Started Early, Took My Dog

Novels are influential.  I often find myself wanting something that I have just read a character in a book doing or wanting.  Or eating.  An example - recently we were trying to plan a vacation and as I had just read Richard Stark's The Green Eagle Score, I suggested we go to Puerto Rico - mainly because Parker seemed to enjoy the place.  Or when I read Sunday by Georges Simenon - a character had his morning coffee in a bowl - that, for some reason, made me long for coffee bowls.  Took me a long time to get a set, but I did.  And they are wonderful.  I realize these examples are of things of no great importance but that is probably a good thing as one would not want major life decisions unduly governed by incidental details in a novel.

I recently read Kate Atkinson's newest novel, Started Early, Took My Dog.  Early on, Jackson Brodie, the PI who anchors four of Atkinson's books, gets a dog.  He witnesses someone abusing a small dog and decides to hit the dog's abuser and take his dog.  The dog, a border terrier, is with Brodie the rest of the book.  And him having this dog really made me want a dog.  (I had a Beagle puppy for five days when I was five years old but haven't been around any since.)  I started researching dogs on the internet.  And thinking about taking dogs on walks.  Then, last week at work, I learned of a situation where someone had to give up her dog because it snapped at her granddaughter.  So I called my wife, asked her what she thought, and now we have one.  And its just a great as I thought it would be.

The Steam Pig and Trouble on the Horizon

I just bought a new copy of James McClure's first novel, The Steam Pig.  First published in 1971, it is a police procedural set in South Africa and is the first in a series starring an Akfrikaner and his Zulu partner.  I bought a used paperback copy of it some 20 years ago on the advice of an old bookseller on the south side of Chicago. (Her store was stuffed to the ceiling with books, poorly lit, drafty, and always filled with cigarette smoke, but I got a lot of wonderful stuff from her over the years.)  I also acquired the rest of the books in the series.  Of course, I never got around to reading them - but I have thought about them on and off over the years.  (The gestation period for me to starting reading something after I buy it can sometimes be a decade or more.)

For whatever reason, I've become interested in reading McClure now.  The problem is all of his books are packed away in boxes and stored in the crawlspace of my dad's house in Chicago - some 700 miles away.  I recently picked up a copy of Snake, McClure's fourth in the series, as back up travel reading.  Which means I've purchased two of these books twice.

I just found out that my dad might be moving next year - and that I have a year to figure out what to do with the 20 or so boxes of books in his crawlspace.  Realistically, I have room for maybe two boxes of these books.  The rest will have to go.  Even if he weren't moving, how long are we allowed to keep boxes in our parents' houses after we've moved away?

I know I have McClures to rescue, plus several Jim Thompson pulps - actually, maybe a lot of noiry/pulpy things from a phase I went through way back then.  I have been wanting to rescue my copy of The Best of Frederic Brown with the Richard Corben cover - something I had forgotten about until I read OlmanFeelyus's review of it last summer.  I salvaged all my Philip K. Dicks several years ago but I know I still have some old SF paperbacks I want.  Boxes of old issues of The New Yorker?  I love my old copies of that magazine but I think they take up too much space.  Getting rid of them will hurt.  The rest of these books?  Obviously, I don't need them all.  I'm going to take pictures of what I discard and this record of biblio-exsanguination will be proof that I don't keep everything and that I am not some demented hoarder.  Is one even a hoarder if one only collects one kind of thing? 

Lastly - I think it is a good thing I have a new copy of The Steam Pig as I think this is the cover of the copy that is in storage.  Can't comfortably read that in pubic, can I?

Comeback Has Come Back

My brand new copy of the University of Chicago Press edition of Richard Stark's Comeback just arrived.   This book marks the return of Parker after a 23 year hiatus.  And for me it should end a four or five month break of not reading any Richard Stark novels.


Butcher's Moon and Backflash should be here soon. 

Thank you to the folks at the University of Chicago Press for reprinting these books.   Can a university press win the Nobel Prize for Literature?  I think these people should.

Killy

I just got a copy of Killy by Donald Westlake.

It is in hard cover, a first edition, and its dust jacket is unclipped. It is a little worn and has some tanning on it. Since I got it for $6.50, I am rather pleased with it. There is only one small problem with it: it is an ex-library copy, a fact the seller did not disclose. Had I paid more, I would be pissed off. But since I got it so cheaply, I can live with it. (Additionally, I won't be so worried about messing it up when I read it.) The seller gave the item a detailed listing and I am certain he purposely omitted the fact that it was an ex-library copy.  (The library sold it for 10 cents.)

My copy of Killy came from the Daycroft School Library. Now closed, this Christian Scientist school was located in the tony Connecticut town of Greenwich (now better known as the primary base for most American hedge funds). It seems odd to me that a Christian Scientist school would have early Westlake novels. Perhaps a librarian had a fondness for crime novels and ordered it. Killy does not strike me as the kind of thing that the school founders would want their students reading. From the dust jacket:

Killy is a first rate detective story about the solving of several murders, but it is even more a novel about how a young man still filled with illusions can be turned into the inevitable path of the ruthless seeking for power.

Or perhaps maybe the students were to read it as a cautionary tale.  Having had a look at the place, I would think they could have used a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go instead as it looks like the kind of place where they keep cloned kids until they are ready to donate their organs.  (But I suppose being a Christian Scientist school, such a thing would have been singularly unlikely.  Or, perhaps, that is the perfect cover?)

