The White Whale, redux!

Last weekend we participated in what I hope is becoming an annual ritual:  the Moby Dick Marathon (MDM) at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.  Loyal readers may recall that I read Moby Dick in 2014, spurred on by my husband and son who had both recently taken the plunge, er, voyage.  The following January I signed up to read in the MDM, and we all enjoyed it so much that Peter joined me in reading this year, and Isabel participated in the Kid's Marathon (reading an abridged version, natch). This was the 20th anniversary of the MDM, so there was a lot of media interest and general excitement about the whole affair.  You can read it about in the Boston Globe, HuffPost, and even hear a story about it on WBUR.*

But anniversaries aside, here's how it works every year.  Moby Dick is read, start to finish, stem to stern, spout to tail as it were, over the course of 25 hours on a cold weekend in January.  It was the New Year when Ishmael and Queequeg set out on their odyssey, from New Bedford, and it was from here also that Melville himself set out on his own whaling adventure aboard the Acushnet.  So, we begin at the beginning.  Someone famous always gets to read the first chapter or two.  (This year, it was Nathaniel Philbrick, author of many books including In the Heart of the Sea:  The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, about the vessel upon which fate some of the tale of MD is based.  And, conveniently, of which a major motion picture is about to open at a theater near you.)

Anyway, the opening chapters are read in a spectacular three-story gallery that contains a huge scale model of a whaleship that you can clamber about in (the Lagoda), and harpoons and prints and maps and general whaling stuff.  It is a bit distracting, but there is a big crowd because, well, call me Ishmael!  One of the most famous opening lines in all of English-language literature!  When the story moves to the Seaman's Bethel across the street, so move we, to attend the service described in the novel, complete with choral-society performed hymn and fierce sermon about - who else - Jonah.

After the action in the story leaves the Bethel, the reading continued this year in a spanking new fourth-floor gallery at the Wattles Jacobs Education Center back at the Museum, with a broad view of the gray, blustery port.  Peter and I took our cue, and read most eloquently from chapter 11, about Ishmael and Queequeg basically getting to know each other by having a smoke and sharing a bed.  I think they were running behind at that point, as we felt our time was cut just a wee bit short.  But the important thing is that we acquitted ourselves with aplomb, tripping over nary a word and letting Melville's rich phrasing roll off our lips like the great shroud of the sea . . . .


Here's me and Petey getting ready to read.

Others would read chapters in Mandarin, Hebrew, Dutch, French, and Portuguese and probably some others that I've forgotten now.  You could even attend a full reading of an abridged version in Portuguese, should you choose.

We Laskins set a course for Cambridge after our reading, given other social commitments, but the event continued into the next afternoon, when the MB Whaling Museum president would read the final chapter "and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."  Last year, I read toward the end, so we stuck around for the dramatic finis.  It is pretty awesome.

Before all of this started, the Kid's Marathon took place.  About 50 youngsters took turns reading chapters from the Great Starts edition, and they were live-streamed to Iceland where it was being read simultaneously - it was some joint project about ocean conservation, which MD is often used to support.  Given our early spot in the main marathon, the organizers gave Izzy the final chapter, which she read with some brio and great poise.  You can see a video of her reading on my facebook page, and if Bill ever gets his act together, there is a video of me and Peter, as well.

The great thing about the MDM is that it is celebrating a big, gnarly, breathtaking, weird, and generally fabulous NOVEL - a book!  Who gets excited about old, wordy books anymore?  The young man standing next to me at the Bethel, underlining something in an already-dog-eared and bookmarked and heavily hand-annotated paperback copy.  And the others toting around the heavy volume that we have.  And the e-readers.  And so on.  There is also a loyal and devoted set of volunteers who make the whole thing happen ("Everyone who works here is an older lady" said Isabel.  I explained the concept of the docent to her.)  But the audience, and participants, are just everyday people like us.  Some students, some older people, some families, some singles, all united around one story.  They sit respectfully, or recline on the floor, books or e-readers in laps, luxuriating in the splendidly complicated language (no one-thousand-most-common-words here), chuckling together at the humor, and silently enduring the final hours of the chase, as Ahab gives into his madness and ends up, well, perhaps you should read it to find out.  Or you can join us next year for MDM21, because we have nailed our doubloon to the mast and plan to be there.  I desperately hope to get to read the chowder chapter ("Clam or cod?") someday.

