Louis L’Amour. Shalako (1962)

     Louis L’Amour. Shalako (1962) Shalako, a man with no past, meets up with a European hunting party led by Frederick von Hallstatt, a Prussian baron who wants to enjoy a “skirmish” with the Apache. Irina Carnarvon, whom Shalako accompanied back to the camp after finding their wagon-master dead, lends him her horse, and he leaves to find a place to hole up while the Apache deal with the hunting party and move on. But he of course he can’t stay away. One bloody event leads to another, the Prussian baron learns that his officer training is useless against guerrilla tactics, most of the hunting party die, Shalako fights a duel with Tats-ah-das-ay-go, a ruthless Apache warrior, and wins, barely. Shalako and Irina ride off together.
     L’Amour knew exactly what he was doing. His stories are chivalric romances. He puts us directly into the landscape, we can feel the heat, smell the dust, see the sun-bleached colours. The characters are just this side of caricature, what makes them believable is their ability to learn and change. The hero must overcome his impulse to avoid adult responsibility. As Tats-ah-das-ay-go falls to his death, Shalako cries out “Warrior! Brother!” and comes close to weeping.
      I like L’Amour’s books, even though they cover the same ground over and over again. He knows how to vary the plots, his narrative pace and rhythm keep us wanting to read. His writing is compact, there are no wasted words. This one is above his average. ***

Margery Allingham. My Friend Mr Campion (2011)

     Margery Allingham. My Friend Mr Campion (2011) Collection of short stories and the novella The Late Pig. I finished that last night, and promptly started rereading the stories. Entertaining, with enough, if stereotypical, characterisation to make you care. There was a TV series starring Peter Davison (also known as one of the Doctor in Dr Who), which captured the look and feel of the stories very well. Like the other women from the Golden Age, Allingham’s strength is character. The puzzles are often too complex for plausibility, but the clues are fairly placed for those readers who like to solve the puzzle before the ‘tec does, and Allingham nicely navigates the inherent implausibility of the amateur sleuth. Campion's friend Oates advances from Detective Inspector to Superintendent. Campion may play a lone hand occasionally when he’s unsure of his ground, but he sees himself as an assistant to the police, not a competitor. Good collection. ***

Conrad Haynes. Bishop’s Gambit Declined (1987)

Conrad Haynes. Bishop’s Gambit Declined (1987) I’m a sucker for novels set in Academia. Here,  it’s a fictitious private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. There’s some satire of academics and administrators, but they’re easy targets, and Haynes is wise enough not to overdo it. The hero is Henry Bishop, a stereotypical unruly professor, who enjoys teaching and respects his students, as well as those of his colleagues who like him value thorough scholarship. A too-good-to-be true female detective sergeant and an apparent sleaze ball of a reporter interfere with each other’s investigations. The murders are designed to cover up an ancient semi-crime, and are not really necessary, but they make a good scaffold for the story, which is handled in movie-style scenes and with decent dialogue. The occasional authorial omniscient asides grate enough that I’d have cut them. All in all, good of its kind. **
  

Robert Crais. The Monkey’s Raincoat (1987)

 Robert Crais. The Monkey’s Raincoat (1987) Elvis Cole is P.I. in the classic mould: cynical, insightful, with a dry wit and a soft heart, driven to right wrongs no matter what the cost. Crais combines L.A, Hollywood, drug lords, corrupt politics, the sleazy side of show business, failed dreams, and a victim who becomes a heroine into a well done entertainment. There’s no puzzle, there’s just the question of whether Cole and Ellen Lang will be able to rescue her son before it’s too late. The central characters have enough depth to sustain interest and engage sympathy, and the secondary characters are well done animated scenery. The ambience draws heavily on the cliches of West Coast crime fiction, but Crais does a better job than most in emulating the classics. A series worth looking for, and collecting if you’re into that. **½

Nancy Pickard. Marriage is Murder (1987)

     Nancy Pickard. Marriage is Murder (1987) Jenny Cain and Detective Geof Bushfield’s wedding is set for two weeks hence, but several domestic murders threaten to interfere with their plans, and worse, Geof is so appalled at what he has witnessed that he wants to quit. Of course all’s well that ends well, but along the way Pickard delivers an extended if somewhat superficial examination of domestic violence. She’s hampered by not having enough space to explore the complex backstories of her characters, and can do little more than sketch the relationships and histories that bind them. Would she have delivered a better novel if she’d had more room? I think so. There’s more than a few hints that she’s really more interested in the psychology of evil and of human failures than in the crime puzzles that these engender. **½

Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian (2012)

     Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian (2012) A book everyone should read. King gives us a history of White-Indian relations from the beginning to the present. He uses stories, with a few numbers and generalisations here and there, but mostly stories. They are not nice stories. King’s ironic asides make them palatable, just. It’s a book that can be life-changing.
     Seems to me that the conquest of the Americas happened at the time when Europe began to reconsider the relationships between conquerors and conquered. Human history is about genocide, mostly. The Bible records several times when the Israelites slew everyone of their enemies, men, women, and children. Or they killed everyone except the boys, who could be trained to be slaves, and the girls and women, who could be used for pleasure or as trade goods. The Iliad ends with the slaughter of Trojans. Ghengis Khan built a pyramid with the heads of the inhabitants of a city that wouldn’t surrender. But after the Hundred Years War, Europeans began to change their attitudes. It’s not that they gave up extermination. It’s just they began to feel, um, squeamish about it. So the problem of the original inhabitants of the Americas became just that, a problem. A few centuries earlier, the wars of conquest between the Spanish and the Aztecs would have continued and expanded until the whole continent was White. Or perhaps a patchwork of Native and White states.
     But by around 1600, a different relationship had evolved. It was Europeans’ desire for beaver fur that made the difference. The Natives become trading partners. They became useful, and even necessary. When the fur trade ended, around the same time that the Thirteen Colonies successfully asserted their independence because the home country wouldn’t accept them as equals, the fact of continued Native presence became, well, inconvenient. Explicit genocide was out (which didn’t prevent massacres and other practices which amounted to genocide). So there were treaties, and abrogations of treaties. Attempts at assimilation. Legal and illegal theft of land. None of which ever got rid of Indians. They are as inconvenient as ever.
     King has traced the history of this inconvenience. It’s not nice. No story of clashing cultures ever is. There are degrees of awfulness, of course, but people invade other people because they want what other people have. If the attempted conquest succeeds, then there is eventually an integration of the  two cultures. Each modifies the other, and if the conquest was far enough in the past, the descendants may even (inconsistently) celebrate both the invaders and the invaded as their common heritage.
     But right now, Native and White relationships are still marked by prejudice, by assumptions of cultural superiority, by thinly disguised attempts at theft, by violence. Neither White nor Indian culture is what it was four hundred years ago, of course, and that fact gives us a small hope that both can influence each other for the better.
     But I’m not holding my breath.
     Unless a lot more people read King’s book. ****

Peter Robinson. Friend of the Devil (2008)

     Peter Robinson. Friend of the Devil (2008) A wheelchair-bound woman is murdered; that’s Cabot’s case. A girl is raped and strangled; that’s Banks’s case. Although these two crimes occur at opposite ends of Banks’s patch, they do connect eventually. Dual plots that intersect are Robinson’s speciality, as is the on-going soap opera of his principal characters. Banks and Cabot both lonesome after their break-up, but neither can find a way to reconcile. The consequences of old crimes at first interfere with the investigation then provide the break.
     A competent performance by Robinson, but not as engaging as his earlier works. He’s now a bankable writer, so his publishers give him leeway to digress and expand secondary plots. Some of these are truncated. Some scenes are merely plot points, and lack the suggestion of deeper currents and complex interwoven back stories that are Robinson’s forte. The psychology of one perpetrator is barely plausible. It’s this contrast between well done and perfunctory writing that grates. The overall effect is uneven. Or maybe I’ve come to expect to much from this series. **