Ruth Rendell, “Tigerlily’s Orchids”

OK, here’s a question. You pick up a new Ruth Rendell mystery, let’s say Tigerlily’s Orchids. The first character you meet, Olwen, is lucidly determined to drink herself to death. And furthermore, “On the whole Olwen was indifferent to other people or else she disliked them…” Do you find that attitude refreshing, or are you aghast? I’m not giving much away by telling you that Olwen eventually has her way and that the process, described with Rendell’s customary calm, is not attractive. So now you’re warned.

Cross-section of a Parisian apartment house by Edmond Texier, 1852

One of qualities I enjoy about Rendell’s work is exactly that calm. She doesn’t editorialize about Olwen. Nor about the incredibly handsome but vapid Stuart Font. Nor about Wally Scurlock, the venal caretaker for the North London apartment block called Lichfield House where the novel takes place. Watch out for the names, though. They tend to supply auras for characters, like the wealthy young girl named Noor, rumored to be dating an Indian prince. (Reminds you of Queen Noor of Jordan, perhaps?) The funny thing is that most rumors in Tigerlily’s Orchids are wrong. Most of the judgments made by the characters about their fellows are also wrong. This is a novel of miscommunication and misapprehension. Oh, yes, it’s also a murder mystery, but that’s easy to forget. There are various feints at physical mayhem and various skullduggery and bad behavior and certainly a puzzle that needs to be solved. But the victim had almost slipped my mind when the solution to his death presented itself.

I got a big kick out of the structure of the novel. The link among the characters is the apartment block itself, placing Tigerlily’s Orchids in a tradition that goes back into the nineteenth century. For instance, Emile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (usually translated as Pot Luck) follows the entwined lives of a group of apartment dwellers. In Rendell’s hands the device feels like one of those clever cartoons exposing a cross-section of a multi-dwelling building and catching the inhabitants in private moments. For instance:

Claudia Livorno came through the swing doors, carrying a bottle of Verdicchio and walking gingerly because the step outside was icy and her heels were high. She rang the bell of Flat 1.

Olwen had nothing in Flat 6 to eat except bread and jam, so she ate that and, when she woke up from her long afternoon sleep, started on a newly opened bottle of gin… In the flat below hers, Marius Potter was sitting in an armchair that had belonged to his grandmother reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the second time.

See? Fun! Oh, and by the way, no character is named Tigerlily, and there are no orchids.

Susan Hill, “A Question of Identity”

Why is Susan Hill not yet a household name in the U.S.? She is as good a writer, as reliably satisfying and interesting, as her peers Elizabeth George, Deborah Crombie, Ruth Rendell (though admittedly not as weird as the last). Her detective, Simon Serrailler, is dashing, talented, and complicated; Hill isn’t afraid of letting us dislike him. The requisite murder mystery sidekicks — his sister, his parents, his staff — are given believable occupations and preoccupations. Yet very often when I ask devotees of the genre if they know Hill’s work, they shake their heads. If American readers know Susan Hill, it’s usually as the author of The Woman in Black, which was made into a film with Daniel Radcliffe.

In fact, her seven murder mysteries are all excellent. They’re solid procedurals, but Hill has a quirky imagination and also understands that, in the 21st century, the Golden Age formula for the satisfying solution feels inauthentic. Life is messier than that. We can’t expect Miss Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey to fix everything in the last five pages. When murder is done, people stay broken, and Hill acknowledges that while providing the fast-moving puzzle we mystery readers want.

So, briefly, here’s the situation in A Question of Identity. Three elderly women are murdered. The culprit is acquitted, but because feeling in the community is so strongly against him, he’s whisked off into what we call a “witness protection program” in the US. He’s given a new identity. Ten years go by and in Lafferton, the cathedral town where these novels are set, another old woman is strangled with an electrical cord.

There aren’t so very many patterns for creating suspense in murder mysteries, and Susan Hill has used them all. This time, the reader has information that the detectives don’t. We can’t identify the murderer, but we have a pretty good idea why he does what he does. What lifts this novel beyond the usual escapism is the way Hill draws all the subsidiary characters into the central rumination about identity. How do we construct it? What happens when it breaks down, or must be adjusted? Simon’s sister the doctor Cat Deerbon has to contemplate a career shift. His stepmother’s marriage is threatened and she needs to redefine who she is as a wife. His oldest niece and nephew are adolescents, so there you go. Everyone’s questioning their identity. Except, of course, the murderer’s victims who won’t get the opportunity.

Ruth Rendell, “The St. Zita Society”

Oh, Ruth Rendell, how do you do it? Your industry is a reproach to all of us who write fewer than two books a year. Your dark imagination is disturbingly inventive, and the consistently high quality of your story telling inspires awe. Maybe slightly chilling awe.

I imagine Hexam Place as looking something like this.

I’ve strayed, over the last few years, from Rendell’s output, partly because she can be really disturbing and sometimes I’m a real coward in my reading. The St. Zita Society is not exactly benign.  There are murders and natural deaths, but Rendell chose to write this book from a distance. There’s little suspense and no lamentation. Some characters are likeable, some are not, and their fates seem almost random. But of course the novel is meticulously crafted to keep us reading while still reminding us of the accidental quality of life.

The title refers to an ad hoc gathering of the servants who work in the houses on an exclusive, expensive cul de sac in London. (St. Zita, apparently, is the patron saint of servants.) Of course these are not the traditionally-ranked servants we know from “Downton Abbey,” with their uniforms and their clearly defined jobs. The boundaries between the classes in Hexam Place are more fluid, as are the duties of those who carry them out. An ersatz princess shares a house with her maid of 60 years; a gay couple rents a basement flat to Thea, who prides herself on her university degree but nevertheless serves as a resentful unpaid personal assistant to her landlords. In another house, a Muslim nanny is more of a mother to the toddler than his flesh and blood parent, a shallow fashion plate.

