The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

I've been reading random noir novels in various Library of America omnibuses over the past couple of years: this one is smack in the middle of the Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s book. It's by Kenneth Fearing, who was a poet before turning to writing crime novels, and this is his most famous book.

The Big Clock is from 1946, and is modernist enough that it feels - well, not exactly contemporary, but like it takes place in a world close enough to our own that we can still feel the texture of it and understand how it works. Fearing tells it in chapters from multiple points of view, but the main character, and viewpoint for about two-thirds of the book, is George Stroud.

Stroud is head editor of Crimeways, one of a group of sophisticated, strong-selling magazines from Janoth Publications in New York on various aspects of modern life. The whole group has a consistent style and method; they're not necessarily the very biggest magazines - they have notable competitors mentioned in the book - but they sell a lot of copies, pay exceptionally well, and pride themselves on having the best talent. (Think Time-Life of about the same era and you'll be close.)

Stroud is happily married, but...he's the main character of a mid-century noir novel, almost as smart as he thinks he is, and drinks about as much as any similar character. He falls into a brief affair with Pauline, the girlfriend of Earl Janoth, head of the whole operation - very brief, one overnight and then a weekend in Albany a few days later. On that Sunday afternoon, he drops her off at her apartment, watching her walk up to the building from across the street - and be met by Janoth, who came back from a trip to Washington, D.C. earlier than expected.

Janoth fights with Pauline up in her apartment, gets angry, and kills her semi-accidentally. He gets out of the building quietly and goes to see his second-in-command/fixer Steve Hagen. Janoth knows he saw someone drop off Pauline, but isn't sure who it was. That man could unroll his otherwise-solid alibi. Steve hints that he will have the man killed, if only they can find him.

So they set the entire apparatus of Janoth Publications to work to find this mysterious man, with a thin cover story about the man being the central figure in some bribery scheme. And the whole project is given to one of Janoth's most trusted and seasoned editors to run: Stroud.

Stroud knows the threads that could lead to him - a painting he bought with Pauline that morning, his physical description, a low-life bar the two visited, that trip to Albany - and does all he can to seem to be pursuing the investigation zealously while putting subtly wrong people on particular aspects of it and letting the results point as much away from him as possible. After all, no one expects that the clues will lead to him in the first place - he's potentially safe unless there's something really obvious.

But Janoth Publications is good at this, and they find multiple people who could identify the mysterious man - including the eccentric fine artist Louise Patterson, who painted and (coincidentally) competed with Stroud to buy the very painting he'd bought the morning of the murder. Stroud's long interest in her work - he has a Patterson on the wall of his office, and several at home - could potentially blow up the whole thing. And his wife Georgette is already worried that he's become distant, as he did once before during an affair.

This is a noir, so someone has to die. The last line of the novel explains who and how - I won't explain further. (It's a short book; just reading it would be quick enough.)

Fearing tells this, as I said above, in a modernist way, with multiple first-person viewpoints, though Stroud is the dominant voice. Each of them have their own quirks and foibles; they're distinct people, though we only spend a lot of time in Stroud's head. The only other repeat narrator is Janoth himself.

Fearing is also witty and interesting on the workings of Janoth Publications itself, including how big media operations will mold public conversation in specific ways - not the usual thing a reader would expect in a noir novel, particularly a short zippy one like this, but it's authoritative and interesting. 

Even further afield, there's a sub-plot about a scheme called Funded Individuals - in which some group of young people would be given support and roughly a million dollars to get started in life, something like a vague early sketch of a venture capital fund but much more general, official, and personal - which I don't think would work at all like Fearing's characters assume it would, but is interestingly quirky and turns up more in the book than I expected. It's the kind of book that feels like it has everything relevant that ran through the author's head while writing it: full of quirky sidebars and precise moments and arch opinions.

The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald

I have a shelf dedicated to reading projects, in my to-be-read bookcases. It's mostly sat quietly for the last few years, with three half-assembled "projects" slowly disappearing behind other things piling up in front of them. I thought I had to assemble all of the books first; my model was Starktober and similar things, where I read a whole bunch of books quickly - generally one a day - and wrote about them just as quickly.

But I don't read like that now, so those "projects" have sat gathering dust.

On the other hand, I have been reading through authors intermittently, mostly nudged by the presence of Library of America books on my main shelves. Over the last couple of years, I got through all of Dashiell Hammett's novels, and then Raymond Chandler's, that way.

One of the "projects" was to read all of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. And I just realized I could do that the same way I was reading other authors: one at a time rather than in a big burst. So I think I will.

The Moving Target was the first of that series, and the first novel to appear under the author's pen name. ("Macdonald" was really Kenneth Millar, but his wife, Margaret Millar, was also a crime novelist, with a growing career at the same time, so her husband cycled through "John Macdonald" and "John Ross Macdonald" before settling on the version of his name he kept for the rest of his career. It was always a fairly open pseudonym; I suppose mostly to keep their books just a few feet separate on the shelves.) "Macdonald" had published four standalone mystery/crime novels before this; he wasn't brand-new, and he'd gotten good notices.

So Moving Target comes mostly formed. It's very much in the Chandler mode: Macdonald's series hero Lew Archer is similarly tough and cynical at this point, and Macdonald has flights of language not unlike Chandler's in the course of the novel. It's also, most obviously, a book about a private detective in Los Angeles and its surroundings in the late 1940s - Chandler would have been the glaringly obvious touchstone even if Macdonald had tried to run farther away from him.

As I recall, Archer became more of a viewpoint, especially as the series went on - he was a window into the lives of the people he met, and did less commentary than Chandler. I'll have to see if I still think that, this time through the novels. It's not really the case here: Archer gets knocked out multiple times, kissed by dames, and gives a few major speeches, all of which is solidly in the Chandler mode.

The joke about Macdonald is that all of the Archer books are about family problems, which stem from some event that happened twenty years ago in Canada. (Macdonald was born and lived most of his life in California, but his family was Canadian and he spent his youth in Ontario.) This first one is about families, but all of the cliché elements aren't there yet - there's no Canadian content here.

Archer is hired by a rich woman to find her husband. Ralph Sampson is a Texas oil millionaire, living on his rents and making occasional random deals, drinking too much and flying around impulsively to Las Vegas and elsewhere. Ralph disappeared the day before, after a flight back from Vegas. Archer was brought in by the family lawyer, Bert Graves, who he worked for when Graves was a DA and Archer an investigator in that office.

Graves is involved in a love triangle with Sampson's twenty-year-old daughter Miranda: he's pursuing her in a slightly embarrassing middle-aged way, while she's making eyes at her father's hunky pilot, Alan Taggert. Mrs. Sampson is openly derisive of her husband, insisting - though she's an invalid whose legs don't work after a fall from a horse - that she's going to outlive him. And Sampson, as Archer discovers, has some very odd business connections, including the gangster owner of the Wild Piano club, a thug named Dwight Troy, and a self-declared guru, Claude, who Sampson gave a mountain hunting lodge as a "temple."

Archer chases Sampson's trail for a couple of days, as it becomes clearer that the millionaire was kidnapped and eventually a ransom note appears. He meets a number of women connected to the case, faded movie star Fay Estabrook and ex-con pianist Betty Fraley, and some violent men connected to them.

Most of this takes place near the Sampson mansion in Santa Teresa - Macdonald's invention, a fictional town loosely based on Santa Monica that later mystery writers would also use - and in the mountains and rural roads nearby. That's one of the most clearly 1949 parts of the novel: how empty so much of Southern California was at that moment, with the post-war building boom still building up steam. (The other thing is another post-war sense, that something big had just happened and was over, leaving a lot of men still keyed up, still used to handling dangerous, important work and now trying to settle back into smaller, quieter lives.)

Archer solves the crime - well, crimes, since there's more than just the kidnapping to deal with in the end. A mystery novel needs at least one murder, doesn't it?

This is an atmospheric and smart mystery novel, very much in the Chandler manner and style but already showing clear signs of distinguishing Macdonald from Chandler. Archer is less romantic than Chandler's hero, Marlowe, maybe more of a post-war man in that. And, as I recall, the series only gets better from here.

Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre

Christopher Brookmyre was the Next Big Thing in thrillers for a while during my career in publishing, so I kept seeing his books, thinking they looked like fun, and having to go back to reading things for my program instead. I think, over the last few decades, he became just a standard Big Thing in much of the English-speaking world, though sadly not a Thing at all in the USA.

Looking him up now, I'm seeing his major series - which started with this book, his first novel - with radically different cover treatments on current editions, and many of them showing up for sale in their UK editions here. That's a sign the US market has not been kind to Brookmyre, for whatever reasons.

And that's disappointing, because on the evidence of Quite Ugly One Morning, his 1996 debut, Brookmyre is something like a Scottish version of Carl Hiaasen, with funny, fast-plotted thriller novels with a political undertone, smart-ass characters who get themselves into more trouble than they expect, and amusingly baroque levels of violence.

It might be the "Scottish" bit that caused the trouble - parts of Quite Ugly get into nearly Trainspotting-levels of Scots dialect and spelling. I found nearly everything clear from context, but a few random words were puzzlers - and there's a Black LA police detective, in one flashback scene, who does not talk like an American at all. It's the kind of thing that can bounce American readers out of a book, I suppose.

The series hero here is Jack Parlabane, an investigative journalist with a talent for getting himself into trouble, not least because he's good at burglary, which we are told he only uses (these days) in the line of duty. He got into hot water in London for exposing the wrong people and fled to LA, where the same things happened - and more seriously, since the wrong people in LA hire killers, and one tried to murder Parlabane.

So now he's newly in Edinburgh, having just landed a day or two before and about to look for newspaper work there. (This is 1996; newspapers were still booming.) But there was a horrific murder in the flat one floor below his last night, which he did not hear because of the usual all-too-Scottish over-indulgence in alcohol. So he wanders into the crime scene, in his underwear, hungover but endlessly inquisitive.

He's briefly a suspect, but, more importantly, it triggers Parlabane's need to get to the bottom of things. So he starts investigating on his own.

At the same time - this is a thriller, not a mystery - we get scenes from the POV of both the murderer (mostly a Standard Thriller Thug with Scottish Characteristics) and his boss, a deeply Tory and horribly self-satisfied wanker who is head of a NHS Trust and looking to use that to personally enrich himself. There is, of course, a nasty scheme behind the murder of Dr. Jeremy Ponsonby, and Parlabane connects with Ponsonby's ex-wife, the anesthetist Dr. Sarah Slaughter, as they both have separate clues that can join up to help solve the crime.

Among other major characters, there's a few cops, including a youngish lesbian woman who is willing to listen to Parlabane's theories and is not immediately dismissive of them. And this is a short novel, so it rattles very quickly through a lot of scenes - often very colorful, in language or violence or setting or all three - on the way to a big ending with Slaughter, Parlabane, the murderer, and the wanker.

It is a fun romp, the more so if you are inclined to align with Brookmyre's regular, quite pointed, but often sidebar attacks on Toryism - our villain is very much like the guy in this meme:

I'm going to be looking for more Brookmyre books myself - I've got thirty years to catch up on - so take that as a recommendation if you like.

Murder Book by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell has one of those modern gig-style careers where she does multiple things (I presume to get something vaguely like the life the previous generation had with A Job that they kept for decades). She does burlesque and stand-up comedy, illustrates books for other people, cartoons for The New Yorker and elsewhere, makes documentaries - and has done two book-length comics memoirs about specific aspects of her life and family.

I read the second one, The Joy of Snacking, soon after publication a few months back. It's a dense, fun, amusing and deep look at a woman who has certain very specific issues with food and made that into both a great story and a thoughtful exploration of the world she lives in.

So I figured I had to go back to her first book. Murder Book was published in 2021, and it's just as dense, thoughtful, personal, funny and insightful as Snacking. Both could be reduced to clichés about modern women - Snacking is the "nothing for me; I'll just pick" book, and Murder is the "why are so many women obsessed with true crime podcasts?" one.

Campbell's remit is wider than podcasts, though: she's low-key obsessed with true crime in general, books and movies and streaming TV (and the wider world of ripped-from-the-headlines but not-quite-true crime, like Law & Order) as well as podcasts, and she has several friends and family members (one sister and their mother in particular) just as obsessed as she is. She's honest about the genre: the template true crime story is about the mysterious death of an attractive (young, white, more often than not blonde) woman, and how, usually, Some Man is found to be responsible and brought to justice. 

Murder Book is organized roughly into chapters - she has full-page white-text-on-black headers to introduce sections, but they're not titled like chapters, and the narrative flows conversationally throughout - with an introduction and then sections on the various different types of true crime and true-crime-adjacent media (movies, books, TV like 48 Hours, TV like Law & Order, streaming shows, podcasts, and so on), plus a few more about her family's history with true crime (she traces the obsession back to her mother's mother's mother, which is pretty impressive and/or worrying).

Along the way, she retells some of her "favorite" murder stories - the Zodiac killer and Ted Bundy have long sections, among others - mostly through the lens of how she heard the story and engaged with it. Campbell grew up in northern California in the '90s, and compares that with her mother's life, in San Francisco and nearby, during the serial-killer-soaked '70s: both of them felt like death and murder were everywhere around them, though it was probably more true for her mother than the more media-influenced Campbell.

Like Snacking, this is conversational and funny, with long back-and-forth dialogue and extensive narrative captions: Campbell is telling this story, and it's in her voice throughout. Her art is cartoony, with dot eyes and mostly simple figures. Her pages have panels jammed up right against each other without gutters, and tiers that don't always line up, to keep that headlong, energetic, "I'm going-to-tell-you-everything-I-can-think-of" style.

Campbell does get into the "why do women love true crime so much" question, dipping back into it a couple of times during the book, and tends to come down on the worry/fascination side. True crime is about the deaths of women, so women look at it, think "that could be me," and want to know more. Campbell, as a stand-up comedian, joked that she loved true crime so much she wanted to be a murder victim - but she mostly thinks it's the other way, that women consume so much true crime to learn all of the tricks and keep themselves alive.

It's a big book, and a dense one. It might have more about murder than many people want at once - but, clearly, there is a huge audience for murder, so I don't think that's a major problem.

And Campbell has a lot of fun with it. It's weird to say a book so much about murder is breezy, fun, and amusing, but Murder Book definitely is. It's a passionate observer's guide to true-crime media, combined with her personal history, and still recent enough that it's fairly up-to-date. I'm not personally obsessed with true crime - I'm a man; I think men worry more on the other side of that equation - but Murder Book is a fascinating deep dive into the mostly women who are obsessed with true crime stories, what they find in it, and what it means to them.

Blacksad, Vol. 2: Arctic Nation by Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido

I don't want to say that creators can't write about whatever they want to write about. That's not my point at all. But if they want to have a particular theme in a particular work, they really should take some time to think about whether that theme actually makes sense.

The Blacksad books are noirish detective stories in comics form, set in a version of the US 1950s as seen by two Spaniards from about fifty years later - Juan Díaz Canales writes and Juanjo Guarnido draws. This world is anthropomorphic, of the no-specific-principle subtype: everyone is a humanoid animal, but it's not like the Red Deer are British and the Whitetail Deer are American, or anything like that. There are lots of different kinds of animals, mostly furry but including some birds, and all the different types seem to be vigorously interfertile, without creating chimeras along the way. The only distinction I think I can see is that men are more likely to be predators (wolves, foxes, bears, tigers) - but some men are large grazing animals (horses, pigs, bulls), too. Women are smaller, frailer things - deer and other ruminants, mostly, I think, plus the usual sexy mostly-human types with fur and animal snouts.

Racial politics maps uneasily at best onto that structure. Animals with darker fur are not necessarily from any particular place in the world, and I'm not even 100% sure if children are even consistently the same "race" as their parents, since there's obviously so many different races and they all interbreed.

