Martha Grimes. The Blue Last (2001)

     Martha Grimes. The Blue Last (2001) Jury’s friend DCI Mike Haggerty asks him to find out whether a girl, supposedly saved from the bomb that destroyed The Blue Last and killed her mother, is who the nanny claimed she was, or perhaps actually the nanny’s daughter. Mike’s suspicion that she was an interloper is correct. The mother had a child before her marriage, which she gave up for adoption: the child’s identity is the knot whose unravelling unties all the other knots.
     Along the way Jury uncovers an art fraud, meets a streetwise urchin (with dog) who survives on his own, and makes friends with a number of other odd characters. Grimes lets herself go in this book: she’s really more interested in the characters than the plot, which however is well done and only mildly facile in it solution. **½ (2008)

Ross Macdonald. Sleeping Beauty (1973)

     Ross Macdonald. Sleeping Beauty (1973) Lew picks up a girl at an oil spill, and is worried when she leaves with no forwarding address. His search for her leads him deep into the California ruling classes, where he encounters their casual corruption and overwhelming desire for power. Untangling the mess of lies and secrets takes Lew longer than usual. This narrative gives us more of his character and of the characters he meets along the way, but Macdonald’s characteristic style remains the same: he gives us almost nothing but the objective, observable facts, and lets our responses to them create the mood he wants. A good read. *** (2008)

Edward Beal. The Craft of Model Railways (1937)

     Edward Beal. The Craft of Model Railways (1937) I’m rereading this book. Well, re-skimming it actually. It’s long-winded, poorly organised, opinionated, and badly laid out. Beal commits the cardinal sin of technical writing: he mixes levels of description, giving detailed instructions for some jobs and vague references to “subjects too large for this book” for other tasks. He digresses without warning. He starts on a subject, and then just writes things down as they occur to him, with no apparent effort to organise them. He’ll start a paragraph about, say, passenger train working, with a reminder of the desirability of understanding of how the real railways do it, and then give only the vaguest information.
     The book’s design is awful, with illustrations usually separated from the referring text, many illustrations not explained at all, and incredibly meager information about the layouts illustrated in the photos, despite a whole chapter devoted to “Notable Examples and Enthusiasts.” In short, the book needed thorough and heavy editing and rewriting, which Beal’s publishers did not insist on. At the very least, they should have insisted on sub-heads throughout, which might have made Beal aware of his annoying habit of treating a subject in several chunks more or less widely separated by digressions. Many things in the model railroad hobby have improved over the years, and writing about it is one of them. * (2008)

Ross Macdonald. Black Money (1966)

 

     Ross  Macdonald. Black Money (1966) Several murders connected to a tennis club, gamblers, gangsters, and a university French Language department resolve into a psychological motive: A prof has a thing for young women, a streak of possessiveness, and a fragile, deteriorating nervous system. Macdonald’s style, a cut or two above Hammett’s in my opinion, carries the rather thin story and makes for a satisfying entertainment.
     The characters are believable, but Lew Archer keeps himself to himself, and despite his carefully complete narrative we don’t get a good sense of the man. He is a point of view, a conscious camera, an artistic temperament. The metaphors that express his responses to the weather, the landscape, the anonymous streets don’t tell us about his inner life. The occasional comments on life, distilled from largely bleak experience, are the only clues we have, and they are so gnomic that they lack personality. Once in a while a profound sympathy slips past the mask. Yet we read on, because Archer is such a precise observer of the people he encounters and the places he goes. We can see what he sees, hear what he hears, but our feelings are our own. *** (2008)

Dale Wilson. Canadian Passenger Chronicle 1, 2, 3 (1998, 2000, 2006)

     Dale Wilson. Canadian Passenger Chronicle 1, 2, 3 (1998, 2000, 2006) Just what it says: three albums of photographs, timetables, a handful of first person accounts, and some general history. Nicely put together, each volume is roughly chronological by railroad and region. The photos vary from excellent to barely acceptable, most of the latter good examples of why one should never scan at a low resolution, and never “resize” digital images prior to fitting them into a page. Wilson and his coworkers have been able to trace the histories of most of the cars and engines depicted. I hope the series continues, and that Wilson finds more travellers’ stories for the next couple of volumes. Although the provenance of all the material is carefully documented, these are not scholarly works, thank goodness. Their audience will be limited largely to railroad fans, and the odd student of transportation who needs something to liven up an academic dissertation. Recommended. *** (2008)

Arthur Upfield. Winds of Evil (1937)

   Arthur Upfield. Winds of Evil (1937) An old-fashioned detective yarn, set in the outback of Australia, where secrets of the past obscure the truth about the present murderer, told in the leisurely manner that guaranteed a pleasant railway journey (a bus journey in my case). Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, a half-caste of exquisite diction and manners, solves the riddle; the murderer does the honourable thing by killing himself, and two couples tie the knot. The author is casually and unmaliciously racist, which would no doubt be a stumbling block to younger modern readers, and would need to be delicately excised in any conversion to video.
     Napoleon is an odd mix of the Saint and Hercules Poirot, having the one character’s secretiveness, and the other’s vanity. Upfield also likes to surprise the reader with the results of his ‘tec’s brilliant ruminations, but does play fair in setting all the necessary clues before the reader. The characters are pleasant, with only an very officious policeman being a truly nasty piece of work (but he gets his comeuppance). The plot creaks here and there, and the murderer’s motivation is “sensational” in the early 20th century style: he’s a somnambulist who perpetrates his crimes without conscious memory after he recovers from his trance. (This has been used successfully as a defense in a couple of Ontario cases recently). Apparently it’s the weather that triggers these trances, especially the buildup of static electricity. Tosh of course, but at the time of the book’s writing as plausible as any other explanation.
     Upfield has a good sense of place and society, and gives us a clear and rather attractive picture of life in the Australian outback of the time. The book lists 19 novels by Upfield available in Scribner’s Crime Classic series, but I’d never heard of Bony before this. I don’t think I’ll seek out other of his adventures, but won’t pass them by if I find them. High class pulp fiction, written by a man who mastered the craft, and as far as I can tell was content to make a living at it without pretentious ambitions towards literature. **½ (2008)
   More about Upfield here .

A. A. Fair. Give ‘em the Axe (1944)

     A. A. Fair. Give ‘em the Axe (1944) Donald Lam is invalided out of the US Navy and returns to his partnership with Bertha Cool. They are asked to find some damaging info on a woman who has married the secret love (and boss) of a naive young woman, who wants to split up the marriage and get her man. Along the way, Cool and Lam encounter blackmail, car insurance fraud, and murder. Lam puts it all together, hands the murderer over to the cops, and gets a girl with good legs, too.
     A. A. Fair is one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s pseudonyms. The story is a mildly tough PI yarn, with a faintly film noir atmosphere. Plotting is perfunctory but complete. Fair lays out all the clues and a few red herrings in classic fashion. Characterisation is cartoonish, dialogue fake tough-guy and slick. Fair’s lawyer background shows in the legalities that entangle Cool and Lam, and in a legal deposition scene, where the good lawyer mounts a brilliant cross examination. A pleasant read, worth a place on a collector’s shelf. It would make a good B movie. The copy I have is a Dell pocket book of 1950 or later. Nice cover art. ** (2008)