What I’m reading lately…

I’m re-reading Martin Cruz Smith’s wonderful novel, Rose, set in a coal-mining town in Victorian England. The protagonist, an American mining engineer named Blair, has just been hauled out of the Gold Coast, disgraced and suffering an acute malarial attack, back to England to face the indignant Board of the National Geologic Society. He’d come through miles of jungle, with five native porters he was supposed to have paid, to the Society’s headquarters, only to find that his funds had been spent on a hunting safari for a visiting British noble – so he took the Bible fund to pay his porters, foregoing his own salary.

This, of course, is not at all the Done Thing. The Board members are in high dudgeon; no person of consequence would be unable to cover the matter with personal funds. Blair’s desperate to get back to Africa, not only because he loves it there, but because he’s left his young daughter of mixed race behind. Bishop Hannay, one of the Board members and owner of a profitable coal mine as well as a weathy estate, promises to get Blair onto the roster of another Africa expedition, and to pay him his expected salary, if Blair will just do him one tiny little favor.

Hannay’s daughter’s fiance, the local curate, has gone missing. Blair is commissioned to look for the Reverend Maypole, and to console Charlotte Hannay… and he has to do it in Wigan, the coal town containing the Hannay mine. Wigan is where Blair was born, a fact he’d mentioned to the Bishop some months prior in Africa, over late-night drinks. Blair doesn’t want to return; he was four when he took ship with his mother for America. She died on the voyage, and an elderly bachelor mining engineer on the ship unofficially adopted him. Blair took the engineer’s name; he can’t remember the name he was born with, or even his mother’s name.

Nothing, in Wigan, is as it seems. While investigating Maypole’s life, he meets a “pit girl” named Rose, one of the last people Maypole was seen speaking with, and she fascinates him. He suspects that Maypole’s interest in Rose was becoming an obsession, and he’s just about to pursue this line of inquiry when he finds out that there was a massive explosion at the mine, with more than 60 people dead, the very morning of Maypole’s disappearance.

Smith is a genius at settings. I’ve never been to Russia or the Bering Sea or East Berlin – but because I’ve read Smith’s Arkady Renko novels, I’ve chased spies through Moscow, gutted fish on a factory ship, dodged bullets on a subway and wolves in the forests near Chernobyl. In Rose, Smith is masterful with putting his reader right in the soup along with his protagonist. Here’s a passage from Chapter 2, when Blair’s train is pulling in to the Wigan station:

The dark sky turned darker, not with clouds but with a more pungent ingredient. From the window, Blair saw what could have been the towering effluent plume of a volcano, except that there was no erupting volcanic cone, no mountain of any size, in fact, between the Pennines to the east and the sea to the west, nothing but swale and hill above the long tilt of underground carboniferous deposits. The smoke rose not from a single point but as a dark veil across the northern horizon, as if all the land thereafter was on fire. Only closer could a traveler tell that the horizon was an unbroken line of chimneys.

Chimneys congregated around cotton mills, glassworks, iron foundries, chemical works, dye works, brick works. But the most monumental chimneys were at the coal pits, as if the earth itself had been turned into one great factory. When Blake wrote of “dark Satanic mills,” he meant chimneys.

The hour was almost dusk, but this darkness was premature. When enough chimneys had passed one by one, the sky turned the ashen gray of an eclipse. On either side private tracks connected pits to the canal ahead. Between the pall and the lines of steel lay Wigan, at first sight looking more like smoldering ruins rather than a town.

Coal was worked into the town itself, creating coal tips that were black hills of slag. On some, coal gas escaped as little flames that darted from peak to peak like blue imps. The train slowed along a pit as a cageload of miners reached the surface. Coated in coal dust, the men were almost invisible except for the safety lamps in their hands. The train slid past a tower topped by a headgear that, even in the subdued light, Blair saw was painted red. On the other side, figures crossed single file across the slag, taking a shortcut home. Blair caught them in profile. They wore pants and coal dust too, but they were women.

