From a Raven's Shelf

October 2023 Edition

By Sarah Young

Hello, Friends:

Can you believe it is October already? I’m still staring at the pile of “summer reading” and thinking, “Oh, I’ll get to that this summer. . . .” Ah, well. If we read all the books in our stack, what would we have to look forward to?

I took a trip down my reading memory lane this month when I decided to pull out a book I hadn’t read for years but was part of a series I loved. Through the last three decades of the twentieth century, Alexander Kent, which was the pseudonym of Douglas Reeman, wrote a series of naval adventure stories set during and after the American Revolutionary War. The main character, Captain Richard Bolitho is a British naval officer, whose career Kent follows from book to book as Bolitho rises in rank and station. When I first read the series many years ago, I began with Sloop of War, which is not the first novel, but is the moment in Bolitho’s career that he is given the command of his own ship, and this is the book I returned to recently. The harrowing and sometimes brutal life of an 18th-century British sailor is told without stint or evasion, but the novel is not overly gruesome. Kent’s command of the historical moment is detailed and nuanced as he follows the career of one man buffeted by political tides over which he has no control, while remaining an honorable and steadfast military officer. If you enjoyed the Horatio Hornblower novels, you would like these novels as well.

More in the mystery vein this month, I picked up Shakespeare’s Landlord by Charlaine Harris. Harris is a phenomenally successful writer with several well-written, best-selling books. You are probably familiar with Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire books that begin with Dead Until Dark, adapted for television in the series True Blood. I prefer the Shakespeare’s Landlord series that features Lily Bard, a complicated but resourceful woman, who tries to escape the aftermath of violent trauma by settling in the small town of Shakespeare, Arkansas. She cleans houses, takes karate lessons, and minds her own business, sometimes spending sleepless nights walking through the dark streets of Shakespeare. On one of her midnight walks, she witnesses the disposal of a body, who turns out to be the unpleasant and disliked landlord of the apartment complex where she does many of her cleaning jobs. Despite her best efforts to remain uninvolved, she finds herself at the center of the investigation and suspicion. Charlaine Harris’s books always have a bit of an edge to them. They feature challenged characters who evolve through the series of books, and she does not pull punches too often or shy away from a little darkness.

A character many people say never evolves is Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum, and I just finished reading an advanced copy of her latest adventure, Dirty Thirty. Once again, Stephanie is on the trail of fugitives who have skipped out on their bail. With her sidekick Lula, Stephanie gets into all kinds of scrapes and mischief and loses at least one more car, forcing her back to “Big Blue,” the indestructible Buick. I was pleased that in this book, Evanovich heavily features one of my favorite characters: Morelli’s big yellow dog Bob. Stephanie is charged with Bob's care while Morelli is out of town, and he proves to be a worthy partner in crime-solving! I like Evanovich’s books for the same reasons most people do: they are funny, sexy, predictable, and fast. The charge at some level against the books is that Stephanie is still doing basically the same things in the same somewhat inept ways she was doing them thirty years ago when the first novels came out, but Evanovich has made a conscious and specific choice not to age her characters as the series goes along, and that is not an uncommon choice in the mystery genre. This book feels a little different, however. There are some significant alterations in Stephanie’s life that suggest change may be afoot.

An entirely different kind of novel is my staff pick for this month. The Vicar by A.J. Chambers is a slam-bang, heart-stopping thrill ride of a spy novel that will not let you rest until you have ignored everything else around you and gotten through to the final scene. Chambers clearly knows the world of which he writes, and this deep dive into the dark corners of the military and spy universe is complicated and simple at the same time: there are bad guys who do horrible things and good guys who do bad things to stop them. The hero is an off-the-books MI5 agent nicknamed “The Vicar” because he controls a network of “parishioners” or fellow spies in the United States. When, one by one, they are “burned,” he sets out to save his last remaining agent and discover what has gone wrong with the organization. Soon he finds himself deep in international intrigue, with an apparent mole in MI5 and dirty bombs threatening the United Kingdom. Clear the stage for the new spymaster novelist on the scene. We will be hearing more from Chambers, I suspect.

Illustration by Michelle Urra for TIME

Speaking of spy novels, they feature rather heavily in TIME magazine’s recently published “100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time.” It’s quite an interesting exercise that offers an interesting “to be read” pile of its own. Such lists are never fully satisfactory because we can all think of books that are not included and usually wonder why in the world some titles made the cut. “Greatest” lists are like literature anthologies: they say as much about the times in which they are compiled as the books themselves. The way this list was created was rather interesting. In addition to TIME editors, seven writers of mystery thrillers were also included on the panel of judges. Megan Abbott, Harlan Coben, S.A. Cosby, Gillian Flynn, Tana French, Rachel Howzell Hall, and Sujata Massey joined the TIME editors in nominating and rating more than 250 books. The editors then evaluated the finalists “on key factors including plot payoff, suspense, ambition, originality, critical and popular reception, and influence on the mystery and thriller genre and literature more broadly.” The breadth of this criteria allows inclusion of novels that extend beyond a narrowly defined genre of “mystery” or even “thriller” and reminds one that great mysteries are simply great novels.

There are some expected entries in the list, which is ordered chronologically. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is often considered the first mystery novel and establishes some of the conventions of the genre. Then there are the obvious entries like The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, A May Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh, and The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham. Other classic mystery and thriller writers of the mid-twentieth century are also represented like Dorothy Sayers, John Dickinson Carr, Eric Ambler, Josephine Tey, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Ian Fleming. Then there are some classic novels as well, like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and Stephen King’s The Shining.

There is also an array of diverse contemporary authors and novels that will likely feature in many such lists to come. Books like S.A Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts, and Robyn Gigl’s Survivor’s Guilt reveal that the mystery thriller is a thriving and expanding genre. Go to this list for some of your next best reads; it’s a very good place to start.

Happy reading to you all.