Fall Preview 2014: Part Two

One thing is clear. This fall, I won't have to go into withdrawal from my serious addiction to books about World War II and the Cold War. In addition to several very serious non-fiction books that I won't talk about (Peter Longerich's almost 1000-page biography of Joseph Goebbels, for example), there are quite a few others that Read Me Deadly regulars might find interesting––and you won't break a toe if you drop them on your foot.

In Sleep in Peace Tonight (Thomas Dunne/Macmillan, October 7), James MacManus looks at America's isolationist period from a slightly different angle. It's January 1941 in this novel, almost a full year before the Pearl Harbor attack catapulted the US into World War II. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt knows that America's entry into the war is all but inevitable, but he is forced to kowtow to the isolationists, in part to maintain enough support for his New Deal economic policies.

FDR's closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, is the protagonist of this novel. He's FDR's envoy, visiting the UK to observe conditions and see whether Britain can survive without US intervention. Hopkins reaches London during an air raid, and famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow tells him the fun hasn't really started, because the heavy bombers don't generally arrive until around midnight.

Hopkins finds himself drawn in by the tractor beam of Churchill's powerful personality, and sympathizes with the British people suffering under the Blitz. Hopkins is also influenced by a romance with his driver, a young woman who, unbeknownst to him, is a member of Britain's Special Operations Executive and is working to make sure the British government knows what Hopkins is advising FDR. There is an entertaining brief video preview of the book here.

I devour stories of civilians' lives during World War II, so I have added Sigrid MacRae's A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany (Viking Adult, September 4) to my wish list. Author MacRae bases this story of her mother's life from letters and diaries given to her by her mother, Aimée. In Paris in the 1920s, while on a world tour, Aimée, a young woman from a wealthy Connecticut family, fell in love with an impoverished Russian baron. Heinrich's family had been driven out of Russia by the Bolsheviks and now lived on a farm north of Berlin.

After a whirlwind courtship, Aimée and Heinrich married and moved to the farm. The Depression, which hit Germany particularly hard, ruined the family. Heinrich joined the German army once the war began, and was killed on the Russian front, leaving Aimée with six young children and feeling stranded in Nazi Germany. Astonishingly, Aimée decided to take her children and escape the country to return home to America, even though her leaving was strictly forbidden by the Nazi government. Shades of the von Trapp family!

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life is one of my all-time favorite books, and Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days (translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky; New Directions, November 11) picks up on the same theme, the turns life (and death) can take, depending on tiny contingencies of fate. As with Ursula Todd in Life After Life, Erpenbeck's female protagonist dies at birth––or does she? In the next chapter she survives, but her life is cut short from a different calamity later on. Each time she dies, an alternative to her death is provided and her story goes on.

Erpenbeck uses the novel as both a contemplation of fate, and a trip through some of the most harrowing times in 20th-century Austria, Germany and the Soviet Union. It definitely looks grimmer than Life After Life, but more than suitable for its time and place(s).

Speaking of grimness, it appears that Martin Amis's The Zone of Interest (Knopf, September 30) will be wallowing in it. Publishers Weekly calls it "[a]n absolute soul-crusher of a book," and "an astoundingly bleak love story," but it also says it's brilliant. Set in a Nazi work camp that seems to be a stand-in for Auschwitz III/Monowitz-Buna, it's a tale told by three narrators. Golo Thomsen, the nephew of Nazi bigwig Martin Bormann, is the liaison for the Buna plant and the camp. Thomsen is in love with Hannah, the wife of our second narrator, Paul, the drunken camp commandant. Szmul, a Jewish inmate from Poland, is the third narrator. He is part of the corpse-disposal brigade, and is forced by Paul to help him devise his revenge on his betrayers.

Given Amis's propensity for caustic wit, I am reminded of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, a novel featuring a completely soul-corroded Nazi officer protagonist. I thought of that book as a story of office politics in hell. I expect The Zone of Interest to similarly reflect the bizarrely cockeyed version of life that goes on during the absurdity of the Holocaust.

