Mystery Reviews

March 2004: This page is about to undergo major reconstruction and become a review page for recently read books. Some of the current entries will be moved to other places on the site, such as Oddities, others will be put down at the bottom of the page. (PS. I am still unemployed, at least officially. Isn't it nice to feel so wanted in one's sixties!)

Well, no, changed my mind. This page will be kept as an archive that you can get to from the new Reviews page (that's how you'll end up here in future). Click here to go back to the Reviews Page.

October 1999: I have been unemployed for several months (the bastards, after 20 years with the company, decided to 'downsize' me), so I have hardly read any new mysteries at all, except when a new Grafton or McCrumb or the like comes out -- books, even paperbacks, are just too damned expensive now. What I've been doing is rereading things on my top-50 list, hence no recent reviews. Consider this web page as suspended for the most part (but hardly anybody ever went to this page anyway, even before). Maybe later.... But you are encouraged to go to Oddities for some outstandingly unusual books.

April 1999: Perceived a problem with this web page -- it is getting too big and is not organized in any particular way, especially not by publication date. I will work on this and perhaps set up an index or search box. By the way, if anything here tempts you to order from Amazon or Barnes&Noble on-line, please do it through my main page link boxes -- they will pay me a couple of bucks if you do and that will help to keep this site subsidized.

Spring 1997: Decided to add a current review page to this site. This will not contain full book reviews, but capsule summaries of mysteries recently read that have particular merit (God forbid, not every mystery I read). The other pages on this site emphasize the tried and true, but there are some really brilliant mysteries being written now, even though we are no longer in the 'Golden Age'. What is contained here is in effect Rave Reviews -- why bother to put the rest on a Web Page? Read the newspapers, etc. for those.

Additions are also infrequent even when I want to extol a book, because I am lazy and end up postponing updating this page until I've forgotten I was enthused.

-- Grobius

Recommended

[These are listed with the most recently read books at the top]

• Lawrence Block: Tanner on Ice Welcome back, Tanner! Block has recently overused his other series characters, Bernie Rhohenbarr (the Burglar) and Matt Scudder (the ex-alcoholic) and come up with weirder and weirder off the wall plots for them. Here he revives one of his earlier series characters after 25 years, and explains it by saying Tanner was cryogenically frozen for that period by the Goteburg Liberation Front (Danes who want to recover southern Sweden, but are non-violent so they froze him instead), and he remained in a freezer in New Jersey until discovered and revived. His awakening is hilarious because he still thinks Nixon is President and his discovering the new world, and finding himself in a 38-year-old body being actually 63, makes for some of Block's most amusing writing in years. In case you remember, Tanner was the guy whose 'sleep center' was destroyed by a Viet Cong bullet in the head and hence never has to sleep. He was used as a spy by a very covert boss of spies in the earlier books, and is now recruited to do it again, in Burma (Myanmar). It's all a lot of fun, but nothing much happens otherwise in this book apart from the cultural and sociological comments. Pity. Still, a worthy resurrection. I'm glad to see Block lighten up after some really depressing (but good) Scudders -- and the Burglar's expoits have been wearing thin lately.
  
  
• Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White There was a very fine rendition of this story on Masterpiece Theatre 5/25/98, with Tara FitzGerald as Marian and a skinny Mephistophelean Count Fosco -- who is supposed to be a Sidney Greenstreet type according to tradition -- but this really worked out well. Excellent. Collins was really quite 'advanced' for a Victorian writer in having feisty heroines and no nonsense about moral trivia. There was another one on Channel 13 a few years ago but that was in their more traditional vein (also quite good however, because it's hard to ruin such a great plot). I guess this doesn't count as a book review, so I'll have to reread it for the second or third time and still get rewarded: Marian as the determined woman and Fosco as the consummate villain are among the best characters in the genre. Great as The Moonstone is as a seminal detective story, The Woman in White is still a better novel. Marian is supposed to be rather unattracive, as Fosco is supposed to be very fat, so this latest show bent a few details. But Tara is absolutely lovely and put in a bang-up performance, and the presentation was very quick and dramatic, no wasted moments, making this one of the best dramatic renditions of that story, which was originally rather drawn out to fill out the serial story as published over several instalments in a magazine format. As a story about 'little people' fighting to avenge wrongs against really slimy and powerful (because of their position in society) villains, this novel is unbeatable and doesn't have the really down-beat ending of Bleak House (although that's probably more true to life).
  
  
• "Dirk Wyle": Pharmacology Is Murder Met the author through this web site and got sent a free copy of his new book for review -- what else can I do but review it here? A pleasant surprise, in fact. There is a lot of incomprehensible gobbledegook about drugs, as one would expect, but this is an area of detective fiction that has not been exploited (usually the use of poison in mysteries involves 'unknown' snake venoms or just plain arsenic; this one really goes high tech about an undedectable poison in a very plausible way). The protagonist comes across as a very likable person and given all the behind-the-scenes detection in the arcania of pharmacology, some violence does happen often enough and in the right places.
  
  
• Ed McBain: Nocturne Ed McBain has slowed down his output lately, but is still a master of the Procedural police detective story. In this one he alternates between three or four seemingly unconnected plots, but actually they all overlap in one way or another and come together brilliantly at the end. This is an 87th Precinct novel, but in addition to Detectives Carella, Hawes, etc. he devotes a lot of time to Fat Ollie Weeks, a slobbish bigot of the Buntz type who is actually quite a good detective -- this part of it is a lot of fun, as he tracks down some obnoxious preppy killers. The Carella investigation is rather pathetic (I mean in the original sense, not denoting a screw-up as that word is misused today). The clue of the swimming with the fishes is brilliant. There are also some really nice set-piece bits of dialogue and observation. Example: "As a detective, albeit not a very good one, Parker knew that the word 'funk' descended from the word 'funky', which in turn derived from a style of jazz piano-playing called 'funky-butt', which translated as 'smelly asshole'. He was amused the other day when a radio restaurant critic mentioned that the food in a downtown bistro was 'funky'."
  
  
• Tony Hillerman: The Fallen Man Hillerman's detective novels set in the Four Corners Indian Reservation were remarkable at first because of the unusual setting and his insights into Navajo culture, but after a while the formula wore thin. He left this milieu to do a book about Viet Nam recently -- this sabbatical did wonders, because this new Leaphorn/Chee book is one of the best of them all. The plot generates a lot more tension than usual (for Hillerman) because it is very tautly woven, and the switching between Leaphorn's and Chee's investigations is nicely handled to generate suspense. One aspect of the writing that is beautifully done is the description of the weather during the transition from fall to winter in Arizona/New Mexico -- you wouldn't expect a dull subject like this to be so engrossing, but it ties in wonderfully with the plot and atmosphere. Reminds me of Upfield at his best (another pedestrian writer who had a great descriptive sense of place). You also get a true sense of the protagonists in this book and grow to appreciate them (previously, they were somewhat stereotyped). This one's a winner.
  
  
• Colin Dexter: Death Is Now My Neighbour This is the best Inspector (Endeavor) Morse book in years. Yes, his first name [Endeavor] is now known to his best friends, because he comes down with diabetes in this book and finds out who really cares about him -- Lewis, Strong, etc. -- and his new girlfriend, the nurse who taught him how to inject insulin and so on, guilt-tripped him into that, as well as stopping smoking (but not drinking, of course). I suspect some auctorial juxtaposition here, i.e. transference, but don't know that for a fact. As far as the plot goes, this story is great, a nasty villain (not the murderer, but the murderee), some pathetic victims, and some clever stuff involving the number 13 -- a red herring, but maybe not. Sir Clixby (and Morse knows it) is far worse than the actual perpetrator -- somebody who will really leave you hissing for what he caused. Morse is one of the most quixotic detectives in current mystery fiction, a depressed grump with great compassion and a manic way of spinning off theories about cases that may or may not hold water (but something Lewis mentions off the cuff about breakfast toast or whatever will set Morse into one of his 'brilliant, Watson, you've solved the case' spins). The Morse books will end up as classics, but what would have ever happened with them if it weren't for the actor John Thaw on the TV series? [Update 2000: Dexter has killed off Morse, sad to say, but at least it rounds out the opus.]
  
  
• Ruth Rendell: The Keys to the Street This was wonderful, but I waited too long after reading it to write up a review here (3 months), so I've already forgotten why I thought it was so wonderful! Let's just say it is beautifully written and has a very unusual plot.
  
  
• Marcia Muller: The Broken Promise Land (16th or whatever in the Sharon McCone series) There was a snide comment on one of my other mystery pages that women PI's were much too concerned with personal relationships, family values, and finding a decent man who provides good sex with soul at the same time. Not enough tough nitty-gritty loner stuff. McCone books fell into the doldrums for a while (which probably brought on my remark that I couldn't care less about McCone's love life), but she has broken out of that with this latest. Finally dumped for the most part all that consumptive death of the All Souls Legal Cooperative and got on with the continuing life of the protagonist -- good riddance, I say! Now McCone is behaving like a real private detective, with all the appurtenances of running her career professionally, as a real business. So we can thank her super-pro tec lover Hy Ripinski for that. And we can be thankful she brought her friend Rae out of the miasma of the ASLC and into a prominent role in this story -- a very good role. This story involves family in a big way, and it is beautifully done without excessive sentimentality. Best thing about it, though, is its setting in the Rock (well, Country) music media environment -- great stuff! (Really deserves an Edgar.)
  
