Daughters Galore

And then there was the matter of skin. When I look back on it now, when I look back on the girl on the dusty road carrying a newborn baby and a bucket, I now realize I knew nothing about skin. Skin touched me only lightly within Cradock House. It was only beyond its walls that the world divided itself so strictly between black and white, with coloured falling awkwardly in between. Yet I thought I understood those grades of colour. I thought I could even manage under the new word called apartheid. Only once I came to live across the river did I realize I was wrong.

In 1919, gentle Cathleen Moore left Ireland to sail for South Africa, where she was to marry her fiancé, Edward Harrington, whom she had not seen for five years. Their home was to be in the Karoo, a semi-desert territory far from the coast. Before long, the family had grown to include Miss Rosemary and young Master Phil. Miriam was their housemaid, and in 1930 she gave birth to a little girl named Ada, after Madam's sister in Ireland. She was welcomed into the household. The Housemaid's Daughter, by Barbara Mutch, is the story of Ada.

From the beginning, Ada felt like part of the family. She helped her mother with her work around the house––cleaning, ironing and polishing––but, at the same time, Cathleen quietly began to teach her to read, and because Cathleen's daughter Rosemary showed no interest, Cathleen also began to teach Ada to play the piano. There are strict conventions about how Mistress and maids are to interact, but Cathleen gets around most of them. Subtly, Cathleen opens her heart to Ada, as she accidentally-on-purpose leaves her journal out for Ada to read and learn from.

Ada grows up alone; isolated from exposure to other children like her. And so she has no real sense of what the world is like.  She is naïve, innocent and at the same time strong and resilient, as she struggles to understand things. She tries to get a grip on wars, which can leave some wounds only on the inside, as happened with Master Phil in North Africa in World War II. She struggles to understand the new fears of apartheid, which strangle the area in the 1950s, and finally she has to come to grips with a terrible thing that happened to her that has her in fear for her life and those of people she cares about.

What is at the root of this fear came down from the mixing of blood within a single family. It had terrible power, this difference in skin between mother and child. It became another kind of war; one that forced disputes among people, divided old friends and turned strangers into enemies. She also had a shame that she would carry all the days of her life.

Music had been the source of Ada's strength throughout the years. She used it to bring peace and comfort to her family, and it enabled her to make a living when otherwise she might have starved. Ada spoke the language of music. She could hear Grieg in the ripple of a river like Cathleen did, yet she she could recognize Township Bach in the rough-and-tumble life of the people. She played it all and and more. Mutch has a poetic way with words, and her descriptions of Africa, the Karoo and the people evoke many strong emotions. Keep a hankie on hand.

Ada was a special daughter and she had a special daughter. But that may be another story. I keep coming across these stories about unusual daughters.

Rei Shimura is a prototypical American daughter in that she, too, is of mixed ancestry and this is far from unusual in a melting-pot country. Her father is Japanese, while her mother is of European extraction. Rei grew up in San Francisco, but has more an affinity for the Japanese side of her heritage and had lived for some time in a small apartment in North Tokyo. The Samurai's Daughter, by Sujata Massey, tells about Rei's line of work, which is in the Japanese antique trade. At present, Rei is taking a sabbatical to take on a personal history project. She hopes to make a record of the style in which the Shimuras had lived before the massive modernization of the 1960s. She was interested in the artifacts of that life, such as the cooking pots, the quilt designs and garden patterns.

She knew that her father had sold several artifacts from his past in order to be able to buy a large house in San Francisco, but she also wanted to understand why her father had gotten rid of some of the more valuable items the family owned, and was puzzled by his negative attitude about them. One artifact he sold was a letter from the Emperor Hirohito himself. Rei flies off the handle easily, so she doesn't communicate easily with either of her parents and she doesn't get the answers she seeks from them. Her hope is to recoup some of the items.

Rei's fiancé, Hugh Glendenning, is a lawyer involved in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of people forced to engage in slave labor for Japanese companies in World War II. They are hoping for recompense, since it was their hard work that gave the now-successful companies a good start. One of these clients is in San Francisco, and is brutally murdered. Rei gets drawn into this case, as her research delves into the war years as well.

