A Long Time Coming
Aaron Elkins
Mystery
Ahh, the classic looted-Nazi-art suspense tale. Aaron Elkins has done this sort of thing before, in the Chris Norgren novels and the standalone thrillers Loot and Turncoat. And you know what? Like the art itself, it never gets old.
A Long Time Coming picks up speed gradually; it's about the middle of the book before the violence begins. I didn't mind. The setup is interesting in its own right, and the story of Solomon Bezzecca--the victim of the looting--is quite powerful. Once the scene shifts to Milan (yes, it's another one of those books that makes you want to travel someplace and eat things) the plot thickens nicely, with several layers of murkily-agenda'd characters to choose among. There's some good art history and some good art technical details and a nice cryptic development or two for the protagonist to puzzle over.
It's not groundbreaking. It's not going to be picked up for a big-budget Hollywood thriller starring Tom Cruise. It is, however, great fun. I'm not generally prone to car metaphors--I'm a train nut--but I can't help thinking of A Long Time Coming as the literary equivalent of a ride in a sports car with a good driver. The gear changes come smoothly, you get just the right amount of excitement, the car handles superbly, and when you get to the end you'd be happy to do it again.
Or, to put it another way: not once did I think "Oh, come on, I could do better than that." If you think that's a low bar, you didn't read this, this, this, this, this, or this. Among others.
Monday, August 20, 2018
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Book Review: Conan Doyle for the Defense
Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer
Margalit Fox
True crime
This is a pretty good book, but it's probably a better book if you haven't already read a half-dozen other pretty good books covering the same material. For one thing, the Oscar Slater case isn't truly a "forgotten cause célebrè". For another, Arthur Conan Doyle's role--while certainly extremely important--isn't quite what Margalit Fox would like you to think.
Finally, Margalit Fox is intent on fitting Doyle, Slater, and the crime into an overarching narrative about Social Justice and The Victorian Mind and Other Big Important Issues. She's far more right than wrong; but the real world is not actually this neat, and she has to do some judicious editing, hand-waving, and generalizing to make everything go where it's supposed to.
To summarize quite a bit, here's Fox's story:
Margalit Fox
True crime
This is a pretty good book, but it's probably a better book if you haven't already read a half-dozen other pretty good books covering the same material. For one thing, the Oscar Slater case isn't truly a "forgotten cause célebrè". For another, Arthur Conan Doyle's role--while certainly extremely important--isn't quite what Margalit Fox would like you to think.
Finally, Margalit Fox is intent on fitting Doyle, Slater, and the crime into an overarching narrative about Social Justice and The Victorian Mind and Other Big Important Issues. She's far more right than wrong; but the real world is not actually this neat, and she has to do some judicious editing, hand-waving, and generalizing to make everything go where it's supposed to.
To summarize quite a bit, here's Fox's story:
- The murder in question was a sensation at the time and a major event in the evolution of he justice system. (Exaggerated)
- The choice of Oscar Slater as culprit had more to do with contemporary social attitudes, particularly anxiety towards aliens, than anything else. (True)
- The police investigation was a travesty. (True in spades)
- Slater's guilt was not discovered but constructed. (True)
- Conan Doyle was a genuinely admirable person, and exemplifies the virtues of his time as much as the bogus investigation and trial exemplified its vices. (Largely true, but incomplete)
- Without Doyle, Slater would never have been released. (Exaggerated)
The truth is that many, many people other than Doyle knew that the verdict was a gross miscarriage of justice. Doyle's major contributions were to write an outstanding and devastating summation and analysis of the case, which nonetheless didn't get Slater released, and to lend his enormous prestige and his connections to the cause.
Look: I liked the book. It has great pacing, a generally sound thesis, some magnificent character portraits, pathos, and a fine sense of time and place. Whether it would be a better book if it were more restrained and less carefully topiaried into shape is an unanswerable question.
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Book Review: Bryant and May: Wild Chamber
Bryant and May: Wild Chamber: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery
Christopher Fowler
Mystery
I've never been able to make up my mind about how I feel about this series. Maybe that's because Christopher Fowler doesn't seem to have made up his mind, either.
Wild Chamber is pretty typical, really. There are elements of black comedy in it, but it's not really a comedy. There are elements of satire in it, but it's not really satire. There are chunks of urban grit, but it's not a hardboiled novel. There are realistic parts, written about natural-seeming characters in believable settings, and then there are parts that seem to have wandered over from Douglas Adams and set up shop. It's sort of a whodunit, although the ending is as much "whuh?" as "ah-hah!" (To be fair, I've read much worse.)
Half the time it seems as though Fowler doesn't like most of his characters, which is a downer. And in every book of the series there's a B plot in which Peculiar Crimes Unit is on the verge of being shut down by the Powers That Be, which frankly gets pretty repetitive.
What's good about it, you ask? (You do. Trust me.) Well, I adore the amiably melancholy off-kilter lead character, Arthur Bryant; he's like Lieutenant Columbo as written by P. G. Wodehouse. There are some excellent deductive bits along the way: "I knew how he got into the garden as soon as I found out that Mrs. Soandso kept a budgerigar". There are plot twists. There are suspects who are actually suspicious. It's wildly creative and full of useless facts. I like the setting. Some of the funny bits are, in fact, quite funny. I didn't spot the culprit until near the end, either.
A mixed bag, in other words--a collection disparate parts, not exactly fitting together, yet it all more or less works out. (That describes the Peculiar Crimes Unit itself, incidentally, as well as the books that feature it.) Christopher Fowler's own website describes the lead characters as "Golden Age Detectives in a modern world", which actually puts it rather neatly. If that doesn't sound like the kind of thing you like, it probably isn't. Otherwise . . . well, I'm not going to be buying the books in hardcover, but I'll pick up the next one if it strikes my fancy.
Christopher Fowler
Mystery
I've never been able to make up my mind about how I feel about this series. Maybe that's because Christopher Fowler doesn't seem to have made up his mind, either.
Wild Chamber is pretty typical, really. There are elements of black comedy in it, but it's not really a comedy. There are elements of satire in it, but it's not really satire. There are chunks of urban grit, but it's not a hardboiled novel. There are realistic parts, written about natural-seeming characters in believable settings, and then there are parts that seem to have wandered over from Douglas Adams and set up shop. It's sort of a whodunit, although the ending is as much "whuh?" as "ah-hah!" (To be fair, I've read much worse.)
Half the time it seems as though Fowler doesn't like most of his characters, which is a downer. And in every book of the series there's a B plot in which Peculiar Crimes Unit is on the verge of being shut down by the Powers That Be, which frankly gets pretty repetitive.
What's good about it, you ask? (You do. Trust me.) Well, I adore the amiably melancholy off-kilter lead character, Arthur Bryant; he's like Lieutenant Columbo as written by P. G. Wodehouse. There are some excellent deductive bits along the way: "I knew how he got into the garden as soon as I found out that Mrs. Soandso kept a budgerigar". There are plot twists. There are suspects who are actually suspicious. It's wildly creative and full of useless facts. I like the setting. Some of the funny bits are, in fact, quite funny. I didn't spot the culprit until near the end, either.
A mixed bag, in other words--a collection disparate parts, not exactly fitting together, yet it all more or less works out. (That describes the Peculiar Crimes Unit itself, incidentally, as well as the books that feature it.) Christopher Fowler's own website describes the lead characters as "Golden Age Detectives in a modern world", which actually puts it rather neatly. If that doesn't sound like the kind of thing you like, it probably isn't. Otherwise . . . well, I'm not going to be buying the books in hardcover, but I'll pick up the next one if it strikes my fancy.
Monday, August 13, 2018
Book Review: Buzz
Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees
Thor Hanson
Natural History
Another fine book from the author of Feathers and The Triumph of Seeds. Hanson has a gift for picking interesting subjects, and for delving into the most interesting topics within them.
