Elly Griffiths, “Dying Fall”

Another mystery with one of those baffling meaningless titles that I can’t quite relate to the narrative — but never mind, it’s the new Elly Griffiths. And that means time spent with Ruth Galloway, the forensic archaeologist who can read bones. And, this being a fairly conventional mystery, that also means readers get another dose of Ruth’s hopeless love for Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson, who is fairly happily married even if he is the father of Ruth’s child. Oh, and of course there is a death, too.

Griffiths manages two unusual achievements in  Dying Fall. The first is transferring her cast of characters to a new setting. Ruth, Nelson, and the Druid Cathbad are usually found in Norfolk. But in Dying Fall, they head north to Lancashire. All of them. Ruth goes on a semi-academic quest, Nelson and his wife Michelle go on a family vacation. Yes, of course they meet up. Sometimes mystery series rooted in a certain locale lose energy when they’re uprooted (as in Craig Johnson taking his protagonist Walt Longmire to Philadelphia). Not the case here, though. Ruth and her entourage work just fine off their home turf.

Imagine an amusement park filled with people wearing Simon Cowell masks…

Which brings me to the second achievement: in this novel Griffiths delicately and successfully bridges mayhem and humor. Here, for instance, we’re in the head of Maureen, Nelson’s redoubtable Irish Catholic mother, in church.

Now, Maureen prays angrily for her favourite child. Please, God, let him see the error of his arrogant ways. Keep him safe, Lord, and let him realise his many blessings. At the sign of peace she holds Michelle’s hand tightly. Though she doesn’t know why, she suddenly feels very protective towards her daughter-in-law.

‘Peace be with you, my darling,’ she says huskily.

‘Thank you,’ says Michelle, who can never remember what she’s meant to say in return.

In fact there’s quite a bit of material about belief systems in Dying Fall. Readers of Griffiths‘ previous books will be familiar with the slightly loopy quality of Cathbad the Druid, who was originally Michael Malone. (He verges on New Age-annoying, but his sincerity and kindness, as well as his devotion to Ruth and Kate, make him sympathetic.) Then in addition to Maureen Nelson’s Catholicism we encounter a skeleton that may be King Arthur’s, which is of great interest to a group of white supremacists operating around a small Lancashire university. That, obviously, is where Ruth and Nelson’s mystery-solving capacities come in handy. But Griffiths also alludes to a contemporary faith in celebrity. The climactic scene of the novel takes place in an amusement park where, for some obscure reason, many of the visitors are wearing masks with the likeness of Simon Cowell on them. It’s as nightmarish as any of the more conventionally creepy scenes in this satisfying book.

Peter Dickinson, “The Last House Party” and “Death of a Unicorn”

We don’t tend to think of our escape fiction as following literary fashion, do we? But it does, friends! This became very clear to me when I recently re-read two murder mysteries from the 1980s, The Last House Party and Death of a Unicorn. A friend once handed another one of Peter Dickinson’s novels back to me, saying, “The plot was just like origami. Once you unfolded it, it was just a piece of paper.” He found this annoying: I did not. But I have to admit that I didn’t follow either of these plots especially carefully. And the “origami” criticism was accurate, because both of these novels were energetically cast in a post-modern mold, jumping back and forth in time and point of view. Remember that? The impulse to constantly remind the reader that she is reading fiction? I don’t think I heard the word “immersive” applied to fiction much in the 1980s, did you?

I do remember, though, that many of the writers who engaged in this kind of fractured story-telling — like Dickinson –are  very skilled, and that each time the fictional rug is jerked from beneath your feet, there’s a small shock. In those days Dickinson seemed especially interested in the way new information can solve old puzzles, so you can see how the technique works well in suspense fiction. The Last House Party isn’t even strictly a murder mystery, though there is a death: it focuses on a baffling episode of a molested child. That bit takes place in an English country house in the 1930s, during the gathering of a clique of proto-Fascists. (Think Cliveden set.) The present-day narrative includes letters that drop the reader into the African desert in World War II, as well as details of running Snailwood House as a contemporary Stately Home. I have to admit that I am not even entirely sure I know what happened: Dickinson’s exposition is so very oblique that I may have missed a few key points.

