Mysteries remain faithful to female spirit
By Carol Memmott
USA Today
Is it any wonder that the most beloved mystery author of all time is a woman? Agatha Christie's marvelous detectives, including Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, have been fascinating readers with their detecting skills since the 1920s.
Female writers have continued the grisly tradition of telling tales about murder and mayhem. Their perspective gives a precise and honest depiction of the female spirit. As Margaret Atwood once wrote: "Sometimes men put women in men's novels but they leave out some of the parts; the heads, for instance."
What some women are writing about these days:
• Linda Fairstein doesn't forget the heads in her chilling "The Bone Vault" (Scribner, $25). There are shrunken heads, mummified bodies and plenty of bones, enough to suit readers who prefer mysteries saturated in atmospheric locations and factual details.
In this, her fifth novel, Fairstein, a former prosecutor, once again brings together assistant district attorney Alexandra Cooper and her wisecracking sidekick, NYPD detective Mike Chapman. They have the spark-and-sparkle kind of relationship that brings to mind Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis in "Moonlighting" or David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in "The X-Files." Sooner or later the spark will ignite into full-blown passion, but in the meantime, the banter and give-and-take between Cooper and Chapman is enchanting.
This time out, the murder of a young South African leads Cooper and Chapman to two of New York's landmarks: the American Museum of Natural History and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Though the woman has been dead for months, her body tucked away in an ancient sarcophagus, it hasn't deteriorated. The corpse is what Chapman calls an Incorruptible. Within the walls of these famous buildings are the clues to her murder, her body's preserved state and the murderer. Readers are rewarded with a richly detailed history of the museums and an authentically documented murder investigation.
• Though Fairstein has already earned her gold star as a champion teller of detective tales, Helen Knode is hoping to crack into the vault of success with her debut suspense novel, "Ticket Out" (Harcourt, $24). OK, so being married to James Ellroy might give her a bit of an advantage, but "Ticket Out" could still be her ticket to respected authorhood.
This smart novel, packed with an insider's viewpoint on Hollywood and the film industry, is an indictment of the star system and Hollywood's manufacture of "products" rather than "art."
Knode's protagonist is Ann Whitehead, a jaded film critic for an L.A. weekly newspaper. After years on the job, she's sick of covering the industry she hates. There's no swooning on her part for the likes of actors such as Tom Cruise, whom she views as a Hollywood commodity. When a young screenwriter is murdered in Whitehead's bathtub, she sees her coverage of the murder investigation as her ticket out of movie reviewing and into a new career as an investigative journalist.
"Ticket" has an eerie quality. It reminds me of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," with touches of the weird and the surreal. Its only drawback might be having too many suspects. But in the end, it successfully catapults desire, greed and ambition into murder and gruesome acts of violence.
• Critics may be hesitant to call Suki Kim's debut novel, "The Interpreter" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24), a murder mystery. The darkly depressed protagonist, Suzy Park, and Kim's dusky literary writing style make readers focus more narrowly on Suzy's shadow of a life than on the fact that her parents were murdered five years before.
Suzy, in her late 20s, goes through the motions of living. Her life is so vague that a lover once described their relationship as having sex with a ghost.
Highly educated, she has drifted from one meaningless job to another. When the story takes place, Suzy is working as an interpreter for Korean immigrants who face legal problems.
The work suits her because she is "interpreting" other people's problems but never her own. Any thoughts she has focus more on wondering about but not being able to interpret why her childhood was so empty, why her parents moved so frequently and why her older sister, Grace, was so coolly estranged from her family.
A chance encounter with a man who once worked for her parents leads Suzy to look into her parents' murder.
Kim has come up with one of the most original and disturbing motives for murder. It brings into play loyalty, cultural differences and the sometimes lonely existence of our nation's many immigrants.
