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Book Review: ROSES, ROSES (1993) by Bill James

11/11/2022

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For readers like me working our way through the excellent, one-of-a-kind police series by Welsh writer Bill James, the shocking spoiler within the tenth Harpur and Iles entry is delivered in the book’s first sentence:
When she was killed by three chest knife blows in a station car park, Megan Harpur had been on her way home to tell her husband she was leaving him for another man.
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It is a statement of fact, simultaneously casual and cruel, calculated to take your breath away. Megan Harpur, the unhappily married wife of Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur, has returned by train from an adulterous day in London. Her lover is a career policeman named Tambo, a man who not coincidentally was once Harpur’s boss, and Megan used the train journey to come to the decision that life with Harpur, despite the willful delusions on both sides, was no longer tenable.

But, as that alarming opening sentence shows in its juxtaposition, Megan’s important internal decision is interrupted by a fateful, fatal external act: while moving her purchases to the car in a deserted, dark car park, an anonymous man attacks her and leaves her for dead. It’s the brilliance of Roses, Roses – which I feel is the author’s most haunting and resonant work in an already remarkable series – that the moment of violence is the beginning and not the climax of Megan’s tale. Told in alternating chapters and fluid in time, we spend half of the book with Megan on her last day alive, witnesses to her doubts, fears, and excitement as she considers a new life and a chance to be happy once more. The other chapters (mostly the odd-numbered ones) follow Colin Harpur as he contends with his colleagues and his two daughters while going around officialdom to call in favors and find his wife’s killer.

Bill James’s books always demonstrate a keen interest in the psychology of deeply flawed people, which is often the most interesting kind of people to study. But I think Roses, Roses reaches a new, deeply human level for the author. What could have been a gimmick – killing off the main character’s wife – in James’s hands becomes a compelling reason to fully explore the couple’s troubled relationship and their complicated, messy motivations (often selfish and personal, sometimes surprisingly thoughtful and generous).

From the previous stories, we have come to know Megan Harpur largely through the eyes of her husband. She hosts a book discussion club, she has grown increasingly restless with Colin’s affairs and the amorality and hypocrisy built into his police profession, and lately she has been looking for satisfaction in other quarters. (Assistant Chief Constable Iles and his wife Sarah play a similar, even more destructive game of extramarital conquests, including Sarah’s dalliance with Colin Harpur.) Here, we learn that Megan’s affair with London-based Tambo has grown increasingly serious, despite her concerns that settling down with another policeman might be a regretful lateral move. She already bristles against Tambo’s string-pulling to access an expensive, fully stocked flat for their trysts; the high-end frozen gourmet dinners seem especially insulting to Megan’s proletariat sensibilities.

Announcing her death from the start gives the author license to truly explore Megan Harpur as a person in those hours before. While the reader’s knowledge of her fate adds pathos to those moments, the cumulative portrait James paints of this character is full of details and touches that ring true: shopping in London, Megan chooses a linen tablecloth that will look great on the family table for Christmas, even though she plans to be gone by then; when she spots on the train the young man who will kill her, she is panicked by the hostility in his stare that she cannot understand and then wonders when he disappears whether she is still attractive enough to stir lustful thoughts in strangers. Megan’s perspective and persona are beautifully, elegiacally sustained through the novel as Bill James returns to her reality again and again, and with each brief chapter of a few pages we are given another few minutes of her life. The irony is that, for the reader, the minutiae and emotions of Megan Harpur’s last day take on a significance even more profound than that which the character manages for herself.


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And I do not want to slight the book’s present moment arc. Colin Harpur’s investigation of his wife’s murder is equally fascinating and very twisted in its journey. The plot builds to a surprising and fully satisfying climax, one that readers should experience on their own. As with all the prior stories, Roses, Roses pushes its law enforcement characters, from Harpur and Iles on down, to inhabit a morally murky landscape, always by their choice and often by their actions.

The alternating of past and present, the masterful, assured drawing out of both storylines, and the fully formed, very human examination of a smart, introspective woman at a crossroads who is ready to move on: Roses, Roses is a remarkable, memorable achievement, both as a crime story and as a literary novel. I wonder what Megan Harpur’s reading group would have made of it.


