Mysteries: Cosy, Cats, Capers, Historical, Medical, Procedural and everything in between

[Zorral]

28 minutes ago, maarsen said:

Him being Canadian

I didn't know that.

I'll start Gallows View, the first Banks soon.  Maybe there will be info in the text regarding that.

[Ran]

I recently got back into reading Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips graphic novels, having missed a whole mess of noir-inflected mystery yarns featuring an original character that Brubaker created (inspired by Richard Stark's Parker to some degree). The first comic is Reckless, featuring the eponymous detective (though he's more a fixer/problem-solver) who had a background as an underground FBI agent who infiltrated radical groups in the late 60s. The first book starts in the early 80s and in general they move forward in time to different cases, but not always. There are five in total so far, and I think Brubaker and Phillips have taken a brief break from it to do other stuff, but they mean to turn back to it.

I enjoyed them.

[Zorral]

So this first, 1987 Banks, the back matter on the paperback from 2017, informs me that author was born, bred, grew up and was educated in Yorkshire, but has lived in Canada for twenty-five years.

This first Banks novel also comes through as written by someone who has studied English Literature classics assiduously.  Lots of echoes of George Eliot's omniscient narrator from the opening of Middlemarch, for instance.  He's a lot less pompous in this novel from 1987 than he already is in the 1997 novel and the 2019 novel.

Edited July 5, 2023 by Zorral

[Fragile Bird]

On 7/5/2023 at 12:41 PM, Zorral said:

So this first, 1987 Banks, the back matter on the paperback from 2017, informs me that author was born, bred, grew up and was educated in Yorkshire, but has lived in Canada for twenty-five years.

This first Banks novel also comes through as written by someone who has studied English Literature classics assiduously.  Lots of echoes of George Eliot's omniscient narrator from the opening of Middlemarch, for instance.  He's a lot less pompous in this novel from 1987 than he already is in the 1997 novel and the 2019 novel.

Do you remember when he died I posted a bit about his background? He was at university in Leeds doing a BA when he saw an ad about a creative writing course in Canada. He signed up for it and went to the University of Windsor (where I did my law degree) and studied under Joyce Carol Oates. He then went to Toronto and did his PhD at York University. He had a summer house in Yorkshire where he and his wife would go every year so that he didn’t lose touch with accents, mannerisms, and local goings on, while living in Canada.

[Zorral]

15 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I posted a bit about his background?

I missed that.  

I've finished the first Banks novel, and lordessa, Gallows View confirms the author's creepy fixation on the sexual murders of young, beautiful women, and the author's sexual obsession with young, beautiful women, and with whom they are or may be, or want to get it off with.  The author never fails to provide us with on the page descriptive details of the sexual violence committed on the victims.  Somehow the author seems to see Banks as a knight in shining armor.  But in reality, he's psychologically as much a creep as the Bads, and no amount of pontificating on literature and music by Banks can hide that. The television series erased these primary components of Banks all together.  In the novel Banks universe there are no crimes really except sexual violence and murder of beautiful young women, with an occasional elderly one thrown in for good measure.  He is a homicide detective of course, but are there no murders committed that don't involve murdering and sexually violating young sexy beautiful women?

It's fair to say this, having read the first volume, one that's sort of in the middle of the series, and one that's close to the end of it.  28 novels of this!

[A wilding]

My gripe with Banks was that he tried for a sort of edgy realism, but it never quite worked.

As an example. One book starts with two policemen randomly encountering a particularly nasty serial killer just after he has finished off his latest victim. (The serial killer is of a sort that thankfully is vanishingly rare in the UK, and yes he targets young women.) The killer resists arrest with a machete and in the resulting fracas kills one of the policemen, but is fatally injured himself. What follows is, I suppose, a mild spoiler:
 

Spoiler

With a member of the public dead at the hands of the police, the surviving policeman (actually a woman) is put on suspension and an inquiry held. So far so realistic. But it then becomes apparent that she is very likely going to be prosecuted for manslaughter. At which point my suspension of disbelief went missing.

