The Fallible Detective

We are in an age of superlatives, fond of the latest and greatest, enamored of super heroes and extraordinary feats. Detective fiction is not immune to these desires, which is perhaps why Holmes, Poirot, and Miss Marple, the three infallible, never to be corrected sleuths, are still crowding the shelves and showing up on screens big and small.

I'm personally very fond of them, but lately I have come to a renewed appreciation of the fallible detective. Not the comic type like Inspector Clouseau, but the competent, hardworking investigator who makes the occasional mistake and who owns up to error, like St. John Strafford.

Strafford, John Banville's detective, is a bit of an odd duck, being a Protestant police officer in very Catholic 1950's Dublin. A member of the Protestant Ascendancy, a fancy term for the descendants of the English colonization project that began in the 12th century, Strafford is a privileged and well educated member of the elite country house set. He is intelligent, quiet, a bit socially awkward, and almost terminally reserved.

Both saddened and relieved by the end of his marriage, Strafford admits he doesn't understand women, an insight that fails to keep him from unwise entanglements. Just the same, Under his cool courtesy, he has considerable sympathy as well as a strong desire to do the ethical thing. This is just as well because unlike some fictional detectives he is not infallible.

John Banville

Strafford's qualities are on display in The Drowned, the newest of Banville's Strafford and Quirke series, the latter being a pathologist who conducts post mortems for the Dublin police. Quirke and Strafford are on uneasy terms, being unlike in nearly everything but a concern for careful work and crime solving. The fact that Stafford is currently seeing Quirke's daughter Phoebe has not helped their relations, either.

The two of them were last seen in The Lock-Up, and one of the interesting things Banville does in the current novel is to shed not only light but doubt on the earlier case. It is an interesting strategy for a novelist and one that raises questions for his detectives.

The 1950's really were a different century as far as forensics goes. Cell phones with their useful location functions, advanced DNA testing, and CCTV footage are tools way beyond what even the best funded copper had in the '50's. Detectives in period novels like The Drowned must rely on interviews, observation, and knowledge of human nature.

This perhaps is what makes a good detective like Strafford a little more cautious, a little more careful, a little less certain that he's on the right track. Or perhaps a certain humility is just part of his character. Another cop on the case has no doubts whatsoever and backs his hunches up with a frequent resource to the third degree.

Indeed, at the end of The Drowned, it appears that the higher powers are about to make a serious mistake, one Strafford sees all too clearly. Is Banville setting up for another novel with yet another course correction? It would certainly be a different strategy and one that his intelligent, humane, and self-doubting detective would be ideal to handle.

The Nordic Murders

 

I am always happy to find some new twist in our favorite genre, given that there are so many familiar tropes and patterns. This is especially true of TV police procedurals, where both cast and plots tend to stick to such familiar ingredients as faithful sergeant, the difficult or incompetent or overly political chief, the feisty if misunderstood detective, the serial killer and the falsely accused.

So there is something to be said for a bold move within the familiar, and The Nordic Murders, a multi-season German production now on PBS Passport, PBS stations, has indeed done something different. One of its chief, if unofficial, investigators is a convicted murderer.

Karin, the murderer

Now murderer as narrator has been around at least since Agatha Christie's Who Killed Roger Ackroyd. I even tried my hand at one with "The Writing Workshop," narrated by a frustrated mystery writer trying to improve his luck by eliminating unsympathetic editors. The Nordic Murders takes a different approach.

Karin Lossow (Karen Sass) was a prosecutor with the local police force when she impulsively shot her unfaithful husband using their daughter's police revolver. Eight years later at the start of the series, Karin is released from custody and returns to Usedom, a German island in the Baltic off the coast of Poland.

Her probation officer, many of her neighbors and certainly her daughter would much rather she take an apartment in some distant mainland town. Karin will have none of it. She intends resume to life in her fine old house and reconnect with her family, namely her daughter Julia (Lisa Marie Potthoff) and her granddaughter Sophie (Emma Bading).

Karin tells her grand daughter that she survived prison by helping and comforting others. To her daughter's understandable dismay, her mom intends to continue this good work on the outside. Given her mastery of German law and legal practices, Karin soon involves herself in the legal troubles of both criminal suspects and victims of crime. Worse yet, as far as the powers that be are concerned, she has a sharp eye for official incompetence, political grandstanding, and procedural errors. An awkward mom to say the least.

Naturally, with five seasons of The Nordic Murders, some rapprochement between mother and daughter is eventually in the cards, but the series makes quite good drama out of the process of reconciliation. It also, rather unusually, has three big female roles. Karin is the most interesting and the most complex, but her feisty, idealistic ,and impulsive

Julie, police commissioner

granddaughter also has a lot of possibilities.

