Uncovering Writing

2 of 5 stars

This started out feeling like an MFA thesis, but the flow of the writing was good and I wanted to see what developed. By the time I hit the third section, I felt that a great premise went from an intriguing satire/parody to a middling horror story. It also felt like a literary genre author testing the waters of the horror genre, with the writing being too clever by half. The ending felt unreal and the knots tied up too nicely. I still have to say that I did want to read to the end, i.e. I never wanted to just abandon reading.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A guilty pleasure that I’m sure Brother Cadfael would relish and embrace. As fun and quick a read as any Sherlock Holmes.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m a big fan of Le Fanu’s short stories, especially his collection “In a Glass, Darkly”. I think The Wyvern Mystery would have been better if it wasn’t novel length. It rambled on for far too long, even though most chapters were only a few pages in length each. Things were also tied up way to neatly in the final few chapters. I’m glad I read this but hope that two of his other novels that are on my to read list are better.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m always one for good book porn, but sadly there wasn’t enough in this one for me. I don’t like unreliable narrators and also found the narrator to be snobby and arrogant. I can like heroes and antiheroes, but there has to be something to like or admire (secretly, perhaps). The characters were never fully developed for me to know them. They were more cardboard cutouts, especially the sole female character.

In this genre, I prefer Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas and The Flanders Panel.

In a Glass Darkly by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After reading Carmilla by itself last summer, someone suggested that I keep reading J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s works. I picked up a beautiful edition of In a Glass Darkly and read it during the last few months. I moved slowly, due to being busy and distracted, but also so that I could savor his writings. This collection of five stories (three short stories and basically two novellas) were so perfect for me that this volume has jumped high onto my favorites list.

Since I mentioned the physicality of the book, let me start there first. It’s a very nice, 1929 edition from Peter Davies, with many small, beautiful illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. There’s something to be said for a physical book. The paper is thick, the boards firm and heavy. It was solid in my hands and just a pleasure to hold. I bought it from Any Amount of Books, a fantastic shop on Charing Cross Road in London.

Turning to the stories, I’d only ever read Carmilla. At the time, I praised it as a fantastic story that predated Dracula and was just something I couldn’t stop reading. Like Laura, I was drawn to Carmilla but couldn’t explain it. The story was just as good, perhaps better, the second time through.

I had heard the name Green Tea, the first story, but knew nothing of it. It was great. The spectral monkey was awesomely spooky and terrifying. Le Fanu describes so little but says so much. Like the spectral monkey of Green Tea, the footsteps heard by no one there was simply terrifying in The Familiar, his second story. I never really was gripped by the third story, Mr. Justice Harbottle. But, I know I will return to this volume again and again over the years, so perhaps it will grow on me. The Room in the Dragon Volant was brilliant, closest to the beauty of Carmilla. The terror of paralysis, almost being buried alive, and love betrayed made for a fantastical story.

I like how Le Fanu talked about writers. In Green Tea, he talked about the relationship between writers and stimulants, something that I can relate to:

“I believe that every one who sets about writing in earnest does his work, as a friend of mine phrased it, on something– tea, coffee or tobacco. I suppose there is a material waste that must be hourly supplied in such occupations, or that we should grow too abstracted, and the mind, as it were, pass out of the body, unless it were reminded often of the connection by actual sensation” (p. 23).

The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I liked the Club Dumas a great deal and was very much looking forward to reading The Flanders Panel. I must confess I like books more than painting or chess, but I came away so very much pleased with this book. A great story with strong characters and simply beautiful language. As one other commenter here noted, the translator (Margaret Jull Costa) did not stand in the way of the words. She did an excellent job and I savored every page of Pérez-Reverte’s book.

Like the Club Dumas, I felt happy, and perhaps a little smug, by knowing some of the inside references the author made. Be it dealing with chess, the paintings, or references to old stories and myths, I was ever thankful for my classical education and my continued delight in those topics.

My biggest problem with this book was when I would finish it, i.e. in 2013 or 2014. It would have been great to end the year on such a wonderful book. But, I will take it as a good omen to start the year by completing this delightful novel.

The Ice Cold Nude by Carter Brown

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve always had a thing for hardboiled stories. I loved Raymond Chandler. I’d tried Dashiell Hammet and enjoyed how the story flowed but missed Chandler’s social and societal commentary. I tried James M. Cain, reading his posthumously completed The Cocktail Waitress and didn’t like it. I thought maybe it was due to it being finished and finessed by someone else. I’d read Japanese hardboiled novels and liked them.

So, now I turned to Carter Brown, aka Alan Geoffrey Yates. He wrote hundreds of books in various genres, including hardboiled. I’d seen a few of his books, including this title, at the Southbank Book Market in London but I didn’t pick any up. My loss. Back home, I decided to give his stories a go, and started with this one.

