Tana French, “Faithful Place”

I always knew I was going to drop everything to gulp Faithful Place down in one or two sittings. That’s just the way Tana French operates on me. And on a few other people as well. I try not to read reviews of books I’m going to be blogging about but I couldn’t resist reading Janet Maslin in the New York Times, and I imagine that’ll move a few thousand units.

So we’re all going to be very bummed, not because the book is bad but because it’s good, and it’s disturbing. Here’s the thing: I’ve been worrying  recently (see the entry for Craig Johnson’s Junkyard Dogs) about the toll these murder mysteries take on the detectives. They get seriously dinged up, physically and psychically. Tana French goes everybody one better, though: at the end of her books, the detective is so wrecked she can’t even use him/her again. This time around it’s Frank Mackey, who in The Likeness was head of the Undercover squad. Clearly, this is a man with a special line in duplicity. Actually, French has gone and imagined for him a past right out of an Irish play like The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Family dysfunction that would do your head in, as they say over there. “Da said, ‘Little whoremasters, the lot of yous.’ I think he meant it in a nice way.” That’s the way those Mackeys talked to each other. And that, children, is the teeny tiny little tip of the iceberg.

But Frank thinks he’s escaped the drink and the violence and the poverty and the unemployment. He left home, went to police college, married up, had a child. But he’s no good to Tana French just peacefully doing his job, so she curls a lash around his neck and yanks him back to Faithful Place where his family lives in the same house and the girl who jilted him 22 years earlier turns up dead. I haven’t given away much, by the way. That’s bad enough, but there are more and bigger emotional land mines waiting for Frank. Honestly, what French puts him through — I don’t know how you write this stuff.

So I’m going to think about something else. One of the qualities of The Likeness that I adored was its glamour. It has a real Rebecca vibe.So I was interested to read in the New York Times yesterday (OK, it’s my hometown paper, I read it very thoroughly sometimes) about a professor named Alice Friedman. She  just wrote a book called American Glamour about modern American architecture. Here’s what she has to say: “So much about glamour is about aspiration and appearance, staging what you want to be, like Gatsby. …. and what is the true you, and will that be discovered?”

I would have said that Faithful Place was un-glamourous but using Friedman’s definition, I’m wrong. It’s actually the story of Frank Mackey ripping off his mask. Ouch.

Andrew Taylor, “The Office of the Dead”

This is the third and final instalment in the Roth Trilogy, Andrew Taylor’s answer to The Norman Conquests. OK, feeble joke, but I’m feeling a little gloomy, as Taylor surely intended. Honestly, this guy and Denise Mina between them have driven me back into the ever-welcoming arms of Angela Thirkell. Don’t they know they’re writing escapist fiction?

The Roth Trilogy works like the Ayckbourn trilogy in that it doesn’t matter which one comes first. Chronology is not Taylor‘s major concern, since the seminal evil deed (the death of a baby) appears to have taken place in 1904. Taylor’s very good at structure: the revelation comes just two pages before the end of The Office of the Dead. It is true that there is one earlier and very creepy death that links up with The Four Last Things, the first book in the series. Most of the book, though, is a series of ominous foreshadowings.  It’s set in a Tim Burton version of a cathedral close, Trollope (or Thirkell) for the 21st century. The narrator, Wendy Appleyard, is recently separated from her philandering husband. She goes to visit her old school friend Janet Byfield in the cathedral town of Rosington. The household also includes the handsome priest David Byfield, Janet’s father Mr. Treevor, and the alarming daughter Rosemary. Mr. Treevor may be molesting Rosie. David prefers church politics to his family. There is no money, but the family lives in a clerical residence known as “The Dark Hostelry.” (A detail that’s slightly clunky for Taylor.) When mutilated animals start showing up, my interest wanes somewhat, I admit. Oh, for some sweetness and light!

