books #34-#49

As noted 'way back in November or so, the cumulative effect of all the surgery I've had since May had finally rendered me sufficiently under the weather that I needed to take a break from my research reading for the forthcoming Bogus Science. In place of big fat nonfiction books with long words in them I resorted to some fiction -- and not just any old fiction but, well, light fiction.

 

The good news is that I'm feeling a fair amount better now, so at last am up to rather more challenging stuff. It's my intention to resume Bogus Science research on the 1st, or thereabouts; before then I plan to read one more novel for pleasure (indeed, I've started it: Louis Maistros's [louismaistros] forthcoming The Sound of Building Coffins) and one that I've been asked to read for cover-puff purposes.

 

Whatever, here (without benefit of editing or even proofreading) are some brief reports (in approximate order of my reading them) on the thrillers and suchlike that have aided the convalescence of my brain:

 

#34: Book Case (1991) by Stephen Greenleaf

 

I'm a sucker for novels that have books/writing/bookselling/publishing as their focus, so this mystery might have been tailor-made for me. A brilliant but anonymous manuscript arrives at the office of a small, loss-making press run by an old pal of P.I. John Marshall Tanner. Who could the author be? Tanner is asked to find out, and discovers himself in the midst of mayhem as various nasty old secrets unfurl. I enjoyed this a lot, and am certain that in a few years' time I'll want to reread it.

 

#35: Smoke (1995) by Donald E. Westlake

 

A typical Westlake petty crook breaks into a facility where researchers are investigating two means of reducing skin pigmentation, both of which individually have had the effect of rendering cats translucent. Caught, the burglar agrees to be a human guinea pig, and in a mix-up swallows both formulae, thereby rendering himself completely and permanently invisible -- not an entirely undesirable state for a burglar/sneak thief. The rest of the novel is a humorous Invisible Man romp, with occasional further sciencefictional aspects -- e.g., a tobacco magnate is desperate to capture the burglar so he might be dragooned into performing industrial espionage on the Human Genome Project, the aim being to identify the genes matching vulnerability to diseases like emphysema and lung cancer: "We've spent the last forty years . . . trying to make cigarettes safe for the human race, and we failed. We can spend the next forty years making the human race safe for cigarettes!"

 

Not absolutely prime Westlake, but pretty damn' fine.

 

#36: All the Queen's Men (1999) by Linda Howard

 

I'm not quite sure why I bought this book in the first place (clearly, because of its condition, it was a yard sale buy). It had been sitting on my shelves for seemingly forever by the time I picked it up a few weeks ago. The novel starts quite well, with a CIA black ops mission in Iran going horribly wrong. Ten years later, two of its members, John and Niema, are brought together to penetrate the fortress of a French munitions black marketeer -- a superdealer in the world's most sought-after hi-tech weaponry. Matters are rendered more complicated by the fact that it's not just the fortress that John wants to penetrate: he's been harbouring a fiery lust for Niema ever since the Iranian business. The tumultuous consummation of their irresistible passion . . . ya-de-ya-de-ya-da. Linda Howard is possibly a better writer than Iris Johanssen (sp?) or Dan Brown, but it's a fairly close-run thing -- certainly in the former case. She may even be a lesser writer than David Baldacci, which is not the kind of comment one finds oneself making very often. Anyway, I got to the end of the book somehow.

 

#37: Alik the Detective (1969; trans 1977 by Bonnie Carey) by Anatoli Aleksin

 

A strange little YA novel that I rather enjoyed. At least, I think it's a YA novel. Sometimes while reading it I thought it must be for far younger children; other times I wondered if it were intended for grown-ups rather than children at all. The eponymous Alik is a schoolboy who's always wanted to be a detective. The class's literature club offers him opportunity to hone his ratiocinative powers on a mystery that . . . well, it's really not much of a mystery at all, more like a plot device to facilitate all the good bits of stuff the author wants us to have fun with. The pretensions and foibles of the various kids, Alik included, are skewered with an infectious joy. This isn't a wonderful book, but it made me chuckle quite a few times so I mustn't complain.

 

#38: Dead Midnight (2002) by Marcia Muller

 

A mystery novel that's rather too competent for its own good, I think. P.I. Sharon McCone has not long lost her estranged brother to suicide. Now she's called in to investigate the apparent suicide of a young Japanese man who worked for a fashion-entertainment webzine notorious for working its employees into the ground. She finds that someone seems to be trying to destroy the zine, someone who's not reluctant to resort to murder if need be. There are some genuine moments of white-knuckle thrill in the book, but elsewhere there seemed to me to be far too many parts where I was conscious of the artificiality of the whole setup. And personally I found McCone's whole ethos more than a tad rebarbative.

 

#39: The Woods (2007) by Harlan Coben

 

I discovered Coben a few years ago with his novel Tell No One (recently made into a pretty good movie . . . in France!). That novel plus its immediate successors -- Gone for Good, No Second Chance, Just One Look -- strike me as pinnacles of the thriller writer's art. I then read some of his earlier novels and was surprised by how little they presaged what was to come: they were perfectly okay thrillers, but they didn't have the incredible plotting genius Coben's work would come to display. After Just One Look came The Innocent and Promise Me, which were good but showed something of a decline: the wonderful plotting inventiveness seemed to be in danger of deteriorating into the sort of obsessive overplotting that mars so much of Jeffery Deaver's work. Now The Woods shows some of the same tendency, and perhaps even more so. It's still better than most other thrillers you'll pick up, and far better than many of them, but it doesn't give you that marvelous "there's no one other than Coben could have pulled this off" feeling. NJ prosecutor Paul Copeland lost his sister at a summer camp twenty years ago when four teenagers vanished, seemingly victims of a now-notorious serial killer. But was the story as simple as that? A new homicide seems to link to that old case, and Copeland is dragged right into the middle of events . . .

 

#40: The Brass Cupcake (1950) by John D. MacDonald

 

This could almost be a Travis McGee novel, although protagonist Cliff Bartells doesn't live aboard a boat and isn't quite the same freewheeler as McGee; he's an ex-cop, squeezed out of the local Florence City, Florida, force because of his integrity, now working as an insurance investigator. When an ancient, crabby visiting Boston heiress is murdered and her fortune in jewels stolen, Bartells gets involved; he gets involved also with the old woman's sole heir and likely next target of the killer(s), a smashing blonde with the quintessentially MacDonald name of Melody Chance. There are thrills, spills, twists, seediness, exposed hypocrisies and all the rest of the good stuff you expect from a MacDonald novel. Boring old fart that I am, all the while I was reading it I was thinking, These modern thriller writers could learn a thing or three from the old maestro . . .

 

#41: Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002) by Walter Mosley

 

Although the movie Devil in a Blue Dress is a particular favourite of mine, this was the first time I'd read a Walter Mosley/Easy Rawlins novel. I'm not sure I enjoyed it as much as I'd expected to, although it was good enough that I certainly have plans to read the other Mosley/Rawlins novel I own. It's a few decades ago in Los Angeles, and Easy is mourning the death of his long-time friend and frequent saviour Mouse when another long-time friend, John, comes calling to say his (John's) son Brawly has been caught up in a radical political group; could Easy do John a favour by extricating Brawly from the group before the cops weigh in with their typical racist heavyhandedness? In the course of attempting to "save" Brawly, Easy uncovers far fouler matters, and more than one corpse. It's a pretty okay tale, with the right number of surprises; I did find some of the racism with which Easy is confronted to be a bit grueling, but I suppose it was an accurate portrayal of its age.

 

#42: Chasing the Dime (2002) by Michael Connelly

 

Thrown out by his girlfriend, technologist Henry Pierce starts receiving calls on his new phone from people attempting to contact the high-class prostitute called Lily who used to have the number he now has. Although he should be concentrating on "chasing the dime" -- trying to attract big-money investors to the next stage of his company's breakthrough electronics project -- instead he becomes obsessed with tracking down Lily. The trail he follows leads him into the lair of some of the vilest criminals imaginable, and he's lucky to escape with his life; others along the way are less fortunate. My disbelief wasn't suspended throughout -- there were several "aw, come off it!" moments -- but the pages kept turning at a satisfactory speed. This wasn't up to the standards of Connelly's Harry Bosch tales, but it was fairly good fun.

 

#43: Don't Ask (1993) by Donald E. Westlake

 

Yes, another Westlake! I thought I'd read all his Dortmunder mysteries, but a few weeks ago I discovered this one at a library sale. Too tempting to be put aside for later, you bet. This perhaps lacks some of the inventive brio of earlier series entries like Bank Shot and Jimmy the Kid and of course The Hot Rock, but if so it's only a smidgen. Two of the new Eastern European countries have emerged from what was before just one, and both are eager to lay claim to the single UN seat their precursor nation held; the unsuccessful suitor will have to wait for years before qualifying for the seat and for all the consequential UN financial and trade bounty. For reasons too complicated to explain here, the contest will be much influenced by which of the countries possesses the genuine femur of an eight-centuries-old saint. Dortmunder and his inept and perennially luck-deserted crew are brought in to steal the bone from the embassy of the nation that currently has it . . . There's some beautiful plotting, fine characterization, and plenty of out-loud laughs -- what more could you ask?

 

#44: Sleeping Beauty (1973) by Ross Macdonald

 

On a beach heavily polluted by a recent oil spill P.I. Lew Archer comes across a pretty young woman weeping with despair as she attempts to save a sea bird. He's drawn into her life, discovering she's an heiress to the oil family responsible for the spill, but has married beneath her. Then she disappears, and Archer is hired to find her. Along the trail he unearths some disgusting old family secrets and trips over a corpse or two. In a way this sounds like just another by-the-numbers detective thriller, but Macdonald was a master of this particular craft; and, though Sleeping Beauty is not one of the strongest of the Archer cycle, it held me more than adequately riveted.

 

#45: Dry Ice (2007) by Stephen White

 

When I first came across White a few years ago I regarded him as the poor man's Jonathan Kellerman: his psychologist amateur detective Alan Gregory matches the more established author's Alex Delaware; Gregory's cop pal Sam isn't identical with Delaware's cop pal Milo, but there are definitely similarities between the two setups; and so on. But then, while Kellerman's novels seemed to become ever more humdrum, White's improved by leaps and bounds. These days I don't bother with Kellerman any more but I pounce on any of White's novels I come across. Alas, I wasn't as impressed as usual by Dry Ice, which is one of those serial-killer novels that seem entirely artificial. The notion that serial killers are all psychotic geniuses strikes me as entirely clichéd and barely borne out by reality. (I've read that serial killers are in fact pretty damn' dumb, for which reason they're generally caught before they've had a chance to really earn the "serial" epithet. Those who manage a longer career are either very lucky or are a bit brighter than the herd. But that doesn't make them Einsteins.)

 

Whatever, a serial killer that Alan helped put away a while back is now at large again, and bizarrely frightening things start happening around Alan and his family. Could the killer have a confederate -- or even two equally psychopathic confederates? Are these murderers deliberately creating a tableau of strangeness as they pursue vengeance against the plucky psychologist? Is any of this remotely plausible? By the end of the novel I confess my interest was fading fairly fast. I was still awake enough, though, to be disgusted by White's/Gregory's apparent endorsement of cold-blooded murder as a means of treating the mentally ill.

 

#46: True Evil (2006) by Greg Iles

 

Iles is another thriller writer who's kind of on probation for me, since the last couple of books of his I've read have seemed a bit sub-par. True Evil to a certain extent restored my faith in him, as it were. Disgraced FBI agent Alex Morse is convinced her sister was the victim of a contract hit, the killer using advanced medical expertise to create the appearance of death by disease. She discovers that a whole string of the clients of a small-town divorce lawyer are striking lucky when their unwanted spouses die, usually but not exclusively of cancer. Now she approaches a young doctor with the grim news that his wife has begun to consult this lawyer . . . There's lots of good stuff in this long novel, enough to take away the sour taste of the fair amount of not-so-good stuff; the ending descends into melodrama, as if Iles were searching for something climactic with lots of explosions for the Hollywood market, but it's reasonably tolerable.

 

One truly memorable passage:

 

You heard Kaiser: poke them with a sharp stick, he said. Well, I just poked Thora. And my guess is, she's going to poke Andrew Rusk like he's never been poked before.

 

#47: Snow White & Rose Red (1985) by Ed McBain

 

Well, I guess we all know by now about my passion for McBain's 87th Precinct novels; my just published novella The City in These Pages (PS Publishing) is a homage to them. I've never been quite so taken by his Matthew Hope detections, but recently I thought I'd read this one because it had been sitting on my shelf for quite a while and because even second-level McBain beats the socks off 'most everyone else. Well, I don't know if it's just that this is an especially good Matthew Hope novel or if my earlier critical judgement was wayward, but I thoroughly enjoyed this. Lawyer Hope is hired by ethereally beautiful Sarah Whittaker to help get her out of the mental institution in which her mother has engineered her incarceration for purportedly nefarious reasons; he sees himself as her white knight, not just her lawyer, especially since she seems as eager as he is to add whole new layers of meaning to the term "lawyer-client privilege" as soon as she's freed from the bin. But there's nothing that can be so simple in McBain's wryly dour view of the world . . .

 

#48: Moominsummer Madness (1954; trans 1955 by Thomas Warburton) by Tove Jansson

 

Comfort reading. I read many, probably most, of the Moomin books during my childhood, likely including this one, although it's so many years ago that I can't be sure. A few months ago Daughter Jane announced that she'd revisited the Moomins in adulthood, and a while later I saw a couple on sale and nostalgically snapped 'em up. In this one a volcano causes a flood that submerges the Moomin family's home, and so the Moomins take shelter in what at first they don't realize is a theatre, bobbing along on the flood waters. Once they discover the true nature of their new lodgings, thanks to the grouchy old stage rat who's still there, Moominpappa determines to write a play in which the rest of our friends can perform . . . There's lots of surreal fun (and a couple more plot strands than this one), and I laughed aloud several times.

 

#49: The Secret Madonna (2009) by J.R. Lankford

 

A few years ago I reviewed Jamie Lankford's first novel, The Jesus Thief, which I enjoyed quite a lot. It concerned a scientist, Rossi, who managed to extract some DNS from the Turin Shroud and use it to clone Christ; of course, plenty of bad guys were horrified at the prospect of a reborn Jesus and therefore determined to prevent the birth or, if necessary, kill the babe. At book's end Rossi is able to spirit the surrogate mother and the newborn away while convincing the baddies that both are dead. As you'll guess from this brief summary, it shouldn't have been my kind of book . . . but I liked it anyway. (There was a very, very bad novel with a similar theme released at roughly the same time. This isn't it.) Later I found out that Lankford had for a while been a member of Blue Ear, the (alas now defunct) international-journalism site that commissioned my The Dragons of Manhattan in its first incarnation, as an online serial. One of the Ears -- I forget who -- e-introduced us, and we've corresponded occasionally since. In consequence, Jamie sent me a proof of the sequel.

 

It's taken her five years to produce it, but now here we have The Secret Madonna. Maggie and her son Jess -- the surrogate mother and the Jesus clone -- have been living in seclusion in a small Italian town, funded and occasionally visited by Rossi. Meanwhile, back in NYC, Maggie's would-be lover Sam, whom all thought was dead, has been in a decade-long coma. Sam now recovers consciousness, thanks to medical treatment paid for by uber-bad guy Theomund Brown . . . but Sam is a changed man, and most definitely not changed for the better! When Rossi finds Sam is alive, he assumes Sam is still on the side of the goodies; because of their linkup, Brown soon discovers the clone is likewise not dead, and pays Sam to kill the boy. Will Sam rediscover his real self in time or will he carry out his dreadful mission . . .?

 

There are plenty of high jinks -- and far more Stark Raunch than in the earlier novel, oh yes. Lankford isn't the smoothest of writers, but despite this I found the pages turning with satisfactory alacrity and my bedside light burned later than it should have as the tale approached its climax. To be honest, I think I preferred The Jesus Thief, but The Secret Madonna is certainly worth one's time.

 

==========

 

I hadn't counted the books in this stack, and thus hadn't realized until now that -- assuming no disasters -- I'm on course to hit the magical FIFTY smack on the nose and indeed surpass it, if only just. Bearing in mind that I must have read forty or fifty books so far for the purposes of Bogus Science, it would be quite understandable should I begin to exude a certain aura of smugness. Yet, as all who know me will tell you, nothing could be further from my nature than smugitude. It must therefore be an aura of something else entirely that I'm exuding . . .