Better Off Dead

Write what you know is an exhortation (attributed to Mark Twain) to all who put pen to paper––or voice to Siri. There is some debate about what this really means, but I take it at face value. One of my favorite sub-genres, if there is such a word, is writers writing about writers and, even better, mystery authors writing about people in their own line of work. They give a little insight into the process of creating memorable characters and their dastardly deeds.

In Stop Press, by Michael Innes, written in 1939, Timothy Eliot is an undergraduate at Oxford with an uneasy mind as the end of the year approaches, and he comes to Professor Gerald Winter for some help. Timmy feels that his father, Richard Eliot, is headed for the loony bin.

Mr. Richard Eliot is a well-known writer of 30-odd books revolving around the exploits of a character known as "the Spider." The Spider began his adventures as a master crook but, over the years, morphed into a dashing detective. The Spider belongs to that class of sleuths who are of ample means, debonair personality and a bit smarter than the police. Recently, however, because of some unusual occurrences in the region of Rust Hall, the Eliot family manor, Mr. Eliot has been wondering if the Spider has come alive.

To be specific there was a burglary that resembled one the Spider had thought of––but that plot was only imagined by Mr. Eliot; never published. Other events occur in the same vein, increasing Mr. Eliot's anxiety. As Timmy would have it, "it was as if the inanimate seeming husk of his father’s books had trembled and cracked, and from the chrysalis there had struggled a living thing."

Coming up at Rust Hall is the annual celebration that the publisher puts on for the Spider's birthday. This year is to be a special occasion, because the Spider has turned 21. Many people are descending on the manor, including other writers, translators, an actor who reprises the role of the Spider on the screen, and many others. Timmy is convinced there will be trouble over the weekend and asks his tutor, Mr. Winter, to come along as well.

Timmy has an older sister, Belinda, who works at nearby Rust Manor with her friend, Patricia Appleby, who is also invited for the weekend. Throughout the course of the first evening, Patricia picks up on some vibes, as several Spider-like rather cruel jokes are played on the guests––and she fears worse is to come. She sends out an SOS to her brother, John Appleby, a chief inspector at Scotland Yard, to come as soon as he can.

Appleby arrives in a dramatic fashion, after all of the lights of the manor were suddenly extinguished as if by magic, and the party was smothered by a frightening darkness. Appleby fixes the lighting problem with the aid of a flashlight and fuse because after all, electrical problems were quite common in old houses in those pre-World War II years. He joins the house party, because he is intrigued by the puzzle. Somehow, someone is privy to the inner thoughts and plots of an author who guarded his secrets carefully, and who furthermore claims that the prankster  has becomes more menacing, as he is now also having thoughts involving the Spider that never entered Mr. Eliot's mind.

John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was born in Scotland, educated at Oxford––like his protagonist––and taught English at many universities. He was a great scholar, and his erudition comes across in his writing. He is the only author I read regularly who uses words I have to look up every few pages. A few of my favorites from this volume were congeries, meaning collections or aggregations; and gnomic, meaning mysterious and often incomprehensible, yet seemingly wise. Nothing to do with eels or gnomes. Innes is such a wordsmith that some sentences are crafted to have a fuller meaning after the words sink in and settle for a bit. Speed-reading will not do for this author.

The peek behind the curtain in this novel is when a character in Stop Press elucidates what makes mysteries successful. For example: "everything is subject to the rules, which the reader knows. There is generally a puzzle that the reader can solve by means of the rules and that implies that in the little universe of the book the reader is the master.  The books cater for the need of security. Real life is horribly insecure because God is capable of keeping a vital rule or two up his sleeve and giving us unpleasant surprises as a result. The author Mr. Eliot, the author isn't allowed to do that. When we figure out the puzzles we get a pleasant sense of intellectual superiority. Knowing the rules we can control them if we want to." Dare we presume that this is how Innes feels as well?

Robert Barnard, a prolific author all of whose works I hope to read eventually, takes several different pokes at the profession of writing. In Death of a Mystery Writer, he targets the aptly-named Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs, a rotund best-selling mystery novelist who is despised by all who know him, because he is an overbearing bully. His books are quite enjoyable, even though readers never feel they can admit their admiration of the author in public. When the author is murdered, there are almost too many suspects. The plot is further enlivened by a missing-manuscript mystery.

On the romance front, Barnard sent his protagonist, Perry Trethowan, to Norway in The Cherry Blossom Corpse, where he accompanies his sister to a Romantic Novelists convention. Trethowan expected chilly weather, fanciful authors and flowery language. He never expected that beneath the facade of these writers, mostly ladies, there would be such malice; back-biting and bitter rivalry lead to the murder of one of the group.

A Hovering of Vultures is the sad tale of the death of a pair of literary writers whose tomes were so dreary that the shocking details of their last moments gave them more acclaim than their lives' work. Barnard's Charlie Peace tackled this case. Read all about it here.

Another novelist who seems to think fictional writers are better off dead is G. M. Malliet. In her Death of a Cozy Writer, there is an Agatha Christie-like gathering during which a wealthy, successful cozy mystery writer––who is also the pits as a human being––meets his fate while a storm blankets the house with snow. Cornish detective Detective Chief Inspector St. Just and his partner, Detective Sergeant Fear, search for Colonel Mustard and the candlestick. Humor and plot twists keep the book alive.

In Death and the Lit Chick, Malliet lampoons mystery writers again, with the sharpest point needling the wildly successful young author of the chick lit mystery. Along with Kimberlee Kalder, there is a group of writers at a Scottish castle where St. Just happens to be staying. The rivals for the bestseller rankings are damsel-in-distress novels (that are fading in popularity with the reading public), spy thrillers (as dated as the Berlin Wall), dark-and-edgy novels (with no edge), and a weird detective story set in prehistoric times. The castle is surrounded by the traditional moat, the drawbridge is up, the lights go out during a storm and, you guessed it, a certain mystery author turns up dead, presenting St. Just with a murder to solve.

I am intrigued by the turnabout where writers of the past are being brought to fictional life, putting on gumshoes and donning deerstalker hats. Several late authors are solving mysteries in their own series. Dorothy Parker is known for being part of New York's famous Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s, a regular gathering of authors, critics and others in the book trade whose barbed witticisms led to their other nickname, the "Vicious Circle." In the first of his mysteries featuring Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table group, author J. J. Murphy turns Dorothy into a Nosey Parker when she discovers a body under the round table who is dead as a doornail, not dead drunk. I might give this series a try.

There are several other real-life authors who have turned into fictional sleuths. Nicola Upson has resurrected Josephine Tey and put her to work. Gyles Brandreth has revitalized Oscar Wilde's wit and personality and recreated him as a sleuth with great success. And, finally, Jane Austen has crawled out of her grave again to put clues together and solve crimes in Stephanie Barron’s series.

All of these stories, in their way, let us know a bit about what authors think of their craft. For some reason, I seem to find books with the authors as victims a bit more enlightening. They give me an appreciation of what an author has to deal with when it comes to the public, publishers and publicity, and the problem of protagonists they are tired of but who are still their bread and butter. They all face the changing times and mores as we do and must make interesting stories out of them.

Black Mystery Month

I am not sure when the penchant for honoring the trials and tribulations of life by hooking them up with a month or day began, but the practice has been around at least for a few decades. Despite February being duration challenged, it keeps up with every other month when it comes to honors heaped upon its head. For instance, it is American Heart Month, Black History Month and Cherry Month. There are a few other tributes worth celebrating as well, like Library Lovers Month, Pull Your Sofa Off the Wall Month and, not least, Spunky Old Broads Month. There is something for everyone.

It was in the 1920s that Black History Month had its origins.  In the beginning it was a week, but by 1976, it graduated to a month because it had been a wildly popular notion. Canada and the United Kingdom also celebrate a Black History Month. The UK named October to be the fitting month, while Canada and the USA elected February for the honor. In this country's case, it was because both Abraham Lincoln as well as Frederick Douglass had February birthdays.

Some of my favorite fictional sleuths deserve a mention this month. In fact, I think one of these, Virgil Tibbs, made a little history.  Recently named one of the top 100 mystery novels of the century, John Ball's In the Heat of the Night tells the story of Tibbs, a black detective looking for a murderer in Wells, a small Carolina town, during the heyday of the Civil Rights movement. I don’t have a copy of this book any longer, but I rewatch the movie anytime it comes on TV.

Tibbs is from Pasadena, California, on a visit to Wells, and has more experience with homicide than any of the police in this town and he's going to get his man no matter how many would like to keep the status quo in this southern burg. Tibbs is a calmer man in the book than in the movie, but the theme of earning respect is present in both. In the Heat of the Night is the first of seven books in the Tibbs series.

Even Virgil Tibbs might have had his prejudices shaken up if he had been told back in '65 that there would be women in the police force doing his very job.

One of these is State Trooper Desiree "Des" Mitry of Connecticut. The Mitch Berger/Des Mitry series, by David Handler, features an odd-couple pairing of the black, beautiful and athletic Des with Mitch Berger, a pudgy Jewish movie critic. In The Burnt Orange Sunrise, the fourth book in the series, Mitch and Des have been invited to join a large party of glitterati gathering from both the East and West Coasts to celebrate nonagenarian Ada Geiger's return from France.

Ada was once an up-and-coming film director who worked in Hollywood with her husband, until they were blacklisted during the McCarthy era. The gathering is to be at Astrid's Castle near the coast. Astrid's Castle is now an exclusive hotel that is being run by Ada's daughter, Norma, and Norma's husband, Les. Built for Ada by her husband on the Gold Coast of Connecticut, in little Dorset, it was a faux castle built into a hillside and had become a tourist mecca, not only to stay there but simply to marvel at.

On this festive evening, they are in the midst of a terrible ice storm that is to be followed by several inches of snow. The glitterati have sent their regrets and the party is a small one; mostly family except for Des and Mitch. Before long, in the best Agatha Christie tradition, the storm isolates the castle and Des and Mitch are on their own as one after another of the guests is murdered.

This may not be the book to read if you are one of the unfortunate victims of Storm Nemo. Brrr.

Across the pond, despite many complaints of racism and obstacles to promotion, one in five recruits to the Metropolitan Police is from black and ethnic minorities, as pointed out by The Guardian newspaper.

There are a few fictional recruits from minority backgrounds whose careers in British law enforcement I am following.

I first ran across Charlie Peace when he was introduced as an astute young Cockney witness in Robert Barnard's Bodies (part of Barnard's Perry Trethowan series). Charlie Peace joins the police and moves quickly into the detective ranks at Scotland Yard. In A Hovering of Vultures, Peace is a Detective Constable. The mystery surrounds a long-dead brother and sister who wrote dreary literary works that are coming into fashion again, largely due to the efforts of entrepreneur Gerald Suzman. Suzman has organized a foundation and a museum, and now sponsors a conference. Charlie Peace is attending the conference undercover, while he tries to figure out Suzman's angle. Suzman is known to the police as a con man and, so far, his motive for resuscitating the interest in the dead siblings is not obvious. Peace fits in easily with the authors and readers. This is a good example of what I like about Peace's character. Barnard never feels he has to explain him. The reader takes for granted that he is smart and well read, because that is how he is presented. Too often in fiction a person who can quote from the greats in literature comes from the upper classes or has at least been educated in private schools alongside the privileged. There are 10 books in this series, so far, and I am leisurely reading them all.

Wesley Peterson is a Detective Sergeant transferred from the Met to South Devon, England. Of West Caribbean ancestry, he has a degree in archeology, and he investigates crimes that are associated with digs and English historical events. In Kate Ellis's The Merchant’s House, first in the Wesley Peterson series, there are a few different story lines that meld the past and the present in a clever way. However, so far in this mystery and the next in the series, The Armada Boy, Peterson remains a cipher. The reader knows where he came from and that he has an interracial marriage, but little else about what goes on in his mind outside the solving of crimes. This is a lengthy series––16 titles to date––so maybe I will find him fleshed out as the series progresses.

If you have a yen for a trip to the past, read about Ben January from Barbara Hambly’s A Free Man of Color. It is timely in that it takes place during Mardi Gras in the 1830s. January is a Creole with a medical background, which he obtained in Paris. His mixed race means he can't make a living with his degree in New Orleans, so he teaches music. There is a murder at The Salle d’Orleans where he is playing the piano for the evening's festivities. He is a free man of color, but still the perfect scapegoat. January has to find the culprit himself if he is to remain free. This is also an intriguing series (11 titles so far) because of the different perspectives regarding the mixed-blood individuals who are an important part of New Orleans life.

There are so many other characters appropriate to Black History Month whom I enjoy, like Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins, Blanche White from Barbara Neely, and Jake Hines from the books of Elizabeth Gunn, all of whom my compatriots and I have discussed before on Read Me Deadly. The list is long and feel free to add to it if you have a favorite.

Some day it would also be fun to talk a bit about characters who should be celebrated as part of Spunky Old Broads Month.

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 . . .