White Butterfly by Walter Mosley (1992)

When a white woman is murdered by a serial killer in the black part of town, the LA cops come knocking on Easy Rawlins' door.

Mystery Review: White Butterfly is the third of the Easy Rawlins novels, and just as good as its predecessors. It's 1956, Easy (short for Ezekiel) is married to Regina with an adopted son Jesus and a daughter Edna. But he's not talking with his wife, drinking too much ("I seen men turn old in six months under that bottle"), and a murderer is threatening the black community. Storm clouds are on the horizon. Something's gotta give. This signals the real strength of Mosley's novels: the plot is strong, descriptions are vivid, the characters are recognizable. And there is a constant awareness of racial politics in America: "I knew when he called me mister that the LAPD needed my services again." Easy is also one of the most well-rounded detectives in all of hard-boiled fiction, a flawed, real, sometimes misguided (even foolish) human being. At times in White Butterfly the reader will want to yell at him to get his head out and appreciate those around him: "The dictionary was on the coffee table. She'd looked up the words she couldn't spell."). We have a murder mystery and a detective with a real life, sharing space in an untenable coexistence. Mosley balances all the elements, there's a purpose and meaning to the story, his novels have a history and a future. The book is never over. If you liked any of the others, you'll enjoy White Butterfly as well.  [3½★]

The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1972)

A wealthy architect hires a young woman from an insane asylum as a nanny for his orphaned nephew, then a hit man shows up.

Mystery Review: The Mad and the Bad was so much better than I expected it seemed perhaps even better than it was. This is one I didn't want to put down because I was afraid of what I was missing when I wasn't reading it. If that doesn't make sense, you're catching on. Written in the hard-boiled style ("His smiled resembled the coin slot of a parking meter"), it's terse, short, quick, and to the point. The Mad and the Bad is not a detective novel, just barely a mystery, few police, noirish, bit of a thriller. Whatever it is, it was entertaining and enjoyable. The protagonist is an early version of Lisbeth Salander, another of my favorite characters: "She pictured men flirting with her -- and her shooting them point-blank. I must be in a manic phase, she told herself." That name-drop and the summary up top should be all you need to tell if The Mad and the Bad is for you. Of the three Manchette novels I've read, this was by far my favorite.  [4★]

The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes (1958)

When a white man is murdered in Harlem the police will bumble on until they solve the case, or don't.

Mystery Review: The Real Cool Killers takes a sharp turn from Chester Himes' first book in the series, A Rage in Harlem. Here the violence increases, the humor decreases, and the story doesn't rest so easy on the stomach. Perversion and random death are side by side. The novel is carefully plotted and doesn't disappoint, the characters are interesting and credible. As a mystery (detective) novel there's nothing to complain about. But there's a larger picture here. The conflict between two worlds colliding: "If you white people insist on coming up to Harlem where you force colored people to live in vice-and-crime-ridden slums, it's my job to see you are safe." The story includes a teenage gang in Harlem called "The Real Cool Moslems," but in the novel's title Himes is careful to identify their real nature. Then he kicks it up a notch, to a level which is never spelled out in words, but only in actions and emotions. There are three sides to this plane of the story. First, the white cops in Harlem and the continual dehumanizing degradation of their casual racism. At first the reader may be able to let it slide as verisimilitude, but after too much repetition of abuse disguised as humor (and undisguised abuse, for that matter), the reader starts to get queasy. It's a harsh lesson. Second, the residents of Harlem who try to live by the code of the neighborhood, and are reluctant to give up any black person, even known criminals, to the white police and criminal justice system. Finally, the two black detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones (who is given much more stage time in this sequel): "You two men act as if you want to kill off the whole population of Harlem," the [white] chief kept on. "You told me to crack down," Grave Digger reminded him. "Yeah, but I didn't mean in front of my eyes where I would have to be a witness to it." They are caught between their duty to protect and serve and the code of silence. Trapped in this untenable frustration they fray and break. They know the citizens are hurting themselves by protecting criminals, but they also understand that people are going to lie as much as possible to protect their own. At this point the black detectives crack, caught in between two rights and two wrongs -- both sides are right, both sides are wrong, the cognitive dissonance is unbearable. "It's only once in a blue moon they get to see a white man being chased by one of them ... a chance to see some white blood spilled for a change ... that's what Ed and I are always up against when we try to make Harlem safe for white people." Yet the author never spells this out or comments, it's simply woven into the fabric of the whole novel. To think Himes addressed all this in 1958 in a detective novel, when it's still on the front page today.  [3½★]

The So Blue Marble by Dorothy B. Hughes (1940)

A former actress and rising young Hollywood fashion designer stumbles across a murder, and another, and another ... .

