Review: All This I Will Give to You

All This I Will Give to You by Dolores Redondo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Long ago I learned to distinguish mysteries between the “cozy,” or classic whodunit, and noir. The fundamental difference between them is that, implicitly, solving the mystery of the cozy restores a comfortable order while, whatever the specific crime of the noir, we’re led to see a deeper and unhealed corruption.

In that equation, give me noir any day. I don’t ask to celebrate the fact that the universe is fundamentally disinterested in us, but, respecting that perspective, I’m routinely stunned by the eloquent, doomed heroic, and dark view the genre presents.

I do understand, though, that the whodunit cozy has its fans. There’s something reassuring in the sense that an intrepid detective can arrive on the scene and straighten everything out. It’s a fundamentally optimistic view of the world, whether we get it in the mode of Agatha Christie/Murder She Wrote or in something darker, like this.

To put it simply, then, All This I Give You is a cozy mystery with many of the trappings of noir. There are noir dimensions to it. In one I wish Redondo explored more we learn that the Marquis’s family fortune came about because he threw in with the Franco regime. In other, much more elaborated possibilities, we see the sexual politics and drug-addiction-as-consequence of socio-political pressures.

As the novel proceeds, though, Redondo downplays most of that dark material in favor of the classic detective narrative. [SPOILER: If you doubt any of that, consider the way the novel ends with the reveal that our protagonist’s husband was heading back to him at the end – it’s a “you were right about your love” kind of moment, complete with the satisfaction that the conniving sister-in-law can be proved to have an “heir” by the wrong man, leaving the fortune and title instead to the loving you nephew. In other words, all’s right with the world at the end.]

Perhaps my biggest complaint here is the method of investigation. Whenever anyone has a question for a potential suspect or for some old hanger-on of the estate, it’ a straightforward conversation. After a while, I found myself thinking of Non-Player-Characters in video games, those figures who have crucial information that they willingly share but only after the protagonist finds his way to them. Otherwise they’re flat and immobile.

I will give Redondo points for a nice ability to throw believable red herrings for our suspects. The ending is satisfying from an unraveling perspective as well as a I-was-fooled pleasure. As it goes, though, it asks a lot of us in the way of keeping characters straight and in filing away precious details that may or may not matter.

As a bottom line, though, I didn’t know to be looking for such clues most of the first half of the book. Yes, I recognized it was a mystery, but I was stuck in the noir world, and I was preparing myself for an ethical vision about the corrupt and homophobic world thwarting our nobler instincts. By the time I realized this was a more modest work – by the time I realize it was a cozy – I was in a hurry to see how this more modest puzzle got solved.

It is well-solved. It’s just not as ambitious as I’d hoped.


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