On one hand, The Iron Duke is a steampunk alternate history with adventures in the city streets, in the air, and on the seas. On the other hand, it is very much more a romance novel than it is a work of steampunk adventure.
Set in an England recently freed from 200 years under Mongol control, mainland Europe and Africa are wastelands filled with zombies. Our heroine, Mina, is a police inspector from an impoverished noble family. She has the considerable disadvantage of being half-Mongol, as her mother was raped. The Mongols are very, very unpopular, and she faces daily insults and assaults. Though frankly it was unclear to me why anyone would blame her, given that she clearly was in no way at fault.
She is called away from a ball to a dead body found on the estate of the Iron Duke, Rhys Traheaern, who freed England of Mongol control 9 years previously. Their attraction is instant, and he announces he will have her, and she spends half the book insisting she's not interested in him while turning to jelly whenever he touches her. Sigh.
They set off on a mission to save England from a new super-weapon that could kill thousands of people, but the book is really more about their developing relationship, which was frankly a lot less interesting to me than killing sea monsters and capturing pirate ships. This is a very competently-written historical romance, with all of the attendant problems of that story type, from dubious consent, to the quaking virginal heroine who says one thing and means something else, to the circumstances that drive a huge wedge between them, only to inevitably come back together, to talk of making babies at the end. Sigh. Just not really my thing.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Knitting Update
I haven't been reading anything recently that seemed worth blogging about (a pretty-good gay romantic crime story and an absolutely terrible mystery), so I will just show you a couple of the things I've knit this winter:
I knit this scarf to match my new blue mittens this year. I used a very soft and squishy yarn, and the result is that I have a soft and squishy scarf whose pattern doesn't show very well because it's curled up around my neck. Not quite what I was hoping for, but a fairly entertaining knit.
I knit these socks as an experiment. I had bought some yarn that looked like it would self-stripe, and was looking forward to seeing how it knit up. Unfortunately it didn't self-stripe, it knit up all blobby. So this, too, was not quite what I was hoping for. And both disappointments were due to yarn choice. Knitting is more complicated than just knitting and purling, casting on and binding off.
I knit this scarf to match my new blue mittens this year. I used a very soft and squishy yarn, and the result is that I have a soft and squishy scarf whose pattern doesn't show very well because it's curled up around my neck. Not quite what I was hoping for, but a fairly entertaining knit.
I knit these socks as an experiment. I had bought some yarn that looked like it would self-stripe, and was looking forward to seeing how it knit up. Unfortunately it didn't self-stripe, it knit up all blobby. So this, too, was not quite what I was hoping for. And both disappointments were due to yarn choice. Knitting is more complicated than just knitting and purling, casting on and binding off.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indridason
Silence of the Grave is apparently the fourth of Indridason's mystery series set in Iceland, but only the second one translated to English, after Jar City. I have not read Jar City, but I did see the film. The protagonist of the novels is Erlendur, who is a truly miserable man. I got a sense of that from Jar City, but his misery and background are explained more in this one.
It begins with the discovery of human remains at a building site in a new area that is being developed outside Reykjavik. The police are called, which includes Erlendur, Elinborg (who is female, nurturing, and generally good), and Sigurdur Oli (kind of a selfish jerk, sometimes played a bit for humor). As the remains are buried, an archaeological team sets to (very slowly) excavating the body. Until the excavations are complete, the police know nothing about the victim--sex, size, or even exactly how old the remains are. So they set about investigating the place, to see who might have lived there or near there in the past. This involves interviewing neighbors to ask them what they remember about the property, which leads them to learn that there was once a chalet on the spot, long since fallen apart, and the knowledge that during World War II there were English and American military installations nearby.
There is also a parallel storyline about a woman and her children who are badly abused by her husband. Over time it becomes clear that the body is a member of that family, and yet until the end the reader doesn't know which of them is in the grave. Did the husband finally kill his wife? Did she finally snap and kill him? I found those passages rather hard to read, though it got easier when we shifted out of the head of the abused woman and into the perspective of one of her children. Still, I didn't at all enjoy reading about their misery and desperation, and skimmed those passages fairly quickly.
