One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

One Good Turn is the second in a very unlikely mystery series: unlikely both in its very existence and in its popularity. Kate Atkinson is a literary writer by temperament -- she won the Whitbread Award for her novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, for example -- whose fourth novel, Case Histories, had a private detective as a major character and concerned some criminal activities. (See my belated and fuzzy review for more.)

Case Histories wasn't much like a genre mystery, but mystery-lovers around the world picked up on it -- I got my first copy of it from my then-colleague, the editor of the Mystery Guild -- perhaps because it was a damn good novel with some mystery elements in it, or perhaps just because the crime fiction field is vast and expansive, with room even for great books that don't fit into marketing categories. In any case, Atkinson wrote three further novels with Jackson Brodie in them -- it's not fair to say they're "Jackson Brodie" novels, given her multi-plot-line style and social novelist's eye -- which are treated as a mystery series, despite how poorly they fit into the usual definition of that category.

One Good Turn is set a year or so after Case Histories; Brodie's life has been changed by the end of Histories, and he's left the private-detective business to be, mostly, a man of leisure in a small house in France. But, for the course of this book, he's in Edinburgh for the Festival, trailing his actress girlfriend Julia and not enjoying anything at all. He's not central to this book -- not even as much as he was central to Histories -- but he is one way into it, and turns out to be perhaps the most unbiased of all of the viewpoint characters.

The plot sprawls out over several days, set off in the very first section by a road-rage incident that ends with quiet, mousy crime writer Martin Canning saving a life almost against his own will, which drags him into the plots of both the attacker and attackee -- each of whom is in Edinburgh for very specific but initially murky reasons. Several bodies pile up quickly -- seemingly without any connection to each other -- and the local police investigate in the form of DI Louise Monroe, who has her own complicated connections to other parts of the case.

Like Case Histories, One Good Turn loops around through a small group of people who end up being more connected than we would expect -- but, unlike Histories, it all happens in a much smaller time and space. If I were wearing a serious lit-crit hat, I'd probably rumble on about how Atkinson came from family sagas, with their vast scope of time and space, to the saga-ish Histories and then realized that crime fiction could give her the chance to compress a similar amount of action and event into less than a week. Whatever the reason, Atkinson tells a compact, tight story here, with threads that appear to be separate at first inexorably pulling closer and closer as we realize who all of these people are to each other -- all the way up to the very last line of the novel.

One Good Turn is a damn good book, and doesn't require knowledge of Case Histories -- Jackson Brodie is in no way a series detective, just a guy around whom interesting things happened a few times. And it shows what a serious writer with an eye for humor and character and the often bloody vicissitudes of life can do when she finds herself in the crime fiction arena, and what a crime plot can do to enliven and up the stakes for a novel of character and connection.

"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" by Lemony Snicket

"Lemony Snicket" -- both the pseudonym Daniel Handler has used when writing for pre-adults and the narrator of the thirteen-book "Series of Unfortunate Events" series -- has been mostly missing since that series ended in 2006, with only a few minor picture books and similar ephemera in the six years following. But Snicket came back in late 2012 with "Who Could That Be at This Hour?", the first in a series of four telling the story of the young Snicket and his first mission for a mysterious organization, at the age of not-quite-thirteen, in the broken-down town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea.

The four books collectively will be called "All the Wrong Questions," and they take their tone and style from Raymond Chandler and classic hardboiled fiction as "Unfortunate Events" took its cues from penny dreadfuls and The Perils of Pauline. The narrative voice, though, is very similar -- Handler, once again speaking as Snicket, here looking back on Snicket's life and failures from a viewpoint much farther in the future.

I can't detail the intricacies of the plot to you now; I read it too long ago. But I can remember the tone and the style and the amazingly assured voice -- and, in case I'm making it sound too dour and dull, also the humor and sheer reading pleasure of At This Hour. Handler has been a compellingly readable writer since The Basic Eight, his first novel, and no matter what else he does, he never loses track of the power of his writing to grab a reader and compel her to just keep reading. At This Hour is smart and melancholy and funny and wry and masterful, and I'm thrilled to know that there will be four more books to follow it.

