Lee Child, “Gone Tomorrow”

I’m slightly concerned about Jack Reacher. I know it’s presumptuous of me — the guy has shown me, over the course of 13 books, that he is supremely capable of taking care of himself. Or of me, or of any number of villains (in Gone Tomorrow, highly violent, I lost count at 8). But Reacher’s computer skills are deficient. I think Lee Child needs to rectify that before Reacher steps out on his next adventure.

Here’s the formula, and it’s a great one: Reacher is the lone-wolf American hero with an objection to bad guys. He’s a wanderer, a guy who travels around the country on buses, with a wad of cash and a fold-up toothbrush. Having served in the Military Police he has all kinds of useful skills like marksmanship and dirty fighting tactics. He’s also huge: six feet six and two hundred fifty pounds. The skill I envy him the most is always knowing exactly what time it is, without wearing a watch.

Gone Tomorrow follows the usual Reacher formula only this time it’s set in New York City and opens — you gotta love it — on a subway train in the middle of the night. Reacher’s eye is drawn to a woman whom he speculatively identifies as a terrorist wearing an explosive belt.  He attempts to talk her out of blowing up the train. Instead, she shoots herself.

It’s a wonderful piece of misdirection and Child follows it up with many more; it’s almost playful, the number of times he turns his narrative backward. I haven’t been enchanted by the last two Child novels but I liked this one so much that I delayed finishing it — the greatest compliment there is.  It was, I have to say, a poor choice on my part since there was a lot of bloodshed in the last few chapters: I am sorry I finished it at 11 p.m.  (Not a good night’s sleep.) But as a piece of escape reading, it was artful.

Still: I want Reacher to be hypercompetent, no — omnicompetent. He is Action Man so he can’t spend much time at a computer screen (not very dramatic unless you’re Hugh Jackman in Swordfish) but I don’t like thinking there’s something I can do better than he can. I want him hacking into the Pentagon. I’m hoping that by next summer, when next he appears on the scene, Child will have taken care of this.

Deborah Crombie, “Where Memories Lie”

What does it mean for the classic English procedural mystery that two of the best practitioners of the genre are American? Elizabeth George is from Huntington Beach, California and Deborah Crombie is from Texas. This makes me imagine them as longing desperately for some mist, some humidity, some lack of definition, some ambiguity — aha! England! I haven’t been to Texas but the searing flat light and surf culture of Huntington Beach are the anti-England. London is the perfect antidote.

Crombie does her research and she has a good ear — good enough to fool me, anyway. (They call it “drink-driving” in the UK: who knew?) And in contrast to the P.D. James I just finished, Where Memories Lie satisfied my appetite for character study as well providing a soundly plotted mystery. Here we get a tale involving the wartime past of Gemma’s friend Erika Rosenthal.  We also get Gemma’s mother’s illness and resulting family squabbles.  All very satisfying.

But I do start to worry about Gemma’s family and friends. The last book involved her parter Duncan Kincaid’s sister. Two back, her friend and former landlady Hazel got dragged into a murder plot. Of course this is one of the implications of a long-running mystery series. We as readers are looking for a story that is, to a certain extent, naturalistic. We want clear, literate, un-showy prose, believable characters, practically credible mysteries. Yet the genre is also remarkably artificial. Writing effective murder mysteries must be like designing tennis dresses: your parameters are very clearly defined and if you stray beyond them, you have failed. Your item (dress, book) loses its functionality. Or becomes unrecognizable.

It’s very much to Crombie’s credit that she has cranked out 12 of these books and that they continue to improve, to get more imaginative, more thoughtful, more complex. And it must be very daunting to finish book 12 and then cast your eye around your fictional landscape, looking for the next place to plant a dead body. I think the whisper of discontent I’m feeling here is caused by another unspoken convention of the genre: your detectives can — indeed, must — have these spectacularly eventful careers, one cleared case after another. (A convention, by the way, challenged by British  newcomer Susan Hill.) But maybe the ancillary characters should be left alone, to provide a respite for the protagonist? Or … no, I think this is it. By involving Gemma’s and Duncan’s  friends and families in the plots, Crombie points a little bit too emphatically to the artifice she works within. I know the great  Sayers did this first, but her books never aspired to anything beyond artifice. Gemma James washes dishes and worries about her children and gets nervous giving a dinner party. This situates her much closer to real life than was ever true for Harriet Vane. So Crombie’s utilization of the friends-and-family as central to the mystery plots is faintly jarring, it just pushes a little too hard against the verisimilitude in which her books are situated.

