Moonlighting in murder.

Irish author John Banville may very well deserve a break. His work has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize (his 2005 novel The Sea took top honors), he is a long time contributor to The New York Review of Books, and formerly edited the literary section of The Irish Times. He's earned the respect of literary critics and his work seems bound for the Everyman's Library or Penguin Modern Classics treatment and literary survey courses.

But Banville is taking a different tack, perhaps a little surprising for an author so estabilished in literary circles. The Silver Swan marks Banville's second foray into mystery/suspense/noir fiction, under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. His first novel, Christine Falls, introduced Quirke, a pathologist obscurely laboring (and drinking) away in post-war Dublin. In that novel, Quirke stumbled into a mystery when a particular young woman turned up on his autopsy table, and he reluctantly pursued the cause of her death to the very core of his own haunted story. That novel was marked by Banville's masterful depiction of a brooding Dublin, matched by the delicate shifting family relationships. I actually wound up buying my own copy of Christine Falls, probably the highest recommendation my cheapsake self could give to a book.

The Silver Swan picks up a few years after the events of Christine Falls. Quirke is on the wagon, and he's making an effort to mend his relationship with his newly acknowledged daughter, Phoebe. He wants nothing more to do with detective work. But another young woman, this time an apparent suicide, piques his interest--especially after her grieving husband requests that Quirke forego the autopsy. He discovers that Deirde Hunt died by another's hand, but this time, Quirke isn't sure he wants to see justice done--something tells him Deirdre would rest better as a suicide. But when one of Deirdre's secrets, a con man who's beginning to dabble in more serious crimes. He's also pursuing Phoebe, leaving Quirke with no choice but to follow the clues of Deirdre's death to the answer.

Or rather, I should say, until Banville reveals the answer. Quirke isn't a typical private eye who follows the clues. Rather, most of the story is told in alternating perspectives, with the mystery unfolding alongside Quirke's deepening involvement. As such, traditional P.I. fans might not find Quirke to their liking. But Banville captures the noirish, suspenseful feel of the 1950s, so much so that I was partly expecting Lauren Bacall to sidle into some of the scenes. I did think a fault was the stereotyping of some characters. And I'm bothered by the terrible victimization of women both in Christine Falls and Silver Swan. Perhaps Banville is being true to the period, but in both books, women (albeit well developed as characters) are treated appallingly by the men in their lives. It bears watching if Banville does more with his women in future books.

It's sometimes tough to pigeonhole particular books, and Banville proves that it's getting harder to classify authors. But maybe we just need to get over putting books (and authors) into tidy catagories. Banville mixes the best of literary description and atmosphere with the mystery plotting to create a memorable character.

Princess, scholar, schemer, sleuth.

If there was ever a period in English history more conducive to committing murder without the prospect of getting caught, few can match the reign of Queen Mary. And if you're looking for a prospective victim whose death would be greeted by more approval than dismay by the people in power, then Princess Elizabeth Tudor would be a prime target. Elizabeth knows she's a target, she can trust few, if any, of her surrounding courtiers, and dreads the arrival of every messenger, who might come bearing word of her ascension to the throne--or her death summons. When word comes from her aunt Mary Boleyn, Elizabeth is overjoyed to see someone from the her disgraced mother's family. But an attack on a Boleyn cousin and her aunt's painful death from poison suggests a larger plot to remove all of Queen Anne's relations out of the picture.

Karen Harper's series centered on Elizabeth I adds a little twist to the typical historical mystery, starting out with The Poyson Garden. She's covering familiar ground here: Elizabeth's precarious position during her half-sister Queen Mary's reign is well-covered ground. Where Harper's take on establish historical fact includes vivid reimaging of real people and a pretty good realization of English life at the time. Elizabeth herself is lively and engaging. Less convincing is the inclusion of commoners into Elizabeth's household--it's hard to imagine the young princess taking in (and trusting) an actor from a travelling troupe. But suspending disbelief over that point, the inclusion of Ned Thompson, and the knowledgeable herbalist Meg (who's conveniently a dead ringer for Elizabeth) adds some color and offers all sorts of possibilities to move the action forward.

