Red herrings, anyone?

I've decided to take a brief break from my typical interest in cozy mysteries to try something a little different. I've never read much in the way of police procedurals, but after coming across Peter Lovesey's Diamond Dust, I thought I would give the subgenre another try.

Part of Lovesey's series surrounding Detective Inspector Peter Diamond, Diamond Dust picks up with Diamond at a sort of ebb in his career. Wrapped up in fighting a possible demotion, he thinks nothing of stopping by a recently discovered murder near Bath's Royal Crescent--only to be stunned to find the victim is his own wife. Diamond quickly embarks on an investigation to locate her killer, but a police force leery of a grieving husband commanding an investigation quickly relegates Diamond to a desk job. Frustrated and under suspicion, he begins his own parallel search into his wife's past, only to realize that his someone from own past might know more than they let on.

That's the main premise of the story, at least. I had never read anything by Lovesey before, a longtime writer who has won pretty much every award in the mystery genre. That he deserves the accolades is apparent in the bewildering array of blind alleys, false leads and subplots that keep Diamond (and the reader) throughly at a loss as to who the culprit is. There's a lot of shifty intrigue going on here, and the fact that Lovesey can keep a grip on the plot thread while still propelling the mystery forward is remarkable. But this fast and convoluted plot comes at the sacrifice of character development. Diamond is portrayed as a hard-nosed, tough veteran who isn't really meant to be likeable, but this doesn't explain why I had little sense of him as a character. Understandably, the other players are lightly sketched, but more on Diamond's wife would have made her less a bloodied body and more of a human being, and lent some humanity to her grieving husband. If Lovesey's characters were as complex as the tightly knotted mysteries he creates, there would be little to find fault with his novels.

Portrait of the author's closet.

I wasn't sure what I was really expecting when I randomly selected My Mother's Wedding Dress: The Life and Afterlife of Clothes from the new book shelf at the library. A history of famous outfits through history? A tour through fashion trends and revivals?

Well, this is actually a memoir, although a rather inventive one. Justine Picardie, herself a former editor of British Vogue, reflects on her life and family by way of their closets. In doing so, Picardie demonstrates just how much our dress reveals of our selves and sometimes the path our lives take. The wedding dress in the title, a little black dress that Picardie's mother wore only once in spite of its easy elegance, foreshadows the breakdown of her marriage; the hideous pleather trousers Picardie herself sported in the late '70s were as much about teenage rebellion as a fashion statement.

Picardie also goes beyond her own family's history to consider the grip that clothing has on some famous figures. She interviews Donatella Versace, an enigmatic figure in spite of her splashy, bright designs, and gets wound up in the cult of the Brontes while trying to trace the history of a ring. In this sections, it seems like Picardie is trying to flesh out the remainder of her memoir, as she doesn't have quite enough from her own family to make for a complete book. While interesting, it's a little jarring to go from Picardie's own family tale to that of a suicide in a white shirt--there's a connection with the clothes, but it is only by the thinnest of threads. My Mother's Wedding Dress works best as a meditation on what clothes can mean both in life and death, but as a memoir/history it feels incomplete.

Politics, with all the promise and frustration.

First: I did not pick up a copy of Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men with the intention of seeing the movie afterwards. I've been getting a kick out of reading the generalized pans, but that's the extent of my interest in the film. I actually decided to read Warren's novel for two other reasons: it's election season, and a book that's been called 'the American novel of politics' seemed an appropriate read, and second, I wanted to see how well the Pulitizer Prize-winning tome held up 60 years after its publication.

All the King's Men is about politics, and has all the traits of politics: alternatively frustrating, inspiring, long-winded and rousing, Warren's novel seeks to set its stamp on American life, in this case literature, rather than history. Loosely following the story of 1930s Louisiana populist Huey Long, Warren creates a Greek tragedy nominally centered on Willie Stark. Like Long, Stark is portrayed as a man of the people who rises to office pledging to fight the rampant system of graft and entitlement, only to fall short of his own high morals. But really, All the King's Men is the story of Jack Burden, a man who is best described as an 'operator' in the Stark administration, digging up dirt on political opponents so Stark can get his way. When he's directed to dig into the history of one of his closest friends, Burden uncovers a history of lies that eventually is disasterous for Stark and those around him.

Warren was once the poet laureate for the nation, and his description of the Louisiana's steamy natural and political environments can be seen as evocative and transporting for the first few hundred pages, after which it just gets downright oppressive. The characters of Stark and Burden are well drawn, but many of the supporting characters (especially the women), just seemed somehow unbelievable. Much like Greek tragedy, Warren demands quite the suspension of disbelief, but to do so for 600 pages of text seemed like asking a lot. Parts of the novel hold flashes of brilliance--Warren can build tension better than many mystery writers--but the frustrations of the rest of the novel makes All the King's Men ironically very true to its political basis: so much promise, but lacking in execution.

British murder spree! part 3

I've always had something of an ambivalent attitude towards Agatha Christie's oeuvre. Yes, she essentially created the modern British mystery genre, but at the same time her most famous of sleuths (Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot) can be seen as something of cliches. But putting aside such misconceptions, Christie's work still stands as landmarks in the genre. And although the Poirot and Marple novels are her best known works, she did write a considerable number of mysteries that didn't feature either detective.

I came to The Sittaford Mystery (also published as The Murder at Hazelmoor) after seeing the film version recently produced by PBS. I'm glad I decided to read the book: save the names of the characters and the setting (a village in England's west country), the plot is almost entirely different and much more satisfactory, in my opinion. The story starts out simply enough: snowbound and bored, some villagers conduct a seance, where it is revealed that the wealthiest resident of the village is dead. Alarmed, his best friend sets out across the snow to check on him, arriving to find him blugeoned to death. A ner'do-well nephew set to inherit the estate is arrested, and the case appears closed. But then that nephew's fiancee Emily appears, determined to release her hapless future husband and find the real culprit.

It's too bad that Christie didn't write more mysteries with Emily Trefusis as the main detective, as Emily's mix of independence, vivaciousness and dogged persistence would have made for an interesting series. With the help of a somewhat unscrupulous journalist, Emily learns enough of the villagers' secrets to find the real murderer. Christie's murders may not be entirely suspenseful (how, exactly, does someone die from being slugged by a sandbag?) but tightly wound plots and a solution that requires careful deduction on the part of her detectives makes Christie's mysteries still appealing even after 70 years in print.