Fall Preview 2014: Part Seven

British crime mysteries have always charmed me. They have a very distinctive flavor and atmosphere. For one thing, all the different regions have different characteristics, in both geography and personality. My fall selections for this category take place in such locations as the Outer Hebrides off northern Scotland, as well as on the south coast and over in the Midlands.

One of Peter May's most intriguing series is a trilogy that takes place on the Isle of Lewis, part of the archipelago of the Outer Hebrides. The central character is Edinburgh Police Detective Inspector Fin Macleod. Fin left Lewis 18 years earlier, returning once only for the funeral of the aunt he lived with for several years. He had never looked back until he was sent to solve a murder that may have involved old friends and auld acquaintances he had not forgotten.

As the second book in the trilogy, The Lewis Man (Quercus, September 2) begins, Fin has come to the realization that he and his police career are not a good fit, so he packs up his belongings and moves back to Lewis. He is camping out and living rough while he restores his parents' derelict cottage, when there is a bit of excitement on the island. Changed little over the centuries, the custom of harvesting peat for fuel can, on occasion, yield secrets from the past. Now, a thin brown arm reaching out of the bog seems to be attached to an ancient Celt, because it is withered and deeply brown. But there is a cute little tattoo of Elvis on it. And the rest of the remains point to a tortured end.

Well, that was then, but now we have DNA and these double helices from the Lewis Man are a sibling match to someone on the island. This someone is an elderly farmer, Tormod Macdonald, whom Fin had known for years and who always claimed to be an only child. But Tormod is now suffering from dementia, and spending great amounts of time living in his head, revisiting his past. His was one of those childhoods spent in care and under the heavy hand of keepers, whose main job descriptions were sadists with sticks. One of Fin's other aims in returning to the island was to repair fences and reestablish old relationships. So when Tormod's family asks for help in this matter, because the local police are looking hard at the Lewis Man's only connection, Fin agrees to help. Fin has always had difficulty leaving his own past behind, but he tracks Tormod's secrets. Naturally, he turns over stones that are hiding surprises, mysteries and evil things that scuttle away trying to remain buried in the sand before he is finished.

The story is as captivating and forbidding as the Hebrides themselves. I read it when it came out in the UK in 2012.

Periphera and Sister Mary Murderous have mentioned G. M. Malliet's Max Tudor adventures before (see here, here, and here). Tudor is a vicar at St. Edwold's, in the not-always-tranquil village of Nether Monkslip in rural England. But once upon a time, Max worked for MI5 and, for one reason or another, he seems to need the skills useful in his previous life more than he could ever imagine.

Max and the villagers have been through A Wicked Autumn (followed by A Fatal Winter and A Pagan Spring) and they are now looking forward to A Demon Summer (Minotaur, October 7), the fourth book in the series. One of the problems this summer arises from local Lord Lilselivet, the 15th Earl in that lineage, who had never met a person he couldn't dislike––and the feeling was usually mutual.

One day, an ill-wisher slips him a dose of gastric discomfort encased in a fruitcake made by the Handmaids of St. Lucy of Monkbury Abbey. The earl's ire results in the bishop asking for help from Max Tudor––which is a turnabout, because he usually is counseling Max to stay away from murder investigations. This is a good thing, because at this abbey there also turns out to be a corpse in the cloister. Max is back again in MI5 mode.

Max wants to put this case to rest, because he is looking forward to his own good fortune, in the form of marriage to a lovely lady who is not exactly the ideal vicar's wife in the eyes of some in the village because of her independent beliefs.

Malliet always provides an interesting tale with characters you can identify with and root for.

It seems that earls just like to cause trouble. In Sally Spencer's eighth book featuring DCI Monika Paniatowski, Supping with the Devil (Severn House, October 1), there's the Earl of Ridley, who is planning to hold a rock festival on his vast grounds. This is the 1970s, Monika has some of the few XX chromosome pairs on the police force and she's not particularly welcome. She recognizes that the move by the Chief Constable to make her an advisor to the earl is really an attempt to wreck her career.

One of the earl's novel moves has given her some concern. He has chosen to employ the notorious Devil's Disciples motorcycle gang to provide the security for the festival. Added to this is the fact that the earl's mother is also outraged enough to want to throw a spanner in the works.

When the body of a tabloid journalist is discovered, the CC excludes Monika from the case, but he may find to his detriment that you can't keep a good woman down.

This is a story that takes on Monika after she has been around a while, so her back story may be a little vague, but the threads of the plot are laced with some humor and unexpected complications. I am really looking forward to this one. It's a bit of déjà vu for mem perhaps.