Another writer who likes to dwell in the dark places is American James Ellroy. He is probably best known for his L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz. Ellroy's obsession with Los Angeles, and the LAPD in particular, hasn't lessened one little bit. Perfidia (Knopf, September 9) is the first volume in his second L.A. Quartet.

Perfidia begins very shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but Los Angeles is already sick with war fever and is in attack mode on Japanese-Americans. The book features many of the same characters you may be familiar with from the first L.A. Quartet, but at an earlier point in their lives.

The action begins with a nightmarish find in a quiet residential neighborhood: father, mother, daughter and son of a Japanese-American family have been slaughtered. Thanks to the publisher, I've had a chance to read an advance review copy of the book. If you know Ellroy, you know about his rat-a-tat hardboiled style, and the grim violence that permeates his version of Los Angeles. There is plenty more of the same here; maybe too much more. The nonstop violence and expressions of racial hatred and misogyny can just grind you down after awhile, and this is a very long book. Still, it's an impressive achievement and well worth reading if you're the right audience.

Ken Follett has always been a guilty pleasure of mine, and all the more so with his Century Trilogy. I finally got around to reading the second installment, Winter of the World, this summer. It has the usual strengths: a powerful, propulsive storyline and a large cast of well-drawn and loosely-connected characters, all set in some of the most cataclysmic and challenging times of World War II and the years immediately before and after. And that last part is where the "guilty" in guilty pleasure especially comes in.

It's a little embarrassing that Follett plops his characters down wherever something particularly sensational is going on. Really, you name it; the attack on Pearl Harbor, street fighting with fascists of various stripes, the London Blitz, escapes into Spain over the Pyrenees, the Nazis' infamous T-4 euthanasia program, the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, the first A-bomb tests in the US and the USSR, the appalling rapes inflicted on Berlin women by the invading Red Army in 1945. Follett's characters are at all of those. At least he didn't go so far as to try to put one of his characters in a Nazi death camp (a concentration camp, on the other hand, yes).

Still, I'm hooked on the characters, so I'll be ready to find out all about what happens to all of them, and their children, as he concludes his trilogy with The Edge of Eternity (Dutton Adult, September 16), a trip through the turbulent years of the Cold War and groundbreaking social and political change.

When I read about the Cold War, I tend to focus mostly on the espionage operations, mole hunting, and all that John le Carré-style stuff. But there are other aspects, of course. This year, two prominent books have focused on the cultural Cold War: Ellen Feldman's The Unwitting and Peter Finn and Petra Couvée's The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book. In The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (Knopf, October 28), author Gregg Herken reminds us that there is another aspect of the Cold War: the policymakers and opinion-influencers among the Establishment.

There were lots of people trying to put their mark on the country's political policy during the years of struggle between the ideologies of East and West. Herken focuses most prominently on five of them: Phil and Kay Graham, the married couple who published the country's preeminent journal of national politics, The Washington Post; prominent journalists/columnists Joe and Stewart Alsop; and Frank Wisner, the manic-depressive World War II veteran and Wall Street lawyer who headed a CIA anti-communist covert action division in the 1950s.

The title of Herken's book alludes to the fact that so much policy was discussed––and sometimes even negotiated––at martini-fueled parties in Georgetown homes. The Cold War is over, but so are the days when politicians, journalists and government officials of all political stripes could set aside the political posturing and grandstanding for the public, at least for an evening of drinking and informal bargaining. I'm looking forward to reading about those old days.

I really like this UK paperback cover

I've been waiting impatiently for a year, since the UK publication, for Jonathan Coe's Expo 58 (New Harvest, September 2). I first got to know Coe's work back almost 20 years ago, with his The Winshaw Legacy: or, What a Carve Up!, his deliriously entertaining mash-up of murder mystery and vicious satire of Thatcher-era Britain. Since then, I've always looked out for his books. Most have been more serious, but with Expo 58, it looks like he's headed back to a sillier territory.