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Book Review: THE PERFECT CRIME (2022) ed. Vaseem Khan & Maxim Jakubowski

11/3/2022

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The thematic hook of The Perfect Crime, a new 22-story anthology from the Crime Writers’ Association, both excited and ultimately disappointed me. As editors Maxim Jakubowski and Vaseem Khan explain in their introduction, this collection strives to give voice to authors who bring their own cultural and ethnic perspectives to their mystery and suspense fiction. Jakubowski notes the genre history of white men who have provided readers with ethnic protagonists, such as John Ball’s African-American detective Virgil Tibbs and H.R.F. Keating’s Bombay-based Inspector Ghote. Since the days of Edgar Allen Poe, crime fiction has overwhelmingly offered stories about white people and white culture, so a collection that encourages men and women of varied racial and ethnic identities to tell their own tales is cause for celebration.

Some authors featured here certainly deliver, while others disappoint. As with any multiple-writer anthology, a reader will likely find some entries stronger than others. With The Perfect Crime, however, I found myself wading through too many generic stories, tales that might be set in the Australian outback or feature characters named Kaeto and Tej but whose predictable plotlines could be transplanted anywhere with a Caucasian cast and suffer no culture shock. I tended to get ahead of many of these unsatisfying stories because their authors play it safe and deliver familiar tropes, whether it’s an unconvincing con-versus-con story or a lover’s triangle where one of the sides takes a telegraphed revenge on the other two.

When an author rises to the challenge to break from genre tradition and explore their own voice and cultural identity, the effect is memorable and sometimes visceral. Two excellent entries confront the subject of racial hatred and the violence it provokes head on. In John Vercher’s “Either Way I Lose,” a light-skinned African-American man in 1919 Omaha gets caught up in politics and prejudice and must decide how far he will go to provoke – or stop – murder within his community. With “The Yellow Line” and its menacing first sentence “He followed her home again,” Ausma Zehanat Khan relates the story of Haniya, a young Muslim woman who becomes the target of a privileged banker who takes sadistic pleasure in stalking his quarry. Both stories are carefully crafted, understated in their prose, and unflinching as they build to their climaxes; each offers a sharp portrait of minority individuals trying to survive within a culture dismissive and often openly hostile to them.

Other writers make great use of the mindset and landscape of their characters. For me, standouts include “For Marg” by the prolific J.P. Pomare, a somber story conjuring up the wet, cold isolation of the New Zealand hills as a widowed farmer tries to stop his sheep from disappearing. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “The Land of Milk and Honey” pays homage to Spanish domestic drama by placing tentative young lovers in conflict with the girl’s repressive patriarch of a father. With “Buttons”, Imran Mahmood explores the psychology of a sociopath in a focused, highly effective sketch of a London man prowling for a victim.

Sheena Kamal’s “Sundown” adroitly tackles the harsh topics of sex trafficking and racial violence in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, the title referring to towns where dark-skinned people must leave by sunset or face the consequences. “Paradise Lost” by Abir Mukherjee strikes a welcome lighter tone as an expatriate Scot criminal, stuck hiding out on a posh island retreat for the ultra-wealthy, schemes to return to the UK. American writer Walter Mosley rounds out the collection with “Bring Me Your Pain,” the story of Acme Green, a gentle man trying to secure a patent for his very unique machine.

As for the other 14 stories featured in The Perfect Crime, a few were enjoyable while others seemed to waste their thematic promise by providing rote plotlines and unremarkable characters. Nelson George’s entry “The Ten Lessons of Big Matt Silver” is notable for its Brooklyn hip-hop industry setting and its screenplay format but loses its impact as it tells far more than it shows, keeping the reader at a distance. (The story becomes a summary treatment rather than a script: “As Matt masterminds the cranberry campaign and worries about the FBI investigation, his relationship with Ruby deteriorates.”)

I wish other writers had shown George’s interest in style and story experimentation. Instead, too many selections cover very familiar ground, even with a location or a character that nods to the diversity the editors are trying to encourage. I am also a bit bewildered about the anthology’s choice of title – the crimes collected here are perfect, imperfect, and in two instances not really crimes at all. Still, I appreciate the editors’ efforts to present and celebrate modern crime fiction from authors around the world. Thanks to The Perfect Crime, I know which authors’ voices I plan to seek out… and which ones I may want to skip for now.