A little lighter fare is this debut novel by a young librarianm Ashley Weaver, Murder at the Brightwell (Minotaur, October 14). If you enjoy the Georgette Heyer mysteries, or the Dolores Gordon-Smith Jack Haldean series, this may a nice choice for a fall read.

Amory Ames is a wealthy young woman who has a rickety marriage to a young playboy, Milo, so she takes the opportunity for a trip with an old friend who is going to a luxury hotel, the Brightwell. This friend also happens to be ex-fiancé Gil Trent, who is trying to stop his sister from marrying a wastrel. Seeing a reflection of her own marital woes, Amory is happy to help. But when the disreputable ladies' man, Rupert, sticks his spoon in the wall (a Georgette Heyer phrase meaning "kicks the bucket") and Gil is arrested, Amory is determined to prove his innocence.

This becomes complicated when Milo turns up and Amory enlists his help in her investigation. Although theirs is an uneasy alliance, the stakes are high and the lines between the friends and enemies are blurred. A little romance, high society gone awry and murder, what more can you ask for? By the way, if you haven't read Gordon-Smith's Haldean series, you are in for a treat. He is an interesting and complex aviator who flew in World War I and is now a private detective.

Back in 2008, in John Harvey's Cold in Hand, Charlie Resnick went through a particularly distressing time and then must have gone into hibernation or retirement. But now he's back, in what is supposed to be the final Charlie Resnick book, Darkness, Darkness (Pegasus, September 15). Charlie Resnick is famous for his love of Dagwood sandwiches, jazz and his cats named after jazz greats, Dizzy, Miles and Pepper.

Charlie worked out of the Nottingham district and had an excellent squad working under him, and is now asked to return to active duty when a cold case heats up. The original crime was the disappearance of a woman during the Miners' Strike of 1984-85, which tore the country apart with civil discord and turned friend against friend and fathers against sons. Some of these enmities still exist. At that time, Resnick had recently been promoted to Inspector and he played a peripheral role in the case.

The case is slow moving, but the most intriguing part of the story is the flashes back and forth through the years, which meld the past and present of Resnick's life. Another book, which uses the Miners' Strike as a backdrop for murder, is Reginald Hill's exciting Underworld, a Dalziel and Pascoe adventure.

I have been a longtime fan of Charlie Resnick and I am sorry to see him go, but he deserves to sit back with his cup of coffee and his Thelonious Monk or Bessie Smith album and put his feet up. Harvey reports that this is certainly the last crime novel that he is going to write. I will keep up with John Harvey through his blog on Goodreads.

Finally, if you enjoy reading mysteries going a bit further back in time, with a sharp eye for period detail, take a look at Charles Finch's latest, The Laws of Murder (Minotaur, November 11), which takes place in 1876.

Charles Lenox is a Victorian gentleman who enjoys exploring via armchair, and relaxing in his study, reading quietly, and sipping tea. But there is another side to Lenox. He can't pass up a mystery, and at one time he could be found looking for clues throughout London; in Mayfair, in pubs, in the halls of parliament and beyond into the rarefied airs of Oxford.

But more recently, he has been a sedate Member of Parliament until he realized his calling was to do something a little more active. Lenox joins a group of friends in a new venture––a detective agency. He hopes he still has all his sleuthing faculties and will get a chance to prove this when a friend, a member of Scotland Yard, is shot and killed near Regent's Park. He is on the case to prove his mettle.

The clues are quite intriguing: an unlaced boot, a recent wound, and a mysterious luggage ticket––untraceable. Sherlock would have loved the case. Mostly, Lenox reads the message in the clues as danger ahead, but he is ready for anything!

In a few days, I would like to share with you some stories of home-grown crime that top off my fall reading selections.

Neither Unbearably Nor Astonishingly Dull

This young man is obviously not riveted.

H. R. F. Keating died last year, but he left us with Inspector Ganesh Ghote of Bombay, India, and some wonderful books of crime-fiction criticism, including my last night's read, The Bedside Companion to Crime. While critic Julian Symons slights the "humdrums," Keating celebrates the "delightfully dull." They are comforting books because they're smoothly written, and you know they will end with justice done. Now, you may be thinking that the rest of my post is about good cozies or traditional mysteries. Nah. Recently, I've been reading too many books of twists and turns to be straightforward like that. Below is a variety of books, none of which is unbearably or astonishingly dull.

These folks could use a big antidote to boredom. Perhaps Andrew Gross's shocking EYES WIDE OPEN.

