Readit 2011: Whodunnit?

The Readit 2011 theme for July was Whodunnit?  While I don’t often read in this genre, advice from library borrowers and the Novelist Plus database led me too some excellent and varied writers, who in turn led me to conclude that I can only read a limited number of violent and psychopathic murders, before I need some light relief.

All but one of the books I read were part of series, which I found myself pursuing, partly because when I find an author I enjoy reading, I want to prolong that enjoyment, and partly to find out how the recurring characters develop (or don’t) over a number of books.

Mary Higgins Clark’s On the Street Where You Live is the one stand alone title that I read.  It deals with the murders of young women that parallel a series of unsolved killings that occurred in the same costal community more than a hundred years before.  Clark sets up a cast of potential victims and murderers, some with family links to the century old murders, introduces a long lost diary, the possibility of a re-incarnated killer and main character troubled by a broken marriage and stalker.  The tension builds, but reader never doubts that the killer will be found.

Cassandra Clark’s Red Velvet Turnshoe is the second book in a series featuring the Mediaeval Abbess of Meux.  I think that I would have taken more from this book if I had read the first and had a greater understanding of the relationships between the recurring characters, especially as Clark writes to obscure her central character’s thinking, distancing the reader from any emotional engagement.   I also wonder how realistic the depiction of a woman of this time travelling so extensively is.  Despite this, Clark successfully evokes the cold, dirt and discomfort of medieval travel, and writes some intriguing (incidental) characters.

Inger Ash Wolfe is the pseudonym of a “well known literary” author, according the jacket notes of The Calling.  The central character, Hazel Micalef, is a woman in her 60s, acting as a police chief in a small town in rural Canada.  She lives with her impressive mother, deals with crippling back pain, seriously unsupportive superiors and her ex husband (and his new wife) while solving what initially appears to be a series of unrelated killings of terminally ill victims. Wolfe gives the reader just enough glimpses of the killer, alongside the main narrative of the police investigation, to build the tension the reader feels to levels of real anxiety. Highly recommended, though gruesome.  Wolfe has written a second novel, featuring Hazel Micalef, The Taken.

Susan Hill’s “Simon Serailler” series, recommended by a borrower at my library, plays with detective novel conventions.  Serailler, a senior detective in an English Cathedral town, is a minor character in the first novel, The Various Haunts of Men.  The focus is on the characters, including a police detective, who are eventually murdered by a serial killer. In second novel, The Pure in Heart, the focus shifts to Serailler and his extended family, but the ‘crime’ - the disappearance and suspected murder of a child - remains unsolved until the third novel in the series: The Risk of Darkness.  Hill is not scared to cull her recurring characters, via death or promotion.  Nor is she scared to make her main character quite unattractively flawed. I’m looking forward to reading the fourth and fifth titles in the series.

Rennie Airth’s three novels span a twenty year period and feature John Madden, who in the first novel is a police inspector scarred by grief of loosing his family and the trenches of the first world war.  Set at roughly ten year intervals (River of Darkness in 1921, Blood Dimmed Tide in 1932 & Dead of Winter in 1944), the police are shown coming to terms with a range of investigative techniques, including forensics and psychological profiling, as they solve first the murder of an entire family at a country home, then the violent killing of a young child, and lastly the very professional killing of a young Polish refugee in wartime London. Though the novels, essentially police procedurals, do at times rely on coincidence and cliché (all the murderers have cold eyes), they feature a cast of well drawn characters who mature and develop over the series.  Very highly recommended.

Finally, for a little light relief, I turned to Rhys Bowen’s Royal Spyness novels. that are set in the early 1930s, and feature Georgie, the impoverished daughter of the late Duke of Glengary & Ranoch and granddaughter of Queen Victoria’s least attractive daughter.  Invited to lunch with cousin Queen Mary (who has her eye on some of the Ranoch treasures), Georgie is asked to perform a series of “favours”: Spy on Mrs Simpson (Her Royal Spyness), baby sit a foreign princess (A Royal Pain), discover the identity of a would be royal assassin (Royal Flush) & represent the royal family at a wedding in Transylvania (Royal Blood).  In all her endeavours, Georgie is supported by a cast of characters including her “bolter’ of a mother, her (non ducal) grandfather, an ex policeman inflicted with doubtful cockney rhyming slang, an old school chum of independent means living the high life and her love interest, a handsome but impoverished Irish charmer. These novels are a blend humour, drawing room comedy and cosy crime, but hint at the very real misery of depression gripped 1930s London.

