The Bookwoman's Last Fling

Cliff Janeway, once a Denver homicide detective, now the owner of a used book store, travels to Idaho to appraise and investigate a rare book collection for the estate of a recently deceased racehorse trainer.  The books were assembled by his late wife, the bookwoman of the title, who died from her peanut allergy many years before.  Now it turns out that some of the valuable first editions have been stolen and replaced with cheaper reprints, and there are some people who wonder who fed her those peanuts in the first place.

I first became aware of John Dunning's series of Janeway mysteries back when I was working in a bookstore myself; booksellers in particular were interested in the series, for obvious reasons.  The character of Janeway reminds me vaguely of Robert Parker's Spenser, if only because they share a certain erudition you don't always find in hardboiled detectives.

This particular volume combines the book mystery with the horse racing setting, à la Dick Francis, whom I also love.  Can't go wrong with that, even though I did guess the villain about halfway through purely from the Law of Conservation of Characters.

Originally posted at MySpace on 6/22/06

The Girls Who Went Away

I've been on a nonfiction kick lately.  I normally read medieval history and a little biography, so this study of unwed teenage mothers who gave up their children for adoption between World War II and the Roe v. Wade case in 1973 is sort of out of character for me; especially since I am quite possibly the least maternal woman on the planet.  You wouldn't think I'd be at all interested in stories like these, but I found the book unexpectedly absorbing.

The author, Ann Fessler, is an adopted child herself, as was her own mother.  The book starts and ends with her own story of finding her birth mother, but the largest part of the book is based on hundreds of oral histories she recorded.  They have a lot in common; a recurring theme is that these girls weren't given a choice.  A lot of them went to homes for unwed mothers where they were treated like dirt, and a lot them believed in their own worthlessness for years afterwards, sometimes all their lives.

When I was looking for a gynecologist after I moved to this town, the first one I called told me up front that she doesn't prescribe birth control pills.  I've been hearing a lot lately about Catholic hospitals refusing to give rape victims emergency contraceptives, and Christian pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for the Pill--sometimes not even giving the woman her prescription back, so she could take it to another pharmacy.  I really don't want to see this society take a giant leap backwards to the conditions described in Fessler's book, but I wonder which way we're going sometimes.

Originally posted at MySpace on 6/16/06

Eight of Swords

Warren Ritter is not a typical hero for a murder mystery.  For one thing, "Warren Ritter" isn't his real name, and is only one of several he goes by.  He's been living under the radar for thirty-odd years, ever since his activities as a political radical and leader of the Weather Underground went sour.  These days he doesn't really have to work for a living (one of his identities had the foresight to invest in Microsoft a couple of decades ago), but to keep busy he reads Tarot cards on a street corner in Berkeley, California.  The book gets started when his reading for a random young woman is filled with warnings, and later that same day she is kidnapped.

The author, David Skibbins, has written a second book featuring the same character.  It's also named after a Tarot card: High Priestess.  With 78 cards in a Tarot deck, he's got the possibility of a really long-running series ahead of him; it'll be interesting to see if the character of Warren Ritter/Richard Green/Dave Ellbruck et al. can support such a series.  The character is the best thing about the first book, Eight of Swords; he's not only a fugitive with understandable paranoia issues and a deep distrust of authority, he's also got rapid cycling bipolar disorder.  The supporting characters of his paraplegic hacker love interest and his octogenarian therapist are equally intriguing.

Originally posted at MySpace on 5/23/06

The Advocate

In mid-fifteenth century France, young lawyer Richard Courtois (played by equally young Colin Firth) leaves behind the decadence and corruption of the big city to live a more authentic life and do some real good in the country town of Abbeville, only to find himself embroiled in defending a woman accused of witchcraft, a farmer who killed his wife's lover--and a pig accused of murdering a Jewish boy.

I enjoyed this movie, but I'm not sure what to make of it.  I ordered it on DVD for the library where I work after the IMDb featured it as their movie of the day; their review remarked that the courtroom trial of the pig is a real giggle to watch, and I figured that any movie with Colin Firth naked couldn't be a total waste of time.  A couple of other reviews I read treated it as a farce, or a satire, and a lot of it was pretty funny.  I particularly liked the exchange between Courtois and the local priest, Albertus, played by Ian Holm, after Courtois learns that Albertus coerces women in the confessional to sleep with him:

Courtois:  Hell must be full of priests.  
Albertus:  Can't move for 'em.

But the overall tone is really too dark for comedy.  Interesting film, though.

Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

This book by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart was recommended to me by a coworker at the library.  I really had no familiarity with the story; I like to read history for fun, but the Gilded Age is not a time period I'm usually interested in.  So I wasn't previously aware that Alva Vanderbilt, a granddaughter-in-law of the famous "Commodore" Vanderbilt, pretty much forced her daughter Consuelo to give up the man she was in love with and marry the Duke of Marlborough instead.  I certainly didn't know that both Consuelo and (oddly enough) Alva went on to become pioneering feminists, active in the British and American movements for women's right to vote.

The author makes a good case that Alva's conversion to the suffragist cause was not as out of character as it might seem in light of the way her social ambitions led her to decide her daughter's future without regard to Consuelo's wishes.  This is mostly a well-written book, though it's the author's first and the style is occasionally repetitive.

Originally posted at MySpace on 4/4/06

The Postman Always Rings Twice

A lifelong drifter finds a reason to stay put for a while when he sees the gorgeous young wife of the man who offers him a mechanic's job.  She thinks he's pretty swell too.  But if they're going to be together they'll have to find a way to remove the only obstacle: her husband.

Let me admit up front that I have never seen the movie with Lana Turner.  I'll have to look it up now, and see how it's different from the book; a lot will depend on whether they made it before or after the institution of the Hayes Code, I reckon.

The book is pretty steamy, in that 1930s elliptical way.  The sex is not described, but you're left in no doubt what's going on.  There's nobody to like; the two principals are both pretty sleazy.  I guess that's the point.  But the book is so well written it kept me flipping pages.

Originally posted at MySpace, 3/25/06

V for Vendetta

I read V for Vendetta, the graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, a long time ago.  It knocked me flat.  I picked up my own copy some time in the late nineties, when the bookstore where I worked at the time got hold of some remaindered paperback copies of the then-out-of-print book.

When I saw the movie it pretty well knocked me flat too.

I noticed the obvious changes from the source material.  As every single article and review about this movie is compelled to mention, Alan Moore had his name taken off the credits--and he's getting more publicity for that act than he would have gotten for being the credited original writer, though I don't suppose that was his point--presumably because the movie is so different from what he wrote back in the 80s.  For the most part, I think the changes work, and I didn't miss the excised characters and subplots too much.

Hugo Weaving does a fabulous job as V.  It's got to be a tough assignment for an actor, spending an entire movie hidden behind a ceramic mask, but he carries it off well, defining the character with voice and body language.  Natalie Portman does an equally fabulous job as Evey, and is convincing as both the passive media flunky at the start of the movie and the tough bald chick who has to decide whether to flip the switch on the explosives at the end.

I do wonder how one man in an oppressive totalitarian society could manufacture and arrange to have delivered some 200,000 Guy Fawkes masks.

Originally posted at MySpace on 3/20/06