The Body in the Library

I don't believe in conspiracy theories. It's not because I'm particularly cynical (or at least I don't think that's the reason), or because I was a scientist before I went to law school, but because I don't think the average person or group of people can pull it off. Most people aren't smart enough to develop the plan and the rest are usually too confident in their plan (or arrogant) to bother with trouble shooting. So the plan fails - some minor detail seems 'off' to an uninterested observer and the elaborate plot comes crashing down.

I'm in the minority, though, and maybe it's because I've read so many Miss Marple books. The fluffy-bunny spinster has one of the most finely tuned BS detectors in fiction. She picks up minor non-verbal cues and inconsistencies, and wraps them in seemingly inconsequential stories of people who've lived in St. Mary Mead. I can see her today, gently pointing out the flaws in some of the crazier theories that bounce around the internet and shocking the younger, more 'aware' people around her when her assertions turn out to be true.

The Body in the Library is Miss Marple's second full length novel and her third appearance (she debuted in the short story collection The Tuesday Club Murders), and while she's a bit softer than she was in those books, she's still a bit of a sharp-tongued gossip rather than the 'sweet aunt Jane' we meet in later volumes. One morning, a maid wakes Miss Marple's friend Mrs. Bantry from an early morning dream to announce, "There's a body in the library!" Naturally, she sends her husband to investigate and yes, there's the body of a heavily made-up girl in a satin dress, lying on the hearthrug. The girl turns out to be a dancer at a near-by resort, not a 'lady' but coincidentally about to be adopted by Conway Jefferson, a wealthy friend of the Bantrys.

Mr. Jefferson's widowed daughter-in-law and son-in-law are the natural suspects, as are a movie studio employee who's recently relocated to St. Mary Mead, a rather stupid young man staying at the resort, and the resort's dance and tennis instructor. Add in a missing Girl Guide, a few careless comments about teeth and nails, and Miss Marple not only solves the crime but points out how and why the criminal tried to frame one suspect who, in a panic, threw suspicion onto the Bantrys. It's simple common sense, something distinctly lacking in today's world.

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.

The Labors of Hercules

The Labors of Hercules may have been my introduction to Agatha Christie.  I remember the copy I took out of the library - a hardback with an aqua cover and a circular logo, apparently part of a series published specifically for libraries, and I remember reading it upstairs at my grandmother's house.  My grandmother died in January 1983, and I had the window open so this must have been the summer of 1982.  Or maybe I'm remembering incorrectly - maybe I read the book elsewhere (because I don't remember reading Agatha Christie before I started high school) or maybe I read it while my parents were preparing Grandmom's house for sale.

Either way, it's been nearly 30 years since I read The Labors of Hercules, and nearly 30 years since English 9 covered the labors of Hercules as well, and I only dimly remembered both.   Bits of plot, and occasional lines of dialog floated through the mist but I'd mostly forgotten "whodunit" so I could sit back and solve the mysteries as if they were new.  They're typical Christie, only stripped down to 15 or 20 pages - a clever plot with a single flaw for Hercule Poirot to discover, and a dash of romance or a happy ending here and there.  It's a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, but fairly ephemeral - middling, not top-level Christie.

All Around the Town

I haven't read a new Mary Higgins Clark book in about a decade.  I haven't re-read one of her books in quite a while either - after several years 'on probation,' I stopped buying new books and donated my backlist to the Book Corner.  She writes good beach books, but she fell into a rut of writing one of the same two books over and over again, and I got tired of them.

Last month, I noticed that the coffee shop where I buy my morning bagel and cocoa had a copy of All Around the Town, so I picked it up and worked my way through it in 5-minute intervals.  The story is fairly typical Clark (young, pretty, well-dressed woman from a world of casual affluence - an 8,000 square foot house in the 1970s, and an assistant prosecutor with a designer wardrobe? -  finds herself in mortal peril and saves herself seconds before the dashing hero completes the rescue).  The book starts with the kidnapping of 4-year-old Laurie Kenyon by an aspiring gospel singer and his wife.  When she's returned to her family two years later, her sister can see that she's been abused but their parents can't cope with the idea and shut it down.   

Fourteen years later, their parents die in a car accident and this trauma brings out the multiple personalities Laurie developed to protect herself from her abuser.  One of these personalities may or may not have been having an affair with a professor married to a gold-digging travel agent.  Naturally, when the professor is murdered, Laurie is the prime suspect.  Her sister, now a prosecutor, resigns from her office to take up Laurie's defense.  In the meantime, Laurie's abuser has become a top televangelist and rekindles his obsession with the girl.  It's a delicately balanced plot, with almost as many near-miss meetings as a screwball comedy but it works, and part of why it works is that the televangelists make minor mistakes which aren't caught because they're buried in conversations.  

There's another reason why I have a bit of a soft spot for All Around the Town.  In the late 80s and early 90s, I frequently ate at the Kenyon Diner in Willow Grove.  Sometimes alone, sometimes with my parents, and on Friday nights with my dad.  We'd sit in the back room where some older guys talked baseball and one of my proudest moments was when, at about 18 or 19, I got a "good point" response to one of my infrequent comments - a response which was my invitation to the ongoing discussion.  One of my solo visits to the Kenyon was on a Sunday morning, with a copy of All Around the Town.  An hour and about 75 pages later, I was approaching the quick-cut finale and there was a line forming at the door.  My waitress came by and refilled my coffee cup instead of asking if I was ready to leave.  That's why the Kenyon is in my personal Diner Hall of Fame.

Whose Body?

Acorn Media has rereleased the early-70s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and I've just finished watching the first two.  I love the atmosphere - the clothes, the props, the attitude.  I think I could very easily have been the eccentric relative to some wealthy, titled family - for one thing, I think 'eccentric' sounds so much nicer than 'weird.'  

Lord Peter is clearly eccentric, and wealthy.  He has a fabulous flat, collects rare books, and owns a large private car in the early 1920s.  He also investigates crimes - not a gentleman's job at a time when gentlemen were defined by not having jobs.  His frightfully conventional brother, the Duke of Denver, abhors his hobby but their mother, the Dowager Duchess, takes a more favorable view.  It's the Dowager Duchess who calls Lord Peter when the architect reconstructing the local church finds a naked corpse with a pair of pince-nez glasses in his bath.  Lord Peter investigates, and finds that the body is probably not that of the affluent man he's been groomed to appear to be.  Also investigating the body is Inspector Charles Parker, who is investigating the case of a missing financier who roughly fits the description of the body in the bathtub.  The body is not that of Sir Ruben Levy, but Lord Peter finds too many coincidences to believe that the murders are unlinked.  

I've read Whose Body at least twice, so I know who did it, but that didn't diminish my enjoyment of the novel.  Sayers deserves her place as one of the grand masters of the golden age of mystery.  Her Wimsey novels are cleverly plotted, with memorable characters (and even more memorable names - Inspector Sugg, Sir Julian Freake) and the right balance of clues and obfuscation for the reader to solve the mystery but not feel stupid if stumped.

Mansfield Park

Fanny Price is not the typical Jane Austen heroine.  She's not witty, or confident, or even obviously competent like the slightly downtrodden Anne Elliot.   Weak and shy, Fanny comes across as someone you want to admire for her unwavering goodness, but can't like because she's so frustratingly passive.  You want to jump into the book and shake her, telling her, "It doesn't matter that you're in the right if you don't do anything to correct those who are wrong."

This is the third time I've read Mansfield Park, and this time I concentrated on the supporting characters.  The main plot, about Edmund Bertram and Fanny finding true love with each other after escaping romantic entanglements with indiscreet siblings Mary and Henry Crawford, never captured my attentions.  Like attracts like and there are few characters in Mansfield Park who are as dull and moralistic as Fanny and Edmund.  For the same reason, I don't believe Henry Crawford actually fell in love with Fanny.  He may have been infatuated with her because she was the rare woman able to resist his charms, but the novelty would have worn off quickly.  Mary may have forced herself to believe she was in love with Edmund, but she was more in love with his position as the potential heir to Mansfield than with the dull, moralistic, clergyman-to-be.  Additionally, Henry never really comes to life.  He seems to exist only to serve the plot, flirting with Julia, courting Fanny, and running off with Maria shortly after her ill-advised marriage.

I enjoyed Mansfield Park almost in spite of its routine plot and bland main characters because much of the supporting cast is drawn with an acid-tipped pen.  On this reading, I realized just how avaricious Aunt Norris is, constantly finding leftovers at Mansfield Park which she can take to her own, small home and probably saving a (meager) salary by using Fanny as an unpaid servant.  I'd realized on previous readings that Mr. Rushworth, Maria Bertram's eventual husband, was an idiot, but this time I realized that he's one of the dimmest characters I've encountered in literature.  He's Hugh Laurie's portrayal of the Prince Regent as a private citizen, unable to distinguish the characters in a play with which he was familiar and probably botching most of his "four and twenty" speeches.   Tom Bertram's friend Mr. Yates made an impression for the first time as well.  Like Tom, he's an unfettered rich kid, the sort who today gets an SUV for his 18th birthday and totals it a few months later because he's texting while driving or speeding because he can.  He goes through life totally untouched by his surroundings, and we realize that when he doesn't follow the Crawfords out the door when Sir Thomas unexpectedly returns from Antigua.  He's so unaware of the consequences of his theatrical plan that he practically brags about it to the obviously angered Sir Thomas.

