A Question of Blood

A Question of Blood (Ian Rankin’s 14th John Rebus novel) is a complicated police procedural told in seven parts, one part for each day it takes Rebus and Siobhan Clarke to close the books on the Edinburgh school shooting that claims the lives of two students. The case does not appear to be a difficult one because one of the three students in the room at the time of the murders has survived to tell what he saw and the alleged murderer, an outsider, has killed himself at the scene. For Rebus and his Edinburgh police colleagues it is a question of why, not who.

John Rebus, always the outsider even among his peers, is determined to answer that question and soon finds himself in conflict not only with certain of his fellow officers but with two Army investigators that seem determined to cause him as much personal grief as possible. For a loner, though, Rebus does have one or two loyal friends willing to cover his back when he needs it most. One of those friends is in charge of the school shooting investigation and is willing to use Rebus in an “unofficial” capacity even though, midway through the investigation, Rebus has been suspended by his superiors. The other is Siobhan Clarke, the young policewoman for whom Rebus has formed a rather unlikely attachment.

It is precisely this emotional attachment to Siobhan that gets Rebus into so much trouble. He is so determined to stop the career criminal that has been threatening her that one night he is seen leaving the man’s home at precisely the wrong moment. As a result of this connection to the stalker, if Rebus is to figure out the why of the school murders, he is going to have to avoid the phone calls and visits of the investigators whose job it is to determine whether or not he is guilty of violent criminal activity.

A Question of Blood, at its heart, is a book about relationships, families, loners and friends. John Rebus is not close to anyone in his family and can count his friends on one hand. In his own way, he probably loves Siobhan Clarke but there is no way he ever could, or would, express his feelings to her. Some of his friends are much like Rebus; they spend too much time in pubs or sitting alone at home drinking themselves toward the next hangover – and they rather enjoy the lifestyle.

Rankin’s Edinburgh is the perfect city for loners. It is a dark, wet and rowdy place, and its streets are populated by teenage thugs that respect no one unwilling to mix it up with them. Rebus can only stomach what he sees because of his deep sense of outrage about what is happening to his city and those around him. Police work is all he has left and, even though he does as much as he can to protect the innocents of Edinburgh, he senses that his is a losing battle. He accepts his fate, however, and is a little unnerved by the emotions he finds himself feeling and expressing at the end of day seven.

A Question of Blood is a satisfying police procedural with an extra twist or two but John Rebus fans will enjoy it most because of the opportunity it gives them to spend some time with their old friend. For such a loner, John Rebus is an easy guy to like.

Rated at: 4.0

I Want This Typewriter

Man, do I want this typewriter!

This is the little machine that produced every word written by Cormac McCarthy in the last 50 years, every single word - some 5 million of them. And now Mr. McCarthy is selling his little Olivetti typewriter and donating the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute. Unfortunately, those who know about this kind of thing estimate that the sale will bring somewhere between 15 and 20 thousand dollars.

The New York Times says:

Christie’s, which plans to auction the machine on Friday, estimated that it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000. Mr. McCarthy wrote an authentication letter — typed on the Olivetti, of course — that states:

“It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. ... I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.”

Speaking from his home in Santa Fe, Mr. McCarthy said he mistakenly thought that the typewriter was bought in 1958; it was actually a few years later. He had a Royal previously, but before he went off to Europe in the early 1960s, he said, “I tried to find the smallest, lightest typewriter I could find.”

Oh, to have money like Tiger Woods (and a less volatile wife) or Paul McCartney (minus the insane wife). As originally described, or not, this baby would look great sitting on the desk in my home office.

Black Water Rising

Jay Porter is struggling. He lives in a cramped little apartment with his pregnant wife, a woman he has known since she was thirteen years old, and he wonders if they can ever afford a better home. Porter, a player during the Black Power movement of the 1960s, is now a lawyer with a cheap, strip mall office and an incompetent secretary he can just afford. His clients are walk-ins and referrals who can barely afford to pay him at all, much less an amount that would offer Porter a decent profit for his work. So, when one of those clients arranges a free boat ride down Houston’s Buffalo Bayou in lieu of a cash payment, Porter accepts the deal and decides to celebrate his wife’s birthday on the little boat.

As the boat makes its way through the heart of downtown Houston in near total darkness, the Porters and the boat’s captain are startled by a woman’s desperate screams for help. It is impossible to see the woman or her attacker from the boat but, as they are paused to listen, the three soon hear the sounds of someone rolling down the bayou’s steep bank and splashing into the water. Porter manages to get the barely breathing woman into the boat but, because he fears getting involved in the problems of this white woman, he brings her to the police station’s front door and slips away before anyone can see him or get his name.

It is only when he sees the story in the newspaper that Porter learns that the woman he rescued may not have been a victim at all - she might, instead, be a murderer. Still reluctant to get involved, Porter only learns how much trouble he is in when a stranger offers to pay him for his silence about what he saw and heard the night of the murder. The man leaves Porter with two choices: take the money and remain silent or be shut up for good.

Attica Locke has here the makings of an intriguing story about a former Black Power radical trying to make his way through the still tense racial attitudes of 1981 Houston, Texas. She does, in fact, do a remarkable job of capturing the mood and atmosphere of 1980s Houston, a period during which the city was facing almost uncontrollable growth in both population and serious crime. It was a time when whole neighborhoods were off limits after dark to whites and blacks alike, high crime black neighborhoods whites did not dare enter and high income white neighborhoods where blacks drew the immediate attention of Houston cops.

Locke, though, makes the mistake of creating two additional subplots that do little more than complicate her story. First, she gets Jay Porter involved with a young man who has been beaten by union thugs who want to head off an economically crippling strike by dockworkers at the Houston port facilities. Next, she exposes Porter to a plot by Big Oil to manipulate the price of gasoline at the pump, a plan about which only one old white man and Porter seem to care. These subplots overwhelm the more interesting, and plausible, mystery of the woman in the bayou and eventually begin to seem almost cartoonish - especially in the way that Big Oil is represented in the most stereotypical way possible. Few of the associated characters seem real and, as a result, even Porter and his wife become less sympathetic characters.

And that is a shame because the first chapter of Black Water Rising is one of the best lead chapters I have read in a while. This could, and should, have been a very different book.

Rated at: 2.5

Pete Dexter's Missing Pages

I'm doing it again - getting excited enough about a book to write about it even before I finish it. This time it's Spooner, by Pete Dexter, a book that came from nowhere to catch me completely by surprise.

I was not unaware of Pete Dexter's work before I started Spooner, having read God's Pocket, Deadwood and Paris Trout, Mr. Dexter's first three novels. But none of those prepared me for the wit and humor on display in this new one. The writing in Spooner reminds me a lot of what John Irving produced at his peak, the kind of writing I've really missed. Warren Spooner is a special character, one not easily forgotten even though he is surrounded by equally memorable (and rather strange) people, including his mother and the stepfather who helped raise him. This is the story of a very troubled young man and his stepfather's refusal to give up on him - no matter what.

I knew this one was going to be fun when I spotted Pete Dexter's "note to early readers." Who could resist reading a book with a note that says, in part:

As far as I know, sometime in November of last year, the book you have in your hands was three years late. There are many reasons it was three years late, probably the most conspicuous being that it was once 250 pages or so longer than the version you hold, and it takes maybe half a year to write an extra 250 pages, and at least twice that to subtract them back out. I realize this leaves another year and a half unaccounted for, and all I can say about that, readers, is get in line. Whole decades are missing from my life, and I am pretty sure I wouldn't have it any other way.

[...]

...god knows how many of my greatest admirers have died while I've been diddling around with this thing - and so you can understand, perhaps, that in the end somebody had to put his/her foot down and say enough, and in the end somebody did. Be assured it wasn't me. I could have kept this up for another five years.

[...]

...you should keep in mind that you're reading somebody who is still missing 18 months of the last 36, and has no idea about 2006 at all.

The Advance Reading Copy of Spooner comes in at a whopping 466 pages, all of them worthy (at least through the 365 pages I've read to this point), but I wonder what those other 250 pages had to say about Spooner and Calmer. It's a shame that we'll never know.

We're All Doomed!

The New York Times and some San Francisco books stores believe the world, as they know it, is soon to end. According to them, the twin monsters known as WalMart and Glenn Beck are on the verge of killing off liberal thought. In the best tradition of Chicken Little, the Times has this to say about the discounting of a handful of bestselling hardcovers by WalMart, Amazon and Target:

So if this is all a scheme to control those influential bestsellers, just what would a future look like if, say, Wal-Mart became the last bookstore standing?

A visit to Wal-Mart stores in Oakland and Mountain View revealed a remarkably limited selection, a narrow worldview and a political bent that can be summed up best with two words: Glenn Beck. The Oakland Wal-Mart carried only 21 hardcover titles: Mr. Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” (plus the audio book) and his holiday offering, “The Christmas Sweater”; “Going Rogue” by Sarah Palin; the book of Carrie Prejean, the dethroned Miss California, “Still Standing”; and titles from the Rev. Rick Warren and the television minister Joel Osteen.

[...]

Praveen Madan, co-owner of The Booksmith in San Francisco, disagrees with this fear. He said people would not start “reading this rightist propaganda literature instead of reading more worthy things” simply because the books cost less.

Mr. Madan said bookstores were more threatened by the recession and e-books than the current price war. Censorship? Not with the Internet selling virtually every book. He, Ms. Caldwell and Mr. Petrocelli — all independent bookstore owners — sell online, and even Wal-Mart’s Web site has a larger, more diverse inventory.

Mr. Madan, at least, is bringing a little common sense to the scare tactics of the Times. He knows that his Bay area customers are not likely to buy "rightist propaganda" as long as he continues to be their supplier of "leftist propaganda." Don't think so? Just read what another bookstore owner there has to say about the Palin book:

“It’s like buying porn,” he said. “People might want to buy it, but they don’t want to be seen buying it in the Bay Area.”

Lit

Reading Mary Karr’s latest memoir, Lit, is akin to catching up with an old friend over a cup of coffee or, perhaps in this case, over something a bit stronger than coffee. Karr’s earlier memoirs, The Liars’ Club (1995), which covered her childhood years, and Cherry (2000), the story of her adolescence and early adulthood, established for her a well deserved reputation as an exceptional memoirist. Now, some nine years after Cherry, Karr completes her story, for now, by revealing how she managed to overcome the odds to escape both the insular little town in which she grew up and the quirky upbringing she endured there.

One thing is certain; Mary Karr has not had an easy time of it. Growing up in a muggy, mosquito ridden little East Texas refinery town, one in which its residents breathe polluted air no matter from which direction it blows (as I well remember), she was raped by a teenaged neighbor when she was eight years old. Her father, a heavy drinking refinery worker, loved her dearly but was not exactly a role model for his daughters. Her seven-times-married, artistic mother was a bit of a desperado in spirit who struggled with a tendency toward full-blown psychotic episodes throughout much of her life.

As she so frankly details in Lit, Mary Karr is a combination of the good and the bad components of both her parents. Always a bit of a rebel at heart like her mother, she went into the world resenting those born to wealth as much as her father disliked them, taking pride that she could at least outdrink those who “had been born on third base” but who believed “they hit a home run.” And outdrink them, Mary did - all the way to the point of her own debilitating struggle with alcoholism, a struggle that would steal years of her life and ultimately destroy the marriage that produced her son.

It was a close thing, but Mary managed to save herself, and she accomplished it by doing something so completely out of character for her that it still surprises her. She turned to prayer and organized religion despite a lifetime spent scoffing at both. Despairing and suicidal, she committed herself to what she calls “The Mental Marriott” and the timeout there that would ultimately lead her to place her future in the hands of God, the possibility of whose existence she previously had not been able to take seriously. Lit is a word of several meanings when it comes to Mary Karr. It can be a reference to her success in the literary world or it can be used to describe the drunken state in which she spent so many of her waking hours for so many years. Finally, and most hopefully, it also describes the religious experience that saved Mary Karr’s life when she finally “saw the light.”

Fans of Karr’s previous memoirs will be pleased with this inspirational addition to her story, but Lit also works well for those reading her for the first time, so well that I suspect the new Karr readers will now want to turn to the first two books.

Rated at: 5.0

(Advance Reading Copy provided by Harper)