It's A Mystery, Yet Not A Crime!

      . . . . Who knows why I haven't  posted in two months?  I don't.  However, unlike this one, there are many mysteries and crimes that are engaging and entertaining.

The Word Is Murder (2017); The Sentence Is Death (2018); A Line To Kill (2021)

This is good, O, very good -- Anthony Horowitz has a series, three so far, which is consciously rather Watson and Sherlock in the present day, so it's Hawthorne and ... ta-Dah! Horowitz.  

This should not work, it should be insufferable at the very least, as character wingman, Horowitz, is portrayed by himself, the writer, as himself, a fabulously successful television writer and writer of novels. Got that?

Horowitz the author doesn't describe himself as character Horowitz as wildly successful, though Horowitz the character does refers frequently to his own / Horowitz the author's works, wildly popular television series such as Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders, to not quite as successful novel, The Silk Road (one of his novels featuring Sherlock Holmes), to the wildly popular Alex Rider YA series -- which became also a wildly successful television series.

Here equally are references to detective and crime fiction by many other writers, past and present. 

One guesses then, this is why this series works, The references to Horowitz's own and others' fictions and television programs is about what is operationally effective in these works, in terms of character, plot, what audiences want, expect and like in a crime and mystery, whether fiction or ‘true crime’. Not least audiences want appealing, interesting locations, or least a milieu which the audience isn’t likely to inhabit itself. An example would be the stews of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh Rebus series. 

So, in A Line To Kill, we are on the Channel Island of Alderney, picturesque but certainly a distance from a reader like myself, who, previous to such crime series, only sense of the Channel Islands -- Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney -- was these are breeds of dairy cattle common even in the USA. Nor more did we know anything about other island groups that are part of the UK, such as the Shetland Islands. But that has changed, due to crime fiction and teleision.

Within author Horowitz's novel, the author and character draw our attention to what author Horowitz knows we know, such as Ann Cleeves's Perez novels set on Shetland Isles, both wildly successful as novels, and a very successful television series. But even more so for A Line To Kill, for instance, there are references to an older, but also very successful television series, Bergerac, which takes place on Alderney’s neighboring island of Jersey. Then, to convolute even more so (beware writers looking to have fun with their own work!), Bergerac’s title character is played by the young John Nettles, who portrays Chief Inspector Barnaby in the television series Midsomer Murders, which may be the most popular scripted crime drama on British television, for which author Horowitz -- and character Horowitz, have written many of the scripts. How meta can we get? 

Yet! Beyond even that, Alderney has hundreds of nazi built fortifications and other WWII left overs from the nazi occupation, including mass grave sites from the four labor camps, thus character Horowitz thinks of the not as wildly successful television series in the UK, but much more liked in the US, Island At War (in which, let us not forget, how perfectly Lawrence Fox played a callow nazi officer ....). 

One of those nazi era Alderney artifacts plays a part in the plot.

These observations by character Horowitz, are always in the context of what Investigator Hawthorn is doing or not doing, or not telling, character Horowitz, etc., and the emotional and professional cost this is to the character writer/narrator, who is supposed to portray this up-and-coming famous, infallible detective. These observations contribute to the portrayal of the writer's character as writer, whose job it is to be a writer / novelist, at least of the sort of writer author/character Horowitz is.

First and foremost, despite whatever joy of inspiration may or may not manifest now and again, this is a job of work, and often, not that pleasant.  It's even more of a slog when this latest project is utterly adored by his publishers and readers who want more More MORE of it (see: Agatha Christie and Poirot, or even Doyle and Sherlock).  These days character Horowitz's job is shadowing Private Investigator Hawthorne on a case and then writing it up the case’s investigation as a book targeted to mass audience.  Which is the job that author Horowitz has given to character Horowitz, yes?

These books are a hoot, their cleverness quite entertaining, and no more taxing to the brain than watching Midsomer Murders, which Horowitz the author made into one of the most successful television programs of all time. Again, here we have a wildly successful set of novels, by Carolyn Graham, turned into a wildly successful television series, author shouted out by character Horowitz. 

I wish to give further credit to Horowitz: these are books I'd recommend to anyone who wants to write genre fiction of any sort.  Horowitz illustrates, without telling us, that one must study, really study, the masters, past and present, to know what one is doing. In no genre is it more fundamental than in crime and mystery to know the genre is which one is writing, and understand every nut and bolt of fabrication, why it is there, how it got there, and how it fits with all the other nuts and bolts. This leads to the understanding that the writer must also know a vast deal more than even this, to construct a satisfying work of crime and mystery.  This is particularly so for mystery writers who wish a career in writing crime and mystery for television.