Michael Gruber: Valley of Bones (2005). The dapper Afro-Cuban Miami detective Iago Paz first appears in Gruber's fun debut, Tropic of Night. Now he's back on a case of defenestration (is that a stupendous word or what?). A loathsome Sudanese hoodlum goes out a hotel window (yep, that's what defenestration is), and inside the room is a praying Emmylou Dideroff, a member of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. Paz bundles her off to write what might be a long and heroic confession. Then he and psychologist Lorna Wise investigate Emmylou's colorful past and the crime. Happily, they also find time to trade quips and canoodle. Very entertaining.

Michael Innes: A Private View (1952, APA One Man Show). In this playful and witty book, a dead young painter's masterpiece is stolen from under the nose of Sir John Appleby, assistant commissioner of New Scotland Yard. The reader revisits the Duke of Horton's mansion, scene of Hamlet, Revenge!, and watches Sir John and his underling, Inspector Cadover, investigate. This lively story should be of particular interest to readers who enjoy art mysteries.

Fitting twin cities: the Perthshire, England village of Dull and the town of Boring in Oregon, USA

Jon Fasman: The Unpossessed City (2008). Fasman likes to jam-pack his books with detailed information and story lines. He did this in his debut thriller, The Geographer's Library, about a New England cub reporter who, when assigned to write the obituary of an academic, opens a Pandora's box of international intrigue instead. Now, Fasman sends Jim Vilatzer, a Washington, D. C. loser, to Russia, where his interviews about life in the gulags attract the attention of the authorities and the CIA. Who isn't interested in modern Russia?

Minette Walters: The Shape of Snakes (2001). Annie Butts suffers from Tourette's syndrome and at the hands of the cruel kids in her working-class London neighborhood. She dies in the street in what is ruled an accident. Twenty years later, her determined former neighbor, Mrs. Ranelagh, is back to finish her investigation into Annie's death. Man, what a read! Walters can give Ruth Rendell's darkest books a run for their money.

Peter Dickinson: The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest (1968, APA Skin Deep). The always-original Dickinson's debut features a New Guinea tribe called the Ku that has moved to London at the end of WWII. When an elderly chief is murdered, Supt. Pibble investigates. Humorous, interesting psychology and anthropology, and unique characters.

Reginald Hill: The Woodcutter (2011). Betrayal and revenge in a complex story about an English woodcutter's son, Sir Wilfred Hadda. Hill's last book is a twisted fairytale and a gorgeous stand-alone of psychological suspense. You'll savor each of the 500 pages.

Sally Spencer: Echoes of the Dead (2011). The self-confessed murderer of young Lilly Dawson is dying. He now confesses that his confession was a lie. DCI Monika Paniatowski must clear up a 22-year-old case from her beloved mentor Charlie Woodend, now retired.

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin (1952). Private eye Lew Archer in a nicely convoluted plot about a corrupt California town. You've gotta read some classic American hardboiled crime fiction this summer: Ross Macdonald, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain.

Eliot Pattison: The Lord of Death (2009). A subtle and complicated thriller featuring an exiled investigator from Beijing, Shan Tao Yun. Shan is now in Tibet, where he runs into several deaths that arouse his curiosity.

Marcia Clark: Guilt by Association (2011). Yes, this is the O. J. Simpson prosecutor. Trust me, she does a far better job as a writer than she did in that trial. Her female prosecutor, Rachel Knight, is gutsy and smart, and this debut about a rape case is wonderful.

Michael Gilbert: The Black Seraphim (1984). A harried young barrister vacations in Melchester, the cathedral town of Gilbert's first book, Close Quarters. He doesn't have an easy time of it, due to his relationship with his beloved and the murderous antagonisms among the clergy. You can count on Gilbert for an intelligent English mystery. Gilbert was a lawyer, and many of his books feature lawyers. Does that sound dull? Not when a client is found dead in a deed box, as in Smallbone Deceased. A nice bit of trivia about Gilbert is that he once had Raymond Chandler as a client.

Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970). Okay, not mysteries in the traditional sense, but if you haven't yet read these books, it's my duty to mention them. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on the road, and Leonard Bernstein and his friends raise funds for the Black Panthers. Perfect for a trip back to the 1960s via reading in the hammock.

We'd love to hear your ideas about un-dull reading designed to dispel the doldrums of summer.

Riding into the English Sunset

Tyrannosaurus rex and Detective Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend are forever linked in my mind. Why? A few days ago, I was idly reading online when I came across an article about the bite of a T. rex. Researchers from the University of Liverpool, using life-size models and computer analysis, state that "the biting force of T. rex may have been able to deliver 12,800 pounds of force—almost 20 times more powerful than previously thought." They likened the force to what it would feel like if an elephant sat down on you.

