The Colorado Kid (2005) by Stephen King

Scene actually in novel, sort of

The Colorado Kid (2005) by Stephen King: Hard Case Crime recently reissued King's novel he wrote expressly for them when their line was launching back in 2005, complete with some new introductory material and illustrations. I think it's a dandy mystery. Is it a mystery? Well, you have to read it!

It's not the pulpy paperback material sometimes reprinted by Hard Case (God bless them), which makes the lurid covers of both this edition and the original comical rather than entirely representative of the tone of the novel. The Colorado Kid would form some of the inspiration for the TV series Haven, though Haven carried over just about nobody other than the eponymous Kid who, it's no mystery from the back cover blurb, is already dead when the novel begins. 

Nothing like this in novel

If the novel isn't quite a mystery, it is a novel ABOUT mystery. It's also a love letter to old-style journalism, old coots, and the fresh-faced enthusiasm of the young just starting out on their own. It's certainly the King novel that would work best with a David Lynch adaptation. Highly recommended.

Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

Murder on the Orient Express (2017): adapted from the novel by Agatha Christie by Michael Green; directed by Kenneth Branagh; starring Kenneth Branagh (Hercule Poirot) and a cast of dozens: Enjoyable, good-looking adaptation of the 1930's Agatha Christie classic of British mysteries stars Kenneth Branagh and his crazy prop mustache as Hercule Poirot, world's greatest consulting detective. 

Branagh directed as well, in a classic Hollywood style buttressed by CGI for some of the large-scale visuals with which he opens up Christie's locked-room mystery. Well, locked-train mystery.

The all-star cast has about three lines each, which is pretty much how the movie has to work unless it's going to be 8 hours long. Critical backlash to this film puzzled me. It's pretty much exactly what it has to be, and it's far superior to the stiff 1974 version that netted Ingrid Bergman a sympathy Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Recommended.

Wind River (2017)

Wind River (2017): written and directed by Taylor Sheridan; starring Jeremy Renner (Cory Lambert), Kelsey Asbille (Natalie), Graham Greene (Ben), Gil Birmingham (Martin), and Elizabeth Olsen (Jane Banner): Wind River Reservation is located in Wyoming, though the state is played by Utah in this movie. Fish and Wildlife Service officer Cory Lambert is our protagonist, drawn into the investigation of a murdered female Native American teenager when the assigned FBI agent (played by a game Elizabeth Olsen) requests help in navigating both the social and physical terrain of the reservation and all its wild landscape.

Writer-director Taylor Sheridan (writer of Hell or High Water and Sicario) keeps things terse and taut while also allowing for the Sublime landscape to play a major role in the film. But he's also a sharp observer of human character amongst a variety of laconic individuals and of small moments amongst the landscape. For some reason, a shot of a spider running across the snow caused me to laugh out loud in delight.

The mystery isn't complex. Wind River is more engaged with the sorrow and horror of the murder, and of the plight of the Native Americans in general, and of Lambert's secret (to the viewer) source of sorrow, the last teased out only towards the end of the film. And Jeremy Renner gets to act again. 

And we remember how good Renner was in The Hurt Locker and how misused his talents have been in the Bourne sequel and those three Marvel movie appearances. He's at his best here expressing a sort of stoic pain. Elizabeth Olsen is solid as the fish-out-of-water FBI agent, as are Graham Greene as the tribal police chief and other actors playing police and citizens and oil-camp workers. Wind River isn't a great film, though in a marketplace dominated by bombast and CGI it's refreshing, much like a Junior Mint. Recommended.

Don't Go Back to Dunnville, Waste Another Year

Touch of the Past (1988) by Jon L. Breen: Pleasant, short mystery sees California bookstore owner and amateur sleuth Rachel Hennings try to solve the mystery of a murdered mystery writer who was obsessed with the year 1937. Red herrings abound, characterization is thin but tolerable, and more inside secrets of the used book trade would have been nice. Lightly recommended.

Crimson (2002) by Gord Rollo: Things start off promisingly in Canadian horror writer Gord Rollo's Crimson. Four boys in a small town (Dunnville, Ontario, to be exact) stumble across an ancient evil. Things get bad, fast. The novel jumps from 1977 to 1986 to the mid-2000's. The increasingly 'and-the-kitchen-sink' approach to the supernatural involves a certain number of homages to such superior 'children vs. ancient evil' novels as Stephen King's It (giant spider! kid wants to be a writer!), Dan Simmons' Summer of Night (evil scarecrow! kid wants to be a writer!), and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (the evil returns periodically!).

Rollo's time-jumps move the novel away from It and company and unfortunately into the realm of 'Why research anything when you can just fake it?'.  This is a novel set in small-town Canada in its first two sections, though there's nothing particularly Canadian about anything. Alas, section two involves a police investigation that starts off laughable and rapidly becomes ridiculous. 

Poor old Dunnville is left to fend for itself, except for the loan of eight officers from other towns, as a serial killer racks up a double-digit murder total in a couple of weeks. Really? It's 1986. Are there no TV stations, no newspapers that aren't local? Given the small size of Dunnville, one might think the province -- and the Ontario Provincial Police -- would be sent in to help. One would be wrong. Hoo boy. 

Then we jump to the mid-2000's, and an absurd prison sequence. Someone gets sent to a Toronto penitentiary for murders he didn't commit. And what a penitentiary! Not only is it worse than Shawshank Prison and the Turkish prison in Midnight Express put together, it's got an overall prisoner death rate that clocks in at about ten times the national average for that time period. Possibly 100X. Alas. Hey, there's an attempted prison break that involves a sewer pipe! There's an electric chair scene! Yes, Canada has brought back the death penalty because I'm not going to spoil how and why that happened! Rita Hayworth is on the Green Mile with It!

Section three also gives us a lengthy Basil Exposition sequence in which the terrible monster explains its entire life history and its cunning plan to its victim. Then, as the monster's supernatural powers consist of Whatever the Novel Needs Right Now, it hangs around to intermittently taunt our death-row prisoner for several years. It floats. Not down there, but up by the ceiling, invisible and inaudible and, given its decayed condition, presumably unsmellable to all but our hero. As its pointless electric chair plot moves to its climax, it's just hanging around laughing and laughing. It even steals our protagonist's last meal! Quel horreur! This is the worst monster in human history!

The novel climaxes with a twist that doesn't make much sense even when it's explained a chapter after that twist. Prior to that, we also get a explanation of What Hell is Really Like that reads like something Todd Macfarlane rejected for his Spawn comic, and which destroys all remaining shreds of the suspension of disbelief the novel has left. 

Some of the loopier supernatural elements might work in a novel that paid much, much more attention to the verisimilitude of its police and prison sequences. Though the villain, a centuries-old being who talks like an annoying bully in an episode of Buffy, becomes less and less interesting the more he talks. And talks. And talks. 

There's even a point at which the monster notes that it was known as Baron Bloodshed. This would make a lot more sense if it weren't known as Baron Bloodshed in Eastern Europe in the 14th century. If nothing else, the protagonist misses a chance for a real zinger by not asking if Baron Bloodshed is alliterative in whatever non-English tongue the monster was speaking at the time. 

Not all the problems are the writer's. A good editor should have suggested changes, especially to the second and third parts. And presumably suggested that a monster that never stops talking isn't a monster, it's just a bad room-mate. Not recommended.

Most Foul and Horrible

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (2008) by Kate Summerscale: The 1860 murder of three-and-a-half-year-old Saville Kent in the County of Wiltshire in Southwest England became the crime story of the year. It would echo in fiction and fact for decades afterwards in everything from pulpy mysteries to Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." Saville Kent's murder had it all -- a locked-room mystery, family secrets and grievances, possible sexual improprieties, class resentments, and the dead and befouled body of a child stuffed mercilessly into the holding tank of an outdoor water closet.

