Hardball

Last Friday, I was about half-way through Hardball and decided to read a few chapters before bed.  I looked up two hours later, having solved the murders maybe two page ahead of VI Warshawski.  Vic, I've missed you, and I've missed submerging myself so deeply into a novel.

Sara Paretsky plays with the timeline in Hardball, but subtly so we don't realize at first that most of the action is in flashback.  After interviewing a gang leader she defended decades ago, VI Warshawski arrives at her office to find it's been ransacked and her 20-something cousin Petra has apparently been kidnapped.  In Chicago to work on her father's friend's son's Senatorial campaign, Petra seems to have become obsessed with family history, routing through a box containing mementos from Vic's parents and asking for a tour of former family homes.  This frustrates Vic, but it's only after several weeks that she realizes that Petra's search ties into one of her active cases.

Lamont Gadsden was a low-level gang member who disappeared the night before a January 1967 snowstorm.  His mother always assumed that he'd been killed in a drug deal but his aunt believed he was a "good boy" and now, crippled by a stroke, she wants to know what happened to him.  Lamont's friends have either died, disappeared, or refuse to talk to Vic, and no one seems to care about a gang-banger who disappeared 40 years earlier, but as Vic investigates, she discovers that Lamont may have been involved in the murder of a peace activist the prior summer.  As she delves deeper into the case, she discovers that her father, whom she always thought of as one of the rare honest Chicago cops, was the arresting officer in the case and that an innocent man may have gone to jail.  Paretsky seamlessly weaves Vic's case with Petra's apparently inexplicable interest in family history, and also manages to fit in some Action Nuns, a chase on public transit, and the sad story of a "good girl" still pining after her "bad boy" 40 years later.

I've mentioned in several reviews that series authors have to figure out how to age their characters.  Initially, Paretsky aged Vic only slightly less slowly than in real time.  In Hardball, written nearly 30 years after Vic's debut in Indemnity Only, Paretsky seems to be using the same technique as her fellow trailblazer Marcia Muller used with Sharon McCone.  After a few installments which fudged the age issue, she's rebooted Vic's birth date.  Initially born around 1950, Paretsky places Vic's tenth birthday firmly in the summer of 1966 and moves her hockey-playing cousin Boom-Boom's death (a central plot point in 1982's Deadlock) to the mid-90s.  Perhaps then it's appropriate that Hardball accidentally dates itself with Vic dipping her toe into the world of social networking - through MySpace.

The Moonstone

Literary historians credit Edgar Allen Poe with inventing the modern mystery story, and that's why one of the major genre awards is the Edgar.  The credit for the first modern mystery novel, though goes to Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone.  Perhaps if he had a less silly-sounding first name, there would be an award named after him.

I'm generally not a fan of Victorian novels.  They're usually too sentimental for my taste, and they have a tendency to slip into sesquipedalian loquaciousness, which also doesn't appeal to me (this sentence aside).  That's probably why I hadn't read The Moonstone until my classic literature RAL chose it.  I enjoyed it, but I also think I could have spent another 30 years of mystery fandom without meeting Gabriel Betteredge

Gabriel is Lady Verinder's steward, a man very sure of his, and everyone else's, place in the world.  Now semi-retired, he ruled the lower servants, believed in the near-infallibility of his mistress, found the answers to all questions in his worn copy of Robinson Crusoe, and he narrates the set-up and the crime.  While Lady Verinder plans a dinner party for her daughter Rachel's birthday, her two nephews - do-gooder Geoffrey Abelwhite and dilettante Franklin Blake - propose marriage and are rejected.  Rachael receives a large, allegedly cursed diamond, wears it to dinner, and wakes up the next morning to find it's been stolen.  A few days later, a housemaid suspected of the crime commits suicide by throwing herself in the "Shivering Sands."

I found Gabriel's narrative moderately amusing but not particularly compelling.  Instead, The Moonstone came to life when Collins brought in other narrators, including Rachel's poor relation Miss Clack, her mother's solicitor Matthew Bruff, physician Ezra Jenkins, and Franklin Blake.  Covering the year following the crime, these narratives piece together motives and bits of evidence which may or may not clear the suicidal housemaid.  It's not Gabriel's fault.  He was saddled with the role of Basil Exposition and Collins should have set up the crime more efficiently.  Collins may have also found some of the other characters more entertaining to write (Miss Clack in particular), and he feels like he's having more fun solving the crime than setting it up.  I figured out "whodunnit" maybe a few pages sooner than I'd like, but on the whole I'd rate The Moonstone as an average-to-good mystery.

