I learned this past week that I share a birthday with an eminent novelist of Victorian days, William Makepeace Thackeray. Had he lived, Thackeray would have been 195 years old last Tuesday.

Although Thackeray's literary stock has seen its ups and downs over the course of these two centuries, there's little arguing that his masterwork, Vanity Fair, is a social satire with staying power.

Born in Calcutta on July 18, 1811, Thackeray was sent to England at age five to attend a boarding school in Chiswick Mall. He polished his knack for the verbal send-up writing for Punch. Vanity Fair's first serial installment appeared in the Times in January 1847.

I confess that as an undergraduate, I never quite got through all 822 pages of my 1962 Signet Classic edition - required reading for a course in the 19th-century novel. It's not that I found the novel an old-fashioned slog. In fact, I remember it was quite funny. I simply ran out of time. That was a lot of reading.

But as it's summer, I decided to take another turn through Vanity Fair. The episodic structure of the narrative allows for plenty of suspense--and made it easy to pick up where I left off all those years ago. As it turns out, the excursion has been delightful.

Architect of the anti-hero (Vanity Fair is subtitled, helpfully, "A Novel Without a Hero"), Thackeray's biting wit spirits us through a world of, well, vain and shallow people. Becky Sharp, a social climber before the type gained gravitas, is the ringleader of this carnival. But alas, no one comes out looking very pretty as Thackeray sets ablaze the petty vanities of English society--from maids and stockbrokers to soldiers and wealthy aunts--against the background of the Napoleonic wars.

Take a look at the picture Thackeray paints of Joseph Sedley, a Vanity Fair denizen who does little more than loll about, waiting to inherit. He's just then in the nuptial sites of Becky Sharp, as she and her set venture out for a night in Vauxhall:

Jos was in his glory, ordering about the waiters with great majesty. He made the salad; and uncorked the Champagne; and carved the chickens; and ate and drank the greater part of the refreshments on the tables. Finally, he insisted on having a bowl of rack punch; everybody had rack punch at Vauxhall. 'Waiter, rack punch.'

No surprise that Jos finds himself undone by the accursed punch. "What is the rack in the punch, at night, to the rack in the head of a morning," the piper of Vanity Fair sagely observes.

The engagement is grounded even before it takes flight. But Beck, sharp as she is, won't be kept down. Many more adventures involving Miss Sharp, the Sedleys, and the Crawleys (of Queen's Crawley) ensue. And if you're not laughing out loud at least once in every chapter, then you're not paying attention.

Pick up a remainder copy of Vanity Fair for just $5.98 at an Olsson's near you. Trust me, this book is way better than (the most recent) movie.

Until next time,
Elizabeth Frengel

While we're on the subject of mysteries, I see the latest book by Scottish crime writer Denise Mina, The Dead Hour, just hit the shelves.

But be forewarned: As much as Agatha Christie's genteel mysteries are idealized and prim—the works of Mina, set in a poverty-ravaged underworld of Glasgow, are jagged and grim.

Mina depicts vividly the seedy side of human nature—showing you more than you probably want to see. And with decaying council flats, drug abuse and sexploitation, corrupt law enforcement and the steely banks of the Clyde River as backdrop, her dramas are chilling.

But what draws me to Mina is her choice of female protagonists. Despite unfavorable odds, they're spirited and complex; not at all the cardboard cliches you often find in hardboiled crime fiction.

Maureen O'Donnell, center of the Garnett Hill trilogy, displays a glacier-like nerve to the outside world. But inside, she's full of fluttering doubts about her own sanity. Even she's not sure that she's not guilty of the crime she ends up investigating.

Paddy Meehan, star of the most recent series, is a reporter for the Scottish Daily News who earned her crappy beat by paying her dues. Still, she's overweight, cruelly shunned by her family, and always at pains to prove herself.

Born in Glasgow in 1966, Denise Mina was working on a law degree at Glasgow University. She was teaching criminology and criminal law and researching a dissertation on the ascription of mental illness to female offenders. But all the while, she had a bug to write a novel. So, "misusing her grant," she says, Mina played hooky from her studies and wrote Garnethill, the first work in the Garnethill trilogy.

Beginners luck or no (Mina says she sent her manuscript blindly to the first three literary agents she found in directory assistance), the debut won the John Creasy Dagger award for best first crime novel. And they only get better.

In Garnethill, we first meet Maureen O'Donnell, who wakes up to find her former therapist, with whom she's having an affair, bound to a chair in her living room with his throat slit. Maureen was just about to break off the relationship...

In Exile, the murder of a woman whose last known residence was a shelter for battered women, takes Maureen (since the police don't seem all that interested) to London to investigate. But don't expect the change of scenery to lighten the mood. Mina's London is as dark and treacherous as her homeland.

