The Present is the Child of the Past: Elizabeth George, A Banquet of Consequences (2015)

 Elizabeth George. A Banquet of Consequences (2015). DS Havers misbehaved in a prior case, and is under threat of transfer to Berwick on Tweed. DCI Lynley has promised to keep her inside the lines. She goes to a lecture by Clare Abbot, a famous feminist who later turns up dead of sodium azide poisoning. An appallingly dysfunctional family swirling around Abbot’s assistant Caroline Goldacres, and the usual bystanders keeping secrets, add to the strain of keeping strictly to the rules, but Havers, Lynley and DS Winston eventually solve the case. Arlo, a charming Personal Aid Dog supplies some sentimental relief. A fairly clued but nevertheless surprising twist at the end upends expectations, but you’ll have to read the book to find out, ‘cuz I’m not telling.
     I borrowed this book from our library after watching the first two episodes in the DCI Lynley TV series. It’s the 19th Lynley book. And it looks like George’s reputation has persuaded her publishers to let her write as much as she wants. The result is a book that’s too long as a crime mystery, and undefined in focus.
     We read dated chapters and sub-headed segments or scenes. Any one of them works very well as character or plot development, but there are simply too many of them. George is excellent at showing self-delusion, and deliberate or unwitting evil. The dialogue is nearly flawless. She understands the conundrums of human relationships, especially when people are unable or unwilling to express unspoken or unadmitted desires and fears. She knows how to use the trivial detail to shift our perceptions of character, to control ambience, and to lay a trail of clues. The book is a pleasure to read.
     This is a novel about a crime, about how it originated and how it affects everyone touched by it. We also learn more about the private and professional lives of Havers and Lynley. The cumulative effect is that of a soap opera, whose characters just happen to caught up in a crime.
     Do I like this book? Well, I’d prefer a more swiftly told tale. On the other hand, the characters are memorable. George can make you care even about the monsters she creates. Every character is damaged in some way. They differ only in their ability to heal from the hurts inflicted on them. Most achieve a resolution of their immediate problems, but they don’t escape into a romantic happy-ever-after fantasy.
     Intriguing enough to make me borrow another Lynley book. As a police procedural, ** As a novel of character, ***

Mini-mysteries: bet you can't read just one (!00 Malicious Little Mystreies, Asimove et al, 1981)

 Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander. 100 Malicious Little Mysteries (1981) A re-read, and just as much fun as the first time. For one thing, I’d forgotten most of the stories, so they felt new. The few that I recognised provided the pleasure of observing how the plot was sprung on the unsuspecting reader. A short-short story works like a joke: it directs attention in one direction, then shows that another direction makes perfect sense. The joke trades on absurdity, the mini-mystery on poetic justice, reversal, and reinterpretation. Asimov’s introduction calls these tales “snacks”, and the trouble with snacks is that it’s hard to stop with just one.

     One of the tales solves the puzzle of Jack the Ripper. Several deal out poetic justice. Several others make a nice distinction between the moral and the criminal law. A good wide range of motifs and themes.

     Recommended. I was thinking about donating my copy to the food bank yard sale, but I’ve decided it’s a keeper. *** to ****

A Disappearance but No Body: Pictures of Perfection (R Hill, 1994)

Reginald Hill. Pictures of Perfection. (1994) A young cop, assigned to the small village of Enscombe to have his officiousness rubbed off, goes missing a few days before the Day of Reckoning, once the day the tenants paid their rents and now an excuse for a party. Ancient traditions crumble, new and old relationships weaken or strengthen as the case may be, people admit secrets to themselves and others, a couple of villains get their poetic comeuppance, and in general there’s a major rearrangement of the village’s social life. Because of the missing PC, Dalziel, Pasco, and Wield are sent to into this vortex of all too human lives. The PC turns up and resigns from the force, and all the other loose ends are nicely tied up. For the moment, it looks like a happily ever after state has been achieved by everyone in the village, but we know it won’t last. Hill didn’t write a follow-up book, so we’ll never know.
     A good read, with Hill experimenting in multiple points of view, including excerpts from several memoirs. Recommended. ***½

Dangerous Rails: Murder on the Railways (Haining, 1996)

