The Martian and the Chicken from Hell

OD-ing can happen to you. For example, Harry Bosch and Harry Hole are wonderful, but too much of their company day after day, and they become those dinner guests who have forgotten how to go home. Or, take the case of reading a lot in the same subgenre. By the time you get to the seventh straight book of espionage, it's like eating nothing but pizza for a week.

It's good to cleanse your reading palate. Read something different from your usual fare. No matter what you commonly serve yourself, you can't go wrong with one of the two books below. They're different, period.

Calling all geeks: your ship has come in. But science-phobic people who scratch their heads at the idea that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen can still enjoy The Martian by Andy Weir (Crown, February 2014). You can even skim the scientific details and get the gist, but I hope you don't. Weir, a long-time outer space aficionado, explains it very clearly. I know already this will be one of my favorite books this year.

In a nutshell, it's about astronaut Mark Watney's quest to remain alive after his Ares 3 crewmates, who believe he's dead, abandon him on Mars without any means of communication. Mark is a botanist, a mechanical engineer, and a Mr. Fix-It. He's also blessed with a terrific sense of black humor and determination to survive. He'll need both, as he'll run out of food and water long before the next mission to Mars arrives in four years. We read the journal entries (beginning with "I'm pretty much fucked"), in which Mark records his goals, games out how he'll overcome the problems involved, and then explains why those efforts failed and what he'll try next. It's fascinating to read about NASA's back-up systems in the Hab and rover and to watch Mark go about his jerry-rigging, which never becomes repetitious. I became attached to this inventive and likable astronaut and laughed as he breaks up the water making and farming with droll comments about his crewmates' love of 1970s TV and disco music. Mark is just so darn human.

Russia recently brought back mice and newts
from an orbit around Mars (Getty photo)

A few months after Mark was left, satellite pictures convince a thunderstruck NASA that he is still alive. Then, the novel alternates between Mark's journal entries, Ares 3 in space, and NASA on Earth. (I loved the response from China's space program and the American agency's in-fighting and political maneuvering; NASA's PR woman gushes that CNN's top-rated show in its time slot, The Watney Report, will engage the public in Mark's situation, and this means more money from Congress.) This is the best kind of Robinson Crusoe-in-space novel: a plan is formulated to bring Mark, the loneliest man in the universe, home. I finished it with a renewed respect for the crazy nobility of astronauts, the can-do attitude of scientists in the face of no time or money, and the good in humankind. It's an out-of-this-world read.

Speaking of out of this world, maybe you saw the recent Washington Post article about the discovery of dinosaur fossils at the Hell Creek Formation in North and South Dakota. The fossils form a picture of "a freakish, birdlike species of dinosaur—11 feet long, 500 pounds, with a beak, no teeth, a bony crest atop its head, murderous claws, prize-fighter arms, spindly legs, a thin tail and feathers sprouting all over the place."

This "Chicken from Hell" would delight Prof. Lars Helland and Dr. Erik Tybjerg at the University of Copenhagen in S. J. Gazan's The Dinosaur Feather (trans. from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund, Quercus, 2013). It would also thrill Canada's top scientific magazine editor, Jack Jarvis, but it would enrage his old friend, University of British Columbia paleo-ornithologist Dr. Clive Freeman. These men are combatants in a debate that has engaged scientists for 150 years: are birds present-day dinosaurs or do they originate from an even earlier primitive reptile?

Sifting through the arguments about this question is Anna Bella Nor, a single mother who's frantically writing her master of science dissertation at the University of Copenhagen. She's always full of rage. Her three-year-old daughter, Lily, is a handful. Anna isn't on the best of terms currently with her parents, and she has no time for her old friends. Anna loathes her dissertation supervisor, Prof. Helland, for being unavailable and impossible to talk to when he is available. Recently, he has been looking and acting very strange. When he's found dead, sprawled in his office reclining chair, his severed tongue on his lap, it barely grieves Anna, who now must depend on the guidance of the reclusive Dr. Tybjerg, who disappears into the University's Natural History Museum, and her office-mate, Johannes Trøjborg, who looks weird and is weird, albeit kind. She barely has time for "the World's Most Irritating Detective," Søren Marhauge, Denmark's youngest police superintendent.