Kate Summerscale does a nice job of structuring her non-fiction book as if it were one of the British mysteries that the events actually helped shape. The murder brought one of Scotland Yard's first eight detectives, Jack Whicher, to Wiltshire to investigate the murder. Unfortunately for Whicher, not only had two weeks passed since the murder by the time he arrived, but a startlingly inept local constabulary had allowed key pieces of evidence to disappear.

The result would be a failure of investigation and prosecution that ultimately caused Whicher to retire and a murderer to walk free. But that's only the beginning of the story. In 1865, a new twist in the case would emerge to enthrall and disgust Great Britain again. And things didn't end there. By the conclusion of her book, Summerscale has unearthed more evidence to shed further light on the awful murder.

Summerscale's prose is mostly workmanlike as she keeps the focus on the facts of the case and the various historical and literary events swirling around it. At points, she actually works a bit too hard to keep from being academic: the text buries illuminating observations about the classic English mystery from Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin in the end-notes. 

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher argues convincingly for the murder and its aftermath's effect on English attitudes towards detectives, and for the shaping of the evolving English mystery novel itself. The 19th-century English legal system also offers some strange moments. And as Summerscale follows various people well into the 20th century, a mystery that seems to have been solved instead offers up more mysteries.

At the centre of the narrative is Detective Whicher, a brilliant man who is one of England's pioneers of investigation and forensics. Around him are arrayed gutter journalists and well-meaning constables, devastated family members and family members with something to hide, a governess whose odd behaviour on the morning after the murder almost ruins her life, a washerwoman who inexplicably hides evidence from the police, a publicity-seeking vicar, a rebellious teenager, and Charles Dickens. It's a rich story, convincingly told. Highly recommended.

Nevermore (1996) by William Hjortsberg: The 1990's paperback version of Nevermore was clearly designed to resemble the paperback of The Alienist, Caleb Carr's riveting 1990's murder mystery set in New York that combined real people (most notably Teddy Roosevelt and William James) with fictional characters in pursuit of a serial killer. The interior front cover/two-page illustration actually seems to have come from the same photograph as the cover of The Alienist. Hmm.

The resemblance mostly ends there: Hjortsberg does combine fact and fiction, but the mystery and the serial killer are only a part of what the novel explores. As with Hjortsberg's more famous Falling Angel (made into the controversial 1987 movie Angel Heart starring Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro), Nevermore is invested in mysteries and morality and the oddities of human nature, not in the prime importance of the aims and methods of detection.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle arrives in 1923 New York to begin his United States lecture tour on the Spirit World and his many attempts to communicate with the dead. Meanwhile, with vaudeville dying, Harry Houdini searches for a new money-making model for his magic shows while also waging a very public war against the mediums and spiritualists whom he views as being dangerous frauds. Despite their radical disagreement on spiritualism, however, Houdini and Doyle were friends. 

And a mysterious string of murders, each based on a different work by Edgar Allan Poe, soon seems to be working its way towards either Houdini or Doyle as the final victim.

Hjortsberg does a marvelous job of combining fact and fiction. He deploys a lengthy and detailed set of historical events and personages while keeping the novel light on its feet and often movingly dark and poetic. But Nevermore is also very funny at points. Nevermore's depiction of Houdini and Doyle makes them lively, fascinating individuals. And the sexy spirit medium who has dubbed herself Isis -- what's her game?

Nevermore is more of a novel with a mystery than a mystery novel. Still, it's satisfying in its fictional and factual elements. And you'll find out how a couple of Houdini's famous tricks were accomplished (though not all of the ones depicted in the novel). Hjortsberg even throws in a climax that's wittily movie-like. All this and the morose ghost of Edgar Allan Poe, visible only to Doyle. Highly recommended.

Southern California Dick

L.A. Requiem (Elvis Cole #8) (1999) by Robert Crais: The Southern California-set Elvis Cole hard-boiled detective series (well, soft-boiled -- Elvis is an emotional softy) always pays off in terms of tightly plotted, minutely detailed detective fiction, almost always with a large side portion of the procedural. There's a lot of procedural in this one, as the police and Cole investigate a murder together thanks to the power and influence of the victim's father. 

