Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

Second helpings - small but tasty

Researching forthcoming 2010 releases for my CrimeThruTime site, I noticed that P.F. Chisholm (aka Patricia Finney) finally had a new Sir Robert Carey historical mystery coming out. Pure coincidence that my radio immediately started singing "Glo-o-o-o-o-o-oria” I'm sure—it is the holiday season, after all—but the book is also about 10 years overdue. Still, it's part of a trend I like, offsetting one where just too many unique / quirky / stylish (vs more strictly commercial) mystery authors and books were getting buried quicker than the bodies inside their covers. Instead, some are finding a second life with small publishers.

Poisoned Pen Press, who are bringing out the Carey book, are the ones I first noticed doing something along these lines, with Michael Pearce’s Mamur Zapt and Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher books. Two of my favorite light historical mystery series, by the way, and the perfect counterargument to anyone who insists reading historical mysteries is like being stuck in a boring classroom lecture by Sister Mary Elephant on a bad day, with the author too busy showing off what they know to tell a halfway decent story. You may not like the books on their own merits, but it won't be because they're filled with boring lectures. Both have a rock solid sense of place in space and time, with plenty of historically accurate detail, but if history lessons were like this, you could sell tickets to attend them. The Carey books, originally issued by Walker, are somewhere in between. Highly entertaining, but with enough dialect and use of similar sounding nicknames for everyone to make them a bit more work to get through. Definitely not dull, dry historical lectures disguised as novels though.

Kerry’s series actually kept going in her native Australia, but disappeared completely here in the States in the early 1990s, dropped after the first couple of books. Poisoned Pen picked things up mid-series in the early 21st century, along with the absolutely gorgeous art deco-ish covers they were then being issued under; simultaneously bringing out the new releases and the missing earlier books. Much the same happened with Pearce’s books (except the covers, unfortunately—I really liked the old Mysterious Press ones), with the series getting dropped in the early 1990s here, before getting picked up and released in a similar fashion, starting in 2002.

Poisoned Pen publishes its share of new authors, but has also done this sort of thing with a surprising range of other books, from reissuing P.C. Doherty’s long out of print first novel. The Death of a King—the book that turned me into an historical mystery fan—to restarting Ken Kuhlken’s quirky California music / detective series to being the American publisher for the last few Ruth Dudley Edwards books. And around again to the top of my for review pile, a book by Joann Dobson in a literate, character-driven. traditional series I'd given up on during an extended hiatus.

Perseverance Press is another small press doing its part to keep some quality mystery authors in print. I knew the name Sheila Simonson from a 1990s series that caught my eye because it featured a female former pro basketball player (jealousy doesn't begin to describe it), but kept hold of me because of the nice prose. Lark may no longer dribble onto the page, but thanks to Perseverance Press, Sheila Simonson is back on the scene after 11 years, with an even more beautifully written traditional mystery series set in the Pacific Northwest. While another of Perseverance Press's 2009 releases was Edgar winner Wendy Hornsby's first book in her decidedly non-cozy Maggie MacGowen series for over 10 years.

So if you're looking for some reading that won't be cookie cutter "same old, same old" take a look through some of the small press offerings. Ask your local indy store owner about who's out there offering what. You really can't get that from an Amazon search, and hey, if you're lucky there will be hot cocoa involved. You'll find plenty of options, from reprint specialist Felony and Mayhem to even more specialized Rue Morgue, whose reprints are from the Golden Age, to our own Lynne Patrick's Creme de la Creme, featuring their own group of distinctive new writers.

Oh and while you're taking that walk on the reading wild side, don't forget to look for long lost friends popping up in new places. Hmmm, how many months before the Robert Carey book comes out....

Not my top 10 list

‘Tis the season for Top 10 book lists, something I’m not really good at. Partially because I’ve never been able to work up any enthusiasm for maintaining a precise database of reading past, present and TBR to work with. I’d rather just read. And partially because, while the list is supposed to be books that meant a lot to me, the reason you publish it is to help others find something they’ll enjoy. Unfortunately those two don’t always walk hand in hand along the yellow book road. While The Zen of CSS may have rocked my world by completely changing how I thought about some things, let’s face it, there’s a highly limited group of people likely to share that experience.

