Auntiemwrites Crime-Mystery Author M K Graff

Can Auntie M just intrude into your day a bit to congratulate THE KING’S SPEECH for getting TWELVE Oscar nods today?!?!

Anyone who knows Auntie M well, knows that she is a total Colin Firth slut fan. And this movie was one of the best, if not THE best, that I’ve seen all year.

Geoffrey Rush was perfect as the speech therapist Logue, and even Helena Bonham Carter toned herself down to play the Queen Mother, growing more around the middle as the years advanced.

There is humor here, too, and Firth noted in an interview that balancing the bits of humor with the drama of the new King’s stammer were the most difficult balance to make. He credits his sister, a speech therapist, with some of the exercises shown to open him up.

Auntie M has adored CF in all of his guises, whether he’s played Mr. Darcy, Nanny McPhee’s harried widower, or singing  in Mamma Mia! And at the Golden Globes, where he’s already won for Best Actor in a Drama, he looked so in love with his gorgeous wife. No, I’m not jealous at all–well, maybe just a teensy bit.

Fingers crossed that the American’s voting at Oscar time see his tremendous talent, not-to-mention his downright sex appeal, and award him the Best Actor Oscar he deserves.

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Tana French is a waif of an Irish actress. When she turned her hand to writing, her first two novels featured a  detective duo of the Dublin Murder Squad, and were both lauded as standouts for their unusual plot and interesting characters. In the Woods won the Barry, Edgar, Macavity and Anthony awards. French’s sequel The Likeness was equally well-received.

This time French has produced a glorious novel about a different member of the squad, featuring Dublin detective Frank Mackey and his host of dysfunctional relatives living on Faithful Place. They’re so dysfunctional, in fact, that Frank has severed relations with most of them at age nineteen, after the girl he was to elope with, Rosie, gets cold feet and never turns up. Becoming a successful detective, having a daughter he adores and an ex-wife he’s unsure about, take up most of his off time–until the day, twenty-two years later, when Rosie’s suitcase turns up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place, sending Frank back to his old neighborhood whether he likes it or not. Now everything Frank believed had happened has to be questioned, with disastrous consequences to those he hates and those he loves.

Faithful Place is a spell-binding thriller, with sharp dialogue and all-too-real characters. Written in first person from Frank’s point of view, we see his clear and unsympathetic views of life, sometimes with biting humor, often bathed in irony. One aspect I particularly want to note is French’s ability to create a Dublin brogue without resorting to a read-stopping stream of dialect. Instead she brilliantly uses key words here and there, as well sentence syntax, to convey the accent the reader hears distinctly. Dublin is a place French knows well, and the pockets of it she shows us are alive and throbbing.

This is a book that will capture you toward its conclusion, even as it envelops you with the many distinctive ways we show feel and show love.

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Ian Sansom has created a most unusual detective in Israel Armstrong: a depressed, Jewish-English vegetarian librarian who drives  an old mobile library van in the tiny Northern Ireland village of Tumdrum.

Ian Sansom’s Mobile Library Mystery series is hallmarked by  the author’s gift for wry humor, as he illustrates the very ordinariness of Tumdrum’s inhabitants and their daily lives. This fourth installment, The Bad Book Affair, finds Israel still adjusting to his breakup with long-time English girlfriend, Gloria. As he awaits his thirtieth birthday, Israel is overcome by a feeling of despair and takes to his bed for a few weeks, existing on spirits and spoonfuls of peanut butter, growing a beard and losing weight in the process. When he is rousted unceremoniously from his navel-gazing by Ted, his driver and friend, Israel returns to work. But within a matter of days, the disappearance of the troubled daughter of a local politician turns his already-slanted world on its head.

Israel suspects the girl’s disappearance may be related to his lending her American Pastoral from the library’s special “Unshelved” category. These are books the Library Committee has decided he must keep under his desk, not on open shelves, and are given out upon request. (They include such horrific and distasteful tomes as  Lady Chatterly’s Lover, A Clockwork Orange, Nineteen Eighty-four, and American Psycho) With Ted’s grudging help, Israel tries to find the girl before he can be run out of town–or celebrate his thirtieth birthday.

As usual, Sansom’s humor extends to the way he ends this book, with another enormous listing of Acknowledgments, people he readily admits he probably doesn’t know personally but have had some impact on his life, from the droll to the mundane. This list ranges from Amy Adams to Carla Bruni, from the Holywood Cricket Club to Marcel Mareau.

Sansom’s books have a lot to say about human nature; about friendship and where to find it; and about the universality of the questions we face in our lives, whether we are Jewish, Presbyterian, religious or non,  vegetarian or not.

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