Rickman, Phil: The Fabric of Sin: A Merrily Watkins Mystery (Merrily Watkins Mysteries Book 9)
This is the ninth of these I read, and I’m impressed at how high a standard Rickman maintains. The Masons and the Templars are in the mix this time. Good fun.
Hitchens, Dolores: Sleep with Slander
Dolores Hitchens was prolific. She composed series of detective novels as well as several stand-alones. Unfortunately she only managed two in this series, because she hits her stride in this one, making the detective more interesting, and spinning a crime more horrible and tangled for him to rectify than she managed in her first. Still, one is grateful that the two “Sleep With” novels were resurrected.
Hitchens, Dolores: Sleep with Strangers
Yet another private eye novel set in Southern California, in this case in and around Long Beach. Since I've spent some time in that city—walked those mean streets—it was fun to follow the action. Throwing a bit of a spanner into the works is the chapter where the detective kidnaps his client, an attractive woman barely out of her teens, because, to give it the most charitable interpretation, he believes she is guilty of three or four murders and that he is helping her to escape. The aging detective has spun a fantasy where they marry in Las Vegas and flee to Mexico. She asks him to take her home, but instead, he drives out into the country, and though the standards of the time keep this from being absolutely explicit, appears to rape her. I can't decide if it is surprising that this novel was written by a woman. Maybe the answer is that it's not. A woman of that time might have good reason for finding it absolutely plausible that a good guy could also be a rapist, and that his act wouldn't even be seen as criminal.
Rickman, Phil: The Remains of An Altar: A Merrily Watkins Mystery (Merrily Watkins Mysteries Book 8)
I’m glad Phil Rickman wrote a lot of these, because they’re absolutely addictive. The supernatural is mostly displaced in this one by an SAS veteran turned minister, sleazy local politicians, and drugs. The novel is not the poorer for that.
Peace, David: Tokyo Redux: A novel (Tokyo Trilogy)
It's been about ten years since David Peace published the second volume of his Tokyo Trilogy, Occupied City, which followed the initial entry, Tokyo Year Zero. One had begun to despair that volume three would ever get written, but the good news is that it did and that it was worth the wait. It is, verily, a crowning achievement. In it, Peace continues to tell the story of modern Japan through the crimes it has experienced: The Teigin Incident; the "Japanese Bluebeard," Kodaira Yoshio; and in Tokyo Redux, the Shimoyama Incident, as the murder or suicide—questions remain—of the then president of Japan National Railways is known. These are not crime novels, though, in the sense that they focus on a crime and its solution. Rather, they use these crimes as prisms to cast light on the history through which Japan has moved since World War II, or perhaps to show us the darkness, that exists in that history.
I have noted elsewhere that non-Japanese have written great books about Japan and about its capital city, but that almost all of these books are non-fiction. I have suggested that Arturo Silva's Tokio Whip was the first great novel by a foreigner about Tokyo. Tokyo Redux may be the second, and these two gifted authors have neatly divided up the territory: Silva focusing on the contemporary, Peace on the historical.
Richard Stark: The Outfit
The spare, simple perfection of Richard Stark's prose, his sharp eye, seem a good analog for the spare, simple perfection of his protagonist, Parker's, life as an independent thief and his cold, chilling view of humanity. We can't help but root for him, and to wish we were as unflappable. "Parker," as Luc Sante wrote, "is a brilliant invention."
Jackson, Shirley: Life Among the Savages
I hesitate to admit that I don't really like the jocular in fiction—not even P.G. Wodehouse—because it makes me sound humorless. I can, however, recognize when the jocular is done well—as in P.G. Wodehouse—and that is the case with Shirley Jackson's early novel (cobbled together in significant part from previously published stories), Life Among the Savages. The subcategory of jocular into which this novel falls has been called "domestic chaos." It's a series of episodes in the life of a couple with two then three then four then five children, New Yorkers who have emigrated to Vermont. The narrative voice is the wife's, so we get her version of how she manages to hold things together with too many kids, not enough money, and a husband who is ineffectual in the way husbands were allowed to be back before men had to at least gesture toward the equality of the sexes. The narrator of the novel never complains about her lot, but there are some sly observations of the role she, like many other '50s housewives, is forced to play. The novel is, apparently, semi-autobiographical. The narrator, though, is never seen writing; one wonders how Jackson was ever able to find a room of her own and be as productive as she was.
Rickman, Phil: The Smile of a Ghost (Merrily Watkins Mysteries)
Another good one from Phil Rickman. He really doesn’t like psychiatrists, and he doesn’t think much of lawyers, either.
Joritz-Nakagawa, Jane: Plan B Audio
The genesis of a book of poems must be, one imagines, somehow different from the genesis of a single poem. The genesis of this collection is the cancer through which the poet, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa has lived, through which she did not die. This is not clear from the first poems in the collection, but becomes stark as the series progresses. One imagines this reflects Joritz-Nakagawa’s initial confusion at what is happening to her body and then the harsh knowledge of her situation. There are cryptic couplets, haiku-like tercets, and a range of other containers for the experiences the poet has, the images that fill her mind.
Her vision of hospital life is bleak: “This is a hospital so someone must die.” That the poet published this book suggests a happy ending. The poem does not offer one.
Beckett, Samuel: The Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett: Volume III of The Grove Centenary Editions (Works of Samuel Beckett the Grove Centenary Editions)
Drama is the literary avenue in which I am the least interested and about which I am the least knowledgeable (surely those phenomena are connected). The only playwrights in whom I’ve ever been fascinated by are William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, whose complete dramatic works I’ve just finished reading. I can only agree with Edward Albee, who writes in the in the introduction to this volume: “You have before you one of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth century.” And what a treat it is to be able to take a step away from the page and toward the stage thanks to the many fine performances to be found on YouTube.
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by Robert S. Lopez:
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