A Month of Mysteries, BookMarks Update June, 2023

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Read my Review

Friends:

I have always been a rabid reader of mysteries, beginning in childhood with the Hardy Boys, a series that began in 1927 and ended with the 190th book in 2005 and which I am reading, via FaceTime, to my 8 year old grandson. Mysteries have served to 'clear my palate' after a steady diet of non-fiction, serious literature, or poetry.

Over the years, I've formed 'close friendships' with the protagonists in a number of detective series. There's Michael Connellyl's Harry Bosch of LA, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone of Santa Teresa, CA, Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti of Venice, Robert Crais's Elvis Cole and Joe Pike of LA, Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole of Oslo, Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander of Ystad, Sweden, Agatha Christies' Hercule Poirot of Paris, Lee Child's nomadic Jack Reacher, Richard Stark's equally nomadic Parker, Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar and Winthrop Horne Lockwood III of New York and New Jersey, and my two all-time favorites, Superintendent Inspector of the Police Judiciare in Paris, Jules Maigret, and Robert B. Parker's Spenser of my own Boston.

Summer seemed like a good time to move the genre of mystery/police procedural/detective story/suspense novel from its status as an amuse bouche to the main course, a month of 'mystery as entree'. The result was that I read eight mysteries in June, five of them books by my old favorite authors and three by authors new to me who had been suggested by friends.

Here are the books I read in June which includes three non-mystery books.

Before turning to the mysteries, here are some thoughts about the other three books. Paul Harding came out of nowhere in 2010 winning the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, 'Tinkers', and 'This Other Eden' shares many of the characteristics of that first book---quiet, lyrical prose, exquisite descriptions, interesting characters, a compelling plot. Set on an island off the coast of Maine which had been settled in the 18th C by freed slaves, it tells the tragic tale of eugenics gone mad as the state invades this quiet, self-sufficient, all-beit strange society and moves the five families to institutions on the mainland. Based on a true story, it's another sad chapter in our nation's legacy of slavery and abuse.

Jericho Brown's 'The Tradition' won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2020. A professor at Emory, he has written a powerful book of poems based on his life experience as a Black gay man. Not an easy read, the poems warrant slow reading and analysis to understand this lived experience of a Black, gay man in America's South. It took copying a poem into my review for me to finally understand the message and Brown's skill in transmitting it.

Pico Iyer is a fascinating writer. Born in Oxford to Indian parents, educated at Oxford and Harvard, living in Japan, and the author of essays and travel books, Iyer's latest work describes his attempts to find a paradise on earth. Exploring the tension between the peace and joy of paradise and the horrors of the real world, the tension between the the Garden of Eden and ‘scenes that memory softens and gilds’, he comes face to face with the suffering that is inevitable in this world that ends for each of us only with death. And death is front and center on every page of this interesting book as Iyer takes us to Iran, Sri Lanka, India, Australia, Northern Ireland, Kashmir and Tibet. Sounds grim but it's a fascinating read. If you don't know Iyer's work, this is a good place to start.

And now mysteries! Why do we read these tales of evil doing, violent murder, and depraved individuals? Why have I read nearly all of Simenon's 74 Maigret novels and all 11 of Coben's Bolitar series? Perhaps there's a powerful element of schadenfreude or relief 'that could have been me but it wasn't'? Perhaps there's a sense of satisfaction as the good guys nearly always win and the bad guys get their due rewards? Perhaps it's the simplified presentation of the struggle between virtue and evil without the complexity and messiness that is the core of great literature. Or perhaps, it's just that the writing in the best of the genre is great, filled with quick, clever, and laugh-out-loud funny repartee and providing terrific descriptions of the main characters.

I read mysteries for all of these reasons but I always return to my favorite authors because of that last reason---the great details of the writing focused on bringing the protagonist into clear focus. After all, the focus of these books is usually the cop, the PI, or the amateur sleuth. Rarely do we get to know the victims or the criminal in such detail. Here are three examples of how the writer introduces us to his protagonist, one from Thomas Perry's 'Murder Book' describing the private investigator Harry Duncan , the second from Elizabeth George's description of Inspector Thomas Lynley of New Scotland Yard, and the third from Harlan Coben's sketch of Winthrop Horne Lockwood III from the Bolitar series:

."Harry Duncan was exactly six feet tall with light brown hair and an athletic body that had sustained the sorts of scars incidental to a history of jobs that involved differences of opinion, but he could keep them unseen without much effort. Over the years he had become adept at making himself less formidable than he was so he could observe."

