#SinC25 Round-Up – The Challenge Thus Far

Here are the names of women writers highlighted by bloggers in the Sisters in Crime 25th Anniversary Book Bloggers’ Challenge. (By the way, it’s not too late to join, The deadline is “whenever.”) Linked names go to blog posts; the names in bulleted lists are writers who are in some way similar. Thanks to all those who have participated – we’ve come up with a long and varied list!

Harriet Stratemeyer Adams (Carolyn Keene)

Catherine Aird

Margery Allingham

• Dorothy Sayers
• Ngaio Marsh
• Carol O’Connell

Karin Alvtegen

Kate Atkinson

• Frances Fyfield
• Jennifer McMahon
• Cornelia Read

Noreen Ayers

Belinda Bauer

Emilia Pardo Bazán

M. C. Beaton (pseudonym of Marion Chesney) (more than once) (and yet again)

Dorothy Bowers

Zenith Jones Brown (aka David Frome and Leslie Ford)

Edna Buchanan

Karen Campbell

• Denise Mina
• Helene Tursten
• Aline Templeton

Mercedes Castro

Sarah Caudwell

Agatha Christie

Anne Cleeves (more than once)

Liza Cody

Patricia Cornwell

Barbara D’Amato

Marele Day

Unity Dow

Sarah Dunant

Janet Evanovich

Cristina Fallarás

Karin Fossum (more than once) (and yet again)

• Ruth Rendell
• Karin Alvtegen
• Dorothy B. Hughs

Ariana Franklin

Tana French

• Denise Mina
• Margaret Maron
• Jennifer McMahon

Inger Frimansson

• Karin Alvtegen
• Camilla Ceder
• Diane Janes

Tess Gerritsen

Dorothy Gilman (more than once)

Alicia Giménez Bartlett

Sue Grafton

Elly Griffiths

Denise Hamilton

• Mari Jungstedt
• Elaine Viets
• Liza Marklund

Petra Hammesfahr

Erin Hart

Joan Hess

Georgette Heyer

Joanna Hines

• Barbara Vine
• Diane Janes
• Morag Joss

Loes den Hollander

Anne Holt

• Yrsa Sigurdardottir
• Minette Walters
• Liza Cody

Katherine Howell (more than once)

Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen

Miranda James

Lene Kaaberol and Agnete Friis

• Sara Paretsky
• Liza Marklund
• Abigail Padgett

Margot Kinberg

• Carol Schmurak
• Elly Griffiths
• Sisal Jo-Gazan

Natsuo Kirino

Harley Jane Kozak

Asa Larsson (more than once) (and yet again)

• Karin Alvtegen
• Karin Fossum
• Laura Lippman
• Stef Penney
• Camilla Ceder
• Kersten Ekman

Constance and Gwenyth Little

C. J. Lyons

Sharyn McCrumb

M. J. McGrath

• Dana Stabenow
• Asa Larsson
• R. J. Harlick

Charlotte MacLeod

Lucy Beatrice Malleson (aka Anthony Gilbert and other pseudonyms)

Miyuke Miyabe

Finola Moorhead

Marcia Muller

Reggie Nadelson

• Denise Mina
• Alex Carr / Jennie Siler
• Asa Larsson

Saskia Noort

Carol O’Connell

Lourdes Ortiz

Maria-Antònia Oliver

Sara Paretsky

Marion Pauw

Louise Penny

Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter) (more than once)

Claudia Pineiro

• Teresa Solano
• Donna Moore
• Leigh Redhead

Evelyn Piper (pseudonym of Mary Modell)

Dorothy Porter

Suzanne Proulx

Kathy Reichs

Rosa Ribas

Imogen Robertson

Leah Ruth Robinson

Mercé Rodoreda

Kate Ross

Rebecca Rothenberg

Catherine Sampson

Marta Sanz

Sandra Scoppettone

Diane Setterfield

Dell Shannon (pseudonym of Elizabeth Linington)

Barbara Burnett Smith

Teresa Solana

Kelli Stanley

Vanda Symon

Josephine Tey

Victoria Thompson

Helene Tursten

• Mary Logue
• Yrsa Sigurdardottir
• Leena Lehtolainen

Simone van der Vlugt

• Jessica Mann
• Esther Verhoef
• Yaba Badoe

Lola Van Guardia

Fred Vargas

Esther Verhoef

Suzanne Vermeer

Laura Wilson

• Aly Monroe
• Jacqueline Winspear
• Andrea Maria Schenkel

SinC25, # 10 – Helene Tursten

My final author for the Sisters in Crime 25th Anniversary Challenge represents for me a kind of women’s writing that I enjoy and sometimes don’t appreciate enough. These are series of books about working women who balance their home life with a difficult and demanding job, who are quietly professional though sometimes have to do a little more than their male colleagues – and bite their tongues at times, who bring compassion with them when they go to a crime scene, and who carry on case after case. They tend to operate in a fictional world peopled with characters and settings drawn on a human scale, rather than running a marathon through high-concept plots with lots of drama and gore. They don’t have a lot of angst because they have work to do and families to go home to. They are a lot like us, only more interesting.

I am so pleased that Soho Press is releasing another book in Helene Tursten’s Irene Huss series set in Göteborg. The series began in 1998 with Detective Inspector Huss (published in English five years later). Translations of two more books in the series – The Torso and The Glass Devil – were published in 2006 and 2007. Then nothing . . . until 2012. Night Rounds, the second book in the series, will come out in English this March.  As anyone who enjoys reading translated series knows, we often have to be detectives and assemble characters’ lives from what we can gather after the fact, putting together the series arc like a puzzle. Can I hope that the next five books in the series might someday be translated?

Night Rounds draws on Tursten’s life experience as a nurse and is set in a private hospital where a power failure leads to the death of an elderly patient in intensive care. The ICU nurse has vanished and is later found murdered, sprawled over the failed backup generator. One of the staff reports that she saw a figure on the grounds just after the lights went out: a woman dressed in an old-fashioned cape and cap. She is certain it is Nurse Tekla, who hanged herself in the hospital attic in 1947. All of the staff know the story, and many believe they have seen glimpses of the ghost before.

As always, Irene investigates systematically, teasing out the relationships of the hospital employees and tracking clues into the past. Her workmates operate as a team, with occasional sparks. A young female detective is being harassed by a colleague who sends anonymous pornography; when he’s caught, he’s merely transferred and Irene finds herself trying to mentor the young woman, who isn’t inclined to bide her time or bite her tongue. There is a sympathetic portrait of mentally ill homeless woman who lives on the grounds of the hospital; social issues – racism, family dysfunction, the sex industry – are present in all of Tursten’s books, though never didactically.

And as usual Irene’s family plays a secondary role in the story, as one of the detective’s twin daughters gets involved in the animal rights movement and finds herself in over her head with activists who are willing to use violence to make their point. One of the real pleasures of this series is the interludes of ordinary family life. Irene is happily married (to an even-tempered man who is an excellent chef! perhaps that’s a bit of wish fulfillment) and has two children who get up to the usual drama that adolescents go through. There’s a nice balance in the books of police work and everyday life, without too much domestic detail; just enough to give readers a realistic and engaging portrait of a capable detective who has a life outside the job.It’s refreshing to encounter a detective who doesn’t flinch from the grim realities of police work but still manages to be present for her children and keep a firm hand on her own emotional tiller. In many ways, this portrait of a woman police officer is a feminist one, demonstrating the way a woman can be herself in a traditionally masculine culture.

The Swedish television series starring Angela Kovacs , made by the ubiquitous Yellow Bird Studios, is quite good, though its dramatization of The Torso seemed to me far more graphically gruesome than the book. My favorite aspect of that novel is the contrast drawn between Danish and Swedish cultures, particularly in terms of attitudes toward the sex industry. I’m not sure what Danes think of it, but it shed a lot of light on Swedish attitudes for this American reader.

Now for the part that has turned out to be much harder than I expected – three women writers who are in some way similar:

• Mary Logue, whose Claire Watkins seems like a remarkably sane and balanced police officer in rural Wisconsin and who always has time for her daughter
• Yrsa Sigurdardottir, who does a nice job of weaving in her heroine’s family life with a light touch
• Leena Lehtolainen, who I can’t say much about because her series has not been translated into English – but I wish someone would! From what I’ve heard from Paula Arvas, a Finnish scholar who was a speaker at last spring’s Stieg Larsson symposium at UCLA, her work is not considered as “important” as harder-edged books by men mainly because she doesn’t write about society’s underbelly and focuses instead on more ordinary people. She has twice won the award for best crime fiction in Finland and has been nominated for the Glass Key award. There are apparently 11 books in the Maria Kallio series, the most recent published in 2011. But it’s not too late for someone to get cracking and translate this series, since Lehtolainen got an early start – her first novel was published when she was only 12 years old!

SinC25, #9: M. J. McGrath

I thought I would include another new-to-me woman writer as I take the Sisters in Crime 25th anniversary book bloggers’ challenge (which you are welcome to try yourself – at the easy, moderate, or expert level). When I read a review of White Heat, it sounded fascinating, combining a strong and resourceful female heroine with a harsh Arctic landscape, and very good it proved to be. It reminded me a bit of Adrian Hyland’s Emily Tempest, a mixed-race Australian living with an aboriginal group, in the way it approaches the complexity of contemporary indigenous people living on a land they understand better than anyone else.

In this complex mystery, Edie Kiglatuk makes her living as a guide for white hunters who want to test themselves against the harsh arctic environment. This is not a job typically held by a woman, but Edie is well attuned to the land and has a living to make. The community she lives in clings to the ice and rock of Ellesmere Island, a place so unforgiving that it was largely uninhabited until in 1953 the Canadian government decided it needed inhabitants to ensure a claim to it. (I gather the US had designs on it for strategic reasons.) They chose Inuit because they had the best chance of coping with the hostile environment. McGrath has written a non-fiction account of these settlers and the unfortunate experiment that left them stranded far from home and up against the elements, the government having forgotten their promise to return them to Hudson Bay if life proved too difficult.

In this harsh climate Edie has overcome years of alcoholism and made a tough life for herself, which includes her hopes for a nephew who is training to be a nurse. When she takes a pair of qalunaat (white men) hunting, one of them is shot. Her nephew comes to help by snowmobile, and when weather conditions allow, her aunt (who proves pigheaded independence runs among women in the family) flies in to take him to the nearest hospital. In spite of their best efforts the man dies, and everyone is eager to declare it an unfortunate hunting accident. But Edie has her doubts, and when more violence strikes even closer to home, she has to get to the bottom of it, which involves a trip to Greenland and some harrowing physical challenges.

The plot is perhaps a bit over-elaborate, with a mulit-national cast of bad guys, but the major characters are wonderfully drawn, with real sympathy and respect for native people living under difficult circumstances without romanticizing the very real challenges they face. The people and the land they live on come alive in this story. It would be a good one to read on a hot day; I read it at the start of winter, and it made me feel very cold, indeed. Once I checked a map, I realized just how far north Ellesmere Island really is.

McGrath wrote an essay about her experiences doing research for her books in the Telegraph. I’m very tempted to read her non-fiction book, The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic, but I think I will wait until it’s warmer.

As for women writers whose work is in some way similar . . .

• Dana Stabenow, who writes about her native Alaska with a vivid sense of place.
• Asa Larsson, who also loves arctic Sweden and makes it sound quite beautiful.
• R. J. Harlick, whose mysteries are set in area where the inhabitants of Ellesmere Island once lived.

SinC25, #6 – Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis

Agnete Friis, Lene Kaaberbøl, and Bronwen Hruska at Bouchercon 2011

As slowly as I am working my way through this challenge – to write about ten women crime fiction authors and recommend three similar authors for each – I am tempted to make this number six and seven, but that would be cheating. Certainly when you read Kaaberbøl and Friis’s first collaborative effort, The Boy in the Suitcase, there is no roughness to indicate there is more than one author at work. The translation, by Kaaberbøl herself, is also smooth, making it easy for the Danish-deficient reader to get lost in a good book.

And a very good book this is, too. In the first scene, a woman has been persuaded to pick up a suitcase at a train station by a frantic friend. Before she puts the heavy case in her car, she decides to see what’s inside, and is surprised to see a small boy.

