Author Archives: Anna

Ordeal by Innocence

by Anna

By Agatha Christie

Ordeal_By_InnocenceWe finally bit the bullet and got Amazon Prime in order to watch “Good Omens,” and since then I’ve also been diving into all the Agatha Christie I’d been pining after. I’d previously reviewed the novel Crooked House, and the movie lacks a fair amount of the charm of the novel, replacing the more familial relationships with additional drama. However, the casting is truly amazing: Glenn Close, Gillian Anderson, and Christina Hendricks, all playing extreme personalities rubbing against each other in the titular crooked house. So, while I preferred the novel overall, the movie is well worth a watch.

After Crooked House, Amazon recommended “Ordeal by Innocence,” a three-part miniseries based on another stand-alone Agatha Christie novel I wasn’t familiar with. Well, I absolutely loved it! An authoritative matriarch has adopted five children from a variety of troubled backgrounds and raised them with dictatorial love. At the time of the book and miniseries’ start, she has been murdered 18 months ago, and the youngest son, with a history of delinquency, found guilty from overwhelming evidence. The son had insisted on his innocence until he died in prison, providing an alibi that couldn’t be confirmed.

The first character we meet is the man who could have proven the alibi, but has been incapacitated for the past 18 months, and is only coming forward now. This of course opens a whole can of worms, as the family had finally settled into some semblance of acceptance of the mother’s death and the son’s culpability, and now suspicion is everywhere again.

The miniseries takes some of the subtext from the book and makes it straight up text, leading to some deliciously shocking reveals along the way. Controversially, the series actually changes the ending, going with a different perpetrator and motive than the book. The revised ending maintains the spirit of the book, and gives a clear nod to a pivotal relationship in the original.

The book is much quieter, taking a more philosophical approach toward what it means to be innocent of a crime if no one can prove it (thus the title). Wikipedia cited that it was not one of Christie’s more popular novels, with reviewers wary of the psychological delving into motives and character. I wouldn’t normally have minded this, but 1950s psychology is rough. The women are portrayed especially uncharitably, which I would guess inspired the changed ending.

As Rebecca pointed out, the two books complement each other fairly well: both large, wealthy families consisting of conflicting strong personalities; in one, the troubled backgrounds of the family members lead naturally to conflict; in the other, the family seems to turn to conflict themselves just for the entertainment. For each, I preferred the version that included the most warmth in characters, and for one that was the novel and for the other the updated series.

As an aside, we also tried to watch “The ABC Murders” with John Malkovich as an aging and depressed Hercule Poirot, and it was such a depressing grind that we couldn’t get past the first episode.

eNewsletters

by Anna

I promise that I’m going to review an actual book eventually, but in the meantime, here’s some more links!

We’ve all mourned the closing of The Toast on this blog (though thank god for the archive!), and before it closed, the editors tried multiple ways to make it financially sustainable but not exclusive without success. E-newsletters may be the answer! Both Nicole Cliffe and Daniel Mallory Ortberg, founding editors of The Toast, have ones that mirror their respective writing styles. Both newsletters are primarily for a paid subscription, though include periodic public posts for people who either cannot afford the subscription or want to read some samples first.

Nicole Cliffe’s daily newsletter, Nicole Knows, lists interesting reads from around the web, including long-form articles, YouTube videos, tweets, advice column letters, and my favorite, particularly juicy reddit posts. She also recently published an interview with Alanis Morissette in Self Magazine, and I’ve never been a huge fan of Morissette’s music, but reading these two smart and compassionate women talk about feminism and motherhood and individuality was a real inspiration.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s newsletter, The Shatner Chatner, is not as regular as daily, but several times a week, and my best idea is that it spans whatever he happens to be thinking of that day. It is often very funny, often very insightful, and sometimes so educational on trans issues that I’m scrambling to keep up.

And finally, this isn’t really a newsletter in the same way as the above, but R. Eric Thomas, an incredibly funny writer for Elle.com, writes a weekly tinyletter, in which he collects his 3-4 articles for Elle.com with some additional commentary or personal anecdote. They are free to subscribe to, and I look forward to them every Sunday as the only thing making current politics even remotely bearable.

