9 Scary Words

I used to agree with Ronald Reagan that the 9 scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help” but now I think there are contenders in town: “I’ve written this book, tell me what you think”

Knowing how much I love to read a colleague (who doesn’t) (love to read that is) has provided me an advance copy of his soon-to-be published tome and is awaiting my thoughts.

This is a problem. While I do indeed love to read I am not indiscriminate with my affections. I don’t, for example, read business books. Neither, for another example, do I read self-help books. Ever. Under any circumstances. I’m not for a moment suggesting I need no help, I just believe that actual help is unlikely to be found between glossy covers emblazoned with phrases like ‘life-altering’ in large, colourful fonts. I suspect real help will also cost more than $29.95). Or, as my Dad would put it, “you get what you pay for in this life darling, if you can’t afford quality go without”.

Accordingly you can possibly imagine my total absence of delight when the aforementioned colleague presented me with a book that combines business with self-help and said “I’ve written this book, tell me what you think”. He also mentioned that he hadn’t shown it to other colleagues but that I was getting special treatment because he knows I am a reader.

Why do non-readers assume that readers will read anything put in front of them be it Pride and Prejudice or a TV Repair Manual? It’s generally understood that people have different tastes in food, clothes or movies so why are reading tastes not equally well appreciated?

And why are there so many non-readers who write books? Isn’t it more than a little arrogant to think you can produce something you have no experience of as a consumer? Or are these non-reading writers so gob-smackingly conceited that they think all the books that have come before theirs were lacking the one vital ingredient that they’ve unearthed?

Despite my annoyance and in what can only be described as a complete failure of maturity I have, to date, dealt with this issue by actively avoiding my colleague. Among other indignities this has included bribing my staff (with significant quantities of chocolate) to lie for me and, I’m ashamed to admit, hiding under my desk for a few minutes last week.

But tomorrow is d-day. I will not be able to avoid being in the same room as my colleague any longer.

I’ve decided to tell him that we he was wrong. That even though I am a reader I ‘m really not the target audience for a book about how to be a better sales person ‘even (to quote the blurb) if the only thing I have to sell is myself’.

Because I don’t imagine he wants to know what I really think which is that the kind of pseudo-psychology I sense his book is about (I sense this from chapter titles like “Selling Up: Why Should Your Boss Buy You?”) is just the kind of loathsome waste of dead trees that no human needs to read and I’d rather gnaw off my own arm than spend a moment with the damned thing.

But if he asks…

 

 

Crime Fiction Alphabet: F is for Fortress

For my contribution to the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme this week I’m taking a look at Australian author Gabrielle Lord’s first novel Fortress, published in 1980. It tells the story of a small school in Sunny Flat NSW (about 500 kilometres west of Sydney) where the sole teacher, Sally Jones, and her 12 students are getting ready for a visit by an Inspector when they are kidnapped by men wearing cartoon character masks. Although neither the teacher nor any of the students are famous or from wealthy families they are held for $1 million ransom. The entire book takes place over the next 40-odd hours as Sally first comforts the children then develops an urge to escape and, ultimately, turn on her captors.

This book is interesting because over the years it has been classified as both adult fiction and young adult fiction and even now I’m not sure where it would belong. I did first read it when at high school but read it again about 10 years later and enjoyed it both times so perhaps it doesn’t really matter. However you classify it the strong psychological elements to the story and unexpected ending made it quite gripping. The students range from kindergarten age to mid-teenage which adds a complexity to the book that is also quite interesting although it doesn’t make it much like Lord of the Flies (despite the many reviews that say it does).

Lord uses real life events as the basis for her book (a 1972 kidnapping from outer Melbourne’s one-teacher Faraday School) although Fortress is far more sinister than the original story. This is an early demonstration of something that has always struck me about Lord’s work: the in-depth research that she puts in. Somehow she manages to strike the right balance between including enough realistic detail to make the story work but not too much as to bog it down unnecessarily. In Fortress the details of remote schooling in Australia are spot on as is the behaviour depicted of both kidnappers and victims.

Personally I think the more subtle elements of the book were lost in the film that was made in 1985 starring Rachel Ward as Sally Jones but, as is often the case, if you ignore the fact it was based on a book it’s not a bad movie in its own right.

Gabrielle Lord is quite prolific having written 10 standalone novels plus having two ongoing crime series and in 2010 she will add to her young adult work by releasing one thriller each month for the whole year in a project called Conspiracy 365. Over the years I think I’ve read most of her books and they certainly do become more polished in terms of writing and structure than Fortress however it’s a damned fine debut novel. Lord has gone from strength to strength since Fortress and her accolades include a Ned Kelly Award in 2002 (for Death Delights) and a Davitt Award in 2003 (for Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My earlier contributions to the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme

• A is for Absolution (Caro Ramsay)
• B is for Bones (Jan Burke)
• C is for Contest (Matthew Reilly)
• D is for Deadlock (Sara Paretsky)
• E is for Entombed (Linda Fairstein)

 

Sunday Salon 2009-11-08 – Week in Review

Books Then and Now

This week was a good reading one for me. I finished and reviewed four books starting with a cosy by new to me author Elaine Viets (Murder Between The Covers), moving to a fast-paced thriller by another new to me author Harlan Coben (Tell No One) then an audio version of an Agatha Christie novel that I don’t recall ever reading before (Dead Man’s Folly) and finishing up with the second novel in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series (The Dogs of Riga).

Arrivals and Departures

So far this month I have shown unusual restraint, acquiring 6 books (3 of them audio downloads) but giving away 23 books to friends and colleagues. I also have found a charity shop that will take as many books as I can give them so I plan to get rid of a lot more books in the next few weeks. My aim is to keep only the books I might one day read again or the ones that have some sentimental value.

Link Fest

This week, most of what I read online made me cranky for one reason or another.

• This post about authors needing to brand themselves started the trend. I certainly don’t disagree that authors should have decent websites and other promotional tools but I am sick to death of the religion that is branding. Books are not burgers and as a reader I am sick to death of being treated like the kind of moron that picks what I want to read based on the pretty covers. The author of the blog post uses James Patterson as the prime example of a branded author and on that issue I agree with him – Patterson is wonderfully branded. However if all authors become Patterson-like I’ll need to find a new hobby because his product is dross and not remotely the kind of thing I actually want to read.
• It’s nothing to do with books but this news article about the plastic bag ban in my state made me crazier still.  It’s only a few lines but for me it epitomised what is wrong with the media, politicians and society in general (what, me over-react?). Earlier this year the government here banned the use of single-use plastic shopping bags and this is what the relevant government minister had to say

SA Environment Minister Jay Weatherill is happy with the outcome. ”Eighty-two per cent of people think that this has had an impact that is on reducing plastic bags to landfill and also getting it out of our natural environment,” he said.

Nowhere so far has there been any reporting on whether the ban has actually had any impact on the environment but apparently that doesn’t matter as long as a majority of people believe it has. It’s not that I’m opposed to the bag ban (hey I’ve been taking my own bags to the shops for ten years) but I am opposed to making law based on the nebulous beliefs of the majority.

• This press release from Women in Letters and Literary Arts (WILLA) about the lack of women in the Publishers’ Weekly top ten books of the year also made me cranky. I’m not thrilled that the PW list had no women writers in it but neither am I convinced that hurling insults and unhelpful labels at PW is going to do much for the cause. Why does this stuff always have to be so confrontational? To my mind WILLA would have been better off just publishing their own list of ten great books by women writers so that commentators might discuss the differences. WILLA is preparing its own list of books by women authors but as it’s happening via a publicly editable wiki it could conceivably contain any (every?) book published by a woman this year and looks petulant rather than considered.

…and one more thing

I don’t know what’s true and what’s not in the great climate change debate but I do know summer is here with a vengeance a whole month before it’s officially supposed to be and I’ve had enough already.

