The Kindness of Strangers

After several months of arduous sea travel, the sailing ship Mayflower, filled with pilgrims looking for a new way of life, found its way into Plymouth harbor. This was in the cold November of 1620, and there was an even colder winter ahead. These hardy souls spent the next few months huddled in the holds of the ship, losing more than half of their members before the spring came. The few that were left made their way onto land and began making themselves a new colony. When they were at their most vulnerable, they met with strangers from the local people who aided them in putting down roots.

“Who ever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” said Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, when she was at a desperate point in her life.

Several of my favorite characters owe their current existence to the kindness of strangers. One of these I have been following for about 15 years. This is the unusual character Kathy Mallory, who debuted in Mallory’s Oracle by Carol O'Connell. Kathy was a waif of about 10 or 11, living on the streets with razor blades in her pockets for protection, keeping on the run from the victims she robbed to stay alive and finding safe places to sleep. She had the face of an angel and a heart that was growing harder by the day. Then a kindly cop, Lou Markowitz, and his loving wife, who gave her a home and unconditional love, rescued her.

Over the course of the series, Kathy morphs to Mallory and enters the police herself. The reader gets to see Mallory mostly through the eyes of all those who care for her, but she essentially is a mystery that is slowly revealed over all the books. There are her partner, Riker, her boss, Coffey, her friend, Charles, and several of Markowitz's poker buddies––whom she used to fleece regularly. They all have specific thoughts about what kind of person Mallory is, but the reader knows that they all have it a bit wrong.

In The Chalk Girl, O'Connell’s terrific book that was published by Putnam early this year, Mallory is back at the NYPD after a three-month hiatus, which she spent driving around the country. Her boss, Lt. Coffey, has kept her deskbound in her time-out corner until the day the rampaging rats ran in Central Park. There have always been rats in the park, and the animal and the human vermin types abound there, but on this day, due to unusual circumstances, they are moving en masse through a particular part of the park––the Ramble––and they are delighted to find several dead bodies to augment their frenzy.

Among all the frightened, running, screaming populace at the park, there is a small red-haired child who looks like a sprite, wandering around trying to find someone to help her. But she is filthy, smelly, maybe bloody, and even grown-up people back away from her. Finally, amid all the mayhem and murder, Mallory is released from her constraints to help find the girl, because if there is one thing she knows, it is being young, alone and frightened. There are a few other reports about this child coming in. She appears to be unusually affectionate and is running up to people with arms outstretched as if looking for a hug. When Mallory finds her, she is the first to open her arms and gather the rather disreputable child to her chest. This seems to be quite a departure for the usually pristine detective, but it was not the surprise to me that it was to Mallory's fellow police officers.

The little girl's name is Coco, and she has been looking for her uncle Ben. She says that he has turned into a tree and it turns out that he is indeed suspended by ropes to a tree––and he is not quite dead. Coco is a remarkable child with distinct qualities and Mallory knows that the little girl will be a good witness to help solve this incident and the cases of other similar hanging victims who had been left to die gruesomely. Mallory's friend, Charles Butler, who is a psychologist, is much more worried about the child's state of mind.

Ben is hospitalized in critical condition, his body shut down due to his ordeal, and while there the police guard him. It was a nice change of cliché when the astute policeman at the door of the hospital room is never caught napping or on break when unwanted and possibly dangerous visitors show up. But Ben was not long for this world and though the police are looking for what tied these victims together, Mallory looks for a money angle because she believes it's the motive for most murders.

The story moves along at an exciting pace, as pieces of the past intersect with bits of the present. The pictures of the crime change like the inside view of a kaleidoscope, with all the little facets falling into different patterns as the case moves along. The people involved are among the wealthy––and among the drug-ridden––as well as people in authority. The images become clear and the accounts are melded beautifully and then balanced.

Mallory's relationship with Coco is very revealing and I am sure that many have interpreted it in different ways as did the people who considered they knew her. My take is that it began as the kindness of a stranger who could be depended upon and then turned deeper than that.

Two other series come to mind that reflect this theme. One is Elizabeth Gunn's, about an aptly-named Jake Hines, a man of many bloodlines. Jake began his unpretentious life in a dumpster, found by a pot-smoking janitor, who took him to a motel clerk, who promptly wiped the coffee grounds out of his eyes and called Health and Human Services. He owed his childhood to the foster parents of Minnesota, and it wasn't until he was a little older that he was a little grateful because he knew that other places were a lot worse. Jake is now the newly appointed Chief of Detectives for the town of Rutherford, Minnesota.

