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I have long been a fan of Ruth Rendell’s dark mysteries. She is somehow able to bring the most sinister characters to life and make me understand and care for them. When you add to that the complex stories she presents and the suspenseful pacing, you’ve got a winning package. So I turned to this audio book as though to a safe haven on a recent long trip. The book I’d selected wasn’t holding my attention and, being a bit sleepy to start with, I needed something to keep me on my toes.

I’ve heard that some people don’t consider listening to audio books to be equivalent to reading a hardback or paperback book. Me, I’m agnostic about book delivery mechanisms. I read and listen to many books and consider both to be “reading the book”. I don't believe that one method or the other is necessarily a higher quality reading experience. Perhaps the difference is that when I listen to an audio book, I really listen, and I am not afraid to rewind if temporarily distracted. It’s not just background noise.

Of course, certain books are better suited for one delivery method or the other. There have been books I couldn't stand reading but enjoyed listening to (e.g., the Harry Potter books) and vice versa (e.g., Robert B. Parker's books). Much depends on the narrator; much on the text. And certain activities are better suited to one or the other: I love listening to a book while I walk but would never just sit in a chair and listen. Obviously, I listen to books while driving, but I try to choose suitable books. They cannot be so subtle or complex that I must give them my entire attention and perhaps even reread passages several times. At the same time, they cannot be too exciting or I’ll start to drive too fast.

Rendell’s story is indeed well-suited for drive-time. Ismay shares a London flat with Heather, the younger sister whom she has spent her life protecting, ever since they were teen-agers, ever since the day Ismay and their mother returned from a shopping expedition to find Heather dripping with water and the girls’ stepfather drowned in the bathtub upstairs. The official verdict was accidental death, but although they never spoke of it, both Ismay and their mother remained convinced that Heather had killed him, Ismay believing that Heather did it to protect her (Ismay) from Guy’s attentions.

Their mother has since descended into schizophrenia and lives upstairs with her sister, the girls’ aunt. Ismay is passionately in love with Andrew, who resembles Guy, but the antagonism between Andrew and Heather may drive him away. Heather meanwhile has been asked out by Edmund, an acquaintance from work, causing Ismay to wonder if she should warn Edmund about Heather’s background. What if Heather should feel the need to protect Edmund from someone, or to protect the children who may follow? Edmund himself is trying to escape the clutches of his mother and her attempts to set him up with the sycophantic Marion, a young woman who latches onto lonely, older people. Well-off, lonely, older people.

I love the way Rendell does suspense: not a pounding beat constantly accelerating, but a tension that ratchets up and down, subtly, as the story progresses, and doubts and suspicions wax and wane. However, I found some of the characters a bit one-dimensional. Edmund’s mother for example: she’s certainly believable (and I’ve known my share of controlling, narcissistic hypochondriacs who happen to be mothers) but she seems a bit overdone to me. Her next door neighbor, Barry Phoenix, with his mustaches and Indian relicts, is a stereotypical English gent of the what-ho, pip-pip school. Although of a higher class than Edmund’s mum, Andrew, Ismay's boyfriend, exhibits the same controlling narcissism and not much else; I found his motivations hard to understand. The sisters themselves, though more complex certainly, seemed oddly flat to me, perhaps because of their solid devotion to each other, never marred by jealousy or competition or resentment, even as they make such huge demands on each other’s emotional lives.

I’m not sure I would have noticed the slight flatness of these characters if I’d been reading the book instead of listening to it. While the narrator was good, hearing the voices of the characters aloud seemed to hit those single notes even harder. The characters I found most interesting were two peripheral ones: the aunt, who despite being middle-aged, is still searching for love and willing to try even bizarre dating services to find it; and Marion’s down-and-out brother Fowler—what a great name!—who brings Marion treasures he finds in trash bins and expects her to take care of him based on childhood promises made in the Wendy-house in the garden. The book kept me fascinated (and awake) all the way home.

Actually I read three books by Stallwood, the first three in her Kate Ivory series set in Oxford. Often an author’s second book fails to live up to the promise of the first. Usually, that first book has been labored over for years while the author tried to get it published. Not only is it impelled by the vigour that pushed the author into writing in the first place, it has been critiqued by writing classes, polished and repolished by the hopeful author. The second book is often a rushed affair, to meet a contract deadline, and suffers from the lack of a long gestation and multiple revisions.

