Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Is there any mystery fan who has not read at least one novel featuring Perry Mason, the criminal defense attorney whose clients are always innocent?  Probably not.  Erle Stanley Gardner wrote eighty books featuring Mason, along with Perry’s confidential secretary Della Street, private investigator Paul Drake, district attorney Hamilton Burger, and police lieutenant Arthur Tragg.  The famous television series featured the same characters and ran from 1966 through 1957, staring Raymond Burr, Barbara Hale, William Hopper, William Talman, and Ray Collins, respectively.

Gardner was a self-taught lawyer, a student who attended one month of law school in Indiana before moving to California where he passed that state’s bar exam.  He began writing for the pulps in the 1920s; pulps were magazines called after the type of cheap paper on which they were printed.  Many well-known authors in the 1920s and 1930s got their starts in these magazines, Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man) and John D. MacDonald (Travis McGee novels) among them.

In 1933, Gardner published his first Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Velvet Claws.  It was an immediate success, and Gardner began writing full time.  In each of the Perry Mason books, a client comes to the lawyer, willingly or unwillingly, with a story that seems totally unbelievable.  Many of the novels deal with gorgeous women and multiple guns, and Perry is initially lied to by nearly all his clients.  The evidence against every client is so strong that the arrogant district attorney, Hamilton Burger, always strides into court with a pitying look at Perry, knowing that this time the famed defense lawyer cannot win.  But, of course, he does.

Gardner also wrote under various pen names, most famously using A. A. Fair for the Bertha Lam/Donald Cool series.  In addition, Gardner founded The Court of Last Resort in 1948 to investigate cases where he believed the wrong person had been convicted.

There is a delightful piece on YouTube with Gardner appearing as the mystery guest on TV’s “What’s My Line”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJuJZ6KPPBg.  Gardner comes across as charming, down-to-earth, and with a good sense of humor.

As a tribute to Gardner, a middle school in his adopted home town of Temecula, California is named after him.

In today’s world of mysteries with its demented characters and horrifying torture scenes, the Perry Mason series may seem a bit dated.   Most of the crimes in these novels are related to greed or revenge, good old-fashioned motives.  But, in fact, those motives never go out of style, as one knows from reading today’s newspapers.

Erle Stanley Gardner definitely made a place for himself as a writer of detective fiction.  He deserves to be on anyone’s list of masters of the genre.

Sarah Woolson is the third woman licensed as an attorney in California.  Everywhere she goes, men and women are astonished to find out there is such a being–a woman and a lawyer, an impossible combination to many in San Francisco in the year 1882.  But Sarah is intelligent, ambitious, and not about to give in to those who believe it’s impossible for a woman to be a lawyer.  And once she takes a case, she will not give up.

Sarah lives with her parents, her single younger brother, and her married older brother and his family in the elegant Woolson family home.  Much as she loves her family, Sarah is anxious for her practice to be successful enough for her to rent her own rooms, away from the over-anxious eyes of her parents.  But that day isn’t here yet.

As Sarah and her brother Samuel are returning with a group from a literary function featuring the Irish poet Oscar Wilde at the home of newspaper publisher Mortimer Remy, Samuel is shot and wounded.  The police and several others in the party believe it to be an accident, a resident of Telegraph Hill shooting at a small animal in the dark, not an unusual occurrence.  Sarah’s not convinced and is even less willing to believe in the accident theory when, several days later, the body of a Telegraph Hill resident who also attended Mortimer’s party is found hanging from a tree.

The police lieutenant in charge of the case calls the death a suicide, but Sarah’s friend Sergeant George Lewis of the city’s police department agrees with Sarah. However, there’s little to go on until another body turns up.

Death on Telegraph Hill paints a detailed picture of San Francisco more than a century and a quarter ago.  Sarah is definitely a woman ahead of her time, a woman who has coolly decided on a career rather than marriage and children.  But then there’s Robert Campbell, another attorney, who is trying to change her mind about the marriage part of her decision.  There’s a large cast of characters including younger brother Samuel; Sarah’s friend, the woman she rents office space from, Fanny Goodman; the young Eddie Cooper, a teenaged carriage driver who is always anxious to help Sarah; and the several people who were at the reception the night that Samuel was shot.  Each one has a distinct personality and helps bring the novel to life.

