Review of Suzanne Rindell's The Other Typist

Today we welcome a guest writer, Rich Stoehr, father to three beautiful daughters, avid reader, occasional reviewer, and newly-minted employee of Amazon.com.  Rich is here to review The Other Typist, by Suzanne Rindell, published on May 7 by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam. This is one of the books we suggested a couple of weeks ago as a summer read, and it looks like Rich would happily urge you to carry it with you to your hammock. But before the review, a few words of introduction from Rich.

I'm honest, and I'm rarely afraid to speak my mind. I'm generous with my praise and I try to be constructive in my criticism. And I do love to entertain. Today, I'm happy to be alive, happy to be busy, happy to be doing what I love with people who I love to be around. In an ocean of experience, and in the words of John Green, I'm "grateful to be a little boat, full of water, still floating."



It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The 1920s were a turbulent age for America, which Suzanne Rindell captures very neatly in The Other Typist.

On the surface, it's the story of Rose, a typist for a police station in New York City in 1923. Rose is, by her own description, the essence of plain, never offensive and easy to miss, dedicated to her job and to her moral center. The Other Typist is narrated by Rose herself, in the aftermath of an alluded-to event that only becomes clear near the end of the book. Enter into Rose's plain, ordered world a new typist––bright, brash, and independent Odalie. Though the two women could not be more different, they form a fast friendship.

As Rose and Odalie grow closer, we see the other side of New York in the '20s––the speakeasies and the parties and the new sensibilities. Odalie introduces Rose to the ever-deepening world underneath the rigidly-ordered world Rose has known. And gradually, we see that Rose's tale has an odd element to it––something vague and unsettling that doesn't quite sit right. As she begins to break her own rules, both in her dedication to the truth at the police precinct and in her personal life, the cracks in her narrative subtly reveal themselves.

Rindell's craft is finely-tuned here, and only rarely does she show a little too much of her hand as the story progresses. Rose's narrative voice is both plausible and enticing, hinting at things yet to come and never faltering. "The devil is in the details," Rose remarks at one point, and Rindell takes great care to get the details right here.

The story of Rose and Odalie's friendship is one of dichotomies––not only the difference between a life of rules and a life of independence, but of a nation still struggling to find its identity after a crippling war and in a new century. In Rose's struggle to find herself I saw a much deeper undercurrent of a traditional, conservative identity locking horns with the new and the exciting––tradition in conflict with possibility.

But they're not really so different, are they, Rose and Odalie? They are both products of their age, reflecting different aspects of the same era––opposing sides of the same coin. The best, and the worst of their time.

The question is, which is which? Who, in the end, is "The Other Typist"? Read it, and you just might figure it out for yourself.

Note: A version of this review may appear on Amazon and other reviewing sites under my user names there.

Review of Owen Laukkanen's Criminal Enterprise

Criminal Enterprise by Owen Laukkanen

Maybe you're familiar with "Minnesota nice," the stereotypical well-mannered behavior of people born and raised in the state of Minnesota. It means you're self-deprecating. You do polite things like taking at least an hour to say goodbye and refusing offered food three times before accepting it even if you're half-dead starved. You avoid fuss and confrontation.

Owen Laukkanen

Canadians have their own stereotypical behavior, which combines well with that of Minnesotans. I can picture the talented Canadian writer Owen Laukkanen climbing off his moose after a snowy morning ride and eating pancakes hosed with maple syrup before sitting down and wrestling with his own Canadian niceness in order to write about crime. Then Laukkanen can wrench his middle-aged Minnesota BCA Agent Kirk Stevens away from his home––where he makes nice with his legal-aid lawyer wife Nancy and their kids––to team him up with beautiful young FBI Special Agent Carla Windermere, a high-octane workaholic who fishtailed her car into Minneapolis-Saint Paul from Miami.

In Laukkanen's terrific 2012 debut, The Professionals (see review here), Stevens and Windermere collaborate on a well-publicized case––the Pender gang's multi-state kidnapping spree. Criminal Enterprise begins a year later. Stevens has promised Nancy he'll do no more cowboying and is working cold BCA cases. He's trying to convince himself that the sense of accomplishment from solving one matches the thrill of working with Windermere, but he's not succeeding. While Stevens pursues an old case involving a murdered man and his missing wife, Windermere is longing for the competent, easy-going Stevens. Her current FBI partner, Bob Doughty, pulls rank and tosses a wet blanket over her attempts to solve the armed bank robbery on "Eat Street" in Minneapolis.

The bank was robbed by a ski-masked couple: a woman carrying a sawed-off shotgun and a blue-eyed man who brandished an assault rifle. The man cruelly pretended to shoot a teller before he and his partner leaped into a waiting Toyota Camry and were driven away. Your typical bank robbers tend to be amateurs or impulsive degenerates; the Eat Street robbers' weapons and behavior lead Windermere to believe they could be pros.  She begins to examine previous open-case robberies to see if she can detect a pattern and identify a suspect.

On the surface, Carter Tomlin looks like a bad bet for bank robbery. Tomlin is an accountant who lives with his wife Becca and kids in a big Victorian on Summit Avenue, the luxurious Saint Paul neighborhood in which Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald once lived. Tomlin over-leveraged himself to buy into the American dream, and when he is laid off from the job he's held for 20 years, it's a catastrophe. Tomlin has always believed a man provides for his family. In times of adversity, real men don't complain, they deal with it.

Tomlin deals with it by free-lance accounting and burning through savings. Desperate, he walks into the bank to talk to a loan officer, but then Tomlin has an epiphany. He walks out, buys a cheap disguise at the Walmart next door, and robs the bank instead. The take isn't much so Tomlin obtains some weapons, picks up a couple of partners, and tackles bigger targets. And, guess what? He doesn't feel emasculated any more. In fact, Tomlin feels like a god when he's holding a gun, and he begins to live for the adrenaline rush of committing crime. What do they say about addicts? They require increasingly higher-dose fixes.

Before you dismiss Tomlin as a completely unbelievable character, think about what criminologist Richard Wright, who wrote Armed Robbers in Action, says about self-reinforcing behavior: "Once somebody takes an action, in this case a shootout, then you're off and running. After that events take on a logic of their own, especially when you have these self-enclosed systems of self-reinforcing behavior. None of them make sense except in relation to one another."

This high-voltage thriller practically deserves a warning label on its cover. What with watching Tomlin befriending Stevens, Windermere trying to get the goods on Tomlin, a guy with a personal beef tracking Tomlin, Tomlin turning into a bad-ass criminal who makes ever-crazier decisions; and wondering whether Tomlin's partners in crime, Tricia Henderson and Dragan Medic, can be trusted––I'm not kidding, at one point I found my butt hovering a few inches above the chair, I was that amped up. Take your heart or high-blood pressure medication before you read Criminal Enterprise.

Oh, but before you do, don't neglect to read The Professionals first. It's not necessary to understand Criminal Enterprise, but do it because these books are so much fun. They look at issues such as the toll of juggling personal and professional lives, the impact of an economic downturn, the strain of leading a double life, and relationships between men and women and between parents and their children. There's an interesting chemistry between Stevens, a good cop and family man, and Windermere, a glamorous and gutsy FBI special agent. In addition, the writing is so crisp you can almost hear it crunch between your teeth, and the action builds to a jaws-clenching finish. Don't take my word for it. Pretend you're from Minnesota or Canada and be nice to yourself by reading Laukkanen.

Note: I received a free advance review copy of Criminal Enterprise. It will be published on March 21, 2013 by G. P. Putnam's Sons. I'm thrilled to learn that Laukkanen is now at work on his third Stevens/Windermere book.

Book Review of Kerry Greenwood's Unnatural Habits

Unnatural Habits by Kerry Greenwood

On her way out for cocktails in the iffy Melbourne neighborhood called Little Lon, Phryne Fisher rescues a young woman who is about to be attacked by three menacing thugs. The woman, Polly Kettle, tells Phryne she is a reporter on a hot story about three young, unmarried, pregnant women who disappeared from a nursing home where they were waiting to deliver their babies. During most of their pregnancy, the women had been made to atone for their sins by being forced to work in the Magdalen Laundry at the Abbotsford convent.

The day after the Little Lon adventure, Polly is kidnapped, and Phryne's friend, police detective Jack Robinson, asks Phryne to help find Polly, since Phryne is better suited to wheedle information from the brothelkeepers Polly had been asking about the missing women. Phryne's investigation takes her from the brothels to the slum home of one of the victims, to the (worse yet, to Phryne) middle-class homes of other victims, to the nightmarish Magdalen Laundry, and more. Even for the normally unflappable Phryne, what she learns about what can happen to unprotected young women is shocking and disheartening.

Although this story has as much verve as any Phryne Fisher novel, it tackles serious subjects in an affecting way. Young women who became pregnant in the 1920s were often rejected by their families and forced to go into unpaid servitude in convents, working in dreadful conditions and subject to whatever discipline the nuns wished to apply. Women had few legal rights and protections and could lose their freedom in many ways, as illustrated vividly in this novel. Phryne can't right all the wrongs of Melbourne society, but she's determined to help as many women as she can and, almost as important, mete out rough and suitable justice to their victimizers.

I confess that whenever I read a Phryne Fisher mystery (this is the 19th in the series), I squirm a little, because Phryne is just too good to be true. She's rich, beautiful, brilliant, able to outwit any villain and conquer any opponent. She collects devoted friends and dependents (doctors, society do-gooders, cabmen, wharfies, street urchins, assorted denizens of the demimonde; you name it) who enthusiastically become part of her detective team. Whenever Phryne needs help, there is always somebody ready to hand with the necessary resources who is eager to spring into action. Her allure is so overwhelming that even her lover's wife is her friend. And anyone who opposes her fears her––or is taught to fear her. Could there be such a superwoman today, let alone 90 years ago?

What I have to remind myself is that the Phryne character is a feminist fantasy figure, wielding a sword of social justice. And what's wrong with that? James Bond is a fantasy figure (of a different sort, obviously!) and nobody seems to mind that one bit. So I resolve to go with the flow and enjoy this fantasy figure and her fantasy life––which, in this book as always, includes colorful, extra-legal and oh-so-deserved punishments for bad guys; socialist workers who treat Phryne as a valued comrade; and hookers with hearts of gold.

Speaking of fantasy, this novel continues the Phryne tradition of lots of descriptions of period clothes, perfumes, hairstyles and, best of all, food and drink. I'm always heading for the refrigerator and liquor cabinet when I read a Phryne Fisher book. This time around, we're told of a classic book, Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, by William Terrington, published in London in 1869. Take a look at the book here. This is one peculiar recipe book. Here's one of the recipes:

Ponche á la Parisienne: Boil 1/2 pint of water and 1 lb. of sugar; when it comes to the thread, add the oleo-saccharum of 1 lemon [I've discovered that is a sweet oil made from citrus peel and sugar] and juice of 2, 1-1/2 pint of brandy, and 1/2 pint of rum; let this heat, but not boil; pour it in a hot bowl; set fire to it; stir it well, and pour into glasses while blazing.

I think I'll choose a more traditional Phryne favorite, like a White Lady (2 oz. gin, 1/2 oz. Cointreau, 1/2 oz. lemon juice and 1 egg white, shaken with ice and strained into a chilled cocktail glass). I suggest you do the same and raise a glass to what might be the best Phryne Fisher book of the series to date.

Unnatural Habits will be published in hardcover by Poisoned Pen Press on January 1, 2013. It is currently available in audiobook form from Audible.com.

Note: I received a free publisher's review copy of Unnatural Habits. A version of this review may appear on Amazon and other sites under my user names there.