Walking on the Moon

The Best American Noir is a pretty sizeable sampling of hard-boiled stories that is largely very entertaining with a few real gems.  The editors, James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, argue at some length for a broad definition of noir.  This is not the sort of broad inclusion that means “anything we like is noir.”  Their definition is broad, but excludes more than it includes.  It is reasonable and they stick to it.  They include a few stories that are outside of my characterization of noir, but there’s nothing in here I would not feel comfortable defending as noir.

While sticking to a definition is all well and good, my point is that the stories in here are different enough that you never know quite what you will be getting.  That is largely good.  Any collection will have highs and lows, but this one has many more hits than misses.  And several of the hits are outstanding.

In particular, I found James Crumley’s “Hot Springs” to be breathtaking.  Every sentence seems cut like a diamond for maximum sparkle and precision of meaning, and each is integrated into a seamless propulsive narrative.  Brilliant work and I will be looking for more.  Elmore Leonard does not disappoint with his “When The Women Come Out To Dance,” a tour de force of dialog and spare prose.  Dennis Lehane’s “Running out of Dog” is atmospheric and sad, and Tom Franklin’s “Poachers” has a strong sense of place.

Several of the stories here are more experimental than noir’s usual reputation.  I thought Joyce Carol Oates’s  “Faithless,” Bradford Morrow’s “The Hoarder” and especially Christopher Croake’s “All Through The House” did unexpected things well.  Croake’s horror story told backward in time is particularly compelling.  I liked Harlan Ellison’s “Mefisto in Onyx” and Chris Adrain’s “Stab” less.  Even for the stories I didn’t like, it was more a matter of not being won over, not of thinking that the work was badly done.

As with many of the things I read these days, I read this on the Kindle.  I found the OCR to be noticeably bad.  Most stories have at least one word break that is confusing in them.  And Joyce Carol Oates’s name is misspelled – an “O” taken to be a “D”.  The prose quality is high enough that this was never more than an annoyance, but if you notice these things you’ll be annoyed.

Strongly Recommended.

J. R. Weil’s autobiography, “Yellow Kid” Weil: The Autobiography of America’s Master Swindler, is an interesting read for anyone interested in how confidence men live.  It is not about the mechanics of the cons, really, but about how a life of playing them played out.  To see the logistics of the  games and the world, check out The Big Con, to which Weil also contributed.

What struck me about the autobiography is how much of a toll this all seems to have taken on Weil, even when he does not really seem to admit it to himself.  He is in no way contrite about how he lived his life or made his money.  He never expresses any regret at having lied to people.  But, over the course of the book, the reader sees that the life of a confidence man has its stresses.

Most of those stresses seem to stem from not being able to get out of the criminal underground once you have risen to a certain point in it.  Weil tries to become a legitimate businessman several times in his life, only to be foiled by one of his buddies involving him in some scheme or other – often without his knowledge.  Weil does several stretches in prison, and while he does not characterize them in horrific terms, it is clear that he does not want to do it again.  Throughout the book he seems to be moving from one place that he’s burned a bridge to another in which he’ll burn one when he gets there.  It adds up to a difficult existence.

Not that he dwells on it.  There are plenty of high times, blowing money he swindled, rubbing elbows with the wealthy, or just carrying out another con.  And his joy in carrying out a con is evident.  He knows that the details on paper are just the details of lying to people to get their money, but his excitement at doing it well jumps off the page.  He delights in the small trappings and tweaks that make the general scam into a personal trap.  It is hard not to share his enthusiasm.

Other than the part where each chapter starts with who he is on the run from this time, that is.

A diverting read told with – I may rethink this later, but – honesty.

Strongly recommended.

For me, reading Pulphead was the experience of discovering a great new writer.  I know others have already realized that John Jeremiah Sullivan is a great writer – these pieces have all been out in the world in some form or another for a while – but for me this was a slow pleasant immersion in his thoughtful, personal, intellectual explorations of American culture.

The topics in Pulphead range from the nakedly personal –  an essay about his brother recovering from a traumatic brain injury – to the glossily fluffy – a description of a personal appearance by people on MTV’s Real World reality franchise.  The breadth of the topics is not remarkable; we live in a world of stunt authors willing to dive into unusual situations and drag a book out of it.  What is remarkable in Sullivan’s essays is how he invests himself personally and intellectually in each situation.  These are personal essays in the very best sense of the word.  He brings his unique perspective to each encounter fearlessly while balancing the personal with keen analysis, introspection, and consideration.  Each one is a compelling cozy conversation with an interesting thinker.

The range of topics encourages a range of tone, though, that shows off Sullivan’s range admirably.  He can be a surprisingly playful writer and each essay offers opportunities to show off different aspects of his style.  To his credit, these aspects are not the ones one might expect from the essay topics.  It brings a certain sense of discovery to each one.

