Review: The Talleyrand Maxim

The Talleyrand Maxim by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The maxim of the title is "With time and patience, mulberry leaves become velvet." Which skips a lot of important steps, notably the role of the silk moth caterpillar, but never mind.

This is a beloved saying of the main character, who is not the detective, but the villain, in a move which Fletcher also used in The Paradise Mystery . He's a law clerk in a Yorkshire town, a man fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, and always on the lookout for a chance to improve his fortunes, at the expense of others should that be necessary.

He gets this chance through a series of unlikely events. First, a wealthy mill owner is killed by a falling chimney in his mill, along with both witnesses to his will, which he has only just finished making (for no readily explicable reason). The will has been put in an old book, again for no obvious reason, so it isn't found after his death, and he's assumed to have been intestate. This means that his niece and nephew inherit, as his closest relatives.

The book falls into the hands of a local antiquarian bookseller, who brings it at the end of the workday to the solicitor's office where our villain works. Everyone else has gone home (or so the villain believes, at least), so when the old man dies immediately after telling him about the will and saying he hasn't told anyone else, he takes it to use as leverage against the heirs, or rather their mother, the late mill-owner's sister-in-law, who is doing a lot of the actual managing of the inheritance. The nephew lacks drive and focus, and the villain dismisses the niece as unimportant, which is a mistake.

This scheme starts unravelling almost immediately, and continues to do so until the end of the book. He soon finds himself in the "two can keep a secret if one of them is dead" situation. Meanwhile, the late bookseller's grandson, a barrister, comes to wrap up his estate, and ends up setting up in practice in the town, not least because of the late mill owner's niece, who has also attracted the villain's attention (more for her wealth than for the attractions of person and character which the barrister notices).

As well as being mostly (particularly at first) from the viewpoint of the villain, this book is notable in having an ensemble cast put together the various clues that the villain doesn't know about or has left inadvertently. There's his employer the solicitor, the young barrister, a police detective, and the honest niece of the mill owner, who isn't just a passive love interest but plays a vital role in the plot, not least by sensibly confiding in people she trusts. Various honest locals (speaking Yorkshire dialect) provide clues, the importance of which they are unaware of.

There's a strong message throughout that unearned wealth is a potential corrupting influence, and that a person is better off working at something meaningful. Interestingly, even the villain seems to know this; his blackmail demand isn't money, but a position as steward or agent managing some of the inheritance. It will make him more money than his law-clerk job, and it's not a post he could get without the leverage, but he is competent to do it and intends to work at it honestly. It's just that his means of getting there are villainous in the extreme.

Overall, it's something out of the ordinary for a Golden Age detective mystery, in a good way, which is my experience of Fletcher's books in general. I plan to read several more.

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Review: The Enterprising Burglar

The Enterprising Burglar by Hearnden Balfour
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Yes, the title is a quotation from Gilbert and Sullivan.

Returned from World War I, and both bored and also outraged at the plight of returned soldiers who starve while war profiteers revel in their wealth, the Enterprising Burglar embarks on a Robin Hood campaign, stealing from the profiteers and giving the money to support... anti-Bolshevik causes? Yes, rather than thinking "The problem here is that capital has too much power and labour too little, I will attempt to shift the balance" or "I'll help support my former comrades who now can't get jobs," he takes on a revolutionary conspiracy that he comes across, the aim of which is to install a dictator in Britain after overthrowing the government. Said dictator candidate is inspirational, plausible, charismatic. His followers, rather than being just working-class Reds, are honest Englishmen of all classes and backgrounds. The Burglar - professionally known as Vive le Sport, legal name Stephen Nicholson, Nick to his friends - wants to foil the uprising while not, if he can help it, landing anyone in trouble other than the Chief, whose identity he is trying to ascertain. Because the other conspirators are just decent fellows who've been misled.

He confides in his old friend Jack and Jack's twin sister Jill (yes, really). Jack is a Scotland Yard detective, who has to pretend he doesn't know about Vive le Sport's activities because, don't you know, they're old friends, what? Knew each other in the trenches, and all that sort of thing. But Jack is being sent by his idiot superiors, who don't believe in the conspiracy, to Russia, so he can't be of much initial help.

