Short Story Wednesday: Playing Games ed. by Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block has edited a good number of short story anthologies. This is his most recent anthology, and the theme of this one is games. I read the first four stories and all of them I read were complex but not confusing, and very entertaining, each in their own way. 

Patricia Abbott's story, "Seek and You Shall Find," features the children's game of Hide and Seek. While shopping at a plant nursery, Kitty notices a man playing hide and seek with a young girl. To her, the behavior seems inappropriate. She thinks back to playing hide and seek in her family home, and the small hidden area in the closet that she had discovered. Later in the day, she sees the man and the girl at a resale shop; the girl is trying on a dress that the man buys for her. She thinks that the man may be preying on the girl, and informs the local police department of her concerns. Days later, the man confronts her and insists she has jumped to the wrong conclusion, but has she? The ending is left open, and I was fine with that.

"Game Over" by Charles Ardai involves video games and two teenage boys who play them whenever they have some quarters. A man working at the video store plots to steal the money from the video machines, and blame the theft on one of the boys. A sad story.

"King's Row" by S. A. Cosby uses the game of checkers. It is a short, bleak story about Maurice, an ex-con just released from prison for bank robbery. He goes looking for the only person who knows how to get access to the loot, Calvin Parrish, and finds him in a sanitarium. The two men play a game of checkers, while Maurice tries to convince Parrish to share the information with him. Along the way we learn more about Maurice, Parrish, and their families and fellow bank robbers. A very clever story.

Jeffery Deaver's “The Babysitter” involves Candyland (and other children's board games). This is the longest story in the book at 32 pages. There are four main characters: Kellie, a teenage babysitter; Rachel and Erik Winston who she babysits for; and a hit man, Michael. The story takes several twists and turns, and is told with humor.

This anthology has a total of 21 stories, so I have 17 more to read. If all of them are as good as these, I have a lot to look forward to. The Introduction by Lawrence Block was a pleasure to read. 

Two recent reviews of this anthology and some stories in the book are at Patricia Abbott's blog and George Kelley's blog. George's post includes the Table of Contents, if you would like to check out all the authors included.

Six Degrees of Separation from Atonement to The Coffin Dancer

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six other books, forming a chain. Every month she provides the title of a book as the starting point.

The starting point this month is Atonement by Ian McEwan.  It sounds like it would be my kind of book, based on the time periods it covers, but it never appealed. I do have a copy and it is on my "maybe someday" list to read.

The link to my first book is by author name... first name. In the last few years, I have read a lot of the James Bond books by Ian Fleming, and my favorite so far is From Russia With Love. James Bond is a serious spy, and Fleming modeled him after people he knew in the Secret Service, but the novels are sometimes more adventure stories than spy fiction and sometimes verge into fantasy. In every book James Bond romances one or more women.

From James Bond I move on to Funeral in Berlin, a novel about the nameless spy created by Len Deighton. The nameless spy, known as Harry Palmer in the movies based on the books, is more of a common, everyday person than the James Bond type of spy; sure, he visits exotic locales, and he deals with dangerous situations and dangerous people, but he is just a working-class guy, doing a job, and has a girlfriend from the office.


I discovered Len Deighton's books in 2012, and since then have read many of his books. Another favorite is Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945. This story of one family in Germany shows the rise of the Nazi party, how it affected Germans and how they dealt with the changes in their society. The focus is on two brothers, both born around the beginning of the twentieth century. Their mother is from a wealthy American family, the father is a well-to-do German industrialist. Both grow up in Germany, and they fight on the German side in World War I.  Between World War I and World War II they take different paths.

Another book related to Germany  between the two world wars is In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. This is Erik Larson's non-fiction account of the years from 1933 to 1937 when William Dodd was the American Ambassador to Germany. He and his family lived in Berlin and took part in society functions there. An extremely interesting book.

The "garden of beasts" referred to in the title is Berlin's central park, the Tiergarten; the Dodd family lived in a home on the edge of the park. Another book with a similar title is also set in Berlin, Garden of Beasts by Jeffery Deaver. This book is a standalone historical thriller, set at the time prior to World War II that Germany was building toward rearmament. The protagonist is a German-American mobster hit man who is forced to take on the assignment of killing Reinhard Ernst, the man behind the  rearmament effort.


Moving away from Berlin and earlier times, my final stop is another book by Jeffery Deaver, The Coffin Dancer, the second book in the Lincoln Rhyme series. Rhyme is a quadriplegic who is skilled at forensic investigations, usually working as a consultant to the police department. Here he is looking for an assassin who is targeting witnesses to a killing. I read this book nearly two years ago and never reviewed it. It was very suspenseful, kept me entertained throughout, but had too many twists and turns at the end... and too long. On the other hand, a lot of the subject matter relates to flying airplanes and aviation, and if Deaver isn't an expert on the topic he did tons of research because it is very realistic in that area.

My chain covered mostly earlier periods in history but ended up with a thriller. It was a lot of fun. Check out the other chains, the links are always interesting.

Garden of Beasts: Jeffery Deaver

Description from the author's website:

Paul Schumann, a German-American living in New York City in 1936, is a mobster hit man known equally for his brilliant tactics and for taking only “righteous” jobs. But when a hit goes wrong and Schumann is nabbed, he’s offered a stark choice: kill Reinhard Ernst, the man behind Hitler’s rearmament scheme, and walk free forever—or be sent to Sing-Sing and the electric chair.

The instant Paul sets foot in Berlin his mission becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse chase, with danger and betrayal lurking at every turn. For the next forty-eight hours, as the city prepares for the coming summer Olympics, Schumann stalks Ernst, while a dogged criminal police officer and the entire Third Reich security apparatus search frantically for the American.

I have only read one other book by Jeffery Deaver, The Bone Collector, which is the first book in the Lincoln Rhyme series. Deaver's books are primarily thrillers.  This book is a standalone historical thriller, set at the time prior to World War II that Germany was building toward rearmament. The author spent a lot of time researching the period. There are three pages at the end where Deaver explains who and what really happened as described in the book and how various details differed from real life. He also includes sources he used in the Acknowledgments section.

This is one of those books that is hard to describe without revealing some of the twists and turns that make it an enjoyable read. The situation is not as simple as it initially appears.

I liked the slow reveal of the primary characters, both their background and their motivations.  Some of the characters seemed too much like stereotypes, but I felt like at the end they had been fleshed out to be more realistic. The story shifts between Paul Schumann, the hit man who is coerced into working for US intelligence; Willie Kohl, the policeman who is investigating a murder in Berlin; Rheinhard Ernst, Schumann's target; and other minor characters.

My favorite character is Willie Kohl. He is a Kripo inspector not associated with the SS or the Gestapo. Most of the resources of his department have been taken over by the other groups, but he has learned to work around that when necessary. It is hard doing a good job investigating crimes in the environment he is working in, but he carries on.

In an interview at his site, Deaver picks Otto Webber as his favorite character.

He’s a small-time crime boss and operator in Berlin. He’s funny, lives life to the fullest and forms an improbable friendship with Paul.

Paul plans to take his landlady out for dinner. She has lost her job as a teacher for saying the wrong thing in the classroom, and her circumstances are drastically reduced.  This describes her transformation:

Thirty minutes later, a knock on the door. When he opened it he blinked. She was an entirely different person.

Käthe was wearing a black dress that would have satisfied even fashion goddess Marion in Manhattan. Close fitting, made from a shimmery material, a daring slit up the side and tiny sleeves that barely covered her shoulders. The garment smelled faintly of mothballs. She seemed slightly ill at ease, embarrassed almost to be wearing such a stylish gown, as if all she’d worn recently were housedresses. But her eyes shone and he had the same thought as earlier: how a subdued beauty and passion radiated from within her, wholly negating the matte skin and the bony knuckles and pale complexion, the furrowed brow.

I liked the book a lot and would recommend it to those who like thrillers set in this period, and who don't mind the length. I did have a few minor quibbles. There was a love interest that seemed to be thrown in unnecessarily, but in the end that part of the story did fit in OK. Although the story kept me interested and entertained the entire time, there are big twists around page 400 (in a book of 536 pages). Twists are good, and I really liked that the author had me fooled, but up until that point I felt like the book was not anything special. After more is revealed I was very impressed with the book.

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Publisher:   Pocket Books, 2005 (orig. pub. 2004)
Length:       536 pages
Format:       Paperback
Setting:       Berlin, Germany
Genre:        Historical mystery
Source:       I purchased my copy.