New(ish) Crime Writers, part 2

by Harry on November 23, 2015

Ok, here’s the second in my series on new-ish crime writers. This one might well already have hung up her boots – if so, it’s tragic. I twice tried to read that Behind the Scenes in the Museum book, and just couldn’t get anywhere with it. Then, in response to a much earlier thread, Jerry Dworkin suggested Case Histories, and then someone else did, and then my Monkees-appreciating neighbor did, but he actually had the book so… Well, that was it for several weeks. Kate Atkinson’s 4 Jackson Brodie books are, taken together, a single masterpiece of the genre. Each book weaves together two or more crimes, the connections between which are far from obvious, and in some cases just a matter of them crossing Brodie’s path. She is Hardyesque in both her complete lack of fear of, and her mastery of the art of, coincidence and her willingness –indeed her determinedness – to strain credulity, and Brodie is tough, lovable, screwed up, a little bit hard to take. Her writing is sublime – I can’t think of any crime writer who is better able to sustain suspense by taking you down an alleyway that you cannot imagine the point of – and which is far longer than seems appropriate – just where you are dying to see the next plot twist. She adores Brodie, but she also adores and crafts her other characters – Gloria in One Good Turn, and Reggie in When Will There Be Good News? are both brilliant inventions. As unafraid as she is of coincidence, she’s even less afraid of long digressive sentences, paragraphs, pages, even chapters. She’s a genius. Maybe we should have a ‘Kate Atkinson paragraph” competition closer to Christmas – if so, CB’s assignment is to do Kate Atkinson in the style of Molesworth.

So: two warnings and a tip.

Warning 1: I nearly put down Case Histories after a couple of chapters. One of the cases is so harrowing and gross that if you don’t trust her (I didn’t) you think she is coldly misanthropic. Trust me, you can trust her, she’s not.

Warning 2: once you are 1/3 of the way into Case Histories you won’t want to read anything else till you’ve finished all 4.

Tip: as with all good series you should read these in order. But, if for some reason you can’t, you can get away with starting with One Good Turn, as long as you then go straight back to Case Histories, and only then onto When Will there Be Good News (I know because my daughter ran out of reading during the trip in which I finished When will There be Good News?; I happened to have One Good Turn with me so she read that first, and it was, just about, ok).

When Universities Really Do Destroy the Past…

by Corey Robin on November 23, 2015

Fifteen years ago, NYU announced a plan to expand its law school by tearing down Edgar Allan Poe’s home on West Third Street, where Poe wrote “The Cask of Amontillado,” revised “The Raven,” and acquired his own literary magazine. The announcement provoked some resistance; 70 scholars signed a letter in protest. They lost. Four years later, a nine-story, 170,000 square-foot Furman Hall was formerly opened. The Poe House was completely gone; a version of its facade was reconstructed a half-block away. According to a historical preservationist:

Walking by, you would never know this was supposed to be the actual remnant of a 19th-century house. It looks tacked on. It’s a facade, literally and figuratively.

Like the capitalist society they serve, universities erase the past all the time. Most of the time we don’t care. For the sake of progress or real estate values, we live with it. Or embrace it.

When politicized university students ask that we revisit the nation’s racial past, however, that we rename buildings not to remove memory but to revise it, we become the most ardent preservationists. Even law professors who said not a word about the destruction of the Poe House.

If the revision in question is for the sake of capitalism, we sigh, whisper an All That’s Solid Melts Into Air, and move on. If it is for the sake of knowledge and anti-racism, we say no, in thunder.