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Reconstructed Mystery: The Unknown Woman of the Seine

28 Monday Mar 2022

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Review: The Unknown Woman of the Seine, by Brooks Hansen
Delphinium, 2021. 261 pp. $26

This much is true. Sometime during the late nineteenth century, a young woman drowned in the Seine, and the gypsum death mask created to memorialize her face became famous. What a face it was — serene, people said. Others spoke of her innocence, her beauty. The poet Rilke wrote of her deceptive smile and what knowledge might lie behind it. Artists studied the re-created face as a model; copies of her likeness could be found in Parisian studios and academies. Nabokov had a character write a poem about her. Camus, it was said, showed her off at parties. Man Ray photographed her.

Photograph of the famous death mask, ca. 1900, photographer unknown (courtesy http://totenmasken.com/totenmasken/html/body_galerie.html, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

To all, the dead woman’s mask represented a quality that touched them, so they invented her story, a biography, a mystery, and how she might have met her end. That background brings us to the current novel, beguiling, occasionally baffling, which offers a coherent explanation, as tense as any whodunit and as meticulously observed as any narrative of any kind.

Hansen’s story begins with a scene in a morgue, November 1889, after the unknown woman’s body has been on display for a month — yes, they did that, apparently — after which the mask maker plies his craft. It’s a prologue, therefore unfortunate by nature, and a bit confusing, at that. But Hansen skillfully rewinds the intrigue from there, chiefly through the eyes of Émile Brassard, a gendarme who’s had a checkered career, partly because his brilliance upsets people, a circumstance the author understates with deft hand.

In fact, if any single word describes The Unknown Woman of the Seine, it’s understated. I admire novels in which nothing is predictable, yet whose randomness derives entirely from characters with opposing goals (not authorial convenience). I also admire those novels that ask me to draw inferences rather than explain themselves, which involves me in the narrative and lets me meet the story halfway, rather than have it spooned into my mouth.

That said, Hansen demands a lot of his readers, and I’m not always up to it. A dose of bewilderment works wonders, though, for you share Brassard’s curiosity and puzzlement. He first sees the woman in the woods far from Paris, while she’s burying a corpse — and none too deep, because subsequently, the wolves get to it easily. Brassard might arrest her, but he can’t, because he’s applying to be reinstated in the gendarmerie after military service in Indochina, so he’s not officially on duty. Moreover, he’s traveling to his reinstatement hearing, so his time isn’t his own.

Consequently, he must walk a tightrope, following the woman while covering his tracks from both the participants and his superiors. Hansen does a marvelous job integrating his hero’s employment troubles with the mores and politics of the time, folding that into the detective’s quest to figure out who the woman is and why she was burying the dead man. If she killed him, as is likely, Brassard assumes there are extenuating circumstances, and he wants to know the story. So do you.

However, he, and the reader, must have infinite patience before things start to make sense. Also requiring patience are references to images of Buddhist philosophy, which go above my head, and which seem — to me, at least — to have little relation to the story. No doubt I missed something.

But the reader who can stick it out will be well rewarded, especially those who like dogs — Brassard’s is quite the canine investigator, perhaps a little too good to be true, yet their relationship is marvelous. The journey the narrative follows could not be more beautifully rendered, whether Brassard’s thoughts, the landscape, or the city of Paris, particularly the presence of that newly built tower, Eiffel’s monstrosity, as some think of it.

Here, the detective considers his reinstatement, as variable and hard to fathom as the heavens themselves:

If the sun said, All is well, all will turn out in due time, the moon knew better. The moon said, Beware. The moon shed light on the darker and more difficult truths, and he could feel them this evening as he wrote — the low clouds of doubt drifting into his brain, or looking like wolves just behind the tree line, grinning and shimmering with the knowledge that his confidence was without ground; he was fooling himself; the matter of his reinstatement is not nearly as simple or assured as he liked to think.… There were men out there who doubted him, and who made it their business to undermine him.

Such magnificent writing rolls easily into your mind, creating inner life, physical setting, and tension, all at once. The narrative’s final pages lack the clarity I would have liked, but the essentials are there. The manner in which Brassard — and Hansen — pull together the evidence makes for a thoroughly satisfying and remarkable tale of mystery.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Damaged Men: Kith and Kin

29 Monday Nov 2021

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Review: Kith and Kin, by Jane A. Adams
Severn, 2018. 218 pp. $29

In December 1928, two bodies wash up in the Kentish marshes, under circumstances anything but clear. But one thing Detective Chief Inspector Henry Johnstone and Detective Sergeant Mickey Hitchens know. They recognize one of the dead as a lieutenant of Josiah Bailey, a London crime boss who inspires such terror that people think twice before uttering his name.

Cliffe Pools, in the North Kent marshes, now cut off from the sea, forms a fleet, a saline waterway (courtesy Clem Rutter, 2007, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Johnstone and Hitchens also know that when Bailey gives an order, failure to comply may bring a death sentence, not only to the disobedient, but to their families. As such, the policemen must consider whether Bailey turned on his own loyalists, and why, or whether a rival gang has retaliated for an offense known only to the participants — in which case a turf war may erupt. What a terror that would be.

