Queen's Gambit, by Bradley Harper, new from Seventh Street Books

9781645060017
Seventh Street Books, 2019
282 pp

paperback



I'm reading more modern crime novels than I'd planned for this year, but in this case (and in another coming up shortly), it's all good. As with books from other genres I read,  I am all about supporting smaller indie presses whose work may go unnoticed in favor of the bigger guys  -- in this case it's Seventh Street Press, and I have another one of their books propped up on my bookstand waiting to be read.

Some time ago I read this author's A Knife in the Fog, and now he's back with book two in this historical crime series with Queen's Gambit.  In the meantime, Knife in the Fog was nominated as a finalist for the 2019 Edgar Award for best first novel. 

It's no secret (and I did say this when I posted about the author's earlier book) that I'm not in love with the idea of remaking historical figures into fictional ones, but I will say that in my case, at least Margaret Harkness is not so prominent a personage  that I can't live with her taking center stage in this novel.   Nine years have gone by since the case that introduced her in Knife in the Fog; during that time she's become a published author with books that are read widely.  It is in fact one woman's changed perception of Harkness that helps kick off this story. 

 In 1881, more than fifteen years prior to the time in which the bulk of the action takes place here, a young man found himself having to flee Imperial Russia after his mother was imprisoned for her role as a member of the group responsible for the assassination of Czar Alexander II.   Having been sent to Berlin to hide, young Viktor Zhelyabov became Herman Ott, married, and had a son.  He is living with his wife's family when he is offered electrical work that he can't refuse because the pay would be "a substantial increase" in his regular salary, needed for his "growing family." 

One month later, it seems that the "nest of traitors" that the German government has been trying to root out has somehow gotten wind about every plan made by  the Security Services, and government officials have no idea how this is happening.   An investigation is required, and it must be "someone from outside."   One official has just the right suggestion, to bring in Professor Joseph Bell, since he has helped the police in his own country a number of times.  Bell brings in Margaret Harkness because of her German language ability and because of their prior experiences together, and she is more than willing -- due to health reasons, she is planning to go to Australia for health reasons, and the fee and the bonus she would receive would allow her to pay for her passage.   The solution of the case will have a huge impact on both Ott and Margaret Harkness,  one that will play out on the streets of London. 


 Despite the subtitle that labels this "a mystery," it seems to read much more along the lines of a thriller, as time is ticking down here until the main event, the planned assassination of (as it says on the cover blurb so it's not a spoiler) "none other than Queen Victoria herself."  [As an aside, the front cover with her majesty's face in crosshairs also sort of gives away the plot even before you get to the back cover, but moving on...]    In fact, the only real mystery is solved early on by Bell and Harkness (and I will add that I figured it out long before they did); afterwards we already know the who, so as it turns out he's not really the "mysterious assassin" of the back cover blurb.    Let me also say that this story is what I call "thriller lite" as the author adds in various threads including a potential romance and a young female detective wannabe who is taken under Margaret's wing.   It's more the fare for readers of lighter crime, and to be very honest, my own feeling is that there is a lot of superfluous stuff that from time to time detracts from the suspense level -- for example, an entire chapter about Margaret's history with tarot cards as well as  reunions with Conan Doyle and Mark Twain (who were both in the first novel).  Then there's  Margaret herself -- while she's a very independent woman and has figured out that dressing like a man gets her into places a woman can't go, she seems a wee bit softer with less of an edge than she had in Knife in the Fog; she also makes some pretty bad mistakes during the course of the story that seem somewhat out of character.   Believe it or not, the character's point of view I cared about the most was that of the bad guy; the clue is in understanding how the titular "Queen's Gambit" works on the chessboard, and the author has explained all of that in the book. 

As I said in my post about Knife in the Fog, the author can definitely write, and I am very grateful to the powers that be at Seventh Street for my copy. While it was entertaining, and while I'll certainly be looking forward to book three,  I actually prefer  a more taut, edgy mystery, so I'm probably not the best or target audience for this book.   That is certainly not because of the author -- it's definitely a me thing.   At the same time,  that certainly doesn't mean that others aren't enjoying it, since reader ratings are for the most part consistently four and five stars both on Goodreads and Amazon.  I'd certainly recommend this novel to, as I said earlier, readers who like their crime on the lighter side and don't mind a few excursions elsewhere outside of the main plot thread. 

