Review: Murder amid the books – an American in Paris

Review of: The Paris Librarian

Author: Mark Pryor

Publisher: Seventh Street Books

Source: Purchase, Half Price Books at Dallas Book Festival

Grade: B+

Texan (by way of Hertfordshire, England) Mark Pryor adds a locked room murder mystery to top all locked room mysteries to the latest in his Hugo Marston series with The Paris Librarian. Wealthy American ex-patriate Paul Rogers has a posh Paris apartment, a beautiful girlfriend, and a cushy job as head of a private library, where he’s holding a special book from the library’s sale for the benefit of his bibliophile friend, Hugo Marston.

Marston also happens to be head of security for the American Embassy and an ex-FBI agent. When Rogers fails to turn up with the book, is it Hugo’s cop instincts or booklust that push him to force an opening of the locked room in the library’s basement where Rogers has spent the morning writing?

The book is forgotten, however, when Rogers’ assistant produces his own key, to find Rogers dead. With no signs of violence, the initial presumption is that Rogers succumbed to a possible heart attack. But to Hugo’s eyes, something doesn’t look right. At least he can plead unfamiliarity with the French requirements for reporting death long enough to call the one person who’s always helped him in the past when dealing with the deaths of fellow countrymen on French soil – Lieutenant Camille Lerens.  

Camille, however, works for the Brigade Criminelle, the police division responsible for investigating the city’s most serious crimes. It takes all Hugo’s charm to persuade her to visit the scene of what seems most likely to be a natural death. Fortunately for Hugo’s and Camille’s friendship – and their professional reputations – an investigation reveals that the actual cause of Rogers’ death was an exotic poison – curare.

Unfortunately for Hugo’s reputation, the poison is only toxic when introduced into the victim’s blood stream, and there’s no mark on Rogers’ body that would have allowed the poison to penetrate his system.

Worse, the library’s security cameras reveal that no one other than Rogers himself entered the locked, windowless room in which he was found. True, his assistant left a book Rogers had requested for research in his writing outside the room, but the ever-helpful security cameras show only Rogers opened the door to retrieve the book, and then only after the assistant’s departure. The police briefly consider the possibility of a bizarre suicide, but the absence of punctures or scratches on the body rules out even that. So how did Paul Rogers die?

Mark Pryor

For a brief while, it appears that the library is dogged with bad luck, when a janitor also suffers a heart attack, but is revived by a helper’s knowledge of CPR.

Red herrings swarm through Pryor’s tale, the best being a journalist’s pursuit of an aging actress who served as a spy during the World War II occupation of France, and is rumored still to possess the dagger she used to silence a too-persistent Nazi officer.

Hugo’s friendship with the comely journalist – and her equally comely girlfriend – as well as a lovely French girlfriend of his own, give Pryor’s hero a chance to revel not only in Paris but other regions of the French countryside. I found myself checking off places I want to see, or revisit, in France, much as I did for London during the reading of Deborah Crombie’s Garden of Lamentations, reviewed at this site yesterday.

Just as American-born Crombie revisits the British Isles frequently to update her knowledge of the setting, Pryor is also a frequent visitor to France. Otherwise, he divides his time between writing and his own crime-fighting duties as an assistant district attorney for Travis County, Texas.

Shades of Agatha Christie-like poison know-how, a dash of intrigue and psychological insight added to Pryor’s knowledge of his locale add up to a fun add up to a cozy with just enough gore to satisfy the more hardcore mystery fans. But why, oh why, didn’t anybody talk to the janitor? Or the workman who might have been able to identify a possible subject making his (or her) escape after a subsequent murder? And will Hugo ever stop playing coy about what he does with the gun Pryor hints he carries?

(Tomorrow I tackle a book in a completely different genre, by another Texan, Dallas newspaper editor turned novelist Michael Merschel’s Revenge of the Star Survivors.)

Review: Death waits among the garden flowers

Review of: Garden of Lamentations

Author: Deborah Crombie

Publisher: William Morrow

Source: Purchase, Half Price Books

Grade: A

The brilliant green lawn of the gated communal garden is marred one lovely Saturday morning, an irritated resident finds, by something white, possibly a bundle of paper or plastic. Debris left by builders? Or burglars? But on closer inspection, the object begins to look disturbingly like a human shape, a young woman in a white dress. And the resident, at first ready to reprimand such untoward behavior as sleeping in a public place, soon realizes that the woman isn’t sleeping at all…

Meanwhile, London’s favorite husband and wife detective team, Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid, are looking forward to a peaceful weekend with their menagerie of kids, cats, and dogs. At least, Gemma was. But Duncan’s off to the office for one last look at a case file, leaving his wife behind to deal with ballet lessons and play dates. Little does Gemma know her day is going to get much, much worse, as Deborah Crombie’s latest entry in her long-running mystery series, Garden of Lamentations, unfolds.

Because the dead woman in the garden of a posh Notting Hill neighborhood is a catalog model for one of Gemma’s friends. And although it’s not Gemma’s territory, her friend insists that she take part in the investigation.

Meanwhile, Duncan is startled to learn that a former supervisor he blames for the death of a trusted police officer, is entangled in the same web that lead to the death of an undercover agent in the previous volume of Crombie’s long-running saga. Worse, it’s a web that may endanger not only Duncan but Gemma and their growing, blended family.

I felt considerable trepidation even beginning to read a mystery series that dates back to 1993, and now includes 17 full-length books and an e-book novella, with a cast of dozens. Mystery series purist sites such as Mystery Sequels insist that readers must start at the very beginning to fully appreciate Crombie’s work.

Someday, if my stack of books to be read ever gets appreciably smaller, I may follow that advice. But first time readers, don’t fear diving in wherever you can. Crombie’s characters are delightful no matter which end of the pool you come from, and she excels at threading their backstory through the narrative in easy to swallow bites, even as she deals with an unusually complex story line, involving not only the “locked room” murder of the young model, but the decades-old police coverup of murder.

Deborah Crombie

Not that complex plots and characters are Crombie’s only accomplishments. A Texan transplanted years ago to England and Scotland before returning to her home state, she still travels back to the mother country yearly to renew her familiarity with its landscapes, accents, and concerns, and especially the neighborhoods of London where Gemma and Duncan live and work.

Visitors from this side of the pond will find Crombie’s books a guide to what’s new, what’s old, and what’s au courant, and find themselves longing to visit such locales as the Jolly Gardeners pub, “a detached building in a road of small terraced houses just off Putney High Street. Victorian or Edwardian, the place had been updated well, with bare floors and simple, mismatched furniture that set off the high ceilings and the love large windows. In winter, coal fires burned in the period fireplaces…”

Or the Red Fox Gin distillery in Shepherd’s Bush. Or the Scotch Malt Whisky Society “tucked above the Bleeding Heart Tavern.” (But beware, it doesn’t open till noon.) Or even the tiny halal take-out shop at King’s Cross, where an American might be able to get a decent cup of coffee. If such places don’t exist, they ought to.

Not that Gemma, Duncan, and their fellow police spend a great deal of time lingering in taverns or coffee shops, confronted as they are with mysteries both current and long distant to untangle. Garden of Lamentations opens with the standard disclaimer that all characters are fictional, but Crombie admits in her ending author’s note that the victim of the long-ago murder whose consequences shade the book was a real person, Stephen Lawrence, a young black man murdered in a racially-motivated attack in 1993. Although two of his attackers were convicted in 2012, the investigation into his murder continues to this day.

(Tomorrow, a mystery by an Englishman turned Texan, Mark Pryor, and the latest in his Hugh Marston series, The Paris Librarian.)

Writing mysteries set around the world – and Texas

She is a native Texan, turned Brit, and back again, who dropped out of high school, got a college degree in biology, and now writes police procedural mysteries set in London.

He is a born and bred Englishman living in Austin, Texas, who prosecutes bad guys by day, and by night (or whenever he finds the time) writes mystery novels about an American in Paris.

Deborah Crombie (l) & Mark Pryor

He (but this is a different he) is a native of Paris – Texas – who lives in Texas and, astonishingly enough, writes historical mysteries set in . . . Texas. He also loves hunting, fishing and humor, sports a terrific mustache, and has a middle initial whose meaning still remains elusive.

I’m referring of course to the contestants of Saturday’s Mystery Jeopardy program at the Dallas Book Festival, where the answers were: Who are Deborah Crombie, Mark Pryor, and Reavis Wortham?

Crombie, Pryor and Wortham, each with multiple books under their writing belts, delighted the audience packing the Evans Studio at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library Saturday morning. And sometimes struggled to remember which question from which of their many books inspired the answers posed by audience members.

“I wanted to be a field biologist,” Crombie said, replying to the conundrum of her college major, “but life just takes you in really funny directions.” The biology, however, did come in handy when she took a forensics course at the University of North Texas as part of her research for her novel series starring characters Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid. (She also travels back yearly to England to keep her knowledge of the country fresh.)

And who’s to say that her personal menagerie of dogs and cats doesn’t help her deal with the cat and dog problems of the James-Kincaid duo, who feature most recently in Garden of Lamentations, out in February of this year.

Pryor, who previously worked as a journalist, came to the United States to visit his American grandmother while he tried to decide between a career in journalism or starting over in a law career. With his grandmother’s encouragement, he chose law, and now works as an assistant district attorney in Travis County, Texas, and spends “every waking moment,” as all good mystery writers must, “thinking of killing people.”

Visits to the booksellers’ shops along the Seine in Paris started him thinking about killing people in Paris, and he has looked back only rarely. Although he has set one stand-alone thriller and a true crime story in Texas, he opted to set his best-known mysteries, the Hugo Marston series, mainly in Paris. “I’ve been back to England once in 14 years, but I’ve been to Paris 15 times,” he said. “It’s hard doing research, isn’t it?”

His latest book, The Paris Librarian, stars Marston as the head of security at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. “Does anyone know what the head of security at a U.S. embassy actually does?” he asked. “No? Neither did I,” he admitted. What he most needed to know, was whether Marston could be authorized to carry a gun around Paris, finally eliciting the diplomatically-evasive answer, “Well, I wouldn’t say you’re wrong.”

Unlike Crombie and Pryor, who began writing as adults, “I had been trying to get published since I was in the seventh grade,” Wortham said. Discouraged, after

a final move to Frisco, Texas, he threw away his “two big boxes of rejection notices” and started fresh as a freelance outdoor sports columnist, first published in the Paris, Texas, newspaper.

More than twenty years later, after publishing thousands of articles, he ventured back to writing fiction with his Red River mystery series set in the 1960’s. He starts a new series, starring Texas Ranger Sonny Hawke, in July.

In common with his fellow Mystery Jeopardy contestants, he detests cell phones, and loves the rugged Big Bend region of Texas for, among other virtues, its lack of cellular service. (Or, if all else fails, make sure the phone batteries go dead.)

(Next: what makes three law-abiding Texas women turn to crime – writing, that is? More answers to come from authors Kathleen Kent, Melissa Lenhardt, and Lisa Sandlin, courtesy of the Dallas Book Festival.)