Capsule Reactions: January 2025

Sometimes there just isn’t much to write about a book, but I have a few thoughts I’d like to get out of the noggin.

The Silk Stocking Murders (1928), Anthony Berkeley
I said I was probably going to revisit the works of Anthony Berkeley Cox in 2026, and I did. And, uh, well. It wasn’t an improvement on The Wychford Mystery. The Silk Stocking Murders is one of the most odiously antisemitic mysteries that I’ve ever read from the Golden Age of Detection (GAD), which is really saying something because many books of this era are antisemitic. It is also pervasively sexist. Because I am interested in the development of the serial killer thriller subgenre, I toyed around with whether I wanted to write a full post about it… but in order to get there, I’d need to either write through or set aside the absolutely rancid bigotry of the book. It’s too prominent to pass by quickly, and what is there to even say that hasn’t already been said? Many old books have various bigotries, but they’ll usually have other things of value. This is not one of those books. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, and the highest value it has is serving as an example of a historical work that does not manage to transcend the bigotries of its time or its author. Despite having two terrible experiences reading Cox’s work, I will still probably read his more famous books eventually. But at this point, those will be out of historical curiosity about the genre and not for pleasure. 

The Tainted Cup (2024), Robert Jackson Bennett
This book was enjoyable! But, despite being sold to me as a fantasy/mystery genre mashup, the mystery side of things was pretty slim. I would categorize it more as a political thriller than a mystery, and the fantasy side definitely comes first:  it’s set in a world like Pacific Rim, beset by kaiju, with a creepy and cool biohacking sort of magic. It doesn’t really fit here because it would be difficult to write about coherently without explaining all the lore and magic etc. But I am giving it a shout out for having fun with some mystery tropes. One thing that is borrowed from the mystery genre is the Sherlock/Watson dynamic between the detective and the sidekick. This trope is always, always fun when it is done well, and I enjoyed it here. The narrator, the Watson character, is biomagically altered to have perfect recall, but that doesn’t give him understanding. It’s a fun way to justify first person narration where clues are noticed and recorded for the reader, but not understood. I liked the book a lot and already bought the sequel. 

Last Call at the Nightingale (2022), Katharine Schellman
This isn’t the first contemporary mystery novel set in the 1920s that I’ve read, and I’m sure that it won’t be the last. It’s a historical setting that I try again and again, searching for something that will really capture me, yet nothing really has. This one was enjoyable enough and I don’t have a lot to say about it. However, it did give me an epiphany:  the reason I keep choosing contemporary mysteries in the ‘20s is because of my love for the Golden Age of Detection. It’s so obvious, I don’t know why I didn’t realize it consciously! It also explains why I tend to be vague dissatisfied with these books:  they aren’t anything like GADs, they’re not intended to be. I wonder if I’ll enjoy them more if I adjust my expectations? Or maybe I should admit that, while I like historical mysteries, this era may be too overshadowed by the Golden Age to satisfy me? 

The Darkness (2015?, 2018 english), Ragnar Jonasson 
This was the first in a series of recent Icelandic crime novels. I'm not the biggest fan of Nordic Noir but I do partake every once in a while. This book has both the strengths and weaknesses of the Nordic Noir. It was a strange and dark book, very atmospheric, and I have no idea how it’s going to be a series. The main character, Hulda, is a detective on the eve of retirement, and though she’s stated repeatedly to have been a very good detective, it isn’t shown throughout the book. She makes a series of devastating mistakes that were frustrating to read, but she is an interesting character: I like a difficult middle aged woman detective. The audiobook was good: briskly narrated, and I liked the concise style. I’m not sure about the ending, but I will probably read at least book two out of sheer curiosity.

If You Can’t Say Anything Nice

I’ve alluded enough times to my soft policy of what I do and don’t write about here that I feel it’s worth writing up in a post of its own to link to. 

I don’t write about every book that I read. This is for a couple of reasons: 

1. This isn’t a review blog! I am not chronicling the entirety of my reading life. I don’t have time for that, but mostly, I don’t want to put the pressure on myself to feel like I have to come up with public-facing thoughts about everything.

2. I don’t like everything I read, and I don’t want to build a habit of saying negative things about living authors in public. 

The first reason is fairly self explanatory, but what about the second? I have access to my stats, I know that absolutely nobody is reading this website. I have no audience and maybe never will! It’s not something I expect (who even reads blogs in 2026!?) and I’m not trying to market myself or publicize this space. I have even questioned myself severely about why I chose to write a public blog instead of continuing to keep a private journal and the answer is convenience as much as anything:  notebooks are heavy and get full up and it can be hard to find a thought again for reference. I want to be able to search and index my thoughts. A private google doc or private blog could work, but I want to be able to pull up my thoughts to reference on any device, anywhere, without having to sign in. For this purpose, a blog just makes sense.

So, these are public thoughts, and I do feel a responsibility to be professional and reasonably kind about the hard work of living people. “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” isn’t a rule I necessarily live my life by, but also, why not err in that direction? I’m anonymous, but I am a professional in a book-adjacent field and as a professional, I simply wouldn’t say anything online that I wouldn’t say at a conference or event.

