Reading Summary March 2019

I read thirteen books this month, including three graphic novels, one science fiction novel, one non-fiction book, and eight crime fiction novels.

Science Fiction

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams

Most people will have heard of this book and its author, even if they haven't read the book. Arthur Dent is protesting the demolition of his house to make way for a bypass. Coincidentally, Arthur's friend, Ford Prefect, is an alien who has learned that the earth is about to be destroyed to make way for a galactic freeway. They are picked up by a giant spaceship from a different galaxy and their adventures begin. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started out as a radio series,  broadcast by the BBC, and later became a novel. It has also been adapted as a TV series and a 2005 movie starring Martin Freeman. The book was a fun read. It is clearly science fiction, but not serious at all.

 Nonfiction

The Minimalist Home: A Room-By-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life (2018) by Joshua Becker

This is similar to the KonMari Method, but the two systems take different approaches. Marie Kondo suggests a different order to eliminating things, going by types of objects and emphasizes doing it all at once. Joshua Becker goes from room to room, and expects the process to take a while. Both are motivational if you want to make some progress in this area, but I can probably accept Becker's approach more easily. The major flaw in this book is repetition, but I see this in most self-help literature.

Understanding Comics (1994) by Scott McCloud

This is a comic about comics. I have read comics all my life, but I do have problems comprehending some contemporary graphic novels and I thought this might help. I did find some of it very useful for me, all of it informative and enlightening, and McCloud's enthusiasm for the subject makes it very interesting.

Graphic novels

The Umbrella Academy: The Apocalypse Suite  (2008) and
The Umbrella Academy: Dallas (2009)
by Gerard Way (Writer),  Gabrielle Bá (Artist)

I bought these two graphic novels before I heard about the adaptation of The Umbrella Academy on Netflix. The story is about a dysfunctional family of adopted children, all born at the same time (in different locations all over the world) to mothers who showed no signs of pregnancy.  The adoptive father, Reginald Hargreeves, takes the children to the Umbrella Academy and trains them to be superheroes. 

Crime Fiction

The Tears of Autumn (1974) by Charles McCarry

This is a spy fiction novel by Charles McCarry, the second book in the Paul Christopher series. McCarry is one of my favorite authors and I have read most of his books. 

See review here.

Extraordinary People (2006) by Peter May

The Enzo Macleod Investigation series, Book #1. I have read several books by Peter May, and I learn a lot from each of his books. He often includes information about the setting and its history in the stories, and that is true in this case. Macleod, half-Scottish and half-Italian, is a forensics expert and a university professor in Toulouse, France. In this book, Macleod spends a good bit of time looking for clues in the catacombs under Paris.

Turncoat (2002) by Aaron Elkins

It is very difficult to describe this book in one sentence, so I will just send you to my review if you want to know more. The story, the premise, and the writing grabbed me immediately. The story begins in November 1963 in New York but soon moves to France, where the narrator, a professor of history, is trying to locate his wife, who has disappeared. 

Remembered Death (1944) by Agatha Christie

This non-series book by Agatha Christie was published in the UK as Sparkling Cyanide. Beautiful Rosemary Barton dies from drinking cyanide-laced champagne at her own birthday party while celebrating at a nightclub in London and the police assume that her death was suicide. My review here.

Smoke Detector  (1984) by Eric Wright

Smoke Detector is the 2nd Charlie Salter mystery, set in Toronto, Ontario. Salter is a member of the Metropolitan Police. In this story, he is assigned to an arson / homicide case. My review here.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)
by Douglas Adams

This book is almost as hard to describe as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is a bit less weird, it is set in the UK, and many strange things do happen. It is a mish-mash of science fiction and fantasy and a detective story. I enjoyed it but it took a while before I had any sense of where it was going.

The Silkworm (2014) by Robert Galbraith (AKA J.K. Rowling)

The second book in the  Cormoran Strike series. Strike is an ex-Army private detective, and his young secretary Robin wants to learn to be an investigator also. This book focuses on the publishing industry. A woman asks Strike's help in finding her husband, an author who has been missing for several days. There is a lot to like about this series and the main characters.

