Walter Mosely: All I Did Was Shoot My Man

This is a relatively new novel (New American Library, 2012) in Mosley's Leonid McGill Mystery series. McGill has a past full of regrets. He is a private investigator with a criminal past, a father that went missing 44 years earlier, three children, a wife, and a former lover. This novel opens as he waits to make amends for one of his more recent wrongs. On request, he framed an innocent woman, implicating her in a massive theft for which she received a heavy sentence. After doing some work to clear her and earn her an early parole, McGill finds that, mysteriously, the crime continues to follow her and its tentacles are wrapping around McGill, his family, and everyone connected to Zella. As he follows the various threads, he attempts to protect his family from the fall out. On the way, McGill's son Twill is learning the art of investigation, his former lover seeks to win him back, and his father surfaces.

Mosley's characters, like the names he gives them (Leonid, Socrates, Ptolemy, Tolstoy, for instance), carry a lot of weight. They are strong with their hands and their hearts, brilliant, and worldly wise. They have insight into the characters and motives of those they encounter, and their senses are sharpened by the injustices and hardships they've had to survive.

I am not a lover of mysteries, although I know there are good ones out there. I don't want to read a book that I can pretty much follow by reading a sentence here or there on the page--its fat, but there are way more words than necessary. Nothing engages with your brain--ho hum. With Mosley, every word is necessary and every word is a pleasure to read. I'll quote a trio of paragraphs from near the end of the novel:

"I'm a twenty-first century New Yorker and therefore have little time to contemplate race. It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate becaues of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every moment of every day.

"Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done.

"That said, Antoinette was one of the racists. She hated her own people because they didn't see her for what she was. She felt betrayed by black men and then I came along. I brought out a thrill in her heart, and maybe her nether regions. That was all good and well; she was a handsome, brave, and intelligent woman, but I was preoccupied with pain so profound that could barely tell if it was mine alone."

Find a copy at your local library or favorite bookstore.

Dennis Lehane's Novel The Given Day

Lehane, Dennis. The Given Day. NY: HarperCollins, 2008

By Walt Giersbach

Tribulation in a Boston Dimly Remembered

The police/mystery novel has always been suspect as literature, even when Umberto Eco and Jasper Fforde transcend genre into a more literary level.  Dennis Lehane skirted this genre tag skillfully in Mystic River; Shutter Island; Darkness, Take My Hand; and Gone, Baby, Gone, creating well-rounded characters who functioned in realistic, inventive story lines.  But, often, his writing remained “mysteries.”  His work in The Given Day, however, exceeds all his former portraits of troubled people trying to function in his troubled Boston area.

Lehane takes the reader back to a relatively unexplored time just after The Great War and influenza epidemic, but before the ‘20s roared in.  In his treatment of the time and place, he was compared in The New York Times to John Dos Passos and The U.S.A. Trilogy.  Boston’s police department was being paid 1908 poverty-level wages, could be ordered to put in 70-hour weeks, and worked in vermin-infested quarters.  Worse, it was a time when strikers found themselves at the mercy of police nightsticks and attacks by goons, African-Americans didn’t walk through white neighborhoods, anarchists were blowing up buildings, and Nativist cultural attitudes poisoned the civic weal.  The Irish — in Boston, at least — ran the civil service at the expense of the Italians and “Bolsheviks” and for the benefit of the Anglo Brahmins.

Lehane’s rich narrative — in 700 pages — leads inexorably to the police strike of 1919, large-scale rioting in the city, families dissolved by “traitorous” behavior, and wanton murders.  Police officer Aidan “Danny” Coughlin; the African-American, Luther Leonard, who left wife and child after murdering a cocaine dealer; and the immigrant Irish maid, Nora, form the triumvirate of characters working to survive in this turbulent environment.  .

Lehane slowly lets the historical period unfold through the eyes of Babe Ruth, shortly to leave the Red Sox, and shoehorns the Great Bambino in and out of the novel.  Babe’s character is wonderful history, which Lehane has researched beautifully, but unfortunately it has little to do with the story’s development.

By creating this universe called “Boston 1918-19,” Lahane time-travels us into an alternative history that is both distant and familiar.  The streets, department stores and place names are all identifiable today.  While this is entertaining — and emotionally involving — it remains questionable whether Lahane is over-dramatizing the venality, mayhem, cultural biases, and civil breakdown of his city and forebears.  Enjoy The Given Day as drama and enlightenment on issues that plague us today, not history, in spite of the author’s bibliographic sources.
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Reading Lehane’s work (of seven novels and a collection) made me reflect that there are books that launch a neophyte writer’s career, those that put air under the author’s wings, and finally the literary triumph that puts the writer at the top of his game.  The Given Day will give any reader pause to examine the cultural baggage we carry as Americans and that which has been smuggled into our luggage by strangers.  The Given Day is a dense literary work firmly nestled in a fascinating time when the country began to turn another corner.


From the Book Review: Dennis Lehane's most recent novel is Moonlight Mile. You can find Given Day and other Dennis Lehane novels at University of Pennsylvania Libraries and at your favorite branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia


http://www.dennislehanebooks.com/

Read other reviews by Walter Giersbach at the Favorite Books and Book Review and find out about his fiction at  Allotropic Lucubrations

Not a False Note Is Played: Peggy Ehrhart's Sweet Man Is Gone

Ehrhart, Peggy. Sweet Man Is Gone. Gale Cengage, 2008

Reviewed by Walter Giersbach

Peggy Ehrhart immerses the reader in a world of musicians, what they go thorough to get their gigs, and the tribulations of trying to get your band to the point where it pays the bills.  Never fear if you’re not an avid music fan.  Her allusions and descriptions are transparent and easy to grasp.   Ehrhart, herself a guitarist, nails this world down cold, then adds the literary challenge of an amateur sleuth wanting to solve the murder — make that two — of friends.
   
The atmosphere and ambience of Sweet Man Gone are right on, from the dingy bars of the Lower East Side to the cheap pads of the Upper West Side to the rundown flats in Hackensack.  Nostalgia flowed over me as I recalled streets I walked and places I hung out long ago.  Her plot flows seamlessly — and often dreamlike — as she drives her clunker in and out of the city, from practice studios to blues bars to crash pads.  Interestingly, there’s not a false note of irony, cynicism, or authorial disbelief in her writing.  Hers is a beautiful portrayal of a lonely woman just trying to make it while loving the blues too much.

The plot unfolds smoothly, building bit by bit as a novel of character evolves into a fast-paced crescendo of discovery.  And, like a classic whodunit, the killer isn’t revealed until the last pages.
   
Sweet Man Gone is a very refreshing antidote for those suffering an overdose on Dennis LeHane, Dashiell Hammett, James Patterson and other hardboiled crime writers.

ISBN-10: 1594146683

Available at three locations at the Free Library of Philadelphia or from your local library or bookseller. Interested in other books by Peggy Ehrhart? Check out her Web page.

Follow Walter Giersbach's own short fiction and ideas at
http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/

Reading anything that you would like to share? Send us your original review to favoritebookreview @ gmail. com

Enter the Man with No Name: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest

Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest

Reviewed by Walter Giersbach

“Red Harvest,” Dashiell Hammett’s first published novel (in 1929), reveals a world of venality, mayhem and revenge that set the tone for detective novels half a century into the future.

A Continental Detective Agency Op is summoned from California to “Poisonville,” Mont. by aged newspaper owner and banker Elihu Willsson. Elihu’s criminal enterprise of imported thugs threatens to turn on him. The aged banker gives the Op enough of information to let our nameless narrator work his way through a host of evil-doers: Bill Quint, an affable old IWW member; corrupt police chief Noonan; greedy Dinah Brand, who has scandalous information on everyone; jealous bank clerk Robert Albury; hoodlum Max “Whisper” Thaler; and other evil-doers who run the town and its rackets. The first question is “Who killed Elihu’s son?”

The Op sets about pitting the factions against each other, saying, “Plans are all right sometimes. And sometimes just stirring things up is all right.” This “stir-it-up novel” is filled with offhanded shootings, explosions, and murder by ice pick. The carnage is colorfully expressed in passages where the Op says, “We bumped over dead Hank O'Meara's legs and headed for home” and “Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.”

Don’t expect plausibility, but do look for the snappy dialogue, strong characters (especially in the Op), and writing style that moves fast. Time magazine included “Red Harvest” in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1922 to 2005. Literary critic Andre Gide also called the novel “the last word in atrocity, cynicism and horror.”

Hammett’s “Red Harvest” has given us a sub-genre of the crime/adventure/detective novel that might be termed “the man with no name.” “Red Harvest” can lay claim to being the successor to the classic Western — not the Sherlock Holmes “whodunit.” The novel’s amazing power and plotting led movie director Akira Kurosawa to create “Yojimbo,” focusing on a freelance samurai who confronts town’s warring factions. Look for thematic vestiges of Hammett’s novel also in Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns” with Clint Eastwood and in John Sturges’s “The Magnificent Seven.” “Red Harvest” is the novel that started an epic genre.

See your library or favorite book seller for Red Harvest and other books by Dashiell Hammett

Gothic Revival by Walter Giersbach '61

Giersbach, Walter. "Gothc Revival." Bewilderingstories.com

Submitted by R. Stuhr

Writer and contributer to the Book Review blog Walter Giersbach '61 recently published a piece of online short fiction at Bewilderingstories.com. Giersbach writes that his story, "Gothic Revival," began as half-hour exercise and "continued into seeing beauty in the grotesque and the grotesque in beauty." Read this from start to finish--and in that order.

Giersbach has also published other stories at Bewilderingstories.com including, "Cable Window," "Number 11," "Laura Lard Takes No Prisoners," and "The Iceberg." To read more about Walter Giersbach '61, visit his blog, Allotropic Lucubrations and check out his reviews in this blog.

Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk

Akunin, Boris. Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk. New York: Random House, 2008.

Submitted by Mark Schneider

I greatly enjoyed Boris Akunin's second novel in the Sister Pelagia
trilogy: Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk. Set roughly a century and
a half ago in Russia, the not-your-average nun Sister Pelagia, who has
a penchant for solving mysteries, takes on the task of unraveling the
peculiar deaths and hauntings at the remote monastery at New Ararat.
Sister Pelagia does so without the blessings of Bishop Mitrofanii, but
only after several other investigators sent by the bishop have died or
gone mad at the hands of the spectral Black Monk, and after the Bishop
himself has collapsed from shock and grief at the unfolding
catastrophe. Sister Pelagia risks her life and excommunication to
find out whether the culprit is evil spirit, criminal mastermind, or
madman. If you like mystery writers such as Tony Hillerman or Randy
Wayne White, where the novel is as much about culture and history as
figuring out whodunit, you'll love Akunin's novels, and the Black Monk
is probably my favorite among them.

The Grinnell College Libraries are well stocked with books by Boris Akunin (Akunin, B. (Boris)), but all but one are in Russian. The one is The Winter Queen. Burling 3rd Floor PG3478.K78 A9713 2003.

The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo

Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Knopf, 2008.

Submitted by Catherine Rod

Swedish author Larsson was a journalist who died at the age of 50 and before his three novels were published. The others in the series of three are The Girl Who Played with Fire (Knopf 2009) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Knopf 2010). Dragon Tattoo is about corporate and family corruption, tragedy and human vulnerability. Catherine Rod, an avid reader of mysteries, notes that this is the first of Larsson's three posthumously published novels. "It is absolutely riveting and has an interesting main character. If you like mysteries, try this one!"

All three novels are on order for Burling Library.