Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for July, 2018

The ever-delightful Flavia Albia is back, informer par excellence.  Following in the footsteps of her adoptive father, Marcus Didio Falco, she is now a well-established informer (in ancient Rome, the term informer was used as we would use private investigator or detective today).  In addition, she is newly married to Tiberius Manlius Faustus, an aedile, or official, of the Roman Republic.

Both were married before.  Flavia was a young widow, Tiberius was divorced by Laia Gratiana.  But now Laia comes asking for help from Flavia for a family friend who has just experienced the death of her teenage daughter.

Clodia Volumnia had been found dead in her bed, and the aftermath of this tragedy is that her mother and father have separated and their mothers, Clodia’s grandmothers, actually have come to blows.  Reluctantly, because she hates to appear beholden to her husband’s ex-wife, Flavia agrees to meet with Clodia’s father to discuss the case.  Using the soft approach, Flavia tells him how sorry she is about the unexpected death of his only daughter and offers her professional assistance; he agrees to hire her.

The father, Volumnius Firmus, tells Flavia that Clodia simply went to bed one night while both her parents were out and didn’t wake up the next morning.  Firmus stresses what a good daughter Clodia was, but he admits that he was unhappy with her choice of friends.  They were several years older than she and possibly had not been a good influence on her.  In addition, she had seemingly developed a crush on one of the young men, and he belonged to a family not up to the Volumnius family standards, at least according to Firmus.

The streets of ancient Rome were filled with gossip, sexual behaviors, and violence that make it seem that the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Certainly the behavior of Clodia’s family–the “perfect” daughter who turns out to be not quite so perfect after all, the mothers-in-law who cannot abide each other, the preoccupation of various people with substance over style–are not unfamiliar to modern readers.  Apparently human nature hasn’t change that much since 89 C. E.

As readers know from other books in the series, Flavia was found begging on the streets of Londonium when she was young and brought to Rome by Marcus and Helena.  Originally she was a nanny to their children, but they eventually adopted her and she became a free citizen of the Republic.  Also, Marcus and Helena were probably impressed by Flavia’s sense of self and her confidence.  “They soon saw I would not accept being treated like a slave….No one could impose on me.”  You admire and respect her throughout the novel.

When Flavia thinks about how she has become involved with sorcery and magic to find out the truth about Clodia’s death she comes to the conclusion that “There was no need of a blood relationship to inherit crazy behavior.”   As her adoptive father was always coming up with wild ideas that led him into trouble, “now so was I.”

Pandora’s Boy is the sixth novel featuring Flavia Albia; more than a dozen earlier novels featured her father as the protagonist.  Readers will enjoy both informers, but my heart belongs to Flavia.

You can read more about Lindsey Davis at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

When a corrupt cop loses his job for not being corrupt enough, that’s a great idea for a novel.  And Terrence McCauley takes that concept and runs with it, very successfully, in what hopefully will be a new series.

Charlie Doherty was a New York City policeman, a bag man and enforcer for the even more corrupt Chief of Police Andrew Carmichael.  Shortly before he was kicked off the force, Charlie had gone against the chief’s express order and successfully investigated the murder of Jessica Van Dorn and the abduction of her brother Jack.  Mr. Van Dorn, to show his appreciation, hired Charlie as sort of a “private detective to the rich,” asking him to look into matters for various wealthy friends in trouble.

Now the detective has been asked to meet with Eleanor Fairfax, whose wealthy husband has allegedly committed suicide in his Empire State Building office.  Despite the fact that Walter Fairfax was found alone in his office with his fingerprints the only ones on the gun that killed him, his widow absolutely refuses to believe that her late husband died by his own hand.

Charlie reminds Mrs. Fairfax that the the official verdict was death by accidental shooting.  But she, wise to the ways of the world, knows that the police chief, who had overseen the case personally, will one day “darken my door…seeking to be repaid for a favor I neither requested not wanted.”   What she does want, she tells Charlie, is proof that her husband was murdered, improbable as that seems to the detective and to everyone else involved in the Fairfax death.

The Fairfax Incident is a noir novel that fits completely in its 1930s time frame.  Charlie Doherty is no angel, even by his own reckoning, but he does have a personal definition of morality.  He is perfectly willing to take on the investigation even though he believes Walter Fairfax did indeed commit suicide.  And having agreed to look into it, he will do his best to find the truth, even if, as it happens, no one besides the widow wants him to.

Terrence McCauley’s prose will capture readers from the first chapter.  As I noted, Charlie is not a poster boy for a morally upright detective, official or private, but both because he feels he owes it to Mr. Van Dorn to do his best and because he has his own standards, he will not let Walter Fairfax’s indifferent son or the vengeful Chief Carmichael stand in his way.

