Books to the Ceiling

Eve McNabb has come home to the village of Crossley to bury her mother May. It is, of course, a sad occasion, but an additional element of mystery intrudes when a letter arrives addressed to May by a woman named Jean. Eve has no idea who Jean is, but it is apparent from the letter’s wording that the correspondent does not know of her mother’s passing. The missive also alludes to a relationship Jean claims to have with May that passes beyond the bounds of mere friendship. Who is this woman, and what kind of hold did she have over May McNabb?

As a child, Eve had been quite close to her mother. For the most part, it was just the two of them; her father Tom had left the family early on and emigrated to Australia. Not long after his abandonment, May had informed Eve that her father was dead. In her professional life, May McNabb had been a teacher and headmistress whose reputation for probity was unquestioned. But on this one subject, she had resolutely declined to provide any specifics. Now, saying her final goodbyes to May, Eve finds herself plagued with doubts and questions. What was the real nature of her father’s fate? An even more radical question suggests itself: Might he still be alive after all?

Eve little suspects that by dint of her inquiries, she is embarking on a journey that will comprise both joy and heartbreak. One thing is for certain: her life will never be the same.

For over two decades, ever since I first discovered the joys of crime fiction, I’ve been enjoying the works of Robert Barnard. Last fall, as part of our Smithsonian mystery tour, my husband and I had the pleasure of meeting this fine writer. Barnard is not only a much-honored author of mysteries; he is also an authority on the Bronte family. The talk he present to our group at the Bronte parsonage was fascinating.

[Robert Barnard addressing our group at the Bronte Parsonage]

[Robert Barnard receiving the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award in 2003]

Barnard has fielded several series in the course of his writing career. (He has also written a number of standalones like Last Post. See the entry in Stop! You’re Killing Me for the complete rundown.) An early title in the Perry Trethowan series, Death by Sheer Torture, is a riff on the country house mystery tradition, at which Barnard pokes exhuberant fun in the course of the novel.

Another of my favorites is The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori, which features policeman Charlie Peace. Haworth is where the Bronte Parsonage is. As our tour bus was entering this jewel of a village last fall, we drove right by the Tandoori featured in the eponymous novel! (Oh, dear - will we ever have a chance once again to have this much fun in the beloved old country?…)

Last Post finds Robert Barnard in top form. Eve McNabb is an enormously appealing protagonist; you’ll find yourself rooting for her from start to finish. I know I did.

How could Jean Loftus and her husband Kenward have lived in Asshe House for decades and not have known about the body buried in the back garden? This is just one of the many questions that surface in the course of Elizabeth Ironside’s elegantly written and meticulously constructed puzzler, The Accomplice. All kinds of surprises lurk in this narrative, not the least of which concerns the true identity of the extravagantly named Evgenia Konstantinovna Chournoroukaya. This illustrious-sounding personage turns out to be none other than the aforementioned Jean Loftus!

As the novel opens, Jean/Evgenia is an elderly widow increasingly immobilized by severe arthritis. She can no longer move about Asshe House with ease and has thus decided to turn the stately home over to her stepson Marcus and his wife Naomi. It is the latter’s project of re-landscaping the back of the house that causes the bones, long buried beneath the roses, to be brought to light.

Evgenia’s back story is told in chapters interspersed throughout the present day narrative. It is equal parts fascinating and harrowing. She came of age at the worst possible time, in the worst possible place: Latvia during the Second World War. She suffered terrible losses before she was able to emigrate to England and start a new life.

Zita Daunsey is Evgenia’s friend and solicitor. She lives with her son Tom, who has cerebral palsy. Zita is also recently divorced from Oliver, who, it seems, couldn’t deal with Tom’s disability. She was thus put in the grotesque position of having to choose between her husband and her child. She chose Tom. It makes for a difficult home life, and there are times when she feels frustrated and resentful, but Zita loves her son fiercely. By all accounts she should loathe her ex-husband with an equal ferocity, but instead, she pines for him and misses him. Such are the vagaries of the human heart…

When Xenia, a student, comes from Russia to stay with Mark and Naomi, events in the novel take an unexpected turn. Xenia claims to be Evgenia’s distant relation, a contention which Evgenia herself rejects out of hand. But that doesn’t faze Xenia, who has a plan of her own devising which she doesn’t hesitate to put into action.

