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.)

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.) 

Wordcraft – Books and reviews to mix & match

The first time I noticed my ranking among Amazon’s reviewers, I was 1 million plus something. And I thought – wow, Amazon even has algorithms for ranking reviewers? Of course, I set my sights on #1, only to find that top rated reviewers gain their status by reviewing everything. In fact, thousands of everythings. Including baby shampoo. (The package was in good shape, it arrived quickly and the shampoo cleaned the reviewer’s hair nicely! A 5-star review!)

image: wikimedia commons

I decided to stick to reviewing books, occasionally posting reviews on this blog as well.  As I contemplated more book reviews for 2017, I enjoyed looking back at reviews posted in the past 12 months and thought – why not do a brief share with readers? Here are the openings of my reviews of several recent books by Texas authors and their titles/authors. See how many you can match. Better yet -- read the books for yourselves!

Review openings:

1)      Psychopaths make the best villains – in life as in fiction. But a psychopath as a main character? That’s what this Texas author has accomplished with a book whose anti-hero flashes the glibness and charm (superficial though they may be) of a true psychopath in a way that will have readers cheering for him against their will.

2)      Jane Austen fans can have Elizabeth Bennet – my fav Austen heroine is Emma Woodhouse. Yes, that Emma, the insufferable know-it-all who tries to fit her friends into incongruous romances while remaining blissfully unaware of her own admirer, her almost equally know-it-all brother-in-law George Knightley. So I was delighted to find the Emma-Knightley trope still alive and well on the plains of West Texas.

3)      Shortly after Saving Private Ryan appeared in movie theaters, I was aghast to hear that one of my co-workers had taken her then-teenage son to see it. She did it, she said, to keep him from getting any ideas that war was glamorous. Then came 9/11, and wars when both civilians and soldiers die – or sometimes worse, live – without any thought of glamour, under circumstances of almost unimaginable, unremitting horror. Those are the kinds of wars this Texas author writes about.

4)      The latest installment in this Texas writer’s series of thrillers starring an ex-CIA agent is the story of a plot to assassinate an autocratic, plutocratic ex-KGB agent who happens to be president of Russia. Readers may rest assured that the Russian president in question is completely fictional. Any resemblance between him and current Russian president and billionaire ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin is, of course, purely coincidental.

5)      A tall handsome stranger rides into a small Texas town just vacated by a corrupt law enforcement official. It’s the classic Western scenario, lovingly but devastatingly updated for the 21^st century by this Texas author. But unlike the horse opera versions of the story, this hero can’t ride a horse, dislikes getting his city slicker shoes dirty, and has no patience for cows. And he comes with a load of modern-day angst – a wife who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, a previous job he left under a cloud, and an angry teenage son.

6)      One spring day in 1940, a 29-year-old West Virginia coal miner went to work as usual. Wearing his carbide lantern helmet, carrying his dinner bucket, he said goodbye to his wife and three children, the youngest a five-month-old infant. His family would never see him alive again. In compensation for his death, the mining company paid his widow one thousand dollars. It also ordered her to clear out of the little company house she rented, because on the first day, the family of the miner who would take her dead husband’s place was moving in.

image: wikimedia commons

 Titles/authors:

            A)    Stillwater, by Melissa Lenhardt

B)    The First Order, by Jeff Abbott

C)    Steel Will, by Shilo Harris

D)    Interference, by Kay Honeyman

E)     Running on Red Dog Road, by Drema Hall Berkheimer

F)     Hollow Man, by Mark Pryor

(Answers: 1, F; 2, D; 3, C; 4, B;5, A; 6, E)

Wordcraft – A character type for our age: the psychopath

At first I wondered whether it’s because I’m a writer perpetually in search of characters that the most recent type to catch my fancy seems to pop up everywhere? It’s the psychopath, a personality no longer limited to drooling serial sex murderer incarnations. In this age, psychopaths, who comprise a surprisingly high percentage of corporate employees, have come to seem so nearly normal that they even have their own media spokesperson.

I refer, of course, to the handsome actor in a brawn suit who stars in a series of commercials for organic hot dogs. I can’t even remember the brand of hot dogs, but whenever the actor appears, assuring the conscientious mom-type opposite him that his hot dogs are safe for her kids to eat, my attention is glued to the screen.

Is he all natural? mom-type asks. He is, he assures her, flexing his obviously plastic pecs, his mesmerizing, unblinking eyes fixed on hers.

But isn’t he chock full of growth hormones, mom-type persists. After all, isn’t that a needle stuck in his, uh, haunch? Without even a glance at the supposed needle (mercifully not visible to the television audience), he wills mom-type to gaze deeply into his soulfully soulless eyes. “That’s not mine,” he says.

All the while, I’m mentally checking off the points on the PCL-R (psychopath checklist, revised) as formulated by Canadian psychologist Dr. Robert Hare. (Glibness and superficial charm, cunning and manipulation, pathological lying, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, etc. Numbers 1, 4, 5 and 15 on the PCL-R. Yes, yes, yes!)

But tempting though it is to run through the list, with weighted responses for each its 20 categories, in an attempt to diagnose public figures, acquaintances, even ourselves (which Dr. Hare strongly advises against), this blog is about literature, not criminal psychology.

Even if we’re not willing to give our characters full points on every item of the PCL-R (criminal versatility or failure to meet conditions of probation, for instance) dribbling in even a few can sharpen the focus either of a story’s antagonist, or more surprisingly, its main character.

On that last point, I’ll give a public thank you to mystery writer Mark Pryor, who I met at this year’s Writers’ League of Texas conference in Austin, Texas. By day, Pryor, an English ex-pat, is an assistant district attorney. His alternate job, however, is writing, both the Hugo Marston series and the stand alone Hollow Man whose scarily charming main character is also an English ex-patriate assistant district attorney in Texas.

Pryor denies any other points of resemblance between himself and his character, a psychopath who describes in detail how hard he tries to repress his nature and fit in with what he terms the “empath” world. Not because he likes those empaths, but because it’s easier to con them if they think you’re one of them.

Even while I admired the character, I wondered how a psychopath could possibly fit into any literature except that of crime and suspense. Surely a more literary genre wouldn’t have a place for psychopaths. Then I found Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld’s recent retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Jasper Wick, Sittenfeld’s glib, lying, manipulative, parasitic, sexually-promiscuous, impulsive and irresponsible (items 1, 4, 5, 9, 11, 14 and 15 on the PCL-R) villain.

Wick in many ways resembles his original Austenian alter-ego, George Wickham, who briefly fascinated Austen’s heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. Now I’m keeping an eye open for psychopaths in and out of literature, and merrily ramping up the psychopathology quotient of the villain in my own work in progress. If psychopaths were good enough for Jane Austen, how can the rest of us resist them?

(For more about psychopaths, see Dr. Hare’s book, Without Conscience, and Pryor’s Hollow Man, both of which I reviewed on Goodreads and Amazon. Although Dr. Hare’s full PCL-R is only available to medical personnel, I found his 20 criteria by Googling “PCL-R images” and saved it to the Pinterest board for my novel in progress, The Ugly Man.)