A is for Susan Wittig Albert, pt 1

Part 1: The list of books of the author
Part 2: A review of one of the authors books

Tomorrow, I'll be reviewing The Tale of Hill Top Farm, the first in the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter (Beatrix Potter owns a farm in 1905 England. The parish registry has gone missing...Beatrix won't rest until its found.

The books of Susan Wittig Albert (mysteries, not her kids books):

The China Bayles Mysteries
Thyme of Death (1992)
Witches' Bane {1993)
Hangman's Root (1994)
Rosemary Remembered (1995)
Rueful Death (1996)
Love Lies Bleeding (1997)
Chile Death (1998)
Lavender Lies (1999)
Mistletoe Man (2000)
Bloodroot (2001)
Indigo Dying (2002)
A Dilly of a Death (2004)
Dead Man's Bones (2005)
Bleeding Hearts (2006)
An Unthymely Death (Short story collection) (2003)
The China Bayles Book of Days (October 2006)
Spanish Dagger (2007)
Nightshade (2008)
Wormwood (2009)
Holly Blues (2010)
Mourning Gloria (2011)


The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Hill Top Farm (2004)
The Tale of Holly How (2005)
The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood (July 2006)
The Tale of Hawthorn House (Sept 2007)
"The Tale of Briar Bank" (Sept 2008)
"The Tale of Applebeck Orchard"(Sept 2009)


The Robin Paige Victorian Mysteries
These are co-written with her husband, Bill Albert under the name Robin Paige.
Death at Bishop's Keep (1994)
Death at Gallows Green (1995)
Death at Daisy's Folly (1997)
Death at Devil's Bridge (1998)
Death at Rottingdean (1999)
Death at Whitechapel (2000)
Death at Epsom Downs (2001)
Death at Dartmoor (2002)
Death at Glamis Castle (2003)
Death in Hyde Park (2004)
Death at Blenheim Palace (2005)
Death on the Lizard (2006)

The Last of the Black Widowers

Isaac Asimov, best known as the author of science fiction novels and short stories, and non-fiction science essays and books, was a fan of Agatha Christie and other mystery writers, and had long wanted to branch out into the mystery genre. His first forays in that genre carried on with his scientific expertise - he wrote a novel A Whiff of Death, in which a professor at a New York university must discover who has murdered his graduate student by substituting cyanide for chemicals on which he'd been working, and of course his two novels Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957) were science fiction mysteries with a human detective and his positronic robot sidekick Daneel Oliwaw.

He then created Wendell Urth, who also dealt with scientific mysteries, with his debut in "The Singing Bells."

But he had always wanted to get into Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and finally accomplished that feat with "The Acquisitive Chuckle," in 1972.

The formula for the Black Widowers stories are the same in all cases, six members of the club, and their waiter Henry, meet once a month at the Milano restaurant for dinner and conversation. A guest is brought, who is "grilled" - asked to justify his existence, and invariably he (it is always a he, for this is a stag organization, except on one occasion when a woman is permitted to present her story, but must remain seated just outside the doorway to the dining room.)

Murder is only involved once in these stories, they are all ...not trivial... but involve such things as stolen bonds, cheating on a test, mislaying a manuscript, and so on. Indeed, as the stories go on, the problems become more and more trivial and far-fetched, but they continue to be popular because readers like the men who compirse the Black Widowers, in particular their invaluable waiter Henry, who is the one who really solves the puzzles.

Asimov was writing these stories during the 70s and 80s, when women were first beginning to challenge those men-only laws for organizations and clubs, and the fact that the Black Widowers is a stag organization and the women's movement is referenced on more than one occasion (for all that, I think Asimov really did think of women only as eye candy...for the most part).

The Return of the Black Widowers, the final book of the series, was published posthumously, and edited by Charles Ardai (with a touching and humorous forward by Harlan Ellison, who appears as Darius Just in one of the stories in the volume, The Woman in The Bar.) Eleven of the stories are reprints of stories from the other collections, six are uncollected stories (since there need to be twelve to fill out an anthology, and Asimov died prior to completing the whole set), and two stories about the Black Widowers by other writers, William Brittain's "The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov" - in which a group of men try to solve a contest using Henry's methods in the Black Widowers stories that they like, the other, by Charles Ardai, a Black Widowers tale.

The weakest story in the collection, and the one I dislike most of all, is "Yes, But Why." It deviates from the formula in that there is no guest - Henry wants to be the guest. He has a problem, and it is by hearing solutions suggested by the other members that he is able to clear away the dross to see the truth. On this occasion, he is having lady problems. As I read this story I just wanted to slap the lady in question, and Henry, and Asimov!

"I have told you," said Henry, "that she is a reserved and independant woman; that we have had a cool and entirely intellectual companionship. It may be, perhaps," and here he grew a trifle pinker, "that she found herself dissatisfied with that companionship. She knew that I pride myself on bein able to see into a complex situation, and it may be she plotted one in which I would fail."

"Yes, but why?" said Rubin.

"So that she would have a reasonable excuse to be distressed and weak for a considerable length of time. So that she would become dependent on me and cling to me. So that I would be concerned about her, and become more involved with her."

Oh, how I wanted to administer slaps all around!

Having said that, if you can track these books down in your local library, I would give them a try, and I suggest reading them in chronological order - in particular, read the first in the series, Tales of the Black Widowers, and its first, "The Acquisitive Chuckle," my favorite story of the lot.

