Murder and revival

Nancy returned from the library recently with a recent Laurie R. King's Mary Russell novel, Murder of Mary Russell. I enthusiastically read the first four of King's novels about police sergeant Kate Marinelli. Great characters and stories. I enjoyed the first four or five of her Mary Russell novels as well. (A teen-aged acolyte of a middle aged Sherlock Holmes? She made it work. And even when, after a few years, the pair married, it worked.)

However, sometime after the 1997 A Letter of Mary, the books were less appealing to me. Maybe it was that A Letter of Mary was so good.

In any case, it's been at least 5 years since I read a Mary Russell novel. And this new one from the library came with good recommendations and it gave me a good excuse to set aside Thomas Perry's A String of Beads. I've read several of Perry's books, and this one, like at least one of the others was a deterrent to sleep. But I wasn't in the mood for one adventure and clever escape after another.

Murder of Mary Russell is a misleading title. In spite of a pool of blood, broken glassware, and Mary Russell's absence, she's not murdered. She's absent from the tale for awhile, but that's not the key.

Mary Gordon as Mrs Hudson

This book is about the background of Clara Hudson, Holmes' housekeeper since forever. It's a story that ranges from London to Australia, Australia to London, and back again a couple times. Thankfully it doesn't recount the voyages. No one should have to read about four months at sea to slow down an already slowly told story.

Things get better in the last third of the book, but reading most of it for me was as dreary as a winter day on the Sussex coast. Not that Mrs. Hudson's past wasn't colorful. She was a beggar, pickpocket, and foil for her father's cons. Quite successful for a time too. Right up until Sherlock Holmes tracked her down. Holmes and Mrs. Hudson were cornered by her father whereupon Clarissa Hudson killed her father and covered up the crime with Holmes' help.

She left England with her infant son for Australia with Holmes' help and returned to England a year of so later, without her son (left with her sister). It's that missing son who appears in the Holmes' house looking for his mother. His threats toward Mary Russell result in the blood on the floor and the absence of Mary Russell.

Enough said. It wasn't great. It fit my mood better than Thomas Perry's succession of deadly hide and seek.

If you like King's writing or are a fan of additions to the world of Sherlock Holmes, you might like Murder of Mary Russell. (library or Half Price books, anyone?) I do wish King would write more Martinelli mysteries.

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• King's web site
• Steven Donoghue's review in the Christian Science Monitor
• Barbara Clark's review at BookPage

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• Thomas Perry's web site
• Muriel Dobbin's review in the Washington Times
• Marilyn Brooks' review in Marilyn Reads Mysteries

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Primary basketball season is over. School's out. Guess who has time to read.

None of that is quite true. Dale Stahl, a former colleague and newly named department chair is involved as a coach in basketball pretty much year round. And he e-mailed me back in mid-May (about the time his AP Econ class was pretty much over). Plus, it seems he read these books sometime earlier.

And I'm trying to figure out why I didn't get to his note sooner. Sorry, Dale. I have no excuses. Tell us more about Dead Lions.

Here's what he wrote:

Herron

Found a new author I absolutely love - Mick Herron.

He has two books set in London amidst the intrigue of the British MI5 secret service. Slow Horses and Dead Lions.

The basics plot element is that the "slow horses" are agents who have made some monumental mistake that has put them on a career path of being slowly but surely drummed out of the secret service.

Far from Regent's Park, the center of power, they are assigned to lowly tasks at the slightly decrepit and depressing Slough House. The leader of the slow horses is the overweight and seemingly burned out Jackson Lamb — a veteran of the cold war and a man with many secrets who still has his finger on the pulse of things, so to speak.

The books are phenomenal, Great intricate plots, twists, suspense without gratuitous violence, old fashioned page turners. I can see them as films and I certainly hope Herron adds a third book to the list!

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• The author's web site
• Betty's review from Mysterious Reviews
• Andi Shechter's review at Reviewing the Evidence
• Mel Jacob's review at Gumshoe

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Reading a Nook

Reading a novel on a Nook (or another tablet-type appliance) is not like reading a book. I haven't figured out the dimensions of difference, but, I'm not as satisfied after finishing the newest Maisie Dobbs mystery, Leaving Everything Most Loved on my Nook as I usually am after putting down a book.

