Wed 16 Feb 2011
Reviewed by Barry Gardner: ANABEL DONALD – An Uncommon Murder.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
ANABEL DONALD – An Uncommon Murder. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1993. First published in the UK: Macmillan, hardcover, 1992.
The inside back flap says Anabel Donald is the author of three previous novels, and lives in England and France. Nothing else. The back cover is completely blank. No other books are listed in the front. Who is this woman, and why doesn’t St. Martin’s want us to know more about her?
Alex Tanner is a freelance television researcher in London. She’s prickly, a bastard from a lower-class background, raised in foster homes, and with a crazy mother. She stumbles upon an old woman who was a governess in a household which was involved in a high society murder some forty years ago; coincidentally (?) it’s a case on which a producer for whom she works regularly is considering doing a documentary. He hires her to research the background, and she begins investigating.
This is quite a well written book. The story moves along nicely, and while I wouldn’t call the cast of characters enthralling, they were interesting enough to hold my attention.
I did get more than a bit fed up with the heroine’s attitude and hang-ups. As a matter of fact, I’m getting damned tired of four of five female leads being anywhere from half screwed up to absolutely neurotic. Is it déclassé to be be well-adjusted, or what? Are reasonably normal people too dull to serve as leads? Well?
Subject of tirade aside, it was a decent book.
Bio-Bibliographic Notes: Some 18 years later, it’s easy to use Google and come up with answers. From the Fantastic Fiction website comes the following information:
“Anabel Donald has been writing fiction since 1982 when her first novel, Hannah at Thirty-Five, was published to great critical acclaim. In her thirty-six-year teaching career she has taught adolescent girls in private boarding schools, a comprehensive and an American university. Most recently, she has written the five Alex Tanner crime novels in the Notting Hill series.”
The Alex Tanner series —
1. An Uncommon Murder (1992)
2. In at the Deep End (1993)
3. The Glass Ceiling (1994)
4. The Loop (1996)
5. Destroy Unopened (1999)
Neither of the last two have been published in the US.
As for Barry’s tirade, as he described it, Alex Tanner must really have been an off-the-wall character for him to have gone off the way he did. Most recurring detective story characters are eccentric, unusual or different in one way or another, not so?
February 17th, 2011 at 3:27 am
You have to wonder what Barry’s reaction to Steig Larrson’s Lisbeth Salander would have been?
Still, his point is well taken, and I have noticed among many modern women writers a tendency toward often extreme neurosis rather than eccentricity in their leading female characters.
That’s meant as a broad generalization because even I can come up with a few hundred examples that aren’t neurotic, but I do think many women writers and readers tend to identify with a female protagonist who is flawed and hung up more than a more perfect fantasy figure — at least in mystery novels.
Sadly for some writers (of both sexes) loading a character down with a tragic past and a truck load of neurosis as a result is a short cut instead of real characterization and development, and I suspect that was the real target of the attack.
I haven’t read these so I can’t speak to them, but I have read enough novels with heroines who seem one Zanax shy of commitment to know where Barry was coming from.
That said, women, being generally more mature than most males, tend to give us slightly more realistic women protagonists than men do male versions. There has to be a fine balance somewhere between a hero who is just short of a demi-god and a heroine who is just short of fully dysfunctional.
I do think it may be a basic psychological difference between the sexes to some extent. Men like to identify with a hero and tell themselves, ‘Gee, I wish my life was like his.’ While women seem in many cases happy to identify with a character and think, ‘maybe my life isn’t as exciting as her’s is, but at least I’m not half as screwed up as she is.’
Different sides of the same fantasy coin.
February 17th, 2011 at 10:29 am
Some excellent observations there, David, and they’re particularly relevant since we’ve just been discussing Joe Pike and his failures (in my mind) as a male fantasy figure in his most recent book.
I was wondering myself what Barry would have thought about Lisbeth Salander, but I have a feeling that he would have been as enthralled with the Larsson books as much as almost everyone else seems to have been.
It requires someone with a lot of writing skills to take an old worn-out concept, the totally messed up female protagonist, rework it, doubling if not tripling the stakes as he does so, and present as it nearly a brand new idea — and succeeding.
And with a tremendous handicap. He was a male author writing about a female character, and that he made her as believable as she is, that’s something else.
There are a lot of flaws in Larsson’s writing, a fact that a lot of people are quite pleased to point out, but forgive me for gushing, I still think he was a genius.
As for Alex Tanner, to get back to the review, I have one or two of her books in storage. I’m intrigued enough to see if I can’t go dig them out.
February 17th, 2011 at 11:36 pm
Steve
As you say, Larrson is in a whole different category as a writer and at least part of his power and that of Salander lies in the fact he was passionate about the abuse and exploitation of women and in Salander set out to create a character who was both realistically flawed and yet heroic.
Though Larrson is much more serious minded, and Salander a deeper and more important creation, I was reminded a little of Peter O’Donnell’s most important success with Modesty Blaise — creating a fantasy figure that — at least within the internal logic of the books themselves — was believable.
Both characters are archetypes, but the fact that the writers in both cases believe in them and work to let us believe in them too pays off.
If you look at the really successful characters in the genre overall, the big names, one thing is true of every one of them: their creators believe in them and so do we. That sense of belief can’t be faked. As a reader you recognize it as soon as the character makes their entrance.
I don’t know about Alex Tanner in this or her other books, but Larrson believed in Salander.