The story might not stand out, but The Moonstone's influence on later novels is clear.  Collins introduced or popularized the locked room mystery and the amateur detective; the multiple POV section foreshadows several of Christie's novels (including Murder on the Orient Express and Sparkling Cyanide), Jim Thompson's The Kill Off, and Marcia Muller's recent and compelling Locked In; and the police detective's decision to retire and grow roses calls to mind Hercule Poirot and his vegetable marrows.   The Moonstone may not have survived 144 years on its story alone, but the grandfather of the cosy mystery is worth reading. 

Crunch Time

I'm used to characters series being ageless, so why has it begun to bother me?  Maybe it's because I've been reading a lot of historical series where the author can slow down time, or maybe it's because there are now several authors writing contemporary series I've been reading for nearly (or over) 20 years.  I've aged but they haven't - characters who were a decade older than I are now six or seven years younger.

Goldy Schultz is one of those characters.  I read Diane Mott Davidson's first two books in 1993, the year her third book was published.  Goldy was 33, had recently gotten out of an abusive marriage, and was trying to support her 11-year-old son with her fledgling catering business.  19 years later, Goldy is 37 and happily married to a policeman, Arch is 16 and (after a few bratty months, covered in a previous book) has become an all-around good kid, and Goldy's business is doing well enough, even during a recession, to hire an assistant.  Yolanda Fernandez, introduced as an old friend (although never mentioned before Goldy's last outing, Fatally Flaky) has lost her job and her home and is being stalked by her possessive ex-boyfriend.  A cop-turned-PI takes her in, but a few weeks later he's murdered and his house is firebombed.  Against the advice of her husband Tom, Goldy takes in Yolanda and her feisty, wheelchair-bound aunt Ferdinanda and begins to investigate whether Ernest McLeod's active cases led to his murder.  Davidson manages to combine a puppy mill, stalking, stolen diamonds, and an extramarital affair into a reasonably believable plot.

The biggest weakness is Goldy's goldfish memory - Davidson frequently introduces "old friends" who were never mentioned before and are likely to disappear from the series after a few installments - but I'll forgive her that as long as she keeps including such wonderful recipes.  If it weren't so hot out, I'd make her spinach quiche (there's Gruyere in the crust, so there's no way it can be bad) and Crunch Time Cookies (oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips and toffee bits).  I'll just think about them until I can turn on the news without hearing the words "heat index."

The Secret Adversary

I associate Agatha Christie with the 30s and 40s, sometimes forgetting the first decade of her work.  As a teenager, I decided to read her books in publication order so I've read her 1920s output, but for the most part haven't re-read those novels.  There may be a reason for that - if The Secret Adversary is exemplary, it took her a few years to find her voice.

Childhood friends Prudence "Tuppence" Crowley and Tommy Beresford meet by chance shortly after being discharged from national service into very Christie-like genteel poverty.  Over lunch, they decide to start a business as the Young Adventurers - willing to do anything, legal or illegal, for the right price.  They're overheard by a stereotypically sinister man who follows Tuppence and offers her a job which he withdrawals when she gives the pseudonym "Jane Finn."  Naturally, Tommy and Tuppence decide to find the real Jane Finn, a young American woman who apparently received important papers as the Lusitania sank.  They meet a member of the British Secret Service, a man who may be the next Prime Minister, and Jane's American cousin; Tommy gets kidnapped; Tuppence goes into service for the woman they think will lead them to Jane Finn, and in the end, it's Tommy's plodding nature rather than Tuppence's quicker wits which save the day.  It's a quick read, and Christie creates plausible streams of evidence for both main suspects.

What Christie does not do is create believable characters.  That was never her strong point, but having recently re-read several of her later works, it's particularly jarring here.  The criminals Tommy meets are rough, ethnic stereotypes and the main characters don't fare much better.  The Young Adventurers - particularly Tommy - are so "pip pip tally ho!" that as I read, images of a young Hugh Laurie playing one of his upper-class twits kept flitting across my mind, and I heard the American Julius Hersheimmer's lines as spoken by Graham Chapman playing a movie studio head.  They're cardboard cutouts created to serve the plot.  Lucky for Christie that she constructed such a clever puzzle.

