Risking It All

Colin Harrison's RISK is one of my favorite thrillers of the year. Here's what I said about in the Barnes and Noble Review on Oct. 1st:



If you missed Harrison's delightful thriller when it ran as a serial in the New York Times Magazine last year, forget about it. This new paperback edition is sharper, longer and much more fun to read.

Harrison is a master of imperfect central characters. George Young is an attorney for a top insurance firm. It’s his long-running job to expose suspicious claims. But Mrs. Corbett, the rich, eccentric wife of the firm's founder, wants to put George’s skills to a special, non-insurance assignment. With only a few months to live, her one desire is to know the true circumstance of her son Roger's violent death -- hit by a truck as he walked out of a bar. George's investigation leads him to Roger's mistress, an elusive Czech hand model named Eliska Sedlacek, whose motives for latching on to Mrs. Corbett's son may have gotten him killed.

George Young is a perfect Harrison hero. “The work can be exciting, and a little nasty,” he says about his job. “Which I confess is interesting.”

His wife, Carol, also a lawyer, works in the compliance division of “a huge New York bank... Being a naturally suspicious person, Carol has done well at her job.”

The Youngs turn out to be a formidable couple of detectives (“Now and then I am reminded that my wife is smarter than I am. This was one of those times,” George tells us when Carol spots an important clue.) Aided by a shrewd bartender and a friendly gangster, they uncover a tangled plot involving valuable metals hidden in cheap Christmas decorations. But not even such shrewd investigators can imagine what old Mrs. Corbett is really looking for.

Insulting Behavior

Ivor Davis, whose update of his landmark Five To Die about the Manson case is selling well, sends these classic insults:

"He had delusions of adequacy."
- Walter Kerr

"The man can light up a room just by leaving it!"
- Anonomous Member of the House of Lords speaking of Gordon Brown

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
- Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
- Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

'Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?'
- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it.."
- Moses Hadas

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
- Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
- Oscar Wilde

*"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend..... if you have one."
- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
*"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." -

Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here."
- Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
- John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial.."
- Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others."
- Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
- Paul Keating

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
- Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.."
- Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"
- Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
- Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
- Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination."
- Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
- Groucho Marx

'There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure.'
- Jack E. Leonard

'He has the attention span of a lightning bolt.'
- Robert Redford

'They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.'
- Thomas Brackett Reed

'He has Van Gogh's ear for music.'
- Billy Wilder

'He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.'
- Abraham Lincoln

'A modest little person, with much to be modest about.'
- Winston Churchill

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor:
She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison."
He said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."

A member of Parliament to Disraeli:
"Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some
unspeakable disease."
"That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."

Good Idea

Fortunately, the title of the third book in the Millenium Trilogy by Steig Larsson has been changed -- from The Air Castle That Detonated to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

I've been told by many lovers of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire about how much they hated the Air Castle title.

Guess somebody got the message...

The Best Crime Novel of the Year?

It's been one hell of a year for crime fiction -- and it's only September... But here's one that sure to be at or near the top of many lists.

THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime)

Just when you thought the invasion of excellent Irish crime writers -- a group nicknamed Celtic Noir -- had ended, along comes Stuart Neville with his first novel. Such impressive colleagues as John Connolly, Ken Bruen and Gene Kerrigan have joined in advance praise for The Ghosts of Belfast. Bruen calls it "the book when the world sits up and goes 'WOW, the Irish really have taken over the world of crime writing. ' "

Its central character, Gerry Fegan, is a former IRA "hard man," a killer in Northern Ireland, now reduced by the coming of peace to a shambling drunk, haunted by the ghosts of 12 victims who follow him everywhere. In a Belfast bar, "Fegan looked at each of his companions in turn. Of the five soldiers, three were Brits and two were Ulster Defence Regiment. Another of the followers was a cop, his Royal Ulster Constabulary uniform neat and stiff, and two more were Loyalists, both Ulster Freedom Fighters. The remaining four were civilians who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He remembered doing all of them, but it was the civilians whose memories screamed the loudest...They'd been with him since his last weeks in the Maze prison, seven years ago... He told one of the prison psychologists about it. Dr. Brady said it was guilt..."

The only way that Fegan can kill off his ghosts is by tracking down his IRA superiors who ordered their deaths. This he does with violent precision, one by one, until he is alone again. Along the way, Neville condenses the fear and hate that troubled Ireland for so long, at the same time creating a memorable character with ease and a cool, deceptively straightfoward writing style.

