Mystery May fourfer!

The City & the City, China Miéville: First read this as an ARC back in '09, my first exposure to Miéville's work, and I felt lukewarm towards it at the time. While it's still not my favorite (I think Perdido Street Station and Kraken tie for that honor), I did better appreciate it this time around. It's a police procedural with a spec-fic premise that's way harder to explain than it is to read in his capable narrative: it's set in the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma (in the same nebulous part of the world as Jan Morris's Hav), which occupy the same physical space but have wholly separate governments, languages, and history--an inhabitant of either city grows up learning the art of seeing and unseeing, realizing in an instant whether a given passersby or building or vehicle is in his own city, able to be acknowledged and interacted with, or the other, whereupon it officially does not exist to them. Looking over the border is the direst of crimes, calling out the mysterious force called Breach. In this singular environment, Beszel policeman Tyador Borlu finds himself investigating a unique and complicated murder: the victim, American archaeology student Mahalia Geary, was found in Beszel . . . but killed in Ul Qoma. And when he finds out that she was obsessed with legendary third city Orciny, the mystery deepens. Miéville doesn't so much blend genres here as snort derisively as the very notion that blending is even necessary; like his cities, they're already part of each other, no matter how fiercely we to keep them separate.

The Guards, Ken Bruen: First in a series narrated by Jack Taylor, alcoholic ex-Garda (i.e., member of the Garda Síochána na hÉireann, Ireland's police force), now picking up private-eye work in between blackout benders. What makes this fast-moving Irish noir work for me, despite its pretty standard setup, is the lyricism of its writing--almost a prose poem in places. Bruen's habit of dropping the beginning of a quote to the paragraph after its tag provides a literal rise and fall to his characters' speech that I found especially effective.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith: This classic thriller hardly requires my praise, but I'm givin' it anyway. Tom Ripley is a small-time con artist sent to Europe by a college acquaintance Dickie Greenleaf's father, who pays his way hoping that Tom can persuade Dickie to leave his idle life painting in Italy to come home and join the family shipbuilding business. Instead, Tom decides to not just emulate Dickie, but become him, killing him and stealing his identity and the money that goes with it. Ripley's often referred to as a sociopath, but I think he's an even more chilling creature--completely blank, a malleable substance that reconfigures itself to the specifications of what those around him expect or want, not so much a personality as a gallery of masks.

And speaking of sociopaths, there's no other way to describe Wayne Ogden, the cheerfully amoral narrator of Scott Phillips pitch-black Midwestern noir The Adjustment. He's just returned to 1946 Wichita from years as a supply sergeant in Europe, a job he used as front for a black-market gamut of drug dealing, pimping, and thievery. Now he's back to work in "public relations" for Collins aircraft, his primary duties being to keep the company's head in booze and hookers, and cover up the consequences. This is not a book for anyone who needs a protagonist with any glimmer of redeeming qualities--being in Ogden's head is a harrowing and repugnant experience--but apparently I've no such requirement, because I loved it. Been meaning to read Phillips for ages--though he lives in St. Louis now, he's a Wichita boy, with a native's nonchalant knowledge of the city, and he's a Watermark Books favorite (I grinned goofily when Ogden makes a phone call "in the back of Gessler's drugstore on Douglas," said storefront now being occupied by Watermark). On the wall of their basement autograph galley, he's drawn himself looking chagrined at a podium, thinking to himself, "Dear God, there's not a single paragraph in here appropriate for a mixed audience. Next time I'm writing a NICE book." I, for one, am glad he hasn't.

Brighton Rock (Graham Greene)

So the first thing I want to say about Brighton Rock, because I wish I had known this before starting (although boy will my face be red if everyone's like, "Yeah, I knew that"), is that the title's not  referring to a geological formation. For years I'd pictured it on a postcard--Brighton Rock, jutting over the sea, scenic but rendered ominous by its appearance in a Graham Greene novel (would someone fall off of it? Or be pushed?). NOPE! Turns out it's a kind of candy, the Wikipedia entry for which calls it "traditional British seaside tubular boiled sweets," a charming chain of modifiers. "Rock" is chunky and cylindrical, kind of like a large straight candy cane, and generally made with a pattern running through it--such as the name of the resort where it's sold--visible all the way through the stick. Hence its fitness for metaphor:

"People change," she said.
"Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature."