Okay, it might be that this mystery is not up to Jacqueline Winspear's par.

The plot, while complicated and multi-cultural is pretty thin. It might be that Winspear's protagonist spends a lot of time pondering her place in the universe. All that time spent in self-analysis is probably one of the reasons she didn't nab the perp sooner than she did.

The book was also the beginning of a transition for Maisie Dobbs, who, at the end of the book closes her investigative business, farms out her two employees, marries off her widower father, puts off her fiancee-wanna-be, and boards a ship for India. (No word about what happened to the cute little MG she tooled around in.)

It could also be that so much of the cultural details from 1920's England seems missing from this story. That stuff made Maisie and her world so much richer than many stories. Winspear moved from England to California sometime after starting the Maisie Dobbs series and maybe she's out of touch with details about London buses, telephones, street scenes, and houses.

It could also be that I started reading this book a week or so ago at home and finished on a Saturday afternoon at the cabin called Sidetrack on a lake called Blake. Maybe the story deserves more concentrated attention.

Two immigrant women from India, roommates in a sort of shelter, are murdered in London. The brother of one of the women arrives in London and hires Maisie to help find the murderer. There are suspicious missionary types, wild children in a park, gifted healers, mystified London cops, a confessed murderer who seems an unlikely culprit, and Maisie trying to decide what her place is in the universe.

It just didn't seem, when I finished it, to be a great reading experience. Was it because of the Nook or something else? I really did miss the paper and turning pages with more than a tap on the right edge of the screen.

I don't know. Right now I want to return to concentrating on the loon who is calling on the lake. What do those calls mean?

Have you read Leaving Everything Most Loved? Have you read a book on a tablet? What did you think? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• The author's web site
• Kathleen Hennrikus' review at the New York Journal of Books
• Marina Maxwell's review at the Historical Novel Society web page
• Melissa's review at Swamp of Boredom

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It's not nice to fool an old man

A month ago I picked up Christopher Fowler's Ten Second Staricase at the Northfield Library. It's subtitled "A Bryant & May Mystery." Reading it was a confusing and slow project.

I suppose I shouldn't have begun with the fourth "Bryant & May Mystery." There were lots of ways that I was adrift from the first page. I should have guessed since the two characters of the subtitle were the heads of London's Peculiar Crimes Unit.

My other problem was that I kept trying to read it in the late afternoons and evenings. The times of day, the confusion, and the writing kept abetting my fatigue. I seemed unable to read for more than a quarter hour without falling asleep. No wonder it took me a month to finish the book.

Throw in a lot of London mythology, a bit of vampire lore, and some cultural history about the "Highwayman," and I was getting less entertained. And that, after all, is a main reason for reading a book like this.

The investigative process used by these agents of the Peculiar Crimes Unit are anything but normal. But that didn't help me since much of it was based on following clues based on arcane London history. The plot is ridiculous. The cops are too weird to admire. The other characters are enigmas and even less interesting than the detectives.

Merry Christmas from Bryant & May

I finished because I hoped the ending would make sense out of some of the rest. It didn't really help.

Have you read any Christopher Fowler or Ten Second Staircase? What did you think?  

Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• The author's web site
• Karen Meek's review at EuroCrime
• Harriet Klausner's review at Best Seller's World
• Jason Dietz's review at NonModern

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Dan Conrad wrote: "I don't know if it was Ten Second Staircase, but I once began a Fowler book thinking stories related to something called "The Peculiar Crimes Unit" -- and in London -- would just have be interesting.

"Wrong. I think I got about a quarter of the way through and gave it up."

Once again, Maisie Dobbs

The last couple times I read a Maisie Dobbs novel by Jacqueline Winspear, I almost despaired of reading another really good one. One of the books I read was more a romance novel than a mystery. The other, unexpectedly, neglected lots of detail and reality. It's been a year, and I was tempted by nostalgia and picked up Elegy for Eddie from the new books shelf at the library.

I'm glad I did.

There is a noticeable lack of historical detail in this new book compared to the earlier ones. Maybe that's because the author has moved from London to Los Angeles. But, it might just seem that way because the coin-operated gas fire places and 1930's fashions are no longer such novelties to me. However, I complained about the reliability of Maisie Dobbs' 1930 MG. The reputation of those cars is/was that they practically required a ride-along mechanic or a driver skilled in small repairs. But until this book, Maisie never experienced a break down. This time the car broke down while parked behind the city home of her lover, who had to call in a mechanic to get it running again.

I really was unhappy with the romance of The Mapping of Love and Death. Well, this time Maisie's romantic relationship is still around, but Maisie is obviously doing some inner work to come to terms with her desires for independence, her desires for the man in her life, and the contradictions between her working class background and her elevation to high society. It wasn't just her smarts and skills, but the generosity of her former employer and her late mentor that brought her wealth and position. Part of the work Maisie has to do is figure out how to best use her good fortune to help people around her without becoming a benevolent dictator.

And the story around which this is told fits with Maisie's inner struggles. Working class people and newly rich industrialists are involved. A young man, Eddie, who we might now call an autistic savant dies in what appears to be an industrial accident. However, there are suspicions that the accident might have been part of the factory owner's struggle to keep unions out of his plant. Eddie had a way with horses and the costermoners (fruit and vegetable sellers who made the rounds of London neighborhoods) regularly called on him to deal with sickly and unruly horses. Since Maisie's dad was once a constermonger, a local group calls on Maisie to sort out the questions surrounding Eddie's death.

Ah, but the resistance to unionization might not be the real intrigue. Eddie, the savant, was also able to sketch things in great detail from seemingly casual glances. (See the story about Stephen Wiltshire.) What did Eddie see? And was all this connected to the death of a crusading journalist who bought Eddie drinks once in awhile? And why did the bully who was suspected in Eddie's death also kill himself? Or did he? And was the reporter's death an accident?

I thought it was a well-written, complex mystery. I also enjoyed the fact that Maisie Dobbs once again had an inner life that was interesting. In earlier books she struggled with PTSD from her years as a front line nurse in France. Now, she was working through more fortunate, but still difficult, changes in her life.

I'm glad I didn't let my disappointments of a couple earlier novels discourage me. If you're looking to begin reading about Maisie Dobbs, I do recommend starting with the earlier books. And you have my permission to skip the couple that preceeded Elegy for Eddie. (See the Wikipedia entry for Jacqueline Winspear to see the books and publications dates.)

Have you read Elegy for Eddie or another of Winspear's books? How did you react?

 Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• The author's web site
• Anonymous review at How Mysterious!
• Lesa's review at Lesa's Book Critiques

Jacqueline Winspear, speaks at Politics & Prose
Bookstore about Elegy for Eddie and writing

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Degrees of separation

"This little bit of the world" got a little smaller this winter. Jeanette Hohman died at age 92. It's not just that this little bit of the world is already small enough, it's also that Jeanette was a remarkable and interesting woman. I say that even though I just barely knew her and met her only twice, I think.

When I stopped publishing Reading on paper, Jeanette was one of the people for whom I printed out web pages. She was the person who, last fall, asked me why I seemed to read only mysteries. Then she suggested The Postmistress by Sarah Blake.

When I was last at the Northfield Library, I found Blake's book in the fiction section and remembered the title. Now I've read it. And I wish I could call Jeanette and talk about it.

In many ways it's a well-written book. But...

There's a good short story at the beginning of the book that would be great if you added in some of the characterization that shows up at the end of the book. It's about finding adulthood and confidence of self. It's a tragedy, but one that raises important questions.

There's another short story in the middle of the book about a reporter trying to make sense out of a randomly cruel and deadly European world in 1940. The fact that the young woman is an American, acting with American impulses and assumptions makes it more tragic.

There are a couple of unfinished short stories in the book as well, but like the American reporter who seem unable to find the end of the stories she reports on, Sarah Blake seems unable to finish the stories. One of them is about childhood and loss while another is about seeking the future and death.

There's an ingenious plot device in the middle of the book which appears to tie the early short story to the incomplete short story about the reporter in Europe, but Blake abandons the device and portrays her character staring out to sea from the town on the end of Cape Cod. This from a young woman who is quoted as saying, "'Whatever is coming does not just come... It's helped by people willfully looking away. People who develop the habit of swallowing lies rather than the truth. The minute you start thinking something else, then you've stopped paying attention -- and paying attention is all we've got.'"

