Happy Boxing Day!

I hope you enjoyed your Christmas Day, whether it included church or Chinese food. Around here, it was deeply religious––we watched the NFL Game Rewind marathon on NFL Network.

I did put it on pause long enough to open presents, enjoy a delicious dinner (prepared mostly by my husband, though I made dessert and was in charge of monitoring the new temperature probe in the roast), and take a couple of walks. I stayed seasonal on my walk, listening to Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca, her second Inspector Hemingway mystery, which has a Christmas theme.

Audible has been insisting for months that I'd like Georgette Heyer's mysteries, but I resisted until last week. I'd never read her stuff before, but I thought of her as a romance writer and I didn't feel like reading some goopy thing. In a weak moment, probably brought on by shopping fatigue and seeing way too many commercials for jewelry and luxury cars with giant bows on them, I tried out Heyer's first Hemingway mystery, No Wind of Blame. It was a hoot!

I had no idea Heyer was so slyly clever. I figured out the whodunnit right away, but it was still a pleasure to listen to because of the amusing characters and writing. Inspector Hemingway is a talented young detective who pats himself on the back a lot, but his pool of suspects include a couple of women so batty and histrionic that he almost despairs.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, and cued up the second book right away. Envious Casca is a country house mystery in which the rich and extremely grouchy Nathaniel Herriard is persuaded by his jolly brother, Joseph, to host a party of his business partner and his relatives and their wives/fiancées/associates over Christmas. Nathaniel is a real Grinch, but anyone would be with this crew on hand. Nearly everybody wants something from Nathaniel; specifically, a big wad of cash, and they are unendingly rude and cutting to each other as they maneuver. Since Nathaniel is a Grinch, though, all their machinations are for naught. When Nathaniel is found murdered on the floor––in his locked bedroom!––it looks like one of these greedy guests might have decided to go to Plan B.

So today is Boxing Day. There seem to be different stories about the derivation of the name and the holiday, which is celebrated in the UK and some of its former colonies. The most common story is that servants were traditionally given a box of food and gifts from their masters on the day after Christmas, since they would all have been required to work on Christmas Day. In honor of Boxing Day, then, I suppose you could read a book involving English country house servants, like Jo Baker's Longbourn, which reimagines Pride and Prejudice from the point of views of the servants.

Or, if you want something more mystery-oriented, you could watch the movie Gosford Park, with its star-studded cast: Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi, Eileen Atkins, Alan Bates, Kristin Scott Thomas, Clive Owen, Emily Watson, Charles Dance, Laurence Fox, Michael Gambon, Jeremy Northam, Ryan Philippe, Tom Hollander, Richard E. Grant and Stephen Fry as the spectacularly dense Inspector Thomson.

The only mystery book I know of that is specifically a Boxing Day tale is the Golden Age classic, Nicholas Blake's Thou Shell of Death. You probably already know that Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis, who was Britain's Poet Laureate and the father of noted actor Daniel Day-Lewis. As Nicholas Blake, he wrote a cracking good series of 16 mysteries featuring amateur detective Nigel Strangeways.

Thou Shell of Death is the second Strangeways mystery, and the one in which he meets Georgia Cavendish, the woman who will become his wife. But it's notable for more than that. This is a fiendishly clever story and well worth reading at any time of year. The setup is that World War I flying ace Fergus O'Brian has received a series of poison-pen letters saying he will be killed on Boxing Day. O'Brian decides to host a house party and invite Strangeways and everyone he thinks might have written the letters. Despite Strangeways' presence, O'Brian is killed in a way that suggests suicide. Strangeways must persuade the police to investigate it as a murder and then do all the legwork necessary to prove their theories to be completely wrong.

In the US, Boxing Day isn't celebrated by name, but boxes are involved, as in returning Christmas boxed gifts to the store, in exchange for something more pleasing. I will be taking one box to the UPS store, because my gift of Watching the English (which I mentioned last Friday) arrived with what looked like a reindeer bite out of 20 pages.

If you received an ugly Christmas sweater as one of your gifts, my advice is to keep it. The Ugly Christmas Sweater Party seemed to be everywhere this year, and I'm willing to lay odds this will be a phenomenon for at least one more season. This year, the stores––even Goodwill––were charging a premium for particularly egregious examples. So you'll be ahead of the game if you can just pull yours out from the back of your bureau drawer next year.

