Jane Haddam, “Wanting Sheila Dead”

I was a little bit disappointed by the last one of Jane Haddam’s books I read, the 2009  Living Witness. I’m delighted to report that Wanting Sheila Dead brought back what I so enjoy about Haddam’s novels: penetrating social analysis delivered in a faintly sardonic fashion, along with a satisfying procedural mystery plot. (Minus the soap-box quality that marred Living Witness.)

This time around, affable former FBI profiler Gregor Demarkian gets involved in a reality TV show that’s filming in his hometown of Philadelphia. The host, Sheila Dunham, is the kind of monster we love to hate; relentlessly unpleasant, unpredictable, given to titanic bursts of fury. Naturally she’s the Sheila of the title and she’s apparently the target of an attempt at murder during the tryouts for “America’s Next Superstar.” (Classic Haddam: a “superstar” needs no talent.) To increase the pressure on Gregor, the show is filmed at Engine House where his wife Bennis Hannaford grew up in the kind of familial dysfunction that makes the action in Eugene O’Neill’s plays look like circle time in a cozy pre-school. A subplot involves one of Gregor and Bennis’ neighbors on Cavanaugh Street, a Very Old Lady who appears to have been murdered. Two unrelated murders for the price of one!

My only complaint, and I expect it had to do with editing, is that I was disappointed to be separated from some of the girls who were contestants on the show. Haddam excels at entering into her characters’ points of view and building sympathy with them, so I wanted to know more about  why Ivy Demari (tattoos, green-streaked hair, skeptical) or Andra Gayle (daughter of a Bronx drug addict) had auditioned for the TV show. It felt as if Haddam had been working up a sub-plot about them, and it never got fleshed out.

Jane Haddam, “Living Witness”

Jane Haddam’s series of mysteries about the affable former FBI agent Gregor Demarkian have given me a lot of pleasure over the years. They’re reliable procedurals shot through with humor and an unusually penetrating eye for social details. Haddam’s dissection of Main Line WASPs is especially observant. But in the last few years, Haddam has become a little bit dyspeptic, inclined to use her novels as soap boxes. Living Witness takes on Christian fundamentalism and the quest to insert creationism into school curricula — which would be fine if she’d kept it as a plot device. Instead, her ire turns the book into a rant. There’s way too much interior monologue, and much of it is repetitive. When she finally gets around to solving the mystery, Haddam’s attention to it seems almost perfunctory. Passion is important, but this is a novel, and Haddam’s indignation overpowers the fiction.

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.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, “To Darkness and to Death”

With so much anxiety during the holiday season — will Junior get home in the snow, does Aunt Tillie still like gingerbread, would hubby wear a bright green track suit and is he an XXL — it’s very soothing to have a well-constructed mystery to dive into. Thank you, Julia Spencer-Fleming, for taking my mind off the miserable state of the United Postal Service, etc. To Darkness and to Death, which features beatings, explosions, and logging machinery, was just the ticket. Once again, we’re in Millers Kill with the Rev. Clare Fergusson and Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne. This time we actually meet Russ’s wife Linda who turns out to be a “pocket Venus.” Who knew Linda would be a hottie? Once more, Clare’s and Russ’s emotions move one step closer to conflagration while the two of them cooperate to solve a violent puzzle.

Of course Spencer-Fleming encounters the challenge implicit in her success. If you write good mysteries, there’s an audience for them, and you get to write more of them. However, with each volume in your series, you put more stress on your readers’ suspension of disbelief. Millers Kill, New York, an Adirondack hamlet, has been home to a disproportionate amount of mayhem. I’m fine with it — for now. And of course reading a series one after the other makes the basic premise seem especially incredible. But I do wonder how long this fiction can be maintained. (One possible answer: See Sue Grafton.)

My other quibble: in this volume, Spencer-Fleming dips into a style that reminds me of Jane Haddam, another mystery writer. The omniscient narrator jumps from the consciousness of one actor in the drama to another, and another as the tale unfolds.  There’s nothing wrong with this, per se. Maybe that is simply how the story needs to be told, but it’s not fresh, and that bothers me.

On the positive side: as ever, Spencer-Fleming manages the plotting dexterously. This time the mystery concerns the development of a tract of land near Millers Kill and the author lays out the competing interests even-handedly, showing how different outcomes threaten different constituencies and characters. Equally even-handed is the distribution of sympathy; no one is a complete bad guy, no one wears a halo. And as in the earlier books of the series, Spencer-Fleming threads the plot with the liturgy and moral concerns of the Episcopal church. Not only does this add heft to the books, but I bet Episcopalians are big mystery fans.