While we're on the subject of espionage, I should mention Double 0 Section (doubleosection.blogspot.com/), a blog devoted to “news and reviews of all things espionage—movies, books, comics, TV shows, DVDs, and anything else that comes up!” Where else could you find out that Elton John “is developing an animated feature from the Michael Buckley novel series NERDS, about kids who run a spy network from their elementary school"? Well, it's really Elton John's company, not Sir Elton himself, but you get the idea.
Craig Clarke presides over Somebody Dies (somebodydies.blogspot.com/), a blog with “Book reviews of crime, horror, and Western fiction ... with the occasional digression.” The blog's banner also says, “Support living authors!” Being a living author myself, I appreciate the sentiment. Lately, Clarke's been writing a bit about “re-Kindling” interest, that is, about older books that have become available again thanks to e-publishing. He's done reviews of Joe R. Lansdale's The Boar and of Douglas Clegg's novella, The Words, for example.
Read Me Deadly (www.readmedeadly.com/) is a group review blog. The reviewers are an interesting gang: Della Streetwise, The Maltese Condor, Sister Mary Murderous, Georgette Spelvin, and Periphera. They read and review crime fiction of all sorts, but they're also interested in reading other kinds of books and are willing to bring those into the conversation, too. In fact, the blog encourages conversation and offers readers a chance to sound off. There's also a reading challenge for 2012 if you'd like to take part. Check it out.
Copyright © 2012 Bill Crider
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Reviews: THE JURY BOX
by Steve Steinbock
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For those of us who love to read books, authors are special. They carry with them a certain mystique. The men and women who write the books we read, we imagine, aren't like the rest of us. So it's not surprising that real-life authors sometimes appear as fictional characters in fiction. This month we look at novels whose sleuths include Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Jane Austen, and Beatrix Potter, among others.
**** Susan Wittig Albert: The Tale of Castle Cottage, Berkley Prime Crime, $24.95. It's 1913, and nature writer Beatrix Potter, best known for her children's books, is preoccupied with finishing the illustrations for her new book and preparing for her upcoming marriage. The remodeling plans for her Castle Cottage are being undermined by a series of thefts at the cottage and in the village, followed by the death of the recently fired carpenter. Wittig Albert cleverly interweaves the story of Miss Potter with the parallel tale of the local wildlife and the mystery of a rare illuminated manuscript. This is the final of the planned eight-book series, but readers can cross their fingers (and paws) that the author is inspired to create more.
**** Stephanie Barron: Jane and the Canterbury Tale, Bantam Books, $15.00. While spending the autumn with her brother in Kent, Jane Austen finds herself in Canterbury near the Pilgrims’ Way, where “everyone is rich ... and each has his peculiar story to tell.” During celebrations surrounding the wedding of a beautiful young widow, the men set out for a pheasant hunt. But the game is cut short when they come across the corpse of a pilgrim on the historical trail. On closer inspection, the “pilgrim” is found to be Curzon Fiske, the first husband of the bride, believed to have died three years earlier. The drama that erupts is right up the alley of the young novelist in this well-told adventure.
**** Ed Ifkovic: Escape Artist, Poisoned Pen Press, $24.95. It's a little known fact that Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Edna Ferber grew up in the same town where Harry Houdini lived a generation earlier. In 1904 the world famous magician revisits Appleton, Wisconsin where nineteen-year-old Edna Ferber works as a cub reporter for the Appleton Crescent. Edna breaks protocol, first by interviewing the great escape artist, and then by investigating the disappearance of a spoiled and attractive high-school student. Already something of an outcast, Edna finds herself caught between scandal, familial responsibility, and curiosity until aid and encouragement comes from the great escape artist.
**** J.J. Murphy: You Might As Well Die, Obsidian, $7.99. Edna Ferber and Harry Houdini also make appearances in the second “Algonquin Round Table Mystery” featuring Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. (Murphy's novel makes mention of the interview between Ferber and Houdini that is fictionalized in Ifkovic's novel.) During a gathering at the Algonquin Club, a third-rate magazine illustrator hands Parker what later turns out to be a suicide note. Multiple madcap twists, chases, and witty exchanges later, Parker and her cohorts ask whether the suicide is a tragedy, a haunting, or a scam. Highly entertaining.
It's worth mentioning that three novels written by Daniel Stashower (author of award-winning scholarly works about Poe and Conan Doyle) featuring Harry Houdini are back in print. Stashower's “Houdini” mysteries—The Dime Museum Murders (1999), The Floating Lady Murder (2000), The Houdini Specter (2001)—are available in trade paperback for $12.95 each from Titan Books.
**** Gyles Brandreth: Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders, Touchstone, $14.00. In Brandreth's fifth adventure featuring Oscar Wilde and narrated by his friend Arthur Conan Doyle, the men find a severed hand, among other sinister objects, in Doyle's fan mail. Clues lead them to the Vatican where they find themselves enmeshed in a pontifical puzzle involving the tragic death of a child. Entertaining even when it taxes veracity.
****Michael Mallory, The Stratford Conspiracy, Top Publications, $12.95. While the Bard of Avon makes a brief appearance in a flashback, there are no real-life authors serving as detectives in this novel by EQMM veteran Mallory. Rather, it's the second novel-length appearance featuring Amelia Watson, the second wife to Dr. John Watson, chronicler and sidekick to Sherlock Holmes. The book features a phenomenal piece of stage magic performed at Madame Tussaud's, followed by a holiday to the birthplace of William Shakespeare where Amelia Watson unravels a conspiracy surrounding Shakespeare's true identity.
**** John C. Boland, Hominid, Perfect Crime Books, $15.95. Boland is another name familiar to regular readers of EQMM and AHMM. Hominid is a tightly written thriller involving genetic research and anthropology that veers close to science fiction and the supernatural. A team of archeologists working on an island off the Maryland coast uncover the crypt of a family murdered three hundred years earlier by colonial settlers who believed them to be devils. The team find themselves imperiled when the local islanders fall victim to a violent hysteria-inducing “virus” and back on the mainland they're pitted against a wealthy megalomaniac who seeks the power held in the ancient DNA. Also new from Boland is The Man Who Knew Brecht (Perfect Crime Books, $15.95), about the secrets that begin to surface when a Connecticut community sponsors a family of Jewish refugees from Russia.
Akashic Books’ Noir anthology series has been a success, with around fifty volumes so far. They include collections of stories set in cities and regions throughout the world. Two very different volumes recently arrived in the Jury Box, and both of them are a good indication of why the series has been so popular. Mumbai Noir, edited by Altaf Tyrewala (Akashic, $15.95 TPB, $24.95 HC), contains fourteen stories that run dark and deep, and provide readers with a unique look into diverse elements of the largest city in India, often taking us to the fringes of society. In “The Body in the Gali” by Smita Harish Jain, a police inspector travels to the brothels of Kamathipura and into the marginalized cross-gender hijra community in order to investigate a murder by castration. Set in Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Sonia Faleiro's “Lucky 501” is a vignette about a ritual castration that is disturbing in its elegance. Avtar Singh's “Pakeezah” has echoes of Somerset Maugham in its lyrical telling of a tale of lost love.
If Mumbai Noir is worth reading for the surprising and exotic new voices it offers, New Jersey Noir, (Akashic, $15.95 TPB, $24.95 HC), edited by Joyce Carol Oates, is worthwhile for nearly the opposite reasons. The list of contributors is much more familiar to Western readers, as are the urban Garden State settings. Yet the stories are no l
ess striking. The collection includes S.J. Rozan's nonseries story “New Day Newark,” Jonathan Santlofer's “Lola,” a Hoboken tale of good art gone bad, and a shocking confession about the murder of Jimmy Hoffa penned by Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini. Interspersed among the stories are works of verse by noted poets including poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Among the more surprising treats in his collection are Bradford Morrow's “The Enigma of Grover's Mill” (about a crime instigated by Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast) and “Too Near Real,” a tale by Jonathan Safran Foer about a disgraced Princeton professor who loses himself in Google Maps.
Copyright © 2012 Steve Steinbock
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Fiction: NAIN ROUGE
by Barbara Nadel
Barbara Nadel's new story is set in the heart of America, but she was born in the East End of London. A writer who formerly trained as an actor, she's particularly adept at capturing settings observed in her travels. She's the author of thirteen novels set in Turkey, a country she has visited regularly for more than twenty-five years. Her latest novel, Sure and Certain Death (Headline), travels back in time, to World War II and a mystery that appears to involve another Jack the Ripper.
Ritchie was as drunk as a sack when he first saw it out of the corner of his eye. Shuffling down Selden towards Woodward Avenue, it was talking and laughing to itself and knitting its tiny fingers in a nervous sort of way. Ritchie's first thought was that he was seeing things. It had been a long time since he'd put away anything apart from the odd bottle of Bud, much less nine, or was it thirteen, beefy great shots of vodka. His body was clearly in some sort of revolt at the violence he had done to it, but Ritchie's attitude was simply “Deal with it, bastard!” If his body didn't like the booze he'd tipped into it, then that was its problem. He had much bigger issues to deal with than whether or not his guts wanted to tolerate spirits, whether his arteries were hardening every time he put a cigarette into his mouth. Now he was seeing the freaking Nain Rouge, which could only mean one thing. He'd lost his mind.
Through all of Detroit's many and various vicissitudes, Ritchie Carbone had always managed, somehow, to cling on to his business. It wasn't much! It hadn't been much. A Coney Dog joint on Second Avenue. Detroiters loved Coney hot dogs. What wasn't to like? Nothing! So a lot of people had moved out of the Cass Corridor over the years? So there was a reason for that, namely, drug-fueled and gang-sanctioned violence, but hey, it was Detroit! Tough city, tough crowd. But then, as Ritchie knew very well, that only worked up to a point. When some little shit who called himself “Da Man” had pumped a bullet into old Freddie's head, that had been enough for Ritchie. That had been it—through, finished, gone. No more Coney dogs on Second and a whole heap of trouble about how he was going to explain how he voluntarily made himself unemployed to Welfare. And now, to top it all, a crazy little mythical freak laughing at him from underneath a lamppost. Instinctively, he put one hand up to his face so that it wouldn't be able to recognize him. But it was probably way too late.
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Of all the many badasses that Detroit had endured over the centuries, the Nain Rouge, or Red Dwarf, had to be the baddest. It was just legend, of course, but it was a legend that went back a long, long way. A small, childlike creature with brown fur, red boots, blazing eyes, and rotten teeth was said to have attacked Detroit's founder, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, in 1701. Shortly afterwards, Cadillac, a wealthy French businessman, suffered a downturn in his fortunes from which he never recovered. His altercation with the Nain is said to have rocked Cadillac to his core. But then the Nain Rouge was a creature that he would have recognised from his native country. A variety of lutin, the Nain Rouge was a common folklore figure in the myths and legends of Normandy. Ritchie Carbone knew it from the annual Marche du Nain Rouge, an old Detroit custom that had been revived in 2010.
His buddy, Jigsaw, had told him about it first. Jigsaw had been a Ford employee back in the day, now he made his living ripping copper and other metals out of derelict buildings to sell for scrap. He'd walked into Ritchie's place almost a year ago and said, “You heard they gonna banish the Nain this year?”
Ritchie had frowned, he remembered it well. “What? You mean they gonna have that march where everyone gets dressed up so they can fool some thing that don't even exist into walking into a fire?”
“That's the thing.” Jigsaw had had his usual, a large dog, fries, and a bottle of cherry pop. “Hey, Ritchie, this what you think they call gentrification?”
Reviving the old Marche du Nain Rouge was something that, to Ritchie, certainly smacked of middle-class people amusing themselves. Although most people with money had moved out of the city years ago, a new type of urban elite was trickling back into pretty old buildings like the Fyffes place on the corner of Adams Avenue and Woodward. They liked old customs like the banishing of the Nain Rouge every springtime. It was said that if the Nain could be banished on the nearest Sunday to the vernal equinox the city would be safe from misfortune for another year. Heaven knew it needed it.
