Fever by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

" Men and women who don't have the skill to consistently beat the odds, who can't quit when they're losing, whose constant need for the thrill of the bet is as addictive as any drug. The estimated number of them is staggering - as many as ten million adults in the U.S. alone, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. Combined, adult pathological gamblers and problem gamblers cost California nearly a billion dollars annually. "
[By definition, odds can't be beat, skills or no skills - a mathematician's comment on the above passage.]

Well, last October when reviewing Savages I swore that I would never reach for a later installment in the Unnamed (not Nameless!) Detective series because of the smarmy soap-opera feel with the same old same old cast and the boring familiarity of characters. Naturally, I fail to keep my word: I found two Pronzini's novels even more recent than Savages and here is a review of the first one - Fever (2008). Yes, meeting the same cast is boring - the sixty-something Mr. UnnamedButVaguelyItalian, the forty-something Jack Runyon, and the 26-year-old Tamara - but the novel is not that bad after all.

Mr. Unnamed has just located a missing woman: the client is the woman's husband, perhaps more concerned about her spending habits than about her well-being. The woman is a gambling addict and her losses over the last four years have totaled more than $200,000. She does not want to come back to her husband; instead she promises to file for divorce.

In the meantime, Jack Runyon, the other detective in the firm, has been hired by an older woman to find her missing son. Mr. Runyon, whose wife died a few years ago, is still in mourning and has been unable to get into a relationship. He accidentally runs into a mysterious woman and develops a strong attraction to her.

Naturally, both cases get complicated and serious: people disappear, several bodies are found. The stories are moderately captivating and readers who like major plot twists will likely be very happy.

Other than the interesting plot I quite like Mr. Unnamed's extended rant against cell phones - here's just a small fragment

"[...] I've never felt the desire for constant connection to my loved ones, business acquaintances, casual friends, and total strangers. A phone, in my old-fashioned world, is an instrument that provides necessary - emphasis on the word necessary - access to another person for a definite purpose. It is not a toy. It is not a source of public auditory (or visual) masturbation."

I share a lot of Mr. Unnamed's frustration with cell phones (likely because I am of the same age). Alas, one will also find quite a few passages and motifs in the novel that are just exasperating. The annoying, painfully cliché conversation about "intimate plastic surgery." The entire Bryn Darby thread, cheap and exploitative. The silly "How is it hanging?" jokes. The cloyingly upbeat ending. Oh well, I did find some enjoyment from reading the novel, so I am giving it a marginally positive recommendation, but it is the slimmest of margins.

Two-and-a-half stars.


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Nutshell by Ian McEwan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

" "We're safely on the ground floor, among the busy morning hum of flies that cruise the hallway's garbage. To them the untied plastic bags rise like shining residential towers with rooftop gardens. The flies go there to graze and vomit at their ease. Their general bloated laziness invokes a society of mellow recreation, communal purpose, mutual tolerance. This somnolent, non-chordate crew is at one with the world, it loves rich life in all its putrefaction. Whereas we're a lower form, fearful and in constant discord."

An audacious literary effort! Hamlet rewritten from the point of view of an eight-month-old foetus ready to come out of its maternal closet. Only a writer of the first rank would have a chance to make it all work. While Ian McEwan does not quite succeed in Nutshell (2016) I appreciate his trying. Better that than indulging the readers by offering them what they are used to read.

The Hamletian foetus narrates the story from his mother's womb. The mother, Trudy (wink, wink!) no longer loves her husband, John, a not-quite-successful poet whose publishing business is failing. Instead, Trudy is in a relationship with John's brother Claude (get it?), a boring simpleton who speaks in clichés and banalities but is more successful in business. Yet what he is most successful in are carnal couplings with Trudy: Claude seems to fulfill all her needs. The narrator, who despite his temporary enwombment has full awareness of the goings-on in the external world, has figured out that Trudy and Claude are planning some dreadful event that may harm his father.