So, well, maybe these books aren't for everyone, but they sure do work for me. Ha!

P.S. for another wildly successful crime / mystery series, which is also a wildly successful television series --  see: Andrea Camilleri's Comisario Montalbano series. In fact, it's in fact two television series, including the non-novel prequel series spun off, Young Montalbano.

This year, Camilleri died of being 87 years old. Camilleri had squirreled away a manuscript of what was to be the final novel in the series, to be published only after he died. I have just read this novel, Riccardino (2021), #28 in the Inspector Montalbano series.

By sheer coincidence, in Riccardino, character Montalbano in the novel has also had a television show made from his life and cases by 'The Author', who presumably is Camilleri. Novel Montalbano seeks to escape the direction of both The Author and the television series Montalbano, i.e. the created character is intent on out-smarting the creator of the television version of himself the character, and The Author of the television version. But whereas Horowitz's Horowitzs refer to other crime series and protagonist such Christie's Poirot, or Rankin's Rebus, Camilleri/Montalbano references, among others, Pirandello’s play, Six Characters In Search of An Author.  This had many previously ardent Montalbano readers feeling betrayed and disappointed . . . .  In many ways Riccardino leads one to think this is how Camilleri handled his resentment of a character and series that too many, from his publisher, to his family's inheritance, to his readers and watchers, would not allow him to leave behind and move on. Again, see: Christie and Doyle!

~~~~~~~~~~~

     . . . . NYC got Omicron for Christmas, shutting us down within three day at the start of Christmas week, so, no, we hadn't a Merry Christmas.  But we did have a sweet, lovely and loving one.  Also a delicious one. It's been fairly wintery too -- with days like today, where we stay right in the mid 30's, even, possibly, a bit of snow flurry. Any snow in our era of  Climate Catastrophe -- which gave us more and longer strings of days more spectacularly beautiful than ever experienced living here -- would be a bit of Holiday miracle. Who knows?  Not I!

Crime In Our Hands (Books), Crime On Our Screens (TV)

     . . . . Horowitz, Anthony. (2016 in the UK, 2017 in the US) Magpie Murders.

In some ways this is an odd, if clever, duck of a crime novel that is two novels in one.

There is The Magpie Murders itself, the last novel by Alan Conway, a best selling crime author whose series features Atticus Pünd, a detective much like Poirot, though German, not Belgian, and rather younger than Poirot, having gone through internment in a nazi death camp. His rescue by the British allowed him to remove to England, thus the series's plots are set in the 1950's. The second, the framing novel, is set in our present, narrated via Susan Ryland, the verging on middle-aged editor of Conway's Atticus Pünd series.

Throughout the two novels, past and present, do homage to the golden age of British crime fiction divas such as Christie and Allingham. They also reference constantly the crime novel series that Horowitz has been instrumental in producing, adapting and writing series for television, which are many, and all of which I've watched, just starting with Agatha Christie's Poirot, Foyle's War and o my, but not only! -- Midsomer Murders!  To be sure, the opening chapter of the framed Conway novel feels right out of the opening shots of the pre-Neal Dudgeon Barnabys of Midsomer Murders, with a pan of the village and the character-suspects

Magpie Murders was a thoroughly engaging whodunit until -- soon in the second section of the framing novel, with us back to Susan Ryland's pov and narration. It sags then, going on too long, and ultimately the solution of the crime within it and who did it, is as unsatisfying as the one at the conclusion of the framed Atticus Pünd Magpie Murders. 

.... Horowitz first developed the concept of Magpie Murders during the first season of Midsomer Murders, which premiered in 1997. He has stated that he wanted the novel to "be more than just a murder mystery story" and to be "a sort of a treatise on the whole genre of murder mystery writing. How the writers come up with the ideas; how these books are formed."[1] ....

It is that indeed, which is entertaining and even useful in itself for anyone who likes to read and watch such series, and anyone who wishes to read them.  Additionally, the book is as overstuffed as candied fruit in a Christmas fruit cake with real life best selling crime series writers’ and reviewers encomiums to Pünd, such as Ian Rankin, Ann Cleeves, etc.  Does one need to say Horowitz is adapting this novel for Britbox and PBS? 

.... In July 2020 Deadline announced that PBS’ Masterpiece would adapt the novel into a six-part drama series and air it in the US, and will air the series on BritBox in the UK.[12] ...

This Horowitz guy, never stops writing!  Check it out here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

     . . . . And yet more village crime!

In For A Murder - W Jak Morderstwo in Polis (2021) Netfix Poland Original.

It revolves around a murder that takes place in a small town in Poland and Magda, a resident in the neighbourhood takes it upon her to investigate the case and solve the murder. However, when the case draws back to some past incidents, the events that follow seem to get complicated.

