Corruption and Past Crimes: Blue City (Ross MacDonald)

 Ross MacDonald. Blue City (1947) Another pre-Lew Archer novel, but it has all the motifs and themes that characterise MacDonald’s novels. Johnny Weather, recently discharged from the US Army, goes home hoping to reconcile with his estranged father. Instead, he finds his father’s widow in partnership with a gangster, his father’s murder unsolved, and his father’s erstwhile partner and rival running the town as his personal fiefdom. Small people with big dreams, psychopaths, corrupt police and politicians, people tempted into crime by the nobility of their goals, people striving for the protective amour of respectability, it’s the American Dream turned nightmare.
     McDonald’s style and plotting is still evolving; this book is no page-turner. But it works as a crime novel. A good entertainment for any fan of mid-20th century American crime fiction, and a must for any fan/student of MacDonald. **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 ****

Mortimer and Friends (Murderers and Other Friends, 1994)

 

John Mortimer. Murderers and Other Friends (1994) Part two of Mortimer’s intermittent autobiography. Charming, humane, with occasional flashes of rage at injustice and stupidity. I enjoyed this re-read. Mother gave me the book for a birthday; she enjoyed Mortimer and Rumpole as much as I did. (So did all the family).
     Highly recommended, partly because it also portrays a time and Zeitgeist that’s now long past, partly because Mortimer understands the difference between law and justice very well, and partly because he’s just very good company. He’s a raconteur, he can make any event interesting and often a reason to reflect about what makes life worth living. If you could push Mortimer to pontificate, he might say something about good company, a loving family, satisfying work, and perhaps jousting at windmills in the sure and certain hope that some of them would prove to be giants worth slaying. Recommended. ****

Deceptions: Christie'sTaken At The Flood

 

Agatha Christie. Taken at the Flood (1948) In postwar England, the Cloade clan dislikes the widow of their rich relative Gordon, whose death in the Blitz deprives them of the money they had come to expect. A stranger appears with news of Robert Underhay, the widow’s first husband, supposedly still alive after all. Which would make her marriage to Gordon invalid, and so relieve the Cloades of their financial difficulties. The stranger turns up dead with a nasty bash to the back of the head. Poirot’s involved because Mrs Philip Cloade had asked him to find Underhay a week or so prior to the murder. 

     The usual complications ensue, and we are treated to nicely done puzzle but an uncharacteristically muddled narrative. The novel I think began as a romance about a returning WREN and her stodgy suitor, etc. The murder puzzle had to be solved somehow, the Inspector charged with the inquiry could have done it all, but I suppose Christie knew that inserting Poirot would satisfy her fans. So that’s what she did. Or so it seems to me. 

     The 2006 TV adaptation with David Suchet as Poirot offers a more coherent and nuanced tale. A couple of major differences reshape the plot so that it flows more naturally from the characters’ passions and flaws. Poirot is presented as the godparent of a major player. A couple of major plot points are completely changed, for the better I think. At any rate, I reread the book after watching the show, which paid more attention to the widening stain of evil, and how fate is the name we give to accident and coincidence. ** for the book, *** for the video.

     The book cover above will make sense only if you read the book.

Financial Crimes

Arianna Huffington. Pigs at the Trough (2003). Here it is 17 years later, and the game continues. Some of the star players have been retired (some via criminal indictment), the rules have been tweaked to benefit the cheats more than ever, and the referees no longer pretend to control the game.
     Huffington’s book is a detailed overview of the financial scandals of the early 2000s, with names like Enron and Andersen showing up in several chapters. Lessons learned? Just keep on buying the most complaisant legislators available. Five years later, we saw the financial meltdown of 2008, in which the rescue money went to the perpetrators instead of their victims. Business as usual. If the bail-out money had been credited directly to the borrowers’ accounts, most of them would have become home-owners pretty quick, and the decade-long limping towards recovery would have lasted maybe three years.
     History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but humans solve problems in much the way as their ancestors did. These solutions toss up the same problems as before, and the cycles continue. If you find a copy of this book, read it. It will help you recognise the players on the current teams of malefactors. ****

Rumpole's Creator

   John Mortimer.   Clinging to the Wreckage (1982) A re-read, and just as exhilarating and moving as the first time. Mortimer’s style is anecdotal: he’s a story teller, but an artful one, who knows how to bring the story to a point, a punch-line, or a twist that recasts the whole meaning of what he has told. The ambience is wry amusement at the follies of being human, and melancholy regret for the losses that make up our lives.

     The reminiscences about his father were made into a TV show, Voyage Round My Father, which I’ve seen, and recommend. Available on Youtube.
     Mortimer was apparently a good lawyer. His practice clearly informed Rumpole of the Bailey, which has the same combination of amusement and regret as this book. He was married twice, and had four children. He’s reticent about the details of his private life; the impression is of the same mix of joy and frustration that most of us know. Wikipedia gives more information.
     This book is worth reading in part because it’s a witness to England as it was between the world wars and after the second one. For Rumpole fans, it’s worth reading in any case. ****

Drugs and other decadent indulgences: Ian Rankin's Hide & Seek

     Ian Rankin. Hide and Seek (1990) The second Rebus tale, and a dark and troubling tale it is. Rankin knows how to create ambience and character, and to tease out a plot that convinces. This one starts with Rebus called to the apparent overdose of a junkie, but niggly little weirdnesses hinting at witchcraft bother him. They widen into a network that ensnares the high and the mighty of Edinburgh.
    
     I first encountered Rebus in the first TV series starring John Hanna, and liked the edginess of the stories. I started reading  his novels,  this is the third one I've finished. I couldn't get far into several others. I don’t think I’ll read another one. I’ve lost my taste for dark and troubling tales. But if you like well written crime novels, read Rankin. He has few equals. ***

Murder on the Home Front (2013)

     Murder on the Home Front (2013) [D: Geoffrey Sax. Patrick Kennedy, Tamzin Merchant] Several murders of prostitutes almost lead to major miscarriage of justice, on grounds of National Security. MI5 protects the actual perp because he’s a code breaker. The fall guy ends up interned on the Isle of Man. Dr Collins, the new young forensic pathologist at first antagonises the police because he’s aware of current methods, unlike his boss, the previous pathologist. He hires Molly Cooper,  a reporter eager to participate in order to get ideas for detective stories, to be his assistant because she doesn’t flinch when he asks her to help out on the first autopsy.
     The false leads, three more murders, and the machinations of MI5 nicely complicate the plot, and as a murder puzzle this movie is above average. As a story about the effects of crime on people and their relationships, it’s merely average: Collins and Cooper are clearly attracted to each other, but either he’s too bashful or too aware of how romance might compromise their professional relationship. As an evocation of wartime London, the movie’s quite good. The director wanted a claustrophobic effect, of being hemmed in and navigating through a perilous labyrinth. This not only set the ambience of hidden dangers and treachery, it also made it easier to give us the flavour wartime grunge. As an exploration of the necessary evils of war the movie fails. It presents the ethical dilemma, but solves it rather too neatly. Maybe it was solved that neatly in real life.
      We enjoyed this movie. Above average. **½

Alan Coren, ed. Punch Book of Crime (1976)

     Alan Coren, ed. Punch Book of Crime (1976) Towards the end of its long run, Punch’s essays became more and more serious. At times, they sounded like leaders in the Guardian. Even the few fictional pieces in this collection exude a rage at a broken and barbarous system that fails to rehabilitate and punishes prisoners gratuitously merely for the misdeed of being cooped up. The cartoons are up to the old and rarely equalled standard, but the prose by turns enrages and nauseates, not by its style, but by its subjects. ** (2010)

Kay Stewart & Chris Bullock. A Deadly Little List (2006)

     Kay Stewart & Chris Bullock. A Deadly Little List (2006) Stewart and Bullock have concocted a nice little mystery, set on Saltspring Island. It’s not as edgy as one might like, with a few plotting troubles. There are two investigators, an RCMP constable and a theatre critic. Two murders and a near-third provide the gore and the plot motivation. They are of course tied together. The little list is the famous one from The Mikado, which figures as the social setting of the mystery. The producer/director of the play (an unpleasant character, obsessed with his vision of himself as a ground-breaking dramatic innovator) has rewritten it with local references, a common enough ploy. But his hints cut a little too close to the criminal truth, and one of his targets murders him. The first murder was an accident: the victim came across the drug-smuggling operation that the murderer was trying to hide.
      The police procedure is handled competently, but clearly at second hand, and drawn out as it is in real life, which tends to slow down the story, especially since every chapter is headed with a place, date and time. The clues and red herrings are fairly placed. The characterisation of the main character, Danutia Dranchuk, is a little formulaic, and whenever it gets close to her inner self, the narrators dance away. A similar skittishness shows up with Arthur Fairweather, the critic. Both these characters’ back stories influence their approach to the puzzle, but we’re given no more than a hint or two. The Saltspring setting is occasionally laboriously done, with careful enumeration of landmarks and businesses. But usually the evocation of the mood is pleasant and has the ring of truth.
     The story starts out blandly and slowly, despite the authors’ use of short chapters, each of which builds to a mild forward-pointing climax. Around the middle of the book, I was engaged enough to want to find out how it all turned out, as well as to see whether various hints about personal relationships would morph into full-blown if incomplete plots. But Stewart and Bullock apparently seem to want their story to be realistic in the mundane sense that most attraction, even if mutual, doesn’t develop into anything, usually not even into a first coffee or drink. Murder mysteries are a type of romance, so unrealistically quick development of attraction into emotional affairs if not physical ones is required. All in all, a pleasant, low-key entertainment. The last sentence points to further adventures of Constable Dranchuk, but whether we’ll see them or not depends I suppose on how well this book sells. ** (2008)

