On Comfort Reads and Rex Stout

There are some books that you turn to when your nerves are jangled, when worries press heavily on you or when everything suddenly seems too hard. I think of them as “comfort reads.” No doubt everyone has a different book, but for me it’s the collected Sherlock Holmes. I’m not sure whether it is the orderliness and logic of the solutions, the sense that Holmes and Watson exist in their own little time bubble on Baker Street where nothing ever changes, or the fact that I have been reading and rereading them for years – whatever it is, it works like nothing else to soothe and calm me.

But to my surprise, I recently found another author who has the same effect. Rex Stout is an amazingly prolific and amazingly successful author of the past who has now faded into near-obscurity. His mysteries featuring the obese Nero Wolfe and the wisecracking Archie are my new addiction, and I now take every opportunity to visit that New York brownstone filled with familiar characters, from Fritz the chef to Theodore the orchid man. Happily, as Stout wrote 72 in the series, there are plenty of opportunities.

Let me be clear – the plots are varied, occasionally verging on silly (the special golf club devised to fire a splinter into the wielder’s heart was something of a lowlight). It’s not about the plot. Like all comfort reads, it’s fundamentally about the characters. Both Wolfe and Archie are a product of their time in having quite appalling attitudes towards women, but otherwise they are both fascinating nuanced characters. Wolfe in particular is a study in contradictions, so obese he can barely move but possessed of huge mental agility, wise but at the same time sometimes petty, and generally inclined to favour orchids over people. In contrast, Archie is charming, fun, and owes a lot of his “jaundiced private detective” shtick to Philip Marlowe. The other thing which anchors the books is the relationship between these two. Their mutual attitude verges on dislike much of the time, but Stout makes clear that both harbour a deep affection towards the other (if both would probably die rather than admit it).

But they key to a comfort read is predictability. You know that the characters are not going to grow, they are not going to evolve, they will never move out of that comfortable brownstone. Loose ends will always be tied up neatly. Archie will have fun along the way, and drink large amounts of milk (something I’ve never quite understood). Wolfe will be irritable then finally solve the case, with help from Archie. It’s like visiting a place you’ve been many times before, but always enjoy, and enjoy more because you know what to expect.

Ultimately, a comfort read doesn’t have to be great literature. There is a place for books which make you feel warm and cosy inside and convince you that the world isn’t such a bad place after all. And that is what both Conan Doyle and Stout do.

 

AWW BOOK REVIEW: True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction, by Helen Garner

I’ve just had one of those moments. You know the ones, where you close the final pages of a book and immediately have the urge to write fan letters to the author. Or, in my case, shout their name from the hilltops (or in my blog). It feels rather redundant in the case of Helen Garner, who hardly qualifies as undiscovered, but I can’t help myself. I’ve just finished True Stories, and the final story is such an indescribably beautiful piece of work that it made me cry.

It’s true, not all the pieces in the collection approach the level of the last piece. Some seem rather slight, and one extended piece devoted to a country landscape had me flicking inmpatiently over pages of description of paddocks. But it’s a collection both easy to read and entertaining, and Garner’s wry postscripts at the end are characteristically amusing. The pieces are arranged roughly chronologically to form a kind of incidental memoir, with Garner as naïve teacher growing into seasoned journalist and then accomplished writer.  But between these there is literary criticism, comments on writing scripts for films, and many other interesting diversions.

The final piece that moved me so much is a description of the maternity ward of a hospital, and events taking place there over a couple of days. While it’s true that the setting is already rich in drama, it’s Garner’s understatement that lets the beauty shine through without seeming overdone. The obstetrician who has worked herself to exhaustion has a coldsore on her lip, daubed with cream.  Like the best of Garner’s work, she creates a window we peer through to see a world just like our own.

When I grow up I want to write like Helen Garner. Enough said.

BOOK REVIEW: Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James

Logically, if you take two things you like and combine them, you should end up with something you like even more. You only need to look at the stratospheric popularity of YouTube mashups to see this rationale being played out.  The “literary mashup” genre has also taken off recently, from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, Laurie R King’s Mary Russell series and others. From what I can see, the key ingredient is an enduring literary classic colliding with an unexpected genre.

So two of my favourite things – PD James crime and Pride and Prejudice – should add up to something even more fabulous, right? Unfortunately, I have to report that this theory doesn’t always work. I don’t have any problem with someone playing with a literary classic (in fact, I was quite enthusiastic about the idea) but it seems that adapting someone else’s work is a fraught and troublesome exercise. A balance needs to be struck between being faithful to the original and building upon it, and the modification that will invariably follow from that exercise. To my disappointment, it’s a line that Death Comes To Pemberley seems to fail to walk with any degree of success.

To start with the positive – the short recap of the events of Pride and Prejudice at the start is an unmitigated delight. James does have a few pithy comments to make on the original, such as Elizabeth musing on whether she would have married Darcy if he was not rich. These were the parts of the book that I enjoyed the most.

The plot itself starts out well but quickly descends into implausibility. This wouldn’t be such an issue if the characters themselves weren’t so wooden. James has a fair head start by dealing with characters that readers already know and love, but unfortunately, she has failed to make them her own. At best, they give the impression of actors in a bad movie reading aloud their lines with little conviction. By the end – death for a crime novel – we don’t really care whodunit at all. The court case at the end goes on for far too long and we spend too much time in the head of Darcy, who is so honourable as to be completely uninteresting (I believe the scientific term is “stuffed shirt”). If nothing else, the book proves Austen’s sense in telling the story from Elizabeth’s perspective!  

The Sunday Times quote on the cover describes PD James as “The greatest contemporary writer of classic crime” and it’s hard to argue with that assessment. But ultimately, as James herself admits in her introduction,  mixing a crime story with Ms Austen’s world was always going to be a big ask. Perhaps there’s a fundamental incompatibility or perhaps the problem is that James was simply too respectful of the original and not bold enough. Whatever the cause, it’s hard to deny that Death at Pemberley is one of the less successful examples of the mashup genre.

BOOK REVIEW: The Bitter Seed of Magic by Suzanne McLeod

I am so tired of sexy vampires. Particularly ones whose entire personality can more or less be summed up as ‘mysterious’. If they are in a rather bland love triangle where the heroine is torn between the good guy and the sexy vampire bad boy, I begin to lose the will to live.

So it’s not good news that The Bitter Seed of Magic by Suzanne McLeod features such a vampire and such a triangle. I picked the book up looking for light entertainment, and it is in fact the third in the serious (I confess, I read books out of order, so sue me – that’s what happens when you’re taking your choice from what’s on the library shelves). But unfortunately, I didn’t find in particularly entertaining, and just now when my eye caught the quote on the cover calling it a “Fresh, unique and urban paranormal fantasy at its best [sic]” I nearly choked on my coffee. Although on second thoughts the lack of grammar and punctuation in that quote is probably something of a giveaway, either as to the quality of the recommending publication or the quality of the editing.

Which brings me to the editing of the book. I accept that writers have tics, in fact we all have writing tics (you may have noticed one of mine is overuse of the em-dash and brackets – probably punctuation overuse in general, actually.) McLeod suffers from the same problem with the em-dash, which I noticed but sympathised with. The one tic that did drive me absolutely bonkers when reading this book was the italics. To give you an idea, I opened it at page 5 and found no less than seven italicised words. One instance is, fair enough, a foreign phrase of two words. The rest? Thought, crack, human, looked and look. Apparently McLeod italicises anything that may have some magical significance, then italicises some more for emphasis. But this is the type of thing that a competent editor is supposed to fix, and I simply cannot understand why no-one addressed this. It made me consider putting the book down a few pages in, although I did eventually get used to it (sort of).

It’s a shame in some ways because sexy vampires and stereotypic character relatonships aside, there is some good world-building here. It’s fundamentally an urban fantasy with strong celtic elements, as well as a few vampires and witches for good measure. The main character, Genevieve, is likable enough, although she does seem to have a disturbing tendency to throw herself into bed with other members of aforesaid love triangle. It seems a little odd, possibly because the sexual tension between them also seems rather forced. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that McLeod doesn’t provide reasons for Genevieve’s actions other than that the men are, of course, sexy (and supernatural). In fact, the lack of convincing backstory is another conspicuous hole in the plot.

Ah, the plot. Let me just say, I was pretty sure my brain was going to explode out my ears at some point, and not in a good way. I would bet you whatever you like that McLeod is one of those writers who makes things up as she goes along, because the way everyone turns out to be related to everyone else at the end seems implausible to say the least. It rather suggests that having dug herself into a rather deep and complicated hole some fancy footwork was required to get herself out again. And unfortunately, by that point I’d lost track of whom was related to whom and it didn’t all make that much sense anyway.

My verdict? It could have been better, but bad editing has ruined what was in any case a not-very-original book. One for the sexy-vamp-fans only.

 

Australian Women Writers' Challenge - update

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was signing up to the Australian Women Writers’ challenge, although it was way back in January. My full-of-enthusiasm initial post is here. Now that we’re more than three quarters of the way through the year, I thought it would be a good time to review progress (read – work out whether I need to panic).

There have been a few difficulties along the way. It turns out that funnily enough, not many databases allow you to search by gender or even nationality. When you find a book online or in a bookstore, it’s relatively easy to work out if the author is a woman or not, but trying to find if they are Australian often necessitates trying to deduce from the publisher name or searching for clues in the biography.

So how am I tracking against the goal of reading at least ten books by Australian women writers and reviewing four? I’ve listed them below with genre and a potted summary.

Reviews:

·         Sharp Shooter by Marianne Delacourt (urban fantasy – Stephanie Plum gets psychic)

·         The Spare Room by Helen Garner (literary fiction - heartbreaking story of caring for a cancer patient)

·         A Few Right Thinking Men by Sulari Gentill (historical crime – murder amidst the political intrigues of 1930s Sydney)

Read but not (yet) reviewed:

·         Cooking the Books by Kerry Greenwood (crime – Corinna Chapman solves mysteries while cooking & eating fantastic food)

·         On Passion by Dorothy Porter (non-fiction – poetic musings on the nature of passion in its many guises)

·         Nothing but Gold by Robyn Annear (non-fiction – life in the Victorian goldfields of 1852)

Yet to crack the spine:

·         Diving Belles by Lucy Wood

·         A Beautiful Place by Malla Nunn

So in summary…not quite panicking yet but still more work to do! One more review and four more to read.

One other thing worth mentioning is that the Australian Women Writers’ project recently passed the milestone of over 1000 reviews. That’s an absolutely mind-boggling number and a huge credit to Elizabeth Lhuede and team. I’m proud to be part of such a worthwhile project which is really no chore at all, discovering writers I didn’t know before and fantastic books. I've also been really impressed by the sheer diversity of books reviewed, in all genres, new, old, and classic. So a big congratulations to the good ship AWW Challenge and all who sail in her!

On Book Covers

Book covers are not something that I pay much attention to any more. On my ereader they tend to render in boring black and white, something to be skipped along with the acknowledgements and the content pages. Perhaps I would pay more attention if they popped up whenever I closed the book (like they do with a Kindle) but on the other hand, once the ereader goes into its case there is nothing to see anyway.

Then recently I saw this cover for Gold by Chris Cleave and I went – WOW. It stopped me in my tracks.

What a killer cover. I’m not entirely sure why I find it so arresting, but it must have something to do with the bright colours and simple design. I like it because it’s not too literal – the obvious thing for a book called Gold would be to have a gold cover (der) or because it’s about two Olympic cyclists, a picture of a gold medal, bike, or at least something vaguely sporty. Hell, for all that the cover tells you, it could be a non-fiction history of precious metals. Instead, the cover makes you curious, and you pick up the book to find out what it’s about. 

The really funny thing is that this seems to be the Australian cover only – the UK cover is a rather strange-looking picture of two girls in silhouette.

There’s no way I’d be picking up that book. I’d think it was some kind of regency romance (been there, don’t want to go back). So they have this dynamite Australian cover, and someone apparently decided, no, the annoying literal one which is gold and has a picture of the two main characters is a much better option. That’s publishers for you.

So apart for my obsession with Gold (which I haven’t yet read), what’s to take out of this? Perhaps the book cover is not dead. Perhaps we’ve just got bored with them because, frankly, lots of them are just not very interesting. Perhaps in the future we’ll see a renaissance in book covers, especially as colour ereaders become the norm. What do you think?

And for the pleasure of your eyes, I’ll leave you with this link from Readings showcasing the best covers of 2012. Enjoy!

AWW BOOK REVIEW: A Few Right Thinking Men by Sulari Gentill

After you’ve closed the cover it can take a few days to pull free of a really fascinating story. You find yourself musing on the plot, the characters and the setting, and daydreaming about it in absent moments. For all my love for the crime genre, this doesn’t usually happen with crime novels – the main reason that they are my preferred weekday read. However, Sulari Gentill’s historical crime novel A Few Right Thinking Men absolutely captured my imagination.

So what was so unusual about this book? First off, there is the setting. I’ve always thought that Australian history was under-utilised as a setting for historical crime novels, and the thirties are probably one of the least-known eras of Australian history. I would have thought that they are a period not exactly ripe with dramatic potential, except that Gentill so clearly proves me wrong. The rising tensions between the communists and early fascists, played out in the context of a squattocracy with conservative leanings and a bohemian fringe with communist sympathies, make for a gripping backdrop. It’s extra fascinating because you can recognise a cultural discourse that still continues today between left and right in this country.

But of course a setting is nothing without a plot and characters, and these are especially key for crime novels. On the point of characters Gentill really excels. The main character, Rowland “Rowly” Sinclair, is a member of a wealthy squatting family, turned artist. He’s rejected the values he grew up with and almost succeeded at becoming a through-and-through bohemian – except that he still feels the tension of trying to fit in with the artists who have come to live in the family manor. His relationship with his family is hardly easier, as he tries to maintain his independence while not irreparably damaging the relationship. A part of him still seems to long for the gracious country lifestyle of his brother Wilfred, although the two brothers disagree on almost everything. When a murder in the family brings politics into the mix, Rowland and Wilfred seem likely to end up on different sides of the brewing conflict.

In terms of plot, this is perhaps not a classical crime novel. While it starts out with a murder, it soon devolves into an examination of the murky politics of the time. The murderer is discovered in the end, but the book avoids the trap of tying up all the loose ends with a too-neat bow.  However, I do wonder if the plot suffers a bit from the paradox Gentill identifies in her comments at the back of the book: “I found I didn’t need to fictionalise the events of the era…the facts were fascinating and ludicrous enough.” The truth may be stranger than fiction, but ironically it is sometimes less believable than pure invention. While the setting was impeccably drawn and Gentill’s historical research meticulous, I think that the book may have benefited if she took more creative licence with the facts. A final confrontation with Campbell, in many ways set up as the villain of the piece, would have given weight to the ending.

The thing I enjoyed most about the book, the thing that kept me thinking about it for days, was that it gave me an insight into Sydney in the thirties that I’ve never had before. You can read a list of facts, even a historical document, but to get that sense of what it was to be there – that idea of how people thought, acted, the politics of the day, the class divisions at work – you need a book like A Few Right Thinking Men. This is where fiction has a huge advantage over non-fiction, yet the best books still manage to educate as well as entertain. The phrase “bringing history to life” is overused to the point of cliché, but this is truly what Gentill manages. It’s a fantastic achievement.