The Long Call - Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves published the first of her thirty-five novels in 1986, A Bird in the Hand, the first novel in what eventually became her eight-book “George Palmer Jones” series. Even before ending that series in 1996, Cleeves was already deep into her six “Inspector Ramsey” books, but she only added one more Ramsey book before ending that series in 1997. That’s when Vera Stanhope, one of the author’s most successful characters came along, and Cleeves has written nine Vera Stanhope novels between 1999 and 2020. During those same years, Cleeves also produced an eight-book series featuring DI Jimmy Perez. These eight novels, because of the television series based on the character and novels, are commonly called the Shetland (Island) novels, but the publisher also labels them “The Four Seasons Quartet” and “The Four Elements” novels. Interestingly, Cleeves has only ever written two standalone novels, one in 2001 and the other in 2003. 

And that brings us to the author’s “Two Rivers” series featuring Detective Matthew Venn. Cleeves began the series in 2019 with The Long Call and the second book in the series, The Heron’s Cry, has just been added. The author’s habit of simultaneously writing two series continues, so hopefully the “Two Rivers” series has helped lessen the pain of fans still mourning the end of the Shetland series. 

All that said, my own first exposure to anything created by Ann Cleeves came via the Shetland television series. More recently, I’ve also watched the first two episodes from season one of Vera. But somehow, despite having seen the name “Ann Cleeves” in bookstores for a long time, I never picked up one of the novels before I finally bought myself a copy of The Long Call.  And The Long Call turned out to be exactly the kind of crime novel, one that is primarily character and setting driven, that I love most. This is particularly true for a series of novels featuring one main character because it is the evolution of the recurring characters that keeps readers coming back for more. If the main characters don’t change, or if they are just inherently uninteresting to begin with, the crimes or mysteries they solve are not enough on their own to keep readers wanting more. 

Well, Ann Cleeves has come up with another winning combination with Matthew Venn and her North Devon, England, setting. Both are unique enough and interesting enough to make readers of this first Venn novel want more. 

Detective Inspector Matthew Venn left the strict evangelical North Devon church community in dramatic fashion years before he took a transfer back to the area to work with the local police. His departure from the church and the area was, in fact, so abrupt and so public, that he is shunned by the church members, including his parents, to this very day. Venn only returns to North Devon because his new husband, Johnathan, runs an important community center in the area, a place depended upon every day by many of the locals, and can’t imagine ever wanting to do anything anywhere else.

But now, even while Matthew is trying to fit in and earn the respect of his new colleagues inside the department, his life is about to get even more complicated. First Matthew’s father dies, and Matthew can only watch from afar as the man is put into the ground, and then someone connected to his husband’s community center is murdered. Not only will the murder investigation lead Matthew Venn directly back to the community which shunned him all those years ago, he will also have to deal with what appears to be a conflict of interest regarding Jonathan’s connection to the dead man. Surely Jonathan can’t be involved…can he? 

Bottom Line: The Long Call is a very good introduction to the Matthew Venn series. Venn is a conflicted character with an interesting take on his fellow cops, and even though he is the lead investigator, he is happiest when out alone following his own leads and hunches. He would never sit behind a desk if he didn’t have to. By the end of this first series book, the reader has a good feel for the supporting cast also: Ross May, a hotshot young constable who irritates Matthew with his obvious craving for attention; Jen Rafferty, a single-mom and a department sergeant who Matthew is starting to see as his go-to investigator; and Jonathan, Matthew’s husband, who is a Matthew’s opposite in so many ways. The murder mystery around which everything else hangs is a rather conventional one that is not particularly difficult for readers to solve for themselves. But that’s not the most important thing here…in the long run, it’s the characters that make this one fun. 

Ann Cleeves

The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe: "The Damned Doorbell Rang"

My recent re-introduction to Rex Stout's terrific Nero Wolfe mysteries led me to a 2020 short story compilation with a title as long as Nero Wolfe was wide: The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe: Parodies and Pastiches Featuring the Great Detective of West 35th Street. What I find most intriguing about the collection is that none of the stories in it were written by Rex Stout. Instead, all of them were written by authors who were fans enough of the series that they consider Stout to have been an influence on their own work. Interestingly, the collection even includes a story written by Rebecca Stout Bradbury, the daughter of Rex and Pola Stout. Other contributors include the likes of Lawrence Block, Loren D. Estleman, Robert Goldsborough, John Lescroart, and Otto Penzler.

