Criminally Good New Murder Mysteries
Sometimes you know immediately that a book is going to get under your skin and stay there. I felt that way only a few pages into Spencer's tart debut, THE MYSTERY OF THE CROOKED MAN (Pushkin Vertigo, 319 pp., paperback, $18.95), which vaults the reader into the world of Agatha Dorn, an irritable archivist and passionate devotee of mystery fiction — particularly the work of Gladden Green (think Agatha Christie through a fun-house mirror.)
When Agatha discovers what appears to be a lost manuscript by Green, one with the potential to tilt the author's legacy on its axis, she becomes famous. It's not long before 'The Dog's Ball,' as the book is called, is revealed to be a hoax. Then Agatha's ex-girlfriend — who had warned her to 'be careful' with the manuscript — dies by suicide. Or did she? Agatha, who's been canceled, thinks otherwise.
Is Agatha 'a crazy woman, haphazardly but unmistakably drifting down and out, sick, unemployed, drunk, obsessed with solving a murder that had never occurred?' Or 'a maverick, pursuing truth and justice … even at the cost of [her] own well-being?' Maybe she's both.
Murder at Gulls Nest
Nora Breen, the plucky, practical sleuth in MURDER AT GULLS NEST (Atria, 323 pp., $28.99) has checked into the Gulls Nest boardinghouse in an English seaside town in 1954. She's there to find her friend Frieda, who has been writing faithfully to her each week until, abruptly, she doesn't. Ominously, Frieda's last letter had concluded, 'I believe every one of us at Gulls Nest is concealing some kind of secret — I shall make it my business to find out and so I shall finally have something riveting to write to you, dear friend!'
Nora arrives at Gulls Nest with some secrets of her own, such as the fact that she spent 30 years as a Carmelite nun, Sister Agnes of Christ. To investigate her friend's disappearance, Nora must leave behind the part of herself that clamored for the solitude of a religious order and live fully in the world, embracing its chaos. It isn't easy, especially when another guest at Gulls Nest turns up dead, poisoned by cyanide. Frieda's handkerchief is tucked into one of his pockets.
Kidd's turn to cozy mysteries after several genre-stretching novels is a welcome one that tantalizes the prospect of more installments. As Nora adroitly observes, 'There's work to be done and deductions to be made.'
Midnight in Soap Lake
Sullivan is channeling 'Twin Peaks' in his latest novel, MIDNIGHT IN SOAP LAKE (Hanover Square Press, 409 pp., $28.99). Not only because of the Pacific Northwest setting, but because of the spookiness that permeates the narrative, thanks to a mineral-filled lake imbued with potentially otherworldly properties and a mythic, creepy figure called 'TreeTop' who has terrorized the area for decades.
Abigail and her scientist husband, Eli, have just moved to Soap Lake. Having expected 'ferns and rain, ale and slugs, Sasquatch and wool,' she's somewhat disconcerted to find they'll be living in the desert, 'scabby with dark basalt, bristled with the husks of flowers.' Not long after Eli decamps to Poland for some research, she's on a walk when she encounters a terrified little boy, caked in dried blood. It turns out his mother, Esme, has been murdered. That night, when Abigail gets home, a strange man wearing goggles, his mouth 'shrouded in white fabric,' taps on her window with a latex-gloved finger. Is it TreeTop?
As he moves back and forth in time between Esme's childhood in Soap Lake and Abigail's present-day sleuthing, Sullivan evokes the richness of a small-town community as well as the secrets-filled uneasiness simmering just below its placid surface.
Vera Wong's Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man)
I appreciate the recent uptick in books featuring sleuths of a seasoned age, particularly ones as prickly, opinionated and delightful as Vera Wong, who returns for her second outing in VERA WONG'S GUIDE TO SNOOPING (ON A DEAD MAN)(Berkley, 324 pp., paperback, $19). After the thrill of investigating a homicide case in 'Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers,' all Vera wants is to be surrounded by family — biological and chosen — in her beloved Bay Area tea shop, where she can dispense food, drink and advice (lots of it, mostly unsolicited). There's just one problem: She's bored. 'Sometimes, all an old lady wants is a murder to solve. Is that too much to ask for?'
Then Vera meets a young woman rattled by the disappearance of a friend who, it turns out, is the social media influencer Xander Lin. It soon transpires that he has died in murky circumstances, and everything about him — real name, money sources, family background — is made up. Vera, undaunted, assembles a crew of friends and begins to unearth the dark secrets at the heart of Xander's short life.
Further adventures cannot arrive fast enough.
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Mark Gatiss has always wanted to play a detective, and in his new series Bookish, he finally is able to fulfil that dream, but he admits to Yahoo UK it was "f***ing hard" to follow in the footsteps of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle by creating his own murder mystery. The writer wears many hats in the U&alibi series; he not only created the show he also co-wrote several episodes, and takes the central role of Gabriel Book — the aptly named bookseller whose hobby is helping police solve puzzling cases in 1940s London. It's a concept not dissimilar to another crime drama he co-created, Sherlock, but this time Gatiss is working with an entirely blank canvas and that made it an interesting challenge. "I'm a great student of the genre. I've always loved murder mysteries, obviously Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Miss Marple, but also a lot of the others I read as a teenager — Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham, and lots and lots. I just love them, and I've always wanted to be one," Gatiss shares. "So I sort of had this idea in this form for about eight years, but it's a sort of synthesis of all of the bits I love, really." When it came to piecing together mysteries, Gatiss bows down to the Queen of Crime, Christie, for her incredible ability to create story after story and make it look easy. "Excuse my French, it's f***ing hard," Gatiss admits of creating his own murder mystery rather than adapting one like he did with Sherlock. "They are beasts. The reason that Christie is still preeminent is that her plots are amazing, and everyone bow down to her. "There is an amazing letter in her archive from Graham Greene, who wrote to her asking to buy plots off her because he couldn't think of any, and she just dashed them off. There are short story plots of hers which would sustain a novel, and it's just amazing, really, some of the cleverest twists and variations of a theme, you never know. "So they are difficult, and the big problems, the biggest challenges, are motive... but mostly it's clues, you have to lay clues that are not too obvious and not too obscure. One of the rules is you have to play fair with the audience; they have to be able to somehow piece it together, and that is the other problem, which is how your detective does it. "Every detective has a thing, and the thing for Book is the bookshop. It is a sort of analogue computer; it's all there somewhere, and he has so many obscure references that somehow he can kind of piece it together. He's a bit of Sherlock Holmes, a bit of intuition. A line I was very proud of is, he says, 'you can read a lot of things as well as books'. I thought that's kind of the ethos of the series." Bookish is more than just its initial premise, though. The six-part series features mysteries of a personal nature too, opening with Book and his beloved wife Trottie (Polly Walker) hiring Jack (Connor Finch), a young man just out of prison with a story to tell. And then there's Book, who has secrets of his own as a gay man in a lavender marriage during a period when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. The show's 1940s setting gave Gatiss the chance to explore interesting, important topics, as he says: "The setting is very crucial. I love this period; it's very under-examined. I love the films of the period hugely, it's the best decade of British film, I think. "What I wanted was to create something in the flavour of The Lady Vanishes or a great film — which if you haven't seen I really recommend — called Green for Danger with Alistair Sim, which is set during the war and is a very clever murder mystery with a central eccentric detective. It's my perfect film, really. "Plus, the idea that he was a gay man in a lavender marriage, and that would be a way of talking about now." Gatiss goes on: "I saw a discussion on TV a couple of years ago with a wide age range of gay people and they started talking about decriminalisation and the two youngest ones looked a little uncomfortable, and eventually the interviewer was saying 'what is it?' And one of them said: 'Oh, I didn't know it had ever been illegal,' and your heart just drops. "But weirdly, that is the great triumph of the gay rights movement; it's an extraordinary thing, and it is like fighting any battle — the real success comes when you don't have to think about it. But at the same time, you want people to acknowledge it or know about it because it's crucial. And also now it could be undone like that, and it's all around the world." "So that's why I think it's important to show 'here's a very dangerous time and you don't know how lucky you are' without wagging a finger," Gatiss says of Bookish. "But also that this dangerous time could come back in a heartbeat, absolutely it could. It's happening all over the world with banning Pride, banning representation across great swaths of the world. It's really frightening." It's a subject that Gatiss feels strongly about. But it was equally important for the writer not to make Book's queerness the central theme of the story, because in a way it heralded progress: "When people asked me the question about representation, I used to say one day, when a detective is incidentally gay, then we will have made progress. And that's kind of what we've done here, because if this show were made in 1980, it would be called 'The Gay Detective.' "The point is not that he is gay, that's a part of the series, but it's not the defining characteristic, like the way there was a show in 1980 called The Chinese Detective with David Yip. Once that would have been the issue, but now it's not. It's not incidental because it's part of the plot and part of the scenario and what we're trying to examine dramatically, but it's not the defining thing." He adds: "As much as people love period and I love period, we also wanted to make sure it wasn't stuffy. The music and the style of it are interestingly not 40s, so it's about trying to find what's common to our time without lecturing people." Gatiss took his role as leader of the production "very seriously" and part of that was ensuring that they had a "very happy production" on set. The writer admits he has no tolerance for pageantry or egos on his sets, and so was keen to ensure that kind of thing didn't occur on Bookish. "It was very, very, very happy company, and I take my responsibilities as leader very seriously, to welcome people, any guest actor, but also the regulars. You have to look after them and make sure they have a good time," he reflects. "I absolutely can't bear any kind of onset bullying or friction or bad atmosphere, I just can't stand it, and I won't tolerate it. It's my show to not tolerate it, you know. "But it's really important to have a happy atmosphere because you feel creative and you can do stuff, me and Carolina [Giammetta], the director, really take that very seriously. "I remember a friend of mine directed Breaking Bad, and they had a guest actor and he said it was just a nightmare. Bryan Cranston wasn't on set until later in the day, and he arrived and he could just see what was going on with this guy, and he just went: 'We like to have a good time on this show, OK?' And that did it. That's the principle I had." And as a writer, he admits that it is inevitable that his latest work is compared to other crime dramas, even his own, because they all share similarities by virtue of being in the same genre. "It's very difficult because in the end Sherlock Holmes said, 'There is nothing new under the sun,' so you have to find variations on the theme, really, and that's the key," Gatiss remarks when asked how he tried to make Bookish different to what has come before. "There's a little bit of Holmes in it, you have to do some sort of deduction because that's how it works, otherwise he either knows everything, or you have loads of scenes of him just looking at stuff. Some of it has to be intuition and some of it has to be cause and effect." Ever the Sherlock Holmes fan, Gatiss references one of Conan Doyle's short stories The Adventure of Silver Blaze as he adds: "You know the ultimate thing really is to find the equivalent of the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, because that's a piece of genius and everyone gets that. "Also, there's the beautiful simplicity of that idea. I thought it was genius: the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, but the dog did nothing in the night-time, and that was what made it curious. It still is just brilliant. So it's [trying to do] that sort of thing, it's inflected by Sherlock Holmes." While he is on the cusp of releasing the first series, Gatiss is already well underway with the second as he reveals he has just finished writing the new episodes with Matthew Sweet and is "cheek by jowl" to "publicising this one and shooting" the next. It's a lot of pressure on the writer's shoulders, but he also enjoys the challenge too. "It's thrilling to create this world, and I always think about it," he says. "There's a marvellous thing Steven Moffat and I used to say about Sherlock, our favourite bit always was before we started a new series. We'd sit in a room and just think about what it might be... it is very thrilling to think about where characters might go and what sorts of cases you might have." Bookish premieres with its first two episodes on U&alibi on Wednesday, 16 July.
