King's Pirate

Back in September, Nancy and I had the pleasure of meeting Laurie R. King. She is the author of the Mary Russell mysteries featuring Ms Russell and her mentor Sherlock Holmes. King was in town to sign and read from her latest (11th) Russell mystery, Pirate King.

Besides being novelties, Nancy and I thought that the first few Russell mysteries were terrific. We also discovered King's Kate Martinelli series, written about a San Francisco detective. To us, they are equal to the best of the Russell mysteries.

The gems of King's books, in my mind, are the dark, yet hopeful novels about the lengths to which good people will go to do good things. I still wish those books are somewhat based on reality.

But back to Pirate King. The book required lots of research and travel to distant lands. We enjoyed hearing from King about her experience of writing the book. It was a bit weird to have her lead her audience at the reading in an amateurish and off-key new version of a Gilbert and Sullivan classic. (The new words were relevant to the new book.)

It was a treat to hear King read the first chapter. I often imagine an author's voice when I read, and now I'm pretty sure I had King's voice right in my head.

We gladly bought a copy, had King sign it it, and went home looking forward to reading the book that had been so much fun for the author to write. I got to read it first because Nancy was busy finishing a couple big projects.

It took a long time for me to read this book. Things began slowly in this mystery. In fact, the first real "event" didn't take place until half way through the book when one of the main characters pushes the other overboard during a crossing of the Mediterranean. And things didn't pick up much fro that point on.

I came away from the book feeling like I'd read an essay on movie making in the 1920s. (Remember all that research King enjoyed?) Following that was a little travelogue about Portugal, a briefing on heteronyms, a short history of the pirates of Morocco, and a description of an old Moroccan palace where the women of the movie company were held prisoner. (Remember the exotic travel King enjoyed?)

In my mind, stories are made up of events — one following another, often causally related. Essays and travelogues sometimes include themes and even events, but they are not mystery novels. This novel includes a flimsy plot, a bit of intrigue, and a dash of adventure, but it's more essay and travelogue than mystery novel. Enough said (for me).

I know the Russell books sell and they're what the publisher wants, but I want another Kate Martinelli mystery or another Darker Place.

Have you read Pirate King? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• The author's web site
  
• 168 reviews at GoodReads
  
• Rick Keiffel's review at the Santa Cruz News

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Old gem

I'm working my way through Laurie R. King's latest book very slowly. So, I'm posting a 2002 entry from the old ReadingOnTheWeb site. It's about a book full of important ideas that's still one of my favorites.

To keep my sanity and to keep my brain cells functioning I must read something besides mysteries and depressing things like Michael Moore's commentary.

Chinua Achebe, like Stephen Jay Gould, is one of my heroes. A wise and perceptive man, he's written several beautiful novels about Nigeria. They may have been works of fiction, but they were true stories.

I picked up his most recent publication, Home and Exile at the Carleton bookstore. It's based on a series of lectures he gave at Harvard a few years ago.

Achebe gave me hope and made me doubt that hope in the span of these few pages (105 to be exact).

He makes the case for the power of story telling. His thesis reminds me of George Orwell's.

In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative.

Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything..."

He then cites an epiphanal experience he had in a university classroom as the central metaphor for a discussion of how the "civilized" world captured the African narrative for over 400 years. At first it was done out of wonder, then to justify slavery. Later, the civilized world wrote to rationalize colonialism and then to defend its reputation.

He and his generation of African students, scholars, and writers began recognizing their loss and began inventing their own narratives.

Even today, as "the empire writes back," Westerners fight a rear guard action to maintain possession of the Third World's narrative.

V.S. Naipaul wins plaudits and is discussed in suburban book groups for describing the depravity and deprivaton of the Third World and deploring the childish resistance of Third Worlders to assimilation into Western civilization. And conservative scholars react to multiculturalism as if recognizing validity in something other than Judeo-Christian civilization threatens the importance (not to mention the superiority) of Greek, Roman, and Anglo Saxon values.

Achebe offers hope that more peoples will reclaim their own narratives, but one bit of pessimism startled me. It's possible, he says, that the damage done by "civilization's" control of the description of Africa and Africans for so many centuries and the propaganda sown by those narratives has made it impossible for us and them to see each other as equally human.

My idealism was challenged directly in a humanistic way. The shock was a danger to my naivete. At my age I shouldn't be vulnerable to such shocks. It does mean I'm still learning, but has my idealism been that superficial? Perhaps so. When confronted by Achebe's words, I knew I shared his fear.

Dehumanization of Africans by Europeans began before slavery. It grew more powerful and even scientific later. In the USA, slavery and the accompanying racism has shaped our culture in powerful ways. Can we, the purveyors of the toxic myth, overcome it? I sure don't know. We've made some progress in our civic behavior during my lifetime, but internalizing common humanity may be beyond us. Furthermore, can the victims of such description overcome the lies, the insults and the dehumanizing treatment? I can only accept Achebe's doubts.

This is an important book. If we're going to survive as a world, as a civilization, as a culture, and as a nation, we need to learn the lesson taught by this wise man. Read the book. If your library doesn't have it, ask them to find it. If you can afford the $10 it costs, buy it. It's Home and Exile by Chinua Achebe, published by Anchor Books A Division of Random House, Inc. The ISBN is 0-385-72133-1.

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• Alastair Niven's review in The Independent (UK)
• Kole Omotoso's review at Africa Resource
• Amy Reads' review

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Surprise! Surprise!

My expectations for a good book are probably pretty low. I don't demand big truths like Barbara Kingsolver. I like a story well told. I want to read about characters who are more than marionettes or caricatures. I like realistic stories to remain realistic and for fantasy stories to make me wonder.

As I finished Case Histories while sitting in front of the little lake named Blake, I realized I'd gotten more than I expected from a good book. Kate Atkinson's book took me by surprise because I expected just another mystery novel. This one was more.

The story is well told, but it's told in little episodes from different points of view. Sometimes the episodes were only a paragraph long. Sometimes the voice telling the story switches from one character to another with little warning. As a reader I had to constantly be "on my toes" -- no groggy reading or skimming through this one.

The book begins with three tragic and horrific short stories set in 1970, 1979, and 1994. A child disappears, a young woman is murdered, and a girl runs away from neglectful grandparents after her father is killed by her mother. Gradually these disparate events begin to come together in the files and investigations of a private investigator in Cambridge (UK). Former police investigator Jackson Brodie is approached in the course of a few days by people involved in these three "cold cases" for help in resolving them.

There are two or three principals involved in each of the stories, and Brodie is an experienced investigator who asks good questions and has good instincts for evaluating the answers he gets. Most of the people he meets and talks to are interesting and complicated, and, as the story progresses, so is Brodie. Atkinson sends him off into very personal internal daydreams in the middle of interviews sometimes, and they are very revealing. As distracting as those were to me as a reader, they didn't seem to distract Brodie from his quest for more information. However, Brodie's past includes a couple horror stories as tragic as the ones he's investigating.

I thought that Atkinson's writing was so evocative of the characters' emotions that often I could only read short bits at a time. It's realism without improbabilities. Well, there's one big and one smaller improbability, but I can always let a remote coincidence or two slip by. Neither the story nor the characters depended upon the improbabilities.

Case Histories is the best book I read this summer. Since summer is officially over, that's a wrap.

So, who recommended Kate Atkinson? Come on, out with it. You deserve some credit somewhere in karma. Have you read Case Histories or another of Atkinson's novels? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it (them).

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• Kate Atkinson's web site
• Nymeth's review at her blog, Things Mean a lot
• Michael Allen's review at his blog, Grumpy Old Bookman (this one's better than mine even though he's likes the book less)

Jason Isaacs (actor who plays Jackson Brodie) interviews Kate Atkinson about the BBC adaptation of Case Histories

Trailer for the BBC series Case Histories

Teaser for the BBC series Case Histories

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Little Canadian treasure

I'm pretty sure I know how Still Life got on my "to read" list. It was one of those innocent-sounding questions that Dale Stahl asked at the end of one of his e-mails, "Have you ever read anything by Louise Penny?"

My answer was, "No," but based on his recommendation, I put her name on the list.

I'm really glad I did. Tana French probably puts extra efforts into the beginnings of her books and Louise Penny must put extra effort into dialogue that reveals characters. And she creates characters that are more than names and titles.

For example, her Inspector Gamache has to tell his wife that he can't attend his grand-niece's christening because there's been a murder.

The scene unfolds: "'Did you murder this person?' Reine-Marie asked her husband when [he] told her he wouldn't be at the two-hour service on hard benches in a strange church.

'If I did, I'll find out...'

'"I'll just tell them you're drunk, again,' she said when he asked whether her family would be disappointed he wasn't there.

'"Didn't you tell them I was in a treatment center last time I missed a family gathering?'

'Well, I guess it didn't work.'

'Very sad for you.'

'I'm a martyr to my husband,' said Reine-Marie, getting into the driver's seat. 'Be safe, dear heart,' she said..."

Penny doesn't have to say much more about that relationship later in the book. Similar exchanges illuminate other characters and relationships.

And there's a story -- a complicated plot. For a story set in a small Quebec town near the U.S. border, there are quite a few reasonable suspects for the murder of a beloved, retired school teacher. There's even that chance that the death was a hunting accident, which caused a frightened outsider to run away. If Penny's later books take place in the same little town, I'll begin to suspect the Cabot Cove ("Murder She Wrote") syndrome, and I'll be very disappointed.

Right now I'm very happy to have read Still Life. It seems obvious to me that Penny loves the place and characters she created. If she keeps Inspector Gamache and his assisstant Jean Guy Beauvior and sends them around Quebec, she can avoid creating a death trap village like the one Richard Levinson and William Link created for Angela Lansbury.

I highly recommend this one. Good characters, good story telling, no great gore, no sex (not even a kiss), few improbabilities, and no super heroism. Oh, and there are some literary references (Auden, Davidson, and Plessner) that are not out of place.

Have you read Still Life by Louise Penny or another of Penny's books? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of them.

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• Penny's web site
• A review by BookGal on her blog
• Three reviews at Epinions

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More on "cozies"

After disagreeing with Dan about Rhys Bowen and Molly Murphy mysteries, I discovered that the discussion group at Once Upon a Crime, a Minneapolis bookstore, was talking about Rhys Bowen last night.

I couldn't go because Nancy and I had made plans to go hear Laurie R. King at a Barnes and Noble near St. Paul. So I suggested to Dan that he might want to go.

Turns out he couldn't go either because he had tickets to hear Maria Muldaur. That turned into a digression about Muldaur (whose performances we both like) and about Pandora, which has become my primary music source.

This morning, after enjoying the presentation and reading by King, I found Laurie R. King's blog's hosting a guest blogger, Rhys Bowen!

Bowen and King, it turns out are good friends. And, as Bowen points out in the blog, they both write about women doing unusual things.

I pointed out the blog post to Dan, who wrote back,

Loved the blog--surprising connections.

What Rhys Bowen writes, about women doing things that people thought they couldn't or shouldn't, is exactly what the last two things I've written are really about: the Cokato [MN] girls playing basketball in the 1920s [the PDF version], and Amelia Earhart flying -- and consciously using her fame as a flyer to push for more opportunities for women and girls and to inspire them to grasp them.

On top of that, she makes reference to Amy Johnson (Britain's Amelia Earhart) whose biography I am currently reading. Almost weird. Thanks.

By the way, as I wrote earlier, if you didn't like Molly Murphy you would absolutely abhor Lady Georgiana. It is like going from Classic Comics to Archie and Jughead! But I love 'em. Unlucky you! 

Here are my clarifications:

• I have no problem with women doing unconventional things. I have a problem with people doing the improbable and unlikely in fictional venues where most things seem realistic. (I like Lewis Carroll and Jasper Fforde.) My example: Bowen's Molly Murphy flees Ireland and arrives penny-less in Liverpool, where the police are looking for her. As she flees down an alley, she's pulled into an unmarked door. What greets her there? Murderous attackers? Dangerous delinquents? No. She is greeted by a woman who gives her a ticket to America so Molly can deliver two children to their father in New York. And the scheme, right out of an I Love Lucy episode, works.
  
  
• It's not just improbabilities. Laurie R. King, who, by the way, called her Mary Russell books "cozies" last night, writes well and creates pretty believable characters. Once you get beyond the conceit of a recent Oxford grad becoming an investigatory partner to Sherlock Holmes, the rest works pretty well. It works because King describes fairly realistic characters, tells good stories, and invents good dialogue. Bowen often relies on the old standby, "and then a miracle happens" to her handsome and daring cutouts of characters. I think an author ought to offer something besides, "It'll all turn out right in the end."
  
  
• An author ought to do more than write grammatically correct sentences and put events in chronological order. Laurie R. King might write "cozies," but she's only able to write one a year. Bowen writes 10-15 books a year. And no, she's not that more talented.

In a few days I'll finish another book and write about it here. It probably fits into the "cozy" category, but the author has a way with words and manages to create more than cardboard cutouts of characters. Just wait. You can join this discussion. Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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Dan Conrad disagrees

This deserves more than relegation to a comment on my Rhys Bowen review. Dan wrote,

Hey, c'mon! You just trashed my favorite "sleuth!"

I've read 'em all and can hardly wait for the next! And if you think Molly Murphy is light, just try Rhys Bowen's "Royal Pain," etc. series featuring the 37th in line to the English throne--in the 1930s. They make the Molly Murphy stories seem positively Bergmanesque!

Here in this vale of tears. I like, from time to time, to turn to something lighter where you KNOW everything will turn out just "peachy-keen" in the end. Maybe it reflects the fact that I first learned to love reading by devouring comic books.

And, seeing the others on your "don't read" list I think now that I better check out M.C. Beaton and Ngaio Marsh as well. If I want something dark and heavy and thought-provoking I can always reread Hardy, Eliot, Woolfe or Brookner -- or go back to something profound like Elegance of the Hedgehog (also among those you have trashed).

We've been agreeing on too much--so about time we could argue a little!

I'll have to gather my thoughts for arguing. And I'll have to go back and see what I said about Elegance of the Hedgehog. Did I really trash it?

And I can hardly wait for your reactions to Beaton and Marsh.

I didn't know you were a closet "cozy" fan. Never had a hint.

Lightweight

I ventured back to the Northfield library, "to read" list in hand. Well, actually, it was in my pocket.

I began near the top of the list. The name Rhys Bowen was near the top and incredibly handy on the library shelf. There were a number of books there by Bowen, and I pulled the first Molly Murphy mystery, Murphy's Law, off the shelf.

It's a lightweight. There are just barely over 200 pages, it's not much more than a paperback in size and weight. Unfortunately, it's a literary lightweight too.

It's set in turn of the 20th century New York, and the book jacket advertises Molly Murphy as a female detective. I was hoping for something akin to the better Maisie Dobbs stories. The story is akin to a comic book plot -- not even a graphic novel. It gets a whole slew of Heart of Gold improbability "awards." I couldn't begin to describe the improbabilities here.

I get impatient with Margaret Coel for writing so much romance novel into her mysteries. Murphy's Law seems to include a minor mystery as a framework for a THE BIG KISS scene. Not a sex scene, a kiss scene!

Give me a break!

On reading the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Sunday, I learned what I'd found in Bowen's book: a "cozy." Mary Ann Grossmann was writing about a self-published book she thought was wonderful and hoped it would help the author find a publisher. The author didn't know it, but with Grossmann's help learned he'd written a cozy. I didn't know what a cozy was, but I read one.

Too late, I read the back cover. The selected press blurbs (carefully chosen and edited, as we know, to present the book and the author in some desired light) would have warned me if I'd read them while standing in the library. Kirkus Reviews compares Rhys Bowen to M. C. Beaton. A Denver Post reviewer compares her to Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. Beaton, Christie, and Marsh are all on my "don't read anymore" list. To top it off, someone at Publisher's Weekly says, "This mystery is sure to appeal to those who prefer old-fashioned , heartwarming stories to tawdry tales full of graphic sex and violence." That was written about a book published in 2001. Hey, I like my tawdry tales (to a degree).

So Bowen goes from my "to read" list to my "don't read anymore" list. Have you read any of Rhys Bowen's "mysteries?" How did you react to them? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• The author's web site
• Some opinions at Epinions.com
• Dawn Goldsmith's review at Crescent Blues
• 163 reviews at GoodReads

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Betrayal of the reader

Dan Conrad also wrote about another gripe he has about some writers.

While I'm at it, I wish to raise another gripe of mine -- besides series of novels going on longer than they merit. That is when authors break a kind of pact I think they (should) have with readers.

The pact is that as readers we will more or less suspend disbelief and go along with the story, even enjoy being led astray as we go, but NOT be suddenly tricked in a kind of "Ha, Ha, I sure made an ass out of you" revelation in the last two pages.

I don't mean a solution to the mystery that you never suspected, but being told at the end that the whole thing was actually someone's nightmare, or the ravings of an inmate in an asylum, or the last thoughts (before the killer returns) of a murder victim who you have been continually led to believe was going to escape, etc.  

Two such that come to mind are Shutter Island by Dennis LeHane (& movie w/ Leaonard Decaprio) and the more recent Sister by first time author Rosamund Lupton. Both novels are exceptionally well written page turners which makes it doubly irritating to get to the ending which is a: "WHAM! Ha! Ha! Fooled Ya! -- Did you really believe that story? -- Well, maybe it happened as I told it--or maybe some of it, or maybe none. Now I can tell you that ya got all worked up over absolutely nothing. HA! HA! The jokes on you!"

Perhaps they think such an ending moves them out of the mystery genre (with its pact?) into something more Shakespearian in level of tragedy -- or something. 

Does this bother you? I know lots of people loved the two mentioned novels, so maybe I shouldn't be upset.

[Well, I'm the one going around giving negative awards for improbabilities and refusing to read books where I expect to see too many of them.

[I agree that an author who betrays readers is a jerk. I don't want to read about angels, miracles, protective spirits, and sprites unless I'm reading something that's obviously fantasy.

[What do you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.]

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Dan Conrad on Jacqueline Winspear

Dan wrote and I thought his comments deserved a couple posts rather than just a Comment on the blog entry.

My reaction to A Lesson In Secrets [Winspear's previous book] was that Jacqueline Winspear had finally run out of things for Maisie Dobbs to do that would last longer than a short story and filled in the rest with countless side stories that were neither very interesting nor in any way relevant to the main plot.

I wouldn't blame Sidetrack [the cabin] for making you doze off. You suggest the story lines are put in to be taken up in later novels. I hope not. When an author begins to write more about the personal lives of the characters -- main and otherwise -- than they do about the core story line I fear they are "running dry"on that series and should move on to something/someone else. Or quit trying to market the books as "mysteries."

Like The Help is, I think, a really great book to read with no mystery in there to move it along, just fascinating characters with interesting stories to tell.

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ála Stephen King

If Stephen King can make a classic car into an evil symbol, why not a snowman? Bill Watterson did just the opposite with snowmen in his comic strips. Jo Nesbø followed the Stephen King model in his 2010 book, The Snowman.
When I saw Nesbø's name on the shelf of new books, I recognized it. (That's the other reason I didn't need my "to read" list when I last went to the library.) Once again, I don't remember how Nesbø's fiction was recommended. Should I be keeping track of that too? Well, if you recommended this Norwegian writer, thank you.
The Snowman is a murder mystery focused on the search for "Norway's fist serial killer." According to a creepy Wikipedia article, there was one Norwegian serial killer, but nothing like the one in Nesbø's book.
The good guy in Nesbø's fiction is "antihero police investigator, Harry Hole," according to the book jacket. He gets a partner in this book who is a stunningly attractive young woman from across the Norwegian mountains (and cultural divide, evidently). There are several comments in the book about how the natives of Bergen are so different from the people of Oslo. Who knew that some Bergensians don't really think of Oslo as a capital city. Or that Oslo natives look down on people from Bergen. In spite of the prejudices in the Oslo cop shop, every male cop in the book except Hole drools over (and sometimes on) Katrine Bratt.
The killer the unlikely pair pursue seems to kill on the day of the first snowfall and builds a decidedly non-Watterson snowman at the site of the murder. As things progress, parts of the victims' bodies become parts of the nasty snowmen. (Maybe they were really snowwomen, since all but one victim was female. But Nesbø doesn't go there.)
The red herrings in the plot are good. At least twice I was tempted to think that Hole and Bratt had found the killer. But I could tell from the number of pages I hadn't read yet, that the story wasn't over. And the last line of the book suggests that the story isn't over yet. Look for a sequel.
I generally liked the book. Most of the story telling is good. The characters are interesting, although not as well-defined as I'd like them. But, there's too much story telling. I skimmed through the end of the book as Nesbø went on and on about the background of the killer. It was as though he'd gone to all the work of creating a back story and he couldn't leave it out of the book. I think he could have left it out.
Nesbø, who is described on the book jacket as "a musician, songwriter, economist, and author" has had three other books published in the USA. I think I'll keep his name on my "to read" list and look for another of his books someday. There's also a film based on his novel, Headhunters, that premiered in Norway and Germany this summer.
Have you read The Snowman or another of Nesbø's books? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reactions.
BTW: Does anybody know what the Scandinavian "ø" does to pronunciation? Or what it's purpose is? It's a pain to type on an English keyboard. Rather like the little circle above some vowels (å). That's a mystery to me as well.

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• The author's web site
  
• Wendy Lesser's reflections on Jo Nesbø in Slate
  
• Barry Forshaw's review in The Indepdent (UK)

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What's good?

While at the cabin called Sidetrack, I read both of the library books that I'd brought with me. There's an interesting library there of books we've finished at the cabin and left behind as reminders, but I wasn't interested in starting a major reading project. So I picked up Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver. It was (and still is) on the bedside stack of potential reading.

I only read a couple of the essays, but one of them addressed a topic that I've wondered about here, why do I like some books more than others. I do know that my state of mind has a lot to do with my affection for a book. But there are other reasons. For instance, I really do like a well-told story.

Here are a couple of Kingsolver's comments that had me shaking my head in agreement. They are from "What is a good story?" that she wrote about her experience editing a collection of short stories.

Her first answer sounds like a textbook declaration: "What makes writing good? That's easy: the lyrical description, the arresting metaphor, the dialogue that falls so true on the ear it breaks the heart, the plot that winds up exactly where it should."

A couple pages she later, she is more personal: Good writing, she says, "should pull off the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces... It will tell me something remarkable, it will be beautifully executed, and it will be nested in truth..."

I'm not sure I demand "large truths," but the rest of what Kingsolver says sounds to me like a good beginning definition of good writing.

By the way, her praise for short stories, tempts me to look up the volume she edited and read some short stories. She wonders in her essay why people don't read much short fiction. I usually avoid it. I wonder why?

Do you read or avoid short stories? Why? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• The author's web site
• 366 reviews from GoodReads
• The publisher's reading guide

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It's Maisie again

I went back to the library, "to read" list in hand, but Ididn't really need it this time.

On the cart of recently returned books by the front desk was Jacqueline Winspear's A Lesson in Secrets. I don't know how Dan Conrad's request for this book from the Minneapolis Public Library is working its way up the waiting list, but Northfield's copy was just sitting on the cart waiting for me. I picked it up, checked it out, and never got 20 feet from the entrance. It was a satisfying and efficient trip to the library.

Sir Oswald Moseley, infamous for leading the British Union Of Fascists before
the second world war, figures indirectly in this story.

Reading A Lesson in Secrets was not as satisfying or as efficient. The book is once again full of fascinating details about fashion and technology of everyday life in London of 1932. There is a theme concerning the Crown's secret intelligence bureau and its focus on Bosheviks in Cambridge's colleges, while ignoring the growing influence of fascists and Nazis on campus. There's also a story about organized crime and a protection racket in London. In fact, there are many stories in this book. Too many by my lights.

Because there are so many stories here, none of them (not even the primary one) really get told well. There's the young widow that Maisie takes under her wing. There's Maisie's assistant Billy and his family. There's a story about Maisie's father, a widower for 20 years, and his new "girlfriend." There's Maisie's romance. And then there's Maisie's undercover job for Crown. Oh, and you might add that there's a story of Maisie's cover as a philosophy lecturer in a Cambridge college. (She's supposed to report on anything untoward she finds on campus.) There's also some of Maisie's reminiscences about her own student days in Cambridge. Well, you see the problem: how to tell all those stories in 321 pages. Winspear tries to do that and ends with, "Yes, time would give up her secrets. She just had to wait." Not great.

Those last lines affirm what I felt throughout the book. These are transitional stories. Most of them lead to future stories. The young widow, like Maisie, makes her way in the world. Billy and his family have a new baby and a brand new house with "an indoor lav." Maisie's father finds a boon companion for retirement. Maisie and her titled lover, in a romance novel, sort out how to merge their strong individual lives and compromise with the expectations of post-Victorian English high society. Maisie finds such satisfaction in teaching philosophy that she turns her detective agency over to Billy and the young widow while she commutes between her lover's London mansion, his family's estate in Kent, and her classrooms in Cambridge. And she probably takes on a few more undercover jobs for the crown while accompanying her lover (husband?) on his business trips around the world.

There are also some things missing. I just can't believe that Maisie's little MG roadster starts everytime she turns the key and it never breaks down or gets a flat tire. (MGs were not modern Toyotas.)

1930 MG like the one Maisie Dobbs drove.

How is it that Maisie and her friends never come in contact with the destitute and unemployed of 1932 England? I'm pretty certain that Winspear did the research, but were developers really building new, semi-detatched homes on the edge of London in '32? And then there's her lover's international business (and another character's global trading company). How was it that these companies were prosperous as the world's economies were falling apart?

So, I wasn't completely satisfied with the book. I wasn't efficient either. I kept falling asleep between chapters yesterday. There's something about being at the cabin called Sidetrack, looking at the lake, and doing bits and pieces of maintenance that are relaxing. And the relaxation led to several naps that interruupted my reading.

Check out A Lesson in Secrets for yourself. Then (or if you've already read it) write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

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• The author's web site
  
• 353 reviews at GoodReads
  
• a review at Rundpinne
  

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Families: can't live with 'em; can't live without 'em

The other familiar name I found at the library was Tana French. Well, of course it was familiar, I just read In the Woods two weeks ago. This time I found Faithful Place and decided to see if French had written a book as good as the first one.

I have come to the conclusion that French must spend a lot of time on the beginning of her books. I wasn't lured in by the first paragraph this time, but by the first two pages. I once again felt drawn into her story and quickly became interested in the characters and what was going to come next. The opening scene, by the way, describes a film noir foggy night on the outskirts of Dublin and Frank Mackey, a young man waiting for the young woman he's about to elope with.

That's the beginning of the background story. The contemporary story takes place 22 years later and the young man from the first scene is the main character. All those years later, Frank's a cop who gets involved in the investigation of the disappearance of the girl who never showed up for the elopement.

He's also a guy surrounded by families. There's the family he grew up in and from whom he estranged himself. And there's the erstwhile family of his daughter and his ex-wife. Oh, and I suppose there's also the family at the cop shop that he's sort of part of.

This stories in this book are really frameworks for exploring what families can do to their own. Frank ran away from his family even though his intended never showed because he knew it was deadly and feared what it might do to him. His erstwhile intended's family isn't much better. The situation reminded me, in less dramatic and less drastic ways, of how my parents distanced themselves (and their children) from most of their families. They'd seen conflicts and nasty behavior and kept in close contact only with most of their parents. So Frank's absence from family for a couple decades is understandable to me. And after reading French's version of family life, I have trouble imagining why all of the people in the book's families didn't run away.

There's really not a lot mystery in this plot and only a bit of suspense. But the way French tells the story and gradually reveals more and more about the characters kept me reading once again. Unlike Coel's The Silent Spirit, I never resisted going back to read more when I had the opportunity.

The ending is a bit romantic (like Coel's), but I can live with that. If French pursues the story line suggested in the conclusion, I expect it will be less romantic, since most of her stories are grittily realisitc.

I liked the book. I didn't think it was as good as In the Woods, but I'll pick up French's second book (Faithful Place was the third) if I find it in the library.

Have you read Faithful Place? If you have, write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted to it.

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• Tana French's web page for Faithful Place
• Karen Ballum's review at BlogHer
• Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times
• Laura Miller's review at Salon (wish I'd written this one)

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Frustrated romance; frustrating mystery

One of the familiar authors I found on my last trip to the library was Margaret Coel. I didn't realize how familiar I was with Coel's books until I looked back at what I'd written about her books here. The earliest entry was in 2002 on the old pre-blogging blog ReadingOnTheWeb. I have averaged just over a book a year by Ms Coel. Some of them I've enjoyed a lot; others have been disappointing. Her story telling is not always top notch. She seems to slip into the romance genre when she spends much time writing about the relationship between a Jesuit missionary/recovering alcoholic on a Wyoming Indian Reservation and a middle-aged/native/divorcee/lawyer working in a nearby town.

In this new book, The Silent Spirit, Coel wanders dangerously close (in my mind) to romance while writing a mystery novel. Maybe she's writing more for a female audience or maybe she sees this as a balance to the superhero antics of Sue Grafton's and Sara Paretsky's characters.

The story is built around a young native man and his attempts not only to make something of himself, but to do something important for his grandfather. That important something is directly connected to his great-grandfather's involvement in the 1923 movie The Covered Wagon.

The two books I read just before this one (In the Woods and Junkyard Dogs) dragged me in and pushed me to keep on reading to the end. However, I read The Silent Spirit in spurts and often went back to it reluctantly. It seemed to me that some episodes were well-told and flowed right along. Then, reading the next episode was like slogging through a mucky swamp -- slow and difficult.

It turned out that the ending was one of the good parts. The widely-flung bits of plot, and a few irrelevancies, came together in Coel's romantic (in a philosophical snese) ending. The last 75 pages made me glad I'd mucked through some of the earlier bits.

Have you read The Silent Spirit? Write, and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

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Other Margaret Coel books I've written about:

• Wife of Moon
  
• Blood Memory
  
• The Girl with Braided Hair
  
• The Eagle Catcher, Spirit Woman and The Thunder Keeper
  
• The Shadow Dancer
  
• The Drowning Man
  
• The Eye of the Wolf

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• Margaret Coel's web site
  
• A hundred and some reviews at GoodReads
  
• Lesa's Book Critique of The Silent Spirit

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Nice doggy. Nice doggy.

I had a busy morning yesterday. After my morning walk, I worked from about 8:00am to 1:30pm. (Working breakfast and working lunch) Things just piled up. I read the headlines and half a dozen articles in the 18 news sources I look at each morning. Found 3 articles that I prepared for the Teaching Comparative blog with bits of commentary and excerpts. I posted 4 excerpts and a comment to the blog that people had sent me. (I aim for one posting each week day, so this was quite unusual.) Then I got carried away trying to explain why the Texas governor is either ignorant or playing to the ignorance of his audience about money and banks. I posted a bit of my outrage at Google+. (If you look at it, you'll have to scroll down to the post with the graph showing the components of the money supply, since I don't know if there's a way to link directly to the posting.)

Finally, in the early afternoon, I showered and went off to run errands. One of them was to the Northfield Library. I returned the Tana French book I'd just finished and went off in search of new things to read. But, oops, I'd forgotten to bring my "to read" list.

That meant I was reduced to looking for new books by familiar authors. Good luck. I found a new book by Craig Johnson. I've written about Another Man's Moccasins and Death Without Company. I liked them, but I'd given both of them Heart of Gold awards for improbabilities.

Well, Junkyard Dogs gets a Heart of Gold and a Green Lantern (for super heroism).

This is another "Walt Longmire Mystery." One bit in the book has the sheriff getting a physical exam during which the doc catalogs his injuries and scars (including a broken bone in one foot and a partially detached retina). After that the super hero sheriff gets banged around some more, but still comes out able to see, walk, talk, and chew gum at the same time. More than any mere mortal. Give us a break, Johnson.

The book also gets awards for improbabilities. I only noticed a couple of them while reading the book, but some biggies popped into my head as I went to sleep.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I was was so entranced with the story and the pursuit of the villains, I finished the book about 11:15pm. Less than 12 hours after checking it out. And I sort of cooked dinner in there and talked to Nancy while eating it.

Craig Johnson relies of his super hero and on improbabilities, but he spins a mean yarn. The characters are pretty one-dimensional, but he spins a mean yarn. Winter on the high plains of northern Wyoming is brutal, but Johnson spins a mean (and complex) yarn. He kept me going for a long time. Oh, did I mention that there's some good humor in the book, too? Like the opening scene where grandpa ties himself to the bumper of the car in the yard while he cleans the chimney, but his granddaughter-in-law doesn't know it and drives off. (Grandpa survives that one, and it's funny because he does.)

Do you need more recommendation from me?

Have you read Junkyard Dogs? Or another of Craig Johnson's mysteries? Write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted.

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• Craig Johnson's web site
  
• Condorena's review at Murder by Type
  
• An interview with Craig Johnson at Art and Literature, The Literary Blog of Raleign's Metro Magazine
  
• Jen from Loraine, Ohio's review at Jen's Book Thoughts

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Stories to read

The other book I checked out during my last trip to the Northfield Library was Jana French's In the Woods. I wish I'd kept track of where I learned about this book. I'd like to thank someone for the recommendation. As it is I have no idea how this book ended up on my "to read" list.

After the last two books I tried to read and didn't finish, I really wanted a book to like.

French won me over on the first page. Her prose and the images she created with them were wonderful. Let me quote:

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland's subtle mixed for a connoisseur's palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasking of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it backs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping-chants.

I know, I've said I'm a reader who likes stories. What French did was snare me with a gorgeous scene. On page 3, she begins telling one of the stories in the book. And she does tell stories well. One of the stories is an awful story of the disappearance of two 12-year-old children that happened a dozen years before the other stories. Oh, and when those three children went mising, a third child survived without memories of what happened. Another story is about a young policeman who has achieved his professional goal of becoming a homicide detective. There's also a story about the relationship between the detective and his partner, who is a smart, mouthy, and very competent woman. The primary story is about the murder investigated by these partners.

In the first third of the book, the detectives' partnership reminded me of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Gal Friday. The smart dialogue and the knowing cooperation is a joy to behold. It changes after that, and I didn't like as I was reading, but in the end, the changes made sense and offered a bit of realism to the fiction.

The story about the children who went missing is told partly in flashback and partly in the words of old police reports. The linkage is that the detective was the child who survived without memories.

The mystery is complicated and intriguing, if murder can be intriguing. It's a major case and a whole raft of characters are drawn into the situation. A third detective joins the main pair and is almost immediately a part of the screwball comedy dialogue.

The last half of the book tells the story of the dissolution of those amazing relationships and the investigation into the details of the murder. It's well done.

I liked the characters. I enjoyed the telling of the story. I came to accept the development of the characters, even though they changed from the very attractive people introduced early in the book.

Also, after struggling unsuccessfully to wade through two books, I not only read this one, but I read it eagerly.

Tana French remains on my 'to read" list. She's written two more books since this 2007 first novel. The other two are also in the Northfield Library. I look forward to checking one of them out.

Have you read In the Woods or another French's books? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• Tana French's web site
• Maxine Clark's review at EuroCrime
• Beth's review at Bookworm Meets Bookworm
• Marilyn Stasio's review in The New York Times

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Double failure

I'll take these failures on myself, but I had lots of help.

Nancy brought Connie Willis' All Clear home from the library. I picked it up and took it to the cabin named Sidetrack because I'd read The Doomsday Book, Remake, and To Say Nothing of the Dog years ago and liked them. There was another Willis book, Promised Land, that I wasn't so fond of.

All Clear was advertised on the dust jacket as another of Willis' time travel novels. I'd found that to be an entertaining and clever device in earlier books. The plot device is that Oxford University historians about 50 years from now discover a method of time travel that lets them go into the past as researchers and return to their rooms in mid-21st century Oxford to write eye-witness accounts of historical events.

Willis' characters are most interested in what went on in London during World War II (as in To Say Nothing of the Dog).

I quickly found out that the 600+ page All Clear was the second of two volumes telling one story. Since I'd read earlier time travel books, I thought I could get by without reading the first volume, Blackout. It turns out I could get by without reading all of the second volume as well.

How many times do I have to read some internal dialogue about a character's fears that she's trapped in the past? Or that she's done something to trap another researcher in the past? Or that one of her colleagues has done something to change the course of history? Well, Willis seemed to think that one or another of her characters just had to say those things to herself every few pages. And how often was it necessary for me to read about the anxieties of getting to work on time or the exact details of what trains were necessary to travel from one part of London to another?

Willis is a successful author, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't need an editor.

[Short aside: Nancy's website features a quotation from T. S. Eliot: "Even a superb writer needs a good editor. A merely good writer needs a superb editor."]

To Say Nothing of the Dog was full of humor and joy. This book was full of anxiety and stress. Okay, the V-1 and V-2 rockets and the Blitz were no fun in London. But the earlier book was also set in London during World War II London. If Blackout, the first volume is a twin to this one, I'd suggest that someone abridge the two and make a (400-page?) science fiction novel out of them. I might have enjoyed reading that and even finished it.

Then I picked up Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time at the Northfield library. It got on my "To Read" list because of a review in the New York Times. Stacey D'erasmo wrote that "Petterson’s narratives tend to unspool in the first person, in hushed, confidential tones. Tight-lipped with one another, his characters open their hearts to the reader, making us witnesses to their most private selves. He makes the reader lean in, out of the wind, to listen closely..."

I'd read Out Stealing Horses a few years ago and liked it. Maybe I wasn't in the mood for the moody, self-indulgent, un-selfconscious internal dialogues in I Curse the River of Time either. The main character wasn't interesting to me.

Another book I didn't finish.

Oh, well. My "To Read" list is still long. It was disappointing that one of the books on the list is only available from the libary as an e-book for an e-reader. I don't have one of those yet. But books? I can handle lots of them.

Have you read Connie Willis' All Clear? or Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time? How did you react? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your experience.

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• Connie Willis' web site
• An admiring review by Julie Phillips in The Village Voice
• A less admiring review by Dorman T Schlinder in the Denver Post
• Per Petterson's web site
• An admiring review of Petterson's book by Kristin Ohlson at Cleveland. com
• Rachel Cusk's positive review of I Curse the River of Time from The Guardian (UK)

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Stieg Larsson, political reporter

In the shadow of the terrorist attack in Oslo, Joan Acocella posted a bit in the New Yorker, "Stieg Larsson and the Scandinavian Right."

The killer in Oslo was exactly the kind of guy who Stieg Larsson spent his pre-novelist career trying to warn the Scandinavian people about. Maybe they should have listened before Larsson created Lisbeth Salander.

In the Times' heavy coverage of the killings in Norway... the name of Stieg Larsson has not come up. That is curious. The major subplot of the stories on the massacre is what many people are now describing as the indifference of the government and press corps in Norway... to native right-wing movements and their potential for violence... [H]omegrown fundamentalist movements have been gaining power in Scandinavia since, decades ago, the citizens of those countries began to lose faith in the benevolence of their vaunted welfare states...

Larsson had an unglamorous job as the Swedish correspondent for a magazine, Searchlight, that was English journalism’s watchdog against right-wing movements in Europe. In his articles for Searchlight he describes the car bombings, the rallies, the magazines of Sweden’s extreme right. He has only one message: fascism is on the rise. “For too long,” he writes, “Nazis, in the eyes of society, have been simplistically and credulously equated with a few dozen skinheads on a Saturday-night stampede.” That’s not the case any more, he writes. They are men in suits and ties, and they are getting elected to office...

Larsson’s main concern was the abuse of women, immigrants, and Jews... Eventually he turned his attention primarily to women...

The summer camp that Anders Breivik invaded last week, a hatchery for the children of the liberal ruling class, included young people whose parents and grandparents came from Africa and Asia.

Such inclusion—or, from another perspective, infiltration—is what the Scandinavian right wing opposes, and political parties ruled by that refusal are gaining power...

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Hurry up and wait (for the paperback)

Paperback Publishers Quicken Their Pace

It used to be like clockwork in the book business: first the hardcover edition was released, then, about one year later, the paperback.

But in an industry that has been upended by the growth of e-books, publishers are moving against convention by pushing paperbacks into publication earlier than usual, sometimes less than six months after they appeared in hardcover…

Publishers say they have a new sense of urgency with the paperback, since the big, simultaneous release of hardcover and electronic editions now garners a book the bulk of the attention it is likely to receive, leaving the paperback relatively far behind. They may also be taking their cues from Hollywood, where movie studios have trimmed marketing costs by steadily closing the gap between the theatrical release of films and their arrival on DVD…

The entire publishing life cycle has sped up in recent years. Hardcovers have less time to prove themselves in bookstores, since retailers tend to move them off the shelves more quickly than they used to. E-book sales are usually strong in the initial period after the publication date but do not spike again after the paperback comes out, said Terry Adams, the digital and paperback publisher for Little, Brown & Company…

As bookstore owners pointed out, readers love paperbacks.

“It’s definitely making the consumer happy to have the paperback available sooner,” said Peter Aaron, the owner of the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, an independent store. “If there’s one form of printed book that will survive, if there was only one, it would be the trade paperback.”

Frustration rewarded

I picked up the last of my birthday cache from book pusher Mary. It was Queen of the Night by J. A. Jance. I'm glad I did, but for quite awhile I wasn't at all sure that I was fortunate to get this gift.

Queen of the Night flowering cactus

Jance's credits page lists 41 previous books. I've read several and been impressed with her characters. I guess she really knows how to structure a plot too. This one is like jigsaw puzzle that is difficult to put together. When I started the book, I had trouble following the story. The book consists of tiny snippets of story and action. Okay, but they aren't consecutive. Each one is carefully labeled with place, day, date, time, and temperature, but that didn't really help me unless I paged back and looked at the labels of earlier snippets. It was frustrating.

Even more frustrating was the huge cast of characters. I stumbled through the first 100 (of 350) pages. But there were interesting people and intriguing mysteries that made me want to continue reading. What I did was go back through the first 100 pages and make a chart of the characters and their relationships.

As you can see, even if you can't read all my scribblings, there are lots of people and lots of relationships. And new characters were introduced after the first 100 pages, too. Not all of them made the chart. This diagram became my reading companion right up to the end. Maybe my old brain isn't as capable as it once was. Maybe I just didn't concentrate enough, but this is supposed to be recreational reading, not academic study. Maybe Jance just created too many characters and too many complications.

I was reminded of the Russian novels that had lists of characters at the beginning. Jance could have helped by making such a list. I also remembered reading Michael Fredrickson's second book, Witness for the Dead, that I read back in 2003. It had a large cast of characters, but something about the way the book was written and how the characters were introduced made it easy for me to keep track of them. (If you look back at that review, done in a pre-blog presentation, you'll find that some of the links are no longer functional.)

Making the chart and referring to it everytime scenes in the book changed, made all the difference for me. I got so I could recognize names and checked the chart for relationships and statuses. From there on the book was great. Reading the last 100 pages kept me awake until nearly 1:00am (long past my usual bedtime).

I'm really glad I made the effort to finish the book. It's really too bad the beginning was so difficult. It's a story full of heroes and villains and family feuds and family loyalties. The story centers on actions -- good and bad, and you know from reading things here that I like good stories. I just wish the story telling had been easier for me to follow.

Have you read Queen of the Night? What was the experience like for you? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reaction.

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• The publisher's web site for the book
• Kirkus Review on Queen of the Night
• Mary Ann Smyth's review at Book Loons
• Terri B.'s review at Tip of the Iceberg

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