Nutshell may be considered a sophisticated, erudite literary thriller; indeed, it is quite suspenseful as the events unfold, even if - and perhaps particularly if - the reader knows their Hamlet. Naturally, I like the novel for the language rather than for the story. As usual, Mr. McEwan delivers stellar, captivating prose, with occasional highly quotable pearls of wisdom, like the following extraordinarily insightful statement:

"Sex, I begin to understand, is its own mountain kingdom, secret and intact. In the valley below we know only rumors."

We find some bravura passages like the following bit about Danish (again, wink, wink!) takeaway food:

"Pickled herring, gherkin, a slice of lemon on pumpernickel bread. [...] Soon I'm whipped into alertness by a keen essence saltier than blood, by the tang of sea spray off the wide, open ocean where lonely herring shoals skim northwards through clean black icy waters."

One will also find lots of humor mostly grounded in sexual context:

"It bothers me that what she swallows will find its way to me as a nutrient, and make me just a little like him. Why else did cannibals avoid eating morons?"

So all would be nice and spiffy, creeping up toward a four-star rating, if not for what I believe is a major inconsistency in the literary device used by the author. Mr. McEwan presents the whole setup on the first few pages of the novel and while I find the main premise inspired and hilarious I question the author's need to explain how the foetus knows so much about the world outside of the womb. The awkward explanations sound contrived. Once we suspend belief to enjoy a fantastic story we do not need attempts to make it partially plausible. I have no problem with assuming that the foetus knows the history of the Western civilization so I do not need to be told that the foetus hearing the words spoken by other characters is not a physically impossible phenomenon. Or this about colors:

"I see the world as golden, even though the shade is no more than a name. I know it's along the scale near yellow, also just a word."

To sum up, the author himself spoils the audaciously original setup and the novel eventually disappoints. The prose is absolutely first class and the whole thing is fun to read yet Nutshell has not touched me in any way, unlike, say, On Chesil Beach or The Child in Time by the same author.

Three stars.

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Dancing Bear by James Crumley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"I heard their voices but not the words, and they seemed far away, as if we all stood in the brilliant salt-air haze of some Mexican Pacific beach, paralyzed by the sun and the softly pounding surf, reduced into an infinite languor, language lost in the muffled, sun-struck crash of the waves in the throbbing air."

I have been afflicted by the curse of often finding books that are promising and captivating at the beginning, and then deteriorate into incoherent or implausible mess. I have even begun suspecting that maybe the fault lies with me being too excited about a new book at the beginning and then too fussy about details as the plot progresses. But no, I have checked quite a number of my reviews of crime novels and similar genres and only about a third of them exhibit the deterioration of quality as the plot develops. Alas, James Crumley's Dancing Bear (1983) is a prime example of that unfortunate category.

The novel begins strongly: the Native American tale about a dancing Brother Bear, the description of the narrator's fight with the hapless mailman, and the banter with Gail are captivating. The setup of the plot, where the narrator is hired by an elderly woman, Sarah, with whom he had been "boyishly in love" 40 years ago, is really excellent. The reader will even find snippets of beautiful prose - like the passage quoted in the epigraph above - which show Mr. Crumley's literary gifts. But then... shooting and killing begins. Killing and shooting. Geysers and rivers of blood. Ludicrous, contrived, gratuitous.

Anyway, the narrator is one Milo (short for Milton Milodragovitch), a late-middle-age burnt-out PI and rent-a-cop for a private security company, a heavy coke addict and alcoholic who stays sober by drinking only peppermint schnapps that he hates. Milo is waiting for his father's "ton of money" that he will inherit when he turns fifty-two, which event can't come soon enough for him. Sarah, who happens to be his father's ex-lover, hires him to investigate strange going-ons in her neighborhood. In the meantime, his boss in the security company gives him a tailing job. Naturally, as required by a cliché literary device, the two cases eventually merge.

Yet shooting and killing begins earlier. The reader is offered geysers of blood:

"His left leg was gone below the knee, his right above, and blood gushed from the nerve on his cheek, and most of his fingers were stubs, the pink, pork-chop flesh not bleeding yet."

Wait; there's more:

"[...] I made sure the dead were really dead. Nobody at home in Blondie's head, the little guy swallowed his tongue, choked on his own blood, and the actor's buttocks jiggled like jelly when I shook them with my foot [...]"

