Whodunit?

audrey's article and malliet's book. that's whodunit

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my creative non-fiction piece "What if they gave a war and no one came?" can be read in the latest issue of yellow medicine review. the information of how to purchase it surrounds this announcement.   Fall 2009 Issue Now Available The latest issue of Yellow Medicine Reviewis a generous 352 pages in length and includes the work of more than 50 contributing writers and scholars. Guest edited by Andrei Guruianu, this issue spotlights Eastern European writers and serves as a 20-year retrospective on the fall of communism. It also manages to do what YMRhas always done well in that it serves once again as a platform for indigenous voices around the world to join the network of ongoing conversations about--as Guruianu correctly identified in his editorial note--"borders and divisions, economic and political struggles, fractured identities and an uncertain future."   death and the lit chick by g. m. malliet bears an uncanny resemblance to my own eloquent corpse.  i suppose any mystery about a writer's conference, especially if it is a traditional, agatha christie-type murder mystery, is going to use some of the same tropes and same jokes. this means that my interest in the novel has more to do with malliet's use of the materials available than it does with her characterizations, plot, etc. the one thing she did that i didn't and should've, would've, could've is to give the reader a few writers' conversations about their craft. one subject of conversation close to my heart has to do with the well-circulated idea of when (in the novel) the murder has to take place. 'a corpse has to be found at page 57, 70 at the outside', says one of the characters (not a direct quote). someone else says 'within the first five pages. otherwise the readers loose interest.' the answer to that remark is 'are they suffering from attention deficit disorder or what?' i have had it so drilled into me that the murder has to occur in the first few pages or the potential PUBLISHER won't read any farther that i just spent a month writing three different beginnings (10-15 page beginnings) to my newest, that eloquent young man in order to move the murder closer to the beginning. i hope that i've chosen the best one to keep. too late now for more major changes. i hope any submissions person who ever receives it will appreciate the work.

literature and the russian 'soul' + two new whodunits

i received an interesting e-mail from larissa of novercherkaask. i have cut and pasted two paragraphs from it:

her subject is--Cultural and Literary Myth (mainly, literary one).

The main
idea is for many years Russian Culture has tried to identify the
artistic world of the Russian classical literature with the real Russian
world. Interestingly enough, people in the West believed us and they
made up their minds that reading Leo Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov works
they can understand real Russia. In the work “People‘s Monarchy” I.
Solonevich wrote,” The psychology of any people cannot be understood
through its literature. Literature reflects only separate scenes of
national life, scenes sharply colored by the observer”.
Nobody takes Edgar Poe’s alcoholic nightmares for the expression of the
North  American spirit and Byron’s pessimism – for the great British

one reason i find this interesting is that i have just returned from listening to dr. john hale speak on 'The archeology and symbolism of Wagner's props.' he covered a great deal of ground in an hour's lecture. one thing he discussed was richard wagner's need to create or re-create national myths in his operas to help the germanic peoples become a country.  in this case, there is a direct connection between the literature of myths in the stories of the operas and the forming of a people-hood. on that same subject, i happened to be reading e.m. forster who feels that wagner's pessimism by way of schopenhauer helped lead to nazi-ism. he's not talking about wagner's exteme nationalism, but rather about the feeling of kill or be killed that he, forster,  gets from the operas.  

i do know what larissa means, though. to give an extreme example, when, as a young woman,  i first started to travel through europe, people would ask where i came from. when i would say 'chicago,' the immediate response was the cocked finger and /bang bang. gangster.' that was the literature and movie of the day. it was not chicago. 

thank you, larissa, for your ever insightful comments.

now i have used up my time and space, more important, my readers' attention. i will get to g. m. malliet's death and the lit chick and rebecca cantrell's a trace of smoke in my next blog.  the books are best exemplified by their covers: death and the lit chick is pink and white with the title supposedly written in lipstick; a trace of smoke is black, grey, and white, a cityscape, berlin at night and in the rain.

idea.
None of the characters of these writers <the above three plus gorky> characterizes the national
psychology of the Russian people or any other people.

