Reading Stieg Larsson while in South Dakota

Like Bird, I finished Stieg Larsson's trilogy while on vacation. But I'd read the first two books before I left home.

I was amazed that The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest began exactly where The Girl Who Played with Fire had ended. It was almost as if an editor had cut the manuscript at the end of a paragraph and declared the first part book 2. The section beginning with the next paragraph was thus declared to be book 3. If I'd been at home, I'd have gotten Fire off the shelf to remind myself exactly what was going on in the final pages. But I was in South Dakota.



The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is a coda to the story (and it is all one story). Bird likened the trilogy to Tolkein's epic. As I read the last book, I began to think of Larsson's story as a symphony. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first movement which introduces the themes and characters; The Girl Who Played with Fire is a second movement in which those themes and characters are played out; The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is really two movements -- the first movement introduces new characters who part of one of the main themes and the second is the coda, or conclusion where all the themes and characters are resolved. (Pardon my musical ignorance, but that's how I understand symphonies. Corrections and instructions are welcome.)

After the heights of the second movement (Fire), the third and fourth movements of Hornet's Nest were a bit of a let down, but they're sort of supposed to be as the conflicts are resolved. By the time the really bad guys are introduced in the first part of Hornet's Nest, they are so vulnerable that their fate seems obvious. And the final resolutions are almost "Happily Ever After (sort of)."

I, too, was driven to read these books. I just didn't have them all during one vacation time. The characters are what really carried the story for me. The conspiracy was a little thin and a lot paranoid, but almost believable. (The Cold War can be a scapegoat for lots of terrible fictional things since it was the cause of so many terrors of real life. Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis?) But the story telling kept me going as well, though I don't know if it would have been as good without Salander and Blomkvist and the villains.

I leave it to some academics to point out the commonalities between Larsson's books, Tolkein's stories, Rowling's wizardry, and other immensely popular "must reads." I'd be interested in hearing their theories about what makes books so quickly and immensely popular.

But here's the deal: the three Larsson books are worth the time -- even if you only devote half an hour at bedtime for a couple months to them. But read them in order. I'll bet that those half hours become hours and then weekend afternoons pretty quickly.

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Katherine Dunn's review of Hornet's Nest in The Oregonian
Ed Siegel's review of Hornet's Nest in Newsday
Alicia Rancilio's review of Hornet's Nest in Taiwan News

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Racing through the Millennium Series

Bird Loomis wrote about the last Stieg Larsson book before I did. Here's his take.

For a mystery buff, I may have been the last person on earth to start reading Stieg Larsson's Girl With Dragon Tattoo from the “Millennium” series.

Jeesh, the Swedish Tattoo film came out, and I had to avoid it, knowing that I wanted to experience reading the books before I saw any of the films (the second one has been released in the US and a US director is working on an American version of Dragon Tattoo).

I wasn't really worried that I'd be disappointed. Everyone who has talked or written about the series has been pretty damned positive.

So, about two weeks ago, heading out to the Pacific Northwest for vacation, I took the first volume to begin on the plane.

It's always fun to be caught up in a book, racing ahead because you're compelled to. (It's also fun to savor books, but sometimes the narrative just requires that you put everything aside.) A couple hundred pages in by the time I got to Seattle, I luxuriated in the cool temperatures and just kept going. Luckily my in-laws had the remaining two books in the series (in hardback!).

I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and plunged into The Girl Who Played with Fire. My brother-in-law offhandedly said he didn't think it was quite as good as the first and third, but you could have fooled me. And although I finished Fire at about 10:30 at night, I immediately started The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest that evening. Despite kayaking, biking, eating salmon, drinking beer, etc., I got through the last volume within another day or so - more or less 1700 pages in about a week.

A lot's been written about Larsson's's books, and I surely have no great, overarching take on them (well, actually I do, noted below, but it's scarcely all that well considered). But I am interested in why some books pull you in so completely that you just can't stop until you're completely done. For me, although the plotting is decent, it's the characters that are so compelling, even if Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomkvist are, like many thriller characters, a bit beyond belief. Indeed, that's part of their charm. Many of the less central characters have their moments, a lot within the Vanger family.

And although there are numerous surprises, the overall arc of the story, especially in the last two books, leads one to believe that things will turn out well for the major characters and that, roughly speaking, justice will be done. About half way through the last book, it dawned on me that these three books were comparable to the Lord of the Rings, along with The Hobbit. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is like The Hobbit in that it introduces you to all the characters and the turf to be played on, but the real story doesn't start until the first book of the Rings trilogy. Larsson's first book is a great start, and we understand the world he's created, but the 2nd and 3rd books offer the real meat of one continuing story - not quite the same quest as Frodo's, but a quest (for revenge, sanity, justice?) nevertheless. Thus the seamless transition between Fire and Hornet's Nest.

In a recent post, Ken talked about putting down a Michael Connelly book because of some of the content. And these books are scarcely for the faint-hearted (nor is the first film, as I understand). Much of the talk about the books and Larsson revolves around victimhood, rape, and abuse in its many forms. But issues of gender and sex and violence are integral to these books - I'm not sure there's anything that is gratuitous (but that's probably a matter of opinion). And compared to some other thriller writers (Andrew Vachss comes most notably to mind), Larsson's not so hard edged.

And in the end, he has given us Lisbeth Salander, a truly remarkable invention of his mind (and apparently, his experience as a teenager). What a gift, and perhaps the most notable reason to hunker down and read these books without coming up for air.

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Katherine Dunn's review of Hornet's Nest in The Oregonian
Ed Siegel's review of Hornet's Nest in Newsday
Alicia Rancilio's review of Hornet's Nest in Taiwan News

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Beauty and Beastly

In preparation for a road trip away from the great prairies I picked up Michael Connelly's 2008 novel The Scarecrow.

I've had mixed reactions to Connelly's books ever since son Jim introduced me to them. Connelly is a great story teller. He weaves together intricate plots and creates fascinating characters. But I take his story telling too literally. The bad guys he invents are really bad guys. The crimes they commit are about the most reprehensible that Connelly can imagine.

There's only so much imaginary awfulness that I want to read about.

That was especially true for me as I read The Scarecrow. It didn't help that I was reading this one while in one of the earth's most beautiful places.

The plot is about a serial killer who is more of a criminal mastermind than Lex Luthor ever could be. Reporter Jack McEvoy is being laid off by his cost-cutting newspaper and is out to write a story good enough to embarrass his soon-to-be-ex bosses. FBI agent Rachel Walling has resigned under pressure for using a Bureau airplane under questionable circumstances. She has a reputation to protect and scores to settle as well.

I was engaged and drawn along by Connelly's story telling over half way through the book. Then the beauty of a mountain sunrise convinced me that I didn't have to read a book about some of the worst human depravity -- even if the good guys might win in the end.

I put it aside. Maybe I'll go back and finish it someday.

Have you read The Scarecrow? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• The author's web site
  
• Jeffrey Trachtenberg's review in the Wall Street Journal
  
• Rege Behe's review in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review

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What's a caper?

This time I went to a book store and found another Thomas Perry novel. After Bird's classification of Perry as a fox of a writer (as opposed to a one-track hedgehog) and after reading Death Benefits and Pursuit, I didn't know what to expect from Metzger's Dog.

My curiosity was aroused by a quote from The New York Times Book Review on the cover: "Very sharp, very funny..." Then, as I began reading the book, I quickly learned that the Metzger of the title is a cat.

It only got better from the cover and the first page. It is very funny. Great one-liners abound, but they're very bound to the context. This is not a mystery or an adventure, it's a comic opera that belongs in the category of "caper" movies like A Fish Called Wanda, Ocean's Eleven, or The Italian Job. I'm surprised it never made it to the big screen or the little one.

A Micky Mouse crime gang steals some cocaine from a research lab and also nabs a stack of classified CIA research on how the USA could take over Mexico. After the mooks fence the cocaine, they find out what they have in secret paper and set out to collect from the CIA for keeping the secrets.

The meetings in Langley, Virginia about how to get the papers back AND terminate the criminals are the funniest parts of the book. I think we're likely to be thankful for the skills collected and used by the CIA, but we're also delighted to think of the people who work for "the company" as fallible and sometimes clueless. The spooks are fallible and clueless in this caper.

Metzger and his dog are not clueless, even if Metzger's feeder is slightly clueless. Metzger's feeder is the focus of the little crime club that hopes to retire on the cocaine money and the CIA's payoff. The CIA would llke to eliminate Metzger's friends, the embarrassment of the stolen papers, and the diplomatic disaster of publicizing plans for the overthrow of a friendly, neighboring country's government.

But the comic opera CIA director is a character out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and so are his plans for dealing with this situation. The plot gets more and more complex and less and less believable as it goes on. But Metzger's Dog is delightful. Once again, Perry got me through the rough parts with really good story telling. I recommend it.

Thomas Perry does indeed know many ways to write books. I'll look for more.

Have you read Metzger's Dog? Write and tell us what you thought of it.

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• Thomas Perry's web site
  
• Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's review from The New York Times (27 September 1983)
  
• An excerpt from Metzger's Dog featured on NPR's summer reads for 2008.
  
• Thirty-one reviews on GoodReads.com

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Frugality again

I don't just read about murder and mayhem. I just finished The New Frugality by Chris Farrell. If his name sounds familiar, it's probably because you listen to public radio on Saturday morning. He's the guy who seems to answer listeners' questions off the top of his head on American Public Media's Marketplace Money. In fact, most of his answers probably require him to look some things up. He's thorough.

The book is a primer of personal finance in the post-recession, post-auto industry collapse, post-investment banks collapse world. The book is probably aimed at people younger than I. I heard naive versions of most of this advice from my parents. Mom and Dad never took a class or studied economics. But they learned a fair bit by living through the Great Depression, a World War, the expectations of another depression, the boom of the '50s and '60s, and the inflation of the '70s. The lessons they taught were limited by their own experiences, but were very similar to the ones touted by Chris Farrell in this book: don't take risks you can't afford to lose; don't get hooked on owning things; keep a safety net beneath your everyday living; don't get involved in things too complicated to understand; and don't start things you probably can't finish.

Of course these were rules broken with glee in the '90s by enough people to get all of us in trouble. That's why the book's called The New Frugality. (He does make a distinction between being cheap and being frugal, something I didn't learn from my parents.) The book's about living, earning, spending, saving, planning, getting an education, retiring, and giving. He advocates all those things within financial reason.

I thought about giving copies of this book to my children, but I think only the youngest needs it. On the other hand, maybe I'm overestimating the financial sophistication of the older ones. They all seem to be demostrating a reasonable frugality in their lives, but we've never really talked about it.

Hey, kids, Christmas is coming.

Have you read The New Frugality? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think of it.

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Another novel by Thomas Perry

I did go back to the Northfield Library and look for another Thomas Perry novel after reading the last one. I checked out Pursuit, Perry's 2001 novel about the ultimate hunt.

People as prey to other people shows up in horror and science fiction as THE ultimate hunting game. Many of the movie and TV treatments can be traced back to Richard Connell's 1924 story, "The Most Dangerous Game." The hapless (even if skilled) victims are almost always the losers of bets or trapped by circumstance into the position of the stalkee. The stalker knows the lay of the land and has the advantages of hunting prowess and weapons. There's a movie trailer haunting TV land now about a bunch of humans on a strange planet being hunted by monster, mechanical aliens (I think). The premier combat/crime/first-person shooter video and computer games also fall into this genre.

I think Perry goes them all one better. No simple victim and villain in this story. The hunter in this pursuit is a former cop turned very private investigator. He'll hunt down the biggest, meanest bad guys -- for the right price. And at the end of the hunt, if the bad guys don't surrender, he turns their bodies over to the current cops. This hunter has been doing this for a long time. And he's very good at what he does.

The prey in this pursuit is a serial killer for hire. For the right price, he'll kill whomever he's pointed at and anyone he thinks might threaten his survival. He's been doing this for a few years. He's very good at what he does.

After an assassination made to look like a crazed mass murder, and after the local constabulary runs out of leads, the father of one of the victims hires the ex-cop to find the murderer. Pursuit is on.

The first thing the hunter does is publicize his hiring and the pursuit -- even before he has any idea who the prey is. That's where the mind games begin. They play a major role in the investigation and the hunt.

There's a great deal of intense action in Pursuit. It's one of the reasons it took me so long to read the book. (I also had to prepare for a teach a week-long class. That's not easy to do when it's the only class I teach during the year.) During most of the time I was reading Pursuit, I could only deal with a chapter or two at a time. I have trouble with keeping my blood pressure down when I'm relaxing. Reading more than a chapter or two of the action and mind games that Perry describes was all I and my systolic and diastolic could handle. But I was always drawn back.

The story is well told, suspenseful, violent, and bloody. There's more violence and blood than I usually tolerate, but Perry does such a good job of setting up the ultimate hunt and telling the story, that I wanted some resolution. And it wasn't ever clear whether the hunter or the hunted or neither would come out alive.

In many ways this was quite different from the other books by Perry that Bird and I read. No template or established cast of characters. Scenes, characters, and actions are just for this book. I'm likely to go looking for another book by Thomas Perry, and I look forward to discovering what it will be like.

Have you Pursuit or another Thomas Perry book? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• Publisher's web site about Thomas Perry
  
• Susan McBride's interview with Thomas Perry

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More from the fox of an author

A couple weeks ago, Bird Loomis recommended Silence by Thomas Perry. Perry was a new author to me, so I went to the Northfield Library and looked for books by him. Silence wasn't on the shelf, but Death Benefits was and I checked it out.

Perry [right] may indeed be a fox compared to other mystery writers. I can't tell yet. I've only read one of his books. I can tell you that I thought Death Benefits was outstanding. It was a delight to read. One sign that Bird is right about Perry's approach to mystery fiction was that this plot didn't follow the conventions of mystery stories. This author does indeed know more than one way to structure a mystery.

He also knows good elements to use. One of the main characters is a private investigator whose skills and connections are nearly magical. Max Stillman lets nothing stand in his way, and he always wins the brawls. He can find out anything through his connections. I began to wonder why this mystery was so difficult for him to sort out because it was hard to see a shortcoming in his panoply of abilities. But without some shortcomings, the book would be pretty short and not very interesting.

When on an assignment for an old-fashioned insurance company, Stillman drafts a young analyst, John Walker, out of the company's cube farm to help him find anomalies in suspect claims. Thus begins a cross-country adventure without any limitation of a budget (thanks to the scale of the fraud). Walker is dragged into late night surveillance, back alley fist fights, attempts to dodge bullets, and unexpected romance. (See what I mean about Perry's awareness of the traditional building blocks of mystery fiction?)

The romance comes for Walker in the form of a seductive computer hacker who works for one of Stillman's contract researchers. If Death Benefits hadn't been published several years before Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I could easily have been convinced that the relationship between Walker and the mysterious "Serena" had been copied from the relationship between Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander in Larsson's books.

If you've read many of my reactions here, you know that I have trouble with contrived situations and things that don't make sense. Well, Perry's story includes some real whoppers, but I didn't notice them until I was done with the book. I credit that to Perry's story telling: it's like being on a fast-moving train that goes through an implausible landscape that doesn't seem implausible until the train stops. (e.g. What's with a New England town of 3,500 people where the police department has 16 patrol cars? Come on, why didn't the magical investigator or his statistical wizard sidekick notice that obvious anomaly? Even the city of 15,000+ I live in doesn't have that many squad cars lined up in the parking lot behind the "Safety Center.") The final scene was rather like the mob scene from a Transylvanian horror movie, but it was only the arrival of the cavalry that made me realize what a ridiculous ride I'd been taken on.

I'm encouraged enough that when I take this book back to the library, I'll look for Silence or another of Perry's books. Have you read Death Benefits or another of Perry's books? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reactions.

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Thomas Perry's web site


"Putting the "Fun" in Dysfunctional," Patrick A. Smith's review of Death Benefits in January Magazine

Andy Plonka's review at The Mystery Reader

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Mature Mystery Writers: The Hedgehog and the Fox

Bird Loomis wrote from Lawrence, Kansas about the delightful results of forgetting to take a book he'd begun on a quick trip to DC.

By happenstance, over the past couple of weeks, I have been reading simultaneously two separate mysteries, by two of my favorite authors. I started Lee Child's Jack Reacher novel, Gone Tomorrow, but neglected to take it on a quick trip to D.C. Coming home, I browsed Hudson News for a good choice, and happened upon Thomas Perry's Silence, which I snarfed up and began to read on the trip home.

So there I was, smack in the middle of two page-turners (trust me). Now I often have two or three books going at any given time, but I can't think of a time that I had a pair of compelling mysteries. In the end, for no good reason, I finished Silence, then returned to Gone Tomorrow and zipped through it to its predictably violent conclusion. Social scientist that I am, I had the makings of a study: two books, each quite good, and yet very different. So how were they different in what they delivered?

The metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog, made modern in a 1953 essay on Tolstoy by Isaiah Berlin, divides people into two sorts: the hedgehog, who knows one very big thing, and the fox, who knows many things. In politics, FDR was the classic fox, while George W. Bush looks like a major hedgehog to me. Reading Silence and Gone Tomorrow at the same time made me consider what makes writers - and especially mystery authors - so interesting that we come back to them, time and again.

Most obviously, Lee Child, through Jack Reacher, is a classic hedgehog. Child had created a protagonist who strains our sense of disbelief, with his stripped-down style of life, and unworldly skills. Time after time, Child places Reacher in a setting (often a small town, but New York City for Gone Tomorrow), creates a challenge that the stubborn ex-major cannot ignore, and allows us to observe him solve the puzzle with an admirable mix of brain and brawn. Jack Reacher, more than most series heroes, is an impossible character, and I, for one, continue to be drawn to him, as he works through a maze of difficulties, often coming to terms with a powerful background figure (the terrorist Lila Hoth in Tomorrow's Child). Child has written 17 Reacher novels, and they usually work well. It's a testimony to his writing and to the character he's created that his books have grown in popularity over time. Still, he's a one-trick pony with a great trick.

Thomas Perry, to mix my metaphors, is a different kettle of fish. Although he has created a popular series and protagonist (Jane Whitefield), he usually writes one-off thrillers. Perry is not the blockbuster author that Child has become, but he has had great critical success from the get go. His first two books, The Butcher's Boy and Metzger's Dog won substantial acclaim. I happened on them, and have been a great fan, ever since, although I've missed a book here and there, in part because each new novel does not become an event (I was lucky to find Silence at the airport). Still, I always look forward to a Perry book, because I know I'm likely to be surprised, by characters, plot, motivations, and even locale. Perry writes hedgehog novels, where plot and personality intersect to take the reader on unsuspected journeys.

In Silence, we get Jack Till, a jaded ex-cop, but with a twist. He has a Down syndrome daughter, now grown, to whom he's devoted. He's not a drunk or a fool, but he's damaged goods, something of a first cousin to Harry Bosch, Michael Connelly's complicated cop. Till turns out to be reasonably interesting and pretty damned competent, which is a good thing, in that he has to match wits with Paul and Sylvie Turner, a married team of hit artists, whose job it is to kill someone Till is protecting. The growing tensions between the highly intelligent, highly lethal Turners (which escalate up to the novel's final page) and between them and their employer combine to keep the reader thoroughly entertained. And that's without them directly dealing with Jack Till. Perry takes us on a great trip, actually a series of actual travels across California and Nevada. He also creates a terrific bad guy, the ultimate employer of the deadly Turners.

Lee Child places us on Jack Reacher's side - indeed, we often feel as if we are at his side - while he embarks upon his quest. Thomas Perry allows us to get close to Jack Gill and the Turners, and strangely, we're rooting for all of them, another fox-like move. Both Child and Perry provide real entertainment, yet it may be that neither is pure fox or pure hedgehog. For example, in the next Reacher book, it 's reported that he has a burgeoning relationship with a woman who aggressively questions his bizarre life style of traveling with nothing but a toothbrush. Maybe we'll get a little exploration of Reacher's psyche; in fact, the best Reacher novels do move in this direction.

On the other hand, Thomas Perry has created some memorable characters in Silence. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Turners return, or Jack Gill begin to work on a renewed relationship with the woman he has successfully protected. As he's demonstrated with Jane Whitefield previously, maybe this fox has more than a bit of hedgehog in his literary genes. I hope so. Paul and Sylvie Turner, dangerous to others and to each other, deserve another go-round.

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• Lee Child's web site

• Kenneth Turan's review of Gone Tomorrow in the Los Angeles Times

• Perry's publisher's web site

• Eleanor Bukowsky's review of Silence at Mostly Fiction

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Supervillains and brave guys

When I think of supervillains, I think of fantasy characters like Lex Luthor and Dr. No. Usually I think of them in association with fantasy heroes like Superman and James Bond.

So, recently I read books with supervillains as primary characters. But opposite them there were no superheroes. There were brave people (not necessarily wise, but brave), but not super heroes.

Over the recent long weekend at the wonderful cabin called Sidetrack, I read William Kent Krueger's Mercy Falls and C. J. Box's Nowhere to Run (or Now Here to Run?). Both books are centered on long-running characters: Krueger's Cork O'Connor and Box's Joe Pickett. Both of these brave guys are nearly overwhelmed by supervillains. In fact, it's not entirely clear why either of them survived past the middle of the book about them.

Both plots involve behind-the-scenes machinations of the rich and powerful, which is one of the sources of the villains' super powers, and something no mere mortal can overcome. I'm put off by stories where such imbalance is vital.

I don't doubt that there are people with money and connections who can make "impossible" things happen and get away with it. I doubt that mere motrals can be such a threat as to attract the wrath of those supervillains.

I also doubt that mere mortals, or records of their existence, would survive the wrath of such supervillains. (It's not just the Chilean or Argentine militaries, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the CIA that can make people disappear.)

Both of these books are packed with action, suspense, blood, and gore. Krueger even cheats by previewing a bloody scene from late in the book as a preface. Box cheats a bit by replaying a "find the bad guys in the wilderness" scenario three times.

In the end, Krueger's hero slinks off into the night in an attempt to protect his family. Box's hero faces years of post-traumatic stress therapy in order to learn to live with himself. (Although I'd guess that Box will resurrect his hero to fight another day with his sanity and identity intact evern without therapy.)

So, I didn't like the imbalance between the bad guys and the good guys. The violence and mayhem was more than I'd prefer in a mystery. The logic of the plots are stretched thinner than I'd like. But I read both of them. They were diversions from the preparations I was doing for an upcoming teaching gig. And they kept me out of the sun during our first really hot summer weekend.

And, one more thing. When I was about half way through Krueger's Mercy Falls, I mentioned to wonderful Nancy that I liked it more than I'd remembered liking the last Krueger novel I'd read. It went down hill in the second half. Then I finished the story, but there were still 50 pages left in the book. What was up with that? It turns out that the anti-climax was the launching of Krueger's next book -- a continuation of the supervillain-brave guy story. BOO! Sorry, I won't be looking for it.

Have you read Mercy Falls or Nowhere to Run? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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William Kent Krueger's web site for Mercy Falls

C. J. Box's web site for Nowhere to Run

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Mystery set in China

Way back when, Chip Hauss recommended the mysteries written by Qiu Xiaolong. He's a comparative literature professor in St. Louis who has lived in the US since 1989. (Do you remember why that date is significant?)

Qiu's novels are good. They are also filled with poetic references, most of which I miss. In A Loyal Character Dancer, the only one I caught for sure was on the last page. It was a reference to one of my favorite lines from T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. No matter. The story is good even if the telling seems slow because of all the poetic references, quotations, and descriptions.

The story has its origins in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) when just about everything was turned upside down and inside out. It was a time for true believers, like the woman who is the focus of the story. She was a dedicated Red Guard who gladly went to learn from the peasants. As a "loyal character dancer," she held aloft symbols of her dedication to Chairman Mao while heading for life among the poorest of peasants. It was also a time for opportunistic characters like the man who raped and later married her.

The contemporary story involves Chinese organized crime, the triads that have recreated themselves in the economic chaos of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." These guys are the opportunistic characters of today.

The plot involves the police work of Qiu's Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau and U.S. Marshall Catherine Rohn who are assigned the task of finding the former Red Guard and sending her safely to the U. S. Interestingly, like Qiu, both Inspector Chen and Marshall Rohn "majored" in literature as undergraduates. Rohn speaks some Chinese and knows some Chinese literature; Chen has studied Western and Chinese poetry. That sets the stage for insider quips and quotes most of which meant nothing to me.

In spite of the poetic interruptions, the story is well told. The main characters are intriguing, and if the forbidden romance of the priest and the lawyer in Margaret Coel's novels is interesting, the forbidden romance between the Chinese Inspector and the American Marshall is, I think, more interesting. So, I recommend A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong. If you read or have read it, write and tell this little bit of the world what you think (thought) of it. And in the poetic reference contest, you can point out those references I missed.

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• Profile of Qiu Xiaolong at January Magazine

• Sudheer Apte's review of A Loyal Character Dancer at Mostly Fiction

• Charles Foran's review at Asian Review of Books

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Well, that was better

Besides picking up a new Walter Mosley book at the library I also picked up a new (to me) Margaret Coel book. I was rather disappointed with Mosley and rather pleased with Coel's Wife of Moon. Like her other mysteries, it's set on the Wind River reservation in central Wyoming.

I hadn't read one of her books for awhile, partly becuase I have been put off by the romance novel tendencies in many of them. This one is better. The romance themes are there. They involve the Jesuit priest at a reservation church, a native lawyer torn between pursuing her destiny and serving her people, and a handsome native lawyer from South Dakota who is pursuing a professional partnership and maybe a romantic one. All that doesn't intrude on this story much at all.

But Margaret Coel plots great stories and writes very good action/suspense episodes. (I'm not as good at reading them.) There are actually two connected plots in this book. One involves events that happened in 1907, during one of Edward S. Curtis' photographic expeditions to photograph native people before they disappeared into the great melting pot. The other involves a powerful Wyoming politician who seems set to announce his candidacy for U.S. president. (The book was written in 2004. What prominent Wyoming politician was in the news then?)

Father John gets involved because one his parishoners apparently committed suicide. Then the dead woman's husband disappears and becomes a suspect. Attorney Vicky Holden becomes his lawyer when he reappears.

To complicate matters a new curator at the tribal musem discovers that some reservation residents own prints of Edward Curtis' photographs that were gifts to thier grandparents. The curator doesn't have to go to "Antiques Roadshow" to know the value of vintage and unknown Curtis prints. Then the curator disappears.

The potential candidate schedules a visit to the reservation. When he does, some of the locals begin asking questions about the sources of his wealth and land bordering the reservation.

And the missing curator's controlling husband shows up and begins intimidating people in an effort, he says, to find his wife. But, his motives are suspect.

It's a good story and it's well told. I wasn't once tempted to think that there was magic or imaginary technology in the air. As a matter of fact, this story ranked very high on the credibility meter. Okay, the imaginary story from 1907 is obviously imaginary and the resolution involves a couple improbables, but they didn't get in the way of my enjoyment.

If you have a choice, check out Wife of Moon by Margaret Coel. Then let this little bit of the world know what you thought of it.

PS:There's a wonderful typo on p. 124: "People here don't think T.J.'s capable of killing anybody," Father John said. "They know the man, and they twist him."

Okay, Father John is originally from Boston, but what kind of accent or speech impediment turns "trust" into "twist?" And what of the editor? Or the proofreader? Did someone do minor sabotage on Coel's book? Someone kindly penciled in the proper word in the library copy that I read. Thank you.

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• Margaret Coel's web page
• Judy Gigstad's review at Book Reporter
• Harriet Klausner's review at All Readers

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Mystery as science fiction

I was happy to find a new Walter Mosley book on the library shelf. I'd enjoyed his first Leonid McGill mystery (The Long Fall) a bit ago because Mosley has such a way with language. It was a treat to read his sentences.

When I picked up Known to Evil, I was looking forward to more pleasurable reading. I was half way through the book when I took it to that wonderful place by the lake known as Sidetrack. I took breaks from proofreading to finish the book.

Well, the words were there and the magical sentences and the flowing narrative, but this Leonid McGill story wasn't what I expected. It was more like science fiction than a New York-based mystery.

It might have helped if I was more familiar with the big city. As it was, whenever Mosley's character got in his car or on the subway to head off to a building or a neighborhood, he might just have well have been getting in a space ship headed for another planet. And most of those planets (buildings or neighborhoods) were pretty featureless places. They were just other planets.

Whenever McGill stopped in his office or his den for a change of clothes or a change of weapons, he might well have been going to a replicator and asking the computer to make exactly what he needed. He always got exactly what the situation called for.

When McGill's wife starts fooling around with a young man and his girlfriend takes up with another guy, guess what? The replicator produces a comely bar tender who comes on to McGill and beds him when he needs some reassurance. (Oh, and the girl friend returns by the end of the book -- no word on what happens to the 26-year, betrayal-ridden marriage.)

And the bad guys in this book were simply featureless, large, powerful, and evil. And all but once in this story, McGill, a stubby, middle aged former boxer, beat the crap out of the villians. McGill also indirectly got to the big bad guys who hired the muscle who tried to take on the private detective -- even the "bad" cops who had been eager for years to take down Leonid McGill.

It's fantasy science fiction as much as anything else. It's not a bad story and it's well told. Just be ready for a story set in contemporary New York that might as well have been set at a time long, long from now in a universe far, far away.

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• Book summary from BookBrowse
• Sarah Weinman's review from The Los Angeles Times
• Vincent T. Davis' review at My SA Entertainment

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Comment on "Hoarding"

Dan Conrad wrote, "With a writer as famous as Doctorow you hesitate to say whether its your fault or his, but I don't believe I've ever finished one of his books. I have the same record with Updike since Rabbit Run -- to say nothing of Norman Mailer. By what --and whose-- criteria are these America's great writers?"

Hoarding

Hoarding has its own cable TV shows. (Buried Alive and Hoarders) It must be fascinating.

Hoarding has some fancy names attached to it: disposophobia and syllogomania. There's not a conclusive definition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). But there are five levels of hoarding described in the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization (NSGCD).

Back in the 1930s and '40s, the Collyer brothers (Homer and Langley) gained fame as wealthy hermit horaders who "lived" in their Fifth Avenue brownstone in Manhattan. When the brothers were found dead in the house in '47, over 100 tons of stuff was removed from the house before it was torn down.

The Collyer Brothers' Fifth Avenue home on the day in 1947 when the police tunneled their way in and found Homer's body.

The New York Times wrote at the time the brothers were found that, "There is, admittedly, something unattractive about the avidity with which society now pores over every detail the Collyer brothers vigorously withheld from public scrutiny . . . . It is almost as though society were taking revenge upon the brothers for daring to cut the thread that binds man to his fellows." It seems that hoarding may be a form of OCD, but that fascination with hoarders is another form of OCD.

Books, a play, and episodes of television series have been based on the Collyer brothers. Most recently E. L. Doctorow's Homer and Langley. I picked this one up in the Northfield Library seeking to read something other than a mystery.

It seems that most of the time that I venture out to read "respectable" fiction, I come away disappointed and baffled by what good literature is.

A couple years ago, a friend recommended a Doctorow story, "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden," which I thought was a pretty good parable. But I never went back and read the rest of the book.

Many years ago, I was intrigured by Ragtime and the movie version (and Elizabeth McGovern's nude scene). But I don't know now whether I remember Doctorow's book or Milos Forman's movie.

Like other Doctorow novels, Homer and Langley is a romanticized bit of fiction that uses the names and psychoses of two real people as a starting point, with a bit of the OCD fascination with hoarding thrown in.

The story sort of wades through 40-50 years of American history as "seen" by a blind guy sitting in a boarded up Fifth Avenue mansion while it (and the world?) falls apart around him. He's tended to by a brother who is more crazy than he is. The crazy old blind guy writes a memoir about all this on a Braille typewriter his brother has scavenged from somewhere.

The deterioration of everything happens so gradually, that the writer sort of accepts as normal the Model T reassembled in the dining room, the Japanese servants hauled off to a relocation camp, hauling water from Central Park when the city shuts off water service, the hippies who crash for a summer, the booby traps that his brother builds in the accumulated trash to deter burglars, and the rats who live (at first) in the walls and (later) around his feet.

I was curious about this book and looked up a couple reviews. The reviewers in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker all went on and on about how the book was packed with details and how the narrative forged ahead. None of them said it was a good book. None of them said it was a bad book. None of them said it was a mediocre book. All of them were intensely interested in talking about the real Collyer brothers and presenting photos of the trash-filled house. It's the fascination with hoarders again.

I don't know if it's a good or a bad or mediocre book. Im back with one of my favorite poets, Reed Whittemore. In his poem, "Today," he wrote

I come from Minnesota.
I must get a great big book with all the critics in it
And eat it. One gets so hungry and stupid in Minnesota.

I do know I didn't think much of Homer and Langley as a novel. It didn't entertain me. I was curious about these characters in the first half of the book and curious about what whould happen to them in the second half. My curiousity about what messages Doctorow was sending grew smaller and smaller until I skimmed through the last dozen pages. Doctorow seems to describe a lot of trivia and neglect most of the essentials of the brothers' lives.

If you want my advice, pass on this one. Go read some Reed Whittemore instead. Now that I've hauled Poems, new and selected (1967) off the shelf, that's what I think I'll do.

Have you read Homer and Langley? Have you read other Doctorow books? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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Michiko Kakutani's review in The New York Times

Michale Dirda's review in The Washington Post

The review in The New Yorker

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The good, the bad, and the best

If I don't watch the bad and mediocre movies or listen to the so-so music, how will I know good stuff when I see or hear it?

Same thing is true of books. Or as the princess said, "I've got to kiss a lot of frogs to find the magic prince." That is what she said, itsn't it?

I've read lots of good books and lots of so-so books. Most of the time that I tie into a bad one, I choose not to finish it.

Then I pick up a really good book, and it's suddenly obvious that it's good. Unless I want to sit back and enjoy it, I have to do the hard work of identifying what makes it good.

I picked up Walter Mosley's The Long Fall recently. It was obviously really good. After I read the first 2 pages, I stopped and interupted Nancy's reading to read her those 2 pages. That's how good it is. Nancy, who edits several semi-pro novels every year, listened intently. "It is so good to know that there are excellent writers out there." That's how good it is.

I've liked several of the books I've read recently. I liked a couple a great deal. The Long Fall stands out as excellent against the background of the books I've read during the past year.

Oh, and here's the opening:

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"I'm sorry, Mr. um?..." the skinny receptionist said. Her baby-blue-on-white nameplate merely read JULIET.

She had short blond hair that was longer in the front than in the back and wore a violet T-shirt that I was sure would expose a pierced navel if she were to stand up. Behind her was a mostly open-air-boutique-like office space with ten or twelve brightly colored plastic desks that were interspersed by big, leafy, green plants. The eastern wall, to my right, was a series of ceiling-to-floor segmented windowpanes that were not intended to open.

All the secretaries and gofers that worked for Berg, Lewis & Takayama were young and pretty, regardless of gender. All except one.

There was a chubby woman who sat in a far corner to the left, under an exit sign. She had bad skin and a utilitarian fashion sense. She was looking down, working hard. I immediately identified with her.

