Not worth the repreve.

In theory, I ought to find The Queen's Fool absolutely riveting: set in the volatile, intrigue-ridden England of Edward VI and Mary I, the story encompasses war, religious upheaval, sex, heartbreak, diplomacy and political maneuvering of the highest order. The title character, Hannah Green, is herself playing a role, hiding her Jewish faith and her sex as she and her father try to make a new life in England after fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Hannah's reputation for divining the future lands her squarely into the center of the royal court, required to spy for Lord Robert Dudley, for whom she has more than a passing fancy. When Mary ascends the throne, Hannah finds herself drawn to the queen's strong character, yet endangered by the same woman's determination to rid England of its Protestant faith. Torn between a safe, but mundane life with her betrothed and the intrigues of the court, Hannah's fateful decisions place her at the very center of the turbulent events surrounding her.

And yet...

Honestly, I just couldn't get into The Queen's Fool. I tried (it's a 500 page book, and I stuck with it to the end), but Philippa Gregory's epic of Tudor intrigue just never really came to life for me. The whole purpose of a historical novel is to recreate a particular world, mixing the well-known figures with characters of the author's imagination. It's especially tricky with characters that are as well-known as Elizabeth I and her fractious family, and to her credit, Gregory has done her homework regarding history and life at the court. But they all still feel somehow...flat, I guess would be the best way to describe it. I had read another of Gregory's novels, The Virgin's Lover, a few years ago, and the feeling was the same. Another issue centers on Hannah. Gregory goes to almost absurd lengths to place Hannah at the center of the action, undermining any sense of belief in her character. Was it possible for someone like Hannah to witness Elizabeth's trysts with Thomas Seymour, be summoned to face charges of heresy and be present at the fall of Calais? It might give Gregory the opportunity to describe those events, but it doesn't work as fiction.

The Queen's Fool is part of Gregory's retelling of the Tudor era, the latest of which is The Boleyn Inheritance. Gregory's books always seem to hit the bestseller lists, which isn't surprising given their emphasis on intrigue and scheming. In spite of Gregory's efforts, though, her Elizabethan world still remains impervious.

Shock and awe through an objective lens.

God knows there are plenty of books out there on the subject of Iraq and the mess we're currently in. I wasn't really looking for a book about the war until I happened to spot Anne Garrels' account of the buildup and opening days of the war come across the circulation desk. I had remembered catching some of Garrels' reports from the battlefield on NPR and being impressed with her work, but I was a little hesitant about picking up a work that was probably outdated.

But after four years of war, reading Naked in Baghdad adds a touch of clarity. A veteran of numerous war zones over the course of her nearly 30 years as a journalist, Garrels knows how to write compelling, gripping reports while keeping a clear, objective eye on the facts. Naked begins in the fall of 2002, as UN inspectors are still trying to determine what sort of weapons Saddam may or may not have and ends in May 2003, around the time of "Mission Accomplished". Arriving in Baghdad, Garrels uses her status as a woman and a correspondent for the relatively-under-the-radar NPR to gain access to the parts of Baghdad where she can get a real sense for how Iraqis feel about their leader. Or so the idea goes. Garrels spends as much time trying to twart the attempts by the Iraqi government to manipulate the news that much of Naked reads as a manual for doing journalism with uncooperative authorities as it does a narrative of a city preparing for war. As the rhetoric and violence escalates, Garrels finds herself part of a dwindling press corps, relying more on her own wits and the bravery of her driver, Amer, in getting the real story. In this sense, Garrels succeeds: the portrait that she creates is an Iraq filled with tension and uncertainty, voicing concerns that will become a familiar refrain over the next few years.

Garrels' Baghdad account in supplemented by email bulletins written by her husband Vint Lawrence, to family and friends. Lawrence is also a talented writer, and his perspective of a husband waiting on the homefront for a loved one provides an illuminating counterpoint to Garrels' war zone experiences. Still, if given a choice between the emails and more of Garrels' reporting, I would go with the latter. Garrels' gutsy reporting in the face of real danger and her insightful portrayal of a complex city makes Naked in Baghdad as relevent to today's Iraq as the Iraq of four years ago.

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.

Simply magical.

The following excerpt is from Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking:

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylght with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themsleves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themsleves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their frief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them. On the night John died we were thrity-one days short of our fortieth anniversary...
I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs.
I wanted to scream.
I wanted him back.

Rather than risk the possibility of farkeling up a review of this book with my amateurish opinions, I will just say that Didion's memoir of grieving following the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne stayed with me for quite a while after I had finished it. There's been a lot of critiques of the book, especially since it won the National Book Award, and while some may call Didion's prose too removed or cold for a book on grieving, I felt that her tone was that of someone trying genuinely to cope, to rationally think through a process that isn't rational at all. But reading Didion's strong, unique voice, simply contemplating the emotions and memories that accompany the loss of someone so close can be its own comfort. The Year of Magical Thinking does all the things that a good memoir should--deeply honest and beautifully written, it takes us for a brief moment into the mind of its creator.

For more on Didion and her memoir, check out an interview she did with NPR's Terry Gross.

Forget the stickman--cue the gunman.

In no less than three places in and on The Big Show: High Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards, is a terse statement: 'This book is not affiliated with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.' This little disclaimer is vital, lest the reader assume that the Academy (those folks behind the Oscars) wanted to reveal the inner workings of its annual bash. From the stage, it's all glamour and stars, a night where the film industry gathers to recognize those deserving films that epitomize the art of cinema.

Whatever. Anyone who's ever sat through an entire Oscar telecast (admit it, you've done it, and you cheered when Titanic won) has to know that whomever is involved in mounting the production has to have a few loose marbles by the time it's all done. Thanks to Steve Pond, we now have proof. Pond (he's the one between Chris Cooper and the very pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones in the back flap photo) gained backstage access to over a decade's worth of Oscar productions, revealing a process that tries sanity and could be reasonably blamed for at least one premature death. The story here isn't so much the stars, although there is plenty of humanizing (and demonizing) tidbits about them. Rather, Pond concerns himself more with the people planning the show, revealing the struggles to do the impossible: bring the show in at a three hour duration, avoid any nasty surprises from overly profane or political winners (or hosts) and ban the tedious thank-you lists from winners determined to have their minute (or five or ten) in the spotlight.

Pond reveals some surprising and humourous aspects to the show, such as the ticklish situation presented by the explicitve-laden nomination of "Blame Canada" for best song, and the potential for the use of rubber bullets in case some acceptance speeches carry on too long. In retrospect, the powers that be behind Oscar might have regretted pulling back the curtain for Pond's little book, but certainly with all the disclaimers, no one will be the wiser, right? At any rate, when you tune in on the 25th for the 79th incarnation of the Oscar bash, keep your fingers crossed for anyone who goes too far over the time limit--they may be in the crosshairs.

How the 0.0046% live.

I'll admit it: I love looking at home decor books. Not so much for the decoration or design of the places (let's face it--it's unlikely I would ever be able to afford the contents of a single room, much less an entire house), but for what the homes reveal of their owners. In most cases, the homes in such books are owned by very wealthy, but fairly anonymous figures. Architectural Digest, however, occassionally features homes of the rich and famous, thereby merging star oggling with the voyerism of looking at their homes.

Part of viewing other people's homes is the smugness that comes with assessing their tastes, and in that sense Hollywood at Home does not disappoint. Never a town (or nowadays, industry) known for restraint, many of the homes easily reflect their owners' larger than life personalities. The best example of excess goes to Jayne Mansfield's infamous Pink Palace, with its bathroom boasting pink shag carpeting on every flat surface (including the ceiling), but is also apparent in Cher's Italian Renaissance villa overlooking the beach, John Travolta's hangar-like home (complete with runway) or Jack Warner's 9-acre estate. Still, for every gargauntuan spread, there's a home that almost looks like mere mortals could reside within its walls. Not surprisingly, these most often belong to Hollywood stars of the past--James Stewart, Katherine Hepburn and Danny Kaye's seem almost quaint in their homey style.

The quality of the essays and photos varies across the book. Some essays concern themselves with the architectural or decorative characteristics of the house, while a few seem more like mini biographies of the famous occupant. The selection of homes is nicely mixed (including some in New York, New England and Ireland), as is the mix between old and new. Some stars are included for who they are rather than for their homes (Marilyn Monroe is here, in spite of the poor quality of images of her homes). But the point of Hollywood at Home's large, glossy format is for display on a coffee table or persual during viewings of Entertainment Tonight, and in that sense it serves its purpose admirably.

A walk braving bears and Katz.

If one were to undertake a 2,100 mile walk through much of the eastern United States, it's likely that a number of memorable incidents would occur in the course of the trek. If it happens to be Bill Bryson taking that walk, then it is fairly guaranteed that every bizarre possibility imaginable will occur, along with the likelihood of a few other unforeseeable calamities. Thankfully for readers, Bryson did attempt such a stroll, and lived to write about it in A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

For anyone unfamiliar with Bryson's work, A Walk in the Woods is pretty representative of his humourous travelogue style. Irreverent in tone, Bryson has the uncanny knack of revealing the subcultures and history of a particular part of the world, all while displaying an astounding ability to attract the most bizarre characters and experiences during his travels. In tackling the Appalachian Trail, Bryson gets plenty of material to work with. Joined on the trail by his woefully out of shape but divinely humourous companion Stephen Katz, Bryson sets out on the trail in Georgia, hoping to avoid the fearsome black bear and inbred hillbillies. The bears never appear, but Bryson and Katz do manage to stumble across truly frightening examples of humanity, including the annoying Mary Ellen, the forever lost Chicken John, and Ralph Lauren-clad day trippers whom Bryson and Katz get the better of.

While tromping through the woods (or seeking out the least scary motel in he can enjoy some of humanity's comforts), Bryson tells of the trail's convoluted history and reflects on the changing environment of the trail as it falls under heavier use. Part travelogue, misadventure story, cultural study and environmental cri de coeur, Bryson's walk never fails to entertain, even if it won't help you avoid a black bear.

Message in a bottle.

I have to say that I'm impressed with Koren Zailckas. Not so much for the fact that she's written an engrossing memoir while only in her mid-20s, but rather for the fact that she even remembers anything of the period of which she's writing. For much of her teens and early 20s, Zailckas spent much of her time getting drunk, drunk, or recovering from binging. Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood is both the story of Zailckas' struggle with alcohol and a warning of how the dangerous drinking has become a destructive means for young women in particular to overcome feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy.

Zailckas points out early in her book that she was never an alcoholic: she never physically required the buzz from a couple of drinks. A good student from a middle class family, she turned to alcohol beginning at the age of 14 to compensate for her perceived social awkwardness. Stories of increased sexual assult and alcohol poisoning in women often appear in the news, but when Zailckas recounts (or sometimes reconstructs from recollections of more sober friends) her experience having her stomach pumped or memories of relationships that revolved around bar hours, her struggle becomes more personal, or in some cases, familiar. Occassionally Zailckas uses grandiloquent language in describing her drinking, an aspect that I found rather annoying, but when she reins in her language, the reality of her experience comes through strongest.

There are several points at which Zailckas makes attempts to curtail her drinking, but when she falls off the wagon she is frank in pointing out her own poor choices. But she also reveals the pervasiveness of alcohol in society and the often contradictory stances toward what is, at its root, a drug. There's a sense of struggle in Zailckas' writing, that the craving for the courage offered by a drink will be something that may never leave her. Her story isn't likely to leave her readers.

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.

Travels with chilly.

With so many travel books out on the market, it sometimes hard to capture a reader's interest with yet another story of ramblings about one country or another. So what better way to draw attention to your foray into the genre than by undertaking what any sober person would consider an insane endeavor--an attempt to hitchhike around the whole of Ireland with a refridgerator?

Tony Hawks, to be fair, was not sober at the time he undertook a bet to do just that. Round Ireland With a Fridge is just that--Hawks' month-long journey around the island with a dorm-sized fridge, relying on only the generousity of picking him up off the side of the road in spite of his unusual baggage. Or so the original plan went. Hawks garnered some radio backing, with periodic on-air appeals to give him a lift when rides were slow in coming. I don't know if I would consider that real fulfillment of his bet--nor the use of anything other than a full-size Kelvinator as his traveling companion--but still, it's enough to give Hawks an unusual look at Ireland than if he had been a typical tourist. There's a lot of scenes that happen in pubs and the like (Hawks makes no secret of his desire to enjoy Irish hospitality--preferably with available Irish ladies), but Hawks and fridge also take some forays into some unexpected sidetrips.

Hawks' day job is that of a comedian for a British radio show, and his story is told in a humorous irreverent tone. Following his hilarious description of an especially memorable night in a rural hostel, it's unlikely that I'll ever be able to look at anyone planning a backpacking vacation without feeling pity for them. A twist on travelogues of the past, Hawks' Round Ireland has much of the offbeat feel of Bill Bryson, with the tone of a Dave Barry.

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.

The harshest peace.

Being a child of the '80s, my personal perceptions of the Cold War consists of mostly stock images and quotes: duck and cover drills in schools, Spam-stocked bomb shelters, ICBMs paraded through Red Square, JFK's 'Berliner' moment, and always, always the image of a mushroom cloud looming on the horizon.

