Mysteries Histories: Three Debuts!

What is it we love about murder mysteries? An old enemy of mine maintained the appeal came from order - that in murder mysteries, everything happens for a reason (even if it's a bad reason) and that's inherently comforting in chaotic times. An old friend of mine (reader, I loved him) used to consume an unending stream of murder mysteries to ease the burdens of his rather onerous job, and he said the appeal came from the fact that justice always triumphs ("which is not always the outcome in real life," he used to sigh, "however much we may strive for it").

I've been an avid fan of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries from the beginning, so to those two very good theories I could add a third: mysteries please us in part for the joy of watching pointed ratiocination at work. In our ordinary lives, thinking usually doesn't happen pointedly - we come at problems sideways, we defer realizations until after our TV shows are done, we let our most promising lines of contemplation drift off into complicated fantasies involving Taylor Lautner. For most of us, the protracted aria of proud link-by-link deduction produced by somebody like Hercule Poirot is one hell of a compelling dream. This also accounts for the backlash popularity of mystery's muddlers, the sleuths who slip and trip into the truth.

Whatever the root causes of the murder mystery's appeal, though, the result is the same: the library shelves and used bookstore bins are filled with them, to the point where you start to wonder if more people have been murdered on paper than were ever murdered in life. And for the last fifty years or so, a booming sub-genre of that profusion has been the historical murder mystery. We'll never know who the anonymous genius was who first had the inspired realization that people in the past must have had to solve crimes just like people in the present (technically, even Doyle was doing a bit of this), but in the 20th century, borne aloft by the boom in historical fiction just generally, the sub-genre exploded. Historical figures from Socrates and Aristotle to Ben Franklin and Abigail Adams somehow found time amidst all the rest of their activities to snoop in warehouses and question evasive priests, and even more popular were the adventures of invented characters set down in the past and interacting with the great and the infamous from their own day.

The rise of this second type of historical murder mystery is only natural - even through the mists of time, we know a little too much about the movements of somebody like the Black Prince or Joanna the Mad to make it credible that they could be dueling with tennis rackets atop the 4:15 to Paddington. But a thoroughly invented My Lord of Loverwurst can get into all kinds of scrapes (including punching the Black Prince in the nose - or punching Joanna in the nose, if he's a blackguard) without prompting that most lethal of historical fiction questions from the reader: did that REALLY happen? If you force the reader to ask that hated question too often, you lose that reader to those boring old sods who write history, and the game's over.

No, the key is to create a historical stand-in who's in a believable position to encounter mysteries (we will forever adore Agatha Christie specifically because the Miss Marple stories are so infinitely unlikely) - an army officer, a government official, the king's better-looking cousin, etc. This person must have access to famous historical figures and events, but the 'public' face of those figures and events must be allowed to proceed unperturbed, like some grand floating parade, while the dirt and skullduggery happens around and underneath them. King John still signs Magna Carta - little knowing that our intrepid castellan has just disarmed the would-be crossbow-cocking assassin.

A good example of this is the first of our three debuts, Murder in the Place of Anubis, Lynda Robinson's 1994 first novel starring Lord Meren, chief investigator to the teen pharaoh Tutankhamun. In this first adventure Lord Meren must unravel the murder of Hormin, a detested scribe whose body is found in the sacred embalming-dedicated precincts of Anubis. Since the pharaoh is a living god in his society, Meren carries a good deal more authority than most historical sleuths, but his best weapon is his own reflective nature, which Robinson manages to convey just as effectively as she does her well-researched background. Meren is a man who's smart enough to listen to his own reactions, and every time he does, he starts to learn something:

As he listened to Selket, Meren became aware of his own vague uneasiness. At first he couldn't understand his discomfort, but then he realized that the woman talking to him shifted from fury to complacency and back again in half a heartbeat. When she spoke of Beltis, her eyes took on the look of a rabid hyena, yet moments before she'd mentioned Hormin with a sweet lilt in her voice.

At the opposite end of the social spectrum from Lord Meren and his unlimited authority is Marcus Didius Falco, the downtrodden working-stiff hero of Lindsey Davis' 1989 debut Silver Pigs. The year is a.d. 70, and Falco is eking out his living in Rome as a poorly-paid informer and part-time snoop. His life changes forever when he encounters beautiful, high-spirited senator's daughter Helena Justina and he suddenly finds himself embroiled in plots and counter-plots involving no less than the imperial family - genial emperor Vespasian and his two sons, creepy Domitian and suave Titus:

Domitian gave no further sign of nerves. He kissed Helena's hand, with the half-closed gaze of a very young man who imagines he is brilliant in bed. She stared at him stonily. Titus intervened, with a smoothness I envied, kissing her cheek like a relative as we reached the door. I let him. If she wanted, she was perfectly capable of stopping him herself.

I hoped she realized these two came from an old-fashioned Sabine family. Stripped of their purple, they were provincial and ordinary: close with their money, ruled by their women, and obsessed with work. They both had paunches already, and neither of them was as tall as me.

Falco is the anti-Meren in every way: he intimidates nobody, he carries no authority (even when he's technically working for Vespasian, it's clear that if he screws up he's on his own), and he's not all that good at deductive reasoning. He has a mongrel stubborn streak that Lord Meren's type of investigator doesn't even think to need, so Davis' readers get a good deal more desperate fisticuffs than Robinson's do (and a great deal more humor - there are set pieces in the first three Falco novels that alone are worth the price of the books). One key thing they have in common: they each make their historical period come alive.

Veering almost totally in the Miss Marple direction is the first novel in Ellis Peters' venerable Brother Cadfael series, 1977's A Morbid Taste for Bones, which introduces Peters' great fictional creation: the Benedictine monk Brother Cadfael, who came to his religious calling after years of wandering the world as a battle-hardened soldier and is now the chief herbalist at the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, in 1137 Shrewsbury. Cadfael is wiser than Lord Meren and more temperate than Marcus Didius Falco - he has a personal passion for seeing justice done in all things, but there's a distinct undercurrent of irritation in many of his adventures, as though he partially resents these intrusions by the murderous outside world into what was supposed to be his contemplative retirement.  The series is some twenty books long, and all of them are fantastic (this rarely happens in murder series, or indeed series of any kind), and they're all enlivened by Cadfael's always perceptive, somewhat wry observations of everyone and everything around him:

They met in the orchard, the five of them, Prior Robert presiding in as solemn dignity as ever. Brother Richard read out the saints to be celebrated that day and the following day. Brother Jerome composed his wiry person into his usual shape of sycophantic reverence, and made all the appropriate responses. But it seemed to Cadfael that Brother Columbanus looked unusually withdrawn and troubled, his full blue eyes veiled. The contrast between his athletic build and fine, autocratic head, and his meek and anxious devoutness of feature and bearing, was always confusing to the observer, but that morning his extreme preoccupation with some inward crisis of real or imagined sin made it painful to look at him. Brother Cadfael sighed, expecting another falling fit like the one that had launched them all on this quest. Who knew what this badly-balanced half-saint, half-idiot would do next?

The Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul is near the Welsh border and often caught in pivotal events in the epic struggle between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda - too often, as often happens in the Miss Marple formula. After a few books in this series, even the most willing reader will start to wonder if it isn't a little odd for all these strange events to be cropping up at this one abbey. Fortunately, Peters' steely-confident prose is on hand at every point - to be enjoyed whether it's believable or not.

And these three are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to historical murder mysteries, of course.  Countless others await our inspection, if the Silent Majority is at all interested in pursuing the case!

Silent on the Moor!

Our book today is Deanna Raybourn's stylish 2009 murder mystery, Silent on the Moor, the third novel starring the entirely amateur sleuth Lady Julia Grey, her enormous aristocratic family, and her Heathcliffean partner in crime detection, Nicholas Brisbane. The series started off with Silent in the Grave in 2007 (in which Lady Julia's husband drops down dead very obligingly on page 1) and continued with Silent in the Sanctuary in 2008, so readers might be wary of picking up this third volume without a quick trip to the Boston Public Library for the first two. But one of the marks of a really good murder mysteries series is its approachability, and Raybourn manages very well the tricky feat of both inviting new readers and rewarding old fans. That trick is a hell of a lot tougher than it looks (it certainly goes well beyond what can be covered in a 'What Has Gone Before' summary at the beginning of later volumes) - it's almost wholly dependent on the author having a crack cadre of first-readers who see the manuscript and catch the oversights before the eager world looks on. Past a certain point, of course, no preventative in the world can help - the later volumes of most long-running mystery series often devolve into a weird, barely-connected series of in-jokes and talisman-phrases aimed specifically at the people who've been buying and reading the books for 50 years. Characters will look at each other, smile meaningfully, and say "Artichokes!" - and there'll be gales of laughter from long-time fans, although the text will be blockaded in kabbalistic obscurity for any first-time reader.

Readers of the Julia Grey novels will therefore be divided in their hopes: on the one hand, they'll want that kind of rut to be avoided, but on the other hand, they'll want the series to continue that long. I'm divided just that way myself: I acknowledge that it would be unbelievable for Lady Julia and sexy Brisbane to have even a couple more life-threatening adventures (with all due respect to Amelia Peabody and her sexy husband, whose propensity for ripping entirely out of his shirts is well matched by Brisbane), but as long as Raybourn can keep serving up such delectably enjoyable novels as this one, I kind of want her to keep doing it.

At the beginning of Silent on the Moor, Lady Julia determines to accompany her sister Portia to Grimsgrave Hall in the furthest reaches of mist-swathed Yorkshire. Portia has received a very tentative invitation from Brisbane, who's recently come into possession of the Hall, and Lady Julia wants to go along because she's tormented by the inconclusive way she and Brisbane left off their relationship. She's in love with him, and she's convinced he's in love with her (a conviction not shared by her large and opinionated family), and so the two set off - with servants, pets (including a quite unfairly maligned pug), and, serving very unwillingly as their chaperon, their younger brother Valerius. After traveling to what seems like the end of the world, they reach Grimsgrave Hall and meet the Allenby women who, until the death of the last male heir, were the Hall's mistresses - and they meet Brisbane, who's the new lord of the manor and seems almost crazed by pressures about which he's initially reluctant to speak a word.

One of the many charms of this series is the easy way Raybourn alludes to Lady Julia's exalted status in her Victorian society; the family has manors, titles, and an endless supply of money, and no great fuss is ever made about it (there's a rumor going about the Internet that Raybourn isn't even English - that she's not only American but Texan - but given the sureness with which she conveys 19th century British landed aristocracy, that surely can't be true; judging by her name, I'm pegging her as minor Scottish nobility). The sisters can be casual about matters beyond the reach of most families:

"I poked about the public rooms earlier," I confessed, coming to sit beside her. "Did you see the tapestry? All those little stitched crowns?"

Portia nodded, her expression faraway. "They are a bit ancestor-mad, I think."

"But why? I mean, we've had kings and queens perched in the family tree, and we do not go about putting it on the walls for everyone to see."

"Because we have never lost it," Portia pointed out patiently. "The Allenbys haven't been royal since the time of Canute. Do I mean Canute? Was he Saxon?"

"Danish, I think," It was difficult to remember. We had had several governesses, none with a very firm grasp of history.

Portia shook her head. "In any event, the Allenbys probably lost everything except their royal blood when the Normans came in and upset the apple cart. They've no grand titles. They are marooned out here like Robinson Crusoe and Friday, with no proper company and a house that is threatening to fall down over their heads at any moment. Is it any wonder they cling to what little prestige they once had? If nothing else it gives them something to lord over the neighbours."

