Books We Love, Books We Recommend

Elizabeth Zelvin

The Malice Domestic convention represents the biggest gathering of avid mystery readers (excluding Bouchercon as drawing lovers of crime fiction and thrillers as well). Malicegoers have a fanatical loyalty to their favorite authors and series characters and an encyclopedic knowledge of the books they’re read (and in many cases, reread over and over). It’s not guaranteed that attendees will have conversations about these books, apart from those of authors who are present and those nominated for the Agatha awards (or the Edgars, which MWA announces just as Malice begins). But it does happen. I had two such conversations during this year’s Malice: one with the old friend with whom I stayed (located conveniently two and a half miles down the road from the convention hotel in Bethesda, MD) and the other with the gentleman who sat on my left during the Agathas banquet, Steve Steinbock, recently appointed book reviewer for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

My friend and her husband are mystery readers, but they aren’t connected to the mystery community, so I had the fun of recommending writers they didn’t know, once they’d told me enough about their tastes to get a sense of whose books they might like. They read James Patterson but find his work “a little too formulaic” and his characters lacking in depth. (They knew nothing of Patterson’s team approach to writing.) They enjoy Robert B. Parker because the formula is redeemed by witty dialogue and characters they have become attached to. (They were surprised to hear that many readers don’t like Susan Silverman.) They don’t mind the gore in Jonathan Kellerman’s books, but think John Sandford goes too far. They had reservations about Linda Fairstein on the counts of characterization and excessive detail in the passages on police procedure.

Between the dealers’ room at Malice and the bag full of books given out to attendees, I was able to give my hosts books I knew they would enjoy along with the fun of making recommendations. Felony & Mayhem Press was selling some of my very favorite traditionals: I bought Janet Neel’s Death’s Bright Angel for them—a police procedural with sophisticated and intelligent characters the reader falls in love with—and Peter Dickinson’s Sleep and His Brother, which I had recently been thinking of and wishing I could reread, for myself. The husband is interested in the World War II era, so he got two excellent books from the goodie bag that I’ve already read: James R. Benn’s Billy Boyle and Charles Todd’s The Red Door. I can’t wait to send my friend a list of series authors she can put on her Kindle, including Margaret Maron, Laurie R. King, and Donna Leon, all of whom I’m sure she’ll love. I think the husband will enjoy Jan Burke, Reginald Hill, and Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.

Steve Steinbock, whom I first met in the bar at Bouchercon a couple of years ago, is a kindred spirit who loves many of the same books I do. He agreed with (or at least let me rant on about) my theory that the middle ground between the heirs of Agatha Christie and the heirs of Raymond Chandler is occupied by the heirs of Dorothy L. Sayers, who introduced the character-driven novel to mysteries of the Golden Age. This goes largely unacknowledged in the perennial cozy vs hardboiled debate, although imho the descendants of Sayers include some of the most extraordinary writers of traditional mysteries, including Maron, King, Hill, and Julia Spencer-Fleming, as well as (arguably) Laura Lippman and S.J. Rozan (usually considered crime fiction writers) and Nancy Pickard and Charlaine Harris (usually considered cozy writers). Steve and I had a grand time talking about Manning Coles’s Tommy Hambledon spy novels. I was able to recommend to him a writer he didn’t know, Michael Gruber, whose The Book of Air and Shadows I consider the perfect thriller (plot, characterization, listen-to-this language, and even humor) as well as a brilliant World War II era suspense novel he didn’t know, the late Ariana Franklin’s City of Shadows. I also recommended Peter Dickinson's superb King and Joker, a refreshing alternative-history view of British royalty (and a propos as the royal wedding competed with Malice itself).

What mysteries do you love? Which authors do you recommend?

Best Reads of 2010, Part 3

Elizabeth Zelvin

Three more books that came out prior to 2010 made it onto my list of last year’s favorite reads. I read Sue Grafton’s U Is for Undertow (2009) last January, and I thought it was her best in years. I haven’t missed a Kinsey Millhone book since A Is for Alibi, and I deeply respect Grafton’s groundbreaking achievement in creating her and keeping her alive and solving crimes. But in recent years, there have been times when I found myself reading one of her adventures dutifully rather than with pleasure. I have grown impatient with Kinsey’s isolation, her lack of personal growth, and the series device of cramming all her cases into the 1980s instead of letting time pass and the world change. But I really enjoyed Undertow: the pace, the plot, the secondary characters, the fluency of Kinsey’s voice. The fact that I liked it in spite of a crucial plot element being one of my most intense pet peeves—the accusation of child abuse that turns out to be falsified—is probably a point in favor of the book’s strength. As a therapist, I have worked with many abuse survivors over the years, and I think focusing on the exceptional cases when it didn’t really happen sends a subtle and pernicious message. I feel the same about stories that feature a false accusation of rape.

The death of Donald Westlake in 2008 at what I consider the shockingly early age of 75 was a great loss to the mystery community and to the literary community at large. I read his final Dortmunder book, Get Real, with a kind of doubled consciousness. On one level, I was thoroughly absorbed in the story; on another, I had two thoughts over and over: “This is prime stuff; Westlake’s still at the height of his powers,” and “Damn! there aren’t going to be any more.” Westlake was one of the funniest writers ever, the kind of writer you could read passages from aloud and have someone who hadn’t even read one of his books howling with laughter. To me, his voice is one of the most distinct and inimitable in fiction. Authors as distinguished and distinctive as Charles Dickens and Dorothy L. Sayers have had posthumous works completed and additional works written by other writers. But I doubt anyone will tackle the book Westlake’s death left barely started. Who could imitate or fabricate that endlessly inventive sense of humor? Get Real was particularly satisfying to me because it skewered another of my pet peeves, reality TV. Someone has the bright idea of building a reality show around Dortmunder and his engaging band of professional crooks, and what ensues is delicious and hilarious.

Ariana Franklin is another of the small group of recent authors whose first mystery, Mistress of the Art of Death, left me eager for more. I loved the next two in this historical series with endearing characters, including a delightfully strong and clever protagonist, 12th-century forensic pathologist Adelia Aguilar. Unfortunately, I found this year’s fourth entry in the series disappointing. I saw through the plot devices hiding the murderer; worse, Adelia disregarded warnings and walked into danger throughout the book in the best tradition of TSTL heroines, what readers call “too stupid to live.” On the other hand, I read and loved Franklin’s standalone, City of Shadows (2006). Franklin took a less familiar aspect of a familiar setting—Nazi Germany during the rise of Hitler—and a well-known historical puzzle—the murder of the Romanov royal family and the possible survival of the Princess, sorry, Grand Duchess Anastasia—and not only gives them a twist but sends them spinning. It’s tremendously suspenseful; a happy ending is by no means assured. And the unlikely main characters gradually engage more and more of the reader’s sympathies as the story unfolds.

I woffled about adding Tana French’s Faithful Place (2010) to my list, but in the end decided the book deserved a place there. For the third time, this gifted writer has taken an idyllic relationship and shattered it to provide the foundation of the story. For some reason, flaws in French’s work seem to make readers angry at the author rather than at the characters. (No, I take that back. It depends: one friend whose judgment I respect disliked the protagonist of Faithful Place, while I did not.) My favorite bit was the character’s rant, delivered to his nine-year-old daughter, about people who are famous without having accomplished anything. My least favorite was a gratuitous attack on therapy and therapists, another of my pet peeves and one that’s appeared in all three of French’s books. But hey, if her characters had gone through treatment—good treatment with an experienced and ethical therapist like, say, me—where would her stories be?