Material Witness

Cross Codes

April 7, 14.30pm

There's a very interesting little passage about a fifth of the way into Cross Bones, Kathy Reichs latest autopsy-fest, in which Temperance Brennan (a name I pronounce in French in my head and find faintly erotic) picks up a book in an airport on her way back to Montreal.

"At the airport bookstore, only a few million of the year's blockbuster barred my way... The flap blurbed a mystery that would shatter an 'explosive truth'."

Tempe picks up the book asking, "Why not. The rest of the universe was reading the thing."

Why not indeed? Religion was last year's big seller, retailers couldn't shift copies of the Da Vinci Code any faster last year if they had stood outside their doors launching copies into the street, and Ms Reichs clearly believes if you can't beat them, join them.

Cross Bones is a novel of ancient bones from the Holy Land that could explode a few truths of its own. Very similar truths in fact...

BTW interesting to see that Dan Brown won his High Court copyright case this afternoon. No surprise there. It'll be interesting to see what the newspapers make of it all in the morning.

Reading

Cross Bones (p128)

The Time Traveller's Wife (p425)

Pegasus arriving

April 7, 20.05pm

Around about February/March each year, during one of my regular visits to Amazon, I start tapping the names of a number of different writers into Search: Books tab. Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Carl Hiaasen, Ian Rankin, Sue Grafton, Laura Lippman, Peter Robinson, Karin Slaughter and a few others. Just to find out when the next book is coming.

But the one I always start with is James Lee Burke. Part of me feels that I'm too old to have favourite singers, favourite actors, films or authors. But thought of a different way, whose books do I look forward to most. The answer is James Lee Burke. (Which is not to say that he wrote my favourite book - about which I shall write another time).

When I looked last month to see what he had coming up this year, I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was a "Dave" being published in July, rather than a "Billy Bob".

Dave Robicheaux was the detective who get me into detective fiction after a 15 year-or-so gap that began when I last put a Hardy Boys book down.

I don't recall which book it was that I started with - it wasn't the first as I didn't develop my compulsion to read series in order until later - but I was captivated from the off. What hooked me I think was the sheer lawlessness of the Louisiana he painted, his sense of the Wild West of the south. It just seemed so alien to me - so difficult to believe that justice in the modern United States could be so arbitrary, so flawed. So abused. (Well, this was a few years ago. The wool has been removed now.)

And, of course there was this driven, flawed, tragic and utterly comnpelling hero - Dave Robicheaux.

So I was thrilled, of course, that there was a Dave on the way. But I had to wait until July??

Perhaps not. I've discovered a new toy since the last book: eBay. And I wondered if there might be any proofs floating around out there. And so there was one copy of Pegasus Descending, a bound proof edition from Orion. I drove the bidding up to about $20 before giving it up, and settling for an early order from Amazon and a July delivery date.

But fortunately the tale didn't end there. When I told the nice woman from Orion I was starting this diary, they offered to send one through, as well as other new titles.

And when I arrived home this evening. There it was. The tell-tale brown carboard book packaking, and inside Pegasus Descending. (Thanks, Gaby.)

The timing is not ideal. For one thing, I yesterday promised to read the Maltese Falcon and for another I started Cross Bones on the train this morning having disposed of The Big Sleep.

So, I'll have to wait. At least until the weekend, and will post a review once I'm finished.

Reading

Cross Bones by Kathy Reichs, (page 104)

The Time Traveller's Wife (page 370)

On the shelf

Pegasus Descending by James Lee Burke

Blood from a Stone by Donna Leon

The Jasmine Trade by Denise Hamilton

Don't mention the Falcon

April 6, 9.01am

It’s confession time. Mention of the Maltese Falcon earlier reminds me that I have not actually managed to read it.

For some reason – I’m not quite sure why – I feel sort of ashamed of this. As if it is a sort of seminal test that I have failed.

It’s not as if I haven’t tried. I think that in the three or so years since I first bought it, I must have started it half a dozen times and on each occasion gotten bogged down somewhere in the first 20 pages and swiftly given up.

