Author: George Mann

2008, Snowbooks

Filed Under: Mystery, Historical, Sci-Fi

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If you’d listened to our most recent podcast (you didn’t, because the recording got messed up, so you might never hear it at all), you would have heard me say this was a Sherlock Holmes-y book that was sort-of-but-not-really steampunk. I was half correct; full of airships and clockwork automatons and laudanum benders and Queen Victoria on an artificial lung crafted from bellows, it’s squarely steampunk. But to define it as that would be to sell it really short. Rather than relying on the setting, Mann writes a good story, leaving the setting to seep in around the edges.

Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. There’s a blight on my reader’s record, a mark of shame I really need to correct. I’ve never read any of the Sherlock Holmes books. From what I’ve picked up (thanks mostly to Gregory House), this book shares a lot in common with Doyle’s beloved mysteries.

Maurice Newberry is a detective and an “agent of the Crown.” He’s not an actual cop, but is good chums with the head of Scotland Yard in addition to packing royal credentials as a sleuth. He lives alone, and spends long hours in his study, often reading books on the obscure or occult, and his hobbies include laudanum and deductive crime-solving. His Watson is a Miss Veronica Hobbes, a sharp and fairly courageous woman, who compliments Newberry nicely. (Her character is fairly nuanced, and quite possibly the strongest in the book.)

In the novel’s early going, there are three primary plot lines. Firstly, there is some sort of plague brought over from India. It is ravaging the slums, and is effectively a small, but obviously hazardous, zombie outbreak. Secondly, there as been a string of murders in Whitechapel, seemingly perpetrated by a glowing blue policeman’s ghost. Thirdly, an airship crashes catastrophically, killing 50, and no sign of the brass automaton pilot is to be found.

It’s fairly obvious of course, being the sort of book this is, that these three strands will eventually be braided together. The fun is in following Newberry and Hobbes as they solve the case(s). So I won’t spoil any of that. As it plays out, this book delivers from every angle. The characters are well rendered. The dialogue has a decorous, almost too-proper politeness to it, one that any fan of Victorian literature will probably find as charming and funny as I did. There are plenty of exciting action scenes, as well as cerebral “Aha” moments. The writing fits the novel’s historical motif well, never underwhelming but rarely going over the top either. The sci-fi elements are plentiful, but don’t overstep their welcome–or worse become so over-concerned with plausibility as to drag down the tone.

This is a fun, engaging book that I think may be criminally underlooked due to genre. Don’t let the steampunk setting repel you, the setting is crucial to the story, but in no way the reason for its success. If you like mysteries and adventure stories, you’re almost certain to enjoy this book.

Similar Reads: The Map of Time (Palma). Also, check out this cool Kickstarter project Nico came across.

Author: Micky Spillane (with Max Allan Collins)

2012, Titan

Filed Under: Mystery

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Max Allan Collins, it seems, is making a habit of rewriting “lost” manuscripts left to him by deceased crime writers and releasing them with his name ahead of the original author. A little weird, but to his credit, this is the second such work of his I have read, and the second that I enjoyed.

Lady, Go Die! (it’s a cludgy reference to Lady Godiva, let’s get that out of the way) is a sequel to the very first of Mickey Spillane’s famous Mike Hammer books–I suppose the former sequel is now the third in the series. As you might expect, it’s a hard-boiled gumshoe mystery, full of gansters and goons, underground casinos, pretty women with chips on their shoulders, and murder. This book walks the genre line faithfully, so don’t expect anything groundbreaking or revelatory, but if you want a quick-to-read mystery full of fistfights and cheesy wisecracks, this certainly delivers.

For instance, it’s full of lines like this:

I went to my bed where I had tossed my suitcase. I opened it, and slipped the .45 Colt automatic out od its sling where it slept like a baby on my clean underwear. But babies can wake up screaming…

Hammer is on vacation on Long Island, trying to pull himself out of an alcohol-soaked depression in the wake of the events of the first book (which I haven’t read). Trouble just seems to find him though, as he stumbles upon three cops “interrogating” (with their fists and boots) a homeless man in an alley, asking him about a missing woman he may have seen. Poochy is his name, and Hammer comes to his rescue. The next day the missing woman turns up dead, naked, and bloated, draped on the back of a horse statue (hence the title).