As was the case for several Cole novels, the only real drag is Lisa Chenier, Cole's love interest who sucks all the joy and energy out of the novel whenever she appears. It doesn't help that Cole suddenly inspires romantic obsession in a female L.A. cop in this one. Crais is at his best when delineating complicated investigations or dropping the occasional witticism. His romantic writing stinks.

L.A. Requiem stylistically  opened up the Cole series when it came out in 1999, mixing as it does the traditional first-person detective narration with third-person flashbacks involving Cole's hyper-competent detective pal Joe Pike and a number of other characters (including the killer) and third-person narration for events Cole is not present for. 

Overall, the novel's greatest strength lies in its depiction of the course of an investigation. The Los Angeles police are depicted sympathetically, for the most part, with a lot of nuts-and-bolts descriptions of just how a murder case is investigated. Good stuff. Recommended.

The Forgotten Man (Elvis Cole #10) (2005) by Robert Crais: Robert Crais explores L.A. private-eye Elvis Cole's tortured childhood in this novel, in which a man claiming to be Cole's long-vanished father is found murdered in an alley. As always, Crais's depiction of the details of an investigation is top-notch. The flashbacks are also fascinating, as are many of the supporting characters.

Crais also brings in a character from a non-Cole novel, Detective Starkey from Demolition Angel. She's a former bomb-squad officer forced into other police work after getting blown up. She's a fun counterpoint to Cole until she becomes romantically obsessed with him, a sub-plot that Crais used with another female cop in the earlier L.A. Requiem. And it's annoying here too. And while Cole is estranged from gal-pal/wet-blanket Lisa Chenier in this novel, she shows up just enough to put a damper on a number of scenes.

The novel is otherwise solid and twisty and thoroughly enjoyable. The indomitable Joe Pike appears, as does Cole's diffident pet cat. Crais opens up the narrative to third-person material not witnessed by Cole, who otherwise traditionally (for the hard-boiled detective) narrates in first person. The climax is thrilling, though it repeats certain plot elements from the earlier Cole novel L.A. Requiem. And the killer is fascinatingly depicted, though he shares a lot of similarities with the killer in L.A. Requiem. Maybe I shouldn't have read these books back to back. Recommended.

Investigations and Desecrations

The Treatment (Jack Caffery #2) by Mo Hayder (2001): DI Jack Caffery, London's up-and-coming police detective (that's Detective-Inspector to you), continues to sort through the accumulated trauma of his actions in the first Caffery novel, Birdman, while also sorting through 20 years of trauma caused by the abduction of his ten-year-old brother by a pedophile when Jack was eight. Caffery makes Inspector Morse look like the friendliest and most well-adjusted fictional English police officer in history. 

Mo Hayder works the horror side of the street in this novel. The criminals Caffery tracks this time around are pedophiles, some believed to be involved with his brother's disappearance and one or more involved with a case he's working on now. A family in a working-class area of Brixton was imprisoned in their home for three days while terrible things happened. The son is missing as the novel begins, while the father is in a coma in the hospital and the mother knows nothing relevant, having been imprisoned inside an upstairs closet the whole time while mysterious things happened downstairs. And Caffery's almost certain that another family may already be prisoners in their own home.

The procedural aspects of the novel are very well-done, from hunches to lab work to the sort of tiny mistakes that can have major repercussions. Caffery's personal trauma makes him a darkly sympathetic figure, especially as his brother's disappearance seems more and more to have something to do with the present-day case. Most of the supporting characters are nicely drawn, from the horrible and damaged female pedophile/victim Tracey Lamb to Caffery's partner, the almost Falstaffian lesbian DCI Danni Souness.

Caffery's girlfriend Rebecca, a modern artist and rape survivor whom Caffery met in the previous novel, is a bit more of a problem. She's certainly wacky, tortured, and interesting. But Caffery and Rebecca's relationship problems draw the reader away from the twisty coils of the main plot and its interconnectedness with Caffery's own past. I ended up skimming some of the later sections dealing with Rebecca. Bad me.

