Sue Grafton: V is for Vengeance

This is the one I forgot about the other week! And this is really the one that sort of re-awakened my fondness for characters I thought I'd stopped loving. I liked Kinsey in this one. I was also sort of amused by how made-for-80s-tv the main story was - the gangster-gone-good who falls in love with the mother of a young man his henchmen killed a few years ago. With the descriptions of clothes and all you could almost picture the screenshots. Nuff said.

Sue Grafton: U is for Undertow

Wasn't I lucky last library visit, getting so many olden goldie favourites that I hadn't read? Janet Evanovich, Kathy Reichs, and now Sue Grafton. This one has the story set in both the present, in a first person Kinsey narrative, and in the past, from different third person views. Grafton has started to do this more frequently in the recent books. It does work well, making for more varied reading, the opportunity to delve deeper into fringe characters, and just generally breaking that specific writing mold that I suppose it's all too easy to fall into, if your heroine is a single loner who solves cases by following up leads, one at a time.

Kinsey is approached by a young man who thinks that he, as a child, witnessed the burial of a little girl who was kidnapped a short while before. He's only just remembered the incident. Kinsey starts picking at the oh-so-few leads that there are, and the mere act of picking of course makes the original perpetrators nervous, and their stupidity solves the case in the end. The kidnapping takes place in 1968 and a lot of the story is about the conflicts between the new hippies and the old establishment so to speak, but surprisingly it's rather focused on the hippies being slackers, druggies and losers, with little sympathy for them. It could be that just these particular hippies are repulsive, but it does come across rather as being the whole movement. Perhaps it's an attempt to scale it down, to focus on the small town's reactions when they just get a drop of the whole idea. Although the fact that the old-fashioned fuddy-duddies are lovely people, especially compared to the dirty, rude, immoral hippies. Who aren't even good parents. A leetle bit odd.

I did like this book, but it could definitely have been neater. I liked how the ending was totally anti-climactic (I still have bad memories of the one that ended in a battle between Kinsey and someone else in heavy machinery - diggers? anyway, it was not good). Would have been nice to see what a great and ruthless editor could have done, plus less pressure to come up with a product. Hm.

Sue Grafton: T is for Trespass

The blurbs on the cover have this as being one of her absolute best, a gripping thriller that’s so exciting you’ll wet yourself. Now, it certainly isn’t one of her worst, so I'm not complaining. Grafton steps away from the format of only writing from Kinsey’s point of view, and in my opinion that alone can make for a more interesting novel. Here we hear the story from Kinsey (first person narrative)and her antagonist Solana (third person narrative) – a calculating con artist who steals other people’s identities and insinuates herself into the homes of old or sick people, only to bleed them dry and (optional) kill them. One of Kinsey’s next-door neighbours falls prey to the woman when he ends up needing a nurse after an accident. So it is a good story, although I feel that the addition of Solana’s sub-intelligent, over-grown and abusive goon of a son was a bit unnecessary. To me the book is about the race against time – is the neighbour doomed? – and the pitting of wits. However, adding the son did make for a joyously violent and bizarre finale fight. I dare a director to film it, I bet you they’d feel compelled to tone down the dirty, desperate scrappiness of it out of fear of seeming ridiculous.

Absolutely one of her best. But I didn't wet myself.

Kinsey v. Maisie

First I read S is for Silence by Sue Grafton. I've been reading a few Graftons lately, but the early ones, since the library are stocking up on their collection, so this became an opportunity to see the difference between the early books and the later ones. S is for Silence is not written exclusively from Kinsey's perspective, instead Grafton switches between Kinsey-chapters (in the present, i.e. 1987) and historical chapters (set in 1953 when the crime takes place), written from the perspective of alternating lead suspects/other characters. It works well, and gives her scope to develop more fully even side characters.

The story is simple enough - in 1953 Daisie's mother Violet disappeared, and now she feels she needs closure. Kinsey reluctantly takes on the very cold case, since Daisie is a friend of a friend. Naturally her prodding gets her results, and the book ends with a spectacular bulldozer chase (please, never film this), which somehow works in the Kinsey genre but is really very OTT. An easy read, and Kinsey seems less boxy and set in her ways than I remember from P and R.

Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear once again features Maisie Dobbs, who here turns out to be almost a bit clairvoyant. Or "sensitive". Or something - I really can't take to this blend of suffragism (is that a word?), Eastern guruism (that definitely isn't) and Afterlife. Anyway, Maisie takes on some cases that take her back to France and all the bad memories that come with that. I do enjoy a WW1 theme, but Maisie Dobbs is too OTT a heroine for me to truly enjoy myself. If this were filmed it would end up some preposterous mix of Lara Croft and Florence Nightingale. With less action, and more long gazes.

Sue Grafton and Michel Faber

D is for Deadbeat (by Sue Grafton) has Kinsey accepting a job as messenger - a man asks her to find a teenage boy named Tony and deliver a check for 25 thousand dollars to him. Kinsey accepts, but when the client's retainer check bounces she goes to find him instead. He turns out to be bad news, an alcoholic just out of prison. He also turns up dead, and now his daughter hires Kinsey to find out if and by whom he was killed. Middling, I'd say - one of those where I'm not 100 % in on what makes Kinsey tick. But the end is quite good, when she tries to talk someone suicidal off a roof.

Faber is a new one for me. I was recommended him on a forum I hang out on. The library had The Courage Consort and The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, so I borrowed them. They have one fault - being too short for a full day at work. Quick reads, but good ones.

TCC was my favourite. The Courage Consort is the name of an a cappella group dedicated to modern composers. Courage is also the name of the group's leader, Roger, and thus of his wife, the wilting, severely depressed Kate. She lives her life in the shadow of the dominant man who has shaped her, contemplating suicide daily. Faber's description of how Kate's depression controls her is excellent - in no space at all he sketches a portrait of someone in thrall to despair. Now the group is headed for two-week rehearsal in a chateau in the Netherlands (I didn't know they had chateaus in the Netherlands!), forcing them into closer contact than they have ever been before. The quiet atmosphere, exposure to the other members and the strange cries she hears in the night start to draw Kate out of her shell. I really liked this. It was moving, funny, succinct and realistic.

T199S was not bad, but I just didn't like it as much as TCC. Again we have a female main character, Siân, who is trying to overcome depression - in this case perhaps not as severe. The book is set in Whitby, where Siân is working an archaeological dig, plagued by nightmares in which she is murdered. She meets an attractive man with an even more attractive dog, who shows her an old letter he inherited from his father (the man did, not the dog. Obviously.). Carefully Siân opens the damaged scroll to read the confession of a man who did something terrible more than 200 years ago. My only gripe with this book really was that it felt a bit short and unexplained somehow, like the ending came too soon and suddenly. It's an absolutely beautiful little book though, with gorgeous photographs of Whitby throughout. I'd love to go there - mr Bani has been and really liked it.

I've borrowed The Fahrenheit Twins now, a collection of his short stories. Looking forward to it. I imght read Babes in Beijing first though (palate-cleansing, as it where).

Food inspiration from books

Am reading D is for Deadbeat (I know, like a fecking dog with a bone I am). Kinsey visits a soup kitchen where they are serving apple sauce sprinkled with cinnamon for afters.

So guess what I had for afters. With cream.

Sue Grafton: C is for Corpse

Kinsey is recovering from the injuries she sustained in B is for Burglary (I presume), which I've read but can't recall precisely at the moment. I think there was a shoot-out in an office. Anyway, so she's working out at the gym when she befriends a young man also in recovery. Nine months ago is was in a bad car accident, which killed his friend and left him badly hurt and with memory losses. Only money and effort has gotten him out of the hospital bed. He confides in Kinsey, saying that he can't remember precisely why, but he is sure that his accident was a deliberate murder attempt, to keep him from revealing something he knew. He hires Kinsey to investigate. Four days later he is dead, in another car crash. Etc, Kinsey investigates, etc she finds the villain. And also saves Henry the landlord from a golddigger.

