It’s a Mystery: Three to Keep Me Guessing

Hmm, three detective novels in a row is something of a record for me: it’s a mystery in and of itself that I pulled the books off the shelves that way. Here’s a post with all three, to get caught up…

I’ve had a soft spot for detective Hank Palace, the narrator of Ben H. Winters’s World of Trouble, ever since I read The Last Policeman (previous post), the first novel in a trilogy that ends with World of Trouble. Palace is a down-to-earth, loyal guy who continues investigating crimes despite the fact that an asteroid is hurtling toward earth and about to destroy everything. In World of Trouble, Palace and his ailing dog, Houdini, have come to Ohio to find Palace’s sister, who’s disappeared. Disappearances aren’t unusual in these fictional end days: people have been going “bucket list” for ages but Palace knows something bigger is amiss. There are lots of plot threads to pull in World of Trouble: an attempted murder, a search for a concrete worker, and, of course, Palace’s relationship with his family, ethics, and impending demise. Winters finds a near-perfect balance of humor, grieving, and realism, and he finishes the book in what I think must be the best possible way. Yes, I laughed and I cried, and [mild spoiler] I love the fact that Palace remains true to himself and the social compact ‘til the end. He doesn’t even yell “Police!” near the end of the book, “because I’m not a policeman anymore, I haven’t been for some time now.”

Commissioner Nicolas Le Floch, the investigator in Jean-François Parot’s The Man with the Lead Stomach, the second book in a series, isn’t quite as endearing or imperiled as Palace but this historical detective novel set in 1761 France made for worthy entertainment. I admit I was more interested in atmosphere than the mystery itself, which involves the rather grisly murder of a courtier’s son. That murder leads to another. Of course. But about that atmosphere: it’s a nice change of pace when there are no fingerprints taken, the investigator travels by horse-drawn carriage, and the detective drinks chocolate for breakfast and lots of wine with his meals, some of which are described in detail, this being a translation from the French. (I opened the book randomly to a page where a cook describes how to cut a rabbit for making pâté…) There are also smells in this early passage describing theatergoers: “There was a disconcerting contrast between their luxurious clothes, and the foul-smelling remnants of wax, earth and horse droppings with which they were soiled.” Michael Glencross’s translation from the French was particularly fun to read because it had some obscure words and terms in common with the book I was working on—this was a perfect way to see them in action in another setting and translated from another language.

Finally, a second book that originated in French: Joël Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, which I read in Sam Taylor’s translation of La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert. The truth about The Truth is that it’s an unholy mess, a blend of a writer coming of age (well, in a sense, two writers coming of age), a satire of the publishing industry, and a murder mystery, with whiffs of Peyton Place and Lolita tossed in. In any case, Marcus (“The Magnificent”) Goldman, a blocked writer who was the toast of New York a year or so ago, comes to the aid of his former writing teacher, Harry Quebert, after Quebert, author of a much-praised novel, is accused of killing a teenage girl, Nola Kellergan, back in 1975; the accusation comes after Kellergan’s body is unearthed in Quebert’s seaside yard nearly twenty years after her disappearance. Quebert lives in Somerset, New Hampshire, so Goldman is dealing with all sorts of small-town relationships, oddballs, and secrets as he interviews townspeople in his quest to free Quebert. Dicker throws in everything from the 1998 ice storm that “paralyzed” lots of New England to the first Obama presidential campaign to lots of seagulls in what feel like attempts to create verisimilitude and capture a time but The Truth is just too filled with extraneous pages, clichéd dialogue, and bits and pieces of disparate genres to come together as a full-fledged novel. Even so, damn it, the book is moderately entertaining and I did read every page. Part of the reason was probably inordinate curiosity after hearing Dicker and his editor from Penguin, John Siciliano, speak at BookExpo America in late May… but I think I’m even more curious to see how writers—not just Dicker but also Winters and Parot—adapt and adjust the detective genre’s typical casts, aesthetics, and plot turns to fit their interests and readers. For a very detailed account of The Truth, check out The Complete Review, here.

Disclaimers: I received review copies of all three books, thank you to the publishers and/or publicists: Eric Smith of Quirk Books for World of Trouble, which will be officially released on July 15; Meryl Zegarek Public Relations for The Man with the Lead Stomach, which was published by Gallic Books; and the nice man at the Penguin booth at BEA, who pointed me to a finished copy of The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair masquerading as a galley. Thank you to all!

Up Next: Xu Zechen’s Running through Beijing.

Steen’s Spare, Brave Lionheart

Thorvald Steen’s Lionheart, a historical novel I read in James Anderson’s translation from the original Norwegian, is that odd book that walks—very successfully—a fine line between mundane and (to borrow blurb verbiage) riveting.

Lionheart tells a stark life story of England’s Kind Richard I, from a tender young age—when his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, begins preparing him for life as a Crusader—and ends with his death from gangrene caused by a kitchen knife that lands in his shoulder because he is too slow to duck. Though the Richard the Lionheart I found on the Internet died from an arrow, I rather like Steen’s version, particularly since Richard is wearing no chain mail and has just eaten two chicken legs before the fatal knife throw.

Steen’s cause of death for Richard fits an almost surgical-feeling sense of the absurd in Lionheart. Steen focuses largely on Richard’s relationships, showing Eleanor’s meddling control (I think I wrote “Freud” somewhere in the margins), the sense Richard might have liked to be a poet, and a bit of an obsession with his enemy, Saladin. And King Philip II of France. And a beautiful nun. There’s action, too, with battles and an imprisonment, but Richard comes across most of all as a conflicted man who thinks maybe he’s destined to fight the good fight, for God.

I realize it’s dangerous to get too many of my history lessons from fiction—and movies like The Lion inWinter, where I first met both Eleanor, reincarnated in the form of Katharine Hepburn, and Richard, as presented by Anthony Hopkins—but books like Lionheart make the fictional versions so much fun I can’t help myself. Steen’s spare mixture of history, court and familial conflicts, novelisticness, and dry humor might not work for you, but it worked mysteriously well for me, and Anderson’s translation read well, too, creating a nice example of a translated text about the distant past that’s written in modern language.

Up Next: Christopher R. Howard’s Tea of Ulaanbaatar and Charles Elton’s Mr. Toppit…

Disclaimer: I received a copy of Lionheart from University of Chicago Press, which distributes books for Seagull Books in the United States. Thank you very much!

Image credit: Portrait of Richard I, from 1620, from BritRoyals.com, via Wikipedia Commons.