As far as plot goes, The Poyson Garden moves quickly like any good pleasure read should, but there's little in the way of actual mystery--the only real question of the book is who the poisoner should turn out to be, and that gets resolved about two-thirds of the way through. From then on, it's more a suspense novel, and I can't say that I entirely bought the characterization at the end--but then I don't want to give too much away. It's not a plot spoiler to say that the book concludes with Queen Mary's death and Elizabeth's ascension to the throne. There are at least eight more books to the series, but I'm not entirely sure I'll continue on with it. Respectable mysteries, Harper's Elizabeth whodunits would make a good alternative to readers of Phillipa Gregory's Tudor novels.

Patience rewarded.

I was drawn to Ariana Franklin's second novel, City of Shadows, mostly due to its setting. The image I have of 1920s Berlin is mostly a combination of decadent nightclubs a la Cabaret and sleek modernist designs from the Bauhaus. But the Berlin of Franklin's novel has a definite dark underbelly, populated by characters desperate to survive in a city that cannot feed its own, in spite of the glittering clubs. Esther Solomonova sees both sides of the city, working for a flamboyant club owner while still recovering from the nightmares of the Russian pograms that left her scarred both physically and emotionally. When her boss, Prince Nick, latches onto a mysterious woman in a local insane hospital who claims to the be the last of the Russian royal family, Esther is given the task of molding her into a believable princess. But with the arrival of Anna Anderson/Anastasia Romanov, Esther finds that the ghosts of her past are not far behind.

Neither, apparently, are the ghosts of Anna's past--and soon more are added. First, the club matron is brutally murdered, then a cabaret showgirl. Esther suspects that anyone with connections to Anna is in the killer's sights, but it is not until Inspector Schmidt of the Berlin police takes the case that Esther's theory is investigated. But as Berlin throws itself into the rising power of National Socialism, the prestige of claiming Grand Duchess Anastasia is a powerful political coup--and at odds with Schmidt and Esther's search for justice.

City of Shadows is a little different from most other suspense novels, in that it took quite a while for the story to really get underway. Franklin uses much of the first portion of the book to create a lush portrait of Berlin and the characters that inhabit it, making the going a little slow at first. But the care Franklin pays in setting the stage pays off in the second half of the book, where the mystery and suspense really start to shift into gear. The depth of characters give that suspense much more of a bite, as I was much more invested in the characters, really caring about the injustices paid to them, and struggling to understand how some could turn to the hateful message of the Nazis.

Anna Anderson was a real person, and many of the events in the book actually happened as Franklin recounts them. But it is as much the nuanced portrait of a city on a brink that gives City of Shadows an authenticity that I sometimes find is missing from many mystery novels. It took a little while to warm up, but I'm glad I stuck with the book as I found myself getting drawn into it more and more. By the end, I was reading at a breakneck pace, hoping it wouldn't end.

Frosty's been iced.

I'm a sucker for macabre twists, so it was just a matter of time before I picked up Snow Blind, P. J. Tracy's procedural set in the frigid expanses of rural Minnesota. The twist to this mystery lies in the method by which the killer(s) go about disposing of their victims. In suitable cold weather fashion, they encase their victims in snowmen, complete with carrot noses. Needless to say, I was intrigued.

The story has some fairly formulaic touches: the detectives are cranky veterans who are leary of venturing beyond their Minneapolis haunts and a rookie sheriff finds herself facing down dangerous criminals before she's even figured out how to get to her own headquarters. The pace is typical thriller, moving at a fast pace and zooming between character perspectives. But most of the story is told from the perspective of Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth of the MPD, and their newbie colleague in Dundas County, Iris Rikker. When a snowman appears in the rural northern county, Magozzi and Rolseth find that all clues seem to lead to the Bitterroot Corporation, a front for an abused women's shelter. While trying to unearth the motives behind the murders, Sheriff Rikker makes some unpleasant discoveries that suggest the mysteries behind the snowmen murders has a much longer history than anyone could have imagined. Snow Blind is a fast read (it took me two working days to blow through it), and it's not wanting for plot turns. Astute readers will probably figure out the ending, but Tracy (in reality a pseudonym for a mother-daughter writing team) wisely creates an ending worthy of the topics surrounding the mystery.

