Anne Holt’s 1222zzzzzz

  I have to admit I haven’t read a “locked rooom” mystery in some time–Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None comes to mind, and Murder on the Orient Express, but I was intrigued by the dust jacket description of Anne Holt’s 1222, one of five novels nominated for the Edgar Awards:

“A train on its way to the northern reaches of Norway derails during a massive blizzard, 1,222 meters above sea level.  The passengers abandon the train for a nearby hotel, centuries old and practically empty, except for the staff.  With plenty of food and shelter from the storm, the passengers think they are safe, until one of them is found dead the next morning.”

Sounds interesting.  Before I open a book to the first chapter, I always read the dust jacket, the author’s “thank you” page, and any other tidbit I can glean before diving into the story.  I found out that Anne Holt is a well-known writer in Norway, a former minister of justice there and has worked as a journalist and news anchor prior to establishing a law practice.  Clearly the woman has chops. I also discovered that 1222 is not the first book in the series featuring Hanne Wilhelmsen, a former detective felled by a shooting which has left her in a wheelchair.  (Side note:  I’m a bit confused about why the American publisher chose to publish this later book first, but that’s another blog.)   So I began the story anticipating a great read.

Hanne Wilhelmsen turns out to be just about the only memorable character in the story. The exception is Magnus Streng, MD, an apt moniker for the doctor who is a little person.  He is large in heart, bonhomie and appetite.  Hanne is taciturn almost to a fault, but is an interesting woman whose backstory kept me reading even though the actual story dragged for 313 interminable pages.  I kept thinking I wanted to read the book about Hanne getting shot and paralyzed, and then having to leave her job as a detective.  Sure hope they publish that one here in the States.

But back to 1222.  The 296 people who are on the train pile into the hotel, have a lot of arguments about who’s in charge and then retire for the night.  During the night, someone is killed.  The next night another person is killed.  I couldn’t begin to tell you either of their names because they were zzzzzzzz.  There’s a great deal of speculation, sumptuous eating, arguing and nothing else.  The basic problem I have with the novel is this:  NOTHING HAPPENS. Even Hanne, who is an interesting character, barely moves around in her wheelchair (she sleeps in it the first night, then on a couch on the main floor after that).  I kept thinking I’d like to see how she would ask for help negotiating around the hotel and in other ways, because she is adamantly independent–to a fault.  Oh, there is one more problem: the solution to the murders is a total cheat.  Hanne has access to information that we as readers don’t have.  That telling detail feels thrown in at the last minute (or maybe in the last re-write) when Holt couldn’t write her way out of the corner she found herself in.  I finished the book only because I have committed to reviewing the Edgar nominees in the Best Novel and Best First Novel categories.  Otherwise, I would’ve put it down long before it was over.  For a locked room mystery, Agatha Christie is the way to go.

On a scale of 1 to 10:

1222:  2

Gone by Mo Hayder

I had not heard of Mo Hayder (www.mohayder.net) prior to reading Gone but I am glad to make her acquaintance. It has been nominated for an Edgar award (Best Novel) by Mystery Writers of America and delivers a mystery to be solved wrapped in enough suspense to keep you up at night, turning those pages. Gone is the fifth offering in a series featuring Detective Inspector Jack Caffery of Bristol’s Major Crime Investigation Unit. His foil is Sergeant Flea Marley, head of the police diving squad, who has a hinted-at past with Caffery.

The book starts with a bang: a woman has her car jacked while she loads the weekly groceries in the trunk (or boot–you’ll learn some Brit vocab from the book). Not a big deal, until we find out her 11-year-old daughter Martha is in the back seat. Caffery is convinced the carjacking is just that, not a kidnapping, and Martha will show up on the side of the road somewhere. She doesn’t.

The carjacker strikes again in a similar way and another little girl disappears. Caffery is stymied when the jacker seems to know what Caffery’s going to do almost as soon as Caffery does. Flea Marley pursues her own theory about the case with a search of an abandoned, flooded tunnel and ratchets up the tension as the jacker is slowly revealed to the reader. The story is resolved in a satisfying climax and (spoiler alert) no children are harmed in the writing of this book.

My reviews of the ten total nominees for Best Novel and Best First Novel each will carry a rating on a liked-least to liked-most scale of 1 to 10.

Gone: 7

What Words Cannot Say

I am reminded of the shortest story ever told, which, if memory serves, is attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

For sale: Baby shoes. Never used.

Everything to See

I sit in Starbucks finishing the last ten pages of Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George, drinking Chai tea, ignoring the Saturday ruckus around me.  In one of the other three comfy chairs, which form a tight circle around a low table, sits an elderly woman with an e-reader.  A friendly-looking middle-aged man approaches, enters our circle and plops down.  The elderly woman recognizes him and greets him by name.  He nods but says nothing.  She asks how he’s doing.

“The airplanes outside my room are too loud.  They make me nervous.  I don’t like them.  They’re too  loud.”

She asks him if he can just try to ignore them.  He repeats what he’s already told her.

He gets up and goes outside to smoke a cigarette.  The woman and I exchange a glance.

“He’s harmless,” she says.  I wonder if I look scared.

“I don’t like loud noise either.  I can relate to what he was saying,” I say.

“He’s mentally ill.  He won’t hurt anyone.  He’s in here all the time and they know him here.”  She repeats that he’s harmless.

I’m surprised she keeps assuring me there’s nothing to fear.  I know many people who are mentally ill, including several people in my extended family.  Many of them deal with difficult living conditions, tenuous or broken family relationships and medical problems exacerbated by their mental illness.  My reaction isn’t fear but admiration at their ability to carry on.  Maybe she’s just reassuring herself, I think.

He comes back in and sits down with us.  They talk about the weather and other innocuous topics while I finish my book.  I leave, grateful for people like this woman who extend small kindnesses to others, most unseen or unnoticed.

What’s in a Name

Rend Lake at sunset

When I was a kid, maybe four or five, I overheard some adult mention Queen Isabella.  I thought it was the most beautiful name I’d ever heard.  I also thought Queen was her first name and Isabella was her last.  Anyway, I labored under this misinformation for awhile until I learned about royalty, but she sparked the beginning of my fascination with names, particularly how they sound and how the fit the owner.

I lean toward romantic, musical sounding names:  Anna Maria Alberghetti pops in my mind.  I smile when I hear it, say it, and wonder if she is anything like the warm-sounding name.  A teacher I work with has the wonderful first name Francisco, which I found myself repeating out loud in the car with just the right accent and rolling ‘r’.  The next time in class he encouraged the students to call him by his first name and I perked up, waiting to hear him pronounce his name with a Spanish flourish, until he said, “You can call me Frank.”  Never.

As a fiction writer, I love playing around with naming characters, sometimes trying to be subtle, other times hoping the name will support the character’s personality or point to some trait.  The current bad guy in a standalone mystery I’m writing is named Cree, short for Credence.  Cree is one letter short of creep, which of course he is.  The protagonist’s name is Horace but everyone calls him Ace.

My father seemed to be the arbiter of naming the children in our family.  He was one of nine children and my mother was an only child, so he picked names–first and middle–from his numerous relatives and slapped them on all seven of us.  I’m fifth in line and by the time my mother went into the hospital to bear me, she’d grown a little tired of not having much say in the naming business.  In those days, apparently women stayed in the hospital TEN DAYS after giving birth.  When my father came to pick us up after mom’s “vacation,” she showed my birth certificate to him:  Deborah Ann Whitehouse was emblazoned on the offending document.

Dad took his pen out and drew lines through the most popular girl’s name in the ’50′s.  He substituted Agatha, which was one of his sister’s names (everyone calls her Dolly, for obvious reasons).  My mom dug in her heels, saying everyone would call me ‘Aggie’ and she hated the sound.  They finally agreed on Adelaide (another one of my aunts) with Frances (mom’s name) for the middle.  I ended up being called Addy, which is darn close to Aggie but different, somehow.  Come to think of it, it’s not too far off from Debbie, either.

Here’s the best name I’ve ever heard for sheer strength, creativity and uniqueness:  Quo Vadis.  True story.  And his last name couldn’t be more mundane:  Jones.

Edgar Award Nominations Announced

Mystery Writers  of America (MWA) has announced the nominees for the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, “…honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2011.”  (MWA website.)  The awards will be presented to the winners on 4/26/12 in New York City.  This year I’m inspired by my writing pal and go-to-conference partner, Karen Burgess (Literary Lunchbox).  For the past two years Karen has read and critiqued the nominees from two of the Edgar categories, Best Novel and Best First Novel by an American Author, for a total of ten books.  She  then put herself out on the proverbial limb and predicted which books she thought would win.  This year I’m going to copy her.

The nominees for The Best Novel are:

1. The Ranger, by Ace Atkins
2. Gone, by Mo Hayder
3. The Devotion of Suspect X, by Keigo Higashino
4. 1222, by Anne Holt
5. Field Gray, by Philip Kerr

Best First Novel by an American Author:

1. Red on Red, by Edward Conlon
2. Last to Fold, by David Duffy
3. All Cry Chaos, by Leonard Rosen
4. Bent Road, by Lori Roy
5. Purgatory Chasm, by Steve Ulfelder

I have read none of these books, which is embarrassing to admit both as an aspiring mystery writer and voracious consumer of the genre.  I can only hope that none of them are as long as the book I’m currently reading, Elizabeth George’s Believing the Lie, which weighs in at 608 blissfully long pages.  So, ten books to read, critique and prognosticate on by April 25th…seems doable.

The Secret to a Long Life

Playing the game "Sorry"

My mother-in-law, Anna Miklasevich Carty, turned 95 last birthday (June 27).  She lives on her own in a home down a dirt road near a pond in Umatilla, Florida.  She’s in great health, other than the fact that she can’t hear too well and was recently diagnosed with age related macular degeneration.  She deflects all entreaties to come live with us, citing the weather among other reasons, like not wanting to be a bother.  Once, while getting my hair done, I regaled the beautician with a story epitomizing my mother-in-law.  When I first met Anna 23 years ago, she sociably asked if I wanted to see her flowers outside the house, as she had to water them.  I asked if she wanted me to get the water hose for her.  She waved her hand dismissively and said she used rainwater she collected.  I followed her into the yard where five gallon buckets were placed strategically around the house.  She picked up a full bucket and proceeded to take me on a tour of her flowers and plants, tipping the bucket here and there where water was needed.  She was 72 at the time.  After telling the story to my hairdresser, I expected her response to mirror my amazement at Anna’s strength, which was the point of the story.  Instead, she clucked her disapproval, saying how much it sounded like her own mother, who lived in Bosnia and didn’t want to keep up with modern times and use a garden hose.

Anna’s father was a Russian emigre who met and married her mother and worked as a coal miner in Richeyville, PA.  She had five brothers and one sister.  Their life was hard.  Anna’s work ethic and uncomplaining attitude was forged then and continues today.  She never wants anyone to do anything for her that she can’t do for herself, and I mean anything.  She has outlived her husband, one of her own children and two of her grandchildren.  While we were discussing her diminishing eyesight, she stated, “Well, you can’t have everything.  I’m lucky, I really am.”

My husband (her youngest son, Robert) and I have mused many times over the years what it is exactly that contributes to Anna’s longevity.  Certainly genetics must play a role.  She also keeps her weight at a trim 105 pounds (she’s about 5 foot 3 inches and shrinking).  She has an upbeat personality and takes an interest in other people, always asking after extended family and giving us the update on her neighbors.  But the one thing we’ve noticed about Anna is that she never sits still for any extended period of time.  She’s up and about and coming and going, reminding me of a bird who lights here and there but takes wing at a moment’s notice.

My husband and I visit Anna often and when it’s time to leave, we all get a little teary.  She stands at the garage waving as we pull out of the driveway to make our way back to the Orlando airport.  As we drive off, one or the other of us sighs and says something to the effect that it may be the last time we see her.  We’ve been saying this since she turned 80.

Heaven’s Keep by William Kent Krueger

Heaven's Keep by William Kent Krueger

I recently finished Heaven’s Keep by William Kent Krueger.  And I’m happy to report I finished it with a great feeling of satisfaction, both as a reader and a writer.  I’ve been a fan of the Cork O’Connor series for years, and this installment did not disappoint.  Spoiler alert:  I’m going to tell about the death of a major character in his series, so if you don’t want to know, STOP RIGHT NOW!

     While this novel was actually published in 2009, I somehow overlooked it and read the next in the series, Vermillion Drift.  In that novel I found out that Jo, Cork’s wife, had died in Heaven’s Keep.  I was horrified!  Jo and Cork had a long and sometimes contentious marriage, which made for great reading.  Their marriage survived infidelity (on both of their parts), differences in education (Jo was a lawyer, Cork the sheriff of a small town in northern Minnesota), differences in background (Cork is part Ojibwe).  The mandate for writers to have conflict/tension on every page was thoroughly exploited by Krueger with this intriguing couple.  And now, in Heaven’s Keep, Cork has to solve the mystery of what happened to the plane Jo was on, which goes missing in a snow storm over the Wyoming Rockies.  He fears the plane has crashed, but a thorough search by Cork and a retinue of volunteers and local law enforcement yields no plane and more questions than answers.  Krueger is able to draw out the possibility that Jo may be alive until almost the very end.

