Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey

May 2, 2013 by 14 Comments
Brat Farrar

Brat Farrar

So having reread The Franchise Affair recently, and still unable to locate my copy of The Daughter of Time, I turned to one of my other Josephine Tey books recently, Brat Farrar, but in this case, the question that I went into this reread with was wondering if it would still feel as relevant as the Franchise Affair did to me.  Because Brat is a very different kind of book, which is in my opinion one of the marvelous things about Tey’s work—there’s no “Tey formula” to them.  If you’re new to her, you’ll find that you’re never going to know what you’ll be getting.  It’s like a present.  I like presents.

So does Brat Farrar hold up?  I think thematically the larger questions of morality and the whole “ends justify the means” stuff certainly holds up just fine, and I’ll discuss those themes in a bit.  But the writing here feels somewhat more old-fashioned, although the book is still very readable—I gulped it right down, just like I did the first time I read it.  One thing I did notice this time that I apparently missed on my first reading was that the setting seems a bit off, and it took me a bit to put my finger on what the issue was.

The novel is not really anchored in any specific time that Tey points out, but it presumably takes place after WWII because there are references to people being “bombed out”.  So given its publication date (1949), one just assumes it’s set somewhere in that vicinity in time.  But it somehow feels like it’s set more interwar, and there are a few iffy timeline items as a result.  Given that the lynchpin events of the book—the disappearance and presumed suicide of Patrick Ashby following the death of his parents in a plane crash off the coast—take place some eight plus years earlier,that puts those events right smack in the middle of The Blitz.  I’ll leave it to you to work out the problem with that and just say that there’s no sign here that the war ever happened—no mention of rationing, of the post-war issues Britain faced.  It’s a little timey-wimey, to quote The Doctor.

The story itself is one of those things that seems so implausible that it’s actually believable: a young orphan named Brat Farrar is mistaken for Simon Ashby by Ashby’s cousin Alec Loding on a London street.  Loding, a down-at-heel actor, realizes that Brat bears a striking resemblance to Simon, who is due to inherit his parents’ estate in a few weeks upon his 21st birthday, and thus to Simon’s dead twin Patrick, who presumably committed suicide and whose body was never recovered from the sea.  A plot is hatched for Loding to tutor Brat in everything Ashby, for Brat to collect what would have been Patrick’s inheritance (as the older twin), and to split the money after.  Brat refuses the offer initially, but eventually gives in upon learning that part of his inheritance is Latchett’s, a stud farm.  Brat loves horses.  From there it’s a matter of convincing his “brother” and his “sisters” and his “aunt”, as well as the family solicitor, that he is indeed the missing and presumed dead Patrick Ashby.

If you’re wondering where the mystery is, well, the mystery is that Brat eventually becomes convinced that Patrick Ashby did not commit suicide, but was murdered.  This naturally puts him in a bit of a quandary, because he obviously can’t voice his suspicions to anyone because he’s supposed to be Patrick Ashby.  It’s not like he can go to the police and say “I suspect X killed me.”—to expose the truth about himself would most certainly land him in the quod.  So he needs to continue his deception, which he grows increasingly uncomfortable with, in order to unmask a killer.

It’s a pretty little ethical dilemma that takes the usual imposter trope and gives it a good shake.  Normally, we don’t get to see things from the imposter’s point-of-view in detective fiction.  We get lead up the path by them just like the great detective and assume that they are who they say they are right up until the point where the detective says “But you’re not really Old Murder Victim’s Nephew, are you?  You’re really X, impersonating the nephew in order to get his inheritance!”  But here, we know right from the get go that Brat is not Patrick Ashby.  So it’s not a matter of “is he or isn’t he?” but one of “will he get away with it or won’t he?” followed by “will he keep this up or won’t he?” and a host of other questions.  Seeing the action from his point of view allows us to develop some empathy for the character—a young man, a foundling, with no family of his own and no real prospects or talents save his amazing skill with horses, is suddenly impersonating a much-loved young man with a huge family, a trust fund, and a horse farm.  Talk about your presents.  It’s easy to understand why Brat agrees to Loding’s scam, it really is.

Plus he’s just so charming.  Tey is a whiz at building a character.  I remember the first time I read this that I wanted him to get away with it, to get the money and the farm and live happily ever after.  I began devising these complicated scenarios in my head while I was reading that would allow him to actually be Patrick Ashby so that he wouldn’t be stealing Simon’s inheritance, but taking what was rightfully his.  I was convinced there was some sort of double-double twist to the whole thing, I wanted it so badly.  And I found myself doing the exact same thing this time.  You know he can’t be Patrick, that he’s not him, but you want him to be.  Brat is really a very awesome guy for a liar and a con artist.

And his moral dilemma is tricky.  As he enters into the Ashby family situation, he feels a real affinity for the siblings and their guardian, Aunt Bee, and he comes to regret what he’s doing because he knows that if they find out the truth that the pain they experienced over Patrick’s suicide, barely suppressed for 8 years, will all come back to the surface, and stronger.  He does not want to hurt these people.  But to continue with his impersonation will hurt them financially as well as emotionally.  And when he uncovers the truth about Patrick’s death, they will be hurt even more.  So it becomes a matter of which pain, and how much, he has to inflict upon them, because no matter what, his agreeing to enter into the deception sets up a load of hurt down the road.  So he has to ask himself if it’s better to continue deceiving these nice people and letting them believe the beloved Patrick is alive while he tries to find out what happened to the real Patrick, or expose himself as a fraud, and he then has to decide whether to expose the truth about Patrick, and thus himself, or whether to allow someone else to get away with murder.  Do the ends justify the means?  Are they better off thinking Patrick is alive or knowing for certain that he’s not, and if it’s the latter, is it right that he should continue to let them think Patrick is alive while he finds and exposes the truth?

It’s all very well done: the Ashby family is so real and carefully drawn that you feel like you’ve sat down to dinner with them, and it’s their disbelief, then hope, then belief that Brat really is Patrick that helps build the suspense.  I’m trying to think of the best way to explain how the suspense in this book follows several paths at once—there’s the “will Brat get away with it?” trail and how he risks being discovered in his deception the entire way through.  Then there’s the “will Brat figure out what really happened to Patrick?” trail, closely followed by the “Will Brat realize who did this?” trail and “Now Brat is in danger!” trail, not to mention the “How will he solve his problem?” trail and the “Is this the right choice morally and ethically?” trail.  It’s very layered, and deceptively complex.