The 1958 World's Fair, a/k/a Expo 58, took place in Brussels, at the height of the Cold War. Graham Greene, in Our Man in Havana, proved that the Cold War could be made entertaining, and now Coe is attempting the same feat. Thomas Foley, a mild-mannered civil servant at Britain's Central Office of Information, and the son of a pub owner, is assigned the task of running the Britannia, the UK's authentic British pub that is its key attraction at the Expo. Placed conveniently close to the rival US and USSR pavilions, the Britannia soon becomes a hotbed of superpower shenanigans, and Foley's dull gray life in austerity Britain is suddenly transformed.

Next, our Maltese Condor will let us know what she's putting on her to-read list for when the leaves begin to fall.

Can't Sleep? A Prescription to be Accompanied by Judicious Applications of Crackers or Popcorn

Let's say you didn't choose to go to bed with a murderer. You went to bed to sleep. You lie there and lie there but sleep has overpowered everyone but you: the clerk at the new Holiday Inn across town, your neighbors across the street, your loved one and animals dispersed across the bed. Don't panic. I have a prescription for you. It won't put you to sleep, but it will make you glad you're awake.

Pick one of the great books below. If you're in bed with a partner, and he or she dislikes your eating crackers in bed while you're reading, now is the time. Crackers on a plate are best because it's the sound of rummaging in the cracker box that brings a sleeper to crabby consciousness. (I'm assuming you eat with a minimum of lip smacking, grinding noises, and moaning.) If reading requires too much concentration in your zonked-out-but-can't-sleep state, choose one of these movies. Accompany with popcorn. (If your DVD player is in the bedroom, keep the sound down and don't pelt any sleeper next to you with popcorn. This is to ensure that your viewing pleasure isn't interrupted by the eruption of Mt. St. Awakened from a Pleasant Dream.) Ta da. Happiness.

James Ellroy, L.A. Confidential, 1990. Ellroy has a bleak view of the world, and the book is wonderful noir, but not for everybody. The plot is complex; however, it boils down to seriously troubled or flawed cops in 1950s Los Angeles, who bust heads while solving crimes or committing them themselves. Kim Basinger won an Oscar for her role in the 1997 movie. It doesn't try to cover the whole book, but it does a great job of translating it from paper to the screen. Also stars Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, and Danny DeVito.

Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty, 1990. Loan shark Chili Palmer travels from Florida to Hollywood in order to collect a bad debt. Once he gets there, he discovers he likes it and wants a piece of the action. Not everyone is pleased. Made into a movie with John Travolta (as Chili Palmer), Gene Hackman (as B-movie maker Harry Zimm), Danny DeVito, Rene Russo, and Dennis Farina in 1995. Fun book; fun movie.

Davis Grubb, Night of the Hunter, 1953. Noir. A man disguised as a preacher tracks down an executed man's widow. Her young son discovers why. The "preacher" is an incredibly evil man and one of mystery fiction's best villains. He's played by Robert Mitchum, scary as hell, in a movie directed by Charles Laughton and also starring Shelley Winters. An unforgettable book and movie, too.

John D. MacDonald, The Executioners, 1958 (also published as Cape Fear, 1962). Rapist Max Cady blames small-town lawyer Sam Bowden for his imprisonment. Now Cady is out and in Bowden's town, making veiled threats against Bowden and following his 14-year-old daughter around. Bowden knows it's only a matter of time until an explosion will happen. Made into a movie Cape Fear in 1961 with Gregory Peck (Sam Bowden), Robert Mitchum (Max Cady), and Polly Bergen. Martin Scorsese directed the 1991 remake of Cape Fear with Robert De Niro (Max Cady), Nick Nolte (Sam Bowden), and Jessica Lange. The movies are interesting to compare in that both are very suspenseful, but the interpretations of the Max Cady and Sam Bowden characters by Peck/Mitchum and De Niro/Nolte are very different. I like both versions.

Peck and Mitchum are diametrically opposed; Peck is an upright man, while Mitchum is a relentless man intent on sadistic revenge. Nolte and De Niro are more complex characters. Watching the less-than-completely ethical Nolte and the disturbing-but-wronged De Niro, you know De Niro must be stopped, but you'd still like to see justice done. Mitchum and De Niro are particularly interesting to compare. De Niro is a maniac while Mitchum is implacable. It isn't often that you can read a book and then watch two directors' interpretations of it and compare top actors occupying the same roles. Don't miss your chance to do it with Cape Fear.