Sometimes I’ll start writing a post and come back to my draft and feel like my words are mean. One lesson I’ve learned about the internet is that it is a small place and for all that it’s full of bots, it also has real people. Almost no living author is so big or so inhuman that they may not be googling for reviews and reactions to their work. I don’t want to be in a position of making anyone feel bad for trying to make art and entertainment. The stakes are low for me, but emotionally high for others. So what if I hated a book and didn’t finish it? Who cares? Beyond absolute record keeping (which I can do more privately), I’m not even sure I do. If a theme or trend in contemporary publishing really bothers me, I think I should be able to write about them without relying on specific examples.

This doesn’t mean I won’t ever voice a critique about a book, but if I am writing publicly about a book by a living author, it means that even if I have critiques, I overall liked it! No holds barred for the dead, though, nor for works that are objectionable to me in ways that go beyond taste and preference.  

Suspects as Narrators and Detectives: Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope

Immediately after I complained about the group of suspects standing in for the detective, I read the first three Vera Stanhope books by Ann Cleeves and found the same thing, particularly in the first two:  suspects, or civilians within the circle of suspects or potential victims, conducting their own speculations and investigations. Interestingly, it doesn’t bother me as much when Cleeves does it! 

Before I get into my thoughts, some quick background:  I’ve read and really enjoyed Cleeves’ Shetland and Two Rivers books (in fact, Shetland has been on my reread list because I remember liking them), but hadn’t touched Vera. No particular reason except maybe they were a little more difficult to find, or maybe I have been low key saving them for a rainy day. I’ve been on a Britbox gift subscription and the show Vera was recommended to me. I thought about watching before reading, but since this is a series I’ve always intended to get to, and because it seems like most episodes aren’t actually adaptations of the books, I decided to prioritize the first few books which do make up the first season. I’m not terribly fussy about spoilers--my feeling generally is that if I am going to enjoy a book, I’ll enjoy it no matter what I know going in--but I do like to pay attention to and think about adaptation choices. So I bought the first few and made them my Christmas break reads! 

The Crow Trap (1999), the first book, is apparently unloved by fans because Vera doesn’t make an
appearance until midway through the book. Instead, the first half passes point of view duties between three scientists as they live together in a cottage while working on an environmental survey in advance of

a commercial quarry development. One of the women is grappling with the apparent suicide of her friend. One is having an affair with the developer. The third and youngest of the scientists whose mind we live in is murdered, and Vera Stanhope makes a dramatic entrance one third of the way into the book to solve her mystery. It’s even later still until the third person close POV drifts into Vera’s mind. Even then, after the point she bursts into the narrative, Vera’s main role is in squatting in the corner of the cottage encouraging the two surviving scientists in their own inquiries. When we get it, her inner monologues are more focused on her memories of the cottage and her father, with relatively little puzzling out of the case itself. If I were to describe Vera's characterization in this book, I’d call it impressionistic and literary:  she is a character, but in the model of literary mystery, the way she engages with the crime is through the lens of the personal. Her narration is devoted as much to remembering her father and childhood as it is to deducting and detecting. She doesn't feel quite like a person yet the way Jimmy Perez of Shetland did immediately. (I think Jimmy Perez is a fantastically written character.) It’s funny that Vera is so fuzzily characterized in the first book because all three of the other POV characters are very well defined, and very distinct from one another. 

Vera is strange in the book. On the surface there is a similarity to Detective Cockrill, whose presence in Brand’s books I dislike so very much (so far):  both are ominous presences, watchful, physically off-putting; both treat the civilians with a distinct lack of care. Like Cockrill, Vera is introduced as a cynic and a misanthrope. Vera actually reminds me a little of Christie’s Miss Marple, and I have got to think that it’s impossible that Cleeves wasn’t putting a spin on that character at least a little bit. Like Miss Marple, Vera uses her appearance (in this case, middle aged, overweight, unlovely) as a disguise, to lure her suspects into a false sense of safety. Like Marple, she moves in small towns and has an understanding of the dynamics and subaltern histories of small communities that can only be won through living in one for decades. And like Marple, her physique is sometimes a limit, and she may deputize others to ferret out bits of information to bring to her.

Even if The Crow Trap never did circle around to giving point-of-view into Vera’s mind, she would be an active investigator:  Vera manipulates the surviving women into serving as her delegates in interacting with suspects, especially encouraging their interest in the earlier suicide. Whether this is because she really thinks they may be on to something, or because she has an abiding interest in local gossip isn’t quite clear. Another key feature of  The Crow Trap is that the surrogates aren’t suspects. This makes their cooperation with one another and with the detective much more realistic and palatable. As the title alludes, they are bait, and while Vera’s thinking and motivations for this unorthodox gambit aren’t very deeply explored, it is a textual choice she has made, and her presence in their lives during tea times and evening drinks makes sense:  she's watching over them. Even while physically passive, Vera is mentally proactive, and the reader is very much aware of it.

I understand why fans would be confused by the structure of the first book, especially if they were coming from the show, but it doesn’t bother me. I can be ambivalent about alternating narrators, but I do like when books have an intentional structure like this one does, and I like when the reader is given more information than the characters. The first third of this book almost has a Rashomon structure, with different points of view on the same event. I also like that the characters themselves have secrets from each other and Vera, and that some of those secrets survive the book–a theme that continues through all three. 