From where I’m sitting, that makes Brat Farrar utterly delicious.

Filed Under: Classics, Mystery Tagged With: , ,

A Man Lay Dead, Ngaio Marsh

April 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment
A Man Lay Dead

A Man Lay Dead

In hindsight, rereading Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dead directly after Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair might have been a mistake.  Stylistically, the two do not compare: Tey is by far the better stylist, and her characters have much more depth than Marsh’s.

It’s a bit of an unfair comparison, though, for several reasons.  First, A Man Lay Dead was Marsh’s first novel, whereas Tey was well into her career with The Franchise Affair.  And they’re two distinctly different types of mysteries, and written at different points during that time known as The Golden Age—the Marsh book is over 10 years earlier, at a time when Agatha Christie was in full reign over the British Crime novel.  So it’s really very much an apples and oranges kind of comparison.  Still, it’s a fact that the far more sparse Marsh left me wanting, following on the heels of the Tey as it did.  And that’s too bad, because I really like Ngaio Marsh as a whole—she’s a great plotter with a theatrical flair to her mysteries that’s entertaining.  But again, in hindsight (that useful creature!), she’s obviously struggling to find her way in this first effort.

The plot of A Man Lay Dead is fairly simple: a country house party, a game of Murder, a real dead body instead of pretend.  There’s a side order of bolshie Russians causing trouble, several women scorned, the intrepid BYT, and, of course, the enigmatic Roderick Alleyn in his first appearance in print.  As plots go, it’s pretty standard stuff—the country house mystery had been done prior to this, and the Russians, the BYT, the tom-cat victim and his various women are all familiar types in a mystery of this era.  In as far as those things go, nothing here really stands out, and in fact, you’d find any of these elements in a Christie book from the same time period.

Where Marsh differs from Christie is that Alleyn is a professional policeman—these books are, therefore, more in the procedural vein than the private investigator line.  So whereas someone like Hercule Poirot can be all “ah, yes” and engage his little grey cells after an inscrutable conversation with someone, or Miss Marple can gently nose her way around by asking seemingly innocuous questions, Alleyn follows police procedure.  He collects evidence, he interviews the suspects, he works on alibi breaking and confirming, constructs a timeline, looks for motives, and pries into personal lives.  It’s all a bit more cut and dried, and Marsh has to labor a bit in this first book to make Alleyn interesting enough for the reader to want to spend an entire novel with him.

In that sense, it’s probably wise that she starts out with an accidental Watson for him in the person of Nigel Bathgate, a reporter who has been invited to the house party along with his cousin Charles, who ends up dead.  Nigel has an unbreakable alibi, so Alleyn can use him in places where he, as a policeman, cannot tread.  The story is told from Nigel’s point-of-view, and as he has a natural interest in what Alleyn is doing, he conveys that interest to the reader.  It works up to a point, but in later books she’d jettison Nigel in favor of a more omniscient point-of-view for the simple reason that once Alleyn’s character is established, Nigel becomes more of an encumbrance than a useful character.  But here he serves his purpose by introducing us, so to speak, to Alleyn and his methods. But it turns out that Roderick Alleyn is pretty hard to get to know.

It’s obvious this is an early book in the series because Marsh seems a bit unclear with what exactly she wants Roderick Alleyn to be—at times he’s a totally conventional policeman, at others a bit of a maverick; he is at turns both capricious and logical.  Sometimes he’s straightforward with Nigel and at other times he’s clearly leading him up the garden path.  He seems an ordinary guy doing ordinary work for Scotland Yard, but there are hints that he’s something a bit more—a vague suggestion of an aristocratic pedigree that she would never spell out even 30 books later, just hint at.

It’s very hard, in this first book, not to see the influence of both Christie and Sayers, and yet Marsh also had a third influence: the theatre.  All of her books have a whiff of theatricality about them, and many of them are set either in the theatre or concern actors.  A Man Lay Dead, with its dramatic murder (a knife in the back is quite plebian compared to some of the later methods she conjured up—one thing about Marsh was that she was rarely at a loss for an unusual means of killing someone, and she came up with some real doozies) and the later recreation of the crime, demonstrate her theatre roots most ably—reading the scene where the body is discovered, for example, I could see it as a stage piece: the gong, the staircase, the body face-down with the dagger in the back, the houseguests standing around gaping.  Enter the Great Detective, stage left.  One thing you can always do with Marsh is visualize every scene, right down to the tray clothes and the leaves on the trees.  She was also an artist, and it shows.

Her theatre experience, and she had a great deal of it, is a great plus in terms of straightforward plotting and limning out basic characters.  But none of the characters in this particular book really develops much past the two dimensional stage—it’s like she’s cast them in the book and told them to take care of developing themselves.  In later books, this doesn’t really get much better, and her seeming determination to keep Alleyn’s roots a mystery even prevents her from doing much with him.  There are exceptions—A Surfeit of Lamphreys, for example, is a great example of what she could do with characters when she felt like bothering.  But just as Christie wasn’t particularly concerned with the people in her books, but the plot, one gets the idea that Marsh is more worried about setting the scene and then filling in the gaps with the expected people.

All of this sounds hyper critical now that I’m reading back through it, and I don’t mean it to be.  While I don’t reread her books as often as others, I do like them, and some of them, like the four set in New Zealand or the ones with a theatre setting, are quite evocative.  When she’s happy and comfortable with her setting, the books seem elevated to another level.  Here, though, her discomfort with the country house setting shows, I think.  So it’s a fun book, and the solution is a bit far-fetched, but it showed the promise of someone with better books in her.

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The Franchise Affair, Josephine Tey

April 18, 2013 by 6 Comments
The Franchise Affair, Josephine Tey

The Franchise Affair, Josephine Tey

As a mystery buff, I am obviously a big fan of what are known as Golden Age detective novels.  The “big three” novelists from that period are Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh–the women with the longest lists of published works and most rabid fans.  But there is a fourth British Crime Queen, and the only reason she’s not grouped with those first three that I can think of is that her career began to flourish much later than the others.  Josephine Tey’s productivity comes near the end of those years we think of as the Golden Age (roughly 1920-1950)—her first Inspector Grant novel (The Man in the Queue) debuted in 1929; Inspector Grant wouldn’t make another appearance in print for 7 years, and most of Tey’s mystery fiction appeared in the late 40’s and early 50’s.