But to forestall that bloodbath, Hitchens and Johnstone must uncover the tangled roots of the murders, and since the key witnesses have connections to Bailey, no one will talk. Moreover, what the detectives gradually learn (but what the reader knows from the get-go) is that the case stems from a decade-old conflict that involves members of a Gypsy clan. They too are loath to speak up, because dealing with outsiders, especially officialdom, has always ended badly for them. As you might imagine, obstacles abound, the “no — and furthermore” that drives the story at a good clip.

However, this premise, though well executed, is surely not the first exploration of gang warfare in a mystery, nor is it what makes this novel worth reading. Rather, Adams focuses on her characters, starting with her two detectives, who care deeply about one another without ever saying so. They met during the Great War, so they have a bond that goes back, a tacit language. But it’s not just the shared background that makes them friends. Mickey Hitchens understands how the war still plagues Henry Johnstone, for reasons only alluded to (but which may have been explained in the first two installments of the series).

Touchingly, Mickey tries to make sure that Henry, a bachelor, bothers to eat enough and care for himself. But when his friend does something stupid in the line of duty, Hitchens doesn’t hesitate to say, “Lord, but you can be an awkward bastard when the mood takes you.” I can’t recall when I’ve run across such a pair of sleuths, or even a subordinate detective who never utters the word sir — in Britain, no less. The focus on characterization extends to the minor players, as with Henry’s sister, Cynthia; Mickey’s wife; and several witnesses, especially those who don’t belong to the mob. All receive a dash of inner life.

I also like how Adams creates a world of damaged people, about whom she refuses to moralize, and for whom luck and circumstance play a large role in whether they escape the darkness or succumb. Though Henry and his sister number among the escapees, that wasn’t a given, apparently, so he understands Bailey’s henchmen better than they realize, probably:

Childhood, Henry thought, ended all too swiftly for most children, especially the children of the poor. Henry and his sister, though his family had endured no such acute financial pressures, had also had their own childhood curtailed, in their case by a father who saw no value in creatures who could not contribute to his own wellbeing. Then the father had died and it had just been Henry and Cynthia and, all things considered, they had done well; in their case it was better to be parentless than so badly parented.

Adams’s prose reads like this throughout, clear, direct, and spare. Though I like that, sometimes her descriptions sound like laundry lists of detail, when I want evocations. The whodunit facet of the narrative consists largely of dialogue between the detectives, much of which veers into information dumps. To be fair, the two men must compare notes, yet how the author presents this exchange matters to me, and I prefer an indirect approach.

The back story, though essential and crisply told in itself, feels shoehorned in at times, including the prologue. In its defense, however, said prologue has one of the most compelling first sentences you’ll ever see, so I understand why Adams wanted to lead with it. Finally, though the ending satisfies in its realism, the solution fails to match the buildup, which leaves me wanting more.

Consequently, Kith and Kin is a novel greater than the sum of its parts. The characterizations are what command attention, and if I were to read another installment in the series, I’d do so to learn how the two detectives progress in their lives.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Who Killed Marilyn Sheppard?: Do No Harm

07 Monday Dec 2020

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Review: Do No Harm, by Max Allan Collins
Forge, 2020. 297 pp. $28

This much is history: During the early morning hours of July 4, 1957, someone bludgeons Marilyn Sheppard to death in her suburban Cleveland bedroom after a possible attempted rape, which she seems to have violently resisted. Suspicion immediately falls on her doctor husband, who nevertheless claims he was asleep on a daybed one floor below. He insists he rushed to her aid when he heard her screams and suffered a physical assault from the killer that damaged a vertebra in his neck.

Actor David Janssen playing Dr. Richard Kimble in the final episode of The Fugitive, 1967, a much-acclaimed ABC television series loosely based on the Marilyn Sheppard murder case. My high school classmates often talked about the show (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States, as the image first appeared without a copyright tag)

The crime becomes notorious, largely because a Cleveland newspaper beats the drum for Dr. Sam Sheppard’s conviction even before his trial begins. Other irregularities mark the prosecution, not least the judge’s refusal to grant a change of venue; a lackadaisical approach to forensic evidence that suggests prejudice against the defendant; and testimony that borders on hearsay. Even so, Dr. Sam, as he’s known, behaved strangely right after the murder, and his two brothers, also physicians, tried to shield him in ways that arouse suspicion. Just before Christmas, a court convicts Dr. Sam and sentences him to prison.

Enter Nathan Heller, Chicago private investigator (and Collins’s creation, unlike many characters in this true-crime novel). Having visited the crime scene hours after the killing in the company of his friend Eliot Ness, Nate has glimpsed physical evidence as well as what the police and coroner do or fail to do. Not only that, he’s a hotshot with a national reputation. Consequently, in subsequent years, when the mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner (creator of Perry Mason) takes an interest in the case and hopes to discover whether a retrial is warranted, he calls on his friend Nate.

Naturally, the Ohio authorities take a dim view, so Nate must be slicker than Brylcreem if he’s to interview the key players. All fear exposure, in one way or another. But as our hero sifts through the conflicting stories, he faces setbacks, and the trail goes cold over the years. Even so, the narrative that results, the search for new evidence and the real killer—if it’s not Dr. Sam—won’t let you go.

