Sick Books 2021: A Year in Sick Reading

Image by Angelo Maneage

In 2021, which is still going at time of writing, I’ve had 112 days of migraine—about 1 out of 3 days, worse than average but what are you going to do. You’re going to read one or two dozen books of detective fiction, as you have been since you got your first migraine, about 21 years ago now, since then thousands of neuro’d days. You read these books at a skim, your head’s fucked up, you don’t really remember them after, can’t follow exactly what’s going on, who cares, not the point, you’re passing time, staying calm, getting through. Often you only realize you’ve read this one before when you reach the absolute end. The best detective fiction is about a woman in a situation. A woman has no good options. She’s stuck in the fucked world, but she’s working the case, she’s trying, back up against the wall. No one gets out pure. Honestly no one gets out alive. The novel will be about a place, probably a city, it will be about money and who has it and who they took it from or made it off. Someone will be trying to do a job, a job that’s about justice, or at least that’s what she hopes it’s about, and there’s only a nearly impossible possibility, but there is a possibility, of doing it in a way that’s a little bit right. The job, the trying, everything is part of the desperate world and its bad money, endless violence, endless injustice. (Cue the end of Chinatown, defeat of hope, is the detective’s best plan just to do the least harm, just do “as little as possible”?) I want to recommend extremely the works of Denise Mina and Tana French, but I didn’t read any of those this year, I think because I’ve already read every single book they’ve ever written. Started the year with A Deadly Divide by Ausma Zehamat Khan on the recommendation of my mother, who also gets migraines. This is a good series with two detectives, Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak, both cops with I think a community focus, she is Jewish and he Muslim, this one is set in Quebec, about a terrible mass shooting at a mosque and right-wing Islamophobic elements gaining traction in a small community. There are college students, I think. A good attentive probing book, though this wasn’t the best choice to start with (fifth in the series), since a lot of it was devoted to the fraught state of the relationship between the two detectives, for which I had no context, other than the old will-they won’t-they, which I do always appreciate. I tend not to mind where I start in a series because before the internet you couldn’t easily know, you just got whatever book was at the library, trotted home with a stack of slick encased hardcovers. Almost all the books listed here are from the public library, almost all read on my phone using the app Libby. I don’t like reading that way but I do it every day. Then Laura Lippman’s Hush Hush, twelfth in her series (I’ve read most, not in order) about the PI Tess Monaghan, who is tall and opinionated and a little messy and very competent and not as feminine as some people want, doesn’t always make a good impression. Her boyfriend is patient and chill, everyone likes him. Lippman’s books are set in Baltimore, a city she knows deeply and where she was a reporter for many years for the Baltimore Sun. It’s a pleasure to move through a city with someone who cares about it and who wants to look at it, look into its history, its racism, and where did all the money go, where are the jobs, just what stopped getting known about when the newspaper closed. Lippmann’s novels make me feel like I’ve walked out to the Baltimore harbor, looked out, turned around, sunk back into the city. This novel is about a woman who may have murdered one of her children, a toddler, and is now out of prison trying to prove her innocence, if she is innocent, which she hires Tess to prove, but is she. Tess is the mother of a toddler and wary. I feel like there’s an important plot thread here with Tess’s sometime associate, retired cop “Sandy” Sanchez, but that may be in another book, I don’t know. Recommended, and then I read Lippmann’s After I’m Gone, which on reflection has the Sandy plot I was thinking of. This one was very sad. A rich con artist kind of husband has disappeared, leaving his wife to figure shit out and make her way, all part of Baltimore’s middle-class Jewish community in the ’60s and ’70s. Memorable for the relationships among the women—wives, daughters, mistresses, sisters—whose lives are defined by some bullshit man upon whom they were forced to depend financially and for whom they had some real hope or even love. Then I read three detective novels by the British writer Susie Steiner—Missing, Presumed; Persons Unknown; Remain Silent—a series featuring a late thirties/early forties woman lead, Manon Bradshaw, a cop, who maybe gets in too late, sleeps around too much, could look less disheveled, and tells people just what she thinks of them too fast. These are lovely. Ambitiously they build characters you might not simply or at all like, even or especially the detective, who navigates imperfectly (and who does it perfectly?) her care for the vulnerable, her inability to change her fucking life, her desire to have kids, her maternal-ish relationship with a young Black teenager whose parents are absent and who is at the center of two of the books, in one of them subject to devastating racial profiling by the police, and the limits of her perspective as a middle-class white woman who works as a cop, that’s the job she signed up to do. These novels are, I think, aware of the bougie vibes of detective fiction (the “tea cozy” mystery) and what readers want from their brushes with crime, at a safe distance, safely thrillingly held by genre—Steiner has an eye on that, she’s trying to show you how a middle-class perspective works, from within. It’s not that the novels are radical, that’s not the right word; they’re thoughtful. The third novel deals with human trafficking and forced labor from Eastern Europe into the UK. Reading it you might think, with admiration: well, someone just took a run at it. And so often that