The Badification of Love

Valentine's Day is Tuesday, February 14th. It's a time for celebrating love with greeting cards, gifts, champagne toasts and kisses. That's tomorrow.

This is today, at Read Me Deadly. It's a time for observing the badification of love in crime fiction. Let's look at some good books involving love that's unrequited, gone missing, gone awry, gone belly up . . . . In other words, love that's gone bad.

Unrequited or obsessional love has inspired many rock 'n' roll songs, and Eric Clapton's "Layla" is one of the best. You might want to play it while we think about books such as John Fowles's The Collector, in which a lonely young butterfly collector named Frederick Clegg kidnaps his beloved Miranda Grey and keeps her captive in the hopes that she will come to love him. Or Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's disturbing 1955 masterpiece about Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who falls in love with 12-year-old Dolores Haze, and then marries her mother.

Of course, unrequited love doesn't always inspire a crime. It may merely burrow into the heart of a criminal or a sleuth, making his or her life more or less miserable and leading readers to groan in empathy. In David Liss's wonderful historical fiction set in 18th-century London, Benjamin Weaver unrequitedly loves the very beautiful Miriam Lienzo, but he is a Jewish ex-prizefighter, and his ethnicity prevents his entry into higher society. He makes a living finding thieves and debtors for the wealthy. In A Conspiracy of Paper, the first book in this literary series, Weaver is hired to find the murderer of a client's father, and his search becomes a Russian nesting doll of financial jiggery-pokery and murderous intrigue.

Keigo Higashino creates a nightmare for his characters when brilliant high-school math teacher Ishigami hankers after his apartment-house neighbor Yasuko Hanaoka in the riveting 2011 book The Devotion of Suspect X. When Yasuko kills her cruel ex-husband, Ishigami leaps to help her dispose of the body and to fix an alibi. The body is discovered and identified, and the police are quickly led to Yasuko and Ishigami. A cat-and-mouse game that becomes increasingly complex develops between the police and Ishigami.

Sometimes the unresolved nature of unrequited love makes it haunt a heart forever. Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides involves the five young and lovely Lisbon sisters, who committed suicide one after another, and the mesmerizing effect these deaths have on their hometown of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Hannah Pittard's Nora Lindell is 16 years old when she goes missing in The Fates Will Find Their Way and, in a similar way, this event stuns some adolescent boys. Nora's disappearance still preoccupies them 25 years later.

In 1962, Ben Wade was a Choctaw, Alabama, teenager secretly in love with a beautiful classmate, Kelli Troy, who had recently arrived from Maryland. It was the early days of desegregation, and Kelli was outspoken in her support of it. Then Kelli was murdered. In Breakheart Hill, by Thomas H. Cook, Wade, now a middle-aged physician, looks back at the days leading up to Kelli's death and its shattering aftermath. His halting narrative that dances around the facts reminds me of Ford Maddox Ford's John Dowell, who slowly teases out the surprising truth of his marriage in The Good Soldier.

Sometimes the death of a loved one creates a terrible void. So terrible for Frank Cairns, that he feels compelled to do something criminal about it. In Nicholas Blake's 1938 book, The Beast Must Die, Cairns begins with a vow: "I am going to kill a man. I don't know his name. I don't know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him." This unknown man is the hit-and-run driver who killed his seven-year-old son. The police have run out of leads, so Cairns builds some information and logical leaps into a case against a man whom he befriends in order to better plot his revenge. The Beast Must Die is both serious and lighthearted, full of twists and turns, and the fourth Nigel Strangeways book written by Nicholas Blake, the pen name of Cecil Day-Lewis, England's Poet Laureate and father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

Edward Elgar, British ecclesiastical composer

Authors sometimes fill death's lonely void with a ghost, which the book's characters don't always appreciate. British fiction writers cannot leave Edward Elgar alone. The last time I saw this British composer, he was taking a fictional trip up the Amazon in James Hamilton-Paterson's Gerontius. (That is a stunning book, by the way, and I recommend it.) Now, Phil Rickman puts a dead Elgar to work as a ghost, haunting his beloved Malvern Hills, in The Remains of an Altar, the eighth Merrily Watkins book. When does this poor man get to retire? Merrily, Anglican vicar of Ledwardine, has been asked in her role of Deliverance Consultant to the Diocese of Hereford to exorcise the bike-riding Elgar, who is causing road accidents. Proposed development on a Wychehill hillside possibly sacred to the Druids, Merrily's 17-year-old daughter Jane's activism, a new night club, and the ambitions of the church choirmaster are a troublesome stew coming to the boil. Rickman's series is an entertaining blend of historical research, mystery, and horror.

What does love got to do with it? Even if singer Tina Turner is less than thrilled with love, P. D. James's Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh is clear about its role in murder. Early in his career, he learned that all the motives for murder could be covered by the four L's: love, lust, lucre, and loathing. Check out these two traditional books of crime fiction, written with tongue planted firmly in cheek, that have the L's pretty well covered:

Bill Crider's eleventh Dan Rhodes book, the charming A Romantic Way to Die, finds Obert College the site of a romance writers' workshop. Townspeople of Clearview, Texas, are thrilled that local-boy-turned-famous-Fabio-dude Terry Don Coslin is back in town. Terry Don's aim is to appear on the cover of every single romance novel published. Given his pecs ("hard enough to strike a match on"), his flowing locks and his handsome face, this is a real possibility. Several local residents are also attending the workshop, including newly-published author, Vernell Lindsey. A well-known New York agent is even scheduling appointments at Obert. It's a cryin' shame when the conference is interrupted by a death, and laid-back Sheriff Rhodes must investigate.

Elizabeth Peters's Die for Love, third book in her entertaining Jacqueline Kirby series about a college librarian, is set at a New York City convention for historical romance writers and their fans. The enterprising Kirby wants an escape from Nebraska, so she travels to New York for this convention, where she poses as an author so she can write off the trip on her tax return. When a murder takes place, the always-curious Kirby feels compelled to investigate despite the warnings of a very attractive cop. D'oh!

Listening to the Righteous Brothers always makes me sing in the shower. I'd be curious to know if  "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" inspires you in that way, too. Maybe you'll feel inspired to read one of these books about love that's wandered away.

Dick Lochte's hardboiled novel Sleeping Dog is teeming with lost love and the just plain lost. The narrative alternates between Serendipity Dahlquist, the teenage granddaughter of a Los Angeles soap star, who prides herself on her worldiness and intelligence, and a tired but dedicated ex-cop turned private detective named Leo Bloodworth, aka "The Bloodhound." Serendipity is referred to Bloodworth when her dog Groucho is stolen, but they have barely met before Bloodworth's smarmy office mate is murdered. The two mismatched sleuths set off on a complicated trail. (Note: there is some material in this book that is painful reading for animal lovers, but I read it with a hand over one eye and the other eye half closed, and I survived.)

Drink to Yesterday by Manning Coles opens at a coroner's inquest in a small town in Hampshire, England, on July 19, 1924. A well-liked garage proprietor has been found dead in his home. After the jury reaches its verdict, the story looks back at Chappell's School in the spring of 1914, where a pump and some rubber tubing have been sitting in a lab for simply ages, just waiting to be used by some bored school boys to inject air into the gas line that lights their school. During the months that follow, teachers and staff disappear into the war effort, and one of the gas-line pranksters follows as well. The result is a grim, realistic story set behind German lines in 1941, but told in such a graceful way that it is a bittersweet pleasure to read. The spies are casual about their braveness, but they are very brave indeed. The people back home who love them need to be brave, too, because as Tommy Hambledon tells his young recruit, "Once the job has taken hold you'll find that nothing else in life has any kick in it, and apart from the job you're dead. Neither the fields of home nor the arts of peace nor the love of women will suffice." Being a spy can be heart breaking, and we're not talking about James Bond here.

What would crime fiction be without dangerous women who need a man's help? Ask private eye Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, insurance salesman Walter Neff in James M. Cain's Double Indemnity or Korean-American investigator Allen Choice in Leonard Chang's Fade to Clear. In the first Allen Choice book, Over the Shoulder, San Jose Sentinel reporter Linda Maldonado saw Choice through a horrific sequence of events, including his being framed for murder. The two became lovers, but then Linda called it off. Now, in Fade to Clear, the intriguing third book, she tells Choice her nine-year-old niece has been kidnapped by the girl's father, Frank Staunton, who is in the middle of a divorce from Linda's sister. The father and daughter have disappeared. Will Choice help? This is trouble all around for Choice, since Staunton is a real badass, Choice's current girlfriend will not appreciate his involvement in Linda's case, and Linda herself presents a problem. But Choice doesn't have a choice. (Oh come on, you completely saw that coming!) This is no place for a discussion of fate and free will. The point is, for better or worse, Choice doesn't stop thinking in Fade to Clear.

Now that we've whetted your appetite for some crime fiction involving love and warned you about the approach of Valentine's Day, you can't say that you don't see it coming TOMORROW. Don't forget your sweetie, family, pets, friends, and the people at work who make it bearable. You can be nice tomorrow. Today, after your Valentine's Day preparations are finished, you can kiss it all off by treating yourself to a nice book about crime.

The Seasons They Are a-Changin'

It wasn't as big a fiasco as New Coke in 1985, but this year's debut of Coke in holiday cans was not trouble-free. Customers complained they thought they were grabbing a silver can of Diet Coke, only to discover later they had a white can of regular Coke. Some people said Coke in white cans tastes different from Coke in red cans. Others protested that the Coca-Cola company has no business weighing in on global warming and polar bears. When Yahoo News recently published an article about these complaints, it drew more than 12,500 online comments. If the first page of comments is any guide, commentators view complainers as careless morons with nothing better to do than calling beverage companies or casting uninformed votes that have led to the United States' current political and economic disaster.

Maybe these complainers deserve some sympathy. Changes can be tough, especially when they happen during the holiday season. There's already enough to do preparing for company or travel and shopping for gifts without dealing with moves, relationships ending or beginning, job hunting or your favorite beverage appearing unexpectedly in a different-colored can. On the other hand, reading a good murder mystery in which characters navigate changes like these over the holidays can be a welcome change of pace.

When Dead Ex, by Harley Jane Kozak, begins in late December, narrator Mary Wollstonecraft (Wollie) Shelley has a life brimming with changes. She has a brand-new lover, Simon, who works for the FBI. Wollie is staying in a Los Angeles penthouse with him while she supposedly looks for a place of her own. She's preparing to help her brother P.B., a schizophrenic, move from a state mental facility to a halfway house in Santa Barbara, California. Designing greeting cards is her regular job, but she needs to supplement this income. She's been a serial dater on a reality show (Biological Clock) and painted a frog mural in the kitchen of a soap-opera actress obsessed with frogs. Now an actor has commissioned a mural from The Iliad (she's reading Homer in Cliffs Notes) and she's been hired to dish about her blind dates with actors for SoapDirt, a daytime TV gossip show. It isn't easy for Wollie to find time to perform these jobs, since her main job is helping her best friend Joey, a former At the End of the Day soap opera actress and the tabloids' and cops' Number One suspect in the murder of that show's producer, David Zetrakis. It's a mystery why someone would even need to kill Zetrakis. He had pancreatic cancer and hadn't long to live. Had Zetrakis hired someone, or could someone else not wait for his natural death? Stay tuned for Wollie's investigation.

Magritte's The Submissive Reader, 1928

I've been looking for a light-hearted series for occasions I want to read but don't have much intellectual energy. When I'm tired, I want to be entertained rather than challenged. At the same time, I don't want a book with characters who are boring or too stupid to live, an awkward writing style, a plot with irritating holes or blood and guts everywhere. I want to curl up in a chair or prop myself up in bed and relax, happily turning pages rather than turning them while sick with dread. I haven't read the first two books in Kozak's Wollie Shelley series (Dating Dead Men and Dating Is Murder), but I might need to pick up one of them. Dead Ex, the third in the series, didn't have me laughing helplessly, but I enjoyed the author's breezy writing style and inside knowledge of Hollywood and daytime TV. Kozak has appeared on the soap opera The Guiding Light and in movies such as Parenthood and Arachnophobia. (She plays Jeff Daniels's wife, and needless to say, I'm getting this DVD to watch again tonight. It should have made my list of Halloween flicks.) Kozak is not a dummy. Interspersed through the book are Wollie's thoughts about what Greek gods and mortals would say about her murder investigation and current events. It's not easy finding a mix of smart and casual writing. If you're on the lookout for an agreeable read over the holidays, Dead Ex might be a nice holiday treat.

Friends and family are gathering at Warbeck Hall, an English country estate, for a traditional Christmas and a chance to say goodbye to the old aristocrat who lies on his deathbed upstairs. The cast of characters in Cyril Hare's An English Murder couldn't be better. It includes the lord's wayward son, a beautiful young woman still in love with the son even though he has treated her shamefully, a cousin who's a cabinet member of the government and the policeman on detail to protect him, the wife of one of the cousin's government underlings and a butler who's been in service to the old lord forever. Holed up in the library, while the others try vainly to make merry, is a Czechoslovakian historian happily digging through ancient books and records. The snow is piling up outside. There's so much tension inside, provided by people whose political views and personal desires will never intersect, that when a death happens it's hardly surprising. Suicide or murder? No one can leave or arrive, so it's up to the policeman on hand to investigate even though his detective skills are very rusty. That's too bad, because someone's killing skills aren't rusty.

Cyril Hare was the pen name of Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, an English barrister and judge. He wrote 10 books of crime fiction from the 1930s through the 1950s. Most of them feature Inspector Mallett (Tragedy at Law is about the travails of Judge Barber, a circuit judge; and With a Bare Bodkin is set in a wartime ministry housed in an old mansion) or barrister Francis Pettigrew (When the Wind Blows is about a murder during a concert). An English Murder is a standalone book written in 1951. It's a timeless story about responsibility, tradition, ambition, social class and change. Since World War II, English society has been changing and this book is about the painful progress of those changes. Like all of Hare's books, it assumes that the reader is intelligent, but there's no requirement that the reader be a rocket scientist. This book is a mystery classic and it makes a great gift for someone––including yourself.

There are some traditional English mysteries set at Christmas that I'm happy to read time and again. My pleasure in them doesn't change. In The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter are staying at a vicarage when Sir Henry Thorpe dies. This leads to an upsetting discovery in his family gravesite. The East Anglia setting, change ringing, eccentric characters and unusual plot make this one of my favorite Lord Peter books.  

Envious Casca, by Georgette Heyer, is an entertaining mystery set at the English country estate of wealthy and short-tempered Nate Herriard. His younger brother Joe has talked him into hosting a Christmas house party for some relatives, their guests and Nate's business partner. The houseguests irritate each other as well as the host. To make bad feelings unanimous, the servants despise many of those present. With this distinct lack of holiday cheer it's not a shock when murder results, although the method is a puzzler.

Nicholas Blake's Thou Shell of Death is set at another home in the English countryside. This one belongs to Fergus O'Brien, a famous airman. When O'Brien receives several death threats before Christmas, he responds by inviting his enemies to spend the holiday with him to better keep an eye on them. Another of Blake's Nigel Strangeways books, The Corpse in the Snowman, is set during a Christmas house party. In this one, a parlor game involving a ghost has an unexpected result.

In Tied up in Tinsel, by Ngaio Marsh, Hilary Bill-Tasmin is remodeling the family home and has staffed it with unusual servants. To celebrate his planned engagement, he invites his odd relatives and his intended to stay with him for Christmas. Already there is Troy Alleyn, wife of Scotland Yard's Roderick Alleyn, who is painting Bill-Tasmin's picture. A murder interrupts the festivities.

I hope you're enjoying the holiday season and finding time to relax with family, friends and a good book. A break from the pressure of shopping and making plans is a good thing.  As a change of pace, I've been reading a good thriller not set during the holidays, Joseph Finder's Paranoia. Adam Cassidy is a low-level employee at a high-tech company. After the tech meltdown, because he "truly despises" his job, he impersonates someone else and arranges a very lavish party at company expense for a retiring loading dock worker. He's discovered and, in order to avoid prosecution for embezzlement, he agrees to take a job at a rival company and work as a mole. Things get very complicated when the change does him good and he likes his new job.