mystery

Borderlines, by Archer Mayor

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If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I like mysteries. Their literary quality is often outstanding, and I always love a good puzzle. This second book in Archer Mayor’s series featuring Joe Gunther hits every mark, making it one of the best police procedurals I’ve read.

Gunther, a policeman in Brattleboro, Vermont, has been seconded to the State’s Attorney at the opposite end of the state. Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom is an isolated, rural area far from the state’s scenic mountains and tourist destinations, and depressed economically, even in 1990 when this novel came out.

He’s familiar with the area, having spent childhood summers here with his aunt and uncle. He’s looking forward to time with his now-widowed Uncle Buster, whose benevolent support he could use as he wrestles with questions regarding both work and love.

In the gripping opening scene, Gunther’s journey is interrupted by an illegal shot, but he is quickly reminded that his authority as a law enforcement officer is limited in the Northeast Kingdom, which is “populated by people who had chosen to put their independence and wariness of the rest of the world above the hardships of living here.”

The pace doesn’t let up, as Gunther arrives in Gannet, the small village of his childhood summers. Ramshackle and rundown, the town allowed half of its building to be bought up by an intentional community, seen by some as a cult. Tensions between the Order and the town have grown, only to explode when a couple from Massachusetts arrives to rescue their daughter. The tension is nicely modulated, with plenty of scenes of Gunther sitting on a step with a childhood friend, walking with his uncle, or phoning his girlfriend to vary the suspense before building to a satisfying climax.

What’s best here is Gunther himself. With this character Mayor finds just the right balance of thought and action. Gunther’s quiet, unassuming voice sets him apart from sometimes brash or bragging detectives. Though there’s not a lot of soul-searching, he’s quick to acknowledge his own mistakes. We’re given all we need to perceive his sorrow at the way the village and its people have deteriorated. The loss of his childhood refuge provides shading to Julie’s story, the young woman whose parents have come to steal her from the cult.

There is one twist that seemed to come almost out of nowhere. Mystery writers have the daunting task of planting enough clues to significant plot twists so that readers think Oh, of course! Why didn’t I see that? while not so many that we guess it too soon. Mayor did an excellent job of preparing for all the plot twists here, save one, noticeable only because of the superb plotting everywhere else.

In talking about the elements in fiction, plot and character are the stars. Increasingly, though, I find myself drawn to novels in which the setting is richly evoked and becomes almost another character. Mayor does that here, brilliantly. The environment he evokes helps us anticipate and understand the people in this story, all brought to life, no matter how small their role. It also charges the mood of the story.

When I was younger, the Kingdom had been much as the name implies – a magical other world, removed from the mainstream and endowed with a specialness in the minds of those who knew of it. Its topography, both rugged and cursive, could reject and embrace, kill and nurture. It was a place where land and weather ruled, where the beauty came less from the majestic mountain views found further south, and more from the perpetual surprises that lurked behind the low, ever-present hills. Even at its harshest, the Kingdom was seductive, as when its omnipotent sky darkened with boiling blue-black clouds, low slung and pregnant with threat.

Its people, like those of Gannet, clung to this mercurial terrain mostly out of choice . . . They were independent, self-supporting, proud, and generally uninterested in what was happening outside of their boundaries . . . But, obviously, the fabric of the Kingdom had begun to strain and yield.

Even now, several decades after publication, this book is a valuable resource if you want to understand the crumbling lives of the rural poor. Mayor’s insight into his fellow Vermonters is demonstrated on every page. As death investigator for Vermont’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and formerly a detective and volunteer firefighter, Mayor brings the authority of real-world experience to this spellbinding tale.

Have you read one of Archer Mayor’s books? What did you think of it? Do you have a favorite?

Sunburn, by Laura Lippman

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Pauline leaves her family at the beach and returns to their rented apartment to pack her bag. Inspired by Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, she has decided to simply walk away from her life.