The ending is a bit lame-ish tbh, but there are several good Kinsey moments in the book. Not a favourite, however. Though I was thinking while reading it that this earlier Kinsey is more mellow and human than later on. Possibly some time when I'm on maternity leave I'll re-read one of the later books to see what I'm after. After all, I haven't read S, and then I must expect T-Z before Grafton is done....

Sue Grafton x 3.. no, 4 really

The library have had a little drive and bought a lot of English paperbacks, so they've stocked up on crime fic too, it seems. After all, those are the books you don't want in hardback. You want easy to carry, stick in your bag, fits in your pocket, read on the bus paperback for crime fic, right? Anyway, for some reason they only had the later parts of Grafton's alphabet series. I asked once, and the librarian thought it was superodd, but no, no branch had the earliest ones. She was a little surprised herself. However, now they're filling in the gaps - lucky me! I am very fond of Kinsey Millhone, and I do think that the very earliest books show Kinsey from her best side. As with all series the charm and inventiveness wears thinner towards the end. It's very sad.

I found E is for Evidence, H is for Homicide (well, duh) and J is for Judgment. And today I found A is for Alibi, so I was very pleased! I noticed a fun little detail in A - at one point Kinsey talks about how disconcerting the climate of Southern California is, with the constant sunshine and so on: you don't get a good grip on what season it is. That's hardly the talk of someone born and bred in a place is it? That's Ms Grafton from Kentucky talking - I'm only saying. Roots will out, won't they?

A is the one about the woman who just got out of jail, where she served eight years for the murder of her husband. She claims innocence, and wants Kinsey to clear her name now that she isn't locked up any more. I haven't finished it yet, but am more than half-way through and can note that she has so far only mentioned her lovely landlord Henry, but we haven't actually met him. Also, I'd like to say that this book must've been a breath of fresh air when it first came out! It really is a nice spin on the PI genre.

E is about Kinsey getting framed. She is investigating a warehouse fire, when evidence is found that she's on the take and California Fidelity doesn't want her working for them any more. She also gets blown up (and later her apartment gets blown up too). The description of the explosion is nicely done.

In H she gets inadvertently sucked into the LA gang scene. On behalf of California Fidelity she's investigating a woman who seems to be trying to commit insurance fraud. Turns out the woman has a gang history, even though she now is seeing a former school pal and cop colleague of Kinsey's. Kinsey agrees to do some undercover work to help out the police, and finds herself trapped with LA gang psychos. Not bad, and I like how Grafton shows compassion even for our villain.

Finally J. After/during H Kinsey's association with CF is over, but they pull her in again to investigate claims that a suicide who may have come back to life in Mexico. This one felt a little more skittish, and there is a twist at the end which I feel might have been made more prominent throughout the book, to keep us the readers guessing a little more.

Yesh.

I was first trying to read R is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton. A few chapters in I was sure I'd read it before. It's the one where Kinsey is hired by a wealthy man to go pick up his daughter who is being released from prison. Sounds a simple job, but turns out the daughter took the fall (note my extensive knowledge of US crime vernacular) for her boss/lover, and now the FBI and the IRS want her to turn stool pigeon (see, I talk the talk).

For the life of me I can't remember how it ends. And it clearly isn't my favourite, since I found it so hard to get into it. Even though Kinsey has sex.

Maybe Graftons are only meant to be read once?

So I put it aside, and picked up Last Seen Wearing by Hillary Waugh, a book I'd never heard of. But apparently it's a classic. Written in -52, it's an attempt to write a crime novel about police procedure. It must have been one of the very first, if not the first, to focus on procedure and forensics. Wikipedia entry here. Now, it almost makes me cringe to read how they break into the subjects house to gather evidence. Anybody hear a "mistrial" being shouted from the back? The (probably very accurate, but still) sexism grates a bit too. By which I mean that I find it hard to find love inside me for the heroes.

The book is about a freshman who goes missing from college, and how the police find out what happened to her by doing stuff the police does, like questioning numerous people, draining lakes, vacuuming cars - no easy ways out. Well, apart form being able to gather evidence with a spot of B&E then.