I have to say I enjoyed it. The plot was kind of weak and the characters were developed only as archetypes of the genre. But it read fast and fun. The dialogue and narrative never held the story down but it also never left you feeling like you were watching a rerun of an old TV show. I think that the hardboiled genre is excellent research material for writers of all types of fiction. Pacing, word choice, and voice are almost always executed perfectly. No matter if the plot is weak, the sexism strong or the bad guys cardboard cutout thugs, it’s a good yarn.

Don’t Look Back by Karin Fossum

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I tried another Scandinavian mystery, this time choosing Karin Fossum, a Norwegian writer. She’s my fourth writer from this area, and my second Norwegian. My first was Gunnar Staalesen. The Swede was Henning Mankell and the Icelander, Arnaldur Indriðason. I was hoping for something better this time but I came away disappointed again. The story was violent and depressing, like the other three. This is one of the draws for this genre, but I guess I was trying to find something beyond just that.

The pacing of the story, especially the bulk middle of it, was very good. I flew through the prose, waiting for the next outcome. But, the ending seemed a bit too tied up, a little rushed. I felt like I was reading a Hollywood script and not a novel. And like the other books I’ve read from this geographic area and genre, I was surprised and shocked at the stereotyping and strong bias against the non-white characters. Barely mentioned, barely treated as fellow humans, they are one-dimensional cut-outs used to reconfirm a biased point of view.

I guess I’m more of an English mystery fan. It’s not that I’m turned off by violence or dark psychological situations. I am a devoted fan of Minette Walters, and I don’t think anyone would call her work happy or feel-good.

A Study in Scarlet / The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finally read the first Sherlock Holmes mystery. I enjoyed A Study in Scarlet, but not as much as I did the Hound of the Baskervilles, the other tale included in this volume.

The first part of A Study in Scarlet was fun, with the introduction of Dr. Watson and Holmes, how they met, their backgrounds and quirks. It was nice to be able to have some backstory instead of just seeing the convivial relationship that I jumped into with later stories and the various film interpretations. The second part of the story, told mainly in the past, was a little more difficult to parse and not really what I expected from a Holmes tale. Then again, this was the first Holmes and it was a “novel” way of telling the story. A short conclusion tied together the two stories, almost a little too neatly. Like the other story in this volume, A Study in Scarlet was a very quick read. Doyle knows how to write smooth, flowing text that propels you from start to finish. It was hard to keep putting down the story as each successive page begged me to read it. I really loved one specific sentence. It could have been common usage from the time the novel was written, but I thoroughly enjoyed it:

"I will now cut one of these pills in two," said Holmes, and drawing his penknife he suited the action to the word. (p. 68)

I must note that I was a bit put off by the sexism, classism and racism in the story. Doyle paints Native Americans, Arab children, working class people and women very poorly. In the past, I might have said that this was simply a sign of the times and forcing a 20th/21st century mindset onto a late 19th century book. However, after having read one of Doyle’s contemporaries, H.G. Wells, especially in his volume Ann Veronica, I can say that there were authors who were writing progressively at that time. In fact, one can jump back to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and even her parents for progressive works in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. So, that was a bit of a negative for me, but overall, I still enjoyed the story.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is my absolute favorite Holmes story. I’m so happy to finally own it in a physical copy. I’ve read it online and on my Kindle using Project Gutenberg’s edition. I will come back to this volume often, although likely just to reread “The Hound”.

I’d give the Hound five stars, which I did when I reviewed it in another GoodReads entry, and I’d give A Study in Scarlet three to three and a half stars. So, to honestly rate this volume as a whole, I’ll give it four stars.

City of Refuge by Kenzo Kitakata

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The perils of waiting so long for a book to finally come out are that you might raise your expectations too high. This happened with Kenzo Kitakata’s City of Refuge. I was waiting for it for years. Each time the publication date neared, it was pushed back a few months. This went on and on. My mother-in-law ordered it for me and it sat on her queue for years until she dropped it. I gave up on it and then it appeared just around Christmas last year. So, I finally got my hands on it as a gift from my wife’s parents and I started reading it in February.

There wasn’t much of a plot and none of the characters were really developed outside of a simplistic 2-D frame. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Kitakata has a way of painting a scene and drawing one into it to contemplate it from inside the mind of the main character. I think this was what I loved about his novel Winter Sleep, but now I wonder if I should reread it to see if I’m missing something. But as for CIty of Refuge, I could never relate to any of the characters or feel for them. It felt a little like watching an episode of Peter Gunn from the 1950s and 60s. It had an aura but little plot and little character outside of what the generic genre provided.

