Working Our Way Into Fall

Thanks, guys

On the first Monday of September we celebrate Labor Day. It's a federal holiday in the United States, our day to thank American workers. We do this by relaxing our butts off with backyard barbecues or carpools to the park for soccer and baseball. We eat hamburgers and watermelon and drink beer or lemonade. We say so long to summer and gird our loins for the hard jobs of fall. Suffering when our favorite football team loses. Cleaning the rain gutters and stacking wood for the fireplace. Explaining trigonometry to our kids. Finding good books for nights that are becoming long and cold.

Today, I'm not only saluting my fellow American workers, I'm mentioning some of them in crime fiction.

Steve Ulfelder's Purgatory Chasm is a hardboiled paean to working off a debt, whether it's money owed, a verbal promise to a friend or a responsibility to family. The narrator protagonist, Conway Sax, was once a NASCAR driver but his drinking ended that career. At one time he owned his own car repair shop but a prison sentence for manslaughter shuttered it. Conway's out on parole and remodeling an old house he owns in Framingham, Massachusetts. He wants to sell it and use the proceeds to open an automotive garage.

Ten years ago, an Alcoholics Anonymous group called the Barnburners saved Conway's life. He pays them back by doing odd jobs or those that require "muscle." The inner circle of this group have become his friends. When one of them, Tander Phigg Jr. (at least his first name isn't Ripe or Fresh), asks for help, Conway agrees despite feeling that Phigg is one of those people who don't have to be drunk to be assholes. Phigg says he's paid $3500 in advance for the restoration of his 1980 Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9. It's been in Das Motorenwerk for months and the owner is giving him the runaround. Phigg wants it back.

Fall in New England is beautiful

This is easier said than done, even for a tough man like Conway, who employs a tire iron across someone's knees as naturally as he uses it to change a flat. For his trouble, Conway receives a fist-sized lump on his head and finds Phigg dead.

Nobody can criticize Conway for being a quitter. He wants to keep his promise to Phigg, even though Phigg's in no position to complain if he doesn't. Conway also feels pressured to solve the mystery of Phigg's death, because his criminal record leaves him open to suspicion. Conway begins by researching Phigg's past. Unlike Conway, Phigg is the son of a wealthy man, a paper baron who employed the whole town. Like Conway, he had a toxic relationship with his father. Phigg was a man who valued appearances. What lay under that surface? Conway's investigation and personal relationships create a smoothly corkscrewing plot that deals with who owes what to whom and why. Not all of these characters are reasonable people, and watching them work it out is gritty and gratifying entertainment.

I wasn't surprised to learn that author Ulfelder is an amateur race car driver and co-owns a company that makes race cars. His knowledge of cars and carpentry adds authenticity to his unusual and likable blue-collar sleuth. Conway's alcoholism isn't off-putting. This well-crafted book was nominated for a 2012 Edgar for Best First Novel by an American Writer. I'm glad Conway is back in The Whole Lie, published earlier this year by Minotaur.

Nero Wolfe doesn't have Conway's strong work ethic. You won't see Wolfe racing to the mall in his Ford pickup to take advantage of Labor Day sales. This mountain of a private eye is content to stay at home in his Manhattan brown house. And why not? He has thousands of orchids to play with in his rooftop greenhouse, a gifted chef in the kitchen, shelves full of books in his office and a pool table in the basement. Wolfe hates working, but his house and staff gobble money. Part of assistant Archie Goodwin's job is to prod Wolfe to work when the bank balance is low. If a wealthy client doesn't spontaneously walk in, Wolfe designs a strategy to hook one.

That's what happens in The Silent Speaker. Cheney Boone of the Bureau of Price Regulation was escorted to a small room at a meeting of the National Industrial Association so he could prepare his speech. He is later found there, bludgeoned to death. Since the BPR and the NIA like each other as much as cats and dogs, there is a lot of finger pointing, but no evidence to back up accusations. The NIA is losing the public relations battle and decides to hire Wolfe. What comes then is a nifty plot that reflects 1946 business technology and the country's debate about governmental regulation of business. (Will this debate ever end?)

