Marilyn's Mystery Reads

My definition of a Golden Oldie is a mystery I’ve read at least two or three times and can’t wait to read again. By that standard The League of Frightened Men is 21 karats.

Rex Stout, one of the absolute masters of the Golden Age of mysteries, wrote more than fifty mysteries featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. For the uninitiated, Wolfe was the quintessential eccentric detective–middle-aged, hugely overweight, handshake-avoiding, woman-distrusting, and agoraphobic.  Goodwin is his assistant–probably two decades younger, good-looking, a great dancer, and the “legs,” if not the “eyes,” of Wolfe.

The story opens with Wolfe telling Goodwin that while the latter was away on a job, a man named Andrew Hibbard had come to the office to ask Wolfe to protect him from assassination. However, Hibbard refused to give Wolfe the name of the man he was afraid of and insisted that he didn’t want the man arrested or punished, simply stopped.

Hibbard’s story is that there were a group of friends at Harvard more than twenty-five years before who inadvertently injured this man when he also was a student there.  As a result this man had had several operations and now, years later, still walked with a pronounced limp. The group had done whatever they could to help this man, financially and emotionally, for years, but the accident still burdened many of them.  Only recently had this man found his talent, and he was now a successful novelist and playwright.  However, in their guilty state, the men years ago had decided to call themselves The League of Atonement, a name which still stuck.

Recently, while at the Harvard graduation of the son of one of the League members, a group of these men and the injured man had been walking together along ocean cliffs late at night.  The next morning, one of the men was found at the bottom of the cliff.  And two days after that, the remaining members had received a poem which they all agreed came from the crippled man, which said he had killed the League member and was going to kill all the others.

Then, several months later, another member of the group died.  The police declared it suicide, but a follow-up poem allegedly by the injured man and saying that there would be more deaths had prompted Hibbard to come to Wolfe for protection.

Wolfe explained that he could not agree to be a bodyguard but would agree to remove the threat, but Hibbard vetoed this.  The meeting ended.  Then, when Goodwin returns to the office several days after Hibbard and Wolfe’s meeting, he casually mentions an article in the newspaper about a man who had written a book the district attorney wanted declared obscene.  This pricks Wolfe’s memory, and he sends Goodwin out to buy a copy of the book.  After he’s read it, he realizes that the injured man Hibbard was talking about is the book’s author, Paul Chapin.

Wolfe gets in touch with the remaining members of the League of Atonement and promises to remove the Chapin threat for a huge fee, payable only if he succeeds.  The majority of the men agree, although some are still hounded by their guilt and fearful of wronging Chapin again.  And then Chapin himself enters Wolfe’s office.  Talking to Wolfe, “he got into (his voice) a concentrated scorn that would have withered the love of God.”

Stout’s book is a masterful psychological study.  To those who know and love Wolfe and Goodwin, this book is absolutely one of the best in the series.  If you’ve never read Rex Stout, this novel is the perfect one with which to start.

You can read more about Rex Stout at http://www.nerowolfe.org/htm/stout/author.htm.

In 1964, Ruth Rendell’s first mystery, From Doon With Death, was published. The jacket’s blurb states that the publisher, “in keeping with its policy of attracting and encouraging the most promising new authors,” takes great pleasure in publishing this novel.  Did they truly ever suspect that the young Ms. Rendell would be the acclaimed author of more than fifty novels, nearly two dozen of which feature, as does her first, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford?

I read From Doon with Death more than thirty years ago, but it’s always remained in my memory as an outstanding piece of legerdemain.  Although an internet piece on Ms. Rendell states that she broke from the mold of the British Golden Age mystery writers (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers), I think that From Doon with Death is very much like Ms. Christie’s novels in its ability to fool the reader with red herrings.

The novel opens when Ronald Parsons, a neighbor of Detective Inspector Mike Burden, calls Burden to tell him that his wife Margaret is missing. She’s a woman of regular habits, her immediate family is deceased, she has made no friends since their move to Kingsmarkham six months earlier, but she’s not home when Ronald returns from work.  No clothes are missing from the meager assortment in her closet, nor is her luggage missing.

Burden tells Parsons not to worry, that she’s simply out somewhere and that she’s bound to return home shortly.  But she hasn’t returned by the next morning.  And a day later her body is found in a nearby forest.

Her life seems innocuous enough, except that when Wexford and Burden return to Parsons’ home for another search of the premises they find in the attic several volumes inscribed to Mina with much love from Doon.  Ronald Parsons says he never called his wife by that name nor heard anyone else call her that.  So were the books actually inscribed to Margaret Parsons, or did she acquire them from someone else?