Geoffrey Avalon (based on L. Sprague de Camp)
Emmanuel Rubin (based on Lester del Rey)
James Drake (based on Dr. John D. Clark)
Thomas Trumbull (based on Gilbert Cant)
Mario Gonzalo (based on Lin Carter)
Roger Halsted (based on Don Bensen)
The deceased founder of the club, Ralph Ottur, on whom the plot of the story "To the Barest" turned, was based on the real-life founder of the Trap Door Spiders, Fletcher Pratt. The stage magician The Amazing Larri, from the story "The Cross of Lorraine", was based on James Randi. The arrogant science writer Mortimer Stellar, from the story "When No Man Pursueth", was based on Asimov himself

Tales of the Black Widowers (1974)
More Tales of the Black Widowers (1976)
Casebook of the Black Widowers (1980)
Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984)
Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990)
The Return of the Black Widowers (2003)

Mysterious Blogs: Authors

EQMM has a column called Blog Bytes... let's see what was reviewed in the Jan 2010 issue:

Kent's Rants:
http://williamkentkrueger.com/blog
Believe it or not, I used to know this author! We both used to work for the same company in Minnesota. It was decades ago, though...I think he was a computer guru at the company...but I attended his very first book signing/reading for his very first novel - jealous as all get out because he'd finished a novel and had it published...and I hadn't finished anythimg! Now, a decade later....he's had several more books published and I... well... I have my blogs and webzines. ; )

Kent is the author of the Cork O'Connell mysteries. (Cork O'Connor is part Irish, part Ojibwe. When Krueger decided to set the series in northern Minnesota, he realised that a large percentage of the population of the county he had selected as a model for the fictional Tamarack County of his books was of mixed heritage)
Iron Lake - 1998
Boundary Waters - 1999
Purgatory Ridge -2001
The Devil’s Bed - 2003
Blood Hollow - 2004
Mercy Falls - 2005
Copper River - 2006
Thunder Bay - 2007
Red Knife - 2008
Heaven's Keep - 2009

John Harvey has a blog called Mellotone70Up Blog, located at: http://mellotone70up.wordpress.com.

John Harvey (born 21 December 1938 in London) is a British author of crime fiction most famous for his series of jazz-influenced Charlie Resnick novels, based in the City of Nottingham. Harvey has also published over 90 books under various names, and has worked on scripts for TV and radio.

He also ran Slow Dancer Press from 1977 to 1999 publishing poetry. The first Resnick novel, Lonely Hearts, was published in 1989, and was named by The Times as one of the 100 Greatest Crime Novels of the Century. Harvey brought the series to an end in 1998 with Last Rites, though Resnick has since made peripheral appearances in Harvey's new Frank Elder series.

The protagonist Elder is a retired detective who now lives, as Harvey briefly did, in Cornwall. The first novel in this series, Flesh and Blood, won Harvey the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger in 2004, an accolade many crime fiction critics thought long overdue. In 2007 he was awarded the Diamond Dagger for a Lifetime's Contribution to the genre.

On 14th July 2009 he received an honorary degree (Doctor of Letters) from the University of Nottingham in recognition of his literary eminence and his associations with both the University and Nottingham (particularly in the Charlie Resnick novels). He is also a big Notts County fan.

I confess I've never read a Charlie Resnick novel. BBC7 will occasionally play book recordings...read by the actor who played Inspector Japp in the Hercule Poirot mystseries that starred David Suchet, Philip Jackson, and the snippets I'd heard didn't raise my interest. However, your mileage may vary.

Smokescreen, by Dick Francis

Edward Lincoln is an actor, and a successful one. But he's the rugged kind, like Clint Eastwood (so he can handle the trials and tribulations that author Dick Francis is about to throw at him!). Before becoming an actor, he had ridden horses for a living, so when a family friend, who is dying, asks him to travel to Australia to discover why her horses aren't running well, he can hardly refuse.
But Lincoln, who likes to maintain a low profile, finds more than he bargained for in Australia, from paperazzi yearning to get some dirt on him (whether or not they have to invent it themselves doesn't matter), to the people behind the poorly-performing race horses, who don't want to see their scheme interfered with.
Francis handles the characters in this book with sureness...we get an insight into the actor's life that is fascinating (in particular the feud with the director/auteru), and of course there are the inevitable racing scenes that are also fun. And then of course there are the trials and tribulations that Francis heroes are known to be subjected to.




Recommended.

Nerve, by Dick Francis

Dick Francis has died today, at the age of 89. He was a former steeplechase jockey. After retiring, he started writing about the sport for a newspaper, and then got into writing novels. Some people say that it was actually his wife who wrote the books but regardless, some are good, some are bad (in my opinion) and most are very popular.

The key element of a Dick Francis book is that it will have something to do with horses and horse-racing. His early books featured mostly jockeys and racing, later books dealt with lead characters in other professions, who were only tangentially connected to the horse racing world.

Another element of a Dick Francis novel is that the hero always - always - will be either beaten up or in some way tortured in the last few chapters of the book, to show how tough they are, presumably.

Truth to tell, Nerve isn't one of my favorites, but it is an interesting psychological story. (My favorite Franis is Reflex, the very first one I read, in which the hero is a jockey and also an amateur photographer, the reflex of the title speaking both of a person's reflexes, and also a reflex lens), followed by In the Frameand then Forfeit.

Interestingly, having just checked Wikipedia, it looks like Nerve was Francis' second novel, written in 1964. I was surprised by that - it is very accomplished, for someone's second novel.

Robb Finn is a beginning jockey, just starting out in his career. Things are starting to look up - he's just been offered steady rides by a trainer, James Axminster. He's ecstatic...he's on his way. Then...things start to go wrong. His horses start to give up on him...is he losing his nerve?

This is a novel of psychological suspense...as several jockeys whom Rob knows are also finding their lives in turmoil...losing their jobs, losing their nerve, nad so on... what is going on?

Here are the first few paragraphs of the book:

Art Mathews shot himself, loudly and messily, in the center of the parade ring at Dunstable races.

I was standing only six feet away from him, but he did it so quickly that had it been only six inches I would not have had time to stop him.