The Crow Trap was published in 1999, and the second book, Telling Tales, was published in 2005. I wonder if Cleeves always intended this to be a series, or if perhaps The Crow Trap was written as a stand-alone novel. I could easily believe this. Telling Tales (2005) is, I think, more representative of the series: while the close third person POV does continue to shift between Vera and people related to the crime, the division is more even, with no delay in Vera's appearance. Vera is more deeply characterized in book two:  she emerges as a definite alcoholic; her dynamic with other officers and with her second is more clearly defined and described; and her complicated feelings about suspects and bystanders to crime is explored. At least in the next two books, she doesn’t explicitly deputize surrogates to detect for her, though her interest in and reliance on gossip remains. The Vera in Telling Tales has the feeling of a character being developed for a long series in the way that the character in The Crow Trap doesn’t. I wasn’t surprised to see similar themes and characterizations continued in Hidden Depths.

In the first book, I felt that the characterization and distinction of the side characters/secondary narrators/surrogate detectives was a strong point. This strength continues through the next two. Even with more intentional characterization, Vera herself continues to feel a little like an enigma, but Cleeves is good at creating point of view characters who have some involvement with the case. These characters don’t continue between books, and the way that they end can feel abrupt. I would guess that for some readers, this is upsetting:  open-endedness is somewhat at odds with a genre that inherently is about solving mysteries, uncovering secrets, and tying up loose ends. In Cleeves’ hands, I like it. I think it’s very intentional what she does and doesn’t choose to resolve, and I don’t mind that griefs are unresolved, that ruptures in relationships are unrepaired, that secrets stay secret.  

Though I did quite like the first two books, Hidden Depths (2007) was my favorite of the three, even though the solution to the mystery was abrupt and under-clued, with a particularly poor motive. I don’t think I read Cleeves for the mysteries, but rather for the pleasure of joining a sharp observer in putting small communities and complex personalities under a magnifying glass. I particularly liked this book because I think one of Cleeves’ strengths is scientific communities. One of the Shetland books I remember liking particularly was about bird watchers, and both books 1 and 3 touch on this community as well. Cleeves is good at describing the rituals and dynamics in isolated communities, particularly scientific communities, to people like me who have no experience with them and never will. 

With these three books out of the way, I’m ready to start watching the show, and I am very excited to see how Brenda Blethyn (a great actor!) interprets a character who is so complex on page. Even though it’s my understanding that the book and the show diverge fairly quickly, I am definitely planning to continue reading the Vera Stanhope books! Writing this made me want to cue up book four, but I will wait and finish the two books I'm working through right now first (both speculative fiction, though they have some overlap, so maybe they'll show up here).
 

2026 Predictions: Themes and Anti-Resolutions

I don’t like setting myself up to failed expectations around the new year, but I do think it’s fun to do a survey of the state of my reading, including some of the themes and categories I’m interested in reading in the coming year. And I do have some anti-resolutions:  authors or types of books that I am consciously going to try to read less of in 2026! 

Themes and Modest Goals

Series reading:  While I might read books in a series on an extended schedule, over years, I like to have a selection of series that I am actively reading. I hate being without a book, and get a lot of titles from long waits or interlibrary loan; rotating through a few series ensures I never have to decide and always have a book available when I need it. I’m also a bit of a mood reader, so I like to have several options depending on my mood and capacity! After auditioning quite a lot of new series in the first months of last year, I feel good about where I am in my series reading:  I’m persevering in my fraught relationship with Peter Robinson; I just started Ann Cleeves’ Vera (I’ll write about it soon!); and I have Jane Casey and Andrea Penrose to sprinkle in for lighter reads. This is a good stable of genres and authors to choose from. I wouldn’t be surprised if I finish at least one of these series in 2026.

Rereading:  Ever since I read The Searcher a year ago and was reminded of how much I like Tana French, I’ve had a yen to revisit her Dublin Murder Squad books! I may also continue with rereading some of Michael Connelly’s Jack McEvoy subseries, since I am more or less caught up with Bosch and Ballard. I would like to finish my reread of Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey books this year. I haven’t mentioned it, but I’ve been similarly PD James over the last few years and while I don’t know that I’ll finish that project (her books can be so literary that I space them apart), I do want to continue! 

History of Mysteries:  My goal is to continue with Christianna Brand and with my ongoing read through of all of Agatha Christie. After rather disliking Anthony Berkeley’s The Wychford Poisonings last year, I want to give him another try:  I liked the mystery but hated the characters and the tone (so. much. spanking!). I’d also like to get back to Ngaoi Marsh, whose books I mostly enjoy but who I fell off of mid series:  I didn’t read any of her books last year! I may also explore some honkaku:  at a minimum, I’ve already bought The Decagon House Murders, so I will certainly read that! 

Cozies:  For a long time, I’ve had a goal to find some cozies that I like. I’m not on very good terms with the sub-genre, but the world is hard and it would be nice to have some lighter reads in the stable. I sampled some in 2025 without much luck, but my goal is to keep trying! 

Stand-alones and planned one-offs: I’m very much looking forward to reading another of Janice Hallett’s delicious epistolaries; I sampled The Examiner and am on the wait list for it at my library. Working in academia myself, I expect I'll either love it or have a lot of critique! I’ve decided one Hallett a year is probably reasonable pacing to keep these fresh. With a little trepidation, I intend to try Kemper Donovan’s ghost writer series (of course I know of him from the podcast, and the trepidation stems from being afraid I won't like it). One of the blogs I read often loves Perry Mason, so I’m going to give an Erle Stanley Gardner a try (I’ve already picked out my title and ordered it from the library!). 

