Marilyn's Mystery Reads

I am definitely getting less patient as I get older.

I used to think that if I started a book that I had to finish it.  I thought that if the author had spent so much time and energy writing the novel and getting it published that I owed it to him or her to read it even if I wasn’t enjoying it.  But I no longer feel that way.

A few years ago I bought a sweatshirt with the words “So Many Books, So Little Time.” That’s become my mantra.  There are simply too many good, not to say excellent, books available for me to force myself to finish one that I’m not enjoying.  If I’m not “into” the book after a couple of chapters, I’ll put it down and choose another.

It’s a bit like eating a meal in a restaurant or buying a pair of shoes.

You go into a restaurant or shoe store (bookstore or library), look at the menu or the racks (bookshelves), and choose a meal or a pair of shoes (crime novel) you think you want to eat or wear (read).  But when the meal comes or you put the shoes on (start reading) you realize it’s not what you want because the entree is too spicy or the shoes are too tight (or the book is too cozy, too violent, or just boring).

Just like you wouldn’t force yourself to finish a meal that you didn’t like or buy a pair of shoes that didn’t fit, you shouldn’t make yourself finish a book that’s not what you thought it was going to be.

And you shouldn’t feel guilty about it–I don’t.

Marilyn

V. I. Warshawski is back, and that’s great news. The heroine of more than a dozen previous mystery novels, this tough Chicago P.I. never disappoints.

As she’s done in her previous books, Sara Paretsky puts layer on top of layer of motives and crimes for Vic to unpack. Vic’s young cousin Petra, whom we met previously in Hardball, is back.  Petra is young, spoiled, and needy, but she’s a relative, and Vic has a hard time saying “no” to her.  This time Petra has a part-time job at a very edgy nightclub in Chicago that is featuring The Body Artist as its main attraction.

The Body Artist’s act is composed of sitting on a stool on the stage, nude except for a thong and the exquisite artwork that covers much of her body, while erotic photos are flashed across a screen in back of her and two burka-clad figures dance erotically alongside her.  In addition, members of the audience are invited to come up to The Body Artist and paint whatever they wish on her body.

Petra calls on Vic one night saying that someone has just tried to kill the Artist, but when Vic arrives at The Gouge club the Artist isn’t interested in cooperating and the club’s manager is rude and hostile.  The following week Petra visits her again with tales of more unpleasantness at The Gouge–out-of-control young guys at one table, a rough-looking middle-aged man at another who’s trying to literally get into Petra’s pants, and a sliver of glass found in one of The Body Artist’s paintbrushes.  And again neither the Artist nor the club’s manager wants to speak to Vic or the police.

On Vic’s third visit to the club, a distraught young woman goes up to the Artist and paints a design on her body.  When a man in the audience sees the design, he loses all control and tries to confront her.  She flees the club and Vic runs after her,  just in time to see her shot and to cradle her body while she bleeds to death.

A few days later the young man from the club, who has been under suspicion for the murder, is found comatose in his apartment and admitted to the jail’s hospital.  His father comes to Vic’s office to ask her to investigate.  He doesn’t believe his son is guilty, but as the young man is unable to speak and tell his story, Vic needs to investigate.

There are a lot of intersecting story lines. Everyone from an Iraqi veteran with post traumatic stress syndrome, Ukrainian mobsters, a Mexican-American family coping with the death of a daughter, a big-time lawyer with a strange interest in the aforementioned family, and the owner of Club Gouge makes an appearance.  None of them will talk to Vic or even admit there are any problems.

Vic is surrounded by her usual group:  her landlord Mr. Contreras; her physician friend Lotte; her lover Jake.  Lotte in particular wants to know why Vic is always putting herself in danger, and Vic is trying to figure out the answer to that question herself.  Mortality is creeping into Vic’s consciousness.  She’s getting older and more reflective, and she’s wondering why she has this need to fight all the battles of the world.  Is it necessary?  Is it right?  And can she always win, or is it impossible to right all the wrongs she sees?

You can read more about Sara Paretsky at her web site.

I really didn’t want to like this book.  But I couldn’t help it.  And I’ll tell you why.

The title should have given me the hint, but I didn’t get it at first.  There’s a gorgeous cover photo of the head of a dog, a big dog, looking at a butte in the desert.  When you connect the cover to the title, you’ve got it…this “Chet and Bernie Mystery” is about a dog and his man.  Chet is the dog, and he’s also the narrator of Thereby Hangs a Tail.