ADDENDUM:  holy cow, I forgot about DICK.  If you've read Moby Dick, or maybe even just thought about it, or really if you just like words and humor, you should get DICK the Game and play it with your friends.  It takes words and phrases from MD, and asks you to complete modern-day sentences with them.  It is snorting, pee-in-your-pants funny.

*If you look very closely at the photo that accompanies this story, perhaps click on it to see a larger version, you will see Bill scratching his head way back in the corner of the Bethel.

2015, we hardly knew ye

Given the deafening silence here on Crime Pays for the past month plus, you would be forgiven for thinking I haven't been reading anything.  I have, really!  Things just got away, and maintaining the reviews here generates its own little pressure that of course compounds when not fulfilled.  And I'm not one for resolutions or turnarounds just because it is January for chrissakes.  Still, I would like to maintain this record, so I'm going to offer some capsules here of recent reads, and then start fresh.

Wolf Hall (2009, Henry Holt, this edition 2015, Macmillan), what?  That's not mystery, that's history, you are saying rhymingly to yourself.  True, we know how it ends.  But we don't really know how it was lived.  There is plenty written on Henry VIII and his crowd:  those he got along with, those he didn't, and those who, like Thomas Cromwell, he just kept close because they were too useful.  Cromwell's reputation is not exactly warm and fuzzy but Hilary Mantel presents him as a pretty complex character, and combined with Mark Rylance's fantastically nuanced portrayal in the televised version, you can't help but find him compelling.  

  "'Thomas Cromwell?' people say.  'That is an ingenious man.  Do you know he has the whole of the New Testament by heart?'  He is the very man if an argument about God breaks out; he is the very man for telling your tenants twelve good reasons why their rents are fair.  H is the man to cut through some legal entanglement that has ensnared you for for three generations, or talk your sniffling little daughter into the marriage she swears she will never make.  With animals, women and timid litigants, his manner is gentle and easy; but he makes your creditors weep.  He can converse with you about the Caesars or get you Venetian glassware at a very reasonable rate.  Nobody can outtalk him, if he wants to talk.  Nobody can better keep their head, when markets are falling and weeping men are standing on the street tearing up letters of credit."  (84)

Who wouldn't want this guy on their side?

What I liked best was the world Mantel created:  deeply described interiors and gardens and art and clothing and street scenes and meals.  It helped that I had the meticulously detailed PBS version in my mind's eye, but even without that Cromwell seems to pay as close attention to the running of his household as he does to Henry's fortunes.  This brief review can't do this novel justice and I'm probably the only person I know who hasn't read it.  But if you are among that group, don't wait!

As presented in Wolf Hall,  Cromwell is a thoughtful and often deeply caring individual, even if simultaneously as ruthless and ambitious as history has painted him.  Early 20th c. investigator Ian Rutledge is about as far as you can get from the latter, but certainly lines up as equally thoughtful and similarly aware of his place in some grand historical trajectory.  World War I veteran Rutledge is up to his usual solid, serious investigative tactics in Hunting Shadows (2014, William Morrow) but his ghostly sidekick Hamish is increasingly diminished.  Charles Todd has Scotland Yard send Rutledge to Cambridgeshire this time, to investigate two murders that are apparently unrelated, except for the fact that they were both committed by the same kind of military-issue rifle that was issued to soldiers in France during the Great War.  There are some good threads here about the war, including discussion of the isolating role of sniper, as well as sympathetic portraits of several men, in addition to Rutledge, who struggle to live with the emotional legacy of the war.  Hamish tags along as usual but doesn't play the same role as in earlier stories.  Here we see Rutledge grappling with his PTSD in a real and visceral flashback, during which he hides in a church, knowing that it is coming and desperately seeking a private place to temporarily fall apart.  The dreams come less frequently for him now, it seems, and Hamish seems content to just ride around in the back seat occasionally commenting.  The resolution of these murders - for of course, they are connected, I'm not spoiling anything by telling you that - is tricky and will require your attention to follow.  In fact, the story kind of putts along for quite some time before all of a sudden getting complicated.  Stick with it, it is an interesting resolution, but still feels like the story didn't know where it was going, and then all of a sudden the author(s) said "I know!  Let's make so-and-so do such-and-such and be related to . . . ."

I don't necessarily believe in signposts pointing to the solution from the beginning, but I don't like an ending that is so surprising it feels tacked on.