Anti-Resolutions: Who I’m Giving Up in 2026

Instead of making resolutions about what exactly to read, I am giving myself anti-resolutions:  authors and categories I am giving myself permission not to read anymore! Though I may come back to them, I’m putting them back on the literal or proverbial shelf for the year: 

Margery Allingham:  There’s some stuff to like, but of the Queens, she is far and away my least favorite. I extremely struggled to finish the last book of hers I read. That was Death of a Ghost, which I thought at first was an improvement only to be disappointed. It exemplified one of the problems I have with Allingham:  her interminable endings that just seem to stretch on and on and on. 

Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus:  A lot of authors who I like (and thus whose taste I theoretically trust), love these books. The fictional Ruth Galloway is always enjoying the latest Ian Rankin book. But I just couldn’t get going with the series in 2025! I like some aspects, but there are also elements in the early books that I find extremely repellent, especially in audio. The early part of the series, at least, is not for me. I might pick up the series a little later in to see if I like it better:  maybe there’s a point where the author finds his stride. 

Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club: Nothing against the man personally, he seems clever and nice. And nothing against fans of the series: I can see why you like them, there’s a lot of charm here! I just can’t get into these books. There’s an ironic remove between the characters and the narrator that I commonly encounter in British fiction. I don’t mind it in some cases (i.e. Mick Herron’s loathsome spies), but I just can’t connect with this series or its characters and I think I’m done trying. I do plan to try the movie adaptation, though.

Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct:  Maybe!? These came so highly recommended that I am loathe to give up, and I haven’t even been able to finish book one! Usually I give series 2-3 books to find their footing, but every once in a while I dislike a book so much that I question the policy, and Cop Hater is a struggle. Even though it's extremely short. I do still want to give the series a fair shake since it’s beloved, but maybe not this year, and like Rankin, maybe I’ll try a later book in the series to see if the aspects I dislike have improved at all. 

Literary mysteries: I have so many blog drafts of articles about literary mysteries that came out in the last couple of years, and I’ve held back on publishing them because they spiral out into sour rants. This is my anti-resolution that I’m most likely to fail because I am perpetually tempted back by positive reviews from prestigious outlets! But for my own happiness, I’d really like to take a year off from reading literary mysteries! Except for a few trusted authors, I can't think of the last time I truly enjoyed a new one. If I were to break down the genres and sub-genres is the books I don't finish, I think literary mysteries might top it. So no more! I'm taking a year off! Probably. 

That does it for my thematic predictions and my anti-resolutions! If I'm still writing a year from now, it will be interesting to see how I do ... when I made art resolutions for 2025, I immediately forgot them, but I ended up doing most of them anyway! Maybe the biggest prediction of all:  I expect this post to fall into the memory hole instantly, and anything I do to meet these predictions will be entirely by accident!

2025 Year End: The Twixties

2025 was a roller coaster in my personal life. I spent the first half of the year recovering from eye surgery. While this was ultimately a positive change, I was more or less blind for several months. The household was plagued by sickness,work had a lot of burnout and drama, and this fall I had an injury that seemed minor at the time but has spiraled into relapses and ongoing treatment. All this against the backdrop of constant static anxiety from living in America and working in a field very much under attack by the far right. I read a fair amount, but didn’t have the wonderful experience I had with Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway in 2024, where a book series captured my heart and mind and gave me solace all year. But reading (and art) were still probably the best things in my life in 2025. Instead of a straight top ten list, here are some off the cuff awards–which are reminding me with a sting that I really should at the very least keep a running list of titles that I read because it’s hard to remember!

Favorite reread: The Unpleasantness at the Bellonna Club by Dorothy Sayers
Peak early Lord Peter! Maybe peak Lord Peter across the board? Favorite rereads are books that are more interesting and engaging on the revisit, and even though I did and do reread fairly often, this book was deeply rewarding to revisit as an adult after last reading it as a teen. Read more of my thoughts about it here.

Spunkiest Sleuth: Wilowjean “Will” Parker, Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood
AKA my cozy category. I only read book one in this series but I am looking forward to continuing. I liked the queer characters and themes, the mid 20th century setting, and the brash Will and self-possessed Lillian. The detective and apprentice (or detective and chronologist) is a dynamic I enjoy, and Will is the apprentice in this series. Spunk in a cozy novel is often badly done and illogical, existing to propel characters into stupid decisions. But Will feels human, smart and brave; she makes mistakes, but for believable reasons.

Slowest burn (complimentary): Charlotte Sloane and Lord Wrexford, Wrexford & Sloane series by Andrea Penrose
Set in the Regency, this series features Charlotte Sloane, a widow who makes broadside cartoons under her dead spouse’s pseudonym, and Lord Wrexford, a member of the British aristocracy who is also a gentleman scientist. Unlike mixed genre novels that put romance before mystery and always end with a couple together, Penrose is satisfyingly patient in allowing the pair to grow as individuals and in relation to each other over a span of books. There’s also the rare well-written child urchin characters with a sweet found family angle. I’d also give these a hat tip as my favorite historical mysteries of the year: though the Regency is one of the most popular settings in historical fiction, they feel unique and well-researched because of their interest in science and early forensics. Penrose captures science of the era very well, imbuing it with the sense of both discovery and precarity that is easily lost (or, worse, treated as a joke) in historical fiction.

