Day 760: The Z Murders

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Cover for The Z MurdersIn general, serial killer mysteries are a more modern invention, but that does not mean none were written in the Golden Age. Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke is one example, although that killer’s victims are not as arbitrarily chosen as those in The Z Murders.

The main character of this novel is Richard Temperley, who has been traveling all night on a train when we meet him. His companion in the compartment, an elderly man, has been annoying him by snoring for hours. His train arrives at Euston Station at 5 AM, and he is perplexed about what to do with himself until a decent hour when the porter recommends the smoking room at a hotel across from the station.

When Richard arrives at the hotel, he is dismayed to pass his elderly railway companion in the hallway. In the room, he notices a beautiful young woman by the fire and thinks he will sit by the window. However, first he has an impulse to check on his baggage. When he returns, he finds the young woman emerging from the room looking upset. The elderly man is now sitting by the window, so he takes the woman’s seat by the fire. He is dozing off when he realizes the old man isn’t snoring. Sure enough, he is dead.

While Temperley is being quesioned by the police, he finds himself omitting information about the woman, particularly that he has found her purse in the seat of the chair he’s sitting on. The elderly man has been shot by a silenced pistol from the open window, the seat Temperley originally chose until he decided to check his baggage. A metal Z is next to the victim on the window sill.

Although Detective Inspector James doesn’t believe Temperley was involved in the crime, he thinks he knows more than he is saying. So, he puts a tail on Temperley. Temperley has found a card in the woman’s purse identifying her as Sylvia Wynne. He goes directly to her house and, finding no one there, is able to get in with a latch key. Richard finds a metal Z in the front hallway under the letter slot. A moment later, Sylvia comes through the window.

Of course, Richard has been smitten at first sight, but he is only able to speak with Sylvia briefly and give her his sister’s phone number before Inspector James is at the door. When he turns around, she is gone again.

link to NetgalleyThe resulting adventure/mystery involves a cross-country chase that reminds me a little bit of The 39 Steps without the espionage. The novel has a complicated plot, but the characters of Temperley and a cab driver named Diggs are nicely drawn. Although Sylvia is pretty much reduced to a damsel in distress, of the Golden Age mysteries I’ve been reading lately, I think I like Farjeon best.

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Classics Club Spin #10!

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Cover for The Remains of the DayJust announced was the first Classics Club Spin since April. For the spin, we pick 20 entries from our Classics Club list, and then the Classics Club picks a number. We read the book corresponding to that number and post a review on October 23.

Unfortunately, since I always enjoy the spin, this may be the last in which I can participate with my current list, because I have so diligently read my classics that even though I have more than 20 still on my list, that is only because I have read them but not yet posted my reviews. I have exactly 20 unread books left, so I will be short for the next spin. If I want to participate, I will have to leave off some numbers and hope they’re not picked, or post the same books twice, or something. Any suggestions? I don’t want to change my list until I finish it.

Here is my list for Spin #10! My last 20 books! (My goal was to read all 50 by February 13, 2019. I think I’m going to make it.)

  1. The Vicar of Wakefield
  2. Henry VI Pt. II
  3. Night
  4. A Wreath of Roses
  5. Selected Poems by Robert Frost
  6. The Idiot
  7. Ada
  8. That Lady
  9. Beloved
  10. The Remains of the Day
  11. The True Heart
  12. The Beggar Maid
  13. Troy Chimneys
  14. Red Pottage
  15. Rebecca
  16. The Moonstone
  17. Far From the Madding Crowd
  18. Vanity Fair
  19. Bleak House
  20. Henry VI Pt III (I hope they don’t pick this number, because if they do, I’ll have to read Henry VI Pt II, too!)

Update: The selected number was #5, aargh!

Day 759: We Are Not Ourselves

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Cover for We Are Not OurselvesBest Book of the Week!
Eileen Tumulty has had a tough youth and adolescence with her Irish immigrant family struggling with alcoholism. For most of her school years she’s had to keep the house and take care of her drunken mother. So, when she meets Ed Leary, a young scientist who holds the promise of getting out of her neighborhood in Queens, she marries him.

