Readersplaining Your Books

It's hard to believe summer is over; before you know it, you'll be composing a wish list for Santa. I've been working on my own list for what seems like forever, because my Santa, a husband who has known me for 25 years, has a head full of ideas about what books I'd like. Bad ideas. An idea will start out on track (he knows I'm interested in sports, politics, and current events) before derailing and heading into the weeds (but I really cannot get into a biography of former pro basketball player/North Korea visitor/oddball Dennis Rodman). Wouldn't you think he'd automatically know this?

Because who wouldn't want to see if his or her head
would fit through the hole in that chair

Apparently not. I've asked Hubby to keep certain facts in mind when he book shops for me. These facts explain why some books are up my alley. I've given a pair of these facts below. Maybe they'll jump start your own readersplanations before your Santa begins shopping.

I appreciate good food and drink––and crime fiction characters who do, too.

One of my favorite old series features Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. Wolfe is a gargantuan genius who loves food, books, and orchids and refuses to leave his New York City brownstone on business. His side kick, Archie Goodwin, provides the witty narration. Books I liked best include Too Many Cooks, Some Buried Caesar, The Doorbell Rang, and The Silent Speaker.

Italian crime fiction is a good bet for mouth-watering food. Take Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano books. They are best read pinned open with one arm while the other arm stays busy hoisting rigatoni and a bold Italian red mouthward. In addition to the food and Sicilian atmosphere, I like Montalbano, a world-weary but decent man, and his colleagues. The latest, A Beam of Light (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli; Penguin Books, September 1, 2015), finds three crimes requiring Montalbano's attention. On the personal front, Montalbano's eye strays from long-time lover Livia to a gallery owner named Marian.

No, thank you, I'd prefer to remain ignorant.

We can't skip France. It's hard not to love the Dordogne and Martin Walker's books about Bruno Courrèges, chief of police. Reading them is the next best thing to a visit; one can almost smell and taste the meals described on the pages. In The Patriarch (Knopf, August 2015), Bruno's attendance at a birthday celebration for a World War II veteran is ruined by murder. One also finds murder in the darkly comic and macabre The Debt to Pleasure, by John Lanchester. The Nabokovian book's unreliable narrator, arrogant gourmet Tarquin Winot, provides recipes à la Brillat-Savarin and a travelogue as he follows a couple to Provence.

I can't say I first think of the English when the topic is good fictional food; in fact, what initially pops into my mind is James Hamilton-Paterson's weird and wacky Cooking with Fernet Branca. Its part-time narrator, the Englishman Gerald Samper, is a ghostwriter for celebrities ("an amanuensis to knuckleheads") and an amateur cook. He lives in Tuscany, although his kitchen seems to be located in hell. Ice cream with garlic and Fernet Branca and mussels in chocolate are bad enough; consider yourself lucky my divulging the ingredients of Alien Pie would be a spoiler. While Samper's recipes are atrocious, this book is a treat.

At first glance, some books of crime fiction seem unlikely to stimulate the appetite. No matter, John Harvey's food descriptions in his Charlie Resnick police procedurals always send me to the kitchen. At home in Nottingham, that melancholy cop tends to his cats, listens to jazz (readers get educated), and rustles up a delicious sandwich or a cup of decent coffee. Wait, we can't forget the paper towels; one of Resnick's men says that if he ate as messily as Resnick, his wife would make him sit out in the garage. Harvey's characters are no strangers to life's miseries or ironies. I like that about them and the books' look at their relationships and the social issues in post-Thatcher England. The first one is Lonely Hearts.

Here's a comforting thought.

I'm an insomniac who often reads until I fall sleep.

Now, I can bore myself to sleep by reading the instruction book for my washing machine, but this can be torture. So, I usually give the instruction book idea a pass and instead read a suspenseful novel with one eye open. That way, my goal of falling asleep is already half accomplished. Does it impress you that I figured this out as a kid? Actually, suspense is best read with one eye in bed; there's something about the reduced field of vision that makes the tension bearable. For bedtime purposes, the book should not provoke the sort of fear that sends you diving under the bed, but, rather, should make you cringe and beg the character to rethink what he or she is doing, such as pawing through a murder suspect's dresser drawers while the suspect is, naturally, beetling home early because he forgot something. One example of this cringing and begging sort of one-eyed read is Joyce Carol Oates's Jack of Spades (Mysterious Press, May 2015), in which the alter ego of best-selling crime-fiction writer Andrew J. Rush steps in to protect a secret.

