Book Review: The Lady of Sorrows
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by Anne Zouroudi
Little, Brown, 2014
"His body was absolutely corpulent," but his face had a sharpness of expression just the same — so we're told about Mycroft Holmes, whom Arthur Conan Doyle presents as a counterpoint to his brother Sherlock not only in his even greater powers of ratiocination but also, especially, in his gross indolence. Not for Mycroft the tramping over desolate moors in all hours, nor the incognito at opium dens or the livery stables of the wealthy. Brilliant he may be, but he exercises, if that's quite the word, his brilliance only in a track running from his lodgings in Pall Mall to his office at Whitehall to his chair at the Diogenes Club.
A faint echo of that counterpoint has run through detective fiction ever since. Always the spotlight belongs to the lithe sleuth-hounds, the men and women who go everywhere and risk everything and skip meals in the process, but mystery authors have from time to time still made room for the Mycrofts of their craft, the 'fat men' who solve crimes in their own eccentric ways, from Mycroft himself (the hero of more than one series of novels) to Rex Stout's infamous Nero Wolfe to Michael Bond's unjustly forgotten Monsieur Pamplemousse (skipping over here Reginald Hill's beloved Fat Man Andy Dalziel, who somehow still manages to go everywhere and risk everything, although he wouldn't miss a meal for owt) ... to Hermes Diaktoros of Athens, the hero of a delightful ongoing series of murder mysteries by Anne Zouroudi set in the Greek Isles. The latest of these mysteries, The Lady of Sorrows, is new from Little, Brown and continues a very strong series.
The lady in the title is a centuries-old religious icon located in the Church of the Lady of Sorrows on the tiny Greek island of Kalkos. The place is famous for the icon, visited by a steady stream of admirers year round, one of whom is Zouroudi's slightly enigmatic fat man, who's enough of a connoisseur of art to perceive, upon his first close examination of the icon, that it's a well-done fake. And it's only shortly after this discovery that a famous icon-painter (with a shady past, some of which we've been tantalizingly shown in the book's expertly-done opening segment) is found dead off the island's coast. Just that quick, Hermes Diaktoros, no stranger to strange events, is drawn into another adventure, and Zourodi sets out to give her readers yet another sensuous and entirely winning mental vacation in the brightly-lit world of contemporary Greece.
It's a world of slower rhythms than the hectic urban West (most certainly including Athens - for that world, readers are urged to seek out Paul Johnston's gripping Alex Mavros mysteries from the superb Creme De La Crime), and Zouroudi doesn't set her fat man in opposition to those rhythms; rather, as he pieces together the fabric of the local scene from the comfort of his private yacht Aphrodite, Diaktoros adapts perfectly, some antsy readers will say maddeningly, to the more relaxed pace all around him:
Yawning, he brushed the bread crumbs from his shirt-front and walked up to the prow, where a hammock was stretched beneath a canvas awning. The deck boards were hot to his feet; the Aphrodite rocked lazily on the swell of some distant ship.As the fat man climbed into the hammock and closed his eyes, the first breath of a breeze set the mast flags fluttering. Through the open galley window, Enrico, washing dishes, whistled a bawdy seaman's song; but the fat man by now was dozing and did not hear.
The fat man possesses the requisite Mycroft-sharp mind, but he's also an unabashed gourmand and aesthete, and our author clearly revels in bringing that rarefied world to life:
In the bathroom, he dried himself and wrapped a white towel around his waist. Using a badger-hair brush, he spread shaving cream over his face and shaved with a silver-handled razor. From a bottle of his favorite cologne (the creation of a renowned French parfumier: a blend of bitter-orange neroli, the honey notes of immortelle and the earthy tang of vetiver), he splashed a few drops into his palms and patted it on to his cheeks. With a fingerful of pomade from a small jar, he smoothed his damp curls, then cleaned his teeth with powder flavored with cloves and wintergreen, ran the tip of a steel file behind his fingernails and polished each with a chamois buffer.
Readers who are themselves connoisseurs of the mystery genre will foresee the potential problem with all this, and some of their forebodings will be justified: there are far more earthy tangs of vetiver in Zouroudi's "Seven Deadly Sins" series than there are left-uppercuts or hastily-scaled garden walls. A detective who has dealings with renowned French parfumiers is unlikely to be found in a tense armed standoff with the bad guy, snarling "do you feel lucky, punk?" When we cast our lot with Mycroft instead of Sherlock, we must be prepared for longueurs. It's very much to Zouroudi's credit that she makes these longueurs both enjoyable and often quite lovely:
For a little while, the fat man took the liberty of wandering through the garden, idling along the paths and stopping to look more closely at what took his eye. He admired the berries on a strawberry tree, and for some minutes studied a large-leafed plant, deciding whether it was tobacco or mandrake. The branches of a peach tree held a heavy, soft-skinned crop; around the roots, wasps fed on the brown-bruised flesh of overripe, fallen fruit.
And as for the actual mystery involving the Lady of Sorrows, rest assured, our gallant fat man discovers everything ... eventually.