22. Tether's End by Margery Allingham

I tried to read Margery Allingham years ago (More Work for the Undertaker), when I was way too young.  I may have even read it twice and both times was thoroughly confused and unentertained.  The wise Kenneth Hite who has excellent taste in literature, among other things, recommended this one  (under the title "Hide my Eyes") in one of the Ken and Robin Consume media posts.  He said:

Chief Inspector Luke suspects a killer operates from the London backwater of Garden Green; Campion agrees. After a riveting prologue, Allingham reveals the killer cubist-fashion from multiple perspectives over the course of one day’s investigation. Superbly constructed crime thriller with Allingham’s gifts for character and observation (especially of the grimier parts of London) tuned to perfect pitch.

You can see why I was inspired to hunt this one down.  It took me a while despite Margery Allingham being not hard to find in most used book stores.  I think it was because of the different titles, (also called "Ten Were Missing").  I finally found it at the Oakland Museum White Elephant sale.

I can't disagree with most of what Hite says above, except perhaps the "perfect pitch" part.  I found the book at times really enthralling and at other times somewhat frustrating.  It's not a mystery so the suspense was not in figuring out what happened but whether or not the innocent people would fall victim to the sociopath.  His elaborate alibi plotting was quite interesting as was the police's investigation.  However, I felt that at times the suspense was elongated because of unrealistic human behaviours.  Several times, the police haughtily dismiss clues as being worthless, which just seemed fake since they were desperate to figure the case out.  Likewise, the young hero (whose adventurous day with the murderer was quite fun to follow) behaves with this weird chivalry of avoiding the police so the young girl he loves name won't be besmirched.  It all felt a bit forced to me.

The plot involves a widow who runs a curio museum in a side alley in London's east end.  She is friends/surrogate mother to a charming man who we learn quite early on is also a sociopathic murderer.  She has written to a distant niece by marriage hoping that she will come and inherit her shop and even possibly marry the man.  The niece's younger sister comes instead (as the elder sister is already married) and happens to write a young man, Richard Waterhouse, who is from her village as a precaution.  Richard smells something fishy (and is slightly jealous) with the sociopath and investigates.

If I were desperate, I would not hesitate to pick up another of Allingham's books, but since I have a plethora of British women mystery writers already to choose from and I suspect her style is not so much to my liking, it will probably have to be specific circumstances or recommendations for me to read her again.

21. Black Reaper by Roger Blake

Actually a nice illustration

Pulp slave fiction is not really my jam, but I bought this one (part of my Encore Books mini-haul) because it was from the New English Library.  The NEL is of course now known among paperback-heads for its  quite rare skinhead series.  I have never seen one in the wild, so thought I should pick this one up.

Wow, is it ever bad!  The n-word is used extensively, but the real offense in this book is the utter lack of any skill or effort at any of it.   I was about to go into detail about the lack of structure, the random jumping between characters perspective, the jumbled exposition but really the entire thing feels like it was written in one go in a day with zero editing (though to be fair, everything is spelled correctly and the grammar is error free), which it probably was.  Nothing in this book evokes the slightest emotion in the reader.  The characters are empty stereotypes.  When things happen, they are told in such a dull, rote manner that you don't care.  The action scenes have zero energy.  Even the sex scenes, of which there are many, are maladroit and the opposite of titillating.  

I guess the point of the book was to sell copies based on the 70s trend of the history of slavery.  The cover is basically Kunte Kinte, no?  And maybe the thought of some violence and black on white sex would further move copies.  Imagine my surprise when I read that this is the sequel to Black Harvest! (The same author also wrote Black Summer and Black Fury.)  I can not begin to imagine how the backstory would hold any interest.  

The story such as it is involves Hester Grange who owns a bunch of land in Canada (!) where she attracts runaway slaves but actually basically treats them like slaves.  Now Canada did not treat runaway Black Slaves very well and we have a shameful history and ongoing present of racism in this country, but Roger Blake clearly did not even try to base this on reality.  The book begins in confusing medias res with Grange ordering a slave hunter to shoot Paul, the slave who was supposed to kill her husband.  The rest of the book is the slave hunter plotting to get revenge on Paul and Hester (though it's not clear why other than racism that he is so particularly mad at Paul who didn't do anything but run away).  This is interspersed with Paul making friends with the local Ojibway tribe and falling in love with the chief's hot daughter.  Meanwhile Hester is sending all her men to hunt down Paul because he was a witness but really because she lusts after him.  She has the markings of an interesting character but her being a tyrannical outpost leader whose downfall is her libido is just a mess.  Even though she is super hot, nobody wants to have sex with her.  She gets Paul drunk, forces herself on him and then spends the rest of the book trying to abort the baby they made.  I know it sounds grotesque and over the top in a pulpy way but really it is all so incompetent that you just don't care.