The plot takes place in western Montana and neighboring states: the author masterfully depicts the rugged landscapes and the tough people of the land. The prose is full of dark and rather grim humor; being a sworn enemy of private gun ownership I laughed out loud when I read the following passage:

"[...] a private investigator by the name of Shepard, when asked by a journalist if he carried a gun in his work, replied,
'Hell, no. If somebody wants to shoot old Shepsy, they're gonna have to bring their own gun.'"

So, despite the utterly ridiculous plot, despite the incessant shooting and killing and gushing blood, I can offer a very marginal recommendation. For the setup, for Montana landscapes, and dark humor.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] we can say authoritatively that the world came closest to blowing itself up during thirteen days in October 1962. Two superpowers overarmed with nuclear weapons challenged each other in what could have spiraled so easily into the ultimate catastrophe. "
(From Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s Foreword)

I have a personal recollection of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962: I was 11, beginning the sixth grade of the elementary school in Warsaw. I exactly remember where I was sitting in the classroom when one of the teachers came in, very serious, and told us that there may be a war. She was so somber and so serious that even I, the class clown, stopped giggling. Only for a while, of course; after all, death does not exist when one is 11.

On October 16, 1962, the U.S. intelligence finds out that Soviet missiles and atomic weapons are being placed in Cuba. This poses the most direct and serious threat to the security of the country in the entire history of the United States. President J.F. Kennedy understands that he has to react and that how he reacts may affect not only the U.S. and the Soviet Union but also the entire world. The 13-day "game of chicken" begins between JFK and the large group of his closest advisors, members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, on one side, and General Secretary of the Soviet Communist party, N. Khrushchev, and his closest advisors, on the other.

Yet this is not an ordinary, simple "game of chicken", where the "winner", if any, is the player who does not blink first. During the Cuban crisis both players know that since they are not allowed to lose, they must not attempt to win either but instead try to exit the game without claiming victory or defeat. At least this is what rational players should do. Humankind can be thankful to both J.F.K. and N. Khrushchev that they were rational players and managed jointly to find an exit from the crisis without any side having a right to claim victory. On the other hand, imagine (completely hypothetically, of course) that the President of the United States is a complete idiot. Hundreds of millions of people would be likely to evaporate in nuclear blasts if such a hypothetical moron serving as the president were trying to win the game.

Thirteen Days. A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis is written by Robert F. Kennedy, JFK's brother, closest advisor, and the Attorney General at the time of the crisis. This is an extraordinary document of one of the most crucial episodes of the 20th century. The narrative is wonderfully concise, clear, compulsively readable, and even if the positive aspects of JFK's handling of the crisis may perhaps be a little overstated, RFK manages to keep editorial balance and also present Secretary Khrushchev in quite a positive light.

I very much admire various observations and recommendations by RFK. For instance, if what he writes about several highest-rank military commanders and their pressure to attack Soviet Union immediately is true, this is really scary and puts a huge dent in my rather positive opinion of the military. I would also like to emphasize one of the most crucial passages in the book:

"The final lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is the importance of placing ourselves in the other country's shoes."

The text is very well written and reads like a first-class thriller. The tension peaks at two moments: on Wednesday, October 24, 1962, when the naval quarantine goes into effect and when the world gets “the first glimpse of the brink of war”. The second peak occurs on Saturday, October 27, night; both JFK and RFK are now pessimistic about chances of avoiding war. Still, the rationality of both K's (Kennedy and Khrushchev) prevailed.

RFK's text is quite short, about 80 pages. It is accompanied by a lucid Foreword written in 1999 by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and an Afterword, written in the early 1970s by two eminent political scientists. The Afterword is a deeply specialized study of various aspects of the conflict, particularly the role of checks and balances in foreign policy and the respective roles of the President and the Congress - not for a casual reader like myself.

The slim volume ends with the full texts of President Kennedy's speeches and several letters exchanged during the crisis between JFK and Khrushchev. An extremely interesting and very highly recommended book.

Four-and-a-quarter stars.