Though Tyler’s book isn’t named, I knew immediately which one was meant. Who could forget Delia on Bethany Beach, walking away from her family, carrying only a straw tote decorated with a large flower? For all of us overburdened mothers with our unrealised dreams—often undefined even to ourselves—it was as though Tyler had revealed our most secret fantasy. Can you really do that? we wondered.

Lippman takes that fantasy and spirals deeper and deeper into it. What would make a woman leave her husband and three-year-old daughter?

Pauline doesn’t get very far. She hitches a ride to Washington D.C. with an elderly man whose wandering hands force her to abandon him in Belleville, a small Delaware town, only an hour away from where she started.

She decides to stay. Introducing herself as Polly, she persuades the owner of a bar/cafe to hire her as a second part-time waitress/bartender. What she doesn’t know is that the man sitting at the bar with her that first night is a private investigator hired to find her.

Adam wasn’t hired by her husband, who is only that night realising she is gone, but by a shady lawyer whose connection to her in unclear.

Much is unclear, to Pauline/Polly and Adam, and to us. Lippman seduces us, revealing bits of information while spinning out new webs of suspicion. We try to decide which of the stories these characters tell are true and which are lies, even as the characters themselves do the same.

It’s like a game of three-dimensional chess. There’s what Adam knows and doesn’t know, what Pauline knows he knows, and what she doesn’t know he knows. Same with Pauline: what she knows and doesn’t know, what Adam knows and doesn’t know she knows. And then there’s the reader. For all our insight into both characters, there’s plenty we know we don’t know, not to mention what we don’t know we don’t know.

It all unfolds naturally, the twists and turns easy to follow. The puzzle is embedded in an engrossing story: a love story, a change-your-life story, a mysterious-death story. Adam, Pauline, and the other characters make their moves based on their limited understanding of the others’ knowledge and motivations, just as we all do.

I especially liked Lippman’s reimagining of the classic noir femme fatale. She pries open the stereotype and takes us on an unexpectedly deep dive into Pauline, her history, her motives, her dreams and weaknesses.

I was also captivated by Lippman’s setting this noir tale in the tiny fictional town of Belleville in rural Delaware in the 1990s. True, there are forays into Baltimore and Wilmington, but the confines of a small town add intriguing nuances to the atmosphere. There is suspense for sure, but the book isn’t a thrill ride. It’s a measured unfolding over the course of one summer of a multi-layered story.

What did you do on your summer vacation?

The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton

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It being the end of summer, I went in search of a real vacation read. Not that I was going away, but I did have a week off from grandchild babysitting duties. I wasn’t looking for a beach read; most of my vacations end up in a cabin in the woods or a footpath in the Cotswolds. Instead I wanted to immerse myself in a big, fat, multi-generational novel, preferably set in the UK.

I found it in The Forgotten Garden. As the story opens, it is 1913 and a small girl is hiding on a ship on the Thames, as instructed by “the lady”. The ship casts off from its London dock to cries of “Bon voyage”, and the girl leaves her hiding place to follow a group of children. Later, a fall on the ship has damages her memory, so she no longer remembers her name or any other details of her former life.

She fetches up in Brisbane, Australia, where she is adopted by the harbormaster and his wife. As an adult Nell tries to discover how she came to be left alone on the boat and why a book of fairy tales was packed in her small suitcase. After Nell’s death her granddaughter Cassandra takes up the search, following Nell’s footsteps to Blackhurst Manor on the coast of Cornwall, ancestral home of the Mountrachet family.

I’d previously read and enjoyed Morton’s The Lake House, impressed by how well she moved back and forth in time without losing me—and I’m a notoriously easily confused reader.

Here Morton doubles down by using, not just multiple time periods but also multiple narrative points of view (POVs). Multiple POVs have proliferated lately, having the cachet of seeming modern. Many writers have tried their hand at using them. Most fail.

At least in my opinion—remember I’m easily confused. Sometimes it seems to me a lazy way of writing. It is a challenge to bring out all of a story’s incidents and information if you are confined to only one character’s perceptions. I think some authors try to get around that by moving from one character’s head to another, instead of finding more creative solutions.

That’s not what’s happening here. I should have been lost a hundred times over as we move between Nell, Cassandra, Rose Mountrachet, and Eliza, the author of the fairy tales. We jump around in time between 1900 when Eliza was a child, 1907, 1913, 1930, 1975-1976, and 2005 when Cassandra flies from Australia to England. We have letters and scrapbooks and journals. We even have some of the fairy tales.

And it all works. It’s not just that Morton labels each chapter with place and date. It’s not just that we have different characters associated with the different time frames to help ground us. Nor is it just that she pays attention to transitions, so for example at the end of one chapter Cassandra in 2005 is examining a legal document, while the next chapter starts in 1975 with Nell checking her passport and tickets.

It’s that Morton has carefully constructed her story so that whatever the date and POV, the line of the story continues. Thus, just as Nell in 1975 begins to learn about Eliza’s early life and that she is the author of the fairy tales, we go to 1900 where Eliza is watching the busy life of London’s streets through a chink in the bricks and making up stories about the people she sees. If I was unsurprised by the ending, I was at least not disappointed.

It’s always interesting to me as a writer to go back, after my gloriously immersive first read, and see how the author has handled releasing information. It’s a tricky balance. You want the reader on the edge of their chairs, but not so frustrated that they throw the book across the room. So you have to reveal information fairly regularly while also holding some back. One good mantra is: every time you answer a question in the reader’s mind, create a new one.

All of the characters, even minor ones, are well-drawn and memorable. The settings—ship, slums, estate, cottages, gardens—are gorgeously done. The letters and other ephemera add to the verisimilitude of the story and give us other voices. To my surprise, the fairy tales also work well, adding emotional depth to the story as the seeds planted by their images flower. In fact, the language throughout is particularly lovely: poetic without being distractingly so. There are some really gorgeous turns of phrase here, some haunting images.

All in all, Morton’s book is a perfect vacation read.

What did you read on your summer vacation?

Ordinary Grace, by William Kent Krueger

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I’ve long been a fan of Krueger’s Cork O’Connor mysteries. Like many such series today, they are graceful and profound enough to qualify as literary fiction. This stand-alone novel, too, while a mystery, is so much more than that.

Frank Drum tells us about the summer of 1961 when he was 16. A bit of a scamp, he is in that liminal space between childhood and adulthood, when we move from innocence to a more complicated knowledge.

He’s often thrown together with his younger brother Jake, partly because he feels he must protect Jake who has a stammer. They are also somewhat isolated from other youngster their age because their father is the Methodist minister in the small town of New Bremen, Minnesota, and they both firmly believe in their father’s religion. Their older sister Ariel is a musical prodigy headed to Juilliard the following year.

As the summer begins, Frank and his family are struggling to come to terms with a death that has been ruled an accident but may be something more terrifying. Frank and Jake, exploring the sand flats where they are forbidden to go, encounter a squatter and notice he has a key piece of evidence in that death. Thus we are unsettled right from the beginning, aware of peril, but unsure whom to trust.

Although told from the distance of forty years, we get a strong sense of what it’s like to be 13. Frank pushes his boundaries, struggles with bullies, and fears the tensions within his family. His mother, once a promising musician herself, is a native of New Bremen who thought she was escaping by marrying a lawyer-to-be, only to be thrust back into her stifling hometown as a preacher’s wife. Adding to her discontent is her rejection of any kind of religion.

With the summer’s events, Frank must also grapple with issues of prejudice and race. He must find his own way through the religious quagmire of bad things happening to good people. And, like many teens, he must suffer those moments of recognising you’ve made a terrible mistake and those when you must make a difficult choice.

Part of the pleasure of reading this story is the delicate balance between these coming-of-age struggles and the dangerous tensions that bubble up as more deaths ensue. Another part is the subtle way the past threads through these events, exposing unexpected strains and traumas. These stories from before the story add depth and resonance.

Yet another remarkable aspect is the way not only the characters change over the course of the story, but also the way relationships between the characters transform.