More than that, he has a gift for narrative flow. One of his better techniques, for example, is to unobtrusively shift paragraph breaks. That is, he takes what would be the conventional break-point between two related paragraphs and moves it a sentence or two ahead. (Indeed, he sometimes does the same thing at the chapter level.) Done badly, this would be incoherent--but Hanson manages to make it work; it's a way of introducing a little smidgen of suspense, of tension that's immediately resolved, into the text.
As to the content of Buzz, I defy you to read this and not start looking for bees the next time you go outdoors. They're extraordinary little critters. Not just the honeybees, either, although Hanson does necessarily devote a good deal of space to them. Sweat bees, carpenter bees, mason bees, bees with tongues longer than they are, parasitic bees, flowers that are codependent on one specific sort of bee, flowers that are actually bee escape rooms, flowers that look like female bees (guys are alike throughout the animal kingdom) . . . it's like the first time you ever walked into the American Museum of Natural History and saw the dinosaur skeletons. You can't help but say: Wow.
Thor Hanson
Natural History
Another fine book from the author of Feathers and The Triumph of Seeds. Hanson has a gift for picking interesting subjects, and for delving into the most interesting topics within them.
More than that, he has a gift for narrative flow. One of his better techniques, for example, is to unobtrusively shift paragraph breaks. That is, he takes what would be the conventional break-point between two related paragraphs and moves it a sentence or two ahead. (Indeed, he sometimes does the same thing at the chapter level.) Done badly, this would be incoherent--but Hanson manages to make it work; it's a way of introducing a little smidgen of suspense, of tension that's immediately resolved, into the text.
As to the content of Buzz, I defy you to read this and not start looking for bees the next time you go outdoors. They're extraordinary little critters. Not just the honeybees, either, although Hanson does necessarily devote a good deal of space to them. Sweat bees, carpenter bees, mason bees, bees with tongues longer than they are, parasitic bees, flowers that are codependent on one specific sort of bee, flowers that are actually bee escape rooms, flowers that look like female bees (guys are alike throughout the animal kingdom) . . . it's like the first time you ever walked into the American Museum of Natural History and saw the dinosaur skeletons. You can't help but say: Wow.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Book Review: West Like Lightning
West Like Lighting: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express
Jim DeFelice
History
The historiography of the American West is debated territory. On one side are the mythologizers; on the other, the debunkers. Good books that take the middle ground are few and far between. West Like Lightning tries, but Jim DeFelice's heart is with the mythmakers.
Mind you, it's an easy read; it's just a rather lightweight one. DeFelice structures his book by following the course of an express rider from east to west, draping it as he goes with local color, geography, stories, outtakes, and whatnot. Periodically he veers back in time to go into the Pony's founding, or forward to look at its ultimate fate. He's actually pretty scrupulous about what he claims as actual unvarnished fact; on the other hand, he's fairly liberal in including (admittedly with proper caveats) the inevitable there's-no-proof-it-didn't-happen excursions.
DeFelice, in other words, mainly wants to tell a good yarn. (He's a thriller writer, and it shows. Many academic historians eschew terms like "pucker factor" and "major badass", for example. Go figure.) He did his homework, then decorated it extensively to produce a book that's amiable, discursive, lively, and lightweight.
Jim DeFelice
History
The historiography of the American West is debated territory. On one side are the mythologizers; on the other, the debunkers. Good books that take the middle ground are few and far between. West Like Lightning tries, but Jim DeFelice's heart is with the mythmakers.
Mind you, it's an easy read; it's just a rather lightweight one. DeFelice structures his book by following the course of an express rider from east to west, draping it as he goes with local color, geography, stories, outtakes, and whatnot. Periodically he veers back in time to go into the Pony's founding, or forward to look at its ultimate fate. He's actually pretty scrupulous about what he claims as actual unvarnished fact; on the other hand, he's fairly liberal in including (admittedly with proper caveats) the inevitable there's-no-proof-it-didn't-happen excursions.
DeFelice, in other words, mainly wants to tell a good yarn. (He's a thriller writer, and it shows. Many academic historians eschew terms like "pucker factor" and "major badass", for example. Go figure.) He did his homework, then decorated it extensively to produce a book that's amiable, discursive, lively, and lightweight.
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