Author: katenepveu

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Robb, J.D.: (12.5) “Interlude in Death”

I’ve got a new Eve/Roarke story by J.D. Robb, and I’m happy. Yeah, it’s a guilty pleasure (I explain a little bit about the background in a review of Conspiracy in Death). But it’s a pleasure all the same.

The new story, “Interlude in Death” (a.k.a. “I couldn’t come upwith another title using ‘. . . in Death’ that I hadn’t already used”), is a novella in a collection called Out of This World. The story doesn’t break much ground, but it moves along nicely, and the sight of Eve trying to get out of giving a seminar at a conference is pretty good. (I’m not crazy about the obligatory revelation about Eve & Roarke’s pasts, but that’s a small quibble.)

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Moore, Alan: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The, vol. 1

Last night I finished volume one of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore (which I keep wanting to call The League of Frightened Men, which is a Nero Wolfe book). This is the collection of the first six issues/story arc of a new comic.

The story opens in 1898 with a Ms. Mina Murray assembling a crew of, well, freaks, at the direction of British Intelligence. After some effort, Ms. Murray (formerly Mrs. Harker, from Dracula) tracks down and recruits Allan Quatermain (from H. Rider Haggard’s books); Dr. Jekyll (& Mr. Hyde); and Hawley Griffin, the Invisible Man. (Captain Nemo is the other member, but the book opens after Ms. Murray—who kicks ass and takes names, and almost made me want to re-read Dracula, which I recall as being very dull textually—has recruited him, which is good because that’s by far the least probable one for her to have tracked down.)

That we’re in an alternate England is quite clear, and not only because these characters actually exist here, though their fates are not as recorded in our world. (For instance, a postscript at the end of Dracula says that in 1904, Mrs. Harker is still married and has a son.) On page 2, our characters stand upon an incomplete bridge across the English Channel—something never attempted in our world. And we eventually learn that our protagonists have been brought together to recover some stolen cavorite from another famous character of the era . . .

This story was a pretty straightforward adventure, made remarkable by the thought and research evident in the details—cameos, world-building, and background images. (There are annotations available, if you’re having trouble identifying some of the characters—or just translating the bits in different languages.) It was an enjoyable read, but I probably won’t buy the next one in hardcover for myself. (I bought this one in hardcover as a present for Chad, and since he thinks my scruple of not reading books I buy for other people is weird, borrowed it some time after he was finished.)

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Stout, Rex: (17) In the Best Families

Today I read Rex Stout’s In the Best Families because, well, it was sitting on the kitchen table when I sat down to eat breakfast. This is one of Stout’s Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books; Wolfe is a very fat, very brilliant detective who never leaves his house on business, and Goodwin is his man Friday who goes about and gathers information for Wolfe to be brilliant with. Archie’s also the first-person smartass narrator of all of the stories, one of my favorite characters ever, and a pure pleasure to spend time with. (A&E TV is currently adapting a bunch of the stories, and Timothy Hutton’s Archie is a very good one.) In this book, the mysterious and dangerous Zeck (from And Be A Villain and The Second Confession) warns Wolfe off a case; Wolfe’s client is murdered; and Wolfe immediately disappears, leaving Archie at loose ends.

Some of the Wolfe books don’t have enough plot, but this has plenty. It also has some priceless moments, which I shall not spoil here. It’s probably not the best place to start reading the series, though, as it might not have as much impact if you don’t know the characters already. Good places to start would be Champagne for One or The Silent Speaker (both currently in print), for instance, or some of the short story collections.

One of the nice things about helping someone move, by the way, is unpacking boxes of books and being reminded of all the books one would like to borrow. I will not be reduced to “Well, it’s here . . .” in picking my next book to read . . .

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Gaiman, Neil, and Terry Pratchett: Good Omens

Another book I’ve been reading piecemeal, though over longer than this week, is Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens. There’s a spare copy of this in the car for when we get stuck in traffic, for me to read aloud to occupy our minds; it works very well for that, though I’m not so good at reading through snickers. On Wednesday, while waiting for the people who were to help unload the moving truck (they didn’t show), I re-read a bunch of it. To borrow a phrase from Book-a-Minute, “Five billion people almost DIE, and it is FUNNY.”

