Readersplaining Your Books

It's hard to believe summer is over; before you know it, you'll be composing a wish list for Santa. I've been working on my own list for what seems like forever, because my Santa, a husband who has known me for 25 years, has a head full of ideas about what books I'd like. Bad ideas. An idea will start out on track (he knows I'm interested in sports, politics, and current events) before derailing and heading into the weeds (but I really cannot get into a biography of former pro basketball player/North Korea visitor/oddball Dennis Rodman). Wouldn't you think he'd automatically know this?

Because who wouldn't want to see if his or her head
would fit through the hole in that chair

Apparently not. I've asked Hubby to keep certain facts in mind when he book shops for me. These facts explain why some books are up my alley. I've given a pair of these facts below. Maybe they'll jump start your own readersplanations before your Santa begins shopping.

I appreciate good food and drink––and crime fiction characters who do, too.

One of my favorite old series features Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. Wolfe is a gargantuan genius who loves food, books, and orchids and refuses to leave his New York City brownstone on business. His side kick, Archie Goodwin, provides the witty narration. Books I liked best include Too Many Cooks, Some Buried Caesar, The Doorbell Rang, and The Silent Speaker.

Italian crime fiction is a good bet for mouth-watering food. Take Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano books. They are best read pinned open with one arm while the other arm stays busy hoisting rigatoni and a bold Italian red mouthward. In addition to the food and Sicilian atmosphere, I like Montalbano, a world-weary but decent man, and his colleagues. The latest, A Beam of Light (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli; Penguin Books, September 1, 2015), finds three crimes requiring Montalbano's attention. On the personal front, Montalbano's eye strays from long-time lover Livia to a gallery owner named Marian.

No, thank you, I'd prefer to remain ignorant.

We can't skip France. It's hard not to love the Dordogne and Martin Walker's books about Bruno Courrèges, chief of police. Reading them is the next best thing to a visit; one can almost smell and taste the meals described on the pages. In The Patriarch (Knopf, August 2015), Bruno's attendance at a birthday celebration for a World War II veteran is ruined by murder. One also finds murder in the darkly comic and macabre The Debt to Pleasure, by John Lanchester. The Nabokovian book's unreliable narrator, arrogant gourmet Tarquin Winot, provides recipes à la Brillat-Savarin and a travelogue as he follows a couple to Provence.

I can't say I first think of the English when the topic is good fictional food; in fact, what initially pops into my mind is James Hamilton-Paterson's weird and wacky Cooking with Fernet Branca. Its part-time narrator, the Englishman Gerald Samper, is a ghostwriter for celebrities ("an amanuensis to knuckleheads") and an amateur cook. He lives in Tuscany, although his kitchen seems to be located in hell. Ice cream with garlic and Fernet Branca and mussels in chocolate are bad enough; consider yourself lucky my divulging the ingredients of Alien Pie would be a spoiler. While Samper's recipes are atrocious, this book is a treat.

At first glance, some books of crime fiction seem unlikely to stimulate the appetite. No matter, John Harvey's food descriptions in his Charlie Resnick police procedurals always send me to the kitchen. At home in Nottingham, that melancholy cop tends to his cats, listens to jazz (readers get educated), and rustles up a delicious sandwich or a cup of decent coffee. Wait, we can't forget the paper towels; one of Resnick's men says that if he ate as messily as Resnick, his wife would make him sit out in the garage. Harvey's characters are no strangers to life's miseries or ironies. I like that about them and the books' look at their relationships and the social issues in post-Thatcher England. The first one is Lonely Hearts.

Here's a comforting thought.

I'm an insomniac who often reads until I fall sleep.

Now, I can bore myself to sleep by reading the instruction book for my washing machine, but this can be torture. So, I usually give the instruction book idea a pass and instead read a suspenseful novel with one eye open. That way, my goal of falling asleep is already half accomplished. Does it impress you that I figured this out as a kid? Actually, suspense is best read with one eye in bed; there's something about the reduced field of vision that makes the tension bearable. For bedtime purposes, the book should not provoke the sort of fear that sends you diving under the bed, but, rather, should make you cringe and beg the character to rethink what he or she is doing, such as pawing through a murder suspect's dresser drawers while the suspect is, naturally, beetling home early because he forgot something. One example of this cringing and begging sort of one-eyed read is Joyce Carol Oates's Jack of Spades (Mysterious Press, May 2015), in which the alter ego of best-selling crime-fiction writer Andrew J. Rush steps in to protect a secret.

