Month: March 2024

Girl Waits with Gun (2015) by Amy Stewart

Good Reads meta-data is 408 pages, rated 3.77 by 31,854 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Yankee 1914.

Verdict: Pluck galore. 

Tagline: Conny got her gun. 

When in 1914 the arrogant and not very bright young company town mill manager, drives his new-fangled auto-mobile into Constance Kopp’s horse drawn carriage outside Paterson New Jersey, he meets a woman who fights back. Barely stopping he refuses to acknowledge fault or pay compensation, and buzzes off.  Constance (Connie to me) doesn’t take ‘No’ for an answer and pursues him by fair means or foul for restitution. 

He retaliates, so unaccustomed is he to being held responsible for his stupid actions as a rich man’s son, he ignores her and then turns even uglier.  The town police have no interest in challenging the son of the owner of the town in all but name, but the county sheriff has his own reasons for taking up the case.

Escalation follows as the young man’s threats take the form of bricks and bullets, and the sheriff, seeing in Constance someone who is constant, gives her shooting lessons against the final solution.

In the course of digging into the owner’s many other misdeeds, Constance is reminded of one of her own. Ahem. Not all is as it seems among the three Kopp sisters living alone on a farm outside of town.  There are a lot of back- and side-stories. [Yawn.]

Nonetheless, justice is done, though less because of the sheriff’s considerable efforts, and the dire risks Constance took, than the revulsion of the manager’s family at his criminal actions. Bit late in coming that. Without the family behind him, he was suddenly alone. Very neat but a long time in coming.  

The time and place are well realised and the characters are differentiated from the repellent plutocrat to the cross-pressured sherif and the sisters themselves alike but different.  First in a series: Miss Kopp Won’t Quit, Dear Miss Kopp, Kopp Sisters on the March, Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions, Lady Cop (Kopp) Makes Trouble, Miss Kopp Investigates, and counting.

The Lantern’s Dance (2024) by Laurie King 

Good Reads meta-data is 300 pages rated 4.54 by 759 litizens. 

DNA: Holmes (attenuated).

Tagline: … [can’t think of anything].

Verdict: Number 18 in the series and it shows.  

Mr and Mrs Holmes of Baker Street are at it again. Mary Russell may be Mrs Holmes, but the absent and deceased Irene Adler remains the love of Holmes’s life, now personified in a son from that brief and sinful liaison. Holmes has to rescue Son and then Son has to rescue father.  Then Mary Russell has to explain it all to them.  

Despite the turbans and lascars inconspicuously getting up to no good in rural Provence, this is a Holmes family reunion. And like most family gathering where the participants have nothing in common but blood, it is b-o-r-i-n-g.

To bring the generations together several laws of nature are set aside.  The plot is a kaleidoscope that must have been worked out by Barry Jones in one of his maze flow charts.  Turns out Holmes is Indian or Sikh, a Swami, or something. Dunno lost the plot. There is very little detecting and much musing.  

Ahem, I can’t let that high score on Good Reads pass without a comment. I wonder if number 19 in this series appeared as 200 blank pages, would it get a similar rating. The author has a loyal following that sees what it wants to see. This book will not add any new adherents to that happy crew.  

The Master and the Margarita (1967 [1928+]) by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)

Good Reads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.29 by 364,380 litizens 

Genre: Fantasy, satire

Tagline: The devil you say! Yes, I do. 

Verdict: Trip without arrival.

A conversation in public park between two savants – one a pompous professor and the other a prosperous poet- is interrupted by a distinguished gentleman who intrudes to correct an assertion the professor made, namely that there was not an historical Jesus. Oh yes, says the interrupter, there was and proceeds to recount Pontiac (spellchecker bite) Pilate’s interview of this man, a telling that does not quite accord with the gospels, but these, according to the professor, are indeed fiction. But the gentleman named Woland insists his account is true, because he witnessed it!

Thus the pair suppose Woland to be a lunatic. But we readers, thanks to the blurb, know better.  He’s a charming devil and that is the literal truth.  In the translation I read, there are many references to the devil and to god.  How did that sit with the Comrades at the time, I wonder. Had they not yet become godless communists?

The stories thereafter proceed in parallel as we find out more about Pilate and witness the superficial corruption of the new approved artistic elite of Moscow who are beguiled by prestidigitator Woland whose entourage include a large talking cat with a taste for vodka and a witch with a Boeing broom stick for flight. 

The Master and Margarita (the Qantas broom stick was late arriving) only enter in the second act and through many trials and tribulations (see above) they achieve a certain kind of survival in limbo, resonant of Dante’s Purgatorio.   

The book has a varied and vexed publication history.  It was written over a period of years, and in regime thaws parts of it were published with heavy censorship, while several samizdat versions came and went, but it was not until 1967 the version I have was published.  I read this same version shortly after publication as a student and recall liking it, although on this reading I found the string of incidents tedious since there seemed to be no purpose but the string itself.

