Category: Book Review

Book Review: UNNATURAL ENDS (2022) by Christopher Huang

1/17/2022

There is much to admire in Christopher Huang’s new mystery novel Unnatural Ends, available in May from the writer- and reader-focused publishing group Inkshares. Featuring Gothic gloom, a fair-play murder mystery, and a twisted history of psychological abuse within a family, there should be something to appeal to almost all readers of crime fiction. What impressed me the most, though, wasn’t the plot or the atmosphere but the author’s excellent attention to the details.

Three adopted siblings return to the chilly landscape of North Yorkshire upon learning of their father’s death. All three have proven themselves in places purposely far away: oldest brother Alan Linwood is an archaeologist, studying civilizations exotic and now extinct; Roger is a brilliant engineer, his talents spent perfecting innovations of air and road travel; and Caroline is a journalist in Paris, covering international news. Each of the Linwood siblings should be well-equipped to investigate their father’s murder, and in fact that is what Sir Lawrence Linwood commands that they do in his will. Should he meet an unnatural end, whomever of the three finds Father’s killer will inherit the ancient family home.

Huang divides his book into multiple third-person limited POV chapters, with each character providing a piece of the puzzle, either through experiences occurring in the story’s present time (April 1921) or years earlier (in 1904, when the three siblings were children and their personalities were being formed through internal logic and external pressures). This back-and-forth temporal structure was the primary reason why Unnatural Ends never really gained momentum for me: the present didn’t have much urgency when past events are given equal weight and page time.

There are two other elements that kept me reading more as an objective observer than as an engaged participant. First, in building his cast and shaping his story, Huang has set himself a paradoxically difficult task. We are supposed to invest in the investigation of Sir Lawrence’s murder, but from the start (and supported by each family member’s past and present experiences) Sir Lawrence is a cruel despot who enjoys making others suffer and bend to his will. His death by violence – bludgeoned by a spiked mace – is fitting, to say the least. While there is the dubious impetus of inheriting a family estate that is as cold and inhospitable as Father himself, there is no initial reason, whether rivalry, curiosity, or justice, for Alan, Roger, or Caroline to seek answers. Sagely, Huang soon gives them appropriate motivation: investigating the murder will provide answers to their own identities. It’s not Father who needs liberating but the adult children who can finally break free.

Granted, a mystery story does not need an alliance of sympathy with the victim to be effective. And the other characters do become less archetypal and more individual, but the journey is a long one. At 450 pages, Unnatural Ends needs its share of twists and turns, and on paper they are there. The problem is that the reader can get ahead of the plot, especially if one incorporates the detective fiction reader’s maxim to not take the truth as it is presumed to be. The author is scrupulously fair with his clues, and I found them easy to collect along the way. The clueing of culprit(s), motive, and mechanics is largely in place by the book’s midpoint, which is when I connected the dots. I then needed to wait for Inspector Mowbray and the sibling sleuths to catch up, and that – along with the vacillating between present and past – diminished the journey.

It is still a story worth recommending. The book’s prose is excellently crafted and presented; when it comes to historical details and literary syntax, the author rarely sounds a sour note or takes a wrong step. He is particularly good at using specifics to make his characters’ world believable and engaging. He describes the Yorkshire moors and the family’s looming stone castle, with its draughty servant passageways and its cliff-hugging sheer stone facade, in convincing sensory detail. The siblings bring elements of their global lives back with them: engineer Roger has tried to partner with Sopwith Aviation while Alan sees parallels between his native landscape and his vistas at Machu Picchu. The historical context is impeccably researched and vividly used; along with Huang’s confident prose, the contextual details make the book a success.

The author’s previous novel, 2018’s A Gentleman’s Murder, is also set in 1920s England and appears to offer a similar winning mix of history and mystery. Unnatural Ends has a U.S. release date of May 10. I received an advance reading copy through NetGalley in exchange for a forthright review.

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Book Review: CONFESS, FLETCH (1976) by Gregory McDonald

1/3/2022

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To start off the New Year, I wanted to revisit a book I had read and greatly enjoyed just a short while ago: Confess, Fletch, Gregory McDonald’s second entry in his amusing and energetic series featuring journalist Irwin Maurice Fletcher. In many ways, Confess, Fletch improves on the eponymous first book: the crime story is twistier, the plot doesn’t signal its destination before arriving, and McDonald provides two memorably engaging supporting characters for his quick-witted antihero to joust with.

The author wastes no time in holding his protagonist’s feet to the fire. On Page One, Fletch arrives in Boston from Italy and finds the body of an attractive but dead young woman in the apartment he has been loaned for his visit. The victim was a stewardess from the airline Fletch had used and the murder weapon turns out to be a whiskey bottle, one that sports Fletch’s fingerprints due to a post-discovery drink as he waited for the police. The journalist, incidentally, uses the precinct’s business number to report the murder, much to the desk sergeant’s irritation. Their exchange offers an excellent example of why McDonald’s writing is so consistently enjoyable. Fletch, who should be feeling nervous as a murder suspect, shows a likeable grace and humor under pressure:

“This is the Police Business phone.”
“Isn’t murder police business?”
“You’re supposed to call Emergency with a murder.”
“I think the emergency is over.”
“I mean, I don’t even have a tape recorder on this phone.”
“So talk to your boss. Make a recommendation.”

Note too that Gregory McDonald, a career journalist himself, pares his writing down to the bare minimum, with short, staccato sentences and snappy dialogue runs that keep the reader zipping through the short chapters. The lines above are representative of the text to be found throughout the Fletch books, with much more white space per page than your typical crime story. Such brevity has its rewards, and despite its multiple plot threads and incidents, Confess, Fletch is remarkably lean yet feels paradoxically rich as a genre reading experience.

As it turns out, the body in the apartment is just the beginning. I.M. Fletcher has a fiancée back in Italy, Angela, and her father, Count Clementi De Grassi, has been abducted and held for ransom by kidnappers. Months earlier, the family’s art collection was stolen, and Fletch has been tasked with trying to track down the missing paintings. One artwork, a presumed Picasso nicknamed Vino, Viola, Mademoiselle (“What else would you call it?” asks Fletch) has shown up for sale through a Boston broker named Ronald Horan, and this prompts Fletch to investigate whether the art collection is intact and who might be holding the paintings.

Enter Boston police inspector Francis Xavier Flynn, a deceptively benign man with the Irish gift for turning a phrase and a keen interest in others, both the guilty and the relatively innocent. Flynn is a wonderful creation, his quietly poetic outlook on life serving as a perfect complement to Fletch’s more obviously ironic worldview. Flynn tows around a long-suffering sergeant he calls Grover (but whose name is not Grover) and asks Fletch, gently but persistently, whether he is ready to confess to Ruth Fryer’s murder. And yet Flynn doesn’t arrest I.M. Fletcher, even though the evidence is stacked against him. A few too many details – not least of which being Fletch’s counterintuitive actions if he were actually a murderer – just don’t add up.

Starting with a book called Flynn published in 1977, McDonald featured Francis Xavier in four stories of his own, and I will certainly track down these titles and enjoy the continuing adventures of this unique Boston homicide detective. It’s not just the droll dialogue that makes F.X. Flynn so memorable; even as a supporting player here, the author gives his humble cop opportunities to surprise and charm the reader. In Confess, Fletch, two scenes stand out as moments that humanize and define a character who, in less artful hands, could have easily been a tired Irish stereotype. Frank’s surprising story of his teenage years spent as an enthusiastic youth in Nazi Germany and the charming moment when Fletch attends a family music concert in the Flynn living room are true highlights, the scenes atypical perhaps but organic and perfectly pitched.

(One exchange I especially love occurs between Frank and his son after completing the rather arduous string quartet: “Da?” Todd said. “That should never have been in anything other than F Major.” “We all make mistakes,” said Flynn. “Even Beethoven. We all have our temporary madnesses.”)

The other character to make a memorable splash – for different reasons – is the larger-than-life Countess de Grassi, who descends upon her stepson-to-be in Boston and commandeers the apartment. Fiancée Angela can’t stand her stepmother, and both claim a right to the art collection despite a contested estate and the still-missing works. Sylvia is brash and manipulative, out to seduce Fletch – or, in her pronunciation, Flesh – so he can do her bidding. She is a lively comic creation, but that seduction and Fletch’s comic(?) defense that he was raped and powerless to refuse her advances lands uncomfortably, to say the least.

Indeed, the Fletch books are often problematical regarding the portrayal of women characters, whether it is the two alimony-hungry ex-wives he is constantly dodging in the début book or the protagonist’s willingness to use and discard a woman for a newspaper story, as he confesses to here in Confess, Fletch. Gregory McDonald may be writing characters for a male-driven (and presumably male-reading) mid-‘70s era, but the stereotyping is regrettable, considering the author is certainly capable of creating surprising people when he wants to. There is one female in the book who is written with sympathy and insight; surprisingly, it is Lucy Connors, the ex-wife of the man who owns the Boston apartment. Lucy recognized her lesbianism only after their disastrous marriage, and Fletch’s interview with her and her partner – in the guise of writing a discreet article for a tony magazine detailing her awakening while keeping her identity a secret – is handled perceptively. So the author can elevate women past comic harpies when he chooses to.

As I write this book review, the Internet tells me that a film adaptation of Confess, Fletch is in post-production and likely due out later this year. It is directed by Greg Mottola and will star John Hamm of Mad Men fame as the title character. The book offers an excellent story ready for the screen, so as long as the adaptation isn’t messed up thoroughly – with Hollywood, one never knows – it should be an enjoyable incarnation. Speaking of adapting the books, Chevy Chase was a logical choice for the pair of mid-‘80s movies, although the Fletch of McDonald’s stories is less shticky and more rounded (and also a more interesting person to be around). As for John Hamm, he seems miscast to me. At one time, Jason Sudeikis was rumored for the role, and I think he would have carried the perfect mix of general handsomeness, ingrained quick-wittedness, and most importantly a talent for comic line deliveries that would have fit Mr. I.M. Fletcher like a glove.

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Book Review: OBELISTS EN ROUTE (1934) by C. Daly King

11/30/2021

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With much fanfare, The Transcontinental is set to begin a three-day non-stop train journey from New York to California. There are many people on board, of course, but the reader of Obelists en Route is conveniently allowed to dismiss the majority and focus on a handful of essential travelers. Specifically, they are the employees, relatives, and attendants orbiting the powerful banker Sabot Hodges, a man who has the personality and attributes that make him a suitable murder mystery victim. Hodges is very wealthy, there are rumors of a recent change in the particulars of his will, and he has made at least one onboard enemy. So it is perhaps not a surprise when the man’s body is found at the bottom of the train’s novelty boxcar-length swimming pool.

But an en route autopsy reveals that Hodges didn’t die by drowning and may have had a heart attack on or near the pool prior to an early morning swim. No poison is detected in the dead man’s system. As a police detective wonders whether the banker’s death was due to an accident, an illness, suicide, or something more sinister, a dangerous bout of gunplay involving Hodges’ secretary, his daughter, and a potential son-in-law points to murderous intentions.

Obelists en Route improves greatly on the formula American psychologist Charles Daly King employed for his nautical predecessor and début detective novel, 1932’s Obelists at Sea. The critical change is this: instead of drafting a quartet of psychologists to interview suspects and investigate the crime (with a passive ship’s captain acting as baffled referee), this train-set mystery appoints and stays with one capable and active policeman. Lieutenant Michael Lord assumes the role of sleuth, and the story is all the better for it. While I wasn’t sure whom to follow as leader at Sea – and in whom to place confidence, if anyone – there is no such problem en Route. Additionally, the murder mystery seems cleaner and the scenario doesn’t evoke quite the disbelief that is generated by the previous story’s plotline and events.

It is true that we are still comfortably traveling the terrain of Crime Fictionland, and the central mystery – was the financier murdered without a mark on his body, and if so, how and by whom? – is a suitable and enjoyable puzzle for the genre. King plots and writes his murder mystery well, and the trainbound investigation has a lot of period charm. (In later paragraphs I explore King's literary Achilles’ heel.) And true to American form, the author adds in almost as much gangster-like gunfire here as he featured in Obelists at Sea.

