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Mark Manning Mystery #4
Name Games
Mark Manning, once a prominent journalist at a major daily newspaper in Chicago, is now the owner and publisher of the Dumont Daily Register, the daily paper in a small Wisconsin city. Here the biggest news is the impending city council report on a proposed new adult bookstore zoning law, the upcoming election for Sheriff and the upcoming annual exhibition of the Midwest Miniatures Society. In a unique coup for the first-ever miniatures exhibition in Dumont, the "king of miniatures", Mr. Carroll Cantrell has agreed to come and judge the show's main event.
But the exhibition itself is quickly shoved off the front page of the paper when Cantrell is found murdered in his room. To make matters worse, Doug Pierce, the local sheriff, is widely believed to be responsible. Pierce - a closeted gay man and friend of Mark Manning - had been carrying on an affair with Cantrell and was the last person seen leaving his room before the body was discovered. As conservative elements in Dumont attempt to exploit the murder - and the sheriff's association with the deceased - to their own ends, Manning, with the help of his lover, architect Neil Waite, his staff and friends, starts his own investigation of the murder. With Cantrell having led something of a double life with no end of potential enemies and the miniatures world itself being a hot bed of rivalries and closely held resentments, the truth begins to feel very elusive indeed. As public sentiment begins to swing and time running out for Sheriff Pierce, Mark must uncover some of this close-knit town's most deeply held secrets if he's to learn the truth in time.
But the exhibition itself is quickly shoved off the front page of the paper when Cantrell is found murdered in his room. To make matters worse, Doug Pierce, the local sheriff, is widely believed to be responsible. Pierce - a closeted gay man and friend of Mark Manning - had been carrying on an affair with Cantrell and was the last person seen leaving his room before the body was discovered. As conservative elements in Dumont attempt to exploit the murder - and the sheriff's association with the deceased - to their own ends, Manning, with the help of his lover, architect Neil Waite, his staff and friends, starts his own investigation of the murder. With Cantrell having led something of a double life with no end of potential enemies and the miniatures world itself being a hot bed of rivalries and closely held resentments, the truth begins to feel very elusive indeed. As public sentiment begins to swing and time running out for Sheriff Pierce, Mark must uncover some of this close-knit town's most deeply held secrets if he's to learn the truth in time.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2000
17 people are currently reading
70 people want to read
About the author
Michael Craft
44 books56 followersMichael Craft is the author of 20 published novels, four of which have been honored as finalists for Lambda Literary Awards. The first installment of his Dante & Jazz series, "Desert Getaway," was a 2023 MWA Edgars nominee for the Lilian Jackson Braun Award. The second installment, "Desert Deadline," was a Gold Winner of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, as was his 2019 mystery, "ChoirMaster." In addition, his prize-winning short fiction has appeared in British as well as American literary journals. Craft grew up in Illinois and spent his middle years in Wisconsin, which inspired the fictitious small-town setting of Dumont, used in many of his earlier books. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and now lives in Rancho Mirage, California, near Palm Springs, the setting of his current Dante & Jazz mystery series. In 2017, Michael Craft's professional archives were acquired by the Special Collections Department of the Rivera Library at the University of California, Riverside. Visit the author's website at www.michaelcraft.com.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 14, 2014
Review of “Body Language” and “Name Games”
BY Michael Craft
Four stars
I’m thinking about binge-reading the rest of the Mark Manning books by Michael Craft. Having finished the first four in the series, I’m going to review the second two together—what I think of as the start of the “Dumont” books, for the quiet Wisconsin town that becomes the setting for Mark’s life.
When Michael Craft began publishing the Mark Manning series in 1997, my husband and I were in the throes of being new fathers. There were no Kindles in the world, and I was also in the process of publishing my own first novel. Gay lit just got away from me.
But now, having survived my mid-life crisis because of the world of escape offered to me by my Kindle, and having largely survived the rigors of child-rearing, I am lucky enough to have stumbled across Michael Craft’s landmark series of gay journalist/detective novels featuring Mark Manning.
Mark is a bit of a prig. In fact, in his first book, “Flight Dreams,” he really pissed me off. It was very hard to like him. But I persevered, promised by the author himself that Mark got better. And, not surprisingly, I’ve grown quite fond of Mark. For all his affectations, and all of his irritating macho anxieties, he has become real to me. He’s still a bit stiff; something of a codger for a man only 42 (as of “Body Language,” published in 2000). Still a little too proud of being straight-acting for my taste.
