All the Light We Cannot See
Because all of my friends who have read this have loved the book, I wanted to love the book too. But the further I got into it, although I loved the way the story was told and the superb prose, I couldn’t appreciate the characters as much as the author wanted me to, and I couldn’t appreciate the startling lack of realism in many areas.
This book really did have superb prose. It read like poetry in many places, and the imagery was vivid, fresh, even startling. It was a pleasure to read, pure pleasure.
I liked the jumping chronology, which is the way memory so often works. Of course it was much more orderly here, but you did have to pay attention so as not to become confused. It would have helped to have had the year as a standard subhead on each chapter. The chronology acted as a spoiler, but it also increased the tension, since the question moved from, “Did they survive?” to “How did they get from Point A to Point X?”
Some of the character problems I noted were:
Werner’s development was predictable. You learn he’s a genius with radios; ergo, he’s going to become a radio technician for the Nazi army. You learn he suppresses his emotions when faced with ethical problems; ergo, he’s going to pay a price for that and will stop sometime and have a crisis. He hears Marie-Laure’s grandfather’s recording being broadcast; ergo, he’s going to meet her somehow. As soon as he does, he falls instantly in love with her. It was all too sweet and clichéd for me. That he dies is perhaps the most real thing about his war experience. That he is haunted by the child they killed is the second most real thing.
Jutta. She was so interesting, and she is mostly off-stage after Werner joins the army, but then we have a synopsis of her war experiences at the end. Why? This is not fair! She should have had more of a role than Frederick throughout the novel, especially since she survives and has a major role in what occurs 30 years later. She is the one who has the right ethics, the right courage, the strength of will, and everything that needs to be set against Werner all the way along as a foil. Her story should have been told in snippets like the others, throughout. This is the only major plot fault, I think.
Marie-Laure. She could have been a more interesting girl, but she hardly develops at all through the novel. The only development we really experience with her is her increasing ability to do physical things, and only because the adults around her are rendered powerless and are forced to allow her to do more. Why not give her some characteristic flaw that she has to overcome that her blindness itself forces her to deal with? Why not allow her to be frightened by her blindness and slowly develop courage? Or frustrated and develop patience? Something! She hardly seems real to me.
Etienne. The great-uncle of Marie-Laure suffers from shell-shock from his experiences in World War One. We would call it PTSD today—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and to my knowledge, it is not something one simply throws off one day when the need comes. He should have had serious problems, especially in that prison fortress. For nobody to have helped him deal with his challenge, I could not believe he was just “fine” one day when Marie-Laure needed him to be.
Characters whose development I liked:
Daniel Le Blanc. The father of Marie-Laure was written well. I liked his willingness to do as much as he could for his daughter, and I liked the way he was written, with his puzzle boxes and keys and secrets. His being captured and dying of pneumonia—these were all credible events and of course necessary to the story being told.
Frank Volkheimer. He was an interesting character. I liked his mysterious devotion to Werner. I liked the ambiguity of his actions, especially when they get to Saint Malo. I really liked that he delivered the bag personally to Jutta and taught her boy to fold a more intricate paper airplane.
Now on to unrealistic elements, which I could not ignore.
The most glaring unreality was that the author simply did not create a complete female psyche for Marie-Laure and others. A growing girl should have had something of her developing sexuality included, not in a prurient way, as this novel was not like that, but it should have been acknowledged. When Marie-Laure learns early on that bad things could happen to blind girls, this problem should have been explored in her psyche. As his daughter grows, Daniel LeBlanc should have been shown teaching his daughter about growing up. His giving her baths when she is 12 and 13 seemed to me to stretch things too far. Why wasn’t Madame Manec bathing her by this time? Neither Daniel nor Madame Manec seems to address Marie-Laure’s personal safety around men either. Women have always had to prepare girls for dealing with men, and it should have been shown at least by a line or two. This is something integral to almost every woman’s psyche.
That the author doesn’t get this right is shown when the rape happens to Jutta and the girls she lives with. That nobody made much of a sound is very unconvincing. One or two of them might have been stoic and mute, but all of them? As young as they were? I couldn’t believe it. Some should have been crying, and at least one you would think would scream, because it would hurt so badly, or because she was so scared or shocked by the horribleness of the violation, or both. That may be very uncomfortable for the readers to have to process, but it’s real, and if you’re going to have a main character gang raped by Russian soldiers along with the rest of her companions, you have to write it believably or not at all. (When I was a teenager, I worked with an older woman who had been through this horror as a teenager herself. She and her sister fled and ate grass and weeds as they ran by night and hid by day from the Russian soldiers until they could cross to West Germany. She said no words could describe how horrible they were.)
The second glaring unreality was the unresolved question of whether the diamond had magical powers to protect its holder while cursing everyone around, or not. The question was left open, although all the events pointed to the curse being a real thing, which was pretty weird to allow.
A third unreality was Frederick coming out of his catatonic state after 30+ years. Really? Does that ever actually happen? (That was on the same level as Etienne throwing off his PTSD.) If it does happen, then I wish it had been allowed to happen immediately after the war, to give him some years of twilight content. He probably should have died young, as his injuries were so severe. I’m not sure what was added by having him live so long. Werner could have posted the bird book pages on his way out of Saint Malo, or given them to Marie-Laure and let her post them. There were so many jumps in chronology that it wouldn’t have been a big deal to have a scene set in 1950, say, showing him dying and rehearsing what happened when he received the bird book pages.
Okay, all that said, I still really liked this book. It was beautifully written and had so many wonderful and powerful scenes that I could hardly wait to get back to it every time I had to put it down. The story line was interesting and mostly well told and easily held my interest all the way through. That I didn’t like some elements was overwhelmingly secondary to how well I liked most of it.
Saturday, March 24, 2018
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Steady May
I thought Aunt May was the steady one, but I got to looking at her life today, and oh boy! She went through a lot. Her life was a roller coaster, but it wasn’t her own doing (unlike two of her sisters’ lives).
She was born in rural Newton County, Arkansas on May 11, 1889. Her parents were Mary Jane Whittington and William Lester Munro (he went by the name Lester). May had a half sister, Annie, and a half brother, Sam, from her mother’s first marriage, but within a couple of years of May’s birth, Sam ran away and was never heard from by the Munros again. (Annie did find out where he was eventually.) May had an older brother, John, and an older sister, Agnes. After she was born, next came a brother, Claude, and three sisters, Lillie, Jessie, and Dora.
Death was a fact of life for this family. Not only had May’s mother’s eldest, Emma, died young, but twins Flora and Florence had died before Agnes had been born. Then Claudy died when he was only five. Soon after that their grandfather who had been living with them died. When May was only 9, her mother died.
May’s father took his children within four years to Idaho where he hoped to work on the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boise project. While they were there, May’s older sister Agnes ran away and got married. May’s father moved the rest of the family, John, May, Lillie, Jessie, and Dora, to Oregon.
May was put in charge of the younger sisters quite a lot, and sometimes she resented it. Lillie and Dora recalled many years later that they sometimes gave May such a hard time that she would go to her friend Amanda’s house and not return all night. Since their father and older brother were “riding the rails” (hitching rides on trains) to different jobs in different cities for weeks at a time, the younger girls didn’t like it one bit that they were left all alone. They promised May they would behave. Probably they thought they meant it every time.
Agnes and her husband returned and lived nearby. Agnes’s husband rode the rails with Lester and John, so the young women and girls were always being left alone. Agnes had three babies by 1907 and only the last one lived.
May met the man she wanted to marry about that time. She was 18 years old that spring. She and Paul Rudolph Rieboldt were married in Vancouver, Washington on October 1, 1907 by a Justice of the Peace. Their witnesses were Mr. H.A. and Mrs. A.E. Rice. Paul Rieboldt had been born in February 1877, in the city of Danzig, then part of Prussia, on the Baltic Sea. His father’s name was Henry (Heinrich, probably). The marriage register says his mother’s name was unknown. Paul’s profession was reported to be an electrical and steam engineer, so he apparently ran the trains. He had emigrated to the United States in 1883; I don’t know whom he came with, but probably his father.
May and Paul moved to Clatskanie, Oregon, a town in the far northwest close to the Columbia River, and in 1909 their daughter Pauline May was born there on February 13th. They moved to Yacolt, Washington, a tiny town then of only 435 people, including them, when the census was taken in April 1910. In July a baby was born to a Rieboldt couple and was buried across the river in Portland, in the Multnomah Park Cemetery. This could have been their child, but we have no corroborating evidence except that I can’t find any other Rieboldt family nearby at all. Their son Paul was born in March 1912 in a suburb of Portland called Woodstock, not far from the Multnomah Park Cemetery.
When baby Paul was only three months old, May’s husband Paul died in mid-June 1912. Not having a death record for him, we don’t know whether it was an accident or an illness that took him. He was only 35 years old. He was buried next to the Rieboldt infant in Multnomah Park Cemetery. (This is another circumstantial piece of evidence that the child was probably theirs.)
May, age 24, went to work, and she kept her children with her somehow. She met another man she wanted to marry, Luther Orando Hallett, whose nickname was Budd. He was born in Pennsylvania in January 1888, so he and May were nearly the same age. Budd worked as a laborer, once working in a sawmill and another record showing him working as a ship builder for a river boat company. Budd and May were married March 17, 1914, and their son, Ashley Sherman Hallett, was born in April 1917.
Budd was called up in the draft of 1917 for World War I, so he joined the U.S. Merchant Marines and was sent to Japan. He died there in Yokohama in April 1918, and May was left a widow for a second time. Even though that was the year of the great flu pandemic, the first cases in Japan were not reported until November 1918, so it is probable that Budd died of something else, but I don’t know what happened to him.
May and her three children were living in Portland, and when she got a job in Bremerton, Washington, she moved them all there. Pauline was old enough to babysit the others, so that is probably what May had her do at first. May’s job was as a “general helper” in the United States Navy Yard there in Bremerton. The children weren’t doing well though. May put Pauline and Paul into the Seattle Children’s Home for a time. When the 1920 census was taken in mid-January 1920, the census taker noted that May and her children were visiting in another state (probably Oregon), but she (the census taker) still managed to get almost all of the information about them correct, with the exception of assigning the surname “Hallett” to the two Rieboldt children. However, two days later the census taker at the Seattle Children’s Home listed Pauline and Paul there. Who was taking care of Ashley is unknown.
The next year May married for the third time, to Owen Alderson Cade, on December 6, 1921. They met the officiating minister and their witnesses, Fay Cobb and Agnes Hodges, at a small hotel in Seattle for the ceremony. Owen was originally from West Virginia and was about five years older than May. He had never been married before and was a worker at the shipyard where May had been working.
The Cades moved within two years to the California Bay Area and found a house in Vallejo; Owen worked at the shipyard at nearby Mare Island. In Vallejo their daughter, Minnie Lee, was born in early July 1924, and their son, Owen Lester (who went by Les), was born in March 1926.
May’s life may have seemed steady from this time on, but she had her share of heartaches on behalf of her children. Yet she saw them all through with a characteristic calm and quiet cheer.
Sadly her eldest daughter, Pauline, died in Napa, California near the end of 1926. Pauline was 17 years old. No death certificate or record has turned up yet, so I don’t know why she died.
In November 1928 Paul swore he was a year older than he really was so that he could join the military. He went first to San Diego and a few years later to Florida with the U.S. Navy. From this time on, his birth is often recorded as being in 1911, but we know that it was actually 1912.
The 1930 Census taker found the Cade family living in Vallejo. The two youngest children were not in school yet, but Ashley, who was 12, was attending school.
By 1935 they had transferred to San Diego, where Owen still pursued the same occupation. May invited her father, Lester Munro, to come down from Oregon and live with them. The cold and wet climate had been getting to Lester. He lived with them until his 80th birthday, and then he died.
In 1937 May became a grandmother when Paul’s daughter Pauline was born in Florida. Paul had married Hilda Fletcher just a month before he turned 20, in 1932. The marriage didn’t last, nor did Paul’s next four marriages. Paul died two years before his mother, May.
Ashley joined the Navy when he was eighteen and got married a few years later. He and Thelma lived with the Cades during 1939 and 1940, before the Navy shipped him out to fight during the War. Ashley and Thelma divorced in 1963 and married again in 1966. In the meantime, Ashley was married briefly to another woman. Ashley had children whose descendants continue to branch out. Ashley died in San Diego in November 1972, three years before his mother.
The Cade children also grew up with bumps along the way. Les had to serve in the military the final year of World War II, which was unnerving to all his family. He came home and married. Minnie Lee was married several times; she divorced the same man twice when she was in her 40s. Their families continue to branch out.
May’s husband Owen A. Cade died in the spring of 1961 in San Diego, California. She stayed there in her home for the next fourteen years, but she often took trips to see her sisters, and they all came to see her. She and her sisters took several trips together; once they went to Arkansas to see their nieces and nephews, the children of their half sister, Annie. May was an innately cheerful person. I met her when I was a young child, and I remember her laughing a lot. I remember how much fun she had being with her sisters.
May died in December 1975, steady to the last.
She was born in rural Newton County, Arkansas on May 11, 1889. Her parents were Mary Jane Whittington and William Lester Munro (he went by the name Lester). May had a half sister, Annie, and a half brother, Sam, from her mother’s first marriage, but within a couple of years of May’s birth, Sam ran away and was never heard from by the Munros again. (Annie did find out where he was eventually.) May had an older brother, John, and an older sister, Agnes. After she was born, next came a brother, Claude, and three sisters, Lillie, Jessie, and Dora.
Death was a fact of life for this family. Not only had May’s mother’s eldest, Emma, died young, but twins Flora and Florence had died before Agnes had been born. Then Claudy died when he was only five. Soon after that their grandfather who had been living with them died. When May was only 9, her mother died.
May’s father took his children within four years to Idaho where he hoped to work on the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boise project. While they were there, May’s older sister Agnes ran away and got married. May’s father moved the rest of the family, John, May, Lillie, Jessie, and Dora, to Oregon.
May was put in charge of the younger sisters quite a lot, and sometimes she resented it. Lillie and Dora recalled many years later that they sometimes gave May such a hard time that she would go to her friend Amanda’s house and not return all night. Since their father and older brother were “riding the rails” (hitching rides on trains) to different jobs in different cities for weeks at a time, the younger girls didn’t like it one bit that they were left all alone. They promised May they would behave. Probably they thought they meant it every time.
Agnes and her husband returned and lived nearby. Agnes’s husband rode the rails with Lester and John, so the young women and girls were always being left alone. Agnes had three babies by 1907 and only the last one lived.
May met the man she wanted to marry about that time. She was 18 years old that spring. She and Paul Rudolph Rieboldt were married in Vancouver, Washington on October 1, 1907 by a Justice of the Peace. Their witnesses were Mr. H.A. and Mrs. A.E. Rice. Paul Rieboldt had been born in February 1877, in the city of Danzig, then part of Prussia, on the Baltic Sea. His father’s name was Henry (Heinrich, probably). The marriage register says his mother’s name was unknown. Paul’s profession was reported to be an electrical and steam engineer, so he apparently ran the trains. He had emigrated to the United States in 1883; I don’t know whom he came with, but probably his father.
May and Paul moved to Clatskanie, Oregon, a town in the far northwest close to the Columbia River, and in 1909 their daughter Pauline May was born there on February 13th. They moved to Yacolt, Washington, a tiny town then of only 435 people, including them, when the census was taken in April 1910. In July a baby was born to a Rieboldt couple and was buried across the river in Portland, in the Multnomah Park Cemetery. This could have been their child, but we have no corroborating evidence except that I can’t find any other Rieboldt family nearby at all. Their son Paul was born in March 1912 in a suburb of Portland called Woodstock, not far from the Multnomah Park Cemetery.
When baby Paul was only three months old, May’s husband Paul died in mid-June 1912. Not having a death record for him, we don’t know whether it was an accident or an illness that took him. He was only 35 years old. He was buried next to the Rieboldt infant in Multnomah Park Cemetery. (This is another circumstantial piece of evidence that the child was probably theirs.)
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| 1917: May holding Ashley; in front of her at left are her sister Agnes's children Mary and Eddie; at right are Pauline and Paul Rieboldt. |
Budd was called up in the draft of 1917 for World War I, so he joined the U.S. Merchant Marines and was sent to Japan. He died there in Yokohama in April 1918, and May was left a widow for a second time. Even though that was the year of the great flu pandemic, the first cases in Japan were not reported until November 1918, so it is probable that Budd died of something else, but I don’t know what happened to him.
May and her three children were living in Portland, and when she got a job in Bremerton, Washington, she moved them all there. Pauline was old enough to babysit the others, so that is probably what May had her do at first. May’s job was as a “general helper” in the United States Navy Yard there in Bremerton. The children weren’t doing well though. May put Pauline and Paul into the Seattle Children’s Home for a time. When the 1920 census was taken in mid-January 1920, the census taker noted that May and her children were visiting in another state (probably Oregon), but she (the census taker) still managed to get almost all of the information about them correct, with the exception of assigning the surname “Hallett” to the two Rieboldt children. However, two days later the census taker at the Seattle Children’s Home listed Pauline and Paul there. Who was taking care of Ashley is unknown.
The next year May married for the third time, to Owen Alderson Cade, on December 6, 1921. They met the officiating minister and their witnesses, Fay Cobb and Agnes Hodges, at a small hotel in Seattle for the ceremony. Owen was originally from West Virginia and was about five years older than May. He had never been married before and was a worker at the shipyard where May had been working.
The Cades moved within two years to the California Bay Area and found a house in Vallejo; Owen worked at the shipyard at nearby Mare Island. In Vallejo their daughter, Minnie Lee, was born in early July 1924, and their son, Owen Lester (who went by Les), was born in March 1926.
May’s life may have seemed steady from this time on, but she had her share of heartaches on behalf of her children. Yet she saw them all through with a characteristic calm and quiet cheer.
Sadly her eldest daughter, Pauline, died in Napa, California near the end of 1926. Pauline was 17 years old. No death certificate or record has turned up yet, so I don’t know why she died.
In November 1928 Paul swore he was a year older than he really was so that he could join the military. He went first to San Diego and a few years later to Florida with the U.S. Navy. From this time on, his birth is often recorded as being in 1911, but we know that it was actually 1912.
The 1930 Census taker found the Cade family living in Vallejo. The two youngest children were not in school yet, but Ashley, who was 12, was attending school.
By 1935 they had transferred to San Diego, where Owen still pursued the same occupation. May invited her father, Lester Munro, to come down from Oregon and live with them. The cold and wet climate had been getting to Lester. He lived with them until his 80th birthday, and then he died.
In 1937 May became a grandmother when Paul’s daughter Pauline was born in Florida. Paul had married Hilda Fletcher just a month before he turned 20, in 1932. The marriage didn’t last, nor did Paul’s next four marriages. Paul died two years before his mother, May.
Ashley joined the Navy when he was eighteen and got married a few years later. He and Thelma lived with the Cades during 1939 and 1940, before the Navy shipped him out to fight during the War. Ashley and Thelma divorced in 1963 and married again in 1966. In the meantime, Ashley was married briefly to another woman. Ashley had children whose descendants continue to branch out. Ashley died in San Diego in November 1972, three years before his mother.
The Cade children also grew up with bumps along the way. Les had to serve in the military the final year of World War II, which was unnerving to all his family. He came home and married. Minnie Lee was married several times; she divorced the same man twice when she was in her 40s. Their families continue to branch out.
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| May at right with her sister Lillie and Lillie’s husband, Lloyd |
May died in December 1975, steady to the last.
Tuesday, March 13, 2018
An Echo of Murder by Anne Perry
Had I just finished reading the last Monk book? I asked myself. There were so many distant loose threads tied up in this novel that this could easily have been the final book in the series. Beware of all the spoilers ahead in this post!
Note: I have been reading Anne Perry novels since 1982 and have been an avid fan ever since. I have read everything she’s published and love her writing. She’s one of the top writers of historical mysteries. I have met her at a number of book signings and events; I have visited with her when I was exploring Scotland for my own family history, which happens to lie in the very area where she lived. My criticism of her novel is to be understood in the light of my very great admiration for her plotting ability, for her character development, for her writing style, and for her ability to transport the reader effortlessly into the past.
Hester and William Monk are at a good place in their lives. Hester’s clinic on Portpool Lane is mentioned, but she doesn’t go there every day anymore; she has enough help that she doesn’t have to. It is managed well, and it is apparently well staffed.
William Monk has a murder case to solve that crosses the lines between his old life in the police, his interim days as a private detective, and his present position as Commander of the River Police. There are four murders in the case, all copied to the last detail. The obvious suspects have alibis for one or another of the crimes and therefore couldn’t have committed them all. Monk has to have help from the regular police, as well as from his adoptive son, his wife, and the poor doctor who is training the Monks’ son to be a doctor.
Speaking of tying up loose threads again, Scuff, whom the Monks took in when he was around 11, is now about 18 or older, starting in his chosen profession learning to be a doctor by helping “Crow,” the poor people’s doctor who has finally received his official qualification. Scuff tells key people that he is to be known formally now as Mr. Will Monk, which makes Hester and William very proud.
Tying up loose ends again, Hester meets a doctor with whom she worked in the Crimea, and he provides the key to the unraveling of the mystery by becoming the chief murder suspect, even being arrested by Monk, although that’s only because the victims’ community resorts to mob violence and is about to kill both the suspect and Monk, except that Monk thinks fast enough and convinces them to let him arrest the man instead. This man, Dr. Herbert Fitzherbert, suffers intensely from PTSD, then an unrecognized condition, but Hester has it to some degree from her experiences in the Crimea, as does Scuff from his experiences having been kidnapped and kept in the hold of the boat of the notorious child molester several books back. So they talk about this issue amongst themselves and in the final trial scene, which creates a sort of anachronism, but handled in a delicate enough way that you can’t really point to it as being out of place, as people could have had such conversations and descriptions of the condition without leading to its public identification.
The problem leads Hester to tying up one final loose end: she seeks out her brother Charles Latterly to apologise for not keeping in touch and not even knowing that his wife had died two years before. She meets his ward, Candace Finbar, whom we know about if we have been diligently reading all the Christmas novelettes, which we have, of course. You remember that in 2015’s A Christmas Escape Charles goes to Italy, and when the volcano on Stromboli erupts, he saves this niece of an old friend, and the old friend, dying, makes him promise to take her in as his ward. Here they are, living in Primrose Hill north of Regent’s Park, and Hester observes that Charles seems very happy with his life now. Candace and Charles are very happy to discuss the murder case with Hester and to provide several suggestions.
Monk does not cover himself with glory in his detective abilities in this case. The answer is actually pretty obvious from pure logical deduction: only one suspect aside from the killer could have known every last detail of the first murder, and as soon as they figure out the first murder was the work of someone who did not commit the rest, they should have been on the right suspect immediately. Yet they stall and stall, looking for motives and connections that they would have been looking for anyway if they had named the killer amongst themselves at once. I couldn’t help but imagine that Peter Wimsey would have taken one look at the evidence and said, as he might have done to Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night, “You aren’t giving it your undivided attention.”
I wasn’t wholly convinced that the trial was conducted particularly brilliantly either. Rathbone goes in declaring that he’s going to make the prosecution prove every step of its case, but then he allows his opposing counsel to commit all kinds of illogical conclusions and claims during the first two days of the trial, and he seems to be caving in to them without a fight! Where did “make them prove each step” go? It’s back only slightly when Monk takes the witness stand and the trial rushes to its conclusion. I couldn’t believe that the testimony described took three days to draw out. There just must be a lot of boring things between these exciting scenes that are not described, nor even mentioned. I liked picturing Hester and Charles and Candace sitting together, even if the author doesn’t explicitly say they do. Of course they would, though! Why would they not?
What wasn’t tied up was Monk’s ties to his former friends and family. His former police partner, John Evan, has been crying out for a mention ever since Monk left the police to go into private detection. I think he did get one mention in one later book, when he was taking care of his elderly father. But isn’t there more to his association with Monk? Did he ever marry? If he did, wouldn’t he have asked Monk, or at least told him? What about Runcorn? Monk has had a few dealings with him, and he does get a mention in this book, but surely there could be a scene. Meanwhile, there’s a very young policeman in this book named Stillman. Why is that ringing a bell for me with an association to the Pitt series? I’m going to have to go hunting to see if I can find a Stillman. Lastly, Monk’s sister, Beth, has never been satisfactorily dealt with. Why doesn’t she visit, or the Monks go visit her ever? Why don’t they even write to one another? Maybe they do, and maybe this is a thread that has to be tied up in another, “last Monk book.”
I see that the next Monk book, Dark Tide Rising, is coming in about six months. I can hope for more loose ends to be tied up and am assured that the Monks are not done yet!
Note: I have been reading Anne Perry novels since 1982 and have been an avid fan ever since. I have read everything she’s published and love her writing. She’s one of the top writers of historical mysteries. I have met her at a number of book signings and events; I have visited with her when I was exploring Scotland for my own family history, which happens to lie in the very area where she lived. My criticism of her novel is to be understood in the light of my very great admiration for her plotting ability, for her character development, for her writing style, and for her ability to transport the reader effortlessly into the past.
Hester and William Monk are at a good place in their lives. Hester’s clinic on Portpool Lane is mentioned, but she doesn’t go there every day anymore; she has enough help that she doesn’t have to. It is managed well, and it is apparently well staffed.
William Monk has a murder case to solve that crosses the lines between his old life in the police, his interim days as a private detective, and his present position as Commander of the River Police. There are four murders in the case, all copied to the last detail. The obvious suspects have alibis for one or another of the crimes and therefore couldn’t have committed them all. Monk has to have help from the regular police, as well as from his adoptive son, his wife, and the poor doctor who is training the Monks’ son to be a doctor.
Speaking of tying up loose threads again, Scuff, whom the Monks took in when he was around 11, is now about 18 or older, starting in his chosen profession learning to be a doctor by helping “Crow,” the poor people’s doctor who has finally received his official qualification. Scuff tells key people that he is to be known formally now as Mr. Will Monk, which makes Hester and William very proud.
Tying up loose ends again, Hester meets a doctor with whom she worked in the Crimea, and he provides the key to the unraveling of the mystery by becoming the chief murder suspect, even being arrested by Monk, although that’s only because the victims’ community resorts to mob violence and is about to kill both the suspect and Monk, except that Monk thinks fast enough and convinces them to let him arrest the man instead. This man, Dr. Herbert Fitzherbert, suffers intensely from PTSD, then an unrecognized condition, but Hester has it to some degree from her experiences in the Crimea, as does Scuff from his experiences having been kidnapped and kept in the hold of the boat of the notorious child molester several books back. So they talk about this issue amongst themselves and in the final trial scene, which creates a sort of anachronism, but handled in a delicate enough way that you can’t really point to it as being out of place, as people could have had such conversations and descriptions of the condition without leading to its public identification.
The problem leads Hester to tying up one final loose end: she seeks out her brother Charles Latterly to apologise for not keeping in touch and not even knowing that his wife had died two years before. She meets his ward, Candace Finbar, whom we know about if we have been diligently reading all the Christmas novelettes, which we have, of course. You remember that in 2015’s A Christmas Escape Charles goes to Italy, and when the volcano on Stromboli erupts, he saves this niece of an old friend, and the old friend, dying, makes him promise to take her in as his ward. Here they are, living in Primrose Hill north of Regent’s Park, and Hester observes that Charles seems very happy with his life now. Candace and Charles are very happy to discuss the murder case with Hester and to provide several suggestions.
Monk does not cover himself with glory in his detective abilities in this case. The answer is actually pretty obvious from pure logical deduction: only one suspect aside from the killer could have known every last detail of the first murder, and as soon as they figure out the first murder was the work of someone who did not commit the rest, they should have been on the right suspect immediately. Yet they stall and stall, looking for motives and connections that they would have been looking for anyway if they had named the killer amongst themselves at once. I couldn’t help but imagine that Peter Wimsey would have taken one look at the evidence and said, as he might have done to Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night, “You aren’t giving it your undivided attention.”
I wasn’t wholly convinced that the trial was conducted particularly brilliantly either. Rathbone goes in declaring that he’s going to make the prosecution prove every step of its case, but then he allows his opposing counsel to commit all kinds of illogical conclusions and claims during the first two days of the trial, and he seems to be caving in to them without a fight! Where did “make them prove each step” go? It’s back only slightly when Monk takes the witness stand and the trial rushes to its conclusion. I couldn’t believe that the testimony described took three days to draw out. There just must be a lot of boring things between these exciting scenes that are not described, nor even mentioned. I liked picturing Hester and Charles and Candace sitting together, even if the author doesn’t explicitly say they do. Of course they would, though! Why would they not?
What wasn’t tied up was Monk’s ties to his former friends and family. His former police partner, John Evan, has been crying out for a mention ever since Monk left the police to go into private detection. I think he did get one mention in one later book, when he was taking care of his elderly father. But isn’t there more to his association with Monk? Did he ever marry? If he did, wouldn’t he have asked Monk, or at least told him? What about Runcorn? Monk has had a few dealings with him, and he does get a mention in this book, but surely there could be a scene. Meanwhile, there’s a very young policeman in this book named Stillman. Why is that ringing a bell for me with an association to the Pitt series? I’m going to have to go hunting to see if I can find a Stillman. Lastly, Monk’s sister, Beth, has never been satisfactorily dealt with. Why doesn’t she visit, or the Monks go visit her ever? Why don’t they even write to one another? Maybe they do, and maybe this is a thread that has to be tied up in another, “last Monk book.”
I see that the next Monk book, Dark Tide Rising, is coming in about six months. I can hope for more loose ends to be tied up and am assured that the Monks are not done yet!
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