1920s » How Mysterious!

Low Light

Oct 182011

I’ve never been to Vegas, or Atlantic City. I don’t like gambling and can’t imagine wasting my time and money on casino thugs. I also don’t like J. Edgar Hoover and think he was just a different kind of thug.

Put all that together, and it’ll be obvious that a book set in Atlantic City and focusing on Hoover and vice lords is not going to be the story for me. Yet Low Light by Stanley J. Cutler was an enlightening — and fun — read.

Elise Connors, the publicist from Outskirts Press who sent me a PDF of the book, described it this way:

A fast-paced thriller about bootleggers, gamblers, gun molls, flappers, IRA gunmen, and anti-Semitic sea captains.

In 1929, top gangsters agreed to cooperate with each other during a week-long meeting in Atlantic City, the sin city of the Jazz Age.

In this richly detailed historical novel, Meyer Lansky and the infamous political boss, Nucky Johnson, enlist an ex-boxer turned studio photographer to take blackmail pictures of the only man who stands in their way – FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

But the story is really about the photographer, Al, who’s engaged to take the blackmail pictures. His wife, Ida, is Meyer Lansky’s cousin, so in exchange for agreeing to take pictures inside Hoover’s hotel room, Al’s going to get a prime location for a vacation photography studio on the boardwalk. Al’s never been a part of the crime circles Meyer runs around in, much less Hoover’s only marginally legal antics, but he’s going to have to navigate through all of it in order to keep his studio and stay out of jail.

I have to admit that reading a PDF copy of a book on my laptop is not ideal, but when I took a trip for work not long ago I flew through this book in no time. If you like historical fiction, especially if you’re like me and really dislike J. Edgar Hoover, you might just enjoy seeing how some gangsters and one formerly innocent photographer manage to take Atlantic City off the FBI’s map.

Book #8 in the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge

The Shadow of the Shadow

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Oct 042011

I read so many books based in the United States that I decided to make my North American entries in the Global Reading Challenge from Canada (easy, Louise Penny) and Mexico (difficult, I didn’t know of any Mexican crime fiction!). I found this fantastic overview of Mexican mysteries and from it selected Paco Ignacio Taibo II as my author, and then I found that my library had a copy of his book, The Shadow of the Shadow (1991).

I knew it was gonna be good when I read the title of the first chapter, “In Which the Characters Play Dominoes” — and they really do. This tongue-in-cheek nature of Taibo’s writing allows him to play with the genre even as he writes a good mystery. The story involves four friends, the journalist, the attorney, the Chinaman (who’s a radical labor organizer), and the poet, who never miss a meeting in a local bar, where they play dominoes and drink to their hearts’ content.

But Mexico City during the 1920s was not the idyllic place suggested by that premise. The poet witnesses a trombonist shot in the middle of a performance. The journalist sees a man falling (pushed?) out a window… and he turns out to be the trombonist’s brother. Tomas, the Chinaman, is trying to help organize a general strike, and the lawyer observes a strange sexual encounter involving a jewel thief. The friends are attacked, shot at, and receive threats, until they finally realize that they must be onto something (although they aren’t sure which one is the target, or why) and marshall their resources to investigate.

Taibo combined real people and events for the backdrop for the story of these fictional friends, and he’s thus able to provide historical and cultural context which makes the story seem real; I especially enjoyed the short (one page or less) chapters called “The Way Things Used to Be,” which provided a bit of each character’s back story, such as the lawyer Verdugo’s moment of glory during a calvary charge in the Revolution. And since I teach in a journalism school you know I’m going to enjoy a book in which the city’s crime reporters band together to go after a corrupt official.

This book was a delight, and I never would have come across it were it not for the Global Reading Challenge. Thanks again to Dorte for organizing it!

Counts toward the 2011 Global Reading Challenge (North America)

Dandy Gilver & the Proper Treatment of Blood Stains

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Jun 192011

Here’s another book from my glorious trip to Foyle’s in London: Catriona McPherson’s Dandy Gilver & the Proper Treatment of Blood Stains (2009). I chose it, of all the many choices, because it was set in Edinburgh (which I love) and because I’d never heard of the series (although after I got home I found that my library has a couple of the books, but not this one).

In this mystery, Dandy receives a letter from a young wife who believes her husband is going to kill her. The only way the aristocratic Dandy can investigate is to sneak into the house by pretending to be Lollie Balfour’s new ladies’ maid. The premise is a good one; Dandy has to take a few lessons from her own maid and is proud when she knows “the proper treatment of blood stains” well enough to teach another maid what to do. The backdrop of Edinburgh’s participation in the 1926 General Strike, and the other servants’ discussion about labor relations, grounded the mystery with a sense of time and place while letting Dandy see the issue from an entirely new point of view.

This is the fifth book in the series, and I did feel that I was missing a bit by not being familiar with the earlier books — I had to spend a little time sorting out who some of the characters were, including some never met but mentioned — but the mystery stands alone. Dandy’s mission quickly changes when the accused man is killed in his own bed. She tries to identify the killer by process of elimination, figuring who was where when, but she’s frequently led off track by servants who don’t regret their master’s demise.

I don’t know about the rest of the series, but this book was a cut above the typical cozy because of the social commentary provided by the discussion of the strike. I not only enjoyed the resolution of the mystery, I also learned something.

Counts toward the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge

Murder on the Cliffs

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Mar 042011

I first heard about Joanna Challis’s Murder on the Cliffs (2009) on S. Krishna’s Books, where she talked about Daphne du Maurier as crime solver. I had to try it for a couple of reasons: first, because I loved Stephanie Barron’s series with Jane Austen as detective, second because I last year finally got around to reading and watching Rebecca, du Maurier’s best known book. It turns out those are both good reasons to read Challis’s book.

The mystery surrounds the death of Victoria Bastion, a beautiful yet apparently wild young woman, who as maid at Padthaway becomes engaged to Lord David Hartley. Daphne, who’s visiting her mother’s former nurse so that she can explore the old documents in the local abbey, is among the first to find the body, along with David’s (possibly mad) younger sister, Lianne. Daphne is appalled by the death, yet she can’t help being intrigued by the mystery, the manor house filled with odd family members and a dreadful housekeeper (yes, the inspiration for Mrs. Danvers). Although her parents want her to come home, she stays to help investigate.

The book is a lot more fun to read if you’re familiar with Rebecca (a scene in which Mrs. Trehearn shows Daphne and Lianne Victoria’s bedroom, for example, makes sense within the plot but has a whole other level of understanding if you remember the similar scene in Rebecca), but it’s also fun if — reminiscent of Barron’s Austen series — you just happen to like reading about a headstrong author and woman who thrills to the prospect of solving a mystery.

Book #3 in the Strong Heroine Reading Challenge