If you saw the movie you’ll remember the scene: John Glenn about to board Mercury 7 and stopping to call NACA (later NASA). “Get the girl to check the numbers,” he says. “If she says it’s okay then we go.” Well, that really happened. John Glenn really made that call. Not on launch day but…
Big city homicide detective Casey Duncan is hiding in plain sight from her own demons and then her best friend Diana is attacked by her ex. Both flee to Rockton, a town of two hundred deep in the Yukon Territory to the purpose made for people like Casey and Diana to hide out in at…
Read more There are monsters in the woods and possibly more right in town.
A dossier on a 550-year European cold snap compiled from tree rings, ice cores, and the accounts of country clergymen and gentlemen scientists. Do we make the weather, or does it make us? Because the Arctic ice pack receded during the preceding Medieval Warm Period, Fagan writes, the Vikings invaded Europe from England to Tuscany…
Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World by Lawrence Goldstone
Larry and Nancy Goldstone sort of back into collecting modern first editions, by way of a hilariously extended effort for Nancy to find Larry a birthday gift for $20 or below. They have a bet on; he is to do the same for her. In the end, Larry gives Nancy a bath brush. She gives him a copy of War and Peace. It's a Heritage edition, the Maude translation, has maps of battles, fold-out illustrations and its own slipcase. Nancy found it for $10, and they spend three weeks talking about it. (She totally wins the bet, in case you were in any doubt.)
From that $10 copy of War and Peace Nancy and Larry embark on a grand tour of used and rare book stores, first in their west Massachusetts county and then expanding their territory to include neighboring states, New York City and Chicago, and then step up into book auctions. Along the way they meet a lot of characters, both in and out of books.
A bookseller tells them
Today, the autographs that are collected, the books that are collected...these are the authors that the collectors read in high school. They've always remembered them, they have a fondness for them*...of course, the people who were read in, say the forties and fifties are different than those who are read in high school today. Then we read Steinbeck and Hemingway and Faulkner. I don't know what they read today."
We did. It comes from having a succession of high school babysitters dragging their bookbags into your living room.
"They read Margaret Atwood," we said.
George stared at us. "That's appalling," he said.
Which gives you a pretty good idea what century most of the booksellers Nancy and Larry meet are inhabiting.
There are extended riffs on Anthony Trollope and Booth Tarkington and Sinclair Lewis and Charles Dickens and John Dos Passos, and for a book published in 1997 some jaw-dropping prices. Their education and expenditures proceed apace, until eventually they buy a copy of Bleak House for $700, with no second thoughts or buyer's remorse.
Reads almost like a novel. Thoroughly enjoyable and very informative, and I might actually get all the way through War and Peace if I owned an edition like theirs. I don't think I'd get through it on a Kindle.
*True. The only firsts I would even consider buying would be Shute, Heinlein and Heyer. I just checked Alibris, where I found a first edition of The Rolling Stones in a "fine" dust jacket for the bargain basement price of $2000. On the other hand, I found a first with dust jacket of The Unknown Ajax for twenty bucks. Couldn't find a first of Trustee from the Toolroom. I didn't have as much fun as Larry and Nancy did, though.
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Fear to Tread by Michael Gilbert
If ever there was an author whose works cried out to be instantly uploaded to Kindle, Michael Gilbert is him. Fear to Tread is one of four or five (or six, or seven) of my favorites of his novels.
Wilfred Wetherall, headmaster of the South Borough Secondary School for boys in post-World War II London, is beset by small problems both professional and personal. His favorite restaurant is going out of business. The father of a promising student appears determined to avert every effort of Mr. Wetherall's to find his son a job that will further his artistic ability. A former student is now a member of the Metropolitan Police Force, lost his wife to thugs he was investigating undercover, and seems on an irreversible downhill slide.
# Permanent link to “…a quiet, inoffensive, persistent obstinacy.”
“...They were a very nasty couple. Bad type. Superstitious, like most crooks. She was the worst of the two, in my opinion. Tried to fix the job so’s it’d look as if the servants had done it. Do you recollect that, sir?”
# Permanent link to “They were a very nasty couple.”
“Yes,” said Alleyn slowly, “yes.”
“Mind,” said the constable warming a little, “I reckon if he hadn’t lost his nerve they’d have got away with it. No finger-printing in those days, you see. And you know how it’d be, sir. You don’t expect people of their class to commit murder.”
“No.”
“No, you don’t. And with the weapons lying there beside these grooms or whatever they were, and so on, well the first thing anybody would have said was: ‘Here’s our birds.’ Not that there seemed to be anything like what you’d call an inquiry.’
“Not precisely,” said Alleyn.
“No, sir. No,” continued the constable, turning his back to the wind, “if Macbeth hadn’t got jumpy and mucked things up I reckon they’d have got away with it. They seemed to be well-liked people in the district. Some kind of royalty. Aristocratic like. Well, nobody suspects people of that class. That’s my point.”
The Sleeping Partner by Madeleine E. Robins
Of the first two Sarah Tolerance novels I wrote on this site
Miss Sarah Tolerance elopes with her brother’s fencing instructor from Regency England to the continent, and when he dies returns home. Cast off by her family, she determines to make her way in the world without falling into prostitution, the usual fallback of the Fallen Woman, and instead sets herself up as an Agent of Inquiry. Setting, plot and especially character are all excellent in Point of Honor and Petty Treason by Madeleine E. Robins. Trust me, you will believe a woman can be a PI in England in 1810.
The Sleeping Partner, the third in the series, may be the best yet. Take the first paragraph.
No one who had seen Miss Sarah Brereton as a child would have taken her for a heroine. She was a well-behaved girl, affectionate and active, given to rolling hoops and running races with the gardener's children. Her upbringing was neither intellectual or revolutionary, being designed to make her what she was destined to be: the well-bred wife of a gentleman of means. That she had failed to achieve this goal was not the fault of her family but derived from some flaw in her character: at sixteen, Miss Brereton had fallen in love with her brother's fencing master and eloped, ruining forever her chances at respectability and marriage. Seeking to contain the damage, Sir William Brereton disowned his daughter and forbade to have her name mentioned. With the girl as good as dead, the honor of the Breretons was restored to a near-unsullied state. The family went on much as before.
No wonder Sarah changed her name, and no wonder what she changed it to. Editors give authors hell over backstory in series novels, and they're right to do so because first timers to the series need to know what's going on. That first paragraph is an exemplar of craft, placing the main character precisely in her place and time, and fun to read besides. Impossible not to turn the page, where not very much farther on in the narrative Sarah uses her sword to spank a bully with a club. Heroine, it turns out, was exactly the right word.
By now Sarah is well-established as an Agent of Inquiry, and is approached at her club, Tarsio's, by a potential client.
...Corton appeared beside her and murmured that a lady was inquiring for her.
"What sort of lady?" She would see her visitor regardless, but often found the porter's impressions useful.
"A real lady, miss. A bit anxious about the eyes."
A real lady in a state of anxiety bode well for business and thus for Miss Tolerance's pocket-book. She directed Corton to bring the visitor up.
The anxious lady's sister is missing and she hires Sarah to find her, and Sarah is plunged in to a maelstrom of betrayal, theft, treason and murder that threatens her physically and emotionally, and which drags her willy-nilly back into her family, that same family which booted her out so unceremoniously so many years before. In the course of events we meet old friends
Joshua Glebb's head, bald, with a long fringe of yellowed hair circling the back, shone in the dusty light from the far window. His entire being appeared to be in the process of succumbing slowly to gravity; his mouth turned down, and his chin, shoulders and gut all looked to be making a slow progress downward until they would puddle around his boot-sole. Until that should happen, Mr. Glebb resembled a fussy and dyspeptic head clerk, respectably dressed and sour of expression. His mouth attained--not a smile, but an absence of frown--when he looked up at Miss Tolerance, and his shrewd eyes lit.
and make new ones, like the missing girl's governess, Miss Nottingale.
"...That morning, in fact, she was reading a political essay Mr. John Thorpe had given her." She paused. "Lord Lyne did not like it."
"What was the essay?"
"A Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mrs. Godwin."
"And she was reading this at breakfast?" That seemed to Miss Tolerance enough to put anyone off their meal.
Oh yes, we'll meet Mrs. Godwin, aka Mary Wollstonecraft, later. Sir Walter Mandif, magistrate, returns, too
"I confess I am enjoying the sight of you within my walls without bandages."
Highly recommended, all three of them, and my fingers are crossed for more.
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# Permanent link to “I confess I am enjoying the sight of you within my walls without bandages.”
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# Permanent link to Cooking, writes Barnes, is the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss.
This is a very mannerly, manorly mystery, set in Victorian England and starring the widowed Laetitia Rodd and her lawyer brother, who ropes her in on investigations that require a genteel touch. The characters are good, including a truly evil villain, and every detail about the time and place rings true, no anachronisms, my pet…
The third in the Ike Schwartz series about a ex-spook small town sheriff in the Shenandoah Valley in rural Virginia. This time someone has dumped a body in Ike’s jurisdiction (well, six feet his side of the county line, anyway). The bad news is his deputy says it looks like a member of one of…
