Pun Salad

I've been taking my time working through Mary Roach's books. (Fortunately, the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library book-selector seems to be a fan as well.) This one is from 2003, and it's Mary's usual travel guide into weird, gross, and (occasionally) hilarious topics that would be considered off-limits in polite dinner party conversation. In this case, as the subtitle says, it's about dead people and what can happen to their bodies (or parts).

There are a lot of possible paths and destinations: organ donation, of course; anatomy class; crash testing; wound research; testing the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin; cannibalism. And more.

One of Mary's investigations takes her to the island of Hainan to investigate reports of cannibalism. Reader, it's not a tourist spot.

Another fun fact: painter Diego Rivera was not just a fan of Marxism also cannibalism!

Mary is often irreverent, with a smart-ass remark never far away. I get the feeling that her everyday conversation can be considerably more R-rated than the prose that makes it into her books. But some things are (literally) dead serious here; one example is her description of the detective work carried out on the recovered bodies from the doomed TWA Flight 800 in 1996. Was it a bomb? A missile? A bolide? Theories abounded, but the investigators managed to debunk them, thanks to clues provided by the corpses.

It never hurts (much) to be reminded that our survivors are going to need to somehow dispose of our remains, and Mary devotes a couple final chapters discussing possible alternatives. There are a lot of them! One intriguing one was "alkaline hydrolysis", which involves a few hours in a pressure cooker, submerged in a lye solution. The process results in a pH-neutral sterile liquid that can safely go in the sewage system, and crumbled-up bones. It is, at least theoretically, more environmentally-friendly than usual cremation via flame.

As noted, this book is from 2003. Surely, things have changed since then? A little Googling shows that progress has been slow on that front. Although there have been a lot of euphemistic names proposed for the procedure: "water cremation", "aquamation", "resomation", …

But what really surprised me: it's illegal in New Hampshire! Your survivors, if they desire to go that route, will need to trundle you off to Vermont or Maine.

I will remind you that the NH motto is "Live Free or Die". Perhaps they should add "But when you die, don't think about being free to use alkaline hydrolysis."

(My guess is that Catholic opposition to the process explains its continuing illegality here. Also verboten is "human composting", another possibility Mary describes.)

I notice that after a long hiatus, Mary has a new book coming out in September: Replaceable You. If I haven't undergone alkaline hydrolysis by then, I'll be grabbing it off the library shelf.

The fifth (and, as I type, most recent) book in Stephen Spotswood's "Pentecost and Parker" series. "Pentecost" is Lillian Pentecost, famed proprietor of her late 1940s New York City detective agency. And "Parker" is Willowjean, her diligent, wisecracking investigative assistant, who narrates most of the book. (There are some excerpts from Lillian's journal.) Two out of the five back cover blurbs make reference to the similar, obvious, precedent of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe/Archie Godwin mysteries.

But this one moves off formula: an antagonist has been shot in the head at a shindig where he had promised to reveal a dark part of Lillian's family history to the world. Lillian arrives to confront him, and … bang, bang, he's dead, apparently shot by Lillian. Ballistics seem to point to her gun! Lillian is arrested, awaiting trial in the wretched "House of D" ladies' prison. To make it worse, one of the prison guards has it in for her.

So Willowjean is tasked with clearing her boss's name, finding the truth about what happened. It is a classically convoluted plot, with numerous possible suspects, each with possible motives. A lot of red herrings. Never fear, eventually the truth is uncovered, Lillian is cleared. This is a continuing series, after all; the outcome is never in doubt. And there's a setup for (I assume) book number six.

Trivia, not that it matters: I caught an anachronism at the start of chapter 38, where Willowjean's girlfriend, Holly, is "stubbing out her Chesterfield in the Folgers can." Ah, in 1947, that would have been a "Folger's can", with an apostrophe. The brand didn't lose its apostrophe until 1963 when acquired by Proctor & Gamble.

The mystery follows the "classic" formula in another way I've always found a tad irritating: Lillian and Willowjean figure out the true culprit, and accumulate supporting evidence, without telling the reader. Yes, this sets up for the Grand Reveal at Lillian's trial later. But this I-know-but-you-don't game kind of emphasizes the artificiality of the narration.

I also found it unfortunate that Spotswood saw fit to append a virtue-signalling "Author's Note" where he bemoans "a wave of laws passed across the country criminalizing gender and sexuality, and stripping women of their bodily autonomy." Sigh. Eye roll. Shut up and write.