Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for June, 2013

Ordinary Grace is a wonderful, brilliant novel.  I’ve written about William Kent Krueger’s earlier book, Trickster’s Point, and Ordinary Grace surpasses even that excellent one with its beauty and understanding of family and human dynamics.

The book’s narrator, Frank Drum, is thirteen during the summer of 1961.   Frank’s father is a Methodist minister in the small town of New Bremen, Minnesota, a man of God in the best sense.  Frank’s mother conducts the choir in New Bremen and in two other small churches where her husband is the clergyman.  Although she has a beautiful voice and had hoped for a professional career, she is now resigned, but not happily, to living the life of a minister’s wife.

Frank’s eighteen-year-old sister Ariel is a talented pianist and composer who has been accepted to the Julliard School of Music, her lifelong dream.  But now, for some unstated reason, she tells her family she doesn’t want to go, that she would rather stay home and go to the local college and study music.

Frank’s younger brother is Jake, eleven years old.  Jake has a terrible stutter, making him the object of teasing and bullying to the point where he almost never speaks in public or in school.  At home his stutter disappears, but outside that safe environment he becomes almost mute.

Ordinary Grace opens with two deaths in a matter of hours.  The first is that of Bobby Cole, a young developmentally challenged boy who was killed on the town’s railroad trestle.  Did he simply not hear the train coming, or did something more sinister happen?  The next day Frank and Jake find the body of an itinerant man in nearly the same place.  That’s a lot of death for such a small town, but there are more deaths to come.

There’s a great deal of tension in New Bremen.  The relationship between Ruth and Nathan Drum is not an easy one, and she is unable or unwilling to understand the importance of God in her husband’s life, how he can keep his faith no matter what tragedies befall the town or the family.

There is an uneasy relationship between Ruth and her daughter’s piano teacher, Emil Brandt.  Ruth and Emil had been engaged very briefly years earlier, but he abandoned her and fled to New York City to pursue his career.  Now he’s returned home, badly scarred and blinded in a fire, his house kept by his sister Lise.  Lise is autistic, and her devotion to her brother is extreme.

But ordinary grace is seen throughout the book, especially in the person of Nathan Drum.  As a clergyman he doesn’t pretend to have all the answers when bad things happen to good people, but his faith in God remains secure. And through his goodness his family and his town manage to survive.

William Kent Krueger has written another outstanding novel, a coming-of-age story that will resonate with the reader long after the last page is read.  His characters are beautifully drawn, and life in a small town in the mid-twentieth century is detailed and accurate.

You can read more about him at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Reads blog at her web site.

A return to the French countryside of Dordogne is as pleasurable as always.  Going back to St. Denis seems in some ways a step back in time to a simpler, quieter life, with the village chief of police knowing everyone in town and interpreting the law in ways to make life more agreeable.  But things, even in this village, cannot stay so agreable, or else there would be no mystery to solve.

An international team of archaeologists has returned to St. Denis to finish excavating areas they had uncovered the year before.  Bruno Courreges, the village’s chief of police, gets a call from the team’s leader, Horst Vogelstern, to report the finding of a corpse buried in the field where the team is working.

“Congratulations.  Isn’t that what you wanted to find,” responds Bruno.  Yes, is Horst’s reply, but this corpse appears to be wearing a St. Christopher’s medal and a Swatch.

Other things are going on in St. Denis as well.  Two farms have been vandalized–one is a farm that breeds geese that are sold to make foie gras, the specialty of the region.  And to further complicate matters, there is a new magistrate who has been appointed to St. Denis, and she is anti-hunting and a vegetarian.  What were the powers-that-be thinking when they chose her?

In the midst of all the above, a summit is being held in town with ministers from France and Spain.  The goal is to reach an agreement between the two countries on the issue of Basque terrorism, a problem for both nations.  The Basques have been trying to establish a separate country in the northern part of Spain for fifty years, and there are areas of France that also have a substantial number of the ethnic minority.  There has always been Basque-related terrorism, but the incidents are increasing in number and getting more violent.

Bruno is also dealing with some personal problems.  His former lover, Isabelle, who left St. Denis for a very important position in Paris, will be returning as part of the security force for the summit.  The parting between Bruno and Isabelle was difficult on both sides.  Between her ambition and his attachment to his village, a combined future for them appears out of the question.  But that doesn’t negate the feelings on both sides.

Adding to that romantic mix is Bruno’s neighbor Pamela, an Englishwoman who has established a home in the village.  She and Bruno also have a relationship, but, like Isabelle, Pamela’s stay in St. Denis may not be a long one.

Martin Walker sets a beautiful scene in this novel, as in his previous ones.  He succeeds in making all his characters stand out and their love for their home totally understandable.  Anyone who is planning to go to France or who even merely dreams of visiting that country owes it to himself/herself to read the five novels  in the series.

Martin Walker is a journalist, historian, and author of several non-fiction books.  You can read more about him at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Reads blog at this web site.

The police asking a burglar to help them out?  This could only happen in Los Angeles.

Junior Bender is the burglar, and he has developed a following among his fellow crooks for solving their problems.  But it’s a surprise when Police Detective Paulie DiGaudio asks Junior for help.  Paulie’s uncle, Vinnie DiGaudio, was a big name in the early days of rock and roll and the producer of “American Dance Hall,” a television show in the 1950s featuring Philadelphia teenagers dancing to hit rock and roll records.

