HELP 10: American Detective

Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project, that very quixotic enterprise, ends with this book, the most recent in the "Amos Walker" series. American Detective was published in hardcover by Forge in April, so it's probably still in your local book store if you run out right now to grab it.

First of all, I have to mention that Walker has a cell phone for at least part of this book (though Estleman does the usual old-fart gag of having Walker struggle with the manual, and not really understand how to use the phone), and realizes he needs access to a computer at another point. So Walker is, slowly, finding his way into the 21st century (and Estleman is reacting to my thoughts about the last book before I had them, too).

That title worried me a bit, I have to admit. Naming an entry in a long mystery series "American Detective" could mean several things, few of them good:

• no one associated with the book could think of a decent title
• the author and publisher nearly came to blows about title suggestions, and this is the compromise candidate
• someone expects this to be the last book in the series
• someone hopes that '70s staple, the generic book, is about to make a comeback

Now, American Detective isn't a bad title. It does sound more like a magazine than a book title, and it certainly has a whiff of the generic, but that can work. In this case, it doesn't have much to do with the plot. One character makes the common observation that Walker is a throwback, and mentions that there once was an "American Detective" magazine, but that's it. (On similar grounds, nearly every PI novel in this country could have been titled American Detective for the past forty years.)

But the plot in this particular book starts when ex-Detroit Tigers pitching great Darius Fuller hires Walker to scare off his only daughter Dierdre's ne'er-do-well boyfriend Hilary Bairn, before Deirdre turns twenty-five and gets her trust fund. As usual for Walker, things do not go as planned, and he hasn't even spoken with Bairn before the first body falls at his feet. Bairn was involved somehow with gambling and organized crime -- presumably starting in the old familiar way of losing too much money in an unlicensed casino -- so Walker tracks down Madame Sing, a Dragon Lady-type who runs much of the gambling (and people smuggling, and so on) in the Detroit area. And things just get more complicated from there, of course. This one again has an over-the-top ending in the vein of Sinister Heights -- an airplane is the setting, this time -- but it all does come together pretty well by the time it's all over.

And I just read ten mysteries from the same series in a row, and still like the series -- so, if you have any interest at all in hardboiled American PI stories, give one of these books a try.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

American Born Chinese was both a National Book Award finalist and the winner of the ALA's Michael I. Printz Award for 2006, so who am I to say it's not all that?

Who am I? I'm the Hornswoggler, that's who! And the day I fail to have an opinion is the day I stop blogging.

I liked American Born Chinese but didn't love it; it tells a decent story but it stays at a solidly Young Adult level the whole time, when it could easily have risen above that. [1] I'm glad I got it from the library rather than buying it -- it may be a matter of too-high expectations, but it disappointed me.

American Born Chinese has three ostensibly separate plotlines, which the astute reader knows will eventually intersect:

• Danny is a typical (White) American high-schooler, whose cousin Chin-Kee, a horrible Chinese stereotype, has come to visit and wreck Danny's life, as he does every year
• the legendary Monkey King wants the other gods to respect him, but they just treat him like a monkey
  
• and Jin Wang, a grade-school-aged Chinese-American boy, moves to a very white suburb and tries to fit in, eventually becoming friends with the only other Chinese boy, Wen-Chei.

The Jin Wang story feels very directly autobiographical, and the other two stories are clearly reworking autobiographical material as well. (Though the parts with the Monkey King also seem to be retelling Journey to the West.) Yang does a good, interesting job of incorporating personal material with the more fantastic and mythological aspects, though the ending is awfully pat. (American Born Chinese has A Lesson, and, knowing that, I bet each of you will realize what that lesson is. It's a decent lesson, as such things go, but books that have lessons tend to stop there, and this one certainly does.)

American Born Chinese is good as far as it goes, but I wish it had gone farther. The Danny sections are supposedly a sitcom called "Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee," and much of the rest of the book is on a similarly glossy surface level. There are some great moments -- such as when Jin's white friend asks him to stop dating a white girl because "she has to start paying attention to who she hangs out with" -- but not enough of them. Yang needed to dig deeper into his own experience and ground this story in more specific moments (of racism, of young love, of friendship, and, most importantly, of a boy conflicted about his own heritage).