Søren is 37 years old, and "he could identify a murderer from the mere twitching of a single, out-of-place eyebrow hair, he could knit backward, and everyone he had ever loved had died and left him behind." Although he has a perfect record for solving criminal cases, his losses have left Søren a big, unresolved mess. His long-term girlfriend, Vibe, has now married another man. At the same time Søren investigates Helland's murder—and, shortly thereafter, another death in this case—he finds himself investigating his own past in order to understand his unhappy present.

Joining him in parallel personal odysseys into the mysteries of their pasts are Johannes and Anna. Unlike these three Danes, Canadian scientists Jarvis and Freeman don't do their own digging; writer Gazan excavates their joint history for us. This makes for a very unusual book, in which everyone—detective, suspects, their connections, and the reader—is trying to figure out questions involving identity, in one form or another. In addition to this interesting "all-hands-on-deck" approach to various mystery investigations, Gazan, who earned a biology degree, serves up an incredibly fascinating scientific debate. Her experience in academia is reflected in the book characters' believability. They engage in a genuine scholarly search for information that's affected by their personal biases and professional jealousies, as they race to publish and defend their findings. I read this book at the suggestion of my fellow Material Witness, Periphera, who knew I'd appreciate Gazan's depiction of the forces that drive university research and politics, and the biological knowledge that gives her book some very unsettling moments and a highly unusual (thank goodness!) method of murder.

So, take your pick of these two distinctive books. A yen for surviving in outer space or a look at the dinosaurs that walked the Earth long ago and still fly among us? Or don't choose between them: I highly recommend them both.

Hooked By the Title

Fickle fate and fortunes are a great way to choose what to read next but sometimes you have to decide what to read first. If best seller lists send the wrong message and you are not the type to read whatever hand-me-downs that are left on your doorstep in a brown paper bag, one way to pick a book is to feel the vibes coming from the books themselves. A good title is one thing that gets my interest up.

I am invariably curious about the title when I encounter someone reading a book. The time is passing when I can surreptitiously find it out for myself since I am running into more and more electronic readers. Today I encountered a young man who was reading his textbook on his phone while he was waiting for awhile. That seemed like a efficient use of time. Have you seen the ad for the Kindle? It's on the back of some magazines and it is very tantalizing because it shows this opening line:

“Though I had often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.”

How many of you saw the ad and had to Google the words to find out the title of the book like I did? That is the power of a title. There have been many books I chose on the strength of the title alone. Most of those times, I am amply rewarded; very occasionally the title is the best part of the book.

One of my best choices was Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg. In Copenhagen one day during a cold December Smilla Jaspersen was on her way home. She comes upon the scene of the death of her young neighbor and friend, six-year-old Isaiah. Like herself, this young boy is of mixed heritage, a combination of Dane and Greenlander. Isaiah’s mother is an alcoholic who leaves Isaiah to fend for himself most of the time, so he has struck up some friendships in his apartment building and had become close to Smilla.

Greenland

Apparently, Isaiah was on the roof of a nearby warehouse and fell to his death. But Smilla knows that the boy was afraid of heights. She inspects the roof, which has no footprints other than Isaiah’s, which at one point lead from the center straight over the edge. Smilla, who can read snow, knows from those footprints that Isaiah was so frightened he ran off of the roof. She asks for a investigation and sets in motion a series of events that will take her to the edge of the world and to her own near extinction.

Smilla begins to get some intimations of the complexities involved when she finds out that a deep muscle biopsy was done on Isaiah’s thigh at autopsy and that Isaiah was being tracked by lawyers and other high-powered men. This seems to be related to the death of the boy’s father several years before during a northern exploration for a large company.

