Oh, Bother: The Red House Mystery

 I’ve been wanting to read The Red House Mystery (1922) since I learned of its existence:  that the Winnie the Pooh guy wrote a Golden Age of Detection mystery novel is curious enough to serve as an advertisement. Add in that some people think it’s pretty good and it’s a must read. 

I could have just picked up a pdf since the book is in the public domain, but instead I went on a rather arduous journey looking for an acceptable audiobook. Ultimately I went with a recording by the Online Stage, and while it met the standard of acceptable quality, I don’t really care for the full cast recording/audioplay style, which assigns different actors the dialog along while having one narrator do the rest of the text. With rare exceptions, I prefer a single narrator. I have trouble accessing the level of concentration I can usually apply to audio when the voices are switching with every line of dialog. Nonetheless, the Online Stage recording quality was good, the performances professional, and the voices were at least clear (another version I sampled was plagued with a terrible mumble), so I went with it. My lukewarm feelings about the audiobook style may have affected my feelings about the book. 

The Red House Mystery has the setup of a classic country house and locked room mystery:  a body is found dead in the office of the titular Red House, its owner has absconded, and an amateur detective descends to sort it all out. It very quickly turns into something a little different, and I’m not sure if that’s because it’s subverting anything, or if the country house locked room murder sub-genres were simply not as clearly set at the time as they seem now, in retrospect. No spoilers, but for me, this was hardly a whodunnit:  there simply aren’t enough characters to have a lively round of suspicion. Characters who are introduced in the first chapters are swiftly dispensed of, and the acting cast of the book is really just three people:  the detective, Antony Gillingham; his Watson, Bill; and the very suspicious cousin/secretary left behind to run the house and assist in the official investigation by his missing relative, the presumptive murderer. Gillingham is a dilettante with a photographic memory, a man who glories in dabbling in different professions to better observe humanity, which is a fun setup for an amateur detective. Unfortunately, there's not much humanity around for him to observe.

Much like Gillingham, while I didn’t understand the particulars until the murderer spelled it out to us all at the end, I had a pretty good idea before long what had happened. But I don’t have the sense that this was intended as an inverted novel. Today, this could be the setup for a thriller or suspense:  a cat-and-mouse between the loyal cousin and two unwanted guests. It is this in plot beats, but the tone is entirely cheerful and adventurous. I swear, as a child I read Boxcar Children and Bobsy Twins books that were more sinister than The Red House Mystery–and The Red House has textual set pieces that seem fully intended to make the reader feel, at the very least, nervous for the two heroes. But it’s only the emptiness of the house and meagerness of the cast that makes the tone feel jarring. Antony and Bill are enjoyable enough to spend time with, but not so charming that the weakness in plot was overcome. 

The book made me think about the importance of characterization in my reactions to a mystery novel:  not just the detective, but also very much the victim, murderer, and cast should be both illuminated and believable. Of course this is the arena where Agatha Christie reigned supreme–her finest books are so good because of how deftly and swiftly and often devastatingly she cut to the quick of humanity. I didn’t expect a staggering level of insight and incision from the guy who wrote Winnie the Pooh, but the introduction to The Red House, with a pair of servants chatting about the people they work for, raised my hopes for some interesting character studies and insights. Alas, the first few pages were the high point for characterization. Poirot always says that the solution to a mystery lies in the life of a victim, and I can easily imagine how Christie would handle this book. With very few changes, I think she would make the victim a much more believable figure, and thus increase the mystery and clue out its solution in a much more satisfying way. 

This seems like a lot of complaining. Ultimately, the book was okay! The best–and worst–thing I can say about it is that it feels like the first in a series. If Milne’s career hadn’t become devoted to his son’s toys, if he’d gone on to write a dozen more Antony Gillingham mysteries, I think The Red House Mystery would be considered one of the stronger first outings of a detective! The book is a solid base to build on, but there’s plenty of room to grow and develop. Because the series was never written, instead it feels rather like a house haunted by the ghost of what never was:  a little too empty, its characters somewhat shambling, the plotting and pacing uneven.  Oh, to visit the library of unwritten books and see where Milne may have taken Gillingham. The most interesting mystery to me in The Red House, and one that wasn’t entirely solved, was whether or not Antony Gillingham would move on to a new profession or whether his appetite for observation would be satiated by detecting.  Would Bill have stuck around, or would he have shuffled off page to the fields of happy matrimony in the way of Hastings or Nigel Bathgate? Perhaps Gillingham could have been called in by or paired with a new Watson each book, some person he’d met in a previous career? Or would they have remained a pair, a Sherlock and his Watson, throughout a series of lighthearted romps through the tropes of the British mystery? Ultimately, pondering these mysteries was more interesting to me than the one posed by the book. 

The Bones of Obsession

In my perpetual quest to understand my own mind and taste by revisiting childhood favorites, I recently picked up the first two audiobooks in Aaron Elkins Gideon Oliver series:  Fellowship of Fear (1982) and The Dark Place (1983). 

I was a fan of Elkins when I was young. I’m not sure how young, exactly, but in elementary school. Certainly too young for some of this subject matter, if I’d had guardians with any interest in shepherding my developing mind more closely. (I’ll try not to harp on this, but the sex scenes were pretty graphic, and I wouldn’t give this book to an 8 or 9 or whatever-year-old today.)  

I remember Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver as an academic sleuth, a progenitor of my beloved Ruth Galloway, and it was a shock to me to find that Fellowship of Fear was more of a spy novel. Now, I like John le Carre’s Smiley books a lot, and I occasionally read Mick Herron, but spies aren’t my favorite. This book rang no memories from childhood, and I wasn’t particularly enjoying it, so I put it down after a couple of hours and skipped to a much richer and more influential text:  The Dark Place. 

It’s odd that I can’t hook this book on to any concrete memory of when and where I read it because I remembered it startlingly well:  the plot, the setting, and a vast number of details about the forensics all seemed to exist perfectly in my mind, requiring only the slightest excavation of the act of rereading to bring forth. This book was my first encounter with the real-life history of Ishi, the Yahi man kept and studied by anthropologists as the last of his kind at UC Berkeley in the early 20th century. I learned the word and concept of the atlatl from this book. Heck, it was probably my introduction to the concept of forensic anthropology! And it certainly sparked in me an appetite for detectives with an academic background, if not always setting. It was absolutely surreal to revisit and realize that so much of my taste was sparked by this book and likely the ones that came after–along with Elizabeth Peters, I’m sure (I’ll get to her someday). 

So, The Dark Place was foundational for me, but was it any good to revisit as a grownup? In the ragged book diary that this replaces, I often alternated between what worked for me and what didn’t. So in that spirit: 

++ The setting! The rain forest of America’s pacific northwest captured my imagination as a child, and it held it as an adult. I haven’t spent a great deal of time in that part of America, but the sense of sogginess, mist, and damp was pervasive and compelling. It even inspired a painting, which I'm including--I did it while listening to the book! 

Misty forest, skeleton trees

 - The mystery. I don’t know if it’s just because I somehow had near-perfect recall of a book I read 20+ years ago or what, but there’s little puzzle here. This isn’t a traditional mystery in any sense:  there’s not a large cast, no real red herrings until the very end, and there’s not much detecting and suspecting. No fair play and closed circles here. This doesn’t particularly matter to me, but what is an issue is the nonexistence of the victims. I don’t prefer mysteries where the victims are merely fuel to get the engine of a plot started. Poirot’s compassion for his victims, Bosch’s mantra of “everyone counts or nobody counts”--these resonate with me, and I found Elkins’ disinterest in the victims almost distasteful, especially considering that there’s a grueling autopsy scene in the book. 

+  Still, I thought way back then and still think that the plot is very interesting. No spoilers, but there’s an anthropological and historical through-line that is both haunting and interesting to me. I was afraid it would age badly, but I found it pretty well handled and it still captivated my imagination! 

+/- I have mixed feelings about the character of Gideon Oliver. He actually has a fairly distinct personality and voice for a sleuth so early in a series, but there are aspects to him that are tropey (he’s sexually irresistible, lol) or ridiculous (he’s such a super genius that he learns an extinct language in less than 24 hours from a single dictionary). But this was only the second book Elkins wrote with the character, and I’m curious to see if he backed away from the super sexy perfect genius tropes and leaned more into the aspects of Oliver that are interesting:  his quick temper, his arrogance, his impatience; his filial love for his academic mentor, an elderly Holocaust survivor and anthropological luminary; his empathy and imagination. If I read more, which I probably will, I suppose I’ll find out! 

+ Flavor:  related to setting, but not quite. Since it concerns murders of hikers in the pacific northwest, the book has a fun (if brief) Bigfoot side plot. It also has a wonderful interview between Gideon and a nonagenarian local. 

- I don’t love that the one female character canonically wanted to sleep with our hero since she was a college student reading his textbook. This is a sentiment that almost no college students feel about the authors of their textbooks. Julie Tendler could be worse written, she does develop a bit over the book and I like her clashes with Gideon, but she’s very much an objectified love interest written by a male author. 

?? How’s the science hold up? Don’t ask me! Though I briefly did want to be a physical anthropologist (certainly directly because of the Skeleton Detective!), I only took one college class about it before retreating to the less organic wings of museum and archive work. On one level, the science is conveyed breezily and confidently conveyed enough to be convincing. It doesn’t break immersion. But on the other, Gideon Oliver is basically a wizard able to practice psychometry, the mystical art of learning improbable information through psychic touch... so it probably isn’t great? Actual anthropologists, feel free to write me and put me in my place. 

The audiobook wasn’t bad, either, though I don’t particularly like listening to sex scenes on audio and don’t always have my hands free to skip. 

So, would I recommend it? Is it actually good? I’m not sure! I definitely have a serious case of nostalgia for this one:  personally speaking, it was surprising and fun to find the genesis of so many of my interests in one book. It’s short, so I suppose I’d recommend it to anyone interested in an earlier entry into the forensic anthropology sub-genre of mysteries and thrillers. But if you prefer female detectives, literally almost any other popular series in this sub-genre would probably be better! 

Death in the Air

No, I’m not here to talk about Death in the Clouds (though, and maybe this is a hot take, I don’t think it’s that bad?). I’m writing about audiobooks, baby! 

For about the past seven years, I’ve been pretty exclusively an audiobook reader. Not by choice:  changes in a disability made it impossible for me to read with my eyes for long periods of time. I had eye surgery earlier this year, and I’ve been dipping my eyeballs back into reading text, but I’ve gotten attached to the habit of audiobooks, particularly combined with walking, crafting, chores, or painting! 

Audiobooks have many skeptics. One of the most common comments I hear about audiobooks is that they aren’t good for complex plots or world building. People are often surprised that I listen pretty exclusively to mystery, fantasy, or historical monographs. And I get it:  when I was flung from the realm of reading text, I struggled as well, particularly with nonfiction, and particularly with speed. I’d been a lifelong but casual audiobook fan, a roadtrip listener. But here’s the thing:  listening to a book or an article is a skill, and if that’s your only option, it’s one that you develop mighty fast. I think people forget that reading text is a skill, and literacy and comprehension both vary depending on myriad factors. It may seem counterintuitive to call aural comprehension a similar skill–most people are born hearing–but I personally have experienced a growth in what I can only call aural literacy. 

While I’m not as good at listening at higher speeds as people who were born with visual impairment, I can do it. It’s not a brag, but just a fact, that I’ve gotten better at aural comprehension, concentration, and memory. Casual listeners (like I used to be) often can’t fathom being able to follow a mystery plot in audio unless it’s in a relatively sensory-deprived setting like driving a car, and for sure different people have different neurological baselines that make some things easier or harder. But it is possible to improve and strengthen aural comprehension and memory to the point that following a mystery plot is perfectly natural. If the ability to solve whodunnits is any sort of barometer, for me, I’m as good or better at listening as I used to be at reading text! 

Of course, there are some areas where audiobooks are simply not going to ever stand up. I miss out on all visual clues from golden age mysteries. If there’s a map, I don’t know it. Recently, when I was listening to Have His Carcass, the audiobook fully cut out the lengthy deduction jam Harriet and Peter have over the cypher. The audiobook editors kindly included it in an appendix, but I didn’t feel compelled to listen. I’ll power through information that doesn’t lend itself well to audio if I need it during my studies or for work, but I felt no great loss fully skipping that section of the book. Not all deductive elements are so easily excised, though, and if my primary goal in reading mysteries was trying to solve puzzles, I’d certainly suffer. I also don’t know how to spell any character’s names! When I found out how "Eyelesbarrow" was spelled, I was shocked. 

The quality of an audiobook is a more serious problem. While I’ve learned to just deal with readers who I dislike, that doesn’t always work. There are narrators whose style I dislike so much that I won’t read a book if they do it. And I’ve run into problems when a narrator switches mid series:  I’ve stalled out on Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series because of a narrator switch mid series (though I’ve every intention to return and finish it up some day). I particularly dislike when a single narrator tries to overly gender different characters–the male narrator trying, very badly, to do women’s voices is the wall I ran into with the switch in In a Dry Season (a book I would otherwise have relished, since I adore cold cases and ghost towns!). Accents can range from laughably bad to wincingly offensive. And in mysteries, sometimes they’re a little spoiled by narrators who over-emphasize elements that are meant to be subtle clues. However, a good narrator can be an absolute joy, and may even transform and elevate a book. Someday I may write about some of my specific favorite narrators and what they offer; I’ve been thinking about it a lot in relation to my Sayers reread. 

It’s not just the narrator that can be an issue. Authorial tics, like repetitive phrases or sentence structure, can be more prominent and annoying to me in audio. Things that I might glide over in text stand out, and if I’m not otherwise enjoying a book a lot, can kill it for me. Though not related to bad writing exactly, I had this problem recently with Iain Banks’ Rebus: in the early books, there are a lot of …. weird (to put it mildly)....  sexual comments, including about Rebus’ own daughter. (I'm not sure if this continues beyond the early books, because I put them down for now). Maybe I was just not a very literate reader of text, but that is the type of thing that I could see myself just gliding past. In audio, it stands out, and it’s hard to overlook when I’m constantly on edge wondering if there’s going to be an uncomfortable paragraph about how all cops are turned on by corpses or whatever. 

There’s a flip side to this sensitivity, though:  I find myself more appreciative of beautiful writing and subtle characteristics, and of humor! Agatha Christie is often given short shrift as a writer; I think everyone just accepts that she was not as good of a stylist as Sayers or others. And by some metrics, that is true, especially for Christie’s lesser books. But rereading them through audio has encouraged me to notice when her writing is lovely, when her observations are particularly surprising or sharp, or when her characterization is particularly interesting or heartbreaking. Christie isn’t given credit for how subtle and deep her characterization and human observations can be, but I think these things particularly stand out in the audio format. Humor also comes through for me more in audio! I couldn’t get into Terry Pratchett until I started listening to the audiobooks, and I think how funny Christie can be often shines under Suchet and Fraser’s narrations. 

Unfortunately, the biggest and most insurmountable problem with audiobooks is availability. I haven’t read any of the lesser known authors from the mid 20th century because they aren’t recorded and they aren’t public domain. Like many people, I have issues with generative AI, but not for accessibility purposes. I’ve used text to speech in academia/work, but I haven’t found the versions that are cost-effective are good enough quality for my fiction taste. If I just need the information, I don’t mind having a robot read to me. But I read fiction for enjoyment, and the jankiness of AI narration makes it impossible for me to enjoy an audiobook read by a robot the same way I do the ones read by humans. Having all these previously inaccessible books open to me is one of the areas I’ve been most excited about post surgery. 

To close this out, here are some of my favorite books that I’ve recently enjoyed for their qualities as audiobooks: 

• Ian Carmichael’s reading of the Lord Peter series are a delight! They deserve their own essay but I really love his character-ful readings. Five Red Herrings was an improvement on the book, whose written dialect I remember finding very difficult to get through.
• Janice Hallet’s The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels felt like it was made for audio! This is a great example of different narrators coming together to create something more like an audioplay than a book. 
•  I love all the Christie audiobooks, but I recently listened to Hugh Fraser's rendition of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and thought it was particularly good. Fraser gives a real performance instead of just narration, and it was a bit like reading the book for the first time to meet his version of Dr. Shepherd.

Michael Connelly and Long Characterization

 Over the weekend I read Michael Connelly's Desert Star (2022), the 24th book in the Harry Bosch series and the fifth in the Renee Ballard series. I've read all the books in both series to this point, some of them more than once. (I'm not caught up with the Lincoln Lawyer series).  I didn't like this one very much. I'm going to write to think through some possible reasons why, just speculations rather than opinions set in stone. 

In the past several years, I've often claimed that Michael Connelly is one of the best, if not the best, contemporary writers of the American police procedural. For the unfamiliar, Connelly began his career as a crime journalist. His books are primarily set in Los Angeles, California and follows Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and his family (half-brother Mickey Haller, daughter Maddy) and friends (Renee Ballard) from 1992 to the present, with the characters and books moving through time. In 201, Connelly introduced a new protagonist detective, Renee Ballard, though merged her books with Bosch's after just one solo outing. And a good merger it was--I think Dark Sacred Night was one of Connelly's better mysteries, if I remember right. 

My opinion about Connelly's skill at the police procedural was forged in the last five years. I started reading Connelly as a teenager, but embarked on a reread (via audiobook) of everything published to date in 2019/2020. Earlier in the year, I started a reread of the Ballard subseries in order to catch up to the handful I hadn't read--this book, The Dark Hours (2021) and The Waiting (2024). I'll read the last before the end of the year. 

I think this is still an opinion I'd defend, but this book and the last* have me doubting this and wondering:  has Connelly lost the touch, or was I wrong? Connelly is almost 70 and has put out at least a book every year for the entirety of the 20th century. At that pace, they can't all be winners! Even Agatha Christie, also prodigious, has stinkers. Maybe the last couple are just a lull, but the latest book has got me thinking of the problem of the detective in such a long series. 

It's a vexing issue, keeping a character going for decades and double-digit-long series. Is the detective unchanging and basically ageless, like Poirot or Marple? Does he experience character growth, like Lord Peter? Do her acquaintances move, die, grow distant, return, like Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway?** Connelly wants to have it both ways, which is sometimes great and sometimes a weakness. His characters fortunes change within their careers:  Renee Ballard starts out exiled to "the late show," the night shift, due to crossing the wrong powerful man, and I've positively lost track of the number of times that Harry Bosch has been fired by the LAPD, only to return to working for some branch of the police in some capacity. Despite these career changes, both characters are essentially static in their personalities and beliefs. Both Bosch and Ballard are Connelly's platonic ideal of a True Detective:  ravenous for justice, damaged people, monomaniacally fixated on solving crime, essentially loners, often willing to work within a system but always outsiders and often at odds with it. Both characters may grapple with big questions and doubts and may even appear to experience character growth and change, but there's a cyclical return to the status quo of characterization in these books. 

And I don't think that's a problem, necessarily. This archetype, and its consequences, clearly fascinates Connelly. I like it too--police detectives who are perpetual outsiders, who grapple with the way systems are often at odds with justice, are my favorite character to lead a police procedural. The American justice system deserves critiquing, and one of the strengths of Connelly's work over the years is his attention to issues like police corruption and violence. While I do like long series that have a lot of character growth and change over time, I don't think a series needs it in order to be good. I love Christie, after all! A fairly static detective can be a really solid pole to build a story around, and can provide a canvas for a lot of nuanced meditations about crime and justice. This is a feature I like in Christie, and I think Connelly's better work does this. 

The problem is that Connelly seems to want to give his characters growth and change, only to perpetually revoke it when the story and abstract ideas of justice call for it. Sometimes, unfortunately, even within the same book! In Desert Star, Bosch goes from lamenting that a suspect died before facing justice in the courts to embracing vigilante violence within a matter of chapters. It's nonsensical! But the anxieties of systemic versus vigilante justice are frequent agitations for Bosch, and I can almost write off such vacillations of character because they are such familiar occupations to him. Almost. I wish Connelly would just embrace a mostly static detective, because character change is not a strength of his, and it stands out as a mistake when everything around the characters change, and when the characters themselves even seem to reach turning points, only to be returned to the status quo.

My biggest complaint with Desert Star is that it does not have enough Ballard, and doesn't show her off well when she is on page. She hardly gets to detect, and almost every single case epiphany and breakthrough is given to Bosch. I hate this because I love Ballard! The introduction of Ballard felt like a fresh turn in Connelly repertoire: as a woman and person of color, she offers new ways to study and critique the system, and I think her first few books were pretty great in how they did this. (For the most part--there's at least one unnecessary sexual assault). Unfortunately for me, Connelly is forever drawn to Bosch, as obsessive about his truest detective as the character is about crime. No spoilers, but I am hopeful that Bosch's detecting days may come to an end soon. 

In some of the previous Bosch and Ballard books, the two characters were better balanced in ways that showed off the best of both:  interestingly, while they are natural partners to one another, there's a lot of friction between them because they are (whether intentionally or not) so similar on paper with their True Detective qualities. The characters clash and rankle when the other makes ridiculous lone wolf decisions, and while the characters may not be self aware of the irony when they call each other to task for not calling backup or taking a phone, there's a fun self-awareness to the writing itself. Some of my favorite parts of Desert Star was the tension and the ease between the two characters. The book has some great tests of trust, and I felt kinship with Ballard's frustration at Bosch's infuriating old independent man decisions, like refusing to dial back shenanigans on an injured knee. (Hi, it's me and my dad.) I do love them together, but it works best when they are on more equal footing, and they simply weren't in this one. 

Unrelated to characterization, my other disliked element of Desert Star was the plotting. In these later Bosch and Ballard books, Connelly has often adopted an A and B mystery structure, with two cases often changing places with one another throughout the book. This book had the same structure, but they didn't work well, maybe because the book felt a lot shorter than some of the others:  it was only 9 hours on audio! That is not a lot of time to have not one, but two huge cases:  a serial killer and a whole family killing. The cases themselves are interesting, but the investigation of them--especially of the murdered family--feels perfunctory and shallow. This is unfortunate, because I usually love how Connelly writes and showcases the minutia of detection and especially with cold cases, how different police policies and procedures create different types of evidence that the modern cold case detective must extract meaning from. Give me multiple pages of database searches! Gimme a week of thumbing through notecards documenting interactions between police and nighttime denizens of Hollywood! Give me close studies of old murder books! I love that shit, and Connelly is often great at it--but it's just not a big part of this book. 

I'm hardly going to stop reading Connelly--in fact, rather than give me pause, this book inspired me to download his 1996 book The Poet to my device. I know I've read that one, but I don't think I ever read Connelly's returns to the journalist Jack McEvoy character, and the three books should give me enough time to cool my heels from this book before continuing on with the most recent Bosch/Ballard pairing. 

I read another contemporary book last weekend,  Liz Moore's The God of the Woods. I'm not sure if I have an essay about it in me, but I'll probably try to think through my mixed feelings on literary mysteries like this one. For now, let me just say that I'm feeling quite burned on contemporary lit mystery and looking forward to returning to Dorothy Sayers to close out my Summer of Sayers reread after I finish with this Connelly diversion! 

*I'm not going to get into The Dark Hours -- maybe another day! 

**A favorite series of mine! I'll write about it someday.