The Woodcutter, The Mugger

Ed McBain's The Mugger is the second of his well-regarded 87th Precinct series.  Unfortunately, this one shows its age a bit; it feels a bit derivative of Chandler here and there.  It's not a bad novel, but also not a great precursor of good things to come.

The Woodcutter, on the other hand, is by an author with a long career, and here Reginald Hill is almost at the top of his form.  I think that the final climactic revelation is a little too melodramatic, but it's also almost irrelevant to the story, and, up till that point, the book is pitch-perfect.  As usual, Hill is very aware of his literary antecedents, in this case The Count of Monte Cristo.  Although he's not in way aping Dumas, it's clear that he knows that story well, while putting a more modern twist on it.

The first part of the story (the unfair incarceration) is communicated to us through essays that Wolf Hadder is writing for his prison psychiatrist.  So they're not in particularly chronological order, and, of course, Wolf has every reason to be careful with his revelations, since his parole will depend on her evaluation of his progress.  Also like the Count, Wolf finds a secret hoard of cash, and he will take his revenge in indirect ways, eschewing direct violence.  Dumas's Count, though, comes to a moral clarity in his actions toward Mercedes.  Does Wolf do the same for Imogen, his Mercedes?  The contrast between Imogen and Mercedes is probably one of the biggest structural differences between the two books.  (Obviously, the addition of the psychiatrist is the other).


This is a much more straight-forward suspense novel than the Dalziel and Pascoe series, and it was a nice break from those.

Death of Dalziel

I've been slowly catching up to the present on the Dalziel/Pascoe books.  Every time I think that author Reginald Hill has worn out his bag of tricks, he changes up the game somehow.

Here, he takes out Andy Dalziel, who most would have said is the mainstay of the series.  Dalziel is caught in a bomb blast and laid up in a coma for most of the novel, leaving everything in his understudy Pascoe's hands.  Pascoe begins to take on some aspects of Dalziel's character over the course of the novel -- he's always been the good cop to Dalziel's bad cop, and now he finds that the bad cop persona has its uses.

Overall, a solid entry in the series, Hill is at the top of his craft here.  He knows how to spin an artful sentence as well as anyone in the genre and better than most, he knows how to weave an interesting plot, and he writes dialog very well.  But I feel like the heart got left behind a few books ago; the middle novels often left me moved in a way this one didn't.

Voice of the Violin, Good Morning Midnight

I finished off two very good, very different books, one from Italy (Andrea Camilleri's Voice of the Violin) and one from England (Reginald Hill's Good Morning Midnight).  In a flight of fancy, it seems to me that comparing them is a bit like comparing two cars from the respective countries, a Ferrari and Rolls.

Voice of the Violin is a no-frills, very fast ride.  In the time it takes Hill to introduce his major characters, Camilleri has his inspector solve a murder, clear an innocent victim, and take care of some personal matters on the side.  But it's also a very smooth ride; you never feel like Camilleri is riding roughshod, skipping too many details.  Partly, he achieves this with minimal scene setting -- he'll switch locations with no indication, give a conversation, then switch over to somewhere else.  Again, though, it's done very smoothly -- I never felt a sense of dislocation.  And, by the same token, the conversations are minimal -- Camilleri just gives you the relevant bits, cutting away before the parties say good-bye.

Good Morning, Midnight, on the other hand, is a very ornate and stately ride.  Hill happily throws in sesquipedalian words on a whim, luxuriating in Dalziel's turns of phrase, and giving us two locked-room mysteries for the price of one.  The book moves at a very deliberate pace; it's not so much that it's slow as that Hill wants to present all of his characters, even the minor ones, fully.  This is important here, because their different testimonies about what happened are the backbone of the novel.  In the end, this is actually a modernist take on the idea of the locked room mystery -- most of the minor mysteries are not only left unsolved, but Hill takes pains to show that it's deliberate; in the novel, truth is unknowable.  All we have are different testimonies, and we can decide how much we trust each one's reliability.

Nail Through the Heart, Death's Jest Book

Nail Through the Heart was another Kindle freebie, a crime novel set in Thailand.  I enjoyed it, but not enough to try others in the series.