While Erlendur is trying to lead this investigation, he's got personal problems. His pregnant, drug-addicted daughter has landed in a coma, and this leads to a great deal of reflection on his family and his feelings of guilt. His ex-wife, who was bitter about their divorce and prevented him from having any contact with his children until they were messed up beyond redemption, hates his guts, and his children mostly do, too. His daughter calls on him when she's in trouble, but then throws abuse at him when he tries to help her get her life straightened out. He accepts that everything must be his fault, though I'm not sure he should, and he broods on it.
I am trying to identify why I was able to get through this book, when I recently gave up on the The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbo. It, too, is a Scandinavian mystery with extensive flashbacks to World War II and a depressed (alcoholic) detective. As a rule I hate flashbacks, and I decided years ago that life was too short to waste on depressed alcoholic detectives. Perhaps it helps that Erlendur, though a miserable bastard, isn't a drunk. Perhaps I was more motivated because I've actually visited Iceland, so I feel a little more connected to this setting. I don't know. But the two books are superficially quite similar, and I was able to read and enjoy this one, and could not force myself to pick up The Redbreast and read any more.
Indridason stretches the story out, dealing the relevant information out to the reader in little dribs and drabs. The police follow some leads that turn out to be wrong, we learn more secrets and of more people's misery, and the more you read the more it seems that life just sucks. Neverttheless, I was interested enough to keep reading. And then there is the dialogue. It reminds me of the stylized dialogue that Steve Brust used in his Three Musketeers pastiches, in which it takes everyone a long time to actually say anything useful. That sort of dialogue, in more modern form, seems common in this story, and I have to wonder if it is stylized, or if Icelanders actually talk that way. I noticed several bits of dialogue along these lines, when the detectives are asking people questions:
detective: "What was she wearing?"
witness: "What do you mean?"
detective: "What was she wearing?"
witness: "What are you insinuating?"
detective: "Nothing. I just need to know what she was wearing."
witness: "Why do you want to know?"
detective: "Because I'm curious. Tell me, what was she wearing?"
witness: "Calm down."
By this point I was ready to punch the witness myself to get them to just answer the fucking question. And there were several instances of dialogue like that. Ask a simple question, wrestle to get them to answer. I found it annoying, though perhaps Icelanders really do talk that way to the police when asked a simple question. I've no idea.
Anyway, I enjoyed Silence of the Grave, even though I probably should have reacted to it the same way I did to The Redbreast. I will probably read more, if for no other reason than that I hope poor Erlendur can find some sort of peace. Silence of the Grave is a very gloomy, rather depressing story, but it kept me turning the pages to find out what happened next.
It begins with the discovery of human remains at a building site in a new area that is being developed outside Reykjavik. The police are called, which includes Erlendur, Elinborg (who is female, nurturing, and generally good), and Sigurdur Oli (kind of a selfish jerk, sometimes played a bit for humor). As the remains are buried, an archaeological team sets to (very slowly) excavating the body. Until the excavations are complete, the police know nothing about the victim--sex, size, or even exactly how old the remains are. So they set about investigating the place, to see who might have lived there or near there in the past. This involves interviewing neighbors to ask them what they remember about the property, which leads them to learn that there was once a chalet on the spot, long since fallen apart, and the knowledge that during World War II there were English and American military installations nearby.
There is also a parallel storyline about a woman and her children who are badly abused by her husband. Over time it becomes clear that the body is a member of that family, and yet until the end the reader doesn't know which of them is in the grave. Did the husband finally kill his wife? Did she finally snap and kill him? I found those passages rather hard to read, though it got easier when we shifted out of the head of the abused woman and into the perspective of one of her children. Still, I didn't at all enjoy reading about their misery and desperation, and skimmed those passages fairly quickly.
While Erlendur is trying to lead this investigation, he's got personal problems. His pregnant, drug-addicted daughter has landed in a coma, and this leads to a great deal of reflection on his family and his feelings of guilt. His ex-wife, who was bitter about their divorce and prevented him from having any contact with his children until they were messed up beyond redemption, hates his guts, and his children mostly do, too. His daughter calls on him when she's in trouble, but then throws abuse at him when he tries to help her get her life straightened out. He accepts that everything must be his fault, though I'm not sure he should, and he broods on it.