And the picture of Oscar Wilde is hilarious.  Although well-known in literary circles, he’s definitely not what people are used to in San Francisco; the locals don’t know what to make of him.  “Attired in a maroon velvet smoking jacket edged with braid, a lavender silk shirt, flowing green cravat, knee breeches, and black shoes with silver buckets….”  Well, you get the idea.  Apparently his sexual preferences have made their way across the ocean, and some rude comments about that were also voiced by his audience.  However, Oscar remains impervious; he probably has heard similar jeers and insults before.

This is the fifth mystery in the Sarah Woolson series but only the first I’ve read.  So the good news is that I have four more novels in this excellent series waiting for me.

You can read more about Shirley Tallman at this web site.

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

Can you imagine being a lawyer who cannot speak in court?  Such is the case for former big-time attorney Parker Stern who suffers from glossophobia, the fear of public speaking.  In Parker’s case this fear shows itself only in court, but that has been enough to virtually end his career.

When Parker’s former law firm dissolved following the suicide of its founder, Harmon Cherry, the firm’s attorneys went their different ways.  Palmer now is a sole practitioner with no clients, Deanna Poulos owns a coffee shop, Rich Baxter continues as an attorney with a large firm, Grace Trimble has disappeared, and Manny Mason is a law professor.  It is Manny who has gotten Palmer his new job as an adjunct professor at St. Thomas More School of Law, teaching trial advocacy to three third-year law students.

Deanna comes to Parker to request that he talk to his former colleague and friend, Rich Baxter, who has been arrested on charges of illegal money transactions and embezzlement from his biggest client, the Church of the Sanctified Assembly.  The government alleges Rich stole seventeen million dollars, had it transferred out of the country, and was planning to leave the United States with a false passport found in his home.  Rich, through Deanna, begs Parker to take his case, swearing that he’s innocent of all the charges.  He also tells Parker that although Harmon’s death has been ruled a suicide, he knows it was murder.

Parker has his own sad history with the Assembly.  He was famous as Parky Gerald, a child movie star, pushed into a show business career by his mother.  Although there are laws protecting the earnings of minors, Parker’s mother managed to take nearly all of his earnings and give them to the Assembly.  When Parker was fifteen he sued to be an emancipated minor, and he hasn’t seen his mother in more than twenty years.

After meeting with Rich in jail Parker agrees to take the case, at least on a preliminary basis.  But when he arrives at court, his client is nowhere to be seen.  As the judge asks where the defendant is, a marshal comes into the courtroom, whispers to the judge, and the judge orders all attorneys into his office.  The news the marshal brings is that Rich Baxter has been found in his cell, a suicide.  So of the six partners of Macklin and Cherry, two have allegedly committed suicide.  Parker isn’t buying it.

Robert Rotstein is himself an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, and he knows the milieu well.  Parker Stern is a fascinating protagonist, reluctant at first to get back into the courtroom because of his disability.  But his loyalty to the remaining members of his former firm finally outweighs his fears.  The book’s other characters are equally interesting:  the bohemian Deanna, Parker’s former lover; his beautiful and bright law student, Lovely Diamond; the mysterious Grace Trimble, whom Parker hasn’t seen in years; and the members of the Assembly, where Parker is known as the First Apostate.

Corrupt Practices is a book that’s nearly impossible to put down.  There’s action on every page, and the insights into people’s characters are deep and well thought-out.  According to his web site, Robert Rotstein is at work on the second Parker Stern novel, and I’m looking forward to reading it when it’s published.

You can read more about Robert Rotstein at this web site.

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

August 3, 2013

It’s a funny thing about novels.  They sweep you into their worlds so that you forget you’re reading something that came out of the author’s imagination.  If it’s a really good book you are part of it, inside it with the characters that the author has created.

Kate Atkinson, author of One Good Turn (reviewed on this blog), has a new best-seller, Life After Life.  It’s a fabulous book, not a mystery but a tour de force about the many lives of Ursula Beresford Todd.  Ursula was born in England in 1910, the third of five children of Silvie and Hugh Todd.

