In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson.

New York: Avon, 1999. $24.00

Inspector Alan Banks’ tenth excursion into the murky depths of human frailty plunges him into a frightening midlife crisis. One blistering hot Yorkshire day, Banks realizes that the soothing Santorini blue paint he’s applying to the walls of his new cottage’s sitting room reminds him of the last holiday he took with his now estranged wife Sandra. Two unsettling phone calls deepen his blues into pure funk. Banks’ son Brian tells him he’s tossing over his architectural training for a stab at becoming a rock musician, which turns Banks (he realizes with horror) into a snarling replica of his own father. Then Banks’ bullying superior, Chief Inspector Riddle, assigns him to investigate a heap of old bones found at the bottom of the dried up Thornfield Reservoir.

Riddle has kept him chained to his desk in career Siberia for months. Suspecting this case will sabotage him forever, Banks nonetheless sets out for the rural Yorkshire Dales where, in the course of solving the case, he discovers that he has become his own worst enemy. Robinson’s exquisite eye for detail and his sure hand at creating highly complex and convincing characters have never been more keenly employed. He skillfully pits the efforts of his totally appealing, all too vulnerable Inspector Banks against the shifting sands of the past as he attempts to solve a murder committed during World War II, through listening to the absorbing recollections of an intriguing elderly woman. This unusual narrative device results in two intertwined story strands that together make for a satisfying whole.

Robinson also crisply introduces a new romantic interest for Banks, the intuitive Detective Sergeant Annie Cabbot, whose attraction to Banks counterpoints Banks’ simultaneous quests to solve a 50 year old crime and pull himself together. Instead of feeling sorry for himself during one of the most depressing stages of his life, he begins to realizes that the ability to take responsibility—which he learned the hard way—is not a burden, but a strength. That kind of meticulously drawn psychological insight—firmly based on a Yorkshire-tough set of moral values—makes the stories Robinson weaves around Alan Banks some of the most invigorating and multifaceted ones appearing today.

London: Allison & Busby, 1999. £9.99

Now available in convenient paperback omnibus editions, these delectable novels offer a veritable feast of detecting. Bond’s cast of cleverly conceived characters is led by the eponymous Monsieur Aristide Pamplemousse (Pamplemousse—whose surname literally means grapefruit.). Forced into early retirement from the Paris Sûreté ‚ over some alleged hanky-panky with a number of Folies-Bergère showgirls (after which the phrase "doing a Pamplemousse" became—among his former colleagues—synonymous with scandalous behavior), Monsieur Pamplemousse now works as an inspector of hotels and restaurants for the illustrious Le Guide, the definitive word on sacred French cuisine at its most haute. Pamplemousse’s boss, le Directeur, Henri Leclercq, embroils Monsieur Pamplemousse in one seething scrape after another. Usually this involves extricating the well-meaning but bumptious Leclercq from compromising situations the director’s wife, Chantal, would find offensive, if not litigious.

Monsieur Pamplemousse’s partner in all his misadventures is Pommes Frites, his lugubriously cerebral bloodhound who, after being made redundant from the Sûreté’s elite Division Chiens, was awarded to Monsieur Pamplemousse as a going-away gift. Bonded like Super Glue to his master, the epicurean Pommes Frites observes, tracks, cogitates, and rescues. And, most importantly, looks after Pamplemousse.

Monsieur Pamplemousse Stands Firm (1992) is a wicked title if ever there was one. Ostensibly yielding to feminist pressures, le Directeur assigns Monsieur Pamplemousse and to test out the first female candidate for Le Guide’s staff of inspectors—brassy, bosomy, highly suggestive Elsie from England, the director’s former au pair. With Pommes Frites in the back seat exhaling garlicky fumes from his lunch of saucission à l’ail, Monsieur Pamplemousse and Elsie hurtle into the dunes of the Côte d’Argent, embarking on a hilarious excursion involving an art theft during World War II. Monsieur Pamplemousse’s investigations land him on one of the area’s fabled nude beaches, equipped with only a hat and a camera—a side-splitting exercise in classic farce.

