Review: The Man in Lower Ten

The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Never did a book so deserve my "plot-relies-on-coincidence" tag. Coincidences are everywhere, which quickly undermined my confidence that the resolution wouldn't be some kind of cheat. It isn't, at least not in that sense (more about that later).

It's as if the author only allowed herself a certain number of cast members, so she had to keep connecting them to each other and having them encounter each other in different coincidental ways. For example: the narrator, a lawyer, travels from Washington to Pittsburgh to show an industrialist some evidence in a case they're both interested in and get his deposition about it. While there, he sees a picture of the industrialist's granddaughter, who also happens to be the lawyer's partner's girlfriend, and who the lawyer also happens to meet on the train back to Washington, where an employee of the industrialist is murdered. The lawyer partners later go out to dinner, and randomly see the defendant they're proceeding against in the case I mentioned before. The narrator's life is spared twice by coincidences, too, which do at least also create complications for him.

Having said that, the prose is smooth and assured, so much so that the author can have the narrator say "I'm not an experienced storyteller, I'm telling this in the wrong order" and actually be using that to increase the tension with foreshadowing. Apparently she was known as the founder of the "had I but known" style, and there's plenty of it here.

As a pre-World War I American gentleman (he owns polo ponies and also rides to hounds), the narrator is, of course, excessively solicitous of ladies, especially but not solely ones he happens to be attracted to, and so does some stupid things in the name of not dragging his love interest and her secrets into the light. He reminded me very much of the narrator of Anna Katharine Green's The Leavenworth Case in that regard. There must be scope for present-day authors to use the current sense of what's Not Done as a similar delaying factor in the resolution of their plots, though you'd probably get caned for it on social media given who has the strongest sense of things being Not Done in our time.

I never did get straight whether the murder victim was the intended one or whether he was murdered by mistake, and it kind of doesn't matter given other (coincidental) events surrounding the murder. We find out the murderer not by the work of the amateur detective, but by someone turning up and confessing to their role in events, which to me is an unsatisfying way of resolving a murder mystery. It's as if the author is saying that the murder was only a way of driving the plot, that it's the struggles and interactions of the characters, including the wrongly accused (the narrator, though he never actually gets arrested), that are the story, and the solution of the mystery is just something that has to be delivered because it's expected; the investigation is not the story, and the detective is not the protagonist. I've read a couple of other books like this ( The Terriford Mystery and The Phone Booth Mystery: A Traditional British Mystery , and I find them disappointing. This one has other strengths, which partly make up for that disappointment, but only partly.

Well written, but structurally disappointing, because of the coincidences and because solving the mystery isn't really the main plot.

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Review: Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife

Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife by Deston J. Munden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is much compared with Legends & Lattes , and for once that's accurate. Not only were they discovered by the same "tastemaker" (which is apparently a thing now), they both feature a retired Orcish warrior taking on a cozy project in food-and-beverage retail. My own feeling is that if you liked one, you'll probably like the other, though this isn't just a clone of Legends; the plot is different in detail, and so is the main character's backstory, which plays into the frontstory a lot more in this book than in the other.

The MC is not just an orc, but an undead orc, killed and then raised by a typical evil necromancer a couple of hundred years before and forced to commit atrocities as a mind-controlled thrall. He and five others broke free from the necromancer's control (exactly how is carefully not stated), destroyed him, and founded a city in which the living, the undead and those summoned from other realms could live together peacefully and prosperously. He then served the city for a long time as a member of an elite guard, but now a new ruler is taking over, and she decides it's time for him to retire from the guard, undergo a necromantic process that restores him to something much closer to life, and do what he wants instead of serving the will of others. But what does he want?

Back during the relatively brief time he was alive, he was an Orcish war chef (which I kept reading as "war chief," but it's chef), a special traditional role that's like an army cook, but respected. So he decides to open a restaurant and start cooking again. After so long, he doesn't know if he can do it, but he rapidly acquires a group of friends who encourage him: a professor who's also some sort of gang boss (but in a good way?), his restaurant employees, and a ten-year-old girl he happens to meet. This young girl turns out to have a connection to his past that requires some working through.

Although this is definitely cozy, it's not just slice-of-life without conflict. There's a rabble-rouser in the city who hates the undead (and the summoned, but mainly the undead) and believes that the living should have everything, and he and his faction cause escalating problems. And the orc and one of his oldest friends, another of the six founders of the city, come into conflict over the little girl's heritage and what it means.