The Tailor of Panama

Espionage lives on lies.  You lie while trying to break through your opponent's lies, so how do you know if your source is telling the truth?  And do you care?  Harry Pendel of Braithwaite & Pendel, tailors to the most powerful men in Panama, has spent his entire adult life lying - harmless lies, to cover up his background, but he's become quite good at creating plausible fictions.  Andrew Osnard knows this, and he knows that Harry has squandered his wife's inheritance on a failing rice farm.  Who better than Pendel, who has access to the Panamanian power structure, to ferret out information on the fate of the Canal?

The Tailor of Panama is technically a spy novel, but the espionage is secondary to the interpersonal relationships.  Osnard is a con man, and though it's obvious to those at the highest levels of the service, they don't care and don't bother to inform those who believe he's a hard working spy.  He's so good at telling others what they want to hear that you wonder why he believes the elaborate stories Pendel tells him of the "Silent Opposition," or why he believes that Micky Abraxas, an alcoholic on the verge of suicide, is the leader.  Maybe he doesn't believe Harry - and doesn't care.  Osnard has no ties to anyone, no family, no friends, and his girlfriend is really just someone he has sex with.  Harry, though, has a family - two children and a wife who is slowly descending into the madness of her childhood memories, and two close friends, all of whom face the repercussions of his lies.  Eventually, Osnard walks away from the chaos he caused, leaving Harry to pick up the pieces of shattered lives in a broken country.

Hangman

I'm not sure how I feel about recurring criminals.  Any series - mystery or not - will have recurring characters, but even though Faye Kellerman has only used Chris Donetti in three widely spaced books, his presence feels more forced each time.  She introduced him in Justice, as a teenager with perfect pitch and a dark secret who went to prison to spare his girlfriend the trauma of testifying at a murder trial.  She brought him back in Stone Kiss, in his thirties and mixing crime and art and married although not living with his high school lover.  Hangman opens with Chris's wife Terry asking Lt. Peter Decker to act as security while she negotiates a separation from her violent husband.  Six hours later, Terry has disappeared and her and Chris's son Gabe has no one to call but Decker.

The following day, Decker goes out on a call - a young woman has been found hanging from a building site. It's not Terry, but Adrianna Blanc, a neonatal nurse at a local hospital.  Still investigating Terry's disappearance, Decker leads his team in the investigation of what may be the work of a serial killer.  Kellerman gives us two very plausible suspects and then carefully crafts (and supports) an ending surprising enough that she allows her detectives to state exactly how improbable that result actually is.

I know I've complained about the prevalence of subplots in the books I've read over the past few years.  Perhaps those authors should read Kellerman's work because she knows how to weave a personal story into the solution of a gory crime.  Because she started with relatively young characters, Kellerman has allowed them to age in approximately real time.  It's been nearly twenty-five years since The Ritual Bath and Peter's daughter is a police detective, married and expecting her first child, Rina's sons are in their twenties and living on the East Coast, and the couple are facing an empty nest as Hannah prepares for college.  Gabe Whitman has grown up in chaos, with a fiercely protective but emotionally guarded mother and a felonious father who occasionally drops in.  As Hannah tells him, no family is truly normal, but the Decker/Lazarus family is affectionate and stable, giving 14-year-old Gabe his first taste of real family life. I doubt that many authors could so seamlessly combine serial murder, missing persons, an emotionally fragile teen, and a sweetly touching family dinner to celebrate Decker's 60th birthday, but Kellerman manages it quite well.  Hagman is an effective mystery, tinged with just enough nostalgia to make me want to re-read the series from the beginning.

Endless Night

I think Agatha Christie realized that Third Girl didn't quite work, so she retreated to more familiar territory with her next novel.  Endless Night includes echoes of its era, with a girl I could easily see as a flower child, avant-garde architecture, and a more explicit linkage of sex and murder than we usually see from Christie, but with few references to cultural touchstones, it could almost take place any time between  the late 1950s and the advent of the cell phone.

