Decay and Disgust in 1664 London -- The Sweet Smell of Decay, a Book Review

Photo: from the book's Goodreads page.

I really liked this book despite its inconsistency. Some parts are very well-written, and some...well, aren't. Very odd. You can get a paragraph or two, or a few pages, with exceptional prose, or description; but then suddenly you get a dead-weight clunker of a paragraph, or sometimes just a line or two. There are shifts in tone, too. Suddenly--and I mean you can hear the screeches--a character becomes shady. Suddenly a scene changes, or you can't see it clearly. Towards the end there's a well-drawn action scene--and then suddenly you're at a trial, and it's very drawn-out. And the main character, Harry Lytle, does this and does that, and seemingly never stops, to do anything, and you realize that can't be, and it all doesn't come together, but it's okay because you're reading about yourself going through the motions as Lytle, and that's enough. In fact, that's the point, and undoubtedly the author's intent.

Very tough to explain.

But despite it all, you have a main character who is likable in his opaqueness. Who is he? What does he do? Not really ever explained, but he's a common enough bloke, and he's supposed to be you, the reader. He's just accessible enough to be us. We're the ones doing what he's doing, seeing what he's seeing. That transition is so seamless, you don't even realize it happened.

1664 London is really the main character, and it is supported well. The mystery isn't really mysterious. (The plot is more of a mystery, if you know what I mean.) It's all explained at the end, not very well, as the bow falls off and isn't neatly tied. But you won't care, because you're there for the sights and sounds of 1664 London, and you will get a lot of that, and you'll like it. The logistics of the ending is a head-scratcher, as are all of the characters when they take off their wigs to check for lice. Everyone's bald, and everything's filthy and gross, and 1664 London is just a disgusting place, where people get hanged but don't die, and their intestines are ripped out and burned and they don't die, and they're then tied hand and foot to horses and ripped apart, and if they still don't die, they're carted in a wheelbarrow to the nearest river and dumped in. And then their heads are stuck on a pike on a bridge or tower. And a prisoner about to die this way soils his pants, and that's described, and you realize that's what you're reading this for--the details, like you're there in 1664 London, and you're happy to be there by reading about it, because you sure as hell wouldn't really want to be there.

That's why this book works. If you like the history of historical fiction more than you like the fiction of historical fiction, you'll like this one. I'm on to the next, A Plague of Sinners.

No Longer A Vet--Now I'll Pay the Toll at the Gate

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you know I never write about my job.  Few of you know what I do for a living, and any reference to it in a comment--good, bad or neutral--makes me delete that comment.

For the most part, that won't change now.  I won't write about the job, but I do have an announcement to make.  In keeping with my policy of not writing about my job, it may seem like code to those who aren't associated with it.

This entry is for those of you who are.

It is with great regret that I have to announce that I am [see title].  This was a brutal decision to make, and I even (almost) had an emotional moment after it was said and done.  There was paperwork to sign, and a long walk back to my seat.  (And they forgot to sign something, so I had to do it again.) I'm told that I made that walk both times with my head down, and that I did not look happy.

Though the job itself remains the same, I will be at a different building, working with a different community.

(However, it seems like I will be allowed to continue with the after-work program at the first building, so stay tuned for that.  It is still on my way home, and so I can still run the program on Wednesdays, from 2:30 to 3:00, which was the plan anyway.  Stay tuned for further details on that.)

I worked for 14 years at the building I left.  I ran an after-work program there for 14 years, with good-to-great success.  I served the same building in a different capacity for 4 years a long time ago. Overall, I spent 18 years--a large percentage of my life--in that one building.

But the building will be a different type of building in two years, and I could not see myself being successful with the new job requirements.  I may have been transferred to another building anyway--quite possibly to the building I am now.  But there was a small chance that I would have been transferred to another building, or asked to stay where I was, with new workers and new requirements, where I felt I may have been less successful at my job.  The bottom line: for me, and to support my loved ones, I felt compelled to switch to a different building so I can work with the same type of workers--the same ones I've worked with for the past 14 years.

I will miss the workers I worked with, many of whom joined the after-work program I ran, as well as the other workers who stated they were very happy to be able to work with me again next year.  Some of them had to talk to people to make that happen, and it seems like they went out of their way to do so.  Now that won't happen.  I do feel, a little bit, that I have left you and that I have let you down.  I hope you don't feel the same way, and I hope you understand my explanation.

