Saturday Review #13
Nov. 6th, 2010 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennariaI am up to date on my NaNo, hooray, so I'm allowed to stop and write up my weekly review. Where I'm going to find the time to read something for next week, I'm not sure, but I'll think of something. If all else fails, I can always review the game MYSTERY LEGENDS: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and go off onto a rant about PoTO sequels. :wry:
Anyway! On with the review!
TEARS OF THE DRAGON, by Holly Baxter.
Cover copy: To think of Chicago in the 1930s is to conjure up pictures of the Chicago Outfit and its earlier crime lords like Capone, to envision a gangsters' and bootleggers' haven in the Roaring Twenties and in the Depression that ended them. Even the storied history of the Cubs or of the city's merchant princes and philanthropists can't quite shake the ciy's gritty image.
It's time for a new look. And here it is, a mystery with a warm family of widowed mother and four daughters at its core. Elodie (Elodie - rhymes with "melody"), the Browne family bread-winner, lacks direct experience with crime, but she's full of curiosity, sharply observant, and nobody's fool. So when a man stumbles into a party given by a Chinese importer of jade and antiques where she is working "for a lark - and extra cash" and utters a dying word - mingdow - she doesn't turn aside. Instead she begins to connect the murder with some odd doings in the office building where she works, events that began one night when the elevator door oepned on the wrong floor...
Elodie's curiosity is up, and quickly bumps into a surprising intrusion of Chinse politics into the heart of Chicago. Her investigation sweeps the whole Browne family into unfamiliar and not very welcome territory...but leaves them with a taste for excitement sure to be slaked in future cases drawn by the master hand of author Holly Baxter.
Talk about bitter irony: the cover does its absolute best to stress how this isn't about Capone and gangsters or anything like that, not not not, totally different direction. But in fact, Capone and Bugs Moran are both one of the threads that are woven into the plot - important threads at that, although not primary ones. So much for a totally new look.
To be fair, though, the emphasis here isn't on gangster hijinks, at least not until very late in the game. It takes some stereotypes (the last honest cop in Chicago, the hard-drinking writer, the earnest young secretary), and mixes them in with the new and different, or at least sort of new and different. Radios and radio dramas loom up very large in the plot: not only are they a constant running sort of background noise, mentioned as something that the characters listen to, the non-murder plot is entirely concerned with Elodie having gotten the chance to help create a radio show of her own, with the help of two professional radio writers (one of them being the previously mentioned hard-drinking writer). When everything blows up near the end, one of Elodie's sisters promptly compares what's happening with the sort of thing she hears about on The Shadow or Fu Manchu.
Momentary digression: I have a soft spot for those old radio dramas myself -- the Lone Ranger was my first fictional crush, and I still have a set of tapes of the old Shadow radio show, sitting on my shelf as I type. I think the book is understandable without that kind of meta-knowledge, but under the circumstances, I read the bits of sample script that Elodie and her co-workers wrote with an extra bit of enjoyment, because they sounded right.
I can't vouch likewise for the Chinese side of things. As near as I can tell, the author has done her research, and she covers for any errors as well as she can by focusing on the viewpoints of non-Chinese characters, who freely admit that they don't know everything. On the other hand...well, this is a white person's view of Chinese people. There are bits that try to balance that reality out, like the claim (by a Chinese character, not disputed by the white characters) that no matter how well Elodie draws the head of the group that's trying to steal an incredibly valuable jade shipment, they can't just show it around outside of Chinatown to find him, because to white people, all Chinese look alike. But there is also the point that even after being corrected multiple times, Elodie still refers to the jade shipment as "Suzy's jade," without even an (apparent) attempt to change her pronunciation. The plotline is definitely new and different -- the jade shipment is being sold to support one side of the cival war going on in China at the time, and the opposing side is attempting to hijack it -- and the author does take care to find a balance between the then-prevalent stereotypes of the Chinese, and the reality of what life was like for Chinese in Chicago in 1931, even if (mostly) filtered through a white viewpoint. It's mostly that I also have a white viewpoint, so it's hard to tell where 'new and different, with a touch of the exotic' ends and 'orientalistic exploitation' begins.
With that said, I still enjoyed it. It's not perfect - the various plot threads don't always tie off as neatly as the author seems to think they do, and I could wish that the ending hadn't involved quite so much gunfire and drama and Elodie being kind of a damsel in distress who's useful mostly because she brings in the cavalry. (Seriously, when heroine is all I SHALL GO INTERVIEW KEY PERSON OF INTEREST TO THIS MESS, ALL ON MY OWN, my reaction was immediately, "Look, honey, either (a) he's gonna be involved in this up to the eyebrows, (b) you're gonna get kidnapped because you went there, or (c) all of the above." Just once, I'd like the answer not to be c.) But her intelligence at least came off as real rather than strictly an informed attribute, and I still liked her even after her performance during the final confrontation (at which she's pretty much a non-entity). I don't know if this did turn into a series -- the book was published in 2005, so it's possible -- but it might be worth looking for more.
Anyway! On with the review!
TEARS OF THE DRAGON, by Holly Baxter.
Cover copy: To think of Chicago in the 1930s is to conjure up pictures of the Chicago Outfit and its earlier crime lords like Capone, to envision a gangsters' and bootleggers' haven in the Roaring Twenties and in the Depression that ended them. Even the storied history of the Cubs or of the city's merchant princes and philanthropists can't quite shake the ciy's gritty image.
It's time for a new look. And here it is, a mystery with a warm family of widowed mother and four daughters at its core. Elodie (Elodie - rhymes with "melody"), the Browne family bread-winner, lacks direct experience with crime, but she's full of curiosity, sharply observant, and nobody's fool. So when a man stumbles into a party given by a Chinese importer of jade and antiques where she is working "for a lark - and extra cash" and utters a dying word - mingdow - she doesn't turn aside. Instead she begins to connect the murder with some odd doings in the office building where she works, events that began one night when the elevator door oepned on the wrong floor...
Elodie's curiosity is up, and quickly bumps into a surprising intrusion of Chinse politics into the heart of Chicago. Her investigation sweeps the whole Browne family into unfamiliar and not very welcome territory...but leaves them with a taste for excitement sure to be slaked in future cases drawn by the master hand of author Holly Baxter.
Talk about bitter irony: the cover does its absolute best to stress how this isn't about Capone and gangsters or anything like that, not not not, totally different direction. But in fact, Capone and Bugs Moran are both one of the threads that are woven into the plot - important threads at that, although not primary ones. So much for a totally new look.
To be fair, though, the emphasis here isn't on gangster hijinks, at least not until very late in the game. It takes some stereotypes (the last honest cop in Chicago, the hard-drinking writer, the earnest young secretary), and mixes them in with the new and different, or at least sort of new and different. Radios and radio dramas loom up very large in the plot: not only are they a constant running sort of background noise, mentioned as something that the characters listen to, the non-murder plot is entirely concerned with Elodie having gotten the chance to help create a radio show of her own, with the help of two professional radio writers (one of them being the previously mentioned hard-drinking writer). When everything blows up near the end, one of Elodie's sisters promptly compares what's happening with the sort of thing she hears about on The Shadow or Fu Manchu.
Momentary digression: I have a soft spot for those old radio dramas myself -- the Lone Ranger was my first fictional crush, and I still have a set of tapes of the old Shadow radio show, sitting on my shelf as I type. I think the book is understandable without that kind of meta-knowledge, but under the circumstances, I read the bits of sample script that Elodie and her co-workers wrote with an extra bit of enjoyment, because they sounded right.
I can't vouch likewise for the Chinese side of things. As near as I can tell, the author has done her research, and she covers for any errors as well as she can by focusing on the viewpoints of non-Chinese characters, who freely admit that they don't know everything. On the other hand...well, this is a white person's view of Chinese people. There are bits that try to balance that reality out, like the claim (by a Chinese character, not disputed by the white characters) that no matter how well Elodie draws the head of the group that's trying to steal an incredibly valuable jade shipment, they can't just show it around outside of Chinatown to find him, because to white people, all Chinese look alike. But there is also the point that even after being corrected multiple times, Elodie still refers to the jade shipment as "Suzy's jade," without even an (apparent) attempt to change her pronunciation. The plotline is definitely new and different -- the jade shipment is being sold to support one side of the cival war going on in China at the time, and the opposing side is attempting to hijack it -- and the author does take care to find a balance between the then-prevalent stereotypes of the Chinese, and the reality of what life was like for Chinese in Chicago in 1931, even if (mostly) filtered through a white viewpoint. It's mostly that I also have a white viewpoint, so it's hard to tell where 'new and different, with a touch of the exotic' ends and 'orientalistic exploitation' begins.
With that said, I still enjoyed it. It's not perfect - the various plot threads don't always tie off as neatly as the author seems to think they do, and I could wish that the ending hadn't involved quite so much gunfire and drama and Elodie being kind of a damsel in distress who's useful mostly because she brings in the cavalry. (Seriously, when heroine is all I SHALL GO INTERVIEW KEY PERSON OF INTEREST TO THIS MESS, ALL ON MY OWN, my reaction was immediately, "Look, honey, either (a) he's gonna be involved in this up to the eyebrows, (b) you're gonna get kidnapped because you went there, or (c) all of the above." Just once, I'd like the answer not to be c.) But her intelligence at least came off as real rather than strictly an informed attribute, and I still liked her even after her performance during the final confrontation (at which she's pretty much a non-entity). I don't know if this did turn into a series -- the book was published in 2005, so it's possible -- but it might be worth looking for more.