He had walked out of the changing room ahead of me, his narrow shoulders hunched inside the khaki jerkin he had put on over his racing colors, and his head down on his chest as if he were deep in thought. I noticed him stumble slightly down the two stepos from the weighing room to the path; and when someone spoke to him on the short walk to the parade ring, he gave absolutely no sign of having heard. But it was just another walk from the weighing room to the parade ring, just another race like a hundred others. There was nothing to suggest that when he had stood talking for two or three minutes with the owner and the trainer of the horse he was due to ride, he would take off his kerkin, produce from under it as he dropped it to the ground a large automatic pistol, place the barrel against his temple and squeeze the trigger.

If you haven't read Dick Francis before - and he's so popular that you probably have, I'd suggest starting chronologically, from Dead Cert (his first novel, 1962), to Straight. He wrote more after that but they are disappointments (either written by a ghost writer or by his son), without the same flair.

Dead Cert 1962
Nerve 1964
For Kicks 1965
Odds Against 1965
Flying Finish 1966
Blood Sport 1967
Forfeit 1968
Enquiry 1969
Rat Race 1970
Bonecrack 1971
Smokescreen 1972
Slayride 1973
Knockdown 1974
High Stakes 1975
In the Frame 1976
Risk 1977
Trial Run 1978
Whip Hand 1979
Reflex 1980
Twice Shy 1981
Banker 1982
The Danger 1983
Proof 1984
Break In 1985
Bolt 1986
Hot Money 1987
The Edge 1988
Straight 1989
Longshot 1990
Comeback 1991
Driving Force 1992
Decider 1993
Wild Horses 1994
Come to Grief 1995
To the Hilt 1996
10 LB. Penalty 1997
Second Wind 1999
Shattered 2000
Under Orders 2006
Dead Heat 2007 with Felix Francis
Silks 2008 ISBN with Felix Francis
Even Money 2009 with Felix Francis

Scooby Doo, What Happened To You?

or...why do movie makers have to destroy their source material?

The first Scooby Doo movie was filmed in 2002. At first I wanted to go see it. I had loved Scooby Doo as a kid, and I liked Rowan Atkinson. Then I learned a bit about the plot... the Mystery Machine gang split up, and two years later reunite to solve a mystery.

Blech. Why why why? It's a trope that movie makers do all the time for movies aimed at teens...have a group that works perfectly fine break up, so there's some quick and easy stuff to move the plot forward instead of coming up with a good mystery plot to begin with . It's like that Thunderbirds abomination, where the one kid doesn't feel loved by his parents...then things arrange themselves so that he's the only one who can save the day. Blech, blech and again blech.

I'm so tired of "rebellious teens" being made the focus of movies. Like Indiana Jones' son (that of course he never knew about...shades of The Genesis Project and Captain Kirk's son - you trying to tell me Captain James T. Kirk, the lothario-prime of the universe, ever had sex with any woman - human or alien, with out wearing a condom? No way, no how.)

Anyway, what really revolts me about this first SCooby Doo movie...which I'm watching on TV - with the sound down, I hasten to add - while I wait for the Olympics to start, is a scene where Shaggy and Scooby are having a belching contest. I can't remember that there were ever any belches in the original Scooby Doo cartoons, but a few years ago - probably in 2002 and now all the rage, there are belches in kids movies. Oh, so funny!

But this scene progressed from belches to farts. Now I suppose boys do think that seeing who can fart the loudest is funny...but that's only because they haven't been taught that its kind of stupid and extremely gross. Let boys do it amongst themselves if they must, if that's what makes them boys, but to subject an entire audience to that crap...or even just a little girl and her parents watching the movie in the privacy of their own home - dis-gusting. Classless.

And we wonder why society today is at the nadir its at.

Having said that... Rowan Atkinson sure does look cute...though not Blackadder II cute. But he isn't given enough to do.

Edited... and it gets work.

It's at the ending now..and Scrappy Doo has turned out to be the villain. Jesus Christ!

But what really revolted me was early than this, when the spirits of Freddy and Daphne somehow get switched, so they are each in each other's bodies. And Daphne as Freddie's reaction - pure lasciviousness. "Oh, great, now I can look at myself naked."

Jeus, what a revolting disaster. You take a kid's show, and you turn it into a lascivious piece of garbage. And this thing was popular enough to spawn a sequel? Very, very sad.

The Red House Mystery, by A. A. Milne

I've been reading The Red House Mystery . It was published in 1922 by A.A. Milne, one of the very first full-length mystery novels. (Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920.)

Although I'm enjoyed the mystery, truth to tell I'm not sure what age audience it's aimed at. A. A. Milne is most famous as the author of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and occasionally in the book the omniscient narrator addresses the reader in a professorial manner (as JRR Tolkien does in The Hobbit, a book for teens, but not in The Lord of the Rings), aimed at adults.

For example:

At about the time when the Major (for whatever reasons) was fluffing his tee-shot at the sixteenth, and Mark and his cousin were at their business at The Red House, an attractive gentleman of the name of Antony Gillingham was handing up his ticket at Woodham Station and asking the way to the village. Having received directions, he left his bag with the station master and walked off leisurely. He is an important person to this story, so that it is as well we should know something about him before letting him loose in it. Let us stop him at the top of the hill on some excuse, and have a good look at him.

The first thing we realize is that he is doing more of the looking than we are. Above a clean-cut, clean shaven face, of the type usually associated with the Navy, he carries a pair of grey eyes which seem to be absorbing every detail of our person.

Mark Ablett is a wealty man who maintains a household in the country, which he allows his cousin to run. He invites people, much less well-off than himself, down to frequent house parties - he is a sponsor of all the arts. On the day when this novel starts, he receives a letter from his ne'er do well younger brother, Robert, who has been living in Australia for decades. He's coming to call.

In due course, Robert does arrive. He goes into the study with Mark, and all is silent for some time. Then there is a shot. Mark's cousin Cayley bangs on the door to the study, while Antony Gillingham, who has come to the house to pay a call on his friend, Mr. Beverly, whom he knows is staying there, sees him from the front door and offers his assistance. When they enter the room, they find the body of Robert on the floor...and Mark nowhere to be found.