Ritchie Carbone, in spite of having a father from Italy, was Detroit through and through. His mother, Agnes, could trace her ancestry back to Cadillac's French compatriots and her folks, the Blancs, had stayed in the city ever since. At fifty-eight, Ritchie had seen the riots of ‘67, the many vicissitudes of the automobile industry, the urban ruins, and, more latterly, the first little flickers of possible city renewal. He knew that the place needed every bit of help it could get and so if that included banishing an evil fantasy Being from its streets, then so be it. But that had been before that little shit, Da Man, had taken over large swathes of Second, before he'd put a gun to Freddie's head and pulled the trigger before Ritchie had even had a chance to consider his offer of “protection.”
Still with his hand in front of his face—to let the Nain see you was dangerous lest it come back sometime to take its revenge—Ritchie yelled at the creature. “Hey, you!” he said. “Get out of my city! Don't you think we got enough problems, huh?”
But the little bastard just laughed, bared its rotten teeth at him, and then began to scamper off at speed towards Woodward. Why Ritchie Carbone decided to stagger off after the Nain wasn't really clear to him at the time, apart from the notion that he was generally angry. But this was actually at Da Man as opposed to the mythical Nain. Not that that mattered a bean! Ritchie drained his last shot of vodka down to the very last drop and then he got up and ran.
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Laughing all the while, the little freak quickly got to Woodward and then turned right. It was, or appeared to be, heading back into the city. Ritchie, adamant that that shouldn't be allowed to happen, followed. So it was just some supernatural fairy or whatever; if it meant to sock what remained of Detroit in the guts once again, he was going to give it a hammering it would never forget. His mind had clearly gone: What the hell if he smacked around some bastard that wasn't really there! What did he have left to lose anyway? The business had gone, his wife had left him, the freaking gangstas had even shot his freaking dog, for God's sake!
Apart from the odd bus, the cars on Woodward seemed to fall into two categories: junk wagons just about held together by rust and great big gleaming gangsta-mobiles brimming with blacked-out windows, guns, and the odd diamond-encrusted finger glancing through the windshield. Someone like Ritchie couldn't relate to any of that! Apart from his friendships with junkies like Jigsaw and Black Bottom Boo, he'd always been a straight-down-the-line, middle-of-the-road kind of person. Being white in a majority black neighborhood had never bothered him. He'd got on with everyone, just like he had when Cass had been largely white. God rest her soul, his momma had even had him take Coneys up to the hookers on Cass Avenue when he was little more than an infant.
“Those girls gotta make a dollar just like everyone,” Agnes Carbone had said whenever she'd made a bag of food up for the ladies of the night. White, black, Jew, or Gentile, she'd never cared and n
either had Ritchie—until Da Man had come into his life. All swagger and crazy jewelry, tooled-up homies and attitude, Da Man had started their “conversation” by calling Ritchie “white trash.” For the sake of his customers, as well as himself, he'd taken it. Until Da Man had shot Freddie.
There'd been no need to kill the dog like that! Hound was old and blind and he hadn't known what the hell had been going on. The customers had high-tailed out, screaming. Not long afterwards, Da Man and his crew left as well, but not before they'd told Ritchie that he had to somehow find a thousand dollars a week to pay for his own “protection.” It had been after that that Ritchie had impotently thrown all of his hot dogs, his bread, and his French fries after the gangstas. They'd just landed on the sidewalk, the waste inherent in their disposal making him want to weep. Since when had he become this hopelessly vulnerable and impotent old man?
The Nain started to cross over Woodward, dodging between the cars and laughing uproariously as it did so. Sometimes a Focus or a Hummer or a Jeep would look as if it was about to barrel into the Nain, but it would always, somehow, evade a collision and come up smiling. At one point it even climbed onto the hood of some great big gangsta-mobile and tapped its clawed fingers against the windshield, but then it slid off again and landed on the tarmac, giggling. The car went on its way, its driver seemingly oblivious to the danger he or she had been in.
Still on the sidewalk, Ritchie swayed on rubber legs, looking for a gap in the traffic. In New York just crossing anywhere would have had him up for jaywalking but in Detroit nobody cared. He launched himself out into the wide road just before he got to Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard. The Nain, across Woodward now, flicked him the finger and Ritchie, at that moment, decided that real or not, the Nain Rouge was history. Even if he couldn't prove his manhood with some teenage gangsta, he could vent his spleen on this little shit!
EQMM, August 2012 Page 6
