Book Review: The Thin Man

 

• By Dashiell Hammett

• Pub Date: 1933

• Where I bought this book: Conveyor Belt Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I found this new bookstore, and felt I had to buy something.

****

    Too many characters for such a short book (201 pages) make this old dime-store novel confusing and difficult to follow. Yes, I know Hammett is considered one of the best of the hard-core crime novelists of his time, but it seems this particular gumshoe tale long ago passed its prime.

    While its writing is plain, straight-forward, and linear for the most part, it is jumbled by introducing some characters almost as an aside, using different descriptions or identifications for some, and having others float in and out of the story at random.

    The by-now cliches of the genre can be annoying, but are understood as part of the era when it was written.

    This is a detective story that uses lots of dialogue, and it isn't always clear who is talking, or whom they are referring to. Following along is confusing, and I found myself repeatedly asking, "Who now?" 

    At one point near the end, two colleagues meet, and their tone and relationship seem to have changed so much that I turned back pages to see what I'd missed. I'm still not sure what happened.

    But Hammett's descriptions of 1930s New York, and its cops and gangsters and dames and detectives is arresting. The style is compelling, and it is easy to get immersed in the tale, even if you sometimes feel lost in the twists and turns.

Book Review: Later

Later, by Stephen King

    You read Stephen King for the writing, of course. His is elegantly simple, using a working class language of good, useful words and descriptive phrases. It's not a style in which you pause and savor every word, but it gets the job done.

    And you read King's books for the stories, and the plots. Sure, sometimes he repeats anecdotes or plays with different perspectives of the tale, but it's always a story where he pulls you along and has you eager to get to the end. 

    King is typecast as a horror writer, but that has rarely been true. And now that he's often switching genres -- he's really gotten into detective and mystery tales recently -- it's even less true. He is, as one critic wrote, just a guy who puts ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances -- usually with a twist of the supernatural, or tearing a hole in reality to show another dimension.

    But mostly, you read King for the characters. One never tires of, or forgets, King's characters. Sometimes, they come back.

    I won't deny he uses tropes -- the magical Negro, the disabled child with mental superpowers. But he has has a cast of characters that often look like America -- and he is getting better at that. He shows strong people who are good, and evil people who are bad. Mostly, though, you can identify with his characters because you know them. They are based on regular people, with their thoughts and fears and biases

    And sometimes those ordinary people have a mystical or supernatural power. It's a King thing, OK?

    Which gets us to Later. It's about a boy who sees -- and can hear and talk to -- dead people. We first meet Jamie Conklin as a young child, but it is his older self telling the story. He introduces us to his mother, Tia Conklin -- a white woman of privilege and single mother who had fallen on hard times. We also meet her lover, Elizabeth "Liz" Dutton, a police officer with questionable ethics.

    This being King, we can probably tell what is going to happen -- someone will want to exploit Jamie's abilities. But that's something King can tell us, better than I could, and better than most writers.

    It's a short book for King, clocking in at less than 250 pages. 

    So pick it up and enjoy. You know you will.

Book Review: The Woman Who Died A Lot

The Woman Who Died a Lot, by Jasper Fforde

This is Jasper Fforde at his best and his worst.

The writing is witty and wonderful. The story arcs are wild and unpredictable. The characters are well-drawn and seem exceedingly normal is an unnatural world.



The plot, is, well, bizarrely Ffordeian

This is book seven in the Thursday Next/Bookworld series. I've read them all, but my mistake was finding book number six, One of  Our Thursdays is Missing, and reading it first. That was a long time ago, and over the years, have read them in order. So I had a background before cracking this one open.

In some ways, it's a little too much Fforde. The plot is all over the place. So much is going on that trying to determine what is happening at any given moment is a special challenge. It's just better to let it all ride. Let me try to sort it out.

Thursday Next is home recuperating, in a forced retirement, after an assassination attempt at the end of the last book. But Thursday doesn't taken lying down lying down. God, now known as the one and only Global Diety, has come out of hiding and has been smiting towns (because he can). Thursday's hometown of Swindon is next on his list, so her daughter, Tuesday, a young scientific genius, is preparing an anti-smiting shield that may or may not work. (It depends on something called the Unentanglement Constant.) Thursday's son, Friday, has lost out on his future job as head of the force that polices time-travel because travelers to the future discover that time travel is impossible. Friday also knows he is destined to murder someone within a week and thus will spend most of his future in prison.

Meanwhile, lots of synthetic Thursdays keep showing up and replacing her. Also meanwhile, representatives of Goliath -- the company that either runs everything in this world or wants to -- keeps stealing obscure 13th century manuscripts. Thursday, in her prestigious (really) new job as chief librarian of Swindon's All-You-Can-Eat at Fatso's Drink Not Included Library, meets one of the thieves, Jack Schitt -- her nemesis throughout this seven-book series -- in her office. It leads to this conversation:

"'We don't often see any Goliath high-fliers in Swindon,' I added. 'What position are you on the ladder these days?'

'Ninety-one. The corporation rewards loyalty.'

'So? Starbucks rewards loyalty -- and they're not out to take over the world. Okay, that was a bad example. Tesco's rewards loyalty, and they're not out to ... Okay, that's a bad example, too. But you know what I mean.'"

Such is an example of the Welsh author's off-beat sense of humor. Here's another: Angry God's smiting of Swindon will center on the town cathedral. The City Council wonders how it will be replaced: "'The price of cathedrals is simply shocking these days, and insurance is impossible, as you know.' 'The "Act of God" clause?' 'Right'"

The town also takes its libraries seriously. Libraries have their own police forces, and the uniform includes combat fatigues, "replete with the distinctive camouflage pattern of book spines for blending into library spaces." Its chief in Swindon begged Thursday to sanction pre-dawn raids to collect on overdue books.

Like I said, sometimes a bit overdone. But don't worry. Fforde wraps things up nicely, although I am not sure if the series is ending -- this book was published in 2012, and Fforde has gone on to other books.

But you never know.

Book Review: Wife of the Gods

Wife of the Gods, by Kwei Quartey

This is your basic detective novel, set in the west African nation of Ghana. The former makes it meh. The latter makes it worth reading -- at least for an old white guy in America, whose knowledge of African culture is, shall we say, lacking.

Now, I won't pretend this made me an expert on Ghanaian ways. But it did teach me a few things, left me wanting more, and, in the end, told a decent story.

The story introduces us to Darko Dawson, an inspector detective with the Ghanaian police, who lives and works in the capital city of Accra. He's a typical fictional detective -- good at his jobs, but with quirks and some personal problems. Dawson's quirks and problems include a quickness to violence, a fondness for smoking marijuana, a mother who mysteriously disappeared while he was still a child, and a son with a heart disease. All of these become plot-points in the book.

Ghana, on the Gulf of Guinea, is outlined in red.

The story starts with the finding of the body of a young female AIDS worker in the fictional town of Ketanu, in the Volta Region in the east of Ghana. Dawson has a connection with the area -- he grew up there, and speaks the local dialect. So the police detective is sent to investigate the potential homicide.

But his visit there is not with problems -- he doesn't like leaving his wife and young son. The assignment seems like a punishment of some kind -- and he must deal with family issues left over from his youth. And while he knows the area, he has problems with the local police chief, and with the fetish priests -- local religious leaders who actions seem more self-serving than providing for their flock. They often act like and portray themselves as gods, and have many wives, often young girls who have been awarded to the priests for various reasons.

The book explores all these issues, dealing with local and tribal customs, and with the very nature of religion and the men who use it to dominate others. It's a common enough issue that we see all around us, no matter where we live.

The problems and the solutions are universal, although the details are African.