So instead of a top 10 list, here are a handful of the books that made a big impression on me this year. While they aren’t all new releases, part of the reason they stood out is that they are all new authors for me or something different from known authors. No particular order here.

The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees is a mystery set in modern Palestine, full of conflicted loyalties and increasingly entrenched beliefs on all sides amidst just too many everyday horrors. Ok, fine. It’s tragic, but been there, seen that on the nightly news. The difference here is that it’s all happening to real people who could easily be your friends or neighbors, people you care about and genuinely experience those horrors through in a way that doesn’t happen with anonymous flickers on a TV screen. Taut, evocative writing, gripping and memorable. I could wish the only American in the book wasn't quite such a negative stereotype since he is the only American, so it just reinforces the stereotype. But it's not as if the stereotype doesn't exist or is extremely rare. Darker than my usual taste, but a book I would hate to have not read.

My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme. Two pages in I was already wondering why on earth I waited so long to read this. Julia’s nephew helped her write and publish this but the voice is 100% Julia: exuberant, forceful, full of life and shamelessly opinionated about everything from the proper way to cook a chicken to the government’s treatment of her diplomat husband. The woman who could laugh freely at herself and at Dan Aykroyd’s hilarious impression of her but also be relentless when dealing with publishers over Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Don’t read it while hungry.

Red Sox Rule: A Season in the Life of a Manager by Michael Holley isn’t the typical sports book. This is more of a character study, covering first what went into creating the person named Terry Francona (and no, not in typical sports book “my 2nd grade teacher and junior high coach were my heroes” fashion), who helped turn the Red Sox from perennial also-rans to winners; then offering a fascinating, “through the eyes of” view of what it was like to be, not anyone, but that particular person in the madhouse that is baseball in Boston. It’s the insight, which wasn’t all directly about sports, that made this stand out for me, not the “insider” info for the fan (yes Manny drove Francona crazy long before he ever publicly acknowledged it). Things such as Francona relaxing during his job interview only after it was clear how prepared and knowledgeable those interviewing him for this job were—I could really relate to that, and it brought Francona alive as a person in a way that reciting great managerial calls couldn’t.

Snake Agent / The Demon and the City / Precious Dragon are the first three books in Liz Williams’ Inspector Chen series. I started the first and barely came up for air before finishing the third. These are mystery / fantasy crossovers set in a near future where cities are franchised—Inspector Chen is assigned to Precinct 13 in Singapore Three—and where it is possible, if not easy, for people such as Chen to travel between heaven and hell and earth. Obviously there’s a certain woo woo factor involved, something I usually avoid like the plague, but it’s very well done here. It’s also the basis of a fair amount of the dry humor that is wound all through the books, including such things as a demon cursed with a conscience (he’s going to have to consider therapy when he has a chance). Action filled, fast paced reading that’s a lot of fun and definitely something different.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis is another of those books I should have read a long time ago. Problem is the book was reportedly all about relying on stats per se over perceptions and instincts. I’m a sports fan / former data analyst and even I find that boring. However, what it's really about is determining which are the right stats, the ones that really matter to winning and losing vs the ones conventional wisdom has always focused on. Take the basic stats and slice and dice them into component parts like the securities industry does to create derivatives—an analogy I could relate to since I once worked with derivatives (yes, alright, so we’re talking checkered career here)—then extrapolate to see what they can tell you. And remember that while stats may not lie, how you interpret / misinterpret them can have the same effect, which is a key truth all too often ignored when people insist that they've proven something beyond question just because they can cite stats. You need an understanding of the game to pick the right stats and get the most out of them, while you need the right stats to understand what’s really happening despite what instinct and watching tell you you’re seeing. I think I fell in love.

A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley (aka Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip) isn’t the best mystery I’ve ever read. It’s doorstop thick and meandering. But it’s also a great, refreshing combination of old and new that is rock solid, combining a huge, engaging Botswanaan detective with a classic, Golden Age approach to constructing a mystery / detective story. All while practically glowing with the life and energy of its unique setting and appealing hero.

So sorry, no top 10, but hopefully some varied ideas for some good reading instead. And hey, if you're into web design and haven't read The Zen of CSS yet...

What’s so funny about that?