Silent on the Moor is the first of these novels I've read in which the bubbling sub-plot of sexual tension between Lady Julia and Brisbane is almost bumped off the page: it's Portia who most strongly fascinates here - Portia who's using the freedom of her well-financed widowhood to share her house with another woman in defiance of society (the book isn't two pages old before she's referring to that woman as 'the love of my life' to her imperious older brother). It's not that Lady Julia isn't sympathetically portrayed - when poison and murder make their appearance at Grimsgrave Hall, she rises to the occasion in ways that will be immensely pleasing to all mystery readers, new to this series or not. But there's a well-worn quality to her sparrings and jarrings with Brisbane - as well-executed as they are, we've seen them before. Less so Portia, and there are times in this novel when most readers will want the focus to stay on the supporting player.

Still, it's Lady Julia's show, and there's great description and some very skilled tension-building and a blissfully satisfying ending, and these things are hardly to be sneezed at! I heartily recommend all three books for those of you who like your whodunits and your Burke's Peerage well mixed!

The Ape Who Guards the Balance!

Our book today is Elizabeth Peters' 1998 novel The Ape Who Guards the Balance, the tenth adventure of her intrepid Egyptologist Amelia Peabody and her ever-expanding circle of family and cohorts in the Edwardian Middle East.

This particular book opens in London, however, where the headstrong and intrepid Amelia is determined to join Mrs. Pankhurst and a crowd of suffragettes in yet another demonstration for the vote. Amelia's super-manly husband Radcliffe Emerson thinks the whole business is a bit unseemly; their dreamboat son Walter – nicknamed Ramses – attends the rally mainly because he's attracted to one of Mrs. Pankhurt's daughters; he's teased about that fact by his half-sister Nefret, whom Amelia and Emerson adopted in an oasis several years/adventures ago. And the whole business is merely a distraction – ordinarily the family would be in Egypt doing research, but Emerson's blunt and outspoken behavior toward the archeological powers that be hasn't done him any favors, and what research projects are eventually awarded him don't at first seem all that exciting.

The 'at first' hints, of course, at the fact that Amelia Peabody isn't an ordinary person – she's the main character in an ongoing mystery novel series. And as all devotees of the genre know well, such main characters can find something exciting in a dish of dry oatmeal. That's one of the many problems with such serials: after two or three adventures, things stop being even remotely believable and the protagonists might as well have laser-vision and bright yellow lycra costumes. This is the paradox of popularity that the father of the mystery genre, Arthur Conan Doyle, understood thoroughly: the public's clamor for more adventures of a favorite cast of characters can quickly warp the ensuing novels out of all semblance of reality. Doyle most famously sought a way out of this paradox by killing off his celebrated detective, although the public wouldn't hear of it being permanent. But he also tried to side-step the trap of unbelievability by making it irrelevant – he made his detective what we might call pre-emptively unbelievable, a super-rational problem-solver with proficiencies in everything from music to jiu-jitsu and a profession that was unique.

Ever since, that paradox has haunted all popular mystery series, and authors have been more or drastically less successful in thwarting it. The easiest method is to make endless adventures a kind of job description – hence the popularity of police procedurals and private eye novels, where new adventures literally keep walking into the room. And by association the most difficult method is to make the detective a complete outsider to any such mechanism – a busybody, in other words, whose insights are either sought by the constabulary or unwillingly thrust upon it. But no matter what the method, the jumping-off point into the realms of fantasy tends to happen at around the third or fourth book in the series.

In a perfect reading world, mystery authors would be stronger than this problem! In such a world, Thomas Harris would not be lured (or browbeaten) by enormous sales to keep revisiting his rather boring signature serial killer Hannibal Lecter, Dr. Watson would not appear often enough for his war-wound to wander around his body, Travis McGee would not have taken enough socks to the jaw to powderize his entire pretty head, and poor Spenser would not have become the gray and amorphous whatever he was at the end of his run. In a perfect reading world, the public would heap their book-buying praise on a mystery author, not a set of fictional characters. They'd say, “We want more Nancy Atherton!” not “We want more Aunt Dimity!” (Of course, in a perfect reading world, authors would have the resolve to say, “I don't care how much you pay me – you're not getting another adventure of the Toff, and that's final”)

But most lazy or self-indulgent readers don't say that – when they find something that pleases them, they want more of it, ad infinitum. Writers who strike such a chord in the reading public can count their blessings – it's a steady paycheck, after all – and many of them end up embracing their luck.