One thing that Rei learns is that although she may look Japanese, speak Japanese and live in Japan, she has much to learn about the culture and the deep, hidden fears and sentiments that persist despite modern times. Rei is somewhat like a Samurai warrior ancestor herself, in that she is combative, resilient and traditional. There are 10 books in the Rei Shimura series and they are educational as well as entertaining. Massey's latest book is The Sleeping Dictionary, first in the Daughters of Bengal series, published by Gallery Books in August 2013. I hope to review this book about a daughter soon.

Sometimes, after reading of very dark deeds, I like to lighten my spirit with something from Michael Pearce. One of these is The Snake Catcher's Daughter. Pearce's mysteries take place in early 20th-century Egypt, when that country was governed by the British, the Egyptians following the code of the French, the Sultan was under the influence of the Ottomans and, of course, there were many other miscellaneous fingers in the pie.

There were those who appreciated the changes the British made, such as abolishing the kurbash, which was a whip used for punishment and extracting confessions, but there were those who liked the old ways better––especially the lucrative methods of job advancement by bribery rather than performance. Garth Owen, the Mamur Zapt in charge of the political crimes section of the government, becomes aware of a plot to discredit many of the British officials and cause them to lose their jobs.

One such man, a policeman, is found drugged in a snake pit and this is leading to all sorts of rumors of untoward behavior. The wily Mamur Zapt has to keep one step ahead of the nefarious plotters and he does this with the help of a young girl who has learned her father's trade, since he is too drunk to take care of business himself. She provides an all-too-necessary service in the land of the Nile. She is a snake catcher. She helps Owen catch the snakes he is after as well.

The list of books about daughters goes on and on, and I can't wait to read Laura Joh Rowland's The Shogun's Daughter (September 2013, Minotaur), a historical novel that takes place in ancient Japan. Another historical novel is The Kingmaker's Daughter, by Philippa Gregory, which chronicles Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, and how he used his daughters politically. Linda Lafferty's The Bloodletter's Daughter is another book about violent ancient times. Bad boys have daughters too, as is seen in The Con Man's Daughter by Ed Dee. In this book, ex-cop Eddie Dunne runs from the Russian mob, the FBI and more while trying to save his daughter. One of my favorite Suzanne Arruda books is The Serpent's Daughter, in which Jade del Cameron must save her own mother from evil forces in exotic 1920s Morocco. Maybe the book that started my interest in daughters of crime fiction is Bootlegger's Daughter, the beginning of the Deborah Knott series, by Margaret Maron. Knott is an attorney looking to be a judge in North Carolina, who gets involved in southern politics and crime.

Now, for books about sons, you'll have to wait for a future post.

Here's to You, Dad

A new tie. Hand-lettered cards. Blueberry pancakes served in bed. Yep, it's Father's Day today.

I make no accusations, but my daughter's flu is well timed. I'll take her place in the obligatory Father's Day golf game with her dad; Dear Hubby's tact will get a lot of exercise. After dinner, we'll grab bowls of popcorn and watch the 1944 movie Laura, in which a homicide detective falls for the woman whose murder he's investigating.

Throughout the day, my thoughts will drift to my own dad. We were close and shared a love of dogs, horses, wildlife, baseball, and reading. When I contemplate the books below, his voice is in my ears.

"Let's practice staying out of trouble." Compared to Adrian McKinty's Michael Forsythe, I need practice getting into trouble.

Adrian McKinty: Dead I Well May Be (2003). A vengeance-filled tale confided by Michael, a young thug who reluctantly flees the Troubles of Belfast in 1992 for New York City, where his fighting skills and cool head come in handy against Dominicans encroaching on the drug turf of Irish gangster Darkey White. All goes swimmingly until Michael can't stay away from Bridget, White's girl. White does something about this, forcing Michael to do something about that. This great series debut is darker and more violent than Dennis Lehane's Depression-era mobsters book, Live by Night (see here for review).

"She looks like she's been dragged through the hedge backwards." I'm sure Deon Meyer's Emma le Roux feels that way, too.

