Book Report: A Letter of Mary

      2 Comments on Book Report: A Letter of Mary

Among the things I re-read whilst moving and packing was Laurie R. King’s A Letter of Mary (New York: Bantam Books 1996). It’s ... fine. I think it’s my least favorite of the Mary Russell series. For the uninitiate, a teenage Mary Russell meets the retired Sherlock Holmes when she inherits a farm in Sussex; he trains her in ratiocination and detecting and so on, taking her on as an apprentice, as a partner, and eventually as a wife. And so on. Hilarity ensues. Five books so far, I think, and Mary is my least favorite of them so far.

One aspect of the book is more interesting to talk about than to read, and it involves a major spoiler, so the Reader is Warned. You see, Russell and Holmes split up, each to investigate one of the two major leads in the case. A good deal is made of the fact that they can’t both be fruitful investigations, that is, either Russell will find the murderer, or Holmes will. We follow Russell; it is, after all, a Mary Russell book. And it’s Holmes who finds the killer.

I suspect, without doing any research, that having a, shall I say, process-oriented rather than goal-oriented portion of the plot was hailed by many reviewers as feminist. And the books are more or less feminist in tone and content; there is much mocking of the old-fashioned chauvinism of the Edwardian relics (there are few characters in any of the books other than Holmes and his brother old enough to be Victorian relics), and of course there’s the basic point that Russell is a match for Holmes in wit and arrogance as well as detective ability. In general, though, as we remember from our college days, detective fiction is inherently objectifying: it treats people as objects, necessarily, as they are the objects of detection. Some of the so-called feminist detective fiction I have read tries to avoid that, at the cost of utterly failing to satisfy my plot-related needs. Others simply take the Camille Paglia view that having a female with metaphorical balls is feminist enough for anyone other than a fanatic, which makes for a better read without noticeably subverting the patriarchy. Still others, Laurie R. King among ‘em, insert passages of edifying feminist ideology into pot-boilers whose settings reveal some of the unfortunate results of the patriarchy. That works OK, tho’ in the Kate Martinelli series, it can get a bit strident. Anyway, if that particular twist was intended to make a feminist point, it did so at the expense of the story; if it was just an unusually lengthy red herring, it was plot at the expense of story, anyway.

Now, that’s kind of a clever idea, when you think about it. Mostly, in detective fiction, either we are spared the false leads, or at least we are present when the final lead turns out to be the right one (of course, sometimes leads which appear false turn out to be correct, later on, and vice versa, but the point is the same). In this case, our detective follows the dead end, and then it told, essentially, the murderer is over there, in handcuffs. It’s a twist I didn’t expect, and didn’t much like when it was revealed. I missed the fun part, just as Russell did, but then Russell, being fictional, didn’t pay six bucks for it.

That’s more than Your Humble Blogger intended to write about my third or fourth time through a pretty unmemorable paperback. Don’t, as they say, get me started.

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.

2 thoughts on “Book Report: A Letter of Mary

  1. Jed

    I decided I wasn’t going to read this book, so I read the review despite spoilers. I think it’s a fascinating idea, a nice subversion of reader and genre expectations; but I also think it’s the kind of thing that an author should approach with extreme trepidation; in particular, if you’re going to go this far in completely ignoring genre (and, indeed, literary) expectations about how plot works, you ought to provide enough else of interest in the book that the reader won’t mind.

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  2. Vardibidian

    Ms. King does provide lots of other things of interest, if you are interested in the whole Holmes pastiche thing in the first place, and like the Mary Russell books. Whether it is enough else is a matter for the reader to decide, and will depend in part on whether the reader enjoys having his or her expectations subverted in this way.

    R.I.,
    -V.

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