The Franchise Affair is one of these later works.  Although it is ostensibly an Alan Grant novel, Grant is not the focus of the book, nor does he solve the crime.  That honor is given to country solicitor Robert Blair, who is just thinking of heading home one afternoon when his phone rings. Two local women are in need of legal assistance, as they have been accused of kidnapping and beating a 16 year old girl.  Blair, whose legal experience is mostly a case of drawing up wills and other routine matters, blusters a bit, but finally agrees to come to The Franchise, the big house on the outskirts of town.

There he is confronted with Marion Sharpe, her elderly, tart-tongued mother, and Inspector Grant, as well as the local inspector.  He hears the story, then meets the victim, Elizabeth “Betty” Kane, whose description of the house, its contents, the women, and their car, all tally.  The Sharpes deny ever seeing Betty Kane, let alone holding her hostage for a month.  Blair realizes the police will have difficulty proving a case against the Sharpes and seems to think the issue will die down, until a national rag gets hold of the story and blasts it all over the country.  As a result, the Sharpes become targets of abuse, Betty Kane is put on a pedestal, and Robert Blair, who is convinced that Betty is lying, determines to find out the truth before the police unearth any kind of evidence that might support her ludicrous story.

There are several things that stand out about this book.  First, it’s unusual for a crime novel to not involve a murder—one rather expects a body, after all, and here the only thing dead is the reputation of two women already viewed with some suspicion by the locals because they are not native to the town.  Second, Tey based this book on one of the most famous criminal trials in England, the Elizabeth Canning case, taking a form of the original woman’s name and the basic details and updating them into what was then a more contemporary setting.  Reading the details of Elizabeth Canning’s story years ago, I was really struck at how little things have changed in 250 years:  the press making a meal out of something and condemning people before they’ve even been tried, basic human nature, and the inherent decency of many people.  As a result, The Franchise Affair, despite being over 60 years old, stands up remarkably well as a study of human nature and the mob mentality.  Plus it’s a cracking good story, richly written, with really interesting characters.

Tey’s eye for all of this is pretty disparaging as Blair works tirelessly to find some piece of evidence that will knock the legs out from under Betty Kane’s story.  The Sharpes come in for a substantial amount of abuse from the townspeople, who start out as gawkers and end up engaging in a pretty nasty amount of vandalism and rumor-mongering.  The “newspaper” that prints Betty’s story makes no effort to verify it first, and while it does not mention the Sharpes by name, it has no qualms about printing a picture of their home and following up with numerous abusive letters written in support of Betty Kane.  It’s hard not to admire Blair, who refuses to give up and staggers on against public opinion and overwhelming odds, despite him being so out of his depth, or the Sharpes, who tire of hiding behind their walls and eventually venture into the town, heads held high.  What is remarkably difficult to grasp is why the police, once the proverbial poop hits the fan with the newspaper story, concentrate on proving the Sharpes’ guilt instead of their innocence–the press story is highly critical of the police for not bringing a case against the Sharpes, and you’d think the police would want to save some face by showing that they were right not to act.  Cynically, Tey suggests it’s more about damage control for them then a matter of guilt or innocence.  Even Blair’s legal pal Kevin points out to him that “justice is for the courts to decide.”

That may be true, but underneath the mystery here is what happens when justice lets one down.  Betty Kane is a really evil character, a nasty piece of work, and yet she manages to fool most everyone she encounters into believing she is nothing more than a young, innocent school girl who has been subjected to a traumatic sequence of events.  Her random selection of two innocent women to victimize in order to cover up her own wrong-doing could result in prison terms for them, and likely would have had Blair not been so dogged in pursuit of the truth.  And the police and the press would have been complicit in a miscarriage of justice.

There’s a lesson in all of that this is still relevant today, with our 24/7 media blitzes and the almost instantaneous dissemination of information that hasn’t been fact-checked.  I haven’t read this book for a number of years, but I found it still not only readable, but relevant.  Check it out.

A brief note: I am fully aware of leaving Margery Allingham off the list of Golden Age writers in the first paragraph.  I am not, I admit, very familiar with her books; the only one of them I’ve read I disliked so much that I never read another one.

Filed Under: Classics, Mystery Tagged With: , ,

The Mapping of Love and Death, Jacqueline Winspear

April 16, 2013 by 1 Comment
The Mapping of Love and Death

The Mapping of Love and Death

I know I’m reading these Maisie Dobbs books all out of order, but I’m just reading them as I come across them with the knowledge that I’m enjoying them so much that I’ll likely sit back down and reread all of them in order once I’ve gotten through them all.

So The Mapping of Love and Death is the 7th installment in the series, and it would appear, based on my limited evidence, to be a pivotal installment in terms of Maisie’s personal life and growth as a character.  The plot itself is engrossing—I really like a mystery where the investigator has to go back into the past in order to solve a case, and I especially like them when the mystery itself is only unearthed some years after the crime.  In this case, Maisie is contacted by The Cliftons, an American couple whose son Michael was killed during WWI.  His body has recently been discovered, along with some papers, a journal, and his equipment, and he appears to have had a liaison with an English nurse during the war.  It is this woman the Cliftons are hoping Maisie will be able to trace.  But Mr. Clifton, who is British by birth, has also seen the post mortem report and knows that Michael was not killed in action, but murdered.

This is a difficult investigation for Maisie, who needs to try and trace not only the unnamed English nurse, but also a murderer. Probing memories in people who might not want to remember is challenging, not only for Maisie the investigator but for Maisie the former nurse.  Michael was a cartographer during the war, and as Maisie weaves her way through various witnesses who had some knowledge of the cartography units, well. The reader gets an idea of just how difficult the task is: there is every chance that someone who might have been able to help her is dead, there are private nursing units as well as those sanctioned by the military, and since the men in Michael’s unit were all killed, the men who knew him best under those particular circumstances are unable to speak.  And when the Cliftons are attacked in their hotel room soon after meeting with Maisie, and when Maisie is later robbed of her document case, things become even less clear: is this a family matter or a war matter?

