Tag Archives: Mysteries

Recent Reading

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I have several half-finished book reviews sitting on my hard drive, all of books I liked quite a bit. They’re unfinished partly because my attention span for writing hasn’t been great, but mostly because of impostor syndrome: I’m having a hard time convincing myself these potential posts say anything intelligent or interesting. Since I ought to be getting some practice in, I’ve written a few paragraphs on books about which I have much less to say:

Agatha Christie, Appointment With Death and Murder in Mesopotamia

Christie’s second husband was an archaeologist and she often accompanied him on digs. Occasionally she worked her archaeological experience into her novels by sending Hercule Poirot off to stumble on murders in random middle eastern countries. She didn’t use nearly enough of her experience for my taste–for all that she knew her stuff, the settings of these novels read like a generic archaeological dig and foreign tourist site and could have been set anywhere in the world.

Trevor Baxendale, Fear of the Dark

This Doctor Who tie-in novel was first published in the years before the current series began. At the time BBC Books published one or two Doctor Who novels every month. I skipped this one at the time because Trevor Baxendale’s novels were always terrible. This one is a short story’s worth of secondhand ideas padded out to a 300 page novel. Here we have all the laziest clichés of late 1990s-early 2000s Doctor Who: Grimdark cynicism. Corporate space marines. Incessant deaths (all so grotesque I’m surprised the BBC republished this book in this more family-friendly era). An alien planet in the far future inhabited by people who talk and think like they’re from 20th century London (and who include, between a starship crew and a mining expedition, exactly one woman). A half-assed monster that is literally called “The Dark” and does evil things because it’s evil.

There used to be a Doctor Who novel just like this almost every month. So much nostalgia. I almost enjoyed it.

Various authors, “Time Trips”

The BBC has been releasing Doctor Who novellas as ebooks under the name “Time Trips.” They’re all very weird.

“Into the Nowhere” is about a planet of traps and walking skeletons controlled by a grotesque nerd caricature who turns out to be guarding all the knowledge in the universe, man, which manifests as the tree from the Garden of Eden because it pulled the image from Clara’s mind. The Doctor, while bleeding from his palms, tells Clara not to eat the metaphorical apple because “the entropic chronicle of perpetuity” would depress her.

“The Death Pit” is a fourth Doctor adventure on a golf course with a deadly alien sand trap. It’s perhaps trying just a little too hard to be Douglas Adams, but it’s charming and at times genuinely funny.

“Keeping Up With the Joneses” is about a sentient time war weapon that turns the interior of the TARDIS into a temporally indeterminate English village with occasional giant monsters. The strangest thing in the book is that the owner of the bed and breakfast is patterned after Lady Christina from “Planet of the Dead,” for all the world as though the Doctor might have had her on his mind. Or even remembered her at all. (When I wrote this review for a post on a mailing list I had to Google the episode to remember her name.)

These novellas are the product of writers who are doing their own thing rather than delivering a “standard” Doctor Who story. That’s fine by me regardless of the quality of the results (not that these three are bad). We have all the standardized, formulaic Doctor Who stories we need at this point.

Avram Davidson, Masters of the Maze

Like a lot of SF, this is the story of a young man discovering he has a hidden destiny and saving the world from an alien invasion. Because Avram Davidson wrote it, it is much better than that description makes it sound. Also much weirder. There’s an other-dimensional maze that runs all across space and time. At the center the hero has a philosophical discussion with Lao-Tze, Apollonius of Tyana, and Benjamin Bathurst. A villainous John Birch Society-type teams up with the aliens to take over the United States, cut taxes, destroy the welfare state, and outlaw milk pasteurization; he has the idea that he might then use them as contract labor to keep wages down. We get chapters from the point of view of the aliens themselves, humanoids who live and think like hive insects. Plus Ambrose Bierce turns up. It’s all as well written as you’d expect from Davidson. The most significant flaw is a lack of important female characters, but that’s sadly common with older SF.