Everyone needs a good read for the holidays, and I did dip back into The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries to revisit the Holiday Bogie, one of my favorite, if very short stories in this collection.  But what I really enjoyed was Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas, part of Stephanie Barron's imaginative series of Jane Austen mysteries.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Here, JA is the "investigator" although mostly she just does what Jane Austen did best:  observe, comment, and resolve issues.  Barron has apparently done an enormous amount of research into Austen's life and times - the sources are, it would appear, abundant and rich - and with this eighth entry into the series, easily creates Jane and her family's world.  From her ebullient mother to priggish brother and ghastly sister-in-law, Jane's family are both represented and skewered, perhaps a bit more energetically than we might find in Emma or Pride and Prejudice, but enjoyably so all the same.  This story is much your standard country-house murder.  Jane and family are invited for part of the holidays to a great house, and shortly afterwards, a murder occurs - then another one!  Jane, not quite a busybody but adept at overhearing and picking up signs and interpreting, has a hand in the investigation into the deaths almost as soon as they happen.

Of course what was really lovely about this was the description of Christmas in a Regency-era British great house.   From bowls of flaming punch to a massive yule log to a splendid hunt and Twelfth Night ball, everything an Anglophile could want is here and I reveled in it.  The book also takes place in 1814-15, which is a rather fabulous time for lavish holidays, just the same period in which Boston Ballet's Nutcracker is set, and kind of around Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.  So my holiday season was basically a stage-snowy whirl of wintry Christmas confection (even if if was 70 degrees on Christmas Eve).

Of course, if you live in the 21st c. and are at all human and thoughtful, you might also think about what it took to create and maintain that lifestyle, the toll on the lives of workers and farmers and basically everyone who didn't benefit from inherited wealth or riches earned off the backs of others. Yes, these are the kinds of questions Downton Abbey raises now.  Applied to our era, this is why, as was noted online today in a discussion of ridiculously expensive restaurants, Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls.  We simply can't live that way, no matter how much we want to.  Even if we win the Powerball (est. jackpot at this writing:  $1.3 BIllion, that's a B).

I've been far too lax on this blog in recent months, both in content and quantity.  Here's hoping I can raise the bar back to previous levels in 2016.  Happy new year!

Better Late Than Never

or:  Thanks to the Wonders of the Internet, You Can Read This Anytime

Followers of crime fiction, the demimonde, and darkness more generally:  did you thrill to last week's New York Times Book Review?  You could read about a biography of my all-time fave John le Carre, meet some wicked smaht women crime writers, and dive into the weird and wonderful world of Sherlock Holmes lovers.  There are some recipes and a few witches get skewered, too.

The Impossible Dead

We have a theory in our house about British television dramas:  there are about 25 actors total in Great Britain, and they are all in all the shows that we like.  Look:  there's Sam from Foyle's War in Death in Paradise!  Roz from MI5 in Crimson Field!  Who isn't in Wolf Hall - Soames Forsyte, Jenny Lee, Mycroft, Lady Persie from the Upstairs/Downstairs reboot, to name a few.  And don't get me started on the unpleasant but apparently bulletproof Spratt from the Dowager's household on Downton Abbey - we see him all over the place, in Crimson Field, Foyle's War, and Inspector George Gently.

A related phenomenon is that I am starting to see fictional detectives in TV terms; namely, Malcolm Fox, in my mind's eye, IS George Gently.  Doesn't matter that Fox is in Edinburgh and Gently in Durham, or that Gently is obviously older than Fox but takes place about 40 years earlier.  There is something in the older, tolerant UK-ish detective with younger impetuous sidekicks that just says white-haired, wise George Gently.

There is a bit of irony in this.  The plot line in Ian Rankin's second Complaints novel, The Impossible Dead, actually turns on the topic of Scottish nationalism, especially its less-stable 1980s incarnation.  This story, set sometime in the now, before the independence referendum of 2014 but firmly in the time of the Scottish National Party's political ascendancy, involves events and characters from the movement's more radical recent past.  The characters are fictional, but not the organizations, and Rankin effectively links them to the the weird old days of the paranoid 1980s:  the bitter end of the Cold War, nuclear arms development, and terrorism in and out of the U.K. (frightening in its day but somehow more comprehensible than the religiously extremist and sophisticatedly global version we live with now).  The younger cops don't really know from this time, but Foxy remembers.  It may be this nostalgia* that makes me link Fox and Gently - both characters operate with an undertone of melancholy that makes them more interesting than your standard single male investigator of a certain age.

Gently's melancholy is firmly rooted in his wife's murder, which, with his being a cop, feeds that whole series.  In Fox's case, the melancholy is less around his work or longing for the bad old days, and more about his elderly father's decline and his difficult relationship with his impossibly selfish sister.  This thread doesn't appear at first to fit in this box-within-a-box story of misbehaving cops, dead cops, and old, unresolved (not unsolved, just, perhaps not correctly solved) deaths.  But I think it is really about coming to terms with your past self, whether that is your political identity, your profession, your additions, or maybe even just your role in your family.

