Enter Pale Death

Have you been on tenterhooks for weeks, wondering what my cryptic comment of last time meant, about 2015 having gotten a whole lot more interesting?  Here you go:  I start a new job in a week, as Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Education, Harvard College.  It's about as low on the decanal totem pole as you can get, but I'm pretty excited.

But enough about me, how about this latest entry from in Barbara Cleverly's doughty Joe Sandilands series, Enter Pale Death (Soho Crime, 2014)?  

My issues with this novel were:
1.  The Downton-derivativity, as mentioned.  The characters map from the Dowager down to the cook, and there is almost priceless art involved - a Canaletto instead of a della Francesca, but you get the idea.  Although, to be fair, there is no Cora or interestingly complex daughters.  And there is a ne'er-do-well younger son, which is kind of intriguing, or would be, if he were better developed as a character.
2.  You clearly have to have followed Joe's story back from India in order to really understand all the characters.  Said it before, will say it again, reading series out of order drives me nuts.
3.  The timing is very hard to follow until we get to the actual house party event but even there, people are invited, but for when?  Is the person Lily is set to observe in London the same as the fellow who asked Joe to help him re-acquire some stolen art?  Are we supposed to know this or did I miss some clue?
4.  A few too many threads, surely designed to be red herrings but serving more as distractions.  Art, a Green Man, various romantic interests, murder, horses.
5.  The horses themselves are not an issue, but the scene where Joe and Hunnyton meet some horses in a field - why do they stop there?  who knows - is all rippling horseflesh pawing the air, overwritten to my taste.  The author is making a point about ancient local knowledge of the Ways of the Horse which is actually kind of interesting, but it is yet another of these plot threads that you have to try and remember in case it is important, which it is not, particularly.

Finally, as the story draws to its conclusion, Our Hero Joe Sandilands is regularly having quiet conversations or preparing to ask someone some penetrating questions or laying the groundwork to catch the perp or otherwise gathering information that will be crucial to solving the case - but not letting us in on it.  In other words, we follow his detective work, but we are not permitted to know what he's finding out.  I hate this in detective fiction.  It does prepare all the characters for a Big Reveal Scene at the end - a crime fiction trope so not inappropriate - but it makes the reader unsettled.  Are we witnesses or suspects, inadvertently or purposely being left in the dark?  Or are we fellow-detectives?  How are we supposed to empathize with the protagonist (which surely we are, since he apparently has all these marvelous qualities - wit, stalwartness, brains, looks) if we aren't let in on what he is doing?  I guess this is a technique to make the Hero the smartest guy in the room but I simply find it annoying.

Although it does occur to me that I find it charming when Hercule Poirot (as portrayed by David Suchet) does it, so maybe it is just the characters here aren't doing it for me.

This is way more detail than this book demands.  I'm making this sound like a more complex novel than it is.  It is not, it just feels disorganized, but that will not make you throw the book across the room.    Look, if you like English Country House Murders, then this might be a good read for you because it is all there - the setting, the people, the gracious living.  There is even a moat!  But read the earlier Joe Sandilands before you get here.  The stories set in India have a more interesting setting, and in his later years, Joe has become a little too wot-wot, jolly good, I say! for my taste.

Ragtime in Simla

I wish I could say I’d been dying to get back to the entirely personable and pleasant Joe Sandilands, but Ragtime in Simla (2002; this edition, Dell, 2006) was more of a desperation move after a few other false starts.  Ratlines was an initial bust, and so was Detective Inspector Huss.  The former was too much of a prose adjustment after Benjamin Black, and the latter was just boring.  While it is true that Huss is a refreshingly positive change after the dour Scandinavians of Henning Mankel and that crowd, her story just never sparked much interest and worse, seemed to be written in cliché after cliché.  Could it have been the translation? 

