A Heroine for the Modern Age
How can you not love Mrs. Blossom?
The cozy, or “soft-boiled” mystery, and its writers, do not get nearly enough respect or consideration when it comes to little things like awards, industry recognition, and great reviews. They are often dismissed as not serious enough (I think it has a lot to do with the perception that cozies are by women about women for women, frankly; it usually always comes down to misogyny, convince me it’s not); and how many times have I heard a mystery writer (usually male) sneering at them as books about single women with cats? But some of our finest crime writers write what are considered cozies—Donna Andrews1, Catriona McPherson, Katherine Hall Page, Ellen Byron, Miranda James, Carolyn Haines and Ellen Hart, to name a few, and the list goes on and on.
And if you think writing one is easy…well, I have written several of them and they are much harder to write than one might dismissively think. I’ve always liked and respected cozy mysteries and their authors; but I gained a lot more respect for them after I wrote A Streetcar Named Murder, which was one of the hardest books I’ve written. You can’t get away with fluffing things in a cozy; those readers are sharp-eyed and know what they are talking about.
And frankly, anyone who dismisses an entire sub-genre of crime fiction without even bothering to read any of the books is just a pompous, pretentious asshole. A windbag. Someone whose opinion is not worth taking seriously.
Needless to say, I was rather excited when one of my favorite crime writers decided to try her experienced and expert hands at writing one.
Mrs. Blossom had never been upgraded in her life.
To be fair, until this moment—the last day of March, a Baltimore March that was going out full lion, all blustery winds and horizontal sleet—it had not been a life that offered many opportunities for upgrades. A good life, yes, even an excellent one while her husband was alive, but also a rooted-to-the-ground kind of existence. It wasn’t a matter of getting past the velvet ropes, more an issue of never getting to them.
For one thing, she seldom flew, averaging only a trip or two a year between her native Baltimore and her recent hometown of Phoenix. She always chose Southwest, a no-frills airline, because she was a no-frills kind of person. Once, just once, she bought a Business Select ticket because circumstances had forced her to book last-minute. The only real advantage was boarding in the first group, a novelty to her. Oh, and there was the drink coupon, but it was 6:30 a.m. She gave it to the nervous flier next to her, who ordered a screwdriver, downed it in three gulps, then fell asleep, his head lolling on her shoulder. Mrs. Blossom had the kind of shoulder that even strangers found inviting.
Laura Lippman, recently crowned a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, has always been one of the top crime writers in the world, in my humble opinion. She has no weaknesses as a writer; her plots are tight as a drum, her dialogue is completely realistic, and her characters are fully imagined, complex and compelling.
And she always hits a home run on every pitch. Murder Takes a Vacation is no different, except that it is completely different.
Older characters driving a crime narrative are rare (although Miss Marple, Mrs. Pollifax, and Jessica Fletcher all come to mind); even rarer is the older character who is also heavy-set. Mrs. Muriel Blossom, our main character here, is just that; an older character who carries some extra weight (and gets shamed for it regularly), but she is so much more than that. She’s used to making herself small in public, and as she told Tess Monaghan (she first appeared in that series) she is good at surveillance because older women are invisible. SHe’s been widowed after a good marriage for about ten years, and has recently moved back to Baltimore from Phoenix, where she lived in a casita on her daughter’s property and helped with the kids. But her son-in-law was transferred to Tokyo, and it is clear they don’t want or need her to come with. In a big twist of fate, she picks up a discarded Lottery ticket in a Circle K parking lot and wins over eight million dollars, giving her a new lease on life, and this vacation for her and her childhood friend Elinor—a week in Paris and then a week on cruise up the Seine—is her first major indulgence.
Not only does she get the upgrade, a very handsome man in line behind her takes charge of her and directs her through TSA, the flight to London, the missed connection to Paris, and even asks her out on a date when they are both back in Baltimore. But on her first night in Paris, Allan, who wasn’t supposed to be in Paris, falls to his death from a hotel balcony, and since she is in his phone…the gendarmes come to speak to her. Her room gets searched—both in the hotel and on the boat—and as she meets other passengers on the boat, she begins to realize that there’s a MacGuffin involved in all of these strange happenings, and is a little sad that Allan might have simply been using her for his own purposes.
BUt for me, as tight and clever as the plot is, the strongest part of the book is Mrs. Blossom, well, blossoming. A woman who is used to being not noticed, to blend in, to make herself small because everyone is judging her about her weight (it happens several times in the narrative, and I wanted to slap the snot out of the people who do it), slowly begins to realize her own worth and value, and begins to assert herself. This vacation of self-discovery, of an older woman shedding her old skin and transforming into a new person, full of confidence and wanting to squeeze every ounce of juice out of her life, was what elevates the book to pure excellence.
Preorder it now, read it, cherish it, and thank me later.
Donna’s Meg actually has an entire menagerie on her own farm as well as access to a zoo.