Sue Grafton. L is for Lawless, M is for Malice, N is for Noose, O is for Outlaw

Sue Grafton.   L is for Lawless The title alludes to a psychopath who betrayed his fellow robbers many years ago, killed one of them, and has been waiting to get the loot ever since. There isn’t any loot worth mentioning, but by the time Kinsey has discovered this it’s too late. She also doesn’t get paid, as the family that wanted her to prove their father’s military service (so they would get death benefits) welshes when it turns out he was using stories of war service as a cover. One of the weaker tales in the series, with a surprisingly creaky plot. Even the psycho seems overdone. ** (2010)




    M is for Malice Kinsey finds a long lost black sheep, reformed of course, whose murder does little to help his dysfunctional family mend its rifts. The murderer is the last surviving relative of a girl betrayed by this family, but she has it all wrong: the lost sheep even then had a fine sense of honour. The story ends, uncharacteristically, with the perp suiciding by running into traffic. Grafton is back in top form in this novel, with Kinsey revealing a few more bits about her past, the social satire sharp as ever, and vexing questions of justice, loyalty, betrayal and love left unresolved, as they often are in real life. *** (2010)

     N is for Noose (1999) The noose figures in two murders that a dead small town cop was investigating. His widow wants Kinsey to find out why he was morose and tense in his final weeks, before a heart attack killed him. The perp attacks Kinsey, and nearly kills her in a final confrontation (a staple motif in Grafton’s books), she suffers the slings and arrows of small-town suspicion, and is glad to return to her medium-sized city. The mood and ambience of a late spring with gloomy weather and glooming mountains overlooking the town, the characters as narrow and closed in as the valley in which their town stands, the wary respect of the cops for Kinsey, are better done than usual. The plot is somewhat Patricia Cornwellish, which is not a compliment. **½ (2010)

   O is for Outlaw (1999) The outlaw is Kinsey’s ex-husband Mickey McGruder, whom she hasn’t seen for fourteen years. She walked when he asked her to provide an alibi for the death of Benny Quintero. Now he’s been shot, and two detectives from L.A. visit her because Mickey apparently made a 30-minute phone call to her a few days earlier. A storage-scavenger offers her a box of stuff he found in McGruder’s storage locker, whose contents were auctioned because he hadn’t paid the rent. In the box Kinsey finds a letter that arrived the day after she walked, which exculpates Mickey. So naturally Kinsey has to discover what really happened, who tried to kill her ex, and who killed Benny. She’s of course nearly killed herself before she unmasks the killer, but this time the plot is less important than the characters. Well done, as usual. **½ (2010)
 

Peter Lovesey. Swing, Swing Together (1976), Mad Hatter’s Holiday

     Peter Lovesey. Swing, Swing Together (1976) Harriet Shaw, skinny dipping with two of her classmates, witnesses suspects in a murder case. This is enough for Det. Sgt Cribb to take her along with him while he chases the suspects down the Thames. The story alludes to and loosely follows Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome, 1889). It turns out that Harriet has in fact witnessed a murder in progress, done as a test of the method to be used on the intended victim. The chase ends in Oxford; the murderers did the job at the behest of a prison warden who was obsessed with his reputation for respectability. In the finale, Harriet is “rescued” from the advances of a lecherous don (whom she suspected of the crime) by the nice young constable who gallantly lent her his cape when she emerged from the Thames like Venus on the half shell, so that she could return to where she had left her clothes. So that’s all right. A nicely done entertainment; we saw it on TV some years ago, too. Lovesey does good mild social comedy and satire. **½ (2010)

     Mad Hatter’s Holiday Set in Brighton after the mass-holiday season, with an intricate plot,

both as a murder mystery and as a family drama. We see most of it from the point of view of an almost pathetic little man, a dealer in optical instruments, who spends his holidays admiring women through his binoculars. But this time he falls hard for his fantasy mistress, strikes up an acquaintance with her and her family, and assists Det. Sgt. Cribb and Thackeray with his naive and painfully respectable evidence. The murderer, a nasty adolescent sociopath, is murdered, but Cribb doesn’t pursue the matter. He’s satisfied to know the truth, while the coroner’s inquest returns a verdict of murder by person(s) unknown. Well done. **½ (2010) 

Update 2023-07-30: The TV series is available on YouTube.

Linda Shapiro. Yesterday’s Toronto 1870-1910 (1978)

     Linda Shapiro. Yesterday’s Toronto 1870-1910 (1978) A collection of photos with reasonably well-researched captions. Nostalgia trip, really, with selections intended to bring back warm feelings about the Good Old Days, which of course weren’t. But the pictures are useful, and the information for the most part is too. Here and there a few reminders of reality help us understand what rare treats the times at the beach or at the Ex really were: wages were low, cost of living was high. We are much better off now, in all respects. One of my continual annoyances are references to long ago prices without reminders of wages. When a dollar a day was a decent wage for a shop girl, a nickel for tram fare was a lot of money. ** (2010)

Elizabeth D’Oyley. English Diaries (1930)

     Elizabeth D’Oyley. English Diaries (1930) A school book, apparently aimed at senior high school. The flyleaf is inscribed “J A Bennett VB”, which I think would be grade 11 here. The selection starts with Charles Wriothesley (pron. rizely or rizzly) through Pepys, Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, etc. Most of the diarists are remarkably circumspect about their own reactions to the events they describe, the main exception being Pepys and Fanny Burney. In part this is no doubt the effect of  D’Oyley’s care in selecting suitable passages. An interesting read, since it provides eye-witness accounts of historical events, and implies differences in the goals of education between the 1930s and now. **½ (2010)

Ed Gorman & Martin Greenberg. Solved (1991)

     Ed Gorman & Martin Greenberg. Solved (1991) What do you get when you ask crime fiction writers to  write stories that “solve” unsolved crimes of the past? You get a pile of pulp fiction. The stories here offer all the familiar formulas: conspiracies, mob-corrupted politicians, psycho-pathologies, megalomaniacs, and so on. Plus more or less vivid gore. Entertaining reads, but not especially memorable, in fact, I’m having a hard time recalling the stories.
The Jack the Ripper tale works best, I think: a vicar’s wife tells how she comes to suspect her pompously pious and uncharitable husband is the Ripper, and how she expects to burn in Hell for having poisoned him with arsenic. Told obliquely in the first person, it works because the character is plausibly devout. **

Sam Berns, progeria patient (link)

Progeria is a genetic disorder that results in premature aging. I've seen a number of documentaries about it. Here's Sam Berns talking about his philosophy of life. He died on January 10th of this year, a little less than one month after giving this talk.

Sandra Ley. Beyond Time (1976)

     Sandra Ley. Beyond Time (1976) The stories deal with time, time slippage, what-ifs, etc. The most common trope is the multi-world interpretation of quantum mechanics, but a couple of stories take the observer effect to mean a conscious observer, the author apparently not realising that in any interaction between particles each is the observer of the other. That’s what Heisenberg’s Uncertainty is really about.
     Anyhow, the most common tone is elegiac and meditative. Contemplation of what-if will prompt regrets for the actual. Any slippage into an alternate reality will prompt nostalgia for what was lost. Questions of value and purpose appear without prompting: if every choice triggers a new set of realities, then none has more purpose or meaning than any other.
     But despite these philosophical implications, the stories tend to the pedestrian and pompous. The most entertaining simply work out the more or less ironical consequences of a single glitch, with Jefferson (for example) a prime mover in the struggle for the independence of England from America, after George III’s son Frederick establishes himself in the colonies and moves the centre of power from London to Washington. I didn’t read all the tales. * to **½ (2010)