Rather than relying on others, Vinnie became, on a small level, a star-maker.  He found local teenage boys who reminded him of Elvis, wrote songs for them, and watched them become teen-age phenoms, if only for a brief time. During this time, Vinnie created two stars.  One was Bobby Angel, a kid who could sing; the other was Georgio, a drop-dead gorgeous boy who couldn’t sing a note but didn’t need to.

Although Junior tells Paulie that he doesn’t get involved in murder cases, of course that’s the reason Paulie has called him.  Vinnie was heard to say publicly that he’d like to kill Derek Bigelow, a trashy reporter who was trying to blackmail him.  Derek is found dead shortly thereafter and Vinnie, although swearing his innocence, looks good for the crime.  The strange thing is, Junior discovers, Vinnie has a solid alibi for the night of the murder but for some reason is afraid to use it.  What could he be more afraid of than facing a murder charge?

Although he’s supposed to be spending all his time investigating the DiGaudio case, Junior is also looking for the missing daughter of the owner of the motel where he lives.  Doris is the woman who has disappeared, apparently with her no-good boyfriend, and her mother won’t call the police.

Doris’ mother, Mildred, tells Junior that Doris hates cops because her father was a cop unfairly accused of killing a man and was forced off the force without a pension.  “So I send cops after her, she’ll smell them coming from a mile away. It’s you or nobody.  She’d never let a cop find her…,” Mildred explains.   So Junior, being the mensch that Mildred calls him, agrees to look for Doris.

With all the above there’s a lot going on in Junior’s life, but there’s even more.  Sparks fly when he meets Ronnie Bigelow, the widow of the late, unlamented (even by Ronnie) reporter who was blackmailing Vinnie; their attraction is instant and obvious.  And Junior is also dealing with his precocious thirteen-year-old daughter Rina, her schoolmate/possible boyfriend Tyrone, and some feelings he still has for his ex-wife Kathy.  And a former gangster, now an elderly man but still someone with mucho power in Los Angeles, wants to be kept abreast of Junior’s investigations into Vinnie’s innocence or guilt.

Little Elvises is a book that will make you laugh out loud but has a serious undertone.  It looks into the sleazy underworld behind the music industry and the desire for fame and fortune that can cause the most horrific crimes. Its characters are a bit over-the-top, but their motivations are real and understandable, even the worst of them.  Timothy Hallinan has written a book that’s a delight to read.

You can read more about Timothy Hallinan at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Reads blog at her web site.

June 10, 2013

Writing after death–good idea or bad?

In The Boston Globe on May 12, there was a fascinating article by Zac Bissonnette entitled “Robert B. Parker is Dead. Long Live Robert B. Parker!” It may seem a strange headline to the non-mystery reader, but to those of us familiar with Parker’s works and his death in January 2010, it makes complete sense.

Robert B. Parker was the author of nearly seventy novels, many of them in the Spenser series. His family, particularly his wife Joan, was faced with the question that has faced the families of other writers in the crime genre. Should a series, or perhaps more than one series, be ended with the author’s death, or should another writer be found to continue it?

Obviously, this is a decision that each family must make for itself. There are arguments on both sides. Readers of a popular series are reluctant to “let go” of their favorites, and they may be ready to accept another author’s similar, if not identical, version of the protagonist and the people with whom he surrounded himself. Other readers are perhaps more loyal to the author than to his creation; they don’t want anyone else’s fingerprints on the characters that the deceased developed, even if those fingerprints are barely detectable.

According to his widow, Parker never discussed his wishes regarding whether or not someone else should continue writing about his three protagonists: Spenser, Sunny Randall, and Jesse Stone. It apparently was hard for Parker to discuss his mortality, even though at age 77 it should have been obvious that his writing life was considerably closer to its end than its beginning. But, says Joan Parker, “He was convinced he’d live to be 100. So that was not in the scheme of things at all.”

Speaking only for myself, I vote to let the characters go quietly. I agree with the estate of the late, great John D. MacDonald, author of the Travis McGee series. “It is because I have never seen a really good imitation, be it art, literature, or music, that carries that poignant echo of the original artist,” MacDonald’s son Maynard has said. Travis McGee died with his creator, which is one way of handling the situation.

Another is for the author to write a novel in which the character dies. Agatha Christie did this very successfully with Hercule Poirot, so much so that Poirot became the first and only fictional figure to have a front-page obituary in The New York Times. Although Ms. Christie wrote Poirot’s final book in the 1940s with the plan of having it appear after she died, she changed her mind and Curtain was published in 1975, a year before her own death.

Tired of writing about his popular hero, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle threw Sherlock Holmes to his (apparent) death over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. “I must save my mind for better things,” Doyle wrote to his mother, “even if it means I must bury my pocketbook with him.” But, as we all know, the public refused to accept Holmes’ death, and the author was forced to bring him back.

So apparently there is no perfect answer to the question of whether the character should live after the author’s death.  And although I read Ace Atkins’ novel Lullaby and enjoyed it, I would have preferred to have Spenser disappear when Parker died. As the New Testament has it, let the dead bury the dead. Amen.

Marilyn