Simenon: Maigret and More

The biggest news in European ebooks last month, as I see it, was the release in France of the first 41 ebooks by Georges Simenon (1903 - 1989), the best-selling French-language author of the 20th century, and by some ways of reckoning the most prolific novelist of any era. Now and through 25 July 2012 the price of these French-language ebooks has been cut in half: individual ebooks now sell for less than four euros, three-packs for less than eight.

I've read, and mostly admired, several dozens of Simenon's books. There are so many of them, and the experience of them is so inseparable from French or European life, that his readers (and especially those of us with a few decades of reading under our belts) find they can't keep track of the numbers. (Simenon himself couldn't say how many he'd written.)

If you read French, you're likely to know a great deal about Simenon already. To you I'll just mention two of my favorite Simenons, one featuring Inspector Maigret and one non-series novel. L'affaire Saint-Fiacre brings the seasoned, adult Maigret back to his childhood home to investigate a crime involving a noblewoman whom he once idealized. Le chat (which was memorably filmed with Simone Signoret and Jean Gabin) is a powerful study of a claustrophobic marriage. (The links provided are to Amazon.fr. Kindle users may want to check their usual Amazon store, and users of other e-readers can get more information at the 'Simenon en numérique' website.)

And if you don't read French? There's an excellent selection of Simenon ebooks in translation--except that the US ebook prices for all the Maigrets available in English exceed the ceiling I've set for most linking from this blog. (See here for an earlier discussion of ebook prices, especially of the 'gouge zone'.) But consider, among the non-series Simenons available in e-format, the very early Tropic Moon (which will remind you of Heart of Darkness, in a good way), Act of Passion (which takes the form of a letter from a man convicted of murder to the examining magistrate who handled his case) or The President (Simenon's most overtly political novel).

And, since we're stressing the non-series novels (now referred to more and more as romans durs), let me mention the best recent piece I've found on them, by John McIntyre.

I'll close with a link to Simenon's 1955 Paris Review interview, which includes among its extensive riches a documentation of Simenon's work schedule and output that is if anything more amazing almost 60 years later. Among other things, Simenon wrote faster than many of us read. But in the process he created a world of indelible atmosphere and unforgettable relationships. As readers and as writers, we're still struggling to catch up.

'Discovering' Boris Akunin

Imagine a young aspirant on the lowest rung of the Czarist police bureaucracy, 20-year-old Erast Fandorin, recently orphaned, indisputably wet behind the ears, stumbling (embarrassing 'foundation garment' and all) into his first case, which seems to involve a peripatetic game of what later centuries will call 'Russian roulette' (but which Russians in 1876 still call 'American roulette')... and a femme fatale for whom he's no match. At the outset, there's little to suggest that Fandorin has a big future (a distinguished career extending 35 years and counting, in which he will never solve the same kind of puzzle twice) or that his first case, The Winter Queen, will launch one of the most successful 'franchises' in international crime fiction. But in the Erast Fandorin novels, and in the other works of Boris Akunin (born 1956), appearances are often deceiving. Fandorin, it turns out, is not only brilliant (we suspected that) but also an astonishing polyglot, a master of disguise, a lover and, on occasion and in the line of duty, a killer....

I've been away from blogging for much longer than I intended, but at least I don't believe I've been wasting time. Among other things, I managed, in the course of my holiday hiatus, to 'discover' Akunin. I put 'discover' in quotation marks because, although I was reading him for the first time, he's been publishing novels for well over 20 years and is the best-known Russian author of genre fiction. He combines qualities of Dostoevsky and Nabokov, not to mention the great series novelists of other countries, whose success he rivals.

He's also amazingly prolific. His historical series about Erast Fandorin runs to a dozen volumes, many of them already published by Random House in the US and Hachette subsidiary Orion in the UK--and this does not count other series under the Akunin name or other works published under other names. ('Boris Akunin' is itself a pseudonym, and it would take an entire blogpost just to explore its multiple meanings.)

Different Akunin series have different organizational principles, slowly disclosed by Akunin through little clues, then made explicit in interviews and essays. The novels in one series, for example, illustrate what Akunin sees as the various possible sub-genres for a crime novel, at the rate of one novel for each type; another series parallels cinematic genres. In addition, different novels and series explore different eras: for example, the first Erast Fandorin novel, The Winter Queen, is set in 1876 and the latest in 1911; another series features Fandorin's British grandson in (mostly) the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Three of Akunin's novels have been filmed (lavishly, by all accounts) in Russia; The Winter Queen is currently getting the Hollywood treatment, for better or worse.

