Visiting Old Friends

After 12 consecutive days of sweltering heat and humidity, interspersed with violent nighttime thunderstorms, my brain feels like an egg that's been slowly fried and dried on a dashboard. And we're among the lucky ones; neighbors a few miles to the south have been without power for almost a week. In conditions like this, my TBR pile looks intimidating and unappetizing. I want familiar, comforting amusement, preferably with gelato. Lots of gelato.

The 3Cs (crafting, cooking, and coffeehouse) genres, once favorite light reads, have been so flooded recently with bland, generic stories and characters that I've rather lost interest in them. Many of them feature airhead protagonists (and why are they always women?) who frequently require rescuing from their own nosy stupidity. The second time that I want to shake a heroine until her teeth rattle I put the book down for good. Life is too short for that!

Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series, about an accountant-turned-baker, came as a welcome exception to this general dumbing-down of the genre. Corinna owns and operates Earthly Delights, a small bakery in center city Melbourne, Australia. It is located on the first floor of the Insula, a quirky apartment building designed like an ancient Roman villa. Corinna used the buyout from her accounting job to purchase both the bakery and her apartment, named (not numbered) Hebe, directly above it. She lives with her house cat Horatio, and has two volunteer stray cats that do rodent patrols in the bakery at night.

Corinna operates her bakery with only some part-time counter help, so her days are long. In Earthly Delights, the first of the series, she opens her bakery door early one morning to let her rodent police, Heckle and Jekyll, out and finds a young girl dying in the street, apparently of a drug overdose. While Corinna's quick response saves the girl, similar drug-related deaths begin to occur around the city. Meanwhile, Corinna and her neighbors in the Insula are being harassed by an anonymous religious fanatic, who leaves threatening letters and defaces and damages the shops. While this series has a wonderful cozy feel to it, there is some rough language––it is the inner city, after all––and some sweet, not-too-explicit sex. Corinna and her community remind me of Armistead Maupin's characters in Tales of the City; bittersweet and very funny. I was so enchanted by the setting, characters, and sly Australian humor in Earthly Delights that I have ordered the rest of the series.

When sexton Willie Boyd of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church is found dead in the choir loft (having spewed all over the keyboards of the organ in the process), Chief Detective Hayden Konig suspects poison. It was poison, but the bottle of sacramental wine Willie had filched and drunk, the only thing he is known to have consumed, is not the source. Many people disliked Willie, including the new priest, Mother Lorraine Ryan, whom many Church members find almost as disagreeable as Willie.

While suspects in Mark Schweizer's The Alto Wore Tweed are plentiful, clues are sparse, and the motive remains a mystery. This novella is interspersed with chapters from Hayden's unfortunate efforts to write a mystery novel in the style of his hero, Raymond Chandler. He has gone so far as to acquire one of the master's manual typewriters in the hope that it will inspire him.

But the Chandleresque story Hayden is writing, while amusing, is not nearly as exciting as the real-life events this autumn in rural North Carolina. The escape of the helium-filled life-sized naked dolls on their way to a bachelor party has dire consequences right through Christmas. And the competing Live Christmas Nativity Displays (one with amorous camel) create such an uproar that it's a wonder Hayden can finally solve his case. This wonderful bit of slapstick mystery is the first in a series, and to my mind still the best.

Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey, is one of those classic mysteries I return to every few years. Brat, who ran away from a London orphanage, wound up in the American West, where he broke and trained horses and hoped for a career in rodeo. A leg injury ended those hopes, so he returned to Britain to bitterly reconsider a bleak, horseless future. There, a chance encounter with an out-of-work actor, who confuses him with a young neighbor believed drowned by suicide years earlier, offers him an opportunity he could never have dreamed.

Alec Loding swears that Brat is the image of the late Patrick Ashby, whose body was never recovered. Patrick, who would have inherited the lovely little horse farm of Latchetts on his upcoming 21st birthday. Whose reckless spendthrift brother, Simon, will inherit the farm––unless Patrick returns. Loding wants to pass Brat off as Patrick, in return for a very modest income, which the estate can easily afford. After much agonizing, Brat takes on the criminal challenge––and the new identity. Alec, who grew up with Patrick and Simon, coaches Brat so thoroughly that even the family lawyer is convinced before sending "Patrick" down to Latchetts to be reunited with his family.

Tey was fascinated by moral and ethical dilemmas, and often put her characters into situations that tested their limits severely. Brat is a basically honest young man caught up in an increasingly intolerable trap of his own making, until the fiction he struggles to maintain smashes against the reality of murder. No humor here, but a story and a mood that linger pleasantly. Maybe next week the weather will break, and the TBR pile will toss up something interesting. Until then, it's nice to have some old friends at hand to revisit.

