A Good Book and a Full Tummy: 2015

In the recently released Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise's uncle Jack tells her,

"As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he'll look for lessons."

Uncle Jack was referring to then-current events in recalling the events from Scout's childhood. He could have been referring to current events in our day. He could have been referring to the reaction many bloggers and reviewers have had over the book. Even those who have not read it have likely heard of or read how our image of Atticus Finch (who, however ideal he may be, is still a fictional character) has been forever altered and how no one will ever be able to reread To Kill a Mockingbird with the same enjoyment (if at all). Much is made of Atticus's surprising racism and how this sequel is so inconsistent with the original story.

For those who haven't already heard, Go Set a Watchman is the original story, the first draft of the novel which was reworked at Harper Lee's publisher's request, reworked to the point of essentially being rewritten as To Kill a Mockingbird, which has grown so beloved that it is understandable that anyone not knowing this (and quite a few who do know it) would be upset at the surprising things Atticus says to the grown-up Scout. So, to anyone who is apprehensive about reading the book because of the opinions of complete strangers on the internet, I offer a bit of advice to make it more palatable: don't read it as a sequel, but rather a separate story connect only by similarly named characters and places. Because it really is its own story, examining the issue of race from a quite different perspective.

That is not to say there aren't things comfortable and recognizable. The grown-up Scout might prefer to be called by her given name Jean Louise, but she hasn't changed much. She's still a fighter, but more likely to use her mind and words now rather than her fists as she did as a child. She has a sense of moral right and wrong which was instilled in her by her father and Uncle Jack and her housekeeper Calpurnia, and those beliefs have been refined by living her first few adult years in New York. So when she learns "the truth" about her father, her revered hero, she is understandably upset.

It is apparent from the first chapter that Jean Louise is struggling to understand her place in the world, and uncertain of her current beliefs, let alone those beliefs she held in childhood. She is returning to her childhood home for a regular visit, but she has no desire to stay. The novel's first shocking revelation is that her brother Jem has passed away a few year's prior to the novel's beginning. Some reviewers have stated that his death doesn't seem to have affected her much. I disagree, it has affected her profoundly, but the story is about Jean Louise coming to terms with herself, and flashbacks show how much Jem's death hurt her and shaped her. She is met at the train station by her boyfriend Henry, a childhood friend who now is part of her father Atticus's law practice. In that same first chapter we get the impression that she's not as committed to this relationship as he is.

The first third of the novel has Jean Louise still struggling to get along with her Aunt Alexandra (whose character is also much unchanged), including her aunt still trying to turn her into a proper young lady, coming more to terms with her father's crippling arthritis, seeing her childhood home replaced by an ice cream shop, and visiting classmates she feels she has nothing in common with. Through all this she's simply trying to figure out what she wants in life, what she truly values, and whether or not she wants to marry Henry.

All this happens before the startling events which have created so much undeserved controversy. Jean Louise goes to the courthouse and sits in what was in her childhood the "colored balcony" and listens to her father - or rather, listens to the words of a very bigoted man while her father says nothing, and is made guilty by association not just to Jean Louise but to many of the reviewers who apparently stopped reading the book at that point. I'm not going to list the things she hears that evening, or the things she is told by Atticus when she angrily confronts him later. Those crimes have been listed by many others. I will instead merely say that every single one of those things certain reviewers have pointed out are taken out of context. I do not say this to justify any of those things; ugly is ugly. But in our zero tolerance, politically correct society, words like "bigot" and "racist" have been used and overused and misused to the point where nearly all of the true meanings have been lost. The things which Atticus says to his daughter are neither surprising for the time period, for the place, and certainly not when taken in context with the rest of the novel. Jean Louise shows herself to be as unyielding and prejudiced - albeit in different ways - as Atticus and Henry and all the others she wants to completely write off and disown in her hotheaded 26-year-old self trying to figure out life.

Whether one reads Go Set a Watchman as the sequel it's marketed as (which it isn't) or the rough draft of To Kill a Mockingbird (which is no where near as rough as many reviewers have stated), if it is to be read at all, it needs to be read fully, not thumbed through to zero in on the shocking bits, not via politically correct sound bytes. A friend commented to me that most people remember the Atticus Finch from the movie, not the Atticus Finch in the book, who is a more realistic hero for his rough edges. From the movie, Atticus's halo seems as near straight as a halo can get. Having read To Kill a Mockingbird many times, I found his halo tilting slightly a couple of reads ago. For me, the cultural icon has not been destroyed any more than my real life heroes have been destroyed when I found things in them I found surprising or disheartening. People are complex; they are not perfect. Atticus is in both books a loving father, a good man trying to see society clearly and fairly and a man wanting to set a better example than he knows he's set himself, to set himself a watchman.

Like To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman is about race relations in the South - but neither book is solely about race. Both novels are about growing up. Both show a still loveable Scout (the child being more loveable than the adult) trying to understand the world around her, trying to do the right thing, trying to be a better person than who she was before. No one should object to that.

Go Set a Watchman

When I wrote my last post, I intended to do a series of sorts and eventually write about all the books I completed in 2014. And then, life got in the way, and I allowed it to. To my credit, however, I have been reading more this year than last. Another reason to set aside more time to actually write about the things I love, such as books and food, which is why I started this blog in the first place.

Almost half of the books I read last year are mysteries. Some were rereads, some were favorite authors, some were authors new to me. Twelve books is a lot to review in one blog post, so I will do none of these proper justice, but there wasn't a dud in the lot. I would recommend any and all of them.

They are, in the order I read them:

The Pyramid, and Four Other Kurt Wallender Mysteries by Henning Mankell

Epitaph for a Spy, by Eric Ambler

The Black Hand, by Will Thomas

Cop Hater, by Ed McBain

Spider Woman's Daughter, by Anne Hillerman

G is for Gumshoe, by Sue Grafton

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, by Harry Kemelman

Night Fall, by Joan Aiken

Jerusalem Inn, by Martha Grimes

Fatal Enquiry, by Will Thomas

Silence of the Grave, by Arnaldur Indriđason
A New York Christmas, by Anne Perry

My thoughts, in order that I am having them today:

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Last year I began reading Scandinavian mysteries. I'd be interested in knowing if all detectives in Scandinavian literature are as downtrodden and morose as Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender, and Arnaldur Indriđason's Erlendur Sveinsson and Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck? I'd like to know, for as much as I have enjoyed these books, sometimes I'd like to close a book with a sign of relief because the bad guy has been caught, rather than closing the book with a sigh of relief because the character (and reader!) has an emotional reprieve, at least until the next in the series.

In Silence of the Grave, Detective Erlendur and his team are called in to investigate a skeleton found at a construction site for a new housing development. The skeleton is determined to be close to seventy years old, and the novel soon begins shifting back and forth between the two time periods. On the one hand, there is the story of the degradation of a family due to domestic violence which is difficult to read not because of its savagery but rather because of its casualness on the part of the abuser. Even so, the author manages to elicit just a little just a little sympathy for the devil by alluding to the abuser's own abused past. Just a little. For the most part, the characters are well enough drawn that it's not difficult to hate one very vile being. Present day, the detectives try to solve a very cold case (I am not making a pun here with the story taking place in Iceland) while Erlendur is fighting his own ghosts of the past. The investigators are still at the crime scene when he receives a phone call from his daughter, whom he has not seen nor heard from in months. "Help me. Please." is all she says before the line goes dead. With the caller I.D. saying "unknown", he really has no place to start, but by searching frantically in the early morning hours, he manages to find her, unconscious and bleeding. The majority of the investigation then falls to his team, as he spends much of his time at the hospital talking to his comatose daughter. Here the reader learns more of Erlendur, and what makes him tick, including a tragedy from his childhood. One of the things I like about the Erlendur novels is how he perseveres; despite the harsh realities of his own life, he gets up every morning, he returns love for the hatred his children and ex-wife often thrust at him, and (with the help of his team, fleshed out more here than in the previous novel Jar City) catches the bad guys.