An updated, Polish Agatha Christie given the screen treatment we know so well by now from Brit tv, like Midsomer Murders etc. and by now later updates such as the Daniel Craig Knives Out.   We even begin with long tracking shots of a lovely youngish blonde woman, riding a bicycle on lovely wooded tracks, getting lovely veg and fruit and honey from the street market, returning home to cute kids in a lovely house. But the husband, nope, not so much . . . 

The W/V necklace we see here is significant to the crime and mystery In For A Murder.

I enjoyed this very much, not least because of its location, which isn't either England or the US,

 in the same way I so enjoy Candice Renoir, the French policier featuring a blonde verging on middle-age detective who is a divorced mom, kind of messy, anxious about her weight, but not that much! brillian  -- and whose smile should be registered as a dangerous weapon.  She turns that smile on someone and any resistance goes out the door.

Martin Walker's The Coldest Case: A Short, Sort Of Book Review

 

Walker, Martin (2021) The Coldest Case: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel. The latest installment.

Walker recently won a French literary prize for representation of Southern France and culture to the world.'

I have an additional affection for Walker’s series now too.  I introduced these books to M, back in the summer of 2020.  They helped distract her from the ordeal of cancer tests and treatments, when it was possible to be distracted still, without morphine. She died last month.  I wish she'd been able to read this latest Bruno.

Areas near the French city of Marseille have been hit by a series of wildfires, burning homes and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents.

I'd expected the next installment of the Brunos would deal with the pandemic as central to Provencal milieu. But it's the wildfire-drought summer of 2016 - 2017 - 2018 - 2019, or maybe even 2020?  Which year it is, is not specified, but it could be any one of them, or even this summer, except of course the book was going through its production process then. However, since there's no reference to previous drought and wildfire summers, this reader assumes 2016.* There are many references to the dangers to the Dordogne in particular, and the series of caves filled with prehistoric paintings, of which Lescaux is only the most famous, though may be not the most important. Which again suggests 2016, because, though wildfires were not unusual in this region in the summers previous to 2016, the extent of the burning and length of time they burned, was new.  Now, like in California, this is the norm.

Castelnaud-la-Chapelle village with Château de Castelnaud castle, Dordogne, Perigord noir, France

The locals – Bruno’s idea of course – employ (a castle that exists in reality) Château de Castelnaud’s re-created trebuchets throughout a set-piece’s endless night to hurl tonnages of ice and water into the advancing conflagration's front lines, retarding it long enough for France’s military fire-fighting planes to be able to fly (so low they have to go, it’s too dangerous at night in the mountains) and spray water on the front – and, not incidentally, as the series is all about the local,** save the castle.

Holy cow!  A litter of puppies are born!

Plus, for the murder mystery, and the historical elements of the Brunos’ formulae, Stasi surveillance documents and trained East German infiltrators from the 1980’s are central.

There's an attempted rape upon a young doctoral archaeologist by a gendarme, which rape is extraneous to all of the story lines, so the reader wonders if a gendarme assaulted a friend of the author? Or else, since she's essential to the solution of the local mystery, but never gets any page time, or time to spend with the local interlocked powers that be/friends, which is lamented several times by Bruno -- this is how author gives her some recognition? Balzac the Bassett's first sired litter of puppies get much more attention than this young archaeologist. Constant attention in fact, even though nobody’s seen them except on Bruno’s fone. Everyone cares about the puppies. Sadly then, we understand this way just what an Outsider she is to this local influencer network intersecting with others of their ilks throughout France in the police, military, media, education, politics, finance, medicine and law (hmm what does it mean that the Church isn't represented in this group?) -- just as it has been at least since the Renaissance. Nobody cares about the young archaeologist Nobody, unconnected to Somebodies. But they do feel vaguely guilty about it, since the author does.   (How much book are we willing make, if this character recurs down the line, as so many do, it will turn out she's the niece of Somebody?)

On the other hand – puppies! And all our recurring characters, as do we readers, know Balzac since he was a pup, and love him well, while nobody knows the archaeologist, including we the readers. Local social circle-hierarchies are cruel as families to those who aren't really part of them.