Mystery Review: The So Blue Marble is wonderful entertainment. A hard-boiled detective story without a hard-boiled detective. But with a speedy though (literally) incredible plot and a murderer's row cast of characters. All in search of a possibly magical, menacing, mythical perfectly sky-blue gem. Our hero, Griselda Satterlee, was married for three years, has been divorced for four (still carries a torch), was a Hollywood starlet for one year and now works as a Tinseltown fashion designer dressing the stars. Still only 24, she's a swell dame but no tough guy. Despite that she's always braver than she thinks she is and manages to battle through every scrape -- and there's plenty. In her debut novel, Dorothy Hughes (1904-93) perfectly captures 1930's upper crust Manhattan, fancy hotels, swell bars, Art Deco and fashion. The So Blue Marble is like watching a TCM classic movie of the time but reading a book: "The magazine slid to the floor, each page's rustle louder than if a tray of dishes had crashed. 'Delayed?' Ann's question was terrored, so soft, softer than a pillow." The story, the writing, the characters, the settings, it's all entertaining as hell. "Danger. The word didn't have the bright sound that poets gave to it. It was something dark and furry, nauseous." Even James Bond-type weaponry. The romance was only so-so, but hey, he's not good enough for Griselda. Dorothy Hughes was also an accomplished poet, receiving the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1930, and wrote the original novel of the film noir classic, In a Lonely Place (1950). despite the slapdash plot, I was happily surprised as just how good The So Blue Marble was and how much I enjoyed it.  [4★]

Reeds in the Wind by Grazia Deledda (1913)

A story of family, custom, and change in turn of the century Sardinia.

Classics Review: Reeds in the Wind is about village life: tradition, debt, religion, drudgery, and guilt, superstition, class, history. And the changing of all that, and how all that doesn't change. Most of all it's about fate. Italian writer Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) was the second woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, in 1926. She evokes the countryside, the landscapes, life in the village, vividly and precisely. Where everyone knows everybody. Kinship and connections, festivals and farms, clothes and customs. The reader is right there in Sardinia. I had dust on my shoes. The characters, the people are then laid atop this rich background. The aging, Christ-like Efix (... lifting his bloody palms ...); the beautiful and tragic Noemi; the young but lost Giacinto. Although an easy and enjoyable read, it wasn't a must-read. Glad I read it, but I didn't connect quite as well as I wanted to do. Didn't feel it as much as I should. Perhaps the cultural or historical divide is too great? Yet I recognize the quality of the writing, of Deledda's talent, the wealth of the story. Reeds in the Wind may be more for readers who enjoy historical dramas, family sagas where the past comes back to bite the present. For any historian who wants to visit Sardinia in 1900, this is your time machine. For philosophers, Reeds in the Wind is up your street as well: "Tell me, you've been around the world. Is it like this everywhere? Why does fate break us like this, like reeds?" "Yes ... we are reeds and fate is the wind ... why the wind? Only God knows why." A story of the earth, of time, of eternal truths.  [3★]

Reading Recap 2018

Happy New Year! Hope you all had a good reading year in 2018 and have an even better year in 2019. Here's the usual caveat for this annual post -- this is all numbers and all mostly only interesting to me (me! me! me!), just so I can keep track of my year's reading and look back in the future. Please don't waste your time indulging my narcissism if you're not in the mood for digits. Rather than more apologies, off we go! I set a personal reading record this year, with 121 books read -- which included a couple of graphic novels and many, many novellas. Accordingly, I didn't set a record for pages read. I was feeling kind of beat up by big books this year and found my happiness in reading shorter books. May be just the right idea for you if you're in a reading slump or a book rut. Counting those novellas, I read 77 novels. Also 18 short story collections and four books of poetry. Good on the stories, bad on the poems. No plays, which is a bit disappointing. There were 18 books of nonfiction, which is fine but never one of my priorities. I read about 20 classics, maybe a few more or less depending on your definition of that hazy category. I think of myself as a "classics" reader, but maybe not so much, eh? Moving on to the authors, I read 75 books by women and 44 books by men, which is a disproportion I didn't expect. I guess I have much more catching up to do on female writers, which probably isn't that unusual. Twenty-nine books were by writers of color, which is about average for me, and 23 books were translated from languages other than English. All in all a good reading year, which I'm happy with, enjoyed, and am hoping to build on for an even better year in 2019. Happy Reading!  🐢

Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon (1930)

Inspector Maigret relentlessly solves the murder on a train of a continental conman, who then appears in a hotel.