The same is true of Death of a Unicorn, but in that case it’s because the central ugly behavior involves post-World War II currency controls. The narrator is Lady Margaret Millett, heiress to another big English country house.  In the contemporary segments, she’s the iron-willed chatelaine and author of immensely popular historical romances, but the roots of the story are in the London Season long ago. Wonderful social history, of course — reminiscent of both Julian Fellowes’ Past Imperfect and of The Pursuit of Love, especially in the way it de-glamorizes the aristocracy at play. So if you wanted a faintly jaundiced view of the state of English debutantes from roughly 1935 to 1970, you could read Mitford, Dickinson, Fellowes in that order. Now there’s a project for a rainy day!

Ruth Rendell, “Tigerlily’s Orchids”

OK, here’s a question. You pick up a new Ruth Rendell mystery, let’s say Tigerlily’s Orchids. The first character you meet, Olwen, is lucidly determined to drink herself to death. And furthermore, “On the whole Olwen was indifferent to other people or else she disliked them…” Do you find that attitude refreshing, or are you aghast? I’m not giving much away by telling you that Olwen eventually has her way and that the process, described with Rendell’s customary calm, is not attractive. So now you’re warned.

Cross-section of a Parisian apartment house by Edmond Texier, 1852

One of qualities I enjoy about Rendell’s work is exactly that calm. She doesn’t editorialize about Olwen. Nor about the incredibly handsome but vapid Stuart Font. Nor about Wally Scurlock, the venal caretaker for the North London apartment block called Lichfield House where the novel takes place. Watch out for the names, though. They tend to supply auras for characters, like the wealthy young girl named Noor, rumored to be dating an Indian prince. (Reminds you of Queen Noor of Jordan, perhaps?) The funny thing is that most rumors in Tigerlily’s Orchids are wrong. Most of the judgments made by the characters about their fellows are also wrong. This is a novel of miscommunication and misapprehension. Oh, yes, it’s also a murder mystery, but that’s easy to forget. There are various feints at physical mayhem and various skullduggery and bad behavior and certainly a puzzle that needs to be solved. But the victim had almost slipped my mind when the solution to his death presented itself.

I got a big kick out of the structure of the novel. The link among the characters is the apartment block itself, placing Tigerlily’s Orchids in a tradition that goes back into the nineteenth century. For instance, Emile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (usually translated as Pot Luck) follows the entwined lives of a group of apartment dwellers. In Rendell’s hands the device feels like one of those clever cartoons exposing a cross-section of a multi-dwelling building and catching the inhabitants in private moments. For instance:

Claudia Livorno came through the swing doors, carrying a bottle of Verdicchio and walking gingerly because the step outside was icy and her heels were high. She rang the bell of Flat 1.

Olwen had nothing in Flat 6 to eat except bread and jam, so she ate that and, when she woke up from her long afternoon sleep, started on a newly opened bottle of gin… In the flat below hers, Marius Potter was sitting in an armchair that had belonged to his grandmother reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the second time.

See? Fun! Oh, and by the way, no character is named Tigerlily, and there are no orchids.

Deborah Crombie, “The Sound of Breaking Glass”

There are few things I love more than abandoning myself to fully satisfying escape reading. It’s pretty harmless — relatively cheap, no calories involved, I respect myself in the morning — yet carries a tinge of the illicit. Is there something I should be doing besides lolling on the sofa, speed-reading? Yes. Absolutely. This is me kicking over the traces.

Happily, Deborah Crombie’s The Sound of Breaking Glass was just the right book at the right time. I’ve written before about her series of police procedurals involving Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid. I wasn’t totally crazy about the last one, No Mark Upon Her, but The Sound of Breaking Glass seems to correct the flaw of the undigested background material. In this case, several characters are involved in the world of contemporary pop music but it meshes better with the plot.

Which is quite conventional, but satisfying in every respect. We have our bodies, but the folks who died are pretty unsavory. We have a shifting cast of possible suspects, but the nice people are largely spared. There’s a little bit of romance, some domestic issues between Duncan and Gemma, all tied up neatly. Yes, as the title indicates, there is even broken glass.

John Le Carre, “A Murder of Quality”

Actually, I already possessed this little book but found an upgrade on the magic laundry room shelves… and it fitted so nicely into my purse, with a subway ride ahead of me….

Yeah. The truth is that I just wanted to read John Le Carré again. And I thought that since  A Murder of Quality was only Le Carré’s  second book, it might not be quite as gloomy or cynical (or do I just mean sad?) as so many of his later books. And it isn’t — quite. Though about halfway through I came across this passage:

Smiley himself was one of those solitaries who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colorful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country’s enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed.

Sherborne School, John Le Carre’s alma mater.

Not exactly cheerful, is it? At the time when Le Carré wrote A Murder of Quality, he was actually working for MI6, then England’s foreign intelligence service. He had spent two years before that at MI5 (domestic intelligence) and before that had taught at Eton. Hence, perhaps, the entirely convincing details of the public-school setting of A Murder of Quality. (The physical setting in Dorset evidently corresponds more closely to Le Carré’s own school, Sherborne.) The fictional Carne School is an ancient and aristocratic institution, proud of its refinement and eager to impart to its students manners and prejudices lingering from the 19th century. A teacher, inviting Smiley to dinner, says, “I usually dress, but never mind.”

I don’t suppose you come to early Le Carré without having read the great Smiley novels, and that puts you as a reader on the completist’s mission, hunting for evidence of what is to come. But A Murder of Quality stands on its own as a neat (if brief) procedural. Stella Rode, the wife of a Carne teacher, fears that her husband plans to kill her in “the long nights.” She feels the police can’t help her, so, circuitously, George Smiley is drawn into the story. As you might expect, snobbery plays a great part in the tale, discussed mostly in terms of minutely observed behavior. (We’ll be seeing more of that as the spy stories come along…) One example: there is a right and a wrong way to cut a piece of fruit at a dinner table. Dead giveaway of plebeian origins.

Overall, in fact, A Murder of Quality is about who belongs and who doesn’t, and how those distinctions affect people. The positive point is that George Smiley, the perpetual outsider, is put in a position where his gift for invisible observation and judgment can be used constructively. The sad point — and this won’t change in Le Carré’s succeeding work — is the lamentable state of humankind.

Susan Hill, “A Question of Identity”

Why is Susan Hill not yet a household name in the U.S.? She is as good a writer, as reliably satisfying and interesting, as her peers Elizabeth George, Deborah Crombie, Ruth Rendell (though admittedly not as weird as the last). Her detective, Simon Serrailler, is dashing, talented, and complicated; Hill isn’t afraid of letting us dislike him. The requisite murder mystery sidekicks — his sister, his parents, his staff — are given believable occupations and preoccupations. Yet very often when I ask devotees of the genre if they know Hill’s work, they shake their heads. If American readers know Susan Hill, it’s usually as the author of The Woman in Black, which was made into a film with Daniel Radcliffe.

In fact, her seven murder mysteries are all excellent. They’re solid procedurals, but Hill has a quirky imagination and also understands that, in the 21st century, the Golden Age formula for the satisfying solution feels inauthentic. Life is messier than that. We can’t expect Miss Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey to fix everything in the last five pages. When murder is done, people stay broken, and Hill acknowledges that while providing the fast-moving puzzle we mystery readers want.

So, briefly, here’s the situation in A Question of Identity. Three elderly women are murdered. The culprit is acquitted, but because feeling in the community is so strongly against him, he’s whisked off into what we call a “witness protection program” in the US. He’s given a new identity. Ten years go by and in Lafferton, the cathedral town where these novels are set, another old woman is strangled with an electrical cord.

