Crime Round-Up

It’s the last week of term here, which generally means a student log jam, fitting everyone in before the vacation begins. And it’s been snowing; not enough to transport us to a winter wonderland, just enough to make the pavements treacherous and the traffic back-up, although it’s supposed to get worse tomorrow. Why can’t snow only fall overnight? At least then it gives you a chance to get up in the morning, consider your options and make sensible decisions. What usually happens instead is a complete gridlock of traffic, with the motorways turned into lorry parks and people trapped in their cars for ten hours. Anyway, this is a slightly hasty post as I attempt to catch up on a number of crime novels I’ve recently read, with not quite enough time to do them justice.

Nicola Upson – An Expert in Murder

This is the first in a series of crime novels (there must be at least three out now) that feature real life crime writer, Josephine Tey as the main character – although not the detective, it should be noted. Upson provides a clever mix of truth and make-believe in her narrative. It begins with Tey on her way down to London to the theatre where her play, Richard of Bordeaux, is nearing the end of a phenomenally successful run. On the train she meets a young fan and ends up making a surprisingly quick emotional connection to her; but tragedy strikes when the train arrives in London and the young woman is found murdered in dramatic circumstances. The context for the story is true – Tey did write a box office smash under a pseudonym, and both in life and fiction, she did not take well to fame, not least thanks to an unjust accusation of plagiarism of the kind that so often accompanies huge successes, and that wounded her deeply. In the novel, this is drawn out into a significant thread.

You can see why Upson chose Josephine Tey as a main protagonist – she lived in turbulent times (the legacy of WW1 is woven very plausibly into the narrative of the crime), had a cool career, and enough flamboyant friends to provide a swarm of jolly secondary characters. But I admit I did feel it would have been so much better if Upson had chosen to write about Tey because she was an exciting, eccentric personality. As it is, she is that most wishy-washy of characters, the nice, sympathetic person. She has no role to play in solving the crime, apart from being the bumbling person who ends up in the middle of danger and who could have avoided it by thinking twice. This may sound like I disliked it, but not at all: I enjoyed it well enough. It is a competently written, well-plotted and thoughtfully composed novel. The setting is a very good one, and I didn’t guess whodunit, nope, not even close. So there are plenty of reasons to give this series a go, even if for me, it wasn’t as good as proper golden age crime.

Joanne Harris – Gentlemen & Players

At St Oswald’s boys’ grammar school, the start of a new school year is plagued by worse troubles than the usual rivalries, disputes and crises. One of the new teaching staff has returned to the school after a decade spent festering the wrongs and injustices of the past, and has arrived with the darkest kind of revenge in mind. Now this was a splendid novel, taut, fierce, intricate, clever. The narrative alternates between our evil protagonist, set to bring the old school to its knees and Roy Straitley, the astute and ironic Latin teacher who is nearing retirement (and being pushed faster towards it than is polite by his colleagues), but who may yet save the day. As our unnamed fiend starts to put his dastardly plans into action, we are gradually given the back story that explains why the school is the target of subtle terrorism. Roy Straitley, on the other hand, has enough trivial problems of his own to solve, what with the German department’s latest attempt to invade his territory (in the form of commandeering his room) and the usual bunch of boyish mishaps, but his experienced teacher’s nose scents danger of a more menacing kind, and despite his age, weight and general unsuitability for the role of hero, he finds himself drawn into the deadly chess game his opponent has planned.

I really enjoyed this, although I also felt that the likelihood of anyone actually getting away with the crimes described was rather low. Frankly, it doesn’t much matter unless you are a stickler for plausibility. The narrative carries the reader along on its fast current and has a twist of stunning brilliance towards the end. Be warned that is also gets very dark, in a way that may feel a bit unexpected. But Joanne Harris is a reliably good writer, and the best part is the voice of Roy Straitley – humane and humourous and grumpy and sharp, a classic entrenched teacher’s voice. I rooted for him in a hopelessly partisan way.

Megan Abbott – Die A Little

I am always attracted by noir and, forgive the superficiality here, the cover of this novel promised such splendid, cheesy, 1950s glammed-up noir that I had to give it a go. On the whole, glam noir is what you get. The story concerns school teacher Lora King, whose unusually close relationship to her brother, police investigator Bill, is abruptly altered by his swift marriage to the volatile but charming Alice. An ex-Hollywood wardrobe assistant, Alice seems at first to fit perfectly into the role of devoted suburban housewife, but as Lora gets to know her better, so more and more incidents serve as warning signals. Alice disappears from her job for days without warning, has clandestine meetings with dodgy men and brings an un-choice relic of her past with her in the form of her messed-up friend, Lois Slattery. It’s enough to start Lora on some quiet investigations of her own, and before she knows it, she is caught up in the seedy underbelly of Hollywood and its greedy traffic in drugs and prostitution. As Lora tries to find out the truth about Alice to save her brother, so she realizes that her own life is heading down a slippery slope.

I felt I ought to have enjoyed this one more than I did. It’s very well written, very assiduously placed in 1950s America, full of period detail and bold in its characterization. But oddly enough, the writing somehow got in the way of the story a bit in its early sections. Lovely writing, when you are offered it to admire just for its own sake, slows the pace down, and crime writing needs that octane-infused quick start if it’s going to really win you over. So it took me about half the book to really get into it. But then I did devour the end, which was well done. I’d like to read another one by this author, and once again there are about three or four more books in the series to choose from. Much promise here, hopefully fulfilled further down the line.

