Historical mysteries, especially those set in the early decades of the last century, have been a staple of my reading diet over the past year or so. In the end, Wings of Fire disappointed me slightly. (But, then, most mystery novels do. They must operate on so many levels, and with so many moving parts, that a margin of failure is pretty much built into the enterprise.) Nonetheless, “Todd” is one of the most sophisticated “past” masters now practicing in the genre.

CHARLES TODD. Wings of Fire (1998).
Three descendents of the illustrious Trevelyan clan lay dead, new additions to a family crypt in the churchyard of a tight-knit, tucked-away fishing village called Borcombe. Vague doubts about their ostensibly non-homicidal deaths swirl like wisps of sea mist along the nearby coast of Cornwall. Scotland Yard, asked to investigate the matter, sends down Inspector Ian Rutledge, who here embarks on his second big case since returning to police service after his not-quite-complete recovery from shell shock. It’s just a year or so after the 1918 Armistice, and for Rutledge gruesome memories of the Western Front prove hard to separate from the gruesome family secrets that haunt Trevelyan Hall. All of the newly departed had connections to the Great War, either through combat or—in case of Olivia Marlowe, a poet who published pseudonymously as O.A. Manning—through an uncanny ability to evoke the horrors of combat. Rutledge, an avid reader of Manning, wonders how a woman and an invalid like Olivia could have understood so keenly the evil core of what he witnessed on the battlefields of France. Todd’s plot revolves around solving that conundrum. Skillfully using lines of verse from a Manning collection titled “Lucifer,” the author sets Rutledge on a hunt for literary clues that culminates in his discovery of a devil in the flesh, right there in bucolic Borcombe. Todd (the pen name of an American mother and son team) excels at taking the milieu of Golden Age British detective fiction and investing it with dark psychological shadings and clear-eyed social realism—qualities rarely found in actual mystery stories of the 1920s. This entry in the Rutledge series falters, though, in offering a resolution that is much too irresolute. A half-dozen mysterious deaths hang from the Trevelyan family tree, but Todd doesn’t fully clarify which of them were murders. A muddled final exposition also fails to illuminate several key details, swathing them instead in a haze of poetic allusion and Cornish superstition.

For a while now, the editors of the New York Times Magazine have been contracting well-known fiction masters to write serialized works whose carefully doled-out segments, presumably, will give readers a spot of relief from reports on Darfur and advertisements for lingerie. This past Sunday, the magazine published the first chapter of an art-heist caper by Ian Rankin. The tale (a stand-alone novel, not an entry in the John Rebus series) will unfold over the next three months, and Rankin will then adapt it for book publication in 2008.

Like a lot of people, I like the idea of publishing a novel in serial form. The image of a Dickens or a Wilkie Collins sweating out chapters of his latest potboiler, scrambling to end each installment on a properly suspenseful note, and handing ink-still-wet pages to an impatient typesetter has time-honored appeal. It corresponds to our romantic view of the novelist as part wandering troubadour (spinning an endless yarn and stringing along a willing audience, Scheherazade-like) and part industrial craftsman (making piece goods for a booming mass market). The idea of serialized publication also plays to the assumption that suspense is the cardinal feature of storytelling—that waiting isn’t the hardest part, it’s the best part.

The reality, however, is that waiting a week or more between stints of reading a novel is pointless. The practice of distributing long works of fiction through periodical literature has fallen into disuse, and for very good reason. When you can buy any of thousands upon thousands of novels in paperback, each for less than a ten-spot, when you can then read such a book at your own sweet pace and without interruption, why would you turn to a magazine to sate your narrative needs?

(With TV shows, by the way, it used to be that you had no choice but to “tune in next week” if you wanted to follow a sequence of episodes through to its finish. Now, thanks to the DVD revolution, you can watch an entire season of The Sopranos or Lost over the course of several evenings, much as you might march through a novel in nightly reading sessions. I’ve reached a point where the idea of watching a show when it’s first broadcast—and waiting seven days for the story to resume—has become unthinkable.)

I read the first chapter of “Doors Open,” the new Rankin serial, and it’s a decent work of stage-setting that leaves me with no inclination to buy or log on to the Times Magazine next week. Rankin writes in a stock manner (he gives one character “dark piercing eyes”), and his plotting moves along rails that many a screenwriter has greased before him. The magazine includes the serial in its Funny Pages section, so “caveat lector” applies to those who come looking for deathless prose or matchless storytelling. I just wonder: Who does come looking for a phoned-in, chopped-up narrative of this kind, and why?

A work of narrative art, as I noted previously, needs to exist as a self-contained, fully realized whole. Serial publication doesn’t prevent a novel from attaining that exalted state, once all of its parts have made their appearance. But this format does seem to compromise a work—by altering its natural flow, by converting it into a vehicle of audience-grabbing entertainment. (“What will happen next to our hero . . . ?”) Audience grabbing and entertainment are all right in their place, but novelists and novel readers also have other business to attend to.