I am trying to identify why I was able to get through this book, when I recently gave up on the The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbo. It, too, is a Scandinavian mystery with extensive flashbacks to World War II and a depressed (alcoholic) detective. As a rule I hate flashbacks, and I decided years ago that life was too short to waste on depressed alcoholic detectives. Perhaps it helps that Erlendur, though a miserable bastard, isn't a drunk. Perhaps I was more motivated because I've actually visited Iceland, so I feel a little more connected to this setting. I don't know. But the two books are superficially quite similar, and I was able to read and enjoy this one, and could not force myself to pick up The Redbreast and read any more.
Indridason stretches the story out, dealing the relevant information out to the reader in little dribs and drabs. The police follow some leads that turn out to be wrong, we learn more secrets and of more people's misery, and the more you read the more it seems that life just sucks. Neverttheless, I was interested enough to keep reading. And then there is the dialogue. It reminds me of the stylized dialogue that Steve Brust used in his Three Musketeers pastiches, in which it takes everyone a long time to actually say anything useful. That sort of dialogue, in more modern form, seems common in this story, and I have to wonder if it is stylized, or if Icelanders actually talk that way. I noticed several bits of dialogue along these lines, when the detectives are asking people questions:
detective: "What was she wearing?"
witness: "What do you mean?"
detective: "What was she wearing?"
witness: "What are you insinuating?"
detective: "Nothing. I just need to know what she was wearing."
witness: "Why do you want to know?"
detective: "Because I'm curious. Tell me, what was she wearing?"
witness: "Calm down."
By this point I was ready to punch the witness myself to get them to just answer the fucking question. And there were several instances of dialogue like that. Ask a simple question, wrestle to get them to answer. I found it annoying, though perhaps Icelanders really do talk that way to the police when asked a simple question. I've no idea.
Anyway, I enjoyed Silence of the Grave, even though I probably should have reacted to it the same way I did to The Redbreast. I will probably read more, if for no other reason than that I hope poor Erlendur can find some sort of peace. Silence of the Grave is a very gloomy, rather depressing story, but it kept me turning the pages to find out what happened next.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
An Occupation of Angels by Lavie Tidhar
I bought this one because Tidhar wrote the awesome steampunk novel The Bookman, which I loved. I also really enjoyed this one.
An Occupation of Angels is, basically, a Cold War spy novel. It is set in an alternate world, in which World War II was interrupted by the sudden and unexpected arrival of various angels at places where people were dying en masse. They took up residence in various cities, and resided there for about 35 years. That would set An Occupation of Angels in the 1970s, though the exact year is never specified.
Our protagonist, "Killarney," is an agent for the British. We join her in Warsaw, just as she's killing the Archangel Raphael. It's never explained why she is there killing him, we just know that it's her mission. She manages to escape back to Britain, and along the journey we learn that she's ruthless. It isn't long before she is called in for another mission: a cryptographer on vacation in Paris is missing, and they want her to track him down. Though her superiors are pretending that it is an easy mission and should be no problem, she knows that they are lying. She accepts, nevertheless. In Paris there are a couple of attempts on her life and the Metatron, who resides in Notre Dame, is killed. Then later it is Behemoth, who resides in London, and Azrael, in Russia. Someone or something is killing the angels, and somehow it is tied to the fellow she is tracking.
Killarney takes off after her quarry, who is apparently now in the hands of the Russians. She tracks him across Russia and has some exciting adventures, and it becomes clear that, like her quarry, she is somehow involved in whatever is happening. I'm not going to spoil it, but the eventual resolution involves Nazis.
In one sense, An Occupation of Angels is treading familiar territory. They have fallen out of fashion now, but these cold war spy stories used to be very common. The appearance of Nazis, too, could be viewed as a tired cliche. But I didn't mind at all. Tidhar, I'm sure, was quite aware of what he was doing, and played quite deliberately with the old tropes. The result is an entertaining, sort of nostalgic story. It was fun to slip into the familiarity of a Cold War spy story, which was nevertheless written for the modern taste, with modern twists. The pace was fast, and it could have been a much longer work in the hands of a different writer. I'm glad it wasn't, though I occasionally wished things were fleshed out a bit. I always prefer works that are spare to those that are verbose, so the pace worked well for me. Overall, this was a quick and fun read.
