Book: Book about Books

 The Bookshop; A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2024

Provenance:  Village Books and Paper Dreams, a three-story bookstore in the Fairhaven district of Bellingham Washington. According to the receipt I was using as a bookmark (and admit it, you do the same). I was up north for one of the Lovely Bride's tax-preparer conventions, and while she attended meetings on the tax implications of crypto, I book-shopped. 

I've noted elsewhere that actors love plays about the theatre, but I don't find a lot of writers writing about the process of making and selling books. Most of the "books about bookstores" have been fiction and in particular romances (cue up the movie "You've Got Mail"). So it's good to get ahold of something talking about the history of bookstore. 

And physical bookstores are odd things in our digital world, in that they have a "baby turtle" approach to sales. A host of authors create works, which publishers create a huge printing of individual volumes, which are then scattered throughout the country to bookstores large and small, independent and chains, on the off-chance that someone will come in and adopt them. There are cases where I go in looking for a specific volume or author, but just as often I'm just browsing, seeing if something piques my interest. 

Which is how I found this particular book. Up in Bellingham.

Review: The Bookshop is more of a collection of short vignettes and anecdotes than a solid linear history of the bookstore, which sounds about right given the individualistic anarchic nature of the history of selling books. It is a swarm of origin stories, and swings all over the joint and all over the country. We intro through the author's local bookstore, the Three Lives in NYC, then spring back in time to Ben Franklin and printer/publisher/ booksellers, then the oldest Bookstore - the Old Corner in Boston. Then we go to bookmobiles, Marshall Fields to introduce the department store bookstore, and the Strand, again in NYC, as the first superstore. we skate along specialty bookstores (Socialist, Nazi, Queer, Black, though nothing on SF or Mystery book shops), then into Barnes & Nobles and the mall/destination bookstore, and Amazon's attempt at a physical bookstore (There was one at University Village, but that's now a restaurant). We take a side alley into the sidewalk vendors of New York, and finally lands on a bookstore co-owned by an author, Anne Pattchet, as an example of the modern indie, blonde-wood bookcases and all. 

Despite the scattershot vignettes, there are a lot of through-lines. The modern independent bookstore is a community gathering place - its owners are in the shop (and often characters in their own rights), and has its regulars and its signings, lectures and events. These bookstores have also always been under siege - underfunded and often running on fumes, with threats from larger chains, censorship, local government regulations, the Internet, Book of the Month, e-books, and even libraries. Plus they have taken the hits from the twentieth century - war and depression and AIDs and COVID. Bookstores close and move and get new owners. So the story of the bookstores are one of survival and community. 

And despite the wide net cast by the author, we're missing stuff. A lot of bookstores get a glancing mention (Powell's in Portland, City Lights in SF, Third Place in Seattle), with the assumption that the reader knows about them. Brentanno's gets mentioned a lot but I don't know much of their story from what is here. There is a lot of famous-authors-as-patrons. But what's missing is the publishers - they move like great dark shapes in the waters offshore, mysterious and powerful. I am STILL looking for a good history on publishers. 

Still, it is a worthy and readable volume that lionizes the independent bookshop and presents its people as unlikely community heroes. Worth diving into.

More later,

Book: The Old New Weird

 Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville, Del Rey Books, an imprint of Random House, 2016

Provenance: I picked this up at the Page Turner in downtown Kent, when I was looking for a completely different book. And that's the nature of the Page Turner in that sort of thing happens quite often.

Review: OK, I'm a fan of China Miéville, but I haven't read everything that he's written. I started early with Perdido Street Station (published in 2000), and the two other books set in the same world, The Scar and The Iron Council. I enjoyed The City and City and Kraken (which I did not review - I don't review everything here), and really liked (and reviewed) October, a non-fiction book about the Russian Revolution. So I picked up this collection of his short fiction, adding it to the To Be Read pile, and finally getting into it in the past month or so. 

And, to my lack of surprise, I enjoyed it tremendously. There are a LOT of stories here, ranging from widely-published works to stuff that was used as handouts at a exhibition in Liverpool. As a result, though you get a good feeling for how and what Miéville writes over a number of different stories. 

When Miéville first showed up with Perdido Street Station, he quickly got folded into his own subgenre- the New Weird. This was over 25 years ago, so the patina of "new" may have gotten a bit threadbare since then, but there are not a lot of other books that fit neatly into that category. Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer gets mentioned a bunch as a sister volume, and I could put The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin in that general category. Piranesi could elbow its way in as well with a good argument or two.

But genre is a slippery marketing term - it effectively says: If you liked THAT, you'll like THIS. But it also sets up it own set of walls - This is NOT magical realism. This is NOT urban fantasy. This is not old school or cozy or like a lot of other things you've seen. It is akin to all of that, but it is a thing of its own right. The Old Weird belongs to Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft, and it has a good linkage with that as well, but this is a different animal.

So what is Miéville's encampment of the New Weird? Well, it has strange doings - icebergs calving above the skies of London, animated oil rigs. card decks with suits that only appear once in a lifetime, or etchings on bones newly-pulled from cadavers. It has body horror, in addictive parasites to people who put on dead animal heads or medical actors who suddenly present with symptoms for future diseases.  Miévilles brand of the New Weird is very urban (usually) and Londonian (keep your wiki link open for when you hit something idiosyncratic).

Most of all (and I think this applies to the New Weird in general) - it is unexplained. No one steps forward in the story with a reason why animated oil rigs are blundering ashore like kaiju.  Even those seeking the truth discover nothing but dead ends and unsure resolutions. Miéville in his short fiction keeps his focus tight on his protagonists (who are also usually his victims), and they are awash in this unsurity as well. This may be a hallmark of the NW, or at least Miévilles patch of earth within it.

It is interesting and puzzling and amazing and horrible and wonderful. It's worth hunting down and reading.

More later, 

Book and a Movie: Kick in the Pance

 The Benson Murder Case by S.S. Van Dyne, Charles Scribener's Sons, 1926

The Benson Murder Case, Directed by Frank Tuttle, Paramount Pictures, 1930

Provenance: Picked this up at the Page Turner, Kent's expansive used and new bookstore. It particular book also happened to be of the collection of Sacnoth, who had been cleaning out his shelves over time. He in turn had purchased the book in 1996 in Madison, Wisconsin (he tends to annotate all his books). This book was one of my "waiting books" - read when I'm waiting for an appointment, or for friends to show up at a restaurant. As a result, I may get two or five pages in before I have to put it aside. So the "waiting books" will be carried around for a while in a deep-pocketed jacket before finally getting finished.

As for the movie version, Sacnoth and friends watch old movies on Saturdays when we are not playing Call of Cthulhu, and have gone through all four of the William Powell Vance movies. While the book is the first of the Vance Vance novels, the movie version was the third starring William Powell. 

Reviews: As the first Philo Vance novel, and it is interesting in what it shows and what drops away later in the series, as well as changes made for the movies. Philo Vance is one of the elite dilettante school of detectives (Lord Peter Wimsey beats him out, since he first showed up in 1923 and who, like Vance, has a friend in law enforcement that allows him access to ongoing cases. 

In the case of the book, Vance's bud, District Attorney Markham is approached by an old and respected friend to investigate the death of his brother, who was his partner in a stock firm. The brother was found seated in his chair in his living room, dressed in his smoking jacket, shoeless and without his toupee, shot through the head. There was a large amount of evidence cast about, and the DA and police go through several suspects, all of which get proven innocent in turn by Vance.

Vance rejects such trivialities as facts and evidence and concentrates on the psychological nature of the killer - what sort of person would kill Benson in this matter? He claims to know the murderer from the get-go, but dances about, demonstrating to the DA that the latest prime suspect fails the test for some reason or another. In fact, he seems to delight in proving the agents of law enforcement wrong, all the while concern trolling their predicament. He's a bit arrogant about the whole thing.

