Random Thoughts, Or, Murder on a C-Note

Cinco de Mayo

The big holiday will be here in a few days, but I'm not thinking of the Mexican celebration. Instead, I'm clearing the decks to be ready to read Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins, the followup to her Life After Life (Reagan Arthur Books, 2013). I still think about Life After Life, the story of the repeating lives of Ursula Todd in 20th-century England.

A God in Ruins (Little, Brown and Company, May 5, 2015) tells the story of her younger brother, Teddy, who was an RAF pilot during World War II and never expected to survive the war. What will the 20th century have in store for him? I plan to find out as soon as possible.

I sure won't be waiting until December 15 for Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May and the Burning Man, the 12th in the Peculiar Crimes Unit series. It was published last month in the UK by Doubleday, but I am going to be patient enough to wait until May 7, when the audiobook comes available in the US on Audible. The narrator, Tim Goodman, is so wonderful, I prefer the audiobook versions of the series anyway, so I suppose it's a happy oddity that the audiobook is available in the US more than seven months before the print edition.


The Cormoran Strike series

Remember back in 2013 when it was revealed that Robert Galbraith, the pseudonymous author of The Cuckoo's Calling, was none other than J. K. Rowling? Since then, we've had a sequel in that Cormoran Strike/Robin Ellacott series, The Silkworm, which I thought was at least as good as the first. I was just talking with some mystery-reading friends the other day about when we might see another book in the series, and that got me to researching . . . .

I learned that the third book in the series will be called Career of Evil and will be coming out sometime this autumn. Yippee! Though, judging from her last book, I would have thought there is no mystery that Rowling sees the publishing business as the career of evil.

I also learned that the BBC plans to dramatize the series, which is terrific news. I've been enjoying the Grantchester series, originally produced by Britain's ITV and shown on PBS this last season––even though, frankly, I'm not a big fan of the Grantchester books. If ITV could make such an excellent series from those books, I'm hoping BBC will do even better with the superior material of the Cormoran Strike books.


O, Canada

The Old Mansion House, Georgeville, Québec

I look forward every year to a new Armand Gamache/Three Pines book from Louise Penny. One comes every August, like clockwork, but it always seems like such a long wait in between. If you feel the same way, you might want to check out this site, which is currently running a series about the real places that inspired locations in the books. It's a lot of fun to read about the real inspirations, like the very un-scary-looking pink house that nevertheless inspired the creepy Hadley House in Still Life.

Louise Penny's monthly newsletter is always an entertaining read too. It's almost like getting a letter from a friend. You can sign up to read her newsletters here. One bit of recent news from her is her husband's recent Alzheimer's diagnosis. She writes with such affecting openness about how this has affected their lives.


Cozies

My brother-in-law, Jeff, enjoys traditional mysteries and is a big-time completist when it comes to series. Once he starts a series, if he likes the first book, he plows through the entire series, usually without a break.

Jeff was the one who first told me about Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series years ago, and that's now up to 20 books. I think I told him about Rhys Bowen's Her Royal Spyness cozies, about the impoverished Lady Georgiana Rannoch, who is 30-somethingth in line for the throne of England. That reminded him of another Englishwoman, Daisy Dalrymple, who decides to make her own living as a journalist rather than rely on her Viscount father.

Daisy's connections to the members of the upper crust allow her to access the kinds of places that are closed to working-class types like police detectives. St. Martin's publishes attractive paperbacks of the series, and seems to be starting over at the beginning. The first book, Death at Wentwater Court, was just republished in March.


What makes a good spy novel?

I was on a real run with C-initialed topics, but I can't resist adding one of these things that's not like the others. "What makes a good spy novel?" is the question recently asked of Olen Steinhauer in The New York Times. As a voracious reader of espionage novels, I was taken by his response:

Depends on the reader. For me, it’s the moral muddiness of the ends/means equation that comes up more often in spy fiction than in, say, murder mysteries. The best espionage stories not only ask questions about how spying is performed, but they also question the value of the job itself. And when the profession becomes a metaphor for living, the spy novel can delve into the very questions of existence, while thrilling the reader with a convoluted plot. Do all that well, and you’ve got a potential classic on your hands.