The Amelia Peabody mysteries, certainly by volume ten, have done a yeoman's amount of embracing. The time-honored device of the writer presenting himself as merely the curator of remarkable original documents got its mystery-novel start with Arthur Conan Doyle and Watson's battered tin dispatch-box containing who knows how many previously unrevealed Sherlock Holmes cases (although, as we all saw when reading recently about Geoffrey of Monmouth, the actual device is much, much older than the murder mystery genre), and Elizabeth Peters uses it here with a broad, grinning gusto:

Students of the life and works of Mrs. Amelia P. Emerson will be pleased to learn that the present Editor's tireless research on the recently discovered collection of Emerson's papers has yielded additional fruit. Certain excerpts from Manuscript H were included in the most recent volume of Mrs. Emerson's memoirs, and other excerpts appear here.

This is good grace indeed, and many thousands of readers have fallen in love with the infectious happiness that shimmers on every page of Peters' books. Her Amelia is as far away from Sherlock Holmes as you could imagine: she's not all that analytically adept, she's very intelligent but a far cry from intellectually rigorous, and she's a rotten shot with a pistol (in our present book, she very nearly shoots her own son while attempting to rescue him). She and her brawny husband (in something of a record, the always-disrobing Emerson manages to be becomingly undraped on the very first page of The Ape Who Guards the Balance) and their gorgeous, lively children (who are all in their twenties by the time of this book, ready to take over for their parents and begin having adventures of their own that presumably won't involve dying of influenza or getting machine-gunned at the Marne) are constantly quarreling and sporting with each other – so much so that you often feel sorry for the novels' various bad guys, who can hardly get a nefarious deed in sideways.

The books are vivacious, and this one is no exception: the skullduggery that first involves Amelia & Co. in London soon follows them to the Valley of the Kings, and for the first time in the series, the young people are given a separate plot as developed and page-turning as anything else in the book (of course it weaves itself into the rest of the book – Peters is quietly very, very adept at plotting). This latter point is important and can often curdle a long-running mystery series: since the main detectives aren't really 'allowed' to change all that much (the readers want terse people to stay terse, helpful people to be always helpful, etc), writers often seek to exercise their actual novelist skills on the secondary characters – usually to the benefit of the series in general. If her fans let her (and if she wants to), Peters should send Amelia and Emerson off into permanent retirement and let Ramses and Nefret have the run of the newborn 20^th century.

Before they get even less believable, that is. Already Amelia has a super-villain of her very own – his name is Sethos, and her descriptions of him will remind every reader of Professor Moriarty. That's good heady stuff, to be sure, but it's also an excellent barometer of a series' critical pressure. Normal people don't attract super-villains: super-heroes do. And there's the unmissable note of rote that's already crept into the series by this point, visible even in tossed-off lines:

I will not bore the Reader with descriptions of the sights of Luxor. They can be found, not only in my earlier volumes, but in Baedeker. To say that we had become blasé about them would not be entirely accurate, for I will never tire of any monument in Egypt; but …

There's no real good way to end that thought except 'but I really, really need a rest,' and even the most devout readers might find themselves thinking the mighty Amelia has earned one. The pleasure of a long-running mystery series like this one are enormous (lest any fans think the point of this whole digression of a post is to say otherwise!) - the allure of going home again is nothing cheap and nothing to be ashamed of – but its pitfalls are as deadly as the tomb-traps that await our intrepid archeologists. Even while I'm whole-heartedly recommending The Ape Who Guards the Balance (the one or two instances in which a first-time reader will feel left out of a running gag are minor and spaced far apart), I'm wondering if perhaps those pitfalls don't merit the use of my favorite investigative tool: the regular series! Shall I go through the world of murder mysteries, discussing the various long-running series? Why, perhaps I shall.