→ December 31, 2011
→ By

The Last Good Kiss.

A reader, Michael L., recommended James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss to me about fifteen months ago, knowing my affinity for hard-boiled detective novels. (This should also give you some idea of how long my to-be-read queue is.) Michael described it as very Raymond Chandler-esque, with influences from later, more “sordid” writers. It is undoubtedly more lurid and graphic than Chandler’s novels, but shares the master’s sense of characterization and his knack for weaving complex mysteries among a very small number of flawed people by layering intrigues and peeling them back one by one for the reader.

Crumley’s detective hero/antihero is C.W. Sughrue, a war veteran and possibly unreliable narrator (so maybe he’s not a war veteran) who handles unglamorous P.I. jobs like spying on wayward spouses for divorce cases or locating deadbeats for bill collectors. While retrieving a wayward author named Trahearne for the man’s ex-wife, Sughrue starts a brawl and shooting match that ends with him earning a job to locate a woman, Betty Sue, who’s been missing for ten years. Betty Sue was in San Francisco with a boyfriend when their car became stuck in traffic, at which point she opened the car door, walked away, and was never heard from again.

The pursuit of Betty Sue is the main plot point that drives the novel forward, but it’s the layering, mostly around Trahearne, that makes the novel so rewarding. Trahearne is a war veteran who fought at Guadalcanal, published three pulpy novels and some volumes of poetry, and lives on an estate in Montana with his wife, his ex-wife, and his mother, running off on semi-regular benders, one of which puts him on Sughrue’s radar. When the two men strike up an odd friendship and Sughrue’s hired to find Betty Sue, Trahearne cajoles Sughrue into letting him tag along, which is when the layering – and the lying, because no one in this story seems to tell the truth at first or even second blush – begins.

Sughrue might be the fourth- or fifth-most interesting character in his own book, which separates this from the best of Chandler, whose novels always revolved around Philip Marlowe. Sughrue certainly mimics Marlowe’s exterior toughness, dry wit, and natural cynicism (especially around the motives of others), but I didn’t find him compelling – he often takes a backseat to the beer-swilling bulldog Fireball, whose loyalty to his owner may merely reflect a desire to protect his main enabler. Trahearne is the real star of the book, complex enough to border on the ridiculous, an emotional train wreck on the inside with a buffoonish exterior. Sughrue makes his presence felt, but more as the machine that makes the other characters go; his best scene is his assault on a house in Colorado where he’s trying to rescue a kidnapping victim, and he has to deal with the house’s defenses and the idiocy of his overbearing, heavily-armed sidekick.

It doesn’t measure up to the best Chandler – which, for me, would start with Farewell, My Lovely – but it’s a quick read that was hard to put down but never insulted my intelligence while holding my attention.

Side note: I’m shocked that this was never made into a film. It certainly has all of the elements to satisfy a major studio – sex, violence, humor, sharply-drawn characters – but has the smart dialogue and layered plotting of a good Coen Brothers movie.

Next up: Carol Shields’ novel The Stone Diaries, winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

–

I’m burying the lede here a little, but I want to thank everyone who’s offered kind words and positive thoughts after this week’s rumor regarding me. I have no comment on the rumor itself, of course, but so many of you have written via one method or another, including a number of readers who have never reached out to me before, that I want to make it clear how much I appreciate your messages and your continued readership over the last five-plus years. This job would not be half as much fun without you guys.

Have a safe and happy New Year’s celebration tonight. If you choose to drink, please give the keys to someone who hasn’t.

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→ October 25, 2011
→ By

Poodle Springs.

I’m generally not a fan of continuations or parallel novels where one author attempts to complete or extend the work of another. Very few such works earn any kind of critical acclaim; I think Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre that tells the story of Rochester’s first wife before madness overtakes her, is the only one I’ve read that is considered a strong work of literature in its own right, and it was more a work of social criticism than a narrative.

Continuations are, in my view, tougher than “authorized” sequels or prequels, because they stitch together two different prose styles and require the second writer to guess at the intended direction of the first – or to ignore it altogether. I’ve read the most popular continuation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon* and found it utterly lifeless; where even a bad Austen novel has its memorable moments, usually humorous ones, all I recall of the completed Sanditon is a lot of walking around on the rocks.