As a mystery, this is a solid enough effort—all of the major players are identified fairly early on, and it’s really more a matter of why Clifton was murdered than who murdered him; I had no issue figuring it out fairly early.  But the story is none the less compelling for that, and I was quickly caught up in his wartime romance, which parallels a new one for Maisie that readers still catching up with this series may be surprised by.  Then there are the changes in Maisie’s personal life as well—her mentor, Maurice, is ill, and her contact at Scotland Yard has been replaced by a less cooperative man.

I find the period details in these books to be spot on, and Winspear is great at capturing the atmosphere of London between the wars.  There is a major factual error right at the very beginning of the story that I’m not sure most people would catch, and as it has absolutely no bearing on the case, it wasn’t enough to actually put me off.  And I really enjoyed learning more about cartography and the importance of cartographers during the war–Winspear keeps the technical details light, but she offers just enough information to make me want to learn more about their roles in WWI.

What I think Winspear does really well in these books, though, is the characters.  Maisie is both realistic and continually evolving, and she’s an interesting character for the time period she exists in—a woman in what was typically a man’s profession then.  She’s not an amateur sleuth, but a professional inquiry agent, and one who runs her own business to boot.  For her time period, she’s very cutting edge, and it’s interesting to watch her make her way through the various barriers that existed to women back then, especially women who are not wealthy—comparing her to Lady Ella, who used her husband’s wealth to start a private nursing unit during the war, makes you realize just how difficult her path has been. I think a lot of writers might have been tempted to overplay this part, too, because Maisie isn’t just a woman earning her way in a man’s world, but a woman who’s pulling herself upward both financially and socially.  Winspear keeps her firmly balanced, though, and avoids letting things get either twee or unrealistic.  Instead, Maisie becomes a symbol of a time period of rapid social changes, but in a quiet, workmanlike way.  Maisie is never hysterical.  I like that in a character.

The only real issue I had with this book was that the end was tied up a little too neatly—in a case with roots firmly entrenched so far in the past, it seems a little much that Maisie would be able to get all of her questions satisfactorily answered, and there is also a final event that has no connection to the actual case at hand that she feels compelled to push for an answer to, even though it’s not only nosey of her but overbearing.  It felt like Winspear had gone perhaps one step too far in neatening everything up, and it wasn’t necessary.  It bugged me enough that I feel I have to mention it, although it happens so late in the book that I can’t mention what it is without completely spoiling the ending.

Maisie receives some life-altering news at the end as well that should allow the author to take her in even more interesting directions as she continues to explore her character.  I need to go back and read the earlier books in the series first, but I’m looking forward to spending time not only in Maisie’s past, but with her future as well.

 

On a more personal note: given the incident in Boston yesterday, I nearly pulled this post out of respect for the situation.  And then I remembered that mystery novels provide us with a reminder that good and justice always triumph. And in this case, the wheels of justice ground slowly, but in the end, justice won.  It’s an idea worth keeping in mind as we make our way through the upcoming days and weeks.  –donna

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Elegy for Eddie, Jacqueline Winspear

March 19, 2013 by 4 Comments
Elegy for Eddie, Jacqueline Winspear

Elegy for Eddie, Jacqueline Winspear

Among the mystery series recommended to me a few months back when I was writing about my interest in Between the Wars fiction was Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books.  Kindle recently had Elegy for Eddie at a reduced price, and investigations suggested that new readers could easily pick up with this book and not feel lost—which turned out to be true, incidentally.

I want to thank those of you who recommended these books—I really liked Maisie and her various cohorts, so much so that I suspect I’ll be going back and reading the entire series.

So Elegy for Eddie involves Maisie looking into the death of Eddie, an autistic horse whisperer she’s known since childhood.  Eddie’s death at a local paper factory seems to be an accident, but the costermongers who knew him insist that there’s something fishy about it and ask Maisie to investigate.  She soon finds that Eddie was doing more than running errands and was inadvertently tangled up in a plot involving a number of powerful men.  Meanwhile, she’s also finding her relationship with James to be suffocating and shifting so quickly that it’s hard to find her balance in it.

I’m going to raise a few eyebrows here and invoke a sacred name (at least to me): Dorothy L. Sayers.  The further I read into this book, the more the comparison came to my mind.  The time frame is nearly identical, and while Winspear is not the stylist Sayers was, she’s also not writing in the time period as Sayers was.  People often talk about how authentic Sayers books feel—well, they were authentic because they were written in the moment, and there’s something about a genuine 20’s and 30’s British voice that is pretty difficult for a contemporary writer to emulate.  For me, finding a writer who is able to somehow capture that element to a point where it’s hard to tell that the book isn’t period is nigh on impossible.  Winspear comes pretty darned close, though.  And Maisie reminds me very much of Harriet Vane in several ways: her logical approach to her work, her need to keep herself intact in her relationship with James and the struggle to find a way to balance all of that, and her adjustment to living in a completely different class than she was born into are all problems Harriet faces, as did any woman who chose to strike out independently in a time when that was still more a novelty than it should have been.

As a mystery novel, this has plenty to cheer about too—it not only reads like an authentic period piece, it’s written and structured much like a mid-thirties Golden Age detective novel—whiffs of political intrigue, suspects across a variety of social classes, clues hidden not just by verbal sleight of hand, but also in character attitudes, and in the end, a good chunk of moral ambiguity for Maisie.  These were complex times for people, and Winspear captures that complexity through the various characters and the situations they find themselves in.  It’s not perfectly done–sometimes it feels a little forced, like she’s trying too hard to get it just right.  But I found those moments few and far between and easily overlooked.

If you’re a fan of Sayers, you should check out Maisie Dobbs, but I will offer a caveat: no one can duplicate Sayers’ brilliance, so don’t expect that.  But this is the same type of mystery, one that not only offers an intriguing puzzle, but also looks at the political and social changes that were rapidly advancing at the time.  In other words, there’s some meat on the bones—and plenty to chew on.

