Nordic Noir

I have been on a Nordic Noir kick ever since the British Wallander debuted on the BBC, which led me to the Swedish Wallander, which I liked better, which led me to the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it just sort of went on from there. Håkan Nesser is Swedish but I think his main character, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, is of some indeterminate northern European country, which could be Sweden or Holland or Poland, according to Wikipedia. He seems to use British police titles and ranks, which makes sense because he has lived in London for the past couple of decades. Van Veeteren is a popular character, and some of the early novels have been made into TV series in Sweden. In the first five, VV is still on the police force, and in the next five, he is retired and running an antiquarian bookshop but still getting involved in cases. He is something like a halfway mark between Sherlock Holmes and Wallander, with some of the wry and negative self-awareness that Holmes lacks and also some of the mysterious methodology, a mix of genius, showmanship and intuition, that Wallander lacks. Borkmann's Point is about a serial axe-murderer with exactly three victims, at least until he kidnaps a female police detective and no one is sure why or if he has killed her. The Point in the title is a point in time defined by Borkmann, a well-remembered mentor from VV's early days as a detective. He taught that there is always a point in the investigation where you have all the information you need to solve it, and all the information that comes in after that point will slow you down rather than help you. So if one can learn to discern that point, one can ignore all the extraneous information and just sit at ones desk and think. Unfortunately, you an only recognize Borkmann's Point after you have solved the crime, so it's more of a thought experiment than a tactic.

The Polish Officer

Well, it's not often I review and blog a book I have only read one chapter of. In fact, it's not often I review and blog books at all anymore. And maybe I am more jetlagged and culture-shocked than I thought I was, or maybe it really was that good. I just read the first chapter of The Polish Officer by Alan Furst, entitled The Pilawa Local. I was in tears. It made me wish I was Polish. And to all my Polish friends, my God, you come from a noble people, and I am heartily sorry if ever in my careless youth I retold or even laughed at a Polack joke, no matter how good-natured.

Why Marx was right, and why Lenin was not a monster

Two book reviews in one article of the Guardian are paired because each offers a fresh look at figures the authors claim are vilified unfairly : Marx and Lenin. Terry Eagleton's book, Why Marx Was Right, uses a structural device of basing each chapter around an "accepted" rationale for the rejection of Marx and then refuting that rationale in the light of history and economics. Lars T. Lih's biography of Lenin is perhaps the first to portray him neither as a communist saint nor a bloodthirsty despot, but instead as a complex man who was optimistic while pragmatic. Single-minded and disciplined as a leader, he nevertheless came to know to his great regret that he had made one catastrophic mistake in his reading of history when the expected international revolution failed to develop from the World War, and instead he was left with a divided and impoverished country and a revolution that could never ripen according to the very doctrine that had driven it.

Four books that may save your life

I am going to do another of these Deborama's Books specials where I review a set of books that seem to me to speak to each other. Normally, it just happens that I read two books simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, that happen to address the same or very similar issues. In this case, I read these books at widely distant times, and only when I read the latest one, A Visit From the Goon Squad, did I see the connection. I guess what happened was that I heard echoes of each of the three other books in it, although I had not consciously connected them before. The theme that they all share is modern life, or near future life, the alienation of individuals as they begin to use technology to communicate in new ways, the breakdown of the family, the persistence of family in the face of this breakdown, the persistence of our need to connect in the face of this alienation and the sadness in the juxtaposition of youth and age that underlies all the problems of connectedness and family.

Things I have read in the past couple of years, and things I want to read

To see some things I want to read, you can view my Amazon UK wish list. To see another wish list and some of my Bookcrossing activity, check out my bookshelf.

Here are some highlights of books I have read in the past two years, when the tension-levels chez Deborama have been very high and consequently little or no blogging was happening.

The thing that stands out most, which was so excellent and moving and unforgettable that it immediately made it to my top 25 list, was E. L. Doctorow's The March. (I bought this in America, so this is the American paperback cover. I actually like the cover on the British edition better, which you will see if you follow the link, but the book is nearly unknown here.) I reviewed this book on Bookcrossing some time ago. Here is what I said soon after reading it:

This gripping work of historical fiction is, in my opinion, Doctorow's masterpiece. I cannot praise it highly enough. I wanted it never to end, it was that kind of book. The historical event it concerns is one I grew up surrounded by : Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's famous "march to the sea", creating a deliberate swathe of anarchy, suffering and often false jubilation from the north Georgia mountains to the city of Savannah.

Two novels that I read that were both highly political in content were very satisfying reads. Apart from that factor, they were very different. One is a current and well-known author, both for the genre and for his often controversial political positions: John le Carre. The book was A Most Wanted Man and it was absolutely chilling. The other was written by a virtual unknown. Again, I bought this book in America and it's not something you're likely to see in any bookshop in the UK, sadly. I say sadly not because this book is stupendous or anything, but because the state of the bookshop market in the UK is sad beyond belief, and far beyond what it is in the States, which is sad enough. Anyway, the book is Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta.

A Most Wanted Man is definitely le Carre's most paranoid spy story to date, easily (in my opinion) outstripping in cynicism and moral pessimism any of his incredibly dark Cold War era stories. For in Smiley's world, the spies had to do amoral things for (arguably) moral reasons, but the elected government was mainly insulated from the choice and the burden of what they put in place. In A Most Wanted Man, the government itself connives to set up an innocent man as a patsy in the war on terror, and not even for any valid reason from a moral standpoint, but just to keep power and the status quo. The really awful thing about this story is that it's so very very believable. Eat the Document is a story of the early twenty-first century denouement of a 1970's political crime entangled with idealism, young love and possible betrayal. It is wonderfully paced and multilayered enough in its plotting to be intellectually engaging, and as one who was on the fringes of the 1970s left, with all its cults and conspiracies and outrageous fantasies, for me the whole milieu as presented in the book rings remarkably true.

The next blog will cover the non-fiction books I have read, and also How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, The Girls by Lori Lansens and a couple of novels by Mary Wesley.

What I am reading now

I have been patiently waiting for this to come out in paperback and there it was, at the local W. H. Smith's when I stopped in for a paper on my post-workout ramble. So now I'm reading it. I could have read it months ago if it weren't for the fact that a) I hate reading hardbacks (too heavy) and b) when I decide to own a set like this (the Millenium trilogy) I want them to be the same format. This is the third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, in the trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson. The other two are:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl Who Played With Fire



Even if you haven't been aware of the several years' of buzz about the books, you probably saw that the film of the first book has opened in the UK recently. This whole Swedish crime thriller thing (second installment) started for me with the British Wallander, based on the Wallander novels by Swedish author Henning Mankell. This led DH and I to watch the Swedish Wallander, which I actually like more. As the stories got darker and darker, I got swept up in the characters of the two young police officers, and sometimes lovers, Linda Wallander (Kurt's daughter) and Stefan Lindman. I had read about the fact that there was a final Wallander novel that Mankell said he would never write, due to his grief over the suicide of Johanna Sällström, who played Linda. In the last televised Wallander episode, the character Stefan commits suicide. Stefan was played by Ola Rapace, whose wife Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth Salander, the lead character in the Millenium trilogy.
Ola and Noomi Rapace at the Paris premiere of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Some books I have read and want to read

Here, in no particular order, are some good books I have read recently (in the past two and a half years, that is.)

The March, by E. L. Doctorow

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff

Meanwhile, the books I have been planning to read can be found on wish list at Amazon.co.uk. Also my "tbr" list at Bookcrossing.

The Lady Di of her day

I read Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire while I was in Portland last year. This is a very rich book, and it is better than the average popular historical biography on several levels. Many contemporary books on "scholarly" subjects, such as history or science, are immensely "dumbed down" to the point that an average layperson such as me, who is college educated but not by any means an academic, feels quite condescended to by the writing style, and a bit cheated by the material. That is definitely not the case with Amanda Foreman's writing. It is never repetitive nor does it over-explain, and yet it remains not only accessible, but also gripping in places, due to the fascinating nature of the subject. As an example of what I mean, here are excerpts from two reader reviews on the Amazon website:

Alexandra from Manningtree: I'm lucky enough to have a history degree, but this book is so accessible you don't need one; Foreman just guides through giving you all extra info without sounding patronising. This has to be the best researched biography I've read... if only my academic reading was as fun.

A Reader frim London:I often feel that books aimed at the general reader, ie, someone like me who did not go to university, assume that we are all thickwits who can't tell the difference between good and bad writing. The one thing I loved about Georgiana is that the book has all the quality of academic history while at the same time being very entertaining. Although at times I had to concentrate really hard on a lot of unfamiliar information, I also felt I was getting the real thing.

A brief synopsis of the life of Lady Georgiana Spencer (great x4 aunt of Princess Diana), who became at 19 the Duchess of Devonshire, will give a taste of the rich and engaging tale this book tells. Beautiful, talented and gracious, Georgiana was one of the wealthiest people in the world, yet she was plagued by enormous gambling debts most of her life. She was one of the first women in the modern world to get involved in politics, at a time when women had not even the faintest hope that they would ever vote, and was alternately cheered and jeered for it by the fickle public. She was married to one of the most powerful peers in England, yet she gave birth to a child who was fathered by a man of lesser rank, and had to sneak away to the continent to do so. She was part of a menage a trois, being in love with the manipulative yet charming and somewhat pitiable Lady Elizabeth Frazer, her husband's sometime mistress. Although she died somewhat prematurely in her late 40s, she was a witness to or participant in many of the major episodes of early modern European history.

A pair of novels with a common thread

I have this weird habit of reading two novels, either close together in time or sometimes even at the same time, that share a theme or otherwise speak to each other in some way. A little less than a year ago, I did it again. I read Vernon God Little, by D. B. C. Pierre, just a week or so after reading Hey, Nostradamus, by Douglas Coupland. Both of these are black comedies (of a sort), told (partly, in one case) from the point of a male teenager protagonist, concerning a community caught up in the throes of a mass shooting at the local high school.
Of the two, I thought Vernon God Little was funnier, but also far darker. Perhaps this is because it does not grapple with metaphysical issues so much. In the bleak, rather horrifyingly ugly community of Martirios Texas, a mass shooting can only bring the people far enough awake from their ugly dream-state to contemplate the possibility of human decency, and they don't get very far with that. All of the characters in VGL are flawed, some of them very, very deeply. Although the novel doesn't have a totally negative viewpoint, the best it can offer is the kind of redemption where a really terrible situation improves to approximate normality. The protagonist, Vernon Gregory Little, is wrongly suspected of the shooting, and is gleefully sent to death row by his community. His mother is sick with concern, but slightly more stressed by losing out on her new almond-coloured refrigerator and being dumped by the evil sleaze-bag Eulalio Ledesma, who is, unbeknownst to her, responsible for her boy's conviction by the media.
Hey Nostradamus is another take on a similar scenario. The neighbourhood and the school are slightly more upscale. This novel is about religion and views society through a more moral lens than VGL. Of the four narrators, the strongest character is the male teenager, Jason. Jason was secretly married to Cheryl, the first narrator, and Cheryl was one of the victims. Jason is revered as a hero because he killed one of the gunmen with a rock, but he is himself so troubled by this and by another little secret in his life that it dominates his adulthood completely. The third narrator is Heather, who marries Jason some time after the tragedy, never knowing that he was married to Cheryl. The fourth narrator seemed to be the villain of the piece at first: he is Reg, Jason's destructive, unlovable father, a fundamentalist with a self-righteous streak and an even bigger streak of character disorder. Reg, however, takes up the narration many years after the shootings, and by this time, life has rubbed off a lot of his sharp edges and he has even gained Christian humility. I am leaving out a lot here, because these quirky touches are so much better when discovered suddenly in the narrative. It's not your typical Douglas Coupland book.

Soul of a Butterfly

This morning I read a book review for a biography/autobiography of Muhammad Ali from the Times Online Books mailing list. Sometimes, a really good review is almost as good as the book itself. This review was excellent, and is the sort of thing I aspire to in my book reviews. Reviews of books that the reviewer didn't enjoy are rarely good, only when the reviewer is good with corrosive sarcasm and the book is bad enough in a big enough way to deserve it. But a good review of a good book gives you a taste of why that book is so good, gives you a taste of the book itself and gives you a little more besides.