Mystery Review: Pietr the Latvian is the first sighting of Inspector Jules Maigret, who was to appear in 75 or so novels written by Belgian author, Georges Simenon. Maigret is very large (though muscular), usually hungry, enjoys a hot fire or stove, and is unceasing and literally unstoppable in pursuit of his quarry. Inspector Javert would be an apt ancestor. Although perpetually perceptive, Maigret is no genius such as Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe. He often relies on moments that are "a complete miracle," coincidences and happenstance. Although on the hard-boiled side, he's not a bully or violent like a Mike Hammer. He uses his large, tough body as an unstoppable force to sweep aside any obstacle to his pursuit. Not overly talkative, he's plain, loyal, and simply determined to get the job done: "Maigret worked like any other policeman ... but what he sought ... was the crack in the wall ... when the human being comes out from behind the opponent."  The translation of Pietr the Latvian was occasionally irritating, seemingly (no French here) too literal with the occasional ill-fitting word sticking out like a peacock at a penguin rally. But the fault could also lie with Simenon himself (after all he did publish almost 500 novels!). The writing here is not the attraction, it's simply a tool. The atmosphere he creates in Pietr the Latvian is the show. The Latin Quarter. We see the glamour and grit, the dives, drugs, and drink, the wealthy and the wanting of Paris between the wars. It's fascinating, with all the delights and flaws of its time.  [3★]

Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle (1975)

A pregnancy, a birth, and the stillness after.

Book Review: Swimmer in the Secret Sea is difficult for me to capture, and may be the saddest book I've ever read. It makes concrete the crushing nature of broken hopes and thwarted dreams, but paints an unbearable reality. As well-written as it is, I'm unsure why anyone would want to read this. I was reminded of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Both that and Swimmer in the Secret Sea are books written in a tight, controlled manner when the reader knows that the author is shrieking inside, writhing with skin on fire. The narrator has two choices: to howl like a maimed animal or to describe every minute drop of the sea of pain in which he's drowning. The pain can be covered for a moment, stilled for a minute, in a carefully detailed description of carpentry, of the simple act of building a box. Perhaps the pain written here is cathartic, encapsulates a life lesson, shows a road taken. Swimmer in the Secret Sea can't be read for pleasure, but maybe it can be read for healing.  [4½★]

The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan (1981)

A young English couple, relationship fraying, visit Venice and find an answer to their problems.

Book Review: The Comfort of Strangers was Ian McEwan's second novel. Actually it seems to be a short story that was left to grow too long, like a hidden zucchini. McEwan can write, but here his letter-perfect descriptions go on, repeated, padding out the minimal story. It's good as far as it goes, creating atmosphere, incisively portraying the couple's relationship as it teeters, one moment hostile, the next making love in the afternoon, but unbalanced, precarious, about to fall any moment. Their trembling relationship creates a nervousness, wondering when one of them will crack, that parallels the foreboding the reader feels as they journey through the cobbled streets, always ending in upset and the same mysterious strangers. The Comfort of Strangers is a Gothic tale at heart, two naive and distracted tourists constantly lost in dusty streets and the filtered Venetian sunlight. It's just not quite enough. McEwan only had enough material for a short story, but by this time he felt he should be writing novels. The man can write, but there isn't enough story to hang all that writing on. And after that the reader may also wonder about verisimilitude, the credibility of the story. While telling his tale McEwan brings the reader into his intricately spun web, but on reflection the reader may feel bamboozled just a bit. Manipulated. The Comfort of Strangers is good enough, there's just not a lot of there there.  [3★]

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (1946)

A twelve-year-old girl comes of age and takes a step toward becoming aware in the American South during the Second World War.

Book Review: The Member of the Wedding is a story about seeking connection, of the desire for belonging and fulfillment, of breaking with childhood and searching for the next step. "She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world ... an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid." Usually I don't like books for adults about children. Often the child is unrealistically precocious and exists in the novel as a diminutive adult, or the child is realistic and so simple as to be uninteresting. Although this short novel may suffer these pitfalls, it works and succeeds nonetheless. We see Frankie Addams (tall for her age) as she grows up amidst the racial issues of the South (read America as a whole), questions of gender identity (that must've been radical in 1946), the dangers of sexuality, and the necessity of hopes and pipe dreams. Carson McCullers brings all of that into the story. The Member of the Wedding addresses issues we're still trying to cope with today. Frankie is isolated, without connections or attachments, without teachers. Her mother is dead and her father is kindly but distant and oblivious. Her small, mismatched family consists of Berenice, the black maid, and John Henry her six-year-old cousin, who spend the long summer days together. Blame her youth but she can be coldly cruel to Berenice and John Henry, yet she also desperately relies on them for support. "She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world." This is the summer her brother, who's been off at war, is getting married. Frankie falls in love, and wants to run away, with both her brother and his bride, finally achieving the connection she doesn't have. She's looking for the "we of me," no longer an "I" all alone, a time when "the world seemed no longer separate from herself." An ill-fated hope. But Frankie's love is innocent and sweet, unaware of the implications of her hopes and needs, just as she is (at least superficially) naively unaware of the consequences of meeting a clumsily flirtatious soldier in his hotel room. In his awkwardness, the too-young Frankie must have seemed somehow approachable to the soldier, hapless as he is. In a way this is just a small poem of a story, about a girl growing up. But Frankie's tale is balanced by her small cohort, who each have their own tragic hopes and dreams. Berenice sees a world where "there would be no separate colored people ... all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and black hair ... no white people to make the colored people feel cheap and sorry all through their lives." John Henry has his own vision "that people ought to be half boy and half girl," though Frankie prefers "that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls, whichever way they felt like." The ending of The Member of the Wedding (although Frankie has learned something), combines both the hope that she has found a friend, but still contains her Achilles heel as she imbues her new friend with the romantic fantasies she's always had, the hopeless hopes she's had before.  [4★]

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899)

A young married woman in New Orleans, Edna Pontellier, who seems to have every material comfort wonders if there might not be more to life.

Classics Review: The Awakening is one of those novels that makes the reader wonder how it got published. Sure, there was Madame Bovary (1856) and Anna Karenina (1877) before, but those were written by those decadent Europeans. Hard to believe that staid, Puritan America could produce a rival, even set in French New Orleans. Although Chopin is blunt in her purpose in The Awakening ("They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings"), there's still enough story here to keep it from becoming an essay ("sailing across the bay ... Edna felt as if she were being borne away from some anchorage"). The writing is modern, looking to the future, yet has abundant symbolism (e.g., she learns to swim) for those want to read for more. There is so much here that The Awakening could certainly be the book that launched a thousand dissertations. For example the infinitely complex ending can be unacceptable to readers from both sides of the feminist divide, promoting no end of discussion about women and motherhood. What Chopin captures is that Edna had no choice in her life decisions until that important summer, she never knew of alternatives to the life predestined and arranged for her. She "awakens" as a new person in that moment, not responsible for her previous actions. Chopin shows that after the awakening she has no alternatives in this world that she didn't make -- living in a strict Catholic community, rejected by the man she loves, for her there is no acceptable resolution in that time. Another theme worth noting is one that I cannot call the "female gaze," but in The Awakening Edna studies other women intently, critically analyzing their lives, their looks, their actions. This is not done (or at least not solely done) in a sense of sexual competition or sexual attraction, but in a sense of examining other women to learn how they conduct themselves, how they put themselves together and out there (I recently also noticed this in the works of Nella Larsen -- dissertation anyone?). I'll also note in passing that part of our hero's "awakening" is brought about by the music of an independent woman who is a talented pianist (counterpart to a "perfect mother" character), given to playing the works of Frederic Chopin; perhaps a nod to the author and her own participation in the realization here. The dinner party scene alone makes the book. Kate Chopin wrote in a naturalist, modernist style, incorporating themes and symbols that would resonate in the work of future American authors. In that period, Edna's evolution was seen as akin to illness or insanity. "He could see plainly that she was not herself ... he could not see that she was becoming herself." The Awakening is a novel that can excite anger, intolerance, condemnation, even hate in readers, as well as wonderment that such a book was so far ahead of its time.  [4½★]