Not Just Another Highland Fling

The closest I have been to Scotland, aside from the luscious bodice-rippers I secretly devoured as a teenager, was a "Tour of Scotland" sampling of seven scotch whiskeys one hazy and better forgotten evening, and an occasional outing to one of the various Highland Games events so popular throughout the Northeast, where big flaming-haired men in kilts hurl young trees and large rocks while bagpipes swirl and spectators and participants alike shout encouragement and insults. Lots of rippling muscles and rowdy fun!

But Scotland is not all crumbling castles, bleak moors, and picturesque warriors. It has produced some of the world's great financiers, inventors and scientists. I can't imagine life without the telephone, television, or ATM machines, all invented by Scotsmen. (Not Scotchmen; "scotch" is reserved for the whiskey and those dense cholesterol-rich eggs deep fried in sausage.)

With all those canny big brains on tap it should come as no surprise that Scotland has its very own serious rival to the brilliant Sherlock Holmes. R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke, trained in both medicine and law, uses both the science of the early 20th century and Holmesian deductive skills to solve his cases.

Author Raymond Chandler, no slouch himself, wrote of Freeman:

This man Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer. He has no equal in his genre... in spite of the immense leisure of his writing he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected.

Freeman also experimented with inverted or howdhecatchum stories, in which the crime is committed early on and the killer immediately known to the reader; as opposed to the more usual whodunnit format. Freeman was a prolific writer, and I am still discovering some of his stories and novels. While the good doctor is not as flamboyant and flawed a character as Holmes, the puzzles––and his methods of solution––are quite similar. Many of Freeman's novels and stories are available as free or low-cost downloads.

While Josephine Tey only wrote seven mysteries over her short life, she is rightly considered one of the doyennes of the Golden Age, and her Detective Inspector Alan Grant can hold his own among the best protagonists of the period. Tey applied a truly remarkable gift for characterization and settings to her unusual and elegant stories, which sometimes had rather weak plots. While her Brat Farrar and The Daughter of Time frequently appear on "best of" lists, my personal favorite is The Singing Sands, published the year of her death.

DI Grant, on sick leave for his nerves after a period of intense overwork, travels by night train to spend time with his cousin Laura and her family in the Scottish Highlands. Leaving the train, he spots a surly conductor roughly shaking a passenger to rouse him. The passenger––a young Frenchman by his passport––is dead, apparently of a drunken fall. Only later, in the hotel dining room, does Grant open his newspaper to find a curious and haunting incomplete poem in an English schoolboy hand and realize that he must have picked it up from the dead man's berth.

With time on his hands, Grant gradually becomes obsessed with the dichotomy between the young man's sensitive face and his sordid death, and the French identification with the British appearance and handwriting. Grant is the only one who believes that there is something very wrong about this apparently accidental death.

There is a lyrical and slightly haunting quality to this rather slow-moving mystery that invites periodic rereading. Some pundits have speculated that Tey, like Dorothy L. Sayers, fell in love with her detective. Every time I read this book I fall slightly in love with both the ardent young victim with the "reckless eyebrows" and the detective who found healing through ferreting out his story and murderer.

To go directly from the civilized and slightly rarefied world of Detective Inspector Grant in the beautiful postwar Highlands to the grimy underside of 1980s Glasgow requires quite a breathtaking dive. In The Dead Hour, author Denise Mina's Paddy Meehan is an overweight and insecure cub reporter working the graveyard shift for a Glasgow newspaper, following nighttime police calls to get stories. She hates her job and the unsavory stories and people it exposes, but needs the money. Her father has been unemployed for several years, and the family depends on her income.

One night she follows a call about an unusual domestic disturbance in a wealthy suburb. A man answers the door and addresses one of the investigating officers by name. A woman appears in a mirror, blood dripping from her face, but she shakes her head at Paddy's urgent gestures to flee. When Paddy attempts to interview the man who blocks the door, he hands her money, asks that the story not be published, and closes the door in her face. Next morning the woman who owns the house is found, tortured and murdered.

It took me several tries to get into this book, with its opening chapters full of unrelenting and gratuitous meanness, but the effort was finally worthwhile. Paddy faces drug dealers and systemic police corruption as well as her own guilt for walking away from the original incident, even as she wrestles with the temptation to keep the attempted bribe. As frequently happens in real life, the closure is messy, incomplete, and somewhat unsatisfying. I admire Paddy's drive and courage and will likely read the next in this acclaimed noir series to see if some unresolved issues get settled, but The Dead Hour is pretty far outside my usual comfort zone.

From refined and mellow Edinburgh to the darkly beautiful peaty Highlands to the brash Glasgow blends; a criminous tour of tiny Scotland offers as wide a variety of innovative criminals as of its rightly famous scotches. Murderously speaking, enthusiasm trumps size, and the Scots have been passionate fighters and implacable enemies since long before Bonnie Prince Charlie led the doomed Jacobite Revolution in 1745.

(The following lovely picture of Glasgow is submitted with my apologies for dwelling only on her bleak underbelly. It can't be all grim gray misery!)