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.