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C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

""[...]making a low sound in her throat, not even a clearly articulated cry. It was a sound more primitive than that. She started to speak, but she could only manage a sort of a dragged-out stuttering phrase, sub-English, devoid of sense. [...] She began to cry as children cry, deep shuddering sobs that went on and on."

After very good A Is for Alibi came much weaker B Is for Burglar . Fortunately, C Is for Corpse (1986) is almost on par, quality-wise, with the impressive first novel in the series. So the failure of B can be blamed on the proverbial "sophomore jinx."

Bobby Callahan is a victim of a horrible car accident on a tall bridge nine month ago. His friend died in the accident and Bobby, seriously disfigured, works out in the gym trying to regain basic functioning of his body. Kinsey meets Bobby in the gym and he hires her to find whoever tried to kill him. He believes another vehicle was ramming his car from behind to eventually force it off the bridge.

Bobby is an unforgettable character; Ms. Grafton does a great job in subtly portraying the rapport between him and Kinsey. The author uses a clever device to focus the reader's attention on Bobby by announcing already in the second sentence of the novel that Bobby Callahan will die soon. Yet even without this, I am sure the readers will be captivated by dialogues between Kinsey and Bobby.

The cast of supporting characters is also impressive. I very much like the portrayal of Kitty, Bobby's stepsister, and his mother, Glen, a very rich and powerful woman, yet believable in her grief and humanness. Even the second-plan characters are well written in this novel: fleshed out and realistic.

The dramatic tension of the main plot is lightened by two side threads: in one we have a reappearance of Jonah Robb from A, again a believable portrayal of a minor character, in the other, quite comedic, we learn about romantic adventures of Kinsey's landlord and their unexpected consequences.

C would be a four-star novel for me if not for Ms. Grafton's use of rather cheap literary components of the plot, like memory loss

"I hate knowing I once knew something and having no access to it. [...] It's like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with a whole hunk knocked off on the floor."

and other forms of artificially postponing major revelations of the plot. We also have a cliché "A-ha moment":

"I suddenly retrieved some data from my memory bank and it appeared on my mental screen just as clear as could be... not the whole of it, but enough."

While the ending is rather cliché and cinematic rather than literary, at least the location of the final scenes is unusual and fitting the grim overall tone of the novel.

Three-and-a-half stars.


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Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens by Eddie Izzard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Most of us think that while we are here on Earth if we eat cake and watch television, that's fine. That's what we're supposed to do. But that's not what our bodies are built for. I believe we can all do more than we think we can do."

These lovely words come from Eddie Izzard, an extraordinary British stand-up comedian: one can find zillions (at least a hundred, anyway) of snippets of his performances on YouTube. His autobiography Believe Me (a memoir of love, death, and jazz chickens) (2017) is a better read than I expected, totally enthralling at places.

First of all, the childhood chapters of the autobiography are totally, and I mean it, outstanding. Yes, I have read more stunning accounts of childhood, like Joyce's and Coetzee's, but these are so-called giants of world literature. Not only is Mr. Izzard's narration extremely funny but also it seems to accurately reproduce a child's way of seeing and describing the world. While the autobiography is co-authored by a professional writer, Laura Zigman, it would be hard to believe that Mr. Izzard did not have significant input into the style and mood of the writing.

Several passages are hilarious. Like the one about finding a wad of used chewing gum in a hedge, washing it thoroughly, and then enjoying "chewing the pre-chewed gum" for weeks on end. Mr. Izzard is very fond of footnotes: they adorn majority of pages in the book. For instance, he remembers getting a "very small third of a pint of milk they would give you at break time" at school and then adds a hilarious footnote: "Mrs. Thatcher eventually got rid of those little third-pints of school milk because she hated children." I ROFL'ed having read this; well, I did not like Mrs. Thatcher either...

The passages about the author's evolution as an entertainer and comedy performer are captivating as well. The reader learns about Mr. Izzard's first experience of saying funny lines in his chemistry class at school, his first public show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1981, then street performing in the mid-1980s and, finally, the beginning of stand-up comedy performances in the late 1980s. The accounts of street performing "escapology" routines (getting tied in ropes and chains and then managing to get out) are particularly fascinating.

