Library Limelights 206

PD James. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. 1972. Vintage Canada/Random House, 2011.

The ever-so-literate Baroness James could have written this today, with its reference to gender-typing. Young Cordelia Gray takes over the private eye business of her mentor Bernie; his mentor had been Scotland Yard's Adam Dalgleish, the popular hero of many James novels. Sir Ronald Callender hires Cordelia to discover why his son Mark killed himself in a rundown cottage. Mark, never close to his father, had abruptly left his studies at Cambridge University with no explanation. Cordelia relishes this assignment from her very first client. But after deciding to stay in the said cottage for a few days, and examining it, she persuades herself it was murder, not suicide.

Seen as a lightweight, amateur investigator ("unsuitable") by most people who first meet her, Cordelia demonstrates a remarkably incisive mind. Mark's friends eventually open up to her, leading to a murky history and the changing composition of Sir Ronald's household. Humour of any kind is always necessary in a crime novel to offset the customary intensity, and James employs it in just the right touches. The climax is unexpected ‒ again, Cordelia's wits save the day but ultimately she has to convince Dalgleish himself that there's nothing fishy about a second death. From here it looks like what she calls her "squalid little office" can expect further business (and of course she does appear in another novel).

Words:

theurgy ‒ invoking divine or supernatural power into human affairs

sacerdotal ‒ relating to priesthood

punnet ‒ a small light basket

One-liners:

▪ Bernie had meant her to have the gun and she wasn't going to give it up easily. (8)

▪ It was a horrible room, ill-proportioned, bookless, furnished not in poor taste but in no taste at all. (44)

▪ As she stared at it in fascinated horror, her heart hammering, a slight breeze wafted in from the open door and the figure swung slowly as if twisted by a human hand. (123)

▪ The great organ snuffled and groaned like an animal gathering breath, before giving forth its magnificent voice in a Bach fugue. (218)

Multi-liners:

▪ "And he sent you?" Miss Markland's voice was a compound of disbelief, amusement and contempt. Cordelia didn't resent rudeness. She felt Miss Markland had a point. (46)

▪ "If you know you're not involved and the question of foul play never arises, you don't think in terms of alibis. It's only the guilty who do that." (120)

▪ "If a man's good to one woman, he'll be good to another. That's what I reckoned and I was right." (134)

▪ "Evelyn was religious. She was, therefore, practised in self-deception." (222)

Lessons:

Cordelia had early learnt stoicism. All her foster parents, kindly and well-meaning in their ways, had demanded one thing of her—that she should be happy. She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love. Compared with this early discipline of concealment, all subsequent deceits had been easy. (15)

Baseline:

Miss Markland spoke with sudden passion as if the words were being forced out of her: "I don't like your generation, Miss Gray. I don't like your arrogance, your selfishness, your violence, the curious selectivity of your compassion. You pay for nothing with your own coin, not even for your ideals. You denigrate and destroy and never build. You invite punishment like rebellious children, then scream when you are punished. The men I knew, the men I was brought up with, were not like that."

Cordelia said gently: "I don't think Mark Callender was like that either." (54)

Evidence:

"He was a tidy lad."

"But not tidy enough to wash up his coffee mug or clean his garden fork."

"That proves nothing. As I said, people do behave oddly when they're planning to kill themselves. We know that the typewriter was his and that he'd had it for a year. But we couldn't compare the typing with his work. All his papers had been burnt." (79)

Cynicism:

Wilfully obtuse, Cordelia said: "I didn't enquire what political party Sir Ronald favours."

Hugo laughed. "Davie doesn't mean that. By fascist Davie means that Ronald Callender holds certain untenable opinions. For example, that all men may not be created equal, that universal suffrage may not necessarily add to the general happiness of mankind, that the tyrannies of the left aren't noticeably more liberal or supportable than the tyrannies of the right, that black men killing black men is small improvement on white men killing black men in so far as the victims are concerned and that capitalism may not be responsible for all the ills that flesh is heir to from drug addiction to poor syntax. I don't suggest that Ronald Callender holds all or indeed any of these reprehensible opinions. But Davie thinks that he does." (83-4)

Denise Mina. Conviction. USA: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2019.

