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Last Tuesday I wrote about comfort reads, focusing on the literary fiction that is the subject of Contemporary Fiction Views. But I realized I've been doing another kind of comfort reading this season, and it's reading I have long enjoyed.
Few things have seemed so indulgent and rewarding to me over the years as binging on mysteries. It started with Agatha Christie (I liked Tommy and Tuppence better than Poirot or Miss Marple) and Sherlock Holmes (oh! the endings that surprised me yet seemed so logical). With the advent of Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries on Masterpiece Theater (the original Ian Carmichael programs, although the Lord Peter/Harriet Vane series won my heart), the age of reading Golden Age detectives had begun.
Especially satisfying were the Ngaio Marsh stories. Her detective, Roderick Alleyn, his painter wife, Troy, and his Watson, Inspector Fox, were self-assured people without being grand and often solved mysteries set in the theater. The anti-Semitism and racism flew right over my grade-school head. Now I don't know if I could go back to these books without cringing and despairing of casual bigotry.
Fortunately, the BBC and PBS came to my rescue with adaptations of the works of P.D. James. Adam Dalgliesh was an endlessly fascinating person, probably because he revealed so little. I kept waiting for Cordelia Grey to show up again in the life of this policeman, poet and aristocrat after An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. The Skull Beneath the Skin was disappointing because it was a Cordelia Grey book, not a Cordelia and Dalgliesh book. There was a little information in a later book, but it wasn't the same thing for someone who by then had devoured the Brontes and Jane Austen.
Not all my mysteries are Commonwealth-based. I have gone through most Michael Connelly's books. While I admire Bosch, I am a Mickey Haller and Renee Ballard fan. And I like this older Bosch better. The continuing character of L.A. in all the books remains a draw.
This fall, I had the chance to review the 30th book in Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. The first books in the series were a hoot. And the eighth book, when Stephanie hooked up with the mystery man in her life instead of the more reliable one, well, I read that novel in 90 minutes. Then I realized the books were all about the same and gave up after the 12th. To be fair to the 30th, I read the 29th book in the series. Some of the minor characters who had annoyed me weren't there, and the others were toned down just enough that it was a breeze to read. And I was able to give the latest novel an honest positive review.
Then the news got to me. So I went back to where I left off originally and have now read six more in the series. Yes, they're repetitive but Lula has a way with words and running in heels. And Ranger is still hot. I can't be serious all the time.
My favorite series has some of everything I enjoy in whodunits. There are continuing characters to get to know and even care about over time. There are story arcs that take up more than one book without overtaking the series. There are crimes that are solved with fair plotting and the reveal of clues. There is a little levity, quirks that make an appearance and sometimes depth in the complexity of relationships that are part of the story.
Louise Penny's Three Pines books are the ones that began as traditional mysteries, set in the nearly twee, but just-right comfy village of Three Pines in Quebec. It was a difficult place to find but Chief Inspector Gamache managed when a murder needed to be solved. The characters, the plotting, the descriptions of food and the fair play in whodunit were all there from the beginning.
At the end of the first novel, there is a moment when artist Clara Morrow, who has been portrayed as pleasant and aimable, notices a darkness hovering at the edge of her work. The early Three Pines books were like that. After the first three, the darkness and complexity deepened. Louise Penny hit her stride as a chronicler of the ways in which human nature struggled and sometimes allowed light in through the cracks of wounded souls. The whydunit aspect of her novels, much as the works of P.D. James, became as important as the whodunit.
The Louise Penny books have something else that makes them my favorite. They have Ruth Zardoz, elderly drunken poet and spouter of curmudgeon ripostes. Lord love a duck, they have Ruth.
There are other series I've enjoyed over the years. Some I mean to revisit and read all of them. Among the works that have been rewarding reading experiences are books by William Kent Krueger, Craig Johnson, James Lee Burke's Hack Holland series, John Connelly and Deborah Crombie. And when a dark mood seems just the thing, there are the Scandinavians, especially Karin Fossum, Asa Larsson and Arnaldur Indridason. I loved Inspector Morse so much that I have refused to read the last book in the series. Nope, don't need to go through that.
All have been comfort reads in the sense that justice usually prevails. And when it does not, there is the sense that a reckoning is still to come. There are characters to get to know, to see what they will do next, to revisit their quirks.
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