The Wearin' o' the Green

A natural pick for Penguin Crime

It's almost here: St. Patrick's Day. The day when shamrocks are everywhere and you're supposed to wear green even if you don't have a drop of Celtic blood. My Irish mother would be shocked, but when I think green, I think crime; Penguin Crime, that is.

Penguin Books revolutionized publishing in 1935 when its founder, Sir Allen Lane, decided that high-quality writing should be offered in inexpensive, but attractive, paperback form. Few in the trade believed in his vision, but it was an immediate runaway success.

Lane established a clear brand vision with the initial design of Penguins. Each book had three horizontal bands. The central band was white, and the top and bottom bands were color-coded by genre: orange for fiction, green for crime fiction, blue for biography, and so on.

Penguin Crime's first two titles were Dorothy L. Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in July of 1935. I think my first Penguin Crime paperback was a Margery Allingham or Ngaio Marsh.

In the 1960s, Penguin opted to get with the times and jazz up the covers, to make them more attention-getting. Designers like Romek Marber, George Mayhew, John Sewell and Germano Facetti created artistic and sometimes cinematic-looking covers, while retaining the color that had long signaled crime to the paperback-buying public.

By the 1980s, Penguin no longer imposed a requirement for a heavy green theme, so we start to see individually designed covers. Most titles in Penguin Crime still have a green Penguin logo, but even that is no longer absolutely mandatory.

Because Penguin kept titles in print as long as they sold in sufficient numbers, we can get a flavor of Penguin's design history reflected in a single title:

Whatever else you might be doing to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, why not relax with a mystery from Penguin Crime?

Book Review of Colson Whitehead's Zone One: A Novel

Zone One: A Novel by Colson Whitehead

C'mon now, trust me. I know this is a blog primarily about crime fiction, but don't forget, tonight is Halloween, and I've got just the ticket. It's literary fiction set in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan after a pandemic Last Night devastated the world. The dead are people who were killed outright or turned into vehicles of the plague.

Zombies!

Buffalo, New York, is the cradle of reconstruction. The goal of the provisional government there is to clear New York City of the undead, zone by zone, and then move on to other cities. In addition to running this military campaign, the government aims to boost the morale of survivors, "all fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one's individuality." Psychotherapist Dr. Neil Herkimer coined the buzzword PASD (post-apocalypse stress disorder) and put it at seventy-five percent of the surviving population; the rest have a preexisting mental condition, so one hundred percent of the world is mad. In addition to shipping out "Living with PASD" pamphlets, the government conducts an "American Phoenix Rising" propaganda campaign, complete with sponsors and the anthem "Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction)."

So much for the survivors. Skels (short for "skeletons" or zombies) come in two types: the rabid flesh-eating predators and the much-slowed and pathetic stragglers, who are trapped in their former abodes. After Marines deal with the rabid skels, crews of civilian volunteers, directed by military officers stationed at "Fort Wonton" in Chinatown, sweep out the stragglers. Currently, Zone One (a region created by barriers south of Canal Street) has been cleared by Marines, and the sweepers are moving through it. We follow one such sweeper, a former Starbucks employee nicknamed Mark Spitz (the full name is always used), whose defining trait is his mediocrity:

His most appropriate designation [in high school] would have been Most Likely Not to Be Named the Most Likely Anything, and this was not a category. His aptitude lay in the well-executed muddle, never shining, never flunking, but gathering himself for what it took to progress past life’s next random obstacle.

Mark Spitz and his fellow sweepers, "seemingly unsnuffable human cockroaches," are protected by not-overly-great weapons and protective clothing and good luck, and they operate in war-like conditions. They swap stories of past lives and use black humor as they dispatch the undead. Occasionally, someone looks like someone Mark Spitz had known or loved. He doesn't consider himself a mere exterminator, but rather an angel of death ushering stragglers on their stalled journey. Of course, not all of the undead Mark Spitz encounters are stragglers; his bad habit of flashing back to happier pre-Last Night times while struggling with skels trying to rip off his flesh nearly levitated me from the bed in anxiety. And the infested subway tunnel would have made a George A. Romero fan happy.

Zone One, published in 2011 by Doubleday, has enough gore to keep a horror fan fairly satisfied, but the wit, imagery, references to pop culture, and wordplay will please everyone. It's surprisingly funny and tender:

Mark Spitz had seen the park unscroll from the windows of the big skyscrapers crowding the perimeter, but never from this vantage. No picnickers idled on their blankets, no one goldbricked on the benches and nary a Frisbee arced through the sky, but the park was at first-spring-day capacity. They didn’t stop to appreciate the scenery, these dead visitors; they ranged on the grass and walkways without purpose or sense, moving first this way then strolling in another direction until, distracted by nothing in particular, they readjusted their idiot course. It was Mark Spitz’s first glimpse of Manhattan since the coming of the plague, and he thought to himself, My God, it’s been taken over by tourists.

