I’ve taken stock of 2011. I didn’t get as much writing done as I wanted. I have to make more time to write and, more important, believe that a) I have something to say and b) an interesting way to say it.
I also didn’t get published. I want to do that in 2012, but that is somewhat dependent upon others. Mind, if I don’t produce then there’ll be nothing to publish. If I submit stuff, then the judgment of others comes it to play. Here’s hoping for the best.
I have read some good books this year. They and the reasons I have for liking the books are listed below.
THE SHANGHAI MOON by SJ Rozan
I have read many of Rozan’s Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series. I tend to lean toward the Lydia books over the Bill books, but that’s just me. It’s an excellent series. Unfortunately, I had rather fallen away from it.
Rozan took some time off to write a couple of different books, one of which dealt with her reaction and coming to terms with 9/11. For a native New Yorker, that had to be traumatic in a way somebody living in rural Maryland doesn’t get. A friend of mine said that losing the World Trade Center, which he’d seen for so many years from his family’s apartment just across the river, was liking losing a limb.
I found a copy of THE SHANGHAI MOON in the Borders as it was going out of business, everything 70% off. I felt like a vulture circling then swooping in to feast on the carcass. Anyway, I saw the new Lydia Chin novel, and I snagged it.
It reminded me of THE MALTESE FALCON in that the “fabulous gem” of the Shanghai Moon becomes a talisman (or is that chimera?) for several people still pursuing it since 1949. Revenge and greed lie at the heart of it, and lies abound. They spread through time and across oceans, religions, and cultures. All handed believably and deftly.
It was a real treat to reconnect to an author I enjoy and respect and I series I treasure. It was also a reconnection for Lydia to Bill. They’d gone there separate ways after WINTER AND NIGHT. This adventure is a restart to their relationship and to mine with them.
The funniest moment in the whole book comes when Lydia’s cousin Armpit jumps through a storefront window to “protect” a jeweler whose under his gang’s “protection”. Lydia observes that only Armpit could believe that a protection racket was about protection.
BLOOD SAFARI by Deon Meyer
I have gone on record as saying I don’t like thrillers. They’re appeals to emotion and to fantasy. I stand by that statement. However, Deon Meyer is my discovery of 2011. He writes thrillers set in his native South Africa. He said at Bouchercon that he believed that thrillers need to have a strong element of mystery. He is good to his belief in BLOOD SAFARI.
He also does it in a police procedural thriller, THIRTEEN HOURS. It doesn’t have quite the strength of BLOOD SAFARI. It does explain the ethnic/tribal politics of the New South African from the perspective of the police.
Many of the same ethnical and tribal rivalries are evident in BLOOD SAFARI. They are compounded by environmental agendas, madness, and corruption in very high places. Neither the Veldt nor the animals nor the people are safe from the power of money.
Besides the unusual setting, the protagonist, Lemmer, is no saint, but oddly, he lives a great deal in his head. He’s a thoughtful man who recognizes his mistakes and tries to correct them. His client is a woman, Emma Le Roux, who is searching for her long-lost brother, a man others either want dead or tried for murder. Lemmer doesn’t believe in her project, but he’s hired to do a job. When he fails to keep her out of hospital, he takes up the search. He solves the multiple mysteries, many of which date back to the apartheid era, South Africa’s less than charming relations with its neighbors, and the corrupt exploitation of those problems by South Africa’s own military-industrial complex.
One of the problems I have with thrillers is a tendency to exploit violence for dramatic appeal. I think it’s cheap. Meyer never resorts to that exploitation. In both books, there is a woman in jeopardy and a man to rescue and/or avenge her. Never once does it turn into exploitation for cheap melodrama. It takes real talent to walk that line.
FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE by George V. Higgins
This novel came recommended by Declan Hughes and John Connolly during their session at Bouchercon 2010. It was one of those 10 crime novels we ought to read before we die. I absolutely agree. It also made a damn good movie with Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, and Richard Jordan.
This novel was a fast read. It is almost all dialogue, so it zips along. It has a tight, narrow focus and a limited number of characters. Those characters are all distinct; each has his own voice. If a guy get repetitious and annoying, it’s because that particular guy is repetitious and annoying.
None of the characters is particularly redeeming; Eddie is simply the most likable of a whole bunch of losers. Everybody uses everybody else. Even the FBI agent is a prick. The cops are just less stupid than the crooks. Jackie Brown, one of the better crooks, however, has the best line: “Life is hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS by Amanda Vickery
For academic history, this book was a winner, even if it weren’t an easy read. It is tightly argued and densely supported with detailed evidence. It is excellent in its detailed treatment of domesticity, adulthood and gender--both genders. The best thing about this work is that it treats both genders as having culturally driven and understood roles. If women had more choices in the Georgian period than we might assume, then men had had fewer. Who knew they weren’t considered full adults without wives and households? There were consequences for not fulfilling those roles, some of them quite profound.
Vickery treats domestic power as legitimate power, not as something to be despised by modern feminists (too many of whom still persist in believing and/or seeing the home as a prison for women and Mommy as a low status job). Furthermore, that domestic power took different forms based on class as well as marital status. Women could and did live independently or, pooling resources, with other women if they were unmarried or without family.
Respectability, though, was the name of the social game for a divergent set of social ranks--the gentry through to literate artisans and tradesmen--as well as for both genders. Because of that touchstone, Vickery does show what constituted abuse by 18th century standards; it’s not much different from what constitutes abuse now. It is the illegitimate exercise of power, usually within a sphere or over matters that don’t concern the abusive person. It's about control--of money, of person, of position--and insecurity.
ON WRITING by Stephen King
I don’t read that many books on writing. I don’t want to read about it; I want to do it. Wrong-headed thought on my part. Sometimes, you need a Dutch uncle. Thank you, Uncle Stevie.
I don’t agree with everything he had to say in there. I never do with anybody. I believe in the importance of research while understanding I cannot allow it to become an end in itself. I don’t hate pronouns; just the opposite, I use them all the time. The structural advice about habits of mind and body resonated it. I’ve been trying to play all emotional and touchy-feely, and that hasn’t work. Oh, it’s helped in the sense that I needed to slay a host of acquired dragons, but not with discipline.
If you’re a writer, you’ve got to write. You’ve got to write every day. It was how I got my dissertation finished. Every day, I sat my ass in my chair and I wrote for at least several hours. Not every day went well, but it was every day. Oddly enough, Uncle Stevie’s insistence on a specific place for writing, one with a door, struck me rather like Virginia Woolf’s insistence on a place of one’s own. I don’t have a door on my downstairs writing room, but it’s got a nice big desk.
Best advice: the story comes first. Second best piece of advice: Read. Thanks to his advice, I noticed how Jo Nesbø uses distractions to indicate discomfort in his POV characters. I wouldn’t have without a little help. Yeah.
I’ll come back to Uncle Stevie every time I need a kick in the pants. That will probably be every year.