By Eleanor Catton – Narrated by Mark Meadows – 29 hours, 14 minutes — When will I learn I can read faster than I can listen? This book was an interesting choice for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, as its style is so “unmodern” and seemingly born of the era it describes: the 1866 New Zealand gold fields. Catton expertly weaves together the stories of a half-dozen principal characters and at least a dozen more half-principal (or half-principled) ones trying to unravel the mystery behind a series of local events–a disappearance, a possible attempted suicide, and the death of a drunkard with a fortune in gold hidden in his cabin. At first the story is a deliberate muddle, but as the seemingly disconnected actions of this multitude of characters is brought to light, the reader assembles a gigantic, delightful literary jigsaw. Mark Meadows does an amazing job developing a unique voice for each character and delivering the reading with pizazz. But it’s a lot to keep track of. Much as I admire his reading, I recommend the print version. (1/25)
Category Archives: Crime
Name Your Poison
“Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners” – by Alexandre Cabanel
“The Poisoner’s Handbook”—a perfect TV show for mystery writers–initially seemed an odd choice for one of PBS’s fine American Experience documentaries a few weeks back. It was based on the book by Deborah Blum, who appears among the show’s interviewees. About the book, Kirkus said, “Caviar for true crime fans and science buffs alike.” And so was the documentary, which you can watch here and which begins:
In 1922, 101 New Yorkers hanged themselves, 444 died in car accidents, 20 were crushed in elevators. There were 237 fatal shootings, and 34 stabbings. And that year, 997 New Yorkers died of poisoning.
Not all those deaths were intentional, it turns out. Ninety years ago, life was full of poisoning hazards at work and at home. You may remember the below-stairs tour of cleaning products, rat poisons, polishes, and “remedies” in the great home in the movie Gosford Park, all of which looked mighty suspicious when the master was murdered.
A major cause of death was carbon monoxide, an odorless, tasteless gas that got into the air thanks to leaky stoves and the piping for gaslights. Even today, when houses are shut up tight for winter, we still hear about deaths from malfunctioning space heaters or, difficult to believe though it is, charcoal grills people roll in to heat up the house. (In 2011, five members of a Long Island family were hospitalized when the 43-year-old mom actually did this.)
Poisonings are so much rarer today, the PBS program explained, because in 1917 New York City hired Dr. Charles Norris to be the city’s (and the nation’s) first chief medical examiner. Norris, born into a wealthy family, was one of those larger-than-life characters who create their own weather. Norris, in turn, hired Alexander Gettler to head the City’s first toxicology laboratory. Gettler and his staff built the field of toxicology from scratch, and he and Norris created modern forensic science. CSI fans are grateful.
Gettler soon realized that he and his staff had to conduct definitive studies of the way different poisons killed, their symptoms in various concentrations, and how they could be detected. Murder by poison, which had been difficult to diagnose in many cases, especially if it wasn’t suspected, became less and less feasible.
In 2011, I read The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor, a finalist for the nonfiction National Book Award in 2009. During his lifetime (120-63 BCE), Mithradates Eupator fought some of the most famous Roman generals, mostly successfully. At the height of his career, he governed 22 nations around the Black Sea and could speak all of their languages. He was an infamous poisoner. He believed his mother murdered his father by poison, and, to protect himself, he learned as much as he could about them.
One protection he engaged in was to take small doses of certain poisons every day to build up his tolerance. (Anyone familiar with Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mystery Strong Poison is familiar with this strategy.) As a result, when Mithradates’ enemies at one point gave him a lethal dose of something, it had no effect, which didn’t hurt his reputation for invincibility. In the region where Mithradates ruled, there was a body of water made poisonous by a deadly plant. Many ducks lived there and fed on the plant, unharmed. Mithradates prepared a great banquet for his enemies, featuring—you guessed it—those self-same ducks, and, by morning, his guests were all dead. He also developed a “universal antidote” to poison, still of scholarly interest. When the Romans finally captured Mithradates, he tried to commit suicide by poison, but his protection worked too well, and he was ultimately stabbed to death.
Gardeners may have noticed the King’s name is familiar: Eupatorium is a genus of flowering plant with several hundred species, including (and in my garden) Joe-Pye Weed. One of its species is, of course, poisonous to humans.
Circling back to American Experience, the underlying message might be that, much as Americans complain about “government regulations,” in the 1920’s before the Food and Drug Administration took dangerous patent medicines off the drug store shelves, before there was a Consumer Product Safety Commission, and before the workplace safety rules that protect people like the poor young women who worked as radium dial-painters and died horribly of jaw and bone cancer, everyday life was full of deadly hazards, and mystery writers had one more handy tool in their store of potential mayhem-makers.
Want more? 12 Toxic Tales from National Geographic.
*** The Dordogne Deception
By Sherry Joyce – Very interesting to read the first romantic suspense novel from a new author and see her struggle with the same kinds of issues that I do. How to plant clues, how to keep the plot moving logically and organically, creating 3-dimensional characters. She picked an interesting setting, and creates a believable sense of place. Some first-timer rough patches, but congratulations to her for finishing (how many novels languish, half-written, in the bottom drawers of people’s desks?) and getting into print! (1/5)
Mysteries Continue to Thrill
The mystery genre has retained its popularity over the years. Whether a classic “whodunit,” a cozy, a police procedural, or some new hybrid of mystery/suspense plus fantasy, sci-fi or horror, crime fiction still draws a strong audience of readers.
Surveyed for Library Journal’s annual round-up of trends in the mystery genre, more than half of the 232 librarians polled say mysteries are the most popular book genre they offer, as measured by circulation, shelf-space—accounting for almost a quarter of their print fiction materials—and e-collections, making up more than 20% of libraries’ ebooks.
While e-collections are growing (and most publishers have finally agreed to sell ebooks to libraries now), which e-mysteries they buy depends heavily on patron demand and costs. Ebook purchases are now about 6% of libraries’ acquisitions budgets, up from 1% three years ago.
“E-books aren’t the future of mystery, they’re the present,” said Soho Press publisher Bronwen Hruska. They accounted for two-thirds of the sales of the Soho Crime imprint in 2012 and half or more of sales by another mystery publisher, Minotaur. Sisters in Crime’s recent interviews with publishers revealed that while e-books are “the fastest growth sector for publishing revenues,” the effect on income—publishers’ or authors’—is not yet clear.
Amazon’s heavy promotion of low price-point books for the Kindle through various deals and free offerings has helped even a few new writers achieve electronic sales that outsell print. An example is when Leonard Rosen’s debut thriller, All Cry Chaos, was picked as a Kindle Book of the Day and sold 7,000 electronic copies and 4,000 print.
Presumably, it helps to write a good book, too. But quality—good or bad—isn’t a guarantee of sales numbers when so many books are free or $.99.
Paris: The Early Detectives (Updated)
Paris in the 19th and early 20th century was in creative ferment and in love with modernism—and the scandalous. In areas like Montmarte, “people went to abandon their inhibitions”; low-rent neighborhoods attracted people on the brittle edge of society; guillotinings were held at odd hours in the vain hope of reducing the crowds of spectators; crime stories were insanely popular; and real-life criminals and anarchists were hailed as heroes.
The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection, by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler describes this world and the ongoing war between the criminals and the Sureté detectives intent on stopping them. They anchor their story with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa and loop backward from there to trace the increasingly scientific methods used to identify malefactors. One of the most successful was a system of measuring and classifying facial and other physical features created by Alphonse Bertillon. By 1900, detectives throughout Europe and the United States used “bertillonage” to identify criminals until the system was replaced by fingerprinting. A reference to Bertillon even appears in The Hound of the Baskervilles, as a rival to Sherlock Holmes.
History, in its tendency to repeat itself, is reviving Bertillon’s concept as biometrics; in today’s incarnation, computers much more accurately measure facial data points. The Mona Lisa was recovered in 1913, and the Hooblers present several plausible “who, how, and why” scenarios, but it’s clear that if the man who possessed it hadn’t turned it over to art experts in Florence, the skills of the detectives of a hundred years ago would never have found it!
Genealogical footnote: When the Mona Lisa went missing, the authorities stopped all ships leaving France and notified destination ports of ships recently departed. When the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm II steamed into New York harbor some days later, U.S. authorities searched the ship and passengers thoroughly. The Kaiser Wilhelm II was the boat on which my grandfather emigrated from Hungary in October 1906. Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photograph below, The Steerage, suggests what his voyage would have been like.
June 2013 Update: a remarkable show of drawings and prints by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec appears this summer at the Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley, and is one of the first museum’s outside Europe to host this large collection. The show includes some recently found print of famous works that have retained their color–looking as fresh now as they were when pulled from the presses 120 years ago! Lautrec captured the world of Montmartre the Hooblers describe–the singers and dancers, the whores, the denizens of the bars and cafes–to a greater degree than most artists would, because he was as attentive to depicting members of the audience as the was a black-gloved chanteuse. If you can’t visit in person (exhibit available until September 1), you can read about it here.