I did have one complaint about Snow Blind, however. This is a Monkeewrench novel, named after the computer security firm that Magozzi and Rolseth enlist to hack into websites for clues. I've never read any of the other Monkeewrench titles, which I didn't think would be an issue as the novels all seemed standalone. In retrospect, I probably should have started with the first title which might have given a little more background. Otherwise, I was rather lost on the first few sections in Snow Blind dealing with previously established characters. On the whole, Snow Blind, while mostly sticking to formula does that formula quite well, providing the excitement that whodunits should.

Neither time nor patience.

Frustration, thy name is Elizabeth George. With her lush writing, English settings, a complicated lead character with an abrasive partner and thorny mysteries, I should be devouring all of her mysteries. Instead, I find myself picking up her books with the anxious hope that I won't have to force myself through to the conclusion, just to find out who commited the crime.

Okay, perhaps we ought to begin at the beginning. Elizabeth George is best known as the author of the Inspector Thomas Lynley mysteries, a series that, since A Great Deliverance was published in 1988, has grown to 14 titles. A perennial best-seller, the Lynley mysteries have gotten a boost since 2002, when Mystery! began airing its own series based on the books. After I saw and thoroughly enjoyed the series, I turned to the books.

George bases her mysteries in the conflicts in and around her central investigator, D.I. Thomas Lynley of Scotland Yard, who also happens to be the eighth Earl of Asherton. Uncomfortable with his status, yet unable to escape his own sense of duty afforded by his priviledged birth, Lynley is a study of inner turmoil, bordering on angst. Lynley's foil is his working class partner, Barbara Havers, stubborn and headstrong, yet with vulnerabilities of her own that she hides behind a shell so thick that she doesn't even acknowledge it to herself. This pairing gives George enough material to work with to drive multidimentioned mysteries full of ethical and moral dilemmas.

When George sticks to the conflict between Lynley and Havers and the issues immediately surrounding the mystery at hand, her formula works--even for the 400 or so pages that most of her mysteries run. But too often, George turns to outside characters that are often only connected to the plot by the thinnest of threads (and usually turn out to be annoying to boot). Along with an unfortunate tendency towards the melodramatic, George's novels sometimes come off as bloated soap operas.

Without all the window dressing and emoting, George's mysteries at their core are tightly constructed crimes, without any clear-cut moral answers. The last of her books I read, Missing Joseph, had all sort of juicy moral dilemmas that remained unsolved at the conclusion. But I had to slog through 400 pages before the mystery actually took center stage. Until George returns to focus on her central characters, I won't be continuing with this series.

Le meurtre dans la ville lumiere.

As of late, I've been drawn to mystery titles published by the Soho Press, a little company that specializes in works set in diverse locales and unusual investigators (just browsing through the library shelves, I've seen crime stories set in Sweden, Afghanistan and the Arctic). Their list includes some well known authors (they publish Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond series), but some authors are often new to most mystery readers.

One such author is San Francisco-based Cara Black, who sets her main investigator back a decade and on another continent. Aimee Leduc, resident of Ile St. Louis in the center of Paris, makes her living investigating mostly computer crime in the heady early days of the Internet. Yet in Murder in Belleville, Aimee finds herself literally thrown into the search for a murderer after witnessing a car bombing. Roaming far from the well-trod center of the city, Leduc searches the gritty streets of Belleville, a suburb of Paris tense with clashes between Algerian fundamentalists and a government intent on cracking down on illegal immigrants. There's a lot that Leduc has to wade through to get to the truth behind the woman killed in the bombing--and much of it leads to friends of hers and the highest levels of the govenment. Her job is made all the more complicated by shadowy figures intent on keeping her from that truth.

Black creates a multilayered, complex knot of a mystery, fast-paced to the point that it's almost impossible to recall all that's going on. I will admit to be entirely confused by many of the events, some of which tended to assume a strong grounding in the history of Algerian/Franco relations--an area that I'm woefully deficient. But part of the mystery played upon Leduc's relationships with Rene, her brilliant (if mostly off stage) partner, and an Inspector Morbier, whom Leduc seemed to rely on in the past. Murder in Belleville is the second in Black's series (Murder in the Marais is the first), so perhaps anyone interested in Black's P.I. would do best to start with that title. For my tastes, I found Black's frantic pace and sprawling cast of characters a little too confusing. But Black's efforts to provide a different twist to a city that seems so familiar is worth a look for anyone searching for murder in unfamiliar territory.

A most compelling 'hero.'

