Lazy Sunday Service

It's taking me quite a while to adjust back to Irish time after 10 days in the US.  It took a little longer to get home than planned.  Coming in to land there were flashes of lighting out of the window and I then got caught in a large thunderstorm in Chicago which went on for hours, with the airport closing five times during the day.  The flight screens were covered in cancelled and delayed notices.  I spent most of the time catching up with admin to try and make life easier when I got back rather than reading.  Still, nine hours hanging round an airport is not a great way to spend a day.

My posts this week
Review of The Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
Home bound
Bad ball

Bad ball

Steve drifted awake and brushed sand from his face.  He opened his eyes and glanced to his left. 

A sand castle was half built and abandoned. 

He sat up and scanned the wide beach, but there was no sign of Jack. 

Panic rising, he clambered to his feet.  Off to his right a beach ball bobbed between sets of breaking waves.  He started to run, yelling his son’s name. 

Reacting to the fearful cries a teenager splashed through green-grey water and scooped up a young boy.

Steve arrived gulping in air.

‘Bad ball,’ Jack said, oblivious to his father’s distress.





A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Home bound

In Tucson airport waiting at the gate to start the journey back to Ireland.  A 5am start is never a good thing, nor is a five hour layover between flights.  In fact, the only good thing about long and multi-leg flights is uninterrupted reading time, though I'm not sure the penalty of jetlag is really worth it.  In the ten days I've been away, I've not managed to get my body clock onto US west coast time, and it'll no doubt be worse flying eastwards.  At least, the trip has been productive and enjoyable.  I especially liked Tucson, though it was a little too hot for me despite the locals telling me it was presently quite 'mild'.  Their mild would be a glorious summer day we'd talk about for years.

Review of The Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (Serpent’s Tail, 1990)

Born and raised in Texas and having served in the army, Easy Rawlins knows all about how black men are expected to act in white institutions.  Despite this, after a long shift working in an aircraft plant in Los Angeles he has a falling out with his boss and is laid off.  It’s the summer of 1948 and he doesn’t have a lot of options, but he’s determined meet the mortgage payments and to keep his newly bought house.  When he’s offered a $100 by a white lawyer to find Daphne Monet, despite reservations, he accepts the job.  It seems that Daphne likes the company of black men and Easy works his way round the bars trying to pick up a lead.  What he finds is a trail of bodies and a complicated knot of people either looking for, or seeking to protect, the devil in a blue dress.  Worse, the police have him pegged as the person leaving the trail of bodies.  He needs to find Daphne fast, hand her over and find a safe exit, assuming he can resist her deadly charms once he locates her.

The Devil in the Blue Dress is a noir tale full of racial and sexual tensions set in the post-war Los Angeles.  The strengths of the novel are the characterisation, contextualisation, and sense of place and time.  Easy Rawlins is an interesting lead character: a man who wants to pull himself up into the middle class but finds himself scrabbling around in the underworld to keep that dream from slipping by; he’s familiar with death from his time fighting across Europe, but he has little appetite for the murderous situation he finds himself in.  As such, his moral compass is generally pointed in the right direction, but he’s prepared to let it waver, especially as he lives in a community where right and wrong are various shades of grey and he has to negotiate the racist attentions of powerful white men.  To complement him, Mosley fills the story with a set of colourful, dangerous characters.  The tale is particularly good at portraying the racial geography of the city, its seedy nightlife and petty crime, and dropping in small historical references.  The plot was interesting, but felt a little opaque at times given the number of characters and their shifting allegiances, and some elements didn’t seem to quite sit right.  Nonetheless, it was an entertaining read, told in a style that is all tell and no show, and is full of noirish atmosphere.

Lazy Sunday Service

After a week in LA, where amongst other things I met the delightful Margot Kinberg, I've now arrived in sunny Tucson.  I managed to leave the book I was reading, The Dividing Line by Richard Parrish, on the plane, which I blame on being dog tired from jet lag (which I haven't yet shaken off).  The story was set in Tucson in 1948.  I've just looked on Amazon and there's no kindle version to download, so I guess I'll just have to re-order it again some time in the future.  I'm now reading Les Edgerton's The Perfect Crime instead.  Today I'm heading off into the mountains up the Sabino Canyon, then this evening I'm having dinner with some city officials.

