Best Reads of 2014: Part Four

Our regular guest blogger,
Lady Jane Digby's Ghost

Good grief! Is it really 2015 already? Where has the time gone––and what good books did I use to pass that time? Here's a list of some of my favorite reads of 2014. Let's start with the Brits.

I'm a fan of British writers. They tend to be snarkier and less politically correct than American authors. They're less afraid to shock or challenge their readers. Here are a couple of books I enjoyed reading this year. Unfaithfully Yours (Corsair, 2014), by Nigel Williams, is the story, told in epistolary form, of four couples who live in the tony London suburb of Putney. The couples used to be friends, but they've grown apart since their children left the nest, taking the couples' reasons for friendship with them.

Over the years, the wife of one couple has died suspiciously, the husband of another couple has changed his sexuality, and the other two couples have fallen out of love and into hate with their partners. Actually, they all hate each other and are not afraid to express their thoughts and opinions on the subject. The loathing and contempt they all feel for each other is hilariously expressed in some of the most deadpan prose I've ever read.

The novel is told in the somewhat unreliable voice of a private detective brought in to investigate philandering of one of the husbands and is both laugh-out-loud funny and very un-PC. Unfaithfully Yours is available in the US in audiobook form, but if you're interested, you should probably order the book from England.

Jon Canter's A Short Gentleman (Vintage, 2009) is the story of Robert Purcell, who is indeed short in stature, but long on accomplishment. He had his whole life planned out as a teenager and has become a Queen's Counsel (what British lawyers call "taking silk") right on schedule. He returns home every night to his carefully-chosen wife and his carefully-conceived children. His life is perfect––until it isn't. Robert Purcell's life falls apart because he commits a crime. The reader doesn't learn what the crime is until late in the book, but living the life of a criminal is not in Robert Purcell's comfort zone. This is a funny look at a man who shouldn't be a criminal but who, improbably, is. A Short Gentleman is available in ebook form in the US.

British comedian and author Ben Elton has written one of the most profound books of the year, Time and Time Again (Bantam, 2014). It is the story of Hugh Stanton, a brilliant History graduate from Trinity College, Cambridge. It is the year 2024, and Stanton is asked to return to Trinity by his former mentor, Dr Sally McCluskey. She tells him that Sir Isaac Newton made a sort of time machine four hundred years ago that could transport a person to 1914, the year Newton had prophesied would be a turning point in history. Of course, it was the beginning of The Great War and McCluskey tells Stanton that he must go back and prevent the assassination of Austria's Franz Ferdinand and then go to Berlin and shoot Kaiser Wilhelm. Those two events will prevent the beginning of The Great War and society will be the better for it.

Hugh Stanton carries out his tasks and The Great War never begins. But what does happen? Would you change history if you don't know what will happen because of what didn't happen? Ben Elton asks these questions and the reader is shocked at what does happen. Time and Time Again is not the best-written book I read all year, but it sure has me looking at history in a completely different way. I think the reader should have a good grasp of 19th- and 20th-century world history to really enjoy this book.

Let's now look at Irish writer Audrey Magee's debut novel, The Undertaking (Grove Press, 2014). Set in Berlin and Stalingrad during World War II, it is the story of German soldier Peter Faber and teacher Katharina Spinell, who marry for the most prosaic of reasons. He wants a honeymoon out of the war zone and she wants his death benefits if he dies. They marry in a telephone wedding, but fall in love and conceive a child when they meet.

Magee is unsparing in her descriptions of wartime Berlin, as the city is bombed into oblivion, and of the postwar period, when the Russian army occupies the city. The Russians are out for revenge for the German occupation horrors in their own territory. Meanwhile, Peter Faber is trapped in the frigid snow and vast wasteland of Stalingrad, as the German government leaves the 6th Army to surrender to the Russians. The Undertaking is not a mystery, but a stunning novel about the micro-effects of wartime both on the battlefield and on the home front. This is not an easy book to read, but is very good.