Job certainty is an important thing.  So is knowing I will be able to stay in the same type of work environment for the foreseeable future--now, and long after any current worker has moved on. Hopefully, I'll be doing this for the next 25 or so years.  We'll see.

And I may be seeing some of you again in two years, when you are sent to work at my new building.

I also look forward to the challenge of my new building.  I have already met with some of the other workers (literally, the workers) and everything seems great.  This new building also has an after-work program of the same type, so it would be cool to compete against this building's after-school program, should I be allowed to do so.  Maybe I'll be asked to anchor it.  I'd rather anchor the program of my former building, but we'll see.  I look forward to a successful year with my new fellow workers--both literal and figurative--and I look forward to every challenge this building offers.

I take my job very seriously--perhaps too much so, on occasion--and I take the responsibilities of supporting my loved ones very seriously, too.  As much as I, they deserved to know that I had job certainty, and that I was able to work in a situation where I felt I would do the most good, and to be the most successful.  If I am not successful at my job, I am not happy.  Nothing else at work matters.

I did what I could for the building, for its workers, and for the community--for 14 years.  I spoke publicly against those who wanted to shut down or transform that building.  I care for the building, its workers and its community, and don't let anyone tell you different.

I will always be a vet; I'll always be very pro-veteran.

And so I say goodbye.  Maybe just for now; maybe for good.  Even if we had our differences, I hope that you agree that I did the best I could at my job, every single day.  And that my best was good.

Be good.

Be safe.

Be happy.

The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber -- Web Sleuths and Cold Cases

Photo: The hardcover's hardcover, from this website at Simon and Schuster.


Though a little dry at times, The Skeleton Crew is a work unlike anything I've read before: a nonfiction piece about web sleuths, people who match missing people with unidentified bodies, thereby giving closure to the families of the dead and, to boot, solving a cold case.

That such people exist is a surprise, and yet not, to me at the same time.  Mostly the web detectives are obsessed people with a personal void to fill.  Some are siblings of someone murdered, or someone missing.  Todd Matthews, the man the book revolves around the most, had siblings die very young--just a few years old--and he thinks he's perhaps trying to resurrect them, in a way.  He doesn't really know.

But he solved the now-infamous case of Tent Girl.  In this book you'll also read about the still-unsolved case of the Lady of the Dunes, from Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  Another case, of a young redhead killed in the desert outside of Las Vegas, haunts me still.

And you might be surprised to know that as many as 40,000--and perhaps more--unidentified bodies take up space right now in coroner's offices throughout the U.S.  More find their way into the unidentified statistics every day.

And they're not all homeless, addicts or prostitutes, either.

One article I read today--similar to this book but not in any way connected to it--concerned a woman who lived under a ton of aliases for over thirty years before she committed suicide in Texas.  Who was she, really?  Nobody knows--including her husband.  She'd covered her tracks that well.  Her latest driver's license was of a name she'd stolen off of an 18-month old's gravestone in Idaho.

Then there was the story of a woman who was kidnapped, sold to a man who molested her and married her (yes).  She's not dead, of course, but she tells the story of a woman, from her exact same situation, who was killed by the man she'd had to marry.  Who was this other girl?  Nobody knows.  She'd just been taken off the street, sold to some guy, and re-named.  And now she's dead, and nobody knows who she is--not even the guy who kidnapped her.

So who's The Lady in the Dunes?  The woman who had her head bashed in and her hands chopped off to hinder her identification?  Nobody knows.  And there's thousands of people like her, unidentified, unknown, unburied and ungrieved-for, all over the country.

Fascinating, in a sad, morbid, I-can't-believe-it kind of way.

And definitely worth reading, if you can stomach it.

It's written by Deborah Halber in a literary-mystery kind of way, weaving interconnected stories, flashing back, coming back around again.  You have to pay attention, but it's easy to do if you care enough.  I found myself Googling some of the nicknames and some of the victims, and reading a few of the websites mentioned in the book.

I even gave a passing thought to trying it myself.  Me, the web sleuth.  But I won't. 

I know better.  It's too depressing and too addicting, and I'd never recover.

The writer in me sees a good novel in here somewhere.  I'll add it to the list of manuscripts-to-come for now.  I've got to return the book to the library, but I'll look to buy it soon, so I can own it when I start to write my web-sleuthing novel.

Police

Photo: An uncopyedited proof, the type given to early readers, or beta-readers.  And, considering the editing job done on this book (see comment below), it apparently remained uncopyedited.  From crimefictionlover.com.

Very, very, very disappointing follow-up to Nesbo's Phantom, a far superior book, even with the ridiculous passages from the rat's POV.  In equal parts boring and frustrating--but mostly frustrating--Police is a book that could've been, and should've been, much better. 

It fails because it's all over the place with its plot and story, and because it doesn't focus enough on its characters.  Nesbo said in an interview that he essentially wrote Phantom and Police as one book, and it shows.  At over 1,000 pages combined, it seems like Nesbo couldn't wait to finish with the ending, that even he became bored and frustrated with it.

How else to explain the inexplicable demise of a major recurring character?  How else to explain how the killer could've had the time to draw and quarter this well-liked character while on the run from everyone?  Could the killer really have chopped off her arms and legs and head in (seemingly) minutes?  Then stash them all in different bags and deposit them in the trash just in time for the trucks?

What?!?  And, by the way, didn't this character deserve so much better?  She's rarely considered for the rest of the book--though everyone was sure not to sit in her chair--and it's never explained why she was done away with when other characters were not, even when we were tricked into thinking they would be.

And that was another thing.  Way too many cheap tricks, like making us think a character's young daughter was in danger when her father calls her friend Emilie's house to inquire about her sleepover.  Turns out, she was at the sleepover after all--just at a different girl's house...another girl in the same class, also named Emilie!!!  Ugh...

Another time a character looks like she's about to get it, but it was just another character sneaking up on her.  She even says that, hey, you're not John Doe--but it turns out he was.  She just meant that he wasn't acting like himself.  Please...

Another time a very distraught father was acting strange at the scene of his daughter's death, just after a character in the previous section said that murders were committed by someone distraught about love, and at the death scene of those he loved.  Turns out, though, that this guy was actually just in grief about his daughter dying, one year to the day...Argh!

The real bad guy is a case of who cares.  The ones you wanted to be guilty--two REALLY bad guys--lose an eye and gets his face burnt off, apparently without too many aftereffects or problems.  They go out in public and live their lives as if nothing happened.  Must've been a great surgery for the guy who lost his eye, though the guy who did it was never a doctor or surgeon, or in any health-related field at all.

And who was that body in the hospital all that time?  Not who you think, but considering how Phantom ended, you couldn't be blamed for not knowing.  Turns out, a character from that book hadn't died after all!  How could the reader have known?  Well, you couldn't, but that's the way it is, anyway.

And where's the REALLY, REALLY bad guy everyone spends most of the book looking for?  Nobody ever says.  Wait for the sequel, I guess.  The only intriguing character is a very beautiful, and very unbalanced (Isn't that always the way?) young woman who does something very touching--and out of character--at the end.  You won't believe it, just like I didn't.

Very cheap.  Very lazy.

And really disappointing, because I like the series and I like the writer.  In fact, I was just thinking of incorporating a technique of his that he uses at the end of every book--what some writers have called his "set pieces," which they essentially are, in a play kind of way.  I now realize that these have to be exquisitely staged and described because a) they end every book; b) they're the resolution of the action / mystery / who-dun-it? / police procedural; and c) they're actually the climax, if you combine them with the next book, which I realize is how Nesbo actually writes these.  So they serve a ton of functions.

But, because of this, they have to be perfect.  Great when they are, as most of them have been.  Really bad when they're not.  And when you combine that with everything I've described above, and throw in a lousy editing job (this could've easily been a few hundred pages shorter), you have a real clunker.

And what he did to that recurring female character--chopped her up into many pieces, without mentioning how important she'd been to the series, or her now-orphaned young son--and throw in the fact that she was apparently alive during most of the chopping up...Indefensibly awful.

So bad I'm driven by it to work on my own book, and to treat my characters much better.  Bad things will still happen to them, but they won't be (or remain) unexplained.  And I'll treat them, as I hope I always have, with much more respect.

So frustrating because, again, Nesbo is a good writer, and though the tricks in this book are cheap, they work because you turn the pages.  You want to figure everything out.  You want to see what happens.  You want to see it all unravel.  And in that sense this book isn't awful, exactly, because I read its 550 hardcover pages in about 24 hours or so.

And I'll read the next one, too.

But...