The dust jacket of my copy of Killy was designed by Arthur Hawkins.  I don't know much about him (I get the feeling he was an important/prominent designer or artist) but I like what I see of his work.  He's also done:

I am still reading Tana French's fantastic second novel The Likeness and don't know when I will get around to reading Killy.

LCD Soundsystem & The Muppets

My favorite record of 2010 was from LCD Soundsystem. Didn't listen to a lot of new music in the past year but was glad I found this album. (I heard James Murphy interviewed on Fresh Air and read about him in the New Yorker - not the coolest way to discover new music - but what can I do?)

This isn't the best song on the album - but the video features the Muppets doing some of their best work since Bohemian Rhapsody.

I know it is supposed to be all about books here but I really love LCD Soundsystem.

The Water Rat of Wanchai

As much as I enjoying reading, I think I may enjoy reading about reading or reading to find new books to read, just as much.  I was reading the arts section of Canada's National Post newspaper last weekend and saw a story about Ian Hamilton and his new novel The Water Rat of Wanchai.  Then I did a Google search on him and the book and was soon convinced that I had just discovered the next Stieg Larsson.  Its possible that I am just responding to some good PR by the publisher and the buzz from a few bloggers but it has been fun telling people (several at work, the barista at Starbucks) that I had just discovered the next big thing in publishing and that in a year, everyone would be talking about Ava Lee (Hamilton's Lisbeth Salander). 

My copy of the book just arrived from Amazon Canada and it looks like some of my reckless enthusiasm is warranted:  "When the phone rang, Ava woke with a start."  Not quite as good as "When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man." (Firebreak, Richard Stark, 2001)  But still, a good start.  I hope I actually read this book fairly soon.  I don't want it to be like the current book I am reading, The Likeness by Tana French.

I heard about her debut novel, In the Woods, fairly early on - certainly before it became a big hit.  So I started it but couldn't get past the prologue.  Really hated that part.  Seemed to drag on forever.  (Longest two pages of my life.)  So I put it aside and then all of a sudden Tana French had published two more critically acclaimed, prize-winning novels.  My wife has read all three multiple times and I had only managed two pages.   So after three or four years, I finally read In the Woods this past month.  On a Kindle. 

I find it hard to believe that In the Woods is her first novel.  French is really, really good.  Set in and around Dublin, French tells the story of two detectives from the Dublin Murder Squad (which does not exist - but wouldn't tee shirts with that name on it be really cool?) working a new child murder case on the site of an archeological dig where two children had vanished twenty years earlier.  Oh, and one of the detectives was with the two vanished kids that day 20 years ago and was the only survivor of whatever happened that day (of which he has no memory).  A long a brooding book  - without a lot of action in it - but still quite wonderful.  In a way, it is the Irish equivalent to Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Swedish police procedurals (the Martin Beck series).  And so far, though I have only read a few chapters of it, The Likeness, her second book, seems to be even better than her debut.

The Rise and Fall of Bowdlerization and Mutilation

January 2011 has been a bad month.  First, some loser published a new edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  The major contribution of this new edition - the elimination of the N-word from the text.  I've been fairly happy that there has been a proper amount of outrage over this and most seem to understand why this is a bad/stupid thing to do.

About the same time as the SafeTwain was published, PBS began airing the recent UK TV phenom Downtown Abbey.  But because certain PBS executives think Americans are stupid, certain parts of the series have been cut to eliminate material they fear we will not understand and to speed up the action because we cannot stay focused without jumping right in to the story.  Who do they think is watching a costume drama about servants and the English aristocracy anyway?  I started watching the original but haven't got very far yet.  This might not be for me.

I read a lot of English fiction and watch a lot of English TV and I constantly encounter material I do not understand.  This is why Google was invented.  For instance, I am currently reading Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog.  Lots of bad things happened in Leeds/Yorkshire in the 1970s and Atkinson makes reference to the Gene Hunt and Jack Regan school of policing.  I got the Gene Hunt reference (I watched the original UK version of Life on Mars - not the bowdlerized version they showed here or the insipid American remake) but had to Google Jack Regan.  Turns out, he's from The Sweeney - which I sort of know about but have never seen.  (Hard to imagine that nice old Inspector Morse was a bad ass before he became Inspector Morse.)  I am reading the UK edition of the book and wonder if this bit will make the American edition when it is published in March.  (And why the delay?)

Earlier this month I read The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs.  I heard Jonathan Coe talk about this book on the radio and that made me really want to read it - because Coe may be my favorite writer.  I guess the TV series of the same name was a big hit (in the US, too, I've heard, mainly because of endless PBS reruns but I never knew about it).  I thought the book was wonderful.  I tried the TV series but it was too painful to watch.  Book seems far superior and maybe the show was funnier in 1975.  While researching the TV series, I found that the new DVD set available in the US has been bowdlerized - they took out something making fun of minorities (or making fun of people who are scared of minorities).  We can put these DVDs on the shelf next to the new Mark Twain.

One thing I was surprised to see and hear was the use of the N-word in Fawlty Towers.  I've been watching that via Netflix and just saw the episode called The Germans.  I'd seen parts of this before but not the whole thing.  In the first half of the episode, before we get to the Don't Mention the War stuff, the Major tells Fawlty a story about a cricket match and refers to the N*s.  As the Major is a washed up, drunken fossil, I take the N-word from his mouth to be more about him than those to whom he refers.  Wonder if it was the same in 1975?

I also read the English and American versions (don't ask) of Lee Child's latest, Worth Dying For.  The only differences I noticed?  Tyres and tires.  This I can live with.