richard jury returns - one of my favorite literary detectives is still solving crimes

Chief Inspector Richard Jury is surrounded by colorful characters - from the idle rich Melrose Plant (who gave up his hereditary title of Lord) who assists him on cases, to his assistant Sergeant Alfred Wiggins (a hypochondriac of the highest order), to the copper-haired fortune teller Carole Anne (is Jury her father figure or a "person of interest") who lives two floors above him, and the residents of Long Piddington, his frequent stop from London to the scene of the crime.

the 4 queens of crime - when women ruled murder mysteries

Growing up I consumed a lot of Agatha Christie novels - but I met my favorite author from the "locked room mystery" genre when I was a junior or senior in high school - Ngaio Marsh.

She was born in New Zealand and split time between there and London. She wrote 32 crime novels and was considered along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allingham one of the "Queens of Crime." Women novelists dominated the genre in the 20s and 30s. (They don't do too bad today either.)

Jerusalem: A Biography - reviewing Montefiore's history of the holy city

Most of us know that in 1493 Christopher Columbus sailed the "deep blue sea." But one of his key motivations for sailing west to secure the riches of India never made it to our childhood textbooks. It can be found in a section of his letter to Ferdinand and Isabella that is often redacted: "before the end of the world all prophecies have to be fulfilled - and the Holy City has to be given back to the Christian Church." It is usually taught that the Spanish monarchs commissioned Columbus to beat the Portuguese in the search for the west route to India. But what is left out is that the drive behind the commissioning was they felt exactly the same way as Columbus - they needed more gold to fund a new Crusade to the Holy Land.

Jerusalem: The Biography
by Simon Sebag Montefiore

That is just a tiny sampling of the fascinating history found in Jerusalem - from King David to
the Six Day War; from the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the concurrent rise of Jewish and Arab nationalism to the Israel-Palestine conflict - woven throughout Montefiore's

the detective I hate to love - or love to hate

Rebus returns in the 18th full novel
featuring the difficult but successful
Edinburgh detective.

I've been reading Ian Rankin's John Rebus novels for close to a decade and have always had a love-hate relationship with this Edinburgh detective. I'm not alone. Rebus's cynical, impulsive, abrasive, self-destructive ways can play like fingernails on a chalkboard, making it hard for all but a few of the other characters to tolerate, much less "like" John - (poor DS Siobhan Clarke, how does she put up with him?). But despite Rebus' expertly drawn flaws, the curmudgeon gets his hooks in you. And it becomes obvious, anyone who tries as hard as Rebus to prove he doesn't care about anyone or anything has to be hiding something ... like how much he cares.

When Rankin retired Rebus in Exit Music - the 17th Rebus novel - and introduced a new Edinburgh character (Malcolm Fox) in (and of) The Complaints (think Internal Affairs in U.S. police terms) - it felt like a huge loss to me. Rebus hadn't run his course - and of course, Big Ger Cafferty, king of the Edinburgh underworld, was out of jail and needed someone to keep a careful - and obsessive - eye on him. There are lead characters that grow more and more weary with each passing novel - but Rebus was worn out and washed up when we first met him. If the chain smoking hadn't killed him yet, why put him out to pasture? Maybe Rankin planned for retirement to do to Rebus what Cafferty considered doing countless times but never did. (Grudging respect? A sense of kinship?)

I also knew I'd miss the old school rock and roll or blues music suggestions. It's always been a bonus to read through what's on Rebus' playlist in each novel, though he still favors his LPs with the comfortable hiss and pops between tracks over CDs or digital music (horrors!) for his late night melancholy as he looks out the window of his flat, a quickly disappearing bottle of Lagavulin at his side.

Standing In Another Man's Grave was a fabulous vehicle to bring Rebus back where he belongs, in the middle of a bloody crime scene. Interesting, I thought Rankin drew a bit much from a theme and process found in my least favorite Rebus novel, Fleshmarket Alley -  (Rebus took a strong and clear and moral political stance, which I thought was a out of character - he normally couldn't be bothered with what the bloody politicians were up to unless it was murder). But having him work as a civilian investigator on cold case files - including a missing person case that may have multiple and current connections - creates the conditions for a triumphant return - even if his boss wishes he would crawl back under a rock.

I would note that Rankin has done as good or better of a job keeping Rebus true to form as any series novelist. That's why reviewing an individual book doesn't seem as important to me as asking if Rebus is really back. Is he?

He's still loathed and feared by colleagues and criminals alike. He still won't give you the time of day unless you have something he needs. He's still the character I hate to love or love to hate most in my commercial crime reading. But even if he has one foot in the grave - or both in another man's grave - he's back, and that's what matters.

How the Irish Saved Civilization

How The Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. Anchor Books.

In 406 A.D the Rhine River froze solid - and the barbarians crossed this temporary bridge to strike one of the final blows to a lazy, corrupt, and aging empire. When Alaric, king of the Visigoths, showed up at Rome's gates in 410 A.D., the citizens still didn't know the end was at hand. Unable to defend themselves - it was a lot of effort after all - they negotiated a "sack" to spare the city from bloodshed:

"So they kept their lives, most of them. But sooner or later they or their progeny lost almost everything else: titles, prosperity, way of life, learning: especially learning. A world in chaos is not a world in which books are copied and libraries are maintained. It is not the world where learned men have the leisure to become more learned."

While working through Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for my nightstand reading, I realized I needed a shorter "boost" to keep going, so I decided to reread Thomas Cahill's much heralded work that shows the disappearance of learning, scholarship, and culture from the European Continent from the fall of Rome to rise of Charlemagne. All the great works of western civilization would have been lost were it not for the fact that as the Continent became illiterate, one small "unconquered people" at the edge of the Empire were just learning to read and write - with gusto. As peaceful Rome turned to chaos, chaotic Ireland grew more peaceful - the key word being more. Following the lead of their eclectic and passionately spiritual patron saint, St. Patrick, and his spiritual son, Columcille, they built centers of learning that not only drew visitors from the Continent, but sent a wave of missionaries that restored and returned the Greek, Roman, Christian and even "pagan" classic literature to Europe.

Just a fun note or two on Patrick. He was not actually Irish. He was a Briton - "almost Roman" - that was captured, enslaved and brutally mistreated by the Irish as a young boy. Following a vision from God - like King David he was a shepherd and solitude and deprivation turned his thoughts toward God - he escaped Ireland and received a seminary education. But his heart beat for Ireland. In one of history's unique footnotes, he became the first missionary since the Apostolic Age. Also, he didn't drive snakes out of Ireland, but he did curb the Irish passion for violence - curbing the passions of that day for hard drink and, um, ah, for a liberated sense of sexuality, is another matter. One of the reasons Patricus was so well received by his one-time tormentors was that he may have been the only man to stand up to the Irish of his century and say, "I am not afraid of you, I fear only God." That they liked and respected.

I'm only one in a long line of many to recommend Cahill's short, poetic, sometimes rambling, but always charming narrative that brings history to life.

book review: istanbul passage: joseph kanon

Istanbul in World War II? Whose side were they on? Allies or Axis? No peeking!

I'll admit, until I picked up Kanon's post WWII novel I didn't know either. As a city straddling two continents with competing histories from the East and West, no surprise they were neutral.

Their geography also made it not surprising that they were a shipping and smuggling center for both sides. I was surprised to learn that for much of WWII they were the safest transfer link in smuggling Jews from Europe to Palestine.

Leon, an ex-pat American businessman - he buys Turkish tobacco -  has run low level operations - errands might be the better word for it - for the Americans and Allies. With Germany's surrender, he is asked to take on one more assignment. The more he is told how simple and safe it will be, the more he knows something big is afoot. He just needs to meet a small boat at the docks, take the passenger to a safe house, ask no questions, and deliver him to an airfield a few days later.