I'd say that quote is a particularly apt description of Steinhauer's newest novel, All the Old Knives (Minotaur Books, March 2015).

Spring Preview 2015: Part Eight

Some of the biggest mysteries for me right now have more to do with book availability than book contents.

There is no book titled The Strange Publication of the Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths, but there should be. You might remember that I'm crazy about Harry Bingham's series about Fiona Griffiths, a police detective in Cardiff, Wales, who has a very unusual psychiatric background (Cotard's syndrome; check it out), a mysterious family history she's trying to uncover, an uneasy relationship with authority figures, and an absolute passion for defending the helpless victims of violent crime. You can read more about Fiona and her entertaining attempts to live on what she calls Planet Normal here.

I read the first two books in the Fiona series, Talking to the Dead (Delacorte, 2012) and Love Story, With Murders (Delacorte, 2014), and I was anxiously awaiting the third book, The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths, which I'd read was to be published in the US this spring. I got impatient and ordered my copy from the UK (Orion, 2014), but I wanted to be sure to let our Read Me Deadly friends know about the US publication. This is where things became mysterious.

I discovered that without my having read anything about it anywhere, The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths slipped out at the end of January in the US, apparently self-published (Sheep Street Books is listed as the Kindle publisher and Amazon's CreateSpace for the paperback). I wondered what the heck had happened here. Previous books in the series had received favorable reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major review outlets, so why didn't Bingham's traditional US publisher publish the new book?

Bingham's website supplied the answer. He has several long blog posts on the subject, but the gist is that his US publisher was so noncommittal about whether and when they'd put out The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths that he finally just published it himself. Good for him, but I have to say I'm mystified as to why any US publisher wouldn't be eager to publish this series. I'm constantly amazed by how the James Patterson factory can get anything published anytime they want, but truly excellent writers like Bingham and Christopher Fowler struggle to get their books published in the US. Do US publishers think
Americans are too provincial to want to read British writers, or do the publishers just not know good writing if it bites them in the butt (or bum, as our friends across the pond would say)? As I say, it's a mystery.

Alright, enough about all this publishing headache. Let's get on with the book so that you can buy it and read it! When a payroll fraud case leads to murder and blossoms into what appears to be a far-flung criminal enterprise, DC Fiona Griffiths goes undercover as an office worker. Calling herself Fiona Grey, she tries to learn the scope of this crime network and who is responsible for the murder. Fiona normally has some trouble fully realizing emotions and inhabiting Planet Normal. Now, by taking on another persona, will she lose the grip she had on her Fiona Griffiths life? And whatever her psychological state, will she manage to stay alive as she gets closer to the truth about the long and violent reach of the fraudsters?

I've complained many times before about the unconscionably long time after UK publication that Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series books finally come out in the US. It's often a complete mystery when the US title will appear, which is so not good enough for fans of the PCU. The strange, but welcome saving grace for audiobook lovers is that the books are usually available on audio in the US at or near the same time the print book comes out in the UK. And so it is this time around, with the 12th book in the series, Bryant & May and the Burning Man (Doubleday (UK), March 26, Whole Story Audio Books, May 1).

The new book begins with mass protests in London's streets in response to a banking scandal. A homeless man is killed, burned to death between the protesters and the police. The PCU is called in when it becomes clear that some mystery killer is targeting victims for fiery death. With Christopher Fowler, you know that along with the investigation and the eccentricities of the PCU's members, you'll be treated to some fascinating history of the city of London. In this case, the book description tells us our history lesson will involve "mob rule, corruption, rebellion, and the legend of Guy Fawkes."

Christopher Fowler also writes that Bryant & May and the Burning Man is the final book in the "second arc" of the series, and:

several members of the PCU team reach dramatic turning points in their lives––but the most personal tragedy is yet to come, for as the race to bring down a cunning killer reaches its climax, Arthur Bryant faces his own devastating day of reckoning. ‘I always said we’d go out with a hell of a bang,’ warns Bryant . . . 

Uh oh. I don't like the sound of this. Now I'm so worried about the PCU team, especially Arthur Bryant, that I might not be able to wait for the audiobook.

If you're like me and you can't get enough of Christopher Fowler's writing, keep in mind that he writes non-series books, which are more horror-oriented, and which you can find listed here. I read Fowler's memoir, Paperboy (Bantam, 2010), last year, which I highly recommend if you're interested to see how he got the way he is, as a person and a writer. If you like your hits of Fowler to be more frequent, you can't beat his blog, which is filled with book news, talk about movies and wonderful bits of London history.

Another British writer who isn't as celebrated in the US as he should be is Christopher Brookmyre. I will never, ever forget the experience of reading the first pages of Quite Ugly One Morning (Little, Brown and Co., 1996), the debut book in his Jack Parlabane series. I was in Stratford, Ontario, with family, to go see some plays. I stopped by the marvelous John Callan Books and asked the proprietor about crime fiction books that might not be stocked by bookstores in the US. He handed me that book, but said I absolutely had to read the first couple of pages before deciding whether to buy it. Brilliant advice! The first scene in that book is a description of the most repulsive crime scene ever, and the police detectives' reaction to it. But if you have a strong stomach and a warped sense of humor, it's gold. I bought all the Brookmyre books the bookshop had.

Brookmyre has written several non-Parlabane books, and I have to say my reactions to them range from mild enthusiasm to near indifference. But now, eight years since the last Jack Parlabane novel, he's back, in Dead Girl Walking (Atlantic Monthly Press, May 5). Parlabane started as a crusading journalist, but now, as a result of events involving a phone hacking scandal, he's out of that business and sleeping with one eye open to watch out for his enemies. He's asked to trace Heike Gunn, the missing lead singer of a group called Savage Earth Heart. The narrative shifts between Jack and the group's newest member, Monica, who keeps a diary of her tour of European capitals with the group.

Although most UK readers say you don't need to read the other Parlabane novels to enjoy this new book, one reviewer recommends reading the short story The Last Day of Christmas: The Fall of Jack Parlabane (Little, Brown Book Group, 2014) to learn just how Jack got to be in the dire situation he's in as Dead Girl Walking opens.

Another UK book that's been hard to get in the US is now coming––after 35 years. It's Ted Lewis's GBH (Soho Press, April 23), a stripped-down-to-the-bone, ultra-noir tale of London crime chief George Fowler, who descends into paranoia and extreme violence as he tries to find out who in his operation is an embezzler and a traitor.

Ted Lewis, who died at age 42, is best known as the British author of Get Carter (originally titled Jack's Return Home), which was made into the classic Michael Caine movie of the same name (and pointlessly remade with Sylvester Stallone). But some claimed that GBH (1980), his last novel, was his real masterpiece. It's been hard to know if that claim is accurate, because the book went out of print almost right away and it was never published in the US.

If you like noir, you might give this one a try. But be warned: this truly is noir, not a hard-boiled detective story. Very bad things happen, and to Sam Spade, Fowler would be like something he'd want to scrape off his shoe.

How about we move on to a British author who has not had trouble getting books published––and pronto––in the US? It's Kate Atkinson, and her upcoming book is not a new entry in her popular Jackson Brodie series. Disappointed? I'm not, because it's a completely unexpected gift, a sequel to her bestselling and thoroughly engrossing Life After Life (2014). I was obsessed for weeks with Ursula Todd's many lives in that book. I found a friend who was almost as fascinated and we spent all of one evening parsing two chapters in the book that are almost, but not quite identical, trying to tease out all the hidden meanings in the differences between the two chapters. I won't say our study magically opened the door to all the mysteries of Life After Life, but I will say that the book is so subtle, with so many possibilities and layers of meaning that it rewards that kind of deep study––after you've first enjoyed the book's sheer adventure and beauty. How many books can you say that about?

I think Life After Life will be a book that lasts and will cement Kate Atkinson's reputation as one of the most talented writers of our day. Her upcoming book, A God in Ruins (Little, Brown and Company, May 5) supplements the story of Ursula Todd's 20th century with that of her younger brother, Teddy. We saw Teddy in Ursula's childhood, and his fate as an RAF pilot during World War II is one of the intriguing plot points of Life After Life. Still, I never saw it coming that Atkinson would shift her focus to Teddy in a new book. Her website says: "For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have. " Now there's a hook to grab me. This will be a book I'll start reading the minute I get my hands on it.

Debut novelist Stephen Kelly isn't British, but he joins that long line of Americans whose love for traditional British mystery compels them to set their novels in the UK. Kelly's The Language of the Dead: A World War II Mystery (Pegasus Books, April 15) is set in the peaceful Hampshire village of Quimby, where it seems all there is to worry about is whether the Luftwaffe bombing raids will target the nearby Spitfire fighter plane factory. But that's before old Will Blackwell––who is rumored to have sold his soul to the devil many years before––is found murdered with a scythe through his neck and a pitchfork in his chest.

That's just the start of a series of violent murders in the village, and the call goes out for the crusty Detective Inspector Thomas Lamb to put a stop to the mayhem. The constant bombing raids bring back terrible memories of his experiences in the Great War, and he worries about the safety of his daughter in Quimby. His investigation, with his team of David Wallace and Harry Rivers, reveals a disturbing village history of witch hunts. Maybe this will be a treat for three audiences: fans of supernatural mysteries, World War II mysteries and village mysteries. I do know that Booklist, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly are all encouraging, and that's good enough for me.

How about something completely different? Hallie Ephron's Night Night, Sleep Tight (William Morrow & Co., March 24) is set in Beverly Hills, far away from the UK. In 1985, Deirdre Unger grudgingly agrees to help her retired screenwriter father, Arthur, get his house ready for sale, but when she arrives, she finds him dead, floating in the pool. From accident, his death is quickly reclassified as a murder and police question Deirdre closely.

Deirdre soon finds that her father has appointed her his literary executor and, as she goes through the pages of his unpublished memoir, she is transported to tragic events of two decades earlier, when her best friend apparently killed her movie star mother's husband. Deirdre's memories are sketchy, because she was in a car accident that night that left her with a withered leg. But she was there in the house that night, as were her parents. Is Arthur's murder connected to that long-ago Hollywood killing, and what might be dislodged from the recesses of Deirdre's memory as she reads Arthur's memoir?

That Hollywood murder sounds a lot like the 1958 killing of movie star Lana Turner's lover, the young and mobbed-up Johnny Stompanato, which was found to have been committed by her teenage daughter, who was attempting to protect her mother from a violent attack by Stompanato. Ephron is one of four daughters (including the late Nora Ephron) of parents who were screenwriters in Hollywood. She was born in Los Angeles and spent some of her youth in a house not far from Lana Turner's place. I hope this personal connection to the Hollywood of 50 years ago will take us back to those days in this story.

Will ice out day arrive before April does?

Review of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Our protagonist is Ursula Todd, the third of five children of Harold Todd, a banker, and his young wife, Sylvie. They live in the English countryside, at a large house they call Fox Corner. We begin on the snowy 1910 night of Ursula's birth––which is also the night of her death.

It should make for an awfully short book to have the protagonist die on the same page she is born, but Ursula is an unusual sort of person. She makes a sort of habit of dying. Born dead, dead in her crib, dying multiple times as a child, as a young woman, and on and on. But, after each death, there she is again, with another chance to avoid catastrophe––at least the particular catastrophes that came before.

Ursula becomes anxious about the sense of deadly déja vu she sometimes has, while her family worries about her anxiety and about the odd and unpredictable things she says and does. The Todd family's maid, Bridget, says young Ursula has the second sight, but the psychiatrist she's packed off to see thinks she is an "old soul," and that her memories are of future events. If she is an old soul, does that mean she can devise a plan that will avoid these calamities, personal and more wide-ranging, that life seems to have in such plentiful supply?

The Mitford family

Just as Ursula's life takes many different paths––or, I should say, lives take many different paths––there are different ways of reading this inspired novel. You may read it for the sheer pleasure of the story, which often resembles Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, a semi-autobiographical comic novel about the famous Mitford family, with their six daughters and one son, who were (mostly) Bright Young Things of the 1920s, and notorious in the 1930s and 1940s for their extreme (and violently varying among them) political views. Ursula's sister Pamela reminded me of Pamela Mitford, her brother Teddy of Tom Mitford, her aunt Izzie of Nancy Mitford. Several events in the book are reminiscent of those described in The Pursuit of Love and in nonfiction books about the Mitfords. There is even a brief reference in Life After Life to one of the Mitfords, which made me think that the resemblances between the Todds and the Mitfords wasn't accidental. (But let me be quick to say that you don't have to have any familiarity with the Mitfords or to have read The Pursuit of Love to appreciate Life After Life.)

Reading any Kate Atkinson novel just to enjoy the storytelling is rewarding, because she has a gift for narrative; capturing the tragic comedy of life, where history and circumstance make all of our plans foolish. Her stories nonchalantly gambol along, even amidst brutality and grim death. Like Pogo, Atkinson seems to believe that life ain't nohow permanent––so we might as well get the most out of it all, even its grotesqueries.

Atkinson makes it easy to fall in love with her characters, despite––or maybe even because of––their flaws. And Atkinson's depiction of time and place are so vivid I felt I was there on the terrace at Fox Corner with the shadows lengthening on a summer evening; there building sand castles on the beach with the Todd family; there in London with Ursula during the relentless bombing of the Blitz, and the endlessly cold and gray days after the war, when continued scarcity of food, gas and electricity made life as bleak and grinding as wartime––except without the excitement of the bombing and the feeling that every day of survival was a blow struck against the Nazis.

But while you're reading this Mitford-esque, but oh-so-Atkinsonian, story, it's hard not to get caught up in the intricate structure of Atkinson's clever plot. I found myself paying careful attention to the chapter titles, and poring over the table of contents to study the construction of the book and tease out hidden meanings. When you read it, as I hope you will, make sure to draft some friends to read it at the same time, so that you can talk about Ursula's lives, how one's actions affect the course of one's own life and those of others, whether you would want to have multiple lives yourself and what you might do with them.

Wry, suspenseful, thrilling, poignant and thought-provoking, Life After Life is a delightfully fresh and inventive novel that should make many 2013 best books lists, and very possibly become an enduring classic.

Life After Life will be published in the US by Reagan Arthur Books (an imprint of Little, Brown and Company) on April 2, 2013.

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

Top Reads of 2011

There are certain subjects you know you shouldn't raise in company if you want to avoid unpleasantness. Politics, religion, how to raise children, just for starters. Among the Material Witnesses, one subject is guaranteed to prompt pained howls from Georgette Spelvin: best-books lists. For some reason, she just hates making lists of favorite authors and reads.

I enjoy looking back over the year and thinking about the books I've read and how they stacked up. I keep a notebook of the books I've read, but all I do is write down the author and title. If I really liked it, I put an asterisk next to it. One of my book club friends has a card file and has a comment card in it for every book she's read for the last 30 years or so. I'm not that organized, but I wish I did have a record of every book I'd ever read, except for the part where people would look at me like I was some kind of compulsive nutcase.

But back to the subject at hand. This is the time of year when the newspapers, magazines and websites tell us what were the best books published in the past year. I always look at those lists and consider myself lucky if I've read 20% of them. It makes me feel like a cultural deadbeat, but that somehow doesn't ever seem to result in my rushing out to get the books they rate the highest.

I'm going to list my top reads of this year, more or less in order, and ask our readers to do the same in comments. They don't have to be 2011 publications; just books you read this year and particularly enjoyed. I think I can guarantee nobody will feel like a cultural deadbeat after reading my list.

Top Mystery Reads

Louise Penny: A Trick of the Light (Maybe not quite as good as Bury Your Dead, but still terrific. Of course, the Armand Gamache series is my weakness.)

Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog (This entry in the Jackson Brodie series picks up shortly after the Masterpiece Mystery! dramatization left off. Atkinson is one of the best writers out there.)

Cyril Hare: An English Murder (A classic British country house murder mystery, but with incisive commentary on British attitudes about class, ethnicity and religion.)

Fred Vargas: An Uncertain Place (Yet another quirky title in the Inspector Adamsberg series.)

Jill Paton-Walsh: The Attenbury Emeralds (A continuation of Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey series.)

Peter Lovesey: Stagestruck (This book about murder in a theater in Bath is part of the Peter Diamond series.)

G. M. Malliet: Wicked Autumn (This is the first in a new series featuring a former MI-5 agent who is now an English country vicar.)

Robert Barnard: A Stranger in the Family (There's nobody like Barnard. This is his 28th standalone mystery and he's already published another one this year. Not to mention his three series and his four books written as Bernard Bastable.)

Alan Bradley: I Am Half Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce at Christmastime.)

Top Non-Mystery Fiction Reads

Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time (Four big volumes telling the story of British society and the empire from the 1930s to the 1970s.  I was mesmerized by it and didn't know what to do with myself for weeks after I finished it.)

Muriel Spark: A Far Cry From Kensington (One of the most mordantly witty books ever.)

Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son (An tour-de-force about contemporary life in North Korea.)

Jane Gardam: Old Filth (Funny, sad, touching tale of the life of Sir Edward Feathers. Like A Dance to the Music of Time, it's as much about the British Empire as it is about the characters' lives.)

Stephen King: 11/22/63 (On one level, a time-travel book about trying to prevent the JFK assassination. On a deeper level, about connectedness.)

Chad Harbach: The Art of Fielding (A coming-of-age story about baseball and much more.)

Fannie Flagg: I Still Dream About You (Fannie Flagg is one of my guilty pleasures and this book was just as satisfying as the rest.)

D. E. Stevenson: Miss Buncle's Book (A real find.  Set in England in the 1950s and about a spinster who decides to write a book to make some much-needed money. She can only write what she knows, so she writes a thinly-disguised book about the people in the village. Complications ensue. This title has been issued by Persephone Books, which reprints neglected classics of 20th-century authors, usually women.)

Top Nonfiction Reads

Erik Larson: In the Garden of Beasts (Novelistic story of a college professor made ambassador to Germany in the 1930s Nazi era, and his adult daughter who accompanied him to Berlin, along with his wife and adult son.)

Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of All Maladies (A compellingly readable biography of cancer.)

Laura Hillenbrand: Unbroken (Astonishing story of Louis Zamperini, who went from juvenile delinquent to Olympic runner, to POW of the Japanese in World War II.)

Richard J. Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich (You'd think there isn't any more that can be said on the subject, but Evans proves that wrong.)

Nella Last's War (Just before the outbreak of World War II, Britain established the Mass Observation Project, in which ordinary people were asked to write diaries and answer questionnaires about their views on contemporary events.  Nella Last, an ordinary housewife in a seacoast town, wrote a diary that is full of everyday detail, but also reveals her deepest feelings about married life, her children, the war, her country, her neighbors, the role of women and more.)

Now it's your turn . . .