David Edison, The Waking Engine

Portal fantasies have been out of style for a while but I’ve seen a few new ones lately. This is one of them, as well as an afterlife fantasy–the idea is that when you die you’re serially reborn on a series of China Miévillesque worlds until you finally reach the place that offers True Death.

I found this novel paradoxically both too weird and not weird enough. Too weird because the afterlife world seems like a collection of grotesque and baroque images that give very little idea of how people in this world would actually live their day-to-day lives. Not weird enough because the hero is almost as bland as an everyman can get. It was several chapters before I even had an idea of what he looked like, or what he was wearing. (The book described him lying down after work and waking up dead; I assumed he was wearing a suit and had to rapidly readjust my assumptions when the book mentioned a heavy metal t-shirt.)

The Waking Engine also suffers from a problem common to afterlife SF, the temptation to pack the story full of celebrity guest stars–here we get Richard Nixon, Cleopatra and Walt Whitman, with a cameo by Kurt Cobain. The end leaves plenty of plot threads hanging, so I’m sensing yet another series; I’m not sure whether I’ll try the next one.

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

Like Masters of the Maze this is really good, but not in a way that inspired me to try writing a full review. I read it a few months ago and at the time I was finding most novels hard to get into, but this one eventually built momentum and I finished the last hundred pages in an evening. It’s a discursive, essayistic novel, which is something that’s appealed to me lately.

It’s published as mainstream but is arguably SF in that it plays with scientific concepts in support of a sort of magic realist narrative, and would probably have been a better Hugo award candidate than most of what ended up on the ballot.

In which I attempt to read what everybody else is reading, and wind up depressed and horrified.

Books, Mysteries, ,

I don’t watch much TV. I don’t listen to top 40 radio. I’m not enticed by most of what ends up on the New York Times bestseller list. Almost invariably, my first hints that a new pop culture phenomenon is in town are articles, blog posts, or casual conversations full of mysterious references to things I’m clearly supposed to know all about. (“‘Lady Gaga?’ Are people just stringing random words together, now?”) I don’t want to drift off into an entirely different universe from the rest of America, so I sometimes try to watch or read the Hot New Thing that Everyone’s Talking About. This, plus the fact that the waiting list at the library was something like 50 hold requests long, is how I ended up buying a copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

I did not enjoy The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. If it wasn’t a runaway bestseller—if I hadn’t been curious about why it was a runaway bestseller—I would have quit reading after fifty pages. (When I was a kid I felt honor-bound to finish everything I read. Growing up, and understanding in my gut that my life and reading time were finite, cured that.) Continue reading In which I attempt to read what everybody else is reading, and wind up depressed and horrified. →

Sarah Caudwell, The Sirens Sang of Murder

Books, Mysteries, ,

Cover art, by Edward Gorey. Because Hilary Tamar is just that cool.

(Note: I’m posting about a mystery novel. I don’t reveal the killer, but it’s almost impossible to talk about a mystery novel without spoiling something. If you’re planning to read this book, proceed with caution.)

The thing that usually gets mentioned when people talk about Hilary Tamar, the legal historian/amateur detective who appeared in four novels by Sarah Caudwell, is that we never learn Hilary’s gender. You might assume from the emphasis placed on that fact that these books spend a lot of time teasing the audience. Actually, it’s the least noticeable or interesting thing about them. Most readers probably get a pretty good mental image of Hilary from his/her narration, even if it’s a different image for everybody. Hilary is big on literary references and hangs out in wine bars with a group of young British lawyers whose misadventures provide him/her with cases, so my mental image of Hilary looks exactly like Horace Rumpole.

Caudwell wrote books in the form of classical detective tales and the style of P.G. Wodehouse (with a little extra frankness about sex). They’re painlessly loaded with the lore of British estate and tax law. The Sirens Sang of Murder, the third in the series, is set in various offshore tax havens. The plot is driven by the absurd lengths to which British millionaires go to avoid taxes, and I actually managed to sort of understand the arcane legal contortions. Caudwell wrote the kind of books that make me feel smarter while I’m reading them.