There is an unexpected richness of wisdom in Believe Me. One will find seemingly off-hand yet deep remarks about human nature and interesting self-observations that do not seem to be pumped-up to impress the reader. Like the fragment where he muses about what his life would have been had not his mother died early, when he was just six years old:

"[...] I do believe I started performing and doing all sorts of big, crazy, ambitious things because on some level, on some childlike, magical-thinking level, I thought doing those things might bring her back. Might make her come back."

I also wonder if I may be biased towards liking Mr. Izzard because of his long-distance running extreme achievements. Not having any practice in his youth he managed to run 43 marathons in 51 days in 2009 and then 27 marathons in 27 days in South Africa in honor of Nelson Mandela and to raise money for a British charity. Although on dramatically smaller scale I am a long-distance runner too and I think both he and I believe that people can do more than they think they can do.

Finally two things I have not enjoyed in the autobiography: the overlong fragments about his coming out as a transgender person: to me Mr. Izzard makes too much of a deal out of a perfectly normal - if not quite common - condition. Well, maybe some readers will be titillated by glimpses into psyche of a man who alternates between "boy and girl moods"; I would rather read more about the stand-up comedy techniques - how he manages to captivate the listeners. The worst thing in the autobiography, though, is the name-dropping: names of celebrities appear in the latter part of the book with increasing frequency.

For the childhood part, for the long-distance running and for the refreshing wisdom it would be an over-four-star autobiography. Even with all the nauseating celebrity stuff it is still a very good book.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.


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Bad Lawyer by David Cray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"'[...] juries are mostly too stupid to follow what witnesses actually say. They rely on manner, like they were at home watching television.'"

I suspect I like David Cray's Bad Lawyer (2001) so much because it pushes several of my 'hot buttons.' Serious flaws of the jury system are my main concern as to the American justice system: based on my personal observations I would rather have a trained judge decide my case than a panel of my "peers" who treat jury service as entertainment in their empty lives or, even worse, who yearn to be in a position of power to mete punishment to others.

Yet in my view, Bad Lawyer also delivers in suspense, tension, plot structure, and - many readers will probably like it - major, major plot twists. The story is narrated by Stanley Kaplan, a once extremely successful lawyer, with a 450SL and a co-op on Central Park West, whose career was destroyed by booze and cocaine. After a full-year rehab, Mr. Kaplan is starting again; his team includes an investigator and a legal secretary: the three of them are united by each having had a very painful past. They are so tight that, in the narrator's words, they form

"a curiously asexual menage à trois that maintained itself through a tyranny of memory, a pure terror of the past."

A woman hires Mr. Kaplan to defend her daughter who has been arrested and accused of murdering her husband. There has been a documented history of serious physical abuse by the victim, so Mr. Kaplan's is planning the prove self-defense. There are serious complication as the case seems to be connected with drug dealing and the accused had had three drug convictions in her past.

The case has been picked up by the media and it is being tried in the court of public opinion even before the criminal trial begins. This is another of my hot-button issues: not only do the media have the potential to pervert the course of justice but they frequently do it, ironically, in the name of justice. What right do the journalists or TV people have to shape the public's perceptions of the case by using trigger words, phrases or images?

Not only is the case tried in the media but there are two opposing camps trying to convince the public to their angle of looking at the case: on one side we have organizations that advocate women's rights - they focus on the history of physical abuse. On the other side we have the black community - the victim was an African-American - whose members claim that the white-owned media are trying to exonerate the killer before the trial begins. This is yet another of my hot-button issues: the near-automatic jumping of various social advocacy groups on the bandwagon of any event that achieves a degree of notoriety.

Anyway, the media battle is raging, which has absolutely nothing to do with truth or justice but all with entertainment. The plot takes several dramatic turns, which - for once - are mostly plausible. I will not provide any spoilers - as opposed to the usual explicit hints given by the publisher on the sleeves of the dust jacket. I highly recommend this legal thriller which, to me, is exceptional among the usual bestselling and totally cliché novels of this genre.

Four-and-a-quarter stars.


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