Collected Miscellany

Though I pretend not to, I enjoy lists. It turns out that lists are more fun to read than to sit down and create; this year-end best of suspense fiction is hobbled by memories of parochial school. In an exercise of extreme cruelty we were forced to write a Christmas card to our parents; to survive, most of us turned it into a letter to Santa. Voila, a list. No one rapped my knuckles with a ruler, nor did I have to stand in the corner and think about my sins; just books, nothing but books.

Here’s my list of the best of suspense fiction in 2004. Some of the choices were published in 2003, but I’m behind the curve, so they count.

FOR THE DOGS by Kevin Wignall. If crime writing has a Renaissance Man, it’s Kevin Wignall.

DEATH OF A NATIONALIST. Rebecca’s Pawel’s marvelous debut.

DECEPTION by Denise Mina. Lachlan Harriot is your native guide through his disintegrating life.

LUX by Maria Flook. She writes beautifully and she’s wicked funny.

THE PROGRAM by Gregg Hurwitz. Dense, intelligent, emotionally complex.

THE WAKE UP by Robert Ferrigno. Hits the bullseye from the jump and keeps hitting it.

TRIBECA BLUES by Jim Fusilli. Read this one before you read his latest. Be warned: Jim will make you hungry.

THE SIXTH LAMENTATION by William Brodrick. As rich and literary a whodunit as you’re likely to encounter.

THE RIFT ZONE by Raelynn Hillhouse. An auspicious debut from a writer with wit and insight.

ICE RUN by Steve Hamilton. An underrated novel in the wake of A COLD DAY IN PARADISE.

THE MURDER EXCHANGE by Simon Kernick. Great story, can’t wait to see where he goes from here.

These are older, but who isn’t?

WINTER AND NIGHT by SJ Rozan. Her best series novel.

RESURRECTION MEN by Ian Rankin. His best Rebus novel.

FREEDOMLAND by Richard Price. After you read this, you’ll avoid North Jersey.

THE SUGAR HOUSE by Laura Lippman. If you only read one of this author’s books, read this one. Then you’ll read the others.

A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR. Dennis Lehane before he was Dennis Lehane. Flawed, native, compelling.

I want to mention THE CONCRETE RIVER by John Shannon and Terence Faherty’s KILL ME AGAIN. These books may be out of print, but well worth tracking down. Likewise, Denise Mina’s Garnethill trilogy; the title confusion between the US and UK is a bit daunting.

Trend of the Year: lousy books from the big names. If suspense fiction is your thing, look beyond the branded authors for people like Lee Child, Ken Bruen, Denise Hamilton, Charlie Stella, or Bill Lashner. For vintage noir, try the titles from HARD CASE CRIME. This is far from comprehensive; I’ll post another list next week of books I wanted to read but didn’t, starting with SJ Rozan’s ABSENT FRIENDS.

A minor car accident damages a topiary clock in a Cape Cod rotary; Alden Warren is an eye-witness to the mishap in the fog. When Alden sees a baby in the backseat of a car driven by druggie-porn star Layla, Alden wants the child for herself.

Maria Flook is the author of Invisible Eden, a non-fiction book about a woman’s disappearance on Cape Cod. In LUX, her third novel, she returns to a similar theme. Her main character, Alden Warren, is left to wonder when her husband vanishes. An avid butterfly collector, Monty had a lover and the local cops are fairly certain his disappearance was entirely voluntary. Alden has a lonely job in a bookstore at the National Seashore; she volunteers to visit shut ins and collects the carcasses of fallen seagulls. Alden conducts a desultory affair with a businessman in Boston. She lives a shadowed life barely disturbing the air as she passes; only Hiram, the old man she visits, seems able to penetrate the veil that surrounds her.

Lux Davis is a local landscaper. He’s sexually involved with his sister-in-law ; her husband is a long-line fisherman and is never home. When a nursery’s owner wants a stand of trees dug up for delivery to a new housing development, the novel’s central action begins to unfold.

The novel has two point of view characters, Alden and Lux; when the author gets them on the same page, sparks fly. It’s a wonder that Alden, fresh from learning she’s not about to become the mother of an abandoned infant, can respond at all. As for Lux he’s the victim of a childhood almost as bizarre as Alden’s. Giant mirrors and shrink wrapped yachts haunt him. It’s a burden as they traverse the discordant home turf; they went to the same high school, Lux and Alden become lovers.

Ms. Flook’s beautiful prose doesn’t disguise her eye for absurdities, both real and imagined. A loggerhead turtle wears a seatbelt on the way to its autopsy; a poisoned seagull crashes through a skylight, hits the floor and flies away. It seems the wildlife of Cape Cod are the victims of their proximity to those with good intentions.

In flashback we meet Monty on the day he died; the local cops aren’t quite as dumb as they appear; they have their eye on Lux and Alden, but as with everything else in this novel it’s not about the obvious. Lux and Alden are drawn to one another in a union of damaged psyches. It’s romance with reverse polarity; these two should never have found one another, but they have.

LUX is a novel that defies the conventions of several major genres from Romance to Crime; the author knows exactly what she’s doing, carefully creating expectations imposed by the limits of book marketing before shattering those expectations. She pays homage to everyone from Stephen King to RW Emerson; Hiram, the only grounded character in the book, is old and sick. He hectors Alden into doing his errands, but offers her solid advice.