It's highly recommendable, if nothing else because its an excellent document of its time. I'm not sure if that was even English what I just wrote, but I'm leaving it there.

My blogging will hopefully be highly erratic for some time now, since I started writing my essay again. Unless I decide to blog about law books....

Sue Grafton: L is for Lawless

Sue Grafton is another favourite of mine. Her heroine, P.I. Kinsey Millhone, is so damn cool. Oneliners abound - Kinsey doesn't take crap from anybody. The kind of person one would like to know, even though she seems abrasive as hell. Grafton's alphabet series has also taught me that California is a lot bigger than we think here in Sweden, and a lot more varied. I like that, when you by-the-by get to know a place through reading a detective story.

Often (almost always) when I read I try to imagine what the book would be like as a film or tv series. I do this especially with crime fiction, for obvious treasons (a lot of it has been filmed). The L book is a novel that sometimes seems like it's been written with film rights in mind. Since Kinsey works alone there is often not a lot of dialogue in the books - or rather, we might have a bit of dialogue, and then Kinsey's thoughts on the conversation and what she's learnt from it. It's stuff that can be quite hard to translate to screenplay, I suspect. A lot of driving and looking tough and eating cheeseburgers while thinking. In this book however Kinsey teams up with an ex-con and his daughter, which gives plenty of opportunity for conversation - always a good way to explain the plot in a film. And we also get these clues: Kinsey hitches a ride with a limo driver who claims to have come up with the original story for Terms of Endearment, only to have it stolen from him. "That's the way Hollywood works. Real incestuous." He later parts with Kinsey saying: "You have any ideas for a female-type Sam Spade film, we could maybe collaborate. Chicks kickin' shit and stff like that."

Hello? Does it sound like Grafton is dropping hints or what? *giggles* And later, there is a fantastic scene which honestly made me laugh out loud (I then had to try to explain it to my youngest daughter, who didn't have a clue what I was on about), featuring a stubborn grandmother wielding a gun. Sounds "done" and trite, but it was actually quite surprising and well executed. Kudos, Ms. Grafton! In the hands of the right director this could, indeed, make a very enjoyable film. It is a very enjoyable book.

My biggest problem with Grafton's Millhone series is usually that they are so difficult to get a good grasp on, time-wise. She started writing them in the 80s, and they are still set in that era, even though time has moved on IRL (L is for Lawless was published in -95). However, not being American I think I don't always pick up on the subtle clues as to the decade we're in, because I often find myself going "whoa, how can he have been in WW2 and still be alive and kicking?" etc. Thanks to some definite information in LIFL it can be dated to 1985. I don't think it's just me being dense though, because I often have the same problem in figuring out what time of day it is and so on during the actual story.

Okay, so I'm being dense. But I could use a few more sentences that help me remember whether it's morning or night, especially since Kinsey keeps napping at all hours.

My second biggest problem is that sometimes the conclusion is a bit of a reach, IMO. People suddenly are exposed as bad guys, and I really wasn't following the argument, and there might be an unexpected shootout. These really aren't violent crime stories you see, so it's always a bit of an "oh?" moment when shots get fired. On the other hand, maybe this is a lot like real life - what do I know? Grafton does her research, and has based her stories on real cases sometimes. I definitely wasn't disappointed this time - I remember feeling a little cheated in the one where she meets a guy who turns out to be psycho, together with his brother. (Can't remember which letter - again, this is why I started this blog. It was long overdue.)

Anyway, I love this series. If people are wondering what to get me for Christmas, the library doesn't have all the books, so I haven't read A, B, C, D and E. In the same vein, you can also check which books my Marcia Muller the library has, and get me the other ones. Sharon McCone's another cool Sam Spade-type detective, that I'm fond of. Except Sharon has friends. Oh, and don't forget Alexander McCall Smith, while you're shopping.

Righty-oh, then. Below is the link to Sue Grafton's website, and also Marcia Muller's, since I mentioned her.

http://www.suegrafton.com/
http://www.marciamuller.com/