25. Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers

this image references
all 3 stories

I probably should not have read this book at this point in time, probably shouldn't have even picked it up, but here we are.  I say that because it is a collection of the final 3 Lord Peter Wimsey short stories with an essay about Sayers and Wimsey.  I was never going to be a completist with this character, so it's not a big deal, but I did feel a bit like I was cheating.  

The first story is about a retired man who is resenting the potential development of the estate land up which his small cottage looks.  When a stranger comes to visit and play chess with him (he is a known chess expert), it is actually an elaborate ruse to frame him for murder of said developer.  The chess match was cool, but they story and mystery were a bit pat and short to be satisfying, involving galosh prints in mud.

The second story has Wimsey, on the day of the birth of his first son, chatting with a perplexed police constable who thought he saw a murder through a mail slot and then returned to find nothing that he thought he saw to be anywhere near the truth.  I guessed this one but the answer seemed so silly that I dismissed it.  It was fun, though, to read the thoughts and dialogue of the aristocratic Wimsey thinking about being a new father.

The third story was the best, because of the funny way it captures the positive side of British upper class mores.  Wimsy is no on his third child, the first of which is accused of stealing prize peaches from a nearby neighbour.  The Wimseys also have a guest, the annoying Mrs. Quint, who keeps lecturing to them about child-rearing.  Wimsey and his son conspire her comeuppance as the former also solves the mystery, to the satisfaction and appreciation of the neighbour.  It's a lot of fun.

The essay by Janet Hitchman is okay.  It's an excellent reference if you want a summary of Wimsey's character and career as well as some biographical info on Sayers herself.  It doesn't have all that much interesting to say, though she tries, other than that.  The book itself is a nice NEL paperback and I hope that some Wimsey completist finds it when I give it away.

 

24. The Goodbye Look by Ross Macdonald

I was a bit wary about reading this one, as I understand there is a peak period with the Lew Archer novels. The Goodbye Look was published in 1969, on the later side and I suspected that this one might not be so great.  When an author works a certain specific style and themes their entire career, it can grow old and repetitive at the end of their work.  I didn’t want to expose myself to a lesser Lew Archer and then find that influencing my perception of his great books.  Nevertheless, it was thin and has a cool cover.  I was on a work trip and knew i could only read in snatches and thought a detective book would be an easily digestible follow.  I was correct on my first worry and incorrect on the second prediction.  The Goodbye Look is a decent read, but it does feel tired, dwelling overly and too heavily on the sins of the past and the lies of couples and parents.  It also had a complex mystery with too many characters so that I got quite confused at times.  This book should be read in one sitting or at least several chunks.  The plot is actually really well-constructed and clever (and messed up) but it takes some focus to keep it all together.

Archer gets hired by a lawyer, Trutwell to help his wealthy clients, the Chalmers, to recover a jewelry box filled with letters that was stolen from them.  The lawyer lives next door to the Chalmers and they have a long history together.  However, the Chalmers don’t seem keen on Archer’s involvement.  Right away, you can tell that there are secrets everywhere and everyone involved doesn’t want to say anything.  Archer, of course, plods along, continuing to probe until he finds out quite quickly that their son Nick is quite likely the culprit.   He has a history of psychological instability and there is a risk of suicide.  He has been hanging out with an older woman and a rougher young man, despite supposedly in love with Trutwell’s nice daughter.  Tracking them down, Archer finds the rougher young man shot to death in his car.  This is where things get complex and we get a bunch of storylines from the past including an embezzled bank (and the disappearance of the money), affairs while boyfriends are away at the war and just a whole lot of lying.

Now that we all know the sad history of the Millar’s, it is hard to extricate their personal struggles from the books.  The themes in The Goodbye Look seem to hit particularly hard in this area and it is troubling to think of the two writers working on this book together which discusses the crimes of wayward children and how their parents dealt with them.  I think part of what makes this book lacking is that there is so much focus on the family and very little on the time and place.  There is also more explicit pscyhological talk, both in the dialogue and Archer’s thoughts.  His metaphors as well were getting a bit forced at this point.

I know I’m sounding really critical.  On its own, it’s an impressively intricate mystery with a pretty good portrayal of the morally bankrupt bourgeoisie.  It just can’t compare to his earlier works and one risks perhaps enjoying them less if you read them after this one.  So I recommend it for Archer completists only.

 

23. Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold (#12 in the Vorkosigan saga)

Still in catch-up mode, I went to the queen of fun and fulfilling (and quick to read), the Vorkosigan series.  Diplomatic Immunity thoroughly delivered.  It was as enjoyable and rich as the previous books with the added bonus that all the previous background to Miles and his various associates, and especially the galaxy-building all come into play here.  My old man memory has held up enough or perhaps after 11 books, I have internalized much of it, that I was able to stay entirely on top of the big-picture space strategy plot points that came up.  This was what I was looking for when I started researching a sci-fi series so long ago.  So very satisfying.

Here Miles is now newly-married, settling into his role as Imperial Auditor and seemingly a slight more staid life than before.  He and Ekaterina are returning from their honeymoom to prepare to settle down and welcome the birth of their son and daughter, in uterine containers back on Barrayar.  Of course, everything goes to shit when he gets a call to deal with a conflict between a Barrayar military escort with the local authorities of the remote Graf station, in Quaddiespace.  The Quaddies were genetically developed with four arms instead of two arms and two legs, specifically for construction and living in zero-gravity and due to persecution and exploitation set off centuries before to make their own colony. 

It's a complicated situation involving initially a disappeared, either deserted or kidnapped or murdered, security officer, plus an "overzealous" (or brutal) attack by Barrayan officers when they went to return to the ship a late-returning pilot.  Things get more and more complicated and risky as the situation continues to escalate to a galactic level.  I'm not going to say more than that.  This was another fun one, involving a great look at the Quaddie world and how they live, lots of gross bio-weapons and some cool, exciting last-minute space action.  I can't wait to see where they go next.

22. Closed Circuit by William Haggard

boring as hell for a photo cover
but still looks cool

Back to fiction and wow what a boost to my reading!  This book was thin and I burned through it in two days, thoroughly enjoying myself.  I love all kinds of reading but it sure is nice when you don't have to re-read passages, check the maps over and over again and even go to Wikipedia to try and figure out the historical context.  

It doesn't hurt how beautiful these Penguins are.  I'm not a massive Haggard fan, but I keep all of his that I find because the editions are so lovely and look great on my shelf.  I know it is pure snobbery, but I love the back tagline of this book "the 'adults' Ian Fleming".  It is so true.  These are smart espionage books.  Sometimes perhaps a bit too smart, as Haggard loves oblique conversations (and even sometimes narrative passages) where nothing specific is mentioned and the read has to infer what is actually going on.  I think this is often how intelligent spymasters do actually talk, but there are also elements that refer to subtle class distinctions in England that can be tough for a 21st century North American to parse.

The story here contains Haggard's usual elements: skullduggery involving a fictional foreign nation that somewhat implicates Britain as well.  However, it is off to the side from his usual sandbox, only indirectly involving the Security Executive branch.  The protagonist is Francis Mason, the heir of a multi-generational farming family of English descent from the South American country of Candoro (an analogue of paraguay perhaps).  His grandfather and the patriarch of the estancia (named "Seven" because it was the seventh plot of land granted to colonialists in the 19th century) drove off a local official in a humiliating way (knocking him down with bolas just after he had left the property) and that local has recently become the president of the country.  He is making serious trouble for Seven so Mason heads off to England in the hope of getting some support from the British Foreign Office and sympathetic people in the Candoran embassy.  His first "ally" is Kenneth Gibb, an ambitious and less than ethical middle ranking diplomat who also had an affair with Mason's wife.  Mason is portrayed initially as a bit soft and passive, but as the narrative unfolds, we of course see that he is made of sterner stuff, as he threads the needle of all the various enemies working around him.

It's a fun read, though I found the ending a bit too dependent on chance.  I didn't mind as there is an excellent scene here of the kind of subtle badassery that is why I read these books.  Just so fucking cool.  The whole thing about Mason is that he is descended from good British stock and his grandfather was a famous badass landowner.  So he inherited that toughness and also was raised on the estancia, learning to ride, work cattle, but he also grew up with the peons and learned all their sweet knife-fighting skills, which gets revealed to the reader at the best possible moment.  He is shown as deferring and polite, just trying to minimize trouble and save his Estancia, while all these nastier and seemingly more sophisticated players are maneuvering around him to screw him out of his money.  When things get nasty for real as an assassin is sent to take out one of those players (with whom he had become allied and started to respect) in a London park, suddenly Mason is whipping out a 14" facón that nobody knew he had on him and completely besting the assassin to the point where he discusses whether or not he should kill him and decides not to because the body would cause problems for them.

 

The Kenneth Gibb character is interesting as well as in some ways the book is more about him.  Haggard really has it in for him.  He starts out as seeming that he will be quite a problem for our protagonist but ends up just getting utterly screwed left and right, to the point where though he initiated much of it with bad selfish decisions, you start to feel bad for him.  By the end he goes out in the worst possible way.  One feels that he may have been a type that Haggard dealt with in his own life, so severe is his retribution. 

21. Russell's Despatches from the Crimea edited and introduced by Nicolas Bentley

My on-deck shelf is maxed out and has been in this state or close to it for quite a while now.  I keep promising not to buy or find any more books, or at least only to look for my most prized treasures, yet I keep finding things that I can't not take.  The iron will of my disciplined youth has mellowed into a more supple approach to life.  This is my long-winded way of justifying me picking up this book on the Crimean war I found in a free book box I don't usually have access to (next to the Pirate park down by des Pins).  It's just such a beautiful book, with pull out images and maps.  And I do need to better understand 19th century European political history.  Unfortunately, it took me several weeks to read and put's me in slight catch up mode for my 50 book goal.

William Howard Russel was a very successful military journalist whose honest reporting from the Crimean front and specifically the siege of Sebastopol, though polite and respectful, exposed the incompetence and disconnection of the government at home.  The logistical planning for the war was a total disaster and the British lost thousands of men to cholera and exposure before the fighting even started. I know we all hate the British and colonialism now, but there is an element in their politics that always allowed for critique and you see that in the writing here.  He writes with sympathy of the brutal situation of the men in the field, who had to spend a winter on sodden ground without tents and insufficient food and clothing and in the gentlest way makes your understand the incompetence of Lord Raglan, the general who was given the post out of respect for his seniority rather than competence.  He also goes after the excessive paperwork and bureaucracy that stymied the army and navy actually making decisions and getting things done.

At the same time, he speaks in the voice of a patriot and his writing is so good that he makes the battles seem quite thrilling.  You could see how young men could read his passages in The Times and feel the allure of the false glories of war.  These passages, however, are strongly tempered by his descriptions of the aftermath.  Wow, these battles were just gruesome.  Russell describes the various mutilations (from shot balls, bayonets and other shrapnel) as well as the fields of the dead, dying and wounded.  It's crazy how expendable life was considered back then in the pursuit of strategic goals on the other side of the continent.

Ultimately, this battle was about western Europe using the Ottoman empire as a buffer to prevent Russian expansion (and allow Britain a free and open market in the Ottoman empire).  The specific flashpoint or excuse to trigger a war was ostensibly a conflict over who was allowed to protect the Orthodox Christians in the Palestine.  It is a conflict that we are still fighting today, in both regions.