Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!

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.