Friday Five: Books Read in May

1. Flowers for His Funeral by Ann Granger (Headline) - In the seventh of the Mitchell and Markby Costwold whodunnits, we encounter rural mansions, village pubs, unfriendly locals, hidden shelters in the woods, and crumbling masonry. When Markby runs into his ex-wife Rachel at the Chelsea Flower Show, he would not believe that her present husband, Alex, would wind up dead moments later, and yet when that happens, he and Meredith (Mitchell) head to Rachel's village to help find the killer, convinced the cause of death was not simply a heart attack. Malefis Abbey, where Rachel lives, is a picture-book murder house, "Its Gothic windows and fantastic chimneys all looking odder than ever among the surrounding trees, suggesting a secret and sinister castle in a fairy-tale." There are some woeful stereotypes as the streetwise Londoners have to deal with the cunning country folk, and suspects are on the list merely because of their foreign nature - "Forgiveness was not much in the tradition of the Middle East. Vengeance was." I'm still not sure what the relationship is between the two main sleuths - friends with benefits? - but the author is at pains to point out how solid, sensible Meredith is completely at odds with flighty, demanding Rachel.
2. Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Penguin) - Chekov's Question 7 is a short story incorporating misdirection as a parody of children's mental arithmetic puzzles: "Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?" Flanagan uses the concept of this non-sequitur to write about his past, his father, nuclear fusion, the affair between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, science fiction, Tasmanian tigers, half-life, extinction, ur-texts, Hiroshima, near death experiences, and other chain reactions. There is a lot to consider, and some of it feels like the unedited ramblings of a man who has won many literary prizes. Some of the aphorisms feel like homilies - "The past is always most clearly seen by those who never saw it"; "Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life"; "Sometimes we discover that we live in the dreams and nightmares of others and we dream anew." He strings these together in a way which initially seems profound but may equally not be. Trent Dalton and Tim Winton write in the same manner of short apparently punchy sentences - it is the way of the male Australian literati, but it leaves me largely unmoved.
3. Everything's Fine by Cecilia Rabess (Picador) - The theme of this story might be to question whether opposities can be together if they do indeed attract in the first place. Josh is preppy, Conservative (with a large C) and white; Jess is from an entirely different background, motivated by morals rather than money, and the only black person in their economics class at their Ivy League college. They have a whirlwind and tempestuous relationship which matures over a length of time (reminiscent of David Nicholls' One Day in that regard) but the cracks appear when Jess is forced to admit to her friends that her boyfriend is a Republican and Josh doesn't understand why she might be upset that he owns a MAGA hat with all its connotations of "racism, hatred and systemic inequality". There's a lot of lecturing as the politics are personal, and Jess tries to ignore the signs - "Everything's fine". She knows her father would be horrified to learn about her boyfriend's ideals, and Josh tells her, "It's better to be happy than right." Is it? Or is it true that "Love conquers all, except geography, and history, and contemporary sociopolitical reality"? 
4. Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Matthew by Shehan Karunatilaka (Penguin Books) - From the Booker-Prize-winning author (The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida) comes a book he wrote ten years earlier, which has since been republished in the light of this acclaim. The sort of shaggy dog story follows retired sportswriter and cricketing tragic, W.G., as he attempts to track down his hero, spin bowler Predeep S. Matthew. W.G. believes Matthew, international representative for Sri Lanka, was the greatest cricketer ever to walk the earth, but his name has been largely erased from the records due to high-profile personality clashes and disciplinary actions. Now that W.G. knows he is dying, he wants to uncover the bowler's story and publish it in a book as his final magnum opus. Alongside the cricket (and there is a lot of it with pen and ink drawings of different ball deliveries) is his personal relationships, with his long-suffering wife, estranged son and ragtag mob of besties. The setting in Sri Lanka is fascinating geographically and politically as the country is torn apart by civil war and the pronunciation of a word can get you killed, and when the novel moves to New Zealand for its denoument, it is no less vibrant. There is much to admire, even if cricket is not your thing, as the tale is deliberately obtuse. After all, a Chinaman is not just a rare bowling action designed to deceive the batter, it is also a term meaning gullibility in Sri Lankan dialect. How much to be swept up in the narrative is entirely up to the reader.
5. The Long Night by Christian White (Affirm Press) - A young woman is kidnapped and taken to a cabin in the woods. A mother paints her trauma onto canvases - the pictures are pretentious and her explanatons of them even more so - and displays her art in galleries when her world is rocked by the abduction of her daughter. The novel mines every trope of the horror film (cabin in the woods; person in back seat of the car; lightning flashes; well on property; trap for young women; trying to remain silent and still while being crawled on by insects), of which Em is entirely aware, having watched them all and enjoying them dispassionately.“I don’t like being scared, exactly – I like being scared on my own terms. Something about the fear makes me feel safe and in control, like I can hold the monsters at arm’s length.”Once again, women are victims of male aggression, but they also save themselves and each other which may go some way to redressing the balance. "They're both breaking down: both bruised and mud-streaked and drenched. The night has peeled them back to the bone, like so much hanging tree bark."It is very well constructed with alternating chapters which get shorter, each one finishing on a cliff-hanger, and a clear timeline as sections are divided into hour stamps: 7pm; 10pm; Midnight; 2am; 4am; Dawn, which plays into the long night of the title. However, White has done this seemingly concurrent narrative that turns out not to be thing before in The Wife and the Widow, so the ‘twist’ is not a surprise.

People Matter: Keeping Bad Company

Keeping Bad Company by Ann Granger

Headline

Pp. 311

This Fran Varady Crime Novel is the second in the series. The reader is clearly expected to have some knowledge of the character, but the novel stands up even without it. Fran is an out-of-work actor living in squats and having run-ins with police. “I knew enough to keep clear of trouble. I can’t help it if trouble sometimes seeks me out.” She has an Indian friend, Ganesh, a decent set of morals, firm opinions, a sardonic outlook on life, and occasional flashes of humour. As the novel is narrated from the first-person perspective, the reader is naturally drawn to her.

While waiting at a station she buys a cup of coffee for a homeless man, Albie, who tells her he witnessed a kidnapping. She believes him, although no one else seems to, and when she decides to look more closely into the matter, Albie winds up dead. Fran senses she may be in danger herself as she meets kidnappers, ransom hunters, distressed parents, and uninterested police officers. She quickly learns that no one trusts anyone else. She particularly doesn’t trust men, and their violence and intimidation are treated almost casually. 

She baldly asserts, “If you’re a young woman and live alone, as I did, the risk of a stalker hanging around the place is always there. They see you around the area, follow you home. Sometimes it gets no further than that. They get bored and seek out other prey. Or they get frightened off.” It is a depressing fact that she needs to know this information. “Noise is a weapon. If you can’t do anything else, yell. It disorientates, frightens, and above all, attracts outside attention.” We were all taught this as young women.

Her politics are socialist-leaning, and she despises those who can see no further than their comfortable lives. “It’s a fact that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. Beggars can’t be choosers they say, and I bet ‘they’ are comfortably housed.” Being an artistic and creative type, her motivations are less consumerist. They assume we all want the things our consumer society reckons essential to health and happiness. But what about the ability to find hope and happiness in little things?”

Her world is one of corner shops, basement flats, disused warehouses and greasy-spoon cafes. She refers to one of the pubs she frequents as “resolutely downmarket. That’s what its patrons like about it. Everywhere else around has been gentrified, yuppified or poncified. The term depends on whether you’re an estate agent or one of the Rose’s regulars.” Her language is generally straightforward with the occasional glimpse of imaginative prose.

This is an immediate environment and a likeable central character, who gets caught up in criminal acts through no fault of her own. There are seven books in the series of the Everywoman – I shall seek out more.