Titanium Noir (2023) by Nick Harkaway 

Good Reads meta-date is 236 pages, rated 4.06 by 4,705 litizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: UK.

Verdict: Enough, already! 

Tagline: All show, no go. 

Our hero gets caught between the Titans and, well, other Titans.  These titans really are big, and one can only become a titan with the wealth of an Arab oil sheik.  Think of them as bodybuilders on the ultimate steroid. They are the 1% who own the government, police, media, and ….  When one of them is murdered, who you gonna call?  Someone who can’t say no, that’s who: a Tiny investigator with gum on his shoe and chip on his raincoat shoulder.

The murdered Titan was an odd ball, even, or especially for a Titan, and Investigator spends a lot of time and adds to the body count unravelling the deceased’s past.  How did such a schomo get to be a Titan?  And what was he up to once he became?  And what does cage fighting have to do with it? All good questions.

The plot is outlandish, to say the least, but the pace, the dialogue, my curiosity kept me reading, but – warning – the author seems to think ‘noir’ means keeping the reader in the dark. Much of the dialogue is cryptic and incomprehensible. There are pages and pages of pointless banter filling out the bulk. Passing points are laboured and pivotal plot points flash by.    

It is sold as noir but I would say it is more nihilism than noir. Part of a series, but this one is probably enough for your reader to ingest (but not digest).  

Balzac as He Should be Read (1946) by William H. Royce

Good Reads meta-data: it is listed without any details. It has 48 pages.

Tagline: Useful.

Verdict: A gem.  

A retirement project I once had in mind was to read in sequence Honoré de Balzac’s La Comedie humaine. I made a false start more than a decade ago and got bogged down in one of his novels that was epistolary, letters between two sisters, which was boring. He must have needed the francs per word and spun it out.  The reading I did then was in publication order, which is not the sequence in which his grand comedy of life fits together. 

The difficulty at that time was compounded because the Rocket e-Book reader of the day did not make it easy. The text was there but not word wrapped on the screen.  That made a considerable difference to my surprise. Moreover the only available digital editions were out of copyright Victorian translations that were censored and stilted

To begin anew, I needed a kick start, and this little book did it.  In case a reader does not realise why a spark-plug is needed, please note that more than ninety (90) stories comprise the whole, and many of those are full-length novels. Balzac was a Niagara of words. 

Royce offers three suggestions about how to immerse oneself in Balzac’s waters.  One is to read in publication order as I tried. Royce himself rejects this because in subsequent editions, Balzac manipulated the sequences to suit the growth and interaction of the 2,450 characters he created on the page.  The time of publication did not coincide with the overall narrative which grew in all directions, including backward.  Ergo to read a novel published in 1840 set in 1840 before one published in 1842 with many of the same characters set in 1830 when they were younger convolutes the narrative in favour of the publication date.  Balzac often birthed characters at age 30 or 40, and then later went to back to them when they were younger.  Eugène de Rastignac appears in nearly thirty of his novels at different ages.  Needless to say these thirty were not published in chronological order of Rastignac’s age. (See Anthony Pugh, Balzac’s Recurring Characters [1974] for pedantic detail.)

Second is by the order of events dated in the novels and stories and this he offers to the reader with the gargantuan appetite for the whole.  Let it be noted that Balzac is largely consistent on dates within each novel and refers to an event or person that can be dated in nearly every story.

Third, embedded in that chronological list Royce bolds the titles of twenty novels that he deems the core of the Comedie humaine.  That is a much more digestible banquet, and since long ago I read The Chouans, Père Goriot, the Wild Ass Skin, The Unknown Masterpiece, and Cousin Bette which were included in that twenty, I had a running start with this selection.  Assuming those six I went to Amazon to find a Kindle version of the next novel: Une Ténébreuse Affaire. It has many titles in English but none are available for Kindle. 

While confirming that absence, Amazon began besieging me with other titles, and I bit on one which I will comment on later.  Suffice to say here that it is a biography (not of Balzac) but of seven of his principle characters. It was an intriguing idea and I have started on it to my satisfaction. More on this later, if you are good.

Personal indulgence. The first Balzac title I read was Père Goriot in high school for an AP World Literature class. The other Balzac’s I read in college for a similar class. What do students read today in high school classes?  Comments welcome.   

I went through Maison de Balzac in 1980, but all I can remember is that there was a secret backdoor through the rear garden that he used to escape the creditors and bailiffs when they came in the front door, usually by kicking it in. He moved around a lot and used false names to elude debt collectors who were legion.

Royce’s long out print book came into my hand thanks to Katester’s perspicacious insight in making it a Christmas gift.