A Work in Progress

Teaser Tuesday: An American Tragedy

You know how sometimes you finish one book with the anticipation of the next giving you itchy fingers.  Now I've finished reading one book and have cracked open Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and I hope that my fingers continue to feel itchy (as in keep turning those pages) as I have 856 pages of small print text just waiting for me.  It may take me a while to work my way through this one, but I hope to stick it out.  Perhaps regular updates (as I did with Anna Karenina) will keep me on track and motivated.

The novel was published in 1925 just one year before Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises to give things a little perspective.  According to the introduction Dreiser was at a low point in his career whilst writing this.  He was forty-nine and living in Hollywood in relative obscurity.  His last work had been published five years previously but was banned as being obscene and had been pulled from the market by his publisher.  His earlier works were out of print.  Suggestions of immorality had plagued his work but younger critics championed his use of realism as a more truthful form of fiction.  He was interested in the theories of Freud, which helped shed light on the psychology of his characters particularly since he had been interested in writing a story about a murderer.  Earlier attempts hadn't been successful.

An American Tragedy is based on a murder that took place in upstate New York in 1906.  Chester Gillette became Clyde Griffiths, who is the central character in the story.  "...the novel represents a massive portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde's tawdry ambitions and seal his fate: It is an unsurpassed depiction of the harsh realities of American life and the dark side of the American Dream."  

My teaser is from the opening pages of the novel as Clyde and his family singing religious hymns on a busy street corner.

"The boy moved restlessly from one foot to the other, keeping his eyes down, and for the most part only half singing.  A tall and as yet slight figure, surmounted by an interesting head and face--white skin, dark hair--he seemed more keenly observant and decidedly more sensitive than most of the others--appeared indeed to resent and even to suffer the position in which he found himself.  Plainly pagan rather than religious, life interested him, although as yet he was not fully aware of this.  All that could be truly said of him now was that there was no definite appeal in all this for him.  He was too young, his mind too responsive to phases of beauty  and pleasure which had too little, if anything, to do with remote and cloudy romance which swayed the minds of his mother and father."

So now I will follow the trajectory of this young life from the son of parents with deep religious convictions to that of a murderer. 

The Shape of Sand by Andrea Camilleri

I can never decide whether I'm happy to come across an already well-established author, particularly one writing crime novels, or not.  The thing about getting in on the ground level, so to speak, of an author's work is being able to read the books as they're published (though sadly with books in translation they are often translated out of order).  Of course once you've read the book that's it until the author writes another.  Andrea Camilleri's The Shape of Water is the first in a long running detective series set in the fictional Sicilian seaside town of Vigàta.  Twelve books have been published with a thirteenth due out this fall in the US.  The upside, however, to discovering a good author like Camilleri is having so many more books to look forward to reading and at leisure, and if the first is anything to go by these will be quick entertaining reads yet with a certain flair that is both culturally rich and with an understated humor.

Inspector Salvo Montalbano has quite a following in his native Italy as well as abroad.  My first impression was that he reminded me just a touch of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret (though only a touch) as well as of another recent discovery Domingo Villar's Inspector Leo Caldas.  Like Maigret he is cool, calm and collected and like Caldas he has an appreciation for a good meal.  Montalbano is smart, even tempered and compassionate.  He's also well respected by the citizens of Vigàta.  You get a sense that he's one of the 'good guys' even if he doesn't always do things entirely by the book.  He's the sort of man who hires a woman to cook and clean for him whose two sons have been jailed thanks to Montalbano even though his girlfriend is wary of the situation.

"The previous July, when she had come to Vigàta to spend two weeks with him, Livia, on hearing this story became terrified."

"Are you insane?  One of these days that woman will take revenge and poison your soup!"

"Take revenge for what?"

"For having arrested her son!"

"Is that my fault?  Adelina's well aware it's not my fault if her son was stupid enough to get caught.  I played fair, didn't use any tricks or traps to arrest him.  It was all on the up-and-up."

"I don't give a damn about your contorted way of thinking.  You have to give rid of her."

"But if I fire her, who's going to keep house for me, do my laundry, iron my clothes, and make dinner?"

