New in November crime fiction: a Sherlock Holmes-inspired story collection; John Lawton’s latest novel; a sticky spy scene in 1970s London and Seattle author Robert Dugoni’s “My Sister’s Grave.”
Adam Woog
Setting a crime novel in times past is a steadfast tradition. Here are a few excellent examples:
Is anyone more qualified to edit the delightful “In the Company of Sherlock Holmes”(Pegasus, 272 pp., $24.95) than Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger? For that matter, is there a more reliable historical setting for crime than Holmes’ London?
King’s justly praised novels star Holmes and Mary Russell, happily married after his retirement. Klinger, a world-class authority on all things Victorian, compiled the marvelous “The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.”
The stories here are by writers familiar (Sara Paretsky, Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver) and less familiar (Michael Sims, Cornelia Funke, Denise Hamilton). Plus some surprises, like science-fiction icon Harlan Ellison and cartoonist Gahan Wilson.
The tales, all exceedingly clever, are sometimes in classic Holmesian style and time period; others make only passing reference to the great detective; and some have ingenious twists. An example of the latter: Andrew Grant’s “Dr. Watson’s Casebook,” related entirely through Facebook postings (“Sherlock Holmes does not like this”).
John Lawton’s“Sweet Sunday”(Atlantic, 266 pp., $25) is set in the tumultuous ’60s. Lawton has done historical crime before, in his excellent (if slightly creepy) series about Inspector Troy, a WWII-era London police detective.
This time we’re in the U.S., where private eye Turner Raines has a specialty: tracking down draft dodgers. But the murder of his friend Mel, an investigative journalist, sends Turner in a new direction. Mel apparently was digging up information about a horrifying event: a massacre in Vietnam that bears more than a passing resemblance to the My Lai atrocity.
A subplot about civil rights seems shoehorned in, but otherwise Lawton convincingly nails the essence of those chaotic years.
I’m a sucker for a spy story with intelligence and style; James Naughtie’s“The Madness of July”(Overlook, 400 pp., $26.95) has both.
London is sweltering through a heat wave in the late 1970s, and the world of former MI6 spy Will Flemyng — now a key man in the Foreign Office and a rising politico — has been blown apart. An American espionage agent has been found dead in a closet in the House of Commons, the victim of an overdose.
The death panics both British and American agents as the situation spirals out of control. And a complex, baffling and ever-expanding situation it is, involving a mysterious letter, a mole in MI6, a sex scandal and a secret in Flemyng’s family history. Things slowly unfold against a background of ambition, manipulation, divided loyalties and treason.
Naughtie sometimes overplays his hand in connecting his multiple story lines. The huge cast of characters, meanwhile, is difficult to keep straight — I was grateful for the list of players provided up front.
Nonetheless, Naughtie, a British journalist, is good at depicting life in the corridors of power. And a long section, set in Flemyng’s beloved childhood home in Scotland, has some genuinely beautiful prose. All in all, a strong debut.
In local news: Bellevue resident Robert Dugoni’s“My Sister’s Grave” (Thomas and Mercer, 424 pp., $15.95 paperback original) is a swift, engrossing story that shrewdly combines elements of police procedurals and legal thrillers. (The author is himself an attorney.)
Tracy Crosswhite, a Seattle homicide detective, is haunted by her sister Sarah’s disappearance decades earlier. Crosswhite is convinced that the man convicted of the crime is innocent — and when Sarah’s remains are found she has a chance to prove it.
Adam Woog’s column on crime and mystery fiction appears on the second Sunday of the month in The Seattle Times.
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