Take love, for example: and the book is all about love. For Ali, it seems essential that he loves vast numbers of people, and is loved back by them. I was there in Atlanta when he lit the Olympic flame, and I felt the oceans of love washing towards him from America and the world. I have been at prize-fights where the very name Ali gets a bigger cheer than either contestant. Ali: the world’s most beloved sportsman; perhaps the world’s most beloved human.
Which is odd when you remember that he spent years as a hate-magnet. Quite deliberately: he modelled his free-wheeling braggart monologues on a wrestler named Gorgeous George, reasoning that the more people who wanted to see his ass whupped, the more tickets he would sell. He was always an actor, an illusionist, a man who adores conjuring tricks. He still does them; though now, as a devout Muslim who will never deceive, he afterwards insists on showing you how it was done.

Be afraid of what's not on the label - be very afraid

I am currently reading Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food On Your Plate, by Felicity Lawrence. It is really frightening. And I have been a savvy food-politics activist for about 35 years and still I didn't know about some of the appalling things covered in this book. It seems to affect everyone this way. Here are some excerpts from Amazon's reader reviews:
"I thought I had some idea about how supermarkets operate and how our food is produced, but I didn't know the half of it. Read this book (then lend it to everyone you know), ponder its contents for a while and I am sure you will change your shopping habits."
"All the chapters made a big impact but I was particularly moved by the descriptions of the migrant agricultural workers living on rubbish tips in Spain, of coffee farmers who were paid so little for their crop that they couldn't support their families and of the phenomenally destructive (and disgusting) practice of prawn farming in South-East Asia. . . Time and time again what came across is the enormous power of the supermarkets and how in competing with each other to be cheapest they create misery all the way down the food supply chain. Some of the supermarket practices described simply beggar belief."

The Curious Incident

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon

I loved this book, and even more importantly, my darling hubby liked this book. I give him about 12 to 20 books a year to read, after I have read and liked them, and think he might like them, and he only likes about a fifth of them. So either he is very hard to please, or I am rubbish at guessing what he will like (a bit of both really.)
So, you have probably heard about this book - that it is about a 12 year old boy with Asperger's syndrome, and neighbour's dog that gets killed with a pitchfork. And since the title is a well-known quote from a Sherlock Holmes story, you would guess that it's a sort of detective story. Well, it is and it isn't. Mostly it isn't. I think this is mostly a story about how people's brains work, and how they don't all work the same way. And this can be a tragedy. There is a certain amount of tragedy in this story, and I felt some overwhelming maternal protectiveness for the likable hero, Christopher.
This has occasionally been referred to as a children's book, but I have never seen it in the children's or young adult section. It is no more a children's book than Life of Pi, which also features a young boy protagonist and is a very similar book in many ways. It is far too short a book to get away with telling even a little bit of the narrative (apart from the fact that a dog is killed in the opening chapter, but everyone knows that). I prefer to concentrate on why I liked it, and why DH liked it. I think we both liked it because the boy reminded us of ourselves, but for each of us, these were very different aspects of ourselves. I identified with Chris's inability to "take in" all of his sensory environment, while being unable to screen it out the way normal people do. Although I do not have Asperger's syndrome or any diagnosed condition, I am what is known as a "low-screener" which means that all my senses are very acute (although often not particularly accurate) and I can be very "oppressed", like Chris, by colours I don't like, crowds, smells and chaos in general. And, like Chris, I use mental exercise to calm myself, often pursuing activities that would drive normal people crazy, in order to drive myself sane. DH, on the other hand, is a very, very "high screener". But he has another of the traits of Asperger's syndrome (in common with some other conditions) which is an extreme difficulty "reading" the emotions, facial expressions and body language of other people, and an aversion to the sort of familiar touching that most people do as part of their socializing. DH again is not diagnosed with a syndrome, and he likes hugs and has no problem shaking hands or anything, but still there is that commonality there and I think that plus the boy protagonists clever maths-geek atheism, made him really identify with Chris.
This is, I think, the great strength of this wonderful little book, that it enables anyone to feel a real kinship with someone with a condition which usually makes its sufferers seems very alien to the rest of humanity. And it makes his condition, and mental illness generally, very knowable and understandable and not a cause for fear and dread.