These are fast-paced police procedurals with an excellent cast of characters, who work well as a team. This is somewhat reminiscent of Dell Shannon's Lt. Luis Mendoza, albeit in a scaled-down town. I am drawn to the dermatologist/coroner who learned English while he was on the run from a work camp in the Soviet Union. He is hard to surprise, because murderers supervised his adolescence.

In Nury Vittachi's series that begins with The Feng Shui Detective, we meet Mr. C. F. Wong, a Feng Shui master who takes on a world-weary cast-adrift 17-year-old Joyce McQuinnie. Wong, living in Singapore, speaks English, but he considers Joyce's to be speaking a bizarre and incomprehensible sub-dialect of the language. It had taken him a while to learn that her term for no was "As if" and it was another breakthrough to find that "What ever" meant yes.

The adventures of these two are always humorous and both parties benefit from the kindness of a stranger.

At Thanksgiving, many people donate their time collecting and delivering food to worthy families, and many take time from their own plans to serve in soup kitchens. My hat is off to all the strangers who can be depended on for acts of kindness at this time of year.

Note: I have reviewed or will post reviews of some of these books on Amazon, Goodreads and other sites under my user names there.

Murder by the Numbers

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when readers who were completists, like myself, used to have to resort to reading the list printed in the first few pages of a book to see what other books an author had written and in which order. It did not take long to find that the flaw in this system was such that the list was frequently not in any particular order. Besides that, where I grew up you had to read just what was available.

One of the little solutions to this problem was to read books whose sequence was evident from the title; for instance, in series following the days of the week or months of the year. The first of these that I recall was the wonderful series by Harry Kemelman that began in 1964 with Friday the Rabbi Slept Late. The Rabbi was David Small, who lived in Barnard's Crossing, Massachusetts. Interesting cases came across his path and he was an excellent sleuth as well. What I recollect most clearly was his subtle education of the reader about some of the fine points of Judaism. I still have some of these old novels in paperback on my shelf and would like to reread them. There were seven days of the week before the Rabbi just solved cases on different days, completing the series more than thirty years later.

Perhaps better known and quite easy to read sequentially is Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series about a female private eye in Santa Teresa, California. A Is for Alibi began the run of alphabetical titles, which now is at V Is for Vengeance. Kinsey is an iconic heroine (when her story began we still used this term) who was raised by a no-nonsense aunt, and who was a police officer briefly before settling into career as a PI. She is a tough cookie who lives a minimalist lifestyle and has few––but very faithful––friends. The series began in 1982, the same year that V. I. Warshawski, the brainchild of Sara Paretsky, came to print. Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone pre-dates Kinsey by five years, first published in 1977. I enjoyed this series quite a bit but I am stalled at N.

In the late '80s, I found M. J. Adamson's series featuring Balthazar Marten. It began with Not Till a Hot January. It was a bitter cold January in New York and Det. Marten was being bored to icicles at his desk job that has kept him working and his mind partially off his personal problems. Balthazar has never totally recuperated from the bomb blast almost a year ago that killed his wife and ruined his leg. Now he has a new assignment that he really wished would have passed him by, but that was not to be. He is headed to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to help with the problems a new casino is having with organized crime.

Marten was well known for his recent work in the River Rat case, in which a serial killer was tracked and caught.  He did speak a good college Spanish and had a partner in the past who had helped him with the language and was Puerto Rican himself. So the powers that be thought he was the right man for the job.

Before he even gets settled in his hotel room by the beautiful harbor, he finds that he has been reassigned to new case of a possible serial killer of young women. This is considered by some a very un-Puerto Rican crime because the case, as it began, seemed very well planned and executed. On the island, murders were usually spontaneous. As a matter of fact, in San Juan they had two distinct homicide divisions. Homicide One, where the killer was unknown––and these crimes were rare––and a larger Homicide Two, for cases where the assailant was known soon after the murder; spouse or other family member, for example. I enjoyed this series because of the great sense of place, interesting and different types of crimes and because it is the only series I have read that takes place in Puerto Rico.

A second series featuring the months of the year is written by Jess Lourey. These are more contemporary and feature a somewhat disgruntled assistant librarian in Battle Lake, Michigan. In the first, May Day, Mira James is consistently foolish, which made it hard to admire her. Some of her cracks were witty and funny, but they were quite mean at the same time. There were many snide remarks when referring to the blue hair, raisin ranch, Q-Tip (white hair, white sneakers) generation. It might have been nice if there was one senior citizen she admired.

