Best Reads of 2014: Part Four

Our regular guest blogger,
Lady Jane Digby's Ghost

Good grief! Is it really 2015 already? Where has the time gone––and what good books did I use to pass that time? Here's a list of some of my favorite reads of 2014. Let's start with the Brits.

I'm a fan of British writers. They tend to be snarkier and less politically correct than American authors. They're less afraid to shock or challenge their readers. Here are a couple of books I enjoyed reading this year. Unfaithfully Yours (Corsair, 2014), by Nigel Williams, is the story, told in epistolary form, of four couples who live in the tony London suburb of Putney. The couples used to be friends, but they've grown apart since their children left the nest, taking the couples' reasons for friendship with them.

Over the years, the wife of one couple has died suspiciously, the husband of another couple has changed his sexuality, and the other two couples have fallen out of love and into hate with their partners. Actually, they all hate each other and are not afraid to express their thoughts and opinions on the subject. The loathing and contempt they all feel for each other is hilariously expressed in some of the most deadpan prose I've ever read.

The novel is told in the somewhat unreliable voice of a private detective brought in to investigate philandering of one of the husbands and is both laugh-out-loud funny and very un-PC. Unfaithfully Yours is available in the US in audiobook form, but if you're interested, you should probably order the book from England.

Jon Canter's A Short Gentleman (Vintage, 2009) is the story of Robert Purcell, who is indeed short in stature, but long on accomplishment. He had his whole life planned out as a teenager and has become a Queen's Counsel (what British lawyers call "taking silk") right on schedule. He returns home every night to his carefully-chosen wife and his carefully-conceived children. His life is perfect––until it isn't. Robert Purcell's life falls apart because he commits a crime. The reader doesn't learn what the crime is until late in the book, but living the life of a criminal is not in Robert Purcell's comfort zone. This is a funny look at a man who shouldn't be a criminal but who, improbably, is. A Short Gentleman is available in ebook form in the US.

British comedian and author Ben Elton has written one of the most profound books of the year, Time and Time Again (Bantam, 2014). It is the story of Hugh Stanton, a brilliant History graduate from Trinity College, Cambridge. It is the year 2024, and Stanton is asked to return to Trinity by his former mentor, Dr Sally McCluskey. She tells him that Sir Isaac Newton made a sort of time machine four hundred years ago that could transport a person to 1914, the year Newton had prophesied would be a turning point in history. Of course, it was the beginning of The Great War and McCluskey tells Stanton that he must go back and prevent the assassination of Austria's Franz Ferdinand and then go to Berlin and shoot Kaiser Wilhelm. Those two events will prevent the beginning of The Great War and society will be the better for it.

Hugh Stanton carries out his tasks and The Great War never begins. But what does happen? Would you change history if you don't know what will happen because of what didn't happen? Ben Elton asks these questions and the reader is shocked at what does happen. Time and Time Again is not the best-written book I read all year, but it sure has me looking at history in a completely different way. I think the reader should have a good grasp of 19th- and 20th-century world history to really enjoy this book.

Let's now look at Irish writer Audrey Magee's debut novel, The Undertaking (Grove Press, 2014). Set in Berlin and Stalingrad during World War II, it is the story of German soldier Peter Faber and teacher Katharina Spinell, who marry for the most prosaic of reasons. He wants a honeymoon out of the war zone and she wants his death benefits if he dies. They marry in a telephone wedding, but fall in love and conceive a child when they meet.

Magee is unsparing in her descriptions of wartime Berlin, as the city is bombed into oblivion, and of the postwar period, when the Russian army occupies the city. The Russians are out for revenge for the German occupation horrors in their own territory. Meanwhile, Peter Faber is trapped in the frigid snow and vast wasteland of Stalingrad, as the German government leaves the 6th Army to surrender to the Russians. The Undertaking is not a mystery, but a stunning novel about the micro-effects of wartime both on the battlefield and on the home front. This is not an easy book to read, but is very good.