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Cat Trick, Sofie Kelly

February 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Cat Trick, Sofie Kelly

Cat Trick, Sofie Kelly

You may recall, or you may not have been reading here then, that a few months back I did a You Should Be Reading…post about one of my new favorite mystery authors, Sofie Kelly.  Ms. Kelly’s latest Magical Cats offering, Cat Trick, was released a few weeks ago and I pretty much immediately downloaded the e-book.  The joys of instant books that you’re really looking forward to can NOT be overstated.

Anywho, Cat Trick is another solid entry in the series, although my initial reaction to it was to find myself a bit mystified.  Let me give you a spoiler-free plot summary, and then see if I can explain why I was puzzled.

Librarian Kathleen finds herself in several quandaries in this installment.  For starters, it looks like police detective Marcus is indeed interested in her, but he’s also a bit slow off the mark, which makes her wonder if he’s as interested in her as she is in him, even if she will not admit any interest at all to any of her friends.  Also gnawing at the back of her mind is whether or not to stay in Mayville Heights or return to her native Boston—her contract with the library is up for renewal and she needs to make a choice.  It’s a decision complicated by homesickness on one hand, her budding romance with Marcus on another, the likelihood of her cats adjusting to living in a huge city on a third hand, and how attached she is to both the library she’s rebuilt and the friends she’s made.

And there’s a mystery in there somewhere.  That was my initial problem with the book—the mystery elements seemed to take a back seat to the other elements for most of the book, a back seat so far back in the car that it was practically in the trunk.  Kathleen goes to work, meets her friends, does her volunteer work, goes to Tai Chi class, has a few dates with Marcus, and talks a lot to Owen and Hercules, her cats.  She seems to be spending very little time snooping, and while it appears that she may be just trying to stay out of Marcus’ way here, which he has repeatedly asked her to do, she’s also promised a friend she’d try to figure out who killed nasty Mike Glazer, a local bad boy who’s come back with a business proposition for the town.  There are tons of potential suspects, but Kathleen doesn’t seem to spend a whole lot of time thinking about them.

Upon further reflection, though, I realized that Kelly was toying a bit with the reader.  In the first three books in the series, Kathleen is still attempting to establish herself in the town, find her footing, and figure out how things work.  By this book, she’s an accepted member of the community, and a trusted one as well, one who has earned a bit of a reputation for finding things out.  In the first few books, Kathleen was a far more active detective, determined to snoop and dig out clues.  In this book, the clues come to her, sometimes without her, or the reader, even realizing it.

It’s actually a clever way of shaking things up a bit.  Kathleen seems distracted by her personal problems—and she is—and Kelly seems to be as well.  And the result of that is that the reader is distracted by them. Meanwhile, the clues are whizzing by, practically unnoticed.  It’s only near the end, when Kathleen is forced into action by a potential tragedy, that she realizes she’s had all the information she needs to solve things all along—and the reader realizes the same thing.

Meanwhile, though, while you’re missing all the clues because you’re distracted, you get to enjoy Kathleen and Marcus’ slow burn of a romance, the antics of Hercules and Owen, and the usual daily routines in Mayville Heights.  For me, if I’m going to be bamboozled, I like to enjoy myself while I’m clueless.  And Kelly’s light prose is highly readable, the characters are all likeable, and the cats are adorable.

So I’ll say it again.  You should be reading Sofie Kelly if you’re a mystery fan.  Great fun, great setting, great quirky characters, and two magical cats.  Can’t go wrong with that.

Filed Under: Mystery Tagged With: , ,

The Nancy Files

February 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment
80th anniversary edition of the first Nancy Drew mystery

80th anniversary edition of the first Nancy Drew mystery

Author’s note: this started out to be a completely different post, but a giant tangent led me to this subject instead.

When I was a kid, I was an insatiable reader.  I read all the kiddie classics, animal stories, and my favorite, mysteries.  The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, The Dana Girls—and Nancy Drew.  I didn’t have a ton of patience for The Hardy Boys, and I liked the Dana Girls well enough (a lot of people are unfamiliar with this series, which was written by the same syndicate as Nancy Drew, but if you like YA mysteries and school stories, The Dana Girls manage to combine both), and the Bobbsey Twins irked me, but I loved Nancy Drew and eagerly devoured the books.

Aside from the fact that they were mysteries, there was just something about these books that resonated with me, although at the time, I really couldn’t have told you what it was and I doubt I was even aware that they were resonating—honestly, I was not the most self-aware child.  I just read, and read, and read them, over and over and over.  I saved my pocket money to buy my own copies, asked for them as gifts, and eventually managed to collect the whole series, plus extras.

Extras?  I was so into them that even as an adult I was still rummaging for them in yard sales and antique stores, not to mention library book sales and used bookstores.  At that point I was looking for original prints of the first 24 books in the series, which are significantly different from their reprinted counterparts, and in at least one case, The Message in the Hollow Oak, the entire plot is different (plus Carson Drew has a gun!  I found that somewhat thrilling when I first read it because it seemed very much like something he wouldn’t have—and apparently I was right because it never appears again).  I’ve picked up a few first editions along the way (joking that I could always sell them to put my daughter through college, a step I’m happy to report was not necessary—I confess I’d miss them) and generally enjoyed collecting them, even as an adult.

It wasn’t until 15 years ago or so that I ever stopped to wonder just why I was so into these books.  I mean, on the face of it, as an adult, they’re obviously too juvenile for someone my age, and as a mystery reader, they’re too simplistic plot-wise and frequently rely on coincidence and lucky hunches, two traits that the average mystery reader deplores and which I, as a reviewer, would consider to be a big fat negative when critiquing a book.  Even my daughter didn’t like them when she was the right age to read them for those reasons.

So obviously, not the mystery elements.  The books are written to a formula as well and make use of so many hackneyed tropes—threatening phone calls, mysterious notes warning Nancy off the case, disguises, inept Scooby-Doo villains—and those tropes are repeated constantly.  You’ll be reading along and think “It’s about time for someone to send Nancy a threatening letter” or “Time for Bess or George to twist an ankle” so they can’t continue pursuing a suspect.  So not the plotting, not the narrative.

Yeah, it’s the characters.  Specifically, Nancy herself.  When I was 8 or 9, I wanted to BE Nancy Drew.  Not so much so I’d get threatened and conked on the head, but because I wanted her life.

