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Shelf Death: The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne

10 Monday Aug 2020

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Review: The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne, by Elsa Hart
Minotaur, 2020. 341 pp. $27

Lady Cecily Kay doesn’t quite understand why her husband, consul in Smyrna for His Majesty James II, has dispatched her back to England, where she can cause no further trouble. After all, if Cecily didn’t point out the oddities in her husband’s financial ledgers, who would? And why wouldn’t he want the benefit of her sharp eyes?

But despite her humiliating departure from the conjugal nest, Lady Kay’s about to have more adventure than she ever could in Smyrna, and in much the same fashion, asking questions that men don’t wish to answer. (Since it’s 1699, London men expect women to listen like donkeys waiting to have their hind legs talked off, but the devil with that.) So when Cecily tours the famous, coveted collection of Sir Barnaby Mayne, a cornucopia of the natural and folkloric worlds, and someone knifes the collector to death, it’s incumbent on Lady Kay to act. Not only do curiosity and scientific rigor demand no less; justice must be served.

My favorite collector, Joseph Banks, as painted by Joshua Reynolds, 1773. President of the Royal Society for more than forty years, Banks established Kew Gardens as the leading botanical collection in the world (courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Dinley, Sir Barnaby’s assistant, has confessed to the killing and run away. But anyone with an open mind who’s met him for five minutes would believe he’s innocent. If ever there were a naturalist who cringed and blushed over the red-in-tooth-and-claw aspects of his passion, it would be Dinley—and besides, what motive could he have had? However, since Sir Barnaby was a gentleman of title and property, as are most of the visitors on the tour that day, whereas Dinley’s a nobody, a confession and flight are enough evidence to hang him.

Nobody takes kindly to Lady Kay’s inquiries as to the time of the murder, who was where in the house then, and what may be deduced from such observations. As we’ve seen, though, subtlety’s not her strong point. She does have one ally, however, a childhood friend from a lower social class, who’s temporarily residing in the Mayne manse, working as an illustrator for the collector’s intended catalog. But it takes a while for Cecily to trust Meacan, who, like Cecily, is less than forthcoming—a nice touch, there—and the two never do quite get over their competition to solve the mystery, another nice touch.

They also have different approaches, since Meacan, who’s gone through two husbands, isn’t above using flirtation to surmount an obstacle. I like that too, especially because Hart shows a light hand, not playing that too far. Unfortunately for the two sleuths, however, by the time they decide to let their hair down and join forces, Lady Mayne, the imperious, estranged widow, shows up. The investigation promptly hits a wall, namely, the prohibition to meddle in the constabulary’s business.

Hart constructs her mystery with consummate skill and, as you’ve probably guessed by now, deployed “no—and furthermore” to great advantage. There are many suspects, each with plausible secrets to protect, and the narrative openly reveals all the facts. But unless you’re a better detective than I, you won’t guess the killer’s identity or much else, which keeps the pages turning and offers a satisfying conclusion.

Along the way, Hart casts a keen eye on everything from late-seventeenth-century foppishness to attitudes toward the occult to collecting as blood sport to foodways — imagine, to eat any vegetable raw, especially a radish! Consider this description of Sir Barnaby himself:

Though age had made him frail, thinning his cheeks to translucence and carving furrows around his eyes, the authority projected over the space around him was unambiguous. His shoulders, encased in black velvet, appeared broader than they were, as if they were approaching breadth and volume from the darkness surrounding them. He wore a gray wig that rose high above his brow and fell in luxurious curls down his chest, framing the pristine lace that cascaded from his collar.

Another delight in these pages is the humor. For example, Hart offers us a would-be collector with more money than brains, a sycophant whom everyone quickly learns to avoid. Lady Mayne is a hoot, stiffer alive than her late husband dead, convinced, with barely repressed shudders, that collecting is a godless obsession. But my favorite is a Russian general, whose verbal duels with Lady Kay are hilarious, further evidence in her eyes of what blockheads men can be.

If I have one reservation about this novel, it’s the climactic scene, which invokes more than a couple tropes. But maybe it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, which would fit. The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne is a delight.

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

Saving the Queen from Herself: Lamentation

27 Monday Jul 2020

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Review: Lamentation, by C. J. Sansom
Mulholland/Little, Brown, 2015. 656 pp. $19

In summer 1546, Henry VIII’s much-abused, overindulged body begins to fail, and the London court vultures jostle for a perch from which to become regent for the next king, the boy Prince Edward. Religious conflict will likely determine who triumphs in this struggle, and those deemed heretics pay with their lives, often at the stake. In this combustible atmosphere, Queen Catherine, who’d like to be regent for her stepson, has made a potentially fatal blunder. In secret, without telling Henry, she has written a religious confession, Lamentation of a Sinner, which wouldn’t pass theological muster, and which has been stolen.