If LUX were optioned for film, it would either be the worst movie ever made or one of the best; the story elements shift and reform much like the “living sand” of the Cape. This approach probably cost the author in terms of sales, which, if true, is a shame. LUX deserves a wide readership, the author should get a ticker tape parade down Broadway. Or The Boston Post Road at the very least.

In my continuing series of “I am not an editor but I play one online” comes a review by a good friend of mine. Jeff Grim was a fellow history graduate student with me at the Ivy League of the MAC (or is that the Poison Ivy League?), Bowling Green State University. In fact we had the same adviser. Jeff is also a veteran of the US Army and an student of the Vietnam War. So it is appropriate that he agreed to review Tommy Franks new book. Please enjoy the review that follows.

Tommy Franks’ autobiography American Soldier is an insightful look into a commanding general’s life as he rose through the ranks of the United States Army. Throughout his career, Franks was a progressive-thinking officer. He challenged the conservative mindset of the Army’s leadership and helped push it into the Twenty-first Century.

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I have been rather busy with sundry things so I thought I would throw out some links that might be of interest to everyone:

– Here is an interesting question: are Michael Crichton’s “right wing” politics ruining his novels? Bryan Curtis at Slate seems to think so. Curtis calls Crichton a “a political pamphleteer, a right-wing noodge.”

– Here is a fascinating James Wood review of The Line of Beauty By Alan Hollinghurst. Woods is obviously so far beyond my league that it doesn’t bear thinking about. I do think, however, that perhaps he gets a little carried away. Could someone please translate this for me:

Hollinghurst’s prose is a genuine achievement–lavish, poised, sinuously alert. His sentences are rich but not languid. He is an aesthete who finally avoids aestheticism, partly because, in a characteristic Jamesian swerve, he is morally suspicious of an aestheticism whose charms he also swayingly registers. His writing is most Jamesian, perhaps, in its constant air of poised intelligence, the sense we have that Hollinghurst, while recording the sensuous delights of the world that he is describing, is intent on placing and carefully measuring the claims of that world.

This is where being a history rather than a English major hurts. I have some Henry James on the bookshelf but it always seems to get superseded by something else that catches my interest.

– The Boldtype year end issue is out. It includes some interesting reviews. There is the ever popular The Plot Against America, You Remind Me of Me, by Dan Chaon, and the intriguingly titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn (judging by the title I thought perhaps the author grew up in Central Indiana). So check it out if that sounds interesting.

– The indefatigable Robert Birnbaum has another interview up, this time with Francisco Goldman.

– In case you missed it when it was posted here, National Review Online posted (in slightly different form) my review of The 100-Yard War yesterday.

On the issue of morality in international politics, it sometimes seems there’s a structural difficulty in the discussion. On the one hand, there are political practitioners (of some form or another) who speak in terms of what can be done, but tend away from the more abstract. On the other, there are academics and/or commentators who are well-versed in the abstract, but have little to no experience with practical action itself, most especially in the international scene.

That is why Derek S. Jeffreys’ book is so timely, in that it finds someone who straddles the practical and speculative realms, and does so in a unique way. Defending Human Dignity: John Paul II and Political Realism is a book I wanted to like, and do to an extent. But it has some major problems as well.

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Terrill Lee Lankford knows his way around Hollywood. EARTHQUAKE WEATHER came out earlier this year from Ballantine. The novel’s inciting incident is the Northridge quake; it drives the Angelenos from their homes so they can meet one another. Mark is a D-boy in Hollywood parlance, working for a production company that has a ‘first look’ arrangement with Warner Brothers. Mark aspires to be being a movie producer, an ambition that the author demonstrates is no kind of work for good people.

While the novel is marketed as a murder mystery, it’s not. Yes, there’s a murder. The head of the company, Dexter Morton, is bumped off in his swimming pool, the apparent victim of falling statuary; Mark discovers this body the morning after a party at Dexter’s Mount Olympus estate. The party culminated with a messy split between Dexter and his live-in girlfriend Charity. Charity goes home with Mark, one of those bad ideas that keeps getting worse. As LAPD laconically pursues Dexter’s killer, Mark emerges as the number one suspect. Mark’s neighbor is a screenwriter with a major grudge against the deceased, but the cops are focused on Mark. He found the body, he stole the girl.

EARTHQUAKE WEATHER is more a social novel than suspense thriller; the microcosm that is Hollywood is exposed as a vicious little world where nasty people win each time, every time. The book is a primer on how things work inside this world; screenplays are bought for all the wrong reasons, handed over to D-boys, like Mark, to be ‘fixed’ green lighted by studio chiefs far removed from the actual work. The essence of corruption is artifice; the film business thrives on suspicion, fear and power. Mark wants to be powerful so he can stop being fearful and suspicious. With a protagonist this shallow EARTHQUAKE WEATHER relies on a cast of secondary characters to propel the story. This is a difficult task for any novelist; Mark’s blundering with the cops make him appear naïve as well as shallow. His conduct around Charity is venal and whiny; Mark heads to South Central in search of true love and or his stolen television set; the reader will be shouting for him to take the TV.

Oddly enough Dexter’s murder doesn’t heighten the story’s tension, but reduces it. Dexter is the straw that stirs the drink and when he’s gone halfway through the book, we’re left with Mark. In order for the scenes leading to climax to make sense we have to believe that he cares about Charity; that was a tough sell, and I couldn’t quite buy it.

Still, there’s plenty to like about Lankford’s style; I’d certainly look forward to reading his next novel. Maybe EARTHQUAKE WEATHER succeeds too well in examining the sleaze of Hollywood. It’s tough to find a character to like.