Bringing Up the Rear

I got a kick out of Maltese Condor's post on Wednesday, with its horse-racing theme. When I apply horse racing to my recent mystery reading, the books are far from front-runners. Actually, that's not quite right. The books are front-runners. But I'm reading from the back of the pack.

John Gardner and The Nostradamus Traitor

I don't think I'd ever heard of author John Gardner until a couple of weeks ago. My eye was caught by what I thought was a new book, called The Nostradamus Traitor. It turns out, though, that this is a republication, and a very nicely-produced one, of a 1979 original publication that was a finalist for the Gold Dagger that year. The Mysterious Press and Open Road Integrated Media are publishing the book this month in quality paperback and ebook formats.

Of course, I checked out Gardner on stopyourekillingme.com and I was flabbergasted to see how prolific Gardner was in his life (1926-2007). I was intrigued and had to do more research. Gardner began his writing career with a series featuring Boysie Oakes. The Oakes series is set in the swinging 1960s, but it's more of a spoof of James Bond, with Oakes being a professional assassin who doesn't like killing people.

The Liquidator, the first book in the eight-volume Oakes series, was a finalist for the 1964 Gold Dagger. Gardner went on to write several other series and a number of standalone crime fiction books. Probably the best fun fact about Gardner's career is that a few years after his last Boysie Oakes book, he was tapped by Ian Fleming's estate to write James Bond novels. He was so good at it (apparently) that he ended up writing 16 of them, including License to Kill and Goldeneye.

How in the world did I completely miss this guy? I know there are gaps in my crime fiction reading, but this is one the entire Kentucky Derby field could run through.

The Nostradamus Traitor begins in London in 1978, when what appears to be an old lady tourist from Germany approaches a Beefeater at the Tower of London. Instead of the usual touristy question, though, Frau Fenderman is looking for information about her long-dead husband, Claus Fenderman, who she says was a spy for Germany in World War II and was hanged at the Tower.

This hot potato (that's heiße Kartoffel for you German speakers) lands in the lap of British Intelligence veteran Herbie Kruger. It's only fair, really, since Herbie speaks German, having been born in Berlin. Herbie was a young boy during World War II, living in Berlin with the mother who lost her husband to a battle with an RAF pilot.  Herbie'd lost his father, but he also lost his friends, Jewish friends, and he knew what the Nazis had done to them, so when the Allies arrived, he immediately made himself useful to them. He's spent decades running agents for Britain in the Cold War, and now he's nearing the end of his career.

But shouldn't that say "hanged," not "hung"?

Frau Fenderman's story seems plausible to Herbie and he even wonders if she might be a possible contact for his espionage group when she returns to Germany. But then things start to smell funny. There is no record of a spy named Claus Fenderman having been hanged at the Tower––or anywhere else in Britain, for that matter. Frau Fenderman also seems to be more familiar with London's streets than she should be. The suspicious smell becomes overwhelming when somebody takes a shot at the lady outside her London hotel.

What little history Herbie can winkle out of the old files hints that Claus Fenderman had something to do with a British wartime intelligence con game called Operation Nostradamus. Herbie sits down with an old acquaintance in the Foreign Office, George Thomas, to find out about Operation Nostradamus, which attempted to distract and discombobulate some of the top Nazis with a mix of real and fake prophecies from Nostradamus's famed 16th-century mystical book. (If you've watched The History Channel––or even Raiders of the Lost Ark––you know that several of the top men in the Third Reich, including Josef Goebbels and Hitler himself, were a little looney on the subject of the occult and were always ready to believe any psychic, soothsayer or mythologist who said––or seemed to say––encouraging things about the Third Reich's glorious destiny.)

Operation Nostradamus was George Thomas's first mission for the Special Operations Executive. He was dropped into France and instructed to contact a deep undercover agent, Michel Downay, who had cozied up to a couple of SS officers and was advising them about Nostradamus. George's job was to impersonate an academic specializing in Nostradamus, an ostensible colleague of Downay, and then get in with those selfsame SS officers and feed them Nostradamian misinformation. George had the heebie-jeebies about going behind enemy lines, period, but having to spend so much time with the SS really didn't help. And could he really count on Downay's being on the side of the Allies? How about Angelle, the alluring refugee living in Downay's apartment? Was she just a trap waiting to be sprung?

In The Nostradamus Traitor, Gardner takes us back and forth between Herbie's 1978 investigation of Frau Fenderman and the attempt on her life, and George Thomas's account of his espionage work in 1941. As Herbie's dogged sleuthing and George Thomas's story progress, Herbie sees that Operation Nostradamus in 1941 and Frau Fenderman in 1978 are more connected than he'd thought––and the connection presents tremendous danger in the current day.

If you're not familiar with The Mysterious Press, founded by the famed Otto Penzler in 1975, check out its website here. In addition to new fiction releases, The Mysterious Press republishes crime fiction classics and hidden gems in high-quality paperbacks. These aren't sloppily OCR'd reprints, either. All are newly typeset, formatted and proofread, printed on quality paper and given attractive covers. For those of you who don't do paper anymore, The Mysterious Press has teamed with Open Road Integrated Media, and offers its books in digital formats.

I'm excited that there are still four more books in the Herbie Kruger series for me to read, all available from The Mysterious Press/Open Road. Then, I can't forget Gardner's 29 books in the other series and standalones, as well as the 16 James Bond books. What with my World War II obsession, I've got my eye on Gardner's Suzie Montford series, about a police constable in London during the war. It begins with Bottled Spider, which they just happen to have at my library. I may be very, very late to the John Gardner stakes, but I intend to earn a spot in the running among his readers.

The Return of John Rebus

Way back in February, Della Streetwise told us here about her two recent "redonkulus reads": Jonas Jonasson's The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared and Ian Rankin's Standing in Another Man's Grave. I rushed out and listened to the former and it really lightened a week of deep winter.

Somehow, though, despite Della's terrific review, I didn't get around to Standing in Another Man's Grave until this week. I always read all the John Rebus books right away in the past, but when Ian Rankin retired Rebus at the end of Exit Music in 2007, I eventually made the emotional adjustment to his leaving my reading life. (Though not well enough to read Rankin's Malcolm Fox books, The Complaints and The Impossible Dead.)

I think I was a little afraid to read Standing in Another Man's Grave. Would it be my old favorite Rebus? Now I'm wondering what I was worried about. He's the same guy, alright; the guy who drives everybody around him absolutely crazy because he breaks all the rules. The gravitational force of Planet Rebus is like a tractor beam that drags anybody who helps him into the disciplinary crapstorm that usually results from his misdeeds.

As night falls at the end of Standing in Another Man's Grave, Rebus must decide whether to fill out that application to be reinstated to CID. I wonder if he'll do it or if he'll decide that operating outside CID's rules is more to his liking. I'm looking forward to finding out. Next time, I'll be the first out of the gate.

Note: I received a publisher's review copy of The Nostradamus Traitor.

Alexander McCall Smith: Author, Musician, Lawyer, Innovator

I am always impressed by those adventuresome souls who are able to kick over their traces and start a new path in life. Famous among these is Grandma Moses, who took to painting in her seventies when she wanted to make something for her postman’s Christmas gift, and Colonel Harland Sanders, who began the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise after a new expressway bypassed his restaurant and put him out of business when he was in his sixties. Both of these were individualists whose "get up and go" hadn't got up and went when they were ready for Social Security. And, even more important, they were people with a vision.

Another of these trailblazers is Alexander McCall Smith. Smith was born and grew up in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), then went off to Scotland to study law. At close to 50 years of age, he was teaching in Belfast, Ireland where he entered a literary competition and won in the children’s category. He returned to Southern Africa in 1981 to help co-found and teach law at the University of Botswana.

"Write what you know" (Mark Twain)

The rest is history, since McCall Smith  came out with his book The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. It was in an airport bookstore that I picked up this first mystery and I was instantly charmed. Mma Precious Ramotswe has had some reversals in her life, with the death of her father and the breakdown of a marriage that brought her more sorrow than joy. She has become a follower of the teachings of Clovis Anderson, author of a text on the principles of detection. She set up as a private detective on a main street in Gaborone, Botswana. Her main strengths are intelligence, courage and a basic understanding of human nature. Somewhat of a Miss Marple, except that this is a career for her. The first thing she does is hire a secretary, Grace Makutsi, who is intensely proud of her graduation at the head of her class at the local secretarial college with an astounding grade of 97%.