"You'll find somebody else!"

"There you're wrong.  I'll never find a woman as good as Adelina." 

Livia, perhaps not surprisingly, is not from Sicily.  Life is different there.  One hot summer morning two trash collectors, rather "ecological agents" find the body of a man in an area of Vigàta known as the "Pasture".  The Pasture is a seedy area where couples congregate to participate in amorous adventures.  It's also a high traffic area for prostitutes.  Silvio Luparello is found rather ignominiously in his parked car with his pants down around his knees, but has a crime been committed?  The well known politician's body shows no signs of a violent struggle and autopsy results confirm death due to a heart attack.  Along with the body an expensive diamond necklace was found near the car, but picked up and secreted away by one of the trash collectors.  Montalbano's superiors pressure him to close the case, which seems only an unfortunate accident, but things don't quite add up so he continues his investigation.

When a once good friend of Luparello's joins up with his political rival winning the election Luparello had set his sights on, Montalbano senses something fishy, but he has no evidence to support his claims.  He has only the same politician asking for help finding a missing necklace that his Swedish daughter-in-law lost, which puts her in a comprising situation he'd like hushed up.  It appears that Luparello was one to "give in to his vices" and had a small cottage hideaway for his very discreet affairs.  One woman seems to be the connection between the various sides of Silvio Luparello, but is everything just a little too pat?  Is she being framed, and why?

This is not a typical detective novel, particularly when the dead man doesn't even seem to have been murdered.  Of course it all depends on how you look at guilt and what motivates people to do the things they do--crime takes on more than one face. 

I enjoyed my first foray into the world of Inspector Montalbano--not just for the puzzle but for being introduced to an interesting cast of characters and even more to an intriguing place both beautiful for its scenery and shocking for the violence.  Even the minor characters are interesting.  The ecological agents are educated men dreaming of better lives and jobs.  The wife of the victim is smart and perceptive with a dry wit.  Montalbano's childhood friend, Gegè, is a pimp with street savvy and an understanding of the seamier side of life.  Of course the most interesting character of all is Montalbano himself.    

The Shape of Water is translated quite smoothly from Italian by Stephen Sartarelli.  It's a case of the prose not getting in the way of the story.  Sartarelli also includes helpful notes on the text explaining cultural references and nuances, which add to the story.  I'd moved on in my reading to mainland Italy, to the Southern coast with Gianrico Carofiglio's Involuntary Witness, but  I'm afraid am approaching library due date means a little detour to Florence and Magdalen Nabb's The Marshal and the Englishman is next up on my literary (crime) tour of Italy. 

For more thoughts on The Shape of Sand check out Euro Crime's review by Maxine and for more on Italian mysteries in general Italian-Mysteries.com seems an invaluable resource.

What I've been working on . . .

I've been having an Upstairs/Downstairs watch-a-thon this weekend.  I'm now on season three, which I borrowed from the library and the due date is approaching, so I've got to watch all thirteen episodes over my long break (four days isn't really long I must note--and there is only one day left...sigh).  I think I've gotten up to episode eight so I'm making good progress.  James Bellamy is married and he and his wife (middle class girl) are at a country house party with all sorts of shenanigans going on.  Whenever I watch movies I like to stitch, so I've had ample time this weekend to work on a couple of projects.

I don't think I've shared my "Mystery Sampler" progress in a while here, so as you see it is coming along nicely.  This is the middle section of a five part design.  Each section is stitched on different color linen using the same floss color palette, which will be sewed together when I finish.  This part has the most stitch intensive motifs--lots of solid stitching which takes time as I am a slow worker.  The grass has smyrna stitches--which are the bumpy things you see.  The roof will also have special stitches--eyelets which I am not overly fond of making but there aren't too many to do.   I'd like to have this entire project finished by the end of the year and I think I might actually manage it as the last two sections look a little less labor-intensive than this one.