His knees rested against his chest, as if someone had folded him up like a shirt. Otherwise he would not have fit, she supposed. His eyes were closed, and his skin shone palely in the bluish glare of the fluorescent ceiling lights. Not until she saw his lips part slightly did she realize he was alive.

What follows is a choppy series of scenes from various points of view. A man in Denmark gets a picture of the boy and a phone call asking if he accepts a deal. A man dreams about a family he doesn’t have and fantasizes about a house outside Krakow where he hopes to live with the woman he loves as soon as he’s finished one little thing. A woman watches her son play in the sand at a park. And then there’s Nina Borg, who had just lost the moral high ground in a confronts an abusive man who is coaxing an immigrant woman away from the shelter where she’d sought refuge. Before she can catch her breath, she gets a phone call from a friend who is desperate and needs a favor. She wants Nina to pick up a suitcase at the train station. As she says to Nina, “you know about such things.”All of these fragments lead up to the opening scene and Nina’s impulse to make the little boy safe.

Nina does, indeed, know about the things desperate people do, and about the reasons a small boy might be drugged and smuggled into Denmark. She works with immigrants who have come to Denmark without papers. She doesn’t trust Danish authorities who are quick to deport her desperate clients, but she realizes she’s caught between them and people who would kill her without compunction. She is a complex character who feels compelled to save the world, but can’t spare any attention or affection for her own children. She’ll fly to Africa to work with refugees, not so much because the Africans need her as that she feels a need to put herself into extreme situations. She’s an irritating mess, but the authors trust their readers enough to give us a less-than-ideal protagonist. Throughout the story our sympathy is called on in uncomfortable ways. Of course we feel for the mother of an abducted child, but we also are privy to humanizing elements of the man who carried out the kidnapping.

The authors have done a terrific job of creating an involving story out of complex contemporary issues by focusing on the particulars: on characters under stress, on the little things that make us care. They also show a great deal of respect for readers. The thrills aren’t mechanical and the way the story is constructed challenges the standard “hero’s journey” recipe for suspense and resolution. Nina Borg is so far from heroic, she calls the very idea of heroism into question. Flaws that are commonly forgiven in male protagonists – becoming so obsessed with a cause that his spouse and children are neglected, bucking authority as a matter of principle, taking life-endangering risks – are harder to forgive when the character is female, and that should make us think. Why do we see some qualities as strengths in men, but somehow disturbing in women? Are heroes who risk everything more selfish than they appear?

One of the reasons I like this book so much is that the authors ask us to participate in making sense of the story and a protagonist complex enough to match. Oh, and did I mention it’s a corker of a story? Three cheers for Soho for adding this terrific series to their already impressive list.

Now for the difficult bit. (I had no idea this would be so tricky when I cooked up this challenge.) Three women authors who are in some way similar:

• Sara Paretsky, whose V. I. Warshawski is sometimes insufferably self-righteous, yet also prone to bouts of self-doubt;
• Liza Marklund whose series heroine Annika Bengtzon resists the anchor-weight that the role of wife and mother sometimes puts on her when she’s hot on the heels of a story;
• and Abigail Padgett whose characters are smart and principled women with serious emotional problems, including Bo Bradley who doesn’t routinely take her bipolar medications and Blue McCarron, an anti-social social scientist who is sometimes aggravatingly sententious.

SinC25, #5 – Tana French

This is my fifth entry for the Sisters in Crime 25th Anniversary Book Bloggers Challenge.

When I got Tana French’s third novel to review, I opened it with some trepidation. I was impressed with her first book, In the Woods, but I was more than usually frustrated by it, too. I found so much of the writing really brilliant, but the brilliance was thrown about (it seemed to me) indiscriminately, so that the scenes that mattered were no better dressed than the ones that really didn’t, like wearing diamonds on a track suit because they’re such lovely diamonds. And I disliked the narrator intensely for being so immature and coy and apparently proud of being utterly neurotic, and I disliked his equally immature female partner. I skipped the second book because the premise sounded so implausible and I was afraid I’d experience that same mixture of delight and disappointment.

But  Faithful Place was a top-notch read for me. It’s about a no-nonsense cop from a hardscrabble part of Dublin who parted with his roots and his family when he joined the police, which seen from the perspective of his neighborhood was as good as joining the enemy. His break from his family and the close-knit community of Faithful Place actually came earlier, when he planned to elope with a girl he loved, the two of them planning to Ireland for a new life. She stood him up, and he was left stranded, estranged from his past but without the future he’d dreamed about.The next best way to start fresh is to sign on as a police officer.

He’s done well and gone on to undercover work and, as the novel opens, is running complex undercover operations. He learns that his girl’s suitcase was found jammed up the chimney of an abandoned house. Her betrayal, the betrayal that shaped his life, is suddenly something very different, and he has to return home to find out what happened to her all those years ago.

Faithful Place is story about a family, their sense of belonging, and the place they call home. The city block where they live their claustrophobic lives becomes an emotional landscape that’s bigger and more dramatic than that of those globe-trotting thrillers in which the fate of the world hangs in the balance. It’s also a microcosm of a nation at a particular point in time that has a lot to say about how macroeconomic forces shape people’s lives. French’s writing style is just as talented as it was in her first book, but much more controlled and in scene after scene pitch-perfect. It’s funny and touching and sometimes poetic in a very Irish vein, and while the story itself may not be full of surprises, neither is Greek tragedy. This is one of those mysteries where character, setting, and its sense of place really carry the day.

Three similar women authors of crime fiction . . . let’s see . . .

• Denise Mina – who is also good at nailing a time and place and has terrific dialogue that conveys those things;
• Margaret Maron – who is very different in tone, but who created a strong sense of place and family in The Bootlegger’s Daughter;
• and Jennifer McMahon – who writes very well indeed about the close relationships that children develop and the very richly detailed worlds they inhabit.

 

 

SinC25 Challenge – a roundup of posts

It has been a while since I last took stock of who has been taking the challenge. High time I provided some links from bloggers who are writing about women crime writers in response to my invitation to mark Sisters in Crime‘s 25th anniversary.

Maxine Clarke has been flexing her reading muscles in a big way. As a regular reviewer for Euro Crime and the founder of the friendly FriendFeed Crime & Mystery Fiction group she keeps her finger on the pulse of mystery publishing – and at her own blog, Petrona, she posts lots of excellent reviews and commentary. For the medium challenge she has profiled the following women authors, all from different countries:

• Diane Setterfield, author of The Thirteenth Tale, paired with Charlotte Bronte;
• Catherine Sampson, reminding me of some books set in China that I’ve been meaning to read, paired with Liza Marklund and Diane Wei Lang;
• Saskia Noort, a Dutch author who is also a resident of my TBR, paired with Claudia Pineiro and Simone van der Vlugt;
• Katherine Howell, author of an Australian police procedural series that sounds very interesting, paired with Sue Grafton; and
• Miyuke Miyabe, a Japanese author who has just gone on my long list of writers to try, paired with Dominique Manotti.

Maxine has not only completed the easy and moderate challenges, but she plans to tackle the expert one, as well! I’m looking forward to it, and hope she will remember the tight deadline of “whenever.”

At The Bunburyist, scholar and author of short stories Elizabeth Foxwell has several posts filled with erudition. In one post she profiles women with “Ink in their Blood – women writers who started out as journalists, including Edna Buchanan, Carol Nelson Douglas, Gillian Linscott, Eve K. Sandstrom, and Celestine Sibley. “AKA” presents five women who wrote under pseudonyms:  M.C. Beaton (Marion Chesney), David Frome /Leslie Ford (Zenith Jones Brown), Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson), Evelyn Piper (Merriam Modell), and Dell Shannon (Elizabeth Linington). What a lot of creativity among those women and their multiple pseudonyms. And what interesting backstories for the authors who first wrote the news.

At Goodreads, Norma Huss profiles Dorothy Gilman, an author who inspired her own writing, adding to her profile M.C. Beaton and Carolyn G. Hart.

Sarah Ward at Crimepieces takes the challenge by writing about Asa Larsson, whose new book Until Thy Wrath Be Past is definitely one I intend to read as soon as possible. She also recommends five other women authors: Mari Jungstedt, Fred Vargas, Jennifer Egan, Ann Cleeves, and Yrsa Sigurdardottir.

Mrs. Peabody investigates Ingrid Noll’s mystery, The Pharmacist, which sounds quite creepy and psychologically suspenseful. She also recommends Josephine Tey, Fred Vargas, Maj Sjowall, Dominique Manotti, and P.D. James.

The library director at Goshen Public Library highlights some women writers for the challenge, including Sheila Connolly’s Fundraising the Dead

Bernadette, who contributes to Fair Dinkum Crime and writes thoughtful reviews at her own blog, Reactions to Reading, has added a couple of blog posts to the challenge. In her second challenge post, she focuses on historical crime fiction, with a new favorite, Ariana Franklin in the lead, adding notes about Elizabeth Peters, Imogen Robertson, and Victoria Thompson. (My, I have a lot of catching up to do.)  She also profiles “genre busters” – women writers who have done something different within the genre. She starts with an intriguing feminist author, Finola Moorhead, whose Still Murder was published in 1991 by Australian publishing house Spinifex which specializes in “innovative and controversial feminist books with an optimistic edge.” She adds to the genre busters Natsuo Kirino, Dorothy Porter, and Karin Alvtegen.

And – oh my goodness, here’s Laurie King, who is rising to the challenge with a few words about S. J. Rozan and her new book, Ghost Hero, a Lydia Chin book that she calls “a zinger.”

Thanks to all who are participating. If you feel inspired to take the challenge – at whatever level – tag your posts SinC25 and I’ll look for them. At the end of this process, I’ll compile a list of all the authors mentioned. I know I’ve already added a lot to my “to be read” list.

photos courtesy of soyrosa and moriza; postcard courtesy of janwillemsen.

Another Week of the Sisters in Crime Challenge

At Petrona, Maxine Clarke takes the “easy” challenge with panache, highlighting a writer who immediately went on my “to be read” list as a result – Unity Dow, who writes about Botswana in a tone that is utterly different than the charming world of Alexander McCall Smith’s popular series. While she is at it, Maxine commends to readers the Australian publisher Spinifex, an independent and feminist press that sounds very interesting indeed. She has five more writers to recommend who have the same dark edge as Dow. (Maxine is extremely well-read in the genre and often contributes reviews to Euro Crime.)  While you’re at it, why not check out Bernadette’s review of Unity’ Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent at Reactions to Reading?

For contrast, at The Bunburyist, Elizabeth Foxwell highlights five women who can put a smile on your face (while solving a murder or two).

Jose Ignacio Escribano continues using his Europass to visit Denmark and check in with Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen, who has some insightful things to say about the cozy mystery.

And I post my fourth challenge author, Reggie Nadelson.

This is fun! Why not join in? And just a reminder, Sisters in Crime will be celebrating its first quarter century of advocacy for women writers in the genre at Bouchercon 2011. See you in St. Louis.

SinC25 #3 – Karin Fossum

I recently had to overcome my indecision in trying to choose just one woman writer from the Nordic countries in Norm’s poll at Crime Scraps. (This sure beats voting for political candidates, when I am usually choosing the lesser of evils.) I ultimately chose Karin Fossum, though there are lots of writers in that poll whom I admire greatly. But Fossum is … well, she’s a bit unusual. And while not all of her books work totally for me, they are memorable and often make it to my tops of the year.

Fossum’s books tend to be set in small communities in Norway, where everyone knows one another – or so they think. When a crime is committed, everyone is shocked, but before long you realize there’s a great deal bubbling along under the surface, and the placid belief that things are just fine is challenged on many fronts. This sounds a bit like Cabot Cove or British village cozies, where the thoroughly unpleasant deceased conveniently racks up lots of enemies (so as to provide loads of red herrings) and once the detective has examined the clues and exposed the culprit, the natural order of the peaceful community is restored.

No, Fossum invites you into a peaceful community, peels back the illusion of wholesome goodness, makes you (and the characters themselves) realize that there are a lot of unhealthy situations flourishing under the surface that are actually nourished by everyone eagerly maintaining an illusion of tranquility and decency. She makes us uncomfortable in a quiet and subtle way.

Her series characters, Konrad Sejer and Jacob Skarre, are the sort of police officers you would want to show up in a crisis because they are patient and good listeners and invariably kind while maintaining a well-calibrated moral compass. They tend not to get excited or act macho and don’t make much of their authority, yet it is indisputably there in it’s pure moral state. They get the job done and restore order.

But we readers aren’t allowed to feel complacent. In the final pages Fossum almost always adds one last ambiguous twist, one touch of uncertainty that leaves you  unsettled and uncomfortable. Her purpose is not to confirm that rural Norway is a safe and tranquil place but rather to remind us that a communal agreement to ignore problems is dangerous and all too common.That violence that erupted and was settled by the police is still there, just out of sight.

The first book in the Sejer series, Don’t Look Back, is a masterful and very quiet story that unfolds as the detectives wonder why the girl who was murdered and left beside a lake had grown so moody before her murder. It turns out that she had become aware of an impulsive act of violence that a truly caring community would have prevented, if they weren’t sustaining an illusion of peace through mutually assured indifference. In The Indian Bride, a lonely man who travels to India and finds a wife gets interrupted when he is supposed to meet her at the airport. She is murdered before she can find her way to her new home. It turns into a fascinating exploration of how an isolated community responds to an outsider and the lengths to which her intended husband will go to lie to himself. I was also very impressed by the short novel, The Water’s Edge, which tackles the sensational topic of pedophilia in a very muted and sensitive way while also raising questions about how society in general treats its children. I reviewed it for Mystery Scene and concluded “As Sejer and Skarre probe into the life of the missing child they demonstrate a fundamental law of Fossum’s universe: Nobody is blameless; everyone is capable of cruelty. The author handles the most despicable of crimes with restraint while uncovering the hidden violence of ordinary lives.” I tend not to recommend When the Devil Holds the Candle because I found it so deeply disturbing that I could hardly bear to read it. It’s certainly memorable, though! If you like a chilling bit of psychological suspense, it might be just the thing for you. (Shudder.)

Three somewhat similar women authors . . .

• Ruth Rendell (whose non-series books can be as psychologically acute and as creepy as Fossum; her Wexford novels not so much)
• Karin Alvetgen (a Swedish author who also focuses more on psychological insight than on social critique, though both she and Fossum could earn honorary degrees in social psychology)
• Dorothy B. Hughes (who, I should confess, I haven’t read much – but In a Lonely Place published in 1947 has some of the same psychological creepiness and elaborate but convincing self-deception that Fossum does so well.)

More from the Challenge

Jose Ignacio Escribano, who bolted out of the gate before anyone else last week, continues his pace with a post on women writers from the Netherlands. He chose to take a stand in Maastricht in part because he is engaged in a book biathalon – two book challenges at once! If you enjoy a challenge, you can catch up with the Crime Fiction on a Europass as they visit Denmark.

At Kattomic Energy, Katherine Tomlinson (Kat Parrish) has wrapped up her challenge with three posts. The first of these is on Edna Buchanan’s memoirs about reporting on crime, Ann Rule, and several true crime writers. The second is about Patricia Cornwell’s first book, Postmortem, and the case that inspired it. In the third she does something many of us could do – she looks over the books on her TBR (to be read) shelves, and discovers a number by women writers, books she looks forward to reading. What’s fun about these posts is the personal stories she includes. Kattomic Energy generates a lot of blogging power.

At the Bunburyist, Elizabeth Foxwell joins the challenge, recalling five women authors who “left us too soon”  – Dorothy Bowers, Sarah Caudwell, Kate Ross, Rebecca Rothenberg, and Barbara Burnett Smith, all fine writers who died too young.

Norm at Crime Scraps begins his challenge with a challenge – a poll on which writer from a Nordic country is one’s favorite. This really is a challenge. (I voted for a writer who will be the subject of a future blog post.)

At Severn House, Susanna Gregory writes about Anne Perry for the challenge and has five more women writers to recommend.  Judith Cutler writes about Amy Myers – and recommendations to make, too.

And I tried to figure out just what it is about Kate Atkinson that works so brilliantly for me – and, of course, have further recommendations. If your TBR isn’t feeling the pressure, we’re not trying hard enough.

SinC25 #2 – Kate Atkinson

As my second woman crime fiction writer to highlight for the Sisters in Crime Book Bloggers’ Challenge I thought I would  say a word about Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series, with a particular focus on the fourth title in the series, Started Early, Took My Dog. These are probably not for everyone; if you insist on things like cause and effect or abhor coincidences, you may find these books insufferable. But her writing style, her humor, and her delightful inventiveness coupled with deep tenderness for hapless human beings have completely won me over.In this book, Jackson Brodie is tracing the birth parents of a New Zealand woman and acquires a small dog by accident, An ex-cop has taken a small child away from a drug addict and decides, against the odds, logic, and the law, to become her mother, an elderly actress is losing her memory – and all of it is connected to a brutal crime that the ex-cop responded to when she was a newly minted police officer.

Here’s what I wrote in my reading log after finishing Started Early, Took My Dog:

Wow, amazing. As always, Atkinson spins a story from a series of lives intersecting, connections as thin and delicate as a spider’s web, everything from Jackson Brodie’s investigation finding a New Zealand woman’s birth parents to an ex-copper who impulsively acquires a small child, to an aging actress whose memory has turned into gauzy lace, all of it woven together in a pattern made of coincidence and connections. More complex in structure than previous books in the series, some of the scenes are from the 1970s, when a crime was hushed up, having implications in the present. Darker than the others, too, but just brilliant, the kind of novel that makes you want to turn back and read it all over again.

If you want to know more about the story – which is brilliant, but hard to describe – I recapped it in a review for Mystery Scene Magazine. Though I’m not typically bothered reading series out of order, this is one that really is best read from first onward:

• Case Histories (2004)
• One Good Turn (2006)
• When Will There Be Good News (2008)
• Started Early, Took My Dog (2010)

But that won’t be a hardship, as they are all quite wonderful – provided you’re willing to accept a universe in which coincidence rules. Normally, I wouldn’t care for this strategy, but … she pulls it off. I found an earlier attempt in my reading log to explain to myself why she works so well for me.

She’s not writing crime fiction, and she’s not mocking it or transcending anything. She’s reacting, though (I think) to what crime fiction does, which is take a group of people and a terrible thing (a murder, usually), explore how those people react to the terrible thing, the reason for which or the resolution of which is unknown, then pull it all together into a solution – both of the crime and of the sense that crimes or other terrible things (like sudden death or betrayal or deviant behavior or jealousy or greed) have the potential to challenge the ways we organize our belief (in God, in the police, in the basic goodness of most people in a crisis, in our own untested morality). That’s one of the reasons mysteries are satisfying. They give us dramatic discord and they involve us in resolution, and they do it entertainingly, whether dark or light, take your pick.

It seems to me that Atkinson is taking all the incident and drama we expect in a mystery, but instead of logic and those social organizations that are there to protect us driving the story line, coincidence is what makes things go forward. And it’s not just randomness; Its as if randomness has a strange quality that charges all the particles in the book so they’ll be drawn together.

What she’s doing is giving us the ripping good story we crave, but giving a completely different reason for how the story will move along. Where in other mysteries there would be reasons for every connection that’s made (even if the reasons were a strain, and not reasonable, really, there’d be reasons) here there are no reasons. Just loads of points of connection. As if to say: What if that connectedness and meaning we crave were there, but not as usual? What if they were connected in some other way, an almost opposite way to reason?

I find these such joyful books – and I feel the same uplift as when a really good crime fiction writer is in a really generous mood and lets things click satisfyingly into place, though it might be more realistic or more modern to let them stay broken. These books wouldn’t work at all if a) she were not as good a writer as she is – she’s funny and touching and wise and just plain good – and b) she were smirking at her cleverness; look, I’m taking a genre and bending it and aren’t I doing something amazing? She doesn’t smirk at all, at the genre or the reader or the characters.

It’s hard to come up with similar authors – Atkinson’s style is unusual – but here are some writers whose lovely use of words takes center stage and sometimes makes logic go stand in the corner.

• Frances Fyfield (whose style is quite lovely, her stories a bit elliptical)
• Jennifer McMahon (who writes quite lyrically about the world from a child’s perspective)
• Cornelia Read (who writes the kind of book I don’t like, except I do because her prose is so astonishingly fine)

Feel free to join in to the challenge – at the easy, moderate, or expert level. I’ll be putting together another round up of challenge posts in a few days.