Quotes of the Day
Good evening. So pleased you could join us. No, don't bother with the door, I can assure you it's securely locked. The windows too. Really, it's quite useless to struggle. Let's try to conduct ourselves in a civilized fashion, shall we? Sherry? We're here to discuss mystery novels. As we both know, there are ominously looming mountains of them, and you don't want to waste your precious beach reading time with books that are doomed to bore, do you? Here instead are six of this summer's most tightly wound, delicately nuanced and deviously irresistible. Settle in and prepare to enjoy yourself. I'm afraid escape is quite impossible.
— THE WINTER QUEEN, by Boris Akunin (Random House; 244 pages)
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On a warm spring morning in 1876, A well-dressed young man accosts a pretty young woman out walking with her governess in a public garden in Moscow. When she rebuffs him, he whips out a revolver, spins the cylinder and blows his own head off. It's a barbaric practice, we learn, that's known in Russia as American roulette.
That mixture of the grisly and the lighthearted is characteristic of Boris Akunin, who in Russia is roughly the counterpart of John Grisham but is virtually unknown here in the benighted Western world. (Akunin is actually the pen name of a respected Georgian academic, Grigory Chkhartishvili. Don't worry, no one in Russia can pronounce it either.) The case of the suicidal swain lands in the lap of a fresh-faced, foppish but surprisingly resourceful young detective named Erast Fandorin, who quickly becomes swept up in a glamorous whirl of moneyed expatriates and gambling, champagne-guzzling aristocrats. You'll understand right away what the Russians see in Akunin: he writes gloriously pre-Soviet prose, sophisticated and suffused in Slavic melancholy and thoroughly worthy of 19th century forebears like Gogol and Chekhov. The Winter Queen is as delicate and elegant as a Faberge egg, and, thank the Czars, we still have nine more untranslated Fandorin mysteries to look forward to.
— FEAR ITSELF, by Walter Mosley (Little, Brown; 316 pages)
Fear Itself is subtitled A Fearless Jones Novel, but the narrator-hero is actually a brainy and somewhat wimpy bookstore owner named Paris Minton. "I'm a small man," he tells us. "I've been chased, caught, and beaten by big-boned women." Fearless Jones, it turns out, is Paris' best friend and polar opposite: superhumanly strong, infernally lucky, ridiculously handsome and very, very good at beating people up. You might say Paris plays Watson to Fearless's Sherlock Holmes, if Holmes had been a jock instead of a nerd.
The Fearless Jones novels share the same richly atmospheric setting as Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins series: black Los Angeles in the pre — civil rights 1950s, a sweltering fever dream of boardinghouses and all-black bars built on the frayed fringes of Raymond Chandlerville. Of course, Mosley is better known for Rawlins, but in many ways the Fearless Jones books make better reading: they're lighter on their feet, funnier and and quicker paced. At the beginning of Fear Itself, Fearless turns up on Paris' doorstep with a tale of woe involving a missing business partner, a mysterious woman, detectives on his trail, truckloads of contraband watermelons...well, there's no point trying to explain it all. Mosley's plots are complicated to the point of near incomprehensibility. (Much like Chandler's. Ever try to summarize the plot of The Big Sleep? Don't bother; it can't be done.) But the result isn't frustrating, it's hypnotic: Fear Itself is a seedy, ever receding labyrinth of petty deceptions, dark desires and unspeakable deeds, with a murderer crouched in the middle, waiting.
— BANGKOK 8, by John Burdett (Knopf; 318 pages)
To say Bangkok 8 is set in Bangkok is an understatement: it is suffused with the cooking smells, mired in the traffic jams and entangled in the bare limbs of the sex workers of Bangkok. Not that the novel is slow going. Bangkok 8 goes from 0 to 60 in about 10 pages, where 60 is a cop dying after he gets bitten by a cobra. Bitten in the eyeball. By a cobra that's high on meth.
