JASON HALF : writer
  • Home
  • Full-length Plays
    • The Community Play
    • Kate and Comet
    • Sundial
    • Tulip Brothers
  • Short Plays
    • Among the Oats
    • Holly and Mr. Ivy
    • Locked Room Misery
  • Screenplays
    • The Ballad of Faith Divine
    • My Advice
    • Finders
  • Fiction
  • Blog

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

11/3/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
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.


0 Comments

Book Review: UNNATURAL ENDS (2022) by Christopher Huang

1/17/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
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. 

Picture
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.

0 Comments

BLACK CAT WEEKLY - Current issue features my short story!

1/9/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
What a lovely way to kick off the New Year! 

Author and editor Barb Goffman contacted me a short while ago and asked for permission to feature a short story of mine, the Maine-set "The Last Ferry", in an upcoming issue of Black Cat Weekly. The e-zine is a marvelous mix of science fiction and mystery stories, and features both short pieces and two novels in this issue. 

It is always exciting and humbling to have one's work singled out by another writer, and it certainly doesn't happen every day. I'm especially honored that the person taking an interest is Barb Goffman, whose lively crime fiction stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and scores of anthologies and themed collections.

Readers can purchase individual issues of Black Cat Weekly or subscribe for the year. "The Last Ferry" is featured in Issue #19, and you can visit the BCW site by following this link.

0 Comments

Book Review: MORTMAIN HALL (2020) by Martin Edwards

9/6/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Writer Colin Watson coined the delightful phrase Mayhem Parva to describe a cosy mystery story featuring the contrasting but familiar combination of unexpected death and genteel rural English village life. It is logical, then, that genre scholar and prolific mystery fiction author Martin Edwards should contribute his own pairings of death-knell noun and residential location, first with 2018's Gallows Court, and now with Mortmain Hall. Both books are largely set in 1930s London rather than in a sleepy Midlands hamlet, so the evocation of a more urban address within each title is only fitting.

At center, both books feature force of nature Rachel Savernake and Jacob Flint, the newspaper journalist who is pulled into her orbit. In Gallows Court, Jacob worked to figure out whether Rachel was responsible, directly or otherwise, in the deaths of some prominent, powerful men who (until then) had likely gotten away with murder. In Mortmain Hall, it is true crime writer Leonora Dobell who has her eye on candidates who might have cheated the gallows. She is so intrigued, in fact, that she invites the group of suspects to her fatefully-named manor house, where more murders do in fact occur. But by then, three-quarters through the book, there has been a steady accumulation of bodies dispatched a variety of ways, and one of the principal questions becomes how the busy run of violence past and present is connected.

I always appreciate an author who experiments with structure, one who is not content to merely deliver the same type of story again and again. (I am, after all, a great champion of Gladys Mitchell, who showed remarkable variety in tone and tale in her work from her first two decades.) Here Martin Edwards approaches his plot and progression differently than the way he built Gallows Court. For one thing, there is a more deliberate incorporation of the Golden Age of Detection elements that the author knows so well. This mystery more closely resembles the genre structure we are familiar with: one initial murder (whose victim Rachel speaks with right before his death) followed by others, a loose group of suspects, a trail of clues both obvious and oblique, and a gathering-of-suspects stormy-night climax where the detective accuses individuals of minor crimes before revealing who committed the major one. Where Gallows Court felt like a galloping thriller with mysteries to be solved, Mortmain Hall reverses the emphasis, so much so that Edwards provides an enjoyable end-of-book tool called a Cluefinder, a list of details and accompanying page numbers to show how evidence from prose dialogue and description could lead a perceptive reader to the solution.

I enjoyed too Mortmain's main character from a plot-driving sense, the enigmatic, masculine, and mischievous Leonora Dobell. She is the figure who contrives to put the cat among the pigeons, and she also adds Rachel Savernake to her list of unpunished killers. Leonora publishes her crime reporting under a male pseudonym – this is still 1930s London – and Edwards explores the gay demimonde of the time and place, as well as the sense of shame and fear should the secret come out and ruin reputations. There is, too, a cataclysm at the climax where nature steps in to deliver justice and destruction like something out of Edgar Allan Poe, and I find great satisfaction in such a conspiracy of elements and author.