Author Colson Whitehead

Mark Spitz is as nostalgic for pre-Last Night NYC's inanimate objects as he is for its people. As he sweeps through office spaces, he sees how little some interiors have changed despite the great unraveling outside of them. When he was a child, he loved to look out his Uncle Lloyd's apartment window. Some buildings he saw met the fate of the wrecking ball, and new buildings grew themselves out of the rubble, "shaking off the past like immigrants." In this new era, it's dangerous to dream about the past, and hope is "a gateway drug." Mark Spitz believes that he has successfully banished thoughts of the future. If you aren't concentrating on how to survive the next five minutes, you won't survive them. Without hope, Mark Spitz, that average Everyman survivor, sweeps to his fate.

A Bit O' Blarney for St. Patrick's Day

Georgette Spelvin: Céad Míle Fáilte! St. Patrick's Day is a day when many of us wish we were Irish, not just for an excuse to go pub crawling, but because the Irish are so dang wonderful. Take their music, whether ancient or rock 'n roll, for one thing. How cool is U2's "Beautiful Day"?

Sister Mary Murderous is entertaining houseguests and won't be joining us in this conversation. I think her guests are Irish. Or, maybe they simply know how to party like the Irish while they watch the NCAA March Madness basketball games this weekend. They'll all be wearing green today. Or perhaps just looking green after eating too many of Sister Mary's unbelievable pecan/coconut/caramel cookies.

Maltese Condor: When I began to think about the day designated for the wearing of the green it made me consider my past reading of books that have a little green in them.

In Red, Green, or Murder by Steven Havill, no one would consider Posadas ex-Sheriff Bill Gastner green, and he would rather they didn’t consider him fragile either as he investigates the death of a friend.

Leave the Grave Green, writes Deborah Crombie,
 as she leads Duncan Kincaid and Sgt. Gemma James into a series-long romantic relationship, which leaves many green with envy. They should be keeping their mind on the drowning/murder of a disliked man.

Celia Grant, a professional horticulturist with a green thumb, discovers a dead body under her landscaping in Green Trigger Fingers by John Sherwood. Naturally, she wants to solve this case herself.

The last mystery written by Clyde Clason was Green Shiver 
in 1941, and it revolved about the rarest of green jade.

A wealthy man gets blown to smithereens in W. J. Burley's Wycliffe and the Pea-Green Boat, and the Chief Superintendant has to wonder if the man’s son has a case of the green-eyed monster.

It has been so long since I read Greenmask! by Elizabeth Linington
 that I believe I was green and recycled it.

The Green Plaid Pants is a mystery by Margaret Scherf that revolves around a pair of trousers purported to belong to Bonnie Prince Charlie. Personally, I have seen plenty of these on greens.

Not red, but Green for Danger, writes Christianna Brand in one of her Inspector Cockrill series. The victim actually might have turned a little green at the gills before expiring.

Kerry Greenwood has Phryne Fisher competition dancing for long hours in The Green Mill Murder, and she has to eat her greens to keep her strength up, like Popeye, to solve a case with roots in the Great War.

I can't overlook the perennial favorites Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss and the song "It's Not Easy Being Green" by Sesame Street's Kermit the Frog. Believe it or not, Kermit wrote a book of the same name.

Della Streetwise: Easier to think of Kermit croaking a song than writing a book with those webbed fingers. MC, all those Green titles make me think of a green Ireland. Lush green grass and shamrocks, legends and myths. Kissing the Blarney Stone. Leprechauns. Irish whiskey, Irish coffee. Irish writers and Irish mysteries. Here are some mysteries set in Ireland:

Tana French's debut In the Woods blew my socks off. It didn't give me much of a sense of Dublin, the physical place, but it gave me a distinct sense of the emotional place of yearning and the paths her characters took to arrive there. Yearning for closure of a tragic childhood mystery. Yearning for an everlasting peace. I liked her next two Dublin murder squad books involving some of these characters, The Likeness and Faithful Place. I can't wait for the fourth, Broken Harbor.

In The Wrong Kind of Blood, by Declan Hughes, Ed Loy is a down-on-his-luck private eye in Los Angeles. He returns home to Dublin for his mother's funeral and an old friend hires him to find her missing husband in the first book in this hard-boiled series.

John Brady's long-running series features a sergeant, later an inspector, in the Irish Garda named Matt Minogue. The books are set in Northern Ireland and the plots reflect the tensions there. The first book is A Stone of the Heart, involving the killing of a Trinity College student. My favorite series book is Kaddish in Dublin, in which Minogue investigates the murder of Paul Fine, the son of Chief Justice Fine.

John Banville's Dr. Quirke mysteries contain dazzling writing. They're published under his pen name, Benjamin Black. Quirke, a hard-drinking pathologist, uncovers a mess when he looks into the death of a maid named Christine Falls in 1950s Dublin. The fifth book in this series, Vengeance, is due in August.

Georgette Spelvin: You mentioned some great books, Della. I'll add some more:

St. Patrick's Day can't pass without a mention of Bartholomew Gill's Peter McGarr, a police officer in Dublin. The setting and characters in this Irish police procedural series are very well done. The Death of a Joyce Scholar is must reading for people who visit Dublin, either in person or through the pages of their books. The last in this series is the excellent 2002 book Death in Dublin, in which two illuminated manuscripts from the four-volume Book of Kells are stolen from the library of Trinity College and a security guard is killed.

Detective Inspector Jack Lennon is Stuart Neville's protagonist in a terrific hardboiled series set in Belfast. The Ghosts of Belfast kicks it off by introducing Gerry Fegan, who's just been released from prison. He's troubled by the ghosts of those he killed for the IRA, and he wants to lay them to rest.

Another excellent hardboiled series: Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor books set in Galway, beginning with The Guards. Ann Henderson shoves former Garda Síochána member Jack Taylor off his barstool to investigate the death of her daughter Sarah, called a suicide by the cops, but Ann says no.

Patrick McGinley's 1978 book Bogmail is a beautifully written tale about what having committed a murder does to the murderer. Roarty, the book's main character, is a pub owner who says about his absent daughter's lover, "He must be destroyed," and before too long, he is. The other characters have the habit of dropping in at Roarty's bar for a drink, and it's a pleasure to listen in on their conversations.

I also enjoyed The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (a member of The Holy Irish Trinity: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O'Brien). A very bizarre novel, and if you are fond of surreal elements with your mystery, you might like it too. Another great read is O'Brien's At Swim––Two Birds, an inventive comic masterpiece about a lazy college student in Dublin who spends much of his time reading or in bed. This is a Russian nesting doll of a book, in that O'Brien's narrator is himself working on a novel about an author whose characters give him an incredibly hard time.

Paul Murray's 2010 Skippy Dies was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. It's not a mystery, but a tender and hilarious 670-page novel that begins with a death by doughnut. It's set at an elite all-boys Catholic prep school in Dublin.

Joyce, Beckett, and Flann O'Brien are must-reads. And a couple more not to be missed: William Trevor, who's been nominated for the Booker five times and has won the Whitbread Prize three times (try the lovely Love and Summer), and Roddy Doyle (try his Barrytown Trilogy).

Peri, your thoughts?

Periphera: When you think of an Irish-American celebration for Saint Patrick's Day, what springs to mind? Lush green countryside and parades? Green beer? Philadelphia has all that, but our "Running of the Micks" (yes, that is the name of the event) may be unique. It is an annual bash that includes a bus crawl of ten Irish pubs followed by a Rocky-like run up the Art Museum steps. Many have tried, but few have succeeded. Some participants insist that success depends on the number of green beers consumed beforehand. The only real mystery here is that no participant has ever died or been seriously injured during the event. The city keeps a few ambulances on standby, just in case.

This event has proved so popular that a number of imitators have sprung up. While the center city event relies heavily on draft Guinness, the suburban Craft Beer Bus carries revelers to a number of pubs serving the products of local microbreweries. No exercise, short of getting on and off the bus, is required. And nearby Laurel Hill Cemetery offers a guided moonlight tour of its facilities followed by a beer buffet, in case you are just longing for a good Irish wake. Tomorrow morning, you may wish you were attending your own!

Material Witnesses: To all of you on St. Patrick's Day -- Sláinte!

Holiday Traditions

Even though the world is felt to be getting smaller all the time, it still can be said that variety is the spice of life. I always enjoy reading mysteries that take place in December while December is swirling all about me. Many countries and cultures celebrate similar events and holidays in a variety of ways, with customs and ancient rites that have settled in over time. I thought I might compare the rituals of December as seen in the four corners of the world–– where murder is always in season.

