The Watchman by Robert Crais

Robert Crais is probably best known for his Elvis Cole series, and up to now, I hadn't read any of his novels. I just corrected that mistake by reading The Watchman featuring Cole's "sociopathic sidekick," Joe Pike.

Pike, owing a favor, agrees to protect a young ‘Paris Hilton’ type heiress, who is a witness in a federal investigation. Quicker than you can say Jason Bourne, they are on the run with Pike killing five assassins in the first day alone. Pike justifiably suspects a leak but who? He calls on his buddy, Elvis Cole, to do a little background investigation and begins to unravel the mystery.

A few years back, I read Without Remorse which featured the laconic Mr. Clark, who was a secondary character in Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series. It turned out to be my favorite book of the group. Of course, if Pike or Clark were continually used, it would ruin their enigmatic appeal. Even so, I'm sure I will read the next Robert Crais offering no matter who the protagonist is, because, as The New York Times said, this is a "taut, muscular... testosterone-fueled thriller." In other words: it rocks.

A special thanks to Darlene Ryan and the ladies at Poe's Deadly Daughters for sending me a copy of the book.

Friday's Forgotten Books: A Treasury of Great Mysteries Vol. 2

I previously reviewed A Treasury of Great Mysteries Volume 1 and for this week's FFB, I'm highlighting the second volume. The complete anthology mixes full length novels, novelettes, and short stories with excellent results. Any collection that begins with Chandler's The Big Sleep and ends with Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca is definitely a four star collection. As with Vol. 1, I passed over the familiar classics in Vol. 2 and started with Carter Dickson's The Man Who Explained Miracles.

Miracles presents Sir Henry Merrivale (HM) as the last stop for cases Scotland Yard has rejected for one reason or another. His division is called "The Ministry of Miracles", which is where Jenny Holden is taken to uncover the identity of the person who is trying to murder her. Since, seemingly, no one is to gain by her death, it's up to HM and his Sherlockian skills to put together the pieces of the puzzle. A locked room, a whispering hall, a knife in back, and a ventriloquist all take center stage before the end. The revelation of the culprit is a bit implausible but the story is so entertaining that it hardly matters. Carter Dickson, writing as John Dickson Carr, has the more believable The Incautious Burglar in Vol. 1, but The Man Who Explained Miracles is great fun.

The venerable Leslie Charteris begins The Arrow Of God by stating that Simon Templar despises the detective story where the murder victim "wanders vaguely through the first few pages with the sole purpose of becoming a convenient body in the library by the end of chapter one." Amusingly, Charteris makes this first chapter a mere three paragraphs long and kills the victim at the very end of chapter two. I like the guy's style! Playboy Templar is in Nassau when supercilious and opinionated Floyd Vosper, while asleep on the beach, is killed by an umbrella shaft driven through his chest. Everybody is a suspect because Vosper had insulted everyone, including Templar. When the superintendent of police is about to accept the idea that Mother Nature was responsible, Templar asks if anyone owns a gun. This is a perfect short story. The main protagonist and all the suspects are engaging and the revelation of what happened to the victim is very well done. Charteris was a master. No doubt about it.

I was not familiar with the writing team of Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice before reading their contribution, Rift in the Loot. Eddie The Actor escapes from prison. With the help of his lawyer and another client of his lawyer, they search for 'his' $50,000 in the backyard of an old girlfriend's house. The loot was buried under a rosebush but, to their dismay, dozens of other rosebushes had been planted during Eddie's stint. A bogus cop, a genuine cop, and Poe's The Purloined Letter all figure into this story's ending. Though I didn't care for this yarn as much as the others, in the category of "they don't write 'em like that anymore", this story, though dated, has it's charm.

Volume 1 and 2 is a great omnibus of detective stories to have on your book shelf. I mentioned in last week's FFBs that I don't normally reread a book yet I found myself turning to Maurier's Rebecca and began reading, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again..."

