The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris

I picked up The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam at the library awhile back, and it turned out to be a fun, light mystery, the kind I like to read at the end of a particularly long day. (I like being led through the story, knowing all will be revealed with minimal work on my end. It’s relaxing when I’ve spent the day trying to ferret meaning from reams of seemingly meaningless data.)

The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris was also fun in the same way: lighthearted, doesn’t take itself seriously, with just enough complexity to make it interesting. I’m looking forward to the next one.

The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris: Recommended

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

As in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (both by Michael Chabon) is largely about what it means to be Jewish. (Chabon’s Jewish, so he’s enjoying exploring his heritage.) In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, you needed to know what a golem was in order to understand what was going on. Before you read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, you’ll probably want to refresh yourself with Elijah (specifically his role in the messiah arriving), the story of Abraham and Isaac, and Judgment Day.

This is not to say that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a largely religious book. It’s not.* It’s about a murder that takes place in a seedy hotel and the detective who solves it. There’s also a lot of noir in it, right down to a minor character named Spade. The noir combined with the Jewish culture set me on edge, which is I think probably what Chabon wants. The detective is at the end of his rope (because it’s noir, and that’s how noir detectives are) and everything is not-quite-right for him, and the combination of Jewish culture and its stereotypes juxtaposed with the hard-drinking, hard-nosed detective put me in a similar mindset. For example, there’s a hard-drinking klezmer music club. That’s just weird. But it worked to draw me in.

Will you like it even if you don’t get all the Jewish and 1940s detective story references? Probably. It’s a compelling story, there are fun chase scenes, and the bit where he describes the nighttime city sky as having “the translucence of onions cooked in chicken fat” is clever. I liked it.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: Recommended

* In fact, at one point he draws a parallel between religion and drug abuse, that were I religious, I might have found offensive.

The Maltese Falcon

I’m noir-ed out. I’ve been reading too much Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Ian Rankin, and now Dashiell Hammett. Instead of thinking about the story, I found myself thinking about how shadows and nighttime play a large role in noir (books and movies), and wondering if it was a reaction to electric lights being more widespread in the first half of the twentieth century, with more people staying up later. (A simple search on “when did electric lights become widespread” doesn’t answer the question.)

The Maltese Falcon is one of the earliest noir novels that I know of. The mystery itself — where the hell the statue is — is pretty simple. The mystery comes from who’s lying, who’s double-crossing who, and who’s really in cahoots with whom.

Honestly, I read it because I felt like I should have read it, not because it particularly piqued my interest. That’s why it didn’t click: I didn’t care very much and it didn’t engage me.

The Maltese Falcon: Meh.

The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye holds together better, plot-wise, than The Big Sleep. The style doesn’t hit you over the head so much, either. Overall, it’s more polished and you can tell it was written after the first. I certainly heard Bugs Bunny much less this time around. It’s a nice, tight polished mystery, and having learned a few things about California from Where I Was From, made more sense. Los Angeles outside Hollywood seems to be a much more interesting place than the shiny-movie-place is. I liked it.*

The Long Goodbye: Recommended

* I have a small problem with televisions in Philip Marlowe’s world.

The Big Sleep

The problem with reading the original sixty-seven years after it’s been published is that all the take-offs echo while you read. Things that popped into my head: Elmore Leonard, particularly The Hot Kid; Bugs Bunny; Calvin and Hobbes; the origin of the word “cool,” maybe from cool-headed, and it definitely applies to Marlowe; Lauren Bacall (who I saw and heard as Vivian, before I knew she played her in the movie); Peter Lorre (who wasn’t in the movie); and the improbability of Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. Bogart’s too old, and was in 1939, when The Big Sleep was published. Of course Bacall would have been far too young at that point, but that’s neither here nor there, and this isn’t a movie review.*

The Big Sleep is practically part of the Canon (though I suspect Harold Bloom wouldn’t approve — too much sex); my only regret is that I didn’t read it earlier. The language is tight, the style is spot-on (duh), and it moves at the right pace. The plot’s a little contrived, but the last book I read was Wodehouse. This plot had nothing on that one for unnecessary complications. Overall, very well done, and in only 200 pages.

The Big Sleep: Recommended, even if you’re not a mystery fan.

* Oddly, I don’t want to see the movie. There are things about how it all works in my head that I don’t want Hollywood to mess with.

Tooth and Nail

Tooth and Nail is the third Inspector Rebus mystery, and I think it’s one of the worst. One of the things I like about these is how Inspector Rebus and Edinburgh work together. But Tooth and Nail takes place in London. Not to mention that the noir aspects of this one seem to take over, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Why the murderer becomes a murderer is also disturbing in a particularly icky way.

Rebus is a better, more nuanced character in the later books. I think this one suffers from being too early in the series.

Tooth and Nail: Meh

A Good Hanging

A Good Hanging is another Inspector Rebus book. I’ve already reviewed Fleshmarket Alley, where I discovered that one of the reasons I like these books is their atmosphere. This one’s actually the first one I read, and the atmosphere is much less noir-like and Rebus has a much better sense of humor. It’s a bunch of short stories, and I think that has something to do with it. It was a good introduction to the character, and the series.

A Good Hanging: Recommended

Murder on the Silk Road

Talking about China as a repressive Communist country instead of a future world economic power? This book *must* be old. I still can’t keep track of the characters very well, and I’m not sure that I can see a glamorous Katherine Hepburn-type wandering around a Chinese desert, ending up in a chase scene. Otherwise, not a whole lot to say here.

Murder on the Silk Road: slightly recommended

Murder at the Spa

How to talk about this without repeating myself from the other two Charlotte Graham books I’ve just reviewed? I’m just not sure. It’s more of the same, but I think the mystery is handled the best in this one, of the three (there’s one more in the series that I own). The pacing is right, the reveals are handled well, I could keep all the characters straight (mostly) and I knew why I should care about most of them. All things that are perfectly good when you’re looking for some relaxation at the end of the day.

Murder at the Spa: Recommended.

Murder at Teatime

One of the reasons that I like this series is its feminism. It’s perfectly ok for the main character to not have any children and to have been married four times; in fact, whenever career gets openly discussed, women who choose to stay home are often slighted. Now, I don’t want to get into a big is-feminism-really-about-choice-if-choosing-to-stay-home-isn’t-ok discussion*, but in this age of articles in the New York Times about opting out and female Yale graduates just wanting to stay at home and raise babies (no matter what the statistics say about the fact that the percentage of women in the workforce is rising), it’s nice to have the opposite perspective: that you can have a career without a family and be happy.

Oh, and for some reason, I had problems keeping all the characters and their relationships to each other straight. Who was Grace again? Should I care about her? I’m just not sure.

Murder at Teatime: Recommended

*Because ultimately how you choose to spend your time is between you and your family.

Murder on the Cliff

Since I learned that whether or not I like mysteries largely depends on whether or not I like the setting, I’m mostly reviewing this book on its setting. Just so you know.

And the setting is fabulous, in the mid-80s, with an old movie star in the vein of Katharine Hepburn as the detective. She gets along well with the police and knows the value of hard work. The solution to the murder uses the typical lead-you-along-the-completely-wrong-path tactic only to give you the real story in the last twenty or so pages that you, of course, never saw coming because there wasn’t anything to lead you to that conclusion. Agatha Christie started that trick, and it seems like most mystery writers use it. I guess you need to because otherwise, all you’d have would be short stories.

Murder on the Cliff: Recommended for your glamour brain candy.

Fleshmarket Alley

This is the latest (I think, Amazon doesn’t have a series page for this one) of the Inspector Rebus mysteries. I read them because I like Rebus. He’s the typical noir detective: dedication to the job to the exclusion of everything else, though he doesn’t profess to like it very much; a heavy drinker; lots of screwed up relationships wherever you look; and chances are that he’s going to meet a bad ending some day, when Ian Rankin decides that he’s had enough of him, and Rebus’ll probably be trying to do something noble at the time.

This one starts off with three seemingly unrelated mysteries – they all have some number of them at the beginning, usually two or three – which then come together, just like you know they will, even though you don’t know the specifics of how.

And that’s why I like mysteries in small doses. There’s a problem to solve, you know it’s going to be wrapped up in the end, and chances are pretty good that you can figure out at least part of it on your own if you want to try. But it’s all right if you don’t want to, too. Too much of it is bad – I don’t always like knowing those things ahead of time, so I tend to read mysteries in small quantities (although I should admit that the harder I have to think during the day, the more I like them in the evening). When I do reach for one, lately it’s been one of these.

Fleshmarket Alley: Recommended

Roma Sub Rosa

This is a series of murder mysteries that take place in late republican Rome, when Cicero was a leading politician, Caesar was rising in power and triumverates were the chosen form of government. The main character is Gordanius the Finder. He investigates cases for various and sundry people, most of them famous. The mysteries that Gordanius investigates for the most part have happened in real life; they’ve been documented in various histories.

As far as I can tell, Gordanius is the voice of the old republic. The old form of government (the republic with its famed Senate) was no longer running Rome and its lands effectively. There were civil wars in the beginning of this century about who got to be a citizen and what that meant. Eventually, Sulla became the dictator who restored order. When he passed on, disorder reigned again, and a number of people, Julius Caesar included, started to vie for power. The Senate was one group who wanted to lead. They represented traditional Rome, which meant male-dominated families, proper etiquette, and hard work. It strikes me as very Calvinistic. The newer powers were more lax. They had more sumptuous parties, more relaxed etiquette but all of the power had to go through one period. Gordanius, without saying it, supports the Senate and the old way of life. Cicero also supports this, but later in the series Gordanius does not agree with Cicero. He feels that Cicero has gotten to be too much of a politician,and is fighting to stay in power without regard to what is best for Rome and its people.

These books are well-written and usually well paced, although they sometimes get bogged down in explaining the history. While I enjoy this, I can see how others wouldn’t. These books are a very good introduction to Roman history around the time of Christ, and are fun to read. Mr Saylor is a good writer who cares about explaining details to readers, but holds back enough detail to make the mysteries a surprise.

Roma Sub Rosa: Recommended

Originally published on degelau.com.