Ebooks are a wonderful thing. Thanks to Project Gutenberg and others, lots of old works in the public domain are available, free, for download. Sometimes they are classics, but just as often they are more obscure things that I would be unlikely to ever see a paper copy of. Fortunately we have the internet, and I have been reading some old works that I probably never would have had the opportunity to try without ebooks. OK, that's my spiel for the day.
John Thorndyke's Cases is a volume of related mystery short stories published in 1909. There are apparently a whole series of mysteries featuring Thorndyke, and I have downloaded a few more and intend to read them. This format is similar to other mysteries of the day, from Sherlock Holmes to Father Brown to Cleek, the Man of Forty Faces. Like the Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu stories, it is told not from Thorndyke's point of view, but that of his friend and sidekick, Dr. Jervis. Thorndyke, who is essentially a consulting forensic physician, is very observant and methodical, and constantly amazes Jervis and everyone else with his results.
Thorndyke usually works for the defense, not the police, though they occasionally consult him, as well. So he wanders into the middle of crime scenes and investigations, makes his own observations, goes home and runs experiments, and then shows up at the coroner's inquest and surprises everyone with his conclusions. He takes a very scientific approach to crime investigation, like a century-old version of CSI. While the police are jumping to the obvious conclusions, Thorndyke takes fingerprints and casts of footprints, examines evidence under a microscope, performs exercises that never make sense until after he has explained them to Jervis, and seems to always easily and instinctively figure out things that are not at all obvious.
The stories, overall, are all a bit too easy -- Thorndyke always figures it out pretty quickly, every piece of evidence they see turns out to be important, and the police and the coroner's court always take his deductions at face value. This is okay with me, actually, as it's the puzzle I'm interested in, not power struggles and courtroom wrangling. The author, Freeman, was himself a physician, and he notes in his preface that he has personally conducted all the experiments and procedures that he has Thorndyke undertaking, to ensure that they are correct and will work. For the time, it was probably pretty good, hard science.
So I was entertained enough by the stories, but the novelty of a hundred year old book is more than the plotline. In fact, what I think I find most interesting in reading books like this are the casual cultural assumptions in them. England in 1909 was very different than our current time and place (in my case, Wisconsin). There are various mentions of things that are unfamiliar to me, or references that get me to thinking. For instance, there was a line to the effect of "he took off like a lamplighter" which made me ponder the practicalities of lamplighting as a profession or public service, and whether they habitually ran about. I suppose they must at one time have been commonly considered to move quickly. Honestly, it's something I had never previously thought about much. And then I came across a grammatical usage I'd never seen before: "By the way, usen't there to be a cab-yard just about here?" Usen't. Cool. I hadn't ever seen that before, and yet it's perfectly understandable, and presumably at the time was not an uncommon phrase. It's things like this that make popular books of this age fascinating cultural documents to the modern reader.
I enjoyed this very much, and plan to read more stories about Thorndyke, quite soon.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Back From Worldcon
I have just returned from a six day trip to Reno to attend Worldcon (well, really four days of con and a day of travel at each end). Overall, it was a really good Worldcon. My friend Kristin thinks it may be the best Worldcon she's attended. I think Chicago in 2000 may have been better, but maybe my memories of that one are special because it was my first Worldcon. At any rate, it was a good con.
I attended a number of panels, and some of them were good. One of the things the con did right was having the panels limited to 50 minutes. Sometimes cons do 75 minute panels, and really, no topic is so exciting that there's 75 minutes worth of material to talk about. 50 minutes is much, much better.
The bane of my con seemed to be steampunk. Frankly, I occasionally read a bit of it, but I'm not a fan, per se. It hasn't captured my imagination, I don't get excited about the idea of reading more, it's sort of okay but not particularly interesting to me. Nevertheless, it seemed like it kept coming up. I attended one panel on the topic, The Moral Aesthetics of Steampunk, which was supposed to be a discussion about the current enthusiasm for and romanticising of the Victorian Era, all the while mostly ignoring that the actual historical Victorian Era was absolutely horrible. However the moderator said: "I disagree with the description," and so they didn't talk about that. Instead, they tried to spend 50 minutes trying to think of things to say about steampunk in extremely general fashion, and mostly kept mentioning Makers and The Difference Engine every few minutes. Very disappointing. However that should have been the one and only steampunk panel I attended.
Unfortunately it didn't turn out that way. The next day I attended Scientific Romances of the Victorian Era, which was supposed to have been about works actually written in the Victorian Era, rather than modern novels set in the Victorian Era. However one of the panelists seemed to be under the impression that it was another steampunk panel, and kept bringing up modern authors and encouraging us to read all the steampunk we could get our hands on. Sigh.
But the most disturbing instance was when I was at Whatever Happened to Cyberpunk? and they started talking about steampunk. On the surface, it would seem to me that cyberpunk and steampunk are very, very different things, so I wasn't too happy when they brought it up. However one of the panelists actually made a coherent argument comparing new works of cyberpunk and steampunk that I actually found quite interesting. Still, I would rather it had not been brought up at all. I really just can't get on the steampunk bandwagon. It's not very interesting to me.
I also attended the Hugo Awards ceremony, even though I didn't vote this year. However, um, how can I put this? I certainly do not agree with some of the results. I don't think I will say any more than that.
I attended a number of panels, and some of them were good. One of the things the con did right was having the panels limited to 50 minutes. Sometimes cons do 75 minute panels, and really, no topic is so exciting that there's 75 minutes worth of material to talk about. 50 minutes is much, much better.
The bane of my con seemed to be steampunk. Frankly, I occasionally read a bit of it, but I'm not a fan, per se. It hasn't captured my imagination, I don't get excited about the idea of reading more, it's sort of okay but not particularly interesting to me. Nevertheless, it seemed like it kept coming up. I attended one panel on the topic, The Moral Aesthetics of Steampunk, which was supposed to be a discussion about the current enthusiasm for and romanticising of the Victorian Era, all the while mostly ignoring that the actual historical Victorian Era was absolutely horrible. However the moderator said: "I disagree with the description," and so they didn't talk about that. Instead, they tried to spend 50 minutes trying to think of things to say about steampunk in extremely general fashion, and mostly kept mentioning Makers and The Difference Engine every few minutes. Very disappointing. However that should have been the one and only steampunk panel I attended.
Unfortunately it didn't turn out that way. The next day I attended Scientific Romances of the Victorian Era, which was supposed to have been about works actually written in the Victorian Era, rather than modern novels set in the Victorian Era. However one of the panelists seemed to be under the impression that it was another steampunk panel, and kept bringing up modern authors and encouraging us to read all the steampunk we could get our hands on. Sigh.
But the most disturbing instance was when I was at Whatever Happened to Cyberpunk? and they started talking about steampunk. On the surface, it would seem to me that cyberpunk and steampunk are very, very different things, so I wasn't too happy when they brought it up. However one of the panelists actually made a coherent argument comparing new works of cyberpunk and steampunk that I actually found quite interesting. Still, I would rather it had not been brought up at all. I really just can't get on the steampunk bandwagon. It's not very interesting to me.
I also attended the Hugo Awards ceremony, even though I didn't vote this year. However, um, how can I put this? I certainly do not agree with some of the results. I don't think I will say any more than that.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Hard Spell by Justin Gustainis
This is another book that I bought on clearance at Borders recently (and then got home and discovered I could have gotten the electronic version for 99 cents. Sigh.). It is another mashup urban fantasy/police procedural. This one is set in Scranton, PA.
Scranton is set at the intersection of lots of ley lines, making it an attractive place for supernatural creatures to live. Our protagonist, Markowski, is an officer in the Occult Crimes Unit of the Scranton PD. They handle crimes by and against supernatural creatures.
The tone of this one is hardboiled. It's full of lines like "My name's Markowski. I carry a badge." We discover that in his backstory Markowski's wife was killed by a vampire, and his daughter is a vampire. His partner dies, and he is assigned to a work with Karl Renfer, a relatively new officer to the unit. Isn't it always thus with hard-boiled detective stories? Anyway, he starts out with doubts about Karl but by the end of the book they have formed a good working relationship.
They are called to the scene where a wizard has been tortured to death, and something valuable stolen from him. He talks the department witch into trying a ritual that will allow them to ask the dead man who killed him, but it goes horribly wrong. Then someone starts killing people in ritual fashion. Markowski doesn't know what it means, but he knows it's going to be bad.
Hard Spell turned out to be quite a good read, once I got into it. It was one of those books that I read straight through in an afternoon. I was entertained, I enjoyed it, who could ask for more?
Scranton is set at the intersection of lots of ley lines, making it an attractive place for supernatural creatures to live. Our protagonist, Markowski, is an officer in the Occult Crimes Unit of the Scranton PD. They handle crimes by and against supernatural creatures.
The tone of this one is hardboiled. It's full of lines like "My name's Markowski. I carry a badge." We discover that in his backstory Markowski's wife was killed by a vampire, and his daughter is a vampire. His partner dies, and he is assigned to a work with Karl Renfer, a relatively new officer to the unit. Isn't it always thus with hard-boiled detective stories? Anyway, he starts out with doubts about Karl but by the end of the book they have formed a good working relationship.
They are called to the scene where a wizard has been tortured to death, and something valuable stolen from him. He talks the department witch into trying a ritual that will allow them to ask the dead man who killed him, but it goes horribly wrong. Then someone starts killing people in ritual fashion. Markowski doesn't know what it means, but he knows it's going to be bad.
Hard Spell turned out to be quite a good read, once I got into it. It was one of those books that I read straight through in an afternoon. I was entertained, I enjoyed it, who could ask for more?
Saturday, August 6, 2011
The Loch by Steve Alten
The Loch is horror, which I rarely read. But at Borders horror and dark fantasy are shelved together, so I came across it a while back while browsing. I decided not to buy it at the time, but have picked it up and looked at it a few times, so when I was at Borders last weekend and everything was on clearance, I decided that it was time for this one to come home with me.
On the surface of it, I probably shouldn't like this book. But this is due to my own tastes and reading quirks, and the things that bug me are usually acceptable to most readers. As the title implies, it's about the Loch Ness Monster. That's only a minor problem for me, because while it's been done a lot of times, there's still something kind of creepy about Loch Ness, so huge and cold and dark and deep, that I suppose for me that vein hasn't been entirely worked out. There are other things about it that do bother me, though, for my own personal reasons. I hate it when stories are told or explained through flashbacks. Yes, it's a perfectly acceptable technique that many people use, but I don't like it. So sue me. The Loch has sections of explanation through the journals of a historical person. Fortunately they were easy to skip, so I didn't let it interfere with my enjoyment of the novel.
The bigger problem, and had I known about it before I read it I never would have bought the book, is that the backstory is about Templars and their treasure. Gad, I hate that. What a boring, overused, tacky, tedious, asinine cliche. I can live with Loch Ness monster stories, but I can't stand Templar secrets in fiction. So there are members of a secret society running around doing secret and gruesome things and working at cross-purposes with the protagonist. Ick, ick, ick.
Despite that drawback--and for me it's a huge one--I mostly enjoyed the book anyway. Even though the protagonist is an idiot and an asshole, and his pining for the female love interest didn't seem plausible, going from ooh she's really hot to I love you without the necessary steps in between. And I didn't really think the last chapter seemed emotionally true to the journey the character had followed. Still, Alten can write really compelling text. It sucks you in and hauls you along for a wild ride, and I kept happily turning the pages (skipping over the historical sections, of course) to find out what happened next. The plot itself is pretty predictable, as a marine biologist with father issues returns to the Scottish village of his childhood and, despite his rational objections, ends up finding and facing down the Loch Ness Monster. And then he hushes certain things up because, you know, Templars and so on. Nevertheless, as I said, it was an oddly compelling read.
On the surface of it, I probably shouldn't like this book. But this is due to my own tastes and reading quirks, and the things that bug me are usually acceptable to most readers. As the title implies, it's about the Loch Ness Monster. That's only a minor problem for me, because while it's been done a lot of times, there's still something kind of creepy about Loch Ness, so huge and cold and dark and deep, that I suppose for me that vein hasn't been entirely worked out. There are other things about it that do bother me, though, for my own personal reasons. I hate it when stories are told or explained through flashbacks. Yes, it's a perfectly acceptable technique that many people use, but I don't like it. So sue me. The Loch has sections of explanation through the journals of a historical person. Fortunately they were easy to skip, so I didn't let it interfere with my enjoyment of the novel.
The bigger problem, and had I known about it before I read it I never would have bought the book, is that the backstory is about Templars and their treasure. Gad, I hate that. What a boring, overused, tacky, tedious, asinine cliche. I can live with Loch Ness monster stories, but I can't stand Templar secrets in fiction. So there are members of a secret society running around doing secret and gruesome things and working at cross-purposes with the protagonist. Ick, ick, ick.
Despite that drawback--and for me it's a huge one--I mostly enjoyed the book anyway. Even though the protagonist is an idiot and an asshole, and his pining for the female love interest didn't seem plausible, going from ooh she's really hot to I love you without the necessary steps in between. And I didn't really think the last chapter seemed emotionally true to the journey the character had followed. Still, Alten can write really compelling text. It sucks you in and hauls you along for a wild ride, and I kept happily turning the pages (skipping over the historical sections, of course) to find out what happened next. The plot itself is pretty predictable, as a marine biologist with father issues returns to the Scottish village of his childhood and, despite his rational objections, ends up finding and facing down the Loch Ness Monster. And then he hushes certain things up because, you know, Templars and so on. Nevertheless, as I said, it was an oddly compelling read.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch
Midnight Riot takes place in London and features a young policeman. He has just finished his two years as a probationary officer, and fears that he will be assigned to the Case Progression Unit to do paperwork. Fortunately a murder happens, and a ghost talks to him, and he is assigned to work with Inspector Nightingale. Nightingale turns out to be a wizard, and he takes Constable Grant as his apprentice.
Grant does not have remarkable talent, and does not immediately master the tasks that are put before him. He works hard, for a long time, before he masters the rudimentary magic that Nightingale is teaching him. Meanwhile he is also working on a series of murders and trying to negotiate peace between the two deities who claim ownership of the Thames.
I have read other books that are said to really capture the feel of London, but none has worked for me as well as this one. I am usually pretty indifferent to setting. Plot-driven reader that I am, I want to know what the characters say and do. I don't care what they look like or what they're wearing or what kind of car they drive or what the wallpaper looks like. It doesn't really matter to me. But Midnight Riot made me actually wish I knew London better, so that I had a better grasp of the places he's talking about. It always impresses me when a writer can write about setting in a way that catches me and interests me, because it's very rare.
I also really enjoyed the crime-solving aspect of the novel. I am a mystery reader, and I like a good police procedural. I also read science fiction and fantasy. A fantasy that is a police procedural, and a very absorbing one at that, is right up my alley. A lot of urban fantasies have a mystery or problem element to them, which is probably why I continue to read them. And perhaps it's old-fashioned or authoritarian of me, but I always prefer police procedurals to books featuring private eyes or amateur detectives or criminals or reporters. And I would rather read about a psychic police constable than a bodyguard or thief or bounty hunter or something. Solving crimes and restoring order is actually his job, and apparently that resonates with the tidy part of my psyche.
Overall, Midnight Riot is just a fantastic read. It has interesting characters, it is very much set in a particular place and the story could not be the same if it were set somewhere else, there are several interesting problems to chew on, and it just moves right along. Grant is neither too competent nor incompetent, and was a very easy protagonist to ride along with. The secondary characters were interesting and individual. It was a hell of a read, and I look forward to reading the next one.
Grant does not have remarkable talent, and does not immediately master the tasks that are put before him. He works hard, for a long time, before he masters the rudimentary magic that Nightingale is teaching him. Meanwhile he is also working on a series of murders and trying to negotiate peace between the two deities who claim ownership of the Thames.
I have read other books that are said to really capture the feel of London, but none has worked for me as well as this one. I am usually pretty indifferent to setting. Plot-driven reader that I am, I want to know what the characters say and do. I don't care what they look like or what they're wearing or what kind of car they drive or what the wallpaper looks like. It doesn't really matter to me. But Midnight Riot made me actually wish I knew London better, so that I had a better grasp of the places he's talking about. It always impresses me when a writer can write about setting in a way that catches me and interests me, because it's very rare.
I also really enjoyed the crime-solving aspect of the novel. I am a mystery reader, and I like a good police procedural. I also read science fiction and fantasy. A fantasy that is a police procedural, and a very absorbing one at that, is right up my alley. A lot of urban fantasies have a mystery or problem element to them, which is probably why I continue to read them. And perhaps it's old-fashioned or authoritarian of me, but I always prefer police procedurals to books featuring private eyes or amateur detectives or criminals or reporters. And I would rather read about a psychic police constable than a bodyguard or thief or bounty hunter or something. Solving crimes and restoring order is actually his job, and apparently that resonates with the tidy part of my psyche.
Overall, Midnight Riot is just a fantastic read. It has interesting characters, it is very much set in a particular place and the story could not be the same if it were set somewhere else, there are several interesting problems to chew on, and it just moves right along. Grant is neither too competent nor incompetent, and was a very easy protagonist to ride along with. The secondary characters were interesting and individual. It was a hell of a read, and I look forward to reading the next one.
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