I have been reading the mystery novels of the late Jane Haddam, novels that are good in their very idiosyncratic way. Her formula is to begin by recounting the interior monologues of a large collection of (usually unpleasant) characters in a setting that is technically possible (convention of Catholic nuns, clinic for the indigent in Manhattan, replica of the Mayflower, etcetera) and then drag in her detective, a former FBI administrator with expertise in poison and serial killers. Her detective also has an interior life, generally baffled and ruminative. He is called in for a consultation when someone dies in a way that offends someone powerful, and then people give him way too much slack.

Theoretically, his home turf is Philadelphia. It’s no Philadelphia I know, and I have lived here most of my life. Though I don’t know much about convents in upstate New York, I often do know something about Haddam’s settings, and my knowledge (of Main Line wealth of the 20th century, for instance) cheerfully contradicts her descriptions. The most recent book I read was set in a New York City clinic in a tough neighborhood, and the setting is frankly ridiculous. I’ve been in bad neighborhoods, and spent a lot of time in New York City when it was in terrible shape, and while there have been shootings on my block in the past, they are nothing like what she describes in her opening scene. Also, that particular clinic would not have been dealing with them.

Most of her books are set-ups for a series of murders that people don’t take nearly seriously as they should, and though her detective knows almost immediately who the murder must be, he doesn’t reveal it until at least one unnecessary murder, usually two, has happened. Then he wraps things up, usually so quickly that the solution zips past me, and that’s it, except for a return to Philadelphia and his platonic affair with a much younger woman and his relationship to a bunch of fellow Armenian-Americans.

So many popular writers have the same flaws she does: implausible settings, ridiculous murders, people taking things way too seriously and not seriously enough, romances that resemble no human relationship I have ever observed, and characters who serve as vehicles for Haddam’s cynical and occasionally stereotyped take on popular beliefs.

But I’m happily chugging through the 30 novels in this series, one by one, in order, just because, for various reasons, I can put up with the flaws.

She writes great interior dialogues. She writes decent exterior dialogue that furthers the action, even if sometimes the plot wanders off into the underbrush and gets lost, even if when I’m finished my chief reaction to the solution of the murder-puzzle is “nope.” She describes her settings just enough to make them seem real in the moment. She rambles, but she is rarely unclear. The emotions her characters experience are complex enough to make them three-dimensional. And her recurring characters, unlikely as they are, are appealing.

I’ll forgive a lot, for a decent read with people in them who are believable and not completely Sauron-like. Otherwise I would never be able to read any fiction at all.