DOROTHY CANNELL – The Importance of Being Ernestine.

Penguin, paperback reprint; 1st printing, April 2003. Hardcover edition: Viking Penguin, 2002.

   As in most things in life, timing is everything, but especially when it comes to comedy. And when it comes to comic detective novels, it’s difficult to explain in words what works and what does not, and when (and why) the beat is off.

   This is the 11th in Dorothy Cannell’s series of books about amateur detective Ellie Haskell, and it’s one of the funniest mysteries I’ve happened to read since the Inspector Dover books. Note to myself: It’s time to read Joyce Porter again, to see if Dover is as humorous as I remember, or if he was really only a rather obnoxious dolt. There’s a fine line, you see.

   Ellie, married, with three young children, is an interior decorator by trade, but — miffed at her husband, she takes up crime-solving with her housekeeper Mrs. Malloy, who’s been moonlighting as an would-be assistant to a private eye. Named Jugg. Nicknamed “Milk.” Of course.

   Here’s Mrs. Malloy explaining to Mrs. H. what her latest ambition in life is, before their first client arrives (page 15):

   The pause is a stroke of genius. It’s all in the timing, as I say. The client then comes in, and the case is on. An elderly lady who (she now believes) wrongfully fired a maid who was pregnant (possibly by the lady’s now deceased husband) and accused of stealing a valuable brooch now wants to find the child and make amends. To complicate matters, a number of Mrs. Krumley’s aged relatives have started to die off in highly unusual (and suspicious) circumstances.

   Taking over the case in Mr. Jugg’s absence, Ellie and Mrs. Malloy find no dark streets to go down. Most of the suspects live in or around the Krumley mansion, Moultty Towers (pronounced Moldy), and are for the most part, members of the upper strata of society.

   There are lots of red herrings and false trails and strange and stranger events that subsequently occur, and it comes as no great surprise that a huge muddle is made in wrapping everything up, presenting the reader with one awkward discombobulated package at the end. I read the last chapter a couple of times, and I confess, it all makes sense. Sort of.

   Would I read another? Absolutely. Weak ending or not, there’s a definite charm that’s present here, and I think it’s unique. Nothing similar comes readily to mind.

PETER TEMPLE – Bad Debts. Collins, Australia, pb, 1996. MacAdam/Cage, US, hc, 2005. Quercus, UK, pb, 2007.

   I read this author’s 2005 novel, The Broken Shore, which I enjoyed, even though I thought it had a few flaws and it probably wouldn’t have been my choice for an award. (I don’t know what would have been as I don’t read many newly published books.)

   [The Broken Shore was awarded the Duncan Lawrie Dagger (formerly the CWA Gold Dagger for Fiction) for 2007. Temple, born in South Africa, is the first Australian to win the award.]

   Temple previously wrote a four book series about a Melbourne private eye named Jack Irish, and this is the first in that series. Jack, who is the narrator, comes with many of the usual troubles.

   He had been a lawyer with a successful practice, but after a client had killed his (Irish’s) wife in revenge, Irish had become a drunk before straightening out a little. Now he does a little minor legal work but mainly works as an investigator for his old legal partner.

   Here he is approached by an old client who is out from jail, having been convicted on a hit-and-run death while he was drunk. Before Irish can follow up, the man is dead, shot in a police ambush. Irish has to re-investigate the case from ten years before when he had been going through the motions after his wife’s death. The investigation leads to a conspiracy on a governmental stage and soon he is the target of ruthless killers.

   On the whole, this was a readable book, though it dragged a little in places; and the plot twisted and turned, though in not wholly unexpected ways. I’m not sure I would classify this as absolutely top-notch but it was not bad. If the second book in the series falls into my hands, I might well give it a try.