Wait!  Before you stop reading, let me say that this is one of the cleverest mysteries I’ve read.  I’m not a big fan of books that feature anthropomorphic animals.  If I want animals that talk and think like humans, I’ll watch the Disney channel.  But I fell in love with Chet.  In a big way.

Bernie is a private detective, specializing in missing persons.  He’s asked by a friend on the police force to bodyguard Kingsbury’s First Lady Belle, a.k.a. Princess, a prize-winning dog that is entered in the Balmoral Dog Show that is coming to town.  Her owner received a threatening letter in the mail, and she wants to hire Bernie to guard Princess to the tune of $2000 a day, a hefty sum given the state of Bernie’s finances and his proclivity for investing in Bolivian tin mines.  But before the guarding can actually start, Bernie goes from hired to fired in less than a day, and the following day Princess and her owner are abducted.

All of this is narrated by Chet, a huge dog of mysterious lineage.  He idolizes Bernie and has an uncanny (is that word related to canine?) ability to come up with just the right expressions to put us in the picture.  It’s almost like listening to a person who doesn’t speak English well or is a recent arrival in America trying to figure out the meaning of conversations/slang swirling around him.

When Chet hears someone say, “They didn’t see diddley,” it catches his attention.  “Bernie was a big Bo Diddley fan…Was Bo Diddley a suspect in the…case?”  Bernie says,”They say Wild Bill Hickok rode through here…”  Chet thinks, “Hickok again? Was he the perp?  Perps had a hard time going straight.  That was something you learned in this business.”

Okay, so maybe this book isn’t for you.  But there’s a real mystery here besides the kidnapping of the Countess di Borghese and the dognapping of Princess.  Bernie’s romantic interest, a newspaper reporter, goes missing while following the Princess story; Chet and Bernie are separated and Chet is sold by a pair of wandering, stoned hippies to a man who wants to take him to Alaska; a sheriff and his deputy are being more of a hindrance than a help in the case, and so it goes.

When you get tired of blood and guts, give Slim Jims and dog biscuits a try.  I think you’ll like them.

You can read more about Spencer Quinn at this web site.

Ah, to be French.  Even in the midst of murder, one must eat, drink, and love.

Benoit Courreges, better known as Bruno, is the chief of police of the small town of St. Denis in the heart of rural France.  A decorated soldier who served with the United Nations force in Bosnia, he wants nothing more than to live the quiet life in his village and serve the people there.  But that, naturellement, is not to be.

There’s a small Arab population in St. Denis.  They are ethnic Algerians, some of whom fought for France during the African campaign of World War II and then emigrated to France.  Others fought for France against their countrymen during the Algerian war of the 1950s and ’60s and escaped to France to avoid retribution when the former colony gained independence.

There’s not much overt racism in St. Denis, which is why everyone is taken by surprise when an elderly Arab man, a Resistance fighter in the Second World War and a recipient of the Croix de guerre medal, is brutally murdered in his home.  A swastika is carved into his chest, and the only things that are missing from his house are a photo of the 1940s soccer team of which he was a member and the above-mentioned medal.

Does the swastika mean that it is a racially motivated crime? Was it committed by a villager or someone from the right-wing National Front, famous for its anti-immigrant stance?  But the family of Hamid al-Bakr has been in France for more than fifty years; the victim’s son is a teacher in the local school and his grandson runs a restaurant in town.  What could have caused the murder of this quiet, almost hermit-like man so many years after his arrival in France?

Two suspects are taken into custody almost immediately.  One is the teenage son of the town’s doctor, the other his girlfriend.  Picked up after Bruno sees their photos at a National Front rally on the Internet, both profess innocence but there appear to be no other suspects and no reason for the murder other than racial enmity.  The investigator sent from Paris would like to see this investigation wrapped up quickly and with a good deal of publicity in order to embarrass the Front, but Bruno isn’t at all certain that the teenagers have committed the crime.

This being France, the murder investigation takes frequent pauses for mouth-watering gourmet meals, homemade wines, Champagne, and the introduction of a beautiful investigator from the National Police.  Except for the murder, there’s a serene quality to the novel, with a great deal of description given to the scenery of the surrounding countryside and the delicious meals that Bruno cooks and shares with friends.

Martin Walker has created a most interesting and charming lead character for his series.  You can read more about the author at his web site and more about Bruno, Chief of Police, at his.  Vive la France!

Have you ever thought much about sidekicks? I hadn’t, until recently.

