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The setting is England. The first novel, River of Darkness, takes place soon after World War I, where a serial killer is charging into rural homes and slaughtering entire families. The second novel, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, takes place a decade later, in the depths of the Great Depression, and a homicidal maniac is targeting young girls for rape and murder. The third novel, The Dead of Winter (love that title), takes place in 1944, after D-Day but before the Battle of the Bulge, and an assassin for hire laying low in England during the war stumbles across a witness to one of his jobs who got away and leaves a trail of dead bodies behind him in a bloody search for the one person living who can testify against him.

The central figure of these novels is John Madden, first a detective inspector for Scotland Yard and then a farmer who in spite of himself is drawn back into the two subsequent cases. There are other great characters, too, Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair, John's boss, Billy Styles the boot constable, Helen Blackwell, the local doctor (love that name, too, Airth's done his homework) and many others, and part of the genius of these novels is that we get to see how things turn out for everyone because we are dropped into their lives at ten-year intervals.

Another reason I love these books is that Airth doesn't force us inside the minds of the killers (I am so sick of that). No, we learn about the villains one tiny piece of information at a time, just like the detectives do. These are police procedurals every bit as good as and maybe even better than Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series, and I never ever thought I'd say that about any novels.

Instead, Airth takes us into the lives of the victims, fully fleshed characters who are practically neighbors by the time he's done with them, and by then you're so worried about whether the good guys are going to get there in time that you're on the edge of your seat.

The setting is a you-are-there trip back to England in the 20's, 30's and 40's, and again, because we get to drop in once a decade we get to see how things turn out. The first novel is all about the cost of war, to John and to the nation. If you teach a natural born killer how to kill in war, what do you think he's going to get up to when you declare peace? The second novel is about what the powers that be will do to maintain that peace, and you will be every bit as disgusted as Angus is when you find out what they are willing to sacrifice in the name of national security. (Fuckers.) The third novel makes full use of world war as a plot device (there is a harrowing scene where the cops are about to make a raid and get blown up by a doodlebug instead), with fascinating detail of what it was like to live in London as well as the countryside during that time.

I just made a friend with a new iPad download River of Darkness, so they're available as e-books, too. Go get 'em.

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You know why I picked up the first of these books? Because many years ago, I stumbled across a paperback copy of another book Rennie Airth wrote, called Snatch.

It's sort of a modern day Ransom of Red Chief, and it is hilarious. It isn't on Kindle yet and you can't have my copy, but there are a bunch of used copies on Bookfinder.com.

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# Permanent link to The Return of Rennie Airth

[from the Stabenow.com archives, February 22, 2010]

I’m what Barbara Wallraff calls a lexplorer, which means that on the way to looking up occurrence in my Webster’s College Dictionary to see if it’s two c’s or two r’s (both) and an “e” or and “a” (an e) I get sidetracked, first by osmometry (measurement of osmotic pressure), and then of course by osmotic pressure (the force that a dissolved substance exerts on a semipermeable membrane, through which it cannot penetrate), and the result is I misspell occurrence for the seventy-third time, but je ne regrette rien! because the spell checker just doesn’t have quite the same feel of untapped riches as getting lost in a dictionary does.

Like Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, where on the first page the noun absurdity is defined thusly: “A statement of belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.” A few pages on we find Australia, “A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.”

And that’s just the A’s. Bierce wrote his dictionary an entry at a time for a weekly newspaper from 1881 to 1906, and even the curmudgeonliest reader will find something on every page to make them smile.

English is a voracious language, gobbling up any foreign word or phrase and putting it to use in law, medicine, cookery, fashion, slang, you name it. The Wordsworth Dictionary of Foreign Words in English tells us where those words and phrases come from, sometimes with surprising results. See circa, “around” from the Latin, as in circa 300 BC, but also, we discover somewhat to our incredulity, related to the English cerement, a waxed cloth for wrapping a corpse.

I also enjoy books about dictionaries, most recently Henry Hitchings’ Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. Did you know that as late as the year 2000, American jurists were consulting the Dictionary to try to figure out what the founders meant by the word declare, as in “declaration of war?” Divided into chapters headed with definitions from the Dictionary in alphabetical order, written with affection, respect and not a little glee, this book is going to make you want to go out and do like Robert Browning did, read the Dictionary from cover to cover in preparation for a life of writing poetry.

# Permanent link to Lexploration

Good characterization and good period detail make Judith Rock's The Rhetoric of Death an engaging read. It's France, 1686, in the middle of Louis XIV's secretly continued persecution of the Protestant Huguenots. Jesuit father-in-training Charles du Lac connives at the escape to Protestant Switzerland of Huguenot cousin (and childhood love) Pernelle. For his -- and their -- own safety fearful relatives hustle him out of southern France to Paris, where he takes up a position at the Jesuit college Louis Le Grand. Trouble follows him, however -- a student is murdered, the student's brother attacked, and Charles is caught up in a power-play between religion and politics that reaches as high as the Sun King's own court, and he must navigate it safely and see the guilty brought to justice if he and his family are to survive.

In the author's note Rock says, "I have tried to make the story's people true to their own century, and not just us in costume." She succeeded.

# Permanent link to Jesuits in Love (and Murder)

It is a quite staggering reflection that when Cook left Canada for the last time in 1767, he was still a non-commissioned officer. It is also a staggering reflection on the Lords of the Admiralty of the time that, because of their innate snobbish conviction that officers and gentlemen are born and not made, Cook did not quite qualify for a commission. He had been in the despised Merchant Service, he had sailed before the mast in the Navy, he was poor and his origins were obscure. There could have been little doubt left in the Admiralty by that time that in Cook they had the greatest seaman, navigator and cartographer of the generation. But a commission? Hardly. Hardly, that is, until they realised that to send a naval vessel to circumnavigate the globe, in the greatest exploratory voyage ever undertaken, under the command of a non-commissioned officer wouldn't be quite the thing to do. For one thing, it would redound most dreadfully upon the alleged competence of those who did hold commissions, and, for another, it would not look good in the history books. So, belatedly, they made him a lieutenant.

# Permanent link to Captain Cook, the Alistair MacLean version