Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  It’s a story as old as California itself, one that has played out in beach towns from Santa Barbara all the way to San Diego as blue-collar residents, surf bums, and mom-and-pop shops get squeezed out by rising rents and redevelopment. In many ways, Tapping the Source is a coda to an entire postwar era when the laid-back Southern California beach lifestyle seemed not only within reach, but almost an inalienable right.

  Yet there is no nostalgia in Nunn’s writing, just a steely, hard-boiled sensibility and a stark acceptance of humanity’s failings. And the most gorgeous writing about beaches and surfing that you’ll ever read. Here’s a taste:

  He took great pleasure in the mornings, in walking along the cliffs, close to the edge, the ocean smooth and glassy beneath, the air still and hot against his face and yet laced with the salty dampness of the sea.

  At first Ike wipes out spectacularly trying to ride the waves, to the mocking amusement of the locals, a menacing bunch led by a charismatic blond surfer.

  Then one morning something happened that was different. Ike got into a wall of white water from a large outside wave. It grabbed his board, sent it skimming across the surface of the water. Ike got to his feet. He was carrying more speed than he was used to, but he found the speed actually made it easier to stand. The wall slowed slightly, began to reform. Ike leaned into the wave and the board swung easily beneath him. A wall of water rose ahead of him, its face glassy and smooth, streaked with white. He was angling across it . . . he was riding a wave. The wall rose rapidly, began to pitch out, his inside rail caught and over he went . . . he wanted to stop and shout, to raise his arms over his head and shake his fists. He knew now what the hoots and screams he had heard from the surfers beneath the pier were all about. He had gotten into a wave.

  But there is a snake in this about-to-be-lost Paradise, and his name is Hound Adams, the good-looking blond surf god who rules the breaks with his cronies. After days spent lounging on the beach and in the water, Hound and his friends throw parties known for booze, drugs, and pretty, pliant girls.

  At first Ike is a wistful outsider looking in. And shirking from it, too, because he’s heard rumors about the homemade movies that Hound Adams likes to create at his drug-fueled parties. And he senses the surfer knows more about Ellen’s disappearance than he lets on.

  But the magnetic pull of Adams and his gang is as relentless as the tides. Ike tells himself that he’s only infiltrating Hound’s world to track down his missing sister. But soon he’s seduced by the lifestyle, and agrees to a Faustian bargain of his own.

  And with that, all pretense of looking for Ellen evaporates.

  Mornings were still spent with the dawn patrol, in the shadows of the old pier. Then it was home for breakfast and back into bed, only this time the bed was Michelle’s. And then it was back to the shop or down to the beach, with a pocketful of Hound Adams’s dope and an eye out for the girls, down in the hot sand and maybe a noseful of coke, because he had discovered where Hound Adams found the energy to party all night and surf all day.

  [ . . .] After that night with the redhead, he had tried not to fuck them, just to recruit them for the parties, sad stupid little girls. And he had laughed at himself for ever thinking there was more to it, something magical, even, and he both wished back the magic and sneered at himself for ever having believed it there.

  And with those words, Nunn pierces to the oily heart of darkness that lies beneath the placid beach town. In time, Ike’s biker friend Preston will take him up the coast to a famed surf break near Santa Barbara (based on a real place) where they camp out and surf for several days in a pristine, prelapsarian coastal paradise. But even here there are shadows. The best surf spot in all California lies on private land owned by a wealthy recluse who has his own dark connection to Hound Adams. There are menacing security guards, pagan rituals, and debauchery that only great money and privacy can buy. As Ike’s girlfriend Michelle is drawn increasingly into Hound Adams’s dark orbit, Nunn heightens the stakes for a terrifying climax.

  But what will haunt the reader is not the resolution of the mystery itself, but Nunn’s achingly beautiful writing about the Southern California coast, one boy’s quest for absolution, and the ragged, hard-won acceptance that some secrets refuse to give up their ghosts, no matter how hard we try. But hopefully we learn something along the way.

  With Tapping the Source, Kem Nunn joins a hallowed group of classic L.A. crime writers who have understood the atavistic pull of the tides and explored the beach’s metaphoric possibilities for almost eighty years. For Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Horace McCoy, Leigh Brackett, and Dorothy B. Hughes, the Southern California coast was far from glamorous. It was a lonely and desperate place where dreams came to die.

  By the time Kem Nunn wrote Tapping the Source, the beach was already transforming into a fantasy playground for the wealthy and beautiful. But while earlier authors used our golden coast as a backdrop, Kem Nunn was the first to make it a living, breathing central character, the ultimate tanned, blond, and duplicitous femme fatale.

  Because in Nunn’s world, the Endless Summer doesn’t seem so wonderful.

  At times, it seems more like a curse.

  Denise Hamilton is a Los Angeles native whose crime novels have been short-listed for the Edgar and the Creasey Dagger. She is also editor of the two-volume anthology Los Angeles Noir, which won the Edgar Award. Visit her online at www.denisehamilton.com.

  Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

  by Douglas Adams (1987)

  CHRISTOPHER BROOKMYRE

  * * *

  Douglas Adams (1952–2001) is best remembered for his five humorous sci-fi novels collectively known as “the increasingly improbable trilogy” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which emerged from the BBC radio series of the same name, first broadcast in 1978. Adams also published a pair of detective novels featuring the idiosyncratic private eye Dirk Gently: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and its sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988). Essentially a spoof on the PI subgenre, the first Dirk Gently novel was described by its author as “a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics.”

  * * *

  It’s common enough to have finished reading a novel, particularly a crime novel, and then to thumb back through it, confirming a few details and checking for things that you missed. It is less common to finish a novel and then promptly return to page one in order to reread the thing again in its entirety. In a rarer subgenus still is the phenomenon of being rewarded for your return by the discovery of a kind of shadow book, a different novel specifically intended for those who have already passed this way once and are thus armed with the information required to appreciate the hidden treasures of the parallel book.

  Anyone who has read (and inevitably reread) Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency will know what I’m talking about. It is not merely a book so intricately plotted and so packed with moments of brilliance that it takes a second pass to appreciate them all: it is a book that reads completely differently the second time around, to the extent that there are jokes and observations clearly intended for the returning visitor. Given that the genre of detective fiction is largely about mystery and revelation, this is an audacious coup, which is not to say that it doesn’t excel on that other level, too.

  Indeed, the pleasure of any great crime novel lies in the way in which it takes a number of apparently disparate incidents, characters, and clues and asks the reader to ponder how they could possibly be connected. The more disparate, the more apparently random, the greater both the intrigue and the satisfaction as the detective somehow pulls the threads together. In DGHDA, it’s fair to say that a new bar is set regarding the disparate and random quotients, such that only a detective who aspires to demonstrate “the fundamental inter-connectedness of all things” could possibly find the solution. The apparently motiveless murder of a software entrepreneur, a gravely worri
ed academic with a live horse stuck in his upstairs bathroom, a guilt-ridden computer whizz kid whose new sofa is lodged on a staircase in genuine defiance of the laws of geometry: these would be enough for any mystery story to be getting on with. But add the suggestion that the academic might be several centuries old, that the whizz kid may have been the victim of ghostly possession, and then top it all off with a reference to someone reading “the second, and altogether stranger part” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”—i.e., the part of the unfinished poem that Coleridge never wrote—and you know you’re in territory where Morse would be struggling.

  In fact, it’s always fun to imagine a couple of the typically hard-bitten and world-weary veteran detectives of conventional crime fiction turning up to the murder scene in Adams’s novel, standing over the body of software entrepreneur Gordon Way where he lies slain by a shotgun blast at the rear of his Mercedes on the floor of a gas station forecourt.

  “What you reckon, guv?”

  “Well, it’s obvious, innit. He’s been done by an electric monk from another dimension. The monk’s been possessed by the ghost of some geezer from a distant galaxy who’s been dead for four billion years and is looking for a time machine so that he can go back and prevent the incident that caused life on our planet to begin evolving.”

  “Yeah, guv. Textbook.”

  The story had its origins in a Doctor Who serial, “Shada,” written by Adams but never completed or broadcast due to a strike during the 1979–80 season. Adams reworked the idea but brought to it far more whimsy than the SF/horror hybrid that was called for in its first incarnation. That said, there are some genuinely chilling moments, mostly concerning the possession of spoiled publisher Michael Wenton-Weakes, and Adams’s description of this character is one that has served as a warning to me down the years regarding what often lurks beneath the placid exteriors of a number of apparently harmless individuals. “He was one of those dangerous people who are soft, squidgy and cowlike provided they have what they want . . . You would have to push through a lot of squidgy bits in order to find a bit that didn’t give when you pushed it. That was the bit that all the soft squidgy bits were there to protect.”

  However, the most important thing Adams brought to his reworking was its eponymous hero, the indisputable star of the show. Gently carves out his unique place in the detective canon thus: “The whole thing was so obvious that the only thing which prevented me from seeing the solution was the trifling fact that it was completely impossible. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.”

  He is a magnificent creation: entertainingly infuriating, unflappable to the point of negligence, unfairly damaged yet boundlessly optimistic, and quite unlike any sleuth that has preceded or followed him. Adams was a notoriously reluctant writer, who was once literally shut in a hotel room by his editor in order to make him work, but when he writes about Dirk Gently, you can sense real joy in what he is about. Ideas flow, jokes sparkle, and all of the other characters suddenly become more interesting through sharing a scene with him.

  This is a book I’ve come back to again and again over the years. I won’t say that I discover something new every time, as I’ve read it too often for that. But like many brilliant crime novels, and like many a great comedy routine, it can be savored repeatedly for the genius of its construction and the panache of its execution.

  If you’ve never picked it up and are now planning to do so, then let me just say that I am truly jealous of what you’re about to read. Twice.

  Christopher Brookmyre was born in Glasgow in 1968 and educated at the University of Glasgow. He worked as a subeditor in London and Edinburgh prior to the publication of his first novel, Quite Ugly One Morning, which won the First Blood Award in 1996 for the best first crime novel of the year. Fourteen further novels have followed, garnering him two Sherlock Awards and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing in 2006. In 2005 he was named Glasgow University Young Alumnus of the Year and in 2007 he won the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award for writing. It’s not all wine and roses, however, as he is a St. Mirren season ticket holder. Visit him online at www.brookmyre.co.uk.

  The Silence of the Lambs

  by Thomas Harris (1988)

  KATHY REICHS

  * * *

  Thomas Harris (b. 1940) is an American novelist and screenwriter who is destined to be remembered principally for two things: the refinement of the serial killer novel into a separate subgenre of mystery fiction with two novels, Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988), that are unlikely ever to be equaled; and making cannibalism seem like a sophisticated lifestyle choice for the discerning gourmand. Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic psychiatrist who gradually moved from the periphery to the heart of the four novels in which he has featured, arguably with diminishing returns, is one of the great monsters of popular fiction. Harris maintains a low media profile and is reputed to find the process of writing intensely difficult: he has published only five novels in thirty-seven years.

  * * *

  “How do we begin to covet, Clarice?” We read something good and want to make it our own.

  Writing a book is a purge. At the end you’re empty, out of ideas, out of inspiration.

  Reading a book is a binge. Characters crisscross your mind. You think about them, impressed by the cleverness of some and the stupidity of others. You want to warn of dangers and to point out clues. The experience may leave you trying to draw a border between fiction and reality.

  In The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris’s characters remained in my thoughts long after I closed the cover. His story intrigued and disturbed me. Though years would pass before I’d begin my first novel, the book left impressions that influenced me as a writer.

  Lambs opens by introducing Clarice Starling, protégée of Jack Crawford, head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science unit. Starling has been chosen to help in the hunt for “Buffalo Bill,” a murderer who starves, then skins, his female victims. Hoping for insight into Bill’s psyche, Crawford sends Starling to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a cannibalistic serial killer confined to prison. Lecter agrees to meet with Starling, but only if she will answer his questions about her past.

  Published in 1988, Lambs was both a landmark and a benchmark.

  The book was a landmark because Harris painted an honest picture of forensic science in all its tedious, exhausting, unglamorous reality, of professionals with specialized training working at their jobs. When I read Lambs I’d been working in forensic labs and at crime scenes for more years than I’ll reveal. Harris’s depiction of forensic methodology rang true.

  There is Crawford, profiling psychopaths in the hope that his efforts will contribute to the apprehension of violent offenders. There is Starling, lifting prints and examining a dead body. There are the Smithsonian entomologists, Pilcher and Roden, identifying a moth pupa extracted from the throat of a corpse.

  Harris once worked as a crime reporter. The experience shows in his detailed descriptions of FBI bureaucracy, of police procedure, of the challenges facing an FBI trainee. And Harris did his homework. Buffalo Bill is based on actual predators: Ed Gein paraded before mirrors in the skins of his victims; Gary Michael Heidnik held victims captive in his cellar; Ted Bundy lured victims by wearing a phony cast.

  After Crawford, Starling, and Lecter hit the best-seller lists, forensic science became a popular topic, and a fascination with serial killers, largely dormant since Jack the Ripper, was reborn.

  Lambs was also a landmark because Harris used a strong woman as the lead character at a time when few were found outside “cozy” or “whodunit” mysteries. Starling is the book’s human anchor and the reader’s point of entry into a twisted world of murder, insanity, and human depravity. Her character broke ground for future females in novels, women who are tough, smart, tenacious, and not particularly co
ncerned with their hair.

  Like forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan, the principal character in my own books, Starling is a woman in a man’s world. Her FBI training has provided her with G-man tools for professional effectiveness: mental and physical strength, alertness, knowledge of procedural technique. Starling works mainly alongside men, but Harris makes no suggestion that she must sublimate the feminine to succeed. Starling’s female orientation at times helps her to note bits of information that other agents have not. Her examination of one of Buffalo Bill’s bloated victims reveals glittery polish on the nails and a bleached upper lip, details that male agents had missed.

  When Crawford tells Starling that Lecter triggered a fellow prisoner’s suicide, presumably because that prisoner assaulted Starling, she says, “I don’t know how to feel about it.” Crawford responds, “You don’t have to feel any particular way about it.” For Crawford, answers lie in the facts of Hannibal’s statements. Starling searches for additional meaning in feelings. Following feelings and intuition ultimately leads her to Buffalo Bill.

  In blending the masculine and feminine, Harris created a character that appeals to both male and female readers. Women can empathize with Starling’s struggle in the man’s world of the FBI, where she works alongside male agents as a colleague and not as a sex object. Men can empathize with Starling’s methodically professional approach to finding Buffalo Bill, and with her courageous confrontation of him.

  By the book’s end, Starling has saved a girl, destroyed a villain, and graduated with honors. She has done so by combining her traditionally male-identified FBI skills with her feminine instincts, though I did resolve that my own protagonist would be endowed with a greater sense of humor.