Mina's versatility enthralls me, whether it's subject matter or plots. Conviction is a real zinger: no police involved here, no detectives, and yet it's a nail-biter ‒ searching for a reclusive billionaire who destroyed Anna McDonald's life. Anna is telling her tale that begins with a broken marriage. Husband Hamish leaves her for her best friend Estelle. To distract herself, Anna is following a multi-part indie podcast about the unsolved sinking of the private yacht Dana. Anna knew the man who died on it along with his two children. She decides that solving the mystery will lead to her nemesis Gretchen Teigler, whom she wants to expose as a ruthless sociopath. At first, Anna appears to be disturbed and unstable ‒ but likeable. She herself is the biggest mystery until she can bear to disclose the ugliness in her past.

Fin, Estelle's abandoned husband, is a faded, anorexic rock star; Anna allows him along as company, sparring all the way. The two determined amateurs contact Trina who made the podcast. They view a dive film of the sunken ship and its bodies. They barely escape a brutal killer in the Scottish Highlands. It takes a while to convince Fin they are being chased but he begins to realize the power of podcast, waking his latent fans to their adventures. New Rochelle, Venice, Paris. It's fast-moving, entertaining, and very au courant with a charming heroine. A pleasure to behold such an inventive author.

Word: meroculous ‒ (aka miroculous, modern slang) hungover

One-liners:

▪ My passport was a dead person's and would set off alarms at every Border Agency desk in the country. (207)

▪ The waiter tutted and was generally very irritated by the mention of veganism for some reason. (242)

▪ Hector helped us, the dress-shop woman helped us and it was all because of the podcast, because Fin was famous and we had an audience. (269)

▪ "Fuck, you're hard to be around." (272)

Multi-liners:

▪ Oh God, Leon's laugh. So dark and wild you could drown a bag of kittens in it. (21)

▪ Pity is a hollow virtue. I like it. It's a form of self-aggrandisement really, bigging yourself up by defining someone as below you. (45)

▪ "I'm glad you came to my home to saddle me with looking after you because my day has been a non-stop fucking fiesta." This was said with a lack of warmth and excessive volume. (103)

▪ People were pleased to see that the rumours of his death were untrue. Where had he been? Too thin, Fin! (111)

▪ I spoke little but when I did I affected a genteel Scottish accent. Accents are important signifiers of authenticity and I got good at that one. I became as close to invisible as possible. (185)

Self-pity strikes:

They would stay together. They would form a new family. Estelle was great, Hamish was lucky, the girls would be delighted with a baby, but Fin and I, we were finished. We were extras in our own lives, marginal asides to the people we loved the most. I felt as if I was sliding off the side of the world. I started crying. Fin took my hand and held it until I stopped.

Then we held hands as we sat on the rickety train, rolling into a grey November London. It wasn't romantic. It wasn't sexual. We held hands like Hansel and Gretel on their first night in the forest. We were both sad and I think we were both grateful that someone else was there, someone kind. (220-1)

Envious awe:

At the far end was a wooden table, possibly the comrade to the stool in the window. Behind it sat a woman with grey hair in a tousled bob. She wore a bright yellow dress and had cat-eye glasses made of clear plastic hanging on a plastic chain. She made me want to go straight out and buy a yellow dress, dye my hair grey and develop an astigmatism. (260)

More admiration:

She spoke like a posh Londoner, with just the slightest trace of Italian accent, but her voice was gorgeous. Drawling, gruff and clipped. I could imagine her young and cynical, charmingly melancholy in a way only very beautiful girls can be. (278)

Mid-journey:

"We've had a big money offer for an advance on a book. I couldn't write a book. How about you do that?"

I said, yeah, sure, why not, I'll write a book.

That is this book, incidentally. What was I thinking? I didn't consider the process of writing a book, the six months of self-doubt, the wrongness of all words, paragraphs strangling each other, civil war on the page, the sheer boredom of writing about myself. I just glibly said, yeah, sure, why not, I'll write a book. I agreed as if I was asked to taste a new flavour of crisp for the first time. Go on then. I'll try it right now if you like, while we're waiting for a bus. (303)

Annie Proulx. Postcards. 1992. USA: Scribner Paperback Fiction/Simon & Schuster Inc., 1995.