P.D. James, “The Private Patient”

We mystery junkies depend on our fixes. Most of our favorite writers crank out a book a year, and for the most part this is a comfortable, steady relationship. We know we’ll get a few hours of diversion and perhaps expend a little intellectual effort on solving the mystery before the final exposition. Current serial mysteries also keep us up to date with the extra-curricular activities of our favorite detectives and their households. (This sometimes requires chunks of awkward exposition for readers jumping into the series in mid-stream.) It’s a delicate balance — the author has to expend the majority of her effort on the puzzle, but the character stuff can’t be too cursory.

I’ve always been drawn to P.D. James‘ detective, Adam Dalgliesh, a traditional Scotland Yard officer who writes poetry in his down time.  He’s complex, haunted — you could say that James pioneered this kind of mystery in which the solution of the crime entails acknowledgment of the moral stain, the distastefulness of the job, the horror, the horror. But James’ work has been a little bit dry lately. It’s always been painstaking, but there were passages of The Private Patient that felt fussy, almost academic. I’ve never cared much about exposition or the puzzle itself, so I’d be quick to feel this was over-emphasized, at the expense of the characters’ private lives.  Looking at the list of the recent Dalgliesh books I find I’ve skipped several, in the course of which his sidekick Kate Miskin apparently embarked on a relationship with a colleague and Dalgliesh himself fell in love.  But in The Private Patient, these relationships were alluded to rather than explored. The mystery itself, a rather simple murder of a rather unpleasant woman, never really engaged me.

I can see how a woman as intelligent and experienced as James would want to stretch this genre, but it isn’t very flexible.  The narrative has to keep moving forward –too much musing on morals and the readers will put the book down. Worse, they won’t pick up the next one in the series.

Junot Diaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”

This is way outside of my normal range, and getting into it was a chore, I have to admit.  It was clear from the start that Diaz has an enormous tool-box as a writer. I’m still in awe at the way he slides, within a single sentence, from street to scholarly and back without getting annoying.  Out of many sentences I highlighted, here’s one long one that can stand for much I loved and found difficult about this book:

“Student today don’t mean na’, but in a Latin American whipped in to a frenzy by the Fall of Arbenz, by the Stoning of Nixon, by the Guerillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs — in a Latin America already a year and a half into the Decade of the Guerilla — a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe.”

To be honest, I’m not sure what he’s talking about half the time (I mean, physics and Latin American history; not my best categories) but I’m hooked.  And it’s not just the confidence and energy of the authorial voice. He is also supremely humane.  The narrative follows the lives of three  generations of Dominicans, Oscar and his sister Lola, their mother Belicia, and the aunt (known as “la Inca”)who raised Beli. The locale shuttles back and forth between the US and the DR, the time frame between the present and the past.  We start with Oscar, a fat, virginal nerd in Paterson, New Jersey, a loser by pretty much any standard. You have to love this kid, but you cringe at his complete inability to negotiate his world. Gradually, as Diaz draws us through his family history, Oscar’s predicament becomes comprehensible, and eventually, inevitable.

The prologue discusses the concept of “fukú,” “the Curse and the Doom of the New World.” The book’s most consistent narrator, Yunior, talks about how his parents saw it all around them — the aura of Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s longtime strongman. And it’s this “fukú” acting in the lives of the de Leon family that ultimately forms their characters and determines their fates.

For the first hundred or so pages, I was reading dutifully.  It was interesting, and I cared mildly about Oscar, but when the action moved to the Dominican Republic, the language and the characters took on a warmth and a generosity, a liveliness and flavor that were much more sympathetic.

Also astounding: two scenes in the cane fields. Symbolically loaded: sugar cane requires cheap brutal manpower to harvest. I can’t be wrong in thinking this is a colonial crop?  And what goes on there, amid the tall, tough stems, is the worst perversion of the worst colonial system, a landscape turned doubly against its inhabitants.

