Interred with Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carroll
I put this book on my queue courtesy of Carrie at Mommy Brain. Interred with Their Bones is an amazing first novel from Jennifer Lee Carrell, an Ivy League English lit. scholar whose first book was about the history of smallpox. Except for the fact that I am in the middle of a reading willpower exercise, I wouldn’t have put it down for a minute!
(I have written in my other blog about the challenges of being a reading addict; the willpower exercise is an effort (hopefully to be more of a long-term habit) not to let reading subsume my entire life – silly, I know! – but instead maintain balance with pesky details like dishes, laundry, sleep, children… So it did take me two whole days to string together the necessary minutes to finish the book!)
This mystery takes its grounding in two pieces of Shakespearean scholarship: an historically documented but missing play (Cardenio); and the lively debate around whether the glovemaker’s son from Stratford is the true author of the incredible body of work given his name. The protagonist is a Harvard Shakespeare scholar turned director, Kate Stanley, who is drawn into a globe-crossing chase of mayhem, murder, and Shakespeareana by her mentor.
This is an intellectual mystery. There is an extraordinary level of intricacy throughout, and the author deftly avoids turning that into a slog through a mire of words. The amount of attention given to the plot does result in the characters being less deeply formed than I would have wished, but I am a character-driven reader and I still felt good resonance with them. Carrell creates an evocative environment for the story as well, taking us on a three-dimensional journey through locales such as the renovated Globe Theatre in London; the Widener Library at Harvard; and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, to name just a few.
As a point of reference, this book had a similar feel to the best-seller The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which I also very much enjoyed (and which comparison is common in reviews of the book). Not being Catholic, or even religious, I had no problem with Brown’s adaptation of some of the wilder theories of Christianity into his book; other readers might appreciate the greater historical authenticity of Interred with Their Bones. All in all, a wonderful read, highly recommended by me, your guide – a solid A, 4.5 of 5 stars, etc., etc. Enjoy!
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Written in 1926, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the fourth Hercule Poirot novel and Christie’s seventh book overall. It takes place after “mon cher Hastings” has left with his Cinderella for Argentina (see Murder on the Links). Poirot has retired to the country to grow vegetable marrows (known in the U.S. as summer squash; zucchini is one of this category), and of course, a murder occurs in his vicinity. A woman kills herself after being blackmailed for murdering her husband, but she sends a letter to her beau explaining her actions, and he is murdered before the identity of the blackmailer can be revealed. Poirot accepts the assistance of his neighbor, local physician Dr. Sheppard, in researching the case, and enjoys his company in the absence of Arthur Hastings.
I would definitely place this book in Christie’s top ten; in fact, I would place it in the top ten of all mystery books I have read. It’s books like this one that have cemented Agatha’s place among the royalty of mystery writers; and coming so early in her fifty-plus year career, it is evidence for why she is considered by many to be the Queen. (One of the premier mystery awards is called “The Agatha”.) She deserves not only the title of “writer”, but truly that of “creative writer”. So many of her books push the boundaries of the mystery novel – in plot twist, in character type, in structure and style – that it can be quite difficult for a modern writer to find a technique that is not derivative of a Christie invention. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd originates one of those. It’s so powerful that when you come to the end of the book, you’ll turn back to beginning and start over; the knowledge so alters your perspective that it is a completely different book the second time around.
Even more impressive, she manages to do these things with an economy of language that is quite unheard of in the modern mystery genre. Modern mysteries tend to be quite dense and complex, taking several hundreds of pages to tell tales loaded with so much action and intrigue that it is frequently a wonder that the protagonist manages to solve the puzzle. The modern books are also heavy with dialogue and description supporting character development. Both an abundance of action and an abundance of character can be quite enthralling to the reader when well-done, yet it is not a necessary feature of a good mystery. I have always found Christie to be quite evocative of both characters and environments despite the fact that most of her books surround the 200-page threshold; and her plots are always involved and realistic in their exploration of the most base of human actions. I am not sure what drives the increasing complexity of modern literature compared to that of past eras; I hope that readers consuming a steady diet of the modern will still be able to appreciate the beautiful simplicity of so many of the classics, in this genre and others.
Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers
I have been quite busy this month, mostly because my partner has been overtaxed with his consulting and our free time was more limited. I have managed to read some books, but they’ve mostly been of the interlibrary loan, must-return-in-two-days, nonfiction variety that were therefore reviewed at my other blog.
I couldn’t let an entire month go by without offering a review for you to ponder, though, so I pulled out a book I haven’t read in quite a while, and gave it a whirl.
