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Book Review: THE LONG BODY (1955) by Helen McCloy

12/23/2022

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While cleaning out her husband’s desk, newly widowed Alice Hazard makes a discovery that should be innocuous but raises much troublesome speculation. The thin, foreign-looking green envelope is empty and still fastened with red string. On the front, so faint that the lettering could have been easily overlooked, are the words Papers Pertaining to Miss Lash. Alice’s late husband John was a diplomat based in Washington, D.C., and there is indeed a Teresa Lash who recently moved into the Connecticut town with her father and has been socializing with Alice’s son. But was this dossier part of John’s political business or information collected for a more personal reason? And where are the missing papers, and why does the envelope smell faintly of a woman’s perfume?

From this relatively benign starting point, author Helen McCloy puts her protagonist through the crucible. For two-thirds of the tale, we follow Alice as she shares her suspicions and doubts – these sections are very much offered from a first-person limited omniscient perspective, so we know only what Alice herself thinks and observes. The tactic is a smart one, as it allows the reader to experience the character’s increasing paranoia (all the more potent since her fears seem to be partially anchored in truth) while also being invited to look critically, outside of the character, and wonder about the soundness of the excitable woman’s mental state.

It is an understatement to say that incidents and revelations manifest quickly. After an attempt on her life sends Alice to the hospital, the traumatized patient sneaks out of her private room and walks (sleepwalks?) to Teresa Lash’s cottage with murder on her mind: she is certain that Miss Lash was driving the car that tried to kill her, although her son and the police are less sure. In her drugged and distraught state, Alice Hazard sees her plan as a way to protect her family and, just possibly, to avenge her husband’s death; John’s fall from a cliff on a foggy New England evening might not have been an accident after all.

With nightmare logic, Alice enters the cottage and finds her quarry already killed in exactly the fashion she had planned to use. Is someone trying to frame the hapless widow or help her? Or could Alice have done the deed herself, with her conscious mind refusing to process and claim the act? It’s a fortunate coincidence that psychiatrist Basil Willing lives in the neighborhood and decides to take an interest.

At 136 pages, The Long Body is slim and propulsive; its plotline covers an impressive amount of ground and generates an admirable amount of suspense. Rather than crafting a fairly clued detective puzzle, Helen McCloy delivers a psychological thriller that seems to be winking occasionally at its own unbelievable melodrama. It is one of those flights of fantastical fiction that seems to exist only on the page or on the screen. If credibility hasn’t been stretched to the limit with the story’s premise and complications, by the time the heroine decides to sneak out of the hospital and kill her nemesis the reader is more curious than concerned. To be fair, dozens of Hollywood crime film scripts from the 1940s and ‘50s play a similar game, gleefully choosing unbelievable but entertaining fantasy over a more logical reality.

The book’s title refers not to an in-the-moment corpse but instead to Dr. Basil Willing’s macroscopic view of a subject’s cumulative personality shaped by age and over time. As Willing explains to Alice, who has sought his counsel:


“Ordinarily we think of growth as changes the body makes in itself. But the Hindus think of the body as a whole including infancy, middle age and old age – a whole that stands still while the motion of time reveals various aspects of that whole which is called the long body – the body that is long in time, stretching all the way from birth to death.”
And a little later:
“When you seek a murderer among people who are superficially incapable of crime, the answer must lie in the long body of one of those people – the true shape of a character as it is revealed over a long period of time.”
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For the record, McCloy’s doctor detective doesn’t appear officially until page 100, and his sleuthing is largely limited to finding the missing papers which provide the backstory, the text of which is presented in one block over the book’s last 20 pages. With the connection between all parties made clear, the motive for murder (and attempted murder) comes into focus, although – as it is for Dr. Willing – the reader ultimately relies on a delivery of details rather than a deduction from clues to reach a solution. The limited cast of characters (those still alive, at any rate) also makes the identity of Cristina Lash’s killer fairly obvious, even if motive is obscured until that backstory is provided. Measured out, The Long Body is an enjoyable little tale, even with its shortcomings. 

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Book Review: IN GOOD HANDS (1994) by Bill James

12/12/2022

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Two mid-level criminals turn up dead at the start of In Good Hands, Bill James’s eleventh entry in his ambitious and literary crime series featuring Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur. It turns out that Raoul Brace – referred to by cops and criminals alike as the original very nice guy – and Lester Magellan have met their violent ends in an uncomfortably familiar way, their bodies battered and burned, with a piece of coal shoved in Brace’s mouth. The tableau recalls the dispatching of two earlier underworld villains, their deaths rumored to have been vigilante killings by an enraged Assistant Chief Constable who, fed up with the courts failing to punish those who deserved it, might have decided to mete out his own justice. (See James’s brilliant, game-changing third installment Halo Parade (1987) for all the sordid details.)

The similarities bring about an internal investigation, something that well-meaning but ineffectual Chief Mark Lane feels is a necessary self-policing step, loathe as he is to attack the ambitious and dangerous ACC Desmond Iles. As Iles fences with the lead investigator, Harpur is asked by Lane to commit to covert surveillance on his supervisor, something Harpur finds both distasteful and impossible. Once Iles spots his lumbering tail – and gives Harpur a couple clouts in an alley for good measure – he grows literary:

“You’ll remember that wonderful analysis by George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, in Character of a Trimmer, seventeenth century.”

“Will I, sir?” He felt a little dazed now but could not risk standing unsupported yet.

“Oh, certainly you will,” Iles said. “Goes like this, doesn’t it? ‘Without laws the world would become a wilderness, and men little less than beasts; but with all this, the best things may come to be the worst, if they are not in good hands.’”

The tension (or uneasy conspiracy) between Harpur and Iles as the internal investigation unfolds takes up half of this unusual police procedural. The other storyline, equally engaging, concerns a pair of thieves preparing to rob the home and safe of upwardly mobile drug kingpin Kenward Knapp while he soaks up societal goodwill at a charity auction. As is the author’s hallmark, James masterfully winds and shapes his characters, placing them on a collision course where not everyone will remain standing at the end. The pompous, scheming Stan Stanfield and his older partner in crime, a wary but gifted safecracker named Beau Derek, are wonderfully sketched serio-comic creations. Stanfield takes on a third man for the job, a black teen named Cyrus, and as doubts seep in about this addition, further pressure builds within the group.

The dynamic storylines and fully established worlds within the Harpur & Iles stories sometimes offer excellent starting points for new readers. I would recommend the excellent titles Halo Parade or Protection (1988) to those looking for an introduction where the series is both accessible and firing on all cylinders. Even the unique, emotionally charged Roses, Roses (1993), with its impressionistic chronicling of a woman’s last hours in life provides a suitable standalone reading experience.

In contrast, In Good Hands feels very much a tale delivered in medias series, and in my opinion James relies on the accumulated build of his characters and their personalities over the last ten books to lend emotional weight to their current circumstances. It is a book best arrived at in sequence, especially as a supporting character is stabbed and dies – needlessly and tangentially, as too often happens in life – in a middle chapter. Yet the victim’s agreeable personality and history are to be found in the earlier series books; taken as represented by this story alone, the loss scarcely registers. But having gotten to know the character through previous adventures, the veteran reader is shocked and moved by the sudden tragic event.
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​All the qualities that make Bill James’s stories so remarkable and singular are fully evident here: biting, literary dark humor; a keen psychological interest in the aspiring criminal classes and the sometimes flawed and dangerous law enforcement figures trying to keep them in check; and always the thematic question of what exactly separates the good guys from the bad guys when both are willing to ignore the law if the rules should limit the world they wish to create. It may be a novel better appreciated by those already familiar with the variegated world of Harpur and Iles, but all readers will still find themselves in the author’s highly capable, very good hands. 

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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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