4 posts tagged “mystery”
Since I'm on a mystery kick, I thought it was time to give Michael Connelly another try. His work is bestselling and critically acclaimed, he's the leading light in the genre of Modern American Noir, but he hasn't moved me. I'd tried him twice before: the Edgar-Winning The Poet was gripping and suspenseful for most of its length, but as it wore on, the plot turns seemed increasing labored and unbelievable (I've had the same reaction to the books I've read by the other best-known Modern American Noir writers, Dennis Lehane and Robert Crais). I also tried his first book, The Black Echo; got halfway through, and put it aside. After a week or so passed and I hadn't gotten around to picking it up again, I realized I had forgotten too much of the plot and, rather than start all over again, I brought it back to the library. Think about that - I got halfway through a murder mystery, put it down, and never got back to it. This would never happen with Agatha Christie! Clearly, Connelly wasn't doing his job.
The Connelly I chose, somewhat randomly, was Angels Flight, a 1998 novel featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch (naming his detective after Hieronymous Bosch gives you an idea about how he sees LA). The victim is a controversial black lawyer whose career is based on suing the LAPD; Bosch must not only solve the murder, but manage the case's racial tensions and navigate the department's political hierarchy who want to clamp down on embarassing information while making the investigation look open and honest. A lot on his plate, and sometimes, it seems like the murder mystery takes a back seat to the politics. The book was well-written, the Los Angeles background is vividly evoked, and Connelly knows police culture. But it was almost totally humorless, and Connelly seems to just pile on the darkness, rather than let it grow from the plot, For instance, Bosch's marriage during the book is cracking apart, but it doesn't have anything to do with the plot or the themes - Connelly just seems unwilling to let even a little light into the story.
(Small, extremely distasteful spoiler in next paragraph)
The turning point for me came around page 300, when Bosch's team uncovers a child pornography web site and child rape becomes a plot point. When I reached this part, one of my kids came into the room where I was reading and started clowning around. Suddenly, I realized I could no longer pretend I was enjoying this book, or that I was turning the pages out of anything but a sense of duty. It was time to bail. I skimmed the last few chapters to see how the plot turned out, closed the book and set it aside to return to the library. And I think it will be a while before I give Michael Connelly another try.
Mystery writer Ruth Rendell is one of the best at what I think of as the Modern British Style, which combines elements of the police procedural and the deductive whodunit. End In Tears is the latest book in her Inspector Wexford series, which she started in 1964. Wexford solves crimes in the fictional village of Kingsmarkham, and the latest book shows that the classic English village mystery has had to adjust to the times. Kingsmarkham has become racially diverse, drugs and urban sprawl are altering the landscape,and, most pointedly for this case, family units have fragmented and reconstituted in unexpected ways. The traditional-minded Wexford views all this with bemusement, and sometimes alarm, and his viewpoint is as important to the book's success as his crime-solving skills.
This isn't the best in the series, and someone coming new to Rendell may want to start with some older classics - my favorites include Death Notes, Speaker of Mandarin, and perhaps my favorite, The Veiled One - but it's a good example of Rendell's ability to write a mystery with a familiar, comforting outward appearance but an unsettling center.
When I was about 12, I read a book that really changed everything for me, affected my relationship with literature, set me on a path that I still travel to this day. I wish I could say that the book was something cool like On the Road or The Brothers Karamazov or Journey to Ixtlan. In fact, it was Agatha Christie's Murder On The Orient Express.
It was the first time I'd read a real, grown-up mystery, with a carefully constructed plot, and I was fooled completely. What especially got to me was that the solution was so unexpected, yet upon immediate rereading it seems that Christie was trumpeting the truth at every opportunity. I began reading all the Christies I could get my hands on - and there are a lot of them - and branching out into Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Rex Stout and others. It turned me from an occasional reader into a voracious one. It made me feel intellectual, and connected to the adult world. And it helped me through a period when I started to realize I was seriously depressed, but not ready to talk to anyone about it.
As I got older, my reading habits broadened, but mysteries have always been a staple, something I continually return to. It's a little surprising, then, that I haven't really reviewed any mysteries on this blog. With this week's book, and going for the next, say, 4 or 5 weeks, I'll be reading and reviewing just mysteries, and talking a little about my history with them.
And what better way to start than with Sherlock Holmes? Surely the most written about fictional character of any kind; the number of authors who have tried to continue the adventures of Doyle's character must number in the hundreds. After The Seven Per Cent Solution became a bestseller, writers seemed to compete to fix Holmes up with the most unlikely real-life character, or come up with some other outrageous gimmick (someone wrote a novel alleging that Holmes was a visitor from the future, another that he was Jack the Ripper). Recent entries into the game include a short novel by Michael Chabon , an acclaimed nonmystery about Holmes facing old age, and an encounter between Holmes and Father Brown. Caleb Carr, best known for his superb historical mystery, The Alienist, takes the tack of trying to duplicate the feel of authentic Doyle in The Italian Secretary, and captures the atmosphere and dialogue quite well. The mystery here involves the slayings of an architect and a workman at Queen Victoria's Royal Palace of Holyrood, in Edinburgh, Scotland; the gruesome deaths resemble the slaying, centuries earlier in the same palace, of David Rizzio, the Italian music teacher and secretary of Mary Queen of Scots. The book takes too long to really get started, with 100 pages devoted to setting out the politics and court life of Victoria, and the backstory of Rizzio. Once Holmes and Watson arrive in Scotland, though, the game is really afoot, and the book becomes a pageturner, though the satisfactions of the plot are secondary to being in the presence of the two greatest detective story characters ever created.
Read a good mystery lately? Let me know about it.
The legal thriller is not my favorite genre - I've taken a vow to never read another John Grisham book - but I do like Scott Turow. He's got it all: graceful writing style, well-drawn characters, plotting that makes you turn the pages, and a skilled handling of big themes. His new book, Limitations, is not a major work. A trade paperback of less than 200 pages, it began life as a serial for the New York Times Magazine, and qualifies as a quick read rather than a book that creates a world you can lose yourself in. But Turow's qualities are in evidence. His main character is a judge, and Turow is interested in the question of how a flawed man can sit in the judgement of others.
George Mason, previously seen as a lawyer in Personal Injuries, is now a Court of Appeals judge trying a teen gang rape case. Aspects of the case remind Mason of an incident in his past, and make him question his fitness to try the case. Other stresses in his life bring him to a breaking point - his wife's serious illness, and a series of threatening emails that come closer and closer to home (Turow is better at the emotional crisis than at the whodunit plot in this one). If you want to try Turow, I'd recommend Presumed Innocent or Personal Injuries over this, but this is worth reading.
While I'm posting, here's this week's random ten:
1. "When We Ran" by John Hiatt
2. "Na Na Na Na Naa" by Kaiser Chiefs
3. "Come On (Let The Good Times Roll)" by Jimi Hendrix
4. "Walk in the Woods" by Peter Case
5. "Language Symbolique" by Thievery Corporation
6. "Chains and Things" by B.B. King
7. "You Got It" by Etta James
8. "Another Time, Another Place" by U2
9. "Lip Service" by Elvis Costello and the Attractions
10."Right On For the Darkness" by Curtis Mayfield