I had a similar problem with the Lord of the Rings. As a boy I was bought a very attractive box set by an aunt and uncle who lived in New  York, that was among my most prized possessions.

But their brightly-coloured covers hid a shameful secret. That I hadn’t ever got more than 50 pages through the Fellowship. It just seemed like a lot of nonsense – eleventy-first birthday parties and the like. A lot of bucolic slowness – Hardy on Mogadon with short legs. 

Those books sat unread for about 20 years until the films came out and I decided I couldn’t possibly go and see the films without reading them (as getting through them afterwards would be impossible). I won’t pretend it wasn’t hard work – Tolkien had a tendency to go on in Elvish a bit much for my liking and I never quite warmed to the dogged heroism of the hobbits, but I made it through them.

The deadline helped and I think a similar drastic measure will be needed for the Maltese Falcon. I’ll make it my new month’s resolution (April) to read it. It has to be worth it, or so many people wouldn’t talk about it in such reverential tones. Getting into it may require doing one day’s commute without any other form of media at all – no book, newspaper or MP3 player. That should do the trick.

Hm. And now I’ve decided. I’m quite looking forward to it.

More later.

Reading

The Time Traveller’s Wife (p 370)

The Big Sleep (p 211)

King of the one-liners

April 5, 2006 14.40pm

That's how Ian Rankin described Chandler in his introduction to the Big Sleep. 

Having just found a beauty in The Big Sleep, I can't disagree.

"Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."

When I consider my own aspirations to writing crime fiction in the light of that, I can really only shake my head and feel small and inadequate.

Genius.

More later.

The Master - a referral to Chandler

April 5, 2006, 8.07 am

One of the biggest benefits of interviewing crime writers is hearing them talk about their influences and favourite writers and then asking them for recommendations.

That’s how I come to be reading The Big Sleep.

Bob Crais credits Raymond Chandler not only with inspiring him to a life of crime, but also to move to  Los Angeles to participate in it. The book that had this effect was actually The Little Sister (which incidentally was a recommendation from Michael Connelly that I failed to follow through) but when I dropped into Waterstones at Trafalgar Square to buy it, I discovered it wasn't the first Marlowe and(being anal about these things) decided to start at the beginning. 

What was interesting about the Chandler range range was the publishers – in this case Penguin – have gone to some effort to revitalise them for a modern audience. Firstly the book has a quite arresting retro cover (block printed red gun on bright yellow background) and then a rather charming introduction from Ian Rankin.

(For the anally retentive among you, the book has a large orange 1 on the spine relieving you from the need to leaf through the bibliography and copyright details to check you’re reading them in the right order).

Repackaging the masters is good practice in my mind. My experience of the crime sections in bookstores – and particularly the larger ones – suggests that publishers have a captive audience prepared to do its research. People hang around for ages working through titles. I’ve never stopped and asked anyone what they are doing, but I’m always looking out for something that catches the eye and interests me, and I guess others do similar.

I initially picked up Michael Connelly because I liked the colour-coded spines and covers of the books (shallow, I know, but there you are) and (much, much earlier) Jonathan Kellerman for exactly the same reason.

So the Chandler series was particularly striking and might help these books in their fight for attention with the modern eye candy on display.

And that has to be a good thing as there is a treasure trove in the archives of these houses. Orion tapped into it brilliantly with the Crime Masterworks series that included The Choirboys, Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon and Interface among many. (These books were numbered at one point which had me scurrying around stores – mostly secondhand and discount shops – trying to get them all).

That seemed to act as a sort of degree course in the art of crime. Ben Hunt, BA (hons) Gumshoe History, Procedurals and PI Pulp.

I’m not too far into The Big Sleep yet, but it’s more immediately arresting than the Maltese Falcon, and even thirty-odd pages down, it’s not difficult to see why the tough, cool, wise-cracking Marlowe became such an influence over so many writers.

More later.

Reading

The Time Traveller’s Wife (p 267)

The Big Sleep (p 32)

Waiting on the shelf

Blood from a stone by Donna Leon

Cross Bones by Kathy Reichs

The Jasmine Trade by Denise Hamilton
 

 

Prologue

April 4, 2006

I just finished reading The Two Minute Rule by Robert Crais, the LA-based crime fiction writer who earned fame for the Elvis Cole series of novels and for Hostage, which was later made into a movie starring Bruce Willis.

It wasn’t Crais’ best work, but that doesn’t matter too much. When he’s at the height of his powers, as he has been in Elvis Coles’ recent outings such as The Last Detective and Forgotten Man, Crais is right up there in the elite group of crime fiction writers.

In The Two Minute Rule, a novel inspired by Los Angeles' extraordinary two-a-day bank robbery culture, Crais is just off his best. The plot was as tight and twisty as a brand new slinky, as one might expect from Crais. The new characters in this standalone book – a convicted bank robber trying to go straight after 10 years in jail and a retired FBI officer – were interesting enough that I’d be more than happy to see them again should Crais choose to return to them. There was also Crais’ usual probing analysis of the fine and ever-moving line between good and bad, an often subjective boundary weaving in and out of the objective markers laid down by the law of the land.  

But what he didn’t achieve with these characters, Max Holman and Katherine Pollard, was the emotional depth that has characterised the Cole novels. This is not really a criticism. Elvis and sidekick Joe Pike have been around for 10 books, Max and Katerhine are just starting out. They may never appear again. 

I relate all this because it might be one of the few places you can read it. For reasons I will explore another time, many literary editors of the UK's  national newspapers, have sidelined genre fiction - crime, espionage, romance, sci-fi, fantasy etc - to the status of afterthought. 

When they are reviewed at all, these books are too often cast into tiny “paperback” sections where they get perhaps 200 words each, or else stuffed into great round-up pieces where 8 novels might be given the same number of column inches as the biography of some long-forgotten 18^th century Armenian poet.  

And I find this baffling. Because these are the books people read. Genre writers sell tens of millions of books a year, while the market for poet biographies, regrettably, is pitifully small.

If you don’t believe me, pick up any one of the Books sections this Saturday or Sunday in the nationals and see how much space is given over to books people actually read, crime fiction and mysteries and the like. It won’t be very much. 

So where do you go to find a not new writer, to hear about the latest Robert Crais novel, or to find out when Michael Connelly or John Grisham might be visiting you local bookstore?

There are disappointingly, frustratingly few resources. Richard and Judy do a job, but I’ve never been home in time to see them. There are some decent crime-writing magazines that do a job, but without ever quite persuading me it was necessary to get a subscription one. And there’s always Amazon – I have found the odd recommendation useful there, but it’s somewhat random and somewhat one-dimensional. 

But to someone who reads a lot of crime fiction, and who enjoys discussing it, arguing about it, being faintly anoraky about it – there’s not that much.

So rather than bitch and moan about it - in fact, as well as bitching and moaning - I decided to try and do something about it, and have created this site as a resource for crime/mystery/thriller/historical fiction fans. (I apologise to fans of chick lit and romance but it’s not my thing, I don’t read much of it and can’t help uou)

It will, in part, be a sort of reading diary. I’ll let you know what I’m reading and what I think, and sound off about tangential issues. I will post formal reviews here. And as a former journalist who has written occasionally about crime fiction I am not completely without resources and will (hopefully) have access to writers for interviews and the like, which I’ll also post here. (I had a half hour with Robert Crais last week, while he was in town promoting The Two Minute Rule and will put some of that up here).

But writing this doesn’t help me get recommendations, so I’m also hoping to attract some feedback. What are you reading? What do you like? Post your reviews and recommendations. What I really want is intelligent and lively debate about the sort of books I love reading.

More later.

 

Reading

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffeneger (p 245)

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (p 14)

(I generally have two books on the go; one on my bedside table at home, and one for my 90-minutes-each-way commute.)

Waiting on the shelf

Blood from a stone by Donna Leon

Cross Bones by Kathy Reichs

The Jasmine Trade by Denise Hamilton