The UK police are not totally corrupt, but in a case like that, with one of their own dead, there is no way that they would not close ranks with an almighty clang. Evidence would be lost, expert witnesses gently leaned on, the survivor coached in what to say, etc. Nor, given the revolting nature of the serial killer, would there be any appetite in the wider world to demand a prosecution. Any politician would shudder at the probable tabloid headlines should they demand one. Most likely the survivor would actually end up getting an award or something.

 

[john]

On 7/5/2023 at 12:23 AM, Ran said:

I recently got back into reading Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips graphic novels, having missed a whole mess of noir-inflected mystery yarns featuring an original character that Brubaker created (inspired by Richard Stark's Parker to some degree). The first comic is Reckless, featuring the eponymous detective (though he's more a fixer/problem-solver) who had a background as an underground FBI agent who infiltrated radical groups in the late 60s. The first book starts in the early 80s and in general they move forward in time to different cases, but not always. There are five in total so far, and I think Brubaker and Phillips have taken a brief break from it to do other stuff, but they mean to turn back to it.

I enjoyed them.

I’ve very much enjoyed all of Brubaker/Phillips’ pulp stuff. They have a talent for telling new stories in cliched environments. I think the Fatale series is their masterpiece although Reckless is pretty good too. I’d quibble on him being inspired by Parker though, I think he’s much more like Travis McGee, the unlicensed detective who will recover anything you’ve had stolen for half its value.

Re Peter Robinson - I think he’s realistic in the way people talk and behave but I never found him that realistic or convincing on police procedure, the way some writers are. I was surprised to find out he was an adopted Canadian, he seems to embody Yorkshire.

I started reading The Chemistry of Death by Simon Beckett. This is adapted for Paramount + apparently, although I didn’t know that when I got it. A forensic anthropologist, expert on gruesome murders, retires to the countryside to be a village doctor after his wife and daughter die. Only the gruesome murders start happening there don’t they? So far so cliched but it is well written and readable with a skilful underlying menace in the thriller aspects.

[Ran]

1 minute ago, john said:

I think the Fatale series is their masterpiece although Reckless is pretty good too. I’d quibble on him being inspired by Parker though, I think he’s much more like Travis McGee, the unlicensed detective who will recover anything you’ve had stolen for half its value.

Yeah, Fatale was terrific.

I should have said that he was inspired by Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of Parker to graphic novel form in particular, and basically just that sort of pulp detective. But yeah, more like Travis McGee in some ways. Although, it's not mentioned anywhere, but Pynchon's Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice has some distinct similarities too.

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, A wilding said:

Spoiler

it then becomes apparent that she is very likely going to be prosecuted for manslaughter. At which point my suspension of disbelief went missing.

 

That's very much in the mix wrtw and Banks that is so creepy.  Not only does portentously rattle on about his playlists, tastes in literature and how well educated he makes himself, he's forever trying to show himself a champion of victimized women of all sorts, a fellow-traveler in that he sees how badly women generally are mistreated (unless they are feminists and (or) ugly -- that's so much in the first book -- in order for Banks to be virtuous expressing that 'the feminist stereotype is true! -- and of course their sort doesn't get sexually violated, for, um, those reasons), and is their white knight, while he mansplains to all of them, from his wife to the reader.  This is a sort of misogyny rather new to me, so blatantly performed as it is, for profit as well as putting up the finger, while the author is the smartest person in the room and everyone else -- the readers -- aren't sharp enough to see what I did there!

Edited July 8, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

This is interesting: The final Banks was published this year, 28 titles in all, beginning in essentially the mid-1980's.  This final title, Standing in the Shadows, takes place for Banks in December 2019

The novel's structure is a back-and-forth to 1980 - 1981, with a different narrator-protagonist, a student in his last term of literature studies. The students do not like Thatcher, and a variety of protest political groups are more than active.  One of them is murdered. This being a Banks novel, of course the murder victim is a young woman, beautiful, sexy, etc.

In Banks's section the General Election is happening.  Banks despises the former mayor of London (while not naming names) so this time he's not going to vote. Another character says, “I’ve voted conservative all my life, but now I can’t.”  So … characters (evidently not people) see the light and change -- though they don't protest what has happened/happening with the gdd tories. 

It's this sort of thing that shows how much Robinson has studied literature, and like his student narrator of 1980-81, the classics of English Lit in particular.  These conversations among colleagues and mates feel strongly to be influenced by those in novels by George Eliot in particular.  Maybe not every reader would feel this way, those sort of inclusions into the narration from whichever year the novels take place (so many of them in the lead-up to Christmas!) are the bits I like best.  This is where the realism, so to speak, takes place.  Even the tedious tendentious music stuff is part of that.  Do we not all know those tedious nerds who will blather on forever in the most tedious of teeny detail why Steely Dan is the greatest musical act in pop history, is part of that.  Banks is a nerd bore, just like Partner, and like Partner, isn't always that, or otherwise that's all she wrote, and I don't mean George Eliot! 

Since all the characters we keep meeting in these novels from the gitgo, including Banks, love going to Europe a lot, wonder what happened to them, with covid and loss of EU membership for travel, etc. Over the course of the novels we're always meeting UK characters who have second homes in Europe.

 

Edited July 14, 2023 by Zorral

[Castellan]

On 7/9/2023 at 2:51 AM, Zorral said:

I missed that.  

I've finished the first Banks novel, and lordessa, Gallows View confirms the author's creepy fixation on the sexual murders of young, beautiful women, and the author's sexual obsession with young, beautiful women, and with whom they are or may be, or want to get it off with.  The author never fails to provide us with on the page descriptive details of the sexual violence committed on the victims.  Somehow the author seems to see Banks as a knight in shining armor.  But in reality, he's psychologically as much a creep as the Bads, and no amount of pontificating on literature and music by Banks can hide that. The television series erased these primary components of Banks all together.  In the novel Banks universe there are no crimes really except sexual violence and murder of beautiful young women, with an occasional elderly one thrown in for good measure.  He is a homicide detective of course, but are there no murders committed that don't involve murdering and sexually violating young sexy beautiful women?

It's fair to say this, having read the first volume, one that's sort of in the middle of the series, and one that's close to the end of it.  28 novels of this!

To be fair, its hardly unique to this author or even an extreme case, and women read and write them too. Try reading Karin Slaughter. Its a horror show. I can't help fearing that some pycho will adopt some of the ghastly means of killing women that she has incorporated.

 

[Zorral]

13 hours ago, Castellan said:

To be fair,

This is so.  In this case though, if I'd begun with the novels I'd have bailed very early on them.  Whereas the impression we get of Banks on the television series is quite different -- not that this is unusual for adaptations either.  I have bailed on television series that do do this constant young female dismemberment meme too, btw.

It's as in the real world -- there are so many dreadful crimes going on out there all the time that aren't the murder of young, sexy, intelligent, attractive women, and shouldn't the cops being doing something about those?  Those crimes and the atmosphere those untended crimes tend to foster, in fact, the murder of women -- murder of women as a consequence instead of a cause?

OTOH, due to the way I went into the novels, which begin so long ago and essentially conclude in this era of insanity and corruption, it makes the series as a series a lot more interesting in terms of Banks himself, who as stand-in for author, finds himself forced to recognize that the figures and institutions to which he was in favor of, one-by-one reveal themselves to be irredeemably corrupt and criminal, including the policing forces and the nation itself.  The Banks of the novels in the 80's and 90's would not see it this way. I would not have been able to see this change if I had begun reading them in the 80's either -- for one thing, of course, without online newspapers and other communications for nations outside my own I wouldn't have had the information that I have now to bring to the novels.

Edited July 16, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

I was rather looking forward to giving Bruce Alexander's series centered on the figure of Sir John Fielding (Bow Street Runners co-founder with his brother, Henry Fielding).  I started with #11 in the series (2005), Rules of Engagment, because it centers on the events going on in the North American colonies of 1775. But within the very first pages, I had to put it away.  The narrators, whether Sir John, or lords in Parliament, etc. refer to "the Adams Brothers" who are seen as the cause of the rebellious events.

There were no Adams brothers. That John Adams and Samuel Adams were second cousins are basic historical information to these times.  For pete's sake!  Unless, this was a sly and very subtle commentary on the massive general ignorance of these classes about everything in the North American colonies, from the people to the economy to the geography.  But it didn't feel like it.  Fini.

 

Johy