Nick has been to a meeting of the conspirators in Wales (he's a master of disguise and has penetrated the organisation relatively easily), and is returning by train to London, in the same compartment as the leader of the conspiracy for the Western area, a Welshman. He's just hoping for some lucky chance that will enable him to go more deeply into the conspiracy and maybe get a clue to the Chief's identity when the author generously provides a train crash, in which the Welshman is badly injured, allowing Nick to impersonate him (swathed in bandages) at the big meeting. There, he gets away with the McGuffin: a signed list of all the members, which was going to be sent to Russia as the only collateral for a loan to fund the revolution. He then tries to use it as leverage to get the Chief to cancel the revolt and stand everyone down. He gives him until a month before the scheduled day.

Of course, the Chief isn't having that, and launches a series of attempts to get the McGuffin back. In the course of these, by the usual credulity-stretching coincidences that were so common in fiction of this period, the same people keep encountering each other in different contexts, and we end up with a love interest for Nick (I thought it was going to be Jill, but no; there are actually three named female characters with lines in this book, and I think they may even pass the Bechdel test.)

Round and round and round we go, and in the end the Chief's identity is revealed (view spoiler)[(it's someone who keeps being connected to everyone else in various ways, of course) (hide spoiler)], and everything resolves itself. Meanwhile, though, we've had action, disguises, bluffs, danger, romance... all the ingredients.

It's not a bad book for its time. Yes, the coincidences are piled on far too thickly, but that could be said of many books written in this period. The love interest is appealing and shows at least some independence, though she doesn't really contribute all that much to the main plot. The schemes are sometimes clever, and if the conspiracy is thoroughly implausible, at least it's not as anti-labour as it could easily have been, and as better writers than this (looking at you, Agatha Christie) made it when employing this particular early-20th-century bogeyman. It's an earnest effort that's just a little too shonky to get four stars from me.

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Review: The French Powder Mystery

The French Powder Mystery by Ellery Queen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As with the first book, even though all of the clues are there, I didn't figure out who the criminal was until just before it was announced at the end. Ellery Queen is the kind of person who is very aware, and likes everyone else to be aware, that he's the smartest (and best-educated) person in the room, and he does back it up with clever deductions that make complete sense when he lays them out.

The same drawbacks are present as in the first book. It is, of course, completely absurd that a senior police inspector on the NYPD lets his dilettante author son trail around with him and investigate crime scenes, and also vouch for someone he'd known as a kid who would otherwise be a suspect, so that he, too, can be present in places he absolutely should not be and party to information he shouldn't have. Even setting that aside as a genre trope, there's an unpleasant undercurrent of casual racism, not in blatant "all these people are inferior and should have no rights" declarations, but in the language used about non-whites. There's a black minor character who is almost always referred to as "the Negress" when a more offensive term isn't being used (not the most offensive one, but a couple of slurs). She's described in the cast of characters as "a study in normal ebon," in other words, a stereotype, and the "dialect" that she and the other black character speak is fully represented, making it clear that they're part of an outgroup. Meanwhile, the Queens' Roma servant is described at one point as "simian."

There's not a lot of character work that isn't directly related to the plot. The romance subplot isn't even resolved.

These are clever mystery puzzles, and I do enjoy them at that level even though I don't solve them, but there's really not much in the way of other levels at which to enjoy them, and the racism is difficult to ignore. I don't think I'll continue with the series.

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Review: Saved by the Spell

Saved by the Spell by Tanya Huff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The premise was immediately appealing to me: What if Harry Potter, but Canadian, from the perspective of the teachers, and the teachers are genre-savvy?

Realistically overworked and underpaid English teacher Abby Bellman has some extra headaches to contend with: the school she works at is a magic school, where kids learn to handle their powers, which can mean things like fireballs and sudden plant growth. That's bad enough, but she's just figured out that one of her new class of 14-year-olds is a Hero. Which means that somewhere there's a Villain, and Abby is the Mentor.