I imagined sitting in that corner, hating everyone else in the room.

"Mr. Brown isn't in?" I asked, ignoring Juliet's request for a name.

"He can't be disturbed."

"Couldn't you just give him a note from me?"

Juliet, who hadn't smiled once, not even when I first walked in, actually sneered, looking at me as if I were a city trash collector walking right in from my garbage truck into the White House and asking for an audience with the president.

I was wearing a suit and tie. Maybe my shoe leather was dull, but there weren't any scuffs. There were no spots on my navy lapels, but, like that woman in the corner, I was obviously out of my depth: a vacuum-cleaner salesman among high-paid lawyers, a hausfrau thrown in with a bevy of Playboy bunnies...

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It had been a long time since I read one of Mosley's books. He's stopped writing about Easy Rawlins and is writing about other characters. This book is about a guy named Leonid McGill, a shady character who says he's trying to go straight. That kind of ambiguity pervades the worlds that Mosley writes about, and the world most of us live in when we're really honest with ourselves. Our ambiguities might not be as dramatic as those that Mosley's characters face, but our stories aren't likely to make good novels.

Some of Mosley's books have been excellent. Others just good. This one is somewhere in between. But it was head and shoulders above most of what I've read recently.

Why?

Besides use of language? The story hangs together. The telling of the story took me along without provoking silly questions about why and how and who. The unwrapping of the complications and consequences are carefully done. The characters are humans I can comprehend even if they're not like people I know or would want to hang with.

There's a new Leonid McGill mystery out since this one was published, and a novel about Mosley's character Socrates Fortlow that I'm tempted to follow up on. It's like running into an old friend.

Anyone else have experience with Walter Mosley's books? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• Walter Mosley's web site

• Anna Mundow's review of The Long Fall in the Washington Post

• Another in a long series (about Bad Boy Brawly Brown)

• Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (an earlier really good book about Socrates Fortlow)

• Fearless Jones (from the old pre-blog site)

• The Walter Mosley page at African American Literature

• Walter Mosley talks about The Long Fall:

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Non-fiction as fiction

I was disappointed (or distracted) when I read Dan O'Brien's Brendan Prairie. But I did want to read about his buffalo ranching experiences, so I got Buffalo for the Broken Heart from the Northfield Library.

This book is pretty straight non-fiction. O'Brien tells the story of struggling to raise cattle on a South Dakota ranch (the Broken Heart) in the prairie between the Badlands and the Black Hills. He explains how he gradually became convinced that raising buffalo was the way the save the ranch and its environment. Then he describes how he (and his bankers) got buffalo for the ranch.



It's a good story, and it is told very well. And the story is told as if it were fiction. There's a beginning, middle, and an end. There are characters and drama. There is science and explanations. There are complete stories within the main story. And the the narrative concludes at the end of the book -- although there's another story implied by the ending. (I wish he'd done this with Brendan Prairie.)

I liked this book. I am looking forward to meeting O'Brien and seeing the Broken Heart next July.

Now, I may well go looking for another of O'Brien's novels next time I'm at the library.

Have you read Buffalo for the Broken Heart? How did you respond to it? Write, and tell this little bit of the world.

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• Becky Wiggins' short review
  
• Reviews at the Washington, DC Public Library site
  
• Information and a review from the Siouxland Library
  
• Dan O'Brien's Wild Idea Buffalo (where you can order organic buffalo meat)

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Black Hills mystery

Well, I got an overdue notice from the Northfield library. It doesn't happen often.

You'd think I'd be able to read and comment on a 250-page book in less than 3 weeks. At least I think I ought to be able to do that. What happened?

The book that's now overdue is Brendan Prairie by Dan O'Brien. It's a mystery and more. Or maybe less.

O'Brien is one of the leaders of a geology/ecology seminar I'm attending next July in the Black Hills. I thought I'd read something he's written before heading west.

I had trouble starting the book. There's so much back story to be told and it takes a long time -- practically the whole book -- to get it told. There's very little that isn't back story.

Then there are the paeans to the beauty of Brendan Prairie, a bit of Black Hills beauty that is about to be developed as vacation housing for rich people attracted to the gambling mecca in the Black Hills. The prairie sounds like an environmental gem. But I was never convinced that it was priceless or unique.

There's also incredible detail about capturing and training hawks and falcons. Yawn. And somehow that seems contradictory to the adoration of nature when O'Brien writes about Brendan Prairie. How is the main character's semi-domesticating of a falcon different from the semi-domestication of a bit of meadow?

At the end, all the main characters are tied up in a nasty ball of string that leaves the survivors bound by secrets and guilt that will never leave them.

I guess this book is a short story, an essay about preservation of nature, a feature article about falconry, and another short story about youthful love and lust.

It never hung together for me. And that's my excuse why it took so long for me to read it and almost as long to get around to writing about it.

Have you read Brendan Prairie by Dan O'Brien? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

Meanwhile I'm headed back to the library with the overdue book and I'll look for O'Brien's non-fiction about stocking his Black Hills ranch with bison. That's more appropriate to the summer seminar. I'll let you know how the book and the seminar go.

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Why do you read fiction?

Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know

Now English professors and graduate students… say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?…

Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and frequently arcane theories that energized departments in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s — Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis — has faded. Since then a new generation of scholars have been casting about for The Next Big Thing.

The brain may be it. Getting to the root of people’s fascination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Jonathan Gottschall, who has written extensively about using evolutionary theory to explain fiction, said, is like “mapping wonderland.”

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Movie review

Dan Conrad wrote last night after seeing the movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

"Just returned from watching The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

"Maybe the best way to describe it is that coming out of the theater I had to check my watch three times as I simply could not believe I had been in there for over two and a half hours. All with virtually no chases, no gun battles, no mind boggling special effects, and no English; just a well told story and actors that looked and performed like they had just walked off the pages of the Larsson book.

"Did I mention that I liked it?"

Here's a link to a trailer for the movie (what I always thought was a preview).

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North country murder

The Economist, like many others, took note of the Scandinavian wave of mystery fiction this week (15-21 March). If you're not a subscriber, you might have to visit the library to read the whole thing.

Inspector Norse

THE neat streets of Oslo are not a natural setting for crime fiction. Nor, with its cows and country smells, is the flat farming land of Sweden’s southern tip. And Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, is now associated more with financial misjudgment than gruesome murder. Yet in the past decade Nordic crime writers have unleashed a wave of detective fiction that is right up there with the work of Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard and the other crime greats. Nordic crime today is a publishing phenomenon. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy alone has sold 27m copies, its publishers’ latest figures show, in over 40 countries. The release this month in Britain and America of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the film of the first Larsson book, will only boost sales.

The transfer to the screen of his sprawling epic (the author died suddenly in 2004 just as the trilogy was being edited and translated) will cement the Nordics’ renown. The more unruly subplots have been eliminated, leaving the hero, a middle-aged financial journalist named Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), and an emotionally damaged computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, pictured above), at the centre of every scene. The small screen too has had a recent visit from the Swedish police. Starting in 2008, British television viewers have been treated to expensive adaptations of the books of Henning Mankell, featuring Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander. The BBC series has reawakened interest in Mr Mankell’s nine Wallander books, which make up a large slice of his worldwide sales of 30m in 40 languages.

