For some reason that I haven’t quite discovered none of the Large Chain
Bookstores carry books by this author. Even Small Independent Bookstores
don’t stock her work unless they have a used section. A pity, because she
writes award winning mysteries that are excellent for suspense without
all the guts and gore you find in a great many of what is on the shelves
these days. I don’t like guts and gore. Plus, I’ve read 5 or 6 of her
mysteries now and she hasn’t repeated a plot. Usually after that many,
the mediocre start getting repetitious.

Fall From Grace centers on the relationships of 5 people who went to
high school together way back when. The Good Looking Bad Boy, Bobby
Ransome, is back in Sechelt after doing a stint in prison. And for some
reason, the school nerd and photographer, Stephen Grayson, who hasn’t
shown his face in Sechelt since leaving right after high school, has
decided to come back to visit his elderly widowed mother. And then there
is Annabelle, Wanda and poor frustrated Warren, who are just trying to
live their lives with messed up relationships and none too hot marriages.
So when Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg finally gets his girlfriend,
Cassandra, on a boat to go sailing for a day, it seriously interrupts his
romantic visions to find Stephen Grayson lying at the bottom of cliff
with all the signs that he has been pushed and a whole crew of people who
could have done it.

This is one of those mysteries where you know who did it but you can’t
figure out why. The pleasure from reading it comes from watching Alberg
work his way thru all the leads and clues. And with this one, the
solution is delightfully ambiguous. Did he or didn’t he?

In high school, years and years ago, a friend of mine read Wodehouse and,
on her recommendation, I read a couple Bertie and Jeeves stories. They
were ok, I guess. I don’t remember much more than that. Then a couple
years ago our local PBS station ran or reran the Bertie and Jeeves
stories with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie and I loved them, especially
Stephen Fry as Jeeves. So when I started reading Will’s reviews, bells
went off and whistles whistled in the back of my head but I never got
around to buying any of them. Then last summer, I was looking for
Virginia Woolf in the used bookstore and found Wodehouse instead so I
bought a couple. But I never got around to reading them. So last week, I
was browsing the shelves in my sewing room where all my books are stashed
and I found the books I bought and read one. And then I read another. And
then I went to the Large Chain Bookstore and bought a bunch more. Which
is to say, I am hooked. Thanks, Will.

Anyway, I started with Pigs Have Wings, a Blandings story
published in
1952. The Blandings stories have at their center Blandings Castle and
it’s owner the slightly dim Lord Emsworth. And the center of his world is
the Empress of Blandings, his beloved pig, whom in this story he is
fattening up to win the prize at the local Fair for largest pig. And then
there is Sir Galahad Threepwood, his old but rakish brother, and Beach,
his port-drinking butler. His competition at the Fair is his grossly
overweight neighbor, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe and his pig, The Queen
of Matchingham. And he employs Lord Emsworth’s former “pig man,” George
Cyril Wellbeloved, who smells of, um, pig and has a mighty taste for beer.
There are love stories, deceptions, mistaken identities, pig thefts and
general rushing about in the two seater that fill in the plot of the
novel. Summer Lightning, published in 1929, is essentially the same
with different girls and a few other characters. In fact, whole passages
are repeated at the beginning of the book, which gave me a weird sense of
deja vu. I suppose Wodehouse thought it worked well one time, why not
repeat it again.

The first thing I noticed is the language. His puns are merciless. I
spent much of the time reading and chuckling out loud, to my husband’s
annoyance. Sir Galahad Threepwood has some of the funniest lines I have
read in a long, long time. And the descriptions of the way characters
move or look is priceless. I thought about underlining them so I could go
back and find them later. About half way thru the Pigs have Wings, I
realized that Wodehouse had woven a pretty complicated web of
interconnection between the characters that he then was peeling back one
by one in the final pages of the story. You know the ending will be
happy, you just don’t quite know how he is going to do it.

I can’t wait to read Bertie and Jeeves.

I normally eschew suspense thrillers for the more traditional mystery but
every once in a while I will pick one up. I read Patricia Cornwell’s Kay
Scarpetta series whenever I can find a new one in paperback. And I read
Faye Kellerman’s Decker/Lazarus series. But that’s about it because they
tend to have too much gore and violence for my taste. However, Faye
Kellerman is married to Jonathan Kellerman and his books are everywhere
so I thought I’d pick one up and give it a go. It was just what I
expected.

Alex Delaware, the “hero,” is a former child psychologist who is now
working as a consultant in LA on police and custody cases. He works
primarily with Milo, a gay homicide detective. His live-in love is Robin
who builds and rebuilds expensive string instruments for a living. She
has issues with his police work centering on his knack for getting
himself into tight situations involving guns. Oh, and he has a mastiff
named Spike. Alex has a visit from a former, failed therapy patient, a
young hooker named Lauren, who then turns up dead a few days later, shot
in the head and dumped in a dumpster. Alex feels all sorts of guilt and
angst over not doing more to help the child she was years ago and his
investigation goes from there.

The book kept my attention. The plot twists were unpredictable and kind
of interesting. His characters were certainly realistic. Kellerman kept
Milo, the gay detective, real and didn’t stereotype him too badly. But
beyond that, it was just ok. I remembered why I don’t much care for
suspense thrillers and got it out of my system for a few months. Too much
gore and violence. Too many graphic descriptions that I don’t need in my
head.

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.