Unnatural Death

Unnatural Death starts with a perfect murder - one that looks natural. Lord Peter Wimsey and his friend Detective Charles Parker are discussing death over dinner when a fellow diner breaks in with the tale of an unsuspected murder. The man, a doctor whose country practice had recently been destroyed by a rumor that he had caused (directly or indirectly) the death of one of his patients. Understandably, the man declines to give his name, but Lord Peter can't let this rest. He gives his assistant, the apparently dithery spinster Alexandra Climpson, the task of finding the doctor's late 'victim' and acting as his agent in the investigation. Miss Climpson finds the victim, Agatha Dawson, and the village and settles herself into its distaff society. Meanwhile, Lord Peter's search for the servants dismissed from the Dawson home leads to the death of one and a near escape for Lord Peter himself. A dropped prayer book, an attempt to frame a distant relative (with the unlikely name of Rev. Hallelujah Dawson), and letters which cross in the mail lead to a much more climatic ending than one would expect when the murder's identity is so clear.

I've already mentioned that I'm re-reading the Lord Peter mysteries, and as with Clouds of Witness, I'm getting much more of the humor this time around. Peter and Charles usually investigate separately, but when they interview a witness together, Charles always tries to rush the witness. This invariably causes the witness to go further off point, leading Peter to kick his friend or whisper sarcastic comments while gently leading the witness back to the topic. Miss Clipson's letters to Peter also made me smile - they're informative but so full of emphasized words and phrases that you read them in the voice of an elderly gossip sharing the latest over coffee and a biscuit.

There's one more aspect of Unnatural Death which I didn't notice in the past. Sayers speaks of 'mannish' career women, and independent women aren't viewed in a totally favorable light. However, Sayers was a career woman - an expert in medieval history with an MA from Oxford, she also worked as an advertising copywriter for a few years. I wonder if she was writing what she thought the public would want to read, or was she reflecting criticism that had been aimed at her?

The Detective Wore Silk Drawers

A few months ago, Deadalus Books had a buy-four-get-one-free mystery sale. They had the next, hard-to-find book in Sharan Newman's Cathereine LeVendur series so I picked four random titles to justify the shipping and take advantage of the sale. Although I didn't realize it, two of the books were the first two on Peter Lovesey's Sergeant Cribb series, written in the 1970s and recently reprinted.

Set in the 1870s, the series features an analytical but essentially underrated Scotland Yard detective. As Sergeant Cribb is mulling over a pint in his local, a man gives him a tip on a body - a headless corpse that has washed ashore. Upon examination, Cribb discovers that the victim was probably a prizefighter and since that sport had recently been outlawed, believes that the crime is larger than a single murder. The titular detective, though, is not Cribb but Detective Jago, a well-born amateur boxer estranged from his family and stuck in a desk job at Scotland Yard. Jago infiltrates the prizefighting ring while Cribb and the plodding Constable Thackery investigate from London. The headless body is actually a bit of a red herring - the main murder occurs later in the book and while there are only two suspects, both have adequate means and motive to keep the audience guessing until Cribb solves the crime.

And Then There Were None

I started reading Agatha Christie in my early teens, but And Then There Were None sort of fell through the cracks. It's one of her 'classics' but I didn't read it until I was in my 30s. Granted, I had two separate copies which became soaked beyond repair (one due to an air conditioner compressor leak, the other due to a dorm refrigerator oozing onto that book's replacement copy), but somehow left copy #3 on the shelf for a decade before reading it, and another decade before my first, RAL-based re-read.

And Then There Were None is a classic locked room mystery. Ten people are stranded on an island, and one by one they're murdered. A few days later, the police arrive to find ten murder victims and no murderer. Some time later, the murderer's confession washes ashore as a message in a bottle, and it's truly ingenious. It also brings up the issues of culpability, revenge, and justice.

Each of the ten victims was responsible, in a way, for a death that was not classified as murder, and one person decided to dispense justice. The least culpable and/or most remorseful died quickly, while the guiltier, less remorseful killers spent days dealing with increasing paranoia. Was, however, the killer accurate in assessing guilt? Anthony Marsden, the first victim committed vehicular manslaughter - but was he reckless (a higher degree of guilt) or merely careless (as the murderer decided)? Vera Claythorn felt deeply guilty for her crime, and yet didn't show it and was therefore considered unremorseful by the killer. Emily Brent seemed almost proud that she indirectly caused the death of her pregnant out of wedlock maid but was deemed less guilty - was that because she was a step removed, or because dismissing her employee followed the social norms of the day? And was the murderer dispensing justice or a psychopath rationalizing revenge?

