Jeff Grubb's Blog, page 25

Plague Books: Baker Street Blues

The Baker Street Jurors by Michael Robertson
Provenance: Here's a secret - Amazon has a free bookstore available in one of its buildings.
OK, it isn't much of a secret, since it was mentioned in an article in the Seattle Times a few years back. And I don't know if it is still there, particularly in these Pandemic times. And what it is is a room with a lot of publishers copies that have been sent in for review for, like the Amazon Book Review that no one else claimed. So it is more of a "free giveway table" situated on one floor of a building that I will not divulge. And it is for Amazon employees, since you have to use your keycard to get in. Many of the books available are bound galleries (Here's the text, but we don't have a final cover or front matter") or Uncorrected Proof ("Here's the text and what we THINK is the cover, but we need to go through it one more time"), so they may not be the finished production you see at the B&N. 
But, hey, free books.
I hit the library few times and, to be honest, found it pretty picked over. I don't know if they restocked every Monday or what, but is had a scattering of SF, a lot of memoirs, some popular fiction, and a good selection of mysteries. Mysteries were well represented, and on a whim I picked up a copy of The Baker Street Jurors there.
And, spoilers, I didn't care much for it at all.
Review: I've nattered on about genre more than a few times to different degrees in this blog. How it is ultimately a marketing term - "If you liked X, you'r like THIS!", How it accumulates its own ancestors (Verne, Wells, or Shelly may have "invented" SF, but none of it was WRITING it when they composed their well-known works). How it changes over time ("Horror becomes Paranormal Romance", or most recently, we've see the mitosis of Fantasy and Science Fiction into two separate sections of the book store.). I don't HATE genre - I'm a big practitioner of it myself - but I do recognize it for what it it.
Well here's another rule about genre - when a genre gets big enough, it starts spawning off sub-genres. Mysteries is a great example. There are cat mysteries, dog mysteries, medieval monk mysteries, feminist mysteries, food mysteries, cozies, police procedurals, ancient Egyptian mysteries, dark Scandinavian mysteries, urban mysteries, and supernatural mysteries. Each of these subgenres may attract general "mysteries" crowd, but they are spot-targeted on appealing to a particular sort of buyer looking for a particular kind of story.
So. Sherlock Holmes mysteries. It it is a successful subgenre in its own right. stepping outside of books, look at the amount of TV shows and movies that have spawned off Holmes over the years, but that's a subject for a different rant. Heck, we have secret Holmes stories, young Holmes stories, lost Holmes stories (like the year he spent after Reichenbach) and even here in this blog, retired Holmes stories.
Baker Street Jurors, and the other books of the series (and yes, it is a series, another hallmark of genre), has an initially tangential connection to the Holmes oeuvre. Its protagonists are lawyers whose offices are at 221B Baker Street. And that's the initial connection. Within this fictional universe, like ours, Holmes is a created character, but that doesn't stop them from getting into Holmes-related mysteries.
In this case, one of the lawyers is summoned to jury duty (Yes, it is a conceit. Would YOU want a lawyer in a jury you were presenting to? But, this is Britain). He ALSO gets a jury summons for Sherlock Holmes at the same address. He bins the second one as a joke, but then, a long, hawk-nosed lanky violinist shows up for the jury duty, looking very Basil Rathbonish. And they are both assigned to the same case, which is a high-profile murder of a famous cricket-player's wife by a famous cricket-player with his famous cricket-playing bat. The game is afoot!
OK, there are conceits in this game. But then, in the midst of the proceedings, they decamp the jurors to the quote-scene-of-the-crime-end-quote. And then jurors start, um, dropping off, in shades of Agatha Christie and her Ten Little Indians (which would be Twelve in this case, plus spares).
Not great, but not criminal, in a writing sense. And the protagonist, Nigel Health (Brother Rory is off on a honeymoon) is fairly likable and a positive character. No, what irritated me about this book, and so irritated me that I kept it on my desk until I could properly dispose of it, was this: Robertson is not playing fair by the reader. If, in a mystery, you say something like "It couldn't possibly be an evil twin", then no matter who says it, you are reassuring the reader that the solution does not involve an evil twin. If the resolution of the crime then proceeds to be, "Ahah! It was an evil twin!" well, yeah, people are going to come after you with cricket bats.
And that's what happens in BSJ. No, not evil twins, but something similar, which left me a little put out. I can put up with the matters of coincidence (like how the guy that looks and acts like Sherlock Holmes ended up on the jury), but this is an outright fib to reader. And that's pretty much a violation of a core concept of mysteries. 
*Deep Breath*, and I've had this volume tucked away behind my monitor for several years waiting for me to get around to dunning it. And now that I have done so, I can safely put it into a box and inflict it on someone at a library sale. 
And feel, somehow, liberated.
More later, 

