Friday, May 30, 2008

Odd Hours and In Search for King Arthur

"Odd Hours" by Dean Koontz is his fourth Odd Thomas book. I thought I had read the first three, but as I started reading this one, I realized that no, I had not. Apparently Odd Thomas (and it seems that is his real name) is a young fry cook who finds himself in the most improbable situations being a hero. He seems like a very like able character, and a decent guy. I just get the feeling that Koontz is messing with my head with books like this. In this one, Odd foils terrorists attempts to bring nuclear weapons onto U.S. soil using a corrupt police and harbor patrol in a small coastal California town. Odd foils them with the help of some flighty good Samaritans, a golden retriever, and the ghost of Frank Sinatra. I think you see my point.
"In Search for King Arthur" by David Day (and I don't know what it is about that title, I want to say "In search of King Arthur", who knows why) was a very good book that attempts to separate fact from fiction, not an easy thing to do, since the legend of King Arthur is so prevalent in our culture, not to mention that if he did live, it was 1500 years ago. Day does a good job of not making history boring and dry, but rather matter of fact while still being interesting. It makes me want to reread Tennyson's "Idylls of the King". And finish Malory's "Morte d'Arthur". I will someday, I swear!

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

The Case of the Buried Clock; The Case of the Drowning Duck; The Case of the Borrowed Brunette

Three more Perry Mason's by Erle Stanley Gardner. "Buried Clock" focuses around a clock that is buried in the forest near some cabins in Kern County that apparently keeps sidereal, or star time. I had no idea what this meant, but apparently the stars gain about four minutes every day on sun time. What does this have to do with murder, you ask? Oh, quite a bit, actually, once you realize that all the people in this remote mountain community wander around at night, taking pictures. The clock actually comes in for a faked alibi. I was wondering right until the end how he was going to finagle that one in!
"Drowning Duck" was really good. A wealthy man hires Perry to investigate an 18 year old murder case. It turns out that the son of the man who was found guilty and hanged is trying to marry his daughter, and the man wants Perry to prove the father's innocence before he'll give permission. The man wants to avoid having a scandal in the family, see. Of course, it's a worse scandal when he's arrested and charged with murdering his house guest.
"Borrowed Brunette" had the craziest premise in the world, but was one of the more understandable and easy to follow Mason mysteries I've read so far. A woman looking to divorce her wealthy husband so she can marry another man learns her husband has hired detectives to shadow her to learn the identity of her boyfriend, so she has a friend hire a girl who looks like her to live in her apartment to throw the detectives off track. All is going splendidly until the friend turns up dead in the apartment, and the woman hired to impersonate her, along with her chaperone, are charged with the crime. The D.A. tries to get Perry in trouble with the Grand Jury for perjury, but of course the Grand Jury is to smart for that! Silly D.A., thinking he could get Perry in trouble! In the end it was actually a very logical suspect who was guilty: the woman's husband, who thought that the friend was actually the boyfriend.

Battle of the Queens; The Case of the Counterfeit Eye; The Case of the Rolling Bones; The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink; The Case of the Burning Bequest

Okay, so I've been reading a lot and just been too lazy to log in and blog about it. My bad. I'll get caught up, and pinkie swear it will never happen again.
"Battle of the Queens" by Jean Plaidy was the fifth book in her Plantagenet series. Queen Isabella of England (John's widow) is delighted to be mentor to her young son, King Henry III. She marries her first lost love, Hugh, and has many children with him. Meanwhile, in France, Queen Blanche guides first her husband as king, and then, after his untimely death, her young son, Louis. Both of these women are strong willed and determined to get their way, and are often working at opposing sides. It was interesting to hear (even if it is fiction) that there were strong willed, forceful women, even in the 1200s.
Now the Perry Mason's by Erle Stanley Gardner. "Counterfeit Eye" has Perry skating on really thin ice, planting fake eyes as evidence at murder scenes. There are not one but two characters in this book with fake eyes. I'm assuming it was more common in the 1940s than it is today. There were some hilarious scenes in this one, including Perry and Paul running around a hotel dressed as window washers. I've also noticed that whenever Perry is called to a hotel by a client, he will inevitably find a dead body in the hotel room. Frankly, I'm surprised the D.A. never arrested him for suspicion of murder. Well, he probably has and I just haven't gotten to that particular book yet!
"Rolling Bones" confused the heck out of me. I reread scenes as I went along, hoping to better understand it, but it didn't help. The corpse (I think--see, this is how confused I am) used so many different aliases I'm not sure what his real identity was. Perry successfully uses one corpse to solve two murders in the end--I think. Exactly.
"Moth-Eaten Mink" was better. The police are hot to catch a man suspected of killing one of their own. The suspect has returned to town after a year of hiding, and Perry is defending his half-brother and girlfriend. D.A. Burger calls Perry as a witness for the prosecution, and there is an amazing surprise ending.
"Burning Bequest" was written by Thomas Chastain 20 years after Gardner's death. It was pretty good; he got Gardner's style down fairly well. The mystery wasn't all that clever: I had the right suspect nailed halfway through the book, and I can't do that with Gardner's books. The only other major problem was that Della really has a very minor role in this book; there's none of the wonderful word play and sly looks that I love in Gardner's books. It was still pretty good, and it had a nice, happy ending.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

