Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon
© 2002 Richard K. Morgan
416 pages

Takeshi Kovacs,  soldier-turned-commando-turned rogue,  is rudely awakened with a job.  Imprisoned for two hundred years, he’s now being offered the chance of parole if he can solve a murder.  Or should it be attempted murder? The victim’s head was blown off, but being rich,  a backup copy of his consciousness was simply downloaded into a waiting clone.    You can do that in the future, you know: your consciousness is stored on a chip within your neck, and if you die...well, if you’ve the means your friends or family  can just copy your consciousness into any available body. (There’s likely to be quite a few, since people imprisoned go into digital storage, their bodies rented out.)    Kovacs’ patron is an exceedingly long-lived and unthinkably rich fellow who wants to find out who killed him, and why they tried to mock it up like a suicide.  Although Kovacs has never been to Earth before,  between his past service in the interstellar military and his training, he’s more than prepared to learn what he needs and solve the mystery.   As cynical as he is, however, Kovacs is about to enter a story grimier than he could have imagined.

I’ve been in a science fiction mood as of late, and recently watched Altered Carbon on Netflix in its entirety.  Finding and reading the original novel was an obvious followup, although the  background of Tak  and of the chief antagonist vary quite a bit between the mediums.  What hasn’t changed is the main plot and premise:  in this future, human civilization is interplanetary,  but the few who need to  travel between  settled worlds  do so by transferring their consciousness to a body-for-hire (a "sleeve") there. Tak is an expert in sleeve-switching, having done it professionally and usually with a dose of psychotropics that inhance intelligence, creativity,  etc.   A manufactured killer, Tak has enormous incentive to figure out what  who tried to kill his patron -- especially when he narrowly escapes being killed by a squad of  hitmen at his hotel. They knew him by name, despite the fact he's never been on planet and has been on ice for quite some time.

Although Tak's personality is not exactly winsome, he does have allies, chiefly a cop who keeps showing up. Kristin Ortega has her own reasons for shadowing Tak: he doesn't know it, but he's wearing the body of her boyfriend,  imprisoned on suspicion of being a bent cop. Together they explore a story and a world saturated in sex and violence.   It turns out that when you live for century after century,  there's really no limit to how depraved you can get. Frankly, it makes for disgusting reading at times, and I continued with the show and the book only because the premise  was and continues to be...well, absorbing.  The chip integrated into the neck -- the cortical stack -- doesn't just allow for immortality for those with the means and the desire. It allows people to spend time in virtual realities -- sometimes against their will, as those being interrogated know. The cortical stack expands the human potential for experience: not only can people explore different bodies, but drugs can be fine-tuned for their specific metabolism.  All this available pleasure creates an atmosphere of jadedness, however, not of contentment, and the sad restlessness that permeates the world here is not all that unfamiliar. The detective story, when it's not submerged in blood, sex, and sadism, is genuinely interesting --  even considering that I'd already experience the story.   The antagonist has a special connection to Tak in the Netflix series which makes their interactions with Tak all the more tragic in the endgame, but that relationship is absent here, and...well, it makes things less intense.

Despite the frequent...unpleasantness, I imagine Altered Carbon  will be one of those books I can't forget about at the end of the year. I don't think I'll be continue in the series, though  -- the sex and violence are too detailed for my tastes.

German title, just because it looks cool:

Alice Roosevelt, Linux, and Death

Approaching the end of the month, as we are, time to post a few also-reads:

Alice and the Assassin, R.J. Koreto. Entertaining historical fiction following the infamous pistol-packing Alice Roosevelt and her cowboy Secret Service bodyguard.  Following the assassination of President McKinely, Alice's father is made president and Alice herself turns detective. Declaring that it doesn't make sense for a feeble-minded Polish anarchist to randomly go after the president, Alice and Agent St. Clair begin following leads on their own -- to the faint horror of Alice's official guardians, Teddy excepting.   The chase takes them into private society clubs and public brothels, alike, consorting with the likes of Emma Goldman, Sicilian crimelords, and members  of the New York yacht club.   Most interesting is the relationship between St. Clair and Alice;  St. Clair is a former cavalrymen, former frontier sheriff turned federal agent, while Alice -- for all her wildness --  is a teenage girl who has been far more sheltered than she realizes. The two have an interesting fondness for one another by the end.

From Here to Eternity, by Caitlin Doughty, visits several cultures around the world to examine particularly interesting death customs, in a bid to convince western readers that pickling the dead and shoving them into an airtight vault at ludicrous costs to ourselves,   is neither normal nor attractive. Although  it doesn't have nearly the strength of her first book (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, her account if becoming a mortician and developing a funerary style more in keeping with older customs. She promotes, for instance, the practice of families washing and dressing their deceased loved ones themselves, and taking part in the burial or pushing the button on the crematory. Traditions like those are those she explores here,  though she's naturally drawn to more...unusual death traditions, like people collecting and decorating human skulls to use as magical tokens, or  occasionally exhuming their dead kinfolk to  dress them and give them tea.  As with her previous book, this one is laden with humor, both in the writing and in happenstance; at one point Doughty was left alone in a cave of skulls and was stumbled upon by tourists, who immediately asked if they could take her picture in terms taken from Emily Post, circa 1915.    Although the book's contents were not as deep as the last one, I was cheered by the promotion of natural-burial movements within the US,  which is also covered here.

Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source. Penned in 2004. Open Life offers a history of the open source software movement, an appraisal of its financial prospects, and a look at how the open source philosophy might be applied to matters other than software.  Admittedly, this is esoteric, and...dated. Most people use open source tech, even if they don't realize it: Android devices, for instance,  and even chromeOS, use Linux at their base,  as do many internet servers, and IOT devices will only bring more of it into people's homes.  A lot of the projects that Ingo mentions here (in examining different ways open-source software companies can be profitable while maintaining their roots)  have since been discontinued, though others (Red Hat) are still around.  One of the bigger success stories is Mozilla,  the first great challenger to Internet Explorer which has matured into Firefox. 


Finally, I also read my two classic club entries for this month, both by Walker Percy.  It turns out I'm not much for existentialist novels, even  if they are by a southern author.

I, the Constable

I, the Constable
© 2017 Paula M. Block and Terry Erdmann
150 pages

Deep Space Nine once made a throwaway reference to the Mike Hammer novels of Mickey Spillane,  and featured Constable Odo reading I, the Jury.  I, the Constable,  plays with that a bit more by having Odo play detective on Ferenginar, searching for a missing person.  Odo fills his spare time on the flight writing 'letters' to Kira and reading more detective fiction -- Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett are named -- and arrives on Ferenginar slinging a mix of 20th century detective slang. The trail will lead him to dead bodies and scheming women, and culminate in a local stumbling around in a trench coat and fedora trying to help. If one likes straight mysteries and can tolerate the Ferengi, this is an amusing read. I was hoping the narrative voice would evoke Hammett and Chandler's style more, beyond a little slang. ("Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.")

The Black Ice

The Black Ice
© 1993 Michael Connelly
336 pages

A body discovered in a sleazy motel on Christmas Eve connects a handful of otherwise dead cases, and sets Detective Harry Bosch against his own department, culminating in the pursuit of a half-chance to Mexico.  The case was never supposed to be Bosch's;  when a cop suspected being bent showed up missing his face, all the department wanted to do was sweep the victim quietly under the rug. But Harry Bosch was the detective on duty when the call came in, and damned if he's going to be kicked to the side.  As is usual, the solitary brooder -- Bosch opens this novel like seemingly every other, sitting by himself and listening to jazz --  can't stop the feeling that there's more to the story, can't stop looking even when everyone else is telling him to drop it.  Several unsolved cases, suddenly parts of a puzzle that he can see the outlines of as he digs, point to a drug lord in Mexico who is pushing a new product in Los Angeles. That's where Bosch ultimately goes, teaming up with a Mexican officer who is an outsider in his own apartment, and their joint investigation leads to fireworks in the Sonoran dark.  While I haven't read a Bosch novel since 201l,  the character is just as compelling as he first was:  a child of the street turned cop thereof,  forever butting heads with the politicos who run things as he pursues justice on nothing more than his gut instincts, black coffee, and the help of rare friends -- usually women.  Characterization is strong here, both as Connelly is developing Bosch (this is the 2nd Bosch novel) further, and giving him interesting enemies, allies, and hybrid creatures to wrangle with.  Interestingly, early on Bosch encounters Mickey Haller -- of Lincoln Lawyer fame, but not made a lead character until that novel's debut in 2005. 

The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep
© 1939 Raymond Chandler
277 pages

A dying old man who lives in a greenhouse, sustained only by its heat and the fear of his children shaming the family,  has summoned Philip Marlowe for a job. The family is being blackmailed, and old man Sternwood wants Marlowe to find out who's doing it, what they've got on him, and to handle the actual paying-off if need be.  Turns out the blackmailer is a local cretin mixed up with other lowlifes who want him dead, and what seems like a simple job will have Marlowe stumbling into a river of blood. The phrase 'big sleep' explicitly  refers to death, the equalizer of punks and patricians alike,  What is not dead is Chandler's writing; only PG Wodehouse rivals him for sheer prosaic fun.  Having watched the movie months before didn't too much spoil the outcome here, as the stories develop somewhat differently.  (One plus: Bogart did all of the narration while I read.)     This is enormous fun as a noir thriller, in part because the narrator doesn't take anyone's games seriously. He has a job to do and  his own sense of honor to abide by  -- and no amount of coy women or thugs with guns is going to get him off the case.

Some early lines:
"I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it."

"I'm thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there's any demand for it. There isn't much in my trade."

"I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings."

"Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead."

"Tsk, tsk," I said, not moving at all. "Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail."

Murder at Fenway Park

Murder at Fenway Park
© 1994 Troy Soos
252 pages

1912, Boston. The Titanic is only a few weeks lost to the North Atlantic bottom, but Mickey Rawling's mind isn't on one of the biggest maritime disasters of history. No, he's just been inducted into the Major Leagues, hired to play with the Boston Red Sox, and his first night he's stumbled upon a man beaten so badly the victim's face no longer exists. And then Mickey threw up on it, just for good measure. Murder at Fenway Park is the story of a rookie ball player who turns amateur detective when he realizes the police intend on fingering him for the crime. While the cozy relationship between the Red Sox and the police might protect him during the baseball season, come fall he'll be left to his own devices.