And yet…
I realized, reading “Body Language,” that Mark is my age, calculating for the year of publication. And men my age have a very wide range of stories to tell. We were the first children of Stonewall—too young in the late 1960s to really know what was going on, or to understand fully the potential upside of being gay in a hostile world. Mark Manning and I had quite different paths in life, and I finally came to understand that I had to forgive him for not taking the same route I had taken to middle age. Mark Manning comes out at 39, whereas I became a father. Mark Manning finds love with a man at 39, while I stumbled into it at 20 and was marking two decades with my spouse by 39. Mark and I were both flying blind as children of the sixties. I have to forgive him for having a less direct road than I had.
“Body Language” finds Mark returning, literally and in his memories, to Dumont, Wisconsin, a small city (or, perhaps, big town) where his mother’s family were bigwigs. Having something of another mid-life crisis (career-driven, now that his sexuality is settled happily), Mark looks into moving back to a place he only visited once as a nine-year-old; but a place that nonetheless has an unaccountable hold over his memories for a number of reasons that are revealed to us as the story progresses.
One always has to let go of a certain demand for reality in reading murder mysteries, because the world of the detective (amateur or professional) is always far more fraught with incident and danger than our own worlds are. Mark’s adventures back in Dumont, from the unlikely reacquisition of a fully-furnished family mansion to a wonderfully tortured murder plot, are evocative of David Brandstetter’s in Los Angeles a generation earlier. One reads avidly, waiting to find out what will happen next; how will our hero figure out the solution to the crime in time to prevent the worst from happening? How will the other characters be affected by the events of the story?
But Michael Craft gives us a great deal more. Each book, so far, has stood fairly well alone—because Craft is adept at providing enough backstory to make the whole picture logical for the reader. That said, it is only through reading all of the books in order, as I’m discovering, that we begin to see Manning’s background details filled in, line by line, color by color, to present us with a rich, finely detailed picture against which Manning’s quirky personality stands out in high relief.
“Body Language” focuses on Mark’s childhood memories from his long-ago visit to his Uncle Edwin’s Prairie-School style mansion in Dumont—memories that are happy ones in spite of the unknown sorrows the novel uncovers. The thirty-three year gap between his visit and his return have been filled with twists and turns, and Mark has to untangle them, not only to solve the murder, but to build a new life and understand himself better. “Name Games” carries on that leitmotif, drawing on Mark’s hidden memories from his closeted years as a young journalist, memories that finally help him recognize the key to the mystery at hand. He finds himself pulled all the way into local politics and, rather marvelously, into the world of high-end miniaturists—people who obsess about tiny rooms filled with tiny things.
And all along, we have Mark Manning’s “Greek chorus.” There’s his old friend Roxanne Exner, power lawyer and femme fatale (I am still forgiving her for what happens in book one, “Flight Dreams”). And, of course, there’s Neil Waite, the rather younger, always out and proud architect, who finally forced Mark to recognize where his heart really lay. Neil shared the center of the first book with Mark; but in the subsequent books he is the moon to Mark’s earth: orbiting closely, but never entirely the center of attention. Neil’s gravity influences Mark in important ways, but it is Mark’s life that causes Neil to change his life. This could be problematic, but Craft is careful to give Neil full agency over his own actions, making Neil the stronger of the two men, even though he is inevitably (narratively speaking) second fiddle to his older partner.
The stealthy richness of Craft’s storytelling is in all of the other secondary characters, who quickly become important to the reader’s appreciation of both plot and setting. Doug Pierce, the handsome middle-aged sherriff of Dumont; Thad Quatrain, the angry teenager struggling to find his place in a traumatized family; Miriam Westerman, aging hippy and bellicose feminist, who has more axes to grind than a medieval armorer. These and other characters (for even those that appear but briefly are carefully rendered), create the necessary plot confusion and provide a savory broth for a greatly satisfying tale.
If book one centered on coming out, and book two dealt with fidelity and monogamy; the third and fourth books deal with notions of family and parenthood that rock Mark’s world while casting ever brighter light on his psyche and personality. While first and foremost murder mysteries of fascinating complexity, these books are also object lessons in the shifting dynamics of what it is to be gay in America. As I read through them, completely caught up in plot, I was also, in the back of my mind, seeing surprising echoes of my own life story—with different details and, obviously, with murders and other traumas I never experienced.
In the end, Mark Manning’s character may appeal more to men of a certain age (i.e. the author’s and my age) than to younger readers. But that is a minor caveat, and I hope younger folks will read these books, because the point of a good murder mystery is the mystery, while the character development (as with Hansen’s David Brandstetter, as with Thornton Marshall’s Nick Nowack) is a bonus that only the most thoughtful and gifted writers can offer us.
I have three more of Mark and Neil’s adventures to read. I think I’ll read them right through and let you know how things go.
BY Michael Craft
Four stars
I’m thinking about binge-reading the rest of the Mark Manning books by Michael Craft. Having finished the first four in the series, I’m going to review the second two together—what I think of as the start of the “Dumont” books, for the quiet Wisconsin town that becomes the setting for Mark’s life.
