WHERE THERE’S SMOKE
By Mel McKinney
St. Martin’s, $22.95
All cigar smokers have heard–and most of us believe–the story that just before he announced his July 1963 embargo on Cuban exports, President John Kennedy sent press secretary Pierre Salinger out to acquire as many Cuban cigars as he could for JFK’s private collection. Now Mel McKinney, a retired trial lawyer who obviously knows and loves cigars, has turned that legend into a spritely and intriguing mystery.
You don’t have to know a Lonsdale from a Rothschild to appreciate “Where There’s Smoke,” any more than you have to know a Vermeer from a Van Gogh to enjoy a good mystery about art. But there are definitely special pleasures planted along the way for cognoscenti of the stinking weed (“The box of Romeo Y Julieta Fabulosos Raul had instructed Paulo to leave on the table was open.” “After lighting an H. Uppman Connoisseur No. 1 Robusto, his favorite cigar for moments of stress or intense concentration . . .”). There’s also a good running joke about a Cape Cod cop who smokes nothing but cheap American stogies while investigating the theft of JFK’s valuable hoard, and a wonderful moment when an ambitious young Mafia boss named Joseph Bonafaccio imagines the future of the world cigar market: ” `We’ll play each end off the other as we dominate both markets–the contraband Cuban cigars and the premium copycats. . . . (T)hink of it! A nationwide network of warehouses and outlets, maybe even a mail-order business–J.B. Cigars.’ “
Like a master cigar roller, McKinney shapes his story carefully, building on the facts of history and adding many flavorful overtones. Suppose some of JFK’s smokes came from the collection of a Cuban who died owing the mob $3 million, and that each of these special cigars contained a secret ingredient–a diamond worth $30,000. Suppose the dead Cuban’s son, owner of a Miami cigar restaurant called Noches Cubanas, saw a chance to use JFK’s sticks to raise some money to help his lady friend buy medicine for Cuban children, and hatched a plot involving a greedy Florida congressman. Suppose the events of November 1963 in Dallas had something to do with cigars. McKinney may just be blowing smoke, but his rings are beautifully shaped and have the heady aroma of the real thing.
HARM DONE
By Ruth Rendell
Crown, $24
After 46 books, Ruth Rendell has earned the right to fool around a bit, to think out loud and let the bones of her construction show. The last few pages of this, her 47th published effort in a remarkable and justly honored career, has Chief Inspector Reg Wexford seriously considering no less than four solutions to the central question of who killed a particularly brutal and sadistic wife-beater named Stephen Devenish. Perhaps the time and pages spent before the arrival of the obvious conclusion are intended to reinforce something that happens earlier in the book, when Wexford’s friend and associate accuses him of becoming obsessive: “He was anxious not to become obsessive, not to let a single not very important case take over and dominate his mind. But he was also aware that it is hard to alter one’s nature, especially at his age. This was the way he was, and to attempt a change would be a violation of his character and not necessarily otherwise advantageous.”
Because she has let us come to know Wexford so fully in the course of dozens of fine mysteries, we are happy to forgive Rendell this small and relatively unimportant indulgence–especially in a book full of other delights. Just as Reg’s wife, Dora, came into her own in the last Wexford novel, “Road Rage,” their elder daughter, Sylvia, gets a chance to shine in this one. The fact that her father has always favored her prettier younger sister, a successful actress, even though he tries hard to hide it, has made their relationship brittle. But when her job as a social worker looking after battered women suddenly becomes dangerous, Sylvia turns to her father for comfort. “Misery and terror were succeeded by a great calm, a warmth that spread through her like drinking something hot and strong. She caught his hand and held it.”
“Harm Done” is also enriched by many lyric descriptions of the English countryside, especially its trees, and by a compassionate understanding of how hard life can still be for women and children despite society’s best intentions.
THE VANISHING VIOLINIST
By Sara Hoskinson Frommer
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $23.95
Anyone who has ever been involved in the performance of music of an amateur or civic nature will get an extra measure of enjoyment from Sara Hoskinson Frommer’s fourth book about Joan Spencer, a sharp and likable woman of a certain age whose interests and concerns are universal enough to win our hearts and unusual enough to capture our minds.