The Wolf at the Table

Another autobiography by Augusten Burroughs, much less funny than "Running with Scissors", like he finally realized how horrific his childhood really was and it's not funny. It was still very readable; I couldn't put it down. This one focused mainly on his relationship with his sadistic, evil father, before his parent's divorce and his subsequent moving in with crazy Dr. Finch. He talks more about his older brother, John Elder, actually using his real name now since he published his own memoir I guess the cat's out of the bag. To me, it was very clear that his father was a person who was just not meant to have children. As much as Augusten tries to love him, and believe that some part of his father loved him back, the sad reality is that his father was an individual not worth loving. Anyone who could be that cruel to small children and helpless animals deserves to rot in hell, as far as I'm concerned. I also understand Augusten's complex relationship with his father: it's hard to love someone so much and yet hate them so much all at the same time. I know; I've been there.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Queen Katherine Parr; The Case of the Mischevious Doll; The Case of the Howling Dog

"Queen Katherine Parr" by Anthony Martienssen was an excellent biography of King Henry VIII's last and most intelligent queen. She used her charm, grace, wits, and common sense to keep this ogre of a man happy in his final years, when he really wanted a nurse more than a wife. Unlike Anne Boleyn, she did not gloat when her enemies were down, and unlike Katherine of Aragon, she was willing to bend her principles to save her life. I've always admired Katherine of Aragon for her willingness to stand up for what was right, no matter how difficult it made her life, but Katherine Parr was able to use such grace and wit that it never seemed like she was giving up her ideals. Very well told story of an exceptional woman.
Two more Perry Masons by Erle Stanley Gardner. "Mischievous Doll" was very complex. Perry really has his hands full when two women who look very much alike both retain his services for different reasons. The first woman, Dorrie, thinks the second one, Minerva, is trying to set her up to take a fall for something Minerva did. Minerva, a wealthy heiress, thinks Dorrie is trying to blackmail her to get some of Minerva's millions. Then one of them turns up dead, and Perry is defending the other. This book had a shocking ending that I didn't see a mile away. But then I never do!
"Howling Dog" was disturbing. This was the first and only Perry Mason book I've read where it seems like his client very well might have been guilty, and he knew it, and pulled some shady strings to get her off the hook. I kept waiting for his brilliant reasoning to show me that his client didn't kill her husband, but he never did. He moved witnesses out of state so the police would never find out about them, he pulled tricks with the prosecution's witnesses, and then, when the prosecution wanted to dismiss the case in light of new evidence, Perry insisted the case go to jury so, as he explained to Della (but I had already figured out) that his client couldn't ever be tried for the crime again. Double jeopardy, you see. Like I said, very disturbing. It was only the fourth one, so maybe Gardner was just testing different ideas to see which ones flew. I think he realized this wasn't the way to go with the Mason books, since all of the other ones I've read have gone to great painstaking lengths to explain away his client's guilt.

Monday, May 19, 2008

The Case of the Substitute Face and the Case of the Perjured Parrot

Two new Perry Masons by Erle Stanley Gardner. Both were really great.
"Substitute Face" has Perry and Della on a cruise ship returning from Hawaii when a woman comes to Perry for advice: she thinks her husband has embezzled money from his company. That night, the man is murdered and his body tossed overboard--with Della as a witness to Perry's client supposedly doing the deed!
In "Perjured Parrot" a wealthy man is murdered and his parrot apparently knows the name of the killer, only the parrot wasn't in the room when he was killed, and both the man's soon to be ex-wife and his current new wife share the same first name. Perry does a brilliant job of cross examining Sargent Holcomb on the stand, first to show how faulty his interpretation of the evidence is, and then to get the real killer so scared of being caught he flees. This one had a really happy ending.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

The Lady Elizabeth and The Prince of Darkness

"The Lady Elizabeth" by Alison Weir was a very good fictionalized account of the life of Queen Elizabeth I from the age of two up until 25, when she becomes Queen. Since I have read so many nonfiction and fiction tales of this story, they all start to blend together and sound alike. I already know the facts of what happens: how she is in the Tower during her sister's reign, how she studied with some of the most brilliant minds of her time, etc. But I like Weir; she has a real gift for storytelling, and both her fiction and nonfiction books are easy to read and entertaining. We disagree on Richard III, but we both feel the same about Elizabeth: quite easily the best monarch England has ever had, and a brilliant woman to boot.
"The Prince of Darkness" by Jean Plaidy was the fourth book in the Plantagenet series. I know, you're thinking, what happened to the third? Turns out my new favorite library doesn't own it :-( Nor does my library, or any others close by. So I read the fourth one, and I'll have to buy the third one online or something. In the meantime, I'll read them out of order. This one takes place after King Richard I has died, and the last of Henry II's sons, John, becomes king. Legend has it that Henry II had a painting made of an eagle with three eaglets tearing away at it while the fourth looks on. He said that painting represented himself and his four sons: the fourth was waiting for the first three to lay him low so he could come along and finish him off, and that's exactly what John did. He was truly the worst of the bunch. He was a horrible king who made many powerful enemies and then wondered why fate always seemed to be against him. Hmm, I don't know--maybe because you're pure evil? He is forced by his barons to sign the Magna Carta, guaranteeing the people of England certain rights. He loses most of William the Conqueror's hard fought lands to the French. He even has to bare himself low to the Pope. No one is sorry when he dies, especially his wife.

The Case of the Curious Bride; The Case of the Bigamous Spouse; The Case of the Fugitive Nurse

A couple of more Erle Stanley Gardner's. "Curious Bride" was a reread. I really liked this one. A newlywed woman suddenly discovers that her first husband, whom she believed to be dead, is actually alive and is now trying to blackmail her rich new husband. The first husband turns up dead--here's the kicker: the new husband was the one who killed him (or so Perry suspects), but he decides to try to pin it on his wife. He goes to the police to turn her in. He tries to get an annulment so he can testify against her in court. What a charmer! Since the bride is his client, Perry blocks the annulment and then tries to get the wife to divorce the new husband, so he can take his deposition in the divorce suit and sweat a confession out of him. The bride is so in love with her louse of a husband that she refuses at first, but eventually Perry persuades her and the truth comes out. I really like the courtroom scenes in this one: Perry pulls some fancy footwork with doorbells and alarm clocks.
"Bigamous Spouse" was also a reread. A young lady living with her friend and her friend's husband accidentally discovers that the husband has another wife just down the road. The husband actually tries to poison her, and she goes to Perry for advice (and his advice is the same as mine: get the hell out of the house!, which of course she ignores). The next day the husband turns up murdered. There are so many suspects in this case that it is easy to overlook the obvious one: the second wife.
"Fugitive Nurse" I hadn't read before (I don't think, anyway). A doctor is presumed dead when his plane crashes and a charcoaled beyond recognition body is found inside. His less than distraught widow comes to Perry and that's when things start to get complicated. The IRS was investigating the good doctor for embezzling $100,000. Then his nurse and presumed love interest goes missing, along with his best friend, his chauffeur...so if the body in the plane wasn't the doctor's (and the murder case against the wife is so preposterous--she spiked his whiskey with drugs so he would crash the plane), who was it? Who stole the money? Who was running the illegal drug cartel using the doctor's plane? There was a whole lot going on in this book.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

The Case of the Velvet Claws; Sleep in Heavenly Peace

First off, another Erle Stanley Gardner reread. "Velvet Claws" was the first Perry Mason, written back in 1933 (I'd forgotten they went back that far). In this one, a married woman comes to Perry because she has been caught out on the town with a prominent politician, and she's afraid a local gossip magazine will report the nasty details. Perry works to uncover the real head of the magazine and pays him an unexpected visit at his house. And who should be there but his client? And guess who she's married to? Um-hmmm. Well, then the husband turns up murdered and the wife tries to say she heard Perry arguing with him before the gun went off. Pin a murder on Mason? I don't think so!
"Sleep in Heavenly Peace" by M. William Phelps was a true crime book about a woman who murdered three of her children at birth and then made a series of really stupid mistakes leading to her arrest and conviction. First of all, she was pregnant with these children in the early 1980s, after abortion was legalized. Why, if she didn't want to give birth to these kids, did she not have an abortion? Why wait until birth to kill them? It's a mystery to me, especially since she already had three normal, healthy little girls when she killed these three. Then, instead of getting rid of the bodies, she put them in boxes and toted them around with her across the country for the next ten years. Ew....She left them in a storage unit in Arizona and when she moved back East (all the babies were born in New York) she stopped paying the storage unit bill. Smart move. So of course it's auctioned off and some poor fool looking for buried treasure finds the skeletal remains of these poor kids and calls the cops. I can't even imagine, opening up a box...anyway, so the police have no trouble tracking this woman down. Her first story (and the one she should have stuck to) was that the kiddies were born dead. Then she says no, she heard them cry but because she didn't get to the hospital in time to deliver them, she was all alone and blacked out during delivery, and woke up to find them dead. Um, okay? And then, after the jury convicts her of killing her kids, she tries to lie to this book author and play up that her mom was such a horrible woman she killed the kids after they were born. Mom was conveniently dead, so she couldn't refute this. It was a very well written and very sad book that just shows how dumb some criminals can be.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

The Case of the Daring Decoy and the Case of the Lazy Lover

I tell you, this almost-being-done-with-school-thing rocks! I can read again without feeling guilty.
Two more Perry Mason's by Erle Stanley Gardner. "The Daring Decoy" was one I own but haven't read before. Two businessmen are in a proxy battle for control of a company when one is framed for murder. But who framed him?
"The Lazy Lover" I had read before, but it was so long ago I didn't remember it very well (until about 30 pages to the end, when I realized I knew the ending. That only happens when I've read them before). Perry receives two checks in the mail from a woman with no explanation as to what they are for, and he can't find her. Her husband claims she ran off with a boyfriend, and her daughter is missing as well. Once Perry does find her, she is arrested and accused of murdering her husband. All the evidence points to her guilt, unless you're Perry Mason. This has one of the most improbable endings ever, with Perry proving that some woman used a pole vault to create fake footprints. I just laughed. Really? You couldn't come up with anything a little more plausible? Oh, well, it's all good fun anyway.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Look Me in the Eye, Running with Scissors, The Case of the Angry Mourner, and The Case of the Gilded Lily

Now that school is nearly done, I have so much more time to read! Yeah!
First up, on Friday I finished John Elder Robison's memoir, "Look Me in the Eye". Robison grew up in an extremely dysfunctional household and wasn't diagnosed with Asperger's (a milder form of Autism) until he was in his 40s. This memoir was a great peek into the mind of someone with Asperger's, how he thinks and processes things. He is very happy and successful: happily married, with a teenage son and his own business restoring classic luxury cars. The coolest thing of all: he spent years with the rock band KISS, designing Ace's guitars. How cool is that?
So after reading that, on Saturday I had to read his younger brother, Augusten Burrough's memoir, "Running with Scissors". Augusten was born Christopher, but changed his name at 18. While John ran off and escaped from home before their parents got too insane, poor Augusten was stuck with them, and boy were they lunatics. After his parents divorced, his mother sent him to live with her even crazier psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, and his household where there were no rules, no boundaries, and everything went, including child rape. It was a very hard book to read, because he was trying to convey the hilarity of the situations, and if it had been fiction, like McMurtry's "Texasville" or something, then it would have been hilarious. But remembering that it's true, all this stuff really did happen to this poor screwed up kid...well, it was just hard to laugh at it then. It was good, though, very well written, and I enjoyed it.
I got two Perry Mason mysteries by Erle Stanley Gardner at my new favorite library that I actually hadn't read yet! It's been so long since I read any Mason books that they all sounded familiar to me, so I took a shot and grabbed two. The one I read yesterday was "The Case of the Angry Mourner", which has Perry on vacation at Bear Mountain when a wealthy young playboy with a bad reputation for being a wolf with women (these are set in the '40s and '50s, keep in mind) is found dead, shot, and of course the young lady he was dining with that evening is the logical suspect, only all the clues lead to her mother, Perry's client. Since Perry's clients are never, ever guilty, you knew right off it wasn't her.
Today's was "The Case of the Gilded Lily". A wealthy (lots of wealthy people in these books--I guess they're more interesting than poor people) businessman is threatened when a blackmailer comes to him with incriminating evidence against his lovely new and much younger socialite wife. The businessman gets drugged during the payoff and wakes up in a motel room with a dead body. Never a good thing. And it wasn't the new wife, either! I love Gardner's red herrings, they're all over the place.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Transgressions Vol. 3

Okay, so I read "Transgressions" edited by Ed McBain, a paperback that had three novellas in it: "Walking Around Money" by Donald E. Westlake, "Walking the Line" by Walter Mosley, and "Merely Hate" by Ed McBain. It was only after I got to work and looked to see if my library owned any more "Transgressions" that I realized--duh, I read the hardcover with all the short stories that are in all the paperbacks two years ago. Sigh. Well, while the stories all sounded vaguely familiar (I figured because I had read so many novels by the authors) I didn't remember them, so it was like reading something new. All three stories were very good--I, of course, liked McBain's the best. It had a typical twist to it that he used a lot that always threw me off. It probably shouldn't have, once I read almost all of his books, but hey, what are you going to do? Mosley's featured a guy who calls himself the "Anarchist" and is all paranoid and full of conspiracy theories. I'm too closely related to too many individuals like that to be able to laugh at it. It hit too close to home :-) But for normal people who don't grow up being told that the FBI is spying on you, it's probably very amusing. Westlake's story involved counterfeit South American money and a thief trying to con two other thieves, who of course find out and thwart him. All in all, they were a good batch of stories. I like reading novellas sometimes.