
I’ve started and deleted this post three times now. Summer has finally descended on my hometown of Ottawa in the form of a miasma of heat and humidity that has resulted in what seems like forty days and forty nights of mist, drizzle, rain, hail, thunder and lightning. I feel like I’ve been startled awake in some decaying tropical locale instead of the second coldest capital city in the world. In honour of this lovely time of year, I had thought to provide a compilation of links to “summer reading” lists from various sources. Each post has seemed so boring they haven’t made it through the draft stage.
Inspiration has thankfully finally arrived in the form of an announcement from the excellent and highly recommended Bytown Bookshop of a Summer Mystery Sale.
Mystery is a genre I rarely comment on as I am not as widely read or appreciative of the form as many of you out there. It’s not even a speciality of the shop, even though my Sister is something of a mystery fan. I can appreciate a good mystery when I read it, but I’ve always found the genre to be so codified that there is little mystery in mystery for me.
However, I find mysteries do make great summer reading. By “summer reading” in this case, I mean the generally accepted definition that you’re not made to work too hard to appreciate the works in question. I would consider Gravity’s Rainbow—an otherwise excellent book—crappy summer reading. You shouldn’t have to turn your brain completely off, but you also shouldn’t have to have a dictionary and other reference books close at hand—additional sources being difficult to manage in a fold-up lounge chair.
So, my personal list of great summer reads from the mystery genre would include anything by John Dunning (my biases being obvious in this case); anything by Jonathan Gash; and anything by Carl Hiaasen—although I have to admit that, although I love Hiaasen’s books when I’m reading them, I later find it difficult to separate them: “was that the one with guy who juggles skulls or the guy who lives above deadly barracudas?” What unites these choices is the clever conceits behind what makes a “detective” in a whodunit. In the works of all three authors, the protagonist is rarely a detective of any kind—or even a reliable person at all. These books are all squarely in the mystery genre, but they have playful elements of revisionism that attract my attention.
The “summer read” I specifically want to recommend though is Louis Bayard’s magnificent The Pale Blue Eye. This is a book I devoured in a few sittings with a scotch on the side-table and some Baroque on the stereo—at peace with the world—a perfect summer read. It is the most generic of the mysteries I’m recommending here in terms of it having an actual detective as a protagonist who is called upon to solve a murder; yet it is also the most challenging and rewarding. Bayard’s brilliant conceit is to set the murder at Westpoint during Edgar Allan Poe’s time at that venerable institution; and to make Poe a student liaison, friend and confidant of the detective narrator. Bayard’s talents shine during the sections of the novel that are in the form of correspondence written by Poe himself—a gutsy move that Bayard executes exquisitely. Bayard has crafted a traditional whodunit mystery (ho hum), within the historical fiction sub-genre of mysteries (yawn) and included large chunks of epistolary passages (aggressive yawn). To my usual tastes, this would be a three-strike deal breaker. Instead, Bayard has crafted a mystery that is genuinely gripping with a shocking ending; brought late 19th Century Westpoint to vivid life; and written utterly convincingly as a young Poe.
The Pale Blue Eye is thrilling, melancholy and shot through with black humour—a good read at any time—but a great summer read in that it is as intellectually rewarding as it is wildly entertaining. That’s what I want from a so-called summer read.
Any other suggestions out there?