(It's also well illustrated by Seth, cartoonist of It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, and his cartoony and cleanly illustrative style is perfect for Snicket.)

What's Due Back at the Library Today?

Why, these three books! Let's see what I can say about them quickly.

Lawrence Block, Hit Me

The fifth book about hit man Keller comes after a five-year gap from the fourth, Hit and Run (I reviewed that, and the previous book Hit Parade, here), and returns to the style of the first three books: it's a fix-up disguised as a novel.

Hit Me doesn't explain whether or where its five pieces -- "Keller in Dallas," Keller's Homecoming," "Keller at Sea," "Keller's Sideline" and "Keller's Obligation" -- first appeared separately, though I can see that "Dallas" was, and still is, available as a Kindle Single. But they are all, structurally, separate stories, each with a distinct arc, and just shoving them next to each other and counting the chapters sequentially doesn't turn Hit Me into a novel. Luckily, it doesn't need to be a novel: it's an excellent fix-up made up of gripping stories, each one covering one job of Keller's.

At the end of Hit and Run, Keller had seemingly abandoned his old career, after a serious betrayal: he had a new name, a new wife, a new home and legitimate job in New Orleans, and a baby on the way. But, like the rest of us over the years 2008-2012, the economic crisis changed his plans, and sent him back into his old ways. More specifically, his philatelic hobby, and the money he needed to continue it the way he wanted to, gave him an excuse to earn large sums by traveling to other cities, meeting new people, and killing them.

Hit Me is actually more concerned with philately than with murder; Keller kills because that's what he gets paid for -- and he's good at working out ways to do it and get away quietly afterward -- but stamps are what he really cares about, thinks about, and schemes about. And, along the way, Keller becomes another one of Block's vivid portrayals of modern men -- never quite sure what they want, but always as sure as young Elvis Costello that they want it now. So this is a quieter, less showy book than you'd expect from a "novel about a hit man" -- but Block has never been one to write to expectations.

Simon Rich, What in God's Name

Heaven is a business, primarily devoted to the production of Xenon. Humanity was a side project of its distant, lazy, unmotivated CEO -- we know him as God -- but He's gotten tired of the whole thing and wants to destroy all life on earth so he can focus on his new project: a pan-Asian restaurant. But two angels in the Department of Miracles have a plan: if they can just call one shot -- get two New York schlubs who secretly love each other to kiss within a month -- then God will call off the destruction and let humanity live on. Oh, did I mention that the two angels' relationship is amazingly parallel to those two schlubs?

Back in my SFBC days, we had a cluster of books that sold well for years and that we periodically threatened to put together to promote -- the fabled "Blasphemy Flyer," which we never actually did. So we would have been very happy to see What in God's Name; I'm sure I could have sold this very well for many years.

But, looking at it with a less mercenary eye, it's even thinner than most of the books in this category: not as blasphemous or funny as God: The Ultimate Autobiography, smaller and less exciting than Waiting for the Galactic Bus, and definitely not holding a candle to Good Omens. (It's not really comparable to Towing Jehovah, since that one definitely wasn't funny, and Only Begotten Daughter wasn't really about the yucks, either.) It is a short, pleasant, mildly blasphemous afterlife fantasy by an up-and-coming comedy writer -- Rich is the author of two collections of short comedy pieces, including Ant Farm, which I enjoyed, and the novel Elliot Allagash, which has been optioned for a movie -- but not much more than that.

So, if you're looking for a novel you can read in an hour or two about a God whose more than a bit of a putz and two sets of would-be lovers too shy and odd to quite get together without a serious push, this will do just fine. If you're looking for anything more than that, keep looking.

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

This one requires much less explanation: you've either heard of it already (and, in that case, probably read it at least once), or haven't. If you're in the latter bucket, immediately put Cold Comfort Farm on your list of books to read -- unless you have a strong aversion to actually funny books or an unnatural attachment to the rural muck and torment of Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and their ilk.

