June-July 2015 Preview: Part Seven

Summer vacation is here for the school children, and, for quite a few of them, reading is not what they are looking forward to. But I am. Even though our time away from work is approaching like a debilitated person inching along on a walker, I am already setting aside some books for a leisurely perusal.

One of these is by Carolina De Robertis. De Robertis is known for poetic historical fiction like The Invisible Mountain, which takes the reader to Uruguay, and Perla, which uses Buenos Aires, Argentina as a backdrop. Her third novel, The Gods of Tango (Knopf, July 7) begins in a small village in Italy during the early days of the 20th century.

Leda is 17 years old and is headed to Argentina carrying only a few possessions, among them her father's cherished violin. She plans to make a new life for herself in Buenos Aires, where her cousin Dante is waiting to marry her.

Bad news awaits her on arrival, and she is told that Dante has been killed. She decides to remain in Buenos Aires, living in a tenement, without friends or family, hovering on the brink of destitution. Despite this, she is seduced by the music that she hears surging out from dark places of the city. It is the tango, the dirty dancing of the era, which surfaced from the lower-class immigrants. The tango is the illicit scandalous dance of the dives and cabarets of the city, and it calls to her.

Prostitution is the main avenue for a woman without means to make a living, but Leda comes up with another devious plan. She has always desired to master the violin but knows that she cannot play in these clubs as a woman. She cuts her hair, binds her breasts and dons her Dante's clothes to transform herself into Dante. As Dante, she joins a troupe of tango musicians with aspirations to greatness. They hope to play for high society.

Eventually, the split between Leda and Dante begins to disappear, and Leda faces a dangerous future.

Much like the couples' dancing scenes in the movie Evita recreate the ambience of Buenos Aires as it was 100 years ago. so does De Robertis evoke the time and the era of the birth of the tango. I recommend hooking up your iPod with samples of this sensuous music for an enhanced reading experience.

Chief of Police Kate Burkholder, from Linda Castillo’s After the Storm (Minotaur, July 14), is another woman who buried her past and made herself a new life. Kate was raised Amish, and she survived a series of brutal murders in her community. She left the faith and her home after the killings. Kate went into law enforcement in the city before returning to her hometown of Painters Mill, Ohio to head the police force. In this, the seventh of the series, a tornado rips through this peaceful town, and human remains come to light. It's Kate's job to try to identify the bones in order to notify the family. It is quickly apparent that these bones had a sad tale to tell because the death was no accident. Once again, Kate sets out to find a killer camouflaged by the gentle sect.

Lineup

Though the case is 30 years cold, a sleeping beast has been aroused and Kate morphs from hunter to prey, as she is first shot at and then stalked by an unknown assailant. The crux of the story is that there are family secrets, and Kate finds once again how far people will go to protect their own.

Linda Castillo has a deft hand at creating slowly growing tension and a desperate feeling of unease. Her books are perfect for a stormy night.

If you were totally wrung out by Castillo's book, a great antidote would be to tuck into Alexander McCall Smith's The Novel Habits of Happiness (Pantheon, July 21). Isabel Dalhousie is a very different kind of sleuth. She is a charming, extremely curious philosopher from Edinburgh, Scotland. The mysteries she solves are felony-free and are basically about delving into moral conundrums.

Kirsten, a neighbor of a friend, has a question for Isabel. Why does her 6-year-old son, Harry, keep on talking about his other life? It is one that involves a different home and a different family. Harry's stories are unusually detailed and very consistent from one telling to the next. He speaks of living by the sea with the Campbell family and a view of a lighthouse with off-shore islands in the distance.

Isabel and her husband, Jamie, go to visit the area, and what they find leads to more questions and to a very delicate situation.

One of the most captivating facets about Isabel Dalhousie is the way her mind wanders into moral discussions as the events of the day pass her by. In the first book of the series, The Sunday Philosophy Club, the reader follows Isabel's mental digressions as she considers such odd moral dilemmas as whether it would be hypocritical for an obese person to recommend a diet and the very interesting thoughts on the moral responsibility of lying. As a philosopher, Isobel believes an unexamined life is not worth living, and she uses her philosopher's mind to untangle unusual problems.

British writer Robert Goddard is a master of the clever twist. His books cover crimes that are set in different parts of the world during different times of history. As Goddard puts it, they have in common the infinite capacity of human nature for intrigue and conspiracy. He writes about unprincipled chicanery, unsolved crimes, unforgiven betrayals, and unforgotten jealousies with double-crosses and triple twists.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 is where Goddard sets The Ways of the World (Mysterious Press, June 2), the first in a trilogy featuring James Maxted, a former pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. Max, as he is called, survived the Great War only to be caught up in another maelstrom. Max and his sidekick, an ex-plane mechanic named Sam Twentyman, struggle to discover the cause of Max's father's death. Henry Maxted, a diplomat, was found dead outside his mistress's apartment building in Montparnasse. Suicide is the easy answer, but Max and James feel it is part of a series of strange deaths of other diplomats that follow Henry's demise. Max and Sam are a likeable pair ,and the trilogy promises to be enjoyable. The British edition came out two years ago, but this edition is worth waiting for.

Spring Preview 2015: Part Two

As I sit here watching the icicles form on the holly bushes and birdhouses just outside my window, it seems my spring reading list is skewing just a little bit to novels that are taking place where ice cleats are not de rigueur. At least some of my favorite authors are brightening the reading landscape this spring.

Even though in Six and a Half Deadly Sins (Soho Crime, May 19), Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun has already retired twice from his post as the National Coroner of Laos and left 70 far behind, he is intrigued by an unusual package that arrives in the mail. It is not exactly a present; it's more like an invitation to solve a puzzle. The first clue is the remnants of a human finger sewn into a garment worn in northern Laos.

This is, after all, the 1970s, and Vietnam is invading Cambodia. With more than that going on, Siri hastens north with his usual coterie: invaluable Nurse Dtui and her husband, Inspector Phosy; Mr. Geung, the lab assistant, who has Down's Syndrome; Ugly the Dog; and, most important of all, Mrs. Paiboun to keep them all straight.

This is an addictive series, both unusual and endearing, and best started from the beginning with The Coroner's Lunch (see review here).

Quite the opposite from Siri Paiboun is Estelle Reyes-Guzman, in a long-running series by Steven F. Havill, which takes place in the southwestern state of New Mexico. Estelle is a young woman who is the undersheriff in Posadas County. She has a busy job and a lively family. In Blood Sweep (Poison Pen, April 7), Estelle is torn between her duties as a mother and those of her job. Her eldest son, Francisco, is a gifted pianist, and he is touring parts of the country under the auspices of his music school. Estelle is concerned when she learns the tour has also taken Francisco to some crime-ridden areas of Mexico, but she is tied down with other responsibilities.

At the same time, the other main series characters have their own problems. Sheriff Bobby Torrez is in danger, and something has happened to old standby Bill Gastner. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Havill's characters always take the calm, reasoned approach to problems and never fly off half-cocked. Estelle will save the day. I have this book on order as we speak!

Now, if you need something more calming because your doctor doesn't like your erratic blood pressure or the way your eyes keep popping in and out, it's time for a little Alexander McCall Smith. You might know him from his Botswana mysteries featuring the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, his Sunday Philosophy Club mysteries with Isabel Dalhousie; or even his 44 Scotland Street series with six-year old Bertie Pollock, who has more fans than almost anyone else in Scotland––maybe more than Smith himself.

Have you heard of the Austen Project? Briefly, six current bestselling authors were paired with Jane Austen's six novels. The authors are to rewrite Austen's works with their own spin on the basic core of the plot. Sense and Sensibility was done by Joanna Trollope, and Val McDermid took on Northanger Abbey. I confess that I've read neither. But when I heard Alexander McCall Smith was tapped to do Emma: A Modern Retelling (Pantheon, April 7) in his inimitable way, I could hardly wait to see the results.

Emma is a young woman so self-possessed she is convinced her gift is to straighten out the messes others have made of their lives––but in the nicest way possible, of course. McCall Smith is a writer whose pen has the ability to draw the most accurate of portraits with gentle humor, penetrating insight and enough acumen to allow a reader to appreciate the trying aspects, as well as the strong points, of even the most difficult of characters.

I am not sure if "gastroporn" is on my Dictionary Word of the Day app, but I got an inkling about what it means when I read what Chief of Police Bruno Courrèges does to a chicken as he prepares one of his scratch meals in Martin Walker's The Devil's Cave. All of Walker's books are filled with the delectable culinary adventures of the man who would make a great husband and father, but who so far spends his time taking care of his town and a few women who wander in and out of his life. If he can't be with the one he loves, he'll love the one he's with, as the Stephen Stills song goes.

So I am eager to read the American release of Walker's upcoming book, The Children Return (Knopf, April 28). (Walker's website states that this title was published in the UK as Children of War (Quercus, 2014).) The theme of this mystery is very topical because it is about an autistic youth from St. Denis, Sami, who has been kidnapped by Islamic extremists. Or did he go willingly? The fear is that he is going to be exploited because he is a genius with technology, and he has gathered an invaluable store of al-Qaeda intel.

Walker does his usual brilliant job of translating international events to a local rural French jargon and makes it all plausible and understandable––hopefully, even resulting in a resolution.

P. L. Gaus has been writing a series based in Ohio Amish country for the past 15 years. One of his central themes has been how modern life intrudes on the quiet, ordered lives of the Plain people. While some of the crimes Gaus writes about are the usual murder, mayhem, grievous bodily harm, theft and the like, the way the crimes are handled––both by the sheriff and the victims––are not the usual. The sheriff is not Amish, but he works closely with the church elders and community leaders. In a place where the tenets of "turn the other cheek" and "forgive thy transgressor" abide, law enforcement takes on another meaning.

But when drug dealers and reluctant Amish drug mules enter the picture, creative measures are needed. Whiskers of the Lion (Plume, March 31) follows closely on his previous book, The Names of Our Tears, since both are related to protecting victims of a vengeful drug contact. Fannie, a young girl on the run, doesn't know whom to trust any more, and she will not be easy to help.

After all this, you need a cup of tea. Try some unusual blend and settle in with Laura Childs's Ming Tea Murder (Berkley, May 5). Theodosia Browning owns a shop that caters to the most exotics tastes in tea if you are lucky enough to live in Charleston, South Carolina. At a gala evening celebrating an exhibit of a genuine 18th-century Chinese teahouse, Theodosia's boyfriend, Max, asks her to check out a photo booth across the banquet hall while he speaks to a museum sponsor.

She meanders across the hall. When she gets to the booth, she finds it occupied by the self-same museum sponsor––definitely dead, the blood already pooling, already congealing. Although Theodosia is no stranger to corpses (this is Book 16 in the series!), she screams bloody murder. Time travel? Scotty's Star Trek transporter? Chinese mysticism? Is there something in the tea?

Alexander McCall Smith: Author, Musician, Lawyer, Innovator

I am always impressed by those adventuresome souls who are able to kick over their traces and start a new path in life. Famous among these is Grandma Moses, who took to painting in her seventies when she wanted to make something for her postman’s Christmas gift, and Colonel Harland Sanders, who began the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise after a new expressway bypassed his restaurant and put him out of business when he was in his sixties. Both of these were individualists whose "get up and go" hadn't got up and went when they were ready for Social Security. And, even more important, they were people with a vision.

Another of these trailblazers is Alexander McCall Smith. Smith was born and grew up in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), then went off to Scotland to study law. At close to 50 years of age, he was teaching in Belfast, Ireland where he entered a literary competition and won in the children’s category. He returned to Southern Africa in 1981 to help co-found and teach law at the University of Botswana.

"Write what you know" (Mark Twain)

The rest is history, since McCall Smith  came out with his book The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. It was in an airport bookstore that I picked up this first mystery and I was instantly charmed. Mma Precious Ramotswe has had some reversals in her life, with the death of her father and the breakdown of a marriage that brought her more sorrow than joy. She has become a follower of the teachings of Clovis Anderson, author of a text on the principles of detection. She set up as a private detective on a main street in Gaborone, Botswana. Her main strengths are intelligence, courage and a basic understanding of human nature. Somewhat of a Miss Marple, except that this is a career for her. The first thing she does is hire a secretary, Grace Makutsi, who is intensely proud of her graduation at the head of her class at the local secretarial college with an astounding grade of 97%.

All of the characters are beautifully drawn, and the reader begins to appreciate the life and culture of Botswana even to the point of ordering Mma Ramotswe's favorite tipple, bush tea, from online sources. It can even be found in local grocery stores these days. The stories are usually simple, but it would be a mistake to consider the characters simple-minded. In The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, several of Mma Ramotswe's friends seem to be walking unwarily into different traps that had me calling out to them to watch their steps, but I underestimated their insight.

Bush Tea

One of the milestones of McCall Smith's life was when he became a respected expert in medical law and bioethics. He used this background as a pathway into his next series, featuring Isabel Dalhousie, who is a moral philosopher by training and inclination. She is the editor of a periodical titled the Review of Applied Ethics. Isabel is a woman of independent means, with a fulltime housekeeper, but she keeps quite busy. People are always coming to Isabel, asking her to solve their problems, and she has become an occasional detective. Her friends and family frequently admonish her about getting involved in problems that are, quite frankly, none of her business.

Actually, what she does best is to personalize the Socratic idea that an unexamined life is not worth living. There are handfuls of mysteries in Isobel's daily life as she ponders the ethics of everyday situations. In The Sunday Philosophy Club, Isabel unfortunately witnesses a man's fall from a balcony in a concert hall. She believes she has a moral obligation to find out what she can about the man, because she thought she exchanged glances with him as he fell. "That was part of the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do."

The location of the stories is in Edinburgh, an eminently respectable town where the citizens believe there couldn't be any murderers here. But Isabel knows that Edinburgh is a place like anywhere else, and has the same range of people as any place else did: the good, the bad and the morally indifferent. But they had their quirks of course, but even their quirks were charming––as we find in The Charming Quirks of Others.

McCall Smith is also the former chairman of the British Medical Journal ethics committee and was a member of many other boards and commissions, all of which he gave up when he achieved success as a writer.

Still with some time on his hands, McCall Smith decided on a new venture, taking a leaf out of the pages of Dickens and the San Francisco novelist Armistead Maupin, both of whom wrote serialized novels. Thus 44 Scotland Street was released in installments every weekday in The Scotsman newspaper and was also later delivered on the BBC radio as 15-minute dramas. The stories surround the characters living in a particular Edinburgh apartment building.

Right away, the reader is caught up in the lives of Pat MacGregor, a 20-something who is on her second gap year, since the first didn’t work out; Bruce Anderson, her narcissistic flatmate; Matthew Duncan, the owner of an art gallery; Angus Lordie and his dog Cyril; and my personal favorite, little Bertie Pollock. Bertie is somewhat of a genius, but his life is constantly made miserable by his overbearing mother, who insists he play the saxophone, speak Italian and visit a psychiatrist regularly. I get every book right off the presses so I can see how Bertie is faring, as he tries to live a normal life and hold his head up in all the difficult and humorous situations he finds himself. These stories have grown into eight volumes so far; the most recent, Sunshine on Scotland Street, is very hard to get hold of.

“To boldly go where no man has gone before” (or to boldly go where no man has swept the floor) (Star Trek and others)

Much to the dismay of his publishers, McCall Smith's next literary experiment was an on-line novel. This was a serialized story published on the Internet exclusive to Telegraph.co.uk. and available to the readers at no cost.

These stories tell the stories of the inhabitants of a large housing unit named Corduroy Mansions, in London, England. Here, also, there is a large cast of characters, one of the most interesting of whom is a dog, Freddie de la Hay.

As Corduroy Mansions was released online, readers could interact via online discussion boards with each other and the author himself. The Daily Telegraph staff edited this. The author wrote a chapter a day, starting on 15 Sep 2008. The first series ran for 20 weeks. These daily chapters were also available as an audio download. Fortunately, there are hard copies for all those who prefer reading a book.

Sandwiched into these series are wonderful children's stories; several nonfiction books, such as The Forensic Aspects of Sleep; and a fifth series, about a Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, who finds himself in one humiliating situation after another.

Finally, McCall Smith has a few nonseries books of fiction. La's Orchestra Saves the World is set in England at the beginning of World War II. Lavender––La for short––goes to live in a country cottage. Music is her refuge, and she helps bring together all the local musicians who played music, and it was an antidote to the horrors of war. In this venture, Smith calls on his own musical background. Aside from his other talents, Smith is also a bassoonist and he co-founded a group, The Really Terrible Orchestra, whose mission it is "to encourage those who have been prevented from playing music, either through lack of talent or some other factor, to play music in the company of similarly afflicted players." Critics of their performances seem to agree that lousy is the best they can ever be.

Well, you can’t be good at everything.

Whatever plans Alexander McCall Smith has for his next venture, either book or series, I look forward to it. I would love to know how he manages his time.