***

An article about The Queen's Gambit by Tom Williams at Historical Novel Society

back through the time tunnel again with a classic: The House of the Arrow, by A.E.W. Mason, 1924

9780755117475
House of Stratus, 2012
originally published 1924
263 pp

paperback

"Did I not tell you, Monsieur, that we are all the servants of Chance?" 

Fourteen years prior to publishing The House of the Arrow, writer A.E.W. Mason had first introduced to the mystery/crime-reading world his somewhat eccentric detective Inspector  Hanaud of the Sûreté in his At the Villa Rose.  That one I just liked on an "okay" sort of level, mainly because of  Mason's proclivities toward what Martin Edwards refers to in his The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books a "lop-sided story structure," in which all too soon the culprit is made known and readers sit patiently (or not, depending on your makeup) waiting for the rest of the story to play out.    House of the Arrow thankfully poses a bit more of a challenge for the reader, so at least for me there was not one iota of frustration here.  This one I quite enjoyed, spending an entire day entranced with it and then finishing off the experience by watching the 1953 film (more on that later) before going on to order the next Hanaud novel, The Prisoner in the Opal (1928). 

just as an aside and an FYI,  while my copy is a hold-in-your-hands reprint edition, House of the Arrow is also available at Project Gutenberg if you lean toward the e-variety of reading:

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200961h.html

Before this story moves on to Dijon, France, it begins in the London office of the firm of Messrs. Frobisher and Haslitt, solicitors,  on the east side of Russell Square.  Among the other letters in that day's batch of mail is one written in an unfamiliar, "spidery, uncontrolled hand" postmarked Dijon.  Haslitt has a client there, a Mrs. Harlowe, a widow whose health is not so great.  The letter is not from her however, but from someone by the name of Boris Waberski,  Mrs. Harlowe's brother-in-law, who has a "great necessity" of part of the "large share" of the fortune he is certain he will inherit upon her death.  The letter is ignored, and three weeks later, Mrs. Harlowe's death is announced in The Times. Haslitt knows he'll hear from Waberski again, and sure enough he does, except that this time the news comes that Waberski has levelled a charge of murder against Mrs. Harlowe's "husband's niece and adopted daughter" Betty Harlowe.  It seems that Waberski's expectations were all for naught, since Betty has inherited the entire estate, and now he claims that she poisoned the widow on the night of August 27th.  The news does not come from Waberski directly, but via a letter from a friend of young Betty, Ann Upcott.  Frobisher and Haslitt are further upset by a telegram coming from Betty herself, which informs the two attorneys that she needs help right away -- it seems that "The Prefect of Police has called in Hanaud, "  and that she believes "They must think me guilty."   Haslitt sends Jim Frobisher to Dijon to look into their client's situation, but before Frobisher leaves, Haslitt says something to him that quite succinctly and tantalizingly  summarizes the rest of the story: 

"...remember, there's something at the back of this which we here don't know."

Truer words were never spoken, as Jim will come to discover as he makes his way to France and meets up with Inspector Hanaud, who accompanies him to Dijon to work on a case of some serious poisoned-pen letters in the area.   

original cover, from Project Gutenberg

The House of the Arrow is by no means your average murder mystery. First, there is some question as whether or not a murder has even been committed; when that issue is settled, the question of who may be guilty takes on a life of its own.  While Frobisher is somewhat in awe of Hanaud, his own feelings about the matter and his own particular personal interests often pit him against the Inspector, even as they work together to get to the truth and as Hanaud's discoveries lead to even bigger questions that need further answers.  In short,  Mason is not (thankfully) going to let his readers off the hook by making it easy this time as he did in At the Villa Rose.  I will say that after finishing this novel I read a couple of posts about this book in which a few people had figured it out, but for  me the solution was a surprise; even better than finding out the who  though was the path to the why and especially the how.   Pardon me for rambling here for a moment,  but I was just talking to someone  the other day about how old school I am with mystery stories, preferring the journey much more than the solution itself;  House of the Arrow affords that very pleasure.  