All of the characters are beautifully drawn, and the reader begins to appreciate the life and culture of Botswana even to the point of ordering Mma Ramotswe's favorite tipple, bush tea, from online sources. It can even be found in local grocery stores these days. The stories are usually simple, but it would be a mistake to consider the characters simple-minded. In The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, several of Mma Ramotswe's friends seem to be walking unwarily into different traps that had me calling out to them to watch their steps, but I underestimated their insight.

Bush Tea

One of the milestones of McCall Smith's life was when he became a respected expert in medical law and bioethics. He used this background as a pathway into his next series, featuring Isabel Dalhousie, who is a moral philosopher by training and inclination. She is the editor of a periodical titled the Review of Applied Ethics. Isabel is a woman of independent means, with a fulltime housekeeper, but she keeps quite busy. People are always coming to Isabel, asking her to solve their problems, and she has become an occasional detective. Her friends and family frequently admonish her about getting involved in problems that are, quite frankly, none of her business.

Actually, what she does best is to personalize the Socratic idea that an unexamined life is not worth living. There are handfuls of mysteries in Isobel's daily life as she ponders the ethics of everyday situations. In The Sunday Philosophy Club, Isabel unfortunately witnesses a man's fall from a balcony in a concert hall. She believes she has a moral obligation to find out what she can about the man, because she thought she exchanged glances with him as he fell. "That was part of the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do."

The location of the stories is in Edinburgh, an eminently respectable town where the citizens believe there couldn't be any murderers here. But Isabel knows that Edinburgh is a place like anywhere else, and has the same range of people as any place else did: the good, the bad and the morally indifferent. But they had their quirks of course, but even their quirks were charming––as we find in The Charming Quirks of Others.

McCall Smith is also the former chairman of the British Medical Journal ethics committee and was a member of many other boards and commissions, all of which he gave up when he achieved success as a writer.

Still with some time on his hands, McCall Smith decided on a new venture, taking a leaf out of the pages of Dickens and the San Francisco novelist Armistead Maupin, both of whom wrote serialized novels. Thus 44 Scotland Street was released in installments every weekday in The Scotsman newspaper and was also later delivered on the BBC radio as 15-minute dramas. The stories surround the characters living in a particular Edinburgh apartment building.

Right away, the reader is caught up in the lives of Pat MacGregor, a 20-something who is on her second gap year, since the first didn’t work out; Bruce Anderson, her narcissistic flatmate; Matthew Duncan, the owner of an art gallery; Angus Lordie and his dog Cyril; and my personal favorite, little Bertie Pollock. Bertie is somewhat of a genius, but his life is constantly made miserable by his overbearing mother, who insists he play the saxophone, speak Italian and visit a psychiatrist regularly. I get every book right off the presses so I can see how Bertie is faring, as he tries to live a normal life and hold his head up in all the difficult and humorous situations he finds himself. These stories have grown into eight volumes so far; the most recent, Sunshine on Scotland Street, is very hard to get hold of.

“To boldly go where no man has gone before” (or to boldly go where no man has swept the floor) (Star Trek and others)

Much to the dismay of his publishers, McCall Smith's next literary experiment was an on-line novel. This was a serialized story published on the Internet exclusive to Telegraph.co.uk. and available to the readers at no cost.

These stories tell the stories of the inhabitants of a large housing unit named Corduroy Mansions, in London, England. Here, also, there is a large cast of characters, one of the most interesting of whom is a dog, Freddie de la Hay.

As Corduroy Mansions was released online, readers could interact via online discussion boards with each other and the author himself. The Daily Telegraph staff edited this. The author wrote a chapter a day, starting on 15 Sep 2008. The first series ran for 20 weeks. These daily chapters were also available as an audio download. Fortunately, there are hard copies for all those who prefer reading a book.

Sandwiched into these series are wonderful children's stories; several nonfiction books, such as The Forensic Aspects of Sleep; and a fifth series, about a Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, who finds himself in one humiliating situation after another.

Finally, McCall Smith has a few nonseries books of fiction. La's Orchestra Saves the World is set in England at the beginning of World War II. Lavender––La for short––goes to live in a country cottage. Music is her refuge, and she helps bring together all the local musicians who played music, and it was an antidote to the horrors of war. In this venture, Smith calls on his own musical background. Aside from his other talents, Smith is also a bassoonist and he co-founded a group, The Really Terrible Orchestra, whose mission it is "to encourage those who have been prevented from playing music, either through lack of talent or some other factor, to play music in the company of similarly afflicted players." Critics of their performances seem to agree that lousy is the best they can ever be.

