Fall Preview 2014: Part Eight

Lady Jane Digby

As fall approaches, the movies turn from summer blockbusters to smaller, "For Your Oscar Consideration" films. The publishing world does a bit of the same thing. Beach reads are replaced on the bookstore shelves by quieter, more thoughtful books, just right for curling up with in an easy chair in your den or living room. In a few months, reading in that easy chair will be warmed by a fire in the fireplace, and we may think life doesn't get much better.

Some big names have mysteries coming out in September, October, and November. One of my favorite writers, Rita Mae Brown, has a new entry, Let Sleeping Dogs Lie (Ballantine Books, November 4), in her Sister Jane series. Like her Sneakie Pie Brown cozy series, the Sister Jane books are set in mid-Virginia horse country. But these books are in between cozies and hard-boiled. Yes, people are frequently killed––and sometimes in truly bizarre fashion––but the characters are genial and likable. (Many times, even those who are murdered are likable.) The major human characters, "Sister Jane" Arnold, her boyfriend, Gray Lorillard, and other members of the Jefferson Hunt Club are joined by a variety of nonhumans, in the form of horses, dogs, foxes, cows, and even birds and owls. Brown gives voice to everyone––human and beast alike.

One of the things I love about series books is how the main characters evolve and change with plot developments. That's particularly true in Brown's Sister Jane series; we see her age in place, while maintaining relationships that go forward through the years. Students graduate from schools, jobs are held or lost, hunt club friends go through emotional turmoil and are helped by each other. (For those readers who are put off by Sister Jane as a Hunt Club master, please know that no foxes are killed in American fox hunting. The dogs––if they're lucky not be evaded totally by the fox––will put the fox "to ground." The dogs are trained not to injure the foxes, and in Rita Mae Brown's books, the foxes and dogs are often friends.)

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie is the first Sister Jane book since Fox Tracks was published in 2012.

Margaret Atwood has a book of short stories coming out in September. Not normally a short story writer, Atwood is publishing Stone Mattress (Nan A. Talese/Random House, September 16), a book of nine short stories, or "tales," as she refers to them.  Atwood has written 40 or so books, and she stretches her writing to many genres, from dystopian to mystery to poetry to thriller. The reader never quite knows what s/he will get from an Atwood work. Stone Mattress, with its nine tales, looks like it has a bit of everything.

Another writer of series books is Deborah Crombie. Her sixteenth book about London police detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma Jones, To Dwell in Darkness, is to be published on September 23 by William Morrow. Though writing with a much heavier hand than Rita Mae Brown, Crombie does an excellent job of updating the lives of the now-married Kincaid and James with each book. The crimes the couple is called on to investigate for Scotland Yard, though, are psychologically dark and frightening.

It's good to compare Deborah Crombie's writing with that of Ian Rankin's in his Detective Inspector John Rebus series. Both books show the private lives of the police officers and the impact of crime solving on their private lives. (Oh, and speaking of Ian Rankin, Amazon shows two "new" books to be published on October 14, 2014. Though  careful investigation, I have figured out that these "new" books were actually first published 10 and 20 years ago! So be careful when looking at "new" books . . . .)

And speaking of new books, let's focus on new authors of old books. Did you think Agatha Christie was dead? Well, she is––she died in 1976––but her character, Hercule Poirot, is being resurrected in a new book, The Monogram Murders: The New Hercule Poirot Mystery (William Morrow, September 9). Evidently written by Dame Agatha using an ouija board, she is joined by the un-dead author, Sophie Hannah. Hannah is an experienced mystery writer; she writes the Zailer and Waterhouse series, among other books.

How do you, as a reader, feel about one mystery writer taking on/over the characters of another, beloved writer? I sure didn't like P. D. James's Death Comes to Pemberley, and I wondered why such a well-thought-of author as James would even attempt to add anything to the work of an even better-thought-of author, Jane Austen.

So, if you're game to see how Sophie Hannah will write Hercule Poirot, then have at it. But please report back to us if you think Agatha would approve or if she'd be spinning in her grave at this new story of her longstanding character. Personally, I think old characters should remain with their old authors. Present-day authors should invent their own damn characters and stop poaching the old guys.

But let's look at Stephanie Barron's new book in her Jane Austen series, Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas (Soho Crime, October 28). Unlike author Sophie Hannah, Barron hasn't taken a character from Jane Austen's writing; she's taken the author herself and given her the adventures. She makes Austen the heroine of a set of cozy mysteries, set in the early 1800s. Here's a problem with most authors who attempt to write a book with Jane Austen as the main character. They seem to forget that life and manners are much different in 2014 than in 1814. Oh, the main themes of mysteries might be the same––greed, infidelity, and jealousy––but they are expressed much differently in modern writing. Can Stephanie Barron carry off era-appropriate writing? Or will Jane's adventures seem to be taking place in 2014? I don't know, but the plot of Twelve Days is going to get me to take a chance!

If you like Tudor mysteries––and who doesn't?––author C. W. Gortner has a new book coming, The Tudor Vendetta (St. Martin’s Griffin, October 21). Set in the early years of Elizabeth I's reign, Gortner’s book looks at the dangers from home and abroad besetting the Queen. Like Rory Clements's books starring John Shakespeare, which take place in Elizabethan England. and C. J. Sansom's Mathew Shardlake series, set earlier, in Henry VIII's reign, the Gortner book is full of spies and danger. Who trusts whom? Certainly, Brendan Prescott, as Elizabeth's spy master, is determined to find out who is a threat to the Queen.

Author Robert Olen Butler returns with the third in his Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, The Empire of Night (Mysterious Press, October 7). The book is set, as were the first two in the series, in the early years of World War I. Cobb, an American newspaper reporter, has been enlisted to spy for US intelligence services in 1915, after the sinking of the Lusitania. (By the way, the Lusitania is the subject of Erik Larson's new book, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, due to be published in March, 2015).

Would the US enter the war? Cobb is holed up in a ritzy castle in Kent, the home of a possible British government mole who may be working for the German government. Set also in Berlin, this book looks like an excellent historical novel. It sort of reminds me of David Downing's newish novel, Jack of Spies.

Another new book that is not specifically a mystery, but might be of interest to some of Read Me Deadly's readers is Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murder (translated from the German by Ruth Martin; Knopf, September 2). It's nonfiction and has received excellent reviews.

These are a few of the books coming out this fall. I've already kicked the cats off my favorite reading chair and I'm ready for days with shorter hours of sun, but more time inside with good books.

Gently Down the Stream

The scandalous rumor that Philadelphia sculler John B. Kelly mailed his jock strap to King George V after his double Olympic victories in 1920 is considered apocryphal everywhere else. But locals just smile and keep the city's secrets.

Kelly, father of actress Grace Kelly, later Princess of Monaco, had been refused entry in the 1920 prestigious Henley Royal Regatta in Britain partly because their rules excluded anyone "...who is or ever has been...by trade or employment for wages a mechanic, artisan or labourer." Kelly, who had worked on summer breaks in his millionaire father's bricklaying business, hadn't even planned to enter the Olympics that year, but handily took two gold medals, narrowly beating out the Henley winner. The public outcry on both sides of the Atlantic made the Henley Committee reconsider its rules, and John's son Jack later won the Henley Diamond Sculls in both 1947 and 1949.

Sculling and stories about it have been popular in Philadelphia since the first rowing clubs opened along the Schuylkill River in the 1730s. So despite Sister MM giving it two thumbs down for excessive domesticity, I enjoyed Deborah Crombie's No Mark Upon Her, although I agree that there was more birthday party than necessary.

DCI Rebecca Meredith of West London Serious Crimes Division had been reckoned a strong Olympic contender at university, before a broken wrist took her out of competition. Twenty years later, she is considering taking a leave of absence to resume her athletic career. Her demanding day job often defers her training time until very late, sometimes after dark. One night she doesn't return, and London K-9 River Search and Rescue members find her murdered body the next day beside her smashed scull.

Primary suspects include her financially strapped ex-husband; her lover, an Iraqi war veteran suffering from PTSD; and another high-ranking Met officer against whom she was secretly building a case of multiple rapes. But several younger members of the Leander Rowing Club are bitterly resentful of the time that their coach spends training this talented older woman, who may be chosen to replace one of them in competitions. DCI Duncan Kincaid has his hands full with this twisted political hot potato and media circus of a case, whose resolution blindsided me completely.

Across the pond in Philadelphia, therapist and single mother Zoe Hayes is persuaded by a friend to take a double scull out after dark in Merry Bloch Jones's The River Killings. When one of Susan's oars snags on something, the scull rolls, dumping the women into the river. Zoe surfaces and clings to the overturned boat, uncomfortably close to the body of the woman whose skirt had snagged the oars. And she can't find Susan. She dives, finds a limb, and pulls, dragging Susan to the surface, only to find that it is not Susan. Or is it? It's so dark! A moan from the other side of the boat assures her that Susan is alive. Suddenly the river seems to be full of tangled, matted masses of floating bodies. The horrified Zoe counts 13 in the spotty moonlight before they get the boat righted.

Zoe's lover Nick Stiles is the homicide detective assigned to the case. The 19 bodies of Asian women they recover appear to have been immigrants who suffocated, quite possibly in the back of a truck or van during transport. Many show chafing from manacled wrists, and all have three wavy scars slashed across their faces. As the FBI moves in to take over the case, Zoe and Susan are accosted and questioned, first by a priest and an old woman, and then by a dubious solo FBI agent. Zoe is sure she is being followed, and when her house is broken into and every picture of Nick defaced, she begins to wonder who she can trust.

As in Crombie's book, a lot of Zoe's time is spent in the minutiae of domesticity and child care, which becomes very tiresome after awhile. What is this new trend among authors to imagine that readers are interested in pages and pages of excruciating details of domestic disasters and tantrums? Many of us read mysteries specifically to escape those daily hassles for a little while. While the information about rowing and the descriptions of the city in The River Killings were accurate and interesting, the story itself––unlike Crombie's––was rather weak. Despite these flaws, I was hooked after the vivid nightmarish scene in the river that opened the book, and will likely try another in the series sometime. But right now, it's time for some tricky but happily undomesticated detection. Any suggestions?

Sweetheart Sleuths Unveiled

Answers to Sweethearts Sleuths Quiz of Tuesday, February 14th

1. Lady Emily Ashton is Colin Hargreaves' fiancée in Tasha Alexander's historical mystery series that begins with And Only To Deceive.

2. Albert Campion's heart is captured by Amanda Pontisbright, who later becomes his wife. She first appears in Sweet Danger, the fifth in Margery Allingham's Campion series.

3. Detective Inspector Gemma James is married to Scotland Yard Superintendant Duncan Kincaid in Deborah Crombie's current novels, but in the first of the series, A Share in Death, she is just his eager assistant.

4. Alan Markby meets his love interest, Meredith Mitchell, in the first of Ann Granger's Mitchell and Markby series. She is a family member of the murderee in Say it with Poison.

5. Corinna Chapman, the baker and owner of Earthly Delights, a bakery in Melbourne, Australia, has the delight of Daniel Cohen in her life. This is the second series written by Kerry Greenwood. Cohen is ex-Israeli commando turned helper to the lost in Melbourne.

6. Rina Lazarus lives in wedded bliss with LAPD Detective Lieutenant Peter Decker in a series written by Faye Kellerman. The latest in this series is Gun Games.

7. Cop Charlie Piotrowski has needed Cupid's help to attract Professor Karen Pelletier in the Joanne Dobson series about an English Professor at Enfield College in Massachusetts.

8. Carol Jordan is a Detective Chief Inspector who hooks up with Dr. Tony Hill, a forensic psychologist and profiler in Val McDermid's series, which takes place in northern England. Their latest outing is The Retribution.

9. Chief Inspector Danny Lloyd is attracted to Inspector Judy Hill in Jill McGown's series, which takes place in East Anglia, England.

10. Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn meets the love of his life, Agatha Troy, while on vacation in Ngaio Marsh's Artists in Crime. There is an in-depth report later in this blog post.

11. Desiree Mitry is a Connecticut State Police Lieutenant who meets Mitch Berger, a film critic, in David Handler's A Cold Blue Blood.

12. Bill Smith is an army brat Private Investigator who partners with Lydia Chin in New York City to solve crimes. This series written by S.J. Rozan whose 2011 Ghost Hero is a finalist for the Dilys Award.

13. Harriet Vane is pursued by ardent amateur sleuth Sir Peter Wimsey through many volumes before she finally consents to be his Valentine. But when it comes to romance, the circumstances surrounding Strong Poison, the book in which these characters meet, do not give this couple an ideal start. Harriet Vane is on trial for murder at the time!

14. Sheriff Walt Longmire and Victoria Moretti are cops and  potential lovers in the wonderful Craig Johnson series based in Absaroka County, Wyoming. Their latest adventure is Hell Must be Empty and since I have not read it yet, for all I know they are still dancing the tango.

Ngaio Marsh's Artists in Crime

This is an example of how one couple still managed to get together even though they first meet under very inauspicious circumstances.



Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn has been having a long holiday in New Zealand, which turned out to be a busman's holiday, as chronicled in Vintage Murder. He has taken the long way home, starting with an ocean cruise that stopped at ports in Fiji, Hawaii and, lastly, San Francisco. While in the port of Suva, Fiji, his eye is caught by a lovely young artist, Agatha Troy. She is sitting on a lifeboat trying to capture the harbor scene. They seem to strike sparks off each other, so they avoid each other all the way from the ocean liner to the wonderful trip across Canada on the Canadian Pacific railroad.

