Conspicuous Consumption

   E.C.R. Lorac is the only British "queen of crime" from the golden age of the English crime novel—think: Christie, Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham—who is not remembered as a queen of crime from the golden age of the English crime novel. She wrote something like seventy novels, and as far as I can tell, except for the odd reissue over the years, most of them have been forgotten. It's hard to know what accounts for this neglect. Perhaps it's because the protagonist of many of her novels, a Scotland Yard man named Robert Macdonald is not, like Poirot or Wimsey or Campion, notably eccentric. He's an intelligent, sensitive, hardworking policeman who gets the job done. (He's also a "confirmed bachelor," which may or may not be code for something whose name Lorac did not dare to name.) If Shroud of Darkness is representative of Lorac's work then it's a shame that her books are not better known. Her plot is predictably twisty, and will engage those w...

When I first heard about Mexican Gothic and Velvet was the Night  by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia I hurried out to buy both. The novels were set in Mexico, and were written by a Mexican author. I like all things Mexican, so why not? They got good reviews, too. I started with Mexican Gothic , and it was . . . just okay. I wished I hadn't, in my enthusiasm, bought two novels by an author who didn't, in the first work of hers I read, delight me. The good news is, though, that Velvet was the Night  was delightful. It is, like Mexican Gothic , Moreno-Garcia's take on a genre: historical noir. I guess if I had to choose I'd always take noir over gothic, so maybe it's not a surprise that I preferred this account of Mexico in the 1970s, when the country was still under the heel of the repressive PRI. A young woman, activist-adjacent, disappears, and with her some photographs that will compromise that repressive government by showing their involvement in a recent riot. A street kid...

 This is the first James Bond novel in the series and the first James Bond novel I have ever read. My only encounter with 007 is through the two or three Bond film I've seen, and the books, if Casino Royale is representative, are quite different. First, there is a great deal less action. If one were to make the book into a movie (which has been done) and chose to do it literally, I don't think any special effect would be called for.  Also, I seem to recall the Bond of the movies as a sort of charming rogue. In this book he's mostly just unpleasant. And I'm pretty sure that 007 is the only one who doesn't know that the femme fatale love interest who he considers marrying is, in fact, an agent of the bad guys, so maybe he's a bit thick. I'm not sure if Fleming intended his main character to be unpleasant and only ordinarily perceptive, but neither detracts from the tightly written yarn that the book is.  I'll probably read another Bond somewhere down th...

 As I may have mentioned in my post on The Emigrants , after rereading that masterpiece I was so certain that I was in the presence of genius that I stopped reading Sebald. I acquired all his books, but decided to hold the pleasure those books would give, the wonder, the awe, in reserve. I am entering that pleasure, that wonder, that awe now, with Austerlitz . Sebald's concerns in Austerlitz , which is no less stunning than The Emigrants , are the same: how survivors make their way through the post-Holocaust world. A Sebald-like narrator hears, over many years, the account of one Jacques Austerlitz, a child who was brought to Wales as part of the  Kindertransport. Austerlitz has only the sketchiest of memories of how he got to Wales; he does not learn his real name until he is sixteen. Later, he attempts to find out what became of his parents, the mother who remained in Czechoslovakia and the father who had made it to France. It is this search that he tells the narrator a...

    I've praised Tana French in the past for her willingness to take her time, to build suspense without resorting to crude action. (The extent of the action, or at least the violence, in this novel is: one fist fight and one off-stage murder.) French is as deliberate in The Hunter as she is in the previous novel in this trilogy, The Searcher , but rather than being a satisfyingly consistent slow burn, in the middle of the book there are longueurs. As much as one appreciates the effort she puts into her description of the rural Irish village in which her protagonist, a retired Chicago cop, lives—she gives us the bad about rural life along with the good—there are times we feel we've had enough and want her to get on with it. Likewise, the most engaging character in the book is that ex-cop; when the narration veers away from him we find ourselves eager for his return. Still, before and after the longueurs, and in spite of the cop-free sections, the novel is a satisfying re...

  At the beginning of Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, the protagonist, Vesta, finds a note in the woods behind her house asserting that a woman, Magda, was killed, that her body will never be found, and that the author of the note did not kill her. Or maybe she doesn't find that note. By the end of the novel, the narrator seems to be, to put it politely, unreliable, or to put it less politely, crazy. We can see that she might be have been made so by the pain she carries from her earlier life as wife to an unsympathetic and unfaithful professor, and that this pain might have been exacerbated by the solitude in which she lives, in a cabin on a disused girl scout camp. We go back and question things that she has told us. Vesta recounts her efforts to understand who the victim named in the note, Magda, was and who might have killed her. Doing this, she is, in essence, creating characters: Magda, her lovers, her killer. She imagines (she might say "discovers") what th...

Virginia Woolf’s first novel, which takes place mostly on board a ship and in South America, is clearly apprentice work. The young person’s earnestness about the big subjects—love, marriage, and death—is there, and at times predictably leaden. But having said that, the young person making this first attempt is Virginia Woolf , and there are flashes of her future brilliance throughout. Her descriptions of social events, the society in which they occur, and of the people who populate that society are often witty, perceptive, and brilliant, and her engagement with at least one of the big issues, death, is substantial and moving. In her reflections on the place of women in society we see the seeds of A Room of One’s Own . This was the last book I finished in 2025. I look forward to continuing my reading and rereading of Virginia Woolf’s novels in 2026.