In some ways, they are a mismatch even though they love each other. Eileen is a practical woman, ambitious for a well-to-do life. Ed cares about integrity, his teaching, and his research. When Eileen buys him an expensive gold watch for a wedding present, one she cannot return, he refuses to wear it even after she replaces the gold wristband with a leather one. He teaches and has a lab at Bronx College. Several times he is offered jobs at more prestigious schools that he turns down. He also turns down an offer to be head of his department.

After a while, Eileen becomes exasperated at their lack of upward mobility. They have bought the three-family house in which they rented an apartment, but they still live in the same Queens neighborhood they moved to when they were married. However, after their son Connell is born, Eileen settles her attention on him for awhile and also continues her nursing career.

Eventually, a shadow falls over the lives of the Learys. I don’t want to tell what it is, because it happens well into the novel. Until it happens, I sometimes wondered where the novel was going but eventually realized it is an honest, unflinching look at the pressures on a small family of a tremendous burden.

The novel is told mostly from the point of view of Eileen, a strong, independent woman with a will to succeed. Because of her upbringing, she has problems with showing affection and being open. Ed is warmer and more affectionate to Connell. Connell is slow to mature but eventually learns to accept responsibility for his actions.

I felt for a long time some distance from these characters, but the sheer weight of everything we learn about them eventually breaks through this barrier. The result is a touching and affecting story about love’s power over adversity.

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Day 758: The Ten Thousand Things

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Cover for The Ten Thousand ThingsIn keeping with my goal to read all of the finalists and winners of the Walter Scott Prize, here is my review of the winner for 2015. The Ten Thousand Things is John Spurling’s novel about a turbulent period in Chinese history. It is written from the point of view of Wang Meng, an actual artist of the time, and inspired by Wang’s paintings of the ten thousand things, all of creation.

This novel is related by Wang from his prison cell, where he chooses to tell about his past in the third person. He has been arrested on charges of conspiracy because he accepted an invitation to view the art collection of the disgraced Chancellor Hu.

Wang’s story begins in a mountain retreat when he is already a grown man. He has resigned his minor government post to pursue his art, although strictly as an amateur. This action has disappointed his more ambitious wife, but she is barely a character in the novel.

China is uneasy under the Yuan dynasty, which is dominated by the Mongols. The Chinese upper class resent the fact that the powerful jobs go to Mongols. Taxes are heavy, and men are restricted to following the professions of their fathers. Wang’s own grandfather, General Meng, was controversial because of having decided to support the Yuan government instead of retiring from his government post as many of his peers did. In Wang’s time, revolts are underway under several different war lords and groups of bandits.

When Wang withdraws to his retreat, he has three fateful encounters. He meets Ni on the way there when he is forced to share a room in an inn. Ni is a great artist whose work affects how Wang views his own. Next, when Wang’s cousin Tao asks him to a nearby village to meet a woman he is thinking of marrying, Wang and Tao are just in time to witness a demand from the Red Scarf Bandits that she marry their chief. When her father asks Wang’s advice, he suggests that she choose for herself. She decides to marry the bandit, and soon becomes a bandit queen named the White Tiger. Finally, Wang meets Zhu, a would-be monk from a nearby monastery who asks Wang to take him as his servant. Wang politely explains he can’t afford to and advises him to join the bandits if he wants to learn about the world. Later, Zhu becomes a powerful war lord and then an emperor.

This novel documents the turbulent period of the overthrow of the Yuan dynasty and the establishment of the even more repressive, but Chinese-lead, Ming dynasty under the paranoid Emperor Hongwu. It moves a little slowly and is told in a detached way from the point of view of an artist who attempts to stay away from the seats of power. It also spends a good deal of time describing Wang’s paintings. The novel reflects a sophisticated and intellectual culture, although it certainly concentrates its story in the upper realms of this society.

link to NetgalleyI think it was this detached viewpoint that kept me from enjoying the novel more. The subject matter is interesting, as I know little of Chinese history and have long thought it was a ridiculous bias that we didn’t learn any history of the Far East in school except when it intersected with Western history. Yet most of the characters seem only sketchily drawn, and I didn’t fully engage. The novel is said to illustrate the principles of Daoism, but since my brief reading on that subject left me completely clueless, I did not understand in what way the philosophy is reflected, except perhaps in the perceptions of the narrator.

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Day 757: Thirteen Guests

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Cover for Thirteen GuestsJohn Foss is a young man running away from London at the end of a failed love affair when he injures his foot jumping off the train at a small station. Guests bound for the house of Lord Aveling take him to the doctor’s house only to find that the doctor is away treating Mrs. Morris, Lord Aveling’s mother-in-law. Nadine Leveridge, a beautiful widow, insists on bringing John along to Lord Aveling’s, the unwitting thirteenth guest at a house party.

Lord Aveling’s guests feature a cricket player, an actress, a member of Parliament, a society painter, a gossip columnist, and a novelist, but there are also some more unusual guests, a vulgar sausage king and his family and a shady couple, the Chaters. Some odd things happen almost immediately. Someone throws paint on Leicester Pratt’s painting of Lord Aveling’s daughter Anne, and an odd confrontation takes place between Zena Wilding, the actress, and a strange man at the train station. Mr. Chater seems to be around sticking his nose into everything.

After John’s foot is treated, he is parked on a sofa in an anteroom. Late that night, he hears a dog barking outside, several exchanges in the hallway, and some glass breaking. The next morning it is obvious that someone broke out of the studio that Pratt locked after he discovered his ruined painting, and the dog has been stabbed to death. Later, the strange man from the station is discovered dead at the bottom of a nearby quarry.

Of course, when Detective-Inspector Kendall arrives, he finds that many of the house’s inhabitants have something to hide. And the man no one seems to know is not the only one to die.

link to NetgalleyAlthough this Golden Age mystery involves time tables, the solution is fairly straightforward but hard to guess. Agatha Christie was a great admirer of Farjeon, who I think gives a good sense of his characters, enough to help me distinguish one from the other when there were so many of them.

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Day 756: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

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Cover for ZTo write a novel about Zelda Fitzgerald, Therese Anne Fowler had to make many decisions between competing sources. Historians and biographers are sharply divided between those who think Zelda ruined Scott’s life and those who think Scott ruined Zelda’s life. Fowler ends up coming in pretty firmly on Zelda’s side. Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast said nasty things about both of them, but many of those things have been found to be exaggerations or outright lies. In any case, I’ve always thought Hemingway was a jerk.

This novel begins when Zelda, fresh out of high school and a popular debutante, meets Fitzgerald, at that time in the army and due to ship out to Europe and World War I. It ends shortly after Fitzgerald’s death. It paints a vivid portrait of Zelda, a woman trying to find a purpose in her life beyond being a wife.

If Fowler has made the right choices, the novel creates a devastating idea of Fitzgerald, insecure, unfaithful, controlling, and alcoholic. He undercuts Zelda in every way possible, publishing her stories under his own name, taking control of her published novel in the editing stage and butchering it, being generally nasty, and threatening to take away her daughter Scottie when she wanted to accept a solo role in the ballet in Naples. His friendship with Hemingway especially drove them apart, as Hemingway was relentless in accusing her of being selfish and ruining Scott’s career, and Scott began to believe it. Note that Hemingway is the same person who did all he could to halt his own wife’s career as a war correspondent.

I was completely absorbed by the novel, which strongly characterizes Zelda and to a lesser extent, Scott. My only criticism, besides a few too many descriptions of clothes, is that most of the other characters are only sketchily drawn. A great many characters appear in these pages, and I can’t say that I had much of an impression about any of them, to the point where I couldn’t remember whether some were friends or relatives. With such vivid personalities as Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein, H. L. Mencken, and Hemingway appearing in the novel, more could have been done with them.

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Day 755: The Woman Who Had Imagination

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Cover for The Woman Who Had ImaginationFor some reason, I have always associated HE Bates with such comic writers as PG Wodehouse and EF Benson. This notion was without having read him, mind. But the stories in The Woman Who Had Imagination are not at all what I expected.

Most of the stories in this collection are set in rural localities and are about ordinary country people. Many of them are closer to character sketches than plotted stories. “The Lily,” for example, describes Great-Uncle Silas, a lively, vulgar old man who likes his jokes and his “mouthful of wine.” A later story describes the circumstances of his death.