The blogger at Vintage Pop Fictions notes that 

"This novel includes just about every ingredient that critics of golden age detective fiction love to mock... On the other hand, the ingredients that cause critics to gnash their teeth are exactly the ingredients that fans of golden age detection (like myself) adore. To a true fan the more outlandish these elements are the better and in this instance they're delightfully outlandish." 

I couldn't have said it better.   Count me as "a true fan," who thrives on the "delightfully outlandish."  

movie poster, 1953, from Rare Film

The film, on the other hand, was a bit of a puzzler.  The way the film is shot gives it a noirish vibe,  but having read the novel, it lacks the elements that make the book both mysterious and suspenseful.  I get creative license and all that it encompasses, and I did enjoy the film for what it was, but I was left with the feeling that there could have been much more to it than what I saw.  I will say though that I immediately checked to see if Oscar Homolka had reprised his role as M. Hanaud; like Bruno Cremer is for me the Maigret, Homolka is the perfect Hanaud, capturing Mason's character's eccentricities so well.  I can only imagine he'd read the novel beforehand to do it so well.  

Holmoka as Hanaud, on the left, from Mystery*File

This book runs rings around its predecessor and I recommend it to readers of Golden Age detective fiction, for readers who like puzzle-style mysteries in general, and to people like myself who enjoy a good yarn that is cleverly constructed, one that takes a number of twists and turns along the way.     Remember, though, it is a product of the early 1920s, so perhaps it may be a bit verbose for modern readers getting to it for the first time.  Then there's Hanaud himself -- he can be both annoying twit and genius crime solver at the same time, so it takes a patient reader at times to get over his personality.  It is, however,  perfect for someone like me who, as noted earlier, enjoys the path much more than the end of the journey.   

The Long Call, by Ann Cleeves

9781250204448
Minotaur/St. Martin's Press
375 pp

hardcover



"We all need secrets, just to keep sane, to feel that the world doesn't own us." 



Let me just say this:  I did not particularly care for the one book I've read by this author, Raven Black, and I never went on to read any of her other novels,  but for some weird reason when I first heard about The Long Call, I preordered it.  To this day I can't think why, but as it turns out, it was a good call.  I spent all of yesterday reading it, unable to put it down.


"... the cry of a herring gull, ... the long call, which always sounded to him like an inarticulate howl of pain."


 And indeed, the long call sounds throughout this novel, which takes place in a  small town in North Devon, centering on the murder of a man with an albatross tattooed on his neck. Given the nature of the tattoo, I immediately figured out that this must have been a person suffering under the weight of some heavy burdens, and as things begin to unfold, it turns out that I was right.   Investigating the crime is Detective Matthew Venn, who had once lived in the area and had broken from a particular religious group to which he and his family had belonged, estranging him from his parents.   Working with his colleagues Jen Rafferty and Ross May, he discovers that the victim is one Simon Walden, a man whose past had left him completely broken.  Walden had been living at the home of Caroline Preece, where he had rented a room along with Caroline's friend Gaby Henry; he had also been  involved as a volunteer at the Day Centre at the Woodyard, a sort of artistic safe place for people with learning and other disabilities, managed by Venn's husband Jonathan.  When a woman with Downs Syndrome goes missing from the Woodyard, Venn begins to surmise that the two cases are somehow connected, and that there is something just a bit off -- there  is "too much coincidence. Too many people circling round each other, without quite touching."   He also realizes that it is  quite possibly the Woodyard itself that is the connection,  putting him in the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether or not to withdraw himself from the case because of his personal ties. Before he can make that decision however, little by little the investigation begins to uncover hidden secrets from the past that just may have a direct bearing on the present.   To say any more would be to spoil, but the story revolves around unraveling those secrets to get to a solution.

And what a solution it is, a complete surprise (for the most part),  but it is the getting there that really matters.  The Long Call is refreshingly free of gratuitous violence or sex, affords the armchair detective  a solid mystery, and the author spends quite a lot of time on the main characters in terms of thoughts and backstories.   She also manages to weave in a number of social issues without being in your face about it, and above all, takes her time in allowing the story to unfold, allowing the questions and the suspense to accumulate  on the way to solving the mysteries in this novel.  As I looked through reader reviews after finishing it, I noticed a lot of people found it too slow (??)  but for me it was absolutely on point.  My only negative is that most of an entire chapter  could have been left out here (chapter 29, in which Caroline and her father do a bit of emotional sparring and then come to terms with each other)  that to me added nothing whatsoever to this story.

This book begins another series, evidently, given the blurb on the front that says "Introducing Detective Matthew Venn."  I was so impressed with The Long Call that I will be definitely be in line to buy Venn's next adventure.    I'm still not sure what prompted me to preorder this book (Twilight Zone music playing in my head here), but I'm happy I did.

A bit dark for cozy readers, and not quite as edgy a story that might be enjoyed by noir fans, I can recommend it for those who enjoy a good mystery without the clutter that is all too often included in a lot of modern crime fiction these days. 

The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith, by Patricia Wentworth

9781911413097
Dean Street Press, 2016
originally published 1923
208 pp

paperback

It's been eons since I've read a novel by Patricia Wentworth, and like most of her fans I spent many hours devouring her Miss Silver mysteries. The intro to that series, Grey Mask, was published in 1928, but Wentworth had already written and had published a number of mysteries beginning five years earlier.  The Astonishing Adventure of  Jane Smith is the first of these, but unlike the author's Miss Silver novels, the "impecunious and intrepid heroine" of this story is in her early twenties.   

Young Renata Molloy has been a sleepwalker since her childhood, and as this story begins, she has inadvertently and unfortunately made her way into a meeting being held in her father's London flat. She is discovered just as one of the members of this insidious anarchist organization  happens to mention "Annihilation of the whole human race!" and of course, they want to know what she's heard.  In another part of the city, Jane Smith is sitting on a park bench counting out all the money she has left in the world, some two shillings and eleven pence, when she is approached by a young man, Arnold Todhunter,  who has mistaken her for the woman he loves, Renata Molloy. The resemblance between the two is uncanny, but it turns out that Jane and Renata are cousins; they are not at all close,  but their mothers were twins and as Jane puts it, "I have always understood that we were very much alike."  They are enough alike that Todhunter tells her of his discovery of Renata being held prisoner in her father's flat, and that according to Renata, she can't leave because her captors will only track her down, "find her and kill her."   Todhunter is to leave for Bolivia within three days and would like to take Renata with him, so he comes up with a most bizarre idea.  Would Jane consent to taking Renata's place in the flat (he can sneak her in via the fire escape) so that Renata would be safe from her "position of deadly peril?"   Jane, who has visions of "the workhouse" once her money runs out, agrees to the plan.  Luckily, she has the foresight to call on an old friend, Henry Luttrell of Scotland Yard CID, before the switch is made.  Also fortunate for Jane, she is no coward, not averse to taking risks,  and she has an amazing ability to think on her feet when necessary.  She will definitely have to call on those skills once she is moved from London to a house in the country, where her "astonishing adventure" truly begins. 

from AbeBooks, first edition cover

 The novel is a combination of mystery and spy story, with some romance added in on top of the action. There are secret passages to be explored, lots of government and villainous intrigue, secret formulas, and  strange people coming and going.  Meanwhile Jane as Renata is still in the precarious position as to whether or not her captors plan to eliminate her for what she may have overheard, but  she's not about to just let it happen without doing something.  No timid rabbit here. 

I had absolutely no clue that this book was going to be as much fun as it was, truly what I'd call a rollicking adventure. As for the mystery (which for me came down to identifying a certain personage), well, as it turned out, I was patting myself on the back not too far into the story thinking "can it be any more obvious?" then feeling like a total dope when all was actually revealed.  Let's just say that I was right, but I was wrong all at the same time,  always a positive. Above all, it was great fun for a few hours, and I am eager to get hopping on all of the non-Miss Silver adventures I've missed. 

Definitely recommended for those fans of Golden Age mystery fiction who are looking for something quite outside the norm. 

an Annie Haynes double feature: The Bungalow Mystery and The Abbey Court Murder

If you are asking yourself the question "who the hell is Annie Haynes," you're probably not alone. I had never even heard of this author prior to this year, when somehow I landed at the crime and mystery section of the website of Dean Street Press while looking up lesser-known women writers of the Golden Age period.  Oh lordy -- no one can imagine how excited I was to find not one, but several women whom I'd never heard of before.  Several clicks later and my library now has quite a few Dean Street Press paperback novels with more to be picked up in the future.  But as usual, I digress.