Gillingham enlists his friend Beverly as his Watson, and sets out to solve the mystery, with the accommodating help of the policeman on the case.

The Red House Mystery is very much a "tea cosy" mystery, a puzzle (and one that anyone who has read twenty years of Agatha Christie may solve quickly - but remember this book was written very early on in the career of the mystesry novel.)

It's an easy read, it evokes a time long past (as do Christie's early novels), and its fun.

I'm reading it in the Kindle edition (only 99 cents). The formatting is a little off. Sometimes lines in a paragraph are shifted down, an occasional indentation is missing, but these are very, very minor problems.

Dangerous Depths, by Kathy Brandt

As an aspiring scuba diver, I wanted to find a book that dealt with mysteries and scuba diving. One series I found was that featuring police diver Hanna Sampson, who appears in:

1. Swimming with the Dead (2003)
2. Dark Water Dive (2004)
3. Dangerous Depths (2005)
4. Under Pressure (2006)

Dangerous Depths takes place in the British Virgin Islands.

From Wikipedia: The British Virgin Islands consist of the main islands of Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Anegada and Jost Van Dyke, along with over fifty other smaller islands and cays. Approximately fifteen of the islands are inhabited. The capital, Road Town, is situated on Tortola, the largest island which is approximately 20 km (12 mi) long and 5 km (3 mi) wide. The islands have a total population of about 22,000, of whom approximately 18,000 live on Tortola.

I include this information because it isn't given in the book. A few of Brandt's characters speak with an island accent, but other than that the reader doesn't really get the feel of being in the British Virgin Islands, for all that there's plenty of investigating underwater going on.

Hannah Sampson is a police diver who comes to the British Virgin Islands to escape from her life in Denver:

I'd first come to the islands on a special assignment, investigating the death of the Denver police commissioner's son, a scientist doing research in the BVI. He'd disappeared while out diving only to be found seventy feet under the water, just off the coast of Tortola, trapped inside a wreck, dive tank empty. The commissionwer had been devastated wanted one of his own people in the Denver PD and an experienced diver checking things out. He'd sent me.

After I'd apprehended the killers, John Dunn, the chief of Tortola police, had asked me to stay and offered me a job, and I'd decided to give it a try. He needed a diver and underwater investigator on his team, and I needed to get away.

Hannah lives on a boat called the Sea Bird. At midnight, she is waked by an explosion and runs on deck to see her friend, Elyse Henry's boat, on fire. Hannah dives into the water to save her friend, who later ends up in hospital in critical condition.

Her police captain believes the explosion was an accident - Elyse must have had a faulty stove on board - but Hannah believes it was attempted murder, and she sets out to investigate Elyse's movements in the last few weeks, to see if someone has a motive for her death.

And she finds one, in men who dislike Elyse's environmental work to save the endangered green sea turtle. But does their dislike extend to murder?

Truth to tell, I'm ambivalent about the book. The mystery is excellent, but it is hard to wade through the writing. (No pun intended.)

Many authors write so well that one loses oneself in the book, eventually unaware one is even reading. Others don't do so well - among them Clive Cussler and Kathy Brandt (although Brandt's grasp of the language is better than Cussler's!) But so much detail is given that it takes one right out of the story.

Here are a few paragraphs:

"Yeah. I'll tell you what though - it's a much nicer job in the crystal waters of the tropics. Back in the States I was retrieving bodies from icy lakes and brown polluted water. Mostly, diving blond. I'll take this any day."

We were quiet for the rest of the ride and I found myself thinking about the diving I had done in the States. And I thought about losing Jake. He'd been the team leader. It had been a frigid January morning, and we'd been on assignment, diving for a body in an alpine lake.

We'd bagged the body and taken it to the surface, then returned to examine and collect evidence. We were on our way back to the surface when I turned to make sure Jake was behind me. He wasn't. I went back, frantic, searching for him in the dark, icy water. By the time I got to the surface, I was hypothermic and out of air. The team found his body the next day.

Jake and I had lived together for over a year and had finally decided to make the big commitment. The wedding was to be that weekend. Instead, I'd ended up standing in the cemetery, watching the snow falling on his casket. I hadn't heard what the minister said that day. I made a promise back then never to get that close again. It hurt way too much.

and here's an underwater description:

We descended slowly. Every few feet, I pinched my nose [one can do this with masks that leave the nose free] and blew to equalize the pressure in my ears. Carr was doing the same. Visibility was about twenty feet, with a slight current. The deeper we got, the darker it became/ At fifty feet, I could see the outline of the wreck. The boat was completely intact and lying on its right side at the edge of a precipice that dropped into nothingness. There was no indication from this vantage that there had been a fire.

I stopped and shot photos [Cussler at this point would have told you what camera and filmn she was using! So would Ian Fleming, admittedly.] Then we continued to the bottom. I checked my depth-gauge: seventy-six feet. Both Carr and I spent a second adjusting the air in our buoyancy compensator vests, just enough so that we were hovering above the bottom. Then we headed for the wreck, our lights on. As we moved in, I shot pictures from every angle, making sure to place the boat in context. Then we moved in closer. We would not touch anything on this first dive, just to get an idea of what we were up against. Carr knew that he would stay behind me and follow my lead.

Check this book out from the library, and it's worth a read. I wouldn't buy a copy though.

Captain America 602: Or, "And don't forget your briefcase, Obama!"

I turned on the radio this morning while I was out for a drive, and heard Glenn Beck comment on the new Captain America comic, issue 602.

(Now, although I don't read comics any more, occasionally I'll pick up an issue. For example today I went into my local comic store for Captain America 602 and came out with three issues of The Marvels Project as well, as this looks ike a reimagining of the Timely Comics from the 1940s, with the Sub-mariner and the original Human Torch (an android), and the original Captain America).