      PETER TEMPLE – Bibliography:

   Bad Debts (1996).   [Jack Irish]
   An Iron Rose (1998)
   Shooting Star (1999)
   Black Tide (1999).   [Jack Irish]

   Dead Point (2000).   [Jack Irish]
   In the Evil Day (2002) aka Identity Theory.
   White Dog (2003).   [Jack Irish]
   The Broken Shore (2006).

   Truth (2008).   [Book 2 in “The Broken Shore” series.]

MERLDA MACE – Motto for Murder. Messner, hardcover, 1943. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, November 1943. Digest paperback: Crestwood / Black Cat Detective #17, 1945 (abridged).

   Motto for Murder was one of a trio of murder mysteries written by Merlda Mace during the 1940’s. The detective she deploys in this story is Timothy J. O’Neil better known as Tip to his friends. He is a 26 year old “special investigator” for Barnes and Gleason, a New York City investment firm.

   How he got this job is one of the big mysteries of this book since he readily admits that he is not much of an investigator and his performance during the story bears this out.

   This is, in essence, a country house mystery. The house is an isolated mansion located in the mountains of northern New York State near Lake Placid. The controlling and quite unpleasant matriarch of a wealthy family has gathered her extended family to tell them that she has screwed them out of their inheritances. A snowstorm descends on the region and several murders occur during a long Christmas weekend.

   This seems to me like a combination of a mediocre Mignon G. Eberhart mystery and a bad Ellery Queen mystery. The author can put words and sentences and paragraphs together in a coherent manner but the book, on the whole, is a disappointment.

   The physical and character clues are not first rate, and the author employs a HIBK technique that serves no valid storytelling purpose. Since the characters insisted on wandering around in the dark, leaving their bedrooms unlocked at night and napping in vulnerable spots, the killer did not have too much trouble carrying out the murders. The “mottos” from the title of the story refer to fortune-cookie type candies wrapped in little papers containing sayings which play a small part in the solution.

   Merlda Mace was a pseudonym of Madeleine McCoy. Apparently “Tip” O’Neil is not a series character, but according to Al Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV, Mace’s other two mysteries utilize a female sleuth called Christine Anderson (the ‘blonde’ in Blondes Don’t Cry).

     Bibliographic data:   [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV]

MACE, MERLDA. Pseudonym of Madeleine McCoy, 1910?-1990?

    Headlong for Murder (n.) Messner 1943 [Christine Anderson; Connecticut]

    Motto for Murder (n.) Messner 1943 [New York]
    Blondes Don’t Cry (n.) Messner 1945 [Christine Anderson; Washington, D.C.]

BORIS AKUNIN – Murder on the Leviathan. Random House, hardcover, April 2004; trade paperback, February 2005. Translated by Andrew Bromfield.

    One of the unexpected benefits of the fall of the former Soviet Union was the career of Russian mystery writer Boris Akunin, with his novels about Erast Fandorin now available in the west.

    Akunin is Grigori Chkhartichvili, a philologist, critic, essayist, and Japanese translator, who took advantage of the new freedom in Russia to create a popular series about 19th Century sleuth Erast Fandorin, a special agent of the Russian Police whose adventures take him from his youth to middle age and from Moscow to exotic adventures around the globe.

    Attractive, smart, and devastating to women, Fandorin is a human and likable hero who combines elements of James Bond, the original Nick Carter, The Wild West, and Ellery Queen in his bright clever adventures.

    The books veer from wild adventure to more or less straight detection, from con men to serial killers, and find Fandorin at various stages in his illustrious career, often caught between clever villains, dangerous beautiful women, and his own devious superiors.

    It’s no surprise Ruth Rendell has called Akunin the Russian Ian Fleming.

    In Murder of the Leviathan Akunin takes a note from Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming. When Lord Littleby and his family are found murdered in their mansion on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris in 1878, the legendary French sleuth “Papa” Gauche finds his only clue to the crime is a key in the shape of a golden whale, a ticket on the luxury steamship the Leviathan leaving Southampton on its maiden voyage to Calcutta.