She was born with the umbilical cord around her neck, and she never drew a breath.

She was born with the umbilical cord around her neck, but the doctor was able to cut it off and she lived.

She was born with the umbilical cord around her neck, and her mother cut it off because the doctor hadn’t been able to arrive in time for the birth.

Do you see a problem here?

Life After Life tells the many (possible) stories of Ursula’s life, assuming that she didn’t die at birth.  She never marries, she marries an abuser, she goes to Germany and marries a Nazi officer, she doesn’t have children, she has a daughter.  It all gets a bit confusing.

The stories of Ursula’s life are engrossing and wonderfully told.  She’s a young child during the Great War and a grown woman, married/unmarried, in England/Germany during World War II.  There are episodes that made me gasp with surprise or dread or sorrow.  But then I would remind myself that none of this happened because on the previous pages something totally different had occurred.

When a reader enters the mind of a novelist, of course there’s a suspension of belief.  We know these things haven’t really happened, we know that it’s all made up and that the author can make anything happen the way she/he wants.  But, at least for me, all the different paths of Ursula’s life kept me at a distance.  I kept reminding myself that because all these things couldn’t have happened to Ursula, none of these things did.

It would be like reading a mystery and finding out that the crime wasn’t solved, as if the author laid out all the clues and left it up to the reader to figure out who did it.  If there are any mysteries like that out there, I don’t want to know about them or read them.  There’s a contract between an author and a reader–the author writes a complete story and the reader gives it his/her complete attention and (hopefully) belief.  If the author doesn’t fulfill the first part of the contract, the reader can’t be faulted for not fulfilling the second part.

All the statements on the cover of Life After Life are true:  “Extraordinary,” “Excellent,” and “Smart, Moving, Powerful” are just some of them.  Life After Life was on the best-seller list for months, deservedly so.  But for me, and perhaps only for me, because of the many narrative paths in this book, a little of the magic of entering the writer’s make-believe world was gone.

Marilyn

Fidel Castro’s Cuba takes center stage in Peggy Blair’s debut mystery The Beggar’s Opera.  As I say in my slightly-less-than-fluent Spanish, the book is muy, muy bueno.

Mike and Hillary Ellis, visitors to Cuba from Ottawa, are having a tough week.  The Ellises have been followed by a group of small boys begging for change, one of whom is more persistent than the others.  When Mike gives the child some pesos in spite of Hillary’s admonition not to, that seems to be the last straw for her, and she announces that she’s changed her reservation and will be flying home alone that evening.

Mike, who is a police detective, was on disability leave following the murder of his partner and his own attack by a knife-wielding suspect who was killed.  Now on vacation, Mike is determined to finish the rest of his week in Havana.  He goes into El Bar mi Media Naranja (Half an Orange), Hemingway’s favorite drinking place, and before long is approached by a jinetera, a prostitute; after downing several drinks, Ellis leaves the bar with her.  In the morning he awakes, alone, and his wallet and badge are gone.

Ricardo Ramirez is a police detective in Havana.  Early on Christmas Day he receives a phone call that the body of a young boy has been found on the rocks beneath the Malecon, Havana’s promenade.  The father of two young children, Ricardo is particularly anxious to solve this case, and it looks as if it will be easy.  A wallet was found on the boy’s body, and the passport with it is in the name of Mike Ellis.

When Ricardo and his colleague Rodriguez Sanchez bring Mike to the police station to interview him, he begins to understand how much trouble he is in.  At first he thinks he’s there because he asked the doorman at his hotel to report his missing wallet, badge, and passport to the police, and he is surprised by the amount of time the police are putting into the case.

“I broke the law by giving him money?” Mike asks.  “I’ll pay the fine then. I had no idea you people took this kind of thing so seriously.”  Detective Sanchez gives the suspect a disgusted look.  “The rape and murder of a child, Senor Ellis, is taken very seriously in Cuba.  We punish it by firing squad.”

The detectives have already searched Mike’s hotel room, no search warrant being needed in that country if a crime is suspected.  Mike is not entitled to a lawyer, but Ricardo does allow him to call his chief of police in Ottawa.  And although it’s Christmas Day, the chief arranges for Celia Jones, the police department’s attorney, to fly down to Havana to find out what’s going on.  Mike is slightly reassured, but his memory of the night before is so vague; can he really be certain that he didn’t kill young Arturo Montenegro?