He escapes the ambush with the passenger alive - and quickly learns that the world political conflict has shifted between the US and Soviet Union. He has no one to trust - and both of the surviving superpowers, along with his Turkish hosts suspect he knows more than he is letting on.

Leon visits his Jewish wife - who is tucked in a sanatorium - every day - she hasn't spoken since a ship with children she was trying to save was sunk. Will he find answers in the silence?

Kanon is a great wordsmith - his almost drawl understated style ratchets up the internal highly reflective conflict of sorting through the shifting sands of friends and enemies on personal - and geopolitical - levels.

____

Mark Gilroy is author of the critically acclaimed novel Cuts Like a Knife. His second novel, Every Breath You Take, releases on October 23, 2012. A 30-year veteran of the publishing industry, he has served as publisher and executive vice president at several companies and currently runs a company that services retailers, publishers, ministries, and other organizations in the industry.

book review: the long goodbye by raymond chandler

Once a decade I get an irresistible urge to revisit the hardboiled crime noir classics I was introduced to in high school but didn't appreciate at the time.

My latest binge included Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock, James Ellroy's LA Confidential, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and two books from Raymond Chandler.


Particularly with Ellroy, Hammett, and Chandler, their anti-hero heros are troubled, rebellious, and cynical - but can't ever escape from that ember of honor and hope smoldering deep inside. The authors paint a dark, bleak picture of the underbelly of society - usually LA. Why LA? Why not LA? Where the lights shine brightest the shadows cast deep and wide.

Their outlook was shocking when they wrote their novels - especially Thompson when he wrote from the killer's perspective - but is standard fare today. (Today, you might need to write with a positive buoyancy to shock people!)

I still read crime novels, but I'm not sure anyone has really bested the patron saints, Hammett and Chandler. That begs the question, who had the greatest character? Was it Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe?

I like both characters - but Marlowe is my favorite and I believe he was at his best in The Long Goodbye - which just edged The Lady in the Lake in my mind.

Marlowe befriends Terry Lennox - wealthy but haunted by his demons from serving in war and by the escapades of his nymphomaniac wife. No good deed goes unpunished and soon both the cops and the gangsters are after Marlowe when he begins to investigate the death of Lennox's wife after being told to back off. Telling Marlowe to back off is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

Rereading Chandler is a graphic reminder that California has always had problems - and a guilty pleasure from an era of tough guys, dames in distress, partnerships between the gangsters and dirty cops, and the discovery that even heros have flaws.


__________
Mark Gilroy is author of the critically acclaimed novel Cuts Like a Knife. A 30-year veteran of the publishing industry, he has served as publisher and executive vice president at several companies and currently runs a company that services retailers, publishers, ministries, and other organizations in the industry.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

By Junot Diaz. Riverhead Books (Penguin). Published in 2007.

A number of friends and family members recommend books for me to read. With a few of them I take particular note: this is a good indication that I'm not going to like the book. But one person in my life who recommends a book two to three times a year - and almost always one I am initially suspect of because it is not something I would pick out myself - is my son Merrick.

I never would have read Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game), Haruki Murakami (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) or Yann Martell (Life of Pi - though I probably would have got to that one eventually) - to name just a few.

Honestly, I really wasn't interested in a novel that deals with the political history of the Dominican Republic under the brutal Trujillo regime - I can watch the news if I want to be depressed was my first thought - but Merrick recommended it - and Diaz's first novel did garner a few little awards like the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critic's Circle Award. But on the issue of awards, that's not necessarily a dealmaker for me; after all, there's more than a few Oscar-winning movies none of us liked. So it came back to Merrick's recommendation. I ordered it, promptly put it on the stack of books by my bed - where it dropped as low as the bottom third (usually the sure sign it's never going to be opened) - and read other stuff for six months before finally picking Oscar up. Reluctantly. Did I mention this book deals with the political history of the Dominican Republic under the the brutal Trujillo regime - AND includes footnotes with historical context and explanations throughout the novel?

Are you feeling as unenthused about Oscar as I was yet? I can go on!

But what a pleasure The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was to read. The jumbled but poetic wordsmything (along with those interesting and slightly disconcerting but somehow fitting footnotes) mark Diaz, the author, as an interesting blend of stream of conscious thought and carefully constructed and intellectual analysis of the world through the eyes of his characters and his out-of-story interjections as self-aware author. (I guess pulling that off is part of the reason he is a professor at MIT. I'm pretty sure he's a very smart guy.) The novel is a subtle and nuanced winding road with an occasional roadblock that delivers a direct, to-the-point, academic, sledge hammer observation on life.

Our hero, Oscar, is born in poverty in the DR - though his grandfather was a wealthy and famous physician in that nation whose unforgivable crime against the state was to hide a beautiful daughter from the lecherous Trujillo - and moves to a rundown, hardscrabble community in New Jersey that is bordered by a dump on one side and a six lane highway on another. There is a fleeting period of Oscar's life when he is the most handsome boy in his neighborhood and school and his mom and great aunt are convinced he is destined to be an international pop star - perhaps as big as Porfirio Rubirosa. But that is a short lived fantasy on their part as Oscar becomes a fat little boy who is the object of ridicule and relentless teasing from classmates. It doesn't help that Oscar's mother is distant and harsh to the point of cruelty - she would probably be reported to health and human services today - with he and his sister. (There's a reason this savage beauty is the way she is that can only be explained by the ravages of the curse described in the next paragraph of this review.) But Oscar is a survivor and escapes into a world of sci-fi and fantasy - he is a bonafide literature and gaming nerd - that allows him to be and dream anything but what he is. Speaking of dreams, Oscar has only two compelling visions in life:  first is to become the Domincan version of J.R.R. Tolkien; and second is to find true love, something he he feels he glimpsed in the golden age of his pre-adolescent youth when he seemed to be on his way to becoming the next Pofirio Rubirosa. Oscar writes novels by nightstand light and falls madly in love on a constant basis - always and inevitably to experience the anguish of heartbreak. Sometimes before the object of his affection even knew he was in love with her.

I should have started where the book starts and mentioned that Oscar is primarily about an evil spirit - the Dominican word is fuku - that has cursed Oscar's family from the moment Trujillo (master of or mastered by evil spirits?) heard rumors of the beautiful daughter of Oscar's grandfather. The evil spirit has destroyed or stolen anything good the family has had or might have experienced - from lands and wealth to beauty and health. (Oscar believes the original fuku landed at San Juan with Christopher Columbus: the Ground Zero of the curse.) So Oscar's family's story is that of a precipitous fall from grace to one of dysfunctional but heroic struggle against the weight of a brutal personal history. The ultimate question I got from the book is this: if you are cursed is there any point in fighting it? Isn't that what a curse is - something you can't fight? Or is there something one can do? How does a lost, downtrodden, forgotten, broken family - and a not-so-little boy who suffers from depression and inertia - stand up to all that an evil spirit - one that is still alive in human form through Trujillo's heirs - and all that it can send at them?

On a visit to see family in the DR it is the frightened, cowardly, non-threatening and non-physically-imposing, ostracized, outcast, loner Oscar that dons the armor of a knight from one of his fantasy novels and choose to face and slay the fuku beast on behalf of his family once and for all - and win the heart of his one and only true love while doing it.

Does his story end in the most improbably of victories - like Frodo Baggins in Oscar's author-hero's Lord of the Rings trilogy - or does his family's fuku prevail and claim yet another victim? If you're in the mood to read a book that deals with the political history of the Dominican Republic during the brutal Trujillo reign, you will discover the answer!

Sad. Humorous. Fanciful. Brutal. Optimistic. Fatalistic. Jumbled. Linear. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has it all.