Another route to dreamworld is reading a book whose accelerated pace leaves me feeling so depleted by its end I can't help but nod off. Duane Swierczynski's Canary (Mulholland Books, February 2015) fits into this category. Swierczynski is known for his stomp-on-the-gas pacing, plot twists, and unlikely heroes/heroines. In Canary, his unlikely heroine is college honors student Sarie Holland, who is forced to become a confidential informant for Philadelphia narcotics cops. Reading Swierczynski makes me wonder what it would be like to share a meal with him; whether we'd eat by stopwatch.

Always only too happy to encounter Moby-Dick in my reading

For times when sleep is obviously a long-distant goal, an engrossing book like The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Henry Holt, February 2015), is a good pick. The "Whites" of the title are the NYPD's Moby-Dicks, those great white whales who escaped justice and who continue to haunt the cops who pursued them. One of them has now re-surfaced for disgraced Sgt. Billy Graves. Price, whose previous novels include Lush Life, about the murder of New York City bartender Ike Marcus and its aftermath, has a terrific ear for dialogue. That, these books' rich prose, and their original, psychologically complex characters make for great reading.

If sleep is hopeless, but I'm really tired, give me a book with crisp prose and an interesting setting. Malcolm Mackay's Glasgow Trilogy (The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, and The Sudden Arrival of Violence) is suitable. While these books have received international critical acclaim, they were only published in the United States by Mulholland Books last April. They involve a Glasgow crime syndicate trying to eliminate the competition. At their heart are two hitmen: the legendary Frank MacLeod and the up-and-coming Calum MacLean. Mackay's writing is clear and easy to follow, and he brings the criminal underbelly of Glasgow alive. Man, what lives these characters lead. I read this trilogy three nights straight because I wanted to know what happens to Frank and Calum.

That's it for my 'splaining today. Good luck with your own readersplanations.

Spring Preview 2015: Part Seven

Reykjavik

Is it feed a fever and starve a cold? Well, if the adage fits, I have a few good ways to feed a cabin fever, starting with a tale from the top of the world.

Inspector Erlendur has always been a gloomy Gus; right from the day he was presented in Jar City, the first book in Arnaldur Indriðason's Icelandic series. His personality seemed to reflect the winters of the Arctic Circle. Those who have experienced the polar vortex of '14 and the polar vortex redux of '15 would know that this explained a lot. But you couldn't help but like him, because he was also a sensible, dogged detective who tended to solve his cases. One of his endearing characteristics was his compassion, and the seeds of this lay deep in his past, stemming form the day he lost he brother in a blizzard when their palms were wrenched apart.

The most recent novel in the series, Strange Shores, was to be Erlendur's final story, but Indriðason has been able to bring us a few tales, which take place early in the career of Erlendur Sveinsson. In all the books I’ve read in this series, this is the first time I have been aware of his last name. Although not the first prequel in print, Reykjavik Nights (Minotaur, April 21) is the first one translated.

As a young cop, Erlendur goes on routine patrol in all the seedy parts of town and becomes acquainted with a tramp named Hannibal. Hannibal dies, supposedly of natural causes, but which Erlender begins to investigate on own his time. In the course of this sleuthing, he realizes his desire to be a detective. He finds connections to another death, that of a young woman. The story takes place in 1974, during a time when Reykjavik is gearing up for the festival celebrating the 1100th anniversary of the settlement of Iceland. I am waiting eagerly for a chance to meet the young, hopefully less somber Erlendur.

There's not a more pleasant place on the East Coast to spend the summer than eastern Long Island. Christopher Bollen sets his second novel, Orient (Harper, May 5,) on a small historic town on the Island's north fork.

