Day 355: Deadly Web

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Cover for Deadly WebA naked teenage girl is found dead in the grounds of Yoros Castle in Turkey. She has apparently stabbed herself through the heart, but there is evidence of some strange sexual practices. Someone is convincing young people in Istanbul to participate in what they believe are sex orgies, only to murder them. Inspector Mehmet Suleyman draws this conclusion while investigating another incident involving a teenage boy, although one death seems to be a suicide.

Inspector Çetin İkmen has made several visits to a friend, local magician Max Esterhazy, for information about a strange obscene symbol someone has been painting on the walls of religious sites. His investigation seems to indicate some connection with Suleyman’s case. Then Max disappears, and blood is found splattered around his study.

Suleyman is having his own problems. His wife has left him for a visit to Ireland, taking their infant son. His unfaithfulness has broken them up, and he has been exposed to the HIV virus through an affair with a prostitute.

Soon another girl is killed, and Suleyman and Ikmen find links to the city’s goth clubs and possibly to Satanism.

I find Nadel’s mysteries set in Istanbul interesting because they often provide fascinating insights into the city’s subcultures.

Day 354: Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance

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Cover for Worldly GoodsWorldly Goods promises a new look at the European Renaissance from a different point of view. Lisa Jardine, a professor of English at the University of London, proposes an interpretation of the period in terms of the growth of commerce and a new consumerism and multiculturalism.

However, the information offered does not seem new. Rulers and wealthy men have always been conspicuous consumers. Jardine attempts, for example, to turn around our view of the flowering of art as merely a series of demonstrations of the wealth of patrons who commissioned the works, a sort of competition to show who is most wealthy or powerful. But simply providing examples of patrons who specified expensive materials or the inclusion of their goods in pictures doesn’t prove this point.

Jardine does a better job of showing how the development of printing made the exchange of ideas easier, thus affecting the advances in many different fields, including the arts and the sciences. However, her argument that the policy decisions of the period were all driven by the dictates of commerce is taking things too far, I think.

The book is well written and lively. It does not back up its assertions with footnotes or a bibliography, however, indicating that it is written for the general public but frustrating those who would like to look further. At some point, I felt that the examples were becoming too repetitive and no new points were being made. For example, Chapter Three is about the proliferation of books and printing, but Jardine continues to make the same points about printing and the sharing of scientific and technical information repeatedly throughout the rest of the book.

Although the history provides an interesting discussion of commerce during the Renaissance, it is oversold as a complete history of the period.

Day 353: Friday’s Child

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Cover for Friday's ChildFriday’s Child is one of Georgette Heyer’s funniest Regency romances. Although some of her novels are a bit closer to being “serious” romances (that is, with the emphasis on the romance, but always with witty dialogue), this novel is endearing in its plethora of foolish characters.

Anthony Verelst, the Viscount Sheringham, is a wild young man who is extravagantly wasting his inheritance on gambling and women, but his estate is left so that he cannot touch the principal unless he marries. He has fancied himself in love with the current reigning beauty, Isabella Milbourne, but he is not tempted to matrimony until he becomes fed up with his mother and her brother, one of his trustees, whom he believes is milking his estate. He proposes to Isabella, plainly expecting an answer in the positive, but piqued by his lack of ceremony, she rebukes him for his dissipated lifestyle. In a rage, he storms off, vowing to marry the first female he meets.

As he is returning to London from his mother’s house in the country, he meets Hero Wantage, a very young lady who is an impoverished orphan and a neighbor. He thinks of her as a little sister, so he has no hesitation in relating the tale of his misfortunes. When he tells her of his vow, she answers, “Silly, that’s me!” So, the heedless viscount throws her up into his curricle and drives her off to London to get married. Since she has long worshipped the Viscount, or Sherry, as he is known to his friends, and has been mistreated by her Bagshot relatives, she is happy to go.

The couple is naturally headed for trouble, for Hero is completely naïve and badly brought up, with no idea of how to behave in society. The heedless Sherry seems to feel that he can go on about his business as always without paying much attention to her, so she begins befriending the wrong people and otherwise falling into scrapes.

This novel features an outstanding cast of secondary characters, especially Sherry’s close friends–Gil Ringwood, a thoughtful young man who vaguely feels there is something wrong with the way Sherry neglects his wife; Ferdy Fakenham, a silly but warm-hearted dunderhead reminiscent of Bertie Wooster; and George, Lord Wrotham, a hot-tempered gentleman who constantly challenges other men to duels and is madly in love with Isabella. As a side comment, I think it is a hallmark of a good Heyer novel that the characters who would be the heroine and hero in a typical romance novel (that is, Isabella and George) provide some of the humor in her own novels, especially the devastatingly handsome George, with his exaggeratedly romantic behavior.

Heyer is one of my favorites for light reading, and Friday’s Child makes me laugh out loud, particularly when Ferdy gets it into his head that he and Gil are being pursued by “that dashed Greek we learned about at Cambridge. Kept lurking about in corners,” in other words, Nemesis. The characters are funny, the dialogue is witty, and the plot is full of twists and turns.

Day 352: Junkyard Dogs

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Cover for Junkyard DogsI read this novel completely out of order with the others, but then I’ve been reviewing them out of order, too, so I guess that’s irrelevant.

First, old George Stewart, who owns the junkyard in Durant, Wyoming, is dragged behind a Toronado by his granddaughter. Then he is attacked by his neighbor. When Walt finds him in an attempt to investigate the first incident, he is dead, but not from these attacks. Someone has shot him.

Perhaps George’s death has to do with a new housing development next to the junkyard. The developer would like to remove the junkyard from the immediate vicinity of the homes he is building.

In the meantime, Walt is using the investigation of a severed thumb to try to keep his deputy, Santiago Saizarbitoria, who is considering quitting after being shot in the last book. Although Walt already knows that someone has claimed the thumb, he wants to keep Saizarbitoria busy and engaged in the hopes that he will stay.

Walt is also dealing with an eye injury and uncomfortable feelings about his daughter’s upcoming marriage to the brother of his other deputy, Victoria Moretti.

As I have said before, I think Craig Johnson is a great storyteller, and I love the setting of these modern-day western novels. To Junkyard Dogs, Johnson adds a touch of an offbeat sense of humor.

Day 351: The Fixer

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Cover for The FixerBest Book of the Week!

In 1911 Russia, Yakov Bok is tired of his difficult life in the shtetl. So, after his wife leaves him for another man, Yakov travels to Kiev in hopes of making a better living. When he helps a drunken man who is passed out in the snow, Yakov is offered a job supervising a brick yard. However, in order to take this job, Yakov must live in a part of the city forbidden to Jews.

It is this circumstance followed by a series of mishaps that ends up with Yakov being accused of murdering a boy he chased away from the brick yard. As the case continues, it becomes clear that the murder is being used by authorities an an excuse to trump up charges of ritual murder against the Jewish community.

The novel becomes more and more difficult to read as literally everything that happens to Yakov makes things worse for him. The gentiles he knows in Kiev tell lies about him. Once he is in prison, the jailers do everything they can to incriminate him, including trying to entrap him into breaking the rules or admitting his guilt.

Yakov goes into jail a nonpolitical, irreligious, naive man who hopes for justice, and the novel is partially about his development into an angry man who refuses to be beaten. Although almost nothing in the way of plot or action happens from the time he goes to jail, I was absolutely compelled to finish reading.

Written in a storytelling fashion that I associate with the tales of Sholem Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer, this novel is more grim than most of the stories I’ve read by these other writers. However, both The Fixer and The Bloody Hoax, by Aleichem, are based on a true event from 1911 Kiev, called the Beiliss blood libel case.

Day 350: The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

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Cover for The Man Who Went Up in SmokeAt first, I thought this novel, written in 1966, was a little more dated than Roseanna, by the same authors. However, except for the formality in the characters’ dress, it stopped feeling dated after awhile.

Inspector Martin Beck has been on vacation with his family less than a day when he is called back to take charge of an unusual case. A Swedish journalist named Alf Mattson has been reported missing by his editor. The difficulty is that he disappeared in Budapest. There can be no official investigation because the Hungarian police have not received an official request for assistance, so Beck must travel to Budapest unofficially.

In Budapest Beck is able to retrace Mattson’s movements right up until he disappeared, one day after arriving. He visits a youth hostel where Mattson spent the first night and hears through his colleagues back in Sweden that Mattson claimed to have a girlfriend there. But when Beck finds her, she denies knowing Mattson.

Beck feels himself at a loss. His discussions with the Budapest police have not gone very far. The police can’t conduct a full-blown investigation until Mattson’s visa expires, but they have made some inquiries. It is not until Beck is viciously attacked that he understands he is getting somewhere.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö are known for having reinvented the police procedural, and many of its present-day conventions were first used in their novels. The novels are well written and deal with common people more often than with career criminals or gangsters.

