[from the stabenow.com vaults, August 15, 2011 ]
Hilarious. How I wish this were a print book.
Of course, to get the joke you have to have read Frank Herbert's Dune seven or eight times. Who am I kidding, try seventy or eighty times, but it's worth it.
# Permanent link to “Goodnight, Maud-Dib…”
Amazing Leroy Grannis surfing photographs.
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His photos have been collected in a book, too.
# Permanent link to Let’s go surfin’ now, everybody’s learning how…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, July 11, 2011]
Fascinating story about the first detective novel, The Notting Hill Murders, whose existence was ferreted out by author Paul Collins (The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars, June 2011). The novel itself sounds pretty darn good, too, a story of wife murder that could star Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. You know, if they were still alive.
# Permanent link to You Mean the First Detective Wasn’t C. Auguste Dupin?
Wild Geese Calling by Stewart Edward White
My aunt gave me this book (along with Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf and Richard Halliburton's Royal Road to Romance), when I became a dedicated reader at age eight. Recently I stumbled across a copy in a used book store. White was a contemporary of Zane Grey and Rex Beach and all those he-man dime-store novel-writing types, but they could never write women. White can. He also writes scenery and weather as well as Grey and characters better than Beach.
# Permanent link to A pioneering adventure story about two well-matched, high-hearted heroes.
Jack of Spies by David Downing
It's 1915, they're shifting from butter to guns in Europe, and British espionage is as yet only a twinkle in the British Navy's eye. They contract hire their spies, as in Jack McColl, a car salesman currently in the German-occupied part of China (a place I never knew existed until now).
# Permanent link to A triumvirate that would set any British statesman’s hair on fire.
(more…)
A man named Peanut escapes from prison in western China, where he has been incarcerated since 1989, and makes his way to present-day Beijing. There, he gets in touch with British journalist Philip Mangan, whom he mistakes for the heir to his previous contact. Mangan, who isn't a spy, yet, is perfectly appalled, at first. When he passes the Peanut info on to someone he knows at the British Embassy, the scene shifts to London and SIS, where case officer Trish Patterson runs it up the food chain and discovers that Peanut may in fact be a Chinese asset who mysteriously disappeared over twenty years before and who is now the potential producer of vital information on current Chinese MIRV ballistic missile capability. In spite of himself Mangan, succumbing to the temptation to become part of the story instead of just reporting it, slips and slides into the shadow world of international espionage. It proves just as dangerous and as deadly to those around him, lovers, friends and strangers alike, as he at first suspected it would be.
# Permanent link to Knives are pulled, shots are fired, people die and governments sell out.
Before The Poison by Peter Robinson
In England in 1953 Grace Fox is hung for poisoning her husband. In 2010 Hollywood composer Chris Lowndes returns to his Yorkshire birthplace and buys a house in Swaledale which once belonged to Grace, and becomes obsessed with finding out if Grace was guilty or innocent of the crime.
Before the Poison reads like an instant Golden Age classic crime novel, an unhurried, deliberate unraveling of a mystery paralleled by a long, slow reveal of the narrator's own motivation, told with a ratcheting up of tension that I found excruciatingly delicious. It is so well plotted, and the two narratives dovetail at the end so naturally, without a hint of contrivance. The scenes of Grace in World War II are devastatingly real. I wrote to Peter Robinson when I finished the book and he wrote back… (more…)
# Permanent link to An instant Golden Age classic crime novel.
Sniper's Honor by Stephen Hunter
Retired sniper Bob Lee Swagger (love the name) gets a call from journalist friend Kathy Reilly, who is writing a story on a Russian female sniper in World War II called the White Witch. The scene shifts to World War II and the sniper herself, along with her boss and her target. As her story unfolds in alternate chapters, we follow Bob and Kathy in the present day as they rediscover her story, one of love and war and fanaticism and betrayal, with front row seats to battles that will leave your eyes watering from the smoke of the guns. Man, can this guy write shoot-outs. The best one is in the present day between Bob and Kathy and those who would really they rather not find out the truth about the White Witch, thanks, which ambush echoes on a smaller scale the one that happened sixty years before. Both are nail-bitingly realistic. Hunter can plot, too, but I won't spoil. Every ending in this book (I think there are about six but I lost count) will make you alternately gasp and cheer. This is the book Robert Ludlum only wished he could write.
# Permanent link to This is the book Robert Ludlum only wished he could write.
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Stet: An Editor's Life by Diana Athill
This book, to borrow a phrase from John le Carre, wears many hats upon its head. First, it's a word picture of publishing as it used to be, or at least was sometime, somewhere, and I think almost inadvertently a parallel portrait of working women post-war. The first half is a personal narrative of Athill's life as an editor, and the second remembrances of individual writers she edited, the most compelling (and appalling) chapter of which is on Jean Rhys*.
The story began with my father telling me: 'You will have to earn your living.'
she writes, and then goes on to fill in her background, one of privileged, upper class English country life filled with horses and books. She fell passionately in love in her teens with a young British officer who then dumped her, which experience she says scarred her emotionally for life. Sorry if I sound a little skeptical here, but really, she was 17 years old when her doomed romance commenced. Get over it, kid.
# Permanent link to ‘You will have to earn your living.’
The Wind off the Small Isles by Mary Stewart
More of a short story than a novel, I would recommend this only for Mary Stewart completionists and those who are traveling to Lanzarote. Her descriptions of the landscape of these volcanic islands are as immediate and evocative as anything she ever wrote about Crete or Corfu.
# Permanent link to For Mary Stewart completionists.