In films and television, sidekicks are the ones who usually aren’t as good-looking as the hero, never or almost never get the girl or guy, and never get the glory.  Think about it.  There’s the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Roy Rogers and Gabby Hayes, Lucy and Ethel.  Am I right?

In mystery novels, things were pretty much the same.  There’s Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, C. Auguste Dupin and Poe’s nameless narrator, Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.  In the last case there’s a bit more equality, but even though Archie is younger, better-looking, and as narrator could emphasize his importance in the case, he’s always a step behind Wolfe.  Yes, in these novels Archie has the girl, but Lily Rowan is more like arm candy than a true love interest, always available to go dancing or have dinner at Rusterman’s, but that’s all.

In earlier books the sidekicks usually were subordinate in every way to the detective, as I mentioned above, especially when it came to who was the toughest guy in the room.  But, interestingly, the sidekick’s role has changed over the years.  I think this began with Spenser and Hawk.  Spenser certainly is tough and knows his way around criminals and low-lifes, but he has a moral center.  Enter Hawk.  When we first meet him, he’s a killer for hire.  And although he’s mellowed in the course of the novels, he still behaves in ways that Spenser can’t or won’t.  Spenser can do breaking and entering, but Hawk can do breaking bones.  That’s why Spenser needs him.

And here’s another facet of the new breed of sidekick.  There was a similarity between the roles of Spenser and Hawk and Elvis Cole and Joe Pike.  Pike’s conscience, like his eyes behind dark sunglasses, is hidden.  There are, or were, things that Cole didn’t do, but Pike did.  Now, however, that Pike has moved on to his own series, he, like Hawk, has gotten softer and isn’t so quick on the trigger.  If Pike is going to be the new hero, he can’t behave like the old sidekick.

We know that certain things, unpleasant and illegal things, may have to be done in order to solve a crime. But we don’t seem to want our hero, and it’s always a hero, not a heroine, to do them.  We don’t want his hands to be so dirty that they can’t be cleaned.  That’s apparently what his sidekick is for.

So what does this say about us as readers of detective novels?

Marilyn

Racial tensions are on the rise in Prosperity, North Carolina.  A small rural town, populated for years by white farming families, it is now host to new people:  wealthy Anglos from a nearby town looking to build McMansions on former farm land and Mexican workers, many of them illegal, coming there to get a better life for themselves while doing the work that the Anglos won’t do for themselves.  So sooner or later, there’ll be trouble.

In Six Mile Creek, it’s Police Chief Judd Wheeler who needs to keep things cool in his small town.  He’s a hometown boy who left to go to college and then became a policeman in Atlanta.  But he returned home for a quieter life, which he’s pretty much had up until now.

Opening with a fight at the high school between a Mexican immigrant and the son of a wealthy white businessman whose family has been in Prosperity for generations, the tensions escalate when the body of a pretty Mexican teenage girl is found in Six Mile Creek.  The girl was last seen three days earlier leaving a party where she and another Latina had been brought to have sex with the white boys on the high school’s football team.  Gypsy Camarena was willing to do this but left angrily when her demands for payment were laughed at.  She never made it home.

The members of the Town Council, Chief Wheeler’s bosses, are important members of the community.  They want a quick resolution to the case but not one that will involve the boys on the football team as that will hurt their chances for college scholarships.   And why did the parents of the murdered girl leave town so suddenly, with no forwarding address, when they hadn’t even claimed their daughter’s body for burial?

In the midst of his investigation, Wheeler is tormented by nightmares relating to his wife’s death.  She also died at Six Mile Creek, several years earlier.  Was it a coincidence that Gypsy was found in almost exactly the same spot as Susan Wheeler?  Or was she placed there for a reason?  The chief’s current relationship with a teacher at the high school is in jeopardy because of his inability to move past the events on the night his wife died, and this, plus the racial tensions in town, emerging drug trafficking, the girl’s death, and two vicious beatings that follow are taking their toll on Wheeler.

Richard Helms has written a fast-paced, enjoyable novel.  There’s a lot going on here, perhaps too much so.  I felt that the introduction of drugs, although realistically portrayed, took attention away from the main plot and from the racial issues that dominated the first two-thirds of the novel.  I think the novel would have been stronger without bringing drugs into it; the racial tensions, Wheeler’s flashbacks, and his intense romantic relationship with his son’s English teacher were enough to keep the reader’s interest at a high level.  However, Six Mile Creek is a very good read and a fine introduction to a strong-willed, ethical police chief who knows right from wrong and always comes down on the side of right.