The Beggar’s Opera is a fascinating book, with well-drawn characters and a city that is both familiar and exotic to most Americans.  There are three surprises at the end of the book, and each one is believable and satisfying.

You can read more about Peggy Blair at this web site.

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

Leonard Rosen is now two for two.  The Tenth Witness is a masterful follow-up to his debut novel, All Cry Chaos (reviewed on this blog).

The Tenth Witness, a prequel, opens with a prologue by the protagonist, Henri Poincare.  In All Cry Chaos he was a man approaching retirement, an inspector with Interpol.  In The Tenth Witness he is a young consulting engineer, a partner in the firm of Poincare & Chin, called in 1978 to oversee extracting gold from outdated computers for Kraus Steel, a global steel manufacturer.  The story is told in a single flashback.

Almost from his introduction to the Kraus family, Henri experiences split emotions.  He is immediately attracted to Liesel Kraus, who handles the publicity and charitable giving for the business’ foundation.  And he likes her brother Anselm and Anselm’s wife and young children.  But he is disturbed, unnerved, by meeting the original co-partner in Kraus Steel and now Anselm’s father-in-law, Viktor Schmidt.  Henri doesn’t know quite why, at least not yet.

Liesel Kraus makes no secret of how the family got started during the Hitler era.  Her father was a member of the Nazi party and ran his steel mills with slave labor.  But like Oskar Schindler, Liesel tells Henri, he saved people’s lives.  And when the war trials began, ten Kraus Steel laborers came forward and signed an affidavit in her father’s favor.  But still, she admits, “My father wore a swastika lapel pin.”

Henri travels with Viktor to see a facility the company owns in Hong Kong.  Viktor explains that when the ship is broken apart, every section of it is remade by the steel mill–pipes, wires, furniture–and reused.  The profits are enormous.  But what Henri sees are the incredibly dangerous conditions, conditions that never would be allowed in Europe.  He leaves Hong Kong with the thought that he doesn’t want to do business with the Kraus company, regardless of the profits that his engineering firm would make.  But when he sees Liesel again he changes his mind, and he accepts the commission.  And so Henri becomes involves with the Kraus family, their business and their secrets.

Just in case the readers are thinking that the Nazis were a special group of vermin, that other people didn’t do those things/have those kind of thoughts, Leonard Rosen sets them straight.  There are two scenes in the book that are so realistic, taking place more than two decades after the war, as to be unbearably painful.

In the first, after Henri has basically uncovered most of the dirty history of the Kraus Steel company, he and Liesel are outside a church when confronted by a Gypsy woman and her child who are begging for coins.  Liesel gives the child a coin, but Henri brushes past the woman and child.  He thinks to himself, A whole (expletive deleted) of cows.  He washes the sleeve where the Gypsy touched him, and then he understands what he was thinking.

I’ll leave the second scene, equally disturbing, for you to discover.

No such thing as a sophomore slump when it comes to Leonard Rosen’s second novel.  The writing is outstanding, clear and crisp, and the author holds your attention from the first page to the last.  The characters are real, and the decisions they make about life and business are real also.  Do not miss reading The Tenth Witness.

You can read more about Leonard Rosen at his web site.

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

I’m not aware of any other mystery novels featuring a gray-haired fifty-nine-year-old female retired F.B.I. agent.  That’s one of the reasons that Rage Against the Dying is a most enjoyable read.

Brigid Quinn is trying to start a new life for herself in Tucson.  She’s happily married to Carlo, a charming ex-Catholic priest whom she met while taking his Buddhism course.  They’ve been married just a year, her first marriage and his second.  But Brigid is keeping lots of secrets from her husband because a former lover wasn’t able to deal with the violent and dangerous aspects of her job, and she’s worried that Carlo will feel the same way.

So even though Brigid is no longer an active agent, she’s fearful of letting Carlo know all the details of her past career.  Her specialty, she tells him as she tells anyone who asks, was copyright fraud, dull enough to stop inquisitive conversations dead in their tracks.