—Anna

Running from COPS

by Anna

So, I’ve moved to Michigan! My life got increasingly frantic leading up to the move, and now I’m surrounded by boxes, but things are calmer. I’m currently reading Rewind, the fourth in the Pinx Video mystery series, which continues to be a delightful mix of noir-ish detachment and absurdist humor. It is a perfect counterbalance to the stress of packing all of one’s belongings up in boxes and then having to unpack them again.

Running_from_COPSHOWEVER, have I got a podcast recommendation for you! It is fascinating, intense, and disturbing, and I have to take it a little at a time. “Running from COPS” is a widespread look at the show COPS, which I was shocked to realize has been on for 30 years and has aired more than a thousand episodes.

I was never a huge fan of the show, but also didn’t think very hard about it, assuming it was just a normal look at law enforcement, and how you viewed the show depended on how you viewed law enforcement in general. Which, according to the podcast, is an entirely intentional impression created by the show and has had truly insidious effects on the evolution of law enforcement.

The podcast interviews the creators of the show, network producers, retired police, lawyers, and most importantly the “criminals,” who are often found not-guilty after the cameras have turned away but will forever be “the person on COPS”. The creators ask a lot of very good questions and then follow up with the people that can answer them, which is the very best of critical-thinking media these days.

I think, like a lot of complacent, middle-class, white people, I had generally bought the argument that while flawed, law enforcement was generally trying its best, and the last decade or so has been a continual waking up to a very different reality. This podcast, for me, has been yet another wake-up call on how methodically the institution of law enforcement has been normalizing and even celebrating human rights abuses. It is not always an easy listen (honestly, in this day and age, just listening to the audio from episodes is upsetting), but I highly recommend it, not only because it is an important eye-opener but it is just great podcasting!

Great Literary Takedowns

by Anna

HunterSThompsonI can’t remember what social media recommended this, but a while ago, someone linked to this truly incredible ‘eulogy’ that Hunter S. Thompson wrote for Nixon on his death:

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

It is also shockingly reflective of the current president, as well. In these terrible times, I’ve been really missing the political writers like Molly Ivins, who could make me laugh while exposing the most outrageous politics, and we need more of them. I hope to God someone writes something similar about Trump on his demise (or sooner).

* * * * * * * * *

MarkTwainWhen I was relating this to my mom as perhaps the best literary take-down I’d ever read, she reminded me of Mark Twain’s savaging of Fenimore Cooper, which if you haven’t read, you need to go do right now:

We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper’s books “reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention.” As a rule, I am quite willing to accept Brander Matthews’s literary judgments and applaud his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that particular statement needs to be taken with a few tons of salt. Bless you heart, Cooper hadn’t any more invention than a horse; and don’t mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes- horse. It would be very difficult to find a really clever “situation” in Cooper’s books, and still more difficult to find one of any kind which has failed to render absurd by his handling of it.

Honestly, is there anything better than a truly skilled author using their gifts for maximum snark?

* * * * * * * * *

Unrelated, but since I’m linking to things, I’ve been obsessed with this tweet all week:

GarthGreenwell

Some good samaritan put together a spotify list that I’ve been listening to all week, and just mulling over how hard it is to feel vulnerable in your teens, trying to make meaningful connections with other people. And, of course, it is just a total shot of pure 90s teenage longing!

— Anna

Hey Ladies!

by Anna

By Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss

Hey_LadiesAfter all my recent disappointments, I decided to go with a book with zero male voices at all. Hey Ladies! started as a randomly occurring column on the late, lamented Toast.

It was one of my favorites – just a series of emails from the most vapid group of friends trying to plan outrageous outings – but it was also a bit controversial on The Toast, with some commenters feeling like it was too broadly satirizing women in general and tipping over into anti-feminism. For the book, which borrows and expands from the original columns, the authors wrote a forward in which they explicitly write:

We’re not making fun of you or your friends or women in general. We’re making fun of ourselves, and how mass emails to big groups seem to bring out the “OMG SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!” in all of us.

I have to admit that I was skeptical, because while I always looked forward to a Hey Ladies! column, it was definitely a sharply-pointed satire of a certain class of women. And the beginning of the book was exactly the same seven truly appalling women (and one audience-proxy who mostly doesn’t respond) that entertained me so much before.

But, damn me if by only a quarter through the book, I started getting twinges of sympathy for each character: Nicole who is always mooching off her friends, but is clearly scrabbling to maintain the lifestyle that lets her keep her friends; Ali who railroads everyone into her preferred decisions, but is also just trying to a decision made; Caitlin who is on the edge of success as a social media influencer but also really does honestly want to help everyone around her; etc.

I mean, good satire lures you into some introspection on how you view yourself and others, right?

Women-led historical mysteries, ruined by the male romantic interest

by Anna

I’m just so tired, y’all. Thirty years of overlooking or excusing bad behavior by male leads and I seem to have hit my wall. Negging is not flirting, condescension is not fondness, and ignorance is not protection. How hard can it be for a man and a woman to treat each other with fairness and respect, especially in a work of fiction? Both of these mysteries started strong, but got problematic far too quickly.

A Girl Like You

By Michelle Cox

A_Girl_Like_YouA Girl Like You features Henrietta, a beautiful young woman trying to find decent work to support her widowed mother and numerous siblings in Chicago during the Great Depression. She waitresses in increasingly risqué venues, following better money while trying to hide it from her strict mother. After the manager at one club is murdered, the handsome and charming (?) Inspector Howard convinces her to go undercover at an even shadier club to get an inside view on a possible criminal network that may have included the deceases manager.

Though young, Henrietta is smart, brave, and increasingly cares what the inspector thinks of her. Inspector Howard, for his part, realizes that his age and station make him unsuitable to court Henrietta, but deals with this knowledge by blowing hot and cold in a frustrating way, including withholding information pertinent to her safety.

The author really shines in capturing the time and place across different sects of society. The shine is tarnished a bit by Henrietta’s chronistic disgust in the face of lesbianism among the waitresses and showgirls, written with just enough emphasis that I began to side-eye the author a bit.

Still Life With Murder

By P.B. Ryan and Patricia Ryan

Still_Life_With_MurderThis novel also features a beautiful young woman, working her way up socially from a shadowy past of crime and poverty in Boston, just post Civil War. Nell is first introduced as the assistant to a rural surgeon, who had rescued her from her upbringing, but in the first chapter she is hired as a governess to an old-money Boston family. Through complicated circumstances, the oldest son of the family is accused of murder, and his mother entreats Nell to do some background investigation.

Like A Girl Like You, the scene-setting and most of the characters are very well done, but the oldest son is awful! Broken from his experiences in the war, William is an enthusiastic opium addict who would rather hang for murder than try to be agreeable to his family, and by halfway through the book, I was ready to let him. Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for him, I guess, Nell is filled with the zeal of saving an innocent man and becomes increasingly smitten. When William isn’t moping over his circumstances, he is purposefully misleading Nell and then scolding her (playfully?) for making assumptions.

I would have washed my hands of him completely and it just made me feel old and cynical. With this string of recent books with intolerable male “romantic” characters, I am feeling a bit demoralized in general, like the older I get the more books I won’t like since I’ve already experienced so many other, better books.

—Anna

Midnight Crossroad

by Anna

A Novel of Midnight, Texas

By Charlaine Harris

Midnight_CrossroadI enjoyed Charlaine Harris’ True Blood series, both the books and the TV show, at least the first few issues of each, so I figured I’d check out her Midnight, Texas series. I watched the pilot episode and the characters and acting were all flat enough that I couldn’t stay engaged, but I was curious enough about the mystery itself that I decided to try the book.

Well, if the protagonist was blandly irritating in the TV show, he’s downright dislikeable in the book – self-centered, arrogant, and deeply uncharitable toward the other characters. Manfred is a psychic – mostly scam artist but with the occasional true sight, which is of absolutely no help in this first book – who needs to lay low for as yet unexplained reasons. The ghost of his grandma directs him Midnight, a simple crossroads of a town in Texas just chock full of eccentric characters.

I sort of assumed he was starting off unpleasant to create an arc of finally realizing his place among all the other supernatural weirdos in town, but it never really materialized. If anything, the other characters got increasingly unlikeable as the book went on.

