I stopped reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping the other day, and I’m not sure I want to finish it. It’s character-driven, but with few characters, and very light on plot. I think I can handle that well enough. I’m beginning to doubt myself on that point.

I’m bringing it up here because I ran across this review of Housekeeping on Good Reads. It’s written by someone who claims to enjoy mostly plotless, character-driven literary novels. He writes:

When I say that I have limited access to these characters and this world, and that it ultimately felt untrue, here’s what I mean (this is Ruthie in the final pages of the book): I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined. Really? It’s character revelations and discoveries like this that pepper the book, and for each one that I could say ‘Yes, I get this, I’m with you,’ there were two or three like that quote above where I just couldn’t grasp the experience or couldn’t relate to the introspection.

I haven’t thought I couldn’t relate to the characters, but perhaps that’s the reason I don’t care about the story anymore. It may also be that the characters make me uncomfortable in a way that repels me. I don’t feel a challenge in the book or tension I wish to resolve. I just don’t like hanging around it, doing nothing.

Due to a combination of tight finances and the possession of a Kindle, I’ve been reading a lot of old books lately, of the kind you can get cheap or free in electronic versions. So I came to read, at last, Mr Standfast, John Buchan’s second sequel to The 39 Steps.

Richard Hannay, hero of the series, is now a brigadier general in the British Army, fighting in France in World War I. As Mr Standfast begins, he has been summoned to the War Office for a special assignment. He is ordered to take on the character of a South African political radical, go to a village called Isham, and insinuate himself into a group of radicals he will find there. Further orders will follow.

The story that follows is rather discursive, ranging as far as Scotland and the battlefields of France. Hannay is reunited with several old friends and one very dangerous old enemy.

A point of interest here is that the author finally adds to the narrative the major element all film versions of The 39 Steps that I know of add at that earlier point in the saga—a love interest. Hannay meets, and falls in love with, a charming young woman who is also a spy. It’s amusing to the modern reader to see the delicacy with which her part (a rather scandalous one at the time) is portrayed.

Buchan’s portrayal of radicals and pacifists is remarkably evenhanded, in my opinion. There are German agents among them, but he makes it clear (perhaps even giving them more credit than they were really due) that most of them are patriotic in their own way—one of them even heroic.

James Bond can be reasonably called Richard Hannay’s literary son, but the differences between the generations are telling. We read modern spy stories partly to be shocked, to see what technical wizardry or ruthless killing technique the agent will use to save his life this time. The Hannay books are written with moral purpose, and seem boy-scoutish to us. The title of the book comes from a character in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the whole story is, in a way, a commentary on that Christian classic, except that the subject is courage rather than faith. I enjoyed it.

Cautions for occasional racial and cultural comments which were acceptable then, but are so no more.

With apologies to Dashiell Hammett fans (after all, I am one myself), I think the archetypal hard-boiled private eye will always be Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Every hard-boiled shamus to this day—and likely far into the future—has to touch his cap, one way or another, to that tall Californian in the trench coat. Even if “he” is a she, even if the writer updates the concept by giving him computer skilz, endowing him with a regular girlfriend, or moving his office to an airplane cockpit. Even if he doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink, has adopted Buddhism, and treats his body like a temple.

Loren D. Estleman bucks that trend. He flatters, sincerely, by imitation. His Detroit P.I., Amos Walker, could be Marlowe’s love child, or maybe Marlowe was cryogenically frozen. Amos Walker wears a hat (or did in the early books of the series, though he admits here that he doesn’t own a trench coat). He smokes and refuses to worry about it, and drinks with enthusiasm. His office, in a seedy building downtown, is exactly like Marlowe’s as far as I can tell, except for the view.

The result makes for a very comfortable read for the hard-boiled fan. Why mess with a formula that works? Continue reading Retro, by Loren D. Estleman →

The Gem Collector (also published as The Intrusion of Jimmy and A Gentleman of Leisure) holds particular interest for the fan of its author, P. G. Wodehouse. Originally published as a magazine story in 1909, it captures almost the precise moment in “Plum’s” career when he began to discover the formula that would soon make him the most successful author of light fiction in the world. He hasn’t quite put the pieces together yet, but the elements are all here, in unfinished form.

The story is of Jimmy Pitt, London millionaire. In his earlier years, being a privately educated young man of high birth but low income, he made his living as a jewel thief in New York City. But now he’s inherited his uncle’s title and fortune, and he’s a reformed character. At least he’s pretty sure he is. In the opening scene, he earns the reader’s sympathy by observing a young man in visible discomfort across a restaurant dining room, divining that the idiot has taken his two female companions out without enough money in his pockets to pay the bill, and surreptitiously sending along five pounds of the needful, by way of a waiter. This earns him the everlasting gratitude and friendship of Spencer “Spennie” Blunt.

On the same evening, by one of those ridiculous coincidences which the author will learn to depend on not less, but more, in his later career, Jimmy encounters a vagrant on the street. And who does he turn out to be but Spike Mullins, a New York criminal (with a ridiculous accent) with whom Jimmy used to work in the old days? Jimmy, kind soul that he is, does not hesitate to take him home and put him up in his own house.

Soon afterward, Jimmy gets invited by Spennie to a house party at his stepfather’s country house. The stepfather turns out to be none other than Pat McEachern, formerly an extremely corrupt New York policeman. McEachern has cashed in on his graft and purchased an English estate. With him has come his daughter Molly, who used to be a friend of Jimmy’s until her father forbade her to see him again.

You can predict the general lines of what follows. I need only add that one of the other guests is wearing a remarkable pearl necklace, which sorely tempts Spike, and has even Jimmy working hard to suppress his old sporting instincts.

The later Wodehouse, of course, would learn to exert less effort to keep his stories realistic. He would learn that, although you can make a reformed jewel thief sympathetic if you try, it’s much easier (and funnier) to find a blockheaded young man of the upper classes and force him, through the blackmail of a ruthless aunt or the pleas of a desperate friend, to burgle the necklace—or cow creamer, or pig. And instead of having your character cool and in control of things, like Jimmy, make him pretty generally feckless, have him caught dead to rights, and watch him squirm. Then deliver him by a deus ex machina, perhaps a brainy valet.

Still, The Gem Collector clearly shows the elements coming together in Wodehouse’s imagination. It’s also an amusing story in its own right, written in the inimitable Wodehouse style, and a very enjoyable read. Suitable for all ages, if they’re literate.