 

literature and the russian 'soul' + two new whodunits

i received an interesting e-mail from larissa of novercherkaask. i have cut and pasted two paragraphs from it:

her subject is--Cultural and Literary Myth (mainly, literary one).

The main
idea is for many years Russian Culture has tried to identify the
artistic world of the Russian classical literature with the real Russian
world. Interestingly enough, people in the West believed us and they
made up their minds that reading Leo Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov works
they can understand real Russia. In the work “People‘s Monarchy” I.
Solonevich wrote,” The psychology of any people cannot be understood
through its literature. Literature reflects only separate scenes of
national life, scenes sharply colored by the observer”.
Nobody takes Edgar Poe’s alcoholic nightmares for the expression of the
North  American spirit and Byron’s pessimism – for the great British

one reason i find this interesting is that i have just returned from listening to dr. john hale speak on 'The archeology and symbolism of Wagner's props.' he covered a great deal of ground in an hour's lecture. one thing he discussed was richard wagner's need to create or re-create national myths in his operas to help the germanic peoples become a country.  in this case, there is a direct connection between the literature of myths in the stories of the operas and the forming of a people-hood. on that same subject, i happened to be reading e.m. forster who feels that wagner's pessimism by way of schopenhauer helped lead to nazi-ism. he's not talking about wagner's exteme nationalism, but rather about the feeling of kill or be killed that he, forster,  gets from the operas.  

i do know what larissa means, though. to give an extreme example, when, as a young woman,  i first started to travel through europe, people would ask where i came from. when i would say 'chicago,' the immediate response was the cocked finger and /bang bang. gangster.' that was the literature and movie of the day. it was not chicago. 

thank you, larissa, for your ever insightful comments.

now i have used up my time and space, more important, my readers' attention. i will get to g. m. malliet's death and the lit chick and rebecca cantrell's a trace of smoke in my next blog.  the books are best exemplified by their covers: death and the lit chick is pink and white with the title supposedly written in lipstick; a trace of smoke is black, grey, and white, a cityscape, berlin at night and in the rain.

idea.
None of the characters of these writers <the above three plus gorky> characterizes the national
psychology of the Russian people or any other people.

 

whodunit? or oenophiles' travel guide?

before drinking from the wine-deep well of a romanticized france, i am going to quote a comment posted on my last blog:

via email: A new comment from “Malaria ” was received on the post “comments from readers, publishing sites, and two new whodunits” of the blog “Whodunit?”. Comment: Great site,this information really helped me , I really appreciate it.Thanks a lot for a bunch of good tips. I look forward to reading more on the topic in the future. Keep up the good work! This blog is going to be great resource. Love reading it. Commenter name: Malaria i quote the above comment because i'm not sure how my whodunit? blog can help a 'fight malaria' website, but i'm glad to help. if any one else sees the connection, please let me know. meanwhile, thank you, malaria, for your kind words. today's book to be discussed is the vintage caper by peter mayle. critic leary blaine says, "This is the kind of book that only authors with several best sellers to their credit could get published." he's right. the book is slight, short, and not really a mystery. it is also completely charming and full of the sunshine of provence in spirit as well as en scene whether it takes place in hollywood, paris, bordeaux, or marseilles. it is a france we remember from our youth or from the wish-we-had youth. algerians never start race or economic riots; synagogues are never desecrated. marseilles is recognized as having crime, but not enough to stop our own criminals turned detective turned criminals, so we see the crime rate enhanced by a delightful caper. the novel starts in l.a. where danny roth's 2-3 million dollar (depending on whether danny or the insurance company is valuing it) is stolen. our detective, sam levine, goes to france to solve the crime. why not? the reasoning is that the wine was from france originally. if mayle knew more about turkey or the ukraine, the reasoning would be that collectors of wine live in turkey or sellers of valuable wines live in the ukraine. the whole plot is simply an excuse to talk about the food and wines of france, which mayle does so well. you don't have to be a francophile or oenophile to enjoy the vintage caper. it is full of delightful food, wines, people, and scenery. knopf is the publisher. it can also be found on audio tapes and kindle.

 

two new whodunits? and an old favorite

because i write this blog and many of my readers depend on it, or maybe just like to compare their opinions with mine, i try very hard to finish each murder mystery that i start. i find my good intentions impossible to realize in kerry greenwood's murder in the dark. i do not like her heroine phryne fisher and i do not like her story. ms. greenwood has written sixteen books in the phryne fisher series, so someone must like them. ms. fisher is too cute, too pretty, too rich, too 'daringly' playful, and too playfully daring for me to identify with on any level. however if you want to know what went on at australian wild young thing parties in 1928, please read.

hard to believe, but it is much easier and much more fun for me to identify with wyoming game warden joe pickett. pickett is the uneasy hero of c.j. box's below zero. this novel takes place in the present in wyoming and other places. it concerns pickett, the law, a missing step-daughter, and pickett's family, and is a good read. this is box's 9th or 10th pickett novel. his books have been translated into 21 languages. the west still has its international appeal.

i am also re-reading jane austen's northanger abbey.  this, i think, is the third time i have read the novel that was published in 1817 after austen's death. it is a satire on the maturation of young girls of her time, still laugh out loud funny today, much to the chagrin of people in the hospital waiting room where i was reading it and laughing away the other day. my apologies.

i'm going to try to get the following book from the library. it sounds great and might have some insights to writing. The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives.

another sub-genre of the whodunit? or a murder mystery that is different

a big party that is held at a museum. that's not unusual. we even do it in canton oh.

a big party that is held at a museum, an aquarium. and the host is eaten alive by sharks while a few hundred guests watch. that is a different opening.

norb vonnegut knows how to grab his reader's attention from the beginning. he pretty well holds it through his novel top producer. most of the time it is fun to read a story half told in arcane language, but there are paragraphs, even pages, that i think are specific to those who have worked on wall street or one of its branch offices on a small town's main street. sentences like 'According to the industry rule of thumb, R. could trade 20 percent of a stock's daily flow without moving the share price. He could sell fifteen thousand shares....' i can follow that, but sometimes,it's just too much detail. 'R.C. hd been an excellent investment. On December 28, 64,436 shares traded and closed at $4.50-a gain of 32 cents from the $4.18 close the previous day. On December 30, another 75,008 shares traded and closed at $5.50'  and on and on. 

for me, reading this financial thriller was burrowing deeply into a foreign world, the world of grove o'rourke, top producer and investor for the firm of sachs, kidder, and carnegie. the man who was eaten by the sharks was his colleague and best friend.  he is gone, digested, and so are all of his millions. grove o'rourke, now morphed into a detective, tracks the missing money and the murderer.

fast moving, well written (i think), with subtle humor--start with shark puns. 

the lost symbol, whodunit? or gothic novel?

the lost symbolis not a very good book.  i am not alone in this opinion. in fact, tom chivers of the london telegraph publishes a list of author dan brown's 20 worst sentences and invites readers to add more. to be fair, the really bad sentences he lists aren't all from the lost symbol, but they easily could be. and i don't understand it. if you are going to publish thousands of copies of a book by a writer, wouldn't you invest a few hundred dollars in say, getting some college english major to edit language and construction?

i'm not going to try to add to the criticism. i will join the voices that say they'd like to be selling as many books. the juxtaposition of those two sentences is not to intimate that the reason for criticism is jealousy. oh, no. it's justified.

instead of adding to the pile, i'd like to discuss the lost symbol as gothic literature. i have just finished reading the granddaddy of all gothic lit., horace walpole's the castle of otranto as well as dan brown's the lost symbol.  what an amazing number of gothic tools walpole and brown use in common. the castle, first published in 1764 could almost be a template for the symbol, published 2009.

first of all, we have in both novels, the roots of the present conflict buried deep in the past, then we have the setting- the castle of o and the castle like structures of washington d.c.. we are presented with a mystic hand-cut off in one novel, the separated hand floating in the other. we are beset by hidden relationships between the characters, discovered during the course of the novel: father/ son and father/ daughter. mystic symbols abound, though brown spends much, much more time with them than does walpole. a good priest/monk shows up in each story. the theme of sacrifice with the father killing or almost killing a son or daughter is a prominent theme in both. more similarities strike the reader, the most important being that one of the messages in each novel is that the sins of the fathers fall on their offsprings. this list should be enough to keep readers of this blog interested. i'd appreciate any more thoughts on the subject or additions to the list. i will close by saying that the biggest difference is that walpole ends his novel with a melancholy soul while brown ends his with the upwelling emotion of hope, a more american ending.

 

two new whodunits (brown and hall) & the mayfield book fair

first, a shout out to the organizers of the mayfield book fair held last saturday from 1-4 o'clock at the mayfield village town center.  good job, ladies and gentlemen. everything was v. well organized; people were exceedingly friendly and helpful; staff gave each of us authors a mini-hershey bar to help us get through the day. as always, we would have like to have seen more customers, but i did very well and am appreciative of all of the work that went into planning, publicizing and setting up. the room was bursting at the seams with the books of 40 authors. i saw some old friends. a big plus was getting to know some new writers. thanks, mayfield.

i had a pleasant surprise in recently reading tarquin hall's the case of the missing servant.  the book stars vish puri, india's most private investigator. many reviewers liken hall's novel to those of mc call smith. yes and no. they are both gentle, slightly humorous novels that try to show us a different culture, smith, africa and hall, india. they both use the technique of immersion instead of, for example, having a person from a different culture as part of the story to educate the reader by contrasts. and both writers emphasize the fact that their detectives are not buff.  we have mc call smith's 'traditionally built woman' and puri who is nicknamed 'chubby.' also, i highly recommend both.

they differ in that hall shows us a much more complex, layered society involved in serious crimes than we see in mc call smith's africa. both writers pick up the rhythm and english usage of the country they celebrate. hall mines his indo-english usage for laughs. he provides a glossary in the back. a few terms are useful; i doubt if any reader needs to be told what a sari is. the book is a pleasure.

i've also started dan brown's the lost symbol. all i know so far is that two of the protagonists are made for each other. robert langdon answers a phone call from someone working for a friend and flies immediately to washington d.c. katherine solomon receives a text message from her brother who has never texted before and runs off to a meeting with him. this famous harvard professor (langdon) and equally famous (or will be) scientist (solomon) don't question anything. the first rule of graduate school is to question everything. i don't know what else will happen in this suspense novel, but a pairing is imminent.

lovesey's whodunit?

if you are a fan of the traditional british mystery, as i am, you will be well pleased with peter lovesey's skeleton hill.  this is the tenth in his series of peter diamond investigation novels. i am probably the only mystery reader who doesn't know about this series. i do now and i rank the novels and detective superintendent diamond right up there with colin dexter's chief inspector morse, elizabeth george's inspector thomas lynley and sargent barbara havers, and reginald hill's supt. dalziel and sgt. pascoe. good company to keep.

the novel opens on the skeleton hill of the title, a hill named lansdown hill near bath. it is during a reenactment of the (british) civil war that took place 350 years ago. among the amateurs playing dead, a genuine 20-year old corpse is found. the story of how diamond solves this 20-year old cold case and ties it into the contemporary murder of a history professor is much fun to read. this is technically, i suppose, a police procedural, but much more charming, humane, and, for me, readable than the usual procedural. diamond is drawn with skill: he's a tad overweight, his boss doesn't like him (the feeling is returned), he's somewhat clumsy, and still misses his murdered wife without being a bit self-pitying. one reviewer says that is an american characteristic. really?