The final installment, Resolution, pits Maureen against her biggest nightmare, Angus Farrell. He's a psychologist and the two have tangled before in the beginning of the series. In this confrontation, though, Maureen finds herself with a conspicuous lack of protection.

Deception (published as Sanctum in the U.K) is a departure for Mina, and perhaps my favorite of all her work. Talk about an unreliable narrator. When Lachlan Harriot's wife Susie, a forensic psychiatrist, finds herself on trial for the murder of a serial killer, Lachlan retreats to her attic office—Susie's sanctum—to go through her files and piece together her defense. What he finds shatters his life and will shock even the most blase readers.

Mina introduces us to Paddy Meehan in Field of Blood, where a coincidence in naming leads Paddy from the copy bench to a become a respected journalist breaking one of the biggest cases the Scottish Daily News has run in years. You'll find yourself rooting for this gutsy underdog even when her moral compass wavers.

Paddy's back in Mina's latest novel, The Dead Hour. When Paddy is called to a late-night domestic disturbance in a posh area of Glasgow, she finds herself with 50 quid pressed in her hand and a request to make sure the incident never hits the paper. The next morning, the woman involved in the disturbance winds up dead and Paddy finds her own life in danger.

Check out any one of these chillers at an Olsson's near you. (You might want to leave on a night light.)

Until next week,
Elizabeth Frengel

The chink of ice in a tall glass; the distant whirr of a lawnmower; the ghostly flash of fireflies; a waft of hickory smoke from the neighbors' barbeque. It's summer. Life's mellow. So why not tuck into a juicy mystery--guilt free?

One of my favorite writers is the dame of whodunits, Agatha Christie. Born in Torquay, the county of Devon, England, in 1890, Christie got her start on a friendly dare. Her sister claimed it was all but impossible to read a good detective story in which the perpetrator wasn't obvious from the start. Christie took up her sister's challenge and wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The rest, as they say, is mystery history.

Among 80 novels and numerous short stories and plays (The Mousetrap debuted in London's West End in 1952 and is still in production), Christie brought to life two of the most distinguished characters in literary history--the quirky yet indefatigable Monsieur Hercule Poirot and the hawkeyed knitting fiend, Miss Jane Marple of St. Mary Mead. With a penchant for poisonings and exotic locales, Christie revolutionized the genre by setting up her detective dramas in closed societies--the Orient Express, an archeological dig in Mesopotamia, the country house of a wealthy (but dead) uncle--and shifting suspicion rapidly from one character to another until no one looks innocent. Her plots keep even the sharpest readers guessing.

Despite pulling a mysterious ten-day disappearing act of her own (troubles in her second marriage led her to flee to a hotel and check in under the name of her husband's presumed mistress), Christie eventually attained one of England's highest honors: she was dubbed Dame of the British Empire. Agatha Christie died on January 12, 1976.

"Soon, I will tell you all..."

We first meet Poirot in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. With his egg-shaped head, curled mustaches, compulsive neatness and insistence on being Belgian, Hercule Poirot is a sleuth to rival the stripe of Sherlock Holmes. He's brilliantly portrayed by British actor David Suchet, who gets down all the Monsieur's quirks to a T.

See Suchet excel as Poirot in The Hollow, a mystery in which the rotund detective is just trying to get some rest at his country cottage, when a philandering husband's untimely demise casts suspicions on an entire party weekending at the neighboring mansion in the Hollow.

You can pick up a film remainder of The Hollow--a superb A&E production --on DVD at one of our locations for just $9.98.

Funerals indeed prove fatal in one of my top book picks, After the Funeral. After the funeral of corn-plaster magnate Richard Abernethie, those present at the service find their own lives in hazard. Poirot is called upon to investigate the mysterious circumstances of his death and its aftermath. Abernethie's death was murder, wasn't it?

Be careful what you wish for. In The Clocks, Susan Webb wishes for a break in the humdrum routine of her life as a secretary for hire. True to Christie form, Susan is sent to the home of blind woman, where she discovers a well-dressed corpse situated among six clocks--all set to the wrong time. Will Poirot figure out why Susan was called there in time to set this puzzler aright?

It's Miss Jane Marple's turn to have her mettle tested in The Thirteen Problems, a collection of short stories based on those told to Miss Marple during weekly meetings of The Tuesday Night Club. The challenge each week is a mystery posed by one of the members--and the object is to be the first to solve these games of murder and deception. Watch as Miss Marple deftly catches up the crooks in their own false yarns.

Check out these and lots of other Christie mysteries--including Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile--at an Olsson's near you. Go on... I bet you can't read just one.

Until next week,
Elizabeth Frengel