Spencer, a widow, lives with her college sophomore son in the small Indiana college town of Oliver, near Indianapolis. She runs the senior citizens center, plays the viola in and manages the local orchestra, and is about to marry a police officer. When her daughter calls from New York to tell her she’s engaged to a concert violinist who happens to be playing in an important competition in Indianapolis, Spencer juggles all her responsibilities to plunge into the heady world of musicianship at a somewhat higher level. Stresses in this environment include a stolen Stradivarius, the disappearance of one of the competing violinists, the unsportsmanlike behavior of other contenders and their families, and the possible guilt of her daughter’s new fiancee.
Frommer keeps her story exciting without sacrificing Spencer’s credibility, cushioning us with scenes of work at the senior citizens center and especially with the absolute perfection of rehearsals of the Oliver Civic Symphony–where an order from the short-fused conductor to the cellists to ” `practice as you’ve never practiced in your lives between now and when you come back next week’ ” makes Spencer think, “I hope they even bother to come back next week.”
THE PRICE OF AN ORPHAN
By Patricia Carlon
Soho, $22
“Copyright 1964 by Patricia Carlon; first published in the United States of America in 1999” reads the vital statistics of this sly and unusual mystery from Australia, the latest of Carlon’s books to be given much-deserved new life by Soho Press. Like her equally excellent “The Running Woman” and “Crime of Silence,” it was originally rejected by Australian publishers as lacking in action and gore–although the smiling villain here is as frightening and ferocious as any in recent memory.
At the center of the story is a 9-year-old city urchin named Johnnie Bradford, taken in as a foster child by Stuart and Kay Heath, a well-meaning country couple who see him as a chance to make up for Stuart’s own deprived childhood. But Johnnie is a rough and troubled youngster, much given to making up stories, especially about the murder he claims to have seen near a dangerous cave he has been forbidden to enter. Only one person believes him: the murderer, a crafty psychopath who kidnaps and tortures him, saying:
” `You’re a child. I couldn’t do that to an adult without being questioned, but you’re a child. A bad tempered, wicked, misbehaving brat who can have his mouth slapped shut, his arm twisted, his bottom kicked, his voice drowned out. And everyone will just nod and say it serves you right.’ “
I’ve mentioned the connection between Carlon and Alfred Hitchcock in previous reviews–the superb way they both use the commonplace to create terror. If only he were still around to turn her books into films.
THE RAVEN AND THE NIGHTINGALE
By Joanne Dobson
Doubleday, $21.95
The delicate balancing act Joanne Dobson pulled off so well in her first two books about professor Karen Pelletier — between the literary past and the academic present, between the pleasures of scholarship and the pains of teaching, between the necessary exaggerations of a mystery and the realities of life–continues without a wobble, as the prickly, working-class Pelletier once again battles stupidity and snobbery at New England’s posh little Enfield College.
Edgar Allan Poe is the spirit hovering over these proceedings: not one of Pelletier’s favorite writers (she prefers women with strength of character to men without any), but a figure who grows in interest with the discovery of a journal by a poet called Emmeline Foster who apparently was the source of Poe’s most famous image–the raven who blurted out “Nevermore!” at every occasion–and who supposedly drowned herself after having been rejected by him. What the journal has to do with the murder of a loathsome and pretentious Poe scholar on the Enfield faculty is the mystery that occupies Pelletier (for once spared the tedium of being considered a suspect) and her increasingly attentive police friend, Lt. Piotrowski. As Pelletier’s life continues to expand, so does the possibility of this series being around for a long time.
IN BRIEF: Thank God for small presses: in this case, Paraclete, a religious concern in Massachusetts that has given David Manual’s “A Matter of Roses” ($20) such a handsome sendoff–a beautifully designed book as well as an intriguing and shapely mystery. Forget the brain-dead links to Brother Cadfael in other reviews: Manual’s Brother Bartholomew is a thoroughly modern character who just happens to live in a monastery on Cape Cod, struggling to center himself and in danger of losing that struggle when he responds to a call for help from a lifelong friend in solving a murder.
And across the country in Tony Hillerman country, Intrigue Press offers another promising debut, “The Pumpkin Seed Massacre” ($22.95), by Susan Slater, whose Ben Pecos–a half-Navajo medical researcher raised far from New Mexico’s Tewa Pueblo where he was born but forced back there by circumstance–could become as lasting a fictional presence as Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.