Orient, as the town is called, was once a quiet place, whose local flavor is now changing, with the influx of moneyed Manhattanites both arty and crafty. Not one of these types is another newcomer, Mills Chivern, a young loner who has blown in from the west and made himself at home. Toward the end of the summer, a local man is found dead in the open water at the same time that a humongous bloated animal corpse is found on the beach. It is presumed to be a product of a nearby research lab. Because he feels he has to save his own skin, Mills joins Beth, an Orient native, to find the killer as the bodies pile up. I am imagining Jaws vs. The Amityville Horror, and if you are looking for thrills, this one seems to be a good bet.

And now, for a bit of fun, try Josh Cook's An Exaggerated Murder (Melville House, March 3).

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. (Sherlock Holmes)

Trike Augustine is a PI who feels his deductive skills may rival the great Holmes, but they don't seem to be any help in the case of a missing moneybags. For one thing, the clues are pathetically obscure. What can you intuit about a dead pig in the living room? It might help if Trike's two Watsons––Max, the former FBI agent, and Lola, the artist––had a clue between them. This book is touted to be funny, but I'll reserve judgment.

Josh Cook is a writer from Boston who works in a bookstore while he writes. From this clue, I deduce that I just might like this book, whether it's funny or not.

In Spider Woman’s Daughter (Harper, 2014), Anne Hillerman breathed new life into her father Tony Hillerman's wonderful characters, Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee, and fleshed out Bernadette ("Bernie") Manualito, who became Chee's love interest as they solved crimes in Navajo Territory.

In Rock with Wings (Harper, May 5), Anne Hillerman continues the series and, by focusing on Officer Manuelito, who is now married to Chee, she tells the story from a female point of view. Bernadette, like many women, plays a dual role; taking care of family, which also includes an aging mother and a troublesome younger sister, while trying to do her job, which at the present seems to be a collection of unrelated incidents.

Chee is working on his own set of crimes. Even though he has retired, Joe Leaphorn still plays a role, because he is the guru to whom the younger police officers turn to help them make sense of what clues they find in their search for the answers.

Hillerman père et Hillerman fille both bring more to the story than just the facts, ma'am, and I look forward to spending some time with this book.

The action takes place near the Rock with Wings, as the Navajo call the Shiprock Monument in New Mexico in the center of the Navajo Reservation. It is a monument of special meaning to the Diné, as the Navajo refer to their people. Hillerman takes the reader to a place with grand vistas and she does my cabin fever good.

Over the years, Salvo Montalbano has had a good angel on one shoulder, reminding him of the right thing to do, and its opposite number on the other shoulder, tempting and teasing. In all the years I've been reading about Andrea Camilleri's police detective, the good angel has won out––except for a flirt with infidelity in Camilleri's last book, Angelica’s Smile (Penguin, 2014). His self-control is beginning to slip again in his latest, Game of Mirrors (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli; Penguin, March 31).

Rescuing his neighbor from a car that needed CPR, Salvo becomes intrigued with Liliana Lombardo and he finds that his rift with longtime girlfriend, Livia, is giving him a little leeway for romantic dalliance. Some bombing of local warehouses is keeping him occupied and, while looking into the motives for the bombings (because nothing is ever simple in Sicily), Montalbano wants to listen to his bad angel. But he is a wily character himself and, as he closes in on the criminals, Liliana disappears.

Then it's a case of cerca donna (cherchez la femme). These books are a lot of fun and I am glad to say that there are at least four more waiting in the wings for translation.

Jimmy Perez of the Shetland Island police, and his colleague, Sandy Wilson, are also out cherchez-ing la femme in Ann Cleeves's latest, Thin Air (Minotour, May 5).

In northern Scotland, there is a peculiar phenomenon near the time of the summer solstice that the Shetlanders call the summer dim. It is into this strange, almost hallucinogenic light of the midnight sun, that a young woman, Eleanor, walks out and disappears into thin air.

Eleanor is one of a group of young people who were friends at university and who have come to Unst, the northernmost of the Shetland Isles. They have taken a holiday cottage and plan to stay for a week, while two of their group celebrate their marriage with local hamefarin dance. Eleanor seemingly sends a text telling her friends not to look for. But, of course, they do––and find her body in a pool of water, looking posed.

Ann Cleeves looks deep into the souls of both the characters visiting and the protagonists investigating, and also into the hearts and minds of the native islanders, making this book quite a feast. A nice way  to keep from starving for reading material in the cold.

Best Reads of 2014: Part Two

2014 has been a good year for reading. It began with an extra-long serving of miserable winter weather, which kept me inside with a book in hand, followed by one of those cruel Aprils that T. S. Eliot beautifully described, and the showers for the flowers were also best avoided by hiding in a good story. But whom am I kidding? I don't need an excuse to read, whatever the weather.

I reviewed many of my highly valued reads after I read them; books like The Fairy Gunmother by Daniel Pennac, I Will Have Vengeance by Maurizio de Giovanni, One Last Hit by Nathan Walpow and The White Magic Five & Dime by Steve Hockensmith.

Here are some more of my most memorable reading choices.

Top Mystery Reads

This Private Plot, by Alan Beechey (Poisoned Press, May 2014), is the third in the Oliver Swithin mystery series. Oliver is a nice fellow who is not always the brightest bulb on a string of lights. He writes children's books about a sneaky ferret, but wants to take a break and compile a book of trivia. In pursuit of the trivial, he comes across a murder, which he intends to solve. The story is perfectly balanced with wit, literary references, and plenty of humor and loose ends. I did a little happy dance when this book was finally published.

Joyland, by Stephen King (Hard Case Crime, 2013), is a wonderful tale about the summer a young college student traveled to the South to live and work at an amusement park. It has got everything––some love and loss, some coming-of-age, a bit of mystery and a nice spoonful of Stephen King horror. Nobody does it better.

Treasure Hunt, by Andrea Camilleri (Penguin, 2013), starts as a barrage of bullets rains down on a piazza. Salvo Montalbano is hailed as a hero as he clambers up a ladder to discover that the snipers are an elderly pair of siblings who have been going slightly nuts for decades. Montalbano has a double-barrel case going on as he searches for the answer both to the riddle of what happened to the treasure found in the shooters' apartment and to a slightly more sinister treasure hunt created by a malevolent secret admirer.

The Death of Friends (Putnam Adult, 1996) is a Henry Rios mystery by Michael Nava. It's the fifth in a series featuring Rios, a lawyer working in Los Angeles. While mourning for a close friend and lover who is succumbing to AIDS, he takes on the case of the murder of a friend and judge who was deep in the closet. Rios is a wonder, both a complex and very likable character. Maybe it would be more specific to say a very admirable character. This series is way too short!

The Glass Room, the fifth book in the Vera Stanhope series by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan, 2012), was short-listed for the Specsavers Bestseller Dagger. Author S. J. Bolton put it well when she said this story has all the elements of a Golden Age Mystery––a windswept landscape, isolated country house, disparate people thrown together, crime scenes mimicking their fictional counterparts and a plot liberally strewn with blind alleys, red herrings and misdirection.


Top Non-Mystery Fiction Reads

Charming Billy, by Alice McDermott (FSG, 1997), is a beautifully told story about a man who led the sad life of unrelenting alcoholism, only redeemed by the fact that so many people loved him.

The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, 2004), is literary rather than crime fiction. It features a once-famous octogenerian detective who is caring for a nine-year-old child, who is mute since he escaped from Nazi Germany. This is a short book, but I found it a gem of a story. It was brilliant, faceted and valuable.

Mike and Psmith (Penguin, 1998; first published 1909) and Psmith in the City (first published 1910), by P. G. Wodehouse, gave me the most laughs I had all year. Mike Jackson is a serious cricketer whose father has pulled him from public school because of his abysmal grades and has installed at a local high school where he meets one Rupert Eustace Psmith. The P is silent, as in Psychotic and Pterodactyl. This pair has riotous adventures and both end up working at a city bank after graduation where Psmith's genius for understanding and manipulation comes to fruition.

I can't imagine how I missed the talents of Robertson Davies after so many years of haunting bookstores and libraries. There is no explaining it. Robertson Davies was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best-known and most popular authors. I began with The Deptford Trilogy. Davies is my best find in years.

The first in the series is Fifth Business (Penguin, 2002; first published 1970). Davies defines fifth business as "Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the recognition or the denouement, were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business."

