Strategy

There is no doubt that there are, if not formulas, at least recipes for most fiction. These change over time as tastes in protagonists change, worries over crime wax and wane, and society turns from one set of problems to another.

The ever popular UK procedural is a nice example. Almost always well acted and often well scripted, it mixes and matches a variety of familiar characters, situations, and crimes. These are instantly recognizable to fans of the genre. There's the crusty, but savvy, DCI and his or her gifted, but occasionally difficult, subordinate. There's the clueless superior and the often snobby top brass. These come as part of a still functioning class system, often a target for up from the ranks coppers with no interest in making nice with the entitled.

Then there's the suspects, preferably both colorful and plausible, and the victim. The latter come in two varieties: young, beautiful, and regretted, or unmourned and not missed. You get the picture.

Unforgotten, a well made UK import now in its sixth season, is currently appearing on Masterpiece (PBS).  I have not seen earlier seasons but clearly the show has been popular in the UK. Season six suggests that its creators are unafraid to tweak the formula. They do this in two ways, in the highly cooperative and egalitarian relationship between DCI Jess James (Sinead Keenan) and her trusted colleague DI Sunny Kahn (Sanjeev Basjklar) and, even more importantly, in the characters of the all important persons of interest.

Possible perpetrators are usually a rum lot, each full of the big and little vices that lead mortals to murder and beyond. Not so in Unforgotten. There are four principle suspects, each with a significant other, who might or might not be involved as well. And here's the thing, they are all sympathetic, and not just sympathetic, but often admirable. What's more, each has been dealt a difficult hand. We have a college teacher bedeviled by sanctimonious students and spineless administrators and a young, autistic man with a bedridden mother. We have an Afghan refugee who has faced both danger at home and horrors abroad, and a provocative right wing pundit whose lover struggles to recover from a devastating spinal injury. 

In each case, our suspects are responsible for difficult but vulnerable companions: a rebellious teenaged daughter, that bedridden mother, the crippled lover, and a newly arrived Afghan without papers. Impossible not to root for these folks.

This cast of suspects – and they are, indeed, suspects, with forensic evidence against them, as well as quick tempers, family problems, and detectible lies – alters the nature of suspense in Unforgotten. How often do procedurals harvest tension from the unknown killer, set to strike again? The plot of this procedural rules out that strategy: the victim has been dead for four years and there were plenty of folks who disliked him. His murder was no random killing.

Instead, what keeps the viewer uneasy is the question: which of these basically decent people not only killed Jerry Cooper but dismembered him? And how could someone that we'd hate to to see in the clink take saw and knife to his carcass?

Good questions and the twin difficulties for the Unforgotten's script must have lain in selecting the appropriate killer and in reaching a solution that is both legit and consoling. I think they managed. The Unforgotten ends on rare notes of reconciliation, unusual in crime dramas but perhaps just the tone that is needed today. 

*****

The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

• https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

• https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864

Imaginary Friends

by Janice Law 

Like a lot of small children, I had an imaginary friend. Not surprisingly, since I was passionately fond of animals, mine was a Mr. Fox. On wet afternoons, I would go down the hall to what had once been a chambermaid's room and get into the dressing up box. As this included a moth eaten jacket of some indeterminate blond fur, I assume the contents came from the "big house" across from the estate garage that held our apartment. There was a variety of vintage dresses and hats with feathers and a necklace of green beads.

Attired in this ancient finery, I would make my way back down the dark wood paneled hall, knock on our kitchen door, and greet my mother with the formal curtesy Edwardian Scots women used: Good afternoon, Mrs. Law. 

Mother would, in turn, greet Mrs. Fox, who came in for milk and cookies and what my mom would call a wee natter.

I've thinking about imaginary friends, both childhood and literary lately, because Ray Wilde, one of my characters, seems unexpectedly to be hanging around, moving from a useful if ephemeral narrator ( "The House on Maple Street") to what recently became his fifth outing. He's becoming that peculiar being, an adult imaginary friend, which is one of several relationships writers can have with their characters.

There are writers, way more clever than I am, who know everything about their heroes, who write up their back stories, examine their genealogies, and honestly claim to have created their protagonists from start to finish. I suspect they are people who do not like surprises and who enjoy control over their creations and plots.

I take a different tack. Characters, whether sparked by invention, observation, or historical knowledge– and I have written examples of each– first appear casually. They are useful in presenting a story. They have an interesting voice and suggest interesting adventures, but they are one-offs, imaginary acquaintances, if you like. 

Characters like Eddie and Tony in "The Smart One" (now appearing in Crimes Against Nature) or Grant ( "Up and Gone" in a recent AHMM) whisper in some inner ear and then depart, almost certainly never to return. They are creatures of one particular story and have no life beyond it.

Converted mill

I thought that would be the case with Ray Wilde, my middle-aged private detective whose modest agency I set in one of our old eastern Connecticut mill towns. I needed a narrator for an idea I had about teen athlete steroid use, and it was not Ray, but the house of the title, ( "The House on Maple Street") that really jump-started the story.

Basically, I knew nothing about Ray beyond his profession, his past work as a cop in a larger town, the make of his car, the condition of one damaged knee, and his attitude of tolerant skepticism. I was surprised when he turned up again with a part-time bookkeeper and an older client who turned out to be most unusual. "The Client" later appeared in The Best Mystery Stories of 2021, so Ray rose in my estimation, although I still expected nothing more of him.

Clearly he had other ideas. "The Man from Hong Kong," appearing in the MarchApril issue of AHMM, is where I learned that Ray has interesting friends, quick reflexes, a long disused Glock, and an older home that probably needs work. What about his personal life? Significant others? Family?  I haven't a clue. We are not at that stage yet.

more Ray Wilde territory

Will we ever be is the question. All I know is that he keeps showing up. A story about a man who loves Halloween decorations has gone out and another story is even now in the computer. But Ray's a cagey fellow. Just this week, I learned that he pitched softball in the Twilight League; aside from that, his personal life remains opaque. I think, though, that we are now on good enough terms that I can consider him an imaginary friend, a grown up Mr. Fox.

Miss Marple Revisited

by Janice Law

A recent bout of Lyme Disease has had me resident on the couch, watching gallery tours or cook shows on YouTube and revisiting the BBC's late 20th century production of all twelve of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books. The series stars the incomparable Joan Hickson as the third member of the great trio of cerebral detectives.

While the colors of the videos seem to have faded, Hickson, who began work on the series at age 78, is every bit as sharp and plausible as I remembered. While Poirot and Holmes are memorable in part for their well-cultivated eccentricities, Miss Marple is an extraordinary mind in an ordinary frame. 

Miss Marple in harmless mode

Indeed, as she herself points out, an elderly lady, being almost universally regarded as both harmless and inconsequential, is free to ask nosey questions and offer sharp observations. Talk about turning disadvantage to profit!

The combination of half-feigned dithering and razor sharp analysis must have been tricky to pull off in both print and film. I think Hickson succeeds in part because she is one of those fine British actors who does less rather than more. Not for her are histrionics or clever bits of business, not even a striking wardrobe such as both Poirot and Holmes enjoy.

In faded pastels and washed out grays, she looks neat and anonymous, but there is no doubt that she has sharp ears and that her chilly eyes miss nothing. "I don't believe anyone," she remarks at one point, which brings me to something I had half forgotten: how very ruthlessly persistent and coldly rational she is, and also how nasty some of the crimes are that she investigates.

The generation of writers that followed Christie reacted not only against the clever and complicated plots, but also against the settings: the cozy version of the class system, the country houses, charming villages, and genteel sections of London. All to the good, mysteries have become grittier, more diverse, or– in the case of popular series like Midsomer Murders, a parody of the older style.

But revisiting the Hickson Miss Marple series, I was struck not only by the vast social changes since the post World War Two era Christie depicted, but also by the continuities in mystery plots. Some literary changes represent a widening of interest, a greater range of characters and social classes, an increased sexual frankness, but others are simply stylistic, a matter of focus and emphasis.

Take Nemesis, one of the best of the series in my opinion. It's tricky and elaborate all right. A fabulously rich man leaves deathbed instructions leading Miss Marple and her nephew on a bus tour of rural churches and country mansions, a route that will involve them in a decade old murder. 

Nemesis is full of puzzles, and yet at the heart it is a sinister psychological drama with a killer brutal enough to have stepped out of any modern thriller.  In a modern novel, we would undoubtedly open with the first of the killings, a young woman bludgeoned and strangled, while the second would most likely be revisited in a graphic flashback. 

Yesterday or today, the material is the same, only the treatment, sanitized in one form, sensationalized in another, is different. Christie found an ideal character for her contemporary format, an observer and analyst who could make old clues speak, who was acceptable everywhere and noticed nowhere – until it is too late for the perpetrator to escape.

Of course, being a rather frail looking woman in her late seventies, Jane Marple is not going to perform heroics. She rarely has to rumple her cardigan, although when called upon, Hickson comes through gamely. She faces down the killer in Nemesis and actually dispatches the villain in Sleeping Murder. Do not try anything with a keen gardener armed with an insecticide sprayer. 

In general, though, she relies on tolerant, rather dim policemen for her assistance, and here I was struck by a real difference, no doubt based on assumptions about women and class. Modern detective fiction often pits the amateur (and sometimes the professional) sleuth against the powers that be. The overweening chief constable, the obstructive chief of detectives, the dismissive local force are frequent obstacles. 

Miss Marple's interrogative mode

But Miss Marple is tolerated. Naturally she is always right and so contributes to a happy solution, plus she is a lady and must be treated politely. She is also old and female and inconsequential. Her help can be accepted and even acknowledged because she is fundamentally unimportant and only a momentary threat to male egos.  

No wonder she is skeptical and trusts no one without evidence. 

Two Heads Can be Better Than One

Until I read A Wilder Shore, the Romantic Odyssey of Fanny & Robert Louis Stevenson, Camile Peri's excellent dual biography, I hadn't realized the number of Stevenson's literary collaborators or the mixed fortunes of their productions. The stories with Fanny were big sellers: A novel, The Wrong Box, with his stepson Lloyd Osborne, survived to be a 20th century movie; the plays with his needy friend, William Ernest Henley, were failures. None rivaled R. L.'s own best works.

Stevenson's ventures with collaborators got me thinking about successful mystery writing partnerships. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo helped create enthusiasm for Scandinavian Noir back in the last century. Charles and Caroline Todd, a rare mother and son collaboration, have produced the successful Ian Rutledge series, while Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have kept Agent Pendergast (fortunately semi-immortal) going though numerous volumes.

To this company, we can now add spouses Collette Lyons and Paul Ulitos, who write as Ellery Lloyd. She is a journalist who studied art history; he has published novels to his credit. Their third venture, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, is a cleverly-plotted account of two young art history majors unearthing the life and work of Juliette Willoughby, a long dead surrealist painter who perished in a fire when she was 20. 

Willoughby, and the great 30's surrealist art show that included her work, were suggested topics by their final year dissertation supervisor, Alice Long, an elderly eccentric. She points them toward the Willoughby Bequest, a vast trove of paintings, ephemera, and Egyptian artifacts, and  also toward the Courtauld Institute's Witt Library and Longhurst, the ancestral home of the Willoughbys.  Longhurst and its present inhabitants open up the world of privilege and obsession that spawned the surrealist artist and her one undeniable (but sadly lost) masterpiece.

I hope this little precis of the premise does not make the novel seem dry or academic, because Ellery Lloyd actually throws a lot of traditional favorites into the mix: Osiris, a secret Cambridge society (more Egyptian artifacts); a family scandal, not one, but two, unsolved disappearances; bohemian high jinks in Paris, blackmail threats, and, eventually, murders.

 We also have a high society party, an over-the-top art opening, and interesting information about the surrealist artists. Except for Juliette and her notable lover, Oskar Erlich, the artists are all real art historical figures and one, Leonora Carrington, was clearly an inspiration for Juliette. The real and fictional women share similar backgrounds, mental health issues, a famous self portrait, and the possession of an older and more successful lover.

The structure of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby is complex but so skillfully done that the story line remains admirably clear. The narrative is shared between Caroline and Patrick, the two students, and the time shifts back and forth between what they know and do in 1991 and in the present time. Their narratives are supplemented by the entries in Juliette's diary, a document which Caroline painstakingly transcribes. 

The result is a an entertaining update of the British country house and high society mystery, with bad behavior among overprivileged aristocrats mingled with modern tech and ultra modern money.  

 

Fashion

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," said Tallyrand, an old pol cynical about progress and change. Still, there's more than a kernel of truth in his observation, which is maybe why at a certain stage, every society seems obsessed by fashion. 

Politics and human nature may resist improvement, but fashion's mysterious currents  provide novelty. William Boyd's new historical spy novel, Gabriel's Moon, got me thinking about literary fashions. However creative or imaginative we are, our work seems inescapably set in our own time and in the style of the moment.

Gabriel's Moon, literate and well done, is in a very British style. Indeed, the plot owes a lot to my own absolute favorite in the genre, Eric Ambler's Journey into Fear, which itself owes big debts to John Buchan.

Even if you have not read Journey into Fear, you will recognize the outline: an innocent civilian, in this case, a well-educated engineer, is pressed into service in a dangerous foreign country.  The little job he is assigned, getting a roll of film back to the UK, does not seem too dangerous, but precautions are taken, and the would-be courier is booked onto an aging freighter with a small group of passengers. 

What could possibly go wrong on this small ship, surely too obscure to have attracted malign notice? Plenty, of course, and our hero soon moves from semi-complacency to a desperate search for friends, to an awareness that he is alone and must rely on his own resources absolutely.

Such a good plot! In Boyd's variant, set not in Amblers pre WW2 but in the early 1960's, Gabriel Dax, successful travel writer, is asked to buy a drawing from a reputable if not exactly famous, Spanish artist. Dax has occasionally done such little favors for his older brother, who is something in the British foreign services. He makes the purchase without trouble and returns home, because this novel is rather more expansive than Ambler's. 

The modern thriller must take time to flesh out its characters and give them back stories and complexities that earlier works indicated with a few well chosen lines. Dax has a history of childhood trauma – a doozy it must be admitted; a florid literary style, and eventually an analyst, one of the more interesting characters in the novel.

