by Helen Currie Foster
Just before a trip I get anxious: is there enough stored in my Kindle to keep me happy? You constant readers know that feeling. Did you upload enough for the waiting room at the airport? For the plane? For a sleepless first night, jet-lagging? Enough to keep you happy even if weak (or no) wi-fi at the (tent, cabin, hotel, boat, campsite, rental) precludes another download? Yes, there’ll be news–but I am escaping!
We’re on a family trip to France, with children and grandchildren. I loaded up the Kindle diligently beforehand. Of course there are way too many wonderful things to do besides read…
Still, my heart sang when we entered the rental in the French mountains and spied—A BOOKCASE!
Moreover, the shelves held mysteries! Ian McEwan, Patricia Cornwell, Elizabeth George, Janet Evanovich, V.I. Warshawski, Alexander McCall Smith…
Also serious nonfiction and titles from Kazuo Ishiguro, Dostoevsky, Graham Greene, Julian Barnes and more. Then I spotted Kinky Friedman’s Frequent Flyer and thought—eclectic tastes! Perhaps some were left behind by guests. Still, the shelves made me want to meet the owners. The welcoming bookshelves and, to boot, a choice of comfortable corners where a tired tourist can flop, prop up the well-used feet, and read…what more can one ask?
(Sidebar—when you see a Talking Head on your screen, with a bookshelf behind—do you wonder if the books really belong to the Head? Or are they just a prop intended to impress? Maybe we’ll see some interviewer pose a question: “How did you like Crimes Against Humanity?” Blank stare.)
I know I’ve mentioned her in a prior blog, but have you discovered Dorothy Dunnett yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dunnett
If you’re familiar with Dunnett’s stunning two historical fiction series, The Lymond Chronicles and The House of Niccolo, you already know she delivered powerful (and powerfully surprising) plots, magnetic characters, and vivid reconstructions of the 15th and 16th centuries. Using (for all that detail) an omniscient narrator.
But in her spare time she also wrote the Dolly mystery series, involving an astoundingly talented portrait painter named Johnson Johnson (yes, two), who happens to turn up in scenic locations in his yacht, the Dolly, on secret missions for the British ministry of defense. I’ve reread three of those on this trip—one set in Ibiza, one in Morocco, one in Canada. Unlike the Niccolo or Lymond historical series, Dunnett’s heroines in these first-person mysteries are in their late teens or twenties and trying to make their way in the world (as an au pair, a cook, an executive assistant, etc.). Naturally they find themselves in dangerous situations while trying to identify a murderer, and Dunnett gives each her own first-person voice—each interestingly different.
Clearly Dunnett didn’t merely set foot in these locales: she absorbed them. The action’s fast-moving, but she paints a landscape with details that place you right in the square where the villains are about to—well, here’s an example from Moroccan Traffic, in the Atlas Mountains, where Wendy, a young executive assistant, watches as Johnson and the engaging inventor Mo pursue two ruthless adversaries up perilous cliffs:
…where they had set their faces to climb was the flank of the mountain; the boulder slope rising to cliffs and ridges and rock bands interlaid with tongues of snow, and scree-fields, and stony pockets of pasture. And further up, behind escarpment and terrace, the burning forepeaks of the range.
I had seen it all from the road. Somewhere there, already entrenched, already waiting, were Gerry and Sullivan, ex-SAS marksmen.
You can also tell that Dunnett (as well as her character Johnson) was a painter:
All around us the hills, limp as blankets, glowed in soft reds, their milky hollows the colour of amethyst. The snow on Sirwa was tinged golden pink, and cast china blue shadows which were technically impermanent. A man walked by the road, a black goat like a scarf around his neck.
And from Roman Nights – the young heroine, an astronomer, battles spy dealings in Italy including the Aragonese Castle on Ischia in the Bay of Naples:
On a plateau the cathedral reared its three roofless sides like a kind of dismembered Versailles, white and flaking; the walls furnished with crumbling cherubs and statues, with rococo arches and pillars and architraves.
Dunnett gives her astronomer heroine plenty of tongue-in chic wit:
Johnson and Lenny sailed out of Amalfi, in a pure, warm air blowing about eight on the bloody Beaufort scale, and the rain lashing down. After becoming exceedingly well acquainted with the water filling the Gulf of Salerno, we fled into a fishing harbour called San Marco and spent the night offshore in a cat’s cradle of other boats’ cables.
Thank you, Dorothy Dunnett, for stupendous scholarship and for witty mysteries in places so believably described. What a gift to the traveler! Sorry, gotta go—I’m deep into Tropical Issue, set in Madeira, where I’ve never been—but it sure looks great in this prose…
What gifts they are to humans—to write, to read!
Award-winning writer Helen Currie Foster lives and writes in the iconic Texas hill country, supervised by three inquisitive and persistent burros. After practicing law for more than thirty years, she found the Alice MacDonald Greer Mysteries had suddenly appeared in her life. Book 10 in the series, Ghost Justice, is expected to debut in August 2025. Helen is continually fascinated by human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps invading our parties. Follow her on Facebook and Amazon, and in Austin at BookPeople.
https://www.facebook.com/helencurriefoster
https://www.amazon.com/Books-Helen-Currie-Foster/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AHelen%2BCurrie%2BFoster
Ink-Stained Wretches 