The Van Dyne who is the narrator claims that position as being Vance's lawyer, and is only telling the tale now because Vance has retired to Europe. In the book, he serves no purpose as a character but to declare Vance as being brilliant and noting the growing frustration of the DA as Vance shows off one blind alley after another. Vance in this initial book comes off as insufferable, such that the DA (and the reader) just wants to shout "give us the answer, already". He actually becomes more likeable in later novels, but still absolutely sure of himself.

The movie, on the other hand, junks about everything except the title, Vance, and some of the supporting cast. Our invisible narrator did not make the transfer. In addition, the movie version riffs off the recent stock market crash. Benson is confronted with a bunch of clients who have lost money and are fed up with his shenanigans. Benson then retires to his country house and is shot. And it turns out Benson lives right next door to his good friend DA Markham, who brings along Vance to investigate. And one of the suspects says that Vance just got lucky in a previous case and challenges him to find the real culprit.

Which of course, he does. But he does it with a bit more grace than his novel incarnation, and more attention to the little facts and clues. He uses less psychobabble in his  explanations (I swear, the last chapter of the book is filled with his explanation of why the killer HAD to be a certain suspect, in part because women are not cool-headed enough to shoot a man accurately in the head). The movie version really hinges of William Powell's performance, who makes Vance actually likable. You can see the bits and bemused  mannerisms that he will bring to the Thin Man movies (and yeah, he's more likeable there than in the original book version as well).

So yeah, the novel is a time capsule - Vance was incredibly popular in his time, and the line "Philo Vance needs a kick in the pance" from Ogden Nash (of limerick fame) in 1931 just underscores the both the character's popularity and division he presented to readers. The movie version is traditional for its era as well, but a lot easier to swallow and worth hunting down if you're a fan of old pre-code Hollywood.

So yeah, check out the movie if you have a spare afternoon. The book? Only if you have a deep interest.

More later,

Book: Timestop

 The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, Avid Reader Press (Simon & Schuster), 2024

Provenance: World Con was in Seattle last year, and though I did not attend, I resolved to read the Hugo novel nominees for that year. And I failed, bailing out halfway through one of the Adrian Tchaikovsky novels. But I did get a copy of The Ministry of Time front the local Barnes & Noble, which has, it should be noted, very much improved over the past couple years.

Review: This book was well-lauded before I even reached it. It is a New York Times bestseller, a pick for the Good Morning America Book Club, a monthly pick for Barnes & Noble, a Best Book of the Year for NPR, Vanity Fair, Good Housekeeping, and some 25 more outlets. Oh, and Obama liked it as well.

I liked it. It didn't win a Hugo. And yeah, I think I understand why.

So here's the skinny. Our unnamed narrator/protagonist works for government ministry in London, and discovers, after she has been hired, that it has a time machine. Sort of. They have access to a "time door" that they can open into other eras. And not to mess up the timeline, they are taking/kidnapping people from the past near the end of their lives in situations where they would not be missed. One of these is Graham Gore, one of the crewmen on the Franklin Expedition. 

Now, the Franklin Expedition rates up there with Nikola Tesla in the things-nerds-care-about-department. The Franklin Expedition consisted of the ships Terror and Erebus, which were dispatched with two years of supplies to find the Northwest Passage. They didn't find one, but instead got trapped in the ice for a couple years, and its people (including Gore) died either on the ice or trying to escape it. Including Gore. Except Gore got kidnapped and was brought to this near future London where the effects of climate change is already starting to flood the city. 

Our unnamed narrator serves as a "bridge" for Gore, along with some fellow workers for other expats from the past. And "bridge" is a good title for combination minder/agent/guide to the modern world. She and Gore fall in love, discover a conspiracy from their future that intends to capture or destroy the time door, and their allies start dropping like flies. 

So the novel veers from dark workplace comedy into rom-com, then slingshots into a thriller, and finally sticks the landing in a science fictional space. Our narrator is relating what she knows of the story, which is more about the effects of time travel on a relatively small group of people - the bridges, the ex-pats, the management, and the assassins from the future.  Early on, she lays down the absurdity of the situation.

"How does it work? How can it work? I exist at the beginning and the end of this account, which is a kind of time travel, and I'm here to tell you: don't worry about it. All you need to know is that in the very near future, the British Government developed a means of time travel but had not experimented with it."

That's a pretty piece of writing, with tenses spilling all over the place. But what its talking about, the nature of the document you're reading does get explained, and it makes sense by the end. At the time, I thought it was going to be a denial of the SF tropes we all know - paradoxes, grandfather clauses, alternate futures. But you're going to run into them, but from the ground-level view. So we embrace the tropes, but not the way you might think.

The book is really good, and deserves to be a Hugo nominee, but I can see how it didn't make the final cut, and much of that is because of the nature of genre. As noted above, the book refuses to "stay in its lane", and while I like that, I understand that it might not resonate elsewhere. But also its part of its own provenance, and how it entered the market. Ministry of Time first showed up in the new fiction release as opposed to the SF areas of bookstores. Most of its high praise comes from traditional/mainstream sources. It was therefore "not of the body" of SF-Dom. Genre can be both a leg up (a "guaranteed" customer base) and a limitation (reaching out beyond that "guaranteed" base). 

Still, Ministry of Time is worth considering on the quality of its writing, and I recommend you check it out. 

More later,

Book: Dreams of a Strange House

 Strange Houses by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion, HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2025, original Japanese 2021.

Provenance: Browsers Bookshop in Olympia. A nice, well-staffed bookstore in downtown Olympia. Purchased on a whim, in part because the front cover had a house blueprint on the front with Japanese icons on it.

Review: Long ago, before I became a author, game designer, and general worldbuilder, I was a civil engineer. And as a result, I have always had a fascination with buildings and how they work and grow over time. In particular, I find blueprints and floor plans interesting, in what they say about the house and people who live there.

Strange Houses is set in modern Japan. The narrator, an author of macabre fiction is approached by a friend who is homebuying with his spouse. And they found a excellent modern house, but there was just something off-base about it. And they sent the floor plans to the author, who quickly noticed some things that were off-kilter. He brought in an architect friend and together the two start unspooling a mystery, which quickly turns disturbing and horrific. 

The book produces the house plans, as well as other house plans as the story unfolds, along with family trees and timelines. And these are presented in the running text as well, allowing the reader to discover the evidence as the author does.  Now, I read a lot of old detective novels from the 20s and 30s, and in such venerable tomes by Christie and Van Dine, they provide floor plans as well. In fact, putting a map or house diagram on the back of paperback editions was a thing back there. So that's not much of a surprise, but what the book does is that was they learn more about the house(s) they make changes to the house plans to reveal new ideas. 

So there are clues in the house plans, which is cool, and I noticed most of them before the two investigators spelled them out in text. But, I also noticed stuff that they left uncommented-upon. In the plans, there is one large room on the second floor without any exterior windows. OK, that's odd (though my first thought was to ask if there was a skylight). But (and this is the weirdness they don't address) there also is one toilet on the floor, and you'd have to pass through the windowless room to get there. It is a little strange that the investigators that are looking really, really hard at the house don't call it out. 

I've mentioned this before in my comments on various Call of Cthulhu products, where the maps don't line up with the text, or have their own discrepancies,  like chimneys that are prominent on the first floor and disappear on the upper floors, or locations of kitchens and bathrooms that would be logistical nightmare regarding the pipes. So I'm sensitized to such things, and in this case seeing stuff that the (real) author would prefer me to miss. And if fact, at the time I wrote it off as simply "Well, they lay out houses differently in Japan", but I went to the trouble of looking up Tokyo floor plans (thank you, Internet), and nope, the ones here look like they make no sense.

In any event, the investigators make some immediate assumptions, which turn out to be mostly true, but the logic leaps are a bit much. And then they find a second house, where the family had previously lived, which also had some odd features. And then there's the family house, of more traditional design, which had its own sense of weirdnesses.

