Favorite Detectives - Introduction

Detective stories - mysteries, historical mysteries - are my favorite genre fiction, just ahead of historical fiction. Combining the two genres combined often works well and opens a broad field for storytelling. A historical mystery in the hands of a great writer is sublime.


I just finished a book in this category Morality Play by Barry Unsworth. My review:Morality Play by Barry Unsworth

Detective stories lend themselves to exploration of serious issues; for example, why do people behave the way they do, whether for good or ill or when is it morally sound to do a bad act for a good end. Detective stories can take place anywhere on Earth (or I suppose in the Universe, but I can't think of any sci-fi detectives) and at any time in history (or the future - as in the alternate history mystery Fatherland: A Novel (Mortalis) by Robert Harris).

And anyone can be a detective. And I do mean anyone - a Turkish eunuch, a Laotian coroner and a Russian nun to name three.

The master, of course, was Arthur Conan Doyle. You can buy the "complete" Holmes stories in several editions - none of which seem to be quite the same!

The Complete Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes is my preferred edition because it has Sidney Edward Paget's original illustrations that accompanied the stories in the 19th-century British magazine "The Strand."

Doyle did not invent the detective novel. That honor apparently belongs to the 1859 book The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins: Father of the Detective Novel.

The first detective short story was published in 1841 when Edgar Allan Poe introduced Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin in the short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

(Doyle also wrote several non-Holmes works of fiction that are well worth reading. In particular I recommend The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. Here is my review.

The Sherlock Holmes' character has been reborn time and again. My favorite Sherlock pastiche is set in Minnesota! Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders: From the American Chronicles of John H. Watson, M.D. by Larry Millett.

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The next post will list some of my favorites in the detective mystery genre.

The Skull Mantra (Inspector Shan Tao Yun) by Eliot Pattison

Below is my review of The Skull Mantra (Inspector Shan Tao Yun) by Eliot Pattison.

The Edgar Awards are presented every year by the Mystery Writers of America. They honor the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, television, film, and theatre published or produced in the previous year. The awards are technically the Edgar Allan Poe Awards.

Some Tibet info. Learn about gompas.


(Photo of the Potala Palace near Lhasa is from Pondstone Communications Blog)
Another review at:

BookLoons Reviews - Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison

"I don't believe everything I read on a book's cover, but when the blurb on The Skull Mantra compares this thriller to greats like Gorky Park and Smilla's Sense of Snow, it's dead on. Pattison has written a remarkable first novel, which places an indomitable protagonist in the disturbing political setting of contemporary Tibet. Who hasn't heard of the plight of the Tibetan people after the brutal Chinese takeover with its erasure of ancient monasteries, genocidal treatment of monks and nuns, and forced labor camps?"

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My review:

The Skull Mantra earned Pattison the 2000 Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America. The story is set in contemporary Tibet. The mystery centers around the efforts of imprisoned former detective Shan Tao Yun to solve a string of murders of high-ranking Chinese officials. The powers-that-be are bent on pining the murders on several Tibetan Buddhist monks. When the headless body of the local prosecutor is discovered by Shan's prison labor gang, he is allowed to investigate the crime by Colonel Tan, the local ranking official. Having spent three years sharing close quarters with imprisoned monks, Shan is highly skeptical that a monk is behind this murder.

The lives of the Tibetan monks and all Tibetans under Chinese domination are Pattison's real focus. That focus raises this book above its rather convoluted and, shall we say, unlikely mystery (are disgraced Chinese detectives really given more-or-less free rein to investigate murders?). Pattison also explores beliefs of Tibetan Buddhists. The demon Tamdin is central to the story, but of greater interest we also learn about gompas, the fortress-like monasteries where traditional practices are studied and passed on; and we learn about gomchen or great meditators; and we learn about the painstaking creation of beautiful sand mandalas, which, once completed, are destroyed.

Pattison sheds light on the Chinese treatment of Tibet, and especially the Buddhist monks; the treatment seems to swing between bad and abhorrent. For example, Shan learns that during the Cultural Revolution the Red Guard seized and destroyed ancient Buddhist manuscripts and used the shreds to line their latrine. Tibetans have been killed or imprisoned, as well. The Chinese government has also drastically altered demographics by encouraging Chinese emigration to Tibet to an extent that Chinese are now a majority in Lhasa, the capital city. (The Chinese government disputes these claims.)

While the history and the mystery contribute to the book's value, its transcendental strength is the exploration of Buddhist spirituality. This element comes through not just through the monks' lives, but also through the changes in Shan and his two assistants/minders. The book could have used a bit tighter editing. Physical locations could have been more distinctly identified as it was sometimes difficult to know where things were happening. Pattison has written another five books in the Shan series and two more in a new series set in colonial America (Bone Rattler: A Mystery of Colonial America). The Skull Mantra gives readers a original and creative take on the detective mystery genre. Highly recommended.

Critique of Criminal Reason: A Mystery by Michael Gregorio

Critique of Criminal Reason: A Mystery by Michael Gregorio
 

Publisher's Weekly summary: "Philosophy professor Gregorio delivers a stellar debut, a mystery set in 1804 that cunningly incorporates the ideas of the great thinker Immanuel Kant into a twisty, fast-moving whodunit plot..... Admirers of quality intellectual fiction should embrace this book, with its pitch-perfect period detail and psychologically complex protagonist."


My review:

In the first book in this intelligent and fascinating series, the reader is quickly plunged into the midst 1803 investigation of a string of murders in Konigsberg, Prussia. Hanno Stiffeniis, a rural procurator, finds himself mysteriously and peremptorily ordered by King William III to report "with all haste" to the ancient city held in a "grip of terror".

Stiffeniis has been recommended to the King by an "imminent person", which turns out to be aged Immanuel Kant, whom he knows from a brief but intense meeting seven years earlier. Something about that meeting caused such concern that Kant's lawyer had written to Stiffeniis and demanding that he never communicate with the old philosopher again. Dark hints are dropped as well that Stiffeniis had a hand in his brother's untimely death.

Mystery swirls around the murders. Are they part of a Jacobin plot to destabilize the Prussian state? Or are the killings the work of a madman? Stiffeniis does meet, of course, with Kant who has also engaged the aid of a doctor engaged in paranormal "science" and primitive pathology. Does Kant really put stock in the doctor's hocus pocus wherein he appears to speak with the spirit of the most recently deceased victim? Has Kant's great mind finally broken under the strain of decades of heroic sustained effort? Has he suddenly changed his philosophical views on death's door?

Stiffeniis also has to struggle with the brutal methods of the Prussian military in handling his prisoners, but his own missteps lead to tragic results that pile one on top of another.

The identity and motive of the killer are well-hidden. Any number of characters seem like plausible candidates at one time or another: Stiffeniis's assistant, Kant's former assistant Martin Lampe, a luridly sensuous albino prostitute, and even Kant himself (!). Even once the murders are solved, the mystery concerning Stiffeniis's brother remains. His own parents turned bitterly and irredeemably against him, but why?

The book contains a number of historical characters in addition to Kant, including his lawyer Jachmann, and his former live-in aide Lampe, who really was fired about two years before Kant's death. The telling of the tale magnificently recreates the lost world of inflexible bureaucratic militaristic Prussia, the debauched denizens of an early 18th century port city's waterfront, the vast chasm of separating the well-to-do burghers from the multitudes living in Third World class poverty. The story also oozes appropriate amounts of creepiness.

Critique of Criminal Reason is an extremely well-written and intelligent murder mystery - but don't worry, you don't need to know Kant's philosophy to appreciate the story. Highest recommendation.

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