One of the delights of owning a Kindle is that often, when you’ve finished a book in a series and just have to find out what happens next, you can go online and download it in a couple minutes. That’s what I did when I’d finished Jeff Shelby’s Thread of Suspicion, and went on to Thread of Betrayal.
I reviewed the first book in this series, Thread of Hope, last year, and gave it high praise. It was the story of a driven man, Joe Tyler, a former San Diego cop whose life got upended when his daughter was kidnapped from his front yard just before Christmas. He stopped being a cop and he stopped being a husband. Instead he became an investigator searching for lost children. He found every one he looked for – except for the one who mattered most.
But at the end of Thread of Hope he got a surprise – a cop friend handed him a photo taken from a seemingly unrelated missing child file. The photo was taken in Minneapolis, and showed two little girls, one of whom was clearly Elizabeth, his own daughter.
Thread of Suspicion finds him in Minneapolis in the bitter mid-winter, trying to locate the family of the other girl in the picture. When that trail fades out, he’s referred to a local woman who’s devoted her life to helping street kids. She agrees to use her contacts to help him, but in return she wants a favor. A homeless boy she’d been particularly close to has disappeared, and because of his very special family situation he may be in serious danger. Solving that problem, Joe discovers a new trail of his own to follow. But he also gets a surprise that causes him to suddenly mistrust people he’s believed in up to now.
In Thread of Betrayal he teams up with his ex-wife Lauren in Denver, again on the trail of a daughter who now seems to be on the run from something. Repeated near-misses and disappointments make this one a real nail-biter. It ends with a kind of a resolution, but unanswered questions remain, so I suspect there’ll be at least one more book in the series.
I highly recommend all the books in Jeff Shelby’s Thread series. I agonized with these people and sometimes wept with them. Jeff Shelby creates characters with blood in their veins, and that blood sometimes gets shed. Also I may have missed something, but I thought the language was pretty restrained.
My highest recommendation. Loved them.
You Too Can Learn to Write
“Revision is the only writing instructor worth the investment required.” Mark Bertrand offers the best writing advice available, despite the plethora of ideas which can make enjoyable reading. This is the reason I don’t want to pursue a graduate degree in writing.
'Hard Case Crime' mysteries
It’s our usual practice here at Brandywine Books to post cover art for the books we review, but I’m going to skip that in making a reading report on a selection of mystery novels from Hard Case Crime. Their publishing strategy, which I applaud in the abstract, is to try to recreate the substance and spirit of the old hard-boiled paperback detective novels of the 1950s (many of which were published by Fawcett Gold Medal, a publisher born in the town where I live). In order to do this, they put out reasonably priced reprints of out-of-print classics (including, bizarrely, The Valley of Fear by “A. C. Doyle”), and also publish new works in the pulp tradition. This extends to racy cover art with lots of blazing handguns, fistfights, and half-naked women. Which explains why I’m not posting any covers.
Having some Amazon gift card money to spend, I bought five of Hard Case’s titles. Alas, I must report that I probably won’t be patronizing them again soon. I encountered some very good writing here, but I don’t think the stories will appeal much to our audience.
The first one I read, and one I rather liked, was 361, a classic by the great Donald E. Westlake. This is a story of a man who comes back from World War II service to unlooked-for peacetime carnage. Maimed in an assassination attempt, he learns that his family is not the family he thought it was, and sets out on a vendetta.
Baby Moll, by John Farris, is also well-written. It’s about a Florida man who used to be an enforcer for a crime boss, but has given up that life and gotten engaged to a “nice” girl. But, as you’d expect, they “drag him in again,” and he goes back into a world of murder, seduction, and betrayal, and gets a taste of it all. There is some heart in this book, but the body count is awfully high.
Songs of Innocence, by Richard Aleas, left me very cold. Excellently written, it’s the story of a young private detective investigating the apparent suicide of a female friend. This is a book that should be confiscated – by force if necessary – from any person prone to depression.
Fifty-To-One, by Charles Ardai, is a very bizarre book, a novelty piece. It was written to celebrate the fiftieth book release by Hard Case, and to mark the occasion Ardai produced a novel of fifty chapters, each using one of the Hard Case book titles, in sequence of publication, as its chapter title. The story of a young girl from South Dakota in big, bad New York City, this book has sort of a lighthearted, Perils of Pauline quality, but is more interesting as an exercise than as a compelling narrative. Fifty chapters of this were too many.
And finally, The First Quarry, by our old friend Max Allan Collins. This is the first in a series of novels which constitute a kind of departure for Collins. In place of his usually more sympathetic heroes, Quarry (an alias) is a professional assassin based in the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois. Collins does an expert job massaging the plot so as to make us root for a fairly repellant man in an even more repellant situation. Lots of violence, lots of quite explicit sex. Very well done, but not the sort of thing we generally boost around here.
So there you are. My advice is to be cautious with Hard Case Crime novels. Aside from the subject matter, there’s a very noir sensibility here, a consistent attitude of nihilism – or so it seemed to me. Pretty much all the elements (except for bad writing) that I generally warn readers about can be found in these books.
Not a Victim
“When you’re more invested in the business of books than you are in loving them, well, the person you cheat is yourself,” says J. Mark Bertrand (“a major crime-fiction talent!”) in response to discussion on the size of his readership. He notes that too often commenters throw out names of authors they think should be selling more books, and then ask where all the good books are, blaming publishing houses along the way.
You can get all of Bertrand’s Books
The latest from the guy who brags about his test score
Today, as I sat in my newly repainted light blue office, it occurred to me to wonder, “What happened to my calendar?”
I’d had a calendar over my desk, and I’d taken it down and set it on a table out in the library before the painting began. But I brought all that stuff back in on Monday. Where was the calendar? It wasn’t a small calendar. It wasn’t likely to be hidden under a pile of papers.
I turned things over, off and on, for a couple hours.
At last I looked up, and noted that I’d already pinned the calendar on the wall.
Sometimes you hear of geniuses like Einstein, who got so caught up in deep thinking that they just lost track of the world around them.
I hope I’m one of those. Because otherwise I need a keeper.
My natal day
Today is my birthday. (By a strange coincidence, I had one on the same date last year.) So far it’s been pretty good, by the standard of my birthdays.
I consider it a birthday gift from God that three Norwegians came to the bookstore today. An elderly gentleman in the party engaged me in conversation, speaking VE-RY SLOW-LY so I could understand him. That was pleasant, and they even bought some things.
And the crew at work bought me a cake for afternoon break, and signed a card. Good cake, too. Tonight I treated myself to half a small Domino’s sausage pizza (they’re knocking half off the price of any pizza ordered online this week. Doubtless just for me).
I also got an e-mail from a guy in Russia, who claimed to be a fan and asked for an autographed book plate for his copy of Wolf Time, and a photo. I can’t figure out a way for this to be a scam, so I’ll be spreading the joy to the eastern hemisphere as well.
And to top off my indulgence, I’ll post my book trailer, because it’s my birthday and you have to humor me.
Does This Platform Make Me Look Talentless?
Mike Duran remarks on The Weekly Standard article on J. Mark Bertrand and his Roland March novels. Jon Breen had written of Bertrand’s limited audience because his books are published by Bethany House. Duran asks, “So how does being a religious publisher limit the reach of an author’s audience? Well, it doesn’t… unless you write sci-fi, epic fantasy, ethnic fiction, espionage, horror, literary, or crime fiction.” He says Bertrand’s books deserve a large readership, but perhaps this publisher doesn’t know how to market them.
I’m not sure I understand what’s missing. Is it simply that if it doesn’t sell in a Christian bookstore to a primary audience of white women, Christian publishers don’t know what else to do with it?
The good, the bad, and the manipulative
I came up with a one-liner today that is, in my opinion, hilarious. It’s so good that I’m positive somebody else must have come up with it first.
“I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous.”
Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week.
My big entertainment, over the weekend, was watching all three Man With No Name movies on Blu-ray. I’ve had a Blu-ray player for several months now, but I didn’t actually own a Blu-ray movie. Finally I noticed that Amazon was selling a set of all three Eastwood spaghettis for about twenty-five bucks, so I sent away for them.
Consumer report: I enjoyed the movies very much, as I always do. But I realized more than ever before – I suppose it’s inevitable as I grow older – that there is no moral value in them whatever. I first encountered the term “moral holiday” in a review of a James Bond movie when I was a teenager, and that conception applies just as well to Sergio Leone’s westerns. They’re works of art, and sometimes breathtaking. But they do not know good from evil.
They think they do. I’m sure director Leone thought he was teaching a moral lesson to the world with his works. He loved westerns – it’s apparent in every frame – but he did not love America. Part of the mystique of the spaghetti western was the suggestion that these movies were more honest than the older movies. The old movies had sugar-coated the hard truth, turning gunfighters into boy scouts. But now we could see the true motivations – hatred, revenge, and especially pure greed.
In fact this was no more realistic than the earlier westerns. If the traditional American oaters romanticized the cowboy and the shootist, the Italian westerns imposed on them a purely modern, amoral sensibility. You can see that in the frequency of violence against women in the Italian movies. In the real American west, violence against women (at least white women) was among the chief taboos. These were Victorians, after all, not members of the Manson family.
But Leone knew how to make a film, and he hired one of the greatest geniuses in film music, Ennio Morricone, to do the sound tracks. The result is pure entertainment, the kind of alteration of consciousness that only a master epic filmmaker can produce.
Just as Leone “tore the mask” off the American cowboy, I shall here tear the mask off the moviemaker – moviemakers are manipulators. They always stack the decks, for good or ill. Understand that and you’re free to have a good time.
Applies equally to novelists, come to think of it.
Amazon is Not a Witch
Maybe Amazon is engaged in a price war, but maybe it’s just taking advantage of publishing dinosaurs who don’t want to understand what different people are willing to pay for real books.
“If the [publishing] industry can’t find a way to truly understand the new reality that has grown up around it,” writes Suw Charman-Adnerson for Forbes.com, it will never find a way to survive current and future changes. Key to this is understanding Amazon’s position in the market and what impact its behaviour actually has.”
She suggests Amazon is not sending the huntsman to cut the heart out of brick-and-mortar stores, but is merely playing its part in a real market. For more common sense on the real book market, see this post on Futurebook.
A semiotic breakthrough
Today I was back in my office, and it seemed strange to me, as if something essential about it had changed. Which was in fact the case. The walls were pink when I left, and now they’re blue.
I said it seemed strange; I didn’t say it was a surprise. Getting it painted while I was out was the plan from the beginning. Our school’s custodial staff did a bang-up job with it.
When I first took on the office of librarian and book store manager, almost the first thing they said was “We plan to get it repainted.” The lady who had been the first to use the office, when the new building was built and the library moved up from its basement quarters in the seminary, thought a darkish pink color would be a good choice. (I’m sure she called it something more technical, like Dusky Pink or Cream of Liver.) Nobody else I’ve spoken to since has concurred in that opinion.
But somehow the years passed without a change. I didn’t really chafe living with the color – interior decoration isn’t generally something that engages me – but when anybody brought it up I had to admit that I’d prefer something else. Still, repainting meant carrying all my junk out and then carrying it back in, which sounded like a lot of work.
But it’s done now. Now I’ve got a light blue office. I’ll have to think of a technical name for the color – Hypothermic Lips, maybe.