And all of this is presented in drawings and conversations between the investigators, and interviews with various people. It is all presented as evidence, in a fairly bloodless fashion (though there is blood in many of the descriptions and conclusions). In this way it feels a lot like Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", where nothing really happens to the narrator as he goes through the files of his deceased uncle and comes to a chilling conclusion. Same here, though there are more questions than answers in the final tally.

The clinical approach of the investigators left me cold, and the fact that things are (maybe) not wrapped up neatly bothered me. The (real) author is a mystery figure whose photograph is a black robe and a white mask (very Studio Ghibli). The books (there are more in this style) are huge in Japan. I want to say that it is the cultural differences that ultimately frustrated me, but I think the translation is on-target.

It is ultimately a case that I bring too much to the book. I know too much about a subject and it brought me in conflict with the reality presented in the novel. And the ultimate loose ends and unreliable testimonies frustrate me, particularly in comparison with the venerable "The Call of Cthulhu". Strange Houses is a short, compact read (given all the house plan illos), but I can't really recommend this even to friends who have spent time in Japan. It was a misfire, though apparently a very successful one.

More later,

Book: Sunny Daze

 Sunward by William Alexander, Saga Press (Simon & Schuster), 2025

Provenance: I sat with the author on a panel at NorWesCon, and was impressed with what he had to say. His book was a nominee for the Phillip K, Dick award, awarded at that convention. So after the panel I went down and purchased a copy from a booth that was selling all the PKD nominees. So this is the writer's version of a three-cushion bank shot as far as selling your book.

Review: Tova Lir is a courier, running private messages and packages through the solar system. As a side gig, she adopts baby bots - AIs which need a physical housing for the first year or so to establish a sense of self. She's independent (one of her moms runs the moon), and not an achiever. She and her latest baby bot encounters another courier's ship, the courier within it dead. The bot is badly damaged. And now she's a target of assassins as she attempts to get her adopted 'bot repaired at the same time as robots as suspected of being responsible for a terrorist action on the moon. Yes, its a lot for a relatively slender book, but it moves along at a brisk clip.

One thing I like about the book is the "whys" - the worldbuilding that is underneath it. Newly-fashioned bots are housed in physical bodies because their intellects can be swept away by the huge amount of data out there (the allegory is to swimming too far out from shore). Couriers are used because all information over the net is public. Civilization is outside Earth because earth's climate is one of continual storms due to climate change. And a cult of humans sends their dead into the sun in great graveyard armadas. It is a weird future, but a well-reasoned one.

It surprises me is that, while SF has a huge number of subgenres, there is nothing for this type of adventure - the Earth off-limits for some reason, and humanity survives in space. John Varley's Eight Worlds stories, Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist wars, Charles Stross's Accelerando with its Vile Offspring. All of them moved the center of humanity out, not to stars, but to the further planets. I don't know what to call it - Post-Terran SF? Solarpunk? Human Diaspora? Somebody probably has a better name. 

Alexander's language is clear and straight-forward in this weird world. The author comes out of writing books for young people, and it shows in his plotting and presentation. Tova Lit is an engaging, motivated hero who is putting the band back together (in the form of her former adopted 'bots) to save one of their own. 

It's a good story, and no, it didn't win the PKD Award. Still worth checking out.

More later,

Books: Seattle Time Capsules

 Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas, by Terra Hatfield, Jenny Kempson, and Natalie Ross, Sasquatch Press (at that time part of Penguin Random House), 2018

Filmlandia! by David Schmader, Sasquatch Books (at the time part of Penguin Random House, but soon to be sold toe Blue Star Press and given its freedom), 2023 

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces by James Rupp and Miguel Edwards, University of Washington Press, 2018

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography by David B Williams, University of Washington Press 2015

The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook, Ballantine Books, 2013 (paperback 2023)

Seattle Noir edited by Curt Colbert, Akashic Books, 2009

Provenance: Various. I believe Seattleness and Art in Seattle's Public Spaces were gifts from the Lovely Bride (Seattleness has a Half-Price Books sticker on it). I found Too High and Too Steep at the Elliot Bay Bookstore when it was in Pioneer Square, The Mushroom Hunters was recommended by colleague Wolfgang Baur, and when I couldn't find it locally, ordered it from Amazon. Seattle Noir was a whim purchase at Barnes & Nobles when I was looking for something else, but it was shelved face-outward and caught my eye. I have no memory of where I found Filmlandia! - it just showed up one day and refused to leave until I read it. 

The Reviews: Books are times capsules. They can't help it. As soon as the last word is written, the final change is made, and the switch thrown and the electricity pumped into the presses, they are frozen in amber. They can be revised, they can be rewritten, but the sheer physicality of the book gives it permanence that no computer file can match. Historical books are trapped not only by their subject matter, but also that they represent the thinking of their times. Even those that want to be current (in PARTICULAR those that want to be current) are stopped at the point when they are finished. 

Anyway,

I've lived in Seattle (OK, a suburb of Seattle) for longer than I've lived anywhere else. I've got my 25-year chip, which allows me to complain about new people moving into the state. But I still have that newcomer's vibe of interest in the area, and picking up what I may have missed before I got here. So I've been accumulating books about Seattle, not out of a passion, but just finding them along the way.

So here are some books about my current home town:

Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas is an infographic book, in that it takes stuff about Seattle and its history and presents it in a variety of graphics - charts, maps, and tables. Some of them are cool. Some of them are obscure, some of them are historical, some of them are time capsules in that they are no longer applicable (listing of pinball parlors in Seattle, most of which are gone).

The infographics are good-looking, but are often more graphic than informative, and you have to do a little digging to understand what they are saying. But, it is immensely browsable, and worth keeping around, even as it slowly moves into the past. 

(They do hit on one subject that always irritated me - they talk for several pages about Shadowrun's Seattle. In the Shadowrun future, a virus transformed a large part of the population into orcs, elves, and dwarves. The orcs took over the Underground. The problem is, the REAL Underground (and Seattle has one), is located beneath Pioneer Square (created when they raised the streets), and FASA put a corporate pyramid on top of it. That's a nit, but in its defense I will point out that FASA, Shadowrun's publisher, was based in Chicago at the time.)

Filmlandia! A Movie Lover's Guide to the Films and Television of Seattle, Portland, and the Great Northwest. has a subtitle that pretty much describes it in full. It is a collection of short bits about productions filmed and/or set in Seattle area and the greater PNW.  Twin Peaks. Northern Exposure. Frasier (though only for one episode), Grey's Anatomy, An Officer and a Gentleman, 10 Things I Hate About You. Even the risible McQ in which John Wayne gets in a car chase up I-5 to South Lake Union, and there's no traffic. David Schmader was a columnist for The Stranger back in the day and does a good job. Yep, with all that old movie lore, it's a time capsule.

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces. Seattle is a land of public art. You're walking along, minding your own business, turn a corner, and BOOM! there's a mural or a statue or an installation right in your line of sight. In part that's because Seattle and King County have a 1 Percent for the Arts ordinance, where 1% of the budget for capital project improvement funds go to art. Nice plan, and it often means you get some monumental artwork (one my favorites is parked outside of Safeco Field, a Tsutakawa piece of a baseball glove with a hole in it. For many years, this was appropriate for the Mariners outfield). 

The book deals with public art in Seattle from SoDo (SOuth of DOwntown) to South Lake Union (now called Amazonia). Lots of pictures, ranging from the big orange Calder stabile in the Olympic Sculpture Garden to the Hammering Man outside the SAM to the Ken Griffey Jr statue outside Safeco. It includes plaques, large installations, and internal pieces within the city's buildings. The presentation is broken up by zones, south to north, and while massive, leaves out a lot of public works not in the city center - like Totten's Changing Form on Queen Anne Hill, Noguchi's Black Sun in Volunteer Park, or Beyer's Waiting for the Interurban in Fremont. 

What makes it a time capsule is that, despite the size of some of these art pieces, they do tend to move around. Pieces are sold, moved, reinstalled. The cover displays Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, which is, well, a gigantic typewriter eraser. Owned by the Paul Allen family, the sculpture was at one time near the Sculpture Park, but moved to Seattle Center, outside the MoPop (Museum of Popular Culture), and was then sold at auction after Allen's death. I cannot find out who bought it or where it went from there. There are similar/duplicate pieces in Washington DC and Las Vegas, but that one was Seattle's.

(Should I ever win the lottery (fat chance), I'd like to create a web site listing all of the publicly-viewable art in Greater Seattle, because I think it deserves it).

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography. Denizens of the Pacific Northwest have a reputation for being love-the-land tree-hugging environmentalists. But we've engaged in a lot of terraforming over the years, making low places higher and high places lower. This books hits the major ones - filling in the tidal flats south of the city, the Montlake Cut which dropped the level of Lake Washington 8 feet, and in particular the Denny Hill Regrade. 

Back at the turn of the previous century, the area north of Seattle's downtown was a large hill, which blocked future expansion and required too many horses to pull wagons up it. The answer from the city fathers was to use sluicing equipment from the gold rush to wash away the hill, load the dirt into barges, and take it out into the sound to dump it. By the time they finished, trucks had replaced horses as transport, and the area became a site of warehouses and used car lots for many decades until Amazon moved into the neighborhood (my first office at Amazon was on the 5th floor of a building on 6th Avenue, and I figure I was still under the original ground level). Williams, who writes a lot about nature in the Northwest, covers a lot of ground (heh) in describing the monumental early efforts that made Seattle what it is today. 

Seattle Noir is one of a series of local mystery novels offered by Akashic set in various cities, ranging from Baghdad to Baltimore and from Lagos to Las Vegas. It is collection of shorts set in the Seattle area, and it cool from the local angle - you've been in that neighborhood, you know what they're talking about, yeah, that feels like Seattle. And Seattle gives itself over to a lot of noir tropes - its power centers moving behind the scenes, its rain-spattered streets and continual gloom (mostly in October and November) creating a continual twilight broken by the neon of business and late-night lights of office workers. It sometimes feels like a city filmed in black and white. Noir town.

For me, though, noir is defined by people making ethical choices and being punished for it. Bogart loses the girl. MacMurray takes the rap. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. What is the morally right choice often goes up against the societal rules. And some of the stories fit that mode. Others, not so much.

Similarly, a lot of good stories are here that are "pure Seattle" - Duwamish tribal rites and Chinatown in the1900s and roadhouses at the city limits. Stories that embrace both our history and our outlook. But there are a few that, while good, you have to to fill in the locational blanks without losing too much of the tale. They're still worth reading, but don't hit the mark as Seattle tales. 

There are a lot of good stories here "The Wrong End of the Gun", "The Taskmasters" and "Blue Sunday" all have that hard-boiled edge. The protagonists are strugglers, the challenges down to earth. Some of the stories could slot in anywhere with a change of street names, but a lot of them feel very Seattlish. Best of that group was "Blood Tide" and "Center of the Universe".

So this is a time capsule in that a lot of the stories take place in that mythical ancient Seattle, But also the way the city has changed from the more recent dotcom boom and conflict between New Seattle and Old, in the evolving conflict since the book was published. It's worth looking at, but not too deeply.

The Mushroom Hunters: A Hidden World of Food, Money and (Mostly Legal) Adventures was written about ten years back, and reflects a Seattle of that age, with a rising food culture situated at the borders of a wilderness. Ten years later, the food culture is more established, and the wilderness pushed back a few more miles. 

The book is about the people in the wild mushroom business - those who go out and harvest them and those who sell them to the restaurants that feature them. These are no white buttons grown in a controlled atmosphere of a former coal mine. These are wilderness mushrooms - morrels and lobsters and chanterelles and white truffles, found in the more undisturbed parts of the PNW, sprouting up at rare times and only under certain conditions. It requires a lot of hiking, watching, getting up at ungodly hours and driving deep into the hinters. It also requires a flexible regard to local laws and trespassing signs. Langdon Cook weaves a tales of the mushrooms and the various people who hunt them out, from bus-loaded tourists on a spree to Vietnamese expats setting up their own claims.

Its only ten years ago, and I can feel the ground has changed. A lot of the restaurants mentioned on the receiving end of the mushroom train are no more, while others remain but have changed ownership. And likely the basics of the mushroom trade have remained, but are buried by more exurban and suburban sprawl. Its a good snapshot of an age and a business out here in Seattle.

And that's it - a whole collection of Seattle books that have popped up. More may show up over time, whether they are our history or are trapped in the amber of the moment that fingers strike the keys and the files are sent to the publishers. All in all, a good collection.

More later, 

Book and No Movie: On the Rocks

 The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake, Grand Central Publishing, previously known as Warner Books, a Division of Hachette Book Group, 1970.

Provenance: Apparition Books, Renton, which has an excellent collection of esoterica, plus solid SF and mystery sections. After discussion of caper films among my Saturday night group which mentioned the movie version, I found this copy, its spine uncracked, on its shelves. 

Review: I've talked about Donald Westlake before in these pages, and how he balances both hard-bitten, hard-boiled protagonists with lighter, more human-sized, comical characters. The Hot Rock is an example of the latter. I was attracted to it because, many years ago, I saw the movie version with Robert Redford and George Segal, and when the subject came up in our group, I kept my eyes out for a copy.

This is the first of the novels featuring John Dortmunder, a very good thief with very poor luck. He goes free from prison and an old buddy picks him up in a stolen car with MD plates. The old buddy, Kelp, has a job for him - stealing a large emerald belonging to an African nation on the behalf of a rival African nation. Dortmunder is uncomfortable with the idea, but lacking a lot of options, throws in with Kelp. 

They put together a team: Dortmunder is the planner. Kelp is the contact. Murch is the driver (who obsesses about driving), Chefwick is the locksmith (who is model train fan), Greenwood is the all-around, the utility outfielder of the group, a hapless romantic. They're all mugs who have had their run of hits and misses, but never a big score. They meet in the back of a bar and plan out the heist from the New York Coliseum. No small thing. The heist works, until it doesn't. Greenwood gets caught with the emerald. 

So now the plan becomes how to get Greenwood out of jail with the emerald. And they do, but they don't. Author and screen critic Robert McKee refers to this as "the gap" which drives character development - the space between character expectations (Greenwood gets the gem) and reality (The cops catch Greenwood). That sets up the next part of the heist (getting Greenwood back) and ratchets up the tension as a result. This happens a number of times - where they succeed until they fail. And as Gilda Radner's character, Rosanne Rosannadanna says, "It's always something."

And so it is. Dortmunder is the pessimist and ready to walk away several times. Kelp is the optimist, and keeps bringing him back into the fold. The risks get bigger with every iteration, as do the resources. The plot bounces along nicely, the characterization is good, and Westlake has an economy of style that plays out incredibly well here.

Anyway, after talking about it in our Saturday night group, we went hunting for the film version from 1972, with Redford, Segal, Paul Sands, and Zero Mostel. And we couldn't find it. Anywhere. Not streaming. Not on Amazon. Not even at the venerable and incredible Scarecrow Video. which is the last local outpost of rentals. In our overheated, overproduced, content-heavy modern times, it is not to be found. I found a Spanish-language version, but that's not the same thing at all. I remember seeing it in the theaters fifty years ago, and seeing it on TV once or twice, but the ground has opened up and swallowed it whole. Would love to know the story of why.

Maybe we have to plan a heist.

More later, 

 

Book and a Movie: Canary In a Coal Mine

 The "Canary" Murder Case by S.S.Van Dine, Fawcett Publications, 1927

The Canary Murder Murder Case, written by S.S. Van Dine, Albert Shelby Lovino, Florence Ryerson, Herman Mankiewicz, directed by Malcom St. Clair, Paramount Pictures, 1929.