    Arriving at Southampton and boarding the Leviathan, Papa Gauche finds himself joined by Erast Fandorin, a handsome callow Russian sleuth with a shock of white hair. It’s a reluctant teaming on Gauche’s part, though he admits Fandorin might be useful. He might be even more reluctant if he knew Fandorn was a walking arsenal of hidden weapons, and something of a genius at crime solving.

    Fandorin is a contrast to Papa Gauche, who lives up to his name:

    But the two form a working relationship, and Gauche soon comes to respect Fandorin’s wisdom and intelligence.

    There are ten un-ticketed passengers on the Leviathan, and one of them is the killer: the Japanese doctor, the professor who deals in rare Indian artifacts, a pregnant Swiss woman, a wealthy Englishman who collects Asian antiquities, being among them. And then in true Christie style the passengers on the Leviathan begin to die at the hand of the desperate killer.

    These books feature grand villains, femme fatales, desperate espionage, and action enough for a dozen books. The Fandorin tales are great fun, playful and intelligent, as Alan Furst said, as if Tolstoy had set out to write a murder mystery. Fandorin is a cross between Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, d’Artagnan, and a Dostoevsky hero, brilliant, swashbuckling, and romantically melancholy.

    I’m not sure anyone in the west is writing anything like Akunin’s Fandorin novels, but thankfully we have them, and so far of the eleven books in the series, at least eight have been translated, with five published so far in the US. Akunin has also written a trilogy about Sister Pelagia, all of which are now available in English.

    Get acquainted with him. His books are literate, playful, and page turning reads. You will find nothing quite like him and no one quite like Erast Fandorin in Western literature — more’s the pity.

    It’s not often you find a writer or a hero who can honestly be said to mix elements of dime novels, Ian Fleming, Dostoyevsky, Dumas, and Ellery Queen, but Akunin and Fandorin manage the feat. There is nothing else quite like them on the shelves.

       The Erast Fandorin series. [Note that so far only the first five have been published in the US.]

1. The Winter Queen (2003)
2. The Turkish Gambit (2004)

3. Murder on the Leviathan (2004)
4. The Death of Achilles (2005)
5. Special Assignments (2007)

6. The State Counsellor (2008)
7. The Coronation (2009)
8. The Lover of Death (2009)

       The Sister Pelagia series

1. Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (2006)

2. Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (2007)
3. Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (2008)

LUIZ ALFREDO GARCIA-ROZA – The Silence of the Rain.

Picador, trade paperback; 1st printing, July 2003. Hardcover edition: Henry Holt and Co., July 2002.

   This moody sort of detective novel was first published in Brazil and translated from the Portuguese, and I recommend it to you. It starts out in a mildly light-hearted fashion, as a mixup over a wealthy executive’s suicide in a parking garage — someone went off with the gun and the suicide note — leads Inspector Espinosa of Rio de Janeiro’s First Precinct into handling the case as though it were a murder.

   (Not unlike Columbo of TV fame here in this country, we are privy to certain events that Espinosa is not, and even by the end of the case he is still running through endless speculations as to what actually happened.)

   The mood becomes gradually edgier, though, until page 121, which is where the reader is forcibly confronted with the realization that this is no cozy, if not before. Reading mysteries taking place in other countries also makes you realize that the rules are often totally different. Here’s a quote from page 161:

   And from page 238:

   Espinosa is, the dead man’s widow decides, a rare bird, a cultivated policeman. He is attracted to her. She is so wealthy she does not seem to notice. Espinosa is a reader of Dickens and Thomas De Quincey, is afflicted by loneliness and self-doubts, and he is also better than decent as a reader of character.

   Besides an almost other-worldly atmosphere and surroundings, there are enough twists and turns of the plot to keep any detective story buff more than satisfied, even with the aforementioned Colombo-like prologue, with an ending I know I’ve never read before — I couldn’t possibly have forgotten a scene like this, and you won’t either.

   And yes, the telling of tale does switch back and forth between first person and third. Just in case you were wondering.

        The Inspector Espinosa series —

1. The Silence of the Rain (Holt, hc, 2002; Picador, trade pb, 2003)
2. December Heat (Holt, hc, 2003; Picador, trade pb, 2004)
3. Southwesterly Wind (Holt, hc, 2004; Picador, trade pb, 2004)

4. A Window in Copacabana (Holt, hc, 2005; Picador, trade pb, 2006)
5. Pursuit (Holt, hc, 2006)

6. Blackout (Holt, hc, 2008; Picador, trade pb, 2009)
7. Alone in the Crowd (Holt, hc, 2009)

[UPDATE] 09-17-09. My local Borders store stopped carrying these after the first three or four. I hadn’t realized there were more in the series until now. I’ve also searched thoroughly, and there doesn’t seem to have been a softcover edition for #5 — why that should be, I certainly can’t tell you.

WILL THOMAS – The Limehouse Text. Touchstone, hardcover & trade paperback, July 2006.

   This is the third book in the series by Oklahoma librarian Will Thomas about late Victorian sleuth Cyrus Barker (the ‘Guv’) and his assistant/Watson Thomas Llewelyn who made their debut back in Some Danger Involved followed up by Kingdom Come.

   This time out Barker and Llewelyn follow the trail of a pawn ticket that leads them into the shadowy environs of Limehouse, London’s Chinese district, where opium dens and honest shopkeepers meet, and the influence of the Chinese tong societies and their hatchet men haunts them.

   The pawn ticket leads them to a rare book that conceals an ancient fighting technique, dim mak, long hidden from the west, and Llewelyn and Barker find themselves caught between a killer seeking the ancient wisdom and the dangers of the growing tension between the British Empire and China as well as the mysterious man at the heart of all the crime in Limehouse, Mr. K’ing (and any reader of Sax Rohmer and August Dereleth’s Solar Pons should have no problem identifying him).

   Through the smoky dream-ridden opium dens to the back room blood sports indulged in by the high and the mighty, Barker and Llewelyn hunt a killer and try to keep their heads while preventing virtual war from breaking out in the streets of Limehouse. Israel Zangwill, the author of the classic The Big Bow Mystery even features in the plot. (Thomas often features a historical and often literary figure like Zangwill in the books.)

   Luckily for them, Barker is an expert on all things Chinese, from the lethal razor sharp pennies he carries in his pockets to the martial arts he engages in. He even keeps a courageous little black Pekingese, Harm, who frequently features in the novels plot, as he does here. Before the game is brought to bay Barker will have to fight a battle to the death in one of those back rooms to save both his and Llewelyn’s life.

   Will Thomas is an admirer of Sherlock Holmes and Doyle obviously, but also familiar with his Nero Wolfe, and Llewelyn is much closer to Archie than Watson, despite his admiration for Barker, his enigmatic boss.

   The books manage a neat blend of action, mystery, and atmosphere that make them a real pleasure to read, as the action moves, the plot twists, and Barker and Llewelyn find themselves in increasingly hot water and trouble. Thomas knowledge of Victorian literature and history also shows in his casual but in depth portrait of his heroes environs.

   These books are great fun, never letting the research get in the way of the action or plot, Barker and Llewelyn a testy and intelligent match as a team, and the observations of just how close our disparate worlds really are a reminder that the more things change the more they stay the same.

   Playful, smart, fast paced, and involving, this is one of the best historical tec series ongoing, and certainly to become a classic. Once you meet them you will want to get to know Barker and Llewelyn and their worlds better.

    * Should anyone think they have caught Thomas in an anachronism, the term “mean streets” was first coined by Victorian writer Arthur Morrison to describe London’s less wholesome districts, in the book Tales of Mean Streets (1895). Morrison is probably better known today for his stories about Sherlock Holmes rival Martin Hewitt.