Linda Barnes, “Lie Down with the Devil”

These Linda Barnes novels have proven to be pretty reliable over the years. Sure, they adhere to a formula: the tall, brassy private eye, her coterie of odd friends and lovers and enablers, her Little Sister Paolina, her low-grade friction with the Boston cops. In the last couple of books, Barnes has made plots involving some of these minor characters, and this time Carlotta’s on-again, off-again romance with mobster Sam Gianelli provides the puzzle.

Sure, there’s a dead body, and everything ties up neatly in the end, so that fresh-face Jessica Franklin who wants her fiancé tailed for the evening finally connects with a mob-related showdown. Barnes does a good job of balancing the mystery with the character-development stuff. I could only wish she’d spun out the sexual tension with Boston cop Mooney a little longer. But maybe she felt the pair had been sparring with each other long enough. I really was worried Mooney would get killed in the shootout at the end, but I guess Barnes thought Carlotta had been through enough for one book. It’s always interesting to figure out what a writer perceives the covenant with the reader to be. Denise Mina is obviously pushing at some of the conventional boundaries but sometimes we do want a more reassuring world-view and I was relieved that Barnes provided it.

Denise Mina, “Exile”

Was it too much, too soon? Was I too excited by Mina’s earlier Garnethill? Would I have liked Exile better if I’d waited a little longer before reading it? Or was it really not as good?

One thing’s for sure: Exile’s very dark for my taste. And another thing: murder mysteries may be a great way to explore social issues, but that makes for pretty uncomfortable escape reading. The book has some technical problems, too — Mina had to switch the narration from Maureen’s wound-up perception to omniscience, to get all the facts in, and the tale loses by the change. There’s also a lot of clunky exposition at the beginning, so awkward that I almost gave up.

In this volume, Maureen gets hung up in the drug-dealing culture and goes to London to try to track down some facts. A Glasgow woman, formerly a resident in a women’s shelter, has disappeared, leaving a husband and four children. A body is found in London that corresponds — but what was Ann doing in London? The cops seem to have gotten the wrong idea, Maureen’s brother Liam (formerly a dealer) may be implicated…. oh, and her father Michael, who abused her, has moved back to Glasgow and Maureen’s having trouble coping. The tangle gets untangled in the end, but the process isn’t very edifying.

Denise Mina, “Garnethill”

Nothing to do with what I feel sure the characters would call the “poncy” home-furnishings catalogue. Garnethill is a neighborhood in Glasgow, and not a posh one either. I don’t imagine there aren’t a whole lot of posh neighborhoods in Glasgow. Most of the characters in this wonderful mystery don’t seem to do much career-wise, but they’re a fascinating bunch. Denise Mina is very interested in moral ambiguity. Her narrator, Maureen O’Connell, drinks too much, has done a spell in a mental hospital, and has a very soft spot for lame ducks.  Her sympathetic brother Liam is a drug dealer, her unsympathetic mother Winnie is an alcoholic and I have never read such a great characterization of a drunk.

Oh, the plot — well, it’s pretty excellent, too. Maureen comes home from a drunken evening and wakes up to find her (married) boyfriend tied up in her living room with his throat slit ear to ear. She is naturally a suspect, especially when it comes to light that Douglas has deposited a lot of money into her bank account. The cops are annoying, and get the wrong end of the stick. Maureen’s own family secrets emerge, and they’re doozies.

Curiously, dark as Garnethill is, I found it more cheerful than  Olive Kitteridge. Mina’s ambition is perhaps narrower (from the reader’s guide it becomes clear that she conceives this as a book that will bring attention to issues of alcoholism and sexual abuse). Her redemptive message is not so very different from what Elizabeth Strout suggests, i.e. that we should sieze pleasures where we find them, and focus on kindness and loyalty in small, everyday measures. Maybe I just needed to have it dressed up in an exotic costume.

Apparently there is a whole school of dark Scottish mysteries, with Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, and Manda Scott among the practitioners. The category is called “Tartan Noir.” It might be fun to stack these books against the emerging school of Swedish Noirs coming our way. From what I’ve read of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, the Swedes have the edge on blackness.