This means, though, I can still look forward to a Pandemic in Provence Bruno. Or Pandemic and wildfires in Provence, just like 2020 and 2021.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  *    We were there in Provence between those of 2017 and 2018.  Wolves had been seen for the first time in decades, if not centuries, in the mountains of our friends' village.  I asked then if it were possible the wildfires had sent them to the region, but no one knew.

**  Which makes this series part of the mysteries classified as "cosies", one supposes?  That this is so contributes no little to its success, one further supposes, as the thriller aspects of the larger plots are often not plausible if one looks at them for one second.

I Moved To New Zealand

     . . . . After dinner on February 28th, I had no idea I was moving to New Zealand, particularly as I was already living in New Orleans due to NOLA Reconnect 2.  But I opened the first season of Brokenwood Mysteries then, and went for the second episode on March 1st. And there I've been all month every night after dinner. What follows are snapshots of how that happened while it happened.  Emphasis on is on snapshots. This is a fresh set of eyes, from an entirely different part of the world, landing upon a 7 year old television series purely by the happenchance of subscribing to AcornTV.

Brokenwood Mysteries, Six seasons (2014-2019), via Acorn.

     Season 1 (2014) New Zealand.  

The series centers "Senior" (title of address at the police station) Mike Shepherd, a detective in possession of the, by now, overly familiar shticks of the quirky detective.  He’s got a music genre fixation – Mike's is Country (Rebus’s a certain subset of 1960’s rock; Bosch’s is jazz, etc.), coupled with love of good wine (instead of whiskey, Scotch, Irish or beer).

He’s got the out-of-date car, that auto aficionados admire, a 1971 Holden Kingswood, but which, notably does not impress Detective Kristen Simms and Detective Constable Breen, Mike's distinctly much younger, fitter, more attractive and more down-to-earth, second and thirds. They don't like Country music either.  Mike’s an out-of-shape, rumpled mess with multiple ex-wives, whom most women still find very attractive, plus he has a dislike of contemporary technology.

Just off the top of one’s head, how many variations of this detective character can I come up with in 60 seconds, starting with Rebus and Longmire and Vera Stanhope (though sans the music and ex-wives, but she does like her Scotch)? Even Midsomer Murders’ Barnaby, when it comes to tech. Such a contrast with CBC’s  Murdoch’s Mysteries Murdoch's fascination with all new technology.

BM has beautiful, soothing, o so gazeable, rural locations that one never gets impatient seeing, shot in the series’s location in New Zealand’s greater Auckland region (North Island), 

including Helensville, whose post office stands in for Brokenwood’s small, but astonishingly resourced with tech and manpower (unexplained), police station. The closest city, Hamilton, is about 2 ½  hours by car from the fictional Brokenwood. Hamilton is a very minor though significant player in Brokenwood life, referred to constantly as a comparison to tiny (pop. 5000) Brokenwood, as well as a destination -- but we never break screen wall and go there ourselves.

     Gotten through season 2 (2015). Into season 3 (2016) now. Got a kick from the good-natured poking of fun at the crazy fans of the LOtR’s franchise who come to Brokenwood to tour Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth (that this isn't possible is part of the plot!), especially the big felt and foam spider, in the first ep, “The Black Widower.”  Impressed also by its pro environmental and endangered species protection message, for spiders, fresh water sharks, and the forests and the fragile habitats of shore lines. Another clever episode of season 3 was the Christmas episode, “A Merry Bloody Christmas.” which had seasonal, touching bits by Mike as to the belief in Santa as real. It turns out his nephew is an adult Down’s syndrome person, who receives tremendous joy from Santa, true joy, not commercial, not made-up or delusional, but true joy. This is the season the series revealed itself more clever in its writing than might perhaps be expected from the previous seasons. And sensitive too, but never ever sentimental, which isn’t possible even for Mike, who seems to possess a bit of second sight and romantic viewpoint, due to younger, thus more cynical, and down-to-earth, Simms and Breen.

     Into season 4 (2017) now. We’ve already recycled domestic abuse and in-the-closet stories, and now we are here again. I’m getting the sense this show isn’t in the least concerned with consistency of tone, or attitude. It seems focused far more on character, which, increasingly, as the minor regulars re-appear in the episodes, and characters from past episodes return, seems to remind the viewer that ultimately character is fixed.  Once a murderer – be prepared, s/he will murder again  -- particularly she.