The Pyramid is the first book about Swedish detective Kurt Wallender that I've read, although I had seen TV movie production with the character portrayed by different actors. Here is a collection of short stories and novellas written after the main body of the series but taking place in the detective's life twenty plus years prior, from a young beat cop, moving forward through twenty years to the time just before the start of the series. he mysteries themselves are good stories. It's an excellent character study and I plan to read others ion the series. It became a tough read towards the end, because unlike the Beck and Wallender stories I began with last year, I actually saw him fall in love, get married and have children, and slowly lose it all, plus the increasing estrangement with his own father. Being put through the wringer makes for compelling stories, but not for easy reads.

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When I learned that Will Thomas's Fatal Enquiry was soon to be published, a did a happy dance. Six years since The Black Hand had been published, and I'd missed Cyrus Barker and his assistant Thomas Llewelyn. And I realized that although The Black Hand had been in my bookcase for awhile, I'd somehow missed reading it, an oversight I immediately rectified. The books have been compared, both favorable and unfavorably, to the tales of Sherlock Holmes. There are certainly similarities, both to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's book version of the character and Robert Downey Jr's movie version. As different as those two are, so is Cyrus Barker to Sherlock Holmes. Fatal Enquiry is probably the closest to be considered Holmesian, but even then, more in the comparison of Holme's Moriarty to Barker's nemesis Sebastian Nightwine.

Previous books have had private enquiry agent Barker and his assistant Thomas dealing with racial hatred, obscure and deadly martial arts, white slavers, and political terrorists. The Black Hand deals the mafia; Fatal Enquiry has them dealing with deadly poisonings and Barker framed for those murders and in hiding for most of the novel while Thomas does most of the leg work, which allows Thomas to shine and prove his worth not only to Barker, who believed in the downtrodden young man all along, but for Thomas himself. Some reviewers have stated they didn't think this latest offering had much character development. I disagree; it is subtle but present, and the end of the novel provides a good starting point for more of that development as Thomas is given full trust and becomes more a partner than before.

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Spider Woman's Daughter has Anne Hillerman taking over her late father's series. She makes the characters her own without detracting from all Tony Hillerman had established. When she tries to mimic her father's styles, she's not entirely successful, but when she writes in her own voice, she tells as good a story as her father did.

Navajo Nation police officer Bernie Manuelito sees retired lieutenant Joe Leaphorn shot in the parking lot of the diner where she and her husband Jim Chee have just has breakfast with their former mentor. She gets to the fallen Leaphorn too late to apprehend, or even get a clear look at, the assailant, but manages to keep him awake and coherent long enough for the ambulance to arrive. As usual, the FBI is less than cooperative with the Navajo police. While Leaphorn's life lies in the balance, Leaphorn's wife cannot be found, and Bernie has been told she's too close to the case to investigate effectively (she investigates anyway), evidence comes to light that clues might be found in one of Leaphorn's and Chee's old cases.To say which one might be a spoiler.

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Eric Ambler is a new author to me, one I'd not even heard of until I stumbled upon a reference to Epitaph for a Spy, and I said, Hmmmm, sounds intriguing. And I found a copy. There is plenty of intrigue here. Shortly before World War II, Josef Vadassay is at the end of a Riviera holiday when he picks up a roll of film he has dropped off. But the pictures aren't his, he learns when the police subsequently pick him up, and he is accused of being a spy. To avoid permanent arrest (there was a slight problem with his passport....) he is manipulated into investigating the hotel's other guests -- something he's ill-equipped to do, but is given no other choice. Preferring not to get to know the others, now he must make friends with a young American brother and sister, expatriate Brits, and a kind German gentleman who is not who he says he is (nor necessarily who Josef learns he is, either). Josef cannot trust anyone, even those who claim they believe him and want to help him. It's the type of story Alfred Hitchcock would have loved, although as far as I know never looked at. And it's the type of story that makes me want to look into more of Eric Ambler's work.

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A couple years ago, during one of my parents' declutterings, they gave me a box of Harry Kemelman's Rabbi Small mysteries. Which looked interesting enough to accept and place in one of my mystery bookcases. Where they sat until rediscovered in one of my too-rare browsings of my own bookcases. It is in Friday the Rabbi Slept Late that we are introduced to Rabbi Small and the New England community of Barnard's Crossing. He's the still-new rabbi in this small community, and not everyone is pleased with his intelligence, independence, unflinching honesty, and even the way he dresses, and a small but vocal faction of that community wants him replaced. It certainly doesn't help when the body of a young girl is found strangled on the Temple grounds, and the rabbi cannot provide a believable alibi. Catholic Chief of police Hugh Lanigan believes the rabbi innocent, but must look at the evidence, which points to the man he has been developing a friendship with over theological discussions, which alone are worth reading the book for.

The Rabbi Small books are not currently in print, but affordable used copies are available online, and Audible.com has an audiobook available.

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Good books should not go out of print. They simply should not. They should be available, at the very least, as Print-on-Demand, as books by unknown authors are.Where is the justice that books such as Joan Aiken's 1969 gem, Night Fall, cannot be found newly printed, nor in audio, nor in e-book format? Fortunately I have the paperback copy I bought at the now defunct Hatch's Books back in 1988. I've taken mailing tape to reinforce the binding, and the pages are a little yellowed, but last year's reading was every bit as enjoyable as the (at least) three tiems I read it before that, the first time being a library copy when I was still in high school.

Meg is nine when her mother and stepfather are killed in a car accident and she is sent to live with the father she barely knew. Her father is distant but provides well for her; she makes friends with the kids next door and grows up, excelling in art, and gets engaged. But she doesn't have peace: when she is nineteen, a recurring nightmare from her childhood has increased in frequency and intensity: she finds herself falling and landing in pain, and then a ghastly face moves back in the darkness in front of her.against the wishes of her father and fiancé she returns to the seaside village in Cornwall where she had fallen off a cliff and broken her leg as a four-year-old child. She is convinced something happened with that accident that is the cause of her nightmares. She meets a man who wants to help her unravel the mystery, but there is someone else who doesn't want her digging into the past of fifteen years ago, when an unsolved murder was committed....

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Rounding out my mystery reads of last year are authors I've read at least one other book from:

Ed McBain's Cop Hater - I read one or two of the 87th Precinct tales back in high school, but cannot say which ones. This is the first, introducing the characters. Three detectives from the 87th Precinct are killed within days of each other, and Detective Steve Carella's investigation, and a careless journalist, makes him and his deaf girlfriend Teddy targets as well.

Sue Grafton's G is for Gumshoe - I've read a handful of these, not in order. Even though the character of private detective Kinsey Millhone ages and occasionally references previous cases, the books stand well alone and independent of one another and therefore do not need to be read in order. In this one Kinsey learns that someone she has put behind bars has put out a contract on her and after he very nearly succeeds she hires a bodyguard. This makes it difficult to continue with another investigation where she has been hired to find her client's mother, who dies under suspicious circumstances shortly after Kinsey succeeds.

Martha Grimes's Jerusalem Inn, by Martha Grimes - These too do not need to be read in order, but it might help especially with the later ones. Each of the Richard Jury mysteries is named after an English pub, and sometimes a part of the story line takes place there. In this, the fifth novel in the series, Jury makes the acquaintance of a beautiful woman in a graveyard. They have a nice conversation over drinks and he is looking forward to seeing her again. But when he does, she is dead, and Jury doesn't buy the official verdict of suicide. Meanwhile, his best friend Melrose Plant, snowbound in a mansion with friends, stumbles across the body of another beautiful woman. When Jury's own investigation leads him to that mansion, it begins to look like the two murders are connected, and that one of the victims might not have been the intended victim after all.

Anne Perry's A New York Christmas - Anne Perry releases a shorter mystery every Christmastime, taking a member of the supporting cast from one of her two Victorian series and embroiling them in their own intrigue during the holiday season. 2014's offering has the now grown daughter of Inspector Thomas Pitt, Jemima, as traveling companion to Delphina, a young woman engaged to a New York aristocrat. The brother of the groom asks Jemima's help in locating Delphina's mother who had abandoned her as a child, and who he believes is back in New York and will create a scandal. Jemima finds Maria, dead, and is subsequently charged with her murder. Only a young police officer believes in her innocence, and that belief might not be enough to save her, unless working together they can solve the real mystery behind Maria's original disappearance and who truly committed the murder of the woman in her flat.

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