Which is the problem with a lot of recommendations I get for humorous mysteries. If I’m lucky, it takes as many as three chapters into the latest "you'll laugh until it hurts" before I realize that one weak smile is going to be about it. I used to think it was me, because I'd see books I thought were decidedly unfunny praised all over various forums. But then a couple years back when I reviewed the first book in his Double Feature series, Some Like it Hot-Buttered, our own Jeff Cohen helped me figure it out. (No, that’s not the blatant brown-nosing it looks like, honest. He really did.)

Jeff’s hero, Elliott Freed, loves comedy so much he’s put all his money into creating a movie theater dedicated to it. But he hates the jokes friends continually email him, because comedy and jokes aren’t the same thing and he’s just not all that into jokes. To paraphrase my own review of Jeff’s book, comedy is about wit and humor, while jokes are contrived stories to set up a punch line.

Comedy and jokes aren't the same thing... epiphany time. The next time a new, much praised humorous mystery left me grumbling rather than laughing—and wondering why—I realized that same division was the problem here. Yes I know it should be obvious, but you think of jokes as, well, jokes. Short set up / punchline pairs that stand on their own. You might read a character telling a joke, but you don't naturally think of jokes as part of the structure of a novel. But that was indeed what too many of the newer comic mysteries seemed to be built from. Instead of real comedy and humor based in absurd situations or wit that is an organic part of the story, they rely on jokes and jokey set ups for the laughs. In the worse cases, the story becomes little more than a strong to hold together a bunch of build ups to various punch lines. And in the absolute worst cases, those were all too predictable punch lines—there was a series of travel based mysteries written a few years ago which everyone swore I would love, because it had mystery and comedy and travel, all of which I do love. But the humor was based on stereotypes that were trite even then, with punchlines you could see coming three pages before they arrived.

What got me thinking about this again was the pleasure in a few recent reads—two by modern authors, one a Golden Age classic—that get it right. Genuine comedy and humor rather than jokes.

I mentioned Donna Andrews and Swan for the Money last week. While I don’t love all her books equally (there are two I absolutely adore—Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon and We’ll Always Have Parrots—with The Penguin Who Knew Too Much only slightly below, and the rest ranging across a couple of tiers below that), I love how she does them. The humor is situational, built from the sort of people who might be your family and neighbors doing absolutely outrageous and absurd things as if they were totally commonplace, or having such things happen to them. The humor is in the situation, with nary a punchline in sight. Take the Tennessee Belted Fainting Goats I also mentioned last time… now consider what it would be like to chase an intruder through a field filled with goats who stiffen and keel over without warning when even slightly alarmed or excited. Go ahead and laugh, I saw that grin.

The humor is heightened by a beautiful foil in smart and sensible heroine Meg, a calm, tolerant but appreciative audience who treats most of the madness around her as normal. Which of course in her world it all is; it's our kind of normalcy that would be really weird.

The other recent book isn’t a mystery, although there are puzzles aplenty inside. Gail Carriger has a new alternate history comedy of manners out, titled Soulless (first in The Parasol Protectorate). Her heroine is even more phlegmatic, and while there are some silly situations, the humor here is more in the language and the style of it all. Not jokes, but witty banter and language that stylishly provides some wonderfully absurd juxtapositions while taking things to their logical absurdities. Think witty Regency style romance (although the setting is Victorian) meets new style urban fantasy. Werewolves and vampires and teacakes, oh my!! For example, when classic prim and proper spinster Alexia is attacked by a vampire, rather than wailing and falling into a helpless swoon, she sharply chides him on his manners (they haven’t even been introduced!) while feeling more upset about the treacle tart she'd been looking forward to—now ruined—than the attack itself. Her scientifically inquisitive approach to personal discovery about relations between the sexes is an absolute riot. The entire book is simply a hoot, full of wicked fun that stands a couple of genres on their ears through the author's wonderful ear for using language to maximum comic effect.

The classic combines wit and situational humor—Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop—which I recently re-read. I love Crispin and wish he’d written more, although I've never had good luck recommending him to others. There’s wit in the banter between characters, such as a silly characters in literature bar game, while the story also has some wonderful situational humor, such as the "University steeplechase” pursuit of a suspect and its water filled ending. Genuine laugh until it hurts stuff if you've any appreciation for the absurd.

Here's hoping we see more of the situational comedy and wit that once used to dominate humor in mysteries. And until we do, my heartfelt thanks to a handful of newer authors like Donna Andrews and Gail Carriger and Jeff himself, who help keep my funny bone nicely polished.