Murder on the Orient Express

I've joined an Agatha Christie RAL on Ravelry - every month, we read and discuss one of her novels, and with over 60 to choose from, we won't begin to repeat until at least 2016. I, and many of the other knitters, have already read most if not all of her books, so the discussion is perhaps more important than in most RALs.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much out of the discussion of Murder on the Orient Express. It's probably because I read the book late in August as the discussion was winding down (yes, I know that my 2010 New Year's resolution was to not let any book sit more than a week without being reviewed - I'm going to keep making that resolution until I keep it), and possibly because I've read it so many times. I know the answer to the puzzle, and I've pondered whether the solution was revenge or justice, so there's very little reason for me to re-read the book other than for lightweight enjoyment. It's literary comfort food - a few hours during which I can enjoy the travelogue and admire how well Dame Agatha plotted what became one of her most famous novels. I can also marvel at how perfectly the producers cast the 1974 movie - or I could, if Patrick would ever watch and return the DVD I loaned him three years ago.

The Malice of Unnatural Death

Dear Mr. Jecks,

This is your 22nd novel, and I've read all 22 over the past 13 years. I'd like to say I've enjoyed them all, but somewhere around the 15th volume, your books became a bit of a slog. I think I've figured out what your problem is - you're putting Baldwin and Simon in too broad of a context. For 15 books, you had them solving local mysteries - the external world of the 14th Century might be mentioned but had little if any effect on the matter at hand. Then you sent your detectives on pilgrimage - an interesting plot device, but not one that worked particularly well. Still, it was less distracting than your recent habit of injecting the political intrigue of the 1320s into Dartmoor. Yes, the battles between Isabella and Edward II and his lovers are intriguing, but they feel tacked on when they affect a local baron and his friend the bailiff. Alison Weir's biography of Isabella was fascinating and your series takes place while she was in power, but that doesn't mean you have to tie her into your plots.

It's sad, because there are some good parts to The Malice of Unnatural Death, and the idea of a necromancer attempting to murder long-distance is fascinating. You've tied this quite well to the subplot concerning the order of succession at a local abbey, and Coroner Richard's booming personality is more amusing than distracting this time around. You've finally figured out the right tone for that character, and I now look forward to seeing him again. All you need to do is trim about 50 pages of obfuscation and keep the bulk of your story local. A good editor can help you do this - perhaps it's time to find a new one.

Jane Eyre

I am not a romantic - forget flowers and candlelight, I'd rather have a guy who will have long conversations with me, quote Monty Python, and play backgammon - so it's no surprise that I don't find Edward Rochester to be a great romantic figure. In fact, I think he's a manipulative jerk. While I do have some sympathy for his being tricked into a marriage with an apparently insane and violent woman, that does not excuse his keeping her prisoner in the attic and pretending that she does not exist. He does not redeem himself by the way he flirts with Blanche Ingram and makes Jane believe he's going to marry Blanche before his improbable proposal to his ward's governess or with he ignores Jane's requests and showers her with unwanted gifts in the days leading up to their planned marriage.

Jane, on the other hand...well Jane's got spunk. She's got a moral compass without being a boring prig like Fanny Price. It gets her in trouble at home, where her refusal to tolerate abuse by her aunt and cousins gets her sent away to a particularly harsh boarding school, but it's also what drives her to escape Thornfield on what would have been her wedding night and eventually find a new life under an assumed name as a teacher in a charity school. The final chapters of the novel, with their Victorian over-reliance on coincidence, felt like a bit of a let down to me, but I enjoyed Jane Eyre more than I thought I would. Charlotte Bronte had a clear, descriptive writing voice, and while parts were a bit dry for my taste (I can just imagine how acidly Jane Austen would have described the benefactors' visit to Lowood), I could both like and admire it.

The Devil's Disciples

Susannah Gregory's first Chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew, A Plague on Both Your Houses, took place during the plague's march through Cambridge. Matthew Bartholomew, the Arab-educated physician and fellow of Michaelhouse College, survived to solve a dozen more mysteries. A decade later, the plague has not returned in The Devil's Disciples, but the fear remains - and Matthew finds himself suspected of being the Sorcerer, a heretic who claims to be able to protect people from the plague. Exhausted from treating patients suffering through an epidemic of the flux (his cure - boiled barley water - seems magical to some, pointless to others, but to modern audiences is simply rehydration with untainted fluids), he's dragged into the investigation by his friend Brother Michael. Michael, in turn, has been dragged into political intrigue involving his patron, the Bishop of Ely, and the Pope living in exile in Avignon. Add in a bidding war over a piece of property left to Michaelhouse and you've got a nice, complex problem to solve.

This is one of the better mysteries I've read this year, but much of the plot depended on knowing the history of the characters. I've read the entire series, but it's been a decade or more since I read the early volumes and some details have faded. While I recommend the book, I do not think it's a good introduction to the series. This is a series that really benefits from sequential reading.

