When You're Too Tired to Sleep

What do you do when you fall into bed exhausted and then can't get to sleep? After rejecting ideas too masochistic (scouring out the bathtub, ironing) and even worse (lying there and making a mental list of where you've gone wrong since first grade, pondering our current US Congress), you should reach for a book or a DVD and the remote. Which one all depends on how you feel.

Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins

If work has you feeling imprisoned and you've got a life sentence with those in bed beside you: your spouse, snoring and snorting in his sleep, and your dog, who won't stop licking his privates: Break out with George Clooney in O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, if you're hankering for a Coen brothers movie with bluegrass music, or Out of Sight, if you're more in the mood for an escaped Clooney pining after Jennifer Lopez, who plays a dedicated US marshal in a movie based on the Elmore Leonard novel. Perhaps you like the idea of the prison being a World War II German POW camp, and your thoughts about the escapee run to the more the merrier, and include Steve McQueen on a motorcycle; if so, fire up The Great Escape. You could watch a cult favorite, The Shawshawk Redemption, featuring unconventional prisoner Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), and his buddy, the prisoner/entrepreneur, Red (Morgan Freeman).

Or, crack open Michael Robotham's Life or Death (Mulholland, March 2015), for a look at another enigmatic prisoner, Audie Palmer, who climbs out of a Texas prison the night before he's due to be paroled. Audie had admitted his involvement in an armored truck robbery that led to the deaths of four people. He was sentenced to 10 years, but the missing $7 million was never recovered. Weaving in and out with Audie's back story are the efforts to find him by pint-size FBI Special Agent Desiree Furness; the sheriff, who as a deputy shot Audie in the head during the robbery; and a prison buddy named Moss. Aussie author Robotham's storytelling kept me turning pages, but some British substitutions for their American counterparts (such as bank "queue" rather than "line") were a little distracting. More distracting are the length of Audie's sentence (c'mon, this is Texas, not Scandinavia), the fact Audie even survived in the joint, given the particulars, and the ease with which he escaped; however, these quibbles weren't enough to keep me from enjoying it. This isn't one of those pulse-pounding thrillers; it's the kind that makes you want to know what happened in the past and how things would end, and, no, I didn't peek.

For when you're so tired, you're feeling less than human––in fact, you're wondering if you're lower on the mammal totem pole than your dog: Empathize with Jax, a mechanical servitor who longs for freedom in Ian Tregillis's The Mechanical (Orbit, March 2015), a hybrid of steampunk, fantasy, and alternate history set in the early 1900s. The book opens with the public execution of some Catholic spies and the destruction of a rogue mechanical man. In the 17th century, the work of scientist Christiaan Huygens led to the development of a Dutch army of automata powered by alchemy and clockworks. These "Clakkers," capable of independent thought, but enslaved through a built-in hierarchy of obligations called "geasa" to their masters and the Queen on the Brasswork Throne, allowed the Netherlands to become the most powerful nation in the world.

There is now an uneasy truce between the Netherlands and the remnants of its opposition in New France (in Canada). In the capital of Marseilles-in-the-West, spy-in-charge Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord has her hands full with a dangerous Game of Thrones-like situation. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, her small espionage network is disappearing. One of her spies, Luuk Visser, a Catholic priest working undercover as a Protestant pastor, gives Jax an errand and then, oh man, you really must read this book for yourself. Everyone is passionate and scheming away like mad. I've never read anything quite like this cinematic novel, and I bet we'll see it eventually on the big screen. It tackles free will, what it means to be human, identity, loyalty, the meaning of faith and religious freedom, and revenge and redemption. Tregillis doesn't shy away from harming his characters, so you can't assume anyone is safe. Some people may find Berenice's foul mouth offensive, and there are a few scenes I found genuinely disturbing. Some scenes drag a little bit, but these flaws are minor. I'm glad there are two more coming in the Alchemy Wars trilogy because this book was great reading on a sleepless night.

If you'd rather watch a robot than read about one, there are the Terminator movies with our former California governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a cyborg sent back from a future in which machines rule the world. I'm telling you, Schwarzenegger was born to play this role. Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, features Harrison Ford as Los Angeles cop Rick Deckard, who is called back to duty in 2019 to track down and kill rogue replicants. James Cameron's Aliens has a cyborg on hand when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver was born for this one) returns to the planet of Alien. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie, Robocop (forget the re-make), is about a Detroit cop, killed in action, who returns to the force as half-human/half-robot. (And they say Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together again.) There are many more of these movies worthy of the time it takes to pop corn and wash it down with a Coke, such as the charming animated flick, The Iron Giant; Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope (thank goodness there's no Jar Jar Binks)....