 In 1923 author Annie Haynes made her debut with The Bungalow Mystery; by 1929 after twelve novels  (one published posthumously and the last one completed by an unknown author and published in 1930), she died of heart failure, which as Lizzie Hayes wrote at her blog Promoting Crime Fiction, was quite possibly connected to the rheumatoid arthritis she had long suffered, a disease which ultimately caused her severe pain and left her crippled.  Three of her books featured Inspector Furnival, four more starred a certain Inspector Stoddart, and the remainder were written as nonseries mystery novels.   Hayes also notes that

"... in 1923 a major newspaper regarded Haynes as one of the two most significant British female crime writers, with only Christie to rival her.  Dorothy L. Sayers, whose first detective novel was also published in 1923, does not get a mention."

 These particular editions of The Bungalow Mystery and The Abbey Court Murder are, according to the back-cover blurb, "the first printed in over 80 years,"  so that already gives them a thumbs up as far as I'm concerned; having read both of them back to back, they get another thumbs up for sheer entertainment value. 

The Bungalow Mystery  begins  as Dr. Roger Lavington of Sutton Boldon,  already having a bad day, is summoned to the house next door, "The Bungalow."  When he arrives he finds the tenant, Maximilian von Rheinhart, who lives there in a "hermit-like preference for his own society," dead on the floor.  His pockets have been "rifled," so while the housekeeper believes it may have been suicide, Lavington is positive that the man has been murdered.  He sends her for the authorities, and in her absence, he is surprised to find a young girl hiding behind a curtain, who begs him for help and asks him to let her go.  As we're told, her "appeal had touched a soft place in his heart," so he takes pity on her and sends her over to his own house as he waits for the police.  It doesn't take the police too long until they realize that there is most definitely a woman in the case, based on clues left behind.

Back home again, Lavington hits on a safe way to get the woman away while the police are watching The Bungalow; she makes her escape but the good doctor is later stunned to hear that an unidentified  woman carrying "certain evidence" on her person related to Rheinhart has been killed in a horrific train accident that also made an invalid of one of his old friends, Sir James Courtenay.   The story picks up again two years later.  Lavington has moved away from Sutton Boldon to be nearer to Courtenay where he makes a startling discovery; in the meantime, the word is that the police have some new evidence in the Bungalow case. 

In the introduction, Curtis Evans states that Haynes' novels

"retain, in stripped-down form, the emotionally heady air of the nineteenth-century triple-decker sensation novel, with genteel settings, shocking secrets, stormy passions and eternal love all at the fore..."

and that description is completely spot on.   At the same time, underneath the secrets, passions and eternal love, and I'll add good old male chivalry to the mix, The Bungalow Mystery  is at its heart an intricate, well-plotted mystery that does not get resolved until the finish when all is revealed.  I will also say that there are a few surprises along the way, and that skimming should be totally out of the question while reading this novel since even small details are relevant.   I won't say why, but after a second read,  I had a greater appreciation for Haynes' ability to  pull off quite a nice sleight of hand here, a sort of literary misdirection definitely deserving of major kudos.

Speaking of sensation novel material,  The Abbey Court Murder was also published in 1923; it is the first of three novels to feature Inspector Furnival of Scotland Yard, and it's a definite page turner to the very end. 

