Arts
Faerie Tales From the Rainbow Library
Three Mysteries
Three Mysteries
by E. Lynn Lemont
Vermont's
own lesbian press, New Victoria, has released three mysteries this fall
— a hit and two hmmms.
The hit is Owl of the Desert by
first-time novelist Ida Swearingen. It's a tautly written suspense story
following Kate Porter as she exits prison on a trip to find her father,
the man who put her there. The twist is that she and her family are not
leftist revolutionaries or members of the Weather Underground, but a right
wing militia group called the American Patriotic Front.
Bud is the general of the Texas-based militia,
the father who raised Kate and her brother Dwight by military discipline.
Dwight, crippled by the premature explosion of a homemade bomb probably
intended for the Jewish editor of a newspaper, has become a televangelist.
Kate almost escaped the militia's reach, getting Bud's permission to attend
the University of Kansas in pre-med.
A bank robbery gone wrong, the death of
a bystander, the abandonment of the "troops" by the general,
and Kate's improbable escape form the backstory. After two years underground,
the memory of the secretary dying in her arms got to be too much, and
she turned herself in to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation Agent Ray
Gruber.
By turning state's evidence, Kate got a
12-year sentence. When the book opens, she's just out, and her first desire
(after beer and the blues) is to find her father and kill him. Of course
it's not that simple, even with the help of Gruber. And then there's her
brother's political backing of figurehead candidates in a grab for power,
a drug importation ring, and her ex-girlfriend from prison, who improbably
turns up in the middle of a scam and a murder, but manages to help.
Swearingen, who has been a taxi driver and
a beet shoveler before working as a family therapist, writes compellingly
of a world under the radar for most of us. I'd read anything else she
wrote in a heartbeat.
One of the two hmmmms is Dispatch to
Death by Martha Miller, the third of her books (the first a collection
of lesbian erotic stories, the second a mystery whose protagonist is a
minor character in Dispatch). Trudy Thomas, a lesbian taxi driver who
drives a lavender cab for the Red, White, and Blue Cab Company (long story)
of Springfield, Illinois, is drawn into several drug-connected murders
by the attractive but mysterious Anita Alvarez, who claims she is the
governor's illegitimate daughter.
What follows is a plot that onscreen would
elicit shouts of "Don't go there! She's trouble! She's using you!"
If all lesbian taxi drivers were as naïve as Trudy Thomas, they'd
be an endangered species. Every single contact between Trudy and Anita
ends in someone being shot and/or several someones being murdered. Let's
just say that Trudy's motivation for remaining involved is not adequately
explored. And, somehow, the traumatic effects of being shot don't really
show except for a few brief paragraphs glossing over some months driving
for a pizza company and being "depressed."
If you really like mysteries and are willing
to consume literary junk food just for its lesbian content, then go ahead
and order this one.
The third book from New Vic this fall, another
hmmmm (maybe it deserves a few more mmmms), is Sudden Loss of Serenity
from first-time novelist Jacqueline Wallen, who otherwise teaches psychology
and human development at the University of Maryland.
The plotline is interesting enough: A neighbor
— and best friend — of protagonist and college professor Claire
Winston is found murdered in a cemetery, the body blindfolded. There are
connections to a possibly shady guru teaching an esoteric Buddhist practice
called Chöd that involves facing demons and fears and offering up
one's life. And to top it off, Claire's biracial daughter Serenity is
discovered missing the same day.
Serenity's father and Claire's ex-husband
is a lawyer in the state's attorney's office. The investigator is a black
female police detective who can't understand how Claire let such a fine
black man slip through her hands. The characters are reasonably well drawn,
and the explanation of Chöd
makes a kind of paradoxical sense.
The red herrings pointing to various suspects are adequately distracting
to create tension.
But there's something not quite convincing
about the assemblage. The players are too civilized, the resolution so
accidental. If the purpose of detective fiction is to leave the reader
with a sense of order restored, this book fails that purpose.
And if I were judging a book's quality
from the number of typographical errors missed by the editor, Sudden
Loss of Serenity would be a candidate for bottom of the list. As
I was reading, the number of typos began to bother me. In a mass-market
paperback from a mainstream publisher, I might notice two or three typos.
In Serenity there were nearly two dozen. I decided to keep track:
Dispatch had eight; Owl had two. By way of comparison,
a mystery I read from glbt publisher Alyson Books had seven typos, and
a lesbian memoir from Michigan State University Press had none.
Perhaps the smaller gay and lesbian presses
are undercapitalized and cannot afford to pay someone with a fresh pair
of eyes to proofread their manuscripts. Perhaps the assumption is that
mystery readers aren't that bright or don't care about language. Whatever
the reason, it reflects badly on the presses, and readers deserve more
respect.
E. Lynne Lemont reads and writes in Franklin County.