Investigating the Detectives

Most mystery readers have a few detective series that they follow closely, as much for the characters as for the stories. And authors are very clever, releasing personal information about their characters' current and prior lives very s-l-o-w-l-y. They can take quite a few books to build up a reasonably robust picture of the protagonist's life and character for the curious reader. During a recent spate of hurry-up-and-wait appointments, I had time to ponder a few of the more memorable detectives whose adventures have enlivened my days.

Elizabeth George's Thomas Lynley, eighth Earl of Asherton and Scotland Yard Inspector, is a very interesting character with a brooding Heathcliffe touch. He was in college when his father died, leaving him with the title and estate and some responsibility for a younger brother, Peter. The tangled relationships within his family and his guilt at the accident that crippled his best friend, Simon Allcourt-Saint James, led him to abandon his mother and brother after his father's death in favor of the police force. He has acquired quite a reputation as a ladies' man, and goes home to his estates as seldom as possible. His friend Simon is engaged to Deborah, who had an earlier fling with Lynley, whose interest in her lingers in the early books. Lynley's partner, Sergeant Barbara Havers, comes from an entirely different working-class background. Her father is critically ill, and her mother beginning to show signs of incipient dementia. Barbara's in-your-face attitude and gritty hardscrabble home life is quite a contrast to Lynley's, whom she initially loathes. You can follow this cast of characters through a satisfying series of now 17 Lynley books, the first of which, A Great Deliverance, won numerous prizes. Several of the stories have appeared on PBS, with actor Nathaniel Parker in the title role.

I am seriously intrigued by Louise Penny's compassionate, philosophical Armand Gamache in her Three Pines series, and have followed the gradual unfolding of his personality and life with avid interest from book to book. An honest, observant, even-tempered man, he has reached his position of Chief Inspector of the homicide department of the Sûreté du Québec through effort and talent alone. In contrast to Lynley, Gamache's home life is full and satisfying, if seldom glimpsed by the reader. He has been married for many years to the elfin Reine-Marie, and they have two grown children; a son in Paris and a daughter in Québec. We learn early that Gamache had been orphaned in childhood, and that there is something odd about his late father. Gamache is a supportive leader and mentor to his team, who trust him implicitly. His relationship with his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, is paternal as well as professional. It is not until Gamache meets the coldest woman in the series that I got a fuller––if viciously biased––picture of Gamache's father from a deliberately hurtful woman who happened to be the mother of his friend Peter Morrow, a Three Pines artist.

The town of Three Pines, in the beautiful secluded Eastern Townships of Québec, is as much a character in this series as the people. The author says "Three Pines wasn’t on any tourist map, being too far off any main or even secondary road. Like Narnia, it was generally found unexpectedly and with a degree of surprise that such an elderly village should have been hiding in the valley all along. Anyone fortunate enough to find it once usually found their way back." Artists, damaged people, and general misfits tend to find it and settle there, offering a heady brew of characters for the novelist. Cell phone and television reception are unreliable; the village gets its outside news from visitors or the newspapers. Even the postman lingers there, to have an espresso in Olivier's bistro and watch the enchanted, slow-moving panorama. Most of the cases in the series are set in or have their roots in this hauntingly beautiful hamlet.

It is hard to believe that Sister Mary Murderous introduced me to this series only a few years ago. I feel that I have known this place and these people forever; yet each book offers fresh insights into the place and characters. The author has finally approved a series of made-for-TV movies based on the series, which PBS will surely pick up for viewing in the states. Curiously, actor Nathaniel Parker, who played Thomas Lynley, will also play Gamache. He didn't work well for me as Lynley, so I will be curious to see how he meets my expectations as Gamache––a more demanding role and character.

The author has said that the character of Gamache is modeled on her husband of many years. If so, these books are a remarkable collection of love letters to a  good and fortunate man and a place many of us have dreamed of finding someday. Each of the eight books in this character-driven series has been a feast of personalities and place, well worth lingering over and rereading. The last, The Beautiful Mystery, closed with an unhappy resolution for the characters, so I am hoping for a better outcome from the next book, How the Light Gets In, due for release in August.

Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey was my first serious fictional crush, and one of my most enduring. Dorothy L. Sayers's Golden Age aristocratic detective is the second son of the late 15th Duke of Denver and the half-French Dowager Duchess Honoria Delagardie, who is a recurring and charming character throughout the series. His brother, the current Duke, is a traditionalist and a bit of a stuffed shirt, and his younger sister Mary fancies herself a bluestocking and a Socialist. While Wimsey presents himself as an affable idiot in society, his keen gift of logical deduction and strong sense of responsibility involve him in the solution of murder mysteries and occasional sensitive diplomatic missions for His Majesty's government.