"Was there anyone in all of New Scotland Yard whom she hated more than she hated Lynley? He was a miraculous combination of every single thing that she thoroughly despised: educated at Eton, a first in history at Oxford, a public school voice, and a bloody family tree that had its roots somewhere just this side of the Battle of Hastings. Upper class. Bright. And so damnably charming that she couldn't understand why every criminal in the city didn't surrender to accommodate him."

“Windsor Horne Lockwood III, however, looked exactly like his name. Blond hair, perfect length, parted on the right side. His features were classical patrician, almost too handsome, like something crafted in porcelain. His attaire was always thoroughbred prep—pink shirts, polo shirts, monogrammed shirts, khaki pants, golf pants, white bucks or wing tips on his feet. Win even had that creepy accent, the one that did not originate from any particular geographical location as much as from certain prep schools like Andover and Exeter. He played a mean game of golf…..He had a perennial golf tan, one of those where the color could be found only on the arms and a V-shape in the neck….Win was full-fledged whitebread.”

Summarizing plots and describing characters in these eight mysteries would ruin the reading experience for anyone who chooses to tote one of these tomes to the beach this summer. Suffice it to say that my old favorites, with the exception of Thomas Perry's silly book about the mob infiltrating small towns in Indiana, came through with flying colors. Simenon, Parker, Coben, and Leon each provided me with a good read. Once again reminding me of the excitement and joy of discovering wonderful new authors, the books by Elizabeth George and John Harvey were a special treat. Inspector Lyndley and Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick, both Brits, will certainly appear in a future BookMarks update.

The best discovery of the month, however, was 'The Big Blowdown' by George Pelecanos. Perhaps best known for writing the TV series 'The Wire', Pelecanos has also written 20 books, most of them about crime in1950's Washington DC. The serial murder of prostitutes is a relatively minor plot element in this book as Pelecanos directs most of his masterly skills towards describing the relationships between two best friends from their childhood to their early, violent deaths. This is fine writing, complex, layered, and powerful, setting Pelaconos apart from most of the other writers on this month's list.

So, after reading 8 mysteries in four weeks, what have I concluded about this genre. First, the quality of mysterries varies greatly, as in all categories of books. The best of them rank with great literature in their elucidation of the human situation--finely drawn characters facing crises of life and death, right and wrong. Second, mysteries provide wonderful entertainment usually free of the need for deep thought, analysis, and remembering that accompanies reading for information or wisdom. A good one stays with the reader during the whole experience urging him back to read more and for some time after finishing the book. Third, the detective genre is best in small, occasional 'bites' rather than one after another. I found it a bit tiresome being confronted with yet another maniacal killer or dead body. I had even begun mystery #9 when I simply gave up, longing for Chekhov or Rebecca Solnit. Just as eating a chocolate eclair or piece of key lime pie at every meal and snacktime eventually leads not just to gaining weight but to a distaste for yet another dessert, the detective story is best consumed as a break from serious reading not as a steady diet. I am looking forward to more serious reading in July albeit with an interlude with Jules Maigret or Spenser along the way.

Poetry on the Charles this month features works by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Dunn who died two years ago today at the age of 82. The NYT obituary that day described him as the writer of "plain-spoken poems about the small things in life and the bigger things within them." A NYT review of his 2009 volume of new and selected poems wrote of his writing in this way: "A typical Dunn poem opens up a basic human trouble---a body souring with age, a marriage souring with regret, a believer souring with doubt---meditates on it with equal parts seriousness and good humor, and finally offers not quite consolation but acceptance, a sense of having gained some measure of dignity simply by looking life in the eye." Here are three of his poems that wonderfully fit that description.

And here, once again, is this extraordinary quote from Lewis Thomas that has elicited a great number of comments.

"Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely out-numbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond....

Add to this the biological improbability that makes each member or our own species unique. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing."

Good reading and good travelling!