Witness – Scene 1
This week’s post is the first scene of my thriller Witness, set in Rome in the current day. I’m interested in your feedback. Enjoy!
The scowling twenty-something with spiky white-blond hair still trailed her by more than a block, though the distance between them was shrinking fast. Steel zippers and snaps punctuated his black leather jacket, and he hid his eyes behind mirror sunglasses, but the prickling skin on Eugenia Clarke’s neck told her he fixed those eyes on her.
She forced herself not to turn and look. Dozens of times she’d walked these few blocks along Rome’s Via del Babuino, which connects the Piazza del Popolo with the Piazza di Spagna, but the street felt hostile now. Despite the clear autumn sunlight of a Sunday afternoon, the stones of the shuttered buildings reflected no warmth.
She glanced behind her. Damn!
She should have called out to one of the young couples she’d passed when she first entered the street, but at that point she hadn’t expected he would really follow her. Even now she could hardly believe it, did not want to believe it, did not want to panic. Yet the street was unaccountably deserted, its antique shops closed tight as oysters. How ironic, she thought. An experienced travel writer, Eugenia helped tourists stay out of trouble. Thousands of readers relied on her. How is this happening? She picked up her pace.
Her gaze darted left and right, searching for refuge, help of any sort. A side street to the left, jammed with parked cars, no people. On the right, a trattoria a few doors down, closed. Even the cats took siestas. She kicked off her flapping sandals and began to run. The clomp of his boots alternated with her pounding heartbeats. He’d catch her long before she could reach the crowds near the Spanish Steps.
His bootsteps grew nearer, and the metallic taste of adrenalin filled her mouth. Another few strides and, finally, ahead on the right, the Anglican All Saints’ Church. She remembered the sanctuary’s side door that opened onto a narrow park leading to another street. She dashed across the Via di Gesu e Maria—Thank you, Jesus and Mary!—through the main doors, and into a hallway sidling along the sanctuary.
“Hello?” Panting, Eugenia called again, louder, as she streaked past the unattended offices. Silence. Desks abandoned. Phones stilled. Where is everyone? Isn’t there church business on a Sunday? Counting the collection, choir practice—something?
A hint of incense and candle smoke lingered in the empty sanctuary. Sun streaming through leaded windows stained the brickwork bloody. The tile was cold on her feet. She called out to the empty air. “Hello! Anybody here?” After a few seconds, “Anybody??”
She checked behind her, down the unlit hallway. Not there yet. At the side door, the new-looking deadbolt turned easily, but the heavy brass doorknob resisted, and she needed both sweating hands to turn it. A final glance over her shoulder before she jerked open the stubborn door.
Outside, she blinked in the sudden brightness. She sensed movement to her left, and tried to duck away. A harsh blow struck the back of her head. Dizzy, she watched her new straw hat sail to the ground. Reaching up to protect herself, she knocked off the man’s sunglasses. He seized her arm and squeezed it hard enough to bruise.
“Fatti i cazzi tuoi!” he growled. Mind your own fucking business! She swayed, stunned and staring into eyes pale and hard as silver coins, until her knees gave way and she collapsed against him. She slid down his chest, breathing the foul odor of sweat-stained leather. A zipper tore her cheek. He gripped her armpit to keep her from falling, and his fist found her face, stomach, ribs. She twisted away, but she couldn’t escape. Their bodies were locked too close together, and she managed only to bury her face deeper in the rancid jacket. Again a metallic taste. Blood, this time. She gasped for breath as a boot came down hard on her bare foot. She felt the force of his blows, but the pain hadn’t started yet.
Her vision blurred, her thoughts clouded. She stared mesmerized at the intricate tattoo coiling up his wrist and disappearing under the leather sleeve. A blue and green snake’s head covered the back of his hand, and through her hazy perceptions she could almost believe it was the snake striking her. Her gaze followed its hypnotic black eyes as it dove into the man’s pocket, and he pulled out a knife. The flash as the blade flicked open broke the spell. She tore herself from his grasp and choked out, “No!”
“Impicciona!” he spat. Meddler.
A flood of pain rose up within her, and she might have heard shouts, running feet. She fell into blackness.