That's the crime, or one of them anyway. Our sleuth is a low-grade Bangkok detective named Sonchai Jitpleecheep. Jitpleecheep is a devout Buddhist, and his firm belief in reincarnation and the transience of the physical world colors every aspect of his investigation. "We do not look on death the way you do, farang," he tells us, using the Thai word for foreigner. "Would you be sorry about a sunset?" Jitpleecheep is also half American and half Thai, which makes him uniquely qualified to understand both the tourists lured by the promise of sex, money, drugs and contraband jade and the Thai nationals who make sure they pay dearly for Bangkok's many pleasures.
— JANE AND THE GHOSTS OF NETLEY, by Stephanie Barron (Bantam; 294 pages)
Having studied European history at Princeton and counterterrorism with the CIA, Stephanie Barron is as qualified as anybody to do the impossible: write a plausible mystery novel about Jane Austen. Yes, that Jane Austen, the real-life author of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Jane and the Ghosts of Netley, the seventh book in Barron's Jane Austen series, begins with two murders: that of a shipwright, whose throat is slit by an unknown assailant, and that of a ship, a 74-gun British warship intended for use against the Emperor Bonaparte's forces (it's 1808, if you're just tuning in) that was burned in the shipyard where it was being built. Jane is enlisted to investigate by her friend Lord Harold Trowbridge, who is both a highly placed government official and a sexy scoundrel of the first water.
I know, I know — but it all makes far more sense than you would think. Barron's basic conceit is surprisingly persuasive: the same qualities that made Austen a brilliant writer make her an ace detective, namely, her quick wit and her psychological acuity. Barron's cause is also aided by her deft marshaling of historical detail — the textiles alone (Sprigged muslin! Bombazine!) are worth the price of admission — and, of course, a dash of genuine erotic friction between Jane and the roguish Lord Harold. Barron is scrupulously faithful to the historical record, so we know that Jane will never actually get married. But shouldn't we let her — and Barron and ourselves — have a little fun along the way?
— NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, by Valerie Block (Ballantine; 337 pages)
Missing: one lazy, affable middle-age accountant and $96,564,217.78 of his clients' money, which was snaffled away via a tangled network of stolen laptops and offshore accounts. Under suspicion: said missing accountant, plus his wife, now a fading ex-model, and his workaholic office assistant, who never had much to fade from. On the case: Detectives Dennis Sprague and Anthony Ballestrino, Computer Crimes Squad. Yes, they carry guns, and no, they're not sensitive about being computer detectives. Well, maybe a little.
Doesn't Valerie Block know that mystery dialogue isn't supposed to sparkle? Doesn't she realize it's supposed to be hard-boiled to the point of inedibility? None of Your Business is actually a magnificently dry social comedy, cunningly smuggled inside a meticulously researched, perfectly paced police procedural, like a virus packaged in a witty e-mail. As Sprague and Ballestrino worry away at a thin trail of clues, they banter and snipe at each other, stress about their expanding waistlines and diminishing love lives and generally behave like real human beings. It's an episode of Law & Order scripted by Candace Bushnell. And if that's not enough, for maximum degree of difficulty, Block supplies us with that rarest of creatures, a sympathetic, believable and deliciously malicious villain who by the end of the book has stolen not only the $100 million but the show as well.
— THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, by Mark Haddon (Doubleday; 226 pages)
For 15-year-old Christopher Boone, the hero of this year's most unusual mystery novel, the entire world is a mystery. Christopher is autistic. He can't understand ordinary jokes. He can't read other people's facial expressions. When people touch him, he panics and screams. So when he stumbles on the corpse of his neighbor's dog Wellington impaled on a garden fork, it's just one more mystery that needs solving. "In a murder mystery novel," the young man tells us, with his permanently straight face, "someone has to work out who the murderer is and then catch them. It is a puzzle." Indeed.
Christopher is a fan of Sherlock Holmes, whose devotion to logic and reason are a boon to a young man who can't understand emotions, and Christopher uses the Holmes stories as a kind of User's Guide to Life. While Christopher slowly teases out the sinister story behind Wellington's murder — which involves him and his family more intimately than he at first supposes — we gradually learn what it's like to dwell in the mind of a child with a photographic memory, who knows every prime number up to 7,057, but who can't understand what a hypothetical question is. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is funny, sad and totally convincing. But is it a mystery novel at all? Or a meta-mystery? Or something entirely new? That itself is a mystery — and worth investigating.
- Lev Grossman