Hayder does have a totalizing tendency to link everything together in this novel. It's understandable, though perhaps a bit too glib simply in a plotting sense. The interconnectness is justified by Caffery's thoughts early on about pedophiles being like some sort of malign slime mold, all part of an enormous organism. But it's still a bit too pat.

As noted, the novel in its entirety shades towards horror in its graphic depictions (and less graphic suggestiveness) of terrible human evil. There are moments that suggest some sort of supernatural connection between Caffery and his lost brother, though these can be explained away. The central antagonist, known in popular lore as a troll who haunts the regional park, is one hell of a creation. And the novel plays fair with its revelations and plot mechanisms. Recommended.

Ritual (Jack Caffery #3) by Moe Hayder (2008): Mo Hayder notes in the afterword to this novel that she had no intention of telling any more stories about tortured English DI Jack Caffery. But return she would eventually. This time around we've got a second lead (police diver Phoebe 'Flea' Marley)  and a new location (Jack's moved to the Glastonbury area, having grown tired of London). 

But the horror elements remain in this police procedural, as Jack and Flea track down whoever it was that dropped a human hand into the harbour. Then another hand turns up. They're from the same person, they're fresh, and both were severed while the victim was alive.

Jack's a little less tortured by his long-lost brother's disappearance this time around, though not by much. Flea has been tortured for two years by the deaths of her parents on a deep-diving trip in Africa, their bodies never recovered from 'Bushman's Hole' in the Kalahari. She also feels guilt that she and not her brother should have been on the dive. The brother survived, unable to stop his parents' sudden plunge into the abysmal depths; Flea believes she could have done something, despite the fact that all deep-diving protocols suggest that had she done so, she would have died too.

So the two work the case, initially separately and, in Flea's case, unofficially. Evidence begins to accumulate that the homeless and the drug-addicted are being harvested for body parts and blood, part of some mysterious underground traffic in the more disturbing elements of religions from specific parts of Africa. Some witnesses report seeing what looks like a demonic South African familiar. And something that Caffery never quite gets a glimpse of is following the detective.

Ritual is quite sensitive to issues of acculturation and cultural appropriation when it comes to Africa -- as one academic says to Jack near the end of the novel, Caffery needs to realize that the term "African black magic" is a demeaning simplification that doesn't take into account the great number of different religions and cults on that vast continent.

Ritual plays fair with its information, though it posits connections among every character in the novel that stretch credibility by the end to just about the breaking point. Flea Marley is nicely drawn, with her own problems, though her growing infatuation with Caffery may soon become an even bigger problem. Hayder pares down Caffery's personal life -- he's left the girlfriend of the previous novel and now frequents prostitutes rather than get emotionally involved with other human beings. But he also begins to forge an initially curious relationship with a homeless wanderer dubbed The Walking Man, a relationship that's perhaps too gimmicky by half but nonetheless fascinating. Recommended.

Exorcising the Future

Looking for Jake and Other Stories (2005) by China Mieville, containing the following stories:

"Foundation" (2003); "The Ball Room" (2005); "Reports of Certain Events in London" (2004); "Familiar" (2002); "Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia" (2005); "Details" (2002); "Go Between" (2005); "Different Skies" (1999); "An End to Hunger" (2000); "'Tis the Season" (2004); "Jack" (2005); "On the Way to the Front" (2005); and "The Tain" (2002).

The lessons we're supposed to learn from many of these stories are so up-front, so undigested into narrative form, that Mieville sometimes seems to be earnestly auditioning for a socialist Twilight Zone TV series. "The Monsters are Due in Buckingham Palace."

Mieville is a fine writer. At novel length, the message becomes part of the narrative, for the most part, and effectively so, at least in the four novels I've read. So, too, the post-modernist tic of foregrounding the artificiality of the story throughout the telling of that story, which can be an annoyance in the longer works, but a minor one. 