As the investigation proceeds, the police discover that Margaret had lived in Kingsmarkham when she was a teenage girl in school. Her husband doesn’t see that as having any relevance to the murder, but Wexford wonders if someone or something from her past has caught up with her, perhaps the mysterious Doon.  Wexford finds a teacher and several of Mrs. Parsons’ classmates still in town, but no one seems to be able to shed light on why anyone would have killed her.  Her only relative, a cousin who moved to America following World War II, may have the answer, but the police are having trouble locating her.

The end of the novel came as a complete surprise to me on my first reading.  From Doon with Death shows the brilliance of Ruth Rendell, even in her first novel.

You can read more about Ruth Rendell at www.amazon.com/wiki/Ruth_Rendell/.

Two sisters, separated by 3,000 miles, careers, personalities.  Two sisters, joined by DNA, shared childhoods, memories.  So are they separate or intertwined?

Arabella Beatrice, known to her younger sister Tess as Bee, narrates the novel.  Bee is in London, helping to search for Tess who has been missing for four days.  Bee has transplanted herself to New York City, is a successful career woman with an equally successful fiancee.  Tess is an art student who has become pregnant by her university art tutor, a married man who quickly told her that he’d have nothing to do with the baby.  Undeterred, Tess is still thrilled by her pregnancy, worried only by the fact that their brother Leon died in childhood from cystic fibrosis, and tests have diagnosed her expected child with the same fatal disease.

Luckily, or so it seems at the time, a local hospital is trying out a new drug to cure the disease in utero. But Tess’s pregnancy ends three weeks earlier than it should have, and her infant son is stillborn.  That’s when she disappears.

Frantic with guilt because she hadn’t returned Tess’s phone calls on the day of the baby’s birth and death, Bee flies to London to help in the search.  But when Tess’s body is found in an abandoned public restroom in a park, the police, the media, and even Bee and Tess’s mother believes that postpartum depression had caused Tess to commit suicide.  And the few loose ends that Bee uncovers do nothing to convince them otherwise.

Bee cannot believe her sister killed herself. She points to Tess’s excited e-mails, the baby clothes she bought, her making Bee promise to come to London to be her doula during the birth.  The police point to her lack of resources, the baby’s death, her single session with a psychiatrist who diagnosed her depression, and her possible drug use.  Neither side can convince the other.

When Bee finds out that the women in the CF tests have been paid three hundred pounds each to participate, and that the doctor in charge is denying those payments, she’s sure that there’s an institutional coverup.  But with each claim that she makes to the police, Bee looks more and more unreliable.  She’s accused Tess’s lover, another art student who obsessively followed Tess around with his camera, and now Tess’s physician of being involved in Tess’s death.

Bee is constantly talking to Tess throughout the novel, telling her about the upcoming television re-enactment of the crime in the hope of finding a witness to the murder, her interviews with an attorney who is helping her prepare for the upcoming trial of the murderer, trying to expurgate her guilt for being too busy on the day that Tess kept trying to reach her in New York.  If only she had taken Tess’s call that morning instead of going into a meeting with her boss, if only she and her fiancee hadn’t taken a spontaneous weekend trip to a cabin where there was no landline and no cell service, if only….But the only way to help Tess now, Bee believes, is to convince the police that she was murdered and force them to find her killer.

Rosamund Lupton’s debut novel is an engrossing page-turner. There is a strong sense of love between the sisters, even given their different lifestyles and personalities.  Characters change in the book, and seemingly minor characters at the beginning take on important roles as the book progresses.  And Bee’s mother and fiancee show their true personalities as Bee’s determination grows.

You can read more about Rosamund Lupton at her web site.

Gas fixtures, apple and pear trees, wooded riverbanks, and striped bass and bluefish swimming alongside a meandering river. It sounds a bit like paradise, but it’s Manhattan in the 1850s.

31 Bond Street by Ellen Horan takes the reader back in time to tell a story of deception, murder, and the law.  Based on an actual case that was a cause celebre at the time, 31 Bond Street is a look into the lives of a small group of people, all of whom are touched and/or changed by the murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell.

Emma Cunningham is a widow with two teenage daughters, and she is fast running out of the funds left to her by her late husband.  A woman of slightly tarnished virtue, Emma meets Harvey Burdell, a middle-aged dentist visiting Saratoga Springs, New York, and accepts his offer of a position as his housemistress in Manhattan, along with his promise of an upcoming engagement to be followed quickly by marriage.  Seeing this as the best opportunity available to her, and seeing his home as a meeting place for her daughters’ future suitors, Emma agrees to his proposal and moves her small family into Dr. Burdell’s house.

At the same time, Burdell persuades Emma to give him $10,000, a significant part of her older daughter’s dowry, to purchase a plot of marshland in New Jersey.  He’s convinced that he will be able to sell this plot, which ajoins one of his own, for a huge profit.  Eager for the money and reluctant to tell him how little savings she actually has, Emma buys the property and hides the deed in her bedroom in Burdell’s house.