In Monsieur Pamplemousse on Location (1992), Monsieur Pamplemousse is sent to a film set as gastronomic advisor for a series of perfume commercials based on Biblical scenes of "lust and gluttony," and filmed by the renowned De Millean director, Von Strudel. The cast includes British hard rock idol Brother Angelo (né Ron Pickles) as Jesus Christ—so foul-mouthed he had to have a bleeper surgically implanted in his throat. When Pommes Frites is inadvertently filmed sprinkling a papier-mâché‚ palm tree, Von Strudel is so impressed ("Zat hund ist ein genius!") he installs Pommes Frites in his own top-billing trailer, leaving Monsieur Pamplemousse temporarily alone to investigate the disappearance of Brother Angelo, who vanishes from the tomb just after the crucifixion scene.

In Monsieur Pamplemousse Takes the Train (1993), le directeur charges Monsieur Pamplemousse with escorting the beautiful daughter of a reigning Sicilian Mafia godfather, from Rome to Paris. The girl—on holiday from her convent school where she is a "corrupting influence"—eludes her erstwhile temporary chaperone in order to set herself up as the Madame of a high-class bordello staffed by her former convent classmates. Monsieur Pamplemousse and Pommes Frites must find her before the news reaches her very dangerous father.

Sly punctures of the stuffiest sacred cows of French and English culture, along with heady cooking tips (the sort that can make the simplest scrambled eggs a vision of gastronomic heaven) give the Monsieur Pamplemousse novels a delicious charm all their own. Not a page passes without a well-earned chuckle, a guffaw, or a fit of the giggles—a tribute indeed to Michael Bond, a Cordon bleu master of the incongruous.

by Charles Todd.

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. $24.95

Nightmares abound in Todd’s latest mystery. It’s the tale of two children gone missing from a railway station in post-World War I Dorset, the murder of their mother (whose neatly laid-out body is discovered in a cornfield near Singleton Magna), and Bert Mowbray, a shell-shocked veteran who is locked up for the murder. Todd’s fragile hero, Inspector Ian Rutledge, constantly carries his own waking nightmare. A British officer during the Great War, he had been forced to execute one of his own men, Hamish, for refusing a direct order in battle. Rutledge had spent the night before the execution talking with Hamish, and now that he is back in his Scotland Yard harness, Hamish’s bitter, jeering voice whispers, growls, and occasionally glimmers with Gaelic insight just at the edge Rutledge’s tired consciousness.

When Rutledge arrives in Dorset, the case seems nearly solved. Mowbray, on his way to find work, thought he had seen his wife and children on the Singleton Magna railway platform—the wife and children who had died in a bomb blast while he was fighting on the Western Front. Deranged with grief, he cannot remember whether he killed the woman he thought was his wife. Rutledge defies the advice of his superiors, the opinions of the local police, and the conventional wisdom that has already condemned Mowbray before his trial. In his painstaking search for the missing children, Rutledge uncovers old, old nightmares that, like his own, all ultimately concern love—love of men for women, love of family, love of country. People, Rutledge knows, both die and kill for love.

As in his previous Rutledge novels, Wings of Fire and A Test of Wills, Todd’s finely crafted post-war atmosphere, his superb exploration of human motives, his deftly sketched supporting cast, and a challenging plot are rewardingly combined here as he compassionately probes the dark scars left by nearly unbearable psychological wounds. But the best thing about Search the Dark is Ian Rutledge. Gentle when he can be, relentless when he must be, tormented he cannot help but be, Todd’s Ian Rutledge is as fine a piece of literary work as appears today.

—Mitzi M. Brunsdale

London: Faber & Faber, 1999. £16.99

Crime writers have to be disingenuous. It’s their stock-in-trade. When P.D. James writes that when asked to name writers of detective fiction "many people . . . would begin with Agatha Christie and probably go on to Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and, today, Ruth Rendell and a score of other well-known women crime writers here and in the United States" she is being, well, lets just say "economical with the truth." The subtext, whether she admits it or not, is "me, me." P.D. James, a.k.a. Phyllis James or The Baroness James of Notting Hill is the best known crime writer of her generation. As this elegantly composed autobiographical fragment makes clear, hers is a belated triumph preceded by an upbringing and marriage both blighted by reduced circumstances, mental instability, and illness. Her husband came back from the war a sick man and died young. She had to pursue other careers to make ends meet, therefore her first book came late and her prodigious success later still.

As she approaches her 80th birthday she appears to the casual or outside observer to be the Grand Old Dame of English Crime to the manner born. This is not entirely the case. Beneath that cosy aunty-ish exterior there is a soul of steel. This isn’t to say that she is an unpleasant person. Far from it. She is a charitable Christian who has much sympathy for those less fortunate than herself. However, she has also been toughened by having to make her way to success unassisted.

The book’s form enables her to retain control, just as she does in her detective stories. The bones are the diary of a single year between her 78th and 79th birthdays. Throughout the year she hangs memories of the past on selected dates. For instance, on December 1st she writes, "It was on this date seven years ago that I learned I was to receive a life peerage." It’s a great throw-away line and, like the book as a whole, says everything and nothing at one and the same time.

One of her reasons for writing this book was to forestall the increasing number of Ph.D. students and others determined to write her biography. It is true that she has gotten in first and done so with characteristic style and perception. But she conceals as much as she reveals even though there are many gems in the book. I particularly like a rather chilling list of eight rules for reviewers which includes the golden admonition "Always read the whole of the book before you write your review." This I have done. I have also known the author for more than twenty years. As a result I feel I should know her better than most. However, after reading the book I feel that I now know her less well than I did before beginning chapter one of both the book and our acquaintanceship.

That is, after all, the mark of a truly skilled crime writer. She plays her cards with the utmost skill, displaying some with a disarming bravura but keeping others tantalisingly close to her chest. At the end of the day the question is "Who is P.D. James?" and the answer, despite all the clues and all the evidence, is "I’m still not sure."

by Deborah Crombie.

New York: Bantam Books, 1999. $23.95

Atmosphere abounds in Crombie’s sixth Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James Scotland Yard procedural. Good as Crombie is at conveying the claustrophobic clannishness of today’s English villages, she outdoes herself here in portraying the folk and feel of East London’s docklands, an old warehouse district known as "the Isle of Dogs" situated on a loop of the Thames just across from the Royal Naval College and the great tea-clipper Cutty Sark.

One of the warehouses is filled with exotic teas from the Far East. It belongs to Annabelle Hammond, an ambitious and stubborn young businesswoman whose unforgettable looks mask a brilliant mercantile mind. When her stylishly suited body is discovered one morning in Mudchute Park, Detective Superintendent Kincaid and his partner and lover Gemma James have to probe far into the history of the docklands to uncover their suspects’ motives. At the same time, both Kincaid and Gemma are facing harsh challenges as single parents which threaten to draw them apart.

Kincaid has recently learned he fathered a son, Kit, who is now eleven years old. He had planned a special weekend to reveal this to Kit, however, the murder investigation shatters those plans and the boy’s affection for Duncan as well. Meanwhile Gemma, struggling to raise her young son on a sergeant’s income and a policewoman’s dicey schedule, is beginning to create her own future—which may or may not include Kincaid. Crombie spins a wicked plot, full of well-positioned red herrings and handsomely realized characters. Her most striking achievement, however, is her development of the thoroughly realistic relationship between Duncan and Gemma, chronicled with sensitivity and warmth and a touch of 90s bitters.

With wit and a finely-tuned ear for idiom and personality, Crombie makes these likeable, vulnerable people jump off the page into their own niches in our memory, and into our hearts like troubled friends whose problems we wish we could solve, but can’t.

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—Mitzi M. Brunsdale

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