Opportunity Costs

I've greatly enjoyed my Richard Stark binge - 13 Starks in a row (11 Parkers and 2 Grofields).  I started The Sour Lemon Score but put it aside to read The Passage by Justin Cronin.  My plans were to take a break after Butcher's Moon (maybe six months or so, not 23 years like some people) but The Passage was screaming READ ME NOW and I gave in.  (I'm glad I listened, the book is fantastic.)

A towering stack of must-read books has piled up while this Stark obsession has been going on:

-Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh (which I was a third into when I picked up The Hunter)
-Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindquist (which reminds me I still need to read Let The Right One In so I can watch the movie)
-The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathon Coe (one of my absolute favorite novelists)
-The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
-61 Hours by Lee Child (due back at the library in 48 hours)
-The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (already started last fall? just got back from the library)
-Burial by Neil Cross
-The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost (recommended by a friend)
-An Egyptian Journal by William Golding (honestly, I have no idea why - it just seems neat)
-The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Steig Larsson (left over from October)
-The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (wonderfully reviewed new novel about journalists)
-there are others that didn't make the list, trust me

To make matters worse, The Passage is making me want to read (and if I don't have, acquire):
-Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
-The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
-The Stand by Stephen King
-The Road by Cormac McCarthy
-The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (been meaning to read this for years)
-Feed by Mira Grant
-Earth Abides by George Stewart

And Amazon is sending me two new books - Lucy by Laurence Gonzales and Kraken by China Mieville (human-animal hybrids and squid, perennial favorites of mine).  And maybe, just maybe, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell.

As for now, I'm going back to reading Low Moon by Jason.  But only if I don't go dig out my Beryl Bainbridge novels.

Four Parkers

I completed the first part of my Richard Stark collection. I now have all of the Parker books Stark wrote before his 23 year hiatus.

I found terrible, old paperback copies of Deadly Edge, Slayground, Plunder Squad and Butcher's Moon on eBay. In a way, this was a stupid thing to do. In September, three of these books will be republished and will be easily available for the first time since, I think, 1985. Which means the prices of these crappy old paperbacks will plummet. But I couldn't wait that long. Butcher's Moon will be reprinted in the spring of 2011 - and then no one will ever again pay $88 for an old paperback copy of it. (The art and design on these 1985 reprints is hideous. I understand shelling out good money for vintage paperbacks that look good. I'll be embarrassed to be seen reading these things in public.)

I really should have my head examined for spending so much on these books - but I don't have money left to pay for psychiatric treatment.

Serendipity and the Origin of the Mourner in Richard Stark's The Mourner

The Mourner, the fourth of Richard Stark's Parker novels, is about the theft of a 15th century French statue. As part of the telling of the story of the statue's history, Ralph Harrow - the father of Bett, Parker's current squeeze, uses the September 1958 issue of Horizon magazine:

Harrow licked his lips and glanced at his daughter, but she was no help. “To begin with, I'd like you to read a brief article in this magazine.” He said magazine, but it was obviously the book he meant. He held it up, and Parker saw above the picture a title: Horizon.And below the picture a date: September, 1958. So it was a magazine that looked like a book. Harrow opened the magazine-​book, muttering to himself, “Page sixty-​two.” He found the page and extended the open book.

Stark then gives even more specific details:

This article concerns a group of eighty-​two statuettes in a monument at Dijon, in France.” He turned the book around so Parker could see. “You see the title? 'The Missing Mourners of Dijon', by Ferdinand Auberjonois.”

In general, the Parker novel do not feature overly specific descriptions of much of anything. So all this detail got me wondering if this article about the statues was real or not (I knew of Horizon magazine - in fact I came across a bunch of copies at a used booksale several months ago but barely looked through them). And it turns out, Stark did his homework:

http://prestwidge.com/horizon/mtoc.htm

I had never heard of the Mourners before so I thought they could have been made up. (Whenever Stark/Westlake wrote about African gems I always assumed they were made up. I know he likes to create fictional African and South American countries so made up statues seemed par for the course.) But on page 62 there is the article by Ferdinand Auberjonois that Parker refuses to read.

This is not much of discovery. Anyone so inclined could have easily found this out (and probably already has). But in a great case of serendipity, 37 of the real Mourners are on tour in the US for the first time right now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/arts/design/13mourners.html

As best I can tell, the Mourner in The Mourner is not on display.

I noticed two other things while looking at the table of contents for the mentioned issue of Horizon. One is that Harrow (the town) is in an article and I am guessing that is where Stark got the name to give to Bett's father.

The second thing I noticed takes a wild leap of imagination to make (and is probably nothing more than coincidence) is that there is an article by Freya STARK in the same issue. The first Parker story was published in 1959. If Donald Westlake read the magazine in September of 1958, did he get his new pen name from here? Yes, it is a stretch. But he did get the idea for his fourth book here - so maybe it is not that much of a stretch.

The Case of the Missing Starks

A literacy charity is running a book sale since mid-April in the building I work in. I, of course, have been going in every day since they opened. And I am not finding anything good. At all. Ever. Even though I have searched through dozens of boxes and tables of books, I have not found a single Donald Westlake or Richard Stark novel amongst the 50,000 or so books they have. Which is all I really want. Some people seem to find Starks everywhere. But not me. I'm losing auctions for them on eBay. The library can't find the few Starks I need. I can't even find pirated ebook versions of them. I know the four Starks I need will be republished by the University of Chicago Press this fall and next spring but I don't think I can wait that long. (I can remember when I used to see Starks all the time - back when I didn't want them. I remember standing in Second Story Books looking at copies of the Grofield books and thinking, How can a crime novel about an actor be any good? So I crossed Stark of the list of writers I was interested in - even though I made the judgment based on the wrong series of books, not knowing that Stark primarily wrote the Parker novels. In fact, my booksense has failed me twice when it comes to Donald Westlake. I always turned my nose up at his Dortmunder books, too. I thought I only liked non-Dortmunder, non-Stark books. I only tried the Dortmunder books after Westlake died a few years ago. Now I love his Dortmunder books, too.)

I did manage to find a Simenon novel that I did not have - Maigret and the Tavern by the Seine.
This is a significant accomplishment because it turns out I have approximately 160 Simenons (Maigrets and non-Maigrets) and it is very difficult to to find a recognize one I don't have. To celebrate, I vacuumed my Simenon bookcase tonight and cataloged all of the books.

Since this book sale started, the only other books I've bought are:
Savages by Shirley Conran
Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo
Straight Man by Richard Russo
The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridason

Savages really confuses me because it seems to be regarded as chick-lit (not my cup of tea) but it looks good. Of the reader reviews I've come across, most people seem to have had a wonderful time reading it. And I can't get enough of jungles and survivalist stuff these days (the effects of repeated/prolonged exposure to Lost, Bear Grylls, Survivorman, Freddie Spencer Chapman, and the HBO mini-series The Pacific). And the book has maps in it.

The two Russos are nice Vintage trade paperback editions. I've been wanting to re-read Straight Man and couldn't pass it up. And I'm stockpiling Scandanavian crime fiction so I had to grab the book from Iceland. I've got two of his other books and hear very good things about him.

The Singing Detective

Dope was great fun. It was written as a 1950s noir/pulp novel - the search for a missing girl caught up in New York's heroin underworld. But it was so much better written than those old 50s pulp novels that I think we have a definite case of the imitation being better than the original. Sara Gran is a really good writer and the guys who wrote the pulps often weren't (or didn't put the same time and effort into the work). I then read an old pulp from 1952 called Thin Air by Howard Brown. Its about a woman who disappears on her husband after they return from vacation. Nowhere near as good as Dope.