 

Review: The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell

Title: the Dogs of Riga (the second Kurt Wallander novel)

Author: Henning Mankell (translated by Laurie Thompson)

Publisher: Vintage [originally 1991, this edition 2001]

ISBN: 1-860-46959-0

Length: 326 pages

Genre: Police Procedural/Espionage thriller

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4/5

One-liner: An intense throwback to thrillers like Gorky Park

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A lifeboat holding the bodies of two dead men washes up on the shore near Ystad, Sweden and Kurt Wallander’s team must investigate. They soon discover that the men were dead prior to being placed in the life raft and then that the men were from Latvia. A Major from the Latvian Police comes to Sweden to assist with the investigation but returns home after only a few days. A major event that could be connected then forces Wallander to go to Riga in Latvia where he is like a fish out of water in a murky political world.

I only read my first Henning Mankell book, Faceless Killers, last year (yes, yes I know I am late to the party). While it was a good read it wasn’t a great one and frankly I found Wallander to be a bit of a boring stereotype so I didn’t rush to pick up the next book in the series. However, having bought the first four books all at the same time because they were on special I embarked on The Dogs of Riga, albeit without a lot of enthusiasm. Luckily I found this story much more engrossing and stayed up way past my bedtime to finish it.

One of the things that struck me most about this particular book is what a good job Mankell does of putting readers in the shoes of Wallander the outsider when he travels to Latvia. The mix of curiosity, confusion and fear that Wallander displays seemed very natural to me. Although we often see these traits in amateur sleuths or accidental heroes we don’t often see ‘official’ investigators in situations where this kind of uncertainty would be believable but in this situation it’s entirely credible. The Latvia that Mankell depicts during a time of political upheaval is a world apart from Wallander’s native Sweden and his growing discomfort with the differences is palpable.

Despite all of that I still can’t warm to Wallander as a character. His hypochondria, bowel problems (ugh!) and ‘helpless male’ shtick just don’t grab me and nor does his habit of believing himself in love with various women at the drop of a hat. About the only thing I like about him is his habit of ‘consulting’ his recently deceased colleague and mentor Rydberg which I found quite touching. He is certainly a richly created character but not one I’d care to meet in real life. Far more than the first book in the series this was a book about Wallander alone so the rest of the characters were fairly two-dimensional although as I was so engrossed in the story I didn’t mind this as much as I normally would.

As I read the book I was reminded of Margot Kinberg’s recent blog post about the politics of murder as this book is all about politics which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. With the bulk of the book being set in one of the three Baltic states which were, when Wallander wrote it, yet to achieve their full independence from Russia the book is dripping with big picture politics and how various individuals coped with their highly charged environment. Some took advantage of the changing landscape while others fought to return to different points in the past and I was thoroughly intrigued by this depiction. In fact the book reminded me of the cold war thrillers I used to devour than a traditional police procedural.

I haven’t decided if I will read the rest of the books in this series or not as I suspect my real enjoyment of this one might be an aberration due to the subject matter and I don’t know if I can stand another encounter with Wallander’s teenager-like behaviour. Does the man ever grow up?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Inspector-Wallander.org is a great site with all the information about various incarnations of Wallander that you could possibly want. As well as details about the various books (their publication dates, translation availability etc) there are FAQs, character details and information about the various films and DVDs that have featured Wallander.

 

Review: Dead Man’s Folly by Agatha Christie

Title: Dead Man’s Folly

Author: Agatha Christie

Narrator: David Suchet

Publisher: Harper Collins [This edition 2007, originally 1956]

ISBN: N/A [downloaded from audible.com]

Length: 6hrs 1min

Genre: Private Detective

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4/5

One-liner: A book that simultaneously manages to offer exactly what you expect at the same time as a surprise ending

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Hercule Poirot receives a frantic phone call from his friend Ariadne Oliver, a writer of murder mysteries. She has created a live murder game for a fête to be held in the grounds of Nasse House which is the home of Lord and Lady Stubbs but she believes there is real danger lurking at the House and she begs Poirot to come immediately. Oliver gives Poirot little to go on but her feelings and, perhaps because of this, he fails to prevent the murder of the young girl who was only supposed to be playing the role of victim in the murder game. He subsequently participates in a stop-start investigation before finally solving the crime.