W. R. Maples and M. Browning, M. Dead Men do Tell Tales (1994)

     W. R. Maples and M. Browning, M. Dead Men do Tell Tales (1994) A forensic anthropologist’s memoirs. Maples doesn’t acknowledge Browning’s role in the writing, so it’s not clear how they collaborated. Maples begins with a summary of his life, and ends with a plea for more resources for forensic anthropology. In between he tells tales of his more interesting or horrific cases in more or less chronological order. While I believe his claim that he finds it emotionally easy to look at remains, it’s clear from his editorial comments that he can well imagine the agony of the victims whose final moments he can read in their bones.
     He has no pity for murderers (at one point he calls reference to an abused childhood “the latest excuse”). He’s a “Christian”, and like most fundamentalists believes in capital punishment. He also as a justifiable pride in his professional skills, and admires the men who taught him his craft. He helped identify Pizarro’s remains, and the bones of the Tsar’s family excavated from a bog near Ekaterinburg. An ongoing project is the identification of American soldiers’ remains recovered from Vietnam and other places, a task that he says will come to an end as identification of the pitifully small collections of remains becomes impossible. An interesting read, and must reading for any current crime writer, I think. He mentions that licking a suspected bone fragment will differentiate it from rock, something that Peter has also told me. I will be sending this book to him. *** (2003)

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

      In the Heat of the Night (1967) [D: Norman Jewison. Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger] Watching this movie, I realised that I hadn’t seen it since its release 46 years ago. I did see many of the TV series episodes, and my vague memories of both made for a melange of misleading impressions. I’m glad we decided to watch it on TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies. The story is simple: Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), waiting for a train in Sparta, Mississippi, is arrested as a suspect in the murder of Colbert. a Northerner planning to build a factory in Sparta. When Chief Gillespie (Steiger) learns that Tibbs is Philadelphia’s number one homicide expert, he wants Tibbs to help him. Tibbs and Gillespie solve the crime, but not before personal weaknesses, and social and racial tensions create events that intersect with and delay the solution of the puzzle.
     The movie is tough, considering its time it’s very tough. It’s difficult to recall the state of race relations in the 1960s. The civil rights movement was top of news and mind. We all knew that people had been murdered in the South. We knew that a mild mistake or social solecism could still be lethal for blacks in Mississippi and Alabama. In Canada the racism wasn’t as overt, but it was real enough. We were at the beginning of decades of self-congratulation for “achievements” that should have been unremarkable: black MPs, black Lt Governors, black writers, and so on. This movie arrived on our screens carrying a heavy load of baggage.
     Still, the movie works simply as a movie. It’s quite likely that under-30s won’t get the full import of some of its plot points, for example, a Philadelphia police chief telling his black subordinate to help out the cops in a Mississippi town, or Endicott and Tibbs conversation about orchids in Endicott’s green house, or the fact that a Northerner was planning to build a factory in the town.
     Chief Gillespie’s slow, grudging acceptance of  Virgil Tibbs as a colleague is nicely done. Gillespie first fingers Tibbs as the perpetrator, then a poor white boy, then one of his own officers. The unquestioned assumptions of the old Southern social order prevent clear thinking. Tibbs also suffers from prejudices: he wants to bring down Endicott, a man who tries to maintain the ante-bellum social order, and, absent slavery, succeeds. Endicott is not the murderer, or even behind the murder, but the values he represents mess up the investigation. The turning point comes when Tibbs admits his hatred of Endicott. Gillespie says, “You’re like the rest of us.” This is a turning point for Gillespie, too. Both men are now able to see each other's strengths and weaknesses as men as well as cops, and the case unravels pretty quickly from that point on.
     The movie works on many levels. The acting is very, very good. It’s difficult to portray a change in character; both Poitier and Steiger succeed. The secondary characters are given enough of a backstory that we understand why they act as they do. Their racism may be a reflex, but it’s a reflex they can on occasion transcend. The pacing of the movie is just right. It starts slowly, and most of the time we see the action contrasted with the slow rural ambience of the town, so that even a drive across town is imbued with menace. The overall feel is of reactions barely suppressed, of rage and fear seething below the Southern politeness, a politeness that cracks from time to time.
      Daylight, nighttime, interior and exterior shots are so subtly alternated that we don’t realise how seamlessly they tell the story until we reflect on that story. The story itself is entirely plausible, both the crime, and the personal and social conflicts that intersect with it. Tibbs occasionally seems a little to good to be true, but in the next shot he’s vain enough of his superior policing skills that this impression dissipates. Unlike the stereotypical detective, he has to be rescued from physical danger. The ending, when Gillespie takes leave of Tibbs with the affectionate “You take care, y’hear?”, is perhaps too Hollywood feel-good, but that’s a very minor cavil. ****

Wolf to the Slaughter (Book Review)

Ruth Rendell Wolf to the Slaughter (1967) A woman disappears, her gormless artist brother has no idea where she’s gone, and several odd events suggest murder. Burden and Wexford sort it out, of course.