What Never Happens (2014) by Anne Holt

This is the second book in the Adam Stubo and Johanne Vik series. The setting is Oslo, Norway. My main attraction to this series is the two main characters. Adam is an inspector in the Criminal Investigation Service and Johanne has worked with the FBI as a profiler. See my review here.

Smoke Detector: Eric Wright

Smoke Detector is the 2nd Charlie Salter mystery, set in Toronto, Ontario. Salter is a member of the Metropolitan Police, but has not been given any interesting cases in the last year or so as a result of political changes in the department. In this story, he is assigned to an arson / homicide case because everyone in Homicide is too busy.

Cyril Drecker was the owner of an antique store who died when the building burned down. The investigation is probably much more realistic than most in crime fiction, with Charlie hunting down clues, interviewing persons involved with the man who died, and sending his sergeant to follow up other leads. Not a lot of action or tension. The suspects are all very interesting: Drecker's current girlfriend, Drecker's wife, his assistant in the antique business, and several people he had done business with recently.

There were many facets to this book. This is as much a book about Charlie Salter the man, husband and father, as it is about a murder investigation. He and his wife have two young sons, an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old; his wife has just started working outside the home and he feels threatened. Charlie has a follow-up medical test necessitated by a recent annual exam, which has him worried. This is a story about a real-life policeman.

I also learned about the internment of Japanese Canadians in Canada after the attack on Pearl Harbor. A side story features one of the suspects, an elderly Japanese gentleman, Gene Tanabe, who has disappeared after the murder. He was interned during World War II and had left a box of Japanese prints with a friend who held them for him for many years. This box (pictured on the front cover of my edition) then turned up in Drecker's shop and Tanabe had purchased it from Drecker shortly before the fire (minus the prints).

This novel features nice characterization and an interesting story that pulls you in, even if it moves a bit slowly. The setting of Toronto in the early 1980's is also well done.  Trying to figure out who the culprit was, I was divided between two suspects, and then it turned out to be someone I had not considered... but the solution made sense, it did not come from out of left field. There are eleven books in the series, and I will be reading the third one, Death in the Old Country, which won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel in 1986.


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Publisher: Signet, 1986; originally pub. in hardback, 1984
Length:  252 pages
Format: mass market paperback
Series:  Charlie Salter #2
Setting: Toronto, Canada
Genre:  Mystery, Police Procedural

"The Duke" by Eric Wright

Deal Me In Short Story #6

This week I drew the King of Spades, which corresponded to "The Duke" by Eric Wright, a Canadian mystery writer. He was born in London, England and immigrated to Canada in 1951. His best-known series features Inspector Charlie Salter of the Metropolitan Toronto Police. Two of his novels have won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel and he has also won awards for his short stories. I have only read one novel by Wright, The Night the Gods Smiled (reviewed here).



A description of the hero of his story:

After half a lifetime of not being very much at home in the world, Duke Luscombe had finally found exactly the right job. He was a cook, trained in Montréal by a catering company to run the kitchen of a construction camp. The training could not have been very extensive: the Duke could cook about twenty different menus, though the same vegetables appeared on most of them, but because some of the items, like steaks and chops, were offered at least once a week, and because there was a roast or a boiled ham every Sunday, some of the menus, like pork tenderloin, appeared only once a month, giving the Duke's repertoire an appearance of being much bigger than it really was. But his skills matched the needs of the men.

Duke is an obsessive man, guarding his domain and its contents at all times. He is a man satisfied with his simple life, and the men accept him for what he is. Until a troublemaker comes along and sees that he can take advantage of Duke's nature.

This is a very short story and I won't go into the plot further than that. What makes this story different is that the narrator addresses the reader briefly at the beginning and the end with a fairly straightforward story in between. I liked this approach and I liked the twist at the end very much. The author set it up very well and certainly had me fooled.

The story was first published in 1993 in 2nd Culprit: A Crime Writers' Annual edited by Liza Cody and Michael Z. Lewin. I bought this book of short stories because of the gorgeous cover, and now I am finally reading some of the stories.