Best road trip company: Lane Holland series, Wake and Murder Town by Shelley Burr
Because of aforementioned vision issues, I tend to bring the podcasts, audiobooks and the music to road trips while others bring the vehicles and the driving. Shelley Burr’s Lane Holland books were a great success on a trip with a family member with whom I share a fondness for Jane Harper’s Aaron Falk series. Like Harper, Burr writes about the impact of crime on small communities in Australia. I particularly liked Murder Town with its scrutiny on true crime tourism. That said, these books are't too deep: they're propulsive and plotty, like all good roadtrip listens should be. I’m looking forward to book three getting an American release!

Favorite Setting: The WW2 Blitz hospital, Green for Danger by Christianna Brand
I wrote about this recently so I won’t repeat myself, but I’ve thought a lot about this setting in time and place in the several months since I read the book! For me, setting is both time and place, both physical (can I picture the layout in my mind as I listen or read?) and atmospheric. Brand succeeds at all in the second Cockrill book. I wouldn't want to go there, but I can imagine it in detail!

Most indispensable (AKA favorite criticism or reference source): The Life of Crime by Martin Edwards’
This masterful history of crime writing was surprisingly easy to follow on audio, but not so much the footnotes, so I asked for the book for Christmas in 2024. I spent a lot of time with it in 2025, exploring it for recommendations. It has made me feel much more confident in my understanding of the genre.

Favorite true crime: Lay Them to Rest by Laura Norton
Though I listen to some podcasts, I don’t actually read a great deal of true crime: I’m really picky about it because I hate when it’s schlocky or feels exploitative. Familiar with Norton from her podcast The Fall Line (which is great, and very ethical for that medium), I knew I’d like this book. It’s fascinating and heartfelt and taught me a great deal about cold cases and about how genealogical investigation works. It was a good pairing to the true crime podcast I listened to the most according to my podcatcher stats, which was DNA:ID, all about cases solved by genetic genealogy! 

Most haunting (AKA all around best): Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie
No, it’s not a category for ghost stories: it’s just the mystery novel I thought about literally the most all year long. Gosh this was good! What a stunner! Maybe Christie’s finest??? Someday I’ll write an essay about it here :)

I have some reading predictions and goals for 2026, but I'll save them for another post so as not to dilute the glory of these works' inclusion on to the first annual Twixties!  

Green for Danger (1944), Christianna Brand

 After feeling so enthusiastic about Christianna Brand’s first Inspector Cockrill book, I picked up Green for Danger (1944) when I was in the mood to get back to reading classics instead of contemporary procedurals. Because I found that the first book is pretty much universally regarded as the worst by other bloggers when I did a tour of posts about it, I was expecting Green for Danger to be significantly better. In that regard, I was disappointed:  I don’t think this book was a huge leap forward over the first. It had many of the same problems, some new issues, and some things that bothered me more to see repeated than they did the first time around. I enjoyed it more, but mostly because of the stupendous setting and tone.

What got Better

In my warm response to Heads You Lose, I gushed about the temporal World War II setting and oh boy, was this book a treat for a history buff! From the opening pages, when the setting was announced as in an old children’s sanatorium converted to a military hospital during the Blitz, I was excited. This is so unbelievably in my wheel house of historical interests, and it did not disappoint. I loved the dread and fear that permeated a book set during a time of active warfare. I loved how the service brought together a much more diverse circle of suspects than your typical group of country house friends. I was delighted to learn more about some historical medical treatments and equipment in detail. And, most of all, I loved the details of the hospital, especially the lives and interactions of the patients (mostly men), and the lives and the complex interactions between the hospital staff. The setting, the time period, the side characters:  all fantastic and fascinating. Above being a mystery, this is a wonderful historical novel full of tremendous and interesting detail about the homefront during the Blitz, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in that history. Written and published before the end of the war, this is a primary source, and it is a fascinating one.

What Didn’t Change Enough

The Detective

I wrote about how I disliked the minimal role that Inspector Cockrill, “Cocky” himself, played in the first book, and I can’t say that this was improved much in Green for Danger. He certainly spends more time on the page, and he has some rather interesting personal connections to some of the suspects in the closed circle. But I don’t have much more sense of him as a character or as a detective. He is a stinky chain smoker who is a little mean to suspects, but is he a good detective? Is he smart? Why does he do it? What are his methods? What is his philosophy of crime? Did he even solve this case, or (as I did) just narrow it down to two? Beats me! A detective doesn’t need to be heavily present on the page, detecting and narrating in plain view, for a mystery to be engaging, but in a series I want to know more about how the detective thinks so that I can put myself in their boots while considering the clues. Not everyone is as good at Christie as articulating a detective’s philosophy and framing a plot within it, but those that aren’t tend to have the detective on page, detecting, like Marsh’s Alleyn. It simply and profoundly doesn’t work for me that Brand keeps Cocky mostly off page and that his point of view remains a cypher to me after two books. 