Looking at the WW2 home front––Britain this time––is British author Lissa Evans in her absolutely charming novel, Crooked Heart (to be published in the US by Harper, July 28, 2015). Noel Bostock is a 10-year-old orphan who has been raised by his aging great-aunt, suffragette Mattie. Mattie is suffering from dementia, but has given Noel a wonderful upbringing despite her increasingly wandering mind.

Noel is a brilliant, precocious boy, given to silence and a seeming abhorrence of other children. Noel is not someone who suffers fools gladly, and he has met his match when he meets Vera ("Vee") Sedge, a local St. Albans woman into whose care he's literally dumped by the evacuation department. Vee has never met a money-making scheme she didn't like, even if it was morally questionable and somewhat illegal. Vee and Noel come up with some novel money-earning schemes.

In this book, Lissa Evans has created some of the most remarkable characters I've ever met. None are caricatures; all are people you might know and love yourself, just transposed to WW2 London. Not only are Evans's characters adeptly drawn, she also gives her readers a look at London in wartime. But the best part of Crooked Heart is the relationships Noel Bostock has with the people in his life, both past and current. A small part of the reader's heart will be left with the suffragette medal given new love in Noel's charitable hands. This is a wonderful, unforgettable read.

Do people retain their moral beliefs as they age? Do they see the outside world in the same way as that world changes and expands around them, while their own world shrinks and they lose their mental and physical faculties? Daniel Friedman, in his new book, Don't Ever Look Back (Minotaur Books, 2014), tries to answer those questions. This book is the second novel about long-retired Memphis policeman Baruch "Buck" Schatz. Friedman's first novel, Don't Ever Get Old, introduced 85-year-old Buck Schatz in a bit more rollicking plot.

In Don't Ever Get Old, Buck and his young grandson chase an old Nazi, hiding in the US, from Memphis to St Louis in an attempt to find some hidden gold. This second book, with a much more serious look at aging and how the now 88-year-old Buck, living in an assisted-living facility with his wife, has not learned to give up the ghosts of the past.

Buck Schatz has been contacted by a long-ago criminal, "Elijah," whom he remembers with no fondness after Elijah master-minded a bank heist in Memphis in 1965. Elijah would like to surrender to police in 2009 for his part in that long-ago heist. The book goes back and forth between 1965 and 2009, as Buck Schatz looks at his own moral beliefs about crime and punishment.

Don't Ever Look Back is a serious book that has some funny parts. I'd say Daniel Friedman's first book was just the opposite. Both make for good reading, but this second book might make you think about morality, aging, and what memories last as a person nears the end of his life.

The Strangler's Waltz (Monsoon Books, 2013), by Richard Lord, is set in 1913 and features two Viennese policemen who are called in to investigate the murder of a wealthy woman found strangled in the red light district. Her murder is followed by four others and the city is in a panic. Will the strangler in Vienna surpass the numbers run up in London by Jack the Ripper 20 years earlier?

Police inspectors Karl-Heinz Dorfner and Julian Stebbel are tasked with finding the strangler. They are helped in their job by Dr. Sigmund Freud, who was the psychiatrist to the first victim, and a young artist called . . . Adolf Hitler, who witnessed the first murder and draws a picture of the strangler, which helps the police identify the murderer. Okay, here's the possible problem with the book. The "ick" factor is fairly strong in a work of fiction featuring Adolf Hitler as a character anything short of mass murderer. But is it really a problem or is it a sign of daring on the part of the author? I can't quite decide, but I'm leaning towards "interesting plot point."

Richard Lord also does an excellent job of establishing place and time; the city of Vienna in 1913. The final years of both Emperor Franz Joseph's reign and the Austro-Hungarian Empire––neither survived the Great War––were a time of inquietude in the city of music and arts. The mystery of the five murders––and the attendant political ramifications of the deaths––is beautifully drawn by the author. I certainly hope that he does produce his promised three more books. This is an excellent beginning of the quartet.

Finally, I'd like to tell you about the reissuance of a series of five books by American author Richard Rosen. The books were originally published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They feature Harvey Blissberg, a retired professional baseball player who starts a second life as a private detective. The books have been out of print for a while, but have been reissued in ebook form.

