Please Lend a Hand

This morning I received an email from a U.S.-born friend who has lived in Japan for 30+ years. In response to a question from me, he recommended the Red Cross as an avenue of donations to help the people of Japan and elsewhere in the wake of this month's earthquake, tsunami and related concerns. (For more options, take this link.) Please consider making a donation now, through whatever organization you choose.

From Wilkie Collins, 'The Woman in White': Epigraph 1.4

I threatened months ago to 'serialize' here the epigraphs that 'introduce' the various 'books' or sections of my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me. The original idea was to reproduce them 'usually with no comments'--but, as I was thinking today about the quintessential Kiss epigraph, the one that precedes the first words of my first chapter, and that I intended as an epigraph for the book as a whole, I saw what a mistake it would be to leave the quotation on its own. It's the first sentence of another novel, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860):

'This is a story about what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.'

Why is this the 'quintessential' Kiss epigraph? Not only because, removed from its original context, it seems to refer to the entire 21st-century novel that it introduces, but also because, like the novel as a whole, it means something completely different to a first-time reader from what it means to one who returns to it after finishing A Kiss Before You Leave Me: the words 'patience', 'resolution', 'endure', 'achieve', even 'man' and 'woman'--nothing is the same. What seems at the outset to be heroic or romantic ends up seeming... something else altogether.

I can say this much: the relationship of the epigraphs to the novel itself is always potentially ironic.

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.

Ruth Rendell: Getting Started

This morning's release of eight of the best 'Barbara Vine' novels as U.S. ebooks is all the reminder I need that I have still not begun to blog about Ruth Rendell, my favorite living crime writer. People usually take one of two or three well-established approaches to Rendell (born in 1930, sits in the House of Lords, three strands or series of novels...)--but you don't 'want to' be reading about Ruth Rendell, you 'want to' be reading Ruth Rendell, or, ideally, reading Barbara Vine. In the 1980s, at the height of her writerly powers, the massively prolific Rendell began writing the occasional novel under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. The Vines 'push the envelope' more reliably than the (other) Rendells (whether we mean the Wexford series Rendells or the non-series Highsmithian ones). If you've never read Rendell, or if you (like me, first in the 1980s and then in the 1990s) have dipped a toe in but not been convinced of her mastery, give her a chance, starting with the first Vine novel, A Dark-Adapted Eye. More to come.

Ellery Queen on Kindle

When I was growing up, Ellery Queen was one of my five favorite crime novelists. (The others were John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout.) I read my first several Queen novels in Pocket Books priced at 25 cents, and by the time I'd made my way through the canon I was paying well over a dollar apiece for the 1970s Signet editions of Queen with the mod cover photos. If you had told me then that Ellery Queen would ever be virtually out of print, I would have found it inconceivable. And yet.... There are many reasons for publishers' neglect of Queen. Suffice it to say that all of that seems to changing with this morning's release for Kindle of three mysteries from Queen's heyday. Halfway House is a good place to start, coming as it does immediately after the nine novels (the earliest is The Roman Hat Mystery) with parallel nationality-plus-noun titles: Halfway House can be seen as marking Queen's turn from the series's overly cerebral beginnings to the more complex psychological content that culminates in the Wrightsville novels (starting with the superb Calamity Town). I haven't read Halfway House in about 50 years, but it was a favorite and I'm returning to it with great eagerness; its successor, The Door Between, I did reread recently and found to be every bit as good as I had remembered it. For today's Kindle releases (and their print counterparts) we're indebted to Agatha Christie's great-grandson James Prichard and his latest project, The Langtail Press. More to come.