58. The Spoilt Kill by Mary Kelly

I managed to finish this just under the wire to include it in my August count.  I picked it up at a very well-curated used bookstore on Shelter Island, Black Cat Books, which had a rich selection of first edition mystery hardbacks, though mainly secondary authors.  I didn't have time to really investigate so just grabbed this one, a Geoffrey Household and John D. MacDonald's first novel in paperback.

Having finished it, my primary appreciation of this book is its physical beauty.  The paper is thick, textured, reminds me of good oatmeal.  There even was a page with a wrinkle from the printing process where you can see that this was manufactured in some imperfect process in the past.  The entire book and all its materials seem to have been entirely manufactured in England, as evinced by this text on one of the inside pages:

Very appropriate too, as the mystery itself takes place in the town of Stoke-On-Trent, in a region of England where pottery is the dominant industry.  I was quite optimistic going in as this appeared to be what I have termed an industrial murder mystery, one that takes place in some job situation in which the author uses a lot of the pages to really describe how these places worked.  I have read ones about the shoe industry and another about processed food sales. I was pretty excited to learn about mid-century industrial pottery.  I was not disappointed.  There is some pretty neat history and regional culture in The Spoilt Kill (for instance, kill is the local pronunciation of kiln, which makes for a good play on words as the body is found inside a kiln).

Unfortunately, the story itself was not so pleasing.  It is very well-written and the descriptions of the locations and characters are also excellent.  The premise is great as well.  Somebody from the inside is selling their designs to competitors and the protagonist is hired to investigate, posing as a writer contracted to update the firm's brochures and history.  It is just so weighted down with British class anxiety and personal recriminations of the period.  People in post-war Britain were really, really down on themselves and super stressed about which class they were in and single and past tragedies.  I get it. They were recovering from a war and had gone from empire to second-world country in a few decades.  The Spoilt Kill just piles it on so thick that it becomes kind of exhausting after a while.  Worse, though, the mystery isn't all that compelling or interesting.  Instead of it being a complex puzzle involved with industrial espionage, it is all about whether or not the love interest is guilty so we can have endless hand-wringing and stunted, tense conversations.

One interesting thing was that right at the beginning, I misread the first sentence and for about 50 pages thought the protagonist was a woman.  I was finding it incredibly refreshing how she was being treated and thought the early connection with the love interest was a subtle lesbian sub-text. Once I realized my mistake, it made me see that the style here was quite different than I would have expected.  I hate to say it, but it was more feminine, with its self-conscious and anxious detective.  I continued to pretend in my mind that he was a woman and it made the book a thousand times more interesting.

Now my dillema is whether or not too keep it!

57. The Long-Legged Fly by James Sallis

There is a really good book store here in Montreal, Le Port de Tête, that opened in the last ten years on Avenue Mont-Royal and I believe is somewhat of a success story.  It is mostly french books with an excellent selection of bandes-dessinées and children's books, which is what I mostly patronize it for.  They had a bunch of english paperback for a while, lots of Jim Thompson's and Agatha Christie's which for some reason I never went in and investigated.  That was a few years ago and I think caught the leftovers in the sidewalk sale they had put out for the street fair.  I got this book, a James Hadley Chase and a Fredric Brown mystery as well as a pre-war British boys espionage/adventure book.

I grabbed this one because the protagonist PI was black and it had a look of one of those late 80s/early 90s paperbacks that can be pretty easy to read.  I found it a bit of a puzzler.  After reading it, I read up on Sallis.  He has a very good reputation and the Lew Griffin series, of which this is the first, is well regarded, even considered under-rated.  Maybe I have to read more of them, but this was an odd beginning.  It takes place over almost the detective's entire life starting in 1964 and following with sections in 1970, 1984 and 1990, each a stage in his life as well as a missing persons crime.  Griffin's detecting mainly seems to be calling people on the phone and then threatening people, because he is big and has a reputation for being crazy, though there is almost zero actual fighting.  A lot goes on in very few pages, with a lot of philosophizing about life, most of it dark.  There is lots of local New Orleans colour, also generally quite down and out.  Sallis is white and while Griffin's race is a big factor, the voice just did not feel black at all to me.  It felt like most semi-intellectual hard-boiled detectives.  Furthermore, by the end, he becomes a succesful writer and even suggests that he (the character) is the one writing the book.  Maybe too strong to call it problematic, but I think I would much rather read a book about an African-American detective in New Orleans written by an African-American. 

Also, several of the missing person's vignettes just seemed implausible.  The civil rights leader who disappears to become a white prostitute and then ends up in an insane asylum, the good christian runaway who gets in brutal porn movies but the director is also in love with her?  It just didn't really add up and none of it was really connected.  I don't know, this didn't work for me.