We first meet Manfred’s landlord, Bobo, who initially seems attractive and pleasant, but then increasingly “naïve” to the point of stupidity. His girlfriend has disappeared, without leaving a note or taking any of her things, and he is currently bummed about being run out on. Of course the girlfriend is soon found dead in ditch, and his “aw, geez, I’m just so sad my girlfriend is gone, but there’s nothing to be done about it” attitude naturally makes him the prime suspect.

Manfred is our primary protagonist, but a good chunk of the book is also told from the perspective of his next-door neighbor, a self-identified witch named Fiji, who is quickly established as the heart of the community and I guess this story. She has been secretly pining for Bobo for years, and quickly mobilizes the community in his defense. I would have liked Fiji a lot more if she hadn’t had quite so constant an internal dialogue about how much she didn’t care that she was “curvy,” and “softer” than the other women in town.

Harris’ writing is always on the pulpy side, but this one seemed especially thinly sketched out, even for her. It was written just a few years ago, and I wonder whether her success in television has led her to focus more on that. With the concentration of varied ensemble of characters and sort of loosely tied together action scenes, it reads much more like the outline for a script than a novel to me. Unfortunately, it didn’t make for an engaging show, either.

—Anna

Women-led historical mysteries, done two ways

by Anna

I’ve been on a bit of a mystery kick, lately (instead of blog-posting, clearly), and read a couple set in different periods but with strong female leads. I got them both for free through Bookbub deals, and I liked neither of them but for very different reasons.

The Rookery

By Emily Organ

RookeryThis is actually the second in a Victorian-era series featuring intrepid reporter Penny Green, but other than the awkward progression of her relationship with a Scotland Yard Inspector, I don’t think I missed much by jumping ahead. And by that, I mean I didn’t actually care enough to miss anything.

Through sheer happenstance, Penny is on the scene of a murder in the London slum neighborhood called The Rookery. She discovers that this is one of a string of murders that have been happening in the last few weeks, and when it appears that the police are not taking it seriously, she naturally decides to investigate herself, with the enthusiastic support of her newspaper, which wants the scoop. It really isn’t a bad premise at all, if only Penny wasn’t such a ninny.

Penny Green is outrageously bad at her job, and I was consistently appalled that the inspector gave her any credence whatsoever. However, not only does the inspector take her advice to an extraordinary and dangerous degree (considering how much she jumps to conclusions and then changes her own mind during the investigation), he provides her inside information which should rightfully get him fired.

Anyway, she is convinced that the wrong man is being suspected, has second (and third, and fourth, etc.) thoughts, but then is quickly distracted by a run-in with a Fagin-type figure: “I’ve given it a lot of thought since I met him and I’m certain he must be responsible for the murders. He’s an objectionable man.” That’s the kind of judicious reporting and police-work that I like to see!

When an eye-witness is discovered, she entreats the Inspector: “If the description of him is even remotely similar to that of Ed [Fagin-type figure] then he must be arrested.” To my fury, the Inspector doesn’t shut her down at once. In better-written mysteries, she would be a side character that serves as a comedic foil interfering with the actual investigation.

One O’Clock Jump

By Lise McClendon

One_Oclock_JumpOne O’Clock Jump is basically the polar opposite. It is the first in a series featuring Dorie Lennox, a private investigator in Depression-era Missouri. She is tough, smart, and deeply sympathetic, and she just can’t catch a break, which is what really did it in for me. In the first chapter, Dorie is tailing a woman for a job and follows her up a bridge, which the woman then jumps off. There’s no heroic rescue, just watching the body float away in the current, which is more realistic, I guess, but also solidly sets the tone for the rest of the book.

The woman, of course, is not who she seemed, and neither is the supposed boyfriend who hired the tail, and wants the investigation to continue, even though he had claimed it was just about infidelity. Dorie’s boss, the owner of the investigative agency, is slowly dying from a combination of exposure to mustard gas in the first world war and a broken heart over his deceased fiancée. Her closest confidante (though she isn’t particularly close to anyone) is a homeless man who sleeps near her boarding house. She has a sort of half-hearted love interest in a shifty reporter with suspect intentions.

