Location, location, location

That's what real estate is said to be all about. Some mystery series aren't all about location, but they tend to be inseparable from certain addresses.

221B Baker Street, London

Is there anyone who doesn't know Sherlock Holmes's famous address? When Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes series, street numbers on Baker Street didn't go above 100, but in the 1930s, the street was renumbered and––presto!––a large building occupied by the Abbey Road Building Society received the numbers 219-229. For many years, the company employed a secretary just to answer the large volume of mail they received addressed to Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street. They enthusiastically embraced the Holmes connection and placed a plaque on the front of the building.

But then, a problem arose. In 1990, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, located at 239 Baker Street, got the head of the local Westminster council to put a 221B Baker Street plaque on their building and claimed the right to receive all mail with that address. This sparked a long-running battle among the museum, the building society, the council and the postal service. The struggle finally ended 15 years later, when the building society moved to a new location.

Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221B Baker Street (formerly 239 Baker Street)

Holmes's office is said to be on the first floor at 221B Baker Street. As you probably know, what Americans call the first floor is the ground floor in Britain, while their first floor is what we call the second floor. When Watson and Holmes go looking for a flat to rent (in A Study in Scarlet), they find 221B Baker Street to be "a couple of comfortable bedrooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished and illuminated by two broad windows."

Blogger Russell Stutler has spent some years figuring out the layout of 221B Baker Street, carefully reading all the stories multiple times. Here is his concept. Note that Mrs. Hudson has a small room off the study and another downstairs, while Watson's room is upstairs.

In Conan Doyle's day, Baker Street was a quiet area of residences for well-to-do Londoners, across from Regent's Park. Today, it's a bustling area, with 221B located just around the corner from the tourist mecca of Madame Tussaud's wax museum.

110A Piccadilly, London

Rumor has it that Dorothy L. Sayers picked 110A for Lord Peter Wimsey's street address in a nod to Sherlock Holmes's 220B. Piccadilly is a good choice for a wealthy second son like Lord Peter. It's home to the Ritz Hotel, Fortnum & Mason and one of my favorite bookstores, Hatchard's. It's described as well-appointed, with a welcoming fire and many, many bookshelves filled with rare editions. Not surprising for a man who is an expert on incunabula (books printed before 1501) and who often has a book auction catalog at hand.

There is no 110A Piccadilly, but there is a 110 and, disappointingly, it's not a house or a block of flats. It's the Park Lane Hotel. More specifically, 110 would be about where the ballroom entrance is. Take a look. It's to the far right in this photo of the hotel.  At least it's across from Green Park, so it would be a nice location if Wimsey did actually live there.

After Lord Peter Wimsey marries Harriet Vane, he and his man, Bunter, say goodbye to Piccadilly and hello to, not Leicester Square, but Audley Square, not far away in Mayfair. The couple move into a place referred to as Belchesters' House, which has a library upstairs with a bookcase that conceals the entrance to a secret room that Harriet adopts as her writing room.

Some contend that the model for the couple's Audley Square house is Number 2, which was a private home built in 1876 and now houses the University Women's Club. That seems an apt location for Sayers and Harriet Vane.  I like to think of Harriet and Peter strolling the one block to one of my favorite places in London, the lush, green and quiet Mount Street Garden.

In Busman's Honeymoon, we learn that Lord Peter buys Harriet a wedding gift of Talboys, a rustic old farmhouse in the village of Paggleham in Hertfordshire where Harriet grew up. They plan to use it as their country home and honeymoon location. When they arrive, they find Talboys not ready for them as arranged. It's locked up tight and it takes some time to gain access. Next morning, they find the chimneys completely blocked––and an even worse find is made in the cellar.

There is no village of Paggleham in Hertfordshire, but there is a Puckeridge that kind of works for me as a place to imagine the Wimseys' country living place.

891 Post Street, [Apartment 401], San Francisco

Dashiell Hammett lived in this building from 1926-1929, and wrote Red Harvest, The Dain Curse and The Maltese Falcon while living there.  Famously, Hammett placed Sam Spade's apartment there in The Maltese Falcon.

