Mysteries: More Murders, More Minor Misdemeanors, More Moors, More Pies

[Datepalm]

New thread, armchair detectives.

Recent reads -

I went through William Shaw's Alex Cupidi mysteries quickly. I think he's done at 4 (or 5, depending on how you count the sort of series kickoff, which technically isn't a Cupidi book) and they seem to be done. Set in Dungeness, this fills the Ruth Galloway shaped hole in my mystery readings - moody coastal English setting, single parent detective, low-key local mysteries, a lot of attention paid to landscapes, animals, local histories, etc.

I read a couple of Mario Todd's Clare McKay as well, set in St. Andrews. Same vibe, though slightly less well put together and less atmospheric, also a little gorier/more violent, which rarely adds much for me, but still enjoyable.

MS Morris - Aspire to Die - Oxford University set murder, scandal amongst the privileged, yaddi yadda. Not very good. Another single parent of teenager female detective, which was ok, but the actual story is poorly done - very boring characters and not much done with the setting.

Bad Summer People - meh. Not great either as satire or as mystery.

The Paris Apartment - Lucy Foley - I like her earlier murder in a remote setting books, but this one is more of a straight-up crime thriller and is just annoying. Everyone is dumb as a brick, the structure and the writing boringly manipulative to keep up from learning the answer, there's all this supposedly dark and raunchy sex, prostitution, illicit affairs, etc, stuff that reads like a teenager writing fanfic, etc.

I started the first WM Craven Washington Poe book and actually abandoned it after a few chapters - pretty rare, for me. It's got the usual murder in an English country setting thing, but is pointlessly gory and violent, and the main detective is a Gary Stu surrounded by idiots and bigots, and the whole thing is a chore to read.

Edited August 11, 2023 by Datepalm

[Zorral]

Thanx Datepalm, for closing the old and opening the new Mysteries etc. thread!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Death of a Busybody (1943) by George Bellairs, another in the British Library Crime Classics series.

The works in this series set in the WWII years in rural-ish locations, and immediately after the war, are providing a detailed picture of how things were there, in those places, with who is there, as opposed to being in the military and government agencies.  I confess to a silly self-satisfaction for knowing what an opening set-piece was all about, with the women driving horse teams mowing cereal crops being spoken of with somewhat puzzled admiration, "These Land Girls got on quick with learning and doing this work. I might even say they're as good as the men were, even if sometimes they need two to lift something."

~~~~~~~~~~

With books like these, and my recent adventures with the Banks series, I have the subject for my piece for our library's magazine autumn issue, the usefulness for historical research to include these materials, if they are available, in the same way historians of Rome and Greece use the literature of the time, the historians of Charlemagne use the works of his minstrels, etc. Contemporary entertainment referencing contemporary events can provide details that some other materials cannot and do not.

Just realized yesterday afternoon, making potato salad, listening to Alexandria (2009), the penultimate title in the long Lindsey Davis series, featuring Informer Didius Falco, that this is another entry into the project.  This novel was published as library systems, great and small, notoriously began dumping books as they digitized, with the idea we don't need physical books any longer, particularly old books.  What happened with the San Francisco library system was particularly scandalous -- there were New Yorker articles published about it even!  As the center of this Falco mystery is the Great Library of Alexandria, the author has replayed all these issues, which in one version or another have come up over and over in library management between management, scholars, readers and the general public.  The author employs Falco as her stand-in for the side on which she herself, a researcher, firmly stands >a!hem< Ha!.  I'd noticed various other contemporary issues in previous books of hers, that play out in classic Roman terms.  And always, there is the general disgust with politicians, big biz owners and lawyers in every book.

Edited July 23, 2023 by Zorral

[Iskaral Pust]

I enjoy Rankin’s Rebus series but less so his Malcolm Fox series.

[Tears of Lys]

And here **I** am, rereading Dorothy Sayers.  

When I find something I like, I stick with it.

 

(Peppered with a little PD James and Christie.)

[dog-days]

I've been thinking of rereading Nine Tailors for a while. I've got a fondness for fenland gothic(k) (see also Graham Swift's Waterland) and NT must be tangled up in the roots of that particular niche. 

[Tears of Lys]

I won't tell you whodunnit then!  Can you remember?

[dog-days]

Yes, fraid so, the ending is too memorable for my brain to have marked it as 'disposable' as it does with most detective novel denouements! But I'm happy to reread it for the atmosphere.

ETA: omg the typos...

Edited August 9, 2023 by dog-days

[Ormond]

I suppose this is curmudgeonly of me, but about the thread title -- though I am sure the great majority of mystery fiction deals with murder, there are some stories where it is another crime like kidnapping or theft which is the focus of the detection, especially in mysteries written for young adults or children. For example, I don't think murder was normally featured in the original "Nancy Drew" series.

[lady narcissa]

Yes, I agree about the thread title.  Unless the purpose of the thread is to only talk about "murder mysteries".  While they are incredibly common, murders are not required for mysteries.  It's hard to bring up specifics without spoilers but I think "Gaudy Night" by Dorothy L. Sayers is well enough known to be mentioned without objection (especially as some of you are reading her now) as an example of a mystery without a murder.  One of my favorite mysteries (which I won't mention because of spoilers) involves a search for a lost treasure and the mystery of what happened to it and following the clues.

I have been reading quite a few mysteries lately.  (All involve murders!)  One series which I believe I learned about from this board is by Andrea Carter and take place in Inishowen, Ireland which have a great sense of place which is my main attraction to them.  One of them begins after a few weeks of unusually hot and sunny weather (for Ireland) and people are a bit miserable about this and wishing for rain and I just felt right at home - these are my people!  I'm not overly fond of the main character but she is interesting enough and the mysteries are decent.  The ebooks retail on amazon for an insane $11.49 but they tend to go on sale often enough and they are certainly worth it for $1.99.

[Tears of Lys]

13 hours ago, Ormond said:

I suppose this is curmudgeonly of me, but about the thread title -- though I am sure the great majority of mystery fiction deals with murder, there are some stories where it is another crime like kidnapping or theft which is the focus of the detection, especially in mysteries written for young adults or children. For example, I don't think murder was normally featured in the original "Nancy Drew" series.

And don't forget the Hardy Boys.  

I positively lived on Nancy Drew when I was around 8 or so.  

[Zorral]

British crime novelist and editor -- including for the British Library Crime Classics series -- has put out here (2022 in the UK) The Puzzle of Blackstone Fell , his third novel featuring an intriguing protagonist, Rachel Savernake. 

https://www.militarypress.com/book-review-the-puzzle-of-blackstone-lodge/

Judging by reviews this is a twice period crime novel as primary chronological location is the 1930's, and the mystery begins in the 17th C.  Puzzles indeed!  Alas, our library/libraries don't yet have it.

I did pick up two more British Library Crime Classics though: Weekend at Thrackley (1934) by Alan Melville, and Death Makes a Prophet (1947) by John Bude.

~~~~~~~~

Re the above: Those books were for kids.  I'm not a kid.  I grew out of them very early, and didn't care for them particularly at all.

I lived on books about horses, primarily, and any other animal fiction I could find. Also sf/f but there was very little, so it was King Arthur and mythology all the way. I lived in the Greek Hero and Myth tales.  I resorted to Nancy only when w/o that sort of book, and then, if there weren't even Western sorts of tales available like Last of the Mohicans and Zane Grey.  They at least had horse ... most of the time!

Unlike a lot of you, mysteries were something I came to as a want-to-go-to fiction deep in maturity.  As mentioned Elsewhere, I have become the cliché of this reader: aging, glass of wine, jazz on the radio!, reading mysteries before bedtime   (when then, for a while, Partner and I read aloud back-and-forth from all sorts of history, before shutting off the lights). 

Now, with the exception of the right historical fiction, mysteries are just about the only fiction I can read, and I really really really like them -- of the right sort.      There are far more of those in the mystery genre than the historical genre -- which seems determined to be Romance genre, which really sux, ya know?

 

Edited August 17, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

From NPR show, One A, we learn that historical fiction is the preferred mode at the moment for fiction writers, meaning 'literary' fiction and others too, such as mysteries (which it as been popular to do for ages now).  I was beginning to wonder though, that so many like Zadie Smith's Barbara Kingsolver's latest novels, for instance, were historicals, for instance, if this hadn't become the way to go, particularly if one can't face trying to make fictional sense out of the present -- and even more so the near future?

Quote

2. OTM producer Eloise Blondiau [@eloiseblondiau] takes a deep dive into how historical fiction became a rich resource for reckoning with our past, feat: Alexander Manshel, assistant professor of English at McGill University [@xandermanshel], and novelists Alexander Chee [@alexanderchee] and Min Jin Lee [@minjinlee11]. Listen.

 

Edited August 18, 2023 by Zorral

[Datepalm]

Muddled through all the Karen Pirie's (except the first one as I'd seen the show). Enjoyed them a lot, despite finding a lot actually quite annoying. Several, especially the 2nd and the 6th have weirdly easy-to-solve mysteries - which I generally pay no attention to and make no effort to solve. But here they were just sitting there. Karen is also hella preachy and repetitive sometimes, with a touch of that Mary Sue thing where all her superiors are comically incompetent and venal, in a slightly absurd register that no other aspect of the books has. That subplot in each book always sucks and always ends with Karen getting a snide one-over on them. (Makes me really impressed with the Cupidi books where she has a boss who has to mind the politics and the media etc and is sometimes cautious or at odds with her, but nevertheless bears a passing resemblance to an adult human in a professional setting.) There's always an odd level of focus on her clothes or her weight in a way that doesn't really add anything, but whatever - still enjoyable.

[Zorral]

5 hours ago, Datepalm said:

Karen Pirie

Quite disliked the television series -- first season -- are there others? But I thought it was the actress manner of playing the character.  So many scenes of her sitting there with her mouth hanging open, vacant eyed.  So it's built into the character by the author?

[Zorral]

Florence, 1537. A murder victim discovered in a convent's scriptorium. The victim is a naked man.

The Darkest Sin (2022) by D.V. Bishop is the second in the author's Cesare Aldo series; the first is City of Vengeance (2021), #3 is Ritual of Fire (2023).

The protagonist is desperate to keep his sexual orientation hidden, as many had to be in that time of renaissance of learning, science, and joy in the arts, antisemitism and hatred of all Others.

The PR's description is, "If you like C.J. Sansom you will like this."

 

[Zorral]

BTW, Peter Robinson's When the Music’s Over (2016) #23 in his DCI Banks series, p. 234 provided the purrfect quote for my article's thesis as to a long series, with a consistent, thoughtful, intelligent protagonist's perspective can offer insights into the history of the non-fictional world out of which the fictive series emerges.

Banks remembered lines from another of Linda Palmer's poems: "In no time at all, we alter what we / see--not nature, but nature exposed / to our vision." She was right about the constant Dance of memory and imagination, perception and creation, history and fiction.  How easily the one was transformed into the other, or by it, sometimes to such an extent that we actually believed a thing had happened the way we remembered it, when it hadn't happened that way at all.  He gave up pursuing the thought.  It wasn't a fruitful line of inquiry for a detective."

After reading the paragraph's last sentence I barked laughter, which I'm sure many other readers of the DCI Banks series did as well, because the entire series is about that!  As ever, Robinson finds ways to enjoy himself as a writer, and never take himself/Banks too seriously (except the older he/they get, the more seriously he seems to take himself as a genius of pan-musical knowledge ).  

Edited September 7, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

Richard Osman puts out his fourth Thursday Murder Club next week, The Last Devil To Die.

It seems at university he got tapped for MI6 , but failed the interviews and tests. For the best he says.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/sep/09/richard-osman-i-would-have-been-terrible-in-mi6-im-too-tall-spill-secrets-and-cant-lie

Martin Walker's latest,  #16 of his Bruno Chief of Police series, A Château Under Siege, is available now. I started it last night, and it didn't rope me in, as the previous ones have.  Bruno's latest adventurers have leaned international Big Stuff, which isn't at all as interesting as his personal patch of ground and their home grown shenanigans. This one is the worst by far, with all these top people of France's -- and the UK's and the USA's -- international military and criminal agencies are right there on his own fone to call personally.  I mean, this is a cop from a small patch in rural France.  So what that he once was in the Foreign Legion? This is quite other than the reasons so many of us have enjoyed the Bruno novels over the years.  I got to Chapter 3 last night, put it down, and picked up an historical; novel set in 16th C Florence. Am wondering if I will get to Chapter 4?

 

Edited September 9, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

In response to @dog-days -- did get a quick start on the new Thursday Murder Club.  It begins with Stephen on the first page.

[Zorral]

@dog-days -- Finished the last chapters of Osman's Last Devil To Die last night.

I predict you will like it.  For many reasons, not least because you will be kept in a state of admiring the author's ability to keep throwing the curve balls, that are not expected.  Even the biggest curve ball, which we expect, turns out to be something more than that, and unexpected.

A great way to go out, which I am guessing The Thursday Murder Club now, wisely, has done .

[dog-days]

13 hours ago, Zorral said:

@dog-days -- Finished the last chapters of Osman's Last Devil To Die last night.

I predict you will like it.  For many reasons, not least because you will be kept in a state of admiring the author's ability to keep throwing the curve balls, that are not expected.  Even the biggest curve ball, which we expect, turns out to be something more than that, and unexpected.

A great way to go out, which I am guessing The Thursday Murder Club now, wisely, has done .

Super. I'm glad it ended on a strong note. In that case I'll pick it up from the library when I can.