My posts this week:
Review of Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer
Review of Die a Little by Megan Abbott
Review of The Devil Doesn't Want Me by Eric Beetner
Abandoned

Abandoned

‘Abandoned by my country!’  The black man screamed, dressed in filthy clothes, waving his arms aggressively.  ‘How would you feel!’

Mark kept walking, pulling Sally closer to his side.

‘How you would feel, buddy, if you were abandoned by your country?’ the black man said, falling in stride besides them.

‘Just keep walking, Mark.’

‘Hey, buddy?  Hey, I’m talking to you!  How would you fuckin’ feel?’ 

Sally increased their pace.

‘Used up and thrown aside!’

They reached the intersection and dashed across towards their hotel.

The black man slowed to a stop.  ‘You can run, sister, but you can’t hide!’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of The Devil Doesn’t Want Me by Eric Beetner (Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries, 2012)

For 17 years, Lars, a mob hitman, has been tracking Mitch the Snitch, a numbers man who sought refuge with the Feds witness protection program.  He keeps his hand in, doing the odd side job, but Mitch is his primary target, though he remains elusive.  Regime change back East, means a young, brash kid arrives in New Mexico to work with the aging hitman.  The kid has inside info from a mole in the Feds as to where to find Mitch.  Lars and Trent are chalk and cheese, taking an instance dislike to each other, but the kid’s information is right on the money.  Approaching fifty, with almost as many kills to his names, arriving to do the hit  Lars’ realises his outlook on life has changed.  And when Mitch appears with a daughter in tow, he balks at having to murder the child as well.  Instead, he snatches the girl and makes a run for it, his sole aim to keep himself and her alive.

The Devil Doesn’t Want Me is a noir, road trip story, tracking the flight of an aging hitman and the daughter of his long-term target as they make their way from New Mexico to Los Angeles.  The story is well plotted, with Lars becoming increasing reflexive and the action and tension building as the tale unfolds, and the resolution is nicely played out.  There were a couple of points where Lars’ judgement seemed a little off, especially the sojourn into Las Vegas, but they did not detract from the story and worked to create an entertaining set of events.  The telling is all show, with a nice mix of dialogue and action, and is darkly humorous at times.  The characterisation is strong, as are the social relations between Lars and his younger rival, and with the daughter.  Overall, a fun and entertaining read that makes one dream of dashing across the desert in a 66 Mustang.

Review of Die a Little by Megan Abbott (Pocket Books, 2005)

In 1950s Los Angeles, school teacher, Lora King, is living with her brother, Bill, an investigator for the DA’s office when Alice Steele, a studio seamstress, breezes into his life.  A short time later, Bill and Alice are married after a whirlwind romance.  Alice quickly settles into her new life as a housewife, endlessly baking and organizing social parties.  Lora, however, senses that there is more to Alice’s past than meets the eye and finds herself becoming suspicious of her stories.  Gradually she starts to investigate elements of her sister-in-law’s history, slowly becoming acquainted with Hollywood’s underbelly.  But the more she digs, the more she risks her own safety and Bill’s job and happiness.

Die a Little is a thoroughly noir tale about the tension between two femme fatales - a sister and wife - battling over the same man.  The main strengths of the novel are the atmosphere, tight plotting, strong characterisation, and crafted prose.  Abbott captures both the hopes of post-war US and its seedy underbelly of vice, drugs, and exploitation, filtered through a darkly tinted lens.  The plot is layered and nicely paced as Lora transitions across the arc of the story as her relationship with her sister-in-law comes under increasing strain.  All three main characters are well penned, being complex and deep, the support cast are more than simply ciphers for the story, and the interactions between the players is nicely portrayed.  The story is told through lyrical, literary prose that adds to the atmosphere.  Overall, an enjoyable noir tale that adds a distinctive voice to the genre.

Review of Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer (Bantam Press, 2013)

Patrick Fort is a a young man with Asberger's Syndrome who, after the death of his father, becomes obsessed with what happens when a creature dies.  In order to try and understand mortality he leaves his exhausted mother and enrols in an anatomy course at Cardiff University.  There he encounters cadaver number 19.  Along with four other students Patrick’s task is to dissect the body to learn about its constitution and establish the cause of death.  Patrick’s diagnosis is murder, an answer nobody seems to want to hear.  But once Patrick gets a notion he follows it obsessively, regardless of the consequences.

Rubbernecker is a wonderful read - witty and smart, with a nice mix of darkness and light, pathos and humour, and a cleverly worked plot.  The three main strengths of the novel are the characterisation, plot, and prose.  Patrick Fort is a lovely creation - truthful, logical, obsessive and unintentionally abrasive - and the other characters are fully formed: his long suffering mother, the students in his shared house, and the staff and patients at the university hospital, especially Samuel Galan locked inside his comatose body and the selfish, uncaring nurse, Tracy Evans.  The plot is nicely put together, with a couple of very nice twists towards the end of the story.  Adding to the reading experience is the crafting of the narrative and the engaging prose.  There isn’t a word out of place, and the story is all tell and no show.  The novel has the feel of a standalone, but I hope that Bauer is thinking of creating another mystery for Patrick to investigate.  Overall, an excellent piece of literary crime fiction. 

Lazy Sunday Service

By the time this is posted I should be somewhere over the Atlantic on my way to Los Angeles via Chicago.  I'll probably still be reading Die a Little by Megan Abbott, or will have moved on to Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley.  The last time I travelled to LA I arrived looking like a horror show extra.  Whilst we were taxiing for take-off in Dallas I got a nose-bleed.  One of those ones that just won't stop.  Unable to get up to go to the bathroom, and with no tissues at hand, my shirt ended up a bit of a mess.  I did what I could to clean up once in the air, but the damage was done.  At least I got a fair bit of space around me at the baggage carousel, where thankfully I could change into a fresh shirt.  Hopefully, that won't happen again.  Which reminds me - I need to pack some tissues.

My posts this week:
April reviews
Review of Missing in Rangoon by Christopher G. Moore
Review of Blood from a Stone by Donna Leon
Review of A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr
Plane envy

Plane Envy

Penny pointed to a tiny silver glint in the sky tailed by two long contrails.  ‘I bet that’s going somewhere nice.’

‘America probably,’ Tom replied.  ‘Or maybe Canada.’

‘My dad says he might have to move to Canada for work.  There or Australia.’

‘You’d be going as well?’

‘Why, would you miss me?’

‘No.  I mean, yes.  I ...’

Penny slipped her hand into his.  ‘We’re all staying.  It’s just him that would go.  He’d send back money.’

‘Sometimes I wish I could just get on a plane and fly away.’

‘When here is so wonderful?’

‘Because it’s so wonderful.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Missing in Rangoon by Christopher G. Moore (Heaven Lake Press, 2012)

Some missing people don’t want to be found, some PIs don’t want to go where they might be hiding, and some parents don’t care about the wishes of the first two.  Rob is the former, hiding out in Burma (Myanmar) with his singer girlfriend, Vincent Calvino is the Thai-based PI who has little desire to travel across the border to find him, and Osborne is the persistent, rich, dying father who wants to be reunited with his wayward son.  At first, Calvino refuses Osborne’s pleas, but when his good friend, Colonel Pratt of the Thai police, asks him to accompany him on an undercover operation to find the source of methamphetamine trade, Calvino relents and takes on the case of finding Rob.  After years of being a closed society, Rangoon is just starting to open up, but it’s still a very different place to Bangkok and Calvino has little local knowledge, nor contacts.  It doesn’t take long to establish, however, that he’s not the only one looking for the missing man.

Missing in Rangoon is the thirteenth outing for Moore’s New York born and Thai-based PI, Vincent Calvino and the first in the series I’ve read.  I had no problems dropping into the series and the book works fine as a standalone.  The strength of the story is the nicely realised sense of place and the social, political and historical contextualisation with respect Thai and Burmese culture, especially the latter as it slowly opens up after years as a closed state, as understood by a well-embedded farang (foreigner), and there are some nice observational touches throughout.  The characterisation of Calvino and his Thai cop buddy, Colonel Pratt, are nicely done, though some of the other characters are little more than caricatures acting out cliched roles.  The plot was engaging and for the most part worked well, though there were a couple of moments that felt a little clunky, and at times there is too much show rather than tell, some of which was redundant with points laboured and repeated.  Overall, despite a couple of quibbles, an entertaining and enjoyable sojourn into complex terrain of Rangoon.

Review of Blood from a Stone by Donna Leon (William Heinemann, 2005)

A few days before Christmas an African street vendor is shot dead whilst selling bags in a square in Venice.  Commissario Brunetti is assigned to the case, but makes little initial headway given that the man’s fellow illegal immigrants have seemingly melted away into the Venetian underworld.  When both the ministries of internal and foreign affairs show an interest in the case, Brunetti is order to hand over the investigative material and warned to drop his investigation.  Intrigued and holding back evidence, he continues to probe, though he seemingly makes little progress.

Blood from a Stone is a curious kind of police procedural, as much about feints and duplicity as detection.  It is told in an understated way and drifts along without any urgency.  The plot is relatively thin -- Brunetti starts to investigate a murder but is then warned off, regardless he keeps surreptitiously picking away at it despite seemingly going nowhere -- but that hardly seems the point.  The tale is more about Venice, Italian food, Brunetti’s family life, the petty office politics of the police, and a social commentary on how immigrants are imagined and treated and the West interferes in African politics.  Leon does a nice job of creating a sense of place, time and social context, and letting the reader float along with the narrative as if on a gondola.  An entertaining, mild-mannered story.

Review of A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr (Quercus, 2013)

It’s winter 1943 and former Berlin cop, Bernie Gunther, is working for the German War Crimes Bureau investigating supposed crimes committed by Allied forces.  Rumours are starting circulate about a  grave of Polish officers in woods outside of Smolensk and Gunther is flown from Berlin into German occupied Russia to investigate.  The area is littered with mass graves, not all of which the German’s want to be discovered.  But if the rumour is true then it could prove to be a useful piece of propaganda which can used to drive a wedge between Russia and its allies.  The grave, however, turns out to be just one problem for Gunther to deal with, along with disgruntled and plotting senior officers and the murder of two local signals operators.  Matters are not helped by the detective’s gruff style and his ability to rub people up the wrong way.  With the Russians set to advance on their positions, Gunther needs to oversee the grave excavations, solve the local murders and move to safer terrain.

I’m a great fan of the Bernie Gunther series.  I’ve read all nine books, buying the last few in the first weeks of release.  A Man Without Breath is a solid enough addition to Bernie’s story, though it is by no means Kerr’s best work.  Kerr writes with a very strong and engaging hardboiled voice.  His characters are vivid, the historical and social contextualisation and sense of place are excellent.  And so it is with A Man Without Breath.  There are three issues with the story, however, that undermine its telling somewhat.  The first is Kerr has tried to cram in too many plotlines and incidents - the Katyn woods massacre and subsequent German propaganda, the plot to kill Hitler by Wehrmacht officers, the Rosenstrasse demonstration by German wives at the arrest of their Jewish husbands, the Gleiwitz incident that started the Second World War, Spanish Fascist experiments on Republican prisoners, several murders that occur whilst Gunther investigates the Katyn massacre, and a love affair.  Any two of these would have been sufficient hooks for a strong, tight plot, but the combination of all of them leads to a bit of a muddle.  Second, the book is overly long (over 500 pages in hardback) and not just because of the plotlines -- several passages could have been tightened up or deleted as they were largely redundant to the plot.  Third, Kerr has Gunther murder a relatively innocent character in cold blood when there were other solutions.  Bernie is no saint, but his appeal is that he has a strong moral compass in a corrupt regime and the people he tangles with are mostly monsters; he witnesses, investigates and avenges war crimes, but he doesn’t commit them.  The action bumped me firmly out of the story and changed my whole view of the character.  The effect of these three issues were to deaden the read, which was a shame, as given the place, time and themes of the book this had the potential to be excellent.  Regardless, it’s an interesting and mostly enjoyable read and I look forward to the next instalment in Bernie’s adventures.

April reviews

Another good month of reading.  My book of the month was Peter Temple's White Dog.  I really do hope that Temple resurrects the excellent Jack Irish series. 

Norwegian by Night by Derek B Miller ****
Beautiful, Naked and Dead by Josh Stallings ****
The Twelfth Department by William Ryan ****
The Big Gold Dream by Chester Himes ***
Last Rights by Barbara Nadel ***
Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer ****.5
A Death in Bordeaux by Allan Massie ***
White Dog by Peter Temple *****