Whatcha readin'?

So there I was on the subway, enjoying Donna Andrews’ ideas in Swan for the Money about some of the comic possibilities inherent in Belted Tennessee Fainting Goats, when I got a tap on the shoulder.

“Whatcha readin?”

I’ve never wholly understood why reading a book makes you fair game for interruption and other things don’t. Most people wouldn’t dream of walking up to a stranger in a restaurant and tapping the arm lowering the fork to ask what they’re eating. And no, it's not just because of the steak knife in the other hand. People don’t tug on headphones to ask perfect strangers what they’re listening to, although in fairness you rarely have to ask to know the answer. But even when you can’t tell, they still hold back, and not just from the ones who look as if heavy metal is both a musical choice and a preferred method of social interaction.  People on cellphones may voluntarily announce to strangers 3 blocks away who they’re talking to, along with intimate details of their sex lives, but no one latches onto the rare quiet user to demand that information. Nope, there’s something specific to reading that triggers this reaction, at least reading the old fashioned way, from a printed book. One of the rarely mentioned benefits of audiobooks is that they’re completely immune to the whatcha readin' interruption syndrome.

And syndrome it seems to be, a sort of biological imperative, like the one that forces people to stare as they pass an accident scene: see person in public place engrossed in book, MUST interrupt to ask what they’re reading—resistance is futile  It’s not just a matter of curiosity, because the really weird thing is that most of the time the person asking doesn’t want to know the details. They just see someone reading and need to ask until they get a response… preferably a very short response, which makes a gentle whoosh as it goes out the other ear.  Offer more than a title and maybe an author in reply, and you get either that “what have I done now” panicky look in response or eyes glazing over faster than a hot doughnut dipped in sugar syrup. It’s a reverse psychology technique I’ve often wished would work half so well on others of life’s chronic interruptions, like telemarketers or the man with all the religious tracts prowling the subway station, but sadly it just seems to encourage them.

Don’t get me wrong. I love talking with people about books and if I’m reading something good, can’t share it with enough people. Even if it’s not so good, or good but just not to my taste, I’m still curious to hear what others think. I wouldn’t review books or be here talking about them otherwise. And I certainly wouldn’t know about the panicky / glazed response if I hadn’t tried to play the game. But that’s the problem. This doesn’t seem to be about books, except books as a sort of fair game marker, and the ones who would be interested in talking about the book never seem to be the ones asking. So I don’t mind answering, but I just don’t get it.

Still, I may have found the perfect response, completely by accident. As an unabashed geek, I’m fond of the User Friendly comic strip set in tech support at an ISP. And was enjoying one of their collections on the subway another day (yes, there's a pattern here—I find books that pique my sense of humor a good idea when dealing with public transportation) when the inevitable happened.

"Pssst. Whatcha readin'?"

I didn’t look up or say a word, continuing to cackle at the contents as I lifted the book so the cover could be read: Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell: A User Friendly Guide to World Domination.  No one bothered me the rest of the trip home, and in fact I found myself with some extra room to stretch out.  I’m thinking of making copies to use as bookcovers on all future public reading.

Cozy vs Traditional

Kim Malo

You know how sometimes the same topic pops up out of the blue in a bunch of different places, as if there’s a subject flu on the loose, infecting conversations all over. Genre has been the theme of late, with cozy vs traditional mystery the popular variant that's right up my alley.

The "what is a cozy vs traditional mystery" question first came up from someone complaining that they couldn’t find any consensus about the answer. The reason for this would be that there really isn’t any.

Some use the terms interchangeably, and some of those you  can virtually hear spit out the cozy label as a sort of pejorative indicating insubstantial, painfully sugary fluff—the cotton candy of the mystery world. It clearly makes their teeth ache and gives them mental indigestion just to think about it. What consensus there might once have been has been hurt by a broadbased shift in where the dividing line belongs, with cozy edging closer to the stereotype behind the pejorative, only without the spitting.  Agatha Christie was once considered the epitome of cozy, and some still think that, but for many others she's now the classic traditional mystery author.