This is where Collins excels. He knows everything there is to know about the case but uses only the most relevant details. The reader follows Nate as he probes one possible suspect, then another, yet the more he learns, the murkier things get. Just when you think he’s nailed down the truth, you find he hasn’t, and not until the very end do you discover the most likely solution.

Collins’s style has been compared to Raymond Chandler’s, and though I won’t go that far, Do No Harm offers its verbal pleasures. A Dictaphone machine “hugged the desk like a frightened time traveler”; “You could have sliced the smoke in here and sold it for bacon”; and “peeling brown paint, like the ugliest suntan in history” decorates one scene of operations. Consider the previous paragraph describing that locale:

To some, the Cleveland Flats, situated on the bottomland of the river’s floodplain, was an industrial wonder — shipyards, foundries, oil refineries, chemical plants, lumber yards, flour mills. To me, the Flats would always be a hellish collection of gin joints and warehouses, where sailors and workingmen wandered in a dank, dark world lit by flickering neon and open flames from gas runoff, the silence broken by honky-tonk music and the fingernails-on-blackboard screeches of factories across the river. Some of these dives dated back to the turn of the century, piles of brick held together by sweat, sawdust and swill.

I recommend reading Do No Harm, but I’m unlikely to try another Nathan Heller novel. When I said the PI had to be slick, that he is. He never makes a mistake, and setbacks don’t throw him. Powerbrokers tell him no or move to block him, but he doesn’t care. You know he’ll work around them if he can’t go through them. Cornered by three punks who’ve gotten the drop on him? Pity them. Attractive women, and there are many, all flirt with him, and he has a way of viewing women as sex objects first and anything else second. Maybe that’s the hard-boiled genre, and it was probably unremarkable in the 1950s, if not the later decade, as the story progresses. But it’s nevertheless distasteful, especially since Nate never has an inconvenient feeling, if any at all, so he seems like a robot wired for high-voltage sex drive.

Given all that, if you read Do No Harm, you know what you’re getting: a throwback, for better and worse, and a ripping good story.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Drinka Pinta Deatha Day: Murder by Milk Bottle

02 Monday Nov 2020

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Review: Murder by Milk bottle, by Lynne Truss
Bloomsbury, 2020. 320 pp. $27

The summer of 1957 has witnessed plenty of deadly violence in Brighton, England, and Constable Twitten longs for a respite. But he’s not going to get one. Three more victims soon bite the dust in rapid fashion, sending this seaside resort town into a tizzy over the August Bank Holiday weekend. What’s more, all three met their end courtesy of milk-bottle shards. This is a rather unfortunate coincidence, since the Milk Girl, a lovely young woman hired by the dairy industry, will be making a publicity appearance, opening a milk bar. Or is it a coincidence?

Consider to the influence of an ice cream competition, judged by the local police inspector, Steine. Don’t forget the beauty contest, widely believed to be rigged, or the barber competition, which has a similar reputation. For good measure, we have a stampede of docile milk cows, a girls’ school with a troubled past, and Mrs. Groynes, char lady at the police station, whose real profession is running organized crime in Brighton.

Incidentally, she’s the only organized person in the station, for the police are utterly incompetent. Constable Twitten, though he sees much, as his first name, Peregrine, would suggest, makes a hash of interpreting it, as his last name implies. He’s perennially blind to the attractive young women who keep falling in love with him, the anti-James Bond. He also has a gift for saying the wrong thing at precisely the wrong moment, so these women may be better off without him. More educated than either Sergeant Brunswick or Inspector Steine, he correctly assumes he’s got more on the ball. But he can seldom convince them of anything, and his manners don’t help. Mrs. Groynes mentors him, when it suits her purposes, fully aware that no matter what Twitten says, he’ll remain the only copper in Brighton who knows she’s a criminal.

As I hope you’ve gathered by now, Murder by Milk Bottle is a riot. I’ve never laughed so often at a mystery, one that recalls British film comedies from the 1960s about blundering police, criminals, or both. (See, for example, The Wrong Arm of the Law, released in 1963, in which Peter Sellers plays a mobster named Pearly Gates.) But Truss has her own style, often witty, very often madcap, never taking itself too seriously. The plot churns merrily, with wry twists and clever turnabouts. You know that the bunglers will bungle, yet will somehow triumph in the end; you just don’t know how. The mystery narration itself is so clever that you’ll keep guessing (wrongly) until the end. And will the characters learn anything? I doubt it.

Truss’s prose is a treat, full of commentary, as with this passage about a dispatcher for roadside assistance:

Mr. Hollibon was an ardent smoker with all the hallmarks of a man who has inhaled warmed-up toxins continuously for more than thirty years. The puckered skin, deep-stained fingers, disgusting cough: he flaunted them all with pride. An army doctor had once asked if his cough was ‘productive,’ and he had replied, truthfully, ‘Yes, very.’ Leaning forward now, he alternately coughed and struggled for breath until (yes!) A veritable torrent of expectoration was produced. And then, pleased with himself, he lit a fresh fag to celebrate.