From a plot point of view, all of this works excellently, and the MC has a considerable character arc which is believable and moving, involving a change of name - which is why I'm not using his name in my review. There are some indications that the author needs more experience (and more editorial input), though. To me, the employees weren't distinct enough, and I had to keep thinking hard to remember which was which, even though they were each a different kind of undead or summoned entity (it says at one point, I think, that he'd also hired living employees, but if this was true I missed which one that was, unless the vampire doesn't count as truly undead). At one point, there are two different and contradictory explanations for the origin of the orphanage (noblemen's buildings claimed by the state or a donation by the former owner) within a single paragraph. A person has grey hair on one page and brown hair on the next. I've already mentioned the careful skirting of the plot hole about how mind-controlled thralls broke out of their conditioning and overthrew the necromancer. I was sometimes taken by surprise, too, by how much or how little time had passed between two indicators of when things were happening, given the events in between.

Relevant to that last point, the author has the common fault of often not using the past perfect tense when talking about events that happened prior to the current narrative moment, which I always find disorienting and distracting. What I mean is that in a sentence that should run "she needed to trust the system she and her family had created" or "the room had never looked better" or "he had never truly let it all sink in," the "had" gets left out, resulting in a moment of temporal whiplash while I parse it.

The author also reaches beyond his vocabulary at times, and unfortunately "mediocrity" is one of the words that's apparently beyond his vocabulary (he writes "mediocracy" instead). In fact, it has a lot of small glitches, like missing words, vocabulary errors and fumbled idioms. They're not in every sentence or even on every page - there are usually two or three per chapter - and (standard disclaimer) I read a pre-release copy via Netgalley, and there may be more copy editing to come.

While all of these minor issues reduced my enjoyment (they may or may not affect yours), overall I did think this was a strong debut. It's positive and hopeful - relentlessly so at times, insisting that nobody is born evil, that we're shaped by our environment and, secondarily, our choices. The city of necromancy is, we're told over and over, one of the safest in the kingdom, though it's having an atypical time in this particular story. A dupe of the populist manipulator comes round relatively easily to a verbal appeal and admits he was fooled, which I found slightly unrealistic, but I suppose if "it's too hopeful" is one of my complaints, the author has at least understood the cozy genre. There is an unexamined tension, though, between the cozy values and the violence of a sword-and-sorcery setting, and I was never completely clear on what the fate of the antagonist actually was - which may have been another intentional skirting of an issue, or just the author not clearly conveying what was in his mind.

It lands in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list, which is usually for solid work with no significant issues, but in this case reflects what would be a Gold-tier book (emotionally moving, strongly written) demoted by a tier for vocabulary errors, missing past perfect and not completely making sense all the time. Still a recommendation, and since most people don't notice these things and some of them may even be corrected before publication, I suspect that it has a strong future ahead of it, and possibly some awards.

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Review: That Affair Next Door

That Affair Next Door by Anna Katharine Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Before Miss Marple, there was Miss Butterworth.

Miss Butterworth is a very decided middle-aged spinster (middle-aged by today's standards; perhaps elderly by the standards of her time), living in the fancy New York neighbourhood of Gramercy Park. When a murder is committed in the next-door house, she - in the most dignified possible manner and with full consciousness of her social position - pokes her nose in and starts figuring things out, in tandem with the police detective, Grice, who had appeared in seven previous books by the same author, and is at this point quite old even by today's reckoning, at 77.

My big objection to the first Grice book, which is the only other one I've read by this author, was that people kept declaiming set-piece speeches about their emotions. The style seems to have settled down somewhere in the interim, and the whole book is a delight, with the notable exception of a nasty piece of anti-Chinese prejudice dropped right in the middle, apropos of nothing whatsoever. It may only be part of the characterization of Miss Butterworth's type of person and her likely prejudices, rather than the prejudice of the author, but it's a jarring note in any case. She's a slightly unreliable narrator, at least when it comes to herself, so I'm choosing to believe this was at least mostly the character's unexamined prejudice.

Miss Butterworth conveys more personality in a paragraph than, say, Freeman Wills Crofts' Inspector French does in probably his entire series (I have only read a couple of those books, but I'd risk a small bet). Take this example:

I don't like young men in general. They are either over-suave and polite, as if they condescended to remember that you are elderly and that it is their duty to make you forget it, or else they are pert and shallow and disgust you with their egotism. But this young man looked sensible and business-like, and I took to him at once, though what connection he could have with this affair I could not imagine.

Grice retains his quirk of not looking directly at people, but always picking some object in the room and apparently addressing his remarks to it, while remaining fully conscious of everything that's going on. He's smart enough to treat Miss Butterworth and her deductions and discoveries with respect, while not being so unprofessional as to open up all of his own investigation to her. She has knowledge he lacks; he's a man (who, if I remember rightly from his first appearance, is of the working class, though that's not mentioned here), and she's a woman who has spent her life in the level of society that the Van Burnams, the family who own the house where the murder was committed, also inhabit.