(It's also possibly a murder weapon? But Greene being Greene, this catalyzing act takes place offstage, and is never fully described.

The shes above are discussing Pinkie Brown, a yawning void disguised as a teenage boy--the scariest character I've read recently, and I just read a book with Hitler in it. At 17, Pinkie is the leader of a gang, small-time but vicious, part of the racetrack-centered underworld of coastal Brighton. He masterminds the murder of Fred Hale, a former reporter now traveling for a newspaper as "Kolley Kibber"--find him and win a prize! (The killing is revenge for events that take place in an earlier novel, A Gun for Sale, which I haven't read.) Because of his semi-fame, his death makes the papers, though it's ruled a heart attack. Two very different women realize something's fishy: Ida Arnold, a big-hearted, big-breasted lady of indifferent virtue, who Kibber/Hale picked up on his last afternoon, and who becomes the unlikeliest of detectives in pursuit of the truth; and Rose, a mousy teenaged waitress from the Brighton slums who knows that the man she served wasn't the one who died. To protect himself from Rose's possible testimony, Pinkie resolves to marry her, despite his lack of feeling and gut-level revulsion at sexuality.

But while it has the bones of a crime novel, the themes of Brighton Rock are no less than salvation, redemption, and damnation. Both Pinkie and Rose are "Romans"--Catholics--while Ida is cheerfully irreligious: her concerns are with Right and Wrong, whereas theirs are Good and Evil. Greene writes about the central experience of Catholicism, i.e. the consciousness of sin and of oneself as sinner, with borderline obsessiveness--and for my money, better than any theologian. If you want to understand why and how I'm Catholic, read Graham Greene, particularly this book, The Heart of the Matter, The Power & the Glory, The End of the Affair . . . they're his best anyway. (And what the heck, add Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited to the mix.) To me, and I shall flatter myself to Greene, there is deep comfort in the idea that everyone is flawed and fallible, that we are all capable of acts both good and evil: because it means I'm not alone when I fall short of my own standards. And, still more important, that forgiveness is possible--that I, too, can be relieved by what's called in Brighton Rock's final pages "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."

And there's nothing I can write after that amazing line that won't be anticlimax, is there?

The Likeness (Tana French)

In The Likeness, the second of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad novels, our narrator is Cassie Maddox, who transferred out of Murder in the emotional aftermath of In the Woods. She's working in Domestic Violence when she's called to a crime scene by her boyfriend, Detective Sam O'Neill, and is shocked to discover her old boss from Undercover, Frank Mackey, is also there. But it soon becomes clear why: the dead woman is Cassie's physical double, and her Trinity College ID bears the name Alexandra Madison--a persona Cassie and Mackey invented years ago when Cassie infiltrated a drug ring at the University of Dublin. And Mackey views this as a once-in-a-lifetime chance for any detective--he's convinced that they should pass the incident off as a non-fatal stabbing and install Cassie in Lexie's life, to investigate her murder from the inside. After initial resistance, Cassie realizes she can't pass up the chance either; she's bored in DV, and she feels responsible for this woman who died bearing her face and a name she created. (And, the autopsy shows, a child.)

Whoever Lexie originally was, when she stole the identity of someone who never existed, she used it to--of all things--pursue a Ph.D. in literature. She lived near the abandoned cottage where she was found in the former manor house of Glenskehy, with four other grad students, so it's to Whitethorn House that Cassie is sent, armed with a mental dossier of all the information she and Mackey could glean regarding this incarnation of Lexie Madison, as well as a wireless mike hidden by bandages. Her roommates--Daniel, Justin, Abby, and Rafe--are fiercely loyal, a little odd, and clearly hiding something. Or somethings. (In this, there are echoes of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, though I find found French's foursome more likeable). But the more Cassie lives with them, inhabiting their intertwined lives, the more she finds herself half in love with the whole thing: the house, the countryside, the improvised family the five have formed. Gradually, her objectivity starts to wane; she hides vital clues from Frank and Sam; she starts to imagine just taking this life that's been given her, living out her years in Whitethorn House.

