Come Clean by Bill James

I'd have to check my book log to be sure, but I think this is the first of James's books I've completed. I know I tried at least one other, and gave up because the detectives were rather offputting.

Come Clean was one of the dozen books I recently bought at the Hastings Public Library book sale for $2. It is a British police procedural, a subgenre that I enjoy. It features Detective Colin Harpur and his Machiavellian boss, Desmond Iles. Iles is portrayed as rather a bastard, but he also reminds me a bit of me, so perhaps I'm more sympathetic to him than I ought to be.

Iles's wife, Sarah, is having an affair with a petty criminal named Ian. They are hanging out at Ian's favorite dive one evening when a man stumbles in, gravely wounded, and is then escorted out the back door by some toughs who followed him in. Sarah's first instinct is to try to help him, but Ian and the bartender are both obviously very afraid of the bad guys, and tell her to mind her own business. The next day the bartender shows up at her house to warn her to keep her mouth shut, or there could be grave consequences for her and Ian. She is scared, and doesn't feel she can tell her husband because then she'd have to admit to the affair. Which she isn't willing to do. So she ends up in an overwrought melodrama of threats and secret trysts with her lover and wondering if she's being followed. I really don't have any use for Sarah Iles, she's an idiot.

Harpur, meanwhile, gets news from his best informant that one of his associates has disappeared and may have been killed by the gang he had joined. He begins to investigate, and concludes that the man is probably dead. He also realizes that his boss's wife is probably involved in some way, but keeps that to himself. Harpur's marriage is a bit rocky, and he is sympathetic to Sarah's affair. However, in the course of the investigation, it comes to Iles's attention that his wife is being unfaithful, and he is understandably angry. He never says anything to her, but being a Machiavellian bastard he decides to use his wife as bait to allow one of the local crime families to try to ambush the other.

I rather enjoyed Come Clean. Sarah Iles and her idiot lover were not really my cup of tea, but I enjoyed the two policemen each independently trying to outmaneuver the other. They are both intelligent, competent, and cynical, and I enjoyed their relationship. I think that I will probably seek out more of James's books, once I've worked my way through the most recent pile of books I've acquired.

Talk to Her

Talk to Her is a Spanish film from the same director who made Volver. I liked Volver quite a lot, so I decided to track this one down, despite hearing mixed reviews of it.

It was really, really, really odd. Really.

Talk to Her tells the dual stories of Marco and Benigno. Marco's girlfriend is a bullfighter who is head-butted by a bull and ends up, brain-damaged, in a coma. Marco is understandably sad and lonely after this happens, and at the clinic he meets Benigno, a male nurse who devotedly cares for another comatose woman, Alicia. It is immediately obvious that Benigno is in love with Alicia, and he talks to her and takes her outside to sit in the sun, and is making plans for the future that involve her. Marco is taken aback, but nonetheless strikes up a friendship with Benigno. It was at this point that I got bored and impatient and switched over to listening to the director's commentary.

Talk to Her is slow to develop. The director takes his time, throwing in flashbacks and pointless musical numbers. There is a film within a film, a black-and-white silent film he put in about a man who shrinks down until he's only a few inches tall, and then decides to climb into his girlfriend's vagina to die. This is supposed to strike Benigno as incredibly romantic. I just found it surreal and gross. But, then, the entire film is rather surreal and creepy.

Overall, the film is too slow, creepy, and gross. It is competently acted but the story, and the meandering, undisciplined way in which it's told, was extremely offputting. Why has this gotten so many good reviews?

Hastings

Yesterday I spent a few hours hanging out with a friend in Hastings, and had a lovely time. I worked in Hastings in 1995-96 at a job that made my life a living hell and made me consider changing my profession. I have rarely been back, as the town has unhappy associations for me. However, I think I have now laid those to rest.


We met at a shop downtown. I worked on the hill, and so rarely went downtown. Hastings has a small, charming Main Street that runs parallel to the river. It's not a main traffic artery, and most of the businesses are up the hill, so the downtown could easily have become a deserted wasteland of empty storefronts and offices (not that I have anything against offices, but they don't draw customers in). I am happy to see that Hastings has gone the way that Stillwater has and Hudson is headed: unique shops that are fun to browse in. There's a bike shop, a toy store, three antique malls, a couple of restaurants, a pottery studio, and a Scandinavian shop. We happily spent a couple of hours browsing. I bought myself a pie server at the Scandinavian shop, where I also ran into an old coworker from my last job at the trucking company. It was nice to see her. I also bought a print to hang on the wall in my dining room at a secondhand shop.

We headed up on the hill for lunch, ate at a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall near the new WalMart, and then hit a book sale at the library. We were there in the last hour, so it was $2 for a bag of books. I picked up 12 books. My friend picked up even more. I read one last night--a quick reread of something I've read before but didn't own until now--and will doubtless be reviewing many more of these books over the next couple of months. Brace yourselves, they're mostly mysteries.

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson

This is another selection from my book group.

Larson is also the author of Devil in the White City, which tells the parallel stories of the preparations for the Chicago World's Fair and of a serial killer in Chicago at the same time. Thunderstruck has a similar structure, in which Larson alternates between Marconi, who invented wireless communication, and Harvey Crippen, who killed his wife and was tracked across the Atlantic with Marconi's technology.

Thunderstruck is structured like a lot of novels I've read, in which the author alternates between apparently unrelated story lines, and then they come together at the end. I've never cared for this structure, because inevitably one story is more interesting to me than the other and I resent the less interesting parts that are interrupting my enjoyment of the more interesting story line. I certainly found that to be the case with Thunderstruck. I was quite interested in the Crippen story. I didn't give a damn about the Marconi story, and around page 100 I started skipping all the Marconi sections. I just found them tedious. Probably somewhere in the world is my opposite, someone who was fascinated by the Marconi sections and bored by the Crippens. I would far rather read a short book about an interesting subject than a long book that's been padded or stretched with uninteresting material, and this book felt like it was padded out with the Marconi story.

That said, the Crippen sections were really interesting and compellingly written. Harvey Crippen, MD, was an apparently mild-mannered man, apparently happily married to a brassy vaudeville performer who called herself Belle Elmore. Belle disappeared, and Crippen told everyone that she had left the country, and later that she had died of pneumonia. He took up with a much younger woman who was a typist at his office, and his wife's friends were scandalized and went to the police. He was later convicted of Belle's murder and executed. The one dissatisfying thing about the Crippen story is that we don't know what really happened. Crippen maintained his innocence to the end, so there is no confession, and forensic science was extremely primitive at the time. Though the book is exhaustively researched, no one really knows what happened the night she disappeared, and some people even wonder if Crippen was innocent. I suspect he probably wasn't innocent, but the circumstances of the death are still not at all clear. However, uncertainty goes hand in hand with nonfiction. It's usually only in fiction that things are wrapped up in a neat package with a bow on top.

I can't recommend the book wholeheartedly, because half of it is padding, and dull padding, at that. But I think the Crippen sections are well worth the time.

The Cask by Freeman Wills Crofts

The cask is a rather dull police procedural written in 1920. For some reason the copy I read is copyrighted in 1986, but the work was obviously much older than that.

In it, London port authorities become suspicious of a cask that arrived from France, but before they could investigate it was spirited away by the man it was addressed to. They track him down, but before the cask can be opened, it is stolen by a carter and delivered to a shop. When it finally is tracked down, the cask is opened to reveal the body of a dead woman in an evening dress. The man is was delivered to is overcome by surprise and hospitalized.

To make a long and rather dull story short, the police decide that the man (M. Felix) is not guilty. They then track down the dead woman's husband (M. Boirac) and determine that he is not guilty. They re-examine M. Felix and decide that he is guilty, after all. Then a private investigator investigates further and decides that M. Boirac is guilty, after all.

I enjoy police procedurals, and I'm always glad to find another writer in the genre. Nevertheless, this one was quite dry, and I kept falling asleep as I was reading it.

Hudson Hot Air Affair

I've tried to go to the Hudson Hot Air Affair a few times over the years, but each time conditions were not ideal for flying, so they were cancelled. This morning, on a whim, I decided to give it another try. It was SO COOL!! I stood out in the icy field among the balloons as they were inflated, with crowds of other hardy souls, and took pictures until the batteries in my camera died. It would have been even more beautiful if it were a clear day, but I'm content, and very glad I went.