An Innes and a Gilbert instead of Seven Starks?

When I fell in love with Donald Westlake's Richard Stark novels a few years ago, I would have given anything to be able to find used and or collectible copies of his books.  I never saw anything by Stark. (By which I mean for sale in bookstores, not online.)  Now that we are a few years into what looks like a fairly solid Westlake revival, I am starting to see more Westlakes for sale in used bookstores.

I stopped by two used bookstores tonight and in the second one I found seven Richard Stark first editions for sale (and some paperbacks reprints, too).  Three Allison & Busbys, two from Gregg Press, and two of the Grofields from Macmillan.  The Rare Coin Score was signed.  All were between $29 to $50.

I am embarrassed to admit that I passed on all of them, especially the Grofields.  (I have all of the Starks in one form or another now though most are not especially collectible, though they are cherished.  Except for my $80 Butcher's Moon paperback, that still makes me angry.) Instead I spent 50 cents on a green Penguin Michael Innes, The Daffodil Affair.  Did a bit of research on it when I got home and the consensus seems to be that it is the strangest novel Innes wrote.  Perhaps not the best place to start reading him but I do like the cover a lot.

I also bought a first American edition of Michael Gilbert's The 92nd Tiger for eight bucks.  I researched all of Gilbert's books to see which ones I wanted to read and this one was definitely not on the list.  But it has been slow-going finding copies of Gilbert's books so I grabbed it.  (Also picked up a reprint of After the Fine Weather over the weekend.) Read the first chapter and realized I kind of liked it.  Or maybe its just that I really like Michael Gilbert.  If this story of an actor being recruited by the Foreign Office to act as a security advisor to the ruler of a small, fictitious Middle Eastern country were written by anyone else, I would automatically skip it.  I hope it turns out okay.

My Year of Reading: 2013

My Year of Reading

Achievement of the Year:  I read 15 Inspector Montalbano novels by Andrea Camilleri, one after the other, in a glorious summer reading binge.  I had been stockpiling (without reading and without exactly knowing if I would like them) these books for years but this summer, faced with not having many books by Donald Westlake to read (having hit Peak Westlake a few years back), I took the plunge and read all of Camilleri's books.  These are all police procedurals and while I loved reading this series, most of the pleasure came from the setting (Sicily), the colorful characters, and Montalbano's culinary exploits. Not the plots, which is unusual for crime novels.  I'd be hard pressed to name my favorite book as I really did enjoy them all.

Archeological Find of the Year:  Last year it was Donald E. Westlake's Tucker Coe novels.  This year, Donald Westlake takes the award again with Brothers Keepers, published in 1975.  I haven't really thought out the criteria for this award, just that it is meant for a book that is not new and is hard to find or has been overlooked (by me).  I never thought I would want to read a novel about monks but being low on Westlakes and then reading this, I sought out a bargain copy and then fell in love with the book.  In Brothers Keepers, the monks learn they are to lose their monastery when their lease expires so then set out (which is inherently difficult as their order is cloistered and dedicated to thinking about travel and not traveling at all) to use the skills they had in their pre-monastic lives to save the monastery.  This is a very funny novel (not unusual for Westlake) but also much wittier and more erudite that his other books, revealing yet another layer of genius in Westlake.

Runner Up:  The two collections of Calder and Behrens stories by Michael Gilbert, Game without Rules and Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens.  These books didn't feel like a great discovery as they are well known and widely admired by those in the know about such things as English spy fiction.  But I knew nothing about them until last year and when I overcame my prejudice against short stories in the crime/mystery/spy genre, I fell hard for Michael Gilbert. (Note:  I do read short stories all the time in regular fiction.  Especially William Trevor, Haruki Murakami, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and John McGahern.  As a kid I subscribed to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and read all sorts of similar short fiction but somehow by the time I became an adult I was of the opinion that any short work of crime or spy fiction was a malformed or stunted novel and should be ignored.  I had no evidence to support my beliefs.  And of course, I turned out to be wrong.)