The Sirens Sang of Murder is set at a specific point in time technologically: the solicitors’ office has just installed a Telex machine, sort of a telegraph hooked up to a typewriter. Michael Cantrip, one of the more airheaded regular cast members, is nuts about it and narrates most of his scenes through his voluble telexes. A few years later he’d have sent faxes, and later still emails.

At one point another regular, Selena Jardine is unhappy with one of the clues—a distinctive pen dropped at a murder scene. It’s old-fashioned, something out of an old detective novel, and she doesn’t find it remotely believable. “People do what books have taught them to do and feel what books have taught them to feel—it is curiously difficult to do otherwise,” observes Hilary. Selena thinks about crime as realistic modern police procedurals taught her to do.

In the real world, lawyers complain about the “CSI effect”, the assumption by jurors that forensic science works just as magically as it does on TV. Stories have power. Everyone sees the world through the filter of the stories they read and watch and listen to.

Sirens’s cast is focused on the financial shenanigans surrounding the Daffodil Trust. They’re looking for a realist motive, a motive that makes some kind of sense. They miss one obvious possibility because it’s intruded into their narrative from romantic (in the archaic sense) literature. The real killer has been reading different books.

We in the audience, as real people reading a mystery novel, can’t help looking at Hilary’s case through the lens of detective fiction—because, heck, it is detective fiction. At one point, a revelation pointed to one obvious suspect who appeared to fit all the clues, some of which had been laid very subtly, very early on. I knew he was a red herring. I hadn’t worked this out through a Holmesian deductive leap. I just had information that Hilary didn’t: I knew I was only two-thirds of the way through the book. What kind of crappy detective novel would reveal the killer with 80 or 90 pages left to go?

The Red House Mystery

Books, Mysteries, ,

Cover Art

Even in childhood, my feelings toward Winnie-the-Pooh weren’t far from Dorothy Parker’s (“Tonstant Weader fwowed up”). When I discovered the existence of The Red House Mystery, A. A. Milne’s one detective novel, my head swam with visions of Death at Pooh Corner. I felt I would someday have to read it. I was certain when I realized that it was the novel that drove Raymond Chandler to write “The Simple Art of Murder”.

As Chandler pointed out in great detail, the plot doesn’t make much sense. Of course, the plots of most old mystery novels hinge on farfetched plans, weird coincidences, and generally extraordinarily unlikely events. Not being Raymond Chandler, I don’t usually notice. I couldn’t help noticing with The Red House Mystery. A Dorothy Sayers novel or an Agatha Christie novel is like a magic trick: the audience doesn’t see the magician pulling the card from his sleeve because he has something more interesting for everybody to look at. The audience doesn’t particularly want to see the card; it would spoil the show. A. A. Milne is like a stage magician who refuses to do the sleight of hand, perfunctorily walking through the trick as though he’s wondering what to have for lunch.

Take the cast. The stereotypical country house murder always happens amidst a houseful of stereotypical guests. The Red House Murder does not disappoint. Then they’re bundled back to London as soon as the body—the brother of the owner of the house, who is now missing—is discovered. For most of the book the only people around are the detective, his Watson, and the missing man’s secretary. The reader catches on pretty quickly that Milne isn’t going to do anything as clever as reveal the detective or the sidekick to be the killer, so the identity of the murderer is less than mysterious; the only questions are the motive, and how he pulled it off.

The motive is taken care of in a chapter. The inquest is in the book only to show the police being dense. Finding the method takes up most of the book and involves whole chapters of obsessing over a secret passage. The country house could be any country house in any novel, and the detective could be Psmith’s duller cousin. The Red House Mystery is a skeleton of a mystery, a mystery boiled down to the barest essentials, and clearing the meat from the bones reveals the core weirdness of the kind of traditional mysteries I love.