The book is divided into three sections titled: "Pastiches," "Parodies," and "Potpourri," and the story title that jumped right out at me turned out to be the very last one in the collection, "The Damned Doorbell Rang," by Robert Lopresti. I figure this one caught my attention first because I recently purchased a copy of Stout's novel The Doorbell Rang and I've found myself more and more eager to begin reading it.

The biggest surprise about "The Damned Doorbell Rang" is that Nero and Archie only make an appearance in the story at all via the memories of a woman explaining to her granddaughter why she and the girl's grandfather moved out of New York City decades earlier - and she doesn't even know the names of the two men who lived next door to them there in the city. And she never did.

"The Damned Doorbell Rang" begins as one of those "worst neighbors ever" stories, this one about various comings-and-goings at all hours of the night, oddball visitors who often rang the wrong doorbell, celebrity sightings, explosions, and attempts on the life of the fat man next door. Nero Wolfe fans, of course, will recognize early on who these horrible neighbors have to be, so it's hard not to laugh out loud when the grandmother assures her husband that he is wrong about the two men being gay - and that she knows this for certain only because the younger one "gave her the eye" on occasion. Turns out that Gran even deserves credit for saving Wolfe's life not too long before she and her husband fled to a quieter lifestyle in New Jersey - a lifestyle that her granddaughter now finds terribly boring.

 The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe, which even includes a story envisioning Nero Wolfe as the son of Sherlock Holmes, promises to be great fun. As much as I would love to read all of the stories in it, the clock started ticking on this one a few days before I could get to it, and the library will electronically yank it away from me my in just a few days. But if this one is half the fun I'm hoping it will be, I'll gladly get back in line for a second go at it. 

Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

Despite all the international acclaim garnered by Kazuo Ishiguro in recent years, Klara and the Sun is my first experience with one of his novels. The immediate buzz about this one was so great that I knew I had to read it, but ended up waiting for five months for my name finally to reach the top of my library’s “hold list.” Thankfully, Klara and the Sun was worth the wait, and now I can look forward to reading more from Ishiguro, including his backlist. 

Klara and the Sun takes place at some time in the relatively near future in an unnamed country in which people seem to have splintered into communities that share certain characteristics and status levels. Those wanting to move to a new city or state first have to  find a community willing to invite them there. This is definitely a country of haves and have-nots, and the impression is that rapidly advancing technology, especially the use of artificial intelligence, has a lot to do with the economic split. 

The novel’s narrator, in fact, is a lifelike robot called Klara, who introduces herself this way to the reader in the novel’s first few sentences:

When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazine table side, and could see through more than half of the window. So we were able to watch the outside — the office workers hurrying by, the taxis, the runners, the tourists, Beggar Man and his dog, the lower part of the RPO Building. Once we were more settled, Manager allowed us to walk up to the front until we were right behind the window display, and then we could see how tall the RPO Building was. 

Klara and Rosa, two robotic Artificial Friends (known to the world as AFs) themselves become friends while they spend all those hours waiting to be taken home by the one teenager who will choose them off the showroom floor. They are friends, but they are not really much alike. Klara, in fact, is everything that Rosa is not: curious, thoughtful, empathetic, and observant. And she will turn out to be the perfect match for the teen girl who finally returns to purchase Klara just when the AF is beginning to think it will never happen for her.

Klara’s new human friend, Josie, is not having an easy time of it at home, but she could not have made a better choice for an AF than Klara because Klara is completely dedicated to her new role as Josie’s protector and advocate. Klara, though, must work within the limitations of her role and she sometimes, especially in the early days, allows herself to be manipulated by others who may not have Josie’s best interests in mind. Klara, though, never stops believing that better days are ahead for Josie and her family — and she never stops working to make that happen.

Bottom Line: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara is one of the most unforgettable characters I’ve encountered in a while. Some may argue that Klara’s selflessness and dedication to her friend Josie is only to be expected; Klara is, after all, only a well designed machine; that she has no choice but to do the things for Josie and her parents that she does. But even Manager, the woman Klara refers to in the novel’s opening paragraph, believes that Klara is special, that she is, in effect, almost human. One of the more intriguing aspects of Klara and the Sun is watching Klara figure out things for herself as she experiences more and more of the world. This is one novel I will not be forgetting…especially that ending.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel - Carl Safina

Trying to figure out what animals are thinking and what emotions they feel is such a tricky business that scientists have come to see it as a landmine capable of destroying their reputations and careers for good. Attribute too much logic or awareness to a non-human species, and you just might become a laughingstock within the scientific community forever. Carl Safina took that risk in 2015 in Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, a 411-page book in which he emphasizes that, “Speculation about animals’ mental experiences happens to be the main quest of this book. The tricky task ahead: to go only where evidence, logic, and science lead. And to get it right.” 