I was prompted to read this book by one of Margot Kinberg’s excellent contributions to the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme. Margot highlighted the humour of the book and as that is an element of crime fiction I enjoy and hadn’t really associated with Christie before I thought it would be an interesting choice for me. I wasn’t disappointed. The Ariadne Oliver character really does make a nice contrast to the somewhat prissy and proper Poirot with her ability to laugh at herself and it does seem like Christie was having a bit of fun with her genre by using the ‘mystery within a mystery’ twist.

This twist is also a perfect device for Christie’s favourite ploy: misdirection of her readers. Even though I know that her plots are always complex and that the obvious clues are red herrings to be ignored I still didn’t come close to picking up on the key hints that led to the solution. As almost always with Christie’s books, the uncovering of the murderer follows a wonderfully convoluted and unexpected journey. One of the things I liked about this book is that Poirot didn’t seem quite so cocky as he is in earlier stories. He doesn’t inveigle himself into every single interrogation and for some time it seems as if he might not even solve the mystery at all. I found this slightly more humble Poirot more likable than I have in the past.

I notice that some people mention struggling to keep track of all the people who appear in this book and I think this is where listening to the audio book had me at an advantage. David Suchet is a superb narrator and manages to provide all the characters a distinctive voice which is very helpful in such a dialogue-rich story. I must admit I am becoming quite addicted to Suchet’s narrations of Christie’s works.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

If you’ve read the print book and listened to the audio book of Dead Man’s Folly clearly the next step is to play the hidden object game based on the book. This screen shot has me tempted.

Another blog to have reviewed Dead Man’s Folly is Books Please as part of the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge that Kerrie from Mysteries in Paradise is hosting.

 

Crime Fiction Alphabet: E is for Entombed

My post this week for the crime fiction alphabet meme continues my homage to Sue Grafton, the original purveyor of a single word crime fiction alphabet, with a look at Entombed by Linda Fairstein.

This is the 7th book in Fairstein’s series featuring New York District Attorney Alexandra (Alex) Cooper and the detectives who have become her friends over the series, Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace. The novel features two main cases with the first involving a skeleton which is discovered in the wall cavity of a building due to be demolished. Because Edgar Allan Poe once lived in the building the case generates more curiosity than concern initially but when it is revealed that the skeleton is a relatively recent one and that a rapist who previously terrorised the city but was never caught has struck again on a victim who used to work in the same building, the find takes on more sinister overtones.

I have read 10 of Fairstein’s 11 Alex Cooper books over the years and, unlike some of my other favourite authors from my early days of crime fiction reading, she has never truly disappointed me. Some of the things that I particularly enjoy about this series are present in abundance in Entombed including the focus on different aspects of American cultural history, a subject I am woefully ignorant about but enjoy reading about because I now have family living in the US and always feel like I should know more. In this book the focus is on Poe’s life and work and this element is woven well into the story via the introduction of a group of Poe enthusiasts called the Raven Society. Also, for fans of the series there is, as always, the friendly competition between the three main characters to answer (or is that ask?) each evening’s Final Jeopardy question which is another unique feature of this series that I’ve always gotten a kick out of.

Fairstein has held the same position as the fictional Cooper and so the legal and procedural details have always felt very genuine. With so much media comment about violence against women being depicted in crime fiction I’m particularly pleased to be talking about this series because I cannot recall a single time when any description of violence in these books felt gratuitous. Subjects such as the rape or torture of women are dealt with but generally from the point of view of the victim and how they cope and are treated by ‘the system’. Here the story focuses on the young Swedish exchange student who is raped and almost killed rather than on her rapist’s point of view. I also think the books do a good job of exploring the complex legal issues surrounding sex crimes and this one is no exception with Alex attempting to indite the rapist based on his DNA profile even though they don’t know the name of the individual.

