For the Fourth: Review of Kathyrn Miller Haines's Winter in June

Tossing around some books trying to decide what next to sink my teeth into, I spied Kathryn Miller Haines's Winter in June (HarperCollins, 2009). Just the thing for this time of year, I thought. I wasn't intending to seek out patriotic reading but, I hit the bullseye here; it was just perfect for my mood.

I first came across Rosie Winter in Haines's The War Against Miss Winter. Rosie is a struggling actress in the New York of the 1940s. She has a day job working for a private detective. Acting jobs are not jumping her way, and she is a bit worried about losing her room at a boarding house that rooms working actresses.

Rosie begins honing her detectival skills when she finds her own boss hanging in the closet in his office. Standard for mystery novels, the police want to write it off as a suicide, but Rosie suspects foul play. Life isn't easy in those days, with food rationing, blackouts on a regular basis and jobs a little scarce.  But Rosie, who has cut her chops in the dog-eat-dog world of the theater, is more than capable of handling a measly lot of criminals––especially with the help of her sleuthing sidekick and best friend, Jayne. What stands out about this novel is the pitch-perfect way that Haines captures the ambience and the tempo of the early war years.

This carries over to the third book in the series, Winter in June. By now it is 1943 and the war machine is in high gear. Both Rosie and Jayne have been more successful in their careers, but they would like to be more of a help with the war effort. Through some connections, they've been offered parts in a USO show that is headed to the South Pacific. Where they will be going is not exactly to Bali Hai, that perfect island, but to a camp in the Solomon Islands now held by the Allies.

This opportunity sounds like a gift from the gods to Rosie, because she has heard that her ex-boyfriend has been missing in action and was last seen in the Solomons. Visiting this part of the world will give her a chance to try and find him.

Jayne and Rosie travel to the West Coast and are excited to be part of a five-woman group sailing out on a converted former cruise ship repurposed by the Navy for troop transfer to the Pacific Theater. As Rosie puts it, though, she was expecting to get champagne for her bon voyage, but instead she got a corpse. In the waters near the point of departure, the body of a woman is found floating. The victim is unknown at first, but it is soon discovered that she is a former WAC who had been stationed at the same base, Tulagi, that Rosie and Jayne are assigned to.

Arriving at the base after a somewhat dangerous and uneasy ocean crossing, the girls are allocated living quarters. They are told that they are privileged characters because the tent of stitched-together sheets that they are to occupy for a few months actually has a floor and, more important that that, they have a barrel of water for a sink.

These ladies take everything in their stride, including communal latrines, nails in posts for clothes hangers and the sounds of a predator- and pest-infested jungle waiting to sing them to sleep. The ladies aren't the only females on the island, because there is a contingent of WACs that came a short while back. These WACs don't have the same privileges as the USO, and this causes some friction.  It doesn't help that apparently a member of their troupe used to be a WAC, a fact she kept to herself.

Between rehearsals for their routines for the show, Rosie tries to quietly investigate what has happened to her ex, Jack, and the murdered WAC.

What irks Rosie the most is that after living in New York for two years of the war, she had grown used to being in a part of the world where being a broad meant something different than it had to her mother and grandmother. Because of the war, women were finding themselves in more and more important roles previously dominated by men.

She was used to travelling the streets alone and to seeing women working outside the home, even when there were children. But in the military, it was made pretty clear that this was a civilian phenomenon only. In the world of the armed forces, women were still second-class citizens.

Haines uses the turns of phrase popular in the forties, and the mores of the time to bring authenticity to her story. She made me nostalgic for a time that was before I was born. The women smoked gaspers, batted the breeze, island-hopped to perform sometimes three to seven shows a day and were getting complacent when there was another murder.

The murder investigations do take a back seat to the chronicle of the reality of the women's lives in the USO and in the Pacific Theater of war. But this didn't detract from my enjoyment of the novel. There is one more chapter to Rosie's life, entitled When Winter Returns. That'll probably be when I’ll read it.

There Is No Place Like Home

There are places in this world whose names are almost synonymous with misery. Places you would rather not experience, like Outer Mongolia, the Black Hole of Calcutta, the wilds of Borneo, and Siberia. To some, because there isn’t a hope in hell that there would be a Starbucks, the place to avoid is the Back of Beyond. But that is in real life; travelling to these areas by way of fiction is another story altogether.

Chinggis Khan Hotel

When I first picked up Michael Walters' book The Shadow Walker, I was immediately transported to Ulan Bator and my first reaction was to flip to Google Earth to see where this was and what a city located on these steppes would look like. This is one of the least populated areas of the world. This mystery was a gripping tale that was as much about the far reaches of Mongolia as it was about the story. An unusual protagonist, Nergui, who, along with the head of the Serious Crime Squad, Doripalam, solves the case of the murder of a British geologist whose body was found in the city's best hotel, the Chinggis Khan.

