Biological science fiction

Some time ago, Gary Sankary mentioned, in his blog Old and In the Way, that he'd enjoyed reading Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear. That was a recommendation to explore, even though he said very little else.

In the back of my head I knew that Greg Bear was a science fiction writer. So, the next time I was in the Northfield library, I browsed through the science fiction section looking for his name. A number of his books were on the shelf, but not Darwin's Radio. Okay, I thought, I'll look again later.

After several unsuccessful forays to the science fiction shelves, I resorted to using the catalog (it's still a card catalog to me, even if it's now online). And there I found the book. It had probably been on a shelf all along, but someone had decided to shelve it in the "fiction" section instead of the "science fiction" section.

This has happened before and I don't get it. Sure, there are no space aliens, intergalactic travel, or imaginary technology in Bear's book, but it's the best kind of science fiction. It is (or was when written in '99) a projection of ideas based on contemporary science. So shelve it with the rest of science fiction.

The science it's based on is biology -- molecular biology involving DNA. Now, I still don't understand very much about this science. I have read enough Stephen J. Gould essays to grasp the concept of punctuated equilibrium, but beyond that I'm clueless. Bear could have been telling me that up is down in genetics and I wouldn't have known the difference. But he seemed to understand the basics and some of the scientific speculation. And then Bear struck out from there to science fiction.

WordiQ.com says, "The scientific details in his work are such that he is usually classified as a hard science fiction author...

"Darwin's Radio... stick[s] closely to the known facts of molecular biology of viruses and evolution. While some fairly speculative ideas are entertained (it is after all, fiction) they are introduced in such a rigorous and disciplined way within the context of the cutting edge of those disciplines, that Darwin's Radio gained praise in the science journal Nature."

The mix that informs the plot includes mass murders in Eastern Europe, some possibly Neanderthal mummies in an ice cave in the Alps (Bear was referencing Ötzi the Iceman), a flu-like illness that seemed to be connected to huge numbers of spontaneous miscarriages and new ideas about human genetics. Nearly all the main characters are scientists, although some of them have fled the ivory towers of academe for commercial ventures and public health administration.

The scientific conflict arises when some scientists see rapid evolutionary change as a disease. The public health authorities have to take action to safeguard populations. Other scientists think they recognize evolution at work and do their best to evade the public health officials who threaten a natural process.

The central characters are a molecular biologist and a discredited archaeologist. Bear makes them an attractive couple and makes them fugitives by the end of the book -- sympathetic fugitives, but on the run nonetheless. That transition from science fiction to hide and seek was difficult for me.

There's too much scientific detail in the book for me. Bear spreads his explanation of genetic details quite thickly on the story. In other places, the story telling is somewhat ponderous. I found myself skimming and skipping a lot. But it's an engaging story and I, too, enjoyed reading it. I might even go looking for the sequel, Darwin's Children.

Have you read Darwin's Radio? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• Greg Bear's web page for Darwin's Radio
  
• Nicholas White's review on his web site
  
• Reviews at GoodReads.com
  
• Donna McMahon's review at SF Site

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Literature Maps

I was playing with Literature Maps this morning before really getting underway. (One delight of retirement is that I can get up, post something on a professional blog, go for a sunrise walk, read headlines in more than a dozen newspapers, have breakfast and my first coffee, and then consider "getting underway" at 9:30am.)

The Literature Maps are part of Gnod, described on its web site as "a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors." I'm not sure what that means, and there's no explanation of how the "system" works. However, if you click on the "Gnod Books" link, you get to a page titled, "gnooks." There you'll find links to the Literature Maps and a discussion about Literature Forms. You'll also find a link to "Gnod's Suggestions," which is where the site gathers data for constructing the Literature Maps. (It collects this data so literally, that typos and misspellings are also collected and republished on the Literature Maps.) At that page, you'll be asked to identify three of your favorite writers. Based on the names you submit, you'll be presented with the name of an author you might like and a link to a Literature Map for that author.

I'd looked at these Literature Maps before, but I hadn't spent much time looking carefully at them. The idea is that if you plug in an author's name, the program will create a "map" of names, and that the closer the names of "two writers are, the more likely [it will be that] someone will like both of them."

I've been tempted before to look at the names that are closest together, but this morning I discovered that the outliers are equally interesting.

So, here are links to Literature Maps for authors I've recently written about and some of my favorites. Using Carol O'Connell as an example, the names closest to hers on the "map" are Gerri Hill, Charles Todd, Maan Meyer, Elizabeth Amber, and Jo Clayton. None of these ring bells with me. However, if I look at the outer edges of this "map," I find the names Walter Mosely, Jonathan Kellerman, John LeCarre, Nevada Barr, Dana Stabenow, Marcia Muller, and Dick Francis, all of whom have written books I've liked. Does that fit with my ambivalent response to the Mallory mysteries?

• Literature Map for Carol O'Connell
  
• Literature Map for Dana Stabenow
  
• Literature Map for Thomas Perry
  
• Literature Map for John Dunning
  
• Literature Map for Åsa Larsson
  
• Literature Map for Arnaldur Indridason
  
• Literature Map for Stieg Larsson
  
• Literature Map for Tony Hillerman
  
• Literature Map for Laurie R. King
  
• Literature Map for Mark Twain
  

So, look at some of these Literature Maps or create your own. How well do they reflect your experiences? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

An American Salander?

A couple weeks ago, NetFlix delivered the DVD of the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to our mailbox. After reading the books and hearing Dan Conrad's raving about the movie, I was really looking forward to seeing the movie and reading the subtitles. I was not disappointed. I only wished I'd seen the movie on a big screen in a theater. The small screen seemed to limit the impact of the movie.

Nancy has not read the Larsson books, but she was entranced by the stories in the movie and taken by the Salander character. She was reminded of a central character in a series of mysteries by Carol O'Connell [left]: NY cop Kathy Mallory. The two young women characters are blazingly smart, extraordinary hackers, and physical fighters without equal. They both are the products of very traumatic childhoods. They're both loners. The differences are physical. If Salander is a tattooed, gothic waif, Mallory is a lucious beauty who can't do surveillance because everybody notices her.

Nancy pulled Mallory's Oracle and The Man Who Cast Two Shadows off her shelf and handed them to me. I read them both. There are big differences between the Stieg Larsson books and the Carol O'Connell books. I'm not quite sure what they are. All the characters are intriguing, but the Mallory character is somehow drawn less intensely than the Salander character.

Well, there is my reading. I think I read these books in snatches too small to get into the flow of the story telling. O'Connell uses quick cuts between "scenes" with little in the way of transistion. Sometimes there's an extra space between paragraphs; other times not. But I would be reading about a discussion of magic and illusion set in an old magician's storage spot. In the next sentence I would be reading about a poker game in which a character without a poker face keeps losing his spare change. And then there were so many characters. If I didn't remember who was who, I'd get totally lost in the transition. And if I read only a few pages at time, I had trouble remembering who was who.

So, the reading experience was, for me, disjointed.

The stories in these novels were intriguing and convoluted. The action scenes, were not interrupted by abrupt transistions and were well scripted. The setting is Manhattan. What's not to like? But, they were not as compelling as Larsson's stories. I could not have read his books in the small snatches I used to read O'Connell's.

Have you read Mallory's Oracle and/or The Man Who Cast Two Shadows? Have you read another of O'Connell's books? What did you think? Is Mallory an upper class version of Salander? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• A review of Mallory's Oracle at Jandy's Reading Room
  
• A review of O'Connell's career and several Mallory novels
  

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You're reading my memory

Novelist James Collins wrote about reading, memory, and thinking about reading in yesterday's New York Times. It reminded me of several of the reasons I began writing little bits about the the things I read. One of the reasons was to reflect on what I read. The other reason for writing an actual newsletter for 20 years and this blog for the last four is that this is my memory cache.

Collins' essay is well worth the 3 minutes it takes to read it.

PS: I've completely forgotten the plot of one of the last two books I read. My blog entry about it is in rough draft and will show up here soon — without a plot summary. In the meantime, I have to check the TV schedule to see if there's a golf match broadcast today.

The Plot Escapes Me

I have just realized something terrible about myself: I don’t remember the books I read… These are books I loved, but... all I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.

Nor do I think I am the only one with this problem. Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.

So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?…

Now, with a terrible sense of foreboding, I slowly turn to look again at my bookshelf… And I have to ask myself, Would it have made no difference if I had never read any of them? Could I just as well have spent my time watching golf?…

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Alaskan summer

The other book I picked up at the Northfield library was A Night Too Dark by Dana Stabenow. I think I've been reading Stabenow's books for a couple decades. She's written more than 30. I keep reading them because most of them are set in Alaska. Kate Shugak or Liam Campbell show up in many of the books, and they are interesting characters. Besides creating interesting characters, Stabenow weaves good plots, tells good stories, writes good action scenes, and tells good jokes once in awhile.

I don't remember any jokes in A Night Too Dark, but the characters and plot are good. I never did figure out the title. I sort of expected that it might have something to do with short days and long nights of the Alaskan winter. Nope. The story takes place in the summer. Maybe it refers to the tragedy at the end. Or maybe things in Kate Shugak's future.

Oh well, the action centers on exploratory work on a potential gold mine just beyond the boundaries of a national park and native territory. Lots of new people flooding a once isolated community that welcomes the inflow of money more than the influx of people. A depressed mine worker walks off into the wilderness to return his body "to nature." A body is found. A month later, the missing guy stumbles out of the woods much the worse for wear, but very much alive.

And there are people and events as unusual and unexpected as anything in a script for Northern Exposure. It's Alaska, after all. Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin hires former PI Shugak (who is also his parmour) to help investigate. Old Sam goes fishing for salmon and hunting moose out of season. Kate's foster son Johnny gets a girlfriend and a paying job. Jim and Kate are as randy as usual.

It was fun to read. It's more chewing gum for the mind and a great summer book. Luckily, I finished it before summer was over.

Did you read A Night Too Dark? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• Dana Stabenow's web site
  
• Patrick Anderson's review in The Washington Post

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Hapless

When I had read the available books from West Yellowstone, I was back in Northfield heading for the public (socialist) library. The librarians have a rolling cart positioned just in front of the main desk where recently-returned books are placed before they are reshelved. I always look at the contents of that cart.

The look paid off the last time I was there, and I went no further. I plucked a new Dana Stabenow mystery and Thomas Perry's Strip from the cart, went to the automatic check out machine with my library card, and left the library. I doubt I was there more than four minutes and walked away with several hours of good reading. I'll write about the Stabenow book later, but here's to Thomas Perry.

If many mystery writers are producing episodes of TV series featuring a few main characters and a few settings, Perry is producing movies set in a variety of places and populated with characters unseen elsewhere in the world of fiction. The dust jacket informations says that Perry "is the author of the Jane Whitefield series..." Well, I might have to go look for one of those. But for now, there is a long list of non-series Thomas Perry books that I look forward to.

Strip, like Metzger's Dog and Death Benefits, is a well-told entertaining tale.

A hapless mook lucked out when robbing a strip club owner who was trying to deposit the nightly receipts from his three gentlemen's clubs. A hapless LA newcomer, who has been spening his retirmement savings trying to impress girls, gets fingered for the robbery. A hapless police lieutenant, who has simultaneous twenty-year marriages and a kid from each who is about to enroll in an expensive university, is assigned to investigate the robbery. The mook gets a girl friend/accomplice for the next late night robbery, and she excitedly shoots someone. The newcomer proves that he's not hapless. The lieutenant stumbles along trying to figure out who is doing what to whom and where will the tuition money come from. Then, a Mexican drug boss and his bodyguards are murdered.

Details? You'll have to read Strip. It's a great and complicated tale with an ending befitting O. Henry.

Have you, too, read Strip? What did you think? Write and tell this bit of the world what you think.

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• Thomas Perry's web site
  
• Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times
  
• Carol Wallace's review at Book Group of One

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Horses and books

One of the books Nancy bought at the Bookworm in West Yellowstone was The Bookwoman's Last Fling by John Dunning. I was about to run off to the library when she said she was busy with John McPhee's Rising from the Plains and I was welcome to read the Dunning book. Such a deal.

I've read a couple of Dunning's books before and they've been entrancing. The books are about the adventures of ex-Denver cop turned rare book dealer Cliff Janeway. This one adds a little Dick Francis flavor because Janeway takes up scut work at a couple racetracks in order to find out who had stolen some treasures from an incredible book collection. Oh, and whether the books' owner had been killed some twenty years earlier.

Along the way there's the matter of a middle-age romance between Janeway and his lawyer girlfriend. And the ex-cop's hankering for a return to investigative action and away from the cerebral book business.

There are some good guys, some bad guys, and some nuts, and lots of horses, and red herrings. But the story moves along and it's interesting right to the end. It was not a book that I felt I had to read quickly (like the Stieg Larsson books). I read The Bookwoman's Last Fling methodically, and that's perhaps how the story was told. In the tropical days at the end of August when we were all hiding in the air conditioning from the heat and humidity, it was a good book to read.

Have you read The Bookwoman's Last Fling? What did you think? Write, and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• Sandy Mitchell's review at Suite101.com
  
• Kathy Weissman's review at Bookreporter
  
• A review at GoodReads

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From the far north

I had three books to write about, and I wrote about one. Now, I still have three books to write about because I've read another. It's time to write.

The other book I bought at West Yellowstone's Bookworm was The Black Path by Åsa Larsson. (She's no relation to Stieg Larsson.)

Three years ago, about the time I was beginning to read Scandinavian mysteries, I read her book Sun Storm. I liked that book enough for the vague memories to encourage me to pick up The Black Path while in Montana.

The book has echoes of the crooked business people that Stieg Larsson's character Mikael Blomkvist was writing about at the beginning and end of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The story here is about a trio of successful Swedish entrepreneurs who reach too far and not too well.

The stars of the story are the same police detective (Anna-Maria Mella) and lawyer (Rebecka Martinsson) who were featured in Sun Storm. The story is convoluted and overly-complex. It's full of flashbacks and asides. I found it quite difficult to follow the story in the first half of the book before I got to know who the characters were.

This is evidently the third book featuring this cop-lawyer pair. (I missed one, I guess.) Maybe that's why I don't have a very good impression of who these women are. Maybe Larsson has never done much revelation about the characters. Too bad, there's potential.

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• Maxine Clarke's review at EuroCrime.co.uk
  
• A review from Complete Review
  
• A review by Uriah Robinson (Uriah Robinson is the blogname of a short, balding, retired health care professional) at Crime Scraps

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Iclandic mystery, again

Suddenly, so it seems, I've read 3 books without thinking much or writing anything. What was it that some famous or notorious person said about the unexamined life or unexamined reading experience?

We are back from vacation (for three weeks now).

When we were in West Yellowstone, we visited one of our favorite bookstores, The Bookworm [see the "tower" with the word "Books" on it in the photo to the left -- click on the picture for a larger view]. Shopping there was more difficult than usual because the store was wrapped in crime scene tape for a couple days. We never found out what happened, but there weren't any body outlines taped on the floor inside. (Then again, there very little floor space inside.)

Nance and I each bought a couple books.

I mined the Scandinavian mystery section (yes, there's a table with piles of mysteries by Nordic authors). The first one I read was Silence of the Grave by Indriðason, the Icelandic writer whose main character, Erlendur, is a sad case. But Indriðason's stories aren't as depressing as those of other Scandinavian writers.

I picked this 2002 novel, which is the fourth of ten books with police inspector Erlendur as the primary character. I've read one earlier book and three later ones. Silence of the Grave offers some insight into the Erlendur character and his relationships with his children. It also allows Indriðason to tell a complicated story in which the present reflects the past.

In the murder mystery, construction excavation uncovers a skeleton. Erlendur and his partners are assigned to determine who was involved and what had happened fifty years earlier. Archaeologists excavate the burial, the detectives look at records and interview former residents, and Erlendur tries to excavate the history of his daughter in order to figure out what happened to the child he abandoned when he walked out on his marriage twenty years earlier. And he tries to find a way to save the drug-addicted daughter who has just survived a dangerous miscarriage.

There were moments (especially as I sat by the Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park), when I nearly gnashed my teeth because the stories seemed overly complicated. But the stories were compelling and I kept on reading. In the end, the complexity was worthwhile and the explanations created by bringing together the very disparate details made all the stories in this book come alive.

And the story of Erlendur, his depression and his passivity and his lack of self-understanding, made it possible for me to understand a bit more about his seemingly heartless flight from his family and his relationship with his daughter (which is part of a couple of the later books).

That gets me to the point of suggesting that you read Indriðason's books in the order in which they were written if understanding the Erlendur character is important to your reading of the mysteries. That would mean reading Sons of Dust and Silent Kill before going on to Jar City, Silence of the Grave, Voices, The Draining Lake, Arctic Chill, and Hypothermia.

Looking back at my reactions to the three newer Indriðason books I've read, I'm not as enthusiastic about Silence of the Grave as I was about Voices, The Draining Lake, and Arctic Chill. But it's worth the time. Maybe someday I'll get all these books together in one place and read through them in chronological order.

Then again, there are so many other books to read.

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• Karen Chisholm's review at EuroCrime.
  
• The Brothers Judd review (and links to many other reviews of Indriðason's books).
  
• Colin Harvey's review at suite101.com.
  

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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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