J. Sydney Jones, The Empty Mirror (Minotaur Books, 2009)
J. Sydney Jones, Requiem in Vienna (Minotaur Books, 2010)
A while back, I happened upon a copy of Frank Tallis's Murder in Vienna in one of our favorite used bookstores. At the time I was ready for another piece of fiction, so I dove into it right away. Set in the capital of Austria at the end of the nineteenth century, Murder in Vienna is redolent with the sounds and sights, smells and flavors of Vienna, and peopled with a number of historical characters that added to the authenticity and richness of a splendid murder mystery. I greatly enjoyed it, discovered it was part of a series, and tracked down the other titles. As soon as I've read those, I'll give you an omnibus review to whet your appetite.
Then Minotaur sent us the Advance Uncorrected Proofs for Requiem in Vienna, the second book in yet another murder mystery series set in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. Although the lead characters are different, the overall ambiance, both physical and cultural, is sufficiently consistent between the two series so that I could easily imagine crossovers (think CSI: New York meets Law and Order: Special Victims Unit). Mind you, I am hardly complaining! I find them both entertaining and very satisfying.
Although I read The Empty Mirror after Requiem in Vienna, I'll give you the review in chronological order to prevent confusion about the time sequence. I will note at the outset that Jones handles the recap quite neatly, giving just enough information from the first novel to enable a reader picking up the second one to get the gist of the characters, but not so much that said reader would find it anticlimactic to encounter the stories in reverse order, as I did by chance.
Jones has populated these novels with a mix of fictitious and real historical characters. I immediately and easily recognized names such as Gustav Klimt and Gustav Mahler, the painter and conductor/composer who appear in The Empty Mirror and Requiem in Vienna respectively. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose later assassination at Sarajevo sparked the onset of the First World War, appears as a very real person in The Empty Mirror. I would never have guessed, however, that Hanns Gross, one of the three main characters in the series, was himself a real historical person. According to the Dramatis Personae page on Jones' Web site, Dr. Gross was indeed one of the founders of modern forensic science, likely a source of ideas for the Sherlock Holmes series penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle during the same period.
The other two main characters are, to the best of my knowledge, fictitious. At least the only references to their names I find when I submit them to Google are in other reviews of these novels. Karl Werthen is a thirty-something lawyer at the opening of The Empty Mirror in August 1898. (I always appreciate dates in historical novels, don't you?) He is the eldest and sole surviving son of a mercantile Jewish family that, like many of Austria's elite aspirants, had converted to Protestantism in the 1870s. Grieving the illness and death of his fiancée six years earlier, Werthen shifted his practice away from his first love, criminal law, to the more staid and lucrative specialty of wills and trusts. He occasionally writes short stories as a sideline. He lives in very spacious and pleasant quarters and has a housekeeper named Frau Blatschky, who serves him outrageous meals. Fortunately Werthen is of a naturally spare build, which his investigative collaborator Dr. Gross is definitely not!
The third main character makes her initial appearance about midway through The Empty Mirror. Karl falls in love with Berthe Meisner after their first conversation at his parents' house, where she is introduced as the friend of their most recent candidate for Karl's wife. A practicing Jew (her father is a Talmudic scholar) in her mid-20s, Berthe is sufficiently liberated so that she works at a day care center run by the city. Karl risks alienation from his family in order to marry Berthe. They shock Frau Blatschky by sleeping in the same room. Gross is hardly the only one of their acquaintances to have difficulty dealing with her decision to retain her maiden name upon their marriage. Indeed, I can only imagine how radical this choice would have been in 1899!
The painter Gustav Klimt is the additional main character in The Empty Mirror. Indeed, it is because the police suspect Klimt in a series of grisly murders that Karl resumes his criminal investigation work. His friend Gross delays his assumption of an academic appointment at the University of Czernowitz in the province of Bukovina to take part in this effort. Actually, because of his age (early fifties), his reputation, and his rather forceful personality, Gross often eclipses the more reticent Werthen in their collaborations.
Although Klimt makes a few brief appearances in Requiem in Vienna, the additional main character in this installment is the composer Gustav Mahler, who comes under attack several times. He's too stubborn to call upon Werthen and Gross himself; Alma Schindler, a rather attractive young woman who hopes to become Mahler's wife, takes the initiative in obtaining the services of the investigative duo. In this novel, the marriage of Karl and Berthe is a fait accompli, although they are still working out the dynamics of the relationship to their mutual satisfaction. Not at all surprisingly, Karl is far more traditional in his expectations than Berthe.
A professional writer, J. Sydney Jones lived in Vienna for nearly twenty years. He had already written a couple of travel guides to Vienna and a piece of historical non-fiction set there in the early twentieth century before he started this series. While the mysteries are indeed quite satisfying in their complexity, and the characters are sympathetic without being overly sweet, I found the setting and the historical background to be the standout elements in this series. Jones' obvious familiarity with the city's streets, buildings, cuisine and weather -- combined with his evident fascination with this period in the city's history -- enabled him to provide a lot of detail that makes these novels especially enjoyable. I look forward to seeing the series and the characters develop further.
