Miss Literacy breaks out her Bics

I worry about my approach to mysteries lately. Perhaps too many hours spent watching forensics programs on TV have jaded me, but my tolerance for plot contrivances and ham-handed foreshadowing is rapidly decreasing. Poor Ellen Paul and her debut mystery, Corpse de Ballet - she hit me right at the wrong moment. If I were charitable, I would give her a "Romance Writer Switches to Mystery" pass that would allow her a higher-than-normal maximum on cliched writing, but today's just not her day. However, she did inspire me to break out My Little Red Pen, wherein I intend to catalog some of the more egregious instances of a writer moving the plot forward through the clumsy use of cliches and all-too-convenient "coincidences" that drive me to Office Depot for a 12-pack of the classic editor's tool. Someone's got to do it.

1. Instances of vomiting and/or queasiness for a female character between the ages of 15 and 50 are not a subtle sign that said character is pregnant. To anyone that has ever read a book or watched TV before, this is as flagrant as the fakeness of Tara Reid's chest pontoons. Prior offenders for this include Ken Follett and even my beloved Jasper Fforde. And no, male writers do not get an exemption. Clues to pregnancy are many and varied - let's try using some of the other, hmm?

2. May I never again read a mystery wherein the heroine's yeast infection leads her to the crime's solution. Crotch itch as deus ex machina? Delightful. Unfortunately, the creativity of the contrivance doesn't cover the bad plotting that made it necessary.

3. Repeatedly describing a character's consumption of a beverage as a clue to a poisoning isn't so much foreshadowing as beating me over the head with the clue stick. I am reading your words, you know. Mentioning it twice is fine. Pointing it out 6 times in 4 pages makes me wonder if you think I'm a little slow. Or maybe it makes me think you're a little slow.

These little mark-ups are great fun - I smell returning feature!

Tragedy at Triangle

Normally I'm not much for books set in NYC - they tend to be written by people from NYC, and thus often infused with the subtext of "...and that's why New York City is the most awesome thing ever in the history of the whole entire universe" that I find exceedingly insufferable. I mean, I love my city, but I don't think it's the acme of modern civilization to the exclusion of everything else, you know?

While dealing with a historical subject probably helps matters, David von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire that Changed America manages to avoid this trap and tell the story of one of the greatest workplace tragedies in American history with clear-eyed insight. On March 25, 1911, 146 people (mostly young women) perished in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. Fueled by heaps of fabric scraps, the fire quickly spread from a single scrap bin to engulf three floors of the factory. Some lucky workers were able to escape via one set of stairs or the elevators, but others were trapped by locked exit doors or were crushed when the poorly constructed fire escape collapsed. Still others leapt to their deaths rather than face the fire. While the fire department quickly got the blaze extinguished, it still managed to kill a staggering number in the few minutes it raged. The tragedy caused a sensation in New York and eventually led to greater reforms for workplace safety.

von Drehle's story starts slowly as he anchors the fire in its context - rather than simply running with the sensational aspects of the tragedy, he offers insight into the social, political, and economic forces at play in the garment industry at the turn of the century. Seeing these forces at work early helps to explain the events of the book's final third, where reform was slow and punishment lacking despite the public outcry in the fire's wake. Also of note are the diagrams and photographs - I'm terrible at translating directional words into a mental picture, so these were hugely helpful in understanding the events.

Despite the sometimes brutal depictions of the victims' final moments, stripped of their protective contemporary euphemisms, von Drehle handles his subject with great sensitivity. Notably, he makes the extra (substantial) effort to compile what is believed to be the first and only complete list of the dead, along with the small scraps of information available about them. These tiny details, such as a grieving mother identifying her daughter's body based on a "unique darn in her sock," give the story its emotional power.

Overall, very well-done and affecting. 4/5.

Locked rooms, twisted

While they've become rather passé lately, locked-room mysteries have long been a staple of classic mystery. The form offers interesting opportunities for the ingenious author, but it's been so badly mangled by the less adept that the best of these snappy little puzzles are most often found overseas or wandering friendless in the used-bookstore desert. Thankfully the smarty-pants-wearing folks over at Soho Crime saw fit to reprint some of Patricia Carlon's work in their first US editions. The reclusive Australian author died in 2002, but the gems she wrote in the 1960s are as sharp as ever. Hence, today's twofer of psychological thrillers - Hush, It's a Game and The Whispering Wall.

Carlon takes the traditional mystery setup and turns it neatly on its head - rather than meandering through clues and suspects in pursuit of a tidy denouement, she lays out the villain's identity and the crime immediately and then builds almost unbearable tension and suspense out of a closed environment. In Hush, It's a Game, a parolee returns and murders the ex-girlfriend who put him away, not realizing that she's locked her young babysitting charge in the kitchen. Reading about little Virginia's struggles to understand what's happening and her efforts to break free results in a truly vivid scare because the tension all results from absolutely mundane misunderstandings and miscommunication. The theme of being unable to make other people see the danger emerges in an even more twisted way in The Whispering Wall. Here, Carlon casts the victim of a severe stroke as her heroine. Although she is paralyzed and unable to speak, Sarah Oatland can still hear and comprehend, a fact which she may come to regret as she overhears a murder plot through the thin walls of her home. Using only her wits, Sarah fights to warn the intended victim and protect herself from the plotters. Carlon achieves something of a masterstroke here - in her vivid depictions of Sarah's frustration and anger, she makes a fully realized character out of someone all observers would see as mostly dead if Sarah had existed in life.

Carlon's greatest strength is her ability to use entirely ordinary human behaviors (namely the tendency towards self-involvement and isolation) to create the chills and scares of her plots. It's easy to separate yourself from a typical serial killer novel because you know the odds of such a thing ever happening to you are about a jiggityjillion-to-one. But when the danger is solely due to other people's indifference, the fright becomes much more real. Her writing is creepy, but oh-so-good. Read these in the sun, and don't shut the door behind you.

Black hats and fear

The sensitivity of animals to their environment is hardly a new observation - from animals in Indonesia and Thailand turning for higher ground ahead of the disasterous tsunami in '04 to my own childhood dog that would dive into an opened kitchen cabinet during a thunderstorm, it's pretty well common knowledge by now. However, the question of why animals are so attuned is still open, but Temple Grandin gives it her best in Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. Grandin is herself autistic, and draws numerous parallels between her own experience and how animals perceive the world around them. While the book would benefit from more extensive footnoting as it's sometimes hard to see Grandin's evidence for her conclusions, her ideas about how to work with animals rather than against them are definitely worthwhile. Understanding how animals think about their world and then using that information to train and handle them properly is far more effective than anthropomorphizing them to the point where you can't get through at all. Grandin theorizes that whereas animals and autistic people tend to think in pictures, normal people tend to think in words. Making these twain meet requires us verbal creatures to make more use of the visual in training and understanding our animal companions.

Probably my favorite part of this book is the heavy emphasis Grandin puts on understanding animal fear. Almost every animal I've ever met is afraid of something, but when fear gets out of control your normally placid pooch can go from zero to apeshit in about .02 seconds flat. Training should be about managing and calming fear, not creating it through aggressive methods. Treats and patience reap far greater rewards than any choke collar ever could.

Familia

Finished Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo at lunch today, and it was the perfect palate-cleanser after my disappointment with Tartt. Whereas Tartt's prose is removed and cold (rather like that Miss Havisham-style author portrait on the back flap), Cisneros's is like a warm, soft rebozo. Her love for her Mexican culture and family is evident in every turn of phrase, and Caramelo is as perfectly executed as semi-autobiographical fiction can get. Even as she renders the overbearing Awful Grandmother in all her tyranny, the underlying thread is of compassion and love for family even when its members drive you 'round the bend.

I loved the casual manner of Cisneros's style, and the conversations between the "author" (the charming and authentic Celaya Reyes) and her rambunctious family create a deeply intimate portrait with charm and humor. But the novel truly shines in the small details that make up a life: Celaya's unfortunate childhood haircut, father Inocencio holding tacks in his mouth as he upholsters a sofa, great-grandfather Eleuterio's drooping face after his stroke. Cisneros elegantly walks the line between moving the plot along and giving enough detail to bring the characters from black and white to full-blown color. And maybe that's the best way to describe Caramelo - a bold explosion of color that captivates the eye and shows off the passion of the artist.

Bonus: the cover art Vintage chose for this is brilliant - an absolutely perfect choice.