A Study in Sherlock

Some of the entries were weak, such as the Dana Stabenow’s “The Eyak Interpreter,” an unconvincing attempt at storytelling via a teenager’s blog entries, complete with underlined words to indicate hyperlinks. The narrative quickly shifts from the presumed style of an adolescent into that of a typical narrator—but by then I was completely turned off. Similarly, Colin Cotterill’s graphic story, “The Case of the Unwritten Short Story” (wink, wink) was unreadable in my paperback edition: small white script on a gray background.

But those were the exceptions. Most of the stories were playful re-imaginings of the Holmes legend: previously untold cases, further adventures, or invocations of Holmes-like detectives. One of my favorites was Thomas Perry‘s “Startling Events in the Electrified City,” in which Holmes and Watson witness President McKinley’s “assassination” in Buffalo, NY. Another clever tale, “A Spot of Detection,” by Jacqueline Winspear, imagines the crime author Raymond Chandler as a boy inspired by the Holmes stories into a brief foray into criminal investigation.

“The game’s afoot” is still a welcome phrase, even all these years after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original burst of creativity in 1887 (A Study in Scarlet).

While Tey is considered a mystery writer—indeed, one of the notable women authors of the “golden age” of British mysteries—Miss Pym Disposes is a “regular” novel that only builds very slowly into a mystery. Lucy Pym, former French teacher and now celebrated author of a psychology best seller, arrives as an overnight guest at a women’s college for physical training and stays on—for another day, then a week—as she gets caught up in the lives of the students and staff. The experience gives Lucy the opportunity to test her theories a bit, to remember her own school days, and to bask in the friendships she quickly forges with some of the senior students.

Why should she go back to London yet? What was there to take her back? Nothing and nobody. For the first time, that fine, independent, cushioned, celebrated life of hers looked just a little bleak. A little narrow and inhuman…
It was nice to meet a morning-of-the-world youngness for a change…There was no good in trying to diddle herself about why she wanted to stay a little longer; why she was seriously prepared to forgo the delights of civilisation…It was nice to be liked.

Tey only introduces the novel’s tension—the awarding of a plumb position at a top-notch school—in chapter 6. And then lets the plot percolate, one small development at a time, amidst final exams, gymnastic demonstrations, and visits to the village tea shop: a world of women striving for independent lives in pre-World-War-II England. (It was published in 1946, but I don’t think it’s set in the 40s.) Tey’s writing is graceful, assured, and a pleasure to read. I was sorry this one had to end (unlike some other books I’ve been reading lately…).

More information

Josephine Tey was one of the pseudonyms of Elizabeth Mackintosh (1897 – 1952). I haven’t been able to find a specific, authoritative website for her, but instead a mix of Wikipedia, various sites about mystery authors, readers’ blogs, booksellers, etc. She is beloved by the Richard III Society for her novel The Daughter of Time, in which (from his hospital bed) Detective Alan Grant solves the murder of Richard’s nephews. Some links:

• July 2011 article in The Guardian (UK)
  Elizabeth Mackintosh: woman of mystery who deserves to be rediscovered

• Article at Richard III site
  The Mystery of Josephine Tey

I was initially captivated by Karen Russell’s twisted tale of the disintegrating Bigtree family and their failing Florida theme park, Swamplandia! Thirteen-year old Ava struggles to carry on her mother’s legacy of alligator wrestling; her older brother Kiwi tries to raise funds for the family by working at the competition, World of Darkness; their sister Osceola, sixteen, succumbs to love affairs with ghosts. The characters are by turns intelligent and perceptive, brave and driven, but also—due to their island isolation—heartbreakingly naive.

At the halfway mark, however, Swamplandia!lost its narrative propulsion. Befuddled by mainland culture, Kiwi endures one coarse indignity after another, as if Russell is completing a checklist—nasty teen peers: check; exploitation of young workers: check; night school insanity: check; misadventures with booze and girls: check. In alternating chapters, Ava journeys downriver with the enigmatic Bird Man to find Osceola, who’s decamped to the underworld with her ghost fiancé.

