Have a Cool Yule!

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Blessed Solstice

...and all the rest of it, gang!

Time to disappear for a while. I'll be back on Tuesday.

Here's an urban tribute to Christmas with Bob Hope, Marilyn Maxwell and Fred Mertz...uh, William Frawley in The Lemon Drop Kid. A great little movie based on a short story by the brilliant Damon Runyon.

(If the embedded video won't play just click here and watch it at YouTube)

NEW STUFF: An Uncertain Place - Fred Vargas

There is no one quite like Fred Vargas in crime fiction today. You have to go back to the "webwork" novels of Harry Stephen Keeler and John Russell Fearn to find any writer who comes close to her unique way of constructing novels that blend the weird, the bizarre and the absurd into a mind-tripping, eye-opening, jaw-dropping phantasmagoria. Luckily with Vargas you also get dreamy readable prose and not convoluted syntax or wacky word-winging as in the case of Keeler or mysteries with transparent solutions as in the case of Fearn. In the Vargas universe everything is truly connected. There is a ubiquity of significance in her books. The absurdities and oddities of life cease to be merely strange and carry a hidden meaning that sometimes borders on the supernatural. She brings the mystery back to the mystery novel on so many levels.

Randomness has no place and there are no coincidences. In a Keeler book, for example, the works of George Barr McCutcheon, a mysterious violin playing thief, and the science of acoustics all come together in the plot of The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman. A man eating a bowl of chow mein nearly chokes on a tiny hand made of jade in The Green Jade Hand, but the scene is not there merely to make us laugh it will have some greater importance to the story. Similarly, with Vargas the birth of a kitten is not thrown into the story offhandedly for cuteness factor; it will have repercussions throughout the entire novel. Likewise other events and discussions that seem to be mentioned in passing -- a brief talk about a man who decided to eat his wooden wardrobe piece by piece, the macabre history of Highgate Cemetery including what was discovered when the body of Dante Rossetti's wife was exhumed nine years after her death -- all have later ramifications in this hypnotically addictive book.

The ripple effect begins when Adamsberg who is in England for an international police conference quite by accident stumbles across a bizarre crime. Eighteen pairs of shoes have been found in front of Highgate Cemetery. And the shoes still contain feet. They have all been cut from nine different corpses and none of them are English. The shoes show signs of Eastern European manufacture and many of them are decades old. It appears that the feet have been collected over a period of years. But who on earth has dismembered several dead bodies and placed their feet in front of a cemetery with a past of legendary proportions? What have those feet do to with the horribly mutilated corpse of a reclusive Frenchman whose body quite literally was chopped up to tiny bits? Why are so many variations of a single name continually turning up in the course of the investigation - Plogerstein, Plögener, Plogoff, Plogodrescu.These names become so prevalent that one of the characters coins the term "Plog" as an exclamation denoting significance or surprise.

Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg will face one of the most unusual criminals in his career. He will discover that nearly everything in his life will be related to the solution of the crime. The people he encounters and takes for granted will play major roles. And most importantly he will discover that a long forgotten night in his past will come back to haunt him with a startling revelation. The less said about the wild fantastical plot the better.

And now a word about the oft forgotten yet very important translator. Sian Reynolds' translation is an intricately built, ingenious example of how translation can become a true art. Finding the right word is less important than crafting sentences that retain the original flavor of the author's native language. Vargas' books are intrinsically French and in this case have an added international dimension when Adamsberg must travel to England and later Serbia where he does not speak either language. There are ample opportunities for linguistic wordplay in these new settings. There are amusing scenes with Adamsberg repeatedly mispronouncing the name of a British police officer and his habit of calling the infamous cemetery Higg-gate and in Serbia he goes out of his way to learn a handful of Serbian words to better impress a woman who runs the guest house where he is staying. Finally, there is a policeman on Adamsberg staff who speaks in alexandrines a French verse of 12 syllables which Reynolds has confessed to being one of the most difficult tasks she tried to duplicate in English. For that alone she deserves the awards she has garnered from the CWA.