     Season 5 (2018) They are going for episode fill-ins around the main plot, having Kristin sort- of-intrigued-by, but not interested by the courtship of Kahu, a gorgeous and smart young Maori, --  and somewhat of a playa. He is not the Maori character, Jared. (played by Hema Taylor) from earlier seasons, who was the only “cool” character on the show. The website for the series says nothing about Jared’s disappearance, or the sudden arrival of his ‘cousin,’ Kahu Taylor (played by Rawiri Jobe). Jared’s character reappears at the end of the season; the website says nothing about the reappearance either. I was glad to see his return. Throughout, the season also turned more bonkers, because so many of the characters are classified out-and-out as, ah, um, mentally disturbed, shall we say. Some of these are seen in other episodes too.  The most deranged of this season’s episodes is #4, “Dark Angel,” the plot of which centers the derelict Brokenwood Institution for the Insane.

     Season 6 already! (2019) Over the last two – three seasons, re-inserting characters from previous episodes into storylines of the later episodes.  It’s a good plan.  It makes BM more of a ‘village’ mystery series. But it's also darker even if more cosy than ever.  First episode of 6th season is set within Brokenwood’s steampunk community, “The Power of Steam” – PLUS – we have an incel.  Holy cow.  Is this the first depiction of Steampunk culture – as opposed to attempts to make movies, etc. from it? on screen? This isn’t a pleasant view due to quite unpleasant characters.  Certainly, inclusion, despite the trumpeting the the big point of the steampunk community is inclusion for the excluded, is not (always) the point, as depicted in the community's cast. or in the story line . . . .  Woo -- the final episode, “Dead and Buried,” brings back three female characters, all murderers, from past seasons.  They are in the private, for profit, Brokenwood Women’s prison, which isn’t like any prison one is going to encounter in the US – and maybe not in New Zealand either. Yoga classes? Knitting classes with real knitting needles? Shouldn’t this population -- as we know the characters from previous episodes -- be in an asylum for the criminally insane?  The female warden wears 5 inch stilettos, form fitting, sexy, yet elegant fashionable outfits – this seems more like a subset of porn that was once and maybe still is, of women in prison.  Plus, we got a lot of butch going on. But then, BM has had many episodes that include teh gay, one of whom is the minor, but recurring pharmacist character, who in the course of the series, becomes Brokenwood’s mayor.

This is an odd series, maybe we could use ‘quirky’ to describe it?  It didn’t seem to start that way, but somewhere in season 3 it started to make a turn to gothic and bonkers, while also, starting with the fake Peter Jackson locations for the LOTR films, getting in, sub rosa, comments about diversity and inclusion, the evils of raping the environment and destroying creatures generally, and endangered ones, particularly. These are the moments that have kept me watching, because while embedded entirely plausibly, they always come unexpectedly. One almost wonders if these 'message' moments are so deliberately composed that unless one already has gotten the message the watcher won't notice?  But I still appreciate them.

Most of all, because without them, one wouldn’t keep watching at all, it's the chemistry among the cast of characters that keeps one watching. The writers never made the dreadful error of attempting to manufacture chemistry or interest in the characters’ interactions via that exhausted “Will the male and female detectives finally recognize how hot they are for each other and DO IT!”  Brokenwood Mysteries doesn’t Do That.  Thank goodness.

I looked forward to spending time after dinner every night with Superior Mike Shepherd, Detective Krista Simms, Detective Constable Sam Breen and Medical Examiner, Gina Kadinsky, and the chemistry among them manufactured by their shared work. I like these people! I liked getting to know a lot of the other, minor characters too, not least Frankie “Frodo” Odos, as the guy for whom nothing ever quite works out, and Mrs. Jean Marlowe, who really does know everything about everyone in Brokenwood, without whom Shepherd would never solve a single murder.

     Season 7 (2020) of Brokenwood Mysteries begins on Acorn Tv on March 29th.  Then it will all really be over. 

Ireland Is Not The Western: Tana French's The Searcher

      . . . . These Are Some Times, happenin', eh? since I last posted.  The night before last el V was wakened by a clap of thunder from the big storm pounding the City.  He woke with a cry, leapt from the the bed, madly scrembling for clothes, yelling at me to get dressed and GET OUT! thinking a bomb had fallen.

That was the night I'd finished reading Tana French's The Searcher (2020). With this novel, she's back to earlier form, and in some ways surpasses the earlier books that were very good themselves and made her justified reputation. The critics one and all informed us at the top The Searcher is modeled on one of John Ford's swan songs of movie Western, The Searchers (1956). I know where the critics tipped to that idea, or think they did, most likely because they were told so think that by the press release. 

That’s the single weak element in French’s novel  – ruminations about young males and masculinity and the closing of the US's old West.  Ya really think an old guy in Ireland is gonna muse on that? Or a Chicago cop retired to Ireland?  One feels compelled here to speculate: did French read Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, published in March 2019, while engaged writing this novel. It sure feels like it because those few sentences seem grafted from some other place upon a narrative and tone that otherwise feels organically sprung from the place where the novel is set, which sure as hell is the greatest antithesis to the vast, dry spaces of the west Texas-New Mexico-Arizona territory of Ford’s The Searchers.