I could not, at that age, imagine anything cooler than being an amateur detective, solving puzzling cases to the general acclaim of the population.  I mean, I love puzzles.  Not jigsaw puzzles (my spatial skills are crap) and not even crossword puzzles, which I’m ironically not very good at, but puzzles.  I’m talking about things that need to be analyzed.  Situations, people, footprints leading to a mysterious bungalow…I’m not exactly nosey, but I am curious.  I like to know why things are the way they are and what makes people tick.  Can’t help it.  If I were a cat, I’d be the kind that always has to know what’s on the other side of the door.

But as far as Nancy was concerned, it was more than the puzzles for me because I think I realized even at age 10 that Nancy relied entirely on too many coincidences and hunches to be a real detective.  Facts are pretty scarce in the Nancy Drew books, frankly.  Except where Nancy’s life is concerned—then you get facts aplenty (except for what mysterious illness killed the late Mrs. Drew.  I used to imagine her wasting gradually away on a chaise lounge for some gruesome reason.  Self-aware I was not.  Imagination I had in spades…).  But once I started thinking about it, I realized that all that mystery stuff was just window-dressing to 10 year old me.  To 10 year old me, Nancy had it MADE.

When I say I wanted to be Nancy Drew, what I really mean is that I wanted what she had.  Her own room.  Freedom to come and go as she pleased.  No siblings to babysit, no chores to do because they had a housekeeper.  A CAR. Nancy’s roadster convertible was the symbol of everything about her: it was not just a status symbol, but a symbol of her independence—she could go anywhere she wanted—to a summer holiday camp, to a dude ranch, on a coastal drive, to Amish country.  And not just because she had that awesome car, but because there was no shortage of money—for joining country clubs, buying sailboats, taking flying lessons, having a generous wardrobe allowance, taking trips.

Nancy went everywhere: she went to NYC, she went to Hawaii, she went to Canada, she went to China for pete’s sake and on safari and to South America.  At the drop of a hat.  “Oh Dad, this case is at such a dead end.  I’m afraid I might never solve it unless I can somehow go to Hong Kong.”  “Well Nancy, as it so happens, I have business in Hong Kong so get your passport and pack your bag! And of course Bess and George can go if they have their parents’ permission!”

I also wanted Nancy’s father.  Not in THAT way, but because he was the source of all the awesomeness.  I knew my dad wasn’t ever buying me a brand new sporty convertible, or even an unsporty one (And I was right!  He did not!) or handing over some massive amount of money for a clothing allowance, or announcing “Hey, how’d you like to go to Hawaii?” anytime soon. I don’t mean to sound unfair to my dad, but it’s true.  Among other things, there were four of us and to feed and clothe on an income that was probably 1/100th of Carson Drew’s.  That’s what made these books like fantasyland to me.  The kindly, wealthy, uber-generous father. The opportunity to go anywhere and be anything.  And the devoted housekeeper who did all the cooking and cleaning so that Nancy could go out and be all spunky and accomplished.  The devoted chums and the dishy boyfriend and the loving aunt and all those grateful people she helped.  Everyone loved Nancy Drew.  Except the bad guys, and half the time even they’d grudgingly admit that they admired her.  Who wouldn’t want that?

Plus, you know, she could do anything.  Model a dress?  Sure.  Fly a plane?  Absolutely.  Tap dance, sail, swim, play golf and tennis like a pro, act in plays, and do charity work on the side in her spare time.  George got to be good at judo.  Poor Bess got to eat.  But Nancy?  Could eat like a horse and never gain an ounce, then rescue a drowning child from a stream, dust herself off, and keep on going like a boss, chasing pickpockets and jewel thieves and having another lucky hunch if the going got tough, then finish off her day with a date with Ned Nickerson (who is, of course, the star quarterback at his college) where they’ll maybe find a clue or get stuck at the top of a ferris wheel or go to a fancy pants dinner dance.

As an adult, that all sounds exhausting, but 10 year old me ate it up.  I really hoped life would be like that when I got to be 18, and of course it was not.  There was no convertible, no housekeeper, no wealthy dad, and no college quarterback.  I’ve never been to China or Africa or even Hawaii.  But by then I’d accepted that  no one gets a life like that, and you know, my life turned out just fine without all that.  In fact, I’ve got it pretty good.

But I gotta tell you, even 40+ years later, I still want that car.

 

Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: , , ,

Out of Circulation, Miranda James

February 14, 2013 by 2 Comments
Out of Circulation, Miranda James

Out of Circulation, Miranda James

I have said this a million times before, but it bears repeating. Librarians go with cats. And librarians and cats make the best amateur detectives. They’re both all about the research, after all.

There are, of course, a lot of mystery fiction series that feature librarians and cats. I’m going to tell you why I like Miranda James’ The Cat in the Stacks series so much before getting to the latest entry in the series:

• Charlie Harris is the librarian. To be specific, he’s the archivist for a small college in Athena, Mississippi and a volunteer for the public library. That’s right, he. I love the twist that the main character in this series is a male librarian.

• Diesel is Charlie’s cat. Charlie’s very large, very vocal cat. Diesel is a Maine Coon. He’s also a rescue cat. And he’s normal. No magical powers, no mystery-solving skills. Just an ordinary cat—curious, loyal (Maine Coons tend to be), begs for food, butters people up. Diesel mostly functions as an ice-breaker here, and his lone detective skill is his ability to judge character—if he doesn’t like someone, Charlie takes note.

• The setting. I’ve never lived in the south, and I really don’t want to (I much prefer our blizzards to the heat down there, sorry) but if I had to, I’d want to live in a place like Athena. James nails the whole small town thing, and the small college, too (I went to a teeny college—this is just right).

• The secondary characters are great. I like that James explores Charlie’s relationships with his adult children, Laura (an actress) and Sean (a lawyer-to-be), with his housekeeper and her daughter (one of the local cops), with the two boarders who also live with him, and with his lady friend (Charlie is widowed, and it’s refreshing to see an author take romance for older adults seriously).

The best word I can think of to describe Charlie is courtly. He is the very essence of a Southern gentleman, and so is Diesel. I really like that Charlie is a rather reluctant detective–he doesn’t “look into things” out of any need for adventure or any preening sense of vanity.  He does so only when asked, and because it’s the right thing to do.  Charlie is a gentle soul who dislikes confrontation and prefers to live his life quietly.  That’s not to say he isn’t curious about these things.  The man is a librarian, after all.  But he also has ethics–there is a rather touching scene near the end of the book where Charlie confesses to the Ducote sisters that he “had to be thorough” in his investigations and so he looked into their histories.  If he hadn’t told them, they’d have never known.  But Charlie would have.

So, Out of Circulation. This is the 4th entry into this series, and it starts out with a scene so familiar to me that I had flashbacks: Charlie is hosting the Friends of the Library Board members, who are planning a big fundraising gala and politely shredding each other in the process. Been there. Oh have I been there. We meet The Ducote Sisters, Miss An’gel and Miss Dickce, in their 80’s and the Grand Dames of Athena Society. We meet Vera Cassity, who wants to be a Grand Dame of Athena Society but who was, alas, born on the wrong side of the tracks and merely married her money. We meet Sissy Beauchamp, born to be a Grand Dame but currently engaging in a very public affair with Vera’s husband Morty. The rest I leave to your imagination, except to note that it turns out that Charlie’s housekeeper, Azalea, hates Vera with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Needless to say, Charlie doesn’t really enjoy his meeting.

And the fundraising gala takes a turn for the worst when someone pushes the pushy Vera down a flight of stairs. Everyone has a motive, including Azalea, and the Police Chief uses this opportunity to put the screws to Kanesha, Azalea’s daughter, who is a threat to his job. He insists Azalea is the best suspect and removes Kanesha from the case, tying her hands. So she turns to Charlie to investigate, and since Charlie certainly is fond of his housekeeper and her cooking, he agrees. And the Ducote sisters, who are rather ticked off that someone ruined their party, also want Charlie to look into things and he can’t offend them.

This particular entry in the series has a number of nice plot turns that keep things jumping, including Vera sending Charlie a picture of her mother just a day before she’s killed. It turns out that the past may hold the key to this mystery, and Charlie has the key to the archives.

This is a great little series that features wonderful characters, but equally important to me is that the books are well-written, with solidly structured plots, good dialogue, well-drawn secondary characters, and smartly set-up mysteries. This entry is no exception. James cleverly uses the gala—a masquerade—to tell a lot about his circle of suspects just by describing their costumes, and uses Vera’s Scarlett O’Hara costume to great advantage when staging her murder, just as she uses the board meeting to introduce us to the tensions that run very near the surface in the town between “old money” and “new money”. What she does not do, however, is make Vera so unredeemable that the reader hopes Charlie never finds out who killed her. Instead she creates just enough sympathy for the character through Charlie’s discoveries that you want to see justice served.

Out of Circulation is good cozy writing at its finest. If you’re unfamiliar with the series, you can certainly start with this one and you won’t be at all lost with the characters or the setting—James is great about making the series accessible to newcomers. And you’ll like Charlie and Diesel so much you’ll want to go back and read the first three, I’ll bet.

Filed Under: Mystery Tagged With: , , , ,

Proof of Guilt, Charles Todd

February 7, 2013 by 3 Comments
Proof of Guilt

Proof of Guilt

Pretty much spoiler-free reading ahead, so have at it!

It’s my favorite time of year again—time for a new Ian Rutledge mystery by Charles Todd.  I was not disappointed.  Rutledge is still just as complicated a character as ever and the mother and son writing team who make up “Charles Todd” are still as deft at plotting as ever.

Proof of Guilt is a real corker of a mystery.  Rutledge is sent to examine a dead body found lying in the street in Chelsea.  The man has no identification on him, no money, no laundry marks, nothing except a very expensive gold watch.  No one knows who he is, and the erstwhile constable called to the scene has called the Yard because he finds it suspicious that the body appears to have been dragged some distance, yet there are no drag marks anywhere near it.  The watch turns out to be a slim clue and leads Rutledge to Lewis French, head of a wine firm.  The watch belongs to French, but the body doesn’t. And French is missing, along with his car and his cousin Matthew, who was due to arrive in England from the Portuguese branch of the firm.  It is indeed a perplexing puzzle—two men missing with no bodies, and one dead body who is neither of the missing men.  All connected by that watch.

I have come to admire Todd’s ability to plot over the course of this series—just when I think I’m on the right track, I find out I’m not even in the right town, and they twist things so tightly you think they can’t possibly wring another turn out of it, only to find out they can.  You have to be prepared for a truly complicated mystery to read these books, especially the later ones.  But it’s fun to watch Rutledge unravel it all.

Ian is as driven as ever to get to the truth of things.  In this case, he has several reasons for doing so: first, he finds himself with a new Acting Chief Superintendent to deal with while Bowles is on medical leave.  The new Chief is a bit of an unknown quantity, but he’s used to running a county police force—he’s not a London Yard man.  As such, he runs things as he would a smaller, more contained force, feeling that his purpose is to process cases in a timely manner, get the evidence to go to trial, and let the court sort out the whole proof of guilt.  So he interferes with Rutledge’s instincts quite a bit here and insists on an arrest based on circumstantial evidence.  Rutledge is convinced that’s the wrong move and that a murderer will go free.  Plus one of the suspects is an attractive young woman to whom he finds himself inexplicably drawn.

There is no lack of suspects here—there’s a jilted fiancé, a current fiancé, both of the missing men, French’s disgruntled, unhappy sister, a man with a personal ax to grind with the family, the firm’s senior clerk, and a few others.  Sorting through potential motives and alibis takes a great deal of time, time Rutledge’s boss seems disinclined to let him have.  It’s all very complicated, so it’s important to pay attention to details when reading.

There were one or two minor annoyances for me.  First, Rutledge spends entirely too much time driving all over England–this is an ongoing issue with this series in some ways.  On the one hand, Rutledge does a lot of his thinking and reasoning in his car while driving from one place to another, so it serves as a handy means of giving him the time to work through his thought processes.  On the other hand, we spend a lot of time driving all over England with him.  Second, there’s an unusual (for Todd) hole in the plot—to say more would spoil things, and it’s only a small hole, but still.  It is there.  And finally, the first two chapters are both brief and used to set up the rest of the plot.  The second of those chapters in fact serves very little purpose, and the information in it might have been better delivered in some other fashion.  At the time, I didn’t really think of it, but once I’d finished the book, I did just wonder “why is that chapter there?  It doesn’t need to be.”

