Random Thoughts, Or, Murder on a C-Note

Cinco de Mayo

The big holiday will be here in a few days, but I'm not thinking of the Mexican celebration. Instead, I'm clearing the decks to be ready to read Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins, the followup to her Life After Life (Reagan Arthur Books, 2013). I still think about Life After Life, the story of the repeating lives of Ursula Todd in 20th-century England.

A God in Ruins (Little, Brown and Company, May 5, 2015) tells the story of her younger brother, Teddy, who was an RAF pilot during World War II and never expected to survive the war. What will the 20th century have in store for him? I plan to find out as soon as possible.

I sure won't be waiting until December 15 for Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May and the Burning Man, the 12th in the Peculiar Crimes Unit series. It was published last month in the UK by Doubleday, but I am going to be patient enough to wait until May 7, when the audiobook comes available in the US on Audible. The narrator, Tim Goodman, is so wonderful, I prefer the audiobook versions of the series anyway, so I suppose it's a happy oddity that the audiobook is available in the US more than seven months before the print edition.


The Cormoran Strike series

Remember back in 2013 when it was revealed that Robert Galbraith, the pseudonymous author of The Cuckoo's Calling, was none other than J. K. Rowling? Since then, we've had a sequel in that Cormoran Strike/Robin Ellacott series, The Silkworm, which I thought was at least as good as the first. I was just talking with some mystery-reading friends the other day about when we might see another book in the series, and that got me to researching . . . .

I learned that the third book in the series will be called Career of Evil and will be coming out sometime this autumn. Yippee! Though, judging from her last book, I would have thought there is no mystery that Rowling sees the publishing business as the career of evil.

I also learned that the BBC plans to dramatize the series, which is terrific news. I've been enjoying the Grantchester series, originally produced by Britain's ITV and shown on PBS this last season––even though, frankly, I'm not a big fan of the Grantchester books. If ITV could make such an excellent series from those books, I'm hoping BBC will do even better with the superior material of the Cormoran Strike books.


O, Canada

The Old Mansion House, Georgeville, Québec

I look forward every year to a new Armand Gamache/Three Pines book from Louise Penny. One comes every August, like clockwork, but it always seems like such a long wait in between. If you feel the same way, you might want to check out this site, which is currently running a series about the real places that inspired locations in the books. It's a lot of fun to read about the real inspirations, like the very un-scary-looking pink house that nevertheless inspired the creepy Hadley House in Still Life.

Louise Penny's monthly newsletter is always an entertaining read too. It's almost like getting a letter from a friend. You can sign up to read her newsletters here. One bit of recent news from her is her husband's recent Alzheimer's diagnosis. She writes with such affecting openness about how this has affected their lives.


Cozies

My brother-in-law, Jeff, enjoys traditional mysteries and is a big-time completist when it comes to series. Once he starts a series, if he likes the first book, he plows through the entire series, usually without a break.

Jeff was the one who first told me about Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series years ago, and that's now up to 20 books. I think I told him about Rhys Bowen's Her Royal Spyness cozies, about the impoverished Lady Georgiana Rannoch, who is 30-somethingth in line for the throne of England. That reminded him of another Englishwoman, Daisy Dalrymple, who decides to make her own living as a journalist rather than rely on her Viscount father.

Daisy's connections to the members of the upper crust allow her to access the kinds of places that are closed to working-class types like police detectives. St. Martin's publishes attractive paperbacks of the series, and seems to be starting over at the beginning. The first book, Death at Wentwater Court, was just republished in March.


What makes a good spy novel?

I was on a real run with C-initialed topics, but I can't resist adding one of these things that's not like the others. "What makes a good spy novel?" is the question recently asked of Olen Steinhauer in The New York Times. As a voracious reader of espionage novels, I was taken by his response:

Depends on the reader. For me, it’s the moral muddiness of the ends/means equation that comes up more often in spy fiction than in, say, murder mysteries. The best espionage stories not only ask questions about how spying is performed, but they also question the value of the job itself. And when the profession becomes a metaphor for living, the spy novel can delve into the very questions of existence, while thrilling the reader with a convoluted plot. Do all that well, and you’ve got a potential classic on your hands.

I'd say that quote is a particularly apt description of Steinhauer's newest novel, All the Old Knives (Minotaur Books, March 2015).

Spring Preview 2015: Part Three

Some weather gurus are saying this week is winter's last hurrah. Well, we'll see about that. I'm not going to be putting away my mittens and boot grippers just yet. In fact, I have put down money that we won't see bare ground in our back yard for at least three more weeks.

While we're all waiting for the crocuses to dare show themselves, there are quite a few books we can curl up with.

The ship's first-class dining room

May 7 will be the 100th anniversary of Germany's torpedoing of Cunard's luxury cruiser Lusitania, with the loss of 1,200 of the nearly 2,000 passengers and crew onboard. Lusitania was sailing from New York to its home port of Liverpool, and was just a few miles offshore of Ireland, expecting to reach home port later that afternoon, when a German U-boat blasted it just under the wheelhouse. The ship listed so badly and sank so quickly that only a few lifeboats were launched. As with Titanic, most victims drowned or died of hypothermia.

Many of those who survived were rescued by Irish volunteers who sailed to help as soon as they heard of the calamity. Mysteriously, HMS Juno, a British cruiser, set off from Cork, but then turned around.

So why did the Germans fire on a luxury passenger ship? They had warned that all shipping passages in the British Isles were war zones, and this warning was printed in newspapers. In response to the outraged responses to the sinking and loss of civilian life, Germany pointed to the fact that the ship was carrying munitions, which was true. Though the US didn't enter World War I for two more years, the sinking of Lusitania and the loss of most of the 139 Americans onboard increased agitation for American involvement, both from Europe and within the US.

We have less than a week to wait until Erik Larson's Dead Wake (Crown, March 10) arrives to recount the story of Lusitania. The publisher's blurb says that we may think we know the story, but we really don't, and that Larson's book is filled with glamor, mystery, suspense and evocative characters.

I take blurbs with a grain of salt, but this is Erik Larson, after all, the man who has given us spellbinders like In the Garden of Beasts, The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck and Isaac's Storm. I pre-ordered Dead Wake months ago and I'll be haunting my mailbox next week until it arrives.

Speaking of mystery, suspense and evocative characters (but not so much glamor), March 10 will also see the publication of Olen Steinhauer's new novel, All the Old Knives (Minotaur). I had the opportunity to read an advance review copy of this one, and it's an unusual, but gripping espionage thriller, with nearly all the action taking place in one evening, in a restaurant.

Henry and Celia were lovers and fellow CIA agents in Vienna when a terrorist hijacking went very wrong on the tarmac at the city's airport, after a low-level CIA agent who happened to be on the plane had his identity discovered by the terrorists. Was the agent betrayed and, if so, how? After that terrible tragedy, Celia left her old life, married, moved to the paradise of Carmel, California, and became a stay-at-home mother to two kids. Now, Henry calls to say that he's in the area for a conference and would love to get together for dinner.

At the restaurant, they begin with that polite chit-chat of old colleagues and lovers; they talk about mutual friends and work acquaintances, Celia's kids and husband, the beauty of Carmel. With each glass of wine (and there are many) and each bit of perfectly composed California cuisine, the talk becomes deeper and more intense. They circle each other, looking for vulnerabilities that will bring out the truth of their old relationship and what really happened that terrible day in Vienna. These old knives can still slice.

Who knows what may lurk behind the doors of these quaint Carmel eateries?

The story is told in the alternating voices of Henry and Celia. Is one of them an unreliable narrator? Are both of them? This is a quick read, but completely engrossing. I was gripping the book so hard I left indentations. When I reached the end, nearly everything Henry and Celia said now appeared in a different light.

I've read all but one of Olen Steinhauer's many espionage novels, and I'm a big fan. In this case, I was impressed that he went in a different direction with his plotting and that it was a success. In the book, he says he wrote the story in a very short time, inspired by having seen The Song of Lunch, a televised adaptation of Christopher Reid's poem, which stars Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson as former lovers who meet for lunch in a London restaurant, 15 years after the end of their affair. If you saw that production, you might be particularly interested in reading All the Old Knives.

Do you remember that old line, "If you can remember the '60s, you weren't really there"? I was in high school during the Summer of Love and in college during the ferment of the early to mid-'70s, and I thought I remembered those times. But now I'm reading an advance review copy of Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin Press, April 7), and I'm seeing I was wrong, in a big way.

Sure, I remember when the Weather Underground accidentally blew up one of their members' family's townhouse in Manhattan; the Kent State shootings; the massive bombing of the University of Wisconsin building; Patty Heart's kidnapping, apparent conversion to a cadre in the Symbionese Liberation Army, the live televised shootout and inferno of the SLA hideout in Los Angeles and Patty going on the run for over a year until her eventual capture in San Francisco. I remember that the national news every night during that period seemed like a nonstop cycle of updates about the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and the student protest movement. But I either never knew or plain forgot about just how much shooting, bombing, kidnapping and other violent actions were associated with the various self-styled revolutionary groups.

Here's a bit of trivia: Dustin Hoffman lived next door to the townhouse in
Greenwich Village that the Weather Underground accidentally blew up

Burrough writes that in 1970, 330 bombs were set off by our own citizens. Usually, the bombers timed the devices to explode after hours and phoned in warnings, so it was rare to have fatalities or even injuries. Still, we're talking about bombs going off and causing serious damage in buildings like the New York Police Department's headquarters, major Manhattan banks, the National Guard building in Washington, DC, the Marin County (CA) courthouse, the Presidio Army base in San Francisco, even the US Capitol and the Pentagon, and many more important sites. Just imagine if that happened today!

I'm finding this a fascinating read, and it will have me reflecting for a long time about those times, where we are today, and what accounts for the differences in who now engages in violent political action and how we respond.

I've written here so many times about Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series. As soon as I finish one book, I start looking out for the next one. As far as I'm concerned, he can't write them fast enough. I won't have long to wait for his new one, The Lady From Zagreb (G. P. Putnam's Sons, April 7). This is the 10th book in the series, but if you're a regular reader, you know Kerr has jumped around a lot in time. The good news is that means reading the series in order isn't all that critical.

This book is set in 1942 and 1943. Bernie is a criminal investigator for the Nazi SD, and his first case in this story is to find out who beat an attorney to death in his office––with a bust of Hitler. Bernie already has a connection with the victim, who had asked him to provide information about the attorney's suspicion that a charitable foundation was a fraud.  A year later, with no solution to the lawyer's murder, a new case is pressed on Bernie. He's asked by Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels (whom Bernie refers to––not to his face, of course––as Mahatma Propagandhi or, more often, Joey the Crip) to help a film starlet named Dalia Dresner track down her missing father. Goebbels, a famously unattractive but powerful and oversexed man, was known for pursuing actresses, so I'm going to guess he won't be happy when Bernie falls for Dalia.

Dalia's case takes Bernie to Yugoslavia, where the Nazis had teamed up with the ultra-nationalist and repressive Croatian group called the Ustashe. The Ustashe actions may not be as well known as some of the others in World War II, especially by those in the so-called bloodlands, but they were every bit as chillingly brutal and genocidal. Bernie will witness yet more of the atrocities of his own people and their allies.

Hitler and Goebbels at German's famous UFA film studio

Kerr makes Bernie Gunther a sort of wisecracking German Sam Spade, and combines classic hardboiled plot lines with serious issues of how a decent guy––but no angel––gets by in Nazi Germany. Publishers Weekly says this one's superlative, so I'm even more anxious than usual to read what fresh hell Bernie Gunther's gotten into.

Here's another bit of trivia I learned recently. Philip Kerr is married to journalist Jane Thynne, who is also a novelist. She has a series featuring a British/German actress named Clara Vine, who is trying to become a film star in Germany in the 1930s and gets mixed up with powerful Nazis. I just got the first book in the series, Black Roses, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Thynne's Clara Vine deals with the people and events that Bernie Gunther comes up against in his series.

You know how our seasonal preview posts are supposed to be about the books we're most looking forward to reading? Well, there is this one book that I know I have to read, but I susupect I'll hate myself afterward. It's Andrew Morton's 17 Carnations: The Royals, the Nazis and the Biggest Cover-Up in History (Grand Central, March 10). I mean, first of all, what an embarrassingly over-the-top title! Second, the author is Andrew Morton, an English writer of celebrity biographies. He's written about Princess Diana, Prince William and Kate Middleton, Tom Cruise, Madonna, Monica Lewinsky, and Angelina Jolie. Some of his books have sold well, but many have been heavily criticized, especially the Angelina Jolie bio.