This isn't a world where magic is hidden. The school is a government school, and there are plenty of others throughout the world (this is the only one in Canada). The existence of magic has changed a few things, though not enough for my full suspension of disbelief, compared with our world. The same authors exist, for example. For reasons not gone into, various forms of paganism have survived into the equivalent of the 21st century, but this is completely not reflected in people's names, many of which (including Abby's, a nominal Druid) come from the Bible, as they would in our world. There are religiously bigoted protestors - with mispunctuated signs - outside the school, and they are never specifically identified as Christians, but they clearly are meant to be. Put this alongside the fact that almost everyone who has a relationship is queer in some way, and you'll know whether you are or are not the audience Huff is aiming for.

My parents were both teachers, and the way they complained about their jobs put me off the profession, so that was a touchpoint for me. I wasn't fully convinced by some aspects of Abby being an English teacher; do real English teachers try to enforce the completely made-up and only-observed-by-total-pedants rule that a preposition is something you shouldn't end a sentence with? Also, despite mentioning misplaced modifiers as something she battles against in her students' work, she commits one. In the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley, there were also a good few sentences with missing, inserted or jumbled words, one misplaced apostrophe and a few other punctuation glitches, and some vocabulary errors. They may be fixed by publication.

I did have some difficulty keeping track of all the minor characters; there are quite a few staff and students, naturally, and because the staff are known by their first names when Abby is talking to them or thinking about them and by their surnames when she's talking about them in the presence of students, and they were mostly introduced in the same scene and not all that well differentiated from each other, it becomes a bit confusing at times.

I've read a couple of Huff's books before, one of which I liked and the other I didn't, so picking up this one was a calculated gamble. I'm glad I did; leaving aside the worldbuilding weaknesses and occasional mechanical issues, it's well told, amusing in a wry way, and shows us a world-weary (and just outright weary) person who, nevertheless, will persevere in doing the right thing regardless of what it costs her, because she does actually care about the kids entrusted to her. It reminded me of Jim C. Hines' Slayers of Old , which I highly recommend, in the way it took familiar genre tropes to the next level of seriousness and asked what would really happen, while keeping an ironic detachment from the essential silliness of them and also telling a good story.

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Review: The Paradise Mystery

The Paradise Mystery by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a different approach to the mystery genre, we (mostly) follow the perspective not of a detective, but of a skeevy young doctor who wants blackmail material that he can leverage. He has just been sacked by the doctor he was assisting because he refused to stop asking the doctor's ward to marry him, something she absolutely will not do - both she and her guardian have a sense that he's not a good guy, even though they have nothing specific against him, and indeed we learn that he is an amoral schemer. When a murder is committed and it looks to the younger doctor as if the older doctor may have committed it in order to keep a secret about his beautiful ward and her younger brother, the younger doctor starts poking around for evidence, and uncovers a sordid story from a couple of decades earlier involving bank embezzlement.

There's a police investigation going on at the same time, though, and the police are suspicious of the younger doctor, who was one of the first people on the murder scene, so they keep half an eye on him.

It turns out that a number of people who knew each other long ago have, by complete coincidence, converged on a small, sleepy cathedral city (modelled, I think, on Winchester, though called Wrychester) and encountered each other, with tragic results. Several of them are now living under different names, and untangling the whole thing takes hard detective work from multiple parties and involves several more deaths (and a couple of complete red herrings: (view spoiler)[it's never explained why the younger doctor drew 50 gold sovereigns out of the bank the day before a witness was bribed with 50 gold sovereigns by someone else, and we also never learn why the retired detective never let on to the local police that that had been his occupation and why the Scotland Yard man had never heard of him (hide spoiler)]). Also, (view spoiler)[there's a Chekov's well that I was sure was going to be the young doctor's grave, but wasn't, though I did accurately predict that he would be killed - having him still around would have been slightly inconvenient to the happy ending, and besides, he deserved it (hide spoiler)].