But the dentist’s behavior becomes stranger and stranger, with days passing when he doesn’t return home. His business opportunities seem never-ending, and then comes the day that Emma sees him enter a hotel with another woman.  She rushes back to his house, convinced he means to cheat her out of the New Jersey property, but her ever-more-frenzied search of her room doesn’t turn up the precious deed.  Furious, she confronts Burdell when he returns; he ignores her and leaves again, and the next morning he is found in his bedroom with his throat cut.

Although we find out in the opening chapter that Dr. Burdell is dead, the timeline isn’t a straight one, and bit by bit we learn about Emma’s past and how it has influenced the choices that brought her to her cell in The Tombs, New York City’s infamous prison. The book’s chapters alternate between Emma’s story and that of her attorney, Henry Clinton, who gets involved after Emma is arrested by a power-hungry coroner and the district attorney who is planning to run for mayor.  There is deep insight into the lives of the book’s characters, many of whom are based on the actual characters involved–the house servants, the mother and her daughters, the very disagreeable Harvey Burdell, and the defense attorney who puts his livelihood at risk in defending his client.

Slavery, abolition, the looming break between the North and the South, and women’s rights (or lack thereof) all feature prominently in the novel.  And all have an impact of the story of Emma Cunningham.

The epilogue tells the story of what happened to the “real” people involved in the case. I found all the characters in the novel so credible that I was amazed to find out that some of them were the creation of the author.  The sense of place in 31 Bond Street is palpable, so much so that the reader may well look up from a page and be astonished at the sound of a car passing by or by the electric light next to her reading chair.

You can read an interview with Ellen Horan at http://redladysreadingroom-redlady.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-with-ellen-horan-author-of.html.

The March 30/April 4 combined double issue of Newsweek has an opinion piece by Susan Cheever entitled “Please Stop Writing!”

I can totally identify with her opening sentence, “Mysteries are my weakness.” Me too, Ms. Cheever.  Sometimes I’m a bit embarrassed when checking out books at my local library–I’ll have three or four mysteries novels in one hand and a couple of mysteries on cds in the other.  I want to say to the librarians, all of whom I know quite well, “I do read other things, you know.”  I’ve even thought about taking out Plato’s Republic or Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln biographies to impress them, but I know I’d return those books unread.

Ms. Cheever’s point is that after a number of mysteries in a series, which she arbitrarily notes as eight, authors tend to run out of ideas.  Or the ideas they have are not so very good any longer.

I’m not sure that there should be an arbitrary number at which an author must automatically stop writing about a specific character, but I do agree that as time goes by it apparently gets more difficult to write new situations for the protagonist.  This relates to a previous About Marilyn column (November 4, 2010), “How To Get Rid of An Unwanted Love Interest.”   A detective meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman (as I noted in that column, this is almost always a male issue).  They begin a relationship, or even get married, and after a number of books the author feels the need for a new romantic interest.  So he/she bumps the woman off.  There is much sobbing, gnashing of teeth, grief, but the detective is free to find another woman and begin all over again.

So there the author has recognized that the detective’s romance is in need of updating to keep the series fresh. But that same author doesn’t see the same problem with his hero.  The hero, as Ms. Cheever says, may also be past his sell-by date, but he keeps on solving crimes.  Although I was a huge Robert B. Parker fan from the beginning, I feel that after Looking for Rachel Wallace, Spenser was finished.  All the clever repartee had been said, and in spite of myself I kept visualizing a 70-plus Spenser saying his naughty words to a 60-plus Susan Silverman.  It just didn’t work for me.

So although I doubt many mystery writers are sitting home, breathlessly awaiting my latest About Marilyn column, just in case one is….Think hard about whether your hero/heroine may be ready to be retired. That doesn’t mean you need to retire; there’s always the opportunity to write a new series with a lead character totally different from the one who made you famous.  It’s worth a try.

Marilyn

The houses are destroyed, the food is rationed, the nearly nightly bombing raids have the residents of the East End fearing for their lives.  This is London in 1940, as shown in Barbara Nadel’s crime novel Last Rights.

Francis (Frank) Hancock, third generation undertaker, is still reeling from his years in the trenches of The War To End All Wars. Except it didn’t, as the Luftwaffe’s bombings clearly show at the beginning of World War II.  Unlike most of the other East Enders, including his mother and sisters, Frank can’t be persuaded to go into the Anderson, the bunker-like corrugated steel paneled structure provided by the government outside his home.  Instead, Frank runs through the streets of his neighborhood during every air raid, recognized by his bemused neighbors as “the Morgue’s son,” until the bombing is over.