That all said, Blacksad, Vol. 2: Arctic Nation is the "racism is bad, m'kay?" book in the series, set in a decaying suburb [1] where a white supremacist organization - explicitly about color of fur, not about national origin or bloodline or anything more substantial, since their big leader is a white tiger - has taken power. This organization, the Arctic Nation of the title, is corrupt and evil and what I guess passes for racist in this world, though the corruption and evil are mostly in the style of every small town in every noir story since 1930 and not particularly distinctive or notable.

Series hero Jon Blacksad - the black panther on the cover, who does have a patch of white on his face, further muddying the metaphor - is hired by a schoolteacher (?!) in one of the few schools still operating (?!) in this town to find a missing child, Kaylie. Kaylie's mother doesn't want the police - corrupt and evil, run by the Arctic Nation - involved, and is scared of something she won't explain, in that usual noir way.

So Blacksad pokes around, with the aid of a weasel (I think) newspaper reporter, and bumps against the usual racists. (There's also a Black Power equivalent, a street gang of jet-black animals, to reinforce the schema - but that just made me think that most of these animals, like most animals, aren't either pure-white or pure-black, so the metaphor gets more and more strained every time Canales leans on it.)

And, frankly, the white tiger that runs the whole thing has tiger stripes on his face, so he's not pure white, either. Nothing in the story calls this out; it's not, as far as I can tell, meant to be some big "racists are hypocrites" reveal - he just is a tiger, and white enough for Arctic Nation, and we shrug and move on. Let me point back to my second paragraph and tap the sign.

There is a shocking revelation, and several shocking deaths, and of course a scene in which the Arctic Nation gather in their KKK-ish robes, because Blacksad didn't get to where it is by being subtle. Blacksad walks out in the end, shaking his head at human evil and racism and so on.

The dialogue is a bit overwrought and not quite colloquial - I'm not sure if that's from Canales' original or inherent in this translation by Anthya Flores and Patricia Rivera. It's mostly overwrought in a noir direction, so I think it's all on purpose: Blacksad is a cartoon version of a '50s detective story, so the tone and style are all a bit cartoonish, too. It is stylish, and it absolutely means well, but Arctic Nation trips over its own (metaphorical) feet more than I'm comfortable with.

[1] This is what the text says. It doesn't make much sense, particularly given the timeframe. It's too early for major white flight, which is not what's described, anyway. It's clearly not a "those people are moving into our neighborhood," either - everyone seems to have been there already, and changing economic circumstances is creating a crabs-in-a-bucket situation. Not to descend into personalities, but I suspect Canales misunderstands, inadvertently or deliberately, a lot of things about the US in the 1950s.

Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson

This is a noir novel; I read it in the Library of America omnibus Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s. I don't know Edward Anderson otherwise, but I assume this novel is thought of as his best book: at least by the editor who put together this omnibus in 1997. (A chap named Robert Polito is credited with that.)

Thieves Like Us is set in the depths of the Depression, in the South (Texas and Oklahoma) - but more often talks about towns and counties than states. States are too big for these small-timers; they don't get that far and only think that big on rare occasions.

As the novel opens, three men have just escaped from prison: T.W. (T-Dub) Masefield, Elmo (Chicamaw) Mobley and Bowie Bowers. Bowie is the youngest, our narrator - he was in on a murder rap that would be accessory at best these days, as part of a botched robbery he fell into working as a carnie. T-Dub and Chicamaw are substantially older, and seasoned bank robbers. Three men is a decent gang for bank robbery - there's a discussion early how four would be better, but who wants to cut in a whole additional man? - so T-Dub and Chicamaw bring Bowie into the work.

It's a short novel, and all told through Bowie's voice, but Anderson gets a lot of specific details in: how they case banks, how they get away (buying cars with cash and burning the car that did the robbery, for one), how they hide out and how long, how they rely on a loose network of mostly relatives, particularly when the police attention is fiercest. He also quotes newspaper accounts of their crimes, as Bowie finds those papers, and gets some solid irony in how misleading, biased, and often just wrong those newspaper articles are.

The plot is loose and episodic; the novel covers a long span of months with three major heists along the way. The heists are not emphasized. Anderson tends to describe them quietly, nearly past-tense - they go well. Maybe because heists that don't go well in the late '30s meant that the heisters all get shot dead or immediately arrested.

So the book is more about Bowie becoming part of this world, and learning how to live with more money in his pocket than he ever expected. Chicamaw and T-Dub are both gamblers and womanizers, both with long-established ways to waste the money they steal nearly as quickly as they steal it. But Bowie is newer, and greener, and more innocent: he thinks he can save it up - at least between jobs - and go away somewhere to enjoy it. The three separate after jobs, to minimize the potential police heat or just to enjoy their money, and then catch back up at a pre-planned time, with T-Dub and Chicamaw having run through everything they stole.

During one of those pauses, Bowie connects with a girl, Keechie - actually Chicamaw's niece, though that's not emphasized, nor does Bowie try to hide the relationship - and the two of them think and talk about making a life together. At the same time, the police of two states are looking for Bowie - for what the papers call a vast number of bank robberies beyond the three they actually did. And newspapers get many things wrong, but, somehow, they found out about Keechie and Bowie, and that's a hot story, too.

Again, this is a noir novel. It's loosely inspired by Bonnie and Clyde. It's not going to end happily for Bowie and Keechie. It doesn't. Anderson has a lot of depth and insight in this short book; it's smart and cynical about people and newspapers and society. The title comes from a repeated refrain, especially early in the book - banks and police and others are just as corrupt, just as money-hungry, just as bad as the bank robbers: they're "thieves just like us."

That's the mindset and the world Bowie and Keechie are caught up in here; it's both roughly true and not at all helpful. In a noir novel, not only are the odds stacked against you, but those odds always come in - like real gambling, not like a happier kind of novel, because a million-to-one shot in real life never comes in.

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

I've mentioned various ways of differentiating literary and commercial novels here before. They're mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's always an element of truth in those quick dichotomies.

Today, the way I want to look at it is: commercial novels need to have a plot. Literary novels only need to have a theme.

Christine Falls is a novel, ostensibly in the mystery/crime/thriller genre, published as by "Benjamin Black," though all the publicity materials, then and since, also made it clear that Black was a pseudonym for the literary novelist John Banville. Banville's photo is in even in the paperback edition (US Picador, 7th printing but first edition) I read. Falls came out in 2006, and was the first of nine novels with the same main character, all as by Black.

I've read a number of Banville's novels, most recently Snow, which is oddly related to the Black series. Otherwise, my readings of his literary novels was mostly some time ago, in the '90s and Aughts, when I was reading at a quicker pace and spending more time analyzing stories professionally. I've also read the Black novel The Black-Eyed Blonde, about a decade ago - that was an authorized sequel to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep which I thought was substantially more successful than other attempts at continuing Chandler.

So I came to Christine Falls intending to enjoy it. And Banville/Black, as always, is a lovely writer of sentences and paragraphs and scenes and moments.

But Falls, like the much later Snow, is largely a message book. That message is: "the Magdalene Laundries were bad, m'kay?" This was not a shocking proposition in 2006, a decade after the initial scandal and four years after a major movie about them.

On top of that, the main character of this book, and the whole Black series, is Quirke. No first name, no middle name, no other name. Just, apparently, Quirke Q. Quirke, the quirkiest quirk who ever quirked a quirk. There are a few moments when Banville/Black nearly stumbles or fails to paper over the fact that his hero has no first name in a world where all of the other characters - most of whom are part of Quirke's family and have known him for decades - do have first names and use them all the time.

So our hero is quirky, got it? Black/Banville wants to be very very sure that you understand that.

And the way that he is quirky is that he's a very large gentleman who drinks a lot - I'm not sure if Banville thinks of it as a lot, as fish don't always recognize water - who has worked as a pathologist in a big Dublin hospital for about twenty years, who was an orphan himself, and who had a wife that died, long ago. So He Is Sad, and has been living a very small, circumscribed life for a long time - doing his work, drinking at all hours, and living in a small set of rooms full of the same old crap he's had forever.