Nobody has ever accused me of a green thumb

The Nero Wolfe series doesn't need to be read in order. The Silent Speaker is one of my favorites because Wolfe pulls a great stunt and Archie is bowled over by a beautiful blonde working girl (the formal rather than the slang definition). I know our Georgette Spelvin thinks Archie is close to the ideal American man, but I must disagree. I'll take Wolfe himself. With a guy like that, there'd be no debate about who needed the car or how much I spent on books. I'd retire from burning supper and watering half-dead plants.

Retirement isn't on the mind of some characters in Dustin Thomason's 12.21. They believe that December 21, 2012 will bring an apocalypse. Serious scholars dispute that interpretation of the end of the 5,000-year-old Mayan calendar's Long Count. One of the foremost Mayan scholars is Chel Manu, a Guatemalan-American epigraphy expert at the Getty Museum and UCLA. It is now December 11, 2012, and Chel is risking her career by safekeeping an extremely rare Mayan codex from A.D. 900. The recently-discovered codex was smuggled illegally into the United States. Chel is over the moon. There are only four other Mayan codices known to exist, and this one might explain the collapse of the Mayan civilization. Chel is surreptitiously deciphering it when she receives a request from East L.A. Presbyterian Hospital. A very sick patient might be speaking Qu'iche, a Guatemalan dialect, and they urgently need her to translate.

Prions are just proteins but are extremely dangerous

Dr. Gabriel Stanton has already been summoned to Presbyterian by a young doctor who suspects this patient's symptoms might indicate a prions-caused disease. Stanton is a workaholic who studies prions, tiny proteins that cause incurable genetic diseases and other incurable diseases, like mad cow from eating contaminated meat. What Stanton discovers at Presbyterian is terrible news, and he and Chel will need to work quickly to stop a global catastrophe.

Author Dustin Thomason wrote the best-selling The Rule of Four, a 2004 literary thriller about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a real Renaissance text, with his good friend Ian Caldwell. After that, Thomason earned an M.D. 12.21, published in August 2012 by The Dial Press, is fast and suspenseful reading, similar to books by fellow physician and science junkie Michael Crichton. Mayan history is fascinating stuff. So is medical research on prions. This is the perfect thriller for counting down the days to the end of 2012. Thanks go to hard-working researchers and the authors who write about them.

I'm joining other enterprising Americans for a last road trip this summer. Our good old-fashioned ingenuity and back-breaking work will have a big payoff when we fire up the grill and pop open those bottles of, uh, German beer. Happy Labor Day, everyone!

A Battle Between Good and Evil

Well, all right, I know we're not talking about THE battle between good and evil, okay? We're also not talking about a battle between the sexes, planets, nations, political philosophies or parties, superheroes and supervillains, man and nature, man and machine, predators and prey or natural enemies such as cats and dogs.

We're not even talking about the battle between dirt and cleanliness so extraordinary one can pretty darn well semi-safely eat off the floor if the floor owner is your German or Swiss grandmother or other nationality that has raised cleanliness next to godliness or maybe not, but you're up to date on your vaccinations such as tetanus, one hopes, or hope to God your luck holds, and don't ask yourself why in the world you don't pick up the food, shake it off, and stick it on a plate for pete's sake unless maybe you're out of plates because you're a bit behind on washing up or you're lying on the floor any way, and you just so happen to see something lying down there, uneaten for who knows why by the family dog or cat or your spouse or kids.

And we're not talking about sports that rightfully have umpteen billions of fans like soccer, known in most parts of the world as football or fútbol or whatever other name your native language calls it. (Pause for a breath and to mention writer Leighton Gage's blog about one of the sport's most wonderful players on and off the field, Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira.)

No.