Do you remember this sampler I was working on earlier in the year?  After February passed my motivation sort of languished with my desire to see nice weather.  All that snow I'll need to fill in soon just didn't appeal at the time, but as I was flipping through projects to work on, I decided to pull this one out again.  I had forgotten all about it to be honest, but as the small project I was going to start was missing floss colors (and I was too lazy to dig through bins to find a skein of it), and this one was ready to go, "February" it was.  I think I might keep going now and not bother with anything new for a while. 

I finished Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises earlier today.  After dragging my feet a bit I quite enjoyed the story.  I think my problem was trying to read it in fits and starts and with the style of storytelling it just wasn't working well.  Since I've read most of the books in the last three days I was able to get into the story and spend lots of time with it.  I do want to write about it, but I think I'll need some time to think about it and maybe read more about it.  I've already pulled out Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy to work on as my next classic read.  I mentioned before that I tried to read it several years back, but I only made it to about page 82 before setting it aside.  I hope to do better now as it very much appeals to my mood.

As it is almost June and we're quickly approaching the midway mark of the year I was looking at the list of books I've read this year and noticed every single book on the list was written in the 20th or 21st centuries.  One was published in 1899, but somehow that feels like cheating to consider it a 19th century book.  I try and read a variety of books, but I'm not doing a very good job it seems.  That said I was just thinking how I would love to pick up a really good, edge of your seat, can't put it down thriller.  I'll be looking through my piles, though I know the last thing I need to do is start a new book.  You know how that goes, though.

Lost in the Stacks: Kitty Foyle

Do you want the good news first or the bad news?  Okay, good news.  I discovered a great book whilst browsing the stacks this week and by an author you may well be familiar with and perhaps have even read.  I checked it out and started reading, and very contentedly was working away on Christopher Morley's Kitty Foyle.

The bad news is: a cursory glance through the book one day ended in the discovery of not one page torn from the book but two--so a total of four pages of text missing (and maybe more?).  I thought at first it might have simply been an accident, but the second missing page is ripped clean from the spine of the book.  I'm so disappointed--not only for myself and other possible readers but am disappointed that someone would deface a book in such a way and ruin someone else's reading experience.

An American author writing during the first half of the twentieth century, Christopher Morley was quite prolific.  He was a journalist, wrote novels, essays and poems and is (according to the wikipedia) best known for his 1939 novel Kitty Foyle.  I, however, had only been familiar with two earlier novels, which are still in print: Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, both books for booklovers that rank up there with 84 Charing Cross Road.  He published over a hundred works and my library has fifteen of them.  The New York Times called Kitty Foyle "sparkling" in an October 1939 review, and an ad describes the book thus:

"To speak of this book as having an 'author' is almost irrelevant.  This is Kitty Foyle, speaking for herself...  Kitty Foyle, representative of a generation of women who were children in the 1920s and girls in the 1930s, and who have known a special kind of joy and trouble."

"That the story of Kitty Foyle, thought by herself to herself, would never intentionally be put on paper, is obvious.  That is why Christopher Morley does it."

It must have been quite a hit upon publication as my library's edition was in the seventh printing in December 1939 after having only been published in October of the same year.  There are two due date slips still attached inside and judging by the many dates stamped it was heavily circulated from 1954 to 1984 (previous date due slips may have been removed).  The poor book has also been mended so at least other readers were able to enjoy it even if I will likely have to look for another source for this particular title (I can at least read through the first ripped page while I search for another copy).   I love this era of history and the novel seems representative of the period, so I'm naturally curious to read it.

Kitty Foyle was also adapted into a movie in 1940 and nominated for Academy Awards in several categories, which resulted in an award for best actress Ginger Rogers (her only Oscar).  It was also made into a radio play and TV soap opera.  I thought I'd share the trailer for the movie.

                                                                                                                                                             Although I didn't bring it home with me, I also pulled from the library's shelf Christopher Morley's New York, which is a collection of essays written after WWI.  I only wish I had thought to bring it home with me over the long weekend, but it's always nice to have books to look forward to later.  And it's not as though I have nothing else to read!

(More) Early Stories of Daphne du Maurier

Look what came in the mail for me this month, Daphne du Maurier's The Doll: Short Stories.  This is the collection just released by Virago, which includes stories that had been published in magazines or US story collections but "lost" and forgotten.  The Guardian wrote about it earlier this year.  It looks like only a very few stories are newly reprinted, as eight are from the collection I just finished reading, Early Stories.  This is a good thing actually (though I wouldn't have minded more stories that were rediscoveries), as Early Stories is a very difficult and expensive collection to come by.  I had to borrow it from a library via interlibrary loan and it is long since returned to the loaning library.  

I wrote about the stories in the first half of the 1959 collection here, and now it's time to write about the rest before the details fade too much from mind.  It's been interesting reading some of Daphne du Maurier's early work.  Many of the stories follow a similar pattern--telling a story that ends in an ironic twist of fate or presents a morality tale of sorts.  Not many have du Maurier's trademark atmosphere with an unnerving sense about them, but there are definitely a few hints of what's to come later.

In The Supreme Artist an aging actor who has a starring role opposite an attractive younger actress is met backstage by a woman who claims the two had an intimate relationship in their more youthful days.  He remembers nothing of their prior history but goes along with her stories anyway filling in odd details, but not getting many of them right.  When the woman leaves and the actress returns she asks who the old woman with the white hair is, playing into the man's vanities and fears.

The Reverend James Hollaway makes another appearance in Angels and Archangels.  Away recovering from the flu at the home of one of his distinguished friends a young curate takes over his parish temporarily.  He manages to offend and alienate the swanky parishioners of St. Swithins' to the point where they stop attending mass.  The charismatic young curate, however, has no problem filling pews and appealing to the more downtrodden souls of London, which does nothing to endear him to Reverend Hollaway who gets his revenge and shows his true colors in the process.

I'd read Indiscretion before, but this is a story I didn't mind revisiting.  Du Maurier asks the question 'how many people's lives are ruined by a moment's indiscretion.  The story's narrator goes to lunch with his boss regaling him with the story of a woman he met by chance and who duped him.  Fate has a way of tricking those who are seemingly self-assured.

Fairy Tale really is a fairy tale of sorts.  This is another story with bleak overtones but a happy ending.  Once again chance or perhaps fate intervenes in an otherwise unhappy life in a surprising way.  It concerns money lenders who have no pity and secret boxes that should contain a very few dollars but is empty when raided in a moment of desperation. 

In The Closing Door a happy young couple is confronted with life-altering news, though only one of the two understands what the news means while the other makes assumptions, and worse, passes judgement not understanding the repercussions of her narrow minded views.  

For me The Lover was the least effective story in the collection.  A total cad plays up to all the women in his cricle and takes advantage of their generosity. Sorry, very vague, but my notes are rather sketchy on this one for some reason.

Leading Lady is another story set in the theater world.  This time a famous actress whose beauty is beginning to wane agrees to work with a new producer.  She doesn't like or respect him, but he's successful and wants to give her a big role opposite an up and coming actor.  The problem is, the actor is a little too good at what he does.  The producer has a high moral standard, which the actress (very immorally) uses to trip up anyone who poses a threat to her.

Nothing Hurts for Long are words that are easier to say to someone else than to apply to one's own life (or to assume they need be applied...).  A young woman very much in love with her husband, who has been away traveling, has very little time or sympathy for a distraught friend whose own husband has just left her.  It's best not to be smug in situations where you think you have the upper hand.   

Week-End is much like Frustration in it's tone and light heartedness.  Two lovers go away for a romantic weekend but end up with a different opinion of each other after a soggy boat trip.  Sweet, caressing words turn to animosity.

Since many of the stories in The Doll overlap with those collected in Early Stories, I will wait before reading any of du Maurier's other short stories (perhaps will save it for Carl's RIP challenge later this year?).  I am definitely looking forward to reading more of du Maurier's work this year, however, and think a novel is just what I need now.