Still, there is a plot, and it feels somehow a disservice to lump Fox and his Scottish compatriots with a Brit.  In The Impossible, Fox and his colleagues Kaye and Naysmith, the despised Complaints, must review some alleged suspicious testimony on the part of cops in another town.  In the course of that work, a retired cop - the one who blew the lid on the misbehavior that the others may be covering up - is found dead, and he, as it happens, turns out to have been investigating a possible cover-up of a death decades earlier, of a political firebrand.  Confused yet?  Yeah, that's how this goes.  Just when you think you've got a handle on it, someone else who may or may not be covering up some less savoury part of his or her past appears.  And then Fox keeps getting pulled back home to deal with his father's failing health and his sister's irrational behavior around that.  While I found the piecing together of the modern radical part of Scottish politics quite interesting, it is never really clear why Fox keeps pursuing the investigation.  Having overstepped at one point in the initial internal investigation, he was warned off pretty early, but keeps poking around, incurring the wrath or more and more senior police and government officials.  The eventual resolution is connected to his own history only tangentially, and ultimately feels a bit forced.

That said, Fox is a sympathetic character, and the story is well-written.  And when I thought about it, the whole coming-to-terms-with-your-past theme makes some sense.  I'm not likely to seek out another Complaints but I still like them better than grumpy Rebus.  And if you like the Scots, you'll enjoy this one.



* Nostalgia is not the right word, for that evokes something you like remembering, and you don't really want to think more than you have to about letter bombs and nationalist terrorism.

Smaller and Smaller Circles

Well that is kind of how crime solving works, right?  You draw smaller and smaller circles around a perp, until you catch him/her.  So you could say that F.H. Batacan's Smaller and Smaller Circles (Soho Crime, 2015) wins the prize for most obvious title of a mystery ever.

That would be doing this unsurprising yet ultimately compelling novel a disservice.  For while the tracking-down of the heinous killer of young boys is fairly predictable, and Our Heroes exhibit the usual mix of genius, humility and a dash of hot-headedness, Batacan writes with warmth about her home country of the Philippines and passion about its flaws.  For the resolution of this crime, and indeed the crime itself, are dependent upon authority figures recognizing and fighting back against deeply entrenched and supremely powerful corruption in the Church and the government.  This venality, in Batacan's Philippines, is the biggest crime of all.

The investigators here are a couple of Jesuit priests who happen to teach anthropology and psychology at a University in Manila, Fathers Gus Saenz and Jerome Lucero. They are drawn in to the investigation by the apparently one respectable member of the National Bureau of Investigation, who recognizes a need for fresh minds not tainted by a desire for fame, fortune, or just plain laziness.  At the same time as Saenz and Lucero work - or don't - with the NBI, Saenz has been pursuing a highly visible priest whom he believes has been molesting boys, much to the dismay of the Church powers (the pursuit is to their dismay, not the molestation).  The story moves along somewhat predictably; Batacan uses the device of giving you a glimpse into the mind of the killer, and I couldn't tell if it was intentional that we were supposed to figure out how he found his victims before Our Heroes did, or not.

But I am glad I read this - thank you Soho Crime club - because it was a view into a different world.  In Batacan's universe, the bad priests are just the top of a heap of dishonest officials, poorly trained or lazy or perhaps just overwhelmed civil servants, all on a massive base of deeply entrenched poverty - the only way out of which seems be through the Church or the civil service, thus perpetuating the cycle of abuse and corruption.  There are pretty searing descriptions of lives lived at the very edge of the abyss, which you have no reason not to believe, and every reason, once you've read about kids whose lives depend on the trash they find at the dump, to be reminded about being grateful.

It is worth reading Batacan's Acknowledgements at the end, because they are a tribute to a great editor.  She writes:
  "The first time I wrote this book - in 1996, when I was in my mid-twenties - I was angry:  angry about my job, about the state of my country, about the callousness, complacency, and corruption that had dragged it there.
  The second time I wrote this book - in 2013, in my forties, having moved back home with my infant son - I found myself even angrier:  about the state of my country, which seemed even worse than it was in 1996, and about the callousness, complacency, and corruption that kept it there."

Smaller and Smaller Circles could be a screed, and it is not.  It is a good read, and it will be one of those that sticks in your mind after you are done.