Her carefully kept secret life starts to unravel when Brigid is accosted in the desert by Gerald Peasil, who takes her by surprise and drags her into the cab of his truck.  When she sees the blood on the cab’s floor, she realizes she’s not his first victim. Surprising Gerald by her strength, in the ensuing fight she stabs his leg with the blade of her specially-designed walking stick, and he dies. Terrified at having to explain the homicide to Carlo, even though it was justified, Brigid manages to tip the truck into a nearby wash and heads home to clean herself off.

A week afterwards, deputy sheriff Max Coyote comes to the house to tell Brigid that they have caught the infamous Route 66 killer.  A man arrested two weeks earlier on a minor charge has now confessed to killing six young women, including Jessica Robertson, an F.B.I. agent who was Brigid’s protege.  Brigid has never forgiven herself for allowing Jessica to be used as a decoy to trap the Route 66 killer; she has agonized for years, fearing that she sent the young agent out before she was ready.  Jessica’s body was never recovered.

At first Laura Coleman, the young agent who interrogated the prisoner, Floyd Lynch, has no doubt of the truth of his confession and his guilt of the several murders abutting Route 66.  But as the interrogation tape is replayed, she begins to have doubts.  However, no one will listen to her; even Floyd’s own defense attorney believes in his admitted guilt.  So Laura turns to Brigid for help.

Brigid Quinn is a very interesting heroine.  A successful federal agent, she was forced to resign after an outcry to her fully justified shooting of a murderer.  That, in combination with her feelings of guilt over Jessica’s disappearance and presumed death, has made her a keeper of secrets, fearful that those closest to her will be horrified and unable to love her.  So her lies keep getting more and more involved, even as she agrees with Laura that Floyd Lynch is not the true Route 66 killer.  But if he’s not, who is?  And how did Floyd come to know details about those killings that were never released?

Becky Masterman has created a fascinating cast of characters in her debut novel, and Brigid Quinn is a protagonist worth following.  You can read more about her at this web site.

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

A recently blinded psychiatrist, a young man with severe developmental disabilities, and a dysfunctional married couple all come together to provide Lynn Raimondo’s fascinating debut novel, Dante’s Wood. 

Mark Angelotti was a successful psychiatrist in New York before some bad decisions and one tragic event forced him to leave that city and relocate to Chicago.  No one at his new hospital knows anything about his personal background, only his outstanding professional abilities, so it’s a chance for him to start over.

Two years after Mark arrives in Chicago, he is diagnosed with Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy, a gene mutation passed on from mother to son.  He gradually loses the sight in one eye, then a few weeks later in the other.  By incredible determination and hard work, he manages to learn Braille (very difficult to do after adolescence) and to relearn the many other things that he must do to have a normal life:  cook, travel alone via public transportation, dress himself.

Now that thirteen months have passed since the onset of his disease, Mark is back at work.  In his own words, he is “the same arrogant, uncaring, self-deceptive bastard I’d always been.”

His supervisor assigns him a case involving Charlie Dickerson, the eighteen-year-old son of a fellow physician at the hospital.  Charlie has Fragile X syndrome, the leading cause of mental retardation, and has the I.Q. of a six to nine year old.  His mother Judith believes that Charlie is being sexually abused by one of the staff members at the adolescent day care facility he attends, while his father Nate says he doesn’t believe this, and that is one of the many things about which this couple cannot agree.

After talking to Charlie, Mark believes he has found the answer to the issues that made his parents bring him to the psychiatrist, and the problem seems resolved.  Six months pass, and although Mark’s prowess in handling his blindness has improved, his mental state has not.  He feels as if his judgments are off, that he’s missing something.  His supervisor wonders if he has forced Mark to come back to work too soon, but Mark insists that that’s not the problem.  He’s just working things through.

Then he receives a call from the Dickersons.  Charlie has been arrested for murdering a staff member at his day care facility.  And yes, it’s the woman Judith Dickerson thought had been molesting him.

Mark is a very interesting character.  He’s bright, dedicated, and determined to live as close to a normal life as possible, all of which are admirable qualities.  But he has a secret that is tormenting him, not allowing him to be open and share his life with anyone.