Rural East Ireland

The rest of the elements in French’s The Searcher are also the inversion of the elements of Ford’s film, most of which I won’t mention for fear of spoilers, which would be a pity. But one can safely state that John Wayne, playing an ex-confederate, is nothing like French’s protagonist, Cal, the protagonist and point-of-view, a retired Chicago cop, dropped into an out-of-the-way contemporary rural community on the island of Ireland. Thus I truly wish the critics had shut up about The Searchers, because it’s a red herring, which adds nothing to the narrative, but rather, to the discerning reader, rather detracts.

The reason this novel is satisfying is because it doesn’t follow any previously generic template.  I can almost always predict exactly where things are going, etc. in any genre of fiction (or movie or television show), at this point.  But not in this novel of French's. 

Among the charming elements, the novel contains a Greek chorus of  ravens, the keen observers, commenting on the action and particularly upon Cal. He views them as a community, with both group and individual personality and expression.  When he thinks to himself the ravens are laughing at him, you agree, from the description of their action and sound. French does this though, without anthropomorphicizing the birds. The protag treats them with respect, and despite having a shotgun, and a being a hunter, he wouldn't think of shooting them, especially just for fun. It's deep rural Ireland, and the ravens belong there.

I took 5 nights to read it -- not binging through (not there's time anyway to binge through a novel in These Times).  It's so well written word for word and composed in rise and fall of action, with lovely rest places now and again, one is happy not to dash through in a single burst, but linger in the world of the novel for a while.

John Ford's The Searchers

Books & TV Because I Am Still Sick and Cannot Socialize - Or Do Anything Productive

     . . . . A holiday season in which I need to be in physical proximity and solidarity with my friends and others 'like us' far more than being online -- I'm too sick to inflict myself on anyone.

El V came down with something hours after returning from Cuba a week Sunday night.  Two day later, ay-up, I have it too. He is nearly well again. But the thing, whatever it is, just sits in my throat and head and does not move. Sore throat, headache, exhaustion.  I'm drinking gallons of water and herbal teas.  I sleep about 11 - 12 hours a night. It's not helping that the weather's very damp, and though it warmed today, the temperatures will be plunging again soon as the polar vortex bends its might force over us.

Most excellent crime writer, Ann Cleeves.

   . . . .But I have books.  Have recently begun reading mystery author Ann Cleeves's series.  She's the author of the Vera Stanhope mysteries set in the dramatic city of Newcastle and the scenic Northumberland district, which as the basis of one of many of our favorite television series, Vera, starring Brenda Blythen.  I've watched all the series of Vera, but never have read one of the novels. But today I was able to bring home one of them, The Moth Catcher, from which one of the last of the Vera series was adapted.  I'm so curious to learn how differently the familiar characters appear in print from on screen.

Lately she's branched into another series set in the Shetland Islands, which are equally dramatically located and equally suspenseful.  These too are now a television series, but I haven't been able to see any of them. I began reading the Shetland series this last weekend, and have two more of them now.

Naomi Franckom, the insurance investigator.  Review of The Last Panthers here.

     . . . . As for watching, there are the dvds of The Last Panthers (2016) season 1, Sky Atlantic.

Opening music: David Bowie.  A European television series, acquired by Sundance TV.  Glossy, stylish, sophisticated production values.  Multi-language (French, English and Serbian), multi-European cast.  Locations range from London and Marseille, to Hungary and Bulgaria, Serbia.

It's very good. And very smart.

Watching via dvds from Netflix.

 . . . Netflix offerings recently available for streaming, which I have not yet gotten to, are

Medici: Masters of Florence (2016) season 1, Italy's Rai television production.  Dubbed into English.  The scuttlebutt is that it's OK, but despite actors such as Dustin Hoffman, it nothing at all special.  One person who has seen it commented that actor, Richard Madden, playing Cosimo Medici (son of Giovanni, Hoffman's role) looked like the Red Wedding was more fun than this.

More information about Four Seasons in Havana here.

The one I'm really looking forward to is a Spanish production of Four Seasons of Havana, based on  Leonardo Padura four crime novels published over 1991-98, taking in Cuba’s Special Period, when it was plunged into penury by the break-up of the Soviet Union, and an end to Soviet aid.  I really liked the novels, though the titles in English were all colors, not seasons. I've probably been to all the locations in the series.

