Is there some sexism happening here?

It has just occured to me - in a blinding flash of the obvious, dawn breaks over Marblehead - that in crime fiction, the MEN write about MEN and the WOMEN write about WOMEN.  And they almost never ever cross that bright line.  Furthermore, there are a lot fewer books with female protagonists, at least in the collections that I've read. 

Now, there are some exceptions.  Magdalen Nabb's man in Florence was Guarnaccia, and there are Louise Penny, Ann Cleeves, Grace Brophy, and Donna Leon writing about men.  (Many about Italian men.  Is it the men, or Italy, or the food?)  But other than Michael Genelin (Jana Matinova), have I come across many male writers have female protagonists?  (Charles Todd is sui generis, being a mother and son who write together under a pseudonym about a man.)  There are some men who write excellent supporting female characters:  Christopher Fowler's Janice Longbright and Phoebe and Sarah and really all the messed-up gals in Benjamin's Black's works are compelling characters in their own right, essential participants if not the driver of the plot. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough. 

Women write about women.  Rebecca Cantrell gave us the interesting Hannah Vogel, negotiating Nazi Berlin, and Cara Black's Aimee Leduc charges around Paris.  And Charles Todd has that nurse, Bess whatshername Crawford doing good in WW1 England.  (They are equal opportunity that way.)

It has also just occured to me that generally speaking, I don't find the female protagonists that appealing.  Do I judge them more harshly?  Do they not meet my preconceived notions of what a crime-solver should be?  Do I just not want to deal with girl problems?  I liked Hannah Vogel, am on the fence about Jana Matinova, and couldn't stand Aimee Leduc.  Have I just been conditioned in some nefarious social manner to prefer male protagonists? 

I don't actually think there is much sexism happening here, but I like phrase, from Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman, "is some sexism happening to you?"  Her litmus test for sexism is, is this polite or not?  I believe I am being perfectly polite in my interpretations of these characters.  But am I viewing them all through some social goggles that I didn't realize I was wearing?  Am I aiding and abbeting some sexism without knowing it? 

Cuba to Italy to the UK

A couple of satisfying reads, one false start, and some current ambivalence mark my recent reading.

I ended my early review of Philip Kerr's If the Dead Rise Not with Bernie Gunther's marvelous comment about nude trombone players.  You could stop right there and have enjoyed it!  But the book continued to be as fine a read as the early chapters promised, and Kerr's description of Batista's near-the-end Cuba is lush and menacing, as the real thing must have been.  The ending was a not-quite-good surprise, in thatI kind of hate those mysteries where the hero was in the know all the time but didn't reveal it to the reader.  But Bernie is a great creation, a true survivor, and I look forward to getting the next one, which I hear starts, surprise, in Cuba!

While I enjoyed Charles Lenox's A Brilliant Blue Death as much for its anglophilia as for anything else, I just found myself restless with the second one, The September Society.  My mood of the moment demanded something grittier than Victorian-era Oxford, steeped in tradition - which I love - like nowhere else.  I think this will be an enjoyable read, but at the time it felt like a too-warm shawl and I cast it aside in favor of . . .

Michael Dibdin's Ratking.  Now, I'd toyed with reading these Aurelio Zen novels for a while, but since I'd seem some adaptations on PBS a year or two ago, I worried that a) the TV version would influence my mind's eye in terms of how I'd "see" the story and its characters, and b) that they wouldn't be interesting because I knew how they ended.  But when I thought about it, I realized that I had NO RECOLLECTION WHATSOEVER of how they ended, so b) was removed as an issue.  And I'm pleased to report that the books are darker and a little nastier than the TV versions, so even if I did recall how they ended (and I'm not sure it was the same anyway), they did not influence my imagination really at all, and that dispatched a).  Add to this the fact that Ratking is a satisfyingly complex story about a kidnapped industrial magnate and his creepy family, well set in the Italian context of constant kidnappings and a lot of good coffee, and you've got yourself a winner.  Dibdin isn't nearly as into food, so far at least, as, say, Camilleri, but I'll take this meal:

"Lunch with Bartocci had indeed proved very much like dinner with the Milettis, except that the food was even better:  macaroni in a sauce made wiht cream and spicy sausage meat, chunks of liver wrapped in a delicte net of membrane and charred over embers, thin dark-green stalks of wild asparagus, strawberries soaked in lemon juice."  (Ratking, 1997 ed., pp. 71-72) 

I look forward to reading more of Dibdin's work, and seeing if any future meals live up to this one.


