Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce solves another one

 A Red Herring Without Mustard, published in 2011, is Alan Bradley's third Flavia de Luce mystery. He published the first, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, in 2008 when he was 68 years old. A former radio and television engineer and screenwriter, he'd published a memoir and non-fiction book when his wife suggested he write something new about the "girl on the camp stool," a minor character who had emerged in the novel he was working on. 

He entered the UK's Debut Dagger contest by submitting fifteen pages about the girl, now named Flavia de Luce, and an outline for the mystery. Bradley, a Canadian, set the book in England despite having never been there. The book won and eleven-year-old Flavia was so popular there are now a dozen mysteries in the series, the most recent published in 2024 although Flavia has not aged.

The books are set in the fictional English village of Bishop's Lacey in 1950. Flavia lives with two older sisters and her father, the family man-of-all-work Dogger, and the part-time housekeeper and cook Mrs. Mullet in a decaying manor home called Buckshaw. Flavia's dad, Colonel de Luce, passes most of his time alone, collecting stamps and listening to music. Ophelia, the eldest sister, prides herself on her appearance and spends most of her time, according to Flavia, looking in the mirror. Daphne, the middle sister, has her nose stuck in a book. Flavia's mother died during a mountain-climbing trip in Tibet when Flavia was small, and her dad has managed to hold the family together although money is tight and the large, decaying country house needs major repairs. 

Flavia narrates the two books in the series I've read. Can you say "precocious"? Although she does not seem to have gone to school, she has absorbed books in the house's extensive library and taken as her own the laboratory in the house that some dead ancestor set up. She knows a great deal of chemistry with a special interest in poisons and will use the knowledge to torment her sisters and solve murders.

Can you say "nosy"? Flavia is willing to poke about Buckshaw, its extensive grounds, the village of Bishop's Lacy, and the surrounding area in an effort to understand—unravel—a series of incidents. In A Red Herring Without Mustard these include a bashed gypsy woman, a dead baby, a dead forger hung on a statue, and much more. Indeed, some readers complain that there is too much.

Can you say "fearless"? Perhaps because she is only eleven Flavia cannot visualize being harmed except possibly by her sisters who early in Red Herring put a sack over her head, throw her into the basement, and interrogate her. Ophelia and Daphne know how to scare her, but Flavia knows how to revenge herself. Nevertheless, she has a moral sense. She knows right from wrong and does her best to do right.

If any of this sounds like it appeals—and it must appeal to a great many people or there wouldn't be a book series, plus a TV series and a movie in production—and if you haven't read Flavia's stories, you might give it a try. Bradley says he feels no difference in approach to writing children’s stories and lifestyle and arts columns to writing adult stories. “In all of these genres—I hate that word!—there’s a need to avoid nastiness and to write from a pure heart. There are enough problems in the world without inventing more. The Golden Age detective story is arm’s-length enough from reality to fulfill the reader’s need for gruesomeness, without any real offense.” 

Making a better world in rural New Zealand

Eleanor Catton tells her story Birnam Wood by means of four points of view: Mira, Shelley, Tony, and Robert Lemoine. There are couple others but they are minor. One of the novel's pleasures is the way Catton shifts point of view without chapter breaks and without losing the reader.

The novel is set in New Zealand's fictional Korowai National Park and a farm that abuts it. "Birnam Wood" is the name of an ecological (essentially communist), activist collective that plants vegetables wherever the members can get away with doing so—friends' yards, vacant lots, and public lands where they won't be noticed. They sell, eat, and donate the produce.

Although Birnam Wood is ostensibly leaderless, 29-year-old Mira, a trained horticulturalist, is the leader and one of the founders. Shelley is a little younger than Mira and another founder; if Mira is the group's spark plug Shelley is the oil that keeps it running smoothly. Tony, and another founder, has been in Mexico teaching English for the five years before the book opens. He's back, at loose ends, and uneasy about reconnecting with Birnam Wood because his departure for Mexico was awkward. 

Robert Lemoine, in his mid-40s, is an American billionaire, a founder of Automoto, a Silicon Valley technology company that, among other things manufactures drones. Lemoine plans to buy the farm and build a bunker that will withstand the nuclear winter that comes with nuclear war. Beware of Americans bearing checkbooks.

The book is a pleasure because each character clearly wants something and tries to get  it. Mira wants to put Birnam Wood on a solid financial base; if it improves the world so much the better. Shelley wants to stop playing second fiddle to Mira and do something else. Idealistic Tony wants to write an article that will expose the corruption and perfidy of New Zealand's government. Lemoine wants to increase his billions. What the characters do—or don't do—to obtain what they want leads plausibly and naturally to conflict.

Birnam Wood is worth reading slowly to savor Catton's writing, long blocks of prose broken by spurts of dialogue. She includes descriptions of events in the characters' biographies, but I never bumped on these as data dumps or "exposition"; somehow the memories, histories, past events felt natural as I reached them. The book is interesting also for Catton's ability to evoke the New Zealand landscape and the three young characters' feelings about the country. Birnam Wood from the title to the last sentence is a remarkable piece of fiction.

One account of student life in a Kyoto university

Given my interest in Japan and things Japanese with a special interest in the literature, I wanted to like Tomihiko Morimi's The Tatami Galaxy translated by Emily Balistrieri. I really wanted to engage with . . . learn from . . . enjoy the novel.

Balistrieri is a Morimi fan. She discovered him one day when she realized she didn't have a book to read on a train. "I went into the bookstore inside the JR gate at Shinjuku Station for a quick fix. Swayed by the cute cover and the fact that it won a science fiction prize, I picked up Morimi's Penguin Highway (now available in English translation by Andrew Cunningham). After finishing it, I went straight to another bookstore and bought every single title by Morimi they had."

A generally favorable comment about The Tatami Galaxy by Gianni Washington concludes, "The decision to leave the narrator without a name was wise as he is clearly a proxy (a term you will come across repeatedly in this book) for all of us. He discovers that it is never too late to live a better life, even if that life doesn’t look exactly the way you think it should. A combination of making the best of what is and keeping your eyes wide open for the next opportunity, however small, is Morimi’s simple, yet potent recipe for positive change. No matter your stage of life, it’s fool-proof."

The book may make that case but I'll never know. I couldn't finish.

The text has four parts. Each part appears to cover the same events and involve the same characters with relatively small changes. The protagonist narrator is a junior in an unnamed Kyoto university. (Morimi attended Kyoto University.) He lives in a run-down dormitory and appears to have only one friend, Ozu.

"Because [Ozu] hated vegetables and ate only instant foods, his face was such a creepy color it looked like he'd been living on the far side of the moon. . . Ozu kicked those who were down and buttered up anyone stronger than him. He was selfish and arrogant, lazy and contrary . . . There was not a single praiseworthy bone in his body." With a friend like that, who needs enemies?

The narrator, who seems to have no parents, siblings, or relatives whines repeatedly that his university experience is not what he anticipated. I was willing to stick with him through the first section, became impatient in the second section which repeats word for word paragraphs from the first section, and gave up in the third when it appeared the author was going to cover essentially the same material with small variations.

This is not Rashomon in which different narrators give different versions of the same event. The narrator in The Tatami Galaxy does not seem to change much in each section. But again, don't hold me to this because I read only the first two and the beginning of the third. I am sure other, more patient readers, will do better. 

Don't speak of the abuse. Keep the usual silence

An acquaintance of mine, Jenny Milchman, has published a new mystery, The Usual Silence. Drawing on her own background Jenny has created an engaging new protagonist, a psychologist who treats troubled children.

Jenny writes that when she was nine years old and walking with her younger brother in her suburban town "I felt something from behind. A hand where it should not have been on my body." She didn't know what was happening but "something felt very, very wrong. Whoever was behind me continued to trail along at our heels. Not letting himself be seen. And not letting go."

The children ducked into a pet store where there was a clerk and pretended to browse until the man—it was a man—left. Back home Jenny told her parents who called the police. "I remember driving around in a cop car, although we never saw the man. I didn’t recall what he looked like well enough to give a reliable report. I now realize how lucky I am in many ways."

Jenny's new creation, Arles Shepherd, treats troubled children while struggling to recover from her own traumatic past, much of which she's lost over time. Jenny writes "Arles is a character who’s good at amplifying the voices of her clients, but struggles with speaking up for herself. It’s a daily battle for her, but one she intends to win. So she fights. Every day. And when the biggest danger of all appears, at the end of the story, she is ready.

"Arles had to fight bigger battles than I did, if such rankings should even be a thing. I admire her greatly for what she survived, just as I admire every survivor out there. And I think we all can play a role in encouraging each other to speak up."

Arles has set up a new kind of treatment center in the Adirondack mountains and The Usual Silence involves two mysteries. One is a ten-year-old local boy who has never spoken a word—or so his mother believes. The other is a twelve-year-old girl a couple hundred miles south who gets off the school bus one afternoon—and vanishes. No clues, no witnesses and the police are baffled. 

One of the many satisfactions of the book, and there are a great many, is how Jenny finally connects the events downstate with the center in the Adirondacks. She writes that her own memory as a menaced nine-year-old "lives on, decades later, as poison. It’s a there-but-for-the-grace-go-I memory for me. I think of those who have faced encounters that didn’t end so well. That’s maybe why I wrote my book. I wrote myself into it and what could’ve been if it hadn’t turned out as it did." Readers of The Usual Silence will be pleased it does.

An evocation of a certain upper class Indian life

Although Mr. Niyogi’s Last Audit is set in Bengaluru, a large city in southern India, there is nothing particularly “Indian” about the story other than the names: Kiran Singh, Mr. Niyogi’s associate; Archana, his daughter; Ramani, his wife; Mr. Saran, the chairman of Saran Airlines, his former employer, and more. With small tweaks it could have been set in New York, London, or Tokyo.

Mr. Niyogi, now retired and plagued by Parkinson’s disease, had grown elderly as Saran Airlines had grown into an international travel conglomerate where Mr. Niyogi was the lead  accountant. Archana learns that a friend’s son has been stranded with 200 other miners on a tiny island in the Maldives when their employer went bankrupt. Can Mr. Niyogi do something?

It seems unlikely. Author S.N. Rao describes the effects of Parkinson’s, which cannot be cured. Palliative measures can give some brief relief, and the author describes these—twice. It’s an ugly, mortifying way to die.

Mr. Niyogi. troubled by a mysterious voice begging him for help escaping the island, comes up with a plan. I was troubled by this supernatural voice and think the author missed an opportunity to make more of it and its effect on Mr. Niyogi.

I was also troubled by Mr. Niyogi’s decision to hide his plan from his loving wife. It requires his daughter’s collusion, and he tells her, her mother “is already under a lot of stress worrying about my health. I don’t want to put her under more stress. As much as I want to do this, I don’t know if I will have the courage if your Mom is completely against it.” This may be an Indian thing, but I don’t think so.

Finally, a small thing. I bumped on the written formality when people talk. ““I did not [rather than ‘didn’t’] want to trouble you any more than I already have, and that is [that’s] why I kept it hidden from you too all this time. But now I need your help, and there is [there’s] no one else I can ask.” Perhaps this is the way an elderly Indian man would talk to his daughter, but it runs through the book and sounds stiff and unnatural.

Nevertheless Mr. Niyogi’s Last Audit is an interesting evocation of a certain upper class Indian life. 

Okay, why should I write a novel?

While most of the 18 essays in The Next Draft are interesting, I thought Suzanne Berne's superior: "Why Write a Novel? Why Read a Novel? And Why Now?"

Edited by Brenda Miller, the book is subtitled "Inspiring Craft Talks from the Rainier Writing Workshop." The workshop is the the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. The MFA is a three-year, four-residency program with emphasis in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Students participate in a 10-day summer residency on campus, and work remotely one-on-one with a faculty member during the year. Every day during the residency begins with a teacher's "Morning Talk"—one of these essays.

I probably responded to Berne's essay so strongly because I'm writing my sixth novel, and it's a question that has nagged me. Dozens of answers to why write a novel come immediately to mind: To make money. (Ha!) To dramatize a point of view. To impress mother/father/significant other. To fill time. To obtain a degree. To add to the culture. (Ha!) To say something that can't be said any other way.

Why read a novel? For diversion. To occupy time. To experience different lives, different cultures. To learn how the world reality works—or doesn't work. To become a more empathetic human being. 

Clearly there's no one reason to write or read a novel and Berne doesn't try. "My aim in part [in this essay] is to try to describe what it's like to write a novel—or what it can be like—and why I think that experience and novels themselves matter."

One answer to why spend years writing a novel, especially knowing it may not be published or, if self-published, may sink without a ripple, is that it "allows for something rare these days: the suspension of judgment." Writing a novel leaves room "for indecision. Even for disorientation. Not the kind of disorientation that makes you disbelieve what's right in front of you . . . but the kind that makes you suspect it may take a while to understand what is right in front of you."

Writing and reading a novel says Berne tends to be—or can be—or should be—a defamiliarizing process that requires "a lot of stumbling and searching, chiefly  basking a series of questions that lead mostly to other questions. Writing a novel offers an extended experience of not getting the point. So does reading one."

The essay quotes Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Chekhov, Elena Ferrante, E.M. Forster (is it possible to write about the novel without mentioning Aspects of the Novel?), Henry James, Georges Simenon, James Wood, and Virginia Woolf. It is thought-provoking and, for someone like myself, reassuring. It's all right to digress in your novel. Everyone does it. 

It's an essay I'll probably reread every year or so. Or when, unsure of what comes next or a work is rejected one more time, I'll read it to convince myself that the current work in progress is not a complete waste of time.

Not quite a walk in the park

The subtitle of Kevin Fedarko's A Walk in the Park is somewhat misleading: "The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon."

True, Fedarko and his good friend Pete McBride were badly—almost fatally—unprepared to walk the length of the Grand Canyon, all 277 miles. They had to be extracted from the canyon twice because to continue further probably would have killed them. Only because they were helped by kind and generous—and experienced (don't forget experienced)—hikers did they survive.

The canyon is laced with trails that Native Americas made hundreds, a thousand years ago or more. Indeed, only when John Wesley Powell spotted a trail leading from the river to the rim in 1876 on the first white person's running of the Colorado River through the canyon did he realize it was not an untouched wilderness. There is however no trail that you can walk from end of the Canyon to the other.

A Walk in the Park is a delightful book, "part memoir, part travelogue, part extended essay on the profound meanings of wilderness." The writing is marvelous and it provoked strong writing from readers on Amazon: "Fedarko combines deep history, personal story, friendship, family, sacrifice, sensitivity to Indigenous rights, understanding of recent history, environmental observation with an adventure that belies belief. The writing is perfect, with moments of sheer lyricism on top of sheer terror." I couldn't have said it better.

Although the Grand Canyon has several dozen recognized (by the National Park Service) trails, there is no path from one end of the Canyon to the other. Fedarko and McBride did manage to walk the entire length of the Canyon, from Lee's Ferry virtually to Lake Mead without one but with considerable help. They did walk in heat and they walked in snow. They rappeled down slot canyon walls and climbed cliffs. It took them a year to complete the trip with periods of recovery between stretches in the Canyon. 

A dip in Havasu Creek near its
confluence with the Colorado

A dozen years ago I went down the river on a raft. A friend won the lottery for a permit and organized a trip for sixteen friends and friends of friends who could take sixteen days to camp along the river. (The NPS has only 482 permits for non-commercial trips down the river in 2025.) Because ours was a private trip, we were free from any commercial restraints, but we had to do everything ourselves. I'd been told it would be the trip of a lifetime and it was.

And having spent sixteen days at the bottom of the canyon and hiked into side canyons (I almost lost a river sandal at the confluence of the Little Colorado where Powell spotted the trail to the rim), I am in awe of Fedarko's and McBride's accomplishment. They were not the first, as Fedarko acknowledges, but more people have walked on the moon than have walked the length of the Grand Canyon.

But you do not have to have gone down the Colorado to appreciate and enjoy the book. Again, another reader says it best: "You will discover a radiantly written, compelling story of a nearly 800 mile plunge into and hike through the intricacies of the Grand Canyon. You will join an astounding odyssey through one of earth’s holy and sacred wonders." If you can't go down the river or visit the Canyon, A Walk in the Park is the next best thing.

An engaging evocation of Jordanian life

A perfectly accurate if totally inadequate description of Dima Bader’s debut novel Dance Around the Dandelion would be something like: “Nuha, a middle-age, married Jordanian woman, has a steamy affair with a much younger man.”

Accurate but insufficient to convey the depth and richness of Nuha’s life and family and contemporary society in Amman, Jordan, where the novel is set. The family is affluent enough they can send Nuha’s half-sister to Houston for cancer treatments. Ultimately the cancer returns, and the girl dies. The parents divorce, the mother returns to Kuwait City, and remarries. The father, Sameer, remarries and fathers Nuha and a son. 

Bader covers this history in the novel’s first section, which she tells in the third person. The adult Nuha narrates the rest of the book, broken up by brief—and ultimately poignant— diary entries by own 8-year-old daughter.

For much of the book, indeed until Nuha falls passionately, overwhelmingly, and unexpectedly in love with a darkly handsome young man who manages his family’s furniture store, she is going through the motions of life. Somehow (and I’d like to know how she does it) Bader is able to hold the reader’s interest while a depressed Nuha walks through her days. We learn about her extended family and life in her grandmother’s Big House, her marriage to Khaled, and her life as part owner of a bookstore in Amman’s Old Town.

Like most families, Nuha’s has secrets. I wouldn’t call Nuha an unreliable narrator, but even as she seems forthcoming the author reveals information carefully, naturally, and when it will have the most effect. And again, somehow the story—Naha’s history—grows in depth and richness as we learn more and more about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dance Around the Dandelion for the craft and for the story. Bader includes just enough Arabic (with translations) to let us know these characters are not speaking English. I would not have included the footnotes to explain Jordanian dishes because they tend to throw the reader out of the story. Nor would I have included the italic sections, but that may be a personal preference. Neither of these quibbles diminish the book’s undeniable and pleasant effect.

The Thursday Murder Club strikes again

 Richard Osman says idea to set his Thursday Murder Club mysteries in a retirement village caught off guard as it came to him on a what he thought would be a perfectly pleasant but uneventful lunch visiting to a friend of his mother in one such community. (He also denies that the character Joyce is modeled on his mother.)

"The setting felt familiar because you're in beautiful countryside, but I was surprised because it was really busy with people everywhere. Then, when you start talking to them, 70 and above, you think, 'My god, there's some talent, wit, wisdom and sense of mischief in this generation, everything is there'. I thought this would be a great setting for a murder story. Let's throw the worst at them and see how they deal with it." 

He says seniors make good detectives because younger people tend to ignore them or not take them seriously. They have a wealth of experience to draw on; they’ve seen everything and done everything at least once if not more. So he created four feisty seniors who, to entertain themselves, begin to look into local cold cases and become entangled in current murders.

The four main characters he’s created have different backgrounds, personalities, and abilities and their skills compliment one another. Joyce is a former nurse. Ibrahim is a retired psychiatrist. Elizabeth was an agent in England’s intelligence service. And Ron is a former labor organizer. During their working lives they would not have become friends. Finding themselves together in a senior development they have become close. 

Osman has now written four mysteries involving the four, each mystery giving one of the four a leading role. I reviewed the first in December 2021. All have been best sellers in the UK and the US, and a movie starring Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, and Ben Kingsley is in the works.

Osman began his career working as executive producer on British game shows, including Deal or No Deal. He was the creative director at TV company Endemol UK, pitching the idea for Pointless to the BBC. In 1999, created and wrote the Channel 4 sitcom Boyz Unlimited with David Williams and Matt Lucas. In 2005, he co-created and co-wrote the animated Channel 4 sitcom Bromwell High. In 2013, he created the short-lived ITV gameshow Prize Island

While you do not have to read the four books in order to enjoy them, and while one might argue that the first in the series, The Thursday Murder Club, is a little clunky as Osman was getting his bearings, they are all thoroughly entertaining.

The short stories of a writer's writer

Because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed James Salter’s novels, I snapped up a copy of Last Night, his 2005 collection of ten short stories in a library book sale.

I’ve read that Salter is known as a writer’s writer, which I take to mean that his sentences, his paragraphs, his stories are, at the craft level, exquisite.

That may be, but Salter's writing is not so carefully crafted that it calls attention to itself. You don’t stop in a Salter story—I don’t stop—to admire a perfectly turned phrase, a beautiful description. You often do finish one of his stories struck by the impact and wondering how he does it.

He manages to evoke people at their most profound and significant moments: A book dealer faces the truth about his life, as it is and as it will never be again, when he is visited by his brash former girlfriend.

A lonely married woman, after a disturbing encounter with a drunken poet at a dinner party, finds herself irresistibly drawn to his animal surrogate, a huge tawny-eyed dog.

A lover of poetry must come to terms with his wife’s request to give up what may be his treasured relationship.

Salter, who died in 2015, was extraordinary in his ability to evoke a place, a person, and a plausible situation in a few pages. I don’t know if he was a writer’s writer, but I do know that his best stories are worth studying to see how he created characters and suggested entire lives.