At the beginning of the series, he is suffering from what today we would call PTSD, as a result of having to order men to their deaths during World War I. His mother and doctors are in despair; he stays in his bed at Denver, terrified to give any order to anyone for fear of possible consequences. Not until his army batman Mervyn Bunter shows up and takes him in hand does he begin to recover. I remember a bit from one of the early books when his mother comes into the London flat and Bunter beams at her and carols "My Lady, he just told me to take away this damned slop and bring him some sausages."  While he continues to recover, Wimsey has recurring bad episodes when murderers are hanged as a result of his investigations throughout the series.

Not until the fifth book, Strong Poison, does Wimsey meet the love of his life, a woman who eludes him through most of the rest of the series. Young author Harriet Vane is accused of having poisoned her artist lover because he was unfaithful. Wimsey becomes involved in the case at the request of a friend, and proves the lady's innocence. He also falls deeply in love with her, and thereafter proposes at least once per book, but she will have none of him. The endless permutations of this most prickly and poetic romance enliven the rest of the series until and even after the lady yields. Common knowledge has it that Sayers herself fell in love with her detective, and even if she didn't, many readers around the world certainly did. The older books in this series of 13 contain references that are shockingly politically incorrect by today's standards, but were ordinary and expected usage for the period in which they were written. At the request of Dorothy L. Sayers's estate, author Jill Paton Walsh completed Sayers's final Wimsey/Vane novel, Thrones, Dominations.  She has since published two more Wimsey/Vane novels, A Presumption of Death and The Attenbury Emeralds.

All of these series are worth reading in order, and rereading from time to time. I am a bit in love with all of these detectives. (Fortunately, my husband isn't the jealous sort.) While I may forget parts of which mystery occurred in which book, I can pretty well track the development of the characters and their relationships throughout the series. They are developed enough to provide good company in boring or frightening times, and never yammer or intrude when not wanted.

Cleaning House

I hate housework. Not with a seething, white-hot hatred or a disdain so profound that I refuse to do any house cleaning, but I do admit that my primary motivation when I clean is to avoid embarrassment if a neighbor drops in. Though, if somebody comes by when things look particularly bad, I could always pull a Phyllis Diller and say: "Who could have done this? We don't have any enemies."

Phyllis Diller (may she rest in peace) also wisely said: "Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance?" Now that I think about it, though, Erma Bombeck's reply to Diller was that if you do it right, housework can kill you. As a mystery reader, I'd put a slight twist on that and say that housework done wrong can kill––somebody. (Warning: spoilers of a couple of well-known classics are included in this post.)

In 1960, Peg Bracken wrote The I Hate To Cook Book. Bracken was clearly a mystery lover; she includes a recipe for Nero Wolfe's eggs, and a slow-cooking stew recipe for those days when you want to abandon household chores and stay in bed reading a good murder mystery. But no matter how much she hated to cook, Bracken didn't kill anybody with her cookery––unlike some people.

In Dorothy L. Sayers's Strong Poison, Lord Peter Wimsey struggles to clear Harriet Vane of murdering her former lover, Philip Boyes, with arsenic. Wimsey's challenge is to figure out how anyone other than Harriet could have slipped the arsenic to Boyes, whose last meal was one in which he shared all the food and drink with his cousin. The answer to Wimsey's challenge: a clever and deadly way of making an omelet.

Nine years after the publication of Strong Poison, Agatha Christie penned a new Hercule Poirot book, called Sad Cypress, that seems to have been inspired by the earlier Sayers book. Christie's main character is a young woman in the dock for murder by poison when a man falls in love with her and is determined to save her by proving her innocence. As if that's not similar enough to Strong Poison, the man's name is Peter Lord! Beyond those similarities, the stories are very different, though. Christie's sleuth is, of course, Hercule Poirot, not Peter––and a good thing, too, since Christie's Peter seems to have only a fraction of the little grey cells of Poirot or Wimsey.

In Roald Dahl's short story, "Lamb to the Slaughter," Mary Maloney is a pregnant housewife whose police detective husband, Patrick, comes home from work and tells her he's leaving her. In a state of shock, Mary goes through the motions of dinner preparation. When she brings a large, frozen leg of lamb into the kitchen, Patrick tells her not to bother, as he's going out. His disdain jolts Mary from shock to outrage and she whacks him with the leg of lamb, killing him.

Clever Mary then puts the lamb into the oven, heads off to the grocery store to give herself an alibi and then goes home to "discover" the body. The murder is investigated by Patrick's work friends, who never suspect Mary and spend their time looking for the blunt object that obviously killed Patrick. When they point out that the roast seems to be finished, Mary invites them to eat it. As they eat, one detective remarks that the murder weapon is probably right under their noses. Too right!

In Busman's Honeymoon, the last of the Lord Peter Wimsey books, Dorothy L. Sayers shows a preoccupation with the perils of housekeeping. When Lord Peter and his new bride, Harriet, arrive at Talboys, the old house they've purchased in the village Harriet knew as a girl, they are surprised that nothing has been done to ready the place for them, as had been agreed. Bunter and the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Ruddle, have to hurry to clean up, prepare the beds and light the lamps and the fire.