An Occupation of Angels is, basically, a Cold War spy novel. It is set in an alternate world, in which World War II was interrupted by the sudden and unexpected arrival of various angels at places where people were dying en masse. They took up residence in various cities, and resided there for about 35 years. That would set An Occupation of Angels in the 1970s, though the exact year is never specified.
Our protagonist, "Killarney," is an agent for the British. We join her in Warsaw, just as she's killing the Archangel Raphael. It's never explained why she is there killing him, we just know that it's her mission. She manages to escape back to Britain, and along the journey we learn that she's ruthless. It isn't long before she is called in for another mission: a cryptographer on vacation in Paris is missing, and they want her to track him down. Though her superiors are pretending that it is an easy mission and should be no problem, she knows that they are lying. She accepts, nevertheless. In Paris there are a couple of attempts on her life and the Metatron, who resides in Notre Dame, is killed. Then later it is Behemoth, who resides in London, and Azrael, in Russia. Someone or something is killing the angels, and somehow it is tied to the fellow she is tracking.
Killarney takes off after her quarry, who is apparently now in the hands of the Russians. She tracks him across Russia and has some exciting adventures, and it becomes clear that, like her quarry, she is somehow involved in whatever is happening. I'm not going to spoil it, but the eventual resolution involves Nazis.
In one sense, An Occupation of Angels is treading familiar territory. They have fallen out of fashion now, but these cold war spy stories used to be very common. The appearance of Nazis, too, could be viewed as a tired cliche. But I didn't mind at all. Tidhar, I'm sure, was quite aware of what he was doing, and played quite deliberately with the old tropes. The result is an entertaining, sort of nostalgic story. It was fun to slip into the familiarity of a Cold War spy story, which was nevertheless written for the modern taste, with modern twists. The pace was fast, and it could have been a much longer work in the hands of a different writer. I'm glad it wasn't, though I occasionally wished things were fleshed out a bit. I always prefer works that are spare to those that are verbose, so the pace worked well for me. Overall, this was a quick and fun read.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Skin Deep by Mark Del Franco
Skin Deep takes place in the same world as Del Franco's Connor Grey novels. I have read four of those, but see that I only blogged about two of them--in a nutshell, I liked each one better across the first three, but was quite disappointed by the fourth. In this world, over a hundred years ago the Convergence occurred, in which fairies, brownies, trolls, and other magical creatures found themselves transported to and trapped in our earth. They settled in because they had no choice, but there is still considerable tension between humans and the fey folk.
The Connor Grey novels take place in Boston, while Skin Deep is set in Washington, DC. The protagonist is Laura Blackstone, aka Janice Crawford, aka Mariel Tate. By day she works as the public relations director for the Fey Guild, the magical law enforcement agency. She is also an agent for InterSec, the International Global Security Agency, and has two other personas she maintains when working for them. In Skin Deep, she is forced to juggle between all three of them, and it is an exhausting task.
The story begins with Laura in her Janice Crawford persona. She is a druid, and was on loan from Intersec to the Washington SWAT team. They go to raid a drug lab and walk into a trap. Laura is nearly killed and the police officer she's with is killed, and because she was concussed she doesn't remember exactly what happened. But on her way home later that day someone tries to kill her again, so she has to assume that the first time wasn't an accident. Laura juggles the three personas as Mariel Tate is investigating what happened, Janice Crawford is getting her ass chewed out by the SWAT team leader who is taking out his frustration on her, and Laura Blackstone is trying to arrange an important event and has to play nicely with the bigwigs and try to prevent a diplomatic incident.
The story has a lot of action, and Laura repeatedly thrusts herself into danger even when her boss is trying to get her to be sensible and back away. There is a good deal of focus on her emotional wellbeing, which is not particularly good. Laura realizes the enormous personal sacrifices her career has forced her to make, and she is exhausted and re-evaluating her life. There was rather too much politicking for me, and Laura Blackstone's job as a public relations officer sounded far more awful than the undercover, getting shot at business. Overall, I enjoyed it. I sat down and read it in one sitting, and found it a solid, pleasant read, not outstanding but enjoyable.