No, we're talking here about the American sport of football, and its Great Big Day, Super Bowl Sunday. THIS SUNDAY. When the New England Patriots, ably led by quarterback Tom Brady, meet the New York Giants, I hope less ably led by quarterback Eli Manning, in Indianapolis, Indiana. While the Patriots and the Giants crack heads in Lucas Oil Stadium in Super Bowl XLVI, fans at home will (again, I hope) not crack heads over bowls of guacamole and chips and bottles of beer or Coca-Cola. Even people who aren't football fans will be watching, because this is the day that ad agencies try to outdo themselves and each other in debuting creative TV commercials (yes, "creative TV commercials" is too frequently an oxymoron), and Madonna, of all people, who in the world chose her to sing I'd like to know, tries to outdo herself and previous performers in entertaining us viewers at halftime.

Americans who aren't watching the Super Bowl will find shopping malls happily drained and ski slopes tantalizingly bare during the game. On the other hand, they will be tragically unable to compare favorite commercials (mine is always the Budweiser beer Clydesdales), intelligently criticize Madonna or argue bone-headed Super Bowl plays at the office water cooler on Monday.

If you can't bring yourself to watch the biggest football game of the year, you can excuse yourself by watching Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl VIII.

Or by reading one of these good mysteries, in which sleuths and criminals butt heads and engage in battle:

Bill Eidson's The Repo is set in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where former DEA agent Jack Merchant now lives on his sloop, The Lila. Sarah Ballard, who makes a living repossessing boats for banks, hires him to look for a missing couple and their yacht. It's an action-packed book with well-drawn characters. The Mayday is the next Ballard/Merchant book.

Walking Shadow, by Robert B. Parker, is the 21st appearance by Spenser, ex-boxer, ex-cop turned Boston private eye. In this book, Spenser is asked by his girlfriend to investigate the stalking of a theater company director. Fists fly and bodies pile up, but Spenser handles all of this with his usual aplomb and rustles up gourmet dinners at the same time. Some of the Spenser books are a little phoned in, but not this one.

Brattleboro, Vermont, is the ultimate New England town for artists and eccentrics. In Archer Mayor's Surrogate Thief, a gun involved in a shooting is linked to a robbery/murder that cop Joe Gunther handled 30 years ago as a rookie. This is a great small-town police procedural, and you don't have to begin at the series beginning.

Jane Langton's God in Concord is set in the town of Concord, Massachustts, home of Thoreau's Walden Pond and destination of Paul Revere's midnight ride in 1775. Developer Jefferson Grandison wants to build on the edge of Walden Pond. This doesn't sit well with everyone. This is the ninth book in the traditional mystery series featuring lawyer and ex-cop, now Harvard professor Homer Kelly. It contains Langton's charming line drawings.

Dennis Lehane's Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are about as good as it gets when it comes to a pair of New England hardboiled private detectives. Begin the series with A Drink Before the War, in which Kenzie and Gennaro look for a cleaning woman who took some papers belonging to a senator. Some terrific Lehane standalones include Mystic River, Coronado (a book of short stories), and The Given Day (a book of historical fiction).

There you are, a bunch of good mysteries set in the beautiful northeastern states of the USA, home of the New England Patriots. At about oh, say, 9:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, I'll be happy to read a good book set in New York, home of the New York Giants. I'll leave it to a Giants fan or someone else to suggest some. Right now I need to rustle up some snacks for Super Bowl Sunday.

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

"Tousled and sleepy, each facing in a slightly different direction, they sat on the sleeping shelves like great black lumps. Their huge, heavy heads drooped, their bodies slumped, their mysterious coffee bean eyes stared at nothing. Lost in gorilla reflections, they scratched themselves occasionally, or emitted a digestive rumble, or poked a listless finger in nostril or ear while they waited for their breakfast.