If you'd like to experience for yourself what all the excitement is about, I'd recommend to US readers this trade-paperback edition, and to UK readers this ebook edition, of The Winter Queen. (US customers of iBooks may find this link useful because of a database peculiarity that makes Akunin more difficult to search for otherwise; check prices carefully.)

Ed McBain and Jo Nesbø, and a P.S. on Exclusivity

Jo Nesbø (born 1960) must be the crime novelist I write about most often here, and I suspect I've never even mentioned Ed McBain (1926-2005; also known as Evan Hunter, the name under which he wrote Blackboard Jungle and the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Birds). So when a new-to-the-US Nesbø novel goes on sale on the same day that a dozen of McBain's 87th Precinct mysteries, some of them over 50 years old, become available on Kindle (in the US)--you might expect me to cover the 'new' Nesbø and save the 'old' McBains for another day.

Actually, both writers are important to me. Nesbø's the newest writer I'm fervently 'following'; I followed McBain almost as devotedly for the last 20 years of his life and went to great lengths to find and read every last 87th Precinct and Matthew Hope novel from McBain's backlist. McBain seemed to write faster than Nesbø does, and a McBain novel is faster to read than a Nesbø; McBain's Steve Carella looks like a particularly straight arrow if you contrast him with Nesbø's antiheroic Harry Hole; but both writers are significant masters of the police procedural novel.

Today's new Nesbø is Harry Hole's eighth case, The Leopard, and it is very much a follow-up to The Snowman. (For the Harry Hole lineup, see here; for more on Nesbø, continue here.) It's another serial-killer novel, and, if anything, even more violent than its predecessor. Between the two books, Harry has left Oslo and begun a new life in Hong Kong. He has to be fetched back home to help his old colleagues unravel an unusually complicated case: you may find that it looks like Thomas Harris on the outside but more like Christie or Ellery Queen at its core (which, for me, is 'a good thing').

If you've read The Snowman, you probably know whether you want to read The Leopard. If you're new to Nesbø, start with the earliest available novel in the series. (Again, they're all listed here; for US readers of ebooks, the earliest currently available is The Redbreast, which introduces characters who appear in all the subsequent books.)

First edition (Permabooks [imprint
of Pocket Books], 1956)

I should mention, for the benefit of newer readers of this blog, that I've vowed not to advertise ebooks that I consider to be overpriced, and I've encouraged others not to pay double-digit prices for ebooks. That's why I link to the hardback edition of The Leopard, not the ebook. I consider even The Snowman to be overpriced in ebook in the US, although the price will probably come down in the months ahead. [UPDATE: As of 18 January 2012, the US publisher has lowered the ebook prices of each of these novels to $9.99.]

Alternatively, consider taking advantage of Amazon.com's reduced prices for one of the two earliest McBain novels just released, The Mugger (1956) or The Con Man (1957), just $4.99 each for Kindle. They're early books, but in them McBain has already hit the stride he maintained through over 50 novels in the 87th Precinct series alone. Before Hill Street Blues and before all the Law and Orders and all the C.S.I.s--and grittier than any of them--there was the ongoing saga of squad room and crime scene, extending into the private lives of the dozen or so police detectives in a single precinct in a city that doesn't call itself New York but that corresponds to New York in every detail. (Show business trivia: Q: What was Gena Rowlands' breakthrough role? A: Arguably, as Steve Carella's wife Teddy in the 1960-61 TV series 87th Precinct, adapted from the McBain novels.) In every novel there are two or three storylines that may well never converge--just like the storylines in real life…

Print editions of all 12 McBains (and the others available for Kindle next week and the week after) will appear in 2012 and will be distributed throughout the US book trade. (McBain's novels about attorney Matthew Hope, beginning with Goldilocks, will follow in September 2012.) But the ebooks will remain Kindle exclusives for the foreseeable future. The publisher, after all, is Thomas & Mercer, Amazon's new crime imprint.