The next day, a recalcitrant chimney blocked with "sut," as Mr. Puffet the chimney sweep calls it, causes a domestic disaster. Wanting to be helpful, the vicar fires a shotgun up the chimney to knock out the blockage, which has the effect of causing an avalanche of dead animals, bric-a-brack and clinkers to crash to the hearth and a gigantic cloud of ash to choke the room. More cleaning required! The day goes from bad to worse when a trip to the cellar on a domestic errand results in an unpleasant find: the corpse of the house's previous owner.

Housework even plays a role in the solution to the crime in Busman's Honeymoon. That chimney mishap dislodges a clue, and it turns out that a regular domestic chore is the key to the ingenious murder method. If only a regular domestic chore around my house was integral to something really important. But I suppose cleanliness is its own reward.

Agatha Christie seemed to find an additional reward. She said the best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. I guess I'll just have to take her word for it. I do my best thinking while mowing the lawn, but then I do that while sitting on a tractor. And, as Roseanne Barr used to say, when Sears starts selling a riding vacuum cleaner, then it'll be time to start cleaning house.

Joan Rivers said she hates housework because you make the beds, you wash the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again. Another woman who hates housework is Judith Singer, the Long Island housewife protagonist of Susan Isaacs's first novel, Compromising Positions. Though Judith's inconsiderate husband, Bob, definitely deserves a leg of lamb to the back of the skull, Judith channels her frustrations elsewhere. She investigates the murder of her periodontist, in the process discovering the seamy underbelly of suburbia. An entertaining book was made into an equally delightful movie, starring Susan Sarandon, Raul Julia, Edward Herrmann and Judith Ivey.

Did I mention I hate gardening too? I believe in the old saying that a garden is a thing of beauty and a job forever. Weeding is the most boring, back-breaking job ever. And why is it that it's so hard to pull weeds, but if I accidentally grab a real plant, it pops right out? My favorite thing about winter is that all the snow on the ground makes my garden and landscaping look just as good as my neighbor's.

Our British friends love their gardening, though, and it plays a role in many of their mysteries. In the Christie book I mentioned above, Sad Cypress, the resolution is helped along by a knowledge of rose varieties. (Good thing I wasn't on the case.)

In Reginald Hill's Deadheads, Inspectors Dalziel and Pascoe investigate a series of deaths at the Perfecta Porcelain corporation. Dalziel's old friend, Dick Elgood, an executive at the company, is convinced that its accountant, Patrick Aldermann, is bumping off people to clear a space for his own advancement. Aldermann is an avid rose gardener, who learned all about deadheading roses to make way for more vigorous growth from his great-aunt when he was only a boy. Has he taken the lesson too much to heart?

Even if you skip the hard work of grubbing in the dirt and just appreciate flowers through a visit to London's annual Chelsea Flower Show, that might not be safe enough. In Chelsea Mansions, the eleventh in Barry Maitland's Brock and Kolla police procedural series, Nancy Haynes's dream of coming from the US especially for the show ends violently when, heading back to her hotel after her first afternoon's visit, she is suddenly and inexplicably picked up by a passerby and thrown in front of a bus, killing her. A few days later, a wealthy Russian émigré is killed in his garden. His house is right next door to the small, somewhat rundown hotel where Nancy Haynes had been staying. Are the two deaths connected?

After reading these books, I feel I've been warned off flower gardening and flower shows. I still remember that classic of Catherine Aird's, Passing Strange, in which the village of Almstone's nurse, Joyce Cooper, is strangled at the Horticultural Society Flower Show.

Other garden produce gets into the act in G. M. Malliet's Wicked Autumn, when that battle-ax Wanda Batton-Smyth, head of Nether Monkslips Women's Institute, is bumped off in the middle of the fall Harvest Fayre. I suppose Robert Barnard's Fête Fatale is evidence that it's the gathering, not the gardening, that's the problem. After all, the church fête that is the scene of this book's murder of the new vicar is more about bric-a-brac and baked goods than produce and flowers. But, as with housekeeping, I'm not taking any chances.

As we head into the weekend, I think I'll take a page from Peg Bracken's book and throw something in the slow cooker while I curl up with a good mystery book.

It Oughta Be a Law

I'm a mostly-retired lawyer. When I began practicing law in 1985, it was at a big firm, just at the start of the go-go era. The law practice soon became all about billing the maximum number of hours possible, accounting for every minute of the day, working long days six days a week and never feeling like my time was my own. (I know, I know, you're just overcome with sympathy for lawyers.)

I blame the concept of law as a business, which became popular at that time, and which displaced the notion of law as a learned profession. As a result of my experiences, I don't have much interest in legal mysteries. It's sort of like that old saw about how you'll never eat sausage again once you've seen how they're made. But there is one exception to my aversion toward legal mysteries: I'm a sucker for British mysteries about lawyers practicing in the good old days. Why? Let me count the ways.