891 Post Street.  Apartment 401 is the top apartment on the corner directly facing the camera.

Today, the apartment building has a coin laundry on the ground floor and a parking garage across Post Street. It's on the corner of Post and Hyde, in the Tenderloin. Not the best neighborhood, but the nicer part of the neighborhood, at least, and realtors like to call it Lower Nob Hill. Recently, an apartment was for rent in the building for $1,450 a month. What do you suppose Hammett's rent was for his modest studio apartment?

There is some disagreement, but most seem to think that Hammett––and Spade––lived in Apartment 401, on the northwest corner. The Friends of Libraries USA plague on the outside of the building states it as fact, so let's just go with it. Mystery writer Mark Coggins has a nice story about the apartment here. Here's the illustration on his site of the floor plan.

It's not a very inviting spot, but as long as you're in the neighborhood, you might feel compelled to take a stroll over to the alley where Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, got plugged. There is even a plaque at the entrance to the alley, just off Bush Street above the Stockton Tunnel. Note that the plaque should have a big **spoiler** mark on it!

A guy named Don Herron has been leading a Hammett tour for 35 years. I'm sorry to say I never heard of it when I lived in San Francisco. But if you're interested, he starts out at noon every Sunday in May and September, and it costs $10. If you can't make it in person, Herron has published a book about it called, unsurprisingly, The Dashiell Hammett Tour.

Another stop on the tour is at 1201 California Street, at the peak of Nob Hill. The Cathedral Tower there is thought to be the model for the Coronet apartment building, where Bridget O'Shaughnessy lived. I'm sure she missed her great view of the Golden Gate when Sam Spade sent her to the joint.

Don Herron winds up his tour at John's Grill. Sam Spade ate there, so maybe you should give it a try sometime. You can even order the dinner Spade had there: lamb chops with sliced tomatoes and baked potato. Before you pay the bill, check out the replica of the Maltese Falcon upstairs.

West 35th Street, New York City

Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe loved his home, a luxurious Manhattan brownstone. And what's not to like? Three stories with a rooftop greenhouse for Wolfe's beloved orchids; quarters for two live-in staff members, including Fritz the cook, and Wolfe's wisecracking assistant, Archie Goodwin; an elevator to take the rotund Wolfe up and down; a richly comfortable office with Wolfe's custom-made chair.

In the books, several different addresses on West 35th Street are given, nearly all of them in the 900s, which are nonexistent because they'd be in the Hudson River. The Wolfe Pack, Nero Wolfe's fan society, has designated 454 West 35th Street as the probable site of Nero Wolfe's brownstone and had a plaque put on the building in 1996. The thing is, there isn't actually a brownstone there, at least not today. Today it's a not-very-inspiring apartment building:

454 West 35th Street

Ken Darby, author of The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe, claims there were never any brownstones on West 35th Street. Darby speculates that the actual location Rex Stout had in mind was Gramercy Park, probably East 22nd Street.

The Nero Wolfe series televised by A&E used a lovely brownstone at 44 West 76th Street to stand in as Wolfe's place.

44 West 76th Street

Because this brownstone has more than the seven stairs in the front that Rex Stout described for Wolfe's home, the filmmakers were always careful to shoot the front so that it didn't show the stairs or only showed seven of them. Now that's attention to detail! Speaking of which, for a whole lot of detail about the layout of the brownstone, check out John Clayton's blog here. To find out everything there is to know about Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, the brownstone and all of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books, our own Georgette is the source. One of these days, I hope she'll write about Wolfe.

Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

After all these big city apartments, it's time to visit a less conventional home for a beloved sleuth. John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee lived on a houseboat called Busted Flush, berthed at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar Marina, in Fort Lauderdale. He gets a plaque from Friends of the Libraries USA too, which you can see in the photo below, just to the right of the fire hose sign.

This isn't really where a berth F-18 would be in this marina's layout, but it's the thought that counts. Nice of the marina to care enough about McGee's fans to recognize him. And MacDonald must have appreciated it too. Not just the recognition, but that it kept fans focused on Fort Lauderdale, rather than on Sarasota, where he lived.

