A Demon in My View – Ruth Rendell

This novel begins with a murder of a woman in a dark cellar – but it turns out that she’s a window display dummy. The man who strangles her holds to the belief that the dummy is a real, living woman, and his experience (which he regularly repeats) gives him an erotic thrill. Clearly, we’re dealing with a full-fledged psychopath. To the outside world Arthur is an odd bird, a fifty year old bachelor, very picky and prickly. He has no friends, but he holds a job and functions well enough. It turns out that the dummy in the cellar is a useful substitute for real women; Arthur has strangled two of them in the past. But using real victims poses the danger of being caught, and he’s quite satisfied with his substitute when the urge possesses him. Another intriguing aspect is that Arthur dresses the dummy in the type of clothes the woman who raised him – Auntie Gracie – wore. But all this amounts to a premise – Rendell doesn’t have a novel. So she introduces another character by the name of Anthony who moves into a flat in the same building as Arthur. Anthony’s problem is his love for Helen – he wants her to leave her husband, but she’s unsure of what to do (a matter that held little interest for me). Rendell’s tying together of these two narrative strands hinges on the fact that both Arthur and Anthony have the same last name. Anthony winds up unintentionally disrupting Arthur’s world. As complications proliferate – and letters between Anthony and Helen play a big role – my interest steadily declined, and the climax comes across as awkward and contrived. Rendell is a good writer, but she couldn’t follow up on that premise. Also, the book has a major gap. Though Auntie keeps popping up in Arthur’s mind, these memories seem innocuous; we’re never given insight as to what effect the woman had on him. Rendell received acclaim as a writer of psychological murder mysteries, so why did she leave out the psychology?

The Box Garden – Carol Shields

I enjoyed much of this novel because I liked the main character. We’re in Charleen’s mind, and I found her thoughts interesting. Not much was happening, but that was OK because her life is on hold, she’s treading water. One complication is introduced: she has to take a trip to attend her seventy-year-old mother’s wedding. The woman had recently had a breast removed, and Charlene can’t imagine her getting married. For one thing – the major thing – she’s an extremely negative personality, always had been. Even a comment about the nice weather gets a response that serves to deny the niceness. Charleen doesn’t hate her mother, but she doesn’t love her. I couldn’t understand how anyone could love this woman. So the whole marriage business was a bit shaky. Still, Charleen is accompanied by her boyfriend, and her sister arrives with her husband. These people I liked, the conversations between them had a nice flow. I was still on board – and then Shields manages to blow it. Maybe she felt the novel needed some drama. But what it didn’t need was melodrama (the kidnaping of her son by a possible psychotic). Suddenly we’re in a mystery thriller and are supposed to tie in some stuff from the beginning of the book to the present situation. This turn of events – and shift of tone – just didn’t work. When the dust settled and everybody was safe and content, I was still disgruntled. A good character is a terrible thing to waste.

A Is for Alibi – Sue Grafton

This is the first in a series of crime novels that Grafton continued up to the letter Y (her death intervened). Their considerable success was dependent to a large degree on whether the reader liked the private investigator, Kinsey Millhorne. I can’t say I liked her all that much. So I was left with a writing style (quite nice) and a plot (not good). The plot of mysteries is almost always the weak point. For starters, an alibi plays no role in the story. The main issue is M (for Motive), but it turns out that murders take place to cover a minor embezzlement. Then there are too many characters, too many complications. And there’s a lack of logic; when someone borrows a friend’s car to kill a woman, doesn’t this person have to account for the smashed fender? Especially since the police are looking for a black car with a smashed fender? All these flaws started to pile up and move me into the I’m-simply-turning-pages mode. The ending was predictable in that it employs the time-honored “ruse” of having an unlikely person wind up being the culprit. Grafton is similar to Ross Macdonald in her ability to effectively sketch in characters and locales, but his Lew Archer remained a shadowy figure. Kinsey is very much in your face. We even get what was, for me, a too graphic look at her sex life. So, to sum up, I won’t be moving on to B (for Burglar).