The Connor Grey novels take place in Boston, while Skin Deep is set in Washington, DC. The protagonist is Laura Blackstone, aka Janice Crawford, aka Mariel Tate. By day she works as the public relations director for the Fey Guild, the magical law enforcement agency. She is also an agent for InterSec, the International Global Security Agency, and has two other personas she maintains when working for them. In Skin Deep, she is forced to juggle between all three of them, and it is an exhausting task.
The story begins with Laura in her Janice Crawford persona. She is a druid, and was on loan from Intersec to the Washington SWAT team. They go to raid a drug lab and walk into a trap. Laura is nearly killed and the police officer she's with is killed, and because she was concussed she doesn't remember exactly what happened. But on her way home later that day someone tries to kill her again, so she has to assume that the first time wasn't an accident. Laura juggles the three personas as Mariel Tate is investigating what happened, Janice Crawford is getting her ass chewed out by the SWAT team leader who is taking out his frustration on her, and Laura Blackstone is trying to arrange an important event and has to play nicely with the bigwigs and try to prevent a diplomatic incident.
The story has a lot of action, and Laura repeatedly thrusts herself into danger even when her boss is trying to get her to be sensible and back away. There is a good deal of focus on her emotional wellbeing, which is not particularly good. Laura realizes the enormous personal sacrifices her career has forced her to make, and she is exhausted and re-evaluating her life. There was rather too much politicking for me, and Laura Blackstone's job as a public relations officer sounded far more awful than the undercover, getting shot at business. Overall, I enjoyed it. I sat down and read it in one sitting, and found it a solid, pleasant read, not outstanding but enjoyable.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer
The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu was published in 1913. It is now in the public domain, and I downloaded it free from Feedbooks.
The narrator of the story is Dr. Petrie, who is pulled into a shadowy world of espionage and crime-fighting by his friend, Denis Nayland Smith. Smith is a law enforcement agent working for the Empire in Burma, but he has returned to England hot on the trail of an evil Chinese crime genius named Dr. Fu Manchu. For some reason he shows up at Petrie's door one night and recruits him to help him track down the mastermind. But it's worse than it sounds--Fu Manchu isn't just breaking the law for his own profit, his goal is to destroy Western civilization.
The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu is a rather extreme example of the Yellow Peril, an idea that was popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that all the yellow people (which in Rohmer's mind apparently means everyone living between Egypt and Japan) are set on the destruction of the white people. If I were to speculate--and this is entirely speculation--I suppose that the Europeans might have had some cause to be concerned that the residents of a large part of the world were not particularly happy to have their countries run as European colonies, for the enrichment of the Europeans. That is to say, they probably did correctly sense that they were unpopular with certain parts of the world. This led some people to fear that the white nations were threatened by the Asians, and led to policies limiting immigration of Chinese to countries like the US and New Zealand. This novel, with its portrayal of the dangerous, clever, and untrustworthy Asians, certainly reinforced the stereotype.
Anyway, as I was saying. Smith recruits Petrie to help him track down Fu Manchu. They have many adventures like sneaking into an opium den in disguise and then being discovered and plunging through a trap door in the floor into the Thames. A recurring theme throughout the novel is that Smith thinks of someone who Manchu might view as an adversary, and they rush to try to prevent the man's death. (And now, for something completely different) It rather reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about The Bishop, a crime-solving Anglican bishop, who races around trying to prevent various clergymen from being murdered, and always arrives a moment too late. This book is a bit like that. Fortunately they managed to save the intended victim's life once or twice, but often they do not. And Fu Manchu, evil mysterious genius that he is, is not content to kill people in straightforward ways, instead the murder is always committed through some exotic or seemingly impossible method that mystifies the poor stupid Englishmen until Smith figures it out. It usually involves drugs, poisons, exotic creatures, or entering apparently inaccessible windows through Asian cunning and acrobatics.