The Busted Flush is named after a poker hand, naturally. In this case, McGee was losing hand after hand, then bluffed a flush and got this 52-foot barge-style houseboat as his payoff. McGee doesn't get to spend much time there, because his cases take him all over, but when he can, that's where he kicks back with a Boodles Gin, enjoying life.

Wherever you call home, I hope you have living companions as tolerant as Holmes's, as loving a life companion as Lord Peter's, as beautiful a home town as Sam Spade's, as much room for your favorite hobby as Nero Wolfe, and as low a purchase price as Travis McGee's.

A Little Night Fright

Halloween is a night my kids look forward to all year. Dressing up in costumes. Going door-to-door, trick-or-treating with friends. Lugging home bags full of candy to be examined, traded with others and eaten until the kids are sick.

I won't be escorting my kids tonight and my husband and I aren't attending a costume party. Instead, we're having a few friends over for movies. We'll offer a choice of tried-and-true nail biters: Psycho (has anyone not heard of Janet Leigh's shower scene or how much Norman Bates loves his mother?), Carrie (Sissy Spacek shows everyone it doesn't pay to annoy her), John Carpenter's Halloween (who in the history of movies screams better than Jamie Lee Curtis?), The Shining (Jack Nicholson gets creepier and creepier as the movie progresses) and The Thing (Carpenter's 1982 movie starring Kurt Russell about a shape-shifting alien).

To accompany the movies we'll serve this hummus from Noble Pig and chips.


Pizza Hummus (Makes about 4 cups)
1 Tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 cup tomato paste
2 teaspoons dried oregano leaves
1 teaspoon dried basil
2 to 3 cloves garlic
3 cups canned chickpeas, drained & rinsed, 1/2 cup liquid reserved
1/4 cup tahini
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon Kosher salt

Heat the olive oil in a small skillet over medium-high heat. Add the tomato paste, oregano and basil, cooking until slightly toasted, about 2 minutes. Transfer the tomato paste mixture to a food processor. Add the garlic, chickpeas, chickpea liquid, tahini, lemon juice and salt.  Puree until smooth and creamy.

If you'd like to read while waiting for trick-or-treaters, you might try one of the books below. I've given a couple of horror and other suggestions.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. The first sentence of this slim book tells all you need to know: "On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming in." Atmospheric and relentless. By the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Drood by Dan Simmons. People either love or hate this 800-page book of steampunk/horror/historical fiction. Too long, but I enjoyed it. A story unreliably narrated by Wilkie Collins involving Collins, Charles Dickens and a mysterious figure named Drood who materializes from the scene of a train accident.

Dracula by Bram Stoker. Hey, I'm sick of vampires too, but this is the classic gothic fantasy and you must read it. Memorable characters in a tale of ever-increasing tension set in Victorian England and the spooky wilds of Transylvania. I've read it several times and still shiver when the Transylvanian peasants cross themselves.

Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula: The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count by John H. Watson, M.D. as edited by Loren D. Estleman. This is one of those books I had to read based on the title alone but I enjoyed this pastiche. It's for Holmes fans who've read Dracula. In this book, a schooner runs aground in an English harbor. The dead captain has lashed himself to the steering wheel and his cargo is 50 boxes of earth. The only living passenger is a large black dog. Sound familiar? Somebody better alert Holmes, and luckily for London, somebody does.

Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler. The Peculiar Crimes Unit investigates London crimes with elements of the macabre or supernatural. This is the first book in an unusual series and it involves elderly detective John May's look back at the first case he and Arthur Bryant investigated during the London Blitz.

Savages by Don Winslow. Ben and Chon are happily supplying marijuana to their customers in Laguna Beach, California until a Mexican drug cartel decides to muscle in. Winslow is a great story teller. This book is thrilling rather than scary. It will keep you reading as you mindlessly reach for candy from the bowl for the little trick-or-treaters. (I hope you bought enough. What kind did you get?)

Appleby's Answer by Michael Innes. Priscilla Pringle is a well-known writer of clerical mysteries and, when a local rector dies mysteriously, her ears prick up and her nose begins to sniff. Her investigations are aided and abetted by the odd Captain Bulkington, who is interested in a real-life perfect murder. Soon Sir John Appleby, retired Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, gets an SOS. As usual, this book, the 27th in the John Appleby series, is a witty and literate gambol.

Make sure you put your leftover candy out of reach of your pets before you go to bed. This is a good night to keep your cats and dogs in the house where they'll be safe and where they can protect you from things that go bump in the night.

Oh, yes. You might want to sleep with a night light on, have a garlic clove on your bedside table and a heavy-duty flashlight under your pillow. You never know when some unannounced visitors will come tap-tap-tapping against your windowpane or ooze into the bedroom from under your closet door. It is Halloween after all. Sleep if you can.

Casting the Detectives

When a mystery book's character moves from the page to the screen, a lot of changes may occur. I was reminded recently of the casting issue when discussing the late Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series with some friends. You may have seen the three-part adaptation on Masterpiece Mystery! last season, with Rufus Sewell playing Zen. This casting provoked a lot of howls from the more ardent fans of the Zen books. My good friend Georgette opined that Rufus Sewell was as much Aurelio Zen as Owen Wilson would be Josef Stalin. Hmm.

Da!

Duh

What do you think?

Were these two separated at birth?

Caterina Murino & Rufus Sewell

Me, I was fine with Rufus Sewell as Zen. He smoldered nicely, looked great in Italian suits and had explosive chemistry with Caterina Murino, who played Tania Moretti. But I've only read a couple of the books in the series and that was a long time ago. Maybe I'd feel differently if I'd read them all and they were dear to my heart.

What makes for a successful acting portrayal of a beloved mystery book character, then? One thing I do know is that a physical resemblance between the actor and the character isn't a prerequisite. Here is Dashiell Hammett's description of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon:

"Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-gray eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down–from high flat temples–in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan."

Humphrey Bogart

David Suchet

That doesn't sound even remotely like Humphrey Bogart, does it? And yet wasn't Bogie near perfection as Spade? Obviously, we need to forget about looks. Instead, the actor must express the essence of the character or make the character his own.

Could there be a better Hercule Poirot than David Suchet? For me, he's Poirot to the life. I didn't dislike Peter Ustinov the many times he played him, but he didn't seem quite right. Albert Finney and Alfred Molina really didn't do it for me. I just hope Suchet gets the chance to achieve his stated ambition to play Poirot in every one of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries.

Margaret Rutherford

Joan Hickson

Agatha Christie's other best-known protagonist, Miss Marple, has also been played by many actors. Just in recent years, PBS has shown productions with Julia McKenzie, Geraldine McEwan and Joan Hickson. They all were appealing to me, though I liked Joan Hickson the best. Going back to the old movies, I just loved Margaret Rutherford, even accepting that she wasn't true to the books' descriptions. She was just so far from even a façade of a retiring nature, and every time I'd see her knitting I'd think that about the only thing I could truly imagine her doing with the needle was tenderizing the rump of a fleeing suspect.

Heston: worst Sherlock ever?

Look on Wikipedia to see the list of actors who have played Sherlock Holmes. The list is something like 70 names long, including such unlikely choices as Charlton Heston and George C. Scott. I remember Rupert Everett's 2004 portrayal of Holmes in the TV movie Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stockings was downright painful, though that had a lot to do with the film itself. I think most Holmes aficionados are satisfied with the portrayals of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett. They've formed many people's mental pictures of Sherlock Holmes for decades.

Benedict Cumberbatch

The current Holmes depictions by Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey, Jr., are a little more controversial. I thought Cumberbatch captured the Holmes disdain for conventional behavior and all lesser mortals (pretty much everybody, in other words), while Downey's willingness to do and try anything was appealing even if he didn't seem all that much like Holmes. But I'm not a hardcore Holmesian, so maybe I'm too easygoing on the subject.