The first in Trey Soos' baseball-murder mysteries,  Murder at Fenway takes readers through a violence summer, in which Rawlings rubs shoulders with baseball greats like Ty Cobb,  and does his best -- with the aide of a nickelodeon musician and a Socialist working on the garment factory-version of The Jungle --  to figure out who did it before either being arrested or beaten to a pulp by the original murderer.   The writing is sometimes unpolished, but the opening framing device -- an old man wandering through the Baseball Hall of Fame, feeling he and the sport have become long-distant strangers, then flashing back to the murder story on seeing the victim on a baseball card -- was well executed.  I suspect readers will find the setting more interesting than the mystery, considering how dramatic this era was in baseball. This was the decade that produce legends who gave their names to awards -- Cy Young, Ty Cobb -- although we're two years away from Babe Ruth stepping up to the plate. This is technically alt-history, considering that Soos kills off a player who -- in reality, died of a heart attack in 1959.

Murder at Fenway Park is by no means amazing literature, but it's enjoyable if you like early-20th century mysteries, or golden age baseball.

Killer Blondes and Killer Wheat

A few weeks ago I read Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, a murder-mystery from the same Pinkerton agent turned author who produced The Maltese Falcon.   I was sold by the opening line:

I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory.

The narrator will, in the opening act of the novel, consume a small truckload of spirits, and some fun lines follow. (Paraphrase: "'Practically'. Everybody's telling me 'practically' the truth. What I want is some impractical joker who will shoot straight!")  Alas, I didn't  care whodunit. The solution surprised me, though!

This Saturday, I wrapped up William Davis' Wheat Belly,  which I read more for inspiration than information. As someone who lost 120+ lbs in a half a year after dropping most processed food, I'm solidly in the camp the author was writing to. (I've also read Why We Get Fat, and that work by Taubes is in line with the Weston Price/Atkins/Paleo/Davis family of nutritional thinking.)  According to Davis, modern processed wheat is a frankenfood with no resemblance to natural wheat, and  responsible for obesity, diabetes, celiac disease, and even some mental problems.  As I said, I don't really need convincing that bread, cereal, etc. are bad for the waistline, but I've been unable to break 206  (March 2012) and it is utterly annoying.  I have weaknesses, you see --  like sweet tea and sweet potatoes. In the last couple of weeks I've actually cut out my 'sweet' tea altogether (which was lightly sweetened -- 1/4 cup in a full gallon of tea, but if you drink a pitcher a day it's a lot of sugar), mixing in lemon juice instead.  (I mostly drink water, of course, but one does like to taste something every once and again.)  Essentially I read this to psych myself up for valiantly saying "No" to the various little temptations -- tortilla chips,  blueberry waffles, that sort of thing.  The psychic game is the reason I've been reading the Stoics and WW2 history lately...it's all about trying to adopt that indomitable spirit. I've also resumed daily walks, which less about burning calories and more about mental focus -- I find it's a lot easier to exercise my will against cornbread if I've already exercised said will four miles in the rain.

What's coming up?  I'm chasing a few rabbits at the moment and need to focus on one them, really,  Gobs of history -- WW2, Spanish empire, Arab conquests -- a little historical fiction, and a few miscellaneous bits.

Airframe

Airframe
© 1995 Michael Crichton
352 pages

What could happen on a plane to leave three people dead, fifty others seriously wounded, and the passenger cabin in ruins?   Why did its pilot only break radio silence shortly before he was due to land in Los Angeles? Thus begins Airframe, a technical mystery from the pen of Michael Crichton, in which one woman  has to scramble to find answers before either her company's life-saving contract with China falls through or before a union upset ripens into war on the plant floor.   This is the first book I've read by Crichton which is not science fiction, although it's still very much the technical thriller, with a nerd-thrilling abundance of information on aviation and the aeronautics business.   It's not merely dumped on the reader, but introduced through characters who stand in for the reader and need to have all of the tech-speak around them translated. Airframe isn't purely technical, as Crichton also develops a business conspiracy angle to make the reader wonder if the accident wasn't one at all. There's also a little bit of author-lecture, as Crichton delivers a rolling barrage at television 'news', condemned as vapid and sensationalistic. None of the characters are particularly compelling, but in a Crichton novel they rarely are.  It is the pursuit of the mystery, simultaneously learning a great deal about an important aspect of global 'civilization', that drives this one. I enjoyed it enormously.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
256 pages
© 1894 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Has it been five years since I read a Holmes collection? I remember picking up Memoirs shortly after reading The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, not nothing that Memoirs was published well before that, but I fell into distraction at some point. More's the pity, because here collected are eleven classic stories that include both the beginning and the (first) end of Holmes' career, "The Gloria Scott" and "The Final Problem".   It contains a few iconic scenes; Holmes stalking about in his cape and seeming to read Watson's mind, as well as some of his best lines:

"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
 "That was the curious incident."

Some Trek author inserted those lines into a novel years ago and it absolutely mystified me. Well, glad to have cleared that up. (On that Trek note, I must say that The Next Generation deceived me in regards to Professor Moriarty. He's charming onscreen, but decidedly uncharismatic here. Granted ,his only appearance is to threaten Holmes with death if he doesn't keep plotting the 'Napoleon of Crime's" Waterloo.)  Memoirs has the same engaging writing as the previous collections, and adds some interesting aspects to Holmes' character, namely his eccentric home decor (storing cigars in Persian slippers, using the wall as target practice).

A few of the mysteries:

• "Silver Blaze": A prize horse has gone missing. (Okay, granted, it's not as ambitious as the missing train from Further Adventures, but it's still very mysterious.)
• "The Musgrave Ritual": A brilliant butler vanishes after being caught studying nonsensical couplets used in an initiation ritual. Could it be that he divined some meaning into the lines?
• "The Gloria Scott":  What secret does a cranky sailor have over this nervous country squire?
• "The Greek Interpeter": A man is driven into the middle of nowhere and used to question a Greek man being held against his will --- why?
• "The Cardboard Box":  Who ordered two human ears packed in salt? 