Another route to dreamworld is reading a book whose accelerated pace leaves me feeling so depleted by its end I can't help but nod off. Duane Swierczynski's Canary (Mulholland Books, February 2015) fits into this category. Swierczynski is known for his stomp-on-the-gas pacing, plot twists, and unlikely heroes/heroines. In Canary, his unlikely heroine is college honors student Sarie Holland, who is forced to become a confidential informant for Philadelphia narcotics cops. Reading Swierczynski makes me wonder what it would be like to share a meal with him; whether we'd eat by stopwatch.

Always only too happy to encounter Moby-Dick in my reading

For times when sleep is obviously a long-distant goal, an engrossing book like The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Henry Holt, February 2015), is a good pick. The "Whites" of the title are the NYPD's Moby-Dicks, those great white whales who escaped justice and who continue to haunt the cops who pursued them. One of them has now re-surfaced for disgraced Sgt. Billy Graves. Price, whose previous novels include Lush Life, about the murder of New York City bartender Ike Marcus and its aftermath, has a terrific ear for dialogue. That, these books' rich prose, and their original, psychologically complex characters make for great reading.

If sleep is hopeless, but I'm really tired, give me a book with crisp prose and an interesting setting. Malcolm Mackay's Glasgow Trilogy (The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, and The Sudden Arrival of Violence) is suitable. While these books have received international critical acclaim, they were only published in the United States by Mulholland Books last April. They involve a Glasgow crime syndicate trying to eliminate the competition. At their heart are two hitmen: the legendary Frank MacLeod and the up-and-coming Calum MacLean. Mackay's writing is clear and easy to follow, and he brings the criminal underbelly of Glasgow alive. Man, what lives these characters lead. I read this trilogy three nights straight because I wanted to know what happens to Frank and Calum.

That's it for my 'splaining today. Good luck with your own readersplanations.

Spring Preview 2015: Part Five

As much as I enjoy nature waking up after a long winter slumber, there are aspects about spring in California I dread. Tule fog is one of them. It's the implacable ground fog that forms after the state's first heavy rains. It becomes trapped between the mountains in the Great Central Valley, although sometimes you'll even find it drifting into San Francisco and seeping out into the Pacific through the Golden Gate Bridge. Driving in tule fog can feel like a variation of blind man's bluff. There is nothing like a set of red tail lights popping up inches in front of you to give you that heart-leaping-into-your-mouth sensation. Unless you want to talk about reading mysteries or thrillers, of course. Let's consider some good-looking ones coming up.

Acclaimed Montreal literary fiction writer Trevor Ferguson writes crime fiction under the pen name John Farrow. His Detective Sergeant Émile Cinq-Mars is an ethical, yet practical French-Indian who combines a Sherlockian mindset with a dogged determination. His sterling arrest record has made him a local legend.

We meet Cinq-Mars for the first time in City of Ice, when he investigates the death of an Armenian student, found dressed in a Santa suit on Christmas Eve, hanging from a meat hook with a message to Cinq-Mars around his neck. In The Storm Murders (Minotaur, May 26), the DS is newly retired, and his wife, Sandra, wants him to stay that way. Then an FBI agent asks for help. The murders of a Montreal farm couple, killed after a blizzard, may be connected to similar murders in New Orleans. To make his consultation in New Orleans more palatable to Sandra, Cinq-Mars combines business with a vacation and takes her along. As experienced crime fiction fans, we know this is a recipe for disaster––and Sandra ends up kidnapped. Kirkus Reviews states, "One of the best mysteries from Canada in some time, this fourth book in a strong series is equally good at capturing the atmosphere of New Orleans and the distinctive qualities of Montreal."

The madness and tragedy of the Vietnam War have resulted in some outstanding novels. The Sympathizer (Grove, April 1) begins as the Viet Cong take over Saigon in April 1975. It's the first novel written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, an associate professor at USC, who originally came to the United States with his family as Vietnamese refugees in 1975. His writing style has been likened to "Alan Furst meets Elmore Leonard."