I dimly remember the Aristotelian notion that “pity and horror” are two of the principal components of tragedy. Diaz is way too subtle to stress how The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao qualifies for that title.  We can figure that out for ourselves.

Mary Anne Shaffer, “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society”

At first The Guernsey Literary etc. etc. reminded me of Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road. Epistolary narrative based on love of books, featuring England after the war… you’ll admit it’s close enough.  Shaffer’s book, though, is fiction, so she can move away from the basic premise and start pushing her characters around the way a novelist should.

The principal of these is Juliet Ashton, a young woman writer (are you surprised?) who is casting about for her post-war voice. (We’re in 1946.) The rest of the cast belong either to her literary life in London (publisher, best friend) or her new friends on Guernsey. It’s adroitly put together: Shaffer eases you into harrowing passages then cuts away briskly. Fortunately this isn’t really an adorable tale of cute oldsters founding some primordial wartime book group. Guernsey — who knew? — was occupied by the Germans beginning in 1940, and the privations included not only extreme shortages of food, fuel, and soap, but also a news blackout. What’s more two of the characters narrate their experiences in Continental camps (Ravensbruck, Belsen) and nothing could be further from cutesy than that.

A few of the characters are annoying: there’s a witch, a rustic who dreams up dreadful food (shades of “The Vicar of Dibley”) a spiteful spinster, a rich American with gleaming teeth. But there’s also a delicious stubborn four-year-old. Best yet, the diction — word choice, turn of phrase — is excellent. Juliet Ashton sounds English enough to have fooled me, and I’m a terrible pedant about this.

This title, by the way, would never have worked before computers brought us the auto-fill feature.

Sara Gruen, “Water for Elephants”

Much as I loved Sara Gruen’s Riding Lessons and Flying Changes, I knew they were on-the-job training. After all, there’s Water for Elephants perched on the New York Times best-seller list. And well-deserved. People clearly love this book, and Gruen is such a crackerjack writer that it was a real pleasure to see her widen her scope and achieve something bigger and richer than her previous novels.

I was really impressed by the double frame that starts it off.  First Jacob Jankowski is in the midst of a crisis under a circus tent — that’ll grab you by the throat. Then Jacob is 93, in a retirement home, subject to all the indignity that entails. Then we finally get back to Jacob Jankowski, age 23, effectively running away to join a circus in the 1930s.  Depression, prohibition, trains, hoboes, roustabouts, the whole thing. Lots of big characters including the lovely Marlena, the equestrian performer in pink sequins, the red-headed dwarf Kinko, and a wonderful elephant with a sense of humor and a sense of justice.

Gruen goes back and forth between Jacob’s florid circus past and his dreary nursing-home present. Please note, both the circus and the nursing home are highly ritualized closed communities. Fortunately Gruen knows how to make a story lively so the linoleum-and-rubber-food version is used as punctuation, almost to bring down the high emotional pitch of the circus narrative.

I knew she had to have done a ton of research. This is just not material a writer has at her fingertips. But boy, did it ever feel authentic. Sights, smells, sounds, the grand structure and the small detail are all in place. My problem with the book is a question of taste rather than execution: it was just a little feverish for me, kind of a Baz Luhrmann vision of something that’s already pretty thrilling. And the end struck me as corny, if perfectly appropriate. Maybe the difficulty is that the contrast Gruen sets up, between the circus and the nursing home, is so great as to be irreconcilable. Maybe there isn’t much room left for average plain-vanilla normal life. On the other hand, perhaps it’s a fable and I’m reading the whole thing too literally. Lord knows that would be nothing new.

Eva Rice, “The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets”

Yesterday I walked past a rain-drenched lilac tree and stopped to smell it.  The sweet scent took me back (smells will do that) to the spring of my seventeenth year when I spent hours roaming around my hometown drowning in successive waves of sweet springtime florals — lily of the valley, magnolia, lilac — and waiting for my life to start.

Eva Rice has that down. The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is an ode to the expectancy of late adolescence, that period of pent-up potential and eagerness, heightened self-awareness, enormous physical appeal and vitality. Lord, it’s no wonder teenagers get into such trouble.