I think I've gone through all the short stories my library has access to, so when next I visit Baker Street, it will be for a full novel!

Murder on the Orient Express

Murder on the Orient Express
© 1934 Agatha Christie
256 pages

"Why does everyone on this train tell lies?!"

A dark and snowy night; the Orient Express, rolling from Istanbul to Paris, slows to a stop in the wilderness, trapped by the growing piles of snow as its passengers sleep. But the slumber of the travelers is disturbed by a sudden cry, the sighting of a figure in a red kimono, and -- the discovery of a dead passenger, stabbed in his sleep.  Murder has been committed -- murder most foul!

..or not. Quickly enough, an officer of the train line enlists his friend, Hercule Poirot, to sort out whodunit, and in the course of their investigation they realize the dead man was a notorious child-killer from America. If anyone deserved to run into a knife several times, it was this fellow. Still, train lines can't have passengers being stabbed willy-nilly; the culprit must be found out. So, with the train still stranded in the wilderness, and no escape available for any suspects, the passengers are summoned to the dining coach one by one and interviewed by the famed detective. The story grows ever more complex; the evidence is contradictory, and everyone seems to have an alibi.  The deceased didn't encounter some malicious vanishing wizard's casting of sectum sempra  -- someone on board must have plotted and committed the deed.

Murder on the Orient Express is my second Christie novel, the first being And Then There Were None, read during the Clinton years. Like that one, the ending here is a terrific twist.  Murder is a story of conversation and deduction, a classic locked-room mystery in which the room is a train cabin. Although the alias of the murdered man leads Poirot to suspect the stabbing had something to do with his notorious villainy in America, the presence of suspects with links to the devastated family confirms it. Only hitch: virtually everyone on the train proves to have some connection to that family.  Unlike the train itself, Poirot's investigation flies  along, with one confusing clue after another baffling the train officials and physician, but giving Poirot some insight into what they are being led to believe happened.   The ultimate resolution is a twist, as mentioned, but not improbable. It is, after all the other alternatives were exhausted, the only possible solution.

Christie definitely lives up to her reputation, and I'll warrant Poirot will appear here again..

The Lady from Zagreb

The Lady from Zagreb
© 2015 Phillip Kerr
432 pages

            Bernie Gunther was an ordinary police detective in wild, wonderful Weimar until Germany’s economy collapsed and fringe parties swept into power. His police department absorbed by the SS, he wears the uniform of a party and of an ideology he loathes – and does a poor job of even pretending to tolerate. His antipathy for the Party makes a man of Bernie’s talents a useful tool, however, at least to Joseph Goebbels. With no career prospects or political ambition, the detective can be hired for a little bit of innocent work that the master of deceit would prefer to keep concealed from his rivals in evil miniondom, like Himmler.  For instance, Goebbels has his eye on a certain starlet who is waffling on cinema as a career prospect, despite being a Siren-like beauty who is sure to become the continent’s most popular actress.  Officially, of course, the chief of propaganda wants to keep her engaged making films to glorify the fatherland,  but he also has more intimate engagements in mind – the kind that married men have no business in making.   The problem is that the poor dear is distracted by her long-missing father, lost in war-torn Yugoslavia. What he’d like for Gunther to do is pop down to the most hellish place in Europe short of Auschwitz for a spell, find dear old dad, and then report back to Berlin.

Nothing is ever so simple, of course. Gunther has already encountered some soul-harrowing scenes since the Nazis took power in 1933;  he has seen massacres on both the Soviet and Nazi sides of the battle-lines, and  been exposed to the Final Solution in action.  Yugoslavia, however, is a bloodbath to be endured only with the native whiskey,:Gunther’s report makes even Goebbels blanch at the horror of it.  There,  the princes of hell on earth decorate their strongholds with skulls on pikes, and photographs of executions, like something out of a nightmare.  The usual psychological defenses – sarcasm, booze, and cigarettes – don’t quite do the trick. To survive, Gunther counterattacks: he falls in love. If the hormone rush from becoming infatuated with Germany's foremost sex symbol doesn't do the trick, then perhaps the thrill of chasing a girl who is not only married, but a mistress-potential for one of the most powerful men in the reich will.  Eventually the action moves to Switzerland,  where Americans mistake Gunther for a German general and hilarity ensues. Amid even more death, however, the piece of a puzzle which has lingered on Gunther's mind for a year finally falls into place.

The Lady from Zagreb is a very well-done detective novel,  putting its wartime Europe setting to good effect and linking several mysteries together. The humor is biting, as ever;  on learning that a fellow officer is writing yet another novel, Gunther comments that there will always be room in Germany for more novels, provided his countrymen keep burning them. In an early scene, a man is literally killed by Hitler; a bust of Adolf is used  as a bludgeon. Against the backdrop of both the Holocaust and the obscene carnage of Yugoslavia, however, even that humor fails to prevent this from being an utterly distressing novel, set in a land of desecration and filled with horror and manipulation. Not even Gunther's relationship with Dalia is free from the cloud of horror, unsurprising given Goebbels' close presence.  Certainly there's no fault in creativity or research; the book is littered with odd little details that must have been strange research finds, like a U-boat parked on the autobahn; one of Gunther's escapes is especially captivating.  As thrilling as it is, Zagreb is more than touch dispiriting on the whole, however.

Foul Deeds will Rise

Foul Deeds Will Rise
© 2014 Greg Cox
384 pages

            A galaxy can be a small world. When James T. Kirk attended a performance of The Tempest put on by volunteers nursing refugees in the middle of a war zone, he didn’t expect to encounter a woman  who tried to kill him. Admittedly, he has that effect on women, but  the last time he laid eyes on Lenore Karidian, she was being hauled off to an insane asylum after the killing blast she meant for Kirk dispatched her father instead.  It’s been over twenty years since, but there she is on the stage, immersed in Shakespeare once more.    But is it her only repeat performance?  Kirk has come to help mediate peace between two planets locked in a bitter war, and whatever fragile hope for bloodshed’s end is lost when the leading counselors for both sides find themselves murdered on Kirk’s own ship.  The murders are utter copies of Lenore’s past crimes, when in her youth she sought to kill anyone who could identify her disguised father as a war criminal.  Although Ambassador Kevin Riley – Kirk’s colleague and former crewman, previously poisoned by Lenore and saved only by Dr. McCoy’s swift action – is quick to believe the femme fatale is up to her old tricks, Kirk suspects there is more to the  story.  The stakes grow after both sides in the war somehow learn that Karidian had a criminal past, and explode into fury against the Federation they blame for harboring a known criminal. Even as two of his officers are arrested by an alien military,  a raging mob takes innocent aid workers hostage. Even worse,  Spock and Scotty – said arrestees – were on the brink of discovering a conspiracy that threatened not only the peace, but the lives of millions.  Foul Deeds will Rise is a classic Trek tale,  an action-mystery reminiscent of the shows themselves, complete with abundant references to Shakespeare.  Plotwise, Cox’s writing is perfectly entertaining, with action unfolding in three different locations at one point, all building together to the same finale, with the occasional fun bit of dialogue thrown in.  It does seem odd that a murder investigation on a starship would involve virtually no reference to security tapes being checked, but how nice it is to see a mystery solved by sleuthing instead of computers!

The Whiskey Rebels

The Whiskey Rebels
© 2008 David Liss
544 pages

"You have my word as a gentleman."
"You are no gentleman!"
"Then you have my word as a scoundrel, which, I know, opens up a rather confusing paradox that I have neither the time nor inclination to disentangle."

The Whiskey Rebels is a story of love, rage, and deceit set during the frontier days of the American republic. Two people, an amiable but disgraced spy and a border widow who was an aspiring author until she had to settle for instigating another revolution,  are drawn into collusion and conflict by a sinister scheme. Although the title brings to mind the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791,  David Liss' first foray into American  historical fiction is not simultaneously his first war novel. Whiskey Rebels is instead a mystery-business thriller in the vein of The Coffee Trader and A Conspiracy of Paper: at its heart is a complicated banking scheme one must either be a financier or an author to cook up, centering on the nascent Bank of America.

Rebels is unusual in having a split narrative, as Joan Maycott and Ethan Saunders take turns in telling their own individual stories that will converge in time  amid frantic chases and gunfire. Joan is a young society woman who is too clever and audacious for her era; after she and her husband were tricked into forfeiting his backpay as a Continental soldier to take up farming on the frontier (wild west Pennsylvania),  their lives were destroyed by greedy speculators despite having turned lead into gold through the whiskey trade. Her plight, which is set several years before Saunders', works forward to intersect with his back in Philadelphia, during the nation's first financial crisis.  Saunders is introduced, tellingly, at a bar where he is about to fight over a woman. It is another woman who will get him into real trouble, though; his old fiance, who he left after he was accused of being a traitor. She's married in the years since they parted ways, and now her husband is missing and her children's lives are threatened. Would he be so kind as to help?

Saunders isn't exactly a knight in shining armor, but he is the sentimental sort. He may dote on the bottle like it was mother's milk and lie with the ease of breathing, but there is one woman he loves and one cause for which he will be utterly true: hers. Finding her wayward husband means attracting the attention of many nasty men who do not want a disgraced drunk roaming through their business, and who have a lot of money to lose if he doesn't let sleeping dogs lie. Fortunately,  there are conspiracies within conspiracies here, and some parties see some use in steering Saunders to act in their interest to undermine the others. This is not a book for shoring up one's faith in human nature, as all of the tale's characters are busy lying to one another as they manipulate the others into doing their bidding, sometimes pursuing mutual goals. It's a you-lie-to-me, I-lie-to-you game that ends up in stabbings, hangings, shootings, fires, and one grenade.  The temporal split works to the novel's advantage, as the main plot is so exhaustively entangled that it takes five hundred pages for firearms and fisticuffs to break out.  The reader is allowed to work his way into the thick of things, given rest periods to read about Joan's misfortunes in the wilderness -- fire, Indian raids, and fighting violent revenuers.  Eventually her plight will drive her back to Philadelphia for revenge, only  now she's no society woman whose idea of mischief is inviting men to take her on unsupervised walks. She's been hardened by the west, determined to destroy a cabal and its government that has become an enemy of its people.

Hell has no fury as a woman scorned, but where is the road from the frontier to Philadelphia and Alexander Hamilton's new bank?  The capital for said bank was to be raised with a heavy excise on whiskey, a tax heavy enough to drive frontier settlers who were just getting by into ruin.  That will drive Joan in part, but there are other factors and malfactors involved, and by and by wretched connections to Hamilton's treasury department are discovered.  Liss handles the intersection of our two characters exceptionally well, as Joan appears as a dinner party attendee in Ethan's story, becoming increasingly important in his own tale as well as hers.  Saunders and Joan will emerge to have a mutual enemy, but conflicting goals; while Saunder's efforts put him in tense cahoots with Hamilton, attempting to prevent the government's new financial plan from being wrecked, Joan sees Hamilton as the Archfiend himself.  The merge  makes the reader root for two people simultaneously who will act at cross purposes; here we have a novel whose most sympathetic characters are the other's antagonist. Unfortunately after they meet the thicket of lies and confabulations becomes even denser. Mercifully, the jibber-jabber about stockjobbing and buying six-percents so the four-percents will float is tempered by an amiable and hilarious lead. Sure, the noble but charming rogue is something of a trope at this point, but even when he's deep in his cups and acting heinously, the reader is beguiled into supporting him all the same.  The authorship itself is playful, the fourth wall threadbare -- at one point Saunders apologizes to the reader for introducing so many women as the most beautiful in the world, but he can't help it. He is astonished to run into so many femme fatales, himself -- it's not his fault!

Although parts of The Whiskey Rebels were strained,  it has immense appeal in having Hamilton as a side character, with Washington and Jefferson in bits parts as well. The other characters are a mix of historical and fictional, with the mutual enemy -- the author of all this misery and drama -- being a factual speculator. Rebel's' exhausting plot twists are eased with humor; it wasn't the story I expected to read, but was well-done and entertaining all the same.

Related:
Alexander Hamilton, Rob Chernow
The Coffee Trader,  A Conspiracy of Paper; David Liss. Historical business thrillers involving speculation and beautiful women.  Hmm, I sense a pattern.

Hanging Curve

Hanging Curve

© 1999 Troy Soos
272 pages

St. Louis, 1922. Babe Ruth reigns as the king of baseball. Mickey Rawlings is no king, not even a prince, but he is at least in the peerage: a utility infielder for the St. Louis Browns.  This season, though, there’s more than  baseball on his mind. A man has been murdered, and his death may plunge the city into bedlam.  The story started when Rawlings,  desperate for a chance to play baseball instead of sitting in the dugout, accepted an intriguing offer to play one game between two local clubs  -- one of them being part of the Negro Leagues.   Professional white  ball players are forbidden from taking the field with black players by MLB management, and Mickey  was eager to test his skills against such obvious talent.  Crawford pitched magnificently, humbling the opposition, and then – days later – he was found lynched, hanging from the stadium’s walls.  There had been a fistfight at the game, and members of the Klan hovered about, but – would anyone murder for a baseball game?   With little else to do on the bench, Rawlings digs for answers.  His search casts a light on the simmering racial tensions in  Missouri, the widespread influence of the Midwest Ku Ku Klux, and a prenatal Civil Rights movement.

The golden age of baseball was not a golden age for its black fans.  Segregation flourished in early 20th century America, especially as southern blacks streamed northward in search of jobs. Rising racial tension led to a burgeoning Klan, and not only in its old home of the South:  the 1920s Klan was strongest in the midwest, practically taking over Indiana.  Racial unrest is the backdrop of Hanging Curve;   five years before its start, labor riots turned into a race war, leaving areas of East St. Louis utterly ruined. The death and mayhem of those hours haunts the memory of those who remain, but matters are rapidly deteriorating once again, apparently instigated by a baseball team. After Rawlings plays his match against members of the Negro League,  matters go awry. He played  unsuspectingly, with a team sponsored by an auto dealership, and many on it held an association with the Ku Klux Klan.  First a black player is hung, then beatings and arsons follow in reprisals and counterstrikes.  Those who survived the riots on both sides know where this is going, and it isn't a road  anyone wants to go down.  Blood feuds can take on a life of their own, though, and Rawlings has to work overtime to find a way to nip this one in the bud. He works closely not only with one of the dealership's Klan members, but with a NAACP lawyer to investigate who killed Crawford...and why. These budding relationships introduce Rawlings to two worlds which he had been otherwise blind to: the widespread popularity and influence of the Klan, and the segregated existence of America's black citizenry. Although the courts maintained segregation as separate but equal, not until Rawlings struck up a friendship with a black lawyer did he realize how factually bankrupt those claims were. In St. Louis, for instance,  the streetcars maintained two seperate lines,  but alloted so few cars and conductors to the black line that passengers were forced to wait far longer than their white counterparts. The Klan, too, was a surprise:  Rawlings thought it just a gang for roughneck racists, not suspecting the organization had a more sinister attraction on the respectable, masquerading as a civic organization.  The pieces of the puzzle indicate to Rawlings that the true motive for that first murder are just as hidden in deception as the Klan members who hovered around the game.

Hanging Curve is one of the most interesting  mysteries I've ever read, with a setting that invokes both warm, sentimental nostalgia for the lovely game of baseball and the sad reality of racial tension in America. Consider: the St. Louis Browns, who played in a city a stone's throw from Ferguson, are these days better known as the Baltimore Orioles. But as Rawlings discovers in Hanging Curve,  there is more to social dramas both in our day and in his than mere racism.  Rawlings was able to tease out the truth,  but will we?

This week: saints of war

Dear readers:

What a week passed these last few days! In the United States, we celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, and therein followed three days of bedlam as people acted like chimpanzees descending on a pile of fruit for Black Friday stores.  How people can simultaneously be thankful while spend the day eagerly dwelling on how much they want this or that once the stores open at six is beyond me.  The month's end also saw the conclusion of NaNoWriMo, which I completed again albeit at a limping pace.

Yesterday was the first Sunday in Advent, the start of those four weeks of anticipation before Christmas. Traditionally it's a time of penitence as people remember the preparation of Mary for the birth of her child, and orthodox Christians likewise prepare for the second coming of Christ. Personally, penitence in the weeks approaching Christmas is a hard sell, but I appreciate the season considering my own horror at the triumph of consumerism over every aspect of human lives, and look to honor the spirit of Advent in some way. I'm ordering an interlibrary loan on Being Consumed,  and have checked out a collection of Advent meditations by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

More immediately, I'm reading a biographical novel of Joan of Arc by Samuel Clemens (of all people!), and then...well, who knows? I've changed my Great War reading plans for this month up a bit; since reviews of the Christmas truce novel I was thinking about are so poor, I'll be reading about the British home front instead.  Reviews are pending for a handful of books, including a collection of short stories by Wendell Berry  and a work in southern history. I probably won't be commenting on A Fatal Advent, a murder mystery I picked up yesterday. Someone keeps stealing things and lethally whacking people on the head with Scotch tape dispensers in an Anglican church, and at the last the main character walks in on the perpetrator threatening another character with murder. There's no sleuthing and the only thing of interest is the main character's occupation:  though ordained, she works as a counselor attached to the church.

My hope for myself and you is that we all stay grounded in what will come a frenetic season of shopping, partying, and other activities.  Good luck!

The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon
© 1929 Dashiell Hammeett
217 pages

"You have always, I must say, a smooth explanation ready."

"What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?” 

A beautiful woman whose life is in danger; a streetwise and world-worn private eye who will take on a globe-trotting criminal conspiracy to rescue her,  and a string of murders that implicates them both:   detective novels don't get more archetypal than this.  The Maltese Falcon is the original hardboiled detective story, and despite being nearly ninety years old it ages splendidly.

Sam Spade is a private investigator who is tasked with assisting a damsel in distress, but when his partner is knocked off on the first night of the investigation, and Spade's only clue to the woman's distress killed that same night, things get complicated fast. The police want to pin both murders on Spade, and just for kicks there are gunmen following him around. Despite initially giving Sam a line about being stalked by a sister's boy friend, Miss Damsel is involved in a high-stakes heirloom theft that will deliver either fortune or death to all concerned.

Granted, when I started reading this I was in the mood for a vintage detective novel, so my delight in reading it had a head start. Even so, I can't imagine not being impressed with the language and style employed here. Considering that this first debuted in a magazine, it's hard to believe that publishers gave Hammett  room to describe actions like rolling a cigarette with such articulation, but these sprinkled little diversions are like a pocket square;  they're small, but add enormous aesthetic appeal.   The characters are vivid, popping out in both appearance and personality.  The plot itself is a tangled whodunit that ultimately sees everyone a little frustrated, but displays that for all his cynicism, Spade is still driven by his own  very firm set of morality.  The Maltese Falcon is stylish, fast, and gloriously fun.

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This week: TBR progress

This past week I was positively underwhelmed by The Bishop in the West Wing, a mystery novel by Andrew Greeley, a Catholic priest.  I’d hoped the novelty of a priest writing about a priest solving mysteries could make for an interesting read, but as with other Greeley novels I've tried, I just couldn't get into it.  I finished this one because it was short, the book is being discarded, and the plot unfolded in the White House.  Essentially the President is an Irish Bill Clinton from Chicago, who is being plagued by a poltergeist and invites his buddy from the old days, now a bishop serving the cardinal of Chicago, to drive it away.  Blackie Ryan, the lead, doesn't do a lot of sleuthing; he just spends several days hanging around the White House while the president eats and has mock-abrasive arguments with his precocious teenage daughters, until eventually Ryan decides the poltergeist is being generated by the malicious lady vice-president.

Well, OK then.   This week I’ll be reading a history of steam transportation that I bought a couple of years ago pursuing an interest in steamships.   It’s a to-be-read extra. I’m also getting back into Richard Fortey’s Earth, a geological history of the planet.

No Time Like the Past

No Time Like the Past
© 2014 Greg Cox
400 pages

Question: why is the heroic, resolute-looking face of James T. Kirk carved Rushmore-like into a mountainside in the middle of the Delta Quadrant?  In search of an answer, Seven of Nine is thrown across space and time into the middle of a firefight, whereupon she rescues Kirk and company from Orion pirates and enlists his and the Enterprise's help in returning home  Her quest for home won't be easy, and is made even more difficult by a bureaucrat's big mouth; after the pirates learn there's a woman from the future among them, they badger the Enterprise relentlessly, turning a mystery novel into a running battle. No Time Like the Past is a TOS novel with a Voyager twist, a fantastic adventure novel rendered by veteran author Greg Cox.

In the course of sorting out the mystery, Seven and the TOS crew will revisit the battlegrounds of some of the original series’ odder episodes, including “The Apple”.  Although some premises stretch plausibility (the planet riven by race war between people who are black on the right side, and white on the left, or the reverse),  Cox succeeds in fleshing them out enough for readers to take seriously. Cox has an easier job handling the characters; a veteran Trek author,  his Spock/McCoy salvos are right on the mark.  The Voyager crew are in character as well.  The story is one of a mystery-turned-scavenger hunt punctuated by frequent battle scenes and an explosive finale as the frustrated Orions try to  board and seize the Enterprise itself.  All this makes for a story that moves speedily along, with plenty of action and time spent with beloved and familiar characters.  Their interactions with Seven provide even more to enjoyed.  As they have no idea of her backstory, her cybernetic modifications horrify the doctor, but her rational personality and strength impress Kirk and Spock.  The big TOS three and Seven have a lot of fun together, the many scenes of peril aside, and so too will the reader.

Sycamore Row

Sycamore Row
© 2013 John Grisham
464 pages

 I have been less than impressed with John Grisham’s books in recent years; The Racketeer made me suspect Grisham or his publishers were merely milking the success of his name.  Sycamore Row, however, is a return to the Grisham of yore; set in his fictional Clanton, Mississippi, the site of many of his better novels.  A direct sequel to his first novel, and building off many others, Sycamore Row is good work, a legal thriller and a story of restoration and forgiveness.

Sycamore Row picks up only two years after the climax of A Time to Kill, in which Jake Brigance defended a black father who meted out shotgun justice to two white hooligans who beat and raped his young daughter. No one expected Brigance to triumph, not in a town like Clanton where racial tensions ran deep. But he did,  and the storied reputation he earned as  a progressive lawyer of integrity earned him the job that begins in Sycamore Road. On a fine Sunday morning, a local businessman, Seth Hubbard, is found hanging from a tree on his property; the next day, Brigance receives a letter from the man appointing him the executor of his will, a handwritten document that cuts out the man's family and leaves his enormous fortune to...the maid.  The black maid.  Once again Jake is thrown into a controversial trial that some want badly to turn into a good ol' race war. Jake  has no interest in that kind of legal battle;  the Hailey trial saw his house and dog perish in flames set by the Ku Klux Klan.

Although the premise sounds a bit much like The Testament -- where another rich old man left a handwritten will that disinherited his family and dumped the fortune on someone who no one had ever heard of, namely a missionary in South America --  the legal battle turns into a historical mystery that comes into light only late in the novel. The legal question of whether Hubbard was sane enough to produce a legally valid will is resolved not by trial arguments, but by historical fact as the characters struggle to discover what Seth Hubbard knew. The characters include not only Jake, but other Clanton favorites like Harry Rex Vonner, a cranky if wise divorce lawyer, and Lucien Wilbanks, who is the last of a noble clan of gentry, a disbarred southern scion with a taste for sour mash and a proud member of the NAACP -- just to rile folks up.  Sycamore Row's  enmeshment with the other Clanton novels will make this work especially attractive for Grisham readers, especially those like myself who've been disappointed by works like The Associate and The Racketeer.   The presiding judge is Reuben V. Atlee, whose own will will cause a stir in  The Summons which it neglects to mention $3 million sitting around in boxes in his basement. Even Willie Traynor, who owned the newspaper whose story was told in The Last Juror, makes a few steady appearances.

For those not enamored of the greater Clanton story, Sycamore Row is still superior to many Grisham works because it's not idle entertainment.  Grisham develops a theme of forgiveness throughout, and the final resolution is magnificent. There's no preachiness, no lectures from the main characters nor wisdom dispersed from a town savant; forgiveness and restoration are written into the character's very actions.  I was spellbound, and hope Grisham returns to Clanton again.

Hitler's Peace

Hitler's Peace
© 2006 Phillip Kerr
464 pages

Willard Mayer has the strangest luck. How many people get to dine with FDR, talk about the worries of life with Winston Churchill, annoy Joseph Stalin, and shake hands with Adolf Hitler? And this after they've  been arrested several times for espionage given a string of bodies trailing behind them. Mayer's no murderer or spy, even if once in his impressionable youth he was a member of the Communist party and passed information to the Soviet intelligence service, the NKVD.  The year is 1943, and Mayer is a philosopher-turned-OSS agent who is accompanying FDR to an ultra top-secret conference as a German translator/intelligence strategist. The confidential conference in Tehran -- the one so concealed that everyone and their twitchy uncle knows about - is the first coming together of the Big Three: FDR,Churchill, and Stalin. But more will happen there than will ever be publicly known, for while some Germans are planning the assassinations  of the allied trio, others intend to entice them into an early peace.

Hitler's Peace is exciting from beginning to end, a bit of historical fiction that occupies a grey area between historical and alternate fiction. Although history is fundamentally unchanged, Kerr's plot explores facts considered odd and provides a highly speculative explanation. Truth is stranger than fiction, however; I was astonished to learn that some events within the novel which strained credibility actually occurred, like the string of calamities that beset the Willie D. Porter, one of the ships escorting FDR to the conference. Within hours, the ship backed into and destroyed another ship, saw a man vanish into the sea, blew a boiler, dropped a depth charge, and just for good measure, fired a torpedo directly at FDR's ship. "She's not what you would call a lucky ship", the baffled president noted shortly before ordering the ship to detach itself from the convoy and deliver its crew for total arrest at the nearest port.  The cast of characters is largely German (Mayer is the son of German immigrants),which is a refreshing change.  They're all antagonists who are neither sympathetic nor overtly villainous; the Nazi regime's crimes against humanity are not ignored, but neither are those of the Russians, and the revelation of several Soviet slaughters features as a plot point. The novel plays fast and loose with history, but touches on aspects of the war largely ignored (Soviet war crimes, for instance, or "Operation Long Jump"). I found it entertaining, though Mayer is only marginally more sympathetic than the book's 'baddies'.