The Bedlam Detective (2012) by Stephen Gallagher: The second of Stephen Gallagher's Sebastian Becker series, in which Becker investigates whether mentally unstable nobles in Edwardian England should be committed. That's for the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy. Seriously. That was a thing.
In The Bedlam Detective, Becker has been sent to the coastal English countryside to investigate and fill a report on the sanity of Sir Owain Lancaster. Lancaster led a disastrous expedition into the Amazon Basin several years previous and then emerged claiming that nearly the entire party was killed by giant monsters. He's a pariah now, but is he crazy?
But as Becker arrives, two girls go missing. Becker, a former Pinkerton, gets involved in the search for the girls right off the train. And then, having proven himself useful to investigating detective Stephen Reed, Becker gets more and more involved in the mystery of the girls, the mystery of Owain Lancaster, the mystery of the monsters... well, a lot of mystery!
Gallagher spikes his novel with lots of intriguing historical details without overloading the reader or getting too far away from the mystery. There's a lot of modern psychology involved -- among other things, Becker's 18-year-old son is a high-functioning autistic savant in a world where the term 'autism' does not exist.
But the mystery of Lancaster is also probed from a psychological POV, often ranging into the possibility of a serial killer and his motivations though the term wouldn't be coined for another 60 years. Gallagher also touches upon Great Britain's Suffragette movement through another major character.
Telling details also include the utterly botched collection of evidence at a crime scene, infuriating Becker, and a marvelous sequence in London with a thick fog having rolled in. Becker's son is sensitively and believably drawn -- autism hasn't given him "super-powers" as is often portrayed in current TV and cinema, but it does allow him to help out on the case because of his intense powers of close analysis and organization.
Everything will dovetail together by the end. An early version of the personal movie camera will play a part. So, too, South American caterpillars and an odd early example of the automobile. There will be tragedy. And maybe even a pay raise for Becker, who desperately needs a new suit and whose office at Bethlehem Hospital is so squalid that he takes all his messages at a meat-pie stand. Highly recommended.
The Black Country (2013) by Alex Grecian: Enjoyable mystery set in England's coal country in 1890. The characters are engaging, though the central mystery will be familiar to anyone who has read The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (2008) by Kate Summerscale. Grecian adds a second mystery to the mix, albeit one linked to the first. Apparently not finding the generally well-portrayed oddities of the coal-mining town and its superstitions to be diverting enough, he also throws in several sections set at the horrifying Andersonville POW camp run with murderous efficiency by the Confederacy in one of those historical foreshadowings of the Holocaust.
Just to lighten things up, Grecian adds a lot of low-level comedy to the relationship of the two Scotland Yard detectives sent to the coal town. He even throws in a lovable, mentally handicapped giant. And a scar-faced mystery man. And an abandoned baby magpie which first one detective and then the giant try to nurse back to health. And village superstitions attached to a mythical monster called Rawhead and Bloody Bones. And a mysterious disease sweeping the village. And a cinematic climax, first above and then below the ground in the village as it is wracked by subsidence caused by over-mining.
We even get a final few lines that will remind the reader of either the forced comedy that seemed to end every 1960's and 1970's American TV drama no matter how dire the preceding events -- or the parodic endings of every episode of Police Squad (a.k.a. the TV show that the Naked Gun movie series continued). It's a diverting novel, though the setting seems under-served by the novel's pedestrian yet over-stuffed ambitions. Lightly recommended.
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (2006) by Steven Berlin Johnson: Engaging, sweeping examination of England's last major cholera outbreak in London's Broad Street neighbourhood near Soho in 1854, and how two men ensured that England would never suffer from a cholera outbreak again. Medical Doctor John Snow and Anglican curate Henry Whitehead, both of whom lived near the outbreak, would form a somewhat unlikely Dynamic Duo whose detective work and scientific acumen would convince the medical and civil authorities of London that cholera was a disease spread by contaminated water and not, as then-standard wisdom had it, by 'miasmic' gases.
Much of the book is marvelous and humane, explaining the rise of cholera to being one of the world's great killers over the course of the last 200 years. Along the way, The Ghost Map also delves into the development of epidemiology, safe sewer and water-supply systems, and the toxic Social Darwinism that helped blind Victorian England to the true cause of cholera in its cities. The book also offers a tour through London's underground economy of night-soil men and cat-meat men and coster-mongers and 'pure' collectors (pure was a euphemism for dog shit), and their roles in keeping the 'above-ground' world running.
You'll also visit the horrifying cess-pits and cesspools and streets of 1854 London. You'll discover why alcohol, tea, and coffee were all integral to the urbanization of the world. But mostly you'll deal with these two heroes of science and rationality, Snow and Whitehead, as they individually and then dually seek an answer to the Broad Street Outbreak.
Only in the last 20 pages or so does Johnson waver, as he suddenly takes the book so wide as to attempt to convince the reader that the world will be a better, more environmentally friendly place when everyone lives in cities (not suburbs -- cities proper). It feels like the beginning of a different book, one whose enthusiasm for urban living and disdain for rural living comes gushing straight out of its author and onto the page. All it really lacks is the line, "Since the beginning of time, man has longed to evacuate the countryside!".
But other than the writer's book-derailing, evangelical rant about the Great Goodness of Cities, The Ghost Map is terrific, informative, sad, and hopeful. Lift your glass of clean drinking water to Snow and Whitehead, who defeated an invisible enemy 30 years before humanity could reliably find cholera under a microscope. Highly recommended.
The Treatment (Jack Caffery #2) by Mo Hayder (2001): DI Jack Caffery, London's up-and-coming police detective (that's Detective-Inspector to you), continues to sort through the accumulated trauma of his actions in the first Caffery novel, Birdman, while also sorting through 20 years of trauma caused by the abduction of his ten-year-old brother by a pedophile when Jack was eight. Caffery makes Inspector Morse look like the friendliest and most well-adjusted fictional English police officer in history.
Mo Hayder works the horror side of the street in this novel. The criminals Caffery tracks this time around are pedophiles, some believed to be involved with his brother's disappearance and one or more involved with a case he's working on now. A family in a working-class area of Brixton was imprisoned in their home for three days while terrible things happened. The son is missing as the novel begins, while the father is in a coma in the hospital and the mother knows nothing relevant, having been imprisoned inside an upstairs closet the whole time while mysterious things happened downstairs. And Caffery's almost certain that another family may already be prisoners in their own home.
The procedural aspects of the novel are very well-done, from hunches to lab work to the sort of tiny mistakes that can have major repercussions. Caffery's personal trauma makes him a darkly sympathetic figure, especially as his brother's disappearance seems more and more to have something to do with the present-day case. Most of the supporting characters are nicely drawn, from the horrible and damaged female pedophile/victim Tracey Lamb to Caffery's partner, the almost Falstaffian lesbian DCI Danni Souness.
Caffery's girlfriend Rebecca, a modern artist and rape survivor whom Caffery met in the previous novel, is a bit more of a problem. She's certainly wacky, tortured, and interesting. But Caffery and Rebecca's relationship problems draw the reader away from the twisty coils of the main plot and its interconnectedness with Caffery's own past. I ended up skimming some of the later sections dealing with Rebecca. Bad me.
Hayder does have a totalizing tendency to link everything together in this novel. It's understandable, though perhaps a bit too glib simply in a plotting sense. The interconnectness is justified by Caffery's thoughts early on about pedophiles being like some sort of malign slime mold, all part of an enormous organism. But it's still a bit too pat.
As noted, the novel in its entirety shades towards horror in its graphic depictions (and less graphic suggestiveness) of terrible human evil. There are moments that suggest some sort of supernatural connection between Caffery and his lost brother, though these can be explained away. The central antagonist, known in popular lore as a troll who haunts the regional park, is one hell of a creation. And the novel plays fair with its revelations and plot mechanisms. Recommended.
Ritual (Jack Caffery #3) by Moe Hayder (2008): Mo Hayder notes in the afterword to this novel that she had no intention of telling any more stories about tortured English DI Jack Caffery. But return she would eventually. This time around we've got a second lead (police diver Phoebe 'Flea' Marley) and a new location (Jack's moved to the Glastonbury area, having grown tired of London).
But the horror elements remain in this police procedural, as Jack and Flea track down whoever it was that dropped a human hand into the harbour. Then another hand turns up. They're from the same person, they're fresh, and both were severed while the victim was alive.
Jack's a little less tortured by his long-lost brother's disappearance this time around, though not by much. Flea has been tortured for two years by the deaths of her parents on a deep-diving trip in Africa, their bodies never recovered from 'Bushman's Hole' in the Kalahari. She also feels guilt that she and not her brother should have been on the dive. The brother survived, unable to stop his parents' sudden plunge into the abysmal depths; Flea believes she could have done something, despite the fact that all deep-diving protocols suggest that had she done so, she would have died too.
So the two work the case, initially separately and, in Flea's case, unofficially. Evidence begins to accumulate that the homeless and the drug-addicted are being harvested for body parts and blood, part of some mysterious underground traffic in the more disturbing elements of religions from specific parts of Africa. Some witnesses report seeing what looks like a demonic South African familiar. And something that Caffery never quite gets a glimpse of is following the detective.
Ritual is quite sensitive to issues of acculturation and cultural appropriation when it comes to Africa -- as one academic says to Jack near the end of the novel, Caffery needs to realize that the term "African black magic" is a demeaning simplification that doesn't take into account the great number of different religions and cults on that vast continent.
Ritual plays fair with its information, though it posits connections among every character in the novel that stretch credibility by the end to just about the breaking point. Flea Marley is nicely drawn, with her own problems, though her growing infatuation with Caffery may soon become an even bigger problem. Hayder pares down Caffery's personal life -- he's left the girlfriend of the previous novel and now frequents prostitutes rather than get emotionally involved with other human beings. But he also begins to forge an initially curious relationship with a homeless wanderer dubbed The Walking Man, a relationship that's perhaps too gimmicky by half but nonetheless fascinating. Recommended.
Looking for Jake and Other Stories (2005) by China Mieville, containing the following stories:
"Foundation" (2003); "The Ball Room" (2005); "Reports of Certain Events in London" (2004); "Familiar" (2002); "Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia" (2005); "Details" (2002); "Go Between" (2005); "Different Skies" (1999); "An End to Hunger" (2000); "'Tis the Season" (2004); "Jack" (2005); "On the Way to the Front" (2005); and "The Tain" (2002).
The lessons we're supposed to learn from many of these stories are so up-front, so undigested into narrative form, that Mieville sometimes seems to be earnestly auditioning for a socialist Twilight Zone TV series. "The Monsters are Due in Buckingham Palace."
Mieville is a fine writer. At novel length, the message becomes part of the narrative, for the most part, and effectively so, at least in the four novels I've read. So, too, the post-modernist tic of foregrounding the artificiality of the story throughout the telling of that story, which can be an annoyance in the longer works, but a minor one.
Of the stories here, though, Mieville abandons both overt message and foregrounded artificiality only rarely. "Details," his much-reprinted story from an H.P. Lovecraft-themed anthology, is a brilliant piece of contemporary Cthulhu Mythos-making. Its settings and characters are grounded in the normative and the mundane; its implications are cosmic and disturbing. I also quite like "The Ball Room," which subtly weaves questions about racial identity and immigration and corporate ethics into a sharp, smart horror story.
Of the other stories, "Jack" works best if you've had some experience with the world of New Corbuzan, that epic-steampunk city of three of Mieville's novels. "The Tain" and "Looking for Jake" are both (intentionally) attenuated, elliptical tales of existential invasion by mysterious forces from Outside. London falls, and not the one in Ontario, Canada.
The rest are either funny and slight, grim and slight, or bleakly funny and slight. They almost remind me more of some of the more didactic short fiction of frequent Twilight Zone contributor Charles Beaumont than anyone else -- Beaumont of "The Howling Man," punching you in the face with allegory, inexplicably made more subtle for Serling's TV version of the story. Uneven but recommended.
The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (1952): Sometimes one forgets how much social critique there was in the works of quintessentially American, quintessentially Golden-Age-of-Science-Fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov. Asimov never attempted anything resembling complex literary style and his characterizations could often be rudimentary. It really didn't matter unless one or both of those things are deal-breakers for a reader: the ideas were the thing, sometimes developed, sometimes simply spun off on the way to another idea.
The Caves of Steel is a remarkably seminal version of what we'd now call a genre mash-up -- the mystery novel and the science-fiction novel. On a crowded and somewhat dystopian Earth of about 1100 years into the future, someone murders a roboticist visiting Earth from one of the long-self-emancipated colony worlds.
This murder is bad for a number of reasons, not least of which being that the colony worlds are far, far, far more technologically and militarily advanced than Earth. Many -- both Terran and sympathetic Spacer -- fear retaliatory invasion, even though 'Spacers' as they're called by Terrans really hate spending time on Earth or among Earth humans, whom they seem to regard as being diseased and unclean.
