58. The Tiger in the Well (Sally Lockhart #3) by Philip Pullman

Now this is more like it!  I was quite frustrated by the structure and plot elements of the second book, The Shadow in the North, and that led me to some trepidation while reading this one.  The story starts a few years later.  Sally is established in her business and home and she has given birth to a daughter, Harriet, who is now a toddler.  All the men in her life are gone.  Jim and Garland Webster have left on an adventure of their own in South America.  The conflict starts immediately, although subtly, as Sally receives a legal summons.  At first, she treats it lightly as it is so absurd.  She is being sued by a man for abandonment who claims to be her husband.  He also wants Harriet.

As she looks into it, and deals with super weak and sexist legal representatives, the case becomes deadly serious and she truly risks losing her child, as well as all her assets and her business.  We quickly meet a truly nasty antagonist, the bland and professional seeming Mr. Parrish.  Meanwhile, we also follow the story of Jews fleeing the pogroms in Europe and arriving in London, where they are often exploited by criminals and attacked by racists or a combo of both.

These two storylines combine in a rich historical adventure that all center around Sally.  I was able to guess quite quickly who was behind it all and it was a bit frustrating that it took Sally so long.  That felt a bit manipulative on Pullman's part, though he explains himself away by basing it on her psychology (she knew all along but didn't want to face it; why?).  My distrust held back some of my enjoyment as Sally really goes through the wringer.  He pulls it out in the end, but the promise of a competent, extraordinary woman that the first book is set up is not fulfilled here in a lot of ways.  She spends much of the book being victimized and never gets to use her skills (no cool financial gamesmanship, she never shoots anybody).  This what we call deprotagonization in the tabletop RPG business.  For instance, in one scene when she is down to her last shillings and she pawns the watch that her father gave her and gets a super low price for it.  I get that Pullman wants her to be as desperate as possible, but this woman is super skilled at money and her dad taught her to be tough and street smart.  This could have been a good opportunity for her to show some mettle and skill and instead she meekly accepts the price.

The other characters and the situation is wild enough that once we start to see some hope, the book gets really fun.  Sally doesn't use her skills, but she is brave and resourceful and quite tough.  We get to see a lot of the lives and locations of the poor Jewish community and this is quite interesting and entertaining.  The finale is quite wild, a real page-turner, so much that I partially blame it for my insomnia and me writing this at almost 2 in the morning.  Too stimulating!

So some minor hiccups but overall this was an excellent adventure and I am glad I am working my way through this series.

57. The Shadow in the North (Sally Lockhart #2) by Philip Pullman

I've committed to reading all 4 of the Sally Lockhart series in order (and also kind of wanted to, though the energy is wearing off a bit; I am almost finished the third as I write this review) and thus jumped right into this the second one.  I was immediately a bit disappointed, as this book jumps ahead 6 years from the ending of the first book.  Sally is now on her own, running a financial management business with mainly women clients.  She still is connected to and manages the photography business, but no longer lives with them and only visits once a month to do their books. It's an odd choice, as so many of the elements that made the first book so fun are just tossed out the window.  They were starting a detective firm, they were an eclectic gang of great characters all living under one bohemian roof.  Sally was finally starting to come into her own. It would have been great to see her continue to develop her strengths and for the gang to do some adventures together.  

Once the adventure gets going, I got caught back up in it.  It's quite fun, involving a cowardly magician who is on the run and a nefarious Dutch industrialist who is doing sneaky things with companies (whose ruin impacted one of Sally's clients which is how she started to sniff around).  Unfortunately, I found the ending very frustrating on two points.  One, which is spoiler free, is that it feels brief and truncated compared to all the investigating and plotlines that came before.  You kind of figure it out quickly and the bad guy gets dispatched all too quickly.  Pullman was trying, I believe, to make a modern retelling of the Victorian penny dreadful.  He does a great job of setting up the environment and the story and then elevating it with modern sensibility.  However, he spends most of his energy on bad stuff happening to the characters (which is fine), but doesn't give the reader the satisfying payoff of the ending.

I remember when I was teaching and the His Dark Materials was all the rage among the middle school kids.  The last book actually came out in 2000 and the kids had been waiting for it.  I personally read it and quite enjoyed it, though I do remember feeling it ended with a bit of a whimper rather than a bang.  But the kids hated it!  They were so mad about the ending that it ruined the series for many of them.  I kind of get where they are coming from now.  I was reading it more as a critique of Christianity and I enjoyed that, but they were focused on the relationship between the two main characters and he did totally pull the rug out in that one.  I kind of think he is trying to be too clever and he showed signs of it here.

SPOILER ALERT

 

 

 

What's worse in this book is that he sets up this awesome gigantic dog that is Sally's companion.  He is clearly super dangerous and super loyal, but we never get him doing anything but sniffing and growling at potential enemies until one final scene, where it isn't even Sally being attacked, and he gets killed!  Totally fucked.  This is the animal equivalent of the Bechtel Scale and it is just lame.  I was really pissed about the dog, but he does the same thing with Frederick, who was one of the great characters in the first book, a significant player in this one, the other half of their potential detective agency, an ally in fighting to young Jim and finally a potential love interest for Sally.  He just kills him off and it felt cheap and manipulated.  I don't really know what was the point in making this choice.  It makes me lose confidence in Pullman as a storyteller.  He feels that his own clever "breaking of the rules" is more important than the reader's pleasure.  No bueno.

56. The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman

If you are going to do a trade
paperback, do it like this!

I read this book already and at the time enjoyed it enough that I wanted to read all of them.  I happened to find all but the first one at Rennaisance thrift shop here in these nicely designed trade paperbacks (see I am not totally close-minded) and then totally lucked out and found the first one that same day at another thrift store that was more clothes but had a few books. I felt that if I was going to do the series, I probably should just re-read the first one, which is what I did.  I also had my daughter in mind who is finally adding actual books to her voracious and rapid graphic-novel consumption pace, but the covers didn't grab her and now that I am reading them I suspect they may be a bit old for her still.  I do remember when I was a teacher, Pullman's Golden Compass series went through the sixth and seventh graders like wildfire but maybe those being more fantastic also makes them more appealing.  I will spring those on to her soon for sure.

The Sally Lockhart series was written before the Golden Compass and though his prose is as strong as ever, some of the structure lacks the craft and polish to make this a masterpiece. Nevertheless, this is a real page-turner and the plot and setting of Victorian England are super fun.  It feels like Pullman just wanted to make a Sherlock Holmes/penny dreadful type adventure but do so with a female protagonist to make it really interesting.  Sally Lockhart is a great character.  Raised unconventionally by her sailor and soldier father who disappeared in a ship wreck in the far east, she is not well-versed in the important skills of manners and social etiquette, but is an expert markswoman and accountant.  The Ruby in the Smoke is basically her origin story as she races against unknown malevolent forces that are conspring against her for reasons she doesn't know.

It gets even more enjoyable when by chance she falls in with an eccentric photographer and his actress sister.  They take her into their sprawling house out of pity but soon realize that her organizational and business skills can rescue their floundering photography business.  They also become allies with her and enlist young and scrappy Jim Taylor, another great character!

There is lots of great action and a truly moving denouement as she learns the truth about what happened to her father.  Very enjoyable and I am now going to read the next one.

 

 

55. Sunset and Jericho by Sam Wiebe

I'd heard of this author before and was interested as I am always curious about B.C. detective fiction.  I found this one at a neat little used book store, The Paper Hound, near Gastown when I was out in Vancouver this summer.  Classic little Vancouver downtown eastside anecdote:  when I was walking towards the store, I noticed they had a small bookshelf outside with cheaper books on it as many used bookstores do. I always check those out, but this time there was a woman leaning and peering into them with a particularly folded and intense posture.  I thought, damn she is more into used books than even me!  But no, when I got closer I saw that actually she was a junky nodding off and just happened to use that shelf to lean on.  Ah, Vancouver!  The poor bookstore owner must have a hell of a time.  

A word about The Paper Hound. This is one of those used bookstores where everything is carefully curated and it is more about a wide range of eclectic finds than exhaustive sections of every genre that you usually find.  It's not entirely my jam as they tend to only feature quirky or out there old paperback fiction.  Nevertheless, you can often find gems at these kinds of stores and I always celebrate the people who keep old books alive.  I also found a book of short stories by Barry Gifford.  So continued success to the Paper Hound.  Go visit if you are in Vancouver.