It’s hard to read Beyond Words without coming away with the impression that Safina did exactly that. What fascinates me most about Safina’s work, however, is how he came into the study wanting to learn two things: how animals are like humans and what observing them can teach us about ourselves. Instead, what he ended up walking away with was just the opposite: a better understanding of how humans are like animals and what being human can teach us about animals. The more he learned, and the more he thought about his goal, Safina realized:

I’d somehow assumed that my quest was to let the animals show how much they are like us. My task now — a much harder task, a much deeper task — would be to endeavor to see who animals simply are — like us or not.

Beyond Words is divided into a prologue, four parts, and a two-page epilogue. Part One is dedicated to elephants, Part Two to wolves, Part Three (the shortest section) to several different species, and Part Four to whales. Each section details the observations that Safina made during the time he spent working with small groups of scientists who have dedicated their entire lives to tracking and learning about a single non-human species. The big surprise about being around people like these scientists is how deeply they relate to individuals within the animal populations they have grown so familiar with. Often, it seems that the researchers have developed genuinely deep relationships with individual elephants, wolves, whales, and other animals. They have become friends in every sense of the word.

At first glance, it may sound as if these scientists may have strayed into dangerous territory. But as they observe their favored species, the “evidence, logic, and science” begin to pile up so overwhelmingly that it is difficult to disagree with what they say. Readers of Beyond Words will experience a wide range of emotions that includes skepticism, awe, surprise, anger, despair, and hope for the future.

Bottom Line: Beyond Words is an eye-opener, a book that reminds us of where our own species fits into the world, along with just how much damage we have done to other species during our ascension to becoming the most dominant animal on the planet. The ultimate takeaway for me, personally, is that being the most dominant species on the planet does not at all mean that we are the most “humane” species on the planet. 

Books like Beyond Words have the power to rock your world. As one of Carl Safina’s neighbors (J.P. Badkin) put it: “If you’re not careful, you can learn something new every day.” Well, here’s your chance. 

Carl Safina

On Distractions and Mixed Emotions

This is one of those days that I'm filled with mixed emotions, even to the point of not being able to focus on the things I need to be doing. It is, of course, the twentieth anniversary of the 9-11 murders, a somber day to be sure, but an anniversary (considering recent events in Afghanistan) that fills me with a whole new kind of regret. So today I feel guilty about not wanting to think much at all about what happened to all of us all those years ago.

Instead, I'm focusing on the little things that are happening all around me right now, like finally getting my car back from the body shop after four weeks of waiting for a new headlight to arrive so that the repairs could be completed. The covid pandemic has caused our supply chain to be crippled in a way that the world's interconnected economy is obviously still struggling to overcome. Four weeks for a headlight to make it to Houston from the supplier is ridiculous! The fellow-who-hit-me's insurance company ended up paying almost a $1,000 in rental car payments on a repair that the shop only charged $1,605 to complete. But now, after a month, it feels like I'm driving a brand new car...and I don't have to putter around in that boxy little Kia Soul anymore.

And college football is back. It feels so good simply to type that sentence. As I do every season, I have high hopes that my team, the Texas A&M Aggies, will have a great season. It doesn't always happen...make that it hardly ever happens...but I always hope that this will be the year. The problem is that A&M competes in the same conference and same division as Alabama, a team that seldom loses more than one game a year. That means that finishing second is almost the most we can ever realistically hope to achieve. Still, I can't wait to see how the Aggies fare against Colorado this afternoon in the second game of the season.

And I visited a couple of used-book bookstores last week and came away with some good stuff. At one store, I found a 1965 copy of Rex Stout's The Doorbell Rang and even though the book was minus its jacket, I am happy to have it on the shelf. I also found an unread copy of Ian Rankin's A Song for the Dark Times in the same shop, and despite already having read and loved it, I added it to my Rankin collection. 

At a different shop, I came home with three books I didn't even know I wanted when I walked through the doors - love when that happens. One is a signed copy of Sherman Alexi's 2012 short story collection called Blasphemy. Alexi is a native American author whose work I've really enjoyed in the last few months, so I'm looking forward both to reading this one and adding it to my permanent collection of short story compilations. 

I'm also a huge fan of Gerald Seymour's books and was happy to find an unread copy of one of his novels, The Walking Dead, that I was unfamiliar with. Thankfully, just so you know, there are no zombies in this book. This is the story of a British secret service agent who is sent to Saudi Arabia on an anti-terrorist suicide mission. Seymour writes some of the best thrillers of this type imaginable, so I'm really looking forward to reading this one. To show how highly Gerald Seymour is thought of around the world, The New York Times says of him, "The three British masters of suspense, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré, have been joined by a fourth - Gerald Seymour." I agree.

The third book I picked up in that bookstore was the last one I reviewed here: I'd Rather Be Reading, a book I responded to with a different type of mixed emotion. I don't exactly regret purchasing this one, but...well, you get it by now. 

The highlight of my book-buying week, however, was the arrival of a copy of The Library of America's volume of Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel, An American Tragedy. This one is over 900 pages long, and I've already read it three times, but I know I'll want to read it again. This is a novel I first read in high school, and I feel as if it is the one that made me fall in love forever with crime novels. Even though it is fiction, because of Dreiser's style and the nature of the crime he describes, it reads very much like a true crime book at times. And the physical book itself is absolutely beautiful - as are all hardcover books coming from Library of America. As the 121 LOA books on my shelves clearly shout out, Library of America is my favorite publisher of them all. 

Well, it's almost game time, so I'm going to fix a quick lunch and settle in for that. Maybe tomorrow, I'll be ready to think about this twentieth anniversary of the tragic mass murder of September 11, 2001, at least in small doses. I just can't do it today, so I'm purposely avoiding tuning in to certain television channels. 

I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life - Anne Bogel

I stumbled upon Anne Bogel’s I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life a few days ago at a used-book bookstore and snatched it right up, figuring that Bogel had to be a kindred spirit. And, even though the book was a little less inspiring than I expected it would be, I was correct about Bogel. She is.

I’d Rather Be Reading consists of an introduction and twenty-one short “reflections” on readers, reading, and the books we love so much. Really avid readers know how difficult it is to pass by books like this one when we run across them unexpectedly. I think we enjoy these so much because reading a book about the joys of reading is almost like having a private conversation with a stranger who actually gets who we are. There are lots of us out here in the real world, but it is not every day that we run into each other, so books like I’d Rather Be Reading (along with book blog commenting) are the next best thing. 

“But avid readers know a great book doesn’t exist only in the realm of the material. The words between those covers bring whole worlds to life. When I think of the characters and stories and ideas contained on a single shelf of my personal library, it boggles my mind. To readers, those books — the ones we buy and borrow and trade and sell — are more than objects. They are opportunities beckoning us. When we read, we connect with them (or don’t) in a personal way.”

And then, there’s this tidbit: 

“We are readers. Books are an essential part of our lives and of our life stories. For us, reading isn’t just a hobby or a pastime; it’s a lifestyle.”

Bogel even touches briefly on one of my own pet peeves:

“We know the pain of investing hours of reading time in a book we enjoyed right up until the final chapter’s truly terrible resolution…”

And these quotes are all from just the book’s introduction, so yeah, Anne Bogel gets it.

Bogel’s topics for reflection include these:

• Confessing your literary sins — all those classics you’ve never read,
• The difference between searching for the next perfect read and having the book find you instead,
• The unbelievable good luck of living right next door to a city library,
• How books allow readers to live thousands of different lives,
• The great fun of organizing and reorganizing your bookshelves — over and over again,
• The danger of becoming a “book bully” who pushes books on friends and family,
• All the different readers she has already been during her (relatively short) lifetime,
• How library due dates motivate her to read more and read faster,
• How your reading choices influence your real-world coming-of-age,
• The joy of meeting a “book twin,”
• Re-reading (“Again, for the First Time”),
• Personal bookshelves being the true “windows to the soul,” and
• The difficulty of remembering off the top of your head which books you read even one month ago.

Bottom Line: While I’d Rather Be Reading is fun, and sometimes inspirational, it left me feeling that the author had only skimmed the surface of most of her chosen topics. Some of the chapters read more like introductions to an idea or topic than true reflections, and I was often left wishing for more. I suspect that I would have enjoyed this one more if I had found it a couple of decades earlier (impossible, I know, because I’d Rather Be Reading was published in 2018), making me think that I’ve already read too many similar books — and that maybe there’s just not that much left to say.  

Anne Bogel