I started my re-reading of the Harvey Blissberg series with World of Hurt (Walker & Co., 1994; ebook reissue from MysteriousPress.com/Open Road, 2013), the fourth book in the series. I had read all of them when they were first issued, and I'm pleased to see they've been reissued. I think Rosen's writing has held up as time has passed.

Another mystery writer whose work reminds me of Richard Rosen's is Lawrence Block. Block is a more prolific writer than Rosen, but one of Block's characters, Matthew Scudder, seems a lot like Harvey Blissberg. Both are cerebral detectives, and the books' plots are often overshadowed by the characters. Block and Rosen both use dialog to move their plots, which I don't think is easily done. Both writers do it well, though.

It's also amusing to see a world without cellphones or personal computers. Written in the early 1990s, car phones (remember those?) are in use and the police have computers to access information but, otherwise, modern-day communications are not used. (It's a bit like reading a Sue Grafton mystery and realizing in 2014 that her books take place in the 1980s!)

So those are a few of the books that kept me entertained in 2014. I'm looking forward to continued good reading in 2015!

Standing All Alone

Our good friend Lady Jane Digby's Ghost is back with another guest post.

For my first two posts on Read Me Deadly, I wrote about mystery book series. In this third post, I'd like to talk about "one-offs" or stand-alone mysteries.

Way back in 2006, I discovered a novel called Berlin. It was written by Pierre Frei, and was the only book he had published in English. His work was translated into English by Anthea Bell, a noted translator from German to English.

Berlin was an international best-seller, and is the story of a police investigation set in postwar Berlin, after it had been divided up by the four Allied powers. A number of women had been found brutally murdered, and the case was assigned to both a local German policeman and an American MP.

The most interesting thing about the book was the focus on the victims of the strangler. All were blonde women who had survived the war and had helped out in anti-Nazi work. This look at victims and their lives was a welcome change from most books, whose focus on women victims are on their beauty and sexiness and are often times reduced to . . . numbers.

But in Frei’s Berlin, these victims' lives meant something and they would be missed. I also assumed that since the author was born in 1930 and had lived in Berlin at the end of the war, the young man featured in the story––the son of the German cop––was Pierre Frei. Berlin is a fascinating look at postwar Berlin through the eyes of a young man. And at some women who tried to make a difference in the desperate times of World War II Germany.

Another book set in postwar Berlin, and featuring German police paired with Allied officers, is Horst Bosetzky's Cold Angel. Bosetzky has written a wonderfully inventive book, set in 1949, about what seems to be a true crime. The reader learns pretty early in the book who committed the murders. Bosetzky fleshes out the victims, murderer, police, and politicians who are involved. He includes a love story––will the policewoman-from-the-East and lawyer-from-the-West find lasting love despite political differences? And how and why were two innocent Berliners murdered, cut up in pieces, and distributed over the vast city of Berlin? Cold Angel is Horst Bosetzky's first book translated into English and well worth looking into.

Irish author John Boyne has written seven or so adult novels, and others for children. Among his books is The Absolutist, which was published in 2012. It is the story of two British World War I soldiers who are bonded through the terrors of the trenches and the horrors of warfare. One survives––forever damaged––and the other one is brought down by a firing squad on charges of cowardice. I think it should be considered a historical mystery because the secrets that one man takes to his grave and the other takes back to England are cunningly doled out to the reader. Boyne is an interesting writer; he never seems to return to the same setting or time twice. (One of his other excellent historical mysteries is The House of Special Purpose, about the last Russian Tsar and his family.)

Staying with World War I, please look at British author Catherine Bailey's The Secret Rooms (Penguin, 2013), a nonfiction book about the Manners family and their family castle, Belvoir. This book, entertainingly subtitled A True Story of a Haunted Castle, a Plotting Duchess, and a Family Secret, is more of a personal mystery. Why was the Duke of Rutland, who died in 1940, trying to protect the family's name and make sure a secret from the Great War never saw the light of day? What was Rutland trying to hide, and why was he trying to hide it? In her fascinating book, Bailey takes the reader though the last 30 years or so of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th. By looking at these years through the mysteries of the Manners family, the reader is exposed to an amazing recap of both family and societal history.