These mysteries take place in an alternate world where the police have trouble with complex murders and are happy to have an eccentric upper-class murder hobbyist around to solve them. Usually I accept this in the same way that I accept that the Discworld books take place on the back of a giant turtle. Usually these detectives are entertainingly eccentric, fundamentally decent if occasionally hard to get along with, and above all experts in their field. I can accept that the police turn to Lord Peter Wimsey in times of crisis, because Dorothy Sayers makes it clear from the start that he’s just that good. (Also, his brother-in-law is with Scotland Yard. Never underestimate the power of nepotism.)

I could not accept Antony Gillingham.

There are all sorts in London if you know how to look at them. So Antony looked at them—from various strange corners; from the view-point of the valet, the newspaper-reporter, the waiter, the shop-assistant. With the independence of 400 pounds a year behind him, he enjoyed it immensely. He never stayed long in one job, and generally closed his connection with it by telling his employer (contrary to all etiquette as understood between master and servant) exactly what he thought of him. He had no difficulty in finding a new profession. Instead of experience and testimonials he offered his personality and a sporting bet. He would take no wages the first month, and—if he satisfied his employer—double wages the second. He always got his double wages.

This is the point at which most readers will wish Antony Gillingham would get hit by a brick.

With all these professions under his belt, Antony doesn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t be a detective as well. Nothing to it, right? He has enough sense of self-preservation to stay away from the police and not let on he’s investigating, so we don’t hear much of the authorities’ opinion on the matter… although, to Milne’s credit, the police don’t take this random, unproven upper-class twit for granted. There’s an interesting suggestion that Antony’s injecting himself into the investigation might backfire:

It would have interested Antony to know that, just at the time when he was feeling rather superior to the prejudiced inspector, the Inspector himself was letting his mind dwell lovingly upon the possibilities in connection with Mr. Gillingham. Was it only a coincidence that Mr. Gillingham had turned up just when he did? And Mr. Beverley’s curious answers when asked for some account of his friend. An assistant in a tobacconist’s, a waiter! An odd man, Mr. Gillingham, evidently. It might be as well to keep an eye on him.

But the rest of the novel keeps the police off in the distance, and it never comes to anything.

A lot of these detectives seem to have way too much fun with their murders. Writers have ways to take the sting out of this. Sherlock Holmes doesn’t notice how he comes off half the time, so we cut him some slack. Peter Wimsey is dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, so we know death affects him even if he doesn’t show it. The Gervase Fen novels cheerfully admit their hero’s a bit of a ghoul, and run with it. I don’t know what to think about Antony Gillingham and his faithful sidekick:

Bill brightened up suddenly.

“To-night,” he said. “I say, to-night’s going to be rather fun. How do we work it?”

Antony was silent for a little.

“Of course,” he said at last, “we ought to inform the police, so that they can come here and watch the pond to-night.”

“Of course,” grinned Bill.

“But I think that perhaps it is a little early to put our theories before them.”

“I think perhaps it is,” said Bill solemnly.

Antony looked up at him with a sudden smile.

“Bill, you old bounder.”

“Well, dash it, it’s our show. I don’t see why we shouldn’t get our little bit of fun out of it.”

This is two people getting ready to watch a man dump a dead body into a lake.

The book ends with the ever-popular “letting the killer do away with himself honorably” scene. Which is okay. it’s usually used when we’re supposed to have some sympathy for the culprit, and I guess we do in this case, inasmuch as he’s the only major character who doesn’t talk like he belongs in the Drones Club. But Antony and the police don’t have a working relationship. What on earth are they going to say when he hands over the killer’s confession? Or is he content to leave the world blissfully ignorant of what really happened?

I never think about this when I’m reading a good mystery. I never worry about any of these things when I’m reading a good mystery. I hope having watched The Red House Mystery strip the paint off the genre won’t make me look at Lord Peter funny the next time I pick up a Sayers.