Review of the Kinsey Millhone 'Alphabet' series, by Sue Grafton

When the police can't help, California private eye Kinsey Millhone tackles her clients' problems with wry honesty and a touch of humour. Well written, well plotted and with engaging characters you want to spend time with.

Chosen because: I've been reading this series so long I can't remember

Starting at 'A is for Alibi', and working via 'E is for Evidence' and 'J is for Judgement' through to 'V is for Vendetta', it's almost obligatory to describe Sue Grafton's 'alphabet' series in a series of alphabetical jokes. But I'll skip all the guff about 'S for Suspense' and 'W for Wit', and get straight onto the review.


'A is for Alibi' first introduced Kinsey Millhone, a private detective in the small Californian town of Santa Theresa. Santa Theresa and the Californian landscape is almost a character in itself, described lovingly and in detail as Kinsey makes her way from clue to clue. We see the growing down-town shopping area, the wealthy homes of Horton's Ravine, the windswept beach, and the run down suburbs with their dusty mom and pop stores. If anything, some of the books seem a chance for Sue Grafton to introduce new landscapes - California's deserts and their trailer communities feature in one, while 'N is for Noose' involves no nooses, but a fascinating portrait of a remote town in the mountains.

One of the great things about the series, and which isn't always the case in crime fiction, is that there is almost always a genuine mystery to be unravelled. We are presented with a series of clues, and Kinsey doggedly follows them up, until the whole plot shakes itself out and into place. Kinsey herself is a woman I enjoy spending time with - honest and determined, unshakingly loyal to her friends, and with a compulsion to lie in the interests of uncovering the truth. Set in the 1980s, when the first was written, the lack of mobile phones and the Internet give Kinsey a more challenging and isolated role than the same private detective might have today. The novels themselves balance pace and thoughtfulness - the sadness of crime and failed human relationships is clear, at the same time as Kinsey revels in the thrill of uncovering cheats and scammers.

So far, we're all the way through to 'V is for Vendetta',  and Sue Grafton is apparently planning to take the series through to Z and then stop. The more recent novels have alternated between the first person narrative and a third person narrative describing events that Kinsey herself hasn't witnessed. Personally, I enjoy this rather less, largely because Kinsey herself, and Kinsey's voice, are what I really enjoy. However, the mysteries are still good, and Grafton has been able to stretch herself into some intriguing new topics, including false memories and the mob.

The only remaining mystery is surely what will 'Z' be for? 'Z is for Zebra'? 'Zoo'? 'Zanzibar'? All Sue Grafton's fans will be waiting with interest.

Review of Bubbles Unbound, by Sarah Strohmeyer (2002)

A screwball detective comedy about a middle-aged hairdresser whose plans to improve her life go awry. Featuring mysterious handsome strangers, poisoned mascara and Slim-Fast, a dead cheerleader and an all-powerful local employer.

Chosen because:  Found on a shelf in a hotel in Thailand

One minute it's a dead secret hidden in a crumbling Victorian manor-house, the next it's a middle-aged New Jersey hairdresser with ambitions for self-improvement. You can't say that the world of detective fiction is limited in scope.

Bubbles Yablonsky is the said New Jersey hairdresser, and more than conscious that she needs to provide her teenage daughter with a role model. So she returns to education, struggling through course after course at the local community college, until she finds her niche as a freelance journalist for the local paper. What starts as reporting on the minutiae of local life rapidly turns into a murder investigation that could help her hit the big time.

