It's a Crime These Shows Were Cancelled

Awhile back, my husband and I were grousing about NBC's having cancelled our favorite new sitcom, Go On, which led to a discussion of the last time we were this irritated with NBC. That was when they cancelled, after two seasons, the wonderful series, Life.

Life ran from 2007-2009, and it starred Damian Lewis as LAPD Detective Charlie Crews. If you're one of the fans of Homeland, you'll recognize Damian Lewis as Nicholas Brody on that show. He also played Soames on the second miniseries of The Forsyte Saga and was in Band of Brothers.

The back story on Life is that Charlie Crews spent 12 years in maximum security at California's Pelican Bay facility, after being falsely convicted of murdering a good friend and the friend's family. When, finally, his conviction is overturned, he wins a bundle in his lawsuit and reinstatement to the LAPD. Reinstatement is important to him, because being back on the job will be his route to finding out who killed his friend and family, who framed him and why.

Nobody ever wants to have to rehire a fired employee, no matter how improper the firing was. Rehiring Crews is intensely uncomfortable for the LAPD, obviously because it's a reminder of a case of institutional failure, but also because the new Crews is just so odd. He discovered Zen in prison and Charlie Crews, Zen Cop, is a pretty alien creature to his colleagues, especially his new partner, the petite, tough-as-nails Dani Reese, played by Sarah Shahi.

At first, you think Charlie is awfully mellow for a guy who's wrongfully spent 12 years in maximum security and who's lost his wife (who divorced him, married a yuppie and now has two kids). But mellow isn't the right word. For the new Charlie, it's normal to be emotionally naked. That has its good and bad sides. It's not good when he uses his police lights and siren to pull over his ex-wife and her new husband to talk to them about, well, everything.

On the other hand, Charlie has a passion for fruit, which he was never once served in prison, and he thinks everything in nature is a wonder. I was going to say that expressing those emotions of pleasure and wonder is the good side of Charlie's emotional nakedness, but when he always says exactly what enters his mind––like about kiwi fruit, say, when he's in the middle of an arrest––it can be awkward.

Dani's exasperation with her seemingly hippie-dippy partner turns gradually to respect and a sort of protectiveness, though, as she sees his detective instincts are still sharp while, at the same time, his new Zen attitude makes him brilliantly able to connect to witnesses and suspects and gain valuable information.

You can watch streaming episodes of Life here or on Netflix Watch Instantly. Please just try the first episode. I'm betting you'll be hooked.

You know, I really should have been ready for NBC's cancellation of Life, considering my previous experience with their treatment of the fabulously original crime drama Boomtown. I'll be the first to admit I didn't watch the show when it first started in the fall of 2002. But a few weeks after it began, my favorite cousin was visiting when they ran a marathon of the first six episodes, and we sat down to watch one. Six hours later . . .

What a show. Set in Los Angeles, it starred Donnie Wahlberg and Mykelti Williamson as LAPD police detectives, Jason Gedrick* and Gary Basaraba as LAPD officers, and Neal McDonough as LA County Assistant District Attorney. The feature that made the show so engrossing was that each episode shows an investigation from the points of view of the different characters, and not just the police detectives and officers and the ADA, but also reporters, EMTs, suspects, witnesses, crime victims and lawyers.

If you need your storytelling to be linear, you'll either dislike this show or it'll knock you right off that straight-line compulsion. In this show, you come at an incident from several different angles; you experience it at the beginning of the episode and come back to it later, with the benefit of other things you see in between. You learn more about what's going on with one character, and that adds a layer of meaning. Then another character and another layer, and so on.

Boomtown is not a whodunnit or even, really, a police procedural. In some episodes, the crime, the victim and the perpetrator are shown right from the get-go. This is a character-driven drama about real people whose work brings them into contact every day with violence and danger, how that stays with them after the workday is done and, in turn, how what happens after work affects them on the job. The show has a style and vision far more artistic than most anything you'll see on TV, but all the show's style points aside, it's the characters that keep you watching.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a streaming option for Boomtown. You can buy the DVDs for the first season, but it looks like the second season is no longer available. That may be just as well, since in the second season, NBC stripped away much of what made the series so compelling. Somehow, they thought (and not for the first time) that if they just take an original show and make it look like a thousand other shows, that would be the ticket to success.

After the Boomtown and Life experiences, I didn't have expectations of a long life for ABC's cop dramedy The Unusuals. A good thing, too, since it lasted only 10 episodes.

I won't claim The Unusuals was up to the standard of Boomtown or Life, but it was different and entertaining. Set in New York City, the premise is that Detective Casey Shraeger, played by Amber Tamblyn, is transferred from Vice to Second Precinct Homicide, where she gets a real coming of age.

The precinct's Homicide squad is a collection of misfits. That's made clear to Casey on her first day:

Detective Allison Beaumont: Here's what you need to know about the Second: Alvarez talks about himself in the third person, Banks sleeps in a bulletproof vest, and yesterday Delahoy named his mustache.  

Detective Casey Shraeger: What about Walsh?

Beaumont: On the plus side, he doesn't stare at your boobs when he's talking to you. 

Shraeger: The down side?

Beaumont: I've got great boobs. Why isn't he looking?

Definitely, the most nearly normal person is Casey's partner, Jason Walsh, played by Jeremy Renner. Walsh may not have any serious quirks, but he is obsessed with finding out who murdered his previous partner––a partner who was known to be corrupt.

The other detectives include Adam Goldberg as Eric Delahoy, a deeply pessimistic man who refuses to tell anybody that he's been diagnosed with a brain tumor and also keeps dodging the medical professionals who think he should, y'know, do something about it. Delahoy's partner is Leo Banks, the guy who lives in a bulletproof vest, which turns out to be because he's sure he will die this year, at age 42, the same age his father and grandfather died.

Each episode tells an interesting crime story, and the various guest stars and side characters are just as good as the leads. While much of the series was comic, it tackled serious subjects and had moments of real pathos.

For comedy, my favorite aspect of the show was the disembodied voice of Dispatch, whose acerbic remarks formed the soundtrack to every scene in a squad car. Dispatch's world-weary smoker's voice reminded me a little bit of old-time character actress Selma Diamond. The real voice belongs to an actress named Marisa Vural. Dispatch would advice squads to be on the lookout for suspects, like the man dressed in a hot dog costume who "may or may not" be wielding a samurai sword, or the Puerto Rican man wearing a cape and no pants, or she might remind everyone that it's a full moon, or share way too much information about last night's disastrous date.

Looking at the bright side, at least the cancellation of The Unusuals made Jeremy Renner available to capitalize on his Oscar and SAG nominations for Best Actor in the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker. The Unusuals is available on streaming video and inexpensive DVD.

Now that we're entering the dog days of summer, and there's not much of anything on TV, this is a good time for you to watch these gems––and for me to re-watch them. If you didn't see them the first time around, please give them a try now.

* Poor Jason Gedrick probably swore off being in a quality cop drama ever again after this. He'd also been one of the stars of EZ Streets, a brilliant, dark cop show that aired for less than one full season on CBS in 1996-1997. That show, also starring Ken Olin (Thirtysomething) and Joe Pantoliano (The Sopranos), and directed by Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) was set in a dark, decaying city in the upper Midwest and every episode was like a movie. There is a DVD, but it only includes three of the nine episodes. It's a crime!

Better Off Dead

Write what you know is an exhortation (attributed to Mark Twain) to all who put pen to paper––or voice to Siri. There is some debate about what this really means, but I take it at face value. One of my favorite sub-genres, if there is such a word, is writers writing about writers and, even better, mystery authors writing about people in their own line of work. They give a little insight into the process of creating memorable characters and their dastardly deeds.

In Stop Press, by Michael Innes, written in 1939, Timothy Eliot is an undergraduate at Oxford with an uneasy mind as the end of the year approaches, and he comes to Professor Gerald Winter for some help. Timmy feels that his father, Richard Eliot, is headed for the loony bin.

Mr. Richard Eliot is a well-known writer of 30-odd books revolving around the exploits of a character known as "the Spider." The Spider began his adventures as a master crook but, over the years, morphed into a dashing detective. The Spider belongs to that class of sleuths who are of ample means, debonair personality and a bit smarter than the police. Recently, however, because of some unusual occurrences in the region of Rust Hall, the Eliot family manor, Mr. Eliot has been wondering if the Spider has come alive.

To be specific there was a burglary that resembled one the Spider had thought of––but that plot was only imagined by Mr. Eliot; never published. Other events occur in the same vein, increasing Mr. Eliot's anxiety. As Timmy would have it, "it was as if the inanimate seeming husk of his father’s books had trembled and cracked, and from the chrysalis there had struggled a living thing."

Coming up at Rust Hall is the annual celebration that the publisher puts on for the Spider's birthday. This year is to be a special occasion, because the Spider has turned 21. Many people are descending on the manor, including other writers, translators, an actor who reprises the role of the Spider on the screen, and many others. Timmy is convinced there will be trouble over the weekend and asks his tutor, Mr. Winter, to come along as well.

Timmy has an older sister, Belinda, who works at nearby Rust Manor with her friend, Patricia Appleby, who is also invited for the weekend. Throughout the course of the first evening, Patricia picks up on some vibes, as several Spider-like rather cruel jokes are played on the guests––and she fears worse is to come. She sends out an SOS to her brother, John Appleby, a chief inspector at Scotland Yard, to come as soon as he can.

Appleby arrives in a dramatic fashion, after all of the lights of the manor were suddenly extinguished as if by magic, and the party was smothered by a frightening darkness. Appleby fixes the lighting problem with the aid of a flashlight and fuse because after all, electrical problems were quite common in old houses in those pre-World War II years. He joins the house party, because he is intrigued by the puzzle. Somehow, someone is privy to the inner thoughts and plots of an author who guarded his secrets carefully, and who furthermore claims that the prankster  has becomes more menacing, as he is now also having thoughts involving the Spider that never entered Mr. Eliot's mind.

John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was born in Scotland, educated at Oxford––like his protagonist––and taught English at many universities. He was a great scholar, and his erudition comes across in his writing. He is the only author I read regularly who uses words I have to look up every few pages. A few of my favorites from this volume were congeries, meaning collections or aggregations; and gnomic, meaning mysterious and often incomprehensible, yet seemingly wise. Nothing to do with eels or gnomes. Innes is such a wordsmith that some sentences are crafted to have a fuller meaning after the words sink in and settle for a bit. Speed-reading will not do for this author.

The peek behind the curtain in this novel is when a character in Stop Press elucidates what makes mysteries successful. For example: "everything is subject to the rules, which the reader knows. There is generally a puzzle that the reader can solve by means of the rules and that implies that in the little universe of the book the reader is the master.  The books cater for the need of security. Real life is horribly insecure because God is capable of keeping a vital rule or two up his sleeve and giving us unpleasant surprises as a result. The author Mr. Eliot, the author isn't allowed to do that. When we figure out the puzzles we get a pleasant sense of intellectual superiority. Knowing the rules we can control them if we want to." Dare we presume that this is how Innes feels as well?

Robert Barnard, a prolific author all of whose works I hope to read eventually, takes several different pokes at the profession of writing. In Death of a Mystery Writer, he targets the aptly-named Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs, a rotund best-selling mystery novelist who is despised by all who know him, because he is an overbearing bully. His books are quite enjoyable, even though readers never feel they can admit their admiration of the author in public. When the author is murdered, there are almost too many suspects. The plot is further enlivened by a missing-manuscript mystery.

On the romance front, Barnard sent his protagonist, Perry Trethowan, to Norway in The Cherry Blossom Corpse, where he accompanies his sister to a Romantic Novelists convention. Trethowan expected chilly weather, fanciful authors and flowery language. He never expected that beneath the facade of these writers, mostly ladies, there would be such malice; back-biting and bitter rivalry lead to the murder of one of the group.

A Hovering of Vultures is the sad tale of the death of a pair of literary writers whose tomes were so dreary that the shocking details of their last moments gave them more acclaim than their lives' work. Barnard's Charlie Peace tackled this case. Read all about it here.