So the New York City police commissioner puts Elijah 'Lije' Bailey, C-5 level detective in the New York City Police Department (though New York City now occupies pretty much all of New York State and New Jersey as well) on the case. But he'll have to work with a Spacer detective. That detective is R. Daneel Olivaw. The 'R.' stands for 'Robot.'
Relatively primitive robots are being forced into the Earth work-force by the Spacers through pressure on the Earth's government, ostensibly to make the lives of Terrans better. Earth people tend to hate robots because they take people's jobs. But the Spacers have also refined robots over the centuries, relying on them as important parts of their relatively unpopulated worlds, making them in a wide variety of shapes and sizes -- including Olivaw's type, which can pass for human unless subjected to quite a bit of specialized scrutiny.
The commissioner trusts Bailey's tact and his detective skills. Bailey may dislike both Spacers and robots, but he's got an open mind -- for a Terran. So off go Bailey and Olivaw, to solve a crime with no apparent physical evidence. The mystery is pretty solid. Bailey makes some mistakes along the way, and we're treated to more than one pretty good explanation of what turns out to be faulty reasoning.
Was Asimov 'right' in his predictions? Well, probably not -- the assumptions made for why robots cannot kill human beings seem pretty ludicrous in the light of the last 60 years of computer evolution. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are an integral part of his long-lived robotic universe (by the time The Caves of Steel came out in 1953, Asimov had been writing about his Three Laws robots for more than a decade, and he'd keep writing about them until his death in 1992). They don't seem plausible now, at least in the sense that robots in Asimov's universe simply can't be programmed without the laws for reasons explained in the novel.
Asimov's hive-like, overpopulated Earth does seem a lot more plausible, especially after another 1100 years of resource usage. Asimov's future Earth lives on the constant edge of complete collapse due to resource exhaustion and an increasingly over-strained infrastructure. Earth has also undergone a sort of acculturated agoraphobia: human beings are afraid to go outside of the domed-in cities. So afraid that to Bailey, it seems reasonable to exclude the idea that a person could have walked across open land as part of the murder plot.
It's a lot of fun to see Asimov explore the sorts of social conventions that might arise after hundreds of years living in a quasi-communal mega-city. The gender conventions of public washroom behavior become important in a world where 95% of all people only have access to public washrooms (or 'Personals' as they're called in the novel). So, too, does importance attach to some of the games played by teenagers on the massive moving sidewalks that move people around New York (and every other mega-city). Bailey's memories sketch in the peculiar, over-populated homogeneity of the future Earth throughout the novel: one such memory involves a trip to the New York City zoo to see sparrows, cats, and dogs.
This Earth has been emptied out of almost everything that doesn't serve a purpose. The population's diet consists to a great extent of products made from a multitude of varieties of genetically engineered yeast. Petroleum has been exhausted. Uranium and other fissionable materials may soon be exhausted, as will coal. The powers that be discuss various forms of solar power, but no one has the will to build them. No one has the will to walk outside, much less the will to colonize new worlds or create and deploy new technologies.
There's a certain amount of serious thinking going on for a mystery novel -- about how civilizations fall, and about how their fall can be prevented. Both Earth and Spacer society need radical revision to survive. It's the robots that may be the key -- rational, cool-minded, and incapable of causing harm to humans. And Bailey and Olivaw would have more crime-solving to do. Highly recommended.
Ghosts Know by Ramsey Campbell (2011): What initially seems to be a horror novel soon turns into a murder mystery, with prickly first-person narrator Graham Wilde both the amateur investigator and the prime suspect. Wilde, the host of a Manchester call-in radio show when the novel opens, soon finds himself drawn into the world of "psychic investigators" and into the mysterious disappearance of a female teenager, Kylie Goodchild, who was ostensibly trying to track down Wilde on the night she disappeared.
Wilde's painful childhood has left him with anger-management issues that flare up verbally at unfortunate times. But he's also rightfully angry at a self-proclaimed psychic who inserts himself into the police investigation -- and then points the finger at Wilde, who's become a vociferous critic of such psychics. Wilde demonstrates on a couple of occasions the tricks people such as John Edward use to "read" an audience. And the psychic here, Frank Jarvis, turns out to be an especially odious charlatan whose tricks, Wilde believes with mounting frustration, should be transparent to all.