Although parts of the mystery are a bit of a cheat, the unusual point of view worked well for me, and the whole thing was entertaining.

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Review: The Valley of Ghosts

The Valley of Ghosts by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read as a distraction while bored by a more worthy book, and I don't regret it, even though the ending is a bit weak.

It almost got my "not-solved-by-detective" tag, though it doesn't quite qualify because the detective does solve the case, albeit by lying in wait for the criminal and watching as he re-enacts the crime while sleepwalking. It also almost qualifies for my "thin-romance" tag, because the detective falls in love with a woman and is prepared to compromise his professional integrity to help her escape when he thinks she's the murderer, even though (as she herself explicitly notes) they have only met three times and exchanged about a dozen words. I keep "thin-romance" for cases where the couple get married after about that much interaction, though, and they do get to know each other over time after that first ridiculous declaration.

The characters are, as usual with Wallace, interesting and not purely stock. There's the reforming jewel thief, the man with a mysterious occupation who turns out to be (view spoiler)[a maker of women's hats - which reminded me of "Madame Eulalie" in P.G. Wodehouse (hide spoiler)], the detective himself who is a pathologist who's somehow ended up becoming an investigator, and his love interest, the daughter of an alcoholic artist who has, in the way of children of alcoholics, learned to cope with unpredictability and the cycle of bad behaviour and seemingly-sincere penitence that just keeps on repeating. The suspect for the murder is a mysterious moneylender, a type of person Wallace probably had unpleasant experience of, since he was often in debt because of gambling. This particular one is remarkable for never being seen and doing all of his business (which seems to involve blackmail as well) via letter.

There's a brief mention of "Reeder," and if, as seems probable, this is J.G. Reeder, one of Wallace's few recurring characters, this places the book within a wider Edgar Wallace Universe.

It's suitably mysterious and complicated, only has one significant coincidence which speeds up part of the plot rather than completely enabling it, and is in general a fun time.

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Review: Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository [and Yarn]

Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository [and Yarn] by Rebecca McKee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked this up (pre-publication, via Netgalley) largely because the title reminded me of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore , for which I have a fondness despite its imperfections. It doesn't have many other similarities to Penumbra apart from the title (and, obviously, a wondrous bookstore); this bookstore is somehow holding the universe together, is located in a small coastal town in New England rather than in Northern California, and is only visible to people who need something from it.

We start out being told that something is awry in the state of the universe that the bookstore holds together, and then we get a long sequence of different points of view from the people who work there, a customer, and the roommate of one of the workers, all of whom are sensing some sort of wrongness they can't put their finger on and are usually doing their best to ignore, and most of whom have (it is hinted, and gradually revealed) secrets they are ashamed of. It has the feel of something that could turn much more horror than cozy. Spoiler in case you need to know which in order to decide whether to read it: (view spoiler)[it's OK in the end. It's not horror. But the journey does get harrowing. (hide spoiler)]

This long middle section takes up most of the book, and for me moved too slowly. Just past half-way, I got bored enough with it, and uncomfortable enough with the constant hints of something wrong that wasn't yet being revealed, that I went off and read another book. But I did come back and finish it, and I'm glad I did, because the ending is compelling and pulls together the carefully-set-up backstories of the characters, all of whom needed to learn something and some of whom also needed to teach something to one or more of the others. My five-star rating is because it has a degree of psychological depth and (like one of the characters in the story) adeptly weaves together a number of threads. It's not, as I've mentioned, without its flaws - the tell-don't-show prologue, the slow-moving middle, and also a character, Violet, who I didn't feel was sufficiently developed for the weight she bears in the plot to hit as hard as it could have. But even if Goodreads would let me drop my pre-publication five-star rating to four - which it won't - I might leave it at five anyway, though it's only just in that zone. Call it a strong four-and-a-half.

The copy editing is good; I could quibble about the instances of "may" that should be "might" and the occasional missing past perfect where I personally would include one, but hardly anyone writing these days doesn't make those mistakes, and most people don't seem to notice.

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