Larsson and Mr Mankell are the best-known Nordic crime writers outside the region. But several others are also beginning to gain recognition abroad, including K.O. Dahl and Karin Fossum from Norway and Ake Edwardson and Hakan Nesser of Sweden. Iceland, a Nordic country that is not strictly part of Scandinavia, boasts an award winner too. Arnaldur Indridason’s Silence of the Grave won the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger award in 2005. The Devil’s Star by a Norwegian, Jo Nesbo, is published in America this month at the same time as a more recent novel, The Snowman, is coming out in Britain. A previous work, Nemesis, was nominated for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe crime-writing award, a prize generally dominated by American authors.

Three factors underpin the success of Nordic crime fiction: language, heroes and setting. Niclas Salomonsson, a literary agent who represents almost all the up and coming Scandinavian crime writers, reckons it is the style of the books, “realistic, simple and precise…and stripped of unnecessary words”, that has a lot to do with it. The plain, direct writing, devoid of metaphor, suits the genre well...

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Clarification of recommendation

Dan Conrad wrote to clarify his recommendation of Charles Todd's mystery. It helps to make sense of why he had pointed out the similarity to the Maisie Dobbs books.

Sorry about that--but the book I read and enjoyed is called Duty to the Dead and is the first in what is planned to be a series of "Bess Crawford Mysteries."

The novel is set in the period around WWI and the Bess Crawford character is an Army nurse -- and thus the comparison to Maisie Dobbs. I've not read any of their books featuring Ian Rutledge so can't comment on the book you read--but it doesn't sound nearly as engaging as Duty to the Dead. I think I'll just wait for the next Bess Crawford installment.

Guess that will teach me to read recommendations more carefully AND not be quick to read an author's first book.

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Back to post-war Britain

I finished a professional project and gave myself leave to escape with a mystery by Charles Todd (actually a mother-son writing team), an author(s?) recommended by Dan Conrad.

The story is set in post-World War I Britain (like Jacqueline Winspear's "Maisie Dobbs" stories and most of Laurie R. King's "Mary Russell" stories).

A local patrician is killed while out riding one morning. No witnesses. Exact scene unknown. The body was found in a pasture some time after the murder. A local investigation seems to indicate that a famous, well-connected local war hero is the murderer. So, the locals send for help from Scotland Yard. Enter Inspector Ian Rutledge.

In the book, A Test of Wills, Ian Rutledge, like Maisie Dobbs, suffers from shell shock (PTSS). His condition is worse than Maisie Dobbs' but not as bad as Maisie's one-time fiance, who is confined to a hospital and unable to speak or care for himself. (The story is also set about a decade earlier than the Maisie Dobbs stories.) Rutledge is haunted by a soldier who mutineed at the front and whom Rutledge killed for his betrayal. The voice of the dead man is part of Rutledge's everyday life. Dark depression waits on the edges of his consciousness to take over.

The post-war period in Western Europe was traumatic for nearly everyone. For Rutledge it meant trying to return to a career that he was quite good at before 1914. A Test of Wills tells the story of his first investigation after the war and after treatment (therapy?) for his shell shock. The scene is rural Warwickshire (northwest of Buckingham -- Stratford upon Avon is in the south of the county). [Coincidence noted below.]

Rutledge's investigation seems to reach the same conclusions as the local one did, but he can't tie up all the loose ends. The voice in his head taunts him. People tell him only what they think is relevant. He keeps probing to find out what they are keeping from him. Of course, he's relentless. The voice in his head and the dark cloud at the edge of his being won't allow anything less. Eventually, he sorts out the details, finds the murderer, and returns to London with his pre-war reputation intact.

The book suffers a bit by comparison to Laurie R. King and Jacqueline Winspear. The story is not as crisply told as King's stories are. But, A Test of Wills is "Charles Todd's" first book. Dan Conrad read a later one and really liked it. I'll read another, but it's more opaque than King's stories. [Remember that teacher in high school or at the university who made it seem that there were secrets and priorities that he/she knew but that she/he wasn't going to explain? I remember several like that. I never could figure out what was most important and what would be on the exam. So I tried to learn everything. Well, this story is told like that. There are scores of details. And the crucial ones aren't revealed until the very end (the exam?). I was disappointed in the resolution as I often was with my grades on those less-than-transparent exams.]

Also, I got less of that feeling of verisimilitude that pervades the Maisie Dobbs stories. I think it has to do with a level of detail in Winspear's books. Ian Rutledge has a car that he uses to get around Upper Streetham, but unlike Maisie's little red MG, I never found out what kind of car it was, how he started it, or how he called the local blacksmith to tow it into town to fix a slashed tire.

I was disappointed in the resolution, but the story telling was satisfying and involving. It was a good book to read while relaxing after the completion of a big deal project. This is the first of an 11-book series, I learned from Wikipedia. From another source I learned that the authors, named as Caroline and Charles Todd, might be using pseudonyms and do not actually live in Delaware, where the publisher says they come from. Another source suggested that the son in this writing team might hold a sensitive position which would suffer from being identified as a mystery writer. Who knows?

Do you know? Have you read A Test of Wills or another of "Charles Todd's" books? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

Oh, and coincidence. A couple days before reading this book, I was researching Warwickshire census records. My dad had searched diligently for ancestors named Wedding in England and never found any. There are many circumstantial clues from colonial Maryland, but no evidence of an English origin for the most senior John Wedding we know of, who died in 1772. Many records are now online in the UK, and I found several families named Wedding living in Warwickshire in the mid-19th century. Older records are not online. Maybe it's time for my research trip to England.

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• Charles Todd's web site
• The publisher's Charles Todd web page
• An interview with "Charles Todd" in January magazine
• Austrailian Kerrie's review of A Test of Wills

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Another voice on Fossum's "Black Seconds"

Dan Conrad wrote:

I roundly "second" this recommendation. Like you, I picked this up forgetting I had not at all liked the last two of hers I had read (Indian Bride and When the Devil Holds the Candle). Inspector Sejer is likable again, the other characters are interesting and real and Fossum's device of sort of letting you in on the solution ahead of time actually moves the story along and increases your interest. This is as good, I think, as He Who Fears the Wolf--if not even better.

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Powerful Norwegian tragedy

It had been a long time since I read one of Karin Fossum's books. She's one of the Norwegian crime writers who has made a name for herself outside of Norway.

[Norwegian Mystery (November 2006), Unexpected Norwegian Treat (December 2006), Who's evil? Who's a victim? (December 2006)]

I might not have pulled this one off the Northfield Public Library shelf if I'd remembered how bleak and dark those books were -- especially the last one. I'm glad I didn't remember.

Black Seconds was a difficult book to read (like a couple of the earlier ones). It revolved around the death of a nine-year-old girl. She disappeared while on a bike trip to a convenience story near home. She'd gone to buy a comic book. She never returned. Her new yellow bike disappeared too. If you have kids, you know why this was difficult to read. If you don't have kids, you can imagine, but you'd have to have a really visceral imagination to really know. Nancy noted, after David's birth, that she'd never felt so vulnerable.

Inspector Konrad Sejer and his assistant Jacob Skarre are on duty when the call about the missing girl comes in. Thus the story begins.