The mystery involves obscured identities, deceptive young gentlemen, and an odd murder which appears to have taken place in two stages. There are plenty of twisty twists and startling revelations. I've not given it my "plot-relies-on-coincidence" tag, because although the murder happens as it does because of a reasonably unlikely coincidence, and there's another coincidence later that raises the irony level, neither of them assist the plot to stay on track, which is the sense in which I mean that tag.

The only significant issue I noticed with the copy editing is that quite often something phrased as a question has no question mark.

I am demoting it a tier ranking (from Silver to Bronze) in my annual Best of the Year list, because of those couple of moments of really horrible racism, but other than that I thought it was better than most other classic mysteries I've read lately.

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Review: Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons by Jaleigh Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll be honest: I didn't expect this to be good.

A lot of people who write "licensed" fiction are, let's face it, hacks - and hacks who, all too often, don't have much of a grasp of the basic mechanics of prose.

This author is better than that, and better than the average writer in general.

Because the characters are a D&D adventuring party, it's an ensemble cast. Those can be difficult to do. Giving multiple characters distinctive viewpoints, voices, motivations and backgrounds, and then meshing them together in such a way that they both clash and support each other and all contribute to the overall plot, is not a trivial task, and here it's handled well. The characters have some dimension to them, and they all have believable arcs which are complementary.

The plot trots along at a good pace without sacrificing characterization, though you are expected to be familiar with the world of the Forgotten Realms; its places and creatures and organizations get minimal description. It even took me a while to realize Tess, the group's leader, was an elf, partly because I was left to assume that the people whose species wasn't specified were human, and (unless I missed something) Tess's elven ancestry wasn't mentioned immediately. There's also a good deal of reference back to the previous book, which I haven't read, but I didn't feel lost because of it; everything said about the events of that book is said in a context where it's relevant to whatever's going on in this book.

Overall, it felt like a good, solid pulpy adventure with well-intentioned, capable but flawed characters who bounced off each other in interesting ways.

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Review: The Lerouge Case

The Lerouge Case by Émile Gaboriau
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This 1863 mystery is so very, very French. There are two mistresses central to the plot, one of them particularly awful, and the other one has an illegitimate son, upon whose identity the plot hinges. Everyone is very excitable. Someone literally dies of shame; someone else, rejected by his love interest, runs out to murder the man she prefers to him, can't do it, and falls into a delirium for six weeks. (Said love interest, incidentally, is about 19 at the time of the main events, since it's roughly two years since events, including the rejected suitor's offer, that took place when she was stated to be 17. However, her successful suitor, who is 33, has been trying to convince his father to let him marry her for the past five years, meaning when he started she was 14 and he was 28. Those aren't good numbers by modern standards, though in 1863 France nobody would have turned a hair; that was the year that the age of consent was raised from 11 to 13.)

The inciting incident is that an elderly woman is murdered in a village near Paris. The amateur detective thinks over the scenario, and concludes that obviously she was a former servant who was blackmailing her former employer over an illegitimate child, which turns out to be correct. The detective, by the way, is not Lecoq, even though this is considered the first Lecoq novel; Lecoq appears only briefly at the beginning, with another brief mention late in the book, and his sole role is to bring the amateur detective, Tabaret, into the story. In later books, apparently, Tabaret is his mentor, and Lecoq takes a more active role.

Tabaret then goes to see his neighbour, who by complete coincidence is closely connected with the crime, thus short-circuiting a great deal of tedious investigation and getting straight to the drama and sensation, which was presumably what the original audience was there for. Plus! The investigating magistrate also has a coincidental connection to the prime suspect, one that will give that punctilious official a good deal of angst, because he's not sure he can be fair and impartial. This development, at least, uses coincidence to create difficulties rather than remove them, but I still don't love it. (Though it will later turn out that, in a way, the first coincidence also caused difficulties...) The author lampshades the convenience of the coincidences, and also the ridiculousness of the hackneyed baby-swap backstory, which, of course, doesn't justify either one.

It soon appears that the prime suspect has been expertly and comprehensively framed, with a lot of physical evidence clearly pointing to him. The physical evidence is subtle enough that a bungling police officer, such as the one who's investigating, would miss it, but Tabaret picks up on it because he's very smart (if eccentric). Tabaret is then convinced of the suspect's innocence by the fact that he has (or at least proffers) no alibi, and someone who was as careful as the criminal they're looking for would definitely have one, but also we, the readers, are privy to the suspect's thoughts, and he is not thinking "I done it, it's a fair cop" (or the aristocratic French equivalent).

And then the supposedly bungling officer tracks down his completely different suspect, and there's a twist that gets us re-evaluating the significance for this case of the old forensic maxim "Who benefits?," and makes it pretty clear who the criminal must be (and we've already seen their motive). Cue manic pursuit and dénouement, including another coincidence to help the detective along, and it turns out the murderer wasn't actually as clever or as careful as Tabaret had thought.

This isn't a "procedural" in the English style at all. It's full of Gallic high drama, and the whole book is driven by character interaction, by people desiring things intensely and taking often ill-advised steps to obtain or keep them. It's a roller-coaster ride of emotional beats that, if they were music, would be speed metal. The forensic aspects of the investigation are misleading more than they are helpful ((view spoiler)[and, in fact, the original cleverly detected details which pointed to a particular suspect turn out to be another complete coincidence, not a clever frame-up at all (hide spoiler)]), and the investigators, far from being the problem-solving plot mechanisms that most English detective novelists would produce starting half a century or more later, are flawed human beings with their own quirks and foibles that impact the plot as well as themselves. The narrator retains a stance of the inevitability of Justice, but the characters come to doubt it, and themselves, deeply.

I'm not sure who translated this particular version, or if they were English or French; the Project Gutenberg text doesn't credit a translator. The phraseology often reflects the original French more closely than a truly idiomatic English translation would, and there are some misplaced or missing commas (for example, comma before the main verb or before "that," or no comma before a term of address). The quotation marks need another going-over as well, since a number of them are missing, while others are where they shouldn't be. Some sentences phrased as questions are missing question marks, while a couple of sentences not phrased as questions do have question marks. There's even an its/it's error. Not a great edition, in other words, and Project Gutenberg is likely not to blame for most of it; they follow the original texts pretty accurately, on the whole.

Although I'm not a fan of the massive role of coincidence in the plot and the over-the-top melodrama, it was a thrilling ride for sure. I'm going to be a bit generous and include it in my annual recommendation list, though right at the bottom of the lowest tier. And I may venture on another Lecoq book, though if it's just like this it will be the last.

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Review: The Bittermeads Mystery

The Bittermeads Mystery by E.R. Punshon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story opens with a man who's amazingly strong, stealthy (despite being large and apparently ungainly), alert, and an excellent tracker. He feels more like a larger-than-life pulp hero than the protagonist of a detective novel, and indeed this is less a detective novel than it is a thriller. The difference between the two often comes down to time orientation: the detective novel is about solving a crime in the past, and the thriller is frequently about preventing a crime in the future. Not that the main character does a particularly wonderful job of that, at least for the first half of the book. He's busy gaining the trust of one of the criminals, falling for the love interest while trying to work out if she was complicit in the murder of his old friend, and maintaining his undercover identity. There has been more than one murder, but it's not really a mystery who committed them; the trick is getting to a point where he can prove it and foil the villain's plans.

It's only around the middle of the book that we discover exactly who he is and get at least some idea of what he's trying to do and why (I guessed it before the reveal, but not a long time before). About two-thirds of the way in, I, but not he, figured out who the mysterious figure behind the crimes was; the main character is notable for his physical rather than his mental aptitude. I was never in any danger of being bored, though; the tension is well maintained, in part by keeping information unrevealed as long as possible. And then there's a race against time to save multiple people in different places, where seconds could count.

The style, particularly at the start, is excitable and overdramatic, again more like a pulp adventure novel than the urbane narration I'm used to in classic detective stories.

The author isn't good with commas, using them to splice sentences together, placing them incorrectly in sentences or leaving them out where they're needed, and not using them when he splits a sentence of dialog in two parts with a tag; he punctuates the second part, incorrectly, as if it was a stand-alone sentence. Today's authors do this kind of thing all the time, but a century ago it was less common, and publishers generally had better editors, who knew the rules even if the authors didn't.

Between the not-too-bright protagonist, the pulpy prose and the mediocre copy editing, I can't give it better than a Bronze-tier rating in my annual recommendation list, but if you ignore those things, it's exciting and full of tension and, at times, action-packed.

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Review: The Wrong Letter

The Wrong Letter by Walter S. Masterman
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The introduction by G.K. Chesterton mentions unspecified faults with the book, which he however commends for fooling him about who the murderer was.

These faults, from my perspective, include simplistic prose mainly consisting of declarative sentences, some of which are comma-spliced, others of which are missing their question marks despite being phrased as questions. The paragraph breaks sometimes make it slightly confusing to work out who is speaking, since the author uses a break after a beat, even if the dialog that follows is from the person who was taking action in the beat.

It's a locked-room mystery, made less mysterious by the fact that in the discovery-of-the-body scene the amateur detective of the (unrealistic) amateur-and-professional pair opens the door of the murder room by manipulating the key, which is in the lock on the other side, with a pair of pliers, thus demonstrating how the murderer could have left and locked it behind them. However, nobody seems to pick up on this, and the police strip the entire room looking for secret passages.

I was finding it tedious, mainly because of the prose style, so I glanced at the ending to see what Chesterton was talking about, only to find that it breaks two of Ronald Knox's rules of detective fiction (rules 1 and 7, if you want to look them up and don't mind a big spoiler). So I didn't bother to finish it.

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