But there were, of course, lots of positives.  The writing is, as always, seamless (I’m always astounded that this is a writing team when I remember to think of it), and the secondary characters are well-drawn and well-developed.  I am rather hoping that one of them, a former military man tangentially connected to the initial crime, is someone Todd plans to use again in future installments—he has great potential to become a male confidant for Rutledge, perhaps even a friend, something the character could use.  Rutledge needs to continue to grow, and having a sounding board who is not the voice of Hamish gibbering in his head would help with that.  Todd also drops a big bombshell on Rutledge near the end of the book that also suggests there’s a shake-up coming for the character in future novels.  It will be interesting to see what happens with that, and whether the outcome is positive or negative.  There is also some suggestion–the tiniest hint–that Bowles might not ever be able to return to duty, in which case Rutledge will have to learn to deal with his new superior and his goals, a development that promises just as much friction as his adversarial relationship with Bowles had.

So in a nutshell, I’d say this is another winning installment in the series.  If you’re a fan, you’ll like it.  If you’ve never read any of these books, you could start here and you’d be fine, but this is one series I really suggest reading from start to finish, not just because you need the backstory and to watch the character growth, but because I’ve yet to be disappointed by any of the Ian Rutledge books.

Filed Under: Historical, Mystery Tagged With: , ,

Pride and Predator, Sally Wright

January 31, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Pride and Predator

Pride and Predator

Sally Wright’s Pride and Predator was another goody from my recent box’o books my friend sent me.  I’m going to start by saying that I’d never heard of her or these books, but my attention was caught by the setting (Scotland—my friend must’ve been on a major Scotland kick) and the time period: 1961.  The back cover copy said it was reminiscent of Golden Age detective fiction.  That was enough for me.

If you like dense, well-plotted mysteries, then this will be right up your alley.  And if you like old school mystery fiction, you’ll love this.  I found it very like Ngaio Marsh in nature, from the methodical clueing to the lavish descriptions.  In my opinion, that’s not a bad thing at all.

The plot is simple enough—a much-loved church pastor has arranged with long-time friend Alex to go on an annual nature hike, but he never arrives at their meeting place.  His body is discovered near an open picnic hamper, dead from anaphylaxis caused by an allergy to bee stings.  No one initially thinks twice about this except Alex, the local Laird, who knows Jon well enough to know he would not have had any kind of picnic hamper with him on a walking trip like this.  Alex mentions these suspicions to his friend Ben Reese, an American archivist who has arrived at the family estate to value the family heirlooms.  Reese is something of an amateur detective as well, having worked in Intelligence during WWII, and after he examines the hamper, he concludes that there might be cause to think that Jon has been very cleverly murdered.   Numerous other crafty attacks take place, and the murderer makes many attempts at misdirection, but at the end of it all, Ben figures it out and nabs the killer in the act of attempting to silence someone who can connect him to the crime.

Here’s what I liked: I liked Ben, both as a character and as a detective.  He’s complex enough as a character to make him interesting—his WWII background, the fact that his wife has died not so long ago, his knowledge of history and artifacts, his sense of presence and command.  This last one is important because, of course, he’s only looking into Jon’s death unofficially, hoping to uncover enough evidence to get the police to re-open the case; as such, no one has to say a word to him, and yet even the most recalcitrant suspect or witness seems unable to tell him to buzz off, willingly answering his extremely prying and sometimes impertinent questions.  I appreciated his methodical work in going through his list and checking things off and sitting back and thinking things through.  There are no coincidences here.

I also liked the murder method (I know that sounds wrong, but bear with me).  One of the things I adore about Ngaio Marsh’s books is that she invented the most creative methods of killing people—a magnum of champagne falling on someone’s head, having someone baled up in bale of raw wool—I like cleverness and creativity so much more than just bashing someone on the head or shooting them.  That takes no real thought at all.  But arranging to have someone who’s allergic stung by bees—now that takes some cleverness.  I like to think that the bad guy is going to be a worthy adversary, you know, and not just some thug with access to a gun or a bust of Julius Caesar.

I found the secondary characters well-drawn in general, not as well done as Ben or Alex or a few of the other major players, obviously, but given enough life that they weren’t simply cardboard figures being shoved about to suit the author’s purpose.  There were no wasted words or unnecessary scenes tossed in just for atmosphere, either.  Everything Wright puts in this book has a purpose.  And with that in mind, I’ll also note that the author did her homework with regard to things like beekeeping.  Although it would be going too far to compare the information on beekeeping to something like Dorothy L. Sayers’ research into change-ringing for The Nine Tailors, I did a little quick fact-checking and found no inaccuracies.  In fact, I found it all rather interesting—not enough to become a beekeeper, mind you, but still.  Interesting.

Where I thought this book did not succeed was with the dialogue.  First, some of it was just too stilted to sound natural.  Second, there seemed to be a reliance on a few words or phrases to suggest a Scots dialect, like the characters constantly saying “a’tall” for “at all” or “verra” instead of “very” (I was grateful, mind you, that there wasn’t a single “ooch aye” in there).  For me, this didn’t convey a dialect so much as convey an author sprinkling a few phrases throughout with the hope that that was enough.  I’d have preferred she just didn’t bother because after a while I started to feel an urge to count the “a’talls” to see how often she was dropping it in there.  It got a bit annoying.

One other thing that really bugged me was the sudden shifts in the point-of-view, which I found disconcerting.  I’d be reading a passage about what Ben was planning to do next and suddenly find myself inside his head and in the first person, then oops, back to third person with no warning.  It was jarring.

Pride and Predator gets off to a bit of a slow start, but it’s really worth sticking with it.  I can honestly say that I had no clue who the killer was until the final confrontation between Ben and the bad guy.  I’m not stumped all that often, so if a mystery is fairly clued and I can’t figure it out, then I consider that an endorsement.

Filed Under: Mystery Tagged With: , ,
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