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.