Thanksgiving Night

I think it’s a rather lovely coincidence that I happened to pick this novel up last week and now find myself reviewing it on Thanksgiving Day, no less. A while back, when I was writing about Jonathan Franzen, I think, someone asked me who I thought was the greatest living American writer. Or at least that’s the question I retained. The answer is, maybe, possibly, Richard Bausch. Is he well known at all in the States? Only he seems scarcely to have been heard of over here, despite a string of novels and short story collections. What I found in his novel, Thanksgiving Night, was a meditation on the paradoxical bonds of love and hate that bind families together, very similar to Franzen territory except that it concerns people with less money and fewer prospects, and it was written in a luminescent prose, lit up from within by the compassion Bausch has for his characters. It was a portrait of small town America, sad and cautiously optimistic, delivered so gently that you might almost miss the dramatic events that fill its pages, near-death experiences, rages and rampages, infidelity, loss and the endless quest for dependable love. I thought it was wonderful.

The novel opens in a warm Virginia late summer with Oliver Ward, general building contractor, turning up at the house of two crazy old ladies, Holly and Fiona. By one of those generational twists of fate they are aunt and niece despite being only a couple of years apart in age, and have spent most of their lives living together, if not near one another, and don’t really know how to do anything different. This is becoming problematic as old age and reduced circumstances mean they have little to do but take their frustrated emotions out on one another, and the results are always quite spectacular. Oliver appears at the door in response to a telephone summons that neither will admit to having made (it turns out to have been Fiona) and interrupts a huge row. Seizing his advantage, he fabricates a $60 call-out charge and is sent to see Holly’s son, Will Butterfield, to get his money. Will, owner of a local bookstore, lives a few streets away with his second wife, Elizabeth. His first wife, also called Elizabeth, walked out on her family as they were heading home after what had appeared to be a perfectly normal vacation. Many years have passed since then, his children have grown, and his new marriage seems to have given him recompense and stability, but it will turn out over the course of the narrative that this shocking event has left a deeper legacy of darkness and resentment than Will wants to admit.

As the story unfolds, so the links between the families of Oliver Ward and Holly Butterfield will develop and grow, the lives of the family members intertwining in unexpected ways. Everyone has their particular story, their particular wounds and sorrows. There’s Oliver’s daughter, Alison, trying to hold her family together, bringing up her anxious and withdrawn children after a painful divorce, trying to help her rather unreliable father to keep in work and off the drink. And Will’s second wife, Elizabeth, at the end of her tether, thanks to the endless ructions caused by the two elderly ladies and troubled by her problem students at the school where she works. Then there are Will’s children from his first marriage – in particular, the self-obsessed Gail, whose announcement that she is determined to search for her mother enrages Will. And acting as a buffer and a foil, is the elderly Catholic priest, Brother Fire, friend to both Holly and Fiona, who is suffering a crisis of faith for the first time in his long life of devoted service.

This is one of those sprawling narratives that spawns a host of sub-plots all of which rebound and relate to each other. But one of the main themes that arises again and again, only so gently and softly that you have to look close to spot it, is the problems caused by lack of self-control. Holly and Fiona can’t control their emotions, Oliver can’t resist a drink, Elizabeth has lost control of her negativity, Gail can’t control her desire to inflict pain on those she loves. But Bausch’s storytelling is alive with sympathy for the origins of these weaknesses. ‘The whole condition of the living universe,’ he writes, ‘understood in the viscera and the bone, is the feeling of something carved, by courage and necessity, out of fear.’ Life is often hard and unrewarding for the characters in this novel, struggling to make ends’ meet or to keep anxiety at bay. It’s no wonder that they sometimes forget themselves to steal the little bits of reward and revenge that they think they need.

And this inclination is exacerbated by the natural condition of the family, Bausch suggests. His families are places where self-control is easily lost because the other members are too close, somehow, to be seen. The familiarity that breeds security and comfort can cross a line and become license to attack or neglect, depending on the circumstances. In the heart of the family, we are most open, most ourselves, most forgetful of the strictures of ethics. We lash out at the people we believe we can depend upon to take it. Richard Bausch explores various possible consequences of this as events speed up towards Thanksgiving Day and the dinner that will unite both families and witness the climax of the novel’s storylines. There are winners and losers, of course, but the cautious optimism retains the upper hand. The ideological heart of the novel beats in the breast of the priest, Brother Fire, who has the revelation that real, salvationary help from one member of humanity to another ‘is usually a matter not much more complicated than a kind word or gesture at the right time.’ It’s exemplary of the quiet, clear ethos of this novel, and it may just be true. May kindness be our watchword, and the source of much gratitude.

Over at the blog hop today, the question is: what makes a modern classic? Ouch, that’s a hard one, but undoubtedly beautiful writing and universal themes play their part. A classic has to last through the ages, so it needs these stable qualities. But it also has to reveal something particular about its age, about the ideas that dominated the time of its writing. Margaret Atwood writes modern classics, but whether she’ll be remembered for her dystopian fictions or her feminist-inspired novels, I’m not sure. Kazuo Ishiguro ought to be up there too, for his clever, quirky works. And I feel sure that Richard Bausch deserves to join the ranks, although this novel doesn’t have quite enough of a punch or a hook to hold it in the public eye for generations to come. I’m looking forward to reading more of him, though, and hopefully stumbling on the book that will assure him his place in the pantheon of classic writers.