56. The Kif Strike Back by C.J. Cherryh

Argh, I thought this, the third in the Chanur series, was the final!  I cry out in half-joking terms because while the Chanur series has not so far been the easiest of reads, I am starting to really get into it.  Cherryh herself even writes an explanatory and appreciative afterword about her publisher allowing her to write a long, complex non-trilogy where each book doesn't end neatly (and with an interesting explanation as to why there are so many trilogies in sci-fi and fantasy).  I realize that this "series" should really be written as a single massive book, like Cyteen.  Also, like Cyteen, while the Chanur series has a decent star map, it would have really helped to also have a list of the various players and which species they were attached to and maybe even the various factions of the Hani (the lion species of whom the Chanur house are the main protagonists).  There is a summary at the beginning of what went on in the first two books that really helped a lot.  I actually learned stuff there that I hadn't gleaned while reading the actual books!

What makes this series challenging is that Cherryh doesn't spell it out for you.  Much of what actually happens is expressed in dialogue or thought by the various characters and the characters themselves often don't know everything or are alien and express themselves in ambiguous ways.  The most extreme case of this is the knnn who communicate in grids of words that can be read with meaning horizontally and vertically because they each seem to have multiple consciousnesses, at least from what the rest of the galaxy understands of them, which is not much (except they breathe methane, have super bad ass ships and just kind of come in and wreck shit from time to time).  So it require careful reading and memory, two of my weaker areas.

Like in Cyteen, the attention does bear rewards.  The politics are complex and made more so by the differences in the competing species (and as we learn more complex by their internal conflicts).  This is the kind of stuff I love and by making it hard to parse, Cherryh makes it all the more realistic.  Also, there is a new threat to captain Pyanfar Chanur and her crew, coming from home-grown bureaucratic conservatives in the form of a kind of police ship that keeps fucking with them.  They really piss me off and I now must get the next book to see how they are dealt with.

I suspect that with most of Cherryh's books, you need to be prepared to invest some time and patience and attention but the end result will be quite satisfying.  I went with these Chanur books after Cyteen because I thought they would be more easily digestible, which was not the case.  Now I know and will prep myself accordingly.  Any suggestions on what would be a good next long read by Cherryh?

55. Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper

Whew, I finally made it through the entire Dark Is Rising sequence.  This was the fifth book and unfortunately, other than a few bright spots, I found my critique to be the same here as it was of the previous books.  The setting is well done and probably the best part of the book, with vivid descriptions of Wales in present and in the past.  There is some neat historical moments as well that though not totally my bag I do recognize as being quite compelling for people who enjoy the notion of a character finding themselves in key moments in Arthurian history.  Finally, there is one scene at the beginning, in the present day, when the hero kids encounter some bullies picking on an immigrant kid.  Later, the bullies' dad comes up to speak to the kids dad, revealing his racism (and that he is part of man that the Dark can influence).  It is disturbing and filled with the same hateful bullshit that is becoming so prevalent again today. 

Unfortunately, nothing is made of this and the rest of the book is again the children being given arbitrary quests where they have little agency beyond remembering some clue from the previous arbitrary quest.  Furthermore, there is not much character development nor interaction between the children.  You never get a sense of why they are chosen and what is in them that helps them along in their journey.  It was all a bit of a slog for me by the end.  I am disappointed.  It is possible that it is just me and where I am in my age that this kind of fantasy doesn't appeal to me, so please be your own judge.

54. Gat Heat by Richard S. Prather

I chose this one after Homicide, simply because it was short.  Too be honest, I was not looking forward to reading it.  The last Shell Scott book I read, The Meandering Corpse, was just too goofy.  I knew this was going to be easy to read and I soldiered on.  Happily, I ended up actually quite enjoying it.  This one was possibly more goofy and that pushed it over into being actually funny.  Scott is also extremely self-deprecating in this one, making himself look bad in front of other cops and witnesses in moments that were absolutely slapstick.  At times, there was the prepatory monologue that I found so off-putting in The Meandering Corpse, but it was scaled way down here and the payoffs were funnier. 

The book opens with Scott responding to a call from a potential client, whom he finds dead in his own home while what he finds out later is a swingers party is winding down.  Scott ends up investigating the murder for the wife (who fails to tell him about the swinging).  The plot and mystery were semi-interesting and the ultimate badguys, an attractive couple whose scam was to get groups of swingers going, take their pictures and blackmail them, were interesting.  There is a lot of violence with a bunch of gangsters in between and two very funny setpieces: Scott breaking into a couple's home fearing an ambush where there is none and destroying their curtains and Scott showing a home movie to a bunch of cops that was going to be evidence but ends up making a goat of him.

I guess the series had its ups and downs.  I was totally down on the Shell Scott series at the last book, but now I am back up again.  I won't be hunting them down, but will do a bit of investigation if another one falls into my lap to see if it is one of the good ones.

53. Homicide: a Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon

After having finished Homicide, my feeling was that it is essential reading if you are a fan of detective fiction.  As lauded by the many reviews quoted on the cover of this 2006 re-edition, it is also essential reading for an understanding of America in the 20th century and who just likes great journalism.  Simon took a year-long leave of absence in 1988 from his job as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and instilled himself as a "police intern" in the Baltimore Homicide division.  You don't really learn of his role until the afterword.  The author's presence is absent from the book and as he writes in the afterword, he mostly succeeded.

I had already read The Corner and of course seen The Wire, the latter of which strongly informed my approach to Homicide.  I was surprised to find that actually only small bits of Homicide are in The Wire.  This book is much more positive than I expected.  The detectives are poorly paid, the politics and hierarchy above them is annoying and the streets are brutal.  However, they love their job and they are really good at it.  The bulk of the book is just case after case, revealing the various detectives' methods, their interplay with the citizens, the other workers and especially with each other.  They don't all make it through but the good ones just keep plugging away, solving murders.  During the year the book was written, over 70% of the cases are solved, which was at the national average.

The hacking away at public institutions that defines the start of the 21st century (and the theme in Simon' later work) was just beginning to manifest itself in the late 80s.  In another afterword, we read about how the closure rate on the murders goes down in the following years (and the number of murders goes up). 

It took me a second try to get going on this book.  The first time, I was too distracted it seemed too long.  This time, I couldn't put it down and was kind of sad when it ended.  The detectives are such great characters (some of whom do show up in The Wire) and the cases each one so interesting.  Simon is a great writer, keeping it fast-moving and straightforward with a cynical and humorous edge that reflects the dark humour of the detectives themselves.  There were several laugh out loud moments.  And while the cases are all "realistic" and do not fit any neat narratives, they certainly were interesting and compelling, making me want to find out what happens as much as the best fictional cases.  Highly recommended.

52. Miasma by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

It's an Elisabeth Sanxay Holding double rock block!  The main reason I went back to back is that they are in the same physical book (part of the way Stark house has done their reprints) and my on-deck shelf is so full that I am stacking books on top so I have to make room.  Also, though, the first one was just so much fun I thought I would keep going.  I was not disappointed.

First of all, she is just such a good writer.  In the first 3 or 4 pages, you get the entire set-up and the stage is set for suspense.  Alex Dennison is a young man right out of medical school hoping to start his practice in a small town.  He has a young fiancee back home that he hopes to marry when he has established himself.  There is pressure there, as her family is well-to-do.  He is a dour, Calvinist from a poor background with a grim outlook on life, but hard-working and honest.  He struggles to get patients and is soon desperate enough to try to get a job on a passenger ship (which does not please his fiancee) when he receives an offer out of the blue from the more established town doctor. It is an offer that seems almost too good to be true.  Dr. Leatherby is urbane, accommodating and supportive.  His  house is beautiful, dripping with class.  He has too many patients and wants Alex to be his assistant at an excellent wage, room & board, including a beautiful nurse.   The offer is a godsend, but Dennison is reluctant as he wants to go on his own.  However, the pressure of his fiancee is always there:

Then, as was natural, his thoughts drifted toward Evelyn.  He took a little snapshot out of his pocket, and looked at it. Such a pretty little face, such a gay and innocent smile! She looked at him out of the picture, as she looked at him in life, making unconscious enormous demands upon him, upon his patience, his energy, asking of him protection against the brutalities of life.  Very well, he meant to meet her demands; he meant to take care of her.  He would save his money, and secure a home for her, where, behind frilled curtains, her innocence and gaiety would be safe.

As it turns out, Evelyn has a bit more mettle than Dennison perceives.  Sanxay Holding beautifully nails his perception of her and the anxieties her potential creates in him.  I love the direct exposure of his psychological punctuated by that perfect little image of suburban properness and safety, the closed frilled curtains.  So good!

And soon things start to happen that confirm Dennison's reluctance.  The sunshiney nurse tells him that he should leave.  Dr. Leatherby's sister does the same, though both seem to like him.  Dr. Leatherby has private appointments with patients at odd hours, one who dies in his sleep the following night and bequeathes 100k on the good doctor.  Dennison's strong sense of right and wrong won't allow him to continue the job without finding out what is going on.

In many ways, the setup here is very similar to Lady Killer (written 20 years later).  An inexperienced protagonist out of their element is the only who finds something wrong is going on.  In Lady Killer, she is on a passenger ship for the first time, out of her depth with the educated classes and a woman. Here, though a man, he also lacks the class and upbringing of the others around him.  In both cases, they are headstrong.  Their determination is commendable and makes them likable but they also are not very smart or subtle about how they go about trying to figure the situation out.  Things get messy.

Miasma was not a total home run.  The ending got a bit convoluted and then required a lot of explanation to clear everything up.  Getting there was a lot of fun, like an excellent old-time radio play with much more depth and nuance than you could fit into a half-hour.