  
• Steven Saylor: The Roma sub Rosa series, starring Gordianus the Finder. An excellent historical series set in Ancient Rome at the time of Sulla, Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Marc Antony, etc. etc. etc. -- obviously a cast of famous and not-so-famous real people mixed with fictional personages (very reminiscent in its complex re-encounters and interweaving of a number of recurring characters of McAuliffe's great Commissions of Augustus Mandrell series). Corruption and politics galore, sex, skulduggery, greed, backstabbing -- all very convincingly spiced with accurate historical details. Funny, too: "Judges, I do not point the finger of guilt -- I point at the guilty finger!" (You will have to read The Venus Throw to appreciate this obscene reference, which ranks with "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit" phrase for courtroom rhetoric at its most ridiculous.) This is great stuff, if not at the literary heights of Robert Graves at his best.
  
  
• Mollie Hardwick (author of Upstairs, Downstairs*): The Doran Fairweather series started out as village 'cosies' -- feisty heroine who runs an antique store, married to a country vicar in Kent, and gets involved in murders. Pleasant stuff that began to grow darker as the author developed the personalities of her cast of characters (as you'd expect from a writer of one of the best 'Soaps' ever). The latest, Come Away, Death, involves a family of ritual killers dating back to the time of Richard III living at Canary Wharf. This is a VERY unusual book -- highly recommended. It scintillates, as it were, between daffodils and ravens (yellow, black, yellow, black). [By the way, did you know that one of the support piers of Tower Bridge contains a mortuary where bodies recovered from the Thames are taken?]

  [*Jean Marsh conceived the series; MH did the novelization. Mollie and her husband Michael also did some good Sherlock Holmesiana.]

• Peter Lovesey: ex-Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath Police. Who'd have thought you would have a Dalziel type in a posh place like Bath? But Bath is not as posh as you would think from the tourist brochures. There have been a couple of previous books about Diamond, but The Summons is another ball game. This one is a new wrinkle on the 'brilliant' escaped convict (a la Richard Kimble) who is out to prove his innocence, but he ends up taking the Assistant Chief Constable's daughter as a hostage and insists on Diamond (the original arresting officer, even though he is no longer with the police) as the negotiator. What a great book this is! [And you will never guess the real murderer, or the motive.]
  Update (Sept 1997): Just finished Bloodhounds, the next in the Diamond series. Not quite as good, but an ingenious take-off on the classic locked-room mystery with the characters being the members of a mystery discussion club who are obsessed with the works of John Dickson Carr, among others. The locked-room (er, boat) trick is brilliant, but there is a major flaw in the timing or at least the logic of it.
  
  
• Peter Robinson: The Inspector Banks series of police procedural novels is based in Yorkshire (Eastvale is a thinly disguised Richmond). Well done, of its kind, and similar in many ways to Reginald Hill (not so much in the earlier books, but more and more now). Innocent Graves is one of the latest and it really puts this author in the top rank -- you could tell he would get there from the last few novels. A classic situation of a wrongly accused man who finds himself in a Kafka dilemma. A great trial in the OJ manner. And a nasty alternate suspect. Great stuff. Blood at the Root (1998) updates the Yorkshire Vales with more contemporary anti-Paki prejudice and less of the traditional moorland society -- more relevant maybe to modern times, but I don't think this trend makes for better mysteries: there's enough political sensitivity already on the op-ed pages of newspapers. [We, well I, don't read mystery novels to find out that the whole world has the same problems with druggies and yobbos and neo-fascists -- one prefers a setting that is 'foreign' enough to take you away from your own environment.]
  
  
• Sharyn McCrumb: Sheriff Spencer Arrowood, policewoman Martha Ayers, and the wonderful old woman with the second sight, Nora Bonesteel, are recurring characters in this writer's books that deal with Appalachian folklore ('hillbillies' in a non-pejorative presentation). They have provocative titles such as The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and She Walks These Hills. The Rosewood Casket put her over the top in this category with a stunningly atmospheric novel that involves a mysterious death long long ago, but also topical stuff about greedy real-estate salesmen in modern Tennessee and yuppies and the destruction of the old Scotch-Irish heritage. The resolution of the past mystery is interwoven with a very moving immediate drama. This book led me to putting her on my 'best mystery author' list. Not a classic mystery with clues, etc. (although there are enough of them to make it fit the genre), but it is a wonderful novel. Update (4/99): The Ballad of Frankie Silver has now come out in paperback, and it is marvellous -- especially the retrospective sections ostensibly by the court clerk of the time of the 1830s trial and execution of Frances Silver, the first woman to be judicially executed in North Carolina. A harrowing and moving tale and a GREAT feat of fictional reconstruction of the legal system and mores of the time. I can't say I've read a better book this year (although it is not really a mystery).