You can read more about Richard Helms at his web site.

One of the first mystery authors I read was Rex Stout.  I was captivated immediately by his incredible creations–Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.  The former was a transplanted Montenegrin, the latter a transplanted Ohioan, but they became the quintessential New Yorkers.  Ah, if only the walls of Wolfe’s Manhattan brownstone could talk!

Although Rex Stout wrote other mysteries, it is the Wolfe series that made him famous and sealed him into my Mystery Hall of Fame.

More than 30 years ago I took a course on mysteries given by John McAleer, Professor of English at Boston College.  He had just written the biography of Rex Stout, and the thought of being in a room with someone who had actually met the author was an incredible experience for me.  I felt as if Stout might walk into our classroom at any moment.  He didn’t, but Professor McAleer made him real for me and everyone else in the class.

He told us that Stout wrote four pages every day and never made any corrections to his writing.  He thought it all out in his head beforehand and simply put it down on paper.  I still find that amazing.

I’ve seen a couple of old Nero Wolfe movies and the television series with the late Maury Chaykin as Wolfe and Timothy Hutton as Archie.  Fine actors they may be, but I could never get into the series.  The same holds true for the very brief series of Wolfe mysteries with William Conrad as Wolfe and Lee Horsley as Archie; it was a non-starter for me.   I had such a strong feeling for what Wolfe and Archie (that’s how I think of them; last name for Nero Wolfe, first name for Archie Goodwin) would look like and talk like, neither series rang true.  The script writers couldn’t match Stout’s prose, and Wolfe and Archie without Stout just didn’t work.

But Wolfe and Archie were not the only fabulous characters that Stout invented.  Anyone familiar with this series knows Fritz Brenner, the chef who cooks the incredible meals that Wolfe and Archie eat; Inspector Cramer, the always exasperated police detective who can never get the best of Wolfe; Lily Rowan, the wealthy society “girl” and Archie’s love interest; and Saul Panzer, a private eye second only to Archie in his abilities.  And who could forget the master criminal, Arnold Zeck?  He was the only man ever to come close to beating Wolfe.

There have been adaptations of Nero Wolfe mysteries in Germany, Italy, and Russia.  I can only imagine the liberties the writers of those scripts took with Stout’s words, if the American writers, obviously more familiar with U.S. slang and New York City, couldn’t get it right.  Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin need the words of Rex Stout, and no one else, to truly be who they are.  No adaptations or abridgments work.

So the bottom line is, if you want to visit this first-class detective series, you need to read the books.   Among my favorites are The Golden Spiders, Fer-de-Lance, A Family Affair, Too Many Cooks, and The Doorbell Rang.

You can read more about Rex Stout at the Wolfe Pack web site.

Among Thieves is my third David Hosp mystery this year, which certainly proves his books are great reads.

Scott Finn is the protagonist in this series.  In the first book, Dark Harbor, Finn is an associate in a huge law firm in Boston, working practically 24/7 in his bid to become a partner.  In Among Thieves, the fourth in the series, he’s a successful attorney in private practice with a recent law school graduate, Lissa Krantz, and a former police detective, Tom Kozlowski, on his payroll.

Finn has an interesting background.  An orphan, he was in the foster care system growing up, and he ran with a criminal crowd in Southie, the Irish section of Boston.  That’s the lead-in to Among Thieves, in which a man Finn knows from childhood contacts him from jail to represent him.  Although Devon Malley has served time in prison for robbery, he’s never been a killer or a top man in the mob, and Finn takes the case.

In doing so, he also takes on Devon’s teenage daughter Sally who was dropped on Devon’s doorstep a year ago by her drug-addicted mother.  While Finn may be ready to deal with the robbery charges against Devon, he’s not quite sure about the child care.  But, having gone through the foster care system himself, he’s determined to keep Sally out of it.

The background of the story is Devon’s involvement with Whitey Bulger, former boss of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang.  Bulger, who in real life has been on the run for more than 15 years, was a major crime figure in Boston and was protected by FBI agents in that city without the knowledge of the Boston police department or the Massachusetts state police.  He is still on the FBI’s Most Wanted list,  charged with 19 murders as well as various other crimes.

Again, in real life, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was robbed in 1990, with 13 works of art stolen; they have never been recovered.  So what’s the connection between a recent spate of murders in the city (seven in number), a small-time thief in Boston, and a murderer from Ireland who has never given up the cause of the IRA?

