2 new mystery novels that make perfect summer reads

Mysteries, crime fiction, whodunits, detective stories — all these terms are regularly used interchangeably. Yet golden-age puzzles are poles apart from modern-day police procedurals. The former are essentially clever intellectual games in which the author hopes to fool the reader; the latter are, as the old “Dragnet” radio show used to say, stories “of your police force in action.” Both, however, can provide ideal summertime reading, as two new books demonstrate.

Set in late-1930s Britain, Tom Mead’s “Cabaret Macabre” opens with the discovery of a mutilated body in the Thames. Whose is it? This is just the first of a succession of mysteries, all of them revolving around a judge, Sir Giles Drury.

Nine years earlier, this distinguished jurist’s secretary died of strychnine poisoning during a Christmas holiday dinner at the Drury family’s country estate. Crazed with grief, the secretary’s fiancé, Victor Silvius, then tried to kill Sir Giles, convinced that he was responsible. Victor has since been incarcerated in a private psychiatric facility and forgotten — except by his devoted sister Caroline, who comes to police Inspector Flint because it appears that someone has been attempting to murder her brother, whom she claims is now perfectly sane.

Meanwhile, Sir Giles has been receiving threatening letters, leading his wife, Lady Elspeth, to hire private investigator Joseph Spector to find out who is behind them. Soon this former stage magician — who first appeared in 2022’s “Death and the Conjurer” and returned last year in “The Murder Wheel” — again joins forces with Inspector Flint, this time to look more closely into the secretary’s death and to probe the connections between the distinguished jurist and the mental patient.

As the investigation proceeds, Mead gradually introduces the highly dysfunctional Drury family, notably four sons, including one from Lady Elspeth’s first marriage and one from a youthful indiscretion by Sir Giles. Then, one night someone takes a shot at the judge.

All of the above is essentially preamble to the assembling of Mead’s dramatis personae at the Drury country house during another Christmas season. On his second morning there, Spector notices a rowboat in the middle of the estate’s frozen lake. Lying inside it is a man with a “chunky knife handle protruding from his chest.” How did the victim, killed on land, end up in a boat in the middle of a frozen lake when it would appear impossible to manage this without breaking the ice? And, perhaps just as important, why did the murderer bother?

Other deaths will follow, some quite macabre (aspects of the plot recall the anonymous 17th-century “Revenger’s Tragedy”). As one would expect, clues and red herrings abound. Does it matter that one character is colorblind? What is the purpose of a secret society of aristocrats called the Tragedians? There are Agatha Christie-like twists aplenty and a final scene that Patricia Highsmith might have imagined. All in all, if you’re looking for diversion — and these days who isn’t? — this latest novel in Mead’s Joseph Spector series will do the trick.

Trick, though, is the operative word. What we enjoy in books like “Cabaret Macabre” is the author’s ability to astonish us. Years ago, Raymond Chandler derided the inherent artificiality of such puzzle-oriented whodunits and in his own work seldom paid much heed to perfectly calibrated plotting. When asked who murdered the chauffeur in “The Big Sleep,” Chandler famously answered, “I don’t know” and implied that he didn’t really care. What mattered to him instead were more literary matters such as depicting political and societal corruption, illuminating character, and creating a now much-imitated style that combines the hard-boiled, world-weary and poetic.

You will find similar emphases in the work of K.C. Constantine, the pen name of the reclusive Carl Kosak, who died in 2023 at age 88. Starting with “The Rocksburg Railroad Murders” in 1972, Constantine chronicled the life and decline of a small Pennsylvania steel town in one brilliantly idiosyncratic police procedural after another. “Another Day’s Pain” is the 18th and final, unexpected installment in this series, which focuses on either Chief of Police Mario Balzic or Detective Sgt. Ruggiero “Rugs” Carlucci.

Located not far from Pittsburgh, the fictional Rocksburg is the kind of working-class community where men in patched khakis carry battered lunchboxes to work and on weekends drink Iron City beer and tend little plots of tomatoes and peppers. Early on in “Grievance,” the previous novel featuring Carlucci (published in 2000), Constantine mentions eight foremen from the shuttered steel plant, each a possible suspect in a murder case: Steven W. Abramovic, Albert F. Bodnar, John J. Czarowicz, Regis A. Horvath, Edward T. Novotniak, Rudolph R. Shimkus, Paul J. Sroka, Luke J. Stefanko. Anyone from the Rust Belt of Pennsylvania and Ohio will recognize their names as being no more unusual than Dirda.

While the now 57-year-old Carlucci is the viewpoint character of “Another Day’s Pain,” the novel provides brief walk-ons for such regulars as the lawyer Panagios Valcanos, Fire Chief Eddie Sitko and even 84-year-old Balzic. Rugs’s girlfriend, Fran Perfetti, once the third runner-up to Miss Pennsylvania, also plays an important part. As usual, Constantine exhibits perfect pitch for vernacular speech, rivaling that of George V. Higgins or Chester Himes.

Throughout the melancholy-tinged Rocksburg novels, hard-working men and women are repeatedly exploited or victimized by insurance companies, a seemingly uncaring state and federal government, corrupt local officials, and the rich and powerful in general. They live with quiet desperation. How do you support your family when you lose your job at the mill and can’t find another? How do you care for a mother suffering from dementia or a wife who is diagnosed with breast cancer? And how does it feel when you end up pushing a broom for minimum wage as your life’s savings get eaten up by medical expenses while tan billionaires play golf at elite country clubs and dodge paying any taxes whatsoever? As a character in “Another Day’s Pain” concludes, everyone knows that “the only reason there’s any charitable foundations is so rich people can hide their money. ’Cause believe me, what they have to give away each year to keep their tax-exempt status is nothing compared to the taxes they’d have to pay if somebody, you know, actually had the guts to repeal that part of the Internal Revenue Code.” Being fundamentally decent men and women, Constantine’s characters endure until they can’t take it anymore.

In “Another Day’s Pain” — set mainly in 2011-2012 — everyone in Rocksburg has gotten a decade older since “Grievance,” and everything has gotten worse. One desperate father can’t find a job except working at Walmart as a greeter; Fran Perfetti is worn out by caring for her bedridden mother and dealing with an endless round of medical bills; Councilman Egidio Figulli keeps hounding Carlucci to retire. As we follow the detective sergeant through a few days in August, he confronts a violent schizophrenic woman and a crazed shooter named Ronald Reagan Kipple, suffers grievous injuries, learns horrifying details about his mother’s past, and reveals the shocking reason that he joined the Army to fight in Vietnam.

“Another Day’s Pain” is a somewhat choppy book, shifting rapidly from scene to scene, from one conversation to another, but its power is undeniable. Despondency and madness — as well as bitter gallows humor — are what await the men and women in the once-flourishing Rocksburg. In truth, there’s no mystery in “Another Day’s Pain” except the insoluble one of life itself. It’s a surprisingly appropriate and moving finale — a dying fall, a sorrowful diminuendo — to one of the most impressive oeuvres in modern American fiction.