Shiroyama

Rei Shimura is a Japanese-American who has been living in Japan for several years. When she is introduced in The Salaryman’s Wife, by Sujata Massey, she is on her way to the Japanese Alps, having worked for two years to save the money for this holiday trip. She is going to a 200-year-old castle town, looking for antiques and a break from her dull gray life in North Tokyo. This is the time that all of Japan is celebrating New Year’s, the biggest party week in the year, but Rei wanted to escape all that and she heads into an adventure that will change her life. There is a Japanese belief that there are no coincidences; that everything is part of a cosmic plan, so before she even gets to Shiroyama she meets the main players who set in motion the events that are to determine her destiny.

Although Rei is part American, she celebrates the holidays Japanese style. Christmas is not celebrated, nor is there giving of gifts. New Year’s is family time in Japan. You spend time with the people you are close to and dine on New Year’s lucky foods, which are symbolic. Long noodles celebrate the changing of the year, vegetables and fruits represent harvest, and roe symbolizes fertility.

Far to the south in the Pacific Ocean, there lies Australia and a different approach to Christmas. In Kerry Greenwood’s Forbidden Fruit, Melbourne baker Corinna Chapman detests Christmas. There are frantic shoppers everywhere and the heat is oppressive at this time of year. Corinna gave up her job in the city for a chance to be her own boss. The hours are long and hard but she works with people she and the readers enjoy quite a bit. There are two wannabe near-anorexic actors; an ex-junkie master muffin maker and a handsome ex-Israeli commando filling out the cast of characters.

Christmas Cake

All this normalcy and carol singing are hiding a sinister religious cult with a subversive agenda, and a vengeful vegan cult with a mission. The story includes two teenage runaways, one of whom is large with child. Her time is near and we don’t know what mode of transportation she is using. It does not appear to be a donkey, although there is one in the story.

Damper

Behind all the mystery solving there is the theme of baking for the holidays, which is described in mouth-watering detail. One can almost smell the aromas coming from Chapman’s Bakery, aptly named Earthly Delights. Traditional Australian Christmas foods include Christmas cake with small treats baked inside. There is also a Christmas damper (a scone-like bread), shaped into a star or wreath and served with butter jam or honey, which originated in the Outback.

Christmas Day in Iceland

It is also the food that I recall in the most detail after reading Arnaldur Indridason’s Voices, which takes place at this time of year. Christmas in Iceland––which is in close proximity to Santa’s home––has many interesting traditions, one of which is that there are 13 Icelandic Santas, each of whom has his own mythology. Iceland's winter holiday goes from early December to January 6, which makes a season of 26 days. Some of the traditions are quite similar to European and North American celebrations and include gift giving on December 24. On New Year’s Eve, there are community bonfires and widespread fireworks.

Inspector Erlendur is another character who feels great personal apathy at this time of the year, but professionally is aggressively investigating the murder of a part-time department-store Santa. There are many themes in this book, but the main one is giving a voice to the victim of murder, a voice for a badly beaten boy whose mother is mentally ill, and finally a voice for his own feelings of despair. This story is one of Indridason’s best.

But as I said I was taken by the food––or I could say taken aback. Inspector Erlendur checks out a room in which a holiday party had taken place. He found the remains of a boiled sheep’s head that the guests had been enjoying. At first I assumed this was possibly a euphemism for something like a head of cauliflower, but was amazed to find it is a usual dish in Iceland and there are even drive-in restaurants where this boiled sheep’s head, which is exactly that, is served with mashed potatoes and vegetables. I will stick with a quarter pounder, thank you.

Christmas in Rio

Another detective close to my heart is the lonely Inspector Espinosa in Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s December Heat. For him, Christmas is pretty much another day in Rio de Janeiro and he spends the days leading up to it trying to solve the murder of a prostitute who was the girlfriend of a retired policeman friend of Espinosa’s. The case is complicated by the faulty memory of this old cop, Vieira. Vieira is an alcoholic who wakes up next to his murdered mistress and finds himself in a peck of trouble. Espinosa knows that open-and-shut cases are never straightforward. Inspector Espinosa will probably spend both Christmas and New Year's reading his books and looking for more to add to his collection. He might eat the traditional pork loin and farofa, which is raw manioc flour, roasted with butter, salt and bacon. On New Year’s Day Brazilians eat lentils to increase their good luck.

A bowl of black-eyed peas on January first is essential for good luck, health and good fortune in my neck of the woods. I tend to cast my fate to the winds and leave this tradition to others in the family who wouldn’t miss this lucky charm for anything.

I would be interested in any holiday traditions that you readers feel are essential to help circumvent bad luck.