Whose Body? is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy L. Sayers. In introducing this intriguing character – a younger son of an aristocratic family, a seeming dilettante, collector of rare books, yet also a shellshocked survivor of World War One and a pretty egalitarian guy given his socioeconomic class – Sayers skillfully builds a traditional whodunit. The alert reader who pays attention to detail will make note of the subtle information that eventually leads to the killer, and the reader who enjoys simply reading without attempting to presolve the mystery will find plenty of good dialogue and narrative to entertain them.
I went on to read the entire Wimsey series and enjoyed them all very much; in fact, this was probably my least favorite. That had very little to do with Sayers’s skill or the mystery itself; both are quite good. However, the suspected victim in this book is a rich, self-made Jewish financier who convinced an ‘otherwise well-bred’ English lady of the upper class to marry him (by the expedient of them being in love). I do not know whether it represents Sayers’s personal prejudice, or more generally that of the era she was writing in and about, but there is a lot of anti-Semitism in this book. I suspect it is the latter, as there is no continuation of this effect in the other books. Still, it made this first book a bit uncomfortable to read, and I remember experiencing trepidation as I was preparing to read the second Wimsey book. Since there was no recurring anti-Semitic theme, I read as I said the entire series, and I don’t hesitate to recommend them to others.
Innocent in Death by J.D. Robb
This is book 24 in the Eve Dallas series by J.D. Robb (a pseudonym for Nora Roberts). These books are futuristic police mysteries; they are very light and rather formulaic, your basic literary junk food. Eve is a NYPD cop in 2150 or thereabouts; she’s married to the richest man in the world. (This is a facet of almost every Nora Roberts book I’ve ever read, and I’ve probably read almost 100 of her books. It’s not always the fella who’s rich, and they aren’t always billionaires like Roarke, but the intended couple will always end up upper-middle class at the lowest!) These books also fall into the traditional romance novel trap of the man always being just a bit more together than the woman – just enough to save the princess, as it were.
Still, as I’ve disclosed, I’ve read a lot of Roberts’s books and I continue to read them, just as I continue to have a Twix bar every once in a while. The character of Eve Dallas is stimulating. She was a terrifically abused child who became a homicide cop; she is a major control freak and she hates emotional scenes. Still, she is also sensitive and loving and committed to her work and her friends, and the struggle between the aspects of who she is frequently takes center stage. I like her quite a bit, and enjoy seeing the blend of power and vulnerability that is in all of us.
This particular volume dealt with the murder of an innocuous schoolteacher, for which no satisfying motive could be found. It became obvious to me fairly early who the murderer was, not from any clues in the plot itself but from the nature of the character; the ability of such a character to commit a murder meant a large deviation from normal psychology and that deviation was quite apparent in the behavior and dialogue. I don’t generally read a mystery with the intent of figuring the solution before it is revealed, so it didn’t bother me to know, any more than it bothers me not to know.
I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this book or this series except to a reader looking for a very particular type of literary experience. The futuristic cop mystery is heavily saturated with Nora Roberts’s experience as a romance novelist. (In other words, there are the requisite scenes of passion, complete with “throbbing members” and so forth, as well as the relationship dynamics I described above.) The plots are solidly devised, but also deviced – they follow a predictable formula – although the information revealing the killer isn’t always so awkwardly developed as in this particular book. If your preference is for a junk food book, you may just enjoy this one, though.
One Across, Two Down by Ruth Rendell
The traditional appositive for Ruth Rendell is “today’s Agatha Christie” (or something of the sort). She’s never had a mysterious disappearance, but Rendell has been writing mystery novels for more than forty years; she has twenty books in her Inspector Wexford series, starting with her first book, as well as 28 non-series books and sixteen short story collections. She happily goes where Agatha never went, though.
I’ve read all the Wexford books and enjoy them; this year I started reading chronologically through her non-series books. One Across, Two Down is the fourth of these, from 1971, and it packs a punch. Agatha made the murderer the protagonist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but you didn’t know it; in this book you very much are in the story from the beginning from Stanley Manning’s murderous perspective. Funny thing, though: he doesn’t actually murder anyone until the last page.
While the Wexford books are a serious character series, I feel Rendell takes her stand-alone books into a far grittier place. They explore deeply what what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called “the line dividing good and evil [that] cuts through the heart of every human being” (from The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956). Beyond this, in every character she traces the darkest emotions: stifling panic, crowing sadism, numbing despair. Bewilderment, defeat, pity – all the feelings experienced by those inhabiting the space around murder.
Are these depressing books because of their darkness? I don’t think they are, but I’ve never been afraid of seeing or even experiencing darkness; it’s an important part of reality and to my mind serves paradoxically to illuminate the human condition. The actions of darkness may sometimes be evil and destructive, as with murder; the darkness itself simply is, without judgment. (Remember that the actions of darkness can also be creative and good, like the writings of Virginia Woolf.)
I’m excited to see where else Ruth Rendell goes in her writing; she packs a lot of talent and I’m only up to 1976!
