Jane Langton: God in Concord (1992)

Edition: Penguin, 1993
Review number: 571

God in Concord is a detective novel about two things I find difficult to understand. The story is about an attempt to build a new development in Concord, Mass., threatening the Walden Pond which inspired Thoreau. I personally find it difficult to get excited about any heritage less than two hundred years old - I was amazed to find a Canadian cousin of mine just as excited about the Victorian terraces which can be seen from the walls of Lincoln castle as by the castle itself. The pond itself might be worth saving from an ecological point of view, though it sounds unpleasantly neglected, but the Thoreau connection seems particularly unimportant. The pond is no longer what it was when Thoreau saw it, which means that without a restoration programme, the literary reference is meaningless. The second thing I don't really understand is why some people revere Thoreau to such an extent. Yes, he could put words together, and he was in part the inspiration of Gandhi's civil disobedience campaign, but the majority of the thoughts expressed in his writing seem to me to be banal.

Nevertheless, an emotional attachment to the pond certainly exists for some of the residents of Concord, while against it stands the developer's desire to make money. The developer is willing to use almost any method to gain permission to build, and so a somewhat stereotypical clash is inevitable. Unusually for the genre, the truth of what is going on comes to light in the course of events, rather than being deduced in a masterly fashion by the sleuth. All the Homer Kelly mysteries seem to be like this to some extent, and this makes them nice and gentle. God in Concord is perhaps a little to comfortable, but this perception may be partly due to my antipathy towards Thoreau.

Jane Langton: The Dante Game (1991)

Edition: Penguin, 1992
Review number: 234

Homer Kelly, Jane Langton's detective, is more prominent throughout The Dante Game than he was in the other novel by her that I have read. As a professor at Harvard, he is asked to take a course in modern Italian literature at the American School in Florence, basically an establishment catering for American students wanting to spend a year studying in Florence.

The American School co-incidentally - and how many times does that word need to be used when describing the plots of crime novels - starts being used as a cover by a group of men plotting to assassinate the Pope, who will be coming to Florence to bless the celebrations of the nine hundredth anniversary of the inauguration of the cathedral there.

Kelly, who was a policeman in Boston before he became a professor at Harvard, begins his own investigation when the conspirators begin murdering some of those working for the school who they think may have tumbled to their secret.

The assassination attempt, incidentally, is organised by drugs barons appalled by the success of a campaign sponsored by the Pope targeting teenagers. They have convinced the man who will actually pull the trigger that it is part of a campaign by certain cardinals to further a progressive agenda for the Catholic church - the ordination of women, the end of celibacy for the priesthood, abandoning anti-contraception teaching. I have heard this last item used as a justification for declaring the Pope the most evil man on earth - which is a rather extreme view.

This plot is perhaps a weak point in the book. In a straight thriller, you might expect this sort of attack to be made on one of the world's institutions; it would certainly not be out of place in a Bond story. In a crime series, you normally expect a more domestic level of violence. Doing something unusual in a genre is usually worth applauding, but Langton doesn't quite carry it off; the suspension of disbelief doesn't quite happen.

Jane Langton: Divine Inspiration (1993)

Edition: Penguin, 1994
Review number: 33



This is a rather unusual detective story, featuring a detective who apparently turns up in a whole series of Jane Langton books, ex-policeman Homer Kelly. The plot concerns sabotage of the organ at a church in Boston, Mass., starting with a fire and the simultaneous disappearance of an organist living in an apartment block next to the church. Even though Homer Kelly is the series character, he isn't the hero of the book; that honour goes to the organist who installs a new organ at the church to replace that destroyed in the fire.

His interest in the vanished organist and her abandoned baby lead to a wealth of complications over about a year (hence the book's structure based on the liturgical year), well handled by Langton who leaves you guessing until just before the end. The book is illustrated with pictures of Boston and excerpts from the organ chorales of Bach, which fit in with the book's structure and help develop the sense of atmosphere.