Of the stories here, though, Mieville abandons both overt message and foregrounded artificiality only rarely. "Details," his much-reprinted story from an H.P. Lovecraft-themed anthology, is a brilliant piece of contemporary Cthulhu Mythos-making.  Its settings and characters are grounded in the normative and the mundane; its implications are cosmic and disturbing. I also quite like "The Ball Room," which subtly weaves questions about racial identity and immigration and corporate ethics into a sharp, smart horror story.

Of the other stories, "Jack" works best if you've had some experience with the world of New Corbuzan, that epic-steampunk city of three of Mieville's novels. "The Tain" and "Looking for Jake" are both (intentionally) attenuated, elliptical tales of existential invasion by mysterious forces from Outside. London falls, and not the one in Ontario, Canada.  

The rest are either funny and slight, grim and slight, or bleakly funny and slight. They almost remind me more of some of the more didactic short fiction of frequent Twilight Zone contributor Charles Beaumont than anyone else -- Beaumont of "The Howling Man," punching you in the face with allegory, inexplicably made more subtle for Serling's TV version of the story. Uneven but recommended.

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (1952): Sometimes one forgets how much social critique there was in the works of quintessentially American, quintessentially Golden-Age-of-Science-Fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov. Asimov never attempted anything resembling complex literary style and his characterizations could often be rudimentary. It really didn't matter unless one or both of those things are deal-breakers for a reader: the ideas were the thing, sometimes developed, sometimes simply spun off on the way to another idea.

The Caves of Steel is a remarkably seminal version of what we'd now call a genre mash-up -- the mystery novel and the science-fiction novel. On a crowded and somewhat dystopian Earth of about 1100 years into the future, someone murders a roboticist visiting Earth from one of the long-self-emancipated  colony worlds. 

This murder is bad for a number of reasons, not least of which being that the colony worlds are far, far, far more technologically and militarily advanced than Earth. Many -- both Terran and sympathetic Spacer -- fear retaliatory invasion, even though 'Spacers' as they're called by Terrans really hate spending time on Earth or among Earth humans, whom they seem to regard as being diseased and unclean.

So the New York City police commissioner puts Elijah 'Lije' Bailey, C-5 level detective in the New York City Police Department (though New York City now occupies pretty much all of New York State and New Jersey as well) on the case. But he'll have to work with a Spacer detective. That detective is R. Daneel Olivaw. The 'R.' stands for 'Robot.' 

Relatively primitive robots are being forced into the Earth work-force by the Spacers through pressure on the Earth's government, ostensibly to make the lives of Terrans better. Earth people tend to hate robots because they take people's jobs. But the Spacers have also refined robots over the centuries, relying on them as important parts of their relatively unpopulated worlds, making them in a wide variety of shapes and sizes -- including Olivaw's type, which can pass for human unless subjected to quite a  bit of specialized scrutiny.

The commissioner trusts Bailey's tact and his detective skills. Bailey may dislike both Spacers and robots, but he's got an open mind -- for a Terran. So off go Bailey and Olivaw, to solve a crime with no apparent physical evidence. The mystery is pretty solid. Bailey makes some mistakes along the way, and we're treated to more than one pretty good explanation of what turns out to be faulty reasoning. 

Was Asimov 'right' in his predictions? Well, probably not -- the assumptions made for why robots cannot kill human beings seem pretty ludicrous in the light of the last 60 years of computer evolution. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are an integral part of his long-lived robotic universe (by the time The Caves of Steel came out in 1953, Asimov had been writing about his Three Laws robots for more than a decade, and he'd keep writing about them until his death in 1992). They don't seem plausible now, at least in the sense that robots in Asimov's universe simply can't be programmed without the laws for reasons explained in the novel.

Asimov's hive-like, overpopulated Earth does seem a lot more plausible, especially after another 1100 years of resource usage. Asimov's future Earth lives on the constant edge of complete collapse due to resource exhaustion and an increasingly over-strained infrastructure. Earth has also undergone a sort of acculturated agoraphobia: human beings are afraid to go outside of the domed-in cities. So afraid that to Bailey, it seems reasonable to exclude the idea that a person could have walked across open land as part of the murder plot. 