Because Cockrill isn’t detecting, that means that, like Heads, in Green a great deal of the detectorial speculation is done by the suspects themselves. In this book I found this bothered me a great deal. A theme of Heads was us-versus-them, the utter disbelief that the very rich suspects carried amongst themselves that someone in their rarefied group of lifelong friends could have committed terrible crimes. It makes sense for those characters to group together and talk through what they imagine the detective might make of the case because they trust each other and they don’t trust him! Though I still chafed at how minimally present the detective was in this detective novel, I was also willing to accept the reasons why he was off page, and why Brand delivered the detection and case-building through the eyes and minds of that particular group of suspects. It made sense and felt thematic. 

This didn’t apply to the same degree in Green, where the closed circle is a group of doctors and nurses all working together in the wartime hospital, three men and three women. Some of the characters in the small group of suspects have relationships, even close ones:  the three women live together and are friendly; the group contains an affianced couple; and the older surgeon and young anesthetist are from the nearby community where they worked together before the war. But except for the final pair, these characters were mostly strangers before the war brought them together in service and they don’t necessarily have much in common, particularly in their varying economic backgrounds and prospects. They haven’t the deep wells of trust, shared history, and class solidarity that bind together the group in Heads. I suppose they are trauma bonded, but the horrifying stress of war and murder doesn't necessarily bring people together, especially when they know that one of them has killed and attempted to kill and may kill again. It didn’t feel believable to me when the characters start idly chatting about how one of them must be a murderer while waiting together to be spoken to by Cockrill. I actually put the book down for about a week after this scene and read something else before I got back to it, it disappointed me and broke my immersion that much. When it happened again towards the end of the book, when the proof of murder had been found, my eyes rolled so hard. I fear this may be a characteristic of Brand’s mysteries, like Poirot gathering the suspects is a trope of Christie, and I don’t like it. 

The characters

I felt the characterization of different members of the closed circle was a mixed bag in Heads. I didn’t think this was better in Green, and may have felt it slightly worse. Oh, some were still finely and deeply drawn. But I think more of the group were shallowly depicted, especially since Brand spends much of the book trying to clue out the suspect while misdirecting towards others by hiding their backgrounds and refusing any point-of-view forays into their minds. It leads to characters who spend the majority of the book as little more than tropes:  the Good Anesthetist, the Sweet Old Man Doctor, the Pretty Nurse, the Inexplicably Attractive Rake Surgeon. The characters who are written more deeply are wonderful–I loved both Esther, a young spinster and adult Blitz orphan, and Woody, a comparatively older, unmarried woman with a bohemian background and implied greater sexual and social experience than her housemates. Woody is my favorite, but I think she is harmed by Brand holding back on her interiority and background to cast suspicion on her:  she’s such an unusual character in contrast to the two other women (who are rather common types of stock characters) that I yearned to spend more time with her. Two out of six is pretty poor ratio, though about the same as in Heads. I think Green was ultimately more disappointing in this area than the first book because I was expecting more. Esther and Woody both have scenes where their characterization is much better than anything in Heads, but ultimately, though it had a lower ceiling, I felt the characterization in the previous book was more consistent. 

What got Worse 

The victims:  I raved about the humane treatment of the victims in Heads, and while they weren’t bad in Green, they weren’t treated with the same degree of respect and interest. Cockrill is not a detective who looks to the psychology and life of the victims to solve crimes, to the detriment of the books. As a seasoned acolyte of Poirot, who does pay attention to such things, I didn’t think this book provided much challenge. Like Poirot, I looked to these things, and almost immediately narrowed the solution down to two.

The plot:  the mystery and the reveals were very obvious. Some reveals I felt myself waiting impatiently on for the characters to catch up. In particular, the method of murder isn’t explained until 72% of the way through the audiobook, but it’s so incredibly obvious that I felt impatient and frustrated as I waited for the reveal. I'm not even sure if it was supposed to be a mystery, what with the clue in the title. Never a good sign, and if I didn’t like the setting so much, the sort of thing that can make me dislike a book. While the motive for the murder is truly interesting, certainly more than in the first book, it isn’t very mysterious. 

I think the plot feels poor because, as I suggested above, Brand’s efforts at misdirection and obfuscation result in uneven characterization. Speaking for books generally, not every character needs to be drawn to the same degree of psychological realism and humanity as another! But it stands out in Brand because these six are our main characters and points of view into the story, because Cockrill is not really a protagonist, because the suspects narrate the mystery. Brand is excellent at writing characters, so it’s frustrating that her efforts to cover up a rather simple and obvious mystery resulted in under-characterization. 

 Conclusion

All that said, Green for Danger has an absolutely stellar denouement that played on Brand's strengths as a character writer. It's rare to have a mystery novel end up with a gut punch that is entirely unrelated to the crime, and I loved it. When Brand's character writing is good, it is very, very good! Combined with the wonderful setting, I still overall enjoyed this book and quickly recommended it. Even with my dislike of Cockrill, I'll happily keep reading the series!

Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan Series 1-3

Because I’m either caught up with my contemporary British and Irish police procedural series or reading them slowly, I’ve been trying out the first couple books of some other longer series to see if any of them can slot into that role. When I’m trialing a series or new author, I almost always try at least 2 books unless I really bounce off the style or content.  After a few misses, for now I’ve settled on Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan series, which debuted in 2010. I learned about this series from Cara Hunter's recommendations on her website! (Book discovery is hard and I love it when authors do this.)

