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.

An eclectic and intriguing list of favorites, appearing on Medieval Mysteries, was recently brought to my attention. (One of the things I like about this site is that it highlights works of nonfiction as well as fiction and mystery.) This particular list was compiled by M.B. Gilbride, one of the site’s three reviewers. It was begun as a list of “all-time favourite medieval books,” but Gilbride ranges far afield here, regarding both genres and time periods.

“M.B. Gilbride” is a heavily cloaked pseudonym. Click here for is his/her list.

Two novels included in this enumeration have also given me great pleasure: Morality Play by Barry Unsworth and The Egyptian by Mika Waltari.

This is a good place for me to plug two favorite nonfiction titles about the Middle Ages. Eric Jager’s The Last Duel is a great example of nonfiction that reads like fiction; from the halfway point to the end I couldn’t put this book down. And then, of course, there’s the book that first sparked my interest in this time period: A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman.

[Barbara Tuchman, 1912-1989]

Another annnotated list that I frequently consult is “Mysteries To Take to a Desert Island” by the late Grobius Shortling (aka Wyatt James). This list mixes the “usual suspects” with completely unfamiliar authors and titles - at least, they were unfamiliar to me.

The kickoff title is A Coffin for Demetrios by the great Eric Ambler. I had the good fortune to be reading this thirteen years ago in Paris, where the culminating action of the novel takes place.

[Eric Ambler, 1909-1998]

I just finished listening to the latest in the No.1 Ladies’ Detective series, The Miracle at Speedy Motors. As always, with Lisette Lecat’s subtle and sensitive reading, it was pure delight. Alexander McCall Smith’s gentle humor is mixed with a sadness just as gentle. As he charts the lives of his characters, some feckless, some reserved to the point of timidity, the author’s love of Africa in general and Botswana in particular shines through.

But meanwhile, it’s business as usual for Mma Ramotswe, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, Mma Makutsi, Mr. Polopetsi, and the rest of the cast of characters at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors (which also houses the office of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency). Mma Ramotswe receives mysterious letters containing veiled - and not so veiled - threats. A woman in search of her family comes to the agency and asks for help. Mma Makutsi and her fiance Phuti Radiphuti, proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, make a fateful purchase together: a spacious bed, with a spectacular headboard shaped like a large heart and upholstered in bright red velvet.

And most poignantly, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni goes in search of a cure for the paralysis of Motholeli, the foster daughter that he and Mma Ramotswe are raising in their modest home on Zebra Drive.

One of my favorite scenes in the book occurs as a heavy rain is tapering off:

“Flying ants. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the air was filling with flying ants, rising up from their secret burrows in the rain-softened ground, gaining altitude on beating wings, dipping down again. It was a familiar sight following the rains, one of those sights that took one back to childhood no matter what age one was, and brought to mind memories of chasing these ants, grabbing them from the air, and then eating them, for their peanut-butter taste and crunchiness.

Toward the end of this luminous novel, Mma Ramotswe speaks of ordinary miracles that occur every day. And I couldn’t help thinking of the fact that I was called to fill in at the last minute at my alma mater, the Central Library, Wednesday night - and who should appear but a patron I hadn’t seen a long time who just happens to share my love of British police procedurals!

Okay, maybe not a miracle - but certainly a fortuitous meeting. We fans of that crime fiction category constitute a somewhat small group. For most American readers, familiarity with this subgenre begins and ends with Elizabeth George. Ah, but there is so much more!

Doing readers’ advisory for this patron is a real challenge, as she’s well up on most of the luminaries in the field: Reginald Hill, Ruth Rendell, Peter Robinson, et. al. She hadn’t read John Harvey for a while, so I urged to try his latest, as well as Peter Lovesey’s. And I recommended wholeheartedly The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill.* Finally, I hope she tunes into this blog, because for some inexplicable reason, I forgot to tell her about Peter Turnbull! For me, the great challenge of readers’ advisory has always been the need to summon up titles and authors from out of thin air. I keep a running list, and Turnbull is most certainly on it - plus I just wrote a review of Once a Biker **- but still, he didn’t come to mind while the patron was standing in front of me. Only later, when I was back home, did I remember..ah, well, I believe the expression for that is “l’esprit d’escalier” - the perfect riposte you think of as you’re climbing the stairs and heading off to bed.

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I find the simple goodness of Precious Ramotswe, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and Motholeli deeply moving. And Alexander McCall Smith’s uncanny ability to depict that goodness in a way that is neither cloying nor sentimental is - well, a miracle.

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* I was rather amused to read the following in a review of The Various Haunts of Men, the novel that precedes The Pure in Heart in the Simon Serraiiler series:

“I confess that I had not paid any attention to [Susan Hill] because of her seemingly plain name, which did not cause me to sit up and take notice. Now that I’ve read her, I realize that her name belies her literary complexity.

Well said! And what a refreshingly candid admission from George Easter, the reviewer and the editor/publisher of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine.

** Since I posted the review of Once a Biker, Martin Edwards has comtributed a thoughful comment. One of the things that has really impressed me in meeting with British writers of crime fiction is their tremendous generosity toward one another.

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 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.

Re Donna Leon’s novel The Girl of His Dreams; with what pleasure did I encounter mention of a certain Venetian landmark, as Commissario Brunetti speeds via police launch to a watery crime scene:

“They passed Palazzo Mocenigo, then the imbarcadero of Sant’ Angelo, and then they came abreast of the stairs running down into the water to the left of Palazzo Benzon.”

Ah, yes - the Palazzo Mocenigo! This was the sumptuous residence of the family into which Lucia Memmo married while still in her teens. It was just the beginning of the long and turbulent life. Born in 1770, Lucia starts out as a naive, overprotected girl and goes on to become the quintessential woman of substance. Here’s my review of Lucia, and here’s an interview with author Andrea di Robilant, her direct descendant. ( I am envious of his ability to connect so directly and intimately with his ancestors.)

In which Your Faithful Blogger, stuck inside due to inclement weather, reads, writes, and reflects on the following:

Michael Pollan’s terrific “Why Bother?” in the April 20th “Green Issue” of The New York Times Magazine. (April 20? I’m running behind; what can I say…)

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As I gazed into the woods behind our house, I took in for the first time how quickly the trees have leafed out. There are no evergreens back there, so in the winter it’s all bare branches and spindly trunks. There’s a footpath just beyond, though, and I like to watch people walking their dogs. This becomes increasingly difficult once the leafing out process nears completion.

Anyway, all of this put me in mind of a painting by Rene Magritte. It’s called “Le blanc-seing,” which roughly translates as “free hand” or “free rein:”

I first heard of this artist when The Museum of Modern Art put on a major retrospective of his works. This was a long time ago. Magritte died in 1967; he may have been still living at the time of this exhibit. Some scoffed at the paintings, calling them gimmicky; I thought it was the most fun I’d ever had in a museum! Here’s why:

[From top to bottom: The Lovers, The Listening Room, The Sirens, Time Transfixed, The Menaced Assassin]

Born in the province of Hainaut, Rene Magritte lived for most of his life in Brussels. He’s right up there with Georges Simenon and Hercule Poirot in my personal pantheon of favorite Belgians.

[Rene Magritte, photographed by Lothar Wolleh in Brussels, 1967]

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On the DVD front, we watched one of the Ruth Rendell Mysteries, “Orchard Walls.” Set in wartime, this is a gripping tale of illicit love and lost innocence. And it features an early performance by an actress whose artless appeal has captivated fans of PBS’s Foyle’s War: Honeysuckle Weeks.

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I was deeply moved by today’s post on the blog The Other World.

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I have now encountered the use of the 2004 tsunami as a plot device in two recent works of fiction: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri and The Water’s Lovely by Ruth Rendell. In an interesting instance of synchronicity, I encountered yet another mention of that terrible disaster yesterday in Susan Jacoby’s masterful The Age of American Unreason. In a chapter entitled “Middlebrow Culture from Noon to Twilight,” Jacoby discusses authors like Allen Drury, Irving Stone and James Michener. In a footnote, she writes:

I immediately thought of Hawaii when I read about the number of lives lost in the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami because many people, watching the tide suddenly recede, had walked out to see the creatures and coral formations revealed on the ocean floor, only to have the tsunami wave return with deadly force. Michener describes a similar scene in his novel.

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

As part of a massive clean-up effort, I grabbed a stack of Drood Reviews and headed for the recycling pile (or, recycling mountain, as it soon came to be known). I was half way there before I looked - really looked - at what I had in my hands. And realized what small treasures I was holding.

The Drood Review of Mystery began publishing in 1982 and ceased, in a rather appropriately mysterious manner, in 2005. Many of us devotees of the genre had been clinging to Drood since the demise of The Armchair Detective in 1996. Armchair was a thick, boisterous mag chock full of reviews, author interviews and profiles, media news, and more. It had lots of advertising, but because they were for mystery bookstores, small presses, and various crime fiction titles, these ads were interesting and welcome rather than noxious and disruptive, as is most often the case with that plague of modern capitalism.

Here’s what’s said about Armchair Detective on the Thrilling Detective site:

The one and only. The late and lamented. The standard by which all other non-fiction mags are judged. This quarterly was around forever (or at least since 1967). It began as a mimeographed newsletter by Allen J. Hubin, spent a few years under the sponsorship of the University of California, and eventually found a home with Otto Penzler, as part of his Mysterious Press. The journal of record for the entire genre. A bit stodgy at times, and it was usually out of date by the time it finally came out, but back issues are well worth hunting down. It’s still recommended, and it is still missed.

Drood Review was a very different kettle of fish. It was shorter and carried no advertising. And the writing, IMHO, tended to be more erudite, analytical, and elegant. Its reviewers and commentators assessed the state of the genre and mined its past for overlooked gems. They urged us to read good crime fiction that was not being widely reviewed. They attacked controversial subjects like racism and gender prejudice head-on, with verve and intelligence. They alerted us to reference works on various aspects of our favorite genre.

One of my favorite features in Drood was the yearly “Editors’ Picks.” It’s interesting to look back from the vantage point of several years on and see what was selected back then. For instance, in the May/June 2002 issue, eight novels were selected from a mind boggling nine-hundred-plus titles published that year: Final Copy by Jan Brogan, Echo Burning by Lee Child, Red Hook by Gabriel Cohen, Grandmother Spider by James D. Doss, Six-Pound Walleye by Elizabeth Gunn, Poor Tom Is Cold by Maureen Jennings, The Good German by Joseph Kanon, and The Reaper by Peter Lovesey.

I’m a great fan of Lovesey’s work, and The Reaper is a really delicious little standalone. But I really got a kick out of seeing Red Hook on this list. The annotation begins, “The setting - the Red Hook section of Brooklyn - in this first novel is as evocatively rendered as in any book we’ve read; its history is smoothly integrated into the novel, both atmospherically and plot-wise.” Here here! It took a while for the sequel to appear, but The Graving Dock has more than fulfilled the promise bodied forth in Red Hook.

For a list of “Editor’s Choice” selections from 1989 to 2000, click here.

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I also found the January/February 2001 edition which covered the conclusion of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse series. There’s a review of the final novel, The Remorseful Day (I’ve read the book but I’ve never been able to watch the film); it’s followed by an intriguing analysis of why the series enjoyed such enormous success:

“Dexter makes Morse attractive for readers by making him attractive to Lewis.Lewis provides a humanizing element, connecting Morse to us as readers. He is Sancho Panza to Morse’s Quixote, Patroclus to Morse’s Achilles….If Morse is a genius, Lewis makes him an approachable one.

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From its inception to its cessation, Drood Review was edited and published by Jim Huang. One look at his bio/resume will show that he has performed yeoman service when it comes to promoting and appreciating crime fiction. Jim’s Crum Creek Press has published two of my all time favorite mystery references:

In 2003, Jim opened The Mystery Company in Indiana, just north of Indianapolis. I strongly recommend the most recent post on Jim’s blog, “The Traditional Marketplace.” A cri de coeur from an independent bookseller - and passionate book lover - trying to hang on to a modest share of the market, it is enough to make you weep.

I wonder if Jim has ever thought of putting together a collection of essays and reviews that have appeared in The Drood Review over the years. I for one would snap it up! Meanwhile, if you look at the website for the magazine, the word “hiatus” is used in a rather tantalizing way. Is there any hope for a revival, I wonder…

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