When the storm clouds clear, though, Mortmain Hall for me is less engaging than its predecessor. This has to do with the roles Edwards' two series characters are assigned here. While Rachel speaks with the story's initial victim, a man in hiding who returns not quite incognito to attend his mother's funeral and in so doing speeds along his own, it is reporter Jacob (and Rachel's faithful family servant Trueman) who does the leg work and much of the surmising. It is also Jacob who, around the story's halfway point, gets framed for murder and must work his way out of the derelict room that houses him and a corpse. This he does, and it came as a surprise that it was Rachel and not Jacob who assumes the role of end-of-book detective, tracing the many paths and crossroads that provide the answers to Who, How, and Why for crimes ancient and recent. For Rachel Savernake here seems largely a reactive figure until that moment. This is because the burning enigma that drives the reader's fascination in Gallows Court – is she a murderer, and if so, is she justified? – is answered in that story and consequently the character's persona is on a very low flame in this book.

Due partly to this, which makes the involvement of both Savernake and Flint in this case academic and impersonal rather than emotional and of high stakes to each, the crime plot and secondary characters of Mortmain Hall felt more distanced and less urgent for me. Even Jacob escapes that crime-scene bedsit within a dozen pages, so any chance of a recurring personal danger is minimized and pressure is no longer on him as it would be were he still a Person of Interest by the police. The irony is, had this been a standalone tale, or had I read this book before Gallows Court, I would not be aware of two strong characters from a previous story looking from the outside in and thus undercutting their potential. Granted, it is because the author put this duo through its paces so well in their first adventure that the characters' once-removed positions here seem lacking.

The above criticisms are (obviously) my subjective thoughts on narrative structure and character activation. Let me note that there is much I enjoyed while visiting Mortmain Hall, including the author's typically taut and energetic pacing and an abundance of primary and secondary mysteries to be solved. These elements should keep, and have kept, many detective fiction fans and amateur and professional reviewers enthralled: see Kate at crossexaminingcrime, The Puzzle Doctor at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, and the starred review from Publishers Weekly. And JJ at The Invisible Event has a podcast where he and Edwards discuss the book and the author's many influences and achievements.

Picture

I can also say without reservation that I look forward to the next Flint/Savernake story! Mortmain Hall has already been available to lucky UK readers, and will be released to US mystery fans via the great Poisoned Pen Press on September 22. I received an advanced reading copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.


0 Comments
<<Previous

    BLOG

    Lots of book reviews and discussion of classic and contemporary mystery fiction. I welcome comments and continuing conversation.

    Subscribe below to receive updates!

    Subscribe

    Categories

    All
    19th Century Novels
    Andrew Garve
    Anne Morice
    Anthologies
    Anthony Boucher
    Appalachian Authors
    Bill James
    Book Review
    Catherine Dilts
    C. Daly King
    Craig Rice
    David Goodis
    E.C.R. Lorac / Carol Carnac
    Erle Stanley Gardner
    E.R. Punshon
    Freeman Wills Crofts
    French Authors
    George Bellairs
    George Milner
    Gladys Mitchell
    Golden Age Mystery
    Gregory McDonald
    Hardboiled Detectives
    Helen McCloy
    Henry Wade
    Herbert Adams
    Hugh Austin
    James Corbett
    J. Jefferson Farjeon
    John Bude
    John Rhode/Miles Burton
    Leo Bruce
    Maj Sjowall / Per Wahloo
    Margery Allingham
    Martin Edwards
    Michael Gilbert
    Michael Innes
    Mignon G. Eberhart
    Milward Kennedy
    Mitchell Mystery Reading Group
    New Fiction
    New Mystery
    Nicholas Blake
    Nicolas Freeling
    Noir
    Philip MacDonald
    Play Review
    Q. Patrick / Patrick Quentin
    Rex Stout
    Richard Hull
    Ross MacDonald
    Russian Authors
    Science Fiction
    Vernon Loder
    Vladimir Nabokov
    William L. DeAndrea
    Winifred Blazey
    Writing

    Mystery Fiction Sites
    -- all recommended ! --
    Ahsweetmysteryblog
    Beneath the Stains of Time
    Bitter Tea and Mystery
    Catherine Dilts - author
    Countdown John's Christie Journal
    Classic Mysteries
    Clothes in Books
    ​A Crime is Afoot
    Crossexaminingcrime
    Gladys Mitchell Tribute
    Grandest Game in the World
    In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel
    The Invisible Event
    Martin Edwards' Crime Writing Blog
    Mysteries Ahoy!
    Noirish
    The Passing Tramp
    Past Offences
    Pretty Sinister Books
    Tipping My Fedora
    

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    RSS Feed

Unless otherwise stated, all text content on this site is
​copyright Jason Half, 2023.