So why will I read this book? You know I can't resist a story about how the former Edward VIII, who famously abdicated the British throne to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, supposedly conspired with the Nazis to be re-installed as the British monarch once Germany invaded Britain. Documentary evidence ostensibly existed, but a secret operation was launched to recover and destroy it, to preserve the monarchy. I am very dubious about the story (to say the least) and I would bet serious money that Morton will focus on all the most salacious stories about Simpson. The title alone tells me that. The "17 Carnations" part is a shorthand reference to a bit of scurrilous and never-verified gossip that Wallis Warfield Simpson had an affair with Nazi Germany's Ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and that he gave her 17 carnations to memorialize each time they slept together. I haven't read anything really trashy in awhile; maybe that's also part of why I'm attracted to this in spite of myself. So here's the deal: I'll read it so you don't have to.

Note: Thanks to the publishers for providing advance review copies of Olen Steinhauer's All the Old Knives and Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage. Some of my description of Olen Steinhauer's All the Old Knives is taken from the review I posted on Amazon under my username there.

Book Review of Olen Steinhauer's An American Spy

An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer

The Cold War era was the heyday of the spy novel. The bad guys were Soviets or East Germans, and the action involved gray men in gray cities behind the Iron Curtain. When the Cold War ended, some thought that would mean the demise of the spy novel, but they were wrong. There will always be the "other," an enemy to hate and fear. Today, we have terrorists of various stripes, of course, but we also have a new bogeyman in town, and he's Chinese. As well as a change in adversary, modern spy fiction reflects other global developments. The conspiracies these days are worldwide, with each side forming shifting alliances with armies, terrorists, self-styled freedom fighters and tribes from every hotspot on the globe. Spies jet from New York to London to Geneva to Hong Kong and dozens of other locales, using all the latest technologies to try to outmaneuver each other.

An American Spy is as cynical as any Cold War novel, and at least as full of double- and triple-crosses. Milo Weaver, a former "Tourist" with the CIA, is recovering from a gunshot wound to the gut and the obliteration of his department, both orchestrated by Xin Zhu, an operative with China's security service. Milo wants nothing more than to make his exit from the spy business permanent, to join the civilian life and to be a regular husband to his wife, Tina, and father to his stepdaughter, Stephanie. But Alan Drummond, Milo's old boss, is determined to exact revenge on Xin Zhu, and he drags Milo into his scheme.

At the same time, Xin Zhu is threatened by more than Alan's scheme, as he finds himself––and, possibly, his beloved wife––the target of another plot by hidden enemies within his own security service. Milo will find himself and his family caught in the middle when Alan's scheme and the Chinese plot come together.

Here's where you notice a more subtle difference between Cold War spy fiction and Olen Steinhauer's Milo Weaver series. In the former, the operatives are usually lone wolves, with their personal relationships tending to be fleeting or emotionally barren. In An American Spy, family relationships are preeminent, not just to Milo, but to Alan, to Xin Zhu and to several secondary characters. The need to protect the family or to avenge harm done to family members forms the motive for much of the plot. It adds a different dimension to the spy story.

This is the third volume in the Milo Weaver series, following The Tourist and The Nearest Exit.  While this book can be read as a standalone, I don't recommend it. Almost 100 pages of the book go by before Milo Weaver even appears on the scene, and if you don't already know who Xin Zhu, Erika Schwartz and Letitia Jones are, you could be excused for wondering what they have to do with Milo and why the book seems to be about them. And even when Milo does make his appearance, he may seem to be largely passive––not surprising, considering he is a reluctant player in the game.

The plot is slow to draw the reader into its web, the pace quickening only in the last quarter of the book. This may not be satisfying to a reader who is unfamiliar with the prior books in the series or to one who is more thriller-oriented. This is a spy story, not a thriller. It's about the machinations of the characters; figuring out their hidden meanings and motivations and how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. And, most of all, it's about a couple of enemies, Milo Weaver and Xin Zhu, who have an unspoken understanding of each other, and a sad and hard-earned knowledge of the price their professions exact on them and their families. This is a rewarding read for someone who has an interest in that more personal kind of spy story and the patience to follow an intricate and deliberately-paced plot.

Before Olen Steinhauer wrote the Milo Weaver books, he wrote a terrific espionage series about a fictional Communist country at the end of the Cold War era. In addition to the Milo Weaver books, I highly recommend that series. Here are the books in that series, in publication-date order: The Bridge of Sighs, The Confession, 36 Yalta Boulevard, Liberation Movements and Victory Square.

Note: I received a free review copy of An American Spy, and a version of this review appears on the Amazon product page under my Amazon username.