The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake

Donald Westlake was two of my favorite writers. Well, maybe three, but two of them used the same name.

Perhaps I should explain.

Westlake wrote mysteries and thrillers and other kinds of crime novels for about fifty years, after an apprenticeship in sex books starting in the late '50s. ("Sex books" were not nearly as exciting as you might think, O person with access to the Internet in the 21st century. A fascinating bit of publishing and social history, maybe, but outside my scope here.) Come to think of it, Westlake wrote several things that it would be hard to fit under even the big umbrella of "crime fiction," such as the Alex Haley piss-take Comfort Station (as J. Morgan Cunningham). But I need to stop digressing, so I'll say "crime fiction" for short.

His first major success was with the Parker books, about a professional heist man, written in tough, taut prose and published under the name Richard Stark, starting in the mid-60s. I read and wrote about all of those books in a burst a decade or so back, under the tag Starktober.

Parenthetically, Westlake also wrote a lot of books under other pseudonyms - a series of PI novels as Tucker Coe, the four-book Samuel Holt series, one book under the unlikely name Judson Jack Carmichael - but I'm not going to get into them here.

The possible-third favorite writer is Westlake writing as himself, in non-series books. The best there, I think, is the very dark The Ax, but there's also a good stretch of winners like Humans and Kahawa throughout the '80s and '90s.

And, finally, I'll get to the way Westlake, using his own name, is one of my favorite writers: the Dortmunder series of humorous crime-caper novels. The first of those books is The Hot Rock from 1970.

This time, I read it in what I think is still the current edition, a trade paperback from 2001 (right when the tenth book, Bad News, was published) that included a short introduction from Westlake about how he came to write it. (Even shorter: it was a Parker idea that turned funny, so he needed a different protagonist. Even after he found one, he lost interest half-way through, put it away for a couple of years, but then rediscovered it and finished it.)

Westlake eventually wrote another fourteen novels and enough short stories for a collection about Dortumnder and his compatriots: they pretty much all stand alone, so you don't need to start here if you find another one first. (I've always been a big fan of Drowned Hopes, myself.)

They're all comic caper novels, which means one thing: plans go wrong, in funny ways. John Dortmunder is a middle-aged - in the way of series fiction, he doesn't get noticeably older over the forty-year stretch of these novels - career criminal, just getting out of his second stint in prison as The Hot Rock opens. He's depressive, hang-dog, put-upon - but also one of the great organizers of the criminal world, able to work out a heist to perfection.

Except for the fact that something always will go wrong - that's the "comic" bit.

This time, he's hired by Major Ibo, ambassador to the US of the African nation Talabwo. His nation and neighboring Akinzi have many low-key conflicts, including a dispute over a major cultural artifact, the Balabomo Emerald. That emerald is currently part of a pan-African exhibit at the New York Coliseum. The Major wants Dortmunder to steal the emerald; he'll pay thirty thousand dollars a man (up to five men) and weekly expenses.

Dortmunder agrees, and gathers his crew. Andy Kelp, his contact with the Major and what counts for Dortmunder's best friend, is already in. He gets driver Stan Murch, locksman Roger Chefwick, and utility player Alan Greenwood. (Who is something like an alternate-world version of Alan Grofield from the Parker books - or, for the more conspiracy-minded readers, the same person and the way to link the two series.)

They make plans, and hit the Coliseum, successfully getting the emerald...but not getting it out. Greenwood, who has the jewel, is caught by the police.

But they didn't get the jewel. So Dortmunder makes a second heist plan, to free Greenwood from a jail on Long Island. And that leads to a third heist plan, to get the jewel from where Greenwood stashed it, in a NYC police precinct.

That's three heists already: there will be six before the novel is over. All of them for the same emerald; all of them - save the last - with the same degree of success.

Westlake is good at escalation, good at repetition, good at specific telling details - and he'd been doing one-off comic crime novels over the previous few years. Those are good, but Hot Rock was where everything clicked: the structure, the characters, the world. A series needs all of those, a structure that can run out in multiple ways over time and a main character that readers will want to come back for - and Dortmunder and his world was clearly that.

Hot Rock is still funny, and fresher than some of the late novels in the series. There's (possibly surprisingly) no racism in the African background - the Major is a smart guy with hidden depths, and the emerald is a plausible, useful McGuffin. The one thing I'd call out for readers who came in later in the series is that the Parker parallels are stronger here: Dortmunder and his crew are willing to use violence in ways that I don't recall from later books - though, in the event, they don't need or have the opportunity to be violent.

So this is a funny crime novel that builds as it goes, with a great structure and a fine cast of goofballs who move it forward well. And it sets up for a longer series with books even better than this one.

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City by Kay Sohini

Comics can be almost anything. They can be fictional or non-fiction. They can be wordless or almost illustrated prose. They can be immediate or thoughtful, punk or academic, seat-of-the-pants or carefully constructed.

We tend to think of them in specific genres, with a pick-and-mix of those options and a dozen more - superheroes are all dialogue and action, with flashy layouts, for example, while young-adult books are brighter, with more softly rounded art, a personal connection and a heaping helping of earnestness. But any particular book can be its own subgenre, and further out on any particular axis than we're used to.

