Femme Noir

This year is the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Symphony, and to celebrate the centennial, the orchestra’s program this week was called “The Barbary Coast and Beyond,” devoted to the vivid musical history of the city in the years prior to and following the 1906 earthquake– an extravaganza complete with entertaining lectures, a dozen highly varied and talented soloists, and a constantly changing screen of historical photographs. I wouldn’t have missed it, as I was inescapably immersed in Daniel Hecht’s extraordinary book, Bones of the Barbary Coast, nearing the end, and wanting nothing more than all the immersion in the subject I could get.

Hecht’s protagonist, Cree Black, is a fascinating figure. Lucretia Black is an empathic psychologist and historical researcher. In her client work, she evolves a highly idiosyncratic method of treatment, the ability to climb into a person’s mind and feel their subjective realities.

Cree also had the life-changing experience of encountering her husband, hundreds of miles away from where he was, minutes after he had died. The young widow becomes allied with two other kindred spirits in the para-psychological firm, Psi Research, which is called upon to intuit the residuum of the dead, when evidence fails to explain their ends.

Burt Machetti, a San Francisco cop, calls Cree and asks her to help him when a bizarre skeleton is found, during the renovation of an old mansion in Pacific Heights. Burt was her deceased father’s best friend; she has not seen him since childhood, and Burt is weeks away from retirement. He’s obsessed by the skeleton, half man and half wolf in appearance, estimated to have lived during the wild years of crime and sin in the city’s Barbary Coast, when gold miners, pirates, pleasure seekers, fallen women, and missionaries thronged the area around the wharfs.

As Burt brings his career to a close, he’s struck by the number of cases in his open files related to dog attacks. He’s a hardened realist, embittered, alcoholic, and corrupt, but addicted to music of the big band era and ballroom dancing. His history, like Cree’s, has its own tragedy; his 6-year-old daughter was abducted and never found, and in his obsession to find her, his marriage decayed. As his career ends, he needs a closing triumph– to discover if there has been a creature like a werewolf, as the bones suggest, and if one still walks among the living.

Bones tell stories. Inconsistencies in their smooth and even development speak of injuries, illnesses, abuse, nutrition, and other aspects of the skeleton’s living form. Cree divides her days between historical research, assisting the forensic scientist in studying the bones, and late-night visits to the scene of the wolf man’s death, to read in the atmosphere what she can of his encounter with death.

At the forensics laboratory, Cree meets Cameron Raymond, a young radiologist. He’s a handsome and vital man, but half of his face is brutally scarred, because the psychologically spun-out Burt Machetti caught him in an adolescent act of thrill-seeking and ground his face into a broken window. Burt believes that Ray, with his obsession for dogs, is the murderer responsible for the many unsolved crimes in his files. Cree disagrees, and finds Ray an invaluable ally in her historical research; she is stuck in the crossfire of mutual antipathy between her two allies.

The story alternates between the present and past, found in the historical archives and the journal of Lydia Schweitzer, who died in the earthquake and whose bones were never found. Hecht weaves together eras in a beautifully vivid tale of the mysteries of human motivation, lives and deaths, and the history of San Francisco’s most colorful times.

By curious coincidence, I met Daniel Hecht many years ago, when he didn’t write, but was a professional musician. And mysteriously, we met in North Beach, only a few blocks away from the former Barbary Coast. It was an incomparable pleasure to renew this acquaintance through this haunting and powerful book, and in the same beloved corner of the city. I will certainly re-meet him again, wherever Cree Black is called in her work.

The last recent mystery I reviewed was so enjoyable that I had trouble finding another recent work to compare. This led me to return to some old favorite writers for an equally satisfying read. Among those writers was the superb P.D. James, creator of the character of Adam Dalgliesh.

Poring through the James oeuvre, I found one that particularly appealed to my professional interest in psychology, A Mind To Murder. It begins with Dalgliesh, a respected poet and police detective, at a cocktail party at his publisher’s office, where the dark and brooding inspector very nearly opens himself up to the possibility of a romantic engagement, after 14 years of mourning his wife, who died tragically young. But just when he is about to invite this scintillating woman to dinner, he is summoned to the Steen Clinic, across a fictitious London square from the publisher’s offices.

A brutal murder has been committed in the basement record room of this respected clinic for psychological treatment, and the dead woman is not much mourned by anyone. But in this clinic, as in so many others of its kind, the mental health professionals are adrift in their own deluge of psychological symptoms and issues. There are secrets, too, and the murdered woman is responsible for unmasking one of them, which causes no end of grief for three people. She also has another secret to expose, and this one may be the reason for her rude decease, before she can blow the whistle. But there is another potential explanation for her death as well, more obvious than the one she is tackling at the beginning of this story— so obvious that the subtle Dalgliesh refuses to accept it as the actual motive.

Among the other things about this mystery that I found fascinating were the descriptions of the treatment modalities offered at the Steen Clinic. The same battle raging in these times, between the psychodynamic practitioners of long-term Freudian psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and the proponents of mixed-modality, shorter-term treatment, was going on with equal force in 1963, apparently. But the Steen staff also used other forms of treatment that have fallen out of favor quite a bit since the time this book was written, like ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, which uses electrical charges to produce grand mal seizures, and is now only used on severely depressed patients.

Another form of therapy that lost favor, after its regular usage at the fictional Steen, is LSD treatment to promote the release of repressed information. Clearly, a few years after the writing of this novel, the recreational uses of the drug became too popular to promote them as therapeutic.

The reader is drawn into the real world behind the therapy office and psychoanalyst’s couch, into a mass of anxieties, longings, and peccadilloes. Many characters have reasons to hate the dead woman, but only one of them hates her enough. It will take Dalgliesh’s cunning insight to get to the bottom of these interwoven complexities, and prevent a second murder from happening.

James writes prose full of subtlety and nuance, and draws characters of viscerally real stature. Each of the troubled psychoanalysts and other professionals in this novel, with their gestures, failed relationships, and anxieties about their inability to solve their own problems, are wonderfully real, especially to a person who is intimately acquainted with members of the profession, as I am. The staff members at the Steen are equally well drawn, and particularly the character of the porter, Nagel, an award-winning painter who is forced to work at a senseless job by day as he pursues the work he loves by night—a painful necessity that leads him to behavior he would have been happy to avoid.

Lovers of high culture will also love P.D. James, with her frequent allusions to fine art and music. Her writing bridges the gap between amazingly well written genre fiction and literature, and she was given the title, Baroness James of Holland Park. to honor her achievements. All her twenty books are equally good, but if you have a particular interest in the field of psychology, this one may offer a special pleasure.

Who is this Sara Gran, besides being a fantastically entertaining writer? I finished Claire De Witt and the City of the Dead and immediately looked her up. I was happy to find out she lived in Northern California, because one of these days, I’d like to meet her.

I read close to a hundred mysteries a year, and frequently adore the detective heroes and heroines I meet in my reading life. Many writers create characters, situations, and environments that are uniquely wonderful and a pleasure to read, but this author has produced something else… entirely.

Gran’s protagonist, Claire De Witt, is psychologically complicated, having been raised by parents so self-indulgent that their survival is a marvel. But whatever their failings may have been as role models, their environment gives Claire the one thing that will change her life: a copy of Jacques Silette’s 1959 book, Détection, found in a dumbwaiter in a sealed wing of the family home.

She finds Silette’s book while exploring with her two best friends, Tracy and Kelly, when they are inseparable delinquent teenage detectives. They read it together and undertake solving any minor mystery to cross their paths. All of them change because of it. Kelly and Claire will both pursue detection as a career. Tracy just disappears, and Kelly will obsessively devote her career to finding their lost friend.