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On writing

I'm curious... how many others work on more than one story at a time, and if so, how many? I tend to have two short stories in progress in addition to my 'great American novel', which is always under construction as inspiration strikes. I tend to read in the same manner as I write with several books at once. I currently have The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo posted on my blog as the book I'm reading, and I'm also working through A Confederacy of Dunces, The Watchman, and A Treasury of Great Mysteries Vol. 2. Just like I can't read one book at a time, I would be hard pressed to construct a lone story until completion. Does anybody else work this way?

My Town Monday: Life in West Africa

Here are two very different stories from Mr. Boh about the rituals for the deceased in Cameroon. One is an interesting piece on a tribal custom that is in danger of fading out of existence from a southwestern village. The other is a lighthearted look at the superstitious beliefs that haunt the living. I've included a couple of pictures of Mr. Boh and me in Cameroon (2004-05). For those of you who aren't from NY (my home state), you might not be so thrilled that I introduced my Cameroonian friend to the NY Yankees with a baseball cap.

Mr. Boh writes:

The skull ceremony in the Bamileke Land
The skull ceremony in the Bamileke land has become a famous event that most tourists have developed a growing interest in. Invited or not, most of them prefer to hang around during this ceremony with cameras to immortalise the event. Even Cameroonians who do not hail from this region witness this with a lot of curiosity.

In the Bamileke land, when the patriarch of a large family passes away and is buried, the rest of the family waits for a few years so that the head of the corpse should completely rot away so that they can have the skull. This skull stays where it was buried until problems begin to plague the family. This is to say that where there is no misfortune in the family, there is no cause for a skull ceremony. But when problems set in, there is a convocation of all the family members from far and near by the successor or the acting family head. When all are gathered in a fixed date, the notables and village elders stand around the grave and pour out libation to their forefathers and ask that they should forgive them for whatever they might have done wrong while the youths do the digging. When they get to the corpse, only a family member gets into the grave and detaches the skull from the rest of the corpse.
With the skull in hand,the designated person carries it to the family house where an elder will now anoint it with calm wood (reddish in color like blood clots). During this anointment, he makes requests on behalf of the entire family to the departed, for example, if a young person has been sick in that family (bed ridden) within this time -- since it is believed that illnesses of such magnitude are meant only for the old -- they would be asking for the skull's intervention. This is particularly where they really think that someone has a hand in the illness. In the situation where they think the illness has been inflicted by the departed family head in response to a wrong behaviour by the sick person or any member of the family,they will still seek mercy on the part of the skull. A mistake here can include the refusal of the successor to go to bed with one of the succeeded wives because here it is considered a taboo if you inherit someone and refuse to go to bed with his wife; it means the wife is nasty to you and therefore you need to be disinherited.

When all requests have been made, they embalm the skull with some cloths and burial again takes place just as before. It must be noted that during this ceremony, the women mourn just as the day the first burial took place.

After the burial, feasting and dancing continue the occasion because they assume their requests have been met.

In the Bamileke land, burials are not done following the normal day to day calendar. There is a traditional calendar that gives room for days like "country Sunday" -- as it is called -- which is the village's Sabbath day wherein no one is allowed to go to the farm or carryout intense work and equally no corpse is put into the ground (buried) on this day. Country Sundays are usually 02 per week.

In a situation where they make a burial program for a fresh funeral and it coincides with a country Sunday, they dig the grave and put in the casket in the evening of the day before the intended burial day but they don't fill the grave with soil. The next day, they do every other thing as programmed and only fill the grave now but no digging.

Certain traditional practices are still very much observed in the Bamileke region; meanwhile other parts of Cameroon are rushing in to modernism and leaving their valued tradition to fade out.

Mr Boh and I often exchange details about customs. I remember one time, he told me that when a child looses a tooth, the parent throws the tooth onto the roof, and if the child is fast enough to run around the house and catch it before it hits the ground, it is supposed to bring them good luck. Well, when I laughed, in good nature of course, he asked what we do in America. So with pride, I began telling him how the child puts the tooth under his/her pillow and while the child is sleeping at night, the 'magic' Tooth Fairy comes in and takes the tooth, leaving money in its place. Of course, this made Mr. Boh laugh as he said, "What a rich country you come from." I laughed some more when I realized our custom wasn't any less absurd! I reminded him that the Tooth Fairy was meant for children, but, nevertheless, it was still funny to think that we perpetuate something so silly. Anyway, here's another tale from Mr. Boh about some of his country's customs and superstitions involving the dead:

The Dead Still Feel Hungry
In the villages of Bakossi in the south west province of Cameroon, it is believed that the dead are omnipresent, here with us in every activity that we carryout. When someone dies, it is forbidden to say bad things about him or her for fear that he may strike back in anger. When someone dies, family and friends have up to three days to carry on with whatever ceremonies to pay the deceased the last respects and the fourth day the person can be laid to rest, i.e. leave the face of the earth and join his ancestors.

The story has been told of one chief in this village who died and his body was kept in a local mortuary for three days. Being a chief, it took some time to prepare for the burial ceremony as various delegations were to read out testimonies and eulogies. The night of the wake-keeping, with the corpse placed on bed at the middle of the sitting room, people started singing as they filed past around the coffin, some dancing to the music that came from the choir. Most of the space outside was taken up by different female groups and had prepared fire-sides to prepare various kinds of assorted dishes to feed the population with.

BEHOLD!! Something happened; there was a black-out in the neighborhood. Electricity went out just for about 03 minutes and within this time something really strange occurred.

The corpse that had been laid in state, well dressed and with a pair of white gloves in hands and white socks on feet had taken advantage of the sudden darkness and gotten up. The three days it had already spent without food were becoming unbearable. All the dancing, singing and preaching from men of God were only helping to make the night look much longer than chief had expected. He had expected to be gone a long time ago but here he was being preached upon etc. Once he got up from that bed, he hurriedly rushed out to one of the pots of soup the women were preparing outside and dug his hands into it pulling out most of the meat and eating it up. (The particular soup is called "Eru" and it is eaten with a paste called "water-fufu" and preparing it entails so much palm oil).

As soon as he had finished eating, he landed back on bed where he laid himself back in state. Soon power supply was reinstated but nobody could tell chief had made a move but for one old wise grandmother who came very close to the bed where chief laid and started exclaiming aloud; "Chief, so you couldn't be patient just for a few hours to await your burial before taking a bite? Now see what shame you have brought upon us". With such exclamations, people started looking critically only to discover that the white gloves chief was wearing were all stained with palm oil from the Eru chief had eaten. Isn't this funny?

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Lady in the Lake (1947)

The film version of The Lady in the Lake is considered a misfire and that’s unfortunate as it’s one of my favorite Chandler novels. It takes Marlowe outside his usual Los Angeles digs to Little Fawn Lake in search of a missing woman. The talented actor and director, Robert Montgomery, decided on an unusual gimmick -- the entire film is seen from the viewpoint of Marlowe. We occasionally glimpse Montgomery in a mirror, but other than that, we, the audience, are Marlowe. I’ve seen the film twice and think it’s better than what many critics said, but then again, I’m a Chandler fan, noir aficionado, and love just about anything from this period. Here's the trailer:



The original New York Times review: “In making the camera an active participant, rather than an off-side reporter, Mr. Montgomery has, however, failed to exploit the full possibilities suggested by this unusual technique. For after a few minutes of seeing a hand reaching toward a door knob, or lighting a cigarette or lifting a glass, or a door moving toward you as though it might come right out of the screen the novelty begins to wear thin. Still, Mr. Montgomery has hit upon a manner for using the camera which most likely will lead to more arresting pictorial effects in the future.”

Dog Day Afternoon

Early Wednesday morning, a small whine was coming from outside the building where I work. My friend, Jerry, pointed out a little puppy, sitting beside a large pipe looking pretty lonely. I rescued the pup and not even 30 minutes later, we find the mom and three other puppies, hungry and weary, and we figured the one I saved must be the runt who wasn't able to keep up with her family. Sure enough, she'd take two steps before plopping down to rest. Worried that she would be left behind if the mother decided to leave in the middle of the night, I took her home and my wife and I fed her, gave her a bath and cozy towel to sleep on. We discussed what to do and reached the conclusion that, even though it would be difficult for us, we would take her in if we were unable to find a home for her. The next day, I took the pup back to work, and found her mother still there (she had also been fed along with the other pups), and the little tyke nosed her way right back in, jumping around and playing with her siblings. I thought she would be fine for the night with her mom since she was so energized from a decent meal and good nights sleep. Sure enough, the next morning, she was again bouncing around with the bunch. The owner of the company decided to take all of them to the vet for shots and a checkup, and before the end of the day, one of the office workers asked if she could keep the pup. So, my charmer and I never got to foster the puppy, but we're very happy to know that she's going to a good home.

Friday’s Forgotten Books: A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

I rarely reread a book. As a kid, I may have given a Hardy Boy's mystery a second go-around, but there have been few others. One book I’ve read within the last few months that I thought deserved a revisit is Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which followed closely on the heels of By-Line: Ernest Hemingway.

Now, I'm not an outdoorsman and I've never been to a bullfight, so reading about hunting, fishing, and bullfighting has never really appealed to me unless Hemingway wrote about them. But Feast is not about these favorite topics of his; this is his account of his time in 1920s Paris as a struggling writer living with his wife and son in meager conditions and his encounters with Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Picasso, Scott Fitzgerald, etc. (perhaps only Dorothy Parker's round table is comparable in terms of the sheer talent hanging out together).

Feast is on the top of my Hemingway heap, with the best parts of the book being his musings on his peers. On F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway wrote: "His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."

Beautiful, stark imagery as Hemingway contributed to the Fitzgerald myth of the doomed writer. The passages about Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were truly harrowing, and Hemingway blamed most of Fitzgerald’s downfall on Zelda. Is what we’re reading factual, partially factual or a re-write of history? Zelda and Hemingway disliked each other immensely.

“[Zelda] described him as ‘bogus’, and ‘phoney as a rubber check’. She considered Hemingway's domineering macho persona to be merely a posture; Hemingway in turn, told Scott that Zelda was crazy.” [Wikipedia]

He referred to Fitzgerald as his friend and you get a genuine sense that he cared for the man. But his fierce competitiveness left few of his author friends, like Fitzgerald, unscathed. I'm a student of his writing but I'm damn glad I wasn't a successful contemporary of Hemingway’s.

Writer and art collector, Gertrude Stein appeared to be a generous supporter of the early Hemingway and she was even godmother to his son, Bumby. The early chapters were devoted to Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, who had graciously invited the Hemingway’s to stop by their home at 27 rue de Fleurus. Stein took an interest in young talent and seemed to relish the role of nurturing them. Hemingway was no exception and she became his mentor in literature and art. However, their relationship ended abruptly when Ernest stopped by unexpectedly, overhearing an argument between Stein and Toklas, who were unaware that he had been let in by the maidservant. Hemingway wrote about the lover’s quarrel, painting Stein in an unflattering, submissive role. Ernest made a quick dash for the door as the maidservant said, “Don’t go. She’ll be right down.” His reply, “I have to go,” was humorous.

Ford Maddox Ford, author and critic, was introduced as "breathing heavily through a heavy, stained mustache and holding himself as uptight as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead" and described as egotistical and jumpy.

But Hemingway could also be gracious and when describing Ezra Pound, he also shed a little more light on his own character. “Ezra was kinder and more Christian about people than I was. His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint.”

Stein, Fitzgerald and Ford all preceded Hemingway in death, and one is left to wonder why he had depicted his friends in such an unfavorable manner. Perhaps ego? But he had already been heralded as the greatest writer of the 20th century at that point. Maybe he just told the facts and simply recorded history. Whatever the case, his accounts, though harsh, are equally fascinating, and it’s impossible not to be intrigued by this novel.

According to his fourth wife, Mary, Hemingway started Feast in 1957 and was working on it at the time of his suicide; it was published posthumously in 1964. There was some controversy that she had deleted a great deal of material concerning his first wife Hadley. So who knows what the final product of Feast would have looked like had he lived. Would it have been published at all? Hemingway had left a mass of unpublished material that he never intended to see the light of day. Obviously, any writer begins a book with the intention of publishing it, but maybe he would have toned down some of the descriptions; but then again, if he had, it wouldn't be half as fun. In an age where everybody writes tell-alls and confessionals, A Moveable Feast is a great read.

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