Elly Griffiths, “A Room Full of Bones”

Ruth Galloway is a great character for a detective series:  overweight, cranky, insecure in every area but her profession, which happens to be forensic archaeology. Which is to say, Ruth studies old bones. What a terrific premise! Teamed with the hyper-prickly police detective Harry Nelson, to handle the technical stuff like actually cuffing the perpetrators, Ruth has now solved four mysteries on England’s Norfolk coast. Unfortunately, A Room Full of Bones doesn’t rise to the level of the three previous books.

Ruth’s new neighbor on the Saltmarsh also plays the digeridoo.

Some of the difficulty arises from the perennial challenges of a mystery series. Elly Griffiths has to keep referring back to previous episodes and juggling familiar secondary characters while keeping everyone moving forward. Fortunately, there’s a lot of tension and a certain amount of humor in this group. Nelson’s relationship with his wife Michelle provides the former and Ruth’s ditsy friend Shona provides the latter. What’s more Michelle now knows that Ruth’s baby Kate is, yikes! Nelson’s. Great touch.

And, yes, there are dead bodies. All over the place, actually. The usual breakdown is that Nelson attends to the recently dead while Ruth solves the older puzzles, but Griffiths engages in some misdirection here by bringing in Aboriginal folklore and a subplot about repatriation of some native Australian remains, along with an animal-rights movement red herring and the possibility of a curse. Druid Cathbad reappears, enigmatically as always. Long dream sequences à la Craig Johnson occur. The ultimate solution of the contemporary murders can be attributed to magic or not (in the style of Fred Vargas)– the drug ring, though, gets sorted. It all seemed slightly perfunctory and even Griffiths‘ usual sharp narrative voice seemed a little bit muffled. I’m hoping she returns to form for the next book, which I’m sure is already under way.

Craig Johnson, “As the Crow Flies”

You think maybe Craig Johnson reads “Book Group of One?” Because, here’s the thing. I was not totally thrilled with Hell Is Empty, his last Walt Longmire mystery, and I made my opinion known on this little blog. In fact I suggested that Johnson might ease up on poor Walt, dialing down the physical abuse and also the psychic horror. And guess what? He did! In As the Crow Flies, the biggest threat to Walt’s health and peace of mind comes from his daughter Cady and concerns Walt’s inefficiency in making arrangements for her wedding. This could sound cheesy and sentimental but at the end of the book there is a limpid sincerity to Walt’s emotional reaction to his daughter’s marriage that, yes, moved me to satisfying tears.

John James Audubon, “Fish Crow.” Possibly related to the bird that speaks in Walt’s peyote vision?

Oh, yeah, he gets the bad guy, too. Plus there’s a whole lot of Henry Standing Bear in this book, and Walt has a peyote vision with talking animals. I tell you, there’s nothing missing. Well, OK. Maybe toward the end there’s a little stumble in the narrative drive. The plot concerns the murder of a young Indian woman, whom Walt and the Bear actually witness falling off a cliff, with her baby in her arms. (Don’t worry, the baby survives.) It appears that she was pushed. But as Walt and the Bear — and Tribal Police Chief Lolo Long, a gorgeous, difficult Iraq war veteran and newbie officer — eliminate suspects one by one, it begins to seem that maybe this murder’s not going to get solved. The FBI intervenes, there are unrelated drug charges and jurisdiction squabbles because it all plays out “on the Rez.” Walt says, “I thought about how this was not how it was supposed to end, with her [Long] providing cab service for the Feds and me walking away. In a perfect cinematic world we would’ve captured the bad guys in spectacular fashion with explosions, car chases, and a parting kiss.” I thought maybe this time Johnson was going to join the parade of mystery writers who turn their backs on the solve-the-crime tradition, but in a hasty flurry of activity, he has Walt solve the murder and provide the closure that I suppose I still look for. Though I could barely follow it, in this instance.

For me, the big payoff came as Walt gives his daughter in marriage:

        I thought about Audrey Plain Feather and how her life hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped — maybe nobody’s did.

My wife Martha’s hadn’t. Mine hadn’t. Even Henry’s hadn’t.

Maybe Cady’s would.