Back in 1996, Stephen King published The Green Mile in six parts than hit bookstores at the rate of one trim volume per month. I was then working at a bookshop, and I recall the modest flurry of excitement that attended each new installment of King’s Depression-era tale. (There was something apt, I suppose, in his choosing that period for a story that followed the structure of a Saturday-afternoon movie serial.) Readers cleared out our stock of each title, month after month, and King cleaned up financially by bringing out The Green Mile twice—first in that series of little chapbooks and then in a one-volume edition. Still, however lucrative it may have been, this gimmick is not one that King has repeated.

My mom recommended that I read The Devil in the White City in advance of my recent trip to Chicago. So I did. And I liked it. Crime, history, architecture, the seam-bursting vitality of a great city: What’s not to like? Since the book sold quite well, a wave of copycat works—books that use criminous events to enliven straightforward history—is no doubt in the offing. Which is not a bad thing, either. (Already, the Chicago Architectural Foundation puts on a tour based on the book.)

ERIK LARSON. The Devil in the White City (2003).
History, indigestible in its raw form, is ultimately a matter of how you slice it. Larson cuts out two pieces of Chicago history, circa 1893, and juxtaposes them in a way that casts a dramatic shadow over the larger of the pair and an aura of significance over the smaller one. The big piece was the World’s Columbian Exposition, an epoch-defining convocation on the shore of Lake Michigan that introduced visitors to alternating-current electricity, the Ferris Wheel, Shredded Wheat, and the idea that the frontier era in U.S. history had come to a close. The relative small piece, in world-historical terms, was the homicidal career of Dr. Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H.H. Holmes, arguably the first American serial killer of the modern type. Holmes built a hotel, later known as his “murder castle,” not far from the fairground’s White City—an expanse of alabaster buildings, all designed in a Beaux Arts style by Daniel Burnham and his team of renowned architects. (Burnham’s struggles to plan and erect the fair’s physical plant occupy much of the book; Larson has perhaps an undue faith in his readers’ taste for stories of bureaucratic jousting.) Apart from that geographic coincidence, these stories have little connection to one another. But, in wedging them together with a sure narrative hand, Larson makes vivid a previously drab-seeming period of the American past.

Here’s a review of the classic PI novel from which I quoted a while back.

HOWARD BROWNE, Halo in Blood (1946).
Circles. A halo is a circle. The Chicago Loop, where private investigator Paul Pine keeps an office, is a circle. Around the inner circle of the Loop are ringed outer circles, extending to Oak Park and Winnetka and Glencoe, and Pine works those circles in a case that pushes him around and around, down and down—corkscrew-like—until he ties the end of the case to its beginning, and thereby forms a perfect circle. Browne should be better known than he is. Writing in the manner pioneered by Raymond Chandler, he spins better similes than Chandler does (and boy, does he spin a lot of them), and he’s a better plot-spinner, too. To be sure, the raw material of this first novel of his does have a derivative quality: The wealthy patriarch John Sandmark calls Pine to his suburban manse and asks the sleuth to look out for his beautiful, wayward daughter, Leona. Sandmark doesn’t like Leona’s latest male conquest, an oily fellow named Jerry Martin. Pine, tailing the couple, watches as a gunman emerges from the night to shoot Martin dead. More murders follow, and Pine links the killing wave to a heist committed in San Diego a quarter-century earlier, and to a strange funeral that he chanced upon in the opening scene of this adventure. All of that linking culminates in a smash triple finish, with Pine pounding out three solutions (separate, but nested within one another) in order to bring the matter full-circle. What Browne lacks in originality, he makes up for in formal elegance.

(For a secondary illustration to this post, I plucked from the Web the cover of a 1940s pulp magazine that—as best I can tell—features the novel Halo in Blood under a slightly different title. “John Evans,” the author listed in the cover blurb, was the pen name under which Browne originally published his Paul Pine stories. Browne, by the way, was the editor of Mammoth Detective, among other pulps.)

To provide content for this journal, I am strip-mining my file of brief detective-novel reviews. (I’ve been writing these little squibs for several years now.) This one covers a fine, fine work that I read a couple of months ago.