Very likely, the thief acted on behalf of a powerful lord who desires her downfall, and there are many of those. Pick your preferred form of treason: disloyalty to the throne, or heresy? Either crime could send Catherine to the block, just like two of her predecessors, whose jewels and clothes she wears. And despite Henry’s ill health, his mind’s still sharp, as are his executioners’ axes.

Queen Catherine Parr (1512-1548), copy of a contemporary portrait after Master John, painted sometime between 1600 and 1770 (courtesy UK National Trust, at Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland, on loan from Lord Hastings; via Wikimedia Commons)

Through her uncle, Lord Parr, she summons Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer who has helped her before with his superior skills at detection and reasoning. A commoner, a hunchback, and more of a free-thinker than he reveals to any but his intimates, Matthew must exercise the greatest caution around ruthless, ambitious courtiers jealous of their prerogatives, who despise him for his looks, birth, and possible heresy.

Accusations of heresy have become an effective, if two-edged, political weapon, often based on such concepts as whether Christ’s blood and flesh appear in fact at communion or symbolically. Given the loose, abstract nature of the argument, any utterance may be (mis)construed according to the hearer’s wishes or prejudices, one way to dispose of an enemy. Further complicating Matthew’s investigation, printers known for or suspected of heretical thinking have been murdered. Did they have the queen’s manuscript? And if so, do the killers possess it now? Do they mean to publish it and destroy the queen that way, or do they have other plans?

Sansom skillfully intertwines these mysteries with the politics of the day. It takes getting used to the notion that anyone would persecute anyone else over such fine distinctions of ritual and believe themselves righteous in doing so. But before long, you understand the mindset that makes this possible, because the social attitudes in this book feel internal to the characters, not merely slipped into their mouths.

To back off this extraordinary novel a second, I’m irritated when I tell people I write historical fiction, and all they focus on is the research I must have to do, as if that were the hard, original part. What about the supreme difficulties of crafting a credible, compelling narrative, in words nobody else has used in exactly that way, and which must pull the reader in on every page? So when I hear such remarks, I’m tempted to reply that anyone can go to the library.

Well, Sansom is the library. He knows every building in sixteenth-century London: which ones stood next to it, what it looked like, who built it, with what materials, who owned it, and how they came by it. That’s just for starters; you see the lords strut, the hangers-on fawn, the supplicants grovel for a sinecure with the great. Among the common folk, you see beggars, lawyers, peddlers, merchants, artisans — you name it. Consider this paragraph describing Matthew’s visit to part of the palace at Whitehall:

He led me to a group of half a dozen richly dressed ladies playing cards at a table in a large window-bay, and we bowed to them. All were expensively made-up, their faces white with ceruse, red spots on their cheeks. All wore silken farthingales, the fronts open to show the brightly embroidered foreparts and huge detachable sleeves, richly embroidered in contrasting colors. . . . A spaniel wandered around, hoping for scraps. . . .

Such knowledge of detail, almost always wielded with impressive dexterity, conveys a dazzlingly rich portrait of Tudor London. To be sure, Sansom occasionally resorts to information dumps, and he sometimes repeats phrases or facts. But in a narrative as long as this one, with as many instances of “no — and furthermore” as I can count, all revolving around Byzantine power struggles, a reminder of who’s in whose camp doing what can be helpful. And talk about pulling the reader in on every page; Lamentation is a mesmerizing story.

The characters appeal to me less. Matthew, aside from his penchant for setting the record straight, which invariably costs his friends, has no great flaw that I can see. Most characters, though rendered in physical vividness, seem ruled by a single trait, or at most, two. But the excellent storytelling and the never-flagging sense of the physical involve you, and you’ll keep guessing the outcome until the end.

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

Rough Work: The Molten City

29 Monday Jun 2020

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Review: The Molten City, by Chris Nickson
Severn, 2020. 224 pp. $29

When we last met Detective Inspector Tom Harper in these pages, in Gods of Gold, it was 1890. The young man from the Leeds slums worked a grim job in his gritty native city, splitting his energies between keeping watch over the impending violence from a gasworks strike and scrambling to search for a missing child. Harper sympathized with the strikers, but the law was the law and favored gentlemen of property, against which he was helpless; more immediately, he feared that if he didn’t find the child soon, she’d die. Not all was pain and suffering in his life, however. He worked with a devoted sergeant, Billy Reed, who became a friend. And Tom was about to marry a widow, Annabelle, of independent mind and income.

Now, it’s 1908, and Detective Superintendent Harper is the number-two man in the Leeds constabulary. Annabelle and he have a sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary, active in the woman’s suffrage movement, as is her mother. Billy Reed has died. Harper no longer hears as well as he used to, and his reflexes have slowed. But little else in his landscape has changed. Having arranged security for a royal visit — receiving a signed appreciation from His Majesty, Edward VII, no less — his reward is to protect Prime Minister Asquith when he gives a speech in Leeds.

Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (date unknown), whose face, the historian George Dangerfield later wrote, was “bland and weary . . . in which frankness and reserve had long fought themselves to a stand-still.” (The Strange Death of Liberal England, p. 4; photo courtesy George Grantham Bain collection, Library of Congress; via Wikimedia Commons)

Where few Britons would dare shout insults or complaints at their king and queen, many would jump at the chance to throw brickbats at Mr. Asquith for his broken promises. Poor workingmen and suffragists are the most likely to riot—including Mary, perhaps, or so her parents fear. Meanwhile, Harper has stumbled over evidence that, fifteen years ago, two children were snatched from their parents, perhaps “purchased” to live in a wealthy home where the mistress of the house has been unable to bear her own.

Had I read the intervening volumes since City of Gold, The Molten City might seem like yet another entry in a familiar formula, what some series can devolve into after a while. (Incidentally, all the volumes bear titles with metallic metaphors.) Yet this novel, like its progenitor, has so much going for it that you have to give it, and the author, their due.

First, there’s the atmosphere — political, social, physical, familial, you name it — which, to me, does far more than set the scene. Tom Harper, as the incorruptible, hard-working utterly dedicated police officer, with nary a social prejudice to his name and a firm belief in feminism, at times seems a little too good to be true. However, his feelings for and about Leeds, conveyed through these descriptions, show me that he loves his city and its people, and that his desire to serve is completely genuine. He stands for something.

That makes his perfection easier to swallow, and Nickson takes care not to let Harper’s halo shine among the populace, who wouldn’t see it, anyway. The rich treat him like a hireling, whom they’ll indulge with an audience if it suits them, not acknowledging that a criminal inquiry compels them to; the poor hate him on sight, because coppers are coppers. They’re none of ’em trustworthy.

Nickson uses simple language to set his scenes, with sparing economy:

The smoke and stink from the tanneries and factories rose up the hillside. Identical, anonymous streets of back-to-back houses. Away from the moor, there wasn’t a tree or a splash of colour to be seen. Someone’s washing hung from a line high across the cobbles, already turning grey from the soot in the air.

Attention to the character of Harper’s environment achieves one other storytelling goal of note. Since this is a mystery, which must live on “no — and furthermore,” many such narratives rely on plot points to deliver the obstacles, sometimes smoothly, otherwise seeming contrived. Nickson’s focus on Harper and his city means that the tension need not result from exterior forces, and that what’s within may raise the stakes. For instance, child snatching means more than a morally repugnant crime to Harper’s corps of detectives, several of whom suffered childhoods full of fear and violence that the authorities did nothing to assuage. Finding the missing children therefore becomes a personal quest, not just part of their job.

I also like how Nickson fuses the political and social issues of the day with the crime, his protagonist, and the Harper family. On every page, you see some aspect of how privilege influences or defines justice, and how each Harper works to change that, even as they remain pessimistic, to varying degrees, about the long-term outcome. And while they agree in sum about the importance of social change, the details get in the way, so that though they love one another, they don’t always get along.

As a consequence, The Molten City, despite its heroic paragon, delivers a satisfying mystery and a vivid portrait of a socially fragmented England.

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

If Music Be the Food of Love: Simon the Fiddler

08 Monday Jun 2020

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Review: Simon the Fiddler, by Paulette Jiles
Morrow, 2020. 337 pp. $28

Simon Boudin, though a Southerner by birth, doesn’t care about the Civil War, nearing its bloody end in March 1865. An itinerant fiddler who lives by and for music, he plays at weddings, garden parties, and, when he has to, saloons, staying one step ahead of the Confederate conscription men. But a bar brawl makes him a captive, and he’s quickly hustled into a ragged butternut uniform and sent to Texas. Nominally part of a regimental band, he’s nevertheless involved in a firefight in May — a month after Appomattox — because of a vainglorious Union colonel named Webb. But afterwards, Colonel Webb gives a party, and who should the hired musicians be but Simon and his friends?

It’s a dangerous assignment, because these men have no discharge papers, and the martial law that obtains in these parts treats such wanderers unkindly. Not only that, Colonel Webb treats everyone unkindly and seems to enjoy it. Nevertheless, he has also engaged an Irish governess for his daughter named Doris Dillon, for whom Simon falls, hard. Based on the limited communication that passes between them, he believes — hopes — that she feels similarly. That does it: From that moment, he resolves to woo her. However, he’s conscious of who he is and what he has to offer. Without land or a promising future, he believes he has no chance with her, so he sets out to make himself respectable.

The obstacles are enormous, and setbacks, even tragedy, befall the group of musicians. But Simon is nothing if not resourceful in his single-mindedness, and he expects the path to true love to be bumpy. “No — and furthermore” lives here, and the story sails along; but no matter how rough the water, Simon keep swimming. His hard-working character and determination are part of his charm, but without music, he’d be lost:

Music is clean, clear, its rules are forever, another country for the mind to go to, and so this search for employment among the drinking places of Galveston did not bother him. To Simon, the world of musical structures was far more real than the shoddy saloons in which he had to play. Nothing could match it, nothing in this day-to-day world could ever come up to it. It existed outside him. It was better than he was. He was always on foot in that world, an explorer in busted shoes.

Music and such prose are two pleasures of Simon the Fiddler. Jiles knows folk music the way she knows Texas of that era, which is to say, inside out. Many songs that Simon plays have faded from popularity or current memory, but the author builds scenes around a couple I love, like “Shenandoah” and “Red River Valley,” so that the music itself becomes a character.

I wish I could say that Simon the Fiddler equals Jiles’s previous novel, News of the World. I’m reminded of the old baseball joke about the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who insisted he didn’t want to win twenty games in a single season, the mark of excellence, because then everybody would expect him to do it again. So I don’t mean to carp when I say that to me, Simon never achieves the breadth or depth that Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, the protagonist of News of the World, does. (Interestingly, Kidd appears here too, in a cameo.) Where Kidd has flaws and edges, born of experience, observation, and crotchets, Simon just has a bad temper, the only blemish to his otherwise sterling character — and, as it happens, a plot device.

As for Doris, she’s perfect — beautiful, sweet-natured, strong, witty, passionate, a young man’s dream. She may be a bit vain, hating to wear the eyeglasses she can’t see without, but that’s hardly a serious complaint against such a paragon.

Meanwhile, Colonel Webb has no redeeming features, and to craft her villain, Jiles has ticked every box. He’s a lech who makes known his intent to have Doris; a ranting alcoholic; a vicious, controlling husband and father; a liar; and, it’s suggested, involved in graft. Webb’s villainy increases the pressure on Doris, and therefore on her white knight. But it also feels melodramatic, weakening the novel, even as it motivates Simon to move faster. What price page turning?

News of the World is a more fulfilling, memorable book. But Simon the Fiddler makes a good yarn; and, after all, the world loves a lover. Take it for that, and you’ll enjoy it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher; this post previously appeared in Historical Novels Review in different, shorter form.

Nurses Under Fire: Blame the Dead

25 Monday May 2020

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Review: Blame the Dead, by Ed Ruggero
Forge, 2020. 330 pp. $28

When the army assigns military police Lieutenant Eddie Harkins to investigate a surgeon’s murder at a field hospital outside Palermo, Sicily, in August 1943, it’s the last thing he wants. A former beat cop in Philadelphia, Harkins knows next to nothing about detective work, and the internecine warfare at the hospital threatens to overwhelm him — as if fighting the Germans didn’t cause enough trouble.

No one misses the victim, an arrogant lech who sexually abused the nurses, bunked alone and had no friends, but wielded a scalpel like a genius, which, to the hospital commanding officer, was all that mattered. The all-powerful first sergeant, responsible for making the hospital run, resents Harkins on sight and won’t cooperate with the investigation. The CO wonders why a beat cop should lead the inquiry — couldn’t the provost’s office send anyone better? — and Harkins is inclined to agree.

Nevertheless, orders are orders, and Harkins quickly discovers that wherever he probes, something stinks, which leads him further on. I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s say that the surgeon’s murder and the sexual abuse are just the beginning. Working on little sleep and facing obdurate officers who seem to have plenty to hide, Harkins finds his moxie. His stubbornness and sense of justice take hold, and he now insists on solving the case. He fears that if he doesn’t, the corruption will spread, and he gets wind that the brass wants to send him packing. Sensing resistance, he digs in and keeps fighting.

Such headaches have compensations, however. Eddie gets to talk to his older brother, Patrick, chaplain to a nearby regiment, their first conversation in more than a year. Also, a childhood friend, Kathleen Donnelly, is a nurse at the field hospital, and Harkins has always had a thing for her. But the way he recalls her from their school days bears no resemblance to her now:

The woman who let her arms fall from his shoulders looked nothing like he remembered. Her dark hair was chopped short and threaded with dust, a few lonely grays wiring out from her temples. Like every other GI in Sicily, she was drawn and sickly-thin, dirt ground into crow’s-feet beside eyes that did not flash, barely looked blue anymore. She wore a man’s fatigue uniform cinched tight at the waist. The legs of her trousers stood clear of her own legs like stovepipes; the uniform was dirty enough to stand up in a corner on its own.

But that scarecrow is an exceptionally competent, confident professional, and the reader will be awed, just as Harkins is. Her story, and those of the other nurses, is one reason to read Blame the Dead. With impressive authority, Ruggero conveys the impossible conditions in which these women work heroically to save horribly mangled men, only to have to dodge unwanted advances (and worse) by men protected from complaint or protest. As you might imagine, the army is the last place where a woman’s word carries weight, and this is 1943, so forget notions of respect, let alone equality. Whatever happens must be their fault, anyway, saith those in charge.

That authorial authenticity extends to the soldiers’ dialogue and interactions. Ruggero graduated West Point and served as an officer, but he’s also researched his ground thoroughly, re-creating the hierarchy, atmosphere, and workings of a World War II field hospital, as well as the city of Palermo, which emerges vividly. As for “no — and furthermore,” rest assured that nothing comes easily for Harkins, who’s continually out of his depth. The pages turn rapidly. As a sidelight, I also appreciate the criticisms the author has his characters make of General George Patton’s callousness toward his soldiers, for which the field hospital picks up the pieces—literally.

Much as I like the story, though, Blame the Dead feels cluttered, with at least a couple too many voices, nonstop everything, and no time or space to reflect on intense, earth-shaking events. Partly that’s the genre, and Harkins is working under tremendous pressure of time, which Ruggero cleverly squeezes. Yet I hope that in future adventures (this novel promises a series), the author shows the confidence to slow down a little, especially when the addition of still more stuff begins to seem contrived.

The villain’s a contrivance too, unraveling toward the end into lunacy, a cop-out I dislike. As for the villainy, that takes such elaborate, baroque turns that I kept wishing that Occam’s razor, to which one character refers, applied here. Those complications further require the resolution to become a sequence of derring-do that evokes more than one cliché.

That said, I find Blame the Dead an arresting, compelling story, and I hope the sequels find a more compatible balance between character and plot.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

Distanced Vision: A Shadowed Fate

27 Monday Apr 2020

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Review: A Shadowed Fate, by Marty Ambrose
Severn, 2020. 180 pp. $29

In 1873, Claire Clairmont, the last surviving member of the Byron/Shelley literary circle from 1816, is scraping by in more ways than one. Living in genteel poverty in Florence with her niece and grandniece, Claire has little in her life besides them and treasured memories of Lord Byron, by whom she bore illegitimate daughter, Allegra. However, Allegra’s dead, having succumbed to typhus as a young child—or so Claire believes. But when Edward Trelawny, who married Mary Shelley after her poet husband died, tells Claire that her daughter may be alive after all, the news galvanizes her to action. Claire must find Allegra.

However, matters aren’t so simple. For one thing, Claire is furious that her old friend Trelawny has kept the secret for a half-century. Indeed, that is rather hard to explain, and both he and the narrative strain to do so. For another, Trelawny and Claire were lovers once, briefly, and he claims to still love her; though again, she’s dubious, considering that Mary Shelley was her half-sister, and he racked up two other wives besides.

Nevertheless, I like this premise as a potential romantic intrigue, and A Shadowed Fate might have grabbed me had the narrative focused on that as a counterpoint to the search for Allegra. We might have had the aging romantic figures conflict over past and present, with a window on what their lives have become, what they might have been, and truth versus perception. Instead, the narrative avoids the conflict between Claire and Trelawny while trying to make a mystery out of Allegra. I think that’s pretty thin material, and bringing in Byron doesn’t liven it up enough.

Claire Clairmont, portrait by Amelia Curran, 1819 (courtesy Newstead Abbey via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Partly, that’s because the story hinges too much on what happened fifty years or more before the novel begins, yet we never see this drama enacted. Rather, Claire reads about it in Byron’s memoirs of his attempt to aid Italian revolutionaries around the time of Allegra’s supposed death. Just as awkwardly, Allegra herself has a few paragraphs to narrate, here and there; how did that happen? Consequently, though Byron becomes the center of the story, no one interacts with him except for the people he’s writing about, only one whom still lives—and it’s not Claire. So he remains an offstage presence, and the crucial story feels distant.

Equally curious, Claire or Ambrose or both seem to have given him a pass for his despicable behavior, startling given that Byron had to be one of the most selfish, egotistical, and vindictive geniuses ever to draw breath. That wouldn’t matter if you understood why Claire still holds a candle for him; but he holds a candle for nobody, intent on burning it at both ends. Maybe that’s the trouble, evoking through a telescope a man who’s long dead, but I think there’s more to it. Compare, for instance, the portrayal here with that in The Enchantress of Numbers, Jennifer Chiaverini’s novel about his only legitimate child, the mathematician Ada Lovelace. Even though Byron appears briefly in that narrative, you see his attraction—and the horrific damage he causes.

As for the mystery in A Shadowed Fate, no plot twist ever reaches the level of “no — and furthermore.” Rather, it’s more like “maybe something will go wrong, but we don’t know.” That’s not enough to sustain any narrative, mystery or no, and when the major, climactic reversal arrives, a clichéd tableau results.

What you do get in A Shadowed Fate is a loving sketch of Italy, which Ambrose clearly knows and revels in. There are moments when you can soak in these places and wish you could see them as they were a hundred fifty years ago. But the characters intrude, and I find less to draw me, there. Much as the first fifty or so pages consist of dialogue dumping information, the characterization progresses through telling rather than showing. One significant example: I don’t see why Trelawny says that Claire was magnetic in her youth, or that he still cares for her.

I wish this novel stirred or beguiled me; unfortunately, it doesn’t.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the author’s publicist, in return for an honest review.