His Dark Materials

*** ***

Northern Lights The Subtle Knife The Amber Spyglass
His Dark Materials Trilogy, by Philip Pullman

I heard these books described as a thinking-person's Harry Potter. That doesn't really do them justice. The format, the intent, the audience, the world-view, all are different in several degrees from Harry Potter. The main thing is that the Harry Potter stories are in the familiar reductionist mode of children's fiction that has borrowed from the highly stylized world of Saturday morning cartoons. Utterly absent are moral nuance, and pleasures are simple and greedy, even for the "good" characters. Everything is very easy to identify as good or evil, fun or boring, giving feelings of pride or shame, and the violence is strangely sanitized. The only moral choices the "good" characters face is whether to act loyally to their friends ("friendship" being the highest imaginable "good" in this world-view) and the power of loyalty to friends neutralizes any other action, from being silent and stubborn to authority figures, right on up to remorselessly killing "bad" characters.
Pullman's stories, though, apart from seeming to me to be too intellectually challenging for most modern pre-teens (I don't mean that to sound as insulting as it probably does, but really they are quite philosophically rarefied in parts) are more in the old style of children's literature, being as weird as Alice in Wonderland and as violent as Grimm's fairy tales and yet as modern as The Little Prince was in its day. And talk about moral nuance, hard choices, and ethical grey areas, these not only proliferate as the story goes on, they more or less drive the entire plot. There are parts that are better than others in the books, and this is something that I imagine young readers will find especially difficult, because there are times when as the focus switched from one group battling unspeakable evil to another, I was quite tempted to read ahead to where the dropped thread was picked up again, and got quite annoyed at almost turgid parts, even though I could tell they were necessary for the whole picture. The sweep of the stories are quite broad, encompassing universes and their creation and destruction, yet somehow not in the old SF Dr. Who kind of way ("Oh, well, when you've seen one megalomaniac who wants to rule the universe, you have pretty much seen them all") but more in that vertiginous way one feels if one allows oneself to really think about the possible implications of quantum physics.
To sum up the trilogy, without injecting any narrative or teasers, I would say that these three books comprise a Faustian fairy tale about parallel histories, theology and physics, featuring a pair of protagonists who are a twist on the old Tristan and Iseult mythology. And it's got talking warrior bears and witches and magical implements that can be replicated in a physics lab.

Jennifer Government - reviewed by me

Jennifer Government, by Max Barry


I am finally getting around to reviewing Jennifer Goverment, and what excellent timing, coming on the heels of the latest atrocity wrought by the US use of privatized paramilitaries (also known as mercenaries). It is the complete privatization of all "services" that could possibly be performed by the government that drives the plot of this small, frantically-paced, quirky SF novel, set in the usual near-future dystopia. But as near-future dystopias go, this one is the most believable yet, and the real likely result of current neo-con trends. Jennifer works for the government, true, just as Buy Mitsui works for Mitsui and Hack Nike works for Nike and Billy NRA - well, one of them does work for the NRA and the other one is pretending to, hence the confusion. But even though Jennifer's job with the government is tracking down and apprehending criminals (not that there's much one can do anymore that is criminal) she can only go to work if she gets funding, and that may have to come from the grief-stricken parents of a murder victim. Funding once acquired, she goes to work to uncover a brilliant new marketing strategy at Nike - mass murders of youths who have just purchased their $2,500 trainers (to raise the street cred, you see.) Jennifer thinks the style of this sounds familiar - sounds like her ex-husband, as a matter of fact. And so it is! John Nike, he is known as now. But it turns out that the killing was assigned to a soft little pleb named Hack Nike who contracted it out to The Police (TM) (who, in one of the novel's many comic touches, play "Every Breath You Take" constantly at their headquarters, because it's their corporate anthem.) They in turn contract it out to the NRA, who are essentially the best funded and most profitable of all the private armies on the planet.

I have a mixed reaction to this book. The premise is spot-on, and some of the wise-ass comedy is absolutely brilliant. On the down-side, and this is not necessary in a black-comic SF novel but it is often the case, the characters are very cartoon-y. I think Barry is trying to humanize Jennifer by giving her a child (the reason she is no longer married to evil John) and the usual single-parent struggle, and a beginnings of a love-life, but all it does is detract from her integrity as a character (rather than as a person) because he is not quite a good enough writer to pull that off. It might have been better to centre her character around devotion to the job and make her lonely and introspective. Also, I am not a big fan of slapstick, even in visual forms, and I find most attempts to write slapstick vaguely irritating. (The one exception being Thomas Pynchon, which is why I admire him so much.) But in all, the good outweighs the bad, and I would give this book an 8.5 out of 10 as SF and a 5 out of 10 as "Literature".

Dorothy Allision light?

Cavedweller, by Dorothy Allison
I guess it was about 12 years ago at least that I read Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. What an experience that was; it absolutely bowled me over. A few years later she came to Minneapolis to speak at the Amazon Women's Bookstore (no relation to the online outfit, which it pre-dated by two decades.) I think it was then that I bought Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, her book of essays which quickly became a classic of queer non-fiction, as her novel was of queer literature.
I was probably expecting more of the same in Cavedweller. Although there is some pain and guilt and a soap-opera worth of messed-up lives, and although it still has that ineffable ability to bring back my own Southern childhood and young adult days through subtle references to sounds and smells and plants and foods and places, it is just not in the same league as Bastard Out of Carolina. That might be A Good Thing, though, because I am sure a lot of people just couldn't quite take Bastard Out of Carolina; it was very raw and very real (largely autobiographical) and yet very alien to most people who, when they say they had a horrible childhood, don't quite mean the same thing as Dorothy means. I love Dorothy Allison, and I will happily read anything she writes. But I think BOOC was a one-shot deal.

A novel like a poem

If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor

The first, and so far, I believe, only novel by Jon McGregor, this is a book that needs more recognition. Reviewers liked it - a lot - and so did I. It is written in a poetic style like a long poem in blank verse. Many of the main characters in the story are never named but are referred to by the house number on the street where the "remarkable things" take place. The story is also like a Greek tragedy, in that almost all of the action takes place in a very short space of time, and on a single street in a typical Northern English city. The street is not a posh or fashionable one; most of the inhabitants are students or immigrants or disabled. There are children playing in the street, which doesn't happen so much in the upscale neighbourhoods. There are people making love in the afternoon, there are very old people who stand at the window and see what goes on in the street. This is an elegaic story, a story full of wonder and melancholy and miracles and disasters and minute observation of the everyday. It's not like any other novel you have ever read.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier

Now a major motion picture, as they say. This was a very cinematic book, as other reviewers of the film have pointed out, and did really cry out to be made into a lovely movie. I haven't seen the movie, just read the book. It had a really authentic-seeming feel, in that as one read it, one felt immersed in this 17th century Dutch town culture, but do we really know what that was like? No, but it was convincing. A little less convincing were the motivations of the main character, Griet. What Chevalier has done with this book is to imagine a persona for the mysterious girl in the painting, of whom no one knows a thing - her age, name, relationship to the painter Vermeer if any. Of especial mystery is her clothing in the painting, which is not typical of any known style at the time. It is vaguely exotic-looking, yet the girl herself is anything but exotic, and is in fact most remarkable for her simplicity and quintessential pretty-young-Dutch-girl appearance. So Chevalier has imagined her as a teenaged maid, from a nice "middle-class" artisan family, forced into service because of her father's industrial accident, and thrust into a slightly alien Catholic household headed by a non-communicative painter and his troubled wife and dominating mother-in-law. All in all I had mixed feelings about the book. It was like a great painting of which you don't know enough; it seemed to promise more than it delivered somehow. And yet I have to give it points for realism, for that very reason: life is often mysterious and vaguely unsatifying, and this book is a hyper-realistic slice of life.

A New Trend in Crime Novels?

Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem
It could be a new trend in detective stories, which have always tended to have a social criticism edge to them anyway (well, the good ones.) A PI or an amateur or an innocent fitted up for a crime is endowed with a little understood disability, which paradoxically gives him or her great advantage in solving the crime. In a way, it's not a new idea. Miss Marple springs to mind, the disability in this case being that she is old and single and thus subject to all kinds of stereotypical assumptions which prove untrue. And then the creation of PIs who are morbidly obese, female, black, quite old or quite young, as well as unlikely combinations, from "I Spy" (OK, they were spies, but the same idea) to Randall and Hopkirk (deceased) have captured the interests of viewers and readers and smashed stereotypes along with bigoted or just unimaginative villains.
Motherless Brooklyn (great title, don't you think?) is about Lionel Essrog, aka the Human Freak Show, who is not only motherless, but suffers from Tourette's Syndrome as well, putting him at the social bottom of his little gang of outsiders, a group of orphan boys employed by small-time Brooklyn hood, Frank Minna. Frank is murdered, and the gang tries to find out who done it and who else is in danger.
I have to confess I knew very little about Tourette's before reading this and it really raised my consciousness. I was running around trying to get everyone I know to read it, too, just because it was so well written.


The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was short-listed for the Booker Prize. I won't review it because I have not read it yet (but mean to soon). It concerns Christopher, a boy with autism, who is obsessed with finding out who killed the next-door neighbour's dog with a pitch-fork. From the reviews I have read, it sounds like it has a lot in common with Motherless Brooklyn, including the compassionate attempt to glimpse the inner world of the "mentally different".

An Excellent Con from Liza Cody

Gimme More, by Liza Cody
Liza Cody is mainly known for detective novels, the Anna Lee mysteries: Dupe, Bad Company, Head Case, Stalker, Under Contract and Backhand.
This is one of a handful of other novels. It's an exciting and fast-paced con-game story about Birdie Walker, an aging but still attractive rock widow who has long-standing issues with record company moguls. The bigwigs are trying to enlist her input for a retrospective film about her deceased megastar husband, Jack. She is trying to protect something but it is not clear what. Her sister, her niece, and her one ally in the business, a sound engineer who has semi-retired to New Orleans, are all drawn into the scheming and mind-games. Then the corporate bad guys up the stakes by sending in a young, naive but ambitious chancer to act as a honeypot to Birdie's niece. In the end, it turns out to be sort of a detective story after all, and has a very gratifying surprise ending.

Two Crackers from Once Upon A Crime

Bad Boy Brawly Brown Star Witness

In a previous post, I bemoaned the lack of good, independent bookstores in most of Britain. Once Upon A Crime, in Minneapolis, is one of the type of bookstores I was thinking about. On my recent trip there for the birth of grand-daughter Savannah, I visited OUAC and purchased five books, reviews of which follow.
Bad Boy Brawly Brown, by Walter Mosley, is a book you will expect to be good if you are already familiar with Mosley's Easy Rawlins series. And it doesn't disappoint. The Easy Rawlins books are all in chronological order, so the story develops, society in multi-racial Los Angeles changes through the decades, and characters grow, change and in some cases die. This is the first novel after the death of Mouse, Easy's criminally violent but strangely endearing oldest friend. The ghost of Mouse haunts the story, plaguing Easy and giving him strength at the same time. This story takes place in the early 1970s, and concerns Easy's attempts to save a young boy from falling into a life of criminality through the strange politics of black power in that era. It is full of all the things you want in an Easy Rawlins story: tender family dramas and piercing sociological insights alternating with anatomically described fight scenes and thrilling car chases.
Star Witness, a Willa Jansson Mystery, by Lia Matera, is one in a series that is a personal favourite of mine. Willa Jansson is a lawyer with a colourful past. She is what we used to call a "red diaper baby"; her parents are 1960s radicals, her values are unashamedly leftist, and her heroes are secular and intellectual and revolutionary, like her parents. The early books in the series featured Willa working for a leading leftist lawyer and then, when he died in an early book, an idealistic legal cooperative. Now she works for a corporate firm, and so gets into those typical nineties-naughties conflicts of belief vs. livelihood. In this story, a bit of a departure, she gets roped into the world of alien abductees and conspiracy theorists, and gets herself tied up in some Gordian knots of legal ethics and personal responsibility. The thing that really shines about Lia Matera's books is the dialogue, both internal and external. I cannot recommend them highly enough.