Looking at the WW2 home front––Britain this time––is British author Lissa Evans in her absolutely charming novel, Crooked Heart (to be published in the US by Harper, July 28, 2015). Noel Bostock is a 10-year-old orphan who has been raised by his aging great-aunt, suffragette Mattie. Mattie is suffering from dementia, but has given Noel a wonderful upbringing despite her increasingly wandering mind.

Noel is a brilliant, precocious boy, given to silence and a seeming abhorrence of other children. Noel is not someone who suffers fools gladly, and he has met his match when he meets Vera ("Vee") Sedge, a local St. Albans woman into whose care he's literally dumped by the evacuation department. Vee has never met a money-making scheme she didn't like, even if it was morally questionable and somewhat illegal. Vee and Noel come up with some novel money-earning schemes.

In this book, Lissa Evans has created some of the most remarkable characters I've ever met. None are caricatures; all are people you might know and love yourself, just transposed to WW2 London. Not only are Evans's characters adeptly drawn, she also gives her readers a look at London in wartime. But the best part of Crooked Heart is the relationships Noel Bostock has with the people in his life, both past and current. A small part of the reader's heart will be left with the suffragette medal given new love in Noel's charitable hands. This is a wonderful, unforgettable read.

Do people retain their moral beliefs as they age? Do they see the outside world in the same way as that world changes and expands around them, while their own world shrinks and they lose their mental and physical faculties? Daniel Friedman, in his new book, Don't Ever Look Back (Minotaur Books, 2014), tries to answer those questions. This book is the second novel about long-retired Memphis policeman Baruch "Buck" Schatz. Friedman's first novel, Don't Ever Get Old, introduced 85-year-old Buck Schatz in a bit more rollicking plot.

In Don't Ever Get Old, Buck and his young grandson chase an old Nazi, hiding in the US, from Memphis to St Louis in an attempt to find some hidden gold. This second book, with a much more serious look at aging and how the now 88-year-old Buck, living in an assisted-living facility with his wife, has not learned to give up the ghosts of the past.

Buck Schatz has been contacted by a long-ago criminal, "Elijah," whom he remembers with no fondness after Elijah master-minded a bank heist in Memphis in 1965. Elijah would like to surrender to police in 2009 for his part in that long-ago heist. The book goes back and forth between 1965 and 2009, as Buck Schatz looks at his own moral beliefs about crime and punishment.

Don't Ever Look Back is a serious book that has some funny parts. I'd say Daniel Friedman's first book was just the opposite. Both make for good reading, but this second book might make you think about morality, aging, and what memories last as a person nears the end of his life.

The Strangler's Waltz (Monsoon Books, 2013), by Richard Lord, is set in 1913 and features two Viennese policemen who are called in to investigate the murder of a wealthy woman found strangled in the red light district. Her murder is followed by four others and the city is in a panic. Will the strangler in Vienna surpass the numbers run up in London by Jack the Ripper 20 years earlier?

Police inspectors Karl-Heinz Dorfner and Julian Stebbel are tasked with finding the strangler. They are helped in their job by Dr. Sigmund Freud, who was the psychiatrist to the first victim, and a young artist called . . . Adolf Hitler, who witnessed the first murder and draws a picture of the strangler, which helps the police identify the murderer. Okay, here's the possible problem with the book. The "ick" factor is fairly strong in a work of fiction featuring Adolf Hitler as a character anything short of mass murderer. But is it really a problem or is it a sign of daring on the part of the author? I can't quite decide, but I'm leaning towards "interesting plot point."

Richard Lord also does an excellent job of establishing place and time; the city of Vienna in 1913. The final years of both Emperor Franz Joseph's reign and the Austro-Hungarian Empire––neither survived the Great War––were a time of inquietude in the city of music and arts. The mystery of the five murders––and the attendant political ramifications of the deaths––is beautifully drawn by the author. I certainly hope that he does produce his promised three more books. This is an excellent beginning of the quartet.

Finally, I'd like to tell you about the reissuance of a series of five books by American author Richard Rosen. The books were originally published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They feature Harvey Blissberg, a retired professional baseball player who starts a second life as a private detective. The books have been out of print for a while, but have been reissued in ebook form.

