After I'm Gone

How do you write a crime novel where the crime both sets up the work and doesn't matter to the plot? Laura Lippman managed this task with After I'm Gone.  Felix Brewer disappeared rather than go to jail in 1976.  He left behind his wife and three daughters, and the mistress who drove him to Philadelphia.  A decade later, his former mistress disappeared as well, and someone finds her body in a park in September, 2001.

It's the coldest of cold cases when Sandy Sanchez picks up the file, and his current-day investigations alternate with chronological flashback chapters.  We see Felix, a small time criminal, sweep Bambi off her feet at a dance, and the early years of their marriage marked mainly by Bambi's mother's disapproval.  After Felix leaves, Bambi leans on Felix's lawyer and her two teenage daughters, muddling through and making excuses for her spoiled youngest.  Each woman narrates a few chapters, with distinct voices and perspectives on their family situation.  Overwhelmed Bambi, brisk Linda, analytical Rachel, and spoiled Michelle each show us a few days here and there over the course of fifty years, leaving subtle clues to the murder's surprising identity.

The Night Manager

A single act turned Jonathan Pine from a Cairo hotel manager into a spy.  One night a guest asked Pine to copy some documents.  The guest, though, was a local criminal's mistress and ex-wife of Richard Onslow Roper, the Worst Man in the World, and the documents involved gunrunning.  Pine made his own copies and gave them to a friend at the British consulate.  With this act (and why did he do it? Le Carre doesn't give Pine's motivation), he causes Sophie's murder.

Two years later, Pine meets Roper.  The Worst Man in the World and his entourage check into the Zurich hotel where Pine now works and after a disquieting encounter, Pine offers himself to the secret service.  He's accepted and given a series of new, shady identities before being set up to save Roper's 7-year-old son from kidnappers.  Roper is grateful, but doesn't quite trust him; Roper's second-in-command Major Corkoran, believe Pine is a plant.  Le Carre alternates between scenes of Pine's assimilation into Roper's criminal enterprise and scenes of his handlers sweating it out (sometimes literally) in tiny, drab rooms.  The plot is perhaps a bit too complicated, but Le Carre's language, as usual, is evocative enough to gloss over a little confusion.  Because of this (and an unconvincing romantic subplot), I rank The Night Manager a step or two below the other Le Carre books I've read.  Very good, but with a few flaws that prevent it from reaching excellence.

Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History

Sometimes an author makes an interesting subject too dry to enjoy.  That's how I feel about Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History.  The subject fascinates me - many of the medieval scientific advances happened in the Islamic world - but the Ahmad Dallal's style never engrossed me.  The book, based on a seminar Dallal gave, is a bit too meta for my taste (not so much about Islamic scientific advances but about the culture's reaction to those advances) and I would have preferred more discussion of medical discoveries.

The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of America

The Age of Edison is a good companion piece to Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light.  Both trace how light changed our societies, mostly but not exclusively for the better.  Where Brilliant took a global view, The Age of Edison specialized, looking at the effect of electric light on America over the course of about 100 years.  It's a straightforward record of how electric light moved from an urban luxury to a necessity available to the most remote American communities.  Along the way, there were local disasters, corrupt companies, and moments of awe when the lights first came on.  The Age of Edison is engrossing and well-written, but there's not a lot to analyze.  Worth reading, but the facts rather than the depiction are worth discussing.

The Bridesmaid

I've had The Bridesmaid on my shelf for decades, since it's early-90s printing.  The book is a bit of a time capsule, a slim trade paperback with the Mysterious Press logo and a form on the back page to subscribe to The Armchair Detective.  The late-80s London depicted in the novel is also a bit of a throwback; a reminder that the exotic locale of my teenage Anglophilic dreams was a bit down at the heels after years of social and economic upheaval.

Phillip Wardman lives in this downtrodden London with his sisters and widowed mother.  He's mildly obsessed with a statue in his mother's garden and has an unnatural aversion to violence and death, obsessions which collide in the first chapter as he carries the statue to his mother's paramour's house after hearing about the abduction of his sister's former classmate.  The date (which includes all three children) does not go well and Phillip assumes he's seen the last of the statue.