(One side benefit of Amazon's new investment in [or of] McBain is the page Perspectives on McBain, where Stephen King, Lawrence Block and many others assess their indebtedness to him.)

P.S.: Exclusivity, a budding issue at Amazon, is not necessarily a good thing. I, like most other independent authors, have the option of giving Amazon the exclusive right to distribute A Kiss Before You Leave Me for at least three months. Kiss would be enrolled in a new program that lends ebooks for free to Amazon Prime members, and I'd receive a prorated share of a multimillion-dollar royalty package set aside by Amazon--but I'd have to pull Kiss from the Apple iBookstore, Sony's Reader Store, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. No one of those stores sells as many copies of Kiss as the various Amazons combined--but ebooks should work for access, not exclusivity. Excluding those other vendors would mean limiting the access of readers who depend on an EPUB-friendly device--the majority of ebook readers internationally. I don't fault Amazon for offering exclusive terms--but exclusivity would not be the best arrangement for me and my readers.

Patricia Highsmith, in Good Company (and Not a Ripley in Sight)

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) used to come up in (my) conversation most often as an example of a US-born author far more prized in the UK and on the continent of Europe than in the US. The American reading public, usually attracted to authors whose books have been successfully adapted for the big screen, seemed to make an exception for Highsmith, whose first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), was almost immediately turned into one of Alfred Hitchcock's most memorable films (1951). She went on to publish a total of 22 novels (including The Talented Mr Ripley [1955] and four follow-ups) and seven volumes of short stories, and many of the novels were filmed during her lifetime. US publishers offered rack-sized paperback editions of Highsmith only now and then, whereas she's been a staple of comparable editions in the UK, France and German-speaking countries for 40 years or so. (She lived in Europe from 1963 until her death.)

The success of Anthony Minghella's 1999 film version of The Talented Mr Ripley seemed finally to put Highsmith on the map for US readers--and her arrival in multiple new US ebook editions this year can only help.

A couple of months ago, Highsmith's superb first collection of short fiction, Eleven (1970; also known as The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories) and one of her more accessible stand-alone novels, the twice-filmed Cry of the Owl (1962), appeared in Kindle and EPUB editions.

Now comes the newest Highsmith book to be available for Kindle and nook: The Tremor of Forgery (1969), often cited as her best novel--so cited, for example, by Graham Greene, who knew a thing or two about moral ambiguities and 'apprehensive' emotional climates in the world of expatriates. In atmosphere, Tremor will remind some readers of the Camus of The Stranger (also known as The Outsider or L'étranger), others of Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky; Bowles was another US-born novelist to whom international readers were more loyal than were readers stateside)--and not just because of Tremor's North African setting. Highsmith's protagonist is Howard Ingham, an American writer who goes to Tunisia to work on a screenplay and, when the film project collapses, stays on to work on a novel. He becomes entangled in (or, it seems at times, liberated by) moral ambiguities. There's a crime or two, and there's seepage in both directions through whatever membrane might separate Ingham's life and work.

For fans of Highsmith (or of Bowles, Greene and Camus), or of 'international' fiction in general, The Tremor of Forgery is a promising choice. But let me mention two other crime classics now available as ebooks, from two grand masters of the Golden Age of crime fiction in Great Britain.

First, Green for Danger (1944) by Christianna Brand (1907-1988). Murder in an operating room during World War II. The quintessential fair-play classic puzzle, and Brand's best-known book. Memorably filmed (1946) with Alastair Sim as Inspector Cockrill.

Second, The Franchise Affair (1948) by Josephine Tey (1896-1952). Half-serious caveat: this is the most nearly Highsmithian novel by the always inventive Tey--and, curiously, the only Tey novel currently available as an ebook in the US. Still, it was named by the Crime Writers' Association in 1990 as one of the 100 best crime novels of all time. A young woman accuses two other women, mother and daughter, of holding her prisoner and mistreating her for a month on their remote country estate. Is she the victim of false imprisonment and abuse, or are they the victims of a false accusation?

Perry Mason Comes to Kindle

One of the strangest things about my childhood was the number of 25-cent Perry Mason paperbacks I went through while still in elementary school. I can't give you an exact count, but I'd say I'd bought and read at least 30 of them before the cover price went up to 35 cents and that before long I'd polished off most or all of the backlist and was following Mason's creator, Erle Stanley Gardner, in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and in hardback. (My father subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, but an issue would have cost all of 15 cents on newsstands; a new hardback Perry Mason, when I started buying them, went for $2.95.) Gardner, who was born in 1889, lived until 1970, and I followed him even longer: Gardner's last Mason novel appeared in 1973.

It's hard for me to realize that today's readers under 30 are unlikely to remember defense attorney Perry Mason. But for the last several years only one Mason novel (out of a total of over 80) has been in print in the US; the TV series starring Raymond Burr ended its principal (nine-year) run in 1966 and survives today mostly on Netflix. I've heard it described as the longest-running courtroom drama series on television, and for most of those nine years I didn't miss an episode. But it was a flash in the pan in comparison with the series of mystery novels on which it was based.

The series began in 1933 with The Case of the Velvet Claws, which was coincidentally my first 25-cent Mason novel. For most of the following 37 years Gardner produced three or more novels a year. Some of them featured other detectives (like the  private-eye duo of Donald Lam and Bertha Cool in books published under the pseudonym A.A. Fair, including Top of the Heap, also available as an ebook), but the majority of Gardner's books star Perry Mason, the brilliant defense attorney whose client is (almost?) never guilty. Mason is abetted by secretary Della Street and investigator Paul Drake; other recurring characters, as the series continues, are D.A. Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg of the LAPD.

Writers can end up paying a price to be as  prolific as Gardner was. To some readers, especially in later years, Gardner seemed more like a book factory than a writer with texture, wit or literary sensibilities: these readers could still be impressed by his more ingenious plots (as in The Case of the Mythical Monkeys or The Case of the Spurious Spinster), but paperback reissues of the series, in the 1970s and 1980s, did not attract the same readership that the Mason novels had in earlier decades.

But flash forward to 2011: Perry Mason comes to Kindle, for the first time. Ten Mason novels are available as ebooks, including, from Gardner's first and perhaps richest decade, The Case of the Velvet Claws, The Case of the Curious Bride, The Case of the Substitute Face and The Case of the Perjured Parrot. If you've been missing Perry--or if you wonder what all the fuss was about--follow one of these links, click on the cover to look inside, and decide whether this might not be something for you.

Still to come: Josephine Tey, Christianna Brand... and Patricia Highsmith.

Ellery Queen - Back in the (Ebook) Mix

One of the little bits of housekeeping a blogger sometimes does is updating old posts so they reflect the current state of affairs. I usually put these revisions in brackets, beginning with the word 'update' and the date of the revision. For example, in a post from last May about free German-language ebooks, I mentioned the absence of any ebook edition of Das Kapital in the original German. Then, when I saw last week that there is now such an edition, I added links to bring the post up to date.

In the last week or so, however, I've discovered a number of 'new' ebooks, most of them in the genre of crime fiction, that call for a fresh post (or two) to herald their appearance, especially given the neglect to which their authors have been subjected in the ebook era and earlier. (True, something similar might be said about Marx himself; that's one reason I mentioned Das Kapital in the previous paragraph.)

The three Ellery Queen mysteries already available in Kindle and other eformats are now joined by The Roman Hat Mystery and Calamity Town.

The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) was the first Queen novel, written under the joint Queen pseudonym by cousins Manfred Lee and Frederic Dannay as a contest entry. It's very much in the 'problem in deduction' mode, a memorable investigation of a murder in the seats of a Broadway theatre, during a performance. The last time I read it (in the late 1980s) I could see it both as the springboard for the cousins' long career and as a typical book from a phase of that career that would soon be superseded by the more 'psychological' phase that attracted me to Queen and his creators in the first place.

Calamity Town (1942) may have been the first Ellery Queen novel I read; it has always been one of my favorites, and it definitely stands up to rereading. It was the first of the Queen novels set in the fictitious New England town of Wrightsville, and much of its humor comes out of interactions between visiting New York sophisticate Ellery Queen (the character) and the tradition-bound townspeople. In retrospect, however, it's clear that what Queen was to find in Wrightsville, in the five novels that would eventually be set there (including Ten Days' Wonder, later memorably filmed by Claude Chabrol), had less to do with country-mouse-city-mouse humor than with psychological depth and new explorations of guilt and innocence: after a couple of trips to Wrightsville, Queen is not even recognizable as the pince-nez - wearing prig of the early 'problems in deduction'.