And then, when Charlie is arrested, it makes even his professional abilities open to question.  Given his lack of a personal life, and the secret he has been holding onto since his move from Manhattan, if he loses his license to practice medicine he feels he will have nothing left.

The author’s description of Mark’s inner turmoil and his determination to get his life back on track make for a compelling novel.  I’m looking forward to the second in the Mark Angelotti series.

You can read more about Lynne Raimondo at this web site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read more about him at this web site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 10, 2013

Writing after death–good idea or bad?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn

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“Fabulous” was the word I said out loud when I closed Buried on Avenue B, and I truly meant it.  This is one outstanding mystery.

Paulette Williams comes to Manhattan South to report a possible murder that may have taken place seventeen years ago.  Darlene O’Hara is a detective in Manhattan South, or Manhattan Soft as it’s called because of its low murder rate.  Paulette is a home health aide, and she tells Darlene that her patient, Gus Henderson, confessed to killing a man and burying him in a garden plot on Avenue B.  Gus is elderly and has dementia, Paulette warns, and has since retracted his confession, but she feel strongly enough about it to come to the police.  She also knows, she says, the exact location of the body because Gus had pointed it out.

While visiting Gus and getting the same denial about the murder that his aide had gotten, Darlene is shown his box of keepsakes.  In it is a photo of a willow tree in the garden.  So after getting permission to take the photo with her, Darlene gets approval from her supervisor to assembles a team and start digging to uncover what is buried.  “You’ve got six hours,” he warns her, and that would seem to be enough to uncover the body of the large black man that Gus previously had admitted to stabbing to death.  But what is revealed by the city’s forensic anthropologist is very different–the remains of a white child, a young John Doe.

Darlene’s search to find the identity of the boy takes her from her Manhattan home to Sarasota, Florida and then part-way up the eastern seaboard in the company of Connie Warwrinka, a detective on the Sarasota force.  What brings them together is the fact that the NYPD got a ballistics match on the bullet that killed the still-unknown and unclaimed body in Manhattan.  That bullet matched one in Sarasota that had been used to kill an eighty-seven-year-old widower there.  There doesn’t seem to be any logical connection, but stranger things have happened.

There’s a lot going on in Buried on Avenue B and a large cast of characters, but the storyline is clear and the characters are wonderfully drawn.  Darlene, who became an unmarried mother at fifteen, now has a son who has just dropped out of college to lead a rock band.  She had named him Alex Rose, and perhaps that’s what caused the change in his career path.  At the garden, Darlene meets Christina Malmstromer, who tends her small plot of tomatoes, basil, and eggplant, and her father, Lars, who secretly makes miniature furniture in the hope that someday Christina will give him a grandchild.

Investigating the murder of Ben Levin in Florida, Darlene meets his childhood friend Sol Klinger and Ben’s downstairs neighbor, ninety-year-old Sharon Di Nunzio, who had a romantic/sexual relationship with the deceased.  And that list of characters doesn’t even touch some of the most interesting ones in Manhattan.  It’s an amazing group of people, all of whom come across as real people, not simply figures put on the pages of a book.

Buried on Avenue B is a terrific mystery, one that has an ending that took me totally by surprise.  It’s a winner in every sense.

You can read more about Peter De Jonge at this web site.

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

What a sad, sad story about dysfunctional lives in pre-World War II London.  What a terrific read.

Hangover Square takes place in a seedy area in the down-at-the-heels Earl Court district of the city.  George Harvey Bone is a twenty-something man with mental illness, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say mental illnesses.  He suffers from schizophrenia, alcoholism, and an obsession which manifests itself only when he is in his schizophrenic state.  During his non-schizophrenic time, George is both fascinated and repelled by Netta Longdon.  During his schizophrenic episodes, his all-consuming desire is to kill her.

In his normal state, George is utterly besotted by Netta.  When he sees her the day after Christmas, he is struck again by her looks.  “Although she was not made up, untidy and not trying,” she bewitches him “with…unholy beauty….”  In his functional state, his wish is to marry Netta and have children with her; in his schizophrenic state, he plots to kill her.  In each state, he has no memory of the other one.