Provenance: The novel is from the collection of Sacnoth, who provided a large number of mysteries for my late mother-in-law when she lived with us, and which I have been slowly burrowing through over the years. The book itself became a shop-worn volume tucked in my jacket pocket, to be read at the moments when I was waiting for someone or something else (the rest of you use phones these days, so you understand the principle). Nearing completion of this particular mystery, I inveighed upon my Saturday-Night crew to watch the film version (we had previously watched The Kennel Murder Case, another Philo Vance mystery. 

The Reviews: The "Canary" Murder Case (the original put the name in parenthesis, and I'll use it here to separate it from the film) lived for several months on the best-sellers lists, and was regarded as being a definitive advancement of the genre. Its detective, Philo Vance, was a erudite intellectual dilletante who is good friends with the New York City DA, Markham, and is allowed to tag along on investigations. A Broadway actress is slain in her locked apartment, and all clues point to an interrupted burglary. Vance, who is more concerned with the psychology of the criminals than mere apparent evidence, disagrees with the prima facie appearances. And the fact that all the initial evidence points to a burglar only strengthens his opinion. The crime scene is, in his opinion, "too perfect". 

It turns out that the Canary had numerous suitors and former suitors and a taste for blackmail, and that her apartment building had more visitors that evening than the news stand at Penns Station. Suspects are gathered, solid alibis are established, then shattered, and it all leads up to an unreasonable poker game with Vance, Markham, and the suspects. Vance knows who the killer is after that game, but the evidences shows it impossible. Until in the final pages, Vance discover "how he did it", with a bit of high tech wizardry (for the time) which left me shaking my head. 

The writing is engaging, though I had a hard time putting William Powell (who is Vance in the movie - more about that later) into the mold of Vance of the book. Instead I kept getting Frasier Crane as Vance - he would quote Latin, refer to obscure artists, and noted that he had to dash out to the opera or a Monet showing. Vance of the books is extremely elite and dilettantish. As a result, he also codes gay - his encyclopedic knowledge of art and disdain for the commonplace, his elaborate mode of speaking, his fondness for NYC Clubs, plus his relationships with the other male members of group (Markham, the rougher, doubting Chief Detective Heath, and the narrator) gives off strong gay vibes in the modern age. (Of course, Van Dine himself believed that romance had no place in mysteries, so this may account for some of that attitude).

And then there is the matter of the book's narrator - supposedly Van Dine himself, who is presented as Vance's lawyer and constant companion, but who vanishes as a character whenever Vance has someone else to chat with. Indeed, all of "Van Dine's" conversations with Vance are along the lines of "I tried to convince Philo to tell me what was going on, but he remained tight-lipped".  Narrator "Van Dine" is effusive in his praise of this great detective. And the "Van Dine" of this volume was living with Vance in Manhattan, since his own apartment was being renovated. So yeah, the aura of "more than just friends" hangs heavy over their relationship in a way that those of Holmes/Watson, Wolfe/Goodwin, or Poirot/Hastings does not. 

So, with twenty-some pages to go in the book, and with me confident of whodoneit and having an idea of howhedidit, I sat down with my Saturday night group to watch the movie based on it. And it is pretty bad in movie form. We get that The Canary (The OG Flapper Louise Brooks) is a nasty blackmailer right off the bat, and she vanishes from the film upon her demise. Vance (William Powell) is already on the case, investigating her on the behalf of a local banker, as she was blackmailing his son. The son was innocent and one of the young ingenues with Mary Astor, herself in an early role (and therefore innocent as well). Most of the bits of gathering the suspects were shortened, but it concluded in the same unreasonable poker game where Vance tests the mettle of the suspects. He realizes who the murderer is, but that murderer perishes before they can confess, and Vance must find out the howhedidit on his own (though better than the way he did in the book).

I say it was pretty bad - it was slow, pokey, and there were odd shifts in the filming. The reason for it was that it was originally filmed as a silent movie, and then retrofitted with dialogue and additional scenes afterwards. This was Powell's first appearance as the lead, and his theater training gave him a natural diction and movement that was missing from the silent-scenes filmed earlier (There was a lot of held shots of people looking grim). And Louise Brooks herself refused to participate in the reshoot, so a lot of her lines were dubbed and in many cases her face obscured. 

This is Powell's first gig as a leading actor in the movies, his first talkie, and and an early establishment of his film character as a hero as opposed to a villain. His calmness and comfort really stands out here, and while he does not have the wit and savoir faire of the Thin Man and other roles yet, neither does he come off with Van Dine's eliteness and esoteric nature. He is dapper, mannered, and restrained.

So, the end result - both movie and book are verging on their centennial. They're of their era (The movie in particular has a couple black actors in supportive, comical roles  - yeah, cringeworthy). They are both worth revisiting, though know that you may face disappointments in their resolutions.

More later, 

Book: An Elegy for Ellison

  The Last Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison (with J. Michael Stracynski), Blackstone Publishing, 2024

Provenance: Christmas present from the Lovely Bride, purchased off Amazon.

Review: I talked about Harlan Ellison the man back here. Let's talk about his "last work" - The long-promised collection of bleeding edge stories called The Last Dangerous Visions. 

I read the initial Dangerous Visions (published 1967) in hardback in our high school library, and purchased paperback editions of it and its two-volume sequel, Again Dangerous Visions (1972), in college. For a young person who had drifted into SF through the ABC axis (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke), the subject matter and writing was a bit mind-blowing. It helped codify the American New Wave of Science Fiction, went after a variety of societal taboos, and kicked down the doors of tradition bolts-and-rivets SF.

Then there was a bit of a lapse of about 50 years, and only after Ellison's passing did his executor, J. Michael Stracynski (the Babylon 5 guy), organize the remaining material Ellison had, added a few stories, and finally finished the volume. 

The result is a mixed bag. Some pieces have that urgent, nostalgic, whiff of the originals ("Assignment No. 1" by Stephen Robinett and "A Night at the Opera" by Robert Wissner). Some feel like political tracks that could appear in the Economist ("Hunger" by Max Brooks). Some were utterly frightening ("The Final Pogrom" by Dan Simmons, which combines the holocaust with American Ingenuity, made more poignant by recent events in this country). Some of the best feel like recent, post-Harlan additions. "War Stories" by Edward Bryant, dealing with weaponized sharks, was brilliant in both presentation and subject. "First Sight" by Adrian Tchaikovski mixes the tropes of first contact, alien cultures, and the limits of the senses in a nice little package. But more than a few were "meh" - OK, but not shaking the earth great. And there were short "Intermezzos" by D.M.Rowles that just completely missed the mark. The art (by Tim Kirk) is a wondrous call-back to the earlier volumes, but the Ellisonesque intros (telling you WHY this story and this author are worth your time) are mostly missing. Yes, and there some typos in the text, including the punchline of Ward Moore "Falling from Grace", which needed a bit more typographic love to make the story land.

The longest entry in the book is Stracynski's own introduction/eulogy of Ellison, two parts remembrance of a friend, and two parts why-this-project-is-late. He hits the good parts and bad parts of Ellison in his travel from Terrible Infant to Grey Eminence, and offers some reasons behind his personal actions over the years. But reasons are not a denial of responsibility, and Ellison the man, the writer, and the editor, has to accept responsibility. An afterword talks about earlier incarnations of the book, and seems like an interesting collection of stories in their own right.

And the end result is ... OK. This final volume would neither kick down the doors of traditional SF (which now continues, but no longer dominates, the marketplace), nor wade onto the shores like a Leviathan, sweeping all in its path. My mind is not blown, but then, I'm no longer a teenager, my high school has been completely renovated, and the world turns and moves on. Some of the dystopian futures are all-too-real. Others feel right around the corner.

But it's a suitable memorial to a mercurial talent. Thank you J. Michael. Rest easy, Harlan.

More later,

The Big Pile of Books: Plane Books

A Right To Die by Rex Stout. Bantam Books, originally published in 1964. 
Too Many Clients by Rex Stout, Bantam Books, originally published in 1960
And Four To Go By Rex Stout, Bantam Books, originally published in 1958
Fade to Black by Robert Goldsborough, Bantam Books, originally published in 1990
The High Window by Raymond Chandler, Vintage Crime originally published in 1942
Pickup on Noon Street by Raymond Chandler, Ballantine Books, originally published in 1952
Playback by Raymond Chandler, Ballantine Books, originally published in 1958
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, Arcturus Books, originally published in 1920 

So I've been doing a lot of air travel this year, and when I travel, I bring along paperback mysteries. They are small, portable, you don't have to turn them off when landing or worry if the batteries are low. I usually get them at used bookstores, so if you lose them, you're out a few bucks.

And there's something I've noticed that I haven't seen anyone else comment about - the demise of the mass market paperback. I've been in a couple big chains, and the stubby pocket-sized mass-market paperback has been almost completely replaced with the larger-size trade paperback. The only mass-markets I'm finding (even in grocery stores, is the aisle next to the greeting cards) are by established authors and part of larger series that have been running in that format for years. Even a couple of the entries here are trade-sized reprints, purchased while on the road. Is this change-over really a thing? Are we losing the traditional mass market paperback of our youths?

Anyway.

These mass-market mysteries are also relatively short, unlike the doorstop fantasy books of the last several decades. That works out as well, since I can finish a book in one hop from Seattle to Milwaukee, or a round-trip to LA. 

I still tend to favor Nero Wolfe mysteries, if you haven't noticed, but I am getting towards the end of the Rex Stout canon, and have actually bought the same book twice under different covers because I was unsure if I have read it or not. I've even engaged with Stout's estate-approved successor. So I'm doing a bit more experimentation, this time with some Raymond Chandler I had never encountered before, and dabbling with Agatha Christie. 

Anyway, here are some recent additions

A Right To Die - Usually, Wolfe's world exists in a 7-year bubble. When we first meet Archie and Nero in the 30's, they've been together about 7 years. In the fifties, they've been together about 7 years. But now we are in the 60's and suddenly we get a direct call-back to an episode in the 30's. Back in 1938, Wolfe cracks the case in Too Many Cooks by appealing to the better nature of a group of African-American waiters. Now, one of those former waiters shows up at his door, quoting the speech that Wolfe had made that night. His problem is that his son is engaged to a white girl, and he wants to find out what's wrong with her. And then, of course, the white girl turns up dead. I mentioned that Wolfe's world is predominately white, but this is one of the times that Stout touches on racism.

Too Many Clients - This is Stout's sex mystery (amusing since the back cover of the paperback edition has a promotion for Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* (But were afraid to ask). Much as A Right To Die delved into race relations, Too Many Clients deals with a high-level exec maintaining a sex-den in Spanish Harlem, where he um, entertains young women. When the exec turns up dead, Wolfe starts gaining client after client who wants to know who did it (and confirm that it wasn't them). The sex is polite, gentile, and mainly confined to the erotic art on the sex-den's walls. And since Archie Goodwin, our narrator, is a gentlemen, it doesn't get much further than a passing glance. Very much of its age.

And Four To Go - This is collection of Stout's shorter works, which originally saw print in glossy magazines like Look and The Saturday Evening Post (both long-gone as regular periodicals). This collection deals with a murders set around the holidays - A Christmas Party poisoning, an Easter parade shooting, a Fourth of July picnic stabbing. Each with a host of suspects and motives and a solid reason for the relatively inert Nero to get involved. Also was a fourth story that was an alternate version of a story that appeared elsewhere, with only the age of a female character changed. Interesting and a pity that such few avenues for this type of fiction now exist.

Fade to Black - Robert Goldsborough is the appointed heir (by Stout's estate) to carry on the stories of Nero and Archie. And it's all right - I can't really fault it. All the pieces are there - the brownstone, the orchids, the gourmet meals, the dicey relationship with the cops. But is does feel a little off, oddly because Stout's stories were always in the moment when they were written. Wolfe is always reading some recently-published volume, and the New York of the era is drivable. Fade to Black hews to that rule as well, but it feels weird once we get into later decades. The first line is "The whole business started at Lilly Rowan's Superbowl party", which just feels odd to me. The mystery involves dueling add agencies and stolen ideas, and there is a body, of course. It's not bad, but we are looking at a different place and time.

(As an addition, this volume was publishing in 1990, and the evolution of the mass-market paperback is clear from the earlier books of the 60's. It is a mass-market, but the margins are wider, and the leading (the white space between the lines) is larger. The book itself has more pages and is thicker, though I doubt there are more words. Paper in this later era was apparently cheaper, allowing the book to swell and take up more space on the bookshelf).

The High Window - This was purchased in Missoula Montana at Shakespeare's, a bookstore across the river from the hotel where MisCon was being help. I had finished Murder at the ABA and wanted to get a book for the return trip. I had read most of the "big" Raymond Chandler (The Little Sister, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye), and wanted to dig into the ones I had not heard of before (or had not been turned into movies). In The High Window, Phillip Marlowe is hired by an upper-class client to recover a rare coin. . Almost immediately hoods start leaning on him and dead bodies start piling up. Two things stay with me as I read through these - one is how Chandler managed to turn LA into a character, an impressive thing for a town that legendarily has "no there there". Chandler here is dealing with the upper crust and the roots they've set down in the more sordid parts of LA

(And by the way, this the trade version of the book, reprinted in the 1992, and can be compared against the earlier mass markets. Thinner, taller, but also wider margins and leading. And a higher price tag, even taking into account inflation). 

Playback -  One other theme that haunts Chandler's pages is broken women - those who have been traumatized as a foundation for their actions. You notice it after reading a few of them. In The High Window it was timid secretary Merle Davis. In The Long Goodbye it was Linda Loring. In this case it is Betty Manning (with a host of other names) who is on the run to California. Detective Phil Marlowe is hired to shadow her, then switches sides and becomes her defender in a cluster of lies and betrayals. The part of LA that Chandler defines here is Enclave Culture - those wealthy colonies along the coast where the old money retires, the young money wants to be included, and the help staff can't afford to live within the town boundaries. That part is the most interesting feature, along with Marlowe's internal monologues.

Pickup on Noon Street - This is a collection of shorts originally written for pulps like Black Mask. There's no Marlowe here, but rather characters named Dalmas and Carmady, both of which have their own internal code that Chandler relies on. LA is here as well, but seedier, seamier sides, which means a lot of hoods and guns, troubled women, and bodies on the floor. I picked up the book at Half-Price, and it came with its own little mystery - a polaroid used as a bookmark of what could be a shoreline or a distant mountain range in the distance, with a non-descript skyscraper along one side. 

The Mysterious Affair at Styles - The first Agatha Christie novel, and the first Poirot, this feels like a bloodless affair in the wake of Chandlers continual callousness and Stout's colorful domesticity. It is the classic Manor Mystery where the suspects are all in the house the night of the murder and everyone has a motive somewhere along the line. Christie wanted to write a mystery where she plays fair, and gives all the clues needed to solve the puzzle, but the passage of a hundred years made this reader sail past the pertinent clue in identifying the murderer. Yet it has a clockwork logic to it and a very British reserve that contrasts with the other books described in this post. The character with the most personality is narrator Hastings - Poirot's expository sidekick in the style of Doctor Watson and Archie Goodwin - who falls for one of the suspects. This particular edition was another trade paperback, nicely presented and large-formatted. 

And that's it for the Plane Books of 2024. The thing that strikes me in this mystery reading is the frame holding the mystery is sometimes more engaging that the mystery itself. Dorothy Sayers has a very political in her writing. Stout (and his successor) takes New York City and turns it into a cozy place for the occasional killing. Chandler reveals the LA outside his window, and Christie gives a tour of the upstairs/downstairs life in the interwar years. The books are centered on the mystery, but what makes them successful is what they're really about.

And I'm looking at stocking up for next year's trips. There will be fewer of them, but they will still be there.

More later.

The Book Backlog: Knives Out

 [Bloggers Note: So, I've been fretting over one particular entry for a while - a review of a game product that I'm spending way too much time fiddling with. I'd take it off the shelf, rewrite chunks of it, then put it aside as more immediate matters (the Political Desk, plays that have a closing date) get in the way. But as a result, I have created a backlog of books on the corner of my desk I want to talk about. So this is the Book Backlog. I will (once again) put aside the much longer piece and try to whittle it down, though  that may be a fool's errand. 

Anyway:]

Court of Daggers by Alexandre Dumas Translated by Lawrence Ellsworth, Cyrano Productions, 2022.

Provenance: It is no surprise to long-term readers (both of you) that I've been a fan of Lawrence Ellsworth's translations of the Musketeer Cycle. So I was a little disappointed when I could not find the continuance of the series on the Pegasus Books site or its distributor Simon & Schuster. But I found this volume and the next one on Amazon, continuing the story under Ellsworth's own imprint. 

Review: I'll be frank - we're in the doldrums here. It is season 5 of 7 seasons and the movie. The original Musketeers stories were written to be serialized in newspapers, and while that makes for reading them fairly neatly and compartmentalized, collecting them together lacks a bit of heft as we move further away from the original adventures. 

This is the second part of the Visconte de Bragelonne, which started in Between Two Kings. As such we get a a chance to deal with other characters than the four core musketeers. In particular, the rising star is the titular viscount, who is the son of the almost saintly Aramis. Of the others, Athos is now a clergyman. Porthos is nobility. D'Artagnan has land in France and England, and still works, off and on, for the Crown, resigning whenever the Crown displeases him.

There are three arcs within the text. The first centers the conflict between the Superintendent of Finance Fouquet, and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who controls the late Cardinal Mazarin's wealth. The King sides with Colbert and signs the death warrant for two of Fouquet's underlings. Fouquet  hires mercs to capture his minions, escaping through a nearby building, and then covering their tracks by setting the building ablaze. Oh, yeah, the building is owned by D'Artagnan, who is on the scene when this goes down. D'Artagnan foils the plot, kills Fouqet's mercs, and lets Fouquet's men be properly hanged.

D'Artagnan is then hired by Colbert to investigate Fouquet's building up a fortress on the coast. D'Artagnan finds that Porthos is charge of the fortifications, and since Porthos is not the sharpest mental blade in the basket, discovers that Athos, now a bishop, is behind this particular development. Fouquet does from fancy diplomatic tapdancing to avoid the noose himself. Interestingly, Dumas (and D'Artagnan) likes Fouquet better than Colbert, even though he is working against him. 

The last act consists of the King marrying off his brother to the sister of King Charles of England (who our glad lads helped put back on the throne). A lot of young men are hot for Princess Henrietta, including the second Duke of Buckingham (which worked out SO well the last time). Bragelonne has to be the voice of reason here, even though he is himself smitten with his childhood love, who in turn has been elevated to a Lady in Waiting (and caught the eye of the King). More drama to come, but that will wait for the next volume, Devil's Dance. 

Bragelonne, the titular hero, threads his way through all this. He is D'Artagnan's Padawan in the first third. He argues with his father a bit in the second set of chapters, but then we scarcely see him until the final bit, where he comes into his own. And while the Viscount worships his father, he shares much with the bravado and cunning of D'Artagnan.

Ellsworth acquits himself well here, covering a lot of territory that most Americans and English-speakers have not heard of in the canon. He trims, edits and modernizes, without losing the plot or burying small bits. An earlier translation of the text can be found here, and it is clear that Ellsworth makes the work readable and engaging for the current readers, just as it was for serial readers in Paris itself. He smooths things out and reduces the stuffiness (to our ears) of the earlier translations. Plus he backs up with footnotes and character descriptions in the back that help clarify where everyone is standing with each other and what any asides and allusions refer to.

In short, I'm still enjoying the series, through we are now 30 years out from when D'Artagnan first entered Paris with his wobbling horse. And it gives me wonderful source material for Miseries & Misfortunes. And I'm looking forward to reading the next volume as well.

More later 

Book: Which King? That King!

 Witch King by Martha Wells, Tordotcom, 2023

Provenance: Christmas gift from the Lovely Bride. She also got me a copy of the latest Murderbot book, by the same author, but I went with this one first. And while I have a lot of other books in the reviewing queue, I thought to jump this one forward while it is still fresh in my mind.

Review: This was a very enjoyable, challenging and rewarding read. It is a fantasy novel, but it bends (but not breaks) a lot of the traditional tropes, creating a distinct world and and engaging story. I'll admit, this was the bedside book for several months, and was put aside three times due to its complexity, but always lured me back.

The story is told in two parts, a present and flashback. Kaiisteron, Prince of the Fourth House, is a demon, a otherworldly race that takes over the recently deceased to live in this world. In the past narrative, his plains-dwelling adopting people were overrun by powerful invaders, the Hierarchs, and he was taken prisoner. The story there is his escape of bondage how he helped create a rebellion. In the present, some 60 years later, the Hierarchs have been defeated and a new empire is rising, Kai awakens from being imprisoned again by persons unknown, alongside Zeide Daiyahah, a Witch. In order to figure out what is going on, the two need to find Zeide's wife, who is a Marshall of the Blessed Lands, and has also vanished without a trace.

That's about as organized as I can make it. Wells has created a world with extremely diverse peoples and types of magic. The demons can drain life, and Kai learns to transfer between bodies as well. Witches are the progeny of Demon/Mortal mating, and have elemental powers. The Blessed are angelic figures pulling from a central power core for their spells.  And the conquering Hierarchs use as similar central well of power, but pull from death magic. And that's pretty much the reason for invasion, which eliminates a host of unique cultures, and gives them more power from their deaths. 

Kai is our viewpoint character, in that we only learn about the world through him, and he shares only as much as he needs to. There is not a lot of exposition here - no explanation of a timeline, no lecture on how the world came to be, no moment when one character turns to another and say "As you know ...". There is a list of Dramatis Personae at the front of the book, a needed tool since there are a large number of allies and enemies for Kai and Zeide. And there is a map, is a bit more perfunctory than your standard issue fantasy, giving me general locations with a lot of space in between.  

And we are dealing with two Kais, here. In the past, Kai is swept up by the Hierarchs' assault. In the present, the Hierarchs have been overthrown and a new Rising World coalition has formed, verging on becoming its own empire. But you have to put that together, and that requires a bit more from the readers than your standard fantasy. Even the intro italicized excerpts from in-world histories fronting the chapters makes little sense in and of themselves, and only when I finished the book did I go back and re-read those sections, just to get a handle on what the world-building was. Wells shows and not tells, and what she shows is often colored by Kai' viewpoints in the two eras.

And there are two eras to Kai's personality as well. Past-Kai is a junior demon coming to terms with his role among his people, and as such more innocent. Present-Kai has lived through an empire's rise and its fall and is much more cynical and untrusting. You can see how the character had grown (and been harmed) over the interim. And it is not impenetrable as, say, aGene Wolfe novel but it takes some awareness to understand.

Magic is similarly not explained, but demonstrated. Spells are intentions, magicians are expositors, constructs are amalgams or chimera. Its more than just a renaming, but rather a reconfiguring of traditional tropes, and you the reader are expected to keep up. 

AND Wells turns a couple fantasy-tropes upside down, literally such as when Kai talks about the Top of the World being the south pole. Pale-skinned folk come from the colder southern islands. There are a lot of matriarchies, which are not presented as exceptions but as norms. Gender preference and identity is fluid. Women in Kai's orbit are the majority, not the token minority. 

And, all this works. Wells is fantastic writer who has created an involved world with a complex story to it. She skips of the epic bits - how the Hierarchs specifically captured Kai, and how the new alliance drives out the Hierarchs. It concentrates on the important bits for Kai - survival in the past, and discovery of a conspiracy in the present. As I said, I put the book aside several time, but each time I re-engaged, I found myself swept up in it. 