Mike Rogers isn't exactly a drifter - he's more of an opportunistic small-time adventurer who moves around Western Europe chasing short term jobs.  He's been a fruit picker, a waiter, a stable worker, and a chauffeur, and it's while driving a rich couple to their almost completed house that he meets Santonix.  The architect is young but dying, and believes he only has time to design one or two more houses; Mike is poor but appreciates Santonix's work.  Perhaps it's a bit too coincidental that Mike soon meets an heiress by an allegedly cursed plot of land which would be perfect for one of Santonix's houses.  Maybe we shouldn't believe that Ellie's paid companion is a gorgeous young woman only interested in allowing her charge to escape the restraints of her avaricious family.  Christie, though, makes this set-up plausible, and since Mike is a non-omnicient narrator, we might expect kinks in the timeline or extra bits of improbability, chalking them up to the imperfections of human memory.

Mike and Ellie marry, move into the dream house Santonix designed, and immerse themselves in village society.  They're joined by Greta, who's been fired by Ellie's family and, much to Mike's chagrin, continues to manage Ellie's life.  Since this is a Christie novel, there is a death - Ellie's - and a death that looks like, but can't be, an accident.  Mike is the natural suspect, but he was also twenty miles away at an auction with a pillar of the local community.  Greta is innocent as well - she was shopping in London.  No one else had a motive, and the only believable person to have an opportunity has disappeared.  So who killed Ellie, and how?  The solution is one of Christie's more surprising twists.

Ashes of the Elements

I don't know how Ashes of the Elements ended up on my bookshelves - maybe my dad bought it at Atlantic because he thought I might like it.  I did, but probably not enough to hunt down the rest of the series.

The book starts with the murder of a poacher, not far from the gates of Hawkenlye Abbey.  Abbess Helwise stumbles on the body (almost literally).  The Sheriff of Trowbridge decides that the forrest people are responsible for the death.   Helwise doesn't trust his methods or agree with his conclusion so when a second poacher dies a similar death, she consults Josse D'Acquin who has recently been granted a nearby manor.  After a night in the forest, the two friends solve both this mystery and answer some nagging questions about the true identity of a postulate who'd been abandoned as an infant.  I found Ashes of the Elements amusing and well-plotted, but forgettable.

Third Girl

You're too old.  Nobody told me you were so old.  I really don't want to be rude, but - there it is.  You're too old. I'm really very sorry.

By 1966, Hercule Poirot would have been well over 100, and he only appeared in two 'new' novels after Third Girl (Curtain was written in the early 1940s).  Agatha Christie was also in her mid 70s, and about as able to understand the youth culture of the 60s as her detective.  Only four years separate Third Girl and The Pale Horse, but the societal changes of those years are highlighted by the later novel's urban setting.  Mark Easterbrook spends most of his novel in a 'timeless' small town or a less clearly dated counter-culture neighborhood; Norma Restarick is a creature of the mid 1960s.

Miss Restarick arrives on Hercule Poiroit's doorstep, bedraggled and confused and thinking that she may have committed a murder.  More through coincidence (in the shape of Ariadne Oliver) than the famous little grey cells, Poirot learns that she's the daughter of an executive who abandoned her and her mother 15 years earlier and has recently returned to London with a new wife and is now running the family business.  She's a 'third girl' - an extra roommate sharing a flat with her father's secretary and an art gallery employee.  Norma remembers bits of things - holding a bloody knife after seeing a fight in the courtyard, melting faces, the apparent suicide of her upstairs neighbor - and thinks she may be responsible.  She isn't, of course, and the first time I read Third Girl (at least 20 years ago), the solution was a surprise.

As I said above, Christie didn't seem to "get" the 1960 (I think that's why she retreated to a more rural and timeless setting for her next novel), and yet this is one of my frequent re-reads.  There's something about the overdone, slightly garish view of the 1960s that makes me think of watching movies on UHF channels as a kid in the 1970s - maybe that's the appeal.  It's also a very well plotted, and features Ariadne Oliver, my favorite Christie character.  I also find Christie's attitude towards 'modern girls' fascinating and perhaps a bit hypocritical.  She seems to say that home and children are the best - or even only - option for young women, and yet she was a career woman who divorced when her only daughter was young, and an adventurer who took a round-the-world trip (and was one of the first Britons to surf standing up) with her first husband and went on several archaeological expeditions with her second.  I'd never noticed those contradictions before, but they don't detract from my enjoyment of Third Girl.