Deb
English has reviewed a couple of Langton’s novels, and she finally
persuaded me to give one a try–she thought that they might make good
read-alouds for Jane and I. She further suggested I start with the
earlier books in the series. I don’t think this one is particular
early, but it was the earliest I could find at the bookstore.

Homer Kelly, former detective, Harvard professor, transcendentalist, and
his wife have been invited to Oxford for a term; Homer will be a visiting
lecturer. Meanwhile, a number of odd events occur about the building and
inhabitants of the Oxford Museum. A night watchman falls to his death;
many jars of sadly decayed crabs are found mysteriously under a tarp in
an area where refurbishment has been going on. Might they have been
collected by Charles Darwin?

Before I start tearing into it, I’d like to say that I did enjoy it; it
filled a pleasant afternoon.

To begin with, it isn’t much of a murder mystery; there’s a little
mild-but-inconclusive investigation, and just a dribble of suspense, but
there’s no real deduction; the case, such as there is, just sort of
solves itself over time. Homer Kelly doesn’t so much solve the case as
simply stamp “Solved” on its cover. (I seem to recall that Deb has made
the same criticism.) And yet everyone is convinced that he’s a great
sleuth.

On top of that, the book is
essentially a long meditation on evolution and the difficulties of
bridging the gap between Science and Religion; it seems that one might
sooner drive a Camel through the eye of a needle. And it’s not a gap
that I, at least, have any great difficulty bridging. I see no reason to
interpret the first chapters of Genesis literally; it’s a description of
the creation suited for the first ancestors of the Hebrews. They weren’t
stupid people, by any means, but they weren’t scientifically
sophisticated. And given that understanding Divine Creation is probably
beyond the human intellect anyway, it wouldn’t matter much if God updated
Genesis with a description suitable for people of our age–it still
wouldn’t tell the whole story. So what’s the message of the creation
story? In a nutshell: this is God’s world; he created it; he created us.
That’s the meat of it. Who am I tell God what mechanisms he’s allowed to
use? God’s got Eternity to work in; perhaps He decided that starting
with a Big Bang and working His way up over billons of years to the first
people was the most beautiful way to do it.

And so, given that the tale turns on the chasm between Science and
Religion it didn’t completely work for me.

But still, I did enjoy it; it was even a little goofy in spots. It
didn’t pass the read-aloud test, in that I wasn’t motivated to share all
of the good bits with Jane as I was reading it, but it was fun.

This is a pleasant time travel story padded to novel length. I enjoyed
it well enough, but a classic it ain’t.

Heinlein wrote this in 1956, and won a Hugo award for it. I’m not sure
just when they first started awarding the Hugo, but this must have been
one of the first Hugo winners.

Man, how times have changed.

This is a novel of imposture. A prominent politician has been kidnapped;
it’s urgent that it not be known. So an out-of-work actor with the
politician’s bone structure is dragooned (more or less) to impersonate
him–just for a few days. He’s successful, and the politician’s staff
manage to rescue him. Alas, the great man is much the worse for wear,
and the impersonation must continue….

It goes on fairly predictably from there. It’s a friendly little tale,
well-told, but I am shocked that it won a Hugo.

OK, now I’m impressed. While I liked it, I compared Hill’s book
A Pinch of Snuff somewhat unfavorably with
Peter Lovesey’s work. Having read this later book in Hill’s
Dalziel/Pascoe series, I still think the comparison is apt, but no longer
unequal. Arms and the Women is as good as any of the Lovesey
books I’ve read, and still feels somewhat similar in style. As with the
later Peter Diamond book, the main characters have mellowed somewhat.

Arms and the Women is less a murder mystery than a thriller.
It begins very confusingly: there’s a cache of illegal guns, and a
shoot-out, and the who’s and why’s remain murky until much later in the
book. Then there’s an extended internal monologue by a character whom
I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to recognize or not, before good ol’
Pascoe appears. (There’s a twenty-one year gap between this book and the
previous one in calendar years, and at least six to eight in internal
years, and it’s not clear how much has happened in the mean time; it makes
it hard to know who the players are.) Once it gets rolling, though, it
cooks right along.

The heart of the book (it would merit publication on its own) is an
extended narrative written by Pascoe’s wife, Ellie. She’s an aspiring
novelist, and is in fact waiting to hear from a publisher about a
manuscript she sent in. It had come back the previous time with some
encouraging comments, and so she reworks it and polishes it, and sends it
in again–and then finds herself completely unable to work on anything serious
while she was waiting. So she starts writing a tale, for her eyes only,
about a meeting between Odysseus and Aeneas on Calpyso’s isle. Aeneas is
there with his army. He’s not gotten to Carthage yet, but he’s clearly a
man of destiny, and it’s clear to everyone, including himself, that he’s
going to make it to Italy and found Rome. Odysseus, just as tricksy as
you’d expect him to be, is just trying to get home. It’s a lovely, funny
little creation, and worth the price of admittance.

Meanwhile, Columbian gun runners are closing in on the cache of
weapons–where so ever it is–and a government spook named Gawain
Sempernel is closing in (so we are led to understand, by hint and by
whisper) on the gun runners. And closing in as well on their English
confederates, one of whom just might be Ellie Pascoe. She might actually
be innocent, but it’s clear Gawain doesn’t much care; this is his last
operation and if she stands between him and a comfortable retirement,
she’s expendable.

I don’t want to give any more away, but I will say that Hill shows the
same restraint that Lovesey shows in The Vault–he lets the
narrative speak for itself. He doesn’t explain all the jokes at the end; he
assumes that we’re smart enough to notice them and appreciate them
without his help.

I’ll definitely be looking for more from Mr. Hill.

Thankfully, Foul Play Press, which I believe has been bought out by
Norton, keeps Atwood Taylor’s books in print. Someone out there besides
me must read them because they are consistently on the bookshelves in
the Large Chain Bookstores I browse on occasion. I keep a list in my
wallet of which ones I own so I can snap up those that aren’t on the list
when I find them.

The Perennial Boarder has Asey Mayo returning to Cape Cod for
a weekend
off from helping Bill Porter refit his car plant to making tanks or
planes. Just as he walks in the door, still in his city clothes, his
cousin Jennie insists he help her deliver clams to a local hotel because
her husband, Syl, has twisted his ankle and can’t drive the truck. After
some breakdowns with the truck and problems with military convoys taking
up the road, they get the clams to the hotel just under the time deadline
only to find it deserted with a dead body in the telephone nook. And the
dead body is dressed in the clothes of one of the guests who has been
coming to the hotel during the summers for years and years. And there is
a tomato pincushion in the middle of the floor. Asey decides to
investigate.

These books aren’t for everyone. They are definitely period pieces with
convoluted plots that don’t follow the normal formula for setting up
murder mysteries. Asey really has no gimmick to distinguish him from
other detectives except that everyone on the Cape trusts him to solve
mysteries, including the local cops. There is no luscious descriptive
writing to fill in the set and the dialog tends to be terse. And I love
them. They are an absolute hoot to read because you never know what is
going to happen next or how Asey is going to get himself out of the fix
he’s found himself in. The stories are straight from the era of radio
drama when the good guys were good and the bad guys were bad. No
psychotic killers with a horrible childhood to lend sympathy. Just plain
old murders for plain old reasons like, well, money.

This is Ulrich’s first book, published in 1980. Unlike her other two,
The Age of Homespun and A Midwife’s Tale,
she broadens her scope to
encompass most of what is known about women’s lives during the late 17th
and early 18th century. It is an examination of the reality of women’s
lives and how it compared to the Puritan ideals of wife, mother and
woman. Ulrich’s use of primary materials and the stories of real women is
fascinating and, as with the other two books she has written, her writing
is crisp and clean. The early half of the book dealing with the role of
woman as Bathsheba was particularly good. I should clarify that the
Puritans saw Bathsheba as the mother of Solomon whom he idealized in
Proverbs 31:10-31, rather than David’s tempting bather on the housetop.
I enjoyed the book a great deal and if you are a reader of colonial
history, I would certainly look it up. It has perspectives not normally
found in the more traditional history of the times.

This is a much later book than A Morbid Taste for Bones
(see previous review) and it’s interesting to see how the character has
developed and changed in the meantime.

The most notable thing is the change in Brother Cadfael’s standing.
He begins as a minor, if important, member of the Abbey community; he has
to work the angles to make things come out the way he wants them to. By
the time of this book, though, he’s the acknowledged expert on certain
things, and well trusted.

Another notable thing is that the cast of continuing characters has
solidified; every successful amature sleuth needs a friend among the
constabulary, and Cadfael’s is Hugh Beringar, the local Sheriff. Hugh
didn’t appear in A Morbid Taste for Bones; here, his
friendship with Cadfael is a matter of long-standing. Ambitious Prior
Robert and his friend the obsequious Brother Jerome are still around, but
the dreamy, unworldly abbot of the first book has been replaced by the
no-nonsense Radagulf, and Prior Robert is clearly on Radagulf’s leash.

But the real question is whether the quality has slipped, and I can
fairly say that it hasn’t. I’ll be looking for the other books in the
series.

Deb
English
mentioned Ellis Peters a few days
ago, and it got me thinking. I read one Brother Cadfael mystery quite a
few years ago; I don’t recall disliking it, and yet I’d never bothered to
read any more about the Welsh monk. The series is perenially in print,
and I decided it was time to investigate. Suiting deed to thought, I picked up
a couple of Cadfael titles; this one (the earliest) and one written many
years later.

For those who are unfamiliar with Brother Cadfael, he’s a Benedictine
monk; he resides at the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul in Shrewsbury,
England. Born in Wales, he had an adventurous youth before settling down
as a monk. He was a crusader on the First Crusade, and was with Godfrey
of Bouillon when Antioch was taken. After the Crusade, he became a sea
captain, and roved over all the Mediterranean world. Finally desiring a
little rest he joined the Benedictines and settled down to grow herbs.

The present book concerns the efforts of the ambitious Prior Robert to
acquire a saint’s relics for the Abbey. Relics (that is, bones) were a
big deal then; one gathers that there was something of an (I apologize in
advance) arms race among the various cathedrals, abbeys, and monasteries
to see who could get the best relics. Prior Robert has set his sights on
the bones of St. Winifred, a little-know Welsh saint. As a native
speaker of Welsh, Cadfael goes along on the trip to get them.

There’s so much here that Peters gets right. Cadfael and the other
monks, and the people they meet, are all believers, as they would have
been. Some are more susceptible to superstition than others (many believe
that a corpse will bleed if the murderer touches it); others are quite
willing to invent signs, wonders, and visions to advance their cause.
But in Cadfael, Peters makes it clear that she understands the
distinction between the reality of God and the mockery we all-too-often
make of Him in our scheming. It’s a fine line to walk, treating the
Christian faith with respect while recognizing the frailty of individual
Christians, but Peters makes it look easy.