Not here. Well, technically even the first book in the series, Death and the Oxford Box, is Stallwood’s second crime novel, her first being the stand-alone Deathspell. Reading these three books in succession, the second being Oxford Exit, gave me the opportunity to watch the author grow from book to book, trying increasingly harder techniques, achieving more complex and resonant stories.

In the first book, writer Kate Ivory takes time out from working on her latest historical romance to jog each morning with a local running group. The members are absorbed with planning both a club race and a crime: they have decided to help Rose, a member of the group, steal back the valuable enamel boxes that her delinquent husband took with him when he left to live with the hateful Lynda. Kate is given the job of coming up with a plan. I found the book entertaining, though the clues were a bit obvious.

In Oxford Exit, Kate is asked by ex-lover, now-friend Andrew to help figure out who is stealing books from the Oxford University libraries. This is a much more complex and assured narrative, with significant clues not so loudly broadcast. I particularly liked the exploration of the mind of the murderer in alternating chapters written from the murderer’s point of view.

This third book goes even further, with more subtle characters and clues. To my astonished pleasure, it boasts multiple narratives woven within the chapters that are perfectly clear even while being fully integrated, something that few writers are able to accomplish without making me crazy. There’s even a post-modernist wink at the reader about three-quarters of the way through. Kate is looking for something to spice up her latest novel about the sister of Dickens’s mistress, and learns that an Oxford tutor is engrossed in research that could be just what she needs: Dr. Olivia Blacket is transcribing newly discovered letters and diaries written by the sisters. Kate, fearful after her last two encounters with murder, feels pretty safe approaching Dr. Blacket, only to find herself immersed in another adventure.

Excellent. I enjoyed spending time with Kate, who is spunky and smart, but forthright about her failings. Most of all, though, I reveled in the unromantic descriptions of Oxford and the various colleges—no dreaming spires here—which brought back memories of my many visits to the town. I’ll be looking for more in the series. How much better can Stallwood get?

This is what happens when I’m in a hurry. Late for my poetry group meeting, I buzzed through the audio books section of the library, picking up a couple of—I thought—mysteries to keep me entertained during my long commute. I suppose some might consider this book a mystery, but I was surprised and disappointed when it veered off into the supernatural. I kept hoping that these paranormal manifestations were just indications of psychological complexity, but finally had to admit that I’d landed myself with a horror story.

I’m not a fan. I avoid horror movies, whether supernatural or slasher. I’ve never read a Stephen King book or—knowingly—any other horror story. I did see Rosemary’s Baby as a teenager and was deeply perturbed, not so much by the fear that any woman might actually bear such a child as by the duplicity of the people surrounding Rosemary. I myself have always been appallingly gullible, so the idea that such innocent-seeming people could harbor such evil intentions troubled me.

And then I don’t like being scared. The real world is scary enough without agitating myself further with scary stories. I don’t even like roller coasters or any but the most gentle carnival rides, like a merry-go-round. That’s partly physical: wild rides don’t give me an adrenaline rush so much as a whoopsie stomach. But also emotional: I find them disturbing rather than thrilling. My idea of a thrill is to drive a bit over the speed limit (shhh) on an empty highway. Call me a wimp; I don’t mind.

You might ask why I read mysteries, then. The reassuring thing about mysteries, at least the ones I like, is that the puzzle gets sorted in the end. Usually the murderer gets his or her comeuppance, but it’s enough for me that someone knows who the murderer is and what he or she has done. Also, as I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I like mysteries where the sleuth, amateur or professional, has a strong moral compass.

And I did like the main character in Erskine’s book; she was the main reason (along with inertia) that I kept listening to it. Emma has what many would call a perfect life: a rewarding career, a loving significant other who is starting to talk marriage, a gorgeous London flat with a rooftop garden, friends, family. Then she sees an ad for a cottage for sale in Essex and recognises it as one she knew as a child on summertime visits to the country, the one everybody called Liza’s Cottage.

Piers, her S.O., hates the country and makes it perfectly clear that if Emma continues with her scheme to buy the cottage, he will not join her there even for weekends, meaning their relationship may have to end. However, caught in an irresistible compulsion, Emma goes ahead and buys the cottage, not for weekends, but to live in year-round, quitting her job and leaving her London life behind.

I enjoyed the description of the village, including its inhabitants, such as the rector, a single man being relentlessly pursued by one of the village spinsters who also happens to be one of his lay readers; Alex and Paula, he being a house-husband while she commutes to London; and Lindsay, who babysits for them and calls herself a witch. In addition, a film crew has set up in town to do a segment on a shop that seems to be haunted.

All very interesting and well-written. I’d have been happy if the book had stayed at that level. However, when paranormal events started taking over, the characters began to seem increasingly unrealistic. Not because of the supernatural aspects, but because they were behaving in ways that were not consistent with their characters as previously presented. Why did Lindsay, a good Wiccan, suddenly start espousing Satanism? Why did Paula, an intelligent modern woman, suddenly go off the deep end and believe—based on nothing but the word of one woman—that babies were being killed in Satanic rituals? I remember the hysteria that swept Britain in the wake of the Hindley trials, but I found Paula’s reaction unbelievable.

It’s a shame, because the first part of the book was so good, and there’s some terrific writing. I’ve said this before in critiquing books in this blog and I guess I’ll end up saying it many more times: the book started out to be very good indeed, with strong and convincing characters, but then the plot took over and twisted the characters out of recognition. Doesn’t matter if it’s a horror story or a mystery or a literary classic, I’d rather see the plot grow out of the characters than the characters shaped to suit the plot.

Another book about books, and one I thought I would like better than The Thirteenth Tale since it is more narrowly focused on Melville and his masterpiece. Moby Dick is one of those novels people love to hate. Often cited as the best American novel, the story of Ahab and the white whale is equally often mocked for its long digressions and weighty themes. I fell in love with Melville’s work when I was twenty and read everything I could find, including—yes—all of Moby Dick even the chapters on whaling, etc.

So I was eager to read this novel about a young woman who emigrates from Tasmania to New York, where she finds a job in a huge, unruly bookstore and discovers Melville. Rosemary is alone in the world, her mother having passed away, and her one friend (who was also her mother’s only friend) a bookstore-owner back in Tasmania. In New York, Rosemary gradually gets to know the peculiar denizens of the bookstore, such as the owner who rants at customers and employees alike from his raised platform, dishy Oscar from Nonfiction who knows all about fabrics, gentle Mr. Mitchell from Rare Books, and Walter Geist, an albino with numerous mysterious ailments including incipient blindness, who is the store manager.

The store itself is known for finding lost books and the employees play a game called Who Knows? trying to top each other’s knowledge of some little-known, esoteric book. Since the only other woman at the store is Pearl, an aspiring opera singer who is in the process of transitioning to the female she understands herself to be, Rosemary’s arrival at the store sets the pigeon among the cats. Oscar introduces Rosemary to Melville’s epic but spurns her romantic overtures. Arthur, who works in the Art section and calls her TD (short for Tasmanian Devil), shows her photography books that embarrass her. Geist seems to find excuses for her company and eventually makes her his assistant.

Geist asks her to read him a strange letter about a manuscript and then to accompany him to visit one of the store’s most esteemed customers, a rich collector, with whose librarian Geist seems to be on very familiar terms. Intrigued by the air of secrecy surrounding both the letter and the visit, Rosemary talks over her suspicions with Oscar, and the two begin to investigate the mysterious manuscript.

Hay has come up with some truly original characters and has crafted a story with sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious references to Moby Dick and Melville’s other work. At the same time, she has portrayed New York City as a place of mystery and wonder, a feat I’ve rarely seen done, maybe by Pete Hamill, Mark Helprin. So in many ways I liked it better than last week’s book. What I missed, though, was Setterfield’s amazing language, her wonderful sentences. Much to admire in both books, while I look for more literary adventure stories.

This is a romance in the original meaning of the word: not a love story so much as a tale of fabulous doings. One of the characters asks, ” ‘What succour, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story?'” A writer after my own heart, in other words.

Margaret lives with her parents over the bookstore where she and her father spend their quiet days while her mother recedes further and further into her own world. The story opens with her receiving a letter from a reclusive writer, Vida Winter, asking Margaret to write her biography. Mystery surrounds the famous author, whose first book was originally entitled Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation but only contained twelve stories. Although the title was fixed in later editions, fascination with the missing story lingered.

Stories help us make sense of our lives. Chaos is reduced to blocks laid end to end to create a narrative arc: a beginning, a middle, an end. What is the missing story, the story that hasn’t been written? It is all about possibility, about knowledge kept secret and half-forgotten histories.

I’m such a book nerd that I love to read books about books. Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels about a man who takes to the road with a tinker’s wagon lined with used books made me think I’d discovered the perfect life. Bookshelves lined the outside of the horse-drawn wagon, so he only has to lift the flaps to open his portable bookstore. When I visited my son in Madrid a few years ago, I was tickled to notice, down a narrow side street, a man doing the same thing: lifting wooden covers to reveal bookshelves attached to the stone walls of the street. Of course we had to stop and buy some books! Other books about books that I’ve enjoyed are A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind. The idea of a Cemetery of Forgotten Books utterly beguiled me.

So I should have loved this book which is so clearly based on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, with subtle references to many other books, such as The Woman in White and The Turn of the Screw. There’s a ride across the moors out of The Secret Garden and an unwelcoming housekeeper reminiscent of Rebecca.

In fact, the list above is the core of my slight reservation about the book. It’s certainly an enjoyable read. A selection for one of my book clubs, I picked it up at the end of a stressful week and found it just the thing for a relaxing evening. Although I saw the ending coming, the main plot still engaged my interest enough to keep me reading. But I found it a bit too derivative. At times I felt the story being twisted to match the Bronte books. The persistent coherences distracted me from the story and probably contributed to my seeing through the various smokescreens to guess the ending. Or endings, I should say, as there are several.

Having said that, I must add that the book is very well written and an intelligent and absorbing read. The most effective characters, those that come alive for me, are Margaret, her father, and Hester the governess. Perhaps that is because they are not so obviously based on characters from the other novels. And the story that intrigued me the most was one that has nothing to do with Jane or Heathcliff: the story of Margaret’s home life, that disappearing mother, her father’s gentle care of her. Not the fabulous doings, the romance, the madness, but what happens in the family. I’m left thinking Setterfield actually does better without the crutch of better-known books, so while I enjoyed the hide-and-seek game of literary references, I look forward to her next book.

I recently reread this book of journal excerpts in preparation for a discussion of Sarton’s poetry that I was scheduled to lead. I first read the book over thirty years ago, and I was completely blown away by it.

Sarton published this journal in order to correct the mistaken impression created by her memoir Plant Dreaming Deep which described her life since moving in 1956 from the Boston area to Nelson, a small town in New Hampshire, where she bought a white frame house and proceeded to create a garden and a home. In the memoir, she also described the people she met in Nelson: Pearley Cole who cut her fields with a scythe, Bessie Lyman from the parsonage who addressed her in Turkish, Quig who made violins and painted, the Warners who cut the hay in her meadow with a team of horses.

Her life in Nelson sounded idyllic to many readers, so in Journal of a Solitude Sarton set out to tell the truth about what it was like for her to live alone for the first time, in a strange town, while wrestling with her first house, a house where the well ran dry in drought and let in marauding squirrels. She writes frankly about loneliness and depression and winter that never seems to end. But also about arranging flowers from her garden and entertaining friends in her first real home. And poetry.

Not having read the earlier memoir, I didn’t realise that this book was supposed to dampen my enthusiasm. I fell in love with the book and read it over and over. She seemed to be speaking directly to me. I too was living alone, trying to write, creating a home in bleak, beloved New England.

I fell in love as well with Sarton’s life, even as I despaired of ever having anything like it. What was not to love? She wrote poetry all morning, gardened in the afternoon, had a wide circle of friends—goodness, in her youth she had known and been encouraged by none other than Virginia Woolf! I skimmed over Sarton’s complaints that the critics ignored her work, her formalist poems running counter to the free-wheeling trend of the times. She seemed very successful to me. Didn’t Norton continue to publish her poetry collections? I somehow missed the fact that she had to teach classes and Wellesley and go on speaking tours in order to make a living.

I missed also that she was so much older than I. Born in 1912 in Belgium, brought to this country by her parents after the outbreak of the Great War, she wrote these journal entries the year she turned 59. Now I have to laugh at my youthful self: how could I, so much younger, expect to have achieved what had taken her so many decades to attain?

I was not the only one who fell in love with Sarton and her life through this journal. Arriving in the early days of the Women’s Movement, it seemed a model for how a creative woman could lead an independent and rewarding existence. Young women swelled her fan base and made her for the first time able to live off of her writing alone. We bought her journals, which continued to appear every few years, her novels and her poetry.

Now I am almost the age she was when she wrote this journal. Rereading it for the first time, I ruefully acknowledge that my earlier despair was groundless. If I haven’t achieved her success as a writer (being nowhere near as good a poet), I have created a life for myself that balances friends and solitude, writing and earning. And one that is full of beauty: sunlight on the trees, birds at the feeder, roses on the table. A perfect life.

I must also acknowledge what an influence she has had on my life. Even though we never met, her example gave me courage over the years to stick to my unorthodox path. Reading this journal now, I don’t see the strong, independent woman I remember. Instead, I see the loneliness of a woman who is not solitary by nature and the persistence needed in her struggle to succeed as a writer. And I recognise my debt to her.

I enjoyed this short story collection immensely. The author was new to me, selected by one of my book clubs. Unlike Olive Kitteridge which I blogged about a few weeks ago, each story here stands alone.

Some people dislike reading short stories because of the effort required to get into a new set of characters and situations; once having made that investment, it can be frustrating to have the story end after a couple of dozen pages. However, I find short stories are perfect for when I have only a little bit of time to read, such as during my half-hour lunch. Also, I appreciate the punch they deliver, heightened by the compression necessitated by the short form.

What does tie the collection together is the author’s unsentimental compassion for his characters. And his generosity. And his remarkable writing.

In “Bastogne”, a man visits the Belgian village where his father fought in the Second World War. This is a story about love. Faced with his own mortality, the narrator moves back and forth in time, weaving his father’s tales into the threads of his own life, and those of his mother, his wife and young son.

Only a very good writer can handle this kind of impressionistic style without irritating me, and McNally is very good indeed. Instead of using linear time to create the narrative arc, McNally uses certain images—dogs, an apple-cheeked nurse, a burning tank—coming back to them again and again, finding a deeper meaning each time. The other thing that he does very well is include specific detail, for example about the design flaw in the original Jeep or Goring’s airdrop of meat paste or Russian-trained dogs. And in the midst of all this detail he can throw in a stunner of a sentence that makes me catch my breath. (I was going to give an example, but they’re not the same out of context.)

Another story that I particularly liked was “Skin Deep” about Lacey, a teenaged girl working for the summer for some landscapers. Her father is in jail, so she lives with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, “an indefinitely-suspended-without-pay firefighter”. Her mother—a former Amway saleswoman who now sells their furniture in yard sales to get by and has just decided to be a Broadway agent—believes Lacey’s destiny is to be a star and wants to sign her up for acting classes at the community college. However, skeptical Lacey has been making plans, with the assistance of her father’s lawyer, to go to college in Massachusetts. McNally captures the end-of-summer ennui, the difficulty of finding and holding jobs, the reluctant love for family mingled with exasperation. And he brilliantly captures what it’s like to be a teenaged girl getting ready to leave home and starting to see her family with objective eyes.

The last story, too, the title story, affected me deeply, resonating with “Bastogne” and its themes. Shortly after his father’s death, Thomas visits Paris with his wife and their young daughter. Paris is where his wife lived and loved before she returned to the States and met him. I loved the image of the gateway itself, a huge arch in St. Louis, the “gateway to the West”, Thomas’s home town where he returned after failing as a screenwriter in Hollywood and became a real-estate agent. Dreams not just deferred but abandoned. And I had to stop and think about mortality and love and parents and children when Thomas says, “People used to call my father The Colossus; then he died; and eventually, not that far into the future, there will be nobody left alive to remember the things he said and did. But when I was a boy, he explained to me the history of the world . . .”

These are real lives, stories from the heartland. I highly recommend this collection.

I had an odd experience with this book. For some reason, I had it in my head that this was a memoir, perhaps because before I started it, some people in my book club compared it to The Glass Castle, an excellent memoir by Jeannette Walls that we read a few years ago. I ordered Caucasia through the library, so I didn't see which section it came from. I didn't look at the back cover or flaps; just started reading. Yes, I noticed the author's name on the cover didn’t match the main character’s, but she says right away that she has changed her name.

So, thinking that it was a true story, I thought it brilliant. Really captured the time period—Boston during the Civil Rights era (which, yes, I remember well)—and laid out some very interesting issues re race. The narrator, Birdie, and her sister are daughters of a bi-racial family: their mother is Caucasian and their father is African-American. By the luck of the gene pool, Birdie can pass for white while the sister has obviously African-American features and coloring.

The father is a scholar, who disapproves of the mother’s activitism and the rather dangerous people she begins to hang around with as she becomes involved with a wing of the Civil Rights movement who believe violence is the answer. The parents separate, the sister going with their father and his new (African-American) girlfriend, Carmen, to Brazil while Birdie goes with their mother and begins a new life as a white girl, moving around to avoid the consequences of the mother’s activism, but eventually settling in New Hampshire.

I did think the bond between the sisters almost too good to be true, but maybe not everyone fought with her sister the way I did, and I was willing to cut the author some slack since truth is often odder than fiction. I read about a quarter of the book before I actually looked at the flaps and realized it was a novel. I can't tell you how disappointed I was! I think that original misunderstanding was why I began to feel that the story—though very well-written—was too far-fetched.

For one thing, certain things were just paired too neatly. One white-looking daughter, one black. A fat, sloppy mother and a hip, gorgeous aunt. One sister overtly favored by their mother’s mother (a wealthy suburbanite), one by Carmen (In fact, I found Carmen's favoritism hard to understand; there seemed no basis for it). Polar opposites always make me suspicious; the world seems more complex than that.

Secondly, parts of the story, starting with the part set in New Hampshire, seemed unrealistic to me. I don’t want to give anything away, but things fall into place for them very easily and the last scraps of their former life seem to float away. To me, the first part of the story was character-driven and the second part more plot-driven, where the exigencies of the plot overrode the nuances of the characters and the complexity of their relationships.

The book raised interesting questions about race, which I thought could have been explored more fully. The weirdness/madness of the father's situation at the end—like a male cat lady—kept me from considering his theories about race. The whole did-she-or-didn't-she of the mother's situation kept me from considering how Birdie felt about being secretly black in white world.

These minor quibbles aside, I think the book is very well-written. The voice was wonderful; Senza really captured the child's and then the teenager's language and world view perfectly. And the period details were added in just the right amount. I loved the way the relationship between Birdie and her mother was developed, the clear-eyed love Birdie had for this flawed woman.

A few weeks ago, in blogging about the Donna Leon book, I mentioned that in the mysteries I like, the detective has a moral code. This code may be openly expressed, as in Robert B. Parker’s books, or it may be shown through the detective’s actions, as in Reginald Hill’s books. Red Harvest takes this concept a step further. Hammett’s first novel was the April selection for one of my book clubs. I hadn’t read it before, though I’d heard it was the basis for Akiro Kurasawa’s Yojimbo and therefore all its descendants. Hammett’s detective is unnamed, but commonly referred to as the Continental Op because he is an employee of the Continental Detective Agency. He is also the narrator of Hammett’s second book, The Dain Curse and several short stories.

The Continental Op is sent to the mining town of Personville, Montana, hired by the newspaper editor to help smoke out corruption, but before they can meet, the editor is murdered. The man’s father, Elihu Willsson, runs the town: he owns the mines, the bank, the two newspapers, the sheriff, etc. He is also the man who brought in the gangsters that his son was trying to nail, brought them in as strike-breakers, but was now powerless to rein them in. Willsson couldn’t openly break with his thugs, the leaders being Pete the Finn, Lew Yard, Max “Whisper” Thaler, because they had too much on him. Elihu Willsson sees his chance to take back his town and hires the Op to clear out the gangsters. The story thus marries two genres, detective fiction and westerns, the first to do so.

Personville—known to its residents as Poisonville—is loosely based on Butte, Montana, where Hammett was sent as a union-buster by Pinkerton. While there, Hammett was traumatized by the lynching of an IWW leader, Frank Little. Hammett suspected other Pinkerton agents may have been involved, but the murder was never solved. The horror stayed with him—Lillian Hellman later wrote that the lynching was “a kind of key to his life”—and it may have been what prompted him later to join the Communist Party. Certainly one of the main characters here is Bill Quint, a labor organizer from Chicago sent out to help the local IWW regain its footing.

Published in 1929, the book was first serialised in Black Mask and is dedicated to its editor, Joseph Thompson Shaw. Shaw demanded tight writing, lots of action, and no dilly-dallying with literary techniques. Within those parameters, Hammett does an amazing job of conveying characters through dialogue and compressed description, such as depicting the Op as “a blond Satan”. The dialogue is full of period slang, portraying these tough guys in their element. Despite the limitations of the first person narration, Hammett enables us to make our own assessment of the Op; his short bursts of dialogue convey when he’s being sarcastic or outright lying, a marvel of compression.

Surprisingly, the murder is solved early in the book, but there are many murders to come, hence the title. This unusual structure keeps the action moving at a clip almost too fast to follow. The most interesting character (for me, anyway) is Dinah Brand, a prostitute, but not the stereotype with a heart of gold; rather, a hand held out for gold. She paints herself as a woman who will do anything for money, but at the same time gives houseroom to a man afflicted with tuberculosis, a disease from which Hammett himself suffered. She is Whisper Thaler’s girlfriend, but manages to thread her way through the town’s corruption and bloodshed, following her personal code.

The Op’s own moral code evolves as the story progresses. His plan for cleaning up the town is to turn the various factions against each other, but as the murder count rises, he finds himself becoming callous and indifferent to the wholesale slaughter around him. He says, “‘Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid, and I felt so much like a native that even the memory of my very un-nice part in the boiling didn't keep me from getting twelve solid end-to-end hours of sleep.'” Watching him teeter on the brink of the abyss is the real suspense in this story.

Looking for gentle wisdom and beautiful writing? Try this collection of short stories, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. How I wish I’d read this book when I was younger, back when I read novels to try to understand the world and why people did what they did. These stories tease open the secret chambers of people’s hearts, revealing everyday pettiness and unexpected generosity. In some cases, we find motivations that are hidden even from the person herself.

If I were teaching a writing class, I’d assign this book as an original way to create character. Olive is a retired math teacher living in a small town in Maine. She has a difficult relationship with her son. Her husband, Henry, runs the town pharmacy. Although Olive is only a bit player in some of these stories, we grasp her essence by understanding what’s happened to her former students, by seeing how Henry befriends his mousy assistant in the pharmacy, by hearing her exchange a few words with her neighbors at the grocery store or a local concert. We watch Olive learn in the most unlikely way that a small kindness reaps a greater one.

In a small town everyone knows each other’s business. More than that, their lives are so closely tied up with each other’s that commonalities emerge, as a couple after years of living together come to resemble each other. By exploring the ramifications of a community’s everyday life, this book complements last week’s David Adams Richards book, which dwelt on the tragic consequences of gossip and boredom and self-importance. The tragedies here are smaller but no less painful. They are lightened by those rare moments of grace, when one person recognizes another’s pain or loneliness and speaks a gentle word to soothe it.

What I valued most was the insight into the long marriages, the ebb and flow of affection and loyalty. There are some young people in the book, but most of the stories explore the consciousness of older people, as for example those who have lost a spouse and feel the lack of someone to tell about the small things that have happened during the day.

With Harmon, we sense his unexpected melancholy now that the children are grown and gone. Although he struggled for years with the chaos they brought in their wake, keeping the house in a confusion of bickering and lost ice skates, he misses them now. Not his wife Bonnie, though. She’s taken off: joined a book club, written a recipe book, reinvented her life. She makes things: braids rugs, creates wreaths from dried roses and bayberry, sews quilted jackets. In Harmon’s hardware store, the customers talk about each other, about their hip problems, and he sees their loneliness. He finds himself visiting Daisy Foster, a recent widow. He brings her a doughnut.

It doesn’t sound like much, but really, it is. Patiently, Strout pursues her characters, sometimes catching them in a net, worn soft with years of use; sometimes slipping in the sharp filet knife and laying bare the hollow bones. She captures familiar turns of phase and spreads them before us: “Now was that so hard to do?” “Say, isn’t that something?” Each story is full of small truths, like realising you want to hear that someone is having more trouble with their child than you.

These are working people. We see them in their jobs, with their families, out for meal or a party. We are presented with life in its entirety, life in the round: petty jealousies, small prejudices and intolerances. Yet throughout the book there is, not a sweetness, but a current of acceptance, bracing and salty and aware. We are constantly aware that these people, however flawed, however small their lives, have value.