Intriguing Developments: The Last Passenger

20 Monday Apr 2020

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Review: The Last Passenger, by Charles Finch
Minotaur, 2020. 292 pp. $28

London, 1855. When a plodding, dissolute Scotland Yard inspector asks Charles Lenox for help solving a murder at Paddington Station, that request puts Lenox in a difficult position with most of the force. First of all, Charles is an amateur; secondly, unlike any police inspector, he’s of gentle birth (the second son of a baronet); and thirdly, he has a way of turning up evidence and making deductions that arouses envy. But this particular case offers no clues to be envious about. The dead man carries no means of identification — no wallet, papers, or belongings — and the murderer removed all the labels in the victim’s clothes.

What’s more, the investigation reaches frequent impasses, because “no — and furthermore” has taken up residence here. You never have the feeling that justice is inexorable, which adds to the tension, and what strikes you most isn’t Lenox’s skill but his eagerness to learn. That quality separates him from some (though not all) duly sanctioned officers of the law.

Since The Last Passenger is the thirteenth entry in the Charles Lenox series, the third of a prequel trilogy portraying how he began his career, I didn’t know I’d wind up reviewing it until I realized, within the first few chapters, how it stood out for me from its siblings. The mystery is extremely clever, and the prose graceful, but with Finch, those are givens. Rather, what appeals to me most about The Last Passenger is how the narrative probes more deeply into Charles’s character and moral and political beliefs than any other installment I’ve read.

To many men of his social station, he’s betrayed his class, and they cut him accordingly, which hurts. That has happened before, but here, he aches more from it. Further, he fears his mother disapproves as well, which carries extra weight, and she’s his sole surviving parent. Nor does his loneliness end there. Still a bachelor at age twenty-seven, and having extinguished his torch for his childhood friend and next-door neighbor, Lady Jane Grey (now, there’s a name from Tudor history!), he finds that Lady Jane and his mother keep putting eligible young women in his way. At first, he wishes they didn’t, but when one young woman in particular smiles upon him, he wonders about that thing called love.

I don’t remember another Lenox novel in which our hero pays so much attention to the disparity of wealth that the metropolis displays, and of which he’s an example. Nor has he before now recognized racial prejudice, in himself or anyone else, or considered deeply the institution of American slavery that has aroused protest in England as the story opens. (Echoes of current issues, perhaps?) Finally, as regular readers of Finch’s series know, the author delights in peppering his narratives with arcane facts, of which this one offers a more than usual portion. Among other bits, you learn what the British railway had in common with ancient Roman chariot tracks; why, in prior centuries to the nineteenth, no respectable lady wore green; the derivation of the word nickname; and how the phrases mind your P’s and Q’s and cold turkey entered the language.

As always, Finch gives you the Victorian Age, in large and small, as with this brief description of the era’s inimitable decorating style, which Charles can’t stand:

. . . a sort of prodigious clutter, walls and tables crowded past elegance, every piece of cloth in the room double-or triple-embroidered, remnants of statuary, wretchedly heavy silver platters and ewers, big dark clocks, etchings of colossal ruins. The spare black-and-ivory elegance of Lenox’s childhood was gone now — submerged beneath a rockslide of things, objects.

Also noteworthy is how Finch takes care to show his detective’s mistakes, and not only because Lenox is learning his craft. Unlike Holmes, say, Lenox never carries the whiff of infallibility, so he’s that much more human. And in The Last Passenger, you see his maturation in more than one way, which is very satisfying. This is not just another mystery, or even just another Lenox mystery, and I recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my work for Historical Novels Review, though I did not review it there.

Killer Jewels: Cartier’s Hope

23 Monday Mar 2020

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Review: Cartier’s Hope, by M.J. Rose
Atria, 2020. 322 pp. $27

Vera Garland would be the envy of most New York women in 1910. Born to a socialite mother and a merchant father whose retail emporium is a household word, Vera has never wanted for any material possession. Nor would she lack the leisure to enjoy them, should she choose. But she doesn’t; she dreams of making her mark in journalism.

To that end, she writes a society gossip column in her gilded-set voice, while, as Vee Swann, she reports on back-alley abortions, tenement life, and corporate malfeasance. She’s got no time or interest in her mother’s plans for her, to wit, a wealthy husband and a career in society. The conflict splits the family, but Vera gets to do what she wants.

Maintaining Vera’s two different personae takes a great deal of sweat (and a little credulity on her friends’ parts, not to mention the reader’s). But it makes a great story, and getting trapped in one identity while needing to be in the other, though an old device, offers excellent possibilities, which Rose ably exploits. Vera wants revenge against the extortionist who brought about her uncle’s and father’s deaths within a week of each other. And the key to her scheme lies within Cartier’s, the world-class jewelers whose premises she may visit with ceremony and complimentary champagne as Vera Garland, but where, as Vee Swann, she’d never expect an audience.

The Hope Diamond, on display at the National Museum of Natural History, New York (courtesy David Bjorgen via Wikimedia Commons)

Her plan has to do with the Hope Diamond, whose lore of danger and ill fortune to its succession of owners furnishes grist for Pierre Cartier’s publicity mill. How that dovetails with bringing down an extortionist, I leave for you to discover.

