You can tell when Mary and I have a mystery coming out. We start answering questions. Kind of like murder suspects.
This time Diane Plumley invited us down to The Bookshop Blog to find out what we knew. She asked Ten Questions. Although we were under investigation because One For Sorrow is being reissued in the UK by Head of Zeus, we spilled the beans about our whole Byzantine series and writing in general.
Luckily there were no rubber hoses involved.
Hope we didn't incriminate ourselves.
On a sleety December night taxi-driver Spike Walters picks up a fare at Union Station. The well-dressed, veiled woman instructs Walters to drive to a poorer part of town but when he arrives at the address given she has vanished from his cab, leaving her suitcase -- and a man's body. Of the missing woman Spike asks himself, as will the reader, "Where was she? How had she managed to leave the taxicab? When had the man, who now lay sprawled in the cab, entered it?"
Chief of Police Eric Leverage and amateur criminologist David Carroll cooperate in solving the crime. The departed is identified as club man Roland Warren, a cad rumoured to have been involved with a number of socially prominent married women although there has been no open scandal, and just as well being as he is engaged. It transpires every article in the suitcase belonged to him and this, along with certain other evidence, convinces the authorities and the public that Warren was planning to elope -- but not with his fiancee. Given the dead man's reputation of not being too fussy about whose wife he romances, a number of upper crust persons naturally come under suspicion, and then there's Warren's just discharged valet, not to mention the bereaved fiancee.
My verdict: Midnight features a fairly complex plot unreeled at a slower pace than in many works. Older novels of detection often display social mores that seem strange to modern eyes, for example not mentioning a woman's name at the club or the terrible consequences of cheating at cards or in some other way being touched by the rancid breath of scandal. David Carroll must navigate these treacherous waters to solve the mystery of the who and how and why of the crime.
This time it was the three bean salad.
It's always something.
The awful realization hits me when I'm halfway home, or hauling the bags out of the car, or in the evening, hours after the groceries have been put away.
"Oh hell!" I forgot to pick something up.
"Forgetting three bean salad isn't a crime," Mary said.
"Or a snack. Because I didn't bring any home. I could really do with a three bean salad right now."
"Do you think you should be eating three bean salad at ten o'clock at night? You never have it except with meals. Since when do you have three bean salad for a snack?"
"Last winter," I told her. "Or the winter before. I forget. Those were good times. Whenever they were."
"I remember. That was at the end of February. We'd been snowed in for five weeks. The shelves were bare. It was either the three bean salad or the tinned okra."
"And it was delicious too. Tangy. What else do we have for a snack that's tangy?"
"What about that tin of okra?"
I scowled hungrily.
"Never mind," she said. "You can buy two tins of three bean salad next week. Or three tins. It's Liberty Hall."
"There's no point trying to be a Pollyanna about it," I said. "The plain sad fact of the matter is...I forgot."
I might almost have said I was vexed, but I'm not sure if anyone has been truly vexed since the nineteenth century.
"It's easy enough to forget," Mary offered sympathetically.
"Well, yes, there's only one way to remember but endless ways to forget. I mean, I can forget to take the grocery list, or forget to write it in the first place. I might forget to take the list out of my pocket at the store. Or else I put it back in my pocket in order to hold the freezer door open in order to get at the vegetarian bacon, and then forget to take it out again before I get to the tinned vegetable aisle. Oh, I'm a wonder at forgetting!"
"You did remember the bacon."
"But I don't want vegetarian bacon for a snack. It isn't tangy. I guess I will just have to suffer for my own mistake," I concluded.
"Look on the bright side," Mary told me. "What if you'd forgotten the loo rolls?"
"Oh hell", I said.
I've debated whether or not Greenmantle could be classified as a mystery. Set during World War I, it certainly revolves around one: who is Greenmantle and can he be found in time to interfere with German plans to use him in their bid to grab the middle east?
Richard Hannay, last seen just before the war in The 39 Steps and now a major in the Lennox Highlanders, is recuperating from shrapnel wounds suffered at Loos, as is his friend Sandy Arbuthnot. Anxious to return to the front line, they are instead asked to undertake a secret mission.
Hannay, Arbuthnot, and "sedentary dyspeptic" American John S. Blenkiron, joined later by an old friend from Hannay's South African days, must find the mysterious Greenmantle and assess the situation so the British can take countermeasures. It is a matter of great urgency and no time can be lost. However, they must begin the task with no clues except three words scribbled on a piece of paper -- Kasredin, cancer, and v.I. In different disguises the men take separate roads to Constantinople where they will meet and begin their search, if they all arrive safely -- and it's a big if. Along the way they encounter dangerous enemies and life-threatening situations and must use fast thinking and physical daring to even get to Turkey to begin their quest in the first place.
My verdict: This novel mirrors a time and society where fair play, decency, and honour were important and practiced as far as possible even in wartime. Military and intelligence gathering methods have changed since WWI and for the modern reader this gives Greenmantle a poignant air at times. Even so, it's a rattling good yarn, with plenty of action, excitement, and suspense, along with a dash of wit. Although I'd read the novel before, I still laughed out loud at the mental picture of Hannay in jammies and dressing gown when, due to circumstances, he is "left to receive my guest in a room littered with broken glass and a senseless man in the cupboard".
Etext: Greenmantle
I've never been a NaNo fan either, as I explained in a comment on Mark's blog. My reaction, when asked if I would do it has always been "Nah, no."
For one thing the 50,000 words NaNoMoWri participants aim for isn't generally considered a novel by publishers these days except in the Young Adult genre. So even if you reach the goal, you still don't have novel.
Then too my composition method is get it right the first time as nearly as possible. There are writers who prefer to dash things off -- to get something -- anything -- down and then clean it up afterwards. I worry about starting off with a manuscript that's too broken to ever fix.
Besides, why rush through a book, simply to produce a given number of words per day? Are we working an assembly line?
Now maybe, just maybe, I'm leery of the concept because I'm a literary sloth. To successfully complete NaNoMoWri you need to crank out 1,600 words a day and I rarely do. To manage that trick 30 days running would be difficult if not impossible. For me. A guy I know once completed his NaNo novel in two and a half days. So this November he's writing two.
And then there's the legendary French author Georges Simenon who claimed he locked himself in a hotel room for several days to write a new Maigret novel at one go. But, well, he was a legend.
Maybe I'm saying NaNo just isn't for me. Everyone has their own writing method.
Hmmmm. I notice I've just written two letters to correspondents, plus some blog comments, which along with this blog come to well over 2,000 words today. And I do love those short, gritty fifties crime fiction novels. Hey, maybe next year.
