Death Will Make You Sober by Elizabeth Zelvin

12May. Kindle.

The subtitle is "A Humorous New York Mystery." It's a good thing she told me, because I would never have guessed; the humorous part, at least. It is so very New York-centric that one couldn't possibly miss that. The main character is absolutely horrified by the suggestion that he fly out to Ohio in the course of the investigation. He does it, but he is clearly afraid that he will get cooties.

It opens in a detox center in the Bowery. So, where can it go from there? To AA meetings, of course. Neither struck me as being deeply amusing - or interesting. When you throw in pedophilia and killer nuns - oh dear, I guess I gave it away. Never mind, you didn't want to read it anyway.

In the Midst of Death by Lawrence Block

10May. Kindle.

Police corruption, and a fairly smarmy cop (who has also been on the take) ratting them out to some political functionary with aspirations to upward mobility (the governor's office) on his mind. The cop hires Scudder when a call girl files charges against him for extortion. When she is murdered, his situation becomes rather more serious.

As seems to be the pattern in these, Scudder solves the crime - but it doesn't lighten the picture any. After Scudder figures out who actually killed the call girl, the informant cop is murdered. Logically, it seems likely that cops did it - and that there will be no investigation. He wasn't a good guy, so getting him killed isn't totally depressing - but who and why leaves a rather sour taste.

So, why read them? I read one many years ago - I've never forgotten the title, Eight Million Ways to Die, and remember nothing else, except a fixed decision at that point in time to avoid Block's work in the future. Now I'm curious about rereading that one to see why it made such a strong, if negative impression; I think it comes up pretty soon. I'm not exactly sure why I went back to them, but they are quite amazingly well written - no surprise considering the source. Then there is my general program of reading a whole lot of murder mysteries. I suppose I could claim that I am interested in comparing, but mostly I just enjoy reading them.

The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling by Lawrence Block

9 May. Kindle.

Okay, Bernie the burglar is good fun. He is also decidedly formulaic. This one wasn't exactly "just doing a favor for a friend" but he is still left in the room with a corpse and somehow is tagged as the logical suspect. This, as usual, leaves him in the position of having to solve the crime himself without access to his tools (in his apartment which is under surveillance). This also means that he is crashing with a woman. As I recall, the woman in the first book was a total stranger to him. This one is not, but Block dodges the inevitable affair and equally inevitable breakup this time by making the woman a committed lesbian (not one of those wishy-washy lesbians who will sometimes sleep with men).

Beyond that the criminal sequence in this book is so convoluted that it was rather difficult to follow. It centers around a rare (but not particularly valuable - and, I am quite certain, imaginary) volume by Kipling. Hence the title. Did I neglect to mention that Bernie is now a legitimate bookseller? Except for his hobby, burglary. I suppose he is a legitimate bookseller - and also a legitimate burglar as well. It's a little like Dunning's bookman series. Cliff Janeway becomes a bookseller, but he can't quite give up his previous profession - of course, he was a cop, not a crook, but you get the idea.

Back on point, this rivals Christie's Hercule Poirot stories for plethora of suspects - he even calls them all together for a Poirot-esque denouement. Enough about other writers and their detectives. I have been feeling that after a dose of Bernie I need to read one of Block's Matthew Scudder stories - so that will be coming up in the near future.

Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler

7May. Kindle.

Another book club has invited me to join them for the summer and this is their current choice. I don't know how they choose. I have been trying to decide if it would be suitable for our book club, I think it would not offend the nice ladies, but I could be mistaken. The setting is split between the thirties and the present and deals with a relationship between a young white girl and the son of their black housekeeper, including long term consequences.

It doesn't have a nice neat happy ending; it would be hard to imagine that in the time and place - which is actually the midwest, not the south - but it does all wrap up a little too nicely for actual probability. I guess that's all right, it is fiction, after all, even though the writer claims that the idea came from her research into her own family history (or was that the hangman book?).

It is inevitable to compare this book to The Help and, since I just read it, to The Queen of Palmyra. Of course, there is the obvious racial issue, but those are both set in the sixties in the vicinity of the civil rights movement; this one is a generation earlier. The Help is about the interactions between white and black women: women of privilege and their servants. The Queen of Palmyra is about a white child and the black women who raise her. Calling Me Home is about a man and a woman, who are young and naive enough to believe that love can win over societal norms.

