Crime fiction, here and there, cozy and not, on page and screen

Lucy Burdette, aka Roberta Isleib. Photo by Carol Tedesco

I recently interviewed Lucy Burdette, who is really Roberta Isleib, who lives in Key West and writes the Key West Food Critic Mysteries. The seventh installment in the series, Killer Takeout, publishes on April 5.

It’s a “cozy” mystery, which means no blood or sex on the page, as Roberta tells me during the interview. Not my usual thing but I enjoyed her book, which is set in the run-up to Fantasy Fest … with a hurricane bearing down. It didn’t even give me too much of a Wilma flashback. I especially admired how she addressed the tensions among Conchs, yearround locals and snowbird socialites. That’s a large — and growing — aspect of life down here, at least from my perspective.

At the same time, my husband and I have been watching the second season of Bosch on Amazon Prime (no spoilers, please — we’re only halfway through). I liked the first season fine but the second one is much better. The best part is that I haven’t read any of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch books. Most of my crime fiction reading is

Titus Welliver plays Harry Bosch.

historical and just about all of my contemporary crime fiction reading has been set in Florida (Carl Hiaasen, James Hall, et. al.). But now I’ve got the first Bosch book, The Black Echo, on order from the library.

And I feel like I’m primed for L.A., not only by watching the TV show — which manages to make L.A. look fairly attractive, probably because nobody on there ever spends time stuck in traffic — but also because I just finished Shaker by Scott Frank. I read a short story about it in Entertainment Weekly and my most excellent local library already had a copy. Frank is a screenwriter and this is a first novel – my opinion has been that screenwriters write excellent thrillers and crime fiction because they know how to move a plot along, as well as how to write dialogue. This one bolsters my theory and is also an excellent option for people who are jonesing for Elmore Leonard now that the master has left us. Frank wrote the screenplays for Out of Sight and Get Shorty and it shows, though he doesn’t really have Leonard’s funny vein. He’s not trying to be funny, though, so that’s cool.

It’s Tudor Time!

Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, the primary subject of Hilary Mantel’s books. Damien Lewis is Henry VIII.

If you have any interest whatsoever in Tudor history and/or historical fiction about the Tudors then you already know that Wolf Hall, the television adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s two Booker Prize-winning novels, has finally reached the U.S. It’s on the PBS show Masterpiece and even if you don’t have cable you can still watch it, online at PBS.org or via the PBS app on your television-watching device.

I will be curious to talk to friends who are watching the show but have not read the books. Mantel’s books are masterful in their immersion into the worlds of their subjects but you really do need to immerse yourself. And there are some potentially confusing jumps around in time.

Mantel’s gotten a lot of press recently, but the best I’ve seen (OK, heard) is her interview with Kurt Anderson on Studio 360, the arts radio show out of WNYC. On the bottom of the page linked there is an extended version of the interview and it was worth it for me. I love hearing her talk about her relationship with these characters, and how she approaches historical fiction (or fictional history, as Anderson proposed she call her work). Especially fun is their discussion of Thomas More, hero of “A Man For All Seasons” but not exactly the best figurehead for religious liberty or freedom of expression, as Mantel points out. There’s also a nice, if short, interview with Damien Lewis, who plays Henry VIII, on the PBS site.

If any of this is making you crave some reading about Tudor times, specifically the reign of Henry VIII, I have some fiction recommendations. If you haven’t done so, and you like the TV series, you should read Mantel’s books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. The mini-series encompasses the events from both books, up to the execution of Anne Boleyn. Oh, sorry! Should I have included a spoiler alert?

I am a big fan of C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels — and hey, there’s a new one out after a long gap! They are mysteries but they stand on their own as satisfying novels and portraits of the period, from the point of view of a lawyer who once worked for Cromwell and keeps getting roped into the increasingly scary orbit around Henry’s court. Apparently the TV adaptation never happened but there’s a radio serial from BBC 4  . . . that is not available online. Rats.

The appearances of Mary Boleyn, Anne’s older sister and Henry’s former mistress, in Wolf Hall made me want to re-read Philippa Gregory’s best known book, The Other Boleyn Girl. Sometimes I like Gregory’s books and sometimes I don’t but I think this is one of the better ones. So is The Constant Princess, which tells the well-known tale from Katharine of Aragon’s point of view.

A couple others from writers who are less well-known: Queen’s Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle is the story of Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth and last wife and stepmother to Elizabeth. And Portrait of An Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett is about Hans Holbein’s introduction to the Tudor court, under the sponsorship of the family of Sir Thomas More.

There are tons more and lots on the nonfiction side, too, but these are the stories that have stuck with me.