someone is a genre writer. Someone looked at a horrific moral and political crime that society is trying not to see and they tried to imagine their way in, built out of that situation a crime that would fit into this genre, which isn’t too hard amid this enormous everyday violence, the exploitation of undocumented workers. Steiner places young Lithuanian teenagers working in brutal indentured servitude in a country whose language they can’t speak alongside young British teenagers from right-wing families whose patriarchs blame immigrants for the economic problems of their day. I hadn’t heard of Steiner previously, I don’t remember who recommended her, the algorithm or my mother? No, I recommended her to my mother? She is a former journalist and I found a few of her pieces online, in one she discusses losing her vision and becoming slowly blind throughout adulthood. But then I found another short essay, written during lockdown, in which she talks about her recent diagnosis with glioblastoma, a kind of brain tumor from which my father died, and which is I am sad to say always terminal. She movingly describes how in her most recent novel (Remain Silent) a character has cancer but she regrets that she made this a subplot, since “in reality, cancer is never a subplot: it is always the main storyline… I didn’t know then what I know now: how paralysing the fear is, how all-consuming it is to be a patient.” How wonderful if every writer, all of us, offered an honest account of what we’ve since learned that our books couldn’t yet include. Though I think the sin she describes isn’t in the book exactly, since while the plot does keep cancer to the margins, this is also a real portrayal of how much the main character doesn’t want to admit that a loved one is truly terribly ill, wants to treat it like everything else, but it’s not like anything else. No one wants to talk about the hours spent being no more than sick. No one wants to face that time, that fear. Steiner’s essay describes how profoundly reading has helped her, accompanied her, during this time of aggressive illness and treatment, and how she wishes more people would write of illness: “So bring on the illness genre: stories of the sick,” she writes, “Fear doesn’t necessarily bring out the best in us but it is an everyday tragedy that blindsides each family uniquely. Writers… need to encapsulate the experience that is at once so common but also utterly particular.” I remember thinking I should write something in praise of her work while she was alive to read it. And that there should be more praise of work like this, which is straightforwardly in a genre, no one is trying to write the most “important” or innovative or prizewinning or historically significant novel, but simply honorably a good detective novel, deeply felt, about a woman in a situation, trying to do her job decently, if that’s possible, in the face of a cruel exploitative implicating world. No one deserves the slow tortuous dying of glioblastoma, but it’s not a crime, it’s just illness, just death. During the time I was reading these I was so glad there were three of them, I had to take a chunk of time off (off from what? I was supposed to be writing, but no one cares if you do that or not) in order to switch medications, which is something doctors tell you to do casually, as if everyone could just clear a month of their life to ride out the barrage of symptoms and side effects that will inevitably occur. But I suppose people just do. If it ruins something to lose that time you’ll just have to deal with it. It’s not something you can talk to doctors about. How just then you missed something important you won’t be able, in this life, to get back. This problem is much less mortal than Steiner’s, but I felt sure she’d understand it. Then I read Flynn Berry’s Under the Harrow, which seems like a pretty successful recent novel by a youngish American writer, though the novels are set in the UK. The characters, the voice—they really don’t seem British. They’re definitely American. I wonder what critics over there thought. It’s not like a moral flaw or anything, it’s just an interesting performance to watch someone try (why not just make the protagonist American etc.?), the book is good, she’s a poised, elegant writer, it’s a fine novel about sisters and what we do or don’t want to know about those closest to us. The detective is the sister of the victim and thus a suspect, often a good variation on the genre. Then I read Charles Todd’s An Impartial Witness, a World War I novel based around two women’s sympathies for each other and a chance encounter. I read this very fast, like I barely read it. I think Charles Todd is actually two people, mother and son who write as a pair, which shouldn’t weird me out. The detective is a young woman nurse. Hard hard time in which to be a nurse, WWI. There was something stiff about the writing I couldn’t get into. I won’t read another. But I think others would and do like them, there are just certain clauses that turn me definitively off. I guess I then read Jessica Barry’s Don’t Turn Around. I remember that I liked this, it’s more of a thriller than a detective novel, but I have zero memory of what it’s about. Absolutely nothing comes to mind. OK, the internet reminds me that this is a novel about abortion, fantastic, and two women in very different socioeconomic classes and life circumstances on a road trip to New Mexico to get a second-term procedure. Yes, recommended. More illness writing, more abortion writing, please. Then it looks like I read the newest Lippman, Dream Girl, which I think is kind of her response to Philip Roth, though I can’t say since my own response to him has been not to read him. I admired it though it wasn’t my favorite of hers. She dives into the perspective of a dangerously un-self-aware older misogynist, who is at the mercy of a few young women for the time being, and well done for trying that. It’s about the plot of one of this man’s books (he is of course a writer) and whose life (a woman’s) he stole it from. Then I read Elly Griffiths’ The Night Hawks. I’ve probably read six or seven