Good Omens is the story of the Apocalypse. The Antichrist was born eleven years ago; but due to a little mix-up at the hospital, he’s been sent off to a nice English family and been raised completely free of Satanic—or angelic—influences. And there’s this angel and this demon who get along better with each other than their superiors, and this book of really, really accurate (but very muddled in time) prophecies, and the Four Horsepersons, and Dog (Satanical hellhound and cat-worrier), and, well, it’s too hard to describe. Just read it. Really.

Pratchett & Gaiman are very good writers separately, as well. Good Omens might feel a bit more like Pratchett in style (such as the Discworld books), but at that time Gaiman was also writing Sandman, a brilliant comic, so that’s not too suprising.

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Garrett, Randall: Lord Darcy

Since Sunday, I’ve basically just read things that happened to be lying around, since I’ve either been packing, moving, or working on some academic stuff.

I re-read Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy pretty much piecemeal over Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. This is an omnibus of three books, one novel—Too Many Magicians—and two collections—Murder and Magic and Lord Darcy Investigates. As the titles suggest, these are alternate-history fantasies that riff on classic mysteries. Among the supporting cast in Too Many Magicians are two characters who are rather like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (for more on which, see below, but who appear in books including Too Many Clients,  . . . Cooks, and  . . . Women), and Lord Darcy investigates a crime or two not dissimilar to those that Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter investigated.

The alternate-history conceit of these books is in two parts. First, Richard I didn’t die on the Crusades but settled down after recovering from his wounds and became a very good king, and the Plantagenets have ruled the Anglo-French empire ever since (it’s about the 1960s in this alternate world, or about present-day to when Garrett was writing). Second, the Laws of Magic were discovered before the laws of science, and have been worked out as thoroughly as science was in this world. (Materialism is presently scorned.)

The feel of the world is a bit odd, as the existence of a competent ruling dynasty apparently means the preservation of the aristocracy and certain courtly forms of manner and dress, yet the tech level encompasses railroads, elevators, and horse-drawn carriages with pneumatic tires. There’s also fairly large amounts of info-dumping going on; I happen to think that the information being dumped is amusing, but other people might have less tolerance of the form. They lend themselves well to being read piecemeal, though, and I enjoy them.

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Westlake, Donald E.: (06) Good Behavior

Thank goodness for Donald E. Westlake.

Friday morning, I spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at my bookshelves. I just didn’t feel like reading anything I had. Finally, my eye lit on Good Behavior, which was sitting off to the side. With a sigh of relief, I swooped down upon it and then sped out the door to work.

I’d re-read Good Behavior within the last six months or so, but Westlake is almost infinitely re-readable, particularly his Dortmunder books. To paraphrase the opening of the most recent, Bad News, Dortmunder is a man upon whom the sun only shines when he needs darkness. Good Behavior opens with him dangling from the rafters of a convent after a burglary gone awry; the nuns look upon him as proof of divine intervention, as their newest member has been kidnapped by her father (who’s trying to deprogram her out of the Catholic Church). If only Dortmunder will get her back—from the seventy-sixth floor penthouse of an office building with very tight security—then they won’t tell the cops about his nocturnal activities.

These books are consistently entertaining, witty, and smoothly plotted. I particularly like Good Behavior, because, well, how can you not like a caper with nuns? The only small flaw on this re-read is that my paperback reprint had been subjected to a copyeditor with no sense of humor: when Dortmunder is given the way to pull off the caper, in the Mother Superior’s office, he says, “Let us prey,” not “Let us pray.” It was still perfect subway and before-bed reading, though, and I highly recommend the Dortmunder books to just about anyone. (Do ignore the movies, though; as far as I can tell, the movie What’s the Worst that Could Happen? has precisely three things in common with the book: the title, the ring, and some of the names. The book is hysterical.)

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Wells, Martha: Death of a Necromancer

Oddly, Sabriel is the second book about necromancers I’ve read in a week, the other being Martha Wells’ fantasy Death of a Necromancer. I’d read her City of Bones, which I picked up used, and just bounced hard off it; I’m not sure why and I don’t really care enough to re-read and find out. Death of a Necromancer was the Wells book I’d been recommended, though, and I enjoyed it fairly well; it was satisfyingly creepy (with a title like that, you expect it . . . ), moved quickly, and had a nice setting, a elegant and refreshingly non-quasi-medieval city. Apparently her Element of Fire is recommended by some as well, though I haven’t yet read it.

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Nix, Garth: Sabriel

Today’s book was Sabriel by Garth Nix. I’d vaguely heard good things about this on Usenet, so bought it on a whim. It’s nominally a YA (Young Adult) novel, so you may have to look in that section for it. (At least go look: the cover is pretty cool.)

This was good. Sabriel is training to follow in her father’s footsteps as a necromancer—but unlike every other necromancer except her father, she binds the dead, according to the Charter that holds together the Old Kingdom, and doesn’t raise them with Free Magic. When the book opens, she’s in Ancelstierre, a vaguely British—or Australian, which is where Nix is from—country with an early-mid 20th century tech level. Her boarding school is near enough to the Wall that magic leaks over from the Old Kingdom (she’s about to graduate, and took a First in Charter Magic to match her Firsts in English and Music). She gets a disturbing message from her father, who has apparently been trapped over the border of Death; he hands over the tools of a necromancer, his sword and his bells, to her. (The seven bells each have a name and a function; if you’re like me and can’t remember names, bookmark the page that they get introduced.)

Sabriel sets out to find out what’s happened to her father, which turns out to be part and parcel with the corruption of the Charter in the Old Kingdom. The quest/coming-of-age format remains durable, and the world she’s questing through as she comes of age is vivid and intriguing. Those who like their magic to be just a little inexplicable will probably like this one; it has some very faint, indefinable flavor of John Bellairs about it. The story’s self-contained, but there’s definitely more to be told, and Lirael is out now (set a generation later). I probably won’t buy it in hardcover, but I’ll certainly look for it in paper.

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Kagan, Janet: Hellspark

After reading Mirabile, I grabbed Kagan’s Hellspark when I saw it in the library. I finished it last night. While not as cheerful and comfort-book-like as Mirabile, it’s still a good read.

Hellspark is the story of a survey team on a new planet, internally split over whether the major animal life form is sentient or not. Adding to the tension, a team member has died—murder? accident? No-one knows. Into this situation comes Tocohl Susumo, whose planet of Hellspark emphasizes linguistic and cultural fluency. Since everyone on the team is from a different culture, and they were briefed by an idiot, and since one marker of sentience is language, well, she’s quite welcome. (Her extrapolative computer doesn’t hurt; I don’t read many AI stories, but Maggy seems like a good one to me.)

Some of the cultural tics presented seem a little extreme to me, and while I don’t doubt that body language is a very important component of language, I was starting to get a little jaded by the nth time some problem was solved by Tocohl’s noticing that a movement was wrong. Overall, though, it was a solid, entertaining, imaginative book.

[Hellspark has been reprinted by Meisha Merlin.]

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Block, Lawrence: (201) No Score

I just read another subway book, one that I started on the subway to work and finished over my morning bagel at my desk—it was a very short book. It also wins my prize this year for “Most Misleading Cover Copy.” The book is No Score by Lawrence Block, the first in the Chip Harrison series. Now, Block is a well-known mystery writer; I’ve been reading his Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries all summer and enjoying them greatly. (The made-up Sue Grafton titles are a hoot.) Block does first-person smartass narration really well, and after having exhausted the Bernie books, I decided to try some of his other stuff. (Light stuff. Apparently some of his other books are very dark.)

The Chip Harrison books looked pretty promising, at least according to that back cover copy I mentioned. To quote: “IT IS A MYSTERY why a big man with a big gun turns Chip’s dream of desire into a nightmare of danger . . . IT IS A MYSTERY that Chip has to solve fast and furiously in a sizzling and suspenseful adventure . . .”

Well, no, it’s not. Chip’s an inch away from getting laid in Chapter One (which is not what I was expecting, as Bernie always draws a discreet curtain over his own affairs, but then, this isn’t Bernie), the guy with the gun bursts in, and then we get most of a book’s worth of backstory on how he got there. And when we get back to the guy with the gun—there’s absolutely no mystery about it.

To be fair, I’ve just gone to Block’s website and he admits that the first two Chip Harrison books “are not mysteries at all (although you couldn’t tell that from the packaging of the Signet paperbacks). They’re erotic coming-of-age novels.” (I’d link right to the page, but it’s annoyingly framed, so I can’t. The original version of this post had a link that skipped the Flash intro, but there’s some odd things going on with the URLs, so rather than have you get a 404 . . . ) The third apparently turns into a mystery novel.

No Score is a very fast, light read. Just don’t expect a mystery out of it.

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