Book Reviews – Page 8 – The Bookshop Blog

The Battle of the Royal Biographies

September 21, 2012 by Bruce K. Hollingdrake

This is a guest post from Will Noble

Queen vs. Empress

One of them is a living queen; the other is a dead empress. But which has the better biography? We
take a look at critical response to Elizabeth the Queen and Catherine the Great to decide which is the
royal write-up you should take home this fall.

Royal is in at the moment. What, with the wedding of Will and Kate last year, Elizabeth II’s Diamond
Jubilee in June – not to mention the bizarre wedding of the 85 year-old Duchess of Alba last October
– everyone wants a bite of the bling. Two of the latest titles to capitalize on this are Sally Bedell
Smith’s Elizabeth the Queen (a portrait of England’s current monarch that hopes to shed new light
on her), and Robert K. Massie’s Catherine the Great, an historical account of the 18th century Russian
empress who was notorious for her many lovers.

They may both have enjoyed long reigns (Elizabeth’s is still going of course), but if critic ratings
are anything to go by, it’s the Russian’s which is by far the more fascinating. Elizabeth the Queen
earns just 57%, compared to the 79% of Massie’s biography, with Bloomberg comically stating
that “…prose comes at you like a spray of saliva, its reverence bordering on rapture…” and My
SanAntonio fully deriding the bio as belonging “…in the same category of sleazy tabloid journalism
that prowls for opportunity to make quick, easy bucks.”

Songs For The Missing

September 21, 2012September 20, 2012 by Diane Plumley

One of our ferrets disappeared. One minute he was in the Queens apartment, the next I couldn’t locate him when putting the ferrets back in their cage at night. I’d not made them go into the cage for a couple of days, so I didn’t know when he actually went missing. The entire apartment was ferret proofed, meaning, all areas of danger were closed up, no holes in walls, or in back of the stove or refrigerator. At first, I had no misgivings–ferrets sleep deeply in burrowing spaces–so my husband and I started our routine of checking all the typical spots–in clothes left lying around, under the bed sheets, below the chairs or sofa, and in closets, although they usually weren’t open. When these didn’t pan out and after we had checked and rechecked, we then took the entire place apart, becoming more and more alarmed when he didn’t turn up. By around 4 in the morning, we realized he just wasn’t there.

The Big Sleep–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

November 24, 2012September 15, 2012 by Diane Plumley

The Big Sleep—Dashiell Hammett–1939–in print

I admit, the film is one of my all time favorites. I will watch it each and every time it plays on Turner Classic Movies. Happily, Mr. Turner didn’t colorize this film–or if he did, they don’t bother ruining our viewing pleasure by showing that version. I can enter at the middle, and become glued to the set, or even at the very end, when there’s just a few more moves to be made, and I’ll still opt to watch it rather than some first run program. I love it for the very reason some critics hate it–the convoluted plot. So layered, that even Chandler was hard put to explain whodunit for one of the murders in the book and on screen. I love the actors, naturally–I mean, how could one not love Bogart and Bacall–and wow–the sister to Bacall’s character, Martha Vickers, steals the show–which is why they went back and added more scenes for Bacall to shine in. Character actors galore, and an early Dorothy Malone add up to the perfect mystery film. And lest I forget, the biblio aspect of the story is just the scotch in old man Sternwood’s glass, he can’t drink.

Laura. Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

November 24, 2012September 8, 2012 by Diane Plumley

Laura—Vera Caspary–1943 (it ran as a serial in a magazine in 1942 before being published as a novel)–used paperback

I recently read another Vera Caspary title, Bedelia, and the only similarity to Laura is the author. Bedelia is a nice character study of a beguiling black widow, whose latest husband finally catches on. It holds neither the suspense or surprise that Laura does. Since a great deal of the impact of the novel, Laura, is intertwined with the plot–I’ll need to give a general *Spoiler Alert” for the entire article! That’s assuming you are one of the few people who never heard of or saw the classic film starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, nor saw the billion rip-offs on episodic television.

Chick Lit Of The Sea

August 30, 2012August 30, 2012 by Jas Faulkner

By Jas Faulkner

For a long time, popular wisdom dictated that genre fiction for girls consisted of dainty prose about the vagaries of friendships and horses that no one else could tame. There were exceptions: the intrepid sleuths and a few other heroes who occasionally saw print. There were even a few girls in R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series who didn’t mind taking on whatever was growling at the foot of the basement stairs or becoming monsters themselves. Love it or hate it, this would change in 2005 when the first of a series of novels by Stephanie Meyer dominated nearly every sales indicator. In spite of tepid to unabashedly negative critical response, in 2005, seventeen million people, mostly mothers and daughters, bought copies of Twilight.

Vietnam Echos in The Mercy Killers By Lisa Reardon

August 29, 2012August 29, 2012 by Diane Plumley

Lisa Reardon is on my Best 100 Mysteries of All Time list for her first book Billy Dead. If I’d read The Mercy Killers before I finalized the list, she may have had two entries. The Mercy Killers is not an easy read, and yet, it compels and rivets the reader with little action other than the characters living their lives, as dysfunctional as they are. The toughness comes from the unrelenting negativity surrounding the crowd at McGurk’s Taproom in Ypsilanti, MI. The book starts with what feels like a forced addition–forced by an editor or publisher to encapsulate the plot before the story even begins, to give the reader a broad idea of what lies ahead–trouble. And war.

Holy Crap! Another Book That Could Be On My List

August 22, 2012August 22, 2012 by Diane Plumley

This is the very reason it took me so long to create the Best 100 Mysteries of All Time list. I keep reading. If I keep reading, especially vintage crime fiction, I’m bound to hit a couple of ‘holy crap!’ books along the way. A ‘holy crap’ is one where at the end I yell, holy crap! More likely in language a bit more salty. I finished a ‘holy crap!’ book about one hour ago, and felt I needed to express my frustration at not being able to add, switch, change, or somehow acknowledge the book in that list.

But the very fact that so many books are that good, should make me happy. And it does, while reading. However, my thinking tank starts placing it before one book, or after another, knocking something off, but then I think, ‘no, that book was really fascinating, book B should go, and so on.’ And the list would never be finished. I had to end that kind of thinking, and set the list, without room for more reads down the line.

The Chill, Ross MacDonald, 1963 shouldn’t have been that good. I’ve read Kenneth Millar before. Millar as Ross MacDonald has been praised as the next thing to Hammett and Chandler in PI stories. But I’ve not found him that compelling. Good, not great. I think his wife, Margaret Millar is a far superior writer, who although acknowledged by the mystery community, hasn’t the place in history her husband enjoys. They both came from a little Canadian town, married and moved to Southern California, where most of their books are set. His is the straight forward detective tale, hers are more psychological and character driven. Her stories are haunting, and not easily forgotten. Or they can be funny as hell.

The Thin Man. Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

August 18, 2012 by Diane Plumley

The Thin Man—Dashiell Hammett-1933-IP

Some may say, well, hell, this books is a given, of course it belongs on the list. But are they thinking of the written word, or the iconic film starring William Powell and Myrna Loy? Is there a huge difference between the two? I’d say, no, not a huge difference, but differences there are. It’s hard to look at title such as this one and imagine how a reader would see it sans the imitators and film adaptations. Hammett’s imagination brought forth the sparkling upper class couple whose life seems full of drink, parties, and more drink. Written from Nick Charles’ point of view, the sentences are crisp, quick and easy going. The plot starts out within the first paragraph as a young lady approaches Charles at a NY hotel bar, while he’s waiting for his rich wife Nora, to return from shopping. The ‘thin’ man of the title is not Nick Charles, as many have believed, but the victim, or one of them. The young lady’s father is missing, his secretary and lover is found dead, and Nick insists he’s not been a detective since his wife’s father died and all those millions needed looking after.