The Long Goodbye

My mystery book group decided to read this classic by Raymond Chandler (c. 1953) for our next meeting. I have not read anything of his in forever, and although it's a bit dated, the writing holds its own. Philip Marlowe unintentionally gets involved with the upper class when he rescues an elegant drunk in front of a night club, after the man's date dumps him out of the car and drives off. Terry Lennox seems a gentle soul and the heartless woman is his wealthy ex-wife. When next they meet, Terry has remarried her and he's just come to have a drink with Marlowe. They do this occasionally over the weeks and then Terry shows up and asks Marlowe to drive him to Mexico. He tells Philip a hypothetical story about a man killing his wife and needing to disappear. Since Marlowe's number was written on a pad of paper at Terry's, the cops come for Marlowe and make his life miserable until word reaches the police that Lennox wrote a confession and killed himself in a little village in Mexico. Subsequently, Marlowe is contacted by a New York publisher who wants him to babysit a pulp fiction writer, Roger Wade, and keep him from getting drunk or striking his wife until his next book is finished. Marlowe refuses the job, but is sucked in when the wife calls and says her husband has gone missing. It turns out that these two cases are very much entwined.  Powerful people, from gangsters to newspaper magnates to the cops themselves, want Marlowe to keep his nose out of it.
Marlowe is a loner with his own set of principles and a drive to get to the bottom of everything. You'll enjoy riding along with him.
A retrospective review from The Independent (Jan., 2016) says of this book "if not the best or most technically accomplished of the Marlowe novels, [it] is without question my favourite."

Virgil Wander

A long time ago, I read Peace Like a River by author Leif Enger. I can't remember what it was about, but I do remember liking it very much. I skipped his 2nd solo book (he has also written 5 mysteries with his brother) but decided to read this, his 3rd novel. And I really liked it. I am not normally a fan of magical realism but that seems not so distracting in this story.
Virgil Wander has just taken a header off a cliff into icy Lake Superior when a sudden snowstorm transformed the highway into a skating rink and his car doesn't make the curve. Fortunately for Virgil, one of the citizens of former mining town, Greenstone, Minnesota, happens to be fishing on the shore below him and jumps in the water to pull Virgil out of the sinking car. The story opens as Virgil is coming back to awareness and his wrestling with the aftermath of concussion. His words are fugitive but his neurologist is not too worried.
" 'Don't worry, everything will come back,' said Dr. Koskinen. 'Most things probably will. A good many of them might return. There will be at least a provisional rebound. How does this make you feel?' I wanted to say relieved or encouraged or at least hopeful but none of these were available."
Virgil is the town clerk and also owns a run-down old movie theatre that never makes any money. People are glad he is alive, but he is unsure if he can resume his former life. He feels like an observer and begins to wonder about doing things differently. He also realizes something is off when he starts seeing a man standing on the water's surface of Lake Superior. He tells his neurologist, who just advises Virgil to let him (the Dr.) know if the man gets any closer.
When an elderly, kite-flying Swede, Rune, shows up in Greenstone looking for information about a son he didn't know he had until just a short time ago, Virgil takes him in so he doesn't have to survive the winter in a camper van. Rune's son was fleetingly a minor league baseball prospect but disappeared years ago in a small plane and has never come back. He left behind a lovely wife, Nadine, who Virgil has pined after for years, and a now-teenage son. Rune builds his fantastic, gravity-defying kites and queries people about his son. He is trying to know him in abstentia, and also--hopefully--through his son's son (Rune's grandson).
Another mystical and less benign element is introduced in the person of Adam Leer, a prodigal son of Greenstone with a pretty checkered past in the movie business. Why has he come back and why does (almost) everyone he come in contact with suffer some ill consequences? One of the towns less well-off inhabitants dies in a confrontation with a "homicidal sturgeon" (Kirkus), although that probably wasn't Adam's fault. The mayor wants to revive the town and so a big summer party and parade is planned, with the quirky theme being all the town's past misfortunes. There isn't a lot of action in this story--fishing, kite-flying--but it is rich in character and atmosphere. You feel like you could sit down at the local bar and have a chat over a beer with any of them.
Again, I found this book so endearing that I am tempted to go back and re-read Peace and also read Enger's 2nd book, So Brave, Young, and Handsome. Fine reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and the New York Times calls his prose "rhapsodic, kaleidoscopic."

