MarysLibrary

Trouble in a small English Village - Wicked Autumn by G M Malliet

Wicked Autumn by G.M. Malliet
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Father Max Tudor has been the vicar at St Edwold's in Nether Monkslip for three years and he has been warmly welcomed into what he perceives as a kind of Eden after his eventful years with MI5. But all is not well in his little town as he discovers when the chairman of the Women's Institute, a much disliked busybody, is murdered on the day of the Harvest Fayre she worked so hard to make a success. I might add that this is the most unusual method of murder I've encountered in all my years of reading mysteries.

The plot is excellent, the characters just what one wants in a village mystery, and the reader will find appealing this clerical amateur detective, not to mention Detective Chief Inspector Cotton whom he assists in solving the crime. Unfortunately, the author feels it necessary to lecture the reader about politics in the Church of England (which she gets all wrong) and the importance of religious tolerance (not something the Anglicans need to be lectured about.)

However, this series, of which this is the first, looks promising and I will be on the lookout for the second book, A Fatal Winter, which will be out some time in 2012.

2012 No 36

Watergate as seen from within - a novel by Thomas Mallon

Watergate: A Novel by Thomas Mallon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Some authors are such favorites that you want to drop everything to read their new book the moment it's released. For me, Thomas Mallon is one of those must-read-now authors. He never disappoints. Dewey Defeats Truman, Bandbox, Mrs Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F Kennedy, although not what we traditionally mean when we call a book a page-turner are, nonetheless, books that you don't want to stop reading, the kind of book that never needs a bookmark because you don't put it down for longer than 10 minutes all day.

Watergate: A Novel may be Mallon's best book yet. It can be tricky fictionalizing people as well-known as Richard Nixon, and when it's someone who was as bitterly hated as Nixon, it takes a deft touch. Mallon attempts in this novel to explain the almost inexplicable phenomenon that we call Watergate - why did the Republicans try to bug the Democratic campaign headquarters, why did they bungle it, how did it move from two inches on the bottom of page 36 of the Washington Post to two-inch headlines on the front page above the fold? How did it go from a third-rate burglary attempt to a near-impeachment of the president?

A great many of the characters whose names were all over the news in the early 70s and are now nearly forgotten play their parts in this story, which unfolds through the eyes of Fred LaRue, the dollar a year director of the Committee to Re-elect the President (commonly called Creep), Howard Hunt, Pat Nixon, Eliot Richardson, and primarily, Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's secretary. Alice Roosevelt Longworth plays a sort of Greek chorus, alternately hilarious and touchingly pathetic. Most of the people in Nixon's orbit are treated as real people, with good intentions and mixed motives. Some decisions are well meant although illegal like handing out money to pay for lawyers for the "plumbers" as the burglars were called (because they were trying to stop leaks to the press.) Other motives were less benign, like trying to cover up the involvement of administration figures as far up as the attorney general.

The tragic irony is that Nixon knew nothing beforehand of this senseless scheme to break into the Democratic headquarters. In part because of bad advice from people like H R Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, in part because of the irrational hatred of his political opponents, the press, and the Washington Post in particular, and in part because he decided when told about it to try to cover it up, a basically non-event devoured Nixon's presidency. Near the end of the book, in a fictional flashback set in a Georgetown bar, the motive for the entire fiasco is explained with searing irony.

Anyone can read this book with pleasure, even if they don't know Jeb Stuart Magruder from John Mitchell or the Saturday Night Massacre from the enemies list. Having lived through it all, however, enriches the reader's understanding of how a man who should have been remembered as one of our great presidents became a disgraced outcast and the only president to resign from office.

2012 No 35

A Game of Hide and Seek by the Other Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is best known for her novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which in 2005 was made into a fine movie starring Joan Plowright. If you have seen that film or read that book you have experienced the mix of laughter, tears, indignation, and sympathy that Taylor's stories evoke.