Although The Accomplice was written in 1996, it was not published here until ten years later. Despite being greatly admired by reviewers and readers alike, Elizabeth Ironside’s novels could not find a publisher here until Maggie Topkis of the famed Partners & Crime mystery bookstore in Greenwich Village decided to import them directly from the U.K. She hand sold Ironside’s Death in the Garden with so much success that she decided to take things a step further. Felony & Mayhem Press, founded by Ms. Topkis in 2005, specializes in reprinting titles of interest that are no longer in print, at least in this country and possibly in the U.K. as well.

Meanwhile, she had an interesting experience while tracking down the author of the two aforementioned works. “Elizabeth Ironside” turned out to be the pseudonym of Lady Catherine Manning, wife of the British ambassador to the U.S.!

[Lady Catherine and Sir David Manning]

Felony & Mayhem has a great list, but good luck trying to tease it out of a site that’s perpetually “under construction.” Titles are classified as British, Traditional, Historical, Hardboiled, Espionage, or Vintage. Topkis engages in a little ad hoc readers’ advisory on the back cover of each book. “Who’s Likely to Like This?” she asks rhetorically on the back off The Accomplice. The answer is, “Fans of Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters and Death in the Garden.” I agree, though for the record, I found Death in the Garden somewhat tedious in spots. For my money, The Accomplice is an altogether more compelling, tightly constructed work.

(A good way of getting a list of titles published by Felony & Mayhem is to do a search on Amazon for “Felony & Mayhem Mysteries.” )

One final word concerns the novel’s title. Ironside uses the word “accomplice” at several critical junctures in the narrative to describe the way in which an individual, by not acting on knowledge that he or she possesses, becomes an accomplice with regard to another’s malevolent actions. In other words, the author is referring to sins of omission, rather than commission. It’s a provocative concept, with crucial moral implcations for the characters in The Accomplice.

Once a Biker is the sixteenth entry in Peter Turnbull’s series of procedurals featuring Chief Inspector George Hennessey and Detective Sergeant Somerled Yellich. This outing begins with a cold case: a disappearance from years past that turns out to have been a murder.

The novel opens with 45-year old Tony Wells unburdening himself to social worker Gillian Stoneman. Wells used to run with a motorcycle gang called the Dungeon Masters. It has been two decades since the gang’s leader ordered the murder of one of its members, Terry North, and his girlfriend. The girlfriend’s body had been found shortly after the crime was committed; not so with Terry North. Now, dying of cancer, Tony Wells feels the need to reveal a secret: where Terry North is concerned, he quite literally knows where the body is buried. A subsequent search in a place called Foxfoot Wood bears out Wells’s revelation.

Hennessey and Yellich have been led to the victim but not to the perpetrator(s). And thus begins an investigation that will take them, along with junior officers Thompson Ventnor and Reginald Webster, deep into the history and the heart of the Dungeon Masters.

Now, if you had told me that I would be fascinated to learn the mores and folkways of a motorcycle gang, I would have laughed in a suitably deprecating manner. But it is these revelations, rather than the actual homicide investigation, that kept me riveted to Once A Biker. Turnbull goes deeper than the surface bravado - and the rather shocking degradation of female members - to explore the odd combination of hubris, vulnerability, and unwritten yet binding rules that accounts for the tight cohesion of a gang like the Dungeon Masters.

Peter Turnbull’s novels have some unique features that I always enjoy. For instance, chapter headings are reminiscent of Victorian novels - or even 18th century novels like those of Henry Fielding. Here’s the heading for Chapter Three: “Tuesday ,18 June, 12.15 hours - Wednesday, 19 June, 01.35 hours in which a bedroom yields dark secrets and both Ventnor and Webster are at home to the gentle reader.” Later, in Chapter Five “…useful information is obtained from an apostate and George Hennessey is at home to the gracious reader.” In chapters such as these, we are afforded a tantalizing glimpse into the private lives of series regulars. Surprises often lurk there.

For a novel about a motorcycle gang, Once a Biker contains some curiously formal, almost antiquated dialog. The diction in these passages adds poignancy to a situation which often involves the delivery of bad news. Here, Hennessey and Yellich are talking to Garry Wells, Tony’s embittered father. Hennessey assures him that for several years prior to his death, Tony had been living as a law-abiding citizen. Garry responds:

“Well, thank you for saying that but…well…he was a very selfish person. He wanted everything and he wanted it yesterday. He was our son, he died young in life of a cruel illness, but he was no saint. But your kind words are welcome, sir. Thank you.