One of the intriguing things about blogging is that you really have no idea how far your 'voice' may reach. But, since my earlier post about Ellery Queen, one of the all-time most read at Jascha Writes, mentioned, in addition to the three Queen novels that had just appeared as ebooks only two more, and those two were precisely The Roman Hat Mystery and Calamity Town, let me mention here a few additional Queen novels as worthy of your attention and certainly of future release in eformat. In addition to Ten Days' Wonder (1948), I'd single out Cat of Many Tails (1949), The Finishing Stroke (1958) and Face to Face (1967). Of course, as I always say, you really don't have to choose....

Coming: the curious trio of Erle Stanley Gardner, Christianna Brand and Patricia Highsmith.

Nesbø, Harry and 'Phantom'

Jo Nesbø

In Wednesday's post I went over the lineup of the nine novels to date in Jo Nesbø's series about sometimes Oslo police inspector Harry Hole. Let's pick up the frequently asked questions where we left off.

Q: How violent are the books? I'm not big on books about serial killers.... A: Only a few of the books to date actually involve serial killings. You definitely don't need to be a fan of, say, Thomas Harris to enjoy the Harry Hole books. Violence? When I read The Snowman, it struck me as the most violent book so far, with The Devil's Star a close second, but the violence never seems gratuitous (or purely genre-driven) to me. True, the books all involve homicide investigations, including at least some forensics. And Harry does manage to get roughed up quite frequently, even for a fictional detective.

Q: Suppose I'm the one reader who never got into Stieg Larsson's books? Or Henning Mankell's? Or.... A: Not a problem. Scandinavia is just a geographic region--not the best reason to read one author rather than another. Scandinavian crime novels are all different. Even Nesbø's own novels seem to me quite different from one another. Try one. You might like it. (I suggested The Redbreast as a starting place for US readers. But not because it's in any way 'typical'.)

The 9th Harry Hole novel
German translation
Die Larve (2011)

I'm blogging about Nesbø and Harry this week because I just read the ninth book in the series, the one that will be published in the UK in March 2012 under the title Phantom. (I can't contain my enthusiasm for the book, but I'll do my utmost to keep this post spoiler-free.) Until this point I'd been playing catch-up with Nesbø; with this book I have become a follower--as addicted to the series as his hero and certain other characters in the new book are to their drugs of choice.

Harry is a recovering alcoholic with memorable lapses; the new book involves the illegal drug trade in Oslo. Phantom, appropriately enough, brought me more highs and lows, as a reader, than any other Nesbø novel. And by lows I mean not disappointments but... let's say developments from which some readers may take a while to recover. Obviously I'm still working on my recovery, three days after finishing Phantom. And speaking of following--and serials--I'm already impatient for the next book in the series. I just realized: Harry Hole is a serial. The blogger is, at least sometimes, the last to know. (Inexcusable parenthesis, especially addressed to fans of Samuel Beckett: I've had my own I-can't-go-on-I'll-go-on oscillation with Phantom and its final scenes. Try, all readers of Phantom please try, this experiment on yourselves: count the number of days or hours after finishing Phantom before you start thinking about book ten in the series.)

Speaking of trying to remain spoiler-free: by some lucky accident, I managed to read the first several chapters of Phantom without knowing certain facts about the plot. I had read only the earliest, briefest descriptions released by Nesbø's German publisher, Ullstein--which have since been replaced by longer blurbs that continue to be discreet but reveal, among other things, how the set-up of the novel relates it to the others that preceded it. In other words, I was surprised--not bowled over, more delighted, mildly but quite 'pleasantly' surprised--by parts of the set-up with which almost every future reader may be familiar before starting the book. (It was, for me, the first of the book's 'highs'. It's a high you may still be able to share--if you restrict what you read and hear about the book between now and the time you read it.)

The whole experience made me dream of an alternative universe in which readers could approach each new book in a state of comparative innocence. In which publishers didn't feel they had to give anything away for the sake of making a sale. In which bloggers, even, rivalled one another in discretion.

I've far exceeded my allotted 500 words for the day--which can be justified not by anything I've communicated about the plot of Phantom (of which I'd vowed to reveal as little as possible) but perhaps by the fact that I'll be taking several days off from blogging (although not from Twitter). I'll be on the road, and if I weigh in here at all it will be only with a comment or two rather than a scheduled post. (By the way, I'm holding off on talking about book eight in the series until closer to its US release date.) Happy reading, listening and coffee-drinking, and happy living as well--until next time.

Nesbø's Harry Hole: The Line-Up

Yesterday I finished reading Jo Nesbø's ninth and latest Harry Hole novel, and I'm still reeling from it--still on its emotional roller-coaster, to be honest. (That novel, 'in case we're interrupted', appeared in the original Norwegian in June, and in German translation under the title Die Larve this month; the anticipated English title is Phantom. [We may be interrupted by my word tally: I'm back to enforcing my self-imposed maximum length of 500 words per post.])

US mass-market paperback, 2011

Because Nesbø and Harry Hole are still new to most US readers, I'd like to run through a few general reference points (to which I gave short shrift when trying to introduce the series last March). When I finally return to speak directly about Phantom, it will be to give it a spoiler-free rave, limited mostly to how you can intensify your enjoyment of it.

So. What do you need to know about Jo Nesbø? His name is pronounced 'yoo NESS-buh' in Norwegian but often simply 'Joe NEZZ-bo' in English. He was born in 1960 and trained as an economist. Was a successful soccer player but was permanently sidelined by injuries. Worked for about a decade as a stockbroker by day and rock musician by night (vocals and guitar with the band Di Derre). Best known as author of the Harry Hole novels but has published one stand-alone thriller (Headhunters) and the Doctor Proctor series of children's books. 

And about Harry Hole (pronounced, to everyone's great relief, 'hah-ree HOO-lə')? He's an Oslo-based (later Hong Kong - based) police inspector (later ex- or acting), a recovering alcoholic. A loner in general, but capable of deep, loving, lasting-but-failed attachments. Smart. Surprisingly likeable.

There are nine novels to date in the series:

1. The Bat
2. The Cockroaches
3. The Redbreast
4. Nemesis
5. The Devil's Star
6. The Redeemer
7. The Snowman
8. The Leopard
9. Phantom

All nine have been published in Norwegian and in German translation. The first eight have been published in French. Numbers 3-8 have been published in English in the UK, with number 9 expected in March and number 1 next after that. Numbers 3-5 and 7 are available in English in the US, with number 8 announced for December and number 6 expected next after that.

Frequently asked questions begin:

Q: Do the books need to be read in order? A: All things being equal, it's desirable. Advice to US readers: start with number 3, The Redbreast [link UPDATED 5 March 2012], and read the subsequent novels in order, in so far as availability permits. The first two novels are less important to the rest than are 3 through 9 among themselves. The Bat Man is set in Australia and is referred to often in recent Hole books because it establishes Harry as one of the few Norwegians with hands-on experience hunting down a serial killer. (It was the first Nesbø I read, and, although I kept going after that, I find it the least engaging book in the series.) The second, The Cockroaches, is set in Bangkok. All the rest are set principally in Oslo and form parts of various plot arcs that interconnect them.

Next: more FAQs and more about number 9, Phantom.

John Dickson Carr on Kindle and iBooks

John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), among the crime novelists I grew up reading, is the best of the best. US-born but with close ties to the UK, Carr is one of the stars of the Golden Age of crime fiction.

He was the grand master of the 'locked room' mystery (his The Hollow Man [1935] defines the entire sub-genre), author of some 80 books of surprisingly uniform quality, cerebral even when he made the reader laugh (his most-used pseudonym was wrongly suspected of belonging to P. G. Wodehouse), a master of both 'contemporary' and historical mystery fiction. (Incidentally, the first chapter of his first 'historical', The Bride of Newgate, measures up very well to the best of Dumas, and all of Carr's 'Victorian melodramas' are good, too.) Carr even experimented (on rare occasions, but successfully) with such unexpected themes as time travel and witchcraft. His place in my personal list of 26 favorite authors is very secure.

And now you can read him in ebook format. Thanks to the Langtail Press, six of Carr's classic novels are now available--all 'contemporaries', most featuring one or the other of his star detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell (He Who Whispers, The Problem of the Green Capsule) or Sir Henry Merrivale (The Plague Court Murders, And So to Murder, She Died a Lady), with one spectacular non-series novel, The Burning Court, thrown into the mix. (I've provided links to Kindle editions, but all six are also available on iBooks, and Carr is 'priced to sell' in both formats.)

And just in case you're not a fan of locked-room puzzles... neither am I: I just like John Dickson Carr.

Give him a try.

30 Days Hath September

I've been away from you for longer than I like, and, with the help of some advice from my sifu (Anthony Korahais), I'm vowing to do better in this new month. In a number of our qigong classes, he's proposed that we make resolutions for the month of September, things that we vow to do every day for these 30 days. (You'll often hear that if you want to establish a new habit, it's a good idea to repeat the action in question every day for 21 days. Thirty days? All the better.)

So I'm vowing to blog every day this month--and to practice qigong every morning. The first vow is partly an experiment: to see not so much whether I can do it (after all, I have decades of journalling behind me) as what happens when I do.

It may seem like a strange way to begin, but I'd be remiss if I didn't write something about two ebooks that appeared this morning, one in the UK and the other internationally.

What I'm calling the UK ebook is the first English-language edition of Jo Nesbø's novel Headhunters. (The US edition will appear next week.) I've been singing Nesbø's praises for years, usually talking about the Harry Hole series (nine crime novels to date, of which The Snowman was most recently published in the US), which still seem to be the books for which he's most likely to be remembered. But only a handful of the Hole novels are available in the US, and the first two haven't been published in English anywhere. For readers who are ready for something very different, the standalone Headhunters may be the ideal choice. It's been called a 'caper' novel, and I always describe it as 'freewheeling'. The less one knows about the plot in advance the better--but I can say that the title refers to corporate headhunting, that surprising crimes are involved, and that this is one of those novels in which two adversaries face off repeatedly, through all the turns of a shifting game of cat and mouse. It's also an amazing book to have written--in its own very different way almost as daring as Ian McEwan's Atonement. Will you still be thinking about it a week after you finish it? Quite possibly not--for that, read the Harry Hole novels instead. (Not that you have to choose!)

It's also worth mentioning that all of Jo Nesbø's revenues from Headhunters (in Norway and internationally, from the novel and the films based on it) go to the Harry Hole Foundation, for reading and writing programs in the Third World.

More widely publicized is this morning's release, in the US and the UK, of Stephen King's eformat-only novella Mile 81. Again, it would hardly be the one work by Stephen King that I would recommend as a starting place--but with King fewer people are looking for a starting place than with Nesbø: people may not agree about Stephen King, but most people are comfortable with their own take on him, whether they love the entire corpus (and, in some cases, read little else), strongly prefer one phase or genre over another, or view him with considerable condescension. (For the record, I personally champion the King of the later short stories but find that we neglect any of him at our peril.) But if you consider yourself a King fan, you will likely enjoy Mile 81 (which plays both the automobile-horror and the childhood cards) and the appended preview of the next full-length King book, 11/22/63, which is due in November.

I'd like to note one (further?) milestone, as I see it, in the publication of Mile 81: it's an ebook-only publication but no one is harping on the fact. There's no illusion that the novella's eformattedness is news. We've come a long way since Riding the Bullet and The Plant....

Jo Nesbø, Inspector Harry Hole and the 'Oslo Trilogy'

I'm guessing that most U.S. readers either don't know Jo Nesbø, the bestselling Norwegian crime novelist, or have taken note of him only recently in their quest for something to read after they've finished Stieg Larsson. The story is somewhat different in the U.K., where the six Harry Hole novels that have been translated into English all figure prominently on the Kindle bestseller list. U.S. rights to forthcoming Hole novels recently went to Knopf, who will be giving a big launch to Nesbø's The Snowman in May, and I predict that Nesbø's U.S. visibility 'problem' will then be a thing of the past. I'll blog more about Nesbø, whom I greatly admire, between now and then; today I'll do my bit to make him slightly more visible by posting links to the Kindle editions of the three Hole novels available now in the U.S.: The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil's Star. They form a trilogy of sorts, and it would be a shame not to read them in order. How do they stack up against that other trilogy? I predict that all you'll miss is a female character as powerful as Lisbeth Salander. Everything else is there, and then some.