Old Guys of the Year:  This arbitrary category exists because of two men.  The Italian crime writer Andera Camilleri is about 87 years old now and only started his series featuring Inspector Montalbano when he was 70 years old - which to me, is amazing.  Prior to that he had a long career as a TV and theatre director and as a historical novelist.  The other Old Guy of the Year is Elmore Leonard.  I have to make a confession here: I never read an Elmore Leonard novel before he died this summer.  I had listened to a few of his books on tape (but they were abridged) and had picked up and started several over the past 20 years but never finished one.  To make matters even stranger, I have heard him interviewed on Fresh Air several times and have read dozens of reviews of his work and profiles of him over the years and always considered myself a fan - even though I never technically finished a book he wrote.  I started Unknown Man No. 89 the day he died and also read The Swtich, City Primeval, and Gold Coast.

Country of the Year:  Italy.  Because of Andrea Camilleri.  And because I also got interested in Mario Vicchi, Leonard Sciascia, and Elena Ferrante this year.  And because I switched to using Sicilian Lemon hand sanitizer.  (I ordered a bunch of hand sanitizer for my wife and when she suggested I get some, I was reading about Sicily and thus Sicilian Lemon spoke to me.)

Book of the Year:  Last years book of the year was Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette and there were two reasons I selected it.  One was because of how good it was and two because it became a running joke between my wife and I.  This year, the best book I read was Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.  But Poppet by Mo Hayder ended up being the most fun (which is at odds with how disturbing and terrifying the book is).  My wife always felt that Poppet was staring at her and was creeped out by the cover.  When I would hide the book she would still swear Poppet was staring at her.  I made some Poppet xmas ornaments for our tree.  And I replaced the star on top of the tree with Poppet.  (This is how we amuse ourselves.)  In purely reading terms, The Goldfinch was my book of the year.   The Goldfinch was 11 years in the making and it is one of those books that people say is like something from Dickens.  By which they mean very long, having to do with an orphan who is mistreated/betrayed by adults, and surround by colorful characters.  But they mean it in a good way.  How to summarize a 700 page plus novel like this?  A 13 year old boy in New York steals/rescues a famous Dutch painting from a museum in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing and is left to fend for himself against others who may not have his best interests at heart.  And conflict ensues.  (Every review of The Goldfinch mentions Dickens.  While that is an accurate comparison, The Goldfinch is also a bit of a demented mashup of Tom Ripley and Gossip Girl.  Really, it contains multitudes.) This is a barebones description of a very long and very colorful book but I hate spoilers and had to keep it short.  For a 700 page novel, it flies by yet does not feel breezy or unsubstantial.  Sheer enjoyment.

My Top Ten List:

10. Alex by Pierre Lemaitre
 9.  Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas
 8.  Poppet by Mo Hayder
 7.  Still Midnight by Denise Mina (but it could have been The End of the Wasp Season or Gods and Beasts)
 6.  Capital by John Lanchester
 5.  The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
 4.  Game without Rules/Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens by Michael Gilbert
 3.  Brothers Keepers by Donald Westlake
 2.  Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
 1.  The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Closing Thoughts:

In many ways, 2013 was the year of the woman.  For a lot of reasons, male writers seem to get more attention than women.  And it has been this way for a long time, mostly for unjust reasons.  And just as obviously women have been churning out great books all along.  But at some point in 2013, for me, I realized that most of the books I was reading that I thought were really special turned out to be by women.  I think it is fair to say that in the US, The Goldfinch was the most anticipated novel of the year.  Life After Life was a big, bold book that got everyone's attention.  The Shining Girls came out of nowhere (not entirely true because Lauren Beukes first two novels received much critical attention but because they were more science fiction she was not yet a household name) and was one of the most interesting and chilling books of the year.  Denise Mina is now writing the best police procedurals in Scotland and therefore the world.  I was totally enthralled by the works of Fred Vargas - new to me this past year.  I read a bunch of other books that turned out to be by women that I really loved. Women won both the Nobel Prize and the Booker Prize this year.  I know I made a bold declaration that it was the year of the woman and I suppose I should have backed it up with lots of great evidence and a more compelling argument.  But for me the most compelling case to be made is that I was just reading the books that looked/sounded the most interesting and gradually noticed that they were mostly by women.