The series detective is Maeve Kerrigan, who has Irish-heritage but is British-born, as she starts as a junior Detective Constable working in London under a legendary superintendent who is amusingly named (and worshiped as by the inexperienced Maeve) Godly. Book two and three pair her with a senior colleague, DI Josh Derwent, and looking ahead I understand that this is a pairing that will last (which I’m dubious about since I don’t like the character, but willing to see where it goes). 

Of the three, book one was definitely the weakest and in a style that seems not representative of the series if they continue in the vein of books 2 and 3. This validates my commitment to trying at least two in a series unless something really puts me off. The Burning sees Maeve newly elevated to Godly’s team as they chase a serial killer, only to be seemingly relegated to semi-independently focusing on just one of the cases in the series. As Maeve looks closer and closer, the case reveals itself to be a discrete murder done up as a copycat killing. 

Here are some pros and cons I had with Book 1, The Burning:  

+ Strong narration (audio and style): The Burning had multiple narrators who were read by multiple people in the audiobook. All were good, but I particularly liked the voice of main character Maeve, Caroline Lennon. I immediately took to both Lennon and the character of Maeve, who feels like she has both a distinct personality and a strong point of view. She feels realistic and human instead of just a character, and her voice–as written and as brought to life by Lennon–was immediately my favorite part of Book 1.

++ Early career detective:  I like that Maeve is relatively early in her career, and that the reader journeys with her both on positive and negative aspects of the job. We see her being mentored and getting experience with new aspects of detection, like attending her first postmortem. We also see her rankling against sexism and xenophobia and struggling to balance her ambition and drive with life and relationships. I hadn’t realized how much I would enjoy this journey until I encountered it, but I guess I’ve been reading a lot of books featuring true detectives lately and forgot that I enjoy the workplace and interpersonal element of the police procedural sub-genre. 

+ A Bit of Romance: Like Poirot, I enjoy a bit of romance sometimes! Just not to the point where the tropes of mystery give way to those of the romance genre. For the most part, I liked the balance that Casey strikes in the first three Maeve Kerrigan books. In book one, Maeve is in the last death throes of a failing relationship and maintaining a mutual workplace flirtation with another DC. Both in this book and subsequent ones, I like that romance is used for character development for Maeve: she's pretty bad at being in relationships, and I love that about her! For all the emotional acuity that she shows at work, Casey writes Maeve to be wary of commitment and loss of control, all too willing to think the worst of her partners. It lays the ground for character development that I hope will happen.

-/+ Many POVs: The reason Book 1 has different audiobook narrators is because, like many British procedurals that I’ve read recently, it has several points-of-view, including a person who is involved in the case. This is not to be confused with third-person omniscient narration, or an author that may dip in and out of many minds like in Christianna Brand’s Heads You Lose. Instead, this has a structure of alternating chapters or parts written in first person from the point of view of different characters. I’m neutral about this structure, especially across different genres and even sub-genres, but in mysteries, I feel like it often detracts from or destroys the puzzle and turns a book into more of a thriller. Which leads me to…

-/- Weak mystery:  Technically, The Burning is a fair play mystery, which is unusual in police procedurals. Maybe it’s unusual for a reason. Book 1 is barely a mystery, to the point where I’m not even sure if the reader is intended to puzzle anything out at all. Maybe this book is a thriller?? I seriously don’t know, and it seems like a problem when a reader can’t tell if something was intended to be a twist or not. I don’t only read for the satisfaction of puzzling, and I do sometimes dip my toe into thrillers, but even beyond me literally figuring it out almost immediately, The Burning felt particularly weak in plot. If not for my tendency to give authors and series with many books a couple trials, I might not have kept reading.

On the strength of Maeve’s character and the enjoyable audiobook narration, I barrelled straight into sampling the next book in the series, and then the next. Not only did I enjoy Maeve’s company and find her narration compelling, I was curious to see if my issues with the structure and plot got better, and they did! I was happy that Casey dropped the split narration for the next two books. I particularly liked book 2, The Reckoning, which is a proper procedural, with the focus on the process of detection and none of the fair play element that made the first book over-clued. I wanted more of what I liked after reading the first book, and less of what I didn’t, and I got it. I’m particularly happy to see the workplace develop:  more characters are added, existing dynamics are deepened, some characters who were interchangeable before begin to differentiate themselves. The plot of The Reckoning is also better, with a series of revelations and discoveries that make the book feel well paced, whereas I place The Last Girl somewhere between the two. While the first book was overclued, the third was rather underclued and felt underinvestigated. Book two also introduced a number of elements that, if the third is any indicating, will become overarching plots and recurring characters. 

The series isn’t a straight line of improvement from book to book:  maybe I was feeling a little fatigued by the time I got to The Last Girl, but I didn’t like it as much as the second book. I’m going to be taking a break, but I will be slotting the series into a regular rotation of one every month or two. I’m looking forward to seeing where the series takes Maeve. 