  Peter Haining. Murder On The Railways. (1996) An anthology in four themed parts, making a fat book that’s ergonomically awkward. The contents make the bother worthwhile. Haining provides a potted publishing bio for each author, including references to film and video adaptations. Very useful.
     The selections are all very good or better. Railways from the beginning were a romantic as well as a convenient way to travel. A long-distance sleeper train provides a closed setting, a limited cast of suspects, and a limited time to solve the crime. Just right for a detective story.
Trains are also targets for crime. The largest heist ever was a train robbery in the UK in 1963. The thieves took £2.61 million, about £45 million ($77 million) in today’s money.
     Section one deals with crime on the express trains. Section two introduces railway detectives. Section three shows that crime on subways forms a subgenre. The last section extends suburban, mostly domestic, crime to the commuter trains. All in all, a good spread of goodies
     Recommended. *** to ****

Reporter or influencer? (Hillerman, The Fly on the Wall, 1971)

 Tony Hillerman. The Fly On The Wall (1971) My copy is a well-read 1979 paperback reissue of this novel, reprinted about 1982, when The Dark Wind (No. 5 in the Navajo Police series) was published. The hero is John Cotton, political reporter for the afternoon Tribune in Capitol City. MacDaniels, a colleague elated that he’s uncovered a story that will cap his career, dies a few minutes after telling Cotton he‘s looking for his notebook. Cotton finds the notebook (of course), and begins to decipher a story of political corruption. He nearly becomes a murder victim himself, pieces the story together, and goes to see Korolenko, a former State Governor, to tell him what he’s found.
     But if the story is published, a corrupt opportunist will win the next election. Should Cotton withhold the story? Should he publish? Is he really the fly on the wall, seeing all, feeling nothing, utterly objective? Read the book to find out.
     By bibliography dating, this is Hillerman’s second novel. In style and pacing not up to his later standard, it’s still a very good read. The descriptions of political shenanigans and calculations show that politics hasn’t changed much since the 1970s. It’s maybe more openly vicious than it was back then. As a story about journalism, it’s become a historical novel with the ring of truth. Hillerman was a reporter for several years before he became an academic and a novelist. It took me a while to read this book. It’s a must for the Hillerman fan, a good read for anyone who likes crime stories, and a nostalgia-inducing experience for anyone who remembers when newspapers mattered more than any other medium.
     Recommended ***

Unusual Brains: Thomson's Unthinkable (2018)

 Helen Thomson. Unthinkable. (2018) Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat showed that suitably edited case histories could help people understand the effects of stroke and other insults to the brain. His sensitive descriptions, his reports of interviews, his attempts to translate his patients’ accounts into accessible narratives, these and more have inspired generations of readers. One of them was Helen Thomson, who cherishes her interview with him a couple of years or so before he died. This book is in part a result of her admiration for Sacks, coupled with a wide-ranging curiosity, and enough neuroscience background (she has a B.Sc) to make sense of the topic of this book: how people with unusual brains manage to survive and thrive.
     Thomson tells the stories of nine people with congenital or acquired brain oddities. There’s Bob, who never forgets a moment. Or Tommy, whose personality changed utterly when he suffered an aneurysm. Or Sharon, whose sense of location is so bad that she has trouble navigating around her house. Thomson interviewed them all, as well as similar ones that she found along the way, and the scientists and psychiatrists who worked with these extraordinary outliers. The result is a reminder that we are our brains. When our brains don’t function as expected, we become different people. That’s the reason we are afraid of dementia, I think. Dementia shows us that what we think of as the most reliable component of our experience, our sense of self, is in fact the most fragile.
     The book confirms my belief that the brain constructs a simulation of reality with the Self, the “I”, not only at its centre but as the essential component, the part that holds it all together. Our “I” knows itself to be “here”, at the centre (the pathological version of this knowledge we call narcissism). If the connection between Self and some component of the simulation is broken or compromised, then not only the awareness of what’s “out there” is altered, but so is the Self.
     I believe that all brains, human and animal, construct such simulations, every one of them good enough to ensure that most members of a species will live long enough to produce offspring. But all of them incomplete and distorted in some way. The outliers that Thomson describes show the common features of the human simulation of reality. They also show how far from the norm any given simulation can be and still function as a human Self. So in the limited sense of the stable Self thereby implied, the Self is what makes each of us a person.
     Footnote: The Christian creeds assert the “resurrection of the body”, which suggests that one of the innovations of the Christian faith was the insight that a Self without a body is impossible. The Incarnation may be understood as another version of this insight. This insight has been slighted or ignored ever since the notion of a disembodied soul was introduced by Augustine and others..
     Recommended. ****