In New Orleans, a city enshrouded in mingled cultures of death, the very young Claire meets Candace Darling, an elegant woman who studied with the once-famed Silette in Paris. She becomes Claire’s teacher, mentor, and friend, and does her share to re-parent her budding mentee. In one of the random episodes of violence that characterize the city’s culture, Constance is shot while dining in a restaurant. Devastated, Claire leaves New Orleans, vowing never to come back.

She takes with her the knowledge of Silette’s highly philosophical teaching, which will make her the self-proclaimed best detective in the world. Silette writes in a variation on Zen riddles. “You cannot follow another’s footsteps to the truth,” he wrote. “A hand can point the way. But the hand is not the teaching. The finger that points the way is not the way. The mystery is a pathless land, and each detective must cut her own trail through a cruel territory… Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow only the clues.”

Claire does return to the City of the Dead, reluctantly, because a client hires her to find his missing uncle, who disappeared at the time of Hurricane Katrina. All the nephew’s efforts to find him through regular channels turned up nothing, and the nephew is sure he’s dead. Vic Willing, the uncle, was a District Attorney in New Orleans, and very well respected. People said only great things about him, and yet, there was a possibility that someone killed him, and a dark reason to inspire such hate.

Once back in New Orleans, she calls Mick, who was Constance’s other disciple; together, they made a loving family of sorts in Constance’s Garden District mansion. Claire is horrified to see that Mick has given up the calling, and devoted himself to helping others in need. He balks, but Claire ensnares him into the search for the missing Vic Willing.

There is nothing Claire won’t do to find the truth. She casts the I Ching, smokes joints laced with embalming fluid with potential perpetrators, drinks cheap booze with the homeless (in search of a former great detective who has forsaken material values), and looks for meaning in the random clues that come along. Beneath the devastation and despair of the storm-shattered city, she finds a friendship so deep that one plants evidence to incriminate himself– only to deflect suspicion from the other– and the New Orleans she used to love so much.

Readers in search of something new in the mystery genre will find it here, and presumably in all of Gran’s other books as well. It was a fabulous find, and everything I’ve read since has been terribly bland by comparison.

In 1920, the First World War is over, and Inspector Ian Rutledge has returned from the battlefields to his job at Scotland Yard. He has two things in his war history that he tries scrupulously to hide. One is that he got shell shocked, that earlier term for PTSD from military trauma, and it’s considered an unsuitable ailment for a detective at the Yard, because at that time it implied weakness. The other thing he needs to conceal is that he was responsible for the death of a deeply respected colleague in the trenches, the Scotsman Hamish McLeod, and Hamish haunts him day and night.

Hamish continues to live in Rutledge’s mind, and his brilliant voice advises Rutledge constantly on his tactical strategies, even as he did on the field of battle. They carry on conversations that Rutledge is sure others can hear, and sometimes they do, in fact, hear the detective speak his responses aloud. Hamish apparently holds no grudge against his friend and killer, because he advises him well.

In this Ian Rutledge mystery, a man comes into Scotland Yard to admit to a murder. The man who confesses is dying of cancer, and says he wants to get this off his chest before he dies. However, the man he claims to have killed, Justin Fowler, has not been found dead. There is no body, so there can be no murder. However, a body does turn up two weeks later: the man who has confessed has been found in the Thames, shot in the back of the head, clearly no suicide.

As Rutledge investigates the murder of the ostensible perpetrator, he finds out one strange fact: the man who confessed was not the person he claimed to be. To find out why this man has claimed to be someone else, Rutledge must go to a tiny village in Essex in the coastal marshlands, to discover the connection between the current victim, the man he has accused of murder, and the person he claimed was dead.

The village of Furnham is hardly welcoming to a man from Scotland Yard. In fact, the village men are openly hostile. It doesn’t take Rutledge long to figure out that the fisherman of Furnham have a busy sideline of smuggling from France. But this is a virtually innocent crime, compared to the monstrous one that the villagers are determined to keep hidden forever.