To top it off, the glue holding the cover to the spine disintegrated and now it is falling apart. I can't bring myself to just recycle it as it is a book after all, but it's in such a bad condition and I really can't imagine anybody else wanting to read this that I don't know what to do with it. 

20. Miss Bones by Joan Fleming

I discovered this at Encore Books purely by going through the shelves.  It was a whim to buy it (and one more by her) based on the great cover design, the weird name and blurb and that it was a woman author.  I thought based on the design and blurb that it was going to be a supernatural or horror book, but it turns out to be more of a classic, almost cozy, suspense/murder mystery of British mid-twentieth century.  It's culturally interesting to compare it to The Ferguson Affair, also published in the same year.  Very different books, though both have hints of how the protagonist/author are weirded out, even disgusted, by the first waves of the new youth movement.

The book starts out with compelling intrigue.  Thomas, a young man of a good family (father a peer and ambassador in Argentina) takes on a job restoring pictures for a very weird guy named Walpurgis who runs an antique shop in Shepherd's Market, London.  The real pleasure in the book is the first half where Thomas doing his best to get along with the quite ugly and aggressively but vaguely cheery and open Walpurgis also tries to figure out what the hell is really going on.  He also gets to know the new neighbourhood and the various characters who come and go, including a pixieish young woman with heavily made-up eyes and bizarre antique clothes (the Miss Bones of the title).  

Unfortunately, as it went on, the narrative moved away from the intrigue and weird to more of a banal, though well thought-out, crime set up.  I figured it out before Thomas did (which isn't hard; he is portrayed as somewhat naive and traditional).  At about halfway through, Walpurgis disappears.  The plot becomes somewhat muddled as Thomas investigates while getting in and out of suspicion with the police.  There is a big twist (that I also saw coming) and a really kind of lame denouement where he is basically handed the pixieish girl deus ex machina (not unrelated to his own rescue actually) that rendered the book quite soft and traditional.  So I was somewhat disappointed in the ending.  I like a neat narrative where everything works out, but Thomas doesn't really do very much and is kind of a nice, passive guy and gets saved and the girl, so it felt forced.

19. The Ferguson Affair by Ross Macdonald

We went to Encore Books in NDG as a family as my wife wanted to do some hunting.  I had been here before and was somewhat disappointed.  They have a quite good collection of science fiction with a lot of older paperbacks but there mystery section was quite disappointing, all new big names.  However, I discovered a random shelf on the back side of an island that was four rows of old pulpy paperbacks, lots of men's adventure (some beautiful Fontana Eric Amblers) from a range of times.  This is the magic of the cluttered used book store!  I grabbed this Ross Macdonald on a whim, thinking it was Ross Thomas and because the first sentence grabbed me (probably more a nostalgia instinct because those 80s paperbacks were all around my house as a child).  It was only when I got home that I realized it was Macdonald, which also wasn't a bad thing and maybe even better.

So I jumped in and was surprised and to be honest reflexively disappointed that this wasn't a Lew Archer novel.  I continued on and became further disappointed when I found the initial setup kind of clunky and then downright bummed when it turns out the protagonist, defense lawyer Bill Gunnarson, has a pregnant wife at home who is naive and that he neglects.  I unfortunately am now all too aware of the Millar's rough marriage and their terrible, near-abusive treatment of their daughter and I could feel some of that post-WWII dysfunctional gender dynamics in the narrative.  Gunnarson has this super crazy rough day where he comes upon an antique store owner with his head bashed in when then dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital which leads to all kinds of other craziness and when he comes home hours late for the lamb his wife especially made for him, he refuses to tell her anything because he "can't"?!  I mean what the fuck white people from the '50s.  I'll grant you being hours late for dinner, but not even calling and then having no explanation. The behaviour all rests on such deep sexism that the woman is not only supposed to be at home but she shouldn't even be privy to your day's work because of some made-up lawyer code.