Another novelist who seems to think fictional writers are better off dead is G. M. Malliet. In her Death of a Cozy Writer, there is an Agatha Christie-like gathering during which a wealthy, successful cozy mystery writer––who is also the pits as a human being––meets his fate while a storm blankets the house with snow. Cornish detective Detective Chief Inspector St. Just and his partner, Detective Sergeant Fear, search for Colonel Mustard and the candlestick. Humor and plot twists keep the book alive.

In Death and the Lit Chick, Malliet lampoons mystery writers again, with the sharpest point needling the wildly successful young author of the chick lit mystery. Along with Kimberlee Kalder, there is a group of writers at a Scottish castle where St. Just happens to be staying. The rivals for the bestseller rankings are damsel-in-distress novels (that are fading in popularity with the reading public), spy thrillers (as dated as the Berlin Wall), dark-and-edgy novels (with no edge), and a weird detective story set in prehistoric times. The castle is surrounded by the traditional moat, the drawbridge is up, the lights go out during a storm and, you guessed it, a certain mystery author turns up dead, presenting St. Just with a murder to solve.

I am intrigued by the turnabout where writers of the past are being brought to fictional life, putting on gumshoes and donning deerstalker hats. Several late authors are solving mysteries in their own series. Dorothy Parker is known for being part of New York's famous Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s, a regular gathering of authors, critics and others in the book trade whose barbed witticisms led to their other nickname, the "Vicious Circle." In the first of his mysteries featuring Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table group, author J. J. Murphy turns Dorothy into a Nosey Parker when she discovers a body under the round table who is dead as a doornail, not dead drunk. I might give this series a try.

There are several other real-life authors who have turned into fictional sleuths. Nicola Upson has resurrected Josephine Tey and put her to work. Gyles Brandreth has revitalized Oscar Wilde's wit and personality and recreated him as a sleuth with great success. And, finally, Jane Austen has crawled out of her grave again to put clues together and solve crimes in Stephanie Barron’s series.

All of these stories, in their way, let us know a bit about what authors think of their craft. For some reason, I seem to find books with the authors as victims a bit more enlightening. They give me an appreciation of what an author has to deal with when it comes to the public, publishers and publicity, and the problem of protagonists they are tired of but who are still their bread and butter. They all face the changing times and mores as we do and must make interesting stories out of them.

Spawning Books

I was messing around online, when I came across an article about the Seattle public library's "Books on Bikes." This sounds like a terrific program, but reading it was bad news. It reminded me that books currently in a stack by my bed need to go home. Between now and 5pm tomorrow, when the library closes, I'll have to make like that bear above. Spawning books may mean a reading frenzy.

I'll hold off telling you about Mukoma Wa Ngugi's Black Star Nairobi (Melville International Crime, 2013) until next week. Today, let me mention a few books on the way to their spawning grounds:

When given the word "niggardly" during the 2013 national finals of the contest "Can You Use that Word in a Sentence," 14-year-old Mississippian Citoyen "City" Coldson doesn't respond appropriately. His rant goes embarrassingly viral on YouTube, and City is exiled to his don't-give-me-any-nonsense grandmother's in Melahatchie. At loose ends, he picks up a book, Long Division, set in 1985, and makes a mind-blowing discovery: the protagonist shares City's name, and other book characters are City's acquaintances. One of them, Baize Shephard, disappeared a few weeks before the 2013 contest. The boundaries between time—and reality and fiction—blur in Kiese Laymon's Long Division, published last June by Bolden/Agate. I'm a sucker for novels-within-novels, time travel, parallel realities, and disappearances; I'll be up late finishing this.

I read Peter Dickinson's Some Deaths before Dying (Mysterious Press, 1999) years ago, but I was in the mood for a re-read. Dickinson is one of crime fiction's most original writers, and all of his books are a pleasure. This one's about memory, honor, and betrayal. Rachel Matson spent her life as a photographer, but now the 90-year-old widow of a soldier who survived a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II lies in bed, barely able to move. Her spirit is still strong, and her mind is still sharp. When she learns that one of her husband's Ladurie dueling pistols is missing, she uses the photographs that document their lives and the help of her nurse, Dilys, to investigate. This complex story, which zigzags back and forth in time and place, is beautifully told and populated by unforgettable characters.

Who can resist a book about the heart strings that bind us set against the backdrop of war? Anthony Marra's 2013 debut, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, published by Hogarth/Crown, revolves around eight characters in rural Chechnya after the fall of the Soviet Union. Three of the characters are key: eight-year-old Havaa, whose father is abducted by Russian soldiers, and Sonja and Akhmed, two doctors who risk their lives to protect her. While the circumstances are bleak, the characters retain enough humor and their fates remain optimistic enough to sustain us. After David Benioff's City of Thieves, I'm once again ready for a return to war.

And now, back to my books, before they return to the library.

Spawning library books

Spawning salmon

Summertime Crime

Are you ready for some TV crime? Most people watch a lot less TV in the summer, but I (for one) like to watch something in the evening after a hard day of yard work or even just lazing around outside. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim this time of year. There are two British crime series now available, though, that might just fit the bill.

For some people, all you need to know about Broadchurch, on BBC America, is that it stars David Tennant. Scottish actor Tennant is best known as the tenth Doctor Who, and for his critically-acclaimed turn as Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2008 season.

David Tennant as DI Alec Hardy and Olivia Colman as DS Ellie Miller

In Broadchurch's eight-part miniseries, Tennant plays Detective Inspector Alec Hardy, who is new to the beautiful coastal town of Broadchurch. Hardy's start is rocky, because he's partnered with Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller, who had every reason to think she was going to win promotion to the DI job.

Their partnership begins with a sensational and tragic case. A boy named Danny Latimer is found dead on the beach, a murder victim. What could have made Danny leave his home in the middle of the night? What could possibly have led to the killing of an 11-year-old boy? What is his best friend hiding? For that matter, what is his father hiding? The anticipation in the UK about the answers to these questions reached "Who shot J.R." proportions earlier this year. (Yes, that means a little Googling will reveal all, but you wouldn't want to spoil this for yourself, would you?)

This description of the show's premise might make it sound a lot like The Killing, but there is one immediately apparent difference. While The Killing (the US version, that is) is set in a Seattle that seems to be in permanent dark and wet, Broadchurch is often ridiculously sunny.

Still, like The Killing, Broadchurch's agenda reaches a lot further than the finding of a murderer. It's about the aftermath of the murder, its effect on the victim's family and friends, and the long-buried secrets that will be unearthed through the investigation.

Fox has already announced that it will produce an American adaptation of the story. Given the usual history of these efforts by network TV, I'll put my money on the original. You can watch it on Wednesday nights on BBC America. The first episode aired on August 7, but will be re-run several times, so you have plenty of time to catch it before the second episode comes along next week.

Did you know that actress Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame spent most of her early childhood in England? She was born in Chicago and, after 10 years in England with her family, completed her schooling in Michigan. She has an impressive ability to switch back and forth between American and English accents. This has come in handy in her acting roles, including her new five-part series, The Fall.

Jamie Dorman as Paul Spector

In The Fall, Anderson stars as Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson of London's Metropolitan Police. She has a particular expertise in psychology and is called in to assist with a string of unsolved killings in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The killer, who is known to the viewer from the start, targets young professional women.

The Fall was a ratings hit this spring in the UK, and a second series has been announced. It's not surprising it was picked up to be shown in the US, but the surprise is that it's not on Masterpiece Mystery or BBC America. Instead, the entire five-part series can be viewed in its entirety on Netflix's "Watch Instantly" streaming video service.

Gillian Anderson as DCI Stella Gibson and
Archie Panjabi as pathologist Paula Reed Smith

Making an entire series available at once seems to have worked well for Netflix with its recent production of House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey. And it may well work here. I already know of a couple of people who sat down to check out the first episode and didn't quit watching until the end.

I am not a fan of serial killer stories, and especially not of stories about violence against women, but I'm hearing so many good things about Gillian Anderson in this role that I'll have to give it a try.

Not With a Bang But a Whimper

Apocalyptic and dystopian novels have the same fascination for me as those geologic mega-disaster shows, and I have finally realized why: they portray global disasters for which I am in no way responsible and about which I can do absolutely nothing. I can't send money to stop sunspots or sign petitions to plug volcanoes or demonstrate against the inexorable slow advance of continents smashing into each other. Nonetheless, all of these events will occur sooner or later, and it is interesting to speculate how society as a whole and individuals within that society will deal with them.

Countdown City is the second in a pre-apocalyptic trilogy by Ben H. Winters. His Edgar-winning first book in the series, The Last Policeman, was set six months before the huge asteroid called Maia will impact the earth, wiping out most of civilization. About half of that time has passed at the opening of Countdown City, and Concord Detective Hank Palace, along with the rest of the force, is out of work. Police forces have been nationalized; electricity and communication services are mostly nonexistent, and water services in the city have finally failed. Law enforcement efforts have shifted from investigation to simply maintaining order.

When his old babysitter, Martha, asks for his help finding her husband, Brett, a former State Trooper who has left after promising that he would stay with her to the end, the likelihood of finding one man in a world where millions have abandoned their previous lives seems hopeless.

"This may seem like an obvious question," I say, when I'm done writing down her answers. "But what do you think he might be doing?"

"I've thought about it so much, believe me. I mean, it sounds silly, but something good. He wouldn't be off bungee jumping or shooting heroin or whatever. He'd be doing something, like, noble," Martha concludes. "Something he thought was noble."

Palace's sole tenuous lead is to a student activist at the University of New Hampshire whom Brett had arrested, then refused to testify against, even though the refusal had cost him his job. Hank rides his bike 40 miles to the Durham campus in search of Julia Stone, only to be nearly killed by an anarchist group calling itself the Free Republic of New Hampshire occupying the University. He is eventually shot, and is only rescued from death by his sister Nico, a member of a well-organized and -equipped group of paramilitary conspiracy theorists. Her group is attempting to rescue the only scientist who may be able to prevent the impact, who they believe has been kidnapped by a power-hungry cabal prepared to sacrifice most of humanity so they can control the world after.

This series should be terribly bleak but somehow is not; a surprising number of people retain elements of human decency and purpose in the face of impending universal destruction. And, of course, a great many do not. As in the first book, the mystery takes second place to the slow devolution of society into groups; from anarchists to predatory bandits to religious zealots, each organized according to the beliefs and values of its members. In a world slowly going mad, laconic, lonely Henry Palace remains a likable if very unlikely paladin. I look forward to the third installment in this unusual trilogy.

In Michael Farris Smith's Rivers: A Novel, the federal government, after many years of increasingly destructive hurricanes, has given up on the Southern Gulf Coast and drawn the Line. Lowland regions of seven states, including all of Florida, are to be entirely abandoned to the elements. Residents who disobeyed the mandatory evacuation orders are on their own; no services of any kind would be provided below the Line. Power, water, police, mail, and medical services are no longer available. Soldiers are stationed at the Line to prevent marauding bands from entering the diminished United States, although small unarmed groups and individual refugees are still welcome.

Cohen had opted to stay in his home on the Mississippi coast after his wife and unborn daughter were killed, and he buried them in his old family plot. Despite the endless rain, he was managing well enough with his dog and his horse and his ghosts. The house was sturdy––he had built it himself––and Charlie, an itinerant tinker dealing in all kinds of foodstuffs and supplies, makes irregular rounds to nearby towns, providing food, fuel, and ammunition to Cohen and his few die-hard neighbors.

Coming home from a buying trip one day, Cohen picks up a pair of teenagers and agrees to give them a lift. They mug and rob him and take his jeep, leaving him to die in a swamp. When he arrives home, his house has been stripped of all of his survival gear, food, and money. Even the few precious mementos of his wife are gone. The generator is still there, so Cohen knows they will be back. He disables the generator and leaves with his dog and horse, leaving a note for the thieves, "To whom it may concern, he is not dead, he is risen."

Without any means to survive, Cohen will have to make a run for the Line. But he is determined to find the thieves and recover his cherished box of memorabilia first. When one of the thieving band is attacked by a mountain lion after leaving Cohen's jeep unattended outside a church where Cohen has taken shelter, he learns the location of the band from the dying man.

While this story moved well and the writing was lyrical and at times quite intense, this is more a "slice of life in interesting times" novel than one with an overarching plot. Rivers is a dark story with a claustrophobic Southern Gothic feeling. In light of the weather anomalies in recent years, the premise is both remotely plausible and quite depressing. No wonder Cohen chooses to live so much of the time in his head, revisiting happier days! Below the Line is not a place I can ever imagine choosing to live.

Note: I received free review copies of these books. Countdown City was published on July 16, 2013 by Quirk Books. Rivers: A Novel will be released by Simon and Schuster on September 10, 2013.

Review of David Morrell's Murder as a Fine Art

Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

In the 1850s, laudanum, a tincture of opium, was available without prescription in England and used to treat everything. Pain, the common cold, the faintness women experienced from wearing corsets to make 18-inch waists and hooped skirts weighing 37 pounds to hide the movement of their legs. While a few doctors recognized that prolonged use of laudanum created a dependency, most people viewed its overuse as a failure of fortitude. Such a failing was a secret to keep behind the heavy curtains of a Victorian living room. It certainly was not to be made public, as Thomas De Quincey does in his shocking bestseller, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Publication of his "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" did his reputation even more damage. In that series of satirical essays, he describes the two sets of Ratcliffe Highway murders, which terrorized England in 1811, as "the sublimest in their excellence that ever were committed."

It's no wonder, then, that De Quincey, in London with his youngest daughter Emily to flog his latest publication, comes to the attention of two policemen investigating a linen-shop murder of five people. The crime, which opens David Morrell's Murder as a Fine Art, replicates De Quincey's detailed description of the first Ratcliffe Highway murders. This begins a desperate game of wits between "the artist of death" and De Quincey, who grapples with his laudanum addiction while he and Emily assist the police.

In a city of almost three million, Detective Inspector Ryan and Constable Becker are part of a force of only 7,000 men. Violence in London isn't uncommon, but murder is rare and multiple murder almost incomprehensible. They conduct an investigation at a time when taking plaster casts of footprints and preserving a crime scene are new ideas, but fighting crowds who want to view the scene and assault suspicious strangers and foreigners, particularly the Irish, are old problems. It's critical not only for London, but the British empire, that this crime, which recalls the nightmares of 43 years ago, be solved quickly.

Ryan and Becker aren't nearly as well fleshed-out as the uninhibited De Quincey, a friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the unflappable and resourceful Emily. The policemen serve mostly to reflect Victorian society in their attitudes about De Quincey's use of opium, his frank talk in front of Emily and Emily's modern bloomers and insistence on accompanying the men everywhere. They are bewildered by De Quincey's wish to analyze the crime by using Kant's ideas about perception and pre-Freudian ideas about the subconscious and memory. After a while, almost nothing De Quincey and Emily do can shock them.

I liked De Quincey and Emily and enjoyed the background story of the opium wars between China and Britain. I was fascinated by the rich description of Morrell's Victorian London. Sewage flows into the Thames, livestock roam the streets, Dr. John Snow only recently proved that cholera is caused not by breathing foul air but by drinking contaminated water. Touching patients is left to surgeons, who are lowlier than physicians. Lord Palmerston, Home Secretary and the country's most powerful man, is called Lord Cupid by people who live on the street. Fifty thousand beggars are ignored because if they're noticed, something should be done to help them. Every day at the Coldbath Fields Prison, prisoners climb 8,000 steps on a treadwheel to power the laundry facilities and "earn" food by spinning a crank in their cell 10,000 times to fill and then dump a cup of sand. (Clearly, the Victorians were into punishment rather than rehabilitation.)

This is the London that Morrell, best known for his creation of Rambo in First Blood, brings vividly to life. There is plenty of action and suspense and a fair amount of graphic violence. The villain is psychologically interesting. I recommend Murder as a Fine Art, published on May 7, 2013 by Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, to people who enjoyed Caleb Carr's The Alienist, Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night, John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman or Charles Palliser's The Quincunx. On my list of things to read, I'm putting De Quincey's "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" and The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 by P. D. James and historian Thomas A. Critchley. It's sad to consider how unthinkable multiple murder was to 1811 London and how thinkable it is today.

Review of Louise Penny's How the Light Gets In

How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny

It may be summer for us, but it's December in Québec as How the Light Gets In begins. The story in this ninth in the Armand Gamache/Three Pines series picks up shortly after the predecessor book, The Beautiful Mystery, ended, and things are just as grim as you would imagine for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, if you read that book.

Gamache's longtime enemies at the Sûrété du Québec are circling like sharks, taking bites out of his Homicide team. All of his team members have been moved to other departments, except for Isabelle Lacoste, and the officers moved to his team in their place are slackers, insubordinate and obviously playing for Gamache's saturnine enemy, Chief Superintendent Francoeur.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache's second-in-command and closest colleague to both him and Lacoste, is now with Francoeur. Jean-Guy is a mess. Hooked on painkillers again, completely alienated from Gamache and broken up with Gamache's daughter Annie. Of course, all of this has been orchestrated by Francoeur and his compatriots. The sharks have isolated their prey and are coming in for the kill.

The Dionne Quintuplets

Considering what his office has become, it's almost a relief to Gamache when Myrna Landers, Three Pines's flamboyant bookseller, asks for his help to find a missing friend. This seemingly simple case unexpectedly becomes a last chapter in the story of Québec's most famous baby boomers, the first quintuplets to survive their birth. This part of the plot is obviously based on the Dionne quintuplets, whom the baby boomers among us will remember very well.

The Sûrété corruption plot that we've been following for this entire series takes center stage in this book, and it's a nail-biter that puts all of the characters under make-or-break stress. For those who have been wondering about the reach of the corruption and the long-term goals of its principals, this will be a particularly satisfying read.

What does this have to do with the book? Read it and find out.

Penny uses the corruption plot not just for thrills, though, but as a return to one of her perennial themes, good and evil. I remember back in A Trick of the Light, the seventh book in the series, there was a passage explaining the difference between Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache always believed there was good in people, but Beauvoir was the opposite. Beauvoir believed that at bottom, you would always find evil, "without borders, without brakes, without limit."

Now Gamache, at his moment of crisis, wonders if Beauvoir was right, that maybe evil has no limits. He knows that it will be hard to find the impetus for the corruption, because most likely, it "started as something small, invisible to the naked eye. It was often years, decades, old. A slight that rankled and grew and infected the host." And now the infection is overwhelming.

Nathaniel Parker as Armand Gamache in the upcoming film of Still Life

Penny always manages to explore the themes of good and evil, love and hate, and sin and redemption without sounding preachy, because she does it through her particular strength, the character study. After reading all the books, and then going back and listening to the whole series on audio, I've come to know the characters as real people, with histories, strengths and flaws. I know their homes and how they live. Louise Penny writes so that there is no distance between the reader and the characters; their thoughts and emotions, what they eat and drink, how they interact with each other and, most important, how they react when bad things happen.

Penny is such a keen observer that it's all too easy to believe that you can travel to Three Pines, sit down at the Bistro and join in the conversation with all these characters, walk the green with them and watch the village children playing hockey, sit in Clara's messy house and enjoy a meal, browse for books at Myrna's bookshop and head upstairs to sit around the wood stove with a cup of tea and a scone. Hmm, there sure is a lot of eating and drinking that goes on in Three Pines––not that there's anything wrong with that! But there's more to it than that. Penny can also use a small moment to evoke poignant emotion, as when she has Gamache pick up a book at a murder scene, flip it open to the bookmarked page and see what the victim would now never read.

Louise Penny has transformed the police procedural and village mystery genres into not a mash-up, but something unique, original and genuine. Every summer, I look forward to my next visit with these characters, and at the end of the book I regret that my visit was all too short. I hope you'll visit too.

Note: How the Light Gets In will be published on August 27 by St. Martin's Minotaur. I received a free review copy of the book.