Of course, the intricacies of the Cold War go well beyond a few points in time. John Lewis Gaddis, professor of history at Yale, has completed several hefty tomes on the subject. Fortunately for those of us who aren't well-versed in diplomatic history, Gaddis has provided an approachable yet thorough introduction to the period in The Cold War: A New History, published in 2005. Writing over a decade after the fall of the USSR, there's never any question in Gaddis' text whose decisions would prove decisive. Gaddis' theories aren't going to break a great deal of new ground: still, even those who are well-versed in the events of the day will appreciate Gaddis' ability to explain clearly the motives of both sides in spite of the tangled geopolitics of the time.

Since The Cold War serves as an introductory text, Gaddis did sacrifice details of events and personalities for the sake of theories and grand strategies. Those looking for a detailed description of the Cuban Missile Crisis or Reagan's words to Gorbachev at Reykjavik won't find either here. But in a war that was just as much about battles that didn't happen, Gaddis' work is indespensible in understanding why events played out as they did.

Nasty weather.

Occasionally I'm struck by a random fascination on a particular topic, and such was the case this past summer when I suddenly felt the need to read something, anything, on tornadoes and storm chasing on the Great Plains. Some cursory catalog searches didn't turn up anything that would satisfy my curiousity, so when I happened to sport Mark Svenvold's account of the May 2004 outbreak of storms on the shelf, I immediately snapped it up.

Tornadoes have always had a fascinating quality about them, driving thrill seekers and scientists alike to drive thousands of miles (literally) in the hopes of seeing just one. Yet the draw of witnessing such storms also speaks to what Svenvold calls 'catastrophilia:' the need to be thisclose to possible, and in some cases, real devestation, either on the ground or beamed over the airwaves via the Weather Channel. It is this fascination with weather as entertainment that makes up the central theme to Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America. To be sure, Svenvold does justice to the art of storm chasing, which requires as much luck as science to put a chaser in the right place at the right (wrong?) time. Like any other seemingly insane endeavor, he portrays a case of characters that range from the quiet, Scout master storm spotter, to the main forecaster at the Storm Prediction Center, and the questionable Californian guy who eventually gets to do some 'real' science out of his homemade tornado intercept vehicle.

These parts of Svenvold's work clip along well, but he's as much concerned with the effect global warming and the Weather Channel have had on the weather and how we perceive it. Although Svenvold makes the argument that both have made impacts on the storms over the plains, the momentum Svenvold had created in the remainder of the work effectively lapses into doldrums. To make the entire book a description of his jaunts across Middle America would be bowing to the lure of catastrophilia, but while struggling through his meditation on the sublime as it relates to storms, I wonder if some more stringent editing could have been merited. Still, Svenvold covers the complete culture of storm chasing in a manner that few other authors have done.

A short work about a long walk.

In this era of fitness mania and extreme sports, the idea of someone walking across the entire North American continent still elicites a sense of awe. We are, after all, talking 3,500 miles across rugged mountains and sweltering plains. Even with modern conveniences such as cell phones and survival gear, it still remains a daunting undertaking. Crossing the continent over a hundred years ago with nothing but a couple of revolvers and five dollars in hand was considered grounds for insanity. Still, that is exactly what Helga Estby and her eldest daughter Clara undertook in the spring of 1896, setting out from their rural Norwegian settlement near Spokane, Washington to New York City, in an attempt to win a $10,000 wager from an anonymous figure. The walk was an epic undertaking, but as Linda Lawrence Hunt chronicles in Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America, it was only a small part of the shifts in the political and social landscapes of America at the cusp of a new century.

Like other studies in microhistory, Hunt uses the experience of one, nearly forgotten individual to cast light on the larger shifts within history. The benefit is to make history personal, which is Bold Spirit's strongest point. Estby was a strong, determined woman whose cross-country trek was likely the least of the hardships that she faced in her lifetime. However, getting into the mind of someone nearly 70 years dead is nearly impossible, and Hunt's task is made all the more difficult by the fact that all of Estby's manuscripts recounting her trip were destroyed by her children in the 1940s. This bit of cultural vandalism was a direct consequence of Helga's walk, and makes Hunt's points about the importance of preserving family histories. But it also leaves Hunt with little to go on other than interviews with Estby's granddaughter and scattered newspaper accounts of the trek itself. These hint at Estby's feelings regarding women's rights, the contentious election of 1896 and the cultural mores of Norwegian immigrants in America, among many other topics , but Hunt's attempts to flesh out the whole story comes down to a lot of conjecture. And, more tragically, there's little chance to hear Helga's story in her own words. Still, Hunt's rediscovery of Estby's remarkable endeavor makes for an unique perspective about a pivotal point in history and introduces modern readers to a woman who was well ahead of her time, even if her full story will forever be lost to time.

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.

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...