The Likeness is somehow even better than In the Woods--and I loved In the Woods. This despite having a frankly implausible premise; I can see how it might be a dealbreaker for some readers, but I just shrugged and moved past it--after all, there's no such thing as the Dublin Murder Squad, and that doesn't bother me. Once again, she takes a familiar trope--Undercover Gets Too Close to Her Case--and makes it much more. Once again, it's a deep study in character, identity, and friendship--beautifully written, well plotted, and often heartbreaking.

Storm Front (Jim Butcher)

Storm Front is the first book in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, currently at 13 books and assorted short stories, all starring Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, the only professional wizard on the Chicago PD's payroll. In other words, borrowing a phrase used by Salon to describe Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen, it's a mix of Raymond Chandler and Buffy the Vampire Slayer--and as such, pretty darn irresistible.

I will say this: Butcher doesn't have the writing chops of Link by a long shot. I'm told he gets better as the series wears on, which is good to hear--it's not so much that Storm Front is badly written, but it doesn't always know when to stop, particularly when it comes to punchlines. And the female characters are not great.  Me, I'm willing to forgive these authorial flaws for a premise like "wizard detective," because COME ON WIZARD DETECTIVE.

It's also necessary in a Book One to unfurl a lot of exposition. Thus, we learn how magic works in this context: largely by harnessing emotional energy, though natural phenomena like thunderstorms can also provide power. Harry's got fraught relationships with law enforcement both municipal--obviously, not everyone at the CPD likes having a mage hanging out at crime scenes--and magical, as he's shadowed by a gruff representative of the White Council, who enforce the Laws of Magic. The first of which, of course, is not to use it to kill; when Harry's called to investigate a couple murdered in flagrante via their hearts literally exploding out of their chests, he's sickened by this perversion of profession, and shocked to learn that the White Council suspects him. We also meet other recurring characters: two possible love interests, a cop and a reporter; the barkeep at the local wizard watering hole; Harry's air-elemental lab assistant,Bob, who lives in a skull in his basement; his giant gray kittycat, Mister.

Really, Storm Front feels a lot like the pilot of a pulpy sci-fi TV show--again, Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes to mind, particularly that clunky first season. I'm willing to bet the series gets better in some ways (like Buffy's special effects) and doesn't in others (like Buffy's costumes), but that it always stays fun. Sometimes, that's all entertainment needs to be.

Paper Towns (John Green)

I wanted Mystery May to include a YA example, and I've been meaning to read John Green for a while, as he's both consistently well-reviewed and bestselling, a rarity for any author, but particularly one who writes books narrated by teenage boys (and he's got a wonderful ear for their dialogue, a rapid-fire mix of vulgarity and in-jokes). Paper Towns won an Edgar (the award named for Mr. Poe), so it was the natural choice.

The mystery here is the disappearance of Margo Roth Spiegelman, who's lived next door to Quentin Jacobsen their whole lives. When they were nine, they found a dead body together. Now that they're high school seniors, their paths rarely cross--he's a band nerd, she's a living legend, hatcher of schemes and haver of unbelievable-but-true adventures like joining the circus or hanging out with rock stars. But one night she shows up at his window, like she used to when they were kids, and talks him into "borrowing" his mom's minivan for an all-nighter of elaborate revenge (capped off by breaking into Sea World in the wee hours). The next Monday, she doesn't show up at school. And when she keeps not showing up, Quentin discovers a series of clues she's left, seemingly only for him, and decides he's the one meant to find her.

I'll admit I spent the first chunk of the book a little miffed by Margo, because boy is she ever a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, all wild and quirky and bringing timid Quentin out of his shell . . . and yeah, there are implausibilities to her character. Really, she ran away to Mississippi one summer and left behind an M, an I, an S, and a P in a bowl of alphabet soup? Ugh. But it's this very convention Green is playing with, it turns out. The more Quentin delves into Margo's life, the hazier she becomes, until he understands that not only is his conception of her flawed, it's only one of several layers of persona she's built up around her, wrapping herself defensively in audacity and riddles. The real mystery Paper Towns considers, then, is subjective existence--how well can we ever, even with the best of intentions, know another human being? Margo's true self, Quentin realizes, is both simpler and more complex than he'd thought: "[t]he fundamental mistake I had always made," he says, "and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make--was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."

