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.

"It's the Characters, Stupid!"

ICED, not hot, tea

"It's the economy, stupid!" became a catch phrase during Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. Since then, political commentators have filled in various words for "economy." Applying this phraseology to my own recent reading, I'd substitute the word "characters." The characters in the books below are so vivid, I feel they must exist somewhere. Any of them would make a wonderful companion for you and a glass of iced tea on that lounge chair in the shade.

Karen Russell: Swamplandia! (2011). Nominated for the Pulitzer last year, it's not a mystery, but a lot of fun. Ava Bigtree, the 13-year-old narrator, is a member of an alligator-wrestling dynasty. Her oddball family owns Swamplandia!, a theme-park island in the Florida Everglades. It's the area's No. 1 tourist attraction until Ava's mother, the park's headliner attraction, dies, and a newfangled competitor, The World of Darkness, opens. Suddenly, Ava is catapulted into the role of heroine to save her family. Original characters in a captivating coming-of-age story.

Aleksandar Hemon: The Lazarus Project (2008). In 1908, Lazarus Averbuch was shot and killed by George Shippy, Chicago's chief of police. Shippy claimed that the 19-year-old Averbuch was a Serbian or Sicilian anarchist who wanted to kill him because Shippy had banned "Red" Emma Goldman, a famous Jewish anarchist, from speaking in Chicago. A century later, Bosnian-American writer Vladimir Brik, whose misidentification as a Muslim makes him empathize with the murdered Averbuch, wins a grant to investigate Averbuch's killing. Brik and Rora, a photographer of wartime Bosnia-Herzegovina, travel to eastern Europe where they learn as much about themselves as Averbuch, the man they're investigating. Flashbacks of the real-life Averbuch's death, a journey into colorful places, and Hemon's tender and witty writing make Averbuch's and Brik's lives weave together and this book special. For fans of Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Gerald Bullett: The Jury (1935). Bullett was a British novelist, critic, and poet who worked for the BBC during WWII. Crime fiction critics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor praise this book: "A murder trial presented in a fashion to put most other fictional trial scenes to shame." It concerns the trial of Roderic Strood for the chloral poisoning of his wife, Daphne. Strood is an adulterer, but is he a murderer, too? The reader learns about the crime, the individual jurors and their lives, the trial, and finally, about what really happened. Detailed and elegant writing make a courtroom classic.

Tom Piccirilli: The Last Kind Words (2012). Five years ago on Long Island, Collie Rand let himself be dragged into "the underneath" and went on a night's killing spree that left a family and several others dead. He's scheduled to die by lethal injection in a week. His brother, Terrier, with whom he has a love/hate relationship, abandoned a fiancée after Collie's spree and moved out West. Now Collie has asked Terry to come home. He insists that he didn't kill one of the victims who died that night, and he wants Terry to investigate. For generations, the close-knit Rand family has handed down names of dog breeds to their kids and a tradition of grift and thievery, but no one has used a gun or killed like this before. Terry's extended family members still live in their huge house, and his former fiancée is married and raising a daughter. Terry is unsure whether to believe Collie and is full of angst. This is a book of very noirish rumination and one of mysterydom's more memorable families.

Georgette Heyer: No Wind of Blame (1939). Even Wally Carter's niece admits he is a shifty and lazy no-good, and when he's murdered, there's no shortage of suspects. In fact, his own home and neighborhood are full of them. His American wife, Ermintrude, inherited a pile from her first husband and was fed up with Wally. An exiled Russian prince, staying at the house, hoped to steal Ermy away from Wally. A local farmer has been in love with Ermy for years. One neighbor owed Wally money, and another resented the attentions Wally paid his sister. In addition to these suspects, there are Ermy's daughter, who "tries on" personalities as often as she changes clothes; the local squire's son; and the neighbor's drippy daughter and leftist son. Inspector Hemingway has his hands full in this traditional British mystery.

Joe R. Lansdale: Edge of Dark Water (2012). This book of noir is set back, and I mean waaaay far back, in the woods of East Texas, during the Depression. The main cast: our narrator, 16-year-old Sue Ellen; her argumentative "colored" friend Jinx; and their friend Terry, whom many call a sissy. They want to dig up their recently buried friend May Lynn, who was fished out of a river with her hands bound and a sewing machine wired to her feet. They'll burn her to ashes and carry her in a jar to the Hollywood of her dreams. Their plans involve rafting to the nearest big town to catch a bus. Needless to say, their journey doesn't go as planned or at all smoothly. Lansdale is a master of dialogue and atmosphere, and this book is Mark Twain meets Elmore Leonard meets Stephen King. Not a gore fest, but some scenes are, uh, colorful. Cussin' and earthy language. Terrific characters, including a villain I'd pay big money to never come across.

