WILL UNWOUND #168: Will’s Mystery Project – “Winter’s Bone” by Daniel Woodrell and “Murder Must Advertise” by Dorothy Sayers
July 10, 2010In this blog, we’ve emphasized the fact that any good reader’s advisory librarian has to know two things inside and out: the book collection and the local patrons. This takes time and hard work. Then my two year old granddaughter, Sophie, in a hurry to get to the children’s room, impatiently pulls a book off the mystery shelf and shoves it into my book bag. It turns out to be a winner. I call that the “Sophie’s choice” factor. How much of picking the right book is just random good luck?
While we’re talking about luck, let’s consider the improbability of picking out two books on the basis of the fact that on the surface they would seem to be completely different as in night and day different and they turn out to be eerily similar. We readers often choose contrasting novels to give our literary lives some much needed variety. Avid readers are adept at avoiding reading ruts by choosing diversity over a steady diet of sameness.
Last week I went to the library with just that concept in mind. I chose two mysteries from our list that on the surface could not have been more different. The first book was Winter’s Bone, a dark and chilling novel that takes place in the remotest and poorest corner of the modern day Missouri Ozarks. To balance that, I picked out a mystery, Murder Must Advertise, featuring a suave, wealthy, and aristocratic sophisticate by the name of Lord Peter Wimsey who seems to be all the rage of the upper crust crowd who live life to its fullest in pre-World War II London.
What a shock it was to discover how ultimately similar these two books are. What is the common denominator? Cocaine.
Let’s start with Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone. It’s a mystery all right, but not one that you would associate with detectives, police chiefs, red herrings, and whodunit plots. For want of a better term Winter’s Bone is a backwoods noir.
The plot is pretty simple and straightforward. The main character is a 16 year old woman named Ree. She qualifies as a woman because she is the glue that holds together a family that includes two boys, a mother who has taken up permanent residence in the land of the insane, and a father who has spent his life in and out of jail and in and out of the beds of many mountain women.
Dee and her family members are a part of the Ozark Dolly clan. The Dollys are an ancient and inbred family of outlaws who have seized control of the crank cocaine market in the Ozark mountains of western Missouri. Name a sin and they personify it. Take your pick…incest, drug addiction, alcoholism, murder, extortion, revenge, physical abuse. ..the Dolly clan does it all.
What Woodrell tries to do with the Dollys and their backwoods setting is create a kind of self contained mountain microcosm from which no one escapes. The isolation of the Ozarks is the perfect setting for exploring the human heart of darkness. Clearly, for Woodrell the human race as symbolized by the Dolly clan is doomed and damned.
The tragedy of the culture is twofold. First, it’s just a brutal place to be a human being. Second, there doesn’t seem to be any way out for the children and young adults who grow up insensitized to the cruelty of the place. The vicious cycle of birth, violence, and death doesn’t seem to have an end. In the folklore of the Dolly family, it extends back to a kind of mythical past that provides the cult like adherence to an ancient code of behavior (never snitch on a Dolly) and a hierarchical structure in which might makes right. Embedded in this cultural ethos is the stricture that women are servile breeders and helpmates.
The heroine of the book, Ree Dolly tries valiantly to rise above her cultural limitations, even to the point of taking on the local Dolly patriarch, Thump Dolly. She needs to know where her father is. He has jumped bail, a bail that he had secured with the family house. If Ree and her brothers and sisters are to avoid being turned out into the woods like wild dogs, she must find her father, dead or alive.
It’s a harrowing, brutal tale of an ancient culture that has turned from moonshine to crank cocaine for its livelihood. You wouldn’t want to live there.
But you probably wouldn’t mind being related to Lord Peter Wimsey and his august branch of London aristocrats. The time is 1932 and the upstairs/downstairs world of English society is at its peak. Lord Wimsey fits right in. He’s brilliant, athletic, debonair, and daring. Think James Bond in a high society crowd.
Too bad for Wimsey that a good friend has prevailed upon him to go to work – an 8 to 5 job as a copywriter in an advertising agency. It’s an agency where weird things are happening…”accidental” falling down the stairway deaths, threatening anonymous letters, and mysterious envelopes of cash appearing seemingly out of nowhere.
It’s as far away from the Ozarks as you can possibly get until packets of cocaine start showing up in the most peculiar places. Yes, certain unnamed employees are using the ad agency as a front to move large amounts of cocaine in and out of the city.
Lord Peter, under the cover of his menial desk job, begins to put the puzzle together, and we discover that the evil hearts in the middle of this malicious drug trafficking scheme are every bit as brutal and ruthless as the backwoods crank cocaine gang in the Ozarks. There’s a meanness to the drug trade that even the most elegant of settings cannot fully conceal.
