Mount Benson Report - 2011

11.24 West Coast Blues by Jaques Tardi / Jean-Patrick Manchette

2012-01-17T16:22:00.000-05:00

West Coast Blues by Jaques Tardi (art) / Jean-Patrick Manchette (writer)

George Gerfaut, aimless young executive and desultory family man, witnesses a murder and finds himself sucked into a spiral of violence involving an exiled war criminal and two hired assassins. Adapting to the exigencies of his new life on the run with shocking ease, Gerfaut abandons his comfortable middle-class life for several months (including a sojourn in the countryside after an attempt to ride the rails turns spectacularly bad) until, joined with a new ally, he finally returns to settle all accounts... with brutal, bloody interest.Released in 2005, West Coast Blues (Le Petit bleu de la côte ouest) is Tardi’s adaptation of a popular 1976 novel by the French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette. (The novel had been previously adapted to film under the more literal title Trois hommes à abattre, and was released in English by the San Francisco-based publisher City Lights under the English version of the same title, 3 to Kill.)Tardi’s late-period, looser style infuses Manchette’s dark story with a seething, malevolent energy; he doesn’t shy away from the frequently grisly goings-on, while maintaining (particularly in the old-married-couple-style bickering of the two killers who are tracking Gerfaut) the mordant wit that characterizes his best work. This is the kind of graphic novel that Quentin Tarantino would love, and a double shot of Scotch for any fan of unrelenting, uncompromising crime fiction. Nominated for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award (Best Adaptation from Another Work; Best U.S. Edition of International Material).

11.23 Tropic Moon by Georges Simenon

2012-01-17T16:02:00.000-05:00

Tropic Moon by Georges Simenon

I didn't realize I had a couple of more reviews to wrap up for 2011. Tropic Moon is such a great book. Simenon leaves you with a palpable sense of anxiety as you read the novel.

Please head over and read the quality summaries and opinions of Buzby and Olman on Tropic Moon.

11.22 Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

2011-12-19T08:30:00.000-05:00

Catching Fire (2009) by Suzanne Collins

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the annual Hunger Games with fellow district tribute Peeta Mellark. But it was a victory won by defiance of the Capitol and their harsh rules. Katniss and Peeta should be happy. After all, they have just won for themselves and their families a life of safety and plenty. But there are rumors of rebellion among the subjects, and Katniss and Peeta, to their horror, are the faces of that rebellion. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.

Jesus, I was warned that if I continued on into this series I would be sorely disappointed. Not that I had any high expectations but the first book was a tolerably entertaining read. For this second novel the author seems to have gotten grander expectations of creating a story writ larger than just the love triangle of Katniss.

Understandably she couldn't just write another Hunger Games but the good stuff about the first book was a fairly low level of moping about the situation and actually being pretty competent when it came to fighting in the Games. This time around though it's all boohoo for me and the heroine time and again needs saving by the better, more well informed men around her.

I'm hard pressed to find a reason to read the third one. I'll just have to wait for the inevitable movie.

11.21 The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette

2011-12-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

The Prone Gunman (1981) by Jean-Patrick Manchette

The Prone Gunman, the last crime novel Manchette wrote, mixes two well-worn plotlines to cruelly ironic effect: the hit man who wants out of the game and the working-class boy made good who comes home to claim his girl.

Martin Terrier grows up poor in a puddle of a provincial town, and has the misfortune to fall for the daughter of the town's one factory owner, who forbids him from seeing her and sends him packing through the service entrance. Young Terrier makes his love promise to wait 10 years for him, swearing, "I will return, I will kill them, I will drag them through the shit, I will make them eat shit." He does, but not in quite the way he had hoped: When the decade is up, Terrier, an accomplished assassin, wants to break free from his employer—a CIA-like American group referred to only as "the company"—and whisk away his old lover, now an alcoholic housewife who finds him absurd. The company, of course, does not want to let Terrier go, and blood and mayhem follow him home.

I'm continuing my little love affair with the short French crime novels of Jean-Patrick Manchette. This one, like many of the others has been adapted into a graphic novel drawn by the Frenchman, Jaques Tardi. I haven't read it yet but I suspect that much of the novel might be lost in the visual translation.

The novel has some insanely cinematic violent scenes but the roughest stuff is the unceasing and crushing disappointment that the hero must endure. It is really a fine little book with some very European sensibilities.

11.20 Zoo Station by David Downing

2011-12-15T13:00:00.000-05:00

Zoo Station (2007) by David Downing

By 1939, Anglo-American journalist John Russell has spent over a decade in Berlin, where his son lives with his mother. He writes human-interest pieces for British and American papers, avoiding the investigative journalism that could get him deported. But as World War II approaches, he faces having to leave his son as well as his girlfriend of several years, a beautiful German starlet.

When an acquaintance from his old communist days approaches him to do some work for the Soviets, Russell is reluctant, but he is unable to resist the offer. He becomes involved in other dangerous activities, helping a Jewish family and a determined young American reporter. When the British and the Nazis notice his involvement with the Soviets, Russell is dragged into the murky world of warring intelligence services.

As mentioned in my previous review of the Kerr book I heard about this author through my father in law who read a number of the Downing books set in pre-war Berlin. I wanted to read both authors close together to compare and contrast their styles. I have to say that Downing wins out for me in the end.

His hero, John Russell, is not a detective but a journalist who is essentially a native Berliner. He sees with a Western perspective though the writing on the wall as Germany is changing into a dictatorship. Many of the upper middle class Berliners that he is friends with including his girlfriend seem to have their head in the sand with regards to the Nazis.

Additionally Downing doesn't make the book into a city tour so much as Kerr does. He still uses the city as a character but allows it to unfold much more naturally. For most of the book he gets around by public transportation which allows for a slower pacing. While the mysteries here may not be as compelling I think this novel draws the reader into the world of Berlin much more deeply.

11.19 March Violets by Philip Kerr

2011-12-15T12:30:00.000-05:00

March Violets (1989) by Philip Kerr

Bernhard Gunther is 38 years old, a veteran of the Turkish Front, and an ex-policeman. He's also a private eye, specializing in missing persons, which means that he's a very busy man. Because this is Berlin 1936, and people have a nasty habit of disappearing in Hitler's capital.

A cluster of diamonds sets Bernie off on a new case -- diamonds and a couple of bodies. The daughter and son-in-law of Hermann Six, industrialist millionaire and German patriot, have been shot dead in their bed and a priceless necklace stolen from the safe. As Bernie pursues the case through seedy Berlin nightclubs, the building sites for the new autobahns, and even the magnificent Olympic Stadium where Jesse Owens is currently disproving all the fashionable racist theories, so he's led inexorably into the cesspit that is Nazi Germany, travelling the murky paths from the police morgue where missing persons usually end up to, finally, Dachau itself.

This past summer my father in law had been reading a number of crime novels by David Downing that are set in pre-war Berlin. I looked for them in the library but couldn't remember the author. It turns out there is another crime author that writes in the same milieu, Philip Kerr. So I got this book.

It's a great period to write in. The threat of impending war, the growing Nazification of the Germans and Berlin of course was such a cosmopolitan city then. The crime story here is good although somewhat convoluted. Kerr seems to have felt the need to have his hero pass through every famous place in Berlin 1936. Gunther is the stereotype of the American hardboiled crime detective: disheveled and hard drinking. Unfortunately, my only major complaint about the novel is the section near the end where the hero goes to the concentration camp. The scenes aren't poorly written it is just that the tone is so glaringly different from the rest of the book that it throws you off.

11.18 The City & the City by China Miéville

2011-12-14T22:41:00.000-05:00

The City and the City by China Miéville

Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad in the European city-state of Besźel, investigates the murder of Mahalia Geary, a foreign student found dead with her face disfigured in a Besźel street. He soon learns that Geary had been involved in the political and cultural turmoil involving Besźel and its twin city of Ul Qoma. His investigations start in his home city of Besźel, lead him to Ul Qoma to assist the Ul Qoman police in their work, and eventually result in an examination of the legend of Orciny, a rumoured third city existing in the spaces between Besźel and Ul Qoma.

This is actually the first Mieville book that I have been able to make it through. He's a huge award winner in the SFF world and has even done some writing for roleplaying games. I think the reason that I was able to enjoy the book is that it is a science fiction novel wrapped in a crime procedural.

The concept of two cities existing side by side with innumerable interstices was a difficult one to be drawn in to. He is a skillful writer though and as you push on through the book he makes the idea plausible.

I would definitely recommend this book as a place to start if you want to dip your toe into the works of China Miéville.

11.14 The White Death by Allen F Chew

2011-10-15T17:21:00.000-04:00

The White Death: The Epic of the Soviet-Finnish Winter War (1971) by Allen F Chew

I'm not sure how I got it in my head that I wanted to learn more about The Winter War. I knew there had been a series if brutal battles as the beginning of WWII with the Soviets trying to invade Finland. I also had a notion that the Finns were somehow tied in with the Nazis through the remainder of the war. A little internet research led me this book by Allen Chew which seems to be the most well regarded English language account of this brief period.

As usual with anything associated with this period everything Soviet begins with Stalin. The Great Purge of the late 1930s left the Soviet army bereft of experienced officers for the most part. Further, Stalin decided he wanted to reclaim territory lost in the Russian Civil War (1917-23). Although Finland espoused neutrality in the war, Russia worried of fascist influence there and had concerns about the geographic exposure of Leningrad. Once Germany invaded Poland

The book is quite good in that it combines a clear account of the politics as well as the battle accounts. The Finns did very well initially because of good leadership and home field advantage. The buggers could ski a whole division through the night, attack and escape back across the frozen landscape. Eventually though the Soviets were able to prevail through the sheer weight of manpower and armaments. The Finns finally sued for peace and ceded large amounts of territory.

11.13 Thirteen by Richard K Morgan

2011-10-13T23:39:00.000-04:00

Black Man aka Thirteen (2007) by Richard K Morgan

I am really, really far behind on posting about my reading but as I finally seem to be finding a taste for the written word I feel I should get some of these out of the way.

From the publisher:

"Carl Marsalis is a traitor, a bringer of death, a genetic freak and an unwelcome reminder of all that is dark in the human psyche – he in every sense of the word a Black Man. And right at the moment he’s beyond the UN’s jurisdiction, banged up in a Florida jail for financing an illegal abortion. So when the US police call, Carl cuts a deal.

The 13s are genetically engineered alpha males, designed to fight the century’s last conflicts. But men bred and designed to fight are dangerous to have around in peacetime. Many of them have left for Mars, but one has returned. Somehow he survived the journey to Earth, and now a series of brutal slayings has erupted across America. Only Carl can stop him.

And so begins a frenetic man hunt and a battle for survival. And a search for the truth about what was really done with the world’s last soldiers."

Morgan writes in a style that could be described as Airport sci-fi. It is very accessible, paced quickly and tends to wrap up loose ends neatly. I've read a bunch of his other books and I would say that this one ranks somewhere in the middle. It was fun but at times so outlandish as to take me right out of the story.

11.17 Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette

2011-08-31T15:42:00.002-04:00

Fatale (1977 ) - by Jean-Patrick Manchette

I came across this guy when I was flipping through some graphic novels at the comic store. Fantagraphics has put out some illustrated adaptations of this French crime novelist who wrote in the 70s. Few of his books have been translated but the library had recent NYRB imprint.

The novel is short but taut. Aimée is kind of a grifter/hitwoman looking for her next job. She is efficient and calculating but still remains human, not cold.

I have to say that the tone and style of this novel reminded me a lot of the books of Patricia Highsmith.

11.16 The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2011-08-17T17:28:00.002-04:00

The Hunger Games (2000) by Suzanne Collins

Jeebuz! Is this ever the year of The Hunger Games. Not only are they making a movie but it has recently been read and reviewed by Kate, Olman and meezly. I had to give it a try to see what all the fuss is about.

In a future world 12 Districts are ruled over by a totalitarian government. There is an annual televised event where one teen from each District is chosen to compete in a ritualized fight to the death with the last survivor winning a life of fame and comfort. I was a bit surprised that more was not made of the similarities to the Japanese book (and manga and film) Battle Royale. That was the first thing that I thought of. It just goes to show you that there continues to be opportunities for making money off of translating foreign properties into something palatable to the North American audience.

To be fair, the book was quite readable and well paced.

11.15 The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya

2011-08-17T17:25:00.003-04:00

The Slynx (2000) by Tatyana Tolstaya

Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn’t one to complain. He’s got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn’t enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he’s not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he’s happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he’s managed—at least so far—to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond.

As you can see from the above description this is an odd book. It is dystopian but primarily in a literary sense. There are many allusions to famous Russian literary tropes that I'm afraid many of which passed over my head.

In the end, a fundamental lack of narrative made this book something of a drag to read.

11.12 The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer

2011-06-10T19:04:00.004-04:00

The Tourist (2009) by Olen Steinhauer

This is a big time modern spy novel with all the push of a major publishing house behind it. I believe it has already been optioned as a movie starring George Clooney. Pretty much an airport novel. My wife, a non-spy novel reader, had quite enjoyed this one and I got sucked in by the cover blurb comparisons to Le Carre.

Milo Weaver spent many years as a CIA Tourist, a highly trained, zero-identity operative. An operation gone bad on Sept 11, 2001 (what coincidence!) made Weaver decide to get out of the game. After several years of domesticity he's drawn back in to the world of the Tourists. An international assassin, The Tiger (!), who he had been hunting for years finally makes contact and gives Weaver some shattering information.

It wasn't the worst book ever. The writer knows what he is doing and paces the story well. However, other than bringing in post-9/11, Homeland Security type setting there was very little innovative in this book. Wait for the movie.

11.11 The Instant Enemy by Ross MacDonald

2011-05-23T23:45:00.004-04:00

The Instant Enemy (1968) by Ross MacDonald

"Lew Archer is hired by Keith Sebastian, a Los Angeles business executive, to find his daughter Sandy, a high-school senior who has run off with a homeless boy. Sebastian and his wife, living on the edge of affluent bankruptcy, seem unable to communicate with their daughter. Archer finds the runaway easily enough, but before he can return Sandy to her parents, she has participated in a violent crime. Archer’s efforts to save the girl from the consequences of her actions, and to understand those actions, involve him in a savage plot twisting deep into the past. At least one old murder and some new ones confound him and the police. Archer himself is very nearly killed by an ex-cop who wants to keep the case closed, but he finally manages to open it and let some daylight in.”

I've never actually read any R MacDonald before so this was a pleasant surprise. The writing was tight and the character of Archer was different enough to keep me interested. Worthwhile.

11.10 The Main by Trevanian

2011-05-23T23:44:00.002-04:00

The Main (1976) by Trevanian

As a younger man I went through a big Trevanian phase. I thought The Eiger Sanction and The Loo Sanction were great and I think I read Shibumi a several times. I didn't realize it at the time but those books were really intended to be satires or parodies of the genres that they were written in. I took them quite seriously though. The Main had a much different tone though. Trevanian seems almost reverential about lost Montreal in this book - the immigrants, the cops and the rough underbelly of St. Laurent.

The novel is all that much more enjoyable because of it's slow pacing and deep character development. It is a shame that he never wrote more books in this setting.

In an interview Trevanian says, "...I had brewing...a cycle of five novels set in Montreal (home of the French/Indian side of my family). These novels were to deal with various segments of that fascinating, multi-cultural world, and each of these novels would be written in a different genre: a love story, a story of revenge, a roman policier, a tale of struggle to success at the cost of humanity, a mystery story. Many of the characters would be recurring — a lead in one novel turning up as a walk-on in another. And each of the novels were to be named for the section of the city in which the principal events occurred."

11.09 Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier

2011-05-05T22:43:00.003-04:00

Kirby: King of Comics (2008) by Mark Evanier

You can't talk about comics or the history of comics without mentioning Jack Kirby. I'd always been aware of Kirby, knew his style and influence but for some reason assumed that he was one of many of the founding fathers of the comic industry. Thank goodness I read this biography because it schooled me on his true influence.

Kirby wrote and drew comics for nearly 50 years. He was there at the inception of what we call comic books today which were stand alone digest size stores often in multi issue arcs rather than just collections of newspaper strips. In those days artists worked in virtual sweatshop environments cranking out whatever was required of them. Kirby's big break came when he and Joe Simon created Captain America for the proto-Marvel comics company.

No one could match the pace or quality of Kirby's output for a large portion of his career. When he knew he was going off to fight in WWII he drew a huge backlog of comics that could be released while he was gone. After the war he worked on any genre that would pay: boys adventure, romance, war, superhero, science fiction, western.

Eventually Kirby connected with Stan Lee back at Marvel. The author clearly has a thing against Stan Lee and it is hard to know how true some of hes assertions are. What is clear is that Lee was much better businessman than Kirby and although they may have co-created a number of characters, Lee seemed to get the lions share of the credit. This period in the 60s was the creative apex of Kirbys career. Thor, the Hulk, Iron Man, the original X-Men, the Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom, Galactus, Magneto, and the Black Panther were all titles that built Marvel into a successful company.

Kirby continued to work for Marvel, DC and other independents right through until the early 1990s through failing health and eyesight. Not may of the titles through this period were very successful commercially.

Jack Kirby was a terrible businessman and was exploited (or at the very least under-compensated) throughout his career. The terrible irony now is that multi-million dollar movies are being made one after another about characters that he created or co-created: Hulk, X-Men, Captain America Thor. I sure hope that his family are making some loot off them.

11.08 A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr.

2011-04-24T16:07:00.004-04:00

A Canticle For Leibowitz (1960) by Walter M Miller Jr.

I have been wanting to revisit this book now for a number of years as I explore the post-apocalyptic literature genre. I know I read it as a teen but really had no memory of what it was about at all. A Canticle For Leibowitz was something of a one hit wonder in that this book was a huge hit for Miller and other than a forgotten sequel written years later he never wrote another novel. Miller was a prolific writer of short stories and contributed to many of the early sf magazines. Canticle is actually three short stories that he repackaged with some adjustments as a novel.

In fact, the structure brought to mind a series of paintings that I was recently introduced to by a friend, The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole. The paintings depict the rise and fall of a city from a "savage" state through its rise and eventual destruction to desolation. Canticle begins after a nuclear apocalypse - the Flame Deluge - where monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz have an abbey in the desert. The monks have struggled to preserve the fading knowledge of a the once great civilization of the ancients. Faced with the constant danger of extremists who believed that exposure to knowledge of the ancients would cause another chaotic world event, they had to secure this information of the ancients; often risking their lives to save it.

The novel explores a number of themes including church v state, religion v science, limitations of technology, and others. At times, the more abstract side of the writing especially about religion can become a bit tedious. It's not proselytizing but the author certainly wants to get deep into it. In the end the message is that information is our most precious resource (quite relevant today). Although perhaps not the most readable book ever but certainly well worth for any fan of classic sf or good writing.

11.07 The Guineaman by Richard Woodman

2011-04-03T19:33:00.005-04:00

The Guineaman (2000) by Richard Woodman

Severn House Publishers

Following quickly upon the heels of reading the exciting Bolithio book I picked up this seafaring novel from the library. The Guineaman was very different tale in many way but an equally interesting read about the mid eighteenth century.

William Kite, the hero of this series is the feckless son of a town apothecarist. One dark and stormy night he is forced to flee the scene of a horrible crime and heads to the coast where he joins a slaving ship, a guineaman. I was well prepared after having read a similar book previously for the wide scope of these books but this one really went for the James Michener style sweeping saga.

Kite joins the ship as a "surgeon" and has to deal with yellow fever among the crew and the terrible conditions among the slaves chained below decks. He takes the moral high road by abhorring the treatment of the slaves especially the rapes of the women by the captain and crew. Strangely though, he ends up falling in love with one of the slave girls and ends up taking her and leaving the ship in the West Indies. The story takes another bunch of arcs with Kite becoming a wealthy merchant, ships captain, trader. He eventually heads back to England with his black bride to attempt to clear his name and start a new life.

As an adventure story there were parts of the book that satisfied but way too much stuff was going on. Kite seemingly lurched from one major set piece to anotherand typically came out of it smelling like roses. The book was well written but this was not a character that I thnik I will pursue much further.

11.06 Richard Bolitho, Midshipman by Alexander Kent

2011-03-17T00:39:00.003-04:00

Richard Bolitho, Midshipman (1975) by Alexander Kent

Kindle

I'm in the midst of prepping to play in a play-by-post roleplaying game with some friends. The game is called Beat to Quarters and its setting is in the British Navy in the late 18th century. I really know very little about the era or milieu so I thought I should check out a couple of books. The ones I am familiar with by reputation, of course, are the Master and Commander series by O'Brien and the Horatio Hornblower books. I wanted to look outside these novels I guess because they are being fairly actively read and reviewed by my circle of friends.

This turns out to be the second book in the series about Bolithio. So although he is still a young and inexperienced midshipman he has one voyage under his belt and isn't entirely green. The story begins briskly with Bolithio making friends with another midshipman, Martyn Dancer, at an inn in Portsmouth. Turns out that they are shipmates because a lieutenant from their ship the Gorgon bursts in and orders them aboard. The Gorgon sails to West Africa where they encounter an empty Merchantman, the City of Athens. The captain deduces that pirates have pillaged the ship and reveals that he is on a mission to to investigate the disappearance of ships in the region. I won't reveal more but there is action aplenty throughout the book with sea battles, night raids and several other daring escapades.

I was actually quite taken with this novel. The characters are well drawn and the pace quite relentless. Very enjoyable.

11.05 The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

2011-03-08T21:47:00.003-05:00

The Franchise Affair (1948) by Josephine Tey

Paperback

Recently I was perusing lists of the top 100 crime novels of all time put out by the Crime Writers Association and the Mystery Writers of America. I consider myself a pretty avid crime reader however I was surprised to see an author who showed up a couple of times near the head of both lists: Josephine Tey. Turns out that her books are not reprinted much and are a bit hard to track down. I did manage to locate The Franchise Affair though.

The Franchise Affair is pretty tame as far as mysteries go but it was still an engaging read. The story is actually based on a notorious abduction case from the 18th century. Robert Blair , a small town lawyer, is called upon to represent 40ish Marion Sharpe and her aged mother when the police bring kidnap charges against them for allgedly seizing a schoolgirl named Betty Kane, imprisoning her in the attic of their large, remote country home known as The Franchise, then forcing her to work as their servant by starving and beating her until she escapes and turns them in. Blair champions the Sharpes cause but public opinion is firmly against them.

Tey's characters are believable, the plot is absorbing, but what makes this book work well is how she successfully plunges her readers immediately not only into the crime, but into the mounting apprehension surrounding the case up until the end. And although The Franchise Affair is set in the countryside, it is a sophisticated story, not just another British country house-based mystery.

11.04 The Russian Girl by Kingsley Amis

2011-02-17T20:48:00.003-05:00

The Russian Girl (1992) by Kingsley Amis
Trade, Penguin

I was looking around in the local used bookstore for some Kingsley Amis that I had never read before. The guy said that this one rarely ever came in to the shop and so I picked it up, intrigued. It is from nearly the end of Amis' bibliographywhich I was not aware of at the time but now seems a bit obvious. The writing doesn't have that crispness that you see in Lucky Jim or The Anti-Death League.

Nevertheless, what Amis writes well about Englishness or more particularly those detailed social interactions that are so particular to the British upper middle class. That class is ably represented by Richard Vaisey, a Russian scholar at the London Institute of Slavonic Studies. He's an intellectual, repressed bourgeoisie married a wealthy and manipulative woman but thoroughly satisfied with his lot. The Russian girl he meets is Anna Danilova, a poet visiting England to raise support for a petition to free her brother, a petty thief unfairly held in a Soviet prison. Anna's poetry is sort of comically bad and Richard's struggle is with his attraction to her and his loathing of her poetry.

The situation will be familiar to anyone who has ever compromised their integrity for love. I can't say that I loved this book although it was interesting. In the end it seemed a bit too much like it was mocking the intellectual pretentiousness that Amis represented himself.

11.03 The Fatal Foursome by Frank Kane

2011-01-28T15:46:00.006-05:00

About Face (1947, AKA Death About Face, The Fatal Foursome) by Frank Kane

Paperback, Dell

I collect a lot of old pulp paperbacks, mainly in the sci-fi and crime genres, but I don't tend to read a lot of them. Many are just too old to safely read, some I have more for the cultural value but mainly I just have too damn many other books to read. Occasionally, I'll get an up-condition dupe and that allows the crappier one to become a reading copy. I've always loved the look of these Victor Kalin drawn mysteries by Frank Kane.

The thing is, when you read a 1947 hard boiled detective novel it often comes across as being pretty derivative from the modern perspective. Of course, at that time they weren't really derivative stories at all. At worst, the authors of this era were emulating one another and writing to sell. Kane was a prolific journeyman writer during the pulp era. Among other things he wrote a huge number of short stories for the pulps and featured his detective Johnny Liddell in over 30 novels. Unfortunately, Kane's reputation has never been as glossy as some of his peers like Hammett or Chandler. Thrilling Detective writes of the Liddell series: "a solid series, nothing really exceptional, but it gets the job done, sorta like Johnny."

In The Fatal Foursome, Liddell is sent out from the east coast to Hollywood to investigate the seeming disappearance of an up and coming actor. In the course of his investigation three more bodies turn up right around the same places he is. Suspicion is that he is getting too close to the truth. There is some fun stuff in here - the scrappy yet comely cub reporter who is after the story...and Johnny, the hard drinking ME who is an old buddy - especially the characters.

This was the first book in the series by Kane and if it's any indication the Liddell books will always be in the 2nd tier of early crime fiction.

11.02 The White Lioness by Henning Mankell

2011-01-24T16:46:00.003-05:00

The White Lioness (1993) by Henning Mankell

Trade, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

I have been reading Henning Mankell's books about the detective Wallander for a number of years. Wallander is something of the clichéd doughy, sleepless, overworked police investigator. The type is used in various iterations across the world of crime fiction. What makes Mankell's books interesting though is his taught writing and dry Scandinavian perspective. Wallander is a homicide detective in a smaller Swedish town, Ystad, and continually comes up against the problems that plague larger cities. Often a small crime will reveal something like international drug gangs or human smuggling. I also like Wallander because he has the bulldog in him - when he gets going on a hunch there is no stopping him.

There are generally smaller subplots in the novels about his love life or relationships with his daughter and father. As you move through the series one tracks along with the detectives personal ups and downs. I tired somewhat of the series because these personal storylines became much more a part of the books. I returned to this novel, the third, because I had missed it first time around and his earlier books are the best. The books begins simply with the disappearance of a straightlaced Methodist housewife. Her life is so normal and unremarkable that Wallander can't understand why she would have left...unless she was murdered! I liked this novel but somewhere around the halfway point the story switches to South Africa and the perspective of political leaders from the end of apartheid era. It wasn't so much the switch that was jarring (Mankell has a long history living and working in Africa) but hearing the fictional inner thoughts and dialogue from real life people like FW DeKlerk. In the end, although it wasn't his best effort, Mankell managed to pull it all together albeit overloaded with a left wing anti-apartheid theme.

11.01 Surface Detail by Iain M Banks

2011-01-17T22:52:00.005-05:00

Surface Detail (2010) by Iain M Banks

Kindle, Orbit Books

The publication of a new Iain M Banks Culture novel is greatly exciting for me. Banks is one of the few contemporary sf writers who keep me interested in the state of the genre and give me faith in the longevity of science fiction. The Culture novels (of which this is the 8th) are not tied together by plot or character but by the universe he has created. The Culture is a fictional interstellar anarchic, socialist, and utopian group of post-scarcity Minds (AI) that exist individually as ships. The universe is populated by an array of other cultures from low-tech to fantastically high-tech but the Culture tends to lord over them all as sort of powerful liberal anarchists.

My simplistic overview does a disservice to the complexity of Banks fictional world. The best thing about Banks Culture books (which are by no means uniformly excellent) is that he has a variety of really cool science fiction ideas and by custom building his universe he can drop them in where he likes.

Surface Detail is quite complex with multiple story lines, timelines and an array of characters. The book rewards diligent and consistent reading but is quite rewarding towards the final third as the overall plot threads come together. My only complaint would be that I felt a couple of the threads lost some of their narrative steam towards the end. Banks argues in an interview that some of the characters "end up working almost as a Greek chorus, commenting upon the action rather than taking part in it."

Nevertheless, this was a really great book and definitely a worthwhile read for those interested in the genre. As Banks says,

You do have the whole galaxy to play with, and you have the full panoply of types of planets to play with, not just rocky, watery planets. You’ve got no excuse for getting bored with it!

2010 Wrap Up

2010-12-24T21:48:00.004-05:00

Well, who would have guessed it. Child rearing apparently makes one's reading habits go into decline. What the hell, even so I am pleased to have gotten through 25 books this year. I think that the first 6 months of having a kid are the most time consuming so it perfectly works out that 2011 will be a goddamn readathon.

If anyone still remains a reader of the MBR I thank you for your continued persistence and patience. I promise that the future will be brighter for books here.

In the meantime feel free to follow me on Twitter: @jladell
and on Tumbler: http://vintagepaperbacks.tumblr.com/

10.25 Running Blind by Lee Child

2010-12-24T21:39:00.004-05:00

Running Blind (2000) by Lee Child.

These Reacher books seem to be well seeded in holiday homes. I picked this one up on the Caribbean island of Nevis where I recently went on holiday. I'd read a few reviews of the Reacher books bu Olman and knew that they were quite readable at the very least.

Although Reacher is a loner this book seems to have him fairly ensconced in a legitimate life. He has a steady gf in New York, has been given a house and ends up working closely with the FBI to track down a serial killer.

The book was easily digested like a Stephen King. The pages just sort of turn themselves. I didn't love the storyline although the opening scene is a ton of fun. Reacher, eating in his favorite Italian restaurant, sees a couple of Eastern European hoods come in and shake down the owner for protection money. He follows them and fucks them up leading them to believe that some other big organization is already taking a piece of this restaurants action. It's a fun bit of writing.

A cool holiday read.

10.24 Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

2010-12-21T21:55:00.004-05:00

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2009) by Karl Marlantes
Kindle, El Leon Literary Arts, 690 p.

The Report is back!

Don't get too excited though because we are going to be doing a couple of mini-reviews to try and catch up on the books we're behind. I picked this novel up on the strength of a recommendation from a good friend this fall who knows that I like to read historical war books. This is a work of fiction written by a Vietnam vet that took him 30 years to write. Supposedly he has been working on the book ever since he came back from the war. For the first quarter of the novel I was somewhat disappointed. It just seemed to be the standard that you read in memoirs of relentless deprivations and drudgery interspersed with short periods of incredible terror. Eventually though the book bets better and better at the author tackles some larger issues of morality and race. In the end it turned out to be a really good book.

In the summer of 1970, Karl Marlantes, a recently demobilised Vietnam veteran posted to US Marine Corps headquarters after 13 months of highly decorated active service, found himself walking some sensitive military papers across to the Capitol. He was challenged by a group of young anti-war protesters "hollering obscenities", chanting "babykiller" and waving north Vietnamese flags.

"I was stunned and hurt," he recalls, speaking to me during a recent visit to London. "I thought, you have no idea who I am… yes, I wanted to shoot them. Six weeks before, I was killing North Vietnamese guerrillas in combat." As his immediate rage moderated into puzzled anguish, Marlantes found himself wanting "to explain myself to those kids. I just wanted to tell my story".

So he began to work on his Vietnam novel, taking a title, "Some Desperate Glory", from a line in Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est". The national trauma of the war was dragging on and he intended to address something huge in the life of contemporary America. "The Vietnam war was a defining experience in the US," he says. "It made this incredible divide, even within families. The Democrats were anti-war and the Republicans supported our troops. It shaped a generation, at least, and conditioned our response to things like Iraq and Afghanistan."

By 1977, Marlantes had completed a massive, first-person narrative, full, he says, of "psychobabble" and an unmediated bitterness that he's now embarrassed to contemplate. No publisher would touch it. So he went back to a second draft, and a third…

Finally, 35 years after he first sat down at his manual typewriter – by now divorced and in his 60s – he completed the novel that's called Matterhorn, a debut that has been hailed by American critics as the definitive Vietnam novel of our times – "One of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam" (New York Times).

The title is derived from the codename for a remote, mountainous military outpost, a "firebase", near the demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating North and South Vietnam and the Laos border, not unlike the notorious Hill 937, or Hamburger Hill. "Matterhorn" becomes a killing field for the young marines of Bravo Company, as they repeatedly try to secure a patch of Vietcong ground. They are led by a young second lieutenant named Waino Mellas, who has much in common with Marlantes: an Ivy League graduate from rural Oregon who adheres to the values of his childhood rather than the smart, east coast radicalism of his Princeton roommates. Mellas volunteers for the Marine Corps and, wet behind the ears, takes command of a platoon in the north-west corner of South Vietnam during the rainy season of 1969, just as Marlantes did. "All second lieutenants in history are the same," he says. "I was just a young white kid from Oregon commanding these working-class kids from the ghetto."

When Marlantes began to commit this experience to paper, the books that influenced him, he says, were the classics: "War and Peace, The Naked and the Dead and the literature of the first world war. It's amazing how that war, and writers like Sassoon, Graves and David Jones [In Parenthesis], have shaped our image and understanding of war. The first world war was the first mechanised war. Survival was more about luck than skill. Where the shells burst. And that was my experience, too."

While Marlantes was painfully translating his tour of duty into fiction throughout the 70s and 80s, supporting himself by working as an energy consultant, the US was coming to terms, creatively, with its national nightmare. The first successful account of Vietnam occurred in non-fiction, in 1977, with Michael Herr's Dispatches, a landmark volume of reportage based on Herr's visits to Khe Sanh for Esquire at roughly the same time that Marlantes was attacking his Matterhorn. Herr's achievement was to find a voice in which to describe an unimaginable apocalypse. It was described by John le Carré as "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time".

"You know how it is," wrote Herr, describing the dead, "you want to look and you don't want to look… once, I looked at them strung from the perimeter to the treeline, most of them clumped together nearest the wire. Then I heard an M16 on full automatic, starting to go through clips, a second to fire, three to plug in a fresh clip, and I saw a man out there, doing it. Every round was like a tiny concentration of high-velocity wind, making the bodies wince and shiver."

From this kind of psyched-up non-fiction, it was a short step to the movies, the first art form to undertake the excruciating process of imagining the unimaginable. Herr contributed some of the voice-over to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now in 1979.

Marlantes remembers that "in their surreal way" the movies of the 70s and 80s helped to focus his imagination and give it permission to roam at will across the no-man's land of America's historic defeat. "How can any modern novelist not be affected by the movies?" he says. For Marlantes, The Deer Hunter was "a fine piece of movie making", but nothing to do with his Vietnam, as he understood it. "Only Platoon came close to getting it right," he says. Instead, it was the next generation of drama, about the second world war, for example Band of Brothers, that would make the biggest impression. "Spielberg and Tom Hanks are the guys who were getting it right," he says.

The moral drive of fiction is faithfully to "get it right" through the contrivance of making it up. Ideally, the novelist must be Everyman to convey the essence of a situation in a universal language. This is a tall order when it comes to a subject that is both intrinsically unsharable (not everyone can be a GI) and innately unimaginable (few ex-soldiers want to talk or write about what they have seen and done).

At the same time, a writer needs tranquillity and perspective in which to recollect the emotion. The bigger the trauma, the longer the necessary perspective. Marlantes continued to wrestle with his magnum opus, in draft after draft, occasionally questioning his fitness for an impossible task.

Others were beginning to find their voices. Ron Kovic wrote Born on the Fourth of July during one hectic month in the mid-70s. Shortly after Herr's Dispatches, Philip Caputo published A Rumor of War, another non-fiction account. Unlike Herr, always a reporter, it was a first-hand expression of combat, a veteran's autobiography that raised the bar for getting to grips with the graveyard called Nam.

In his foreword, Caputo set out his artistic credo. A Rumor of War was not a history or a "historical accusation". It was, he said, conscripting the language of fiction, "a story about war, based on personal experience". Taking his cue from Mailer in The Armies of the Night, the author puts Lieutenant Philip Caputo centre stage in a deployment of marines to Da Nang. The narrative moves from a rational, semi-detached opening entitled "A Splendid Little War", through a section depicting the madness of war ("The Officer in Charge of the Dead") to a full-blown nightmare ("In Death's Grey Land") in which the Caputo character is accused of shooting Vietcong suspects and faces a court martial. Eventually, the charges are dropped and Caputo is reassigned to a desk job followed by an honourable discharge.

An epilogue addresses the memories awakened by the fall of Saigon in 1975. A Rumor of War was possibly the first time a former serving officer had addressed the role of the marines in Vietnam. Merlantes, also a marine, and proud if it, acknowledges that Matterhorn builds on Caputo's groundwork.

By the mid-80s, the war in Vietnam was becoming lost in the slipstream of history. All that remained of a national tragedy were the terrible craters left by the B52s and the rusting military hardware on the beach at Da Nang. The memory of the war was kept alive by veterans' rage, investigative journalism and the quest for war crimes. In Sideshow, William Shawcross exposed the role of Henry Kissinger in Nixon's secret war against Cambodia, and Born on the Fourth of July became a hit film, starring Tom Cruise.

In fiction, meanwhile, the platoon was beginning to emerge as the definitive unit of humanity in the face of battle. The leading exponent of platoon fiction was Tim O'Brien, first in Going After Cacciato (1978), and then in The Things They Carried (1998), a sequence of linked stories based on O'Brien's experiences. In "Good Form", the narrator introduces a new element into writing about Vietnam, drawing a distinction between "story truth" and "happening truth", an allusion to Daniel Defoe's famous description of the novel as "lying like truth".

O'Brien seems to be arguing that telling a story which is technically inaccurate yet truthful about the sensation of war – as opposed to baldly stating the facts of a situation – is the more honest way to report the veterans' experience, while at the same time assuaging the writer's conscience. In relation to this distinction, Marlantes says of his fictional mountain: "Everyone knows what 'Matterhorn' is. It's every hill in Vietnam. I've tried to explain what it was like. Sometimes it was so hard I would start to cry at my typewriter and say, 'I can't do it.'" Never did fiction feel less like entertainment.

O'Brien, Caputo and Kovic, among others, universalised Vietnam – whose jargon passed into the common currency of the time – as a shorthand for the madness of a jungle war. The US, meanwhile, continued slowly to come to terms with its past. The election of Bill Clinton, who had not served in the military, in 1992, was one kind of milestone on the road to national sanity. But the war would not go away. In 2000, George W Bush's alleged "draft dodging" became a campaign issue, though not a decisive one. In 2004, John Kerry attempted to capitalise on his career in the military and was unceremoniously "swiftboated" by Republican veterans.

As the US continued to make peace with its past, Marlantes continued to write and rewrite his manuscript. After Iraq, so alienated from war had the public become that some publishers to whom he showed his work advised him to cut it in half and relocate it in Afghanistan. But he refused to deviate from his course. "It was now twice the book it was in the beginning," he says. "Then, I had no compassion for any of the characters. Now, with maturity and distance, I had come to love them all."

Many books and films about Vietnam have been unable to suppress a persistent strain of fear and loathing for the place. For Marlantes, the impulse was to celebrate a noble sacrifice and to make his novel an act of homage to the fallen. There is nothing derogatory about Matterhorn. With the passage of time, too, he had found a way to deal with the unmentionable face of conflict – the inevitable racism of the frontline where whites were fighting alongside black troops. "You cannot imagine how racist the army was in the 60s," he says. "Out in the field, we were held together by fear, but once the troops were back at base the old divisions, black and white, would come back."

Truthful and painful or not, still nobody was interested in the story he was telling. "There would be times," he says, recalling his long march to publication, "when I'd say to myself, 'If you don't believe you've got the talent to do something better than everyone else, you'd have to be crazy to go on.'" The process of composition was accompanied by the nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder. Remarkably, after more than 30 years, the novel exudes a desperate fury as Marlantes drags the reader (and Bravo Company) through firefight after firefight.

Combat is not Marlantes's deepest subject. Metaphysically, he wants to grapple with the relationship of killing to the nature of evil. In a key passage, he writes: "No, the jungle wasn't evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares. It occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good or evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself up to the pain of watching it get blown away."

It's at moments like this that Marlantes steps alongside Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and even Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms). But even after 35 years, his life's work was no nearer publication.

The typescript was a beast, some 1,600 pages. No one wanted it. Vietnam was passé; first novels were a no-no; the author was too old; and so on. Spurned by agents and battered by rejection, Marlantes placed his book with a small non-profit publisher in Berkeley, California – El León Literary Arts.

His luck began to turn. Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove/Atlantic, decided Matterhorn was "the Vietnam novel of our generation" and persuaded El León to go into a commercial partnership. Entrekin also persuaded Marlantes to cut and sharpen his battered manuscript from 800 to 600 printed pages in one final edit. "Every cut hurt," says Marlantes, "but if I wanted to reach a wider audience, this was what I had to do."

Marlantes has been rewarded for his determination to tell his story: currently, Matterhorn is no 3 in the New York Times bestseller list. The commercial tide is turning towards Vietnam stories again. For instance, Tatjana Soli's forthcoming first novel The Lotus Eaters, set during the fall of Saigon, tells the story of a female war photographer who must choose between her Vietnamese lover and her journalist ex-boyfriend. The conflict has begun to join the US civil war as a national trauma that is finally sponsoring art in new and unexpected ways.

Robert McCrum in The Observer

10.23 The Passage by Justin Cronin

2010-10-08T19:15:00.005-04:00

Before I wimp out and cop another review let me say that I enjoyed this book a lot and if it had been 250 pages shorter I would be recommending it to all my friends. Perhaps this Cronin guy will be like George RR Martin and not give us the next volume until 2015.

"This is one of those books that arrives on the shelves with a backstory. When the first chapters of Justin Cronin's vampire fantasy started circulating in US publishing houses back in 2007, they sparked a fierce bidding war. Cronin became a rich man long before the public got their hands on his work (the book and film deals netted over $5m). The public's turn has finally come and The Passage is being touted as this year's blockbuster beach read.

The story starts in the near future with government experiments on a virus that gives those infected with it superhuman strength and eternal life. The downside is that it also gives them fangs, claws, glowstick orange skin, a taste for human flesh and raging photophobia. The first section details the virus's discovery and subsequent tests conducted on death-row inmates. It's taut and tight and, from the amorality of the military experiments to the passing references to America's polluted, lawless state, everything in the opening section drips with dread.

In fact, the opening chapters are so effective that it takes ages to settle into the second section, which is set in the post-apocalyptic world left by the inevitable release of the virus. The action had been fast and violent, with helicopters and bombs; in part two, there's a new cast of characters living a century later who plod round on horses and get excited if they catch a rabbit. The pace does pick up, though, and Cronin's postviral world is inventive and interesting – even if it does owe a debt to The Road, The Stand and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Cronin, who won the Hemingway/ Pen award for an earlier novel, is a skilled writer. Most of the characters are well drawn and he tackles the philosophical issue of gaining eternal life at the cost of your soul in between the throat-ripping battle scenes. But he does have some annoying quirks. He sprinkles italics and unnecessary capital letters around in a very distracting way. He's weirdly coy about using the word vampire – his creations are variously called Virals, Flyers, Dracs and Smokes.

Also, the only character who appears in both sections of the novel is a six-year-old girl called Amy (or The Girl from Nowhere, as Cronin has it). She should be fascinating – Amy possesses ill-defined special powers and has kept her humanity despite viral infection – but readers have no access to her interior life and she barely speaks. No doubt this is because The Passage is the first of a trilogy and her story will unfold in later books, but it does mean that this one has a gaping hole at its heart.

A further problem is practical. If you need to take an easyJet flight to reach the beach you want to read this on, it will be virtually impossible to fit this 766-page hardback in hand luggage. If you do manage to cram it in, though, you won't regret it. I turned The Passage's pages feverishly to find out what happened next."

- Alice Fisher in The Observer

10.22 The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo

2010-10-08T19:14:00.004-04:00

"THE DEVIL'S STAR is an outstanding example of the new school of Scandinavian crime fiction, an excellent police procedural with a great plot. The sort of book that makes me think "this is why I love crime novels." I was utterly gripped for all of its 522 pages, and I am a reader who usually likes the shorter novel or novella. There was a good depth of characterisation, lots of vignettes and back-stories, and all the sub plots came together and were put to rest at the end. Well almost all...

There have been other detectives whose heavy drinking is a problem, Rebus and Morse spring to mind, but Oslo Detective Harry Hole is a full blown alcoholic who has touched rock bottom. His career has been blighted by an unsuccessful investigation into the death of his colleague and friend Ellen Gjelten. He has split from his girlfriend Rakel, and his days in the police force are numbered.

Then during the Oslo holiday period Camilla Loen is found murdered in her flat. One of her fingers on her left hand had been cut off, and a tiny diamond shaped like a five pointed star, a pentagram, the devil's star, had been placed behind her eyelid.

Harry is asked by his long-suffering boss Bjarne Moller to work the case alongside his long-time adversary Tom Waaler. Harry believes Waaler is a corrupt cop, involved in arms smuggling and somehow responsible for the death of Ellen Gjelten.

Lisbeth Barli goes missing in broad daylight with only her severed finger found, while Barbara Svendsen is murdered in her office toilet, with a finger severed from her left hand. Now the investigators can utter the words "serial killer".

Among the interesting minor characters is the dedicated forensics officer Beate Lonn, who has had an abusive relationship with Tom Waaler. Then there is the eccentric psychologist Stale Aune who teaches the investigating team, and the reader, everything they need to know about serial killers.

But this novel relies on the very successful interplay between its two interlocking threads of the hunt for the serial killer, and the struggle between the two policemen. I identified with the flawed but caring Harry Hole, a man who feels perhaps too emotionally involved with those around him. While I have known people who I could definitely imagine as the cold, smooth, cynical, totally amoral Tom Waaler, but I won't go there at the request of my legal adviser.

There are a number of clever plot twists that keeps the reader on their toes, and just when you think the hunt is over events take an unexpected turn.

This was a top-drawer crime fiction thriller with well-drawn characters, an interesting detective, a riddle to solve and above all a fresh angle on the serial killer novel."

- Euro Crime

10.21 The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson

2010-07-12T22:57:00.005-04:00

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest (2007) by Stieg Larsson
Kindle edition, 602 p.

Yes, yes, the worldwide phenomenon that is me reading the Girl With books has finally ended (although I have still yet to see the last two movies). The series is all wrapped up and the author is dead so I expect over the next year we'll see a gradual fading out of interest in northern European crime fiction. I'm glad to see the love being given out to fine crime writers like Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo even though it's all in search of the next Larsson.

Who is really to say why these set of book have become as insanely popular as they have. They are certainly not the best crime fiction ever written nor even the best European book out there. Like Harry Potter, these fiction memes seem to take on a life of their own. A certain initial push and suddenly the publishers market them everywhere. I guess that other than having died Larsson could have ended up like all the other "airport authors" out there (read:Dan Brown, Robert Ludlum, John Grisham or Stephen King).

I mention King because I think that Larsson and him (and probably the others) have hit upon a certain formula that gives these books their immense readability. There always seems to be a sense in the middle portion of the book of powerful evil forces arrayed against the hero(s). We the reader know that they will be overcome but there is just enough doubt that we keep avidly reading on to see how it will be done.

In Hornets Nest we essentially work through the aftermath of the conclusion of the previous novel. Salander is hospitalized and Blomkvist is back at the magazine Millennium. The dark forces embedded within the Swedish secret service determine that she should never be allowed to tell the truth about what happened with her father, the Soviet defector. Drama ensues on many fronts with various subplots dropping in here and there.

I know I sound flip but the plot at times felt way too over-plotted. Every loose end seemed to intertwine with another and be brought to a satisfying conclusion at the end. Nothing was left ragged or interestingly unsaid. Despite that criticism I think the books were fairly well written and this last one did not go so insanely over the top as the previous.

For anyone who has actually read these books and is reading this blog I direct you to this short piece from the New Yorker which hilariously cuts the books down to size. Perfect.

10.20 Thumbprint by Friedrich Glauser

2010-07-02T18:12:00.003-04:00

Thumbprint (Wachtmeister Studer) (1935) by Friedrich Glauser ; translated from the German by Mike Mitchell.

From the Bitter Lemon site: "Friedrich Glauser was born in Vienna in 1896. Often referred to as the Swiss Simenon, he died aged forty-two a few days before he was due to be married. Diagnosed a schizophrenic, addicted to morphine and opium, he spent much of his life in psychiatric wards, insane asylums and, when he was arrested for forging prescriptions in prison. He also spent two years with the Foreign Legion in North Africa, after which he worked as a coal-miner and a hospital orderly. In 1939, a year after Glauser’s death, the film of 'Thumbprint', the first Sergeant Studer mystery, was greeted with critical acclaim and commercial success. Studer became more famous than his creator, the mark of true success for a fictional detective."

10.19 Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

2010-06-19T09:45:00.003-04:00

Boneshaker (2009) by Cherie Priest

"Boneshaker is the story of the Wilkes/Blue family, a storied Seattle clan whose three generations unmade and remade the city through a series of scientific and martial adventures that are recounted with great relish and verve. First, there's Leviticus Blue, an arrogant mad scientist who developed a great tunnelling machine (part of a Russian-sponsored competition to improve Alaskan gold-mining) and undermined the city of Seattle, releasing the Blight, a poisonous gas that causes the dead to rise, and to hunger for the flesh of the living. Then, Maynard Wilkes, a prison guard in Seattle, committed an act of great mercy and bravery by releasing the prisoners in his care before they could be blighted, losing his life in the process, and becoming a hero to those left behind the walled-off city of Seattle, and a pariah to the settlers in the Outskirts beyond the wall. Then there's Briar Wilkes, the widow of Leviticus and the daughter of Maynard, who is scraping by in the Outskirts, trying to outrun her reputation but unable to, and unable to escape Seattle because of the great Civil War that is eating America with martial trains and dirigibles and great armies. Finally, there's Ezekiel Wilkes, the son of Briar and Leviticus, who has snuck back into the walled city, wearing an antiquated Blight-mask, to discover the truth about his father.

And that's where the action kicks off, with son and mother chasing one another through the Blighted city of Seattle, avoiding the zombies, befriending the Chinese laborers who run the great machines that suck clean air from beyond the wall into the sealed tunnels beneath the city, trying to escape the clutches of the evil Dr Minnericht, the self-appointed king of Seattle (who may or may not be Leviticus Blue), befriending rogue zeppelin pilots, armored giants, and steam-powered cyborg barmaids.

It's full of buckle and has swash to spare, and the characters are likable and the prose is fun. This is a hoot from start to finish, pure mad adventure. "

Cory Doctorow on boingboing

I got this one from the library because I was intrigued by the hype. It seems to bee quite popular in the nerd-iverse and has won the 2010 Locus and Hugo awards. I'm not an especially big fan of steampunk but then neither do I specifically hate it.

I was nowhere near as excited as Herr Doctorow about this novel. It seemed super contrived to me almost like an AP from a role-playing game. Obviously she put a lot of work into the book and had some interesting ideas but in the end it all seemed so young adult. I guess now after Harry Potter really any style of book can win the Hugo award. I'm actually reading another YA right now by Le Guin and it is so much richer and better than this one.

10.18 Under The Dome by Stephen King

2010-06-08T19:48:00.004-04:00

Under The Dome (2009) by Stephen King
Hardcover, Scribner, 1074 p.

"His latest, 1,088-page tome, Under the Dome (Scribner, $35), hews to the classic King formula: A community is isolated, a force of horror is introduced. In this case, Chester's Mill, Maine, is sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes and helicopters and cars and birds crash into it. A gardener's hand is severed by it. Bullets whiz off it. So do missiles. No one knows where it came from — whether it is supernatural, a military experiment, or an act of terrorism. The real focus is not the dome, of course, but what happens beneath it, the "orderless, reasonless beast that can arise when frightened people are provoked." King's ability to create a gripping world is so great, his pacing so effortlessly swift, that it can feel as if you're caught in a cat's claws, at once fearful of and delighted by the horrors the next page might bring.

Often that horror is trained on a war vet turned line cook who goes by the nickname Barbie. He is our doorway to 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, waterboarding. Look to contemporary horror movies like Hostel, Saw, Wolf Creek, The Devil's Rejects — all of them spotlighting abduction, rape, torture, dismemberment — and you can understand them as offspring of the war on terror. The world under the dome is born of the same caul, but it's infinitely more sophisticated, because King knows that the biggest danger comes not from the outside — from bombs, from war, from Islam — but from the mob growing within. We are all under the dome."

Benjamin Percy in Esquire

1000 pages in a little over week, baby! I had this one out from the library so I was under the gun to finish it before the due date as I knew I would never get it back. I've been off King since I was a teenager but I wanted to pick this one up because I had a lot of fun recently with his last book Cell. That book was really over the top and had some great moments although in the end I think he fell back on some of his stander King-ian tropes. Also, UTD was supposedly an idea he had back in the 70s that he had shelved and finally returned to. I think his earlier books are the best.

UTD is fine. It is immensely readable but in the end like one of those movies that has one cool idea but fails elsewhere. There is a huge cast of characters and at times you wish that some of them would just die a horrible death so you could get on with it.

In the end, I'd have to say you should take a pass on this one unless you are a huge fan and have lot's of time to devote to reading.

10.17 Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by EW Hornung

2010-06-01T17:33:00.003-04:00

Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by EW Hornung

I guess to many people E.W. Hornung’s Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (1899) would hardly qualify as a forgotten book. The character of Arthur J. Raffles--man-about-town, raconteur, famed cricketer, and daring “gentleman thief”--has spawned film adaptations (starring David Niven) and television productions (one featuring Nigel Havers), plays (including one written by Graham Greene), and numerous spoofs. Trivia fans will tell you that Hornung was the brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and that Raffles and his bumbling sidekick, Harry “Bunny” Manders, were devised as inversions of Conan Doyle’s own Holmes and Watson. As for the book itself, a collection of short stories first published in Cassell’s Magazine and then in book form in March 1899, it has attained “classic” status. My own copy says as much. It was published by Penguin Classics, with a sober black jacket and a scholarly introduction. But the truth is that the book was unknown to me (and possibly me alone) until I was directed to it by a fictional cat.

The feline in question belongs to one Bernie Rhodenbarr, star of Lawrence Block’s terrific Burglar series, and it just happens to be named Raffles in honor of a thief every bit as skilled, wily, and incorrigible as Bernie himself.

To be honest, I was surprised by the eight stories that make up The Amateur Cracksman. I thought they might show their age--which they do--and I feared they might be a bit tame--which they’re not. The stories are full of wit and intrigue and cunning. They’re sharp and punchy and to the point. True, the mysteries are not terribly mysterious and their outcomes not altogether surprising. But the pleasure is in the telling, in spending time with old-school pals Bunny and Raffles as we follow their (mis)adventures from Bunny’s first introduction to the world of burglary in “The Ides of March,” through to Raffles’ possible demise (in a manner that foreshadowed Holmes’ “death” at Reichenbach Falls) in “The Gift of the Emperor.”

As with Conan Doyle’s Watson, these stories are told from the perspective (and through the moral lens) of Hornung’s secondary character, Bunny. A struggling writer who has squandered his family inheritance, Bunny asks Raffles for help after losing the last of his money in an ill-advised game of baccarat. Of course, the help Bunny receives isn’t quite as he’d anticipated. It turns out that Raffles is every bit as “cussedly hard up” as his friend, although a good deal more resourceful, and before very long he’s duped Bunny into participating in a tricky jewelry heist.

None of this sits easily with Bunny. Throughout the tales he’s eaten up with shame at his crooked behavior, constantly afraid that his formerly good name will be forever tarnished. It’s a relief, then, that Raffles is a genuine chancer. To him, burglary, like cricket, is a “sport,” a “game,” even (when it’s done especially well) a form of “art.” Raffles is wholly unrepentant, so long as the challenge is stiff and the solution elegant.

“My dear fellow, I would rob St. Paul’s Cathedral if I could, but I could no more scoop a till when the shop-walker wasn’t looking than I could bag the apples out of an old woman’s basket ... Now there’s some credit, and more sport, in going where they boast they’re on their guard against you.”

Raffles certainly does that, pitting his wits against professional crooks, fearsome prize-fighters, brash diamond merchants, duplicitous fences, crass Australian politicians, and the recurring thorn in his side, Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard. In overcoming them all, he drills locks, molds keys, cuts through window glass with a diamond, brown paper and treacle, and employs copious disguises and false names--even going so far as to dress up as a tramp and a policeman in “A Costume Piece.”

And just as he appreciates the worth of a good costume, so Raffles knows the value of a credible cover story (something my own series character, Charlie Howard--globetrotting thief and hack mystery novelist--appreciates only too well). Of his cricketing fame, Raffles tells Bunny: “To follow crime with reasonable impunity you simply must have a parallel, ostensible career--the more public the better.”

It also helps that the burglaries Raffles commits are carefully tailored to secure the reader’s sympathy. On occasion, Hornung devotes almost as much time to eviscerating the boorish society types that Raffles targets, as he does to describing the thefts themselves.

“It is a vulgar sort [of theft],” said [Raffles], “but I can’t help that. We’re getting vulgarly hard up again, and there’s an end on ’t. Besides, these people deserve it, and can afford it.”

To my mind, the most intriguing story from the collection is “A Wilful Murder,” in which Raffles contemplates killing a villainous fence who is shaping up to blackmail him. It’s a mark of Hornung’s confidence in the character he created that he not only has Raffles voice the idea, but revel in its appeal.

“I’ve told you before that the biggest man alive is the man who’s committed a murder, and not yet been found out; at least he ought to be, but he so very seldom has the soul to appreciate himself. Just think of it! Think of coming in here and talking to the men, very likely about the murder itself; and knowing you’ve done it; and wondering how they’d look if they knew! Oh, it would be great, simply great!”

It’s in this blurring of moralities where the real magic happens in these stories, and where the true complexities of Raffles’ personality force the reader to make a choice. Can you side with a crook (even a so-called amateur)? Can you follow him on the prowl, or in the course of plotting a murder? Can you, ultimately, leave these stories hoping that Raffles has made good his escape, or content in the knowledge of his watery fate?

Hell, try reading the following, from Raffles to Bunny, and tell me there’s even a choice to be made:

“Why should I work when I could steal? Why settle down to some humdrum uncongenial billet, when excitement, romance, danger and a decent living were all going begging together? Of course it’s very wrong, but we can’t all be moralists, and the distribution of wealth is very wrong to begin with… I only wonder if you’ll like the life as much as I do!”

Folks did like the life as much as Raffles--they enjoyed reading about his exploits to such an extent that Hornung completed another two short-story collections about his unconventional hero--The Black Mask (1901; published in America as Raffles: Further Adventures of The Amateur Cracksman) and A Thief in the Night (1905)--as well as a novel, Mr. Justice Raffles (1909).

Can a classic be forgotten? Maybe not. But if you’re yet to make the acquaintance of A.J. Raffles, you might enjoy breaking into a copy of The Amateur Cracksman.

Chris Ewan writing in The Rap Sheet

It was this review that made me look around for a copy of the Raffles book. I had never heard of his stories which is surprising given that I am a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes. Of course, I can see the connection between the two especially in the writing style. It is sad to me when people say that turn of the century writing is dated - different, yes. I'd put Doyle, Wodehouse and even Hornung up against any of the popular writing that is coming out these days. The Hound of the Baskervilles vs. Harry Potter...no contest.

10.16 The Big Book Of Basketball by Bill Simmons

2010-06-01T17:14:00.002-04:00

The Big Book Of Basketball (2009) by Bill Simmons

"ESPN’s Bill “the Sports Guy” Simmons published his long-awaited magnum opus: The Book of Basketball, a 700-page epic that seeks to answer every question anyone could ever possibly ask about the NBA (Was Wilt better than Russell? Did Nash deserve his MVPs?) and then approximately 900 more (Who were the ugliest players of all time? How does the 1992 Dream Team lineup correspond to the different singers in “We Are the World”?).

Simmons recounts the history of the league from its birth in the ultrawhite forties, as well as the history of his own super-fandom (he grew up going to Celtics games with his dad in the seventies and eighties—as he puts it, “studying the game of basketball with Professor Bird”). He projects the hypothetical stats of seventies superstars if they’d never discovered cocaine. He brutalizes Vince Carter early and often: “Fifty years from now, we wouldn’t want an NBA fan to flip through some NBA guide and decide that Vince Carter was a worthy basketball star. He wasn’t.” And he garnishes everything liberally with Simmons-isms: blanket statements, Vegas stories, baroque pop-culture analogies (Kobe Bryant as Teen Wolf), and novella-length footnotes.

The heart of the book (over 400 pages) is what Simmons calls “The Hall of Fame Pyramid”—his idiosyncratic ranking and analysis of the 96 greatest players in NBA history, from Tom Chambers to Michael Jordan. Each ranking is accompanied by an opinionated mini-essay about the player: David Thompson (No. 70) was “the Intellivision to Jordan’s PlayStation 2”; Reggie Miller (No. 62) was “the most overrated superstar of the past thirty years”; watching John Stockton (No. 25) “was like being trapped in the missionary position for two decades.”'

- Sam Anderson in NY Mag

Having taken this book out of the library I have to admit that I skimmed over a few parts. Still, as I am basically the target market for Simmons writing, I definitely loved reading this one. Simmons is a funny writer although sometimes maddeningly digressive. He writes lovingly about the league but is also able to impart so much historical information. The final HoF Pyramid got to be a bit too much and I skipped around looking for players I knew. This is a great book for the true basketball fan but it shouldn't be for someone who is on a deadline but more the kind of book that is sitting around that you can drop into and out of in small doses.

10.15 The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley

2010-05-24T18:52:00.004-04:00

The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977) by John Varley
Paperback

"There are many aliens out there in the depths of space.

Out somewhere in that vast dark, the Ophiuchi Hotline has been broadcasting the entire sum of an alien race's knowledge. Little has been decrypted but that which has is of fabulous value.

Back here in the Solar System, but not on Earth, there are the half-human hybrids, divorced from the rest of humanity's concerns, freed from the gravity wells of planets, living their lives as artists of outer space.

Not all aliens are friendly however: Other aliens came, devastated our civilisation and threw Earth-based humanity back into the stone age. Then they took up residence on Jupiter, maintaining a quiet but forbidding presence.

Knowledge gleaned from the Ophiuchi Hotline allowed the Lunar and other colonies to survive. Life goes on and most people accept the new state of affairs. They believe that there is nothing they can do to reclaim Earth or to expel the aliens from Jupiter.

Tweed is not one of these people. He's the ex-President and a master criminal. He is determined to use any means possible, within or outside the law, to regain what he believes is humanity's birthright: the Solar System and everything within it.

Lilo is a scientist and another criminal. She has been found guilty of the capital crime of illegal biological research. Although she's going to die, she plans that her clone, secreted far from Earth and due to awaken soon, will take over her life's work.

Tweed, however, wants Lilo and her knowledge. He won't let a mere death sentence get in his way. He's after her and her clone.

Now there's a new problem. After four hundred years, the latest decryptions from the Ophiuchi Hotline appear to be saying that the information is not a free gift. Now it seems that the alien masters of the Ophiuchi Hotline are demanding payment and no-one knows what payment, or when, or what dread penalties will entail if the debt remains unpaid.

Fabulous, wonderful stuff. This is John Varley's first novel, and he was rightly called "The New Heinlein". It stunned me when I first read, it remains a favorite and I became a firm fan of his writing. It's got intriguing characters: the humans Lilo, Cathay, Vaffa and Mari. And then of course the wonderful Parameter-Solstice, free from the constraints of space-suits and spaceships, just floating in space.

What's it got: a beautiful babe as a heroine, in fact several of them all over the Solar System; an evil criminal genius, inscrutable aliens, more aliens, and alien-human symbiotes cloning all over the place, romance and excitement."

- SF Reviews

This book was by no means up to the standards I had expected from reading his Titan trilogy. I can see the parallels with Heinlein and I just don't really like that style of writing. If I was to recommend a John Varley book then this would not be it.

10.14 The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

2010-04-23T11:22:00.003-04:00

The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West

"The Day of the Locust is generally considered the better work [than Miss Lonelyhearts] (perhaps in part because West had more room in which to work, as Miss Lonelyhearts is only fifty-eight pages long). It is an unrelenting portrait of those on the edges of Hollywood, the scene technicians and failing actresses, the motel rooms, boredom, and heat. Cock fights and prostitution intersperse with funerals, as several men (one of which is named Homer Simpson — I've always wondered if Groening read this book) fight for a chance to sleep with Faye Greener, a vacant 17-year-old whose father is an aging vaudevillian. West depicts the poverty of Hollywood, both economic and spiritual, in grimy detail; again, the final scene culminates with a mass expression of the resentment that permeates the everyday lives of the characters who have come to California for their fortunes: "Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment....The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies....They have slaved and saved for nothing."

Jill Owens at Powell's Books

This short novella is packed with superb writing. West captures the sickly overripe world of Hollywood between the wars. There are a lot of parallels with the insipid entertainment universe we live in now.

10.13 D-Day by Anthony Beevor

2010-03-21T19:51:00.004-04:00

D-Day (2008) by Anthony Beevor

"The French frying pan is starting to resemble the Russian fire,’ wrote the Pravda correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg about the battle for Normandy at the end of June 1944. It was true: although Anglo-American losses ran at 2,000 men per division per month after D-Day, higher than the Russian losses of 1,500 per month on the Eastern front at the time, the Germans – who lost 2,300 per month – were comprehensively defeated in the campaign.

Yet as Antony Beevor never fails to point out in this most humanitarian work of military history, French civilian losses were huge too; in the first 24 hours of Operation Overlord alone, more than 3,000 French civilians were killed – more than double the number of American GIs who died on Omaha Beach. Caught in the crossfire between the biggest amphibious assault in history and fierce German resistance, even bombarded by their own Free French Navy, the people of Normandy paid heavily for their liberation.

Beevor’s previous books on the siege of Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin led us to expect something special from D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, and he does not disappoint. Very distinguished books have already been written about Overlord by Max Hastings, John Keegan and Carlo D’Este, and this one certainly deserves its place beside those. Beevor has a particularly keen eye for the aperçu or quotation that brings an experience – very often a gory one – to life. Airborne troops forced to crawl through hogs’ entrails as part of their toughening-up procedure, for example, or a sergeant’s report of the deaths of 18 paratroopers dropped too low for their chutes to open, as sounding 'like watermelons falling off the back of a truck’.

The chapter on the Omaha Beach landings is almost the literary version of the opening scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan, with the same horror and pace. In the 30 minutes before H-hour, the US 8th Air Force dropped 13,000 tons of bombs there, but because they did not want to hit the oncoming armada and flew in across the beaches rather than along them, the bombs missed, and German machine-gunners wreaked terror and chaos as the invaders disembarked. 'Men were tumbling like corn cobs off a conveyor belt,’ one sergeant from Wisconsin recalled.

With 11 of the 13 amphibious trucks carrying howitzers sinking, some men landing miles from the designated sites, and German mortar shell explosions turning beach pebbles into grapeshot, the beach soon resembled an abattoir. It is testament to their sheer doggedness that the Americans landed no fewer than 18,772 men there that day. Beevor draws attention to the role of tanks and destroyers in finally blasting a way through the beach defences; the naval guns grew so hot from firing that they had to be continuously hosed down with water.

Beevor is unsparing in his comments about the military commanders: Montgomery is portrayed as having 'a breathtaking conceit which almost certainly stemmed from some kind of inferiority complex’; Hitler showed a blind faith in the defensive Atlantic Wall that was perplexing in a man who had so ingeniously outmanoeuvred the Maginot Line so easily four years earlier, and Beevor wryly jokes how 'Only Charles de Gaulle could have written a history of the French Army and manage to make no mention of the battle of Waterloo.’ (The night before the landings, de Gaulle called Churchill 'a gangster’ and Churchill called de Gaulle 'a traitor’.) Eisenhower, smoking four packets of Camel cigarettes a day and watching with tears in his eyes as the 101st Airborne Division took off from Greenham Common, emerges well from this book, though more for his diplomacy than his strategy.

The German high command is rightly also coruscated by Beevor, particularly for the absurd system whereby there was no central command in France at the time of D-Day, with responsibilities being shared between Rundstedt and Rommel, who profoundly disagreed about how to deal with the invasion. The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine commands were kept separate from the Wehrmacht, with even the flak corps staying under Goering’s control. The nation that had invented the concept of the powerful central general staff failed to put its own precepts into operation, partly out of Hitler’s political preference for divide-and-rule.

Only about half of the book is about D-Day itself, for it continues with the breakout from Normandy, the bomb plot against Hitler, the closing of the Falaise Gap, and goes all the way to the liberation of Paris. Beevor maintains the tension throughout, while pointing out how, by mid-1944, the quality of some German units in France was pretty low."

- Andrew Roberts in The Telegraph

This was the first book that I have read on my new e-book reader. It was a fairly enjoyable experience although I am not sure I would recommend it for a book with a lot of maps in it like this one. The map pages don't reproduce too well and when you are reading about battles it is always necessary to be flipping back to recheck the drawing.

Like his other military history books Beevor writes very accessibly giving both the broader overview and the human perspective. A battle like Normandy was a massive undertaking with a huge number of armies, corps, generals, etc. Keeping track of everything is a challenge but he is up to the task.

10.12 Homicide by David Simon

2010-03-21T19:51:00.003-04:00

Homicide (1991) by David Simon

"Fans of the acclaimed television series The Wire won't be surprised to learn that the programme has its roots planted firmly in reality. Twenty years ago, its creator David Simon, then a young crime reporter in Baltimore, spent 12 months as a fly on the wall with the city's homicide unit. The resulting book, Homicide, not only spawned two huge shows (the other being Barry Levinson's seminal series of the same name), but also stands as one of the best studies of policing ever written. Simon's genius in this formidable book is to avoid the detailed forensic description popularised by dramas such as CSI, showing us instead the human side of “murder police”.

Although the detectives featured in Homicide possess plenty of skill, it is their personalities that matter. There is the unit's resident wizard, Donald Worden, a bearish man with a photographic memory, who Simon calls “the only surviving natural police detective in America”. During the course of the book's year, Worden finds himself enmeshed in two politically fraught cases that bring him to the point of resignation, an event that would tear the unit apart. There is Terry McLarney, the clandestinely sophisticated squad sergeant who dresses as if he “wouldn't come to work until the family dog had a chance to drag his shirt and sport coat across the front lawn”. And then there is Jay Landsman, the wisecracking sergeant whose practical jokes and vulgar witticisms mask an acute mind. (Fans of The Wire will recognise Landsman, as they will a number of other characters who are resurrected for the show.)

Although Homicide is perforce filled with harrowing detail, most notably an autopsy performed on a two-year-old, it also possesses a deep vein of dark comedy. Led by Landsman, the detectives deploy a gallows humor that has them batting one-liners back and forth like a group of seasoned vaudevillians. As Simon reminds us, “nothing in the world can come between a cop and his attitude”.

Of course, it is not all fun and games for the murder police, and Simon proves capable of balancing humour with an equally gripping pathos, as in the case of Gene Cassidy, a promising young cop who is blinded in a senseless shooting. And then there is the detective who quickly adjusts the clothing of a murdered woman moments before her distraught husband rushes into the room. No case is more affecting, however, than that of 11-year-old LaTonya Wallace, found strangled and eviscerated in a dark alley after being abducted on her way home from the library. Although the investigation of her death starts in a glare of publicity, it gradually falls upon the shoulders of one beleaguered detective, Tom Pellegrini, to carry the burden as the case grows colder - and his own health suffers.

The true genius of all of Simon's work is its scope. Just as The Wire encompasses an entire city by focusing on the work of one bedraggled police unit, so Homicide moves beyond individual victims to tell the stories of those touched by their deaths. By staring deep into the eyes of the departed, Simon reveals the mysteries of the living."

Stephen Amidon in The Sunday Times

A really amazing book. After having watched The Wire you can see many of the scenes and characters which were taken from the book.

10.11 For Kicks by Dick Francis

2010-03-07T01:32:00.008-05:00

For Kicks (1965) by Dick Francis

"The English Earl of October tries to hire Australian horse breeder Daniel Roke to find out how someone is giving race horses a drug to win races that does not show up in drug scans. Although he initially resists, he agrees and goes undercover as a stable boy. In this guise, he is able to see and hear all that happens as he goes from stable to stable. In the process he gets to know Elinor, the Earl of October's younger daughter, and they become friends and perhaps a bit more. When he does finally figure out what is going on, not only is he in danger from the people behind it, but Elinor is as well. When he is forced to deal with them, he ends up in jail and only the Earl of October can get him out because it is his older daughter who has accused him. Unfortunately, the Earl is away at the moment. Can Daniel get out of jail? Can he prove who is behind the horse drugging scandal? Will he and Elinor get out of this alive? Read For Kicks to find out! "

I'm turning off the comments for this post because my other DF review gets like 20 Chinese spam posts a month!

This really is one of the better of Francis' books. The author was big on class and gets caught up in exposing class injustice at times. The story though ratchets up the tension throughout and makes this one a crackerjack book.

10.10 Death of a Ducthman by Magdalen Nabb

2010-03-07T01:32:00.006-05:00

Death of a Dutchman (1982) by Magdalen Nabb

"When Magdalen Nabb died in August 2007, she left us with a dozen pieces of delightful brain candy: the Marshal Guarnaccia crime novels.

The Marshal is a low-level law enforcement officer in Florence. He doesn’t consider himself very bright—indeed, he thinks of himself as a consummate bumbler—but that’s precisely his strength, his lack of ego. Because he doesn’t jump to conclusions, as do his superiors who warrant their own intelligence, the Marshal is able to ask the questions that crack the case.

In Death of a Dutchman, the second Guarnaccia novel, a Dutch jewel dealer turns up dead in a flat in Florence. The Marshal’s superiors write the death off as an obvious suicide, but there’s nothing obvious about the case to the Marshal. To the contrary, he wonders at all the loose ends and partial clues that point not to suicide but to murder.

And who is the mysterious woman last seen with the Dutchman? As the Marshal follows this woman around the city of Florence, we are wrapped in what Nabb does best: drawing characters out of everything, people, buildings, parks. With a few deft strokes, she brings the city and its throng of people alive.

It’s a hot and muggy summer in Florence, and the twists of the case build as the Marshal pursues the woman through the twisting allies and crowded plazas. As a thunderstorm gathers on the surrounding hillside, illumination dawns on the Marshal, and the psychological depravity of the murder case cracks open.

Nabb’s lean and elegant prose doesn’t rely on flash and bling for excitement. She told stories the old fashioned way, by constructing an intricate plot and then letting it tighten its noose around the reader’s neck as the pages turn. Originally published in 1982, Death of a Dutchman has long been out of print. Kudos to Soho Crime for bringing back the series. Anyone who enjoys a sophisticated, literary crime story will love Nabb’s Marshal Guarnaccia series."

- briancharlesclark on Puck

Absolutely agree. A very low key but enjoyable mystery in the Continental style.

10.09 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

2010-03-07T01:30:00.002-05:00

Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson

"Snow Crash is a well-crafted, tongue-in-cheek romp through a near-future America so familar, one expects to see its characters chasing each other down the street.

Set mostly in geographic California with arterial highways delivering consumers to the fast food, faster shopping, and even small country franchises, a very modern, ancient Sumerian virus is turning hackers and non-hackers alike into tongue-speaking refugees.

Throw in the Metaverse, Stephenson's version of the global information structure. A three-dimensional audio and visual hallucination built around the mystical powers-of-two, cartoon physics rule the day. Rent a cheap avatar for a stroll down the main street. Ride your motorcycle at 300 km/h and bounce harmlessly off of a 20-mile square building. Just don't read the scroll held by the Bland Angel of Judgment.

Further complicating matters is a slew of divergent and entertaining characters. Your guide through this journey is the unlikely Hiro Protagonist (no, really!), a once and future hacker wonderboy who took off before the IPO and now delivers pizza for the Mafia (thirty minutes or less or you're fired). Joining him is the ever resourceful Y.T., a teenaged Kourier skateboarding her way through traffic by harpooning cars.

Want more? How about the surprisingly boyish Uncle Enzo, head of aformentioned Mafia, or L. Bob Rife, fantastically wealthy crank, founding funder of Rife Bible College and current owner of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier. Perhaps you'd like to meet Mr. Lee, proprietor of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong Franchise, or stop to pet Rat Thing, a supersonic isotope-powered cybernetic pit bull. Pushing forward the plot is a Metaverse librarian and Raven, a one-man killing machine and nuclear power.

Sounds serious? Perhaps. Complicated? Enjoyably so."

chromatic on Slashdot

Snow Crash is one of the must-reads on the essential geek reading list. I'd been meaning to revisit it for awhile given the fact we are now coming up on 20 years since it's publication. While still super entertaining the book is showing it's age coming from the early internet era and having a sort of gee-whiz feeling about all things tech.

10.08 Night Of The Jabberwock by Frederic Brown

2010-02-18T11:15:00.005-05:00

Night Of The Jabberwock (1951) by Frederic Brown Pbk, William Morrow & Co.

I am disconcertingly behind in my book reviews for 2010. The further I fall back the less I am inclined to try catching up. The plan now is to post short blurbs most likely credited to other sources with a short afterword containing my thoughts. I hope, once caught up, to reload on my own reviews. On to Night of the Jabberwock:

"Nothing compares with Fredric Brown’s inimitable, hallucinatory sense of humor. Equally adept writing both sci-fi and crime fiction, his best novels often show the influence of both—nightmarish tales of the bizarre that seem too weird to be true. But, in Brown’s world, the truth is never normal, and the irrational reigns supreme. Such is the case with Night of the Jabberwock (1950), which follows a reclusive Lewis Carroll scholar making his living as a small-town newspaper editor as he takes a trip through the proverbial “rabbit hole” and winds up in the most unexpected of situations. A strange man appears at his door one night, offering him the opportunity to “raise the Jabberwock” at midnight; meanwhile, a lunatic has escaped from the local asylum; and, to add to the mayhem, big city mobsters are on their way to town, and our protagonist wants to get the full scoop. The concoction is pure Brown: a surreal voyage laden with humor and action in which the protagonist—and the reader—is always on the brink of losing their sanity. Plus—what other crime novel features such fascinating, in-depth discussions of Carroll’s literary and scientific work, or begins every chapter with an applicable quotation from the author? Certainly a one-of-a-kind book, and worth all the effort it takes to track it down."
- Cullen Gallagher in pattinase

I felt like the novel was a bit overly plotted and my unfamiliarity with the Alice story didn't help me. Nevertheless, there were some taught mystery and thriller elements that showed what a fine writer FB was.

10.07 Straight by Dick Francis

2010-02-16T14:37:00.004-05:00

Straight (1989) by Dick Francis
Pbk, Pan, 302 p.

Dick Francis passed away the other day at age 89. Francis was a British writer of thrillers that took place in and around the world of horse racing and jockeys. A successful racer himself, Francis had a keen ear for the milieu of exhilarating wins, brutal injuries, shady trainers and wealthy owners. I'm not sure when I picked up my first Francis book but I am sure it was years ago when I was in my Bagley/Innes/MacLean phase.

Straight, his twenty-eighth novel, has many of the Francis tropes that can be found across his oeuvre. The hero is involved with the racing world, lower class, tough and has a strong sense of morality. He is thrown into a situation quite unexpectedly often. In this novel, Derek Franklin, a jockey recovering from injury, is informed that his estranged brother has been in a horrific accident. Derek takes over his brothers semi-precious gemstone business and becomes more and more involved in his life. In the Francis books, there is often a woman, usually upper class, who is the love interest and who is of course drawn to the studly hero. The antagonists generally are career criminals or someone within the racing fraternity who has turned to evil.

Although they are formulaic, a Francis novel is immensely readable. He is just one of those genre writers who has the innate ability to make you keep turning the pages as the hour gets later and later. I would recommend his earlier books especially Dead Cert, Nerves, Flying Finish and Whip Hand.

10.06 The High Window by Raymond Chandler

2010-02-11T23:44:00.004-05:00

The High Window (1942) by Raymond Chandler
Pbk, Vintage Crime, 152 p.

When you first start to read a Raymond Chandler novel it can all seem so cliched until you realize that this guy was one of the originators - the real deal. Chandler's Philip Marlowe books were spare, tough and vivid. Chandler could sketch out in a paragraph what would take others pages to do. Take this description of a club he enters:
"The lobby looked like a high-budget musical. a lot of light and glitter, a lot of scenery, a lot of clothes, a lot of sound, an all-star cast, and a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail. Under the beautiful soft indirect lighting the walls seem to go up forever and to be lost in soft lascivious stars that really twinkled. You could just manage to walk on the carpet without waders. At the back was a free-arched stairway with a chromium and white enamel gangway going up in wide shallow carpeted steps. At the entrance to the dining room a chubby captain of waiters stood negligently with a two-inch satin stripe on his pants and a bunch of gold-plated menus under his arm. He had the sort of face that can turn from a polite simper to cold-blooded fury almost without moving a muscle."

Great stuff. In this, the third Marlowe novel, he is hired by a rich old lady to recover a gold coin that she thinks has been stolen by her recently disappeared daughter-in-law. Chandler weaves the story around 40s Los Angeles which he evokes so beautifully. A very worthwhile book to read.

10.05 The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem

2010-02-06T19:37:00.003-05:00

The Invincible (1964) by Stanislaw Lem
Pbk., Penguin, 186 p.

Most of the Lem books that I have read have something just slightly inaccessible about them. He is an amazing writer but I think sometimes his ideas get lost somewhat in the translation from the Polish. He really does have an incredible imagination though.

The Invincible is a much more straightforward science fiction novel than others of his that I have read. The spaceship Invincible wakes its complement of hibernating crew and lands on a dusty and inhospitable planet. It turns out that several years earlier, the Condor, another ship, came before and contact was completely lost. The Invincible is here to find out what has happened.

Lem writes from the perspective of the Navigator who is sort of second in command to the Astrogator, an older, steady type man. As more and more of the fate of the Condor is revealed the Navigator becomes much more invested, emotional and thrown off balance by their fate.

This really was a fun novel to read. The science is so kooky but the way it's written is entirely believable. This was a cool book.

10.04 The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith

2010-02-04T21:25:00.004-05:00

The Blunderer (1954) by Patricia Highsmith Trade, Norton, 265 p.

Lament For A Lover is a pretty awkward title for a great psychological thriller. The Blunderer is Walter Stackhouse, a husband, a lawyer and wound incredibly tight. He is married to neurotic Clara who is alternately a harridan and devoted to her husband. The live in the highly codified world of 50's Long Island - the friends, barbecues and parties always require the couple to put on a mask that Stackhouse hates. A newspaper article about the alleged murder of a Newark man's wife lodges in Walters brain and he wonders if he could do the same thing. On a bus trip to her mothers Clara turns up dead in the same way as the other woman and Walter comes under scrutiny.

The story tracks Walter and the Newark man, Kimmel as their paths become more intertwined with each other. Highsmith writes with tension all the time both giving the inner obsessions and moving the plot along. Walters every blunder is so well rationalized that you wonder how he could be losing his reputation and friends. Of course, everyoe in the book is so repressed (it is Highsmith, after all) that there is every opportunity for misunderstandings to occur. Just when things are getting jacked up, Highsmith drops a psychotic cop into the mix for the explosive conclusion in Central Park.

10.03 Maigret And The Pickpocket by Georges Simenon

2010-01-23T14:32:00.005-05:00

Le Voleur de Maigret (1966) by Georges Simenon
Pbk, Harvest/HBJ, 151 p.

This is one of the later Maigret books in the vast series (1931-1972) that are not really as well regarded as the later ones. Simenon wrote over 100 stories with Maigret, a police detective in Paris. This was certainly an entertaining story but I tended to lose interest at times.

Maigret is one day pickpocketed on the streetcar and strangely receives his wallet back in the mail shortly. A young artist took it and pleads with Maigret to look in to the murder of his wife as payment for it's return. Maigret becomes quite closely involved with all the artists various friends while trying to figure out this little murder.

This book was ok but certainly didn't grab me and drag me in to the story.

10.02 Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco

2010-01-19T17:30:00.006-05:00

Safe Area Goražde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-95 (2000) by Joe Sacco Pbk, Fantagraphics Books, 227 p.

Joe Sacco has made a bit of a name for himself as a journalist/graphic novelist. I have previously read his book called Palestine which is about his experiences in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 90s. On the strength of that book I picked up Safe Area Goražde.

I really had very little idea what this one was ll about. Obviously I knew broadly about the Bosnian War but would have been hard pressed to describe what it was about or who the major players were. In 1994-1995 Sacco visited the the enclave of Goražde several times and interviewed many of the residents there. He relates their personal experiences in the war and for the most part does so in a dispassionate way. In several cases though Sacco becomes clearly upset about some of the things that he hears about and the book becomes extremely violent. There is nothing wrong with this if they are true events but is is a bit jarring. Nevertheless, war is horrible and the graphic novel is a very strong way of describing it.

I really enjoyed this book and think that it is an important one. I loved the fact that he used regular asides to describe (with maps!) the process of the Bosnian War was super helpful. I feel like I could confidently explain it in a conversation now.

10.01 Capilano by James W Morton

2010-01-19T17:10:00.003-05:00

Capilano: The Story Of A River (1970) by James W. Morton
Hardcover, McClelland & Stewart, 184 p.

I bought this book because I work for a large portion of the year on this river. As you may be aware, I am a fisheries biologist and the Capilano River a great source of salmon and trout locally.

The story of the Capilano River is really the story of the city of Vancouver. In the late 1800s this city was just the land situated where the Fraser River met the Pacific Ocean. White settlers were slowly carving a town out of the forests and swamps. As the city grew a reliable and fresh source of water was needed and the Capilano fit that bill.

Ever since then the Capilano River has been one of the main sources of drinking water for the ever expanding population of this city. Don't let that lull you into thinking that the Cap is a pristine watershed. Morton spends a large part of his book outlining how this once beautiful and might river has been destroyed by us. The Indians were moved, the giant cedar forests logged, the wildlife shot and the immense runs of coho salmon and steelhead trout decimated. Ultimately, a 300foot high dam was built in the 1950s to assure the city of it's water supply.

While depressing, Morton has written a well researched and readable book with chapters devoted to many of the issues mentioned above as well as many of the crazy and and interesting characters who worked for and against the river. Even after all they have done there it is still an amazing place and I am privileged to work there.

2009 The Year In Review

2010-01-07T01:11:00.002-05:00

And so 39 it is. I really thought that I was going to be able to make it to 40 this year but the holidays just sapped my reading. Nevertheless, I am pleased with the progress that I made. With a few exceptions I was able to read for pleasure pretty consistently across the whole year although I really powered through a bunch of books in the summer while on vacation.

I have to say that it was a pretty good variety as well. My non-fiction reading was, as usual, almost exclusively historical military books although I did read a business book. I was glad to get to a couple of more of the classic Vietnam books.

There were quite a lot of thrillers here but nothing specific really dominated. I read a bunch of books by Swedes who know the dark side of the soul. In memoriam of Westlake I was able to get to a few more of his novels that I had never read as well as a cool graphic novel adaptation of one of his books. Some of the best thrillers this years were some of the oldest - John Buchan and Erskine Childers books were both from before the first world war.

Science fiction perhaps suffered the most this year for me with only a few of my read which could be really classed as sf. I think 2010 will be the year to discover some great novels of the future.

Thanks to all who have read this blog over the year or at any time in the past. And especially to those of you that have commented. Analytics tells me that I have had ~1400 visits this year although I'll bet a lot of those were bots.

Here's to the new Decade!

09.01 Riders Of The Purple Sage by Zane Grey
09.02 Headed For A Hearse by Jonathan Latimer
09.03 The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
09.04 I Know A Trick Worth Two Of That by Samuel Holt
09.05 The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
09.06 Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell
09.07 The Light of Men by Andrew Salmon
09.08 The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 by Rick Atkinson
09.09 The Vendetta by Nick Quarry
09.10 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
09.11 Kinds Of Love, Kinds Of Death by Tucker Coe
09.12 How The Dead Live by Derek Raymond
09.13 Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith
09.14 A Rumor Of War by Philip Caputo
09.15 The Devil's Children by Peter Dickinson
09.16 In The Country Of Last Things by Paul Auster
09.17 Empire Of The Sun by J.G. Ballard
09.18 The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell
09.19 On The Beach by Nevil Shute
09.20 Intelligence In War by John Keegan
09.21 The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs
09.22 The Bitter Tea by Gavin Black
09.23 Last Stand At Saber River by Elmore Leonard
09.24 Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
09.25 To What End by Ward Just
09.26 Eureka by William Diehl
09.27 The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
09.28 The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
09.29 The Limbo Line by Victor Canning
09.30 Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
09.31 Spook Country by William Gibson
09.32 Peril At End House by Agatha Christie
09.33 The Hunter by Richard Stark/Darwyn Cooke
09.34 The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
09.35 Miracles Of Life by JG Ballard
09.36 Cell by Stephen King
09.37 The Guns Of Heaven by Pete Hamill
09.38 The Big Blowdown by George P Pelecanos
09.39 King Suckerman by George Pelecanos

09.39 King Suckerman by George Pelecanos

2009-12-30T17:48:00.004-05:00

King Suckerman (1979) by George Pelecanos
Trade, Serpent's Tail, 313 p.

This is the second book in the well regarded quadrilogy of Washington DC written by George Pelecanos. After reading the first, The Big Blowdown, I immediately picked up this one and started it. While not quite as good as the first, this novel definitely holds its own.

This book takes place in the 70s and is linked to the first with the son of Pete Karras being one of the main characters. Karras and his buddy Clay play basketball and generally get laid back. One day they get mixed up in a drug deal gone bad and end up with all the money and a funky lady. When the well-armed dealer starts spilling blood to get to the cash, Clay and Karras must take a stand, go straight, and get justice--or maybe just sweet revenge.

I really enjoyed the milieu of this book (1976 the Bicentennial year, Blaxploitation, drugs and basketball) but I didn't feel that the characters were as richly drawn as in the previous book. I am going to keep my eyes open for the final two in the DC Quartet, The Sweet Forever and Shame The Devil.

09.38 The Big Blowdown by George P Pelecanos

2009-12-23T10:59:00.005-05:00

The Big Blowdown (1996) by George P. Pelecanos Trade, Serpent's Tail, 313 p.

This is the first in George Pelecanos' 'DC Quartet' of crime novels that take place in the capitol. I'd heard of Pelecanos through his work on The Wire and then read the Quartet reviews over on Olman's blog in 2007. I finally pulled tis down off the shelf at the end of the year because I knew it would be a good read.

Needless to say, I was very pleased that I did. Pelecanos is a fine writer and he truly has a love for DC. The story follows Pete Karras, a Greek-American, in the 1940's after the war. It weaves a tale of crime, betrayal and friendship through the years. I won't post more here on the plot because the journey of discovery is really fun. I'll just say that the final confrontation is a real blast.

I'd say that this book is the best of the first two in the Quartet as I have only read those.

09.37 The Guns Of Heaven by Pete Hamill

2009-12-17T18:14:00.004-05:00

The Guns Of Heaven (1983) by Pete Hamill

I actually had no idea that this book was a Hard Case Crime reprint. I picked up an old edition in the dollar bin at the bookstore and liked the cheesy cover. It turns out to be a bit overwroght but I liked the main character and it was quite readable.

The main character is a New York journalist with close ties to the IRA back in the old country. On a visit over there he is given a letter to take back to America that starts a series of thrilling events. Briscoe unknowingly brings back some of "the troubles" from Ireland and when they mess with his young daughter there is no holding him back.

Hamill writes tautly and he has some great, if stock, characterizations.

09.36 Cell by Stephen King

2009-12-17T09:28:00.004-05:00

Cell (2006) by Stephen King
Pbk, Pocket Star Books, 449 p.

In the 80's I used to read all the Stephen King I could get my hands on. I haven't really touched him since but there has been a bit of buzz in the past couple of years. His book, On Writing, has been well received and I like the look of his newest novel, Under The Dome. And then I read the thoughtful reviews of this book by both Olman and meezly. Those both convinced me to pick this one up.

I won't give much more of a synopsis other than to say that it is about a New England artist struggling to reunite with his young son after a mysterious signal broadcast over the global cell-phone network turns the majority of his fellow humans into zombie-like killers.

I thought the book was a lot of fun but especially in the beginning. King writes gleefully about the chaos of a world gone completely mad. He is also able to have the hero characters behave as competently as you might expect people who are survivors to do. He still has his King-isms of old like the repetition of songs or the powerful dark man who is at the center of things a la "the Walkin’ Dude" from The Stand.

Overall, a book worth checking out if you have any love for the old 1980's Stephen King.

09.35 Miracles Of Life by JG Ballard

2009-12-17T09:24:00.008-05:00

Miracles Of Life by JG Ballard
Trade, Harper Perennial, 278 p.

The British writer JG Ballard died this past April. I've always been a big fan of his science fiction books from the first 10 years of his career. Only recently did I see the film that was made from his semi-autobiographical book, Empire Of The Sun. When I saw this autobiography I knew I wanted to pick it up just to learn about his background.

I'm glad that I did because it turns out that Ballard's early days growing up in Shanghai were pretty interesting. Similarly to the book, Ballard's parents were upper middle class expatriates in China which made them essentially the upper class. Large estates, drivers, staff and boarding schools were all the norm for Ballard until Pearl Harbor. After that the Japanese occupied the International Settlement and in 1943 he and his family were interned for the remainder of the war. Camp life for Ballard in many respects paralleled what he wrote in his book with the obvious difference being that he was with both his parents for the whole time.

Ballard and his family then moved back to England by way of Canada. After school he intended to become a medical doctor but some interest in stories he had written convinced him to become a writer. He was however, profoundly unsuccessful at getting any of his work published and so had to try his hand at a wide variety of jobs. Eventually, while training for the RAF in Canada, he came across some American science fiction magazines and was inspired to write sf. Even then, many of his ideas were considered far too avant garde for the mainstream sf world.

In this book he is quite dismissive of his first books such as The Wind From Nowhere and The Drowned World. Nevertheless, he was able to become a writer full time at this point in his life and raise a family in England. In 1964 his wife died and left him to raise their 3 children on his own.

The autobiography becomes somewhat less interesting at this point because Ballard did himself. He never remarried and he devoted himself to basically two things: writing and raising his kids. He gained some notoriety in the early 1980's with the success of Empire Of The Sun and the subsequent Spielberg movie. For the most part, Ballard was a quite writer who kept to himself.

This was a great book for anyone who is interested in finding out a bit more about the man behind the pen.

09.34 The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

2009-11-08T11:36:00.004-05:00

The Girl Who Played With Fire (2006) by Stieg Larsson
Hardcover, Knopf, 512 p.

Earlier this year I reviewed Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in this blog. I liked that novel but was not super interested in reading the sequel(s). Nevertheless, when a friend offered up the newly released translation I cleared my reading list for it.

This book is again about the two characters from the previous one. Mikael Blomkvist — crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium — has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.

On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander, the savant from the previous novel.

Now, as Blomkvist — alone in his belief in her innocence — plunges into his own investigation of the slayings, Salander is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.

Again, the story is gripping and immensely readable. Like, say, an author such as Stephen King the writing seems super simple but flows well and is structured in such a way as to make you gobble up the pages.

In the first book, Salander was a secret expert at all sorts of skills that helped her and Mikael solve the mystery. This time though she is like some James Bondian super savant. It turns out that in addition to her amazing computer 'hacking' skill she is a boxer, lockpicker, and has a photographic memory. From the events of last book she has also now become very wealthy and buys a massive 20 roomed apartment. Larsson does things like giving a minutely itemized list of the Ikea furniture that she buys for the place. It all becomes a bit distracting and unnecessary.

09.33 The Hunter by Richard Stark/Darwyn Cooke

2009-11-03T14:12:00.002-05:00

Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter, Adapted & Illustrated By Darwyn Cooke
Hardcover, IDW 140 p.

If you look at the 2009 banner at the top of this blog it will be obvious that I am a fan of Donald Westlake and, in particular, his Parker series of crime novels. The Hunter (1962) was the first in the series and arguable one of the best. This story was twice made into film (1967 & 1999) and now Canadian cartoonist Darwyn Cooke has been given the task of adapting some of the Parker books.

The original novel is a masterpiece of taut writing and follows the story of Parker who is seeking revenge and payback after being betrayed and left for dead by his criminal partners. Parker is unrelenting and brutally violent.

I was initially concerned about this adaptation because I wasn't sure the art would match up with the tone of the story. The art though is very spare - almost in a European style. The coloring is only three toned - black, white and a pale blue - which means the drawing are very important. It took a couple of re-readings for me to start to dig the drawings and while it would not be the art I would have matched with the story it woks overall fairly well. Cooke has refrained from explicitly showing much of the violence and he uses shadow effectively to give the story a great atmosphere.

This really was a nice adaptation and I am looking forward to The Outfit to be published later in 2010.

09.32 Peril At End House by Agatha Christie

2009-10-25T08:37:00.003-04:00

Peril At End House (1932) by Agatha Christie
Pbk, Harper Collins, 222 p.

When I was much younger I was a huge fan of the classic British mystery authors, Ngaio Marsh, H.R.F. Keating, and Agatha Christie. I've tended to keep away from the older police procedural mainly because of repetition that tends to pop up over and over. I do like to pick up the odd Hercule Poirot mystery because you can never go too wrong with the eccentric detective book.

In Peril At End House, Poirot is on vacation at the Cornish resort of St. Loos when he meets a beautiful young woman at the hotel. She tells him of three recent "accidents" that she had escaped possible death from. When she returns home her hat is left behind and Poirot discovers a bullet hole in it leading him to believe that her life truly is in danger. A very pleasant mystery follows with a good cast of characters and even a real murder in the midst of it all.

09.31 Spook Country by William Gibson

2009-10-25T08:36:00.001-04:00

Spook Country (2007) by William Gibson
Hardcover, Putnam, 371 p.

Bill Gibson, once a top notch science fiction writer, continues his transformation into a writer of contemporary techno-thrillers. Like his last book, Pattern Recognition, this novel takes place in modern times.

Gibson weaves themes of contemporary art, cyber-security, classism and post-9/11 society into a multi-threaded story. Unfortunately, I am feeling more and more that he is taking interesting themes, ideas and imagery for his most recent novels and then trying to weave them all into some kind of coherent plot. The overall impression is underwhelming. I'd like to see Gibsone return to the genre of SF because I think that he has some cool perspectives on the future.

09.30 Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

2009-09-12T12:58:00.003-04:00

Little Brother (2008) by Cory Doctorow

Kudos to Doctorow for breaking the publishing paradigm and making this book (and many of his others) freely available under the Creative Commons license. I downloaded this book to my iPod Touch and read it with an app called Stanza. Obviously not the ideal way to read a novel but I found it was nice to be able to pull it out any time and read a chapter or so. Also, given the content of the story I thought it was pretty cool to be pushing the envelope of new reading techniques.

Little Brother is a YA book but I would suggest that people of all ages can read it. The story concerns Marcus a teenager who lives in San Francisco. One day when he and his friends arou out cutting school a terrorist bombing destroys the San Francisco Bay Bridge. In the ensuing chaos, he and his friends are picked up by the Department of Homeland Security, held incommunicado and tortured. Upon his release, Marcus fights back against the police state that the city has become using his tech and hacking know how.

Doctorow writes here in a very broad manner and clearly sets up the straw dog of the terrorist attack to drive home his points about freedom of speech and government repression. Nevertheless he manages to make the story fun and interesting without getting too preachy. Buy a coy for all the teenagers that you know.

09.29 The Limbo Line by Victor Canning

2009-09-01T19:31:00.000-04:00

The Limbo Line (1963) by Victor Canning

This is my first Victor Canning book and I am sure going to be looking out for more. Canning writes in the tradition of the great British thriller authors: Eric Ambler, Hammond Innes and Desmond Bagley.

The Limbo Line is a tight little Cold War thriller. Richard Manston is a retired agent living the life of leisure as a gentleman farmer and golfer. He gets drawn back in to the game by his superiors to break a Russian kidnapping ring that is grabbing low level defectors and whisking them back to the Motherland.

The British Secret Service has identified the next victim, a ballerina, Irina Tovskaya, as the next victim. Manston’s job is to dangle her as bait and follow her through the “Limbo Line” the organization that handles the kidnapping, brain washing, and smuggling of the kidnapped defectors.

Of course, nothing goes as planned and like any good spy novel there are various crosses and double-crosses, escapes and evasions. This was a fully satisfying and fun read.

09.28 The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

2009-08-15T16:46:00.003-04:00

The Forever War (2008) by Dexter Filkins

I have unfortunately left this review for a couple of months and so I don't have it in the forefront of my brain as it were. My regular readers know that I like to keep an eye on the literature of military history. In my recent reviews of some Vietnam books I have come to realize that you really do need the perspective of time to write effectively about historical events.

Dexter Filkins is a reporter for The New York Times and has covered the Middle East for the past decade or so. This book is a series of vignettes that cover his reportage from both Afghanistan and Iraq. The role of a correspondent is to obviously present the events that they encounter. It gives us a small window into the world of the soldier and their experiences. I recently read Dispatches by Michael Herr which is a very similar book by a reporter which contains his experiences in Vietnam. Unfortunately, I had the same problem with this Filkins book as I had with that one. As reporters they relay amazingly well the sights and sounds of the battle but when it comes to giving any historical or political context then they fall short.

I still enjoyed this book and I thought the scope of it was what made it really interesting. Filkins starts by describing a mass beheading in a stadium in Kabul by the Taliban before their overthrow. He goes on to present some powerful scenes of the hours and days following 9/11 as he wandered in among the wreckage of the towers. Some of the best scenes take place when he is embedded with a group of Marines taking part in the attack on Falluja.

I can't say I would really suggest you go out and seek this book but read it if available and definitely look for Filkins writing in the Times.

09.27 The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson

2009-08-15T16:44:00.003-04:00

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2005) by Stieg Larsson
Trade, Vintage Crime, 590 p.

I know you have seen this one. This is one of those books that is getting the full muscle of the publishing industry behind it right now. Basically there is a copy prominently displayed in every single book retailing space in America these days. I remember a year ago reading Bangkok 8 or it’s sequel which had a similar zeitgeist. I may have this wrong but I think that the author, Larsson, turned in the third novel in the series and then died right afterwards. That always pumps up the interest.

Regardless, I am always psyched to see genre fiction cross over onto the mass culture. Also, one of my favorite writers is Henning Mankell, a Swedish crime author so I was interested to check this one, by another Swede, out.

The plot is a difficult one to describe but it basically involves two threads and characters that intertwine. Mikael Blomkvist is a crusading financial journalist who has just come through a bruising libel trial. He takes a leave of absence from his magazine and is hired to investigate a 40-year-old missing persons case. The Vanger clan is one of the top industrial families in Sweden. Their patriarch is nearing the end of his life and wants to find out what happened to his niece who disappeared one day in the 60’s.

The other thread follows a young woman named Lisbeth Salander who is something of a disaffected loner. Tattooed, pierced and surly she seems like the last person who would be the top investigator in one of Sweden’s largest security firms.

The author does a nice job of spinning the two characters stories out and ultimately bringing them together. I felt it was a bit forced in the way he characterized them as polar opposites but for the most part it worked. I am a little surprised that American readers have taken to this book so strongly given the differences in pacing between this Northern European novel and most American books.

All in all, a fun book to read. I will definitely look to find his next novel when it comes out of hardcover next year.

09.26 Eureka by William Diehl

2009-08-15T16:41:00.003-04:00

Eureka (2002) by William Diehl
Pbk., Ballantine, 470 p.

Not really sure why I picked this one up in a used bookstore. The only book I recognize by Diehl was Sharky’s Machine which was made into a movie with Burt Reynolds (?). Nevertheless, this turned out to be an excellent crime novel and a great vacation read.

This is one of those crime books that has its roots deeply buried in an event that happened way in the past. In this case it is something that occurred in the 1920’s in a town called Eureka, on the coast near LA.

Flash forward to the 40’s before the war and Zeke Bannon is a homicide detective in LA. Him and his partner investigate the death of a woman who appears to have been killed when her radio fell into the bathtub. Zeke is one of those dogged cops that never think things are quite what they seem and he ferrets out some inconsistencies in the tragic death.

Without revealing more of the plot I can only say that the author does a great job of setting up the story and zipping back and forth in time. Most of the first third of the book takes place in the past and the rest in 40’s LA. Diehl does a nice job of writing the hardboiled style of Chandler or Hammett. He is also great with the little details about the cars, clothes, etc.

I would recommend this book as worth picking up if you saw it on the dollar rack or on the bookshelf of your next vacation getaway.

09.25 To What End by Ward Just

2009-08-15T16:38:00.002-04:00

To What End (1968) by Ward Just
Trade, PublicaAffairs, 179 p.

Continuing in my exploration of some of the more well regarded books covering the Vietnam War, I decided to read To What End. Ward Just was a correspondent “in country” for several years for the Washington Post. The book reads like an expansion of several pieces presented as chapters.

Similar to many other books on the era I have read the presentation is haphazard to some degree. Perhaps I am reading the wrong accounts but if one reads an account of WWII there is a certain clarity and sequential presentation of the events interspersed with analysis. Vietnam books seem to always be vignette driven – almost chaotic. For men who wrote right after the war there is probably a reason for this. The war was chaotic, dirty, undisciplined and difficult to analyze.

Ward Just admittedly wrote this book before the war was over and he wrote it quickly. He writes some vivid and detailed chapters on the South Vietnamese political scene in the heart of the war. These parts are very interesting and make you see how many competing regional, national and international interests there were at the time. Not entirely unlike Afghanistan right now.

In the end the best parts of this book are the small moments that he recounts being a journalist along for the ride. The jungle, the ambushes, the heat all combined to wear down soldiers in myriad ways.

A worthwhile book in the canon of Vietnam War literature but not the first one I would go to.

09.24 Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard

2009-07-29T18:41:00.001-04:00

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (2005) by Yvon Chouinard
Trade, Penguin, 258 p.

As regular readers of the Report know, I don't generally read business books (I leave that to Buzby). However, a co-worker lent me this book and assured me that it was an interesting and worthwhile read.

Yvon Chouinard, if you don't know, is the founder and owner of the company Patagonia. These days Patagonia is what they call a lifestyle brand - meaning that the comapny has moved far beyond what they initially made and now sell outdoor clothes mainly to urban folk.

The first half of the book which is by far the most interesting describes how Chouinard started Patgonia and how it grew. His family came from Quebec and moved to California when he was at an early age. The young Chouinard was an avid fisherman, hiker, surfer and above all, a climber. He decided that he wanted to start making his own climbing gear and began manufacturing high quality pitons and carabiners on his own. Slowly the reputation of his equipment grew and he hired on a few friends to help out. They soon branched out into rugged climbing clothing and early polypropylene clothes. They eventually sold the climbing gear part of the business (now called Black Diamond). Through the 80's and 90's Patagonia grew and now does in the region of $300 millon in sales annually.

The latter half of the book outlines Chouinard's, and by extension, Patagonia's ethical and business philosophies. This part of the book is pretty poorly written and mirrors in more formal language many of the things that he talks about in the first part of the book. The company strives to have a good workplace with childcare and lots of other benefits. Chouinard himself took off large chunks of time from the daily operations of the company to pursue his outdoor activities. Since the 80's Patagonia has donated 1 percent of sales to environmental causes.

As mention, this was not the typical book I would pick up but I mildly enjoyed the first half.

09.23 Last Stand At Saber River by Elmore Leonard

2009-07-29T11:09:00.002-04:00

Last Stand At Saber River (1959) by Elmore Leonard
Pbk, Harper torch, 247 p.

Before he became a crime writer Elmore Leonard's early novels (this is his 4th) were westerns. Leonard's story is set in the Arizona Territory during the last days of the Civil War.

Paul Cable, a wounded captain on from the Confederate side, has been discharged and returns with his family to reclaim his homestead. He finds his home occupied by Union sympathizers who work for Vern and Duane Kidston, brothers who supply remounts to the Union Army.

A former Confederate soldier, Edward Janroe, who runs guns to the southern forces, tries to maneuver Cable into killing the Kidstons. Although Cable wants to avoid trouble, he is drawn into several gun battles in which he uses his wartime tactics to outfox his overwhelming opposition.

This was definitely a fun novel to read and one of the best of the few westerns that I have read. Worth a look.

09.22 The Bitter Tea by Gavin Black

2009-07-29T11:06:00.005-04:00

The Bitter Tea (1972) by Gavin Black
Pbk, Fontana, 189 p.

This was something of a classic 70's Fontana adventure novel a la Desmond Bagley or Alistair MacLean. All of Blacks book feature the hero Paul Harris. I'm not sure what role he plays in the other books but in The Bitter Tea he is a suave businessman who runs his own shipping company out of Kuala Lumpur.

One evening on a trip to a mountaintop luxury casino he witness an assassination attempt on a high ranking Chinese official and recognizes the assassin. That evening he also meets a beautiful and deadly woman from Bangkok.

The adventure is moderately interesting but not up to the standards of the authors I mentioned previously. I would probably give another one of his thrillers a try but unless it was substantially better I'd pass on this writer.

09.21 The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs

2009-07-29T11:05:00.002-04:00

The Mucker (1913) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Pbk, Ballantine, 320 p.

This was a great, rip-roaring ride of a novel. The Mucker is like a whole bunch of different genres all wrapped up in one book. It is a sea story, a marooned story, the story of a prize fighter, a fugitive tale, and a love story. Burroughs weaves virtually every pulp genre together into the tale of Bill Byrne, The Mucker.

The book is now in the public domain and can be found over at Project Gutenberg.

09.20 Intelligence In War by John Keegan

2009-07-01T17:46:00.007-04:00

Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (2003) by John Keegan
Trade, Vintage Canada, 387 p.

This is one of the more recent books by Keegan, a leading British military historian. I suspect that he was asked to put something like this together to tie in with the Iraq War and the heightened public interest in all things "intelligence".

Keegan's thesis here is that intelligence in war is secondary to force. The general thrust is that one side in a conflict may have superior intelligence however that may not give them an advantage if the other side possesses a stronger or better run army. He writes, "[...] it strikes this author that the organization of intelligence-gathering and subversion within the same body is undesirable. Subversion is a weak way of fighting, differing from conventional warfare by the total unpredictability of its results; moreover, in a democracy, it is always liable to disavowal by legitimate authority and denunciation by authority's political opponents. Intelligence-gathering, by contrast, can yield conflict-winning outcomes and , if securely and soberly conducted, is an activity only those of ill-will can condemn.
Yet, in the last resort, intelligence warfare is a weak form of attack on the enemy, also. Knowledge, the conventional wisdom has, is power; but knowledge cannot destroy or deflect or damage or even defy an offensive initiative by an enemy unless the possession of knowledge is also allied to objective force."

The book is structured as many Keegan books are with chapters advancing chronologically. He sets forth a number of examples to advance his overall thesis. Napoleon, Stonewall Jackson, a discussion of wireless intelligence, Crete and Midway during WWII. The penultimate chapter, which I found the most persuasive, concerned the battle for the Atlantic during WWII. The Allies had cracked German codes using Enigma and yet loss from U-Boat attacks remained high. German naval tactics were initially superior and even though the Allies knew they were coming they couldn't do anything about it.

The final chapter is also very interesting and concerns the German secret weapons that were developed near the close of WWII. The V-1 and V-2 rocket that were designed and deployed from Scandinavia and later France had been known about in bits throughout their development. Intelligence=gence came from various sources - human intelligence, aerial spy photos, etc. The Allies however, were never able to put all the pieces together and predict what was going to happen until the rockets started landing. In the end though it didn't matter because the war was effectively over.

Overall, not a bad book but by no means close to being one of Keegan's best efforts.

09.19 On The Beach by Nevil Shute

2009-06-18T17:20:00.004-04:00

On The Beach (1957) by Neville Shute
Pbk, Signet, 238 p.

Finally. I have been wanting to read this novel again for years and never actually found the time to pick it up. I think I may have read it as a teen so my perspectives and interpretations now are, I expect, wholly different.

The novel is a surprisingly bleak indictment of the aftermath of nuclear war. I always find it interesting when I read post-apocalyptic books from the 50's and 60's at how devastating the results of a nuclear holocaust are portrayed. At that point in time only 2 bombs had been dropped but I expect there was a certain immediacy to the devastation for most people. Pictures and newsreel footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were probably widely distributed. Perhaps I should never underestimate the power of the public's fear when it comes to disaster.

On The Beach posits that a widespread nuclear war has devastated the northern hemisphere rendering it totally uninhabitable. The novel takes place in Melbourne where a young naval officer with a wife and new baby lives the ideal 50's dream in a small house outside the city. He is recalled on assignment to be the liaison officer to one of the last remaining US naval vessels, a submarine. The Australian and the commander of the sub become something of friends.

In the background there is an impending menace. The nuclear fallout id advancing slowly south and over the coming months will render the entire planet uninhabitable. Shute uses this set-up to examine how the various characters in the book deal with their inevitable mortality. The nerdy scientist takes to racing a sports car, the US sub captain remains chaste in memory of his dead family while being courted by a young lady or the Australian officer plants a flower garden that he will never see bloom. Pretty heavy handed stuff as you can see.

Nevertheless, Shute finds a little bite in his examination of class structure and the Australian (read: British) "stiff upper lip" mindset. There is no chaos in the book; no one riots or gets out of control unless some heavy drinking counts. Calm stuff in the face of certain death. I found that the psychology of the characters, while odd seeming to me, was interesting and worthwhile.

09.18 The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell

2009-06-02T23:35:00.004-04:00

The Man Who Smiled (1994) by Henning Mankell
Trade, Vintage, 324 p.

Another excellent Henning Mankell book in the bank - I think I have read about a half dozen now. Mankell is a Swedish author who writes police procedurals about a detective, Wallander, in Ystad, 60 km south-east of the city of Malmö, in the southern province of Skåne.

Inspector Wallander is the classic loner: unmarried, strained relations with his family, few friends. He is, however, an excellent detective which is why it is shocking at the beginning of the book to find that he is considering quitting the police force. In the previous novel (The White Lioness) he killed a man in the line of duty and is now guilt ridden.

The strange death of a lawyer friends father and then the death of his friend serve to draw Wallander back into the fold. He assembles the old team and finds himself again through the rigors of the extensive investigation.

A good read.

09.17 Empire Of The Sun by J.G. Ballard

2009-06-02T23:24:00.004-04:00

Empire Of The Sun (1984) by J.G. Ballard
Trade, Simon & Schuster, 288p.

I have always wanted to read this Ballard book mainly because it is, in many respects, a memoir of what he wet through as a child in Shanghai. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the British were all interned for the course of the war.

Ballard's book follows young James Graham, a boy obsessed with all things aerial and convinced of the superiority of his class. In the chaos of the Japanese occupation of the Shanghai International Settlement Jim becomes separated from his parents. This section of the book is really interesting. For Jim, it is just an adventure running around trying to find food and exploring the vacated houses.

Eventually Jim becomes interned in a large camp at Lungua where the story tracks the years of starvation, hopelessness and ultimately death for many of the inmates. The book is really a story of survival but also a a loss of innocence for a young boy. A boy who idolized war is reduced to gnawing on maggot filled potatoes and caring for crazed prisoners. Surely that is as long a way from piloting a heroic Japanese Zero as you can get.

Quite soon after the novel's publication Hollywood came calling and a film was made by Steven Spielberg. I have only watched the early parts of the movie but as I expected there is a lot of sanitization going on. Ballard writes in 2006: "I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn't help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else's."

09.16 In The Country Of Last Things by Paul Auster

2009-05-15T19:40:00.003-04:00

I picked this book as my choice in our Ramblekraft book club. Obviously the post-apocalyptic theme intrigued me although I had heard of the author through meezlys reviews of The Music of Chance and The New York Trilogy.

[We now have a review up from meezlyblog]

[And another from The University of Crumbolst]

In the beginning we meet Anna Blume who has crossed the Atlantic to find her brother, a missing journalist. This information is slowly parsed out over the early section of the book as the City is described. The City is vast and unforgiving. Unemployment is massive, scavenging rife and death easy. Something as simple as the weather can kill you or you can just give up and go to the Euthanasia Clinics (a cool nod, I thought, to Make Room, Make Room/Soylent Green). Everyone who is surviving has to work to survive.

Anna's search recurs but she mainly just lives. The daily struggle of scavenging takes all of her will. The novel feels like one of those POV shots where Anna just takes up with whatever slightly more positive thing comes along. A strange interlude occurs where she lives with a madman and his wife (weird ending) followed by something of a romance in the ruins of a huge public library. Each encounter builds on the last but not in the way that you can immediately put your finger on.

I really enjoyed the concept of the real annihilation of the City. There never seems to be anything produced with everything scavenged or sold like the entire interior of Victoria's house. Entire blocks will just be razed for reasons that are only a rumor. Even the description of trying to navigate the roads which are crumbling and buckling.

For me the theme of this novel was hope. Survival is based on having hope but hope in the story it is almost unreal. Anna never really sees a future or escape from the City. They are certainly always options but always there are barriers: not enough glots, have to care for Samuel. We see that those who give up hope like the shipbuilders wife quickly wither away. The last section of the book obviously is much more positive but I never quite felt it was tangible.

From what I had heard of Auster, I was expecting a book that took the PA genre and used it as hook to hang some modern literature gymnastics: deconstructing this or making it a "meta-sf" that. Similar to Cormac MacCarthy's The Road though, the story remains respectful to the canon of the apocalyptic. In many ways I found it a little like some of the early British PA fiction from Ballard or John Christopher. The human condition is examined in light of a fractured world and we don't explicitly have to know what the destruction is to see it's effects on people.

The narrative is not so driven but I enjoyed the depth of the descriptions. Anna's life was so relentlessly brutal, she persevered and yet I never fully came to sympathize with her. Nevertheless the theme of hope is finally realized in the end and when I thought more about it afterwards I hoped that they all make it somewhere better.

09.15 The Devil's Children by Peter Dickinson

2009-04-16T00:20:00.003-04:00

The Devil's Children (The Changes: Book One) (1970) by Peter Dickinson
Pbk, Laurel-Leaf Fantasy, 187 p.

This YA novel, which is the first in a trilogy, has an interesting premise: something (it is not clear as of yet whether it is magical or technological) has caused much of the population of England to react violently against anything mechanical. Riots and mass chaos ensue, plague runs rampant, society quickly degenerates, and a girl named Nicky Gore is separated from her family. Nicky eventually falls in with a band of traveling Sikhs, who do not suffer the same aversion to technology. Because of this, they are not always certain what might bring violence upon them - those like Nicky, who feel the effects of the Change, are likely to react murderously when confronted with engines and other devices. They originally take on Nicky as a "canary", to tell them when they are acting dangerously, but she quickly finds friendship and a home of sorts with them. The Sikhs are eventually able to settle outside a small farming community (which is rapidly degenerating into feudalism) and make a living doing metal work, but they are mistrusted, and their existence remains perilous.

There are some very cool things about this book. The premise, like I said, is fascinating, although it's a little frustrating not to have any kind of explanation for the Change (on the other hand, the fact that there's no easy answer is kind of neat). You also don't run into many YA novels that explore any aspect of Sikh culture, so that also makes this stand out from other similar novels. My only real complaint is that it seemed that the character of Nicky was slighted in terms of development. I didn't feel Dickinson gave the reader much of a sense of what she'd been like prior to the Change, so it was hard to understand if her toughness came from her experiences during the riots, or if she had always been as strong-minded as she comes across in the novel. The ending was also quite abrupt, but since it's the first book in a trilogy, that might be expected.

09.14 A Rumor Of War by Philip Caputo

2009-04-10T21:44:00.002-04:00

A Rumor Of War (1977) by Philip Caputo
Trade, Owl Books, 356 p

As I mentioned before in my review of Michael Herr's Dispatches I am looking to read some of the more well regarded histories and memoirs related to the Vietnam War. Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War was extremely popular in the late 70's. In fact, the author writes in a postscript to this book that the fame and notoriety that he gained from his memoir drove him to drink heavily and eventually have a breakdown.

That seems a strange result given the crazy and horrific stuff that he writes about in this book. In the beginning though, all is golden. Like many young men of his generation Caputo joined the army for 2 reasons: boredom with his middle class existence and a youthful desire for the glory of war. Educated, Caputo trains to become an officer and joins the 9th Expeditionary Brigade of the USMC. These soldiers were the very first sent to Vietnam in 1965 when the US involvement was in its infancy. The soldiers are there to guard US airbases and installations only. At first, the war seems distant, and winnable. The NVA and VC are rarely seen by the troops.

The middle section of the book describes how he was assigned to a desk job cataloging casualties. Here we begin to see the inexorable escalation of the conflict. Casualties are rising, soldiers are becoming disillusioned and atrocities are increasing on both sides. Caputo describes the intense weariness of the front line soldier resulting from too many night patrols, filthy conditions, the stifling heat and unending bugs to name just a few of the privations. In addition, the fighting is nothing like anyone expected. The enemy was virtually never confronted on the battlefield. Instead there was a constant level of fear and forced alertness from mines, sniping, mortars and brief ambushes which almost always ended with the VC melting away into the bush.

In the final section of the memoir Caputo requests a front line assignment again and is reassigned to a rifle company. Here he writes more about the day to day life of a soldier that is "in the shit". Ultimately, there arises a situation where Caputo and his troops cross a moral divide and there are some pretty serious consequences for him.

All in all, a powerful and gripping book. Immediately after reading this book I was a bit disappointed. I think I got over hyped as to how good it was going to be. Upon reflection, however, I've really thought a lot about the way he was able to relate his mind set changing over the course of the book. Also, Caputo writes in a very clear and forthright manner with none of the colloquial language like was used extensively in Dispatches.

09.13 Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith

2009-03-31T13:29:00.007-04:00

Deep Water (1957) by Patricia Highsmith
Pbk, Penguin Crime, 260 p.

What a writer! Patricia Highsmith doesn't rely on tricks or gimmicks. She builds up her stories bit by bit so that near the end of the book you want to read more but you are also a little bit scared to find out what happens. I haven't read any Highsmith in a long time I think, in part, because of something that was mention by another reviewer: "she is so precise and cold in the way she views humans that it could make you a little crazy if you read too much of her (or at least depressed)."

Victor Van Allen has it all. He is a well respected man with many friends in a perfect small town. He has a beautiful, sexy wife and a lovely daughter. There are no money concerns - he has a small private income which allows him to run an exclusive printing company putting out a few titles a year of poetry, etc.

Victor Van Allen, however, is a cuckold.

Ever since their marriage his wife has had a series of lovers all paraded before him and the town. She often has them over for dinner and drinks long into the night and before Vic retires to his room on the other side of the garage. The marriage is a sham and yet Vic seems entirely unfazed by the whole thing. He has has his hobbies and his printing company and his wonderful daughter which seem to give him perfect equanimity about the situation.

His friends, however, see the situation and are constantly urging him to do something about it. Get mad, get divorced, do something. So finally one night at a party he spreads a rumor that he killed one of her lovers who had disappeared a time ago. And that, of course, opens the Pandora's box to possibly committing a real murder.

I loved the wholesale indictment of the classic suburban 50's lifestyle that this novel presents. Each chapter is another banality of a school concert or a neighbors picnic yet Highsmith keeps ramping up the tension. You feel as though something is going to happen but you don't want it to because it will bring down this house of cards that has been constructed.

There is also fairly overt sense of misandry going on here. The entire novel is told only from the perspective of Vic which gives you a certain sense of myopia after awhile. He is entirely contemptuous of most of the characters in the book other than a few people and even some of them ultimately let him down. At times he seems almost like an automaton, entirely too perfect. I've seen it characterized that "[Highsmith] writes about men like a spider writing about flies". A most apt description.

I give this novel a wholehearted recommendation.

09.12 How The Dead Live by Derek Raymond

2009-03-27T11:30:00.002-04:00

How The Dead Live (1986) by Derek Raymond (Robin Cook)
Pbk, Abacus, 203 p.

When I read a new author I like to wait until I am finished the book before reading their bio. And what a fascinating bio Derek Raymond has. Raymond is the pseudonym of Robin Cook (no, not the airport novel Cook). He was born into wealth in London and moved to the country during WWII. After dropping out of Eton, Cook lived with the Beats in Paris, spent some time on the Lower East Side and then developed a taste for crime - smuggling and auto theft among other things. At the beginning of the 60s he moved back to London where he became involved tangentially with the Krays. This is when he wrote his first novel, The Crust on its Uppers (1962), which is supposed to be excellent. Cook continued to write through his life without much popular success. Eventually, his Factory series (of which How The Dead Live is the 3rd) brought him some measure of success as Derek Raymond.

I really liked this novel. It was dark, tough, sardonic and original. The story, like the others in the Factory series, follows an unnamed Sergeant in the London division of Unexplained Deaths, known as A14. The hero is "surly, sarcastic, and insubordinate" to the extreme but is a bulldog for the truth especially where it concerns the lower classes. He is sent up to the country to investigate the disappearance of the French wife of a local doctor. The town itself and all it's players turn out to be not what they seem (a little like a noir version of the movie Hot Fuzz).

Excellent book by a new author (for me). Looking forward to finding more books by him especially:

The Crust on Its Uppers, 1962, originally published under the name of Robin Cook, reprinted by Serpent’s Tail, 2000

He Died with His Eyes Open, Secker & Warburg, 1984, the first book in the Factory series

The Devil's Home on Leave, Secker & Warburg, 1985, the second book in the Factory series

I Was Dora Suarez, Scribner, 1990, the fourth book in the Factory series

09.11 Kinds Of Love, Kinds Of Death by Tucker Coe

2009-03-22T13:55:00.008-04:00

Kinds Of Love, Kinds Of Death (1966) by Tucker Coe (Donald E Westlake)
Pbk., Signet, 141 p.

Donald Westlake wrote a series of five novels as Tucker Coe. The hero of the books is a disgraced ex-cop who does various jobs in the gray world between the police and the underworld. The hero, Mitch Tobin, is unlike any Westlake hero I have read before. He is not the sardonic killer like Parker nor is he the humorous thief like Dortmunder. Mitch Tobin is a bit morose, he only takes on the job for the mob in this book because he hates that he isn't a cop anymore and his wife has to work at a discount store. He is approached by a slick high-level mob boss and asked to investigate the disappearance of his mistress(along with a good chunk of cash).

There is a lot of procedural stuff here but it is still fun because he is doing an investigation not with the resources of the police force but with some serious gangster pull. A cool twist.

I liked this book. It was by no means his best but it definitely made me want to see where Westlake goes with this character for a few more novels.

09.10 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

2009-03-19T17:29:00.003-04:00

The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by John Buchan
Pbk., Popular Library, 142 p.

After having read Greenmantle last year I was on the lookout for a copy of John Buchan's first adventure novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

With very little preamble Buchan introduces us to his hero, Richard Hannay. Hannay is a well to do colonial Brit who worked for a number of years as an mining engineer in South Africa. This novel finds him living in London, bored with society life and looking for adventure.

Fortunately his upstairs neighbor knocks on his door seeking sanctuary because Hannay is "an honest man, and not afraid of playing a bold hand." The fellow spins a tale of international intrigue which Hannay can't help but become involved in. He eventually has to go on the run and the bulk of the novel consists of his flight across the English countryside eluding police and nefarious agents. In the end he must return to London to set up a climactic encounter with the enemy.

This really was a fun book to read. Although Hannay makes a number of miraculous escapes from his pursuers in the novel you always feel like he really could have done them. I would still say that Greenmantle was the better of the two books but not by much.

A number of film versions of the novel have been mad; all of them adding on varios subplots. Hitchcock's 1935 version is generally regarded as being the best.

09.09 The Vendetta by Nick Quarry

2009-03-17T17:21:00.003-04:00

The Vendetta (1972) by Nick Quarry
Pbk, Gold Medal, 158 p.

Thanks to Olman for this quick an fun read. You can see his review over here.

It's a pretty stock gangster story told in the Prohibition era but written like a 70's potboiler. Paolo Regalbuto a Sicilian immigrant has given up the gangster life for the love of a good woman. One night his apartment accidently gets bombed and his wife and kids are killed. His revenge then gets coopted by some up and coming gangsters who use Paolo's methodical killing to further their own ends. Eventually Paolo outwits them all although his heart never really seems behind it.

The book is taut and fast paced. Nothing outrageously great but definitely fun to read. Still looking for another book by Nick Quarry called The Don Is Dead.

09.08 The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 by Rick Atkinson

2009-03-17T14:43:00.005-04:00

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (2007) by Rick Atkinson
Hardcover, New York: Henry Holt. 791 p.

The Day Of Battle is the amazing second volume in Rick Atkinsons three volume history of the Allied liberation of Europe in World War II. The first volume, An Army At Dawn, tells the story of the war in North Africa and was published in 2002. The third volume will recount the struggle for Western Europe, from the eve of the Normandy invasion through the fall of Berlin.

Atkinson writes clear and well researched history. Always readable, he sometimes goes a little to deep into speculating on a description of how something might have been. My only other complaint would be that he focuses too much on the internecine political battles between the various generals. I would have liked to have read more analysis on the actual tactical battle details.

The Day of Battle recounts the epic struggle of the Allies as they invade Italy and ultimately push north to Rome. When the war in Africa was over there were hundreds of thousands of men and millions of tons of materiel sitting idle in Algeria and Tunisia. Leaders knew that an invasion of France was not possible in 1943 and so they decided to invade Sicily. Operation HUSKY, as it was called would give the Allies practice at launching an air and amphibious assault which they knew would be necessary for Western Europe. There was no clear mandate for what was going to happen after Sicily was conquered though. Several large armies (American, British and Canadian) landed in Sicily with very little coordination and virtually no battle plan for when their soldiers left the beach. In effect it was something of a free for all. While never quite as bad, this would be a recurring pattern throughout the Italian campaign. American and British generals mistrusted one another and were often out for their own glory leaving the troops to suffer the brunt of their lack of professionalism.

The Sicilian campaign should have been a fairly simple one. The Allies were close, prepared and the island was defended mainly by Italians, not known for their military prowess. Nevertheless, may things that could have gone wrong did go wrong. Eventually after nearly 30,000 casualties on each side and 140,00 Italians POWs the island was in Allied hands and the retaking of Europe had begun.

Churchill always advocated for the invasion of Italy. He felt that this would siphon off troops and supplies from the German eastern and western fronts. Further, Italy could serve as a resupply point for fighting in the Middle East and Far East. The Americans resisted this plan because they wanted to concentrate on an all out invasion of western Europe. In 1943 this invasion was not going to be ready and rather than have it's troops idle they signed on the the invasion of Italy.

The Allies invaded Italy at Salerno in September of 1943. The Germans were strongly dug in to the hills above the beaches and casualties were heavy. It was only the combined power of the Allied naval and air bombardments that allowed them to gain a foothold. German counterattacks nearly succeeded in destroying the Salerno beachhead but the Fifth Army managed to hang on. The Germans, realizing that they were over matched fell back to a series of defensive lines that crossed the country from Naples to Rome.

By early October, the whole of southern Italy was in Allied hands, and the Allied armies stood facing the Volturno Line, the first of a series of prepared defensive lines running across Italy from which the Germans chose to fight delaying actions, giving ground slowly and buying time to complete their preparation of the Winter Line, their strongest defensive line south of Rome. The next stage of the Italian Campaign became for the Allied armies a grinding slog against skillful, determined and well prepared defenses in terrain and weather conditions which favoured defense and hampered the Allied advantages in mechanized equipment and air superiority. It took until mid-January 1944 to fight through the Volturno, Barbara and Bernhardt lines to reach the Gustav Line, the backbone of the Winter Line defenses, setting the scene for the four battles of Monte Cassino which took place between January and May 1944.

Monte Cassino was an ancient monastery perched on a hill which anchored the German Winter Line. In February of 1944 the Allies, erroneously thinking that Axis troops were using the monastary to spot positions, dropped over 1400 tons of bombs on the monastery, town and surrounding hills. The Germans promptly took up positions in the ruins and proceeded to stave off repeated Allied attacks resulting in about 54,000 Allied and 20,000 Axis casualties. The Allies eventually pushed through based on the sheer weight of metal and men.

One of the real lessons that I learned in this book was that the Allies for the most part did not have an imaginative general among them. Again an again there are examples of full frontal attacks on fortified positions occupying the high ground which would fail until the Germans were overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

Finally, only weeks before the invasion at Normandy, the Fifth Army led by General Mark Clark liberated Rome. There is controversy surrounding this maneuver because the Fifth Army was supposed to sweep around behind the mass of the retreating Germans and cut off their retreat northwards. It is suggested that Clark's thirst for glory meant the Italian Campaign would sputter on for nearly another year. With the invasion of Normandy though The war in Italy was quickly forgotten but not so for the friends and relatives of the over 600,000 combined casualties.

09.07 The Light of Men by Andrew Salmon

2009-03-15T08:03:00.000-04:00

The Light Of Men (2008) by Andrew Salmon
Trade, Cornerstone Book Publishers, 250 p.

This, the second novel in our Ramblekraft Book Club, was suggested by Olman after reading a review by Doc.

The premise is an interesting one. It is nearing the end of WWII and the Nazi death camps are in full swing efficiently killing Jews, vagrants, homosexuals and the like. A young man named Aaron enters one of the camps, seemingly healthy and impervious to the indignities heaped upon him by the camp life, Kapos (prisoner guards) and SS. Aaron has a mission to find a man who he seems to know about in strange detail. Quickly Aaron learns the ways of the camp and gains some allies in his quest but everything is tenuous; random death is always a step away.

When Aaron finally encounters his quarry, the story changes from one of his survival to one where he must find ways to help another survive. As an unexpected benefactor, Aaron seems too good to be true. The story of Aaron is also woven within another narrative taking place within the camp. A Prophet has emerged, protected by the prisoners, who is gaining popularity as well as potentially deadly attention from the power structure. Combine this with the quickly approaching Allied forces and you have the setting for a complex conclusion to the novel.

My overall feeling about the book is mildly positive. The author could be inconsistent chapter to chapter in the strength of his writing and so too did my interest track. I think the greatest kudos should go to Salmon for vividly creating a picture of life in the concentration camp. He has obviously done his research and I would suggest that a couple of his descriptions approach passages I have read by Primo Levi.

I do have some criticisms though. The critical plot point involving Aaron seemed to me fairly obvious early on in the book which detracted somewhat from my enjoyment. Further, I felt that the last several chapters were, while well written, not as good as they could have been. What I mean is that to build a third act with some punch required bringing a bunch of different threads together skillfully. I would argue that based on the writing in the earlier parts of the book Andrew Salmon could have done a better job. Nevertheless, I don't think tht detracts much from a fine cross-genre novel.

One last thing I want to mention that has to do with the publisher, not the author. In these times of mass market publishing and big box book stores I think an author and publisher need to do everything possible to get their book into the hands of the public. First of all there were a few typographical errors in my edition of the book. And in my opinion the cover designer has got to be taken to task. Cover design is a crucial element in a book and the drawing plus the nearly unreadable text on this one detracted from the package.

09.06 Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell

2009-02-15T14:34:00.004-05:00

Tomato Red (1998) by Daniel Woodrell
Trade, No Exit Press, 240 p.

There are a lot of books out there and not many of them are well written. Furthermore, there are millions of books that do not use an original idea in them. This goes double for genre fiction and in particular crime fiction. Tomato Red purports to be a crime book but you could have fooled me. The author, Daniel Woodrell, describes his writing as "country noir" and for this novel at least he shoots for what you might think that term means.

The story concerns a fellow named Sammy Barlach, a no good, messed up, hillbilly drifter who ends up one night passed out in the living room of a house he has broken into on the wrong end of a crank binge. He awakens to find a brother and sister there; she's Jamalee a short little redhead who wants to escape her up bringing and he's Jason a preternaturally handsome teen who is discovering he is gay. The two of them sort of adopt Sammy and take him back to live with them in the house next door to their mom, Bev the hooker.

It's all a good set-up and at this point you wonder where things are going to go with the story. Well, they don't really go anywhere. It mainly becomes a character study of the four cats mentioned above with some class tension thrown in for good measure. The writing style itself is cool and unique to at least what I have read. Perhaps some of his other books utilize the conceit better however by all accounts this is supposed to be his big award winning book. Better luck next time.

09.05 The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

2009-02-11T18:00:00.004-05:00

The Left Hand Of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin
Pbk, Ace, 304 p.

For no real apparent reason I have always been resistant to reading this book. Perhaps it was a subconscious misogyny or just disliking being told what books are the "essential" sf novels. Either way, I finally took it upon myself to see what all the fuss was about especially since, like me, this story turns 40 this year.

This science fiction story takes place on a planet called Gethen which is also known as Winter. The planet is so cold as to be almost at the limits of humanoid survival. There are 2 large nation states, Karhide and Orgoreyn as well as a number of smaller ones on the planet. The inhabitants of the planet live a near feudal existence with Kings, councils and peons however, there is still tech in things like outdoor gear and vehicles. The primary difference in the Gethians concerns their sexuality as compared to 'normal' humans. For most of the month they live as functional androgynes expressing no sexuality. Then for a couple of days they enter kemmer, a highly sexualized period where they can become either male of female depending upon who their partner is. Both can sire and bear children.

For the most part the novel is written from the perspective of an alien, Genly Ai. He has been sent to the planet as an Envoy from the Ekumen, a sort of benign federation of planets. They generally send a single representative to new planets to try and convince them to join. A single Envoy poses little threat but also has extensive diplomatic and language skills. In spite of this, the task Genly Ai has been set is a difficult one as the Gethians are somewhat unconvinced of the necessity of joining the Ekumen.

The story was very well written. I would liken her writing a little to Iain M Banks in the skill at creating a believable alien world and it's personal and political intrigues. Telling it from the perspective of an outsider who gets to travel all over the planet is a cool way to describe without describing. Obviously, sexual politics play a role in the book but she never pushes them too hard or makes you feel that the Gethians are different just to make them alien. Their sexuality is integral to the development of the race and their place on Winter.

I'm glad I finally took the time to read this book and would recommend it for any fan of science fiction.

09.04 I Know A Trick Worth Two Of That by Samuel Holt

2009-02-02T15:16:00.003-05:00

I Know A Trick Worth Two Of That (1986) by Samuel Holt (Donald Westlake)
Hardcover, Tor, 288 p.

This year is, of course, the first year where we are not going to be able to get any new writing from Donald Westlake. In tribute to him I have changed up the look of the blog for the year and I am going to make an attempt to read some of his many titlaes that I have never read before.

Between 1986 and 1989 Westlake published 4 novels under the name Samuel Holt. Last year I reviewed this first of these, One Of Us Is Wrong and I recently found the second, I Know A Trick Worth Two Of That.

Like the first book, the titular hero is Sam Holt, ex-cop and ex-actor. Sam fell into a part as the lead for a popular TV series called PACKARD for five years and now after that series has ended he is living the easy life. A place in Hollywood, a house in NY, girlfriends on both coasts and a surly manservant are the accouterments of Sam Holt's life.

This book is perhaps not quite so preposterous as the one I reviewed earlier but I'd say it is also not quite as good. An old friend on the run has asked Sam to give him a place to stay for awhile. After a few days an already scheduled house party takes place at Sams pad and the friend turns up dead in a locked bathroom. Sam, while diplomatically investigating his friends, must find out who killed his buddy and perhaps solve the mystery of who was following him.

Not the best Westlake effort I have read mostly due to the bowtie ending however as always an entertaining author to read.

09.03 The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

2009-01-29T11:49:00.006-05:00

The Riddle Of The Sands - A Record Of Secret Service (1903) by Erskine Childers
Pbk, Penguin, 336 p.

A review of this wonderful novel would not be complete without a precis of Childers life. Erskine Childers (1870-1922) was a member of the last generation of true imperial British. He fought in the Boer War and was instrumental (largely through this book) in getting the British government to recognize the German threat prior to WWI. A lifelong sailor, he often took hes boats down through the Frisian Islands and the Baltic (see map below) with his wife and brother. Later in life Childers became involved with the struggle for Irish Nationalism, smuggling arms to the precursor to the IRA. In 1922 after the beginning of the civil war between Sinn Féin and the IRA he was arrested, tried and quickly executed while an appeal was pending. The apocryphal story of his execution was that he shook hands with the young firing squad and ended his life with the words, "Come closer lads, it will be easier for you."

The Riddle of the Sands begins with a letter received by Carruthers in London. Carruthers is a self described "peevish dandy" who is stuck in London working at his Foreign Office job even though most everyone else has left the city for the summer. The letter is from his old schoolmate Davies, a slightly lower class but friendly fellow whom he knew slightly. Davies asks him to come out to join him on his yacht on the Baltic for some sailing and duck shooting.

Carruthers decides to go down thinking of long leisurely days in his "cool white ducks and neat blue serge" sipping champers in the sun. He is quickly disabused of that notion. Davies has a small boat, the Dulcibella, "something over thirty feet in length and nine in beam". Carruthers is initially skeptical about even staying on what with the cramped quarters and actual sailing worked he is forced to do. Gradually he effects a transformation of attitude mainly because of Davies super positive attitude and the beauty of the areas that they are sailing.

The two men slowly get a routine together over the first third of the novel but it seems Davies has had an ulterior motive for getting Carruthers out to Germany. He has some suspicions about some men he met earlier and professes to have had an attempt made on his life. They agree to leave the Baltic and return the the Frisian Islands to reconnoiter further. Germany has a small coastline on the North Sea with a line of small islands just offshore which are backed by extensive sandy shoals. There is virtually no harbour or room for large vessels. It is into this area that the young adventurers explore.

I don't want to give too much away because the "mystery" is slight. It is the journey that these fellows take that is so great to read. There is a lot of sailing and sailing terminology but never so much as to make the book bog down. This is supposed to be one of the first examples of the spy novel and it reminded me in a lot of ways of the writing of John Buchan (The 39 Steps, Greenmantle).

Top notch.

So I grappled with the niceties of that delicate craft; smarting eyes, chafed hands, and dazed brain all pressed into the service, whilst Davies, taming the ropes the while, shouted into my ear the subtle mysteries of the art; that fidgeting ripple in the luff of the mainsail, and the distant rattle from the hungry jib--signs that they are starved of wind and must be given more; the heavy list and wallow of the hull, the feel of the wind on your cheek instead of your nose, the broader angle of the burgee at the masthead--signs that they have too much, and that she is sagging recreantly to leeward instead of fighting to windward.

09.02 Headed For A Hearse by Jonathan Latimer

2009-01-18T13:43:00.005-05:00

Headed For A Hearse (1935) by Jonathan Latimer

Man, I am glad that I didn't have the edition with this cover on it. Mine is # 6 in the Dell Great Mystery Library as selected by Anthony Boucher, Humphrey Bogart and Louis Untermeyer. They selected some awesome titles some of which I am going to try to read this year.

Headed For A Hearse is one of several titles that Latimer wrote featuring the detective William Crane. In this book however, Crane doesn't feature much in the story until near the end. Robert Westland is on death row for the murder of his estranged wife. Only 5 days away from electrocution he finally snaps out of his daze and decides that he doesn't want to be killed for a murder he didn't commit. He manages to bribe the warden to allow him to meet every day with a group of people who have a vested interest in his case: a lawyer, detectives, his business partners and his lover. Together all these folks under the direction of the lawyer, Finklestein, work to solve what is essentially a locked room mystery.

Suffice to say there are lots of open leads (Westland put up little resistance at the trial) to follow up on in a limited amount of time. As more information comes in the detective Crane becomes more a part of the story and integral to the ultimate solution.

This book is awesome. It is funny, gritty and the mystery is actually interesting to try and figure out. There is a great scene where Finklestein and the detectives visit and interview a hot slightly slutty showgirl. Later that night on the way back to the hotel room:

"I've got a good idea." Crane took a coin from his pocket, walked over to a phone booth by the cashier's cage, and called a number. "Miss Hogan's apartment," he said. In a minute he spoke again. "This is the State's Attorney's office, we must speak to Mr. Finklestein." There was another pause. "Mr Finklestein? - I suggest, Mr. Finklestein, that you have the decency to pull the living-room blinds."

He returned to the table, as pleased as if he had solved the Westland case.

09.01 Riders Of The Purple Sage by Zane Grey

2009-01-15T09:45:00.007-05:00

Riders Of The Purple Sage (1912) by Zane Grey

I thought I would take another stab at the Western genre. I have read a couple of Elmore Leonard's western novels but those are more of a re-imagining of the style. Sort of like Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven as compared to The Great Train Robbery*. Zane Grey on the other hand is the real deal. He was one of the founders of the genre and Riders of the Purple Sage was one of his first books.

There were a few things that surprised me about this book. It was a long novel (over 300 pages) and the plot was moderately complex. The story takes place in western Utah in 1871 in a small Mormon town. A young woman whose dead father was the scion of the town has taken up a spinster life managing her fathers vast holdings and associating with cowboy Gentiles (non-Mormons). The town elders and other top Mormons don't like this and begin a campaign to ruin the woman. Through the help of her Gentile friends she eventually comes to see the true evil of the supposedly upstanding Mormon community.

I can't totally figure out where I come down on this novel. The writing can be really simplistic with dialogue that is just plain bad. Also, I expect because of the era in which it was written, there is little or no "grit" - no violence or hard language. This is too bad because he sets up some really incredible confrontations between characters.

However, there are some nuggets of gold to be found in here. The descriptions of the country are amazing and powerful. There is a scene where a thunderstorm washes across the sage that was incredibly vivid. Also, some of the action (especially the horse chases) were really a lot of fun.

I am not going to be one of those huge Zane Grey fans buying up all his oeuvre but given the option of one of his books on one of those dismal hotel used bookshelves I would definitely read him again.

* The first film version of Riders was made in 1918, then again in 1925, 1931, 1941 and in 1996 with Ed Harris.

2008 Year End Wrap-Up

2009-01-06T11:23:00.002-05:00

Once again, I did not reach 50 books but I am quite satisfied to have reached 34. This year I did not really make a great effort to crank through the books until the latter third of the year. Also, I had 2 pretty substantial magazine subscriptions which took up a good chunk of my reading time. However, 2009 is going to be the year I rededicate myself to hitting 50.

In terms of the titles I read this year, I have to say that I feel like I made some great choices. The Spanish Civil War book I read was a great intro to the subject along with Hemingway's stories. I managed to throw in a few more post-apocalyptic titles (Tripods trilogy, Three Californias trilogy, A Secret History of Time to Come, Empty World). I made a little bit of a start on cracking the Western genre which I will be continuing in a limited way this year. Of course, crime made up a big component of my reading as ever. On the 1st of this year the great Westlake passed away so I intend to revisit his books this year.

I also joined a cool book trading site called BookMoochfrom which I obtained a number of the titles I read this year as well as getting rid of quite a lot of the chaff from my bookshelves.

Onward and happy new year to my few readers!

Donald E. Westlake, R.I.P.

2009-01-02T10:56:00.003-05:00

A giant has passed away. Thankfully we still have his writing.

Obituary here

You can find links to a hell of a lot more Westlake tributes here.

08.34 The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon

2008-12-31T19:45:00.003-05:00

The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007) by Michael Chabon

Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.

This is the second book I have read by Chabon after reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay a few years ago. That was a fun novel which incorporated much of the history of the Golden Age of comic books and contained references to many of it's heroes such as Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Joe Simon, Will Eisner, and Jim Steranko.

This newest novel came with a good pedigree having won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. It turns out to be SF not in the science fiction sense but more so in the speculative fiction one. I would describe the book as an alternate history crime novel.

The setting of the book is one where history has diverged from the one we now know around 1940. The US has created a temporary European Jewish homeland based in Sitka, Alaska. The State of Israel was never created because of their loss of the Arab-Israeli war. Now, over 50 years later, the Reversion is set to evict all the millions of Jews that have been living in Alaska. At this point our crime story begins.

I won't reveal any of the details of the plot but suffice to say that there is an execution style murder in a fleabag hotel where an alcoholic, divorced police detective named Meyer Landsman lives. Yes, it all sounds cliched but Chabon writes very well and the setting of Sitka with it's Tlingit natives and ultraorthodox Jews makes the whole thing really interesting.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this book although I do have two fairly minor complaints. In the end, I felt some dissatisfaction with the reveal but it can never be all that you expect it to be. The other issue for me was the incessant use (whether by design or style, I do not know) of simile in the book. Nevertheless, a good read.

PS: The rights have been optioned, pre-production completed and the Coen Brothers are set to direct.

08.33 The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett

2008-12-31T10:06:00.004-05:00

The Long Tomorrow (1955) by Leigh Brackett

This is another post-apocalyptic novel that I have had sitting on the shelf for a long time but never gotten around to reading.

Two generations after a nuclear war America is a rural society. The Constitution forbids towns larger than 200 people or more than 100 buildings. The prevailing wisdom is that cities were the root cause of the war and that technology development will lead again to great destruction.

Len Colter and his cousin Esau are teenagers in the New Mennonite community of Piper's Run. the boys sneak out one night to a strange revival meeting where they witness the stoning to death of a trader who is supposedly involved with the rumored town of Bartorstown, a place where technology is being developed. The boys secretly steal a radio from the traders wagon and although they don't know how to use it they both become interested in the forbidden technologies.

Ultimately they are caught and harshly punished by their fathers leading them to flee down the Ohio River to the larger town of Refuge. There they both fall for a young woman and become involve with a group who is pushing to grow the town larger than it's constitutional limits. Fleeing a confrontation with the traditionalists, both boys are finally brought to Bartorstown where they learn the true secret of it's technologies.

This novel, while interesting, failed a little for me. The ideas developed of the rejection of technology and blind adherence to faith were all well done however when it came to the end the author never seemed to take a stance either way. I think the book in its time pushed the envelope but now seems a bit dated.

08.32 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

2008-12-24T15:22:00.002-05:00

08.32 Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov

I will be discussing this novel with my forum group in February so I'll be leaving a blank space here for the forthcoming review.

Let me just say in advance that I thought the writing was incredible.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

08.31 Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse by JJ Adams (ed)

2008-12-24T15:06:00.003-05:00

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (2008) by JJ Adams (ed)

I got this book earlier in the year and have been quite excited to read it because of my fascination with the PA genre and in spite of the fact that I don't really dig on short stories too much.

Unfortunately, the whole thing does not come together too well as a collection. There are 23 short stories here which were written from 1973 to 2006. While many of them certainly qualify as apocalyptic there are others that seem weirdly out of place.

It is not like the list of writers is poor - we have stories from Stephen King, Gene Wolfe and Lethem. My feeling is that the editor never had a clear idea about how he wanted to present what he felt were PA stories and as a consequence he just grabbed whatever he could find and threw them in there. Something of a disappointment.

08.30 World War Z by Max Brooks

2008-12-07T18:49:00.003-05:00

World War Z (2006) by Max Brooks

I actually managed to read WWZ in the year it was given to me by a friend last Christmas. In the late 90s I used to read this website that was called, I think, Alpha Dog. The format of the site was posts in the first person by this guy who was holed up somewhere in England overrun by zombies. This was in the era before blogs and so the daily update thing was pretty novel. It was cool to follow along as he slipped out to gather food or fought off various attacks. Sometimes he'd disappear for weeks at a time and then come back with a post about how he'd tried to make a trip to some other town or something. This book, World War Z, was similarly exciting to read.

The structure of the "novel" is that it is being written years after a zombie outbreak swept across the world. The "author" was one of the writers of the official UN report that came out after the outbreak was under control however much of his anecdotal work was removed. This book gathers together interviews he did with survivors all across the globe. Not only are the people he interviews survivors but they often have played a critical part in the situation.

The book is an extremely easy read not only for it's content but the style is conversational and simply written. Nevertheless it is a fun fantasy.

08.29 The Sands of Kalahari by William Mulvihill

2008-12-02T21:42:00.003-05:00

Again, I think I heard of this book from Vintage Hardboiled Reads. It turned out to be a cool read.

The story is the classic plane crash survival trope. A small group of disparate people are flying across Africa when their plane crashes in the Kalahari. Because their flight was unregistered they expect no one to know where to come looking and so they set off across the desert in hopes of finding some rescue.

Eventually they come across a sort of mini-hill range in the midst of the desert where there is some shelter, water and fruit. Here the story becomes much more of a social experiment. The pilot decides that he will leave the rest of the group behind and strike out to try and find help somewhere. The rest of the group begins to subsist in their little valley according to their various skills. The old Afrikaner shows them desert survival skills. The strong game hunter decided to kill the family of baboons that live in the hills because he doesn't want them to compete for resources.

As the weeks go by one of the group devises a unique way of eliminating the others as he reverts to an almost prehistoric survival mentality. It's hard to convey how weird the story gets but you really get drawn in to the survival adventure.

08.28 No Pockets In A Shroud by Horace McCoy

2008-10-31T15:28:00.006-04:00

No Pockets In A Shroud (1937) by Horace McCoy

Not sure where I came up with this little pulp gem but it turned out to be a good find. The story is about a newspaperman in Small city America. JOE is a super principled hard-head reporter who is let go from the paper at the beginning of the book because he wants to write a story that will bother some advertisers. Rather than compromise he turns his energy to starting a small magazine that will serve a twofold purpose. He wants a forum to write freely about the corruption and nepotism in the city but he also wants the magazine to be something of a high society gossip column. One thread of his character in the book is his constant struggle to be a part of the upper class.

Eventually he gets the mag off the ground and begins to write some hard hitting pieces. He exposes all sorts of corruption amongst powerful men in the town leading to some expected violent consequences. Eventually he uncovers a KKK-like organization whose members are the city's elite. A brilliant finale ensues.

This was a really cool book. It was definitely not typical of any novels that I have read from that era.

08.27 The Green Wound Contract by Philip Atlee

2008-10-31T15:23:00.004-04:00

The Green Wound Contract (1963) by Philip Atlee
Pbk, Gold Medal 206 p.

Many series of tough guy agents were written in the 60's and 70's. James Philip Atlee wrote 22 books about the CIA super agent, Joe Gall, with all the titles having "Contract" in the title. I was put on to these once again through a review over at Vintage Hardboiled Reads. Additionally, Olman posted a review of the title The Canadian Bomber Contract over on his 50 books blog.
I managed to pick up a few in the series and thought I would give the first one a shot: The Green Wound Contract.

It's actually been a while since I read the book (I am way behind on the reviews) so I can't give an in depth synopsis. I do remember that the plot was fairly convoluted