I've vaguely felt like re-reading Cold Comfort Farm for more than a year -- I actually pulled out my copy, just before Hurricane Irene, but didn't get to it before the flood killed it. But The Wife and I rewatched the movie -- which is also excellent, in a very similar way -- a couple of weeks back (though The Wife didn't remember seeing it before, strangely). And so, through the mysteries of Inter-Library Loan, I got a copy of this edition, with the Roz Chast cover and the Lynne Truss introduction, both of which I recommend.

Cold Comfort Farm was Gibbons's first novel, published in 1932, as a takedown of the then very popular "rural novel" (Mary Webb seems to have been the exemplar of this now-forgotten subgenre), and it's as funny, and as endlessly quotable, now as it was then. It's a book about the triumph of thinking and planning over blind tradition and florid emotionalism, so I expect a lot of SFnal people will love it for that. But, most importantly, it's wickedly funny and deeply lovable, a joy to read and a joy to re-read and a joy to remember.

Strange Embrace/69 Barrow Street by Lawrence Block

There's nothing like old pulp fiction to show you viscerally how people thought they were supposed to live -- not how they really did live, in all of its messiness and day-to-day details, but what the narrative of their lives was, the stories that they told themselves about how they were. Fiction that aims at art bends events to fit its conceptions, but pulp doesn't have that luxury: pulp thrives on speed of production and speed of comprehension, so a pulp story can't be too specific or idiosyncratic; it needs to tell the story that the reader expects, and get out of the way.

Two of Lawrence Block's early pulp novels -- he's written a lot of other novels, and shorter works, in various modes since then, but these two books definitely are pulp, and were written at speed in the pulp manner -- have recently been reprinted in a back-to-back edition from Hard Case Crime: Strange Embrace and 69 Barrow Street, both paperback originals from 1962. Each was originally written under a pseudonym -- Ben Christopher and Sheldon Lord, respectively. Neither one would benefit from a serious explication of its plot and themes: they're pulp novels, written quickly to be ready quickly, to give a quick thrill to a mostly young, mostly male audience that just doesn't exist for written fiction anymore. They're both stories of young men who get caught up in "sexy" stories in New York's Greenwich Village -- one is a successful theatrical producer from uptown, investigating a series of murders among his cast, and the other is a local painter, struggling with what we would call a unrealized sadomasochistic relationship with his live-in girlfriend.

But what both books have in common is deeper than that, and is implied by the first title: any "sexy" book in the late '50s and early '60s used "Strange" as a near-synonym for lesbianism, and so both of these books have important lesbian characters. Important to the plots of the books, I mean: they're not going to show up in any history of the literary depiction of gay women, since they're heavily stereotyped according to the assumptions of the time: man-haters, damaged, with something wrong with them because they're not the same as everybody else. [1] The lesbian characters are semi-surprises in both books because they look like "normal" women -- they're not short-haired plaid-shirt-wearing construction workers.

Because these are pulp novels, they're very concerned with "normal" -- 69 Barrow Street even more so than Strange Embrace, which is really just a slightly sleazy mystery trying to milk some frisson from that lesbianism. Barrow, though, is a novel about sex and about how people should interact with each other -- the narrative voice reflexively tells us (meaning that original audience, all of those crew-cutted boys across the country, dreaming of a sexual liberation they didn't seriously expect would arrive later that decade) that it's so very, very wrong, so not normal for women to want to have sex with women, or for any people to want to have sex other than the normal way. (There's an amusingly vanilla orgy in the middle of this book -- entirely couples pairing off and going off to quiet places to have mostly straight hetero sex that's probably in the missionary position most of the time -- and this is horribly, startlingly shocking, and shows that these people are irreparably damaging their sensibilities and souls, even more so because they smoked marijuana beforehand!)

Look, don't read these books to tell you what your sex life should be like -- don't read any fifty-year-old pulp novels for that, because they'll screw you up. (Today's pulp, all of those manly thrillers with fainting damsels and lovingly-described military hardware, are not going to be any better, either.) But do read them to see what people used to think was far outside the pale, and to enjoy how Block was a fine craftsman of prose and incident even at that very early date in his career: even when he was acting as a conduit for standard plots and potted characters, he made them as rounded as they could be, into exemplars of their time rather than the stereotypes that he had to work with.


[1] 1962 was back when "normal" was a defined thing rather than a range; America didn't understand statistics yet.

