Winter Preview 2014-2015: Part Eight

All those World War II and atmospheric crime novels I'm planning to read this winter need to be leavened with some good old-fashioned "entertainments," as Graham Greene used to call his not-so-serious writings. Luckily, it looks there will be plenty on hand.

UK cover on the left, US on the right.
As usual, the UK cover is lots better

Did you see the 2009 film An Education, about a young woman growing up too fast in England as the country transitioned from the austerity of the 1950s to the Swinging 60s? One of the striking things about that movie was its sense of that particular time and place. The novelist Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay, and if the description of his upcoming book, Funny Girl (Riverhead Hardcover, February 3), is anything to go by, he had a lot of that sensibility still inhabiting his brain after the screenplay was finished.

It's 1964, and young Barbara Parker decides that winning Miss Blackpool would doom her to a year of dreary local ribbon-cutting ceremonies, much too long to wait to go to London to make her fortune. So she refuses the tiara and heads off, hoping to emulate her idol, Lucille Ball. In fairly short order, she wins the lead in a BBC sitcom called Barbara (and Jim), about a young couple's married life. Hornby takes Barbara (screen-named Sophie Straw) and the creative characters behind the show through their personal comedies and tragedies, all the way up until the present.

I'm reading that the book includes a mix of real history and fiction, and has a selection of black-and-white photographs that lend it a little of the feel of a sort of celebrity bio or TV history. Word also is that it's both hilarious and touching, as the characters experience sudden celebrity and what happens after.

Another character looks back on a long and eventful life in Alison Jean Lester's Lillian on Life (Putnam Adult, January 13). Even though I claim to be cynical about authors' blurbs, I have to admit that this first caught my eye when one of my favorite authors, Kate Atkinson, wrote: "I absolutely loved Lillian on Life. It was a delight . . . so fresh and clever."

In this debut novel, Lillian is born to a stereotypical staid midwestern family in the 1930s, but leaves convention behind, as she samples men and cultures around the country and the world. I like the idea that the story isn't told as a straight chronology, but as a series of 24 life lessons, told with wry humor and a determination to avoid regret. I'm not at all sure I'll like Lillian, but I do like character studies and she definitely looks like quite a character.

Speaking of characters, how about the late columnist Dorothy Parker? I was recently reading the book Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair (Penguin, October 2014) and giggling over her "Hate Songs" pieces on men, actresses, relatives and the office. That put me in the mood for more.

Author Ellen Meister decided that Dorothy Parker should never die, so she decided to imagine that Parker lives on, as a feisty ghost residing at her old drinking and rapier-wit-wielding place, the Algonquin Hotel. Book One was 2013's Farewell, Dorothy Parker. But it wasn't a farewell, because the ghost of Dorothy Parker will return in Dorothy Parker Drank Here (Putnam Adult, February 24).

This time around, Dorothy will buttonhole Algonquin resident Ted Shriver, who is a reclusive resident waiting to die of cancer, which he refuses to have treated. Shriver has no will to live since his brilliant writing career was derailed years before by a charge of plagiarism. Dorothy will team up with TV producer Norah Wolfe to try to keep Shriver among the living. I've only seen one early review, but it says the book is full of heart, wit, suspense and compassion, so it seems like just the ticket for a gloomy midwinter day.

And speaking of characters who drink––a lot––Stewart O'Nan's West of Sunset (Viking Adult, January 13) takes on F. Scott Fitzgerald during the last three years of his life. His career was decrepit, Fitzgerald had ruined his health, Zelda was in a sanitarium, and in 1937 he grabbed one last chance by heading to Hollywood to be a screenwriter.

The Hollywood studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s produced some of my very favorite films (The Philadelphia Story, Holiday, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Rebecca), which means that I'm anxious to read this even though I've never been much of a Fitzgerald fan. Still, advance reviewers say it's an insightful novelization of the waning years of Fitzgerald's life, which were nothing like the Jazz Age period. And if I also get to read about Louis B. Mayer, Humphrey Bogart and––hey!––even Dorothy Parker in La-La Land, I'm happy.

I have some trepidation about Laurie R. King's 13th Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes book, Dreaming Spies (Bantam, February 24). I practically hurled the 11th book in the series, Pirate King, across the room in sheer frustration. Holmes was barely a presence, and Mary on her own was so boring, with her complaining and humorless self-satisfaction that I decided that was the end of my reading in the series. But I have some friends who said the next book, Garment of Shadows, was much better. What pushes me toward wanting to read this one is that the title is a play on Matthew Arnold's reference to Oxford as a city of "dreaming spires." I'm a complete sucker for Oxford-based mysteries.

The story of Dreaming Spies is apparently set not only in Oxford, but also in Japan. This visit to Japan is alluded to in a couple of earlier books, but this is the first time readers will learn exactly what Russell and Holmes got up to in that faraway land in 1924. Word is that it involves a blackmailing English lord and ninjas. Yes, ninjas. Will this 13th story in the series be a lucky 13? The proof will be in the reading.

One of my favorite Golden Age mysteries is Delano Ames's She Shall Have Murder, the first in a delightful series featuring Jane and Dagobert Brown, who are a sort of English Nick and Nora Charles. Compared to the Charleses, the Browns drink fewer martinis and more tea, but they get up to just as much silliness. In this first book, Jane Hamish is not yet married and is working in one of those classic English village law offices, where all the law you need to know is in the head of the senior partner, and the tea cart will be coming around any minute.

When spinster client Mrs. Robjohn is found dead from a gas leak in her home, the underemployed Dagobert Brown, Jane's intended, refuses to believe it's an accident and decides to investigate, dragooning a reluctant Jane into his sleuthing. It's a delightful story, with its charming characters and evocative description of the austerity of Britain shortly after World War II.

Delightful as the story is, why am I mentioning this old chestnut in the context of a book preview? Simple. Manor Minor Press has just republished the book with new cover art and annotations that add depth to the story. For example, I now know what Veganins and Melachrinos are, along with the full explanation of that British Double Summer Time I've seen mentioned in so many period British mysteries.

Another protagonist who is equal parts entertaining and exasperating is Don Tillman, first met in Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project, which I reviewed here. Don is an Australian genetics professor who resembles The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper, only with a lot more interest in sex. In The Rosie Project, Don's Wife Project, in which he attempts to find a mate via a rigorously designed requirements questionnaire, becomes tangled up in the Father Project, wherein he agrees to help barmaid/student Rosie identify her biological father.

I don't want to spoil The Rosie Project for you, but in the upcoming The Rosie Effect (Simon & Schuster, December 30), Don and Rosie are married and have moved to New York, where he is a visiting professor at Columbia and she is a medical student. Don has loosened up some of his strict rules for living to accommodate the more spontaneous and flexible Rosie, since he has concluded that, despite her failure to achieve a passing grade on his Wife Project questionnaire, she is the world's most perfect woman.

But when Rosie announces she is pregnant, Don is knocked for a loop. The amount of research involved in optimal pregnancy diet and exercise, successful parenthood and the best infant equipment is daunting enough, but a series of calamities result when Rosie repeatedly fails to be a cooperative subject and the rest of the world just doesn't get Don's spirit of scientific inquiry, as when he decides to spend long periods of time on a park bench observing small children in a playground and making notes.

I had the opportunity to read an advance copy of The Rosie Effect and, while it has a little of the bloat you always seem to see in the sequel to a runaway best-seller, and it doesn't achieve the same heights of inspired lunacy as The Rosie Project, it still gave me a few chuckles. It might be something that would cheer you up if you're a little under the weather after New Year's Eve.

Is it appropriate to look forward to a new book in a series when I still haven't read the first one? I was so excited about William Shaw's She's Leaving Home last year (originally published in the UK as A Song from Dead Lips) that I bought it right away, but it's still there on my e-reader. I find that's the problem with e-books; too easy to lose track of them.

Shaw's series features Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen and temporary Detective Constable Helen Tozer of London's Metropolitan Police in the Swinging 60s. It wasn't all rock-and-roll and miniskirts. The force was openly sexist and racist, and there were plenty of bent coppers. Crime rates were high; fraud and corruption were more the rule than the exception.

Life on the force can be hard for Breen, with his Irish heritage, and far harder for Helen. In Kings of London (Mulholland, January 27), Breen finds a death threat in his work pigeonhole and is met with indifference about the finding of a mutilated body thought to be a homeless man. The interest level changes when another body is found, this time the son of a powerful politician. The politician wants results, but the prominent don't want any publicity that could possibly harm them.

The more I look at the reviews of the books in this series, the harder I shake my head at my failure to read the first book yet. This looks like a gritty, stylish rendering of a past that's not so distant but is still a different world.

If you're a regular reader of Read Me Deadly, you know that I just love everything Veronica Mars. The TV show, the movie, and the book The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line that came out earlier this year. I'm even a devotée of the commercials that Kristen Bell is doing with her real-life husband, actor Dax Shepard, for Samsung. Check out their cute and funny Christmas ad here.

Veronica will be sleuthing again in Rob Thomas's Mr. Kiss and Tell (Vintage Paperback Original, January 20). As fans know, the Neptune Grand hotel has been the scene of all manner of sins, from adultery to blackmail to murder. For the fanciest hotel in town, it sure has its seamy side!

Now, a woman complains that she was brutally assaulted in the hotel, smuggled out and dumped in a field, left for dead. The hotel hires Mars Investigations (i.e., Veronica, her father Keith, and their electronics savant, Mac) to investigate the woman's story. But the hotel isn't a terribly cooperative client; they refuse to turn over their reservation list, for example. Surveillance video has key gaps, the victim refuses to identify who she was supposed to meet at the hotel, and other witnesses seem to be hiding information too.

One of the strengths of the Veronica Mars world is its clear-eyed gaze on corruption in a town with a wide gap between rich and poor. The police force is usually responsive only to the powerful, and it takes Mars Investigations and its few allies in the force and the courts to get any form of justice. Early readers say that Veronica's usual cynicism about Neptune is in full force and that we see plenty of our other favorite characters, including Veronica's old biker buddy Weevil and love interest Logan. This looks like just what I'll need in the bleak midwinter.

Note: I received free review copies of The Rosie Effect and She Shall Have Murder.

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.

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.