Oh, and it is The Fifties. No more specifics than that, but it is definitely The Fifties.

But then, one day, Quirke gets interested in the case of Christine Falls - not a portentous name at all, o no! -  a corpse in his department that he notices one night during a party for a nurse who is heading to a hospital in Boston. (Boston in the US.) His pseudo-brother/brother-in-law Malachy Griffin - Griffin's father the Judge raised Quirke after rescuing him from the orphanage, and the two married Boston heiress sisters Sarah (Mal) and Delia (Quirke) - was doing something suspicious with the paperwork for Falls, and the drunken Quirke was interested.

Quirke sort-of, more-or-less, intermittently, tries to figure out what happened to Falls. He fairly quickly learns that she died in childbirth, despite Mal changing the paperwork to say it was a heart problem, and learns that there's a big Catholic conspiracy, mostly bankrolled by his father-in-law, that moves what seems to be a vast sea of unwanted newborns out to deserving families, both in Ireland and among the Irish in America. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for this to be illegal, but it's being run by gangsters, and Quirke is repeatedly threatened and eventually badly beaten.

This all happens very slowly. The reader, if that reader has any knowledge of the wider world, has already figured out nearly all of the plot, and has correctly identified the two possible candidates for the father of Fall's baby. But Banville/Black is writing in a literary manner, so we get a long section with the adoptive parents of that baby, over near Boston - the mother is mostly the viewpoint character, and is quiet and loving and more than a little boring, while her husband at first seems just a bit loutish but turns out much worse than that.

Anyway, Quirke (James Quirke? Seamus Quirke? Aloysius St. James Roberto Quirke?) learns a bit more about the baby, including that she was carried off to Boston by the very nurse whose going-away party was the occasion for Quirke's discovery of Falls in the first place. (In a literary novel, everything must be connected. There are no coincidences.)

Eventually, after about three hundred pages of thoughtful introspection from various POV characters, Quirke is in Boston, chaperoning his niece Phoebe - who in the minor B-plot was mooning after a totally unsuitable young man, Conor Carrington, who is shock! horror! Protestant - to visit her grandfather, who is near death. 

There are a lot of mystery-novel-esque elements to close out the book, including a death that could be called murder if you want and a rape that is deeply thematically important. (2006 seems awfully late for a Significant Rape in a novel, but Banville is of the older generation.) The old man funding the whole scheme - Quirke's father-in-law, Phoebe's grandfather, who has a Big Sleep-esque hothouse and wheelchair, speaking of thematic elements - does die, as we all know he would. Quirke learns some things, including one shocking truth that is almost immediately retconned into something he always knew - so I suppose he drank it out of his mind for twenty years? Maybe you can do that if you're Irish enough - but does not solve any crimes or act like a detective in a detective novel at all.

In fact, he's very much a literary-novel protagonist. He's in the middle of a family situation that's more complicated than he realizes, he pulls at threads that lead to things he wasn't ready to learn about the people closest to him, and the most important changes in the book are internal to Mr. Quirke Q. Quirke, Lord of Quirkiness.

Again, Banville/Black tells this story in exquisite prose and has a fine hand for characterization - though Quirke himself is a bit more of a black box than he should be, to make those end revelations work. But it feels like a novella's-worth of matter stretched out to novel length for no good reason, to tell us all that something we already know about was Really Bad.

Um, yeah, OK, I guess. What else have you got?

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs by Ben Sears

I'm still not sure if Ben Sears intends his comics to be all-ages (or, more specifically, most-ages, for tweens and up), or if it's a by-product of the stories that he tells. Either way, I'd say his books are OK for tweens, mostly, if that's something you care about.

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs is Sears' new book this year; it follows 2021's Young Shadow and can be considered a sequel to that book. I say "can be considered," because it doesn't reference the plot of the first book in any way, and Spiral Scratch isn't in this book - so maybe it's a prequel, instead. Or just another book in the same world, with no clear time sequence.

In the first book, Young Shadow was an urban vigilante, of the kind renowned in comics since the 1930s, though he was somewhat more lefty - mostly beating up polluters and corrupt cops - than the typical Big Two character. And he's still doing some of that here: the story starts with Shadow and a group of kids - a distributed group of sidekicks, I suppose, or something like the Shadow's organization, or a anarcho-syndicalist collective, if we think he's leaning more heavily into the lefty thing - follow a truck with two bearded guys, stop them from dumping large barrels of something toxic in a place they shouldn't, and turn them those bearded guys to the authorities of Soil & Water.

So we think "Young Shadow & the Watchdogs" is this vigilante group, probably. The title at first made me think it was a band, but sadly it's definitely not that. But it's not exactly a superteam, either: The Watchdogs are actually a baseball team, and Shadow is their coach. There's only eight of them other than Shadow, which means, including him, they only just barely have enough players to field a team, and can never change pitchers - but it's comics, and I suppose Sears wants to avoid having a too-large cast.

Anyway, the Shadows have a game coming up, with the requisite snooty rich kids - the term of art used in the book is "prep school jerks" - in two days. So the day after the vigilante action, they're going to have a big practice to make sure they're ready.

Parenthetically, these seem to be school-age kids - maybe middle school, maybe late elementary - but no one even mentions school. They're out late at night stopping polluters who threaten them with guns, and parents don't seem to bat an eye. And they spend the whole next day playing baseball. I assume that Bolt City has public schools and that these kids are enrolled, but the book itself provides no evidence to support that.

The reader thinks that the book will be about that big game with the snooty rich kids, and this old Meatballs fan was up for that. Or, possibly, that the polluters would come back and interfere with the game: some kind of intersection of the vigilante plot and the baseball plot. Neither of those two things are true.

Instead, Watchdogs takes a turn into the supernatural - signposted by a cold-open sequence about a nasty pro baseball player, in some earlier time and place - and the Watchdogs instead play a very different baseball game, against an unexpected opposing team. I don't want to be coy about it; you can see them on the cover: the Watchdogs need to battle a team of skeletons because of the usual haunted-artifact-makes-them reasons. If they lose, they all die.

To immediately defuse all tension, they do not get eaten by the eels at this time. Sears works in a combination of the traditions of the superhero comic and the It-was-Old-Man-Jenkins! kid-friendly mystery, both of which require that the hero win in the end and everything be put right with the world. So they play fair, they play well, and they win in the end. The haunted artifact is returned to its proper custodian, and even the grumpy old  supernatural baseball player has a change of heart, maybe, we think.

Sears tells all of this in a fun cartoony line, softly rounded and full of amusing visual interest in every panel. He tells it all straight, but his art subtly tells the reader not to worry; nothing too scary will happen from these skeletons and other monsters. That's another reason I think his books are OK for younger readers: they fit well in that tradition, and tell stories in ways that audience will both enjoy and be familiar with.

I'd still like to see a proper sequel to Young Shadow, to see what happens next and what's the deal with Bolt City, but this was an amusing diversion from that plot, with an appealing cast and a lot of pages with great bits on them.

Playback by Raymond Chandler

This is the last and least of Raymond Chandler's novels, written after the death of his wife Cissy and published the year before his own death. It's also, uneasily, a sequel to Chandler's previous (longest, best) novel, The Long Goodbye, which can make Playback feel even smaller and less impressive by comparison.

So Chandler didn't do himself any favors with this book. It's still Chandler: there's plenty of strong moments and descriptions and ideas in it, and the detective-plot, though not as robust or resonant as his better books, still works and is at the center of the novel. Playback is not a bad PI novel; it's just disappointing, since we know how much better Chandler could be.

It's about eighteen months after The Long Goodbye. Philip Marlowe, Chandler's series hero, is still mooning over Linda Loring, the rich heiress who got away in that book. Mooning more obviously here than he was in the previous novel, actually, which I (and many other critics before me) attribute more to Chandler's loss of Cissy.

Marlowe is hired by "Claude Umney, the lawyer" - that's how he inevitably answers his phone, and Marlowe does make a smart remark about it, but it doesn't take - to follow a certain person and report back. Umney is working, he says, on orders from unnamed but powerful forces "back East." The person to be tailed is, of course, a gorgeous blonde woman: Betty Mayfield,  traveling under an alias. Marlowe watches her arrive on the Super Chief train, hang about in the train station for a few hours, and then continue on to San Diego. He follows her there, and to the small community of Esmeralda.

Marlowe finds Mayfield attractive, and thinks she's being blackmailed - she was clearly confronted by a man in the LA train station - so he doesn't just report her location to Umney and finish up the job. Instead, he snoops about, pretending to be her jilted husband to the desk staff at the motel where she's staying, and eventually meets and talks to Mayfield.

Things get a bit more complicated from there, with some femme fatale business from Mayfield, a potential murder or death by misadventure but no corpse, the question of the whereabouts of that blackmailer, another PI sent by possibly the same "back East" people, and Mayfield's growing connection to the ex-gangster who owns half of Esmeralda. There's also some mostly-honest cops, and a tough hotel detective, who wander through near the end.

All the materials are there, but Chandler doesn't use them as effectively in 1958 as he did earlier in his career - the Kansas City connection between the second PI and the ex-gangster, for example, is mostly just shrugged aside as coincidence. In the end, Marlowe lets a murderer get away with a stern talking-to, and is rewarded for his bravery by a phone call out of the blue by Linda Loring, the One True Love of his life, who will come back to LA for him if he wants her to.

It's an incongruous ending that feels more like undoing and redoing Long Goodbye than doing up Playback. It might have worked if Chandler had done some work in the middle of the book to contrast Mayfield and Loring - though, frankly, they both seem to be to be cut from the same standard Chandler blonde-dame cloth.

Readers will likely take Chandler's novels in order - there's only seven of them to begin with. You can stop after Long Goodbye is you want to; it's enough of an ending for Marlowe anyway. Playback doesn't retroactively ruin anything, but it is a smaller and lesser thing to come at the end.

I Am Their Silence by Jordi Lafebre

It's always an interesting question to ask what a creator is like - what kind of work do they do, what kind of stories do they tell? And does that change, depending on the circumstances?

In comics in particular, I think there can be an intriguing difference between the way a creator works alone and how they work with others - particularly interesting for those who both write and draw, and even more so for the ones who mix their work up depending on who they're collaboratorating with.

Jordi Lafebre has made at least two big solo graphic novels - there's two that have been published strongly in English, where I could see them, at least. He's also worked drawing other writers' stories, most commonly with Zidrou, I think. (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.)

Always Never was a sunny almost-love-story, told in reverse, starting with its sixty-something protagonists finally having time for each other and then immediately winding the clock backward, step by step, to show how they got there. From that book, I might have hypothesized that Lafebre liked complicated structures, hidden connections, and ambiguously happy endings - and that he would tend to tell those stories in sunny colors, with animation-inspired character designs with expressive faces, usually in well-framed panels at a middle distance, arranged into fairly straightforward gridded pages.

I Am Their Silence was Lafebre's next major solo book after Always Never, and it does have those elements, in a somewhat different mixture.

Eva Rojas is a noted psychiatrist in Barcelona, in her early thirties. As is the cliché in stories about psychiatrists, she's both not entirely mentally well herself - she's subject to strong bipolar episodes, and sees visions of dead women from her family during those times - and is in this story herself under the care of a psychiatrist. Well, not exactly "care," I suppose - she's being interviewed by a colleague, Dr. Lull, as part of an evaluation process after temporarily losing her license.

Lafebre frames the story with that session between Eva and Lull - we start there, we drop back to that room repeatedly, the story is narrated by their conversation, and the story ends in that room. In the middle, though, he flashes back and forth as Eva describes the events of the past week - a very eventful, busy, surprising week, as might be expected from a woman experiencing a manic episode.

Eva went with one of her clients, Penelope Monturose, to a family gathering in the middle of that week - Penelope's grandmother, the matriarch, was going to read her will, and the whole family was going to gather. Eva was to be there as support for Penelope, but...Eva, at least in her manic phase, seems to have trouble letting anyone else be the center of attention or to have the last word. (Which strikes me as not-ideal personality traits for a psychiatrist, but the narrative declares her to be brilliant, so perhaps her manic episodes are usually less common and/or less severe?)

Anyway, she meets her client's complicated family, makes a big impression, and is there when one of the three brother-heirs (children of that matriarch, all in late middle age) is shockingly murdered. Worse, she's so nosy and manic that she becomes the primary suspect in that murder, which means she just has to investigate it herself to clear her name. (Well, to be fairer, it's more that she's still manic and so overwhelmingly nosy that she can't help herself but to investigate - I get the sense that Eva can no more stop poking her nose where it doesn't belong during a manic episode than she could flap her arms and fly away.)

Eva narrates the increasingly dramatic events of the week, as she gets more and more enmeshed in Monturose family schemes and is repeatedly warned away from the case by the serious police detective who looks a lot like Angela Merkel - and so is called "Merkel" consistently, since Eva is narrating the story.

To that point: I don't think Lafebre is trying to make Eva an essentially unreliable narrator - that's more difficult to do in comics, where the reader assumes what he sees in a panel is real, and not just what the narrator is describing - but it does shade a bit in that direction. We are meant to realize that Eva carries everyone, not least herself, along on the wave of her manic episodes and part of that mania is the urge to explain and categorize and nail down every last detail.

In the end, the reader already knows Eva wasn't the murderer. She might be manic, she might be often-inappropriate, we might have doubts at how successful a psychiatrist she actually is - she does not cover herself in glory with the one patient we see her interacting with in this book - but she definitely did not kill anyone. And, eventually, that's clear to the important people in the book as well, and Eva's investigation, such as it is, wraps up successfully.

I've focused on the main plot, but - as you might guess - there's also more details about Eva here; she didn't randomly become bipolar, but was driven into it by early trauma. That intertwines with the main story throughout - often in ways we readers see but Eva does not explain to Lull, so as not to look even "crazier" to him (although she is, to be clinical about it, severely impacted in her daily life by bipolar episodes, so it is a major problem for her) - and reaches its own climax in a way that Eva takes to be triumphant but seems to me to break several laws and irrevocably screw up the evidence in this case.

But then I think I found Eva less charming and more of a frightening loose cannon in this book than Lafebre intended. As Lafebre presents her, Eva is only just barely able to life an independent life, and is teetering very unsteadily on the verge of a complete breakdown - on top of the "repeatedly interfering in a major police investigation" stuff, of course. I don't know the Spanish standard of care, but my guess is that Lull really should call for her to be confined under observation for at least the duration of a full bipolar cycle, to get a better handle on how Eva is actually living her life.

I doubt that will happen - Eva solved the crime and it is funny! - but Eva is still very much not well at the end of this book, even if she is slightly closer to well (maybe) than she was at the beginning. I also still have serious doubts that anyone with her massive failures in tact, decision-making, and information-handling can be any good at all as a psychiatrist, but I suppose that is a premise, and I try not to argue with premises.

Still, this is a smart, engaging, fast-moving story with a fascinatingly complex main character - full of flaws, as I keep saying, and doubly fascinating because of them - told brightly and compellingly by a great maker of comics. Just don't assume that Eva is right because she's the protagonist, and you'll have a magnificent ride.

Blacksad, Vol. 1: Somewhere Within the Shadows by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido

I've read parts of the Blacksad series before, and generally found it to be strong work but entirely in a derivative mode - my post about Amarillo probably has the most detail there. But I thought it might be time to go back and re-read the series from the beginning, since I'm not sure I ever did read all of it.

That's how I got to Blacksad, Vol. 1: Somewhere Within the Shadows, which has as much noir as you can take, and maybe even more than that. As is the whole series, it's written by Juan Diaz Canales and illustrated by Juanjo Guarnido, and was originally published in 2000 and then translated by Anthya Flores and Patricia Rivera for a 2010 American edition. The current editions of the whole series seem to be e-book only, from Europe Comics, which is where projects that don't have a current serious North American publisher go, so they don't entirely die.

The book itself doesn't say this, but it's set in a somewhat fictionalized 1950s USA, as seen by a couple of Spaniards two generations later. It's also an anthropomorphic story, so everyone is some variety of animal, which, as I recall, maps somewhat uneasily with the racial politics that shows up later in the series. (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. But, again, it's my sense that the Blacksad series is never subtle about anything, no matter what opportunities it has to do so.)

Anyway, this is the introduction to the series, which means it has to do a lot of heavy lifting in its forty-eight pages. It's a bit too stuffed, which leads to a sense of it being a "noir Greatest Hits." Series hero Jon Blacksad is a private detective - more implied than said; there's not much room - whose old girlfriend Natalia has just been murdered. The cop in charge of the case, Smirnov, drags Blacksad in for vague reasons - in a more grounded story, Blacksad would be warned off the case; here he's basically told "hey, you're the hero, go on and solve this, won't you?"

Blacksad has quite a bit of very noirish, derivative-Chandler musings, presented as captions, through which he narrates his investigation of Natalia's death. Since there aren't many pages, there's no room for dead ends in this case: the just-previous boyfriend he turns up is important, a thug shadowing Blacksad attacks him and then provides important backstory, and so on.

Blacksad is beaten up (check), thrown in jail (check), and confronts the smooth, corrupt rich guy who attempts to bribe him (one very big check), before providing the ending required by the form.

Somewhere Within the Shadows has nothing surprising or new in it, but I should admit that it's not trying to be new or surprising: the point here was to tell as noirish a story as Canales and Guarnido could work up, and they succeed entirely at that. It's second hand at its core, but it is gorgeous and atmospheric, and Canales handles the standard furniture of this genre confidently and consistently. I can still wish that it had a little more originality or specificity, but that's clearly not what the creators were going for here, and they solidly hit the target they were actually aiming for.

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

The fifth Jackson Brodie novel, Big Sky, came out in 2019, after a nearly decade-long gap since the previous book, Started Early, Took My Dog. It's structurally like the previous books: Brodie is an important viewpoint, but only one of several, and the story circles around both a group of characters, many of whose thoughts we see, and some unpleasant and illegal activity both in the present day and the past, which all comes out in the end. They're all crime novels, but I still don't think they're really mysteries - there are police, detecting things, and sometimes Brodie doing detection as well, but the detection is not the focus and the feel is much more like a literary novel.

Well, Kate Atkinson did begin as a literary novelist, winning the Whitbread for her first book Behind the Scenes at the Museum, so that's not surprising.

This time, we're on the east coast, back in Yorkshire, in a cluster of towns and hamlets and villages of which the one familiar to me is Whitby - from Dracula. Brodie is living in a rented house nearby, doing minor private-detective work, mostly watching or entrapping unfaithful husbands, and trading custody of his teenage son Nathan with his former partner, Julia, who is working as an actress on the Collier TV show nearby. 

One of the other viewpoint characters returns from a previous book - Reggie Chase, a teenager in When Will There Be Good News?, is now a Detective Constable working on a cold case this time. (There's always the underlying question in a series of how swiftly time passes - I think, for the Brodie books, it passes normally, and everyone gets as many years older as the calendar indicates.)

The crime this time is sex trafficking, which causes some tonal shifts in Big Sky, and also means Atkinson is more reticent about showing the bad things underlying the plot than previously - not always to the book's benefit. We do see a few of the women trafficked, but none of them from inside their own heads, and Atkinson's politeness in skipping over all of the actual criminal activity means they stay ciphers, or plot tokens. This is clearly a post-Jimmy Savile novel; there's a (fictional) trafficking ring that was discovered and shut down a decade or two previously. The two heads of the ring were caught: one suicided and the other is now dying in prison. But there were rumors of a "third man," who was never identified - Reggie and her partner are running down leads related to that now, after a victim from those days gave a new interview and named some new names.

The other viewpoint characters are are peripherally related to the ring that is still running - the second wife of one figure, her teenage stepson, a local businessman who might be brought into the scheme by the current three conspirators, and some secondary characters.

I find that the Brodie novels, and maybe Atkinson in general, are a bit of a hill to climb starting out - Atkinson has to run through her large, disparate cast, to identify everyone, place them in the world, and explain their backstories and how they're related to each other. That takes the first fifty or seventy pages of the book: it's all compelling writing, but it can feel a bit like homework. Once the narrative gets past that point, though, her strengths shine out more clearly, as she can make connections and cut back-and-forth between strands and (several times this book) carefully give the reader the impression something particular (and generally shocking) has happened, while leaving herself room to show that impression was mistaken.

Big Sky is a bit messier, and I think not quite as successful, as the previous books: Atkinson can't show us sex trafficking the way she could murder and abduction, so it's all abstracted and on the level of tut-tutting rather than visceral. But the characters are sharply drawn, their thoughts full of insights and pointed moments, and the writing is as supple and engaging as ever. Not quite as good as the previous books is still very good.

The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

Hisataro is a mostly ordinary Japanese schoolboy, in his first year of high school in the mid-90s. Well, ordinary except for one thing: he relives the same day, over and over again, regularly but unexpectedly. By this point, he's worked out the rules: when a day repeats, it always happens exactly nine times. He's the only one who can alter what originally happened on repeated days, but what he does can make other people change what they did the first time around. He doesn't control when it happens, and it can happen multiple times in a week or not for a couple of months.

(He has, you might say, just a mild case of Groundhog Day syndrome, one that consistently clears up on its own without any need for medical or other intervention.)

So, at the point The Man Who Died Seven Times begins, Hisataro is physically sixteen - but he's lived through, he estimates, about twice as many years as that. It's given him advantages - acing tests that happen to land on repeat days, or using multiple days to get to know girls he wants to date - but mostly, he admits, he's a mediocre student without strong desires for anything, maybe a bit fatalistic because of his condition.

Seven Times takes place over one New Year's holiday, among Hisataro's family, mostly during one particular day repeating over and over again. And his grandfather keeps dying on that day - murdered, Hisataro thinks, by a member of the family. If he can just arrange events the right way on the last version of the day - the one that becomes "real" - then Hisataro can save his grandfather's life. 

He might be the only one that strongly invested in keeping the old man alive. Reijiro, that patriarch, was a bad father to his three daughters, especially after their mother died early. His oldest daughter ran off to college and married early to escape him; his youngest daughter married a teacher at her school soon afterward, also to escape. The middle daughter was left to keep care of him - and to become President and assumed heir of his company when an unlikely sequence of lucky bets and business ventures were wildly successful and the old man became very rich.

In the last few years - it's probably almost thirty years since those two daughters ran away - they've gotten closer as the old man got older. Everyone now spends the days after New Years at the old man's now-palatial house, reconfigured from how it was when the sisters grew up. 

Hisataro is the third of three sons of his mother; his aunt Haruna has two daughters. Their Grandfather is probably going to have one of those grandchildren adopted by his middle daughter Kotono, and so inherit the entire vast fortune. (Or, maybe, he'll have his faithful young assistant Ryuichi adopted instead - or even Emi, Kotono's assistant.) He writes a new will each New Year's, potentially changing his mind on his heir every time, though - before this fateful year - his family doesn't know all the details of how he decides and which heir he has decided on.

The whole family arrives - the five grandchildren and three sisters, but not the two husbands, who each bowed out for vague reasons related to problems each is having at work - on the 1st of January, to spend two days celebrating with family and then returning home the night of the 2nd. There's tension, as you'd expect, but mostly between the two runaway sisters, each maneuvering to set at least one of their children up for the fortune.

The days go normally; Hisataro remembers getting into the car to go home the evening of Jan 2, after a day of too much drinking with his grandfather. (There are a number of aspects of Seven Times that will seem really odd to North Americans; the casual way a sixteen-year-old gets absolutely blotto with his grandfather is the first and most obvious.)

But he wakes up in his grandfather's house. It's what he calls the Trap: the day will repeat nine times. And, in this first repeat, something shocking and unexpected happens: his grandfather dies, having his skull smashed in by a vase of flowers.

So Hisataro rearranges the next day so that the person who was with grandfather couldn't be - but grandfather is also dead at the end of the third version of the day, his head bashed in by that same vase.

And so on - Hisataro tries several times to gather as much of the family away from grandfather as possible, only to see him still die, still have a heavy object batter his skull, in versions four and five and six.

This is a play-fair mystery, so I won't give any more of the plot than that - I might have said too much already. Hisataro does solve the "mystery" in the end, and there is a plausible, fascinating twist even after he does solve it.

Nishizawa has a sly sense of humor here - this is not the kind of humorous book that has jokes, but there's dark amusement in the ways Grandfather keeps getting killed, and a different flavor of amusement in the infighting and maneuvers of the family members to get the old man's money. If you're looking for a mystery novel with an odd skiffy premise that makes strong use of both, Seven Times is a lot of fun.

Bridge Planet Nine by Jared Throne

I came into this book with almost no expectations, and was happily surprised - it's a taut, smartly-paced crime thriller in a lived-in SF universe. I'll try not to spoil what turns into a twisty plot with a lot of revelations, but keep that in mind.

Bridge Planet Nine is Jared Throne's second full-length graphic novel, and I think the first to be published by an established company - Top Shelf put it out in October. It's the kind of book that takes unabashedly genre materials, uses them well, and mixes them to make its own story.

It's the medium future. Humanity has expanded to some unknown number of other planets, and seems to be living under a mildly dystopian corporatocracy - well, about as dystopian and corporate-ruled as today, frankly. One of those corporations, Partna, has a string of "Bridge Planets" - uninhabited worlds used as refueling stations for automated transport ships. It sounds like the point is either to extract all of the mineral wealth from those planets or to degrade them enough that Partna can take full ownership for some other activity later - or maybe both.

Four people are planning a heist on one of those planets. Garrett was a VP at Partna before a scandal - which he claims he had nothing to do with - took him down, tossed him in prison, and ruined his life. He has the knowledge and the desire to hurt Partna. The other three are specialists: Hudson is a long-time criminal with a lot of expertise; Wes is the one who'll get them through digital security, with his reprogrammed drone Etta; and Pearl, Wes's sister, is the pilot. They have contacts so they can "borrow" a ship to get there and back - not in a lot of comfort, but good enough.

Garrett knows of a high-value ship, with extra security, coming into Bridge Planet Nine soon. The ship, and the planet, are completely automated - no staff at all. So the four heisters just have to get there, quietly take what they want, and get back out - a big payout for all four of them, minimal risk.

Of course it's not that simple.

Before we meet the heisters, there's what I might call a cold open. A group of people, on a planet somewhere, execute or sacrifice one member of their group by chaining him outside at night and removing the mask they all wear. Something in the environment kills him, unpleasantly, almost immediately. We don't know exactly where they are. But we can guess.

Garrett and crew do get to Bridge Planet Nine without trouble, and park their ship away from the transfer station they plan to hit. They take a ground truck over, marvel at the ruined buildings from when this was an inhabited planet, and get to work on the security at the transfer station. They know their jobs, are smart and organized, and have planned carefully. (This is roughly a third of the way into the book.)

Things go badly in unexpected ways, as they always will in a heist thriller. The mission shifts, there are revelations of what Partna did and is doing on Bridge Planet Nine, and, of course, there is sudden violence and death. There are other characters, too, of course. You need to have a larger cast than just four people to have enough deaths to make a thriller.

The borrowed ship does lift off from the planet at the end of the story; I'll say that much. It does return to Earth, with a crew and a pilot. The people on that ship are not unrewarded by their efforts on Bridge Planet Nine. It's a good ending, a satisfying ending - one that fits for both a heist thriller and a gritty anti-corporate SF story.

Throne draws this in an indy-friendly style, with sharp spotted blacks, crisply distinct faces, and a good eye for design - both of his pages and for elements in his world. Suitably for both the heist and grungy-SF genres, most of the background elements look worn, lived-in, half-broken - he draws a universe that's already seen a lot of activity, where the street has been making its own uses for things for a long time now. Bridge Planet Nine is impressive: it tells its cross-genre story well, with distinctive characters, a strong sense of place, and serious tension throughout.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

This is the big one; if you read only one Raymond Chandler novel, it should be The Long Goodbye. It's almost twice the length of his earlier books and not structured like a traditional mystery - a loose, looping, allusive novel that can make the case, all by itself, that private-eye stories can be fine literature.

I don't know if the world needed to be told that in 1953. On the other hand, I don't know if "the world" has entirely learned it since then - the world is full of blindered people of all kinds. Some refuse to believe mysteries can be as good as any other novels; some read only private-eye novels.

I'm not going to describe the plot in any great detail - it's deliberately slow, and recursive, and is best experienced by reading it. I did flag a whole lot of quotes, and I might drop a couple of them in below, with some linking material, to give you a sense of the book.

But I can tell you it starts with Terry Lennox - a drunk, a man badly damaged by his WWII service, the once and future kept husband of a widely-ranging heiress, a man with his own notions of propriety and honor. Series hero and narrator Philip Marlowe rescues him one day - more or less from his wife - and comes to be his friend, in the way of men who don't get close to each other or ask each other many questions.

One night Lennox calls Marlowe and needs a big favor, no questions asked - to be driven to the airport in Tijuana. This is a mystery novel; Marlowe assumes and we the reader assumes that means someone is dead - and we're both right. It won't be the last death.

Somewhat later, Marlowe is hired - sort-of - to find the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, who has disappeared on what both his wife and his New York editor are afraid is yet another bender. The Wades live in the same rich town and mix in the same circles as Lennox's wife; Lennox's sister-in-law is prominent there.

Maybe this is a good point to throw in a quote - here's Marlowe talking to the novelist's wife, on p.502 of the Later Novels & Other Writings omnibus:

"Look, Mrs. Wade," I said finally. "My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick."

That's the core point of any mystery novel - the why of a specific shocking violent act. And the best mystery writers, Chandler at their fore, make it clear that we can say some things about any particular act, especially in retrospect, but that people are strange and contingent and unexpected. Long Goodbye is a novel about people, the things they do and the ways they bounce off each other - often violently.

This is also the book where Chandler has the "main story" cool down repeatedly, almost as if his plot is dying out, as Marlowe goes on to other cases, other parts of his life, before looping back to that cluster of Lennox and Wade and the rest:

So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.

"Come in, Mr. Thingummy. What can I do for you?"

There must be a reason.

(p.549)

As I said, this is a long novel - especially for a mystery, especially for 1953. Marlowe isn't really investigating any of the deaths, and, for a long time, he's half-heartedly trying to get away from the bits of this puzzle he's entangled with. But this is what he does: he worries loose bits of string until he gets to the knot and untangles it.

In the end, we do learn what happened - to Lennox and Wade and all of the others, to the cops and crooks and millionaires and their daughters. This is a magnificent American novel, on the short list that everyone should read at least once. I'll leave it at that.

Fishflies by Jeff Lemire

It still surprises me when I lose track of a "favorite" creator's work - in my head, I'm still the guy who spent sixteen years diligently tracking every last thing being published in my areas of concern, so that feels impossible to me. But I haven't tracked like that for two decades now, and I don't even see the trade publications I used to use as initial sources. Even if I wanted to, both PREVIEWS and Publishers Weekly are gone or vastly diminished from what they were when I relied on them.

But when I recently read 10,000 Ink Stains, Jeff Lemire's recent memoir of his career in comics, some of those old habits came back - I took notes. (I keep a small google doc with mostly series I want to keep reading in the library app - keeping them more-or-less in the same order, so I rotate through and remember to keep going with the ones I want to continue with. On the other side, I just removed my entry for Asterix as I was updating it based on reading this book.) So I now have a list of things I missed by Jeff Lemire.

Some of them are his Big Two superhero work - those have question marks after them, and I'm not sure if or when I'll get to them. But I also missed some of his more "indy" work, which I've consistently (well, mostly, with a big asterisk for Ascender/Descender, where the worldbuilding triggered a strong reaction) enjoyed - so I have a list of those books, and plan to get to them in '26.

First, though, he had a major series recently that I missed - seven issues of sixty-ish pages each, collected as a single book this past March. Written and drawn by Lemire, with one flashback section drawn by Sean Kuruneru. That was Fishflies, another story of rural Ontario and the hardscrabble lives of the damaged people who live there, like a lot of his solo work going back all the way to Essex County.

Fishflies is the story of two people - that's them on the cover. She's Francis "Franny" Fox, an elementary-schooler in Belle River, a small town in Southern Ontario, near the water. He's Lee Simard, a minor criminal, probably in his late twenties, who held up the Belle River Mini-Mart one night, shot a kid coming there to buy popsicles, and then...something happened to him.

It's the height of summer, the few weeks around a full moon when the local mayflies - called fishflies here, because they come from the water and smell like fish - swarm over everything. Some of you may have similar insect infestations where you live: I've seen cicadas here in New Jersey and "love bugs" down in Florida. This is a big, annoying, unpleasant one - the fishflies gather in huge masses for a few days, and then die. They don't bite or sting; they're purely a nuisance - the worst thing is their vast number and the unpleasant crunch underfoot.

There's a supernatural element to this book, which isn't explained until much later. 

Lee flees the botched robbery and his shooting of the kid, Paul Dupuis. He seems to be shot himself, in exactly the same place as the kid. He's also tormented by the fishflies, which seem to be biting him. He runs through the fields, and ends up on the farm where Franny lives with her sour, abusive father. She takes him in, making him a place to stay in an unused silo. She knows he "did something bad," but insists God can forgive him if he changes.

And he does change - but not the way she means. See that thing on the cover? That's Bug, which Simard transforms into by the next day. He can't talk, but is strong and can jump really far. Franny still wants him to be her friend. She still wants to protect him, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, the local head of police Danny Laraque is looking for Simard. We also follow Dupuis's mother Helen, first watching over her comatose son in the hospital. And there's an old couple, brother and sister, who have seen "bugs" like Simard emerge before - and devoted their lives to killing those bugs.

Franny and Bug flee - and the police realize that she's missing and think Simard has kidnapped her. Things escalate. We learn the secret of the supernatural element: why Simard became a bug, and how it's happened before. All of those characters circle the story, and circles always lead back to where they began.

Fishflies is somewhat horror-tinged and somewhat crime-story-plotted, but it's still very much in the mainstream of Lemire's solo work: damaged people, in poor circumstances, in small Ontario towns, in stories that are, to quote myself, "literary explorations of death and regret and loss." His scratchy art is perfect for those kind of stories, those hardscrabble people, and it works really well for a giant anthropomorphic bug, too. Lemire gives this story the page-space it needs to breathe, including sidebars about fishflies from secondary characters in this town at the end of most of the original issues. It's creepy and sad and dark, but does give a glimmer of hope for some people, especially Franny - who needs it most.

Burning Midnight by Loren D. Estleman

This is the third of the Amos Walker books I've read this year [1] - I ran through a big clump of them eighteen years ago, under a tag with a silly title, and then let them accumulate on the shelf mostly annually since then - and, like the last clump, I seem to be finding patterns in the books that slowly make me enjoy them less and less.

Well, the 2007 batch was a slow process, even though I read ten books in less than a month. This batch seems to be running more quickly, which is unfortunate. There are six more on the shelf, and maybe two or three others I missed, and it would be nice to read them, and even nicer to want to read them.

I see that I noted, during the 2007 batch, that this was a solidly old-fashioned series, that series hero Amos Walker sometimes tends to the random hard-boiled comment mostly out of context, that women are people rather than plot tokens only intermittently, and that the plots tend to devolve into action sequences rather than detecting more often than I liked. All of that is still true. The thing about women, maybe even more so.

I might need to be bit elliptical here, since giving away the solution to a mystery is Not Done. But there's a major Misguided Liberal Lady in Left-Handed Dollar, and then the underlying villain of Infernal Angels was an EEEvil Dragon Lady who I don't really remember but had been a character in earlier books.

Burning Midnight, which was the new book back in 2012, features not only the surprising return (very late in the book) of that EEEvil Dragon Lady, but also another major Misguided Liberal Lady.

I had been worried that the series would have descended into some kind of racism in these Obama-era books - PI novels are inherently conservative in the small-c sense, and often in the big-C sense, too - but I didn't expect that much...I don't want to bluntly call it misogyny, but don't have a better word...on my bingo card so quickly. I don't know if author Loren D. Estleman did that on purpose, or if he or his editor even noticed it, but three books in a row with very similar shocking surprise endings - and the next book also seems, in its description, to strongly hint the EEEvil Dragon Lady will be the Big Bad - is a bit much.

And I'm deeply aware than, if I'm seeing some creping Tea Party influence now, in books written around 2010, that things could get much worse as I reach the books written in the later teens and afterward. I have a mostly positive opinion of Estleman that I would like to keep if at all possible, even as I keep repeating the mantra "the book is not the author."

(I was worried about racism, but, oddly, these three books feature very few Black people - other than one top-level cop friend of Walker's who's in every book - for a city like Detroit that is 78% Black. This one does have a bunch of Mexicans, though, he said brightly.)

Anyway, this book sees Walker hired by Inspector John Alderdyce - the aforementioned Black cop buddy - to investigate his estranged son's brother-in-law. The son, Jerry, changed his last name - I'm not sure we ever get what he changed it to - and married a Mexican-American woman, Conchata "Chata." Chata has a sixteen-year-old brother, Ernesto "Nesto" Pasada, who lives with them in a close-in Detroit suburb, but has been spending a lot of time recently in what I gather Detroiters actually call "Mexicantown."

So much time, that he's gotten a tattoo on his hand indicating he's joined the Maldado gang. And so much that he's not coming home as regularly as his sister would like.

Nesto has not quite disappeared as Walker takes the case, but he's in the middle of a slow fade. Alderdyce wants Walker to talk to Chata, find Nesto, and convince him to give up the gang stuff and go back to a relatively normal teen life.

This is a Walker novel, so it's not that simple. As Walker pokes around the barrio, he finds there are two feuding gangs in the neighborhood, the Maldados and Zapatistas - both new, and tentative, and offshoots of much more dangerous and violent Mexican border gangs, but possibly rapidly getting more serious and dangerous.

Walker talks with two major community figures there, the reformed gangbanger-turned-businessman Zorborón and the gringa who runs the local non-profit, Sister Delia, both of whom say they've had minor violence recently, seemingly to warn them away from Maldado affairs. And then, of course, the murders and arson starts.

Walker does solve it all - I hinted at the solution above, and won't do more than hint - and eventually finds Nesto and drags him home. In the very last chapter, the EEEvil Dragon Lady from previous books calls him and basically says "if I ever run into you again, I'm going to have you killed," with the usual "of course, I can't have you killed now, even though I really want to and know plenty of people who would do it, because this novel is over and I'm actually just setting up a plot hook for another novel" caveat.

I've said many times I prefer mysteries to thrillers. I don't know if mysteries, as I mean them, actually still exist - I read the NYTimes Top 100 books of the year list today, by chance, which had a section for Thrillers and even one for Horror but no Mysteries (or SF) - but this series has solidly moved towards thrillerdom in ways that annoy me, even aside from the lazy EEEvil Dragon Lady-isms and the "whiteys should keep out of Mexicantown and let the locals do whatever the hell they want - except cops, of course, who are pure and honest and wonderful" mindset here.

I still like Walker as a character, especially after his voice settled down from the early books. I like having PI novels in the hardboiled style to read, even if they're more thriller-y than mystery-esque. I don't think Estleman is actually grinding any specific ideological axes in this series; I think it's more the natural flow of hardboiled fiction and the pull of the renormative ending. But my patience for the same thing over and over again is getting thinner. I may read another one or two of these, but I'm beginning to wonder if I will be able to get through the six more on the shelf.

[1] "This year" being 2025; I wrote this in November.