They're not the best-written ever (but few series mysteries are intended as works of art). I mainly read these for the escape, anyway, and I enjoy the characters in them. This series has a less realistic feel to it than, say, Ngaio Marsh's mysteries (but it is not quite as fanciful as some of Margery Allingham's work). The biggest sticking point, as always, is the "amateur sleuth" being *invited* by the police (in this case, I guess, a friend on the force) to stick his nose into an investigation. Or maybe things used to be done differently, I don't know.
Tremaine is an interesting character - a 60-ish former tobacconist who apparently had a profitable-enough shop that he was able to sell out and retire and have enough to live fairly comfortably on. A lifelong bachelor (and I really wonder, if that's meant to be coded for something, given that these books were written in the 30s) but he does seem to have his share of minor infatuations with the (often much younger, and so he never acts on them) women in the milieu he winds up in. He also is a big fan of those Romantic Stories magazines (which I tend to think of as more commonly aimed at late-teen, early-20s women, but whatever) and he does seem to have a strong "romantic" streak in the sense of wanting to see certain people couple up. (Heh, he "ships" it, I guess you'd say today).
This particular novel involves a seaside town that also is perhaps a bit of an artist's colony - a play is being put on, a play where no one knows the author (which is an important plot point later on). There is a fairly high body count in this one and one of the murders in particular feels really unnecessary. And I will admit, the murderer turned out to be a character I found sympathetic and related a bit to....which was jarring.
And apparently Tremaine himself is a bit jarred at the end; thinking of all the murders and how he didn't see clues in time to (perhaps) prevent them, and also just the sort of general unpleasantness people get up to (getting deeply in debt, having ugly tawdry affairs....), he thinks:
Everything he had touched had turned to pitch under his hand. His investigations had revealed only rottenness lying beneath the veneer of a happy, peaceful community. There had only been terror and intrigue, jealousy and dreadful murder. Was the heart of man just corruption, mocking his outward splendor?
And then a fresh, caressing coolness was gently fanning his cheeks. He squared his shoulders, as though he was brushing the depression from him. It was only a night breeze from the sea, of course. It possessed no magical powers. But suddenly his mind was clear again.
You couldn't see only beauty in the world. You had to see the disfiguring stains, the sordid and sprawling things, too. Because that was life. Life was ugly and untidy besides being marvelous and full of wonder. You had to see the dirt as well as the stars. To see the dirt and not become a cynic, to hold fast to one's ideals, to preserve one's belief in the underlying decencies of humanity - that was the real purpose of living...."
Maybe a little overwritten, I don't know. But I liked it and yes, it resonated with me. No, I've never - thank God - witnessed a murder or even been involved in a situation where someone in my circle was murdered. But that idea of being able to see the dirt, clear-eyed, with life, and still not become a cynic....yes.
I want to read the rest of these (I've bought a lot of books lately but stuck them in my Amazon wishlist so I remember the titles when I am in a book-buying time again) and I honestly think these would make a nice sort of BBC type mystery - like the old Campions with Peter Davidson or the Poirots or many of the other shorter-duration mystery series they've run. Not sure who would make a good Tremaine; I am not up on my British actors in their 50s-60s, but I picture him as a slightly-over-average-height man, fairly slim, with thinning brown hair and a thin face with sort of a perpetually reticent expression (in the novels it's also noted he wears a pince-nez that is always in danger of falling off his face).
And I want to keep these, to read again - I don't re-read a whole lot, but I do like Tremaine sufficiently well (as I do Inspector Alleyn and Albert Campion) to want to re-read the books in order to revisit the characters.
***
I also finished Robert Silverberg's "The Moundbuilders," which is a slightly older book (I want to say late 1960s) on the history of the various moundbuilding groups in North America. I don't know how much has changed or been disproven, but Silverberg does point out a couple things:
- The moundbuilders were several distinct cultures, and not some mystical "vanished race" as was proposed in the 1800s.
- The sort-of-shocking casual racism (against Native Americans) that drove anthropologists of that era to stretch to try to suggest the Moundbuilders were actually Vikings or displaced Phoenicians or a lost tribe of Israel - anything to be able to continue to believe in the "savage" idea of the current Native Americans that the European-Americans believed in that era. It seems more to me that the moundbuilding cultures sprang up during a time when the climate was very favorable to agriculture (they seem, by and large, to have been agricultural societies - perhaps in order to HAVE large building-type projects of that nature you must have an agrarian class that provides the food for all others) and then a later climate change made agriculture fail, and the descendants of the mound builders had to largely go back to hunting and gathering, and, as is sometimes the case, the past glories of their society were forgotten.
- There were scam artists. People who mocked up "runic tablets" and also tablets with "ancient Hebrew" on it - either to make a buck selling/showing them to rubes, or again, to reinforce the deeply-held beliefs that "These HAVE to be the work of either European or Semitic people; they cannot be made by Natives." There was also an odd incident with a couple of pipes shaped like elephants - a mound-digger found them, swore up and down that they were EVIDENCE of an "advanced society" at a time when elephant-like animals still existed in North America and so therefore evidence of this golden-era antediluvian society that was very different from the people currently living there. And when challenged, the finder stuck to his guns.
It turned out a couple people made the pipes, essentially in their garage, and placed them in the mound, to prank the guy. AND THEY NEVER CAME FORWARD. Which blows my mind after having read a number of high-profile cases of research fraud in recent years....it was only years and years later that the hoax came out. People are strange.
The book is honestly probably better as an historical exposition of the THEORIES about the moundbuilders than actual current understanding of the mounds....but that in itself was interesting to read about.
***
The third one was "Death of a Ghost,"a Hamish Macbeth mystery. I may not finish this one; it feels much less tightly plotted than some of them, there are some of the "scandal" parts that are just kind of depressing, and the body count, again, is high. Something just feels "off" to me about the story compared to the earlier novels in the series. Perhaps the author is getting bored with the characters and not coming up with good new plots? This one seemed to plod in places, and there seemed to be a tinge of sad cynicism about it - most of the "potential suspects" are kind of awful people, no one (save Hamish and his co-constable) feel like they're trustworthy people....and, yeah. Kind of a disappointment.
***
I am still working on Ed Yong's "I Contain Multitudes" and now I feel like I should have pencil-marked some sections of it to go back to; there's probably stuff in there that it might be good to include in some of my teaching.
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