Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Love on the Rocks

by Sharon Kitchens


I decided to get down with Valentine’s Day this year in the form of the romantic mystery genre. Mary Stewart could give Ian Fleming a run for his money when it comes to glamourous locations and attractive twenty-something British female characters. Her stories are intelligent, but light, atmospheric, engaging, and a bit Hitchcockian.  

Grab the heart-shaped box of chocolates (particularly if it’s got some caramel filled candies), light a few candles, heck if it’s your thing plop a few long-stemmed red roses into a vase, dim the lights slightly, and who am I to say no to pink-and-red heart garland? You do you.  


Stewart’s greatest gift as a writer may be her ability to transport her readers to remote, rugged, romantic landscapes into elegant halls behind rusty gates and dark dusty passageways where roses hang festooning like cobwebs. It is into these settings that she drops her heroines who are at once independent and also a bit of the 1950’s stereotypical damsel in distress. They are all searching for something beyond the walls of their current situation. They all find mystery and romance.


Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow was born on Sept. 17, 1916, in Sunderland, England, a port city and shipbuilding center in Durham County on the northeastern coast. The oldest of three children of an Anglican clergyman, she began writing as a small child. 


She taught English at a local university until her husband, a fellow professor, suggested she try writing a novel. Stewart and her husband lived in the village of Loch Awe, on the west coast of Scotland. Her work was primarily published between 1956 and 1980 with her most commercially successful book Nine Coaches Waiting published in 1958.


Michelle sold me a paperback copy of Nine Coaches Waiting a couple years ago and that was it for me. Young Linda Martin with her brown hair and gray lonely eyes travels to a stately old chateau in the French Alps as an English governess to a nine-year-old boy. She drinks herbal liqueur, keeps secrets, deals with a seriously dysfunctional and manipulative family, also poison and blackmail and car accidents. There is Leon de Valmy, the master of the house, his younger brother Hippolyte, his son Raoul, and a kind Englishman. No character is that well developed. The focus is on the setting and the overall arc of the story. And, of course, the budding romance with a killer or not? Well, you’ll have to read the story and weave your way through the cast and all. 


I was attracted to these charming mysteries that weren’t all that complex or bloody. That provided a bookish escape to an isolated hotel on the Isle of Skye (Wildfire at Midnight), a brooding cluster of ancient buildings nestled deep in the wild upper reaches of the French Pyrenees (Thunder on the Right), and into the mountains and Adonis Valley in Mount Lebanon (The Gabriel Hounds). There would be a fire crackling, a bit of gin, and a balcony with mountain views. And just as you felt nice and safe and warm there’d be a scream followed by gasps and that horrifying moment when a man’s hulking figure threw a shadow on the wall and…hands clutched a throat and Oh my God, the murderer….


After Nine Coaches Waiting my favorite books by Mary Stewart are Rose Cottage and The Gabriel Hounds.




Rose Cottage – Set in an idyllic English village during the summer of 1947, a young war widow returns to her childhood home only to uncover a web of intrigue. Also, her elderly neighbors may be mischievous witches. There is a bit of family drama, truth finding, and romance. 


The Gabriel Hounds – The book is very loosely based on the accounts of the life of Lady Hester Stanhope (legendary figure known as the Queen of the Desert who lived during the late 1700s and early 1800s). The Gabriel Hounds are a pack of hounds that run with Death. When someone is going to die you hear them howling over the house at night.

An English girl in her 20s (nine times out of ten the protagonist is an English girl in her 20s) visits her cousin in Beirut. This cousin is the essence of charming. He’s an Oxford man who has been through North Africa. When our young protagonist meets up with him, he’s presently driving a white Porsche 911 and in the company of a friend’s father who is described as a bit of a V.I.P.  A bulk of the story takes place in a secluded and decaying palace (complete with a labyrinth) in which their eccentric great aunt (modeled after Stanhope) has ensconced herself. 


OXO


Thursday, January 26, 2023

The Great State of Hendrix

 by Sharon Kitchens


A wickedly funny place created by one of the greats of twentieth-first-century literature. A brilliant raconteur who charms you one platter of fried chicken at a time. Reading Hendrix is a lot like spending time inside a jewel box of antebellum splendor with Ricky Bobby watching a series of slasher films while eating takeout Chinese and a peanut butter and chocolate Dairy Queen ice cream cake as spirits are conjured in the southwest library and meteorological hell breaks loose outside.

You must dedicate yourself entirely to his layers of terror, strangeness and hilarity. Take a big jump, leave common sense and fad diets far behind, and boogie down to a supernatural pop culture rich existence. Page after page is so charming so gooey so FUN so WTF LOL OMG WTF. He touches all the bases. All the senses. Don’t hope to come up for anything but a short gulp of air here and there during chapter breaks. This dude has a gigantic imagination.


Also, he knows how to write high school, family dysfunction, the U.S. South’s culture and clichés, bloody assaults, and paranoia. You can’t fake what he does. I see my Arkansan relatives and all the love and totally f*cked up stuff and I take Hendrix’s work personally. Yeah, he’s hilarious, but he also gets the whole thing. 


There’s nothing especially fast-paced about his stories, but they hold onto you and you do feel an urgency to keep up just because his writing is so darn good. His characters aren’t even that flawed, they’re just weirdos and frankly people who are real. At some point they just say ok there’s a demon get the shovel and let’s do this thing. And you just know Hendrix is there cheering a few feet away. 


I love that man’s work. I’ll read every darn thing he writes. And yes, sure as heck, I’ll be making sure any old stuffed animals really are locked away. I mean, they're cute and all but I think at this point we can forego any catastrophic consequences they might wish to lob at me. Same with an Ouija board. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll just read your books!


p.s. Thought sharing a menu from the Book of Buffets might be appropriate given Hendrix's culinary tastes - at least in his books. After all, the South is more than fried chicken, potato salad, and pound cakes (though I love all those things). 





Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Excerpt: Ghosts Both Loud and Quiet - an interview with Grady Hendrix

by Michelle Souliere

NOTE:  This post is an excerpt from a longer interview which you can read in its long-winded entirety at https://greenhandbooks.blogspot.com/2023/01/ghosts-both-loud-and-quiet-interview.html -- I wanted to leave room here on Mystery Detection Club for Sharon's post about How to Sell a Haunted House!

On January 22, 2023, I was able to chat to Grady Hendrix about his new book, How to Sell a Haunted House while he was en route to his performance in Savannah, GA.  Don’t worry, I think we did really well avoiding any spoilers!!! 

ANOTHER NOTE:  You may well ask why this is on our mystery blog.  There will definitely be some bleed-over into ghost stories here and there because both Sharon and I loooove ghost stories.  But in the case of How to Sell a Haunted House, the story really does turn into a mystery, but I can't tell you any more because I don't want to ruin it for ya!  👻🔎💕

----------------------------

GH: Do you want to dive in?

MS:  Yeah, let’s do this!  I guess we could start with a little check-in, because How to Sell a Haunted House came out just a week ago.  How’s it going so far?

GH:  It’s weird, because this is a book my editor and I really thought was going to be sort of a miss.  So it’s been nice to see people respond to it.  It was a really, really hard book to land.  There were three radically different versions of this book before I got to the one that’s the current version.  My editor and I had a pretty frank conversation.  Both [of us] felt like it’s a really weird book, it’s a really personal book, and we really felt that – you know, it would be okay, but we’d do better next time.  That’s what you’ve got to do, right?  We were pretty prepared to write it off. 

The response has been really nice.  And it’s really nice to see people get invested in a book this weird.

MS:  From my own experience reading it, yeah, it’s a lot.  It came out great!

How did the book start?  What was the little germ that kicked it off and seeded it? 

GH:  It was definitely Covid.  My mom had a couple of health scares, and I was down in South Carolina, staying with her for a while in 2020.  I think Covid really made a lot of us hyper-aware of our parents’ mortality.  I was standing out in the garage, looking for something, and she has all this junk out there.  There were all these garbage bags full of fabric scraps that she keeps saying she’s going to make a quilt out of, for the last … twelve years?  Longer than that.  And she’s never going to make a quilt.  She’s never made a quilt in her life. 

I was just realizing, I’m going to have to sort through it all, and throw it out when she dies.  What do you do with all this stuff?  There’s the easy stuff, when someone dies, and you’re cleaning out their house.  There’s stuff that’s clearly garbage, and stuff that’s clearly family heirlooms, but … there’s a lot of stuff that falls into a gray area.  There are clothes, there’s shoes, collections they have that you’re not very interested in, and don’t have much value. 

It just got me thinking about the weird kind of relationship we all have with inanimate objects.  We talk to our cars, and we beg our phones not to crash, and we surround ourselves with dolls.  With Funkos, and action figures, and… beanie babies!  Our kids have dolls, and our dogs have dolls.  It made me really realize that we all have this strange relationship with inanimate objects, that I hadn’t really seen many people write about. 

And I wanted to write about family, because that was a challenge.  I hadn’t really written about a family with siblings, and family stories are usually ghost stories -- are in general haunted house stories. 

All those pieces started adding up.  And that was where things started rolling. 

MS:  In your own life, do you have any particular doll or toy experiences from your own past that kind of drove Louise and Mark’s experiences in the book?

GH:  Oh sure, sure!  I really had a lot of stuffed animals as a kid, who I was very concerned with.  You want to make sure they’re comfortable, and not bored, and have something to do when you go to school, and things like that.  Pupkin is definitely inspired by my wife’s childhood stuffed animal Snocchio, who’s this guy who has been with her since she was probably two years old.  No one’s quite sure where he came from, he kind of just showed up one day in her crib, probably a gift?  He’s pretty terrifying, but he’s also – he’s a cool guy, he just takes a little getting used to.

I always feel like Toy Story, the movies that deal with this, really let Andy off a bit too easy.  The toys have an obligation to him, but he doesn’t seem to have any obligation to the toys.  And that’s sort of what drives The Velveteen Rabbit, and why I always found that such a horrifying book.  These animals so want to serve this kid, and the kid seems to care less.  I always thought that was such a crazy unequal relationship.  The dynamic is so warped.

MS:  At the start of How to Sell a Haunted House, some sort of very mundane, but creepy house moments occur.  You talked about your mom having some house scares [NOTE:  I thought he had said “house scares” earlier, but he in fact said “health scares,” ha!], and stuff like that. 

Are there moments where you’ve experienced stuff that make you wonder if something’s going on?  Because How to Sell a Haunted House rides a tandem track between all these toys and puppets, and also the house, and what that means, the haunted house.

GH:  Absolutely.  It’s not even stuff that made me wonder.  I think everyone, to some extent, has experienced that feeling of being in the house where you grew up, and it’s the afternoon, and maybe you’re home from school early, or you come home and no one’s there, and … this feeling of just… unease.  You know? 

You’re all alone in that house, it’s afternoon, it’s getting towards evening, and the house – you know, you definitely don’t feel like all the rooms are empty.  You definitely feel like the house is listening, and paying attention to you.  I think that’s a really common experience.  My parents were divorced and my mom worked, and so I’d come home and be alone until evening.  My sisters were all older than me, and were moved off to college, and living on their own. 

There’d be times I’d just leave the house and sit in the front yard and wait for someone to come home because it got overwhelming.  And I would be surprised to meet someone who hadn’t had that experience.

MS:  I think my youngest brother also had a similar experience, which we, the older kids, didn’t have, because the house was always full.  That gives it a very different feel. 

Do you remember any particular moments that sent you out into the front yard?

GH:  Oh sure!  You’d hear things fall over in the attic… we definitely had squirrels up there, but…  so you’d hear that.  Or it would just become overwhelming.  The feeling of unease.  Because I think it’s really hard to be anywhere by yourself as a human being, and not start to populate it.  Whether it’s hiking, or when you’re in the woods on your own, or you’re in a house by yourself.  Anything.  We just start to insert sentience into our surroundings.  So for me it would hit a point where I just couldn’t handle it any more, I would just have to get out of there.

MS:  Returning to writing – what is your process like?  I know it’s long.  I also know you posted about your Wall of Crazy which I hadn’t known about before, so – could you talk a little bit about what your process is like, now that you’re through writing How to Sell a Haunted House?

GH:  I write a lot of drafts.  And generally I’ll have a first draft, and I’ll have a lot of stuff I want to get in there, a lot of set pieces, a lot of moments.  And generally that kind of overwhelms it.  So I’ll kind of drag myself through that last third, and then I’ll put it aside a little bit.  Then I’ll go back and do another draft.  Really what it becomes is getting rid of all this stuff I think is so cool.  And focusing more and more on the characters.  And really narrowing down on them. 

And then I always have a big wall ahead of me [the aforementioned Wall of Crazy] that has a lot of visual reference on it.  Some of it is images that have stuck with me, and some won’t even be for that particular book.  There’s an image of a kid wearing an old man mask, walking up a flight of stairs, and I’ve had that up since… probably My Best Friend’s Exorcism.  No – We Sold Our Souls.  I think that went up when I was writing We Sold Our Souls.  In about 2016, 2017.  And that image is really part of the impetus for How to Sell a Haunted House.  So its moment has come around. 

GH:  One of my big influences from a writing point of view is Elmore Leonard.  And there are a couple other writers, like Charles Willeford is one, George V. Higgins is another, Ed McBain’s a little bit of one, in the sense that they really pare things down to the absolute minimum.  It’s more work to write the minimum. 

MS:  [laughs]  It is!  And people don’t realize that.  Returning to your Wall of Crazy, I notice it has a lot of food on it for this one.

GH:  Yeah.  Yeah.

MS:  My friend Sharon that I’m doing a mystery fiction blog with, she’s super food-obsessed, and she wanted to know if there were any of those recipes or food-related things – if there was a recipe you wanted to share that tied closely to the book.

GH:  No, not really.  I mean, those were all … me trying to get my head around 90s food. For me, the way into Nancy, the mom, and her character, was really the fact that she was a very enthusiastic but very baaad cook.  And that’s always a Southern tragedy, because if you’re a mom in the South, you’re expected to not only cook, but to love it.  And to cook a certain kind of food.  I think there’s a lot of pressure on people, on moms, for that.  

 So that was why the Wall of Crazy was so food-focused.  This idea of – she’s cookin’ and cookin’ and looking up new recipes, and getting exotic, and experimenting, and treating it like this creative outlet, and the family is just dreading eeeeverything she produces, because it’s awful.  Those recipes were more like, “Let me get in that headspace.” I would feel like I was causing a health hazard to share any of them.


MS:
  With the exception of maybe My Best Friend’s Exorcism, your covers don’t generally follow the Paperbacks from Hell model, but have you noticed because of reading all of those crazy novels from the 70s and 80s, especially horror novels – have the Paperbacks from Hell influenced your own writing?

 

GH:  Yeah, I guess they have, in two ways.  One is – and mostly they’re examples of what not to do – but the big thing I’ve realized is just how many of those books, especially when you get to certain publishers like Pinnacle or Zebra, how much those books were padded, and how much the cover was designed to sell the book, but often had little to do with the interior.  And you realize that so violates the contract with the reader.  And you realize that some of these books really get wild, in terms of what happens, but without being emotionally engaged with the characters. 

 

They were all in an arms race, how to be bigger and more over-the-top and more extreme, but they left behind the reader.  And since not much happens, in terms of scale, in How to Sell a Haunted House -- there’s not a big body count -- but I found if you get readers really emotionally invested in the characters, then even the small things feel big, because they feel big to the characters. 

I will say the positive thing I got from the Paperbacks from Hell, is that there are some writers like Elizabeth Engstrom, or Michael McDowell, who are really, really good stylists.  They really helped teach me what I can get away with, and that’s always good to see.

MS:  I know your family has teachers in it, and you’ve obviously grown up reading from a young age.  How did you wind up starting to read as a kid?  Did you have any favorite early books that you started with?

GH:  My family were big readers.  All of them.  Even my dad, who only reads hardcover non-fiction about World War II.  He is always reading.  And that probably comes from his family.  He grew up pretty poor in upstate South Carolina in the country.  But his mom was a schoolteacher, and so reading was always a big deal in that family, and education.  And my mom’s family – she was a big reader from the time she was a kid.

So for my family, from the time we were all kids, you always had a book with you, and you weren’t allowed to be bored.  If you’re waiting in the doctor’s office, you’re expected to be reading.  If it’s a long car trip, you’ve got a book.  To this day, my sisters and I don’t go anywhere without taking a book, because you might wind up in line, and then you’ll read! 

The real big one for me happened because my dad worked in England in Guy’s Hospital for about a year and a half when I was 6 turning 7, so we lived in Dulwich, sort of south London, during that time.  And we rented a house from these folks, and this was in the 70s, so this was very brown corduroy damp London.  And the library at this house had this big, black fake leather book, and it took me forever to figure out what it was.  I only learned it a few years ago.  It was the Reader’s Digest book called Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. 

I never want to see it again, because I’m not sure it would live up to my memory of it. 

As a kid, I was fascinated by it.  It was heavily illustrated, it was full of really gritty gothic kinds of legends, and it made England make a lot of sense to me.  There were pictures of witches being hung, and people in gibbets, and I remember really vividly a woman who had her hands tied to the clapper of a big bell, and it was being rung.  All this stuff!  And I knew that I shouldn’t be reading it, but I would take it and hide it and read it every chance I got. 

It just really made England make sense.  Because my parents were really into the whole, “Okay, it’s the weekend, we’re going to drive to this country home, or this circle of stones, or this church.”  We were always doing these cultural things.  Reading the book, it was like, “Oh, this cultural home?  It had priests’ holes, where Catholic priests would hide, and then the agents of the queen would drag them out and torture them to death.”  Or this circle of standing stones where druids would go.  It just made the country seem not the gray, rainy place I was looking at, but this place that had all of this amazing bloodshed and history. 

MS:  For my very last question, and then I’ll let you [laughs] continue on your route to Savannah – As I was reading the book, I had moments where I was just like, “Oh my gosh, he’s putting me through the wringer, I can’t handle this, AAAHHHHH!!!” One of those points happened when I was reading the parts where the possibility of possession is examined, and I actually scribbled down on my scratchpad, half-angry, half-exasperated, half-genuinely-wondering, “Do you ever get possessed by your books as you’re writing them?”

GH:  Um, I wouldn’t say “possessed,” but when writing a book, you focus very intently on something entirely made up, and bunch of imaginary playmates, and you do that for 10 months, 12 months, 13, 14 months.  There does come a point where that, and the stakes of the book, seem a lot more real than the world around you.  The book becomes the lens you see the world through. 

It really does become this strange and difficult-to-describe process where there’s a back and forth between the book and your life.  When I wrote My Best Friend’s Exorcism about those high school friends who disappear, my best friend from high school out of the blue got in touch with me.  We hadn’t spoken in fifteen years, maybe longer? We see each other a lot now. 

We Sold Our Souls, which is sort of the book about not giving up and keeping going, was really around the time I was thinking about quitting writing.  It was just not going well.   And that book, writing that book, really got me through that. 

Writing How to Sell a Haunted House got me through the pandemic.  I was away from my family, I missed them, and so I had an imaginary family I could spend time with and think about, and focus on.  My parents both had really serious health scares, and my siblings and I, as I was writing this book, hit a point in our lives where we had to sort of start figuring out, “What are we going to do when our parents die?”  Do we stay a family?  Do we stay in touch?  Do we … what do we do?  How does a family look after that? 

Every single one of these books has been such a part of my life that it would be very hard to give that up. 

MS:  Talk about a sea change, right?  Each one has an effect…

GH:  Well you know, it’s funny.  I wrote These Fists Break Bricks with this guy Chris Poggiali.  It’s a non-fiction book about kung fu movies coming to America, and that’s very much a story about black martial arts and Latin martial arts and Asian martial arts in America, and what that meant in the 70s.  Chris and I were doing the most amount of writing on that book during the George Floyd protests.  So it was like we were back in the 70s and watching that history still moving around us. 

It’s such a huge part of my life now, I’d have a hard time giving it up.  These books are me.

MS:  Well I hope you never do, because after you write them, they become part of our lives, and we get to partake in that too, so … thank you!  Thank you for writing, and thank you for putting them out there and getting them into our hands.

GH:  Oh yeah!  Well I love it.

MS:  Thinking in terms of your new show, do you have any warnings or promises for the audience of your April talk here in Portland?

GH:  All I’ll say is that it’s going to change your life.  It will supercharge your selling abilities, and you will really, really come away from it knowing that if a situation arises, you will be fully capable of putting a haunted house on the market.

MS:  Hey, everyone should join us!  Grady will be coming back to Portland, Maine, to appear at SPACE Gallery the evening of Wednesday, April 26.  Keep your eye peeled for event info!  And meanwhile, if you haven't yet, you should grab a copy of How to Sell a Haunted House and read it for yourself!

NOTE:  This post is an excerpt from a longer interview which you can read at https://greenhandbooks.blogspot.com/2023/01/ghosts-both-loud-and-quiet-interview.html -- I wanted to leave room here on Mystery Detection Club for Sharon's post about How to Sell a Haunted House!

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Michelle's "Now-Reading" and TBR piles - mysteries only!

Hi everyone!  

Sharon posted her 2023 pre-order list last week (you can read that here if you missed it: Books I’ll be reading in 2023 by Sharon K.), so I thought it only proper that I add in my own, but in a slightly different vein -- first my "now reading" stack of mysteries, and then my "To Be Read" pile of mysteries.  

These bookstacks were both, of course, extracted from my multiple piles of books at home.  And to be honest, I probably missed a few.  My TBR stacks are many and there might also be a whole bookcase full of books waiting for me to read...  😆 might, as in DEFINITELY.  I've often joked that I need a Time Turner, or to find a way to add more hours in the day, because there are always a million things I want to read, but I'm always working too much.  Figures!

Michelle's "Now Reading" stack:

The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart -- I've read this one before, but I always forget all about it (the Vincent Price movie [1959] always sticks in my mind).  This is one I'd like to do a blog post about eventually.

Cape Fear by John D. MacDonald -- I watched the Robert De Niro film (1991) in the movie theater and was terrified by his portrayal of the villain.  Turns out the book might be even more insidious!  It's a classic that has long been on my "I Should Have Read This By Now" booklist.

Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown - see post here: Fighting with Poets - an examination of Michael Connelly's "The Poet" vs Fredric Brown's "Night of the Jabberwock"

Tied up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh -- this was supposed to be part of a Christmas mystery post, but that will have to wait for next year now.  😉  I love her mysteries, most of which feature Inspector Roderick Alleyn.  For those looking for someone to read after running out of Agatha Christie titles, these are similarly fun.  I started with Death of a Fool and have been reading them completely out of order.

Singing the Sadness by Reginald Hill -- a UK mystery author that I've been meaning to try out for a while now.

The Killing of Polly Carpenter by Robert Thorogood -- binged the TV show Death in Paradise and then discovered there was a whole book series it was based on - yippee!

Something Shady by Sarah Dreher -- set in Maine! spooky house! mysterious doings!

The Shrieking Skull by James Skipp Borlase -- not technically mystery, this is Valacourt Books' 2022 Victorian Christmas ghost stories offering, and I couldn't resist including it.

The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict -- I just finished this one! Super-fun holiday puzzle, a real treat.  I wouldn't be surprised if I pick this up for a re-read on future holidays.

Death in Disguise by Caroline Graham -- another discovery via adaptation, this is part of the book series that generated the excellent Midsomer Murders television episodes from Britain.

Bodies from the Library v2 ed by Tony Medawar -- a great anthology series of Golden Age detective stories unearthed from various obscure vaults.

The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories ed by Martin Edwards -- a terrific anthology from the British Crime Classics Library.  I try to read one of these each holiday season!

The Murder Book: A Graphic Memoir of a True Crime Obsession by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell -- a graphic novel exploration of our obsession with true crime, through the lens of the great granddaughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's sister, Annabel Fitzgerald (also intrigued by true crime as it turns out).  Campbell tries to examine why she and other women she knows (especially those in her immediate family) are so fixated on true crime and its offshoots.  For those of us who find ourselves asking similar questions, it's interesting to read about another fellow true crimer's path.

Murder on Brittany Shores by Jean-Luc Bannalec -- the second in this great series, which I am absolutely loving.  I started by reading the most recent installment when an ARC came across my desk (The King Arthur Case), and then dove back to the first book in the series after finding the both the location settings and the main inspector pretty darn wonderful.

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw -- a fascinating read so far, with a narrator seeking a missing author by way of his psychometry (ESP by touch).  Remote locations, a mysterious 1970s commune, and a feel of Roanoke-type mystery make this a really appealing read so far.

 

Michelle's "To Be Read" stack:

The Castle of the Demon by Patrick Ruell (aka Reginald Hill)

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson -- I jumped into this series with Box in the Woods which was wicked fun, so now I have to start at the start!

Guilty Creatures: A Menagerie of Mysteries ed by Martin Edwards 

Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus -- meant to read this for Halloween, oops!)

Shady Hollow, Cold Clay, and Mirror Lake by Juneau Black (UK covers)

The Fleur de Sel Murders by Jean-Luc Bannalec - obviously I need one of these in the chamber at all times.  I'm going to be bummed out when I run out of books in this series, so I hope Bannalec keeps writing for a long time.

Standing by the Wall by Mick Herron -- a collection of stories from the Slough House series, which I've been hearing great things about.  Apparently if you run out of Le Carré books, this is where you should head next for entertainment.

Death on a Winter Stroll by Francine Mathews -- Nantucket winter - picturesque and surprisingly hazardous if you're the wrong person(s)!

Agatha Christie's Complete Secret Notebooks: Stories & Secrets of Murder in the Making by John Curran -- I mean, how can you resist?! (will have copies this in the shop soon for anyone who wants to read along!)

The Cloisters by Katy Hays -- another fresh new title that caught my eye

The Angel Maker by Alex North -- I've heard great things about his earlier books, so I'm going to check one out.

The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman -- #3 in the fabulous Tuesday Murder Club series!  Saving this like dessert...

White Horse by Erika T. Wurth -- sounded interesting, so I added it to the mix.

Hokolua Road by Elizabeth Hand -- one of my favorite Maine authors and a killer mystery creator!  I can't wait to see what she's getting up to in this book.  Curious Toys was great, and her Cass Neary series is to die for.

Sunday, January 1, 2023

Fighting with Poets - an examination of Michael Connelly's "The Poet" vs Fredric Brown's "Night of the Jabberwock"

Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock (1950) and Michael Connelly’s The Poet (1996)

as read and compared by Michelle Souliere

 

Reading Michael Connelly’s The Poet resurrected my experience of reading Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock, even though they are very different books.  So of course I had to dig out my old copy of it, and re-read it – even before I finished with The Poet.

 

I wish I could have gotten Sharon to read Night of the Jabberwock so we could have done a good conversation back-and-forth post about the two books (she looooves Michael Connelly but I’ve barely started with him!), but I’m due for a solo post, so it falls to me to flesh this out for you, our dear readers (however few you may be, in our nascent stages of the blog, New Year’s 2023)!  I’ll start with The Poet because I really want to talk about Jabberwock – I like both books, but Jabberwock remains a favorite.  You’ll see.

 

Michael Connelly’s The Poet:

Last year, after years of hearing about him from others, I decided it was finally time for me to try a Michael Connelly novel.  Sharon recommended The Poet.  I started it, and was feeling pretty lukewarm about it – but as soon as the literary element made itself known in the storyline, I was hooked.


Michael Connelly’s The Poet is one of three novels he has written featuring the main character Jack McEvoy, an investigative reporter.  In discussing McEvoy, Connelly has mentioned that his character is somewhat autobiographical, but “what is autobiographical is his view of the business” – when Connelly is writing the character, he writes what he himself would do in each given situation, drawing from his own experience as a crime beat reporter throughout the 1980s.  (see interview with Paul Davis here: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/michael-connelly-on-fair-warning-and-his-crime-rep/)

 

The Poet definitely feels personal, so I was pleased to find that verification in his own words.  I say personal, but really it feels like it’s unpretentious, more specifically.  McEvoy’s inner dialogue is raw and straightforward.  It gives you the impression that you are hearing his thoughts as fast as he is – there’s no filter, no buffer to slow them down and sift them out.  This also means there are moments in the story where McEvoy is just as in-the-dark as you, the reader (perhaps even more so). 

 

McEvoy’s twin brother, a police officer, died shortly before the story starts -- a purported suicide.  But something about the case bothers McEvoy, and when he latches onto some strange clues while digging into other similar cases, ostensibly in the process of researching police suicides as a whole, he knows he’s laid hold of a case much bigger, and more dangerous, than anything he could have imagined.  At the end of Chapter Two, he lays treacherous groundwork for the story to come, telling us, “I thought I knew something about death then.  I thought I knew about evil.  But I didn’t know anything.”

 

Two sentences form the lynchpin of this story, written inside the fogged windshield of the brother’s car: “Out of time.  Out of space.”  A cryptic legacy of which no one knows what to make.

 

And from those two short sentences spin the rest of this tale, feathering pinions of tiny case details, cop by cop, that stand out on reinspection, that have bothered the investigating officers, sometimes for years after their fellow officers’ deaths.

 

Needless to say, things accelerate quickly.  McEvoy finds himself first working against, then with, then against, then with a special FBI unit, and the creep of a killer piles horror upon horror as he hears the baying of the hounds getting closer.  The elegant sentences stolen from an age-old poet to grace each incident cannot conceal the sordid dealings which lie at the root of this spreading evil.  The only solution is a brutal cauterization of the elusive source.  I won’t spoil the story for you, in case you have yet to read it yourself.

 

Fredric Brown’s The Night of the Jabberwock:

Several years ago, while I was attending ReaderCon in Burlington, MA, my friend and fellow bookdealer Bob Eldridge gave me a copy of Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock.  I had never read Brown before, although I was familiar with him by reputation from his wild and absurd scifi work such as Martians, Go Home (1955).  Brown was also an early originator of flash fiction (the two opening sentences of “Knock” 1948, which form a complete story themselves, and “Answer” 1954).  But I hadn’t realized he also wrote mysteries.  That evening, sitting in my hotel room, I began reading Night of the Jabberwock, and didn’t get to sleep until very late that night.

 

Where The Poet embeds a few choice lines in each of its cases, waiting to be found by McEvoy’s stubborn tenacity, Night of the Jabberwock opens each chapter with an epigraph drawn from Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky.  And like Connelly, Brown uses his experience as a newspaper proof-reader and reporter to build the backbone of this winding story.

 

The passage beginning with “’Twas brillig and the slithy toves,…” sets us out on our adventure, not quite knowing what we are up against, and feeling as ill-prepared as the forewarned son of Carroll’s rhymes.

 

Our guide and narrator is hardly better-off than we are.  Doc Stoeger, regularly haphazard newspaperman, publisher of the weekly Carmel City Clarion, and Lewis Carroll afficionado, wakes from a dream of the Jabberwock coming for him on the dark streets of his small town, only to find he’s fallen asleep at work waiting for the next-to-final proof of his latest issue, due to come out on Friday morning.  A few small tweaks to the type for the edition accomplished, he heads for Smiley’s across the street, looking forward to a drink to end the long day. 

 

     Smiley tells him, “Glad you got here early, Doc.  It's damn dull this evening.”

 

     Doc commiserates with him.  “It’s dull every evening in Carmel City, and most of the time I like it.  But Lord, if only something would happen just once on a Thursday evening, I’d love it.  Just once in my long career, I’d like to have one hot story to break to a panting public.”

 

Clearly, we readers know things are about to change.  Instead of the usual Thursday night drill, Doc is about to find himself in the middle of what seems like a dozen different nightmare collusions, none of which he could have anticipated in a million years.  This Thursday, he’s going to wish the evening’s brouhaha started and ended with having to figure out what to put in the paper now that the Tuesday rummage sale has been canceled at the last minute.

 

The evening starts off normally enough.  Rummage sale kerfuffles (you thought I was kidding?), some booze, a chess game, rampant Carroll-quoting challenges, etc.  A weaving walk home through the dark.  A dite[1] more booze.  Then Doc learns of the existence of the Roman Candle Department at the local fireworks factory (introducing him to a new lifegoal).  Still, all fairly normal Thursday night events.

 

Next one Yehudi Smith arrives on Doc’s doorstep, a peculiar chap hailing from a Lewis Carroll-loving club, with a strange invitation for Doc to attend a secret meeting.  More booze!  More Carroll quoting!  But these veer into some wonderful deepdives, introducing the lighter Carroll reader to such passages as:

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,

And each damp thing that creeps and crawls

Went wobble-wobble on the walls.

-- from “The Palace of Humbug”

 

Smith also brandishes a clipping from a nearby newspaper at Doc, titled “Man Slain by Unknown Beast,” and broaches the topic of risks associated with joining ranks with the Carroll-loving club.  Attack by a real Jabberwock?!

 

And thus the night begins to turn its tail and reveal a sinister side.

 

Before dawn breaks, Doc will have lived a lifetime’s worth of insane and terrifying events, all by pure happenstance.  All echoing back and forth from Carroll’s rhymes.  All insensible, as most human things are.

 

It’s not in the book, but surely at some point Doc quoted Alice in Wonderland to himself: “Dear, dear!  How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?”

 

In closing:

Both Brown and Connelly are aces at writing a tale that lures you in quietly, then gets its hooks in you with all sorts of intriguing details, and then thrashes you mercilessly (but with great interest in your entertainment as a reader).  Almost a half-century apart, but both highly skilled, and both well worth a read.



[1] A “dite” is a Maine measurement, somewhere between a smidge and a bit.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dite