James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978).
Crumley hits a series of notes that another virtuoso of the hangdog-noir style had sounded a quarter-century earlier. The Last Good Kiss, like The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler’s masterpiece from 1953 (note the valedictory wistfulness in both titles), builds an array of cockeyed triangles around an alcoholic writer, a woman who seeks to “rescue” him, and a sad-sack shamus whom the woman hires for that purpose. Yet in numerous ways Crumley charts new territory for the hard-boiled genre. Part of what’s new, in fact, is actual territory: C.W. Sughrue, part-time detective to the wealthy and degenerate, part-time bartender to their poor and equally degenerate brethren, calls Montana home. For him, dirt roads and an endless ream of black highway replace the mean streets of urban noir; instead of clipped wisecracking, he offers parched country wit, too dry even to be called sardonic. Sughrue is also distinctly a man of his moment, the tail end of the burned-out 1970s, a time when bitter memories of the Vietnam War and the acrid odor of the ’60s counterculture still hung low and thick over the land. Across that land, from Cauldron Springs in Montana to Colorado and Oregon and other points west, he drives an El Camino pickup—a halfling monstrosity, neither quite a truck nor quite a car, and a fitting emblem for a period when no one seemed to know which shape to take. In its plotting, too, Sughrue’s adventure departs from its precursor. Where Chandler typically scored his work with a regular drumbeat of killings, Crumley inserts a murder only in the final movement of his story. A pure quest narrative for much of its length, the story follows Sughrue’s search for the long-lost daughter of a woman who runs a watering hole in Sonoma, California, where Sughrue has tracked down the errant author. The daughter disappeared a decade earlier, first into a commune, then into the porn industry, and then presumably into some other false utopia. Even after the hero locates this damsel, she faces threats from a boorish ogre and a cruel, jealous crone. But which ogre, and which crone? Sughrue, on his Interstate odyssey, encounters multiple candidates for both roles.

Spring came along, and thoughts turned naturally to baseball—the crack of wood against horsehide, the sight of a fresh green infield, the annual return after a long winter of sentimental chatter about the National Pastime. Brimming with seasonal spirit, I read a mystery novel that uses the game (and the sepia-tinted memories of it that come easily to middle-aged American boys of a certain kind, of which I am one) as its background. The book, rather like a typical spring, fell somewhat short of its promise.

TROY SOOS. Murder at Fenway Park (1994).
The perils of a superficial approach to historical fiction are vividly on display in this sojourn through the summer of 1912, when Fenway Park was brand-new and the Red Sox were on their way to a pre-“Curse” World Series victory. As hero and narrator Mickey Rawlings tells the story, that golden summer was a blood-tinged affair. A utility player recently acquired by the Boston Americans (the team’s official name back then), Rawlings no sooner arrives at Fenway than he stumbles upon the freshly dead body of a Detroit Tiger, its face turned to pulp by a baseball bat. Other incidents, among them an ominous warning to keep quiet—a favorite bat appears on Rawlings’s hotel-room pillow, suggesting that his head might be next in line for a not-so-sporting clout—place the tale firmly in the genre of hokey melodrama. The characters that surround Rawlings, meanwhile, are as stale as yesterday’s open bag of ballpark peanuts. There’s a plucky suffragette who helps Rawlings play detective; a matronly Irish boarding-house keeper who serves him hot stew and stern, worried looks; a beef-brained police captain, ready for his next take in a Keystone Cops short; and a crew of snuff-spitting teammates, each one as pure of type as when Ring Lardner first envisioned him. Most disappointing of all is Rawlings himself, an ingenuous 19-year-old who lacks credibility both as an observer of life and as a solver of crime. The crimes in question have their roots in an actual scandal that involved Ty Cobb, the 1910 American League batting title, and efforts by gamblers (in a kind of warm-up to the Black Sox scandal of 1919) to throw that title to Cobb nemesis Nap Lajoie. Baseball in those “deadball” days was more innocent yet also more corrupt than it later became, and Soos’s lone achievement is to bring that paradox into focus.

Season of the Monsoon, set in Bombay (or Mumbai, as Indians have called its since 1995), leaps forward from Bombay Mail both in time and in realism. I saw no serial killers—that I know of—on my visit to Mumbai. But I saw much else that Mann had noticed, and skillfully captured, before me.

PAUL MANN. Season of the Monsoon (1992).
In a land that teems with death almost as thoroughly as it does with life, a slain and mutilated male prostitute usually wouldn’t garner much attention. When such a corpse turns up near the center of India’s Bollywood movie colony, however, several people take notice—not just the untouchable kuli who must dredge the body from a lake in northern Bombay. Film City nabobs are on hand, and so is Inspector George Sansi of the Maharashtra police force. A brown-skinned, blue-eyed wonder, with a mixed-race pedigree that makes him an ideal outsider’s insider, Sansi comes across as a figure of fancy, if not of fantasy. He has an Indian feminist mother, a well-to-do English father, a law degree from Oxford University, a scar to prove his valor in the fight against drug-running terrorists, and now, perhaps, a hip American journalist girlfriend. Taken as a whole, it’s almost enough to help him contain the multitudinous chaos of India. Almost but not quite. While Mann idealizes his hero, he doesn’t stint on realism in depicting the Indian scene in all its heart-breaking, awe-inspiring disarray. His pen captures plenty of apt detail: dung fires being lit at dawn, awakening a city where each life hinges precariously on another; a gangster’s lair, in which a glitzy dream of a Vegas bachelor pad somehow flourishes amid one of the dreariest slums on Earth; the fine bone china on which Sansi and his corrupt superiors dine while conferring at the Willingdon Club, a relic of the British Raj. Less compelling are details related to the crime under Sansi’s investigation and to his hunt for the criminal, whose identity becomes clear well before the novel’s finale. The certainties of karma, rather than the mysteries of murder, then take center-stage, and Mann—partly by dropping peculiar hints of reincarnation—adds an Eastern twist to the standard Western tale of how a serial killer meets his end.

In late January and early February of this year, I traveled to India. This was my first trip to the subcontinent, and it may well be my last—not because it failed to leave an impression on me, but because it left such a bewilderingly strong one. In fact, the title of this journal takes its inspiration from India. A loose translation of “the Nataraja,” as the dance of Lord Shiva is called, the phrase “cosmic dance” for me summons an image of inexorable, formless movement, out of which form mysteriously emerges—rather like the movement of culture.

I hope at some point to write more about what I saw in Bombay and Delhi and dusty points beyond. But for now, here and in a subsequent entry, I present capsule reviews of two thrillers set in India that I read after my return home. India, famously, is all about chaos. And there’s nothing like a good mystery yarn, or even a bad one, if what you want is to contain the reality of chaos within the illusion of reason.

LAWRENCE G. BLOCHMAN. Bombay Mail (1934).

Swift and sure, on track and mostly on time, a train hurtles across the plains and hills of central India. Moving to the rhythmic clatter of steel wheels on steel rails, it excavates a kind of core sample of the land and its people, allowing passengers to take in a timeless parorama: dun-hued mud huts and strange trapezoidal temples, men in red turbans and women in blazing-yellow saris. Just so does Blochman set this début novel churning forward and gliding past colorful terrain—from its tense beginning at Government House in Calcutta (where Indian Nationalists have detonated a bomb) to its neat finish at Ballard Pier in Bombay (where romance blooms between a pair of newly cleared former suspects, a pukka American fellow and a plucky Canadian lass). In between, Inspector Leonidas Prike of the Criminal Investigation Division sifts through clues to figure out who poisoned Sir Anthony Daniels and later shot the Maharajah of Zunjore. Both victims met their end while riding the Bombay Mail, and Prike vows to name the culprit before the train reaches its terminus. The mystery that he successfully unravels doesn’t quite belong in a first-class compartment, and neither do the thriller-like antics that come beforehand. Overall, though, this modest entertainment earns its fare as a sharply etched period piece.

The detective novelist Michael Dibdin, a Brit who lived in the United States and wrote about Italians crimes, died last month. Seeing his obituary spurred me to take down from my shelves a book by him that I bought years ago, on the strong recommendation of a friend, but had never read. So I read it, and discovered that it belonged on my all-time-best list. I’ll be stocking my shelves with more of Dibdin’s work.

MICHAEL DIBDIN. Ratking (1989).
A cardinal defect of the mystery novel, in many critics’ eyes, is its need to skimp on character development. Almost by definition, a whodunit must guard from the reader’s view the deepest thoughts and urges of all characters who might be suspects, lest it become apparent (say, through interior monologues) that they could or could not have done the foul deed in question. A certain shallowness therefore seems instrinsic to even the best-written examples of the genre. Dibdin, in this first entry in his series about Italian police commissioner Aurelio Zen, remedies that flaw by taking the narrative structure of so-called serious fiction and turning it upside-down. Near the end of his tale, once Zen has figured out who kidnapped the Perugian industrialist Ruggiero Miletti, who conspired with the kidnappers, and who then murdered the old patriarch, the author unfurls a tapestry of acutely imagined, finely woven data on several key suspects—their back-stories, their innermost drives—all of it comparable to what a “literary” writer would roll out in the early going of a novel. Somehow it all works, and brilliantly so. It works because, as in any good detective story, the detective well-nigh fills the characterization quota all by himself. Zen comes across initially as a comic figure. The four Miletti children and their consorts, who pull the unseen strings behind this case, all make sport of him. The local investigating officials alternately ignore, humor, and manipulate him. Yet Zen, beneath a phlegmatic exterior, possesses a questing intelligence and a stout survival instinct that lead him to a measure of truth (though not to justice, of course) and to victory in a bureaucratic battle (though not in the larger war, of course). The novel also works because of the compelling, albeit revolting, metaphor around which Dibdin has built it. A ratking, a cryptozoological creature formed when several rats fuse together at their tails, looms as the perfect image of how power operates in Italy. That this many-headed beast may not actually exist only strengthens the point.