Gaudy Night (Dorothy Sayers)

So this review was going to start with a rant about how Dorothy Sayers's tour de force Gaudy Night was out of print and what is WRONG with people, but I've learned that Harper is reissuing it in October with a swank new cover, which has simmered me back down. This is a book which should not be lost: partly because it contains a crucial chunk of her twenty-year Lord Peter Wimsey narrative, in the form of the BEST PROPOSAL EVER (fictional division, of course; don't get het up there, Andersen). Still more vital, it portrays the lives and travails of educated women in the first decades of the twentieth century, from their own perspectives--an experience that must not be forgotten. I hesitate to call it the first feminist detective novel, not being an expert on either category, but it is certainly early, and important.

If you're not familiar with Lord Peter Wimsey, you are in for a treat come October. The short version is: Bertie Wooster but fiercely bright, and a detective. With a monocle! As charming a character as he is, though, he appears in Gaudy Night for maybe a tenth of its pages--and detecting proper takes up maybe a fourth. Most of the book centers on Harriet Vane, a mystery writer Peter saved from the gallows when she was accused of murdering her lover in Strong Poison. He fell madly in love with her, and had been proposing to her on a regular basis--and being refused--for years since. He does nothing so unpleasant as stalk, never fear, merely sending a polite letter every month or so; she continues to demur not from antipathy, but from resentment over being indebted to him for her life, and an unwillingness to award herself as recompense for said debt.

The book takes place in 1935, as Harriet returns to Shrewsbury College, Oxford, for her class reunion, dubbed the "Gaudy." After a weekend of friendships rekindled (and regretfully outgrown) with former classmates and dons alike, she's drawn back to the city of dreaming spires by a pleading letter from the Dean, who knows her dabbling in detection and needs discreet help. There's been a rash of nasty happenings on Shrewsbury campus: poison-pen letters, obscene drawings, vandalism, including a bonfire of students' gowns in the quad and the wanton destruction of Miss Ludgate's long-in-the-making manuscript on her new theory of prosody. The culprit seems bitterly hostile towards unmarried academic women, branding them as harpies and man-eaters . . . and timing and circumstances point to one of Shrewsbury's own.

So why not call in the police, or at least alert the highers-up at Oxford? Well, the very nature of the pranks--their pointedness at the collegiate woman--begs for as little publicity as possible. Women were only granted the right to receive degrees from Oxford in 1920 (Sayers, like Harriet, was one of the first women to do so), and they're still regarded as at best unusual and at worst unnatural. Harriet fumes when the gown-burning incident is reported by a London paper as an "Undergraduettes' Rag" investigated by the "Lady Head":

Women, of course, were always news. Harriet wrote a tart letter to the paper, pointing out that either "undergraduate" or "woman student" would be seemlier English than "undergraduette," and that the correct method of describing Dr. Baring was "the Warden." The only result of this was to provoke a correspondence headed "Lady Undergrads," and a reference to "sweet girl-graduates."

This sort of sniggering is exactly why Shrewsbury's academics want an investigation on the quiet. And while Harriet protests she's hardly a professional, she's happy to oblige by moving back onto campus, ostensibly to research a biography of Gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu. And she's fallen back in love with the intellectual life, after years away in unlucky love and literary society. In between incidents with Shrewsbury's mad prankster, Sayers luxuriates in conversation, between smart and opinionated women, about who they are, who they could be, what society demands of them and what it should. It's wonderful to read, both as artifact and as sad testimony to what hasn't changed.

For a mystery novel, Gaudy Night seems to have little at stake--no murder, no theft of material property (beyond those academic gowns, weighty with their symbolic value). But what's threatened is far more precious: the right of women to pursue the examined life, to find paths other than marriage and family. Though Harriet finally accepts Peter's suit at novel's end, it's from a realization that he does, indeed, view her as an equal, a mind to rival his own. His successful proposal demonstrates this--he addresses her not only in Latin, but in a snippet from an Oxonian degree-granting ceremony, calling her magistra, literally, a woman with a master's degree. It's, uhm, really, really romantic. Almost as romantic as having my attention distracted from a book of Onion sports reporting to be proposed to in front of my whole family on Christmas morning . . .

Now You're One of Us (Asa Nonami)

I realized, while writing up In the Woods, the peril of reviewing mysteries: for me, the effectiveness of these stories depends on their gradual, methodical nature. I.e., the (good) mystery is a mechanism, the function of which is unknown at first--my enjoyment comes during the process of watching smoothly fitted gears turn, sudden switches flip, hidden panels open . . . and finally feeling the pieces click into place. It's deeply satisfying to some piece of my problem-solving brain.