The Only Way Is Wessex

I never paid much attention to Michael Gilbert until last year.  I had seen his name around and knew of a few of his books but for the most part, he was not on my radar.  Until I learned about the short stories Gilbert wrote about Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens.  Once I read the two collections of stories I fell hard for Michael Gilbert.

I just started reading his 1984 novel The Black Seraphim.  It concerns a young pathologist suffering from exhaustion who leaves London and heads to the cathedral town of Melchester to spend a month recovering.  Dr. James Scotland's vacation does not go according to plan when there is a murder in the town and he is drawn into it.  I have become a compulsive Googler of things while I read and I was puzzled as to why I could not find Melchester on a map of England.  I knew I had heard of the place before.  It sounds like a real place.  After a bit of research, I figured out that it was from Thomas Hardy that I knew of Melchester, from Jude the Obscure.  Over his writing career Hardy created a fictionalized region of England called Wessex for his books and Gilbert had used the Wessex town of Melchester for The Black Seraphim. (Also, Hardy's wife had a dog named Wessex, a terrier.)

I love the idea of using someone else's fictional universe as a setting.  Gilbert's appropriation of a place from Wessex has had me thinking of other great fictional places.  Some of my all-time favorites:

Gotham City
Metropolis
Mayberry
Stepford
Springfield
Castle Rock
Charming
Farmington
Emmerdale
Holby
Stars Hollow
Rosewood
Grand Rapids
Pawnee

New Science May Help Oasis?

As someone who reads a lot, I always pay attention to what the news has to say about the latest developments in the study of reading.  Three recent stories caught my attention and I think it is pretty clear how one of these stories is all the evidence you would ever need to see to support the other two.

The magazine Science just published a study which claims that reading literary fiction improves one's theory of mind. From the editor's summary in Science:

Theory of Mind is the human capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one's own beliefs and desires. The currently predominant view is that literary fiction—often described as narratives that focus on in-depth portrayals of subjects' inner feelings and thoughts—can be linked to theory of mind processes, especially those that are involved in the understanding or simulation of the affective characteristics of the subjects. Kidd and Castano (p. 377, published online 3 October) provide experimental evidence that reading passages of literary fiction, in comparison to nonfiction or popular fiction, does indeed enhance the reader's performance on theory of mind tasks.

I think that makes a lot of sense and I am glad that there is some evidence to support it.

And the journal PLOS ONE published something very similar:

How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation

From the PLOS ONE abstract:

The current study investigated whether fiction experiences change empathy of the reader. Based on transportation theory, it was predicted that when people read fiction, and they are emotionally transported into the story, they become more empathic. Two experiments showed that empathy was influenced over a period of one week for people who read a fictional story, but only when they were emotionally transported into the story. No transportation led to lower empathy in both studies, while study 1 showed that high transportation led to higher empathy among fiction readers. These effects were not found for people in the control condition where people read non-fiction. The study showed that fiction influences empathy of the reader, but only under the condition of low or high emotional transportation into the story.

So, two serious studies which contend that perhaps reading fiction makes you a better person - or perhaps better able to relate and understand other people - which, I would argue, helps you to be a better person.  Most readers probably love to read whether or not it is good for them so explaining the benefits of reading is for the most part preaching to the choir.

However

I was reading the Guardian the other day and I saw this headline:

Noel Gallagher says reading fiction 'a waste of fucking time'

Oasis songwriter voices frustration at reading what 'isn't fucking true' and says he restricts himself to 'things that have actually happened'

(Ask yourself: who are the angriest pop musicians around?  I bet he's in the top three of every list.) He goes on at length about how he hates reading stuff that isn't true and it occurred to me, that if there ever is a person who could benefit from spending more time reading fiction, its him.  (Note:  He has created a lot of great music and some of the anger and rage he feels has been put to some good use musically.  But still, I think at this point in his career, he could do with some reading therapy.  Especially since what he claims about reading fiction is now proving to be scientifically unsound.)