The pacing is… temperate. Maybe surprisingly so, given that there’s been a murder and our expectation is that it will be the centerpiece in this novel. But The St. Zita Society belongs to the body of Rendell’s work that simply investigates the disturbing behavior that could — possibly — be going on all around us. Discomfiting, but satisfying.

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.

Barry Unsworth “Losing Nelson”

A few weeks ago, around the time of the publication of Bring Up the Bodies, Newsweek published Hilary Mantel’s list of five excellent historical novels. Naturally I paid attention. Losing Nelson was the first of them to arrive at my local library and I found it exhilarating. Some critics think historical fiction is somehow lame, or lazy, or unoriginal, and often that’s true. (Also true of literary fiction, though.) Maybe what attracts critical fire is the occasional predictability of the historical novel’s structure. I bring this up because Barry Unsworth so successfully avoids it.

Lemuel Abbott’s portrait of Lord Nelson. Idealized, of course.

Losing Nelson is narrated by a middle-aged Englishman who has dedicated his life to the late-Georgian naval hero Lord Nelson. This narrator — whose name, Charles Cleasby, is barely uttered in the course of the novel — is one of those lonely weird people who populate the novels of Barbara Pym or, more alarmingly, Ruth Rendell. It’s clear from the start that Charles is immensely damaged and part of the novel’s suspense is generated by sheer curiosity: what the heck happened to him? He is aware of his own peculiarities, but only in part. So he’s one of those tricky unreliable narrators. Especially unreliable because Barry Unsworth pierces narrative convention and has Charles’ story not only shift back and forth in time but also in person, from “I” to “you” to “I” again, only often the “I” is Nelson. One minute we are in Charles’ head, discussing a sea battle, the next minute we are on the deck of a ship, nearly deafened by cannon fire. In effect, Charles in in such psychic distress that he retreats into this alternative identity he has so carefully constructed: Horatio Nelson. He even, it’s clear, has imaginary sex with Nelson’s mistress Emma Hamilton.

It sounds jarring, but Unsworth is so adept that I found the effect magical instead. Both worlds, the contemporary and the historical, are vividly imagined and described but the way they unexpectedly penetrate each other is both original and effective. What’s more Unsworth keeps the narrative tension taut because Charles has made a hero out of his alter ego. Yet as he works on his book about Nelson (of course he’s writing a book) he has to confront a disturbing, anti-heroic episode in Nelson’s career. It’s clear to the reader that the Nelson fetish can’t hold back the tide of Charles’ psychic agony forever. Will the influence of his part-time secretary Miss Lily offer him a steadying hand? Or will Charles come apart as he investigates the truth about what happened in Naples in 1799? As he stands in a shadowy Neapolitan church he thinks, “I felt the same sorrow, the same helplessness that I had so often felt at home in my study. Whatever one made of the documents, the truth of the past was beyond grasping — it lay in the looks exchanged, the tones used, and the eyes and voices had left no trace.” Okay. Maybe we can’t get to THE truth of the past. (The very idea that there is a single truth is a symptom of Charles’ fragile, absolutist view of the world.) But in Losing Nelson, Barry Unsworth gives us a provocative version of it.

April Smith, “Good Morning, Killer”

April Smith’s Good Morning, Killer has made me think hard about the creepiness factor in crime novels. Actually, it might have been reading Smith back to back with Lee Child — I have just experienced a lot of mayhem at second hand.  But the issue lingers for all of us who turn to mysteries or thrillers for escape reading — bad, violent things happen to characters. And the better the writer, the more convincing the badness is. For instance, Ruth Rendell is fabulous, and at her most sinister, she is really disturbing. Some of her writing on family structures, and especially motherhood, is downright chilling. And, sure, it’s fiction, but while reading you experience it as real — don’t you?

Maybe not. Somewhere in my reading mind, there’s a constant awareness that these books are artificial, and that’s what makes it possible not to grieve or be terrified by the stories they tell. It’s a fine line, the distinction between the artificial and the naturalistic, and where the writer positions that line is going to be different for every book. Of course this theme of artificiality vs. naturalism rewards discussion when applied to all kinds of literature, but I’m sticking to my point here: escape fiction.

Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, important setting in "Good Morning, Killer"

Which brings me back to April Smith. She’s a wonderful writer. Elegant, humorous, evocative, clever, vivid. Good Morning, Killer opens with a description of swimming laps in a California rain storm that was, all by itself, worth the price of the book. But Smith’s heroine, FBI Agent Ana Grey — wow. I’m beginning to think Ana is seriously nuts. Good Morning, Killer is full of very poor emotional choices. For instance, imagine you are the lead agent on a case involving a kidnapping. Pretty good odds you should not be taking 3 a.m. phone calls from the kidnap victim when she’s released. Or, let’s say you’re dating your opposite number in the Santa Monica police department. And you’re his boss on this kidnapping case. Think that could get awkward? Then what if you get taken off the same case after a really unfortunate incident involving gunfire; was it really a good idea to keep pursuing leads on your own?

Despite my qualms I kept reading, because Smith is a good story-teller, and maybe I have more tolerance for this stuff — or did yesterday, anyway — than I thought. The thing is, Smith can’t let Ana become so crazy that she’s annoying. Strangely enough, that’s the quality that would be truly off-putting.