But this, like Fossum's earlier books, is more than story telling. Along with the events that make up the story, there are the ruminations of many people, and that's the most powerful part of the book. Fossum explores multiple perspectives: Sejer's, the missing girl's mother's, the missing girl's aunt's, the missing girl's cousins', and others. These internal dialogues have to carry the book forward, because there aren't many events.

Fossum tells us about intensive and futile searches. There is questioning by Sejer and Skarre. There is waiting. Sejer and Skarre fill in the waiting time investigating a fender bender involving one of the missing girl's cousins and his sketchy friend. They also try to interview the neighborhood character, a 50-something autistic man who can't speak. When that interview is a bust, they try talking to his widowed mother, who cleans his house, washes his clothers, and does his shopping. They even contact the missing girl's pen pal in Germany.

Practically nothing happens during most of the book. The searches and investigations go nowhere. After reading over half the book, the tension was intense. Fossum does an excellent job of sticking with events and the thoughts of the characters. That straightforward, factual story telling raised my anxiety level.

Sejer and Skarre begin re-interviewing everyone. Cracks begin to appear in people's stories. Somewhere in the second half of the book, I began to suspect what had really happened. But I wasn't sure until the very end.

A little girl died in a small Norwegian village. Some of the fears of everyone involved were borne out. But some of the mystery resulted from people trying to protect themselves and other parts resulted from the recognition of the vulnerabilities of parents.

I'm glad I stuck with this one, in spite of the ineffable sadness of the story.

Have you read Black Seconds? Write and tell us what you thought.

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See also:

• Maxine Clarke's review at EuroCrime
• The 50 Greatest Crime Writers, No27: Karin Fossum
• Fossum featured in Spotlight on World Mysteries at PBS

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Back to old favorites

I was browsing in the Northfield Library for new reading material.

Nancy and I are going to a geology/environmental seminar in the Black Hills and the South Dakota badlands in July and one of the leaders is a writer named O'Brien. I went looking for his books, thinking I knew who he was. So I was looking for his books. Well, it's not Tim O'Brien, whose The Things They Carried was about American soldiers in Vietnam. (I wondered what he was going to be doing at a Black Hills seminar.) The O'Brien I was looking for is Dan O'Brien, "a writer and buffalo rancher" according to his publisher's web site. His main book is Buffalo for the Broken Heart. The Broken Heart is his ranch and buffalo are what he raises there. The book's subtitle is "Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch," and I guess that's why he's one of the seminar leaders. I will read his book before we go, but it's checked out and I found other things to read.

What I found and brought home was Laurie R. King's The Language of Bees. This is the latest in her series of books about the genius ingenue who captured the heart and hand of Sherlock Holmes.

It's set in the early 20th century, just post-World War I and it's the 9th book about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. It's full of period language and technology. Mycroft Holmes is the equivalent of James Bond's Q. Sherlock Holmes and his nearly child-bride discover that Holmes has a son from a turn-of-the-20th-century dalliance in Paris, and that the son has a wife and daughter. This happens about the same time as the young man discovers who his father is.

Holmes' daughter-in-law has some unsavory bits in her past and they catch up with her about the time that the young family moves to London. And who does the young man turn to for help? Why the daddy who abandoned him before he was born, of course.

The plot is full of typical Holmesian deductions, surveillance, and research. Mary Russell hires a plane (in 1924) to fly from London to the Orkney Islands in bad weather. Holmes practically buys a fishing boat to take him to the same place. There is a serial murderer out there threatening Holmes' son and granddaughter. The evil villian always seems a step or two ahead of the pursuers.

Well, it's a lot of the same old, same old well-told story. Can you tell that even though I rather enjoyed reading this book, that I'm tired of the premise? Sara Paretsky and her private investigator V. I. Warshawski was a treat and a wonderful adventure for about six books. Then I tired of them too. I want Laurie R. King to go back and write a couple more books about San Francisco detective Kater Martinelli. I'm not tired of reading about her yet.

The trouble is that King has ended this book with the sort of cliff hanger that Conan Doyle used. She's created her own version of Professor Moriarty. At the end of this book it's clear that there will be a Language of Bees II in the near future. I won't be waiting for it.

And I've yet to figure out any meaning for the title or for the sections of the books about Mary Russell's investigations of the abandonment of one of Holmes' bee hives.

Have you read The Language of Bees? What did you think of it? Write, and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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See also:

• Laurie R. King's web site - it includes some amateur video of some of the key scenes from the book
• a review from the California Literary Review
• A review by ScotKris at It's a Crime! (Or a Mystery...)

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Chilly

Last December, at the Carleton Book Store sale I bought a copy of Arnaldur's mystery, Arctic Chill. I finally got to reading it recently.

But, before I go on about Arctic Chill, I'd like to reiterate something I mentioned when I wrote about Jar City and then forgot when I wrote about The Draining Lake and Voices.

In Iceland's insular world, people are known by their given names alone. They have patronyms or matronyms, but people don't use them. The population of the country (317,000) is about 80% of the population of Minneapolis. The country is smaller and snowier than Kentucky. Nearly everyone lives in a city or town. None of the towns or cities, save Reykjavik, has more than 30,000 residents. People are known by their first names. Ask Icelanders about Indriðason, and they might not know whom you are speaking about, even though Arnaldur is a best selling author.

So, in spite of the publication of Arnaldur's patronym on the cover of the English version of his book, I'll refer to him as he's known back home. If I remember.

What about Arctic Chill? It's not up to the standard that Arnaldur set with Voices. Inspector Erlendur (who also gets a patronym for the American dust jacket) is haunted by the childhood death of his brother when the two of them were caught in a blizzard. His post-traumatic stress shapes nearly every aspect of his personality and most of his actions. I kept expecting Erlendur's past to play a major role in the investigation of the murder of a 10-year-old boy in this story. It didn't.

The death of Erlendur's mentor and the ambiguous relationship between them is more important in this book. I'm not sure why, even after re-reading the last chapter.

It was a difficult book to get into. The beginning is full of details, ideas, and actions of the three main cops investigating a schoolyard killing. There are so many details, I found it hard to keep track of people and events. The detectives seem incredibly thorough and Arnaldur tells us about nearly every detail. I even started the book over after reading the first third.

The dust jacket says the book's "a thriller." It's not a thriller. Unlike the backstories and parallel plots in Voices, there's little here besides the investigation.

Erlendur's children show up a couple times, but there's no real development of the relationships.

And here's part of the problem: the US edition of Arctic Chill wasn't published until 2009, but it was written in 2005. The Draining Lake was written in 2004. Voices was written in 2003, so I'm reading these out of sequence, which might make a difference. As I hinted before, I might decide to go back and read these in chronological order before I read Hypothermia, written in 2007.

In any case, Arctic Chill was a better book than I expected after reading the first third of it twice. It wasn't as good as Voices or The Draining Lake. I might well read them all again and someday, I'll read the newest one.

Have you read Arctic Chill or other of Arnaldur's books? What did you think? Write, and tell this little bit of the world about your reaction.

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• Maxine Clarke's review at EuroCrime
  
  
• Barry Forshaw's review in The Independent (UK)
  
  
• kimbofo's review at the web site Reading Matters
  

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