There aren’t so very many patterns for creating suspense in murder mysteries, and Susan Hill has used them all. This time, the reader has information that the detectives don’t. We can’t identify the murderer, but we have a pretty good idea why he does what he does. What lifts this novel beyond the usual escapism is the way Hill draws all the subsidiary characters into the central rumination about identity. How do we construct it? What happens when it breaks down, or must be adjusted? Simon’s sister the doctor Cat Deerbon has to contemplate a career shift. His stepmother’s marriage is threatened and she needs to redefine who she is as a wife. His oldest niece and nephew are adolescents, so there you go. Everyone’s questioning their identity. Except, of course, the murderer’s victims who won’t get the opportunity.

Anywhere But Here….

No, I did not read Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here, though I’m sure that some time I should. (It sounds kind of harrowing but maybe that’s just me.)

I just hit a little rough patch. Does this ever happen to you? Distress piles up and all you want to do is Get Away to some place where someone else has problems you don’t really believe in, and anyway they’re going to get solved in a couple of hundred pages. For me that place is always a book. Always a book I’ve read before: this is no time for experimentation. It’s more of an emergency; you might say I was reading frantically. The way I justify this is thinking that I am keeping my conscious mind busy and out of trouble with these comforting plots while some heavy lifting occurs in the unconscious part of my mind.

So in the last week and change I read:

Catherine Gaskin, The Property of a Gentleman

Dick Francis, Enquiry

Dick Francis, Comeback

Michael Gilbert, The Country House Burglar

Jane Aiken Hodge, Watch the Wall, My Darling

Old friends all (in several cases, I had to tape the covers back onto the crumbling pages). And I’m feeling much better, now, thank you.

Gillian Flynn, “Gone Girl”

Wow. That was intense.

I’m still shaking my head over Gone Girl. Yes, it is incredibly gripping. It has that…. that thing, where you just cannot let it go. Maybe it won’t let you go, because Gillian Flynn has written this inside-out murder mystery from the dual points of view of the protagonists. Who are also antagonists. And both of whom are egotists.

The Mississippi River plays a sinister part in the novel. Here it is in Hannibal, MO.

Yes, I think that’s it. There’s an urgency to this story-telling  – the chapters alternate in the voices of Nick Dunne and his wife Amy and they’re both desperate, desperate to convince you that they’re right. That what they did was justifiable. That they are, really, fundamentally lovable, despite it all.

But wow, talk about unreliable narrators! There’s Nick, the drop-dead handsome working-class Irish boy from Missouri who married the high-flyer, Amy Elliott. Amy who is brilliant, beautiful, sexy, wealthy, and…. gone. Gone from their depressing house in a failed housing development in a dying town on the Mississippi river. Vanished completely, leaving signs of a struggle, the door to the house wide open, a dress on the ironing board and the iron still on. Uh-oh. They always look at the husband first, right? Nick’s in trouble.

And you know, that’s about all I can tell you, except that this sidewinder of a plot kept totally jerking me around. And that as the book went on, both Nick and Amy crept away from being naturalistic Girl and Guy next door to more startling, less subtle, almost mythic characters, leaving behind a trail of secondary folk (Amy’s parents, Nick’s twin sister Margo, the cops) as the end of the book becomes almost a two-hander. Gillian Flynn controls the material the whole time and the result is totally compelling entertainment.

Ruth Rendell, “The St. Zita Society”

Oh, Ruth Rendell, how do you do it? Your industry is a reproach to all of us who write fewer than two books a year. Your dark imagination is disturbingly inventive, and the consistently high quality of your story telling inspires awe. Maybe slightly chilling awe.

I imagine Hexam Place as looking something like this.

I’ve strayed, over the last few years, from Rendell’s output, partly because she can be really disturbing and sometimes I’m a real coward in my reading. The St. Zita Society is not exactly benign.  There are murders and natural deaths, but Rendell chose to write this book from a distance. There’s little suspense and no lamentation. Some characters are likeable, some are not, and their fates seem almost random. But of course the novel is meticulously crafted to keep us reading while still reminding us of the accidental quality of life.

The title refers to an ad hoc gathering of the servants who work in the houses on an exclusive, expensive cul de sac in London. (St. Zita, apparently, is the patron saint of servants.) Of course these are not the traditionally-ranked servants we know from “Downton Abbey,” with their uniforms and their clearly defined jobs. The boundaries between the classes in Hexam Place are more fluid, as are the duties of those who carry them out. An ersatz princess shares a house with her maid of 60 years; a gay couple rents a basement flat to Thea, who prides herself on her university degree but nevertheless serves as a resentful unpaid personal assistant to her landlords. In another house, a Muslim nanny is more of a mother to the toddler than his flesh and blood parent, a shallow fashion plate.

The pacing is… temperate. Maybe surprisingly so, given that there’s been a murder and our expectation is that it will be the centerpiece in this novel. But The St. Zita Society belongs to the body of Rendell’s work that simply investigates the disturbing behavior that could — possibly — be going on all around us. Discomfiting, but satisfying.

Tana French, “Broken Harbor”

OK. We know that Tana French is a goddess, yeah? So all I really have to do here is tell you that Broken Harbor keeps up her usual high standard and that you should read it right away. But just in case you don’t know her work, or want details — or because I can’t help myself — here’s more.

Ghost estate: photo from Galway Planning Blog on WordPress

French‘s last outing was Faithful Place, which took a searing look at a certain kind of Irish family dysfunction, while also, naturally, solving a mystery. In Broken Harbor, though, she takes on the more recent phenomenon of the wreckage of the Celtic Tiger. Her narrator detective is Michael Kennedy, whom we knew (and disliked) in Faithful Place as “Scorcher.” In an interview in the Barnes & Noble Review French talks about how she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stand living in Scorcher’s head for the two years it took her to write the book. Well, it can’t be a fun place — Kennedy’s a seriously hurting puppy. But so, it turns out, are all of the characters in Broken Harbor. And, as in French‘s debut novel In the Woods, the detective has strong emotional ties to the location that should probably prevent him from taking the case.

Are the themes hit a little hard here? I’d say so. “Broken Harbor” is the old name of the seaside resort where our narrator used to vacation with his fragile family; two happy weeks a year in a caravan parked on the seashore. Broken (get it? broken?) Harbor has been renamed “Brianstown” as part of one of those sketchy real estate developments that were abandoned in the Irish crash and are now called “ghost estates.” Kennedy catches the case when a young family is discovered dead in their house. Pat and Jenny Spain were living the good life, working hard, spending hard, raising two adorable kids and getting on the “property ladder” with a 110% mortgage, when it all went haywire. Our first clue: the walls of the pristine Spain house — one of the few occupied among the rows of half-built abandoned shells — are full of holes punched through the drywall.

So what we basically have here is a tale in which the slick surfaces are peeled away and we witness the desperation beneath. Is the plot a surprise? Not especially. Is the handling magisterial? Absolutely. As Tana French’s readers know, she is the master of the unreliable narrator and Kennedy is a tour de force. This is a guy who’s spent his entire adult life attempting to hold back the forces of darkness: “In every way there is, murder is chaos. Our job is simple, when you get down to it: we stand against that, for order.”

Here’s another bit of Scorcher’s wisdom, which explains the perennial popularity of the mystery novel. “One of the many ways that murder is the unique crime: it’s the only one that makes us ask why. Robbery, rape, fraud, drug dealing, all the filthy litany, they come with their filthy explanations built in; all you have to do is slot the perp into the perp-shaped hole. Murder needs an answer.”

By the way, French usually chooses as narrator a secondary character from her previous book. This suggests two possibilities for Novel Number 5: the young eager Richie Curran or the odious department hack Quigley. Any bets?