*It’s funny how often these final, unfinished novels are proclaimed by fans of the authors in question as potentially the authors’ best work; you’ll certainly hear how Sanditon, which Austen abandoned after eleven chapters due to ill health, signaled a new direction for her writing, blah blah blah – just look at the unsourced praise in the Wikipedia entry on the book. This is nearly always wishful thinking on the part of fans, combined with the fact that a fragment of a novel is miles away from a completed book.

This is the long way of telling you that I entered Poodle Springs, in which Robert Parker (creator of the Spenser character) starts with the four short chapters left behind by Raymond Chandler and builds a Philip Marlowe novel on that scant foundation, with some skepticism. Chandler is, in my view, a prose master (although novelist Martin Amis would disagree), and his style is often imitated but never matched. Take the sparse, clipped phrasings of Hammett and add some of the greatest similes ever put to paper and you might build a reasonable fake, but Chandler’s writing remains unique in this or any genre. I gave Poodle Springs a fair shake, but at the end of the day it is just a nice detective novel, nowhere close to any of the five Marlowe books I’ve read.

Chandler’s four chapters include a shocking opener – Marlowe is married to Linda Loring, who first appeared in The Long Goodbye
 and seems as ill-fitting a wife for the loner detective as any candidate. They’ve moved to a tony California hamlet called Poodle Springs, but Marlowe insists on earning his own living rather than becoming a kept man for his wealthy bride. He’s approached by the proprietor of a local casino of dubious legality, at which point Parker takes over. He wisely dispenses with the Loring subplot (if we can even call it that) for much of the book and focuses instead on the crime story, one that has the typical hallmarks of hard-boiled detective fiction (small number of characters in a tangled web) but with a leering crudeness that is horribly out of place in a Marlowe novel, and prose that simply can’t match the master’s:

There was a big clock shaped like a banjo on the wall back of the receptionist. It ticked so softly it took me a while to hear it. Occasionally the phone made a soft murmur and the receptionist said brightly, “Triton Agency, good afternoon.” While I was there she said it maybe 40 times, without variation. My cigarette was down to the stub. I put it out in the ashtray and arched my back, and while I was arching it in came Sondra Lee. She was wearing a little yellow dress and a big yellow hat. She didn’t recognize me, even when I stood up and said, “Miss Lee.”

That’s a lot of words without telling us anything at all. The waiting room in question has no relevance in the story. Chandler doesn’t normally waste the reader’s time like that, nor does prose ever have that choppy sound like ever period is an obstacle you hit at full speed. Parker occasionally hits with a good metaphor – “Hollywood Boulevard looked like it always did in the morning, like a hooker with her make-up off” – although even that one would never have come out of Chandler’s pen.

Parker’s plot revolves around a bigamist, some nude pictures, and a few people with behavioral issues, standard stuff for this sort of novel, but his obsession with sex borders on the puerile, at least compared to the subtle approach of Chandler, where sex is always under the surface but never out in the open. An exhibitionist wife bares all to Marlowe – who passes because he’s married, so really, what was the point of this? – and we get too much about Marlowe in the boudoir with Linda when she’s not involved in the plot at all, including a tacked-on ending that feels like a nod to Chandler’s stillborn introduction.

Which gets back to the fundamental problem with Poodle Springs: It seems likely that Chandler never intended to finish this book. Marlowe probably shouldn’t be married, and certainly shouldn’t be married to Linda Loring. Perhaps these four chapters were just Chandler exploring an idea; perhaps he realized it wasn’t going to work. Perhaps it was his own depression after the death of his wife Cissy that led him to put Marlowe into a marriage. (He only finished one novel after her death, Playback, which I haven’t read but which seems to be considered his worst completed work.) The continuation of Poodle Springs was a commercial success, but the positive reviews of the time that claim that “you can’t see the seam where Chandler stopped and Parker picked up the pen” are an insult to fans of the master’s work.

Next up: A Finnish novel, Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare, currently on sale through that link for $5.60.

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→ September 7, 2011
→ By

Pulp.

I waited until that night, drove over, parked outside. Nice neighborhood. Definition of a nice neighborhood: a place you couldn’t afford to live in.

Charles Bukowski wrote his final novel, Pulp, as he was dying of leukemia, and passed away before the book was published. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then that the overarching theme of the book is death – facing it, fleeing from it, and wondering what there is to life other than speeding towards it.

The protagonist of Pulp, Nick Belane, is a private detective who is simultaneously lucky (his cases have a habit of solving themselves) and down on his luck (he’s somewhat broke and usually heading to the bottom of a bottle) when he receives a visit from a new client, who calls herself Lady Death, and most likely is the Grim Reaper in more attractive form than we’re using to seeing. She wants Belane (which I presume rhymes with “Spillane”) to track down a man she believes to be the French author Celine, who should be dead by about thirty years but is apparently running around Los Angeles. Nick picks up a few more clients, including a man who believes his controlling new girlfriend is a space alien, another man who believes his wife is cheating on him, and a friend who hires him to find the elusive Red Sparrow but doesn’t actually know what it is. (The Red Sparrow is most likely a reference to Black Sparrow Press, a small publisher whose financial support allowed Bukowski to become a full-time writer at age 45.)

On its surface, Pulp is a hard-boiled detective novel reminiscent of the clipped tones of Hammett and tight yet rich prose of Chandler, although Belane’s toughness is more superficial than that of the Continental Op or Philip Marlowe. Belane bemoans his inability to catch a break in between catching breaks, dropping into deep depressions that last until the next barstool, where he typically orders a few drinks, starts a fight, and leaves more or less victorious. Clients find him, as do clues, yet he still manages to encounter no end of trouble, much of it because of his own bad decisions.

In between drinks and fights, Belane muses on the nature of life and often doesn’t like what he sees, looking at the indignities of this mortal coil from bodily functions to the need for money to questioning his own sanity. One of the book’s most memorable scenes puts Belane in the waiting room for a psychiatrist he wants to question; the waiting room is full of apparently crazy people, but when Belane’s name is called and he’s ushered in, the apparent psychiatrist claims he’s just a lawyer and Belane is yet another crazy person who’s entered the wrong office. Is Belane crazy? Did he black out? Did reality change on him, as it has a habit of doing to him throughout the book?

As much as Belane looks at life and cringes at what he sees, he’s not running headlong into death, even though Lady Death tells him a few times that he’ll be seeing her again soon. But it’s his inner monologue that really makes Pulp memorable and often very funny in a wry sort of way; it’s an accumulation of decades of wisdom, much of it not all that useful, wrapped up in a fast-paced detective story where the ultimate case is solving the mystery of life. I won’t spoil the ending, although you can probably figure out where the book is heading, and even so the plot is hardly the thing there. Bukowski managed to pay homage to my favorite genre through a black-comic look at the end of life. It’s quite an achievement.

Next up: Richard Stark’s heist novel The Score, available as a free eBook for the Kindle (or Kindle iPad app) through that link. Stark was one of Donald Westlake’s pen names, and I reviewed the first novel in this series two years ago.

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→ September 1, 2011
→ By

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

Alan Bradley walked away from a career in broadcast engineering to become a writer but didn’t produce his first novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, until he turned 70, likely unaware at the time that he was about to embark on a new career at a point when most people are satisfied with retirement. The book, the first in a planned series of five (book four comes out in November), is a murder mystery of sorts, but succeeds because of the appeal of its protagonist, the precocious eleven-year-old amateur chemist (and sleuth) Flavia de Luce.

Flavia is intelligent and quick-witted, and takes no interest in the trappings of young girlhood like dolls, dresses, or makeup (all favorites of my five-year-old), instead comforting herself with her sophisticated home chemistry lab, where she pores over classic texts in the field (such as Henderson’s An Elementary Study of Chemistry) and replicates the experiments of chemistry giants such as Lavoisier … and his wife, who, along with Madame Curie, is one of Flavia’s idols. That comfort is necessary because her family is – although it would be early for the word, as the book is set in 1950 – dysfunctional; her widowed father has completely detached himself from his family, her two older sisters have no use for her and are each wrapped up in their own worlds, and only the gardener, Dogger, seems to care for Flavia in a familial way.

When Flavia discovers a dying man in the cucumber path on her family estate in Buckshaw, a death for which her father will eventually be arrested, she begins working to unlock the mystery in stages: Who was he? Why was he arguing with her father shortly before his death? And did he steal the missing piece of Mrs. Mullet’s custard pie? The case, of course, revolves around poison (Flavia’s particular obsession within chemistry), but also requires a lot of legwork, a lengthy exposition by her father (more interesting for the way he delivers it than for its content), and the inevitable face-to-face confrontation with her prime suspect, putting her in danger that she has to think her way out of.

The resolution of the murder mystery is rather perfunctory – while perhaps realistic given the setting, it’s pretty obvious who killed the stranger and what the motive for the murder was – but Flavia steals the show. Bradley notes in the afterword that she was a secondary character in another novel he was trying to write, and took over the pages to the point where he realized he had to start over and write a book starring her. The Sweetness is written in the first person, and the combination of her adult-like powers of deduction and her childlike energy, with a degree of innocence somewhere in between the two, is infectious, especially when an adult character – often Inspector Hewitt, charged with solving the murder – puts her on the spot and she has to dissemble. Her desire to solve the crime is matched only by her immediate bent toward revenge on anyone who wrongs her, usually one of her sisters, which hatches a minor subplot that lasts for about two-thirds of the book. The one downside to Flavia’s personality is that she is extremely observant, and as the narrator she shares all of these observations with us, often to the detriment of the story at hand.

I rarely recommend reading a book just for a character, but The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie would be an exception. It’s a very quick read; my wife gave me the book as a gift for Christmas – which shows you how far behind I am in my book queue – but I believe she’ll like it more than I did, as she’s a fan of what I’d call the “light murder” genre. It will not satisfy anyone looking to solve a difficult puzzle, but if you can step back and just enjoy Flavia’s effervescent character, you’ll find it worth the time.

Next up: Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel Some Buried Caesar. Also, the DVD for Black Swan just arrived in the mail today.

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→ August 30, 2011
→ By

Behold, Here’s Poison.

Author Georgette Heyer is best known – or so I’m told by Wikipedia, which is never wrong – as the creator of the literary subgenre known as the “Regency romance,” historical novels set among the English upper class in the early 19th century (that is, the time of Jane Austen’s books) but written in the 20th century. I had no idea who Heyer was when my wife gave me one of her non-romance novels, the mystery Behold, Here’s Poison, for Christmas last year. I can see the connection to those Regency romances, which Wikipedia describes as featuring “intelligent, fast-paced dialog between the protagonists,” as this book was fast and witty, but I’d be hard-pressed to call it a detective novel and it fell a little short as a mystery. It’s more of a fun thriller built around a country-house murder.

Gregory Matthews is the head of household at the Poplars and holds all the keys, literal and metaphorical, to the lives of the family members around him. When he’s found poisoned (by nicotine) in his bed one morning, everyone in the house is revealed to have a motive – his sister, sisters-in-law, niece, two nephews, the family doctor, and so on – while no one has a clear alibi except the one man, the intelligent, sardonic Randall Matthews, who had the most to gain directly from Matthews’ death: nearly his entire liquid fortune. Superintendent Hannasyde and Inspector Hemingway, who appear together in three other Heyer novels, arrive on the scene to piece together the mystery of Matthews’ death, a story complicated by the eventual death of one of the many other suspects.

Randall is by far the most interesting character in the book, as he’s a few levels above everyone else in brainpower and isn’t afraid to show it, tweaking his relations (especially his nosy aunts) for his own enjoyment. His arrival after the elder Matthews’ murder leaves no doubt about his role in the rest of the book – he’s there for dry wit, as when he first appears, entering a room filled with his relations after they’ve all learned of Gregory’s death:

“And which of you,” he inquired, looking amiably round, “is responsible for dear uncle’s death? Or don’t you know?”
This airy question produced a feeling of tension, which was possibly Randall’s object. Mrs. Lupton said: “that is not amusing nor is this a time for jokes in bad taste.”
Randall opened his eyes at her. “Dear aunt, did you think I was joking?”

Just about every family member has some humorous aspect to his or her character, and putting them all in a room brings the worst out in them, making the family scenes – and there are many – the real highlight of the novel.

While I enjoyed the book for the dry humor and quick prose, I can’t call it a proper detective story – more of an old-fashioned thriller. A true detective story stars the detective; he can be any sort of detective, a police inspector or a PI, a sharp investigator or a drunken hack, but his personality drives the story and he becomes the hero (or antihero, as the case may be) through which the reader experiences the investigation and solution of the crime. Hannasyde’s character is bland – I wouldn’t even call him “vanilla,” which is rather an unfortunate synonym for “bland” since real vanilla flavor is anything but – with no distinguishing characteristics other than the natural suspicion you’d expect to see in any detective character, and the conversations between Hannasyde and Hemingway are merely explanations of where they stand in the investigation. Hannasyde’s best role is as a foil for Randall, who admires the detective’s intelligence but also plays him for his own benefit.

I’m also reluctant to categorize Behold, Here’s Poison as a true mystery because of how few clues there were to the killer’s identity. I rarely figure out who the killer is in better mysteries, but can always see how I should have figured it out once I reach the conclusion. In this case, however, Heyer’s explanation fit the story to date but was based on awfully scant evidence, some of which wasn’t even clear to me as I read it because Hannasyde didn’t discover it – in fact, he only solves the crime when another character fills in the missing blanks in the final chapter.

Those two complaints do undersell the book a little; it’s a good read because it’s full of witty dialogue and most of the Matthews clan are humorously drawn caricatures – a group of slightly batty would-be members of the gentry whose dialogue will elicit more smirks than laughs, but still plenty to run you through the book towards the conclusion of the murder. I would just urge you not to look at this as a detective story or as a mystery, but more along the lines of what might happen if P.G. Wodehouse decided to try to satirize those genres.

Next up: Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, a cute mystery that made Bradley a first-time novelist at age 70.

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→ June 24, 2010
→ By

Farewell, My Lovely.

My first notes piece from the Tournament of Stars is up, along with a video of right-hander Christian Montgomery.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

How can you not like Raymond Chandler? He was a serious, literary writer who chose the detective story as his milieu and even wrote one of the greatest essays ever on the art of writing (“The Simple Art of Murder”). His prose was sparse and forceful like Hammett’s, but with a constant undercurrent of wry, self-deprecating humor. And his influence has been enormous.

I think the critical consensus has The Big Sleep as his best novel, but for my money Farewell, My Lovely surpasses it, with a more involved plot, much more insight into the character of the detective, Philip Marlowe, and more dry humor. Marlowe stumbles on a giant man, Moose Malloy, who storms a black nightclub that was previously whites-only, and is more or less dragged upstairs where he sees Malloy slug the bartender and hears him shoot the owner. Shortly afterward, Marlowe gets a cold call from a potential client who wants him to provide protection for a brief job that night, and despite his own suspicion, goes along … and that’s where the fun really starts.

Chandler weaves the two cases in and out of each other as Marlowe chases one while the other might be chasing him, and while there’s a natural suspicion that the two tracks are related, the answer to that isn’t clear until the very end of the story. I thought we got more insight into Marlowe’s character in this book, from the way he uses the weakness of Jesse Florian to get more information from her to the way he manipulates her nosy neighbor to his handling of the liberated young Anne Riordan. There’s a con-man psychic, marijuana cigarettes, a kidnapping, lots of booze, and the usual spot-on prose from the master of the genre.

Next review: Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.

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→ June 23, 2010
→ By

Death in the Truffle Wood.

Pierre Magnan’s Commissaire Laviolette novels have long enjoyed success in France but have just recently become available in English, starting with the series opener, Death in the Truffle Wood.

A number of hippies have gone missing recently in a small, nondescript town in Provence, and as the novel opens the reader witnesses another murder, unrelated except for the fact that it occurs as the serial killer is dumping one of his bodies, tying the two crimes together, albeit clumsily. Long, lazy passages introduce us to the various residents of the town (that is, the pool of potential suspects), most of whom are involved in some way with the truffle business. (The mushrooms, that is, not the chocolates.) Magnan gives us a few passages devoted to the fungus and local customs and dishes built around it, but not quite enough for my tastes. Eventually, the book’s nominal star, Laviolette, arrives in the town on an ambiguous, almost unofficial assignment to solve the string of murders, and he begins by trying to break down the barriers thrown up by the local citizens, most of whom date their heritage in that town for generations, toward any outsider.

Two aspects of Death in the Truffle Wood bothered me. One was the language, which could be a translation issue as much as a prose issue, but throughout the book Magnan showed a sparse style that seemed less an homage to the classic hard-boiled novels I enjoy than just laziness, like Magnan couldn’t be bothered with details, as in this absymal section on a kitchen scene that’s tangential to the main action:

The owner, in a state of panic at his overloaded stoves, inundated his underlings with contradictory orders. Little by little, however, everything fell into place and order reigned once more.

Oh, everything fell into place? That’s nice to hear. If you’re not going to fill in the picture, don’t sketch out the outline. As it was, Magnan had several asides along those lines that desultory nods toward the standard expectations of scene-setting, which stood in stark contrast to his over-long descriptions of the potential suspects, presented in awkward internal monologues before the plot can really get rolling.

The second problem was the fact that the alleged star of the book, Commissaire Laviolette, fades so easily into the background and has little to do with solving the case. In fact, he missed one of the most obvious clues I have ever seen in any detective novel, the pig’s reaction to a specific patron in the town’s bar. But he also lacked character or personality, and the novel reads like a mystery that solves itself.

I’m willing to concede that some of the trouble could be the result of a poor translation and would give the series another chance, but I’m going to try to get the next book, The Messengers of Death, in the original French and see if that makes a difference (even though it will take me substantially longer to get through it). But right now, I have a feeling this is another case of reviewers fawning over a novel that was a hit in another language and country first even though, had it been written by an American and published first in English, they would have seen it for the thin, somewhat drab novel that it is.

Next review: Back to a master of the genre, Raymond Chandler, with Farewell, My Lovely.

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→ June 21, 2010
→ By

Fer-de-Lance.

I’m back from a week of vacation in St. Kitts with my phone completely off and no access to email. Add to that a copious supply of rum and it might have been the greatest week of my life. I will get to a post running through the places where we ate as well as general thoughts on the island later in the week.

I also went through seven books in seven days, mostly detective stories, starting with my first exposure to Nero Wolfe in print form with Rex Stout’s first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance. I’ve heard several of the classic radio programs starring Sidney Greenstreet as the corpulent, eccentric genius who solves crimes without leaving his office/apartment and raises and breeds orchids when he’s not playing detective. The real leg work falls to his employee and occasional verbal sparring partner Archie Goodwin, who also handles some of the orchid-management duties and often finds himself frustrated in the face of Wolfe’s ability to draw correct conclusions from limited data.

Fer-de-Lance is the first of the 33 novels Stout wrote, although he didn’t write it as an introductory novel, making references to (nonexistent) prior cases and character histories so that the novel’s beginning isn’t bogged down in lengthy details or dull tangents. The case involves an Italian immigrant who goes missing and turns up dead and a college President who drops dead suddenly on a golf course, with Wolfe and Goodwin making the connection and Wolfe figuring out how the core murder was committed but not knowing for certain who committed it until later in the book. The climax, where Wolfe reveals the killer’s identity to the police, is a bit over the top but certainly enjoyable.

Two major facets of Fer-de-Lance propelled the book forward for me. One is the two fascinating characters of Wolfe and Goodwin. Wolfe is a maddening (but not mad) genius, exacting, arrogant, but brilliant and logical, relying on the psychology of suspects much as Hercule Poirot typically does. Goodwin chafes under his boss’s condescension but ultimately must bow to Wolfe’s superior powers of deduction; he’s too much of a dandy to be hard-boiled but does fill the role of the hard-boiled detective who pounds the pavement, threatening and being threatened, while Wolfe sits in the comfort of his office. Stout sets up a number of avenues of friction between the two for subsequent books.

The other was Stout’s approach to revealing the crime to the reader, which deviated from the standard formula where the author saves the final details for the last chapter or two of the book. In many detective or mystery novels, that’s almost a requirement, as the reader’s curiosity provides velocity to the text that is lacking in pedestrian writing, but Stout’s characterization and simple and witty prose are strong enough to drive the reader forward even after Wolfe and Goodwin have settled on the killer’s identity and instead work backwards to prove that Wolfe’s answer is correct, rather than following clues to a conclusion that ends the book.

I enjoyed Fer-de-Lance but wouldn’t class it with Christie’s intricate, subtle plotting, or Chandler’s terse, literary prose; it’s faster and easier but without the same depth, definitely worth the time if you’re familiar with any of the Wolfe adaptations and want to see the character in his original form, or if you’re looking for a quick, fun, yet still intelligent detective novel.

Next up: There’s not too much new to say on the 20th Wodehouse novel I’ve read, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, other than that it’s vintage Wooster, so I’ll skip ahead to Pierre Magnan’s Death in the Truffle Wood for the next writeup. I’m currently reading Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi (also published as The Zen of Fish).

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→ November 17, 2009
→ By

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Some of my TV hit from yesterday is available online. I’ve got a quick take on the Adrian Gonzalez/White Sox rumor on Rumor Central. My morning wrapup piece is now up as well.

—

Question: If Stieg Larsson had lived to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo get published, would it have received the same fawning critical reaction? After reading the book, I have to doubt it. It’s a brisk read, sometimes gripping, but it’s a lot closer to your average mass-market pot-boiler than the serious novel of ideas that the pull quotes I’ve seen would indicate.

Mikael Blomkvist is a crusading journalist in Stockholm who, at the book’s opening, has been found guilty of libel and sentenced to three months in jail after a big expose he ran on a leading Swedish businessman turned out to be based on fabricated information. Blomkvist is then summoned to meet the patriarch of the Vanger family, Henrick, who wants to employ him to write the family history and use that as a ruse to dig around the forty-year-old disappearance of his niece, Harriet Vanger, who is presumed dead but whose body was never found. Henrik used a private security company to run a background check on Blomkvist, and the report was written by Lisbeth Salander, the inked girl of the book’s title, a brilliant loner with issues and a serious (but seemingly justified) hatred of men. Salander and Blomkvist end up working together on the Harriet case for Henrik, for their own curiosity, and for the potential to save Blomkvist’s publication, Millennium, which ran the discredited article.

The story flies by, even though Larsson hasn’t overpacked the book with action sequences. There’s just one major protagonist-in-jeopardy episode, and much of the remainder of the investigation part of the book covers Blomkvist and Salander’s efforts to unearth information on the Vanger clan, since they’re working a very cold case in which modern investigative techniques aren’t that useful. Following Blomkvist as he navigates some of the odd personalities associated with the case is interested for fifty pages or so, but it’s not enough to sustain the narrative, and Larsson eventually has to push the plot forward with some “aha” moments and discoveries. I finished the book inside of 96 hours, and that one bit where Blomkvist is nearly killed is a heart-pounder.

The main problem with Girl is that it’s not so much a detective story or thriller as it is a revenge fantasy. Larsson piles injustices on both his two main protagonists and on unseen victims, then takes out the crooks and the creeps one by one in clinical fashion. I admit to seeing a certain satisfaction in watching Blomkvist and Salander – particularly Salander, who is almost sociopathic in her vengeance, although I imagine Larsson intended to make it seem more obsessive/therapeutic – bring justice to bear on the baddies, but it also made for a cliche-ridden plot with only one really surprising twist (one that was actually foreshadowed at the book’s opening, although Larsson did a nice job casting doubt on that initial suspicion).

Those two protagonists are also somewhat thinly drawn. Blomkvist is atonal – he’s not perfect, as he’s consistently reckless in his personal liaisons and many of his professional choices, including the one that nearly gets him killed – but he’s roughly as interesting as a glass of water. Salander is far more interesting as the brilliant freak with the mysterious past, driven by some unknown but unpleasant episode from her childhood, but her absurd memory and skill with computers remove doubt from the reader’s mind – she breaks every code, obtains every file or photo, remembers every detail. Flawed detectives have to work to solve a case. Salander just has to breathe.

The prose is just atrocious, although I’m not sure how much is Larsson’s (he was a journalist by trade, not a fiction writer, and I think it showed in his wording) and how much is just a bad translation from the original Swedish:

Finally he opened his shoulder bag and put his iBook on the desk in the office. Then he stopped and looked about him with a sheepish expression. The benefits of living in the countryside, forsooth. There was nowhere to plug in the broadband cable. He did not even have a telephone jack to connect an old dial-up modem.

Larsson loaded the text with irrelevant details that don’t set the scene or elucidate anything about the plot or characters; that sort of self-editing is critical to any novel but particularly one in the detective genre. He also degenerates into dimwitted populism that reminded me of why I stopped reading Michael Crichton after two books:

“The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn’t have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy.”

I mean, aside from the inherent ignorance of what the purpose of a stock exchange is, and the omission of the fact that personal wealth in any capitalist economy is going to be at least partly driven by the movement in the equity markets, Larsson (speaking through Blomkvist) really nails it.

Would I recommend the book? It’s a fast and entertaining read, and if that’s what you want from your novels, then you’ll enjoy it. I’ll probably check out the sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, when it comes out in paperback, although I can’t say I’m dying to do so. (Larsson does end with a small personal cliffhanger for Salander, which struck me as a little unrealistic and not a driver towards the next book.) Having read so many better novels even within the space of detective stories, though, I found The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to be like empty calories.

Incidentally, friend of the dish Levi Stahl disliked the book far more than I did. I at least enjoyed the reading, but the prose seems to have made Levi quite angry.

Next up: Wayne Curtis’ And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, a non-fiction book about my favorite distilled spirit. A bit of trivia from the book: If rum is the distilled essence of molasses, and brandy is the distilled essence of wine, what spirit is the distilled essence of beer?

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The Case of the Missing Books.

I’m back and online again. I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 3 pm EST (and maybe again later that half hour) to discuss the NL Gold Glove Award winners. There’s at least one awful oversight on par with Franklin Gutierrez from the AL awards. Klawchat is on for tomorrow at 1 pm EST.

Ian Sansom’s The Case of the Missing Books is the first in the “Mobile Library” series of pseudo-detective novels, but wasn’t good enough to get me to attack the second book (which one of you mentioned in the comments on the last post was unreadable anyway). The story revolves around sad-sack librarian Israel Armstrong, a Jewish vegetarian from London who takes a librarian job in a rural Irish town, sight unseen, only to find that the job has changed to one overseeing a mobile library, and that all fifteen thousand books have gone missing. This leads Israel to play detective – badly – to try to find them.

For the most part Sansom just borrows gags from other writers or, in the case of all the bathroom humor, from time immemorial. The vegetarian-served-a-meal-of-meat gag? (Saw that in Everything is Illuminated, and it wasn’t funny then, either.) The blue-collar guy with an unexpected interest in classic literature? The driver who can’t seem to keep his car on the road? Jokes about Israel’s name? There was very little original humor in the book, and with a pretty thin plot – halfway through the book, Israel is barely settled in the town of Tundrum, and I wouldn’t say he makes any progress in the case until the final 50-60 pages – there’s nothing left to sustain the book. It’s a quick read because of all the dialogue, and some of the dialogue is quick and snappy, but it raises the question of whether Sansom can write decent prose, and some of the dialogue brings an unnecessary level of detail around ordinary events in Israel’s day.

Next review will be much more positive, though – Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.

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