I've been reading a hefty biography of Dennis Potter, the man who wrote the TV mini-series The Singing Detective. And I've been re-watching The Singing Detective, which I now own, on DVD. It is, without doubt, the greatest thing ever shown on television (even though I don't think it has ever been shown in its entirety in the US). Who knew that a musical set in a hospital about a writer of detective stories and who is suffering from a debilitating skin disease and simultaneously writing a detective story in his head, hallucinating, reliving his childhood, reluctantly undergoing psychotherapy, and feuding with his ex-wife could be so compelling and entertaining? And since Potter himself suffered from the same skin disease, fact and fiction is blurred in amazing ways. (Michael Gambon plays the Singing Detective. He also played Inspector Maigret, Georges Simenon's famous detective, on PBS. I have about 150 Simenon novels and I was always amazed at how on some of the books, the drawing of Maigret looked so similar to Michael Gambon and what I imagined Maigret to look like - until I found out that some of these books were republished when PBS first broadcast adaptations of them for the first time. I think I'll be getting them from Netflix soon.) I can't remember how I found out about it but I knew of it for years before I ever saw it. Dennis Potter did a famous interview as he was dying and I had heard snippets of it on Morning Edition and I guess it stuck with me. The DVD has the full interview but I haven't watched it yet. (Sometime in the last week or two I heard a profile of Neko Case and her new album on Morning Edition and then I somehow found myself in a record store buying her new album - and I barely know anything about her. But as it turns out, the new album is pretty cool.)

I also caught up with two Michael Connelly novels that I bought last year but didn't get around to reading. Both The Closers and The Lincoln Lawyer were fantastic. Next up is the new Sarah Waters novel The Night Watch.

Tap, Tap, Tap

I was in New York over the weekend and I went to the Strand to look for some books. I couldn’t find my top two choices – The Night Watch by Sarah Waters and a new biography of the British scientist J.D. Bernal by Andrew Brown. I did find three books that I had previously been unable to get anywhere else (library included) and bought them. They were Kiss It Goodbye by John Wessel, The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes and Come Closer by Sarah Gran.

I wanted to get the Declan Hughes book when I was in Ireland but it has yet to be published there. It hasn’t been officially released here either – I got a reviewer’s copy. The John Wessel book is the third in what had been a series of crime novels set on the south side of Chicago. I thought the first two were okay and I liked the Chicago stuff. He seems to have disappeared after the third book – which was nearly impossible to find.

The coolest book I got was Come Closer by Sara Gran. I scored a copy of her new book, Dope, from the library last week. I’d heard some great things about Come Closer but had never seen a copy before. The book is about an architect who may or may not be possessed. While I generally hate anything to do with the supernatural, this book rocks. She’s a brilliant writer. Uncluttered prose that flows smoothly. Very economical yet nothing important gets left out. Tremendously entertaining.

The book is also a great primer on what to do if you or a loved one is suffering from demonic possession. Here’s a simple 10 point diagnostic tool from the book:

Are YOU Possessed by a Demon?


1. I hear strange noises in my home, especially at night, which family members tell me only occur when I am present.


2. I have new activities and pastimes that seem "out of character," and I do things that I did not intend and do not understand.


3. I'm short and ill-tempered with my friends and loved ones.


4. I can understand languages I've never studied, and have the ability to know things I couldn't know through ordinary means.


5. I have blackouts not caused by drugs, alcohol, or a preexisting health condition.


6. I have unusual new thoughts, or hear voices in my head.


7. I've had visions or dreams of personalities who may be demons.


8. A psychic, minister, or other spiritualist has told me I'm possessed.


9. I have urges to hurt or kill animals and other people.


10. I have hurt or killed animals or people.


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0-3: You are probably not possessed. See a doctor or mental health professional for an evaluation.


3-6: You may be haunted, or in the early stages of possession. Do not be alarmed. Seek a spiritual counselor for assisstance.


6-10: You are possessed. Consult with your spiritual counselor immediately. You may be a threat to the safety of yourself and your family.



Possession usually begins with a preliminary stage called "obsession"- the obsession of the demon with the victim. In this stage the victim is still alone in his body but all five senses, and in addition the memory and mind, can be manipulated and disturbed by the Entity. The victim may feel lust, envy, greed, or urges towards any of the sins with stronger force than ever before. It is common for the victim to hear the demon in the form of rapping, tapping, or scratching that seems to follow them around; also common is for the victim to have their dreams infiltrated by the Possessing Entity.

I gave the test to my traveling companion on the bus ride back to Washington. To protect that person’s privacy, I won’t reveal the outcome of the test – but let’s just say it explains a few things. Especially the tapping.

Dope

I got Dope from the library. I didn't think I'd be able to score my Dope there - I figured I'd have to buy it on the street. Let me tell you, this is some good stuff.