The man accused of the murder in the confession, and the man who was supposedly murdered, both lived at River’s Edge, the great country house outside of Furnham. The man accused of the murder is the son of the woman who owned it, and this woman adopted the theoretical victim and a niece who had lost her parents. When the two young men went off to war, the mother disappeared and was never found; the niece went to live in London at the house left to her by her parents.

Only one man in this town seems open to talking to a Scotland Yard investigator, and that’s the rector. It’s not a particularly religious village, and the rector seems glad to speak to anyone. Gathering information is arduous; no one is willing to tell Rutledge anything and too many people are openly antagonistic.

Operating alone and unarmed, Rutledge is vulnerable. No one at the Yard knows exactly where he is, as he races from one town to the next in search of answers, having to crank his automobile to get it going each time. He would be an easy target for a desperate murderer, and a body tossed in the marshlands would never be found. Fortunately, Ian Rutledge has Hamish to remind him when he must watch his back.

Charles Todd and his mother, Caroline Todd, make up the writing team known singularly as Charles Todd. They both grew up hearing stories from parents and grandparents about the Great War. Rutledge’s war experience and life in England in those years comes alive through these family stories, and make The Confession a definite page-turner. I didn’t always love the writing itself, as I’m disinclined to contemporary sentences that begin with the word “for”– but this is nonetheless an immensely entertaining and clever read.

The thoroughly modern young Varvara Andreevna Suvorova, known as Varya, exasperated her parents, who describe her as “making the transition from ‘perfect nuisance’ to ‘loony nihilist’.” In fact she has championed ideas about women’s liberation, in 19th century St. Petersburg, where she rents an apartment together with Petya Yablokov, her comrade in the fight against outmoded ideas. They are roommates, and not lovers, but they present themselves to landlords as a married couple; Petya decides that marriage is the logical end-result of their meeting of minds and an end to his feelings of sexual frustration. Varya is not so sure.

Russia is currently at war to liberate other Slavic nations from domination by the Turks (and presumably to dominate them themselves). The idealistic Petya signs up as a volunteer, and Varya says she will join him at the front. En route to meet him, the driver she has hired to take her there abandons her in a roadside bar, taking all her belongings and money with him. Erast Fandorin, a Serbian volunteer, saves her and takes her to the front.

Fandorin is inscrutable and seemingly unemotional. He is also obscure in describing who he is or what he does. In the Russian camp at the front, outside the Bulgarian town of Plevna, he is referred to as “titular counselor,” and to prevent Varya being sent back, he takes her on as his assistant. Aside from the nurses, she is the only woman in the camp, and a popular figure in the camp clubhouse for foreign journalists and officers of the army.

An act of sabotage sends the Russian army off to do battle at the wrong destination. As the cryptographer who decodes the wireless order to attack the wrong town, Petya is imprisoned in the garrison, and Varya solicits the help of Erast Fandorin to find the real saboteur.

Numerous suitors line up to court the lovely Varya, including the impetuous star general and a charming French journalist. The fight for Varya’s attention triggers animosities among her admirers, but Fandorin isn’t one of them. He is too busy finding the enemy agent in their midst, a challenge that will take him as far from the front as London and Paris to uncover a most unexpected foe.

Like all Russian novels, this fine one takes a bit of acclimation on the part of non-Russian readers. You have to get used to the parade of characters with last names mostly ending in the letter “v,” patronymics (son of, or daughter of as a second name), and the nicknames associated with their first names. It usually takes a while to remember who each character is, when referred to alternately by last name, first name and patronymic, all three, a nickname, or simply a title. Fortunately for me, I’m on my third Dostoyevsky novel re-read for the year, The Idiot, and I had some preparation.

Akunin’s novels are fantastically popular in Russia, and this is no surprise. This one, in a lively, highly readable translation by Andrew Bromfield, combines a clever plot, engaging characters, human drama, a surprisingly entertaining look behind-the-scenes in the war zone, humor, and made-up events in Russian military history so convincing that I was perplexed, wondering why I had no recollection of the battle of Plenya. That’s because there never was one, except in The Turkish Gambit.