Netta is the leader of a small group of extremely unpleasant people.  She is a wanna-be film actress but is unwilling to put any effort into learning her craft.  Actually, it’s not so much that she wants to act, she wants the money and glory that would come with being in that profession.  But, being too lazy to improve her skills, she hasn’t gotten any further than a couple of small movie roles.

In many ways, the relationship between George and Netta is similar to that between Phillip Carey and Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage.  In each novel there is a sad, lonely man who falls in love with a sadistic and uncaring woman.  Both Netta and Mildred use George and Phillip, respectively, only for monetary reasons.  They show no warmth, feeling, or compassion for these men, only scorn and distain for the way the men allowed themselves to be treated.

Hangover Square is a hard read.  One goes back and forth in George’s disturbed mind, and both of his states are hard to deal with.  When he appears normal, his obsession with Netta allows her to treat him dreadfully, and although he sometimes recognizes this, he is so enthralled by her he is unable to break the cord that binds them.   When he’s in his schizophrenic state and plotting murder, it’s equally hard to read.

Hangover Square is considered Patrick Hamilton’s finest novel.  He also was a poet and the author of two successful plays:  Rope, which was made into an Alfred Hitchcock film starring Jimmy Stewart, and Gaslight, later to become a movie starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman.

You can read more about Patrick Hamilton at this web site.

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

Early on in D. A. Mishani’s debut novel, A Missing File, police detective Avraham Avraham (no typographical error) is talking to the mother of fourteen-year-old Ofer who, she says, didn’t come home from school that day.

“Do you know why there are no detective novels in Hebrew?” Avraham asks Hannah Sharabi.  He mentions Agatha Christie’s books and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  “Because we don’t have crimes like that,” he answers his own question.   “He’ll be home in an hour…maybe tomorrow morning at the latest.  I can assure you.”  But Avraham is a bit too sure, too smug; Ofer doesn’t come home later that day or the next.

Avraham Avraham is a thirty-eight-year-old detective in a quiet suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel.  Children or teenagers never disappear from Holon.  Though Ofer hasn’t come home by the following morning or contacted his mother, Avraham is still not overly concerned.   However, he does institute a police search of the apartment house where the boy lives with his mother and two younger siblings.  His father, an engineer on a ship, lives with the family when he’s in port, although he travels frequently.

However, by the afternoon of the following day, Avraham admits to having second thoughts.  He’s beginning to worry that he hasn’t been professional, that he was too eager to dismiss Ofer’s mother’s visit to police headquarters.  And now, although the police search finally has begun in earnest, there still aren’t any significant clues to the young man’s whereabouts.

Ze’ev Avni is a neighbor of Ofer’s family.  He appears to have an unusual interest in the police proceedings, rather than in the boy’s actual disappearance.  A high school teacher, Ze’ev tells the police that he had been approached several months earlier by the family to tutor Ofer in English.  According to Ze’ev, the tutoring had gone well and he and his pupil had begun to develop a sort of friendship when suddenly the boy’s mother told Ze’ev that Ofer wanted to stop his English lessons and get tutored in math and science instead.  But Ze’ev is convinced that that isn’t true, that for some reason the boy’s parents were actually the ones who wanted the lessons stopped.

Throughout the novel, Avraham is tormented by feelings that he didn’t pay sufficient attention to the missing boy’s mother.  When the time comes for him to go to Brussels for a long-planned vacation he doesn’t want to leave the investigation, but he is forced to go by his friend and mentor in the department.  However, by the end of the novel, Avraham and the reader realize that this trip has been a life-changing event for him.

Mishani’s detective is a lonely soul.  He celebrates his thirty-eighth birthday during the investigation into the teenager’s disappearance, and it’s a sad occasion.  He seems to have no life outside his work.  When Marianka, the woman he meets through a friend while visiting Brussels, asks him what he does when he’s not a policeman, he answers, “I’m a policeman then too.”

Steven Cohen has provided a wonderful translation of this novel from the Hebrew.

D. A. Mishani is a literary scholar and teaches courses on the history of detective literature.  His first novel is a character study as well as a mystery, and both parts mesh perfectly.  You can read more about him at this web site.

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