    That said, I will grant that in The Limehouse Text Thomas uses the term a number of years before Morrison’s book was published.

       The Cyrus Barker & Thomas Llewelyn series:

1. Some Danger Involved (2004).
2. Kingdom Come (2005).
3. The Limestone Text (2006).
4. The Hellfire Conspiracy (2007).

5. The Black Hand (2008).

6. “In progress,” according to the author’s blog, August 2009.

STEVE HAMILTON – North of Nowhere.

St. Martin’s; paperback reprint; 1st printing, May 2003. Hardcover edition: St. Martin’s, 2002.

   When I went to undergraduate school in Michigan’s famed upper peninsula, there was a popular song (and maybe a movie) called “North to Alaska.” Our version was turned around and became “South to Alaska.” (Maybe you had to be there.)

   Anyway, this is the fourth of former Detroit policeman Alex McKnight’s recorded cases, the first of which, A Cold Day in Paradise, won an Edgar. There’s a town in the lower portion of the state called Hell, down around Ann Arbor, and I’ve been there, and I’ve been to Paradise, where this story takes place, up around Sault Ste. Marie, and more in the middle of nothing but trees, trees and more trees, it is hard to imagine.

   Well, there is the Lake Superior shoreline, and nearby Tahquamenon Falls. Could the area be the site of the next building boom, for rich down-staters to build multi-room faux-Victorian summer mansions along the lake?

   Alex gets involved when a poker party he’s invited to at the last minute is interrupted by gunmen who seem to know how much money the wealthy host (and would-be developer) has in his hidden upstairs safe.

   The tale as it develops from there is too long (322 pages) and too talky to be truly hard-boiled, but Hamilton has the knack of pulling the reader into his story with prose as smooth as you hope to live for and yet so seething with underlying tension that it sometimes hurts. McKnight also has a wonderfully uncool and all-but-inept private eye buddy whose loyalty is questioned but comes back answered.

   This is a guy’s book — the only women that show up are three or four wives, some faithful and some not. There’s also just enough honest-to-goodness detective work going on to add an extra dimension to a rip-roaring northern woods adventure novel that’s sheer all-out fun to boot.

FRANK TALLIS – A Death in Vienna. Random House, trade paperback, May 2007. First UK edition, as Mortal Mischief: Century, hardcover; June 2005.

   I’d been eying this novel, set in turn-of-the-century Vienna for some time. When I decided to buy a copy, my local bookshop was out of stock, but a copy was ordered and a week later I settled down to read it.

   Dr. Max Liebermann is a follower of the new theories of Sigmund Freud, which puts him in conflict with his superior at the hospital where he is affiliated. He is also the good friend of Detective Oscar Reinhardt, and when a psychic is murdered inside her apartment in a room locked from the inside, with no apparent means of entry other than the door, Oscar invites Max to assist him in his investigation.

   Vienna, in 1902, was a center of the arts. Mahler was conducting at the symphony and opera, Gustav Klimt was exhibiting his works at a museum, and the city was rich in cultural events, first-class restaurants and the inevitable conflicts between the conservative past and the new, more open present. Tallis evokes the city with great skill all the while constructing a plot that tests the professional and personal skills of his protagonists.

      Series: The Liebermann Papers

1. Mortal Mischief (2005). US edition: A Death in Vienna, Random House, May 2007.

2. Vienna Blood (2006). US edition: Random House, Jan 2008.
3. Fatal Lies (2008). US edition: Random House, Feb 2009.
4. Darkness Rising (2009). US edition: Random House, Mar 2010.

   Mystery writer Lyn Hamilton died of cancer earlier this week (September 10th) at the age of 65. At a pace of a book a year over the past 11 years, she was the author of an equal number of mystery adventures featuring her series character Lara McClintoch.

   From Lyn Hamilton’s website: “The series features Toronto antique dealer Lara McClintoch, who travels the world in search of the rare and beautiful for her shop, finding more than a little murder and mayhem along the way. Each book in the series is set in a different and exotic location and calls upon the past in an unusual way.

    “The first book in the series, The Xibalba Murders, was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award for best first crime novel in Canada, and the eighth, The Magyar Venus was nominated for an Ellis award for best crime novel. The Celtic Riddle formed the basis for the 2003 Murder She Wrote TV Movie starring Angela Lansbury.”

   The Chinese Alchemist (2007) had already been announced as Lara McClintoch’s final appearance.

   Also from the author’s website: “Courses in both cultural and physical anthropology in her student days at the University of Toronto inspired a life-long interest in ancient cultures. Lyn was for six years the Director of the Ontario Cultural Programs Branch, the branch responsible for the licensing of all archaeology in the province as well as for museum and heritage conservation support programs.

    “Lyn visits each of the locales she writes about, and has led tours to come of the sites in her books. Her books have been translated in Chinese, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Turkish and will soon be available in Croatian, Greek, Hungarian and Thai.

    “She was writer-in-residence at the North York Central Library in 2003, and held the same position at the Kitchener Public Library in 2004. She lives in Toronto, and like her sleuth Lara is something of an antiques addict.”

    More details about the author can be found in online obituriaries on the Toronto Star and CBC websites.

   The Lara McClintoch Archaeological Mysteries. The entire series was published by Berkley. The first two were paperback originals; all of the others were published first in hardcover, then in paperback.

      The Xibalba Murders (1997)
      The Maltese Goddess (1998)
      The Moche Warrior (1999)

      The Celtic Riddle (2000)
      The African Quest (2001)
      The Etruscan Chimera (2002)
      The Thai Amulet (2003)

      The Magyar Venus (2004)
      The Moai Murders (2005)

      The Orkney Scroll (2006)
      The Chinese Alchemist (2007)

Short story:

       “Stark Terror at Tea-Time.” Original story with Lara McClintoch. Included in Death Dines In, edited by Claudia Bishop and Dean James; Berkley, 2004.

MANDA SCOTT – The Crystal Skull. Delacorte Press, hardcover, April 2008. Paperback reprint: Bantam Books, February 2009. UK edition: Transworld, January 2008.

   According to Mayan lore, the world will end on 21/12/2012. The only salvation for humanity lies in the activation of 12 crystal skulls entrusted to the protection of a network of keepers.

   Stella Cody O’Connor, a descendant of Cedric Owens, the keeper of the ninth skull, who was murdered in 1599 after hiding the skull from the dark forces who would destroy it, with the help of her husband, Kit, retrieves the skull from a cave in which it has been buried.

   This is, however, only the beginning of her task, and the novel traces, with mounting tension, Owens’ odyssey in the past and Stella’s present-day struggle to protect the sacred skull.

   Owens’ odyssey takes him to the New World, where the powers of the Skull are revealed to him. The Skull is no inanimate object, the mute subject of the quest. Its keeper bonds with it, and it is that spiritual and emotional bond that is, perhaps, the most distinctive quality of this intelligent thriller, giving it an unusual and moving resonance.

         Bibliographic data [expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

SCOTT, MANDA (Catriona).

      The Dr. Kellen Stewart series —

   Hen’s Teeth. Women’s Press, UK, pb, 1996; Bantam, US, 1999.

   Night Mares. Headline Press, UK, hc, 1998; Bantam, 1999.
   Stronger Than Death. Headline, UK, hc, 1999; Bantam, 2000.

Note: The series is set in Glasgow, Scotland, and environs. Dr. Stewart is a doctor, a therapist and a lesbian, and in various ways she’s personally involved with each of the cases of murder she works on.

       Crime/mystery novels —

   No Good Deed. Headline, UK, 2001; Bantam, US, 2002. [Nominated for an Edgar, 2003.]

   The Crystal Skull. Transworld, UK, 2008; Delacorte, US, 2008.