A Beautiful Blue Death

Last night I finished Home by Nightfall, #9 in the series.

Charles Lenox's brother, Edmund, is a recent widower. Charles sees him moping and invites himself to stay with his older brother for a while at Lenox House, the country estate where they both grew up.

Similar to book #6, A Death in the Small Hours, this one has a double mystery, one in London and one near a country estate.

The Lenox House is located just outside of Markethouse, the regional market town, which hosts a major market each week. A number of items have gone missing and there has been a break-in at a local house.

In London, the famous German pianist, Mueller, goes suddenly missing right after a major concert. He's last seen entering his dressing room after the concert. It's a near international incident and Scotland Yard are keen to find him. The Royal family, being mostly Krauts, also want to stay in the good graces of their German cousins.

I would say the build-up to both mysteries is just fine. But I found the conclusion to the Markethouse one to be somewhat dull and anticlimactic. Clearly this book is geared more toward female sensibilities.

There's a lot of caterwauling of "feelings" regarding Charles' concern for his older brother. Fair enough, but it just becomes too much. And (spoiler alert), the conclusion to the Markethouse mystery involves someone who was taking advantage of the women he employed. So if your sense of a good story is the victim status of women, you'll love this plot. But I found it a bit stilted and seemed to be crafted for today's audience.

The London mystery just seemed a bit odd. I won't give it away. But this mystery is more about which detective agency will get credit for finding the pianist, Mueller. The plot itself seems self-consciously crafted to be a little too clever (or artificial) by half. Okay, I will spoil it: Mueller escaped through a secret trap door in the ceiling with the help of the theatre manager who also helped hide the body. Why? Why did the theatre manager help? Because he was selling a lot of tickets and wanted Mueller to do more shows, so just naturally he would involve himself in what looked like a murder.

They both hid Mueller's mistress' body in the secret room above his dressing room. She died by drinking the poisoned wine that she had intended for Mueller because she thought Mueller was going to dump her (he was). Mueller, having somehow deduced she was trying to suddenly kill him, switched glasses while she wasn't looking. And then he just started wandering around London. Why? At this point, you really don't care.

Dumb, dumb, and dumb, if you ask me. They at least finally made it clear that Scotland Yard wasn't going to prosecute him. Why would they? He didn't put poison in the wine and certainly had no way of knowing the wine was poisoned. It was just bad luck for her that Mueller took a precaution. And Scotland Yard did find a bottle of poison in the mistress' possession, so that sealed that aspect.

But the overall atmosphere of the book was fine. But, again, Finch has some problems crafting artful plots.

On a side note, the "Lenox" name is not Scottish. "Lennox" would be. But Lenox is derived supposedly from "Lance." It would seem that family names can undergo many subtle changes over the centuries.

Next up in the Inspector Lenox series (#8) is The Laws of Murder.

Having read these books out-of-order (checking them out as they became available for loan), I was already aware of the major plot element spoken of in later novels: A senior inspector of Scotland Yard, Inspector Jenkins, who was a long-time collaborator and often friend of Charles Lenox, is murdered.

Relations between Lenox and Scotland Yard had cooled after Lenox left Parliament and started his own detective agency. The cooling included Jenkins as well, who he considered a friend and for whom he had materially helped his career by helping to solve a couple of high-profile cases. Lenox and his agency were given the complete cold shoulder by the Yard, perhaps seen now as a more public form of competition. Lenox was now no mere likable amateur but "in the trade."

Since then a Marquess has bit the dust as well (salt, in this case). He was known to be a bad character despite the high title. Are the two deaths connected? And that's about as far as I've gotten in this one. It's a competent read so far.

I picked up Finch's A Burial at Sea again after having set it down a couple months ago. I think the problem was that I have read too many good seafaring stories and this seemed to be covering old ground, and not as well. But Melville, Patrick O'Brian (still need to read his Master & Commander series), C.S. Forester, and Jack London are tough acts to follow. But the online library had no others available at the moment.

Looking back, I've read a 10,000 fathoms worth of seafaring stories, although I didn't actually make it through Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. It was pretty dry reading. But do read Nathaniel Philbrick's modern In the Heart of the Sea if you get a chance. Did I read Childers' The Riddle of the Sands, one of the books said to launch the entire espionage genre? I think so. There's a good list of seafaring books here.

In A Burial at Sea, we have MP Lenox being sent on the HMS Lucy whose primary mission is to take him to Suez where he has some official functions to perform. But his real mission is a secret one that runs parallel. He is to meet somebody and that's as much as we know.

Along the way there is a murder or two on board the Lucy, of course. And I can't readily see how Finch will make the plot work out so that it makes sense. We'll see.