Despite all the action, I found The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu to be a fairly slow read. It didn't hold my attention all that well, and I found that I was finding ways to pass the evenings without reading, like knitting or watching hockey, even though I'm not really a hockey fan. As I noted with Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces, which is from the same time period, some of the cultural assumptions were quite interesting, for instance the idea that upon receiving bad news a woman would be so prostrated with shock that she would lie abed ill for days afterwards, or the ability of everyone in the story to know, off the top of their head, when the next train was leaving for any given destination.
Dr. Fu Manchu escapes in the end, of course, so that there can be more novels in the series. And though I found it a bit slow going, I'm still glad I read it. Really, reading hundred-year-old popular novels is quite interesting.
The narrator of the story is Dr. Petrie, who is pulled into a shadowy world of espionage and crime-fighting by his friend, Denis Nayland Smith. Smith is a law enforcement agent working for the Empire in Burma, but he has returned to England hot on the trail of an evil Chinese crime genius named Dr. Fu Manchu. For some reason he shows up at Petrie's door one night and recruits him to help him track down the mastermind. But it's worse than it sounds--Fu Manchu isn't just breaking the law for his own profit, his goal is to destroy Western civilization.
The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu is a rather extreme example of the Yellow Peril, an idea that was popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that all the yellow people (which in Rohmer's mind apparently means everyone living between Egypt and Japan) are set on the destruction of the white people. If I were to speculate--and this is entirely speculation--I suppose that the Europeans might have had some cause to be concerned that the residents of a large part of the world were not particularly happy to have their countries run as European colonies, for the enrichment of the Europeans. That is to say, they probably did correctly sense that they were unpopular with certain parts of the world. This led some people to fear that the white nations were threatened by the Asians, and led to policies limiting immigration of Chinese to countries like the US and New Zealand. This novel, with its portrayal of the dangerous, clever, and untrustworthy Asians, certainly reinforced the stereotype.
Anyway, as I was saying. Smith recruits Petrie to help him track down Fu Manchu. They have many adventures like sneaking into an opium den in disguise and then being discovered and plunging through a trap door in the floor into the Thames. A recurring theme throughout the novel is that Smith thinks of someone who Manchu might view as an adversary, and they rush to try to prevent the man's death. (And now, for something completely different) It rather reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about The Bishop, a crime-solving Anglican bishop, who races around trying to prevent various clergymen from being murdered, and always arrives a moment too late. This book is a bit like that. Fortunately they managed to save the intended victim's life once or twice, but often they do not. And Fu Manchu, evil mysterious genius that he is, is not content to kill people in straightforward ways, instead the murder is always committed through some exotic or seemingly impossible method that mystifies the poor stupid Englishmen until Smith figures it out. It usually involves drugs, poisons, exotic creatures, or entering apparently inaccessible windows through Asian cunning and acrobatics.
Despite all the action, I found The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu to be a fairly slow read. It didn't hold my attention all that well, and I found that I was finding ways to pass the evenings without reading, like knitting or watching hockey, even though I'm not really a hockey fan. As I noted with Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces, which is from the same time period, some of the cultural assumptions were quite interesting, for instance the idea that upon receiving bad news a woman would be so prostrated with shock that she would lie abed ill for days afterwards, or the ability of everyone in the story to know, off the top of their head, when the next train was leaving for any given destination.
Dr. Fu Manchu escapes in the end, of course, so that there can be more novels in the series. And though I found it a bit slow going, I'm still glad I read it. Really, reading hundred-year-old popular novels is quite interesting.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Hooray!
I am typing this on my new laptop. It's a Macbook Pro, a step up from my old machine as well as being new, of course. It feels sleek and crisp and science fictional. Zoom!
Monday, February 7, 2011
Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, translated by Robert Van Gulik
I have read and blogged about several of the Judge Dee historical mysteries written by Robert van Gulik. Judge Dee is an ancient Chinese magistrate who acts and investigator and judge in crimes committed in his district. What I didn't realize until now is that they were inspired by this book, Dee Goong An, an actual eighteenth century Chinese mystery novel, which van Gulik translated and then wrote more stories about the character.
Van Gulik has an introduction in the book explaining the traits of old Chinese mysteries and why they are mostly not to the taste of Westerners, and then explains why Dee Goong An is more accessible than most. As is typical of these novels there is a supernatural element present, in this case in the form of the spirit of a murdered man hanging around the graveyard. Also as typical in these novels it seems to be common to have suspects tortured, and the torture is described. Van Gulik left that out of his own stories about Judge Dee. It also, typically, describes the execution of the criminals, something else that is uncommon in Western mysteries.