Roy Ridley

I am, however, a hardcore Lord Peter Wimsey-ite. It's commonly said that Dorothy L. Sayers modeled Wimsey's physical appearance on Roy Ridley, who was a Fellow and Tutor of Oxford's Balliol College. In Whose Body, Sayers describes him as having "rather hard grey eyes [and a] long, indeterminate mouth" and adds to that "a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead, accentuated by the brushed-back sleekness of his tow-coloured hair." Wimsey's appearance wouldn't stop a clock, but he's no oil painting, either. As Sayers would put it more elegantly, "[a]t no . . . time had he any pretensions to good looks."

Ian Carmichael

On the screen, the two most well-known depicters of Dorothy L. Sayers's creation are Ian Carmichael and Edward Petherbridge. I don't downright dislike Carmichael's portrayal, but he's too bumptious for my taste. And I can't get the picture out of my head of his somewhat pudgy body in a harlequin costume in Murder Must Advertise. It was just not right.

Jeremy Sheffield

Edward Petherbridge

On the other hand, Petherbridge seemed a closer physical resemblance to Sayers's Wimsey, though I'd say a touch too effete. More important, Petherbridge conveyed Lord Peter's yearning for Harriet Vane and his occasional angst about the consequences of his detective work. I'd love to see a remake of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories, but I don't know whom I'd cast as the lead. Maybe Jeremy Sheffield, a British actor who caught my eye recently.

Jason Isaacs

Right now, PBS's Masterpiece Mystery! is televising a three-part series based on Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie mysteries. Jason Isaacs, looking very different from his well-known part as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies, plays Jackson Brodie. First off, he looks great, with his penetrating blue eyes and weather-beaten but handsome face. He has a voice as warm as a peat fire and personality that's an irresistible mix of wry humor leavened with an air of lifelong loss. Since I've never read the books, I have no way to compare his portrayal to Kate Atkinson's creation. Thoughts about that or other crime fiction characters portrayed on screen?

Have You Had Your Serial Today?

It must be a mixed blessing to write a successful mystery series. The benefits are obvious: a built-in audience for each successive title in the series, characters who can be explored at length and in depth, and a protagonist with name recognition who may even become an icon like Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey or Miss Marple.

But writing a series has its challenges. Readers may come to feel so invested in the protagonist and other regular characters that they are offended if the author wants to change direction. Previous descriptions of the protagonist's background restrict what the author can do with the protagonist later on. The author may come to feel the series' success is as restrictive as golden handcuffs.

Arthur Conan Doyle resented that the success of his Sherlock Holmes stories kept him from more important pursuits and he killed off Holmes in 1893, only to succumb to public demand and resurrect him in 1901. Agatha Christie's grandson says that she had many ideas for plots that were inappropriate for Hercule Poirot and wanted to create new lead characters. But Poirot was her most popular protagonist and her publishers and public demanded she continue to produce new tales featuring the little Belgian with the active little grey cells. So, despite the fact that she had come to view her creation as a bombastic, detestable creep within 10 years or so of his first appearance, she churned out her Poirot stories for more than half a century.

The challenge for the serial writer is keeping the story fresh and interesting within the boundaries created by earlier books in the series. How many series have you read that eventually appeared to be phoned in by the author, with the protagonist's character seeming to be preserved in amber and plots settled into well-worn ruts?

In the past couple of weeks, I've read three new books in successful and long-running series. These were all series I had on my must-read list from the start. How well their authors managed the challenge of sustaining interest varied.

Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache/Three Pines series could be a prime candidate to fall into dull repetition. After all, how much can you do with a series set in a remote, idyllic village in the forests of Québec's Eastern Townships region? How many villagers can be killed off before the town's residents would have to flee for their lives if they weren't completely nuts? Louise Penny tackles the inherent restrictions of her setting—and the incongruity of Three Pines being a place of art, friendship and hospitality and, at the same time, a locale with an appallingly high murder rate—with wry humor. In her latest book in the series, A Trick of the Light, local bookseller Myrna describes Three Pines as "a shelter[, t]hough, clearly, not a no-kill shelter."

Penny also knows it's best to mix things up a bit by moving her location on occasion. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is a detective stationed in Québec City, which opens up more possibilities. In A Rule Against Murder (also published as The Murder Stone), Gamache and his wife are on vacation at a resort when a murder occurs. Bury Your Dead takes place almost entirely in Québec City during its winter carnival.

For A Trick of the Light, Penny returns to Three Pines, though she opens the action in Montréal's Musée d'Art Contemporain, where Clara Morrow, one of the Three Pines regular characters, is about to enter a preview of a solo show of her work. Clara is 50, far beyond the age when most artists are discovered, but after working in her successful artist husband's shadow for decades, she has become an overnight sensation.

After the preview, Clara returns to Three Pines for a celebratory party with her village friends, and artists, gallery owners and artists'agents from Montréal. In the category of friends are Gamache and his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache and Beauvoir have become acquainted with Three Pines and its quirky residents during their investigations of several prior murders.

The celebratory mood is swept away when, early the next morning, the murdered corpse of a woman is found in Clara's garden. The woman is identified as Lillian Dyson, a childhood friend of Clara's who cruelly betrayed her while they were in art college. But what was Lillian doing in Three Pines when Clara hadn't laid eyes on her in over 20 years?

Traditional detection methods of examining means and opportunity still leave Gamache and Beauvoir with a wide field of suspects. They shift their focus to motive, which reveals a huge gap between the type of person Lillian is widely reported to have been 20 years earlier and how she is seen contemporarily by her new circle of acquaintances.

Gamache realizes that the question of Lillian's true personality is the key to the mystery, because only through understanding her nature can the investigators learn how she inspired murderous hatred and in whom. In the course of their investigation, Gamache and Beauvoir also confront the horrors they still live with as survivors of a deadly attack on their team the year before. The experience has affected Gamache profoundly, but it has not shaken his fundamental belief in people. Beauvoir thinks: "The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you'll find good.  He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn't. He believed that if you sift through good, you'll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit."

Clara's new-found success and Lillian's murder also bring to a boil the problems of envy and lack of understanding that have plagued her marriage for several years. In fact, envy is a persistent theme in this book, as another deadly sin, greed, was in Penny's prior book, A Brutal Telling.

What Louise Penny does best, and what allows her to write a mystery series that stays fresh, is to focus on the human heart and spirit, nature and the small pleasures and concerns of life (especially food!), rather than on forensics, timetables, violent action or gimmicky personalities. She writes about envy, resentment and fear eating away at people, threatening friendships, marriages, partnerships and even lives, but also about love, forgiveness and redemption offering hope for change and a forging of new, stronger bonds.

A Trick of the Light was released on August 30 and if I were you I'd rush right out and get it.

What do you suppose is the longest-running mystery series among currently living authors? Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford series must be one of them. She started in 1964 with From Doon With Death and is up to her 24th in the series, The Vault (published in the UK August 4, 2011 and to be published in the US September 13, 2011). In addition to Inspector Wexford, Rendell has 35 non-series books and 13 more written as Barbara Vine. Just thinking about her work ethic makes me want to sit down and put my feet up.

In 2009, London's Telegraph newspaper reported that Rendell didn't want to write any more Inspector Wexford novels after that year's The Monster in the Box. I was worried that Rendell was fed up with Wexford and that The Monster in the Box would show it, but my concerns were unfounded. The book was a truly enjoyable wrap-up to the series, with Wexford tackling a case that took him back to his earliest days in the police force, and his mixed-up personal life at that time.

What a surprise to hear this year that there would be a new Wexford book. The Vault finds Wexford retired and splitting his time, with his wife Dora, between their longtime home in Kingsmarkham and the coach house of their actress daughter's upmarket home in London. Retirement is good for Wexford's physical health, as he spends hours a day taking long walks in the city, but he finds himself at loose ends without his work. He's relieved when Tom Ede of London's Metropolitan Police, an old acquaintance, asks him to provide consulting assistance in the investigation of four long-dead bodies found down an ancient coal-hole on the grounds of a house in quiet St. John's Wood.