Hosp’s numerous characters are real and vibrant.  In Among Thieves, the offbeat romance of Finn’s staff members/friends, Lissa and Tom, continues and deepens.  Devon Malley is shown as a man out of his depth, always looking for the big score but doomed to a life of financially unrewarding crime, who finally has one good thing in his life, his newly-discovered daughter.  And Sally Malley (she says her mother always had an unusual sense of humor) is a strong girl who has learned the hard way that no one can be relied on or trusted.

Hosp’s sense of place is excellent too.  He knows his way around Boston, much as Robert B. Parker did, but his novels are grittier and Finn is a lawyer, not a private eye like Spencer.  Finn would rather be writing briefs and appearing in court than dealing with a brutal murderer, but he has taken a stand to defend Devon and does it.   Among Thieves is a strong novel in an excellent series.

You can read more about David Hosp at his web site.

I must stop reading mysteries about foreign places–my “must visit” list is getting way too long.  Now I’ve added Florence, Italy to it.

If you like the Inspector Brunetti series by Donna Leon, you’ll definitely enjoy The Drowning River.   Christobel Kent has created Sandro Cellini, a middle-aged former police detective, soft–spoken and much in love with his wife, a man with a great deal of humanity. Perhaps too much, as it was his humanity that caused his forced resignation from the Florence police.

After a child was kidnapped and found murdered, Sandro Cellini kept the child’s father informed about the suspect’s life, the suspect against whom there was not enough evidence to bring charges although the police knew he had killed the child.  Then, years later, the suspect was found murdered, and the breach of trust that Cellini had committed came to light.  He was allowed to resign so as to not blacken the reputation of the police force.  Unhappy and guilt-ridden, Cellini is at loose ends until his wife Luisa tells him his skills should be put to use as a private investigator.

Four days after he opens his office, a woman walks in and tells her story.  Her husband was found dead in the river, and the police believe it was a suicide.  Lucia Gentileschi doesn’t.  Her husband was eighty-one, considerably older than she, and had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, but she is sure he wouldn’t have killed himself.  “Why,” asks Cellini, “are you so sure?”  Her answer is simple.  “He never would have left me behind.” But, of course, although they were married for more than forty years, she doesn’t know everything about him.

At the same time, Cellini’s wife brings him a case of a missing English girl, Ronnie Hutton, who has disappeared from her Florence apartment and the art school where she was a student.   The owner of the apartment the girl and her roommate were renting told Luisa Cellini about her disappearance, how the girl’s mother was in Dubai and couldn’t leave, and could Luisa’s husband look into the matter?  Sandro Cellini doesn’t want to, but when he sees a photo of the missing girl in the newspaper he realizes that he had actually seen her in person, from his office window, early on the day she disappeared.  So he’s already involved and has no choice but to get more involved.  And then the two cases intersect.

There are several subplots going on as well.  Luisa Cellini has found a lump on her breast, and there’s the obvious dread of what the biopsy will bring.  And Ronnie Hutton’s roommate feels the police are getting nowhere and that she should become a small part of the investigation.

There’s an amazing sense of place in The Drowning River.  The author takes you street by street, piazza by piazza, until the reader feels that she’s actually walking through the city.  That apparently is due to the fact that English Ms. Kent has spent quite a bit of time in Florence, speaks Italian, and obviously loves the city.  The novel is slow-paced, the story going back and forth between the man who drowned and the girl who disappeared.

This is definitely not your typical private eye mystery, with guns and violence, but a thoughtful look into a city and its people, both natives and visitors.

Unfortunately, Christobel Kent doesn’t have her own web site, but you can read more about her at International Noir.

In a major departure from his Inspector Kurt Wallender series, Henning Mankell takes us to four continents in this thriller–Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.  So skillfully does he write, it seems as if Mankell has actually been to all of the above places at the times the events he’s writing about occur, although that’s obviously impossible; the first Chinese segment and the North American segment take place three quarters of a century before Mankell was born.

The Man from Beijing begins with the massacre of eighteen elderly people and one child in a tiny village in Sweden.  A photographer is the first person to happen on the scene.  Frightened and stunned he drives off and crashes his car, but before he dies he manages to impart the news of the killings.  The police arrive in the village, of course, and they and everyone in the country are appalled and bewildered by the carnage. Who and why are the questions on everyone’s lips.