It's a lot of fun to see Asimov explore the sorts of social conventions that might arise after hundreds of years living in a quasi-communal mega-city. The gender conventions of public washroom behavior become important in a world where 95% of all people only have access to public washrooms (or 'Personals' as they're called in the novel). So, too, does importance attach to some of the games played by teenagers on the massive moving sidewalks that move people around New York (and every other mega-city). Bailey's memories sketch in the peculiar, over-populated homogeneity of the future Earth throughout the novel: one such memory involves a trip to the New York City zoo to see sparrows, cats, and dogs. 

This Earth has been emptied out of almost everything that doesn't serve a purpose. The population's diet consists to a great extent of products made from a multitude of varieties of genetically engineered yeast. Petroleum has been exhausted. Uranium and other fissionable materials may soon be exhausted, as will coal. The powers that be discuss various forms of solar power, but no one has the will to build them. No one has the will to walk outside, much less the will to colonize new worlds or create and deploy new technologies.

There's a certain amount of serious thinking going on for a mystery novel -- about how civilizations fall, and about how their fall can be prevented. Both Earth and Spacer society need radical revision to survive. It's the robots that may be the key -- rational, cool-minded, and incapable of causing harm to humans. And Bailey and Olivaw would have more crime-solving to do. Highly recommended.

Arkham and Manchester

Ghosts Know by Ramsey Campbell (2011): What initially seems to be a horror novel soon turns into a murder mystery, with prickly first-person narrator Graham Wilde both the amateur investigator and the prime suspect. Wilde, the host of a Manchester call-in radio show when the novel opens, soon finds himself drawn into the world of "psychic investigators" and into the mysterious disappearance of a female teenager, Kylie Goodchild, who was ostensibly trying to track down Wilde on the night she disappeared.

Wilde's painful childhood has left him with anger-management issues that flare up verbally at unfortunate times. But he's also rightfully angry at a self-proclaimed psychic who inserts himself into the police investigation -- and then points the finger at Wilde, who's become a vociferous critic of such psychics. Wilde demonstrates on a couple of occasions the tricks people such as John Edward use to "read" an audience. And the psychic here, Frank Jarvis, turns out to be an especially odious charlatan whose tricks, Wilde believes with mounting frustration, should be transparent to all.

Campbell's use of first-person narration is solid here, and periodically leads us to question how much we actually trust Wilde and what he's telling us. Such narration also leads to a slightly different narrative voice for Campbell, whose off-beat descriptions of things have to be tailored to his narrator's relatively straightforward way of observing the world. Wilde is much more verbally inclined than he is to the visual, which makes perfect sense given his job.

The mystery aspect of the novel plays scrupulously fair with the reader. It helps, of course, to realize this is a murder mystery, but once one goes back to the relevant earlier sections of the novel, upon the revelation of the culprit, the whole thing has indeed been laid out fairly. There's a decent helping of humour here, both bleak and not-so-bleak. Wilde's callers sometimes seem to be completely addled, while Wilde, when angered, sometimes verges on Yosemite Sam-level outrage that he can barely contain.

As with many of Campbell's works, this one deals in large part with the scars, physical and psychic, of childhood, and the ways in which they have shaped the adults the children become. And one last twist towards the end of the novel comes like a kick in the stomach. Highly recommended.


　

The Watchers Out of Time by August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft (Collected 1974): Besides collecting and keeping in print the stories and letters of H.P. Lovecraft for 30 years at the small press he co-founded, Arkham House, August Derleth also published the work of many other fantasy and horror greats while also maintaining a thriving writing career himself. He's one of fantasy literature's most indispensable figures for Arkham House alone.

Derleth also extrapolated a number of stories from notes, fragments, and sections of letters left by H.P. Lovecraft. This collection actually lists Lovecraft as the primary author (as Derleth himself would have), though there's little here that's actually written by Lovecraft. And I've actually read enough pastiches and homages derived from Lovecraft's Commonplace Book to recognize a couple of examples here.

The bad news is that Derleth's odd love of italics, especially for the concluding paragraph of a story in which terrible things are revealed, is displayed here. Boy, I hate that, and I'm not alone.

The good news is that while Derleth lacks Lovecraft's weird imagination, he can sometimes make up for this with a superior sense of how to depict rural settings and rural residents. Derleth, a regional Wisconsin writer when he wasn't Lovecraft's posthumous Boswell, has a fine eye for natural description. Even a slight story like the first one collected here, "Wentworth's Day", benefits from that studied and accurate creation of an isolated rural world.

Other than a story or two too many about Lovecraft's Innsmouthian hybrid human-amphibians, this is a solid collection. It's also weirdly soothing, which is not something I'd say about Lovecraft's work. The one real debit here is that Derleth's last work, which gives the collection its title, appears here unfinished as it was on Derleth's death in the early 1970's. Given Derleth's own work finishing up Lovecraft, surely someone could have paid Ramsey Campbell or Brian Lumley -- two discoveries of Derleth in the 1960's who are still popular and active writers today -- to complete the story. Preferably without concluding italics and exclamation marks. Recommended.

Get on the Bus

Inspector Morse 1: Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter (1975): Before Inspector Morse became a beloved PBS franchise that would have its own acclaimed run of episodes and then two spin-off series currently on the air, it was a series of mystery novels by Colin Dexter.

This first installment shows Dexter's early brilliance in combining an American mystery trope (the hard-drinking, tarnished knight of a detective) with the enduring British trope of the detective story per: Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. Detective-Inspector Morse is moody, mercurial, and the highest of all high-functioning alcoholics. He solves crimes in and around the Oxford University area, which apparently has the highest murder rate east of Detroit.

In Last Bus to Woodstock, he teams up with stoic, salt-of-the-Earth Detective-Sergeant Lewis for the first time, a match made in heaven as Lewis remains grounded and methodical even as Morse's investigation wanders all over the map. Morse, erudite and self-pitying, almost blows the case, in part by doing something that would definitely blow the case if he did it and was found out in a contemporary investigation. Lewis puts up with insults and Morse's occasionally bizarre need to keep secrets from his own partner until he's proven right. Like many self-pitying people, Morse has an enormous ego and an attendant fear of appearing to be wrong or misguided.

But Morse is also devastatingly insightful, which explains why he's stayed on the force so long. He's also a lonely bastard throughout this first novel. Dexter's portrayal of both character and British police procedure is top-notch, and the novel never less than engaging.

While it's set in the relatively recent mid-1970's, the novel gives us a mystery that simply couldn't happen today thanks to changes in society and technology. It's a murder that relies to a great extent upon the difficulty of making a truly private telephone call in Oxford circa 1975. Lend it to your kids to show them what telecommunications was like in the Oldey Timey days. Skype would scuttle the entire plot. Highly recommended.

Did you drove or did you flew?

The Strange Files of Fremont Jones by Dianne Day (1995): Breezy mystery set in San Francisco circa 1905. Fremont Jones is a suffragette who leaves her wealthy family in order to experience personal freedom on the other side of the States. She sets up shop as a freelance typewriter. She types letters, documents, poetry, memoirs, and short stories for people who cannot type themselves.
Day started her career as a romance novelist, and this shows through in a couple of sequences, especially a somewhat hilarious sex scene in which Jones loses her virginity. Not content with having her character solve one mystery, Day has her solve three over the course of the novel. It's such an oddity of structure that I wonder if the novel started life as three short stories.

The best of the three involves a young writer who has Jones transcribe his three creepy short stories. The writer claims the stories are true, and when he disappears, Jones sets out to locate the sources of the stories. She also gets involved in a Chinese tong war, an attendant mystery involving her boyfriend, the mystery of her missing landlady, and the mystery of her mysterious downstairs neighbour. Is that four mysteries? I enjoyed the story, though some anachronisms creep in from time to time. Lightly recommended.