This is food for thought all right, but what does this have to do with DCI Woodend? Give me a minute. I was still thinking about how much faster I'd need to run from a T. rex than I'd already planned when I started the twentieth book in Sally Spencer's series, Fatal Quest: Woodend's First Case. The story begins in London on the smoggy night of November 10, 1950, when a teenage girl is killed by a man wielding an old-fashioned razor. Then the scene shifts to the buffet at the Whitebridge railway station in June 1973, where a "big bugger in a hairy sports coat" buys a beautiful blonde in her 30s a drink.

The man is newly retired DCI Woodend, and the woman is Sergeant Monika Paniatowski, who will replace him. They have sneaked away from his retirement party. Woodend is waiting for the train that will take him to his retirement villa in Spain. Paniatowski is already missing him; he has been her boss and mentor, and she's dreading his retirement. She teases that it's a miracle he actually made it to retirement, and Woodend smiles and says that's less remarkable than his promotion to Chief Inspector in the first place. He says he did it "by arrangin' to have somebody killed." She asks him to tell her about it, so he does.

In 1945, Major Cathcart, Woodend's WWII commanding officer, told Woodend that he would be returning to his former job at the Metropolitan Police Force and suggested a man of Woodend's obvious abilities should move to London and become a bobby. That explains why Detective Sergeant Woodend is sitting in his office at the Met on November 10, 1950 when the call comes in. A woman's shriek, "delivered in a whisper," tells Woodend that a man told her he had killed a girl and left her body at a bomb site on Mitre Road. Then she hangs up.

At the crime scene, Woodend is disgusted by the language the doctor and the constable use to refer to the murdered girl, who is black. They suggest that the murder will be low in priority for the Met, and their predictions are fulfilled and more. First, Woodend's superior, a lazy and irascible DCI named Bentley, assigns him to head this investigation, a first for Woodend. Then, an anonymous call to Woodend's home warns him that "if yer know what's good for yer, yer won't do that job too thoroughly." Woodend's investigations yield some surprising facts about the murdered girl, Pearl Jones; when Woodend reports these facts to DCI Bentley, he yanks Woodend from the case and assigns him to the death of a criminal at the rough Waterman's Arms.

Woodend is a "decent, honest, principled bloke in a world that has largely given up being decent and principled" and he asks himself, if he doesn't find justice for Pearl, who will? Despite threats from his superiors and London gangsters, attempted bribes, and other attempts to divert him, Woodend perseveres in this case that launches him into the ranks of Detective Chief Inspector. What follows this case is a career of 25 years of crime solving. The Met may not have appreciated the unorthodox Woodend's refusal to play by anyone's rules other than his own, and his talent for getting up his superiors' noses in record time, but Woodend can be proud at his retirement.

Fatal Quest, the last in the series, but detailing Woodend's first case, is a well-written English police procedural, full of wonderful characterizations and ironic humor (Woodend's wife refers to his "sweatin' over a hot criminal all day" when he arrives home). It's more than a simple story of how Woodend tracks down a murderer and becomes a DCI. It's a look at love in its many different forms and the heartache and havoc it can cause. It's a depiction of London five years after the war when bombed-out sites remain and people are scrabbling. The black market opened up new ways for criminals to make a living. Overt racism and corruption stain the Met, and some Met officers argue that organized crime is beneficial because powerful gangsters help keep crime under control. Against this backdrop, it's good to watch the decent Woodend work his first case. Then, in the first book of the series, 1998's The Salton Killings, Diane Thorburn is only the latest in a series of schoolgirls to be killed in 1950s Cheshire, and DCI Woodend will investigate. There are 18 books between these two.

I've already said goodbye to Colin Dexter's Chief Inspector Morse (The Remorseful Day), Ian Rankin's John Rebus (Exit Music), and Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander (The Troubled Man). There will be no more fantastic Superintendent Andrew Dalziel/Sergeant Peter Pascoe books from Reginald Hill. Happily, Woodend's successor, DCI Monika Paniatowski, now has her own series (beginning with The Dead Hand of History), but I'm hoping very hard that Woodend's disappearance at the end of Fatal Quest won't be an extinction like the one suffered by T. rex. Right before he hops on his train, Woodend says that in six months' time, he'll be running a little private detection agency in Spain with his old mate Paco Ruiz, whom we first met in Madrid at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in James García Woods's A Murder of No Consequence. I certainly hope Woodend is as good as his word.