Monday, March 26, 2012

2011 Edgar Award Nominee: Book Review: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin









Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
By Tom Franklin

     Tom Franklin lives in Oxford, Mississippi and teaches in the MFA program at The University of Mississippi.  This novel is set in small town Mississippi in contemporary times.  “Crazy Larry” Ott lives a reclusive life on a small farm.  His increasingly demented mother lives in a nearby nursing home.  Larry works at his father’s old service station and garage, an establishment that the locals avoid like the plague.  Larry is the town pariah because he is considered to be the murderer of a young girl in the 1970s.  The body of the missing girl was never found and no trial was ever held, but Larry was convicted by the court of public opinion because he was the last person to have seen her alive.  Interest in Larry escalates when twenty years later another local girl is missing.  The investigator, Silas Jones, is a childhood friend of Larry’s, a black man who grew up in a wooden shack on Larry’s father’s farm.  Silas is also known as “32”, the number he wore as a star baseball player in high school and at the University of Mississippi.  The relationship between Silas and Larry is hazy in the beginning.  In flashbacks we see them growing up in the 1970s, a time when racial tensions ran high in the deep South.  The relationship grows more distant in high school when Silas becomes renowned as an athlete and Larry becomes more reclusive.  The relationship is severed when Larry takes a girl from the next farm on a date to a drive-in movie and she is never seen again.   

     Twenty years later another girl is missing, Larry becomes the obvious person of interest and Silas, now a local police officer, has to reconnect with his former childhood friend because of the investigation.  Without ruining any surprises, suffice it to say that the relationship between Larry and Silas is revealed to be much more complex than the reader first imagines, the murders of the two girls (a generation apart) are linked, but not in the way you would first suspect and the complex story comes to a fairly solid, complete resolution. 

     The strengths of this book are many.  The characters are vivid and are drawn with an economy of words.  The setting in Mississippi (much like the early novels of John Grisham) plays an integral role in the plot line and again, is very keenly described by the author.  The inclusion of descriptions of local foods is a nice touch as well.  The whole story is told with the underlying presence of racial tension.  The author doesn’t bludgeon you with this; it just lurks in the background adding intensity to an already suspenseful tale.  I greatly enjoyed this book and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin was a very worthy Edgar nominee and I thought was every bit as good as the eventual winner, The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton.  I look forward to more novels from this author.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

2011 Edgar Nominee: Book Review: I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman









I’d Know You Anywhere
By Laura Lippman

     Laura Lippman is a former Edgar Award winner. She was a reporter for 20 years including 12 years at “The Baltimore Sun. She began writing novels while working full time before leaving daily journalism in 2001. Most of her crime novels feature a female private investigator named Tess Monaghan.  I’d Know You Anywhere is a “stand alone” novel and, according to the book jacket, is based on a very well-disguised true story.

     The story opens with main character Eliza Benedict re-adjusting to life in America after living in London for several years with her financier husband and two children.  Her seemingly bucolic existence is shattered one morning when she receives a letter from Walter Bowman, a Virginia death row in-mate who recognized her picture in the Society section of “Washingtonian Magazine.”  This man, sentenced to die for a capital murder, has been on death row for close to twenty years and an execution date has finally been set.  Walter wants to see Eliza, whom he kidnapped and raped when she was 15.  Unlike other victims in Walter’s crime spree, Eliza’s life was spared.  The mystery of why she was the only victim to survive has haunted her and been fuel for tabloid speculation during all of these intervening years. 

     The plot alternates between Eliza’s present day terror and indecision about confronting her previous captor and the actual months she spent as Walter’s prisoner.  During the present day Eliza agonizes over how to continue to shelter her children from her horrible history, how to avoid the journalistic spotlight which searches for her as Walter’s execution nears and how to justify her morbid curiosity and search for answers to her life-long questions regarding her experience as a sexual crime victim.  The account of her abduction and imprisonment includes a serious psychological look at the criminal mind and “The Stockholm Syndrome”. 

     The setting of this book ambles from suburban Baltimore, West Virginia and parts of the Shenandoah Valley and Northern Virginia.  There is one critical scene which occurs at Luray Caverns.  Walter takes Eliza there and she comes very close to escaping with a group of school children who are on a field trip.  There is a flash point in the story where Eliza contemplates escape and Walter, watching her from a distance, understands what she is thinking and decides to let her go should she so decide.  Fearing for her family’s safety (Walter has threatened to kill all of her family members if she ever leaves him) Eliza elects to stay with Walter.

     This is an interesting book with intriguing character studies.   The plots are intricate, but at times a bit slow moving.  I expected more of a surprise ending.  The ending is basically fairly predictable and almost anticlimactic.  There are interesting statements regarding capital punishment woven into the fabric of the story which are a plus.  All in all, this was a very enjoyable read, more of a "building tension" type of novel and not a "hang on to your hat" kind of mystery.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Book Review: Thirty Rooms to Hide In - Insanity, Addiction and Rock 'n' Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic by Luke Longstreet Sullivan


Thirty Rooms to Hide In – Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic

Luke Longstreet Sullivan

This remarkable book is a comic/tragic memoir written by a young man who grew up with an alcoholic father.  This is certainly a field that’s been plowed many times before, but this story is different in several respects.  First of all, the alcoholic in question was a renowned orthopedic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.  Secondly, the story evolves in a time not so long ago when addiction was poorly understood, alcoholism was seen as a character flaw (“lack of self-control”) and the devastating effects of one person’s addiction on others in the household were grossly underestimated.  Luke Sullivan cobbled together this amazing narrative using contemporary diaries written by several of his brothers as well as his mother and by bound correspondence between his mother Myra and her retired father .

This is really the story of Myra Longstreet and her husband Charles Roger Sullivan.  They met while undergraduates at a small Ohio college in the late 1940s.  Their courtship was interrupted by Myra’s contracting tuberculosis and their marriage was interrupted early on by Roger’s commitment to the United States Navy.  Roger became an orthopedic surgeon and, after completing training at the Mayo Clinic, had the honor of being offered a position on the Clinic faculty.

The marriage produced six children – all boys, Luke being the fifth in line.  A good bit of the book deals with the hilarious antics of a household with six precocious and seemingly uncontrollable boys.  What one didn’t think of the others did.  There were frequent knock-down, drag-out fights, pranks which backfired and stunts which defy belief.  The “thirty rooms to hide in” refers to The Millstone, a spacious home on a large tract of land which the Sullivan’s purchased after Roger Sullivan began working on the faculty at Mayo.  The structure was built in the1930s and has a very unique architecture, including a turret where Myra kept a large library.  There were also spooky places, including an attic with peculiar crevices and a dark and dank basement which was converted by the Sullivans into a bomb shelter during the early 1960s.  The boys all had delusions of super powers and frequently used them to climb the high gabled tile roof of The Millstone or to climb down the sides of the structure like Spider Man. 

Underlying all of this seemingly charming veneer, Luke Sullivan tells the story of the deterioration of his father.  Roger developed the propensity to “rage” when he came home from the Clinic, consuming more and more liquor as time goes on.  He directed his rage mainly towards Myra, hurling verbal abuse that is incomprehensible.  He railed on for hours at a time about her deficiencies as a mother and wife and resented her close relationship with her father who lived in Florida and with whom she exchanged weekly letters.  Roger had a difficult relationship with his own parents.  His father was a Methodist minister and his mother (who the Sullivan children refer to as “The Rock” because of her stone-cold demeanor) was a domineering, fault-finding shrew.  Roger also verbally and physically abused his sons, once beating the head of one of the younger boys against the refrigerator because he couldn’t remember the days of the week for a quiz at school.  The resulting dents in the refrigerator remained a silent but constant reminder of how bad Roger’s temper was and how dire the consequences of his rages were.  In the vein of self preservation, the boys developed a talent for disappearing in the house or surrounding countryside, leaving their mother to bear the brunt of most of the terror.

The older two boys, Kip and Jeff, learned to play the guitar and formed a rock and roll band called The Pagans.  They became local celebrities, posing in advertisements for a Rochester clothing store and even recording their own 45 RPM record.   (OK, I’m showing my age:  I know what this is and still own a large collection of “45s”, including many by Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and the Comets, and The Beatles.)  Luke Longstreet uses this aspect of their family life to define the profound influence that rock and roll music, in particular the “new music” by The Beatles, helped shape many of us who grew up in that period.  He also uses The Pagans to illustrate Roger’s unpredictable behavior fueled by alcohol.  One day he was hiring The Pagans to play a Mayo party he was hosting at his house, the next day he was cursing and saying how loud, obnoxious and worthless The Pagans were.   

Roger’s addiction and resulting erratic behavior inevitably impacted his performance at the Mayo Clinic.  His supervisors, including the Chair of the Orthopedic Department all tried to help.  Roger and Myra each sought psychiatric consultation with little benefit.  Roger blamed all of his problems on his wife, which in the 1950s and 60s was a readily believed excuse.  The environment in The Millstone deteriorated to the point that Myra packed up the boys and left for a few months in 1964.  There is a riveting chapter where Roger is beating on the door of Myra’s library with an axe while she and the children cower in fear.  Finally, one of the boys lowers himself from the balcony “Spider Man style” and runs to the neighbor s for help.

Friends of the family also tried to intercede.  A local dentist, also a close family friend, tried to talk sense into Roger.  He was rewarded for his efforts by being accused very vociferously by Roger at a public gathering of having an affair with his wife.  Roger is finally let go from the Mayo Clinic.  He travels the country searching for another job, often showing up for interviews hung over or drunk.  One night, after calling home in another alcoholic rage, he dies from a combination of booze, sedatives and insanity.  This is not a “spoiler”, since the book opens with Roger’s funeral.

Luke goes on to describe his mother’s “life after Roger” which included academic success as a reading tutor and instructor at a local college.  Myra continues to this day (she is in her eighties) to assume a lot of blame for what happened to Roger and also for the shamble of a life they provided for their sons.  The author does not describe what happened to the six boys, although all are still alive.  Data shows a high incidence of addiction issues in offspring of alcoholics, so it would be interesting to know how these boys matured.  One would hope that they defied the odds and have lived a full, rich and happy life.

This book resonated with me on several levels.  First, the Sullivan boys grew up in the same era that I did.  I fully understood their fascination with rock and roll, their excitement about the presidential election of 1960 and their despair upon hearing of the Kennedy assassination.  Secondly,  I, too, am the son of an alcoholic father.  Fortunately for me, my father got help before I was born and remained sober the entire rest of his life.  Thank the good Lord, I never witnessed or suffered anything remotely similar to what befell the Sullivans.  I never even knew until I was in late high school that there had ever been a problem.  I just thought my parents were tea-totalers.  I enjoy alcoholic beverages as much as anyone but am very cognizant of their power and potential for disaster. 

This is an excellent book.  It makes several important points.  First, doctors and their families are human beings and can fall prey to the same demons as everyone else in the general population.  Fortunately, there are much better methods to deal with the impaired physician now then there were in 1960.  The Medical Society of Virginia has an excellent program (initiated by Lynchburg’s own Dr. William Barney) which has helped many.  Secondly, it is hard to comprehend that the understanding of addiction issues and alcoholism in particular was so primitive just one generation ago.  We should all be grateful to the researchers and workers in this field who have advanced the art of treating these problems.  Finally, Thirty Rooms to Hide In underscores the value of humor in coping with life’s many trials and travails.  I am grateful for Luke Sullivan’s courage to write this book and am very glad that I read it. 
Thirty Rooms to Hide In is a self-published paperback book which is available from the usual on-line vendors.  There are electronic editions as well.   It is also available for direct purchase (at a much reduced price) at the author’s web-site.  The web-site also contains many family photos and 8 mm videos.  There are scans of Myra’s letters and the children’s diaries.  There are even mp3 format recordings of The Pagans!  

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Book Review: 2005 Edgar Award Winner: California Girl by T. Jefferson Parker




California Girl
 T. Jefferson Parker
  
     California Girl is a fantastic crime novel set in Southern California, the locale for all of T. Jefferson Parker's many entertaining novels.  This author has been nominated three times for the Best Novel Edgar Award.  This is his second winner, the first being Silent Joe.  If you have never read one of Parker’s books before, you don’t know what you are missing.  He transcends the genre of mystery novel, as his books have great depth and are not pure crime novels or mysteries.  Like Silent Joe, this book is a tremendous character study.  Actually, there are multiple character studies which intertwine and interact.  California Girl is also a re-creation of an era and a place: late 1960s Orange County, California.  While this is not a historical novel, the appearance of many non-fictional characters makes this an even more interesting read.  These include such disparate characters as Richard Nixon, Timothy Leary and a hyperactive and wild rock and roll drummer named Charles Manson.
  
     The story is set up in the 1950s.  Two families feud after their sons are involved in a rumble outside of the California Girl orange packing plant.  The Becker family (four sons) is respectable, church-going and hardworking.  The Vonns (three boys, one girl) on the other hand, are from “the other side of the tracks”, literally and figuratively.  They are more interested in motorcycles, alcohol and drugs than more mainstream pursuits.  The one daughter involved, Janelle Vonn, grows up to win regional beauty contests and rises above her sordid upbringing.  The eldest Becker son is killed in Viet Nam and the remaining three mature into a minister, a newspaper reporter and a police officer.  The Vonn brothers remain outside the law, engaged in everything from illicit drugs to stolen goods.  The two family stories intersect again in 1968 when the decapitated body of Janelle Vonn is found in the now deserted orange packing plant.  Each of the three Beckers investigates Janelle’s killing from his own perspective.   Further clashes with the surviving Vonns are inevitable.  A conviction is finally secured and the alleged perpetrator is incarcerated.  The Beckers are never really satisfied with this and thirty years later the case is brought to a startling and unexpected conclusion.  Dirty politics (a Parker staple) play a major role in the resolution of the story.

     This book has it all: great characters which are well developed, a twisting but plausible plot with unexpected turns, a spectacular Southern California setting which the author obviously knows and loves and interesting historical tidbits thrown in for good measure.  I enjoyed California Girl by T. Jefferson Parker immensely and recommend it highly.  This novel is more than worthy of the 2005 Edgar Award which it received.




Monday, March 12, 2012

Book Review: What It Was by George Pelecanos



What It Was
George Pelecanos


     George Pelecanos has crafted another superb crime noir novel set in Washignton, D.C.  The main character is again Derek Strange, an African-American former metropolitan police officer who left the force after the infamous 1968 riots following the King assassination.  Strange is now a private investigator and is hired by a young woman to find a stolen ring.  The ring was stolen during the contract murder of her boyfriend, a small time drug dealer.   The murderer was Robert Lee Jones, nicknamed “Red” because of his hair color.  Jones’ street name is “Red Fury” since he is frequently driving his girlfriend’s automobile, a red-over-white Plymouth Fury GT Sport.

      Strange’s ex-partner Frank “Hound Dog” Vaughan is the investigating officer in the boyfriend’s murder.  Frank, an ex-Marine who fought at Okinawa, earned his nickname because of his facial features as well as his reputation for dogged pursuit of criminals.  Strange and Vaughan’s investigations overlap and they co-operate with each other in an attempt to capture Red Jones whose life of crime goes into hyperdrive.  Vaughan is under increasing pressure from the city government to put Jones behind bars and turns to a varied group of informants including cross-dressing prostitutes.  Complicating matters, there are two mafia connected fellows from New Jersey in town who are also looking for Red to collect on a bad debt. The story comes to a shattering conclusion as all parties converge on a house in suburban Maryland being used by Red and his partner as a hide-out. 

      Pelecanos infuses this novel with gritty realism, sometimes illuminating some unimaginable habits of the druggies and prostitutes who comprise most of the secondary characters.  All of his characters are memorable.  He also vividly brings the story to life by including many details of the automobiles of the era (1972) as well as the popular music of the time.  You can listen to all of the music he mentions in a George Pelecanos playlist on Spotify.    What It Was is a very entertaining read and anyone who enjoys police procedurals and realistic crime fiction would enjoy this book.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

2011 Edgar Nominee (Book Review): Faithful Place by Tana French






Faithful Place
By Tana French

    Forty pages into this book I assumed this would be my favorite of the 2011 Edgar nominees.  The book is set in Dublin and features the mother of all dysfunctional Irish families.  The main character is an undercover detective named Frank Mackey.  His father is an alcoholic (surprise!) and abusive.  His mother is the typical Irish mother who is a master at sending her children on guilt trips.  Frank has an older and younger brother and sister.  The story opens with nineteen year old Frank waiting for his girlfriend Rosie Daly.  Their plan is to escape their lower class life and neighborhood by running away to London.  The only problem is that Rosie never shows up.  Frank finds part of a note Rosie wrote implying that she was taking off for London on her own.  Young Frank leaves Faithful Place behind also, relocating in Dublin and becoming a well-respected undercover police officer.  He marries, has a daughter, becomes divorced and never attempts to contact his parents or is siblings.

     Twenty two years later Rosie’s suitcase is found in an abandoned home on Faithful Place.  A search of the basement finds the remains of a young woman which is eventually identified as those of Rosie Daly.  The ultimate “cold case” becomes Frank’s obsession, despite being warned by superiors to stay away from the investigation. 

     The plot segues from the present day as Frank reluctantly reacquaints himself with his estranged family back to the events leading up to Frank and Rosie’s ill-fated rendezvous twenty two years previous.  The list of suspects begins to narrow when Frank’s younger brother Kevin apparently jumps from an upper story window in the same abandoned house where Rosie’s body was found.  The police find a tidy explanation for both deaths:  Kevin was her killer and took his own life in remorse.  Frank, however, is not buying any of it. 

     As Frank digs into his past, he finds even more “skeletons”.  He narrows the field of suspects down to the unthinkable – other members of his own family. 

     This book is extremely well written.  It could, however, have used a bit of editing.  There is one whole chapter where Frank tries to explain death to his nine year old daughter which seemed unnecessary.   The perpetrator of the crimes is fairly obvious early on, but the way the plot resolves at the conclusion is very clever.  I thoroughly enjoyed Faithful Place.