     Another side story which plays well in delineating Cork’s personality is his relationship with his adolescent son, Stevie (“It’s Stephen.”).  Against his better judgement, Cork takes Stephen with him to investigate the missing plane, and we see the nascent man developing in the 13-year-old.  Stephen also participates in a Vision Quest during the story, although we get few details about this.  My hope is that Krueger will consider writing a Young Adult novel specifically about Stephen’s time in the woods under the wing of the elderly Henry Meloux, an Ojibwe Mide.

     Kent Krueger’s writing has a wonderful, quiet confidence.  He writes with authority about Minnesota, the Anishinaabeg and the dark side of human beings and murder.  His characters are varied and believable and often exemplify midwestern decency without being goody-goody.  His writing schools me in the art of utilizing detail without overdoing description, a tough, tough thing to do.  He also reminds me to keep to the story, don’t skimp on the plot and care most about the characters because everything derives from them.  When I finished Heaven’s Keep, I closed the book and thought that if I could write just one novel like it, I’d die a happy woman.  I’m working on it (the novel, not the dying…).

Bouchercon 2011

St. Louis street art.

This year’s Bouchercon is in Saint Louis, Gateway to the Midwest.  The conference is hugely attended by folks all over the United States.  The first evening, my writing pal Karen Burgess and I ate dinner (or should I say, almost didn’t eat dinner since we waited for one hour for our food to arrive, just in time for us to be leaving for a Sisters in Crime workshop) with two women unknown to us: Vivian from Seattle and Julie from Kansas. We bolted our food and ran to the workshop.

Bouchercon’s format is to provide six one-hour panels (and occasional interviews with the most well-known mystery writers, such as Robert Crais, Sara Paretsky and Val McDermid) per day, with a half hour break between to browse the book room and line up to have those purchased books signed by your favorite author (or writer, former journalist, or even authoress, depending on which title you prefer, this roundly debated by a panel of female writers).

The panels I have attended thus far have ranged from mediocre (one panel discussed the purported topic for about five minutes and then digressed to mostly nonsense, appearing to just want to hear themselves talk) to excellent (a panel on whether evil is intrinsic or extrinsic, nature v. nurture, and how do we write about it?).

This is mostly a “fan” conference as opposed to a “writers” conference, and it’s wonderful to be among a group of people who appreciate reading and writing; enough so that they spend three and a half days listening to conversations of those who do the writing. There is so much noise in the world (my particular pet peeve is restaurants playing music so loud that you can’t engage the person across the table from you in conversation), so much hype and selling and frenzy, it is nothing short of an unwinding to sit and listen to thoughtful, serious, sometimes humorous discourse about books.

City Art in St. Louis

A Perfect Day

Today the weather is perfect–low 70′s, sunny, breezy, the kind of day I want to play hooky from any and every responsibility:  don’t want to eat sensibly, don’t want to exercise, don’t want to write, don’t want to interpret, don’t want to talk to anybody…give me a cup of coffee and a chair on the front lawn so I can be one with the out-of-doors.  I’ve officially crossed into crotchety-dom.

I asked my husband if it is worth enduring hellacious winters, absent springs and bone-baking summers for a few glorious days like today.  He said yes…didn’t even have to think about it.

Now that Labor Day has passed, the calendar is a grim reminder of the worst to come.  I now fully understand my mother’s late onset hankering to live in Southern California after a lifetime of living in the midwest.  Fully.  While I don’t want to live in So-Ca, I would like to live in a place where weather isn’t extreme; although after all of the natural weather-related disasters this year alone, is there such a place anymore?  And more than that, why does this happen?  What manner of change comes to a person who as a child loved every inch of snowfall, played and ice skated in sub-zero weather, ran outside when spring thunderstorms hit to feel the drench of rain, and laid in the sun on 90 degree days until sweat-soaked, then dove into the lake and swam forever?

One of my favorite aunts died recently.  Aunt Barbara was in her 80′s, had a large family, had the kind of laugh that when you heard it made you laugh too, and was a superb cook.  We had large get-togethers at her home; the main activities: eating and talking.  My brothers, sisters and I would run around with our cousins until time for the late-night trek back home from the suburban hinterlands.  Her death marks time, a stroke on the proverbial number line, separating then and now.

Barbara Lightner Whitehouse