Kay Sohini is an academic - I think that's important. She's also an artist and a teacher of artists, and (obviously) a maker of comics. Central to this story is the fact that she's from India: born and grew up in the Calcutta suburbs, a native Bengali speaker who went to expensive, demanding English-language schools. Her first book was This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, a memoir of how and why she came to move to New York City; it was published last year.

On all of the axes I called out in the first paragraph, Sohini is far to the latter side. Her book is personal, factual, told entirely without dialogue, in a continuous narrative presented often as large paragraphs on her pages, told a decade or so after the fact, through the lens of a lot of personal and professional experience since. And her art is, I think, digital: colorful and illustrative and carefully-constructed, never quite aiming at photo-realism but often quite close, a camera eye that maybe is meant to show us how Sohini sees the world.

I don't know if Sohini did this deliberately, but it's the kind of thing I'd expect from an academic, from a person trained for years to analyze and interpret. City is somewhat organized in that classic way: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The thesis is the image of New York and how that contrasted with Sohini's life growing up - her first chapter is about the first, and the second delves (in the most academic part of the book) into the question of how New York, and "the West" in general, was seen in her country growing up - and gets somewhat into the knotty question of colonization and the mindset of a post-colonial society.

The antithesis is a bad relationship Sohini had in her twenties. She never gives us a name or a face - her art style, and the all-narrative, no-dialogue script is very distancing, I assume deliberately - but she lived with a man who turned out to be controlling and violent, and who she learned years later was carrying on multiple other major relationships at the same time. Somehow, during this time - and Sohini does not want to make it clear to the reader how long this period was, or what years it covered - she still kept up her academic work, or came back to it.

And that gave her an escape: she applied to graduate school (several of them) in New York and nearby. She ended up with a full ride to SUNY Stony Brook, and went there. As far as the book says, this was at least a decade ago, probably the early Teens, and she doesn't mention ever going back to India after that.

Her life in New York is the synthesis. Sohini bluntly points out she is a very controlled, interior, introverted person - the kind that thrives in big, bustling, energetic, anonymous cities, where interactions are many but straightforward, where it's easy to be part of a vast sea of people, alone and specific and particular like everyone else.

This is not a confessional book in any way. She does name her husband and devotes a little page-space to things about him - but doesn't say how they met, anything about their wedding or cute relationship moments or respective backgrounds, or anything else personal like that. We also don't see him - this is a book about Sohini exclusively, about, possibly, the education and creation of an artist. It's how she got to this point: how she became the person who wanted to, and could, create This Beautiful, Ridiculous City.

There's something inherently chilly about City - appropriate for a book about New York, where everyone is happy to be helpful and direct while dodging deeper connections. I don't think Sohini has completely synthesized all of her theses and antitheses here, but they're her life: expecting that would be ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if she revisits some or all of these themes in another decade or so - especially if she ends up living somewhere else at some point. That's one of the intriguing points of any memoir - it can only ever show one side, one view of a life, and there can always be other sides or new experiences or reconsiderations.

Seven Places Without You by Juan Berrio

Just reading two books by a creator doesn't make you an expert: let me say that up front. I read Juan Berrio's lovely wordless Kiosco earlier this year, and was happy to see his name again when browsing through my library's app. (Either the app itself or the publishers putting work into it are not the best at metadata, so one book has the author "Juan Berrio" and the other "Berrio Juan," so they are not linked in any clear way.)

Seven Places Without You was a 2018 graphic novel, originally published in Spanish because Berrio is Spanish (living in Madrid) and translated by Fiona Marshall for a 2019 English-language Europe Comics edition. [1] 

The main character is Elena. She's young, living in a city - probably Madrid. Over the course of the book, we come to think that she's still a student. She's been living with Jorge, in his family's home, for some time, and it was good - at first. But Jorge is spending less and less time at home, ignoring Elena more and more. She doesn't know why, and he's been evasive when she tries to ask.

It has seven chapters, each set in a different place - hence the title. It starts in Jorge's family house, right at the moment when Elena decides she has to leave, and calls friends to see if she can stay there for a while. Those friends - Maria and Nacho - turn up in several chapters, as does Mario, another friend who has been pining for some time for Elena and awkwardly says so midway through the book. The second chapter is set in Maria and Nacho's apartment, before and during a party, and later chapters are set during a family dinner at Elena's parents' house, at Mario's apartment, in a park, at an evening out in a bar, and, finally, in Elena's new solo apartment.

It's mostly quiet and observational. Berrio focuses on Elena but we see her from outside. We know her thoughts - like anyone in the world - only from what she tells other people, and we're pretty sure she's not saying everything she feels. Berrio has a soft earth-toned palette, with squared-off panels not bordered by lines.

And, given the title, we assume, as the book goes on and there's no word from Jorge, that he will not be a character in the book. My just raising the question is possibly a spoiler, so I'll leave it at that. Seven Places Without You is a book about the Jorge-shaped hole in Elena's life, how she realized that it was already there and the ways that she began to fill that space in the early days after the break.

It's just as lovely, if a lot more melancholy, than Kiosco was. Berrio is incisive and thoughtful; his people are real and understandable and likable - even Jorge running away, even Mario clinging too close - and we see all of them through the lens of how they interact with Elena.