The book's narrator is a South Vietnamese army captain, whose poor Vietnamese mother raised him in the absence of his French father. After college in the United States, he returned to Southeast Asia to fight in the war. The Captain assists his general in composing a list of those who will board American flights out of Saigon for exile in the United States. There, among a community of exiles trying with varying degrees of success to create new lives in America, the General involves himself with raising money to fund a rebellion back home. The conflicted Captain, who tells us from the beginning, "I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces," observes this and reports it all to his Viet Cong handlers in Vietnam.

I'm usually skeptical about authors' blurbs, but reviewers' remarks about The Sympathizer are in line with those of writer T. C. Boyle: "Magisterial. A disturbing, fascinating and darkly comic take on the fall of Saigon and its aftermath and a powerful examination of guilt and betrayal. The Sympathizer is destined to become a classic and redefine the way we think about the Vietnam War and what it means to win and to lose."

I blinked when I read the comment of Otto Penzler, head of Mysterious Press, about Joyce Carol Oates's Jack of Spades (Mysterious Press, May 5): "This is Joyce Carol Oates at her most diabolical—no small statement." I'll say. Oates is the woman who recalls one of her first childhood stories was Poe's "The Gold-Bug." In a career that has spanned almost 50 years and produced more than 100 books, Oates has written family chronicles, gothic horror, and psychological suspense. A favorite topic is violence and victimization among complex characters living in a rural or small-town setting, where the most common details of everyday life can assume disturbing meanings.

Jack of Spades is about a bestselling mystery writer's slide into madness. The writer is Andrew J. Rush, whose 28 tastefully-written books have earned him the reputation as "the gentleman's Stephen King." All seems to be going well for Rush, a model citizen of a small town in New Jersey, until one of his three adult children, Julia, finds a copy of A Kiss Before Killing in his office and questions him about it. Unknown to almost everyone, including his wife, Rush writes a lurid and super-violent series under the pen name "Jack of Spades." Shortly thereafter, a local self-published writer named C. W. Haider, who has a litigious history involving well-known crime-fiction writers, sues Rush for not only pinching her ideas, but actually stealing her work. It may not be a terrible mistake to sue Rush, but it could be a mistake to end all mistakes to sue the Jack of Spades. I have a feeling Oates enjoyed writing this, and it should be a lot of creepy fun to read it.

Speaking of creepy fun, I had to investigate when I saw the cover of M. J. Carter's first novel, The Strangler Vine (Putnam, March 31). The title refers to the jungles of India, where creeping vines choke trees until vines and trees are impossible to tell apart. It is into the jungle that novelist Xavier Mountstuart has disappeared after visiting the Honorable East India Company's thuggee department in Calcutta in 1857. The Company is determined to eradicate the thuggees, notorious bandits known for silently strangling their victims. Col. Patrick Buchanan sends Jeremiah Blake, a scholar and Holmesian special inquiry agent, and William Avery, a naive young lieutenant in the Company's army, to find him.

This book combines a history of early Victorian India with the derring-do of a couple of mismatched buddies on a quest to find a vanished writer, based on the real-life figure Philip Meadows Taylor, author of the 1839 novel, Confessions of a Thug (see the review of Tabish Khair's The Thing about Thugs here).

So, tell me, how do you not read Claire Fuller's Our Endless Numbered Days (Tin House, March 17), when advance copy readers rave, warn you to read very carefully and not to read ahead; and Publishers Weekly tells you it has "the winning combination of an unreliable narrator and a shocking ending"?

The unreliable narrator is Peggy Hillcoat, who begins her dual-timeframe tale as a 17-year-old in 1985, when she has returned to her mother's home in London. Then we are taken back to 1976 when Peggy is 8-years old and living with her father, James, and Ute, her German concert-pianist mother. James and Ute are ill matched and arguing all the time. Without Ute's knowledge, James, a survivalist, packs Peggy off to a small log cabin in the Dutch forest, far away from everyone, and tells her the Earth's population has been destroyed, and the two of them are the only humans left alive. James and Peggy live off the land, and chapters fill in the story until the two timeframes meet. This sounds like an extremely interesting variation on coming of age in the post-apocalypse.