Towards the end of this book there’s a major incident in the personal life of one of the three main characters and this highlights another strong aspect of this series which is the strong relationships that feature. Although Alex is not terribly lucky in love she does have terrific relationships with both Mike and Mercer and also has some strong female friendships that help her cope with the traumas she observes and is occasionally part of.

My only review of one of this series here at Reactions to Reading is Killer Heat which I read earlier this year. It’s probably my least favourite of the series but I still rated it a very respectable 3.5.

My previous crime fiction alphabet entries are

• A is for Absolution (Caro Ramsay)
• B is for Bones (Jan Burke)
• C is for Contest (Matthew Reilly)
• D is for Deadlock (Sara Paretsky)

 

Review: Tell No One by Harlan Coben

Title: Tell No One

Author: Harlan Coben

Publisher: Orion Books [originally 2000, this edition 2007]

ISBN: 978-1-4091-1702-5

Length: 346 pages

Genre: Thriller

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 3.5/5

One-liner: A frenetically paced, superbly plotted yarn.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Eight years ago David Beck and his wife Elizabeth took their annual trip to the remote place where they had shared their first kiss. That night Beck was beaten and his wife kidnapped. She was found dead several days later, apparently the victim of a serial killer. Beck has since put some semblance of a life back together but it quickly unravels when he starts to receive messages that appear to be from his supposedly dead wife at the same time as two bodies are found in the spot where Elizabeth was kidnapped from. As Beck tries to determine if his wife might be alive after all, the authorities become convinced it was Beck not the serial killer who was responsible for her death and some nefarious characters who seem to know what really happened eight years ago take whatever action is necessary to ensure no one else finds out the truth.

I know it’s an over-used phrase but this book was, for me, a genuine page turner. Sure there are coincidences and plot contrivances to be found but I still read the book as quickly as I physically could, sneaking a few pages whenever I had a spare moment. The original premise hooked me immediately and the story, although far-fetched, sustained its internal logic throughout. There were multiple switches in point of view from first person (Beck’s) to third (virtually everyone else’s at one point or another) which helped give the frantic sense that lots of action was taking place simultaneously.

While the yarn was enjoyable unfortunately the characters were a little too predictable and trite for me to really connect with. Beck is so full of wholesome goodness (he’s a white doctor in a ghetto neighbourhood who never judges anyone not even the pregnant 12-year olds and is still in love with his dead high school sweetheart and is even kind to puppy dogs….) that if I met him in real life I’d want to beat him myself. Almost all of the rest of the characters are stereotypes too: the drug dealer with a heart of gold who helps Beck to go on the run and the evil generic Asian who has seen too much and can kill a man with his bare hands and so on. About the only character who I was really interested in as a person rather than a plot device was Beck’s best friend Shauna the plus size model who “stalks into a room as though it offends her”.

However, in a thriller more than almost any other genre plot is king and I can’t go past the fact that the book kept me interested from the first page to the last.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

For some quite unfathomable reason I’ve never read any of Coben’s other books but based on the writing here I’m keen to try more so if you have a favourite Harlan Coben book or can tell me whether or not I need to start at the beginning of his Myron Bolitar series let me know in the comments below.

This book was supplied to me free by the First Reads program at goodreads.com (how a book that’s been available since 2000 qualifies as ‘first read’ has me baffled but I’m grateful for the book anyway).

Tell No One has been reviewed at Jen’s Book Thoughts and You’ve Gotta Read This,

 

Review: Murder Between the Covers by Elaine Viets

Title: Murder Between the Covers (the second dead-end job mystery)

Author: Elaine Viets

Publisher: Signet

ISBN:1-86254-486-7

Length: 268 pages

Genre: Amateur sleuth/cosy

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 2.5/5

One-liner: A light, undemanding read

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Helen Hawthorne works for cash at Page Turners, a family owned bookstore in South Florida. The proprietor, Page Turner III, is horrible to staff and customers alike and few people are upset when he is murdered. Helen is forced to investigate his death when her friend Peggy is arrested for his murder and finds that almost everyone who knew Page Turner had a good motive for killing him.

