Alexander McCall-Smith. Trains and Lovers (2012)

     Alexander McCall-Smith. Trains and Lovers (2012) Four people share a compartment from Euston to Edinburgh. Two young men tell the stories of their loves, the older woman tells of her parent’s love, and the older man keeps silent, but we learn about his life-long chaste gay love for his boyhood friend. McCall-Smith knows how to tell stories so that we want to know more. His writing is skilful, his dialogue sounds natural, his scene-setting creates ambience the way good movie music does: we hardly notice that it’s done, still less how it’s done.
     The events of his characters’ lives are hardly unusual. It’s McCall-Smith’s ability to make the ordinariness of life significant that explains his popularity. I find his books very readable, but they are finally not quite satisfying. They are very well done stories, but they don’t demand that we reflect on our own lives, they don’t make us rethink our prejudices and insights. On they contrary, they soothe us by suggesting that our attitudes are just fine the way they are. A young man and a young woman can find a life-long love despite the social distance between them. A young woman can be deceptive and duplicitous. A man and a woman’s life together can engender something deeper than mutual respect.  Love is more than sex, it can grow and continue without sex. Do we doubt these insights? Only if we insist on cynicism, and McCall-Smith somehow disarms the impulse to sneer. That’s what makes his books something more than pleasant entertainments. **½

Louis L’Amour. Shalako (1962)

     Louis L’Amour. Shalako (1962) Shalako, a man with no past, meets up with a European hunting party led by Frederick von Hallstatt, a Prussian baron who wants to enjoy a “skirmish” with the Apache. Irina Carnarvon, whom Shalako accompanied back to the camp after finding their wagon-master dead, lends him her horse, and he leaves to find a place to hole up while the Apache deal with the hunting party and move on. But he of course he can’t stay away. One bloody event leads to another, the Prussian baron learns that his officer training is useless against guerrilla tactics, most of the hunting party die, Shalako fights a duel with Tats-ah-das-ay-go, a ruthless Apache warrior, and wins, barely. Shalako and Irina ride off together.
     L’Amour knew exactly what he was doing. His stories are chivalric romances. He puts us directly into the landscape, we can feel the heat, smell the dust, see the sun-bleached colours. The characters are just this side of caricature, what makes them believable is their ability to learn and change. The hero must overcome his impulse to avoid adult responsibility. As Tats-ah-das-ay-go falls to his death, Shalako cries out “Warrior! Brother!” and comes close to weeping.
      I like L’Amour’s books, even though they cover the same ground over and over again. He knows how to vary the plots, his narrative pace and rhythm keep us wanting to read. His writing is compact, there are no wasted words. This one is above his average. ***

Margery Allingham. My Friend Mr Campion (2011)

     Margery Allingham. My Friend Mr Campion (2011) Collection of short stories and the novella The Late Pig. I finished that last night, and promptly started rereading the stories. Entertaining, with enough, if stereotypical, characterisation to make you care. There was a TV series starring Peter Davison (also known as one of the Doctor in Dr Who), which captured the look and feel of the stories very well. Like the other women from the Golden Age, Allingham’s strength is character. The puzzles are often too complex for plausibility, but the clues are fairly placed for those readers who like to solve the puzzle before the ‘tec does, and Allingham nicely navigates the inherent implausibility of the amateur sleuth. Campion's friend Oates advances from Detective Inspector to Superintendent. Campion may play a lone hand occasionally when he’s unsure of his ground, but he sees himself as an assistant to the police, not a competitor. Good collection. ***

Conrad Haynes. Bishop’s Gambit Declined (1987)

Conrad Haynes. Bishop’s Gambit Declined (1987) I’m a sucker for novels set in Academia. Here,  it’s a fictitious private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. There’s some satire of academics and administrators, but they’re easy targets, and Haynes is wise enough not to overdo it. The hero is Henry Bishop, a stereotypical unruly professor, who enjoys teaching and respects his students, as well as those of his colleagues who like him value thorough scholarship. A too-good-to-be true female detective sergeant and an apparent sleaze ball of a reporter interfere with each other’s investigations. The murders are designed to cover up an ancient semi-crime, and are not really necessary, but they make a good scaffold for the story, which is handled in movie-style scenes and with decent dialogue. The occasional authorial omniscient asides grate enough that I’d have cut them. All in all, good of its kind. **
  

Robert Crais. The Monkey’s Raincoat (1987)

 Robert Crais. The Monkey’s Raincoat (1987) Elvis Cole is P.I. in the classic mould: cynical, insightful, with a dry wit and a soft heart, driven to right wrongs no matter what the cost. Crais combines L.A, Hollywood, drug lords, corrupt politics, the sleazy side of show business, failed dreams, and a victim who becomes a heroine into a well done entertainment. There’s no puzzle, there’s just the question of whether Cole and Ellen Lang will be able to rescue her son before it’s too late. The central characters have enough depth to sustain interest and engage sympathy, and the secondary characters are well done animated scenery. The ambience draws heavily on the cliches of West Coast crime fiction, but Crais does a better job than most in emulating the classics. A series worth looking for, and collecting if you’re into that. **½