Trials are over in nothing flat.

This makes life a lot easier for lawyers. I do see, though, that it's not necessarily such a bonus for the parties in interest, especially defendants. Take Dorothy L. Sayers's Strong Poison, for example. Harriet Vane is on trial for killing her lover, Philip Boyes, and it looks like she is only days away from a date with the hangman. Fortunately, Lord Peter Wimsey's sometime agent, Miss Climpson, is on the jury and she holds out against the other jurors' guilty verdict. The hung jury gives Lord Peter the time to find the real culprit and save Harriet's neck.

A defendant lucky enough to be a member of the House of Lords could escape the potential pitfalls of the British criminal court system by demanding a trial by his peers; which, in that case, meant Peers of the Realm. The law was changed in 1948, but when Lord Peter's brother, the Duke of Denver, was accused of murder in Clouds of Witness, the law was still in force. The trial in the House is quite a scene, with 300 members of the House of Lords entering the chamber two by two, wearing robes with ermine rows on their shoulders. Instead of a drab bailiff droning out the particulars of the charge, the Sergeant-At-Arms and the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery hand around a Commission and a Staff of Office and then read the Certiorari and Return, including a "long, sonorous rigmarole" that ends in the reading of the charge of murder against "the most noble and puissant prince Gerald Christian Wimsey, Viscount St. George, Duke of Denver, a Peer of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland."

Whew! After all that, the trial is almost an anticlimax. But when Sir Impey Biggs (one of the great character names) gives his final speech for the defense, he not only asks for a finding of Not Guilty, but notes that with it will come the restoration to the Duke of the "traditional symbols of his exalted rank." I suppose that means that he gets back his nobility and his puissance, whatever that means.

British barristers and judges wear nifty wigs and robes.

Having a bad hair day? Not a problem if you're a barrister or judge. Just pop on your wig and nobody will ever know. And those robes will hide gravy stains, missing buttons and any number of other crimes against fashion. Of course, some lawyers are less likely to need the camouflage than others. Frances Fyfield created the character of Helen West who, like herself, has a career as a lawyer for the Metropolitan Police and, later, for the Crown Prosecution Service. Although Helen deals with some very gritty crimes and many deeply dubious individuals, she is no fashion criminal. Some of Fyfield's award-winning Helen West novels include A Question of Guilt, Not That Kind of Place and Deep Sleep.

British court rules allow judges to question witnesses and to comment on the evidence to the jury.

Wouldn't this make being a judge a thousand times more fun than it is in the US in the present day? It would be like being Judge Judy, only for real––and with higher-toned rhetoric and better costumes. Although I think this judicial ability to shoot your mouth off whenever you want would make being a judge much more appealing to the kind of ego-driven person who is drawn to the law (yes, I said it), that power doesn't seem to make it all that worthwhile to some British judges. Take the poor Magistrate in Henry Cecil's Settled Out of Court, who is having a bad morning with a particularly full-of-himself and long-winded barrister named Tewkesbury:

MR. TEWKESBURY: Now, officer, I want you to follow this next question very closely.
CONSTABLE: I try to follow all your questions closely.
TEWKESBURY: And to what measure of success?
MAGISTRATE: You needn't answer that question.
TEWKESBURY: But, sir, with the greatest possible respect, am I not entitled to an answer?
MAGISTRATE: No.
TEWKESBURY: But, sir, unless I know the measure of success which the officer has in following my questions, it becomes more difficult for me to frame the next question.
MAGISTRATE: So far you seem to have overcome your difficulties most manfully. I have observed no lack of questions.
TEWKESBURY: Your Worship's courtesy overwhelms me.
MAGISTRATE (to himself): I wish it would.
TEWKESBURY: Is it now convenient, sir, that I should resume my cross-examination where I left off?
MAGISTRATE: Very well.
TEWKESBURY: Well then, officer, would you be kind enough to tell me the measure of success with which you have understood my previous questions?
MAGISTRATE: I've just said he needn't answer that question.
TEWKESBURY: But, sir, did I not understand you to change your mind and say that I may ask it? If I may say so, the greatest judges change their minds. Judex mutabilis, judex amabilis, if I may say so.
MAGISTRATE: Mr. Tewkesbury, would you kindly continue your cross-examination of this witness? I've fifty summonses to hear after this.
TEWKESBURY: I don't know how your Worship does it and retains your good humour.
MAGISTRATE (quietly, to his clerk): I've about had enough of this. Is he sober?

Georgette is a devotée of Henry Cecil's books and, doubtless, could contribute many more stories about judges and lawyers in Cecil's world.

John Mortimer's Horace Rumpole is of the view that judges seem to live only to undermine him by interrupting his witness examination in order to inject their own probing questions and by casting aspersions on his arguments when they give instructions to the jury. It's clearly a wonderful power for the judge, but not so much for its target, Rumpole. In the story "Rumpole on Trial," Rumpole complains that one of his regular nemeses, Judge "Ollie" Oliphant, sighs and rolls his eyes when Rumpole sums up the case for the defense and responds to Rumpole's arguments by telling the jury: "Of course, you can believe that if you like, Members of the Jury, but use your common sense, why don't you?"