The first major TV series from Spain’s Tornasol Films, a force in Spanish/Latin American movie production, producer of Juan José Campanella’s Academy Award winning “The Secret in Their Eyes,” “Four Seasons in Havana” is also the first Caribbean Noir. 

Reading Wednesday - The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons - No Spoilers

Dan Simmons is well known as the author of such expansive science fiction and fantasy novels such as the Hyperion and the Endymion series. The list of his novels is long, and almost all their titles a classical references, meaning classical in the sense of Greco-Roman mythology as seen above, or 19th century English and American literary canon, from Drood (Charles Dickens) to Carrion Comfort (Gerard Manley Hopkins) and The Hollow Man (which whether or not in T.S. Eliot it was "Men" still brings the poet to mind) -- and even Endymion, beyond the Greek myth is also a poem by Keats).

Simon's latest novel, The Fifth Heart (2015), mashes together several nineteenth  bold-face names in American and English Gilded Age fiction and history, authors and characters alike. This is a fin-de-siècle era meta novel of genres, a text constructed upon a variety of narrative and point of view modes. *

The tale's hub is the 1885 mysterious suicide of Clover Adams, historian Henry Adams wife. The narrative opens in 1893 with Sherlock Holmes, who is in the midst of his three-year disappearance after the events at Reichenbach Falls;  he's accepted the assignment -- presented to him by whom? --  to investigate what Holmes has been assured was not a suicide but Clover's murder. Though Holmes appears certain from the very beginning of the novel that Clover was murdered, suicide is also a theme from the first pages.

Present from the beginning too, is Henry James, who introduces Holmes to John and Clara Hay, Sherlock's companion, so-to-speak in his assignment, and who narrates in the manner of his own novels, as the detached, but invested observer, such as Fanny Assingham in The Golden Bowl.  However, there other narrations going on in this novel, to which drawing the reader's attention the narrative voice(s?) go out its / their way to do.

Among the historical figures we have the character of John Hay, who was the unpaid second secretary to President Lincoln during the Civil War, serving as assistant to the official secretary, John George Nicholay.  After the war, Hay tried his hand at journalism, worked abroad for the state department, co-authored with Nicholay the ten- volume Abraham Lincoln: A History (1890).  Hay married banking magnate Amasa Stone's wealthy daughter, Clara Louise Stone, in 1874, making a salary moot for the rest of his life. Settled in Washington D.C., he served in various capacities at elevated levels of government, including as Secretary of State for presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

Clara Stone Hay by Anders Zorn (1860–1920),

Clarence King on far right. King was an American geologist, mountaineer, and author. He served as the first director of the United States Geological Survey from 1879 to 1881. He also was perpetually broke. Adams and Hays often bailed him out.

Henry Adams, my favorite American historian, invented the discipline of medieval history for academia in the United States at Harvard. He wrote the brilliant multi-volume history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, which as great-grandson and grandson of the two Adams POTUSes, he was in the most excellent of positions to do. He wrote copiously for the high end journals of the day and also for newspapers, particularly in the run-up to the Civil War. His quirky, self-embittered Education of  Henry Adams covers a lot of the ground leading up to the Civil War, and the war as conducted abroad, who, as son and private secretory to Francis Adams, a senator and once presidential candidate for the Free Soil party, and the head of the Lincoln's Legation to St. James, put Henry again in the best position to do. He wrote two anonymously published novels, both of which are rumored to have a female figure modeled on Clover Adams.The political novel, Democracy, was vicious about presidents Grant and Garfield.  Some say that Andrew Johnson was also satirized in Democracy -- but it's not possible to satirize the disaster that Johnson and his administration were. As an Adams, with a brother who was very good at making money, Henry Adams was a comfortably wealthy fellow.

Hay and Clara, Henry Adams and Clover, in company with the most manly of them all, Clarence King (King could give Theodore Roosevelt more than a run for the money in the outdoor manliness race), formed the most select of social circle clubs, calling themselves The Five of Hearts. Adams and Hay were such close friends their mansions were built adjacently, on D.C.'s H Street. It was their friend, Clarence King, who, without an abode of his own, presented the Five of Hearts club with the famous five hearts-embossed tea set and stationary. Receiving a summons on that stationary to drink tea on H Street would bring even "a president running barefoot across town in the snow" -- though the White House was just across Lafayette Square from the club's H Street mansions, so such an invitation might not quite as much a heart stopper as the clubbers believed.

The American class system is a strong theme running through The Fifth Heart. Henry and Clover, John and Clara, Clarence King, by the advantages of birth, possess the wealth and power that put them at the apex of privilege.  Henry James, by virtue of his own family's solidly middle-class intellectual affiliations, is among the intellectual and artistic elite, acceptable to the company of the highest-toned aristocrats. However, James lived mostly abroad because the U.S. is too raw for him. Naturally then, it is James who meditates on who is and who is not a gentleman and what a gentleman is and does. Neither is he manly, nor is he rich -- he frets constantly about his lack of financial and popular success. And there's that shifty, unidentified narrator, who keeps drawing attention to -- we presume -- himself, and who narrates extensively upon the others' speculations about who belongs and who doesn't. Finally there's Sherlock, who is no gentleman at all, not even American, and, unlike the others, a character.

Also, Sherlock is tall.

Presumably then, the title itself says that in some way The Fifth Heart is in dialectic with the Five of Hearts club.  We should keep in mind that the average of the combined heights of all five of the members of The Five of Hearts Club was 5 feet 3 inches. These were little people.  Their room for drinking tea with their Hearts tea set was made with furniture and other furnishings scaled to their littleness. They were little in other ways: anti-semitic (Adams), anti-woman (King) and anti-immigrant (Hay). They were snobs, mean with their snobbery, and provincial in their snobbery, for all their traveling in other climes and acquisition of the most rare, expensive and beautiful objects of art and decoration. They could have come out of James's The Golden Bowl, Daisy Miller and The Americans.

This is a novel all of whose elements (except, perhaps Holmes) are of great import to me as an historian, particularly Henry and Clover Adams.  Hay, like Nicholay and Adams, are essential to the understanding of so much American history. For a long time Henry James was my favorite novelists. A novelist who mapped many of his characters directly upon the people he knew. This includes the Adamses, as in his short story, "Pandora", in which the central figure is Henry Adams.

I personally am certain that Clover Adams tragically took her own life.

Melancholia, as the disturbances brought by depression and bi-polarity were known as in those days, ran in her family on the maternal side.  She and Henry were no longer as close as they had been initially. Much of that was Henry Adams's own bitter disappointment that his great historical studies of early America, Jefferson's and Madison's administrations, did not achieve praise and wide readership. It is also hinted the bitterness came because he'd never become POTUS, or even a Senator.  (It was said among various of his contemporaries that born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Henry Adams expected the presidency would be given to him on a silver platter, nothing he had to work to get.) Another contribution was his sense that he was born into a world for which he hadn't received the training to be successful -- something that happens to many people as they age, and the world changes rapidly.

Ultimately a self-centered fellow, Henry didn't, or couldn't, provide Clover the tender attention she should have been receiving -- and as well, schooled in New England repression, she rejected attention, comfort and succor.

That Adams's eyes wandered to other, more happy and lively women -- happier and livelier than himself too -- is not anything for which it seems Clover's suicide should be blamed. It was another symptom of her illness, not the cause of suicide. Moreover there are barely even hints that the very physically fastidious Adams ever was physically unfaithful. If infatuation caused Clover's suicide there would have been few wives left alive in the Washington of that era, including Clara Hay. The historical record shows that in 1887, James Tuttleton wrote:

John Hay fell in love with Nannie Lodge, the beautiful wife of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Their affair was conducted by indirections so circumspect, in the gossipy Washington society of the time, that their usually “thwarted assignations” could only have caused them both continual frustration. 

There's also a great deal about both Hay and Adams's later life love affairs in Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (2012) by Natalie Dykstra.

Henry Adams commissioned this mourning memorial to his wife, Marian (Clover) Hooper Adams. 

More than likely the death of her dearly beloved father triggered a deep depression from which Clover never recovered.

I recoil from mash up fiction generally, but this one, with the characters it has, the historical era, was an exception, so much so I went out of my way to obtain a copy.

-------------------------------

*  Just as a great deal of The Fifth Heart's text is built out from the previous works of Doyle and James, and books about them, and the central figures, such as The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends 1880-1918  by Patricia O'Toole (1990).