Send in the Clones

For a long time, I've read "themed" detective fiction: there's a time and a place for heavyweight novels and biography, but not all the time. I need light relief: I also need things to read in short snatches whilst travelling and whilst running system tests. This light detective fiction is ideal - you get a puzzle to solve in standard Agatha Christie fashion, and a background setting that hopefully teaches something new.

I think I've read everything Agatha Christie ever wrote. I started with "Cards on the Table", which was for some reason in the junior school library. I now suspect someone on the staff was a serious bridge player: if so, thank you, whoever you were. Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter) was therefore a great find for me. I was already interested in the period and the Cadfael books had something of the same feel about them: her slightly unlikely hero has a way with people and a fair and subtle mind. The "also starring" characters are often from stock and Shrewsbury is often a backdrop rather than a place where the characters live, but none of this detracts from the pleasure in reading the books. I was sad when she died and I'll miss the anticipation of a new paperback publication. Well worth a look if you haven't come across them before. I never could get to grips with her other series, but many of my friends have enjoyed them, so give Inspector Ghoti a try as well.

In another completely different field, Tony Hillerman has chosen the Navajo and their reservation in the south-western United States. The characters definitely live in their surroundings and both they and their attitudes are presumably well drawn. I say "presumably", because as yet I have no way of knowing for sure, but anyone who gets a "Special Friend" award from the people on whom his characters are based must be getting it fairly well right. Either that, or working for the tourist board and in that case the roads would be better in the books.

Recently, I read a couple of books that could be said to be from the same mould and I wanted to review them, so first I went back and re-read one of my favourite Hillermans,

Sacred Clowns, (Penguin [0-14-017733-7], also in a US printing)

It's always hard to review detective fiction without including plot-spoilers, so I'll keep it general. After re-reading it, it's still one of my favourites. I already knew about the Koshare of the title, but only because Hillerman's earlier stuff had prompted me to do some background reading. The idea of religious clowns whose function is to political satire is enormously appealing. Interwoven with the main mystery, which becomes a murder, is a fine tale of divided loyalties. This, for me, is one of Hillerman's strong points: there are normally several facets to the story and part of the fun is in working out which bits fit which puzzle. I envy anyone who has all of Hillerman's Navajo fiction ahead of them. In terms of the plots, they can be read in any order, but the main characters and their relationships grow and change throughout the series, so later novels contain "character spoilers" for the earlier ones.

The two books which prompted me to re-read Sacred Clowns were

Ravenmocker by Jean Hager (Mysterious, [0-446-40107-2])

The Shaman Sings by James D Doss (Avon, [[0-380-72496-0]).

I'll come right out and say that, whilst Ravenmocker is a good book, for me, The Shaman Sings was rather better. I've looked for reasons why I prefer it and one reason may be that I had most of the plot of Ravenmocker worked out at half time. This wasn't a case of the butler having done it and in truth the plot device is very clever, it's simply that I'm an anal-retentive who reads dialogue carefully and teases away at anything odd. I feel, however, that this isn't my main reason for preferring "The Shaman Sings".

Both books carefully weave sub-plots together so that without it being clear until the end what fits where. Both portray a clash of cultures and as with Hillerman they both appear to have well-researched backgrounds. Both combine the spiritual with the mundane and both do this well. Ravenmocker has a neat scene with a traditional ceremony on a manicured urban lawn, for example. Where, for me, The Shaman Sings wins out is in the interweaving. For the plot of Ravenmocker, it makes only a small difference what is real and what imagined. The plot is still well drawn but I found myself reading it as part detective novels, part anthropology text. Fascinating, but in the Shaman Sings I found it impossible to segregate the two, any more than the characters could. By the end, it mattered deeply to me what was true vision and what coincidence.

Which brings me to a series with similarities to Ellis Peters' Cadfael. The splendidly pseudonymous Peter Tremayne has a day job which involves being an expert on early Irish law. If that sounds completely off the wall, his heroine and setting do the concept justice. Fidelma is an eighth century Irish woman whose nobility gives her access to important people and whose duties as a judge include investigating crimes (as usual, murders are the most common). I picked up "The Subtle Serpent", one of the later novels first.

Although they move in grander circles than Cadfael, the characters interact with their background in a way that reminds me of Hillerman. Peter Tremayne uses the background to make a number of subtle points about the development of the Celtic and Roman churches, as well as women's rights. Unlike a few other authors I could name, he does this without taking time out from the plot to preach at the reader. Each point is somehow integral to the twists and turns of the plot: Tremayne regularly has several puzzles and that part of the fun is sorting out into which puzzle a particular piece fits. The first in the series is

"Absolution by Murder" [0-7472-4602-5]