Maybe I was supposed to see the unfinished stories and the unused plot links as part of what Sarah Blake was writing about. Maybe I was paying attention to the wrong things. But, I am too dense to recognize Blake's topic. Maybe Jeanette knew.

It seems to me that this is almost a novel. But when I finished, I wondered what it was about.

Oh, and the title? The postmaster in that small town at the end of Cape Cod wondered what effect she could have on her community if she simply didn't deliver some of the mail. It turns out it wasn't her, but the visiting reporter, trying to recover from her war time experiences, who refused to deliver some mail. But, in the end, it didn't matter.

Have you read The Postmistress? What did you think it was about? Do you think Blake had a message? Or was she just telling incomplete stories? Come on. Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reactions. (And recruit a new reader to this little bit of the world.)

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• The author's web page
• "Telling Stories Of War, One Person At A Time" from NPR Books
• Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times
• Dawn's review at She is too Fond of Books
• Laura Cococcia's "Interview With Sarah Blake" at Huffington Post

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No expense but taxes

I made my way to the socialist Northfield Public Library. Once again I was taking advantage of the taxpayers of the city. Of course, in order to get there I took advantage of the taxpayers by driving on the completely subsidized streets and stopping at the taxpayer-funded stop signs and stop lights. Thank you to all of you who paid for all that. Including me, of course.

In any case, there's no fee for checking out books from the library. I checked out An Impartial Witness by Charles Todd.

Unlike Wings of Fire, that I read in January, this was "A Bess Crawford Mystery." The Ian Rutledge character and the voice in his head were a bit much, and the story telling was laborious. The earlier Bess Crawford story (A Duty to the Dead) was better.

An Impartial Witness was not.

I skimmmed the final two-thirds of the book. I don't think I missed anything important.

Bess Crawford's father is a retired Army general, Victorian style. Why he doesn't lock her in her room until stops her obsessive pursuit of murderers, I don't know. Somebody should lock her in her room. The mother-son duo who write as Charles Todd aren't likely to do it. Whatever their process for scripting and writing mysteries is, it's no longer functional from my point of view. I will no longer look for their books on library or bookstore shelves.

At least I didn't have to buy the book.

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The authors' web page for An Impartial Witness
A summary of 622 ratings at Good Reads
Beth Crowley's review at Murder by Type
NomadReader's review at nomadreader

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It's Maisie again

I went back to the library, "to read" list in hand, but Ididn't really need it this time.

On the cart of recently returned books by the front desk was Jacqueline Winspear's A Lesson in Secrets. I don't know how Dan Conrad's request for this book from the Minneapolis Public Library is working its way up the waiting list, but Northfield's copy was just sitting on the cart waiting for me. I picked it up, checked it out, and never got 20 feet from the entrance. It was a satisfying and efficient trip to the library.

Sir Oswald Moseley, infamous for leading the British Union Of Fascists before
the second world war, figures indirectly in this story.

Reading A Lesson in Secrets was not as satisfying or as efficient. The book is once again full of fascinating details about fashion and technology of everyday life in London of 1932. There is a theme concerning the Crown's secret intelligence bureau and its focus on Bosheviks in Cambridge's colleges, while ignoring the growing influence of fascists and Nazis on campus. There's also a story about organized crime and a protection racket in London. In fact, there are many stories in this book. Too many by my lights.

Because there are so many stories here, none of them (not even the primary one) really get told well. There's the young widow that Maisie takes under her wing. There's Maisie's assistant Billy and his family. There's a story about Maisie's father, a widower for 20 years, and his new "girlfriend." There's Maisie's romance. And then there's Maisie's undercover job for Crown. Oh, and you might add that there's a story of Maisie's cover as a philosophy lecturer in a Cambridge college. (She's supposed to report on anything untoward she finds on campus.) There's also some of Maisie's reminiscences about her own student days in Cambridge. Well, you see the problem: how to tell all those stories in 321 pages. Winspear tries to do that and ends with, "Yes, time would give up her secrets. She just had to wait." Not great.