Well, you can’t be good at everything.

Whatever plans Alexander McCall Smith has for his next venture, either book or series, I look forward to it. I would love to know how he manages his time.

Redonkulus Reads

It's impossible to keep up with slang. What I'd call "cool," my kids call "hot." But whether I use "outtasight" or "da bomb" to describe the books below, I recommend them for a winter night's reading.

He's baaaaack! Yes, hallelujah, Ian Rankin had mercy upon us. After retiring Edinburgh cop John Rebus in 2007's Exit Music, Rankin brings him back in 2012's Standing in Another Man's Grave.

U.S. cover of book published in 2013
by Little, Brown and Company

Rebus is still an ex-cop, although he's working as a civilian for the Serious Crime Review Unit of the Lothian and Borders Police when he fields Nina Hazlitt's call. Her daughter, Sally, disappeared on New Year's Eve in 1999 and Nina is convinced that it was only the first in a connected series of disappearances by young women who were traveling on the A9 through the Scottish Highlands. Brigid Young in 2002. Zoe Beddows in 2008. Nina hasn't been able to persuade any cops of her theory but Rebus tacks up a map of the A9 onto his wall at home and starts to sniff around. Researching these cold cases leads him to Edinburgh's CID. There he hooks up with his protégé, DS Siobhan Clarke, to investigate the three-day disappearance of 15-year-old Annette McKie, who got on a bus to Inverness for a party and hasn't been seen since. Her last message was a photo transmitted from her mobile phone.

It's not the same Edinburgh police department Rebus retired from. New DCI James Page doesn't understand Rebus's references to Led Zeppelin, and there's a young cop who sits at her computer all day, doing research and interacting with online social communities. Other things haven't changed. Rebus still drinks and smokes too much. He effortlessly gets on his superiors' nerves and mostly ignores their instructions. He remains a subject of interest to Malcolm Fox in Complaints, the internal affairs division. Fox (yes, Rankin's new series protagonist, a straight arrow completely unlike Rebus, appears in this book) says there is no longer room in the police force for even one maverick who bends the rules while breaking cases. Fox distrusts Rebus and his socializing with retired criminal bigwig Big Ger Cafferty, whose life Rebus once saved, and other career criminals connected with the McKie case. Rebus, feeling like vinyl in a digital age, climbs in his old Audi and hits the A9 to chase down leads, while dodging the press and his bosses.

If having Rebus back in unofficial harness isn't, like whoa, enough, the force's mandatory retirement age has changed and he can apply for reinstatement. Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch can unretire, so why not Rebus? There's only one sticking point. Rebus may need to lose a few pounds to pass the physical fitness test. After this atmospheric book, in which little is what it seems, more Rebus would be too coolish for words.

Rod Bradbury translated from the Swedish
and Hyperion published it in 2012

Like the poor women in Rankin's book, Allan Karlsson doesn't plan to disappear in Jonas Jonasson's amusing debut, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. He's never been one to ponder things too long, so almost before he knows it, he's slipping away from the Old Folks' Home in Malmköping, Sweden, and the birthday party about to take place in his honor. Allan decides he "could die some other time, in some other place." He ignores the beckoning of the shop where he buys his vodka and shuffles off to the bus station.

There, a long-haired punk whose big suitcase on wheels won't fit into the small restroom with him asks Allan to watch it while he relieves himself. The restroom door has no sooner swung closed before Allan's bus appears. So Allan "surprised himself by making what--you have to admit--was a decision that said 'yes' to life." He gets onto the bus with the suitcase and asks the driver how far a fifty-crown note will take him.

Allan is not the old coot the enraged punk/criminal who owns the money-filled suitcase assumes he is. He was once a famous demolitions expert who offered his explosive services to world leaders of all stripes, from Franco to Mao to Stalin to Truman. Allan not only hobnobbed with the powerful, he himself affected world events. Jonasson weaves stories of Allan's colorful past into his present adventure, in which he and his unconventional new friends are pursued by both police and criminals. Jonasson's droll writing and quirky characters are perfect for a satire about aging, crime, police investigations and the making of history. It's sweet sauce for topping off a very long day.