It is also one of those stories from mystery fiction’s Golden Age that offers some very entertaining anthropology when read more than 80 years later. The eager to please, dialect-sporting “colored” porter James may be an unfortunate characterization (though common for its time in U.S. fiction and film) but other details of the cross-continental rail trip are very instructive. Modern-day comforts made me ignorant of the realities of a 1930’s “non-stop” train journey, for example, which would need to switch out locomotive engines as well as conductors. The former would need changing to undergo maintenance and inspection – coal- and oil-burning engines would overheat on a cross-country trek – and the latter would swap as one conductor’s familiar route territory ends and another’s begins.

When he learned that I had acquired a copy of Obelists en Route (thank you yet again, academic interlibrary loan!), my well-read mystery fiction colleague Nick Fuller told me, “Watch out for the economics lecture.” So I thought I was prepared when self-described “technocrat” and argumentative passenger Noah Hall began to engage Sabot Hodges in a heated debate about “the Energy Survey” and “greenback inflation”, a mélange of ideas that continues on for eight pages. Little did I know that this passage was just a preamble, and that it is, surprisingly, Lieutenant Lord who talks about economics for an additional ten pages mid-book (p. 198-208), trying to make sense of “social credit” and “national dividends”!

To say that the crime plot stops during these strange and circuitous conversations is an understatement; they are so inorganic to an otherwise forward-moving mystery that there is little to do other than attend the lectures or skip over them. No diabolically nested clues to the crime or killer's motive are to be found therein. And as on the pages when his psychologist characters take the lectern and explain at length their field of study, the economics dialogue is augmented by multiple footnotes and text citations, in case the besieged reader is interested in learning even more about the subject.

Mystery author and psychologist Charles Daly King.

One has to wonder just how successful (or useful) King thought these heady digressions were. I suspect any editor who wasn’t purblind or spineless would clear his or her throat and tactfully suggest omitting the chapter. Or perhaps his publisher felt indulgent, or even rationalized that the economic theorizing was value added. Even so, it is amusing to see a footnote from C. Daly King that directs the mystery reader to a book called Integrative Psychology (1931) which is co-written by someone named Charles Daly King and is, in the author’s own estimate, “entertaining and instructive with many practical hints”.

Fortunately, the digressions are limited and Michael Lord’s investigation into murder on the train (when he isn’t holding forth on economic theory) is focused and engaging. The author’s practice of fair play is indeed scrupulously fair, with a Clue Finder indexing all the clues and revealing page, paragraph, and line where they can be found. I was even able to guess the means of murder of the otherwise undrowned and unmolested Sabot Hodges, and being the dope that I am, I usually don’t tumble to those things. Obelists en Route proves a genuinely agreeable journey, should you manage to find a copy of the book and can afford the ticket. Just watch out for the economics lecture.

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Book Review: CLUB (1991) by Bill James

11/25/2021

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Writing as Bill James, Welsh novelist James Tucker continues his incisive, morally murky, and darkly funny series featuring Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and the many scheming lawbreakers he interacts with, whether as crooks or colleagues. The books continue to build towards a fascinating cumulative effect: while the plot of each novel can stand on its own, the characters and conflicts carry over in serial fashion and past sins reverberate in new ways. This is especially true with Club, the seventh book, in which the author selects an interesting but incidental figure from past volumes and lets him writhe and wriggle in the unforgiving spotlight as a central character under pressure.

Ralph Ember runs the Monty, a pub with a dodgy reputation whose owner and clientele have both seen better days. Ralph is another of James’s upwardly mobile-looking petty criminals, a man who takes pride in his family and his once solid social reputation. His daughters attend an expensive school where Ralph campaigns (a little too personally) to keep Latin in the curriculum; in the pub, it’s no cheap beer for him when a sip of Armagnac will show the right touch of class. When Caring Oliver and Pete Chitty begin to put together a team for a bank job in Exeter, they reach out to Ralph because he’s a pro from the old days. But left unspoken is his reputation cemented from a job gone wrong years ago, where he was known thereafter as Panicking Ralphy.

Club is one of the series’ most visceral stories to date, not because it is overly violent or agonizing but because the author uses his third person prose to get inside and lay bare the psychosis of Ralph Ember, whose vulnerability and anxiety can produce outright claustrophobia in the reader. In James’s hands, the character is a completely believable straw man, working very hard to convince himself that he is still in complete control under pressure while his sweating limbs and shaking hands and lurking doubts scream otherwise. We spend the most time with Ralph in this book, very much inside his head, and it is company with an unlikable but completely believable flawed man, a graying dog who still tries to bark to show his status but doesn’t know if he’s fooling the rest of the pack or even himself.

Getting inside the mind of Sarah Iles, Club’s other truly troubled character, is even more unsettling. The Assistant Chief Constable’s wife is grieving the death of her lover Ian Aston, whose body is found on a trash heap near a pay phone. Aston may have been ambushed on his way to make a prearranged call to Sarah… and it’s possible that he may have been killed by her husband, pushed past the breaking point. With grief, uncertainty, and tension swirling within her – and the knowledge that the police would close ranks to protect their own – Sarah begins to break down and entertain very dark thoughts, with her hatred of life extending to her newborn baby girl.

What continues to amaze me about this crime series is how deftly and successfully Bill James explores his fictional world and the characters caught under the dome. As with Panicking Ralph Ember, the reader is given entrée into some of the cast’s perspectives, with the limited character views fully explored by the text. So we look at the situation through Ralphy’s eyes in his chapters, and know his every irritation and fear – and indeed his personality and belief system – through the third-person commentary. The same is true when a chapter focuses on Sarah Iles or Colin Harpur: we are in their world, feeling their emotions. (By contrast, the author never lets us share ACC Desmond Iles’s inner thoughts, and that’s a wise rule; neither reader nor colleague nor spouse knows what this potentially dangerous lawman is really thinking.) Crafting an interior point-of-view through prose is hardly a new literary tactic, but Bill James does it beautifully, and his characters are truly memorable and affecting because of this.

It’s also a marvel that so much wit and humor is infused into stories that often charge toward unhappy, painful conclusions and truths. I am amused by a turn of phrase or a wry description on every page and manage to laugh aloud from a detail or line of dialogue on every other. Consider this simple and sincere analysis through Ralph’s eyes as he makes an obligatory visit to case a bank:

Ralph Ember walked through the customer area of the bank at Exeter, trying to appear loaded and troublefree, and helped himself to a meaty handful of leaflets about special deposit account interest rates. His hands shook a little and he dropped a couple. They dived and carried like paper darts and he left them on the floor. He wanted no long scene here. If banks had any sense at all they would do sneak pictures of everybody who came in to collect investment brochures: no better way to get a nice view of the interior, and bank robbers’ cars and houses were waist-deep in the things.

James’s dialogue is equally effective in building character and exposing artifice. At its best, it also carries a mischievous, higher-minded ring, a play of language and expression reminiscent of Tom Stoppard. In this run, Harpur and Iles joust with a reality-television producer who believes his crime reenactment program is altruistically noble:

Yare-Gosse declared: “With respect, may I remind you, Mr. Harpur, gentlemen, that our programme is called Where Is Truth? Our obligations are inescapable.”

“We have a maxim here: truth is what the jury says,” Harpur replied.

In the corridor afterwards, Iles snarled quietly, “Since when have you been up to epigrams, Harpur? You got that stuff about truth and the jury from me.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

“True about truth? Are we moving into philosophy?”

“It’s a philosophical show he’s trying to put on, yes?”

“Oh, yes, he’s fucking dangerous all right. He believes he’s the people. All media do. Yet most of them are hardly even persons.”

As with the previous one-word book titles Protection (1988) and Take (1990), Club is loaded with multiple meanings. Ralphy thinks of his ailing bar as a club for the almost-respectable set, while the police fraternity forms a club that will look the other way when the lawbreaking is their own. The word is also used as act and weapon on Sarah Iles’s lover and will be used again on another character within the twisty story.

Perhaps James rings the bell – or hits the reader over the head – a little too often with his chosen word, which appears more than two dozen times before this tale concludes. But it is a minor criticism; characterization, psychology, plotting, and wit are handled so winningly that a writer can be forgiven a bit of heavy symbolism. James must have enjoyed exploring the faults and fissures of his unsteady main character here: Panicking Ralph gets to headline his own story a decade down the road, when a 2001 series entry will bear his name.

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Book Review: UNNATURAL ENDS (2022) by Christopher Huang

Book Review: CONFESS, FLETCH (1976) by Gregory McDonald

Book Review: OBELISTS EN ROUTE (1934) by C. Daly King

Book Review: CLUB (1991) by Bill James

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