The Vault is a sequel of sorts to one of Rendell's non-Wexford novels, A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999). While it's not necessary to read the other book to understand The Vault, it might be a good idea, since it's bound to make The Vault more interesting. And that would be a good thing. While The Monster in the Box seemed to breathe new life into the Wexford series, The Vault is tired. Most of the witnesses and suspects are so one dimensional that it's hard to keep them straight. The secondary-story strand about the Wexfords' Kingsmarkham daughter, Sylvia, manages to be simultaneously lurid and dull. Some of the writing is sloppy and unclear as well.

Still, Rendell has Wexford make some interesting observations about his new role as a consulting detective with no official standing and how it affects his interactions with interviewees and the police. I wish I knew why Rendell decided to write another Wexford after The Monster in the Box made such a good series conclusion. Pressure, as in Christie's and Conan Doyle's cases? Or does she believe she still has something to say about Wexford and his cases? If it's the latter, I hope she exploits the possibilities in Wexford's new role to create a more fully dimensional and coherent book next time around.

And that brings me to the third new series book, Laurie R. King's eleventh and latest in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, Pirate King (to be published September 6, 2011). I loved the first book in the series, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and have read every book in the series as soon as it was published.

I was delighted from the start of the series when the young bluestocking, Mary Russell, met up with Sherlock Holmes. Their partnership was filled with erudite and witty repartee, and they traveled the world together sleuthing in ingenious disguises and using elaborate ruses to escape peril. But then something strange happened. King began separating Holmes and Russell. At first, the books would describe each of the partners' doings, which were bookended with scenes of them together. Later on, though, their time together became strictly limited and Mary's separate role was emphasized.

Pirate King takes this trend even further. In this book, Holmes is entirely absent for a good two-thirds of the book and the pair are together for very few pages. I would estimate that scenes of the two of them together total only about 20 pages or so out of more than 300 pages.

Mary is persuaded by Holmes and Inspector Lestrade to go undercover as a director's assistant with Fflytte Films as they head to Lisbon and Morocco to make a silent film about Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. "How can there be a silent film about an operetta?," I hear you ask. It turns out the project is about a film crew trying to make a film about The Pirates of Penzance. The play-within-a-play conceit becomes ever-more elaborate, as Mary works with actors playing the parts of pirates, constables, British officers and coquettish daughters, and many of the actors turn out to be something other than what they seem.

Mary's task is to see what she can find out about Fflytte Films that might explain why crime seems to follow its films in ways related to the subject matter of each film, and why the previous director's assistant disappeared before the crew left England for Portugal. A series of minor disasters besets the cast and crew in Lisbon, but real danger begins as their sailing ship approaches North Africa. In this third part of the book, Holmes has joined the cast incognito, as an actor playing the Major General, and he and Mary must rescue the party from grave danger. This third part of the book, which takes up a little over 70 pages, has all the derring-do, action and spirit that are lacking in the rest of the book. It is cleverly written in a way that I could imagine as a script for a silent-film adventure story.

I'm puzzled why Laurie R. King has altered this series to de-emphasize the Russell/Holmes collaboration almost to the disappearing point. Having so much of the book devoted to Mary working alone forced it into an awkward first-person narrative that reads like a well-educated and earnest young businesswoman's travel diary. I wasn't particularly interested to read in detail about her dealings on behalf of and with the cast and crew, her seasickness, rehearsal travails and the like. (And I'll admit I was a little miffed by Mary's scornful attitude toward my beloved Gilbert & Sullivan.)

Though the book returned to the series' old form at the end, I couldn't help noticing that the subjects of Mary's investigation were mere afterthoughts in the resolution of the story. It made me wonder about the utility of so many of the previous pages detailing Mary’s sleuthing.

Has Laurie R. King come to feel so restricted by the Russell/Holmes partnership that she separated them? Is the weight of Sherlock Holmes's legendary persona so burdensome that she wants to cut him loose? She's the creator and, of course, she's free to do that. But I'm one of those pesky fans who don't like to see a change in a winning formula.

Note: I received The Pirate King and A Trick of the Light as free review copies. Also, portions of the reviews in this post appear in book reviews posted on the books' product pages on Amazon, under my Amazon pen name.