The first numerical series I completed was a short one by Donald E. Westlake, writing under the pen name Sam Holt, that was also published in the late '80s. Westlake explains in the preface of One of Us Is Wrong, that he wanted to try something different from his usual successful characters, so he arranged with his publisher this short series featuring Sam Holt, actor/sleuth. His publisher foiled him at the store when he found his books displayed as the author Sam Holt aka Donald Westlake. He never finished the series, stopping at The Fourth Dimension Is Death.

In What I Tell You Three Times Is False, Westlake takes our hero to an isolated location that Agatha Christie would envy. On a small island in the Caribbean, a group of actors and a director have been called together to do a pro bono effort intended to raise money for the American Cancer Society. They have been given the use of a large tower, once owned by a drug baron now in jail. Now it's owned by two movie producers, who have promised to do a certain amount of goodwill work. The idea is to do a "find a cure for cancer" commercial, and they have brought together a cast of exemplary fictional detectives. There is Sherlock Holmes, played for many years by Clement Hasbrouck, who lately has also been dubbed "Clement Hasbeen." Miss Jane Marple is also at hand and of late has been portrayed by Harriet Fitzgerald. The part of Charlie Chan is covered by a true Asian, Fred Li. The most current is TV detective Jack Packard, 6-foot-6, a criminologist, college professor, karate black belt and amateur detective with lots of skills and talents, played by the author Sam Holt. In real life (real life in the book, that is), the only thing that Sam shares with Jack is his height and his experience as a lowly traffic cop years ago.

Once on the island, a severe tropical storm cuts off all the inhabitants from the mainland. Naturally, in cases such as these, dire things happen to the radio as well and  communications are severed completely. This is a skillful retelling of the And Then There Were None type of story, or the cut-off-by-a-storm story, and some clues are obvious and then you talk yourself out of them. Naturally, in this case your money is on Jack Packard.

Two other numerical series I have tried are Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, beginning with One for the Money, and James Patterson's The Women’s Murder Club series, starting with 1st to Die. In both of these series, one was enough. On the other hand, Elizabeth Gunn's numerical series using sports metaphors and beginning with Triple Play in 1997, features Jake Hines, a police detective in Rutherford, Minnesota. These are fast-paced police procedurals with an interesting protagonist and a slightly unusual location.

There are other sequential series I am sure that might be in my future reading. These days, though, with websites like Stop, You're Killing Me! and Fantastic Fiction, I have no problem with finding what else an author has published and in what order. If anyone has some suggestions of mysteries written in a chronological or temporal pattern I would love to hear about them.

Take Me Out To The Ball Game

When everybody else was getting excited about the baseball playoffs, pinning their hopes on their favorites and trying not to be too downhearted when their hopes were dashed to the Diamond-Tex, I decided to check out whether murder and mayhem lurked in the games of summer.

What I found interesting–and I may be in left field about this–was that fictional skullduggery on the playing fields of the major leagues seems to take place almost entirely in Boston. So since there was no way around it, my introduction to the games afoot was Murder at Fenway Park by Troy Soos.

This is a very engaging story of Mickey Rawlings, a 19-year-old utility baseball player who has been hired to play for the Boston Red Sox for the 1912 season. On Mickey’s first day at Fenway he walks down a lonely dark hall on his way to the manager's office and discovers a badly beaten body that had been creamed by a baseball bat. Mickey is made so ill by the sight that it is a while before the next person on the scene finds both Mickey and the dead man. Before you can say Jackie Robinson, Mickey realizes that he is the number one suspect. Fenway Park was opened to the public for the first time in 1912 and owner Jack Taylor was anxious to avoid unpleasant publicity, so he warned Mickey to keep quiet and the affair was hushed up with some collusion from the police.

Mickey, who was young, naïve and not the sharpest cleat in the shoe, was nonetheless aware that as long as the Red Sox and Taylor needed him to help the team win the pennant he was probably OK, but there were incidents that shook his confidence: someone took pot shots at him and he also felt threatened by a strange bat left on his bed as a warning. He felt he had to solve the case because the police were not going to look farther than Mickey himself.

