Saralee Says
I suppose I have become a creature of habit. When I read a series by a favorite author like Sue Grafton, James Patterson, Jan Burke, Nevada Barr, J.A. Jance, Cecilia Tishy, Steve Womack and James Lee Burke, it is because I like the ongoing saga of character development combined with a good whodunit story. If I have been a relatively good girl, finished my chores and gone to church, I save Sunday afternoons for good brain candy entertainment.
My plan for Q Is for Quarry (Putnam) was to spend an afternoon with the latest book by Sue Grafton about the ongoing events in the life of Kinsey Millhone, who is a 30-something, twice-divorced, sometimes crackerjack detective. These books are not going to change the world — they are total escapism for me. I like to read mysteries uninterrupted so that I can totally immerse myself in the plot.
When I started Q Is for Quarry, I was delighted to visit Santa Teresa, a city loosely based on glamorous Santa Barbara, California. Grafton took me out of the city I wanted to visit, Santa Teresa, into a hick and dreary town but still managed to weave a pretty good story. The only problem was that I needed the characters to wear name badges. I could not keep them straight. You know how some books have a family tree at the beginning so you understand how characters relate? Q Is for Quarry needed one. I kept flipping back to remind myself who is Justine and which one is Adrienne after. Is Ruel the father or the son? Do you ever have problems following the plot and keeping the characters straight?
I have several questions for our book club and look forward to your feedback. How long do you think authors can keep their readers interested when they are writing a series of mysteries? If you are a Grafton fan, do you think she is as good with Q Is for Quarry as she was with A Is for Alibi, G Is for Gumshoe or, the author’s favorite, J Is for Judgment? Which book is your favorite? Did you know Grafton is from Kentucky, attended Western Kentucky and graduated from the University of Louisville?
How does Grafton compare to other mystery writers? I like her better than I do Patricia Cornwell because Cornwell is determined to make her leading characters dark and miserable. They never ever laugh or have fun. Do you think Grafton should stop while she is ahead or finish the alphabet? She already has the titles for all of the series and plans to finish A-Z around 2015. Will you read every letter of the alphabet? I plan to. Do you avid readers think this is OK? Should I reward myself with mysteries, whose stories do not stay with me, or do I need to plow through the Modern Library list of 100 best books? I’m interested to know what you think.
Larry’s Language
Remember high school? Most of the world seems to divide into two groups: those who remember high school as the greatest time of their life and the rest of us who consider ourselves lucky to have survived and escaped. Author Sue Grafton hit a winning book series idea 20 years ago with A Is for Alibi featuring California private investigator Kinsey Millhone in the fictional town of Santa Teresa (better known in real life as Santa Barbara). Almost every year Grafton produces another mystery in her alphabetic series, and this year it is Q Is for Quarry. Her alter ego, Millhone, lives a solitary life of her own choosing that centers on the neighborhood pub, her elderly landlord, her bitter high school memories, and the latest unsolved crime.
Part of the fun of solving any good mystery read is figuring out the clues and avoiding the false trails. This story is full of misleading trails as Kinsey explores a 1969 suspicious death of a young woman. Her death was the result of foul play, and the body has never been identified despite her malformed teeth.
This is a modern mystery. This is not your parents’ generation of cozies and English village whodunits. While Agatha Christie perfected the locked room mystery, the murdering narrator surprise, and while Alfred Hitchcock and his ilk developed the twist ending, little was left for the modern practitioners but to become more realistic. Now murderers, instead of being the butler, are the local psychopath who should have been committed to the asylum years ago but has been allowed to wander homeless in an urban neighborhood instead. These books represent reality at its worst.
These modern crime novels feature setting and place plus characters with an attitude that is resentful of authority, disrespectful of propriety, and oblivious to morality. As a result, violence and mayhem are at a premium. What I particularly liked about this book though was how sympathetic Grafton and Kinsey are to the victim. It is not important what type of person the murdered woman was; she still deserved to have her story told. Do you think that is true, even if the victim is a despicable character?
Perhaps because these stories were never required reading in school and easily avoid the seemingly endless concentric circles of post-modernism, people buy and read them. In fact, Q Is for Quarry debuted in the No. 1 spot on the USA Today best-seller list. Most best-seller lists are full of crime novels because readers love a good puzzle. Another reason is that modern mysteries reflect the character defects and personalities of the detective, the victim, and the perpetrator. For example, in Q is for Quarry we learn more about private detective Kinsey Millhone’s alienation from her family and how they probably shunned her mother because of her marriage to an older man. In addition, author Grafton feeds us tidbits about the classic 1966 Mustang, the advantages of nitrous oxide in dentistry, Hungarian cooking, and just how good fast food can be while it is probably killing you.
Mysteries are fun. Everything you read does not have to be serious, complex or difficult. Sometimes reading should just be for fun, and crime novels ably fill that purpose.
Our next selection will be Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
