SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Where else but Dublin might you find a James Joyce scholar dead, and Det. Supt. Peter McGarr and the Murder Squad of the Garda Siochana reading Ulysses, and occasionally Samuel Beckett, in an effort to understand what led to his death? This is, no doubt, the only murder mystery ever written which takes so seriously the conflict between James Joyce, who was committed to writing “novels of competence,” and Samuel Beckett, who believed totally in “the novel of incompetence,” a conflict which also involved the literature scholars and critics at Trinity College who were as partisan as the two novelists. As esoteric as this sounds, author Bartholomew Gill has a field day here, creating characters who do more than just live and breathe—they live riotously, get roaring drunk, have wild and sometimes hilarious love affairs, wear their hearts and emotions on their sleeves, love their country and its history to the depths of their being, and, though they take their jobs seriously, they see them as just one part of real life. Gill includes lively and wonderfully droll conversations throughout–the teasing and byplay one expects of close and caring relationships–both at the Garda station among his repeating characters and at home. And when Det. Hugh Ward and Det. Ruthie Bresnahan finally “discover” each other, one of the highlights of this novel, their love scenes are as hilarious as they are steamy. My favorite of this series.

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Julian Trevelyan-Tubal, the second son of Sir Harry, is now the eleventh generation of Tubals to have run the family’s bank, an old and prestigious institution which has, now, not surprisingly, fallen victim to the same deteriorating economic forces as every other bank and investment company in London and around the world. With Sir Harry in Antibes, where he is recuperating from a stroke, Julian has been responsible for managing the “firm.” Julian wants to accept an offer to sell the bank to an American, Cy Mannheim, but he has found it necessary to borrow two hundred fifty million pounds from the family trust for a limited time to shore up the bank, which now has eight hundred million pounds worth of toxic assets and useless mortgages in territories the bank has never even visited. Justin Cartwright, an award-winning author who was born and grew up in South Africa and now lives in London, uses his dry wit and sense of satire to tell the story of the Tubals, a family which has few inner resources to deal with the crisis the bank is facing: “The money simply imploded. It no longer exists. Nobody can explain it.”

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Not a traditional mystery, Kate Atkinson’s third Jackson Brodie novel grows instead out of the terrible traumas that children and young people must endure when people they love die violently. So marked are they by their sudden tragedies, that they never really escape their pasts, and spend the rest of their lives wondering “when will there be good news.” Five separate plot lines evolve and begin to overlap here, and in each of these plots the main characters are all needy people hiding an inner loneliness from which they would like to escape. In the first plot, Joanna Mason Hunter is a physician living in Edinburgh, the happily married mother of a one-year-old, a woman who appears to have it all, but thirty years ago, she escaped a slashing attack which murdered her mother, sister, and baby brother. Though she seems to have put her past to rest, the murderer of her family is about to be released from jail. Jackson appears on the scene when he is nearly killed in a train crash on the way to Edinburgh. The narrative speeds along, ironies abound, and mistaken identities create some bizarre and sometimes darkly humorous scenes.

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In a book that is pure unadulterated fun, Kate Atkinson creates her second Jackson Brodie mystery (2006), featuring a series of bizarre characters, all involved with murder–either planning it, committing it, or trying to avoid it. Many seemingly unrelated characters, involved in several seemingly unrelated plot lines, make their appearance in the first fifty pages. In the main plot line, an Edinburgh automobile accident leaves “Paul Bradley,” a mysterious man and innocent victim, at the mercy of a crazed, baseball bat-wielding Honda driver. A witness, Martin Canning, the timid writer of Nina Riley mystery stories, reacts instinctively to the impending carnage, hurling his laptop at the Honda driver and saving “Paul Bradley” from certain death. A second set of characters revolves around Graham Hatter, the wealthy developer of Hatter Homes, who is in trouble for bribery, money laundering, and fraud in the building of cheap tract houses. Jackson Brodie, former cop and private investigator, in Edinburgh for a drama festival in which his girlfriend is involved, introduces a third plot line when he discovers a woman’s body on the rocks beside the ocean.

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Darlng Jim has every characteristic that I usually avoid in novels–it’s melodramatic, gothic, completely unrealistic, filled with horror and romance and magic, and over-the-top with coincidence, bloody medieval battles, and men turning into wolves. And I enjoyed every minute of it! From the opening pages to the absolutely perfect (and perfectly outrageous) ending, I was under its spell, smiling at the author’s deliberate manipulation of my feelings, his unembarrassed use of well-worn plot devices, and his comic book style of narrative which kept the action coming and coming and coming—a book to be read for pure, unadulterated fun! Danish author Christian Moerk “breaks the rules” by setting this terrific story in Ireland, both contemporary and ancient, and does so with panache and flair–and with a huge smile on his face.

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