The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzsch

5May. Kindle.

Medieval mysteries are intriguing to me in that forensics are out, making motive, opportunity, and insight into the dark pathways of the human mind absolutely critical. Oops, checked my dates and this is not actually medieval, but Renaissance. It is set in the early seventeenth century in Germany. Same rules apply.

For once, the pre-modern detective (that should cover all those medieval mystery series as well as this one) is NOT a monk or a nun. The detective is the hangman. His daughter is important to the story, but she is definitely not the central character. The hangman's position in society as described in the story is an odd and awkward one. Rather like the untouchables in India, the hangman was essential to their social structure (his job included torture and such as well as hanging and beheading) but the nature of the work put him outside normal society. Hangmen did not marry outside their clan; they were considered bad luck - people did not speak to them unless necessary or even make eye contact. So - the hangman's daughter would marry the son of the hangman in another village, and the hangman's son would take up the headsman's sword in his own time. Our hangman's daughter has taken up with the son of a self-styled doctor providing much material for the local gossips. Curiously, this hangman is a healer in his own right - and a much more successful one than the doctor. His "patients" tend to come to him very quietly after dark. Also virtually outcaste in the society are midwives. Go figure.

The story itself is very dark and rather slow moving. Although unless one is a fluent reader in both languages, it is impossible to know how much to blame on the translator. The only time I actually tried to read a novel in German was after we read an excerpt of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks in a German lit class in college. I was fascinated by the small piece and went after the novel. I probably made it about a third of the way through, then a bit more with English and German side by side - then just finished it in English. I suspect that German renders in English better than a good many other languages.

As described in this book, the renaissance was not the sole property of the upper classes. The only character who typifies the "renaissance man" would be the hangman himself - who reads and owns books and believes that what lies beneath the skin may have something to do with illness. And - is willing at personal risk to search for a killer rather than allow an innocent woman be labeled a witch - even if he must torture her to attempt to force a false confession.

Comeback by Dick Francis

4May. Kindle.

Just for a twist, Peter Darwin, our hero in this one, is a career diplomat. However, his profession doesn't figure into the story heavily, except to put him on the scene through friends of friends and to give him the free time to hang around and solve the mystery. The murder victims are primarily horses and the professional career of their vet, who happens to be the fiance of the friends of friends cranky daughter. Okay, there is a people murder - seriously gruesome - but more than that would be telling.

I puzzled for a while over the title, but that, I believe, is related to Peter's secret. All the coincidental circumstances of meeting and accompanying his friend's friends take him back to the neighborhood where he lived as a child, the only son of a widowed mother, until she met and married a career diplomat who swept her off her feet and adopted her adolescent son - changing his name. So he "comes back" anonymously to his childhood turf and appears to intuit things that he has no business knowing. I could (but won't) go back and check the last few chapters, but I don't believe he ever reveals the source of his uncanny knowledge of places and people.

Good fun, as always. And he does get the girl - a much nicer one than the aforementioned cranky daughter.

Murder for Greenhorns by Robert Kresge

3May. Kindle.

Catch up time, before it gets any worse. I have four after this one that I need to write up. I suppose I could start saying "No comment," but I don't actually suppose that I will.

This, I suspect, was one of the really cheap super deals that Amazon offers from time to time. It was sort of a sappy little period Western/mystery/romance. It doesn't even manage to end with the killer getting hanged; he gets sort of reformed, but the nice guy gets the girl - who is, by the way, a nineteen year old school teacher on her way out to someplace in Wyoming from someplace in the midwest weeks before her teaching job is supposed to start. She frets about showing her ankle, but she doesn't mind stripping down by the creek on the trail without any concern about what she was displaying to all and sundry.

The solution of the mystery was a little pat, to all intents and purposes the murderer confessed (a quick chorus here of "I Shot the Sheriff" - only I guess he was really the Marshal) - but since the shooter was merely the contract killer we must be satisfied with getting the guy that hired him.

Oh well. It wasn't particularly painful to read. I do not believe that the nice ladies of the book club would be offended.