Recently read: Edwin of the Iron Shoes

[viktor_haag]

Something lead me to run across Marcia Muller and her fictional detective, Sharon McCone. Might have been someone asking about female PI characters and McCone being one of the examples I'd never heard of. Accordingly, I dusted off the library card and borrowed a copy of Edwin of the Iron Shoes, the first in her series.

The result was a bit mixed. The book was a quick and smooth read, more or less: 170 or so pages of not very dense type and not a few blank chapter-facing pages. In modern terms, the book seems more like a novella than a novel, for length. Originally published in 1977, the book also feels very much like a product of its time. The narrative is pretty well seasoned with some earnest social commentary project through the plucky young detective and her interactions with other characters. Looking at wikipedia's list of the McCone's series, I find it interesting that the first book was published in '77, and then a five year gap to the second, and then pretty much a book every year or two up to the present day.

For some reason, the setting, character, and even plot, seemed to remind me a lot of The Rockford Files: a slight rotation of the characters involved, and the book might well have been adapted into a Rockford episode. The plot involves a murdered antiquarian in a neighbourhood in transition to which the investigator has a previous connection thanks to having looked into previous incidents of vandalism and arson in the area. The book introduces three characters who might well show up later as "series regulars": her boss, a possible love-interest cop, and a friend who provides her with some expert advice around physical evidence involved in the case.

Mechanically, the plot works reasonably well: there are several plausible candidates for the killer, and they logically get hewn away as time passes. The (seemingly) best candidate, stereotypically, gets taken off the list in the fourth act, and then replaced through a bit of a twist. However, the book suffers a bit from an unplausibly tight arrangement of characters: some of the characters have unreasonable connections to one another, and this is perhaps one reason why it comes across as a TV script -- it's all very well not to alarm the reader by yanking the killer from off sage in act five, but it does stretch credulity a wee bit by tying the killer into the dramatis personae in surprising ways that make it all fit into a neat little box. It seems to me that this might be a symptom of the times, and the scope, of the book: modern procedurals that have more pages to stretch across seem to reject this level of structural tidyness: not everyone in the city knows everyone else, nor should anyone reasonably expect them to.

Still and all, the book was not a disappointing read, and I'm interested enough to read the second in the series, Ask the Cards a Question, to see how it compares to the first. Not sure how much farther than that I'll venture, though. I think the book is probably a solid B tending to B-, and not worth your time except perhaps as a matter of curiosity or completism to get to the later books, or a quick read if you read quickly, and are pre-disposed to consume mysteries in volume. Muller seems roughly contemporary with Sue Grafton and Sarah Paretsky: Milhone first appears in '82 with A is for Alibi and Warshawski in '82 with Indemnity Only. In wonder how much Muller's McCone appearance in '77 influenced Grafton and Paretsky (if at all)?

Comments

Followed you back from James Nicoll's LJ and spotted this

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Just to point out that if you only read the first McCone book you miss out on what is probably Muller's most important achievement in the genre (or in any genre of genre fiction). This is the extent to which she has been willing and able to allow her protagonist to believably become increasingly more competent and emotionally self-aware over the years of her series, as opposed to either keeping her as a charming and semi-helpless bumbler for an implausible and annoying length of time, or confusing "character growth" with "piling on angst and trauma until the character is just a broken husk of the potential they once had".