New Books!

After not buying many books this summer (spent the time reading books I already own), somehow a giant stack of (mostly) new books has appeared.

I was punished by the universe for not ordering the winner of the Booker Prize when it came out in the UK (not that I knew this was going to be the winner, but I knew I wanted to read it well before it won) and as a result my new American copy of Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, ordered the day after it was published in the US, is a second edition.  That is not fair.  (But I am very happy for her that her book is already in a second printing here.)  But as these things have a way of evening out, I found for $4.00 an autographed first American edition of the 1987 winner of the Booker Prize, Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger.

New hardcover first editions from the UK:  Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe, The Deaths by Mark Lawson, and Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright.  I did not order Denise Mina's new book when it came out this summer and have been duly punished and got a 3rd or 4th printing of The Red Road. Ugh.

New hardcover first editions from the USA: The Facades by Eric Lundgren, &Sons by David Gilbert, and Night Film by Marisha Pessl.

And some other bargain priced first edition American hardcovers: When the Women Come Out to Dance and Tishomingo Blues, both by Elmore Leonard.  And Heart of the Hunter by the very interesting South African crime writer Deon Meyer.

And the weirdest new addition - a large print, ex-library edition of a collection of Michael Gilbert short stories, The Mathematics of Murder.  In terms of bad editions of books, condensed editions are the worst, next is large print, then I guess book club editions, then maybe ex-library editions, then maybe anything not a first edition.  Many of the copies available of this Gilbert book were very expensive and because of the government shutdown and threat of default, I made a panicked decision and opted for this inexpensive large print edition of The Mathematics of Murder.  This book is from the Sefton Public Libraries - Birkdale Library Southport.  Which is in or around Liverpool.  Checked out at least 21 times from June 2005 through July 2010.  I hate looking at it but when I am reading it, after a while I sort of forget how large the print it.

Elmore and I

Everyone knows by now that Elmore Leonard died last month.  It was heartening to see how much people liked him and his work.  I have been a fan of his for some 20 years now - but have harbored a terrible secret about my relationship with Elmore Leonard:  I have never read an Elmore Leonard novel.

I own about 13 of his books.  I started buying them sometime after the book Get Shorty came out. Recently I found in my collection a new and unread first edition hard cover copy of Rum Punch with a lottery ticket in it from September 1992.  (The ticket was not a winner.)  I know I listened to the abridged versions of Get Shorty and Out of Sight read by the great Joe Mantegna.  But that doesn't count as having read them, I don't think.  I saw film version of Stick when it first came out (before I knew who Elmore Leonard was) and I saw Get Shorty on videotape.  Leonard has been interviewed many times on NPR (most often on Fresh Air - really good interviews about all of his work and also many interviews about adaptations of his work) and I have read dozens of profiles of him and reviews of his books over the years. More recently I've been reading blog posts about him.   For not having ever properly read his work, I always felt that I knew a lot about Elmore Leonard.  In fact, I can't think of many people whose careers I have followed that I know as much about.

When I heard the news that he was hospitalized after suffering a stroke, I realized I was going to end up as one of those people who only starts to read Leonard because he has just died.  And sure enough I started Unknown Man #89 the night he did.

So far I have read Unknown Man #89, The Switch, and City Primeval.  I am currently reading Gold Coast. (Cat Chaser came in the mail today.) And I have been very impressed by what I have read.  I mean, I always assumed I would really like him.  I think I was partly put off by how colorful some of his characters are.  Like they are interesting to hear about but that I might not want to spend 300 pages in their company.  One of the blurbs used in Cat Chaser, from the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, but originally, it seems, from a review of Tishomingo Blues in the Baltimore Sun, says "Dashiell Hammett may have invented the genre, and Carl Hiaasen might be funnier at it on his best day, but the debate over who's the all-time king of the whack job crime novelists just ended. Living or dead, Elmore Leonard tops 'em all."  And therein lies the problem - I do not have a high tolerance for whack job crime novelists.  But so far, this has not been much of a problem.