Smilla lost her mother to the sea when she was young and she began to feel an alienation toward nature. In an attempt to recapture what she had lost, she subsequently learned all there was to know about snow and ice. When Smilla tries to explain what she sees on the roof—those seemingly self-explanatory footprints—to the authorities, they look at her skeptically. Her father tells her: reading the snow is like listening to music; to describe what you have read is like explaining music in writing.

The mystery is: why was the death of one small boy so crucial to important people whose tentacles reach back into Greenland’s exploration of the past 60 years? Smilla faces death every day in order to figure this out. When she succeeds, she has to think about what her role will then be.

This book is suspenseful and beautifully written, poetic, musical and arousing the emotions of anger, despair and fatalistic resignation. It is a book with passages to underline after you collect yourself when you turn the last page, then double-check to be sure it is the last one.

How could I not be intrigued by this next title? Did he store secret things in it? No, but it was much better than I imagined.

Inspector D. P. Anders, protagonist of Marshall Browne's The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders, had been retired from the Rome police for several years when they asked him to return to the force to help clear up some cold cases. He was a decorated national hero who had been instrumental in bringing down an anarchist group 10 years before. It was during this effort that he lost his leg—as well as his desire to be a policeman.

Now Inspector Anders has been sent from the ministry in Rome to a southern city (unnamed in the book) because a few months earlier, the Ministry’s agent, Investigating Magistrate Fabri, and his two bodyguards were blown to pieces while sitting in a piazza café. Fabri was sent to investigate the assassination of Judge de Angelis, who was presiding over a case of local corruption that involved many powerful locals.

The Commissioner of Police in this southern city cannot understand why he has been sent an aging policeman of no particular rank and who, additionally, is disabled. Anders himself is not sure why he was chosen for this commission. But locally, the ripples are already being felt and almost immediately another undercover cop from Rome is killed.

These recent deaths of public figures in the city have been ascribed to anarchists. This is the story that the powers that be have agreed upon. Anders is well aware that most, if not all, of the groups of anarchists that terrorized Italy at one time were either disbanded or deep underground. He knows that the real people involved in these crimes are involved with a different criminal society, one that has been the power behind the scenes for decades in southern cities. The governing factor that keeps the criminals in charge of the city is fear.

Anders wonders bitterly if truth and justice will ever be stronger than the mafia and the politicians and bureaucrats in their pockets. In this excellent novel, you will find a beautiful recounting of the classic paradox: an irresistible force meets an immovable object. One realizes that if there is such a thing as an immovable object, there cannot be an unstoppable force. Both cannot be true at once. In this particular story, one is given hope that evil cannot triumph forever; perhaps good will prevail. Browne tells the tale with a rapid pace, the suspense building to the point that I find myself gripping the book with both hands. Everything that happens has such a sense of reality that my sense of disbelief is completely shut down. I have an intense feeling of despair for the characters in this city, but where there is life there is hope.

I was drawn to the title The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes, by K. C. Constantine, because I grew up in an area where all vegetables came from elsewhere and the only ones I felt were fit to eat were small, green and came in a can that said Le Sueur on the front. The idea that tomatoes had speed fascinated me.

Mario Balzic is the half-Serb, half-Italian police chief in Rocksburg, one of those small, ethnic, coal-mining towns in Pennsylvania where the mines have all but closed and the people are leading hardscrabble lives in a changed economy. This is a tale for any time. Balzic feels he knows the people on his turf like the back of his hand. So he is a little surprised when Frances Romanelli, whom he's known since childhood, begins to repeatedly call the police station because her husband Jimmy is missing. He also feels a little guilty because he has not seen her for so long, or seen her father, who was Mario's father's best friend.

Jimmy has been murdered and this case turns out to be something like one of Balzic’s Pittsburgh Pirates' baseball games: sometimes you do everything you are supposed to do and things still go against you. Mario understands subtlety and suspects immediately who Jimmy's killer is, but knows that unless this case is handled with delicacy it will blow up in his face like TNT at the coalface. Mario Balzic is a low-key but astute sleuth who loves his family, his wine and his town. There are 17 titles in the Mario Balzic series, starting with the 1972 title The Rocksburg Railroad Murders.