Deon Meyer: Blood Safari (2009). A tense standalone thriller, set primarily in South Africa's wildlife preserves, exploring that country's contemporary social issues and political history. Narrator Lemmer is a tough professional bodyguard who's never (1) lost a client, or (2) become personally involved with one. His record is challenged when he's hired by Emma, a Cape Town ad consultant recently targeted by violence, as she investigates the identity of a man wanted for the murder of four poachers. She thinks it could be her brother Jacobus, who disappeared from Kruger National Park 20 years ago. Writer Meyer's exotic landscape is populated by strong characters, vividly described.

"I'm not sleeping; I'm just resting my eyes." Take a gander at a Kafkaesque insomniac who has vanished from his Paris apartment.

Georges Perec: A Void (1994). You'll have to read it to believe it, but Frenchman Perec, a member of Oulipo, a group of mathematicians and writers who put constraints on their work to foster creativity, used no letter "e" in his 300-page book, and translator Gilbert Adair managed the same astonishing feat in English. This has amusing consequences, as the friends of missing Anton Vowl search for clues in his diary and notebooks, which contain e-less excerpts from Hamlet's soliloquies ("Living or not living: that is what I ask") and Poe ("Quoth that Black Bird, 'Not Again'"). Their investigations—interrupted by deaths—provide very satisfying entertainment for people who love words and highly original writing.

"You kids learn to get along." This was difficult for us war-mongering siblings; however, tattling or whining to Mom or Dad was discouraged by them and strictly taboo among us. If threatened by outside disaster, we sibs always closed ranks.

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō: The Makioka Sisters (Japan, serially in the 1940s; the USA, 1957). Set against the backdrop of the Second Sino-Japanese War and pending World War II, this is the poignant tale of a wealthy Osaka family who tries to find an acceptable husband for the third sister, as Japan modernizes and their finances and social standing decline. According to custom, Yukiko Makioka, a shy and obedient woman now age 30, must wed before the much more westernized and rebellious fourth sister, Taeko, who already has a secret, unsuitable boyfriend. Both Yukiko and Taeko live with second sister Sachiko, a very caring woman, and her husband; the oldest sister, Tsuroko, refuses to acknowledge her family's deteriorating fortunes while she and her husband move to Tokyo. Watching these sisters maneuver through these perilously changing times makes unforgettable reading.

My dad had so many admonitions for me involving my mother, ranging from "Don't talk back to your mother" to "Ask your mother," I hardly know which to choose. I'll settle for one of my favs, "We won't worry your mother about this." She would think this book very strange.

Sergio De La Pava: A Naked Singularity (self-published, 2008; Univ. of Chicago, 2012). At the center of this nearly 700-page book of difficult-to-convey bizarreness is the son of Colombian immigrants, our narrator Casi, a perfectionistic and obsessional New York public defender, who has never lost in court. Then he does, and a lawyer colleague has an interesting proposition. In a way, this novel is a compelling––albeit satiric––legal thriller, as Casi grasps at justice for his beleaguered clients and works on behalf of a mentally handicapped man sitting on death row in Alabama; yet, as if our justice system doesn't contain enough room for all the absurdity and existential angst, there are many, many digressions into philosophy, television, boxing, and who knows what all. I'm still reading it, but I can tell you this: it's an entertaining book for those who enjoy unconventional writing and unique voices. For fans of David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon et al. If it takes a straightforward plot to please you, look elsewhere for fun.

"I'm not going to tell you again." But he did. Certain issues came up over and over. Man, considering our incorrigible natures, my patient, yet determined dad did wonders with his kids.

S. T. Haymon: Ritual Murder (1982). Haymon's writing is always clear and elegant; she liked to juxtapose an odd murder and an alien setting, such as a stately home, a cathedral, or a museum. In this second series book, Haymon creates copy-cat victims separated by centuries when the mutilated body of Anglebury choirboy Arthur Cossey is found in the excavated tomb of Little St. Ulf, a 12th-century victim of ritual murder. Appealing Det. Inspector Ben Jurnet, who's preparing to marry Miriam and despises the nickname "Valentino," and his Welsh sergeant begin with the question of child molestation before their suspenseful investigation moves to issues of anti-Semitism and drug trafficking. Fans of Ruth Rendell, P. D. James, Batya Gur, Deborah Crombie, or Caroline Graham should check out the Jurnet series, which begins with Death and the Pregnant Virgin.

