31 May 2015

Big books from a small country

Jussi Adler-Olsen is touted on a cover of one his books as "Denmark's number one crime writer." I think that means he's the number one writer of crime fiction. He's part of the highly touted Nordic mystery writers group. Thank Stieg Larsson for getting publishers and many readers to pay attention. Well, there are others to thank as well. Many of them I've written about here since I'm part of the fan club. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Greenland, and Iceland and all the little islands near them (even though some are parts of Scotland now). Of course, American audiences only get to see the really good ones, I presume.

Adler-Olsen
Adler-Olsen is very good. At least the two books of his I read in the past few months have been very good. They are both copyright 2014, though it's difficult to imagine them being produced simultaneously.

The primary characters in the books I've seen are Detective Carl Mørck, his assistant Assad and secretary Rose. Mørck is a "retired" cop who has been put in charge of Department Q, the section of the cop shop that deals with old, open cases. There are three people in Department Q. Like many detectives in the literary world, Mørck has been pushed into his position because he didn't play well with bureaucracy and protocol and hierarchy. It also gives the author more leeway in inventing story lines.

Adler-Olsen wrote both of these books by telling two stories: one from the past (that activates Department Q) and one from the present (which brings Mørck into conflict with the bosses who exiled him to the basement offices of Q).

The story from the past is told in a pretty straight forward way (although interrupted by chapters set in the present). But the story set in the present, because it involves learning about the story from the past relates the discovery of events from the past in chronologically reverse order (Mørck learns about the most recent things first).

While reading, I imagine Adler-Olsen with two time lines on his desk, one for each story. And he draws lines connecting things in the past with things in the present. That way he keeps clear what the people in the present know about the past, and he keeps things revealed about the past relevant to events in the present.

Hey, and not one word about present or past tenses, until now.

Both books are good and I enjoyed reading them. In Conspiracy of Faith, Department Q is assigned to investigate a message found in a bottle in the ocean near Greenland. The paper in the bottle leads everyone to think its origin is Denmark. The message is only partly readable, but it might imply a murder.

In the course of investigating the message from the bottle, Mørck uncovers more recent crimes that might be connected to the old one. And one of the clues is that they all involve tiny Christian cults that have tried to separate themselves from the evil world.

In The Purity of Vengeance, Department Q begins investigating new evidence in a 30-year disappearance. When Assad and Rose discover that a number of other people disappeared on same weekend three decades ago, and that a couple of the people on the fringes of several cases are still acting strangely, the hunt is on.

I think I liked The Purity of Vengeance better, but that might be because I read that one second and had figured out the method in Adler-Olsen's writing. In any case, I liked reading both books -- well, as much as I can enjoy reading about awful crimes committed by awful people. I haven't yet resolved that one. Have you?
Have you read any of Adler-Olsen's books? How did you like them? Write (Reading@SideTrack.org). Tell this little bit of the world about your reactions.




30 May 2015

J. A. Jance,J. A. Jance

I'm sitting in front of the lake in the little cabin called Sidetrack. Pardon me if I get distracted because the lake's eagles are flying around and doing a little fishing at dusk. Bald eagles nearly ceased to exist in my lifetime. I grew up thinking I'd never see one. But they're back. Right outside my window here and even along the Cannon River in Northfield and around the urban lakes in Minneapolis. Human behavior can make a difference.


I don't pick up a book by J. A. Jance for great literature. Of course, I rarely pick up a book because it's supposed to be great, or even good literature. That stuff is hard to read. I think I do enough hard work.

If I don't want good literature, what do I want? I want an engaging story that doesn't confuse me -- so it's got to be clearly told. I want to read about primary characters who are interesting and straight forward. The characters can have internal conflicts and self doubts. He, she, or they can suffer from the slings and arrows of forturne, but I don't want to read a story about duplicitous or smarmy people.

Jance
J. A. Jance tells stories well. Her characters are well defined, if not deeply etched in her pages. Her stories are appropriately complex without being unbelievable. (However, several of her characters, like other authors' characters and several TV mystery "stars" are conveniently very wealthy. That wealth makes it possible to "buy" ways out of inconvenient roadblocks, like cross-country or international travel, the need to make a living, or distribution of Franklins for information.

Well, I picked up two books by J. A. Jance in the past several months. Once was a paperback that cost $10.00. The other was a hardback that cost half that. (The second one was in a big bin in the grocery store.)

In the first, Second Watch, I got to check up on the knee replacements that detective J. P. Beaumont got. He's hobbling around pretty well, but his pain-killer-induced dreams seem to be leading him toward finding a killer in a 30-year-old case that was Beaumont's first homicide case. Because of his medications and his handicaps, Mel Soames is a vital part of the case. (I've forgotten whether Mel is J. P.'s latest wife or just his partner. Jance books are forgettable.)

Together, they probe into old open murder cases and new ones that seem to have connections to the things in J. P.'s dreams and his memories of events in Vietnam in the early '70s. It's all sort of believable -- except perhaps for J. P.'s undefined wealth. I remember little fo the details of the story. I remember feeling, "That was pretty good" when I finished.

The other book was Moving Target. The characters in this one are Ali Reynolds and her long-time "butler/caretaker/private secretary" Leland Brooks (guess which of them is unreasonably rich), and Ali's fiancé, B. Simpson. Oh, and a bunch of Leland's friends and relatives from his days as a subject of the queen 50 years ago.

B. gets involved in finding whomever tried to kill a young hacker who had taken down his school district's network. He got help in protecting the young miscreant from Sister Anselm, a taser-carrying nun who was a friend of Ali. Off in the UK, Ali got involved in sorting out the suspicious deaths in a rich family known to Leland. The trails of these deaths went back a couple generations. Both stories were engaging, and inspite of their complexity were not confusing. I recall liking this one better than the previous one.

According to list in Moving Target, J. A. Jance has written 50 books. You've probably read one or more along the way. What did you think of it (them)? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you think.



24 May 2015

Hillerman reprise

Eight months ago, I picked up a paperback by Anne Hillerman at Half Price Books. Anne Hillerman is the daughter of Tony Hillerman of Navajo mystery fame. She took possession of several of her father's characters for her own attempt at mystery writing.

Okay, I wanted to read more about Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, but did I want to read what the daughter of their creator wrote? In hard cover or at full price, probably not. This was a chance I was willing to take. Glad I did.

But it took awhile for me to read the book. I put it in the glove box of the Miata. I put the Miata in storage last October. I tried to get it out a couple weeks ago, but there was this flat tire. When I got the repaired tire back on the car Saturday, I discovered the battery was dead. Even after I borrowed a car and jumper cables, the battery would not hold a charge. But I did find the book.

Anne Hillerman
It is Spider Woman's Daughter, and it's told mostly by Bernadette (Bernie) Manuelito, the daughter and granddaughter of Navajo weavers, Navajo police officer, and wife of Jim Chee.  There is a much more feminine perspective in this story telling compared to the stories Tony Hillerman told. There are a lot of references to the spider women (weavers) in Bernie's family. There are a lot more female characters.

Anne Hillerman follows her father's model by extolling the beauty of the desert while describing some of the long drives through the reservation and to nearby cities. She stays true to his characters, although Joe Leaphorn is unconcious in a hospital bed during most of the story. (Spoiler Alert: It's really not nice to nearly kill off your father's original hero in the first chapter of your book.) She weaves a good story and a complex mystery that takes place partly on and partly off the reservation. So local cops, the FBI, and the Navajo police are involved.

I had the feeling several times that sections of the book were originally longer than the published version and that the editor guided the author in slimming down the size of the novel. Those "abbreviations" didn't always help, but it was a 360-page paperback.

On the other hand, some of the pivotal action scenes seemed to go on and on and on. It happens on TV mysteries and in some books, but do evil doers ever take time to explain what they're doing and why to their victims? If it were me, I'd pull the trigger, start the fire, crash the car and get out. Explanations? Who needs them? Oh, readers or viewers who didn't get the message from the story! Seems like a deficit of story telling rather than overly loquacious villians.

Okay, I liked Spider Woman's Daughter. Maybe not as much as most of Tony Hillerman's books. But, it's been a long time since I read one of those and not all of his books were equally good.





01 May 2015

Revisiting a long-admired author

Long ago, just after Bill Clinton had been elected president, he called Walter Mosley one of his favorite authors.

I remember thinking, "Walter who?" Then I went out and got a copy of Devil in a Blue Dress. I was hooked and read many more of his books. Then Mosley spoiled me in 1997 by writing Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. It was so good, I nearly stopped reading Mosely's books. He's written over 30 books since '97. I've probably read three or four.

Half Price Books had a Mosley book on the shelf for $5.00. That's less than the cost of a paperback these days. I went for it. The book is All I Did Was Shoot My Man, A Leonid McGill Mystery.

The book jacket touts this as "a tale about what it means to be a family." Family has been a vital part of all the Mosely books I've read and Leonid McGill's family is diverse, troubled, and loosely bound. The woman who hires him, a private detective, to answer some old questions is part of a family that includes her late husband, the man she may have shot.

Mosley
Like the other Mosley main characters I've read about, McGill is nearly overwhelmed by the events and troubles his family gets involved in. It's difficult for me to imagine how this guy functions from day to day. Somehow, in Mosley's story telling, McGill does function and survive, although not always happily.

My imagination may not be adequate to understand everything in the story. After all, I'm an old white guy from small town Minnesota. Mosley could pull the wool over my eyes without half trying as he writes about New York City and the former small time "fixer" that McGill is. But somehow I trust Mosley's perceptions and story telling. This was a good story well told. Check it out at a library near you (or ask for my copy).