Birgitta Roslin is a judge in a city far from Hesjovallen where the killings took place.  Although she, like everyone else, is horrified when she hears about the murders, she would seem to have no personal ties to the village.  But the next day, when she reads the names of the victims, she is reminded that her late mother had lived in Hesjovallen and realizes that two of the people killed were her mother’s foster parents.  She contacts the police and makes a visit to the town, scarcely aware of why she is doing so.

Once there, Roslin gets a cool reception from the local police who are overwhelmed investigating the biggest bloodbath in modern Sweden. At night in a nearby hotel, unable to sleep, Roslin breaks into the cottage where her mother lived and takes a diary from one of the drawers.  The diary was written by a man she assumes to be a relative of the Andren family who took her mother in.  “JA” had emigrated to the United States from Sweden in the 1860s and had become a foreman for one of the railroad companies engaged in building the tracks for the trains that crossed the continent.  His diary shows JA to be a tough, brutal overseer, bigoted against the freed slaves, American Indians, Irish immigrants, and Chinese indentured servants who are laying the tracks.  And it’s the Chinese/Swedish connection that forms the plot of The Man from Beijing.

In each section of the book, whether it takes place in Sweden, the United States, China, or Mozambique, Mankell makes the reader feel what it’s like to be there. It takes a while for the connections between these various points to appear, and I must confess that not everything is made clear.

I do have some “nitpicking” with this novel.  The reader can understand the motive for the crimes, but I didn’t find the motive as convincing as I would have liked.  I also felt that Birgitta Roslin was a bit too naive, too passive for a woman with her life experiences.  SPOILER ALERT: And I thought the way her life was saved was not believable.

These caveats aside, The Man from Beijing is a page-turner in the best sense.  It has a terrific plot, believable characters, and a sense that many of the political beliefs that Roslin and other characters have come straight from Mankell’s heart.  Like every other book by this author, it’s a mystery worthy of your time.

You can read more about Henning Mankell at his web site.

“…The (coal) seam was no bigger than thirty inches and often narrowed to twenty-six. Miners here spent their working lives in a space no taller than a coffee table…its operators all lay prone.  Miners had to bring straws with their lunches because there was rarely enough room to tilt a Coke can over their heads.”

The cliche life imitates art is unfortunately too true, for this novel’s story closely parallels the tragedy in a West Virginia coal mine earlier this year.

This first novel by Gardiner Harris has the very dysfunctional Murphy family at its center.  They are third generation miners in Perry County, Kentucky.  Will Murphy is the novel’s protagonist, for hero is too positive a word to describe him.  Will’s father and uncle started mining in a small way, and after the oil crisis in the 1970s the demand for coal increased and so did the family fortunes.  Then Will’s father forced Will’s uncle Elliott out, creating a family rift that never healed.

Years ago Will was responsible for causing an explosion in the family mine; as a result his younger brother died, and Will suffered severe burns over much of his body.  Will has never forgiven himself, so partly to make amends he gave up mining and is now an inspector for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.  Just before the book opens Will’s father died, and the reading of his will gives complete control of the Blue Gem mine to Will’s brother Paul.  As the novel begins, there is an explosion in the Blue Gem in which nine miners drown; the investigation has been given to Will.  Is the official thinking that he won’t find fault with his brother’s mine?

Mining is an incestuous business, with miners, mine owners, and mine inspectors all members of the same families.  The miners are dependent on the mine being open and operating, the owners are dependent on the slack enforcement of safety standards by MSHA to ensure high profits, and the inspectors all have relatives who work or own the mines.  It’s not a good recipe for honest inspections and rigid adherence to safety regulations.

Will is very much a flawed man.  He’s tormented by the accident he caused, and everything he has done since then has been impacted by that event.  His relationship with his mother is cool, his relationship with Paul almost non-existent, his relationships with his superiors in MSHA difficult because they want to close the case, his relationship with his wife and teenage daughter problematic because his wife has moved out of their home so their daughter can attend a different high school and have the chance to win a basketball scholarship.

There’s so much going on that several times Will is ready to give up the investigation, but each time something comes up to cause him to try to make sense of why the miners were cutting in an old mine area which shouldn’t have contained water but did.

Harris uses his background as an investigative reporter in coal mining Kentucky to bring to life a community where there’s nothing else but mines, no other way to earn a living.  It’s all most people in the area know, and their lives have been so restricted for generations that it’s almost impossible for them to think about leaving and finding another way of life.  Will Murphy has managed to leave the mine, but the mine hasn’t left him.

You can read more about Gardiner Harris at this web site.

There is only one Queen of Crime, and Agatha Christie is her name.

