Saturday, September 17, 2011
7th Sigma -- Steven Gould
Too bad the title Cowboys and Aliens was already taken, since it would have been a pretty good one for this book, except that there aren't many cowboys in evidence and maybe no aliens.This novel is a an updated version of Kipling's Kim, which will be obvious to everybody who's read Kipling. Gould makes this very clear, and the protagonist is even named Kim(ble). The setting is the American Southwest after a strange event has returned it to something much like the frontier. The event is the appearance of the bugs, tiny creatures made of metal with no other purpose that we know if other than to devour more metal and produce more bugs. You wouldn't want to live around them if you had metal fillings in your teeth or a hip replacement or anything metal attached to your body. The bugs are confined to the dry southwest, so the rest of the world goes on pretty much as before.
Some people, however, choose to live in The Territory. Since there's no metal, life is reduced to a simple level. There are bandits, outlaws, farmers, ranchers, good people and bad. There are eramic knives and crossbows cardboard rifles that fire ceramic bullets. Two of the good people are Kim, who's a kid with a lot of potential. He falls in with Ruth, a sensi who's come to The Territory to open a dojo and teach aikido. Kim's a great pupil, and he becomes useful to the law in Gould's version of the Game.
The book's highly readable, if episodic, and it leaves a few questions unanswered at the end. So it must be the first of a series. It's clearly a YA novel even if it's not being marketed that way, but it's something anybody can enjoy. Check it out.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Philly Poe Guy might dispute the first sentence
Poe Museum Nevermore? - Courant.com: BALTIMORE (Reuters) - Of all the U.S. cities that claim a connection to the troubled author Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore likes to think its case is strongest.
Poe's family is from Baltimore, his literary career began in the city, he died a mysterious death at a Baltimore hospital and his body was buried here in 1849.
But the city may soon lose a key physical connection to Poe. The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, where the writer lived for four years in the early 1800s, is in danger of closing next year, due to budget cutbacks by the city.
Poe's family is from Baltimore, his literary career began in the city, he died a mysterious death at a Baltimore hospital and his body was buried here in 1849.
But the city may soon lose a key physical connection to Poe. The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, where the writer lived for four years in the early 1800s, is in danger of closing next year, due to budget cutbacks by the city.
Impossible Murders: Cracking the Locked Room Mysteries
AbeBooks: Impossible Murders: Cracking the Locked Room Mysteries: The 'locked room' mystery is one of the most intriguing sub-genres of crime writing. These books depict a crime committed in what appears to be an entirely impossible situation such as a locked room where the killer has seemingly vanished into thin air.
The concept of a behind-closed-doors mystery has been a plot device since the heyday of Ancient Greece but it was not established as a sub-genre of crime fiction until the 19th century. One of the earliest examples is Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue where a woman and her daughter are murdered by someone speaking an unintelligible foreign language within an inaccessible room, which has been locked from the inside and is located on the fourth floor of a building. Several other authors (Joseph Conrad, Sheridan Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins) also made early attempts at this style of mystery.
The concept of a behind-closed-doors mystery has been a plot device since the heyday of Ancient Greece but it was not established as a sub-genre of crime fiction until the 19th century. One of the earliest examples is Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue where a woman and her daughter are murdered by someone speaking an unintelligible foreign language within an inaccessible room, which has been locked from the inside and is located on the fourth floor of a building. Several other authors (Joseph Conrad, Sheridan Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins) also made early attempts at this style of mystery.
Bad Moon Rising -- Ed Gorman
Ed Gorman's series about lawyer Sam McCain has always been a favorite of mine. Plots, characters, setting, and attitude. This series has it all. The song titles that are used as the titles of the novels give you the time period. They begin in the '50s (okay, the first book, The Day the Music Died, uses a line from a song and not a title), and we're not well into the darkness of the late '60s/early '70s with Bad Moon Rising (Creedence released the song, one of the all-time greats, in '69). There's a hippie commune just outside Black River Falls, and when the daughter of one of the town's prominent citizens is murdered there, McCain is drawn into the case. Everyone except McCain seems to believe it's an open-and-shut case, especially Cliffie, the town's police chief, who doesn't figure as much in this story as in previous books. McCain begins his own investigation, and things prove to be a lot more complicated than anyone thought. Ugly secrets are uncovered, but Gorman, as usual, is wonderfully even-handed at presenting the human beings involved. Nobody's painted in one color here. Even the worst have redeeming qualities, no matter how small. And even the best have their flaws.
I'm sad to say that this appears to be the final book in the series, unless Gorman plans to take it in a new direction. My greatest regret is that McCain will probably never give his secretary's husband the butt-kicking he so clearly deserves. I've enjoyed every book in this series, and if you haven't read the others, I'd advise you to get started. It's worth your time, and like the rest, this one's a real keeper. Check it out.
PaperBack
Will Manson, The Mathematician, Flagship, 1967
(This is not, as far as I know, the biography of Seepy Benton.)
An Afterword on Afterwords
When I was reading Lawrence Block's Afterwords, I was happy to see that he repeated a story I first read in one of his Writer's Digest columns many years ago. In one of his books, Two for Tanner, which is set in Thailand, he found an error in the galleys. Instead of "tobacco shop," the text read "tobbo shop." He started to correct it but had second thoughts. "Tobbo shop" sounded like one of those local-color things real insider would know about, so he left it in. I believe he said at the time that he hoped someone would come along later, stumble across the term, and write a book that mentioned the notorious tobbo shops of Thailand in an attempt to get at the real spirit of the place.
When I read that, I said to myself, "If I ever have a chance to be the guy who makes that mention, I'm gonna do it." Sure enough, when I was working on one of the M.I.A. Hunter books (I did several of those, and I believe Back to 'Nam is the one I'm talking about here), the opportunity arose, and I put it into the text. Did the mention make it into the published book? I have no idea, but if it did, I'm pretty sure Block never saw it. I get the feeling he didn't read the M.I.A. Hunter series. At any rate, I loved doing that, and it's one of the reasons writing can be so much fun.
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