Book reviews
If curiosity is a writer’s greatest innate gift, Joshua Cohen may be America’s greatest living writer.
Or maybe just the most focused.
His first collection of non-fiction, emblazoned with the word “Attention” four times in bold font like crime scene tape on the cover, is dazzling in its scope, but, oh the irony, it’s also very hard to get through.
There are 46 pieces here, about everything from the Ringling Bros. circus to Bernie Sanders. And those are just a couple recognizable topics. Throw in deep dives about Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, 1936 German Olympian Helene Mayer, and 29 pages about the author’s journey to Azerbaijan in search of wisdom from the “Mountain Jews” living in the Caucasus mountains, and what you have is a hodgepodge of writing that makes your head spin.
Digested in very small doses – an essay per night before bed, say, or a short one on the john – it will still take you weeks to reach the end of this book. And when you get there, you’ll probably have forgotten how Hrabal redeemed Socialist Realism.
Still, writing like this does deserve some praise. Cohen truly commits to his subjects, dropping knowledge and literary criticism all over the place. On Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s juxtaposition of natives and conquerors: “He has always believed that one tradition can, and does, reinforce the other, but it seems that his belief gutters out when the indigenous becomes the popular.”
The whole book is like that, filled with topics that will be foreign to most readers, forcing them to really engage if they want to comprehend any of it. Despite the author’s disdain for our modern society of distraction, it also helps to have Google close at hand.
Some context before each piece may have helped. When and why did Cohen write this? Was it published somewhere or scribbled in a journal? The best bits, for this reviewer, are the “From the Diaries” pages between pieces. Here’s one of my favorites, titled “WHY I’VE NEVER HAD SEX IN HUNGARY: Mom calls me in Budapest: ‘Bring me back that paprika paste. the kind in the squeeze tube. Aren’t all the women beautiful?. Don’t they all look like me?'”
If you enjoyed Cohen’s singular novel “Book of Numbers,” you’ll find essays here to love, too. You’ll just have to work at it.
‘The Dollar-a-Year Detective’
Jack Starkey was a Chicago police detective until he got shot, took his disability pension and moved to Fort Myers Beach on Florida’s Gulf Coast. There, he bought a bar called the Drunken Parrot and set up housekeeping in a houseboat that is in no way seaworthy.
Jack spends some of his time editing best-selling novels written by an old friend in Chicago. The books are loosely based on Jack’s big-city exploits – the hero engaging in derring-do that the real Jack is too level-headed to contemplate.
But Jack misses the action, so when Cubby Cullen, the police chief in sleepy Fort Myers Beach, needs a hand with something big, Jack pitches in, accepting a dollar as his fee.
In “The Dollar-a-Year Detective,” the second book in this series by William Wells, the something big is the murder of a bank executive and his wife, found shot on a drifting yacht.
By the time Jack finishes muddling through the case, it swells to include bank fraud, a Russian oil magnate, embezzlement at an Indian casino, political corruption and several more dead bodies.
Wells’ yarn contains none of the swashbuckling heroism common in detective fiction. The violence all occurs offstage, and Jack spends most of his time wandering around, hoping something will turn up.
As he puts it, “An ace detective like me has to at least look busy interviewing people and poking around for clues until a snitch comes forward and tells me who did it.”
Wells laces his story with humor, but not the wise-cracking kind typical of much detective fiction. Jack rarely makes a joke with his colleagues, reserving his gentle humor for the reader in his first-person narration.
As a result, the book is a detective story with the sensibility of a cozy, somewhat reminiscent of the fine Mario Balzic series by reclusive novelist K.C. Constantine.
“The Dollar-a-Year Detective” represents a major improvement over the first novel in this series, 2016’s “Detective Fiction,” which exhibited some rookie writing problems. It’s an entertaining, well-written read that’s well worth the time.
‘The Man Who Couldn’t Miss’
On the surface, David Handler’s mysteries about Hollywood ghost writer and novelist Stewart “Hoagy” Hoag, his lovely actress ex-wife, Merilee Nash, with whom he will forever be in love, and Lulu, their vocal basset hound, are a light read, with good plots and no overt violence. But Handler also uses this series to explore heavier situations – celebrity worship, debilitating disease and secrets so precious that some people have no limits on what they will do to protect them.
Those are themes that the mysteries tackle in 2018 and were just as pertinent in 1993, the year in which “The Man Who Couldn’t Miss” is set.
In the series’ 10th outing, Hoagy has joined Merilee at her farm in Lyme, Connecticut. Hoagy and Lulu are staying in the farm’s guesthouse, where he’s working on his next book, joining Merilee for meals and drinks. Merilee is directing and starring in the one-night performance of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” that will be a fundraiser to save the historic Sherbourne Playhouse. The audience will be filled with “stage and society luminaries” – Katharine Hepburn, Jackie Onassis and her “tall, dark and handsome son,” Neil Simon and Meryl Streep, to name just a few. And the play will be star-studded with four well-known actors.
Hoagy again turns amateur sleuth when one of the male leads is murdered during the play’s intermission. Hoagy already is dealing with a former friend of Merilee who is blackmailing her over an incident that happened more than 20 years ago. Although Merilee is innocent, she knows that even a whiff of scandal can derail her career and ruin her wholesome image.
“The Man Who Couldn’t Miss” moves briskly as the energetic plot also delivers an insider’s view of the work needed to produce a play and why actors, directors and crew are passionate about the theater.
The trio of Hoagy, Merilee and Lulu continues to be the heart of Handler’s series. Despite their divorce, Hoagy and Merilee love each other. A reconciliation – always hinted at – continues to enhance the novels. As for Lulu, she’s just a dog – a good dog, a faithful dog – but just a dog. She doesn’t talk, she doesn’t solve crimes. Her only quirks are she likes cat food and is allergic to a certain perfume.
‘The Line
That Held Us’
Life is hard in the corner of the Smoky Mountains where the Hooper, Moody and Brewer families live. Drug abuse is rampant. Jobs are scarce. And some folks put food on the table and money in their pockets by poaching.
Darl Moody and Carol “Sissy” Brewer are both doing just that one chilly morning. Unfortunately, they’re doing it in the same place. Sissy is on his hands and knees, stealing a neighbor’s ginseng crop. Darl is in a blind, hoping to shoot a deer out of season. But Darl ends up shooting Sissy.
“The Line That Held Us” is David Joy’s third novel about life in this region where family roots run deep and where some folks live by a code that puts them outside of the law. The book’s title is in the past tense because in this tale, the line between civilization and savagery doesn’t hold.
In a panic, Darl asks his best friend Calvin Hooper to help him cover up the accident by burying Sissy’s body. Calvin wants to call the police, but he relents when Darl reminds him what Sissy’s big bother Dwayne Brewer is like. He’s a hard-drinking brute who spends his time brawling, breaking down and reassembling his pistol, stealing chain saws, rereading his Bible and resenting neighbors and tourists who have it easier than he does.
Devoted to family despite his abusive childhood, Dwayne deeply loves sweet, simple-minded Sissy and has been known to savagely beat anyone who bullies the younger brother.
When Sissy fails to return from his ginseng poaching trip, both Dwayne and a by-the-book police detective he doesn’t respect set out to learn why.
The result is a chilling tale of vengeance that ends well for no one. It is well told in a voice that is lyrical in its descriptions of the region’s natural beauty.