Fifth business in this case is Dunstable Ramsay, a history professor with a wooden leg and many interests in mythology, magic and the lives of saints. The story begins with a badly thrown snowball that defines the lives of the five people involved in the incident.

In The Manticore (Penguin, 2006; first published 1972), the stories of these individuals continues. It is told by David Staunton, the son of Boy Staunton, as he tries to discover who killed his father.

Fortunately for me Davies has written several series, which will entertain me as well as enrich me in the years to come.


Top YA Reads

Paper Towns by John Green (Dutton, 2008) is a change from dark dystopian societies and post-apocalyptic scenarios. It led me to read several other John Green books.

The Giver by Lois Lowry (HMH Books, 1993) is about a futuristic society that has refined itself into a utopia by eliminating pain and pleasure as well as individuality. This is a great springboard for spirited discussion if you are around kids who would actually read a book!

The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo (Candlewick, 2001) is haunting, poignant and heart wrenching. The story is a short but powerful tale about rising out of despair.

I Didn’t Kill Your Cat by R. Stim (2011). This was one of those books I read because the cover caught my eye. I loved heroine Frankie Jackson, who must solve the case of a murdered cat and clear her own name. There is a wonderful cast of characters who live on houseboats in the Sausalito area.


Top Audio Listening

The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony (Thomas Dunne, 2009) is a fascinating story about how South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony accepted a herd of "rogue" elephants on his Thula Thula game reserve in South Africa and kept them from being annihilated. Anthony says: "This is their story. They taught me that all life forms are important to each other in our common quest for happiness and survival. That there is more to life than just yourself, your own family, or your own kind." The narration by Simon Vance won the 2014 Audie Award for Biography/Memoir.

When the author of this book passed away, the elephants he interacted with for many years instinctively walked many, many miles to come and visit him at the place near where he died.

Winter Preview 2014-2015: Part Two

This season, we're expecting some wonderful books that will either chill you or thrill you. There is something for every reader. My choices tickled my fancy because they all have elements of humor in them. I am not sure where the phrase "the dead of winter" came from, but it might suggest that a good murder mystery is what is called for to lighten up the dark days.

Andrea Camilleri's sardonic sense of humor is always something to look forward to, and I tend to grab a translated copy hot off the presses. The most recent, The Brewer of Preston (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli; Penguin, December 30) is a departure from his usual Inspector Montalbano series, but it looks like it has Camilleri's custom blend of humor and misbehavior. It takes place in his favored location but in a different time. It is still Vigàta, Sicily, but the story takes place in 1874.

At this time, Vigàta is under the rule of the prefect of Montelusa, who has decided to build a new theater. The first production is to be an opera called The Brewer of Preston. You would think that the townspeople would be happy about this. Not necessarily so.

Apparently, the old cliché about not pleasing everybody holds true. The choice of this particular opera upsets several groups in the town. They cry that it's too obscure, it's too mediocre or it's not traditional.

Suddenly, cabals and gangs and cliques are formed, some having good intentions, others bent on mischief. The members of these brigades each want to put their own stamp on the opening of the theater. Plots, subplots, vendettas and conspiracies begin boiling throughout the town. The new theater becomes the target for variety of pranks and misdemeanors, including a fire that flashes through the building shortly after it opens.

Camilleri is a master of comic misadventure and this book should brighten any winter's day.

Sicily isn't the only place where rivalries and disputes are par for the course. In Norman Draper's Backyard (Kensington, November 25), which is set in the Midwestern suburban town of Livia, there are feuds and conflicts a-plenty to liven the days. This is a town where there's something in the water that has created more green thumbs than garden gnomes. This is also a town where gardening is the raison d’être and the competition for best garden is keen.

Nothing is more likely to upset the status quo than the announcement about a best yard contest run by a local nursery. It's not long before the gardening elite begin to engage in a not-very-subtle form of suburban warfare. Aside from the bragging rights, there's to be prize money. Many of the gardens reflect their obsessive owners' personalities and there are reputations and more at stake––like relationships and marriages.

It is a charged landscape as late-night surreptitious forays into competitors' gardens result in sabotage perpetrated on innocent flowers and imitation Edens. The story promises to be darkly hilarious, with descriptions of beautiful plants and flowers that will have you dreaming of spring.

I can think of a lot of reasons to avoid a Russian winter, but Elena Gorokhova has better ones and, in a memoir, she tells the story of why she left Mother Russia during the Cold War era of the 1980s to come to America.

In Russian Tattoo: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, January 6), Elena recreates how, when she was in her twenties, she met and married an American teacher, Robert, who moved her to Austin, Texas. She was anxious to leave the privations and the day-to-day difficulties of living in a struggling country. It turned out to be a case of "marry in haste and repent at leisure," though, because Robert was basically cold and detached. Not that Elena missed her mother––she didn't––but in Texas she was a fish out of water, wearing her homespun dress and trying to overcome the negative images that the locals had of Russians.

Her mother-in-law, who lived in Princeton, New Jersey took her in and things began to look up. She found her feet, teaching English as a second language to Russian immigrants in New York City, and a new romance came into her life. I'm looking forward to this depiction of the immigrant's point of view, with a mix of rays of sunshine and some frost.

I always look forward to Alan Bradley's latest. This year it is As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust: A Flavia de Luce Novel (Delacorte, January 6).

When we last left Flavia, she had been informed that she was going to be sent to a boarding school in Canada once attended by her mother, Harriet. Being sent to Miss Bodycote's Female Academy seems to Flavia to be a punishment as well as banishment, but the budding chemist and sleuth is now 12 years old and her family feels the move will help her learn about things that she would never encounter at home.

After crossing the ocean and part of the North American continent, she begins to settle in her new digs when a charred and mummified body tumbles out of the bedroom chimney. This is like a gift to Flavia and she's raring to go on the hunt for the victim's identity at the same time as she tries to make new friends––maybe a few enemies.

Aside from rumors that the Academy is haunted and that the headmistress is an acquitted murderer, Flavia hears that several girls have disappeared from the school without a trace. Detecting is mother's milk to Flavia, and she is up to the task as she is still unaware about what her destiny has in store for her. Go Flavia!

If Robertson Davies's World of Wonders or Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants fired your imagination, you might be intrigued by Paddy O'Reilly's The Wonders (Washington Square/Pocket, February 10).

What do Leon, a young 20-year-old man with severe heart disease; Kathryn, an Irish woman with Huntington's disease; and Christos, a failing Greek performance artist, have in common? For one thing, their lives are close to over and, for another, they want to keep on going. Leon is given a mechanical heart, which is a thing of astonishing beauty created from brass and titanium, and its lub-dub can be seen through the door built into his chest. Kathryn gets gene manipulation that cures her disease but causes her to grow thick black wool over her body. Christos had removable ceramic wings implanted in his back.

They all come under the influence of Rhona Burke, the daughter of a well-known American circus impresario. She wants to turn Leon into a superstar. Already hounded by journalists, they are deluged with offers of fame, money and immortality. She promises that they will not be sideshow freaks. Then she whisks them away to a Vermont mansion surrounded by walls and barbed wire.

Under her expert guidance, the three become The Wonders. It isn't long before they become a global sensation. As they become celebrities, without having done anything to deserve it, the trio also quickly finds that fame is addicting and full of loneliness but, even worse, it is dangerous.

These are modern-day Frankensteins, monsters not exactly of their own making. Whether done willingly for the sake of art, unwittingly as a result of medical treatment or for the sake of staying alive, there are consequences to the actions that transformed them.

The story revolves mostly around Leon, who is shy, quiet and otherwise unremarkable. He struggles with anxiety and, at the same time, the treachery of fame. But the main actors of the tale are the public, who fawn over the Wonders and then hate them, abuse them, stalk them and adore them; that's the way of fame in our age.

We are going to get well acquainted with severe weather days in the next few months. This is a story that should transport you to a very different reality.

A slightly quicker read is Mystery of the Dinner Playhouse (Five Star, January 21), by Mike Befeler.

An unexpected side effect of retirement is that you end up either driving your spouse crazy with all the together time or your spouse begins to get on your own nerves. (Or both!)

Gabe Tremont has retired from the police department, and his wife's reaction to his being underfoot is to make a very long list of things he can do outside the house. The best thing on the list is an evening out at the Bearcrest Mystery Dinner Playhouse. Dave suspects that, as is the convention, the butler in the play would be the villain. Gabe gets a surprise after the play is over when the butler, actor Peter Ranchard, is found murdered offstage, poisoned with cyanide.

Gabe jumps back into the saddle, takes charge of the case and finds he enjoys the chase more than retirement.

Murder mysteries about theater folk are fun because the characters are usually eccentric, and larger than life. Befeler has been writing a humorous geezer series and now he brings that style to a new character and story.

Oh, To Be Young Again

It's always fun to pull out those old photo albums and take a squinty-eyed gander at your younger self––un-Photoshopped, of course. It is easy to see, by comparing photos taken over the years, how you got from there to here.

Now we have the opportunity to watch some interpretations of how some of our iconic fictional sleuths got the face they earned. Several months ago I tuned into a new series on PBS about the early life and times of Endeavour Morse. This is a prequel to the long-running Inspector Morse program, which was derived from the Morse novels authored by Colin Dexter. In the series, Shaun Evans portrays young Morse as he begins his career as a Detective Constable with the Oxford City Police CID.

Morse, blessed with the unusual Quaker name of Endeavour, spent some time at Oxford University and some time in the army, where he worked with ciphers before joining the police. Young Morse is at first disillusioned by detective work, but he is quite the natural and seems bound to be a success, although he has quite a time satisfying his superiors. This form of constant disapproval I call the "McCloud Syndrome," because it always reminds me of the TV series McCloud, in which Dennis Weaver plays a marshal out of Taos, New Mexico, who could never please his boss. No matter how many cases he solved with wonderful deductive reasoning, his Chief always treated him as a bumbler.

The episodes I've seen so far do an intriguing job of fleshing out young Morse's character, giving the audience some hints about his background and family life. There is also a vintage red Jaguar in this new show. But it does not belong to Morse––not yet anyway. The series continues in 2014 and I look forward to it. My vote in this case is for the young Morse. He was much more likeable than old Morse, in my view.

A relatively new book series by James Henry introduced me to the younger Jack Frost, another well-known detective, both in the print series written by R. D. Wingfield, and its adaptation for television.

In the third book of Henry's Jack Frost prequel series, Morning Frost, Frost is a Detective Sergeant who has just struggled through one of the low points of his life. It is October of 1982, and Jack had just buried his wife Mary, who had suffered from cancer. There had been a point before her diagnosis when Jack had been planning to ask for a divorce because he had become attached to a female DC who worked out of his precinct. But despite Jack and Mary's many differences, he stayed with her to her death, ended all hope for personal happiness with the DC and sank himself into his work.

Several cases are dumped on Frost at once; very reminiscent of the way R. D. Wingfield treated Frost. There are body parts, female hit men, stolen artwork and the murder of a policeman, and Frost manages to shamble on his way through this to collect all the threads and knot them together. Superintendent Mullet of the Denton police has his usual mixed feelings about Jack. It has been made clear to him that Frost has been tapped for promotion to Detective Inspector for some time, and Mullet would do anything that would quash any recognition of Jack Frost.

Frost appears to be in his late thirties in the James Henry series and not that much older than that in the first of the Wingfield series books, Frost at Christmas. In the original stories, Frost is portrayed as a loveable rogue who is exceedingly sloppy and inefficient in his work habits, and with a personality that is at times sarcastic, insolent and conniving––which doesn’t affect the squad he works with, since they are incredibly loyal to him. This is not a total surprise, because readers tend to like Frost more than they expect to.

In the TV series, Touch of Frost, Frost is portrayed by David Jason, who appears a decade or two older than the fictional Frost, aging naturally over the course of a total of 15 years of the series. On TV, Superintendent Mullet is seen in a kinder, gentler light and Frost himself has more respect for women. The female characters in the books usually have little to recommend them. My vote in this case is ambiguous. I think both the printed series are excellent, but as a character I like the old Frost better. That may be because James Henry gets more into the personality of the man than Wingfield did. Ignorance is bliss.