I found other characters to be more sympathetic this time around.  Julia Bertram is a self-absorbed rich girl, but she's also aware that Aunt Norris considers her second best to her manipulative sister Maria.  Her eventual marriage to Mr. Yates isn't unexpected, but possibly not a bad choice.   They're like Pete and Trudy Campbell in Mad Men, immature and wealthy but not without hope of eventually reaching maturity.  Sir Thomas felt like a remote paterfamilias when I read Mansfield Park for the first time.  This time I saw a man who cared about his family, giving Maria the option to break off her obviously doomed engagement and becoming the first to realize that Fanny had grown from a meek little girl to a pretty young woman who'd been cheated of the attention heaped on her cousins.  I also felt more sympathy for Mrs. Price.  She's too passive to handle life as the wife of a disabled and unemployable alcoholic, but when she married for love, there was no way for her to know that her husband would be wounded in battle and that she'd bear ten children in fifteen years.  

What strikes me most about Mansfield Park, though, is how of its time it is.  Austen's other five major works all feel modern, but I can't see Mansfield Park in a 21st Century setting.  Emma and Pride and Prejudice were both brought into the 1990s, and I can see Northanger Abbey cast with sorority sisters or Sense and Sensibility played against the current recession, but Fanny Price feels so strongly tied to the 18th Century that I can't see how the plot could be adapted to a modern setting.   Maybe that's the attraction - with the rest of Austen's books, I'm trying to see how to fit them into present-day Philadelphia, but with Mansfield Park, I just let it be.

Death on the Nile

I've been reading Agatha Christie for nearly 30 years - she was my gateway into adult fiction, and a few years ago, I realized that despite the many hours I'd spent with her books, I'd only read about 2/3 of them and re-read about a dozen multiple times.  I've since worked on reading more of the cannon, but that doesn't stop me from pulling one of the favorite few off the shelf every few months.

Death on the Nile is one of those favorites.  I remember the first time I read it, as a 15-year-old on my way back from vacation in Rio de Jenario.  25 years and at least a dozen revisits later, I still flash back to my mother retrieving me from the airport snack bar where I was pouring over the plan of the S.S. Karnak so intently I hadn't heard our flight announced.  

The plot of Death on the Nile follows the locked room template.  Someone murders Lynnette Doyle while she's on a honeymoon cruise in Egypt.  No one other than her fellow passengers could have committed the crime, most of them have both alibis and motives, and it is up to Hercule Poirot to deduce the identity of the murderer.   Of course, I know who murdered Lynnette Doyle, and why, and how.  That allows me to enjoy the setting and the characters, especially the Allertons (does Mrs. Allerton really not know what her son is up to?), Simon Doyle (is he really the sweet, stolid, doting husband he appears to be?) and Cornelia Robeson (is she dim, or has she been typecast by her family?).  Rereading Death on the Nile, or any Christie novel, is untaxing pleasure reading in its most basic form.

Seneca Falls Inheritance

I like to re-read mystery series.  I'm sure that seems odd to some people, because what's the point of reading  a mystery if you know the solution?  For me, the point is to revisit the characters earlier in their history and see how they've grown over the years.  And, to be honest, with nearly eight years and 457 books between visits, some of the details of Seneca Falls Inheritance were a little fuzzy.

The book opens with a flatboat accident which kills Friedrich Steicher and his wife.  A few weeks later, his daughter by a brief, annulled first marriage appears in Seneca Falls, asking for directions to the Steicher farm.  Her body turns up in the canal the next day, and when the town learns of her parentage, Steicher's son becomes the main suspect.  Constable Cullen Stuart and town librarian Glynis Tyron piece together the solution, with a few unlikely but not totally unbelievable twists.

Miriam Grace Monfredo ties this mystery to the organization of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention, and she isn't totally successful in doing so.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton sets the main plot in motion by writing to Steicher's first wife, asking her to tell her daughter that she may be in line to inherit a prosperous farm and has enlisted the novel's fictional librarian/detective to help organize the Convention, but the convention itself feels unconnected to the main plot.  I've always been fond of that particular historical event (I memorized Stanton's keynote address in 6th grade forensics), but in retrospect, its appearance in Seneca Falls Inheritance feels a bit forced.  The book also contains a bit too much character exposition and explanation, probably because it's the first in the series,  and it's not particularly complex.  Like Sharon Kay Penman's Justin de Quincy mysteries, it may serve as a good bridge from YA to adult novels for pre-teens interested in mysteries or historical novels.