Winter Preview 2014-2015: Part Eight

All those World War II and atmospheric crime novels I'm planning to read this winter need to be leavened with some good old-fashioned "entertainments," as Graham Greene used to call his not-so-serious writings. Luckily, it looks there will be plenty on hand.

UK cover on the left, US on the right.
As usual, the UK cover is lots better

Did you see the 2009 film An Education, about a young woman growing up too fast in England as the country transitioned from the austerity of the 1950s to the Swinging 60s? One of the striking things about that movie was its sense of that particular time and place. The novelist Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay, and if the description of his upcoming book, Funny Girl (Riverhead Hardcover, February 3), is anything to go by, he had a lot of that sensibility still inhabiting his brain after the screenplay was finished.

It's 1964, and young Barbara Parker decides that winning Miss Blackpool would doom her to a year of dreary local ribbon-cutting ceremonies, much too long to wait to go to London to make her fortune. So she refuses the tiara and heads off, hoping to emulate her idol, Lucille Ball. In fairly short order, she wins the lead in a BBC sitcom called Barbara (and Jim), about a young couple's married life. Hornby takes Barbara (screen-named Sophie Straw) and the creative characters behind the show through their personal comedies and tragedies, all the way up until the present.

I'm reading that the book includes a mix of real history and fiction, and has a selection of black-and-white photographs that lend it a little of the feel of a sort of celebrity bio or TV history. Word also is that it's both hilarious and touching, as the characters experience sudden celebrity and what happens after.

Another character looks back on a long and eventful life in Alison Jean Lester's Lillian on Life (Putnam Adult, January 13). Even though I claim to be cynical about authors' blurbs, I have to admit that this first caught my eye when one of my favorite authors, Kate Atkinson, wrote: "I absolutely loved Lillian on Life. It was a delight . . . so fresh and clever."

In this debut novel, Lillian is born to a stereotypical staid midwestern family in the 1930s, but leaves convention behind, as she samples men and cultures around the country and the world. I like the idea that the story isn't told as a straight chronology, but as a series of 24 life lessons, told with wry humor and a determination to avoid regret. I'm not at all sure I'll like Lillian, but I do like character studies and she definitely looks like quite a character.

Speaking of characters, how about the late columnist Dorothy Parker? I was recently reading the book Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair (Penguin, October 2014) and giggling over her "Hate Songs" pieces on men, actresses, relatives and the office. That put me in the mood for more.

Author Ellen Meister decided that Dorothy Parker should never die, so she decided to imagine that Parker lives on, as a feisty ghost residing at her old drinking and rapier-wit-wielding place, the Algonquin Hotel. Book One was 2013's Farewell, Dorothy Parker. But it wasn't a farewell, because the ghost of Dorothy Parker will return in Dorothy Parker Drank Here (Putnam Adult, February 24).

This time around, Dorothy will buttonhole Algonquin resident Ted Shriver, who is a reclusive resident waiting to die of cancer, which he refuses to have treated. Shriver has no will to live since his brilliant writing career was derailed years before by a charge of plagiarism. Dorothy will team up with TV producer Norah Wolfe to try to keep Shriver among the living. I've only seen one early review, but it says the book is full of heart, wit, suspense and compassion, so it seems like just the ticket for a gloomy midwinter day.

And speaking of characters who drink––a lot––Stewart O'Nan's West of Sunset (Viking Adult, January 13) takes on F. Scott Fitzgerald during the last three years of his life. His career was decrepit, Fitzgerald had ruined his health, Zelda was in a sanitarium, and in 1937 he grabbed one last chance by heading to Hollywood to be a screenwriter.

The Hollywood studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s produced some of my very favorite films (The Philadelphia Story, Holiday, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Rebecca), which means that I'm anxious to read this even though I've never been much of a Fitzgerald fan. Still, advance reviewers say it's an insightful novelization of the waning years of Fitzgerald's life, which were nothing like the Jazz Age period. And if I also get to read about Louis B. Mayer, Humphrey Bogart and––hey!––even Dorothy Parker in La-La Land, I'm happy.

I have some trepidation about Laurie R. King's 13th Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes book, Dreaming Spies (Bantam, February 24). I practically hurled the 11th book in the series, Pirate King, across the room in sheer frustration. Holmes was barely a presence, and Mary on her own was so boring, with her complaining and humorless self-satisfaction that I decided that was the end of my reading in the series. But I have some friends who said the next book, Garment of Shadows, was much better. What pushes me toward wanting to read this one is that the title is a play on Matthew Arnold's reference to Oxford as a city of "dreaming spires." I'm a complete sucker for Oxford-based mysteries.

The story of Dreaming Spies is apparently set not only in Oxford, but also in Japan. This visit to Japan is alluded to in a couple of earlier books, but this is the first time readers will learn exactly what Russell and Holmes got up to in that faraway land in 1924. Word is that it involves a blackmailing English lord and ninjas. Yes, ninjas. Will this 13th story in the series be a lucky 13? The proof will be in the reading.

One of my favorite Golden Age mysteries is Delano Ames's She Shall Have Murder, the first in a delightful series featuring Jane and Dagobert Brown, who are a sort of English Nick and Nora Charles. Compared to the Charleses, the Browns drink fewer martinis and more tea, but they get up to just as much silliness. In this first book, Jane Hamish is not yet married and is working in one of those classic English village law offices, where all the law you need to know is in the head of the senior partner, and the tea cart will be coming around any minute.

When spinster client Mrs. Robjohn is found dead from a gas leak in her home, the underemployed Dagobert Brown, Jane's intended, refuses to believe it's an accident and decides to investigate, dragooning a reluctant Jane into his sleuthing. It's a delightful story, with its charming characters and evocative description of the austerity of Britain shortly after World War II.

Delightful as the story is, why am I mentioning this old chestnut in the context of a book preview? Simple. Manor Minor Press has just republished the book with new cover art and annotations that add depth to the story. For example, I now know what Veganins and Melachrinos are, along with the full explanation of that British Double Summer Time I've seen mentioned in so many period British mysteries.

Another protagonist who is equal parts entertaining and exasperating is Don Tillman, first met in Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project, which I reviewed here. Don is an Australian genetics professor who resembles The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper, only with a lot more interest in sex. In The Rosie Project, Don's Wife Project, in which he attempts to find a mate via a rigorously designed requirements questionnaire, becomes tangled up in the Father Project, wherein he agrees to help barmaid/student Rosie identify her biological father.

I don't want to spoil The Rosie Project for you, but in the upcoming The Rosie Effect (Simon & Schuster, December 30), Don and Rosie are married and have moved to New York, where he is a visiting professor at Columbia and she is a medical student. Don has loosened up some of his strict rules for living to accommodate the more spontaneous and flexible Rosie, since he has concluded that, despite her failure to achieve a passing grade on his Wife Project questionnaire, she is the world's most perfect woman.

But when Rosie announces she is pregnant, Don is knocked for a loop. The amount of research involved in optimal pregnancy diet and exercise, successful parenthood and the best infant equipment is daunting enough, but a series of calamities result when Rosie repeatedly fails to be a cooperative subject and the rest of the world just doesn't get Don's spirit of scientific inquiry, as when he decides to spend long periods of time on a park bench observing small children in a playground and making notes.

I had the opportunity to read an advance copy of The Rosie Effect and, while it has a little of the bloat you always seem to see in the sequel to a runaway best-seller, and it doesn't achieve the same heights of inspired lunacy as The Rosie Project, it still gave me a few chuckles. It might be something that would cheer you up if you're a little under the weather after New Year's Eve.

Is it appropriate to look forward to a new book in a series when I still haven't read the first one? I was so excited about William Shaw's She's Leaving Home last year (originally published in the UK as A Song from Dead Lips) that I bought it right away, but it's still there on my e-reader. I find that's the problem with e-books; too easy to lose track of them.

Shaw's series features Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen and temporary Detective Constable Helen Tozer of London's Metropolitan Police in the Swinging 60s. It wasn't all rock-and-roll and miniskirts. The force was openly sexist and racist, and there were plenty of bent coppers. Crime rates were high; fraud and corruption were more the rule than the exception.

Life on the force can be hard for Breen, with his Irish heritage, and far harder for Helen. In Kings of London (Mulholland, January 27), Breen finds a death threat in his work pigeonhole and is met with indifference about the finding of a mutilated body thought to be a homeless man. The interest level changes when another body is found, this time the son of a powerful politician. The politician wants results, but the prominent don't want any publicity that could possibly harm them.

The more I look at the reviews of the books in this series, the harder I shake my head at my failure to read the first book yet. This looks like a gritty, stylish rendering of a past that's not so distant but is still a different world.

If you're a regular reader of Read Me Deadly, you know that I just love everything Veronica Mars. The TV show, the movie, and the book The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line that came out earlier this year. I'm even a devotée of the commercials that Kristen Bell is doing with her real-life husband, actor Dax Shepard, for Samsung. Check out their cute and funny Christmas ad here.

Veronica will be sleuthing again in Rob Thomas's Mr. Kiss and Tell (Vintage Paperback Original, January 20). As fans know, the Neptune Grand hotel has been the scene of all manner of sins, from adultery to blackmail to murder. For the fanciest hotel in town, it sure has its seamy side!

Now, a woman complains that she was brutally assaulted in the hotel, smuggled out and dumped in a field, left for dead. The hotel hires Mars Investigations (i.e., Veronica, her father Keith, and their electronics savant, Mac) to investigate the woman's story. But the hotel isn't a terribly cooperative client; they refuse to turn over their reservation list, for example. Surveillance video has key gaps, the victim refuses to identify who she was supposed to meet at the hotel, and other witnesses seem to be hiding information too.

One of the strengths of the Veronica Mars world is its clear-eyed gaze on corruption in a town with a wide gap between rich and poor. The police force is usually responsive only to the powerful, and it takes Mars Investigations and its few allies in the force and the courts to get any form of justice. Early readers say that Veronica's usual cynicism about Neptune is in full force and that we see plenty of our other favorite characters, including Veronica's old biker buddy Weevil and love interest Logan. This looks like just what I'll need in the bleak midwinter.

Note: I received free review copies of The Rosie Effect and She Shall Have Murder.

It Oughta Be a Law

I'm a mostly-retired lawyer. When I began practicing law in 1985, it was at a big firm, just at the start of the go-go era. The law practice soon became all about billing the maximum number of hours possible, accounting for every minute of the day, working long days six days a week and never feeling like my time was my own. (I know, I know, you're just overcome with sympathy for lawyers.)

I blame the concept of law as a business, which became popular at that time, and which displaced the notion of law as a learned profession. As a result of my experiences, I don't have much interest in legal mysteries. It's sort of like that old saw about how you'll never eat sausage again once you've seen how they're made. But there is one exception to my aversion toward legal mysteries: I'm a sucker for British mysteries about lawyers practicing in the good old days. Why? Let me count the ways.

Trials are over in nothing flat.

This makes life a lot easier for lawyers. I do see, though, that it's not necessarily such a bonus for the parties in interest, especially defendants. Take Dorothy L. Sayers's Strong Poison, for example. Harriet Vane is on trial for killing her lover, Philip Boyes, and it looks like she is only days away from a date with the hangman. Fortunately, Lord Peter Wimsey's sometime agent, Miss Climpson, is on the jury and she holds out against the other jurors' guilty verdict. The hung jury gives Lord Peter the time to find the real culprit and save Harriet's neck.

A defendant lucky enough to be a member of the House of Lords could escape the potential pitfalls of the British criminal court system by demanding a trial by his peers; which, in that case, meant Peers of the Realm. The law was changed in 1948, but when Lord Peter's brother, the Duke of Denver, was accused of murder in Clouds of Witness, the law was still in force. The trial in the House is quite a scene, with 300 members of the House of Lords entering the chamber two by two, wearing robes with ermine rows on their shoulders. Instead of a drab bailiff droning out the particulars of the charge, the Sergeant-At-Arms and the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery hand around a Commission and a Staff of Office and then read the Certiorari and Return, including a "long, sonorous rigmarole" that ends in the reading of the charge of murder against "the most noble and puissant prince Gerald Christian Wimsey, Viscount St. George, Duke of Denver, a Peer of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland."

Whew! After all that, the trial is almost an anticlimax. But when Sir Impey Biggs (one of the great character names) gives his final speech for the defense, he not only asks for a finding of Not Guilty, but notes that with it will come the restoration to the Duke of the "traditional symbols of his exalted rank." I suppose that means that he gets back his nobility and his puissance, whatever that means.

British barristers and judges wear nifty wigs and robes.

Having a bad hair day? Not a problem if you're a barrister or judge. Just pop on your wig and nobody will ever know. And those robes will hide gravy stains, missing buttons and any number of other crimes against fashion. Of course, some lawyers are less likely to need the camouflage than others. Frances Fyfield created the character of Helen West who, like herself, has a career as a lawyer for the Metropolitan Police and, later, for the Crown Prosecution Service. Although Helen deals with some very gritty crimes and many deeply dubious individuals, she is no fashion criminal. Some of Fyfield's award-winning Helen West novels include A Question of Guilt, Not That Kind of Place and Deep Sleep.

British court rules allow judges to question witnesses and to comment on the evidence to the jury.

Wouldn't this make being a judge a thousand times more fun than it is in the US in the present day? It would be like being Judge Judy, only for real––and with higher-toned rhetoric and better costumes. Although I think this judicial ability to shoot your mouth off whenever you want would make being a judge much more appealing to the kind of ego-driven person who is drawn to the law (yes, I said it), that power doesn't seem to make it all that worthwhile to some British judges. Take the poor Magistrate in Henry Cecil's Settled Out of Court, who is having a bad morning with a particularly full-of-himself and long-winded barrister named Tewkesbury:

MR. TEWKESBURY: Now, officer, I want you to follow this next question very closely.
CONSTABLE: I try to follow all your questions closely.
TEWKESBURY: And to what measure of success?
MAGISTRATE: You needn't answer that question.
TEWKESBURY: But, sir, with the greatest possible respect, am I not entitled to an answer?
MAGISTRATE: No.
TEWKESBURY: But, sir, unless I know the measure of success which the officer has in following my questions, it becomes more difficult for me to frame the next question.
MAGISTRATE: So far you seem to have overcome your difficulties most manfully. I have observed no lack of questions.
TEWKESBURY: Your Worship's courtesy overwhelms me.
MAGISTRATE (to himself): I wish it would.
TEWKESBURY: Is it now convenient, sir, that I should resume my cross-examination where I left off?
MAGISTRATE: Very well.
TEWKESBURY: Well then, officer, would you be kind enough to tell me the measure of success with which you have understood my previous questions?
MAGISTRATE: I've just said he needn't answer that question.
TEWKESBURY: But, sir, did I not understand you to change your mind and say that I may ask it? If I may say so, the greatest judges change their minds. Judex mutabilis, judex amabilis, if I may say so.
MAGISTRATE: Mr. Tewkesbury, would you kindly continue your cross-examination of this witness? I've fifty summonses to hear after this.
TEWKESBURY: I don't know how your Worship does it and retains your good humour.
MAGISTRATE (quietly, to his clerk): I've about had enough of this. Is he sober?

Georgette is a devotée of Henry Cecil's books and, doubtless, could contribute many more stories about judges and lawyers in Cecil's world.

John Mortimer's Horace Rumpole is of the view that judges seem to live only to undermine him by interrupting his witness examination in order to inject their own probing questions and by casting aspersions on his arguments when they give instructions to the jury. It's clearly a wonderful power for the judge, but not so much for its target, Rumpole. In the story "Rumpole on Trial," Rumpole complains that one of his regular nemeses, Judge "Ollie" Oliphant, sighs and rolls his eyes when Rumpole sums up the case for the defense and responds to Rumpole's arguments by telling the jury: "Of course, you can believe that if you like, Members of the Jury, but use your common sense, why don't you?"

British coroners have a power similar to judges to guide the outcome of cases. In Colin Watson's Flaxborough novels, longtime Coroner Albert Amblesby conducts inquests with an iron fist and a lot of sardonic comment. You get the impression that nothing ever happens in an inquest that isn't orchestrated by Amblesby. If you haven't read any Flaxborough novels, give Lonelyheart 4122 a try first. I think it's the funniest, and it features one of the great side characters in crime fiction, the deceptively genteel-appearing con-woman Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime.

Legal research was a piece of cake.

Statutes, regulations, administrative rulings, case precedents and all manner of legal authorities can take forever to slog through. The amount of material increases at a dizzying pace. But in Delano Ames's She Shall Have Murder, published in 1948 (see a full review at the end of this post), it was a much simpler matter. Law clerk Jane Hamish goes into the office of solicitor and senior partner Mr. Playfair to ask him about a matter of company law. Playfair responds: "In answer to Sir John's inquiry, Miss Hamish, quote to him paragraph twelve of the Companies Act of 1929. You'll find it in the fifth volume on the left there on the top shelf, page 116." Just imagine having all the law you need, right there in your office and, apparently, memorizable.

Speaking of cake, how about the snacks in the office?

I don't want to sound like a whiner, but our idea of a snack at the office was some scorched coffee from the Bunn-O-Matic, a candy bar from the newsstand downstairs or, if you could spare a little more time, a dash out to the coffee shop for a cookie. But in these old British mysteries, the lawyers seem to spend almost as much time taking breaks for tea, coffee and biscuits as they do working.

When I was reading She Shall Have Murder, it seemed like I was always hungry. It must have something to do with the fact that the staff spent so much time in the kitchen, boiling up hot water for tea, getting plates of buns and biscuits, opening tins of sardines and making sandwiches.

Forget the snacks, how about the drinks?

Even better than always having tea and biscuits in the office, the lawyers go out for long lunches, always seem to have a bottle of sherry (or something stronger) in their cupboards and, by 5:00 pm, you can usually find them propping up the bar at their favorite watering hole. In Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar series, the lawyers at 62 New Square seem to think that being "called to the Bar" means the siren song of their local wine bar, the Corkscrew, where they crack open bottles of Nierstein as often as they crack open law books.

Horace Rumpole, the most famous tippling barrister, can be found most evenings at Pommeroy's Wine Bar, a glass of what author John Mortimer calls Chateau Fleet Street or Chateau Thames Embankment in hand. I never thought about it before, but it does seem that in crime fiction, English lawyers drink wine, while police detectives seem to prefer beer and whisky. Is it a class thing or does it just go with the job? Maybe I should check and see what Elizabeth George's Thomas Lynley drinks. (I think wine, but I'm not sure.) Lynley is both a police detective and the 8th Earl of Asherton, so his choice of tipple might be something of an indicator whether the British character's drink of choice is based on class or profession. Or, maybe not, since Elizabeth George is an American.

* * *

Reading these books could just about ruin the practice of law for anybody trying to do the job these days. Hmm. Maybe I'll forward some of these books to some of today's law-as-a-business types and show them how much more fun it was (and could be?) to practice law as a learned profession.

If you'd like to read other classic mysteries featuring British lawyers, here are some suggestions:

Cyril Hare's Francis Pettigrew series, beginning with Tragedy At Law

Carter Dickson's Sir Henry Merrivale series

R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke series

Michael Underwood's Rosa Epton series

Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair

Michael Gilbert's Smallbone Deceased, Death Has Deep Roots, The Crack In the Teacup and Flash Point

Agatha Christie's "Witness For the Prosecution" (and the film of the same name, starring Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power and Elsa Lanchester)

Check out this annotated edition
from Manor Minor Press!

Review of Delano Ames's She Shall Have Murder

There are few things I enjoy more than a good, old-fashioned British puzzle mystery. The kind with a limited number of suspects, and whose solution depends largely upon figuring out times and places, and picking up on small clues dropped in dialog. But the mystery also has to have an appealing sleuth. Delano Ames gives us all the elements of an excellent classic mystery, along with a bonus: two appealing sleuths.

Jane Hamish is a law clerk at the small London firm of Playfair & Son. Her fiancé, Dagobert Brown, is currently unemployed. A regular client, the extremely paranoid Mrs. Robjohn, has been found dead in her apartment. The death is ruled accidental, the result of the gas jet in the gas heater going on in the middle of the night when gas service is restored after an outage. Dagobert, who visited Mrs. Robjohn earlier that evening with Jane, realizes that the death was actually a murder. With his plentiful spare time, he begins an investigation.

Over drinks, tea and dinners, Jane and Dagobert compare notes about his sleuthing and what she has been able to find out in the office. They have quite a few suspects: Mrs. Robjohn's son, Douglas; his secret fiancée and Jane's office co-worker Sarah; Major Stewart, one of the law firm partners; Rosemary, another co-worker and someone who shares a secret with Major Stewart; Oates, the light-fingered office runner with apparent underworld connections; and old Mr. Playfair himself. Figuring out the culprit will take a lot of devious tricks by Dagobert, and some risky ploys by Jane.

Delano Ames's writing is delightfully wry, and Dagobert and Jane are a lively, smart-talking pair. They're not unlike Nick and Nora Charles in some ways. Dagobert delights in tricking suspects and driving them a little crazy with his antics, while Jane often tries to puncture Dagobert's bumptiousness with a well-placed dart or two. But, unlike Nora, Jane is an active partner in the sleuthing; a supremely intelligent young woman who is up to the challenge of solving the crime.

Note: A version of this review appears on Amazon, under my username there.