Bubbles is a heroine very much in the mode of Stephanie Plum, Janet Evanowitz's kooky and unquashable bail-bondsman. There's the same fast-paced action, the quirky elderly relatives, the troubles and opportunities of small town New Jersey life. In fact, Sarah Strohmeyer mentions in the acknowledgements that Bubbles was dreamt up at Evanowitz's kitchen table. But while Stephanie Plum is light-hearted comedy from start to finish, Stohmeyer's book is a slightly more uneasy blend of the serious and the screwball. Bubbles has real dilemmas that Stephanie never sees - a hamster doesn't need it's owner to set it a good example. And so she goes back to education, keeps up her job in the salon where she has responsibilities and commitments, and thinks carefully about sleeping with the handsome love-god who appears on her doorstep. I like the idea - frankly, Stephanie Plum's endless faffing between the two impossibly good-looking men in her life is starting to annoy me - but in practice, I felt that the serious and the comic sides of the plot didn't quite fit together. The local steelwork's irresponsible business practices was particularly awkward in this respect, ranging between being matter for gross-out jokes and for the tragic death of Bubbles' father. Frankly, I think that Strohmeyer might have been more at home writing a more openly political crime thriller, in the style of Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski novels.

Having said all that, if you like Stephanie Plum (and I do), it's well worth trying out Bubbles Yablonsky.

Review of The Library Paradox by Catherine Shaw (2006)

A Victorian female detective sets out to investigate the impossible murder of a Professor in a locked room. Set at the height of the Dreyfus affair, the novel takes us into the heart of the Jewish community in 19th century London, tackling anti-semitism and xenophobia.

Chosen because: a Christmas present from my mystery-loving aunt

Well, once again (following Colin Cotterrill's The Woman who Wouldn't Die) I'm thrown into the middle of a series, with a set of characters who (presumably) all know each other and each others' little foibles, while I'm left trying to work out who's who, and, more importantly, try to work up the empathy for them.

This last couple of weeks, I've been reading four different crime novels (The Woman who Wouldn't Die, The Cadaver Game, A Lesson in Secrets, and The Library Paradox), all part of a series, all with a historical twist, and its been an incentive to consider the role of character in the readers' enjoyment of the novel. With two of the novels, The Cadaver Game and A Lesson in Secrets, I'd already read several other books in the series. With the other two, I was coming fresh into the story half-way through. How much of my enjoyment of The Cadaver Game was the result of meeting again characters who I'm familiar with? How much of my difficulty with The Library Paradox was the result of being thrown into the fourth or fifth novel in the series?

I was left thinking of Donald Maas's thoughts (in his excellent book Writing the Breakout Novel) on the crucial importance of the reader's empathy with a central character, and his discussions of what makes us identify a character. My problem with Vanessa Weatherburn, the heroine of this novel, was that I never particularly got to like her. For no good reason. She seemed a nice enough person, but there was never that moment in the opening chapter when she grabbed at me and made me think, 'yes, this one, I'm rooting for this one'. I certainly never got as far as liking (or even being able to quite remember who was who) her three young student companions, Amy, Emily and Jonathan, which meant that when one of them fell into mortal danger towards the novel's climax, I was fairly unmoved.

Vanessa Weatherburn meets all the criteria for a heroine I should empathise with - an intelligent, educated Victorian woman, who is willing to throw off the shackles of convention to take up an alternative career as a detective. She even lives in Cambridge, my own home town, in a house which I can picture exactly. And yet... I was left ungripped.

So what does an author have to do to make me want to cheer for their heroes, right or wrong, from the beginning to the end of the novel? What makes us put a small part of our soul into someone else's imagination? It's something that I, as a would-be writer myself, need to keep thinking about. But one of my writing buddies, reading over an early draft of my novel, suggested that it was the small incidents that can touch - and the small words. My heroine left her cold, while her side-kick, she said, had her from the very first moment that he gently smoothed the straps over a dead boy's shoulder.  

I was repeatedly left thinking that I should be enjoying the novel more. For me, without a deeper empathy with the characters, I felt rather as though I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 documentary about attitudes towards Jews in England and France in the late 19th century - and if I'd wanted to read about that, I would have gone back to the source and re-read Amy Levy's Reuben Sachs, or Zola's J'Accuse.

Having said that, I really did enjoy the elements of the novel set deep in the immigrant Jewish community in London's East End. Shaw brought the atmosphere, the sights and smells and people, to life in a way that I was longing for in the rest of the novel's settings. But in many ways, for me, the most memorable part of the whle novel was a re-telling of a short story by Yiddish writer Isaac Peretz. 

Review of Bellwether, by Connie Willis

A comic portrayal of a team of scientists struggling to continue their research despite hopeless bureaucracy, diminishing funding and romantic entanglements - not to mention the difficulties of getting a decent cup of iced tea.
 
Chosen: bought after being introduced to her novels via a friend

I'm not sure whether you can call this a science fiction novel in the mainstream sense - no aliens, no far-flung planets, no adventures, even - but it's certainly fiction about science.

Connie Willis is a hard writer to categorise. Her novels range from the very funny To Say Nothing of the Dog, a time-travelling romantic comedy, to much more serious but gripping looks at history, such as the duology Blackout and All Clear.

Bellwether is set in a reseach lab in fashionable Boulder, Colorado, where sociologist Sandy is trying to track down the underlying source of trends and fads of all kinds. Meanwhile, her colleague Bennett is struggling to find the funding he needs for his research into chaos theory, and Management is trying out yet another management strategy du jour.

It's much quieter and lighter than her other books, and as such was a bit of a disappointment to me when I first read it - it certainly doesn't have either the pace of Blackout / All Clear or the screwball comedy of To Say Nothing of the Dog. But it's one that I've come back to repeatedly.  Engaging characters, a very neatly worked-out plot (no suprise, as TSNotD is structured in the style of a classic 30's murder mystery), and most of all, an author who clearly has a topic she wants to explore. The increasingly bizarre fashions followed by the characters (particularly the duct-tape) are a recurring comic touch. And its a nice reminder that middle-aged scientists and sociologists are every bit as driven by trends as their younger, more obviously fashionable juniors.

It's quite an achievement to combine a discussion of scientific breakthroughs, the problems of blindly following the fashion, and romantic comedy. Well worth reading, if only to see how lucky you are not to work at HiTek labs with fashion conscious Flip as your personal assistant.

One minor but important point. Connie Willis is totally wrong about bread pudding in this novel - it is delicious and Sandy's on-off boyfriend is quite right to change his mind about it.

Where are all the women?

The mystery that we are supposed to be wondering about in Dan Simmons' Hyperion is the approaching end of the world, the nature of the all-powerful, unknowable Shrike, and the 7 pilgrims' quest to prevent Doomsday.

What I am actually wondering about is, 'where are all the women?'.

So far, across a planetary federation of what seems to be thousands if not tens of thousands of planets, we have been introduced to no fewer than four women. The first was a native who kindly nursed a passing missionary / anthropologist and so merited an entry in his diary. One was a nurse who smoothed a soldier's fevered brow and was exploded by aliens ten seconds later, leaving the solider to get on with the serious manly duty of stealing spaceships. The third turned out not to be a woman at all, but - after several pages of lovingly detailed descriptions of her naked body - a monster. (I know, that happens to me a lot too. You go for a coffee with a woman you happen to meet, and lo and behold, she turns out to be a monster with retractable spikes spinning out of her vulva. You can't go back to that cafe again.) We do still have one woman to be fully introduced to, so lets hope for the best.*

The best thing is that at one point, the missionary / anthropologist wonders how the tribe he is studying manages to reproduce themselves, given their total taboos around bodies. I think he should be wondering how his own galaxy-wide civilization has managed to keep going, given that there are apparently 3 women and 1 female-looking monster to reproduce the entire next generation. In fact, the Shrike needn't bother to kill anyone off - it can just wait for nature to take its course.

It's striking just how different men and women's writing can be. A friend's novel, set in the religious turmoil of the 16th century, includes powerful dukes, noblemen and soliders, but also the whole host of sisters, grandmothers, sisters-in-law, aunts, nuns, women just getting on with the shopping - in short, the type of mix of genders and ages that she and I see in real life. Lois McMaster Bujold, whose work I'm a great fan of, is another writer who thinks about the gender realities of life in the future, and tackles the mystery of the general lack of women in the future head on. Which leaves me wondering - do most men science fiction writers simply live in a woman free world?

* There is also a one week old baby girl on the pilgramage, but she mainly seems to play the portable role of a handbag or other arm decoration. Certainly she behaves like no other baby I've ever heard of.