In A Game of Hide and Seek we meet Harriet and Vesey when they are 18, he casually cruel to hide his insecurity, she shy and fearful. They are in love but they dare not express their feelings. The closest they come to outward expression of the intensity they feel is when playing hide and seek with two young friends. They always hide in the hay loft together and they never say a word to one another about their love. It is quintessentially Elizabeth Taylor.

In the second part of the book it is some years later and Harriett is married with a 15-year old daughter. Vesey, who has become an actor, reappears in her life but time has not treated him gently. They discover they are still in love but of course they are, in about 1957, in a difficult situation.

The book is not as grim as it sounds. Other characters who range from amusingly confused to hilariously vain. As Anita Brookner has said, "All her writings could be described as coming into the category of comedy. Comedy is the best vehicle for truths that are too fierce to be borne."

 2012  No 34

Math and Science for English Majors

The Square Root of Murder by Ada Madison. Mysteries with amateur detectives who are mathematicians or scientists or that feature math and science have a particular pull for me. As the years have gone by I've become more interested in, for example, algebra, and do quadratic equations for fun - they are so much more relaxing than reading serious literature because they have a definitive answer with little ambiguity. The same goes with mysteries of course and this first in a series about college math teacher Sophie Knowles is a treat. A second book in the series comes out in March.

2011  No 191

 

 A Spark of Death by Bernadette Pajer. This first of the Professor Bradshaw mysteries is about exploring the uses of electricity, which was fairly new phenomenon in 1901. When a much disliked University of Washington professor is found dead in a Farady Cage in the school's lab the police come looking for his colleague, Professor Bradshaw. Set in turn of the last century Seattle and at the Snoqualmie Falls, the book is interesting as well as entertaining with a clever plot that had me baffled until the very end. A second book in the series will be out in May.

2011  No 192

 

I Am Half Sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley. I'm grouping this latest Flavia de Luce mystery in the science and math category because one of the things we all love so much about Flavia is her knowledge of botany and chemistry and her skill at concocting things in her attic laboratory. This mystery also concerns itself with Shakespeare and especially Romeo and Juliet and takes place at Christmas. There is much to like in this story including the ending, which I did not anticipate.

2011  No 193

Show Dog - Jack the Australian Shepherd

Show Dog by Josh Dean. Ah, show dogs! The prima donnas of the canine world (and that includes the males.) I picked up this newly published book in hopes a little dog show reality would help me get over my crush on Westminster's 2012 Best in Show, Malachy. This Pekingese, as Josh Dean says, is an animal that appears to be a Pac Man ghost bred to an angora goat and looks pretty much like Cousin It from the Addams Family. What better way to take my mind off Malachy than to read a book about Jack, an Australian Shepherd, a dog that looks like a generic Dog.

Jack coulda been a contenda. He may, some time in the future be one of the "campaigned" dogs who are in line to win Best in Show at big dog shows. He blew onto the scene and came away with his championship status in four months. He's a delightful character and a splendid show dog.

But the dog show world is complicated and seldom does a dog like Jack, whose owner can't afford to pay a handler to travel with him to shows all over the country all year or to advertise in dog magazines in an attempt to bring him to the attention of judges, make it to top dog in the US or to the winner's circle at Westminster. But people who love dogs love to show them off and dogs like Jack, who are natural showmen, want to be shown, so his owner will probably bring him back to the show circuit.

Meanwhile, in spending a year following Jack around, meeting owners, handlers, judges, and others in the dog world, Josh Dean has learned much that ranges from interesting and amusing to hilarious to downright weird. For example, did you know that George Washington was a breeder of American Foxhounds and instrumental in defining the breed? That there are 15,000 polar bears in Canada alone, but only 500 Sealyham terriers in the entire world? That Berger Picards are often mistaken for Wirehaired Portuguese Podengo Media? (I had to throw that in there. If Sealyhams, which are familiar to everyone, are down to 500 dogs, how many Wirehaired Portuguese Podengo Media can there be out there?)

The dogs are characters, but the people who own and show them are, as we learned from the movie, Best in Show, sometimes more eccentric than the dogs. One owner tells the story of a handler who was kicked out of a show in Pennsylvania . . . for relieving herself in the exercise pen.

It seems that this owner of a field spaniel who "almost certainly having spent too much time in the company of dogs, ducked into one of those sawdust lined, fenced enclosures . . . and not just any ex-pen. It was the one for puppies, which has a short door intended to keep out larger dogs. The woman . . . had to crunch down into a ball and crawl to get in, and then - to add to the indignity - she got stuck on the way out. Within a few minutes of her ungainly exit, someone had hung a sign that said DOGS ONLY."

The book is full of anecdotes and serious discussions about such things as breeding and health, popularity of breeds, cost of advertisements ($4,500 for the cover of The Canine Chronicle), the difficulties of training a dog to perform in a dog show, and the money flowing into the American dog show world from emerging economies, with major players now in Brazil and China, for example.

A wonderful book and I hope not the last from Josh Dean who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, son, and imaginary pet dog.

2012  No 33

Is this the Great American Novel?

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps the most famous American novel of the 1920s, The Great Gatsby has been riding a sine curve ever since, going into and out of fashion at regular intervals. It is heading into a new popularity phase right now. Which is good, because it just may be the Great American Novel we used to talk about.

There is so much in this short novel, so many extraordinary characters (Fitzgerald said he thought Tom Buchanan was his best creation), settings you can almost smell and touch, a seemingly simple but actually quite complex plot line, a little mystery, a little murder. And lots of themes and symbols. An English teacher could go nuts with the theme of time, with which the book starts and ends, the American Dream, travel by automobile (both Jordan and Baker were makers of automobiles at the time), wealth, honesty, and clothes.

And of course the green light flashing at the end of Daisy's dock.

I picked up the book because the 22nd Avenue Book Club is going to be discussing it next month. I'm so glad we picked it.

2012  No 32

A humorously serious poke at some sleazy politicians, Act of Darkness by Jane Haddam

Act of Darkness by Jane Haddam. This book has been sitting in my real, physical To Be Read pile. There is a virtual pile in my head that doesn't bear thinking about, but the physical pile is, if not exactly manageable, at least not mind-boggling. But I've been putting off reading it because I do love the Gregor Demarkian mysteries and I know they grow deeper and more thoughtful as time goes along so I have a great deal of good reading ahead of me, but not enough.

Jane Haddam, whose real name is Oriana Papazoglou, which I like a lot more than her pseudonym, has written 27 of these books, originally called the Holiday Series because the stories took place on holidays: Christmas, Easter (Western, Roman Catholic), and in Act of Darkness, the 4th of July. The next book will take place on Halloween, and the next on St Patrick's Day, and then on Thanksgiving. The books have themes of social criticism, the one at Easter being a discussion of the church and this one being about politicians.

Gregor Demarkian, the Armenian Hercule Poirot as Time Magazine has called him, goes off to Long Island at the beginning of this book with his friend Bennis Hannaford, whom he met in the first mystery, to a fund raising "seminar" at the house of "the last of the real actresses," an Elizabeth Taylor-like woman who is doing this to raise money for her son-in-law, a US senator from Connecticut. Demarkian has been asked to attend by an old friend at the FBI for reasons he is finding difficult to understand.

The senator, Stephen Whistler Fox, and his wife, Janet, were the parents 10 years earlier of a baby with Down's Syndrome. Fox and his college friend Kevin Debrett, who delivered the baby, were purportedly so affected by the child's death they have devoted themselves to passing legislation which will aid in the care of children with Down's and in Debrett's case, running a clinic to deal with the many illnesses such children are prone to and not incidentally making a lot of money. Since a major piece of legislation is about to be proposed, a lobbyist for a union of workers who care for mentally retarded children is also there, hoping to influence the legislation, which was in part written by Debrett to favor private clinics like his.

The sleazy people in this book happen to be Democrats but that is, I think, a function of the time it was written (it was published in 1991.) It's politicians in general the author is after and the kinds of corruption that occur on both sides of the aisle, and she has some sharp things to say about Republicans and conservatives as well. The author does create a hilarious knee-jerk liberal who relies on her astrologer and meditation to decide everything from what to have for breakfast to whether to pull the plug on her hospitalized mother, who was not in a coma or near death but rather had broken her hip. She is entirely unable to understand why anyone would criticize this euthanasia. "She was old. Why would she want to live?"

I knew from the very beginning who did it, why, and how. Unfortunately, when I got to the end of the book I discovered I was wrong. Which pleased me. It was a convoluted plot with many possible murderers and many possible motives, not to mention a mysterious method of actually committing the murders, all wrapped in a very amusing package. This is a first-rate mystery.

2010 No 31

What Is It About Cats?

The Encyclopedia of the Cat by Bruce Fogle. I've been paging through this book for a couple of years and finally got down to reading the text recently as well as looking at the splendid pictures. I don't usually notice the publisher of a book, but it's impossible not to be aware you're looking at a DK Publishing book, the quality is so outstanding.

I would like to get a kitten. Wilhelm, having spoken to Miss Darcy and Miss Woodhouse about this matter, says they do not. But I can dream about a blue Chartreaux, a seal point Exotic, or a sleek, lilac Havana Brown.

This is the book to inspire those dreams.

2012  No 30

White Crosses by Larry Watson

White Crosses by Larry Watson is a slow moving book about a good and well-meaning but misguided man, insecure, self-critical, and ultimately a failure. Jack Nevelsen is the sheriff of a remote county in Montana near the Canadian border, a man with a lot of responsibility but not a great deal to do. Serious crime is not a problem in his county and he and his deputy are easily able to handle the complaints about barking dogs, a drunken man wandering in the street, and the occasional invented problems of lonely people.

But then one night he gets a call that there has been an auto accident with two fatalities. Since it's the night of the local high school graduation he fears it is two teenagers. But it turns out to be the principal of the local elementary school and a young girl who graduated that day. Suitcases in the trunk seem to indicate they were running off together.

For reasons even he doesn't really understand, the sheriff concocts a story to explain away what he thinks is a scandal that would tear the town apart. And once having spread his story he has to ride herd on the people who might let the truth slip out. After a short while two white crosses appear near where the accident occurred.

I wish I could tell you the ending because the irony is so sharp and bitter it is almost unbearable.

Although the book is set only about 700 miles from where I live, I read about it in an excellent review by dovegreyreader, who is 5,000 miles away in England. She read about it in another fine review by Kevin from Canada, who is at least 3,500 miles from Devon. This is Globalization I can really appreciate.

I have posted a large picture of the cover of the book because the photograph fits so well the story within and is so starkly beautiful.

2012  No 29

 

A Ball for Daisy by Chris Raschka is given the Caldecott

Chris Raschka's A Ball for Daisy was given this year's Caldecott award for the best children's picture book of the last year. Once again (I'm getting to be a curmudgeon) I find the award-winner unworthy of the award.

If there is such a thing as a sentimental minimalist post-modern picture book, this is it. Daisy has a red ball, which she plays with and obviously loves. When at the park another dog plays too roughly and the ball deflates Daisy is bereft.

But when she goes again to the park the other dog has brought a blue ball to give to Daisy. You have here angst over the loss of something beloved and the sentimental return to joy at the replacement with something equivalent. The story reminds me of Job, who at the end of the story is given a new family and flock. As if they could replace what he has lost. Children do not "get over" heartbreaking loss. They become distracted by a new toy or a new puppy, but they do not, like Daisy, recover entirely from their sadness.

Publisher's Weekly gushes over the pictures, but I was not particularly impressed with them. A trained artist might understand the appeal, but I doubt children will. Raschka uses color to reflect moods: yellow for happiness, lavender and purple for sadness. (There's a brilliant new idea.)

The book is for children in preschool to grade 2.

2012  No 28