Reading in April and Mystery Pick of the Month

In the month of April I read eight books. I read two books that are not in the mystery genre. I read The Princess Bride by William Goldman. Also one non-fiction book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss.

I read six mysteries in April. Two vintage mysteries this month. Two mysteries written after 2005. And two mysteries written in between. A good balance. No historical mysteries this month, but some coming up soon.


The mysteries I read this month are:

1. The Stately Home Murder by Catherine Aird
2. The Ransom Game by Howard Engel
3. The Chinese Parrot by Earl Derr Biggers
4. Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie
5. Chinatown Beat by Henry Chang 
6. The Dark Winter by David Mark

The Crime Fiction Pick of the Month meme is hosted at Mysteries in Paradise. Bloggers link to summary posts for the month, and identify a crime fiction best read of the month. Check out the link here to see the other bloggers picks.

Once again I had trouble narrowing down my choice for Pick of the Month. I enjoyed all of the books, and it was hard to make comparisons because of the variety of mysteries I read. But this month I did pick one favorite.

My Pick of the Month is The Stately Home Murder by Catherine Aird. This is an unusual pick for me because it has a lot of humor, and I like my mysteries on the serious side.

The Stately Home Murder, published in 1969, is the third book in a twenty-two book series which is still being published. The author is definitely poking fun at many elements of country house mysteries in this book, but it is quite a good mystery in itself. As far as solving the crime, I did have some inklings along the way, at least regarding the why, but I am not sure I ever guessed who. I was entertained by the banter between various policemen and how some of them did not take all of the pomp of the stately home so seriously. The humor was dry and witty.

D is for The Dark Winter by David Mark

Today I am featuring The Dark Winter (2012) by David Mark for my submission for the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme. Aector McAvoy is a Detective Sergeant in the Serious and Organised Crime Unit in the town of Hull. At the time of year this is set, Hull is cold, dreary and bleak. The area is depressed. Not a picturesque setting. McAvoy is happy to have his job but he is an outsider. He is known as...

...the copper who cost a detective superintendent his job and sparked an internal investigation that scattered a crooked team of CID officers to the four winds. Who managed to glide through the whole thing without a blemish on his written record. He’s the copper who did for Doug Roper, the copper who nearly died out at the woods beneath the Humber Bridge, at the hands of a man whose crimes will never be known by anybody other than a handful of senior officers who stitched his face up more expertly than the doctors at Hull Royal. He’s the copper who refused to take up the offer of an easy transfer to a cosy community station. Who now finds himself on a team that doesn’t trust him, working for a boss who doesn’t rate him, and trying to blend into the background while carrying a Samsonite satchel with adjustable straps and waterproof bloody pockets …

Two weeks before Christmas, McAvoy is sitting with his son outside a coffee shop, eating cake, and a violent death occurs across the square in a church. McAvoy rushes to the church, and collides with the murderer as he leaves the area. He is immediately involved with the crime, the death of a young girl that seems random and meaningless. He has seen the murderer, up close; although his face was covered with a balaclava, McAvoy has seen his eyes.

Coincidentally, McAvoy also gets involved in a case of man who has "fallen" off a ship while it was out at sea. His death may or may not be suicide. Eventually what he learns about that event leads to a connection to the first death. And others to come.

The crime solving in this book does stick pretty close to normal police procedures and the crime is solved through police work, although there is some element of luck and coincidence involved (as I am sure happens in most police work). McAvoy is just one of a large team of policemen working on this very visible crime. Because he has been relegated to a lot of thankless tasks since his whistle blowing incident, he also ends up doing a lot of phone call follow-up and grunt work on this case.  And some of this work does lead to clues to the killer.

McAvoy is a likeable character, honest, well-meaning, idealistic. He is humble, and doesn't believe in himself; worries a lot about whether he is making the right decision. He is a family man, a devoted father, worried that he is making his family suffer when he pays more attention to the job. But he is not perfect, does not get along with others easily.

My Take:
I liked this story and I want to see how the series continues. The setting, the characters, and the storytelling are all unique in some ways, but I think I like the way the author had the plot unfold best of all. I did find some of the occurrences to be unrealistic; the protagonist is in danger a bit too often.

I don't especially like stories told in present tense, but it was OK here. There were strong female characters, particularly Trish Pharaoh, the new head of the Serious and Organised Crime Unit and Helen Tremberg, the Detective Constable that McAvoy works with.

Overall, I found this to be a very good debut mystery, and I am hoping the author keeps up the good work, and offers us more interesting adventures.

The Crime Fiction Alphabet is sponsored by Mysteries in Paradise.  Please visit this post to check out other entries for this letter.

Other reviews here:
Mysteries in Paradise
crimepieces
In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel

The Princess Bride: William Goldman

The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, is the second book I have read for the Once Upon a Time challenge. I think I must be the only person in the world who has not either watched the movie, The Princess Bride, or read the book. The book was published in 1973; the movie came out in 1987.

For the most part, The Princess Bride was a very enjoyable read. This is a story within a story, and it is very clever. The two stories are very different in tone. The story of the princess bride is a fairy tale with characters who are either very good or very bad, and frequent escapes from very difficult circumstances.On the title page of the edition I read, it is described as a "Tale of True Love and High Adventure." The framing story tells the reader how and why the author decided to abridge the very long and sometimes boring version of the The Princess Bride, as originally written by S. Morgenstern.

There were times when I found it difficult to believe that this was intended as a book for children. I don't know what Goldman's intentions were, but I know that many children do read it.  This story has a lot of violence, but that bothered me less than the elements of torture. Torture is something that bothers me in a novel, even a fantasy. Maybe as a child, I would have taken it less seriously. (Note that I am not in favor of limiting children's reading. My reading as a child was not monitored -- to my knowledge -- and I did not censor my son's reading.)

At Common Sense Media, in the section "What parents need to know", they describe the book in this way:

...this sharp-edged fairy tale is geared to tweens and older. The cliffhangers are more intense and some scenes are scarier than in the film version. You'll find truly evil villains, murder, swordfights, knives, blood, poisoning, kidnapping, torture, giant carnivorous rats and eels, and similar scary stuff.

I have read reviews and analyses that examine the post-modern elements of this book. I don't know enough about post-modern literature to comment on that with any intelligence. I enjoyed Goldman's framing story and his cynical and barbed comments more than the basic adventure story; yet at times he was too negative, and the comments took me out of the main story towards the end. I am sure that was intentional.

My overall opinion is that this is an interesting and entertaining story that can be enjoyed at many levels. And, yes, I am now going to watch the movie, sometime soon.

C is for Chinatown Beat by Henry Chang

Today I am featuring Chinatown Beat (2006) by Henry Chang for my submission for the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme. My theme for the meme this year is mysteries that feature policemen as the main character.

Introduction from the book flap:

Detective Jack Yu grew up in Chinatown. Some of his friends are criminals now; some are dead. Jack has just been transferred to his old neighborhood, where 99 percent of the cops are white. Unlike the others, confused by the residents who speak another language even when they’re speaking English, Jack knows what’s going on.

The Setting and the Detective:

New York City, Chinatown, 1994. Jack's father has just died and he is relatively new to a posting in Chinatown. He is adjusting to his father's death as he investigates two crimes in Chinatown.

This is the story of an outsider. Quoting from the book:

Of the twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred and sixty-nine officers in the New York City Police Department, Jack Yu was the eighty-eighth cop of Chinese-American heritage. A lucky number, he once thought. At a sinewy five-foot-ten, he'd have failed the height requirement of a decade earlier. Now, four years into his career, he'd been transferred to Chinatown, back into his old neighborhood, a detective second grade. 

After four months here he realized that working in the 0-Five was like living in two worlds at the same time. In a precinct that was ninety-nine percent yellow, the Commanding Officer was named Salvatore Marino, and the beat cops were ninety-nine percent white. The white cops put in their shifts, then beat a quick retreat back to the welcome of white enclaves beyond the colored reaches of the inner city. Chinatown was like a foreign port to them, full of experiences confounding to the average Caucasian mind. Don't worry about it, Jake, its Chinatown. They were able to dismiss it as a troublesome nightmare, half-remembered and unfathomable. These Chinese were creatures unlike themselves, existing in a world where the English language and white culture carried little significance. Generations of sons and daughters of the Celestial Kingdom, they lived their lives by their own set of odd cultural rules. When a crime was committed, no one ever saw or heard anything. When the cops rousted them, it was a Chinese fire drill. 

But Jack had grown up in Chinatown, knew what it felt like to look and breathe Chinese, to savor foo yee, ga lei, pungent and spicy aromas that white precinct cops wrinkled up their noses at, to speak and decipher regional dialects that sounded to the others like a back-alley cockfight.

Even in the community, Detective Jack Yu doesn't fit in because he represents the law and a police force that no one trusts. In his personal life, he carries baggage from his poor relationship with his father. His father was disappointed when Jack became a cop, and when Jack moved out of Chinatown.

One of the crimes being investigated involves Uncle Four, a member of the Hong Kong-based Red Circle Triad, and his beautiful young mistress, Mona, imported from Hong Kong. This plotline is compelling and  overshadows the other elements of the book.

My take:

I wondered how true this picture of Chinatown in the 1990's was, because we are only seeing the underbelly of the community. The crime, the violence, the hopelessness that many experience. I could not help but compare this book to the series by S. J. Rozan, starring Lydia Chin, a resident of Chinatown, and her sometimes partner, Bill Smith. The picture of Chinatown in Rozan's books is not so dark. The first Lydia Chin book was published in 1994, the same year as Chinatown Beat takes place.

However, Henry Chang was born and raised in Chinatown, and he is speaking from personal experience, which would make this book a valid picture of the time and the place. See this interview with the author at the New York Times site.

As I read this book, I had mixed reactions. I was coming into it expecting a police procedural, and it was more of a character study and an examination of Chinatown culture. As a novel, I liked it a lot. As a mystery, it was lacking. Still, my overall reaction is a positive one.

My recommendation is dual. If you want a straight mystery and a definite resolution, this may not be for you. If you are open to a crime novel with a different approach, this is a very good one.

Please visit the post at Mysteries in Paradise to check out other entries for this letter.


Other reviews of this book are at: Petrona and January Magazine. The review at January Magazine is very detailed, so you might not want to read it until after you read the book.

The Murder on the Links: Agatha Christie

My Agatha Christie read for this month was The Murder on the Links (1922), one of the early books in the Hercule Poirot series. 

In recent years, I have only read a few books by Agatha Christie and this is only the second one featuring Hercule Poirot. So far, I find the Poirot character to be smug and irritating, but he does get the job done in the end. I know he is a very popular character with most Christie readers, so I am prepared to have my mind changed as I read more books in the series.

Robert Barnard summarizes the plot in two sentences (in A Talent to Deceive):

Super-complicated early whodunit, set in the northerly fringes of France so beloved of the English bankrupt. Poirot pits his wits against a sneering sophisticate of a French policeman while Hastings lets his wander after an auburn-haired female acrobat.

My take:

• I liked that this novel was told in first person by Captain Arthur Hastings. I do seem to favor first person narratives, where it makes sense.
• I enjoyed the hints of romance between various characters. Christie often throws in some romance, but it does not overpower the story.
• I suspected fairly early on how the murder had been committed (although not the why). However, the clues were strung out throughout the novel and held my interest.

Having enjoyed Hastings as the narrator of this book, I was disappointed to find that he only features in eight of the thirty-three Hercule Poirot novels, and mostly in the earlier ones. From what I have read, he is the narrator for most Hercule Poirot short stories.

The other Hercule Poirot novel that I have reviewed is Murder on the Orient Express (my review is here). That one is later in the series and Hastings is not involved.

I  read this book for the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge, hosted by  Mysteries In Paradise. If you are interested in joining in, here are instructions on how to do that. Links to other reviews for this month will be found here.

Also submitted for the Vintage Mystery Challenge (World Traveler). The novel begins with Hastings returning to London after a Paris business trip. He then travels to France with Poirot at the request of a client. The majority of the book takes place in Merlinville-sur-Mer, France.

B is for Earl Derr Biggers

Today I am featuring The Chinese Parrot (1926) by Earl Derr Biggers for my submission for the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme. Please visit the post at Mysteries in Paradise to check out other entries for this letter.

Biggers wrote six Charlie Chan mysteries. The Chinese Parrot is the second book in the series. The first book in the series is set in Hawaii, where Charlie is a detective on the Honolulu Police Force.

I did not realize when I chose this book for a CFA post on police procedurals that Charlie was on holiday for this outing. My plans were to feature police procedural novels that fit a more standard definition of a police procedural novel.

It is difficult to settle on a definitive description but this one by Julian Symons in Bloody Murder (revised ed., 1985) comes close to what I am looking for.

The police novel, or the police-procedural as it is now called, concentrates upon the detailed investigation of a crime from the point of view of the police, and in the best examples of the kind does so with considerable realism.

However, it is not that unusual for an author of a police procedural series to take a break from the standard fare and send his detective on holiday, so I decided to go ahead and include this book. (Not to mention the fact that I thought about moving to the next in the series, but it has the same type of plot.)

In this book, Charlie has traveled to the mainland (San Francisco) to deliver a valuable string of pearls. He is doing this as a favor for his old friend and owner of the pearls, Sally Jordan, who needs to sell them because she has lost all of her considerable fortune. Alexander Eden, another old friend of Sally's, has negotiated the deal.

The opening paragraph:

Alexander Eden stepped from the misty street into the great, marble-pillared room where the firm of Meek and Eden offered its wares. Immediately, behind showcases gorgeous with precious stones or bright with silver, platinum and gold, forty resplendent clerks stood at attention. Their morning coats were impeccable, lacking the slightest suspicion of a wrinkle, and in the left lapel of each was a pink carnation, as fresh and perfect as though it had grown there.

The majority of the book is set in a small town in the California desert, where the buyer of the pearls has a ranch. Charlie and Bob Eden, Alexander's son, travel to the ranch. When they arrive, suspicious circumstances lead Charlie to convince the buyer that the pearls will be arriving at a later date, even though he has them with him. Shortly after that, Charlie and Bob discover evidence that points to a murder, but can find no body.

At this point, we are about one third of the way into the mystery. The story gets even more complex, and the book is a great read. There are many interesting supporting characters, including a local newspaperman and a young woman who scouts for movie locations.

Racism rears its ugly head, as is common in many books written at the time. Charlie and other Chinese characters in the book are treated with a lack of respect and outright hostility. However, the author depicts Charlie Chan as an intelligent and insightful detective, well-known and respected even outside of Hawaii.

I have only read one other mystery in this series, the first one. Charlie is more central in this novel. In the first novel, The House Without a Key, Charlie does not show up until half way through and the story of the Winterslip family is more prominent than the detecting. My review of the first novel is here.

This book is also submitted for the Vintage Mystery Challenge (Dangerous Beasts: a book with an animal in the title).