Each book I have read reminds me a different crime writer.  Unknown Man #89, which movingly and unexpectedly becomes about alcoholism and addiction, made me think Leonard was going to be like Lawrence Block.  But then The Switch was more like a the sort of farce Michael Frayn would write if he were to try his hand at a crime novel.  City Primeval, by far the best Leonard book I have consumed in any form, calls to mind a prolix Richard Stark.  And now Gold Coast reads like a Carl Hiaasen novel - though given when it was written means Carl Hiaasen writes Gold Coast era-like Elmore Leonard novels (with mobsters and dolphins and the enforced chastity of mafioso widows).

If all goes well, I have copies to read of Split Images, Cat Chaser, Stick, LaBrava, Glitz, Bandits, Freaky Deaky, Maximum Bob, Rum Punch, and Pronto.  I regret having waited so long to read his books but the stack I have to read is quite the silver lining.

Bogmail, Reading, and the Internet

I do not remember how I discovered the Irish novelist Patrick McGinley.  My best guess is that I saw a Penguin paperback copy of his first novel, Bogmail (1978), in the mystery section of a used bookstore in the early 1990s.

I think I read it in 1994 or 1995 and it is slightly horrifying to think that is almost 20 years ago.  I loved it and then set out to find and read the rest of his books.  In Bogmail, a pub owner has to kill his barman and after he disposes of the body in a bog, starts to get get blackmailed by a mysterious person. And then things get complicated.

Earlier this year, McGinley published a new novel, Cold Spring, and Bogmail was republished to coincide with the rebroadcast on Irish television of Murder for Eden, the 1991 adaptation of Bogmail.

Curious to revisit Bogmail after all these years I got out the copy of Bogmail I read (a second edition hard cover) and was stunned by how much I wrote in it.  (I never write in books.  I often take notes but in general I hate defacing them by making notes in them.)  Apparently, my knowledge of Irish vocabulary and culture was almost non-existent and I wrote down the definitions of dozens of words.  I can remember asking random Irish people the meanings of certain words. (Which probably was a lunatic thing to do but how else was I going to figure this stuff out?)  I guess I used dictionaries to understand some of the words.  This would have been done when the internet was still in its infancy and certainly well before mobile high speed internet access (via which I always consult Google when reading now.)  In fact, I recently read 15 novels in a row by the Sicilian crime writer Andrea Camilleri and I Googled dozens of things in each book I read.   I know the internet is destroying traditional book publishing and retailing but after seeing what my reading was like pre-internet (with Bogmail) and what it is like now (with Andrea Camilleri), it is astonishing how much the internet is enhancing the reading process.  I suppose the ability to instantly access a world of information is taken for granted by most but seeing the notes I wrote in Bogmail made me realize how different things used to be not so long ago.

A different example of how the internet is enhancing my reading life just popped up in the series of books I started after I finished reading Andrea Camilleri.  For some reason, I fell behind in reading the Scottish crime writer Denise Mina.  She is a fantastic writer - so good that for the second year in a row, she has won the Theakstons Old Peculiar crime novel of the year award. Up until a few years ago I had read all of her books, usually just as they were published.  All of my copies are UK editions as I never wanted to wait for each book to be published here.  But in 2009 she started a new series with Still Midnight and it didn't grab me right away.  So I put it aside and now four years later, I've gone back to it and the books which followed: The End of the Wasp Season, Gods and Beasts, and The Red Road.  These books feature a female Glaswegian police officer named Alex Morrow.  In The End of the Wasp Season, DS Morrow mentions that some lazy police officers are reading The Digger, which is a weekly paper in Glasgow that covers crime, criminals, and corruption.  And it just so happens that via the internet I saw, back in 2007, a documentary about The Digger that BBC Scotland aired.  The reference to The Digger in the book is interesting but by no means crucial to understanding anything but nonetheless I was thrilled that I recognized it.  (And also thrilled that the hours I piss away on the internet occasionally pay off.)