Say you're in that half-asleep/half-awake state when your identity feels like a mirage, so you could really get into something to do with spies: Of course, you can't go wrong with another viewing of The Third Man, set in Allied-occupied Vienna and starring Joseph Cotten as pulp western writer Holly Martins and Orson Welles as his childhood friend, Harry Lime. We could argue whether it's the best-ever espionage movie. In Éric Rochant's 1994 film, Les Patriotes (The Patriots), Ariel Brenner (Yvan Attal) leaves his home in France for Israel on his 18th birthday. There, he joins Mossad and loses his idealism in a morally fuzzy world. Naval commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) takes up with Susan Atwel (Sean Young), the mistress of US Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman), in 1987's No Way Out. Susan's murder cues the spinning of a web of deceit. This is a re-make of a terrific 1948 movie, The Big Clock, with Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and Maureen O'Sullivan. In the German movie, The Lives of Others, it's 1984, and Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is compelled to launch an investigation of the celebrated East German playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) by a man who has designs on Dreyman's girlfriend. Don't you love wheels within wheels? 

Make sure you leave the butter off your popcorn if you decide to watch your spies on the page instead of on the screen. Don't waste time piddling around when you're tired; go straight to the British novels. What is it about MI5 and MI6 that makes seeing them under the microscope so diverting? We'll think about that while we cringe at some of these British writers' disdainful depictions of the CIA "cousins" as demanding and inept, throwing around cash, bigfooting joint operations, and screwing them up because they think about short-term payoffs rather than long-term consequences.

I kept a stiff upper lip about the cousins and enjoyed Charles Cumming's A Colder War (St. Martin's Press, 2014). It's the second series book about Thomas Kell, an MI6 agent disgraced during the Witness X affair, whom we first met in the 2012 Steel Dagger winner, A Foreign Country (see review here). Kell has now once again been hauled out of the cold, this time to investigate the death of Paul Wallinger, head of the SIS station in Turkey, in an airplane crash. MI6's Amelia Levene thinks three recent intelligence disasters point to a mole in the SIS or the CIA.

Yeah, looking for a mole is nothing new, but Cumming does a good job with it. He takes his time; there are close to 400 pages. Notable are the clarity of the writing, use of locations, and the charm of the descriptions. It was a pleasure to learn what Tom is reading and to see what's on his shelves. Cumming once worked for MI6, and I liked his knowledge about how the agency works (the extent to which personal relationships affect spying is interesting) and his familiarity with spycraft. The life of a Cumming spy definitely isn't for everybody. Their careers ruin their family relationships and make keeping their stories straight––to themselves, as well as everyone else––almost impossible. They are betrayed by ass-covering superiors and ambitious colleagues, and they need a good night's sleep and sweet dreams as much as anybody. At least a gorgeous young woman falls into bed with Tom, a lonely man in his mid-40s. You might roll your eyes at this, but, hey, while Tom's no James Bond, he's not John Gardner's cowardly Boysie Oakes of The Liquidator fame, either. I'm looking forward to seeing Tom again on a night I can't sleep.

I've Got a Secret

A secret shared is a secret lost. And this goes double for spies. That's the message I take away from two books I just read, Charles Cumming's A Foreign Country and James Church's A Drop of Chinese Blood. Both Cumming and Church have intelligence agency experience (Cumming with MI6 and Church (a pseudonym) with the CIA in Asia) and their sophisticated books simmer with secrets, mysterious disappearances, double dealings, betrayals, conspiracies and hopes of redemption.

A Foreign Country opens in Tunisia, where ex-pat Jean-Marc Daumal mourns for his 20-year-old British au pair, Amelia Weldon, with whom he was having an affair. Now her passport and belongings are missing and she has disappeared. As much as he loved Amelia, he wonders if what had bound them together was "a shared aptitude for deceit."

Flash forward thirty-some years to the present. Philippe and Jeannine Malot, an elderly vacationing French couple, are killed on the beach in Egypt. A "target" called HOLST is kidnapped in Paris. Thomas Kell (age 42, estranged from his wife and forced to retire from MI6 months earlier) receives a phone call from MI6's Jimmy Marquand. Amelia Levene, who's due to take over as chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service in six weeks, is missing from Nice. It's possible she's only having an affair, but maybe not. Kell is the only one who really knows what makes Levene tick. If he finds her quickly without attracting attention, all will be forgiven and Kell can come in from the cold.

The past is never far from the present for this book's characters. Take Kell for example. His entire personality grew out of a talent for the clandestine. He can't remember who he had been before the tap on the shoulder to join the SIS at twenty and he hasn't been able to create a successful life since retirement. All he knows is "the calling of the secret world." Kell despises the increasingly corporatized atmosphere within SIS and the attention his former superiors paid to their own personal advancement. He likes Levene and sees her as the "last roadblock preventing SIS from turning into a branch of the Health and Safety Executive," even though the male-dominated agency is nearly allergic to a female chief. Kell tracks her down and when he does, he discovers the game of hide and seek is only beginning.

Cumming puts his SIS experience to good use. MI6 gossip and traditions, interrogation techniques (Kell has interesting comments about the CIA in Afghanistan), interactions between intelligence agencies and increasingly tech-heavy spycraft feel authentic and are woven tightly, with clear writing, into a labyrinthine plot. How easy for spies now to snap photos with camera phones, conduct research online, communicate via cell phones and email and use GPS devices for traveling and tracking. But how difficult to avoid detection, crack encrypted passwords, manage with no cell phone reception and escape being captured or killed! Whereas a spy's methods and equipment have changed, the personal toll of a career in espionage hasn't. I really liked the complexity and insights of major characters Thomas Kell and Amelia Levene. The villains are nasty, but Cumming makes them three-dimensional humans. The settings in France, Tunisia and England are well described.

A Foreign Country is Cumming's fourth stand-alone book and was published in 2012 by St. Martin's Press. It comes after last year's The Trinity Six and won 2012's Steel Dagger Award. Fans of John le Carré or Olen Steinhauer should enjoy it.

Cumming's Amelia Levene is a beautiful woman but, according to A Drop of Chinese Blood's Major Bing Zong-yuan, Fang Mei-lin is the most beautiful woman in the world. For weeks rumors have been flying that she might show up in the far-flung Chinese town of Yanji, where Bing is director of the Ministry of State Security operations on the China-North Korea border. Bing's MSS superiors in Beijing have been happy with his record of controlling corruption and keeping Yanji as clean of North Korean operations "as could be expected." They've recently sent special couriers warning him that he's responsible for Madame Fang's safety. When she arrives, she refuses to talk to Bing and surprises him by her intimacy with his Uncle O, a wily police detective in Pyongyang until he left North Korea in a hurry and came to stay with Bing. O is supposedly working as a private investigator, but he spends most of his time in his workshop at Bing's home making plans for bookshelves. O and Madame Fang go out for the night and the next day O says they'll meet again. Instead, she disappears over the river into North Korea.

Sudden disappearances aren't out of the ordinary in Yanji. A year before Bing arrived, his MSS predecessor vanished without explanation. After taking all their cash, Bing's wife drove off with a Japanese pastry chef in Bing's car. Lieutenant Fu Bin, a Third Bureau spy planted in O's special bureau, left unexpectedly. Now, Du Hwa, a young woman whose cherry-red lips and dress make Bing long for fruit, tells O that her father, a master forger and counterfeiter, is missing and she insists O must find him. It's a very urgent matter because some body pieces, assumed to be Mr. Du, have arrived and are being stored in her brother's restaurant freezer.

Yanji, China is close to the northern tip of North Korea.
It isn't considered a plum assignment for an MSS bureau chief.

Unfortunately, in the wake of Madame Fang's disappearance, O is compelled to join his nephew on a Beijing-ordered escort-and-recovery mission (dropping them in Ulan Bator, Mongolia before shipping them to North Korea) that is so mysterious and complicated these two men, responsible for carrying it out, must form multiple hypotheses to try to understand it. As O explains, with more than one hypothesis, "you don't end up stuffing all the evidence into one bag, whether or not it fits." The bigwigs in Beijing exert enormous control in many disturbing ways and this draws both satirical comments and apprehension from Bing, the book's narrator. The stunning amount of scheming by the various criminals and agents made me dizzy. Happily, O, Bing or someone else explained (or more often postulated) what the hell people were thinking and doing so I was able to keep up. It's not the first time a book has convinced me I don't have the guile to be a spy but I'm really not cut out to spy for China or North Korea. Or Mongolia, for that matter.

I don't want to give you the impression that because of its complex plot this book is no fun. It's very fun. The characters and settings are drawn extremely well. How often do you get to peek at an honest Chinese MSS agent's life on the North Korea border, sit at a table of Kazakh agents in an Irish bar in Ulan Bator or ride in a shipment crate with three men and a corpse on a train to North Korea? In addition to all the characters' entertaining maneuvering, the long-suffering Bing and uncooperative O have a sparring relationship that reminds me of Rex Stout's Archie and Nero Wolfe––if you throw in a smidgen of Kung Fu's Master Po befuddling his student Grasshopper. Although I must give Bing credit. He operates by the seat of his pants much of the time but he's a smart guy who knows more than he lets on. After all, his dad was O's brother. As for O, it's impossible for Bing, and us, to know exactly what O's "retirement" means.

It looks as if the four-book Inspector O series, which is set in North Korea and begins with The Corpse in the Koryo, is finished and a new series, set in China and featuring Major Bing and his uncle O, begins with A Drop of Chinese Blood, published by Minotaur Books in 2012. It helps if you've warmed up your noggin with the Inspector O books but it's not absolutely necessary. If you like Martin Cruz Smith, give this book a whirl. I loved it.

Attack of the TBRs

Back a few years ago, I used to worry about finding mysteries to read. I would haunt the local bookstores and library and get recommendations from the few friends who were also mystery readers. I would read every mystery I got my hands on through those methods and I'd have a small handful of TBRs (to-be-read books) at most.

Then it happened. I went online and met Georgette, the Maltese Condor, Della, Periphera and a lot of other mystery readers. Because of their stellar recommendations, my TBRs now number over 100 and are threatening to burst out of their bookcase. Sometimes I hear their authors reproaching me for leaving them on the shelf, and for my seeming to prefer new books fresh from the library or bookshop.

Some of the authors with books among the TBRs boldly accost me. Ian Rankin demands to know why I tore through each Rebus book as soon as it was published, but now, just because he's moved on to a new character in The Complaints, I'm not so eager. Fortunately for me, his Scots brogue is so strong that I don't understand a lot of what he says. I think he called me a "bampot," though.

Graham Hurley points to all the shelf real estate being taken up by the second through eleventh books in his Joe Faraday series and asks why I don't read them, considering that I have a 2012 series reading challenge going on. He's particularly peeved that I've chosen to read Josephine Tey's books for the second time for the challenge rather than his books for the first. I weakly respond that I did read the first book in his series and my husband has read all of the series, but he seems dissatisfied with my answer. "Hey pal," I want to say, "keep it up and you're getting moved to the already-read shelves."

Charles Cumming reminds me how excited I was to pick up The Trinity Six at the library's used bookstore six months ago, and how fascinated I've always been by the Cold War's Cambridge Spy Ring. It's been awhile since I've read a Cold War thriller, he points out. "And now that the remake of le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is coming out, it's the perfect time to read my book," Cumming reasons. He could be right, so I pull the book so that it stands out an inch from the others on the shelf. You know, like a little spy signal.

Andrea Camilleri seems to understand that I respond better to positive enticements than to criticism and pushiness. "Ciao, bella," he says, "there you are in your winter with your short days, and you deserve a visit to Salvo Montalbano's sunny Sicily. Ecco, you have three of his first four books right here! Put up your feet, pour a nice glass of limoncello and read."

Don Winslow appeals to nostalgia. "Hey, remember back when you found me at The Book Passage in Corte Madera? A Cool Breeze on the Underground and my other Neal Carey books, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, California Fire and Life. Those were the days, right? I know The Dawn Patrol didn't work for you, but we can get past that. You picked up Satori: A Novel Based on Trevanian's Shibumi at a book sale on a whim and it's been sitting here for the last couple of months. Give it a try; it's totally different from anything I've ever done." Maybe he's right. So I pull his book forward a little bit too.

Tana French is sulking over there on the far right of the second shelf. She knows I wasn't crazy about Faithful Place and she seems to guess that In the Woods isn't going to entice me anytime soon, no matter how many of my mystery-reading friends loved it.

Jedediah Berry is diffident, but he can't keep the injured tone out of his voice when he asks why I abandoned The Manual of Detection for something newly arrived from the library and then never picked up his book again, even though I was enjoying it. Unfortunately, I have no answer.

It's just as hard to explain to Thorne Smith why I haven't yet read Topper, even though Georgette and my husband loved it. I can't even look at Carlos Ruiz Zafón over there on the far right of the bottom shelf. The Shadow of the Wind is one of the longest tenants on my TBR shelves. How can I not have read it after years of my mystery friends telling me how great it is?

Then there are my old friends, the Michaels Gilbert and Innes. They sit there together, Gilbert's Close Quarters and The Danger Within, and Innes's Lament for a Maker and six Appleby books. The Michaels don't say much, because they know I'll get to them. After all, having read others of their books, I know I'll enjoy these books and I'm a lifelong fan of classic British crime fiction. And, of course, being British, the Michaels would never be pushy. The American in me wants to tell them that's not the way to get ahead, but I know they can't change their inbred characters. (I suppose their being dead is also a bit of an obstacle to a transformation in their personalities.)

The clamoring and censorious looks from the TBRs became so bad that I recently moved them from the living room to the next room. I can still hear them, but faintly, and they try to accost me when I go past them to the laundry room, but at least they're no longer such a constant reproach. Now I just have to do something about my history TBRs. Some of those guys have guns!

Which of my TBRs would you spring from the shelf and place next to my reading chair?