What We Think We Know

How many of you have kicked your spouse under the holiday dinner table to warn him about dangerous conversational territory, only to be rewarded for your subtlety when he loudly demands, "Why are you kicking me under the table?"

I'm asking this question because I've been doing a lot of thinking about the assumptions involved in our communications, interpretations, and perceptions. It's easy to be wrong. Take the Gary Larson cartoon on the right. See the guy carrying the bazooka? Now, maybe Larson isn't kidding, and we can assume that man is a wacky, paranoid survivalist. In that case, it would be smart to avoid eye contact and skedaddle across the street. Then again, maybe Larson is joking. It could be Halloween, and that dude might be headed to a costume party. Or, perhaps he's some kids' beloved Uncle Bob, waiting on the corner to be picked up for a fun day of inner-tubing down the Green River, and his weapon is an awesome water gun for little Johnny or Susie. Yeah, that's the ticket. That's what I'll assume.

There are two books I've enjoyed recently because they explore themes of communication, interpretation, and perception. I'm going to tell you briefly about one of them today. I'll be back tomorrow to tell you about the other.

"I am a doctor," begins Marc Schlosser, in Herman Koch's deliciously dark Summer House with Swimming Pool (translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett; Hogarth/Crown, June 2014). The cynical Schlosser isn't quite as good looking as George Clooney, but Schlosser tells us most people find him very charming. His liberal prescribing habits and the blind eye he turns on his patients' unhealthy overindulgences have created a practice popular with people in the creative and entertainment fields. (Oh man, we aren't as lucky as Schlosser's patients. He coddles them, but he doesn't spare us. His vivid observations about excessive eating and drinking's effects on the human body will make you padlock your fridge and abandon your liquor cabinet.)

We learn very early on that one of these patients, famous actor Ralph Meier, is dead. Schlosser is facing the medical board's scrutiny, and Meier's widow, Judith, is incensed. Schlosser relates how this came about by looking back at his Mediterranean vacation, when Meier had invited Schlosser, his wife, and their two beautiful blond daughters to come stay at his summer house. Also there were Judith Meier, their two sons, Judith's mother, and an American filmmaker and his much-younger model/actress girlfriend. These characters––and other people and animals in the neighborhood––are well described in their varying degrees of unhappiness on the road to oblivion, and Schlosser has interesting takes on them.

Just in case you don't know what a weasel looks like

Schlosser circles around, telling us about himself and one of his medical school professors, and giving us his dissection of the eventful summer pieces at a time; we only discover the truth of it all at the book's end. Along the way, the developing portrait of Schlosser––whom I can't discuss without using words such as "weasel," "reptile," and "chutzpah"––and his remarks about nature's warning signs, the perception of time passing, and people's behavior and events will keep you reading until the early hours. If you have an upcoming appointment with your own physician, I prescribe saving this book until after that visit if it's the type that requires you remove all your clothes. Otherwise, enjoy your vacation on the dark side with Dr. Schlosser.

On Tuesday, I'll tell you about Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You (Penguin, June 2014).

Bang-Up Hot-Weather Books

"Talking about a biohazard, you should have a warning posted on the door," my husband said, looking into our bedroom. There I was, sorting and rearranging books. I am at the stage where you have an even bigger mess than the one you started with days before. Books are stacked all over the floor, piled on the bed and falling off the dresser. His remarks were a mistake. He'd been reading about the discovery of 50-year-old vials of smallpox and other deadly viruses forgotten in a US governmental lab's cold storage. Since he put the apocalypse on my mind, as soon as he left the room I abandoned cleaning for digging for books like Nevil Shute's 1957 On the Beach, in which a sailor jumps ship to return home in the aftermath of a nuclear war; Stephen King's The Stand, about a battle between good and evil and a deadly virus called Captain Trips; and Jeff VanderMeer's quiet and creepy Authority (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2014), the second in his Southern Reach mystery/horror/sci fi trilogy. (Authority shouldn't be read until you've read Annihilation (see my review here).)

I'll tell you more about the postapocalypse when I find all my the-future-is-the-pits books. In the meantime, I'd like to mention some books I've come across in my searching, the ones perfect for reading this summer.

A few days ago, I happened upon Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat, also published under the better title of A Cure for All Diseases, and couldn't resist a re-read. It's the second to last in the Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe series and dedicated to fans of Jane Austen (you'll see why when you read it). Dalziel is at the Avalon clinic in the seaside resort of Sandytown, recovering from injuries suffered in an explosion. While fresh psychology grad Charlotte Heywood's emails to her sister sometimes feel excessive, I love this book for its look at Dalziel as an invalid (!) and Daphne "Big Bum" Denham, a rich woman who likes to make people around her dance. The ocean setting and the murder (a sure nominee for best summer crime scene) make it perfect hot-weather reading. It can be read as a standalone, but it's best appreciated if you already know Hill's characters––and believe me, they're well worth knowing. I'm now reading Death Comes for the Fat Man to remind myself how Dalziel was blown into his coma in the first place (of course, PC Adolphus Hector was involved) and how Peter and Wieldy investigate in the Fat Man's absence.

Scotsman Donald Pace goes missing in northern Africa during World War II in Gerard Woodward's poignant and offbeat comedy Letters from an Unknown Woman (also published as Nourishment). Donald's wife, Tory, works toward the war effort at Farraway’s Gelatine Factory. She has evacuated their children to the Cotswolds and is living southeast of London with her widowed mother, Mrs. Head, as the book begins. Like Death Comes for the Fat Man, Woodward's book begins with a big bang. This one, courtesy of a German bomb, levels Dando's butcher shop next door and provides an almost perfect leg of what Mrs. Head and Tory hope is pork for their dinner. Soon a letter from Donald arrives. He's prisoner at a German stalag and he begs Tory to send him dirty letters. Tory's efforts to satisfy him awaken a new woman. It's much more than a sexual awakening. It's Tory taking charge of her own life. By the time Donald, a very bad sort, returns home, no one is the same.

In I Shall Be Near to You by Erin Lindsay McCabe (Crown, January 2014), onetime tomboy Rosetta Edwards refuses to stay home when her new husband, Jeremiah Wakefield, joins the Union Army to earn money to buy a farm in Nebraska. When he goes off to fight the Civil War, she cuts her hair, becomes "Ross Stone" and passes a cursory physical to fight at his side with other volunteers from rural New York. This beautifully written book, narrated by the memorable Rosetta/Ross, is a love story set against the loud and dirty backdrop of war. It's based on letters written home by hundreds of northern and southern women who actually fought in the Civil War.

And now back to the trenches of book sorting and shelving in our bedroom.

Two for the Hammock: Dunant and Hiaasen

How's the summer reading going so far? Hitting rough seas or sailing through books like a dolphin goes through waves?

My own reading hasn't been on cruise control. It's been warmer than usual on California's Central Coast, and I've found it too easy to accelerate from zero to crabby. This has made me very finicky about books. Some need to wait until it's a little cooler. Take Summertime, All the Cats Are Bored by Philippe Georget (Europa, July 2013). The reviews for this French noir are excellent, but they contain words like "languid" and "exquisite Gallic ennui." As eager as I am to meet tired Perpignan cops Sebag and Molino, I'll wait until I'm not so heat exhausted myself. Likewise, I'll postpone the literary horror Red Moon by Benjamin Percy (Grand Central, 2013), described as "a cross between Stephen King and the Michael Chabon of The Yiddish Policemen's Union." Its lycan terrorists sound too energetic for my current listless self. It might be time to cool off with James M. Tabor's Frozen Solid, a tense thriller set at the South Pole, published in 2013 by Ballantine. It supposedly reads like "Andromeda Strain meets The Thing." No need to break into a mental sweat for that, and a lot of fun, I hope.

Here's a dissimilar duo that recently hit the spot:

As soon as I opened Sarah Dunant's Blood & Beauty: The Borgias: A Novel (Random House, 2013), I wanted to yell "that's amore!" One finds a historical note describing the city-states of Italy, family trees of these city-states' rulers, and a map of Italy at the turn of the 15th century before the story begins on August 11, 1492, with the papal election of the Spanish Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who will reign as Pope Alexander VI.

While the animal on the Borgia family crest is the bull, "everyone knows it is the cunning of the fox that runs in the family." Wily Alexander, who is both warm and ruthless, immediately sets out to amass wealth and political power through his much-loved children by his mistress Vannozza dei Caanei: cold Cesare, who resigns his cardinalcy to become a formidable politician and a genius as a soldier; beautiful Lucrezia, who enters into three politically advantageous marriages, and is close to Cesare; Jofré, the youngest, marries Sancia of Aragon for political reasons, and she then has affairs with Jofré's older brothers; Juan marries and has two children before he is murdered in 1497.

Can you think of any other family dynasty more in need of a good public relations firm than the Borgias? Through her depiction of history and psychological portraits, Dunant shows that they were more than an incestuous family of crafty murderers. They were a brutal family, but they lived in brutal times. Blood & Beauty, which ends in 1502, will be followed by another Borgias book. Given Dunant's fascinating characters, story-telling talents, and rich prose, I'll definitely read it.

It's a long way from 15th-century Italy to present-day Florida, but there are still people determined to make money and gain power through deviousness.

It's very comforting, when you're feeling kinda grumpy and sweaty, to read the crime fiction of Florida native Carl Hiaasen, in which he uses black comedy to savage the greedy, the corrupt, and the ignorant who are ruining the environment of his beloved state. His 2013 book, Bad Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf), doesn't rank with his best, but it's still plenty entertaining for people who don't have issues with raunchiness, gross-out moments, or bad language; and who enjoy oddball characters, zany plots, and poking fun at South Florida.

The story involves Andrew Yancy of the Monroe County sheriff's department, who did something bad in public with a portable vacuum cleaner to his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend's husband, and Yancy will be busted down to restaurant inspector as a result. He will do anything to get his badge back, and a window of opportunity opens when the sheriff asks him to drive a severed human arm—caught by a tourist fishing on his Florida Keys honeymoon, of course—up to Miami.

There are only 250-300 of these tiny Key deer
left. They are about 2-feet high at the shoulder.

Now, you won't believe the bizarre directions the plot takes from these facts: Miami forensic pathologist Rosa Campesino is pretty and adventurous, as well as smart; Eve Stripling recognizes the severed arm as wearing her husband Nick's wedding ring and is accused by her stepdaughter Caitlin of killing him; Christopher Grunion is breaking ground on a resort at Lizard Cay in the Bahamas, displacing and angering Neville, owner of a monkey that appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean; developer Evan Shook is building a spec McMansion on the lot next to Yancy's house, and Yancy passionately hates the McMansion; and Yancy's ex-girlfriend, Bonnie Witt, is wanted in Oklahoma. There you go.

Tonight, instead of visiting the South Pole via Frozen Solid, I'm reading A.S.A. Harrison's The Silent Wife, which features alternating character portraits of Todd and Jodi, a man and wife in a marriage deteriorating to murder. I'm emulating the conditions of the South Pole, however, by accompanying Harrison's book with homemade salted caramel ice cream. I should have accompanied Blood & Beauty with an Italian gelato, and Bad Monkey with coconut ice cream, but I try not to plug in my ice cream machine when no one else is home. I'm sure you're good enough detectives that I don't need to tell you why.

I'd love to hear how your own summer reading is going.

Review of Bill James's Vacuum

Vacuum by Bill James

Nature abhors a vacuum. All characters in Bill James's Vacuum, the 28th novel in his farcical-noir series, are in complete agreement about that. The clamorous debate is about how Nature will fill it.

In James's previous series book, 2011's I Am Gold, Manse Shale's wife Naomi and son Laurent are gunned down as Naomi drives Shale's Jaguar to school. Grief-stricken, Shale has retired as CEO of his hugely profitable "recreational firm" (a comprehensive drug-trafficking business) and immersed himself in religion. He's delegated all responsibility to his No. 2 man, Michael Redvers Arlington. Now, when Arlington's unbribable bodyguard, Edison L. Whitehead, calls Arlington "a great man, great intermittently," he means Arlington is very capable when he hasn't morphed, without warning, into General Francisco Franco. When Arlington is Francisco Francoing ("F.Fing"), he forgets the present and does things like phoning the German Defense Ministry to request the bombing of Guernica by Field Marshall Goering's aircraft. Arlington's many quick shuttles between sense and lunacy create instability and a precarious leadership void, in which ruthless people will jockey to fill it. They won't care if innocent people get hurt.

This danger is clear to the new Chief Constable, Sir Matthew Upton; ACC Desmond Iles; DCS Colin Harpur; and DCI Francis Garland. For years, the egomaniacal and amoral Iles has turned a blind eye to two separate drug-selling operations in his unnamed seaport in southwestern England: Shale's and Ralph ("Panicky Ralph") Ember's. As long as people ("especially younger women with brilliant arses") can stroll unhurriedly everywhere in his domain, all is well, because the greatest police objective after "stuff the Home Office," is "no blood on the pavement."

In Iles's view, drugs tenant the vacuum that Nature abhors. There will always be drugs––no matter how harsh the laws against them––and it's better that the dealing be confined to one area of the city, where it can be "expertly supervised by fine, though freewheeling, grossly libidinous, folk like Harpur here and Garland. Plus, of course, the Drugs Squad." [There are few differences, and many similarities or parallels, between police and crooks in James's series. Like Arlington, Iles is clever, but has spells of derangement––in his case, "flashback cuckold-fits," consisting of shout-screams and trembles, "producing a strobe effect from the silver buttons of his uniform"––when something reminds him that Harpur and Garland had affairs with his wife, Sarah. As if sharing brain spasms weren't enough, Arlington likes the "nice conviviality" of sharing Honorée, a prostitute, with Iles.]

Ralph Ember is a young Charlton Heston look-
alike; people expect him to act like El Cid

Sir Matt holds a different opinion about the vacuum. Ember is a drugs purveyor and a leading suspect in the unsolved murders of Naomi and Laurent Shale. Shale usually drove Laurent and his daughter, Matilda, to school, and his wife could have been killed by mistake. The deaths are a chance to destroy Shale's and Ember's drug operations. Towards this end, Sir Matt authorizes a search of Ember's estate, Low Pastures.

Sir Matt has upset the drugs-trade equilibrium lovingly created and maintained by Ember, Shale, and Iles. Criminals don't know if Ember and Iles had a falling out, if Sir Matt has taken away decision-making from Iles, or if Iles has changed his mind about the drug trade since the killings. Ember doesn't want to look like he can be kicked around. Ember's wife, Margaret, worries that, whether or not he was involved in the Shale murders, their two daughters may be targeted for retaliation. Whitehead tries to control Arlington's F.Fing. The employees farther down Shale's corporate ladder start muttering about the Peter Principle, which states that one is promoted to his or her level of incompetence. Karen Lister, the live-in girlfriend of Shale's current No. 2 man, gets nervous.

Southwestern England

On the police side: Iles, who resents being a congenital sidekick, and who has been "pasteurized" and "neutered" by the new Chief, now hopes to nurse Sir Matt away from his "new-brooming" towards "clarity" about drugs. Harpur––not by nature dull, but nearly always "jet-lagged by the necessity of keeping Iles from calamity," battered by the advice of his two teenage daughters, and distracted by his younger girlfriend, Denise, who's become intrigued by the "zipless fucks" of Fear of Flying––becomes zombified by indecision. All of these people, and others, are sucked into a situation they can't completely understand or control as Nature rushes to re-establish equilibrium.

*******

Colin Harpur is a fair-haired
Rocky Marciano almost-look-alike

Bill James's Harpur and Iles series––like William Marshall's Yellowthread Street Station books––is original and unique. It's a ferociously dark and funny British police procedural characterized by very skillful plotting, an atmosphere of brooding apprehension, and biting repartee between endearingly eccentric characters, who inhabit a bleak and violent world, where boundaries between good and evil are blurred. The dialogue is a treasure trove of witty wordplay. For example, Iles, who controlled and finally destroyed former Chief Constable Mark Lane, says of his new Chief, "In a while, I think I might become quite fond of Sir Matt. He's someone who knows his own mind and yet is not ashamed of it. I admire that kind of courage." Later, Iles asks after Sir Matt, "the poor, articulate, benighted, beknighted sod."

It took half a dozen books after You'd Better Believe It, the 1985 debut, for James to become thoroughly comfortable with his odd couple––the acerbic Iles and Harpur, who knows exactly how to handle him––but good books in the 29-book series are easy to find. Try Pay Day, in which neither criminals nor police know whether they can trust Chief Inspector Richard Nivette; or Wolves of Memory, which finds Harpur and Iles protecting a rambunctious informant. I highly recommend Harpur and Iles to people who are experiencing a black humor/noir vacuum.

Book Review of Colson Whitehead's Zone One: A Novel

Zone One: A Novel by Colson Whitehead

C'mon now, trust me. I know this is a blog primarily about crime fiction, but don't forget, tonight is Halloween, and I've got just the ticket. It's literary fiction set in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan after a pandemic Last Night devastated the world. The dead are people who were killed outright or turned into vehicles of the plague.

Zombies!

Buffalo, New York, is the cradle of reconstruction. The goal of the provisional government there is to clear New York City of the undead, zone by zone, and then move on to other cities. In addition to running this military campaign, the government aims to boost the morale of survivors, "all fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one's individuality." Psychotherapist Dr. Neil Herkimer coined the buzzword PASD (post-apocalypse stress disorder) and put it at seventy-five percent of the surviving population; the rest have a preexisting mental condition, so one hundred percent of the world is mad. In addition to shipping out "Living with PASD" pamphlets, the government conducts an "American Phoenix Rising" propaganda campaign, complete with sponsors and the anthem "Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction)."

So much for the survivors. Skels (short for "skeletons" or zombies) come in two types: the rabid flesh-eating predators and the much-slowed and pathetic stragglers, who are trapped in their former abodes. After Marines deal with the rabid skels, crews of civilian volunteers, directed by military officers stationed at "Fort Wonton" in Chinatown, sweep out the stragglers. Currently, Zone One (a region created by barriers south of Canal Street) has been cleared by Marines, and the sweepers are moving through it. We follow one such sweeper, a former Starbucks employee nicknamed Mark Spitz (the full name is always used), whose defining trait is his mediocrity:

His most appropriate designation [in high school] would have been Most Likely Not to Be Named the Most Likely Anything, and this was not a category. His aptitude lay in the well-executed muddle, never shining, never flunking, but gathering himself for what it took to progress past life’s next random obstacle.

Mark Spitz and his fellow sweepers, "seemingly unsnuffable human cockroaches," are protected by not-overly-great weapons and protective clothing and good luck, and they operate in war-like conditions. They swap stories of past lives and use black humor as they dispatch the undead. Occasionally, someone looks like someone Mark Spitz had known or loved. He doesn't consider himself a mere exterminator, but rather an angel of death ushering stragglers on their stalled journey. Of course, not all of the undead Mark Spitz encounters are stragglers; his bad habit of flashing back to happier pre-Last Night times while struggling with skels trying to rip off his flesh nearly levitated me from the bed in anxiety. And the infested subway tunnel would have made a George A. Romero fan happy.

Zone One, published in 2011 by Doubleday, has enough gore to keep a horror fan fairly satisfied, but the wit, imagery, references to pop culture, and wordplay will please everyone. It's surprisingly funny and tender:

Mark Spitz had seen the park unscroll from the windows of the big skyscrapers crowding the perimeter, but never from this vantage. No picnickers idled on their blankets, no one goldbricked on the benches and nary a Frisbee arced through the sky, but the park was at first-spring-day capacity. They didn’t stop to appreciate the scenery, these dead visitors; they ranged on the grass and walkways without purpose or sense, moving first this way then strolling in another direction until, distracted by nothing in particular, they readjusted their idiot course. It was Mark Spitz’s first glimpse of Manhattan since the coming of the plague, and he thought to himself, My God, it’s been taken over by tourists.

Author Colson Whitehead

Mark Spitz is as nostalgic for pre-Last Night NYC's inanimate objects as he is for its people. As he sweeps through office spaces, he sees how little some interiors have changed despite the great unraveling outside of them. When he was a child, he loved to look out his Uncle Lloyd's apartment window. Some buildings he saw met the fate of the wrecking ball, and new buildings grew themselves out of the rubble, "shaking off the past like immigrants." In this new era, it's dangerous to dream about the past, and hope is "a gateway drug." Mark Spitz believes that he has successfully banished thoughts of the future. If you aren't concentrating on how to survive the next five minutes, you won't survive them. Without hope, Mark Spitz, that average Everyman survivor, sweeps to his fate.

Meteoric Local Legends

My good friend Georgette is not the only one who reads the satirical newspaper The Onion. I'm sincerely hoping that God does not read it or at least skips the horoscope section because a few weeks ago my horoscope said, "You've always wanted to become a local legend, so please enjoy your fame as The Guy Who Smoked at the Gas Station and Everyone in the Next Town Thought Was a Meteor." I wouldn't mind being well-known but not at the price of becoming a human Roman candle. The characters in the following books may not share my astrological sign but they still achieve local fame in rather meteoric ways.

"Tran, Tran, and Hok broke through the heavy end-of-wet season clouds. The warm night air rushed against their reluctant smiles and yanked their hair vertical. They fell in a neat formation, like sleet. There was no time for elegant floating or fancy aerobatics; they just followed the rusty bombshells that were tied to their feet with pink nylon string.

"Tran the elder led the charge. He was the heaviest of the three. By the time he reached the surface of the Nam Ngum reservoir, he was already ahead by two seconds. If this had been the Olympics, he would have scored a 9.98 or thereabouts. There was barely a splash. Tran the younger and Hok-the-twice-dead pierced the water without so much as a pulse-beat between them.

"A quarter of a ton of unarmed ordnance dragged all three men quickly to the smooth muddy bottom of the lake and anchored them there. For two weeks, Tran, Tran, and Hok swayed gently back and forth in the current and entertained the fish and algae that fed on them like diners at a slow-moving noodle stall."

So begins The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill. These poor tortured Vietnamese soldiers fall into the Laotian lake like meteors without the blaze. When their bodies are discovered, however, they will provide the new national coroner of Laos with a flaming headache. Tran, Tran and Hok have the potential to become an international incident.

It is 1976, a year after Communists came to power in Laos. Siri fought with the Communists out of love for his wife but when the fighting was over he expected to retire. Unfortunately, doctors are in very short supply and the reluctant Siri is drafted to become coroner. He has no formal training in performing autopsies and there are few supplies, textbooks or assistants to help him. Yet Siri goes about his business. Hacking through red tape and cover-ups, Siri tackles the suspicious death of a local Communist leader's wife, the surfacing of the Vietnamese soldiers in the lake and a series of deaths in northern Laos.

The Coroner's Lunch is the first of a seven-book series. It's an unusual series in many ways: the exotic Southeast-Asian locale, a look at life under a Communist regime in the 1970s, an irreverent coroner protagonist in his 70s and the combination of serious and farcical writing. Cotterill employs vivid imagery and unique characters. He is respectful of Laotian culture and traditions while skewering bureaucrats and finding humor in life's tragedies. If an outlandish plot element occasionally strains belief or one plot thread is weaker than others, it really doesn't matter.

This series is a great find and Cotterill's books only get better: Thirty-three Teeth (Siri must identify some badly charred corpses, investigate a creature killing people in the capital and explain why citizens are falling to their deaths from a ministry building) and Disco for the Departed (Siri investigates a corpse entombed in cement at the former home of the President in remote Vieng Xai) are wonderful. Next month, readers get a timely holiday present because Soho Press will publish Cotterill's Slash and Burn. I can't wait. One of these days I'll visit Southeast Asia but for now, I'll read about Dr. Siri Paiboun.

Our next local legend is Sovereign of the Deep Wood, who is "the approximate size and shape of a snow blower." He is a wild boar, the town mascot in Nancy Mauro's debut, New World Monkeys. The boar is owned by Skinner, a man you'd rather not cross, so it's not an auspicious beginning to life in the fictional town of Osterhagen, New York when Lily and Duncan's Saab collides with Sovereign of the Deep Wood as they arrive in town. Tellingly, Lily attempts to grab the Saab's steering wheel away from Duncan moments before impact and then mercifully kills the severely injured boar with the tire iron when Duncan can't.

Duncan and Lily are only in their early 30s but they fight with the zeal of a couple who's been incarcerated for a lifetime in a flamboyantly unhappy marriage. When Lily inherits an old Victorian in upstate New York, she and Duncan see this as an opportunity for change. Lily can get moving on her Ph.D. dissertation in pre-Renaissance architecture while Duncan commutes to his job at a Manhattan ad agency. Things are bound to look up personally and professionally. And pigs, like meteors, can fly.

This is an eccentric book containing eccentric characters (including a sexual deviant), an eccentric plot (including a backyard grave) and eccentric writing (I've never seen so many adjectives, similes and metaphors in one book in my life). The characters are for the most part unlikeable even though I empathized at times with all of them. Mauro's writing is imaginative but so stuffed with sentence modifiers it nearly bursts at the seams. This book isn't for everyone, certainly not for people searching for stripped-down prose and a speeding plot. I did have fun reading it and I suggest it to someone who likes black humor and satire and is looking for a book by a creative new writer. I'm glad to hear Mauro is working on her second novel now because I plan to look for it.

Meanwhile, I can take heart from avoiding a fiery (or other) demise. My most recent horoscope is more promising: "You may not be an expert on which snakes are poisonous and which aren't, but damn it, you know a cuddly one when you see it." You're darn tootin', I do.

Third Time the Charm

This afternoon I was thinking about crime fiction, when I stumbled across a Newswire headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion. It says, "Third time the charm for man trying to eat Skittle off of moving model train." Now, on its face, this headline has little to do with crime fiction, but here at Read Me Deadly, strict rules of logic are swept under the carpet on Friday. Regarding the headline, think about persistence in the face of great odds, luck both good and bad, quests that may seem nonsensical to others, and trains when moving that present a problem. The books below contain all of these elements.

Nigel Williams's The Wimbledon Poisoner is a comedy of manners involving an ordinary man, Henry Farr, who is obsessed with the idea of killing his wife Elinor. His obsession begins with fantasies about her death. At first, Henry pictures himself merely grieving by her graveside "looking mournful and interesting" and "comforted by young, fashionably dressed women." He daydreams of coping with their daughter as she roams the house, bereft. After a time, Henry's normal train of thought jumps the rails and takes him to an unexpected destination: he sees himself not as widower, but as murderer. Henry finds this change of scenery thrilling because murderers are no longer hanged by the neck until dead; instead, they become the subject of best-selling paperback novels, they're chased by paparazzi, and their thoughts on life and crime are elicited by television documentary-makers:

"Henry pictured himself in a cell, as the television cameras rolled. He wouldn't moan and stutter and twitch the way most of these murderers did. He would give a clear, coherent account of how and why he had stabbed, shot, strangled, gassed or electrocuted her. 'Basically,' he would say to the camera, his gestures as urgent and incisive as those of any other citizen laying down the law on television, 'basically I'm a very passionate man. I love and I hate. And when love turns to hate, for me, you know, that's it. I simply had no wish for her to live. I stand by that decision.'"

Henry is convinced that being a convicted murderer will be a lot more fun than being Elinor's husband and a solicitor for Harris, Harris and Overdene of Blackfriars, London. He refuses to let anything stand in his way. If a few friends and neighbors die because of Henry–who has no aptitude for murder, whose luck is mostly rotten, and whose obsession has made a train wreck of his common sense–that's very unfortunate. This collateral damage just stokes the fire of his determination, and Henry becomes increasingly reckless in his attempts to dispatch Elinor.

The Wimbledon Poisoner hands the reader a conundrum: one roots for Henry to succeed in his quest, because accompanying him on his journey of switchbacks and derailings is so merry, but one also hopes Elinor won't die, because she's a nice person and besides, what would Henry do then?

This is a beautifully written book of satire. It's full of unexpected characters and situations. Its plot twists surprised me and made me laugh out loud. I recommend it to people who like P. G. Wodehouse, Tom Sharp, Roald Dahl, David Lodge or Evelyn Waugh.

When a fire of suspicious origin destroys the Baldwin Insane Asylum, killing 30 patients, Dr. Theo Baldwin decides to move the survivors from Barstow, California, to Fort Supply, Oklahoma. A one-armed yard dog (security agent) for the Santa Fe Railroad named Hook Runyon is placed in charge of the move in Sheldon Russell's The Insane Train. It is the 1940s, and most able-bodied men are fighting overseas in World War II. When few asylum employees are willing to relocate to Oklahoma, Hook recruits some disabled vets to replace them for the trip. Complicating their job is the law that forbids carrying weapons while attending the asylum patients, who include not only women and boys, but also the dangerous criminally insane.

Frenchy, the train's engineer, says that he hauled a load of railroad officials to Chicago one time, and this trip can't be worse than that but, needless to say, he's wrong. Dangerous inmates, the vets' inexperience, a decrepit train, the challenging terrain, and the uncertainty of the passengers' reception in Oklahoma make the trip treacherous. Is it pure bad luck that Death boards the train for Oklahoma, too?

The Insane Train is a great book of historical fiction that captures life in the U.S. when it is still reeling from the Great Depression and devoting most of its resources to the war effort. Russell shows us people–asylum employees, disabled vets, railroad workers–who have a small grip on security and who scrabble hard to maintain it. The asylum patients have even less. All of them become real people in these pages.

Russell's protagonist, Hook Runyon, is a terrific fictional character who is tough and uneducated, but smart. In his off-time, he scours thrift shops and flea markets for first editions (and shares his knowledge with us!) and tries to keep his dog Mixer out of trouble. Hook makes a good friend, but he's a man who lives in a caboose and his life keeps him moving.

Publishers Weekly calls this book one of the six best mysteries of 2010. Russell's prose is spare but elegant and makes for enjoyable reading. He clearly knows his trains and the time and settings he writes about. This is an uncommon series, and I'm thrilled that the next one, Dead Man's Tunnel, will be out next year. At some other time, I'll tell you about The Yard Dog, which introduces Hook Runyon; for now, I'll just say you should read it, even though you don't have to in order to enjoy The Insane Train.

Eulalia is becoming increasingly alarmed about Algernon Pendleton's dire financial situation. In Russell H. Greenan's The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton, Algernon, the 50-year-old great-grandson of a famous Egyptologist, lives alone in Great-grampy's old house in Brookline, Massachusetts. He makes a precarious living by selling off Great-grampy's Egyptian artifacts one-by-one to Mahir Suleyman, a homesick Turk with a basement shop. Things are going from bad to worse, and Algernon is nearing his wits' end. But he lovingly answers Eulalia's demands for reassurance because she is his best friend. Eulalia is also a Worcester china pitcher with bowl, so delicately beautiful she brings to mind Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Algernon says he'll never get rid of her. 

A head injury he suffered in the war may explain why Algernon alone hears Eulalia's voice, but his own explanation is that there are colors, such as ultraviolet, whose wavelengths are invisible to the human eye. We cannot hear a high-pitched dog whistle. On the strength of these facts, he says, all objects in creation have voices, even if not everyone can hear them.

Algernon's life has settled into an odd routine of talking to the gravestones in the Burying Ground or to his almost equally strange neighbor and creating sculptures from bones (osteo-art). Then one day a train of events pulls out of the station and heads for Big Trouble: old war buddy Norbie Hess unexpectedly arrives, extremely depressed and carrying a suitcase full of money. Shortly thereafter, Madge Clerisy, an exceedingly ambitious and beautiful archaeologist from Pennsylvania, who has been buying the Egyptian artifacts from Suleyman just as soon as he gets them, badgers Suleyman into giving her Pendleton's address, so she arrives, too. She is on a quest to become very famous. The luck of Eulalia, Algernon, Suleyman, Hess, and Clerisy has changed in ways none of them could have foreseen, and their lives will never ever be the same again.

This is an entertaining book, full of suspense and black humor. It's difficult to pigeonhole in that it's gothic; black comedy; fantastic; extremely clever; replete with references to philosophers, poets, and scientists; and appealingly quirky. Strangely enough, this bizarre murder story makes one reflect on some of life's largest questions. What if there is no death, if everything–a pitcher, a cigarette, a pen–is alive, if we have occupied a variety of forms in a variety of different worlds? It makes for a very unusual read.

I'd love to hear about some other books that come to your mind when you read "Third time the charm for man trying to eat Skittle off of moving model train."