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.

Ruth Rendell, “The Vault”

We’re getting on in years, Ruth Rendell, Reg Wexford and I. I sort of dropped the ball on the Wexford novels, one of the most consistently satisfying police procedural series. I left Reg out there in Kingsmarkham, his Southern English town plagued by a remarkably high rate of violent crime. I must have missed three or four books in which he applied his humanity and his intuition to the puzzle at hand and solved it entirely plausibly. I missed various developments in his family: his actress daughter Sheila’s marriage, his social-worker daughter Sylvia’s third child. Then when I picked up The Vault, I found that Wexford has retired! Not only that, he’s living in London and walking everywhere has taken off his extra poundage. But he’s at loose ends, doesn’t quite know what to do with his time. So he’s happy to be called in as a “consultant” on a murder that baffles the local force. Beneath a patio behind an expensive house in St. John’s Wood, four bodies have been discovered. Not one can be identified, and while two men and a woman seem to have been interred at roughly the same time, one body is much more recent. The home-owner claims he didn’t know the bodies were there. Where do you even start?

Hence Wexford’s intervention. He has time the legitimate force doesn’t, time to noodle around and talk to the neighbors, to observe and cogitate on his long walks through North London. In some ways he’s coming to resemble my beloved Jean-Pierre Adamsberg of the Fred Vargas novels, but Rendell works in a more naturalistic vein than Vargas. While the latter always includes some supernatural element, and you’re aware at all times that you are reading a suspenseful confection of a tale, Rendell is more matter-of-fact. I think that’s what has always given her creepier books their special weird power.

Despite its title, despite its resolution, The Vault won’t inspire nightmares, or even discomfiting reflections about the dark corners of human nature. It’s just efficient, effective entertainment.

Susan Hill, “The Betrayal of Trust”

Goddesses: Three Graces at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, sculptor unknown

OK, it’s official. Susan Hill enters the contemporary murder mystery pantheon, along with the goddess Tana French and the goddess Fred Vargas. Why, you may wonder, are these women deities in my little firmament? Because they consistently deliver entertainment that is also challenging. Because they work in a traditional genre and make it contemporary. Because they divert and provoke at the same time. And because they write so darn well.

I’ve posted about Susan Hill before and I’ve liked all of her books, but The Betrayal of Trust may be the best yet. A discerning friend theorizes that Hill is working on a series of twelve Simon Serrailler novels and he may be right. There’s something very intentional about the way she plants story lines and leaves them unfinished — it reminds me of the later Patrick O’Brian books. You don’t so much have a sense of the author being obliged to fill you in on the sidekicks and incidental characters (which I felt in Elizabeth George’s Believing the Lie), as a sense of groundwork being laid. Hill trusts us to be patient.

The precipitating factor here is a terrible tempest that floods the moor near Lafferton and exposes a skeleton. It turns out to be the remains of a fifteen-year-old girl who vanished on a sunny day sixteen years earlier — a cold case, in fact.  Serrailler catches the case but this is clearly contemporary Britain, because his struggles have as much to do with budgets as criminals. Budget constraints are also threatening Imogen House, the hospice where Simon’s sister Cat Deerbon works. Cat, in fact, is besieged on all sides; by grief, by overwork, by her children’s reactions to her husband Chris’s death.

What I most admired in this book was the fact that Hill let Simon be an outright jerk. He’s always been complicated, and Hill has sketched in the family background to justify that. But now, whether it’s the onset of middle age or the pressure of work or his always dangerous arrogance, he oversteps the bounds. He’s truly horrible to Cat, callous with his colleagues, inconsiderate at best with his new love-interest. (Gotta say the True Love plot thread did not entirely ring true to me, but maybe it’s there to humble Simon, a book or two down the road.)

There’s also a strong feeling of melancholy. Without dipping into the cynicism of, say, Benjamin Black, Hill has never spared her readers, and in The Betrayal of Trust several of the plot lines are extremely sad. One character suffers motor neuron disease (what we call ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease). Another has a partner with Alzheimer’s, who must be institutionalized; another is nursing a husband with Parkinson’s. It did remind me just a teeny bit of the phrase from the old hymn “Abide with me –” “Age and decay in all around I see…” Redemption? Satisfaction? The murder gets solved. That’s all we’re going to get. It’s enough.

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?

Fred Vargas, “L’Armee furieuse”

Fred Vargas does it again. I’ve written pretty frequently about the challenges of keeping a mystery series fresh. There’s a lot to juggle: the setting, the sidekicks, the detective’s emotional development, amorous relationships if any. Some writers clearly tire of the gig, and some manage to stick with it for an improbable span (let’s all raise a glass to the indomitable Sue Grafton). But I can’t think of any mystery writer who started with a template as demanding as that of Fred Vargas. It’s not enough that her Commissioner J. P. Adamsberg novels feature the infuriating, intuitive police commissioner and his linear polymath colleague, Brigadier Adrien Danglard. This dichotomy has always let Vargas use her novels as a way to think about epistemology – which, as one of you brilliant readers has pointed out, is really always the subject of a mystery novel. Who knows what, and how do they know it?

But Vargas — who is a very smart gal — ups the ante by linking her crimes with … let’s call it unreason. Each of the Adamsberg books includes a plot line about something ancient, creepy, and in some cases paranormal. We have plague. Werewolves. A ghost with a trident. A magic potion. Each time Adamsberg has managed to solve the earthly crime, finding a conventional criminal without entirely dismissing the possibility of these weird phenomena. And in L’Armée furieuse, our author follows suit.

Peter Nicolai Arbo's Asgardreien, 1872. This is the general idea of the Furious Army.

L’armée furieuse is a ghastly apparition seen in a Norman village. Danglard, naturally, informs Adamsberg all about it (he’s useful, Danglard: a walking, talking provider of exposition). It’s a northern European phenomenon of a mounted undead warrior, hauling with him several future victims, howling and wailing. The victims, once seen and identified, always die violently. Not everyone has the privilege of seeing the Furious Army, or the Wild Hunt; it’s a kind of second sight. And if you do see it, you are obligated to warn the potential victims to give them a chance to escape.

The unfortunate seer in this case is Lina Vendermot, the lushly sexy sister in a remarkably peculiar family. They are all brilliant but Hippolyte talks backward, Martin eats nothing but insects and Antoine believes he is made of clay. Vargas pulls some strings to get Adamsberg assigned to the case — plausibly enough, I suppose. The local police commandant, the count, the Parisian case of the murdered industrialist…. like that. I don’t have to tell you that Adamsberg figures it all out.

Meanwhile Vargas keeps slipping in sentences like this: “If there was one thing Danglard disapproved of most about Adamsberg, it was the way he took sensations to be proven facts. Adamsberg retorted that sensations were facts, material elements that had as much value as laboratory analysis. That the brain was the most enormous of laboratories, perfectly capable of sorting and analyzing the given data, such as a look, and extracting reliable results from it.”  Which is of course what we all do when we read mysteries, right?

Ann Cleeves, “Morts sur la lande”/”Telling Tales”

I feel pretty silly about this. It makes sense to read French murder mysteries in French, in an attempt to maintain language skills. Thus Fred Vargas. But it’s pretty cumbersome to read an English murder mystery in French, just because you found it in a Parisian book store and thought it looked good and didn’t even know it was originally written in English. Your native language.

This little folly may have affected my opinion of Ann Cleeves. The last third of the book dragged somewhat — it felt like some of the less exciting recent P.D. James novels — but then again, I might just have been losing focus, or missing crucial vocabulary. The good news is that I liked Telling Tales enough to follow up with Cleeves. There are apparently four novels featuring the homely, overweight police inspector Vera Stanhope, whose powers of observation and curiosity combine with her unconventional methods. Telling Tales is a pretty conventional police procedural about a ten-year-old murder of a young girl. New evidence has come to light that exonerates the woman who was convicted of the murder, but this news doesn’t reach her in time. She commits suicide.

A small community is essential to this kind of story-telling and Telling Tales is set in a northern English village where (you expected this, right?) many of the characters have secrets. Interesting atmosphere; much of the novel is set amidst the shipping on the Humber river (teaching me lots of new French words I will never be able to use). Emma found Abigail Mantel’s body when the two of them were fifteen years old. Her hard-won peace of mind and domestic contentment is threatened by the news of Jeanie’s death. Before long there is another death and suspicion falls on other residents of the village. OK, yes, it’s formulaic. But Cleeves is adept: timing, psychology, foggy atmosphere, all contribute to the apparent success of the book. I’ll know more when I’ve read one in English, though.

Fred Vargas, “Debout les morts”/”The Three Evangelists”

I don’t have the temperament of a completist. Not for me the obscure early works, the unfinished manuscripts, the lesser-known short stories of the eminent novelist. But I find myself making an exception for Fred Vargas because she is just so much fun. Debout les morts/The Three Evangelists, published in 1995, is one of Vargas‘ earlier mysteries, though it comes after L’homme aux cercles bleus/The Chalk Circle Man, in which police commissioner Jean-Pierre Adamsberg makes his first appearance. It’s clear that Vargas had not yet figured out who her chief protagonist is going to be, since The Three Evangelists ignores Adamsberg in favor of the three out-of-work academics who study, respectively, prehistory (Mathias/Matthew, the “hunter-gatherer”) the Middle Ages (Marc/Mark, the “broke aristocrat”) and World War I (Lucien/Luke, with a tin soldier on his keyring). They occupy a wreck of a house in a quiet neighborhood, each taking an entire floor, layered chronologically in what might have been fatal whimsy in other hands. The top floor is occupied by Marc’s uncle and godfather, an ex-cop with a tarnished reputation.

As one might expect, three reasonably attractive (well, except for Lucien) young men make friends of their female neighbors and thus become involved when former opera star Sophia Siméonidis is deeply disturbed by the appearance in her garden of a young beech tree. When Sophia disappears, the tale takes off. As in The Chalk Circle Man, Vargas concerns herself with research methods. (After all, she has a PhD. in history and published academically as recently as 2007.) Direct observation, archival research, excavation, discussion, even that tricky process, thought, are all brought to bear on the problem. In a wonderful passage near the end of the novel, Marc goes on a walkabout through Paris, coming to grips with ahorrifying conclusion, then returns home: “He had accepted the idea. He had understood. Everything was in order. He knew where Sophia was. He had put the time in.” Other crucial clues that only Vargas could have invented: the quality of the disturbed earth when a trench has been closed up. A spelling error. The rust-mark left by a paper clip on an old newspaper.

It’s true that The Three Evangelists is not the full-blown Vargas I’ve come to adore. She’s still playing with archetypes rather than real characters — Mathias, for instance, the prehistorian, prefers not to wear clothes and speaks very little while Lucien, the only post-industrial historian, feels naked without his tie. But somehow she makes even these slightly schematic figures sympathetic. And if the murderer’s motive seems a little thin, there’s enough action at the end to more or less veil that shortcoming. The truly good news, though, is that a new Vargas is appearing in France on May 18. Mark your calendar!

Jane Haddam, “Glass Houses”

After all my highbrow Virago reading last week I’m faintly embarrassed at returning to murder mysteries, but there you have it. Sometimes all i want from a book is escape, and over the years Jane Haddam’s series mysteries have provided that reliably. On the other hand, I did spend some time thinking about what separated Haddam from, say Elizabeth George, who also writes series mysteries. George is a much bigger deal, commercially speaking, and that’s not entirely a question of marketing.

See, I think readers like me, reliable consumers of mysteries, often want something more than the puzzle — even more, perhaps, than the reassuring trajectory of order disrupted and restored. Elizabeth George and some other writers like Susan Hill, Fred Vargas and the goddess Tana French also manage to write about something. This is not the same as Denise Mina’s avowed social-work focus or Jane Haddam’s propensity to break into rants on behalf of her characters. Rather, the former writers use the mystery genre to think about something more abstract like, perhaps, memory (French’s In the Woods) or epistemology (Fred Vargas‘ Adamsberg novels). This doesn’t mean that I won’t follow Sue Grafton all the way to “Z” or that I’m never going to read Margery Allingham again. But mystery readers may be eager for a more multi-dimensional experience than the police procedural with an entertaining cast of sidekicks.

Haddam has been writing for years about Gregor Demarkian, a former  FBI profiler of serial killers. The books are set in or around Philadelphia, and include a large cast of neighbors, friends, a love interest, and city functionaries, my favorite of whom, John Henry Newman Jackman, is a hyper-competent, hyper-ambitious, black Catholic politician. I’ve always liked Haddam because she’s a crackerjack social observer. She has a wonderful grasp of the opportunities and limitations afforded by a wide range of social strata, and she’s not afraid to share her opinions. But I have found with the recent novels that opinion — raw, unedited — is occupying more of the page than I would like.

So, Glass Houses. There’s a serial killer loose in Philly. He (they’re almost inevitably male) strangles women then cuts their faces with broken glass and leaves the bodies in alleys. Gregor Demarkian has to contend with severe police dysfunction in this case, as well as with the reappearance of his highly neurotic consort Bennis Hannaford who is ravishing and rich. The case gets solved. I never thought it wouldn’t.

Fred Vargas, “Un Lieu incertain”

The translation for this Fred Vargas title is listed on Amazon as An Uncertain Place. Looks like the English edition will be available in May, though not from Penguin, which has been issuing Sian Reynolds’ translations like Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand. As one of Police Commissioner Jean-Pierre Adamsberg’s staff might say, “Mystère.” Also, “Dommage,” which means “too bad.” Because I’ve just read a fabulous murder mystery and want to share my enthusiasm.

Fellow Vargas fans will know that her mysteries flirt with the ancient menaces to civilization: plague, ghosts, werewolves and now, vampires. The novel opens with Adamsberg and his sidekick Adrien Danglard at a conference in London where they are confronted by seventeen shod feet, severed from old cadavers, lined up at Highgate Cemetery. It’s a rousing start for the usual intricate Vargas puzzle, with an indelible visual image and any number of meanings that could be assigned to the phenomenon. But does it have anything to do with the Parisian Criminal Brigade?

Highgate Cemetery, suitably creepy

The connection doesn’t become clear until later. These Vargas books develop at their own pace and require that we readers emulate Adamsberg’s free-floating approach to cognition. They follow the rules of the traditional mystery — the bad guy is there all along, the red herrings are exposed as distractions — but those elements are worked into a dense network of images, characters, and ideas. The crime that kicks off the investigation in this book is a gruesome killing in which a body is systematically dismantled. One of the cops on Adamsberg’s team seems distracted, makes errors, and soon it seems that Adamsberg himself may fall under suspicion. Enter a level of plot compexity worthy of John LeCarré, where the institution that upholds the law is revealed as deeply corrupt.

Thus Adamsberg’s flight to Serbia has something in it of the return to Eden. One of the reasons these books are so compelling is that the secondary conflict is always between the intuitive and the materialist. Vargas spells it out, demonstrating how it splits the squad room: “Here the antagonism revived with new strength, between the material positivist members of the Brigade, who were deeply disturbed by Adamsberg’s vagaries, and those more conciliatory members who saw no harm in shoveling clouds from time to time.” This divide mirrors the way Vargas has played with the apparently supernatural in some of these mysteries. On his visit to the Serbian village, home of the master vampire, Adamsberg accepts at face value the inhabitants’ beliefs in the vampire and the menace it poses to them. He walks along the Danube, picks up some Serbian, seduces a waitress. Comes close to death.

Vargas‘ finesse is such that both positivists and dreamers can be satisfied with the outcome, but that both would benefit from a little flexibility in their thinking. Meanwhile the tense sidekick Danglard chases romance and loosey-goosey Adamsberg is confronted once again with the troublesome matter of emotional ties. Once again, Vargas inserts a kitten into the story. I am always a sucker for a kitten. So is Adamsberg.

Fred Vargas, “L’homme aux cercles bleus”/”The Chalk Circle Man”

It’s always interesting to read a series out of order. I’ve been struck by how much Fred Vargas packs into her mysteries about Paris police commissioner Jean-Pierre Adamsberg. As you must if you’re writing series fiction, she develops her lead character and a recurring cast of sidekicks — think “Cheers” only in a Parisian police station. But Vargas is also an historian and archaeologist so her interests are somewhat unusual. And now that I’ve read L’homme aux cercles bleus, the initial book in the Adamsberg series, I am more convinced than ever that Vargas is actually writing about — big breath here — epistemology.

Yes, the study of how we know things. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Both for a moonlighting academic, and as the subtext of a murder mystery. Vargas has made a nice theme out of the partnership between Adamsberg, whose working method is almost entirely intuitive, and his colleague Adrien Danglard who is more conventionally intelligent and formidably well-informed. (In later books, we see them collaborate, as Adamsberg comes to rely on Danglard’s fund of information and gift at analysis.)Vargas also begins this novel with a character named Mathilde, an oceanographer who make a hobby of observing strangers in Paris, like someone “creating a cabinet of curiosities,” explains a psychologist about her. “…she is an indefatigable researcher.” Why do I think Vargas might have been writing about herself?  She may also be showing her hand when Adamsberg writes in his little notebook, “Yesterday … I asked myself why I was a cop. Maybe because in this job you have things to look for [research: same word in French] with the chance that you’ll find them.” As opposed to academic research, perhaps, when you often have no chance of finding things?

Jean-Hugues Anglade: the perfect Adamsberg.

And then again maybe I’m reading too much into a simple murder mystery. Except it isn’t very simple. Someone in Paris is drawing big blue chalk circles on the sidewalk. At the center of each is an abandoned object: a hair curler, a battery, tangled audio tape. Adamsberg finds these circles ominous, exuding evil. Danglard, committed to a more concrete world view, is skeptical until one of the circles contains a body. I have no idea whether the procedure portion of the book is plausible, having thankfully had no experience with the Parisian police. Honestly, Vargas‘ version seems way too interesting but that’s all to the good in a novel.