Book Beginning: Ross MacDonald's The Blue Hammer

I drove up to the house on a private road that widened at the summit into a parking apron. When I got out of my car I could look back over the city and see the towers of the mission and the courthouse half submerged in smog. The channel lay on the other side of the ridge, partly enclosed by its broken girdle of islands.

...is the beginning of Ross Macdonald's The Blue Hammer.

This was Ross Macdonald's final novel and the Lew Archer private eye series was well-established by this point. Macdonald had begun to get the acclaim that has since landed him in the Library of America. It seems to me he's not trying anything flashy here at the beginning in this one. The narrator is Lew Archer but we're not told that. (Though it is on the cover of the book.) He's on his way to see a potential client, but we don't really know that either; all we know is that he's on the grounds of a well-to-do southern California house. (Mission, smog.) It's low-key, but still I like it. Though I have to admit, if I wasn't already a Macdonald fan, I don't know that it would sell me.

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a bookish meme hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader. To play, quote the beginning of the book you're currently reading, give the author and title, and any thoughts if you like. Your reporter is almost on location this week, reporting remotely from (northern) California.

Julian Symons' The Blackheath Poisonings

Julian Symons' The Blackheath Poisonings (1978) is subtitled A Victorian Murder Mystery and so it is, but not by much. It takes place in 1892.

Three members of the interlocking Mortimer/Collard/Vandervent families are killed by arsenic poisoning. The family's money, widely thought to be considerable, comes from the family business as toy merchants; they also own a pair of spectacularly something houses near to each other at Blackheath. At the time of the poisonings, the matriarch of the family lives in one of the houses with one of her daughters as yet unmarried; her son and daughter with their respective spouses live in the other. Roger Vandervent, a widower, came to his marriage to the other Collard daughter with a son by a previous marriage. Those are the principals.

Whew. Have you got all that?

Roger Vandervent is the first to go, then next that matriarch, Harriet Collard. The daughter-in-law Ysabel Collard is arrested for the murders, is convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, when a third murder occurs, that of her husband George Collard. Since Ysabel is in prison, she's clearly innocent of the third murder, and now it's presumed she's innocent of the first two as well. She's released, and the murders go unsolved in the world of the novel, but a final postscript reveals that, in fact, a rough justice prevailed.

This warmed up as it went along. The initial exposition, which I boiled down to a paragraph above, was pretty leaden and a bit unclear; I had to keep referring back. Also Symons, who is a scholar of the mystery novel tradition among one of his many hats, wears his learning rather heavily in this, clanking along like a full suit of armor to prevent any accusations he didn't know his period. Consider:

She [Ysabel] sat alone in the coach marked "For Ladies Only" and carried with her George Newnes' publication The Strand Magazine. She turned the pages and glanced at the plentiful illustrations which, together with the stories by a writer named Doyle, she supposed to be the secret of the magazine's success. She read nothing, however,...

I appreciate a sly Sherlock Holmes reference as well as the next person, but did we need George Newnes? Ah, well, your mileage may vary...

But the resolution was stronger. The solution was clever and there was even some emotional weight in the denouement. First the doctors and then the police are comically incompetent, and the solution to the case is revealed in that postscript by Paul Vandervent, the son by a previous marriage. Satisfactory, as Nero Wolfe might say.

Vintage Mystery Challenge. Silver Age. What. Means of Murder In The Title

Jorge Carrión's Bookshops: A Reader's History

Jorge Carrión is, among other things, a travel writer, and this volume is, among other things, a volume of travel, travel to bookshops. He imagines a passport which has, instead of the stamps of countries, the stamps of bookshops he's visited and there are bookshops in Buenos Aires, in Istanbul, in London, in New York, in Sydney, in San Francisco, in Santiago. He himself lives in Barcelona and, of course, there are bookshops he's visited in Barcelona. He describes the layout, the shelves, the windows, the signs, and most importantly, the stock.

That, of course, is one of the great pleasures of this book for a book lover: the thought of all those bookshops one (I) could go to. The ones I have been to (say 57th Street Books in Chicago) I now want to revisit; the ones I haven't, well, I've made a list.

But there's also a melancholy tone to the book. Carrión emphasizes early on that book selling is a business even though we as book lovers don't always want to see it that way. I may have been known to hoard a book or two that only my heirs and assigns will ever be able to get rid of, but by definition that can't be true of a bookseller: if they don't sell books they don't last in the business for very long.

And plenty of bookstores fail anyway. Increasingly as his book goes along (and as his writing of it went along--he seems to have been working on this book over the course of ten years) the bookshops he once visited have closed. 

Bookstores also take on other functions. He introduced me to the Spanish neologism cafebrería, that combination of a coffee shop and bookstore, a word that could usefully be imported into English. Of course it's a business and one does what one has to. Are these lists of the world's most beautiful bookstores any longer about books? Or have they become tourist destinations? If selling is necessary then can we complain when booksellers do what it takes? Carrión does not take a stand, but only brings up the question.

Anyway, enjoyable, even if I just lost an hour Googling bookstores that no longer exist where I've spent my time and money...