Maisie Dobbs

Although Jacqueline Winspear never intended for this to be the first of a series, there are now 15 books based on "Maisie Dobbs." Winspear was born in Kent and later emigrated to the U.S. Many of her books are partially set in Kent and she paints a warm and loving picture of the countryside. This is a wonderful series and you must really start from the beginning to get a good picture of how Maisie came to be. Maisie was born the daughter of a costermonger, someone who sells their wares from a barrow or cart. She lost her mother while still young and she and her father have struggled to make ends meet ever since. Her father, known as Frankie, decides to ask at the home of one of his wealthier customers (he sells fresh produce) if they might have room to take Maisie on as a lower level maid. He knows Maisie is smart and he and his wife had originally planned to send Maisie on for an education, so father and daughter are both disappointed but realistic about how Maisie will make her way in the world. However, Maisie's curiosity is insatiable and she gets up in the middle of the night to sneak into the manor house's library and read philosophy. When she is discovered in her clandestine pursuit by the late night homecoming of Lady and Lord Compton, she is sure she will be let go. But Lady Rowan Compton has been encouraged by a family friend, Maurice Blanche, to do more than protest for the rights of women and the poor; she decides, in consultation with Maurice, to have Maurice tutor Maisie and prepare her for college. And they succeed. But just as Maisie is starting at Girton (Cambridge's college for women), WWI is starting and Maisie, feeling compelled to do something to aid soldiers, decides to lie about her age so she can be trained as a nurse, first at a hospital in London, and then she is sent to France. All this we learn in a flashback.
The main thread of the story is set in 1929 London and Maisie is just opening her own business as a psychologist/ private investigator. She has apprenticed for several years with her mentor, Maurice, who has now retired and turned the business over to her. Clients are reluctant about dealing with a woman in such a position, but Maurice's and Lady Rowan's standing in society buys Maisie an introduction and Maisie subsequently convinces people with her own actions. What starts out looking like an inquiry into possible infidelity quickly evolves into an investigation into a "Retreat" that ostensibly provides a haven for injured (physically or mentally) veterans. The wife in question is actually visiting the grave of a man who once stayed there; coincidentally, Lady Rowan's son is considering surrendering his fortune--for that is the requirement--in order to live there as well. So Maisie is doubly motivated to find out whether this is a legitimate enterprise or a scam. She contrives to have the handyman in her office building, Billy Beale, admitted to the Retreat to check it out. Not only does Maisie come face to face with the physical and psychological damage that was wrought on a generation of young men--and some young women such as herself--but it re-opens a painful loss in Maisie's life. Compelling characters, interesting plot, vivid settings, and observations of the changing status of women initiated by the war all make for an engaging read.
Good reviews of Maisie Dobbs : NPR, Publishers Weekly; and lukewarm reviews: Kirkus.

Murder in the Secret Garden

Normally I would start with the first book in the series, but I just picked this up from the used books at the library and it is obvious that I missed a lot of background information from the previous 2 installments in this "Book Retreat" mystery series by Ellery Adams. Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable read and I would certainly read other books by this author...after all, her bio says she owns 3 cats so we are partners in cat love.
The series is set at the book themed resort of Storyton Hall in Virginia. Not only do they have extensive libraries for guests, but they offer wonderful gardens in which to perambulate and outstanding food, including afternoon tea with delicious pastries in the Agatha Christie Tea Room. What's not to like?!
Jane Steward, widowed mother of 7 year old twin boys (Fitzgerald and Hemingway), is the manager and guardian of Storyton, along with a somewhat unusual cohort of staff with special skills who are referred to as the Finns. On the weekend our story opens, Jane is expecting members of the Medieval Herbalist Society as well as a wedding party. The herbalists are interested in Storyton Hall's walled garden. When one of them turns up dead in the river during the 1st annual rubber duck race, and it's determined that she did not drown but was poisoned, Jane and her cohort of guardians begin to investigate. Then a rare book that had been on display in Storyton Hall's library is found stolen from its locked case. A former love interest of Jane's shows up after an unexplained absence of several months and declares his undying affection for Jane, but she is not sure whether he is trustworthy given the rumors of his being a book thief. A reclusive herbalist living off the grid also gets murdered by poisoning when the Medieval Herbalists go to see his locked garden of poisonous plants. There are too many suspects! but the Poison Princess--an expert on poisonous plants--appears to have an airtight alibi. This is a light but engaging read with endearing characters. Cosy mystery and romance fans would appreciate this book.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal

I was unaware of author Jeanette Winterson's fame (the BBC adaptation of her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit won a BAFTA for best drama) when I started this book, although she does talk about it in this straight out memoir of a miserable childhood in an adoptive home and her struggles to form strong close relationships as an adult. "When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.’
 The image of Satan taking time off from the Cold War and McCarthyism to visit Manchester in 1960 – purpose of visit: to deceive Mrs Winterson – has a flamboyant theatricality to it. She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father." Also when she was angry, her mother would beat her, lock her in the coal hole, or lock her outside the house all night. If her father was working night shift, he would let her out/in when he got home. If not, she "sat on the doorstep till the milkman came, drank both pints, left the empty bottles to enrage my mother, and walked to school."
Winterson describes how literature and poetry saved her psychologically as a child and how the creative process of writing saved her as an adult. "To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson’s story I had to be able to tell my own. Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out."
I am generally not a fan of memoirs (with some notable exceptions, like May Sarton's) and it was a struggle to get through this book for me. Still there were some very astute observations that I had to write down.
"Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside--and that structure is built in part by what happened on the outside."
"I love the way cats like to be half in half out, the wild and the tame..."
She describes books as thresholds where the author's story "crosses the threshold from my world into yours."
"Books for me are a home...you open a book and you go inside."
"Unconditional love is what a child should expect even though it rarely works out that way. I didn't have that and I was a very nervous watchful child."
"When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love--its quality--to be unreliable."
"For most of my lie I have behaved in much the same way because that is what I learned about love. Add to that my own wildness and intensity and love becomes pretty dangerous. I never did drugs, I did love--the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak that health."
"I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love."
"It is never too late to learn love. But it is frightening.
When talking about leaving home she said,"You always take it with you. It takes much longer to leave the psychi place than the physical place."
Said that in the post WWII move away from neoliberal economics, in order to rebuild societies, "It was a real advance in human consciousness towards collective responsibility; an understanding that we owed something to each other. Society. Civilisation. Culture."
"The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated."
Glowing reviews abound: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly