Review: Golem for Broke: A Magical Midlife Urban Fantasy

Golem for Broke: A Magical Midlife Urban Fantasy by Deborah Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Midlife urban fantasy is often an ever-so-slightly reskinned version of what I always refer to as This Damn Thing Again, where a middle-aged woman with no ties (instead of a young woman with no ties) inherits property from an elderly relative, returns to her hometown, discovers her magical heritage, meets a hot werewolf and/or cop, gets a cute familiar and solves a bland and obvious mystery while not putting much work into a small business.

This book is not that.

Instead, it's set in a world similar to ours - maybe a little too similar, given that the difference is that a lot of people have magic, and this is publicly known, and apparently this has been the case for a long time, maybe forever. The protagonist is Jewish, and for some unexplored reason, even though people from every culture have magic, the apparently universally used terms for people with and without magic, and the name of the group that polices it, are Hebrew terms.

The original (as far as I know) twist to this particular setting is that magic comes to people through transitions or traumatic life events, including but not limited to puberty and menopause. The protagonist and her three friends, collectively the Mad Queens, have magic they got at menopause, which reflects menopausal changes - hot flashes giving fire magic, brain fog the ability to make other people forget things, and so on. They also have secret secondary magic, secret because (again, for reasons unexplored beyond "historically, people with two powers have been a problem"), that's drastically illegal and will get you imprisoned for life or killed. This provides stakes; Tovah, the protagonist, must protect her secret, and so hesitates to use her second power (of unravelling magic) in case it leads to detection for her and her friends, but sometimes that's her only option if she's going to survive.

They function as a kind of problem-solving agency, not exactly private detectives but similar, and have managed to find a legal loophole that means they aren't regulated by the authorities. This puts the protagonist at odds with her cousin, who's the head of Gevurah, the supernatural policing agency for the Canadian city where they all live. Not least because she inherited the Mad Queens agency from her aunt, the cousin's mother.

The book opens with a tone-setting scene, simultaneously hilarious, ridiculous, suspenseful and occasionally coarse, in which Tovah, in the middle of a mammogram, topless and clamped into the machine, must fight off a rogue golem who's threatening both her and her mammography technician. This leads into a mystery/thriller plot that kept me interested, and mostly puzzled (in a good way), throughout.

There are a few flaws. I've already mentioned some bits of worldbuilding that didn't completely convince me. There's an enemies-to-lovers romance arc that didn't convince me either. Firstly, not a lot of work has gone into the "enemies" bit; there's no backstory (as far as I remember) of any specific incidents or reasons why Tovah and the golem maker are enemies, it's just "this bastard is my brother's best friend and we don't get on." Then the handling of the actual arc reminded me of an early British motor car, in that it was so obviously "enemies to lovers" it might as well have had a man walking in front of it waving a big flag and letting off fireworks every time he reached an intersection. And then there are a few minor issues, like why a golem made of fired porcelain would leave clay under the fingernails of a woman she'd attacked.

But the golems and gargoyles are cool, the world is interesting if occasionally thin, the plot is sound, the multicultural middle-aged women are gloriously indifferent to what other people think, the threats feel genuinely threatening and the protagonist feels genuinely competent and intelligent, the writing craft is solid, and the editing is mostly very clean. I'd definitely read a sequel.

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Review: Dancers In Mourning

Dancers In Mourning by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Unusually, this book includes a callback to earlier in the series: a character from Police at the Funeral reappears, and is the means of introducing Campion into the investigation into what is, at first, just a series of nasty pranks played on a prominent theatrical producer/dancer with the apparent goal of disrupting his show and/or emotional stability (inasmuch as theatre people can be said to have emotional stability).

It omits a callback to Sweet Danger, in which Campion more-or-less promised a very young woman that when she was old enough, they would try a relationship. (It's less creepy than it sounds, in context.) I would have expected some such callback, because in this book he inadvertently and rather to his dismay falls in love with his client's wife.

Campion's love interests always seem to be unavailable. A good half of them end up with (or, in this case, start out with) someone else, for a start. Having played out a similar pattern - excluding the someone-else's-wife part - in my own young adult life, I sympathise, though I got past it at a younger age than Campion; it's a form of self-sabotage, probably, or self-protection against actually having to deal with a relationship.

As always, all the characters are vivid, individual and mostly eccentric, or at least distinctive in some way. Not the least vivid of them is Lugg, Campion's ex-con manservant. Sent to fill in as butler at the country house that's the centre of the events when the existing butler resigns, Lugg declares, "I'll do anything, as long as it's not common." Which is amusing, because Lugg is always common, as his habit of addressing his employer as "cock" attests. He ends up teaching the theatrical manager's six-year-old daughter to pick locks with a hairpin and run the three-card-monte scam, much to her delight, and probably nobody else's.

To my surprise, I figured out the murderer some time before Campion did, though I didn't have his personal stake in the answer. It's not the best of the series, but mainly because of the character work I still feel it deserves five stars.

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Review: The Blotting Book

The Blotting Book by E.F. Benson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Rather disappointing as a mystery, and not much to my taste as a novel either.

I bounced off Benson's Mrs Mapp, a thoroughly nasty, small-minded woman, after already having been less than delighted by his character Lucia's pretentious self-involvement. The characters here are not wonderful people either, and all in all Benson comes off as a misanthrope. Even the person for whom his omniscient narrator's viewpoint has little but praise acts completely out of character for what we're told about him, and since we don't see the key scenes it's never explicitly explored how he came to do so. (His motive is clear, but not how such a person comes to do such a thing.)

The mystery isn't particularly puzzling. A young man (22) reposes complete trust in a lawyer who has looked after his inheritance almost all his life, and been like a father, or at least an uncle, to him. What he doesn't know is that the lawyer had made some foolish investments and lost a lot of the young man's money, and is now attempting to get it back again. The lawyer's partner, who does know this, uses the knowledge to blackmail the first lawyer. The partner, knowing that the young man comes into his inheritance if he marries, also slanders him to his intended's father so that the marriage won't proceed, reducing the risk that he'll become aware of the shenanigans.

The young man becomes murderously furious about the slander, which doesn't succeed in its goal (since the intended believes in him), and when the partner is found murdered close to the intended's home, where the young man was around the presumed time of the murder, he is arrested and tried for the crime.

There's very little investigation shown; the investigating officer isn't even very bright. We're mostly shown the trial, at which evidence comes out that points to the (extremely obvious) actual murderer. It's a short book, and the whole thing wraps up quickly and linearly.

Not a success for me, and I think I'm done with Benson after this.

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Review: Sorcery, Swords and Scones

Sorcery, Swords and Scones by T.L. Stone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A pleasant cozy, and a good follow-up that builds on the first book in the series.

This time, the main focus is on Sass, the dwarf partner in the tavern of the series title, rather than on her half-elf business partner Lira, as in book one. Lira's story does continue to progress, though. (view spoiler)[Her elf uncle turns up and is very useful, her relationship with her orc love interest progresses to the point of setting a wedding date, and the remaining member of her former adventuring party turns up, along with his wife. (hide spoiler)] We learn what Sass was running from, and get to meet her best friend Thrain (Lord of the Rings readers will recognise this as the name of Thorin Oakenshield's father - we're not in Middle-Earth, but it's a nice homage).

There's a good deal of cozy food and drink and cute animal time, and the slow progression of a romance for Sass, but intermingled with this is a more serious threat from Sass's past, the reason she left home and ended up in the village of Wayside. (view spoiler)[She was fleeing an arranged marriage - with another woman, apparently normal dwarf custom, and arranged when she was a child. She's attracted to women as an adult, but it's not clear whether that's just a coincidence, or something that was already known about her in her youth, or simply considered irrelevant by her parents and dwarf society generally. The ex-fiancee is built up as a violent, irrational tyrant who will trample over anyone to get what she wants, but in the end is convinced relatively easily to go back to the dwarf lands more or less empty-handed, rather than pit her formidable dwarf force against a scratch mob of former adventurers and poorly-armed townspeople, and promises not to take vengeance on Sass's family other than to publicise the fact that she's working in a humble capacity at a tavern. Sass's parents then turn up, and are also easily convinced that Sass should stay where she is and live the life she's chosen; they only ever wanted the best for her. I found all of this capitulation too easy and not sufficiently earned, and felt more consequences ought to have ensued, but perhaps there will be some in future books. (hide spoiler)]

I noticed some typos and other issues, though fewer than in the previous book, and reported them to the author using an email address she includes in the book for that purpose (showing a commitment to quality).

Like the first book, then, this has a few flaws from my perspective, but they're not fatal ones for my enjoyment, and I will continue to follow the series.

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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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