"Good night, sleep tight./ Don’t let the bedbugs bite./ And if they do/ Then take your shoe/ And knock 'em 'til/ They’re black and blue!" Dad, I wish you could have met hit woman Clara Rinker.

John Sandford: Mortal Prey (2002). We follow two story lines in a furious game of cat-and-mouse between a smart and lucky lawman and an obsessed, cold-eyed killer, who've met and like each other. After nearly killing Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport in 1999's Certain Prey, Clara ends up in Mexico. A botched attempt to kill her is fatal to her fiancé and unborn child. Assuming the triggerman was hired by four old employers, a seething Clara sets on a rampage through St. Louis, Missouri. The FBI drags Lucas away from his preparations for a new job, house construction, and wedding to aid their agents there. This is the 13th book in Sandford's Prey series, but there's not a speck of staleness to be found. Gotta love Lucas, a warm and generous hulk, who sold the role-playing game he developed, and now drives a Porsche and indulges his taste in clothes. I rooted for Lucas and Clara, as I did for both cat and mouse in Owen Laukkanen's 2012 debut, The Professionals (see review here), featuring young kidnappers also pursued by a likable Minneapolis detective and the FBI.

"Did I raise you in a barn?" After I pointed out that, yes, I mostly was raised in our barn, my dad switched to, "Were you raised by wolves?" Got me there, Dad.

Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms (2000). Narrator Harry Crane, now in his 80s and confined to a nursing-home bed, looks back at Depression-era East Texas when he was 13, and he and sister Tom (short for Thomasina) roamed the woods, scaring each other with stories about the Goat Man. One day they discover the disfigured body of a young black woman hanging by wire from a tree in the creek area called "the Bottoms." Their father, Jacob—town barber and constable—attempts an investigation that encounters extreme racism and provokes violence. As more corpses come to light, Jacob takes to drink. The combination of innocent children coming of age in the South, a crime involving race, and a parent who tries to do the right thing is reminiscent of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, but this beautifully written book, which won an Edgar and was nominated for numerous other crime-fiction awards, is much more unsettling and violent than Lee's novel or Lansdale's Hap Collins/Leonard Pine books.

I hope fathers are enjoying a wonderful Father's Day with their families. If you're remembering your father, as I am mine, I hope your memories warm you.

Hooked By the Title

Fickle fate and fortunes are a great way to choose what to read next but sometimes you have to decide what to read first. If best seller lists send the wrong message and you are not the type to read whatever hand-me-downs that are left on your doorstep in a brown paper bag, one way to pick a book is to feel the vibes coming from the books themselves. A good title is one thing that gets my interest up.

I am invariably curious about the title when I encounter someone reading a book. The time is passing when I can surreptitiously find it out for myself since I am running into more and more electronic readers. Today I encountered a young man who was reading his textbook on his phone while he was waiting for awhile. That seemed like a efficient use of time. Have you seen the ad for the Kindle? It's on the back of some magazines and it is very tantalizing because it shows this opening line:

“Though I had often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.”

How many of you saw the ad and had to Google the words to find out the title of the book like I did? That is the power of a title. There have been many books I chose on the strength of the title alone. Most of those times, I am amply rewarded; very occasionally the title is the best part of the book.

One of my best choices was Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg. In Copenhagen one day during a cold December Smilla Jaspersen was on her way home. She comes upon the scene of the death of her young neighbor and friend, six-year-old Isaiah. Like herself, this young boy is of mixed heritage, a combination of Dane and Greenlander. Isaiah’s mother is an alcoholic who leaves Isaiah to fend for himself most of the time, so he has struck up some friendships in his apartment building and had become close to Smilla.

Greenland

Apparently, Isaiah was on the roof of a nearby warehouse and fell to his death. But Smilla knows that the boy was afraid of heights. She inspects the roof, which has no footprints other than Isaiah’s, which at one point lead from the center straight over the edge. Smilla, who can read snow, knows from those footprints that Isaiah was so frightened he ran off of the roof. She asks for a investigation and sets in motion a series of events that will take her to the edge of the world and to her own near extinction.