i definitely recommend this novel. you can also get it on bbc audiobooks, read by simon prebble. it might be fun to take on a long drive.

happy birthday, how-to-write advice, whodunit? "Hardball"

from american public media, a salute to elmore leonard:

today is "...the birthday of novelist Elmore Leonard, (books by this author) born in New Orleans in 1925. Straight out of college he got a job at an advertising agency, so he would get up and write every morning at 5 a.m. before going into the office. He published some pulp Westerns, and then started writing crime fiction, and went on to write 43 books. Many of them have been turned into movies, including his novels Get Shorty (1990), Be Cool (1999), and Rum Punch (1992), which Quentin Tarantino made into the film Jackie Brown."

for those of us who don't seem to find the time to write, note that mr. leonard 'would get up and write every morning at 5 a.m. before going into the office.' that's advice by example. here's some of his writing advice in his own words: He said, “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.”

let's see, sara paretskys' newest novel, hardball deals with a contemporary chicago election ( we know that's going to be crooked in some way); a contemporary disappearance of a young woman working on that election, who happens to be v. i. warshawski's cousin; a forty year old murder, make that two because  a forty year old disappearance turns out to be a murder, too; make that three--i had forgotten the fire bombing of a nun; an attempted assassination of martin luther king; vic warshawski's relationships with her deceased parents; and much, much more.-- to the point where one paragraph contains all of the following proper names  (not as a list in the paragraph), peter, george dornick, steve sawyer, harvey, petra, les stranwell, kruman, harmony newsome, brian, and lamont. these are not by far the only characters in this novel.  warshawksi herselfcontinues to be one tough gal. she jumps out of a moving car and manages to run along side it. she puts out flames and cradles the dying nun. she also manages to solve the crime with a forty year old baseball as a main clue. i'm glad to see private eye warshawski back on the mean streets of chicago. i wish paretsky had created two books out of hardball. she has enough material.

coming next-- the whodunit? skeleton hill and comments on the russian reviews of dan brown's novels.

 

comments, back track on whodunit?, and v.i. is back, looking for whodunit?

• response to our russian critics ran from a reader's 'Russian comments were fun to read' to novocherkaask professor larita's thanks that includes the students' reaction:

  "The opportunity to see their opinion
  published in the famous writer’s blog is something they had never
  expected and is a real surprise to them."
• and her explanation about the students she teaches:
  "The new generation of future economists -
  mathematicians is more well-versed in US and English literature and
  today they are able to express their own opinion which  you have found
  interesting.
  As an Associate Professor, I’ve been teaching English (sorry, not
  Mathematics and Economics) to the students of this speciality for about
  ten years and actually, I’m very proud of them."
• i am , too, and with my contacts at outstanding russian universities.
•  
• in my last blog, i wrote about "james patterson's swimsuit, written with maxine paetro. i don't like serial killers; i don't like gore; i don't like torture; i like sex, but not gratuitous sex. swimsuit is full of all of these, and, tribute to patterson's skills, i'm reading it as fast as i can turn the pages." was i ever wrong. i wrote those few lines at the beginning of what proved to be an exceedingly boring read. by the time the killer had sexually assaulted and tortuously (is there such a word?) murdered thirty women, the novel was 'same old, same old.' don't waste your time. i don't know why patterson, who is a skillful writer, wastes his. well, he does made money at it.

i haven't as yet finished sara peretsky's hardball, but i'll go out on a limb again and award her a big 'yea!' i'm glad to see her back on the whodunit? circuit with v. i. warshawski leading the search for a man who has been missing for something like 40 years and associated chicago criminals. i suppose, as an ex-chicagoan, i'm prejudiced in her favor, but she hasn't published 15 previous books on my say-so alone. more about this book, all positive, i hope, in my next blog which will be written in a few days when i have finished the novel.