Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  All of this said, Science Good, Bad and Bogus is, overall, an extremely valuable, interesting and entertaining compilation, and can be thoroughly recommended to anyone interested in the stranger workings of the human mind and in the effectiveness of rational, analytic thought as a tool for understanding the grab-bag of marvels that is the universe around us.

  —Infinity Plus

  Death in Dublin

  by Bartholomew Gill

  Morrow, 304 pages, hardback, 2002

  Bartholomew Gill (real name Mark McGarrity) died in summer 2002 and so this posthumous novel is presumably the last in his popular sequence about Dublin cop Peter McGarr – unless, perhaps, McGarrity left further unpublished manuscripts, or unless the publisher commissions another author to continue the series.

  The Book of Kells and a couple others are stolen from Trinity College, Dublin, the thieves leaving behind a gruesomely murdered security chief. Initially responsibility is laid at the feet of an obscure pro-Celtic-Golden-Age-That-Never-Was secret society, the New Druids, a suspicion reinforced by receipt of video tapes, seemingly from the society, demanding ransom.

  But is it all really so simple? McGarr, recovering from two years of widowerhood, doubts it even while falling for the sensual lures of one of the key witnesses, Kara. He doubts it even more as Chicago-gangster-style violence erupts on the Dublin streets, as the body count of gorily murdered tangential characters mounts, as he goes back for a further bout of uninhibited passion with the sophisticated Kara, whom he can hardly credit would be interested in a gnarly old street cop like himself, as ...

  This last novel in the series was in fact my first – alas, most probably my last, too. It's entertaining, but in a rather superficial way; if there are hidden depths to the tale and its recounting then I missed them. And, by about a quarter of the way through, credulity begins to be stretched beyond breaking point. No. I can't believe either that Kara would throw herself wantonly at McGarr; even less can I believe that her behaviour wouldn't make him smell a very large rat. I can't believe Dubliners would be so blasé about the sudden epidemic of shoot-ups in their city, or about the grandiosely staged serial murders; to be true, the people are shown to be glued to the TV news, but there's no sense that, say, they're taking such precautions as staying indoors a lot. I didn't much believe in any of the characters, from the Irish taoiseach and McGarr's dimwit publicity-seeking rival superintendent on down – with the exception of McGarr himself, his immediately family and a muckraking journalist, who are well handled. And, while it's many a year since last I was in that city, I didn't even find myself believing in the Dublin setting.

  A further annoyance: the publisher presumably felt so reverential toward its deceased author's sacrosanct words that numerous hasty first-draft clumsinesses are evident: "The others were staring at him, one man even having rose from his seat to get a better look"; "McGarr knew other people who had suffered losses as great as he is but whose hobbies had given them succour and solace"; and so on

  I suspect Gill fans will enjoy this novel as the completion of the saga. For the rest of us, this is a book to be borrowed from the library as a way of passing a no more than moderately enjoyable evening.

  —Crescent Blues

  Vaporetto 13

  by Robert Girardi

  Sceptre, 197 pages, paperback, 1998

  There are too many supernatural novels about Venice, and almost all of them conform to the same template. An American or a Brit who works in one of the professions – teaching and finance are particularly popular – has recently suffered either a bereavement or the bustup of an amatory relationship, and they go to Venice, either for a therapeutic holiday or for professional reasons. There they discover the mystical magic of the damp and squalid city, get lost a few times while walking insomniac among its bridges and back alleys, and encounter the supernatural. If they are female, they are likely (although this is far from inevitable) to meet a staunch and reliable male who helps them through the various assaults mounted by the spirit world, and at the end either sail off into the sunset with them or say a wistful and moist-eyed farewell along the lines of: "I love you forever and the sex was grrreat, but It Was Not To Be." If they're male, it's more likely the fascinating but highly enigmatic woman whom they meet while walking insomniac among those bridges and back alleys and with whom they have that grrreat sex doesn't support them against the spirits but actually is a ghost made flesh.

  Robert Girardi's Venice novel falls into the latter category. It's short – little more than a longish novella – and it's generally very nicely written, but it has absolutely nothing new to say. The ghost woman is encountered about ten pages after you've started impatiently wondering when she's going to appear, and the only surprise about the denouement is the fact that Girardi believes the revelation that the woman is a ghost is going to surprise you. After that, in an epilogue, his hero (Jack Squire, touchingly called Jack Spire in the blurb, presumably by the same person who in the prelims describes good reviews of Girardi's previous novels as "paise") seeks pastoral advice from his priest, who guides him as follows:

  And before you can come to mass, you'll need to come to confession ... Because if, as you say, you pursued sexual relations with that Venetian woman outside the sanctity of marriage, it's still adultery plain and simple, even if she was dead when you did it.

  There are too many supernatural novels about Venice, and almost all of them conform to the same template. This is one of them.

  —Samhain

  Motion to Kill

  by Joel Goldman

  Pinnacle, 400 pages, paperback, 2002

  If you don't get further than the first twenty pages or so of this legal thriller ...

  Well, the trouble is it's difficult to get through those first couple of dozen pages, but thereafter you find yourself reading a moderately enjoyable romp.

  Lou Mason is a painfully smart smartass and the most recently arrived partner of law firm Sullivan & Christenson. The firm survives largely on the business brought to it by senior partner Richard Sullivan, so it's bad news all round when he's found drowned – a death soon determined to be murder. Fab babe cop Kelly Holt investigates, and Mason insinuates himself into her investigation partly for self-protection (not only is he a possible suspect but the murderer seems to have lethal intentions towards him, too) and partly in the hopes of insinuating himself into something quite different. He'd been on the point of resigning because he'd realized that much of Sullivan's business was crooked; now it becomes increasingly evident that the corruption extended far further through the firm than he could ever have envisaged. He's teamed up with fab babe lawyer Sandra Connelly – who has never shown much interest before but now seems to be throwing herself at him – to try to salvage as much of the firm as possible, while around them the body-count inexorably rises.

  The double dose of fab-babery is a bit hard to credit, especially given Lou's exceptionally rebarbative incessant line of smartasshood – his chat-up lines might have impressed the girls at high school, but a grown-up woman like Kelly would surely have the sense just to smack him one – and elsewhere there are plot elements that strain plausibility more than a trifle, but otherwise Motion to Kill is largely fun stuff, and the pages keep turning at a satisfactory pace. In purely technical terms the writing is often somewhat amateurish, with in particular a plethora of unheralded changes in point-of-view making some passages hard to follow. Overall, indeed, what the novel desperately needs is the attention of a good editor; even a good copy-editor would have been useful. Any diligent editor would have done something about those opening pages: the opening chapter or two would serve well in a creative writing class as an example of What Not To Do.

  If you're looking for another Scott Turow, John Grisham or Marianne Wesson, then you're going to have to look a bit further than Motion to Kill. If you're a fan of David Baldacci, though, then you're going to find this – which is, let us remember, Goldman's first novel – at least comparable and probabl
y a step up. Certainly he's a writer who seems worth some investment of a reader's persistence for future, hopefully more polished works: I definitely plan to read his succeeding novels, The Last Witness and the forthcoming (February 2004) The Cold Truth.

  Let's keep our fingers crossed that Pinnacle have given him an editor for those; it is, after all, what publishers are for.

  —Crescent Blues

  The Tarzan Chronicles

  Text by Howard E. Green

  Foreword by Phil Collins

  Hyperion, 192 pages including two 8-page gatefolds, hardback, 1999

  For some while now Hyperion have been producing a The Art of ... book for each new Disney animated feature, and with their large format, lavish illustrations and generally useful texts these books have become items to be treasured – in some instances, as with Mulan, perhaps more than the movie itself.

  In this instance it was a foregone conclusion the book would be a delight: the backgrounds in Disney's Tarzan are so magnificent that a book devoted to those alone would be an object to adore in its own right. As it is, we have here in addition hundreds of roughs, conceptuals and finished artworks showing all the main characters, either solo or played off against the sumptuous backdrop of the African jungle (or, quite properly, Disney's vision of it – just as Burroughs's Africa wasn't the real Africa).

  Perhaps surprisingly for an art book, the text, albeit journalistic in style and treatment, is not just adequate but good – not merely a carelessly thrown-together adjunct to the pictures. Green has clearly had extensive access to the main players in the game, most notably Glen Keane, Supervising Animator on the character Tarzan. Naturally this character is the one treated by Green in greatest depth, but for my money the most interesting section of the book is in fact that on the bringing to the screen of the other characters in the movie, most particularly Jane.

  Jane is anyway a fascinatingly realized character: on the one hand plain and on the other attractive; on the one hand resembling Minnie Driver, who voiced the part, and on the other – at least according to Driver herself – "a character that doesn't really look like [me]". These two linked dichotomies make for a screen persona to which one's emotional response is satisfyingly complex. Green is clearly aware of this, and there is the sense in his text that he would have liked to devote rather more attention to Jane than the dictates of space permitted.

  And then there are those backgrounds. Produced using a computer technique called Deep Canvas, whereby fully convincing 3D images can be generated – a sort of turn-of-the-century equivalent of the multiplane camera, and potentially every bit as important – these artworks are nevertheless best viewed as just that: artworks, and exquisite ones. For, although computers have been used in the backgrounds' final manifestation, we mustn't forget that it was human hands and human minds that created the originals, without which the computers would have been useless. The teams led by David McCamley (Supervising Digital Background Painter) and Dale Drummond (Supervisor of "Look Development") should be credited with a very genuine artistry – several fine artists whom I know have rushed out to buy this book purely on the strength of the backgrounds – rather than be regarded as mere keyboard slaves.

  The only area in which this book could be said to fall short is in its discussion of the Deep Canvas process itself. Apparently there was more here, but at the last moment Disney became concerned over the dissemination of trade secrets and so text was excised. This presumably accounts for one or two odd design decisions, such as a massive double-page spread showing only a close-up of the upper part of Tarzan's face. But that is a very minor criticism.

