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

Sleeping Giants

Mysteries rely, perhaps more than we like to admit, on evil. Murder and violence are essential to the genre and often simply a given. Not so in the novels of Rene Denfeld. Yes, there is violence, including violence against children, and murder pops up as often as it does in most mysteries. What makes her four novels different is an obsession with the the roots of evil.

In Denfeld's work, evil stems from evil with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, and it has its roots in the same institution: the family. The sacrifice of children in the House of Atreus caused a cascade of blood violence. In Sleeping Giants, as in Denfeld's terrific The Enchanted and the Child Finder stories, cruelty to children produces monsters who, in turn, terrify and traumatize the next generation.

All this may sound rather grim and formulaic, but Denfeld is an excellent writer with a real knack for creating rounded characters, especially young ones. She also produces sensitive portraits of characters who are more or less outside the norm. These range from the poetic, but truly psychopathic, hero of The Enchanted to Amanda, the dedicated zoo keeper of Sleeping Giants, whose mind, as she admits, does not work quite like other people's.

Amanda has trouble with clocks and making change and simple math, but she understands her charge, Molly, an unhappy polar bear. She proves to be brave and resilient and, though no great student, a very competent researcher.

Unsurprisingly, her twin areas of interest both involve families. She wants to know just how Molly came to be orphaned in the far north of Alaska, and she wants to know what happened to her older brother Dennis, who, unlike her, was not adopted as an infant, but confined in Brightwood, a supposedly progressive facility for disturbed children and youth.

Located on the wild northern coast of Oregon, Brightwood is an abandoned relic by the time Amanda sets foot in it. But the reader knows from the opening pages that Dennis was indeed incarcerated there and that, subjected to holding time, a popular crank therapy, he committed suicide by running into the treacherous and dangerous surf. All that's left is a gravestone and the general reluctance of locals in the small town to discuss Brightwood, although they have some good things to say about Martha King, the former superintendent.

Amanda might well have become discouraged but for another well drawn character, Larry, an ex-cop who is mourning his late wife and falling into depression in his remote cabin. A chance meeting with Amanda arouses his protective instincts, and he adds his expertise and some of his former professional contacts to her search.

The unraveling of the mystery of Dennis's life is nicely done, but the heart of the book lies elsewhere, in the glimpses of the difficult and withdrawn child's life, his friendship with Ralph, the custodian, and his brief moments of joy. Denfeld has some surprises with her adult characters, too, and despite the grim events and the narrowness of many of the characters' lives, the novel eventually comes down on the side of cautious hope.

Rene Denfeld

Evil generates evil, but goodness has its powers, too, if much less spectacular ones. Evil flashes out in violence, all is quick and final. Goodness is slow, patient, in for the long haul. Not too many books in any genre illustrate this contrast as well as Sleeping Giants, which manages to produce an entertaining mystery as well.

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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 also available from Apple Books.

Towles in Hollywood

One of the oldest plot lines in the canon is the one about the old guy who comes back to triumph. From the days of the old war horse and the old samurai to the old gunslinger, the old spy and the old cop, the age and experience of a supposedly washed-up guy turns out to trump vain and overconfident youth in these stories.

Guy, that is, as in masculine. I am sure there are some mysteries where the surprisingly capable older character is female, but lets face it: the pattern for the older woman sleuth was set by Miss Marple, who appears to have been born complete with her spectacles, sweaters, and skepticism. 

The females in the plots under consideration tend to be young and beautiful with surprising tastes in May-December romances. While I am old enough to enjoy the triumph of age over youth, I feel a certain impatience with what are clearly fantasy plots based on masculine wishful thinking.

So it was with real pleasure that I discovered Eve in Hollywood, a short novel tucked into Amor Towles' new collection of stories, Table for Two. He's taken Eve Ross, a character from his 30's New York novel, The Rules of Civility, sent her to Hollywood at the height of the studio system, and landed her right in Raymond Chandler territory. It's a good move.

Eve is great: brave, intelligent and loyal. And like almost all Towles's characters, she is a charmer. Indeed, charm is almost the hallmark of this author, whose characters are almost uniformly entertaining, eloquent, and appealing. His particular talent has seldom been on such varied display as in Eve in Hollywood.

Besides Eve, we have Charlie, the widowed and retired cop who meets her on the train west. He's returning home from New Jersey when he chats with Eve, regaling this eager listener (how different from his chilly and bored daughter-in-law!) with tales from his professional past. They won't be wasted on this gal.

No sooner have we met Charlie, then we are introduced to another supposed has been, Prentice, a once important screen actor who, literally, ate himself out of stardom. Prentice still has an eye for pretty starlets, though, and, more importantly, a genuine and protective sympathy for actors on the lower rungs of the treacherous Hollywood ladder. 

He and Charlie are going to be our comeback guys but with a difference. No cliched feats of derring do from these two, and plenty of mistakes, wobbles, and mishaps, and plenty of help accepted from younger friends. No age-inappropriate romancing, either. These are realistic older guys, and their great moments are all the more satisfying for being almost entirely plausible. 

The book is unusual in structure as well as in theme, being organized in short chapters, each from a different point of view. We get Eve, Charlie, and Prentice, but also a wide range of other voices and characters, from Olivia (de Haviland, a real golden age actress) to an out of work still photographer, a big time studio lawyer, and the house detective at fancy Beverly Hills Hotel where Eve, Olivia, and Prentice are residents. 

This design requires tricky plotting to keep the action moving, and Eve in Hollywood is a real master class in structure as well as in differentiating characters' speech and outlooks. But far from being a novelty ornament, the organization of the novel is a fine complement to the plot, which relies less on individual heroics and super hero skills than on the cooperation and courage of folks of ability and good will.  

This novel began as a Penguin Books ebook and as a print edition, apparently published by Towles, himself, while one of the stories was an Audible original: signs that even best selling, big name authors are dabbling in new ways to reach audiences.

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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?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

Locked Rooms

Although the narrator of Seishi Yokomizo's The Honjin Murders claims that, "The locked room murder mystery [is] a genre that any self-respecting detective novelist will attempt at some point..." I must confess not only to quite disliking the genre but to have no ambitions whatsoever to attempt one.

Nonetheless, recently I found myself reading three novels that contain locked room mysteries. What was interesting, even to a non-connoisseur ,was how the puzzle was embedded in different sorts of books, and how all three toy with deaths that might be murder that looks like suicide or suicide that might be murder. 

Yokomizo was a great admirer of western golden age mysteries, with a particular fondness for the puzzles of John Dickson Carr, and, it appears, for cerebral detectives of an eccentric nature. The Honjin Murders, published shortly after World War II but set in 1937, was his first to feature what would be his long running amateur sleuth, Kosuke Kindaichi.

Rather than beginning with the detective, Yokomizo uses a crime writer as his narrator ( a tactic that Anthony Horowitz has used to great effect in his Tony & Hawthorne novels) and presents the ghastly murders at the Ichiyanagi family compound in an almost documentary fashion. He describes how he learned of the case, quotes various official documents, and finally gives what he describes as accurate a reconstruction of his sleuth's detecting as possible.

The brutal murder of a couple on their wedding night presents a stiff challenge, and the solution is a masterpiece of ingenuity if scarcely plausible. But this is detection as escapist fiction, a bloodless puzzle despite the many gruesome details. It is only in the aftermath, when Kindaichi ponders the why, rather than the how, of the crime, that we get into the psychology of the characters and the peculiarly Japanese elements of the situation that make The Honjin Murders quite different from some of its prototypes.

I came across this interesting period piece, because Anthony Horowitz mentions a couple of locked room mysteries in Close to Death, a mystery that, yes, incorporates a locked room case. The novel also marks a deviation from the format of the earlier, and to my mind, more successful, Tony and Hawthorne mysteries. 

Close to Death delays Hawthorne's arrival on the scene by relying on an ambiguous case from several years earlier which involved Hawthorne and Tony's predecessor. This was perhaps a decision taken in the name of realism, as poor Tony has been rather endangered and damaged in prior outings. But just as Sherlock is senior partner to Watson, so Hawthorne is the really key figure in Horowitz's outings.

The switch does, however, enable Horowitz to construct a nicely complicated puzzle set among the well heeled and elegantly housed, a sort of urban Midsomer, with, like the Midsomer Murders series, a good helping of social comedy and satire. Misdirection and red herrings abound, something Yokomizo does nicely as well, and if plausibility is stretched, the book is amusing.

Robert Dugoni, whose many novels include the Tracy Crosswhite series, features a tricky locked house killing in Her Deadly Game, featuring Keera Duggan, an ambitious young lawyer handling her first homicide defense and her first really high profile case. She is also juggling an alcoholic father, a vengeful ex-lover and various difficult siblings– the sorts of personal baggage now almost required of the modern sleuth.

The crime is ingenious and the solution very nearly as complex as the one Kindaichi comes up with in his case. The difference is that this locked room is embedded in a careful and plausible account of police procedures, forensic examinations, and legal strategy. Curiously, though, the resolution of Kerra's personal problems is perhaps less convincing than the rather glum conclusions of the old Japanese mystery.

The Honjin Murders, Close to Death, and Her Deadly Game are all ingenious and, in their own ways, revealing of the attitudes and values of their times and places. What is crucial in each is different and so are the techniques employed, although all rely on close looking and careful listening. Honor, respectability, money, safety, and revenge play out in different ways, but in each story, a powerful motivation leads to an elaborately organized death and a challenging puzzle.