One evening last week when the new Kubu novel had been put to bed for the day, Stan and I talked about the issue of quality in mystery novels. We started off discussing what we thought quality meant, and ended up wondering if it meant anything at all beyond personal taste...
Stan and I came to the conclusion that it was all a mystery and went to bed. Can anyone help us with this mystery of quality?
Gary's recommendation sent me to the Northfield Public Library where I found a copy of A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley. The book is a murder mystery set in the capital of Botswana [capital city, left]. (Go ahead and click on that link to the Wikipedia page about Botswana or this link to the CIA World Factbook page on the country. The CIA has a much better map. You know you want to find out where it is and what it's like.)I recently read Late Edition, by Bob Greene, who hails from Columbus, Ohio. I enjoyed the book for a variety of reasons:
- It's about the decline and almost sure demise of the printed newspaper as a part of American life, and therefore it's a commentary on the gains and losses of "progress";
- my dad ran a small town newspaper from 1956 to 1974, and those times provided a "micro-scale" example of the things Greene identifies in his experience as a reporter for the long-defunct Columbus Citizen-Journal;
- and finally, I really enjoyed Greene's journalistic style–perhaps because of my experiences as a newspaper man's son, but just as likely because of my twenty years as an English teacher, pleading with adolescents to "write in active voice!"
So, I wrote an email to Bob Greene, since, SURPRISE!, his email address appears on the book jacket! I'll include it here to illustrate how I felt about the book and why I'm recommending it to the readers of ReadingBlog:Hi, Bob–Thanks for recommending that I read your latest book, Final Edition, a while back. I just finished it yesterday, on a plane flying back from frigid Tampa (where the golf vacation was frozen out but the computer worked just fine).
As I might have told you in previous correspondence, my dad was the publisher of a small-town newspaper in Minnesota from 1956 to 1974. I witnessed first-hand the Frankenstein-ian changes you describe in Final Edition, from the elimination of the linotype operators (my dad employed a blind man to do that job for the once-a-week Photo News in Owatonna, MN) to the "cold-type" process that preceded computerization–costing the blind man his job. Then on to the reduction in advertising revenue (I clearly recall eating at local restaurants on " due bills"). Then on to the nationalization of the news sources (the competitor, The Daily People's Press, soon carried national columnists--perhaps even your columns appeared there). Then on to oblivion: after he sold the paper in 1974, the new owner turned the Photo News into a weekly "flyer" devoted to advertising only, no photos, no news . . . . it lasted a year.
So, as I read the book, I felt like I was the cognizenti: smelling the hot lead of the linotype, seeing the paste-pots, feeling the smoothness of the high-quality newsprint (after all, my dad's paper WAS the Photo News), tasting the sandwiches brought back to the city desk by a copy boy . . . .
Somewhere around 1960-61, I worked episodically and not particularly dexterously as a paper-assembler on Wednesday nights. My job was to lay the first page on the conveyor belt so the rest of the "assemblers"–all girls, and all with much faster fingers than mine–could place successive pages on the soon-to-be-folded paper.
My "work" there was, I now realize, my dad's attempt to give me, literally "hands-on" experience in the production of the paper. I would have been better off if he would have let me write a few words, I think! After all, I ended up teaching high school English for twenty years before I made up my current job as a consultant to school districts, parts of which include writing grants, reports, and improvement plans.
I wanted to share a little of "my story" with you, since I so resonated to the anecdotes, personalities, and events you describe in Final Edition. They took place across the country, in thousands of newspapers, big and small, large circulations of 100,000 or a million, and the 5,000 papers my dad's little enterprise produced one-a-week in rural Minnesota.
Something has been lost in translation, I think, to introduce a movie metaphor, with the inevitable demise of the "real" newspaper–the one you could hold, feel, read, think about, shuffle, use to start a fire or wrap a fish.
Thank you, Bob, for writing an appropriate epitaph for the enterprise . . . .
Marc Reigel
Grandview, Ohio
And then, Mr. Greene wrote back to me:In writing Late Edition, I tried to tell the story the way I did for this reason: I hoped that, by telling the story of that one mezzanine newsroom, I could come close to getting down on paper what it is we all may be losing as the inevitable changes in the newspaper world, and in America, take place. What you said in your letter-- especially those great stories you told about the Photo News, and your experiences there-- tells me that you understand all of this very well.
I'm honored. If you think any of your friends might like the story in the pages of Late Edition, I'd be very grateful if you would recommend it to them. I'd like for this book to reach the people who will appreciate it the most, and you may know who some of those people are. I hope the sound of all that laughter and good times in the long-ago city room will reach them.
Thank you again for your thoughtfulness, and your kind words. It means a lot to me.
Bob Greene
I thought this interchange illustrated something about writing, too.
Perhaps writing promotes making connections between writer and reader on a deeper, more personal level than, say, speaker and listener. Writing can be viewed on the reader's time; speaking needs to be heard on the speaker's time. You know, now that we are clearly, if not officially, well past "middle age"–oh, all right, I suppose 65 can be the new 45, at least for an evening–I find that reading trumps listening on issues I want to explore more fully.
So, I'm recommending Late Edition for readers who might resonate to that concept. A reader can read the book as though he or she might read a newspaper–if there were any newspapers left to read; and, yes, the style is journalistic: crisp sentences, sharp words, few adjectives, active voice.
Perhaps something has, indeed, been lost in translation with the loss of a bit of Americana: the daily, if not twice-a-day, newspaper.
Thanks for sponsoring this forum for sharing ideas about books, for so long and so well, Ken. As Bob Greene says, "It means a lot to me."
Books live forever. Authors, sadly, do not.
Robert B. Parker has been my favorite novelist since 1977, when I checked out Mortal Stakes, the third novel in his now-legendary series of books featuring the one-named private detective Spenser, from the Novato High School library and immediately fell in love. (In a purely platonic and literary sort of way.) I quickly went back and read the two preceding novels in the skein, The Godwulf Manuscript and God Save the Child.
My life has never been the same...
The old friends -- the senator, Bernie Sanders, and the chief of staff, Huck Gutman -- live a Washington paradigm: a fraction of a life here, a fraction elsewhere. For some, Washington can never be a whole place. "At times for us, it can be a lonely road," Gutman says one afternoon…
Gutman, a pleasantly rumpled 66-year-old with a thick, gray Vandyke beard and a puckish glint in his eyes, is searching for the right words to explain Washington in a windowless basement restaurant of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. He pauses, starts to say something, stops and looks around. A stray senator chats quietly with an aide a few tables over. To his left, a reporter tries to extract secrets; to his right, papers are being shuffled. Conversation hovers at low-hum.
"This is a very strange world we're eating in the middle of," he confides. "It's entirely absorbed with itself. It's all so inside the Beltway. I feel the occasional need to break out of this world."
And so it is that he began lobbing poems into the e-mail inboxes of every chief of staff in the Senate. Each note offers escape through verse. Meaty, challenging, thought-provoking lines, accompanied by pages and pages of Gutman's analysis. Poetry that has nothing to do with cloture votes or amendments or motions to recommit. Poetry intended to get his BlackBerry-addicted, tunnel-visioned, life-as-a-treadmill colleagues to think about the "huge dimensions of life that get shortchanged" in the grinder that is Capitol Hill.
Gutman, you see, is also an English professor, though he's on an extended leave of absence from the University of Vermont. Poetry is his way of connecting on a different plane…
Incongruently, one reader Gutman can't seem to reach is his buddy, Sanders. They have been friends for years… Even though they "talk for hours, talk about everything," Gutman still hasn't managed to turn Sanders into a poetry fan…
Still, Gutman always finds others to enlighten. Little by little, he becomes a kind of Capitol pied piper of poetry. His poetry e-mail list is approaching 1,500 recipients, including many former students and literary thinkers from around the world. ("You will publish the address, so people can sign up, won't you?" Gutman says one afternoon. Sure, Huck. It's LISTSERV@lit.uvm.edu.)...
After reading your latest blog, I may be adding to your reading load by suggesting something that could put you even further behind.
I just finished Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd and it is, in my opinion, a terrific book. Its the first in what they promise to be a series of Bess Crawford mysteries.
Actually, I think Jacqueline Winspear could have a copyright case against them as Bess Crawford is so like Masie Dobbs you could switch the names and never suspect the difference: she's a plucky WWI British nurse to start with.
Still it is, if anything, even better. The characters are so interesting I didn't even notice that 90 pages had gone by and there was no real mystery yet, just a highly engaging narrative. But once the mystery starts to unravel, well, don't plan on going to bed early.
I am also wondering if you have read other books by the mother-son team that goes by the name Charles Todd. I see they have a whole series of mysteries featuring Ian Rutledge and am wondering if you are aquainted with those. This is the first I have heard of Charles Todd, but I suspect that's not the case with you.
Meanwhile, Gary Sankary wrote from Apple Valley, MN, "BTW, just finished the first Detective Kubu book, have you read that one?I agree. I read Cruel Stars of Night a couple years ago and quit about 1/3 of the way through (which I almost never do) as by that time I didn't care one iota what happened to any of the characters. It was so bad I have sworn off Swedish mysteries since -- except for Stieg Larsson. I see I was wise not to finish it.
So, I bought Another Man's Moccasins, "the fourth book in Craig Johnson's award-winning Walt Longmire series..."
This book gets at least one Heart of Gold for improbabilities, but they are in the set up of the plot, not the events. That makes them more forgivable to me.