Sunset and Jericho, I learned after I started reading it, is the fourth installment in the Wakeland detective series, about Vancouver private investigator Dave Wakeland.  This was a solid and enjoyable detective story about a gang of anti-capitalist radicals who kidnap and murder the mayor's son.  The plot is deeply integrated into current Vancouver political issues, especially the problematic dynamic of real estate values and the growing gap between the rich and the poor that has destroyed what little homegrown culture Vancouver used to have.  I say "what little" in a slightly demeaning way but I don't belittle it because back in the day there was a really cool punk rock, artists, weirdo scene in Vancouver that was the one thing holding it back from the dominant culture of bourgeois gentility (which had some pleasant aspects though ultimately suffocating and depressing).  Sunset and Jericho gets a little fantastic with some crazy violence and action which I felt extended the ending unnecessarily.  It also portrayed the radicals in a way that you hated them but never really gave the full satisfaction of them getting their asses kicked.  Finally, there was a brutal and what I felt was forced surprise twist at the very ending that kind of undermined the rest of the story for me.  Maybe if I had read the first 3 it would have fit in better, but it just didn't work.

All the criticisms out of the way, the rest of the book up until the ending was a real page-turner with great characters and locations (many of which are familiar to me) and a nice, convoluted backstory to the mystery that was quite satisfying to unfold as you read.  I particularly like the abandoned therapy retreat in the British Properties.  I'm going to keep my eyes open for the first 3 books.

54. The Long and Loud Silence by Wilson Tucker

I've been looking for the Wilson Tucker book Wild Talent for decades now.  It inspired a tabletop RPG (Wild Talents) whose design I quite appreciated and is also considered I believe to be the first or one of the earliest ESP battle type stories.  I have read a few other of his books and never loved them (not terrible just from that period of sci-fi which tends to be too speculative and not enough story for my taste). However, this one I decided to take because it is post-apocalyptic (a sub-genre which used to be my favourite but now I am just more of a completist) and because it's a beautiful Coronet with that sick cover.

I'm glad I did get it because this was an interesting read.  It is marred by the nerdy white male sexual politics of the early 1950s.  Once you filter that out, it is a dark and low-key "realistic" PA tale that is quite cool.  The narrator is almost Parker-like in his absence of emotions.  Corporal Russel Gary, career military man, wakes up after a major drunk on his birthday to find that some enemy had somehow sent bombs that killed most of the people, either through a nuclear blast (the kind that leaves buildings standings) or with disease.  His first encounter is with a teenage girl who is desperately robbing jewelry stores.  This is already where the books sexism really sucks.  I get it that she is a young, teenage girl but it shows she has street smarts.  Why would she only be stealing jewelry?  It's stupid.  We get away from her fairly soon (of course though totally naive and unable to make the most basic survival decisions, she is sexually experienced and "surprises" him at night).  We get a lot of cool exploring where he learns that America is divided between east and west along the Mississippi. The east is contaminated and considered full of spies and traitors.  The Mississippi is guarded all along its banks and all the bridges except a few blown up.

The portrayal of the behaviour of the survivors on the eastern side is weird and not well thought out.  Feels like in Tucker's world there are barely any people and he doesn't explicitly say most of them were killed.  It also seems like they quickly and too easily degenerate into looting mobs and starvation instead of pulling together.  Despite these issues, the interactions with the world is quite cool.  He spends a winter on a Florida beach with another man and woman but leaves when they fall in love.  He becomes a sort of bodyguard for a naive farmer family.  It's cool and readable. As the narrative progresses, he slowly descends further and further into animal survival, in the end living in a cave.  It doesn't really end, except a sort of "romantic" wrap-up to the storyline with the naive teenager.  So while flawed, it was an engaging and unsettling story of a ruined and divided mid-20th century America.

53. The Suspect by L.R. Wright

I discovered this author and series because after decades, her work has finally successfully made it to the TV screen in the form of the new Canadian series Murder in a Small Town.  I backtracked to realize the books were written in the 80s and take place in and around Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast in B.C., which we visited last summer.  I found this, the first one, at The Book Exchange used English language bookstore in Amsterdam.  There were several others, but I wanted to see if I like it first.  Also, I suspect these should not be hard to find when I am next in B.C.

It starts out with a bit of a twist in that you the reader knows who committed the murder right from the beginning.  One old man, visiting another old man, bashes him suddenly over the head with an old shell casing.  The murderer recognizes his guilt and is about to turn himself in when realizes  why bother, as he will get caught eventually, he might as well live free for as long as he can. It's subtler and more nuanced than that, but you get the picture.  It's more of a "whydunnit" (I stole that from a Goodreads review), as well as an interesting cat and mouse game between he and the detective.

The detective is Karl Alberg, promoted from Kamloops where he had to leave his family behind as his wife had a successful business and his daughters doing well in school there (RCMP policy is to move their mounties around so they can never get embedded in the community which makes them assholes but also maybe less prone to corruption).  He answers an ad and meets the single librarian, Cassandra who moved from Vancouver to Sechelt to be near her older mother.  Cassandra has also become friends over time with George, the murderer.

It's a very absorbing and page-turning read, the kind of comfort mystery that readers can't put down and whose characters you grow attached to.  This is a great book to take on the plane and I actually forced myself not to read it at the airport because I knew I would get done too quickly.  I appreciated the locale and descriptions of the geography, though I found that aside from the old hippy fish seller, the characters were not all that quirky and you don't get the sense of some of the benevolent oddness that defined small B.C. coastal towns back in the day.  Maybe they get richer as the series goes on.

I won't seek these out but will grab them when I find them.  I do have one rant about the TV series.  How is it that in the year of our Lord 2024 fucking Canadian television productions still follow this dogma:

"A lot of U.S. media thought it was actually set in Canada, not in the U.S. They didn't actually grasp that this wasn't Canada," Roberts said. "We wanted to make it just a little more generic ... so that it would have the best opportunity internationally to succeed."

Are you kidding me!?  Have you learned absolutely nothing from the success of all those nordic and british crime series?  Or how about Trailer Park Boys or Schitt's Creek?  American viewers do not want watered down generic versions of mysteries they already see every night.  They want to see the unique cultures and perspectives of different places.  The very strength of the L.R. Wright series is that they take place in a uniquely beautiful and culturally interesting place in the world!  Thousands of American tourists now visit the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island every year.  It's just everything I hate about the media decision-makers in this country, the insecure, grovelling to the States, lowest-common-denominator thinking.  This is why the French-Canadians say we anglos have no culture.  We kill it ourselves out of fear and safety.  Just outrageous. Fire everybody.

52. Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie

I saw the Ealing movie adaptation of Whiskey Galore at an Ealing film festival in my younger days and quite enjoyed it.  I stumbled upon this trade paperback version of the book and thought I might enjoy it as well.  It served me as comfort and distraction during a trans-atlantic flight and then several subsequent nights of brutal jetlag from which I am still suffering as I write this.

It's a story of two small Scottish islands during the final years of WWII (1943 to be precise).  They are under rationing of many things, but it is the slowly dwindling and then finally exhausted resource of the island's whisky that is wreaking havoc among the psyche and relations of the people of the islands.  There are many subplots in this book and many characters.  The main one is the middle-aged English Sergeant who is engaged to marry the young Scottish lass, but whose father, famous already for prevaricating about everything, won't give his blessing nor agree on the wedding date.  The bad guy in the book, if there is one, is the local rep for English war security, who is the classic managerial popinjay spoilsport that nobody takes seriously.  He is always writing letters to his superiors, complaining about the laxity of the Islanders. We also have a nice school director who is also betrothed but completely beaten down by his puritan, domineering mother and too scared to tell her he is going to get married.

All these problems and the general mood and well-being of the region could be solved by whiskey and the solution arrives when a freight ship gets hung up on some rocks and turns out to be carrying 40,000 bottles of the best quality whiskey, to be sent to the US as part of I guess some lend-lease agreement.  The names, the descriptions of the bottles and the labels of all the different types of regional whiskeys was one of my favourite parts of the book.  I don't know if they were made up, but they were fun to read about and imagine.

It's a pleasant read, more of an exposure to the pleasant culture and people of these small islands, with an entertaining dig at English bureaucracy and superiority.  I was a bit confused at first, as I couldn't distinguish with any memory the various Scottish names (especially as several of them share last names), but once I got into it, it flowed nicely.

I left this book in a free book shelf in Amsterdam. I  hope it finds an appreciative next reader.