May 25: Reading Notes

Once again the month is flying by, and this month I've been somewhat turned around.  I was thinking it was time to pick up the next Slaves of Golconda book, W. Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale, but discussion is set to begin at the end of June.  Of course you are welcome to join in (and I would be happy to send an invite to anyone interested in posting on the blog, please just send me your email).  I had picked up the book earlier this month and started reading the first few pages but found it hard to concentrate on it--maybe it was simply bad timing.  Has anyone read Cakes and Ale?  What did you think?  I'm looking forward to reading more of his work and hope I love it as much as I loved The Painted Veil.

So, Maugham is safely set aside for a few weeks and instead I've picked up Shusaku Endo's The Sea and Poison for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong.  Now, I've been planning on reading all the books I am able to read on the list, so I bought the book without actually reading the description, but I hadn't realized that the story is about (at least in part) the vivisection of a P.O.W. during WWII.  I read a lot of mysteries and crime novels, so violence does come up in books I read, but this seems particularly gruesome and horrifying to me.  I have a feeling this may be a difficult book to read, but I have heard many good things about the author, so I am going to push on with the story, which I started reading last night (and I thought I had another week to read it, but I've started it late, so I will not be ready to talk about it on Friday).  I expect the author isn't writing about such a topic lightly and won't do it in a gratuitous way, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier.

It's so much easier when crimes occur 'off stage'.  I just finished Andrea Camilleri's The Shape of Water, which is a most interesting crime story.  There were a few moments of unease, but the crime in this story wasn't as obvious as first assumed.  I'll be writing about it over my long weekend, but I can easily say I liked it so much that I've already ordered the next few books in the series.  I also just finished reading Kate Simon's memoir, Bronx Primitive.  I wrote very briefly about it here, but I didn't think I would write about it again.  Now that I've finished I think I do want to write about it, as I enjoyed it even though it was an occasionally uncomfortable read (in a totally different way than I expect the Endo to be).    

Kate Simon wrote three books of memoirs, and I have the next two ready to go, A Wider World: Portraits in Adolesence, and Etchings in an Hourglass, but I've been looking forward to reading Gail Levin's biography of artist Lee Krasner (and I should note it's a library book with a looming due date, which always means the reading stack gets shuffled a bit), so I started that last night as well.  At the moment memoirs really appeal to me, so I've been dipping into Susan Allen Toth's Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood which is about growing up in Ames, Iowa in the 1950s.  She also wrote three books of memoirs, as did Mary Cantwell.  Guess how many books of memoirs I've got stacked up at the moment.  I'll leave it to your imagination.  I've been reading such a paltry number of nonfiction books that it feels good to be so interested in reading these--even if it takes me the better part of the year to work my way through them.  Any suggestions for memoirs--particularly about growing up in the first half of the twentieth century are welcome.  Because you know you can never have enough reading material on hand (or in mind).

As you can see I have Plenty to keep me busy for the foreseeable future, but I think this weekend is going to be given over to finishing Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.  Can I make a confession?  I'm not quite sure what to make of it.  I think this is going to be the sort of book I can appreciate and admire, but maybe not throw all my heart into loving.  Of course I am not quite at the midway mark, so a lot can happen still.  I can see why it's an important book.  The sort of book where if there hadn't been a Hemingway we might not have (well, fill in the blank here as I'm still learning).  But for all it's simplicity in the way of his prose style, that doesn't make it an easy read.  As a matter of fact I checked out two books of criticism to help me make sense of things.  Linda Wagner-Martin, in one book, writes:

"Ernest Hemingway's 1926 The Sun Also Rises provided readers a startling example of the newly modern novel.  People accustomed to fiction by Charles Dickens of Jane Austen, books in which a leisurely narrative told a recognizable story about well-described characters, found Hemingway's cryptic introduction of characters--people whose actions did not seem to be purposeful--puzzling.  And for a novel said to be about people who had survived the debilitating trauma of the First World War, The Sun Also Rises contained almost nothing about that cataclysmic event.  Strangely, Jake Barnes's wound, the most apparent evidence of the war's damages, seems to have made him a strong and almost wise protagonist."

"The Sun Also Rises was not the novel readers expected it to be.  Its style was so unusual as to be just plain troublesome."

Well, that does make me feel better.  But should I, a modern reader, still be having that same sort of response?  Something to contemplate as I work my way through the story.   

Teaser Tuesday: Night Shift

Back in my early blogging days I read a book by Maritta Wolff called Sudden Rain.  I wrote about it here, but please keep in mind I had only been blogging about six months, was still trying to find my voice and wasn't quite sure how I wanted to write about books (and hopefully I have improved over time).  Sudden Rain had an interesting publishing story.  Maritta Wolff was a hugely popular writer in the 1940s and 1950s.  Her first novel Whistle Stop portrayed the seamy side of life in a small Michigan town and went into something like five reprintings.  She went on to write five more novels, which were bestsellers, but then disappeared from the literary world.  The story goes that she didn't like the intrusive nature of the success her books garnered so she packed it in and led a quiet, private life with her husband and son.

No more was heard about her until after her death when it was rumored that the last book she wrote had been stored in her refrigerator from 1972, when it was completed, until her death in 2002.  It was published posthumously and her first two books were also brought back into print by the publisher Scribner.  I'm not sure if I was more fascinated by the book's history, or whether the story simply appealed to me (probably a combination of the two), but I remember Sudden Rain being a totally engrossing read.  I expect "instant commercial success" is a euphemism for books that were "popular", which is how Scribner has marketed these reissues, but they also take pains to note that Wolff received a certain amount of acclaim for her writing and was respected for her ability to vividly portray small town life with a particularly good ear for colloquial American English. 

Night Shift was published in 1942 and made into a film a few years later.  It begins very dramatically with a rather gruesome accident in a factory where car bumpers are manufactured.  Once again the setting is a small Michigan town and the story revolves around three sisters.  I thought I'd share a little of the dialog for my teaser today.

"Poor old lady," Sally said.  It makes me nervous to hear her.  I'm always so afraid she'll fall down up there or something, and get hurt.  Suppose she'd fall, coming down those stairs?  They're so dark."

"Probably wouldn't hurt her if she did," Fred said.  "I see a drunk once fall down two flights of stairs, just rolled right down 'em over and over.  Hell, when he got to the bottom he just picked himself up and walked off, looking for some place to get another drink."

"Well, it's different with her.  She's an old lady; her bones are all brittle."  Sally paused with a pound of butter in her hand before she put it in the refrigerator.  "How much did you have to pay for butter, Virgie?"

Virginia was scrubbing on a greasy frying pan.  She stopped and rested her arms tracked with soapsuds on the edge of the dishpan.  "Let's see.  I got the groceries at Rogers'.  Butter was thirty-nine cents."

Sally shook her head and put the butter into the refrigerator.  "Thirty-nine cents!  Wouldn't you know it!  You can get it at the A. and P. for thirty-two!"

Sorry, I just dropped you in the middle of that conversation.  Sally Otis is married with three children and her younger sister Virginia lives with her.  Fred is another boarder in the rooming house.  I've yet to meet the third sister, but she's going to enter their lives and throw everyone into an upheaval.  I love the description of this novel--"full of tension, excitement, violence, and even bloodshed".  When I read Stephen Becker's book (published in 1964) one of the blurbs read: "stinting on neither sex nor violence...a novel that is meaningful".  I guess sex and violence do sell--even with something deeper to the story.  I'm finally getting to my 2011 reading list, but I would have read this book in any case.   As a matter of fact I think I'll be looking for the rest of her novels now as well--it's a pity all her books weren't reissued, but better three than none!

A Monday Mishmash

This weekend I finally had a little time to do some catching up on blog reading.  It's always nice to clean out the saved posts in my Google Reader, though I must admit many of them were so old it almost seemed too late to leave comments.  I didn't get to quite everything I wanted to, but it's a start.  I always find the most interesting things when I'm out and about reading, so I have a mishmash of things to share here today.  I have to say that it is quite dangerous for me when I'm playing catch up as I end up adding books to my wishlist and find far too many distractions that get in the way of my own reading pile.

Karen at Bookbath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea are hosting a Paris in July readalong.  I shy away from readalongs as I usually have so many other plans of my own, but I am very tempted to squeeze one in as I have a number of books in my reading pile that would fit perfectly!  I have an ARE by Catherine Delors that has languished far, far too long, or I could finally read one of Fred Vargas's crime novels with a Paris setting.  I wouldn't mind picking up one of Carol Drinkwater's books on Provence.  So it wouldn't be too much of a reading detour (even though I'm spending most of my summer in Italy).

Kim at Reading Matters was lucky enough to be invited on a London tour led by author Imogen Robertson, who has written several mystery novels featuring Harriet Westerman in a late 18th-century England.  Her first book, Instruments of Darkness, has been recently published here in the US, and I've been unsuccessful in reading it--only because the line at the library is so long.  I have it out again but I think I've again not allowed myself enough time so am contemplating breaking down and buying the UK edition which is out in paper.  The tour was specific to her second book, Anatomy of a Murder.  Do click on over as Kim has inserted a video into her post of Robertson speaking about some of the locations appearing in her book.

The Crime Writer's Association has announced shortlists for a number of their awards.  I'm particularly interested in the CWA International Dagger (and later will be curious to see which books make the lists for the 2011 Gold and Steel Daggers).  By chance I've read one of the books on the list, Domingo Villar's Death on the Galician Shore, which I thought was very well done.  I'm planning on reading a few more of the books which made the list but may not manage to do so before the winner is announced July 22.  Maxine at Petrona gives a run down (with links to reviews on the titles she's read) on the nominees with a few predictions.

I'm excited to see that Zen (as in Italian investigator Aurelio Zen) is going to air on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre beginning July 17.  I've only read a few of Michael Dibdin's standalone novels and none of the Zen mysteries, but I do have a few on hand so might try and read them before I watch the adaptation.  I found an interesting interview with Rufus Sewell who is playing Zen about his interpretation of the role in the Guardian--see the video here.  Dibdin passed away in 2007, but he had been interviewed in 2003 and talks about his inspiration writing the character, also via the Guardian.

This is going to be a short work week for me as I'm planning on taking Friday as a vacation day in order to extend the long weekend just a tad bit more.  Hopefully that will mean more reading time.  And it'll be the unofficial start to summer.  I need to stop wishing for it to be Friday as I am wishing the year away it seems.

Lost in the Stacks: A Covenant with Death

Stephen Becker's 1959 book, A Covenant with Death was a bestseller.  It not only was a Book of the Month Club selection but the paperback rights had already been sold by the time it appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and it was made into a movie in 1967.  Becker joined Saul Bellow, Len Deighton, Victoria Holt and Herman Wouk on the NYT bestseller list for April 4.  It is sadly out of print, however.  This is a lost in the stacks book that I have actually read.  It was with much relish that I finished it earlier this week.  Normally books that deal with courtroom drama don't appeal to me as much as other types of stories, but I found this one quite engrossing.

"Louise Talbot chose to spend the last afternoon of her life lounging in the shade of a leafy sycamore at the split-rail fence before her home."

Louise Talbot is only twenty-seven, but is perhaps the most "disturbing" woman in Soledad City.  She isn't intentionally provocative, but she doesn't need to be.  Attractive, stylish and well dressed, friendly and more importantly lonely.  Small towns, particularly in 1923, and the likes of Louise Talbot don't mix easily.  She spends her last hours chatting and laughing with her neighbors and passersby.  And four hours later she was dead.

There's little doubt her husband did it, and the court case seems only a matter of formality for Judge Lewis.  Known in 1923 as Young Judge Lewis, Ben narrates the story from the comfort of his study some forty years later.  It's with much wisdom and hindsight he tells the story, but in 1923 he was a newly minted judge.  At only twenty-nine Ben is made a judge by the Governor who knew his father, and in this sweltering New Mexico summer he must preside over his first capital trial.  If convicted the accused faces death by hanging.

I don't want to give away any details of the trial, which gives the story such excitement, but a number of twists make it not nearly so cut and dry as expected.  This isn't, however, just a straightforward courtroom drama.  The setting and characters play into the storytelling adding depth and perspective.   In 1923 New Mexico had not long been a state and still had the mentality of a territory.  Prohibition may be raging in the rest of the country, but the only thing dry in Soledad City is the landscape.

"We were a queer sort of town, part frontier, part plantation, part pleasure, part cruelty, part old Mexico, part clanking modernity, and, as noted, part murder."

Ben himself is a product of his environment to some extent.  The son of an American father and Mexican mother who were happily married and impressed upon him the importance of strong principles, he was educated in Chicago and fought in the World War.  He's a thoughtful and sensitive man, but certainly at the beginning of the story he's still uncertain and unsure of his decisions.  He must grapple with the question of how best to serve the law and society, so this is a moral conundrum as well.  And against it all he is dealing with his own personal dilemmas.

If you come across Stephen Becker's The Covenant with Death it's well worth reading.

Murder, Italian Style

Every year about this time I begin thinking about reading a few 'beach books'.  These aren't books that I would necessarily read at the beach, because where I live there is no beach (or ocean or major body of water for that matter).  Rather these are books that have seaside settings.  If I can't go there I can at least read about being there, right?  This year, though, I think my summer destination is going to be a little different.  I was noticing that my library book stack has an inordinate number of books that are mysteries or crime stories that are set in Italy.  And I happen to be reading Andrea Camilleri's The Shape of Water which is set in Sicily, so I guess I've unofficially kicked off something resembling a summer reading project.  I'll start in Sicily and make my way up the boot all the way to Venice.

After Sicily I can hop on over to a coastal resort in Southern Italy where Gianrico Carofiglio's Involuntary Witness is set.  I first heard about this book via Caroline.  This is actually a courtroom drama. "A powerful attack on racism, and a fascinating insight into the Italian judicial process, it is also an affectionate portrait of a deeply humane hero."

Heading up the coast to Naples I'll meet Captain Natalia Monte in Jan Marete Weiss's These Dark Things working on her first case (well, this is a first book anyway).  A young college student there has been found murdered in the catacombs beneath a monastery.  While I've read very mixed reactions to this book it sounds like a promising start and Weiss appears to be very adept at creating a convincing setting.

Next is Rome with a fittingly titled The Dogs of Rome by Conor Fitzgerald.  Commissario Alec Blume sounds interesting--an American expatriate who's lived in Rome for twenty-two years might have an interesting perspective on life and the criminal world in Italy. 

The Last Enemy by Grace Brophy takes place in Assissi in Umbria, which I hear is somewhat off the beaten path as far as crime stories go.  Here Commissario Alessandro Cenni looks into the death of an American woman--the niece of a wealthy aristocratic family with skeletons in their closet.

There's lots to choose from in Tuscany, however.  Niccolo Ammaniti's I'm Not Scared is set in the Tuscan countryside, which is told from the point of view of a nine-year-old boy who discovers the body of a child in an abandoned house.  Both Death of an Englishman by Magdalen Nabb and Time of Mourning by Christobel Kent are set in Florence.  Marshal Guarnaccia is Nabb's sleuth who has the aid of Scotland Yard in the investigation of a respected Englishman.  Nabb's books are mostly from the 1980s but Christobel Kent's Sandro Cellini is a PI working in contemporary Florence.  

I like the sound of Carlo Lucarelli's sleuth in Almost Blue.  Grazia Negro is a hip, young female detective who works with a special unit tracking down serial killers.  Apparently there is one on the loose in Bologna! 

Finally it's up to Venice to revisit Donna Leon's Inspector Guido Brunetti.  I think I left off at A Noble Radiance, but I might have to shuffle through my notebook to make sure.  "Providing insight into Venetian society through the lens of a gripping intellectual mystery, this atmospheric tale from Donna Leon finds Inspector Guido Brunetti investigating an aristocratic family with a shady past."  I like Brunetti and his family and am looking forward to getting back to his Venice. 

I'd like to read all of these, but we'll see how it goes.  It would be fun to compare and contrast the books and there seems to be no end to choices.  Have I missed any particularly good Italian crime novels or mysteries?  I'll be finishing with Inspector Montalbano soon I suspect and then onwards towards the tip of Italy with Carofiglio.