The woman, it turns out, was in bed with the mob, and running an illegal casino in her dead-husbands mansion. Hammer finds himself in the middle of a tangled conspiracy full of mobsters, crooked cops, and a possible serial killer mixed in. Saying more than that will spoil the fun.

You know if you like these kinds of books or not. If you like to relax with this sort of mystery now and again, Lady, Go Die! will keep you happy for a few hours.

Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Comedy is Finished (Westlake), No Rest for the Dead (Gulli, ed.)

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author: Denis Johnson

1991, Penguin Books

Filed Under: Literary, Mystery

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Leonard English, the flawed hero of Johnson’s darkly comic novel, moves to Cape Cod’s Provincetown during the winter lull following the suicide attempt suggested in the novel’s title. Beginning one job as a night DJ at the local radio station and another as an assistant to a private detective, English often finds himself wandering Provincetown’s late-night streets, and is quickly caught up in the tight social circle of any off-season tourist town. Throw in a missing artist, a star-crossed love triangle, and an employer’s potential ties to a right-wing survivalist movement in the mountains of New Hampshire, and English soon has more than enough to keep him busy, while Johnson has the beginnings of this engaging, gritty noir novel.

Johnson, who lived in Provincetown for the 1981-1982 residency of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, knows his setting well (the novel is set in late 1980 and early 1981), and English’s introduction to the casual cross-dressing and multitude of sexual identities Provincetown is known for is entertaining and deftly-handled. Arriving at the town’s main street, his wrecked car towed behind him, English sees: “Three ungainly women–were they men, in bright skirts?–danced in a parody of a chorus line by a tavern’s door, arm around one another’s shoulders. Passing along the walks and ambling down the middle of the street were people in Bermuda shorts and children eating ice-cream cones as if it weren’t under 60 Fahrenheit today.” It would be hard to visit Provincetown without having a similar experience.

Although this is Johnson’s fourth novel, the influence of his long background as a poet can be seen in the inventiveness of his prose.

He was a citizen of a country north of Mexico that made no sense; he was an inmate of romance and a denizen of the terrainless geography, a lot more real than the geography on maps, that drifted down from these dark blue oceans to the desert but catching on the invisible peaks of Atlantic City and Cap May and Ocean City and the Southern beach resorts, a geography of heated sand and greased-back hair and surf glowing under a full moon. It was the off-season, but the off-season had no jurisdiction–the place was like a closed carnival–nothing counted but the thrilled ghosts.

Writing like this, with the impulsive digressions, playful language, and vivid imagery Johnson will perfect in later prose, propels the reader along.   English’s suicide attempt, hinted at briefly, and his damaged psyche, make for interesting mysteries. Together, these are almost enough.

Unfortunately, even fine writing doesn’t help the novel as the plot begins to unravel, arriving at an ending that is bizarre even for an already strange book, and worse, ultimately disappointing. But this novel is an interesting artifact of sorts, a mid-point in Johnson’s career: although this was his fourth novel he was perhaps still transitioning from poetry to prose and had not yet published Jesus’ Son, the collection of short stories that appeared a year after “Resuscitation” that was so successful he has only recently crawled out from under its shadow nearly twenty years later. While Resuscitation of a Hanged Man might not be read as an early masterpiece, it is certainly an entertaining read, an odd stop on the road map of one of literature’s most celebrated writer’s career.

Similar Reads: Nobody Move and Jesus’ Son also by Denis Johnson, The Rum Diaries by Hunter S. Thompson.

Author: Raymond Chandler

1939, Alfred A. Knopf

Filed Under: Mystery, Literary

As part of my quest to immerse myself in the mystery genre, I’ve been asking what books to pick up. Chandler’s books came up frequently, so I started with his first and most famous. For reasons that become immediately apparent upon reading, this is a seminal work in modern detective stories, and Phillip Marlowe (Chandler’s recurring protagonist, though this is his first novel) is the quintessential gumshoe. He’s tough, clever, wisecracking, and suave (and he drinks a lot).

Marlow is hired by a dying billionaire to uncover a blackmailer. He ends up embroiled in a large plot with many players. This is a hardboiled detective novel through and through. It’s full of socialites with dirty laundry, lowlifes with secrets, gamblers, pornographers, racketeers, and murderers. But it also has much greater literary chops than I expected. While there’s plenty of now-cliche hyperbole (“She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch”), there’s also more eloquent writing found throughout. Lines like this:

Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise which didn’t change her expression or even move her lips.