I started my re-reading of the Harvey Blissberg series with World of Hurt (Walker & Co., 1994; ebook reissue from MysteriousPress.com/Open Road, 2013), the fourth book in the series. I had read all of them when they were first issued, and I'm pleased to see they've been reissued. I think Rosen's writing has held up as time has passed.

Another mystery writer whose work reminds me of Richard Rosen's is Lawrence Block. Block is a more prolific writer than Rosen, but one of Block's characters, Matthew Scudder, seems a lot like Harvey Blissberg. Both are cerebral detectives, and the books' plots are often overshadowed by the characters. Block and Rosen both use dialog to move their plots, which I don't think is easily done. Both writers do it well, though.

It's also amusing to see a world without cellphones or personal computers. Written in the early 1990s, car phones (remember those?) are in use and the police have computers to access information but, otherwise, modern-day communications are not used. (It's a bit like reading a Sue Grafton mystery and realizing in 2014 that her books take place in the 1980s!)

So those are a few of the books that kept me entertained in 2014. I'm looking forward to continued good reading in 2015!

A Mystery Appears in Your Future

Fate is my friend. She likes to help when I have trouble making a decision. Go out with Joe or stay home and work on my taxes? I toss a coin. If it's heads (Joe), and I'm chagrined it's not tails (taxes), I stay home and work on my taxes. If I'm thrilled it's heads, I go out with Joe. See, fate is my friend!

Fate also helps with my reading, but this time she doesn't appear in the guise of a coin. She appears as a fortune cookie fortune. I save my fortunes in a zip-lock bag and keep the bag in a drawer of my desk. This makes it very handy for those times when I'm restless with the desire, no, the need to read, but unable to settle on a particular book. Out comes the bag. I close my eyes and pick a fortune at random. Indecision evaporates; I'm ruled by fate. The book must match my fortune.

I'd like to tell you about some books fate found for me.

Fortune: "You could prosper in the field of wacky inventions"

I saw "wacky," and my mind was all over Florida. Tim Dorsey. Carl Hiaasen. Craig Rice wrote a fantastic screwball series with John J. Malone, the "little lawyer," set in Chicago, and an even more farcical series with photographers Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak. Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum gets wild. Joan Hess's Maggody series takes a few loops on its way around the block. But before I started thinking about single books or had a chance to leave the U.S., I saw the word "inventions," and that meant William Marshall's Sci Fi, a book in his Yellowthread Street series set in the fictional Hong Bay district of Hong Kong.

If Yellowthread isn't the most unusual police procedural series in mysterydom, I'd like to hear what is. Marshall is a one-man band of off-the-wall humor; writing full of italics, capitalizations, and word repetitions; and plots you won't believe. As The Washington Post Book World says, "Marshall has the rare gift of juggling scary suspense with wild humor and making them both work." We'll explore this series later, but for now, look at Sci Fi. Here's how it begins:

"The Martians had landed.

"And, with them, the Venusians, the Saturnians, the Moon-People, Gill-Man, the entire complement of Star Wars extra-terrestrials, Chest-burster, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, The Hulk, The Alien, The Contagion, and, for the joy of antique and nostalgic older souls, several variations of Oriental Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff and--particularly popular among the more diminutive--Peter Lorre and The incredible Shrinking Man.

"The second day of the All-Asia Science Fiction and Horror Movie Congress was in full swing in Hong Bay and so far there had been so many outside invasions of the place by sea and by land that if Paul Revere had been resurrected to take on the task of announcing them to the Colonials he would have retired from the scene with terminal laryngitis after the first fifteen aircraft-fuls."

This is not great literature, but it is great fun. I never miss the chance fate hands me to visit Marshall's exotic world. If you have an appreciation for the off-beat and the wild, I invite you to join me there. This series is not for everyone, but it is for me. And maybe for you, too.

The fortune: "Don't let unexpected situations 'throw' you"

My eyes raced to that word "throw," and my heart did a cha cha cha. I deeply love baseball, and now I had an excuse to indulge a passion. Up to bat came Harvey Blissberg, narrator of Richard Rosen's Strike Three, You're Dead. Blissberg's lead-off words: "It's when you're going good that they throw at your head." He was center fielder for the Boston Red Sox, but now he's been traded to a not-so-stellar expansion team, the Providence Jewels. Blissberg is not a happy man, but he's a good man and a team player, so when his closest friend on the Jewels, star reliever Rudy Furth, is found murdered in the locker room whirlpool, Blissberg wants to know why. With the help of his beautiful TV sportscaster girlfriend and his brother, he fields an investigation.

Vikram Chandra's
928-page Sacred Games

You don't have to be a baseball fan to appreciate Strike Three, You're Dead, although that makes the read more special and gives you an edge in the detection. Rosen is a skilled writer, and his tale moves with the effortlessness of an All Star third baseman. Artful plotting, good characterization, and knowledgeable sports writing.  The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association selected it as one of their 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century. You can go into extra innings with the rest of the Harvey Blissberg series, in which he's retired from baseball to become a private eye. All in all, this series is a solid hit.

Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone

Fortune: "Life is a game of complex strategies"

I gazed at the books on my shelf. I'm saving a book recommended by a friend, The Shadow of the Shadow by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, for a vacation. It's a book involving four friends who meet nightly in 1922 at a Mexico City hotel bar to play dominos. Have you read it?

Another game, chess, has plenty of complex strategies, but I'd already read Joanne Harris's Gentlemen and Players and Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Flanders Panel, and I didn't want to read them again.

Cameron McCabe's The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

I eventually picked two books to match this fortune. The first is Ignacio Padilla's Shadow Without a Name, a complicated and compelling book involving identity and Nazi history. A 1916 chess game on a train traveling to the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Eastern Front determines the fate of two men. The winner will assume the identity of Viktor Kretzschmar, a railway pointsman on the Munich-Salzburg line; the loser, Thadeus Dreyer, a newly conscripted soldier bound for the Front. Life will become an extremely complex game for these men. I want to talk more about this interesting book at another time.

The second is an old friend whom I hadn't seen in years, Michael Gilbert's Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens, a 1982 collection of short stories told in an inimitable clipped yet dramatic way. Calder and Behrens are top British espionage agents who have been working together so long they can anticipate each other's moves. They are now working undercover for the Joint Services Standing Committee, ready to be whisked anywhere their special skills are needed. When they're not putting England's enemies in check, they are merely old friends and neighbors who play chess in Calder's study with the Persian wolfhound Rasselas at their feet. (Gilbert was famous for his love of dogs, and Rasselas, a skilled operative himself, is a terrific character.)

Charlotte Jay's Beat Not the Bones

I could go on, telling you about the books I matched to my fortunes, but I'm going to stop now because I'm curious. I'd love to hear which book you'd choose, if fate handed you a fortune. (I've listed some fortunes below.) I bet you'd like to hear what your fellow blog readers would choose, too. You can answer either here with a comment, or better yet, let's take this discussion to our 3rd Degree page.

Remember, the idea is to choose a book you haven't read, but might like to read, to match the fortune. That's the purpose of this fortune cookie quotation procedure, to help you select a book when you can't decide what to read. Make your book match the fortune based on any book criteria you want: title, topic, characters, cover, page length, what you know about the author, what you've heard about the book. You can pick a book you've read to match the fortune only if you love the book and would actually like to read it again.

Here are some fortunes that need a matching book:

Agatha Christie's Death Comes at the End

"Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise."
"A cheerful greeting is on its way."
"Don't look back, always look ahead."
"Your most memorable dream will come true."
"In youth and beauty, wisdom is rare."
"You will take a pleasant journey to a faraway place."
"Enjoy the spotlight."
"Many opportunities are open to you, seek them out."

Okay. What fortune did fate hand you, what book did you select, and why?

One more question.

If you don't use fortunes to help you when you can't decide what to read, how do you finally decide?