Mysteries

I just started a mystery that’s set in Boston’s Back Bay. The framework is this—two  authors are at work on new novels and corresponding as they go. One lives in Australia (no mention of specifically where on the continent though) and is writing a murder mystery set in Boston’s Public Library. The other is a Southerner living in Boston, who’s trying to get a publisher interested in his first book.

But wait, it seems there’s a story within a story. The Australian writer is creating a tale about an Australian author in Boston who’s in the midst of penning a murder mystery set at the Boston Public Library. So far, with this story within a story, I’m wholly confused and having a hell of a time keeping the characters straight. In fact, I feel quite sure I’m not keeping the stories straight at all.
If I wanted a confusing, difficult read I would’ve checked out Gravity’s Rainbow or Finnegans Wake. The BPL murder mystery was billed as “sharply thrilling” and “an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure.” So, not some cheesy, cozy mystery but also not The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle which, by the way, I quite enjoyed. This time around, I was hoping for something more like Kate Racculia‘s Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts.

Who knows, maybe my current read, The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill, will ultimately be as intriguing and fun as Tuesday Mooney and 7½ Deaths? For now I’m just nitpicking, as in:

• there are two BPL entrances not one. Both have been open since 1972 (when the Johnson Building first opened) apart from a brief period of renovation.
  
• the vegan fast food place, (mentioned in chapter four or five) is in Central Square Cambridge NOT Copley Square.
• there hasn’t been a squalid, seedy area (as mentioned in chapter three) in Back Bay or Downtown Boston in well over 20 years.

The book was published in July of ’22. There’s no indication that it’s set in, say, ’82 when there were still dodgy sections of downtown and small, cool, non-posh stretches of Back Bay. Way back in '82 there were three fab used bookstores and one funky, well stocked new books shop. There were second hand clothes places, a joint that sold nothing but handmade cat themed tchotchkes, another where you could find castings of architectural griffins, gargoyles and angels. There were at least two record stores, lesbian and gay bars, two big movie theaters AND there was still a bad side to Beacon Hill and a Combat Zone.

Me, waxing nostalgic? Nah, couldn’t happen. //snort//

So far, all this book is doing for me is inspiring memories of the way things were and maybe sparking a future visit to the BPL.