When Michael Craft began publishing the Mark Manning series in 1997, my husband and I were in the throes of being new fathers. There were no Kindles in the world, and I was also in the process of publishing my own first novel. Gay lit just got away from me.
But now, having survived my mid-life crisis because of the world of escape offered to me by my Kindle, and having largely survived the rigors of child-rearing, I am lucky enough to have stumbled across Michael Craft’s landmark series of gay journalist/detective novels featuring Mark Manning.
Mark is a bit of a prig. In fact, in his first book, “Flight Dreams,” he really pissed me off. It was very hard to like him. But I persevered, promised by the author himself that Mark got better. And, not surprisingly, I’ve grown quite fond of Mark. For all his affectations, and all of his irritating macho anxieties, he has become real to me. He’s still a bit stiff; something of a codger for a man only 42 (as of “Body Language,” published in 2000). Still a little too proud of being straight-acting for my taste.
And yet…
I realized, reading “Body Language,” that Mark is my age, calculating for the year of publication. And men my age have a very wide range of stories to tell. We were the first children of Stonewall—too young in the late 1960s to really know what was going on, or to understand fully the potential upside of being gay in a hostile world. Mark Manning and I had quite different paths in life, and I finally came to understand that I had to forgive him for not taking the same route I had taken to middle age. Mark Manning comes out at 39, whereas I became a father. Mark Manning finds love with a man at 39, while I stumbled into it at 20 and was marking two decades with my spouse by 39. Mark and I were both flying blind as children of the sixties. I have to forgive him for having a less direct road than I had.
“Body Language” finds Mark returning, literally and in his memories, to Dumont, Wisconsin, a small city (or, perhaps, big town) where his mother’s family were bigwigs. Having something of another mid-life crisis (career-driven, now that his sexuality is settled happily), Mark looks into moving back to a place he only visited once as a nine-year-old; but a place that nonetheless has an unaccountable hold over his memories for a number of reasons that are revealed to us as the story progresses.
One always has to let go of a certain demand for reality in reading murder mysteries, because the world of the detective (amateur or professional) is always far more fraught with incident and danger than our own worlds are. Mark’s adventures back in Dumont, from the unlikely reacquisition of a fully-furnished family mansion to a wonderfully tortured murder plot, are evocative of David Brandstetter’s in Los Angeles a generation earlier. One reads avidly, waiting to find out what will happen next; how will our hero figure out the solution to the crime in time to prevent the worst from happening? How will the other characters be affected by the events of the story?
But Michael Craft gives us a great deal more. Each book, so far, has stood fairly well alone—because Craft is adept at providing enough backstory to make the whole picture logical for the reader. That said, it is only through reading all of the books in order, as I’m discovering, that we begin to see Manning’s background details filled in, line by line, color by color, to present us with a rich, finely detailed picture against which Manning’s quirky personality stands out in high relief.
“Body Language” focuses on Mark’s childhood memories from his long-ago visit to his Uncle Edwin’s Prairie-School style mansion in Dumont—memories that are happy ones in spite of the unknown sorrows the novel uncovers. The thirty-three year gap between his visit and his return have been filled with twists and turns, and Mark has to untangle them, not only to solve the murder, but to build a new life and understand himself better. “Name Games” carries on that leitmotif, drawing on Mark’s hidden memories from his closeted years as a young journalist, memories that finally help him recognize the key to the mystery at hand. He finds himself pulled all the way into local politics and, rather marvelously, into the world of high-end miniaturists—people who obsess about tiny rooms filled with tiny things.
And all along, we have Mark Manning’s “Greek chorus.” There’s his old friend Roxanne Exner, power lawyer and femme fatale (I am still forgiving her for what happens in book one, “Flight Dreams”). And, of course, there’s Neil Waite, the rather younger, always out and proud architect, who finally forced Mark to recognize where his heart really lay. Neil shared the center of the first book with Mark; but in the subsequent books he is the moon to Mark’s earth: orbiting closely, but never entirely the center of attention. Neil’s gravity influences Mark in important ways, but it is Mark’s life that causes Neil to change his life. This could be problematic, but Craft is careful to give Neil full agency over his own actions, making Neil the stronger of the two men, even though he is inevitably (narratively speaking) second fiddle to his older partner.
The stealthy richness of Craft’s storytelling is in all of the other secondary characters, who quickly become important to the reader’s appreciation of both plot and setting. Doug Pierce, the handsome middle-aged sherriff of Dumont; Thad Quatrain, the angry teenager struggling to find his place in a traumatized family; Miriam Westerman, aging hippy and bellicose feminist, who has more axes to grind than a medieval armorer. These and other characters (for even those that appear but briefly are carefully rendered), create the necessary plot confusion and provide a savory broth for a greatly satisfying tale.
