Our Lady of Pain

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Our Lady of Pain (St. Martin's, 2007).


When I started reading Marion Chesney / MC Beaton's Agatha Raisin stories, I thought that I was settling in for a long, fun run, but I turned on them during the third book. In part because they were all plot contrivances and in part because Agatha's self-destructive romance with her neighbor was infuriating me, my eyes started glazing over, and I abandoned them midway through the one about the wellspring.

But her Edwardian Murder Mystery series appealed to me, as I enjoy reading stories set in this period. The first book introduced a gang of splendid, fun, characters and, once again, I settled into a run. I knew that this one would be a shorter one, as Chesney only wrote four books with these characters. I suppose because they do require a lot of research, and she seems to want to release a new novel every eight months or so, it was starting to become a burden.

And, sure as shooting, it became a burden to read them. Feeling like the absolute worst of media tie-in novelisations, these are uncomplicated plot-driven exercises that just stampede along with minimal character development and no depth or discussion. Some stuff happens, and then some more stuff, and then some more stuff, and it keeps happening, and, worse, characters get unreasonably angry with each other for perceived slights thanks to a determined lack of communication.

So this time out, Captain Cathcart starts escorting one of his clients while assisting her with a problem, and his sometimes fiancee, Lady Rose Summer, gets entirely bent out of shape about it, and then gets accused of her murder, and then lots of things happen, and Daisy and Becket finally hook up and then get married, and then unnatural roadblocks keep getting thrown at them, and then they're in Paris and Lady Rose has a chaperone, and then, and then... honestly, the mishaps stop being funny and end up aggravating and tedious.

Mercifully, the book does draw the series to closure. I see that some fans are hoping for another one day, but I'm fine with things ending like this. They didn't end with anything like the promise of the first book, but I'll credit her for not leaving many details hanging. Not recommended, sadly.

Snobbery With Violence

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Snobbery With Violence (Severn House, 2005).


After reading a couple of the Agatha Raisin cozies, I found myself reading about their author, Marion Chesney, and after I finished marveling at just how many books she has written - she is a machine! - I looked closely and saw that she has written four in a short series called "An Edwardian Murder Mystery," set in the 1900s. An analogy can be drawn to Agatha Christie, actually. Her best-known series were the stories of Hercule Poirot and of Miss Marple, but she also wrote a few lesser-known books about amateur detectives Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. Perhaps likewise, Chesney is best known for Hamish Macbeth and Miss Raisin's adventures, and here are these period pieces sort of hidden away, mostly unknown and unheralded.

The lead character in this series is Lady Rose Summer, a teenage aristocrat who turns to amateur sleuthing after she crosses paths with a young, retired military man, Captain Harry Cathcart. He, returned from the Boer War quite short of money, starts an interesting new career discreetly resolving the various and complicated social problems that the upper class keeps getting into, for £1000 an issue. Much to Lady Rose's aggravation, neither Captain Cathcart, nor anybody else, will take her investigations seriously, and, in employing a former music hall performer as her maid, she seems bent on ruining her own reputation. The scandal!

These two make a very fun team, and Lady Rose is a great heroine, a suffragette who is stymied in her would-be occupation by social conventions - it's very difficult to investigate a murder when sexually transmitted diseases are part of the motives, when nobody will speak of such unpleasantness around a young woman. With its insightful mix of the era's social custom, fun and vivid characters, and a pretty good mystery, this was quite a good read. I found myself enjoying it at the expense of Agatha Raisin, whose unpleasantness starts getting pretty wearing after about the sixth book. Recommended for fans of Sayers, Allingham, Marsh and that gang.

Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (Ivy, 1993).

Some weeks ago, I tried M.C. Beaton's most recent novel about Hamish Macbeth, and I enjoyed it enough to try sampling her other character, fiftysomething amateur sleuth Agatha Raisin. She lives in retirement in a little Midlands village not really unlike somebody else's setting of St. Mary Mead, where, steeped on a diet of detective fiction that she's borrowed from the local library, she absolutely insists on assisting police with their inquiries.

Unlike Macbeth, I started with the first Agatha Raisin novel. It reads very much like the confident work of somebody who's reasonably assured that she'll have a publisher interested in whatever she wishes to write, and can fill her pages with a giant supporting cast. It feels more like a TV series pilot than a novel, and why not? At the time, Macbeth had been made into a successful, lighthearted BBC drama starring Robert Carlyle and while Raisin has not yet made it to television, there have been a few full-cast recordings for radio. (If there ever is a Raisin TV series, it must surely star Dawn French.)

On the one hand, this is as fine an example as ever there will be of the modern "cozy" mystery, but at the same time, it's done with a really impressive knowledge of the genre. It's not quite a parody, but it knows what it's doing. Quite apart from namechecking so many authors who came before her, Beaton is able to devise precisely the sort of overinventive and very silly killing that used to aggravate the hard-boiled Chandler so much. Here, somebody has poisoned a quiche that Raisin purchased from a shop in London to enter into a local cookoff as her own. But they haven't even done it with arsenic or something sensible, but some absurdly rare and lethal plant. So was the poison meant for Raisin, who started off in the village making enemies-for-life with her big city ways, or for the judge. There's little to the murder beyond the intellectual puzzle, and Raisin's interest is hardly a quest for truth, but the role that she's invented for herself.

Frankly, I'm darned if I can figure how in the world Beaton is able to sustain such a silly premise, but she's written something like two dozen of them. I've set aside the next two books in the series. I won't claim that I'm chomping at the bit to tackle them, but I can certainly appreciate construction as clever and diverting as this. Recommended for people looking for light reading.

Death of a Kingfisher

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Death of a Kingfisher (Grand Central, 2012).

Invariably, I end up looking over the reviews at Amazon.com when I copy the code for the link above. The notes for M.C. Beaton's latest novel about Police Constable Hamish Macbeth (the 28th!) surprised me more than I've ever been, doing this blog. More than a quarter of the reviews gave it only one or two stars, comparing it unfavorably, and vehemently, against the earlier novels in the series. Sure, everybody in the creative arts gets the "not as good as they used to be" all the time, but the volume of the shouting here was really something else.

This is interesting, because I was planning to write up a little something telling my readers about how very unusual this book that I discovered was, and the allegations from some members of Beaton's fan base that it's unforgivably gory and violent started my brain ticking. I finished it believing that it was weird enough to warrant looking at some of the other books in the series, but now I find so many people expressing that it's a somewhat atypical entry, and that the other books are much, much better. Hmmmm.

So Macbeth, a quick-witted and careful constable with a small village beat and no real desire for advancement or promotion or city life, is the star of this series of novels that are firmly in the "cozy" genre of detective fiction. He's investigating vandalism at a local tourist attraction, a glen that's on a plot of land being disputed between grouchy members of an unpleasant family. When a murder is reported, Macbeth, following procedure, notifies his superior officer in the nearby larger town, and police and press descend on the glen to find that it's actually a rare and beautiful bird that nests there, poisoned. The very angry detective inspector bawls out Macbeth in front of the cameras for wasting police time and resources, which turns into a PR nightmare as a nation of animal lovers protests his tactlessness. The bird can't even be laid to rest without a public relations catastrophe.

It's all very well and fairly amusing until a human being is killed. I'm rereading Chandler right now, and I can't help but think that his low opinion of British detective fiction would not have been swayed by the unbelievably contrived death of the unlovable, wheelchair-bound rich lady. There's convoluted criminal schemes, and then there's launching somebody via rocket. Look, I'm fine with this blog popping back and forth between detective fiction and comic books, but if I wanted to read Batman, then I would have. You know what works for killing people? Guns.

But this tomfoolery is not comfortable playing within the lines of "cozy" mystery. Among the unpleasant and unhappy family, we meet two sullen, disaffected, malicious teenagers. While the book plays along happily with its witty and goofball domestic squabbles and lighthearted tweaking of police procedure and its remarkably silly death scenes, the children become more and more important to the narrative, and we learn more about their sociopathic behavior. About three-quarters of the way to the end, these two have evolved past the pranking, wicked kids to whom we were introduced and seem like creatures from a much more violent and unhappily realistic world, with organized crime and white slavery and pitiless cruelty that provides none of the "cozy" world's escape from our lives.

There is also a very strange disconnect between their antics and the flow of the novel. For the most part, as novels of the genre go, this piece tells us a single story about a single incident, isolated over the course of a few weeks while the events play out. But as the duo become the central characters of the story, each new event is related as happening several months later. It's almost as though Beaton ran out of interest with the glen and couldn't find a way to wrap up things, so she began reporting what happened to these characters after the incident concluded, and could not stop talking about them. It's a trick that doesn't really satisfy me, but I mention it because it is so incredibly weird. I can't imagine why Beaton wanted to change the focus so firmly, and in such a disjointed way.

I'll give the author credit for doing something so very strange and unique, but it's evident that the approach didn't satisfy her long-time readers at all. I'll definitely sample Beaton again sometime. I was charmed enough by the village of Lochdubh that I planned to return anyway; I'm more intrigued now that I know that it's not always this bizarre.