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Book Review: MURDER IN ABSENCE (1954) by Miles Burton

11/1/2022

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One of the most curiously structured crime stories in the voluminous John Rhode/Miles Burton canon, 1954’s Murder in Absence spends its first half investigating the death of an unlucky estate agent in the market town of Hembury and its second half onboard a freighter helmed and staffed by Norwegians in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Inspector Arnold looks into the strange circumstances of the murder of Rufus Jones, a realtor who disappears for several days. Eventually, his body is found in a storage building on one of the available properties. Jones’s automobile is found abandoned on farmland away from the building where his body was discovered, but the car’s interior appears to have been the scene of a mighty struggle. Arnold strongly suspects Tom White, Jones’s cousin and business partner, who has motive and opportunity for dispatching his relative.

And then, starting in Chapter 10, we leave the inspector to his suspicion and his procedure and instead board The Ballerina, a commercial freighter that also accepts a limited number of tourist passengers to accompany the crew on their business voyage. Desmond Merrion and his wife Mavis find themselves well suited to the unfussy arrangements, and plan to travel for six weeks while High Eldersham Hall undergoes renovations. Dozens of pages go by with no apparent mystery in sight, although the reader knows enough to keep an eye on Mr. Jasper Wilberton, an outspoken older man who has his nephew, Horace Bewdley, in tow. What we know that Merrion does not is that Mr. Wilberton had called on H. Jones and Son Estate Agents the day that Rufus Jones went missing.

The mystery story connecting the two sections is interesting but not exceptional, and as sometimes happens in the Miles Burton books, two things occur: poor Inspector Arnold becomes focused on a single, incorrect suspect and finds it hard to look past him; and the reader is denied an important piece of information (here, the relationship between killer and victim and the motive for murder) until it is revealed near the end of the book. Somehow, such withholding of details, which muddies the fair-play waters, never really frustrates me when I read a mystery story by the prolific Cecil John Charles Street. I think it is because Street always practices forthright, clear-eyed procedural storytelling, and that style is compulsively readable even if it lacks surprise or filigree. (There is a reason why he is identified as a writer belonging to the “humdrum” school of detective fiction.)

But the mystery plot is not the most memorable and, yes, surprising part of Murder in Absence. That honor goes to the author’s detailed and affectionate evocation of the Merrions’ cruise experience aboard that Greece-bound freighter. Street doesn’t merely offer up general details; rather, there are dozens of observations about life aboard a working cargo ship for both passengers and crew that the author delivers with a reporter-like authenticity.

The specifics are quirky and fascinating and must surely have been collected from real life. Merrion’s mischievous tricking of a Norwegian waiter into believing the ship is three miles out from shore so drinks can be ordered; the pulley system used – and the accompanying clamor – when cargo is swung from the dock to the loading bay; even the descriptions of the rocky Greek islands and the novelty of the on-ship smorgasbord are presented with a knowing, experiential touch. I found these passages a delight, largely because it felt like Street was taking pleasure to share his own recent adventures. In his biography and genre study Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery, scholar Curtis Evans writes that Murder in Absence “draws on the peripatetic John and Eileen Street’s practical knowledge of realtors and freighters to provide a convincing and original Miles Burton tale”. Such well-observed specifics definitely make Absence one of Street’s most evocative stories, and an enjoyable one at that.

The late-period Miles Burton editions are quite difficult to find. While the books Street wrote in the 1950s under his John Rhode pseudonym saw print in both Great Britain and the United States, the Burton stories were only published through the Collins Crime Club in the UK. I am grateful, then, for the wonderful library collective over at Internet Archive, which allows free digital lending of hundreds of mystery and crime books that might otherwise prove challenging and cost prohibitive to track down and read. The information page tells me that the Archive’s full-text scan of Murder in Absence was added in August, and such active curating is very exciting indeed.

Perhaps predictably, Internet Archive now must defend the legality of its online book loan practice in a lawsuit brought by four litigious, notably for-profit publishing companies. As the website claims to own a copy of every digitized book and has a clear electronic lending policy – upon checkout, users get access to the text for a limited time and never own a downloaded or printable copy during or after use – I don’t see how the Archive’s program differs from other e-lenders like Hoopla and OverDrive or from the beloved patron borrow-and-return traditions of our brick-and-mortar libraries. Until Internet Archive can no longer offer this wonderful service (and I hope that day never comes), I am excited to fully explore its growing online catalog of crime and mystery novels from previous eras.

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