The billionaire’s two wild daughters are at the heart of the blackmailing scheme. Eventually Marlow stumbles upon the younger daughter, drugged, naked, and posed for a camera. Beside the camera, a dead man. As he follows the case from clue to clue and suspect to suspect, Marlowe continually observes scenes with keen detail, giving the reader not just a visual, but a subtle sizing up of every person and place.

It’s not an overly literary book by any means, though. Roughly halfway through the book, the case seems pretty sewn up. But a few details nag at Marlowe, and acting on a hunch, he uncovers a whole ‘nother layer of plot. Here the book really kicks into hardboiled gear. I won’t spoil anything, but bodies pile up and Marlowe both deals out and receives plenty of pain. He keeps a cool head through it all though, eventually unravelling the mystery. Everything ties up in a very satisfying conclusion. I was caught a bit by surprise, but not due to any deus ex machina curveballs by Chandler. Just turns out Marlowe was a better detective than me.

This book is short and awesome. If you like mysteries and crime fiction at all–even if all you’ve read is Steig Larsson–and you haven’t already read The Big Sleep, go for it

Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson).

Author: Jessie Crockett

2010, Mainly Murder Press

Filed Under: Mystery, Short-Run

As of late, for what reason I’m not sure, I’ve been enjoying the quick-read gratification of trade mysteries and thrillers.

Although its title isn’t very original, and it won’t be winning any awards, Live Free or Die managed to scratch this newfound itch of mine just fine. At times the book read a bit housewife-y, but ultimately it all added to the charm. I got a Murder She Wrote kind of vibe, if that makes sense. There’s a quaintness to the narrative at work that complements its secluded town setting nicely.

Gwen Fifield is a pretty unassuming lady in the small New Hampshire town of Winslow Falls. She’s a widow of seven years, the town postmistress and vice-chief of the volunteer fire department. A string of fall fires escalates into a murder mystery when the town historian is found dead in the burning local museum. The site is so ghastly, the fire chief keels over with a coronary and Gwen is thrust in charge.

Gwen tags along with Hugh, a hunky, red-bearded state fire investigator assigned the case, and they start to piece together just who would want the old lady dead, and why. Things ramp up when some of the victim’s antiques (despite most of the town believing her museum just full of old, worthless junk) are noticed missing from the crime scene. Then one of their suspects ends up dead, and things get even more intriguing, and dangerous, for Gwen. Somehow two murders don’t warrant the involvement of the real police, though. The town policeman, Ray, is borderline retarded, and wisely defers to Gwen and Hugh, who, despite not being an actual law enforcement officer, does most of the police work. It’s a good thing too, as Ray, along with most of the town, automatically blames the immigrant Brazilian family and would be content to arrest them and let that be that. Local TV news doesn’t appear to have penetrated Winslow Falls yet.

Being a proud New Hampshirite, I took a little exception to Crockett’s depiction of the townsfolk as simple bumpkins with a widespread distrust of foreigners. But it works for the story she needs to tell, and in the end, their township isn’t characterized offensively (like the murderous British rubes in The Siege of Trencher’s Farm). It’s more playful, like Funny Farm. Despite their flatness from angles such as that, Crockett’s characters do find personality, certainly enough to keep a whodunnit interesting.

You’ll probably figure out the killer before the book’s big denouement, but it’s okay. Crockett offers up a few viable suspects, and does a commendable job of plotting an original murder mystery against the backdrop of a antique-heist caper. It can lay on the lovey-dovey stuff a bit too heavy at times (along with Gwen’s overweight insecurities, this is responsible for most of its housewife-y vibe), but all in all it’s a nice little mystery by an unknown author that’s worth a look from casual mystery fans.

Similar Reads: No Rest for the Dead (Gulli, ed.), The Darker Side (McFadyen), Hot, Shot, and Bothered (McFarland)

2011, Doubleday

Filed under: Mystery, Fantasy

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Low Town is a genre mashup the likes of which I’m not sure I’ve ever read before. It combines the world of a gritty fantasy novel—and its attendant medieval melee and magic—with the plot of a mystery novel. The hero of the novel (though “hero” is a loose description of him) is the Warden. It’s unclear exactly what that title means, but it’s certain that the Warden is the primary drug dealer in Low Town, the nickname for the slums of a large city in Polansky’s fantastical Thirteen Lands.