Belated Review Files: April

What I have here are two novels that I read three months ago -- I liked them both at the time (though I'm pretty sure I had some reservations and criticisms), but, at this point, what I can say about them will be pretty vague and general. So I'm slamming the two of them together into one post in hopes that two mediocre reviews will be nearly as good as one focused one. Arguments, complaints, counter-examples, and any other commentary is always welcome; the comments are open.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

This is the first of what unexpectedly turned into a series of detective novels; Atkinson had previously written three standalone novels (one of which, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, had won the Whitbread Award) and a collection of short fiction, and so Case Histories looked, when it was published, like a literary novel with elements of mystery in it rather than "a mystery novel."

And the storytelling in Case Histories is very much on the literary side -- the first three chapters set up three parallel stories in 1970, 1994, and 1979, each titled "Case History" (Numbers 1, 2, and 3), before getting to our detective, Jackson Brodie, with the fourth chapter, and then rotate among several viewpoints from those three cases until all of the mysteries are revealed  and solved (not really by Brodie) in the end. Brodie is a private detective (ex-police, ex-soldier), hired to solve problems, but, of course, the cliche in detective novels is that the PI isn't supposed to solve murders but does anyway. Atkinson doesn't follow the cliche; one of Brodie's cases is looking into a death, but he's nothing like the standard mystery-novel PI.

I'm not sure why the mystery audience has taken Atkinson so much to heart -- I was introduced to Case Histories by my then-colleague, who edited The Mystery Guild book club, and the subsequent three novels have all been picked up by mystery readers, so this is clearly happening -- from the evidence of Case Histories; it really does take a literary novel's stance on murder and death, that they happen and are often inexplicable, and that they can't be "solved" or explained in the way that most mystery books try to do. Still, I'm not about to tell other people what they like best about their own genre: Case Histories is an incisive novel that is very smart about people and what they do to one another, and clearly Brodie is a deeply appealing main character. (Though he's not as central to this book, either as the focus of action or as a Ross Macdonald-esque focus of attention, as one might expect.)

Rule 34 by Charles Stross

You're reading this on the Internet, so I presume that you recognize the title's reference: if you can think of it, someone else has already made porn about it. Stross's novel Rule 34 is not about porn directly, but it is about the Internet, about the connections and appropriations made there, and about -- as Bruce Sterling once put it, the uses that the street finds for other people's things. Rule 34 is a near-future thriller -- more of a detective novel than Case Histories is, actually, with a deep attention to what policing may look like very soon -- and a loose sequel to Stross's 2007 novel Halting State (which I reviewed here, glancingly, at the time).

It's also a surprisingly wearying novel, one that works hard to prove to its audience that it's as up-to-the-minute as it can be, with its three-stranded second-person narration, its plethora of extrapolated detail about day-to-day life two or three tech generations down the line, and its fears about what computers, computer-aided technology and the society they're embedded in might allow before too long. As usual with Stross, Rule 34 will fill the reader up to her eyeballs with ideas and concepts, but, unlike Stross's best books, I felt filled up by Rule 34. There's a kind of SF that feels driven by the need to be utterly up-to-date, to be the new model everything, and Rule 34 gives off that aura: this is SF as cutting-edge as Stross can make it, about everything that he can think of or crowd-source, about the Way We Will Live in a decade or so in all its terror and wonder.

I personally find that Stross can be a bit dour and pessimistic the closer he tries to hew to realistic futures and technological extrapolation, either because the sheer scale of the effort daunts him or because the portents of that looming future are that frightening. (Oddly, his books about the imminently looming Lovecraftian apocalypse -- the novels about the secret British organization called the Laundry that begin with The Atrocity Archives -- feel brighter and less doom-laden to me, perhaps because of sheer whistling-past-the-graveyard bravado.) I respected Rule 34, and was awed by it, but I don't think I can quite say I loved it. But Stross is one of only a handful of writers even trying to seriously grapple with what daily life might look like ten or twenty years from now, and Rule 34 is perhaps his strongest attempt in that direction: it is likely to be proven right in a dozen major ways and a thousand minor ones.