If book one centered on coming out, and book two dealt with fidelity and monogamy; the third and fourth books deal with notions of family and parenthood that rock Mark’s world while casting ever brighter light on his psyche and personality. While first and foremost murder mysteries of fascinating complexity, these books are also object lessons in the shifting dynamics of what it is to be gay in America. As I read through them, completely caught up in plot, I was also, in the back of my mind, seeing surprising echoes of my own life story—with different details and, obviously, with murders and other traumas I never experienced.
In the end, Mark Manning’s character may appeal more to men of a certain age (i.e. the author’s and my age) than to younger readers. But that is a minor caveat, and I hope younger folks will read these books, because the point of a good murder mystery is the mystery, while the character development (as with Hansen’s David Brandstetter, as with Thornton Marshall’s Nick Nowack) is a bonus that only the most thoughtful and gifted writers can offer us.
I have three more of Mark and Neil’s adventures to read. I think I’ll read them right through and let you know how things go.
December 25, 2019
Name Games is very much in the vein of the previous books of the series. It gathers a gallery of familiar characters, some of whom we get to know little better along the pages, in a fun and entertaining story.
The writing is, I think, improving a little, though there are still some clumsy turns of phrase and too much of a tendency to repeat contextual information that the reader is already well aware of.
I guessed who the killer was about halfway through but that didn't distract too much.
The writing is, I think, improving a little, though there are still some clumsy turns of phrase and too much of a tendency to repeat contextual information that the reader is already well aware of.
I guessed who the killer was about halfway through but that didn't distract too much.
January 7, 2019
The series gets better and better!
This entry in the Mark Manning series is (with apologies to the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang movie) truly scrumptious! The characters continue to develop and keep me intrigued with where they are going and how (or if) they will get there. The mystery centered around the world of miniatures is unique and revealing. As stated in previous reviews, I did not want to put this down. I don't want this series to ever end.
This entry in the Mark Manning series is (with apologies to the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang movie) truly scrumptious! The characters continue to develop and keep me intrigued with where they are going and how (or if) they will get there. The mystery centered around the world of miniatures is unique and revealing. As stated in previous reviews, I did not want to put this down. I don't want this series to ever end.
December 8, 2023
Another good entry in the Mark Manning series. This one I had figured out a bit quicker, but there were a lot of things I still didn't know for sure until the end of the book.
On to the next one.
On to the next one.
April 22, 2016
Another win!!!!
craft is a great writer, the characters are so rich with details, and it seems each book gives more details of Mark Manning.
Granted the are minor not much important with the story , their is always a loose connection , but I love series that like these.
It's almost impossible to find gay mysteries that are so engaging and greatly roll models.
I much prefer the small town flavor his first two seemed to far to really create side characters.
If I was to complain about anything it would be the dream sequences. This book was less repetitive in the dreams but it to me their wearing a bit thin.
Otherwise this is a great story as each new book in the series is better and more interesting then the last.
craft is a great writer, the characters are so rich with details, and it seems each book gives more details of Mark Manning.
Granted the are minor not much important with the story , their is always a loose connection , but I love series that like these.
It's almost impossible to find gay mysteries that are so engaging and greatly roll models.
I much prefer the small town flavor his first two seemed to far to really create side characters.
If I was to complain about anything it would be the dream sequences. This book was less repetitive in the dreams but it to me their wearing a bit thin.
Otherwise this is a great story as each new book in the series is better and more interesting then the last.
August 1, 2015
This book should be retitled Niles Crane Solves a Murder because I kept seeing David Hyde Pierce as the main character, Mark Manning. His behavior, worries, and mannerisms all reminded me of Frasier's neurotic brother Niles. Mark Manning is not the kind of guy who should be solving any mysteries because he majors in the minors. He gets too distracted by miscellaneous things like the kind of pen someone uses, how hot someone's coffee is, and how hot he looks in a T-shirt and a pair of running shorts that he just can't seem to focus on the big picture. His distractions, unfortunately, become our distractions and take away from the plot. There are some funny and campy characters here, but I guess I wanted more of a gritty mystery and Name Games just didn't do it for me.
May 15, 2023
Fun, easy reading. However, Mark can be a bit of a narcissistic prat at times. I don’t know how Neil
stands him sometimes.
stands him sometimes.
December 3, 2013
a great fun rainy day gay mystery with more plot and some great characters. a small town sheriff is outed by a fake extortion letter in investigating the murder of a celebrity visiting to judge a minature furnite roombox competition.
January 13, 2024
Mark has another mystery to solve and this time he must clear his friend's name in the process. With the help of Neil they uncover alot of victim and his connection to adult star in the past. I liked this mystery.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews