When you watch TV shows about New York, people are always dropping by. People drop by Jerry’s apartment or Rachel’s or Bob’s or Oscar and Felix’s. I don’t know how accurate that is – no one drops by my apartment, which is probably a good thing because I don’t like to clean. For awhile, we had one friend who did feel comfortable enough to just drop by – and then he moved out of the city and far away. I’ve always envied people who live in a community of togetherness, where people just drop by like on TV.*
Which is why, I think, I like Jane Haddam’s mysteries. Because the main character, Gregor Demarkian, lives in a community where people just drop by, an Armenian-American enclave within Philadelphia.
Gregor grew up in this community, the son of immigrant parents who moved there because everyone they knew moved there. He worked hard as a child and earned a spot at Penn and a graduate degree at Harvard, and worked for the FBI for 20 years and lived in an apartment in DC, and went home only for twice, once for his mother’s funeral. And then his beloved wife died of cancer and left his life empty and burnt out. Retired, he returned to the neighborhood where he had grown up, expecting it to have become like the rest of Philadelphia. And discovered, instead, that it had become a fairyland where all the kids of his generation had made it big and come back and fixed up the neighborhood. They either moved back, or stayed, or lived elsewhere and took care of their parents by renovating their apartments and buying them everything they could in appreciation.
And everyone drops by.
Maybe a little too much for Gregor, who is a bit of a curmudgeon. His apartment is sparse and undecorated for the holidays, in a community where everyone else is over-decorating. When the book starts, he has been called by the priest of the Armenian church, a refugee from Eastern Europe, where his wife died in one of those Russian prisons like where Nalvany died. The priest speaks many languages – modern and dead – inhabits a book-filled apartment up the stairs from his church, and takes in refugees. He is not naïve, and he became worried when Robert Hannaford, a very rich man of old Philadelphia money, dropped by and offered him a suitcase of cash for his church to persuade Gregor to have Christmas dinner with his family.
Gregor, whose life has begun to re-thaw, feels the stirrings of professional interest. He agrees that Hannaford’s motives seem opaque; and he agrees to go to the dinner.
Hannaford’s home is a complete contrast to the Armenian neighborhood. A 40-room mansion on Philadelphia’s main line, with a small apartment block for the live-in servants, it is so isolated from the community that the neighborhood, neighbors, are never mentioned. The family – Hannaford, his ailing wife, the adult daughter who stayed home to care for her mother, and five other adult children who have been brought together by two of the children for nefarious purposes of their own but agreed to come each for his or her own reason – where was I? The family drift through this mansion like ghosts.** You’re never sure exactly where anyone is, which makes it more challenging when family members start getting murdered.
Luckily Gregor is there when the first murder happens.
This book is the first in Haddam’s holiday mystery series. From here she marched on through every major holiday – religious, American, and Jewish – switched to other occasions like birthdays and homecoming, and eventually dropped the whole “holiday” theme thing altogether. Haddam built her writing discipline as a romance writer, then switched to mysteries, kicked off this series by releasing several books per year (!), then settled down to a steady book a year through 2014 when she stopped. The last book in the series was published in 2020, the year after her death.
Which means, if you read this first one and like it, you have a lot of other books in which to enjoy Gregor Demarkian, his cozy Armenian-American neighborhood, and his deepening relationship with Bennis Hannaford, who takes an apartment in Gregor’s building, I think because she sees his proximity as protective against the crazy SFF fans who are stalking her (for her books). Haddam is smart – she knows the moment Gregor and Bennis’s relationship moves in a romantic direction, the gig is off, like Dorothy Sayers learned to our great regret but oh it was a glorious flame-out. The only mystery writer I know that has pulled it off is Margery Allingham, but the love story there was always second in nature to the mystery…
I haven’t read all the books in this series. I dropped out about half way through. (Although now, I think, I need to download the rest and read those, too, especially the one published posthumously, just to see what happens and how the neighborhood changes over the years.) And, over the books I’ve read, the quality stayed consistent. They are well-plotted with large murders interspersed with little mysteries and problems within the community, which neighbors drop at Gregor’s door like a cat presenting a mouse on the doormat. The books are jam-packed with characters, Armenian-American characters, Roman Catholic Irish characters, wealthy people who are unhappy despite their money, anxious people just trying to get ahead, people who think they should be able to tell other people what to do, people trying to pull a fast-one. If you like characters, these books will satisfy that need.
So drop by Haddam’s neighborhood for a cup of coffee and a mystery. You won’t regret it.
*How normal is this, that people just drop by, anywhere? My cousin, who lived in a gated community in Miami the last time I visited her, held a pretty open house. Her friends and neighbors were always dropping by – although I remember that she did get pretty upset with one of them who just walked into her home without ringing the doorbell or at least cracking the door and hollering, Yoo-hoo, you ready for company? But aside from that, I don’t know anyone who has this relationship with their neighbors. They are saying that one of the reasons that “young people” (pick your generation, the “young people” are always in trouble for some reason) are so angry right now is that they have unrealistic expectations about how people live, based on social media. They think, because they see influencers living in fancy houses, with big closets full of expensive clothes and shoes, and traveling everywhere all the time, and eating out all the time, that this is what their lives should be like, and they are angry at the older generations for taking that away from them. Uh, well, the older generations worked the same kind of sh*t jobs they work now, and shared tiny apartments with too many roommates in rotten neighborhoods, and ate ramen and boxed mac and cheese until they had saved enough money for their own tiny apartment in a rotten neighborhood waaaaaaay out on the train line to nowhere. Yes, it is different now than when I was the age of people who are currently entering the workforce – they have more challenges, with the housing shortage and the burdening cost of student loans. And the 0.01% are sucking up a whole lot more of the wealth in this country, increasing the number of have-nots. And it is still unrealistic to think that, if you are straight out of college and don’t have parents who can subsidize your lifestyle, that you’re going to live like an influencer. It never ceases to amaze me, when watching House Hunters, how many first-time buyers say they have to have a 3-bed/2-bath home with a garage and a big yard – whatever happened to the starter home? So maybe my expectation of “people dropping by” just because that’s what happens on TV falls into the same category as all this and I’ve gone on faaaaar too long for a post about books.
**Which also resonated with me. I used to say that you could walk into my mother’s house when we were all home for Christmas, and think the place was empty. We all retreated to our corners and did our own thing and called it “being together.” Unlike my husband’s first generation Filipino-American family: when they get together, they are all in the same room all the time, cooking, watching TV, chatting, looking at photographs… I said once that, if they could, they’d all sit on the same chair. And then we went to my father-in-law’s for Christmas and I walked into the living room: my husband was sitting in an armchair with his laptop, showing pictures. His mother was sitting on one arm of the chair, his father was leaning over the back, one sister was sitting on the other arm of the chair, and the other sister was sitting on the floor, leaning back against the chair, looking up at the laptop. As you can imagine, my coming together with this family was a bit of a shock. For them and for me.
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