And if you like British mysteries, check out Unfaithfully Yours, by Nigel Williams (Corsair, January 16, 2014). Williams is also a prolific writer who never returns to the same characters or plots.
Unfaithfully Yours is a truly hysterical novel about the––possible––murder of a wife in the London suburb of Putney. It's told totally in epistolary form.

Four couples, who used to be friends, have grown apart. They were friends because their children went to school together, and when the children grew up and left home, the reason for the parents' friendship ended. In 2000, one of the wives was found dead in her living room, the supposed victim of suicide. Ten or so years later, the group of former friends is brought together by a private detective, supposedly hired to look into the philandering by one of the husbands, Gerry Price, QC, who is married to a Classics teacher, Elizabeth Price. Who hired the detective is one of the mysteries that doesn't get solved until the book's end. Most of the characters are completely vile, and the few that aren't are partially vile. But it is a fun read about life in today's striving Surrey.

So, there are a few one-offs. I can think of many more and I bet you can, too. Let us know of some of your favorites.

Third Time the Charm

This afternoon I was thinking about crime fiction, when I stumbled across a Newswire headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion. It says, "Third time the charm for man trying to eat Skittle off of moving model train." Now, on its face, this headline has little to do with crime fiction, but here at Read Me Deadly, strict rules of logic are swept under the carpet on Friday. Regarding the headline, think about persistence in the face of great odds, luck both good and bad, quests that may seem nonsensical to others, and trains when moving that present a problem. The books below contain all of these elements.

Nigel Williams's The Wimbledon Poisoner is a comedy of manners involving an ordinary man, Henry Farr, who is obsessed with the idea of killing his wife Elinor. His obsession begins with fantasies about her death. At first, Henry pictures himself merely grieving by her graveside "looking mournful and interesting" and "comforted by young, fashionably dressed women." He daydreams of coping with their daughter as she roams the house, bereft. After a time, Henry's normal train of thought jumps the rails and takes him to an unexpected destination: he sees himself not as widower, but as murderer. Henry finds this change of scenery thrilling because murderers are no longer hanged by the neck until dead; instead, they become the subject of best-selling paperback novels, they're chased by paparazzi, and their thoughts on life and crime are elicited by television documentary-makers:

"Henry pictured himself in a cell, as the television cameras rolled. He wouldn't moan and stutter and twitch the way most of these murderers did. He would give a clear, coherent account of how and why he had stabbed, shot, strangled, gassed or electrocuted her. 'Basically,' he would say to the camera, his gestures as urgent and incisive as those of any other citizen laying down the law on television, 'basically I'm a very passionate man. I love and I hate. And when love turns to hate, for me, you know, that's it. I simply had no wish for her to live. I stand by that decision.'"

Henry is convinced that being a convicted murderer will be a lot more fun than being Elinor's husband and a solicitor for Harris, Harris and Overdene of Blackfriars, London. He refuses to let anything stand in his way. If a few friends and neighbors die because of Henry–who has no aptitude for murder, whose luck is mostly rotten, and whose obsession has made a train wreck of his common sense–that's very unfortunate. This collateral damage just stokes the fire of his determination, and Henry becomes increasingly reckless in his attempts to dispatch Elinor.

The Wimbledon Poisoner hands the reader a conundrum: one roots for Henry to succeed in his quest, because accompanying him on his journey of switchbacks and derailings is so merry, but one also hopes Elinor won't die, because she's a nice person and besides, what would Henry do then?

This is a beautifully written book of satire. It's full of unexpected characters and situations. Its plot twists surprised me and made me laugh out loud. I recommend it to people who like P. G. Wodehouse, Tom Sharp, Roald Dahl, David Lodge or Evelyn Waugh.

When a fire of suspicious origin destroys the Baldwin Insane Asylum, killing 30 patients, Dr. Theo Baldwin decides to move the survivors from Barstow, California, to Fort Supply, Oklahoma. A one-armed yard dog (security agent) for the Santa Fe Railroad named Hook Runyon is placed in charge of the move in Sheldon Russell's The Insane Train. It is the 1940s, and most able-bodied men are fighting overseas in World War II. When few asylum employees are willing to relocate to Oklahoma, Hook recruits some disabled vets to replace them for the trip. Complicating their job is the law that forbids carrying weapons while attending the asylum patients, who include not only women and boys, but also the dangerous criminally insane.

Frenchy, the train's engineer, says that he hauled a load of railroad officials to Chicago one time, and this trip can't be worse than that but, needless to say, he's wrong. Dangerous inmates, the vets' inexperience, a decrepit train, the challenging terrain, and the uncertainty of the passengers' reception in Oklahoma make the trip treacherous. Is it pure bad luck that Death boards the train for Oklahoma, too?

The Insane Train is a great book of historical fiction that captures life in the U.S. when it is still reeling from the Great Depression and devoting most of its resources to the war effort. Russell shows us people–asylum employees, disabled vets, railroad workers–who have a small grip on security and who scrabble hard to maintain it. The asylum patients have even less. All of them become real people in these pages.

Russell's protagonist, Hook Runyon, is a terrific fictional character who is tough and uneducated, but smart. In his off-time, he scours thrift shops and flea markets for first editions (and shares his knowledge with us!) and tries to keep his dog Mixer out of trouble. Hook makes a good friend, but he's a man who lives in a caboose and his life keeps him moving.

Publishers Weekly calls this book one of the six best mysteries of 2010. Russell's prose is spare but elegant and makes for enjoyable reading. He clearly knows his trains and the time and settings he writes about. This is an uncommon series, and I'm thrilled that the next one, Dead Man's Tunnel, will be out next year. At some other time, I'll tell you about The Yard Dog, which introduces Hook Runyon; for now, I'll just say you should read it, even though you don't have to in order to enjoy The Insane Train.

Eulalia is becoming increasingly alarmed about Algernon Pendleton's dire financial situation. In Russell H. Greenan's The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton, Algernon, the 50-year-old great-grandson of a famous Egyptologist, lives alone in Great-grampy's old house in Brookline, Massachusetts. He makes a precarious living by selling off Great-grampy's Egyptian artifacts one-by-one to Mahir Suleyman, a homesick Turk with a basement shop. Things are going from bad to worse, and Algernon is nearing his wits' end. But he lovingly answers Eulalia's demands for reassurance because she is his best friend. Eulalia is also a Worcester china pitcher with bowl, so delicately beautiful she brings to mind Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Algernon says he'll never get rid of her. 

A head injury he suffered in the war may explain why Algernon alone hears Eulalia's voice, but his own explanation is that there are colors, such as ultraviolet, whose wavelengths are invisible to the human eye. We cannot hear a high-pitched dog whistle. On the strength of these facts, he says, all objects in creation have voices, even if not everyone can hear them.

Algernon's life has settled into an odd routine of talking to the gravestones in the Burying Ground or to his almost equally strange neighbor and creating sculptures from bones (osteo-art). Then one day a train of events pulls out of the station and heads for Big Trouble: old war buddy Norbie Hess unexpectedly arrives, extremely depressed and carrying a suitcase full of money. Shortly thereafter, Madge Clerisy, an exceedingly ambitious and beautiful archaeologist from Pennsylvania, who has been buying the Egyptian artifacts from Suleyman just as soon as he gets them, badgers Suleyman into giving her Pendleton's address, so she arrives, too. She is on a quest to become very famous. The luck of Eulalia, Algernon, Suleyman, Hess, and Clerisy has changed in ways none of them could have foreseen, and their lives will never ever be the same again.

This is an entertaining book, full of suspense and black humor. It's difficult to pigeonhole in that it's gothic; black comedy; fantastic; extremely clever; replete with references to philosophers, poets, and scientists; and appealingly quirky. Strangely enough, this bizarre murder story makes one reflect on some of life's largest questions. What if there is no death, if everything–a pitcher, a cigarette, a pen–is alive, if we have occupied a variety of forms in a variety of different worlds? It makes for a very unusual read.

I'd love to hear about some other books that come to your mind when you read "Third time the charm for man trying to eat Skittle off of moving model train."