And now for the ambivalence.  I've written before about how much I enjoy Ann Cleeves' Shetland Islands-based mysteries, as much for the setting as for anything else.  And Blue Lightning did not disappoint on that front.  This one takes place on detective Jimmy Perez' home island of Fair Isle, yes, of sweater fame.  And apparently birding - the plot involves a murder at a birding research center, where birders from all over the world come to look at the many species that move through the Shetland Islands.  Once again, the light, the sea, the barren land, the weather, all add up to make for a compelling setting.  And, this plot involved a cook at the birding station, so there are gallons of tea and an awful lot of fresh-baked scones, not to mention a few drams of whiskey which never hurts.  I challenge you to read this, and to NOT want to put on a sweater and get baking.  But I didn't find many of the characters particularly compelling, and Jimmy and Fran's relationship . . . is it fraught or not?  I'm kind of tired of sorting that out, now four books in.  Finally, the resolution is one of those out-of-the-blue ones that just seems sort of invented to end the book.  Well, the series ends here, and I still think they are worth reading for the islands and the baking.  But stop by to borrow them, no need to rush out and buy.

Zut alors, I have meesed one

(points if you get that reference in the title)

The Oddballs did not include Ann Cleeves' Shetland Islands series, Raven Black, White Nights, Red Bones, and Blue Lightning.  I've read the first three, and have to say that the setting is really the star in these.  They are your standard crime-in-a-rural/idiosynchratic-setting thrillers, with a local cop,the expectedly single, male, appealing fellow named Jimmy Perez.  Yes, that's a Spanish surname in the very far north of the UK, adding a jarring little twist, but apparently not anachronistic, thanks to Spanish seamen who wrecked in the area centuries ago.  Over the course of the books, Perez becomes enamored of, and in a relationship with a local artist named Fran. She is an outsider, while he is considered a native. Fran and her daughter are key characters in the first book, but not integral to the crimes themselves in the later ones (that I've read). 

There is of course a core of Britishness, even though the Islanders would be the last to say they are at all affiliated with their southern cousins. There is a vast quantity of tea and almost as much coffee drunk in these stories.  The crimes are appropriately heinous for proper British village mysteries, and the villians always good and local.  Much of the tension in these stories comes from the meshing of Island natives with outsiders who've moved there for various reasons - they love the landscape, or the solitude, or the sweaters - yes, Virginia, there really is a Fair Isle, and they knit like crazy up there.  But it is not hard to see why people love it there, since Cleeves' descriptions of the light, the sea, the barren landscape, and the shingle are hypnotic.  They jarr, nicely, against the spot-on discussions of the local fishing economy, role of tourism, and challenges of an encroaching modern world on a place with deeply traditional social, political, and economic roots.  This tension is best demonstrated in Red Bones where the wealth that came with fishing and the glory that came with assisting the Norwegian underground in WW2 is beginning to stagnate, causing all kinds of problems, that are in turn presented against the backdrop of an archeological dig, of course revealing that these are age-old challenges. 

I found the plots almost secondary here, now that I think about it.  Particularly with Raven Black, the ending seemed to come from nowhere, and I hate that - feels like the author just needed to tie it up and said oh I know, I'll have HIM/HER do it.  (Don't want to give it away!)  I know I've said I don't want to figure it out in Chapter Three, but neither do I want it tied up too quickly at the end.  One wants to work to solve the mystery, but then to be able to look back and see the signs adding up. So I liked the bit of historico-social overlay, but do I remember who did what to whom in the modern story?  Alas, no.  

Now, I've been kind of holding off on reading the final installment, Blue Lightning, because I made the mistake of reading some reviews on Amazon, and people are REALLY divided on this last story.  Apparently something shocking will happen at the end that really pissed off devotees of the series.  I'm guessing that Jimmy or Fran are either killed, or revealed as the villain in whatever the drama will be.  But I've been feeling at loose ends with it, so I'll get Blue Lightning at the next opportunity.  And perhaps a sweater.