It’s all very well-written but unrelenting in the grimness, so I’m in the difficult position of admiring the book but not exactly enjoying it. If there could have been just the tiniest bit of levity, I think I could have really liked this series, but I just can’t with this mood right now.

Night Drop

by Anna

(Pinx Video Mysteries Book 1)

By Marshall Thornton

Night_DropI have been hesitating over this review for a while because Thornton writes predominately gay mystery/romances, which is definitely a niche market and not for every reader. The Pinx Video Mystery series is written for a wider audience, though, and is just so good that I have to recommend it. The first book of the series, Night Drop, begins on the night that officers that beat Rodney King were acquitted and riots broke out across LA.

The riots are only tangentially related to the plot, and the characters themselves are only vaguely curious. At first, this complacency was off-putting, but I remembered having the same sense of distance myself. As much as they seem so recent to me, the 90s were a very different time, with the racism and brutality of police and greater society only starting to become clear to wider population.

On the one hand, I wish this book had given it a little more respect, especially considering how often we are now reliving this on a daily basis, but on the other hand, Thornton really does a masterful job of capturing the (white, middle class) cultural feeling of the 90s. It is very strange to read a well-done period-piece mystery set during your lifetime.

Our protagonist Noah Valentine (other than his name, he is the quintessential everyman) has isolated himself after the death of his partner, spending his day working in the titular Pinx Video store, which he owns, and holing up in his tiny apartment in the evenings, only socializing with his neighbors, a delightful, somewhat older gay couple that are trying to take him under their wing.

The riots only vaguely break through his apathy, and only to the extent that they affect him. He reluctantly closes his video store for the day, and learns on the following day that the camera shop down the street had gotten burned down. He had a casual acquaintance-ship with the owner, and half-assedly tries to find out what happened out of a hazy sense of social duty and curiosity.

As they run across clues that don’t seem to add up, Valentine, his neighbors, and his neighbors’ friends become more drawn into the mystery, as well as the official police investigation. Of course, the official police investigation includes a handsome officer who may or may not have more than official interest in Valentine, but all three books in the series stay in solid PG territory.

Thematically, the book has an odd but very readable overlap of noir and cozy mystery genres. It is packed with amusingly odd characters, all of whom tend to shrug off the crimes around them in a sort of noir-ish existential malaise. I very much hope that this is an ongoing series, but book 3, which came out at the end of last year, had a somewhat more final sense of conclusion than the others.

P.S. – It wasn’t until I was telling Rebecca that all the books have titles relating to video rentals, that I realized that a video rental store might be the most 90s setting possible.

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Anna

By Hanif Abdurraqib

They_Cant_Kill_UsHanif Abdurraqib is very smart and funny on twitter and instagram, but I was unprepared for just how deep his collection of essays would go. When Rebecca asked what it was about, I said “essays discussing different musicians and albums,” which is such the tip of the iceberg as to be completely misleading.

Abdurraqib is first and foremost a poet, and it shows in these essays. Every word is carefully chosen, which leads to very dense and evocative prose, and slow but engrossing reading. Just about every essay starts with a musician or album (ranging from Carly Rae Jepsen to Future*), and uses that music as an access point to discuss something about humanity or society that the music is trying to address.

As a black boy growing up in Ohio and super into the punk scene, and then an esteemed music critic trying to sell all his friends on Jepsen, Abdurraqib is well experienced in finding his own place in scenes that are not often created with people like him in mind. He talks about the tension that often exists between the artist, the art, and the audience, any of which can be alternately be welcoming or alienating. The funny thing is that Abdurraqib talks about music in such a way that I got all excited to actually listen to it, but then it inevitably wasn’t as interesting or complex as his analysis. So, while I didn’t get introduced to any new favorite musicians, I’m definitely keeping tabs on Abdurraqib’s future writing.

*It took me a good five minutes of flipping through the book to select two, since I kept being like, oh, I should mention The Weeknd; no, My Chemical Romance; no wait, Migos; or Fleetwood Mac, etc. etc. Abdurraqib has an awe-inspiring range of interests!