British coroners have a power similar to judges to guide the outcome of cases. In Colin Watson's Flaxborough novels, longtime Coroner Albert Amblesby conducts inquests with an iron fist and a lot of sardonic comment. You get the impression that nothing ever happens in an inquest that isn't orchestrated by Amblesby. If you haven't read any Flaxborough novels, give Lonelyheart 4122 a try first. I think it's the funniest, and it features one of the great side characters in crime fiction, the deceptively genteel-appearing con-woman Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime.

Legal research was a piece of cake.

Statutes, regulations, administrative rulings, case precedents and all manner of legal authorities can take forever to slog through. The amount of material increases at a dizzying pace. But in Delano Ames's She Shall Have Murder, published in 1948 (see a full review at the end of this post), it was a much simpler matter. Law clerk Jane Hamish goes into the office of solicitor and senior partner Mr. Playfair to ask him about a matter of company law. Playfair responds: "In answer to Sir John's inquiry, Miss Hamish, quote to him paragraph twelve of the Companies Act of 1929. You'll find it in the fifth volume on the left there on the top shelf, page 116." Just imagine having all the law you need, right there in your office and, apparently, memorizable.

Speaking of cake, how about the snacks in the office?

I don't want to sound like a whiner, but our idea of a snack at the office was some scorched coffee from the Bunn-O-Matic, a candy bar from the newsstand downstairs or, if you could spare a little more time, a dash out to the coffee shop for a cookie. But in these old British mysteries, the lawyers seem to spend almost as much time taking breaks for tea, coffee and biscuits as they do working.

When I was reading She Shall Have Murder, it seemed like I was always hungry. It must have something to do with the fact that the staff spent so much time in the kitchen, boiling up hot water for tea, getting plates of buns and biscuits, opening tins of sardines and making sandwiches.

Forget the snacks, how about the drinks?

Even better than always having tea and biscuits in the office, the lawyers go out for long lunches, always seem to have a bottle of sherry (or something stronger) in their cupboards and, by 5:00 pm, you can usually find them propping up the bar at their favorite watering hole. In Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar series, the lawyers at 62 New Square seem to think that being "called to the Bar" means the siren song of their local wine bar, the Corkscrew, where they crack open bottles of Nierstein as often as they crack open law books.

Horace Rumpole, the most famous tippling barrister, can be found most evenings at Pommeroy's Wine Bar, a glass of what author John Mortimer calls Chateau Fleet Street or Chateau Thames Embankment in hand. I never thought about it before, but it does seem that in crime fiction, English lawyers drink wine, while police detectives seem to prefer beer and whisky. Is it a class thing or does it just go with the job? Maybe I should check and see what Elizabeth George's Thomas Lynley drinks. (I think wine, but I'm not sure.) Lynley is both a police detective and the 8th Earl of Asherton, so his choice of tipple might be something of an indicator whether the British character's drink of choice is based on class or profession. Or, maybe not, since Elizabeth George is an American.

* * *

Reading these books could just about ruin the practice of law for anybody trying to do the job these days. Hmm. Maybe I'll forward some of these books to some of today's law-as-a-business types and show them how much more fun it was (and could be?) to practice law as a learned profession.

If you'd like to read other classic mysteries featuring British lawyers, here are some suggestions:

Cyril Hare's Francis Pettigrew series, beginning with Tragedy At Law

Carter Dickson's Sir Henry Merrivale series

R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke series

Michael Underwood's Rosa Epton series

Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair

Michael Gilbert's Smallbone Deceased, Death Has Deep Roots, The Crack In the Teacup and Flash Point

Agatha Christie's "Witness For the Prosecution" (and the film of the same name, starring Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power and Elsa Lanchester)

Check out this annotated edition
from Manor Minor Press!

Review of Delano Ames's She Shall Have Murder

There are few things I enjoy more than a good, old-fashioned British puzzle mystery. The kind with a limited number of suspects, and whose solution depends largely upon figuring out times and places, and picking up on small clues dropped in dialog. But the mystery also has to have an appealing sleuth. Delano Ames gives us all the elements of an excellent classic mystery, along with a bonus: two appealing sleuths.

Jane Hamish is a law clerk at the small London firm of Playfair & Son. Her fiancé, Dagobert Brown, is currently unemployed. A regular client, the extremely paranoid Mrs. Robjohn, has been found dead in her apartment. The death is ruled accidental, the result of the gas jet in the gas heater going on in the middle of the night when gas service is restored after an outage. Dagobert, who visited Mrs. Robjohn earlier that evening with Jane, realizes that the death was actually a murder. With his plentiful spare time, he begins an investigation.

Over drinks, tea and dinners, Jane and Dagobert compare notes about his sleuthing and what she has been able to find out in the office. They have quite a few suspects: Mrs. Robjohn's son, Douglas; his secret fiancée and Jane's office co-worker Sarah; Major Stewart, one of the law firm partners; Rosemary, another co-worker and someone who shares a secret with Major Stewart; Oates, the light-fingered office runner with apparent underworld connections; and old Mr. Playfair himself. Figuring out the culprit will take a lot of devious tricks by Dagobert, and some risky ploys by Jane.

Delano Ames's writing is delightfully wry, and Dagobert and Jane are a lively, smart-talking pair. They're not unlike Nick and Nora Charles in some ways. Dagobert delights in tricking suspects and driving them a little crazy with his antics, while Jane often tries to puncture Dagobert's bumptiousness with a well-placed dart or two. But, unlike Nora, Jane is an active partner in the sleuthing; a supremely intelligent young woman who is up to the challenge of solving the crime.

Note: A version of this review appears on Amazon, under my username there.

The Seasons They Are a-Changin'

It wasn't as big a fiasco as New Coke in 1985, but this year's debut of Coke in holiday cans was not trouble-free. Customers complained they thought they were grabbing a silver can of Diet Coke, only to discover later they had a white can of regular Coke. Some people said Coke in white cans tastes different from Coke in red cans. Others protested that the Coca-Cola company has no business weighing in on global warming and polar bears. When Yahoo News recently published an article about these complaints, it drew more than 12,500 online comments. If the first page of comments is any guide, commentators view complainers as careless morons with nothing better to do than calling beverage companies or casting uninformed votes that have led to the United States' current political and economic disaster.

Maybe these complainers deserve some sympathy. Changes can be tough, especially when they happen during the holiday season. There's already enough to do preparing for company or travel and shopping for gifts without dealing with moves, relationships ending or beginning, job hunting or your favorite beverage appearing unexpectedly in a different-colored can. On the other hand, reading a good murder mystery in which characters navigate changes like these over the holidays can be a welcome change of pace.

When Dead Ex, by Harley Jane Kozak, begins in late December, narrator Mary Wollstonecraft (Wollie) Shelley has a life brimming with changes. She has a brand-new lover, Simon, who works for the FBI. Wollie is staying in a Los Angeles penthouse with him while she supposedly looks for a place of her own. She's preparing to help her brother P.B., a schizophrenic, move from a state mental facility to a halfway house in Santa Barbara, California. Designing greeting cards is her regular job, but she needs to supplement this income. She's been a serial dater on a reality show (Biological Clock) and painted a frog mural in the kitchen of a soap-opera actress obsessed with frogs. Now an actor has commissioned a mural from The Iliad (she's reading Homer in Cliffs Notes) and she's been hired to dish about her blind dates with actors for SoapDirt, a daytime TV gossip show. It isn't easy for Wollie to find time to perform these jobs, since her main job is helping her best friend Joey, a former At the End of the Day soap opera actress and the tabloids' and cops' Number One suspect in the murder of that show's producer, David Zetrakis. It's a mystery why someone would even need to kill Zetrakis. He had pancreatic cancer and hadn't long to live. Had Zetrakis hired someone, or could someone else not wait for his natural death? Stay tuned for Wollie's investigation.

Magritte's The Submissive Reader, 1928

I've been looking for a light-hearted series for occasions I want to read but don't have much intellectual energy. When I'm tired, I want to be entertained rather than challenged. At the same time, I don't want a book with characters who are boring or too stupid to live, an awkward writing style, a plot with irritating holes or blood and guts everywhere. I want to curl up in a chair or prop myself up in bed and relax, happily turning pages rather than turning them while sick with dread. I haven't read the first two books in Kozak's Wollie Shelley series (Dating Dead Men and Dating Is Murder), but I might need to pick up one of them. Dead Ex, the third in the series, didn't have me laughing helplessly, but I enjoyed the author's breezy writing style and inside knowledge of Hollywood and daytime TV. Kozak has appeared on the soap opera The Guiding Light and in movies such as Parenthood and Arachnophobia. (She plays Jeff Daniels's wife, and needless to say, I'm getting this DVD to watch again tonight. It should have made my list of Halloween flicks.) Kozak is not a dummy. Interspersed through the book are Wollie's thoughts about what Greek gods and mortals would say about her murder investigation and current events. It's not easy finding a mix of smart and casual writing. If you're on the lookout for an agreeable read over the holidays, Dead Ex might be a nice holiday treat.

Friends and family are gathering at Warbeck Hall, an English country estate, for a traditional Christmas and a chance to say goodbye to the old aristocrat who lies on his deathbed upstairs. The cast of characters in Cyril Hare's An English Murder couldn't be better. It includes the lord's wayward son, a beautiful young woman still in love with the son even though he has treated her shamefully, a cousin who's a cabinet member of the government and the policeman on detail to protect him, the wife of one of the cousin's government underlings and a butler who's been in service to the old lord forever. Holed up in the library, while the others try vainly to make merry, is a Czechoslovakian historian happily digging through ancient books and records. The snow is piling up outside. There's so much tension inside, provided by people whose political views and personal desires will never intersect, that when a death happens it's hardly surprising. Suicide or murder? No one can leave or arrive, so it's up to the policeman on hand to investigate even though his detective skills are very rusty. That's too bad, because someone's killing skills aren't rusty.

Cyril Hare was the pen name of Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, an English barrister and judge. He wrote 10 books of crime fiction from the 1930s through the 1950s. Most of them feature Inspector Mallett (Tragedy at Law is about the travails of Judge Barber, a circuit judge; and With a Bare Bodkin is set in a wartime ministry housed in an old mansion) or barrister Francis Pettigrew (When the Wind Blows is about a murder during a concert). An English Murder is a standalone book written in 1951. It's a timeless story about responsibility, tradition, ambition, social class and change. Since World War II, English society has been changing and this book is about the painful progress of those changes. Like all of Hare's books, it assumes that the reader is intelligent, but there's no requirement that the reader be a rocket scientist. This book is a mystery classic and it makes a great gift for someone––including yourself.

There are some traditional English mysteries set at Christmas that I'm happy to read time and again. My pleasure in them doesn't change. In The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter are staying at a vicarage when Sir Henry Thorpe dies. This leads to an upsetting discovery in his family gravesite. The East Anglia setting, change ringing, eccentric characters and unusual plot make this one of my favorite Lord Peter books.  

Envious Casca, by Georgette Heyer, is an entertaining mystery set at the English country estate of wealthy and short-tempered Nate Herriard. His younger brother Joe has talked him into hosting a Christmas house party for some relatives, their guests and Nate's business partner. The houseguests irritate each other as well as the host. To make bad feelings unanimous, the servants despise many of those present. With this distinct lack of holiday cheer it's not a shock when murder results, although the method is a puzzler.

Nicholas Blake's Thou Shell of Death is set at another home in the English countryside. This one belongs to Fergus O'Brien, a famous airman. When O'Brien receives several death threats before Christmas, he responds by inviting his enemies to spend the holiday with him to better keep an eye on them. Another of Blake's Nigel Strangeways books, The Corpse in the Snowman, is set during a Christmas house party. In this one, a parlor game involving a ghost has an unexpected result.

In Tied up in Tinsel, by Ngaio Marsh, Hilary Bill-Tasmin is remodeling the family home and has staffed it with unusual servants. To celebrate his planned engagement, he invites his odd relatives and his intended to stay with him for Christmas. Already there is Troy Alleyn, wife of Scotland Yard's Roderick Alleyn, who is painting Bill-Tasmin's picture. A murder interrupts the festivities.

I hope you're enjoying the holiday season and finding time to relax with family, friends and a good book. A break from the pressure of shopping and making plans is a good thing.  As a change of pace, I've been reading a good thriller not set during the holidays, Joseph Finder's Paranoia. Adam Cassidy is a low-level employee at a high-tech company. After the tech meltdown, because he "truly despises" his job, he impersonates someone else and arranges a very lavish party at company expense for a retiring loading dock worker. He's discovered and, in order to avoid prosecution for embezzlement, he agrees to take a job at a rival company and work as a mole. Things get very complicated when the change does him good and he likes his new job.

There Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens

On Monday, my good friend Della posted "Last Night I Went to Bed With a Murderer" about her propensity for reading murder mysteries in bed. Excellent stuff; you should go read it if you haven't already. Della's post got me to thinking about reading in bed and especially about reading spinetinglers in bed. The fact is, though, I can't. First of all, my record for staying awake while reading in a horizontal position is somewhere around 11 minutes. But, more importantly, I don't like my spine tingled at any time, especially not when it's dark and who knows what might be lurking outside. When you live in the sticks, there are enough creepy noises in the night. I don't need some author prompting me to imagine even more.

I admit it: as a reader and viewer, I'm a complete coward when it comes to violence, horror and sometimes  even suspense. I was the kid who had to leave the room when The Twilight Zone came on. Just hearing the theme's dee-dee-dee-dee dee-dee-dee-dee would have me rocketing out of my chair. The first movie I ever went to was Pinocchio, and when he got swallowed by the whale well, let's just say that's 50 cents my mother regretted spending.

I haven't gotten a lot more sanguine with age. I've never seen Jaws or The Exorcist. And don't even think about trying to persuade me to see them now. It would just confirm what I already know–and make me bitterly resent you on top of it. We don't want that, do we?