The novel is set in mid-1950s England, a brilliant choice, for Rice makes Penelope Wallace’s world reflect her own unsettled expectant state. London is seething with Teds (those guys in the zoot suits) and fever for the new music. Rationing ends. There are marvelous clothes to be had, but they are novel. A few American characters move through the book like scarlet macaws, exotic and impossible to miss.

Plot? Well, you know what they say, it’s either “a stranger comes to town” or “a man goes on a journey.”  In this case, it’s the stranger: Penelope meets Charlotte Ferris and this new friendship shakes up, then ultimately settles her life. Charlotte and Penelope are the  kinds of girls who live in big houses and go to debutante parties. Penelope actually lives in an immense medieval monster called Milton Magna, as much of a character as any of the humans.

Given the setting and the concerns, I would have had a hard time resisting this book anyway.  But, oh, my lord, the charm!  ”I met Charlotte in London one afternoon while waiting for a bus.  Just look at that sentence! That in itself is the first extraordinary thing…” Eva Rice is one of those writers who takes you by the wrist and draws you into the party, gets you a drink, introduces you to the coolest-looking guy in the room (possibly Harry Delancy, the young magician with mismatched eyes) and checks on you from time to time to make sure you’re having a marvelous time.

This book very strongly reminded me of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, a sacred text from my youth.  Similar concerns, similar strong first-person narrative, but lots more glamor.  I was somewhat concerned that, ultimately, it would be content-free, but Rice has a few tricks up her sleeve (one, I have to say, a little clunky, you’ll know when you reach it). Plot developments at the end not only recast the events, but shuffle the importance of the characters, somehow move the center of the book out of Penelope’s own 18-year-old head into — gosh! The other people in the world! Who had separate existences before she came along, and still do!

There’s so much fabulous writing here, but one scene stands out: Penelope and Charlotte get to hear Johnnie Ray, a matinee-idol singer, perform live at the Palladium. Rice conjures the female bacchanale, a flicker away from hysteria: the screaming, the tears, the fainting, the absolute unreason.

So many lovely nuggets: a man who is killed by a falling bookcase. Nouveaux riches “who had taken the liberty of labeling their art as though we were in a museum.” Oh, and about damage to a dress: “It isn’t ruined. Any good dry cleaner will get ash out of satin.” Got that?

Sue Grafton, “T is for Trespass”

Sue Grafton is such a professional. Could she possibly have known, when she wrote A is for Alibi 20-some years ago, that she was going to work her way through the whole alphabet? Did she know that her formula would hold up, that she could produce 20  satisfying mysteries based on that template without boring us (or herself)?  

Here’s how it works. T is for Trespass is narrated, naturally, by private investigator Kinsey Millhone. It’s 1987 in Santa Teresa (Santa Barbara to you) CA. There’s a predator on the loose, a sociopath named, for our purposes, Solana Rojas. Grafton alternates between Kinsey’s point of view, in the first person, and Solana’s, with an omniscient narrator. There’s a real estate subplot.

This is one of those deals where you know from the start who the bad gal  is and furthermore what she’s doing, so the enjoyment, and the suspense, come from watching Grafton knit together her two plots. You know that eventually Kinsey will get her hooks into Solana — the genre tells us this. But you don’t know how she is going to pull it off. 

Very skilfully, as it turns out. There’s a double ending which made me realize how important the final confrontation with the villain is to the genre. There’s a nifty pacing trick, when Kinsey finally tracks down a character she’s been pursuing — she sees him and then stops to muse about the nature of recognition of another person. It lends drama to that little confrontation. And unlike Barry Maitland,Grafton  takes the trouble to give very minor characters a few traits or a speech that flesh them out into people, rather than devices.  

I wonder if that’s a matter of balance. I’m not sure how you’d analyze this, but let’s say you have a finite length, 100,000 words. Is Maitland actually fitting in a lot more plot, and is that why he’s cursory with the characterization? Does Grafton put her characters through less, are there fewer narrative events, so she can tell us what Kinsey eats for lunch? The author of a mystery series has to get this balance right, because the subsidiary characters and the setting are often what keep readers coming back. If we all just wanted puzzles we’d be reading nothing but Agatha Christie.