Ham and Pea Soup: A Rare Interest in Corpses

A Rare Interest in Corpses by Ann Granger

Headline

Pp. 410

Marketed in some territories as The Companion, this is the first novel in what becomes a historical crime series set in Victorian London. After her father’s death in 1864, the penniless Elizabeth (Lizzie) Martin takes up a position as companion to Mrs Parry, her god-father’s wealthy widow, only to find that her predecessor, Madeleine Hexham, who had supposedly run off with an unknown man, is dead (and pregnant). Madeleine’s body is discovered in the recently-demolished slums around the prestigious new railway station at St Pancras, and Inspector Benjamin Ross is in charge of the investigation. Lizzie realises that she knows Ross from her childhood (her father sponsored his education) and that ‘Aunt’ Parry, as she is encouraged to call her, was a landlord for the housing development, causing several elements to build up into a classic detective mystery.

Through the use of alternating chapters between Lizzie and Ross, we are drip-fed information about the developments and social mores of the times, ranging from scientific progress to insights into the working of and attitudes to the police force, and personal relationships.

London is changing and the era is one of rapid development: the capitalist society dictates the rich will get richer while the poor are further oppressed. Mr Fletcher runs the construction company which is building the station on the grounds of the housing Mrs Parry sold to the railway for development. He doesn’t want the police involved on his worksite, because people are fascinated when a body is found. Mrs Parry is equally uncomfortable. “No one wants to be known as a slum landlord and after Madeleine’s body was found there, she liked even less the idea that people would associate her with the place.”

St Pancras Station in the course of building (1871)

Morals and attitudes to women are also questioned. The supposedly religious and upstanding Dr Tibbett expresses his conservative reactionary views to Lizzie in a manner that demonstrates the constraints within which she must work. “I am sorry to say I find increasingly that there is a type of modern young woman who fancies she may speak as freely as a man. I am an old-fashioned fellow who believes that woman is the greatest ornament to her sex when she realises the boundaries Nature has set for her.” He, and others, blame female victims when they are exploited and abused. “We did not know the circumstances of Madeleine’s death. Whatever Tibbett had to say it would amount to declaring that it was all her own fault.”

This is a world in which class distinctions are rife and supremely hierarchical. Inspector Ross comes from mining stock and has risen through the ranks; his superiors dislike him because he is working class. He notes that the social strata extends to the upstairs/ downstairs milieu of the masters and servants. “I reflected that below stairs there existed a world which, in true Darwinian fashion, had evolved quite differently to society above. Had the great naturalist set himself to study it, he might have found as much of interest there as he had in Terra del Fuego.” Although this is the first in the series about Benjamin Ross and Elizabeth Martin, it is evident that there will be more, and that Lizzie and Ben will end up together; they are both honest and self-aware with a strong moral backbone.

The novel is full of the classic features of the Victorian detective drama. The dim-witted Dunn (Ross’s superior officer) struggles to solve the mystery, announcing, “This is turning into a dashed complicated business, regular cat’s-cradle of possible motives.” There is a dressing table with a hidden drawer in which Lizzie conveniently finds a diary written by the dead woman. Thick Victorian fogs made of coal fire smoke and freezing atmospheric conditions add to the ambience and there is even a standard chase through the pea-souper. It is satisfying without being too demanding and a thoroughly enjoyable addition to the genre.

George du Maurier cartoon in Punch, 1889

Dripping with Middle-class Snobbery: Rack, Ruin and Murder

Rack, Ruin and Murder by Ann Granger

Headline

Pp. 314

As cosy Cotswold murders go, this is a fine example. There’s a dilapidated old manor house, a family fallen on hard times, a local clan of ne’er do wells, and an unidentified dead body that turns up on someone’s sofa. Inspector Jess Carter has to scurry about the countryside splashing her car down narrow pot-holed roads and falling in drainage ditches to discover the identity of ‘the stiff’, as the corpse is generally called, and reporting back to Superintendent Ian Campbell, with whom she is bound to have a repressed romantic relationship – this is the second in a series that currently runs to six, so there’s plenty of time for this to develop.

With the help of the clueless Sergeant Morton, Carter rather fortuitously (and not entirely convincingly) uncovers the criminal elements of the tale. As in all families and small villages, there are buried secrets. Old Monty Bickerstaff (he of the erstwhile grand country house and biscuit emporium) has been keeping one for years. Now he is finding he can no longer cope without his daily whisky, memories of the past are starting to trouble him.

Later, when truths come to light, he remarks, “Secrets are buggers. The only place for them is out in the open where they can’t muck up anyone’s life.” This is clearly the homily of the novel, but without secrets there would be no murder mysteries, so they must remain, no matter what young Tansy Peterson argues. “They were all so bloody hypocritical in those days. They really were. They were dead set on respectability. That didn’t mean they behaved themselves, just that they buried any bad news, any scandal, as they saw it.” This allows for some clunky exposition as the Superintendent explains to young people today what things were like in olden times, and that it wasn’t easy to get a divorce, especially if you were a woman.

As with all death-by-numbers stories, there must be multiple characters, whom we can count as suspects, and they must all be described succinctly so that we can instantly form impressions. Granger’s portraits are one-dimensional and often snide; she is particularly prone to class and weight shaming, and clothes are often shorthand for character. Naturally, Jess is perfectly positioned as the manic-pixie-dream girl trope, “a terrier of a girl, with short dark-red hair, a pointed chin and widely spaced grey eyes that sparkled with intelligence.”

Other women are described by age, weight and perceived attractiveness, for example one is “pretty in a wan sort of way", while another is “an overweight blonde wearing tight black leggings that did nothing to disguise her plump thighs and bulging calves”. Older people get short shrift in the description stakes – they are largely past fanciable age and therefore barely relevant. It always reverts to age, such as three women who have been firmly and inescapably labelled: “The oldest woman was waving her arms above her head. The youngest, overweight, lumbered beside her, mouth gaping and badly dyed scarlet hair flying. Between the two extremes of age came a middle-aged third who must be Maggie Colley.”

Men don’t necessarily escape the class, weight and age censure either, and middle-class snobbery fairly drips off the pages with character outlines such as, “a burly, bearded man in grimy jeans and quilted body-warmer worn over a plaid shirt” or, “a short, podgy individual, wearing a ginger woolly cardigan, baggy brown corduroy trousers and slippers.”

This is a formulaic and relatively shallow murder mystery, with one-dimensional characters and a somewhat petty plot. But, it is heart-warming and life-affirming as the murder is neatly solved, and the charming Cotswold village can return being a peaceful idyll, until the next time, which we eagerly await!

Victorian Thriller of Modern Manners: A Particular Eye for Villainy

A Particular Eye for Villainy by Ann Granger

Set in Victorian London, this novel (the fourth in a series of seven so far, but perfectly readable as a stand-alone novel) concerns a husband and wife ‘team’ who are not exactly working together. Narrated in alternate voices, the story follows Elizabeth Martin Ross and her husband, Inspector Benjamin Ross as they attempt to solve the mysterious murder of a man on their street, Thomas Tapley. No one knows anything about Mr Tapley, where he comes from, what he does, or where he goes during the day. He was taken in by a respectable landlady (Mrs Jameson, a neighbour of the Ross’s) and accepted because he “was possessed of a certain charm and innocence of manner. For all his down-at-heel appearance, the street soon decided he was ‘an eccentric’ and approved his presence.”

Naturally, discoveries are soon made, such as the fact that he has a brother, Jonathan Tapley, who is a barrister, a daughter, Flora, who is soon to be married, and a secret from his past. The novel is also peopled with earthy characters such as cab drivers, prize fighters, street urchins and policemen. Superintendent Dunn exclaims to Inspector Ross, “Only think of the players in this drama! Beautiful and pure young woman – I suppose Flora Tapley to be both – on the brink of marriage. Son of a peer. Eminent barrister. Mysterious Frenchwoman of dubious background seen with the victim on the beach at a Continental watering hole. Good grief, Ross, this business has all the ingredients of a shilling shocker!” And all this is before Superintendent Dunn even knows about the private detective disguised as a clown.