Plot is by far the strongest aspect of Cartier’s Hope and just about the only reason to read the novel. It’s a good reason, though. In the interest of full disclosure, my taste runs toward character-driven narratives — as though you might not have guessed — because some plot-driven novels pay little or no attention to subtlety. So too here, in ways I’ll discuss further down. Yet I have to admire how Rose strings out the story, layering twist after twist, making her protagonist work, so that nothing comes easily, and the “no — and furthermore” feels genuine. Rose also keeps you guessing without tricking you. She’s a generous writer that way; if anyone falls for a misperception or misdirection, it’s Vera/Vee.

The plain prose never draws attention to itself, and Rose limits her descriptions largely to interiors, with sparse, thoughtful detail. The author loves New York, and it shows in the locales portrayed as they were, whether tenements, newsrooms, or the Plaza Hotel. I trust her research in general, though I did find one anachronism: Traffic lights didn’t exist back then.

More troublesome are the language and the characters, who speak and think like latter twentieth-century folk, or even those of the present day. I don’t just mean words or phrases like accessorize or reach out to, but the manner in which people discuss their ideas. Vee and her journalist friends, passionate about women’s rights, seem like retro creations, modern sensibilities and worldviews dropped into 1910. It doesn’t help that some of these scenes feel like information dumps.

But it’s not just the political or social milieu that strikes me wrong. Vera’s father sounds like a gifted psychotherapist as well as a brilliant retailer, a wonderfully thoughtful, considerate man. He’s made one mistake, a whopper, but seems perfect otherwise. Ditto Vera’s love interest, who could be a midcentury intellectual. He’s done one bad thing too, but there are mitigating circumstances, to be sure. These people are too good to be true.

Rose often explains what a character’s trying to do or has just done when it’s obvious. That authorial hand not only feels condescending, as if the reader can’t be trusted to get the idea, but prompts you to wonder what other manipulations are taking place. A skeptical reader (guilty, Your Honor) might suspect sleight-of-hand in the storytelling.

Still, Cartier’s Hope offers that intriguing plot, with legends about jewels thrown in. If that’s your style, you could do a lot worse.

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

A Different Kind of Thriller: The Second Sleep

03 Monday Feb 2020

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Review: The Second Sleep, by Robert Harris
Knopf, 2019. 298 pp. $27

In 1468, the bishop of Exeter sends a young priest, Father Christopher Fairfax, to a remote village to bury a parson who has just died in an accident. But when Father Fairfax gets there, he discovers that his late colleague collected antique books that the church and government have condemned as heretical. What’s more, at the funeral, a stranger interrupts the service to declare that the deceased’s death was no accident, nor did it result from witchcraft, as some have said — the accident site is thought to be haunted. To no surprise, more startling facts come Christopher’s way, and what he thought was a trip to perform a sacrament turns into something not at all routine, likely dangerous or compromising.

Shield of the See of Exeter, established in the tenth century (courtesy Hogweard, via Wikimedia Commons)

In The Second Sleep, then, do we have a murder mystery with a Gothic overlay? Is this another example of a trope, Killed by an Ancient Manuscript? Or, maybe, to play the book publicists’ game, this novel is The Name of the Rose meets Middlemarch.

None of the above. We’ve got a splendid, thought-provoking, unusual thriller, by a master on top of his game. I thought Harris slipped some with Munich, but The Second Sleep evokes the quality of Dictator and An Officer and a Spy. As with those novels, here, the pages gently exhale history like a subtle, authoritative scent, “no — and furthermores” pile up effortlessly, and the protagonist undergoes an arduous journey, changing in a way he couldn’t have predicted.

But there’s more, because Harris has bent to the genre to his will. As the narrative gradually makes clear, there’s something odd, not to say out of character, about this fifteenth-century English village. And as you continue to puzzle how this can be — for the details are too precise to be accidental, and Harris is a careful storyteller — you and Father Fairfax have something in common. You’re both due for a significant surprise.

However, as I said, this is a subtle, gradual reveal. Consider this paragraph from the fourth page, one that displays Harris’s fine prose as well as a hint of his intent:

After a while, the road began to ascend a wooded hillside. As it climbed, so it dwindled, until it was little better than a cart track — ridged brown earth covered loosely by stones, shards of soft slate and yellow gravel braided by the running rainwater. From the steep banks on either side rose the scent of wild herbs — lungwort, lemon balm, mustard garlic — while the overhanging branches drooped so low he had to duck and fend them off with his arm, dislodging further showers of fresh cold water that drenched his head and trickled down his sleeve. Something shrieked and flashed emerald in the gloom, and his heart seemed to jump halfway up his throat, even though he realised almost at once that it was nothing more sinister than a parakeet.

Parakeets? How’s that?

