coffee & ink

So far I have obviously been terrible at posting more this year, but I do have some posts in progress and may even finish one someday. In the meantime, a bunch of older books I like have come out as ebooks, so I thought I'd recommend them:

• Sarah Smith, Perdita Halley and Alexander von Reisden mysteries
  Series of historical mysteries, set in the turn of the (twentieth) century in Boston and Paris, featuring a blind pianist and a scientist with a troubled past. Elegant prose, sophisticated characterization, and very good on the lingering effects of childhood trauma -- when I do read mysteries, I tend to read for character, prose, and mood more than puzzle, and these are no exception. The Vanished Child is about a man who bears a great resemblance to a child who vanished many years ago, and how and why he impersonates the lost child. The Knowledge of Water shifts location to Paris and involves a writer very clearly based on Colette, plus a plot to steal the Mona Lisa; A Citizen of the Country focuses on early attempts at film-making in France.
  
  You might want to try these if you like Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries.
  
  
• Kristine Smith, Jani Killian series
  Sf. As the series starts, Jani Killian has been on the run for over a decade. She was once considered one of humanity's brightest, a student at the alien idomeni institute in an attempt at alliance-building, which went drastically wrong in a clash between conservative and radical idomeni idealogues, for which Jani is partially blames. Smith's world-building is different from the generic default in interesting ways: neither her humanity nor her idomeni are unified fronts; Jani is from a Colony world whose antecedents seem to be Acadian and Hindu; one of the most important professions is "protocol officer," or paper-pusher, the authentication of information being one of the keys to interstellar commerce.
  
  
• Cherry Wilder, The Rulers of Hylor series
  Unusually fine fantasy trilogy (published as YA in hardcover and adult in paperback) from the mid-eighties; makes a lot of standard fantasy tropes seem fresh by the excellence of the prose and the maturity of the characterization. Each book focuses on one of a group of first cousins, the children of three beautiful sisters called the "Swans of Lien," and the dynastic struggles in the continent of Hylor. Nicely variable in style as well: book one is third-person limited past, book two is first-person limited retrospective past, book three is omniscient present tense (slipping into past). Each book can be read independently of the others, although they work better together. There is an overall arc (regarding the sorceror who manipulates the lives of all three cousins) that only becomes clear in Book Three; earlier than that, you get the benefit of the varied points of views, in which a mysterious and ominous figure in one book is a dearly beloved friend in another, or a brilliant military victory becomes a tragic defeat.
  
  Wilder died some time ago; the books are being published by the Frenkel Literary Agency, so ... there's that. :(
  

And one new one for lagniappe:

Letters to Tiptree (ed. Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce) is a collection of letters by contemporary sf writers to James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), plus excerpts of Tiptree's correspondence with Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ; it's on sale for $.99/£.99 pretty much everywhere, including the publishers direct. I'm partway through, absorbed, interested, argumentative, and inclined to put it on my Hugo nomination ballot for Best Related Work.

English grad student Joe Roper discovers evidence that the works of Shakespeare may have been written by the Earl of Oxford, not even the most popular usual alternate candidate (that would be Bacon, although I have a cracked fondness for the Queen Elizabeth theory). He's dismayed by this, partly because (a) alternate Shakespeare theorists tend to be total loons; (b) Joe, from a working class Vermont background, uncomfortable with the class shifts required for his proposed career, has a fierce attachment to the biography of the middle class kid from Stratford who made good; (c) Joe's mentors are a married pair of famous Shakespeare biographers, about to publish a long-awaited follow-up to the book that won them reknown.

I would have liked this better if I didn't find the Shakespeare authorship controversy absurd. To do Smith credit, the book doesn't require buying into the theories, although it does offer them more respect than I feel they deserve. (The book site contains an exhaustive bibliography on the historical and critical sources Smith used.) Her prose is, as usual, exquisite, although Joe's voice is very different from Alexander Reisden's (protagonist of The Vanished Child and sequels); her characterization is compelling. This is, ultimately, a reflection on biography and biographers, on how writers see their subjects as themselves. It does make me think that the authorship controversy is just one example of a general difficulty many people have believing in fiction: many people--many biographers of writers--seem to believe that the most convincing, most compelling, scenes must be taken from life; that there must be a one-to-one correspondence of character to someone in the writer's past; that fiction simply imposes a narrative on lived experience rather than entirely transforming it.

Writers' biographies fascinate me but seldom satisfy me.

Two people recently mentioned having bought books I recommended, so I am filled with megolomanical fantasies of persuading the entire world, or at least the portion of it that reads this post, to read Really Good Books (TM).

So, here are some of my favorite mysteries:

First, everyone who liked Daughter of Time should read (a) Josephine Tey's other books, of which my favorite (after DoT) is Brat Farrar; and (b) Elizabeth Peter's Jacqueline Kirby mysteries, particularly The Murders of Richard III, which riffs off DoT nicely. My favorite in the series, though, is Die for Love, where Jacqueline goes to a romance writers convention and mystery and amusements ensue.

Trying to remain remotely on the day's topic, humor, I'll also recommend Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar mysteries, which are the funniest things ever.

'It was rather delicious fudge, and I was quite hungry. You will be interested to hear, Hilary, that it had a most remarkable effect--even on Selena after a very modest quantity. She cast off all conventional restraints and devoted herself without shame to the pleasure of the moment.'

I asked for the particulars of this uncharacteristic conduct.

'She took from her handbag a paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice and sat on the sofa reading it, declining all offers of conversation. I have never known you, Selena, so indifferent to the demands of social obligation. I, on the other hand, talked a good deal, though not as I recall with great lucidity; I was trying, for some reason which now escapes me, to explain to Rowena the effect of Section 478 of the Taxes Act; but I kept forgetting halfway through my sentences how they were meant to end, so I fear that I may have given her an imperfect understanding of these provisions.'

I'm very fond of historical mysteries, and one of the best I've ever read is Sarah Smith's The Vanished Child. It's about a man who bears a great resemblance to a child who vanished many years ago, in turn of the century Boston, and how and why he impersonates the lost child. The writing is elegant and the developments are heartbreaking. The sequels don't have quite the perfection of form as the first one but they are still very, very good: The Knowledge of Water shifts location to Paris and involves a writer very clearly based on Colette, plus a plot to steal the Mona Lisa; A Citizen of the Country focuses on early attempts at film-making in France.

Another very good series is Kate Ross' set of mysteries about Julian Kestrel, a Regency dandy, which is also as elegant as the setting demands.

I'm not sure whether Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night is any good as a mystery; I love it for the depiction of a community of women scholars and the evident devotion to learning and literature.

Obscure but should be better known: Molly Brown's Invitation to a Funeral, a mystery whose detective Aphra Behn, a Restoration playwright and spy widely believed to be the first woman writer to have earned her living by her pen. Brown also has a terrific Web site on Restoration London.

Favorite popcorn reading: J.D. Robb's set of futuristic mysteries about Eve Dallas, a tough-as-nails homicide detective in late 21st century New York; Amanda Cross's series about Kate Fansler, an English professor who usually investigates mysteries with a literary and/or feminist slant; and Peter Dickinson's King and Joker and Skeleton-in-Waiting, set in a slightly alternate England so he can use the royal family as subjects and protagonists. They're bright and witty and unexpectedly insightful about gender, sexuality, and perception.

On the edge: Sean Stewart's Passion Play is an sf novel set in a fundamentalist future America, with a terrific hard-boiled detective narration and even better characterization; and Sarah Waters' Affinity is a literary/historical novel about a Victorian philanthropist who visits a women's prison and becomes drawn into a relationship with a spiritualist imprisoned for murder. The mystery aspects are very good, but they may not be central enough to the book to suit people looking for a straightforward mystery.