Those last lines affirm what I felt throughout the book. These are transitional stories. Most of them lead to future stories. The young widow, like Maisie, makes her way in the world. Billy and his family have a new baby and a brand new house with "an indoor lav." Maisie's father finds a boon companion for retirement. Maisie and her titled lover, in a romance novel, sort out how to merge their strong individual lives and compromise with the expectations of post-Victorian English high society. Maisie finds such satisfaction in teaching philosophy that she turns her detective agency over to Billy and the young widow while she commutes between her lover's London mansion, his family's estate in Kent, and her classrooms in Cambridge. And she probably takes on a few more undercover jobs for the crown while accompanying her lover (husband?) on his business trips around the world.

There are also some things missing. I just can't believe that Maisie's little MG roadster starts everytime she turns the key and it never breaks down or gets a flat tire. (MGs were not modern Toyotas.)

1930 MG like the one Maisie Dobbs drove.

How is it that Maisie and her friends never come in contact with the destitute and unemployed of 1932 England? I'm pretty certain that Winspear did the research, but were developers really building new, semi-detatched homes on the edge of London in '32? And then there's her lover's international business (and another character's global trading company). How was it that these companies were prosperous as the world's economies were falling apart?

So, I wasn't completely satisfied with the book. I wasn't efficient either. I kept falling asleep between chapters yesterday. There's something about being at the cabin called Sidetrack, looking at the lake, and doing bits and pieces of maintenance that are relaxing. And the relaxation led to several naps that interruupted my reading.

Check out A Lesson in Secrets for yourself. Then (or if you've already read it) write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

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• The author's web site
  
• 353 reviews at GoodReads
  
• a review at Rundpinne
  

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Double failure

I'll take these failures on myself, but I had lots of help.

Nancy brought Connie Willis' All Clear home from the library. I picked it up and took it to the cabin named Sidetrack because I'd read The Doomsday Book, Remake, and To Say Nothing of the Dog years ago and liked them. There was another Willis book, Promised Land, that I wasn't so fond of.

All Clear was advertised on the dust jacket as another of Willis' time travel novels. I'd found that to be an entertaining and clever device in earlier books. The plot device is that Oxford University historians about 50 years from now discover a method of time travel that lets them go into the past as researchers and return to their rooms in mid-21st century Oxford to write eye-witness accounts of historical events.

Willis' characters are most interested in what went on in London during World War II (as in To Say Nothing of the Dog).

I quickly found out that the 600+ page All Clear was the second of two volumes telling one story. Since I'd read earlier time travel books, I thought I could get by without reading the first volume, Blackout. It turns out I could get by without reading all of the second volume as well.

How many times do I have to read some internal dialogue about a character's fears that she's trapped in the past? Or that she's done something to trap another researcher in the past? Or that one of her colleagues has done something to change the course of history? Well, Willis seemed to think that one or another of her characters just had to say those things to herself every few pages. And how often was it necessary for me to read about the anxieties of getting to work on time or the exact details of what trains were necessary to travel from one part of London to another?

Willis is a successful author, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't need an editor.

[Short aside: Nancy's website features a quotation from T. S. Eliot: "Even a superb writer needs a good editor. A merely good writer needs a superb editor."]

To Say Nothing of the Dog was full of humor and joy. This book was full of anxiety and stress. Okay, the V-1 and V-2 rockets and the Blitz were no fun in London. But the earlier book was also set in London during World War II London. If Blackout, the first volume is a twin to this one, I'd suggest that someone abridge the two and make a (400-page?) science fiction novel out of them. I might have enjoyed reading that and even finished it.

Then I picked up Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time at the Northfield library. It got on my "To Read" list because of a review in the New York Times. Stacey D'erasmo wrote that "Petterson’s narratives tend to unspool in the first person, in hushed, confidential tones. Tight-lipped with one another, his characters open their hearts to the reader, making us witnesses to their most private selves. He makes the reader lean in, out of the wind, to listen closely..."

I'd read Out Stealing Horses a few years ago and liked it. Maybe I wasn't in the mood for the moody, self-indulgent, un-selfconscious internal dialogues in I Curse the River of Time either. The main character wasn't interesting to me.

Another book I didn't finish.

Oh, well. My "To Read" list is still long. It was disappointing that one of the books on the list is only available from the libary as an e-book for an e-reader. I don't have one of those yet. But books? I can handle lots of them.

Have you read Connie Willis' All Clear? or Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time? How did you react? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your experience.