• Val McDermid: A Place of Execution (1999). The plotting is brilliant, although it doesn't tread ground that's never been trodden before -- the remote and self-governing village, child molestation, the repercussions of an old crime 35 years later. The first two-thirds of the book are a good, but standard 'true crime' novel, ostensibly written by a journalist; the final third (35 years later) is the revealing of what really happened, and there is enough detection in it to classify the book as a detective story, with fair if well-hidden clues some of which are cleverly dropped in in the first section, where one is not reading it as much more than a good procedural novel. The prose is excellent, the early 1960s milieu very accurate as to policing of the period and nostalgic backdrops, the trial scene suspenseful and well-done. Best is the characterization on all levels, important and secondary people. And what I particularly liked was the setting in the 'backwoods', as I know from experience, being familiar with towns in the mountains of eastern Tennessee (not featured in this book, but no different really, from what is) and with the Peak District of Derbyshire and Staffordshire (my brother lives in Leek and I know the places described pretty well). Val McDermid is a member of the Scottish McMafia of crime writers along with Rankin, McIlvaney, etc. but actually lives in Manchester and sets her stories in that area usually. I haven't quite figured her out yet, since I haven't read more than one book of each of her various series heroes/heroines. "Place" was a one-off, supposedly, though I'd like to see Catherine the investigative-reporter lady and ex-cop now bird-watcher Tommy in another book. Just finished some Internet checking-out, and find that along with her standard 1960s nostaligic set-up (Beatles and other pop singers, JFK assassination and his connection with Buxton, Profumo, etc.) what seemed to be irrelevant connections between missing children interspersed in the book -- to mislead us into thinking a serial killer? -- are actual victims of the once notorious Moors Murderers in the real life of the time.

  <<<<< SPOILER >>>>> (To read, run your cursor over the green background.)

  As detection this book violates one of Knox's rules: that "The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader." There are lots of items that turn up later that were just not told to us, or hardly more than hinted at, especially in regard to the thoughts of the 'second detective' (DS Tommy Clough, a great character by the way) who turns out to be so important in the end-game, even though he is not used as a point-of-view person. Also, the layers of the 'extended family' with only 3 surnames leaves out the most important -- something only hinted at very indirectly in a distracting but moving sub-plot. The clue is there in a vague sense, but hardly anyone would ever spot it on a first reading. It is a corollary of another of Knox's rules ("The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story") that it should also apply to any other key persons. I have a bad habit dating back to school days (writing comments in the margins of my books, underlining, etc.), which undermines the value of my book collection for the resale market -- but my point has always been "I own this book and I can do anything I want with it," not caring about the antiquities aspect. In any case, I did that with this book, as I've done with all my Carr books. In most cases comments like 'But wouldn't the neighbors have known that the daughter was dead' were fixed up with an 'Ah, so, they had moved to another town where nobody knew them' at the denouement (one gets the suspicion that the author inserted these tie-ups at galley-proof stage, given her acknowledgements in the preface about 'gratitude to so-and-so for pointing out major errors'). We were never told this, in fact never told about these major characters at all. Also a blunder in the courtroom scene when the prosecution forensic specialist goes on about blood from a virgin's hymenal rupture when the whole point of the case was that she was not one. It is a rape charge as well as murder, but photographs taken by the accused murderer and used in evidence prove that he did that long before he supposedly 'ravished' and killed her. (That may be a clue, but it's not a very good one!) In fact, the production of these nasty photos in court is never described in the transcript we get, only hinted at as having been produced in evidence. There were a few items like this that rang gongs even when the flaws were covered over at the end. As great a character as the witch-like matriarch Ma Lomas is -- in fact the most marvellous creation in this book, a true classic figure -- it is hard to believe that she was able to manipulate the interbred degenerates of her village so skillfully or be so crafty at villainy and clever psychological manipulation of outsiders like the police. [But, no, she is NOT the murderer! In fact the murderer is ... well, read the Crispin story about Baker.] I actually felt sorry for the man executed until the final revelation, where the whole point of this clever plot is made perfectly clear and satisfactory.

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