I’m looking forward to reading more about Charlie Doherty and his relationships with the residents of the neighborhood that goes, in his words, “from Park to The Park.”

You can read more about Terrence McCauley at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

There are the lies we tell to others (to impress, perhaps, or to make ourselves more important), and there are lies we tell to ourselves (to protect ourselves from acknowledging the truth of what we are doing or what our motivations are).  In Peter Swanson’s latest mystery, All The Beautiful Lies, there are both kinds of lies; it’s up to the reader to decide which is the more dangerous.

Harry Ackerson is a few days from his college graduation when he receives a call from his stepmother to say that his father is dead.  The night before, while walking on his favorite cliff path overlooking the ocean, Bill Ackerson apparently slipped and fell into the water below.

The initial police investigation quickly changes gears, however, when the autopsy reveals a bruise on Bill’s head; now it’s considered “a suspicious death.”  But who would want to kill this quiet man, owner of two rare book stores, married for several years to his second wife, and father to an only child?  Bill would seem to have had no enemies…but apparently he had at least one.

Nearly everyone in All The Beautiful Lies has a secret.  Alice, Bill’s widow, is the product of a very dysfunctional mother and an unknown father, two things she never told her late husband.  Her stepfather, Jake, was attracted to her before he married her mother, a woman he knew to be an alcoholic and sometimes drug abuser; after her mother’s death, Jake and Alice lived their lives closed to family and friends lest the true nature of their relationship be exposed.  Harry seems to be fearful of his sexuality, something he’s not ready to admit even to himself.  And who is the mysterious young woman Harry notices outside the used bookstore his father owned in their hometown, and why was she at the funeral, only to leave without speaking to anyone?

Peter Swanson is one of today’s best writers, regardless of the genre being discussed.  His characters are totally realistic in what they say, do, and think.  Their lies are what they have constructed to get through life–whether to hide what they dislike about themselves or to help them get what they want.  Either way, it’s a question as to whether they control the lies or whether those lies control them.

This is Peter Swanson’s fourth mystery and the fourth one I’ve reviewed.  He’s definitely one of the authors whose novels can never come quickly enough for me.

You can read more about Peter Swanson at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

Fame, they say, is fleeting, and in many cases that’s true.  But some people do have reputations that last long after their final books are published.

My daughter-in-law’s father, former ABC radio entertainment reporter Bill Diehl, is an intrepid devotee of flea markets and “antique” shops.  Bill is not an avid mystery reader, but whenever he’s at these venues he’s on the lookout for something for me.  Recently he made a spectacular find–three copies of the Mystery Writers of America Annual magazine–from 1965, 1970, and 1973.  He sent them to me, and they made for fascinating reading.

I found the most interesting items in each issue were the ads listing that year’s newly published novels.  Seriously.  It was an amazing opportunity for a mystery fan to see which writers are still known and read today.

Of course there were names familiar to most mystery readers, although they are from a past generation or two:  from Dell Publishing–Agatha Christie, John le Carre, and Ed McBain.  From Avon–Robert Van Gulik and John Dickson Carr.  From Fawcett:  John D. McDonald.  From Viking:  Rex Stout.  From Random House:  Margaret Millar and Bill Pronzini.  These authors have definitely stood the test of time.

But equally interesting is the fact that other well-known mystery authors of the 1960s and ’70s have faded into oblivion.  Do you know the books of Rubin Weber, Frances Rickett, Margaret Manners, Cornelius Hirschberg, or Charlotte Jay?  I’d never heard of any of them.

Who were these men and women?  I looked them up in the Minuteman Library catalog, which contains the contents of thirty five member libraries in Massachusetts, and not one of these authors has a book in any of the collections.  Also interesting is something I Googled (naturally)–not one of the above-mentioned publishing houses of these well-known writers is still around.  Each has either been totally shut down or taken over by the giant conglomerates that control publishing today.

Does all this mean that the mystery authors of the past that we read today are the best and that the ones who have not been read in years are not?  How can we know whether an author is good if his/her books aren’t readily available?  Perhaps the works of Weber, Rickett, Manners, Hirschberg, and Jay are masterpieces that simply got lost in the deluge of the many mysteries that are published each year.

Fleeting fame doesn’t apply only to mystery novels, of course.  Back on Google, I looked for the list of Nobel Prize recipients in literature.  Do the names Paul von Heyse, poet (1910), Haldor Laxnew, novelist (1955), or Yasunari Kawbata, novelist (1968) sound familiar?  I must confess, not to me.

As they say, life is short, and apparently so is fame.  So my advice is to curl up with a mystery now; it doesn’t matter if someone will be reading it a generation or two from now.  Carpe diem, carpe libro.

Marilyn