When You're Too Tired to Sleep

What do you do when you fall into bed exhausted and then can't get to sleep? After rejecting ideas too masochistic (scouring out the bathtub, ironing) and even worse (lying there and making a mental list of where you've gone wrong since first grade, pondering our current US Congress), you should reach for a book or a DVD and the remote. Which one all depends on how you feel.

Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins

If work has you feeling imprisoned and you've got a life sentence with those in bed beside you: your spouse, snoring and snorting in his sleep, and your dog, who won't stop licking his privates: Break out with George Clooney in O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, if you're hankering for a Coen brothers movie with bluegrass music, or Out of Sight, if you're more in the mood for an escaped Clooney pining after Jennifer Lopez, who plays a dedicated US marshal in a movie based on the Elmore Leonard novel. Perhaps you like the idea of the prison being a World War II German POW camp, and your thoughts about the escapee run to the more the merrier, and include Steve McQueen on a motorcycle; if so, fire up The Great Escape. You could watch a cult favorite, The Shawshawk Redemption, featuring unconventional prisoner Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), and his buddy, the prisoner/entrepreneur, Red (Morgan Freeman).

Or, crack open Michael Robotham's Life or Death (Mulholland, March 2015), for a look at another enigmatic prisoner, Audie Palmer, who climbs out of a Texas prison the night before he's due to be paroled. Audie had admitted his involvement in an armored truck robbery that led to the deaths of four people. He was sentenced to 10 years, but the missing $7 million was never recovered. Weaving in and out with Audie's back story are the efforts to find him by pint-size FBI Special Agent Desiree Furness; the sheriff, who as a deputy shot Audie in the head during the robbery; and a prison buddy named Moss. Aussie author Robotham's storytelling kept me turning pages, but some British substitutions for their American counterparts (such as bank "queue" rather than "line") were a little distracting. More distracting are the length of Audie's sentence (c'mon, this is Texas, not Scandinavia), the fact Audie even survived in the joint, given the particulars, and the ease with which he escaped; however, these quibbles weren't enough to keep me from enjoying it. This isn't one of those pulse-pounding thrillers; it's the kind that makes you want to know what happened in the past and how things would end, and, no, I didn't peek.

For when you're so tired, you're feeling less than human––in fact, you're wondering if you're lower on the mammal totem pole than your dog: Empathize with Jax, a mechanical servitor who longs for freedom in Ian Tregillis's The Mechanical (Orbit, March 2015), a hybrid of steampunk, fantasy, and alternate history set in the early 1900s. The book opens with the public execution of some Catholic spies and the destruction of a rogue mechanical man. In the 17th century, the work of scientist Christiaan Huygens led to the development of a Dutch army of automata powered by alchemy and clockworks. These "Clakkers," capable of independent thought, but enslaved through a built-in hierarchy of obligations called "geasa" to their masters and the Queen on the Brasswork Throne, allowed the Netherlands to become the most powerful nation in the world.

There is now an uneasy truce between the Netherlands and the remnants of its opposition in New France (in Canada). In the capital of Marseilles-in-the-West, spy-in-charge Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord has her hands full with a dangerous Game of Thrones-like situation. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, her small espionage network is disappearing. One of her spies, Luuk Visser, a Catholic priest working undercover as a Protestant pastor, gives Jax an errand and then, oh man, you really must read this book for yourself. Everyone is passionate and scheming away like mad. I've never read anything quite like this cinematic novel, and I bet we'll see it eventually on the big screen. It tackles free will, what it means to be human, identity, loyalty, the meaning of faith and religious freedom, and revenge and redemption. Tregillis doesn't shy away from harming his characters, so you can't assume anyone is safe. Some people may find Berenice's foul mouth offensive, and there are a few scenes I found genuinely disturbing. Some scenes drag a little bit, but these flaws are minor. I'm glad there are two more coming in the Alchemy Wars trilogy because this book was great reading on a sleepless night.

If you'd rather watch a robot than read about one, there are the Terminator movies with our former California governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a cyborg sent back from a future in which machines rule the world. I'm telling you, Schwarzenegger was born to play this role. Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, features Harrison Ford as Los Angeles cop Rick Deckard, who is called back to duty in 2019 to track down and kill rogue replicants. James Cameron's Aliens has a cyborg on hand when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver was born for this one) returns to the planet of Alien. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie, Robocop (forget the re-make), is about a Detroit cop, killed in action, who returns to the force as half-human/half-robot. (And they say Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together again.) There are many more of these movies worthy of the time it takes to pop corn and wash it down with a Coke, such as the charming animated flick, The Iron Giant; Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope (thank goodness there's no Jar Jar Binks)....

Say you're in that half-asleep/half-awake state when your identity feels like a mirage, so you could really get into something to do with spies: Of course, you can't go wrong with another viewing of The Third Man, set in Allied-occupied Vienna and starring Joseph Cotten as pulp western writer Holly Martins and Orson Welles as his childhood friend, Harry Lime. We could argue whether it's the best-ever espionage movie. In Éric Rochant's 1994 film, Les Patriotes (The Patriots), Ariel Brenner (Yvan Attal) leaves his home in France for Israel on his 18th birthday. There, he joins Mossad and loses his idealism in a morally fuzzy world. Naval commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) takes up with Susan Atwel (Sean Young), the mistress of US Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman), in 1987's No Way Out. Susan's murder cues the spinning of a web of deceit. This is a re-make of a terrific 1948 movie, The Big Clock, with Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and Maureen O'Sullivan. In the German movie, The Lives of Others, it's 1984, and Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is compelled to launch an investigation of the celebrated East German playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) by a man who has designs on Dreyman's girlfriend. Don't you love wheels within wheels? 

Make sure you leave the butter off your popcorn if you decide to watch your spies on the page instead of on the screen. Don't waste time piddling around when you're tired; go straight to the British novels. What is it about MI5 and MI6 that makes seeing them under the microscope so diverting? We'll think about that while we cringe at some of these British writers' disdainful depictions of the CIA "cousins" as demanding and inept, throwing around cash, bigfooting joint operations, and screwing them up because they think about short-term payoffs rather than long-term consequences.

I kept a stiff upper lip about the cousins and enjoyed Charles Cumming's A Colder War (St. Martin's Press, 2014). It's the second series book about Thomas Kell, an MI6 agent disgraced during the Witness X affair, whom we first met in the 2012 Steel Dagger winner, A Foreign Country (see review here). Kell has now once again been hauled out of the cold, this time to investigate the death of Paul Wallinger, head of the SIS station in Turkey, in an airplane crash. MI6's Amelia Levene thinks three recent intelligence disasters point to a mole in the SIS or the CIA.

Yeah, looking for a mole is nothing new, but Cumming does a good job with it. He takes his time; there are close to 400 pages. Notable are the clarity of the writing, use of locations, and the charm of the descriptions. It was a pleasure to learn what Tom is reading and to see what's on his shelves. Cumming once worked for MI6, and I liked his knowledge about how the agency works (the extent to which personal relationships affect spying is interesting) and his familiarity with spycraft. The life of a Cumming spy definitely isn't for everybody. Their careers ruin their family relationships and make keeping their stories straight––to themselves, as well as everyone else––almost impossible. They are betrayed by ass-covering superiors and ambitious colleagues, and they need a good night's sleep and sweet dreams as much as anybody. At least a gorgeous young woman falls into bed with Tom, a lonely man in his mid-40s. You might roll your eyes at this, but, hey, while Tom's no James Bond, he's not John Gardner's cowardly Boysie Oakes of The Liquidator fame, either. I'm looking forward to seeing Tom again on a night I can't sleep.

The Friday Fishwrap

We had Town Meeting this week and I've been obsessed for the last couple of months with putting together information and getting out the vote so that our library would be funded. We got the funding, but not without a struggle. We also had a huge debate about whether to adopt a pay-as-you-throw trash program.

Even though it doesn't get too awfully heated at Town Meeting, during the slow bits I always think Murder at Town Meeting would be a great plot for a New England mystery. I can visualize one of the more cantankerous types taking a bathroom break, stopping at the Historical Society's hallway table for a cup of coffee and a homemade brownie, then dropping stone dead 15 minutes later in mid-harangue. Was it a stroke, a heart attack, or was he actually––cue portentous music here––murdered?

During my recovery from Town Meeting, I let art wash over me in the form of one of my favorite caper movies of all time, How to Steal a Million, featuring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole during their most youthful, chic and charming stage of life. The flick is set and was filmed largely in Paris in the 1960s. Audrey plays Nicole Bonnet, the entirely Givenchy-clad daughter of Charles Bonnet, a famed art collector. What nobody but Nicole knows, though, is that behind the false back of an upstairs wardrobe is an art studio where her beloved Papa (played by the extravagantly eyebrowed Hugh Griffith) forges Impressionist paintings, following in the footsteps of his father, who faked sculptures, like the prize of Bonnet's collection, the Venus statue, ostensibly carved by Benvenuto Cellini.

Hugh Griffith as Charles Bonnet

When Bonnet agrees to allow the Cellini Venus to be exhibited at the Kléber-Lafayette Museum, he doesn't realize that by signing the associated paperwork, he has also agreed to have it examined by an art expert. Cue that portentous music again! Somehow, the Venus needs to disappear before it's examined.

Nicole's first thought is to ask Simon Dermot to steal the statue. Why? Well, she thinks that's Simon’s profession. Her assumption makes sense, when you consider that she first encounters him, at the beginning of the movie, when she finds him in her living room in the dark of night, apparently lifting a valuable painting. She wings him with an inadvertent shot from an antique pistol, he charms her into giving him a ride "home" to the Ritz Hotel, and there's that "meet cute" that every romantic comedy needs.

The Bonnet house on rue Parmentier

Simon, who is actually a lawman charged with identifying art forgers, is naturally puzzled by Nicole's request and asks why she needs to have this particular piece of art stolen. Her answer: "You don't think I'd steal something that didn't belong to me, did you?" Simon: "Excuse me, I spoke without thinking." Without revealing his true profession to Nicole, Simon comes up with the most comically elaborate theft scheme ever. It's an inspired bit, and a genius melding of caper and romantic-comedy seduction. As Simon hands Nicole a museum cleaner's costume, points to the bathroom and orders her to take off her clothes, she asks: "Are we planning the same sort of crime?"

It's an exuberant movie, filmed in eye-popping color-saturated CinemaScope and filled with witty repartée and chemistry to burn between Hepburn and O'Toole. I could watch it again right now. Or maybe I should pull out my DVD of that other Audrey Hepburn classic caper, Charade, with Cary Grant. What to do?

Are you wondering if I'm ever going to talk about any mystery books? Well, frankly, I'm behind on my reading. I'm listening to Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May and the Burning Man when I walk the dog. It's fantastic, but it's currently only available in the US on audio, so I'll save a full review for a date closer to the publication of the US print and ebook versions.

Tell you what, though. Since we're talking about humorous crime, how about a list of the 2014 books up for the Last Laugh (humorous crime novel) Award at this weekend's CrimeFest international crime fiction convention in Bristol, UK? Here you go:

Lawrence Block: The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons
Declan Burke: Crime Always Pays
Christopher Fowler: Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart
Shane Kuhn: Kill Your Boss (published in the US as The Intern’s Handbook)
Chris Pavone: The Accident (This was supposed to be humorous? That might explain what I was missing when I read it.)
L. C. Tyler: Crooked Herring  (winner)

I hope you all have a wonderful and caper-filled spring weekend, even if your capers are just in a piccata sauce.

My Wartime Ration Books

Our friend, Lady Jane Digby's Ghost, raved about Lissa Evans's Crooked Heart here recently, and I just had to read it. She was nice enough to send me her copy and she was right; it's delightful.

Crooked Heart is the story of Noel Bostock and Vee Sedge, a couple of misfits in England during World War II. Noel is a 10-year-old orphan boy, living with his eccentric godmother, Mattie, in her rambling old house near Hampstead Heath. Mattie was a suffragette in the '20s and has a disdain for anything conventional, including the evacuation of children at the beginning of the war, keeping a house tidy, finding a new school for Noel when his old one closes, or listening to the local ARP Warden's lectures on air raid precautions.

Mattie decides to educate Noel herself, going on nature field trips to the Heath and setting him essays on subjects like "Would You Rather Be Blind or Deaf?," What is Freedom?" and "Should People Keep Pets?." Noel is happy not to have to go to school with other children, since his experience is that they are usually stupid and like to bully him for his nerdiness. When Noel and Mattie are not in session in their home school, Noel reads detective stories (I knew I liked that boy right from the start!) and Mattie sings old protest songs:

On the final chorus repeats, Mattie would simultaneously hum and whistle. 'A rare and underrated skill,' she'd remark, 'and one that, sadly, has never brought me the acclaim it deserves.'

Mattie's eccentricity becomes more marked as she falls victim to dementia. At first, it can be amusing, like when she can't remember the last name of the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, though she knows it's a bird's name, like Owl or Ostrich. Noel reminds her that it's Sir Christopher Wren, and she thanks him, but responds "I can't help thinking 'Sir Christopher Ostrich' has a tremendous ring to it." The sad day eventually comes when Noel must be evacuated from London.

In St. Alban's, an odd boy like Noel doesn't find any quick takers, but the promise of government subsidy eventually persuades Vee Sedge to take him in. Vee is middle-aged, the sole support of her dotty mother, who spends her days writing letters to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and her lump of a son, Donald, who uses his heart murmur as an excuse for utter sloth. Vee is barely scraping by, cleaning houses and doing other odd jobs.

The war gives her a chance to make some much-needed money on the fiddle, like so many others. Vee's particular scam is to collect for fake charities. The problem is, she's just not very good at it; too nervous and bad at keeping her stories believable and consistent. Noel, the world's youngest management consultant and business partner, turns Vee's business into a far more successful entrepreneurial effort.

From this point, the plot thickens, with Vee and Noel discovering other much more serious crimes afoot. This partnership will evolve in ways both comical and heart-warming, and these are a couple of characters who feel so real you'll miss them
when you close the covers. But don't forget, this is an English story, which means that just as there was very little sugar allowed by a wartime ration book, this is a story that is never overly sweet.

If I were you, I'd put Crooked Heart on your wish list. It will be published in the US by Harper on July 28. If you can't wait, buy the UK book (Doubleday, 2014) or, as I'm doing, order a copy of Lissa Evans's previous World War II novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half (Doubleday, 2009), about a young copywriter at the Ministry of Information.

Evans's cock-eyed look at a boy's life in World War II England reminded me a little bit of one of my all-time favorite movies, Hope and Glory. The protagonist is seven-year-old Bill Rowan, who discovers that World War II is the most exciting thing imaginable to come into his life. Learning to identify all the fighter planes and joining a gang that plays in the rubble of bombed-out houses are so much more fun than sitting in school and the crushing boredom of identifying all the "pink bits" on the world map that form the British Empire.

Bill's point of view is based on the boyhood experiences of director John Boorman, which provides some added poignancy in seeing Bill's sister's growing up way too fast; his father, a Great War veteran, heading off to be an army clerk; and his mother, a talented pianist, wondering what might have been if she'd married family friend Mac, who shares her love of classical music. But the real fun begins when the family's own house is destroyed and they must move in with Bill's grandparents, who live outside London, on the river.

Bill's grandfather and Noel's Mattie would have made quite a pair. Grandpa George is at least as eccentric as she, and shares her disdain for public education and any other convention. He's given to fits of temper, melancholic (and wine-fueled) reminiscences of old girlfriends, and a keen desire to teach Bill how to fish effectively and, more importantly, how to bowl a cricket googly so that the two of them can defeat Bill's father and Mac, who played for their World War I regiments. Bill is half-terrified and half-eager co-conspirator.

What both Crooked Heart and Hope and Glory have in common is that they focus on how, amidst the rationing and dropping bombs, it was a time of liberation from social convention. Most of all, though, they're just plain fun.

One of Crooked Heart's reviewers compared it to a couple of her favorite books, Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, and Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. That made me wildly impatient to read the book, since I Capture the Castle is pretty darned wonderful and The Pursuit of Love is one of my most-prized books, one that I re-read regularly.

The Pursuit of Love is set in the years just before World War II and during the war. This time, the story is more female focused. Written in the voice of Fanny, it's about her wildly unconventional cousins, the Radletts, who are essentially Nancy Mitford's own family, which was both celebrated and notorious in England from the 1920s on.

Fanny's Uncle Matthew is mercurial, anti-social and bad-tempered, famously rude to houseguests. He roars at his seven children, but complacently allows them to tease him and, to everyone's vast entertainment, hunts them with dogs over their countryside. He has his surprising soft spots. He loves to play Caruso records at full volume, and is oddly fond of his in-law, Davey, who is a hypochondriac and esthete.

The seven Mitford siblings in 1935

The real focus of The Pursuit of Love is Fanny's beautiful cousin, Linda, who marries a crashing bore of a banker, leaves him for a revolutionary, and then leaves him in turn for a charming Frenchman. Linda's pursuit of love is comic and bittersweet, and the hazards and liberations the war bring to the entire family are more of the same. This is a book to read whenever you need some cheering up and some non-saccharine sweetness.

I just realized I wrote this entire piece about two World War II books and a movie without once writing "Nazi" or "Hitler." How about that!

The Wayback Machine: Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep

Those of us of a certain age (nope, even older than that) can remember rushing home from school in the afternoons to watch The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, starring an intrepid flying squirrel and his moose sidekick. It had a regular feature called Peabody's Improbable History. Peabody, the genius dog, had invented the Wayback Machine, and he and his boy, Sherman, would dial in a year and travel back in time, helping to unscramble history that had somehow gone awry. Today we will borrow the Wayback Machine to visit 1939 and the release of Raymond Chandler's first Philip Marlowe novel.

Chandler with Taki, his editorial assistant and critic

Raymond Thornton Chandler, widely considered one of the most influential writers of twentieth-century noir, was a bit of an accidental author. When he lost his job as an oil company executive in 1932, during the Great Depression, he started writing short stories for The Black Mask pulp magazine to support his family. In 1939, he cannibalized elements of several of his short stories and reworked them into his first full-length novel, The Big Sleep.

The setup, briefly, is this: Dying millionaire, General Sternwood, father of two beautiful out-of-control daughters Vivian and Carmen, calls in PI Marlowe to deal with a blackmailer. It is not the first time he has been forced to pay blackmail on behalf of Carmen. Previously a man named Joe Brody had "sold" pornographic pictures of the luscious 20-year-old to her father. That time, Vivian's husband, Sean Regan, had handled the transaction. But Sean has inexplicably vanished, so the General must grudgingly turn to an outsider for help.

I have seen and enjoyed the classic movie version, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, several times, but had never read the book. It is an entirely pleasurable experience. A lot of the dialog and descriptions that fly by too fast in the movie are wickedly funny and well worth lingering over in the book.

As Marlowe is leaving the mansion, the butler stops him to say that the older daughter, Vivian, wants to see him. He finds her in a huge suite, reclining on a chaise and drinking. She doesn't offer him a drink––or even a chair––before trying to pump him about why her father hired him.

"I don't see what there is to be cagey about," she snapped. "And I don't like your manners."

"I'm not crazy about yours," I said. "I didn't ask to see you. You sent for me. I don't mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me."

Then, as now, there were decency and marketing restrictions in Hollywood that required changes to Chandler's story and characters. The effect here was to make the movie even more confusing and ambiguous than the book. In one case, even the murderer was changed! While the rewrite hung together well enough, it weakened the story considerably.

One character considerably toned down in the movie was the disturbed and disturbing sex kitten, Carmen, played by the young fresh-faced Martha Vickers. I had to disagree with Marlowe in his assessment at one point: "She was a dope. To me, that's all she would ever be, a dope." He would learn better later. Chandler's Carmen is one of the more memorable and genuinely creepy fictional characters I have encountered.

After the success of this first novel, Chandler never went back into industry. He would go on to write seven more Marlowe novels, the last completed by author Robert Parker long after his death. Most have stood the test of time quite well, and several were made into movies––The Big Sleep twice.

Writers for the 1946 screenplay of The Big Sleep included Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner William Faulkner, and Leigh Brackett, a science fiction writer whose haunting and elegiac Skaith trilogy, about biologically modified races on a planet under a dying sun, is a standout in the genre. The 1946 movie is very good––a classic, in fact. But if you haven't yet read the book, you're missing out on a whole new dimension of Raymond Chandler and his tough-talking, chivalrous Philip Marlowe. This is one of those very rare instances where the book and the movie enhance and enrich each other.

Review of Mick Herron's Dead Lions

Dead Lions by Mick Herron

Let's say a telephone line worker is out working in the phone company truck one day when he realizes he forgot his lunch at home. So he drives home in the truck to get his lunch, and on the way back he blows through a stop sign and hits a car. Now let's say, instead, that the worker decides to ignore that boring packed lunch and drives over to the Bada Bing for a lunch of beer, chicken wings and live entertainment. On the way back to the job, he blows through a stop sign and hits a car.

Is the phone company liable for the worker's car accident? Well, this is where the delightfully-named "frolic and detour" principles of the law kick in. The first scenario is a mere detour, which means that the worker was still sufficiently on the job to make the phone company liable for his accident. But the second scenario is a frolic (in more ways than one), and the phone company isn't liable.

Now let's say the employer isn't the phone company, but Britain's MI5 intelligence service, the line worker is an entire small office building's worth of castoff agents gone rogue, and the damage ranges from severe embarrassment to kneecapping to gory death. In other words, not just a detour or even a frolic, but some whole new legal concept, like maybe ruckus, binge, spree, rampage, rumble or wingding. Though maybe being British, they'd go for understatement and call it something like a perturbation.

Whatever you call it, and whatever the legal consequences, what we have in Mick Herron's Dead Lions is decidedly not just another day on the job. At MI5, if you screw up in a big way––like become a blackout drunk or punch out another agent in the lunchroom or let highly confidential material fall into the hands of the press––then you end up being moved from Regent's Park to Slough House. At Slough House, the "Slow Horses" are given endless, dull paperwork, in hopes they'll give up and resign.

In case the humiliation of becoming a Slow Horse, and the tedium of the work aren't enough encouragement to quit, Slough House boss Jackson Lamb turns up the discomfort level with a constant stream of insults, demeaning assignments (like picking up his takeout orders) and crude gross-outs, like aiming his deadly flatulence directly at his charges.

The current denizens of Slough House are made of sterner stuff, though, and won't be pushed into resigning. Or maybe it's just that they're too stubborn or stupid to realize the movers will never be taking them back to Regent's Park.

As the story begins, an old street agent named Dickie Bow is found dead on a bus near Oxford. Lamb figures out that is murder and that it's connected with a Cold War Russian spy named Alexander Popov––who may be real or may be a fiction created by MI5 back in the day. Nobody at Regent's Park would want to be bothered with this, Lamb thinks. They're far too busy spying and conducting disinformation campaigns on each other; probably not all that interested in some washed-up low-level stringer agent from a war they've all but forgotten. Lamb harnesses all the Slow Horses to work on the case; all, that is, except for the two who get a call from the Park to provide protection to a visiting Russian oil baron, Arkady Pushkin, while he's in London for some high-profile meetings and possible recruitment by the Park.

Did you notice that Alexander Popov and Arkady Pashkin have the same initials? One of the Slow Horses, Catherine Standish, does, and that worries her. At first, Lamb is dismissive: "Give me a break. I've got the same initials as . . . Jesus Lhrist, but I don't go on about it. This isn't an Agatha Christie." You'd better believe it isn't an Agatha Christie, and Lamb's crudity isn't the half of it. As Catherine's suspicions ferment, the plot bubbles with sleeper spies, Russian gangsters, riot in the streets, guns, explosions and mayhem in London's newest, loftiest skyscraper.

It can be a little difficult at times to keep all the Slow Horses straight, and the plot loses a bit of steam in the middle, but get past this and enjoy Herron's writing. It's full of style and cynical humor, and the last third has all the punch-your-lights-out action of a movie thriller––though the Slow Horses' nonexistent budget means that chases are on foot or bicycle, and the weaponry is in short supply.

Dead Lions will be published on May 7, 2013 by Soho Crime. There is plenty of time before then to read Slow Horses, Herron's introduction to the Slough House crew, which was a finalist for the Crime Writers Association Steel Dagger Award in 2010. And maybe I'll also read his Zoë Boehm series: Down Cemetery Road, The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die and Smoke & Whispers.

Dead Lions reminded me of just how effective and dangerous––not to mention entertaining––intelligence agency castoffs can be. If that piques your interest, you might try Bob Cook's Disorderly Elements, featuring the mole-hunting exploits of Michael Wyman, laid off from MI6 with no pension and a baby on the way; or Paper Chase, a wicked caper about four retired agents who decide to get back at the current crop of MI6 whippersnappers who have the bad manners to issue them written orders not to write any memoirs of their intelligence service.

Or how about Brian Garfield's Hopscotch, in which a 25-year CIA agent is booted out and, missing the thrills of the job, decides to threaten to expose all he knows about the Cold War powers' secrets, for the pure adrenaline-pumping pleasure of getting them all to chase after him? The film adaptation of the book is a hoot, too, and features the perversely charismatic pairing of Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. For sheer, giddy detour, frolic, hubbub and cartoonishly violent uproar involving former agents, it's hard to beat the movie RED, with Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich and Mary-Louise Parker.


Note: I received a publisher's review copy of Dead Lions. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads and other reviewing sites under my user names there.

Procrastinators of the World, Unite!

Today's date brings me joyous relief. Why? It's my day to talk to you about books, and it's also National Procrastination Week. I'm not sure exactly what about procrastination we're supposed to celebrate (naturally, I'll put off investigating until tomorrow), but I choose to think we procrastinators are granted a guilt-free week for getting caught up. We can yet again resolve to do things in a more timely manner. I'll do that later. Right now I want to tell you about a book whose review fell prey to my procrastination and then I'll mention a few other good books and the movies made from them.

Liars Anonymous by Louise Ure

If you grew up in the United States, you probably heard the story of the young George Washington and the cherry tree. His father finds his beautiful tree lying on the ground and asks George if he knows who chopped it down. George replies, "I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet." Rather than punish George for cutting down the tree, his father praises him for his honesty. We'll postpone debating the truth of this legend.

On Washington's birthday in February, my idea was to write not about an honest hero, but about Louise Ure's Jessica Dancing Gammage. Washington's birthday is past, but it's never too late for reading about Jessie. If there was a 12-step program for liars, like there is for alcoholics, prosecutor Ted Dresden says she'd be its "queen and founder and president." Jessie is honest enough with us, however, to begin her narration of Liars Anonymous with these words:

I got away with murder once, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen again. Damn. This time I didn't do it. Well, not all of it, anyway.

"This time" involves Darren Markson. When the airbag in the Cadillac he's driving in the desert near Tucson, Arizona deploys, it triggers a satellite phone call to Jessie, a HandsOn car emergency service operator in Phoenix. Markson tells Jessie that he's been rear-ended and he's going to talk to the guy in the other car. She hears him get out of his car. Three people speak briefly and next come alarming noises of a physical fight before someone disconnects the HandsOn call. Jessie is disturbed enough to do something illegal. She reactivates the audio connection to Markson's Cadillac and listens to sounds that she interprets as Markson's murder.

Jessie's call to 911 prompts a Tucson police investigation of the accident site. There is some evidence left by the collision but no cars or people are found. The police ask Jessie for help interpreting the HandsOn evidence. She leaves Phoenix––where HandsOn knows her as Jessie Dancing, and Mind Your Manors housesitting service knows her, falsely, as "a former nun and nondrinker, with an allergy to pet dander"––and heads to Tucson, her hometown. There, she is known as the woman who three years earlier was acquitted of murder. She immediately runs into problems.

The story about Markson that she tells Detective Deke Treadwell is undercut by Markson's wife Emily, who knows nothing about an accident and says her husband called her the day after Jessie says he was rear-ended. Markson said he was flying to a meeting in New Mexico and that he'd left his car in the airport parking lot. Jessie, an expert in lying, diagnoses a bad liar and resents being drawn into a subterfuge.

Det. Treadwell, former partner of Jessie's retired father, and her father are the only ones who still believe Jessie isn't a murderer. Other cops and attorneys in the DA's office resent her reappearance in Tucson and are suspicious of her involvement with the missing Markson. As Jessie explains, "Declared not guilty of a crime I had committed, I was not about to be railroaded into one I had not." She has no choice but to figure out what happened to Markson.

While Jessie is sucked into the spiraling violence surrounding Markson's vanishing, she tells us, bit by bit, about herself and the murder she committed. Jessie is the first of seven children. Her mother always kept her at arm's length and now she considers Jessie dead. After majoring in philosophy in college, Jessie had been working as a bartender when her very close friend Catherine died. That's when Jessie "took over her quest" and killed someone. She confides, "You would have thought those studies would have better prepared me to come to terms with becoming a killer, but the ethics of killing were still a muddle to me. If you take a life, does it change you? Yes, in a thousand shadowed ways. Is it worth it? Sometimes."

Jessica Dancing Gammage is an extraordinary character whose story deals with personal responsibility and the gulf between guilt and innocence. Liars Anonymous is full of action, but it's Jessie, the honest liar, and the story's ending that blew me away.

My husband and I are enjoying our own crime fiction film festival. Don't put off reading these outstanding books and watching their movies:

Prizzi's Honor

Richard Condon. Two mafia killers fall in love in Condon's black comedy, Prizzi's Honor. It was made famous by the John Huston film starring Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner and Anjelica Huston. Condon also wrote The Manchurian Candidate, an outstanding Cold War conspiracy thriller about thought control and political assassination. It was made into a great 1962 movie with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh, and filmed again in 2004 with Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight. Watch them both and see if you agree with me that the earlier one is better.

High Sierra

W. R. Burnett. In Little Caesar, crime's a hoppin' in Chicago during Prohibition. Cesare "Rico" Bandello has killed a cop and is climbing organized crime's career ladder before he's forced to run for his life. Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. star in the classic 1930 movie of the same name. Who hasn't seen Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Alan Curtis and Arthur Kennedy in John Huston's 1941 High Sierra? Burnett wrote the noir novel about a Palm Springs, California heist before collaborating on the movie with Huston. In 1950, Huston filmed Burnett's The Asphalt Jungle, which stars Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen and Sam Jaffe in a caper story about a jewelry robbery.

A Kiss before Dying

Ira Levin. This writer was a machine for turning out books that became movies. A Kiss before Dying involves a scheming psychopath who wants a fortune and decides that courting a rich family's daughters is one way to get it. Robert Wagner stars in the 1956 film that also introduces Joanne Woodward. Forget the 1991 remake with Matt Dillon and Sean Young. In the supernatural/horror thriller Rosemary's Baby, Rosemary and her husband Guy move into a new apartment house and when Rosemary becomes pregnant, she finds Guy and the other tenants increasingly spooky. Many of us are familiar with the movie featuring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. Like Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby, Joanna Eberhart feels like a fish out of water in the satirical novel The Stepford Wives. The other married women in Stepford, Connecticut are strangely docile. The Stepford Wives was filmed multiple times but the only version I like is the 1975 version with Katharine Ross. I've written before about Levin's neo-Nazi thriller The Boys from Brazil (here). I've yet to read or see Levin's Sliver, which is about voyeurism and obsession. I might take a pass on the movie unless someone can recommend it. The Rotten Tomatoes website viewers rated it a solid rotten splat, with only 12 percent liking it!

Fellow procrastinators, I hope you enjoy our week. Let's all vow to be better about being on time. Tomorrow. For now, I vote we curl up with a good book. I'm heading for the couch with Herman Koch's The Dinner. What about you?

Deciding on your style is one more good way to procrastinate