Life In the Time of the Virus - The Abyss Yawns

Automat by Edward Hopper 1927
Month Eight. 

Things are getting worse in the outside world. You knew it was coming, those of you were that were paying attention to how these things work. As we move from summer into fall, people move indoors, so spreading the virus is easier among groups. As a result, we are spiking, both here in King County and across the nation. A spike happened during the winter months in the Great Influenza a century ago and is happening here.

We are better prepared, the disease is more survivable, and vaccines and treatments, while still unproven, are promising. But hospital beds are filling up again and patients are being airlifted into Seattle from overloaded states like Utah and Idaho. The Federal Response remains abysmal, and the states are once more left to shift for themselves. It is the sort of thing that everyone was aware was in the works, but nothing much was done, so we confront another potential seasons of lockdowns, self-quarantines and shifting away from voluntary semi-isolation to a more hard-edged version once more.

[And over the course of writing this, news comes that we are shutting down further. No small gatherings. No meals in restaurants. No museums. Not a complete lock-down, but still extremely severe and stronger than any time since March. If I knew of a better way forward, I would definitely suggest it, but I don't.]

Of course, in the midst of this there was an election. Look elsewhere on this page for all the commentary therein. On election day, I turned down the media, social and otherwise, and retreated into a book. Unfortunately, the book was a Mary Beard volume on Rome, detailing its slide from sort-of-a-Republic into full-fledged authoritarianism, so probably it was not the most relaxing choice. I shifted over to a collection of Nero Wolfe stories about halfway through the evening.

I think that the sense of quarantine and isolation may be more pronounced as we move to the winter months, which in the Puget Sound means grey, rain, cold, the rare snowstorm and the occasional high winds. We had been eating out (or sending out) for food more of late, and that may get cut back if the restaurants have to reduce again. 

All work in on-line and with video chat, and while that keeps me going, the lack of in-person relationship and general haranguing is felt. Meetings in conference calls are usually for a purpose, and less for just messing about - talking about the latest professional sports game, the latest computer game everyone is playing, the latest movie. We do an on-line happy hour once a week, which is very good, but still does not match the sudden digressions into medieval trade practices that once marked the middle of my work day.

Pro sports teams are playing to empty stadiums with piped-in crowd noises. The newspaper is a slender thing, lacking a lot of its advertising. Catalogs, however, have made a comeback, and the Post Office has been loading the mailbox with the pre-holiday crush. And I am getting spam robocalls (Currently Kate from the Warranty department wants to get in touch with me. A lot.), so they have returned to their natural habitat, at least.

But I miss live theatre. I miss museums. I miss bookstores. I miss going to new restaurants. I miss sudden decisions to go shopping. I miss sushi. As it grows chiller, I miss sitting on the beneath the new deck, watching the daylight linger..I miss sunlight late into the evening, and soft rains that clear by morning. Now comes the winter of our discontent, lacking a glorious summer in the immediate future.

More later,

Plague Books: A Pirate's Life For Me

Fast Ships, Black Sails, Edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, Night Shade Books, 2008

Provenance: NorthWestCon. Gotta be NorthWestCon. Night Shade had a table in the Dealer's Room that year, one of the few publishers that did. It has been a source of trade-paperback-sized volumes in my library over the years.

Review: I have a soft spot for the Age of Fighting Sail. It shows in Spelljammer. It shows in the world I pitched that never was. And It shows in a short story I wrote for Oceans of Magic. I've read/listened to the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian, but never really got any traction with Hornblower or the Bolitho series. So Pirates? An easy sale for me. 

And this collection of pirates definitely scratches the itch. I have space pirates. I have fantasy pirates. I have alt-world pirates. I have cyber-pirates. I have poetic pirates. I have a surprising amount of cannibals. And most of them are pretty darn good.

One of the challenges in a pirate story, or any story in the Age of Fighting Sail, is that the sailing ship is the most complex machine of its age. Naval architecture was precise and unforgiving, and the the operating system consisted of the living crew who had to operate in co-ordination to keep things from going hull-sided up. Even operating a ship was a challenge and a craft, much less fighting to the death with another of these complex battle-wagons.

And there is the romance of the sea, of foreign lands, and of the promise of treasure and riches for those who who can bear up, and are fortunate. The 18 stories here range from pure fantasy to alternate histories to horror in tone, and most of them are pretty good. The best from my opinion was "Araminta, Or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake" by Naomi Novik, but a lot of the tales take on a distaff view of the historically (though not exclusively) male-dominated profession of piracy. A couple of the tales, did feel like the background music was "Brandi, you're a fine girl". Kate Sparrow's "Pirate Solutions" features hackers with historical and mystical piratical connections, with nods to Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Howard Waldrop and Michael Moorcock are here with name recognition, though Waldrop's is a mashup of Gilbert and Sullivan with Peter Pan, while Moorcock's contribution is a vignette, at best. Elizabeth Bear/Sarah Monette roll out a Cthuloid space tale with "Boojum", and Paul Batteiger does a nifty bit of worldbuilding with an ice-bound world in "Cold Day in Hell" which smacks of a Patrick O'Brien tale (on skates). 

The only story that left me cold was Steve Aylett's "Voyage of the Iguana", which seeks to take the terminology and jargon of the old salts and make it completely impregnable. I think it was humor, but the shot was wide and failed to take down any rigging. Rhys Hughes drops a shaggy dog story in "Castor on Troubled Waters", but that was forgivable. All in all, a good collection, nicely paced and well-put-together.

And it has just a hint of spray of sea salt on it.

More later, 

The Political Desk: Last Call

 So, how did things turn out?

Not horribly at all. Not everything went the way I recommended, but that's the nature of having an election - they let all sorts of people have their say. There have been a number of interesting wrinkles, including the fact that the late ballots in the State of Washington have been more Republican, when normally the last-minute surge has been urban and Democrat. Other notes as we will go through.  

Referendum Measure No. 90 - Approved  by healthy amount.
     Right before the election I got a robo-call against the measure that was positively frothing at the mouth about how it was a horrible things because it would do all sorts of thing that the measure specifically said it was not going to do.
Advisory Vote No 32 - All REJECTED by healthy amounts. 
    Which goes to show you that 1) They still don't matter, 2) Their wording is pure scare-tactics, but 3) We really hate taxes, even if it does not affect us directly. But those of you who were running a multi-billion dollar aircraft assembly plant in your basement as a side gig, the voters of Washington State have your back.

Engrossed Senate Joint Resolution No. 8212  - Rejected    

  This one is a surprise. I thought this one, to help fund elder care, was a no brainer. THIS ONE, I believe, has teeth to it, so as a future old person, I'm interested in seeing what happens next. 

harter Amendment No 1 - Inquests - YesCharter Amendment No 2 - Disposition of Real Property for Affordable Housing- YesCharter Amendment No.3 - References to Citizens - YesCharter Amendment No. 4 - Office of Law Enforcement Oversight - Subpoena Authority - YesCharter Amendment No. 5 - Making the King County Sheriff an Appointed Position - YesCharter Amendment No. 6 - Structure and Duties of the Department of Public Safety - YesCharter Amendment No. 7 - Prohibiting Discrimination on the Basis of Family Caregiver, Military, or Veteran Status - Yes
Proposition No. 1Harborview Medical Center Health and Safety Improvement Bonds - Approved. 
President and Vice President of the United States: Joseph R. Biden and Kamala D. Harris.
    At 9 AM, our neighbor sounded an airhorn, which usually he uses for Seahawk touchdowns. That was the point that the AP declared that PA flipped and declared Mr. Biden the winner (it doesn't work EXACTLY like that, but its the way it has been done all the way along). My Facebook page is filled with co-workers and former colleagues dancing in the streets. Looking at the big picture, it doesn't look as much like a refutation of the GOP as a refutation of the horrible man who has squatted in the White House for the past four years. But that's enough, right now..
United States Representative Congressional District No. 9 - Adam Smith.
    I did get a couple robo-calls on this one, encouraging I vote for someone who stood for people, not party (which this year means being a Republican but not wanting to admit it). Problem was that it was for the 8th District, not the 9th (The Democrat won there as well). Way to spend your campaign bucks, folks. 