This is the time of the year when everyone is making lists of the Best of the Year. I can never make one of those lists. But I can tell you that An Uncertain Place is definitely a book I would consider to be included as one of the best of the new books, if not the absolute best, I have read this year. A little masterpiece of a book that is also an enviable work of contemporary fiction. It may not be to everyone's taste judging from a variety of indifferent and confused reactions in other reviews I've come across on other blogs. For me, however, this is pretty damn awesome crime fiction.

VIDEO: Dean Martin and "The Christmas Blues"

Here's an antidote for anyone like me who is tiring of "Frosty the Snowman," "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" and the rest of those novelty Christmas tunes being piped in everywhere you go.

I had never heard this song until yesterday and I thought I knew all the sad Christmas songs ever written. It's kind of swingy and upbeat for a song that's all about loneliness.

Music by David Holt, lyrics by the incomparable Sammy Cahn. Vocal by the coolest member of the Rat Pack (IMO). I think he had a few too many cocktails before coming onstage.

If the video doesn't play in the window below you can watch it here.

The Shadow on the Glass - Charles J Dutton

This is the third book featuring John Bartley as detective and narrated by a Watson character named Pelt (no first name) who makes Captain Arthur Hastings look like a candidate for Mensa. The story is slight and seems to have been written with Carolyn Wells' The Technique of the Mystery Story within easy reach. Filled with reiterative "tabulation scenes" the book could easily have been of novella length had all those portions been omitted making the story streamlined and the action unimpeded.

On the eve of his daughter's wedding Frank Rich, a millionaire book collector is found battered to death in his locked library, accessible only by private elevator and that elevator is guarded by two private detectives hired to watch over the wedding gifts. In addition to the murder it is discovered that a valuable rare book of Italian sonnets worth $30,000 and a box containing $5000 in gold coins (one of the many wedding gifts) are both missing. Donald Maxon, a spiteful cousin, who disapproved of the wedding goes missing the next day and is thought to have drowned in the ocean. For some reason the bulk of the novel is spent looking for this supposedly drowned character rather than trying to find out who killed Rich. Numerous "tabulation scenes," (a Dutton staple) an unnecessary inquest scene, and other extraneous action set pieces were surely inserted for the pulp magazine audience but serve only as padding and do not propel the story forward.

To be honest nothing much really happens in this very slight story except the endless repetition of the events of the crimes and the continual pronouncements of how puzzling it all is. The detection is negligible. Every three chapters something missing will be found in an obvious place. The "drowned" man turns out to be very much alive though this too is hardly surprising. Even with its tantalizing locked room problem the mystery is sadly routine with familiar tropes and more than a handful of "hackneyed devices." The only interesting piece comes at the end when the locked room is finally explained. But it turns out to be a faked locked room -- a definite anticlimax.

The book is chock full of lectures that are bound to annoy a 21st century reader. You will learn all about the inferiority complex and why at least two characters are thought to be suffering from this condition and will have to trudge through long paragraphs of psychological behavior. There are, however, some interesting passages on collecting medieval books as well as the art of the erotic engraving and how scandalous it was thought to own such a "dirty book" in the 1920s.

I have read several of Dutton's books but mostly those with his second detective, Harley Manners, in the lead. Manners is younger and more of an action hero than John Bartley who belongs to the old scientific detection school. This is pretty thin stuff even for Dutton whose early work first appeared in serial format in the pages of pulp magazines like Detective Story Magazine and Star Novels Magazine. Elsewhere on the internet I have written up plot summaries of some much better books by Dutton and talked about why I think he is worth reading for his insights into the early form of criminal profiling used in hunting down a multiple murderer. But I have yet to read one of his books that does not suffer from the reiteration scenes so necessary to the serial format with all those variations on how to convey "our story thus far." Sad to say that this is perhaps Dutton's poorest effort.