The track bridged the canal, over barges heaped with coal, then traveled by a gasworks and a rank of cotton mills, their high windows bright and the chimneys that drove their spinning machines spewing as much smoke as castles sacked and set ablaze. The locomotive slowed with its own blasts of steam. Tracks split off to goods sheds and yards. In the middle, like an island, was a platform with iron columns and hanging lamps. The train approached at a creep, gave a last convulsive shake and stopped.

See? Genius. Not only does the reader see Wigan in vivid detail, the reader understands that Wigan is black, smoking, despairing, the anteroom to Hell.

I won’t go into plot details (go check it out of the library, or better yet, buy a copy!), but here as in all the Renko books, there is a mystery, there is a love interest, there are characters with secrets of their own, and there is great physical danger to the hero from unforeseen directions. People lie. Situations are not as they seem on the surface. Conversations and observations are reported in a matter-of-fact manner, such that if the reader is not paying minute attention, important information will be missed.

It occurred to me today that I approach each revelation of a Smith novel with such delight because I tend to take his characters at face value. One person’s speech is at odds with her social status? She’s extraordinary. One person tells the protagonist he knows nothing about the disappearance? He’s telling the truth. In my life, I’m suspicious: you want me to invest in your business plan? Forget it. You say you had no ulterior motives in asking me that question? Yeah, riiiiiiight.

But reading Rose? I’m watching the scenery, listening to Blair’s deadpan sarcasm, witnessing his increasing fascination with the pit girl Rose, keeping a furtive eye out for Rose’s violent boyfriend. I miss stuff. And I’m surprised by occurrences and admissions of truth. They blindside me, even the fourth time through, even though I already know they’re coming.

Now, that is how you write mystery. I love mystery novels… cut my teeth on Agatha Christie. Never got into the hardboiled style, though I’ve read my share of Ngaio Marsh and Dashiell Hammett and Ellery Queen. Tony Hillerman is a good read, but I don’t love his stuff either. So who do I love? P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George. James is so economical – she can tell you worlds about a character in about four sentences, even a minor character. Ruth Rendell’s books scare the crap out of me; they tend to concentrate on ordinary-seeming characters who are mentally unstable, and who create convoluted tangles of situations around innocent people. The ground seems soft under my feet when I read Rendell.

Elizabeth George has a set of recurring characters who have relationships; each of her books (I think there are fourteen at this point) concerns itself not only with the murder at hand, as it were, but also with her major characters (a Scotland Yard investigator and his sergeant) and events in their lives. George’s murderers range from a student at a prestigious boarding school to a disturbed obese daughter to a respected doctor to a charitably-inclined owner of a printing company, but the themes of her books touch on family relationships – What does it mean to be a parent? A child? A sister, a wife, a grown son? What are each person’s rights and expectations and responsibilities? Where do the joys lie, and where the dangers?

At one time, I enjoyed Patricia Cornwell’s early Scarpetta novels, but no longer. I began to be disillusioned with them after a major character was killed in a gruesome way, and when it became apparent to me that her major characters, each of whom has significant emotional difficulties, were not making any headway toward personal growth at all, and seemed to actually be regressing into self-destruction. The novels became too depressing for me to read, beginning with Hornet’s Nest, and I found that I did not even like to reread the early novels, because I knew what was to come years later. I’ve also noticed a change, from her carefully-crafted climaxes of action to too-short, choppy scenes, dizzying and uninformative, without the self-reflection of the major characters I saw in the earlier books. I haven’t even read her most recent novel, and I doubt I will.

I saw on Amazon recently that Martin Cruz Smith has a new Arkady Renko novel out: following Gorky Park, Polar Star, Red Square, Havana Bay, Wolves Eat Dogs, and Stalin’s Ghost, there is now Three Stations. I’m going to nab me that baby right quick and prepare for a good read. Hope the library has it.

Note:  I actually wrote this about three weeks ago, and I have yet to get to the library.  What with my laptop screen being broken (still using it with an external monitor), Gaze being sick (he’s better now)  and my father-in-law in the hospital (not out of the woods yet), I haven’t been blogging much.  If you feel so inclined to pray for Bill and the family, that would be much appreciated.

Image of Rose in hardcover from Amazon.