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October 2, 2009
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TGIF
I spend a lot of the work week just craving time to read. My vision of the ideal weekend always involved hours and hours spent doing nothing but reading and reading and reading. It rarely turns out that way, as life has a way of intruding, but it's still a dream--one based on a memory of childhood bookwormness.
Was recently asked by a friend for recommendations for thrillers and/or murder mysteries, the kind you can't put down and that make you want to stay up all night reading. He mentioned a preference for Donna Tartt, Conan Doyle, and P.D. James -- all of which will do that.
A partial list of what I recommended:
--Anything by Wilkie Collins, creator of what the Victorians nervously called "sensation fiction" and to my mind our first and best thriller writer (sorry to fans of eighteenth-century gothic fiction or Poe--Collins is It to me). Particularly recommended are the novels he wrote during the 1860s, when he was coming out from under Dickens' suffocating mentorship and before the opium addiction had addled him overmuch: The Woman in White, The Moonstone (considered by critics to be the first full-blown mystery novel), and No Name. That last one never gets much credit; the other two are the ones you always hear about. But for nail-biting page-turning screw-work-and family-and-sleep reading experiences, it doesn't get better.
--Anything by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. I could never get into the American analogues--the hard-boiled stuff. But I love the way Christie and Sayers read like a Forster novel run amok. They are mannered and observant and enervated in that genteel, post-Victorian way, while still being most murderous and most rigorous re: detection.
--More Donna Tartt. She's slow, and so far there's only The Little Friend, which is sort of like Harriet the Spy meets Carson McCullers with whiffs of Flannery O'Connor floating about. Tartt's first novel, A Secret History, is set in a thinly veiled version of Bennington College, where Tartt began the book as an undergrad, and where she pays much homage to the sociopathically privileged, drugged out and casually violent literary world of Bret Easton Ellis, who also began his career as a student at Bennington, and to whom, if I am not mistaken, Tartt dedicated The Secret History. Her second novel feels a bit closer to home--Tartt is a Southern writer before she's a campus novelist, and it's fun to see her framing her relationship to her predecessors by way of a novel about a girl who winds up getting way in over her head with the secrets and crimes of adults.
--Speaking of Southern writers, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which invented the "true crime" genre at the same time as it invented literary nonfiction (or the "nonfiction novel" if you prefer). A wonderful read, and more so when you do your homework and sort out how he gathered his information, where he took his liberties, and how very much help he had from his dear lifelong friend Nelle, who we now know as Harper Lee. I'm a bit of a Capote freak, so I will also recommend The Grass Harp, the Gerald Clarke biography, and the two films, Capote (Oscar-winner with Philip Seymour Hoffman) and, less well known but also very good, Infamous, with Sandra Bullock.
--I forgot to mention Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, so I will mention it now. This is a lesser-known Victorian novel by an Anglo-Irish ghost story writer with tremendous capacities for generating suspense and dread. It began as a short story parable about Irish landlord-tenant violence of the 1830s, and then evolved into a more accessible, saleable novel, scrubbed of its brooding allusions to provincial Irish violence and pitched to a mainstream English audience. Still accessible today--and to my mind, far more interesting when you excavate the history of the text, and the history the text evokes. But then, I'm a sucker for nineteenth-century Irish history.
--Also mentioned: Dickens' Bleak House, Charles Palliser's The Quincunx, and Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost.
More recommendations welcome.
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Comments:
I don't usually read mysteries/crime novels, but here are a couple I thought were exceptional:
1)Andrew Klavan's "True Crime," which is about a very hackneyed subject--an innocent man who is about to be executed and the cynical newspaperman who is trying to save him. Klavan really makes it work, though.
2)Evan Hunter's "A Matter of Conviction"...from the late 1950s or early 1960s; embodies naive liberal thinking about crime but very very well written.
Josephine Tey, especially The Singing Sands and the odd but justly celebrated The Daughter of Time (in which her detective, convalescing from an injury in hospital, becomes obsessed with the flaws in the popular picture of the villanous Richard III).
Sharyn McCrumb's Appalachian novels. She says she's not a mystery writer but they're mysteries. My favorite is She Walks These Hills. Several plot lines, some funny, some poignant, some horrifying. It's a good read.
...My daughter and I attended a book signing that she did in Memphis, when If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him came out. (That's another good read. When is arsenic poisoning not poisoning with arsenic.) She gave an interesting talk, during which she said that you can't make anything up. Anything you think you have made up, no matter how outlandish, somebody has done somewhere. I think about that every now and then.
Don't forget Elizabeth George.
For murder mysteries that are also beautifully written, check out Arnaldur Indridadson. Four or five of his books have been translated from Icelandic to English, and it's interesting to see what he does with the genre when almost no one in his country ever gets murdered.
Here are two of the best mysteries ever written: The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull. Can't tell you anything about it without giving too much away.
A Case for Three Detectives by Leo Bruce. Locked room murder mystery. The local constable, Sgt. Beef, takes one look and says he figured out what happened, but before Scotland Yard lets him get the arrest warrant, three of the greatest detectives in England (modeled after Lord Peter, Poirot & Fr. Brown) arrive to "help" him solve the case.
One that might stretch the genre a bit, but not too much, and is well worth reading is Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg.
(Erin, have you read any of these? From what you described that you like, you'd probably enjoy them.)
Also I don't usually read Stephen King but I gave his Dolores Claiborne a try and thought it was pretty good. Some of Thomas H. Cook's books are hauntingly good. When he's on his game, he does foreshadowing better than anyone else in the thriller-mystery genres.)
If your friend is interested in non-fiction, Miles Corwin wrote two absolutely riveting books about his experiences following LAPD homicide detectives, Homicide Special and The Killing Season. Also in the non-fiction category, try Under and Alone by William Queen (ATF agent infiltrates motorcycle gang.) And for incredible suspense that starts to grab you slowly early in the book and just builds and builds, there's Witness by Whittaker Chambers
I second Laura's Sharyn McCrumb recomemendation. I found out about her from a reference in one of Greil Marcus's books, and if you're into Southern gothic or American folk culture, they are engaging novels.
Mark Haddon's wonderful *The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time* is also un-put-downable. Its mixture of a detective structure with a tense family drama, a coming of age story, and an attempt to enter the mind of a boy with autism is not only artistically successful but strikingly humane.
For non-fiction, I've got a strange recommendation. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors recently edited *A New Literary History of America*. It features essays by scholars, novelists, non-academic researchers, and artists. None of the essays is jargony and none is more than five pages. Covering 1400 to the present, it is cultural history in flashes of lightning, bursts of energy in the formation of American culture. Anyone interested in the writings that made America, from the Jesuit Relations to Anne Bradstreet's poetry to Linda Lovelace's autobiographies, will find it engaging and insightful.
Erin, have you tried Dan Simmons' _Drood_? It's a lengthy, but interesting work. I wouldn't quite call it a mystery--maybe an opium mystery. He makes Wilkie Collins the narrator and Dickens is a prominent character. I know enough that Simmons gets lots of details correct, but I don't know if he's just getting a few details correct and fudging everything else. It's an entertaining read.
Thanks, all, for the recommendations. Jason -- I've not tried Drood, as I have had some unpleasant experiences with books that aim to complete Victorian writers' unfinished works, or to tinker with the history and biography of that period. I got so angry at Peter Carey's Jack Maggs--an ingenious take on the creative origins of Dickens' convict in Great Expectation that is hampered by some really gratuitously bolloxed historical detail--that I sent an annoyed critique off to the publisher, who ought to have done better. But then there are exceptions, Richard Flanagan's recent Wanting being a remarkable one, not least because of how he does Dickens. I think it's terribly dangerous ground to try to vivify larger than life artist-figures like that--but he does wonderfully. I'll check out Drood.
My daughter is irritated at not having found a copy of The Buccaneers unfinished as Wharton left it. She doesn't want somebody else's view of how it should have ended.
I picked up Dan Simmons' The Terror at an airport bookstore. This led my husband and me - he more than I - to read about actual arctic expeditions including the Franklin expedition. Parts of the book irritated me. I thought the nod to Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" was very heavy and overdone, for instance. But on balance it's a pretty good book.
Well I guess I pressed the send button a few days too early. Now some of the best ones are coming back to me.
There's the Flashman series, of course. For mysteries anything by Raymond Chandler should do. As for thrillers, not too many people read Helen MacInnes any more but she wrote some outstanding cold war thrillers. Some of William Buckley's are pretty good also.
There's also Mr. Standfast by John Buchan. That book has everything you could ask for in a book--just off the top of my head--aerial dog fights, spies, car chases, masters of disguise, English country estates, WWI infantry battles. I thought it was his best book-- better than The 39 Steps.
Beau Geste by Wren is from about the same era, and is still worth reading. Churchill's The River War and My Early Life are non-fiction but read like thrillers. Also Moonfleet by Falkner and the Ascent of Rum Doodle (a cult classic).
Another thriller I'd recommend would be Frederick Nolan's Mittenwald Syndicate. And then there are works of Alistair MacLean, Frederick Forsyth, Desmond Bagley, Brian Garfield, and Brian Callison. Their books vary in quality, but their best is among the best thriller fare.
For more non-fiction, try K-19 the Widow Maker by Huchthausen, and some of Jim Corbett's books regarding his adventures in India.
Erin, is there something by Sir Walter Scott that you'd recommend?
Iain Pears' art history mysteries are fun, too.
I also like Arturo Perez-Reverte.
I'd put "Freedom and Necessity" by Steven Brust and Emma Bull alongside Iain Pears. Comes with a star turn by Friedrich Engels.