Julia, a police commissioner is the most conventionally drawn. Conscientious and perceptive at work, if a bit chilly, her love for her nice husband and daughter have not kept her from a torrid romance with an attractive Polish police officer. This affair, I suspect, was devised to add interest to a character that is not as well drawn as her female relatives.

Still, big female roles are not to be sniffed at, and possibly because of them, The Nordic Murders relies less than usual on violent action, car chases and assaults. The writers also seem fond of gray areas, both moral and legal. Sometimes what looks like murder, turns out to be something else; sometimes murder results from an array of intolerable choices; sometimes the most likely perpetrator really is innocent and someone perfectly nice has done a dreadful thing.

Sophie, Julie's daughter

The Nordic Murders' sparse dialogue, German with the occasional Polish (both subtitled in English) and rather subdued acting style represent a change from the snappy repartee and non stop action favored by most English language series. But the series has a good cast, well constructed plots, and an unfamiliar setting in one of the most contentious and long suffering regions of the planet. A kidnapping victim is stashed in an old WW2  bunker and desperate refugees huddle amidst sparse conifers, for history, political as well as personal, underlies this interesting series.

Taboos

Back at the end of the 20th century, I received a rejection letter from a magazine that had started to publish my short stories. I was assured that it was a good piece (it later appeared in 1998's The Best American Mystery Stories) but they declined to publish it because their readers did not like this sort of thing.

"This sort of thing" was about a small girl and her mother, undocumented Irish immigrants. They are very much under the thumb of their "protector," their landlord and the proprietor of the restaurant where the mother works, who uses his power to extort sex from the mother. The events in the story are precipitated when he turns his attention to her small daughter. 

There was nothing graphic in "Secrets" but the sexual abuse of children was taboo in some publishing quarters. And, as we now know, such abuse had long been a forbidden topic elsewhere. The Me Too Movement was not so much the start, as the culmination, of a series of scandals involving schools for Native Americans, Junior Hockey players, elite female gymnasts, and religious institutions of nearly every persuasion.

Nowhere has the breaking of this taboo been more significant than in Ireland if recent Irish journalism, films, novels, and short stories are any indication. The title of Fiona McPhillips new novel, When We Were Silent, says it all. Secrecy, a culture of sexual shame, and the immense power and prestige of the Catholic Church conspired for centuries to hide the sins of the powerful and, instead, to punish their victims.

That's very much the deal in When We Were Silent which presents two story lines. Now- when Lou (Louise) Manson is a successful teacher living with her daughter, Katie, and her wife, Alex, and Then, when Lou was repeating her level six year at tony Highfield School, where as a poor girl she is definitely an outsider.

 Lou at 17 is tough and clever, a good student and a gifted athlete. Besides her poverty and her lack of a posh accent, she has two other distinguishing features, both well hidden from the powers that be. She is attracted to women and she has a secret agenda: getting the goods on the swimming coach whom she believes ruined her best friend's life.

McPhillips is very good on the inner lives of adolescent girls and on their passionate friendships and rivalries. In general, the girls' characterizations are superior to those of the Highfield adults who are vividly one dimensional and even to the adult Lou, who is perhaps necessarily less dynamic than her reckless early self.  

Also good is McPhillips account of Highfield School which is very nearly a character itself. Of course, exclusive private schools and colleges, the more isolated the better, have long been a favorite of mystery writers. Their inbred cultures, their sense of social and intellectual superiority, and their distasteful entitlement not only inspire thoughts of homicide but provide a good deal of satisfaction when institution and/or perpetrators are brought down to earth.

So is it with When We Were Silent – but not for a long time. McPhillips novel reflects the changes over the last 30 years that were essential before teachers, parents, authorities, church officials would listen to children and before same sex relationships ceased to be considered a damnable catastrophe. 

When the situation that ended in near disaster for Lou at 18 is replicated with another accusation of sexual misconduct and another coach, Lou and her friends find themselves with big decisions: to remain silent and become complicit or to speak out and reawaken old wounds and old dangers. The contemporary section both opens and closes the novel as McPhillips skillfully presents the costs of silence – in both the past and the present of her characters' lives.

This is a mystery writer to watch.

Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

Switch Hitters

 by Janice Law

I recently read Red Comet, Heather Clark's fascinating biography of poet Sylvia Plath. Aside from thinking that the prevention of so complete and probing a book might make an excellent motive for a literary mystery, I was interested that Plath sold some illustrations to The New Yorker before the editors bought her poetry.

That made me think of other notable artists who moonlighted in another discipline: Michelangelo wrote sonnets, Van Gogh, wonderful letters; novelist Gunther Grass did handsome etchings, while both Bob Dylan and Tony Bennett paint, not to mention several present and former Sleuthsayers who compose songs and perform music.

I am a minor member of this interesting fraternity, being a semi-serious painter of long standing. Although I have done the occasional illustration for my own pleasure and, years ago, did cover drawings for a number of Anna Peters novels when I participated in the Back in Print opportunity, I have rarely combined the two arts or even treated the same subjects.

But about a year ago, writing a short story focused on the Tour de France gave me a little insight into the differences, at least for me, between writing and painting. 

I have long been a fan of grand tour cycling and had done quite a number of paintings inspired by the grand tours. For non-cycling fans, these events, even on TV, are a visual feast. They traverse spectacular scenery in France, Italy, and Spain, with, increasingly, well-chosen visits to other cycling mad countries.

 

The colorful array of team uniforms proves a real challenge to the fans, who themselves favor wild costumes–dinosaurs and inflated fat suits are popular this year– along with Borat style tiny bathing suits, big fluffy wigs in team colors, and, of course, at Le Tour, the giveaway shirts and caps from the sponsors' Caravan, in white with red polkadots (the King of the Mountains jersey) or bright yellow (the maillot jaune– the famous Yellow Jersey of Tour leader). You can imagine how promising all this is to a painter!

 

A short mystery story was a different matter, and though I had often thought of writing something set in the cycling world, there were always technical difficulties. A body can be dropped anywhere in a story, so can forbidden drugs or an act of violence. But timing is difficult around a cycling race. People consuming the equivalent of 4 or 5 bananas an hour just to keep pedaling are unlikely to get into much trouble, while riding along at up to 70 kilometers an hour just inches away from other bikes does not lend itself to anything but the tightest focus.

 

Commentators, professional observers that they are, are trapped in their booth watching multiple screens, while understanding the duties and techniques of the professional security people would have required serious research. It was not until I thought of a favorite former rider, himself a terrific writer, who does color commentary for Le Tour and blogs on  random topics during the race, that I found a plausible protagonist.

I decided that someone along his lines would do. Only the crime remained, and that was easy. A mystery about the Tour had to involve the Devil. Not, you understand the genuine Hadean item, but the fan who for years has danced and capered along the sidelines in horns, red top and tights, a pitchfork, and in recent editions, a black cape, which, one commentator remarked last month, he wears to breakfast.

With these ideas in hand, I struggled as usual to construct a plot, as I like mysteries to be plausible and am more at ease with interesting characters than unforeseen twists and turns. As usual the beginning went swimmingly, the end was at least vaguely visible, the middle, a struggle. It was finished, revised, fussed over, sent out and sold. Thank you, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

About a year later, I got an idea for a painting on the same subject: the Devil at Le Tour, which is actually the name of the short story. I had been taken with the dinosaur costumes and the sea of yellow and polkadot t-shirts and thought the brilliant red of the devil costume would serve to pull it all together. One day as the TV camera panned along a group of fans, devil gave a hop and there was the picture. 

I made some drawings, pinned a satisfactory one up next to my easel, picked up a small brush and, using burnt umber, sketched out the design. At this point, I really should wait a day or so to be able to spot the inevitable little errors. But no, although I can wait for a literary idea to develop, an image, once arrived, must be gotten down fast. I use inch wide brushes and rough the whole thing in as fast as possible.

For better or worse, I usually have a good sized (20 x24 or 24 x 28 inch) board covered in an hour. Then I spend probably 50% more time looking at the picture than I do physically painting, and, I must admit, a fair bit of time making corrections that could maybe have been avoided with a less impulsive and more professional and craft wise approach. 

However, I am not sure one can change one's working style too much. Little modifications, yes, complete change, no. Too much of creative work is beyond conscious control, and while I have sometimes thought that I would have done better with a more careful approach to painting and a more colorful approach to writing, change of that magnitude is not possible.

"The Devil at Le Tour" may or may not have appeared in AHMM by the time this emergency piece runs, but the painted version appears below.

Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

The Uses of Mystery: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

The discovery of a body in 1979. What is a more classic mystery opening than a stray and unexpected corpse? Followed up, in this case, by a police visit to an old man who looks very much like the prime suspect? Category police drama anyone?

 

In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has some other ideas. The passage about the discovery summarizes events that were genuinely mysterious to most of those involved back when the deceased was dropped in an abandoned well at Chicken Hill, a hardscrabble section of Pottstown, PA.

In 1932, Chicken Hill was home to the newer inhabitants of an increasingly industrialized town. Blacks fleeing the Jim Crow South and east European Jews fleeing pogroms scratch out mostly marginal lives with one eye on the unwelcoming forces of law and order. 

Two of the more fortunate inhabitants are Moshe and and Chona Ludlow. He runs the local theater and has found considerable success booking Black as well as Yiddish musicians. She runs the grocery store that, with its generous credit, functions as a life line in the current hard times and gives her rapport with locals in the Black community, especially Nate and Addie Timblin.

The Timblins' struggle to keep a young, deaf relative out of the notorious orphan home enlists both Ludlows and provides a spine for the dramatic events of the novel. But even the genuinely gripping main plot line is only the armature for McBride's detailed portrait of the community, bursting with fully realized and fascinating characters. 

 

Many are engaged in some dubious hustle, as Chicken Hill copes not only with poverty but with a lack of basic services. Even a water supply is tricky; health care is a dangerous gamble, and decent jobs are basically beyond the grasp of even competent people like the Timblins.

 

The 1920's and 30's saw a resurgence of the Klan, widespread anti-Semitism, and a deep suspicion of immigrants. This was true in the north as well as the south. The Depression only deepened those social ills and a fear amounting to hatred of those on the margins.  

 

Success, or even survival, in Chicken Hill takes sharp wits, a sense of community, and a great deal of ingenuity, social, political and mechanical. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a portrait of a community under stress: intelligent, but under educated and full of odd customs, superstitions, and rituals. 

 

Is there a mystery in there, too? Certainly, with two bona fide villains, a contract killing, a fatal assault, and some high risk schemes involving the brotherhood of railroad workers. There is plenty going on but the novel takes some familiar mystery conventions and tropes and works them into a bigger picture. 

This gives National Book Award winner McBride time to expand his characterizations and atmosphere, to indulge in some flights of fancy, and even to harken unto the supernatural. Some mystery fans may prefer a more streamlined plot. But I think most will be charmed by how some favorite devices are employed in this beautifully written and very accessible novel.

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Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

 

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books.

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available

Birnam Wood and the Uses of Mystery

Ah, New Zealand, land of mountains and fjords, beautiful and isolated. What better place for a survivalist billionaire to purchase a little just-in-case bolt hole? None, it appears, and in Birnam Wood, Booker prize winning New Zealand author Eleanor Catton offers up a plausible one: Robert Lemoine.

He's about to buy an old sheep farm adjoining one of the South Island's national parks when he finds Mira Bunting trespassing. She spins him a yarn which he soon unravels: Mira is actually loitering with intent to garden. Talk about contrasts: she is an idealistic guerrilla gardener hoping to short circuit the capitalist system, while Robert became one of the richest people on the planet by purveying surveillance equipment and high tech drones.

That's the key meeting in Birnam Wood, a psychological thriller that delivers considerable suspense while presenting incisive character studies of the principal actors and a good deal about New Zealand leftist politics. It also raises interesting questions about the costs and feasibility of a quick conversion from fossil fuels and about the potential and astronomical profits for anyone in the right place with the right minerals.

Catton uses a complex structure to keep all these strands together, presenting the action via  the viewpoints of several characters, including the key Birnam Wood folks: Mira, founder and leader, whose tendency to step over the line in a good cause leads to the crucial meeting with Robert; her increasingly resentful roommate and second in command, Shelley Noakes, who proves not only more practical but more ruthless, and former member, Tony Gallo, an aspiring investigative journalist and an ideologue with some serious political ambitions. 

We also get inside the head of Jill Darvish, devoted wife of the recently ennobled Lord Owen, who sees some disturbing fissures in their long and happy marriage since her husband was raised to the peerage. The Darvishes own the old sheep farm where Mira wants to plant veggies and Robert wants a bunker – and perhaps more.

Robert is a bit of a Master of the Universe caricature, perhaps almost a necessity since his sense of his own power and intelligence drive much of the action. He is a chilly guy, never more sinister than when he is being charming and helpful.

The others are a more complex, but each has not only marked strengths but little weaknesses which become more pronounced after the Birnam Wood volunteers are settled at the farm, where their work is underwritten by Robert's largesse. Catton skillfully creates a situation where one careless decision creates a disastrous cascade. To my taste, there is perhaps more disaster than needed, but Birnam Wood is very much in the contemporary style with its splashy climax.

There is another character in the novel that deserves mention, rural New Zealand itself. Catton not only sketches in the spectacular beauty of the landscape but also the extreme isolation possible given the ruggedness of the terrain, the few roads, and the vast forests with only a few trails and even fewer hikers huts or services. It is a place where a lot can happen out of sight as the characters eventually discover.

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Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864