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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Jane Langton mystery -- must more be said?, May 16, 2003
This review is from: The Deserter: Murder at Gettysburg (Hardcover)
I don't read a great many mystery novels, although there are a few authors for whom I keep an eye open. Jane Langton is one of that small group. Her mysteries are far from any stereotype of hard-bitten private eye or police detective tales. Langton's books are quirky and literate, peopled by eccentric characters and, more often than not, deeply linked to some aspect of history. All involve Homer and Mary Kelly (both are Harvard professors, although Homer is also a former policeman) but usually the Kellys are less the center of the story than the means through which it is told. Mary Kelly, it turns out, has an ancestor who evidently did something terribly shameful during the Civil War, the details lost in family silence. Sparked by contemplation of Harvard's grand Memorial Hall, dedicated to the memory of those Harvard men who died fighting for the Union in the Civil War, the Kellys begin researching why great-great-grandfather Seth Morgan's name became shrouded in such disgrace. And it soon becomes apparent that the heart of the mystery lies at Gettysburg where Morgan's regiment, the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, made a futile, bloody attack on Confederate works near Culp's Hill on the morning of the third day of battle. The novel's narrative switches back and forth from the present, with Homer and Mary delving into libraries and records depositories and family attics, to 1863 where we see the battle through the eyes of a scapegrace soldier and then the battle's dreadful aftermath of pain and suffering as Morgan's pregnant wife searches through hospitals for her vanished husband. For those of us who are students of that Civil War battle, the fictional detectives' excursion to Gettysburg will bring nods of recognition when they make the long walk from Lee's statue across the wide fields to that low stone wall on the other side of the Emmitsburg Road, marveling at the odd beauty of lines of cannons, and later when they encounter the less than scrupulous proprietor of Bart's Battle Flag Books where not all artifacts may be quite what Bart claims they are (and where Mary is astonished that so many books could be written about the Civil War). Jane Langton is a gifted, somewhat unconventional writer who here has created strong images of the terror of the battlefield and the horror of the hospitals. And late in the book she crafts an extraordinary interlude when Homer Kelly returns to Harvard's Memorial Hall, today doing service as the freshmen dining hall, and envisions a magical dissolution of the gulf in time separating the current generation of heedless students eating sloppy joes there from the men commemorated about them in stone and stained glass, like Strong Vincent at Little Round Top and Robert Gould Shaw of Fort Wagner and Charles Russell Lowell at Cedar Creek, torn and bleeding bodies suddenly hoisted on to the tables amidst chicken fingers and Diet Coke. It is a powerful, eloquent moment, calling upon all of us to remember and understand.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ida's Story, June 16, 2003
This review is from: The Deserter: Murder at Gettysburg (Hardcover)
The Deserter is the best plotted Jane Langton mystery in the whole Homer Kelly series. People who normally avoid her novels because there isn't enough mystery should give Ms. Langton another chance. You'll be following the developments with interest up to the last pages of the book. A typical Homer Kelly novel pretty much gives the mystery away in the first few pages, and the focus is on how Homer or his wife Mary will find out what really happened. They usually bumble around quite a bit, and their efforts are more amusing than brilliant. What makes most of the novels appealing is their rich intellectual development of an interesting thinker and period in time. In The Deserter, the excellent aspects of that approach are retained while interesting new aspects are added. I was very much impressed with these changes. In the Deserter, the reader is presented with the same mystery that Mary Kelly has: What shameful thing happened to her great great grandfather, Seth Morgan that no one in the family wants to talk about? In the course of pursuing that mystery, Ms. Langton adds a second one for Ida Morgan, Seth's pregnant wife, during the Civil War. Where and how is he? Ida reads that he's listed as missing in action at Gettysburg, and wants to find out what happened. The story has several narrators including Homer, Mary and Ida. In addition, you'll meet and listen to the story of Private Otis Pike, a member of the Harvard Class of 1860 and fellow Hasty Pudding Club member along with Seth and several of the other officers in the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry at Gettysburg. The book is filled with fascinating details of how the fallen Harvard men were remembered and honored by their school, the conduct at Gettysburg for this infantry unit, how the dead and wounded were handled, and the records involving the unit. Much of the details involving Gettysburg will evoke The Red Badge of Courage for you. The details are enriched by period photographs, reproductions of period documents and quotes from famous people involved in the Civil War. In a final note, Ms. Langton tells you where all of these people and details were derived. As a story telling device, Ida's search for Seth is marvelous and provides many interesting insights into war's aftermath. The book will have special appeal to those whose relatives died in the Civil War as well as to Harvard people who have stared up at those stone tablets in Memorial Hall. After you finish this outstanding book, I suggest that you take the time to find out more about one of your relatives who is no longer with us. Naturally, if you have one about whom the family tries to avoid talking, you may bump into a fascinating story. But feel free to pick someone whom the family is proud of. Undoubtedly, you'll learn something important. Good luck in the archives and scrapbooks!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very little Homer and Mary in this one, October 30, 2005
This review is from: The Deserter: Murder at Gettysburg (Hardcover)
This book is indeed a 'Homer Kelly' mystery (the seventeenth in the series), but Langton's serial detective has very little to do in "The Deserter." In another of her mysteries, Langton has a character refer to the 'deep well of the past.' In "The Deserter," we are IN that well, glancing occasionally upward at dimly gesticulating characters from the present. The author could very well have left Homer and Mary out of this book, and still have told an interesting story about the Battle of Gettysburg and its aftermath.
Normally I avoid books about the American Civil War like the plague. Even Langton's patented touches of light humor, e.g. the dance hall babe in beribboned knickers, failed to brighten up this book with its piles of sawed-off limbs, frightened young soldiers, and putrid corpses.
The plot overlay involves Mary's effort to clear the name of her great-great-grandfather, who was accused of deserting his regiment during the Battle of Gettysburg. We slip backward a hundred and fifty years and learn that Lieutenant Seth Morgan was actually killed by one of his own soldiers, who then swapped uniforms and identities with him and hightailed it for Baltimore. Seth's pregnant wife Ida searches the temporary hospitals and morgues for her husband's body and is finally told that Seth deserted.
Ida is the real heroine of this book, although she never learns the actual fate of her husband (that has to wait for Homer and Mary). She is one of Langton's typical heroines: slightly shabby and made bulky by her growing baby, but upright, determined, and very likeable. Her sixteen-year-old brother is sent to bring her back home to Massachusetts and enlists in the Union Army, instead.
Ida stumbles across her brother dying of typhoid fever in Washington D.C.'s Patent Office, which has been converted into a temporary hospital (the author admits that she knew the Patent Office was no longer used as a hospital by the time of the Battle of Gettysburg, but she was so charmed by the location that she fudged just a bit in her otherwise historically accurate account). Ida herself is about to give birth, and the man she thinks is her husband, Seth has pranced off to music hall stages unknown with his bubbly mistress.
Actually, this is one of the more cheerful passages in "The Deserter."
This will never be my favorite Langton, but it is still worth reading if you are a fan of this mystery/history author. "The Deserter" is illustrated with drawings and nineteenth-century photographs of the real places where her fictional characters played out their very serious lives. The portrait-photographs that Langton 'borrowed' for her protagonists are especially haunting--all of those young lives despoiled by a dark, desperate civil war.
A sequel to "The Deserter," called "Steeplechase" will be published by St. Martin's Press in November, 2005.
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