A few weeks later, at his sister Fiona's wedding, Phillip meets the statute come to life.  Bridesmaid Senta Pelham is an aspiring actress who bears a freakish resemblance to Phillip's lost statue and the two begin an affair when Senta returns to the Wardman house to change back into her ordinary clothes.  As they grow closer, Philip gradually realizes that Senta has trouble distinguishing truth from fiction, but that there's just enough truth in her stories that he can't dismiss them outright.  Combined with her obsessive love, this leads Phillip to claim to have committed murder.  Senta then claims to have killed for Phillip - but has she, and whom has she killed?

Rendell used her Barbara Vine pseudonym to distinguish her psychological mysteries from the more straightforward ones.  While reading The Bridesmaid, I wondered why this one was published under her real name.  It features a narrator with imperfect insight into and knowledge of an unstable potential murderer, but there's something missing.  Perhaps it's the fact that the solution (which I guessed too early for my taste) is clear-cut.  I still don't know the identity of Jamie's mother, but I easily connected the deaths in The Bridesmaid.

Richard III: The Search for the King's Grave

"Oh, enough about Richard - let's talk about me!"  That's how Philippa Langley's chapters came across.   A writer who organized the search for Richard III's remains (found under a Leicester car park in 2012 and confirmed as Richard's in 2013), she makes Richard almost an afterthought to her search, and her navel-gazing.  I am interested in the archaeology involved in finding the grave, but Langley glosses over that and keeps coming back to the "feeling" she had when she stood over the R painted on the tarmac and under which Richard was eventually found.  (My cynical side kept thinking about how plastic memory is and how easily one can implant false memories in one's own mind.)  Langley's writing style didn't help; I can't remember the last time an author irritated me so much.

Historian Michael Jones's chapters were much more enlightening and enjoyable.  His straightforward exploration of Richard's actions and motivations segued neatly into how Tudor libel turned Richard III  into a historical monster.  His style is a bit dry, though.  I wanted to enjoy Richard III: The Search for the King's Grave but unfortunately the authors made it difficult to do so.

The Man Who Loved China

I should have enjoyed The Man Who Loved China more than I did.  I've read a few books by Simon Winchester and found them engrossing, and Joseph Needham is a fascinating character.  A true polymath, he read biochemistry at Cambridge, became a fellow of the college, and married a fellow scientist.  (Joseph and Dorothy Needham - also a biochemist who studied the chemical composition of muscles - are the only married couple to both be named fellows of the Royal Academy.)

Then Needham met a young Chinese scientist named Lu Gwei-djen.  They started a life-long affair (with the knowledge and consent of Dorothy Needham - they had the sort of bohemian post-Edwardian arrangement that makes me think of the Bloomsbury Set), and Needham's love for Gwei-djen led to a love of China.  Initially attached to a diplomatic mission, he set out to confirm his theory that China and the West had parallel tracks, both inventing technologies that at the time were considered purely Western.  He was right, and his discoveries changed the world's view of China.

I should have been fascinated by Winchester's narrative, but for some reason it didn't make much of an impression on me.  Perhaps it was how and when I read it, a few pages at a time before bed during the dreariest part of the winter.  It may be a book that requires more concentrated attention.

Sun in a Bottle

Imagine, unlimited power where the only by-product is helium, a non-toxic gas used both industrially and to blow up party balloons.  Sun in a Bottle traces the 20th Century quest for viable, and then commercially viable fusion power.  Building on the (ultimately wrong) Too Cheap to Meter dreams of early fission power and the sensible desire not to create waste products that could bring about the end of the world, scientists on both sides of the Cold War raced to create fusion reactors which produced more energy than they used.  Charles Seife has written a fascinating, if somewhat dry,  narrative of what is still an unsuccessful enterprise.

Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas

1814 is drawing to a close and Jane, Cassandra, and their mother travel to their former home to spend the holidays with the Mr. Collins-like James Austen and his Mary Musgrove-like second wife, Mary.  They're in for a drearily holiday until a neighbor invites the family for a series of parties and balls to celebrate the full Christmas season (the holiday not being confined to a mere day until the rather dreary Prince Albert imported that tradition).  Jane, as usual, stumbles upon a murder and with the help of Benjamin West's son Raphael (an artist in his own right but here making sketches for a later work of his father's), untangles a web involving both clandestine love affairs and foreign affairs.  As usual, the charm of the story lies in "meeting" the inspirations for Jane's characters and seeing her for the witty, rather sharp-tongued woman she must have been (rather than the prim spinster her nieces and nephews made her out to be after her death).