Griffiths novels though I never particularly intend to read another one. They are reliable? Her detective is a British archeologist, professor at a northern university, I can’t remember where because I don’t know anything about it. There’s lots of archeology and old old history stuff, including of course the tensions around what stories contemporary Britons want their ancient histories to tell. The protagonist is super likeable, again a woman who’s not too tidy, nicely stubborn, impulsive, she’s in love with a married man, has a child with him and has to sort that out, day by day, book by book, that’s the best part of the series. The man is an actual detective, a cop, I’m remembering, and we have a lively portrait of the cops in the local shop, all ongoing characters, as is a local Druid-interested fellow and some other academics, the university portrayal realistically including the endless task of negotiating bloated professorial personalities. They’re character-driven novels, you can tell that she just loves these characters. I suppose they’re a bit too cozy for me. The plots are often a little thin. I don’t think she loves plot as much. I sympathize, I have never written a plot, was thrilled when my second novel was praised as “literally plotless.” Then there was Woman with a Secret by Sophie Hannah, another British writer. Hannah’s plots are PREPOSTEROUS. It might annoy you but it’s pretty fun. I can’t remember at all which book this is because I’ve read like 5 Hannah books in the past 18 months. Oh wait, yes—about the extremely performative murder of a provocative conservative columnist, and a slippery liar sort of woman who is caught up in it, we’re given her point-of-view and can’t trust it. I’d like to note that from day one Hannah just included blogs and their comments, the online news cycle, Twitter, Facebook, just like all new media in her novels—immediately she pulled new tech and its forms into her narratives, creating these feverish delicious disturbing imitations of how people live online and use their phones to fucking destroy each other. Literary fiction barely includes all this, still. What the hell, fiction writers? Hannah is a pretty postmodern detective novelist. I have a feeling she could write some other very different kind of novel but she doesn’t care to, she likes writing a book a year and she’s kind of on top of the world. I think she’s also a publishing poet. She does some updated Agatha Christie stuff I haven’t read. Her series features two prickly detectives who are now romantic partners, and sometimes they’re at the center of the book, sometimes to the side and our focus is on the characters involved in the crime. Multiple POVs, always. She writes the whole “Spilling CID” crew, like five or six ongoing characters for ten novels or whatever. It’s so respectful. I never remember any of their names or anything about them. You can tell she’s done it all perfectly if you would only pay attention. Anyway she’s maybe not for traditionalists because her plots are so loopily artificial and you have to just like it if a smart woman is having fun. But you can tell the world scares her for real. There are always stakes. I stopped reading her for a decade maybe for some reasons related to all this, one book tired me out, I don’t know, but I’m back now. Then I read Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, recommended by my mom and which caught my eye because it was a tenth anniversary edition from Soho Crime. Soho is a great indie press and I’m into anniversary editions, make it new again. I liked the author’s human-sounding foreword as he reflected on what made this book, his fifth, a good and lasting one, and how he nursed the idea of it for a long while after one day passing by a loser-looking door on the street. Properly this is a spy novel not a detective novel. It’s about a bunch of fuckup spies who are sent to a rubber room of a house together. They’re the slow horses. Wonderfully part two is called “Sly Whores.” I can’t tell how realistic the spy stuff is (versus with Le Carré, I guess, whose bio provided that stamp of authenticity), but that’s fine, I’m not invested in either the ongoing existence of the British intelligence agencies or their correct representation. The plot has killer underdog energy, the group of these cast-offs have to really pull together and get competent, dirtbags rising against the neolib establishment. The book’s also politically astute, written in 2010 and predicting the rise of the nativist right-wing and the Brexit movement in Britain. Highly recommended. In the same day I finished this one I read the entirety of Take it Back by Kia Abdullah, I didn’t move from the couch for hours because moving sucked. This is a compelling one, British, about a teenage girl who is white and has facial difference and who accuses four Muslim teens from immigrant families of sexual assault. The protagonist is 30-year-old Zara Kaleel, who used to be a fancy lawyer but quit and is now a sexual assault advocate and not always holding herself exactly together. Her position in the case—navigating conflicting accounts of the event, figuring out who is telling the truth, managing reactions to the case in the community—is excruciatingly tense. As I read this book I was thinking that it’s not the most elegantly written of detective novels (sometimes the teens don’t really sound like teens etc.) but you just felt like the author really cared. She was totally all in on her characters and on the ethical, political, cultural questions raised by the plot. I think you can always tell when a writer really throws her whole self at her target, respect. What can I say about reading these fourteen books, some of which I will forget shortly, since they’re stored in the least reliable part of my brain? Unlike reading Twitter they don’t make a sick person want to curl up and stop trying to live. Reading these books I felt like: someone made these just for you, you’re stuck on the couch and someone made you this intricate worldly thing to think about and feel with, just to keep you company, just to help you feel more alive on any shitty day.