Murder and revival

Nancy returned from the library recently with a recent Laurie R. King's Mary Russell novel, Murder of Mary Russell. I enthusiastically read the first four of King's novels about police sergeant Kate Marinelli. Great characters and stories. I enjoyed the first four or five of her Mary Russell novels as well. (A teen-aged acolyte of a middle aged Sherlock Holmes? She made it work. And even when, after a few years, the pair married, it worked.)

However, sometime after the 1997 A Letter of Mary, the books were less appealing to me. Maybe it was that A Letter of Mary was so good.

In any case, it's been at least 5 years since I read a Mary Russell novel. And this new one from the library came with good recommendations and it gave me a good excuse to set aside Thomas Perry's A String of Beads. I've read several of Perry's books, and this one, like at least one of the others was a deterrent to sleep. But I wasn't in the mood for one adventure and clever escape after another.

Murder of Mary Russell is a misleading title. In spite of a pool of blood, broken glassware, and Mary Russell's absence, she's not murdered. She's absent from the tale for awhile, but that's not the key.

Mary Gordon as Mrs Hudson

This book is about the background of Clara Hudson, Holmes' housekeeper since forever. It's a story that ranges from London to Australia, Australia to London, and back again a couple times. Thankfully it doesn't recount the voyages. No one should have to read about four months at sea to slow down an already slowly told story.

Things get better in the last third of the book, but reading most of it for me was as dreary as a winter day on the Sussex coast. Not that Mrs. Hudson's past wasn't colorful. She was a beggar, pickpocket, and foil for her father's cons. Quite successful for a time too. Right up until Sherlock Holmes tracked her down. Holmes and Mrs. Hudson were cornered by her father whereupon Clarissa Hudson killed her father and covered up the crime with Holmes' help.

She left England with her infant son for Australia with Holmes' help and returned to England a year of so later, without her son (left with her sister). It's that missing son who appears in the Holmes' house looking for his mother. His threats toward Mary Russell result in the blood on the floor and the absence of Mary Russell.

Enough said. It wasn't great. It fit my mood better than Thomas Perry's succession of deadly hide and seek.

If you like King's writing or are a fan of additions to the world of Sherlock Holmes, you might like Murder of Mary Russell. (library or Half Price books, anyone?) I do wish King would write more Martinelli mysteries.

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• King's web site
• Steven Donoghue's review in the Christian Science Monitor
• Barbara Clark's review at BookPage

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• Thomas Perry's web site
• Muriel Dobbin's review in the Washington Times
• Marilyn Brooks' review in Marilyn Reads Mysteries

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Rereading

The rereading wasn't intentional this time. I was at the last day of the Northfield Hospital Auxiliary used book sale. Everything was half priced. I picked up a Laurie R. King novel from 2007 for a buck. It didn't look or sound familiar.

However, the opening chapter of The Language of Bees seemed vaguely familiar. Maybe it had been a teaser appended to the end of a previous book??

Most of the first third of the book seemed new. Then there was a section about flying around the Scottish islands in 1924. That rang some memory bells. But the ending seemed all new to me.

Once again, looking out the window at the shores of the little lake named Blake on a cool, cloudy weekend promoted reading. Between naps and gardening and cleaning, I read the book.

My memory must be going or The Language of Bees just wasn't very memorable. I wrote about reading it in the spring of 2010. I wasn't terribly impressed then. I'm not terribly impressed now. Go back and see what I said then. I agree with myself. I am still ready for Laurie R. King to write about people other than Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes.

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Readin' Ritin' and pRocrastinatin'

Sorry to have been away.

I have been reading. I just haven't been writing about what I've been reading.

I blame it on the Nook.

I got a Nook for Christmas. And it came loaded with a bunch of stuff to read. But reading from the screen of little computer-like tablet threw me. Reading was very different. And when I finished, I didn't have a bound pile of pages between covers to hold and look at and remind me that I really did want to keep up the practice of writing. I've been doing this for 25 or more years.

Well, I finished a real book this evening. It's sitting here next to my keyboard and writing about it seems easier. More natural.

The book is Garment of Shadows by Laurie R. King. You remember, she's the woman who began writing about Mary Russell, the young woman who became the apprentice and then the wife of an old guy named Sherlock Holmes after he'd sort of retired. (See what I wrote about that first book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice if you're curious.)

By my count this is the thirteenth story about Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes. It's a follow up to Pirate King and is set in Morocco. Nancy checked it out for me from the Northfield Library along with a couple e-books for the Nook for my birthday.

Enough preface. Like Pirate King, this was not one of King's best. Garment of Shadows was pretty un-Holmesian. It was more Holmesian than the pirate book because Holmes played a bigger role. And there was some Holmesian sleuthing and logic. But the old guy and his wife were really out of their element in Morocco. They were probably not out of their element more than they were in a couple of the stories set in the Middle East. (Remember, Ken, it's fiction!)

Maybe I'm not remembering well the early Laurie R. King plots or the Doyle stories. Every time I try to think of examples from this book that seem un-Holmesian, I remember examples of situations, plot twists, and conundrums from Doyle stories. Maybe I'm not willing to admit that King really does a good job of writing in the Doyle genre.

This story begins where Pirate King left off. Russell and Holmes abandoned the movie company about they time the film is finished and separately end up in the Moroccan city of Fez. I had to get out a map of Morocco to follow the story. At the beginning of the book, Russell awakens without any memory. She's rescued by a mute little boy, who rescues lots of the good guys before the book ends.

While Russell searches for herself, Holmes is searching for her while visiting a diplomat in Morocco who happens to be a distant cousin.

In the meantime, there is growing tension between Britain, France, and Spain. Holmes' brother Mycroft is messing around in these tense international relationships like Dick Cheney selling a story about WMD in Iraq. Then there are the groups of Moroccan rebels fighting for independence and superiority.

Russell and Holmes are reunited. Russell gradually regains her memory. They facilitate a summit conference between a colonial diplomat and a rebel leader. They get shot at, drugged, imprisoned, and framed. They sneak back into the city of Fez through a "back door" and...

But that would be giving things away.

It's not as good as some of the earlier Russell-Holmes books. Laurie R. King has written some non-Russell-Holmes books, but the Russell-Holmes books have become so popular she's given up writing about Kate Martinelli, the San Francisco detective. And I doubt she'll be able to take time to write other books as good as A Darker Place, Folly, and Keeping Watch. Her publisher probably demands at least one Russell-Holmes book a year.

Too bad. I would really like another book about Detective Matinelli. Or an intriguing story about someone conquering inner demons.

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• The author's web site
• 
  King discusses Garment of Shadows
• Stefanie Aucoin's review at Medfield Patch
• Laura's review at I'm Booking It

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King's Pirate

Back in September, Nancy and I had the pleasure of meeting Laurie R. King. She is the author of the Mary Russell mysteries featuring Ms Russell and her mentor Sherlock Holmes. King was in town to sign and read from her latest (11th) Russell mystery, Pirate King.

Besides being novelties, Nancy and I thought that the first few Russell mysteries were terrific. We also discovered King's Kate Martinelli series, written about a San Francisco detective. To us, they are equal to the best of the Russell mysteries.

The gems of King's books, in my mind, are the dark, yet hopeful novels about the lengths to which good people will go to do good things. I still wish those books are somewhat based on reality.

But back to Pirate King. The book required lots of research and travel to distant lands. We enjoyed hearing from King about her experience of writing the book. It was a bit weird to have her lead her audience at the reading in an amateurish and off-key new version of a Gilbert and Sullivan classic. (The new words were relevant to the new book.)

It was a treat to hear King read the first chapter. I often imagine an author's voice when I read, and now I'm pretty sure I had King's voice right in my head.

We gladly bought a copy, had King sign it it, and went home looking forward to reading the book that had been so much fun for the author to write. I got to read it first because Nancy was busy finishing a couple big projects.

It took a long time for me to read this book. Things began slowly in this mystery. In fact, the first real "event" didn't take place until half way through the book when one of the main characters pushes the other overboard during a crossing of the Mediterranean. And things didn't pick up much fro that point on.

I came away from the book feeling like I'd read an essay on movie making in the 1920s. (Remember all that research King enjoyed?) Following that was a little travelogue about Portugal, a briefing on heteronyms, a short history of the pirates of Morocco, and a description of an old Moroccan palace where the women of the movie company were held prisoner. (Remember the exotic travel King enjoyed?)

In my mind, stories are made up of events — one following another, often causally related. Essays and travelogues sometimes include themes and even events, but they are not mystery novels. This novel includes a flimsy plot, a bit of intrigue, and a dash of adventure, but it's more essay and travelogue than mystery novel. Enough said (for me).

I know the Russell books sell and they're what the publisher wants, but I want another Kate Martinelli mystery or another Darker Place.

Have you read Pirate King? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• The author's web site
  
• 168 reviews at GoodReads
  
• Rick Keiffel's review at the Santa Cruz News

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More on "cozies"

After disagreeing with Dan about Rhys Bowen and Molly Murphy mysteries, I discovered that the discussion group at Once Upon a Crime, a Minneapolis bookstore, was talking about Rhys Bowen last night.

I couldn't go because Nancy and I had made plans to go hear Laurie R. King at a Barnes and Noble near St. Paul. So I suggested to Dan that he might want to go.

Turns out he couldn't go either because he had tickets to hear Maria Muldaur. That turned into a digression about Muldaur (whose performances we both like) and about Pandora, which has become my primary music source.

This morning, after enjoying the presentation and reading by King, I found Laurie R. King's blog's hosting a guest blogger, Rhys Bowen!

Bowen and King, it turns out are good friends. And, as Bowen points out in the blog, they both write about women doing unusual things.

I pointed out the blog post to Dan, who wrote back,

Loved the blog--surprising connections.

What Rhys Bowen writes, about women doing things that people thought they couldn't or shouldn't, is exactly what the last two things I've written are really about: the Cokato [MN] girls playing basketball in the 1920s [the PDF version], and Amelia Earhart flying -- and consciously using her fame as a flyer to push for more opportunities for women and girls and to inspire them to grasp them.

On top of that, she makes reference to Amy Johnson (Britain's Amelia Earhart) whose biography I am currently reading. Almost weird. Thanks.

By the way, as I wrote earlier, if you didn't like Molly Murphy you would absolutely abhor Lady Georgiana. It is like going from Classic Comics to Archie and Jughead! But I love 'em. Unlucky you! 

Here are my clarifications:

• I have no problem with women doing unconventional things. I have a problem with people doing the improbable and unlikely in fictional venues where most things seem realistic. (I like Lewis Carroll and Jasper Fforde.) My example: Bowen's Molly Murphy flees Ireland and arrives penny-less in Liverpool, where the police are looking for her. As she flees down an alley, she's pulled into an unmarked door. What greets her there? Murderous attackers? Dangerous delinquents? No. She is greeted by a woman who gives her a ticket to America so Molly can deliver two children to their father in New York. And the scheme, right out of an I Love Lucy episode, works.
  
  
• It's not just improbabilities. Laurie R. King, who, by the way, called her Mary Russell books "cozies" last night, writes well and creates pretty believable characters. Once you get beyond the conceit of a recent Oxford grad becoming an investigatory partner to Sherlock Holmes, the rest works pretty well. It works because King describes fairly realistic characters, tells good stories, and invents good dialogue. Bowen often relies on the old standby, "and then a miracle happens" to her handsome and daring cutouts of characters. I think an author ought to offer something besides, "It'll all turn out right in the end."
  
  
• An author ought to do more than write grammatically correct sentences and put events in chronological order. Laurie R. King might write "cozies," but she's only able to write one a year. Bowen writes 10-15 books a year. And no, she's not that more talented.

In a few days I'll finish another book and write about it here. It probably fits into the "cozy" category, but the author has a way with words and manages to create more than cardboard cutouts of characters. Just wait. You can join this discussion. Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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Radicals in high places

There are times when I seem to have no impulse control. It often happens in bookstores. I was only passing time. Waiting for someone else to do something. The specifics are lost in a maze of trivia. But the book I bought while I intended to be "just waiting" is very much on my mind. Of course, I only finished reading it half an hour ago.

When I saw Laurie R. King's Touchstone on the shelf in paperback I was lost. Since I read Beekeeper's Apprentice back in 2001, I've been a sucker for her books. It doesn't seem to matter whether she's writing about Sherlock Holmes' replacement for dear old Dr. Watson, or the San Francisco detective, or the cult busting undercover agent, or an innocents' underground railroad, I've liked her books.

I was just grateful that the book had made it to paperback before I found it. I'm sure that saved me more than a dozen dollars. (Even so, a dozen dollars for the paperback makes me appreciate the 50¢ paperbacks of my youth.)

Touchstone is a thriller set in mid-1920s England. An undercover FBI agent is paired with a British WWI veteran with PSTD. The veteran's sister is paired with Lady Hurleigh as progressive social activists. The veteran is also Lady Hurleigh's former suitor. The suit was ended by terrible, mostly psychological wounds the soldier suffered on a French battlefield. Lady Hurleigh is also paired with her current lover, a radical politician striving for legitimacy and political power. Lurking behind it all is a shadowy, semi-official intelligence agent who is planning to make Britain safe from reds and unrest, whether Britain wants that safety or not.

King tells the story quite slowly at first. It is a 550-page book. I slogged through the first half of the book. It could have used some energy and action. But the last third of the book makes up for the slowly-building tension. I had difficulty putting the book down while I read the last 100 pages.

I'd advise you to skim through the first half, but you'd might miss key elements that come into play later. You could probably live without them, but the ending does tie up all the loose ends -- well almost all. There could be a sequel, but it might be a romance novel.

Can you tell I liked this one? King has once again written a book I really like. She offers a believable picture of upper class English life and a plausible image of anti-Communist politics in J. Edgar's FBI and the infant MI5 of the 1920s.

I recommend it. Maybe this is the first recommendation for summer reading.

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• Laurie R. King's web page about Touchstone
• It's a Crime! (Or a Mystery) review of Touchstone
• Dick Adler's review of Touchstone in January magazine

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Characters and island suspense

Here's another set of comments I wrote about a Laurie R. King book. It's dated February 2004, but that can't be right. I wouldn't have been at Sidetrack in February and Kris wouldn't have been bringing guests at that time of year. Reading the entry carefully, I find I wrote this in July '03 and only got around to posting it at ReadingOnTheWeb in February.

Here's another of my favorite King books.

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I was at Sidetrack for the purpose of cleaning and preparing the place for Kris and her friends from Madison who would arrive the next week. I was also dealing with the death of a cell phone thanks to the misfeasance of somebody at Amery's Radio Shack store. Oh, and there was a free range cat that kept hanging out on the deck between hunting trips. I thought it was the neighbor's cat. But the neighbor hadn't been around for two days.

I didn't get as much cleaning done as I'd intended. I was trapped by a book: Folly by Laurie R. King.

King first came to my attention as the author of a series of books about Mary Russell, a young woman who becomes a partner of Sherlock Holmes. Those were quite enjoyable. King also wrote four mystery novels about Kate Martinelli, a San Francisco detective. She's also written a couple other novels about interesting characters.


None of them prepared me for Folly. There are portrayals here of depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome that set my teeth on edge. There's also the story of the brave and intelligent woman at the center of the book who struggles mightily with her feelings and her madness. There are enough real threats to add to the imagined ones to make the suspense palpable. Rae Newborn, the woman at the center of the stories, is living alone on one of the San Juan islands (i.e. no other island residents). The suspense in the story telling was enough to keep me from reading it after dark while I was alone at Sidetrack, even when there were neighbors here.

But it wasn't just the very well-told story that kept me reading that July afternoon when I should have been washing and vacuuming. It was the characters. King has always populated her novels with interesting people: the young woman at Oxford who seeks out a retired beekeeper as a mentor, a "retired" adventurous detective who keeps accepting commissions from highly-placed friends, a cop whose life away from the office is more important to her than the professional dedication she gives to law enforcement, and the quiet deprogrammer who infiltrated a dangerous sect for example.

Folly focuses on four generations of a family and the representatives of these generations are wonderfully drawn. The resilient main character is most complete, but the others appear as real people as well. It's not that I'd like to spend a lot of time with these people, but before I was very far into the book, I cared about them. Even the characters around the edges of the story are bright and clear.

So what makes this a wonderfully excellent book are the characterizations, the portrayals of imperfect people finding ways of coping, the carefully-told suspenseful tale, and the way it drew me into the world created by Laurie R. King. But that's just my opinion.

I finished the book only an hour ago, and I can already pick out some gimmicks and plot devices that I might criticize. But this book doesn't deserve nit picking. It deserves to be read and enjoyed.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the Pulitizer-winning book I wrote about in the last issue was not, to my mind, a great American novel. This may not be either, but it's better. And the tensions between sanity and insanity, struggle and acceptance, and love and resentment are as profound and universal as the themes of Chabon's book. If he can win a Pulitzer, Laurie R. King deserves one too.

What do you think?

Improbable upstart

In my continuing effort to bring reviews from the old ReadingOnTheWeb site to the new-fangled blog, I'm concentrating on my favorites.

Laurie R. King is one of my favorites. I wrote this after reading The Beekeeper's Apprentice back in August 2001.

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When I read a review recently of a new mystery featuring Sherlock Holmes set in St. Paul, Minnesota and involving railroad magnate (Empire Builder) James J. Hill, I figured this Holmes stuff must be a trend. I had just finished a new post-Conan Doyle Holmes mystery myself and enjoyed it very much, thank you.

It's been a long time since I've read any Sherlock Holmes -- about 40 years.

When I was about 12 years old, I stayed at my great-uncle Clarence's home for a couple days. (He was a World War I veteran who belonged to the Fraternal Order of the Cooties, Minneapolis Pup Tent, in memory of those awful months in France.) He'd finished off an attic room and decorated it with books. One of them was Sherlock Holmes Detective Stories, which I devoured while a quiet guest. Uncle Clarence gave it to me when I went home. It's on my shelf right now.

The new Holmes mystery I read seemed to very much in the spirit of Conan Doyle's work. Maybe. Because all my Holmesian memories seem to come from Basil Rathbone movies, and the book is dead-on accurate to those images, phrases and accents. The book is one Nancy recommended, The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King [at left].

If you've ever wished that Holmes would get a gentle comeuppance, here's the book for you. And who better to chastise that old know-it-all than Miss Mary Russell, a 15-year-old American orphan "whose mental acuity is equaled only by her audacity, tenacity, and penchant for trousers and cloth caps." (quoting the book jacket flack)

The plot revolves around the kidnapping of the daughter of a US Senator who was visiting London. Holmes is lured out of retirement and persuaded to take on a teen-aged, female assistant to help Scotland Yard solve the case. Of course, the kidnapping was only a ruse to get Holmes out of retirement and into the world, so he could be killed.

It's a fine story of Mary Russell's discoveries about her new life as a ward in England and Holmes' world of treachery and detection. By the end of the book, Mary Russell is a student at Oxford and ready to take a term off to help Holmes solve another case. That must be what King's next book featuring Russell and Holmes, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, is about.

The Beekeeper's Apprentice is great fun -- just keep imagining Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes sputtering in the face of a brilliant young woman. And then imagine what Dr. Watson is doing!

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