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!