Richard Ford: Canada (2012). Ford's first novel in six years is narrated by retiring teacher Dell Parsons, who looks back at his life fifty years ago. Bev and Neeva, the middle-class parents of 15-year-old twins Berner and Dell, make hapless criminals. They are caught robbing a bank in Great Falls, Montana, and are imprisoned. Before the authorities can intervene, Berner runs away to San Francisco with her boyfriend. The naive Dell ends up at a hunting lodge in Saskatchewan, Canada, with a violent American ex-patriate named Remlinger. Dell's examination of how he built a sense of self and a philosophy of life makes great reading.

I'm currently enjoying Jess Walter's stunning 2012 book, Beautiful Ruins. What about you? Can you share any great summer reading discoveries?

The Shirty Thirties: Tongue-in-Cheek Cozies

England's gracious country manors have probably hosted more fictional murders than the mean streets of any major city. They're just more discreet about them; preferring to sweep such embarrassing incidents under the rug, or at least keep them out of the newspapers! Like many readers, I can't seem to get enough of these nostalgic tales of luxurious lifestyles and leisurely weekends that aren't there any more, and was delighted recently to find a couple of new-to-me offerings.

A book tabled outside a used bookstore introduced me to the work of British author James Anderson and his lugubrious Detective Inspector Wilkins. Wilkins is a kind of counterpoint to Christie's Poirot: openly sure that he has been promoted beyond his ability and "not sanguine, not sanguine at all, M'Lord" about his ability to resolve the case at hand. After which, of course, he solves the crime quite handily through a series of brilliant Poirot-like deductions. The crimes take place at Alderly, the small (a mere dozen guest rooms, imagine!) but lovely manor house of George Saunders, 12th Earl of Burford, his wife Lavinia, and their daughter Gerry.

In The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cozy, Gerry invites her orphaned and impecunious friend Jane Clifton for a long weekend even as her Uncle Richard, a government minister, is preparing to conduct secret negotiations with representatives of a foreign power at Alderly. The Earl has invited a Texas millionaire and fellow gun collector with his wife and secretary, and the Countess expects a notorious sponger who "hangs around like a flu bug" according to the Earl, as well as an author researching Gracious Country Homes of Britain for an upcoming book.

Full house at Alderly this weekend, and a very odd mix, thinks the venerable butler Merryweather as he scans the guest list. And 13 at dinner, how very unfortunate. But as it happens, a French baroness traveling past has a fortuitous road accident and is invited to stay while her car is repaired. Poor Lord Burford is greatly relieved that he won't have to plead illness and dine alone in his bedroom to even the table after all!

Between the open-handed affability of the Earl and the social skills of his Countess, Alderly prides itself on its hospitality. However, its lavender-scented linen-clad beds must be pretty uncomfortable––or perhaps it was the thunderstorm?––but on Saturday night it seemed nearly everyone was creeping around the dark halls on clandestine errands, bumping and thumping each other, none of them on the, er, usual romantic business. The Sunday sun rises on two fewer guests, one found shot in the lake and the other found equally dead in a well-publicized secret passage. A fortune in jewels and a pair of rare dueling pistols have also disappeared.

This book is a wonderful tongue-in-cheek romp through mystery's Golden Age, with frequent allusions, both direct and subtle, to the famous fictional detectives and mysteries of the period. It has everything a proper country house-party needs: spies, thieves, blackmailers, murderers, as well as a very creative method of disposing of a body. The book included a map, but I really needed a list of the characters and a flowchart to keep track of the action. Who done it came as a complete surprise to me.

A true confession: Regency romances, aside from Austen's, bore me to tears. I overdosed so badly in my teens that the sight of an empire waistline on a book cover can drive me straight to another aisle. Despite this, I picked up regency queen Georgette Heyer's Why Shoot a Butler? for the charming vintage––and definitely not Regency––cover.

Frank Amberly is motoring to Graythorne, his uncle's country place, for a long weekend and gets exasperatingly lost in the dark and mist. Finally passing an Austin pulled over by the side of the road, he asks rather rudely for directions. An equally rude young woman standing by the car directs him back the way he had come.

As he cautiously turns the Bentley in the narrow lane, his headlights pick up a man slumped behind the starred windscreen of the Austin, his shirt bloody. The young woman won't give her name or come with him to the police station to report the death. While she is carrying a gun, Amberly determines that it has not been recently fired, so he leave her there and gallantly doesn't mention her presence at the scene to the police.

While the story line here was a little different from one of Heyer's romances, the villains were obvious and odious, and the love-hate relationship developing between Amberly and one of the suspects took up quite a bit of the book. Not a keeper for me, or an author I'll look for again.

Now I'm torn. How to spend the afternoon? Tennis, or maybe golf? Or curl up with a cozy fire and a book in the dear old library with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves? Darling, please ring for tea. We'll have it in here, not in the drawing room––so cozy, isn't it?

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.