Death's Jest Book is the umpteenth entry in the Dalziel and Pascoe series.  It's one of those examples of an author's craft improving even as his invention flags.  Hill's craft has never been better -- his similes are crisp and witty, his dialog is strong, Frannie Root's letters have a distinctive voice, and so on.  At the same time, the story isn't that compelling.  It's mostly a cleanup operation from Dialogues of the Dead, resolving the hanging plotline of an uncaught murderer, wrapping up Pascoe's pas de deux with Frannie Root, and that's about it.

I've felt for a long time that crime novels can give a writer a leg up by giving him a natural impetus forward -- there's always something to move the plot forward, because he ultimately has to resolve the situation created by the crime.  In Death's Jest Book, Hill shows the reverse; with only a minimal crime to focus on, the plot completely languishes, and, however fun the writing, it's not enough to save the book.

One other big shortcoming is series-itis.  Hill has crafted a few long-running characters by this point (Wield, Dalziel, Pascoe, Ellie) as well as some shorter-running ones who he wants to make long-term (mainly Novello, but also "Hat" Bowler), and he wants to give them all a role in the book -- if he'd taken out some of those sub-plots, the book would've been shorter and stronger.  I don't know if he's worried that we'll forget who they are if they don't show up or what.  (Compare this with Jim Butcher, who's got the confidence to drop characters out of sight for 3-4 books at a time)

Proven Guilty, Dialogues of the Dead

Not much to say about Proven Guilty, Jim Butcher's 8th Harry Dresden novel, since I'm only about halfway through, except to say that it's proof that even the pulpiest authors can improve.  One of my pet peeves with the series has been Butcher's tendency to throw out pet phrases until they become irritating -- "Hell's Bells" is probably the chief offender.  So imagine my surprise to be more than halfway through the book and only had one "Hell's Bells" and none of the other annoying phrases.

The stuff that Butcher is actually good at -- the plotting -- has fortunately not changed.

Reginald Hill has been an author who I've lauded in the past for his willingness to change, and Dialogues of the Dead shows that willingness in spades.  Although it's part of the Dalziel/Pascoe series, Hill spends most of the novel with a new recruit to the force, "Hat" Bowler.  Although Dalziel and Pascoe are important to the book, Bowler is really the central player.  In a way, Hill is revisiting themes from early on, with Bowler playing a similar role to the early Pascoe, as a college graduate trying to cope with Dalziel.  But Bowler is more than a Pascoe stand-in.  He is not an intellectual they way Pascoe is, and is more aggressive about going around Dalziel.

At the same time, he provides some of the sparks that the Pascoe/Dalziel relationship used to have, before Pascoe matured, and before Hill began to wear away some of Dalziel's rough edges.  Hill has also matured, and the struggle is rendered more subtly than the early Pascoe/Dalziel books.

In addition to confounding our expectations about the series characters, Hill has completely up-ended the typical closure of a whodunnit.  I'm not sure if I approve -- he's still never really dealt with the thread left over from Dead Heads, the closest equivalent in his previous work.  But it's a bold move, and it'll be interesting to see where he takes relationships in the next book or two.

Arms and the Women,The Disposable Man

Between one thing and another, it's been hard to catch up to the reading I've been doing, but hopefully this post brings me up to date...

Reginald Hill invokes both the classics and feminism in both the title of Arms and the Women and its subtitle, "An Elliad," letting us know that Ellie Pascoe is going to be a focus of this novel.  Inside, he alludes St. Uncumber, apparently a patron saint of women in parts of rural England, and includes Liberata, a political protest group focused on the rights of unfairly jailed women.  So I think it's safe to say that the novel is Hill's attempt to work a female point of view into what has until now been an almost exclusively male series.

At the same time, Hill is trying to round out Ellie Pascoe's character and give her view of the Peter Pascoe/Dalziel relationship, in a short story that she's been writing.  We already know that she views Peter as pius Aeneas, and here she writes Dalziel as Odysseus, matching wits with the more straight-arrow Aeneas.  I think that her story is supposed to show that her anti-Dalziel stance is softening, which she would never admit to in public.

Having said all that, I wasn't so blown away by the book; I appreciated Hill's aims more than the result.  In general, I don't like it when local law enforcement crosses swords with the CIA/MI5.  It usually feels very forced to me -- I have a hard time believing that these things happen all that often.  Usually, there is some stretching required to get the international bad guys into the local picture, and Arms and the Women very much suffers from this problem.  The connections required to bring all the characters together are positively Dickensian, with too many disparate characters turning out to be related.

I think the same problem afflicts Archer Mayor's The Disposable Man, although not as badly.  Joe Gunther gets wrapped up in a wrangle between the CIA, the FBI, and the Russian Mafia, all taking place in Northern Vermont.  Once you accept the basic premise, Mayor does a much better job than Hill of tying the characters into the plot, but it just felt like a lot to swallow.  On the other hand, his goals are so much less ambitious that I fund I don't have much to say about the novel.

Bloomsday Dead, On Beulah Height

I just finished a couple of books that made me think about the intersection of the readership for detective novels and "high art" books.  Adrian McKinty's Bloomsday Dead is a violent thriller that is riddled with references to Joyce's Ulysses, from the title and first line ("Stately plump Buck Mulligan") through the chapter titles, all the way to the closing line ("yes").

And these aren't just clever references; the theme of homecoming and wandering is woven through the novel.  Michael Forsyth finally comes back to Belfast, his Ithaca, after 10 years of wandering, to be reunited with Bridget Callahan and her daughter Siobhan, respectively his Penelope and Telemachus.  And the action takes place over a single day, just as Ulysses does.  Of course, the novel is not as schematic as that, just as Ulysses is not a copy of the Odyssey.  Rather, these thematic undertones add resonance to the sense of closure at the end of the book.  But I wonder, how many devotees of both hard-core modernism and hard-boiled noir are out there -- it seems like McKinty's is deliberately aiming at a very small audience.

On Beulah Height is another in the Dalziel/Pascoe series.  It was excellent, with Reginald Hill at the top of his form.  But, reading it at the same time as I was listening to Bloomsday Dead made me wonder again about that intersection of high and low art.  Hill throws in a number of references to the Aeneid (and, with the benefit of reading the novel 10 years after its original publication, I already know that the next novel is called Arms and the Woman).  Now, it's true that the Aeneid is not as obscure as Ulysses, but I can't help feeling that "Of arms and the man I sing" is not exactly a widely-known line, nor will references to Pascoe as "pious Aeneas" ring a lot of bells.  So, is the expectation that those who get it will be happy, and everyone else just ignore it, or what?

And, of course, while I get to revel in my smarts, I can't help wondering what references I'm missing elsewhere.  For example, anything that references, say, Tolstoy is going to go right over my head.

Beyond the Wood, Cabal

A couple of series books this time and a classic.

I'm catching up to the present in my Dalziel/Pascoe reading; Beyond the Wood was written just over a decade ago.  But its heart is set in WWI, specifically at Passchendaele, where British forces fell in huge numbers to conquer a very small area of land.  Pascoe finds out that one of his grandfathers was court-martialled and executed for cowardice in the battle, and he investigates further.  The WWI story doesn't really impinge on the modern story, which I actually thought was a good thing; very often mystery authors try to tie two crimes together -- one from the distant past and one in the present -- and it's pretty unconvincing.

The other notable event in this book was that Dalziel falls for a suspect again.  It's reminiscent of An April Shroud, the fourth book in the series (and Hill even has one of the characters mention the earlier case), but Hill handles it more maturely and subtly this time around.  On the one hand, it's not fun to see an author turn to recycling earlier plot ideas, but in cases like this, where he returns to a theme that he wasn't as adroit at earlier, I think it's nice to see the improvement.

The theme of Cabal is illusion and reality and their interaction.  The book centers around a mysterious conspiracy within the Knights of Malta that conducts assassinations and controls finances.  The punch line, of course, is that the conspiracy doesn't exist, but, even so, there are concrete results from the belief that they exist.  Crimes are committed to get more information about them, Aurelio's life is placed in jeopardy because others think he knows about them, and so on.  This theme carries through into the subplots as well -- there's a humorous side story about Aurelio and his girlfriend each suspecting the other of infidelity because they've created an illusion around the work they do, hiding the details from the other.

We also have Zen trying to actively be a corrupt cop, trying to take a bribe from a suspect to drop the case, and failing miserably by shooting the suspect instead.  In the end, fate seems to destine Aurelio for the side of the angels, even against his own wishes.