Going off on a Tangent

The Readit 2011 theme for June was Go Reads, and I thought that I’d read some travel guides to plan a holiday and some travel writers.  I even borrowed some from the library.  But I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to plan a holiday, or to read about other people’s travels.  I did dip into Jan Morris’ A Writers World: Travels 1950-2000 and enjoyed a few short pieces, but I didn’t recognise the Sydney that she wrote about, and quickly lost interest.

I decided that I needed to tackle the challenge from another perspective, and so turned to fiction.

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy was sitting on my bookshelf, marked for a re-read following Towel Day on the 25^th of May.  My cousin first introduced me to Douglas Adams writing when I was 16, when our extended family was snowed in for more than a week in the English countryside.  No one could get in or out, and food and book supplies were dwindling.  We were surviving on cup-a-soups and I’d read my way through my grandmothers collection Catherine Cookson and Readers Digest condensed novels.  The Hitchhikers Guide was a revelation.  It was funny and thought provoking, and most definitely a different type of book to Tilly Trotter. 

Rereading the Hitchhikers guide, 25 years later, having read all Douglas Adam’s sequels, knowing the trials and tribulations ahead of Arthur Dent, knowing how long he’d have to wait to get a decent cup of tea, was a revelation all over again.  The writing, the ideas, the lunacy, are as strong and fresh as ever. 

Sticking with the fantasy travel theme, I decided that it was time to broaden my understanding of time travel.  Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time was a childhood favourite I’m a big fan of Connie Willis and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife.  A quick search of my library’s catalogue confirmed that time travel crops up far more often in children’s books than it does in books for adults.  I chose two books that were currently available: The Boy I Loved Before by Jenny Colgan (also published as Do You Remember the First Time) and Robert J Sawyer’s Flashforward. 

Bumping into an old boyfriend at a wedding, Colgan’s main character, Flora, realises how dissatisfied she is with her job, her fiancée and life in general.  She wishes she could go back in time to make different choices, and is promptly transported back one month in time and transformed into a 16 year old schoolgirl, living with her parents again.  The story then revolves around Flora trying to fit in as a sixteen year old, encountering mean girls and making a friend at school, preventing her parent’s marriage break up, and sleeping with her ex boyfriends younger brother.  At the end of the month, Flora again attends the wedding, and transforms back into her 30something self, to find that her parents marriage has been saved, her unwanted fiancée conveniently wants to marry someone else, and the old boyfriend is still attracted to her – as is his younger brother who finds her strangely familiar.  I found this a messy and unsatisfying read.  The different elements of the story seemed glued together rather than integrated, and consequently, the conveniently tidy ending for all (one bridegroom substituted for another in the space of a month with no unhappy feelings!) was unbelievable. Far from being the type of sympathetic character you want things to turn out for, Flora is selfish and unlikable, especially in her treatment of the friend she makes as a 16 year old.

Sawyer’s Flashforward deals with freak series of events involving the particle accelerator at CERN that results in the entire human race “flashing” forward to experience a few minutes of their life twenty years in the future.  The characters then cope with the consequences of the flashforward, struggling to work out if the future is inevitable, or with foreknowledge, it can be changed.  This is  a wonderful set up, and I can understand why it appealed to the makers of the TV series it inspired, unfortunately, it does not live up to its promise.  Firstly, Sawyer spends a lot of time explaining and making the science plausible, in a clumsy way that intrudes upon, rather than enhances the storyline.  I would have been happy to accept that the flashforward happened, as a matter of suspended  disbelief. I don’t need to know the detail necessary to recreate the event in my own backyard. 

Secondly, Sawyers characters are one dimensional, obsessed with themselves and lacking empathy for everyone, even those you’d expect them to care for deeply.  As a result they are not just unlikeable, but unbelievable.  They feel like “types” or cogs in a narrative machine, rather than real people with real feelings.   One character, obsessed with “solving” his own future murder, hounds a traumatised young boy for details of an autopsy he witnessed in the flashforward, and barely registers the distress of his brother who is on the verge of suicide.  Another leaves strangers to care for the body of his stepdaughter, who dies as a result of the flashforward, in case he is needed back to work. Most jarring was the language used by a 30 year old character to describe the body of a 50 year old they saw in flashforward.  I’m willing to believe that a 30 year old man might not find a 50 year old woman attractive, but to describe her as a “hag”, and her body as like “fruit gone bad” seems excessive.