Captain America had been in the news a few months ago... the original Steve Rogers had been killed, and a new one had taken his place who was insane...at that time I hadn't been moved to pick up an issue... but this time I was, because according to Glenn Beck the issue was classifying white working-class American survivalists as terrorists.

So I wanted to check it out and see for myself. The issue is called Two Americas.

(A history of Captain America - as presented in this comic book)
1940s - Steve Rogers, the real Captain America
1950s - Rogers in suspended animation, the later insane William Burnside becomes Captain America
1960s - the real Steve Rogers is discovered by the Avengers and thawed out, to become Captain America
2009 - Steve Rogers is killed (but not really) and Bucky, who was his partner during WWII as a teenager (and who died!) takes over the mantle of Captain America
2009 - The insane Captain America, William Burnside, returns and partners with the Watch Dogs, a group that apparently wants to overthrow America's government.

Of course, Boise, Idaho is known for being home to militia and survivalist (although if you ask me how I know this, I couldn't tell you, but I've read about it somewhere) and there are White Supremacist groups out there who are evil (but we never hear of the Black Supremacist grous that are also out there and are just as evil...)

Anyway, to this particular comic book. I've come in at least one issue behind the times, so who these Watch Dogs are isn't exactly clear. They are hardly militia men or border patriots taking it upon themselves to stop illegal aliens, considering they are wearing body armor. They are all white... but then it's Boise.

The false/insane Captain America, looks at a closed strip mall, at businesses out of business, and thinks, What is happening to my America. From this one can infer that he's not upset about immigrants or bloacks, just that everyone is out of work.

Then there's a Tax protest, and these protesters are seen (apparently) as loons to the sane Captain America and his partner, the Falcon. There's a mention of Teabaggers (as opposed to Tea Partyers), and so on. So - nothing about putting the US back to white America, and all about preventing evil taxes from destroying businesses.

The Falcon goes undercover to a business as an IRS agent saying he's doing an audit. He's thrown out of the bar by the sane CA (in disguise, as he wants to infiltrate the group) to the cheers of everyone. So...all the guy wants to do is audit the bar, not close it down, and this has everyone upset.



Interesting stance by the insane Captain America here. Typically, this is how a female character is made to stand, with a hip thrust out, guys usually stand with their weight centered. [Not related to my theme, here. It just is interesting - I dont' think I've ever seen a male character stand like this before. At least, not a super hero or villain character.]



"What the hell has happened to my America?" Note he's saying this while looking at closed-down businesses, not looking at an integrated neighborhood. The thrust of this insane CA is apparently not an integrated America, just the government and its taxes.



Note the character just to the left of the woman is black. But its the two men on the left who seem to be "the kind of Americans hes looking for."



How can they work if they live in tent cities? But apparently, some survivalists have deliberately taken to the woods of Idaho to avoid having to pay taxes.



A tea party. All white folks protesting.

Now, when Glenn Beck mentioned this panel, he seemed to think it was dissing the protesters. But the Falcon's words seem to be pointing out that it's not only the "loony Watch Dog" group that doesn't like the government. (The Watch Dogs being the group that apparently intends to overthrow the government)






The Falcon pretends to be a tax auditor, claiming that this barkeep had been sent several letters (when obviously he hadn't been). He's black, in an all-white bar.


And when he gets thrown out by Bucky (the sane Captain America, who used to be the real Captain America's side kick during WWII, of course.!!!), note he gets in a dig, calling the Falcon Obama.

And final notes, just on why some people buy comic books...



A yellow costume, which certainly shows how well-endowed this guy is.



Apparently each Captain America issue has two stories, one featuring Cap, the other Nomad, a female super hero who wears a practical crime-fighting uniform. Then Ariana - a Spiderman clone - comes along. And what's she wearing? A t-shirt, cut so as to show off her belly button. Do boys actually buy this comic just so they can look at her belly-button? Because jesus would anyone fight crime wearing a t-shirt like that, rather than armor or a bullet -proof and fire-proof consume covering one's entire body???

The Books of Josephine Tey

When I was oh, 13 or 14 (how I wish I'd started keeping a journal when I was that young, as I'd love to be remember the first time I read this or that book, saw this or that play or movie, etc.) I first read Elizabeth Peter's The Murders of Richard III - in which a group of enthusiasts who believe in Richard's innocence of the murder of his nephews in the Tower of London, foregather in an English country house to have a simple meeting, only to have sinister happenigs spoil their fun...but delight the reader, of course.

In that book, Peters mentions Josephine Tey's book The Daughter of Time, and since I had convened a fascination for Richard after reading her book, I next sought out The Daughter of Time, and liked that too. (Truth is the daughter of time.) After that, I read all of Tey's books. Although Wikipedia wasn't available at that time, the much-lamented Armchair Detective was - and it was for sale at my local book store devoted to selling used mysteries - Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore in Minneapolis, MN.

And one of those issues had an article about Elizabeth McIntosh, who used Josephine Tey as one of her two pseudonyms, so I knew the info that Wikipedia presents, if you check that source today:

She was born in Inverness, Scotland on July 25, 1896 and died from cancer on February 13, 1952.

She attended a physical training college in Birmingham, before becoming a teacher. However, her literary career began only when she was forced to give up regular work in order to care for her invalid father.

The most famous of her five mystery novels is The Daughter of Time, in which Grant, laid up in hospital, has friends research reference books and contemporary documents so that he can puzzle out the mystery of whether King Richard III of England murdered his nephews, the Princes in the Tower. Grant comes to the firm conclusion that King Richard was totally innocent of the death of the Princes.

The Daughter of Time was the last of her books published during her lifetime. A further crime novel, The Singing Sands, was found in her papers and published posthumously. After her death, proceeds from her estate, including royalties from her books, were assigned to the National Trust.

As Gordon Daviot she wrote about a dozen one-act plays and another dozen full-length plays, but only four of them were produced during her lifetime. Richard of Bordeaux was particularly successful, running for fourteen months and making a household name of its young leading man and director, John Gielgud.

Tey is mentioned in the 1982 Stephen King novella, Apt Pupil.

Tey appears as a main character in An Expert In Murder (Faber 2008) by Nicola Upson, a detective story woven around the original production of Richard of Bordeaux. The second novel in the series, Angel with Two Faces, was published in 2009; further novels are planned.

Angel With Two Faces is not yet available in the US, however, I hadn't known about Expert in Murder at all, until I read the wikipedia article in preparation for what will be my entry tomorrow - a Dated Death compendium for A Shilling For Candles.

The film rights for A Shilling For Candles, published in 1936, were purchased by Alfred Hitchcock, and it was turned into Young and Innocent, a fun little film that nevertheless had very little in common with its source material.

I started reading the book last night, and as it was published in 1936, and in England, there are lots of references that now, almost 75 years later, may not be apparently to the casual American reader. Hence, my Dated Death project, in which I annotate these books so that modern readers can more fully enjoy them. Of course, all books, dated or otherwise, are enjoyable, one can understand what's meant in the context of the paragraph, of course, but it does add a certain je ne sais quois to know the exact meaning of the reference or phrase used.

So look for that tomorrow, for A Shilling For Candles.

Asimov writes about A Whiff of Death

Isaac Asimov discusses his writing of A Whiff of Death in his autobiography, In Joy Still Felt. I reproduce some of what he says below:

[and there a reveal of the murderer, so beware]

On May 14, 1957, or thereabouts, Asimov began writing a straight mystery novel. He had been asked to do so by Isabel Taylor of Crime Club, Doubleday's mystery outlet (Doubleday being one of the publishers of his science and science fiction work.)

My first title was Sit With Death. After I had written two chapters, I sent it off to Isabelle Taylor and began a new science fiction story.

And

Meanwhile [while he was dealing with the threat of being fired from the Medical School because he did not have tenure, pg 99] all that month I had been racing to finish Sit With Death, my mystery novel. It was done on September 22, and I liked it a great deal. ...It had, not entirely coincidently, a subplot in which the professorial hero struggled to obtain tenure.

However, on October 4, Isabelle Taylor told him she didn't like the book, and rejected it. It was the first time Doubleday had ever rejected one of his books.

He retitled it A Whiff of Death and sent it to other publishers, but it was coninually rejected. (This despite the fact that at this time he was extremely well known as a science and science fiction writer. He was also doing battle with the Boston University Medical School at this time.)

I discovered, eventually, that the chief flaw in the book from the standpoint of the publishers was the inadequacy of the motive for the murder. It involved a PhD student faking results, and that seemed a tiny sin to most editorial readers.

When I gave fellowe professors an inkling of the plot, however, they shuddered and turned away from me, obviously suspecting some deep-seated perverse element in my nature even to imagine so heinous a crime. Too little for one group of people, too much for another.

Finally, Avon accepted the book, perhaps - thought Asimov - because they hoped to get some science fiction books out of him as well.

Several months pass.

On that December 10 trip to New York, I picked up an advance copy of the Avon paperback edition of my mystery. They called it The Death Dealers, a totally inapprpriate name. What's more, there was on the cover a beautiful woman holding a gun-which was fine except there was no beautiful women in the story and no gun. I complained, but the Avon editor told me the cover was simply a device to label the book as a mystery and it didn't necessarily have anything to do with the story.

The book was not a success in its original printing (because of the title, Asimov believes), but as Asimov says:

The poor reception that The Death Dealers received, both in manuscript and in print, deterred me [from writing a sequel with his police officer detective, Jack Doheny.]

He tells another story:

When I wrote the book, I was very anxious not to have anyone think I was satirizing the medical school [where he was teaching at Boston University School of Medicine], so I kept my mind firmly fixed on Columbia University [which he had attended], its physical plant, its faculty, even some of the graduate students I had known. It never occurred to me that anyone at Columbia would recognize the descriptions, but of course they did. It became a game there, trying to guess who the various characters were, and everyone wanted a copy.

and

On November 24, I had agreed to talk aty Columbia University the next March. Since I had left Columbia 15 years before, I have returned only once or twice and it hd become foreign territory to me. I was not foreign to the Columbia students, apparently.

I was to talk to the chemistry students in particular, and the young man who invited me told me with great glee that various faculty members would come and, in particular, that John M. "Pop" Nelson would be there. Pop Nelson had taught me undergraduate organic chemistry a quarter century before, and it was his appearance that I had taken in vain in my picture of the murderer in The Death Dealers.

What's more, the student referred to Pop Nelson as "Cap Anson," the name I had used in the book, and said that Nelson had read the book. I was horrified, and wrote to ask for assurance that Nelson had not been angered before I would agree to come. [Asimov had assumed he'd been dead for years when he wrote the book.]

Was the book's initial failure because of its titla, The Death Dealers? Asimov received the rights back from the initial publisher, and sold it to someone else for a reprint, when it was given his original title, A Whiff of Death, and that's when all the reprints came.

A Whiff of Death, by Isaac Asimov

A Whiff of Death is out of print, but of course it can be had through a wide variety of used book stores on the Internet, including Amazon and Abe.com.

It was first published in 1958 (as The Death Dealers) and went through several reprintings, though as mentioned above its out of print now.

I'm really ambivelent about whether or not I like the book or not, although I am probably influenced by my opinion of Isaac Asimov (love his non-fiction, don't care much for his fiction. No - not even the Foundation Series or the Positronic Robots!)

Well, let's get to the review first. I'll save the commentary for a sequel to this blog entry, which I'll post tomorrow.

Louis Brade is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at a certain New York university. He is based on Isaac Asimov, and his experiences at the Boston University School of Medicine, where he was an assistant professor while also pursuing his writing career.

Brade is a mild man, who has been an Assistant Professor for eleven years. Life at home is somewhat difficult, as his wife, Doris, wants him to get tenure (by being promoted to Associate Professor) to give them security. As an assistant professor, he can be dispensed with at the end of each school year for any reason or no reason. With tenure, he can't be.

Unfortunately, as the book opens, Brade has just discovered his prize PhD student Ralph Neufeld, dead in the laboratory. He'd been working with various chemicals, and had died from inhaling cyanide. And Brade, knowing of Neufeld's idiosyncrasies in preparing his various concoctions for experiments, knows that his death could not have been an accident...it must have been murder...and that as his advisor, he, Brade, is the most likely suspect.

In order to save not only his chance at tenure but also his freedom, Brade must discover who really kiled Neufeld, and why.

A Whiff of Death is a fascinating view into the inner world of higher education - where professors have (academic) life-or-death over their students, and everyone is anxious for tenure, and, in the 1950s at least, faculty wives bullied their husbands over status and tenure (because, of course, being unable to have careers of their own, their only status depended on that of their husband's).

There is a lot of scientific jargon throughout the book, but not so much as to grow weary - at least not to the average mystery reader, who has the use of his or her brain above that of the mere romance reader! - and Asimov does play fair with the reader (about on a par with his Black Widowers mysteries....the clues are there, but well obscured).

If you like Asimov's writing style, and you like mysteries, you'll enjoy A Whiff of Death, Asimov's first "straight" mystery novel. (His first science fiction/mystery novel was The Caves of Steel, published in 1954.)

Here are the first few paragraphs from the book:

Death sits in the chemistry laboratory and a million people sit with him and don't mind.

They forget he's there.

Louis Brade, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, would, however, never forget that little fact again. He slumped in the chair in the cluttered student laboratory, sitting with Death, and very conscious of it. More conscious of it, in fact, now that the police were gone and the corridors were empty once more. More conscious of it now that the lab had been cleared of the physical evidence of mortality in the shape of Ralph Neufeld's body.

But Death was still there. He hadn't been touched.

Brade removed his glasses and polished them slowly with a clean handkerchief that he kept for that one use, then paesed to look at the double reflection, one in each lens, each broadened in the middle by the trick of glass-curvature so that his spare face looked full and his wide, thin lipped mouth wider.

No deeper marks, he wondered. Hair as dark as it was three hours ago, face lined about the eyes (as was fitting at forty-two), but no more lined than before all this?

Surely, one couldn't deal with Death so closely and not be marked in some way.

And here are a few covers:






And in a test for future use, just to see if Kindle can handle umlauts and things:

ä
ë
ö
ü
β
Ű

A List of Mystery Blogs

(culled, I confess, from EQMM's Blog Bytes, by Bill Crider)

Divided into a few categories:

Novels in Blog Form (Serialized)

General (reviews plus discussions of life, the universe and everything)

Mystery Book Review Blogs

Blogs from Around the World

Blogs that share book covers

Novels in blog form (serialized)

Treason At Hanford: http://texaspulpwriter.blogspot.com

General (reviews but also other things

Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine: http://billcrider.blogspot.com

Patti Abbott: http://pattinase.blogspot.com

The Existentialist Man: http://existentialistman.blogspot.com

The Kindle (Book) Report: http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com

Scott D. Parker: http://scottdparker.blogspot.com

Mystery Book Review Blogs

Eastern Standard Crime: http://easternstandardcrime.blogspot.com (no longer being updated, but the archives are there.)

Pulp Serenade: http://pulpserenade.blogspot.com

Meritorious Mysteries: http://mysteryheel.blogspot.com

Blogs from Around the World

The Tainted Archives: http://tainted-archive.blogspot.com (England)

Blogs that share book covers

Rex Parker: http://salmongutter.blogspot.com

Judge a Book By its Cover: http://judgeabook.blogspot.com

Book Scans: http://www.bookscans.com (a website, and an irritating one. The index is of the Publishers, not the books, so its impossible to know if a certain book is there unless you know the number under which it was published by a certain pubisher!)

The Friends of Mr. Cairo

The song that inspired this blog.

Jon Anderson (of Yes) and Vangelis. Album: The Friends of Mr. Cairo



Buy it here:

Rewind, by Bruce Kimmel

Rewind, by Bruce Kimmel. Authorhouse. 2005

Jonathan Goldman is a successful producer of Broadway sountracks. For the last three years, he has run his own company, Twyckam Island, but the money to start up the business was provided by two investors, Dick and Deborah Bowman. There are a couple of thorns in his side; his useless secretary, Paula Finkel; his payroll manager, Bob Noone, who keeps wantinng to be given more things to do for the company, and Deborah Bowman, the bipolar (manic-depressive) woman who thinks Twyckam Island belongs to her and keeps referring to Jonathan as her employee.

Abruptly, however, Jonathan's world goes to hell in a handbasket. Paula quits, after sending him an email in which she accuses him of malfeasance and of inappropriate behavior toward her, and Dick and Deborah Bowman fire him, after finagling the business papers so that his name is no longer listed as an owner of Twyckam Island, but simply as that employee that Deborah had always claimed he was.

His life spirallig out of control - even if he sues the Bowman's he'll lose, as they're wealthy and can afford to keep the suit dragging on in the courts until he's bankrupt - Jonathan decides there's only one way out. He drives his car over a cliff.

Then....the people who caused him such misery begin to die...

Here are the first several paras of the opening chapter:

It was excruciating. She was on her fifth take; her pitchy singing and her interpretation of the song was, to put it in the nicest possible way, putrid. Suddenly, she stopped singing.

"Sorry, I need more me. Is that possible?" she asked, adjusting her headphones for the umpteenth time.

I looked over at my long-time engineer, Marty. My long-time engineer Marty was staring at the console, looking like he was about to throw up the cannelloni he'd had for lunch.

"She needs more her," I said.

Marty looked at me with his usual Marty look - the look of someone who was troubled with constant constipation (he wasn't - it was just his look). "I can give her more her until her ears bleed-it ain't gonna help."

I pressed the talkback button. "More you coming up," I said, with as much niceness as I could muster.

Marty turned a knob on the console, rewound the tape and started the track up again. The voice of Teddy, the conductor, came over the speakers, counting off -- "One, two, three," and, a beat later, the band played a four-bar intro. Callie dove into the song. Unfortunately, it wasn't a song you should dive into; it was a gentle song, a sweet song, a tender song, and she was singing it as if she was Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit. The vocal quality was laden with heaviness and darkness and weirdness, not tomention too much volume.It was stultifying, and it had been stultifying since take one. She stopped again.

Bruce Kimmel certainly is in his milieu in Rewind. A former actor (he had guest-starring roles in several sitcoms during the 1970s) Kimmel is also a singer (recording under the name Guy Haines) and a successful record - and now CD - producer. He produeced a hundred or so Broadway albums for Varese Sarabande, then, after they closed their division, he started his own label, Fynsworth Alley, usng start up money from a wealthy couple who were his investors...just like in Rewind.

Indeed, Rewind is semi-autobiographical, as Kimmel relates exactly what happened to him and Fynsworth Alley. His investors forced him out of his own label, they filed a lawsuit against him which almost bankrupted him, and after he was out of the picture they drove the label into the ground with their ineptness. He was driven to despair and felt like killing himself and them... but of course never did so, except in print. (Would that more people would take such a therapeutic step - write their murders instead of commit them.)

Kimmel writes relatively well, though he does have an annoying affectation -- all of his characters repeat themselves. (As for example in the example above, when Jonathan Goldman is talking about his sound engineer:

I looked over at my long-time engineer, Marty. My long-time engineer Marty was staring at the console, looking like he was about to throw up the cannelloni he'd had for lunch.

It would be okay if just one character did it - as for example Jonathan Goldman - as an example of his affectations, but every character does it. (Goldman narrates the first half of the book, but after he drives his car off a cliff, subsequent chapters are narrated by other people...using a technique derived (successfully) from Sunset Boulevard. ) And every character who takes up the narration thereafter does it, too.

For example, here's Brian Levitt:

A week after the funeral I got a call from James Bedford telling me the Bowmans were dropping the lawsuit. If I was willing to drop the countersuit, we could all just sign off and be done with it. While I would sincerely have loved to take that bitch to court, we all signed off and were done with it.

The book is certainly fascinating in what it reveals about the music business. But, knowing that he's written it based on true events, the characters are somewhat irritating. Useless secretary Paula Finkel, for example. If she was so useless, why didn't he fire her long ago, instead of letting her stick around being useless? Indeed, that would have made more sense. He fires her, and that's what prompts her to send him and the Bowmans the email in which she accuses him of stealing from the company and acting inappropriately with her. But instead, it's her choice to quit, and she writes the email out of sheer vindictiveness.

Bob Noone is simply an inherently dishonest individual. The name "Noone" must be a dig at the real-lfe payroll guy (no one, a nobody) who took over Goldman's company but wasn't any good at the producing end and thus everyone ended up hating him.

But the characters of Dick and Deborah Bowman? Deborah is a racist (he's Jewish) and she's homophobic (his sound engineer is gay) and yet he puts up with her regular stream of abuse instead of telling her to buy him out, or offering to buy them out? Doesn't say much for Goldman's character.

Kimmel has written another mystery for mature readesr - Writer's Block, and two mysteries for kids featuring the character Adriana Hoffstetter. He publishes them all himself, through AuthorHouse, although this must not be held against him. The books are professionally edited, and while Kimmel's affectations and his ego can get a little wearing, the mysteries themselves are well-written. I think its simply Kimmel's desire to have complete control over his work that makes him publish the books himself, not that they're unworthy of being purchased by a "real" publisher - although said publisher might have given him an editor who could have gotten him to tone down his repetition schtick.

Unfortunately the prices for the boois are a bit high.... I'd be willing to read the Hofstetter books if I could get them for $6 a piece, but not for $15!

The Fiction Makers

I'm watching my favorite Saint episode -- (The Saint, starring Roger Moore as Simon Templar) -- "The Fiction Makers". Indeed, I like it so much that I took the name of one of the books mentioned in it, Volcano Seven, for the name of my own site - a tribute to diabolical masterminds everywhere.

Having said that, I must admit that the story has one major flaw that has me screaming at the TV screen more often than not.

The plot of the story is that Amos Klein is the author of several "caper books" in which an organization called Sword pulls off a variety of robberies, only to be foiled by hero Charles Lake.

In real life, Amos Klein is a woman, so her publisher is anxious to keep her real identity secret.

Also in real life, an organization of criminals led by a man calling himself Warlock, has actually created Sword, and using "Klein's" methods, have actually pulled off several robberies successfully. But they want a big score, and for that they need the real Amos Klein to write them a story.

So they attempt to kidnap "him" on the same day that Simon Templar is visiting her home in the country. They think Simon is Amos Klein, and the girl is his secretary. So they take them both.

So far all well and good. Except, thoughout the rest of the two part episode, Simon continually asks the girl, "What should we do," and she continually says, "I don't know."

I just wanted to slap the screenwriters silly. This woman is a genius, she's obviously written books with plots that work - otherwise the real life Sword would not be successful - so she should be the one coming up with a few ideas, anyway. But noooo. It's Simon, every time. Every time I hear Simon saying, "Well, what should we do?" - actually paying this woman the tribute of thinking she can come up with some good ideas - she always says, "I don't know." I just growl with frustration.

However, as I said, I love the main idea of the story - that a group of people can admire a fictional organizatoin so much rhat they come to emulate it.

If I ever win the lottery, or in other ways earn a million dollars or so, I shall buy an island and covert it into the same set used in the Gerry Anderson TV series Thunderbirds...see if I don't!