Review of William Boyd's Solo

Solo by William Boyd

In a New York Times book review of William Boyd's James Bond novel, Solo, Olen Steinhauer (one of my favorite modern espionage writers) writes that "[Ian] Fleming’s Bond was only rarely a fully fleshed character. More often, he was a catalog of likes and dislikes, and it’s this very hollowness that has allowed later generations to imbue him with their own sensibilities." I think Steinhauer has it exactly right. Bond has continued for 60 years now, in books and movies, and each generation enjoys a different Bond; one suitable for that age's zeitgeist.

Though Boyd sets Solo in 1969, when Bond is a 45-year-old agent, the book reflects both present-day concerns and the weary cynicism we now have about governments and their minions. After Bond celebrates his forty-fifth birthday on his own, drinking champagne and martinis in the Dorchester Hotel restaurant, his boss, M, gives him a new mission. Disguised as a journalist for the French international agency Agence Presse Libre, James is to head for the African nation of Zanzarim, currently in a nearly stalemated civil war.

The war began when oil was discovered in the southern part of the country, and the country's two dominant tribes go to war, with the south attempting to split off into a new nation, called Dahum. The Zanzarim forces from the north are much better equipped, but the scrappy southerners have been holding them at bay for two years––though at the cost of a famine that has left nearly all of Dahum, except its capital city, graveyards and waiting rooms for death. This could all be present-day Africa, unfortunately; not much has changed in the last few decades. The reader recognizes the scenario immediately.

Anyone familiar with the Bond books and movies will recognize a great deal more than the African scenario. Martinis? Check. Gadgetry? Check (though this book is not remotely the Q playground that some other stories have been.) Beautiful women? Check. Being around Bond too much becomes dangerous to one's health? Check. Relentless and creepy villain? Check. Evocative and unforgettable character names? Check.

Bond's assignment is to make the leader of the Dahumian forces, Brigadier Solomon Adeka, "less effective"––a classic intelligence-game euphemism. Of course, there are plenty of zigs and zags along the way, and many memorable characters. Bond's intelligence contact in Zanzarim, the beautiful half-Zanzari/half-Scottish Blessing Ogilvie-Grant; dangerous Rhodesian mercenary Jakobus Breed, whose previous battle injuries have given him a permanently open and deceptively weeping left eye; local helpers with the monikers Christmas and Sunday; and Bond's "fellow" journalists, including one bloated, misogynist sot from the Daily Mail named Geoffrey Letham and a London stringer named Digby Breadalbane (doesn't that sound like a J. K. Rowling name?) who is grateful for Bond's treating him to beer and cigarets.

When Bond's mission is over, he can't shake the desire to get personal vengeance on those who betrayed him in Zanzarim. That quest takes him to Washington, D. C. The U.S. setting allows Boyd to make a few tart observations about how easy it is for Bond to obtain some pretty serious firepower, and how Americans don't have a clue how to make coffee. (A refreshing change from the usual British complaints that Americans don't make tea according to their strict rituals.)

William Boyd's choice of Africa for his setting was a good one. This is almost home ground for him, since he was born in Ghana himself, in 1952, and was a teenager when Biafra, in southern Nigeria, attempted to secede, triggering a bitter three-year war and blockade, which caused horrific famine in Biafra. And, of course, there have been all too many incidents of war, tribal violence and related mass starvation in Africa since then.

As espionage thrillers go, this is on the more thoughtful end of the spectrum. You'll find action scenes, sure, but this isn't an action-fest and there are no catalog-worthy verbal sketches of elaborate spy gear. It being a Bond novel, we do have descriptions of cars and guns, but not in the near-pornographic detail you see in some of the Bond movies.

Boyd is much more interested in the life of an intelligence agent; what it does to the psyche to have a life of lies and to know that anyone who gets close may pay a heavy price. The Bond of Solo would fit right in if he were dropped down in Boyd's previous books, Restless or Waiting for Sunrise. A perennial issue in Boyd's books is the nature of identity, and though that's not a dominant theme in this book, it is present––which seems only right for James Bond.

Boyd is also a better writer than Ian Fleming. There is a bit of a clunker scene of lengthy exposition toward the end of the book, but there are moments of real beauty in Boyd's prose, and he brings introspection and complexity to his Bond. Boyd's Bond is a fallible man, and far from invincible. If you're looking for a thoughtful, somewhat melancholy spy thriller, Solo is a good choice.

Note: Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

All Those Daughters

From the very first book in Tony Hillerman's Navaho series featuring Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee, The Blessing Way, I was hooked. Each and every story in the series is a gem. When his daughter wrote her own book to add some sparkle to the series, it seemed appropriate to focus on a female perspective. This made me consider all sorts of daughters, and I might be writing about a few of them over the next few weeks.

Spider Woman’s Daughter (October 1, Harper/HarperCollins), by Anne Hillerman

Monday morning at the Navajo Inn has been a favorite meeting place for the Navajo police, going back to when Joe Leaphorn was just a young detective and making his reputation as someone with a sharp mind. These meetings had become brainstorming sessions for unsolved cases, which segued into routine matters of budget and staffing. Joe was talking about a woman who hadn’t shown up for a meeting, when Captain Howard Largo called the meeting to order. Despite the fact that Leaphorn was retired from the police force and working as a PI, he was welcome to stay. Largo also incorporated a young officer on a rotating basis each week, and this week it was Officer Bernadette "Bernie" Manuelito. She had been on the force for several years and had been married to Jim Chee for two of these. She was honored to drive the hour it took to get to Santa Fe.

After the meeting, Bernie is looking out the window while making a call from her cellphone when she sees a slight person wearing a hoodie approach Leaphorn and appear to shoot him in the head. She is powerless to stop the attack. The shooter then jumps in a pickup and drives off. After Bernie gives the only eyewitness statement, she is told to stay out of the way of the investigation. When the dust settles, Bernie’s job is to contact Joe’s family and friends.

Naturally, the first place to look is at Joe’s present cases and perhaps at old grudges. Revenge is not a Navajo attribute, but many Navajo have changed, so the field is wide open.

In the Navajo mythology, Spider Woman is the Holy Person who taught the Navajo to weave and gave the Hero Twins the weapons they needed to find their father, the Sun, and to rid the world of monsters. In this world, sometimes there are very messy situations with many threads, and those women who straighten everything out may be called Spider Woman’s Daughter. That is the role Bernie Manuelito plays in this mystery. She is the kind of person who notices details that others miss: a silver bracelet with hearts on it, doodles with triangles that have deeper meaning, misplaced pottery that others overlook, patterns and reflections.

I don’t think that Manuelito will replace Leaphorn and Chee, but she is a great addition. The same goes for Anne Hillerman. Her dad Tony Hillerman’s books are there for us to reread any time, but now we have the pleasure of reading hers. Fortunately, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

The Headhunter’s Daughter (2011, Morrow), by Tamar Myers, tells the tale of another kind of daughter. This one lived between two worlds.

The gravel pits that were the residua of deep excavations along the great Kasai and Tshikapa rivers left by the Europeans digging for diamonds in the Congo were known to be haunted by a Belgian woman who had drowned in them. One day in the years after World War II, a boy of the Bashilele tribe came here to fulfill a ritual that would allow him to become a man. He had to take a human life and, along with it, the head of the person he killed. The skull would be used as his mug, with which to drink his palm wine for the rest of his life. Despite this, his people were not cannibals and they looked down on those river tribes who were.

What the boy found at the river looked like a beast eating a child, since he had never seen a perambulator before. When he heard the sound of a truck coming––another unfamiliar sound––he grabbed the unusual-looking child and ran for miles back to his hidden village, taking the child to his mother and dying, clutching his chest, before he can explain anything. About 13 years later, rumors come to the ears of the Belgian authorities of a white girl living with a tribe of headhunters deep in the jungle. Captain Pierre Jardin of the local Belgian police has asked two women to accompany him to the interior. One is a local newly-arrived American missionary from South Carolina, Amanda Brown, whose native name is Ugly Eyes, and a woman who works for her, known as Cripple. In this part of the world, names always mean something. As a matter of fact, the local people think that names with no meaning are foolish.

The once-little baby is now going through puberty, and is the daughter of the Chief Headhunter. She too is known as Ugly Eyes because of the odd color of here eyes, but she, like all the other women, has been made attractive by having been scarified on her face and back and having had her front teeth removed. No one knows how these customs got started, but it is well ingrained despite the fact that they all bemoan their loss when it comes time to eat. The Chief Headhunter thinks it might be a good thing for his daughter to spend time with the people known as the Breakers of Rocks, because they are everywhere and are now in power, but the Headhunter continues to be amazed how such a primitive and ignorant people had managed to subjugate his own.

What happens to both of the Ugly Eyes will have you on the edge of your seat. Cripple, whose early life was chronicled in The Witch Doctor’s Wife (2009, Avon), is always the voice of reason. One of her take-home lessons is: "Life is very simple if you don’t think it too much. Act first from the stomach, and then see what the head has to say."

This is an engrossing story of many layers. There is, at first, the mystery of the kidnapping of a baby ensconced in what at first seems to be a satire on cultural differences and overt and covert racism. But then one is intrigued to find out that Tamar Myers grew up in the Belgian Congo and was raised alongside a tribe of headhunters, the Bashilele. Much of what she describes of the life of the different tribes, including the Belgians and the missionaries, is true to life.

Myers adds a postscript to the story, as she tells the tale of her ancestor, Joseph Hochstetler, who was captured by the Delaware Indians during the French and Indian War. Surviving records tell the story that he was ritually scrubbed in the river by the women and told that he was now part of their tribe, flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone and that his white blood had been washed away. He was 10 years old at the time. When he was released nine years later, he did not want to leave his new family and he visited them often. One is not just the color of one's skin; one is the color of one's heart.

There is also an old movie, The Light in the Forest, with this theme. In 1764, when a peace treaty between the Delawares and the British requires that all captives be returned to their families, Johnny Butler (a very young James MacArthur of Hawaii Five-O's "Book 'em, Danno!" fame) is forced to return, but the injustice he sees sends him back to the wilds. And you can see Fess Parker in this film as well. I thinks it's only available on VHS.

Ice vs. Heat

Earlier this week, I was stunned when my fellow Material Witnesses began making lists for our upcoming summer books post on June 28th. Is it summer time already? My kids are out of school, but it's still hard to believe when the weather has been zigzagging between hot and cold. I've been pulling sweaters on and off and switching from hot chocolate to iced tea accordingly. But the decision to apply heat or ice can be trickier than that. Take the debate between applying a cold pack or a heating pad to a sports injury. And how do you pick a book when the thermometer ranges from 95° to 55°? A book like Robert Aickman's Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories (the title's got that right) raises your temperature by making your heart pound, but also gives you goosebumps that chill. A better bet might be one of these two books:

When Beluga narrator Nick Reid tells himself out loud, "I'm not having the week I'd hoped to have," he hasn't seen the half of it. He and his ginormous best friend, Desmond, were "taking time off" after robbing a meth lord of $300,000 in Rick Gavin's first series book, Ranchero (reviewed here). To keep up appearances, Nick and Desmond have returned to repossessing rent-to-own furniture when Kalil's customers, many of whom live in the type of houses where dogs boil out from under the porch and a shotgun pokes out of a window, don't make their payments.

Therefore, life could be pretty routine in Indianola, Mississippi but for the fact that Desmond's ex-wife Shawnica still has him in her clutches. Her shiftless brother Larry, fresh out of Parchman Prison, wants Desmond to lend him money for a criminal scheme. A hidden trailer-load of already-stolen Michelin tires is just waiting for Larry and his friend Skeeter to steal and sell on the black market––but they need money to buy a truck. Desmond's $30,000 buys not only transportation, but also the terrible vengeance of the man who originally stole the tires, a well-connected Mississippi Delta crime lord, Lucas Shambrough. Between helping Desmond deal with that god-awful sniveling Larry, Shambrough's deadly "ninja schoolgirl assassin" and his dumber-than-two-sacks-of-hair hired cracker villains, it's a wonder Nick has time to court pretty Greenville cop Tula Raintree, although it is convenient that their first "date" happens when she's placed Nick under arrest.

Author Rick Gavin, who lives in the Delta and writes when he isn't doing construction work, combines the charm of appealing characters with insightful observations of Delta residents and traditions. The dialogue is pitch perfect. Watching Nick, a former Virginia deputy sheriff, scuff up no-goods, and Desmond squeeze relish onto his Sonic drive-in hot dogs goes well with ice tinkling in a glass of lemonade and the drone of a ceiling fan. This entertaining Mississippi Delta noir, both gritty and funny, is perfect for hot days of summer reading.

On the other hand, Richard Crompton's 2013 debut, Hour of the Red God, is a great pick when it gets chilly. It's a book set in Nairobi, Kenya, "a landscape of corrugated iron, concrete, and thatched makuti roofs."

The title is the English translation of Enkai Nanyokie, the Maasai tribe's name for the time when people turn against each other in anger and madness descends. In his criminal investigations and the loss of his wife, Detective Sergeant Mollel is much more familiar with the vengeful and capricious Red God than the loving Black God.

Mollel is a conscientious man who never seems to feel at home, even with his young son. He has long and looped ears that are a mark of pride among the Maasai but an object of ridicule and prejudice elsewhere. His boss, Otieno, has brought him back from traffic duty in Loresho to Nairobi Central CID. The mutilated body of a young Maasai woman has been found in Uhuru Park and Otieno expects Mollel to solve what he calls "a Maasai circumcision ceremony gone wrong."  Mollel disagrees. He says it's deliberate murder.

He and his colleague Kiunga, a Kikuyu, investigate against the backdrop of the 2007 election, with its ethnic violence and the involvement of mungiki gangs and the government's paramilitary General Services Unit. Evidence leads the two policemen to Orpheus House, a recently closed refuge for women who wish to leave prostitution, and to powerful political and religious leaders.

Former BBC journalist and Nairobi resident Crompton's book is nothing short of stunning. His prose, with a lack of quotation marks, takes some getting used to, but it fits this complex story about crime set in an exotic Nairobi. Mollel reminisces about his tribal childhood and shares various Maasai myths. Even in the city center, Mollel doesn't escape tradition. At night, there are rumors of night runners with supernatural speed and strength who, when killed return, to their forms as normal humans. The stories about scavengers that Mollel's mother told him influence how he solves a crime. Crompton's characters are caught between modernity and traditionalism. How does tribal identity survive in a changing world?

Here Come the Brides

A fanciful person once asked me: "Why do women cry at weddings?" Well, I have an opinion about that, but it's one I usually keep to myself. There are, of course, many marriages that are an excellent cause for a good cry.

In Wife of the Gods, by Kwei Quartey, there is an interesting story about one of these sad instances.

In Ghana, on the western part of the African arm, there is a custom that goes back for generations. Accepted in the past, it has become controversial in the present. The custom relates to the Trokosi, which is translated to wife of the gods or slave of the gods. These are young women who are given in their early puberty to the holy man of the village to serve him in all ways and to make reparations for possible wrongdoings. Traditionalists are in favor of the custom and deny that slavery is involved. The Ghanaian government, as well as other organizations, oppose the practice.

Detective Inspector Darko Dawson is a city boy who lives in Accra. He is quite pleased with his life as a policeman, husband and father. He has had tragedies in his past, having lost his mother when she disappeared after a visit to her sister in Ketanu, and when his brother was severely and permanently injured in an accident.

Accra

Aside from having an anger management problem, Darko is ordinary––except for a special sense called a synesthesia, with which he can hear special qualities in people's voices. He describes voices as the sensation of soft, wet grass on bare feet, the texture of rich warm velvet, and even the sense of a sharp wet river reed scraped across the palm. These descriptions help the reader get a better sense of the character so described.

A young medical student, Gladys Mensah, was helping out in the village of Ketanu, bringing education about sanitation and AIDS. She was also trying to help the young girls and women known as the Trokosi. One day, she is found murdered near the area where the village priest/holy man lived. One of the Trokosi, Efia, is the person who finds the body. Many years earlier, Efia’s uncle murdered a man and was imprisoned, but the family feels they have been cursed and are suffering from the gods' displeasure. The elders of her family go to the high priest, Togbe, who communes with the gods and tells them that all will be well if they bring him a female child to serve at the shrine. She will belong to the gods and she will give birth to the children they give her through Togbe. Thus, at the age of 12, Efia becomes a wife of the gods.

Witchcraft and traditionalist healing and spirituality are essential elements of the story. DI Dawson has more modern beliefs, and he decries old-fashioned notions. This is what makes this story especially satisfying; the juxtaposition between a modern city like Accra, and life in a rural area such as Ketanu.

Dawson is sent to the location to clear up this case. He has relatives in the area and he speaks the local language, Ewe. He has mixed feelings, because he feels more at home with concrete under his feet, and memories of the disappearance of his mother in this part of Ghana have kept him from visiting his family, his mother's sister, for decades. But, on the other hand, he may re-investigate this mystery as well. He too, has a foot in both worlds, even though he has tried to put the past behind him.

This is a story of contrasts. The reader gets a better sense of Ghana because of the inclusion of both the city and the country life. The elements of the story that give a picture of the past make the present stand out, as the culture of the Ghanaians evolves as do all ways of life. Solving a mystery with modern techniques at hand makes the witchcraft stand out in stark relief. Finally, Gladys and Efia are women who belong to two different worlds, but in a small town in Ghana, their stories come together in a nice contrast.

This book has been compared to Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana mysteries, but aside from the African setting most things are quite different. The pace, the characters and the subject matter make this a unique mystery of Africa. I am really looking forward to the next in the series, Children of the Street.

Another problematic form of marriage is expounded upon in the novel Desert Wives, by Betty Webb.

"What do you call a dead, sixty-eight-year-old polygamist? In the case of my thirteen-year-old client, you call him your fiancé."

Arizona private investigator Lena Jones took Rebecca Corbett away from Prophet Solomon Royal, because her job was to rescue her from a polygamy compound called Purity, and soon the men from the area would be swarming to take back what they saw as their property: a breeding-age girl.

Rebecca's mother, who had left the compound sometime before, has hired Lena to find the girl, whose father had returned to the compound and taken young Rebecca with him. He brokered a deal in which he would get two 16-year-old brides, and the head of the polygamists, Prophet Solomon, would get beautiful Rebecca.

It is no use to call in the police, since the reality of the political situation is that despite laws against polygamy and child marriage, it was still prevalent in many small enclaves of Mormon fundamentalist sects that separated from the mainstream LDS Church, and the local authorities do not interfere with the sects.

Lena and Jimmy Sisiwan, her partner at Desert Investigations in Scottsdale, Arizona, have hidden Rebecca among Jimmy’s Pima Indian relatives. Then, the leader of the compound, Prophet Solomon, is found dead and Rebecca’s mother is arrested for the murder of the polygamist.

Polygamist sect wives and children

Lena goes undercover at the Purity compound, masquerading as one of the wives of a sympathetic member of the compound who, while believing in polygamy, do not endorse child marriages.

As Lena learns while undercover, there are troubles afoot in Purity. The new “Prophet” is more moderate, and is totally against underage marriage, as well as forced marriage, but he has an uphill battle and his life is also been threatened.

Many of the male members of the Purity compound have access to arms, and many of the women who seemingly are docile and hardworking are seething below the surface. What is causing this pot to boil? Why do the authorities turn a blind eye time and again?

As The New York Times pointed out, if Betty Webb had gone undercover and written Desert Wives as a piece of investigative journalism, she'd probably be up for a Pulitzer.

Who would you ask to define wife? You might get an unexpected answer. When Anonymous was asked to define a husband, he had this story to tell: "I told my wife that a husband is like a fine wine; he gets better with age. The next day, she locked me in the cellar."

Have Ambulance, Will Travel

I am amazed to think that we are coming up to the 100th anniversary of the War To End All Wars. I've been intrigued by the WWI era and I frequently read mysteries that use the days after the war and into the 1920s as a backdrop for unusual themes and interesting characters who inhabit the shadowy world of crime fiction.

One of the sub-genres of mystery fiction is that involving the plucky young woman who has the foresight to cast off the shackles that were keeping women at home, barefoot, pregnant and yada yada. Class barriers at this time were dissolving for many reasons, only one of which was the fact that an entire generation of Britain's young men had been wiped out and women were stepping in to fill the breaches. There were a few of these young ladies who cast off their pasts and leapt to the defense of the good guys, managing to get themselves close to the front lines of the war in France, either as ambulance drivers or nurses.

Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher was one of the early protagonists who fit this mold. I first encountered Phryne Fisher when she took her first case that started with an ocean voyage to Australia in Cocaine Blues. This mystery introduced Phryne as a wealthy young woman with some relation to the British nobility. It was the decade of the 1920s and the Honourable Phryne was at loose ends in London.

Phryne had not always been rich; she was actually born in Australia in circumstances of poverty, but her father came into an inheritance and the Fishers left their privation behind them. Phryne was named after a courtesan of extraordinary beauty who lived in Ancient Greece in the 4th century BC. This lovely was purported to be the model for some famous statues of Venus.

Hispano-Suiza

After finishing school, Phryne went to France and joined a French women's ambulance unit during WWI and was duly decorated for bravery. Phryne being quite beautiful, she also worked for awhile as an artist's model. After the success of solving her first murder case, she settles down in Melbourne, Australia, in a house with the number 221B and has no problems finding clients. She has a certain code of conduct, but she does enjoy the company of lovers. She also drives a Hispano-Suiza, one of the few in her part of the country. Greenwood has drawn a vivid portrait of a very intriguing sleuth with an excellent sense of place and time and I have enjoyed almost all of the 18 books in this series. I have kept two for a rainy day because I don't tire of Phryne.

Another intrepid young lady of fiction who has fled home and hearth is the American, Jade del Cameron, whose character has hints of Beryl Markham and Isak Dinesen. This series of six books so far is written by Suzanne Arruda. Jade was raised on a ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. But we are introduced to her in Mark of the Lion when she is attached to the French Army as an ambulance driver. Her mantra when the shells are pelting down is "I only occupy one tiny space, the shells have all the rest of France to hit."

After surviving an air raid by the skin of her teeth Jade takes on the dying wish of a mortally wounded pilot who asks her to find his brother and thus begins her career as a detective. Her investigation leads her to Nairobi, Africa. Later she comes back to Africa as a photographer, but mysteries and occasional murders require her sleuthing skills. She is an intrepid soul and counts marksmanship, knowledge of motor mechanics learned in the ambulance corps and piloting an airplane among her abilities.

The backdrop of Africa enlivens this series. Del Cameron is frequently either going into the wilds on safari or on photographic jobs in the interior, while at the same time clashing with the staid British ideas of how a woman should behave. She is gutsy enough to try everything and has no fear when she has to pilot an airplane. Jade is very different from Phryne Fisher and both series have a lot to recommend them.

Perhaps the best known of our mold-shattering young women is Jacqueline Winspear's amazing Maisie Dobbs. There are eight books chronicling her adventures. She is introduced in Maisie Dobbs, which was the Agatha Award winner for Best First Novel in 2003. Maisie was the daughter of a costermonger (someone who sells fruit and vegetables from a wheel barrow) and she went into service at the age of 13 as a maid for an aristocratic family in London. She was very bright and, with the help of her employers, she left their service, went to school and later trained in the nursing profession.

MG

While a battlefield nurse during the war, part of a Voluntary Aid Detachment, Maisie was injured both in body and spirit. She returned to London after the war to work with her mentor, a well-known detective, Dr. Maurice Blanche, at Discrete Investigations. When Blanche retires, Maisie opens her own detective agency. She is cautious, concerned about the state England is in but she does need to get around and so has an MG as a pair of wheels.

In her first case, she is asked to look into why several severely scarred veterans are dying unexpectedly at a therapy retreat on a farm. Maisie sees that perhaps the murderer may be as much a victim of the war as the vets. This story makes us very aware that wars don't stop on the date the history books give us; in fact, they never end. The repercussions are like the splash of a pebble in a brook, ever widening. Winspear does the history of the social changes that came about after the Great War beautifully without sermonizing.

I won't make a prediction about which of these heroines you would like best. Perhaps it is important to know that there were real women who could have been the models for characters such as these. One of them is Hélène Dutrieu (10 July 1877 – 26 June 1961), known as the Belgian Hawk, who was a cycling world champion and stunt person, pioneer aviator, wartime ambulance driver and a director of a military hospital. After the war she was a journalist.