     As usual with Rendell, the investigation stirs up trouble for the people involved. She has a sharp eye for vice and weakness; she notes how circumstance and character lead us all into more or less devious and deviant paths. None of the characters evoke much sympathy.

     This is an early Wexford, Rendell is still discovering the character. There are no hints of most the backstory we know from the later books. The solution is a surprise, and the only unsatisfactory aspect of this novel. It fits the available evidence and facts, in that limited sense it’s plausible. It’s even inevitable, given the personality of the killer. But it somehow doesn’t ring true: the murderer seems to be invented to fit the crime. **½

Death Comes to Pemberley (Book Review)

     P. D. James Death Comes to Pemberley (2011) Austen fans will like this book, P D James fans less so. It’s obvious that James is having fun writing this book, indulging every Austen fan’s weakness and secret desire: to know as much about Elizabeth and Darcy as possible.
     James has an astute eye for character, and reminds us of the darker undertones in Pride & Prejudice, such as lingering memories of misplaced affections. Her extrapolation of Darcy and Elizabeth as a married couple is however rather thin. Darcy and Elizabeth are most of the time too good to be true: James seems to be in awe of Austen’s characters, and doesn’t deepen our understanding much. Her hints at disturbing memories could have led to a more subtle understanding of these two people, whose love has grown out of their characters. Austen is one of the first to insist that character, rather than any combination of social class, convention, or legal and financial expectations, is the basis of a sound marriage. This implies that Darcy and Elizabeth are pioneers in a new model of married happiness. Austen merely assumes happiness; James could have shown it. We don’t see much of them as parents, either; perhaps James didn’t trust herself to this well enough, and hid behind the eighteenth century upper-class habit of banishing children to the nursery. Her reminders of the severe social constraints on Darcy and Elizabeth are salutary, however: we are too prone to assume that 21st century social norms could have been applied two hundred years ago. Still, I would have liked to see Darcy and Elizabeth discuss their doubts and fears more.
     In the secondary characters such as Col. Fitzwilliam she assumes some changes, not all for the best. Georgiana has become a mature young woman, but instead of showing us how this has changed her relationship to her brother, James tells us. The servants are uniformly loyal retainers who know their place; we see and hear no Upstairs, Downstairs bickering (or worse). Wickham has seduced one of the servants, which provides an intersecting plot, the solution to the puzzle, and (finally) revelation of Mrs Younge’s role in the misfortunes of Pemberley.
     The crime plot is pretty simple, and the murder puzzle, such as it is, is resolved by a death-bed confession which exonerates the accused just prior to passing sentence (which annoys the judge). Prime suspect Wickham has apparently been chastened both by the loss of his good friend Denny (the victim) and by his experience as an innocent man found guilty, and will no doubt make good in Virginia, where the prison chaplain has helped him find a place.
     In the final chapters, James ties up a lot of loose ends, many of which feel superfluous to the crime story, but which may satisfy the Austen fan’s longing for more than Austen gave us. They fulfill the desired function of filling in the details of the story of Darcy and Elizabeth. In terms of character, plot, and back story, this pastiche is successful.
     However, a successful Austen pastiche must above all capture her style, and here James fails. Too many of her words are simply not correct usage for the turn of the 19th century. Her syntax, although far more formal than most crime writers’, lacks the diamond hardness of Austen’s prose. The dialogue is serviceable, but we get very little of that ironic revelation of character at which Austen excels. The authorial asides, which in Austen are always light in tone however severe in judgment, often feel heavy-handed. What saves the novel is James' narrative gift, which keeps us turning the page even when we’re given exposition rather than story-telling.
     I enjoyed reading this book, but not as much as I expected, and less than I wanted. **-½

Death Notes (Book Review)

     Ruth Rendell Death Notes (Put On by Cunning) (1981) An elderly man drowns in his ornamental pond, apparently by accident. His fiancée tells Wexford that he thought his long-lost daughter was a fraud. The long and tangled and international case that flows from this is one of Wexford’s trickiest, but also curiously unengaging. It’s as if Rendell lost interest once she had figured out the plot. Wexford is still the centre of the narrative, but we know him well by now, and there are no new revelations of character. Burden, newly remarried, has mellowed, and also become capable of sharper insight. The secondary characters are nicely sketched, but that’s all they are, sketches. The villain is merely a stick figure on which to hang the crime. A pleasant read, but not Rendell’s best. **