“Christmas is for happy people,” a moody young hotel maid observes in Arnaldur Indridason’s (Indriðason) Icelandic thriller Voices. Indridason’s equally moody sleuth agrees. The moody sleuth, police inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, is on the scene because Santa has just been murdered—at one of Reykjavik’s leading hotels. In real life, Santa is the hotel doorman, who has…
A few years ago my husband and I spent a week at a safari camp in Tanzania. The safari experience included stunning views of landscape and animals, boozy evenings at the bar, nights in a tent as comfortable as our bedroom at home, an eccentric proprietor, and an equally eccentric assortment of fellow guests. The…
It was a pleasant July afternoon in Hoboken, New Jersey. The year was 1841, and Hoboken offered a countrified respite from the sultry heat of New York City. Two young men were relaxing along the Hudson River near Sybil’s Cave, where a rocky cliff had been excavated to reach a natural spring. People believed the…
Uncle Frank wanted to be Ernest Hemingway. He was my mother’s younger brother, a dashing figure who often stayed with us when I was a child in the early 1950s. Then he’d be off, hitchhiking from our house in the San Fernando Valley down to Mexico to take in a bullfight. Death in the Afternoon…
In Kwei Quartey’s Wife of the Gods, Ghanaian police inspector Darko Dawson observes a village ceremony: “As Dawson watched and listened, he saw in action the Ewe people’s long-held fame for the drumming tradition . . . unmatched by anything [he] had seen before.” I’ve seen the Ewe people’s drumming tradition in action too. In…
I’m one of the few humans on earth who is not a Stieg Larsson fan. I closed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo after two pages and never opened it again. That says a lot about my distaste for the book, because in general I have a bias toward Swedish crime writers. I adored Henning…
I discovered Fred Vargas on the plane coming back from France. In real life she’s Frédérique Audouin-Rouzeau (Fred as the short form of her name, and Vargas from Ava Gardner’s character in The Barefoot Contessa), a French historian/archaeologist with many books to her credit, among them seven mysteries featuring Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Six have been…
My husband is in love with Fanny Ardant. But I don’t mind. I’m in love with her too. She’s the beguiling actress who plays the female lead in François Truffaut’s Confidentially Yours (Vivement Dimanche!, or“Finally Sunday”in the original). It was Truffaut’s last film, made in 1983—an homage to Hitchcock. Julien Vercel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a…
When I was a child in the Southern California of the late 1950s, watching Peter Gunn on television was one of the week’s highlights. Henry Mancini, who did the music for the series, lived in a neighboring town and went to our San Fernando Valley church, so we had a proprietary interest in the show. …
