Category: Krimi

Goodreads meta-data is 173 pages, rated 3.85 by 2859 litizens.  

Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Predicable. 

A Swedish widow in Götenborg, the eighty-eight year old Maud, lives in an enormous, inherited flat that is the envy of many. She appears harmless and helpless, yet she is in fact irascible and deft at turning the perceptions and prejudices about elderly ladies against others in five loosely linked stories (or is it incidents) in the collection.  The covetous neighbour is bamboozled and strung up by her own mobile, the aggressive tourist got stuck in the wrong place by a knitting needle, an antique dealer trying to con her out of her belongings finds himself no longer growing old – and so on.  Maud leaves a string of bodies behind her.

When Inspector Irene Huss (there is an in-joke here) notices that Maud’s name keeps coming up on reports about these deaths, she smiles and moves on.  What could a harmless and helpless old woman do anyway.  Why nothing at all.  

Except…!  

While the stories were repetitive, Tursten’s afterword about the stimulating challenge to write about a perpetrator rather than a plod was charming, but not quite in proportion to the reading it took to get there.  

GoodReads meta-data is 206 pages, rated 4.0 by 113 litizens,
Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Most welcome!
On Wall Street in the early 1970s investment banker John Putnam Thatcher reluctantly is drawn into a fight over the appointment of a new partner in a client firm. In that family firm one partner has died and the workload is piling up until a new one can be found. Nothing new in that.
But in this case the head of the firm is an irascible game player in his 80s who cares not a whit for convention and has no heirs to drop anchor on him. His final beau geste is to appoint a black man to the firm and nominate him for a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. While the Board of Governors of the Exchange can be relied up to be colour blind in considering the nomination, not so the clients of the firm or other members of the exchange. The black candidate is a well-qualified and immensely successful banker himself.
But the southern clients react and the southerners in the firms go off the rails at the idea of working for ‘one of them,’ as an analyst says while slamming doors. The racism is visceral and pronounced. There is one grotesque scene at a gala at the Lincoln Center when a racists stock broker of some wealth berates one and all, but most of all the hapless Thatcher for treating with ‘one of them,’ though this apostle of purity does not use such an oblique term. The racist then descends into an incomprehensible rant that today can only bring to mind President Tiny.
Amid all this conflict another of the partners of the firm is poisoned and dies. While a sniper per the cover art takes a shot at the black nominee. Thatcher starts putting two and two together.
Needless to say the obvious candidates are too stupid, impetuous, incompetent to murder anyone but the language, civility, and reason. As is to be expected, the least likely one did it!
This is part of a long running series, many of which I read in paperback years ago, perhaps even this one, though the mists of time have closed over it. This time I had on Kindle. The setting is evoked but not with crushing pedantry, the characters are many and differentiated, there is mystery rather than gore, and the dialogue is acerbic and droll. While the police are never central, they are portrayed as competent, focussed, and determined, not figures of ridicule to make Thatcher look better. He has no need of straw men to look good. Miss Corso, Thatcher’s office retainer, is a marvel of indifference to everything but her duties and in this single-minded application she invariably makes Thatcher feel he does not live up to her standard. Enuf said.
Emma Lathen is a partnership of two Harvard graduates in business, Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart. They wrote twenty-four Thatcher novels and another seven set in Congress with another protagonist. The first appeared in 1961 but it was only in 1977 that their names became known. The secret had been successfully kept secret for fifteen years.

Goodreads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.31 by 2455 litizens.
Genre: krimi, period

Verdict:  ambiguous.
In the heart of Little England at fictitious Littleton Cotterell in 1909 wealthy Lady Hardcastle and her redoubtable retainer Florence Armstrong, the maid of all work, including sleuthing, are settled in a Midsomer picturesque village in the southwest near Bristol. Flo narrates with a sharp eye and a sharper tongue.
Then the kinematographers come to the village, and by a mischance Lady Hardcastle offers them a roof. They had been scheduled to stay at a neighboring estate but a mysterious fire in the kitchen has made that impossible.  
The kinematograpers screen an 18-minute film about the undoing of a witch to the protests of Republicans who see in filums the devil’s work.  Meanwhile an aggrieved rival of the kinematographers appears at the pub with a tame journalist in tow. By the way the kinematographers include the film actors four. Finally some travelling musicians pop-in to muddy the waters and provoke a tiresome double backstory.  Whew! Now that the cast is assembled, the mayhem can begin.
Because the kinematograph is the work of the devil, Christian vigilantes appears to picket, to protest, and cause trouble.  The local vicar has some choice words to say about such pious thuggery that reminded me of many current tiny minds. For the Vicar God takes delight in the achievements of His creation. He’s sophisticated and wise and understands the subtleties of Man’s ingenious inventions. On the other hand, the self-proclaimed pious thugs exhibit resourcefulness only in their careful selection of scriptural texts to support small-mindedness, combing misquoted Bible verses and threats of eternal damnation.
Then the morning after celebrating until late tthe screening of the film, one of the actor is found, dressed in role, dead just as his character died in the film.  The villagers were agog at seeing a film for the first time to begin with and the death — of course it had to be murder — drives one and all round the nearest bend.  His death confirms the Christian thugs in their many prejudices.  
The well meaning local plods are lost and Bristol CID sends in Inspector who is old mates with Her Ladyship and Strongarm.  Since he has many other krims on the go back in the city, he more or less delegates the investigation to Lady and Maid.
Before you can say this is nonsense the leading lady is found dead, also in-role, in Lady Hardcastle’s very own kitchen!  That makes it personal!
The Christian vigilantes make Prime Suspects.  Then there is an artistic rival whose has dogged the steps of the kinematograpers across the land.  
 
Along the way there are lessons about village life, the state of film-making at the time, the hills and dales around Bristol, and an insufferable load of banter between Hardcastle and Strongarm that pads out the story near to tedium.  But they do some ratiocination to sort through all the parti-coloured herrings, which are many.  
T. E. Kinsey
The approach is more didactic than I can usually abide but in this case the information is well integrated and tossed off in portions.  However, I found the insertion of a lengthy double backstory first about the tender years of Strongarm and then the adventures of Lady Hardcastle distracting, tedious, and limp, the more so considering this is number four in the series.  Likewise the two travelling minstrels who show up again are simply there to cue the backstories not to move this one forward, and their message about the menacing German is left on the cutting room floor, or should have been since it is not resolved.  I expect it is a tease for the next volume in the series.  Is it any wonder that some readers grind their teeth? 

GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.00 by 44 litizens.
Genre: krimi, period

Verdict: [Not sure.]
Henry VIII together with his queen, Katharine, is in residence at Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s folly, Hampton Court built in 1515 it has all modern conveniences, namely hot and cold running servants. Flemish tapestries to reduce draughts, decorated fire buckets at every fire place, and more. Wolsey is chief minister to the mercurial King, having built the palace to serve as a royal residence, as a diplomatic embassy, and as his own residence. Thus forty rooms are reserved for the royal party, and another forty set aside for visiting diplomats, and so on. Kitchens, stables, latrines are sufficient to service a thousand guests. Imagine that. Well maybe that is TMI.
The building is baroque and so are the people. The intrigues are many. There are rivals for the king’s favour. There are conflicts over inheritances among the courtiers. There are sexual liaisons, financial corruption, and the like. Queen Kathrine has produced no male heir, and that is a storm brewing that readers realise more than the characters with our hindsight.
It is the very cold Lent of 1522 when into this happy throng comes Hugh Mac Egan from Ireland, a lawyer sent to prepare a marriage contract for the son of his client, the Earl of Ormond. The boy, James, is a page to the Cardinal, along with eleven other youths, heirs to mighty lords of the land. James’s intended is Anne Boleyn.
She dominates much of the early going. Indeed, too much for this reader. She is described at least four times before my trigger finger got itchy and I started flicking pages whenever she appeared. Her lustrous eyes, her swaying carriage, her husky voice, her almond face, her clear skin, her gleaming hair, her ……. Enough. She is way out of James’s league but no one seems to notice that, apart from the lady herself, who has another in mind, another page at this stage, young Harry Percy who is the scion of the Earl of Northumberland, who is Midas rich. She spends a lot of time rubbing Harry up the right way.
Then, it seems during a Lentan meal with the king present, a courtier is murdered, and the circumstantial evidence points to James. Hugh undertakes his defence, in between recitations of Boleyn’s features. While much is made of the fact that the crime occurred in the king’s presence the investigation is lethargic to say the least. There is a jurisdictional dispute between the king’s sheriff and the cardinal’s over whose case it is. That has potential but since both of this officers are portrayed as dimwits, it is not developed.
Much is made of the difference between Irish and English law, but that does not effect the plot. It is simply a didactic aside.
Queen Katharine is shown to be much more than the religious zealot to which she is usually reduced in the popular culture. She is well aware of the currents eddying and swirling around the court, and offers Hugh some insightful and intelligent assistance so subtlety that he almost misses it while enumerating Boleyn’s attributes. The queen is an old hand at seeming to do nothing while doing something in a court where her every gesture is noted, codified, catalogued, recorded, reported, and analysed.
Likewise, as all powerful as Wolsey appears from afar, he is well aware that everything depends on Henry’s indulgence, and judging the limits of that indulgence is tricky from day to day with such a changeable man. Best therefore to do little by halves, always checking the wind.
One of the pillars of the krimi is the rush to judgement. A crime occurs. Officials latch onto a suspect and declare guilt. Case closed. Our hero then struggles to re-open the case and to defend the suspect. There is never much of an explanation, if any, about why the officials are satisfied to let the real culprit escape while they convict an innocent. It cannot be just incompetence else they are not worthy of the steel of our hero, so they have reasons, which usually amount to a bribe. Yet in accepting a bribe to permit a murder, they expose themselves to a like risk and more. It seldom adds up. Life can be like that but not literature.
Sometimes period krimis have too much period exposition and not enough krimi (mystery, investigation, surmise). Authors having done extensive research want to make use of all they learned and the exercise becomes didactic not entertainment. This one uses much period nomenclature, some of it Gaelic, and I was glad to have the Kindle dictionary to the ready. There is also much description of the kitchens, the corridors, and rooms, little of which relates to the crime. For the purposes of the plot we did not need to know that there were four or five kitchens, each with its own store rooms, etc., but told we are.
A few niggles about the plot remain, though I admit my speed page flicking may be the explanation. I never did figure out why Ann ‘Much-Described’ Boleyn risked so much on the spur of the moment and evidently convinced her paramour instantly to do the same almost. Nor was I sure what the point was of the torture and murder of the servant, while locking our hero in a box. Did the murderer of the doctor ever face punishment. Hard to tell.
A final plaint. Lawyer Mac Egan repeatedly praises Irish law in contrast to English law because it does not have capital punishment for murder, but rather extracts a financial penalty. We are given to understand three times, at least, that this is preferable to the barbaric English use of axe and noose. Is it? Does it not put a price on murder, one a rich man may be able and willing to pay? I am not arguing for capital punishment here but against the blanket preferment of the fine for murder. So that the rich can say, after torturing and killing, here are twenty cows.
To keep my niggles in proportion, I add that the book has very fine descriptions of wind, weather, water, and winter. That the characters are differentiated in speech and manner. That there is a mystery of two, though the pace is disjoined what with all the renditions of Boleyn’s charms, and people with a variety of characters from the time. And the time and place are made foreign and familiar. These are many and considerable accomplishments.

Cora Harrison has many other books.
I tried but could not engage with another period krimi from Tudor England before coming to this one. Thomas More is present in the books, and that was why I decided to read one though in these pages he mentioned only one in a list of worthies. Reading this book was an overdue anecdote to Hilary Mantle’s incomprehensible soup that so many claim to like, although I am delighted to see that more than 7000 GoodReaders gave it one star or less, and said the obvious.

Good Reads meta-data is 289 pages rated 3.0 by five litizens
Genre: Krimi, puzzle

Verdict: borderline boring.
Among the aged retainers residing by grace and favour at Hampton Court Palace is old General Hamilton (Ret.) who goes each night to sit by the River Thames and recall the glory days. For reasons never explained he carries a chair with him each night and it is several times mentioned but plays no part in the proceedings. He is good humoured and much liked, living with his sprightly niece who is also well liked.
The equally aged staff, doormen, gardeners, maids, and night-watchmen, are sure there is a ghost in the grounds and this spectre is much invoked but plays no part in the plot. It is fabled the ghost is Samuel Pepys clad in a garish jackanapes coat. There are several references to Pepys but again they are sidebars without advancing the plot. The general’s niece has a colourful coat that provides the mystery.
One night the general is stabbed to death and all are agog. Strangely none of the elderly residents fears that they will be next, though that would surely be the reaction of some among such a group. Instead the protagonists, led by Annabel Sinclair, Lady-in-Waiting (Ret.), leap to the conclusion that — because of the coat — plod will focus on the niece who is completely innocent and to shield her the bulk of the novel consists of a three-ply tissue of lies to mislead the police inspector Margetson.
Quite how the inspector is to solve the crime when everyone lies to him is anyone’s guess. But this is not his first case and he expects lies and works through them with a patience that this reader did not have as I flicked the pages. Indeed he does not solve it, but after 280 pages of lies, the elderly villain commits suicide and leaves and explanatory note.
The setting is unique and fully exploited but because the characterisations are paper-thin and there is no action it hardly matters.
It reads like a puzzle krimi, providing the reader with all the clues to figure out the plot. The acme of this type is certainly Agatha Christie’s ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ (1926). Any hardened krimi reader will figure it out well before page 280, but the prose limps on.
Hampton Court Palace (1515+ ) has a long history as a grace and favour residence. (The last resident admitted by this means was in 1980, says Sarah Parker in ‘Grace & Favour: The Hampton Court Palace Community 1750-1950’ (2005), p. 126. Those in residence remained until 2009 when the last left. Grace and favour is extended by the monarch to those who have rendered past services, and include widows and dependents of such servants. Military officers and court officials (including retired ladies in waiting) are among those so favoured. By the way, none of this is explained in the novel, but derives from Wikipedia.
Edith Keate (1867-1945) was a civil servant who researched and wrote a ‘Guide to Hampton Court Palace’ and other official works about public places.

She penned five other krimis but one is enough for me for the moment. It has been re-issued in the Black Heath Classic Crime series rendered for Kindle. It seem odd that Cardinal Wolsey who built it is never mentioned.
By the way she is E. M. Keate though the Amazon listing has her as M. E. Keate.

Genre: Krimi
GoodReads meta-data is 328 pages, rated 3.6 by 1004 litizens

Verdict: Read all about it!
Capability Weeks, a young woman of nineteen, works for the editor of the Ladies’ Page on the stuffy and staid New York ‘Sentinel’ newspaper in 1915. She and her father, Julian, have only recently returned to the States after decades abroad in Europe and Asia. That experience gives her the caché to land the newspaper job but leaves her unprepared for the manners and mores of the time and place. Though the pair are comfortably well off, Mr Weeks grudging approves of Capability’s work, provided it in no way interferes with her home duties, which fall to her because her mother and his wife died years ago. Later in the book, this need to run the home comes into conflict with her journalistic ambitions.
It was a time of breakneck economic growth, raging war in Europe, submarine attacks in the Atlantic, and a tsunami of immigrants. A volatile mix in the making.
Because it is new to her, Capability observes New York City and its denizens with interest, the skyscrapers, the wind tunnel streets, the underground subway, the class snobbery, the social distance between classes, the profusion of newspapers. All of this brought to the mind the two great chroniclers of the Gilded Age (1880-1917), as the period was later called, Henry James and Edith Wharton, and Capability is no match for either of them. It was a time of rapid economic growth that promised to go on forever, with it streamed millions of immigrants arriving at this new Eden every year. At the same time stupendous wealth was concentrated in the railway and banking barons, a few of whom appear in these pages. (Aside, one of these lesser magnates endowed Duke University where the author of this book obtained a PhD.)
One day the Ladies’ Page editor is indisposed, and sends this ingenue in her place to an elaborate garden party with Japanese daytime fireworks. (A new idea to me which is fully explained in a Wikipedia entry.) While passing among the great and the (not so) good at the party Capability studies them, and has an unpleasant encounter with the penniless scion of a once great fortune, Hunter Cole and his burlesque dancer wife. Capability and the wife hit if off, both being fish out of water in this set. Cole is a rude and crude bore, despite his illustrious forbears. Think of a radio shock jock and there you have him. Seasoned krimi readers will have no trouble in picking him as the first to go, and he does — good riddance — during the fireworks display. Capability may have been the last to see him alive and the first to see him dead.
Because she was there the newspaper editor reluctantly assigns her to assist the male journalist covering murder, but in a very circumscribed role suitable for a woman. She chaffs at that, the more so when she sees how superficial the male journalist approaches the subject. (Ahem, what’s new.)
However the police investigation applies the standard operating procedure of the time and blames Hillary Clinton. (Just joking to see if the reader is paying attention.) No the SOP is to find the nearest immigrant who barely speaks English, in this case an Italian stable hand, and pin the crime on him and beat a confession out of him. This satisfies the police and the journalist, but Capability finds it a long bow.
The book is rich in the detail of life in that rarefied stratum, time, and place, which is seen afresh, if not with the wit and insight of James or Wharton. For example, Capability is assigned an interview with Miss Anne Morgan (yes, of that Morgan family) about her book ’The American Girl: Her Education, Her Responsibility, Her Recreation’ (1915) who like a Hollywood star today displays celebrity compassion for working women. However Capability and this reader, too, found Miss Morgan to be streets ahead of them. That was refreshing. In so many krimi writers there is the ambition to write social criticism by portraying others, especially the rich, the famous, the successful, as grasping dunderheads and imbeciles. Not so here. Miss Morgan knows herself, including her own blind spots. Woe to a journalist who tries to trip her up.
Likewise Capability’s chance encounter with a German diplomat is very well presented. He may be up to shady things but he is no cardboard stereotype, and when called to account for his actions, makes a cogent statement.
Another compensation is the broader canvas the novel offers, no character in a James or Wharton book ever spoke to a stable hand, an Italian immigrant, or visited the Tombs (if one does not know what this is, look it up because it still exists, or did when I saw it in 1980).
In this era everyone is addressed in every exchange by title, thus ‘Miss Weeks.’ While I am sure that is accurate, it is tedious to read, like those rituals of formality that plump up Alexander McCall Smith’s slender stories. The constraints on women are many and they are made apparent but not to a didactic drumbeat of hindsight such as is found in other krimis that want to offer a discounted, hindsight social criticism, i.e., for the author to display peacock feathers of virtue.
The author distinguishes characters, offers their distinct perspectives, and steers on without losing focus. This is the first in a series.

Radha Vatsai
Bones to pick, I have a few, somewhere along the way Capability becomes Kitty to friends and family. Yes, the name does refer to the gardener though why did not register with me.

GoodReads metadata is 256 pages, rated 3.57 by 132 litizens
Genre: Krimi, sub-species Locked Room murder.

Verdict: More, please.
In the hallowed halls of Westminster a financier sits down to dine tête-à-tête with his old friend, the Home Secretary in a private room. The subject of conversation will be money, a lot of it for the Exchequer is at low tide. But before the Home Secretary can pop the question of a gigantic loan, the division bell rings and off he goes to the floor of the House of Commons to cast his vote, leaving Money Bags alone in a closed room with an attendant outside. Yes, I know, not literally a locked room but near enough.
When the Home Secretary, famed both for this stupidity and honesty, the former, say the wits, explains the latter, returns to dinner he finds Money Bags shot dead!
While Scotland Yard puts in an appearance, a young parliamentary secretary is drafted to investigate the nooks and crannies of Westminster where no plod is likely to make headway. The Tory government is already rocky and this murder could send it to the bottom in no time, unless there is a quick resolution that clears the air. More generally the murder of a major financier does not enhance the reputation of England as a safe investment to other financiers!
As a guide to the topography of parliament of the time, this is Baedeker in all but name. It comments on the accommodation, the food, the time to get from one place to another, the friendliness of locals, the standard of service. and so on.

The author was a Labor MP and she has an eye for details, and the wit for satire, all of which is well judged. Just enough to taste but not too much to jade.
It is far superior to J V Turner’s ‘Below the Clock’ set in the same time and place, discussed elsewhere on this blog. This leaden title is rated higher at 3.64, such is the idiocy of the species.