If
you’re a writer, one of the ways you keep in shape — mentally, in any event —
is by reading a lot. There may be an exception to the rule that good writers
are good readers, but I can’t think of one offhand.
Having
just published my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, a little over three months ago, I find myself reading
more mysteries than usual lately. As I consider writing a second book, reading
what others have written in the genre helps me keep my head in the game, so to
speak.
In
a typical month it would not be unusual for me to read, for example, Eric
Ambler, Agatha Christie, Donna Leon, Louise Penney and Henning Mankell. I like
to mix the Brits, the Yanks, and authors from abroad, or who set their stories
abroad, and am partial to writers who have stood the test of time but open to
checking out the new guy. After all, I’m one of the new guys now.
The Obsession and the Procedural
Here’s
a look at three books I read and liked in October. We’ll begin with Thirteen Steps Down by Ruth Rendell,
published in 2004. Rendell, probably best known for her Inspector Wexford
series, is one of the grandmasters of the genre. The Wexford books are stylish
whodunits, with a perceptive eye cast to the vagaries of modern English life.
Thirteen Steps Down is a stand-alone
book and belongs to a subset of books she’s written that follow a non-police
character whose life is unraveling. Here, the protagonist is an
exercise-machine repairman who seems normal but quirky at the beginning of the
book and by the end has gone crazy over an obsession and committed a murder.
It’s a testament to Rendell’s skills that the former is almost scarier than the
latter.
Maj
Sjowall and Per Wahloo are a husband and wife Swedish writing team who wrote
ten Martin Beck police procedurals together before Wahloo died in 1975. The Laughing Policeman is the fourth in
the series, published in 1968. It follows a group of Stockholm detectives as
they attempt to solve a massacre on a city bus where one of the victims was a
fellow detective. Over a period of months, the clues gradually and painfully
come together to form a surprising picture. It’s a near-perfect book, and I
don’t say that often. Jonathan Franzen liked it enough to write an appreciative
introduction for a recent Vintage Crime edition.
Found Among the Used Books
Last
weekend I read Deadstick by Terence
Faherty, first published in 1991. I’d never heard of the book or the author,
but came upon it while browsing the racks at Logos used bookstore in Santa Cruz
and picked it up for two bucks. It’s easier to “find” a book like that in a
bookstore than on Amazon. The books and their publishers give off clues in
their physical form that you just don’t get on a computer.
Deadstick follows the adventures of Owen
Keane, an ADD researcher for a Manhattan law firm retained to look into a
40-year-old plane crash that killed two people. As you may already have
guessed, there was more to the “accident” than authorities discovered at the
time, and Keane is kept busy following that trail and attempting to sort out
his relationship with a nymphomaniac red-haired librarian named Marilyn. It’s a
good book (all three were), and now that I’ve discovered Faherty and Owen Keane
at the used bookstore, I look forward to following further adventures through the
bookstore and Kindle. That’s the way of the book-shopping world these days.