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• Connie Willis' web site
• An admiring review by Julie Phillips in The Village Voice
• A less admiring review by Dorman T Schlinder in the Denver Post
• Per Petterson's web site
• An admiring review of Petterson's book by Kristin Ohlson at Cleveland. com
• Rachel Cusk's positive review of I Curse the River of Time from The Guardian (UK)

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Londinium Mystery

One of the books I picked up at the Amery Library a couple weeks ago was The Jupiter Myth by Lindsey Davis. I pulled this one off the shelf because I remembered being entertained by a couple of her books several years ago.

Davis is an Oxford-educated former civil servant, who "ran away to be a writer." What she has written more than a dozen mysteries about a first century (C.E.) "informer," Marcus Didius Falco. Old Falco has worked his way up from being a free lance fixer and finder of missing relatives to working for the top Romans in colonial London.

The story in The Jupiter Myth circles around (and boy, does it go round and round) the attempt by Roman (not Scilian) organized crime to expand its protection and smuggling business to the frontier. In the process a retainer of a British ally of Rome, a local "king," is murdered. Falco is assigned by the Roman governor to fnd out what's going on and placate the "king."Of course, things get more complicated. Falco's best buddy, a fellow veteran, is undercover from Rome investigating the Roman mob. And the people Falco is interested in are the same people his old pal is interested in. And, his best buddy is secretly in love with Falco's sister. And Falco's wife is trying to rescue a homeless waif who is a British orphan. And one of the governor's centurians is on the take.

The story telling seemed to start off very slowly (like a Swedish mystery?). It may have been that I was reading in bits too small to keep me interested. However, when I began reading more than a couple little chapters at a time, the story was more interesting.

Marcus Didius Falco might whine about British weather and carp about being so far from his glorious Rome, but it was a relief from the dour Scandinavian weltanschaung I've read a lot of lately. Better? No, just a bit more uplifting.

Davis is great on researching the historic details and she does tell a good story. Check out one of her books and tell us what you think.

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• Lindsey Davis' web site
• Cindy Lynn Speer's review of The Jupiter Myth

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From Minneapolis

Bird Loomis isn't the only person to send in recommendations recently.

Dan Conrad, whose words have appeared here to great effect in the past wrote again.


As the news in the real world continues to be little but gloom and doom... I've turned (in fiction writing) to a series of heroes and heroines who face problems that would make Hercules wince but never fail to come out victorious--and then some.

Ken suggested Laurie R. King, and I started with Art of Detection featuring Kate Martinelli--a lesbian cop in San Francisco. [For reasons I don't understand, this book's title shows up as The Art of Detection on illustrations.] Now I'm going back to the start of the series and then take up with the heroine introduced in Beekeeper's Apprentice - I think.

My favorite right now is one Molly Murphy who is introduced by Rhys Bowen in Murphy's Law.

Molly is wanted for murder in Ireland (ca1900) but has immigrated (illegally) to New York and is bent on being a private investigator--against all odds.

Then there is Maisie Dobbs who enters in a novel by the same name by Jacqueline Winspear. It doesn't hurt that her experiences as a British nurse in W.W.I and her being part gypsy give her uncommon insight.

Then there is that disgraced son of a British nobleman who solves murders in high places (with help from his sometime actress, prostitute, spy girlfriend) in 4 novels by C. S. Harris. I'm about 80th on the waiting list for the 4th in the series.

Oh, then there's my favorite so far this year, and not just because of the name. Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News. It takes a while to get going but when it does, hold on to your hat. You'll love that teenage girl and older heroine even more than the featured detectives.

That's it for now. Got a bunch of books on Christianity as it was before Constantine (to say nothing of the Apostle Paul) twisted things around to create a religion unrecognizable by the early followers of Jesus. Enough for now.

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See also:

• Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy web site
  
• Rhys Bowen interviewed by Barbara Peters of Poisoned Pen Press and Bookstore, Arizona
  
• C. S. Harris' web site
• Kate Atkinson's web site
  
• Patrick Ness' review of When Will There be Good News from The Guardian (UK)
  
• Improbable upstart, my thoughts on Beekeeper's Apprentice
  
• Maisie Dobbs mysteries
  
• Recorded Maisie Dobbs mystery

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