Elmore Leonard, Out of Sight, 1996. Bank robber Jack Foley breaks out of a Florida prison one night and runs into U.S. Marshall Karen Sisco, who has just arrived. Foley's accomplice, Buddy Bragg, hops into the car while Foley climbs into the trunk with their hostage, Sisco. After years in prison, how does Foley share a trunk with a beautiful woman and not fall in love, even if she is a U.S. marshall? Made into an entertaining movie with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.

If you're in the mood for another Leonard book/movie combo, try his novel Rum Punch, in which airline hostess Jackie Burke is caught bringing money into the country for gunrunner Ordell Robbie. The cops bring pressure on her to set him up, but this is a Leonard plot so things don't go as originally planned. Leonard's Rum Punch was used by Quentin Tarantino as the basis for his movie Jackie Brown, starring Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Robert De Niro, and Samuel L. Jackson.

James M. Cain, Double Indemnity, 1943. A classic hard-boiled story in which an evil, greedy woman talks a he-should-know-better-but-he's-no-longer-thinking-with-his-brain insurance agent into committing fraud and murder. Raymond Chandler worked on the screenplay, and Billy Wilder directed the 1944 movie starring a hard-as-nails Barbara Stanwyck, the basset hound-like Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson, who plays MacMurray's boss. A great movie made from a terrific book.

Victor Canning, The Rainbird Pattern, 1972. There are two plot threads, one involving a series of elaborate kidnappings and another involving a psychic (and her lover), working for an elderly woman who wishes to reunite her family. Eventually the threads connect. This book inspired Alfred Hitchcock's mischievous last film, Family Plot, made in 1976. William Devane/Karen Black are the sophisticated baddies, and Bruce Dern/Barbara Harris, the disorganized goodies; they all look like they're having fun.

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, 1939. The corrupting influence of money! White-knight private eye Philip Marlowe is hired by old General Sternwood to investigate why book dealer Arthur Geiger has an IOU signed by his daughter Carmen, who is not a goody two shoes. This is Chandler's first book. William Faulkner worked on the screenplay, and the 1946 movie stars Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Elisha Cook, Jr. The plot has some holes, but with these actors, who cares? In 1978, a remake was made with James Stewart, Sarah Miles, and Oliver Reed. Strangely, the setting is no longer Chandler's 1930s Los Angeles, but 1970s London. Do I need to tell you it's not as good as the 1946 classic?

Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940. Moose Malloy's girlfriend Velma, a cute redhead, disappeared after he went to prison. Now Malloy is out and insists that a reluctant Marlowe look for her. The characters and settings in this book are so vividly done you'll ache after reading. Farewell, My Lovely was made into a movie several times: The 1944 movie Murder, My Sweet stars Dick Powell as a decent Marlowe and Mike Mazurki as Malloy. Robert Mitchum, who looks like he's been around the block a few times here (I love that man!), plays Marlowe and Jack O'Halloran plays Malloy in the 1975 full-color remake, Farewell, My Lovely.

Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe could have been talking about Chandler when he said that a writer he admired rode words bareback. Nobody in mystery fiction used words like Chandler. If you haven't bothered to read him yet, you have a tremendous treat in store. Keep a couple of his books by your bed (The Long Goodbye, The Little Sister, The Lady in the Lake), and if you can't sleep, be happy that you have the chance to read one.

Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal, 1971. French dissidents bungle an attempt on Charles de Gaulle's life so they hire a professional assassin code named "the Jackal" to do the deed. This is a race between the Jackal and Commissaire Claude Lebel, France's best detective, who has been assigned to find and stop him, without a speck of help from de Gaulle, an extremely brave and haughty leader who sees no need to alter his schedule in the slightest way, or others in power who would like to see Lebel fail. It was made into a movie in 1973. Michael Caine wanted the role, but director Fred Zinnemann wanted an unknown actor, so Edward Fox stars as the Jackal.

