Tana French, “Broken Harbor”

OK. We know that Tana French is a goddess, yeah? So all I really have to do here is tell you that Broken Harbor keeps up her usual high standard and that you should read it right away. But just in case you don’t know her work, or want details — or because I can’t help myself — here’s more.

Ghost estate: photo from Galway Planning Blog on WordPress

French‘s last outing was Faithful Place, which took a searing look at a certain kind of Irish family dysfunction, while also, naturally, solving a mystery. In Broken Harbor, though, she takes on the more recent phenomenon of the wreckage of the Celtic Tiger. Her narrator detective is Michael Kennedy, whom we knew (and disliked) in Faithful Place as “Scorcher.” In an interview in the Barnes & Noble Review French talks about how she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stand living in Scorcher’s head for the two years it took her to write the book. Well, it can’t be a fun place — Kennedy’s a seriously hurting puppy. But so, it turns out, are all of the characters in Broken Harbor. And, as in French‘s debut novel In the Woods, the detective has strong emotional ties to the location that should probably prevent him from taking the case.

Are the themes hit a little hard here? I’d say so. “Broken Harbor” is the old name of the seaside resort where our narrator used to vacation with his fragile family; two happy weeks a year in a caravan parked on the seashore. Broken (get it? broken?) Harbor has been renamed “Brianstown” as part of one of those sketchy real estate developments that were abandoned in the Irish crash and are now called “ghost estates.” Kennedy catches the case when a young family is discovered dead in their house. Pat and Jenny Spain were living the good life, working hard, spending hard, raising two adorable kids and getting on the “property ladder” with a 110% mortgage, when it all went haywire. Our first clue: the walls of the pristine Spain house — one of the few occupied among the rows of half-built abandoned shells — are full of holes punched through the drywall.

So what we basically have here is a tale in which the slick surfaces are peeled away and we witness the desperation beneath. Is the plot a surprise? Not especially. Is the handling magisterial? Absolutely. As Tana French’s readers know, she is the master of the unreliable narrator and Kennedy is a tour de force. This is a guy who’s spent his entire adult life attempting to hold back the forces of darkness: “In every way there is, murder is chaos. Our job is simple, when you get down to it: we stand against that, for order.”

Here’s another bit of Scorcher’s wisdom, which explains the perennial popularity of the mystery novel. “One of the many ways that murder is the unique crime: it’s the only one that makes us ask why. Robbery, rape, fraud, drug dealing, all the filthy litany, they come with their filthy explanations built in; all you have to do is slot the perp into the perp-shaped hole. Murder needs an answer.”

By the way, French usually chooses as narrator a secondary character from her previous book. This suggests two possibilities for Novel Number 5: the young eager Richie Curran or the odious department hack Quigley. Any bets?

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.

Tana French, “The Likeness”

Let’s start by thinking about glamor. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (with the magnifying glass, yes), the word doesn’t enter English until late in the 18th century, when it basically means a spell. The contemporary definition offered by the OED is “A magical or fictitious beauty… a delusive or alluring charm.”

So glamor is by definition deceptive. And The Likeness dives right into that pool, insisting on both charm and delusion, which are naturally sides of the same mirror. The basic premise of the book involves doubling: Dublin detective Cassie Maddox, whom we met in In the Woods, is summoned to the ruins of a cottage outside of Dublin one morning to find her former Undercover boss Frank Mackey and her current boyfriend Sam O’Neill (of the Murder squad) hovering over a body. Sam is especially undone, because the body is a physical double for Cassie.

If you’re willing to buy that premise — and why wouldn’t you be, with Tana French in charge? — the rest of the plot is plausible. Frank wants to use the likeness to send Cassie back to the life of the murdered girl, Lexie Madison. Cassie’s got a reckless streak, and unresolved issues about loyalty, so she agrees. And what a menage she falls into! Here’s the opening line of The Likeness: “Some nights, if I’m sleeping on my own, I still dream about Whitethorn House.” Do you remember the opening line of Daphne duMaurier’s Rebecca? “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Tana French is absolutely setting you up here: you are supposed to be thinking for all 466 pages of this book about appearance and reality. Whitethorn House is as much a fantasy as Manderley was, and Cassie Maddox falls for it and all who dwell there. There’s Daniel March, the brilliant rakish owner of the crumbling 18th century mansion in the Irish countryside. Rafe, “the resident eye candy,” is English, trying to escape his boorish rich father. Justin, nervous and gay, Abby, plucky and practical, with a drug-addict mother — the five of them (with the late Lexie), all graduate students, have forged a new family. Cassie, orphaned young and never quite over it, falls deliriously into her deception. She becomes Lexie, and comes perilously close to losing herself in the spell these people cast.

