Literature

I must say, Not Quite Dead was absolutely the weakest of John MacLachlan Gray’s three historical novels. There’s two major flaws with the book. Well, okay, before I get started on the two major flaws, I should point out there are lots of things I liked about the book, and I’d be interested in seeing more books featuring some of these characters (Inspector Shadduck in particular), but these are not the things that stuck with me about this book. So the two big things: first, the plot was complicated and slow. Complicated and slow, while fine in any number of other books, is not a quality that I look for when selecting a mystery/thriller. The complexity of the plot (or perhaps, seeming complexity) is mostly the result of having too many characters and differing points of view for a book this short to assimilate. It jumps all over the place,… Continue Reading →

Tamburlaine Must Die was far too short. Louise Welsh has written a racy, exciting story of sex, jealousy, and revenge, and it was so short and simple as to be almost entirely insubstantial. Better to call it a novella, or a perhaps a longish short story (given the large type) than a proper novel. Christopher Marlowe came properly alive with a lively and distinctive voice, and I enjoyed him as a narrator. Welsh’s prose has the flavour of a proper Elizabethan dialect, if not exactly the form. The only book that I can think of to compare it to is Leon Rooke’s Shakespeare’s Dog, and just like in life, Kit Marlowe is wonderful, but he doesn’t quite sing like Shakespeare. I was more willing to accept Marlowe as a believable character than I expected, but the fact that all the major characters but one are major players in Elizabethan life… Continue Reading →

In John MacLachlan Gray’s sophomore effort at historical fiction, we are once again presented with journalist Edmund Whitty as our protagonist (one hesitates to label him a hero), roaming London in search of solvency, a good story, and now his dead brother’s secret. Gray’s England is less complex in White Stone Day than it was in The Fiend in Human, but no doubt the reader is meant to fill in some of the blanks based on information supplied in that previous novel. In exchange for this less fully-drawn England, Gray gives us a much more interesting and complicated mystery (or rather, criminal endeavour, as there is very little mystery as to who is doing what to whom; what remains to be revealed is if the guilty parties meet justice, and how) and characters with much more depth and psychological realism. At three hundred and thirty-nine pages, White Stone Day most… Continue Reading →

I had never heard of Georges Simenon before seeing this book in my local used book concern, but I’ve lately been on the lookout for detective or mystery or crime fiction (I’m unclear as to how the genres break down, I just know something that I like when I read it) since reading The Big Sleep and John MacLachlan Gray’s The Fiend in Human last year. The blurbs on the back cover led me to believe that I’d be getting a kind of Belgian genius of the genre, Chandler meets Sartre as it were. But Luc Sante’s introduction, stressing the volume of Simenon’s output over the quality (more than four hundred books!) actually made me a bit worried. If I’d wanted to read Stephen King, I would have purchased Stephen King. My worries were quickly proven to be unfounded. How could a man knock off a book like this in… Continue Reading →

I wasn’t quite able to finish this, my sixty-ninth book, in 2008. New Year’s Eve celebrations tripped me up with forty pages to go. Still, I regret nothing, except perhaps that various circumstances prevented me from giving this novel the attention it deserved during most of the month (!) that it took me to read it. (The saddest part of that being that I probably only spent about ten days with the book over that period, being distracted or busy or suffering from the holiday blues or whatever the rest of the time.) Like with most of Nabokov’s books, I finished The Gift feeling like I’d just experienced something profound without necessarily being able to identify, let alone understand, what that something was. On the surface the book is pretty straightforward; in the mid-1930s an impoverished Russian émigré poet, the son of an adventerous and quite dead minor noble, moves… Continue Reading →