It begins at a wedding, as happily-married Lady Judith Carew and her husband Lord Anthony are leaving the church after the ceremony.  There, she gets a nasty surprise on recognizing someone she had thought long dead, and her entire world changes in that moment.  The man demands that she meet him later that night at 42 Abbey Court; there is no way she can refuse because the man has information about her past that her husband Lord Anthony does not know and that she does not want him to know.  The Carews are scheduled to attend a dinner that evening; she tells Anthony to go on as she fakes a headache to keep her at home.  As soon as her husband leaves, Judith grabs one of her husband's revolvers and  makes her way to the appointed rendezvous, but things go tragically wrong and someone is killed.   Judith finds her way home, but lives in abject fear that her presence at the murder scene will be discovered;  her doctor suggests rest and quiet, so the Carew family makes its way to the family home, Heron's Carew.    And that's when things really start popping.  Not only does Judith have to worry about being found out, but there is also a matter of  young Peggy Carew's new admirer, a certain Lord Chesterham whom nobody but Peggy thinks will make a suitable match (and with good reason ...); Judith also has suspicions about Anthony's cousin Lady Sybil Palmer who has recently become a widow and goes digging around to find out any dirt on Lady Carew, and of course, the appearance of Inspector Furnival, whose superiors at the Yard are putting pressure on him to make an arrest in the matter of the Abbey Court Murder.

I couldn't turn these pages fast enough. I am a huge, huge fan of sensation novels, and I can't get enough of this stuff!    I will say that I guessed the who here once a major clue was revealed but it's okay ... I was actually more interested in getting to Lady Carew's secret and waiting to see how the good inspector was going to finish off his case. 

Both are fun vintage novels and I believe I'll have to go pick up the others here shortly.  If these two early books are indicative of her work, I'm in for a lot of serious entertainment.  While they won't be for everyone,  readers of these old mystery novels will enjoy them, as will anyone interested in the resurfacing of an obscure writer brought once again to the light.

Whose Body? by Dorothy Sayers

9780062307545
Bourbon Street Books, 2014
originally published 1923
213 pp

paperback

"Enter Sherlock Holmes disguised as a walking gentleman."

As much as I prefer the less unsung mystery/detective story/crime novels of the past, there comes that time when I just can't pass up the more well-known novels of this particular era, especially when the author's name is so familiar to nearly everyone, mystery reader or no.  And while I wouldn't call Whose Body the best in the series (that will come down the road a bit later), it is most certainly worth reading as it introduces one of the best-known characters of mystery's golden age, Lord Peter Wimsey. 

Just a wee bit about Sayers' creation before moving into the novel itself.  In his work on Sayers,  James Brabazon,  author of Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography (Charles Scribner and Sons, 1981) picks up a quotation of hers from  "How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter," from Harcourt Brace News (Vol. I, July 15 1936: 1-2) where she reveals in a sort of tongue-in-cheek fashion that she had been "thinking about writing a detective story," when in walked Lord Peter:

"complete with spats, and applied in an airy don't-care if-I-get-it way for the job of hero." (120)

 Martin Edwards, writing in The Golden Age of Murder (Harper Collins, 2015), says that Sayers "reasoned" that

"A detective who was not a professional police officer ... needed to be rich ... and to have plenty of leisure time to devote to solving mysteries.  She conceived Wimsey as a caricature of the gifted amateur sleuth, and found it amusing to soak herself in the lifestyle of someone for whom money was no object..."

She also

"endowed Wimsey with criminology, bibliophily, music and cricket as a favourite recreations. He is a Balliol man, equipped with a magnifying glass disguised as a monocle, a habit of literary quotation and an engaging, if often frivolous, demeanour." (19)

We also learn in Whose Body? that he  is also someone whose "young mind had been warped in its young growth by 'Raffles' and 'Sherlock Holmes'," and whose "career as a private detective"  was "hampered" by a public-school education. But there is much more to this "frivolous" man which doesn't crop up here until well into the story, when, as I remarked somewhere after finishing this novel, just as he's really getting on your nerves there comes that one moment when you suddenly realize just how very human Lord Peter Wimsey actually is. 

from OUPblog

A call from his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver,  alerts Lord Peter to a most unusual crime.  A dead man, wearing nothing but a pair of pince-nez, was discovered in the bathtub of the mild-mannered architect Thipps of Battersea.  Later, after having a look at the flat in Queen Caroline Mansions and incurring the wrath of Inspector Sugg,  Wimsey returns home and is called upon by his friend and Scotland Yard detective Charles Parker, who tells him a story of the disappearance of financier Sir Reuben Levy.   As it happens, Levy had gone missing on the day he was slated to attend "a most important financial meeting and do some deal involving millions."  Parker had taken his own look at the man in the bath, thinking it might be Sir Reuben; on discovering that indeed it was not, Parker remains puzzled at the man's disappearance.  He welcomes Lord Peter's interest in the case, and it is not too long before our hero comes to realize that perhaps the two just might be related.  First, though, he and his almost Jeeves-like valet Bunter must wade through what will turn out to be a mess of red herrings before the case(s) can come to a successful close.

What absolutely has to be my favorite cover:  1948 Avon paperback edition; artwork by Anne Cantor from Moment

Most unfortunately, once you reach a certain point, the identity of the criminal is way too easy to figure out, but I think you have to consider the fact that,  as Edwards notes, the author was generally "more interested in describing the culprit's methods of carrying out and concealing the crime."  In this sense, I was actually more interested in Lord Peter and Bunter to actually mind too much, and despite knowing ahead of time the who, the how, I felt, was rather ingenious.  And also under the heading of most unfortunately (and I would add uncomfortably), I'd forgotten exactly how demeaning Sayers' descriptions of  Jewish people were at the time.   Otherwise, I'm quite happy to have read it again, and as I have the entire series here, I'm sure Lord Peter and I will meet once again in the near future.

The Black Jersey, by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

9781984801067
Random House, 2019
originally published as Maillot Negro
Translated by Achy Obejas
312 pp

hardcover


The narrator of this account, Marc Moreau, says close to its beginning that

"We understood that every so often there would be an annus horribilus, a cursed year, for the Tour de France. By the time we finished the first four stages of the tour, we would start to suspect that this could be the worst of all." 

He's not joking -- the mystery within this novel centers around the attempts to discover who is responsible  for a string of horrific incidents, some deadly, among the cyclists competing in that year's Tour.  Moreau, a domestique for Team Fonar,  is asked by French police Commissioner Favre to assist him in trying to solve the case, since Favre believes that "the killer or killers belong to the circuit."  As he notes, those responsible have "struck with surgical precision to maximize their effect on the results of the race."  He's come to Marc not only because of his background in the military police, but because he's on the inside.  The executive director of the Tour is also hopeful that Marc will help since these accidents, as he puts it, are  "the most serious threat to the Tour de France in all its history."   Somewhat reluctantly he agrees to do as they ask. 

Had the author left it there, the mystery and its solution would have been satisfying enough, but this is definitely not your average crime novel, not by any stretch.  It is a very human story, and Marc is much more than an insider helping the police.  At the heart of this novel is the close relationship between Moreau and  Team Fonar's star cyclist Steve Panata,  with Marc destined over the years to be Steve's protector and domestique, doing anything and everything to ensure Steve's victories in the Tour.   As he and the police uncover evidence leading toward finding the "killer among you," Marc also comes to as the blurb notes, the "sickening realization" that everything that's happened has been to the benefit of his own team.  That's bad enough, but he also finds himself having to battle his own feelings for the good of the team, and he is under a huge amount of pressure to leave his role as second fiddle and go onto victory in his own right. 

I'm not a huge sports fan at all, I'm a ten-mile-ride-is-my-limit sort of cyclist so I can't speak to what he's  done right or not here as far as the Tour de France, but the decision made by the author to use this exacting competition as the milieu for his story turned out to be a good one.  As he says in this interview with The Spain Journal, the Tour

"takes the passions to the limit. Emotions are bare wires when competing for something that demands so many sacrifices.  Love, ambitions, loyalty or betrayals are over-dimensioned." 

 All of  what the author says in this short bit of quotation is made so vividly real in this novel, along with the intensity of the competition, to the point where, as also noted in that interview (although I'm thinking he meant "rider," not "runner'),

"If a runner is willing to kill himself, descending a mountain at 90 kilometers per hour on precarious roads and huge abysses, why would he not be willing to kill for it?"

The author did such a fine job here that even I had no idea who was trustworthy and who was not, and I never guessed the who.  I will say that I had to go back when all was revealed and read that part again (it's a little complicated and it was a wee bit on the murky side), but there was still one more  shocking and unexpected surprise in store even after all became known. 

The Washington Post featured this book in June as one of "9 Picks for Your Beach Bag," but I would consider this novel as way more than just a fun summer read.  The author's  intense focus on the people here made this a novel I won't soon forget.