Me, I’m a certifiable mystery wimp, someone who has as little interest in getting into the cracked head and black heart of a psycho killer as I do in dodging bullets and spurting blood through the shadows of darkly dangerous mean streets. In other words, I’m the cozy / traditional target audience, one of those who cares about the difference. While as a reviewer I think one of my jobs is to flag the things that help a reader fit the book I'm talking about into their personal genre universe. Which means having some grasp of what those things are likely to be.

I usually save the cozy label for books closest to the pejorative stereotype, or those in a subcategory that has all but taken over the modern cozy. The former are the books too light and fluffy even for me, like Nancy Atherton’s Aunt Dimity series. The latter includes things like Laura Childs' Tea Shop and Scrapbooking books—series “packaged” around a cozy hobby / craft, cozy profession such as pet sitter, or cozy specialty shop. The writing and storytelling are't always notably fluffy or cutesy,  but having the cozy hook at their core keeps them compartmentalized there. I'll admit to not being crazy about the way these sorts of series dominate the genre. It creates an impression that having such a marketing package is at least as important to the publisher as the things I care about—good writing telling an interesting story.

Traditional mysteries, like cozies, sit at the limited gore and violence end of the spectrum, with people and relationships still central to the story, but the feel is more real world. There’s an idealized, almost fantasy world element to the real cozies, based in a secure feeling that even though the stories involve a murder or two, it really is a good world where bad things are pretty much limited to bad people and things will always come out right in the end for the good ones. That real world vs "cozy world" feel is probably the key difference between the two genres for me. Traditional mysteries don’t dwell on grim and gore much more than cozies do, but it’s still generally recognized as part of the world they live in. They can still be funny and even light in some ways, but they're never actively cutesy or fluffy.

Traditional mysteries have one gray area that cozies generally don't, involving the sort of sleuth. I used to think that both meant an amateur, since professional detectives had their own genres. But authors like Louise Penny, whose protagonist is a police officer, tell stories built around events and relationships outside the precinct that just have more in common with traditional mysteries than classic police procedurals. So traditional she is.

Fortunately I have her latest, The Brutal Telling, here to read in case I want to think some more about that. It's a tough job, but as they say, someone has to do it.

But enough about me

Kim Malo

Hello, my name is Kim and I (ducks head shyly and scuffs toe in the sand—note to self: MUST vacuum more often) am a mystery fan.

 

It started small, when I was young. Entry books? Oh the usual things for the time. Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators… even, yes, Cherry Ames. I liked it, maybe a little too much, but I was sure I could handle it; I could stop anytime.

 

But then someone introduced me to the hard stuff: Ellery Queen, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Delano Ames, Elliot Paul, and more, much more. I was young, we weren’t in Kansas anymore and this was heady stuff, not meant just for kids. In fact, there was a little contretemps with my mother over Ellery Queen, whose paperback covers at the time featured scantily clad women draped around things in mildly suggestive poses. My mother didn’t read mysteries, so there was no convincing her exactly how misleading they were, and I wasn’t going to admit to not being quite sure what the suggestions were supposed to be about (I really was pretty young). But I digress…

 

Anyway, I was in deep, and that was before I started to touch real hardcore stuff… Mickey Spillane, Shell Scott, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett (The Glass Key remains one of the best books I've ever read), John D. and Ross McDonald. This wasn’t just a different world from the one around me, it was a different universe, and I was lost forever exploring it.

 

The really fun part came as I got older and discovered that there were more and more of these mystery universes out there, with more and more people populating them all the time. Historicals are my favorite. I was born with a gypsy’s wanderlust and love the combination they offer of mystery puzzle paired with vicarious travel in place and time. The best give you a real "you are there" feel as they use both the mindset and tools of a different time to tell an intense story.

 

Then I discovered a new kind of fun telling people about the mysteries—what makes this one under-rated, why do you remember this writer days later or only wish you could forget that one within 20 minutes of closing the covers. Why do I recommend this one, while saying it's really not to my taste, or say I like that one but still refer to it as mind candy… not to be despised, but not really very satisfying when you want more.

 

And so I became (scuffs toe again—where DID all this sand come from anyway?—while gulping bravely) a mystery fan AND a reviewer. OK, the dark secret’s out and I look forward to sharing more about it with you. Sharon set quite a standard for me to live up to (Nope, sorry Sharon, not a rugby fan, but LOVE basketball which has its own oddly shaped balls), and I hope you have fun reading while I try.