I picked up The Talented Mr. Ripley because it was the selection for the sole book club that met at a convenient time for me. So I wasn't really eager to delve into Patricia Highsmith's dark, literary style, which made for slow going in the first portion of the novel. But such detailed characterization leads directly into the mind of Tom Ripley, or as close to an understanding of the motives that drive him to commit his crimes.

The novel opens with Tom posing as an IRS representative, running small con jobs while brooding over his own feelings of deprevation and persecution. When he's enlisted to retrieve a wayward son from Italy, Tom sees his chance to have that life to which he feels entitled. Through manipulation and the use of his incredible talents , Tom sets about to get that life. To say more would be to give away much of the plot, but the story arc is not necessarily the best part of the book. Rather, it's Highsmith's ability to make Tom the sort of person that blurs the distinction between the repulsive and the compelling. Tom is always on the edge of being discovered and all his plans exposed, but much of the suspense lies in whether we want to see Tom come to justice--a question that I doubt would be easily answered. It's a pity that Hitchcock never made The Talented Mr. Ripley into a film (as he did with another of Highsmith's novels, Strangers on a Train), as the atmospheric settings of 1950s Italy would have provided a great backdrop for the suspense of the plot. But Highsmith's carefully crafted work requires no visual interpretation to bring to life her chilling story, and a central character who will likely linger in the minds of anyone who encounters him.

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.

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.

British murder spree! part 2

Like Laurie R. King's Mary Russell novels, time and place are central to Elizabeth Peters' novels featuring Amelia Peabody. Like Russell, Peabody is fiercely independent and confident in her abilities, in spite of having spent much of her life under the thumb of her domineering father in 1880s Victorian England. In Crocodile on the Sandbank, Peabody immediately sets out for Egypt, determined to see more of the world after her father's death. Immediately at home in the Valley of the Kings, Peabody sets to work 'assisting' Egyptologist and bachelor Radcliff Emerson, much to his displeasure. Their work is soon interrupted by the appearance of a mummy that drives away all the Egyptian workers and threatens the lives of Peabody and her companions. I found the mystery to be a little hokey (the rampaging mummy kept bringing to mind the Brendan Fraser film The Mummy) and an annoying damsel in distress that everyone would probably be better off without. But Peabody herself is a plucky, appealing character, and her battles with Emerson are enjoyable to behold, even if you already know who's going to come out victorious.

It's not surprising that Peters also did quite a bit of work in romance fiction, as the strength of her book lies not in the mystery (which is quite easy to figure out), but in the sparks between her characters. Originally published way back in the 1970s, Crocodile is the first of Peters' long Peabody series, all set in colonial Egypt. The exotic time and place of the series is also one of its draws, and the fast moving plot and romantic undertones makes Peters' detective an appealing read.

British murder spree! part 1

Okay, so this post's title is a rather devious attempt to make this post seem more lurid than it actually is. True, I've been indulging in my taste for British murder mysteries, so there are quite a few bodies turning up, but to term it a spree is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, it's murder, but this is civilized killing, thank you. So put on your tweeds, make some tea and curl up while these people go about nicely dispatching each other.

I had previously written about Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice featuring Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell, enjoying King's creation of a feisty, liberal partner to Holmes' Edwardian coolness. Continuing with A Monstrous Regiment of Women, King focuses more on developing Russell's character, as Mary delves into the inner workings of a women's organization in which various members have been dying suspicious deaths. Holmes is mostly offstage during the investigation, but never far from Russell's mind as she finds the detective playing a larger role in her life. I've read a few more of King's series, and her strongest abilities lie in the interplay between Holmes and Russell, similar to that of Sayers' Wimsey/Vane novels, and her depiction of post World War I Britian. As her series moves along, I found King's plots to be more tangled, something that wasn't as much the case in the earlier books, were the emphasis was more on suspense rather than unraveling the mystery.

More bodies to come...

"Dammit Holmes! It is not elementary!"

It’s a risky proposition for an author to resurrect an iconic literary character for the purpose of a new series; even more questionable is the addition of a sidekick for the famous figure’s comeback. In the world of mystery fiction, no figure is more sacred than Sherlock Holmes. Yet Holmes’ stature has not kept Edgar-awarding winning author Laurie R. King from imagining what the detective would be like had he happened to take a precocious fifteen-year-old girl under his wing and teach her his craft.

Dangerous, yes, but in creating Mary Russell, the apprentice to Holmes' beekeeper in The Beekeeper's Apprentice; or, On the Segregation of the Queen, King has given Holmes a formidable ally. Fiercely intelligent, the staunchly feminist Russell is the perfect match for the idiosyncratic and often misogynist detective. Through tests of increasing difficulty, the two slowly gain each others trust. But just as Russell and Holmes have become a team of considerable prowess, an opponent from Holmes’ past reappears, with nothing less than the destruction of Holmes and all those near to him their only desire.

I haven’t read any of the original Holmes stories, so I can’t say whether King matches Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in terms of literary merit. But King has created an engrossing chess match of a mystery that requires the full concentration of both detectives and the reader. Her depiction of World War I era England is vivid, and the dawning of women's rights coupled with the passing of the Edwardian era creates a tension in the plot. My quibbles are minor: the story occasionally flags as King goes about constructing her plot and characters, and the beginning is entirely too hokey. Since completing The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, King has penned seven more Russell/Holmes titles, and has developed quite a following in the process. It’s an impressive start, and the rest of the series promises to be just as intriguing. Book number two (A Monstrous Regiment of Women) is already on my request list.

The Seedy Side of the Cities

Mention Minnesota to most Americans, and the concept of "Minnesota nice" often springs to mind, along with mosquitoes, languid evenings at The Lake and the 'aw-shucks' wholesomeness of A Prairie Home Companion. Editors Julie Schaper and Steven Horwitz do their best to dispel this notion of the North Star State with their collection Twin Cities Noir. Part of Akashic Books' series of noir anthologies centered on various locales, Twin Cities Noir features familiar metropolitan landmarks and occasional episodes from Minneapolis/St. Paul history, often with a tinge of Midwestern dry humor (or fatalism, if you're a Lutheran). So Schaper and Horwitz give us bodies bobbing in the Mississippi ("Bums" by William Kent Krueger), a snow emergency that turns explosive ("Noir Neige" by K. J. Erickson), the uneasy transition to American culture faced by Hmong immigrants (David Housewright's "Mai-Nu's Window") and the gangsters who found sanctuary in Depression-era St. Paul ("If You Harm Us" by Gary Bush), among others.

Authored by Minnesotans from varying publishing backgrounds, the collection is a bit uneven in quality and 'noirishness.' A few stories climaxed into bona fide cliffhangers, but others seemed strangely lackluster or predictable. Perhaps the limitations of the genre and form are partly to blame for this, but there's no harm in skipping over stories that don't appeal, as each entry stands on its own. Like other titles in the series, Twin Cities Noir will primarily draw those who call the Cities home; noir fans will appreciate a setting away from the usual noir scene, with shady characters that you wouldn't want to see walking the streets of Lake Wobegone.

Still tangled after 67 years.

Occasionally I get the urge to go back and read some of the classics within genres--the ones that most libraries have on the shelves not because of the overwhelming demand for them but because they have attained a sort of sacred status that exonerates them from any to-be-weeded list. I probably shouldn't be so harsh with Raymond Chandler's 1939 classic The Big Sleep. The first of Chandler's novels, it introduces Philip Marlowe, the Los Angeles-based private eye perfectly embodied in the equally classic 1946 film by Humphrey Bogart.

As one of the first (and best) of the hard-boiled, haunted PIs of crime lit, Marlowe's character can sometimes be pretty cliched to modern readers, but Chandler's ability to portray the desperate seediness of Depression-era LA still puts to shame many modern writers. If you can't feel the dank rot underlying Marlowe's LA, you're not paying very close attention to Chandler's prose. And in The Big Sleep, everyone has a bit of rot in them. The plot is famously knotted (Chandler himself claimed not to know the motives behind one of the deaths), but what begins as a case of blackmail swiftly turns into murder--and then the serious crimes start to happen. Chandler keeps the twists and turns coming, with characters so shady it's a wonder they don't immediately shrivel up in the sunlight.

In spite of all the deaths, there isn't a whole lot of graphic violence, and the language is relatively cuss-free. For those reasons, The Big Sleep may appeal to older readers turned off by gratuitous violence or foul language, but who still want a compelling mystery. For any reader who likes a complicated private eye on a twisted case, Chandler's work still sets a benchmark in crime fiction.