Howard Engel. Murder Sees the Light (1984)

   Howard Engel.  Murder Sees the Light (1984) This is third or fourth in the series (I really must check up on this), and Benny Cooperman exhibits the same mix of cynicism and romantic hope as in the earlier books. Engel’s skill is character and location, and he manages both with just the right touch of detached amusement needed to make this entertainment enjoyable and not too demanding. Some of the clues are telegraphed a little too obviously, but others are too obscure, so I guess it balances out.
      This time Cooperman’s job is to watch a televangelist on the run from the civil law, and if possible prevent his murder. As it is, two people die violently, and Cooperman almost does; and there’s an ancient death that turns out to be a murder, too. Cooperman decides not to turn in the perp of this last one, for reasons only vaguely moral. Nicely done; a better than average crime novel. **½ (2006)

Wexford arrives: From Doon with Death

     Ruth Rendell. From Doon With Death (1964) The first Wexford, short, little character development, a fairly simple puzzle presented fairly, but we already see Rendell’s fascination with abnormal and unusual psychology. There are no apparent reasons for Margaret Parson’s murder, and the only clues are some poetry books with passionate inscriptions, given her by a mysterious lover named Doon. Doon is of course the murderer, but the usual misdirections and unrevealed facts caused by people’s desire for respectability slow the investigation.
     Wexford and Burden make a good team. In later books, Rendell develops Burden’s character differently than hinted at here; only his narrow education suggests the rigidity of his moral judgments that she presents and explores in later books. Wexford already has the well-read mixture of cynicism and compassion that marks him throughout the series. A good beginning. **½

Brian Aldiss. Who Can Replace A Man? (1965)

     Brian Aldiss. Who Can Replace A Man? (1965) Aldiss tried his hand at most of the sub-genres of SF. These tales show his skill as well as his powerful and off-kilter imagination. I’ve read many of them in various anthologies; they were worth re-reading. Aldiss focusses on the human costs of technologies and/or encounters with unexpected glitches in the workings of the universe. He’s very good at making even the most bizarre premises work. Man In His Time posits that a cosmonaut returning from a first exploration of Mars exists about 3 minutes ahead of Earth time. The most difficult thing is for Earth-time people to plan what they will do 3 minutes from now. Psyclops deals with aliens ho can mimic human form, but cannot of course mimic humanity. A Cold War story about infiltration by the enemy, it evokes the fear of the mysterious and dangerous Other. Old Hundredth is an elegy on the passing of Man, leaving behind an earth peopled with genetic experiments, animals with powers beyond any current human’s, and yet unable to follow humanity to whatever plane of existence humans have achieved.
     A good introduction to Aldiss’s universes, in the UK the book was titled Best Science Fiction Stories of Brian Aldiss. I can’t quarrel with that title. ***

2019: minor corrections.

Ruth Rendell No More Dying Then (1971)

     Ruth Rendell No More Dying Then (1971) Mike Burden’s wife has died of cancer, leaving him almost paralysed by grief, and unable to see what his emotional isolation is doing to his children and their aunt, who has come to help Mike look after them. Then a little boy disappears, Burden interviews Gemma, the mother, and falls in lust with her. She desires him for comfort, and for temporary distraction from her grief at the loss of her son John. The case eventually wraps up when Gemma discovers Leonie, her ex-husband’s mistress, with the boy. She refuses to press charges, because Leonie has always wanted a child. Mike lets her go with some relief, as she is not a suitable candidate for wife and step-mother of his children. But the affair has served not only to assuage his grief, but to teach him about the validity of emotion, which his narrowly moral view of the world has prevented him from recognising.
     The boy’s disappearance stirs up memories of a girl who disappeared a year or two earlier. Her body is found in a disused cistern. Her murderer however has suffered a stroke, and cannot be brought to justice.  He was in some sense avenging the death of his own daughter, allowed to drown by a supremely self-centred man who married the missing girl’s mother.
     Rendell is exploring several examples of parent-child relationships, grief, anxiety, fear, and self-centredness. Read as such, the novel would provide  materials for discussion by a reading club or college literature class. Read as a crime novel, it offers a couple of plausible puzzles and their solutions. Read as a chapter in Mike Burden’s life, it feels superficial. He condemns Gemma’s free-spirited style of life, with household duties scanted, dress to unconventional, moral judgments avoided or too mild for his taste, but it’s a condemnation too stereotypical to be as convincing a Rendell might wish it to be. However, his lust/love for her overwhelms him, and his relief when she rejects his offer of marriage and goes off to look after her son and live with Leonie, reveals the old Mike Burden, puritanical and duty-obsessed as ever, but far less judgmental.
     And odd duck of a book, which doesn’t quite fit into the Wexford canon. I read it over two days, but what kept me reading was not the crime but the psychology. **

R. D. Wingfield A Touch of Frost (1987)

 

R. D. Wingfield A Touch of Frost (1987) Frost, frowzy, rumpled, foul-mouthed, rebellious, stubborn, too fond of alcohol and cholesterol-laden food, perpetual ignorer of rules and regulations, hater of paperwork, but a detective who gets results, which frosts his Division Commander Mullet and his rival Inspector Allen. The novel begins with a dead drug addict floating in diluted piss in a public convenience. He didn’t drown, he was murdered, but only Frost (who knows all the most disreputable people in Denton) cares. There’s another murder, a string of burglaries, a couple of rapes, and finally a stand-off with a hostage taker, who’s shot just as Frost is about to disarm him. Frost solves all the cases, and wins the respect of the demoted former inspector who’s been unloaded on him. The vision is bleak, but Frost’s compassion for the weak and damaged, and his obsession with truth gives us some hope. Mullett is a right bastard; for him, policing is merely a means to gratify his social climbing ambitions. Wingfield savages Insp. Allen’s obsession with correct police methods. Every character’s back story reveals weaknesses and sometimes vices. Policing is a chaotic mess. In short, the novel has the ring of truth. **½

Brian Aldiss. Last Orders (1979)

     Brian Aldiss. Last Orders (1979) The title story tells of a police captain trying to persuade a couple of people to go to the ship that will take them off Earth to escape the breakup of the Moon. Instead, the three drift into a nostalgia sampling of whiskey and other good things, and semi-aimless conversation about the past. Most of the rest of the book consists of an interrelated group of stories about dreams, space faring, artificial planets, and other technical and scientific marvels, the setting for the make-work life of the characters. Technology gives them all the creature comforts they need. The question now is, what to do with all that leisure time, available because making stuff and providing services is no longer necessary. Perhaps dreams are an alternate and better reality; perhaps not.
     The stories have a dream-like logic, with occasional waking into some sort of reality, which may itself be a dream. Dream research of one kind or another figures in several stories, too. No matter: that’s a puzzle not worth solving, for these stories are really about purpose and meaning when necessity no longer makes the rules. Aldiss seems to think that without the constraints of reality we would all go mad. Or else only the mad recognise reality for what it is, a trap sprung by a mischievous universe. In the last story, the hero retreats into a dreamworld, and whether that is an alternate level of reality or merely a figment of a mad brain is left us to us to decide.
     An interesting book in many ways, but not a moving one. **

Jerome Charyn, ed. The New Mystery (1993)

     Jerome Charyn, ed. The New Mystery (1993) Sponsored by the The International Association of Crime Writers, this collection purports to showcase developments in crime writing. The subtitle refers to "essential crime writings", which is a wee bit of an exaggeration. What the book in fact showcases is gore-porn. Most of the stories describe gory and mean-spirited crimes with no mystery whatsoever about them, except perhaps the mystery of what kind of person wants to read this stuff. I don’t. In the 20 years since this collection was published a handful of the writers represented here have become reliable best sellers. The rest have sunk back into the obscurity from which this collection tried to extract them.

Ian Rankin. A Good Hanging (1992)

     Ian Rankin. A Good Hanging (1992) Rankin is good at what he does, the depiction of Edinburgh as a bleak, sleazy dystopia rife with assorted vice and crime. Detective Inspector John Rebus of the Edinburgh CID uses unorthodox methods, and wishes he could use more, especially of the violent illegal kind. He’s one of several fictional cops working outside the procedural box. Police procedure is essentially boring, the collection and sifting of massive amounts of data in the hope that someone will recognise the significant bits and create a plausible narrative that’s close enough to the truth that some justice will be done. But the fact is that the majority of crimes are not solved, which is the main reason for plea bargaining and withdrawn charges, not to mention cases that never come to trial for lack of evidence.
     The strength of these stories is Rebus, one of the most believable characters in crime or any other fiction. These stories are romances, adventure stories in which the hero must traverse a menacing wilderness, overcome all kinds of enemies, and defeat evil. The modern desire for superficial realism introduces ambiguities, ironies, and complexities different in content but not scope from those of their mediaeval prototypes. Romances satisfy our desire for some kind of metaphysical and moral order. No matter how bleak and sleazy Edinburgh appears to be, Rebus helps hold back chaos. Crooks are put away (or worse), the innocent are avenged, Rebus can sleep without too much nightmare dreaming. He has some hope, and so we too have some hope that evil will not triumph, however many skirmishes it wins.
     Well done. ***

Torkel Franzén. Gödel’s Theorem (2002)

     Torkel Franzén. Gödel’s Theorem (2002) A fairly technical but nevertheless reasonably accessible exposition of what GT is and is not. It deals mostly with the mathematical and logical consequences of GT, and explains why claims about the limits of math based on GT are almost all wrong. Franzén also makes references to the metaphorical uses of GT in philosophy, theology, and so on, but doesn’t spend much time on these, mostly because once one understands GT, one sees how absurd most of these metaphorical extensions are. A good book, but a difficult one. It cured me of some nonsense, which is a good thing. ***
    PS: Franzen died in late summer of this year (2006). A loss. His death sparked a flame war on several news groups, instigated by people who couldn’t take his accurately aimed zingers at their nonsense, and worse, his attack on their willful obtuseness. (2006)

S. D. Levitt, & S. J. Dubner. Freakonomics (2005)

     

S. D. Levitt,  & S. J. Dubner. Freakonomics (2005) Saw Levitt on TVO, talking with Allan Gregg, and decided I wanted to read the book. BR Pub Library bought it. The book originated in a profile of Levitt written by Dubner for the NY Times. Dubner is no doubt responsible for the clear style, and in many ways the book is an extended magazine article, but it contains actual data, and many references to original work. IOW, the book may be accessible in style and format, but it’s serious in scholarship. The title is unfortunate: Levitt’s examples aren’t freaky at all, but quite serious.
      In many ways, the book recalls Paulos’s attempts to increase numeracy. The authors claim they have no overarching theme, but do admit a consistent aim, to give the reader some of the tools needed to dissect conventional wisdom and ask the kinds of questions likely to produce good answers. In this they succeed as well as can be expected, considering that such criticism depends more on a change in attitude than on the acquisition of new tools. Good book, worth rereading just to ensure accurate recall of the data. *** (2006)

Maeve Binchy. This Year it will be Different (1996)

     Maeve Binchy. This Year it will be Different (1996) These are definitely “women’s magazine” stories. Most seem to have been written to fit a double-page spread, “A story complete in two pages”, as my mother's Woman’s Own used to describe them. They establish plot and character swiftly, mostly through displaced interior monologue, the kind where the narrator rather than the character presents the thoughts and reactions. Most deal with the healing power of Christmas. A few tell of single women entangled with married lovers; all are disentangled by the end of the story. The men are either paragons of male virtue, impossibly kind and sensitive, or else cads, that is, very much like real people. Pleasant but forgettable entertainment. It’s difficult to recall much of any of the stories. ** (2006)

John Keegan. Intelligence in War (2003)

     John Keegan. Intelligence in War (2003) Case studies focussing on the role of intelligence. As always, Keegan has found a variety of examples illustrating the full range of his subject. The case studies are exhaustive (and exhausting to a person with merely bystander’s interest in the history of warfare), but are presented clearly and precisely, so that one can follow the conduct of the battles easily. However, I did not like the monochrome maps. Colour would them easier to read.  Most of the photographs add little more than weekend magazine interest. The last chapter summarises Keegan’s take on the varying roles and value that intelligence has played, and his disapproval of the confusion of intelligence and subversion instigated by Churchill (a failure, as it turned out).

Keegan directs his book to the student and professional. The publishers seem to think the book also has appeal to the interested amateur, but in this they are mistaken. A good popular book lurks in these pages, at about half the length, with coloured maps, and chapter introductions to guide the reader. *** as a professional book, *½ as a popular book. (2006)

Alexander McCall Smith. Portuguese Irregular Verbs (2004)

     Alexander McCall Smith. Portuguese Irregular Verbs (2004) M-S calls this an “entertainment,” and so it is, a very mild one. Smith makes fun of German academia in the person of Prof. Dr. Moritz Maria von Igelfeld, but the joke wears thin fairly quickly. I read this in much the same mood as I eat potato chips, expecting the next one to be utterly satisfying. But the short tales that make up the narrative of v. Igelfeld’s life merely play variations on the same themes, the obtuseness of the professor who believes that his is a higher calling, and his incompetence in the ordinary matters of life. In the end, v. Igelfeld’s life held little interest for me. He’s a doofus, and despite Smith’s best efforts, his mishaps never attain the distinction of farce, and barely hover above the level of the shaggy dog story. *½ (2006)