Joe Wood

Murder at Fenway Park takes you back to the days of horsehide balls, afternoon games that could get called on account of darkness and widespread behind-the-scenes gambling, with police and politicians equally corrupt. The same puppet-masters who were active in Boston were later implicated in the White Sox World Series scandal. But one of the best things that happened in 1912 was that toys were first put into Cracker Jack boxes that year. This was the era of Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson and the very unusual Smoky Joe Wood. Joe Wood was only 19 in 1912 and threw such a fast ball he said he thought his arm would fly off his body. He started his career in a mostly female team, the Bloomer Girls. At the age of 17, it was said he could look like a girl, but two years later he took the Red Sox to the World Series. These players are featured in this story.

Soos has a six-book series chronicling Mickey Rawlings's adventures as his journeyman's baseball career takes him to Ebbets Field, Wrigley Field and finally ending up with the Saint Louis Browns. This history is better than the mystery for me.

Other Fenway Park, Red Sox-centric mysteries that I have on my list to read include Rick Shefchik's Green Monster, in which sports detective Sam Skarda tries to find the truth about a claim that the Red Sox victory in the 2004 World Series was fixed. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and her son Jere Smith write about the 2007 Boston Red Sox in Dirty Water: A Red Sox Mystery. The team in this case has troubles with an abandoned baby left at the field (naturally nicknamed Ted Williams) and agents gone bad, trafficking in Cuban baseball stars. If you like college baseball, it is covered in Lloyd Corricelli's Chasing Curves. This takes place in Lowell, Massachusetts, not far from Boston. Apparently the rest of the leagues and teams and towns in America need to find a voice to tell their tales or they prefer to keep their secrets hidden.

I did find some baseball stories set outside Beantown, though. Wild Pitch by A. B. Guthrie Jr. brings baseball home in a more personal way, reminiscent of the old "root root root for the home team" sentiment. In a sparsely populated Montana county, 17-year-old Jason Beard is an assistant to the sheriff during the warm summer months when he is not pitching for the high school or the city team. He makes about five dollars a week. I guess the decade to be the '50s. He is getting some renown as a pitcher and has hopes of a limited career in baseball. He is rarely seen without a baseball in his hand that is there for the express purpose of strengthening his hand and arm muscles. As is the way in small towns, most everyone who passes Jase has a comment or a compliment about either the last baseball game or the one coming up. To get the picture, you have to understand that those country-town ballparks have no grandstands or bleachers and only a couple of benches for the players. The audience likes to stand where they can be sure to out-call the umpires and be a part of the game.

When a sniper kills an unpopular man, Jase, acting as the Watson to Sheriff Chick Charleston, begins the investigation that has to dig deeply into town secrets. There are several books in this series as well and Guthrie has such a way with descriptions that I like to think of him as a poet.

If you have ever played ball at any level whatever, there is always a time when your memories bring you back to the feel of your glove and the smell of neatsfoot oil that beckon you back to the fields of play. City or Parks and Recreation softball teams sponsored by local businesses satisfy this yen. These can be single-sex or coed, but no place is safe when there are maniacs about. And I am not talking about loud Little League moms with language that would make a sailor shudder and earn their kids a mouthful of soap if they used it. In Triple Play: A Jake Hines Mystery by Elizabeth Gunn, a recreational league home plate is desecrated by a posed, mutilated young man in a baseball uniform. There are many anomalies, most significant of which is the pair of metal-cleated old shoes that the corpse has on, the likes of which were outdated years ago. What I like about this series is the Ukrainian dermatologist coroner. He was once a teenage Siberian slave (work camp survivor) who has traded one frozen climate for another. How he alternates practicing dermatology, where the use of a scalpel is usually skin deep, with complete autopsies is also a mystery to me. While he speaks five languages he manages to mangle English slang in a ferocious manner. This enlivens the scenes of the deaths a bit. It is par for the course for Rutherford, Minnesota which uses all its recourses imaginatively because it is a small town growing so rapidly that it needs a coroner on a more and more frequent basis. There is on hand state-of-the-art crime-scene techs from St. Paul for the more complex problems, but Pokey (so called because his name Pokornoskovic is unpronounceable to many) gets offended when other experts take over.

I even found a murder mystery about a semi-pro league to round out the menu of baseball samplers. In A Minor Case of Murder, by Jeff Markowitz, the lovable team mascot, Skeeter, dies in what might be an accident, but under some suspicious circumstances. As you might guess from the mascot's name, the minor league team concerned plays on the Jersey shore. Having been to many a game on the East Coast, I can say with certainty that the skeeters leave a lasting excoriated impression.

All in all, while some of these authors hit home runs with their books, and with some I invoked the infield fly rule (the ball was dropped), I am still humming "Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don't care if I never get back...."