In finely wrought coherence of story and character, The Second Sleep takes on themes regarding knowledge, faith, reason, church and state, and human frailty. There’s even a touch of coming-of-age, for, like the best of Harris’s protagonists, Christopher faces severe challenges to his beliefs, character, and principles, and the narrative pushes the envelope at his expense. But the author neither lectures nor spells out anything unless he has to, which leaves room for the reader to think and feel — what a novel should do.

I’d say more about this fine book, but I fear giving too much away. Don’t read the blurbs on the back, though for once, the flap copy is safe. The Second Sleep will both entertain you and make you think.

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

Love, Theft, Hate: The Sisters of Summit Avenue

18 Monday Nov 2019

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Review: The Sisters of Summit Avenue, by Lynn Cullen
Gallery, 2019. 312 pp. $27

Coming of age in 1920s Indiana with barely a penny to their names and kindly but incompetent parents, sisters June and Ruth are fiercely attached but deadly competitive. Elder June, the popular girl, the beauty, the one with artistic talent, wants to escape their drab existence, to make something of herself. Bookish Ruth, deemed less capable, less everything, wants the attention she believes she’s never received. Accordingly, throughout their lives together, whatever June gets, Ruth wants. Shortly before Ruth’s eighteenth birthday, she settles on June’s fiancé, John, as her next goal.

But though Ruth marries John and settles down on his family farm, by 1934, she’s up against it. A heretofore rare form of encephalitis that has swept the country in the 1930s has left John mostly comatose. Their farm is failing, Ruth struggles to raise four kids, and her mother, who lives with them, is too lost in dreams of a past that never existed to have much to offer.

Marjorie Husted, the actress who portrayed Betty Crocker on the radio, ca. 1944 (courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, “Fight Food Waste in the Home,” Office for Emergency Management, Office of War Information; via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, June has married a successful doctor, a cheerful, controlling narcissist, Richard Whiteleather (now, there’s a name) and lives in a mansion in St. Paul, Minnesota. June has jewels, fashionable dresses, and a country-club membership, but she remains insecure about her origins, and she’s childless, which breaks her heart. She has a job with the flour company, answering the tons of letters lonely, frustrated, harried women write to Betty Crocker — an advertising logo, not a real person — and working up the recipes and pamphlets distributed in her name. You can guess what Ruth thinks of her sister’s job:

In between giving out recipes, Betty tipped off her followers on how to win a husband and keep him, not only by taking the proverbial shortcut through his stomach, but by keeping themselves attractive and interesting. Betty, with her on-air interviews with bachelors about what they looked for in a wife and her ten-cent booklets full of man-pleasing recipes, implied that men were like dumb beasts running free on the plains, unaware that they were being stalked, until, bang! they were shot down by “Apricot Topsy-Turvy” or “Peeps and Squeals Sandwiches,” served by a perky huntress in an apron. She wondered how her sister could live with herself, contributing to this nonsense. Of course, Sister June had always been a big game hunter.

Not only does Ruth resent June for earning money through artifice, while she herself struggles to farm (presumably raising the wheat that makes the flour), she hates it all the more that June sends her every penny she earns. Ruth, who stole John from June, has to watch while crippling illness steals him back. June, who suffers from Richard’s self-centeredness, envies Ruth’s ability to have children by the man they both love, even though he’s now lost to the world.

The family dynamic reveals so much by itself, you understand their world, no explanation required. Combine weak parents, rivalry for attention, ambivalent attachment, and thwarted desires, and you see why, for example, either sister would want John, a kind person but a man incapable of asserting himself.

However, I wish Cullen didn’t tell feelings so often when they really matter; she’s more than capable of showing them. I also wish she’d built the novel more coherently, especially in the first third, when the narrative leaps back and forth from decade to decade in three different narrator’s heads. There’s a lot of back story to cover, and no doubt Cullen settled on this narrative form after trying others, but it takes a while for the central event to occur, a visit to Ruth’s farm by June and Richard, which leads to confrontations everyone has been avoiding forever.

Still, Cullen’s keen, subtle sense of human psychology wins the day, and you can see how family resentments and foolishly kept secrets have cascaded through the years. As a storyteller, she knows how to employ emotional “no — and furthermore,” in which internal narrative, triggered by mundane events, ratchets up the tension. This requires no manipulation or contrivance: It’s character-driven narrative at its best.

That is, until the end, which I find implausible. Partly, that’s because Cullen has done such a fine job pushing her characters into tight corners that redemption is no longer an option. I don’t want to give anything away, of course, but to take one minor example, consider that Richard, the egotistical doctor, might not be so pliable a character as that. Such people don’t change easily; and, further, there’s a wonderful scene in which June’s mother-in-law freely talks about her son’s unbounded greed for what he wants. Mother knows best, I think.

If you can love ninety percent of a novel and slap your head in consternation at the remaining ten percent, that’s how I feel about The Sisters of Summit Avenue. Read it for the terrific character studies; but I think the author, who has done brilliantly portraying messy lives, may have tried to tidy up too much.

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