Most of all, for me, after several novels in the last few years with vague or disappointing endings, the conclusion here is deeply satisfying. All the pieces come together. We have gone on a journey with these people, a journey that has left me with a full heart.

What novel have you read recently that engaged you emotionally from start to finish?

Hard Truth, by Nevada Barr

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I’ve enjoyed the Anna Pigeon mysteries by Nevada Barr ever since they first came out. Anna is a park ranger, and each book takes place in a different national park. Barr herself worked in national parks during the summer, so she brings experience to her stories.

I know she also does extensive research for each book. One of her books, Blind Descent, is based on an actual incident in Lechuguilla, one in which my brother was involved. He was shocked by how accurate her details were, not just of the cave itself, but caving technology, and the kinds of people who would be on such expeditions (though there were no murderers on his descent!).

I heard her speak once, and loved her description of how she learned to write mysteries. Her first book was surprisingly accomplished. It deservedly won both the Agatha and Anthony awards for best first mystery. Barr said she learned by taking a few favorite mysteries and taking them apart. She studied them for months trying to understand what worked and what didn’t. I think this is a great way to learn how to write! After all, it wasn’t that long ago that there weren’t MFAs in creative writing.

Hard Truth is the 13th book in the series and finds Anna working in as District Ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park. When she arrives, she finds a team that has been traumatized by a six-week search for three missing girls. They come camping with a group of young people under the guidance of their pastor. The girls have never been found, and the active search called off.

Oddly, the parents did not participate in the search. Instead, they prayed. Part of what I would call a cult, their home is a compound run by a large bully of a man whom everyone is afraid of. Anna hears that the sect has broken off from the Mormons, finding them too worldly and liberal.

A parallel story gives us a young woman, Heath Jarrod, who has come camping with her aunt. They are staying in the “handicamp” because Heath is confined to a wheelchair since a climbing accident, leaving her bitter and angry.

Barr mixes up these characters in events so suspenseful that a long car ride passed in a flash. I like Barr’s writing, her detail about the life of a park ranger, and her descriptions of the parks. This book, sadly, had less about the park and more about the evil on the loose.

One of my friends told me she stopped reading Barr’s books because she finds them too violent. I’ve thought about her comment while I’m working my way through them again; I find it interesting to read a series consecutively sometimes. I have to say, this book is particularly gruesome. In fact, the last few have been quite violent near the end, but this one verges on being a horror story. I’m almost afraid to read the next. My friend might be right.

What mystery series have you enjoyed?

The Nutting Girl, by Fred DeVecca

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Alvin Toffler famously predicted in 1970’s Future Shock that coming generations would have many jobs in their lifetimes. Frank Raven can testify to that. A former monk, policeman, and private eye, these days he walks his dog, records bird songs, and runs a low-key movie theater in Shelburne Falls, a small town in Massachusetts, near the Vermont border.

His peace is disturbed by the arrival of a Hollywood film director and his crew, scouting locations for a new film featuring the mega-star Juliana Norcross. When the reckless Juliana goes missing, the film’s director Nick Mooney hires Raven to find her, which he does rather quickly, and then to protect her—primarily from herself. Then Juliana really disappears.

This debut mystery has a lot to recommend it. DeVecca takes these seemingly stock characters—a disillusioned, middle-aged detective; an arrogant, young director; and a wild, self-destructive actress—and brings them to life as unique individuals. He does this by bringing out emotions and aspects of them, contradictory and compelling. For example, Juliana instantaneously bonds with the Sarah, the teen-aged daughter of Raven’s new friend. Their friendship and mutual trust develops throughout the story.

Raven himself, in addition to listening to the birdsongs he’s recorded, is a morris dancer. Morris is a traditional performance dance from England whose popularity took off in the U.S. in last quarter of the 20th century when the handful of morris teams swelled to over a hundred. For me it was love at first sight that summer afternoon in 1975. I was taken by the simple elegance of the dance, the strength and grace it required. I went on to dance and perform morris for almost 40 years before retiring. (Full disclosure: I am slightly acquainted with the author through the morris community and have walked the streets of Shelburne Falls).

Morris dancers are mostly enthusiastic amateurs, for whom dancing is but one part of their lives. DeVecca’s description of Raven’s team practicing and then dancing the sun up on May Day adds distinctive color to the life of the town, as do his descriptions of the town itself, its famous Bridge of Flowers, and the Deerfield River.

After Juliana disappears and is given up for dead, Raven and Sarah continue to search for her and try to understand what happened on her last day. There are clues for the reader to untangle and ever-higher stakes to drive the story. As an editor, I would have made a few recommendations designed to tighten it up, but this is a very good first entry in what I hope will be a series of books about Raven and Shelburne Falls.

Have you read a mystery set in a place familiar to you? Did that make it more interesting?

Deep South, by Nevada Barr

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Looking to change up her life, Ranger Anna Pigeon accepts a promotion that takes her away from her beloved Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado to the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. Driving deep into the tangled darkness, Anna finds her car sliding off the road. Then she learns that the directions she’d been following, provided by one of the rangers who will be working for her, had sent her down a little-used road that led nowhere. Is it a prank? Or something more ominous?

Anna struggles to adjust to her new role as chief in a culture where women are not expected to hold positions of authority. At the same time, the culture calls for men—even teenaged boys—to be respectful towards women. Anna stumbles across a group of Civil War re-enactors, a good introduction to Faulkner’s home state, the man who famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Then she stumbles upon a particularly gruesome murder and it is up to her to solve it.

I’ve long been a fan of Barr’s series, that takes Pigeon to national parks around the country. I’d read this book a dozen years ago, but have been rereading—or rather listening to—the whole series. I’ve been on the road a lot the last few months, and these books make the miles fly by. It also seemed appropriate to reread these books starting last year, which was the 100th birthday of the U.S. National Park Service.

I remember hearing Barr speak, I think in 1998. She said that when she decided to write a mystery, she took a handful of her favorite mysteries and spent a long time studying and deconstructing them. Her process obviously worked well, because her first Anna Pigeon mystery, Track of the Cat, was a bestseller as have been the rest in the series.

As I’ve mentioned before, writers often debate about process. Is it better to plot out your story before starting to write or just start writing (known as “pantsing”, as in writing by the seat of your pants)? The answer is yes. Whatever works for you. And writers sometimes find that their process changes with each new writing project.

Another debate centers around training. Is it better to start by getting an MFA in creative writing or study the many craft books available? Or is it better to follow Barr’s path of reading intensively as a writer, studying books that have worked? Again, there are many paths to your goal. I don’t have an MFA, but I’ve taken a few workshops. I’ve learned a great deal from writing craft books as well as from reading as a writer (the original concept for this blog).

Perhaps most valuable of all has been engaging in critique groups. This involves not just reading a variety of work and having to think critically about it, but also hearing how other people think and react to the same work.

A friend recently said that she’d stopped reading Barr’s mysteries because they got too violent. I see what she means. As I’m proceeding through the series, it is not the violence of the murder, which is expected, but the violence Anna Pigeon encounters that strikes me.

Still, I love the descriptions of the parks, the complex characters both new and repeated, and Anna herself with all her doubts and strengths. She continues to hold my interest. And Barr does suspense well, so well that I find myself at the end of a roadtrip that seems to have taken no time at all.

Which national park–in the U.S. or another country–is your favorite?

By Cook or By Crook: A Five-Ingredient Mystery, by Maya Corrigan

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Mysteries are a genre in themselves, and there are numerous sub-genres. You can pick up a police procedural or a hard-boiled mystery. You might find a legal thriller, a paranormal, or a historical mystery. An extremely popular sub-genre is cozies, the sort of classic mysteries written by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, where the puzzle is the important component and the grisly details are mostly off-stage.

This 2014 mystery is the first in a series and is both a cozy and a cooking mystery. Val has moved back to Bayport, a town on the Chesapeake Bay, ostensibly to persuade her grandfather to fix up and sell his large, old house and move to a retirement community. In reality, she’s hoping to make a new life for herself after a horrific car accident put an end to her career promoting cookbooks in New York City.

But there are plenty of snares for the uninitiated in a small town. Val is invited to the home of a new friend from the tennis club and finds her dead. Val gets ensnared in trying to solve the murder because the prime suspect is her cousin. Her investigation forces her to question her first impressions of the people she’s met in Bayport.

She herself becomes threatened when an SUV runs her off the road and there are mysterious sounds in the night. Some among the police suggest that it is just her imagination, but Val isn’t so sure.

I wanted a pleasant story to distract me during a challenging week and found it here, along with a few details of living on the Chesapeake Bay which is always nostalgic for me, but especially so just now.

The cooking aspect is quite fun, too, as Val tries to teach her grandfather to cook. As a bonus, several recipes are included in the book, one of which is for crab cakes. Well, like most Marylanders I have my own recipe for them, one that my mother jealously guarded, even if she did get it off an Old Bay tin.

I enjoyed the story, given the requirements I came in with. Yes, some of the clues were a bit broad, and I wished Val would have stood up for herself a bit more, but those are minor quibbles compared with the amiable diversion it gave me. The description of the town’s alliances and associations—and especially of teaching someone to eat hard crabs—were great fun.

What mystery sub-genres do you enjoy?

Fear of the Dark, by Walter Mosley

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Mosley’s fans know that his many novels, including the Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones mysteries, are rousing adventures that navigate the liminal areas that lie in the shadow of good and evil, guilt and innocence. While we race along with the narrator, trying to avoid danger and death while figuring out just what is going on and what to do about it, we are testing our own moral code.

This addition to the Fearless Jones collection is narrated by Fearless’s friend Paris Minton, bookstore owner and ferocious reader. Most of Paris’s problems follow visits from his cousin Ulysses “Useless” Grant, a petty crook who spreads trouble in his wake. Although Paris turns Useless away at the door, refusing to help him, trouble comes in the door anyway. Luckily Paris can turn to his friend Fearless—a man Paris says is “outside the law” and “stronger of thew and character than any other man I had ever met.”

For me, the great joy and value of fiction—all fiction, highbrow or lowbrow, genre or literary, ebook or audio, text or graphic novel—is the chance to live someone else’s life. In Wired for Story, Lisa Cron explains the biology behind our deep-rooted desire for virtual adventures: stories are how we learn about the world and test our abilities. Most of all, to my mind, they increase our empathy by enabling us to see the world through someone else’s eyes and by forcing us to fill in the gaps with our own emotions and experiences.

Walter Mosley’s novels let me encounter the world as a black man, an especially difficult and valuable stretch for me. This particular book is set in Los Angeles of the 1950s: not the easiest time to be a black man in this country. Without disrupting the flow of the story or preaching, Mosley gently reminds us of just how different life was and is for a black man than for someone, say, like me.

The most explicit moment comes when Paris comes upon a white man lying dead on the bookstore floor. He calls Fearless for help, and he brings a friend to help dispose of the body. Paris says:

There I was, in a truck with desperate men. I was a desperate man. It was hard to believe that a milquetoast coward like myself could be involved in such a clandestine and dangerous operation. But the reasons were as clear as the quarter moon shining through the windshield.

All three of us were living according to black people’s law. The minute I came upon that white boy’s body I knew that I would be seen as guilty in the eyes of American justice. Not even that—I was guilty. There was no jury that would exonerate me. There was no court of appeals that would hear my cries of innocence.

I wasn’t a brave man like Fearless or a born criminal like Van Cleave, but we all belonged in that truck together. We had been put there by a long and unremitting history. My guilt was my skin, and where that brought me had nothing to do with choice or justice or the whole library of books I had read.

This is not empty polemic. It is a necessary explanation of why Paris doesn’t just call the police when he finds a dead body on his property. It is why this quiet man gets drawn into the dangerous currents of the criminal underworld.

Being such a big reader explains Paris’s voice being a little more florid than today’s readers might be accustomed to. One area where I particularly noticed his voice was in the descriptions of every character, even the most minor walk-on extra. As David Corbett points out in a recent blog post, “the ability to describe the human face in fiction seems to be, if not a dying art, at least in a state of decline, even indifference.”

In this story Mosley mixes it up. He makes use of faces, posture, clothing and behavior to bring his characters memorably to life. Here are some examples:

Jessa was wearing an orange sundress that had little white buttons all the way down the front. The collar had a little dirt on it. Her red purse was scuffed.

Mona was a beautiful young woman. She was Negro and she was brown, but the brown mixed with gray everywhere in her appearance. Her skin was touched by it; her eyes sometimes shone with lunar possibilities. Even her hair seemed to be lightened by the midtone color.

Rinaldo had copper skin and slicked-back hair that did not seem straightened. He was missing one tooth and stood and walked in a hunched-over posture that he blamed on forty years leaning over pool tables.

Cleetus Rome, an elderly white man, . . . was old and toothless. He smelled something like dust or maybe even loam and he always bought magazines from me that had swimsuit models on the covers.

I was especially interested in the different ways Mosley describes skin color. He never falls back on the overused “coffee” or “mocha” but instead imagines the particular tone of a character’s skin.

As a writer and as a person I am learning a lot from this book. Even after providing an exciting read, it continues to reward further study.

Have you read a mystery or thriller that transported you to another world?

The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories, by Ian Rankin

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Two weeks ago I was thrilled to hear Ian Rankin speak at my local indie bookstore. He’s been one of my favorite authors ever since the early 1990s when I picked up one of his books at a store in Toronto. I’d seen high praise for his work on DorothyL, a listserv for mystery enthusiasts, but his books were not available where I lived and online bookstores were only just getting started.

Rankin’s books feature John Rebus, following him from his early days as a detective sergeant in Edinburgh as he moves up through the ranks. In the last few years, Rankin has started another series with Inspector Malcolm Fox, but this volume of short stories is all about Rebus.

It’s surprising to me that short story collections are not more popular, especially now when there are so many entertainment options and our attention spans are said to be shrinking. One reason that I sometimes resist short stories is that I find the beginning of a story requires the most concentration. With a novel, the payoff for that investment is much larger than with a short story. However, here the familiar characters and setting make the stories easy to move into.

Putting a story collection together can be tricky. When you put stories written independently next to each other, sometimes unwanted resonances or repetitions might emerge. Not here. The stories are chronological—one of the joys of the Rebus series is that Rankin has the character age in real time—and vary in interesting ways. For example, while all of the stories are in third person, some of them are from the point of view of characters other than Rebus.

We first meet him in his fifties, living alone since his wife left taking their daughter with her. Rebus doesn’t have much of a life outside of the job: just a few friends from work, a broad knowledge of the pubs in Edinburgh, and a love of music. He’s known for going his own way—a trait not valued in a bureaucratic organisation like the police—but also for solving the thorniest crimes. He carries emotional scars from his past, wounds that are chinks in his armor. And, like the best detectives, he has a strong moral code that is constantly being tested.

What I love most in Rankin’s novels are the complex puzzles. The name Rebus itself means a puzzle. In every story, there are multiple strands, later understood to be thematically related, that come together at the end. To my surprise, the stories here are also quite complex despite the smaller playing field.

I also love the huge role played by Edinburgh in Rankin’s work. I feel like I know the city even though I’ve never been there. We endure its weather, spend time in Rebus’s favorite pub, the Oxford Bar, and visit the tourist spots like the Royal Mile and the statue of Greyfriars Bobby. We find ourselves in less savoury parts of town and even explore secret places, like the city below the city. As we follow Rebus in his chase for clues, we start to understand the differences between Edinburgh and other places, such as Glasgow or Fife.

There was standing room only at my local indie bookstore when Ian Rankin spoke. I’m delighted that so many readers have discovered this fabulous author and that he is continuing to give us stories that challenge our minds, enlarge our world, and ask us to look again at our own moral code.

What mystery writers have made your list of favorite authors?