While Sullivan works some of the same territory as Chuck Klosterman, they are very distinct writers.  I do suspect that Klosterman fans who have not read Sullivan are in for a treat.  As are readers who have not read Sullivan for any other reason.

Strongly recommended.

One of the interesting things about the Kindle store is that one can find a lot of work by very small authors in there.  I forget how I happened on Christopher Daniels’s  Teleport This, but I know I was looking for a science-fiction-flavored page-turner for light entertainment.  Teleport This fit that bill nicely.

Overall I would say that Teleport is a new writer working out his chops, not a virtuoso performance, yet.  While the plot was diverting, it was also fairly pedestrian.  The characters were distinct, but all likeable; I could sympathize with the villains.  While those elements were competently executed, I found the dialog to be very strong.  Daniels writes characters that are fun to listen to, in the sense that screwball comedies or Oscar Wilde characters are fun to listen to.  Their dialog is just stylized enough to be snappy while staying realiztic enough to be believeable.

Probably the biggest weakness is that the characters are all just a little too likeable.  As with Deadman’s The Art Of Arrow Cutting, everyone here is agreeable and reasonable, or they are a villainous caricature.

Fun to see a writer working out his voice somewhat.

Richard Bak’s The Big Jump does an excellent job telling much of the story of the creation and pursuit of the prize that Lindbergh was to win for the first solo crossing of the Atlantic from New York to Paris.  There’s a lot of specificity in naming the goal of the Orteig Prize, and one of the fascinating parts of this particular chunk of history is how that specific feat captured so much of the world’s attention.  It is an odd little niche of history and well worth the treatment Bak gives it.

You cannot tell this story without talking about Lindbergh, of course, but Bak admirably brings to life both the other daredevils seeking the prize and the man who established it.  Raymond Orteig found the challenge that would ignite not only the imaginations of the flyers who would try for it, but also of the public who would breathlessly watch it.  Bak is insightful in pointing this out.

Orteig is an interesting character, and in many other histories would be one of the most interesting players.  1920’s aviation had a bumper corp of remarkable folks in play, though, and Bak paints them all with some verve.  One-legged French aces, sparky engineers, and a self-promoter who sneaks himself onto a trans-oceanic attempt to duck out on his wife are only a few of the characters who drift on and off the stage illuminated by the prize.

There are certainly some things left out, and in many ways The Big Jump is like the Ortieg prize itself.  It generates interest in a great achievement, but there is more to do fully realize its promise.  Lighting that fire is an fine achievement.

Strongly Recommended.

When people hand me books, I tend to read ’em.  My Dad handed me this one when I saw him over Christmas break.  He’d been killing some time in a used bookstore and he liked the title.  It’s a great title to get you to pick up a book, so I see how it drew him in; Lewis Grizzard, the author, pulled it out of a country western song for just that reason.  My Daddy Was A Pistol And I’m A Son Of A Gun is also a great title because it sums the book up so well.  Grizzard’s father was larger than life, and their relation shaped him.

The title is so universally appealing that it is easy to imagine that the book is about fathers and sons in general.  It is not.  This is about a specific father and son, a larger-than-life engaging but eventually tragic drifter and his son.

Grizzard does a great job at getting all of his enormous father on to paper.  His daddy was such a man of extremes that most people trying to think about him would have to constrain themselves to one or two aspects, to write the man into a caricature.  Grizzard manages to give a fully realized picture without pulling a punch or failing to give credit.  Getting something like that right in your own head is hard enough; putting explaining it to someone else on paper is much harder.

He looks at his father’s influence on himself with the same clear eyes.  Again, clearly sizing that up and presenting it honestly is a feat.

All that would only be interesting to Grizzard and maybe a mental health professional except that Grizzard writes an entertaining yarn.  This is entertaining in the best sense of that word – diverting and interesting.  This is a great story told to keep an audience listening.  The yarn is much more than a shaggy dog story, but its told with the rhythms that hold a listener’s interest without exhausting their patience.  Being honest and engaging simultaneously is Grizzard’s great achievement here.

Strongly Recommended.

Sam Kean takes the Periodic Table as a loose guide for a series of stories about the unusual things we know about the elements and how we found them out.  There’s some promise that this is a book about the periodic table and its history, but that falls more and more by the wayside as the book goes on.  From a writing perspective the table is as much a McGuffin and an organizing principle.  How that affects your enjoyment is largely going to be a function of how much you wanted to know the table’s story.

Kean’s writing has two excellent features.  He can clearly and intuitively explain science and he can bring scientists to life.  His discussions of the discoveries that people have made are plain enough that one can follow them easily, but keeps enough of the complexity that the reader understands why they are discoveries.  That balance keeps the reader’s interest up without losing them in the details.  Secondly, he does a great job at making the scientists distinct and memorable with a few anecdotes.  Several times he reminds the reader of a person we haven’t talked about in a couple chapters with a pithy summary of the person’s character that brings them immediately back into focus without the feeling that you’ve been studying for a test.

The periodic table is a broad subject, even when taken strictly.  Just understanding why the thing is laid out the way it is and what it says keeps physics and chemistry students busy for weeks.  If you throw in a historical discussion of how we figured out the layout, there’s quite a bit to say.  Kean doesn’t say all of that.  In fact, he strays from the details and evolution of the table itself pretty quickly, branching into other areas of physics, chemistry and the people who do them.  If you are interested in that in-depth exploration, you will be disappointed.

I was not disappointed.  The topics and discussions are connected and intriguing.  Though Kean never goes into the secret origins of the periodic table in obsessive detail, everything he talks about rhetorically connects.  He started from the table, and stays connected, so there’s always a way to where we started.  And the trips are interesting and informative.

Strongly recommended.

I first read this collection of Larry Niven’s short stories sometime in the early 80’s.  I’ve always enjoyed Niven’s short work.  It’s direct, speculative and interesting, everything I look for in SF.

This collection includes several of his stories where he extrapolated the societal changes that cheap ubiquitous teleportation would bring.  It is fun to see how many of those speculations held even though communication more than transportation won the race.  Flash crowds are now communication artifacts, but were put forward by Niven in his teleportation stories.

The other thing I noticed was the strong sense of 1970’s California that pervades the stories.  Several times I understood a place reference or an attitude reference I’d missed before, because I’ve lived in California for a while.  While the gender politics is enlightened for the times, the biases of the times are also present.

Overall these are entertaining, thought provoking stories.  Recommended.

Tony Horwitz has picked a remarkable subject for this history.  His claim that Brown’s tactically laughable attempt to mount a series of slave insurrections in 1859 was strategically brilliant is well taken.  The raid both galvanized abolitionists in the North and convinced the South that Northern public opinion was widely united against them.  Horwitz goes into detail because while many Americans know of the attack, few know any details.  It is fascinating to understand how one lone fanatic catalyzed the largest and most violent social change in American history.

Horwitz does not quite make the situation understandable, but he does lay out Brown’s history and actions clearly.  Brown is a largely unremarkable 19th Century American who is monomaniacal about abolition.  Though driven to act, his limitations as a marginal leader and planner prevent him from forming a directly feasible plan.  Furthermore, even the infeasible plan is pretty poorly executed.  Yet the history of secession and abolition run through the raid.

He also shows that the times were on abolition’s side. In another time, Brown’s raid might have been taken by the South as proof of that abolitionists were a violent fringe group without support or skills and by the North as evidence that abolitionists were unhinged radicals whose methods were unconscionable.  Brown’s powerful, theatrical martyrdom steers the reaction away from those possibilities.  While Brown is clearly not someone who can plan an insurgency, he can die operatically for a principle, and that makes all the difference in his legacy.  So does the overall shape of national opinion at the time.

Outside of the introduction, Horwitz does not tie Brown’s legacy to recent martyrs.  McVeigh, the 9/11 terrorists, and many others who have launched doomed attacks to further their beliefs have been largely unsuccessful in impelling events toward what they believe to be righteous. I’d like to hope that is because those people were misguided fanatics; but that’s how many would have characterized Brown in 1845. There are evidently times when bold and doomed violence changes the world – sometimes for the better.  While Brown’s story does not in itself tell when those times are or why it is so, it captures a clear case to study.

This is an interesting, well told history that makes you think.  Strongly recommended.

I’ve been aware of Max Allan Collins’s love of PIs and skill at writing them since following Ms Tree in the 1980’s.  While I don’t follow mystery writing closely, I see he’s earned a bunch of honors in the field.  Ms Tree was some good stuff, so when I ran across Chicago Lightning: The Collected Nathan Heller Stories for cheap on Amazon, I had to give it a look.

In his introduction, Collins claims to be more novelist than short story writer, and these stories bear that out.  They’re all solid pieces of genre fiction, told with a bit of panache, but none of them blows me away.  However, these stories are presented chronologically from Heller’s perspective but were written decades apart.  There is a clear, interesting character evolution going on in the background – that is, in the Heller novels – that is reflected in these stories.  That kind of organization and attention to detail makes me think that Collins has characterized his writing strengths clearly.

Lightning does have its pleasures, one of which is the meticulous research Collins brings to each story.  Most of these stories are historical fiction, with Heller interacting with real people and events of the day.  Historical detective fiction is a nice trick, and Collins breathes life and credibility into a setting that is often mythologized. The short stories don’t give him quite enough space to completely make the time his own; the veneer of fiction over the true crime reports is visible in some.  Still, as with the continuity and changes between time periods, there’s enough here to whet my appetite for a novel.

Overall this is a tantalizing introduction to an author and a character I will certainly seek out again.

Recommended.