More January books

[redbird]

Havana Nocturne, by T. J. English. The subtitle is "How the Mob owned Cuba…and then lost it to the Revolution." That's the story English tells, of American gangsters operating in Cuba, and how that entwined with what they were doing in the U.S., and then Fidel and his followers. English is a better story-teller than he is a writer. Sometimes he just doesn't seem to grasp his vocabulary: for example, he uses "decamped" where he clearly means "camped" or "made camp." Others of the infelicities prompted cattitude to say "block that metaphor!" For example, English refers to certain actors and singers have "risen from the firmament" to become major stars. And the epilogue includes the phrase "Compared with the former leader of Los Tigres, other prominent players in this drama passed through their later years in one piece." That said former leader was killed by a bomb, a week after saying in print that he considered bombings a legitimate political tool, does not improve the sentence. However, I don't think it's just a loose grasp of the language that has the author describing women as "lesbians" based on their being paid both to put on a lesbian sex show and to then have sex with men in the audience. (If you assume they're into all of it, they're bisexual; if you conclude, as I do, that they were doing it for the money, there's no evidence whatsoever about their sexual orientation.)

That said, this is a good story, and one I hadn't known most of. Yes, I knew in a general way that the Batista regime had been corrupt, but not the details and the extent of the Mafia entanglements. There are also interesting non-Cuban details, like the state trooper who got suspicious one night in upstate New York, set up a roadblock, leading to a series of events that forced J. Edgar Hoover to admit that the Mafia existed and was a national organization.

English takes advantage of the legal principle that you can't libel the dead: a lot of his subjects, from Lucky Luciano to John F. Kennedy, can't sue, even where what he says is damaging and may be unprovable even if true. (Though Luciano probably didn't mind having people know that he'd helped the war effort in the 1940s.)

White Sands, Red Menace, by Ellen Klages

This is a sequel to The Green Glass Sea, and I don't know how well it stands on its own. Read a month after The Green Glass Sea, it's vivid. This is mostly the story of two teenage girls, Dewey and Suze, at Alamogordo just after World War II. The previous book is set at Los Alamos, where the girls' parents are working on what is, at the time, called "the gadget." Dewey is very un-girl-ish in her interests, in a way that almost nobody except her father has room for. Suze isn't exactly girly, but fits in a bit better.

Klages does a good job with both the adolescent/coming-of-age stuff, and glimpes of a time and place not as far from here as we might like to think. (There's a lot of casually accepted legal segregation, which surprises the girls, who can't do much about it at 14.) Meanwhile, Suze's parents are arguing over the continuing A-bomb research, and about his having pushed her to postpone her career for a year to keep the family together, and then trying to make that the status quo when they had agreed that after a year they would all move back to California, where there are jobs in her field and people who don't assume that woman and scientist are incompatible.

(One small point that annoyed me, while being entirely realistic: Dewey and Suze formed a two-member "Shazam Club" in the first book. Dewey, having learned the Greek alphabet after asking her father a question one day, starts writing the word SHAZAM in Greek. Lower-case Greek, because it looks more exotic. Which means that intermittently, I'm going along reading, and it suddenly says "Séadzam." OK, /z/ is also a plausible transliteration of ζ, but η is a vowel, not an h.)

Murder Packs a Suitcase, by Cynthia Baxter

This is both a mystery and a novel that gives you a bit about a character. At the very beginning, we see Mallory, a recently widowed woman, riding the commuter rail on her nervous way to an interview for a barely-more-than-clerical job at a magazine. She walks in, almost flees before they call her, and finds to her astonishment that she's being interviewed as their new travel writer, to replace someone who had quit suddenly. From there, she's dealing with her college-age children, who prove to be far more enthusiastic about "Mom, you have to get back to actually doing stuff" in theory than when the practice means she isn't immediately available to listen to their problem, and the new job. The morning after she arrives in Florida, where she's researching an article on old, kitschy Florida attractions (gator wrestling, "Shell World," tropical gardens, and such), one of the other travel writers being hosted and treated to free meals turns up dead on the floor of the hotel coffeeshop.

From there, the course is somewhat predictable: everyone turns out to be more entangled than Mallory expected, and the local police consider her one of their suspects. Meanwhile, she is discovering that she likes the new job and is competent to handle it, and gets somewhat back into the swing of dealing with people. She's still grieving, but more engaged with the world.

The jacket copy describes this as a "cozy" mystery: I think they mean there's an amateur detective. The publisher also says the next book in the series will be out in April 2009; I'm tempted to ask the library for it, but I suspect it may settle into more routine "amateur detective dropped into random settings" and less novel of character. (They also list books in a previous series by the same author, the titles of which sound distressingly twee.)

The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, by Margery Allingham

They say the past is a foreign country. Between that, the English countryside, and a focus on an odd social stratum, I periodically found myself lost, not just in what was supposed to be rural dialect, but in the translations thereof for the benefit of the non-rural characters (and, I guess, the urban reader of the time), and in the things that aren't explained because the writer assumed they were clear. I recall liking, and understanding, other of Allingham's Albert Campion mysteries better, some years back; I don't know if the difference here is me, or this particular novel. I may read more, but if this had been my first, I don't think I would. (The mystery is, more or less, resolved, though key pieces of motive and back story, and particularly the reasons for the interactions between the tax collector found dead under a bridge, and Campion's host for the weekend, remain unaddressed.) Allingham also pushed one of my reliable "annoy the redbird button, the spelling of ordinary words as "dialect" by explicitly giving pronunciations that not only match mine, but are the only ones I'm aware of, in this case "noo" for knew. I forgive Dorothy Sayers this, because she does other things well; I'm less sure about Allingham.

Comments

[shikzoid.livejournal.com]

I loved The Green Glass Sea and look forward to the sequel.

Re: Murder Packs a Suitcase. One of my annoyance buttons is the idea that all "mysteries" are "murder mysteries". I wonder how high the body count has to be before a book is taken out of the "cozy" category.