  The production and design values are first-rate and, just to top it all off, the cover price, although $50 may seem a lot, represents a bargain by comparison with other art books. This is a splendid and extremely beautiful book.

  —unknown venue

  The Anniversary

  by Amy Gutman

  Little, Brown, 352 pages, hardback, 2003

  Exactly five years ago notorious serial killer Steven Gage was executed. Now three women closely involved in his final days – his ex-girlfriend, the lawyer who tried to get his death sentence commuted, the bestselling writer who built a career on her book about him – receive anonymous notes wishing them a "Happy Anniversary". Soon after, the writer, Diane, is murdered in a fashion somewhat resembling the dead killer's modus operandi.

  The crime brings together the other two women, lawyer Melanie and ex-girlfriend Laura, now living as Callie and hoping the world has forgotten her past. They recall how Gage, while on Death Row, tutored other prisoners in law, so that some gained retrials – among them notorious serial rapist-murderer Lester Crain, who, shortly before escaping detention, vowed he'd show Gage his gratitude ...

  Yet Diane's killing has none of the hallmarks of Crain's handiwork. Even so, there are signs that he is, as it were, in the vicinity of all the goings on, and Callie's suspicions centre on him – even after Melanie has been viciously attacked but, significantly, not killed, and even after Melanie's old friend Mike Jamison, an ex-FBI profiler, points out that the attack on Melanie, with its attempt at a quick kill, could not have been more unlike anything done by Crain.

  The notion of the crimes of one serial killer being perpetuated by another after his incarceration or death is not a new one, but then most serial-killer-chiller-thriller plots aren't especially original, and that doesn't necessarily stop the resultant novels from doing their essential job of thrilling and chilling. It's what the writer does by way of original development of the well worn premise that can engross us; and, even if that development is itself not particularly original, the writer can carry the whole thing off by creating an appropriately chilling atmosphere or through the manipulation of secondary-level plotting surprises.

  Gutman succeeds with the third strategy: several times I was startled by minor twists. Unfortunately, she fails with the first two. For the most part the tale is predictable – e.g., the eventually revealed murderer was my #1 suspect from very early on. But the greater problem is the lack of atmosphere, allied to a failure of her central characters to jump off the page: they should be interesting, because she's praiseworthily striven to give them all sorts of characteristics and foibles that ought to make them real people rather than fictional protagonists, but they stubbornly remain two-dimensional. And so I didn't care what happened to any of them; several times I had to remind myself that, since I was reading this book for review, I couldn't simply put it aside.

  It's a pity, because elements of Gutman's subtext are interesting. She raises important questions – without polemic – concerning capital punishment, and she has some significant things to say on the subject of guilt and self-accusation.

  In sum, this isn't a bad book. It's just dull where it shouldn't be.

  —Crescent Blues

  Lost Stories: 21 Long-Lost Stories from the Bestselling Creator of Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man

  Edited by Vince Emery, introduction by Joe Gores

  Vince Emery Productions, 352 pages, hardback, 2005

  A good claim can be made – and it is certainly made by both Joe Gores and Vince Emery in this book – that Samuel Dashiell Hammett was one of the formative influences on 20th-century (and hence 21st-century) US literature, bringing to American fiction a new clarity and terseness of style, not to mention a whole new range of subject matter. Academic critics might point first to Ernest Hemingway in this role but, as Gores and Emery rightly maintain, it seems clear that it was Hemingway who was influenced by Hammett, not vice versa.

  The 21 tales assembled here are, as is usually the case with collections of this sort, something of a mixed bag. Some are no more than squibs – one is little over 100 words long – and in some other instances it is easy to see why the stories have slipped through the nets of previous anthologists. But some – like "Laughing Masks" (1923) and "Ber-Bulu" (1925) – are of far more substantial interest. The former is a hardboiled tale of the ty
pe for which Hammett is best known; the latter is equally hardboiled but set not in grimy streets but on a remote Philippine island. Future anthologists will have good cause to be grateful to Emery's detective work in unearthing these two – as, of course, do readers today.

  However, only about half of this book is occupied by the 21 tales. The remainder, aside from Gores's longish and interesting introduction, comprises Emery's contextualizing text. I soon found that this, constituting as it does a biography of Hammett the writer – with plenty also about Hammett the man – was even more interesting than the stories ... which is saying something. Probably because Hammett's later communist activities have encouraged US literary historians to downplay the extent of his influence, we tend to underappreciate how highly Hammett was regarded at the time; further, we're likely to undervalue Hammett's contributions to the Hammett–Hellman literary partnership because Lillian Hellman, in the eyes of today's literary elites, had the "respectability" of being a playwright whereas Hammett was, after all, "merely a thriller writer". Emery quite radically sets us right on both misconceptions, while at the same time being quite unflinching about Hammett's many flaws as a human being.

  As if the content weren't enough on its own to make this book a necessary addition to your shelves, it's also quite beautifully produced, with excellent paper, carefully chosen typography, substantial boards covered in what seems to be real cloth, an old-fashioned square backing, and so on. For the first time in my life, I was impelled to go out and buy one of those stretchy cloth book protectors to keep my review copy pristine.