Saph

Last time I got the chance to hang out with raven, about a year ago -- there would have been another time recently but, alas!, airline crimes interfered -- I ended up with two books shoved into my hands: Mavis Doriel Hay's Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell.

I was not particularly familiar with Hay's game before this; she falls squarely in the Golden Age but only ever published three novels before focusing all her attention on Rural British Handicrafts. raven is right however that these books are both very fun and worthy of attention for their structure: neither of them have a kind of traditional primary detective figure, and both of them instead focus on a group of people in the murder victim's broader community who sort of collectively solve the crime by bouncing against each other in various directions until the right information comes to light.

In Murder Underground, the unloved landlady of a boarding house is found murdered on the subway, and her Bertie Wooster of a nephew promptly bumbles his way all over the crime scene and makes himself prime suspect number one (Dorothy Sayers, in her review, called this man one of the most feckless, exasperating and lifelike literary men that ever confused a trail and I couldn't put it better! god bless!) We spend a good chunk of the book following the Feckless Nephew and another good chunk just hanging out with the people who live in the boarding house, all of whom have Opinions, Mostly Incorrect.

Death on the Cherwell has some returning characters from Murder Underground but mostly focuses on a group of Young Lady Students who have been having an inaugural meeting for their we-hate-and-curse-our-bursar club when they happen to see said bursar floating down the river in a boat, presumably pre-cursed because she's very obviously dead. The police detective on the case has more to do in this one but the charm of the book is all in the Young Lady Students bopping around trying to investigate on their own, annoying various of their friends and relations in the process.

Hay has also written a third book that I've not yet read and I'm curious to see if it leans as much as these two into the ensemble and the way that a whole community can become stakeholders in A Murder Problem. In the meantime, raven has encouraged me to pass these along to another good home if anyone else would like them! ETA and they are CLAIMED

(As always when reading Golden Age mysteries one is inevitably going to run into some classic Golden Age racism, and in this case it would be remiss of me not to mention that Death on the Cherwell has some opinions about Eastern Europe ... ah, those excitable Yugoslavians! A Yugoslavian Young Lady Student MIGHT declare blood feud against one of her admins. Who Could Say. We Just Don't Know.)

Everything I've previously read by M.T. Anderson emotionally devastated me, so I despite the fact that Nicked was billed as a comedy I went in bravely prepared to be emotionally devastated once again.

This did not happen .... although M.T. Anderson cannot stop himself from wielding a sharp knife on occasion, it it turns out the book is indeed mostly a comedy .....

Nicked is based on a Real Historical Medieval Heist: the city of Bari is plague-ridden, and due to various political pressures the City's powers have decided that the way to resolve this is to steal the bones of St. Nicholas from their home in Myra and bring them to Bari to heal the sick, revive the tourism trade, and generally boost the city's fortunes. The central figures on this quest are Nicephorus, a very nice young monk who had the dubious fortune of receiving a dream about St. Nicholas that might possibly serve as some sort of justification for this endeavor, and Tyun, a professional relic hunter (or con artist? Who Could Say) who is not at really very nice at all but is Very Charismatic And Sexy, which is A Problem for Nicephorus.

The two books that Nicked kept reminding me of, as I read it, were Pratchett's Small Gods and Tolmie's All the Horses of Iceland. Both of those books are slightly better books than this, but as both of them are indeed exceptionally good books I don't think it takes too much away from Nicked to say that it's not quite on their level: it's still really very fun! And, unlike in those other somewhat better books, the unlikely companions do indeed get to make out!

I did end it, unsurprisingly, desperately wanting to know more about the sources on which it was based to know what we do know about this Real Historical Medieval Heist, but it turns out they are mostly not translated into English. Foiled again!

On a lighter Parisian note, I read my first Katherine Rundell book, Rooftoppers, which I would have ADORED at age ten but also found extremely fun at age forty!

The heroine of Rooftoppers is orphan Sophie, found floating in a cello case the English Channel after a terrible shipwreck and adopted by a charming eccentric named Charles who raises her on Shakespeare and Free Spirited Inquiry. Unfortunately the English authorities do not approve of children being raised on Shakespeare and Free Spirited Inquiry, so when they threaten to remove Sophie to an orphanage, Charles and Sophie buy themselves time by fleeing to Paris in an attempt to track down traces of Sophie's parentage.

Sophie is stubbornly convinced she might have a mother somewhere out there who survived the shipwreck! Charles is less convinced, but willing to be supportive. On account of the Authorities, however, Charles advises Sophie to stay in the hotel while he pursues the investigation -- but Sophie will not be confined! So she starts pursuing her own investigations via the hotel roof, where she rapidly collides with Matteo, an extremely feral child who claims ownership of the Paris roofs and Does Not Want want Sophie intruding.

But of course eventually Sophie wins Matteo over and is welcomed into the world of the Rooftoppers, Parisian children who have fled from orphanages in favor of leaping from spire to steeple, stealing scraps and shooting pigeons (but also sometimes befriending the pigeons) and generally making a self-sufficient sort of life for themselves in the Most Scenic Surroundings in the World. The book makes it quite clear that the Rooftoppers are often cold and hungry and smelly and the whole thing is no bed of roses, while nonetheless fully and joyously indulging in the tropey delight of secret! hyper-competent! child! rooftop! society!!

The book as a whole strikes a lovely tonal balance just on the edge of fairy tale -- everything is very technically plausible and nothing is actually magic, but also, you know, the central image of the book is a gang of rooftop Lost Kids chasing the haunting sound of cello music over the roof of the Palais de Justice. The ending I think does not make the mistake of trying to resolve too much, and overall I found it a really charming experience.

Sometimes I think that if I ever gain full comprehension of the various upheavals and rapid-fire political rotations that followed in the hundred years after the French Revolution, my mind will at that point be big and powerful enough to understand any other bit of history that anyone can throw at me. Prior to reading Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, I knew that in the 1870s there had briefly been a Paris Commune, and also a siege, and hot air balloons and Victor Hugo were involved in these events somehow but I had not actually understood that these were actually Two Separate Events and that properly speaking there were two Sieges of Paris, because everyone in Paris was so angry about the disaster that was the first Siege (besiegers: Prussia) that they immediately seceded from the government, declared a commune, and got besieged again (besiegers: the rest of France, or more specifically the patched-together French government that had just signed a peace treaty with Prussia but had not yet fully decided whether to be a monarchy again, a constitutional monarchy again, or a Republic again.)

As a book, Paris in Ruins has a bit of a tricky task. Its argument is that the miserable events in Paris of 1870-71 -- double siege, brutal political violence, leftists and political reformers who'd hoped for the end of the Glittering and Civilized but Ultimately Authoritarian Napoleon III Empire getting their wish in the most monkey's paw fashion imaginable -- had a lasting psychological impact on the artists who would end up forming the Impressionist movement that expressed itself through their art. Certainly true! Hard to imagine it wouldn't! But in order to tell this story it has to spend half the book just explaining the Siege and the Commune, and the problem is that although the Siege and the Commune certainly impacted the artists, the artists didn't really have much impact on the Siege and the Commune ... so reading the 25-50% section of the book is like, 'okay! so, you have to remember, the vast majority of the people in Paris right now were working class and starving and experiencing miserable conditions, which really sets the stage for what comes next! and what about Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet, our protagonists? well, they were not working class. but they were in Paris, and not having a good time, and depressed!' and then the 50-75% section is like 'well, now the working class in Paris were furious, and here's all the things that happened about that! and what about Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet, our protagonists? well, they were not in Paris any more at this point. But they were still not having a good time and still depressed!'

Sieges and plagues are the parts of history that scare me the most and so of course I am always finding myself compelled to read about them; also, I really appreciate history that engages with the relationship between art and the surrounding political and cultural phenomena that shapes and is shaped by it. So I appreciated this book very much even though I don't think it quite succeeds at this task, in large part because there is just so much to say in explaining The Siege and The Commune that it struggles sometimes to keep it focused through its chosen lens. But I did learn a lot, if sometimes somewhat separately, about both the Impressionists and the sociopolitical environment of France in the back half of the 19th century, and I am glad to have done so. I feel like I have a moderate understanding of dramatic French upheavals of the 1860s-80s now, to add to my moderate understanding of French upheavals in the 1780s-90s (the Revolution era) and my moderate understanding of French upheavals in the 1830s-40s (the Les Mis era) which only leaves me about six or seven more decades in between to try and comprehend.