Lenox's nephew, Teddy, is on board as a midshipman in his first voyage at sea. His brother, Edmund, has asked Lenox to look after him as best he can. And now with a savage murderer (or murderers) roaming among a crew of a couple hundred, that could prove difficult. One reviewer describes this as a "locked room mystery," which is a genre I've heard of in terms of gaming.

I finished A Burial at Sea. Let me quote myself:



My book instincts are well-honed, and they didn't fail me here. I don't mind giving away the plot because this isn't a book that most should want to read.

We've all read books where the plot is clearly meant to appeal to being turned into a movie. I think Finch may have had this on his mind.

Long story short: There are two murders on the HMS Lucy. One victim (a second lieutenant) is thrown to his death from the crow's nest and then (somehow) gutted on the quarterdeck with no witnesses. It was dark. Okay. The other victim (the captain) is garroted in his quarters and then gutted. And interspersed with this (presumably by the same person or persons), the murderer is also stirring up a mutiny.

MP Charles Lenox is on the Lucy for transport to a meeting in Port Said, Egypt. He has an official mission to meet with the Egyptian leader and a covert one to meet with a French informer. Both are related to getting Britain more influence with the Suez Canal and with Egypt while trying to gauge France's possible war plans against Britain.

So it certainly seems possible that the murders on the Lucy are connected to this political intrigue and that the gutting is just some kind of cover for other motives.

But, nope (big eyeroll...oh geez) it's just a serial killer who (I guess) is trying to give himself a fast-track promotion by eliminating the two officers ahead of him in the line of succession, if you will.

But his day job is as a third lieutenant. But he's really a sociopathic murderer, and has been since his childhood. His father put him on this ship with his steward (secretly a bastard brother) to watch over him and who also knew that he was a monster. He was there to clean things up if need be.

So, really, Finch? A serial killer? That's your plot? I knew from the smell of it that this book was going south.

But it gets worse. Having killed his two rivals (the captain and a lieutenant), this fellow (Billings) becomes acting captain. But Lenox, of course, susses him out. And then out of the blue Billing's steward/servant/chaperon bastard-brother comes into the Agatha-Christie-like "final scene" being run by Lenox and brandishes a gun. He and Billings then force Lenox onto a provisioned dingy (the bastard brother having prepared this in advance, figuring his crazy brother would go south at some point) and escape the ship after (somehow..how? god only knows) fouling the rudder.

The dingy sets off for the coast of Africa with Lenox, Billings, and the Bastard Brother. But then the Bastard Brother (knowing that Billings was going to kill Lenox) throws Lenox overboard and gives Lenox, what he says, is a fighting chance. Lenox is picked up by the Lucy but they lose track of Billings and his bastard brother who make it to shore somewhere (I think) on the very west coast of Africa.

Lenox eventually makes it to Port Said to fulfill his duties. But one night he wakes up with a knife at his throat and it is Billings. Groan. This is the worst sort of lame plot element. How did he get there so fast? How did he find him? And it's two o'clock in the morning. And of course Lenox's steward just happens to come in to Lenox's room at that very moment, sees his peril, and bashes Billings over the head from behind.

Oh my gosh. Tell me this clown wasn't writing for a movie. This is just the kind of awful stuff that lazy movie-makers think is good.

Still, there were plenty of parts of the novel that were fine. But its bones were decayed. Also, throughout the various novels is a decided lack of good grammar. Finch (and/or his editor) is little familiar with the proper use of the comma, for instance. And some of his run-on sentences should have never made it through a first draft.

I've blown through all the Charles Lenox mysteries offered in book form at the online local library. There is one audiobook of one that I haven't read. But I don't do audiobooks. And I really don't want to pay for the books. Maybe I'm just cheap. But I figure there's a whole lot out there for free before I start paying for them.

One I found (more or less a Scotland Yard or English detective mystery) is The Last Detective by Peter Lovesey. It's book #1 of 21 of the Peter Diamond mysteries.

It's very early days. But already I would say his writing style is (so far) above that of Charles Finch. There's already a very minor character, Miss Trenchard-Smith (she reports a floating body to the constable who lives just down the road), who seems quite real. We'll see how this goes.

There are many reviews at Amazon who point out what they say are errors in Finch's descriptions of England. No doubt an Englishman, by and large, can write more accurately about England than an American.

But I'm an Anglophile as well and don't mind that it seems Finch is too. And some of the complaints of errors are of the type "That didn't exist until five years later in the era the story is set in." But I think some artistic license is allowed because he's commenting about interesting things at about that time in England. Being too much of a stickler drains the life out of things.

Not that I would notice any errors. I haven't. And I have pretty much sworn-off female writers of anything before about 1980. Most of it tends to be painful gibberish...as does most of the stuff by male writers. But I'll give Finch credit for not being overtly PC or "woke."

And there's just a certain no-nonsense tone I like in my novels. I tried reading Thackeray's Vanity Fair (mentioned in that latest Lenox novel) and, goodness gracious, I just can't read five pages of fluff that has, at most, one plot element in it. It's the same reason I was having trouble getting into a Jane Austin novel. I mean, geezus, get to the flippin' point. I can't stand reading about five shades of emotion, ten shades of fabric, and twenty shades of social niceties all in the same paragraph.

Is that description fair to the writers? Many of them are beloved as classics. But, good god, I don't know how they reached that status. Give Finch his due. He knows how to turn the page and just get on with it.

Okay, scratch The Last Detective off the books you must read. I have to chuckle at this one Amazon review:



I'm scratching my head as well. Good lord, there are 18 more out there like this? I hope to heck he's gotten better. Also…



That's where I differ, but for my own reasons. I got hooked into the plot enough that I just had to see how the book would end. Would it be as terrible an ending as I saw coming? The two trains were heading toward each other on the same track and I just had to stick around for the finish.

The first half of the book is more or less is okay. But then I just hit a wall. I could not read another lengthy chapter of the police interrogating a suspect or witness. Or the courtroom scenes. It was boring writing. I just wanted to know who did it in this contrived plot. So I skipped. I skipped/skimmed the last 40% of the book, stopping only to read something the pertained to solving the mystery.

And then, good god, it turned out to be the 12-year-old boy. And of all the characters, he was the one most badly written. He didn't sound at all like a 12-year-old boy. The writing was just awful. Another Amazon review:



Yep. I'll admit that I couldn't have done better and that they don't build statues to critics. But if you are a reader, your time is precious because there are indeed so many books and so little time. We need a good filter. We need to be able to trust reviews.

Well, trust this one. It's certainly possible that his writing improved in subsequent novels. But I concur with what others are saying: I'm not sticking around to find out.

Snobbery with Violence is about half the length of a normal novel. It's always difficult to determine "pages" from an eBook. But Amazon has it listed as 260 pages.

I'm not really sure where all this is going. So far it is a pastiche of incidents wherein a "fixer" for the aristocracy (or whoever can pay), Captain Harry Cathcart, is cleaning up some upper-crust messes here and there.

One involves retrieving some blackmail letters for an indiscreet wife who has an affair with a handsome young artist while having him paint her portrait. Apparently, it's the blackmail that he actually does for a living with the portraits as a pretense.

Another involves Rose who has made an ass of herself in her coming out "season" and now is considered unmarriable. She learns that her would-be fiance (he hasn't popped the question yet) has made a bet on whether he can bed her by the end of the year, or something like that. She makes an open social stink about it at a party and apparently that is a big no-no in regards to how to handle that. She had also further earlier damaged herself by attending a suffragette meeting.

Okay, I know, I know. We're getting some you-go-girl feminism mixed into this. And you know my threshold for it is very small. But when dealing with the British aristocracy, they really did have, I guess, some extremely rigid male/female roles that certainly (in terms of what was considered scandalous, at least) did not favor the ladies.

I have no problem with this. So far it's not "woke" junk being shoved down our throats. The tone is more a bit P.G. Wodehouse without Wodehouse's ultra-exaggerations. I find this novel by Beaton to be more readable than anything I've tried (and failed...always) with Wodehouse. Wodehouse is just so over-the-top that nothing seems real enough for the comic element to work well.

The fixer had uncovered that bet made by Rose's suitor under pay from the father to basically dig up some dirt on the guy. But the fixer isn't done fixing for Rose. The King is now interested in her, not that she has her reputation sullied. A royal visit is planned to Rose's father's estate. Normally this would be a big (and expensive) honor. But Rose's father has heard through the grapevine that the King merely wants to try to deflower Rose as a sort of sport.

So the fixer is called in again. He first tries feigning a typhoid outbreak at the earl's estate. But the royal representative who is sent to investigate sees through this. So the fixer has to step it up a notch. He sends some anonymous letters to the newspapers threatening action by the Bolsheviks. He then gets his hands on some dynamite and dynamites a railroad depot and a bridge in the general vicinity of the earl's estate. The King wisely cancels his trip to the earl's estate for security reasons.

That's the tone of it thus far. But apparently there is an overall mystery that will be woven into this. But I haven't reached that stage yet.