[1] I've praised Europe Comics multiple times before: they're digital-only and don't really promote much, since they're primarily a marketing effort from continental-European publishers towards English-language publishers, but they do - or did - a large volume of excellent books far outside the usual standard North American comics genres.

All of This and Nothing: Tuesday's Gone

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

As I noted a few weeks ago, this series moves back in time - two parallel tracks of Famous and Obscure. The famous track has now gotten deep into my childhood: I tend to think the hugely popular songs we still listen to will tend to be from our childhoods, but there may be different opinions on the matter.

This week, it is actually a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, which It embarrasses me to type. ('70s kids loved the Skynyrd at the time, but often don't like to talk about it later.) For the tiniest bit of hipster cred I might have, though, my favorite Skynyrd song is Tuesday's Gone.

(Yes, another sad love song - I do have a type.)

The lyrics aren't complex: the singer is taking a train away from his woman, for what sounds like forever, even though he seems to still love her.

Train roll on, on down the line,
Won't you please take me far away?

Reading between the lines, the singer might be heading out because she already left. Or left in spirit - however you want to take it. It's definitely a song about something that's over.

Tuesday's gone with the wind.
My woman's gone with the wind.

Because this was the '70s, Tuesday's Gone is a whole epic thing: seven and a half minutes of twanging guitars and honkytonk piano and a string section - but that lead guitar line is amazing, and the singer has a great world-weary tone, and the whole thing earns its length.

Books Read: September 2026

As I always say: this is mostly an index, and mostly for me. But here's what I read last month:

Ben Passmore, Black Arms to Hold You Up (9/1)

Grégory Mardon, Incognito, Book 1: Perfect Victims (digital, 9/2)

Gary Groth & Eric Reynolds, editor, MOME, Vol. 1 (digital, 9/3)

Martha Wells, Queen Demon (9/3)

Faith Erin Hicks, The Adventures of Superhero Girl (Expanded Edition) (digital, 9/4)

Liniers, Night Stories: Folktales from Latin America (9/5)

Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool (9/5)

Peter Bagge, The Complete Hate, Vol. 2 (digital, 9/6)

Chris Roberson, Michael Avon Oeming, & Chris O'Halloran, Shadow of the Golden Crane (digital, 9/7)

Ian Frazier, Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody (digital, 9/7)

Juan Diaz Canales & Junajo Guarnido, Blacksad, Vol. 3: Red Soul (digital, 9/12)

Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1959 to 1960 (9/13)

Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point: 1979-1996 (9/17)

Roy Thomas & Jan Duursema, Elric: The Vanishing Tower (digital, 9/19)

Ray Davies, Waterloo Sunset (9/19)

Steve Cuzor, The Red Badge of Courage (digital, 9/20)

P.G. Wodehouse, Ring for Reeves (9/20)

Jeff Lemire, Matt Kindt, & David Rubín, Cosmic Detective (digital, 9/26)

Nancy Peña, Madame Cat (digital, 9/27)

Loren D. Estleman, Don't Look for Me (9/27)

Next month I will read some more books, you betcha.

Antick Musings Is Old Enough to Drink Today!

As of today, Antick Musings is twenty-one years old. That may seem impressive, but I have two children older than that. I also tend to see only the things that annoy me about the blog (my own badly-worded or trite thoughts, this horrible layout that I don't know if I even could change at this point).

But: yay! I suppose.

Every year on this day, I intend to post about the glorious holiday, and have succeeded most years. (I missed most of the big round numbers, due to a flaw in my character.) Since I'm starting to type this post almost a month ahead of time, it might actually happen this year.

(If you're reading this, and there's just some vague apology below, and it's late November: oops, I didn't.)

History of the Blog: Links to Links

For me, blogging often devolves into links to links that in turn link to other things. The Glorious Anniversary is no exception, so here's the history: first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth (published two months late and substantially shorter than the others), eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth (much shorter than usual, but on time), seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth.

You may note that several years are missing in that list.

Yes. Yes, they are.

And let me quote a lightly edited version of what I wrote last year about what I grandly call The Myth of Antick Musings, because it's still as true as it was then:

I started this blog as practice, since the book-club company I worked for at the time was going to start up a bunch of blogs, and I would be tasked to write the one for the Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC). That corporate blog was scrubbed from the Internet long ago, and the company has changed hands several times. It may well be entirely out of business now; I see that Columbia House just died. So the fact that my half-assed practice blog is still running while the SFBC itself seems to be gone, well, that's a sign of something in the world, I guess, though I don't count it as a win.

After I was cast out of the SFBC (and, though I didn't realize it at the time, editorial work and the SFF field in general), this blog turned into exactly what I thought it never could, should, or would be: a book blog. Oh, well.

I used to watch moves and write about them here. I used to post notes and links to random things actually happening in the real world, too! We truly are living in the worst possible timeline.

History of the Blog: Easily Manipulated Metrics

At this point in the annual post, I traditionally throw in a table of the number of blog posts each year. Why? Would any reader care? I doubt it, but, somewhere deep in my psyche, I suppose I see it as the Blogging KPI, and so I must track it.

• 2025-2026 -- 406 posts
• 2024-2025 -- 407 posts
• 2023-2024 -- 405 posts
• 2022-2023 -- 410 posts
• 2021-2022 -- 279 posts
• 2020-2021 -- 265 posts
• 2019-2020 -- 55 posts
• 2018-2019 -- 178 posts
• 2017-2018 -- 368 posts
• 2016-2017 -- 263 posts
• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

Anyone who cared could track my level of ennui, at least on a yearly level, from the above. I will note a remarkable consistency over the past four years: I've figured out a habit that works, and I am a creature of habit, so...let's see how long it can last.    

I had a second blog - I know, but that's just the way we lived then - for a few years in the teens. It was called Editorial Explanations, and was snarky comments about editorial cartoons. I included those in my Post-Count KPI for while, but now I don't.

The Inevitable Links: Posts About Books

Antick Musings did turn into a book blog, first gradually (when I thought I still had a chance to get another editorial job) and then all at once (when I realized that would never happen).

Most of the posts here, for the last decade or more, are about books. So the bulk of this anniversary post, every year, is links to those posts, using sentences I wrote that I'm still inordinately fond of. Yes, this is a hugely self-indulgent thing - I do it every year, and I'm going to do it again.

Comedy duos have to be contrasts - the wacky one and the one that tries to keep it together, for example. The optimist and the pessimist. It doesn't have to be a gag man and a straight man, but that's pretty common.

It's my blog, I can do it however I want.

Heavy Bright is a positive, mostly uplifting story about fighting evil by whacking it with a spoon.

But the thing about life is that you can always do something today, even if you haven't done it for twenty years.

It isn't, in any appreciable way, the end of a trilogy, mind you. But you can definitely think of it like that.

We are all prisoners of the people we actually are, as we keep trying to be the people we want to be.

As I said, this is a horror story, so our main characters don't gather their forces and battle the monsters to save the world - that would be fantasy. They also don't find out exactly how it works, figure out how to counter it, and do so - that would be a thriller. And they don't gather evidence and present it to some authority who can shut down Home - that would be a mystery.

The promiscuous must always want to have sex with us, right? Since we are clearly wonderful and special, since we are us.

Some SF novels seem to predict the world we actually got, and are brought back out of the depths and lauded for that, as if being right was the point of fiction.

Digital books have a lot of advantages - they can be cheaper, they're definitely lighter, you can fit many more of them in the same space, they can be accessed almost immediately from almost anywhere, and so forth. But they can also mysteriously disappear in a way that never happens with physical books.

Prime has become a legend, off doing whatever in the hinterlands, but the Last Good Ruler calls him, using the Secret Codes of Yore, and tasks Prime with finding a new home for humanity among the stars, because that's exactly the kind of job where you want a murderous and unimaginative centuries-old cyborg inculcated with a toxic mindset.

That could be one marker of liberal vs. conservative, I suppose: the cartoon version is that liberals bend over backwards to "include" others, no matter what convolutions they have to go through from moment to moment in doing so, while conservatives refuse to change anything about themselves ever, gleefully doubling-down on their worst aspects and making those the core of their personalities.

Sorry, just a little joke there. Of course they beat the old man who is an alternate-world version of their father and grandfather to death. That's much better.

With translations, there's a lot of "I think" and "here's what has made it to my side of the ocean" - it's a big world, and how someone looks at home is not always the same as how he dresses up to go visiting.

If your world has dozens of races, all hugely distinctive from each other, the fact that some of them have darker skin than others will tend to seem somewhat less important than the fact that, for example, some of them are mammals and some are herptiles, or the whole predator/prey thing.

There's one exceptionally circumlocutious section almost smack-dab in the middle about the word "queer" and whether or not it applies to Gorey, which I take to mean that Gorey was probably gay but either led a mostly celibate life as an adult or that his affairs were so scandalous and so well-hidden that they can't be discussed in public even fifty years later.

In her wanderings, she needs to do quite a bit of bending and stretching, squeezing through tight spaces, lying languidly reading or tossing restlessly while asleep, standing thinking with hands on hips or reaching over her head to get something. Did I mention she does all of those things naked? She does them naked.

As long as we can understand how this world works, it can still be funny: we don't need to live in that world ourselves, or, frankly, for that world to have ever existed.

Sometimes you just want to be convinced that the old verities are still true. The sun rises in the east, robins nest in the early spring, and Andrews McMeel publishes cute little books of relationship cartoons for impulse purchases.

If you have the visual tastes of a hyperactive fifteen-year-old-boy, this will be the greatest comic in the history of everything. For anyone else, adjust your expectations accordingly.

It's not that I don't think CEOs aren't sociopaths who would take any action that benefited themselves; it's just that it's so criminal, and would be massively obvious in retrospect, that I don't believe he would be stupid enough to believe he could get away with it as depicted.

Meanwhile, behind all this, the general public - as always in superhero comics, a stupid mass of sheep-like morons who can't understand that superpowered people are better and special and their rightful masters - has responded to the Second Cataclysm by turning against all superheroes, on the grounds that alien gods never seem to try to eat planets that don't have superheroes on them.

There's a kind of mom who has five or more kids, all named things like Jacob and Hannah. There's a kind of mom who has two or three kids, with names you can't predict. And there's a kind of mom who has just one, with a name like Magnus or Tinkerbell.

But that is their plan, and they insist that it requires a giant robot crab, and, like all fiendish plans hatched by secret societies of multiple villains, it works pretty well for a while.

As often with Hernandez, his pages are interesting and his artistic choices bold - sometimes bold in the "that is great" sense; sometimes in the "why on earth would he expect that to work?" sense - and I do believe that he thinks these pieces come together to form an overall narrative.

As my old boss would say, why spend a year writing a novel when a really good one only costs a few dollars?

The world is big and full of things, some of which are vaguely familiar even if you've never seen them before - I guess I find that weirdly comforting.

Stories don't have to be true to be good stories - frankly, it's more often the opposite.

Supremacists who make up lies about a minority to foment anger and try to get them thrown out of the country are common in many places.

Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps the children yearn for stories of old werewolves and ominous tigers. Stranger things have happened.

And, lastly, I occasionally give up on a book mid-stream: I don't have to love a book to finish it, but I think if I find myself talking to the author, in my head: "Jesus Christ, Hughes, read the fucking room," then the book has lost an essential connection to me as a reader and I shouldn't try to make larger statements about it.

The Inevitable Links: Everything Else

I have posts about other things - not as many, and not as much as in the early days of the blog. In 2026, for the fourth year in a row, I had a series of posts about songs on Mondays. I think I'm not as good at writing about music as I am about books - some of you may have unkind thoughts, wondering if that is even possible, but I will ignore you - but I do it because I like these songs and I want to surface things I like here.

I post lists of new books - only physical books, but however and whenever I get them - here, under the overall title Reviewing the Mail (which I stole from Chuck Klosterman, who doesn't seem to be using it anymore). I've called those posts different things occasionally, too, mostly by mistake.

I also do quotes from the books I read - every Saturday as Quote of the Week, and twice a year in a closet-cleaning exercise. (Also available from that link, in big clumps on New Year's Eve and the Sunday closest to Independence Day.)

As The Blog Lurches Into a Twenty-Second Year

I gave up on big pronouncements and predictions long ago. Given my druthers, I'd be coming up on my fifteenth year or so as Editor-in-Chief of the SFBC. But they never were my druthers: that's the lesson life teaches us all.

I do expect to keep doing whatever you call what I do here. I am massively a creature of habit, and this blog is about five of those habits at this point. Take that as a promise, or a threat.

But it's good that the blog is old enough to drink, now: it takes pressure off me. I've been on a blood thinner - for six or seven years, I think? I can't even remember; I've been on various heart meds since '02 - which has meant that I can't drink. But, maybe, in some odd way, I can think that Antick Musings is doing it for me.

May your own creative endeavors similarly take over aspects of your own life, like kudzu in the summertime: that's my valediction this year.

Quote of the Week: Another Morning

I thought about sitting up. The various governing bodies in my mind all agreed that this would be a good thing, but there were disputes over the timetable.

 - Walter Mosely, Blonde Faith, p.174

Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography by Joshua Kendall

I was an avid Doonesbury reader in my youth; I assembled all of the books eventually (up to about 2009, though I might have missed the rare one about the TV special) and read it daily in the paper. But I lost all those books in my 2011 flood, and never felt the need to either re-buy the old ones or get any of the new ones since then. G.B. Trudeau, the strip's creator, went to Sunday-only not too long after that, too, which killed one of the best aspects of the strip: its density and the way it told extended stories among a large cast, intersecting with the issues of the day. Doonesbury as a Sunday-only isn't the same thing at all; in a very real sense, the strip ended a decade ago.

But a decade after something ended is a good time for a retrospective, isn't it?

Joshua Kendall, a Yalie like Trudeau who has been a noted reporter and the author of several previous biographies, tells the story of Doonesbury the strip here, along with some biographical material about Trudeau. The book is called Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography, but it's not that much of a biography and it's much more Doonesbury than Trudeau.

On the other hand, Kendall actually got what seem to be extensive interviews with the famously reclusive and press-shy Trudeau - who famously went seventeen years at the height of the strip without speaking to a single reporter - and got him on the record at least a little bit about his personal life. So I'm not exactly complaining: Kendall probably delivered as much of a biography as the reclusive Trudeau would allow.

Also, Trudeau has had a frankly boring life, in the best WASP preppy manner. A WASP's name famously should appear in the paper only three times: birth, marriage, and death. Trudeau is already way over-exposed by the standard of his people. He had a big success right out of college with his first major project, and stuck mostly with permutations of that project for fifty years. He married another media figure (TV host Jane Pauley), which sounds like it could lead to drama, but they have had a quiet, apparently entirely happily life together, with three kids and no scandals, from all accounts. Add to that the fact that Doonesbury is an outward-facing strip, about things in the real (political, social, entertainment) world, not about anything personal, and Kendall had a much harder job than someone like David Michaelis, who wrote about Charles Schulz and his strip full of personal psychological insights.

Kendall does have the usual initial couple of chapters to cover Trudeau's ancestors and young life (through college and the proto-Doonesbury Bull Tales); it's the most interesting, new, and fresh material in the book, telling us the things we don't already know. (Trudeau had an ulcer in middle school! That was actually the reason he was classified 4-F in the draft! He also wrote and staged plays for years as a kid - which is interesting and new but deeply unsurprising once you learn about it.) After that, the book's chapters mostly align to eras of Doonesbury: Watergate, the rest of the '70s, Trudeau's first hiatus and the Reagan years, the big shift to post-college life, B.D. and the focus on wars and warriors, and one last chapter on Trudeau's long history mocking Our Current President.

It is not quite a critical reappraisal of Doonesbury; Kendall stays primarily on the reporting side. But he does map out the eras and major concerns of the strip, so this is a valuable book for anyone who might want to do that critical reappraisal.

Kendall also takes advantage of being an official biography to use a lot of Trudeau materials: there's a relevant Doonesbury strip on about half of the pages, including a lot of Sundays at full-page size. He also reprints other letters and ephemera throughout, since the book was already being designed that way - it's a much more intensely designed and carefully laid-out book than the standard biography, and a fine model for anyone doing a biography of a visual artist or cartoonist. (That old standard, the insert section, is nice as far as it goes, but having the art actually on the same pages as the relevant text is vastly superior.)

So Trudeau & Doonesbury is perhaps not as surprising or informative as one might hope: Trudeau is still private, and more than a little boring. Kendall does a good job with the materials he has, and the access Trudeau gave him, but the back half of the book does somewhat turn into "and then there was a two-week sequence about Dan Quayle, who Trudeau depicted as a feather." It's worth it for fans of the strip and political junkies of the last few decades, and those who still get a frisson from the iconic strips like "Guilty! Guilty! GUILTY!"

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 3: Resurrection by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

On this side of the Atlantic, they all hit at once: in 2018, Europe Comics published (digitally) translations of the three Cosmonauts of the Future books, all turned into English by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

But, in their original life, the first two both came out in 2000 and this third and final book - Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 3: Resurrection - was four years later. So that original audience might have expected, or at least have a reasonable suspicion, that the characters were a few years older this time.

A reader who pays really close attention and has the details of the first two books at his fingertips could have figured that out from the early pages of the book, too - our heroes, Gildas and Martina, are taller, and there's a reference to something "eight months ago" on the first page, an event that didn't happen in the previous books. They also think it's 2033, which would place it more precisely in time if I remembered what year they thought it was in the previous books.

(They are not quite correct, for reasons which become clear as the book goes on.)

They're not on the planet Mawis anymore; they're traveling around in a spaceship, along with two aliens (one in a human suit, their former teacher for killing stinky aliens). They don't say why, but we assume they're looking for the rest of humanity: Gildas and Martina are clones of space explorers who died in a crash on Mawis, and, now that they're growing up, it makes sense that they'd want to find their own people.

They do find a human-crewed space station, which confusingly (for them) seems to be a museum of their lives, exactly like the Mawis-created replica of their childhood that they grew up in. And that's somewhat how this book goes: it's simulacra and clones all the way down.

Gildas and Martina don't learn this for a while - they are very confused, and running about at high speed, often chased by clones of themselves using dangerous weaponry - but they have found human civilization, and it is not at peace. There's a faction run by their daughter Celta and a faction run by Gildas's sister Gaelle, and both use clones of the two of them - the obviously perfect human beings - as soldiers. Both sides are heavily armed; each is dedicated to the extermination of the other; neither is particularly amenable to persuasion or anything more peaceful than a ray-gun.

Do Gildas and Martina manage to bring peace to human civilization, leaning somewhat heavily on the fact that they are "the originals"? (I don't see why their clone-ness is terribly different from the hordes of clone soldiers, but it works, so I won't sweat it.) Yes, they do.

The story is a bit more confused than the first two books, and ramps up the slapstick running-and-fighting material from the second book as well. It does feel a bit like writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Manu Larcenet were escalating with each book, and hit their limit quickly with this third one. It is still fun, zippy adventure, but a reader can definitely see why they would think they'd exhausted the premise by this point.

The Kingdom, Vol.1: Anne by Benoit Feroumont

I was sure this book was different, but I didn't know how much or in what ways. It looked like it might be for younger readers, which was hugely different from the first book I read by its creator, Benoit Feroumont: Gisèle & Bèatrice.

After a bit of research - mostly trying to navigate a computer-translated version of Feroumont's detailed Wikipedia page - I believe that The Kingdom series is more typical of Feroumont's work than Gisèle & Bèatrice was, but there's a certain sharp wit and love for antic mischief that I suspect is common in his work. After reading this one, I don't think The Kingdom series is specifically for young readers, but it's all-ages in a European sense: full of things certain American readers (you know the kind) would be shocked to give to their little darlings, but pitched to be understandable to an audience roughly ten and up and reasonable for that audience for most normal human beings.

The full title is The Kingdom, Vol. 1: Anne; it was originally published in 2009, has colors by Feroumont's wife Christelle Coopman, and was translated by Mercedes Claire Gilliom for this 2017 Europe Comics edition. (There are ten books in the series; the six that existed before 2015 were translated in the years of Europe Comics' flourishing and the rest seem to be sitting in limbo for now.)

It's one of those lightly fantasy stories set in a pocket kingdom - small enough to be just the unnamed capital city and as much countryside as needed for stories, small enough that the King can be a local figure, and specifically with no neighbors that impinge on the story. This one, I think, sets up a lot of the characters and situations for later in the series. In particular, this one is about the title character, Anne, the friendly, happy, ultra-competent maid who has been taking care of the King - this isn't the kind of book with a deep sense of the organizational structure of a big house - who loses her job and has to move on.

You see, she's been frightened by owls hooting in the night, and so has been sleeping in the King's bed to avoid them. (He's the usual good-natured-but-ineffectual doddering old guy, along Lord Emsworth lines, so there's no thought or possibility of hanky-panky.) But a flock of little yellow (talking) birds have just arrived in town: this is annoying and disruptive, but not seen as particularly weird or unnatural. They're gossip-mongers - I might say "shit-stirrers," to be more precise - who delight in telling people things that will annoy, anger, or frustrate them, and particularly things that will cause them to fight with each other.

Anyway, the birds told the mean Queen about Anne and the King, so she fired Anne. The King gives Anne an old house down in the city, which she is to turn into a tavern. On the way there, she has some slapstick adventures, attempting to attack the birds and running into the large blacksmith's apprentice François, who immediately falls madly in love with her. (This, I gather, will be a major plot engine for later in the series.)

Anne does find her new home, which is a dump. But the birds more-or-less befriend her - they're still jerks - and help to clean it up. And she does turn it into a tavern. The climax of the story is the opening night of that tavern, when the King's children - two goofy sons and a more sensible daughter - come in disguise to patronize that tavern, plus a large contingent of the palace guards, sent by the Queen to give the impression that the tavern is raucous and unpleasant, so it will fail.

Does the character whose name is in the title of a the first book in a comic adventure series succeed despite all odds? Of course she does.

Feroumont tells this story in a broad way, full of jokes and big body language - it's a funny book that makes very little attempt to be subtle. And it's mostly tween-friendly, assuming your tweens aren't shocked by the "sleeping"-with-the-King plot-starter.

Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley

I used to read Walter Mosley books regularly - at least the Easy Rawlins series, which I devoured in the '90s. But first kids, then my exile from editorial work slowed down my reading - and mysteries took the first and most severe hit in that slowdown.

So I now realize that 2007's Blonde Faith - the tenth book in the series, of sixteen novels and some short fiction so far - is the first book in this series that I've read in probably twenty years and only the third Mosley book I've read at all this century.

Add to that the fact that I'm a white East Coast guy reading a mystery series about a Black detective in historical LA and points nearby, and I might need to warn you that you have no reason to take my opinion as having any weight whatsoever.

With that said: this book is set in early 1967. As usual, the series hero is Easy Rawlins, a man originally from Houston, a WWII veteran, and a guy who's tangled in his own head all of the time. (That's been true throughout the series: Easy is a smart man who is good at the private-detecting work he does, off and on, but not as good at getting through the interpersonal stuff in his own life.) He's forty-seven at this point, though still, as seen in this book, chasing women that are literally younger than his own stepson. (Catching them, too: it's that kind of book.)

That also means that this series, since it's in the first person from Easy's POV, gets stuck in his head. It's been a long time since I read the earlier books, so I can't make a comparison, but this one doesn't have as much plot as you might expect from its three hundred pages. It's basically: Easy looks for two guys, both old friends, and eventually finds them together. Some other things happen along the way, but not a whole lot of complications or sideplots.

Meanwhile, Easy is tormented because the great love of his life - or at least his recent life; he has capacity to chase women in bulk and has for decades at this point - Bonnie Shay, is getting married to her other boyfriend, an African prince. There's some complicated backstory there that might have come up in previous books or might have been between books: Easy's daughter Feather needed some tricky medical treatment, and the prince paid for it, but his price was Bonnie, who he took from Easy at that point. (But he's supposedly a good guy, so this might be somewhat colored by Easy's memory and prejudices.)

The two missing men are Christmas Black, a former Green Beret caught up somehow (on the "trying to stop them" end) with a nasty ring smuggling drugs via Vietnam, and Easy's old best friend Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, a gangster who is accused of killing Pericles Tarr. Easy tracks down Tarr, who turns out to not be dead, and meets the smugglers, who are posing as Army officers. As required by a mystery novel, the two plots somewhat intersect, because Black and Mouse know each other.

Easy's voice is compelling and believable, but I found him more than a bit whiny here, especially for a guy who bags one hottie (the woman of the title), is well on his way to a relationship with a college-aged additional hottie, and flirts very successfully with one or two others I can think of - all while being despondent because he lost Bonita entirely because he didn't bother to get in touch with her for an extended period of time. A man can definitely protest too much.

And the mystery is a bit thin here. Easy is just trying to find two men, who he's pretty sure will be not that far away and who are both so good at violence that it's unlikely they'll be in any serious trouble. And that turns out to be the case. The tension is mostly about Bonnie, and about Easy's own internal demons - this is closer to a literary novel than a mystery. I do like literary novels, admittedly, but I prefer their heroes not be utterly obnoxious twerps, and Easy is really close to that line here.

All of This and Nothing: Songs That No One Will Hear

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This is possibly the most Obscure of my obscure songs: a single from one of those bands that is basically one person: the Swedish indypop "band" we are soldiers we have guns. (Stylized in all-lower case, for maximum indy cred, I guess.)

we are soldiers we have guns ran for the back half of the Aughts, roughly, with a few EPs and at least one full-length (get up, get out, - still on Bandcamp for anyone interested to look for more). The one person in this case was Malin Dahlberg; no idea what she's doing these days but I hope it's creative and fulfilling and wonderful.

Songs That No One Will Hear is the first we are soldiers we have guns song I ever heard; I think it was featured on Fingertips (which has been the way I discovered a lot of bands over the years - might be good for you, too. If not, my general advice is to find some outlet that is similar enough to your tastes that you always find what they feature interesting).

The lyrics don't exist anywhere online, and we are soldiers (I'll stay lower-case, but I have to abbreviate it somehow) has a lo-fi sound - so untangling exactly what Dahlberg is singing might not be worth the effort.

But, for a lovely mostly-quiet song from an obscure band from an obscure part of the world, Songs That No One Will Hear is almost a platonically perfect title, and the song itself lives up to it. Just listen.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 26, 2026

Three books for this week - one I bought myself (trying to use an old gift card that didn't go through in the end, curse the luck) and two new books from Tachyon. The Tachyon books will be first, according to my usual rules.

Mary G. Thompson has written short fiction and novels for younger readers, but I think Precious Children is her first novel for adults. It's a SFnal horror novel about cloning, of the replacing-loved-ones style, focused on one family who seem to have awful luck in the mortality of their children but luckily are rich enough that those children can be replaced and their existence continued - the question being how closely that existence continues, and what happens to the person previously using the brain that becomes the newest version of their beloved son. It's just been published by Tachyon.

Also from Tachyon, even more recently published if I can trust the metadata, is a new collection of short fiction by the least positive man in Hard SF, Peter Watts. Fold Catastrophes collects eleven stories originally in various anthologies, websites, and magazines, going back to 2013. There's also a new original story at the end.

And last of the three is the book I bought myself. I've gotten behind on Charles Stross's Laundry-verse novels, possibly because they do try to be substantially more depressing and gloom-soaked than the real world, which has been a tricky thing this past decade. I believe Quantum of Nightmares is the second of the "New Management" series, set officially after the apocalypse, and following Dead Lies Dreaming, which I wasn't super-fond of. This one seems to be less "Peter Pan-inspired goofy young people putting on a show," though, so I hope to give it a try. I also already have the sequel to this on the shelf, and want to get to the supposed final actual Laundry novel The Regicide Report. (Which, come to think of it, I could probably just read without hitting the others first - but it looks even gloomier than Standard Stross, which is incredibly gloomy indeed.)

Quote of the Week: A Relapse of Poetry

I have generally found, as I have gone around the world, that people are tolerant and ready to forgive, and in our little community it was never held against Rodney Spelvin that he had once been a poet and a very virulent one, too; the sort of man who would produce a slim volume of verse bound in squashy mauve leather at the drop of a hat, mostly on the subject of sunsets and pixies.

    - P.G. Wodehouse, "Rodney Has a Relapse," p.131 in Nothing Serious

Leonardo the Genius (Vol. 1) by Bob De Groot & Turk

The credit on the book just says "De Groot and Turk," but other official descriptions include De Groot's first name. I'd have to go to a secondary source to learn that Turk is actually an artist named Philippe Liégeois. Similarly, this material looks to be forty or fifty years old, but the book itself gives a 2002 publication date in French and a 2016 date for this translation by Montana Kane.

The same secondary source notes that the Léonard comics - the terminal "o" pops up in Dutch and English translations, and possibly elsewhere, but the original French and Belgian editions don't have it - began in 1974. I think this book collects '70s stories in a package - possibly the start of an entire repackaged series - from the early days of this century.

This is one of those works of humor that seem to be very popular in their home culture - there have been fifty-seven volumes in French, continuing to the present day - but have not travelled as well. At least, it's barely traveled into English, which is the only bit I can really evaluate.

The premise is simple: there's this genius, living in a small town in a vaguely Renaissance world (but with some Renaissance-versions of modern things when the jokes require them), who invents crazy things. He looks a lot like Leonardo Da Vinci. This is the first book of his adventures: Leonardo the Genius.

It starts out with single-pagers, and even the longer stories only last four or five pages. I see that this series originated in magazines, and might still appear in magazines today, which explains that.

The jokes are silly and broad, which makes me wonder why it hasn't traveled into English more successfully. There is something vaguely European about it: like Asterix, there's an underlying sense that you have to have at least a little bit of cultural/historical grounding to get the jokes, and maybe general American audiences react badly to that.

Over the course of this book, Leonard hires an assistant - just called "Disciple" here, though I gather he gets a name in some later stories. This allows even more slapstick, and for the inevitable "guy wrapped up in bandages in a hospital bed" results of some less-successful experiments.

As I said, it's all just a bit old-fashioned - big squared panels with tightly ruled lines, squared-off dialogue balloons, that mid-century style of humor, a big-nose cartooning style from Turk - but that's just a sign of the era it came from. A few of the jokes are unfortunate now - there's one in which Leonardo invents the first airplane, and then a swarthy guy tries to hijack it to Cuba, ha ha ha - but most of it is durable all-ages humor that still basically works.

I find this kind of series fascinating, because it's so obviously A Big Deal in the land of its birth, probably hyped every year when a new volume comes out and the big birthday/Christmas wish for thousands of kids, and yet it's totally unknown in my country. The world is big and full of things, some of which are vaguely familiar even if you've never seen them before - I guess I find that weirdly comforting. The book itself...ehhh, it was OK. I think it's a lot more resonant if you grew up with it.