But since I want to preserve that experience for other readers, I end up having little to say. Premise. Other thing I liked. It's good! (Or, it's not.) And I suppose, if you know me, and/or trust my taste, that's enough. I'm not sure whether it's really reviewing.

So let's call this less a review than an endorsement, namely of Asa Nonami's supremely creepy tale of familial horror, Now You're One of Us. That wonderfully unsettling cover taunted me across the room for months back when our D&D nights took place at Vertical's offices--and this is a case wherein judging a book by its cover is a smart decision. That single personal hair on the soap perfectly encapsulates the domestic disquiet in the story of Noriko, who marries into the wealthy Shito family and moves into their compound, where four generations of just the nicest people live in perfect harmony.

Except, OK, maybe her sister-in-law is a little old to be bathing with her developmentally disabled teenage brother. And if Great-Granny can't walk, what was she doing in the hallway in the middle of the night? And why on earth are there hallucinogenic plants in the front garden?

At this point I run into the peril and have to say WHY INDEED? But I must say, despite the common trope of the bride surrounded by a new family who are not what they seem, Nonami's take is unique, especially the ending. And her sense of menace, aided by dispassionate and slowly paced prose, is top-notch. It's a fun, eerie little novel.

In the Woods (Tana French)

Confession: my primary reason for instituting Mystery May was as an excuse to read more Tana French--I'd enjoyed Faithful Place in 2010, and wanted more. So I started at the very beginning, as per Julie Andrews, with the multiple-award-winning In the Woods.

Had not quite realized how her books fit together (the two mentioned above, with The Likeness in between; Broken Harbor comes out in July); they're a series chronologically, all related to the fictitious Dublin Murder Squad, but each has a different first-person narrator. Cool, right? Here, it's Detective Rob Ryan. Born Adam, he's abandoned the name in an effort to shuck the notoriety he earned as a twelve-year-old after his two best friends disappeared from the woods where the three often played, near their suburb of Knocknaree. He was discovered with his shoes dyed black and stiff with blood, parallel tears in the back of his T-shirt--and no memory whatsoever of what had happened. There has been no trace of the others, living or dead, since.

Twenty years later, Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, are assigned to a murder in the same woods; twelve-year-old Katy Devlin has been bludgeoned and then carefully laid out an a stone altar at a nearby archaeological dig. Two tiny pieces of forensic evidence--a girl's hair clip and a drop of blood--seem to link it to the old case. Ryan knows he should stay away from this case, for the very same reasons he can't leave it behind. It's a recipe for bad decisions, and he makes an irreparable one.

Tormented detectives are a dime a dozen (or, this being an Irish novel, ten-a-penny, or ooh! Let's go with "bog-standard"). But what sets ItW apart is the depth of character. French is astonishingly adept at writing both Ryan's inner and outer lives: his frustration at not being able to remember the most important day of his life, his tiny, resurfacing memories of the moments he spent with Jamie and Peter, and especially the well-observed dialogue between him and Maddox, the easy rhythms and constant teasing of close friendship.

Loved this book. Can't wait to read the rest.

Announcing Mystery May!

There comes a time in every bookseller's life when she looks at her TBR shelf and her stack of ARCs dutifully organized by release month and says to herself, "Ehn, screw it." For me, that moment of mutiny came last week, when I finished up Asa Nonami's Rebecca-but-so-much-creepier Now You're One of Us and realized I was in the mood for a run of mysteries, darned the torpedoes, and moved on to Tana French's amazing In the Woods. (Full reviews of both of these forthcoming. I've been sick. Again.)

Join me, then, as I catch up on a bunch of authors I've been meaning to read . . . and grant myself re-reads of China Mieville's The City and the City and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (ugh, how is the latter out of print? what is wrong with people?). Here's my wishlist:

Ken Bruen, The Guards
Jim Butcher, Storm Front (Dresden Files #1)
Alafair Burke, Never Tell (this one is an ARC, out in June)
Tana French, The Likeness
John Green, Paper Towns
Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley 
Scott Phillips, The Adjustment
Lauren Willig, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation