This & That: Style, Books etc.

Some stuff I've been thinking about:

• Reading the April hard cover edition of the ABA Journal I ran across this.  The co-head of DLA Piper's international arbitration group was tired of the bickering between firm lawyers working on a case where the workload was spread between the firm's New York and  London offices.  Seems that they "couldn't stop correcting one another's grammar and writing styles styles based on their respective country's English."   So the firm ended up developing its own English style guide.  It doesn't say how long that took and how much bickering and compromise was involved.  But I'd like to see it.  I regularly spell words the British way because I read so much British literature.  
  
• Sadly, I have reached the end of the Tess Monaghan series (at least until Laura Lippman writes another).  Sometimes a series will get stale the further it goes, but I think this series just gets stronger as it goes along.  (Although I do think she should strive to end the next book without a shooting at the end, that's getting a little old.) The last book, Another Thing to Fall, involved a television production in Baltimore.  Unlike the multitudes of people who dream of working in movies and television I've always known I'm not cut out for that life.  I'm a night person, not a morning person.  This novel confirmed that.   While reading this series I never bothered to find out anything about Laura Lippman on a personal level.  I knew she was a former reporter because every time I would go look for a link to one of her books it mentioned that.  But I didn't know that she was married to David Simon until I read the afterward to this book.  That is one creative household.   And it reminds me that I still need to watch the last two seasons of The Wire.
  
• More Twitter Lit:  Baby Trotsky, a Twitterary Magazine.  I just love the phrase "Twitterary Magazine".
  
• Happy Earth Day - what's left of it.

Characters Online

I recently read somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that a movie script in which two persons were unable to connect through the entire movie was deemed unrealistic in an age of cell phone proliferation.

What I'm waiting for is a movie in which two people are in constant communication, are completely on the same wavelength, have a real connection, are close friends and yet never lay eyes on each other and only interact digitally. In this age of social networking sites, blogs and other digital communication, this seems like a realistic scenario. In the past this only occurred if one of the characters was a computer but now the possibilities seem endless.

A couple of years ago I was reading Nancy Pickard's The Virgin of Small Plains (which I highly recommend) and in the midst of the story one of the minor characters logged onto her computer:

In her room, seated in a straight-backed chair in front of a scarred old wooden desk, Catie logged onto thevirgin.org which was the most popular of the small number of websites that had sprung up about the Virgin of Small Plains. Without even stopping to read through the entries from that day, she opened a new window to type up her own account of the astonishing thing that had truly happened to her.

Pickard then created Catie's blog post. For those of us who spend time online this was a very true moment. For those people who know nothing about blogs, it was a small enough part of the story that it didn't distract from anything.

At the time I thought it was just a matter of time before someone created a virtual community that was integral to the plot. And that is what Laura Lippman did in her mystery novel By a Spider's Thread. Lippman's detective Tess Monaghan is asked to track down a missing wife and mother who has run off with her children. Tess, who is in Baltimore, discovers that they are in the the Midwest. But instead of traveling to the Midwest herself, Tess relies on a network of other female private investigators with whom she communicates via a listserv and instant messaging. The listserv is called Snoopsisters. The members help each other out with cases but they also listen to each other. They share their frustrations and their successes. The conversations that Monaghan creates sounded realistic to me and Tess couldn't have solved the mystery without the Snoopsisters.

I liked this idea and I hoped that Lippman would continue it in later books. But, although she mentions the Snoopsisters in later books, they aren't integral to the plot and Lippman doesn't create any conversations for us to read.

It is only a matter of time before someone writes an entire story involving people who only know each other digitally. Or who have met but only interact digitally, like old college friends who have rediscovered each other through Facebook. Or blog friends who finally meet each other in person. Maybe an updated version of the country house mystery where the bloggers spend a weekend at a bed and breakfast. Perhaps in southern Indiana ...

This & That: Music, Travel, Books, etc.

Some stuff:

• A local artist is putting the words of Meriwether Lewis to music. Words like: "heartily tired of the national hug".
• My friends Meg and Adam have finished the South American half of their year traveling around the world. Starting in Peru, they moved on to Bolivia, Argentina and Chile before spending a final three weeks in Columbia. I admit I was nervous about them being in Columbia but they say it was beautiful and the people were lovely. After a brief stop back in the States they have moved on to spend a month in New Zealand where they are traveling around by spaceship. Then they head to Asia. Jealous? Me? What makes you think that?
• I've made it to the last of Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan mysteries. I'm really impressed how she doesn't repeat herself with plots (although shooting people at the end of the novel is starting to get predictable). I finished The Last Place which involved a serial killer (and had references back to the very first book too). It was really creepy and I found I couldn't read it late at night. In By A Spider's Thread she took the action out of town again (southern Indiana no less - I'd like Andi's opinion on if she got it right). But she avoided the problems I had with her when she sent Tess to Texas by creating a network of female investigators that Tess could call on for the out of town work. That worked really well (in fact I'll probably write more about that at some point.) As I read this series I did regularly wonder if she was purposely trying not to cover Baltimore ground that David Simon covers, but then came No Good Deeds. It had a different twist though - it ended up being a meditation on the power that the federal government has to make the life of an average citizen miserable if it so chooses. I just picked up Another Thing to Fall from the library and when I finish that, I'm finished. Sigh.
• I had jury duty today and I brought Anna Karenina with me to read. I assumed I'd be there two days (that's what usually happens) and I'd have a lot of downtime (that also usually happens). But I only had to serve one day and most of it was spent in an actual courtroom going through voir dire. They didn't pick me (no surprise there) but I also didn't get much reading time in. I only have about 200 more pages to go - I just need some uninterrupted time when I'm not too tired. I thought for sure that jury duty would provide that. Wrong. But I did my civic duty.

Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan

I haven't posted much lately about books I've been reading. But that's not because I'm not reading. On the contrary, I'm flying through books.

At the suggestion of andif, I've been reading Laura Lippman's series of mystery novels that feature Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan. I love a good mystery series and this, so far, has been a really good series. I've read Baltimore Blues, Charm City, Butcher's Hill, In Big Trouble, The Sugar House and In a Strange City. I'm working on The Last Place right now.

Like I said, I love mystery novels. But I don't usually talk about them. Sometimes one of my reading groups picks one to read and there really isn't a whole lot to say after everyone decides whether or not the ending was surprising. A series is another matter because then there is often (but not always) an underlying story that builds the characters and can be a topic for discussion. But most reading groups don't commit to a whole series.

I thought I'd take a break from reading and talk a bit about why I'm enjoying this series. First, she hasn't annoyed me with erroneous lawyer detail. Yes, there is the obligatory lawyer, but he has only a small part in the series. He is important to Tess because he is a rowing coach as much as for his legal connections. Lippman spends very little time ever talking about him practicing law - which is a good thing. That means I'm not distracted by erroneous or unlikely lawyer details, as I often am in these types of series. And what she does talk about she either gets right or it's close enough to right that it isn't a distraction for me. For instance, one of the clever things about this series, is the reason there is an obligatory lawyer in the first place: to give Tess a confidential relationship with her clients. That's a really good reason and it's believable. Lippman doesn't quite get it right (or, she got it right once but then stopped getting it right), but that doesn't really matter because she has the overall idea right.

The other thing she's done right is give really good descriptions of Baltimore that paint a picture but don't go into so much detail that it is distracting. I like a mystery series that makes me feel part of a city: the London of Lord Peter Wimsey; the Rome of Marcus Didius Falco; the Edinburgh of John Rebus. Often when an author sets a story in a "second" city there is either too much description or too little. If there isn't enough description there is no sense of place. But too much detailed description (and this is usually the case) makes the reader feel like a visitor instead of a resident.

So far in my reading only one book was set outside the Baltimore area: In Big Trouble. So far, it has been my least favorite of the series, but not because of the descriptions of San Antonio. She does a good job with those. No, the problem for me was that Tess ended up solving the mystery in Texas the same way she would have done it in Baltimore, which was completely unrealistic. Lippman has done a great job of giving Tess a network in Baltimore with lots of contacts that can help her solve cases: newspaper contacts from her previous job, legal contracts, contacts within the police force and especially family and friend contacts that are very believable. Tess comes from a low profile politically connected family in Baltimore; not the glamorous political connections but the working class, bureaucracy connections (I'm waiting to see if she ever uses her mother's connections at the NSA). She also has a good friend that comes from money and that provides her with entry into circles that would otherwise be closed to her.

But in Texas she has no real contacts and yet... everyone opens up to her. I found it especially unbelievable that a homicide detective would sit there and share speculation about the case with a total stranger who has just found the dead body. This is one of my pet peeves about many mysteries I read. The detective just has to show up and everyone opens up. I was glad when Lippman moved Tess back to Baltimore.

I particularly liked Butcher's Hill, which had a couple of really good plot twists that were unexpected but not so much of a stretch that I found them unbelievable. And I liked In a Strange City which had a wealth of interesting tidbits about Baltimorean Edger Allen Poe. So far, the plots aren't formulaic and Tess grows and learns as the series goes along. In the current book I'm reading, The Last Place, she has been forced to go to anger management classes and it will be interesting to see how she comes out of those. (This one also involves a serial killer and is giving me the creeps.)

I'll be sorry when I get to the end of this series.