The character of Fandorin is both mysterious and memorable. Who is this brilliant man? Is he old or young? Everyone seems to know of him, but hardly anyone seems to know him all that well. He is, like Connelly’s Harry Bosch, a man who keeps much to himself, deeply attractive in his reserve. Also like Bosch, Fandorin is a character you certainly want to meet again.

Shelby Kay Tate, formerly of Star, Mississippi, has moved to Nashville to follow her dream. She writes country songs, and Nashville is the only place to be. As this story opens, Shelby has 56 (and 1/2) hours before she and her two friends, collectively called Wild Women, will preview some of her songs at a songwriters’ night, where a lot of the A&R people from big music companies go to see if they can find new talent. One of Shelby’s songs isn’t quite finished yet, and she’s busy.

She gets off work at Sweet William’ s café, and is racing to get her errands done, when she could swear she sees her ex-husband, Leroy, on the street. Shelby thought she had left the good-for-nothing Leroy safely behind in Star. In her dreams, she has romanticized notions of him, and misses him, even though he hated her song writing, laughed at her dreams, and treated her badly.

When the possibility of the real Leroy being there turns out to be a fact, she doesn’t have time to deal with him. But he will not be put off. He’s come to get her back, but his tactics are terrible. Leroy ends up in jail on charges of assault.

In jail, he meets the inconceivably unscrupulous con, Mac McKenzie. When Leroy tell Mac about his plan, to customize and own vehicles for touring musicians, Mac drags him into his own plans for a crime spree as soon as they are released, telling Leroy that it’s the only way to finance his business. Leroy doesn’t like it, but clings to the notion that Mac is only working in his interest. He thinks that once he can make his personal dream come true, he will have a lot of money and Shelby will want him back.

Leroy is clearly clueless in every way. He destroyed his marriage to begin with, then he takes a completely idiotic path to winning her back, thinking that he can do it with either force or money. And of course he allows himself to be duped by Mac, with no better ideas of his own to move his business plans forward. Even more unbelievable than Leroy’s idiocy is the fact that the smart Shelby Kay Tate should have ever married Leroy at all. One imagines that there weren’t that many choices available in Star, Mississippi.

Unbeknownst to Shelby, she was born at the exact moment in time when Patsy Cline met her death in a plane accident, and Patsy, an angel now, follows Shelby and watches out for her. But on the same night that Leroy has surfaced and wreaked havoc, Patsy’s angel sends Shelby on another time-wasting errand, delivering an order from the restaurant to a woman named Ann King. And Ann King turns out to be someone who is very, very pivotal in Shelby’s future.

The appearance of an angel in this plot did give me pause, especially as it was in a head-on conflict with the dark spirit that powered Mac’s gambol of terror, with Leroy as his dumb accomplice. Was I really going to love this book? Actually, I did.

I fought it, too, having a band of country “dark grass” musicians in my life, and being exposed to a lifetime’s worth of country music for a few years, which I never knew I liked at all. Mostly, I liked them, their dark humor, and their phenomenal performances. I’m more the Scriabin kind of music lover, bit it’s hard not to like Patsy Cline and a few other stellar musicians in the genre. Shelby’s splendidly drawn character and love of what she does, and Shankman’s wonderfully clever writing, just won me over.

The title caught my attention, and it didn’t surprise me to find out that it was the title of the song that Shelby had 56 1/2 hours to finish. And in that time, one career is born, another reborn, one person survives a near-death experience, and one is the official stiff so necessary to books in the genre. Shankman has also written a series of classic detective novels, and I look forward to reading those with great pleasure. This book was in the library’s mystery room, along with her other titles, and isn’t quite a mystery, but a most entertaining read.

If you have never read any of van de Wetering’s novels about the Amsterdam Homicide Squad, you have a pleasure ahead. You’ll meet the stolid, but often brilliant, Adjutant Grijpstra and his Sergeant, the handsome de Gier, who is often subject to fantasy. These two back up their aging Commissaris, and their young colleague, Cardozo.