Where the two books differ is that Dorothy L. Sayers is a literary stylist par excellence. As a writer she has an almost Shakespearean range…high comedy, tragedy, romance, and farce. Daniel Woodrell, on the other hand, deals strictly in the shadows of tragedy and hopelessness.
Both books are excellently written and pack a big punch. I give Murder Must Advertise 5 stars (out of five) for the exceptional writing skills of Dorothy L. Sayers. Winter’s Bone gets 3 stars for its sobering look at a uniquely tragic mountain culture.
Will, another author to add to your list. (This addition falls under the know your customer rubric.) When you were asking for mysteries I didn’t realize how close Catholicism is to your core. Fr. Andrew Greeley is not even as good a stylist as Chesterton, but his locked room mysteries featuring Blackie Ryan are delicious. Blackie is Chicago Irish and through the stories progresses through being priest, auxillary archbishop and in what will likely be the last book, archbishop of Chicago. (To some extent he’s a reflection of what Greeley thinks he might have been like if he weren’t so adept at pissing off “downtown”.) It’s almost inevitable that you’ll read Blackie’s (and probably Greeley’s) favorite marriage sermon about strawberries, but his handling of the locked room sub-genre makes it worthwhile. Try for one of the early ones.
Great idea, Bill. Thanks. Blackie it is!
I’m glad you liked the Dorothy Sayers book. Our patrons tend to relay that she is a good writer. I’ll have to check out some of her titles.
And I’ve always found what you mentioned – that the randomness of finding new titles you like on library shelves while browsing can yield great results in discovering previously unknown gems author-wise and title-wise. And I’ve always found that to be a fun thing – sort of like being on a treasure hunt as you never know what you’re going to find – that next really great read might be right around the corner.
And as far as the mystery genre goes…I don’t generally read standard mysteries but instead like titles with a supernatural mystery to solve – like Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files series which features hard boiled wizard PI Harry Dresden as the protagonist.
Should you ever wish to check out the Dresden Files series the first title is Storm Front.
And I’ll put Murder Must Advertise on my to-read-list.
Linda R…thanks for the recommendation. Sayers is an old fashioned literary stylist who has applied her skills to the mystery genre. She is great to read.
I’ve taken a liking to Jayne Ann Krenz, who write mysteries with a paranormal twist. A bit formulaic, buit she is a librarian!
Dear Will,
I was introduced to Dorothy Sayers mysteries by my dear friend Carol, whose parents were both avid mystery readers. I had never read a mystery before, being totally engaged by the big novels of my English Literature classes – yes I was one of those students who loved having to read 10 big novels in 10 weeks and write term papers too! So Dorothy Sayers captured me with her wonderful writing style, and her debonair detectives..however, I haven’t read this one, so know that it is time to start again…when I read mysteries I want escape, and I prefer British high society to the claustrophic world of the Dolly’s for sure.
Vicki, have you read “Gaudy Night?”
I read the Lord Peter mysteries in order about 25 years ago. Most are on my reread list – particularly Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors (a must if you have any interest in the art of change ringing). I’m so glad you enjoyed your first Sayers, Will!
And I must thank you for the stellar rating for Maisie Dobbs. I’m on the last book in the series. I’m going to finish it and move on to non-fiction – a new history of the Battle of Britain.
Ellen…I envy your freedom to read through a series!
When you’re done with your project and can return to Sayers, here’s another side by side comparison that you might enjoy. Try reading Lord Peter (especially before his marriage) at the same time that you read Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. Peter works very hard to disguise himself as Bertie (kind of like the Scarlet Pimpernel). The PBS (well, really BBC) Wimsey mysteries were exceptional in their use of the parallel. And, of course, Bunter and Jeeves are the real stars.
Watch for the film Winters Bone, on limited release in several metro areas soon/now. It captures the mood of the book extremely well.
It has been on the film festival circuit for over a year.
Thanks for the info, Anne.
Another film note to our mystery lovers—check local listings—PBS airing the new “Murder on the Orient Express” on Masterpiece Theater tonight in my area featuring the wonderful David Suchet as Hercule Poirot. Looks great! Earlier this week there was a special with Suchet on the history of the Orient Express.
Thanks, Wynette. Everyone can watch this after the World Cup Final!
Yes, you will just have time to put your zuzuvela away, go out for a short walk, and bang—it will be time for Masterpiece Theater!
I figured that the team that scored would win. I was right.
The thing that made Murder Must Advertise special for me is the keen insights about the world of advertising, creativity, and consumer behavior that Dorothy L. Sayers provides, like her observation that the most successful ad copy comes from those who aren’t persuaded of the value of the product and find their creativity enhanced by their detachment. Is that why librarians are so typically unable to be persuasive in telling others about the value of libraries?
Wayne, you make a very good point. One that I really need to follow up on soon. Thanks.
Winter’s Bone is the five star. Though I must admit I haven’t read the other.