Oh, there’s a lot going on here. You’ve got the Cinderella thing, as Cassie turns herself into the dead girl. You’ve got various sexual undercurrents: Lexie was pregnant when she died. You’ve got the glamor component: these five attractive young people living together in a grand house, creating their own witty, elegant civilization. Only one of them must have killed Lexie. And Cassie is wearing a wire, and none of it will end well.

I read The Likeness when it came out in 2008 and I’ve been hoarding it for a re-read ever since. The glamor thing gets me every time (see Rules of Civility), and French has given Cassie a literate, eloquent, sensual voice with a redeeming edge of irreverence. I loved every page of it, and as of today I’m counting down to the next go-round.

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.

Gene Kerrigan, “The Midnight Choir”

What should I have deduced from the fact that The Midnight Choir’s title comes from a Leonard Cohen song? That it would be hip? Sad? Dark? Here’s the quotation: “Like a drunk in a midnight choir/I have tried in my way to be free.” (The true hipsters among you will not need to Google it as I did; it’s from “Bird on the Wire.”)

Anyway, I think I need to add Irish Noir to the growing catalogue of mystery categories to avoid. True, Detective Inspector Harry Synnott of Dublin does not at any point sleep in a reclining chair with an empty bottle of booze by his side, which happens to Inspector Rebus in Ian Rankin’s mysteries. But he is, naturally, estranged from his wife and grown son. He has a troubled past in the police force. He is no longer entirely certain that he trusts himself and his sense of morality is deeply compromised.

Gene Kerrigan’s storytelling is excellent, no doubt. He pulls together the various skeins of his plot artfully and the denouement is both unexpected and satisfying. His depiction of the Ireland of the early 2000s is scathing but fascinating: it’s the era of the Celtic Tiger and the prosperity washing over Ireland seems to have intoxicated many of the characters. One get-rich quick scheme after another unmoors them. Synnott’s patient skepticism provides a reality check.

What’s more, as we get to know Synnott, our relationship to him changes. This is quite a trick for an author. We see much of the action of The Midnight Choir from Synnott’s point of view so we are implicated in his actions. I can’t say much more without giving away plot points but basically four cases intertwine here: a rape, a jewel heist, a double murder and an ugly cocktail of gang activity. Synnott is investigating two of them and as a reader you follow him at first with admiration. Then… well.

But Kerrigan is not writing just another procedural. He’s got beef with the way Ireland is run. So does Tana French, and in a way The Midnight Choir reminded me of Faithful Place, but it’s more biting. Also considerably more gruesome. The Midnight Choir is a good puzzle; well-paced, compelling, and angry. Disturbing, in fact. That may have been Kerrigan’s intention; as Stieg Larsson was, he’s a journalist. Maybe he sees fiction as a way of drawing attention to an ugly situation. It’s effective, but it may not be what you’re looking for in escape fiction.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, “In the Bleak Midwinter”

So at choir practice the other night I was talking to a friend about sublimation. Really. The soprano section was discussing Dorothy Sayers, and the moment in Gaudy Night when Harriet Vane, fiiiinally after soooo long, looks at the sleeping Lord Peter Wimsey and falls for him. Much ooh-ing and aah-ing and then we had to sing something in Latin for a while.

However, when the Latin was finished, Soprano I leaned over and said, “You’ve read Julia Spencer-Fleming, haven’t you? Because in those books, the heroine and the male love interest… well, it’s been six books and they’re still yearning. Oh, and she’s an Episcopal priest! You’d love these books! The titles are all quotations from hymns!”

Now I know that there are hundreds of thousands of readers who have no interest at all in a series of murder mysteries featuring a female Episcopal priest and her neighbor the police chief in an upstate New York hamlet. And for those people, the hymn-based titles will not be an additional draw. Nor will the fact that the Rev. Clare Fergusson came to the priesthood from the Army and knows cool ways to hurt bad people. (In one passage she reminded me of Lee Child‘s Reacher.) Even when I report that Spencer-Fleming is a terrific writer, these readers will remain unmoved.

Which is fine. Tastes differ. What’s more In the Bleak Midwinter, despite the ecclesiastical bells and whistles, is a pretty conventional murder mystery. This is not a startling departure like the work of Susan Hill or  Tana French. But here’s the deal: it takes at most a few hours to read a murder mystery and usually about a year to write one. You’ll notice the asymmetry. Gosh, I probably consume more than forty years’ worth of mystery-writing every year and, yes, that does alarm me somewhat. It also explains why I’m so pleased to find a new author.

Oh, the plot. Newborn baby left in box at church door, body of girl found in snowy ravine, Rev. Clare has the wrong clothes and car for upstate New York in November and by the way, the vestry hates her. And the police chief is married. For now.

