Fall Preview 2014: Part Five

It's been so warm I can barely remember what it's like to put on a sweater. I'm looking forward to the day my lemon cookie needs a hot tea rather than an iced tea accompaniment. Then I'll pick up my tea, a cookie, and one of these books, and head for the comfy chair.

I have a bone to pick with Random House, American publisher of English novelist David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks. Why do we get the kinda boring cover at the right, while the Brits get Sceptre's feast-for-the-eyes cover below?

The Bone Clocks has already been long-listed for the Booker Prize, but it must dog paddle across the Atlantic before arriving on our shores next Tuesday, September 2nd. It is apparently very ambitious and the "most Cloud Atlas-y" novel Mitchell has written in the last 10 years. Publishers Weekly's starred review even asks, "Is The Bone Clocks the most ambitious novel ever written, or just the most Mitchell-esque?" Yikes! Sometimes "ambitious" seems to be code for "You're going to have to force yourself to finish it so you can discuss it around the water cooler," but Mitchell's books are invariably interesting even if somewhat maddening.

Like Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks is long (640 pages), with six overlapping narratives. The story is told by five narrators, including Holly Sykes, whom we first meet as a feisty 15-year-old girl running away from home in Gravesend, England, in 1984. Holly isn't a typical teenager. She has heard voices she dubbed "the Radio People," and she's somehow become involved in a spiritual war between these "soul-decanting" Radio People and the "Horologists" of the Marinus from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, who are trying to stop them. This is a genre-straddling novel of sci fi/horror/fantasy/realism about free will and destiny. By the time it winds down, we've observed Holly for 60 years.

It's been a few years since I read Timothy Hallinan's The Fear Artist (see review here). I'm pleased to see the next one in the series, For the Dead (Soho Crime), will be out on November 4th. These books feature American writer Poke Rafferty, his Thai wife, Rose, and their adopted-off-the-streets daughter, Miaow, now in junior high.

Life is going well for the Raffertys, and they are preparing to welcome another member into their family. Then Miaow and her boyfriend, Andrew, buy a stolen iPhone and discover it contains pictures of two disgraced and murdered police officers. This discovery jeopardizes the lives of the entire family, since the Bangkok police investigation of the officers' deaths is not on the up-and-up. For their safety, the Rafferty family may need to depend on someone who has betrayed them in the past. The warmth of feeling between these characters and Hallinan's plotting, witty descriptions, and knowledge of Bangkok make this an unusual and appealing series.

Don't you love it when you unexpectedly come across something new by a writer whose previous book you enjoyed? Anybody who has ever been involved with house-sitting would appreciate the surrealistic Care of Wooden Floors, by journalist Will Wiles, in which our narrator, a nameless British copywriter, house-sits a gorgeous apartment for old friend Oskar, a somewhat obsessional classical musician. Oskar has notes for Nameless everywhere, but there are three major rules: don't play around with the piano, take good care of the two cats, and don't let anything happen to the French oak floors. Do I need to tell you Nameless breaks all three rules in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way? Then things really spiral out of control.

That book is Kafkaesque, and so is Wiles's next, The Way Inn (Harper Perennial, September 16, 2014). Neil Double would have flummoxed everyone on the old TV series What's My Line?. He's a conference surrogate, hired to attend a business conference so someone else won't have to. Wearing a cheap suit, staying in an anonymous hotel room (his favorite hotel brand-name is the Way Inn), listening to boring speakers, and eating tasteless food suits Double's personality and life philosophy just fine, until he makes the mistake of mentioning his occupation to Tom Graham at a Meetex conference about––wait for it––conferences. Graham works for Meetex, and he takes great umbrage about Double's doubling in for the legitimate conference attendee. Double's life assumes the quality of a nightmare. There is no guarantee the answer to his problems is the mysterious Dee, a woman who hints to him about strange secrets in the Way Inn.

It's hard to think of a crime-fiction writer more versatile than Donald E. Westlake. He wrote under his own name and several pseudonyms, and his series protagonists ranged from the comic, unlucky crook Dortmunder to Parker, a cold-hearted and violent professional thief. Westlake also wrote screenplays, such as Payback and The Stepfather. When he died at age 75 in 2008, Westlake had won lifetime achievement awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the British Crime Writers Association. And he was still going to his office, where he typed all his manuscripts on his manual typewriter.

As a Westlake fan, I cannot wait to read The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, edited by Levi Stahl, with a foreword by Lawrence Block (University of Chicago, September 24, 2014). This is a compilation of material, such as previously published and unpublished essays, pieces from an unpublished autobiography, a history of private-eye fiction, letters, interviews, appreciations of fellow writers, some recipes concocted by his characters, an essay by his wife Abby, and more. Westlake was insightful and funny. Even people who have never read his fiction would likely enjoy this book.

Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Coffee House, distributed by Consortium; September 1, 2014) won the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. It's McBride's first novel, and it looks like a doozy. It's about a nameless girl, born into a poor, rural Irish family with an older brother she adores, a very abusive Catholic mother, and an absent father. The brother's operation for a brain tumor leaves him with physical and mental deficits and also deeply affects his family.

We follow the girl through her childhood to college, and there are upsetting aspects involving sexuality. She narrates the whole 227 pages in an Irish lilt, in what is less a stream of consciousness than an interior monologue with ungrammatical sentence fragments or a word or two. Most punctuation, except for periods, is missing. Reviewers say the effect is thoughts too inarticulate or rapid for complete sentences. Here's an example:

Suddenly. She's all here mother. She. With scalding prayers. Forgotten her old lash phone calls. Am I not here? I. Give me a good punch on my face. Stop. It's fine now. It's fine now isn't that why you came? To pick up. Bits and pieces. Let her do her thing. Name of the father but shhh. Lead us not into temptation. That's right. All very well. I. So I won't utter a single. No. I will. Do this. I will do this for you because. I can."

This book is definitely not for everyone, but it sounds like an unforgettable read.

Turn up the reggae music and light one up if you've got one, because I'm going to tell you about Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Hardcover, October 2, 2014). It's a 560-page epic, set primarily in Jamaica, as well as in New York, covering several decades of violence, poverty, and corruption. Although Bob Marley isn't mentioned by name, one can assume he's "the singer" whose attempted assassination in December 1976 is prompted by a political rivalry. Marley, his wife, and his manager are lucky to escape, and the wounded singer goes into exile in England. The novel's headcount and dozen narrative voices (Marley's isn't one of them) are hardly affected.

The major characters are low-level thugs and big baddies, such as hit man John-John K and Copenhagen City gang kingpins Papa-Lo and Josey Wales; politicians from the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People's National Party (PNP); CIA agents worried about the spread of communism; journalists, including one from Rolling Stone; and Nina Burgess, whom PW calls "undoubtedly one of this year's great characters." Nina begins as a Kingston receptionist, sheds one identity after another, has an affair with the singer, and ends up in New York before the book ends.

Mathematicians work their tails off on problems that have stumped their predecessors for centuries, and what happens when they solve them? An outer-space alien from Vonnadoria kills Andrew Martin of Cambridge after Martin solves the Riemann Hypothesis, and then the alien takes Martin's place so all evidence the Hypothesis was ever solved can be obliterated (Matt Haig's The Humans).

In Stuart Rojstaczer's The Mathematician's Shiva (Penguin, September 2, 2014), Rachela Karnokovitch, a brilliant mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, reportedly solves the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, but then dies of cancer and takes its solution to her grave. Her meteorologist son, Sasha, hopes to bury her with dignity; however, dozens of mathematical geniuses arrive in Madison, and, instead of sitting shiva with the family, do everything they can think of to discover Rachela's secrets, such as ripping up floorboards and holding a séance. Excerpts from Rachela's memoir of fleeing Poland as a child during WWII are shown in flashback.

Author Rojstaczer is a former professor of geophysics at Duke, and his book looks like a lot of fun, even for those of us who started formulating excuses for missing homework as soon as our math teachers assigned those terrifying problems with the two trains leaving the station at different times and traveling at different velocities. PW calls Rojstaczer's book "hugely entertaining."

Have you read Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games? It's an epic centering around two men: Inspector Sartaj Singh, one of the few Sikhs on the Mumbai police force, and his pursuit of the Indian gangster Ganesh Gaitonde. This 928-page doorstopper even has a glossary of Mumbai slang in the back. It's a great read, and I've been looking forward to reading whatever else Chandra might write.

Finally, here it is. Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (Graywolf Press, September 2, 2014) is "part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir" of traveling from India to the United States and of working as a programmer before becoming a writer. Chandra explores the connections between the worlds of technology and art, and the cultures of code writers and artists. This is a must read for me.

Tomorrow we'll take a look at more books Sister Mary is putting on her list for fall.

I Spy a Sleeping Spy

Last week my good friend Sister Mary Murderous reviewed Olen Steinhauer's An American Spy. I was in the mood for espionage, but the mental picture of spies chasing through the snow in Prague or standing on a dark cold street in Helsinki made me pause and shiver. How much nicer for a spy to hibernate during the winter and to awaken in the spring when it is warmer.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Hibernation may be pleasant for the spy, but it presents the spy's master with obvious potential problems. The goal is for the spy to be comfortable sleeping in enemy territory while disarming the enemy's suspicions, yet the spy shouldn't be so comfortable s/he will refuse to be awakened. The spymaster in Donald E. Westlake's Money for Nothing gets around this problem in an ingenious way. His sleeping spy doesn't realize he's been asleep, or even a spy, until he's told to wake up.

Here's how it happens. Josh Redmont receives a mysterious check for $1,000 from United States Agent. Redmont is a fairly honest guy. He tries to trace the check but he doesn't get anywhere and he could use the money. Whoever United States Agent is, the check is good so Redmont cashes it––then the one he gets the next month, and the next month after that. The checks keep coming for seven years and Redmont keeps cashing them.

Then one day, a stranger introduces himself as United States Agent and tells Redmont that he's active. The threatened safety of Redmont's wife and child will insure Redmont's cooperation in an assassination scheme that is somewhere between a Westlake comic caper and a hard-boiled Westlake-writing-as-Richard-Stark plot. The book's indeterminate nature keeps it from being top-of-the-line Westlake, but it's still an entertaining book about a man who unexpectedly proves to be a more enterprising agent than his spymaster dreamed possible.

Eric Clark's The Sleeper is more serious, ironic and suspenseful than Westlake's book. It invites discussion about gray areas of morality. Clark's protagonist is James Fenn, a young British journalist who is a communist sympathizer like his father. Fenn thinks he knows what he's letting himself in for when he walks out of Hungary in 1956 with a rescued baby strapped to his chest. The escape from Hungary is planned because Fenn is to be Russia's sleeping spy in England. The baby is a "welcome bonus" who is adopted by Joseph Banks, a very rich English academic, and his Hungarian-born wife.

It's now more than 20 years later, in the 1980s. Fenn no longer works on Fleet Street. He, his wife and two young daughters have moved to Malta, where they live simply but happily. Fenn isn't much of a Marxist anymore.

Richard Stanley Godwin, former Defence Minister, has just been elected British prime minister. In West Germany, the CIA has been questioning Vitali Suslov, but the Americans can't decide whether he's a genuine defector or a KGB plant. Based on what Suslov says, someone in England has passed secret information to the Russians. The CIA suspects Godwin's good friend and adviser, Sir Joseph Banks.

The CIA insists that the British investigate Banks, but there's a big problem. Several years earlier, British Intelligence tried to investigate Banks and when Defence Minister Godwin got wind of it, he was outraged and put a stop to it. Now, the investigation will have to be done without Prime Minister Godwin's knowledge. An elaborate plan is devised that involves Fenn, the journalist with a special connection to Banks through Banks's adopted daughter. The British know Fenn is a never-awakened Soviet spy, so a British agent named Mallahide will pretend to be the Russian spymaster who tells Fenn it is time to wake up.

The ensuing scheme involving the manipulation of Fenn and the targeting of Banks is more complex than it needs to be. This makes it less believable, but its complexity makes it noteworthy and worthy of Machiavelli. As the screw comes down hard, the plot twists and turns and the tension mounts to the almost unbearable point. Mallahide pops more and more aspirin and Fenn sleeps less and less until the book's conclusion, when the reader can finally put the book down and sleep.

That is, unless the reader needs another book with a sleeping spy, such as the following: William Safire's Sleeper Spy features a Russian spy who has earned a fortune in the U.S. through his investment of Russian money. The Russians have forgotten exactly who he is, but they––and the Americans––want to hunt him down. There is a race to identify an Oxford-educated IRA sleeper agent in former Director General of MI5 Stella Rimington's thriller, Secret Asset. Michael Gilbert's Into Battle is set on the eve of World War I, while Daniel Silva's The Unlikely Spy is set in World War II. In Manning Coles' second Tommy Hambledon book, A Toast to Tomorrow, a man with amnesia is released from the hospital and becomes an important person in the Nazi party before he remembers that he's a British spy. Now that's what I call hibernation!

Murder by the Numbers

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when readers who were completists, like myself, used to have to resort to reading the list printed in the first few pages of a book to see what other books an author had written and in which order. It did not take long to find that the flaw in this system was such that the list was frequently not in any particular order. Besides that, where I grew up you had to read just what was available.

One of the little solutions to this problem was to read books whose sequence was evident from the title; for instance, in series following the days of the week or months of the year. The first of these that I recall was the wonderful series by Harry Kemelman that began in 1964 with Friday the Rabbi Slept Late. The Rabbi was David Small, who lived in Barnard's Crossing, Massachusetts. Interesting cases came across his path and he was an excellent sleuth as well. What I recollect most clearly was his subtle education of the reader about some of the fine points of Judaism. I still have some of these old novels in paperback on my shelf and would like to reread them. There were seven days of the week before the Rabbi just solved cases on different days, completing the series more than thirty years later.

Perhaps better known and quite easy to read sequentially is Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series about a female private eye in Santa Teresa, California. A Is for Alibi began the run of alphabetical titles, which now is at V Is for Vengeance. Kinsey is an iconic heroine (when her story began we still used this term) who was raised by a no-nonsense aunt, and who was a police officer briefly before settling into career as a PI. She is a tough cookie who lives a minimalist lifestyle and has few––but very faithful––friends. The series began in 1982, the same year that V. I. Warshawski, the brainchild of Sara Paretsky, came to print. Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone pre-dates Kinsey by five years, first published in 1977. I enjoyed this series quite a bit but I am stalled at N.

In the late '80s, I found M. J. Adamson's series featuring Balthazar Marten. It began with Not Till a Hot January. It was a bitter cold January in New York and Det. Marten was being bored to icicles at his desk job that has kept him working and his mind partially off his personal problems. Balthazar has never totally recuperated from the bomb blast almost a year ago that killed his wife and ruined his leg. Now he has a new assignment that he really wished would have passed him by, but that was not to be. He is headed to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to help with the problems a new casino is having with organized crime.

Marten was well known for his recent work in the River Rat case, in which a serial killer was tracked and caught.  He did speak a good college Spanish and had a partner in the past who had helped him with the language and was Puerto Rican himself. So the powers that be thought he was the right man for the job.

Before he even gets settled in his hotel room by the beautiful harbor, he finds that he has been reassigned to new case of a possible serial killer of young women. This is considered by some a very un-Puerto Rican crime because the case, as it began, seemed very well planned and executed. On the island, murders were usually spontaneous. As a matter of fact, in San Juan they had two distinct homicide divisions. Homicide One, where the killer was unknown––and these crimes were rare––and a larger Homicide Two, for cases where the assailant was known soon after the murder; spouse or other family member, for example. I enjoyed this series because of the great sense of place, interesting and different types of crimes and because it is the only series I have read that takes place in Puerto Rico.

A second series featuring the months of the year is written by Jess Lourey. These are more contemporary and feature a somewhat disgruntled assistant librarian in Battle Lake, Michigan. In the first, May Day, Mira James is consistently foolish, which made it hard to admire her. Some of her cracks were witty and funny, but they were quite mean at the same time. There were many snide remarks when referring to the blue hair, raisin ranch, Q-Tip (white hair, white sneakers) generation. It might have been nice if there was one senior citizen she admired.

The first numerical series I completed was a short one by Donald E. Westlake, writing under the pen name Sam Holt, that was also published in the late '80s. Westlake explains in the preface of One of Us Is Wrong, that he wanted to try something different from his usual successful characters, so he arranged with his publisher this short series featuring Sam Holt, actor/sleuth. His publisher foiled him at the store when he found his books displayed as the author Sam Holt aka Donald Westlake. He never finished the series, stopping at The Fourth Dimension Is Death.

In What I Tell You Three Times Is False, Westlake takes our hero to an isolated location that Agatha Christie would envy. On a small island in the Caribbean, a group of actors and a director have been called together to do a pro bono effort intended to raise money for the American Cancer Society. They have been given the use of a large tower, once owned by a drug baron now in jail. Now it's owned by two movie producers, who have promised to do a certain amount of goodwill work. The idea is to do a "find a cure for cancer" commercial, and they have brought together a cast of exemplary fictional detectives. There is Sherlock Holmes, played for many years by Clement Hasbrouck, who lately has also been dubbed "Clement Hasbeen." Miss Jane Marple is also at hand and of late has been portrayed by Harriet Fitzgerald. The part of Charlie Chan is covered by a true Asian, Fred Li. The most current is TV detective Jack Packard, 6-foot-6, a criminologist, college professor, karate black belt and amateur detective with lots of skills and talents, played by the author Sam Holt. In real life (real life in the book, that is), the only thing that Sam shares with Jack is his height and his experience as a lowly traffic cop years ago.

Once on the island, a severe tropical storm cuts off all the inhabitants from the mainland. Naturally, in cases such as these, dire things happen to the radio as well and  communications are severed completely. This is a skillful retelling of the And Then There Were None type of story, or the cut-off-by-a-storm story, and some clues are obvious and then you talk yourself out of them. Naturally, in this case your money is on Jack Packard.

Two other numerical series I have tried are Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, beginning with One for the Money, and James Patterson's The Women’s Murder Club series, starting with 1st to Die. In both of these series, one was enough. On the other hand, Elizabeth Gunn's numerical series using sports metaphors and beginning with Triple Play in 1997, features Jake Hines, a police detective in Rutherford, Minnesota. These are fast-paced police procedurals with an interesting protagonist and a slightly unusual location.

There are other sequential series I am sure that might be in my future reading. These days, though, with websites like Stop, You're Killing Me! and Fantastic Fiction, I have no problem with finding what else an author has published and in what order. If anyone has some suggestions of mysteries written in a chronological or temporal pattern I would love to hear about them.

The Naughty Take Their Lumps

It's a lump of candy cane coal,
not a mouse dropping.

Yesterday, while shopping at Trader Joe's, I came across the perfect holiday gift for someone who's been naughty this year: little pieces of minty candy cane drenched in rich dark chocolate so that it resembles lumps of coal. You may have a person on your shopping list who deserves such a gift. God knows the world of crime fiction is replete with characters for whom such a gift would be appropriate.

Now, I'm not talking about villains so nasty their own mothers, if sensible, would shriek and run at the sight of them: Not Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter of Thomas Harris's Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs or the serial killer of T. Jefferson Parker's The Blue Hour. Not the criminal masterminds Professor Moriarty (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and the Deaf Man (Ed McBain). Or the psychopathic lawmen of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280.

And certainly not the vicious albino hit man Grady Fisher in Urban Waite's The Terror of Living. The word is "naughtiness," not "depravity." Hand the coal to the decent-but-flawed Phil Hunt, who spent 10 years imprisoned for the shotgun killing of a bait-shop owner during a robbery that netted him $40 when he was a young man. He straightened out after prison and married a good woman, but their lives are a constant quiet struggle. To supplement the income they make raising and boarding horses on a small farm in northwest Washington State, Hunt occasionally smuggles illegal drugs by riding one of his horses into the mountains and fetching a package dropped out of an airplane. Hunt should have quit while he was ahead. His last job is interrupted by off-duty deputy sheriff Bobby Drake, who struggles with emotional baggage involving his father, a disgraced ex-sheriff. The novice smuggler accompanying Hunt is caught, and the drugs are lost. Suddenly, Hunt's life, never easy, is made a heck of a lot harder now that he has Drake, the DEA, and Fisher, who's been hired by a drugs kingpin, hot on his trail.

The Terror of Living is Waite's 2011 debut, a book that straddles literary and mystery fiction. If you only read cozies, it's not for you; rather, it's for people who like Cormac McCarthy, Robert Stone, Graham Greene, Dennis Lehane or George Pelecanos. It's about how bad things happen to good people or how good people make bad decisions, setting them on a train going too fast for them to leap to safety. Waite's tale isn't entirely unpredictable, but his characters are eloquent, the setting is beautifully described, and the writing is assured. I look forward to this young writer's books in the years ahead.

Let's now stop gazing ahead and take a look back over our shoulders and across the pond (I have a crick in my neck just writing that), where another man merits a piece of our coal for naughtiness: Margery Allingham's Magersfontein Lugg, sleuth Albert Campion's second banana. Has there ever been a fictional character more aptly named than the lugubrious and vulgar Lugg? A Cockney who was once a cat burglar, Lugg now functions as Campion's loyal manservant, heavy, and expert on England's criminal underworld. Lugg is no better than he has to be. The first book in this Golden Age classic mystery series is The Crime at Black Dudley. In that book, Campion investigates the death of his host at a weekend house party without Lugg's assistance. He meets Lugg in the second book, Mystery Mile, while looking into all the deaths and close calls that occur around Judge Crowdy Lobbett. The most energetic, light-hearted, and creative wordplay in the series is found in More Work for the Undertaker, in which Campion and Lugg become involved with the extremely eccentric and literary Palinode family while searching for a multiple poisoner. The most serious and beautifully atmospheric book is The Tiger in the Smoke, featuring the escaped prisoner, sociopath Jack Havoc. (Allingham is wonderful with names.)

Like Lugg, E. W. Hornung's A. J. Raffles is a talented detective when tracking a man responsible for crimes other than his own. He is England's best cricketer and a sociable gentleman who lives at a prestigious address: The Albany, in Piccadilly. He's patriotic and once sends the Queen a gift. But Raffles receives a lump of coal because he's a daring and cynical thief who steals for the challenge and excitement in addition to the money, which he occasionally gives away. (That gift to the Queen was stolen.) He's a safe cracksman and a master of disguise.

Raffles appears in a novel and more than 20 stories chronicled by his old school friend Bunny Manders. (All of Hornung's short stories featuring Raffles, written from the 1890s to the 1920s, can be found in the 1984 book, The Complete Short Stories of Raffles--the Amateur Cracksman. After Hornung, other writers continued the series.) Bunny loves Raffles and is ambivalent about his criminal career.  Hornung's friend and brother-in-law, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, also didn't entirely approve of anti-hero Raffles. Although these stories exhibit the prejudices of their time, they are classic adventures that are a pleasure to read. You can also search for a play, several films, a radio series, and a British TV series that feature Raffles.

More idealistic and romantic than Raffles is Leslie Charteris's Simon Templar, a dashing figure whose true name is unknown and whose nickname is "The Saint." His calling card, which he leaves at scenes of his activities, features a stick figure with a halo. The Saint earns his coal by operating as "the Robin Hood of Modern Crime" outside the law to right wrongs and avenge innocent victims by stealing, killing, and helping people. He's a master of disguise, a skilled knife thrower, and an expert fighter. Danger is good for you, he says, because it makes you feel intensely alive. The tales are of all sorts: character studies, whodunits, ghost stories, science fiction, or straight adventures. We first meet The Saint, who has barely arrived in the small town of Baycombe on the coast of England before an assassin appears, in the 1928 book Meet the Tiger. Following that first appearance are portrayals in more novels (written from 1967 to the end by people other than Charteris), short stories, radio programs (Vincent Price is the best known Saint), several TV series (Roger Moore became internationally famous in this role), films (George Sanders in the 1930s and 40s), comics, plays, and magazines.

Before heading back to the United States, let's pay a visit to Colin Watson's Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, who well deserves her lumps because she's an endearingly genteel criminal who specializes in con games and theft. Miss Teatime appears in Lonelyheart 4122 and all subsequent books in the Flaxborough Chronicles series except Blue Murder. In Lonelyheart 4122, Inspector Purbright investigates the Handclasp House, a matrimonial bureau that may be involved in the disappearance of two women. Purbright runs across Miss Teatime and warns her about the bureau, but she pays no attention. In Just What the Doctor Ordered, three Flaxborough women are attacked by elderly men (one man threatens to "pollinate" one of these women). The men escape from the scene by running sideways in a crab-like fashion. Purbright suspects an herbal elixir for virility. He doesn't know what to suspect in Six Nuns and a Shotgun, because all he has is a telegram about two naked nuns in Philadelphia. In all of these books, the clever and enterprising Miss Teatime is a thorn in Purbright's side. Watson's Flaxborough books are filled with eccentric characters; they are clever and amusing. I highly recommend them.

We'll have to catch Simon Brett's Melita Pargeter, a gentleman crook's widow who often turns her hand to investigations, and Jonathan Gash's shady antiques dealer, Lovejoy, later. Let's return to the States, where our next coal recipient is Donald E. Westlake's John Dortmunder, a determined and good-hearted man who has no pretensions to a life outside of crime. Dortmunder isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, however, so the plots he masterminds are invariably foiled by his scruples, his inept colleagues, or plain rotten luck. There are fifteen books in this entertaining series, which opens with the newly paroled Dortmunder's attempt to steal the Balabomo emerald in 1970's The Hot Rock. These books feature masterful plotting, great small-time crooks' lingo, fine suspense, twists and turns, and a delicious sense of irony. I enjoyed all of them. Here are a couple: Bank Shot, in which the bank is in a mobile home, so stealing the money means stealing the bank; What's the Worst that Could Happen? features the theft of Dortmunder's lucky ring by a well-to-do businessman, so Dortmunder assembles a team to seek revenge; Bad News involves the taking over of an Indian gambling casino. For a list of the books in the series, see Westlake's page on Stop You're Killing Me.

We could drop off coal to John D. MacDonald's adventurer Travis McGee, but that will take a separate trip. Instead, we'll make a quick visit to Bernie Rhodenbarr, Lawrence Block's genial New York City burglar. The first book in the series is Burglars Can't be Choosers, in which Rhodenbarr is caught burgling an apartment. He pays off the cops, but then things change when they find a body, and Rhodenbarr has to run. Among good books in this series are The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (Bernie's friend Carolyn's cat is kidnapped, and a Mondrian painting might be the ransom) and The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (Bernie has opened a used bookstore in an attempt to go straight. When his landlord's demands return him to a life of crime, a dead body in the apartment he's burglarizing and a frame job involving a stolen baseball card collection give him a headache).

Our coal all delivered to its worthy recipients, let's relax with some Speculoos Wafers (from a Washington Post recipe based on a thin, spiced French cookie) and some strong coffee. While we're relaxing, we can talk about other characters who require our coal and the gifts we're going to give those who are nice.