In the second in the series, The Adversary, Nergui's case takes him further out into the steppes as he tries to find connections between the disappearance of a young nomad boy and the death of his mother, and the country's most powerful crime lord, whom Nergui has been after for years. Aside from the setting, the characters themselves are so intriguing that they are memorable. It is not the 87th Precinct. Instead, you have a police crew that is trying to help Mongolia into the 21st century. The land is free of Soviet influences, but unable to master freedom without pervasive corruption. Nergui sometimes feels like he is operating with one hand tied behind his back. He can do all that is possible for ordinary crimes, but organized crime is off limits.

I have not come across a murder mystery written about Borneo, but Graeme Kent has a new book that transports the reader to the nearby Solomon Islands. This is a new series featuring Sergeant Ben Kella, a touring government police officer who was also the aofia of his tribe, a man chosen by the spirits to keep the peace. He joins forces with a young newcomer to the Islands, Sister Conchita, who has just been appointed to help the priest at the mission. The islands are a British territory and Kent enlarges on the ambiance and the history of the progress of the area towards independence. Sergeant Kella has been educated both in Sydney and London, where he took a Master's degree. He even did a little police training in Manhattan.

Some of the locals still feel the yoke of colonialism and the feeling is that the British would prefer to restrict the education of the islanders so that the better jobs can be saved for non-islanders. In Devil-Devil, an elderly man has been killed and Kella must investigate and solve the crime without causing bad feelings and enmity among the different generations and the different tribes. On this island where the crime took place, there lived 13 different clans, each speaking its own language. It was a powder keg. Kella and Sister Conchita walk a fine line inexorably to the solution and I can't wait to read more about this pair.

I have heard about the Black Hole of Calcutta most of my life without realizing where it was exactly. The Black Hole of Calcutta is a cell in the jail of a British fort in Calcutta, now known as Kolkata. In the middle of the 18th century, British and Indian troops fought at this fort. A reported 146 defenders of the fort were driven into the small cell and many had suffocated by the next morning.

I have encountered only one writer of mysteries that take place in this city, now becoming better known as Kolkata. Are we becoming more politically correct, as we now speak of Mumbai and Kolkata, or did they change their names from Bombay and Calcutta? Satyajit Ray, better known as a filmmaker, wrote a series of stories that were collected in The Complete Adventures of Feluda. These are short stories about a young amateur detective who is really a renaissance man who can do almost anything. He is well-versed in the martial arts and is a marksman. He reads about photography, geometry and anything that can help him solve crimes. He gets more adept at crime solving as the stories progress. In the Royal Bengal Mystery, you see some elements of a Sherlock Holmes influence.

Being banished to Siberia reminds me of the nightmarish tension of the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s. The name "Siberia" means "sleeping land," and for a thousand years, while Europe and Asia developed, Siberia slept. It was five million square miles and could swallow all of Western Europe and two USAs. It is covered by taiga (forests) and animals, vast deposits of minerals and more. It is a land of perpetual winter, where the temperature on a good day is forty below. In A Cold Red Sunrise, Stuart Kaminsky's Russian detective, Porfiry Rostnikov, a dogged, intense Moscow police Inspector who occasionally gets on the wrong side of the KGB, is sent on a case to this area of tundra and snow.

Tumsk, the town where Rostnikov and his partner are sent, was built around a weather station. This place had not resisted change; it had not even been threatened by it. It was a collection of a few houses and government buildings. A Commissar from Moscow had been murdered while investigating the death of the daughter of a Russian dissident who had been exiled to Siberia. The exile in question was a brilliant doctor whose situation had gained some press in the West and the authorities want a quick resolution to the problem.  And, of course, Rostnikov obliges as always.

We might differ in our opinion about what constitutes the Back of Beyond. I have felt at times that it is where I live, because we have no bookstore, but there are more backward places. In Steven Havill's Scavengers, the story takes place in the New Mexico desert near a town called Maria. Ex-Sheriff, now livestock inspector, Bill Gastner describes it as having lain comatose since the day Coronado walked through.

This story is the first one in the series that features Estelle Reyes-Guzman as the new Undersheriff. She is called to the isolated desert area because first one body, then another, is found dumped in this desolate area. Reyes-Guzman is as sharp as a tack. She sees small discrepancies and details that help her solve these mysteries in a relatively short time. These stories have an excellent pace as well as a good sense of place. Havill makes me want to visit this area. Even though it is bleak, he makes it sound out of the ordinary.

When I close this kind of book, I am really happy to be where I am, having enjoyed a glimpse of life in places of nightmares for some, while I am either warm and cozy or cool and content in my own chair.