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.

Another Smart One

Apparently  I need to add Sophie Hannah to my list of mystery writers who are Smarter Than They Need to Be. And here she is on Amazon, chatting with the goddess  Tana French. This pretty much signals the end of my work day.

Tana French, “In the Woods”

Ever since I finished this book a couple of years ago, I’ve been waiting to re-read it. Yes, Tana French is that good. So this time around I tried to read more critically, to understand just what it was that made me so enthusiastic. First comes the narrative voice. This is one of those novels (like Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader) that conspicuously features a charismatic, unstable narrator. Rob Ryan tells you right from the get-go that he cannot be trusted. But he’s so witty, so clever, such a romantic (in the sense of heightening the emotions provoked by his experiences)… you know he’s trouble, but you listen anyway.

Ryan is a detective in the Murder unit of the Dublin police force. What few people know is that as a child he was involved in a famous case in which his two best friends vanished forever from the woods behind his house. So when a child is killed in the same woods, Rob should not work the case. Oh, well.

There is a mystery, a perfectly compelling one, but it is outshone by Rob’s narration. One of French’s important themes is the power and unreliability of memory — throughout the police case Rob is tantalized and tormented by flickers of reminiscence. “Most people,” he says, “have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with. Losing a chunk of your memory is a tricky thing, a deep-sea quake triggering shifts and upheavals…”

And if you have no memory, or if your memory omits a chunk of your past, what does that do to your character? French sows In the Woods with clues about Rob Ryan’s neediness and instability, but he is the narrator. So it’s easy to lose track of how troubled he is, until he starts making very serious mistakes.

Rob’s partner in the police force is Cassie Maddox, a small sprite of a woman whom Ryan adores. Poignantly, he often refers to her in the present tense, as if their relationship were ongoing. There’s a kind of train-wreck fascination to the unraveling of the plot, and you know pretty early on that Rob’s heading for disaster and taking his partnership with Cassie down with him. It just occurs to me that part of the reason this relationship is so compelling is the way Rob notices every detail about Cassie. He makes the point somewhere that detectives are, by definition, observant. Wouldn’t we all like, at some point, to have an intelligent observant person turn their full attention on us? Isn’t that part of the appeal of these books, to imagine yourself as the one being examined and understood? Yet there’s a dark charm, too, in watching Rob fall apart. Which is just as well, because this is another mystery in which the author subverts many of the expectations of crime fiction. The comfort we’re left with not that of a solved crime and restored equilibrium. It’s closer to schadenfreude: at least I’m not as crazy as the fictional Rob Ryan.

Donna Tartt, “The Secret History”

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”

It’s a great first line. How can you bear not to read further? A few sentences down comes “We hadn’t intended to hide the body where it couldn’t be found.” I’m hooked.

But I’d forgotten that this book is not just compelling, it’s truly sinister. I’d been reminded of it by Tana French’s The Likeness which also features a clannish group of brilliant students who connive at the death of one of their number.  French’s characters, though, have a lot more fun, perhaps because her book has more limited aspirations. It’s as if she can afford to let them play around more because she doesn’t have to use them to make a point.

Tartt’s structure works very well.  I quoted above from the prologue. Then she backs up, gets the narrator (a middle-class Californian: useful to have an outsider to observe the folkways of a precious lower-Vermont liberal arts college) to Hampden College and inserts him into the advanced Greek class where he meets the protagonists. Bunny, the least clever, most ordinary of them, doesn’t die until page 269 though an anonymous Vermonter meets his death in a bacchanal on page 163.  It’s chilling how little any of them cares about the farmer. Bunny, however, becomes not just unattractive but downright menacing so he must also be removed.

What Tartt does brilliantly is lure you into the mental state of these five extremely strange characters. Kids, really, college students: and I suppose their indifference to anyone outside their clique is age-appropriate. Or would be, watered down.  But this is high-grade, wanton disregard. Tartt focuses on the reflexive snobbery that keeps these characters linked, a self-anointed aristocracy of intelligence and taste that is fed by their professor, a truly nasty piece of work.  Face it, if you belong to a group that regularly drops into ancient Greek to preserve secrets from the hoi polloi, your morals may just crumble around the edges.

The writing’s wonderful. Could be irritating if you don’t enjoy florid erudition, but a lot of it is really witty. For instance: in the lengthy denouement (half of the book, really, when everything comes literally unraveled) a drug bust at the college prompts massive destruction of contraband.  “Théophile Gautier, writing about the effects of Vigny’s Chatterton on the youth of Paris, said that in the nineteenth-century night one could practically hear the crack of the solitary pistols: here, now, in Hampden, the night was alive with the flushing of toilets. ” Dark but funny.