Murder She Wrote

Reading this remembrance of Angela Lansbury this week took me back to my grandparents’ house in Arkansas where the tv always seemed to be loudly playing Murder She Wrote. It was also at my grandmother’s house that I first discovered Agatha Christie. I still love a good mystery, and if it’s a little quirky, so much the better. Today’s repost reminds me of an author I need to revisit, Emily Arsenault.

Not since reading the Flavia de Luce mysteries, have I been so intrigued by the amateur sleuths that crop up in Emily Arsenault's books.

 In What Strange Creatures, Theresa Battle writes copy for a candle company catalog by day and procrastinates writing her dissertation by night. When her brother is arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, she tries to prove his innocence.  By seeking out the girlfriend’s current and former acquaintances she often draws inspiration from her dissertation subject, Margery Kempe. Weaving Kempe’s story with Theresa’s, Arsenault ventures to ask us to examine our own vocations.

 Miss Me When I’m Gone centers around Gretchen Waters, the author of Tammyland, a memoir of the author’s love of female country music stars. When Gretchen turns up dead after a reading, everyone is shocked, including Jamie, her best friend from college. Gretchen’s mother asks Jamie to be her literary executor and turns over the journals, files, and notes Gretchen was working from for her second book. Originally intended to be a book about the men of country music, Jamie discovers that this second book is actually Gretchen’s attempt to find out more about the identity of her father. As Jamie pieces together the notes left behind, she travels into Gretchen’s past and finds out more than the murderer bargained for.

The Broken Teaglass follows two young dictionary editors as they start finding random citations from a  mysteriously quirky story called The Broken Teaglass.  As the excerpts turn up out of order, they intriguingly reveal a corpse, a guilty conscience, and a love affair all set in the very dictionary offices from which they are working. What could be better than a novel that combines unrequited love, murder, and words? Arsenault builds up the suspense with each excerpt, and helpfully puts them all in order in the later chapters revealing that context matters.

 

 

Devil in a Blue Dress

I love a good period-mystery. The intrigue, the clues, the lipstick. Immersed in a plethora of British mysteries lately (like this one and this one), I decided to read something set on this side of the pond for this week’s challenge.

The task: read a classic of genre fiction. So I turned to one of my favorite mystery writers – Walter Mosley. It’s been years since I sat down with one of his Easy Rawlins’ detective stories. When I picked up Devil in a Blue Dress, I had forgotten how hard it is to put down.

From the first page, Mosley not only sets the scene but immerses the reader in the middle of post-WWII Los Angeles. Easy Rawlins is minding his own business, hanging out in Joppy’s bar, wondering how he’s going to make his house payment. Joppy introduces him to a shady character named Albright who offers him a job. All Easy has to do is find a young woman named Daphne Monet. Unlike his name, the job is anything but.

It’s a world of violence, racism, hatred, and two-timing men not much different than our own. Through it all, Easy hears a steady voice that comes to him at his worst moments, when all he wants to do is run. As he says, “The voice is hard. It never cares if I’m scared or in danger. It just looks at all the facts and tells me what I need to do.”

And he gets it done.