This one is up for a Hugo, and yeah, I can see that. It is a doorstop fantasy novel, and I am relieved to know that it is (currently) only a solitaire. While I really like Wells' shorter, more contained works, the presentation of world and the flow of the narration is excellent, and I would not be surprised if it took the award this year.

But yes, it does put demands on you, the reader. And it rewards them. 

More later. 

Book: A Conventional Murder

 Murder at the ABA by Isaac Asimov, Fawcett Crest paperback edition, 1976

Provenance: Half-Price books down in Tukwilla, picked up before a trip to the MisCon convention in Missoula, Montana. When I fly, I tend to read old paperbacks. They are small, light, and, if forgotten on the airplane, easily replaced. They also, I believe, are slowly going extinct, replaced in the first-run bookstores with larger trade paperbacks. So there is a whiff of nostalgia and slowly decaying pulp about them. I like 'em.

This particular volume belonged to a John Braschler, and had as a bookmark a ticket to see Doctor Strange in 3D at the Pacific Science Center on 11/19/2016. Add to that a bookmark from Half-Price, and a sticker from SKS Props, another guest of the convention, given to me by owner Steve on the plane trip back from Missoula, Montana, so the physical book has its own history.

It is kind of strange, reading a book about a murder at a convention over Memorial Day weekend, while I was traveling to and from a convention over Memorial Day weekend. Such is life.

But what about the book? Well, I didn't care for it much, but decided to bull through it (and then write about it). Another advantage of old spinner-rack paperbacks. Even if you don't like 'em, you can still power through them.

Review: Isaac Asimov is known primarily for his SF and nonfiction science, but wrote mysteries as well. His best-known were about the Black Widower Club, where a bunch of writers gather for dinner, are presented with a  mystery, cast about options and opinions, then have the waiter solve it for them (usually the mystery revolves around someone mis-hearing or misunderstanding something). And in this case, Asimov was hired by Doubleday to write a full mystery novel set at the American Bookseller's Association, which was held in 1975 in New York City (he never identifies the city in the book, but Asimov says he attended the 1975 convention to pick up local color). 

And I attended ABAs and ALAs (American Library Association) about a decade later, when they had reached their apex such that the attending editors would bring along their assistant editors as sherpas to carry out all the free books offered. And Asimov gets the ambience and panels and celebrities and hurley-burley pretty correct. 

Supposedly Asimov based his main character, Darius Just, on fellow writer Harlan Ellison (who he dedicates the book to). And it's a pity that he didn't use more Ellison, who carved his own trail through SF as a brilliant writer, a complete mensch, and a raging pain in the butt, all at the same time. Darius Just is simply a height-deficient midlist writer, successful with a bad movie adaptation, as was Ellison in the mid-70s. That portrayal lacks the fire, irritation, ego, and lyrical verbal swagger of the original version's public persona, even in those days. Asimov's Ellison-clone is a wan, fatalistic figure who believes in the immovability of fate in addition to his own personal culpability in that fate. That's a shame.

Oh, OK, the plot. Darius Just is a semi-popular midlist writer asked to do an interview at the ABA by a friend. Also at the convention is Giles Devore, who Just mentored. Devore's first novel was a huge hit. Devore has become a complete jerk, his infantile obsessive-compulsive nature offending all around him. Just finds him dead in the bathtub and we're off to the races. And because Devore is so obsessive-compulsive, Just suspects murder.

And to be honest it plods a bit.  Mind you, Asimov's fiction tends towards the bloodless - people talking and thinking as opposed to people doing. And that style is evident here as Just rolls through suspects and prospects throughout the book. Asimov takes his time getting to the point - we are about a third through the book before the deserving victim finally croaks.

In addition, the book is filled with liberated 70s sexism, that Playboy-era mindset where equality meant that women had the right to have sex with you. Darius Just comes off a horndog, and Asimov (who writes himself into the novel, working on a book called Murder at the ABA - very meta) self-identifies as a lecherous flirt (and is praised for it). Add to that the fact that almost every female character in the book is described is sexual terms (bustlines and body-shape are a major factor here). And victim Devore has his own personal kinks. The end result is, as kids today say, cringe. 

The mystery is mechanically OK. I tagged the murderer early on, primarily in terms of the book's pacing (non-important suspects drop away from the narrative, but the true murderer keeps popping up). I also tweaked to the key clue. But I missed the full rationalization for the crime, in part because writing technology has changed from the mid-seventies.

Ultimately, the book comes off as dated and my eyes rolled many times in the reading - Stan! was traveling with me, and noted that I would read a few pages, then close the book and look into the middle distance for a short time before returning to the text. It's not great Asimov, but more on the level of his other mysteries. I would've liked to see Harlan Ellison as a main character as opposed to this dry-veined doppelganger. He'd have been an interesting detective.

More later, 

Book: Early Stout

 The President Vanishes by Rex Stout (Originally published as Anonymous), Farrar & Reinhart, 1934.

Provenance: Purchase from Half-Price Books, off the shelf. I've pretty much tapped out the original Nero Wolfe series over the years, and have been wandering around the canon's periphery since.

Review: One of the challenges in following a writer for a particular series is that you might not always enjoy their other works as much. I have been a noticeable fan of the Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout, but I've found his related Tecumseh Fox mysteries, which had the same level of twists and turns, to be less engaging than the domestic squabbles of corpulent detective Wolfe and his wisecracking leg-man Archie Goodwin. 

And there's a similar challenge with The President Vanishes. This one was written after the first Wolfe mystery, Fer-De-Lance, but was published first. And it much more a political thriller than a mystery. It was initially published anonymously, in part to create the impression that someone with strong political connections penned it, but that pseudonymous fig-leaf did not last long (a 1934 Times review points the finger strongly at Wolfe, and he admitted it a few years after publication). 

Here's the plot - Europe is at war, and some movers and shakers from the business community want in on the racket. They've got Congress, the Press, and a bunch of neo-nazis called the Grey Shirts, under the control of a charismatic leader Lincoln Lee all gunning for war. Against them we have the president, who is pacifistic and doesn't want to send US boys into battle. Then, right before a major vote on war, the president, well, vanishes. Kidnapping is assumed and there is a mad scramble of the various inhabitants of Washington to find him, as the powers-behind-the-throne push for the Vice President to step in or ignite a populist Grey Shirt rebellion. Either way gives them the war they want.

The book scatters its main characters, starting with a lobbyist working with the conspirators, then moving to the Secretary of War, who is in charge of the investigation, and finally settling on Chic Moffat, square-jawed, wise-racking Secret Service agent. He feels like an early draft of Archie Goodwin, but more willing to slug his girlfriend (Alma, a secretary for the First Lady) for her own good.  Stout also gets into the details of the Grey Shirts, their organization, secrets, and Lincoln Lee's patriotism. Lee is a true believer, and gets some dandy speeches, and Stout pulls it off well. 

The plot has its echoes in the past. The year before, a group of businessmen sought to launch a coup against FDR and install retired Major General Smedley Butler as a dictator. Butler dropped a dime on his co-conspirators, and this all came out about the time the book was written. Also, we have the earlier example of Woodrow Wilson being incapacitated, and his Vice President being unwilling to take the office. And we had our home-grown fascist groups, like the Silver Shirts in the Pacific Northwest. So there was some grounding on this.

The nature of the war itself (This was 1934) is left a bit vague. There are battles in Siberia. France is a opponent, and the US leans towards helping Germany, but the nature of the players and causes is left unexplained. Which makes sense because the action is all in Washington DC, and war, any war, will do. 

The book generated a movie of the same name, which also hit in 1934 (Paramount started filming before the book was published). There are a lot of demi-familiar faces from that age of the studio system, including Rosalind Russell in one of her early roles as well as perennial cowboy sidekick Andy Devine. The conflict is simplified a bit, but it pretty much follows the same beats as the book itself.

So how is it? Not bad, showing a lot of Stout's strengths with character and plot. But I'm pleased with the fact that Wolfe and Goodwin took off, and that there was a lot more them in the future.

More later,