Smarter Than They Need to Be

Tomorrow, July 13, Tana French’s Faithful Place will hit my Kindle. In honor of that event, I thought I’d list a few of one of my favorite categories of authors: mystery writers who are smarter than they need to be. I find myself saying this frequently: it’s the writer with extra power under the hood who produces the really diverting diversions. Alpha order here, because I don’t actually know the IQ level of each of these people:

Benjamin Black, Booker Prize winner as  John Banville

Sarah Caudwell, eminent English barrister

Tana French, multinational (Irish, Italian, American) actress

Dorothy Sayers, author of a highly respected translation of Dante

Rebecca Stott, PhD. from the University of York, wrote a bio of Darwin before Ghostwalk

Fred Vargas, a medievalist and archaeologist, formerly of the French Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique

part of an IQ test, I believe

Frank Tallis, “A Death in Vienna”

A murder mystery set in Vienna in 1902 sounded like a terrific idea. Teaming up to solve the mystery: Oskar Reinhardt, a detective, and his friend Dr. Max Liebermann, a doctor who experiments with the new treatment known as psychoanalysis. (Naturally Dr. Freud appears in a walk-on part.) The victim is a beautiful blonde clairvoyant who has been shot in a locked room.  Along the way, the author places his characters in the famous coffee houses, at the Secession, and he even sets the climactic scene at the peak of the famous Reisenrand, the Ferris wheel in the Prater that Hitchcock so memorably employed in The Third Man.

It almost works, but Frank Tallis isn’t a terrific writer. Much of the historical and local color seems obligatory: why tell us exactly what everyone orders each time the characters sit down for a cup of coffee? Why trace their steps — right on this strasse, left on that brücke — when these are routes the characters would follow without thought? Why pause to tell us that Liebermann’s new coffee table was made by Koloman Moser? It’s all clumsy. And Tallis’s word choices are sometimes labored. “Weak spears of watery light angled through the mossy curtains, illuminating motes that glided through the air with the lymphatic grace of protozoa.”  ”Lymphatic grace?” If you say so.

That being said, the plot is satisfying and the pacing works nicely. The characters all feel a little bit second-hand, as if we’d met them before in other books (the bluestocking English governess, the sexually abusive bank president and his downtrodden wife, even the slightly plodding policeman Reinhardt and the more intuitive Dr. Liebermann). But the murder itself is quite ingenious and when all’s said and done, turn-of-the-century Vienna is a fine place to spend a few hours.

Deborah Crombie, “Necessary as Blood”

What a terrible title! I still can’t figure out how it pertains to the book, and it’s the kind of non-sequitur that I know won’t ever stick in my brain. Nor does it tell you anything about the novel. Maybe we Deborah Crombie fans are just supposed to grab the next one regardless, like the Sue Grafton books, whose alphabetical titles are pretty thin on the information, too.

Next complaint: there’s a little too much going on here. Crombie has created a rich and satisfying environment for her Scotland Yard detectives Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid. We’ve got their respective kids, their bosses, their underlings, their friends — even their vet appears in this one. It all hung together and everyone’s appealing enough but there just aren’t enough pages in the book to do justice to the supporting characters and the plot.

For this book Crombie turned to London’s East End, which clearly fascinates her. In fact you could say that the neighborhood around Shoreditch and Bethnal Green is one of the protagonists of the novel, because it throws together an unlikely mix of characters who end up interacting in interesting ways. The plot is not actually complex — Sandra Gilles, an English artist and mother, is married to Nasir Malik, a Pakistani lawyer. One day Sandra mysteriously disappears. A few months later, Naz also vanishes, and it’s at this point that the Yard is called in. The candidates for baddie range from Sandra’s unsavory drug-dealing brothers to a mysterious club owner to a smarmy veterinarian. The novel doesn’t really spend enough time on the various options — one of the reasons I like the traditional procedural is that I enjoy witnessing the detectives winnowing the evidence, bringing their keen observational skills to bear on the various suspects. In this novel the villain doesn’t spend enough time on our radar for us to actually engage with him, or with his evil deeds. That part all feels sketched in. Overall, Crombie is such fun to read that I could almost overlook this flaw. Will Gemma marry Duncan? Will Melody tell her father to buzz off?  Yet — why should I be worrying about this when there are dead bodies lying around?

Andrew Taylor, “The Judgement of Strangers”

Well, that was disturbing. I can see what Taylor’s up to now and it’s pretty clever. The Judgement of Strangers interlocks with The Four Last Things in interesting ways and the third novel (which I will read, albeit with trepidation) promises to reveal yet further tantalizing secrets. So it’s a little bit like “The Norman Conquests,” only not as much fun.

In fact, not by a long shot. This book is narrated by David Byfield, who appears in The Four Last Things as a secondary character. Taylor’s created a believable character here, but not an appealing one, and it’s something of a penance to have to, well, endure the events of the novel (murder, drug addiction, infidelity, Anglican priests run amok) through his perceptions. He’s a coward and a prig and very adept at self-deception, which is a feat for Taylor, so let’s give him credit for that. But that’s the risk you run, having such a man narrate — your reader may get fed up.  This reader very nearly did. I suppose it’s a tribute to the power of curiosity that I’m even going to pick up the third volume.

Andrew Taylor, “The Four Last Things”

Am I spoiled? Here’s a perfectly good literate murder mystery set in London, with an Anglican vicar as a protagonist, and I’m faintly disappointed. Well, if I am spoiled, it’s Andrew Taylor’s fault, because his Bleeding Heart Square was so terrific that my expectations were perhaps a bit high. So let’s damp them down — this is really Ruth Rendell territory, with a criminal who does terrible things to children and her sidekick who fantasizes about doing less-terrible things. Maybe this is the source of my faint discontent, because Taylor backs off, giving us a tolerable ending in traditional restoration-of-order form. I should be glad, right? Because half the time I’m too creeped out by Rendell to even read her novels, which are hugely unsettling.  I should certainly be happy to have found someone who’s turned out a string of readable traditional English mysteries, and I am, I am. I’m now launched on The Judgement of Strangers which, involving as it does some of the same characters, may make for a richer experience. It’s just that The Four Last Things felt a little bit thin.

Andrew Taylor, “Bleeding Heart Square”

It’s a really good day when you find a new writer who publishes clever, literate murder mysteries. It’s an especially good day when this writer has been at it for a while and there’s a backlog of titles for you to work through. And it’s a terrific day when the writer is Andrew Taylor, and your introduction to him is Bleeding Heart Square.

Bleeding Heart Square hardcover

His U.S. publisher, Hyperion, is issuing some of this previous books along with this one, and they all have beautiful covers with architectural photographs, vaguely sinister, dark-toned — not unlike the covers of the Alan Furst books. Say what you will, these designers know just how to signal the contents of these novels. Bleeding Heart Square is set in 1934 London, as economic conditions reduce the options of many Britons, and the Fascist party starts to stir up all kinds of ugly trouble. But Taylor, clever man, maps this situation onto a 19th-century framework. Did you remember that Bleeding Heart Yard is the setting of a big chunk of Little Dorrit? (It’s OK, I had to check, and I just read the darn thing.) Furthermore certain characters in Bleeding Heart Square — the alcoholic gentleman ne’er-do-well, the physically imposing and menacing landlord — share DNA with Dickens’ characters.

But Taylor’s not slavish, and the mystery part eventually overruns the Dickensian scaffolding. Lydia Langstone, 28 and pretty, has left her boorish rich husband (soon to join the British Union of Fascists) because he bullies her. She flees to her estranged father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis, who lives in a squalid boarding house in Bleeding Heart Square. Taylor is especially good on the nitty-gritty reality here: Lydia left home with “Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Ones’ Own but she had forgotten her toothbrush.”

There’s a murder, there are sinister clues (literal bleeding hearts are regularly sent to the frightening landlord, Serridge). There’s a downtrodden police investigator (more Dickens) and a fresh-faced journalist who falls for Lydia. Several sections take place in the country but it’s more Stella Gibbons than Angela Thirkell. No laughs, though.

Still, all the literary allusions bring a level of playfulness to the plotting. Which, by the way, is excellent. Twists and turns all the way, right to the end. A really artful piece of work.

Donna Leon, “About Face”

I’m beginning to feel a little bit sorry for Donna Leon. For years it seemed as if she had a great gig, living in Italy, writing popular murder mysteries set in Venice — what a fantasy! The problem is that the reality of living in Italy has begun to get darker and darker. About Face goes so far as to compare Italy’s state of lawlessness to that of Somalia, and Leon makes a pretty good case for this assertion.

In this book the bad deeds have to do with refuse. We all know about the Neapolitan situation with the trash in the streets, and the deep involvement of organized crime with the industries that do or don’t remove trash and take it where it’s supposed to go. If you think about it, the situation couldn’t be confined to Naples alone. So this is what Commissario Brunetti investigates this time around.

The spin is the presence of a character, Franca Marinello, whom Brunetti meets at a dinner party and likes very much despite her face which has apparently been ruined by overly drastic plastic surgery. Leon’s working with metaphor here: Brunetti’s inability to see beyond Marinello’s face, and his haste to judge her, impairs his ability to grasp what is really happening in the baffling garbage case, which soon includes a murder.

Leon writes a terrific scene that takes place in some abandoned fuel tanks, in which a young eager cop is viciously burned by merely touching some toxic goop that’s leaked out of its barrels. (Given the emphatic way Leon signaled this, I was afraid he was going to be shot, so merely losing a bunch of skin to poisonous slime came as quite a relief.) The bad guys who are trafficking in the stuff aren’t even identified, let alone brought to justice. I’m pretty sure Leon thinks there’s none of that to be had in Italy right now.

Sue Grafton, “T is for Trespass”

Sue Grafton is such a professional. Could she possibly have known, when she wrote A is for Alibi 20-some years ago, that she was going to work her way through the whole alphabet? Did she know that her formula would hold up, that she could produce 20  satisfying mysteries based on that template without boring us (or herself)?  

Here’s how it works. T is for Trespass is narrated, naturally, by private investigator Kinsey Millhone. It’s 1987 in Santa Teresa (Santa Barbara to you) CA. There’s a predator on the loose, a sociopath named, for our purposes, Solana Rojas. Grafton alternates between Kinsey’s point of view, in the first person, and Solana’s, with an omniscient narrator. There’s a real estate subplot.

This is one of those deals where you know from the start who the bad gal  is and furthermore what she’s doing, so the enjoyment, and the suspense, come from watching Grafton knit together her two plots. You know that eventually Kinsey will get her hooks into Solana — the genre tells us this. But you don’t know how she is going to pull it off. 

Very skilfully, as it turns out. There’s a double ending which made me realize how important the final confrontation with the villain is to the genre. There’s a nifty pacing trick, when Kinsey finally tracks down a character she’s been pursuing — she sees him and then stops to muse about the nature of recognition of another person. It lends drama to that little confrontation. And unlike Barry Maitland,Grafton  takes the trouble to give very minor characters a few traits or a speech that flesh them out into people, rather than devices.  

I wonder if that’s a matter of balance. I’m not sure how you’d analyze this, but let’s say you have a finite length, 100,000 words. Is Maitland actually fitting in a lot more plot, and is that why he’s cursory with the characterization? Does Grafton put her characters through less, are there fewer narrative events, so she can tell us what Kinsey eats for lunch? The author of a mystery series has to get this balance right, because the subsidiary characters and the setting are often what keep readers coming back. If we all just wanted puzzles we’d be reading nothing but Agatha Christie. 

Barry Maitland, “No Trace”

Maitland is new to me. This is another book I bought because of its cover — note to publishers of murder mysteries, bring on the moody black and white images, relevance to plot be damned. Apparently Maitland is launched on a series involving these Scotland Yard detectives, David Brock and Kathy Kolla. Apparently also St. Martin’s/Minotaur isn’t doing much to push them, because there’s very little sales apparatus on the Amazon website — earlier books don’t even have jacket photos, there’s no Kindle edition, no review, not even reader reviews.  Pretty sad. It’s not a great book, but it’s respectable, and genre addicts need their fixes. It takes a heck of a lot longer to write these things than it does to read them, so it’s a pity the publishers don’t know how to find us. 

Respectable but not great, I have to say. I suppose the model here is Deborah Crombie or Elizabeth George, straight-up contemporary police procedural involving male DCI and female DS. Only they have no personalities. They’re utterly flat. The book is ingeniously plotted but Maitland is so cursory with the characterization that at first the narrative had a strange choppy rhythm, as we moved from consciousness to consciousness without — this is difficult to express — ever feeling grounded. I think that’s what I mean. Here’s an example: late in the book Kathy Kolla visits the Soane Museum in London to follow up on a clue. She has a conversation with a guide  in the course of which essential information is imparted. Yet the guide is described only as “an elderly, impish man” and not named. That’s an opportunity lost.  Think of the nifty pen portraits we get from writers like Crombie and George, who manage to flesh out even the most fleeting presences in their books.  

The dialogue isn’t bad, and the description of place is pretty good. Lots of moaning about Yard bureaucracy (standard for contemporary UK and Italian mysteries) which ties neatly into the plot. Plot concerns pretentious idiocy at a Shoreditch art gallery. This stuff works very, very well. Nice sardonic view of art that includes, for instance, a “piece” called “Dead Puppies” that involves just that.  Clever.

Georgette Heyer, “The Unfinished Clue”

Copyright 1934, straight-up English country-house mystery. Totally predictable, very restful. Opening sentence: “It was apparent to Miss Fawcett within one minute of her arrival at the Grange that her host was not in the best of tempers.”

I think we’re done here.