It’s hopes like this you cling to at major turning points in your life, and, more important, the lives of your children. You keep going, and you hope for the best, and sometimes, maybe not very often, your hopes come true.”

See? I’m welling up just quoting it. Thanks, Walt. Thanks, Craig.

Walt Longmire on the Small Screen

Henry Standing Bear -- eventually

Apparently A&E has agreed to produce a series based on Craig Johnson’s Western-themed mysteries. Of course you want to know who will star as Walt, the wise and somewhat battered narrator — answer is Robert Taylor, and I couldn’t find a recent photo of him. Instead here’s Lou Diamond Phillips, cast as Henry Standing Bear. I think they’re both going to have to bulk up.

 

 

Craig Johnson, “Hell is Empty”

So – why shouldn’t a mystery writer be allowed to break out of the mold a little bit? Or, wait, let’s put this another way: must a mystery writer’s production always have an eye to the market?

Well, we live in a capitalist society and one answer to that question is that the market is always right. And the market, I’m afraid, is going to tell Craig Johnson to get back to what he does best. But what Johnson does best may be what led him into this situation in the first place, because his detective, Absaroka (WY) County Sherriff Walt Longmire, is a man with more sensitivity and imagination that you’d expect from a tough guy in a pickup. In fact, Johnson’s first novel, the marvelous The Cold Dish, featured a very effective mystical scene on a mountaintop. It blurred the lines of the naturalism that later became Johnson’s usual effective style.

The 9th circle of Dante's Inferno, where the traitors freeze: Gustave Dore's engraving

This is not always a mistake. Fred Vargas traffics with the supernatural in her Adamsberg novels. But I would argue that her books are somewhat stylized in the first place, so the irruption of ghosts or The Wild Hunt into a police investigation doesn’t jar. (Probably because Adamsberg is like no cop we’ve ever met.) But Craig Johnson’s work is about the workaday. So when it became apparent that he had  structured Hell is Empty around Dante’s Inferno, I got restive. First there’s the stone killer named Raynaud Shade (as in the dead people). Then there’s Walt’s guide in his terrifying high-altitude chase, an enormous Cheyenne Indian named Virgil White Buffalo. If that weren’t enough, Walt carries in his pack a paperback copy of The Inferno. And, yes, it does stop a bullet. But then, the bullet turns out to be imaginary. This is all as Walt, wounded and hypothermic, hallucinates at the top of Cloud Peak.

It worked before, in The Cold Dish, but that might be because the earlier book’s structure was sound and the mystery itself was fascinating. In this case, Johnson identifies Raynaud Shade as the killer very early on, and most of the novel is simply a bloody and brutal chase. There are inserted flash-back sections from the point of view of a little boy, whom we eventually understand is the child whose bones Shade is carrying up to the mountaintop. The only reason to use this technique is to pass along information that keeps the reader on the hook, but I felt awfully dim as I tried to piece together these disturbing scenes.

Walt makes an appealing narrator, wise and wry, but Johnson puts him through an implausible amount of agony in this tale. Again, if we Longmire fans weren’t accustomed to a more naturalistic narrative, this might have been easier to accept. It’s actually a compliment to Johnson that we care so much about a totally fictional guy. Maybe he’ll catch a break in the next book. OK, Craig?

Craig Johnson, “Another Man’s Moccasins”

Being a methodical kind of girl, I tend to read series mysteries in order, the way their author wrote them. But I got sidetracked somehow with Craig Johnson and leapt to Junkyard Dogs before getting to Another Man’s Moccasins. Of course it doesn’t matter: these books have to be written to work as standalones. But reading the two books so close together brought up an interesting issue. It seemed to me that Junkyard Dogs was reaching for comic effect, and did so pretty successfully. But Another Man’s Moccasins goes in a completely different direction — also with considerable power. So I began to wonder about the amount of flexibility within the murder mystery genre. Someone has to be killed, someone has to figure out who did it, and the investigation must be consistent with the nature of the characters. It must also endure for some satisfying length of time — at least 100,000 words.