The TV Show You Have to Watch

If you're at all like me, you have been searching -- mostly in vain -- for a new TV comedy series you can look forward to. I'd almost given up hope (Curb Your Enthusiasm has never done it for me; 30 Rock used up all its jokes several seasons ago; don't even mention the appalling Parks and Recreation, which made poor Amy Poehler look untalented; and Mad Men has too many characters who look alike).

But now, thanks to the Divine Sarah (Weinman, that is), I've fallen in love with a show called Bored to Death, which began last Sunday on HBO. It stars Jason Schwartzman as creator Jonathan Ames’s fictional alter ego, named Jonathan Ames. Jonathan is a blocked writer, pothead and white-wine tippler who falls into a funk when his girlfriend dumps him. He consoles himself by reading Farewell, My Lovely, and that inspires him to advertise as a private eye on the Internet.

Ted Danson, as Jonathan's former boss, is equally impressive. Mr. Danson steals every scene in the role, which he plays as a loonier, more endearing version of Arthur Frobisher, the amoral business tycoon he portrays on Damages. When Jonathan asks George if he really needs so much Viagra, George primly replies: “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. My heart medicine and heavy drinking have taken a toll."

Jonathan doesn’t have many qualms about his new job. “I say that I’m not licensed, and that makes it more legal ... ish,” Jonathan tells his best friend and fellow Brooklyn loser, a graphic artist named Ray (Zach Galifianakis), who is appalled.

"Within 20 minutes of the pilot," writes Weinman, "Jonathan morphs from a commitment-phobic struggling novelist and magazine writer recently dumped by his girlfriend Suzanne (Juno’s Olivia Thirlby) to an unlicensed PI on the lookout -- with suitably disastrous and cringe-comic results -- for the missing sister of a college co-ed who saw his ad on Craigslist. The impetus? A frayed paperback of Ames’s favorite Chandler novel... After watching the first three episodes, I'm still not sure if, to use a well-worn cliche, Bored to Death is going to play in Peoria, but I have to hand it to HBO for doing their best to try."

Another interesting new show, especially for time travel addicts, is ABC's
FlashForward, . It's in the Quantum Leap genre, stars the gorgeous and believable Joseph Fiennes, and might just be worth a look.

Funny (and Cheap!) T-shirts

WGBH, the Boston Public TV station where all those fine British mystery series made their first American appearance, is having a great sale.

I particularly like a couple of t-shirts, WHAT HAPPENS AT GRANDMA'S STAYS AT GRANDMA'S and WHAT PART OF THE QUANTUM THEORY DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? -- at the amazing price of $5.70 each!

No Small Beer Here

Hound, by Vincent McCaffrey

Two things attracted my attention to McCaffrey's debut mystery: the publisher, a new (to me, anyway) Massachusetts house called Small Beer Press; and the fact that the author ran the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop on Newbury Street in Boston -- scene of much browsing and buying pleasure on my part.

When Victor Hugo went out of business in 2004, McCaffrey took it online -- what a good idea. He also began work on Hound, which is about a bookhound named Henry Sullivan, who buys and sells books he finds at estate auctions and library sales around Boston and often from the relatives of the recently deceased. He's in his late thirties, single, and comfortably set in his ways. But when a woman from his past, Morgan Johnson, calls to ask him to look at her late husband's books, he is drawn into the dark machinations of a family whose mixed loyalties and secret history will have fatal results.

Throughout the novel are people whose lives revolve around books: the readers, writers, bookstore people, and agents -- as well as Henry, the bookhound, always searching for the great find, but usually just getting by, happy enough to be in the pursuit. "Vincent McCaffrey's debut mystery is crammed with stories, with likable, eccentric characters, much like his marvelous Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop -- of all the bookstores in the world, the one I still miss most of all. Like all good mysteries, Hound concerns more than murder: it's rich in detail and knowledgeable asides about bookselling, the world of publishing, and life lived in the pubs, shabby apartments, penthouses, and strange corners of the city of Boston," says Kelly Link, author of Pretty Monsters.

And Paul Tremblay, who wrote the fine mystery The Little Sleep, sums up the book's unusual qualities best: "McCaffrey's bookseller, Henry Sullivan, is as endearing, frustrating, and compelling a character I've come across in some time. Hound is more than Henry's show, however. It's a slow burn murder mystery, a sharp character study, a detailed exploration of Boston, and a mediation on the secrets of history -- both personal and universal."