To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

No, no, I'm not delving into what the heck Hamlet was thinking in his famous soliloquy. We'll question the philosophical meaning of life and the mysteries of death some other time. Right now, I'm talking about the pleasures of bedtime, and it's not sleeping, dreaming or sex that's foremost on my mind. I don't know about you, but the bed is one of my favorite places for reading.

There's just something so very luxurious about shedding the day as well as my clothes, slipping into bed, and picking up a great book to be whisked away to a world outside my own. My husband may or may not be by my side, but my two dogs are definitely on the bed somewhere. On the bedside table, there's something to eat and drink, a heavy-duty flashlight (for under-the-covers use, and it doubles as a club if my reading conjures up a wild-eyed ax murderer lurking behind the closet door), and a bookmark for when I submit to "Nature's soft nurse," sleep.

But first, some books:

A warm bed is the best vantage spot for pondering Jim Kelly's version of a locked-room murder in the snow of West Norfolk, England. Death Wore White (2009) opens as Sarah Baker-Sibley, driving her Alfa Romeo, obeys a detour sign on the main coast road and follows tail lights onto the Siberia Belt, a narrow unpaved road. Half a mile away, Det. Inspector Peter Shaw and Det. Sgt. George Valentine are checking a report of toxic waste on frigid Ingol Beach when they discover a dead man on an inflatable raft floating into shore. The man's bloody mouth and a corresponding mark show that he has bitten his own arm to the bone.

When the two policemen make their way to the Siberia Belt, they find a line of eight vehicles stuck in the snow behind a pine tree that has fallen across the road. There is only one set of footprints leading to the pick-up that's first in line. The second vehicle's driver, Ms. Baker-Sibley, insists that the third vehicle's driver, who walked up to the pick-up's window for a brief conversation, kept his hands in his pockets the entire time. So who stabbed the pick-up's driver in the eye with a chisel? More forensic evidence makes this murder even more difficult to comprehend. Is it related to the corpse on the raft, and a body that's discovered in the sands later? As well as investigating these three murders, Peter looks into a cold case involving the murder of the Tessier boy. At that time, Peter's father, now dead, was George's partner, and the two cops made a mess out of the investigation. The senior Shaw retired, and George was demoted.

The less-than-warm relationship between current partners Peter and George is nothing new for experienced crime fiction readers, but the ingenious plot, the interpretation of the forensic evidence, and the vivid Norfolk setting and its hard-scrabbling inhabitants make this police procedural, first in the Shaw/Valentine series, worth losing sleep.

Oh man, there are no sweet dreams when the disillusionment of Vietnam comes home to America. In Newton Thornburg's Cutter and Bone (1976), Alex Cutter is a paranoid, scarred, and disabled Vietnam vet, and Richard Bone is a hedonistic dude, fond of drink and getting high, who abandons his family and advertising career to scrape by as a gigolo. (In the 1981 movie based on the book, Cutter's Way, John Heard is Cutter and Jeff Bridges is Bone.)

One night when Bone is drunk, he thinks he sees a man dumping a bag of golf clubs into an alley trash can; however, the next day he realizes that what he saw was the disposal of a high school girl's dead body. Although it was dark, and Bone saw the distant man only in silhouette, when he sees a newspaper photo of Missouri corporate tycoon J. J. Wolfe, Bone exclaims, "It's him!" This electrifies Cutter, and, although Bone tries to backpedal, Cutter will have none of that. Cutter seeks justice for the girl, sure, but bringing revenge on Wolfe will somehow fix what happened to Cutter in Vietnam and what's wrong with the country he returned to. Bone allows himself to be overruled, and he and Cutter head to the Ozarks to investigate.

Cutter and Bone is haunting. It's not so much about redemption, as the conflict between alienated prodigal sons and corrupt authority figures. It takes place mostly in Santa Barbara, California, the same lushly beautiful beach town that provides an incongruous setting for Margaret Millar's novels about society's misfits. (It's also the model for Sue Grafton's fictional Santa Teresa, home of private eye Kinsey Millhone.) Thornburg's dialogue is pitch perfect, and you won't forget his two young men.

Noirish thrillers are perfect for night-time reading. But let's say your car needs a new muffler, your dog chewed one of your favorite shoes, or your spouse's spaghetti gave you indigestion. For whatever reason, you don't have the heart for noir, no matter how wonderful. Fix yourself a cup of tea and have one of these almond biscotti. What to read? Perhaps a little something before turning off the lights. Karen Russell's Vampires in the Lemon Grove, George Saunders's Tenth of December, and Jess Walter's We Live in Water are all enchanting 2013 short-story collections.

Maybe you want something more substantial than a short story. Outstanding British humor? Try the 1889 masterpiece by Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), about the holiday boating trip on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford taken by friends Harris and George and their dog Montmorency. Others: Henry Howarth Bashford's Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man. The Diary of a Nobody (1892), which details 15 months in the life of Mr. Charles Pooter, was written by brothers George and Weedon Grossmith. Cold Comfort Farm (1932), by Stella Gibbons. Stephen Potter's The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship (or the Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating) (1947). Gerald Durrell's autobiographical My Family and Other Animals (1956).

Or, snuggle back into your pillow and roll your eyes at Dornford Yates's "Berry" Pleydell, his family, and close friends—British aristocrats who find themselves fish out of water, as England experiences social and financial upheaval between the World Wars. In the seventh series book, The House that Berry Built (1945), the Pleydells sell their ancestral pile in Hampshire, England, and flee to the cheaper South of France, where they believe aristocrats are still appreciated. There, Berry builds Gracedieu, a mountainside château, patterned after Cockade, the author's own French residence. The joy of this comic novel is in the very detailed description of Gracedieu's construction process. As World War II approaches, the Pleydells are forced to skedaddle once more.

I could go on forever, talking about books for bed, because, really, what books aren't suitable there? It's eminently satisfying to lie flat on my back between the sheets, book raised above my face, and read about, say, corpses who can't lie still and must lurch around like zombies. Or corpses lying as quietly as I am. For example, Lee Child's Without Fail involves Jack Reacher's attempts to stop assassins targeting the new American vice president. In The Crossing Places, by Ellie Griffiths, forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway is called when a child's bones are found on a Norfolk, England beach. Or people who might be rolled up in sheets to lie quietly. You may be familiar with Oregon psychiatric patient, Randle McMurphy, in Ken Kesey's 1962 classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (made into a movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture); and hospital patients in Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island (2003) (Martin Scorcese directed the movie). But have you met the man who wakes up with no memories in a mental institution and pulls himself back together in Virginia Perdue's excellent suspense Alarum and Excursion (1944)?

More sheets find their way onto mummies; for example, in books by Elizabeth Peters, featuring feminist Amelia Peabody, a Victorian Egyptologist. In Dermot Morrah's 1933 charmer, The Mummy Case Mystery, the police are satisfied that the charred body in Oxford Professor Benchley's room is the professor and not the newly acquired mummy of  Pepy I. Professors Sargent and Considine aren't so sure. There should be two bodies, not one. Their investigation is full of Oxford ambience, wit, and red herrings.

Now, I'm getting sleepy. I'll have to finish Gerald Seymour's fine book of espionage, 2000's A Line in the Sand, tomorrow night. I love reading in bed. If you haven't already, I strongly suggest you give it a try.

R. I. P.

One of the signs that a person is getting older is that the obits are the first items perused after opening the morning paper. We seem to want to revel in the fact that our names are not among those listed. My name, not an uncommon one, has been listed there on at least one occasion and I have been happy to report––like others before me––that the reports of my death had been greatly exaggerated.

These days, of course, we get a  bunch of information online and I learn some sad news by surfing other mystery blogs. Recently, some of my favorite authors have moved their typewriters and word processors to a higher plane.

Jakob Arjouni (pseudonym of Jakob Bothe) was a German author to whom I was introduced a few short years ago by his book Happy Birthday, Turk!, which I mentioned here. Jakob was just 48 years old when he died less than two weeks ago, after a difficult struggle with pancreatic cancer.

Those books of Arjouni's with which I am familiar have a focus on contemporary problems, particularly those in his own environment. He was born in Frankfurt am Main and lived there much of his life. Detective Kemal Kayankaya is his PI protagonist, who was born in Turkey but was adopted and raised by German parents. Despite his fluency in the German language, he is subjected to racism due to his ethnic appearance. He counters this with glib and humorous wisecracking repartee.

In One Man, One Murder (also published as One Death to Die), Kayankaya is hired to find a young Thai woman who has been abducted. Like many female immigrants from the East, she worked in the sex trade in order to pay back the people who brought her to Germany. A nice German man paid off her debts in order to keep her in his life, but deportation proceedings had begun when thugs, who had plans to extort a large ransom from her golden goose, took the girl. This goose hires Kemal instead.

Kayakaya realizes that someone in the immigration office may be involved when he hears of other disappearances, so he heads to the immigration office. A cake-eating woman interrupted her snack to ask him his name:

'Kemal Kayankaya.'  

 'Spelling?'  

 'Pretty good mostly. I have a little trouble with those foreign words.'

After this she refuses to accept that he is a German citizen. He couldn't be.

As the case progresses, the detective follows the clues to the seamy underbelly of Frankfurt life. He prides himself on solving cases no matter how sordid the affairs seem to be, but the unstoppable, unshockable Kayankaya gets a few surprises before he can put this case into the old files.

Arjouni won the 1992 German Crime Fiction Prize for this book.

Arjouni wrote seven books of fiction and his prose is terse and to the point, very much like Ken Bruen, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Margaret Yorke, who was 88 years old when she died late last year, was nearly twice Arjouni’s age, and she was also a very prolific author as well as another favorite of mine. I liked her small gem of a series of five books featuring her sleuth, Dr. Patrick Grant, who was an Oxford don with a Ph.D. in English literature and a fondness for Shakespeare, and who used his powers of logic and deduction to solve cases.

Yorke was born in Dublin, but spent much of her adult life in the UK. She began writing in her thirties, but it was in her fifties that she turned to crime. In Dead in the Morning, Grant is staying with his sister to help out with her infant. Written in 1970, Yorke portrayed Grant as the sensitive male. Even today, most men don't rush to help with their neonate nieces or nephews.

Before Grant has a chance to get bored, the housekeeper of a mean, grumpy old woman is found murdered. Patrick knows one of the possible suspects from St. Mark's College, where he is Dean, and he decides to seek out the murderer himself, since he feels the police are on the wrong track. The theme of murder in a country village makes this a classical mystery, and the clues are all there for the reader to find the killer before Patrick does. The stories in this series have recently been republished by House of Stratus in very nice trade paperback, and I am enjoying becoming reacquainted with the interesting Dr. Grant.

When I read the obituary written about James D. Doss, who also died in the past year, I was astounded to learn that his day job was that of an electrical engineer who worked on particle accelerators in Los Alamos, New Mexico. What a far cry this is from his mystery stories featuring police detective Charlie Moon, who is a rancher and sometime tribal police investigator on the southern Colorado Ute reservation.

Moon investigates crimes with the help of his aunt Daisy Perika, a tribal shaman who has prophetic dreams when trouble is brewing. In the first book, The Shaman Sings, the story begins with the brutal death of a young woman who is a brilliant physics student at a local university. Granite Creek Police Chief Scott Parris is warned by Daisy of more trouble to come, and he begins having disturbing dreams of his own.  The easy answer would be to charge the nearest foreigner––who in this case happens to be a janitor with an unsavory past and who is now on the run. It helps that his tools were used in the crime. But Parris believes that there is an evil force at work around the campus.

I found this debut intriguing because the characters are so well drawn that I wanted more of them––and I was fortunate enough to have my wish granted. The trio of Moon, Parris and Perika has adventures covering 17 volumes, the last of which, The Old Gray Wolf, was completed shortly before Doss's death. Charlie Moon has the misfortune of killing a young man in the course of his duties. It was a second unpleasant surprise to find that the young man had connections to the mob and retribution was on its way. There were several plot twists, but there was quite a bit of digression and verbal meandering to deal with as well. Overall, I believe Doss was good to the last drop.

I often wonder how I can justify keeping all the books that I have collected. But then I think of times like these, when I can turn to my treasures and reread the books and stories of those who have passed on and be comforted that the words written are still here to be enjoyed and to enrich our lives.