Lord Peter’s Early Years

I didn’t plan to revisit Dorothy L. Sayers this summer. But in a fit of summertime sadness, I got the whole series on audiobook to cheer myself up. I’ve read the whole series through once, and reread a few of the books on a select basis. This was my first time with the audiobooks. I sampled a few narrators and going with Ian Carmichael was a done deal the instant I heard him:  he’s really, really good at Lord Peter’s patter and prattling. I never liked the look of him as Wimsey in the show from the 70s (too old, too round), but he has the manner down wonderfully. These aren’t books to listen to on increased speed:  Carmichael already talks a mile a minute when in his Peter mode. I haven’t watched any of the screen adaptations of Sayers, but Carmichael seems to understand the character and have a very clear vision for him. It’s a wonderful performance, so good that it even made one of my least-loved of the series, Five Red Herrings, not only intelligible but actually enjoyable. (Not having to read phonetically written accents is a benefit of audiobooks that I forgot to mention in my post about them!)

Setting aside my strong positive feelings about the format, it’s odd to revisit Wimsey. I was a teenager when I first read Sayers, and now I’m about the same age as the characters. When I first read the books, I had absolutely no context for the character. I’d read maybe a third of Christie and all of Sherlock Holmes, but no other mystery writers contemporaneous to Sayers. Now, I almost feel as if I have too much context to meet these books with the same open-hearted love that they first inspired in me. Oh, I still love them, especially for Harriet Vane, but it's tempered. 

There’s knowledge of history and genre and biography rattling around as I listen to these books, but also knowledge of fandom. I saw someone on tumblr point out that Sayers’ relationship with Peter is very fannish:  he’s her blue-eyed boy, her blorbo, her disgusting slice of maggoty cheese. And once I knew the concept, it was unavoidable to consider Harriet as self-insert, a Mary Sue: she is a mystery writer who Our Hero just so happens to fall madly in love-at-first sight with?? And though I think the books are too well written to be dismissed for these elements, there’s no doubt that there is truth in them, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of Sayers’ feelings towards her characters on the books, especially as I round the bend of the turning point on Peter’s character. Even though I feel some critical way about Sayers and her relationship to her characters, characterization is one of the biggest draws to me as a reader, and character growth over a series is something I value. I think, but I’m not sure, that characters whose authors feel strongly about in one way or another are typically better than neutral characters. I’d rather a character that the author hates, or one that the author loves too much, than a neutral and dull detective! 

But I’m getting off track. Early Sayers! Young Peter! While most people fans celebrate the later, more literary novels, I do actually like both early Sayers and young Peter quite a lot. Lord Peter Wimsey is immediately more interesting to me than contemporary detectives because he is fragile. Young Peter is a World War I veteran and he suffers from shell-shock, now recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, and this immediately charges all his relationships with interest in these early books. His cliche butler, Bunter, is elevated and differentiated as the caretaker of someone struggling with occasionally serious mental illness, and Bunter’s steadfast loyalty is easily explained by a trauma-bond from the trenches. In the second book, Clouds of Witness, we’re taken to Peter’s family to face a criminal charge against his duke of a brother. Peter is unabashedly his mother’s favorite child, not just because he’s most similar to her, but because she seems to treasure him as only a parent can a child who was almost lost. He hardly knows his little sister, their very different experiences in the war serving as a wedge between them. Peter’s detecting is a vulgarity amongst his class, but it’s tolerated because it is understood as a remedy for his madness, and while he’s a person of power by default of birth, in these early books, Peter is also othered from his class by how widely known his struggles with PTSD are. He’s desperate for escape and solace, and it makes him relentless and dogged in pursuit of puzzles and cases. But Peter is also furious about seeking truth, about seeing things as they are and not as romance and tradition and honor dictate they be, and that is surely an aspect of his character tied to the great disillusionment of WWI. 

If it’s not obvious, far and away my favorite of the early Sayers books (and maybe one of my favorites in the whole series) is The Unpleasantness at the Bellonna Club. The setting of a gentlemen’s club for veterans on Remembrance Day is brilliant. Seeing Peter amongst other men who are coping (or very much not) with similar wounds is fascinating. It's also interesting to see Peter's wellness contrasted:  unlike so many others in the Bellonna, his body is intact, and compared to poor, shattered George Fentiman, his psyche is comparatively whole. I also happen to think the mystery is unusually good for Sayers (I love a forensic angle!), but the setting and cast of characters in this book are elevating and illuminating. There is something so heartrending and fascinating seeing Lord Peter be moved from the setting of the aristocracy (where he painfully doesn’t fit anymore) to this haunted house of haunted men, a place where he does fit, where he immediately understands the other men in ways he could not seem to comprehend his own brother. It’s great! It’s so good! In this book, Sayers’ love for her own character works so well. 

Sadly for me, but happily for the imaginary character of Peter, Sayers’ rather dropped the PTSD after this book. Perhaps she’d simply felt she’d explored it as much as was fruitful. Perhaps expunging the unpleasantness allowed Peter to heal in a profound way off page. I think there may actually be an argument for the latter, to an extent. But also, it isn’t too much longer until Harriet is introduced and Peter Wimsey begins his transformation into romantic hero as well as amateur detective. 

I took a break from my summer of Sayers to read mostly police procedurals this fall. I slowed down, in part, because of a dreadful hypothesis: I expect that I’ll dislike Lord Peter more and more as the series concludes and he trends towards being more authoritative in his aristocracy and more romantic in his heroism. I hope to be wrong when I do finish the rest of the books.