We are well into the hammock season which for me means crime fiction (and sometimes nonfiction) by the stack. So, here are some quick and dirty summaries of hammock books to get you through the hot weather.
Rain Fall by Barry Eisler—Crime fiction has many sub-genres. This is a hit man thriller set in Tokyo and featuring a half-Japanese American and former Green Beret who kills for hire. But he’s a good killer; our hero and protagonist. His technique can be subtle or brutal. He will break your neck or send a radio signal to your pacemaker to give you an untraceable heart attack. John Rain loves jazz and becomes involved with the daughter of one of his victims. She’s an up and coming jazz pianist and may hold the key to a potentially far-reaching scandal that could overthrow the Japanese Government. Rain gets caught between the CIA, the Tokyo underworld and the Japanese police in a fast moving story that holds your attention. The author obviously knows Japan and, as ambiance is important in crime fiction, creates a bit of a Tokyo travelogue as the indomitable John Rain karate chops and schemes his way to a successful conclusion, inevitably losing the girl in the end.
One Shot by Lee Child—Lee Child has created a super hero named Jack Reacher who is most guy’s idea of what they’d like to be (when they were sixteen years old): 6’5”, 250lbs of muscle and guile, smart as blazes, unbeatable in a fight, brave to the point of recklessness, irresistible to women and unencumbered by possessions. Reacher is a former major in the military police. Did I mentioned he is a fabulous shot? In Child’s books Reacher appears out of nowhere, solves the crime, screws the gals, thumps the villains then disappears with a hearty hi ho Silver. Genre-wise, it’s a procedural as Reacher, always entertaining and surprising with his audacity and in his ability to improvise, finds the perp and beats them, stabs them, shoots them, or all of the above. In One Shot a former Army sniper is accused of indiscriminately killing several citizens. He calls for Jack Reacher. Reacher knows the guy has done it before but soon learns he didn’t do it this time. In the climactic scene Reacher has to single-handedly attack a house that has a 200 yard clear fire zone around it. The house is occupied by several armed men, one of whom is a tremendous shot with a night scoped rifle. The house is protected by an infra red detection system. Reacher is armed with a knife. Does he do it? Oh yeah... Nobody like Jack Reacher.
By A Spider’s Thread by Laura Lippman—I’m going to guess that Ms. Lippman’s detective, Tess Monaghan, maybe looks like a younger, stronger, taller version of herself, a kind of attractive blond with a wide mouth and a serious look. Tess operates her own little detective firm in Baltimore. She’s half Jewish and half Irish which gives the author opportunities to speak for both communities. Tess is kind of lonely. Her boyfriend from an earlier book, a rock musician, has gone off to take care of her cancer stricken mother. Tess is recovering from a wound from a previous book and is a bit traumatized but is short on cash so takes a missing persons job. A beautiful young mother has left her conservative Jewish husband and split with the kids. Why, where and with whom did she go? Tess uses good detective work, with help from her on-line support group of female detectives around the country self-styled as the “snoop sisters”—to run the missing wife to ground. The gal has a past unknown to her husband and the mystery, as it unfolds, is an interesting one. It kept my hammock swinging.
Winter of the Wolf Moon by Steve Hamilton—like all of the above, Wolf Moon is a series. (We crime fiction readers enjoy a good series). Alex McKnight is a broken down ex-cop, ex-minor league baseball player who has sort of retired to a camp on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where his late father had built a complex of cabins which Alex rents to fishermen and snowmobilers and where he often gets involved in solving a mystery. It’s colder than hell in the UP and it snows all the time. Alex has a snow plow on the front of his pickup truck and has to plow his way into his cabin every night on his way home from the local bar where he has a lonely dinner each evening while drinking Canadian beer that the barkeep especially stocks for him. His neighbor, an Indian, recruits Alex into a league hockey game. The action starts there when he gets into it with the hot dog star of the opposing team. Later, this fellow’s girlfriend asks Alex for help; then she disappears. There’s a bag of drugs, narcotics cops, an unfriendly police chief, a friendly sheriff, snowmobilers, lots of snow, a couple of beatings, a trip to Canada, a night in jail, and a solution to the mystery. Good cold book for a hot summer day.
Dancing With the Virgins by Stephen Booth—an English mystery of the psychological thriller sub-genre set in the north country in the moors of the Peak Park. There seems to be a serial killer. The lead protagonists of the book, Ben Cooper and Diane Fry, intensely dislike each other for some reason and that’s a bigger mystery than who killed the mountain biker who was really an animal activist who was trying to stop the dogfights held in the farm near the park and was somehow involved with the lady lawyer who got her face slashed and can’t remember anything and her dead daughter who the lawyer had adopted out years ago. Booth’s style is to tell the story in a series of short scenes that sometimes seem arbitrary. He’s probably a better writer than many of his colleagues but perhaps is too ambitiously trying to be a novelist. All we crime readers want is plot, ambiance, action, good characters and resolution.
Soul Circus by George Pelecanos—Pelecanos is a producer of HBO’s Wired and his novels which take place on the mean streets of DC are gritty and real. In Soul Circus the detective is a fifty something black guy named Derek Strange who has a younger, white partner named Terry Quinn. Strange is working on the defense team of a drug dealer. Quinn is looking for a missing girl. The plot is good but with Pelecanos what you get is a scary tour of the underbelly of our nation’s capital with its down and outers, lowlifes, criminals and street people. Pelecanos always delivers. He’s one of the best.
A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger—Junger is well known as the author of The Perfect Storm. In this strange little memoir/reportage he tells the true story of the Boston Strangler who terrorized the greater Boston area in the early sixties and became a legendary serial murderer of women. Junger’s family had a person experience with Albert DeSalvo who was convicted of being the Boston Strangler. DeSalvo worked as a carpenter on a remodeling project at the Junger home in Belmont, Massachusetts when Sebastian was an infant. The front piece of the book has a photo of Mrs. Junger holding her baby. Behind her are the contractor who built her studio and a young, handsome Albert DeSalvo. She had an uncomfortable encounter with DeSalvo during the course of his employment but generally had a good impression of him. During the job a women was murdered a short distance from the Junger home. A black house cleaner, a refugee from the South, was arrested and convicted. But Junger tries to make the case that the black fellow was innocent, a victim of racism. That DeSalvo may have been the perpetrator. And, Junger raises questions, too, as to whether or not DeSalvo was, in fact, the Boston Strangler which was impossible to prove conclusively in the days before DNA. Last year we spent a couple months in Belmont so it was interesting to read a story which had a familiar scene as a backdrop. The murder in question had taken place just a few blocks away from the house our kids were renting. Who knew?
Okay, that stack is finished. Back to the library.
Re: So You Think You Can Direct, here’s how to video (this one featuring Heidi and Benji who are participants on So You Think You Can Dance winning a big swing dance competition). No camera tricks.
I used to watch every sport that played across the TV screen. Baseball, football, hockey, lacrosse, even roller derby. I was a sports fanatic, eager to see the action, obsessed with the result, identifying with the participants. As the years passed I lost interest, eschewed the Final Four, Wimbleton, The Superbowl, the World Series, the Rose Bowl and the Stanley Cup. They seemed unimportant, corrupted somehow by scandal, drugs, big money and narcissism. The only sport that seemed relevant was golf which was totally individual, self-policed and void of trash talk. Yet viewing a golf tournament is often akin to watching grass grow so lately I only tune in to LPGA golf which has the added of attraction of Paula Creamer’s pink ball, Michelle Wie’s super long legs, Annika’s nifty calve muscles and Natalie Gulbis’s superb overbite. I digress. Please excuse. The point here is that I have discovered the ultimate in sport. (No. It’s not cage fighting). It is the relatively unknown sport of “Staredown,” practiced by a growing cadre of dedicated professionals. They are professionals in name only for there is, as yet, no money to be made as a member of NASP, the National Association of Staredown Professionals. The sages are fond of saying that “The eyes are the windows to the soul.” Staredown is the competitive manifestation of this ancient wisdom. The official historian of Staredown has source evidence that the sport originated in ancient Egypt. It is very difficult to explain Staredown to the uninitiated. Helpfully, a young film director, J. R. McCord, has created an hour long documentary (Unflinching Triumph) that details the origins, history and evolution of professional staredown. The film features an up and coming Staredown professional named Philip Rockhammer and follows his progress as he tries to rest the title from five time winner, the Michael Jordan of Staredown—Tony Patterson. The documentary is sympathetic to Philip’s trials because, frankly, Tony Patterson is somewhat of a jackass. Indisputably, however, his patented move, jamming the jackhammer, messes up opponents and allows Tony to win victory after victory. Philip has a couple of moves as well, specifically—wrestling the woodpecker and sailing to Ecuador on a boat made of shoestrings. (The moves are impossible to describe). The Staredown community is small and tight. They are focused on success and victory. The rewards are esoteric to be sure and, in Philip’s case, were it not for his girlfriend Chrissy who supports him, pays his bills and drives him around, he would not be able to compete. Director J. R. McCord follows Philip and his entourage as Philip attempts to discover his inner Puma and defeat Tony for the national championship. Pure sport is hard to fathom. Staredown is as pure as it gets. In Staredown the normal sports metaphors, clichés and trite sayings gain freshness. Staredown opens up the possibility of new athletic fantasies. One yearns to grab the Visine and give it a try. The documentary is highly recommended, nearly as profound, in its own way, as Supersize Me or An Inconvenient Truth.