Agatha Troy is going back to a household of art students whom she is to teach for the next several weeks. Alleyn, who still has some few days of leave left, is going to spend some time with his mother. These households are somewhat close to each other.

This is a motley crew of artists at Tatler's End, Troy,s home. The students and the model settle in for the painting of a recumbent nude. As with all artistic people, there are some disturbances, but the greatest of these is the murder of the vivacious young model. Since Alleyn is staying in the vicinity, he is asked to go to Tatler's End to investigate. Alleyn is not sure about this case because he really wants to follow his heart, which tells him that the woman he is falling in love with cannot possibly be a murderer. His head, on the other hand, is very well trained and he has associates who will keep his mind on the job.

Tatler's End

The cast of suspects is large, with so many people in the house, and much of the story revolves around who was where and when, then who left and at what time, and the merry-go-round typical of some classic mysteries. My eyes did glaze over once or twice with the recounting over and again of time schedules and itineraries.

All's well that ends well––except for the model who was, in any case, walking a perilous line. Readers of Marsh know that Alleyn and Troy are made for each other and are together in future books, so this is a delightful introduction to their relationship.

This cartoon from the New Yorker may represent all of our couples in the later years of their relationship.

Wanted: One Strong, Smart, Sassy Woman

Be warned. Today's post is just one long complaint. I'm feeling distinctly grumpy about female protagonists in recent mysteries. I've reached the point of throwing the book across the room with three series I used to read regularly. Here is my lineup of female sleuths no longer welcome in my library:

Gemma James. I used to devour Deborah Crombie's series featuring Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James of Scotland Yard. Crombie wrote some terrific mysteries, like Dreaming of the Bones and Kissed a Sad Goodbye.  She has a real talent for plotting and conveying a strong sense of time and place. Eventually, Crombie developed a personal relationship between Duncan and Gemma, and now they're married and sharing their children.

With Duncan and Gemma no longer work partners, Crombie seems to have chosen to depict more of their home life as a way to keep up with them as a pair. But the swap of domestic detail for detective collaboration is a poor exchange. In her most recent book, No Mark Upon Her, Crombie includes such teeth-gritting scenes as kids squabbling in the car, Duncan and Gemma negotiating childcare responsibilities and, in case I wasn't already in complete despair, a birthday party for a three-year-old.  It could only have been worse if she'd added in the children singing. (Yes, W. C. Fields has nothing on me.) When Crombie can spare the time for the actual crime story, the plotting is intriguing, tight and twisty. But for me, the price to be paid for the mystery plot is now way too high. I'm sure there are readers who want to be a fly on the wall observing the details of the couple's domestic life, but I'm not one of them.

Mary Russell. Back when I read Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice, the first book in her series featuring bluestocking Mary Russell, I was charmed. The 15-year-old orphan Russell is impatiently waiting out her minority in the care of a disagreeable aunt when she meets Sherlock Holmes, who is engaged in beekeeping while in semi-retirement in Sussex. I loved the relationship struck up between the two, as he trains her in the art of detection. Naturally, I went on to read succeeding books in the series, which are exciting adventures in locations as far-flung as Dartmoor, Palestine and San Francisco. But one constant was always the erudite and entertaining banter between Holmes and Russell, and their close sleuthing partnership.

A few books ago, King began sending Holmes and Russell off in different directions in their investigations. They would still usually have some correspondence and would eventually meet up and work together, but the characters on their own missed the spark they had when together. In the latest book in the series, Pirate King, Holmes is out of the picture almost entirely, until more than three-quarters of the way through the book. The story is told mostly through a first-person narrative by Russell, who comes across as a self-satisfied, humorless prig. I'm thinking this book is meant to set the stage for the series to become entirely Russell-focused. If so, I'm out.

Maisie Dobbs. This is another series that I liked at the outset, but whose protagonist I have come to view as tiresome. She started out being spunky; a largely self-educated working-class girl who, after serving as a nurse in the Great War, sets up her own detective agency. The ninth book in the series is just about to be published, but I gave up with number seven, The Mapping of Love and Death. Life is too short to read books––even well-written books––about a character as mopey as Maisie Dobbs. She is never-endingly sobersided, has virtually no real personal life and I just couldn't take her glumness anymore. In the same vein is Charles Todd's Bess Crawford. I read the first book in that series and that was more than enough. If either one of these women cracked a smile, their faces might break.

So where are the good female protagonists these days?