Governor: Jay InsleeLt. Governor: Danny Heck 
    This was a no-lose situation with two Democrats in the running, and the winner had the best yard sign of the season "Give Olympia HECK!". But what is interesting is that there was a 20% write-in, most of it for Joshua Freed, GOP, who ran for Governor in the Primary (and lost), and who is in trouble for funny-money business in his funding (so, you know, GOP). But it is phenomenally tough to run a write-in campaign, even when it is all mail-in. So that's worth noting.

Secretary of State: Kim Wyman. 
    Here's one I can't say I'm sad to be wrong about, even though Ms. Wyman is a Republican. She has done a very good job in a position that a lot of her party hates. The GOP tends to hide behind her pant-suit cuffs when they need to point to an "honest Republican", but she has proved herself capable and competent repeatedly over the years. 

State Treasurer: Mike PellicciottiState Auditor: Pat (Patrice) McCarthyAttourney General : Bob FergusonCommissioner of Public Lands: Hilary FranzSuperintendent of Public Instruction: Chris ReykdalInsurance Commissioner: Mike Kreidler
Legislative District No. 11 State Senator: Bob HasegawaLegislative District No. 11 Representative Position No. 1: David HackneyLegislative District No. 11 Representative Position No. 2: Steve Berquist
State Supreme Court Justice Position No. 3 - Raquel Montoya-LewisState Supreme Court Justice Position No. 6 - G. Helen Whitener
Superior Court Judge Position No. 12 - Andrea RobertsonSuperior Court Judge Position No. 30 - Doug North
And with that, we slap the Political Desk back into its cryogenic chamber and let it rest until the next set of ballots come out.
More later,

Meanwhile, in America ...

Go Vote.

Plague Books: Stark Sixties

Richard Stark's Parker:The Hunter, Adapted and Illustrated by Darwyn Cooke, IDW Publishing, 2009

Richard Stark's Parker: The Outfit, Adapted and Illustrated by Darwyn Cooke, IDW Publishing, 2010

Richard Stark's Parker: The Score, Adapted and Illustrated by Darwyn Cooke, IDW Publishing, 2012

Richard Stark's Parker: Slayground, Adapted and Illustrated by Darwyn Cooke, IDW Publishing, 2013

Provenance: Loaned from Stan! Brown.

Review: Real good. Lemme give you the backstory.

Author Donald Westlake wrote under a wide variety of pen names to match his various styles and markets, and one of the most successful was Richard Stark, who penned a long-running series about Parker (no other name given, may not even be his real name), a successful career criminal. Parker specializes in large scale heists, then lives well off the proceeds for a few months, until the bank account drops and he goes back for another score. He ties not to kill innocents (there is a lot of knocking people on the head and tying them up), but needless to say, he ends up killing a lot of not-so-innocents. The books have been wildly popular and turned into various movies over the years.

Artist Darwyn Cooke, who passed on in 2016, has a distinctive and unique style. I always connect him with New Frontier, a DC series from 2004 but set in DC's "Silver Age" of the early 60's. In both instances he has a clean, open style and an incredibly dynamic handle on action. When Stan! lent me the books, I did not expect to see how much he translated the novels into wordless action sequences where every beat landed and carried the reader from one panel to the next.

Back to Parker of the moment. He's the guy you're rooting for, in part because the people he is up against are so much worse. He's ice-cold and callous on the job so he can relax later. In his stories, Parker is on the job, and then gets betrayed, and then gets revenge. That's the basic plot of  both The Hunter (the first of the books by Stark) and The Outfit. When I read The Hunter, it tickled a memory of an old movie with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickenson.. Point Blank. And yep, it is based on the novel. 

 In many ways, Parker is kinfolk to the Continental Op, who lives on the other side of the lawful divide. Parker lives in that twilight world of crime, where everyone is a little bit crooked, and a lot of the crooks don't even think of what they do is criminal. Maybe they drop off a briefcase. Maybe they make a call. Maybe they wait by the track for someone to make a call. They are cogs in the greater machine. They don't do well, but they get by.

And then someone gets greedy, or stupid, or crazy and it all goes to hell. In The Hunter, one of Parker's confederates betrays the rest of the crew and leaves Parker for dead - he gets revenge. In The Outfit, someone sells Parker out to help himself, and Parker brings down the entire organization on the other side. In The Score, Parker puts together a crew of people on a chancy job against a mining operation in a box canyon. In Slayground, an armored car job goes casters up and Parker is trapped in an shut-down amusement park as gunmen hunt him. Slayground also has a short backup story - The 7th, which collapses an entire novel down into a double-handful of pages without losing much of the plot. 

And Cooke is brilliant in the art. His command of the medium is perfect as wordless panels show as opposed to tell. He works with the black and white medium with its long shadows and silhouettes and makes it sing. And he gets down into the weeds of the procedure of the crimes and counter-crimes and he explains it all, summarizing the challenges and opportunities, laying out how things are supposed to go and how Parker crashes the party. His character's best weapons are knowledge and understanding of the human condition - he can kill without remorse but also knows how to calm down his targets.

Cooke also situates the work squarely in the 60s, with Esso stations and road maps and cars with big fins, Tiki decor and night clubs and risque matchbook covers. Angular clothing for the men and soft tight-fitting curves for the women. This is lightyears away from New Frontier in its darkness and brutality, but has that same openness of line and sense of hope that the Kennedy era spawned. 

Cooke passed on in 2016, so there will only be these four volumes, but that will be enough. It is strong enough to make me look for the old Stark novels themselves when I can get into the used book stores again. Or even dig up a Lee Marvin movie.

More later, 

Plague Book: Baker Street Boys

 The Final Solution, A Story of Detection by Michael Chabon. HarperCollins 2004

Provenance: From the collection of John (Sacnoth) Rateliff. John notes within the book when and where he purchased the book, and when he read it. IN this case, it was purchased from Borders' Books on February 5 on 2005 and finished the next day, when it was raining..

Review: Short novel, but for me it proved to be a long read.

I think this slender book can be entered as evidence into the argument of the difference between Literary Fiction and Popular Fiction. Chabon has set up his shop in this borderland, with tales that sound like Genre Fiction. The Yiddish Policeman's Union is Alt-World SF, Gentlemen of the Road is Historical Fantasy, Yet I won't dare to say he elevates the genre so much as applies Literary Fiction techniques to what might otherwise be popular fare.

Here the story is a Sherlock Holmes story. Holmes is never identified as anything other than the old man or the detective, retired and tending to his bees. It is in the heart of WWII and the ancient detective comes up on a young boy, a mute refugee from Europe, who has a grey parrot. The parrot recites numbers in German. No one knows what the numbers mean, but it could be important, which in turn kicks off a number of other things, including the theft of said parrot and a murder. 

Chabon's style is ... ornate, bordering on baroque in places - thickly layered and crossing back on itself, so I am often reading a single paragraph as second or third time to figure out what I missed. His pacing, as in Gentlemen of the Road, is a stone skipped across a lake surface - each chapter involves a direct change of scene, time, and often narrator, and it takes a while for the mental gears to catch and the reader to understand what it going on. 

From the genre side, the author plays fair with the reader - the clues are presented in a fashion that when the reveal is made, it does note require knowledge the characters might know but was denied to the reader. From the literary side, the tale is much more about in interior lives of the characters - the detective, the police, the inhabitants of the house where the young mute boy resides, even the parrot itself Even the curiosity of the the parrot is not revealed to the characters inhabiting the book, but the reader is rewarded with a hint of what is truly going on. Holmes does not solve that particular mystery, but it is not one he is charged with solving.

The illustrations, by Jay Ryan, are good, weaving the text itself into the art. I've noticed this with a number of short books - is interior art a value-added for such short volumes, to make up for the lake of tonnage in the page count itself?

It does occur to me that I have been more successful listening to Chabon's books on audio than actually reading them. The text does flow if read by someone who knows what is going on, though I still need to back up occaisionally in case my mind wanders and I miss something.

More later, 

The Political Desk: The Jeff Recommends

So, this has been a marathon. How did we do? 

Well, the pledge of "No Republicans" was pretty easy to adhere to, in that some of the Republican candidates were SO BADSOME that such a choice would be easy even in normal years. But the fact that the state and managed some really choppy times of late and come out mostly whole has shown that the folk in charge at least have a clue. And it would be a good thing that expand that out to the rest of the nation. Here's the summary:

Referendum Measure No/ 90 - Approved
Advisory Vote No 32 - Approved
Advisory Vote No 33 - ApprovedAdvisory Vote No 34 - ApprovedAdvisory Vote No 35 - Approved

Engrossed Senate Joint Resolution No. 8212  - Approved 

harter Amendment No 1 - Inquests - YesCharter Amendment No 2 - Disposition of Real Property for Affordable Housing- YesCharter Amendment No.3 - References to Citizens - YesCharter Amendment No. 4 - Office of Law Enforcement Oversight - Subpoena Authority - YesCharter Amendment No. 5 - Making the King County Sheriff an Appointed Position - NoCharter Amendment No. 6 - Structure and Duties of the Department of Public Safety - YesCharter Amendment No. 7 - Prohibiting Discrimination on the Basis of Family Caregiver, Military, or Veteran Status - Yes
Proposition No. 1Harborview Medical Center Health and Safety Improvement Bonds - Approved. 
President and Vice President of the United States: Joseph R. Biden and Kamala D. HarrisUnited States Representative Congressional District No. 9 - Adam Smith
Governor: Jay InsleeLt. Governor: Markos LiiasSecretary of State: Gael TarletonState Treasurer: Mike PellicciottiState Auditor: Pat (Patrice) McCarthyAttourney General : Bob FergusonCommissioner of Public Lands: Hilary FranzSuperintendent of Public Instruction: Chris ReykdalInsurance Commissioner: Mike Kreidler
Legislative District No. 11 State Senator: Bob HasegawaLegislative District No. 11 Representative Postion No. 1: Zack HudginsLegislative District No. 11 Representative Postion No. 2: Steve Berquist
State Supreme Court Justice Position No. 3 - Raquel Montoya-LewisState Supreme Court Justice Position No. 6 - G. Helen Whitener
Superior Court Judge Position No. 12 - Andrea RobertsonSuperior Court Judge Position No. 30 - Doug North
So, if you haven't voted, go vote now. Vote like it matters, because it does. See you after the 3rd.
More later

The Political Desk: Judges

In Washington State, we elect our Judges. I'm good with that, and it is part of the direct democacy that works for us. And I say this fully admitting that a LOT of positions don'r even have two candidates in them. I will only cover those that have compeititve races here.
When I recommend Judges, I keep a tab open to VotingForJudges.org, which does a nifty job aggregating the important endorsements for the various positions. Unless the candidate in question has other black marks against them, I tend to listen to it. It has served me well, and should work for your locality.
State Supreme Court Justice Position No. 3 - Raquel Montoya-LewisState Supreme Court Justice Position No. 6 - G. Helen Whitener
Superior Court Judge Position No. 12 -  Andrea RobertsonSuperior Court Judge Position No. 30 - Doug North, though his opponent, Carolyn Ladd, also gets extremely high marks. This is a toss-up, but I give it to Judge North based on his experience. 
Finally, we sum up.
More later, 

The Political Desk: State Legislature

Ah, now we are down in the weeds. These are the folks we are sending to Olympia for part of the year to sort things out. Even if you are voting in Washington, you might not know these folks. They are pretty good, and gives me hope for politicians. 
Legislative District No. 11 State Senator: Bob HasegawaLegislative District No. 11 Representative Postion No. 1: Zack Hudgins Legislative District No. 11 Representative Postion No. 2: Steve Berquist
Bob Hasegawa has no opposition this time. Congratulations, Bob Hasegawa!
Zack Hudgins versus newcomer David Hackney. I'll be honest, both are good, and this is one of those races where we will get fine service regardless. I go back and forth on this, but ultimately  I will go with Zack Hudgins - he's been sending out newsletters.
Steve Berquist is a teacher who went to Olympia because they were slack on teachers in the State House. And he's done a good job. Let's keep him.
That's it for our State Legislators, at least the ones I can elect. 
More later,