Grijpstra and de Gier have a particular bond. For one thing, they write and play music together, Grijpstra on drums and De Gier on flute. Grijpstra keeps a set of drums in their office for moments when they need inspiration. When they’re not together, Grijpstra paints, and de Gier charms women. They grumble at each other and speak about the elusive colors to perfect a painting, the ways sounds can be reproduced on instruments, or the poetics of their work, as they hunt down bad guys in the streets of Amsterdam.

Ah, Amsterdam… where de Gier can smoke a joint with his glass of jenever, while trading information with their undercover agents in a bar, and the Commissaris takes endangered witnesses home for protection. In Hard Rain, the homicide division is up against some particularly evil foes, who operate a charity for foreign aid– as a front for a criminal organization that brings in young women for the slave trade in prostitution and uses them to import illegal drugs for their clients. The organization also runs a private club, where illegal gambling, prostitution, and distribution of drugs takes place.

But this is Amsterdam, where prostitution is legal, only when women are paid, taxes are collected, and the public health officials check women regularly to insure that no sexually transmitted diseases are being passed along. Gambling is legal, too, in a major casino, which is also monitored and taxed. And of course, marijuana is available readily. What the Dutch really don’t like is the hard drug trade, which turns people into junkies, who rip off tourists, and creates other problems. And the idea of deluding the innocent public into thinking they are donating to a worthy charity, and using their money to fund crime, is not something that even the tolerant Dutch will stand for. Well, maybe they’re not so very tolerant, but they’re definitely canny, and know that managed vice brings endless tourism.

The Commisaris has a particular desire to bring down this crime ring. For one thing, his distant cousin, Fernandus, is the leader of it, and the Commisaris has hated him since kindergarten, when the despicable cousin made sure to get him in trouble. He’s only grown less agreeable over the years. This cousin’s right hand man touches a sharp nerve for de Gier, too, because they look very similar. De Gier sees them as the dark and white knights headed for a duel to the end.

At the same time, there is corruption among the upper level functionaries of the Amsterdam police, and they relieve the Commisaris and his staff from active duty when they try to reopen a case of theoretical suicide. Undeterred, they work underground, infiltrating the clubs’ headquarters to confirm their worst speculations about what is really going on there. This is no longer their jobs, but their moral commitment to their society.

I return to visit Van de Wetering’s colorful characters far more frequently than I get to enjoy his splendid city. It’s sublimation for the urge to be there, walking among the canals and leaning houses of the old city, eating in brown cafes, and checking in at the city’s wildly creative clubs and museums. The books are wonderful reminders of the eccentric spirit that thrives amidst the essentially conservative culture of the people.

There is only one book in this series of 14 that I have yet to read, and I put it off, like the last chocolate in he box, to savor when the call to Amsterdam draws me again. Hopefully there will be many more plane tickets between now and then. But if I finish the series, I will certainly just be tempted to just read them all again.

Mysteries with a highly psychological element always appeal to me, since I’ve been trained as a therapist– and have only developed a deeper fascination with the mysteries of the human mind as I see more and more of them. I found this book in the main library’s mystery room, and the minute I saw that the narrator was a psychologist, I knew I should read it.

I wasn’t at all disappointed. In fact, the closer I came to the end, the more interesting it became. To tell you why it did will only ruin it for readers who have not yet had the pleasure. So I will spare you any spoilers.

Deane, the narrator, says in the first paragraph that “Psychoanalysis assumes that normally we only remember what we want to remember.” As this story develops, we can see that a lot of useful forgetting is going on. As it ends, we are confronted with the case illustrating that a person may well have a shadow self dwelling in the same body as the self we know, the shadow that never gets as far as a person’s conscious mind.

Harry Deane prefers his assumed first name to Henry, the one given him by his family. His family, however, has given him other things that have served him well. When his parents die in an auto accident while he was in his post-graduate work at Yale, his inheritance allows him to finish school without worry. After leaving the university, he gets a teaching job, which he endures as long as his patience would allow; then an uncle dies and leaves him a decent income, which enables him to leave academia behind.

Just when he receives this incredible piece of good news, he has a nasty fall on an icy winter sidewalk. He has a concussion that leaves him in the hospital for several days, and when he regains consciousness, he is sure what he will do as soon as the academic year has ended. In spite of his windfall, Harry finds that this near-death accident has aged him, and he wants to get far away from the terrible winters of his New England college.

He is determined to return to the lovely town of Clearwater, and the woman he loved there, Celia, the daughter of Judge Arabin, who is the law of Clearwater and the surrounding county. In Harry’s absence, Celia has married another man. He is determined to either win her away, or, if she’s happy, to assume the role of loving friend. Harry is content to settle in Clearwater and observe from afar what Celia’s situation is like, while establishing his household and the stable of horses he intends to raise.

In this idyllic life, there is at least one problem. Harry’s cousin, Lex McLean, is ferociously jealous of Harry’s inheriting all the family money. Lex is a Washington columnist, noted for the scathing attacks in his columns that are a hair’s breadth away from libel. And he is watching Harry, waiting for him to slip, while fatuously maintaining the family relations. There is another problem, too. In this peaceful town, there’s a prowler, something that has never happened there before, and is causing the residents a lot of anxiety.

When Harry and Celia meet, he is confronted with a disturbing truth. Celia’s husband, Simon, has a distinctly dual personality. When sober, he is an affable, sociable man who is absolutely likable. When drunk, he is savage, jealous, duplicitous, and cruel. He is also, soon after Harry’s return, shot to death.

Who killed Simon? The answer to this question is chilling, and something that Harry discovers for himself. It’s as disturbing to him as it was to me, and a thoroughly unexpected conclusion to a haunting story. I had never read Helen McCloy before this book, but I’ll be returning to the “McL” section of the library’s mystery room in search of more.

I had my reservations about a mystery featuring an 11-year-old sleuth who was already an accomplished chemist. However, I was not yet acquainted with Miss Flavia de Luce of Buckshaw, the rambling old wreck of a country manor outside of the village of Bishop’s Lacey.

Colonel Haviland de Luce, father of Flavia and her generally abusive older sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, is perpetually certain that they must give up Buckshaw, left to him by his adored and long-dead wife. The money has run out, and there seems to be no solution. But in the short term, the Colonel has rented out the place to Illium Films as a movie set.

It’s nearly Christmas, and the film company has arrived with its caravan of trucks, crew, performers, and director. The most famous actress in their known world, Phyllis Wyvern, and her frequent leading man, Desmond Duncan, have come also, all of them occupying the many empty bedrooms of the house, and filling the halls and rooms with endless bits of gear and lighting.

It’s interesting enough to draw Flavia out of her beloved chemistry lab, left intact by her deceased Uncle Tar, complete with equipment, supplies of chemical components, and his copious and instructive notes on the specifics of chemistry. When Phyllis Wyvern arrives, she recognizes Flavia immediately. Her picture has appeared in the newspapers more than once; much to the huge dismay of the local constabulary, Flavia has been instrumental in the solving of crimes. Phyllis Wyvern has more than a passing interest in crime, for good reason.

Flavia develops a friendly relationship with the world-famous actress, but her favored companion is Dogger, her father’s old army friend who is the indispensable man about the estate, and seems to know everything, especially what to do when things go wrong. Of course things do go wrong. Several things.

Flavia is concerned with her own dilemma at this time, solving the disturbing question of whether there is, or isn’t, a Father Christmas. She knows her father can’t really afford the excellent laboratory equipment she asks for, and yet, it always arrives on Christmas morning. So she cooks up a substance in the lab that will keep Father Christmas glued to the chimney if he comes. This will turn out to be a very inspired idea.

Phyllis Wyvern decides to do a good turn for the local vicar, who needs a new roof for the church, and offers to do a fundraiser for him. Colonel de Luce suggests they do it at Buckshaw. On the night of the event, however, there’s a terrible storm, and almost the entire village is stuck in the old mansion, camping out everywhere.

There couldn’t be a more inconvenient night for a murder, from the point of view of the police, with all the film people and the entire village all crammed into the same house. Too many suspects would be in breathing distance from the corpse. Needless to say, that’s the night when they have one.

The police try to keep Flavia firmly out of the business, not because they want to protect her child-like innocence, but more because they don’t want an 11-year-old solving their crime for them. They ought to know better than to try.

So yes, I opened this book with reservations, in spite of the rave reviews on the cover and inside pages. Somehow the thought of an 11-year-old detective had no cachet for me. It only took a couple of pages to give up entirely to Flavia’s winsome genius. This book is an odd and captivating treat, entertaining from beginning to end, beautifully written, and the prelude to many more hours of reading other Falvia de Luce adventures.

Kinky Friedman is an author who writes about his detective alter-ego, also named Kinky Freidman. Kinky the character lives in a loft on Vandam Street in New York’s SouthVillage, and maintains his office there as well. But in this story, Kinky is not doing much business, because he has been seriously laid up with a long-latent case of malaria he’s been carrying around for years.

In spite of the fact that his strain of malaria is by far the most dangerous, his Indian doctor, Dr. Skinnipipi, wants to release him to the care of his friends, the Village Irregulars, who get called upon from time to time to do some work for him on a case.

Dr. Skinnipipi clearly needs a hospital bed, and sends Kinky home with his devoted friends. Even in his delerium, Kinky is not sure this is a good idea. After all, he knows his friends. There’s McGovern, the hard drinking journalist, who has selective deafness and exasperates him with a constant “Say again?” and Ratso, the neurotic compulsive eater–who willingly plays Watson to his Holmes– and a bunch of others with a particular mania for drunkenness.

They pretty much leave him alone in the bedroom to alternately sweat, freeze, and hallucinate. They are busy in the living room, camping out amidst empty beer bottles, dead soldiers of harder stuff, and overflowing ashtrays. Between the excesses of alcohol and the close quarters, they’re also having a few loud disagreements, often on the subject of who gets to sleep on the sofa. Kinky’s cat adds her touch to the imbroglio by leaving her “Nixons” everywhere, and especially on the backpack belonging to Ratso, the one she doesn’t like.

While the Irregulars fight for the sofa and occasionally take off to do a work assignment, Kinky gets well enough to look out a window and smoke a cigar. He sees an episode of brutal domestic violence in the building next door, and later sees the man who beat the woman loading a gun. He becomes convinced that the woman he saw is in real danger. His friends try to verify if this really happened, or if it’s just another one of his fevered delusions. Of course, they see nothing, and start to worry if Kinky is finally around the bend for good. With friends like his, it might not be surprising.

But they humor him, and another old friend, who has an actual detective agency in Hollywood, comes to New York to help the Irregulars sort out if there is really a big problem next door, or if Kinky just needs humoring until the psychiatric crew takes over. He arrives with surveillance gear and sets up the Irregulars on a 24/7 watch.

But finally they do see her. And they even try to help her out of her difficult situation. In order to find out what happens next, you have to read the book.

However, the discovery of the woman next door does lift the spirits of the Irregulars, because at last they’re sure that Kinky wasn’t hallucinating any more. This is a good thing, in this crowd of dysfunctional types. Kinky is by far the least damaged of the bunch.

Both Kinky Friedmans, author and character, have weird, eccentric humor and a highly idiosyncratic world view. They’re so bad they’re refreshing, in a world where bad behavior isn’t nearly as popular as it once was. In this book, Kinky is absolutely incapacitated, but still thinking fast, so it will be most entertaining to find out what he does when he’s well—in the next book.