I leave with you another great line, when Dr. Leatherby's chauffeur is first introduced:  "They found Ames in the garage; a very self-possessed young man, with the independent air of one who can always find a job."

51. Lady Killer by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Not the copy I have, sadly.

This was a lot of fun!  Young and beautiful (and was we learn quite strong-willed and practical) Honey Stapleton is taking her first ocean passage to the Caribbean with her old and uptight and very wealthy husband, Weaver.  Right from the beginning you can see the marriage is not doing well.  He is a total pill, worried about everything and super conscious about being proper.  He locks himself in the bathroom to change.  Honey, on the other hand, though aware that she doesn't love him, really does want to make a go of it.  She is realistic about her situation yet inherently positive.  She soon meets the couple in the cabin, Hilary and Alma Leshafer, next door and right away things seem suspicious.  They are a couple on their honeymoon but the wife's luggage never arrived and she almost missed the boat because she got a call that the departure was going to be delayed.

Though at first I thought it was going to be about the travails of Honey as a naive, out of her element young wife amongst the educated upper class set, right away you see that she is a pretty cool character.  She immediately recognizes that Hilary is super suspicious and Alma is way too in love to see it.  The book is fun because almost all the men are either jerks or deliberately oblivious while the women are more or less trying to work around their stupidity or evil.  The twist that comes at the end makes this even more fun.

50. Death on the Broadlands by Alan Hunter

I bought this at the excellent Dark Carnival simply based on the cover and the back blurb saying it was in the "classic John Buchan tradition".  This latter is wildly erroneous, though it is indeed British.  I learned after reading it that this is one of over 50 George Gently novels, which are quite highly regarded (and inspired several TV series) and which I will keep an eye out for.  In this one, though, Gently is a secondary character, whose true identity is not revealed to the protagonist until almost the very end.

The protagonist is Stella Rushton, semi-succesful novelist who was recently quite badly jilted by a somewhat public figure whose biography she had written.  She receives an invitation to stay in a lovely cottage in the Broadlands which I guess was a somewhat well-known vacation spot in Norfolk.  Though a wreck at first, Stella soon reveals that she truly has a writer's observation, a strong spirit and an independent sexuality.  She wants to stay alone to write but soon gets sucked into the social life at the larger house of the cottage's owner, a very successful play-write.  They are a catty and somewhat unpleasant crew, except perhaps young Keith, morose heir to an engineering firm who falls into puppy love with Stella.

It takes a while for the crime to actually happen but the idyllic surroundings gradually become tainted by the human foibles of the theatre crew and others.  I was quite enjoying the book for the first half, especially the wonderful descriptions of the locations and the somewhat nasty characters.  The book fails a bit in that the crime itself is not that interesting and the solution less so.  I will spoil the book somewhat to say that the murder victim being young Keith was an interesting gender reversal of the all too common oversexed young girl victim.  Stella's ultimate callousness to his death seemed to underline this.  Interesting for a book written in the early '80s.  I will check out some of the earlier Gently books if they pass my way.

49. Recursion by Blake Crouch

I can basically quote most of my review of the first book by Blake Crouch that I read "Dark Matter" and use it again here, minus the plot details.  And happily minus my major criticisms of the book (the consumer brand/status-focused narration and lame character).  I won't be that lazy, though.

Once again, meezly brought this book home from a work colleague.  She devoured it in a week and after Davy I really needed something easy to consume.  Recursion was clearly it.  It is the story of a woman who while working on a machine to capture and retrieve memories (as a way to if not cure Alzheimer's at least to alleviate its symptoms; her mother suffers from it) accidentally discovers what is in effect time travel.  By going back to old captured memories and dying, you actually go back in time to the point of that memory and can live again making new choices.  However, there are also some pretty nasty side effects, as the people's lives who have gone on to different paths will suddenly begin to remember their previous lives on the day that the original person went back in time.  Anyhow, things get really messy.  Like globally destructively messy.  It's a lot of fun and both a bit of a mindbender and kind of moving.  Ultimately, like Dark Matter, it ultimately is about a love affair.

I am curious if Crouch has read Replay, because there is a lot in Recursion that borrows from that book.  In some ways, Replay is more emotionally satisfying, as it explores deeply what would happen if you could go back and start again.  Recursion is much more of an action thriller and while fun doesn't quite leave you as emotionally satisfied.  Still, an excellent summer read.

48. Davy by Edgar Pangborn

I cannot remember how Davy was recommended to me.  Once again, it was a book on my list for quite a while.  I am trying to figure out what the hype was.  I have to be honest, this was a tough slog.  It felt self-indulgent to me, with very little story and really not a whole lot to say, at least in today's context.  Perhaps in the mid-60s themes critiquing religious dogma, the folly of human conflict and frank sexuality seemed refreshing.  If so, they needed to be at least in a package that had something else going on besides a lot of reminiscing using folksy language and a sort-of bildungsroman about a young man coming of age.

I have gotten ahead of myself.  The story is about Davy brought up in post-WWIII upstate New York which is now several countries in somewhat of a medieval state, with a few larger towns and many small villages protected from the wilds by stockades.  There is a more rigid social hierarchy, with slaves and indentured servants and most people practice a kind of post-apocalyptic "Murcan" Christianity, which has all kinds of dogma, particularly around childbirth to prevent the proliferation of "mues".  Davy is an orphaned indentured servant with an adventurous spirit who runs away, joins a trio of wanderers and then the Ramblers, a performing/snake-oil selling caravan.  It is narrated from a present where he eventually became part of a larger political reformist movement that go overthrown.  All that stuff is interesting, but it actually makes up very few of the pages.  Most of the time we get philosophizing between the characters that was just not very interesting.  There are little incidents in between that are not unentertaining but when you have neither clear narrative nor thematic drive, one wonders what it is all in aid of. 

The world itself was also not uninteresting, but there was something so one-sided about the way it was presented.  It felt like a campaign where the Dungeon Master spends the whole time telling you what the world is like and does endless conversations between NPCs to show you all his brilliant little nuances.  I get that mainsplaining was sort of the default for science fiction from this period, but somehow Davy felt particularly egocentric to my reading. 

One bright spot was that the back of the book has lists of other books for sale by Ballantine including this gem:

Now that is the kind of book I want to read!

[A tip of the hat to Mporcius who wrote a much better review with a similar opinion and who must have had the exact same copy and spotted the gem above near the bottom of the non-fiction titles, where I had petered out.  I also stole his picture above, so go read his blog!]

47. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

This was a cool find, though not by me.  There is a very nice bookshelf of free books in the basement/laundry area of the apartment where we stay in Vancouver. It is usually pretty mainstream stuff (almost a dozen Lee Child's) which is nice if you are desperate, but it is not often I find anything of true value there.  My wife grabbed this one, after I thought I had thoroughly checked the shelf, and she thought I might find it interesting.  She was correct!  I didn't even know it existed nor its import in the history of detective fiction, so a fail on the part of my education there.

As it says on the back cover, The Moonstone is one of the earliest detective stories in English fiction.  It was originally serialized in the 1860s and was quite popular, as were the later book versions.  It's the story of a massive diamond stolen from the head of a Hindu statue by British soldiers which makes its way to England, as well as the three Indian men whose family lineage is to hunt down and return the diamond to its rightful place.  The black sheep uncle who stole the diamond bequeaths it to his niece (either as redemption with his family or revenge, it isn't clear at first).  When the niece receives it on her 21st birthday, it is stolen.  The narrative is long and told from several viewpoints: the head butler of the house, the cousin who transported the diamond, the family lawyer, a distant cousin (and funnily and scathingly portrayed religious zealot who is constantly trying to convert people and then leaving them improving pamphlets when she fails) and a few others.

It's long and it takes a long time to unravel the mystery.  What is cool (and what Dorothy L. Sayers makes a big deal of in her intro) is that you can figure most of it out in the first part when the crime happens.  It does tend to meander and at points I felt the mystery was somewhat artificially drawn out (like the victim daughter refusing to speak to anybody for years about it when if she had just opened up everything would have been resolved way faster).  Nevertheless, the various narrators are all so interesting and enjoyable written that I really didn't mind.  The ending veers into a side story about a half-caste doctor's assistant that is quite moving and cool.  It was nice to read this book at this point in my 50 books journey, because I am so far ahead, I didn't feel the need to rush and was quite happy to jump into 400+ pages of Victorian drama and detection. 

The theft of the diamond is portrayed as a negative action, though it is the undiscipline of the troops that is the problem not the reality of invading some foreign country to take over its resources.  The more I read this summer, the more I am reminded of how fucking basically barbaric British colonialism was, the moreso by how they masked it in legality and codes of ethics.

46. Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford

I have now started adding the source or reference for books that I have on my wanted list.  Too many times I find a book and I have completely forgotten how it came to my attention. Such is the case with Nancy Mitford.  My sense is that it came indirectly from a high-falutin' place (I am not in direct contact with such places) such as the New Yorker.  She, I believe, had a minor renaissance recently, as evinced by the beautiful Folio version I found at Pulp Fiction books in Vancouver (their store on West Broadway). 

Given my gradually increasing tendency towards British Literature, with an emphasis on the upper classes, this book fell perfectly in my area of current interest.  It is kind of like Trollope on crack, although there really is much less of a true narrative here and it takes place in the mid-20th century.  Things have changed a lot from Trollope's time and at least in this book, Mitford is much funnier.  Maybe it would be more accurate to say that Mitford is sort of a blend of Trollope and P.G. Wodehouse.  At it's core is the same desire to look at the characters and behaviours of the British aristocracy.

Love in a Cold Climate follows the Hampton family, the perfect British gentleman and man of state who is the father, the egotistical and motivating wife and their beautiful, disconnected daughter, Polly.  That trio and the various characters around them are expertly and humorously described by the more middle class, though still from an aristocratic family of her own (with an equally entertaining portrayal), narrator, a cousin and friend to Polly.  There isn't a lot of story at first and the crux of the plot is around when and who Polly decides to marry and the fallout.  It's the ride that is the real pleasure.  Not all her books were social comedies, so I am not sure about her entire bibliography but I will now be looking in the literature section of used book stores for her other books like that.  I believe that this is actually the second book and I should have started with The Pursuit of Love.  Both were at the bookstore and I only took this one, not being sure.  Fool, I.

45. Deadly Welcome by John D. MacDonald

So I was in Vancouver and did some fairly decent book-hunting. One thing I noted was the messiness of used bookstores.  Even the main Pulp Fiction store on Main was uncharacteristically cluttered with boxes so that you couldn't get at some shelves.  Macleod's was absolutely out of control.  There was literally a horizontal pile of books going along the back wall as if they had been dumped there by a bulldozer.  I am sure there are major space limitations and it may be that used books are coming in at an unprecedented rate as 20th century book owners die off.  Nevertheless, I find it deplorable.  There are ways to organize your stock to allow customers access and to allow you to more efficiently get the sellable stuff on the shelves.  Sometimes I want to just volunteer myself to spend six months in some of these bookstores whipping them into shape.

That being said, I did make a really nice little find at Macleod's.  7 of the late Ed Gorman's top 10 non-Travis McGee John D. MacDonald's all in a pile on the floor.  I have spoken before (and had some nice comments about) the ubiquity of his books, but these were just too beautiful to pass up.  Plus any opportunity to render hommage to Mr. Gorman I will take.  Check these beauties out!

Unfortunately, the first one I read, Deadly Welcome, I did not like as much as Ed.  It starts out as a spy novel, where an agent is sent back to his home town to convince a retired genius engineer to come back and work for the government.  The old engineer is holed up in this Florida shithole because his wife, who was from there and dragged him back there, was also murdered there and he can't move on.  So it veers quickly into a murder mystery.  The small town is portrayed exquisitely (and depressingly) and the brutal deputy sheriff who dominates the downtrodden of the region with the tacit support of the law-abiding citizens is an excellent antagonist.  Unfortunately, it all felt a bit rushed. The mystery was not mysterious and the resolution was only extended with a kidnapping of the main female character (and burgeoning love interest) you could see coming for pages and felt very unecessary.  I am not too critical because this was originally a short story that MacDonald expanded into a novel, but so far probably my least favourite of his non-McGee novels.  As Gorman said "Not all JDM fans like this novel but I’ve read it three or four times and enjoyed it every trip out." and I must include myself in that group of not all JDM fans.

44. Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie

I picked this up new from a pretty cool mobile bookstore called Iron Dog Books that was outside of Jazzfest in Vancouver.  I had been looking for it used for a while and despite its popularity (or perhaps because of) was having no luck.  I was happy to support this store as the woman who owned it really knew her stuff and had an excellently curated selection.  Ironically, I found a used copy plus the other two of the trilogy at Pulpfiction books the next day.

If you are a contemporary science fiction fan, you should be aware of Anne Leckie and the Imperial Radch trilogy by now.  It is a big success and I can confirm that it lives up to the hype.  It's part of the new wave of what I will term "woke space opera".  There is a lot to get in a huff about here and people already have.  I won't go too far down that road except to say that science fiction is always a reflection of the time it is written.  The theme of the impact of colonization (and particularly as finally being perceived by the colonizers themselves) is central to this book and gender identity as in issue is interwoven into the narrative.  To my mind, it is all an integral part of a really interesting whole and the story and setting are rich and engaging and the themes so integral to them that nothing in this story seems forced or having any kind of agenda.  It's just really good science fiction.

I won't go too deeply into the story either, as you can find that all over the web.  I was hooked from the start as the main character is a ship as well as many "ancillaries" or the stolen human bodies that its AI can inhabit to do all of the ship's various duties (such as serve its officers, annex other civilizations and then later police them).  They are part of the Radch Empire, whose raison d'etre is to "civilize" other human races, with systematic annexation using their giant AI ships and their ancillaries.  The actual humans who run these ships come from houses of various interlocking statuses.  It's a really cool set up and of course things get complicated.  I will leave it there. 

43. The Rose of Tibet by Lionel Davidson

This is the second book by Lionel Davidson I have found (picked it up in Amsterdam) and is his second book and much earlier than Kolmynsky Heights.  It's the story of a young man who sneaks into Tibet in 1950 in search of his brother who somehow got separated from a film crew.  Post-WWII Northern India, Tibet and western China is an interesting and complex time and this is a great view of it on the ground (and mostly from an ignorant outsider).  Compared to Kolmynsky Heights, though quite adventurous and perhaps a bit over the top, I found The Rose of Tibet to be much more grounded and realistic (though similarly to Kolmynsky Heights the ability to survive extreme cold seems quite fantastical).  I am much more convinced of Davidson's reputation now. 

I think part of his appreciation, at least for the The Rose of Tibet, is that this is a true adventure book, along the lines of John Buchan (there is even a long hiding out in a hole sequence), but couched in more modern terms and context.  There is gruelling mountain travel, which I usually find hard to connect to, but here you really feel the pain and struggle.  There is some great sneaking around and intrigue and weird characters.  And there is some pretty hardcore action, including a gruesome battle between starving man and starving bear.  The entire book is framed as if Lionel Davidson is an editor who stumbles upon this true story but struggles to corroborate it (as the protagonist cannot be found) and so publishes it as fiction.  This left the ending feeling a bit deflated, but the adventure along the way is so much fun that it is excused.

Great book.  Try and find it.

42. Reflection of Evil (originally Death of a Fox) by Jan Roffman

A pretty classic 60s British gothic thriller, uplifted somewhat by the really tight unity of place.  Young widow Joanna Crane with her 4-year old son Mark, in economic desperation takes a job as a live-in housemaid in a sad duplex at the end of a country lane.  Her employer is laconic to say the least and utterly without sympathy, a stern, isolated old man with meagre but specific wants.  We learn that Joanna's husband died two years earlier and her attentions to his disease (and of course his death) have made her son somewhat neurotic and needy.  Things quickly get weird when the perspective switches to a man hiding in the attic, spying on her and wondering how she will mess up his plans.  Who he is and what those plans are take a while to learn, and it is part of the anxiety/fun.  It is winter and the constant snow storms play a crucial role in Joanna's psychological struggle with at first isolation and then fear when she discovers the existence of this third player in their little house.

So much of the protagonist's action is passive in these books.  I find it really challenging to read.  They are really slow, agonizing burns. Instead of the intermittent release of some ass-kicking you get in the men's action books, in these gothic thrillers you spend a lot of time just following the heroine as she tries to figure stuff out, then tries to master her emotions and then tries to just survive and not get harmed and more importantly, not allow that which is precious to her be harmed (in this case, her son).  She is also constantly blaming herself for everything and being so critical of what she considers tactical mistakes, when you as a reader recognize that she is actually pretty darn brave and making the best of a really fucked up situation.  I guess this is so the love interest (in this case, the town doctor) can later absolve her directly.  And in the end, she does actively save herself and her son with some desperate but direct action.

I found the backstory here pretty cool and well thought out (which they aren't always in this genre), and the stuffy, cheap, cold house very convincing and unpleasant.  The location and the side characters as well were well developed.  There was also a fox struggling with the winter that was a nice (if sad) touch.  The romance wasn't as fleshed out as it could have been, almost felt like an afterthought.  Really, the meat here is about a woman trapped in a house with a killer, isolated in a winter storm and how she survives.  Solid.

41. The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker

Ah summer vacation, so much time to read.  I can't remember why this was on my list now (I really need to start noting where my recommendations come from) and was happy to find it at a used for a reasonable price. I was also ready to take a deep dive into an absorbing 600-page epic.

Unfortunately, this book didn't really deliver.  I was never attracted to Clive Barker, mainly because I am not a horror fan but also because the Hellraiser movies always seemed a bit simplistic and watered down for me, mall horror for the trendoids.  Horror books from the 80s also often seemed slightly pornographic where the story was just a delivery vehicle for the titillation of sex and violence.  I was however, like many of my generation, a huge Stephen King fan.  He delivered on the characters and situations and often the actual horror seemed secondary to the story.  I was hoping to have a similar experience here.

The story starts out promisingly with a middle-aged loser guy, Roland Jaffe, stuck in a job in the dead letter office in Omaha Nebraska.  His dick boss forces him to go through all the lost mail and pull out anything of value.  At first, he is resistant but since he had been fired from so many jobs, he does what he is told.  After a while, though, he starts to discover a hidden communication, a world of people grasping for some other world.  By being in the center of the postal world, he is able to glean through scraps of people with hints of it that there is some other power out there.  He even starts to accrue some of this power to himself and when his corrupt boss, stupid but cunning, begins to suspect something, he kills him, burns the building down and starts on a journey to find this Art, as he calls it.

A lot happens in the beginning part of the book, so much that it felt rushed. Jaffe ends up a powerful near-spirit in battle with his nemesis, both trapped in the caverns at the bottom of a small town in Simi Valley.  Here is where most of the rest of the book takes place.  Unfortunately, the storyline keeps going, with more characters and more foundation being laid for the ultimate battle.  Normally, I would welcome a continuing storyline, but it becomes hard to tell what the story is and who are the main players.  Characters that seem central to the mythology disappear and others that have no real background suddenly become prominent.  The revelation of the background cosmology also feels sort of arbitrary and never grabbed me.  It's shame because the portrayal of the town is excellent and he really captures that cheap pseudo-Christian bourgeois morality of the 80s.  Nothing solid is made of it and by the end I was just sort of reading to get through it. Finally, the use of the word cunt felt excessive and arbitrary (or just put there to be titillating; what 16-year old girl refers to her own "cunt"?)

 I am not sure why this book is so loved that it deserved a big reprint.  It's not badly written and there were some freaky ideas and cool moments, but as a whole it just didn't hold together and I certainly wasn't satisfied.  My wife tells me she liked Weaveworld a lot better, so maybe I'll give that a try but so far my opinion on Clive Barker remains skeptical.

40. Love Lies Bleeding by Edmund Crispin

I am specifically on the hunt for The Moving Toyshop by the same author, as recommended by Kenneth Hite, but found this one in an Amsterdam used bookshop as a decent proxy.  It turns out that the detective is the same and that this story takes place ten years later than the Moving Toyshop (without any spoilers thankfully, just a passing reference from a tertiary character).

Loves Lies Bleeding starts off very British and very promising for me.  It takes place at a second-rate public school where the headmaster and headmistress of the affiliated girls school are discussing the distressed state of one of the latter's students.  Already, the language is really rich, dry and quite funny.  It felt like a slightly older and more verbose version of Michael Gilbert.  The masters are a motley lot, described with a cynical but affectionate regard by the headmaster.  The next day the girl disappears and soon after that, two masters are found dead, murdered by a .38.  Fortunately, the headmaster's old acquaintance, Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford and amateur detective had previously been invited to deliver the end of year speech.  He works with the headmaster and the local constabulary to unravel the mystery.  Along the way, we get a very British and entertaining cast of characters, a comprehensive and fulfilling portrayal of the school and environs and an exciting hunt through the forest and a final car chase.  I enjoyed everything thoroughly except the mystery itself, which was a bit too convoluted for my limited attention span.  The last twenty or thirty pages went into excruciating detail first about the logic of Fen's deduction process and then a narrative about what actually happened, at which point, I didn't really care anymore, especially as we barely got to know the culprits before they were revealed.  For real mystery fans, I think this would have been all pretty good stuff.  As it was, the overall writing (though perhaps a bit excessive on the obscure vocabulary and adverbs) and characterization of people and place were very much what I look for in this kind of book, so I am extremely glad to have Edmund Crispin added to my list and my search for the Moving Toyshop will continue in earnest.

39. Old Man's War by John Scalzi

I had been meaning to read this book for a long time and finally found a used paperback copy while in Amsterdam at this odd coffee shop that had piles of books on the sides of a staircase for sale or trade.

Old Man's War was a big hit and put Scalzi on the sci-fi map so I won't go into too much detail about it.  Briefly, it's the future where earth is plodding along after a few wars, but more or less the same.  However, out in space, humans are constantly waging war with other races and colonizing planets they can win or keep.  The recruitment plan for the Colonial Defence Force is pretty unique.  When a human on earth reaches 75, they can choose to sign up where somehow they are made into space soldiers.  What actually happens to the recruits is kept secret and none of them ever return to earth.

The first part of the novel is the story of one of these recruits, widower John Perry, and part of the fun is learning what happens to him after he signs up.  The second part is him learning about the universe and all the various battles going on (also quite fun).  While there is no single storyline, there is a romantic narrative that I won't reveal that was also quite satisfying and emotionally fulfilling.

This book is heavily influenced/inspired by Starship Troopers (which I really need to read).  I question a bit its position on war and colonialism.  Though there is some interesting soul-searching on the why of what these soldiers are doing, it is all ultimately hand-waived away by the excuse that all the other races are violently colonizing planets as well.  It's a questionable thesis, given when this book was written in 2005 as America ramped up its foreign involvement in the wake of 9/11.  Despite this, it's not a simplistic or jingoistic book, just feels a bit too embedded in the American exceptionalism that defined this period.*  In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, this book is really fun reading.  It moves along zippily and there are some great aliens (all of whom get fragged) and excellent battle scenes with unique tactics.  I could imagine this was well read among actual troops.  I'll be keeping an eye out for his other books and the two sequels to this one.


*Doing some internet reading, I see this issue has been heavily discussed.  I found this essay to be a nice encapsulation of the debates and an excellent, more balanced and nuanced analysis of the book itself.