Judge Dee solves three crimes in Dee Goong An: the deaths of a traveling silk broker, of a poor shopkeeper, and of a bride on her wedding night. It is the poor shopkeeper's death that gives him the most trouble, as he knows the man was killed and knows who did it, but cannot prove it, and the dead man's mother keeps weeping and wailing and obstructing him at every turn. There are a few things that seem a bit hard to believe, for instance in the death of the bride, when Dee asks a servant several times to tell him exactly what she did that day, and then when he discovers that her account was incorrect she insists that she just didn't remember. It seems likely she didn't remember only so that the crime would not be solved too quickly. Nevertheless, I found this a very interesting read, and quite entertaining.
Van Gulik has an introduction in the book explaining the traits of old Chinese mysteries and why they are mostly not to the taste of Westerners, and then explains why Dee Goong An is more accessible than most. As is typical of these novels there is a supernatural element present, in this case in the form of the spirit of a murdered man hanging around the graveyard. Also as typical in these novels it seems to be common to have suspects tortured, and the torture is described. Van Gulik left that out of his own stories about Judge Dee. It also, typically, describes the execution of the criminals, something else that is uncommon in Western mysteries.
Judge Dee solves three crimes in Dee Goong An: the deaths of a traveling silk broker, of a poor shopkeeper, and of a bride on her wedding night. It is the poor shopkeeper's death that gives him the most trouble, as he knows the man was killed and knows who did it, but cannot prove it, and the dead man's mother keeps weeping and wailing and obstructing him at every turn. There are a few things that seem a bit hard to believe, for instance in the death of the bride, when Dee asks a servant several times to tell him exactly what she did that day, and then when he discovers that her account was incorrect she insists that she just didn't remember. It seems likely she didn't remember only so that the crime would not be solved too quickly. Nevertheless, I found this a very interesting read, and quite entertaining.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces by Thomas Hanshaw
It took my a while to finish this one because my Nook developed technical difficulties, and I had to wait until a replacement arrived. Incidentally, Barnes & Noble has been great with support on the Nook.
Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces is a detective novel from 1912. It's in public domain, and can be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg or Feedbooks. I got the Feedbooks version, and it was very nicely formatted and a pleasure to read.
Cleek is a burglar and master criminal. He and his associate, a French woman, are responsible for a series of thefts, and to add insult to injury he starts sending letters to Scotland Yard informing them of what he's planning to steal next. At the beginning, he intends to steal the wedding gifts that have been sent to the participants in a high-profile high-society wedding. The police know this, and station men all around the house to try to catch him. They fail, and he succeeds. However, while making his getaway he encounters the niece of the house owner, and instantly falls in love with her beauty and purity and decides to swear off his life of crime.
After this, Cleek becomes a consulting detective for Scotland Yard. He is a clever man who knows all about the criminal classes, and furthermore he has amazing control over his facial features so that he can alter his appearance and assume new identities merely by concentrating. In fact, this is how he carries off the first crime: he assumes the appearance of someone who had legitimate business there. The book is a series of related stories, rather like the Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown books, rather than a novel-length story. But throughout is the overarching theme of Cleek trying to atone for his crimes and win the hand of the young lady whose appearance convinced him to abandon a life of crime.
Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces was published 99 years ago, and it's very interesting to see the differences between the world Hanshaw wrote about and our own. It's hard to know, of course, how much of what he wrote was an accurate reflection of normal English life and how much was literary fashion of the time. For instance, the text is littered with relatively young widows and widowers. I suppose it is likely that mortality rates among the young were much higher then than they are now, but wow. Further, every young woman is beautiful, and nearly all of them marry men considerably older than themselves. There are even a couple of cases in which a man and his young adult son were both courting the same young woman. While in today's society it would be assumed that the older man would be at a disadvantage, in this book the opposite is true. The sons' ardor was considered foolish and not to be taken seriously, when the older and more established man was available.