When the Warden stumbles upon the gruesome murder of a child, he gets drawn into a mystery that involves cruel nobles, twisted magicians, and his own dark past as both a scarred army hero and a disgraced detective.

On paper, this looks like an easy home run, but the reality is not quite as successful. It’s a bit of a mystery itself as to why it doesn’t work as well as it should: my complaints are relatively small, and Polansky is quite skilled at the things he does well. For one thing, the fantasy side of this novel draws a lot more water than the mystery does. Low Town (the place) is well-detailed and intricately imagined, down to its smallest details, like the tidy tidbit that an incompetent branch of the city’s law enforcement is ruefully nicknamed “the hoax.”

The mystery side of things isn’t quite as enjoyable, mostly because it’s too simple for my taste. I prefer a nuanced, multilayered mystery; Low Town offers something closer to an adventure, the plot points coming in the form of logistical problems rather than secrets or lies to uncover.

The Warden’s team includes an old army buddy and a savvy street kid who’s a natural thief—it’s unclear why either shows the Warden the loyalty they do, as he repeatedly rejects their help, often with vicious and unnecessary meanness. He prefers to soldier on alone, ostensibly to protect his friends, but it’s an unconvincing and ultimately much less fun way to do things.

Also problematic is the bone-thin plot, especially when Polansky makes the Warden do inscrutable things to fill pages because there are no more clues to chase down. In one scene, after the Warden’s ex-partner is killed, he finds a spot on a roof and drinks himself stupid while he watches the hoax work the scene. For hours. This is not even an act of grief, as the best the Warden can muster is mild annoyance at the man’s death. It’s just a scene that takes up words.

When the plot has some bends to take, Polansky’s talent for writing hints at how good this book could’ve been. The Warden’s way of working revolves around his mouth and his connections. He has an insolent, insulting way of mocking those he sees as harmful to Low Town, which include the police, the guard, and the federal agents investigating the child’s murder.

This is generally good stuff, especially when he lays into a righteous kill like a vile noble with depraved hobbies. And while the patois of Polansky’s dialogue takes a bit of getting used to, it makes for a sometimes fun (though sometimes grating) read.

The Warden has a habit of using his fists when his mouth doesn’t work, and the ensuing action scenes are some of the best in the novel. Also, the end of the mystery is well done, even if the Warden seizes on a single suspect for far too long before the final turns.

Ultimately, though, the Warden’s unlikeable characterization soured me on this promising novel. I’m not usually one to complain about an unlikeable character. One of my favorite characters of all time is Parker, Richard Stark’s ruthless expert criminal. But even Parker knew when to accept help, and Parker’s best scenes were when he had to deal with other people.

Because, after all, that’s what novels are about: people dealing with people. A shame that this one didn’t strike gold, but I’ll be keeping an eye on Polansky in the future.

Similar books: Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith; The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry; The Dresden Files series, by Jim Butcher

2011, Dutton

Filed under: Mystery, Thriller

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The Keeper of Lost Causes is the first English-translated book in Jussi Adler-Olsen’s bestselling Danish crime series, about the unique Department Q. It stars Carl Morck, who’s one of Copenhagen’s best detectives… until he falls into an ambush and watches his partner crippled and another cop killed.

Morck is deeply traumatized by the incident, and his passion for detective work vanishes. Since his superiors can’t fire him without starting a union battle, they devise a plan to stash Morck away by creating a new department for high-profile cold cases, Department Q. Morck’s assignment to Q is technically a promotion, which appeases the police union, but really it’s a way to put Morck on ice. Nobody will care if the traumatized detective never solves one of the years-old crimes assigned to him, so it’s the perfect place for him to recuperate (i.e. not work very hard). Meanwhile, the bosses can route most of the government money earmarked for Dept. Q to their underfunded homicide division.

Morck, for his part, is more than happy to sit around staring at the covers of case files. Until, that is, he runs across an interesting case and his curiosity drags him back into an investigation. Keeper follows that investigation as a straightforward, quite entertaining police procedural.

The case Morck stumbles upon is the five-year-old disappearance of a prominent, attractive female politician, Merete Lynggaard, and the narrative bounces back and forth between Merete’s experience and Carl’s unraveling the case.