Many of the stories depict characters caught in their environments, such as “The Story Without an End,” which describes the life of a boy working in a restaurant who is terrified of his boss, or the title story about a bored young man on a church choir expedition who meets a young woman unhappy in her marriage.

link to NetgalleyAlthough the descriptions of rural settings are beautifully written, many of the stories in this collection depict the lives of people who are depressed by the limitations of their lives. However, that is not always the case. In “Sally Go Round the Moon,” a man helps his niece by marriage escape the life she hates in London and then decides to leave himself.

To give you a flavor of the lushness of these stories, here is part of the description of great-uncle Silas’ house from “The Lily”:

On summer days after rain the air was sweetly saturated with the fragrance of the pines, which mingled subtly with the exquisite honeysuckle scent, the strange vanilla heaviness from the creamy elderflowers in the garden hedge and the perfume of old pink and white crimped-double roses of forgotten names. It was very quiet there except for the soft, water-whispering sound of leaves and boughs, and the squabbling and singing of birds in the house-thatch and the trees.

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Day 754: The Night Sister

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Cover for The Night SisterI have never read anything by Jennifer McMahon before, so I have no way of knowing whether The Night Sister is characteristic of her or not. Certainly I was captured by this creepy and original tale.

The novel is set in three different time periods and features two related sets of characters, but it begins chillingly in the present when Amy takes a shotgun up the stairs of her house in Vermont. Jason, her friend from childhood who just talked to her a week before, is shocked to be called as a policeman to her house, only to find Amy and her family dead. Only her 10-year-old daughter Lou is outside on the roof.

In California, Piper receives a call from her sister Margot. She is shocked to learn that her ex-best friend Amy and her family are dead. Even more shocking is that it appears Amy killed her family and shot herself. Piper leaves immediately for Vermont, but she is preoccupied with memories of the summer she and Amy were 11, the last summer they were friends.

Occasionally, the novel returns to the 1950’s and the story of sisters Rose and Sylvia. Sylvia is the beautiful, favored child, and Rose feels she is treated unfairly. She believes something is wrong with Sylvia and starts wondering about her grandmother’s stories about monsters. She catches Sylvia sneaking out at night to go to the tower near the family motel.

link to NetgalleyBack in the present, Piper rifles her memory about the discoveries the girls made when they were 11. By then, Amy’s mother Rose is seldom around, rumored to be in a mental hospital. Sylvia disappeared years ago, presumed to have left for Hollywood and never heard from again.

This novel is not only truly suspenseful, but it is hard to predict. Several times I was convinced I knew what was going on, but I never did. It’s a truly gothic thriller.

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Day 753: Blood & Beauty

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Cover for Blood & BeautyBest Book of the Week!
Blood & Beauty is a historical novel about the Borgia family that shows meticulous research, examining in light of modern findings the legends that have surrounded the family for centuries. It also powerfully evokes the period.

The novel begins with the election of Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI. He is clever and ruthless but sentimental about his four illegitimate children. Although historically there is some debate about the birth order of the oldest two sons, Dunant firmly places Cesare as the oldest, followed by Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofrè.

Although the pope loves his children, especially Juan and Lucrezia, their value is largely in the alliances he can make through their marriages. Cesare’s value, on the other hand, is to back up his father on the religious front. He begins as a cardinal, although he is unsuited to his religious profession and eventually throws it off to become a commander of armies.

Juan’s marriage is first, but the novel is mostly concerned with the relationship among Pope Alexander, Cesare, and Lucrezia. It is much more complex than and different from what you may have heard. It is Lucrezia’s misfortune to be married into families that become enemies of the Borgias because of shifting alliances. This is particularly true of her second marriage to Alfonso of Aragon, whom she loves.

Dunant remarks in the afterward that the Borgias have not deserved their evil reputation. Certainly they were rapacious and ruthless—and more interested in the good of the Borgias than anything else—but so too were most of the great families of Italy at that time. In this novel, alliances are made and discarded at will by most of the great families.

This novel is historical fiction at its best. None of the characters are invented or romanticized, and we become immersed in the world of Renaissance Italy.

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