Back in the 1990s, I used to enjoy Lauren Henderson's Sam Jones series. Sam was a London sculptor with an extremely lively personal life who was always stumbling into bizarre and threatening situations. Sam could never resist poking her nose in, no matter the risk. Book titles like Black Rubber Dress, Freeze My Margarita and Strawberry Tattoo convey the cheeky style of this series. Lauren Henderson also collaborated with Stella Duffy to produce an anthology of bad-girl crime fiction called Tart Noir. (Great title!) Alas, the last Sam Jones mystery was published in 2001 and I have given up hope for more.

Liza Cody was also a favorite in my (relative) youth. She wrote two gritty series, one featuring Anna Lee, a London PI, and another with Eva Wylie, a wrestler and security guard. Cody seems to be done with these series, though she is still writing. Maybe I should check out her latest nonseries book, Ballad of a Dead Nobody, about the mystery of the death of a female founder of a rock-and-roll band.

And I can't forget another old favorite, Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski. Over the years, though, I've gone off her. Or maybe not so much her as the books, which came to feel dominated by social issues. What do you say, should I go back and try again?

I've also enjoyed Sujata Massey's Rei Shimura and Cara Black's Aimée Leduc. Both of these are still good, but it appears that the Rei Shimura series is most likely over, and the Aimée Leduc series has become to seem somewhat formulaic. Kerry Greenwood's 1920s Melbourne, Australia, flapper/sleuth, Phryne Fisher, is a hoot, but the books are just bits of fluff.

I used to like Margaret Maron's Sigrid Harald series, but I could never get into her Deborah Knott books. Her new book, Three-Day Town, puts the two characters together for the first time, but to the detriment of both. The book can only be described as a disappointment to fans of both protagonists.

It's a sad state of affairs when one of the feistiest and most interesting female protagonists is an 11-year-old girl––by whom I mean, of course, Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce. But as lively and amusing as Flavia is, I want to read about a grownup woman who is vibrant, intelligent (like Harriet Vane), has a sense of humor, doesn't moon around about men and children (I'm looking at you, Rebecca Cantrell's Hannah Vogel), and who doesn't make a habit of endangering herself with too-stupid-to-live decisions (that bad trait applies to all-too-many female protagonists).

But it is possible to go too far in the strong female protagonist vein. In Sophie Littlefield's A Bad Day for Sorry, Sara Hardesty is a survivor of domestic abuse who runs a sewing shop in Missouri and, as a sideline, acts as amateur sleuth and a vigilante against abusive men. This book was nominated for several awards, but I was not charmed by a character whose investigative methods consist of beating up and intimidating people. Another strong character––one whose methods don't constitute felonies––is Helene Tursten's Detective Inspector Irene Huss, who is a 40-something police detective in Göteborg, Sweden. Huss is smart and likable, as she navigates through the hazards of a sexist work environment and a sometimes challenging family life. Unfortunately, the novels featuring Huss are of the grimly nordic variety, with too big a helping of disturbingly graphic violence for my taste.

There are several female secondary characters I admire and would like to see more of, like Diane Fry of Stephen Booth's series featuring Ben Cooper, Ellen Destry of Garry Disher's series featuring Hal Challis, and Annie Cabbot of Peter Robinson's Alan Banks series. I'm not a fan of Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley series. Havers is her own worst enemy and it irritates me to see her shoot herself in the foot repeatedly.

So, here we are. I've trashed a bunch of female protagonists––I hope not too many readers' favorites––and bemoaned the disappearance or too-little-appearance of women characters I like. But it can't be hopeless. I'm convinced there must be some female protagonists going strong out there. Two possibilities, and I'd welcome comments on them, are Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak and Julia Spenser-Fleming's Claire Ferguson.

I hope to find somebody who can restore my faith in the female sleuth. Ruth Rendell, once asked about her choice to have a male protagonist in her Inspector Wexford series, quoted Simone de Beauvoir: "Like most women I am still very caught up in a web that one writes about men because men are the people and we are the others." Reminded of that statement in 2009, Rendell said that times had changed, replying: "I don't think that our sex is the people or the others, we're all the people. Perhaps because women are taken more seriously now, not just by men but by each other." I agree that times have changed and it's high time we had a female protagonist as compelling as some of my male favorites, like Inspector Wexford, Commissaire Adamsberg, Armand Gamache, or even Andy Dalziel. (The last of whom, given the recent sad death of Reginald Hill, is now the late lamented Andy Dalziel, I suppose.)

Note: I received free review copies of Deborah Crombie's No Mark Upon Her and Laurie R. King's Pirate King.