Though police originally thought Merete fell into the ocean during a nighttime cruise, she was actually kidnapped and imprisoned by mysterious people. The bulk of Merete’s sections detail the torments she faces in captivity: her kidnappers have put her in an empty room without so much as a window to the outside world. She lives in complete darkness for a year, without a toothbrush or a change of clothes. After 12 months, her tormentors turn on the lights for the next year, and increase the air pressure by one atmosphere, as they will each year until they decide to kill her by dropping the pressure back to normal and making all the tissues in her body explode.

Adler-Olsen’s strength lies in crafting suspense, and these consistently nauseating looks into Merete’s imprisonment serve just that purpose. As Morck investigates, uncovering one clue after another, the vignettes describing the brutality of Merete’s imprisonment provide urgency and stoke the need to see the bad people punished. In this way, Keeper reads like a much more polished, much more gripping version of Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo Girl books.

Unfortunately, Adler-Olsen’s writing gets muddied by a rough translation, which dilutes his prose and dialogue.

He looked like a boy whose request for an ice cream cone had been refused, but knows that if he stands there long enough, there’s still a chance he might get one.

Still, he’s a much sharper writer than Larsson, and he’s one of the best I’ve read from the new wave of Scandinavian crime novelists. For every one of those seemingly mandatory translation train wrecks, you get something pretty good. Lines are never quite phrased well in English, but there are a few that you can tell might have been good in the original Danish. Like this description of a mental ward:

Egely was a whitewashed building that splendidly proclaimed its purpose. No one ever entered voluntarily, and it was far from easy for anyone to get out. It was obvious that this was not a place for finger-painting or guitar lessons. This was where people with money and status placed the weak members of their families.

Similarly half-decent are Adler-Olsen’s characterizations of Morck’s new department and his capable but weird sidekick, Assad. Both are given a depth of attention that implies they will be around for the sequels. Morck himself is an amusing hero, if not exactly riveting on his own.

My biggest complaint is that, for the reader, the discovery of the evil mastermind behind this plot comes not from Carl’s investigation, but from that mastermind simply revealing himself to Merete on a whim, as he had categorically refused to do for five years. Still, while that feels programmatic and disappointing, it is necessary for the story, and Adler-Olsen manages to keep the suspense high even after the kidnappers are unmasked, which helps a lot.

All in all, this is a well-paced procedural mystery. Certainly not the best I’ve read, but better than most of these translated pulp novels, and a perfect fit for any fans of Scandinavian crime novels.

Similar reads: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, by Stieg Larsson

1934, Redbook

Filed Under: Mystery.

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For whatever reason, I’ve never really been into mystery novels. But after unexpectedly finding a lot of enjoyment in No Rest for the Dead, I wanted to ride the wave a little longer and figured I ought to hit some of the classics. I opted to hold off on Sir Doyle (A Study in Scarlet is in my short pile), and go for the more gumshoe-y cred of Dashiell Hammett. I wanted something that I would be totally ignorant of, so The Maltese Falcon was out–I love the film. The Thin Man, though it doesn’t have any written sequels, spawned a very popular series of films (that have been languishing in my Netflix–Qwikster?–queue for ages), and seemed to have a strong following of fans on the internet. So I went to library and snagged a copy.

This is more or less your straigth forward whodunnit. Julia Wolf, assistant to the eccentric, somewhat hermetic, Clyde Wynant turns up full of bullets, and Wynant is nowhere to be found. Nick Charles is a retired detective, returned to New York City from San Francisco for a vacation with his wife, Nora. An old acquaintance with the Wynants, and assumed by most everyone to be on the case (although he tries somewhat half-heartedly to not get involved), Nick is drawn into the investigation.

The book’s style is fun and breezy. Nick, with enough edge to be interesting, is perfectly set up to play the protagonist for a mystery like this: Hammett carefully keeps him one step ahead of the other characters but one step behind the unraveling mystery, thus orienting the reader in just the right spot for compelling tension. A similar balance is struck with the characterization–Nick means business, but he never takes things too seriously. The cast of characters around him are all strong, while still fulfilling the stereotypical (prototypical?) roles of the usual suspects you expect from a mystery like this: scheming, rich ex-wife; guilty-seeming oddball son; beautiful but naive young woman; shifty lawyer; hard boiled policeman; wormy stool pigeon, etc.

And man, do they drink a lot. The book mostly occurs in night clubs (namely speakeasies, since it occurs during Prohibition) and various characters’ apartments, and in every scene they’re tossing them back, often before breakfast. Despite the rampant boozing, Nick and Nora (who is sharp-as-a-whip) generally keep their wits, unlike some other characters who get a little “tight” on liquor. The ability to consume so much and still keep his edge adds a lot to Nick’s character (and to Nora’s as his foil). The mystery here is solid, but not overly meaty. It would be passable for a hard-boiled detective story, but the levity of Nick’s character and circumstance–he’s both retired and on vacation, remember–add a winning degree of personality to the book.

The Thin Man is a good package all around, and a solid pick-up for just about any reader. Most people can probably get through it in an afternoon pretty easily. It definitely brought me back to the old days of my childhood when I used to read a ton of Encyclopedia Brown books (though this is obviously more complex than those), and it whet my appetite for more classic mysteries like this.

Similar Reads: The Maltese Falcon (Hammett), No Rest for the Dead (Gulli, ed.). Also, the recent video game L.A. Noire does some rather interesting mystery stuff storytelling-wise and cinematically…for a while, then it gets pretty stale.

[Note: If you need help with the September 20, 1999 NY Times crossword, the dog's name is Asta.]

2011, Touchstone

Filed Under: Mystery, Thriller.

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The inevitable first question when looking at a mystery book with 26* authors is, how did they do it? The second is, of course, does it work at all?

I’m still not really sure the answer to question number one. I had fun imagining, while reading this book, that each author was given a character, or a role, kind of like a dinner party parlor game. By the end of the book, with enough authors writing multiple entries from varying perspectives it becomes clear that this wasn’t the case.

It also becomes clear that Gulli is a fine and comprehensive editor. The answer to the second question? Yeah, it works; everything is sewn up nicely.

The book opens with an affluent woman from San Francisco, Rosemary Thomas, being executed by lethal injection for the murder of her husband, art gallery curator and socialite Chris Thomas. Chris’s body was found decomposed almost beyond recognition and stuffed into an iron maiden in a German museum. It’s pretty clear (to the reader at least) there’s reasonable doubt as far as Rosemary’s guilt is concerned, but it becomes a politiczed case and she is basically fast-tracked to execution.

Then we jump back a few years, set the scene, meet the characters. Chris was crooked, so there are black market art dealers and mobsters, and he was a philanderer, so there’re a few of his lovers:  the ambitious young art dealer who owes Chris her career, and a beautiful grifter cum call girl. There’s an artist friend of Rosemary–who has good professional reason to hate Chris and his sexual advances–and her ex-con husband. There the billionaire philanthropist who funds the gallery–he was Rosemary’s friend–and there’s Rosemary’s money-grubbing lawyer brother. These were the last people to see Chris alive. Then at the center of it all, we meet Jon Nunn, the cop whose damning testimony was the final nail in Rosemary’s coffin.

Fast forward back to the present. Much of the book revolves around Nunn, who has slipped into a deep alcoholic depression, trying to reopen the case. He now thinks he got it wrong. Meanwhile a shadowy figure is also sneaking around and amonymously attacking and threatening the characters. From here, much of the book is your typical thriller. It’s exciting and fast paced, if a little predictable. But, when you consider how many ladles are stirring this pot, that’s actually pretty impressive. There are a fair amount of plot threads and character threads at work, and however Gulli managed it, it’s quite a feat that the cord never frays and the story keeps its pace and momentum nicely.

The novel reaches what I found to be its highest point about 2/3 in, when it shifts from a more taught thriller to a nice little whodunnit. All the characters, with their collected motives and alibis are brought together through Nunn’s detective work. A game of Clue ensues, with each character playing his or her hand as best they can. I’m a pretty infrequent mystery reader, I’ll admit. So maybe this is just the way these books are alway structured, I really don’t know. Nonetheless, I liked this part very much. It plays out fairly quickly, but that short time is a little cerebral and quite exciting.

Now I don’t know if its through smoothing by Gulli’s hand, or the nature of popular mystery writing, but none of the various parts of this tale feel disparate. It’s certainly not a collection of linked stories like I more or less expected it to be. Occasionally you can tell a change in author (besides the name given at the start of each chapter) through something subtle like shift in balance between dialogue and exposition, but on the whole, the style is very uniform.