Smilla begins to get some intimations of the complexities involved when she finds out that a deep muscle biopsy was done on Isaiah’s thigh at autopsy and that Isaiah was being tracked by lawyers and other high-powered men. This seems to be related to the death of the boy’s father several years before during a northern exploration for a large company.

Smilla lost her mother to the sea when she was young and she began to feel an alienation toward nature. In an attempt to recapture what she had lost, she subsequently learned all there was to know about snow and ice. When Smilla tries to explain what she sees on the roof—those seemingly self-explanatory footprints—to the authorities, they look at her skeptically. Her father tells her: reading the snow is like listening to music; to describe what you have read is like explaining music in writing.

The mystery is: why was the death of one small boy so crucial to important people whose tentacles reach back into Greenland’s exploration of the past 60 years? Smilla faces death every day in order to figure this out. When she succeeds, she has to think about what her role will then be.

This book is suspenseful and beautifully written, poetic, musical and arousing the emotions of anger, despair and fatalistic resignation. It is a book with passages to underline after you collect yourself when you turn the last page, then double-check to be sure it is the last one.

How could I not be intrigued by this next title? Did he store secret things in it? No, but it was much better than I imagined.

Inspector D. P. Anders, protagonist of Marshall Browne's The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders, had been retired from the Rome police for several years when they asked him to return to the force to help clear up some cold cases. He was a decorated national hero who had been instrumental in bringing down an anarchist group 10 years before. It was during this effort that he lost his leg—as well as his desire to be a policeman.

Now Inspector Anders has been sent from the ministry in Rome to a southern city (unnamed in the book) because a few months earlier, the Ministry’s agent, Investigating Magistrate Fabri, and his two bodyguards were blown to pieces while sitting in a piazza café. Fabri was sent to investigate the assassination of Judge de Angelis, who was presiding over a case of local corruption that involved many powerful locals.

The Commissioner of Police in this southern city cannot understand why he has been sent an aging policeman of no particular rank and who, additionally, is disabled. Anders himself is not sure why he was chosen for this commission. But locally, the ripples are already being felt and almost immediately another undercover cop from Rome is killed.

These recent deaths of public figures in the city have been ascribed to anarchists. This is the story that the powers that be have agreed upon. Anders is well aware that most, if not all, of the groups of anarchists that terrorized Italy at one time were either disbanded or deep underground. He knows that the real people involved in these crimes are involved with a different criminal society, one that has been the power behind the scenes for decades in southern cities. The governing factor that keeps the criminals in charge of the city is fear.

Anders wonders bitterly if truth and justice will ever be stronger than the mafia and the politicians and bureaucrats in their pockets. In this excellent novel, you will find a beautiful recounting of the classic paradox: an irresistible force meets an immovable object. One realizes that if there is such a thing as an immovable object, there cannot be an unstoppable force. Both cannot be true at once. In this particular story, one is given hope that evil cannot triumph forever; perhaps good will prevail. Browne tells the tale with a rapid pace, the suspense building to the point that I find myself gripping the book with both hands. Everything that happens has such a sense of reality that my sense of disbelief is completely shut down. I have an intense feeling of despair for the characters in this city, but where there is life there is hope.

I was drawn to the title The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes, by K. C. Constantine, because I grew up in an area where all vegetables came from elsewhere and the only ones I felt were fit to eat were small, green and came in a can that said Le Sueur on the front. The idea that tomatoes had speed fascinated me.

Mario Balzic is the half-Serb, half-Italian police chief in Rocksburg, one of those small, ethnic, coal-mining towns in Pennsylvania where the mines have all but closed and the people are leading hardscrabble lives in a changed economy. This is a tale for any time. Balzic feels he knows the people on his turf like the back of his hand. So he is a little surprised when Frances Romanelli, whom he's known since childhood, begins to repeatedly call the police station because her husband Jimmy is missing. He also feels a little guilty because he has not seen her for so long, or seen her father, who was Mario's father's best friend.

Jimmy has been murdered and this case turns out to be something like one of Balzic’s Pittsburgh Pirates' baseball games: sometimes you do everything you are supposed to do and things still go against you. Mario understands subtlety and suspects immediately who Jimmy's killer is, but knows that unless this case is handled with delicacy it will blow up in his face like TNT at the coalface. Mario Balzic is a low-key but astute sleuth who loves his family, his wine and his town. There are 17 titles in the Mario Balzic series, starting with the 1972 title The Rocksburg Railroad Murders.

