by Helen Currie Foster

Aren’t there two keys to your enjoyment of a mystery? (1) Whether you like the protagonist(s), and (2) whether you’re drawn to the setting?

If I don’t find myself caring pretty quickly about the protagonist (or protagonists—see Mick Herron’s Slough House series, with its delightful collection of failed spies, or Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series with its appealing retirement village residents), I can’t read another page. I shut the book. I want to feel I’m collaborating with the protagonist—so I want to be drawn to his or her mind and experience. Is your reaction similar? When you’re in the bookstore or library, and open a mystery by a new-to-you author, how many pages do you give the author before you shove the book back on the shelf? Not many, right?

The same goes for setting. Setting furnishes part of the puzzle, gives clues to the motivations and preoccupations of the characters. Maybe the author chooses a spot on the planet where the reader has never set foot. A tiny coastal village in Alaska? The ancient cities of Sicily? Or Fred Vargas’s French mysteries, with her Pyrenees-born police inspector Adamsberg? bit.ly/3Or0nDh

Whatever the setting, the author must help us experience it. I recently reread the Shetland series by Ann Cleeves and was caught up by her use of sensory detail. She has us breathing salty air and the smell of sheep, feeling the Atlantic breezes, hearing the cries of gulls and kittiwakes, and always tasting the cups of coffee her police detective, Jimmy Perez, makes time for as his long day wears on. https://greatbritishbookclub.com/all-of-ann-cleeves-shetland-books-in-order/

So wherever a book takes us—Texas Hill Country or Gulf Coast, Paris, Venice, Lake Michigan, Maine, the endless vistas of New Mexico or Arizona, the wilds of Yorkshire—give us the smells, the tastes, the sounds! The feel of the place! And an engaging protagonist!

I also revisited The Coroner’s Lunch, book one in Colin Cotterill’s 15-volume Dr. Siri Paiboun series, set in post-1975 communist Laos with its informers and “burden-sharing tutorials.” Cotterill again impresses with how quickly chapter one captures us, when we meet Dr. Siri, age 72, after the Pathet Lao regime denies him retirement and appoints him coroner—a job he must learn from a tattered manual. bit.ly/3K8Td3N

As we meet Siri in chapter one, we learn he dreams of the dead he’s examined: “He was somehow able to know the feelings and personalities of the departed.” He tells no one of his dreams, fearing they’ll think him a raving lunatic. Besides, “His condition did no harm and it did encourage him to show more respect to cadavers once he knew the former owners would be back”—in his dreams.

Arising from bed, “Siri…carried his small transistor radio to the coffee table. It was a sin, but one he delighted in.” Under the Pathet Lao regime it’s forbidden to listen to Thai radio from across the Mekong River. Instead, “Lao radio broadcasts boomed from public address speakers all over the city from five A.M. on.”

Here’s the smell of Siri’s morning: “He brought his thick brown Vietnamese coffee to the table, sat in his favorite chair, and inhaled the delicious aroma. It smelled a lot better than it tasted…The scent of temple incense had already filled the room, but the roosters were still dreaming of magical flights over mountains and lakes.” And here’s part of what he sees on his way to his office, passing the Mekong: “On the far bank, Thailand stared rudely back at him…The river that was once a channel between two countries had become a barrier.”

Siri defies the instructions of his doctrinaire would-be supervisor Judge Haeng: he continues to wear his ancient leather sandals to his ramshackle office, refusing the black patent shoes Haeng says a coroner should wear, and he pursues the murderous truth despite raids on his notes and even the theft of the bodies he’s analyzing.  

Sights, smells, tastes, sounds! An atmosphere of dreams, the presence of the dead, the feel of an omnipresent regime, and the casual defiance of this irrepressible witty doctor in his ancient leather sandals! Plus a dose of magical realism! Siri’s surrounded by vivid, believable characters—but Cotterill keeps us in Siri’s point of view.

But wait, you say—is there no romance? Wait until you meet Auntie Lah, with her baguettes—“the sweetest in Vientiane”—or taste the sandwiches she makes for Siri—“always different and always delicious.” Siri’s acerbic assistant, nurse Dtui, tells him: “She’s got a crush on you.”

An appealing though wacky protagonist, and a fascinating setting: just one chapter, and I was in.

At the moment, my setting’s different. With the epic heat dome squatting on Texas, I’m temporarily two states away from home, drinking coffee in early morning cool, looking at alpenglow pink on the Front Range and sniffing the vanilla scent of ponderosa pine. From the porch you can hear Glacier Creek rushing past. This setting includes a quartet of mule deer boys, sporting their impressive antlers, still velvety, as they stalk quietly through the sage above the creek. Black squirrels prance on granite boulders, pink and green with lichen; Richardson’s ground squirrels dash from burrow to burrow. Hiking yields paintbrush, mariposa lilies, periwinkle-colored harebells.

And the remnants of past fires!

Tomorrow, though, back to the beloved Texas Hill Country: limestone, live oaks, the stubborn creek still reflecting the sky, and Book 9 of the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series.