In fact, the only thing that I didn’t enjoy thoroughly was the ending. I won’t spoil it of course, but it’s pretty predictable. I sort of expected that; it mostly only bothered me because of David Baldacci’s challenge in his preface:

And in my humble opinion it’s a twist that is so original you won’t have to concern yourself with bragging on your blog about how you figured it all out long before the conclusion. Well, I guess you can, but you’d be lying.

I figured it out before the end of the prologue–and I’m not lying. But that didn’t ruin this book for me. To tell the truth I got a bit of a rush to finally find out I was right all along. And I enjoyed the ride, working through the mystery to see if my suspicions were founded. I think anyone who likes mysteries or any of the contributoing authors will like this book. It’s not literary fare, just a quick and easy to digest mystery book. If you see it on an airport bookstore shelf, pick it up. It would make a great flight companion.

Similar Reads: The Thousand (Guilfoile), The Wreckage (Robotham), The Reversal (Connelly)

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

*Full List of Authors: Jeff Abbot, Lori Armstrong, Sandra Brown, Thomas Cook, Jeffery Deaver, Dana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, Andrew F. Fulli, Peter James, J.A. Jance, Faye Kellerman, Raymond Khoury, John Lescroart, Jeff Lindsay, Gayle Lynds, Philip Margolin, Alexander McCall Smith, Michael Palmer, T. Jefferson Parker, Matthew Pearl, Kathy Reichs, Marcus Sakey, Jonathan Santlofer, Lisa Scottoline, R.L. Stine, & Marcia Talley.

2011, Henry Holt and Company

Filed under: Literary, Mystery.

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A Death in Summer boasts no world-breaker plot, no nail-biting race to find a killer, and no chilling plot twists. In fact, for long stretches the mystery idles in the background, nearly forgotten as characters sit around and smoke cigarettes and talk.

For most mystery writers, that would mean the book fails. But Benjamin Black—or John Banville as he’s known when winning Bookers—isn’t most mystery writers. In his hands, such a premise becomes a pleasure, mostly because he’s such a damn good writer that simply existing in the world he creates will satisfy.

Benjamin Black mysteries follow, primarily, a pathologist named Dr. Quirke, who solves crimes in 1950s Dublin with the help of an assistant named Sinclair and a police inspector named Hackett.

The crime this time around is the murder of a newspaper tycoon. Or the possible murder, at least, as it first seems to be a suicide. Quirke and Hackett slowly, almost lazily trace the clues of the case down various branches. Their attitude suits the setting: horse-drawn carriages dominate the streets of Black’s Dublin, and Quirke’s corner of the city is its prim high society, where tranquility testifies to high standing.

As the investigation proceeds, the focus of the narrative shifts to Quirke’s affair with the dead man’s widow, and Quirke’s daughter taking up with his assistant. Much more time and energy are spent living these lives than chasing particular clues, and that’s fine because the star of the show is Black’s prose.

Like this passage, in which the assistant Sinclair sees a prostitute on the street, and his thoughts spool out:

There was a hazy green glow over the square, and mist on the grass behind the black railings. The whores were out, four or five of them, two of them keeping each other company, both skinny and dressed in black and starkly pale as the harpies in Dracula’s castle. They gave him a look as he passed by but made no overture: maybe they thought he was a plainclothes out to trap them. One of them had a limp—the clap, most likely. One day, not so far in the future, he might fold back the corner of a sheet and find her before him on the slab, that thin face, the bluish eyelids closed, her lip still swollen. He wondered, as he often wondered, if he should leave this city, try his luck somewhere else, London, New York, even. Quirke would never retire, or by the time he did it would be too late to be his successor; something that was in him now would have been used up, a vital force would be gone.

It’s not just the elegance of this prose that captivates me, it’s the way it loops through the character’s life, the way it connects large concepts like death and impermanence to these two people—Sinclair and the prostitute—who haven’t even spoken (yet), and the way it reflects the thinker at every line. The book’s greatness lies in passages like this, where Black exercises his understanding of people along with his talent for the written word.

And while the case of the dead newspaper tycoon eventually coughs up a twist or two, along with a few gruesome revelations, fans of the modern crime novel should brace themselves for a different kind of story, one that’s more of a late-night companion than an up-late page-turner.

Similar reads: Misadventure, by Millard Kaufman; Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon