A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Dysfunctional & Ideal Families, a Statue, & Milton Sweltering summer. To celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary Chief Inspector Armand Gamache (Head of Homicide for the Surete de Quebec) and his wife Reine-Marie are staying in the Maison Bellechasse, a former robber baron wilderness hunting lodge now the top auberge in Quebec. The only other auberge guests are members of the wealthy and dysfunctional Morrow family, there for a reunion to commemorate the placing of a giant statue of the deceased patriarch Charles (and to frostily ignore or nastily needle each other). This being the fourth Inspector Gamache novel, A Rule Against Murder (2008), the ninth chapter ends with an impossible killing by means of a rare murder weapon. Who did it? Gamache suspects someone from the messed-up family, Agent Jean-Guy Beauvoir focuses on a member of the auberge staff, while Agent Lacoste tries to stay professional. The overarching plot of the first three novels, involving Gamache’s enemy in the police hierarchy and spies on his team, has been resolved, and this novel is the first in the series to mostly occur away from the quirky and cozy village of Three Pines. Three Pines is represented in the novel, though. It’s just over the hill in the next valley from the ex-hunting lodge, and at the start of the first chapter, a postman carries an ominous letter of invitation to a house there… WHAT I LIKED ABOUT THIS NOVEL 1. Compelling Characters The Morrow family turns out to be more interesting and complex than at first meets the eye, and Beauvoir is surprisingly unpleasant for most of the novel. No outdoorsman, he is about the only character to hate wild nature, which he sees as pesky black flies; he almost xenophobically scorns “mad Anglos” and gets a charge out of telling people there’s been a murder, and he’s there to investigate it. Penny’s people feel real because they have flaws and complications and dark sides and sympathetic sides, and she’s good at gradually revealing them as she rotates her POV narration from among them. She thereby keeps us turning the pages not only to find out who dunnit, but also to find out how the characters came to act and feel and think as they do. At least as much as finding out the killer’s identity, I wanted to find out things like why Gamache can’t let his son name his baby after Gamache’s father, why Peter’s nickname is “Spot” and Mariana’s “Magilla,” who wrote “Julia gives good head” in the men’s room of the Ritz, why Irene won’t touch or be touched, what Bean’s gender is, and why Beauvoir is so attracted to the hulking past middle aged chef of the auberge! 2. Sensual Pleasures, Especially Food and Drink Sausages with maple syrup! Cucumber and Raspberry soup with dill! Barbecued steak sandwich with sauteed mushrooms and caramelized onions on top! After-dinner espresso and cognac! 3. Art and Literature References Relevant to the Plot, Characters, and Themes Rodin (the Burghers of Calais), Milton (Paradise Lost), Sir Walter Scott (“Breathes there the Man”), John Gillespie Magee (“High Flight”), Pegasus, Pandora, etc. 4. Canadian/Quebecois Culture Canada Day, the 1960s Quebec change from Anglophone to Francophone, bad swear words like “tabarnak,” indigenous people making hunting lodges for robber barons, etc. 5. Interesting Plot-Relevant Tidbits about Nature Twenty-five-year-old black walnut trees kill everything around them; honey bees can only sting once, etc. 6. Vivid Descriptions “She looked like a bird or a withered angel as she approached.” “Then an old hand, like twigs stripped of bark, reached out and held the gaily patterned sun hat.” 7. Insights into Human Nature The truth *about yourself* will set you free. Emotions like anger and hatred may in time turn into murder. Above all, “The mind is its own place and, in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.” Penny movingly develops this with the Morrow clan, the auberge staff, Beauvoir, and Gamache. 8. Armand Gamache The presiding deity of the novel, almost too good to be true. Poetry quoting, art referencing, human nature revealing, “monster” (murderer) exploring, self understanding, smelling of safety and calm (rosewater and sandalwood!). He’s the ideal husband and father and teacher and boss. His chief flaw is a fear of heights (which Penny is sure to flog him with now and then). 9. Ralph Cosham The perfect audiobook reader for this series. WHAT I DISLIKED IN THE NOVEL 1. Unbelievable, Unnecessary, Almost Absurd Action Scene Penny can’t resist putting Gamache in thrilling but excrescent and unconvincing action scenes in the climaxes of her novels! 2. Unfair Point of View Narration As Penny rotates among the points of view of her various characters, she commits the crime (which should be banned from the mystery genre) of doing some narration from the point of view (in the mind of) the killer that leaves out things the killer would surely be thinking about. Sneaky point of view tricks enable her to prevent us from guessing the killer’s identity. 3. Something Too Easy for This Reader to Figure Out Relative to the Ace Detectives Via little hints given too early, Penny makes it too easy for this reader (no kind of detective) to figure out how the murder was done well before Gamache and company figure it out. Embarrassing. 4. Too Much Mystery Solving Explanation and Absence of Vital Information Finally, Penny doesn’t really explain just how certain things relating to the timing of the crime and the positioning of the victim were made to work according to the killer’s plan, and she finesses this via misdirection via Gamache’s final Genius Detective Explanations. Finally, Penny’s strengths are character development, interaction, and insight, not violent action, and she should write her mysteries more fairly re point of view and more convincingly re method of murder. I really liked this novel and couldn’t put it down and will continue with the series, but I felt disappointed by the climax and resentful at the revelation of the culprit. View all my reviews
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A Red Death by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “You’ve got a big problem, son.” July 1953. World War II veteran Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins is sweeping one of his secretly owned buildings, the Magnolia Street Apartments near Watts, when he does some provocative foreshadowing: “Everything was as beautiful as always … it wasn’t going to last long. Soon Poinsettia would be in the street, and I’d have the morning sun in my jail cell.” Five years ago, the affair of The Devil in the Blue Dress (1990) gained Easy $10,000, under the table money with which he bought some apartments to rent out under an assumed name, and now a disheveled, persistent white IRS agent given to calling Easy “son” starts investigating him for tax evasion. As Mofass, the man who collects rents for Easy (and acts like his boss to hide that Easy is the owner) tells him, “They got you by the nuts, Mr. Rawlins.” Meanwhile, EttaMae Harris, a beautiful, strong, sexy woman Easy still loves fifteen years after she married his murderous best friend Mouse, has just left Mouse and moved from Texas to LA with her cute son LaMarque. Who knows what Mouse would do were he to show up and find EttaMae and Easy together? Then a fervid anti-communist FBI agent named Darryl T. Craxton offers to dismiss Easy’s tax troubles if our man will just get to know Chaim Wenzler, a Jewish union organizer who’s helping the First African Church in charitable activities. Soon murder victims and Easy are turning up together, making the LA police suspect him of being a killer. Like many private eyes in hardboiled detective stories, Easy is an observant and laconic first-person narrator, drinks too much, gets plenty of straight sex but remains single, is observant and thoughtful, is not a sadist but can deal out punishment in self-defense, has a handy gun or two, and has a moral compass more active than most people’s around him. Unlike many typical private eyes, Easy is not actually a detective but a favor exchanger, helping people in his community when they’re in trouble with the law or each other. And he’s telling his story some thirty years after the events occurred. Also unlike many genre private eyes, Easy is African American, and many of the most interesting parts of this second novel in his series, A Red Death (1991), come from Walter Mosley’s depiction of 1950s era Los Angeles as experienced by people of color. This novel says some interesting things about African Americans’ identification with Jesus and the back to Africa movement. I really liked the concise and vivid descriptions of the different shades and kinds of skin color among the African American community: e.g., “His color was dark brown but bright, as if a powerful lamp shone just below his skin,” “Jackson's skin was so black that it glinted blue in the full sun,” and “Mouse's color was a dusty pecan.” As the novel progresses, Easy finds it increasingly difficult to steer clear of the IRS agent, to satisfy his FBI handler (“I'd become a flunky for the FBI”), and to avoid self-loathing while becoming good friends with Chaim and sleeping with Mouse’s wife. He nonetheless has the time (and energy) to engage in some one-night-stand action and to visit his good friends the Penas, who run a Mexican luncheon café and take care of his abused and mute adopted son Jesus, as well as to learn about communism, blacklists, and the like. I liked the first Easy Rawlins novel and was looking forward to this second one. Mosely has an ear for dialogue, writes concise and vivid descriptions, is good at evoking 1950s era LA, and weaves potent themes about race, religion, the Cold War, and human nature into his book. But… despite Michael Boatman’s professional reading of the audiobook, I didn’t enjoy this novel. I got tired of Easy’s (easy) self-recriminations and self-condemnations, didn’t enjoy his ability to have sex with near strangers while supposedly sleeping with the woman of his dreams, and was unimpressed by his detective abilities. And I found the denouement too speedy after the gradual development towards it. I will listen to other Easy Rawlins mysteries but won’t be in a hurry to return to him. View all my reviews
The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Three Pines, Spiritualism, Murder, and Arnot Starting The Cruelest Month (2008), the third Inspector Gamache novel by Louise Penny, was like reclining in a familiar chair by a crackling fire while snacking on a maple syrup garnished brioche while sipping a creamy café au lait. Almost too comfortable. At first. To Penny’s credit, she’s soon working twisted shadows into even the most benign and healthy seeming of people and places, introducing an old haunted house, and channeling her inner wiccan/psychologist. “Was something more sinister at work behind the pleasant facade of Three Pines?” Oh, you betcha! In the first eight chapters Penny returns us to the main setting of her murder mystery series, Three Pines. The Quebec village (“where poets take walks with ducks and art falls from the sky”) is quirky and cozy without being trendy or edgey and, like Shangri La or Narnia, is only found accidentally by lost people who need it. Living in Three Pines is Penny’s recurring cast of eccentric and appealing people: the sensitive and sensible about-to-be-discovered artist Clara Morrow and her already successful but secretly jealous artist husband Peter, the prickly old foul-mouthed poet Ruth Zardo, the gay couple immaculate Olivier and disheveled Gabri who run the town B&B and bistro slash antique shop, and the large generous black former psychologist and current bookstore owner Myrna. Because none of those recurring characters could ever be guilty of murder (we assume), Penny introduces some new ones: luminous Madeleine and her generous friend Hazel, Hazel’s needy university student daughter Sophie, the widower town grocer Monsieur Beliveau, Odile (a bad poet who runs an organic shop) and her boyfriend Giles (an ex-lumberjack who crafts beautiful furniture from dead trees and talks to live ones), and the mousy wiccan Jeanne Chauvet. Jeanne, who is visiting Three Pines for the first time, quickly finds herself presiding over not one but two seances, the second of which takes place in the abandoned and cursed and or haunted old Hadley House and ends with someone apparently dying of fright. If it is another Three Pines murder, who better to find the killer than Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec’s homicide department? In his fifties, he possesses a large, elegant figure, deep brown eyes, strong face, and laugh lines around his eyes. Though his native tongue is French, he speaks English with a British accent, having studied history in Cambridge U. He is incredibly intelligent and well-read, quoting at will from classics and contemporary poets. He is observant and patient (“I listen to everybody”), being especially interested in people’s homes and emotions (“The most important thing in a murder investigation is how people feel”). He trusts his intuitions. Unlike many of today’s detective heroes, he’s happily married and has successful children but no alcohol or demons poisoning his inside. He likes to recruit ostracized agents for his team. He is THE ideal father/teacher figure. But will Gamache be able to solve the present mystery while having to deal with a media assault on his character and career engineered without his knowledge by his best friend from childhood Superintendent Michel Brevbeuf who has for decades secretly hated Gamache’s ability to live happily despite adversity? It’s clear that the five or so years old Arnot case (in which righteous Gamache split the Surete in two by bringing down a corrupt Surete superintendent) is still hanging over Gamache’s head. On his murder investigation team, in fact, two young agents are spying on him and sabotaging the case, the ever-unpleasant Yvette Nicole and the ever-eager Robert Lemieux. (Luckily, he also has reliable agents Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste) Will Gamache’s inveterate good faith and desire to rehabilitate lost causes cause his downfall? If this third book in the series follows the pattern of the first two, the murder case will be solved while the Arnot case is developed a little further without being resolved. We do learn here what the amoral Arnot was doing to merit being exposed, prosecuted, and imprisoned five years ago: destroying indigenous villages with agents provocateur, alcohol, and murder. Penny writes rotating every page or two or less among the points of view of her varied cast of characters. She excels at getting in the heads of different people. However, by narrating via so many point of view characters as she tells her story, she may at times cheat by hiding certain key information from the reader that the characters would surely think about, whether it’s who’s side they’re on in the Arnot Surete cold civil war or how they killed someone (though this last is probably a flaw of most detective genre stories). Penny writes interesting Quebecois cultural details (spring hailstorms, bear poop, French and English, hockey references, etc.). And food: creamy Brie or pate on crisp baguettes, eggs Benedict (with Canadian bacon!), pear and cranberry tart, maple laced brioches, frothy and steamy cups of rich and aromatic coffee, and more. And she writes vivid similes, like “She looked as if made up by a vindictive mortician,” “dark circles under her eyes, as if grief had physically struck her,” and “Emboldened by the light, as though what they held was swords, they moved deeper into the house.” And it’s a pleasure to eavesdrop on the witty Three Pines locals and on the wise Gamache and his agents. The characters talk about life and human nature, like the concept of the Near Enemy: unhealthy emotions masquerading as healthy ones (attachment as love, pity as compassion, indifference as equanimity). Gamache’s truism “It’s our secrets that make us sick” works perfectly in the story, as does the fact that some people can’t stand seeing other people (especially friends) happy. Although Penny is prime when setting people to talking, teasing, philosophizing, questioning, musing, and so on, so far her action scenes are unfortunate. Each of her first three Gamache novels features a climax involving violent action, and each time it feels contrived, unbelievable, and even absurd. Luckily, such scenes are short and rare and don’t detract much from the overall excellence of her stories. Ralph Cosham reads the audiobook with his appealing voice giving every moment in the novel the perfect pace and emphasis and mood without ever showing off. This novel was a page-turning, moving, and humorous read, and I’m looking forward to the fourth Gamache story. View all my reviews
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “It wasn’t a game for knights.” It's mid-October and Philip Marlowe, private detective, has donned his powder blue suit: “I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it.” Why the dress up? He’s calling on “four million” in the person of rich old General Sternwood. The first thing he sees upon entering the Southern California gothic mansion is a stained-glass panel featuring a knight in armor not really trying to untie a maiden garbed only in her modestly concealing long hair. Before he can get to see the General in his orchid hothouse, he’s approached by twenty-year-old Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth.” She notes Marlowe’s height (“Tall, aren’t you?”) and looks (“Handsome too”) before biting and sucking her finger-shaped thumb and falling into his arms. Marlowe coolly tells the smooth old butler, “You ought to wean her. She looks old enough.” Marlowe is duly hired by rich, old, declining, and (to Marlowe anyway) appealing Sternwood to deal with some guy trying to blackmail his younger wayward daughter Carmen. He also lets slip that his older wayward daughter Vivian’s husband Terry Regan has gone missing, but refrains from asking Marlowe to find him. Neither daughter “has any more moral sense than a cat.” It’s quite an opening to Raymond Chandler’s first Philip Marlowe hardboiled detective novel The Big Sleep (1939). There will be smut and gambling. There will be a two-bit chiseler and a big-time underworld type and a seedy unsavory blonde and a classy charismatic blonde. There will be some gay types. The book is homophobic as befits its era: in one uncomfortable scene, Marlowe feigns an effeminate voice suitable for a fay book collector (“If you can weigh 195 pounds and look like a fairy, I was doing my best”), and in another uncomfortable scene a young gay man ineffectually punches Marlowe, for “a pansy’s punch” lacks a certain force). There will be some rather clean (given the city and the era) police captains and DAs and such. The Sternwood femme fatale daughters are “cute,” trying to insult or seduce Marlowe by turns, succeeding only in making him say things like, “the rich can go hang themselves” or “I was sick of women.” There will be terse and cool dialogue, as when Marlowe is threatened by a gangster on the phone and says, “Listen to my teeth chattering.” There will be many similes, some of which fail awfully (e.g., “The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings”), most of which succeed finely (e.g., “His Charlie Chan moustache looked as real as a toupee”). Chandler’s good at a vivid, seedy poetry of observation, like “The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty, meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.” Or like “The world was a wet emptiness.” He writes some nice lines, too, like “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” Chandler’s also good at making Marlowe withhold his suspicions and conclusions about cases until he suddenly reveals them through conversations with clients and suspects and enemies and the authorities and the like. This keeps us guessing long after Marlowe has figured something out. The biggest achievement of Chandler is to present in Marlowe a cynical loner who drinks, plays chess, and says things like “the knights don’t belong in the game” and sees things like stained glass knights failing to rescue nude damsels in distress and thinks things like “Me, I was part of the nastiness now,” but who despite it all remains above the sordid sump of Los Angeles (and the USA) by sticking to his “professional pride,” whereby a Private Investigator keeps his clients’ personal information private and where he refuses to take advantage of amoral women who literally throw themselves at him and where he stubbornly tries (at financial and other costs to himself) to protect the gradual deathwards decline of a rich old man. He’s satisfied with his $25 per day plus expenses. On the other hand, Marlowe is not above smacking a troublesome girl on the side of her face: “Probably all her boyfriends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand why they might.” Audiobook reader Ray Porter does female voices too high, whether it’s a Jewess with a “smoothly husky voice,” a spoiled and decadent rich girl, or a character played in the movie by Lauren Bacall. Porter is no Bacall! He's fine with male characters and most importantly with Marlowe, but he is sure poor at female voices, and listening to him try is unpleasant. One problem I found with The Big Sleep is that I didn’t really care about the characters, apart from or wait even occasionally including Marlowe. As an early example of the hardboiled detective genre, The Big Sleep is “cute” in the way Carmen Sternwood is cute: unsavory, taut, bone-scraped face, predatory teeth, inane giggle, liable to show up unannounced and naked in your bed one moment and ask you to teach her how to shoot a gun the next. But it is great nonetheless. For “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill. You were dead. You were sleeping the big sleep.” View all my reviews
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
“Man makes plans and God laughs” The Yiddish Policeman’s Union: A Novel (2007) by Michael Chabon is a compelling though at times over-written alternate history novel crossed with a hardboiled mystery story. In 1948, the new Jewish state of Israel collapsed, leaving the Jews of the world without a country. A while after that calamity, a US government act reserved Sitka, Alaska for Jewish settlement, but in the present of the novel, some sixty years later (“now” is 2008), the US is in the process of reverting Sitka to standard United States territory, forcing the majority of the Jewish citizens to relocate, and they sure aren’t wanted in the USA. With the Sitka police winding down operations preparatory to vacating, 44-year-old detective Meyer Landsman starts working on a last case, one that nobody wants him to pursue, least of all his new commanding officer, his ex-wife Bina Gelfbish. One of the guests staying in Landsman’s “home,” the seedy Hotel Zamenhof, has been found shot dead execution style. The victim is apparently a former Hasidic and current drug addict called Emmanuel Lasker. Who would have killed him so professionally and why? What is the meaning of the half-finished chess game on the board in his room. Who is the guy, really? In that vivid alternate history setting, Chabon’s book often reads like a Raymond Chandler novel. Landsman ticks off many hardboiled protagonist boxes: divorced, personal life a shambles, only romantic partner a shot glass, friends worried about his mental and physical health, his work the only thing he seems to live for; observant eye, vivid memory, keen instinct, stubborn independence, and strong moral code. But Landsman is Jewish, “the most decorated shammes in the District of Sitka,” though he (believes that) he lost his faith long ago. Most of the characters in the novel are Jewish, with a few notable exceptions. And they are usually speaking Yiddish to each other (translated by Chabon into English for us), which leads to a lot of spicy language, including plenty of Yiddish terms like papiros (cigarette) and noz (policeman). (In an interesting interview at the end of the audiobook, Chabon says that he was inspired to write the novel by his love for the work of Chandler and by his reading of a Yiddish phrasebook that made him wonder what country such a book would ever be useful for visiting and then to imaginarily create such a country himself.) There are thus many interesting things related to the Jewish experience, like the belief (hot or cold depending on the era, community, and person) that a Messiah will come, the fraught life in a hostile world, the constant irony and sarcasm, and, my favorite, the eruv, “a scam run on God… something to do with pretending that telephone poles are door posts, and that the wires are lintels. You can tie off an area using poles and strings and call it an eruv, then pretend on the Sabbath that this eruv you’ve drawn . . . is your house. That way you can get around the Sabbath ban on carrying in a public place.” The ways in which Landsman’s faith in unbelief is supported and subverted by the novel are also neat. Lines like, “A dealer in entropy… A disbeliever by trade and inclination… To Landsman Heaven is kitsch, God a word, and a soul at most the charge in your battery,” make us think that he might be protesting too much. On the other hand, “A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.” There are interesting takes on detective work (“telling a story”) and police work (helping men “realize that all along just under their boots lay the abyss” by “jerk[ing] back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor”). And the process of disentangling the mystery is well done: orderly, inevitable, and surprising, with thematic and social depth. There are plenty of great scenes, like Landsman trying to sleep in a bed with his partner’s little kids kicking him in their sleep, talking with the impressive wife of a crime lord, escaping from a cell while handcuffed to a bed, and visiting his partner Berko’s father. There are neat lines, like “Landsman’s congratulations are so ironic that they are heartfelt, and they are so heartfelt that they can only come off as insincere, and he and his partner sit there for a while without going anywhere listening to them congeal,” and “They all looked shocked, even Gold, who could happily read a comic book by the light of a burning man.” And the Chandleresque similes! At their best they’re original, vivid, perfect, and funny, like “She looks like she’s wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth.” Some of the best similes refer to Old Testament things, like “Her right arm is raised, index finger extended toward the trash bins, like a painting of the angel Michael casting Adam and Eve from the Garden.” However, I did start feeling that Chabon too often indulges in cool similes and descriptions, fatiguing me by making me appreciate too many similes, which began to numb me to their virtues, especially similes describing relatively unimportant things, like “Mrs. Kalushiner wanders into the back room, and the beaded curtain clatters behind her with the sound of loose teeth in a bucket.” Moreover, some of the similes try too hard, like “with haircuts that occupy the interval between astronaut and pedophile scoutmaster.” The audiobook reader Peter Riegert is excellent, and the interview with Chabon after the novel is interesting. The only downside of the audiobook is the odd music (electric guitar and bongos) that regularly fades in and out. View all my reviews
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The sentence was to endure” Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012) is narrated by Joe (nicknamed Oops because he was his parents’ accident) Coutts, who many years later as a married lawyer (?) is recalling the summer of 1988 when he had just turned thirteen. Joe and his family were members of the Ojibwe (Anishinabe) tribe living then on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. Joe’s father Bazil was a judge, his mother Geraldine a tribal enrollment specialist. The novel opens with Joe and father finding Geraldine covered in blood and vomit and smelling like gasoline. She has been raped and nearly immolated. But because she won’t reveal who did it or why, Joe takes it upon himself to find the perpetrator so as to bring him to justice of one kind or another. Joe has suspects, for instance a white man from a slimy family involved in one of his father’s court cases or the new white Catholic priest who’s a scarred veteran proficient at shooting gophers. Meanwhile, his mother becomes spider-like in her emaciation and isolates herself from her family. Despite, or perhaps because of, the appalling nature of the brutal rape and its tragic effects on Joe’s mother and his family, the novel is often very funny, Erdrich writing comical and quirky scenes, details, and asides through Joe’s narratorial voice, giving him and the reader plenty of chuckling or smiling release valves to ease sympathy and outrage. There are eccentric characters, like Joe’s grandfather Mooshum and Linda Lark. There are things like the account of the Star Trek Next Generation characters liked (Worf, Data, Deanna Troi) and disliked (Riker, Wesley) by Joe and his friends; the time when a self-important medicine man in training unwittingly dumped a lot of hot pepper herbs on the heated stones in a sweat lodge; the description of his friends’ idiosyncratic bicycles; his thirteen-year-old crush on his ex-stripper aunt’s breasts. Lines like, “There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young.” Even when he and his friends are scouring the woods around the Round House (an abandoned symbolically female site for traditional rituals) for clues that his mother’s attacker might have left behind, an intensely serious activity, Joe makes us smile via a legion of hungry ticks and his friend’s comical story about being accidentally flea bombed inside his house when he was four. There is a harrowing scene where Joe notices his mother’s vertebrae sticking out through her nightgown, her shoulder blades like knives, her complexion pasty, her eyes darkly circled, her hair lank and greasy, and her vitality dim, and then announces to her that he’ll find and burn her attacker, only to have her briefly assume her former mother persona’s authority to tell him that he will not cause her more fear, will not search for her attacker, and will not ask her questions, and then he tries to teach their wolf-dog Pearl how to fetch, only to have her intimidatingly refuse, closing her teeth on his wrist as if to snap his bones, leading Joe to say with humorous understatement, “So you don’t play fetch, I see that now.” Erdrich has an eye and an ear for how adolescent boys talk, act, feel, think: the teasing, boasting, joking, supporting, and rough housing; the randy bawdy hungry reckless behavior. It all feels real and adds layers of comedy and pathos to the story. Joe and his buddies (Cappy, Angus, and Zach) speculate on whether it’s better to have a penis looking like Darth Vader or the evil hooded Emperor, get side-tracked when looking for evidence by the lucky find of a couple of cold sixpacks, make Indian jokes, tease each other, sneak cigarettes, are embarrassed by lewd remarks from grandmothers, and enjoy each other’s company. When Joe gets his friends to help him try to find and nail his mother’s attacker, the book almost gets a Stand by Me vibe (though less sentimental). Throughout, Erdrich writes plenty of reservation life details about politics, policing, law, health care, enrollment, adoption, food, families, groceries, parties, powwows, sweat lodges, Catholicism, history, pronunciation of d instead of th, and more, as well as plenty of references to things like “the gut-kick of our history” experienced by all Native Americans by which, for instance, the USA (from the founding fathers and early Supreme Court on) eagerly took their land by any means devisable, or by which their people were lynched, or by which the federal government enacted outrageous laws interfering with their own legal systems and so on. Indeed, much of the book centers on the question of tribal autonomy (or lack thereof) when it comes to legal matters and criminal cases. “They’d built that place [The Round House] to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth.” In addition to Star Trek: The Next Generation, Erdrich also writes in plenty of vintage popular culture references to the likes of Lord of the Rings, Dune, Star Wars, Alien, and TV action games. She does much vivid and witty writing, like “Sour turnips and tomatoes, beets and corn, scorched garlic, unknown meat, and an onion gone bad, the concoction gave off a penetrating reek,” or like he “labored with incremental ferocity. . . ant-like.” The novel becomes bleak towards the end, shedding humor in favor of tragedy and loss and sudden aging, and I have to think more about what I think of the abrupt conclusion: is it perversely unfulfilling or bracingly honest? It is like the cold breath of a windigo winter wind: “We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.” I am glad to have read the novel and do recommend it as a necessary book for anyone interested in historical and contemporary Native American life, but. . . I prefer Erdrich’s Love Medicine or Birchbark House books. The audiobook reader Gary Farmer is just right. View all my reviews
Killer by Nature by Jan Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Radio Drama of UK Serial Killers, Forensic Psychologists, and Police I should say up front that I’d have never listened to a serial killer crime suspense story if it weren’t one of the “Audible Originals” Audible was giving free to members. So I’m not the proper audience for this kind of thing. That said… Killer By Nature (2017) by Jan Smith (produced and directed by David Darlington, who also did the music and “sound design”) is a contemporary serial killer “radio” drama, complete with chirpy bassy techno music introducing and ending the ten “episodes,” sound effects, a cast of voice actors playing the different characters. The 4.5-hour story is set in Northumberland in the UK and centers on forensic psychologist Diane Buckley, who has left the police force to start her own business with a partner/friend Carol Hawkes. Buckley is invited back into police work by her former colleague, DI Bill Winterman, who has been assigned to deal with a recent murder committed with the same MO (postmortem bifurcated tongues) as those committed by convicted serial killer Alfred Dinklage at least ten years ago. The problem is that Dinklage has been in solitary confinement for ten years, so there is no way he could have committed the murder. Right? So, are the police dealing with a copycat killer? Or was Dinklage innocent ten years ago, and the real killer has resumed his handiwork now? Buckley has just given Dinklage an assessment test because he stabbed his former psychiatrist with a sharpened plastic spoon, and the result of the test indicates that he’s “a cat pretending to be a mouse” and should be transferred to a more secure facility asap. He does have the unnerving habit of murmur-crooning creepy nursery rhymes. An interesting wrinkle to the story is that Buckley has two teenaged kids, a boy and a girl, and her intelligent, friendless, manipulative, lying, detached, moody daughter Megan is showing signs of being a potential serial killer without Buckley being at all aware of it, despite her profession--or because of how busy it keeps her. Another character of interest is Buckley’s young, rookie forensic psychologist Tice (Tyce?) Wilberforce, who has a mentally disabled brother to whom he reads fairy stories and who ranges from wondering how Buckley can handle knowing the worst that human beings are capable of and thinking of quitting to wanting to be given more responsibility with a particular case. Being a radioesque drama without any narration, it sometimes takes a moment to ground oneself when a new scene opens, because each new place and situation is conveyed by characters mentioning names and settings in conversation. But it’s done well enough. The actors are fine, with Rob James-Collier (Thomas on Downton Abbey) playing a suitably creepy psychopath, and the others fleshing out their roles within the constraints of the medium. There is one poor performance, fortunately a minor one without much “screen” time, the actress responsible for the “American” expert promoting an experimental facility for the treatment of youthful psychopaths, because she sounds like an ersatz American voiced by a British actress who can’t quite get the accent right and who says “Americanisms” like “super” in an unbelievably smarmy voice. The story itself has some interesting aspects regarding psychopaths, like how some of them are able to channel their drives into productive careers in law, science, and politics, etc. And is Alfred Dinklage really a psychopath or is he something else? And does psychopathy run in the family? But as the drama progressed, I began experiencing flashes of loss of suspension of belief and becoming irritated by the actions and inactions of the characters, like Buckley regarding the case, Megan, and Wilberforce, or Carol Hawkes regarding Buckley. Not to mention the many instances of plot contrivance via people not answering their phones at crucial times. There are also some corny lines, like when Winterman’s police superior says something to the effect of, “Our ship is so leaky it’s practically a submarine” (cause the media keeps getting top secret case info). And the denouement is a bit rushed and unconvincing given the buildup. And I finally didn’t care for most of the characters. Nonetheless, I suppose that fans of suspense thriller serial killer audiodramas set in contemporary England would probably like this one. View all my reviews
The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Poker, Baseball, History, Magic, and the Apocalypse In 1948, a freshly orphaned ten-year-old boy called Lewis Barnavelt rides a bus from Wisconsin to Michigan to live with his uncle Jonathan in New Zebedee, pop 6,000. Lewis cuts no heroic figure: he parts his oiled hair in the middle, wears purple corduroy pants, has a moony fat face with shiny cheeks, and murmurs Latin choir boy prayers full of sorrowful questions like “quare me repulisti?” (Why have you cast me off?”) He packs his enormous suitcase full of books and lead soldiers. He’s hopeless at sports (he can’t hit a baseball and always lets the bat fly out of his hands when he tries, while playing football he always collapses to the ground when anyone approaches him, and he is always picked last, if at all, when teams are chosen). He likes eating chocolate-covered mints while reading history books about bloody events like the assassination of Rizzio by Mary Queen of Scots’ noblemen (fifty-six stab wounds!). Lewis is also given to crying, whenever his feelings are hurt or he’s scared--which is not seldom. But he does have a lively imagination and a heart ready to love, and luckily, his eccentric uncle Jonathan van Olden Barnavelt is likeably strange and lives in a wonderful three-story stone mansion at 100 High Street that Lewis immediately takes to. When he first enters the house, Lewis finds a gray-haired smiley-wrinkle faced woman listening to the wall; it’s his uncle’s neighbor and best friend, Florence Zimmermann. And soon the trio are playing poker till midnight with old foreign coins and a dubious deck of old magician’s cards, with Lewis winning most of the hands. Is it due to his luck or to some kind of slight-of-hand performed in his favor by Mrs. Zimmermann and Jonathan? The pair are like a married couple who live next door to each other, always visiting each other and affectionately insulting each other: Weird Beard, Fatso, and Tub of Beans vs. Frumpy, Doll Face, and Frizzy Wig. Lewis quickly comes to love his uncle and Mrs. Zimmerman--way cooler parents than his own strict and threatening biological ones whose recent demise he never thinks or feels sad about. But why has Jonathan scattered a hodgepodge of clocks throughout his house? And why does he creep stealthily about the house late at night, turning the clocks off or tapping on the walls as if listening to something? The short novel depicts Lewis learning provocative half answers to his questions while experiencing vivid illusions and dangerous necromancy and a “device” that looks like a clock and becoming a catalyst for a battle for the fate of the world between bad good and good bad warlocks and witches. Bellairs writes a lot of fine descriptions, like “He heard the noise that earthworms make, as they slowly inch along, breaking hard black clods with their blunt heads.” He also writes telling life wisdom, like this: “You can’t prepare for all the disasters in this frightening world of ours.” Or “One of the troubles with people is that they can only see out of their own eyes.” He fills his novel with neat things, like Jonathan’s galleon hookah and a petrified forest family grave space in the local cemetery. Magic in his hands has a consistent basis: “Most magic is accomplished with solid everyday objects, objects that have had spells said over them.” He writes plenty of humorous lines, like “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lewis, stop playing Sherlock Holmes. You make a better Watson.” I liked The House with a Clock in Its Walls (1973), because of Bellairs’ vivid descriptions of New Zebedee, 100 High Street, the town cemetery, and the historical and other illusions; because of the relationships between Mrs. Zimmermann, Jonathan, and Lewis and between Lewis and Tarby (the daredevil sportsman most popular boy in school); and because Lewis is such an atypical hero. Also because the antagonists Mr. and Mrs. Izard are pretty scary. And because of Edward Gorey’s typically dark, quaint, and stylized illustrations. And especially because of George Guidall’s savory reading of the audiobook. The novel ends a little abruptly. A new character is inserted without any preparation or narration in an off-handed way at the very end. Lewis can get a little frustrating. There is no explanation as to why early on Jonathan freezes when the bell in the monster-faced steeple of the town church tolls. Finally, I’m almost--but not quite--enticed enough by this first book to go on and read the others in the series. View all my reviews
Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The dollar is my master, but I ain’t no slave" Joe King Oliver, the black narrator of Down the River Unto the Sea (2018), the first novel in Walter Mosley’s new hardboiled detective fiction series, begins his story by telling us how he came to be exiled from the police department eleven years ago: he was sent out on a routine auto theft arrest mission wherein he was induced to have sex with a young white lady who then accused him of rape. Vile powerful people orchestrated the scheme to prevent Joe from making what would otherwise have been the biggest heroin bust in NYC history. The charges against Joe were mysteriously dropped, but not until he’d spent about 90 days in Rikers Island Prison (most in solitary confinement), leaving him permanently scarred in body and spirit and costing him his marriage. Luckily, his best friend from the police force, Sergeant Gladstone Palmer, helped Joe start the King Detective Service, which he is now running with the help of his beloved seventeen-year-old daughter Aja-Denise. (Mosley is not writing a black Veronica Mars, as AD is only his secretary and Joe is too protective of her to ever let her actually work any cases.) After musing on his past to bring us up to speed on his character and situation, Joe goes out on his present case (trailing a popular Republican politician to find dirt on him) and then is presented with two new cases: the first would involve investigating whoever set him up eleven years ago, while the second would involve trying to prove that an African American political journalist and social knight errant called A Free Man didn’t murder two on-duty white policemen. Joe must think carefully before taking either case, for investigating them would antagonize dangerous powerful people who’d rather bury the past and or the truth, putting at risk his business and life and forcing him to become a new person. Needless to say, soon Joe is running around NYC (Brooklyn, the Bronx, the Village, Coney Island, Staten Island, Central Park, Wall Street, Brooklyn Bridge, Port Authority Bus Station, etc.), following leads in a variety of settings ranging from the wealthy and exclusive to the dirty and dangerous, questioning a variety of people ranging from the corpulent and grotesque to the young and beautiful, from the white to the black, and from the pleasant to the antagonistic. Joe also encounters a fair amount of racism, from the relatively benign (a white receptionist at his grandmother’s retirement home not believing that his grandmother could be a resident and not a worker there) to the positively bellicose (a white thug calling him the n word and trying to get him to fight for supposedly stealing his girlfriend). Instead of his spunky daughter, assisting Joe in his investigations is his “satanic sidekick” Melquarth Frost, a white ex-super con genius sociopath with seemingly unlimited financial and mental resources. Joe is a fine private investigator first-person narrator for a hardboiled detective story. He has many of the traditional traits, being a single ex-cop with a weakness for women, a sturdy moral code, the ability to bend the rules for a good cause, a proficiency for violence without sadism, the capacity to drink large quantities of hard liquor, a brainy brain (good at playing chess and go), and a wide range of literary experience (regularly referring to authors like Hesse and works like All Quiet on the Western Front). I suppose the main fresh thing about him is that he’s African American, hardboiled black PIs still being rare. And that he’s been traumatized by his stint in prison. And that he has a surrogate big brother slash father relationship with Melquarth Frost. Unfortunately, Mosley also overuses the seemingly omnipotent Melquarth Frost, making things a bit too easy for Joe. Mosley also writes some cliché hardboiled lines, like “You’re twelve miles of bad road” and “Let me see that other paw and it better be empty.” Some lines are a little coy, like “Sometimes I liked to pretend that I was a detective out of a book.” And he maybe overuses the writerly trick of having first person narrators not let us know what they’re planning till after their plan gets set in motion. But he does do plenty of fine writing, whether neat similes (e.g., “Willa departed, and for a while I was alone and at peace the way a soldier during World War I was at peace in the trenches waiting for the next attack, the final flu, or maybe mustard gas seeping over the edge of a trench that might be his grave”), cool life wisdom (“The magnetism between young lovers, even when they’re old, is the gravity of the soul, undeniable, unquestionable, and, sooner or later, unwanted”), cynical American culture (“I secretly cheered for my country, where over and over again the almighty dollar proved its superiority”), and racial insights (“America was changing at a snail’s pace in a high wind, but until that gastropod mollusk reached its destination I had a .45 in my pocket and eyes on all four corners at once”). Dion Graham is a solid reader of the audiobook, dexterously shifting between Joe’s narration and the voices of the various characters he meets (as young as AD’s 17-year-old voice and as old as Joe’s grandmother, as white as Gladstone Palmer and as black as Joe). But perhaps his reading of Joe’s narration often falls into an up and down repetitive rhythm that is not as dynamic as it might be. I found this story (set today and so featuring iPads, email, cloud storage, and disposable non-traceable phones etc.) a little too contemporary and prefer Mosley’s post-World War II Los Angeles Devil in a Blue Dress Easy Rawlings novel. When I read Mosley again, it will probably be a Rawlings story. People who like well-written contemporary hardboiled detective stories, especially those set in NYC and or featuring race (it’s “Dedicated to Malcolm, Medgar, and Martin”), should like Mosley’s novel. View all my reviews
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “one great big suntanned hangover” At times Raymond Chandler’s penultimate Philip Marlowe novel The Long Goodbye (1953) reads like a hardboiled southern Californian Great Gatsby. There are references to F. Scott Fitzgerald and to T. S. Elliot and to hollow men and to corrupt American culture, and adjacent to the sordid real world (here smoggy LA) there is an exclusive community (here breezy Idle Valley) of amoral “pure gold” wealthy people who attend bacchanalian cocktail parties and abuse tranquilizers and commit adultery too often, and there is even a pair of former lovers who can’t be together and can’t forget each other. Of course, there is also Philip Marlowe, the bitter yet romantic, solo-chess-playing, liquor or coffee drinking, “shamus” (Private Investigator) knight stubbornly trying to do the right thing in the wrong situations, renting a small house on Laurel Canyon and a dusty office on Cahuenga in LA, “the big sordid dirty crooked city,” now 42 and feeling his age, still unable (or unwilling) to make much money, still single. Marlowe is more of a man of action than Nick Carraway and is more cynical about the rich (“bored and lonely people”), but as the common man outsider looking in at the lives of the rich (“I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split”), he offers a similar vantage point in The Long Goodbye. The novel’s plot gets going when Marlowe sees a woman basically dump a drunk out of her car and decides on the spur of the moment to help the guy because there is something likeable about him, despite or because of his white hair, scarred face, weak charm, and peculiar pride. The man is Terry Lennox, and knowing him will soon have Marlowe driving around LA and vicinity, including once to Tijuana and several times to Idle Valley, not to mention being arrested, interrogated, insulted, beaten, threatened, hired, helped, rewarded, accused, used, tempted, confided in, lied to, and more. There will be murder and unusual jobs. There will be private investigation and media manipulation. There will be a $5,000 bill and surprising telephone calls. There will be seductive ladies and unsavory doctors and good cops and bad cops and eloquent thugs and an impudent Chilean servant and a “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” quoting black chauffeur. And a guilty and possibly suicidal alcoholic writer stand-in for Chandler himself, though Roger Wade is an author of best-selling sexy historical romances instead of hardboiled detective novels. This being a Chandler novel, it is enlivened by original similes and vivid descriptions: “Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.” (Coffee) “He looked at me like an entomologist looking at a beetle.” “Sparrows with rosy heads hopped about pecking at things only a sparrow would think worth pecking at.” “An hour crawled by like a sick cockroach.” “The air was warm and quiet and full of the tomcat smell of eucalyptus trees.” And by great lines of dialogue: “You’re a piker, Marlowe. You’re a peanut grifter. You’re so little it takes a magnifying glass to see you. . . You got no guts, no brains, no connections, no savvy, so you throw out a phony attitude and expect people to cry over you. Tarzan on a big red scooter.” “All tough guys are monotonous. Like playing cards with a deck that’s all aces. You’ve got everything and you’ve got nothing. You’re just sitting there looking at yourself. No wonder Terry didn’t come to you for help. It would be like borrowing money from a whore.” “You know something, Marlowe? I could get to like you. You’re a bit of a bastard—like me.” And by cynical life wisdom: “Drunks don’t educate, my friend. They disintegrate.” “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” “The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. . . We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.” It also features much social criticism of American culture and capitalism, everything from the lousy food of American restaurants and planned obsolescence of mass production to the corruption of media, politics, business, and law into essentially organized crime: “The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer.” It sometimes almost reads like a McCarthy-Era apology for communism: “There’s a peculiar thing about money. . . In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own.” The Long Goodbye is a page turning book without cheap suspense. There are some neat twists in it. I like how Marlowe will get irritated by a person who’s too snotty or thuggish or phony and then aggressively spew at them the analysis he’s been privately cogitating without narrating it. It’s effective storytelling, because we haven’t come up with Marlowe’s conclusions ourselves because we’ve been reading his exploits with rapt attention, so when he suddenly explains us up to speed while dressing someone down we experience a cool “Ah hah!” This being a 1950s novel, there is casual racism directed at Latinos and Japanese and blacks, but the worst people Marlowe encounters are white. Finally, does Marlowe protest too much when he says things like, “I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars”? In any case, his narration sings with a terse sordid urban poetry: "Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. "It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care. I finished the drink and went to bed." Fans of hardboiled fiction must read The Long Goodbye, but also people interested in well-written, unglamorous depictions of LA and America in the 1950s. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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