On one such night, Frank comes upon a man clawing at his chest and screaming that he has been stabbed.  Frank tries to stop him, not believing him, but the man curses and runs away.  But his body turns up at Frank’s undertaking parlor two days later.  The man turns out to have been a local tough named Kevin Dooley, with a vicious mother who is about to turn Kevin’s widow and her daughter out on the streets.

Although Pearl Dooley, Kevin’s widow, was abused by her late husband, she insists to Frank that she still loved him.  And maybe she did, Frank thinks.  Who knows what goes on between a man and his wife?  But the Dooley family, headed by Kevin’s mother, doesn’t want anything to do with Pearl, and when Frank tells the coroner that Kevin had told him he was stabbed, a further investigation proves that he indeed died from being stabbed with something long and thin put directly into his heart.

Even though Frank believes he did the right thing by telling the coroner that this might have been a murder rather than a result of the bombing, the undertaker is upset when Pearl Dooley is arrested for the crime. Given her family history, with a mother who had been hanged as a murderess, things don’t look good for Pearl.  And when Frank finds Pearl’s sister Ruby, whose own boyfriend has just died under suspicious circumstances, it simply adds more weight to the idea of “bad blood.”

Frank Hancock is a man who is still reliving his time in the trenches of Flanders. He’s an outsider in homogeneous England, having a white father and an Indian mother.  He’s a man who runs wildly and stutters during air raids.  He’s a man still dealing with his guilt at having killed German soldiers during the first World War, even though they were the enemy.

The characters created by Barbara Nadel are incredibly real. Frank’s sister Aggie has been left by her husband when he ran off with her best friend, and she dresses too provocatively for her sister Nan’s repressed tastes.  Fred, the neighborhood bobby, simply wants to clear the murder case without having to do much work in order to do so.  Pearl, Ruby, and the two other sisters of the dysfunctional Reynolds family have never recovered from their traumatic childhood and live in fear that someone is trying to get revenge for the killing more than twenty years earlier of their mother’s lover.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say one of their mother’s lovers, as each of her four daughters had a different father.  For its insights into war-torn London and its citizens’ psyches, Last Rights is a book to read.

You can read more about Barbara Nadel at http://www.twbooks.co.uk/authors/barbaranadel.html.

Imagine holding your breath for the last three chapters of a book. That’s what I did when I read The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman.

A thriller that takes place in Berlin in 1932, when the Brownshirts are walking the streets  and Jews, Communists, and gays are threatened, The Sleepwalkers gets more tense from chapter to chapter.

Jewish Willi Kraus, a celebrated Inspektor-Detectiv in the city’s police force, is called away from a party to the site where the Rivers Spree and Havel meet.  There lies the body of a young woman, head shaved, whose beautiful teeth mark her as an American.  The next day, when the city’s pathologist examines her, he reports to Kraus that the woman had had an unimaginable surgery–her fibula, the bone that runs from ankle to knee, had been surgically removed and replaced upside down, making it almost impossible for her to walk.

While following up on this case Kraus is told to give priority to the missing princess of Bulgaria, in Berlin for a visit with her husband.  Her husband tells Kraus that the couple went to a nightclub where his wife was hypnotized.  All was well until the princess’s husband woke in the middle of the night to discover that his wife was no longer in their hotel suite.

When Kraus interviews the hotel’s doorman, he is told that the princess indeed came to the lobby at midnight, said she had to go out for cigarettes, asked for the location of the nearest train station, and left the hotel.  She walked like a sleepwalker, the doorman says.

Then Kraus discovers that there have been three other cases in which young women have gone missing, and all appeared to be “going somewhere in their sleep.”  Interestingly, all three were foreigners.  No one had put the three cases together yet, but Kraus is sure there’s a connection if only he can find it.

In the midst of all this is the rising strength of the Nazi Party. Although the reader knows that 1932 is just the beginning, there are already many ominous signs in the city.   Brownshirts march unmolested through the streets holding signs with grotesque caricatures of Jews, chanting “Every time you buy from Jews, you harm your fellow Germans!”  Newspaper articles encourage mob violence against Jews and Communists.  Jewish children are beaten up in schools while teachers ignore the bullies.  And yet the Jews couldn’t or wouldn’t read the handwriting on the wall.

Willi Kraus, holder of an Iron Cross, First Class for bravery in World War I, is still disbelieving:  “Had fear overcome all logic?  They still had a constitution, yes? An army.  Laws.  Had (they) so little faith in Germany, in (his) fellow Germans that he thought they’d sell themselves out to a gang of criminals?” One wants to shout yes, yes, yes, but of course one can’t change the past.

The Sleepwalkers is similar to several other books about the Weimar Republic (see my reviews of If the Dead Rise Not, May 24 and The Garden of Beasts, April 16).  However, the fact that Willi Kraus is a Jew as well as a detective and a medal-winning World War I soldier gives this novel a different twist.  He’s both on the inside and the outside.  There’s decadence, suspense, and history a-plenty in Paul Grossman’s first book.

You can read more about Paul Grossman on this web site.

Josephine Tey is an author who is not too familiar to American readers of crime novels. She was 56 when she died in 1952 and had written only a handful of novels, but every one of them is worth reading or, in my case, re-reading.

Elizabeth Macintosh, Tey’s real name, used an “old proverb” that can’t be found anywhere, according to a review of Tey’s works in the Washington Post, for the title of this book.   “Truth is the daughter of time” is the saying, and I must admit I’m not sure exactly what it means.  Perhaps it means that “truth will tell,” which would certainly fit with the novel’s story.

Alan Grant, the British police detective who is the hero in several of Ms. Tey’s novels, is, as the English say, “in hospital” with a broken leg. Cranky and bored, he welcomes an old friend, Marta Hallard, a well-known stage actress, who brings him a pile of posters from the British Museum.   Each one is a portrait of a murderer or evil-doer.  In that pile is a portrait of a man whom Grant believes doesn’t belong there, and Grant is famous at Scotland Yard for his ability to “pick them at sight.”  The portrait is of Richard The Third, infamous king of England, best known for killing his two nephews in the Tower of London to preclude any claims they might have to be king.

The more Grant looks at the portrait, the more he is certain that the man with the sensitive face could not be the monster that English history says he is.  So obsessed does he become with this portrait that Marta brings a young American friend of hers, Brent Carradine, to do a bit of research for him to find out more about the king.  And the more deeply Grant and Carradine get into it, the more certain they both become that “history is bunk” and that Richard had no reason to kill his nephews and didn’t do it.

There’s a great deal of history in this book that apparently is known to the English but totally unknown to most Americans.  Names such as Eleanor Neville, the Cat and the Rat, and Lord Morton of “Morton’s Fork,” for example, are seemingly as well known in that country at Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross would be to students of American history.  But Tey explains her country’s history beautifully, and what might in other hands have become a dry treatise is instead a wonderful look into kings, queens, and court villains.

Fighting the battle at Bosworth in 1485 between the Yorks (Richard’s family) and the Lancastrians (followers of Henry Tudor, soon to become the first Tudor king), Richard was defeated and killed.  How amazing is it that Tey brings not only Richard but all of the members of his family and his court to life more than 500 years after his death?

Unfortunately, Josephine Tey doesn’t appear to have a web page, but you can read about her at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Tey.

Back I go again to snowy, cold Sweden.  Don’t they commit murder in Sweden during the summer?

Be that as it may, The Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg will surely chill your blood, regardless of the season in which you read it.

The novel takes place in the present time, but the source of the crimes goes back a quarter of a century. When Erica Falck returns to her hometown of Fjallbacka after her parents’ death, she is immediately confronted by the death of her girlhood friend, Alex.  Alex’s body was found frozen, with her wrists cut, in the bathtub of her home.

Alex is a woman who seems to have everything. The successful co-owner of an art gallery, she is a woman who has beauty, brains, and a very wealthy husband who adores her.  But what was bringing her from her sumptuous home in Stockholm to her former hometown of Fjallbacka nearly every weekend?  Her husband, who knew that his love for her greatly exceeded her love for him, was too fearful to ask questions; better to deal with the uncertainty than to end their marriage.

Erica, a successful writer of famous Swedish women’s biographies, is asked by Alex’s parents to write a eulogy for their daughter.  They are convinced that she would never have killed herself.  According to Alex’s father, “she didn’t have the inner strength.”  And it turns out her parents were right.

Erica is reluctant.  She protests that she and Alex were friends a long time ago and hadn’t had any contact in the intervening years.  But that opens up the question that has bothered Erica all this time–what made Alex drop out of Erica’s life and made her family pick up and leave in the middle of the school year without a word to anyone? 

Various other threads run through The Ice Princess. Erica’s younger sister, Anna, is trapped in an abusive marriage that she doesn’t seem to have the strength to leave.  Anders, the town’s brilliant painter and also its local drunkard, continues to waste his life and his talent.  And then there’s the twenty-five year old mysterious disappearance of the son of the town’s richest family–he was a teacher at the local elementary school and was simply gone one day.  Did he commit a crime and flee?  Was he murdered?  Did his despicable mother and/or his arrogant adopted brother have anything to do with his disappearance?

On the lighter side of this dark novel is the burgeoning romance between Erica and another childhood friend, Patrik Hedstrom, who is now a member of the town’s police force.  In love with Erica since they were children, Patrik can hardly believe his good luck at her interest in him now.

According to the book’s jacket, Camilla Lackberg is the author of four #1 best-sellers in her native country. With her stunning prose and her insights into small town life and its citizens, it’s easy to see why.

You can read more about Camilla Lackberg at her web site.

Imagine if someone told you to think of a number, any number, from one to one thousand. You do, and that person hands you a previously written note with the number you had in mind.  How did he do it?  It’s not your age, your house number, the number of children you have, the year you were born–it’s just a number that you pulled from the top of your head.  How did he know the number you would choose? This is the problem that opens Think of a Numb3r by John Verdon.

Retired police detective Dave Gurney is trying to settle down to a peaceful life with his wife in a small village in upstate New York. Out of the blue he gets an e-mail from a college classmate, a man he hasn’t heard from in more than twenty years.  The letter’s author is Mark Mellery, now a well-known author and director of a nearby spiritual retreat, and in his letter he asks for Gurney’s help.  Reluctantly Gurney agrees to see him the following day, and when Mellery arrives he explains what is troubling him.

Years ago Mellery had a serious alcohol problem, and there are black holes in his memory, weeks and weeks of which he has no memory.  It’s been years since he’s taken a drink, but now he has received a letter in which the letter writer appears to know some secret from that time.

To prove that he knows all about Mellery, the letter writer asked him pick a number from one to one thousand; Mellery picked six fifty eight, a number he swears to Gurney simply came to him with no association to any part of his life.  When he opened the envelope that was enclosed in the letter, the number six fifty eight is what was written.  Of course, part of Mellery’s problem is that the number has no association to any part of his life that he remembers, given the many alcoholic blackouts he had, and he’s now convinced that the letter writer knows some disreputable secret about his past.

He refuses Gurney’s suggestion that he go to the police, saying that that would be a lose-lose situation: either they’ll treat the whole thing as a joke or they’ll start poking around his Institute for Spiritual Renewal, upsetting his clients, and that would be worse.

Reluctantly Gurney tells Mellery he’ll look into the problem–there has to be a simple solution, no one could possibly have known what number he would choose. Then Mellery receives a phone call in which he’s asked to pick another number.  He chooses nineteen, again for no apparent reason, and is told to go to the mailbox outside his home and open the envelope that’s there.  He does, and there’s a slip of paper inside with the number nineteen written on it.  And then Mellery is killed.

This novel is truly a thriller. The reader knows there has to be some logical explanation for the numbers game and for the bizarre way that Mellery is murdered–shot, his throat slashed numerous times, footprints in the snow leading away from the body and then simply disappearing, and a chair abandoned in the middle of a snow-covered lawn with cigarettes strewn around it.  Unless you’re a believer in ESP, which Gurney isn’t, you have to believe there’s a logical explanation.  But what is it?

Think of a Numb3r is an incredible debut. The plotting is fast-paced, page-turning, and the various characters that Gurney encounters in his search for Mellery’s killer ring true.  And Gurney’s strained relationship with his wife and his difficulty in truly leaving behind his sleuthing days are well written and believable.

You can read more about John Verdon in this interview.

After slightly more than a year of blogging, I’ve come to the conclusion that there really is an art to the perfect review. I’m not saying I’ve mastered perfection yet, but I do know what not to do.

When I read a review of a novel or a film, I frequently stop after the first paragraph or two.  That’s because too often I’ve had the experience of finding out more of the plot from the review or synopsis than I wanted to know.

I recently read a mystery, nameless here to protect the author of the back cover’s blurb, which gave away the fact that there was a second murder and told the reader who the victim was.  What made this especially upsetting was the fact that the novel was 350 pages long and the second murder didn’t take place until more than half way through, on page 182.

As it happened in this case, I hadn’t looked at the back cover at all before starting the book.  In fact, I had just finished the chapter in which the second killing took place when I decided to read the back of the novel.

What was the point of giving the reader or prospective reader such a plot spoiler before he or she read the book? It certainly would have killed the suspense for me if I hadn’t already reached that chapter.

There’s a fine line between not giving the potential reader enough of a teaser to whet that person’s interest versus giving out too much information and spoiling everything.  I hope I usually manage to get it right; if I don’t, please let me know.

Marilyn

South Africa in the 1950s. Not a good place for blacks, Indians, Chinese, or anyone other than white.  But a fascinating, although very scary, place to visit via a novel.

Let the Dead Lie by Malla Nunn is the second novel in her series featuring Emmanuel Cooper, a South African of mixed blood who can and has passed for white. For writing a sympathy note to a black woman on the death of her son who was in police custody, Cooper had to leave the Johannesburg police force and move to Durban, where he has a low-level job in a shipyard.  Cooper’s former supervisor, Major van Niekerk, was also sent to Durban as punishment, but he has remained loyal to Cooper and has enlisted his help in ferreting out some corrupt members of the Durban police force, although Cooper’s operation must necessarily be covert.

Cooper is following these orders, trying to forget how much he misses being a police detective, when he stumbles across the body of a young boy on the docks.  The boy was a runner for some underworld thugs but was harmless himself, simply a poor white kid trying to support his family.  When two Indian teenage brothers are spotted at the scene of the murder, they fit perfectly into the racial intolerance of the time; before long there’s a city-wide police search for them.

Cooper gets caught  in the middle of this, knowing that the Indian boys are innocent. Then Cooper’s landlady and her housemaid are murdered, and an incriminating piece of evidence is found in Cooper’s apartment.  Van Niekerk makes a deal with him–find the actual murderer and Cooper can rejoin the police and obtain that all important white identity card.  It seems that in South Africa in the 1950s if you were light enough to “pass” and had the right connections, you could get a white ID.  That piece of paper allowed you to go to certain parks, the beaches, hospitals, and schools–it controlled your life.  Without it, you were a second-class citizen under the law.

There are some very interesting characters in Let The Dead Lie. In addition to Cooper and van Niekerk, there’s the bar girl, mistress of van Niekerk; a seriously ill former Russian spy and his very pregnant wife; an Indian gangster; and a Jewish doctor and a black police constable who were punished in the first novel for helping Cooper find out the truth about a murder.

In addition to the racial laws passed in 1948 that characterized the population as “white,” “colored,” “mixed-race,” and “Chinese,” there is also the ethnic division between the British and the Dutch or Afrikaans.  The British and the Afrikaans don’t trust or respect each other, and each group walks a dangerous tightrope to try to be in first place.

Let The Dead Lie lets us into a world that, thankfully, is in the past.  The sense of history in this mystery is overwhelming. The reader learns how precarious life was there, especially for non-whites but even for the white population.  Corruption and favoritism ruled, and once you were caught in a trap there was not an easy way out.  Being innocent wasn’t enough.

In addition to being a novelist, Malla Nunn is an award-winning filmmaker. You can read more about Malla Nunn and see a brief video of her at her publishers’ web page.

Not to keep you in suspense, I’m writing my first post in this section about what I consider the most golden of all Golden Oldies–And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie.

I have read this mystery at least five times over the years, each time with the thought that this time I’d see the red herrings and clues that I hadn’t noticed the previous times I had read the book.  After all, I knew after the first reading what had happened and why.

But that didn’t happen.  With each reading I was more impressed by the author’s ability to completely mystify me, to lead me down paths that definitely led me away from the murderer, all the while being convinced that I knew exactly what she was doing. In my mind there’s no one like Dame Agatha  (she was named a Commander of the British Empire in 1956).

For those not familiar with the novel’s plot, ten people, a very disparate group, are invited to a deserted island off the coat of Devon. There seems to be nothing in common among them–there’s a judge, a rich young racing car enthusiast, a married couple who are the servants on the island, a retired military man, a governess, a former policeman, an elderly woman, a mercenary, and a physician.

Each had received a somewhat cryptic invitation from someone who professed to be an acquaintance, inviting them to spend a few days on the island.  But when the group was assembled, it turned out that no one knew exactly who had invited them, and there was no host or hostess there.

All was set for their arrival however, and they anticipated that the next day would bring the owner of the island to the house.  But after dinner, the manservant played a recording that accused each of the guests of being a murderer. They all vehemently denied the accusations with various excuses or reasons for the deaths that were described, and all claimed they were innocent.

The young race car enthusiast admitted that he had run down and killed two pedestrians some time ago, but he said that certainly wasn’t murder, just an accident that was “beastly bad luck.”  He picked up his drink at the bar, swallowed it in a gulp, convulsed, and died in front of the group.

And then the other guests started dying, one by one. At first there was denial, the guests saying that the deaths were natural–suffocation, a weak heart.  But soon there was the realization that someone had decided that these people literally had gotten away with murder and needed to be punished.

And Then There Were None is a masterpiece. Perhaps it’s dated, as a Sherlock Holmes story may be dated, but that doesn’t take away one bit from its perfection.  If you haven’t read it, put it on your reading list.  If you have, you know why it’s heading the G. O. list.

As much a snapshot of New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s as it is a mystery, Snakes Can’t Run by Ed Lin gives the reader an insight into the various factions of an ethnic community at a turning point in its history.

The snakes in the title are not of the reptile variety but rather snakeheads, what today we more commonly call coyotes.  They are Chinese American citizens who bring over illegal immigrants, in this case to lower New York City.   Not surprising is that both snakeheads and coyotes are the names of animals in that their treatment of the men and women they bring to the United States, whether it be via ships to New York’s Chinatown to work in restaurants and laundries or via trucks to Arizona to work in the fields, is inhumane.

Robert Chow is a New York City police detective whose late father was an illegal immigrant. Chow was a huge disappointment to his father when he decided not to go to college and joined the Army instead, then came home from Vietnam to become a policeman.  The elder Chow had higher aspirations for his son, aspirations that were out of his own reach as an immigrant with an incomplete grasp of English.

And Robert Chow has other demons besides his memories of his father.  He came back from Vietnam an alcoholic, and when the novel opens he’s only been sober for four months.

Now Chow is surrounded by illegals in his own neighborhood, where he’s the poster boy for diversity in the Police Department. Chinatown is split between two groups–the mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese Chinese.  Although Taiwan has been replaced by mainland China as a member of the United Nations, the United States still did not have full diplomatic relations with the Republic of China in 1976 when the novel takes place, and tensions among the Communists and the Taiwanese are running high.

Adding fuel to the fire is the increased number of illegals coming to New York from China, mainly Fukienese.  Like most immigrants, they arrived in America poor and uneducated and willing to do anything to stay here.  But by coming here illegally, with the help of Chinese Americans who owned businesses, they couldn’t object to low wages, poor working conditions, and lack of benefits.  And in order to pay back the money advanced by these merchants to the snakeheads, or owed by the immigrants themselves to the snakeheads, these illegal aliens were basically indentured servants, many working until their deaths trying to pay back what they owed.

Although there is a double murder early in the novel, I felt Snakes Can’t Run was more of a sociological study than a mystery.  There’s a great deal of history in it and a lot of background of Chinese and Chinese American feelings during the late 1970s, and the mystery takes second place to that.  But one of the reasons I love reading mysteries, as I have written before, is because they take me outside my own world.  I was pulled into the gritty world of Chinatown–its food, its superstitions, its people. And it made for very interesting reading.

You can read more about Ed Lin at his web site.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.  It’s certainly true in Julia Spencer-Fleming’s fourth novel in the Reverend Clare Fergusson/Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne mystery series.

I usually review the most recent book by an author, since I think that’s what most readers want.  In order to truly understand the dynamics of the priest and the police chief, though, this series should be read from the beginning.  That being said, To Darkness and To Death, the fourth Fergusson/Van Alstyne novel, will hopefully lead you to read the other books in order and thus gain a deeper insight into the characters of the two protagonists.

Clare Fergusson is an unmarried Episcopal priest in a small town north of Albany, New York. Russ Van Alstyne is a former soldier and the married police chief of this town, Millers Kill; kill is an old-fashioned word meaning a body of water such as a creek or river.

In Out of the Deep I Cry, the first book of the series, the two meet, and by the second book, A Fountain Filled with Blood, there is the beginning of a relationship that is slowly, slowly heading toward a place neither one wants it to go.

In To Darkness and To Death, many things in Millers Kill have reached the boiling point, including the relationship between Clare and Russ.

Millers Kill, like many other small towns, has been losing manufacturing businesses to other locations with cheaper labor and manufacturing costs. The two biggest businesses in town, Castle Logging and Reid-Gruyn Pulp and Paper Mill, are about to be sold by their reluctant owners to a joint ownership by a foreign company and a native conservancy group.  Economics being what they are, it’s simply not financially feasible for these two companies to stay in business, especially given the fact that the town’s huge timber tract, which they both need to stay in business, is owned by the van der Hoeven family and is also being sold.

So into the mix that is the core of the book’s one day events is 1) Millie van der Hoeven, member of the family that owns the 250,000 acre timber land, who is missing as the novel opens; 2) Randy Schoof, a logger who can’t think of any other way to make a living when he’s told the logging company will close; 3) Becky Castle, daughter of the logging company’s owner and a committed “tree-hugger” who’s putting together the sale of the timber tract; 4) Shaun Reid, fourth generation owner of the pulp mill who desperately wants his son to be the fifth generation owner; 5) Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne, whose platonic but emotionally charged relationship is about to come to a head.

What happens when law-abiding people don’t see any way out of their difficulties except murder? What happens when people who’ve always been law-abiding members of society decide to take the law into their own hands?  What has made them decide that their lives are worth so much more than anyone else’s?

What happens when two people who shouldn’t be attracted to each other, are?  Can anything good come of it?

Each of Julia Spencer-Fleming’s books shows a deep understanding of human nature. Most of us know the rules of behavior, but we can’t or don’t always abide by them.  And when we don’t, things go from bad to worse.

You can read more about Julia Spencer-Fleming at her web site.