Day 349: The Silver Sword

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Cover for The Silver SwordThe introduction of my edition of The Silver Sword says it is a beloved British children’s book that has not been out of print since it was published in 1956. When I began to read it, the names of the characters seemed vaguely familiar, and when I read that it was published in the US as Escape from Warsaw, I realized that I too had read it as a child.

Joseph Balicki is taken away from his family in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation of World War II for the crime of turning Hitler’s picture to the wall during a scripture lesson. He eventually manages to escape from prison and make his way back to Warsaw, only to find his house destroyed, his wife imprisoned, and his children missing.

Since the first days of the war, the family planned that if they ever got separated, they would meet in Switzerland at his wife’s parents’ house. Joseph decides to head for Switzerland, but first he befriends a street urchin named Jan. Joseph gives Jan a trifle belonging to his wife, a silver sword, and asks him if he ever meets his children to tell them to go to Switzerland.

The novel flashes back to when the Balicki’s mother was arrested. After the arrest, Ruth, Edek, and Bronia take to the streets and live through the war in cellars or in the woods outside the city. Edek is taken away to a German labor camp. Finally, at the end of the war, Ruth meets Jan and decides to make the trip to Switzerland. But first, she and Bronia, and Jan, for he comes too, must travel to Germany to find Edek.

The story goes quickly, narrated in a simple manner that does not focus much on emotion or characterization. Serrailler was cognizant of the sensibilities of children and also wanted, in the postwar years, to focus on reconciliation, so there are good people among all the nationalities the children encounter. He tries to show the horror and destruction of war without being too violent.

Perhaps Serailler was unaware that the Russians waited outside of Warsaw hoping that the Polish resistance would be completely wiped out by the Nazis. In any case, he did not express at all how much the Poles feared the arrival of the Russians. The story is probably not going to be very satisfying for an adult to read, from this standpoint and that of the style, but I remember being riveted by it as a child.

Day 348: A Fatal Grace

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Cover for A Fatal GraceIn this second novel of the series, Inspector Gamache is investigating the death of an old bag lady when he is called back to Three Pines to solve the murder of a very unpleasant woman. C C de Poitiers is a minor celebrity who is poison in the village because she treats others so callously. Now she has met an unusual and complicated death, electrocuted while watching a curling game on the day after Christmas.

Gamache has lots of suspects, including the victim’s hen-pecked husband and her daughter, whom she continually heckled about her weight. But as he investigates, he finds that Poitiers was not who she said she was.

In an ongoing plot, Gamache’s career is threatened by an old case where he took down some crooked officers high in the force. He has two new members of his team, local agent Robert Lemieux and agent Yvette Nichol, taken on because he likes to mentor young officers. However, one of them is working for his enemies by helping them sabotage his career.

It is always a pleasure to return to Three Pines, and I like the generous Inspector Gamache. Apparently some readers who were charmed by the picturesque village in the first novel were disenchanted by this sequel, but a mystery series about murders in a small town is bound to affect the atmosphere of the location. My favorite of the series so far is actually the one that took place in Quebec City, and it’s hard to imagine how many more people Penny can kill off in this village, but I still enjoy the series.

Day 347: The Strangled Queen

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Cover for The Strangled QueenBest Book of the Week!

The Strangled Queen is the second in Maurice Druon’s The Accursed Kings series. In The Iron King, King Philippe IV and his progeny were cursed at the stake by the Grand Master of the Knights Templar for conniving with the pope to destroy the knights for their wealth. Now, after the pope and one of the king’s advisors dies, Philippe begins to believe in the curse and dies shortly thereafter, within a year, just as foretold.

His death leaves Philippe’s eldest son, Louis X, on the throne. Louis needs an heir, but his wife, Marguerite of Burgundy, was imprisoned in the Chateau Gaillard for adultery along with her sister-in-law Blanche. He is unable to get a divorce because a new pope has not yet been chosen. He sends Robert of Artois to coerce Marguerite into signing a letter claiming that their marriage was not consummated and their daughter is illegitimate.

In the meantime, Louis is involved in a power struggle against his uncle Charles of Valois. Louis does not know that Robert of Artois has taken his uncle’s side as part of his scheme to reclaim his inheritance, stolen by his aunt Mahaut.

Druon’s historical fiction is powerfully written, elegant and ironic. His novels do not take the point of view of one fictional character, as do most historical novels. All of the characters are actual historical figures, and few of them are sympathetic. The plots are driven forward by the power of the events they relate.

Several years ago, I had a hard time finding this series of books so that I could read it, but I felt that the result was worth the effort. Now, luckily for readers who are interested in the series, a new version of these books is available in paperback.