But there’s also plenty of wordplay. My favorite is the Cockney rhyming slang, in which the phrase “best whistle” refers to whistle and flute, meaning suit; or “boat,” short for boat race, meaning face. But there’s also Twitten’s predilection for psych talk, which is ridiculously funny, and the name of the girls’ school, Lady Laura Laridae (Laridae is the class of sea birds that includes gulls). And finally I’ll cite the author’s play on the famous advertising phrase of the dairy industry, Drinka Pinta Milka Day, which a waggish Brighton newspaper publisher, considering all the mayhem, turns into Drinka Pinta Deatha Day.

None of this surprises me, given Truss’s fame for Eats, Shoots & Leaves, her plea against the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue, as Professor Higgins put it in My Fair Lady. But I tell you, if she wishes to write a mystery revolving around death by comma (Oxford or inverted), I’m down for that.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my work for Historical Novels Review.

Plymouth Rock Asunder: Beheld

19 Monday Oct 2020

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Review: Beheld, by TaraShea Nesbit
Bloomsbury, 2020. 272 pp. $26

In August 1630, as the ten-year-old Plymouth Colony awaits a ship from England bearing more colonists, rivalries and resentments divide the settlement. Alice Bradford, the governor’s wife, who sets the scene and narrates much of the novel, ascribes the tension largely to indentured servants who accompanied the pilgrims but don’t follow God’s ways. That summer witnesses the settlement’s first murder and increasing encroachments on indigenous lives and property. Mistress Bradford’s conscience stirs at how the colonists, led by the soldier Myles Standish, have so quickly forgotten how the Wampanoags saved them from starvation through kindness and generosity.

Nesbit performs a great service in her tale of appalling hypocrisy, brutality, and greed. Her historical background seems authoritative, and I’m glad to see she’s countered a few myths traditionally spoon-fed in American schools. For instance, the pilgrims weren’t all fleeing religious oppression; many sailed from Holland originally, where they’d found tolerance. Rather, they feared intermarriage with the Dutch, whom they despised, and sought economic opportunity in the New World.

Further, they meant to land in Virginia, of which they had heard favorable reports as to the climate and soil, and which put them further away from the Dutch in New Amsterdam. But the captain of the Mayflower, perhaps because the storm-filled, illness-ridden crossing had taken such a toll, held to a more northern course. From that decision arose New England.

Portrait of William Bradford, artist unknown, believed to be seventeenth-century (courtesy http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/articles/ushistory/williambradford.htm via Wikimedia Commons)

Nesbit performs one other service: She focuses on the women of Plymouth, who have been largely lost to history. Alice comes across especially well, the good wife who sees and understands far more than she can say, who believes implicitly that her husband should rule her as he governs the colony, and who suffers mightily for all that. The novel also pays due homage to the back-breaking work she and other women perform to keep the settlement afloat, about which the historical record is equally mute.

I admire how Alice holds fast to an outlook that her sharp perceptions do nothing to shake, though she herself trembles a little. Also fine is Eleanor Billington, wife to John, both former indentured servants and therefore outliers. Eleanor sees the Puritans for who they are and tries to keep her bad-tempered husband from running afoul of them. Like Alice, she’s trapped: The Billingtons lack the resources to move, and even if they pulled up stakes, they’d lose years’ worth of labor and the land they scrimped to buy.

Alice’s voice is vivid and accurate without adornment, what you’d expect from her, as with her description of the new colonists emerging from the ship:

The first heads to pop up from the tween deck were small black-capped men. Then came three heifers and a bull and behind them, more men, half a dozen women, and with them a handful of children. There they were, four dozen or so, sickly and sea-legged. Their pale English bodies, weakened by the journey, as if ghosts, crossing over. One by one, the women’s bare ankles and leather shoes dipped in the surfaces of the sea. I knew their look well — their hopeful and fearful imaginations of the present situation.

Nevertheless, despite a terrific premise, worthy themes and historical perspective, and excellent female characters, Beheld disappoints me as a novel. Much as I’m glad to feed my contrarian soul against the lies my teachers told me, and though the portrayal of fundamentalists so willing to oppress others feels relevant today, Beheld wants more nuance and more coherent storytelling.

Bradford, though a forceful governor, has no redeeming features as a man except that he’s good in bed — surprise! — or as good as any seventeenth-century Englishwoman has the right to expect. Standish, known as Shrimp because of the short stature of which he’s ashamed, is highly disagreeable, vicious, and treacherous. The murder, announced in the second paragraph, is fairly predictable, and the narrative keeps referring to it before it happens, as if the author (or her agent or editor) feared nobody would keep turning the pages without reminders of Something Really Important. I’ve never liked that authorial technique, which has the opposite effect to what’s intended and makes me think that the novel begins in the wrong place.

The blink-of-an-eye chapters interrupt the flow rather than propel it. Some, from an omniscient narrator called Nature, though prettily written, feel dropped in. All that, and the layout, including unnecessary breaks for different “parts,” gives the impression that the publisher worries that the book looks shrimpy. I don’t see why length matters, but I did want longer scenes and fuller development, especially of storylines and the male characters.

So with Beheld, you get an arresting, unusual narrative inherently noteworthy because of our national myths, yet which feels as if it has holes. I wonder whether Nesbit, with her solid command of the subject, could have filled a few in.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Perpetrators: A Meal in Winter

04 Monday Feb 2019

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Review: A Meal in Winter, by Hubert Mingarelli
Translated from the French by Sam Taylor
New Press, 2018. 138 pp. $15

One brutal Polish winter in an unspecified year during World War II, three German soldiers embark on a mission they dislike because remaining in camp would require them to do what they like even less. Emmerich, Bauer, and the unnamed narrator evade their despised lieutenant, a self-important martinet, to go hunting one of “them.” If the trio brings their quarry back to camp, they’ll be spared having to execute those prisoners already collected. But if they pretend to have caught one and shot him or her on sight, the lieutenant won’t believe them and will be certain to assign them the mass killing duty, which disturbs their dreams and troubles their consciences.

Since “one of them” means a Jew, A Meal in Winter is therefore a Holocaust novel, and an unusual one, at that. Not only does Mingarelli focus entirely on Emmerich, Bauer, and their unnamed comrade — the perpetrators — the author casts them strictly as men ordered to perform a task they hate, which poses moral dilemmas. The real sadist, therefore, is the unseen lieutenant, who has placed the three in their predicament. What’s more, they seem neutral, if not indifferent, to Jews, whereas a Polish civilian who happens on them is a vicious anti-Semite. Emmerich, Bauer, and the narrator are reservists, meaning they’re older men, and Emmerich has an adolescent son he’s worried about, an anxiety his buddies try to help them with.

No Holocaust story I’ve ever heard starts from such a focus on individuals rather than mass actions, but that doesn’t mean A Meal in Winter couldn’t have happened. Mingarelli plainly wants as spare and simple a narrative as he can get, preventing the perpetrators from hiding in a large group. That approach works well in some ways, but others, not.

The understated prose conveys the frigid, barren winter landscape, the physical difficulties of coping with it, the trio’s attempts to pull through their hardships together, and, from the outset, having to choose between unpalatable alternatives. Such is their state of mind that when they capture a Jew and find an empty house in which to warm up, that counts as a special occasion:

When I turned around, there was smoke floating from the chimney. The sight lifted my heart. Added to the fact that we had avoided the shootings and that there had been no wind since the morning, it was no exaggeration to say that this had been a good day.

And of course Emmerich’s sharp eyes [which had spotted their captive] had made it an even better day, for tomorrow we would undoubtedly avoid the shootings again, if there were any. Bringing one back meant we would have the right to go out searching again. Nobody would be giving us evil looks…. Unlike today, we would even be able to wait for the kitchen to open so we could get our rations. We would be entitled to all of that tomorrow.

So far, so good. A Meal in Winter is a haunting novel, to be sure, a razor-sharp moral tale that attempts to explain how men caught up in a heinous crime contribute their share of it. Mingarelli, a writer of great subtlety, never lets his characters soapbox; like most soldiers, they’re largely inarticulate, especially about feelings. So it is that when Emmerich frets about his son at home, and whether the boy will take up smoking — what the soldiers do plenty of — I read that as his prayer that his son will never have to hunt and kill anybody.

But there’s one problem with A Meal in Winter. Emmerich, Bauer, and friend are still killers, and they’re chasing down victims who pose no threat. They’re not fighting off Russian soldiers or Polish partisans; in fact, they’re not fighting at all, because the people they’re hunting have no weapons. Like most soldiers, these three concentrate on how to stay warm, eat enough, and get safely through another day — but that program requires them to murder innocents. Consequently, they’re unsympathetic — at least, to me — and if I’m supposed to be impressed that they tell the anti-Semitic Pole to quit foaming at the mouth, forget it.

Conversely, if Mingarelli wants to show how these men kill without malice or conviction, you could argue that’s even worse than if they were die-hard anti-Semites. Granted, a key strength of this novel is how Mingarelli leaves plenty of space for the reader to slip into the story and ask, “What would I do in this situation?” But though I understand the soldiers’ plight, which Mingarelli describes in remarkably few yet vivid words, I can’t call them victims, care about them particularly, or identify with them; they’re moral placeholders, no more.

Nevertheless, as a moral exercise, A Meal in Winter will challenge readers, and there’s much to be said for that. This slim novel won’t take you much time — I spent longer writing this review than I did reading the book — yet I’m confident it will stay with you.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, where this commentary appeared in shorter, different form.

Walking Dead: The Deepest Grave

15 Monday Oct 2018

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Review: The Deepest Grave, by Jeri Westerson
Severn House, 2018. 200 pp. $29

The waning years of the fourteenth century are a bloody time in London, it seems. Recently buried corpses have been seen traipsing about the cemetery at St. Modwen’s church, dragging their coffins. A seven-year-old has confessed to killing his best friend’s father, a wealthy cloth merchant, and a relic related to St. Modwen has disappeared from that same household.

Enter Crispin Guest, the so-called Tracker of London, who solves mysteries like these for sixpence a day. The Deepest Grave is the eleventh novel of the series featuring his adventures, but Westerson catches you up on his previous career as a knight serving John of Gaunt, when Crispin had a title, lands, and power. He lost them because he backed the wrong horse when Richard II ascended the throne. If the series goes another seven historical years, Crispin’s fortunes should improve when Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son, usurps Richard’s crown. Naturally, however, Westerson’s characters don’t know this, and just about everyone reminds Guest, in one way or another, that he’s a traitor lucky to be alive. One who’s kinder is his former lover, Philippa Walcote, mother of the boy who has confessed to murder — an impossibility, by all accounts, yet the child figures to hang unless Crispin can work his rational magic.

Renold Elstracke’s posthumous 1617 print of Dick Whittington, fourteenth-century London’s famous lord mayor, and his equally famous cat (courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons)

I like Guest’s comedown, which forces our hero to earn an honest living and abide in humble conditions, with his apprentice, Jack, and Jack’s pregnant wife. This unusual ménage makes for an intriguing setup and offers opportunities that, unfortunately, Westerson fails to exploit. For instance, the narrative never delves past the surface of its disgraced protagonist’s feelings, whether as a once-favored somebody who has lost everything, or a middle-aged man who has never married. The narrative tells you straight out that he has regrets, but I wanted to see them in action, especially his struggle with them, and how others might view them. Further, he’s too decent to chafe at his reduced circumstances, which I find unrealistic and a shame. Anyone of any era would have strong feelings about falling from grace, and this is the fourteenth century, when venality’s the rule rather than the exception.

But Westerson has a different agenda. Character doesn’t drive The Deepest Grave, which is fine, but I wish it were harder to tell the good guys from the bad, or that her people showed more than a single, overriding trait. Also, a few interactions Crispin has when he’s not solving crimes feel predictable and pat; I’d like this book a whole lot better if his private life were messier.

What all this adds up to is a generic feel, which I see echoed in the prose:

He was able to enjoy the night, the stars peeking in and out of the cloud cover, wisping across the night sky between the tall buildings. The glittering stars marched ahead of them on a cloudy trail. The shops and houses were blue in the falling light. Only the wealthier houses had gleaming candles shining through glass windows. The rest were barred with shutters, with only a stripe or two of light.

To me, paragraphs like these—the only exterior descriptions in the novel–give little sense of London or fourteenth-century English life. I get that the sky is cloudy, but I don’t really visualize it, or what Guest thinks about it; and that sky could have been there yesterday as well as five hundred years ago. How tall were the buildings? What did the glass look like? The streets?

I’m also skeptical that Guest’s belief in reason rather than Scripture meets so little surprise or opposition, when such thinking was a burning offense. Does Jack, who grew up a thief as a young child, really quote Aristotle, as Guest does? Would a fourteenth-century man, no matter how erudite or educated, link the heart to the pumping of blood? (Westerson could have made that point a different way, but the phrasing jumped out at me.)

Nevertheless, The Deepest Grave has its charms. Westerson integrates the two stories, the churchyard walks and the merchant’s murder, with skill and economy. She deftly employs “no — and furthermore,” so that nothing comes too easily for Crispin, who makes mistakes. Unlike Crispin the man, the Tracker of London follows a less predictable path, and the puzzles will keep you guessing.

The Deepest Grave makes thinner, less satisfying fare than other historical mysteries from Severn House, but it’s entertaining and clever in its way.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Clever Puzzle: Dancing with Death

25 Monday Sep 2017

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Review: Dancing with Death, by Amy Myers
Severn, 2017. 215 pp. $29

It’s hard to dislike a novel that begins, “‘Galloping codfish, Kitty! What the dickens do you call that?’” This exclamation comes from Nell Drury, the chef–do not call her cook–at Wychbourne Court, ancestral home of the eighth Marquess Ansley and his somewhat quarrelsome family. It’s 1925, enough time after the Great War for the love of merriment to have retaken hold, though no one has forgotten the suffering and sacrifice. Nell, a former student of the great Escoffier at the Ritz-Carlton, if you please, has much on her plate. Most immediately she’s responsible for the hors d’oeuvres and two full meals at the soirée her employers are giving.

However, the festivities also include a chummy get-together with the ghosts said to inhabit Wychbourne, and since the place goes back centuries, there are quite a few. Actually, only one person believes that there are ghosts, but she happens to be Lord Ansley’s sister,the sort of dotty eccentric that no English manse can be without, especially in fiction. Lady Clarice has many more instructions for Chef Nell, because, you know, ghosts must eat too, or, at the very least, they derive pleasure from smelling and seeing their favorite foods. As a dutiful, loyal servant, Nell keeps her opinions of this to herself; all she knows is that the evening will be complicated.

How right she is. If you’ve ever read or seen a movie in the country-house mystery genre, you need no ouija board to know that someone will die during the ghost-klatsch; that this murder will have multiple suspects; and that Nell will take it upon herself to investigate, sometimes running afoul of the police, who somehow think that solving crime is their job. But if Myers’s bow to conventions is altogether predictable, how she handles them makes all the difference.

Dancing with Death is strongest in its plot, at which Myers excels. Without introducing hidden facts that the reader couldn’t possibly have guessed–a ploy we’ve all come across, despite its lack of generosity–Myers leaves more or less everything open to view. You know the enmities, alliances, and romances running through the household; you just don’t know who’s lying to protect whom until people revise their stories. Consequently, Nell never sees more than the reader does, and since she has to balance what to tell the Scotland Yard inspector against her loyalty to Wychbourne, she’s protecting people as well, which adds another layer of tension.

The occasional wit helps. As Nell observes while visiting an aristocratic neighbor who wishes to hire her for a party:

It was a stone-built residence looking bleakly ornate compared with Wychbourne Court. I’m here for you to witness how grand I am, it seemed to be saying to her. The large reception room where she was asked to wait did nothing to contradict this assessment. Gentlemen in military uniform glared down from every wall and their long-suffering wives smiled weakly at the painters. Nell wondered whether they ever got together with the Wychbourne Court ghosts.

I wish, though, that Dancing with Death had more wit beyond Nell’s mild oaths; “blithering beets,” and the like, clever once, get tiresome after a while. And though Myers keeps the narrative percolating, she pays little attention to character. Nell’s a capable diplomat, independent, and conscious of herself as a pioneer, a woman in a field dominated by men. That’s interesting, but Myers does little with it other than to mention it, repeatedly. Very little of her past (or anyone’s) appears, and her reflections are the trite type common to the genre: “Could X be lying? That could be dangerous. Then again, Nell owed it to the Ansleys.” You get the picture.

There’s also little to define the era as the 1920s other than a few songs, dances, styles of dress, and social attitudes. The war has left its mark, we’re told, but people don’t seem to walk around with it. One Ansley daughter dabbles in socialism, and her enlightened views about class do her credit, but I’m not buying her theory that her parents don’t really care about that stuff anymore. Even to think so, without any discussion, conflict, or evidence, seems like a retrospective view of that time rather than those years from the inside.

The foreign ministers of Germany, Britain, and France try to prevent war in Europe, October 1925, Locarno. From left, Gustav Stresemann, Austen Chamberlain, and Aristide Briand (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, via Bundesarchiv)

Should historical mysteries offer a deeper perspective? I think they should; certainly, the best do. One that comes to mind, of about the same length, is Chris Nickson’s Gods of Gold. Obviously, not every writer has to be like every other, and Dancing with Death has its charms. But I know which approach I prefer.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

House of Atreus, Revisited: House of Names

12 Monday Jun 2017

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Review: House of Names,by Colm Tóibín
Scribner, 2017. 275 pp. $26

Agamemnon, waiting with his army for a fair wind for Troy, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods. That act sets in motion a blood-will-have-blood intrigue that throws Mycenae’s House of Atreus into turmoil and evokes moral issues that inspired all three tragic dramatists of ancient Athens: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Iphigenia in Tauris, as a priestess of Artemis, sets out to greet her brother, Orestes, and his friend, Pylades; fresco from Pompeii, 1st century C.E. (Naples National Archeological Museum, courtesy May Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons)

Here, Tóibín has departed from the script in an always riveting but occasionally portentous narrative, and the result is a mixed success. As befits its sources, House of Names offers plenty of deep themes, and these intense, jittery Mycenaean royalty have enough ambitions, fears, and rough edges to give those themes superb scope. The story, though familiar, feels fresh, partly through reinterpretation, but largely because Tóibín knows how to evoke corners and wrinkles of character that add tension. Even though you know what happens next, you have room to hope that it won’t go that way, and he subtly encourages this delusion until it’s too late.

The novel opens with Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s queen, narrating how her husband lures her and their daughter, Iphigenia, to his camp on the pretext that the girl was to marry Achilles. I like this section very much. Not only does Tóibín craft the warrior king into a weakling, a vacuous coward who can’t even bring the news himself, an unspeakable father to a daughter who adores him, the women attempt to resist and are crushed as if they were insects. The feminist message comes through loud and clear, but there’s more.

Clytemnestra, whom literature has long stereotyped as a bloodthirsty fiend who knows nothing beyond her treasonous lusts and desire for revenge–a misogynistic portrait, if ever there was one–receives a measure of rehabilitation in House of Names. It’s not just that Tóibín plumbs how deeply her daughter’s sacrifice shakes her emotionally. It’s that the brutality pushes her to declare, privately, that if the gods in fact demanded Iphigenia’s death–which Clytemnestra doubts–that only proves their irrelevance.

I know as no one else knows that the gods are distant, they have other concerns. They care about human desires and antics in the same way that I care about the leaves of a tree. I know the leaves are there, they wither and grow again and wither, as people come and live and then are replaced by others like them. There is nothing I can do to help them or prevent their withering. I do not deal with their desires.

But this being the House of Atreus, Clytemnestra doesn’t stop at philosophy. She swears revenge and spends the years of her husband’s absence planning how to carry it out. When Agamemnon finally comes home from Troy, Clytemnestra murders him and gives out that a rebel faction within the palace was responsible. To accomplish this, she has enlisted Aegisthus, a powerful, unscrupulous man who has own scores to settle, and, she finds, no desire to share power or anything else except her bed–and others’. Clytemnestra has miscalculated by a long shot.

And that too is a theme–how, when killing starts, it doesn’t stop. Electra, her younger daughter, swears revenge in turn, and from her narrative sections, you see that she too wants power. Whereas Clytemnestra loved Iphigenia and, once, her husband, Electra doesn’t seem to love anybody. But she hates her mother, to the point that she blames her for Iphigenia’s death. Clytemnestra has done serious wrongs, but Electra’s approach tells you that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Amid all them is Orestes, Clyemnestra’s son, who grows up an exile and yearns to return home. Again, unlike the classic treatment, this Orestes isn’t a natural leader, an outraged son who demands his birthright. In fact, he’s a born follower and wants to do right, whatever that might be. He has only two desires–to find love and not to be shunted aside. His is the saddest, most poignant perspective in the novel, a balance to the mayhem in which he must participate.

Having loved Nora Webster–and held up its prose as a model for my own writing–I’m startled to say that Tóibín’s style in House of Names fails to measure up. The language seems excessively formal, and therefore often distant; for instance, the author never uses contractions and often adds needless prepositional phrases that make people sound pompous. Sometimes, they speak as if they knew a scribe were in the room, taking dictation for posterity. The rhythm, too, becomes annoyingly noticeable in places, as with the short, choppy sentences in Clytemnestra’s voice.

But my biggest complaint, one that surprises me, is the sheer number of “he felt, she felt.” Tóibín didn’t do that in Nora Webster, a novel remarkable for its artistry in conveying inner life through subtext and by inference, with nary a cliché. Compare that with an example here, “He veered between feeling brave and feeling nervous,” and you see the difference.

As a novel of ideas and a retelling of a powerful story, House of Names is worth reading. But it’s disappointing, nevertheless.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Hunting Dissidents, and the Truth: The Seeker

10 Monday Aug 2015

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Review: The Seeker, by S. G. MacLean
Quercus (UK), 2015. 398 pp. £14

A politician once said of Germany that it took half the country to control the other half (and he was speaking around 1900, well before either world war). I get the same chilling impression of midseventeenth-century London from The Seeker, a mystery that involves murder, royalist conspiracies, and the terror of speaking one’s mind.

Cover by Henry Steadman (Courtesy Quercus Books, UK).

Cover by Henry Steadman (Courtesy Quercus Books, UK).

It’s 1654, and after a fractious, savage civil war, Oliver Cromwell has seized power, employing a vast, pervasive spy network to root out anything he considers subversive. His most ubiquitous, feared agent is Damian Seeker, who seems to know whatever you shouldn’t have done, when, and with whom. So if you’ve spoken against the Lord Protector Cromwell’s joyless, repressive regime; longed for the Stuart monarchy to return; written a poem extolling liberty; or merely sat in the same room as someone who’s done any of these, when The Seeker comes for you–and he will–don’t bother to deny a thing. It’s better not to.

However, what makes Seeker more than an extraordinarily energetic, gifted goon is a passion for truth, no matter where it leads. Consequently, when an assassin fells John Winter, a soldier who enjoyed the Lord Protector’s favor and sat in his inner council, it’s more than a security breach. It’s also a murder case, and finding the killer matters, not only because he could strike again, but–well, because. And from the first, Seeker doubts that Elias Ellingworth is the killer, even if he was discovered near Winter’s body, holding the bloody knife, and even if he’s penned seditious pamphlets.

To find the real murderer, Seeker must follow a sinuous trail that quickly branches in several directions, all of which appear to threaten the regime. Coffee houses, the latest fad in London, are the perfect breeding ground for conspiracy, though they’re also places for free conversation on any topic under the sun. I like how MacLean plays this theme. Cromwell’s followers pretend that they have swept away a tyranny based on birth and replaced it with a temperate government that values merit. But, as Ellingworth insists, the Lord Protector has betrayed the democracy he once professed and instituted a tyranny of his own. That Seeker, a commoner of humble origins, hunts down dissidents to uphold an unjust, autocratic ruler lends the conflict a fitting irony.

Little is known about Seeker’s origins, though, for the man never talks about himself or his feelings, if he even has any. He’s all work. However, Maria Ellingworth, the imprisoned suspect’s sister, interests him, and I doubt I’m giving anything away by saying that the young woman’s naive honesty and directness slowly seep through his defenses. It’s obvious from the get-go, though anything but obvious how it will end.

That’s The Seeker’s greatest strength, I think. Except for a scene or two recounted out of order to withhold a secret, the novel is exceptionally well plotted, no mean trick, given the sheer number of characters. Further, MacLean excels at hiding whether certain key characters are friends or foes, sometimes up until the end. I could have done without a cliché action or two, as when Seeker holds off his men to battle a traitor in single combat, but that’s a minor quibble. I love the period details, which flow seamlessly through the narrative and lend atmosphere. The language does slip occasionally, though; I’m certain no seventeenth-century Englishman would have ever used the phrase liaise with.

Seeker’s also pretty thin as a character, yet he’s the deepest of the lot. Late in the novel–too late, I think–we’re told (not shown) why he’s so loyal to Cromwell, and why he loves order above all. But I’m not entirely persuaded, and I think it would have taken little to establish this in small ways throughout the narrative. Seeker has potential–why is he so fierce, and why does truth matter to him?–but this book doesn’t exploit his inner conflicts. Maybe in future installments, MacLean will show more of him and her other characters.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed The Seeker. In the interest of full reporting, let me add that the novel won the 2015 Crime Writers’ Association Endeavour Dagger for Historical Fiction.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.