I’m glad I read the book and glad that I had the opportunity to read all of his works that have been translated into English. I will hesitate before buying another of his novels but I will someday go back to Winter Sleep and maybe Ashes to see if City of Refuge was an aberration. I was so caught up in Japanese noir after reading Natsuo Kirino’s Out. I wonder if that book, which had a strong identity and feminist streak to it, got me excited to read anything I could in that area and I might not have had such a critical eye at first. No matter, I read City of Refuge and did not put it aside, so it was good enough to demand I finish it.

The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

When some people talk derisively about pulp novels or hardboiled crime fiction of the early to mid 20th century, this book is an example of why their opinions shouldn’t always be disregarded. I really wanted to like this book, a posthumously edited and published book from one of the trinity of hardboiled fiction: James M. Cain. He, along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, propelled this genre to great heights during their creative careers. I really like some of Chandler’s books (e.g. The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep) but others just seem weak or two-dimensional. I never could get into Hammett. Cain falls squarely into the “don’t really like” category. I guess I like hardboiled fiction when it also explores the larger social situation the story is set in. To simply create a salacious or subversive story isn’t enough, for me. We need to explore why it’s “naughty” and who we are critiquing and why.

Cain is an expert at prose, moving the reader effortlessly from the first page to the end. But the plot is weak and the characters are cardboard cutouts, laking depth and never asking the reader to like or hate them. There’s plenty of room for social commentary on working mothers, alcoholism, manufactured ideas and ideals of social stature, and so forth, but the author chooses to not delve into any of it.

Part of the problem is that this book was pulled together from a slew of both finished and partial manuscript versions, along with handwritten notes and comments from the author. All of these save one were not dated, so the progression of Cain’s thoughts can only be assumed. The editor, Charles Ardai, seems to say that his selecting a section from one manuscript, a chapter from another, a name of a character from a third, etc. is just what editors do with their living authors. He notes that his “editee” is deceased but claims that isn’t much of an impediment.

This is all described in an afterword to the book, where Ardai also defends Cain’s oeuvre with an almost nonsensical form of logic. If Cain was hated, it was because he was so good. If you thought he was bad, you missed the point. Things along those lines. He seems to claim that the ultimate vindication of this writer is that some of his books were made into movies that turned out to be successful. I wonder if the Afterword was left off, if I’d come away a little less disappointed with the book. Having a lifelong fan edit an unfinished book and then praise the effort seems a little much.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another three star Chandler. I’m guessing this might do me in for more of his books. The Big Sleep (1939) was a spectacular introduction to Chandler’s style and world. And his The Long Goodbye (1953) has made it into my top ten favorite books.

Like Farewell, My Lovely, there are just too many descriptive sections in The Little Sister that go on and on, usually at the beginning of a chapter. It slows the hardboiled, fast-pace style that drew me to Chandler’s prose in the first place. The story here is good but the execution just isn’t there.

Weird, the two books I don’t like fell in between the two I really liked. As I said before, read The Long Goodbye. It’s well worth it for social commentary, fast-paced writing, and a good time. Trust me.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I turned to Dashiell Hammet since he was one of the first authors to popularize the hardboiled genre. This style is one of my favorites, and I’ve read examples of it from American and Japanese authors. I really love Raymond Chandler, who is sometimes called Hammet’s successor. On a meta-level, I was also excited that Hammet was born in my adopted state of Maryland (in St. Mary’s County) and grew up in Philly (my hometown) and Baltimore (my new hometown and where I worked for many years). Alas, the stars didn’t align to make this a great book for me.

The hardboiled style of fast-paced, staccato writing is absolutely there. Hammet has mastered the art of story telling and I wanted to finish the book almost from the very first page. However, unlike Chandler, there was no social context or message. I have called Chandler a hardboiled Steinbeck: dealing with social issues while still telling a great detective story. Hammet’s characters are two-dimensional cut outs who lack any nuanced behaviors or redeeming factors. They have no backstory or clear motivation. There’s no discussion of the overall social situation, how things got the way they were, why it should be fixed and how that might not work anyway.

In Red Harvest, one has a very utilitarian story of bad guys getting taken down by the scheming of an unnamed and shady detective. This feels ore like the script for a late 20th/early 21st century Hollywood film. Lots of “shoot ‘em up”, sexiness and drinking, rather than a well-honed novel from the early 20th. Alas, I probably won’t read any more Hammet.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was looking forward to trying another Scandinavian mystery, especially one set in a city that I actually visited back in 2000. The premise of the book was interesting but there was very little character development beyond two-dimensional characters and stereotypes of victims and perpetrators. The characters never jumped off the pages and sometimes acted in ways that furthered the plot rather than reflecting their back history. An example of the latter is every appearance of Erlendur’s daughter, Eva Lind. Over time, she might have changed her attitude towards her father, but not at the pace set by the author. As for the story itself, it seemed a little melodramatic and overly complex and then tidied up too quickly in the end.

I gave the story two stars (“It was ok”) since I truly wanted to read to the end and I wasn’t shaking my head all the time. It was a quick read to boot.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Farewell five stars? Chandler’s second novel, my third of his I read and my first non-5-star rating. I really liked his first novel, The Big Sleep and then found The Long Goodbye, published 14 years later, to be an excellent read and hardboiled social commentary. I was looking forward to Farewell, My Lovely and left not upset but not happy.

The hardboiled lingo he used so well in The Big Sleep was fleshed out with too many descriptive words in this book. It reminded me of advice I received in a writing class about how much description to use and how you should hit so many senses with each sentence. The crisp, rapid-fire pace of his other books, and the genre in general, is slowed down so much that it was a chore to read some sections. When Chandler dropped into dialogue mode, his touch returned, but the narrative never matched the pace of his characters talking to each other. While that was my bigger beef, I wasn’t as interested in the plot line in this novel. It seemed forced, less believable and with too many two-dimensional characters.

If you want to read Chandler, start with The Long Goodbye. So far, that’s been my favorite book of his and it earned a spot on my favorites bookshelf.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My first five-star review of 2012! What a fabulous book: a hard-boiled Steinbeck. Chandler truly is a fantastic writer that pulls you through his story with succinct yet incisive dialogue and churning plots. I liked this infinitely more than the Elliot Gould movie and significantly more than his Big Sleep novel. Do yourself a favor, read this book at the earliest opportunity!

The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a fun read that was going to be a five star book until the expedient and simplistic denouement. I admit having seen the film first, with an amazing performance by Johnny Depp (and directed by the pedophile rapist Roman Polanski) but as always, the book exceeded the film in almost every aspect.

While reading, I wrote that this was ‘a book that makes me proud to have an education’ and ‘a book that makes me mourn the advent of the eBook’. To touch a real book, smell it and feel its contours in my hands, what glory! I wonder what will become of book collectors in the age of Kindles, iBooks and such things? I loved the insider knowledge the book deals in, from the linguistic to the analytical. I highlighted “But we all share a conspiratorial wink when we talk about certain magical authors and books. Those that made us discover literature without weighing us down with dogmas and teaching us rules.”

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Like another recent book, I came to Henning Mankell’s Firewall after having seen a film version of it. I can’t recall this BBC production on Masterpiece Mystery too clearly, so the book still felt fresh to me. And, I’m sure it was adapted for filming, so the two versions would be somewhat divergent.

Overall, I liked the book. It was a fast read after the first few chapters, which felt a little too heavy on exposition. I was entertained and it was worth my time to read it. I’m glad to add another culture’s police procedural to my reading list, having read American, British and Japanese ones in the past. While the genre must have things in common, each example brings something unique to the reader. So, I look forward to more books like this from Sweden and beyond.

On the negative side, I didn’t care for some of the storytelling techniques that Mankell used. For example, he would be telling the story, moving forward in time, but then start a chapter as if its being told way in the future, looking back. He tells the reader that the upcoming scene is pivotal and has racked his main character Wallander’s psyche for years to come. Then he switches back to the present and tells the story. I think it’s a weak attempt at building suspense or grabbing the reader’s attention. Then again, perhaps Mankell is trying to stop those readers who skip to the end to find things out and then reads from the beginning or middle. I’m not sure but I didn’t like it. As for story, it’s not too deep and it gets wrapped up rather quickly and too nicely at the end.

I also wasn’t big on the weak development of the characters, especially the “Bad Guys.” He paints them in broad stereotypes, e.g. the crafty Asian who has trouble speaking English and can’t speak Swedish and techies who have poor to no social skills and interactions. He doesn’t really develop his female characters, from Wallander’s fellow officer Ann-Britt Höglund, to murderer/victim Sonja Hökberg, and to the various female characters scattered throughout the story.

I should probably read more of Mankell’s works to see if this one book was an aberration or his normal style. I’d still recommend it to someone wanting a mystery/police procedural, but it’s not in my favorites list.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a fun romp through a hardboiled detective classic! I had never read the book, having only seen the Bogey/Bacall movie. But what a book this was. I loved the pacing, the dialogue, the tone. Chandler can really paint a noir picture. It’s hard to put this down once you pick it up. It won’t change your worldview and probably won’t make you smarter or dumber, but you’ll be glad to have read it. It’s a great example of why reading is called pleasure.

There’s also a great deal of awesome lines in here. One of my favorites was:

"Mr. Cobb was my escort," she said. "Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten– when Larry Cobb was sober."