In particular, since the art only takes up about half of the space on the pages, American Born Chinese feels uncompleted -- as if half of the story is still out there to be told.

I liked American Born Chinese, but I would have liked the book it could have been much better. But Yang is still quite young, so I expect he'll have plenty of time to dig deeper and learn to tell the story behind the obvious one.


[1] Note: I am not saying that YA fiction is lesser than anything else. But American Born Chinese falls into a common YA style of telling a coming-of-age story, subordinating all of the elements of the story to the coming-of-age of the main character, and ending as soon as he learned the particular important lesson about himself that this book is about. It's not that American Born Chinese is YA; it's that it becomes a very specific, genre-fied type of YA story.

I've Been Remiss About Linking to ComicMix

But I'll be better right now.

Link-lists (which usually have more SF-oriented links than comics-oriented, though the latter come first for obvious reasons):

• Felt Typewriters
• Inferior Five Edition
• Gorey Tribbles
• Wired Pennies
• Back to the Rack
• Unbelievable Things

And one review:

• Chance in Hell

HELP 9: Nicotine Kiss

I dawdled through Estleman's 2006 novel Nicotine Kiss over the long weekend, but finally finished it this morning. (I note that this book was published in hardcover in March of 2006, that the next book in the series has now been published, and that a paperback is not out nor obviously in the works, which is a bad sign.)

It opens with a bang: Amos Walker, our protagonist and a Michigan PI, is searching for a dead-beat husband on the first day of deer season, and finds him on the wrong end of a rifle. The deadbeat drops Walker with one shot, then eats the rifle himself, and Walker's leg -- and maybe his life -- is saved by an old acquaintance, cigarette smuggler Jeff Starzek.

Two months later,Walker is recuperating when he hears Starzek's name again: the smuggler's brother-in-law wants to hire Walker to find him. Walker soon discovers that he was the last one to see Starzek -- and that an agent from Homeland Security with a bottomless wallet of John Doe warrants is also very eager to see Starzek.

It goes on from there, with investigations into Starzek's past that (happily!) don't turn up any fifty-year-old murders in Canada for once, and what is essentially a monster truck-snowmobile race across a frozen lake. I found parts of this a bit implausible, and it seemed to wrap up more quickly than I expected, but it's another good entry in a fine hardboiled series.

But it's hard to miss that Walker is getting increasingly out of touch with the modern world, and I'd like to see that affect his cases more -- he doesn't use a computer or cellphone, and I'd expect many of his contacts for running license plates and Social Security numbers would have been retired or downsized by now. He's also getting older -- by my count, he should be solidly over 50, since he's a Vietnam vet and went there after four years of college -- and he sustains a major injury at the beginning of this book, so the physical stuff should become increasingly more difficult. (Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter mysteries did a good job of realistically aging a hero, though Brandstetter wasn't usually physical in the old-fashioned way Walker is.) I'm not saying Walker can't be a tough guy in his 50s -- there are plenty of tough guys in their 50s -- but that a now-gimpy tough guy in his 50s might want to work on other methods if we wants to go on as he began...

Movie Log: Mr. Bean's Holiday

On Saturday, a local movie house was showing Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen...but I couldn't convince the boys to go see it. (I may also have been a bit conflicted because I don't remember how violent and/or creepy it is.) So the movie we three saw this weekend was Mr. Bean's Holiday, which of course doesn't compare but is successful enough on its own terms.

Mr. Bean is a character Rowan Atkinson created for an early-90s TV series, reprised in one movie ten years ago, and has announced he won't play anymore. Bean is an ill-fated British man of few words but a boundless ability to get in trouble. The character feels like a throwback to the days of silent comedy, where a movie's hero couldn't see a ladder without getting tangled in it and flying objects inevitably hit someone in the face.

In this movie, Bean wins a Cannes holiday in a church raffle, and of course trouble ensues. He comes face-to-face with French cuisine, gets lost, and inadvertently ruins another traveler's laptop...and that's just the movie cracking its knuckles and getting ready for the plot to start. The real plot starts when Bean accidentally causes a man to miss his train, and then meets the man's son on the train. The two of them soon miss a train themselves, and the usual catalog of odd types of transportation ensues. A pretty young French actress eventually joins them, the kind who would be a love interest in a normal movie. (But it's impossible to picture Bean having any sort of romance.) And it all ends at the Cannes Film Festival, during the premiere of a movie.

This is nearly a catalogue of physical comedy -- I don't remember any hanging-high-above-the-street stunts, but I might be forgetting something -- and most of it is pretty funny, for people who like that sort of thing. (It's not quite slapstick, usually, but it's definitely physical rather than verbal comedy.) I wish Atkinson would do more work along the lines of the Blackadder TV series, but that was nearly twenty years ago, so I should probably stop complaining.

As I said, I took my kids to see this, and both I and they enjoyed it. It's not a movie that will live for the ages, but it's funny, and, sometimes, that's enough.

Yotsuba&!, Vol. 1 by Kiyohiko Azuma

I feel like I should read more manga, so I try things like Yotsuba&! every so often.

And then I don't get them.

This is an all-ages comics story, first in a series, by a popular creator, that's supposed to be very funny. But I can't even figure out the premise. There's this little girl, Yotsuba, who's probably four or five. She has green hair (like a four-leaf clover, the translator unhelpfully points out), and the back-cover copy hints that she might even be an alien. But she also seems to have some sort of learning disability or brain dysfunction -- she doesn't know what common items are, doesn't seem to remember things people just told her, and is perpetually in a manic phase. The humor of this series (at least in this volume) is entirely driven by her perceptions of the world.

If she's just supposed to be a goofball, then she's funny. If she's unable to learn, or otherwise retarded, then I'm a bit uncomfortable laughing at her. I suspect there's some Japanese cultural reference, or a long history of characters like this, that I'm just not aware of.

But, from reading this book, it seemed to me like she has a major learning disability...and that we're supposed to find that funny. I might be a Republican, but some things are too far out even for me.

Buddha, Vol. 4: The Forest of Uruvela by Osamu Tezuka

And this is the half-way point in Tezuka's occasionally Disney-ish retelling of the life of the Buddha. (I'd read Vol. 3 the previous day.) It covers about eight years, mostly focused on the Buddha's time in a community of ascetics and his problems with their religious doctrines (both about the strictures of caste and about the monks' ordeal-based asceticism). During those eight years, a major character from earlier volumes dies and the Buddha finally achieves enlightenment.

We also get a side-story about an invulnerable giant -- literally; he's twenty feet tall and heals any injury -- who comes into the service of the new prince-conqueror of Buddha's homeland and also runs up against the prejudices and established wisdom of the people there. (It's pretty clear Tezuka's main point -- and probably Buddha's as well; I'm ashamed to say I'm not well-versed in Buddhist teachings -- is that the caste system, and similar ways of classifying people, is wrong.

There's more philosophy and melodrama, and fewer cutesy little-boy figures in this volume, so I found it pretty successful and less jarring than some of the earlier ones. But it's still a quite varied mixture, so be warned.

Movie Log: Melvin Goes to Dinner

In a well-ordered universe, Netflix would have sent a Sonic X disc for my sons to watch for the long weekend, and I wouldn't have seen Melvin Goes to Dinner yet. Unfortunately, we live in a random, chaotic realm, and so Melvin came in the mail on Saturday and I saw that night.

Not that there's anything wrong with Melvin -- he anchors a nice movie -- but my plan was to put him off until next week sometime. But this year has been an object lesson about how my plans don't work out, so I'd better learn to roll with it.

I don't think this ever had a theatrical release, though it wowed them at the festivals. It's a short comedy-drama, mostly about four people having dinner at a restaurant (in L.A., I believe), though it's not presented quite in chronological order and has scenes both before and after the dinner. It also was based on a stage play, and it does feel a bit stagey -- the characters make long speeches, and the four-people-at-a-table set-up is clearly derived from the stage. But turning this story into a movie did open it up some; it does move out into other scenes, and that keeps it from being claustrophobic. (Though the hand-held camera work during some of the restaurant scenes adds that back in; there are an incredible number of shots of the back of someone's head in this movie.)