In All My Sad Dreaming, by John Caulfield, doesn’t sound like a murder mystery; it sounds like a book of poetry. But it succeeds in its way as both. The tourist brochures show Cape Town in the summer, when the sky is a radiant blue. They do not show the city in the grey winter. They never show the Cape of Storms.

Cape Town, South Africa

It is winter when this story takes place. This is a mystery set in Cape Town, South Africa during a violent modern era; a time when most houses have burglar bars on the windows and security gates on the front doors. Captain James Blake is a member of the Police Service and part of the serious violence unit. He is just leaving the hospital after having been there for a considerable time, suffering from two gunshot wounds. Blake is still hoping to understand what has happened to him when he is called to the scene of a murder that his partner thinks he should see, despite his ill health.

The victim is a wealthy lawyer who was once a member of a rock band of four young men who had moderate success years before but who had gone on to other endeavors and had not seen much of each other. There was an attempted reunion the year before, but it was stopped in its tracks when one of the men died in a freak skydiving accident. The most suspicious circumstance in the dead lawyer’s life centers on his young and beautiful Thai mail-order bride, who seemingly hates him and who has already one dead husband to her credit.

Blake is getting some weird vibes and Blake’s partner, Sgt. Mkhize even wants to consult his witch doctor. There are two other members of the musical group whom Blake has yet to track down, but in a country where you can be killed for your shoes or for a cigarette, the dead lawyer's six million dollars certainly make a good motive for murder.

Somehow Blake can’t seem to get a grip on things. This case, his life. He tells himself that he seriously wants to escape this violent decaying country. But a part of him will always regard the city of dreams as his home. So on he goes, attempting to solve this murder. The story is filled with musical references that go back to the ‘70s, when the rock band was in its heyday. The prose itself is musical in many ways and there is a tone of foreboding overlying it all.

"'Tis fifty long years since I saw the moon beaming
On strong manly forms, on eyes with hope gleaming
I see them again, sure, in all my sad dreaming...."
—Peadar Kearney (Irish rebel song "Down By the Glenside")

Not the the least of my choices is The Woman Who Married a Bear by John Straley. I might just as easily have picked this one for the interesting cover. This is the first of the Cecil Younger stories. Cecil is a young man in his mid-thirties who lives in Sitka, Alaska. He grew up in Juneau and traveled a bit, trying out several careers before realizing that what drives him is his curiosity and a sense of justice that requires him to find out what has happened in any given situation. There is a difference between the facts and the truth according to Cecil.

Sitka, Alaska

In his quest to find himself, please his father, accept the fact that the woman who loved him has left him, and just for the flat-out fun of it, Cecil prefers to spend most of his time in an altered state. He has grown quite accustomed to finding himself face down somewhere after a night of hitting the low spots. But he does work as a private detective and when he gets a call to look into a cold case a few years old with the purported murderer already incarcerated, he jumps at the chance to do something besides look into rapes and robberies. Before 24 hours have passed, he is on somebody’s hit list and he has to solve this case or die in the process.

All of the books in this Straley series have entertaining titles. The next is The Curious Eat Themselves and Cecil Younger is well worth getting to know.

There are several other books that leapt off the shelf into my hands when I was hooked by the title. If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him by Sharyn McCrumb is the eighth book in her Elizabeth MacPherson series and it tells the tale of women looking for revenge. Slow Dancing With The Angel of Death by Helen Chappell takes place on the eastern shore of Maryland and introduces Hollis Ball, who is visited by the ghost of her dead husband asking her to find his murderer. One of my all-time favorites is The Man Who Understood Cats by Michael Allen Dymmoch. This is also a debut novel which takes us to Chicago and a partnership between a police detective and a psychiatrist. I highly recommend this series although it is very hard to find. Lastly, in Mad Dog & Englishman, by author J. M. Hayes, a small-town Kansas sheriff named English and known as Englishman has to try and solve the town's first murder with the help of his half-brother Mad Dog.

Sometimes you can indeed judge a book by its cover.


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