I would argue that this behaviour was even more sexist than was normal for the time period.  And what's even weirder, is that as I read through the book, I really started to get the feeling I was reading a Margaret Millar book.  So many of her themes are foremost in this book.  Now I need to read more Macdonald, as I suspect both their themes overlap so I could be wrong here, but I mean we have the private club with the swimming pool, we have a sympathetic look at the Mexican American community and several key characters, we have deep family secrets that go waaaay back.  Even the tone felt more Millar-like than Macdonald.  I know she did a lot of editing of his books and I'm wondering how far it went with this one (and maybe part of the reason why it isn't a Lew Archer).

The good news is that as the book went along, it got better and better.  The plot structure by the end is quite brilliant, delivering so much more than I anticipated from the opening set up.  We get a great set of really broken characters and a rich look at how they got there.  What I love about this book is that you learn these backstories via detecting.  It is shown in the sense that Gunnarson keeps digging until he finds their families and goes and talks to them and you get the whole damaged mess not just through what happened to them but seeing the old version of the people who did it to them.

Just for the record, the story involved initially a gang of burglars who appear to have some connection to the hospital for figuring out who is not at home.  The case appears to be broken open by the murder of the antique dealer who may have been selling the stolen goods, but starts to get much messier when an ex-movie star who is recently married to a Canadian oil tycoon (nice legit CanCon also here thanks to the Millars) gets kidnapped.  These two seemingly disparate cases are connected by a handsome but sleazy lifeguard at the club who has also disappeared.  Things get complicated and fun.  Recommended.

18. Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold (#9 in the Vorkosigan saga)

I guess Memory could be considered an interstitial novel.  I also suspect it may be the transition book to a new phase in the series.  Miles is basically grounded on Barrayar, after the seizures from his being resurrected from cryosleep cause him to accidentally slice off a rescued hostage's legs.  The real problem, though, was not the accident (Bujold has a nice wry way of treating these kinds of horrific space injries that make them somehow slightly funny), but that Miles lied about it on his report to his Barrayan ImpSec spy master, Simon Illyan.  He is caught and is forced to resign and give up his military duty, leaving him stuck at his family's mansion alone and brooding, trying to figure out his future (including the option of running away back to the Dendarii mercenaries to be his alter ego Admiral Naismith forever).

However, he isn't given long to fret as Illyan starts displaying bizarre behaviour, seemingly losing track of time.  This gets worse and worse until he has a total breakdown.  Miles now must act as a Vor and old family friend, against the new chief of ImpSec.  This book never really gets going into this main plot until the second half and even then it doesn't feel totally like the main story.  The real story here is Miles trying to figure out who he is and we also get a good dose of Barrayan aristocratic developments, including the emperor finally falling in love.

It's not a rip-roaring adventure, but I still found it absorbing and a page-turner.  We know the characters quite well now. This was finally the book where I think I truly get Miles' character.  He really comes off as brilliant and driven in the way he solves the mystery of Illyan's memory.  The ending and where it seemingly closes off certain storylines and opens new ones was quite satisfying and I'm looking forward to see where it goes from here.

17. Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell

Once again, I have forgotten to note where I learned about a certain author.  Somebody I follow strongly recommended Sarah Caudwell's four Hilary Tamar novels and so I added them to my hunting list.  I found 3 of them at the Oakland Museum White Elephant sale and without knowing if they would be any good, bought them all.  They were only a dollar and I wasn't sure if I would have the opportunity again.

Well so far so good, this first one is quite a lot of fun.  Once again, I found myself less interested in trying to figure out the actual mystery while really enjoying the writing and characters.  Hilary Tamar is the "detective" (and the narrator) but really it's about a group of junior lawyers and their witty banter who all work for the same London firm.  It is deep in that aristocratic, Oxbridge self-deprecating, classical education rhetoric where they are always fighting about who should pay for the wine and pointing out each other's deepest flaws in the most passive-aggressive way possible.

The situation here is that their least practical friend, Julia, is off to a vacation in Venice on an art tour when she gets accused of murdering one of her fellow travellers, a beautiful young man named Ned, who is found stabbed through the heart in his hotel bed with which she had spent the entire afternoon.  The book is semi-epistolary as the first half is the group reading Julia's letters which are primarily about her trying to hook up with Ned and lead up to the murder (and thus give all these clues).  One of the things I liked about this book (written in 1981) is that both homosexuality and female sexual initiative are treated as given.  Julia simply wants a fling and is both worried about not succeeding but also of making Ned think she actually cares about him.  Ned is travelling with another young man, a strapping, up-and-coming sculptor whom she (and the others) suspect is in love with Ned.

Once again, the mystery once unraveled was quite clever, but there was no way I would have ever figured it out.  The conceit in the book that comes out a bit at the beginning is that while Tamar is the most clever of them, nobody respects here and later, you realize they also find her a pedantic bore as when she is trying to explain her reasoning, they all find excuses as to why they have to be elsewhere. It's pretty funny.  A very enjoyable read and strongly recommended, especially for fans of the cozy.

16. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer

I have been wanting to fill the void of my understanding of how we got from the Byzantines to the Ottomans for a long time now and this interest flared up when I read Abbas' Modern History of Iran.  My European history is not great, but at least I have the broad lines.  The Ottomans and the background to today's Middle East was pretty much absent entirely.  I had been waiting for a recommendation so as to not waste any time with false starts, but ended up discovering this book at the indefatigable Moe's Books in Berkeley.  It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for, a well-researched, academic yet readable, chronological history of the Ottoman empire from its beginning in the 13th century when Osman sort of settled in Anatolia (modern day Turkey) to its demise after World War I when it reduced itself to the single nation of Turkey.  Spoiler alert:  the ending is rough.

This was an incredibly informative and eye-opening read for me.  It definitely answered how the Byzantime empire fell and was taken over by the Ottoman empire.  But there was so many more historical puzzle pieces filled in for me here that I hadn't anticipated, as well as concepts and ideas that I didn't know I was missing.  The big one was that the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the forced movement of people's, especially Muslims coming back to the Ottomans and Christians leaving them, was a major factor in the structure of the Middle East as we know it today.  Another big piece that this book filled in (though only partially) was the situation in 19th century eastern Europe and especially the Balkans (that were all part of the Ottoman Empire) that led to World War One.  I went to a liberal arts school where we had two mandatory Humanities courses that were supposed to cover much of the 20th century, but even for a very progressive school, they basically omitted the Ottoman empire almost entirely.  It's crazy.

The concepts in history and culture that this book also further enlightened for me were manifold as well.  In particular, though I was knew about the Armenian genocide and had studied it briefly in a summer extension course, I did not realize how it can be argued as the progenitor of the Holocaust itself, as one of the first truly modern genocides, directed via policy and bureaucracy.  The Germans of World War 1 who were allied with Turkey at the time were aware of it, approved of it and in some cases participated in that so that there is a direct line that can be traced to it and Nazi policies in World War Two.

Another interesting concept is the mutability of sexuality and the social mores around it.  Man boy love was a real, common and accepted thing in the first two thirds of the Ottoman empire and evidently in the rest of Europe. Today, much of the literature around it is read as metaphorical, but Baer makes a pretty strong case that it was literally meant.  These weren't gay relationships as we know them today, but rather the socially accepted sexual relationships between bearded men and their "beloved" unshaven boys.  This was open and very common for centuries.  Once a boy became a man, then heterosexuality was supposed to kick in with sex in marriage for procreation.  I am overly simplifying it to point out that this was the cultural norm and not licentious behaviour, as the Ottoman Muslim elites had as strict a social code as their European counterparts.  It's important to read and understand these histories as it really makes one question ones own assumptions about what is "normal".

Baer's big argument is that Ottoman history should not be seen as an eastern other but rather as an integral and integrated part of European history.  He makes a compelling case.  The other big them up until the Young Turks take over and do really horrible things in the name of modernity, is that the Ottoman Empire was fundamentally Muslim in its nature and leadership but existed, survived and even thrived by allowing other nationalities, religions and cultures to live and at times even thrive within its border.  This wasn't just Jews and Christians, but also various sects and interperations of Islam as well.  Not that this was all peaceful and hunky dory as we talking about human beings here so there was plenty of oppression and massacres and injustice.  It was, though, a concept of civilization that was very different than the secular nationalism of the modern Turkish state.  I was very surprised to know that after the Jews were kicked out of Spain in the inquisition, that they fled to the Ottoman empire and it was seen by many Jews as their saviour and a place where they lived in an integrated way under Muslim leadership for centuries. Today's rhetoric is that the Middle East is an unsolvable complex mess where the Muslims and Jews have been fighting forever, but that was not actually the case (well the unsolvable mess part might be).  Knowing history makes one realize that change is indeed possible (for better or for worse) and can and will something that we in our current vision could not expect or even believe could happen.