He also has a girlfriend, Loretta, who works at a Wimpy Burger and whom he sees as exotic because she's working class. Loretta, in turn, introduces him as her "posh boyfriend" which gives her a certain style and very modern, too. 

There was, to my memory, only one female character in Journey. Dax has not only a girlfriend and a female analyst, but his spy control is Faith Green, a chilly woman whom he rather perversely finds seductive. Both are very much 21st century women, although in 1960-62, the attitudes of male thriller writers skewed traditional.

There are other stylistic differences, too. While Ambler's novel cut straight to the chase, Boyd's has time to consider the mystery of Dax's childhood (the novel is a spy story wrapped around a mystery); the costs of secrecy and deception; and the restraints of the class system. 

He explores the psychology of double agents, a reflection of his fascination with Kim Philby, the notorious British agent, and manages to first extricate Dax and then trap him in a most satisfactory manner, eventually like Ambler's hero, on shipboard. 

Boyd's well done Gabriel's Moon is interesting stylistically because it presents an era that itself provided plenty of spy thrillers. Moon reads convincingly today but the novel's attitudes, timing, and style are resolutely of our time and to our taste, as a glance at any equivalent novel from the early 1960's will show. 

So was Tallyrand wrong? Not entirely. At least in the literary world, some things don't change entirely but morph one way and another in fashionable variations.

****

The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

Disclaimer

    One of the best movies of the 'Sixties was Rashomon, a beautiful black and white film set in the samurai era by Akira Kurosawa and based on a story by his country man, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The plot revolves around an assault and murder; a samurai and his wife, traveling through a forest, are attacked by a bandit. When the dust settles, the wife has been raped, the samurai is dead, and the bandit, eventually to be captured, is on the run.

Cate Blachett

    Each of the protagonists presents a radically different view of events, the wife and the bandit in person; the dead samurai, via a trance medium. Unsurprisingly, each story casts the teller in the best possible light, though one commonality is that there is no good ending for the woman in any scenario.

    I thought about Rashomon, seen so long ago, with Disclaimer, the brand new Apple + series by Alfonso Cuaron and based on the Renee Knight novel of the same name. Truth is once again closely related to self interest and self image, but modern society gives far more opportunities for  promoting one's point of view. The samurai, his wife, and the bandit had only their testimony. The characters in Disclaimer have books and websites and photographs and email and messaging.

Kevin Kline

    But as Pontius Pilate asked, What is truth? And how can it be untangled from passion, malice, self interest, shame, hate and guilt? Rashomon took under two hours; Disclaimer takes seven episodes, but both come to similar conclusions, and sad to say, one of them is that societal odds are still stacked against women.

    Just the same, Disclaimer, well cast and quite elegantly photographed, is mostly entertaining with dramatic final episodes. At heart, it is a story of grief becoming toxic and a man finding purpose in revenge after the loss of his son and his wife's depression and eventual death. Played by Kevin Kline, Steven conveys both genuine sorrow and cold, manipulative malice.  

    In this age when print seems old fashioned, it is reassuring for a writer that Steven's chosen instrument of revenge should be a self published novel. But then The Perfect Stranger only needs a handful of readers, beginning with Catherine (Cate Blanchette) the woman he blames for his son's drowning. And though the novel begins with the usual disclaimer that the work is fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidence, in this case, Steven doesn't mean a word of it.

Leslie Manville

    No, The Perfect Stranger is the absolute truth about a long ago holiday in Italy, and if Catherine or her husband (Sasha Baron Cohen) or son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) have any doubts, well here are some photos to back up the story. And here is an Instagram website purportedly belonging to the long dead Jonathan (Louis Partridge) with more pictures and lots of troll bait. 

    The Perfect Stranger, actually composed by Steven's wife (well played by Leslie Manville), is a genuinely good read. Plus, Steven seems diffident, vulnerable, earnest, and compassionate, even when the viewer already knows his game.

    The structure of the series helps to make him convincing. Contemporary events are intercut with scenes from that long ago Italian summer. These, while absolutely essential to the working out of the plot, are the weakest episodes in the series, with various wrong notes smoothed over by erotic scenes reminiscent of the men's magazines of the last century.

Louis Partridge

    These glimpses of the past certainly could be shorter, but they serve a clever purpose, and viewers who persist will be rewarded with a gripping finale. And some questions, too. With all our tech, are we any closer to accurate knowledge of events than the ill fated trio in Rashomon? Or are we, in fact, more vulnerable to lies, ever rushing to find truth and quick to endorse – and spread ever more exaggerated opinions? Nervous, on the one hand, lest we offend the proprieties of the moment, and on the other going to extremes when we are convinced we are right? 

    Disclaimer is a slick and sometimes manipulative thriller that raises some of the real questions of the moment.