In All My Sad Dreaming, by John Caulfield, doesn’t sound like a murder mystery; it sounds like a book of poetry. But it succeeds in its way as both. The tourist brochures show Cape Town in the summer, when the sky is a radiant blue. They do not show the city in the grey winter. They never show the Cape of Storms.

Cape Town, South Africa

It is winter when this story takes place. This is a mystery set in Cape Town, South Africa during a violent modern era; a time when most houses have burglar bars on the windows and security gates on the front doors. Captain James Blake is a member of the Police Service and part of the serious violence unit. He is just leaving the hospital after having been there for a considerable time, suffering from two gunshot wounds. Blake is still hoping to understand what has happened to him when he is called to the scene of a murder that his partner thinks he should see, despite his ill health.

The victim is a wealthy lawyer who was once a member of a rock band of four young men who had moderate success years before but who had gone on to other endeavors and had not seen much of each other. There was an attempted reunion the year before, but it was stopped in its tracks when one of the men died in a freak skydiving accident. The most suspicious circumstance in the dead lawyer’s life centers on his young and beautiful Thai mail-order bride, who seemingly hates him and who has already one dead husband to her credit.

Blake is getting some weird vibes and Blake’s partner, Sgt. Mkhize even wants to consult his witch doctor. There are two other members of the musical group whom Blake has yet to track down, but in a country where you can be killed for your shoes or for a cigarette, the dead lawyer's six million dollars certainly make a good motive for murder.

Somehow Blake can’t seem to get a grip on things. This case, his life. He tells himself that he seriously wants to escape this violent decaying country. But a part of him will always regard the city of dreams as his home. So on he goes, attempting to solve this murder. The story is filled with musical references that go back to the ‘70s, when the rock band was in its heyday. The prose itself is musical in many ways and there is a tone of foreboding overlying it all.

"'Tis fifty long years since I saw the moon beaming
On strong manly forms, on eyes with hope gleaming
I see them again, sure, in all my sad dreaming...."
—Peadar Kearney (Irish rebel song "Down By the Glenside")

Not the the least of my choices is The Woman Who Married a Bear by John Straley. I might just as easily have picked this one for the interesting cover. This is the first of the Cecil Younger stories. Cecil is a young man in his mid-thirties who lives in Sitka, Alaska. He grew up in Juneau and traveled a bit, trying out several careers before realizing that what drives him is his curiosity and a sense of justice that requires him to find out what has happened in any given situation. There is a difference between the facts and the truth according to Cecil.

Sitka, Alaska

In his quest to find himself, please his father, accept the fact that the woman who loved him has left him, and just for the flat-out fun of it, Cecil prefers to spend most of his time in an altered state. He has grown quite accustomed to finding himself face down somewhere after a night of hitting the low spots. But he does work as a private detective and when he gets a call to look into a cold case a few years old with the purported murderer already incarcerated, he jumps at the chance to do something besides look into rapes and robberies. Before 24 hours have passed, he is on somebody’s hit list and he has to solve this case or die in the process.

All of the books in this Straley series have entertaining titles. The next is The Curious Eat Themselves and Cecil Younger is well worth getting to know.

There are several other books that leapt off the shelf into my hands when I was hooked by the title. If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him by Sharyn McCrumb is the eighth book in her Elizabeth MacPherson series and it tells the tale of women looking for revenge. Slow Dancing With The Angel of Death by Helen Chappell takes place on the eastern shore of Maryland and introduces Hollis Ball, who is visited by the ghost of her dead husband asking her to find his murderer. One of my all-time favorites is The Man Who Understood Cats by Michael Allen Dymmoch. This is also a debut novel which takes us to Chicago and a partnership between a police detective and a psychiatrist. I highly recommend this series although it is very hard to find. Lastly, in Mad Dog & Englishman, by author J. M. Hayes, a small-town Kansas sheriff named English and known as Englishman has to try and solve the town's first murder with the help of his half-brother Mad Dog.

Sometimes you can indeed judge a book by its cover.


Playlist to get you in the mood to read these books.



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