This is a farfetched development even for this fantastical novel and seems designed to allow Russell—via Ava—to recount low points in Florida history: the seeding of the invasive meleleuca tree to dry up the swampland in the 1940s, a Labor Day hurricane that killed thousands of black laborers. All leading up to another item on the checklist: rape of the innocent. (Why the Bird Man had to travel across several ecosystems with Ava before he assaults her is still one of the novel’s mysteries.)

The later chapters are tedious. Then the whole mess is quickly cleaned up in a couple of pages, with Kiwi’s rescue of the sisters, a reunion with their missing father, drugs for Osceola, and mainland high school for all three—a remarkably flat ending for a book that critics hailed as “deeply haunted,” “wonderfully imaginative,” and “routinely ravishing.”

I’m beginning to wonder whether book reviewers also assess books based on only the first few chapters.

Book jacket marketing

I confess that I often succumb to publishers’ attempts to market a book on the basis of the book jacket. At both bookstores and the library, I consider lots of unfamiliar books that just look interesting: something about the cover art and the title that begs “what about me?” Not that I always capitulate; but in this case the poetic title (from a carol by Christina Rossetti) and icy-blue illustration lured me in. That it was a murder mystery series (one I’d never heard of) with a twist (combining faith and suspense) got me to pick it up.

Generally, invocations of “faith” in relation to fiction would be off-putting; I’m not interested Jan Karon-type gloppiness or tales of love among the Amish. But the list of Spencer-Fleming’s awards—Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, etc.—and a quick scan of the first couple of pages intrigued me. And…I couldn’t resist the potential of another engrossing series.

Solving murders with a dose of faith

In the Bleak Midwinter is the first in the “Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne” series of murder mysteries, originally published in the early 2000s and now being re-issued by Minotaur Books in trade paperback editions. The premise is that Episcopal priest (and former Army pilot) Clare and chief of police Russ join forces to solve crimes in the small town of Millers Kill in upstate New York—romantic entanglements resulting.

The writing was good, the mystery interesting (even though I suspected the killer earlier than either Clare or Russ), the main characters engaging—and the setting offers something a little different. I did have a problem suspending my disbelief about aspects of Clare’s character. First, it seems unlikely that—just three weeks into her first parish and in the midst of the Advent-to-Christmas season—she could bypass planning for services and pageants in favor of meddling in crime. Then, it’s also surprising that unchurched, married Russ becomes her “only friend,” what with parishioners, three other parishes in town (with ministers of some sort), and conceivably a network of other Episcopalian churches in the region.  And while the set-up for the suspenseful snow scene relied heavily on Clare’s inadequate car and clothing, I hope that’s not going to be a running motif. She can’t convincingly be both ex-Army tough and dumb-blonde oblivious to the weather.

The verdict: I’m willing to try the next installment, A Fountain Filled With Blood (ooooh!), available as an ebook for $2.99 during February.

“Books used to satisfy me,” said Philip. “But as I get older I find they aren’t enough.”

If the books are like Small World, they won’t be enough, won’t satisfy. Perhaps I should have waited a bit before beginning the next book in David Lodge’s campus trilogy. But I wanted to see if it got better with the second book, Small World. It did not.

The opening scenes of an academic conference—University Teachers of English Language and Literature—at Rummidge University were promising. A naive Irishman, Persse (only mistakenly named to the English faculty at Limerick College) is introduced to conference traditions: bad accommodations, boring lectures, insecure pedants, preening presenters, and the latest lit crit fad: structuralism. (The book was published in 1984.) Characters from the first book, Changing Places, reappear—Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, et. al.—and they are just as tedious and unlikable as they were ten years earlier.

That’s my chief complaint. There’s not a single character in this book worth caring—or reading—about. Lodge certainly tries to hedge his bets, adding more and more characters via short, uninspired collage scenes. As dull as the male characters are, they’re paragons of fascination compared to Lodge’s women: the mysterious, beautiful (and thus surprisingly brilliant) Angelica; the annoying wives Hilary (“thick rolls of flesh”) and Beverly (“broad bum”).

The book is meant to poke fun at academe—all that hustling for more prestigious appointments or to ever-more exotic conference locations, all that straining toward humor—but it never becomes funny. The dialogue is stiff. The coarse sexual references seem tacked on for effect. The exposition is supposed to be witty and sly. But who wants to read prose like this?

“There’s something I must ask you, Fulvia,” said Morris Zapp, as he sipped Scotch on the rocks poured from a crystal decanter brought on a silver tray by a black-uniformed, white-aproned maid to the first-floor drawing-room of the magnificent eighteen-century house just off the Villa Napoleone, which they had reached after a drive so terrifyingly fast that the streets and boulevards of Milan were just a pale grey blur in his memory. “It may sound naive, and even rude, but I can’t suppress it any longer.”

The characters, collages, and conferences multiply, then give way to astonishing revelations of twins lost and found, of lust satisfied and subverted. How Shakespearean! It’s the layering on of cleverness that I find most irritating, as if Lodge is saying the reader: do you think this “quest” reference is clever? no? how about this send-up of Marxism? or this? or this? It doesn’t ever become anything but a pile of clever goo.

The best I can say is that I learned a couple of new words: micturate, to urinate (when “urinate” just won’t do); chippolata, alternate spelling for chipolata, a small sausage in a narrow casing (an apt metaphor for this whole book, actually).

The first book in Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell – Sherlock Holmes series, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994), recounts their meeting from Russell’s point of view; the Beginners e-book (2011) gives Holmes the opportunity to describe the early days of their relationship. We learn that Holmes, at fifty-four and retired, had been on the brink of committing suicide when the tall, boyish fifteen-year old stumbles into his life, her nose buried in a book. And not just any book, but Virgil’s Georgics. After assessing Mary’s remarkable intelligence and attention to detail, Holmes finds a new reason to live: to train Mary as a detective. But first he has to save the wealthy orphan from her avaricious aunt and cousin, who are intent on gaining Mary’s fortune for themselves.

Here is one of the chief pleasures in reading a series (or at least, a clever one). You’re introduced to a cast of characters you can follow from book to book, tracking their development while they encounter new challenges and adventures. There’s comfort in mixing the familiar with the new. In this instance, you get to re-visit an old story from a new perspective.

I love to find a series that’s already been around for while—if it catches my imagination, I can read book after book without having to wait, wait, wait for the next installment. After discovering such greats as Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Josephine Tey, I feasted on their series, no waiting required. I also read much of Martha Grimes, P.D. James, and the first few volumes of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series that way, only finding them years after they’d made their initial splashes. Still have to do the same for Ruth Rendell’s Wexford; I’ve read a lot of stand-alone Rendell—and Barbara Vine, her pseudonym—but only one or two Wexfords.

Long live the long-lived series!

Set in 1969, Changing Places involves a faculty exchange: lackluster Philip Swallow travels from Rummidge University to Euphoria State, while hot-shot Morris Zapp heads the other way. Of course, there are some dated references, but it was actually a revelation to see how many things still felt fresh; for example, the book’s campus protests could be today’s “occupy” movement. (Sadly, despite our protests and movements, we haven’t made as much progress as we’d like.)

For some reason, Lodge felt the need to change place names—Euphoria for California, Esseph for San Francisco; it seems precious rather than witty, and certainly doesn’t fool anyone.

I think it’s the struggle to map the two exchanges that diminishes the book. Just when Lodge seems on the verge of delving into a situation in sufficient detail, he switches to its opposite number on the other side of the pond. There are many paired circumstances, so that the plot—and the resultant humor—feels forced.

Yet there are some funny moments. Zapp, a notorious womanizer, discovers that he’s the only man on a charter flight for women traveling to England for abortions (one of his students sold him her ticket). Later, he has to hide from a rampaging colleague on a paternoster, an elevator with revolving compartments; the description of the two men’s movements on and off the device felt ideal for film. Indeed, when I flipped to the foreward (afterward), Lodge mentions that there was a film option planned in which John Cleese would play Swallow and Walter Matthau, Zapp—but the project stalled.

Although Changing Places wasn’t quite what I expected in a campus novel, I plan to read the second and third installments later on this year.

The “criminal investigation” that set this tale in motion was so flimsy that I’m still not sure whether there was actually a substantive reason behind any of it. But it gave King an excuse to put Mary undercover as an assistant to a film company making a film about the filming of the Pirates of Penzance (yes, that’s right: it’s not a typo). Mary travels to Lisbon, where she meets the poet Pessoa (an historical figure—once I read the acknowledgements I realized I’ve heard of him before);  then sails the high seas in a brigantine (memorizing every knot and nook); and finally is held for ransom (along with the thirteen actresses playing the daughters of the “Major General”) by real pirates (playing film pirates). Part of the fun is Mary’s literate, intelligent voice as she narrates her travails: she cannot quite believe what she’s gotten herself into (though we’re never worried that she won’t be able to get herself out with, perhaps, just a small bit of help from Holmes).

Obviously, King is so confident in her audience that she can spin this cotton candy, and we’ll cheerfully slurp it up. But I do wish she (and other authors) would be careful about the needless repetition of details. It’s painful to read the same lines of exposition more than once. Is it just sloppiness or do these authors assume we readers take weeks between chapters (or pages) and need regular refreshers?

Despite such quibbles, I’m always pleased to read more in the Russell-Holmes saga; I’ve also saved King’s e-book Beekeeping for Beginners on my iPad for a rainy reading day soon. And A Study in Sherlock (King is one of the editors) is on my list for 2012.

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

This seemed like a dream book! First, I love Jane Austen and in particular Pride and Prejudice. (Having read it at least two, possibly three times before, I kept a paperback copy in my car during several years of attending softball and field hockey games: I would dip in during game delays and bad weather, always coming up refreshed.) Apparently, James is a longtime fan of Austen, as well.

And, I’ve enjoyed a number of P.D. James’s crime novels (as well as her dystopian tale The Children of Man) and I (still) plan to catch up on those I’ve missed. James knows how to cast out a series of narrative threads, then weave them into a web that draws you in. She typically combines storylines about the victims, suspects, and detectives with a detail-driven police procedural plot—and her method works, quite well.

The much-heralded Pemberley attempts to blend an Austen narrative of British society (a glimpse into Elizabeth and Darcy’s marriage, several years on) with a James narrative of crime. Alas, James tries hard to adopt Austen’s style and tone—the analytical, almost gossipy, layering on of details about appearance and social milieu—but it comes off flat. And there is so much repetition of the very same details, as if James had to pad the (rather thin) story to get to a certain number of pages. (Austen was never guilty of that!) I finally started skimming, skipping whole chunks of text, almost complete chapters, to get to the anti-climatic ending. Happily, I didn’t miss the clever references to other Austen characters—the Elliots of Persuasion and Harriet of Emma—near the end of the novel.

So very disappointing. It makes me wonder whether an author with a such a strong voice of her own is the best candidate to mimic the beloved voice of another author. I read a negative review of Pemberley when the book first came out last fall, and thought, I bet that writer just doesn’t get what James is trying to do, perhaps he doesn’t really appreciate Austen’s works, or James’s works, or both. I was wrong and he was right: this one was a bit of a stinker.

Alice I Have Been

What an interesting idea for a novel: exploring and imagining (this is a work of historical fiction, not biography) the life of Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

I’d had a rough idea of the back story: that Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll), a mathematician, was somehow acquainted (family friend?) with an actual Alice, that he spent an inordinate amount of time with her, and that he told her the stories that became Alice in Wonderland. Even taking into consideration the different mores of Victorian times, the circumstances did sound borderline disturbing.

Benjamin has filled in the details to create a portrait of how Alice and Dodgson met (she was the daughter of the Dean of Oxford University, he was a mathematics don who lived across the Quad) and their time together and then (almost inevitably) apart. Narrated by Alice herself, the novel spans the bewildering innocence of her childhood, an emotionally-challenged young adulthood, and a wistfully wise old age.

For eighty years I have been, at various times, a gypsy girl, a muse, a lover, a mother, a wife. But for one man, and for the world, I will always be a seven-year-old girl named Alice.

Alice I Have Been beautifully blends literary history with well-crafted storytelling. I believed in Alice’s right to tell her story, to set the record straight about the unique set of circumstances that resulted in a remarkable, much-loved, yet puzzling work of literature but that also altered and defined her life.

A wonderful way to kickstart my 55@55 books project!