Brian Garfield, Hopscotch, 1975. Hopscotch won an Edgar for Best Novel. It is the story of a CIA agent who is so bored with retirement that he decides to do something about his boredom; he'll force his former CIA colleagues and Russian counterparts to hunt him down and eliminate him. Garfield wrote the screenplay for the movie, but rather than a suspenseful story like his book, the 1980 movie is a comic spy spoof with Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson.

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, 1929. The search for a legendary statuette leads to betrayal and murder. Read the book and then watch the 1941 John Huston movie, which stars Humphrey Bogart as private detective Sam Spade along with Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. Both book and movie are classics and unforgettable.

Need more recommendations for a book by Hammett? Put those sleepless hours to good use reading his The Glass Key, involving political corruption, loyalty, double-dealing, and a love triangle in an anonymous city in New York or his Red Harvest, in which a private operator takes on a corrupt town.

Philip MacDonald, The List of Adrian Messenger, 1959. Ten names appear on a list, and it's not one composed by Santa Claus. The names' owners are murdered. Find out why and we'll know by whom. In the 1963 movie based on the book, Anthony Ruthven Gethryn (George C. Scott) is asked to investigate the murders. This is the movie in which some big-name Hollywood actors appear in disguise, and you're supposed to see if you recognize them. At the end, they reveal themselves. Fun.

Geoffrey Homes (pseudonym of Daniel Mainwaring), Build My Gallows High, 1946. A man's mysterious past unfortunately catches up with him. Mainwaring also wrote the screenplay for the 1947 movie based on his book, Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. This is my husband's favorite noir film and is considered by many to be one of the best noir movies ever made. I love the book and the movie.

Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder, 1958. THE classic courtroom drama written by a former Michigan state supreme court justice. An ex-DA defends a soldier accused of killing the man who raped his wife. In 1959, the book was made into a gripping movie directed by Otto Preminger and starring James Stewart as the defense attorney, George C. Scott as the prosecutor, Ben Gazzara as the defendant, and Lee Remick as the wife. The judge was played by a Boston lawyer named Joseph Welch, who had figured as a good guy in the Sen. Joseph McCarthy hearings.

Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man, 1934. A charming book about the dapper ex-detective Nick Charles and his excitement-loving wife, Nora. They're in New York on vacation over the holidays when they become involved in a disappearance and murder. William Powell and Myrna Loy star with the dog Asta (schnauzer in the novel, but a wire-haired fox terrier on the screen) in the not-to-be-missed movie series: The Thin Man, After The Thin Man, Another Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man, Song of the Thin Man, and The Thin Man Goes Home. You'll want a martini while watching one of these movies.

Jim Thompson, The Grifters, 1963. Oh man, con man Roy Dillon, his scheming mom Lilly, and his main squeeze Moira Langtry have dysfunctional relationships in this excellent but depressing noir book about the ability to control one's fate. The Grifters is a good movie, too; the acting is really something. Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, Annette Bening, and Pat Hingle star. Donald E. Westlake wrote the script.

Thompson is a powerful writer whose noir comes in handy for those times you're annoyed with your overly optimistic sister or you want confirmation that the world is a bleak place. He's not the most pessimistic writer in mysterydom (if anybody can beat David Goodis in that department, I want to hear about it), so you'll be able to face the world when the cruel sun comes up and it's time to stop reading. You might even be able to smile after you've had a cup of coffee.

Roman Polanski's 1974 movie, Chinatown, isn't based on a particular book by Raymond Chandler, but it is regarded as that director's homage to Chandler. J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a private eye, Noah Cross (John Huston) is a robber baron, and Faye Dunaway is Cross's daughter in 1930s Los Angeles. Stir in corruption of the political and moral kind, and you have a wonderful movie experience.

Now, aren't you pleased you read a fantastic book or watched an incredible movie? Sometimes sleep is overrated and best kept for those moments when you have nothing better to do. I prescribe it for the dentist's chair, your doctor's waiting room, or while you're waiting for your daughter to try on all the shoes in the store. But then again, these are times for a good book, too....