Ann Granger makes the most of her setting, with the time and location being of paramount importance. As it is before telephones and cars, characters are constantly sending telegrams and catching a cab to deliver news or collect people. The novel ranges from Southampton to Harrogate via London and France, infused with a suspicion of foreigners and seaside towns, which “tend to have a racy reputation.” Deauville and Trouville are apparently known “as the sort of place fellows take their mistresses.” There are, of course, grim and criminal elements: there is an altercation at a graveyard and a chase across rooftops like something out of Oliver Twist and the accounts of the less salubrious parts of the city are imitations of Dickensian descriptions.

As with another Ann Granger novel I have read, there is a focus on the process of the law. In many aspects detection is a puzzle, and Inspector Ross searches for clues, but the author points out that people’s lives can depend upon this game and that they need compassion and humanity. If the law is a game, policemen and lawyers don’t always play on the same side, and they often compete. Inspector Ross battles with Jonathan Tapley and clearly does not like him: “I could not let him win. I would not let him win. We were like a pair of duellists, facing one another in a misty dawn, pistols drawn and having one shot each.

Part of this antagonism is motivated by class: Inspector Ross’s parents were coal miners; he was brought up ‘on charity’ and sent to school by the largesse of his benefactor. Because it is written by a woman, the consideration of female treatment is prominent. At times it provides wry humour, but there is also social commentary; women have limited options as they ‘belong’ to their men folk. Ann Granger may have grafted some more modern ideas on the sensibilities of the characters, but the anachronisms are forgivable in the nature of humour and irony.

Cosy Cotswolds Crime: A Season for Murder

A Season for Murder by Ann Granger

Headline

Pp. 310

This novel is subtitled A Mitchell and Markby Village Whodunnit, implying there are more. A quick Google search reveals there are fifteen and this is the second. I would happily read them, as I found this to be what is somewhat dismissively termed, a ‘cosy murder’ novel, but it is perfect for reading on a rainy weekend, and as comforting as a bowl of chicken soup. It is set in a world of village life, country lanes, cosy pubs, and the Boxing Day Hunt where do-gooders attempt to help with varying degrees of success, and men are cruel to women. It was published in 1991 before mobile phones and internet searches – crime was different then; a plot point relies upon bin men collecting the rubbish bags personally. The moors are spooky, the lanes can be too quiet, and myths and superstitions abound along with ancient and pagan rituals. It’s all wonderfully atmospheric.

As usual, a young, attractive independent woman (Harriet) is the murder victim, but there is blame apportioned to her and her behaviour: she had many gentleman callers; she was a harpy and a whore; she had no one special to look after her; “But I wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t driven me to it… It was entirely her own fault, her doing, not mine… She was the cause, she started it all.” Men can’t be trusted apparently, and they certainly can’t be friends with women. Harriet, and women in general, suffer from this dichotomy.

The novel follows typical crime tropes and we are aware that due process must be followed; in law as in literature. “I’m not a barrister, Markby thought, nor judge nor jury. But he was the first step on the path to those persons and he had to get this right! If he didn’t, some clever lawyer would get the boy off on a technicality.” Another of these tropes is that there must be chemistry and tension between the male and female detectives, and so, of course, there is. Meredith is a happily single woman, yet still feels she has to prove herself to others and stake her place in the world, especially at Christmas; a very lonely time.

At thirty-five, Meredith has always “looked after herself”, and now she considers, “It was too late to change and tie herself to someone else. But she knew that was untrue. Of course it could be done. People married or entered into permanent relationships later in life and thrived on them. But it would turn her world upside down.” The perspective often changes from Meredith to Marky as the novel follows the thoughts of one and then the other. At one point they are singing carols (badly) in church, and the focus switches like a harmony in song. This is nicely done, and the style of writing complements the delightful Cotswold setting to make this an enjoyable addition to the genre.