REVIEWS
BLOG BYTES
by Bill Crider
John Sheridan and C. T. Henry are the duo in charge of The Mystery Bookshelf (henryct.wordpress.com), where “helping you select truly excellent mystery fiction” is their goal. It’s primarily a review site, but there’s an occasional interview, too, most recently with author Charlie Newton. Sheridan seems to be carrying most of the load in 2012, and he’s set himself a challenge that includes reading some of the “classic” crime novels, reading new authors, and reading books from different geographical areas. Both authors have posted links to lists of their favorite books, so you can find out how their tastes align with yours. I’ve found this kind of thing helpful when considering reviews.
Kittling: Books (www.kittlingbooks.com) might strike you as an odd title for a blog unless you know a bit of Gaelic. Kittling, we’re told by Cathy, the blog’s writer, is “a Gaelic word that means ‘anything that strikes [my] fancy,’ and that pretty much sums up my reading tastes.” Mostly her tastes run to mysteries, and while there are plenty of reviews here, other features include link roundups, interviews, photographs, and book news. If you have time, find the link to “Library Memories.” You’ll find some things there that might strike a chord. The writer also has a list of her favorite series, so as with the blog mentioned above, you can see if her tastes accord with your own.
When a blog has a title like Nick Jones’ Existential Ennui (existentialennui.blogspot.co.uk), you might not expect it to be devoted to “Crime & spy fiction, SF, book collecting, comics,” but that’s what this one is. One of the first links you’ll want to click when you pay a visit is “Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s.” It’s just what it claims to be, and book collectors will find it irresistible. Jones does reviews of the books he collects, and recently he’s discussed novels by Victor Canning, Donald E.
Westlake, Adam Hall, and Jeremy Duns. There’s also a long interview with spy novelist Duns that I recommend.
Some of Jones’ reviews also show up on The Violent World of Parker (violentworldofparker.com), an excellent blog mainly concerned with Westlake/Richard Stark’s memorable character but also with a lot of related material. Don’t miss the links to other Parker things on the site, all highly recommended.
Copyright © 2012 by Bill Crider
Bill Crider is the author of The Blacklin County Files, a short-story collection available for Kindle.
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PASSPORT TO CRIME
REVIEWS
THE JURY BOX
by Steve Steinbock
From time to time a certain word or theme serendipitously recurs in books that arrive in The Jury Box. This month, for example, we lead off with three books that feature “crow” in the title. We will also look at a new U.K. publisher whose science-fiction titles often veer headlong into the realm of crime and detection.
**** Craig Johnson, As the Crow Flies, Viking, $25.95. Just in time for the new A&E Network series based on his books, Johnson delivers his eighth novel featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County. The Wyoming lawman is visiting the Cheyenne Reservation to make preparations for his daughter’s wedding when he witnesses a young woman falling to her death from a rock outcropping, a swaddled infant in her arms. Longmire finds himself begrudgingly playing mentor to the new police chief of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, a pretty but hard-nosed veteran of the Iraq war. Johnson’s dialogue is written with laugh-out-loud wit, while the prose stays in tune with genuine human characters and a colorful setting.
**** Marc Strange, Woman Chased by Crows, ECW, $24.95. In this smartly told tale by Edgar-winner Strange, a Toronto police detective makes a visit to a small Ontario town, giving an inconsistent explanation about a dead Russian in a hotel. But the dead man turns out to be the detective himself. Local police chief Orwell Brennan juggles family issues while investigating the murder and its connection to a paranoid Russian ballet instructor and a promiscuous psychologist. Crows, like magpies, are attracted to shiny objects, like the ninety-seven-carat ruby that once belonged to the Tsarina and may have made its way into this small Canadian town.
*** Randall Silvis, The Boy Who Shoots Crows, Berkley Prime Crime, $15.00. In rural Pennsylvania, a twelve-year-old boy, last seen shooting at crows by a local artist, has gone missing. The lonely sheriff is drawn toward the artist, who recently moved from New York to escape an oppressive marriage. But she can’t escape migraines, haunting feelings, or her reliance on pain pills. Silvis’s novel is less a mystery than it is a novel of psychological suspense and it might have worked better had the dialogue and inner thoughts of the characters been better distinguished from one another.