Melvin (director Michael Blieden) is a thirty-ish slacker, working for his sister (Maura Tierney) in some kind of government construction planning office after having dropped out of a psychiatric residency. He's going to meet his friend Joey (Matt Price), an unspecified businessman, for dinner. Joey's friend Alex (Stephanie Courtney) is in town for the day, so Joey invites her along. And Alex runs into her old friend Sarah (Annabelle Gurwich) on the street, and drags her into the dinner. So the final count is four people with tenuous connections...until we learn more.

Melvin Goes to Dinner is not a movie of plot; it's about what these four people talk about, and secondarily about what they reveal about themselves along the way. I enjoyed it; I think my wife found it pleasant but less engrossing. There's a lot of good detail acting -- glances, facial expressions, that sort of thing -- and camera work that catches it, so you have to pay attention to it. I found the four main characters interesting and engaging, and I liked the stories they told. (A fair bit of their talk is about sex, if that attracts or repels people.) But if you thought Sideways was a slow, self-indulgent movie about people you hated, don't go anywhere near Melvin Goes to Dinner.

Unpacking "Buzz Means Nothing"

I just realized that I was saying two things in that post, and shoved them together without making that clear.

1) The Hugos are very much not a buzz-driven award, so considering what works people on the Internet are talking about is not a good strategy to predict Hugo winners. (You used to be able to get a decent read on Hugo voters through the discussions in print sercon fanzines, but I have no idea if that's still true.)

2) Buzz maps very lightly, if at all, to actual sales and interest among "real readers." This is true for all of SF/Fantasy, and probably for any book genre.

For example, the top five books on the NY Times Hardcover bestseller list right now are:

1. A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, by Khaled Hosseini
2. PLAY DIRTY, by Sandra Brown
3. AWAY, by Amy Bloom
4. THE QUICKIE, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge
5. THE SANCTUARY, by Raymond Khoury

If you searched the Internet and book-review outlets, I bet you'd find quite a bit of "buzz" about Hosseini, and maybe some about Bloom, but a great silence about routine bestsellers like Brown and Patterson. Similarly, on that same list is Sandworms of Dune (by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson) at #8. It'll probably be the biggest-selling SF novel of the year, but it's not a book the Interneteratti are fond of, so it has no "buzz."

What's really happened, in our end of the literary world, is that SF/Fantasy has gotten big and complicated enough that we have our own "commercial" and "literary" [1] ends, just like the general world of fiction. And when we talk about "buzz," we mostly mean that a book is popular with the literary end of the genre. That doesn't mean that it can't be a big success, but it does imply that it has qualities that the great mass of commercial readers are not specifically looking for -- and may even be biased against.


[1] This doesn't map exactly, since our "literary" end also includes the people who praise particular books for their diamond-hard science, which doesn't always mean they have similarly sparking prose. But there's still the sense of the "literary" SF and Fantasy books being those that aim higher and succeed on more levels than telling a good story.

Mildly Nerdy

It's a holiday weekend, so how about a meme? I got this one from Ben Jeapes.



Hm, I wasn't aware that an interest in history and literature was "nerdy."

Incoming Books, Week of 9/1

Some of these I bought, some were given to me by colleagues, and a couple came in from publicity folks for review (either here or at ComicMix). I hope to dive into some of this stuff as soon as I knock off the last book-and-a-half of Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project, which has been taking longer than I expected...

• Samedi the Deafness by Jesse Ball -- an interesting literary debut novel from Vintage
  
• Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson -- a sketchbook travelogue from the author of Blankets; it's also about a year and a half older than I expected.
  
• Good As Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm -- another Minx title.
  
• The Book of Classic Insults edited by Tom Steele -- a cheap remainder at Borders (where I've been a lot the last couple of weeks, since I've been bribing Thing 1 with manga for every "real book" he reads over summer vacation).
  
• Graphic Classics: Bram Stoker edited by Tom Pomplun
  
• The Somnabulist by Jonathan Barnes -- an interesting-looking detective/historical/occult/thriller/fantasy with a great first paragraph, which I'm hoping to put off to read closer to its February 2008 publication date. Let's see how long I can resist it...
  
• Making Money by Terry Pratchett -- which I suspect will be the next big book I read.
  
• Queen of Candescence by Karl Schroeder -- I left behind a copy of Sun of Suns in my old office; maybe I can find time to read this one.
  
• Angel Skin by Christian Westerlund and Robert Nazeby Herzig -- another graphic novel to review for ComicMix
  
• and Ragamuffin by Tobias S. Buckell.

Well, I'd better get reading!

A Quick Post-Hugo Thought

Various people have started to look at the results, and the usual wave of moaning and gnashing of teeth has begun. (The complaints shift a bit every year, but there always are complaints.)

One thing I wanted to point out, before the conversation gets too big to keep track of:

Buzz Means Nothing

The people discussing any particular work or person online are not necessarily Hugo voters to begin with, and no one has a group of friends that matches the makeup of the Hugo voters. So posts of the type "I can't believe X lost; everyone I knew thought it was easily the best in the category" just makes you look like Pauline Kael in 1968.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it -- I'm sure people will -- just that relying on "what people were talking about" is a bad strategy for the Hugos. (There are awards, usually run by media people, which are entirely dependent on buzz and can be predicted quite well from levels of buzz. But the Hugo isn't like that at all; it's given by lots of cranky SFF fans, most of them with idiosyncratic tastes and a mile-wide streak of contrariness.)

Hugo Winners!

Grabbed from SF Awards Watch, and compared to my predictions:

• Best Novel: Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
  I'd said it was a race between Stross and Vinge, but I thought Stross would win. But I guess Japan is close enough to Northern California to be within the "Vernor never loses" zone. Now I guess I really do need to read Rainbows End. Missed
  
• Best Novella: “A Billion Eves” by Robert Reed
  Just what I predicted. (And SF Award Watch's look at the voting patterns shows that it was a race between Reed and Swanwick, which is also what I predicted. I'd better savor this moment, since the rest of the list doesn't go my way...) Hit
  
• Best Novelette: “The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDonald
  Also matched my prediction. Hit
  
• Best Short Story: “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt
  I thought that Neil Gaiman would win, but I was wrong. Missed
  
• Best Related Non-Fiction Book: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B Sheldon by Julie Phillips
  As I predicted. Hit
  
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Pan’s Labyrinth written and directed by Guillermo del Toro
  A big surprise -- to me at least -- especially since Pan had the fewest nominating ballots (and I thought it wasn't all that great, honestly). Missed
  Edit, later that day: Pan's Labyrinth actually had the second-highest number of nominating ballots (see comments); the mixup in counting was worse than I'd thought.
  
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who, “Girl in the Fireplace” written by Steven Moffat & Euros Lyn
  I admitted I didn't have much of a clue, and I'd missed the way Battlestar Galactica had lost nearly every bit of support it used to have. Missed
  
• Best Editor, Long Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden
  I thought it would go to Jim Baen, simply because he died recently. Meaning no disrespect to his memory, but I hoped that this award would go to honor living editors, so I'm very happy to see Patrick get it. Missed
  
• Best Editor, Short Form: Gordon Van Gelder
  I thought Sheila Williams should get it, because so many Asimov's stories were on the ballot. However, the voters are more conservative than logical, I guess. And Gordon certainly deserves it. Missed
  
• Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
  My timing was off; I thought it would go to Bob Eggleton (perhaps helped along this year by his known love of Godzilla) one or two more times before Giancola took over as the guy to beat in this category. But Giancola is already the artist to beat. Missed
  
• Best Semiprozine: Locus edited by Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong & Liza Groen Trombi
  Just what I thought; Locus is unstoppable in this category. Hit
  
• Best Fanzine: Science-Fiction Five-Yearly edited by Lee Hoffman, Geri Sullivan & Randy Byers
  Wrong, wrong, wrong, though I admitted I didn't know much about the category. I should have been able to guess that a fanzine that only comes out every five years would excite Hugo voters, though. Missed
  
• Best Fan Writer: Dave Langford
  I thought Scalzi would win; I was wrong. Missed
  
• Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu
  I had no real idea, and guessed wrong. Missed
  
• John W. Campbell (Not a Hugo) Award: Naomi Novik
  One of my rare correct predictions this year. Hit
  

So I'm 5-for-15 this year. I hope nobody placed any bets based on my predictions. But, since I try to be as cynical as possible in my predictions, I'm usually happy when I'm wrong.

Books Read in August

The end of the summer was mostly taken up with Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project, and here's the whole month's worth:

• Andi Watson & John Howard, Clubbing (8/1)
  
• Lat, Kampung Boy (8/3)
  
• Lat, Town Boy (8/3)
  
• Shannon Wheeler, Screw Heaven, When I Die I'm Going to Mars (8/4)
  
• Nick Abadzis, Laika (8/5)
  
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (8/6)
  
• Darby Conley, Get Fuzzy: LoserPalooza (8/6)
  
• Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming, Powers, Vol. 7: Forever (8/7)
  
• Gipi, Notes for a War Story (8/8)
  
• Ian Shaughnessy & Mike Holmes, "Shenanigans" (8/9)
  
• P.G. Wodehouse, The Heart of a Goof (8/11)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Downriver (8/12)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Sweet Women Lie (8/14)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Never Street (8/19)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, The Hours of the Virgin (8/21)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (8/23)
  
• Jen Van Meter, et.al., Hopeless Savages (8/26)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Sinister Heights (8/27)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Poison Blonde (8/28)
  
• Gilbert Hernandez, Chance in Hell (8/29)
  
• W. Haden Blackman, Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Weapons & Technology (8/30)
  
• Loren D. Estleman, Retro (8/31)
  
• Osamu Tezuka, Buddha, Vol. 3: Devadatta (8/31)
  

I didn't get as much reading done as I'd hope to this month -- partially because the family and I went on a few trips, and partially for personal reasons. With any luck, I'll bounce back in September. (No, let's be honest: what I hope is that I get a job, and have to cut back severely on pleasure reading -- that would be the best outcome.)

Buddha, Vol. 3: Devadatta by Osamu Tezuka

This is the third in the massive eight-volume series retelling the history of Siddhartha, who is given the title "Buddha" on the second-to-last page of this book. Actually, there's a lot of other things mixed up in here -- many of which I expect are fictional -- but the story of the Buddha is at the center.

Tezuka's style is still wildly diverse here, in drawing, theme, and just about every other aspect you can think of. Extremely cartoony children share panel space with photo-realistic backgrounds and philosophical musings give way to slapstick, melodrama, or modern references. It mostly hangs together, but the rapid changes in tone often gave me whiplash.

At the beginning of this volume, Siddhartha has finally left his home and become a monk. He falls in with an older monk, Dhepa, and starts learning about hardship. But then the story shifts a few years in the future, to follow another young boy (Tezuka gravitates, again and again, to smart but unruly boys) from Siddhartha's home. This boy, Devadatta, is driven away from his home and raised by wolves (and then by a monk-turned-wild-man), and then the narrative leaves him to go back to Siddhartha. (Devadatta will apparently come back into Siddhartha's story in future volumes -- as many of the characters keep coming back, even if I'm having trouble remembering who they all were.)

Buddha is generally considered Tezuka's masterwork, but I'm finding it less focused than a book like Ode to Kirihito. Yes, Buddha shows more of Tezuka's range in the space of a single work, but that's not necessarily a good thing -- the goofy and serious elements here don't always mesh well. (As with a wrapped-up, literally snot-nosed kid with a big bandage "X" on his forehead who also can prophecy when anyone will die.)

I've got volume 4 on hand, and I'll probably dig up the second half from the library, as well. But this is a seriously oddball comics series.

(And here's what I wrote when I read the first volume.)