"Pretty much like people first thing in the morning, if you ask me." ("Nice Gorilla," by Charlotte and Aaron Elkins, Malice Domestic I, edited by Elizabeth Peters)

If you ask me, too. Makes me feel like reaching into the story with some cups of strong coffee. Do you often feel like that while reading? I do. I'm not talking right now about books in which someone is acting as if his or, more often, her forehead has been stamped "too stupid to live." I'm talking about books in which a character is wearing a sign on his back that says, "Kick me." Or when someone's suspicions ripen as slowly as that avocado sitting on your kitchen counter when you're anxious to make guacamole.

Mrs. White is one of those avocados. She is a quiet housewife and mother who gradually comes to realize that her beloved husband is the guy who has been brutally murdering women in the New England town of Putnam Wells. The reader knows this from the very beginning, when Louise Porter gets home with ingredients for chicken cacciatore dinner, and Paul White walks slowly out of the kitchen corner to join her.

This is a fascinating story that shows a woman picking up the first little clue and drawing a false conclusion. Soon there are more clues to puzzle Mrs. White about her carpenter husband, and she begins to probe her memory for almost forgotten, but now tantalizingly suggestive hints that might help her decipher the present. At the same time, her husband Paul increasingly recognizes that his wife isn't the soft and placid woman he thought he married. The tension builds until plot developments and changing characters' viewpoints shift anxiety into overdrive.

Margaret Tracy's Mrs. White is not a gore fest. In addition to gripping psychological suspense, this book offers some interesting character portraits. It's too bad that, after winning the 1983 Edgar for Best Paperback Original, it's largely forgotten today.

Today, yesterday, a century ago. Avocados are not a recent development as we see when we get to know Mrs. Bunting in Marie Belloc Lowndes's 1913 classic, The Lodger. The Buntings are good people who have retired from careers as house servants. Unfortunately, they are now teetering on the brink of financial disaster. They finally put a small card in the window, offering rooms to let. When a stranger reads the card and knocks on their door, Mrs. Bunting casts an experienced servant's eye on him and assesses him as obviously a gentleman, even if his clothes are very shabby and his manner very odd. After all, he's a potential lodger, the only thing that stands between the Buntings and starvation on the street.

London is in a state of uproar due to a series of murders committed by a man called "the Avenger" because he leaves notes on the bodies. From these notes, it is obvious that the murderer doesn't approve of women who drink. The Buntings follow the Avenger murders in the newspapers that are hawked in the neighborhood and are kept abreast of the clues by a young cop working on the investigation. He drops by occasionally to see Mr. Bunting's beautiful teenage daughter, who has come to stay with them, but he never sees the lodger.

After reading newspaper accounts and listening to their policeman friend, is it any wonder that Mrs. Bunting becomes suspicious when she overhears the reclusive lodger, holed up in his room, reading aloud passages from the Bible that are uncomplimentary to women? He has already forbidden her to enter his room under any circumstances. And then there is his appearance and manner, which are so bizarre. Soon, Mrs. Bunting is lying in bed listening for him to tiptoe out of the house in the middle of the night.

This book is a wonderful psychological and moral study of the respectable, working-class Londoner at the turn of the century. This Londoner is very suspicious of the police, loyal to associates, concerned about public opinion, conscious of class differences, and aware of the precarious nature of financial security. Moral questions about the nature of sanctuary and the plight of the criminally insane come into play. Mrs. Bunting finds herself in a real predicament: she needs the money the lodger provides, isn't sure if he is guilty, feels sorry for him, and actually rather likes him. She worries about the safety of the beautiful young woman staying in the house, yet worries that the policeman will arrest the lodger and cast the Buntings into financial ruin and life on the street.... Her suspicions slowly ripen. It's enough to make her head, and a reader's head, spin.

The Lodger isn't a horror story, but rather, excellent classic psychological suspense. I enjoyed this book and the 1926 Hitchcock movie made from it. (There's a glass floor in the movie, a fabulous idea given the mysterious lodger pacing upstairs and poor Mrs. Bunting, worrying below him.) This is a particularly great book to read and movie to watch as the days slink away to leave us nights of wind, rain, and cold. Along with The Lodger, how about something hot to drink, some chips, and guacamole made from ripe avocados?