Book Review: Whip Hand

Dick Francis
1979
Awards: Edgar, Gold Dagger
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Yeah! This is exactly what a fast-action, summer-reading kind of mystery novel should be.

As usual with Dick Francis, the story revolves around horse racing. The detective in this book, Sid Halley, is a former jockey who had to quit riding because he lost his left hand (his whip hand) in a racing accident. Sid’s missing hand is a perfect device for making him unique and giving him both physical and mental challenges to overcome.

Sid ends up solving three tricky and somewhat interrelated cases over the course of the book in spite of being threatened and severely beaten and - what turns out to be most difficult of all - having a severe crisis of confidence. I have to admit I don't remember the twists and turns of all of the cases because I was so wrapped up in the plot I just wanted to keep turning the pages to see what would happen next, but the most interesting of the three story lines was a bookmaking scandal in which promising young horses kept developing unexplained heart conditions.

I loved looking into Francis’s hoity-toity and yet also seedy world of English horse racing. I also loved how Francis gave me enough information as the book went along to make me feel like I was solving the case along with Sid; what surprised me surprised him too.

But, at the same time, Francis also held just enough information back to do a very effective call-all-the-characters-into-the-room grand reveal at the end. (Actually, in this book, you get a bonus mini-reveal in addition to the grand reveal, and it comes at just at the right time to make you feel like things just might turn out okay after all the struggle Sid has been through.)


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Resurrection Men

Ian Rankin
2003
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ – – – –

This might have been one consecutive British mystery too many. Or maybe I’m just missing my sci-fi. But I was extremely, extremely impatient with this book.

I have identified five primary irritants.

First: the plot. It didn’t hold my attention. In the semi-complex story, the main detective/hero, D.I. John Rebus, is sent to remedial detective school undercover, on a thin pretext of insubordination, to investigate other detectives also attending the school who are suspected of corruption. While there, Rebus manages to solve three cases simultaneously – he ferrets out the truth about the officers’ corruption; he and the corrupt cops solve a real-life cold case as part of their class work; and, through phone calls and quick off-campus visits back to his station, Rebus helps a protégé investigator solve the murder of a local art dealer. I didn’t care about any of these three cases enough to really want to keep reading.

Second: the main character. A blurb on the back of the hardcover first edition of this book describes detective Rebus as one of the most "rounded, warts-and-all characters in modern crime fiction." Maybe by “rounded” they meant “ill-defined.” I never got a consistent sense of his personality. Sometimes he was taciturn, gruff, and rebellious against authority, like Mike Hammer. Sometimes he was pained and wrestling with inner demons, like Matt Scudder. And other times he was light-hearted and sarcastic, readily volunteering advice, like Adela Bradley.

Third: ridiculous, gratuitous, contrived nicknaming of secondary characters and even some of the darned buildings. A sampling:

James "Jazz" McCullough
Morris Gerald "Big Ger" Cafferty
"Dicky" Diamond, a.k.a. "the Diamond Dog"
Eric "Rico" Lomax
Eric "Brains" Bain
John "Perry" Mason
George "Hi-Ho" Silvers

Fourth: jarringly unnecessary explanations of un-witty banter. For example:

"They got a picture of me? Was it my good side?"
"I wasn't aware that you had a good side."
A low blow, but he let her get away with it.

Thank you for helping us out by telling us that was a low blow.

Fifth: the author constantly trying to impress us with detective Rebus's record collection. While sitting in Rebus’s car or apartment, the secondary characters always manage to find themselves going through his records or CDs. This allows them to make studiedly casual references to long lists of offbeat and/or obscure bands (Cocteau Twins, Massive Attack, R.E.M., Arab Strap, Jackie Leven, Bad Company). Okay, I get it, Rebus has an eclectic, educated, wide-ranging taste in music (and, therefore, so must the author). He’s practically as cool as Quentin Tarantino.

To be fair, there were two things I liked about this book. (1) It takes place in Scotland. (2) There is a preamble at the beginning of the book explaining the British police ranking system (D.S., D.I., D.C.I., etc.) which I'd always been confused by. That explanation has helped me a lot in understanding the relative positions of officers in great British TV mystery series like Foyle’s War and Cracker.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Lingala Code

Warren Kiefer
1972
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Lingala Code is a bit like a simplified, jazzed-up version of a John Le Carré spy novel, but set in Africa and with an action hero as the main character.

It packs a pretty good punch of excitement, with riots and shootings and spear-throwing Kasai warriors and even a car chase.

The book is set in 1961 in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). The Congo at that time had just gained independence from Belgium and was a mass of turmoil, with lots of violence, corruption, poverty, and competing warlords jockeying for power.

The main character is Mike Vernon, a former Air Force pilot and current CIA agent (unofficially) working for the US embassy (officially) in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa).

At the beginning of the book, Vernon’s best friend and CIA/embassy colleague gets shot to death in a supposed home burglary. But Vernon is suspicious of the shooting and sets out to find out what really happened, opening up a whole huge can of dangerous worms. His investigation pulls in some of the warlords and a local terrorist and eventually reveals a Soviet mole in the embassy.

All of which is indeed very exciting, even if I did sometimes get confused which of the corrupt politicians was which and who worked for whom.

Vernon’s activities take him all over the country. I am not sure if Kiefer had actually been to the Congo when he wrote this, but the details of what Vernon sees in all these places sure made it seem real and I very much enjoyed being immersed in the sweaty world of central Africa for a time.

At one point, for example, Vernon has to fly a tiny prop plane several hundred miles over thick, dirty green jungle to meet a contact at a plantation just downriver from Stanleyville (now Kisangani). He describes his flight in detail - how he uses the lake near Inongo and the town of Boende as checkpoints and how the crocodiles look like logs floating in the mustard-yellow river below him.

I also liked Vernon’s description of his ride on the car ferry from Kinshasa to Brazzaville:

“Out on deck there was no breeze, but it was better than inside the car. The view across Stanley Pool to Brazzaville was not exactly inspiring: green and yellow clots of jungle hyacinth floated by like small islands, while the ferryboat engines pounded and shook beneath our feet...

The Pool is swift in places and the boat was old and underpowered - probably the same one Joseph Conrad sailed upriver seventy years ago. To maintain course to the opposite bank it sometimes crabbed at a forty-five-degree angle upstream.”

I said earlier that this book was a little like a simplified Le Carré novel with more action. The problem is that more action is not necessarily to a spy novel’s benefit. Le Carré's best novels are gray, bleak, and filled with the unromantic, unglamorous, often tedious work that is real-life spycraft. That’s what makes them so real and, strangely, so tense and nerve-wracking. The dramatic Lingala Code requires, on the one hand, more suspension of disbelief and, on the other hand, less sympathy for the main character.

So perhaps Mike Vernon is actually more like James Bond than George Smiley. The bad guys in The Lingala Code were pretty much bad and the good guys were pretty much good; there weren’t many subtle characters or surprising twists. (Although when there were twists, to Kiefer’s credit, he didn’t try to dangle the suspense along way past when you’d figured something out.)

As happens all too often in murder mysteries, the love interest falls flat. Vernon’s girlfriend Françoise was hard to take as the totally stereotypical gorgeous and understanding Frenchwoman from Aix-en-Provence. I found her completely unbelievable as a motivating factor.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Five Best Portrayals of Female Characters in Nebula & Hugo Award Winning Novels

Herewith, I submit for your consideration my choices for the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels that have the best representations of female characters.

These books all have a woman (or girl) as their primary central character. All of them face life-threatening challenges unprepared and have to use their wits and other assets to overcome or persevere through them, with minimal or no help from the males in their lives. They are all human; they make mistakes and they learn from them. The main character and the other women (or girls) in them are, for the most part, unique individuals, richly and unstereotypically written. The books are written by both men and women; they are set both on earth and in outer space; and they take place in both the past and the future.

Doomsday Book (Connie Willis)

The main character of this book, Kivrin Engle, has to cope with unbelievable heartache while coming up with practical solutions to her very real and immediate problems. To survive, she must not only be an excellent academician and diligent student, but also an able hands-on medic, cook, vet, and gravedigger. She makes plenty of mistakes, but she recovers and learns from them, and she grows during the book so that she is a very different character at the end than she was in the beginning.

Dreamsnake (Vonda N. McIntyre)
Sexy, semi-nude representation on the front cover of the first edition of this book notwithstanding, the main character of this book, Snake, is a thoughtful and pragmatic protagonist. In spite of the limitations of her post-apocalyptic environment, she has become an accomplished healer and scientist. She uses logic, experience, and determination to survive several crises and to inspire others to follow her leadership. She's also one of the only Hugo/Nebula females to get her own real road trip story.

The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)

The main character of this book, Nell, is born in a poor section of town to a dissolute mother with extremely bad taste in boyfriends. When Nell is young, it seems that everyone who she loves either dies or abandons her. But she has both brains and pluck, she learns technical concepts quickly, and she can come up with ingeniously creative solutions to problems. With those attributes, and the help of a nanotech girls' primer, she is able to not only survive in a pretty hostile post-cyberpunk world, but to become a hero to millions of other girls.

Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Robinson generally does a good job with his female characters; he gives them good stories, cantankerous, unstereotypical personalities, independence, and a lot of brainpower and talent. This book arguably has about seven or eight central characters, several of which are women, whom it follows independently as their lives intertwine. Nadia Cherneshevsky, in particular, is one of the most bad-ass female characters you could have in a realistic hard science fiction novel. She is a talented nuclear engineer; she doesn't like getting caught up in the internal politicking of the other Martian colonists, she just likes going out and getting things done. Things like building the first permanent habitation on Mars, constructing dams and lakes and research facilities and weapons, and figuring out ways to use natural Martian geothermal forces to rapidly make the atmosphere warm enough for human survival.

The Healer’s War (Elizabeth Anne Scarborough)

This story is written from the point of view of Kitty McCulley, a U.S. Army nurse in Vietnam during the 1960s. Her experiences are drawn heavily from Scarborough's own experiences during that war. She is a wonderful main character; she is practical and doesn't take much guff, but she also readily admits it when she goofs up. She has compassion for all her patients, whether they are U.S. Army soldiers or Vietnamese civilians. And she has to use both tact and courage to survive while she’s lost alone in the countryside with only villagers to help her.