There are multiple instances of suspects coming from far-flung places, like South America or the Far East. The British Empire was still pretty strong at the time and so a lot of men traveled to far-flung places, but still: were there that many people from exotic places living the the English countryside, or was this authorial embellishment to add to the air of mystery? I've no idea. There are multiple murder plots involving inheritances, including two in which the intended victim once saved the life of a wealthy person far away, and don't realize they have recently inherited considerable wealth. These are puzzle stories, so the crimes aren't committed with a blunt object to the head, they often include clever or mysterious agents of death. But, even for a former burglar, Cleek is remarkably knowledgeable about exotic poisons, and his methods rely on knowing things no one else does. For instance, at one house he drugs them all so that he can go around to the different bedrooms and observe the position everyone sleeps in. When he finds the one who sleeps curled up, instead of stretched out flat, he knows he has the killer.
Cleek's facial ability and his unbelievably complete knowledge of crime of all sorts certainly strain credibility. I'd go so far as to say that his ability to alter his appearance might as well be called magic. Nevertheless, I found it a quite entertaining read. There's never any doubt that Cleek will have the answer, but who cares? This is good popular entertainment from another time, and I enjoyed reading it.
Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces is a detective novel from 1912. It's in public domain, and can be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg or Feedbooks. I got the Feedbooks version, and it was very nicely formatted and a pleasure to read.
Cleek is a burglar and master criminal. He and his associate, a French woman, are responsible for a series of thefts, and to add insult to injury he starts sending letters to Scotland Yard informing them of what he's planning to steal next. At the beginning, he intends to steal the wedding gifts that have been sent to the participants in a high-profile high-society wedding. The police know this, and station men all around the house to try to catch him. They fail, and he succeeds. However, while making his getaway he encounters the niece of the house owner, and instantly falls in love with her beauty and purity and decides to swear off his life of crime.
After this, Cleek becomes a consulting detective for Scotland Yard. He is a clever man who knows all about the criminal classes, and furthermore he has amazing control over his facial features so that he can alter his appearance and assume new identities merely by concentrating. In fact, this is how he carries off the first crime: he assumes the appearance of someone who had legitimate business there. The book is a series of related stories, rather like the Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown books, rather than a novel-length story. But throughout is the overarching theme of Cleek trying to atone for his crimes and win the hand of the young lady whose appearance convinced him to abandon a life of crime.
Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces was published 99 years ago, and it's very interesting to see the differences between the world Hanshaw wrote about and our own. It's hard to know, of course, how much of what he wrote was an accurate reflection of normal English life and how much was literary fashion of the time. For instance, the text is littered with relatively young widows and widowers. I suppose it is likely that mortality rates among the young were much higher then than they are now, but wow. Further, every young woman is beautiful, and nearly all of them marry men considerably older than themselves. There are even a couple of cases in which a man and his young adult son were both courting the same young woman. While in today's society it would be assumed that the older man would be at a disadvantage, in this book the opposite is true. The sons' ardor was considered foolish and not to be taken seriously, when the older and more established man was available.
There are multiple instances of suspects coming from far-flung places, like South America or the Far East. The British Empire was still pretty strong at the time and so a lot of men traveled to far-flung places, but still: were there that many people from exotic places living the the English countryside, or was this authorial embellishment to add to the air of mystery? I've no idea. There are multiple murder plots involving inheritances, including two in which the intended victim once saved the life of a wealthy person far away, and don't realize they have recently inherited considerable wealth. These are puzzle stories, so the crimes aren't committed with a blunt object to the head, they often include clever or mysterious agents of death. But, even for a former burglar, Cleek is remarkably knowledgeable about exotic poisons, and his methods rely on knowing things no one else does. For instance, at one house he drugs them all so that he can go around to the different bedrooms and observe the position everyone sleeps in. When he finds the one who sleeps curled up, instead of stretched out flat, he knows he has the killer.
Cleek's facial ability and his unbelievably complete knowledge of crime of all sorts certainly strain credibility. I'd go so far as to say that his ability to alter his appearance might as well be called magic. Nevertheless, I found it a quite entertaining read. There's never any doubt that Cleek will have the answer, but who cares? This is good popular entertainment from another time, and I enjoyed reading it.
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