How did I ever miss this one? ... her first novel! The incomparable Proulx shines a spotlight on an underclass of America, the overworked and the under-educated — hardscrabble farmers, weary miners, migrant workers, fur trappers, hustlers and losers of every stripe. Mainly we follow some members of the Blood family as they leave their debt-ridden, collapsing dairy farm. In particular we get to know oldest son Loyal Blood who committed a murder (accidentally?), sending him instantly on a wandering course all his life, fumbling every opportunity to better himself. His brother Dub and sister Mernelle fare somewhat better. Their mother Jewell adapts to all the changing circumstances, only to melt finally into the scenery, literally. Proulx sharply etches each character, supplemented by their own words whether verbose or barely articulate. The land itself is a living entity as we live through rain, mud, snow, rockfalls, dust storms, prairie fires.

The panorama goes from post-war to the end of the 1980s, anchored by various postcards across time and country. Proulx's whimsy comes in the names she bestows on her people, like Beeman Zick, Perce Paypumps, Alvin Vinyl, Arlene Greenslit, Oscar Untergans, Juniata Calliota, Bullett Wulff, Fantee Horsley, and so on. My favourite place name was DogBoil, Manitoba, one of the tiny settlements along Loyal's endless search for work or fulfillment. And how about CoffeePot, Michigan; Vengeance, New Mexico; Spineweed, Arizona; Hammerlock, Colorado; Streaky Bacon, Montana; Weeping Waters, Vermont. America: as we seldom see it. Hard work, hard times, hard luck. Proulx makes us live through it all.

Word: anatomic ‒ relating to the body's structure, or anatomical research

One-liners:

▪ "You can't leave us run this farm alone," said Mink in his buzzing voice, the self-pity getting into his rage. (10)

▪ Her voice so custard smooth now it would cure a sore throat. (21)

▪ "I see the way you throw yourself at trouble." (172)

▪ He had tried to keep the tremulous balance of his life, walking a beam between short friendships and abrupt departures. (186)

▪ There was always a fine grit on the linoleum, soil blown from across the world, brown roils that rose from the steppes of central Asia and ended lying on his windowsills. (189)

Multi-liners:

▪ "No, I don't want you to go for no vet. I want you to go for the rifle and five gallon of kerosene." (104)

▪ "Guard!" bellowed Beeman Zick. "We got a dancer here." But by the time they cut the old guy down the dance was over. (111)

▪ "You know, I'm not made to get along comfortable with most people." He scratched the back of his neck. "I seem to comb their hair the wrong way." (158)

▪ The electric stove was clean but it couldn't dry socks, burn paper, raise bread or provide comfort. Cost money to run it. They called it progress. (215)

▪ The woman ran clumsily out to the clothesline to take in the dish towels. They twisted and leapt like gut-shot cats. (287)

Jewell, later in life:

New People. New people owned the general store, started new stores, turned barns into inns and woodwork shops. They moved into farmhouses hoping to fit their lives into the rooms, to fit their shoes to the stair treads. She thought they were like insects casting off tight husks, vulnerable for a little while until the new chitin hardened.

... She was alone for the first time in her adult life, alone in a solitude that tasted like a strange but sweet tropical fruit. The big meals three times a day, the twice-weekly baking, were the first to go. She ate scratch meals, cold potatoes, leftover soup, sandwiches that Mink had hated as 'city food.' The huge loads of Monday wash no longer sloshed around in the wringer machine. She slept until six in the morning. (128)

Perceptive Ben:

"And tell you something else. There's something haywire about you. I can smell it. You're accident-prone. You suffer losses. You're tilted way far off center. You run hard but don't get anywhere. And I don't think it's easy for you." He looked at Loyal. The old black eyes looked at Loyal. Tiny yellow rectangles, reflections of the open door, invited him to step through. Loyal took a breath, exhaled. Started to speak, stopped. Began.

"I can stand it," he mumbled. "I'm not doin' so bad. I got some money saved up. What the hell do you expect?"

They sat in darkness, the thick apricot light firing strewn distant rocks.

"Some other time," said Ben. "Here, have another shot of misery water." (172)

Law officer's lament:

"You know where those scum are now? Every one of them?"

"I'll bite."

"Right where they were a year ago. Doing the same thing. Illegally trapping bear, taking the claws and gallbladders, selling to the Japanese and making a fortune. You know why? You know why all that work is down the tubes? Judges. Fucking, two-bit, smug, dumb, egocentric, stuck-up, ignorant and stupid judges who cannot tell their ass from a jelly doughnut. You be interested to know those stinking humps that sat with you got fines of one hundred dollars each for 'practicing taxidermy without a license.' They peeled it off a roll as big as a ham and paid up with a smile." (257-8)