From The Mysterious Affairs at Styles (1920) to Sleeping Murder (1976), she wrote.  Think of it, more than fifty years of writing.  Not only novels but plays, short stories, her biography, romances under the name Mary Westacott.  She began when there were probably more horses than cars in England and you needed an operator to make a telephone call and finished when men had stepped onto the moon and satellites spun around the earth.

Not every book she wrote was great.  Actually, on the advice of a friend I’ve never read Nemesis, because she told me it was so bad I’d never want to read another Christie afterward.  And I never liked Tommy and Tuppence, a married couple who seemed outdated to me even after Mrs. Christie tried to modernize them in the 1970s.

But, when she was good she was great.  If I had to choose one mystery to take along on the proverbial desert island, there’d be no hesitation…And Then There Were None.  I must have read that novel at least five times, and each time I’m amazed by it.  How did she do it, I’d ask myself.  The identity of the murderer is right there, it’s clear from the first chapter, and yet the reader is totally surprised at the end.  You may think that a mystery is a “beach read,” to use the popular phrase, but that’s not true for a really great one.  You need to read every word if you want to catch the villain.  And in Mrs. Christie’s books, to coin a metaphor, the floors are slippery with red herrings…you need to watch your step or you’ll fall into the trap she sets for you.

Monsieur Hercule Poirot was her masterpiece.  Ms. Jane Marple, the elderly lady from St. Mary Mead, was featured in a number of outstanding books (At Bertram’s Hotel, A Pocket Full of Rye, The Murder at the Vicarage), but it is Hercule Poirot who brought the author her greatest fame.  In 1975, the year before her death, Mrs. Christie released Curtain, which told the story of Poirot’s last case and his death.  I remember reading his obituary in The New York Times that day, the first (and maybe to this day still the only) time the death of a fictional character was headlined in that newspaper.

If you haven’t already read them, or even if you have, please do yourself a favor and (re)read the following:  And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, and The ABC Murders, just to (re)discover what outstanding storytelling is.

You can read more about Agatha Christie at her web site.

I haven’t met a tough-talking British female private eye in a long time, but now Charlie Fox is here. Second Shot is the second book in a series featuring a former member of the Women’s Royal Army Corps, a martial arts expert and crack shot.  But Charlie was court-martialed out of the corps in a bogus trial, and now she’s working as a private investigator in a small London firm.

There’s quite a backstory to Charlie, formally known as Charlotte, but it’s pretty much only hinted at here.  The reader finds out that she comes from a well-to-do English family with cold, unloving parents; what we don’t know is why this semi-estrangement has taken place.  Her father, an internationally known orthopedic surgeon, is very upset with her career choices, both past and present; her mother’s reasons aren’t explained at all.  So all we know is that Charlie is pretty much alone in the world, except for her professional and personal relationship with her boss, Sean Meyer.

Meyer’s agency is approached when Simone Kerse wins a thirteen million pound lottery in England. She plans to use part of that money to travel to America to find her long-lost father, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a child.  Now Simone is a single mother with her own child, but the child’s father has been stalking her, trying to persuade her not to try to find the man who ran out on Simone and her mother more than twenty years ago.  Simone doesn’t want Charlie’s interference or protection, but when the child’s father bursts into a restaurant where Simone, her daughter, and the two investigators are having lunch and seemingly tries to grab the child, she reluctantly agrees to let Charlie accompany her and her daughter to Boston while she searches.

The opening chapter of the book has Charlie in a ditch, hiding from a gun-wielding Simone who is shot dead before she can shoot Charlie. The book then flashes back to how the detective was hired, how Simone’s father was located, and how money can’t buy happiness, even thirteen million pounds of money.

To the author’s credit, Second Shot is a definite page-turner.  Charlie is an interesting heroine who comes with lots and lots of baggage.  I would have enjoyed the book more if some of that baggage had been unpacked instead of merely being hinted about, to flesh out Charlie’s character.  There’s a lot of talk about Charlie not wanting to take the assignment as it means going to America where she obviously had had a terrible experience some time before, but we’re never told what it is.  Is that information in First Drop, the beginning of the series, or is it a teaser that will only be explained later?  I think it’s an important enough piece of information about the heroine to warrant an explanation.

And Zoe Sharp doesn’t seem to have a strong handle on her characters’ emotions and personalities–they changed from chapter to chapter, not always convincingly.  That said, there were some things that totally surprised me.  There was one that I was sure I had figured out, but I was wrong (yes, sometimes that happens).