I'm only slightly better when it comes to books. My preferred mysteries are those in which the violence occurs off scene. It isn't that I've never read suspense or thrillers. I've read some of Val McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, for example. I can't say they weren't excellent, but when I got to one with the title The Torment of Others, I took that as a none-too-subtle hint that it would be beyond the horizon of my tolerance. I mean, seriously: the torment of others? I won't watch America's Funniest Home Videos because it torments others too much. I gave up Stuart MacBride's Logan MacRae series when I read Flesh House (a major mistake for me) and the titles alone of his subsequent books make it clear to me that I got out in the nick of time: Blind Eye, Dark Blood and Shatter the Bones.

I've been a big fan of Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series, set in Oslo, but his most recently translated book, The Leopard, features a serial killer whose work is spectacularly creepy and repulsively gruesome. This from a guy who has written a children's book called Doctor Procter's Fart Powder? But he's hardly the first author who has decided, for some reason inexplicable to me, that a serial-killer plot is just the ticket. Well, not only are those books too scary for me, the last thing I want is to be taken into the twisted psyche of the killer, which seems to be part and parcel of serial-killer books. The book becomes a cat-and-mouse game in which the reader is invited to feel at least a tug of sympathy for the killer. I prefer my murderer to have a particular animus toward one person (I might stretch it to a small group of people), and I like him or her to have a reason for murder that I can relate to, even if I wouldn't find it sufficient to drive me to shoot, stab, poison, electrocute, cosh or otherwise dispatch the victim.

So, is it clear to everyone that when it comes to violence, horror and serial killers, I'm way off the bandwagon? What appeals to me about crime fiction is the puzzle solving and the characters. I want to read books that tell the truth about the characters in it and how they came to do whatever it is they do. True, in one case, that character will have committed the ultimate sin. But I don't need to have that sin described to me in graphic detail or have the victim's terror and pain played out in the text.

In light of this confession of my lily-livered nature, some might think it's strange that I read a lot of World War II history in which, of course, there is enough horror for even the most intrepid reader. But somehow, I feel that because there can be such real horror in the world, I don't want it in my fiction reading. I know there are many other readers who feel just the opposite: they will read novels with violence and horror, but don't want that in their nonfiction reading.

But back to mystery. In traditional mysteries, the reader need never see into the full depravity of the murderer's mind because, for one thing, the murderer is exposed at the close of the book. But just because a book isn't filled with teeth-clenching suspense or harrowingly graphic descriptions of violence doesn't mean that it's mild or dull. The discovery of the victim's body can be a moment of shock and horror; all the more so because the reader hasn't been subjected to a literally blow-by-blow account of how the corpse came to be. The examination of motives and the revelation of the murderer's identity are often emotionally intense.

In Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night, there isn't even a murder, but when Lord Peter Wimsey takes center stage in the Senior Common Room of an Oxford women's college and reveals the identity of the person who has been leaving poison pen notes and playing increasingly nasty tricks on its faculty and students, it's one of the most emotionally raw and intense moments in crime fiction. I recently re-read Ngaio Marsh's A Clutch of Constables (or, rather, listened to the audiobook), and Agatha Troy's horror when, while admiring the river and countryside while on a barge cruise, she discovers a murder victim, is arresting:

"Troy leant on the starboard taffrail and watched their entry into this frothy region. She remembered how she and Doctor Natouche and Caley Bard and Hazel Rickerby-Carrick had discussed reality and beauty. Fragments of conversation drifted across her recollection. She could almost re-hear the voices.

'–in the eye of the beholder–'

'–a fish tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful–'

 '–if a dead something popped up through that foam–'

'–a dead something–'

'–a dead something–'

'–through that foam–'

'–a dead something–'

Hazel Rickerby-Carrick's face, idiotically bloated, looked up; not at Troy, not at anything. Her mouth, drawn into an outlandish rictus, grinned through discoloured froth. She bobbed and bumped against the starboard side. And what terrible disaster had corrupted her river-weed hair and distended her blown cheeks?"

I was out walking on a warm, sunny day when I reached this point in the audiobook, but I felt a chill upon hearing these words and visualizing the scene so vividly portrayed. I had a real feeling of the disorientation and shock Troy felt when making this nightmarish discovery. And that's what works for me. Horror once removed. (At least once; after all, I am a chicken.)

My state of mind puts me on the sidelines when people rave about authors like Mo Hayder, Thomas Harris and Jeffery Deaver, but I know there are plenty of other people who can't wait to read their books. Some of my best friends enjoy a good nightmare-inducing plot, an evisceration or two and witnessing a gruesome autopsy alongside a medical examiner who is expert in the arcane ways of establishing time of death. Who knows, some of the Material Witnesses may be in that group. If so, we'll be hearing from them very, very soon.

So are you in the chicken coop with me or are you prowling around the pen, just waiting to pounce? If you're in with me, you're probably already familiar with classic authors like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. Have you tried modern authors like Louise Penny, Reginald Hill and Fred Vargas? These are authors who don't sneak up behind you and yell Boo! but who also don't shy away from examining the feelings that compel a murder and describing the emotional impact of the crime on witnesses and those connected to the victim.

Now if you're not a chicken, my recommendation is um, uh . . . Can I get some help here?