This Body of Death

Elizabeth George used to be one of my favorite authors.  Her Inspector Lynley mysteries are complex and populated by interesting characters, but around 2003 (5 books ago), she hit a serious slump, and I put her 'on probation.'  She began to redeem herself with Careless in Red, and while This Body of Death isn't quite up to the level of Playing for the Ashes or In the Presence of the Enemy, I am once again looking forward to her next book.  

Meredith Powell fell out with her best friend Jemima Hastings over Jemima's then-new boyfriend.  Nearly two years later, Meredith decides on their shared birthday to swallow her pride and restart their friendship, but Jemima had left town a few months earlier, and the corpse found in a London cemetery the previous day turns out to be Jemima's.  Acting Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery is the primary on the case, and after a rough initial meeting with her team, she asks Lynley, still on compassionate leave after his wife's death, to work with her.  As they investigate from London, DS Barbara Havers and DS Winston Nkata search the New Forrest town where Jemima had lived, and find more questions than answers about Jemima's ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend.  Just as they're making progress, Ardery calls them back to London where she's slowly losing control of the case.  Barbara does, eventually, discover the killer, through a combination of logic, insubordination, and luck, but it's not the tidiest solution.  It feels a bit as if George realized that after 950 pages of plot, subplot, 'colorful' side characters, and false leads, she had to find a way to end the book.  There's no 'cheating' on the solution, but it doesn't feel totally natural.

I had a few other minor issues with This Body of Death.  The first involves timeline - I realize that few mystery series allow characters to age in real time, but with the nearly two year gap between the publication of each novel in the series and how two recent volumes occurred simultaneously, This Body of Death takes place only 14 months after Playing for the Ashes which I read in 1996 and the time compression is a bit jarring.  As I said above, some of the characters (particularly Jemima's landlady and a local psychic) were a bit too 'colorful' for my taste and a good editor might have trimmed some of their eccentricities and tightened the character development scenes for Isabelle Ardery.  

What I loved about the book was the return of Barbara Havers.  Part of George's slump was due to the near (or total) disappearance of her most compelling character.  Havers is bright, insecure, intuitive, stubborn, and the character who most clearly comes to life in every novel.  In the Havers-light books, I missed her dry sarcasm and her determination to follow her (usually correct) hunches.  Most of all, I missed her complicated relationships with Lynley, Deborah, and Simon, and her budding friendship with her neighbors.  The highlight of the book for me was when Barbara, at Ardery's order, tries to improve her look and asks 9-year-old Hadiyyah for advice.  The passage where the defiantly schlumpy Havers gets the Trinny and Susannah treatment from her young neighbor made the entire book worthwhile.

Remembered Death/Sparkling Cyanide

I'm not sure how many times I've read Sparkling Cyanide since the mid-80s.  My copy was in storage for about a decade, but there were years where I read it more than once so this is about the 15th re-read.  The cover (yellow, with "Agatha Christie" in large blue letters and "Remembered Death" in slightly smaller reddish-brown print, above a small picture of a man and two women in evening dress superimposed on a skull) began to fall off during this reading and is now held on with packing tape, and the cover price is $2.95 - these, as well as the yellowing pages, are a testament to years of comfort reading.

Christie really is comfort reading.  When I take one of the dozen or so I've read multiple times off the shelf, I know I'll get a well-plotted mystery without too much gore, usually populated by attractive, wealthy, and entertaining characters.  They're clever, but not too taxing - the perfect antidote to a stressful week.

Sparkling Cyanide is one of Christie's "murder in retrospect" novels, with a present-day murder added to spark the plot.  Beautiful, vain, Rosemary Barton apparently committed suicide at her birthday dinner held in an expensive London restaurant.   A year later, her husband George holds a dinner at the same restaurant with the same guests - Rosemary's sister Iris who inherited her sister's fortune; Rosemary's two lovers, the mysterious Anthony Browne and rising politician Stephen Farraday, Farraday's wife Sandra; and George's secretary Ruth Lessing.  As he's about to announce that Rosemary was murdered, he dies, as his wife did, by drinking champagne laced with cyanide.  Five suspects with five strong motives - and yet none of them could have killed either Barton, let alone both.  It's a typical Christie plot, solved in 190 pages with just enough coincidence to be believable.  

Dame Agatha populated the story with beautiful, wealthy people untouched by the Depression and WWII, dancing in posh frocks and dinner jackets - miles away both physically and emotionally from the Underground station where she undoubtedly worked on the manuscript during the London Blitz.  Her 1943 audience read Sparkling Cyanide as a relief from the horrors of the day, but it also works as a teenager's transition into adult literature and a bored project attorney's mental escape from the tedium of her job.  It's not a taxing read, but with scattered references to fashion, history, and Shakespeare, also not quite as shallow as it may appear.  Sparkling Cyanide is an old friend, and I'm already looking forward to the next time we meet.