Campbell's use of first-person narration is solid here, and periodically leads us to question how much we actually trust Wilde and what he's telling us. Such narration also leads to a slightly different narrative voice for Campbell, whose off-beat descriptions of things have to be tailored to his narrator's relatively straightforward way of observing the world. Wilde is much more verbally inclined than he is to the visual, which makes perfect sense given his job.
The mystery aspect of the novel plays scrupulously fair with the reader. It helps, of course, to realize this is a murder mystery, but once one goes back to the relevant earlier sections of the novel, upon the revelation of the culprit, the whole thing has indeed been laid out fairly. There's a decent helping of humour here, both bleak and not-so-bleak. Wilde's callers sometimes seem to be completely addled, while Wilde, when angered, sometimes verges on Yosemite Sam-level outrage that he can barely contain.
As with many of Campbell's works, this one deals in large part with the scars, physical and psychic, of childhood, and the ways in which they have shaped the adults the children become. And one last twist towards the end of the novel comes like a kick in the stomach. Highly recommended.
The Watchers Out of Time by August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft (Collected 1974): Besides collecting and keeping in print the stories and letters of H.P. Lovecraft for 30 years at the small press he co-founded, Arkham House, August Derleth also published the work of many other fantasy and horror greats while also maintaining a thriving writing career himself. He's one of fantasy literature's most indispensable figures for Arkham House alone.
Derleth also extrapolated a number of stories from notes, fragments, and sections of letters left by H.P. Lovecraft. This collection actually lists Lovecraft as the primary author (as Derleth himself would have), though there's little here that's actually written by Lovecraft. And I've actually read enough pastiches and homages derived from Lovecraft's Commonplace Book to recognize a couple of examples here.
The bad news is that Derleth's odd love of italics, especially for the concluding paragraph of a story in which terrible things are revealed, is displayed here. Boy, I hate that, and I'm not alone.
The good news is that while Derleth lacks Lovecraft's weird imagination, he can sometimes make up for this with a superior sense of how to depict rural settings and rural residents. Derleth, a regional Wisconsin writer when he wasn't Lovecraft's posthumous Boswell, has a fine eye for natural description. Even a slight story like the first one collected here, "Wentworth's Day", benefits from that studied and accurate creation of an isolated rural world.
Other than a story or two too many about Lovecraft's Innsmouthian hybrid human-amphibians, this is a solid collection. It's also weirdly soothing, which is not something I'd say about Lovecraft's work. The one real debit here is that Derleth's last work, which gives the collection its title, appears here unfinished as it was on Derleth's death in the early 1970's. Given Derleth's own work finishing up Lovecraft, surely someone could have paid Ramsey Campbell or Brian Lumley -- two discoveries of Derleth in the 1960's who are still popular and active writers today -- to complete the story. Preferably without concluding italics and exclamation marks. Recommended.
Inspector Morse 1: Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter (1975): Before Inspector Morse became a beloved PBS franchise that would have its own acclaimed run of episodes and then two spin-off series currently on the air, it was a series of mystery novels by Colin Dexter.
This first installment shows Dexter's early brilliance in combining an American mystery trope (the hard-drinking, tarnished knight of a detective) with the enduring British trope of the detective story per: Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. Detective-Inspector Morse is moody, mercurial, and the highest of all high-functioning alcoholics. He solves crimes in and around the Oxford University area, which apparently has the highest murder rate east of Detroit.
In Last Bus to Woodstock, he teams up with stoic, salt-of-the-Earth Detective-Sergeant Lewis for the first time, a match made in heaven as Lewis remains grounded and methodical even as Morse's investigation wanders all over the map. Morse, erudite and self-pitying, almost blows the case, in part by doing something that would definitely blow the case if he did it and was found out in a contemporary investigation. Lewis puts up with insults and Morse's occasionally bizarre need to keep secrets from his own partner until he's proven right. Like many self-pitying people, Morse has an enormous ego and an attendant fear of appearing to be wrong or misguided.
But Morse is also devastatingly insightful, which explains why he's stayed on the force so long. He's also a lonely bastard throughout this first novel. Dexter's portrayal of both character and British police procedure is top-notch, and the novel never less than engaging.
While it's set in the relatively recent mid-1970's, the novel gives us a mystery that simply couldn't happen today thanks to changes in society and technology. It's a murder that relies to a great extent upon the difficulty of making a truly private telephone call in Oxford circa 1975. Lend it to your kids to show them what telecommunications was like in the Oldey Timey days. Skype would scuttle the entire plot. Highly recommended.