This series benefits greatly from its setting in the ancient northern city of York. We accompany Hennessey as he walks along the medieval walls - something I myself was thrilled to do three years ago. At one point, the Chief Inspector gazes up in wonder at York’s incredible Minster, the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe. ( I can’t imagine living in such close proximity to this sublime edifice. I think I would feel blessed every minute of my life! )

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Peter Turnbull treads lightly - very lightly - on the internet. From the extemely brief biography on Tangled Web UK, I learned that Turnbull was a social worker for some years in Glasgow before returning to his native Yorkshire. From the Gale Database Literature Resource Center we learn, among other things, that this author was born in 1950 and that his father was an engineer and his mother, a nurse. Turnbull earned degrees at various institutions of higher learning in England and Wales. He has worked as a steelworker and a crematorium assistant in Sheffield and in London; in addition, he has been a social worker in Brooklyn, New York. ( I must admit that last bit really made me want to know more about him!)

There’s a sad little twist at the end of Once a Biker that caught me completely by surprise. I’ll say no more about it at present…

In a quote cited in Literature Resource Center, Emily Melton of Booklist Magazine observes that “This low-key Scottish author writes refreshingly intelligent books that are an absorbing blend of gritty murder mystery, human-interest story, psychological profile, and wry social commentary.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I just finished listening to Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Although the book was published in 1996, the story is back in the news because of last year’s film by Sean Penn. I wanted to read the book before seeing the movie.

The audiobook consists of six discs, and I almost gave up after the first one. I was finding the company of an arrogant, self-absorbed, monumentally selfish young man well nigh unendurable. I stayed with it and I’m glad that I did, although I found it a profoundly disturbing story.

Chris McCandless’s odyssey across the West began immediately after his graduation from Emory University. He fetched up variously in the tiny town of Carthage, South Dakota, where he worked at a grain elevator, in the California desert, in Bullhead City, Arizona, where he worked in a MacDonald’s, and in several other out-of-the-way places before heading north to Alaska.

And the purpose of all this wandering? Well, there seem to have been several purposes, none of them very clearly articulated. One was certainly to slough off the trappings of the upper middle class existence into which Chris McCandless was born. The child of Walt and Billie McCandless, he was raised in Annandale, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC. His father was an aerospace engineer of considerable eminence, having among other things designed advanced radar systems for the space shuttle. Chris had a younger sister Carine and six older step siblings from Walt’s previous marriage. (Annandale is about fifty miles southwest of where I’m sitting at the moment. I lived there for a year in the late 1960’s. It is now part of a suburban agglomeration devoid of any distinguishing features and choking on its traffic.)

From what I read in this book, the McCandlesses did not experience extraordinary friction within the family unit while Chris was growing up. But he was a complicated person, a restless, discontented soul who often seemed at odds with his environment. His relationship with Walt was somewhat touchy. I read somewhere that all boys, as they grow into men, face a reckoning with their fathers. Chris’s way of dealing with this reckoning was to flee from it, as far as he could, as soon as he could.

In fact, he vanished from the lives of all of his family members. At the time of his death, they hadn’t had word of him for several years, despite having at one point hired a private investigator to look for him. It is this willful act of disappearance that I found enraging. Chris claimed to be close to Carine, yet he froze her out of his life along with his parents, supposedly because he feared that if he contacted her, she would in turn tell their parents something that might reveal his whereabouts.

As Krakauer describes the scene, Carine was utterly desolated when she learned of her brother’s death. Chris’s parents were likewise crushed. I have to admit, I was a bit surprised by the intensity of their grief, especially where Carine was concerned. Family is family, I know, but I thought that at least one of them would have hardened his or her heart against this young narcissist who had so perversely hardened his against them.

(I am reminded of the novel The Tinderbox, in which a family man whose daughter is a runaway never stops loving her and hoping to find her; meanwhile, the mother’s heart has turned to stone where her errant daughter is concerned.)

Into the Wild is not just about Chris McCandless and his ill-fated Alaskan adventure. Krakauer also relates stories of other men whose lives followed a similar trajectory. These were actually fascinating tales. The one I particularly enjoyed was about Everett Reuss (pronounced “Royce”) whose solo traversal of the southwestern deserts culminated in his disappearance, in 1934. The last trace of him was found in Davis Gulch, a canyon of the Escalante in Utah, where he had made camp with his two burros. After several months had elapsed, a search party found the burros grazing placidly at the bottom of Davis Gulch. Of the twenty-year-old Ruess there was no sign, and never has been, up until this day.

When I first visited the California desert, I had already heard of Reuss as a result of my reading about the history of the American West. I’ve always wanted to know more about his brief life and was pleased to encounter him in Krakauer’s narrative.

Many are the speculations - some plausible, some farfetched - concerning the ultimate fate of Everett Ruess. On the other hand, we know what happened to Chris McCandless. In his case, the question is not what, but why. Jon Krakauer does not attempt to formulate a conclusive answer to this question; he presents the facts to the extent that they are known and leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. But it would not be quite accurate to say that Krakauer has no particular attitude toward his subject. This is from the Author’s Note that prefaces the book:

I won’t claim to be an impartial biographer. McCandless’s strange tale struck a personal note that made a disapssionate rendering of the tragedy impossible. Through most of the book, I have tried–and largely succeeded, I think–to minimize my authorial presence. But let the reader be warned: I interrupt McCandless’s story with fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless.

( I personally found the narrative of Krakauer’s harrowing mountain climbing experience interesting but over long and therefore unnecessarily intrusive.)

In my estimation, Jon Krakauer seems somewhat in awe of Chris McCandless, believing, apparently, that the young man was in some way preternaturally gifted. Accordingly, Krakauer is bewildered, even hurt, by the vituperation heaped on McCandless in response to his story. The book Into the Wild grew out of an article Krakauer wrote for Outside Magazine: “The article…generated a large volume of mail, and not a few of the letters heaped opprobrium on McCandless–and on me, as well, the author of the story, for glorifying what some thoguht was a foolish, pointless death.” He goes on to quote passages from this correspondence. I’m no expert on surviving in the wilderness; still, I couldn’t help but agree with some of what was said:

‘Why would anyone intending to “live off the land for a few months” forget Boy Scout rule number one: Be Prepared? Why would any son cause his parents and family such permanent and perplexing pain?’

After I’d finished the recorded book, I got the print version out of the library. Krakauer places many wonderful, thought-provoking passages at the beginning of each chapter. Some were from the works of well known authors such as Thoreau, Jack London, and Wallace Stegner; others were by wanderer/explorers with whom I was unfamiliar, like Edward Whymper (Scrambles Amongst the Alps) and John Menlove Edwards (”Letter from a Man”). I was hoping to find a bibliography but there was none; an unfortunate omission, IMHO.

By the end of July 1992, ill and weakened by lack of food, Chris McCandless knew he faced death alone in the Alaskan wild, sheltered only by the derelict shell of Fairbanks Bus 142. Eventually he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had made for him, and there breathed his last: “He probably died on August 18, 112 days after he’d walked into the wild, 19 days before six Alaskans would happen across the bus and discover his body inside.” He was 24 years old.

It is impossible to read the book’s concluding chapter and not feel overwhelmed by sadness. In the epilogue, Krakauer tells how he accompanied Billie and Walt McCandless to the scene of their son’s death. They placed a memorial plaque just inside the door of a bus; they also left emergency provisions under the bed at the rear of the vehicle.

I’m pondering the possibility of a post entitled “Books That Haunt Me - or that I think will haunt me.” Into the Wild will be near the top of the list.

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Here are two interesting and provocative articles about Chris McCandless: “Into the Wild: The False Being Within” by Craig Medred in Far North Science; and “The Cult of Chris McCandless” by Matthew Power in Men’s Journal. The latter piece also offers some intriguing observations concerning the film, which I still have not seen. I guess I’m a bit afraid of it, at this point…

I always look forward to the new Peter Lovesey because I know I am virtually guaranteed to enjoy an engrossing story, intriguing characters, lots of atmosphere, and exceptionally fine writing. The Headhunters delivers on all those expectations, and then some.

Often in good series fiction, the reader encounters at least one variation on a theme in each series entry. In this novel, we get to know Jo Stevens and her friends Gemma, Rick, and Jake well before the police come into the story. Jo is an earnest, decent young woman who is somewhat confused as to what shape her life is going to assume. One thing she does know: she is attracted to the taciturn, somewhat mysterious Jake Kernow. Jake works in a nature preserve located near the Selsey beach. Not long after their first meeting, Jo takes a walk on the beach hoping to run into him, but instead, she makes a terrible discovery: a woman’s body floating in the shadow of a breakwater.

This gruesome find precipitates Jo’s first encounter with the Chichester police. It’s an offputting experience; Jo finds herself on the defensive, although she has done nothing except act the part of a public-spirited citizen. She is then asked to come to the station in order to observe a group of men in an identification parade (Britspeak for line-up). She agrees, with great reluctance, to this request. Sure enough, her part in this proceeding upsets her even more - and with good reason.

What’s interesting here is that my sympathies were enlisted so strongly on Jo’s behalf that I found myself sharing her fear and resentment of the police, with their aggressive interrogations and frightening insinuations. To me, they didn’t seem like the heroes of the story - at least, not at first.

But eventually, as they showed themselves capable of both subtlety and compassion, Henrietta “Hen” Mallin and her team grew on me. Mallin first appeared in The House Sitter, where she supported an investigation headed up by Lovesey’s series protagonist Peter Diamond. Then, in The Circle, their roles were reversed. Peter Diamond does not appear at all in The Headhunters.

In yet another change, the series venue has moved from Bath to Chichester, a cathedral city located in West Sussex, in the South of England. This is an area rich in both history and legend. Early in their acquaintance, as they walk along the beach, Jake tells Jo something about those legends:

“He stretched out his arm and made a sweeping movement in the direction of the sea. ‘Somewhere out there is a deer park’

She laughed. ‘Oh, yes?’

But he was serious. ‘In the time of Henry VIII, it was hunting country. Fisherman still call that stretch of sea “‘the park.’”

‘Hard to imagine.’

‘And still further out is a cathedral, they say.’”

Jo is understandably incredulous, especially about this latter tale, but Jake is dead serious. Later he tells her that over the years, people claim to have heard church bells at low tide!

( I’ve expended a good deal of effort trying to obtain further information about the legend of the sunken cathedral off Selsey Bill in West Sussex. Information was elusive; I felt as though I were going around in circles. The Wikipedia entry on Selsey has a short section entitled “Early history, prior to inundation.” Also I kept encountering references to the lost city of Ys, which was supposedly built on the coast of Brittany and then swallowed up by the sea. Here’s how that legend goes.

All the while I was doing this research I kept hearing in my head the haunting strains of “La Cathedrale Engloutie” by one of my favorite composers, Claude Debussy. This work was inspired by the legend of the city of Ys.

Click here for the sound file. )

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I love it when writers of fiction reference the history and lore that’s connected to the setting of their work. In Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, the village of Ewelme in South Oxfordshire appears briefly in the novel’s narrative; the author throws in, almost as a careless aside, that the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Ewelme is where the poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s granddaughter Alice lies buried. One feels instantly thrown back to a time several centuries distant.

[Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Ewelme]

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As more killings occur, the plot of The Headhunters becomes increasingly convoluted; at the same time, the sense of urgency is greatly heightened. But the murderer’s identity is only part of what makes this novel suspenseful. One of the problems Jo Stevens has with the local police is that they persist in their belief that the culprit is Jake Kernow. Jake is an interesting character, a shy introvert whose passion for the natural world could not be more genuine. Jo’s unshakeable faith in his goodness is the lodestar of this novel. And yet, as I read, I became increasingly anxious: is Jo in fact right about Jake? Is she willing to stake her life on her conviction? This is the point of tension that kept me glued to the pages of this novel right up to its harrowing conclusion.

Roiled. Distressed. Even distraught. Even in tears. That was me, wandering through the house in the early hours of this morning, contemplating the emotional wreckage so vividly depicted in Donna Leon’s seventeenth Guido Brunetti novel.

The book begins and ends with a funeral. In between these two solemn events, Brunetti and his team investigate the death of an eleven-year-old girl found floating in one of Venice’s many canals. Identifying her is the first priority. She turns out to be a child of the Gypsies - or, more properly, the Rom. Her parents are eventually located in an encampment outside the city. The scene in which the mother is informed of her daughter’s death is shattering, like something from one of the great Greek tragedies.

Interestingly, Brunetti has been reading in just this area, encouraged by Paola, his ferociously intellectual wife. (A university professor whose personality is a nice synthesis of the brainy and the sensual, Paola is one of my favorite continuing characters in this series.) This conscientious, caring policeman is haunted by the scene in The Trojan Women by Euripides in which Hecuba bewails the death of her grandson Astyanax: “‘I, homeless, childless, and the one to lay you in your grave, you so young and miserably dead.’”

[ Engraving of the death of Astyanax]

Once again, Leon gives us a Venice with all its contradictions: choked with the tourists that are its life blood, filled with hidden beauty, its people by turns generous and ruthless. And once again, she limns a society where favors are traded, and veiled - and not so veiled - threats are made against those who would pursue justice into unwelcome territory.

Of course, much of the beauty of Venice is in plain sight. At one point, Brunetti wanders into a church to look at a favorite painting, Tintoretto’s Crucifixion:

“Brunetti had always been struck by how bored this Christ looked, stuck artfully up there on his cross, posed in front of the hedge of perpendicular spears that divided the painting in half. Christ seemed finally to have come to accept the truth of those warnings that all this business about becoming human would come to no good; He seemed eager to get back to the job of being God.

Passages like this illustrate well the reason why so many of us cherish Donna Leon. This is simply not the kind of scene, not to mention the caliber of the writing, that you commonly find in contemporary crime fiction.

Guido Brunetti is not in the mold of the middle-aged detective with secret sorrows and a messed up personal life. On the contrary, his family - he and Paola have two children - is what sustains him, the one immutable good in his troubled universe. He knows he can go back to them and find renewed strength with which to fight the good fight. And go back he does, especially when a meal is on offer. The entire family frequently has lunch together as well as dinner. We readers are invariably told just what’s on offer chez Brunetti, and it’s inevitably something utterly mouth watering: fusilli with black olives and mozzarella and calamari ripieni, for example. Even the pizza sounds special, when kicked up several notches with mozzarella di bufala and pomodorini!

Believe me, you’ll be as grateful for these interludes of warmth and sanity as Brunetti himself is.

As I was reading The Girl of His Dreams, I kept waiting for the meaning of the title to come clear. It eventually does, with the utmost poignancy.

Donna Leon

In Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of short stories, Jhumpa Lahiri turns a laser-like eye on the experience of Indian expatriates. Back and forth they go, these characters, from India to America and back again (with occasional stopovers in London, the author’s birthplace). If they are not traveling in actuality, then their restless spirits are traveling instead, searching constantly for a way to accommodate the sundered parts of their existence.

In the title story, Ruma is twice exiled, having moved from New York to Seattle. Adam, her American husband, works for a hedge fund and travels frequently. Mother of little Akash and once again pregnant, Ruma is lonely and isolated in her new home. She has mixed feelings about an upcoming visit from her widowed father. “Ruma feared that her father would become a responsibility, an added demand, continuously present in a way she was no longer used to.” But her father’s week long sojourn becomes a quiet revelation.

I can’t resist observing, with regard to “Unaccustomed Earth,” that the portrayal of Akash is one of the least sentimental depictions of a fictional child that I have ever come across. All right: to put it bluntly, he’s a nearly insufferable brat! At least, that’s how he struck me, at first.

In “A Choice of Accommodations,” Amit and his wife Megan, a physician, have traveled to the Berkshires to attend the wedding of Amit’s old school friend, Pam Borden. They have left their daughters with Megan’s parents so they can have a romantic getaway, but instead, the trip exposes fissures in their relationship.

Five stories comprise the first part of this collection. Each is like a small novel, filled with discreet pleasures that are inevitably overshadowed by anguish, guilt, and sorrow. Problems that commonly face all families are magnified and complicated by cultural ambivalence.

The second part of Unaccustomed Earth consists of three interlinked stories. Each concerns Hema and Kaushik, a woman and a man who are brought together by destiny more than once. The pain of an irreconcilable loss hovers over these tales. At one point, Kaushik flees his family, working his solitary way up the coast of Maine in the middle of winter:

“I had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste that tremendous power my mother possessed forever.

I can’t say enough about Lahiri’s gorgeous, gorgeous writing. This book helped me to understand why I pick up, and then just as quickly put down, so much contemporary fiction. IMHO, it can’t hold a candle to this. With this book, Lahiri has raised the bar very, very high.

(I just have to throw this in at this point: one of the ways in which I judge writers of fiction is how well they handle writing about sex. There’s a scene in one of these stories that totally erased my doubts on that score - it was a “Wow!” And now, I’m going to monitor the library’s reserve list on this title…)

In 2000, Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Interpeter of Maladies. She followed this story collection with the novel, The Namesake. I recommend both highly, though for me, the former has a slight edge. Lahiri is a master of the short form narrative. My only question about her at this point is whether, in her future work, she will be moving outside the sphere of the Indian-American experience, which clearly constitutes her comfort zone. On the other hand, it won’t bother me if she doesn’t. She has made that world so real, so vivid - and so universal.

And now, I give you Jhumpa Lahiri:

My husband just walked by the computer and exclaimed, “What a jaw-dropper!” I figure if she gets worn out from all that writing, she can make movies instead! (In fact, she appears in the film version of The Namesake, which i have not yet seen.)

Those devoted to the works of Shakespeare should enjoy this article about Stephen Greenblatt that appeared in the Sunday New York Times’s Arts & Leisure section. Seems that Greenblatt, one of our leading Shakespeare scholars and author of the wonderfully readable Will in the World , has himself written a play!

[Stephen Greenblatt, left, with his collaborator Charles Mee]

Here’s a review of Will in the World that appeared recently in the Howard County Library’s blog, “Highly Recommended.”

How endlessly tiring it must be for those who know and love Liverpool, a vibrant city rich in history (some of it very dark), that so many of the world’s people know only one thing about it…

Yeah, yeah, yeah…

(Here’s a post from Martin Edwards’s blog on the newly opened Hard Day’s Night Hotel.)

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Harry Devlin is a solicitor who lives and works in Liverpool. He’s in his office one morning, is going through his messages, when he comes upon the following:

“In Memory

Harry Devlin

Died suddenly,

Liverpool

Midsummer’s Eve

Few events can be as unnerving as reading your own obituary. And Harry is appropriately unnerved. Meanwhile, young women in the area are being murdered. The perpetrator is inflicting the same telltale injury on each of his victims. Is there a serial killer on the loose? Harry has a penchant for running his own investigations, and when Kay, a young woman he knows and likes, is found dead, he has all the motive he needs to look into the matter, especially since the official police inquiry seems to be going nowhere fast.

Waterloo Sunset is the eighth novel featuring Harry Devlin. I don’t think that the first seven books in this series have been “officially” published here. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to ascertain this information, what with small presses - and smaller presses - flitting about. But I don’t want for a minute to put these businesses down. Poisoned Pen Press, which has many fine titles on its list, is the publisher of Waterloo Sunset and of the excellent Lake District mysteries featuring Daniel Kind and Hannah Scarlett.

It can be disadvantageous to the reader to jump into a series in the middle, but I felt that I got to know Harry Devlin rather quickly. As he enters his middle years, Harry at first seems sadder and wiser, having suffered some painful personal losses. But he is not by nature a passive person, and once roused to righteous anger, as he is when he learns of Kay’s murder, he won’t rest until he has answers. There are times when he resembles the proverbial bull in a china shop, and I shook my head and thought, Harry, Harry, what a foolish/dangerous/outrageous thing to do! But I ended by admiring the guy and liking him, too.

Martin Edwards paints a crowded canvas here, and I did have some trouble at first keeping track of all the characters. The process became easier, though, once the narrative gained momentum. And at the same time that Edwards is ratcheting up the tension, the city of Liverpool itself is coming into increasingly clear focus.

In accordance with an European Union initiative, Liverpool has been designated a European Capital of Culture for 2008. (For more information about Culture Capitals, see Wikipedia.) This is basically a chance for Liverpool to strut its stuff. It also provides Martin Edwards with an opportunity to salt his novel with tongue-in-cheek allusions to Liverpool’s new status. There’s a janitorial service called Culture City Cleaners. And there’s Cultural Companions, employers of attractive young women on the lookout for easy money. They get entangled with men looking for more than cultivated conversation. From these encounters, trouble flows in copious streams…

Cue: “Ferry Cross the Mersey,” by Gerry and the Pacemakers

(I admit it - I’m nostalgic for sweetly unpretentious songs like this one.)

Harry’s inquiries take him to Crosby beach, where he encounters a man who must have witnessed a murder. Why? Because he is standing close to where it happened. But he will never divulge his secrets, because he cannot. He is made of iron, and he is not alone: “‘Another Place,’ where where one hundred iron men stared out at sand, sea and sky.”

The sculptor is Antony Gormley, of “Angel of the North’ fame.

We had the pleasure of meeting Martin Edwards on our Smithsonian Mystery Lovers’ Tour in September. He is a warm, engaging, and witty speaker. These qualities inform his writing as well. I enjoyed the Liverpool lore; also, Edwards’s allusions to specific songs serve as cultural markers and reminded me of the novels of Peter Robinson. (This would be about the highest compliment I could pay a writer of crime fiction!)

I was going to entitle this post: “Two Thrillers,” but I decided that while that term certainly applies to the Harris novel, it’s rather less descriptive of the Simenon. Then I thought about the fact that the creation of suspense is more to do with the craft of storytelling than it is with a specific genre of fiction. After all, I’ve read numerous mysteries in which there was hardly any suspense at all, and I’ve read love stories in which the suspense is positively excruciating. (Joanna Trollope is very good at that sort of thing; so, for that matter, is Jane Austen.)

Then I decided not to worry about any of it and just start writing!

The eponymous ghost in Robert Harris’s novel is actually a ghostwriter. His task is to produce a readable memoir purportedly written by Adam Lang, a charismatic former prime minister. Lang had been an extraordinarily popular and effective politician until he insisted that Britain support the American president’s war on terror. Sound familiar - Bush’s poodle, etc.? Well, yes, there’s more than hint of Tony Blair in Adam Lang, but as the novel’s plot unfolds, it becomes clear that we’re dealing with a “what if” scenario that is at a pretty far remove from Blair’s present circumstances.

The novel’s action begins in Great Britain, but the scene quickly shifts to Martha’s Vineyard, where Lang, his wife Ruth, and the rest of his entourage are holed up for the time being. It’s the dead of winter, and the idea is to keep Lang out of the public eye, sequestered on the remote, sparsely populated Vineyard while work on the memoir gets under way. Actually, there already exists a completed memoir, but it is considered to be all but unreadable. It had been written by a former close associate of Lang’s, Michael McAra. Alas, McAra is not available to revise his work: some two weeks prior, his body had been found washed up on a secluded cove on the island. The new ghostwriter’s task is to rework the existing material into a readable, saleable form. It seems like a fairly straightforward assignment, but it turns out to be anything but.

What seems at first like a fairly simple set-up gets complicated very quickly. The escalating crisis seems all the more urgent due to Harris’s terrifically effective use of first person narration. By severely limiting the point of view to that of the writer, we are forced to share his bewilderment, a bewilderment that soon shifts to unease and finally becomes full blown fear. The more answers he gets, the more questions he has. And no sooner has he started to make progress on the book than a nasty accusation against Lang, already being played up in the press, becomes the basis for possible legal action by an international tribunal.

And still, there lingers a particularly disturbing question:Just how did Michael McAra die? And what does his death imply with regard to the fate of his successor?

Robert Harris has produced a thriller in the classic mode. The Ghost is an edge-of-the-seat page turner; the quality of the writing is consistently high, while in depth characterization is by no means sacrificed on the altar of a fast paced plot. But I would expect no less from this incredibly versatile author of two historical novels that I thoroughly enjoyed: Pompeii and Imperium. Would I place The Ghost in one of my favorite fiction categories, “thrillers with brains?” Most definitely.

The “ghost” himself is a flawed but fundamentally decent human being; I was rooting for him throughout. And by the way - I would refer to him by his proper name - if only I knew it…

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A woman walks into a police station in Paris to report her husband missing. This seemingly prosaic opening presages a jarring, baffling series of events in Monsieur Monde Vanishes, a 1952 novel by Georges Simenon.

AsI read on, I fully expected to be following a police investigation while checking in periodically with la famille Monde. Instead, I found myself traveling alongside Monsieur Monde himself, as he disappears further and further into the interior of France. (I’m not giving much away here; this change in point of view occurs in the latter part of the book’s first chapter.)

Norbert Monde works for Monde and Company, a firm of brokers and exporters founded by his grandfather in 1843. He and his wife had both been married before; each has a son, and Norbert also has a married daughter.

Like Louis Thouret in Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard, Norbert Monde lives a life solidly grounded in the bourgeois milieu of mid-twentieth century France. And like Thouret, he has reached a crucial juncture and knows that in order to avoid a terrible crisis, he must radically change that life. Louis Thouret has been forced to take drastic action due to the loss of his job. Monsieur Monde, on the other hand, is quite secure in his employment. In fact, he is quite secure in all facets of his existence. and it is that very security from which he feels impelled to flee.

At first, Monsieur Monde seems curiously passive. Events carry him forward willy-nilly: “He was not thinking of Madame Monde; he was not thinking of anything. He was conscious of moving restlessly in the midst of an outsize universe.” He continues in this mode until a fateful encounter changes everything.

One of the best things about Monsieur Monde Vanishes is Simenon’s vivid depiction of the demi-monde of mid twentieth century France. Within this twilight world, Norbert Monde makes his way through a landscape that offers no ready made road maps:

He was a man who, for a long time, had endured the human condition without being conscious of it, as others endure an illness of which they are unaware. He had always been a man living among other men and like them he had struggled, jostling amid the crowd, now feebly and now resolutely, without knowing whither he was going.

And now, in the moonlight, he suddenly saw life differently, as though with the aid of some miraculous X-ray.

I admit that it took me a while to catch the rhythm of this novel. Once I did, I was mesmerized. In a post that appeared on his blog last month, Martin Edwards quotes John Banville’s praise of Simenon’s non-Maigret novels. They were, Banville avers, instrumental in his decision to try his hand at crime fiction (which he now writes as Benjamin Black). All I can say is, small wonder.