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by Andrew Taylor
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by Andrew Taylor
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by Andrew Taylor
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by Andrew Taylor
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by Andrew Taylor
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Nevermore
Sometimes audacity pays off. And you sure have to have a lot of chutzpah to attempt the kind of high-stakes literary heist that Andrew Taylor has masterminded in An Unpardonable Crime (Hyperion, $24.95). For starters, stickyfingers Taylor grabs hold of the 19th-century novel and runs. An Unpardonable Crime is neither an homage to nor an ironic modernist wink at the 19th-century novel, it is a 19th-century novel -- the gloomier sort Dickens wrote toward the end of his life, when Fate and Coincidence seemed less like acts of grace and more like taunts lobbed at humankind by the Great Puppeteer. Taylor's sweeping mystery tale is populated by innocents, eccentrics and evildoers whose lives twist, turn and overlap in a brilliantly intricate pattern.
At the dead center of the labyrinth sits Edgar Allan Poe. That's right: Taylor has kidnapped the Father of the Detective Story and plunked him down in this novel that recounts -- and has the nerve to solve -- two real-life mysteries that haunt Poe's life. First, there's the disappearance of his actor-father when Poe was a small child; second, there's Poe's own unexplained disappearance just before his death. (The Master of the Macabre vanished in Virginia and reappeared a week later in Baltimore, where he died, raving.) Given the risks of such bold biographical and novelistic thievery, anything less than a perfectly calibrated fictional performance by Taylor would set off the critical alarm bells. Luckily, in writing An Unpardonable Crime, he has also pulled off "the perfect crime." This is a stunning mystery: intelligent, ambitious in its construction, moving and, as befits its Poe-ish origins, genuinely frightening.
The story focuses primarily on the years 1819-20, and features as its hero and narrator a solitary young man named Thomas Shield. Shield's nerves are shot -- he was cited for bravery during the Napoleonic Wars but suffered for years afterward from what would be diagnosed today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Through the intercession of his dying aunt, Shield finds work as an assistant teacher at a boys' boarding school outside London where he encounters two pupils who look disturbingly like twins: One is named Charlie Frant, the other Edgar Allan. (Poe lived in England between the ages of 6 and 11 while his foster father, John Allan, struggled to set up a London branch of his business.) Shield is drawn into the society of the turbulent Frant family, serving as a tutor to Charlie and his close friend Edgar during school holidays. When Charlie's beautiful mother is left widowed upon the ghastly death of her husband, Shield foolishly hopes to become a more permanent fixture in the Frant circle. Slowly, he realizes that he's been flattered above his station for a purpose.
That's just a dip into this maelstrom of a tale that features duplicitous servants, femmes fatale, ancestral piles, stolen jewels, missing fingers and sub-subplots about war profiteering in the States, shady bank dealings and unholy loves. Certainly some of the huge pleasure of reading An Unpardonable Crime derives from clutching at all the literary allusions flying about. Taylor nods to Poe's trademark terrors -- live burials, pits, sinister doubles -- but there are also strains of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, the Gothic gloom of all three Brontë sisters and, as noted, Dickens's later, darker masterpieces. An Unpardonable Crime is much more, however, than the sum of its "borrowed" parts. This is a mystery that creates its own vividly unsettling world. The odd mood of that world stays with a reader long after all the hidden identities have been unmasked and all the crypt doors have been fastened tight.
Triple-Decker Thrills
John Dunning's erudite "Bookman" series does most of its traveling back in time via the musty old volumes that its hero, Cliff Janeway, scouts for his rare book business. In The Bookman's Promise (Scribner, $25), Janeway has just bought himself a doozy of an armchair time-travel aid: He's paid close to $30,000 at auction for a three-decker edition of Pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, by the Victorian explorer and notorious man of letters Richard Burton. Janeway should be nestling in to enjoy his luxurious read, but he makes the mistake of accepting an invitation to go on National Public Radio to talk about rare books in general and the Burton book in particular. Shortly thereafter, an elderly woman named Josephine Gallant turns up at his store. ("She was not just old, she was a human redwood.") Gallant claims that Janeway's prize acquisition was part of a Burton collection pillaged from her grandfather's library in 1906. Most lesser humans would dismiss the old gal's claims -- especially since she passes away hours after the meeting. But Janeway is an old-fashioned man of honor, and his determination to track down the provenance of the Burton volumes intensifies when a friend safeguarding the literary treasure is murdered.
The Bookman's Promise itself is a volume that fans of the "Bookman" series will be delighted to add to their crime libraries. In addition to serving up the familiar trademarks of this series -- Janeway's rueful worldview and the enlightening tidbits about rare books scattered throughout the story -- the novel ambitiously conjures up a lost journal about Burton's rumored espionage work in the American South on the eve of the Civil War. As gilding on the pages here, Janeway even finds romance in this latest outing -- with a woman who can quote James M. Cain, no less!
In a Good Cause
Rebecca Pawel set the mystery world agog last year with her debut historical novel, Death of a Nationalist, which takes place in Madrid immediately after the Spanish Civil War. That Pawel was only 25 years old and still could offer such a nuanced understanding of the politics and social conventions of the times was one cause for wonder. The other marvel was the novel's resistance to sentimentality: The good characters behave in spectacularly foolish and sometimes cowardly ways. Moreover, Pawel's main character, Carlos Tejada Alonso y Léon, is a sergeant in the Guardia Civil and a dedicated supporter of the conservative Catholic Franquista cause. Given the judgment of history, a Republican rather than a Nationalist would have been a more politically congenial choice for a hero. The courage of imagination that Pawel demonstrated throughout that first novel stoked critical anticipation for a sequel.
Well, here it is. Law of Return (Soho, $24) is set in the university city of Salamanca, where Tejada, now a lieutenant, has been transferred for a tour of duty. Coincidentally, Salamanca is also the city where Elena Fernandez, Tejada's left-leaning love interest, has moved to be with her aged parents. (She's particularly protective of her father, a former classics professor and supporter of Miguel de Unamuno, the great poet who was ousted from his post as rector of the University of Salamanca in 1936 because of his dissenting political views.) To put it mildly, Elena and Tejada are stationed in opposite trenches when it comes to politics; that Pawel has caved in and allowed these two starcrossed lovers to reach an accord is both satisfying and disappointing, since that happy turn of events signals that Law of Return is less morally complicated than its predecessor.
Still, there's plenty to admire in this mystery that intertwines plots about the disappearance of a paroled political prisoner and the clandestine efforts of Elena's father to smuggle a Jewish colleague out of occupied France. Elena takes center stage in this latter tale of wartime suspense, since she has the freedom of movement that her father lacks. (As a known dissident, he must report in to Tejada for weekly police checks.) The "law of return" of the novel's title alludes to a 1924 ruling permitting Sephardic Jews whose ancestors were expelled from Spain to reclaim their Spanish citizenship. The title also refers to the reunion of Tejada and Elena, whose future happiness will rest on a scrupulous avoidance of the hotbed issues of religion and politics.
The Missing
What's left to discuss, then, is the weather, and weather -- gray, chilly, wet -- is a brooding element in Karin Fossum's police procedural Don't Look Back (Harcourt, $23), which has been translated from the Norwegian by Felicity David. Fossum's novels starring Inspector Konrad Sejer have been critically acclaimed throughout Europe, and it's easy to see why. Sejer is one of those deadpan police philosopher types the Northern climes generate. (Think of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander or Maj Sowall's and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck.) A widower whose loneliness is eased by his dog and drink, Sejer lives for his work and for the occasional visits of his daughter and small grandson.
Don't Look Back toys with the terrible theme of the many ways a parent can lose a beloved child. It opens with the disappearance of a little girl in an isolated Norwegian village. As Sejer and his team desperately try to track down the child, readers are told that "their unease was growing steadily, like a dead spot in the chest where the blood refused to flow." Yet, even as that storyline swerves away from its dread resolution, another horror presents itself. The unclothed corpse of a teenaged girl -- a popular babysitter in the village -- is discovered at the edge of a mountain lake. Annie Holland was tall, muscular and aloof; in short, not the kind of girl one would think of as vulnerable to attack. As Sejer delves into Annie's background, the puzzles multiply. Every man in Annie's life, Sejer learns, is hiding sins; but then Annie turns out to have been harboring some grim secrets, too.
Echo Effect
Another spring, another Spenser novel. Bad Business (Putnam, $24.95), by Robert B. Parker, is kind of a screwball hard-boiled. A beautiful woman (again) walks into Spenser's Boston office and hires him to gather evidence against her two-timing husband in preparation for the divorce she's about to request. As Spenser begins tailing the husband, he realizes that another private investigator is tailing him. So he begins tailing the tail and unearths a thin layer of subplots about open marriages, pop-psychologist conmen and sex clubs in suburbia.
Anyone (like me) still addictively reading the Spenser books at this diminished moment in the series's long history knows that expectations must be lowered. There's neither suspense nor much provocative social commentary in Bad Business, but every so often there are echoes of Spenser's saucy humor and razzmatazz dialogue. When Marlene Rowley, the beautiful client, walks into Spenser's office, he describes her thus:
"She was good-looking in kind of an old-fashioned way. Sort of womanly. Before personal trainers, and StairMasters. . . . Her reddish blond hair was long and thoroughly sprayed. . . . Her mouth was kind of thin and her eyes were small. I imagined cheating on her." Okay, I said "echoes."
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
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