So, as a writer, you’ve got pretty strict limitations. But you’re still playing with one of The Big Issues, death, and perhaps its ancillaries, like guilt and grief. It’s a good selection of themes, and I can totally see how a writer like Johnson might want to handle them in different ways from time to time. Thus while Junkyard Dogs has an antic, sardonic flavor, Another Man’s Moccasins is — well, actually, it’s tragic.

It begins with a body, of course. But I should add that Absaroka County Sherriff Walter Longmire is a little shaken right from the get-go, because his beloved daughter Cady got hurt in the last book, and she’s just now recovering from her head wound. Walt himself, while physically fairly sound, is thinking dark thoughts about mortality. So when the body turns out to be that of a young Vietnamese woman, it’s no surprise that Walt starts having flashbacks to his military service. The good news is that we get a lot of Walt’s Cheyenne sidekick Henry Standing Bear in this book. The bad news is that he and Walt crossed paths in Vietnam under the very worst of circumstances.

It must be said that neither the Vietnam mystery nor the Wyoming mystery is especially mysterious. But Johnson does a good job linking them, and he also does well with the fairly frequent transitions between present-day and flashback. In the course of the novel Walt hears a couple of hard truths about his own character, delivered in completely credible ways. It feels as if Johnson is reaching a little further than usual this time, while still obeying the rules of the mystery game, and he does so effectively. It is true that I wasn’t really looking for gruesome combat scenes when I picked this up, but I have a lot of respect for the way Johnson handled the challenge he set himself.

Fred Vargas, “Dans les bois eternels” or “This Night’s Foul Work”

Authors of murder mysteries have to keep a lot of balls in the air, and I’ve complained frequently here about disappointments in the genre. Dans les bois éternels (translated as This Night’s Foul Work) is not one of them. Once again, Fred Vargas demonstrates that there is nothing intellectually contemptible about writing entertaining fiction.

I will admit that I didn’t feel quite the same exhilaration this time as I did reading Pars vite et reviens tard. There’s something exceptionally thrilling about discovering a new writer and becoming acquainted with the detective and the team. But one thing Vargas did very well with the first Commissaire Adamsberg novel was create a large enough footprint for herself so that she had ample room to maneuver in successive novels. (Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire novels would be the contrasting case — Walt is less entertaining off his own turf.) And part of Vargas‘ cleverness was the way she made Adamsberg an intuitive, unconventional thinker, difficult to pin down, constitutionally off the grid. So in this book, when Adamsberg ends up in a bar in Normandy, toting a pair of stag horns home in his small European car, you can’t see how the dead stag is going to line up with the mysterious killing of two ne’er-do-wells in northern Paris. This could merely be one of those vague Adamsberg moments, but it’s not.

Actually, one of the plot techniques I really admired here was Vargas‘ ability to shift the terms of the conflict. In the early portions of the book — and one of the pleasures here is the leisurely way it all plays out — Adamsberg and his amiable crew are up against another branch of the police. Sure, they’ve got these two bodies and they want to find the killer but the real tension concerns whether or not they will be able to keep the case. Adamsberg suspects this is not merely a random drug killing and wants more time to investigate. Not until a hundred or so pages in do we identify an actual potential murderer.

Vargas also does well with secondary conflict. Adamsberg is a complicated guy with a difficult past. This book puts a new man on his staff, one who turns out to challenge Adamsberg on every level. And, because the logic of the murder mystery demands it, this conflict becomes part of the central puzzle as well.

Finally, the secondary characters continue to entertain. Adamsberg the goofy relies on Danglard the anxious polymath. The big-boned Violette Retancourt’s erotic spell over her colleagues endures. And the enormous timid cat La Boule plays a significant role. That part was a little bit cutesy for me, but I loved Vargas‘ character summary of the beast: “… the cat was incapable of managing alone, totally devoid of that slightly scornful autonomy that makes up the grandeur of the feline.” That kind of writing, that kind of perception, allied with clever plotting and a French setting makes a nearly ideal read for me.

Craig Johnson, “Junkyard Dogs”

I like Craig Johnson for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that when I read The Cold Dish and wrote him a mash note, he actually wrote back. Yep, a long, cordial email, and I’ve felt very warmly toward the guy ever since. Even when, in Kindness Goes Unpunished, he sent poor Sheriff Walt Longmire to Philadelphia.

See, Walt is a cowboy. Sure, he’s a kind of beat-up postmodern cowboy with emotional baggage and a certain respect for law and order — ooh, maybe we could even say he’s the product of a dialectical interplay between cowboy and sheriff. How would that work? Cowboy: self-reliant, stoical, good with animals, independent, something of a rogue. Sheriff: well, the guy with the star. I think that works. Anyway, my point is that  though every writer of a series is duty-bound to vary his or her formula somewhat, Walt Longmire needs to be out west.

Meaner than a....

Part of the reason for that is that we want our detectives competent, far more competent than we ourselves are. The mystery formula is in large part about reassurance. It was not reassuring to have Walt Longmire in an urban setting, misreading cues and severed from one of his greatest assets, which is a deep knowledge of the players in Absaroka County, Wyoming. And while part of Craig Johnson’s charm is making his protagonist self-deprecating, Walt in Philly was, well, just too far off the ranch.

So Junkyard Dogs, set in Durant, Wyoming, was reassuring from that point of view. It was funny: it opens with a great visual gag and goes on to gently mock both the tough-old-coot owner of a junkyard and his dispiriting grandson Duane. The book, as we expect from series fiction, continued to mull over the careers and love lives of the secondary characters. Walt and his potty-mouthed deputy Vic get no closer to resolving their romantic relationship but the handsome Basque deputy Saizarbitoria begins to recover from post-traumatic stress syndrome and begins to adjust to life with a newborn baby. There is a slightly worrisome subplot involving Walter’s health. Normally in this kind of book (I’m thinking in particular of the Sue Grafton mysteries, in which Kinsey Milhone has sustained considerable damage over the last 20-odd years) the detective gets dinged up but the reader is allowed to forget the physical damage which frankly strains the credulity.

Johnson seems to be reaching instead for a comical litany of Walt’s injuries, which feels wrong. We readers need to maintain the fiction that Walt, despite his ostensible bumbling, is in charge. A kind of post-modern mockery of the genre (which the catalogue of his injuries seems to point to) undermines that dynamic.

Oh, the plot: murder, gunshots, Henry Standing Bear stalking a killer in the snow, an errant severed thumb. And, yes, junkyard dogs. Also a character who is meaner than the latter. Pretty satisfying.

Thomas Perry, “Vanishing Act”

I’m pretty sure this is the first of Perry’s Jane Whitefield series. The concept is brilliant: Jane is a Seneca, from upstate New York, who helps people disappear. The later books are somewhat more functional, more pure thriller, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Perry’s a reliable source of pleasure and diversion. But I got an extra charge out of Vanishing Act this time around. It seemed to have an extra, unnecessary layer of circumstantial detail that Perry was almost compelled to include. Some of it was back story on Jane’s own family (full-blood Seneca father, anglo mother) and on the folkways of Indians in upstate New York. This must all have taken a lot of research on Perry’s part and I had the sense that he was sharing something he found very compelling: a way of life and a tight-knit community that stand in contrast to Jane Whitefield’s peripatetic metier, and in contrast to the thinly-rooted life of mainstream America. In a way Vanishing Act shares a lot with Craig Johnson’s wonderful The Cold Dish, which features a startling (and entirely successful) dream sequence involving a mystical Indian intervention in the anglo world.

Fundamentally, all of these Jane Whitefield books combine two enormously appealing plot devices: the character transformation (hello, Cinderella!) and the chase scene. Vanishing Act cranks that up further in that Jane’s “rabbit” — the guy she is steering to safety, away from the hunting dogs — turns out to be a traitor in his own right. So we see Jane both as vulnerable and capable. This is one of Perry’s great feats in this series; he doesn’t flinch away from the damage that Jane’s avocation does to her. Hence, possibly, the fact that there are only five of these books.

It’s also very clever that the final confrontation takes place in the woods. At first, it seems that the villain is dictating the terms of the duel, as he lures Jane deep into the trackless terrain of the Adirondacks. But she finally taps into her heritage and reclaims some Indian skills. Is it corny that she ends up painting her face and sticking feathers in her hair? Did Perry envision this as a scene in a movie? Doesn’t matter. I’m with her all the way.