Summertime, according to Porgy and Bess, is when the livin’ is easy. But that claim sprang from a Manhattan-born White man whose experience with African-American culture in Charleston, South Carolina, was non-existent. As we so well know, the living was anything but easy for Black people living in the South during the summer or any other season. And how—dear reader, please forgive this abrupt, jarring, and utterly forced transition—did summer get associated with easy reading? I’m not the first person to note that summer is a great time to read something long and challenging and old. The next book I read is going to be Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust (aka Sartoris). But reading a good mystery or thriller is essentially like reading an action movie, and I’m happy to indulge during any season of the year. I’ve just finished a couple of good examples.
I first got to know the work of Peter Swanson when a friend gave me his Eight Perfect Murders, an entertainment that Swanson might have written with me in mind: bookstore-owning protagonist, a series of murders based on those found in eight famous Golden-Age mysteries, and deft, controlled writing. Thus when Swanson newest novel, Nine Lives, arrived to good reviews, I bought a copy. Here Swanson limits his Golden Age tribute to one novel, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, in which a group of houseguests gets picked off one at a time by a killer in their midst, but Swanson’s novel sprawls over a broad geographic area unlike Christie’s claustrophobic one-set experiment in whodunit misdirection. As is often the case with books of this genre, including Agatha Christie’s, the greatest fun comes in the beginning and the middle, when we readers learn the terms of the mystery at hand. We keep turning pages in order to learn the solution, of course, but the great revelation for me isn’t nearly as entertaining as the journey to reach it. But Swanson is clever enough to provide one satisfying surprise as denouement.
I had never read anything by Chris Pavone until I opened Two Nights in Lisbon, a thriller enthusiastically recommended by a friend in my chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. Here’s another successful entertainment, even if the title is forgivably misleading. (The bulk of the novel covers three days and two nights in Portugal, but the entire tale takes place over a much longer period.) A woman wakes up in a hotel in Lisbon and sees that her husband is missing, and I really can’t say much more without spoiling the fun. My favorite parts of this novel were Pavone’s occasional digressive comments about the state of modern culture. He’s an excellent writer, as we would expect from an editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and he’s not afraid to drop a shrewd social observation into his pell-mell plot. His eye for detail is dazzling, and he’s able to skewer the privileged and the super-rich as skillfully as Tom Wolfe or, for that matter, Alexander Pope. This man knows the English language and controls it beautifully; so why and how could he and his editors repeatedly allow eyebrows to “raise” rather than rise? I don’t want to be the quibbling pedant here, but anybody who can write this well ought to know the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb.
My copy of Flags in the Dust contains an introduction by its editor, Douglas Day, whom I used to see around the English Department at the University of Virginia when I was in graduate school in the mid-1970’s. Day was one of the legends, a Parnassian figure who had just won the National Book Award for his biography of Malcolm Lowry, a handsome, manly man who walked with a limp because of an automobile accident, and a person I regarded with awe from afar. My God, I would think, what an enviable life that man lives. He was Hemingwayesque in his manner and appearance, and it turned out that the parallels were terribly consistent in his multiple marriages and suicide. But I didn’t suspect any of those traumas were in the works when I saw him on the grounds of the university. And now I have begun reading his edition of Faulkner’s third novel, the first to be set in Yoknapatawpha County, the first in which Faulkner found his milieu and his voice. So far it’s knotty, disorienting, and, by today’s standards, unbelievably racist. But before you write Faulkner off as another Southern bigot, read Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. Faulkner lived among people who perpetuated the Lost Cause myth, but he could never bring himself buy into it. Absalom, Absalom appeared in 1936, the same year as Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell sold millions of more books than Faulkner did, but today it’s the Faulkner novel that most wrenchingly presents the toxic culture of racism in the American South. Faulkner would not pretend that the living was ever easy for Black people in his part of the world.