**** Stef Penney, The Invisible Ones, Putnam, $25.95. In a departure from her first novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, Penney tells a story in two voices about the search for a Gypsy girl who disappeared seven years earlier. Ray Lovell, a half-Gypsy P.I. reeling from the breakup of his marriage, becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Rose Janko and unwrapping the secrets of the Janko family. His narrative is interwoven with chapters told from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old nephew of the missing girl, a fatherless Gypsy boy trying to find his own place in the world.
**** Dennis Palumbo, Fever Dream, Poisoned Pen Press, $24.95 HC, $14.95 TPB. Running at a fever pitch, Palumbo’s second novel featuring Pitts-burgh psychotherapist Dan Rinaldi opens with the trauma expert called to the scene of a bank robbery and hostage situation. Rinaldi’s commitment to the case and uneasy attraction to the detective in charge lead him to old adversaries, political wheeling and dealing, and an upcoming gubernatorial election. Multiple twists attest to the fact that Palumbo, a psychotherapist himself, got his chops in Hollywood.
**** Margaret Maron, Three-Day Town, Grand Central Publishing, $25.99. In this entertaining crossover, Maron brings two series protagonists—Judge Deborah Knott and Lt. Sigrid Harald—together in a case involving stolen art, New York society, and murder. Judge Knott and her husband are in New York for a belated honeymoon, having brought along a package for one of Knott’s distant cousins. The cousin turns out to be the mother of Harald, (last seen in 1995’s Fugitive Colors), and the package contains a rare erotic statuette. Maron took risks reviving an old character and interweaving stories from both perspectives, but the result is a fun fish-out-of-water adventure.
*** Donald E. Westlake, The Comedy is Finished, Hard Case Crime, $25.99. This newly discovered novel written by Westlake thirty years ago was ultimately shelved, in part because of its plot’s similarity to Martin Scorsese’s 1983 film The King of Comedy. The book, the first hardcover book to be published by Hard Case Crime, is pure Westlake: part caper, part thriller, and part darkly comedic character study. In the wake of Watergate, ageing comedian Koo Davis is kidnapped by a revolutionary fringe group. The showdown with the FBI is tense, tragic, and at times touching.
*** Charles Beckman, Jr., Honky-Tonk Girl, Borgo Press, $14.99. First published in 1953 and featuring cover art from the original Falcon digest paperback, Honky-Tonk Girl is a hardboiled novel set in the world of jazz, by Texas pulp-writer and jazzman Beckman. Drummer Miff Smith was a ladies’ man, in the habit of dating multiple women every night until one shot him in the head. Brooding bandleader Johnny Nickles measures up the suspects while dodging a corrupt local sheriff.
Angry Robot Books is a UK-based publisher specializing in noir, offbeat, and cutting-edge science fiction. What drew them to our attention was the number of titles that crossed genres into crime and detection. While trans-genre isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, adventurous readers will want to check them out. All titles are also available in electronic formats. We had a chance to sample four new novels.
Chris Holm, Dead Harvest, Angry Robot Books, $7.99. With a gritty three-tone cover reminiscent of the old Penguin paperbacks, Dead Harvest features an otherworldly bounty hunter, The Collector, whose job is to capture the souls of the departed bound for pur
gatory. But when sent to retrieve a teenage girl accused of slaughtering her family, The Collector is convinced she’s innocent and so begins a single-minded mission to dismantle a cosmic conspiracy.
Adam Christopher, Empire State, Angry Robot Books, $12.99. When the woman P.I. Rad Bradley is searching for turns up dead, the jaded detective learns her killer may have been a doppelganger of himself from a parallel version of New York City. Set in several alternative universes where police airships patrol the skies and superheroes battle supervillains, Empire State works as a P.I. story, an homage to comic-book heroes, and a science fiction mind-twister with parallel “pocket” universes.
Guy Haley, Omega Point, Angry Robot Books, $7.99. Otto Klein is an emotionally restrained cyborg. His partner is a Class 5 Artificial Intelligence who wears a trenchcoat and fedora. Together they travel between the real world and several dozen virtual reality realms pursuing a rogue Artificial Intelligence determined to take over all of reality. The result is a thriller that explores how realms of virtual reality might bleed into the real world.
Lavie Tidhar, The Great Game, Angry Robot Books, $7.99. This third in a series of steampunk adventures with fictional and historical characters from the Victorian age is packed with references from classical crime and horror fiction. Doctors Jekyll, Frankenstein, and Moreau all make appearances, as does Irene Adler, Bram Stoker, several characters from Dracula,and Agatha Christie’s village of St. Mary Mead. Looming in the background is a famous detective referred to only as “the beekeeper.” But the central plot of the novel involves a hero named Smith on a mission to find the killer of Mycroft Holmes.
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Steinbock
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PASSPORT TO CRIME
PASSPORT TO CRIME
THE STRANGE ARCHITECTURE OF DESTINY
by Eliécer Cárdenas
Eliécer Cárdenas is one of Ecuador’s most respected literary authors. He has won numerous writing awards, and his 1979 novel, Polvo y ceniza (Dust and Ashes), about a real-life bandit hero who...
REVIEWS
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
PASSPORT TO CRIME
THE STRANGE ARCHITECTURE OF DESTINY
by Eliécer Cárdenas
Eliécer Cárdenas is one of Ecuador’s most respected literary authors. He has won numerous writing awards, and his 1979 novel, Polvo y ceniza (Dust and Ashes), about a real-life bandit hero who prowled the border between Ecuador and Peru, is considered one of the canonical Ecuadorian novels of the twentieth century. Readers can find extracts of that novel in the appendix of translator Kenneth Wishnia’s academic study, Twentieth-Century Ecuadorian Narrative (Bucknell UP, 1999).
Translated from the Spanish by KennethWishnia
What missteps will he make with the clumsy iciness of his scythe?
—Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo
He saw her again after—what, three or four years? It was her all right, unmistakable with her cinnamon-colored skin and features that reminded him of the native princess in a marvelous mural by Diego Rivera that he once saw in a magazine. She was about to enter the building that he had just left a moment before. She was wearing a pair of sheer white slacks and a lilac-hued blouse cinched at the waist. Then her unforgettable profile got lost in the crowd going in and out of the revolving doors.
He resolved to follow her and speak to her this time, although he had only caught occasional glimpses of her over the course of his life. He had seen her for the first time when he was already married and she was quite young. He saw her riding a bicycle along the paths in a park and, struck from afar by her radiant adolescent beauty, stopped to look at her, putting off some task that he doesn’t even remember, to wait among the trees for her as she reappeared, riding toward him on her girl’s bicycle. As she crossed his path a second time, she gave him a smile that was full of mysteries and prophecies. Unable to follow the girl, he decided to preserve her image in his memory.
He saw her again a year or two later. By then he had corrected the mistake of his first marriage with a no-fault divorce that cost him the apartment he had paid for on the installment plan and the secondhand car they had used to handle the distance between their brand-new home and their jobs. They had no children. Fortunately, their relationship had come apart before they seriously considered bringing children into the world. He was drinking an espresso and meditating bitterly on the fleeting nature of what people call love, which at that stage, with his disastrous marriage weighing on his shoulders, seemed like some kind of polite lie or magical spell whose purpose was to ease the despair, boredom, and monotony that followed the brief delight of infatuation, which took a wrong turn when they decided to spend their lives together, when he saw her through the window of the café walking along the sidewalk. He recognized her immediately. She was one of those women you don’t easily forget; her movements were feline, confident, and vaguely threatening, and she was fully aware of the men gazing at her, but remained in command of her own carefully crafted solitude. He paid for the coffee and ran after the woman who, simply by reappearing before his eyes, produced an emotion in him that he didn’t expect to feel anymore, but there it was once again. As he followed her from a safe distance, he realized that she was no longer the young girl of a couple of years ago, but a full-grown woman who carried herself proudly, with a spring in her step, in complete control of who she was. He imagined her with a boyfriend or a lover, and when she stopped to look in a store window, he slowed down and looked at her, waiting for her to notice him. She responded with a slight but radiant smile, and he kept walking past her, thinking that it wasn’t worth the trouble of getting involved with such a splendid girl while the splinters of his broken marriage were still digging into his flesh and, well, because he still had some hope of getting back together with the woman who had been his wife.
Many years passed, and he forgot about the woman he had seen a couple of times so long ago. He traveled overseas on business and managed to grow quite bored with Amsterdam, although as a consolation he became a fan of cold beer and solitary walks, which gave him the opportunity to admire all the young blond women with the whitest-white, velvety-smooth skin that they showed off with such determination while strolling around the tulip-filled parks, their shadows stretching off to infinity in the late-afternoon splendor that reminded him of the golden polish on an antique and princely set of silver dinnerware.
He returned to his native land and got married again, and this marriage lasted long enough to produce two children who transformed his home life into a peaceful, all-encompassing haven: placid, maybe a bit monotonous, true, but that was the trade-off for stability. Any marital disagreements they had were barely noticeable as they dropped the kids off at a day-care center that was run like a tiny sovereign state for children. It consumed a good part of the couple’s budget, but they felt it was worth it for the good of the children, who were attended on like demanding little monarchs. His wife worked very long hours and rose up through the ranks to an important managerial position, from which she toppled when Pedro, one of their little ones, died at the day-care center due to an unexplained respiratory failure that the specialists attributed to a congenital condition. There was nothing they could do about it. The child was destined to pass away suddenly and unexpectedly. His mother found it impossible to continue her career, as if quitting her job was the price she had to pay to protect her surviving child. It was an irrational decision, made so abruptly that it muddied their relationship to the point that, without knowing exactly how it happened, it led to their separation. He felt bad for her, since she had abandoned her dreams of success and had lost him as well due to the sudden death of their little one. It wasn’t fair. But who ever said life was fair?
There was a period following the breakup of his second marriage when he started to see the mystery woman more often. One time it was at a movie theater. She had gone to see the same film and they exchanged looks in the lobby, the
ir faces lit up by the glow of the marquee. Shortly after, he spotted her on the corner while he was riding the bus. It was only a fleeting vision, but clear enough for him to realize that she was as magnificent as ever and that all those times he had seen her, she had never been with somebody else. She was always alone, as if she didn’t need anyone by her side. She stood out like a single flower against the dull gray background of a vacant lot. Sometimes he thought about her. When he found himself in the tiny apartment he rented after his second divorce, lying on the bed with his shoes off and his hands clasped behind his neck, he would entertain himself by imagining the long-awaited encounter with this mysterious woman who, he supposed, was some kind of high point or milestone in his life.
He wasn’t particularly religious, but since he was on his own again he occasionally flipped through a Bible that someone had given him in the hopes that it might bring him some comfort, and he read some verses that said that there is a time for everything: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to sow and a time to reap. Would there be a time for him to be with this mystery woman who kept turning up with the randomness of a winning lottery number? He saw her again during this period, three or four more times. They even said hello when they saw each other, as if they were friends, but he always walked right on by, regretting that he didn’t have the courage to stop and talk to her. She must have thought he was a strange and timid little man.
He started to dream up stories about this woman: that she was always alone because her lover was a jealous millionaire who insisted that she visit him on the weekends at some luxurious hotel in the country or at an exclusive beach with a dock full of yachts. Or, he imagined that she had sworn to become an unsolvable riddle to all men because of some horrible betrayal during her adolescence. Or that her mother or her father were invalids, and that caring for them had used up her ability to show affection for others. He preferred to stick with the image of the millionaire lover: that way, he could feel like he was playing a small, tangential role in the beginning of a risky but worthwhile adventure. Three years after that string of chance encounters with the woman, he saw her once again. She was leaving a clothing store, carrying the kind of bag used for feminine garments and accessories. Her movements were light and silky, flowing like a creature who was not of this world. She seemed so distant and unreal that for a few seconds he felt as if she were a product of his imagination. Her hair was styled in the latest fashion, shimmering with an iridescent glow that made him think of the black marble dome of a Hindu temple in one of those exotic tourist brochures. He chose not to approach her, as always. What could he possibly say to her? That they knew each other on account of a bunch of completely random encounters? Should he play the fool by introducing himself and offering his hand like some kind of pretentious Casanova? But time is unforgiving, he thought, and he was afraid that they might both be old and gray before they met again and finally had the opportunity to talk. Would there even be another opportunity? The chance meetings were just that, unlikely to be repeated.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 Page 30
