Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 41

The Silent Speaker by Rex Stout

The Silent Speaker by Rex Stout

There’s a large cast of suspects in the eleventh Nero Wolfe mystery with everyone seeming to have a bone to pick with the murder victim. To make things worse, there really are no clues (at least no clues that the reader could be expected to pick up upon) to identify the culprit. What there is is a missing recording cylinder which may or may not help to identify the miscreant.

 

So, in other words, it’s a typically impossible Nero Wolfe case, but what makes this mystery stand out above others is that Wolfe gets mortally offended twice—a dead person on his doorstep (so to speak) and a new Homicide Inspector who is determined to go after Wolfe with rubber hoses. It’s a fascinating case which brings Wolfe places I never expected him to go.

 

Destroyer 53 Time Trial by Warren Murphy

Destroyer 53 Time Trial by Warren Murphy

It’s hard to come up with a truly fresh plot in a series with more than fifty books in it, but Murphy accomplished exactly that in Time Trial. Remo and Chiun get pulled back in time while investigating advanced weaponry near a Mayan ruin in the jungle. In fact, they get pulled back 5000 years where they become involved in the events that begin the Mayan calendar and find themselves the pivotal players in determining whether the young Mayan people will survive or be snuffed out by the Olmec. Now I won’t pretend there is any actual history in this story, but it is an enjoyable adventure with a lot of action and some interesting problems.

 

Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg

Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg

This is a classic Silverberg novella which I have been planning to read for a very long time. It’s a sad but beautiful story of a man from 1984 who has been pulled into the world of the fiftieth century—a strange place where people spend their lives sightseeing recreated wonderous cities of the past. He has fallen in love, but the woman he is in love with abandons and hides from him leaving him to determine the problem that has grown between them and find a way to bring hope to two lives in the far future. It’s really a lovely tale.

 

Nolyn by Michael J. Sullivan

Nolyn by Michael J. Sullivan

This novel shows why the back of the book blurb is so important. It can whet your appetite for the novel, but it can also set you up for disappointment. That’s what happened to me with Nolyn. The blurb set me up for an exciting fantasy military adventure—and there’s enough of that there that I was glad I read it. But it was also misleading, because in the first sixty or seventy percent of the novel, roughly two-thirds of the prose was devoted to a storyline focused on a woman whose child has been kidnapped—and that really wasn’t military at all. It wasn’t a bad storyline, but I resented it because in tone and style it was nothing that I had been led to expect in this book.

 

That being said, the last third is great—truly interesting—as are the opening chapters on the military problem. It’s an interesting book and I’m ultimately glad I read it, even if I feel a little misled by the blurb.

 

Lost Worlds of South America by Edwin Barnhardt

Lost Worlds of South America by Edwin Barnhardt

Edwin Barnhardt is Great Courses principal expert on the native peoples of North and South America, and in this volume he walks the reader through a primer on the ancient peoples of the far south—people who appear not to have crossed the Bering Land Bridge and who had to invent agriculture and everything else that comes with a civilization all on their own. They were isolated from the rest of the world and had no models to follow—not that that slowed them down. Barnhardt’s tour of these ancient peoples is absolutely fascinating and I quickly discovered that I knew almost nothing about them—especially pre-Columbus. It’s an extraordinary world that we’ve only scratched the surface of.

 

The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen

The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen

This is the first Ellery Queen mystery and I was a little bit surprised that Ellery was only a supporting character in the story—THE supporting character as it turns out, but not the person whom we follow throughout the case. The mystery is top notch—a murder happens in the middle of a theatrical performance and Ellery’s father, Inspector Queen, has to figure out who committed the crime. The biggest clue, as suggested by the title, is a missing top hat, but how it is supposed to lead to the culprit is by no means obvious.

 

The first fifth of the story sets up the crime and provides the boundaries of the investigation in a very enjoyable fashion. Then we get down to brass tacks and try to figure out who killed a lawyer with an increasingly bad reputation. Lots of people hated the man and as the Queens discover, lots had reasons to fear him.

 

The gimmick of the Ellery Queen mysteries is that each book carefully provides all the clues needed to solve the crime—who done it and why? I figured out the “who” in this one, but not because of the clues. I figured it out by thinking about how mystery writers plot stories and using this totally unfair technique I correctly identified the culprit—but not how the murderer committed the act. As the Queens narrowed in on the culprit, I went a step further and figured out how the hat was gotten out of the theater (that was done fairly) but I couldn’t have explained anything else. Yet, when the Queens explained it, I felt that I had been given every chance to solve the crime.

 

One additional thing needs to be mentioned, This book was published in 1929 and reflects the prejudices of the 1920s. At times, interactions and other facets of the story will make a modern reader cringe as I’m sure we would do nearly constantly if we ever traveled in time back to the Roaring Twenties.

 

The Bering by Sean Flynn

The Bering by Sean Flynn

Ever since I read The Perfect Storm some decades ago, I have been interested in accounts of real-life catastrophe. (Heck, maybe it really goes back to those “Scouts in Action” articles in Boy’s Life Magazine.) The Bering fits well into this proud tradition, recounting the sinking of The Ranger Danger in the winter in arctic conditions. It’s frankly remarkable that anyone was able to be rescued. That so many survived boggles the mind.

 

Flynn interviews many of the rescuers and the survivors in this podcast and it’s impossible not to be moved by their experiences. You can’t catch the emotion in a voice on the printed page, but when you hear these people describe their struggles and how the crisis is still with them today, it’s utterly remarkable

 

A History of India by Michael H. Fisher

A History of India by Michael H. Fisher

I think that India proved to be too vast and complicated for a single Great Courses Text. Fisher gives a good try starting in prehistory and going to the present day, but I always felt like he was jumping around and rarely making connections between his topics. The first sixteen lectures are a highlights reel of events before the sixteenth century. Then he slows down a little, but I still felt like we were leapfrogging through history trying to cover just a smattering of events in the last five hundred years. The best part of the course focused on the twentieth century—especially when Fisher looks at India and Pakistan after they win their freedom from Britain. If nothing else, Fisher shows just how complex the subcontinent and its peoples truly are.

 

Black Orchids by Rex Stout

Black Orchids by Rex Stout

I like the shorter Nero Wolfe mysteries even more than I do the full-length novels. They’re obviously more compact and that makes me feel like I can digest them more quickly and that deludes me into thinking I have a better chance to figure out who committed the crime—not that I came anywhere close to doing that in either of the two mysteries in this volume.

 

The heart of the first story is the black orchid of the title—someone has bred a perfectly black orchid and Nero Wolfe wants it. He is so obsessed that he actually leaves his home to go to the flower show and try to wrangle the flower from the owner. So Wolfe is on the scene when the murder happens and he is finally motivated to solve the crime when he figures out that his payment can be the orchids he so desires.

 

In the second, a woman is being libeled to the harm of her business and she wants Wolfe to put an end to it. Once again, Stout comes up with a great plot that would have been interesting even without the murder that always occurs somewhere in a Wolfe case. The clues were all there, but I didn’t come anywhere close to solving this one either—not that that dampened my enjoyment. It’s watching Wolfe work that makes this series so special.

 

The Odyssey of Homer by Elizabeth Vandiver

The Odyssey of Homer by Elizabeth Vandiver

I’ve read The Odyssey more frequently than I have The Iliad. It’s always been primarily an adventure story for me and in addition to the text, I’ve enjoyed reading about the places that might have inspired the fabulous lands discovered in this poem. What Vandiver does in this Great Courses book is give you the substance behind the epic that makes it clear why this book has resonated with audiences for millennia and why the ancient Greeks turned to it again and again as a guide to proper behavior. For this is a book that explores in remarkable depth the meaning of what modern audiences would call proper hospitality. It also, and I’m shocked I never picked up on this on my own, depicts what happens to a land when all the fathers go away to war and never come back again. This is a wonderful exploration of one of the all-time great works of literature and is worth listening to again and again.