Recent readings
THE LIGHTHOUSE, P. D. James, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005, 335 pages.
This is the most recent of the 86-year-old British author’s 18 books. Although I have plowed through some of her previous mysteries featuring British police Commander Adam Dalgliesh (Death in Holy Orders was the last I read), I simply couldn’t do it with this one. Typical of her mystery novels, The Lighthouse runs to 335 pages; it would have been far more interesting had it been many fewer pages (my choice for the length of mysteries is just a few over 200 pages).
My beef with her works is the tiresomely excessive length of fanciful prose that she uses to set the various scenes and to bring the numerous characters into the story (there are always more than a handful) and to guide them through it.
In The Lighthouse the opening scene is set at typical length with Dalgliesh in conference with his superiors regarding his assignment to investigate a murder on a tiny island off the west coast of England.
To have the security forces involved was always a complication. Dalgliesh reflected that the secret service, like the monarchy, in yielding up its mystique in response to public enthusiasm for greater openness, seemed to have lost some of that half-ecclesiastical patina of authority bestowed on those who dealt in esoteric mysteries. Today its head was known by name and pictured in the press, then previous head had actually written her autobiography, and its headquarters, an eccentric oriental-looking monument to modernity which dominated its stretch of the south bank of the Thames, seemed designed to attract rather than repel curiosity. (p. 5)
The foregoing is only about half of this scene-setting paragraph.
A female detective over whom Dalgliesh has command is introduced:
In her flat above the Thames, Detective Inspector Kate Miskin was still in bed. Normally, long before this hour, she would have been at her office and, even on a rest day, showered, clothed and breakfasted. Early rising was habitual for Kate. It was partly by choice, partly a legacy of her childhood, when burdened with the daily dread of imagined catastrophe, she would drag on her clothes at the moment of waking, desperate to be ready to copr with the expected disaster: a fire in one of the flats below preventing rescue, a plane crashing through the window, an earthquake shattering the high-rise, the balcony rail trembling, the breaking in her hands. (p. 12)
Such involved prose can be acceptable in a regular (non-mystery) novel to add color to the scenes and insight into the personalities of the characters; many celebrated novelists (Charles Dickens, for one) have used such style to good effect. But, as a mystery reader, I want to get to, and stay with, the action with a bare minimum of such folderol; I don’t think I am alone in that respect.
Similarly, the TV police procedural Homicide would have been a show I should have enjoyed–I like police action shows (I usually watch Law and Order) and it was set in the Baltimore area where I live. But there was too much soap opera in it (one detective dealing with his wife’s illness, another spending too much time musing on the meaning of life, yet another, a divorced man, finding a soul mate whom he first saw working in a fast-food restaurant but also was studying music at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory). But because of all that baggage I gave up watching it. (There is almost nothing of the personal lives of the main characters in Law and Order.)
This is the most recent of the 86-year-old British author’s 18 books. Although I have plowed through some of her previous mysteries featuring British police Commander Adam Dalgliesh (Death in Holy Orders was the last I read), I simply couldn’t do it with this one. Typical of her mystery novels, The Lighthouse runs to 335 pages; it would have been far more interesting had it been many fewer pages (my choice for the length of mysteries is just a few over 200 pages).
My beef with her works is the tiresomely excessive length of fanciful prose that she uses to set the various scenes and to bring the numerous characters into the story (there are always more than a handful) and to guide them through it.
In The Lighthouse the opening scene is set at typical length with Dalgliesh in conference with his superiors regarding his assignment to investigate a murder on a tiny island off the west coast of England.
To have the security forces involved was always a complication. Dalgliesh reflected that the secret service, like the monarchy, in yielding up its mystique in response to public enthusiasm for greater openness, seemed to have lost some of that half-ecclesiastical patina of authority bestowed on those who dealt in esoteric mysteries. Today its head was known by name and pictured in the press, then previous head had actually written her autobiography, and its headquarters, an eccentric oriental-looking monument to modernity which dominated its stretch of the south bank of the Thames, seemed designed to attract rather than repel curiosity. (p. 5)
The foregoing is only about half of this scene-setting paragraph.
A female detective over whom Dalgliesh has command is introduced:
In her flat above the Thames, Detective Inspector Kate Miskin was still in bed. Normally, long before this hour, she would have been at her office and, even on a rest day, showered, clothed and breakfasted. Early rising was habitual for Kate. It was partly by choice, partly a legacy of her childhood, when burdened with the daily dread of imagined catastrophe, she would drag on her clothes at the moment of waking, desperate to be ready to copr with the expected disaster: a fire in one of the flats below preventing rescue, a plane crashing through the window, an earthquake shattering the high-rise, the balcony rail trembling, the breaking in her hands. (p. 12)
Such involved prose can be acceptable in a regular (non-mystery) novel to add color to the scenes and insight into the personalities of the characters; many celebrated novelists (Charles Dickens, for one) have used such style to good effect. But, as a mystery reader, I want to get to, and stay with, the action with a bare minimum of such folderol; I don’t think I am alone in that respect.
Similarly, the TV police procedural Homicide would have been a show I should have enjoyed–I like police action shows (I usually watch Law and Order) and it was set in the Baltimore area where I live. But there was too much soap opera in it (one detective dealing with his wife’s illness, another spending too much time musing on the meaning of life, yet another, a divorced man, finding a soul mate whom he first saw working in a fast-food restaurant but also was studying music at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory). But because of all that baggage I gave up watching it. (There is almost nothing of the personal lives of the main characters in Law and Order.)
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