"The Duke" has since been published in A Killing Climate, an anthology of the author's stories and in two collections of short stories by Canadian authors (Iced: A New Noir Anthology of Cold, Hard Fiction and Mystery Ink).

Every other week I draw a random card to determine what short story I will read for the Deal Me In Short Story challenge. My list of short stories is here. Jay at Bibliophilopolis hosts the challenge.

7th annual Canadian Book Challenge: Summary post

This year I participated in the 7th annual Canadian Book Challenge. This is an online reading challenge hosted by The Book Mine Set: the Book Blog with a Canadian Bias. Participants from Canada and around the world aim to read and review 13 or more Canadian books in a one year span: July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2014. A Canadian book is a book written by a Canadian author or set in Canada.

This was my 2nd year participating in the challenge. I read only 10 books for the challenge this year, but I was happy with that accomplishment.

I read these books for the challenge this year:

Unholy Ground by John Brady

The author was born in Dublin but immigrated to Canada at the age of 20. The first book in the series won the Arthur Ellis award for Best First Novel. The next four books in the series were all finalists for the Arthur Ellis award for Best Novel. The protagonist is Matt Minogue, a Detective Sergeant in the Murder Squad, a division of the Gardai, the Irish police force. The death of a elderly resident of Dublin is being investigated; he appears to be merely a British citizen who had settled in Ireland. It turns out he was connected to MI5 in the United Kingdom. This book was published in 1989, and is set in Dublin, Ireland. Thus the political issues in Ireland at the time are a big factor.

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley

Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan Bradley

The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley 

The 4th, 5th, and 6th books in a series, set in post World War II Britain, in the village of Bishop's Lacey. Flavia narrates the stories. She is the youngest daughter (around 11 years old) in the de Luce family, and lives with her two sisters and their father in an ancient country house.

The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott

The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott is a historical novel set in the years preceding and during World War I. It is the story of three sisters, teenagers as the story begins, who travel with their mother to support the family as a vaudeville act. I loved this book and it is hard to describe why. I was engaged in the story immediately. I loved the way the author switched back and forth between the sisters (especially) and the mother (occasionally). This book covers the years from 1912-1917 and thus World War I figures a great deal. That was also a plus for me. I like to learn about wars in a fictional setting.

Under the Dragon's Tail by Maureen Jennings

This is the second book in the Murdoch Mysteries series, published by Maureen Jennings in 1998, and featuring William Murdoch, an Acting Detective in Toronto in the late 1800's. Maureen Jennings does a wonderful job of portraying Victorian-era Toronto.

We also get well-developed and interesting characters. Without dwelling on Murdoch's past, the author conveys how his childhood has affected him, and his continuing grief for his fiancee who died of typhoid, at the same time he yearns for a relationship with a woman. Maybe he is a tad too perfect, but I can live with that. Constable George Crabtree, and several of the suspects at varying levels of society are also well-defined; their portrayals contribute to the overall portrait of the city, its poverty and its inhabitants. 

The Night the Gods Smiled by Eric Wright

Eric Wright was born in 1929 in South London, England and immigrated to Canada in 1951. He is an academic; he taught English at Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto from 1958  to 1989. Four of his novels have been awarded the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel, including this one. 

This book gives us some insight into the relationship between the French areas of Canada and the English speaking areas. Toronto police detective Charlie Salter is assigned as liaison to a case of murder that takes place in Montreal, because the victim is from Toronto. It is the kind of case that his department doesn't have the time or inclination to deal with, so it is passed down to him. He is thrilled to get it, since he has been working essentially as a "gofer". He works with Sergeant Henri O'Brien from Montreal, and they develop a nice relationship along the way.

In the Shadow of the Glacier by Vicki Delany

This mystery novel is set in the fictional mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia. Constable Molly Smith is assigned to assist veteran Detective Sergeant John Winters in a murder investigation. Although Molly (also know as "Moonlight") is a rookie, she has insider knowledge of the community that Winters does not have; on the other hand she is closely involved with various persons who could be suspects. There were a lot of elements to the story: draft dodgers who had moved to Canada years earlier, ecological issues associated with a resort development, treatment of women in police departments, and the complexity of family relationships and working relationships.

Sleep While I Sing by L. R. Wright

This book is the second in a series by L.R. Wright (1939- 2001). The series features RCMP Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg and is set in a small town on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. This second entry in the series starts with the discovery of a dead woman in a secluded area. The woman remains unidentified. An artist's sketch is made and distributed, but does not generate the identification they were hoping for.

L. R. Wright excels at characterization. Karl is a loner and divorcee who misses his family. He has his problems, but he is happy in his work and good at it. The secondary characters and side plots are interesting. The writing is understated.

The Film Club by David Gilmour

Overview from Dundurn Press: "The Film Club is the true story about David Gilmour's decision to let his 15-year-old son drop out of high school on the condition that the boy agrees to watch three films a week with him. The book examines how those pivotal years changed both their lives." I read this book as much for the commentary on the films watched as for the story of Gilmour's experiences during those years. 

I will be signing up for the 8th Annual Canadian Book Challenge as soon as I read my first Canadian book for the challenge.

The Night the Gods Smiled: Eric Wright

In some ways, this is the perfect type of mystery for me. To a certain extent, it is a straight novel about a man going through a mid-life crisis and having difficulties with his job. His job just happens to be a police detective and he wants to be investigating serious crimes, not sitting at a desk. However, sometimes I did find that the story was too slow, too quiet. I kept expecting it to pick up and waited for the twists and turns in the plot. (I do wonder if I have been reading too many "exciting" books.)

Eric Wright is a Canadian author of mystery novels. He was born in 1929 in South London, England and immigrated to Canada in 1951. He is an academic; he taught English at Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto from 1958  to 1989. Two of his novels have been awarded the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel. This book received that award, and also Britain's John Creasy Memorial Award for first books by previously unpublished writers.

This book gives us some insight into the relationship between the French areas of Canada and the English speaking areas. Toronto police detective Charlie Salter is assigned as liaison to a case of murder that takes place in Montreal, because the victim is from Toronto. It is the kind of case that his department doesn't have the time or inclination to deal with, so it is passed down to him. He is thrilled to get it. He works with Sergeant Henri O'Brien from Montreal, and they develop a nice relationship along the way.

The victim in this book is a professor of English at a small college in Toronto, so Wright has drawn on his own experience and we get an accurate picture of a group of colleagues at the college affected by this professor's death. This group was visiting Montreal for a conference when the death occurred.

In retrospect, I may not have been fair to this book as I read it. Maybe too much going on in my life while reading it. Maybe not so interested in male mid-life angst. And regardless of my initial reactions, I do hope to continue reading the series, should I find further books available.

When I went back and reread the first chapter, I was overwhelmed at the beauty of some of the passages. Charlie is in a loving marriage, and has two teenage boys; his wife is from a rich family on Prince Edward Island. Here he describes the feeling of an interloper married into a rich family.

Annie's family were well-bred, tactful, and keen to include Annie's choice in the clan. They absorbed Salter's family into their world of fishing, sailing, riding and perpetual lobster suppers as if he had paid dues. Most of the time Salter was happy to enjoy their world. Occasionally, impatient and constricted by it, he felt like the lone Christian in-law in a family of Jews, conscious of his uncircumcised state, his slightly albino look, and of the determination of his relatives never to make him feel like an outsider.

There is quite a bit about Salter's family life and relationships and mid-life adjustments. For some readers, that might be a distraction. I was fine with that, especially Charlie's introspective musings, I just felt that the whole story moved too slowly.

In Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994), William L. DeAndrea describes the Charlie Salter novels as "low-key, but finely crafted and sharply observed police procedurals." He also says:

A policeman with real-life problems and emotions, Toronto Inspector Charlie Salter is reminiscent of Helen Reilly's Inspector McKee in that although his cases are procedural in form, they don't usually take the protagonist down any particularly mean streets. Shrewd observation of the middle classes is Salter's specialty.

This book is very much like some Golden Age mysteries, with less violence and a slower pace.

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Publisher: Signet, 1985; originally pub. in hardback, 1983
Length:  254 pages
Format: mass market paperback
Series:  Charlie Salter
Genre:  Mystery, Police Procedural