The interesting fact behind this series (which as of this year will run to eight books) is that before writing each book Elaine Viets does the jobs that she describes in the book. She was, according to her website FAQ, a bookseller for over a year before (or perhaps while) writing Murder Between the Covers. I’m sure this is what helps to give the bookstore and its myriad of demanding, (and only occasionally lovely) customers. Having done my share of time in jobs dealing with the general public I found much to relate to in that aspect of the book.

The rest of the book is fairly standard for the genre. Each potential suspect is eliminated, generally via direct questioning, until there’s only one potential killer remaining and most of this was done quite believably although the ending was a little too contrived.  There are a series of oddball characters, such as Helen’s purple-loving 76-year-old landlady, Margery, who provided the kind of humour I tend to like in my cosies.

My one problem with the book is that I never quite bought into the Helen character. The premise is that she works for cash because any income she earns officially has to be shared with her ex-husband so even though she’s well-educated she works ‘dead-end jobs’. I suspect that in the real world someone smart in similar circumstances would just get themselves some good quality fake identification and get a better paying job. So there were quite a few points when I thought “well you really don’t have to be in that situation” and so I couldn’t summon up the sympathy I’m sure I was supposed to have.

 

 

Review: The Trojan Dog by Dorothy Johnston

Title: The Trojan Dog

Author: Dorothy Johnston

Publisher: Wakefield Press [2000]

ISBN:1-86254-486-7

Length: 268 pages

Genre: Amateur sleuth

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 1/5

One-liner: A confusing, disjointed mess.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The book is set in 1996 in the lead up to the Australian Federal Election of that year. Amid fear that the government of the day would soon be ousted Sandra Mahoney is contracted to write a report on administrative out-workers for the department dealing with labour issues. Soon after she starts the woman who hired Sandra, Rae Evans, is accused of fraudulently obtaining $900,000. For reasons I still can’t explain Sandra decides that Evans is not guilty and sets out to ‘investigate’ the case (if you define investigate as blunder through a series of conversations and random acts of stupidity).

I struggled with this book thought can’t really explain why. Why I didn’t throw it against a wall that is. Probably something to do with the fact it was given to me as a gift.

It’s the most confusingly convoluted plot I have come across in a very long time. It felt as if someone had laid all the book’s paragraphs out end-to-end then rearranged them randomly before sticking them back together and calling it a book. Some of the several dozen story threads seemed to end almost mid-sentence while others went on interminably but in neither case there was not much advancement in the main story. The case hinged on computer fraud which required complex explanations of hacking and other techno-babble and the parts of the story dealing with these sounded as if they’d been translated from the Martian by a drunk babel fish. When we finally got to the resolution it was a complete non-event, I could barely remember having encountered the bloke who turned out to be the bad guy although I had long since given up caring ‘whodunit’ (in fact I kept forgetting what ‘it’ was).

Another problem with the book was what I took, by the end anyway, for pretentiousness but may have been poor copy editing. I’m way more interested in politics than the average person (I remember election years the way others do World Cups or Olympics) but for the typical reader (and anyone outside this country) I can only imagine that chunks of this book, especially the first third, would make no sense at all. It’s full of obscure references to the political landscape and is peppered with acronyms that I can’t believe anyone outside the Canberra scene would have understood then let alone 13 years later.

The characters were equally difficult to come to grips with. The book is told in the first-person voice from Sandra’s point of view which should have made it a personal story but didn’t. Sandra was vague and timid most of the time which made her occasional risking of life and limb quite unbelievable. Her reason for believing in Rae Evans was only ever hinted at and never explained why she went to such lengths to find out what really happened. Not that I need to like a character to enjoy a book but when everything else is going wrong too an unlikable protagonist is one burden too many so I found Sandra’s insipidity and shoddy treatment of many of the people around her very disagreeable and when at the end of the book she decides she is going to become a computer analyst I wanted to scream “oh really, so all I have to do to get a new job is call myself an air traffic controller eh?”

Sandra’s love interest is Ivan something-Russian and he isn’t her husband (a fact which should have added far more interest to the narrative than it did) and he is a caricature of all things geek. Most of the others who features in the book are so randomly discussed or involved with the story that I didn’t form any other lasting opinions.

I could actually go on some more but I’d probably start getting really rude and/or personal and I really try to avoid that on Reactions to Reading. I’m only cross because I feel I wasted a lot of time on this book and that isn’t the author’s fault because I could have stopped at any point.

Other Stuff

I was relieved when I read this review in the Australian Crime Fiction Database and realised I was not alone in my thoughts about this book because I was beginning to think I was completely mad. Well respected Aussie crime fiction reviewer Graeme Blundell says that Johnston’s series has improved considerably since this outing but I can’t imagine spending another moment in Sandra Mahoney’s company.

 

Crime Fiction Alphabet: D is for Deadlock

My entry this week in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is Sara Paretsky’s Deadlock. The second in what has recently become a 13-book series, Deadlock was published in 1984 and features one of the earliest hard-edged female private eyes in crime fiction: VI Warshawski. The plot displays many of the features the series is known for including the involvement of VI’s friends or family and lots of under cover work as VI investigates the murder of her cousin Boom Boom, an ex hockey player. Boom Boom is assumed to have drowned by accident in Lake Michigan but VI thinks differently and investigates his new employer, a large grain company, only to discover corruption on a grand scale. The book features blackmail, sabotage and men doing nasty things and there’s no one but VI to stop them. In this interview Paretsky says the novel was written for her husband Courtenay Wright who is an ex naval officer, which possibly explains how all the shipping details were so spot on.

The plotting is complex but tight which makes the book a genuine page turner. It is also one of those books where when you work out the clever double meaning of the title you smack your head Homer Simpson style.

This series was one of the first I started reading as a late teenager when I deliberately sought out books in which the women did more than either wait patiently for their men to come home or hop into bed with any bloke that asked. For that reason I really enjoyed VI who was starting out in her own business after a short-lived career in the public defender’s office and, although she had a healthy sex-life, didn’t behave as if a man was the answer to all her prayers. Other traits I enjoyed were that VI never responded appropriately to ‘authority’ (yes mum I particularly identified with that one) and drank Johnnie Walker black label scotch at the same time as being an opera buff and staunchly loyal to her friends. These contradictions in her personality made her seem very realistic to me and also led to unpredictable twists and turns in the books as she didn’t always behave as you might expect.

The other standout feature of Paretsky’s novels, including this one, is the depiction of Chicago. One Christmas I visited my brother and sister-in-law who’d been living in that city for a year and they were both astonished at how much of the city I could recognise or quickly get the hang of and I owe it all to my many re-readings of these books. Despite a windy, wintry cold the depth of which I’d never experienced before, I loved doing my very own VI tour and it’s still one of my favourite places to visit.

I used to wait with breathless anticipation for each new book in this series but I’ve become a bit disillusioned of late. Although it’s been four years since the last book in the series was published I haven’t rushed to get my hands on this year’s release: Hardball. The last several books have, for me, seen too much of Paretsky’s own politics bleed into the narrative and I got tired of being lectured at about the evils of big business, racism and whatever other rant Paretsky felt like making. VI had always had a social conscience but in the later books the social themes seem to have taken over the stories and, as always, this makes me cranky. I’ve no quibble with authors wearing their political hearts on their sleeves but only if they do it naturally, through their characters’ actions. Still, for old time’s sake I will be reading Hardball eventually.

My crime fiction alphabet so far

• A is for Absolution (Caro Ramsay)
• B is for Bones (Jan Burke)
• C is for Contest (Matthew Reilly)