I’d like to see more of Charlie Fox.  She’s an interesting woman, and the series has a lot going for it.  It needs a bit of tweaking in terms of characters, but Ms. Sharp is definitely on the right track.

You can read more about Zoe Sharp at her web site.

If something is perfect, why change it?

My husband and I were on Cape Cod on July 11, and I read in The Boston Globe that Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express would be shown on PBS that night.  Now, as far as I’m concerned, Ms. Christie was/is The Queen of Mysteries.  I know, I know, the Golden Age style is no longer in vogue.  Now we need serial killers (see my July 7 post), sexual perversions, and child abuse to make a best seller.  But no one, past or present, could toss those red herrings around like Dame Agatha.

Very excited to see a new version of this classic novel, I sat through an hour-long promo of David Suchet going for a ride on the Orient Express.  I’m guessing he’s a Method Actor and needed to experience the train before he “became” Hercule Poirot.  I must admit that I’ve never been the biggest Suchet fan, but then I’ve never seen a Poirot I thought was authentic.

Anyhow, at 9 p.m. I was ready to view this mystery classic.  And was I disappointed! I thought that Suchet was acting as if he had a hyperactivity problem.  His facial expressions, his gestures, were so unlike the refined, mannered Belgian detective as to be almost (almost) humorous.  I keep waiting for him to calm down, to remember the character he was playing, but no such luck.

Of course, I don’t know if this (mis)characterization of the great detective was the author’s fault or the director’s.  But either way it was wrong, wrong, wrong.  There wasn’t a bit of Christie’s character in this production.

My feeling is, if you’re going to change the character or plot of a novel when you bring it to film or television, perhaps you should simply invent a new character.  Leave the old one alone and come up with your own idea.

And that way you won’t even have to pay royalties!

Marilyn

Malaysia, here we come!  Inspector Singh Investigates:  A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder is the debut novel featuring Singaporean police detective Inspector Singh.

So here’s my confession–I needed to look up Google Maps to find Singapore and Malaysia. And when I did, I was even more confused, so I needed to read the attached text to figure out the story of the Malay Peninsula.   The Dutch established trading posts there in the 17th century, the British later colonized it, the Japanese invaded it during World War II.   In 1948, the British-ruled territories on the Malay Peninsula formed the Federation of Malaya, and in 1957, after a decade of intense negotiations, it gained independence from Britain and renamed itself Malaysia.   In 1963 Singapore and two other states joined the Peninsular Malaysia Federation, but Singapore left in 1965 (or was expelled, depending on which source you believe) to become a separate nation, a city-state.

Be honest, did you know all that?  If so, you must have been paying more attention in Geography class than I was.  Well, maybe all that background isn’t strictly necessary to enjoy Inspector Singh Investigates, but it does help one understand some important aspects of the story.

The maverick inspector has been sent from Singapore to protect the rights of Chelsea Liew, a Singapore citizen who marred a Malaysian man twenty years ago and now is about to be tried for his murder.  The picture-perfect marriage of the beautiful model and the wealthy tycoon spiraled into an abusive relationship with adultery on the side. The birth of three sons did nothing to help Chelsea’s marriage to Alan Lee, and she now stands before the court accused of his death.

Before the murder came the divorce with its custody issues.  Popular opinion favored Chelsea, as Alan’s extra-marital affairs were well known.  It looked as if Chelsea had a good chance to gain custody of their children, even though she was not Muslim; although Malaysia is a strongly male-dominated culture and officially a Muslim state, there is freedom of religion.  However, when things begin to go badly for Alan Lee during the trial, his lawyer requests and is given a two-week recess.  When the trial resumes it is announced that Lee has converted to Islam and has unilaterally converted his three sons as well.  According to Islamic law, this conversion automatically gives him custody of the boys to raise them as Muslims.  Was the threat of losing custody of their sons enough of a motive for murder?

This is a very strong first novel.  The characters are well-defined, easy to remember.  And the insights into the Malaysian culture and the city of Kuala Lumpur are well done.  It’s a “foreign” country, even to neighboring Singaporeans.  Singapore is a tightly run country, famous for outlawing chewing gum in public and for caning people as punishment.  Malaysia, on the other hand, is looser, overcrowded, and ecologically unaware, or so it seems from the picture of its capital city.  The description of Kuala Lumpur is a fascinating one.   And Inspector Singh is a wonderful addition to the world of police detectives.

You can read more about Shamini Flint on her web site.