In any case, I’d decided to give Barbara Cleverly’s early 20^th century detective another try, and I’m not unhappy that I did.  For various reasons, World War One veteran and Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands (just got the connection – does he know Ian Rutledge?) seems to find himself regularly in India, and there is always some nefarious activity going on that only Our Hero can get to the bottom of.  In this instance, Joe is on his way to the high mountain town of Simla, the summer capital of the British Raj, when he witnesses a murder.  Faster than you can say bobs-your-uncle, that murder is connected to an earlier one, and the cinematic characters and settings are piling up left and right.  There are beautiful women with tragic pasts, disreputable drunken chums, brisk bureaucrats, lordly elites, mysterious madams, inscrutable natives, plucky kids, and all the rest you’d expect to find in a novel set in the final decades of British rule in India. Ragtime in Simla is a pretty straight-up mystery, with some mixed-up identities, but it will keep you reading to see how it all comes out.  

And you cannot miss with the setting.  Cleverly has a terrific eye for detail, and while I don’t know much about India, it all reads authentically.  You can look up Simla, or Shimla, as it is now called, and if you do a google image search you will indeed find pictures of an absolutely stunning setting on the edge of the Himalayas.  Cleverly was not making it up, nor was Kipling, whom her characters all adore and have apparently memorized on the subject of this charming hill town.  And while she has an obvious affection for the British in India, Cleverly is not above an accurate portrayal of its lesser lights, such as this description of a “chummery” where a group of the aforementioned louts live:

“Joe’s impression of Old India was reinforced as they entered the house.  The furniture was European but shabby and knocked about.  Bills and invitation cards jostled each other on the mantelpiece; not a few of these were over a year old.  Inevitably, the prints of the “Midnight Steeplechase” hung on the wall along with a fine leopard skin and the head of a markhor.  A fencing mask and crossed foils added a note of gentlemanly athleticism, and there were whips, boots, boxing gloves, boxes of ammunition, not-well-secured gun cupboards, boxes of cigars sealed and opened, the remains of what obviously been a copious breakfast amongst the debris of which could be seen a bottle of gin and a bottle of Angostura bitters.”  (146)

Yes, I like the distinction between “Old India” and the current setting – suggesting that one shouldn’t paint anything – even British colonialism – with too broad a brush.

But you know, that colonialism – precisely the source of all that marvelous atmosphere – is really a bit hard to take if you think about it even a little bit.  Colonialism has apparently become a focus of tourism in India, which gives about the same frisson of discomfort as touring plantations in the American South that play the antebellum romance card just a little too hard.  Simla in the 1920s is about 25 years away from Indian independence, but of course this is coming after decades, centuries of British domination.  And if you really go down that path, it is just ghastly to contemplate how the British imposed themselves and their nation on so so many other indigenous peoples and entire continents for so very long: North America, Africa, South Asia, and so on.  It is not coincidental that I’m thinking about this because we’re planning a family trip to Ireland, and of course you can’t miss how they feel about the British.  I know that lots of folks think that the US acts the same way today, but while I agree that we come on a bit strong sometimes, in context, the US’ efforts at world domination pale in comparison to the 18^th and 19^th c. Brits.  But yeah, I felt a little breeze of collective white guilt reading Ragtime in Simla, if only because it does all sound rather lovely.  Oh well, as my husband likes to gently chide, as long as you feel guilty about it.

    

The Oddballs

Last of the catch-up posts. We could also call this the random historicals.

Fin de siecle Vienna is a great setting for a novel, particularly when written by someone who has obviously done his research. When reading the Reinhardt/Liebermann series, you have the sense that author Frank Tallis spent hours wandering around the city with vintage maps, making sure that every location in his stories makes sense and is reachable by the route he describes. The authenticity extends to the mmm-inspiring descriptions of cafe culture, where each person's particular kaffee und kuchen are tailored to the character, the location, the time of day, and so on. That's some research I'd like to have been along on. Tallis' main characters are Oskar Reinhardt, a police detective with an idiot boss, and his pal Max Lieberman, a psychologist who follows that newly fashionable and slightly suspect fellow Freud. The scenes with Freud himself always feel a bit much to me, but Tallis is in fact a clinical psychologist so who am I to judge? Reinhardt and Lieberman work on really creepy crimes, that always seem to involve a lot of blood, some anti-semitism, a healthy dose of sexual or other kind of obsession (that's where Freud comes in), and a great deal of excellent music (Reinhardt sings and Lieberman plays the piano, both rather expertly) all washed down with some cigars, kaffee, and a whole lot of schlag. They are actually darker than I am painting them, but I find those cafe scenes so deliciously distracting. I've read four so far, Vienna Blood, Fatal Lies, Vienna Secrets, and Vienna Twilight, but there are a couple more (bear in mind that they, like many crime novels, are published under different titles in the UK). I think that atmospherically-speaking, they are best taken in the winter.

What is it about crime solving and good eating, that seem to go hand-in-hand in so many of these books? A series that I loved at first, and left only reluctantly, was Jason Goodwin's Investigator Yashim. This one is really sui generis, in that our hero is a eunuch formerly in the service of the Turkish sultan in 1836. Having served in the court, although now he is sort of retired from that work, he is occasionally called on to discreetly investigate crimes that could apparently topple the Ottoman empire. Yashim is aided in this work by a nutty Polish diplomat who lives in shabby splendor in a crumbling mansion, and who offers a foretaste of Poland's complete political irrelevance to the modern world. If you like complicated stories where you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA OF WHAT IS GOING ON, these are for you. As I surely would in some dark quarter of Istanbul, I got completely lost while trying to figure these stories out. Why did I read three of them, then? Well, Goodwin's descriptions of Istanbul are absolutely mesmerizing, for one thing. Like Tallis, this is a man who has spent a great deal of effort ensuring that his settings are accurate down to the tiniest detail, not that I would know from 19th c. Istanbul of course, but consider the start of chapter 5 of Goodwin's first novel, The Janissary Tree:

"It had been a difficult morning. Yashim went to the baths, was soaped and pummeled, and lay for a long time in the hot room before returning home in his freshly laundered clothes. Finally, having explored the matter in his mind in every way he could think of in an effort to draw a lead, he turned to what he always considered the next best thing.
How do you find three men in a decaying, medieval, mist-benighted city of two million people?
You don't even try.
You cook."
(Goodwin, The Janissary Tree, p. 15)

So, yeah, he had me at "went to the baths" but it gets even better. This is a short chapter, just two pages, but it contains one of the best descriptions of an individual cooking for his own enjoyment that I've ever read. It actually inspired me to buy not one but two Turkish cookbooks, and while I'm no expert, I've thoroughly enjoyed cooking from them, particularly Classical Turkish Cooking by Ayla Algar.

I don't think that the follow-up novels in this series ever quite lived up to this moment in the first one. After The Bellini Card, which was the third, and most ridiculous, I gave up. But you know, re-reading that chapter above may make me give Goodwin another chance. It's certainly going to make me look up Acem Yahnisi, which Yasim made by taking "a chicken, jointed it, crushed walnuts on the flat of the cleaver and prepared . . . with pomegranate juice." (16)

Not really historical, but European and not fitting anywhere else (since I've not actually read any other Scandinanvian crime novels, yes, it is true I didn't read those ones about The Girl), is Henning Mankell's Wallander series.  I read several of these after watching a terrific television adaptation of the first few, starring the dreamy Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander.  But after about six, I thought to myself, why am I punishing myself this way?  This fellow is so goddamned depressed that he is depressing me.  And it is all in translation which is pretty stilted (although maybe that is just Mankel) more so even than Camilleri, who is also in translation but Sicily makes up for it.  Once you get past visions of Danish modern furnished police stations, you are left with nothing but bleakness and depressed people killing each other, or trying to find out why they are killing each other, in tons and tons of snow.  Of course, that is not entirely true, they don't all take place in the winter, and there are evocative seaside settings.  But there is no good food, and while I hate lazy phrases like this, it applies here:  life is too short.

Last of the oddballs, and briefly, is Barbara Cleverly's The Last Kashmiri Rose.  This takes place in the days of the British empire in India, and while it has marvelous settings and a certain amount of romance, I kept confusing Cleverly with Cleary and the Ramona books for kids.  Tea, buckets of it, and snakes I think.  No good food, natch.