Nancy Pickard. Marriage is Murder (1987)

     Nancy Pickard. Marriage is Murder (1987) Jenny Cain and Detective Geof Bushfield’s wedding is set for two weeks hence, but several domestic murders threaten to interfere with their plans, and worse, Geof is so appalled at what he has witnessed that he wants to quit. Of course all’s well that ends well, but along the way Pickard delivers an extended if somewhat superficial examination of domestic violence. She’s hampered by not having enough space to explore the complex backstories of her characters, and can do little more than sketch the relationships and histories that bind them. Would she have delivered a better novel if she’d had more room? I think so. There’s more than a few hints that she’s really more interested in the psychology of evil and of human failures than in the crime puzzles that these engender. **½

Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian (2012)

     Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian (2012) A book everyone should read. King gives us a history of White-Indian relations from the beginning to the present. He uses stories, with a few numbers and generalisations here and there, but mostly stories. They are not nice stories. King’s ironic asides make them palatable, just. It’s a book that can be life-changing.
     Seems to me that the conquest of the Americas happened at the time when Europe began to reconsider the relationships between conquerors and conquered. Human history is about genocide, mostly. The Bible records several times when the Israelites slew everyone of their enemies, men, women, and children. Or they killed everyone except the boys, who could be trained to be slaves, and the girls and women, who could be used for pleasure or as trade goods. The Iliad ends with the slaughter of Trojans. Ghengis Khan built a pyramid with the heads of the inhabitants of a city that wouldn’t surrender. But after the Hundred Years War, Europeans began to change their attitudes. It’s not that they gave up extermination. It’s just they began to feel, um, squeamish about it. So the problem of the original inhabitants of the Americas became just that, a problem. A few centuries earlier, the wars of conquest between the Spanish and the Aztecs would have continued and expanded until the whole continent was White. Or perhaps a patchwork of Native and White states.
     But by around 1600, a different relationship had evolved. It was Europeans’ desire for beaver fur that made the difference. The Natives become trading partners. They became useful, and even necessary. When the fur trade ended, around the same time that the Thirteen Colonies successfully asserted their independence because the home country wouldn’t accept them as equals, the fact of continued Native presence became, well, inconvenient. Explicit genocide was out (which didn’t prevent massacres and other practices which amounted to genocide). So there were treaties, and abrogations of treaties. Attempts at assimilation. Legal and illegal theft of land. None of which ever got rid of Indians. They are as inconvenient as ever.
     King has traced the history of this inconvenience. It’s not nice. No story of clashing cultures ever is. There are degrees of awfulness, of course, but people invade other people because they want what other people have. If the attempted conquest succeeds, then there is eventually an integration of the  two cultures. Each modifies the other, and if the conquest was far enough in the past, the descendants may even (inconsistently) celebrate both the invaders and the invaded as their common heritage.
     But right now, Native and White relationships are still marked by prejudice, by assumptions of cultural superiority, by thinly disguised attempts at theft, by violence. Neither White nor Indian culture is what it was four hundred years ago, of course, and that fact gives us a small hope that both can influence each other for the better.
     But I’m not holding my breath.
     Unless a lot more people read King’s book. ****

Peter Robinson. Friend of the Devil (2008)

     Peter Robinson. Friend of the Devil (2008) A wheelchair-bound woman is murdered; that’s Cabot’s case. A girl is raped and strangled; that’s Banks’s case. Although these two crimes occur at opposite ends of Banks’s patch, they do connect eventually. Dual plots that intersect are Robinson’s speciality, as is the on-going soap opera of his principal characters. Banks and Cabot both lonesome after their break-up, but neither can find a way to reconcile. The consequences of old crimes at first interfere with the investigation then provide the break.
     A competent performance by Robinson, but not as engaging as his earlier works. He’s now a bankable writer, so his publishers give him leeway to digress and expand secondary plots. Some of these are truncated. Some scenes are merely plot points, and lack the suggestion of deeper currents and complex interwoven back stories that are Robinson’s forte. The psychology of one perpetrator is barely plausible. It’s this contrast between well done and perfunctory writing that grates. The overall effect is uneven. Or maybe I’ve come to expect to much from this series. **

Simon Brett. So Much Blood (1976)

    Simon Brett. So Much Blood (1976) Charles Paris gets week-long gig replacing a cancelled show at the Edinburgh Fringe. During a rehearsal for another play by the same group, the Derby University Dramatic Society, or D.U.D.S., an objectionable young man dies when a prop knife turns out to be a real one. Paris believes it’s murder, and sets out to solve the puzzle. A double twist in the plot confirms the reader’s early inference about the perp’s identity. Along the way Paris has an affair with a careerist young actress, finds a friend who shares his literary and whiskey tastes, briefly reconnects with his wife Frances (they are separated), and provides Brett with an opportunity to show off his knowledge of Edinburgh’s streetscape. The writing varies from barely competent to evocative. Brett indulges in some mild satire on theatrical types, especially the earnest non-professionals who believe that The Theatre is hopelessly out of date. The result, like one of the D.U.D.S. reviews, has good bits, but lacks the coherence of character, ambience, and plot that would make for a satisfying novel.

     Brett has also done other series, TV scripts (my vague memory records better than average videos), and has produced and directed miscellaneous plays and TV series. See his Wikipedia entry for more. This effort seems to me to be below his average, probably because it’s only the 2nd book, an apprentice work. But I’ll have to read a couple more Paris mysteries to confirm that. **

Robert Silverberg. Hawksbill Station (1968)

     Robert Silverberg. Hawksbill Station (1968) Premise: a “humane” totalitarian regime has replaced the constitutional republic of the United States, and sends political dissidents 1 billion years into the past. There is no way to return these exiles. Plot: A newcomer has no political knowledge of value, and it’s clear to the reader, if not the exiles, that there will be way to return. Setting: pre-Cambrian Earth, with no life on land. Silverberg’s depiction of this setting is limited both by his knowledge, and the gaps in contemporary understanding of this era).
     The narrator’s task is to make all this work in terms of character. Silverberg fails. The exiles are political stances and/or psychological case histories. Barrett, the central character, has a backstory involving an love triangle as well as political betrayal, and that’s as complicated as it gets.
     Silverberg is good at elucidating ideas, at presenting ideologies and politics. It’s fascinating to see how little has changed in the US political landscape. Silverberg is especially good at what makes America America: its unwillingness to change, which in practice means a major upheaval in every generation, when the inevitable effects of incomplete transmission of the culture forces changes that the old guard resents. But by the middle of the book, about the only impetus is the plot, which is thin. I’d guessed the resolution, skipped to end and saw my guess confirmed, so I stopped reading. **

Carola Dunn. Rattle his Bones (2000)

Carola Dunn.  Rattle his Bones (2000) Daisy Dalrymple’s 8th case. While researching an article on the Natural History Museum, Daisy almost witnesses a murder. She hears it, but doesn’t see it. This both annoys and pleases her fiancé, Det. Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher, because she of course does some sleuthing on her own, but also provides Fletcher with a couple of crucial clues. The murderer bonks her on the head. He did the dastardly deed to cover up a theft of gemstones, which he wanted to convert into cash in order to finance a dinosaur hunt.

     Nicely done entertainment, with better period ambience than most, characters not too cartoonish, a satisfying puzzle, and well-paced clues and red fish. This is the 3rd Dunn I’ve read, they’re fun, but not keepers. **½

Two Miss Marple Videos (2013)

     Two Miss Marple Videos (2013) A Caribbean Mystery and Gresham’s Folly. Starring Julia MacKenzie, who is no Jean Hickson, but she’s very good all the same.
     These new adaptations of Miss Marple stories pick up on hints in Christie’s texts and elaborate them. Mostly this deepens the characters and improves the dialogue. But they also use visuals to generate ambience and mood that Christie may not have had in mind. The Joan Hickson versions had a feeling of deep currents; here they are closer to the surface.
     Occasionally, the adapters allow themselves a joke. In A Caribbean Mystery, Ian Fleming appears as a hotel guest. He tells Miss Marple he’s writing a spy thriller but doesn’t have a name for his hero. The guest lecturer, presenting a slide show on the island’s birds, announce himself as “Bond, James Bond.” Eureka! This is also the story in which Mr Rafael meets Miss Marple. In a later talehe gives her the task of preventing a crime. The murderer is a wife killer, a type that Christie used more than once, perhaps as a revenge on her unfaithful first husband.
     Both these tales rely on secrets from the past to make motives plausible. In both, the murderers are psychopaths, charmers who feign empathy they don’t feel, and in both the motive is mere money. But sometimes secrets are revealed inadvertently, and then self-preservation leads to secondary murders. Christie believed that killers were overconfident, that they could not imagine being outwitted by mere mortals, and so found added killings easy. There’s a good deal of truth to that, but I think it’s more likely that psychopathic killers just can’t imagine how serious their crimes are, and therefore can’t imagine that ordinary mortals want to find them and thereby restore the balance we call justice. A lack of empathy not only limits one's capacity for relationships, it also limits one’s ability to foresee how others will act, and so limits planning for the future.
      Both videos are good entertainment, especially for Christie fans. **½