Now on to the interesting battle of the Montalbanos. Salvo Montabano is the protagonist of the popular Andrea Camilleri novels based in the fictional town, Vigàta in Sicily. He is a Commissario in the police force, a rank comparable to a superintendent of a regional force. Montalbano has his own way of doing things, as he has to navigate without compromising himself through the murky politics of life in Italy, where the crime bosses sometimes have more power than the politicians, let alone the police. He has those rare characteristics of honesty, decency and loyalty.

Luca Zingaretti

These stories have depth because Camilleri makes it a point to "smuggle into a detective novel a critical commentary of my times." There has been a television show based on Camilleri's books for about 15 years. Acting the part of Montalbano is Luca Zingaretti, whose image is synonymous with Montalbano.

In 2012, Italian television aired a spin-off featuring a young Montalbano, who was to have somewhat of a Che Guevara appeal. Michele Riondino was cast in the role, and young Montalbano has all the fine characteristics that make the mature Montalbano the person that he is. He has an energy, mixed with his style and appeal, that is eminently watchable.

Michele Riondino

Before I can vote on which of these characters I prefer, I am going to have to bone up on my Italian because these shows are only available with English subtitles. In this case, at least the older and the younger Montalbano face off weekly in Italy so there is an abundance of opportunities to compare the different stages of Montalbano's life.

Review of Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano’s First Case

Montalbano's First Case by Andrea Camilleri

Salvo Montalbano and the sea go together like spaghetti and squid ink. It may not work as a combination here, but in Sicily it is a match made in heaven. But Montalbano began his career as a policeman in Mascalippa, an area of meadows carpeted with grass, polka-dotted with livestock, mountains in the distance but not a breath of salty air and it was killing him. He thought it was akin to being in jail.

When he heard a rumor that he was to get his promotion to Chief Inspector, he was not sure whether that was good news or bad news. Fortunately for him, his boss had been able to read his hangdog expressions over the past years and had recommended that he get his promotion, but in a different location: Vigàta, on the coast.

He took a trip to visit his home-to-be and, just as he got out of the car, he was assailed by an exquisite perfume, a mixture of stagnant seawater, rotten seaweed, decaying fish, ancient ropes and sardines. He knew he could be happy here.

The first thing he did was to find a trattoria on the main drag where, after he had eaten enough for four or five people, he still felt light as a feather. Salvo felt absolutely certain that the move to Vigàta was preordained. The only fly in the ointment was in the guise of an almost insignificant traffic accident that occurred right in front of Montalbano, who had yet to identify himself to anyone in the town as a policeman, much less their new chief Inspector.

As Montalbano was waiting outside the restaurant, a sports car came speeding out of nowhere. It swerved slightly and sideswiped a slower car. The driver of this slower car was an elderly gentleman wearing glasses. The elderly man stopped his vehicle and got out to inspect it. The speeder in the roadster got out of his car and approached the old man and smashed him in the face before the speeder was forced back into his own car by a passenger and then tore off.

Montalbano took charge, but there was a traffic cop there as well, and it would be some time before Montalbano settled into his job in Vigàta. By the time he did, this little case began to develop twists and turns, with strings pulling at Salvo this way and that. He actually began to feel that thin, invisible wires were moving him forward like a puppet.

Who wrote that? "Ah, Pirandello," thought Montalbano, but this thought segued into the plot of the Argentine author Borges, who narrated the plot of a mystery in which everything could be traced back to the random encounter between two chess players on a train who had never met before. The two players planned a murder, executed it and managed to avoid raising any suspicion. This first case is like many of Montalbano's cases. He has to be more wily than the crooks and the mafia, and slyer than the politicians, if he wants to keep landing on his feet. Particularly if he wants to do it with his honor and integrity intact.

Carmine Fazio, who becomes Montalbano's deputy, wants to understand what kind of boss he is going to be working under. Salvo explains. His philosophy is comparable to homemade sweaters made of wool.

But that's a pattern I can't divulge without giving away too much. This ebook novella is a prequel that is as enjoyable as the entire Camilleri series.

Note: Montalbano's First Case was translated from the Italian by Gianluca Rizzo and Dominic Siracusa and published by Mondadori/Open Road Integrated Media in October 2013. I received a free e-galley from NetGalley for purposes of review.