HardCaseCrime.com — I love everything hardboiled, and was pondering the lack of prolific harboiled authors just the other day. Dennis Lehane, for example, is a guy I like, but once I “discovered” him, I devoured everything he’d written in about a month. That happens a lot to me. It’s only been thru force of will that I haven’t finished the Patrick O’Brian seafaring series…I dole them out to myself like Dove ice cream bars — one every couple of months.

I also wonder when we’re going to get to the genre serial terrorism fiction. Seems like fresh ground. Yeah, I’ve read Vince Flynn, but that dude leaves me cold…not that great a writer, and the fault-free characters are booooooring. Interesting situations, and plot contrivances and a Clancy-ish hardware fetish, but every scene is so utterly predictable.

Anyhoo, something new to read.

Via Deliverance…

I grabbed The Kite Runner at the Borders last week when I was out picking up new books on poker. I started it around 7:00 and was up till 3 in the aye-emm finishing it. Since I did that, I would have to call it a good book. It was a compelling page-turning read with some pretty good, minimally complex characters, and the “interesting foreign land” perspective. But, at the end of the day, or even here at noon-thirty, I can’t say it was great or that it deserved all the accolades listed on the back of it (or those gushing Amazon reviews). It’s a very basic plot, and it’s a story we’ve read a million times. The Afghanistan history hook is about the only thing that’s compelling about it, so it’s got that going for it, and it does a pretty superficially good job at that, but it’s not the kind of novel that’s intended to illuminate history. Which, when I think about it, is what I was really hoping for. If you haven’t read 40,000,000 novels like I have, you might find that you like it much more than I did. So, I give it two Knob Creeks out of five, for being written well enough to keep me reading till the wee hours.

…from my long-time pard, Otis (the lawyer, not the pokerer). Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, No Country for Old Men, comes out Tuesday. I’ll knock you down if you get between me and Borders that morning.

In 1980 southwest Texas, Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4 million in cash. The bulk of the novel is a gripping man-on-the-run sequence relayed in terse, masterful prose as Moss, who’s taken the money, tries to evade Wells, an ex–Special Forces agent employed by a powerful cartel, and Chigurh, an icy psychopathic murderer armed with a cattle gun* and a dangerous philosophy of justice. Also concerned about Moss’s whereabouts is Sheriff Bell, an aging lawman struggling with his sense that there’s a new breed of man (embodied in Chigurh) whose destructive power he simply cannot match.

Longish, too, at 320 pages. Of course, I’ll devour it in one sitting and have to wait ten more years for another one, slowly and carefully re-reading all of his old stuff for the fifth or sixth time. I’m telling you, there is simply nobody writing today that is as good as McCarthy. But if there were, I’d seriously never get any work done…I’d have my nose buried in books 16 hours a day.

I have to be giggly-sad at all the hoopla over yet another serving of Harry effing Potter, as well. It’s simply inescapable. Cormac McCarthy probably doesn’t need the dough, but I’d love to see him receive 1/100th of the attention that the kiddie magic book will get. Not only for McCarthy’s sake, but so that the reader will be well-served.

* What the hell’s a cattle gun? Wonder if they mean the bolt gun used in slaughterhouses?

I bought the latest Tom Clancy novel, mumble-mumble-mumble, at the NOLA airport for reading on the trip back. I seem to have left it in the seat-back pocket. Besides the total waste of $8.50, I’m not at all bothered by that…it reads like the guy was writing a screenplay, even 100 pages in. Now, I enjoyed the heck out of his first couple of books, which were no great literary shakes, but they had interesting characters and cool plots. I basically quit reading about the time Jack Ryan got thrown into his umpteenth unplanned horrific national security crisis. This, though, was so freaking cadboard, it was almost sad. Practically a Word macro…like a Grisham or a Koontz for mil-diplo wonks.

I wouldn’t be so harsh if I didn’t see so damn many people toting his books around. What’s up, peeps? Just enjoying the serial? That’s cool by me…I love serials. I gotta say, though, that I haven’t found any new good ones in a while. Everything seems to be written by chicks for chicks with main chick characters. Is that an unplanned Oprah effect? Whatever it is, I can’t get into it. None of them are hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, ass-kicking (and -kicked) super-hard-boiled badasses like Inspector Rebus from Ian Rankin.

Actually, this falls more into the category of a Christmas wish: this guy says there’s a new Cormack McCarthy novel coming out. In August.

At least I’ve got plenty of time to re-read the Trilogy before then.

My pal Otis left me a note yesterday that author Larry Brown had passed away.

He followed with a handful of disturbing novels, including “Dirty Work” (1989), “Joe” (1991), “Father and Son” (1996) and “Fay” (2000). His characters — mechanics, whores, parolees — are drunk on beer, violent by nature and sad by circumstance and self-destruction. They also love their pickups and Tom T. Hall records and despise moral rectitude.

“People who are in trouble are the kind I know best,” he once told an interviewer. “They’re the kind I grew up around.”

William Larry Brown was born in Oxford on July 9, 1951. After high school, he served briefly in the Marine Corps, where his work with injured veterans inspired “Dirty Work.”

A poor student who never aspired to college — he flunked his high school senior English class — he was largely self-taught as a writer and reader. He was a strange presence at the fire station, a slight and soft-spoken man who was frequently ribbed by his poker-playing cronies for his literary interests, whether Louis L’Amour and Harold Robbins or O’Connor and Mark Twain.

When he turned to writing — an epiphany, he said, while pond fishing in a cow pasture in 1981 — he said he just needed a typewriter, personal space and an idea.

In seven months, he had finished his first novel, about a bear on the loose in Yellowstone National Park. Evidently, it was terrible.

“Just imagine,” he once said, “it was 327 single-spaced pages of sex and man-eating.”

Brown is one of my all-time favorite authors. I highly recommend all of his books, including his short stories. It’s funny, though — the obit describes his work with words like “grim”, “doomed”, “disturbing”, “damning”, but good gravy, you’ve got to be an idiot not to see the joy of life, and living life, in his words. Yeah, it’s rough and it hurts and it’s not always High Tea at the Waldorf, but his characters lived and breathed and bled and drank and got what they could out of what they had to work with.

Many thanks, Larry Brown, and may you rest in peace.

On a more serious note, you could do a lot worse than to set aside a couple of hours for reading and absorbing this William Langewiesche article from the Atlantic Monthly about the Columbia space-shuttle disaster. Not only is it a stark study of bureaucratic institutionalism in government agencies, but the story and the personalities surrounding it are compelling. Make no mistake that, no matter what you hear the various gubmint mouthpieces say into microphones, this is exactly the way the entire WashDC boehemoth runs…or more realistically, staggers through the day. Besides, Langeweische is a brilliant investigative (investigatory?) writer with the ability to make orbital mechanics semi-understandable to Tractor Man here.

It’s one reason I applaud anyone, Dem or Reep, who can come in and start blowing things up (metaphorically speaking there, bub). Just think — NASA is only 30 years old. You recking there might some of the same thinkin’-and-doin’ at places like the USDA, or the CIA, or the DoD?

HoustonChronicle.com - Britain to curb famous legal rule

This is unbelievable, and I can’t believe I’ve not heard about it till now:

The British Parliament on Thursday approved legislation to overturn “double jeopardy” protection for offenses such as murder, rape and armed robbery.

The centuries-old legal rule prevents suspects being tried twice for a crime and is enshrined in the legal codes of many of Britain’s former colonies, including the United States.
But under the Criminal Justice Bill, introduced by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government, a person acquitted of certain serious offenses will face a second trial if compelling new details, such as DNA evidence, come to light.

Damn. That’s the frikkin’ 5th Amendment they’re rolling back over there. I’m sure no Constitutional scholar, but that’s plain freaky and not just a little bit shocking. Man, am I even MORE glad my mom and dad had the good sense to be Americans.

Found it at ACT…

Michael von Blowhard tackles the seemingly age-old question of Commerce vs. The Arts in America (with bonus Bo Diddley!):

We’re a special case too because our commercial culture is so overwhelming that our high culture winds up feeling beleaguered. It flinches; it cowers; it gets on its high horse; it begs for donations — anything to defend itself against what it conceives of as the evil commercial juggernaut. As a consequence, American high culture is often prone to getting whiney, grandiose, political, and morally accusing — to carrying on like an adolescent who’s always threatening to go on the dole. Perpetually possessed by the vapors, contempo American high culture loses track of what it might have to contribute — it wants to be loved for itself, not for what it does — and goes into protest mode instead, thereby rendering itself irrelevant, and thereby driving many who might otherwise be open to it back to commercial culture, where you can at least feel semi-certain of getting a little something for your time and money.

…and he arrives at the opinion that I think any level-headed person would: Can’t we all just get along? I personally see no reason why we can’t, but then, I have no dog in the fight. I gave up trying to “learn” or appreciate high culture (more than) a few years ago when I realized that it would take a whole lot of schooling just to learn where to start. So now it’s pretty much cest la vie with me [giggle].

However…I would like to see some of the millions of dollars pumped into governmentally-approved high culture projects, like symphony halls and equestrian centers and performance spaces (whatever the hell those are) channeled in some way towards something (anything, really) that the Common Man might appreciate and utilize. To close the circle here a teeny bit, a lot of resentment from the rubes comes from seeing public monies spent on such high-toned crapola that the average schmoe just doesn’t want anything to do with. We’re told, practically scolded & at vomitous length, by our civic leaders that the symphony-opera-ballet-museum-whatever is for everyone, but the “everyone” you see involved in these affairs is the tux-and-fur crowd. Hardly “everyone”. I guess I’d just like to see City Hall throw $1.6MM at some guy (like me) to do something like take the Longhorn Ballroom and return it to it’s national reputation as THE place to see great Texas Music in Dallas. But, whoopsie! That’s beer and liquor and smoking and dancing and all those things an International City just doesn’t do, dahling, unless they’re slumming.

Another question raised by MvB is why the battle has to be fought over and over and over. That one’s easy: we ain’t stopped birthing babies, who get educated, and learn a few things, and think they have The Answer. Sometimes they do, and let’s all drink to that! Most times they don’t, though, and while it may seem new and fresh and shiny and blindingly intuitive to them, it just ain’t to us geezers in the audience. Because we’ve seen it and heard it a thousand times before — which kind of makes us a bunch of fuddy-duddies to them, and rightly so. As for why there are so many geezers still prattling on about it, my main guess is they have some (shudder!) commercial turf to defend, and you’ll find it if you dig deep enough (like a micron or two below the surface.)

An-t-way (as my dear webbie-friend Jahna says), this whole bloviating post was ginned up just so I could post this howler of a comment:

The main difference between the literati and rednecks is, the literati get the elbow patches when they buy the jacket.
- Alan Kellog

God, I love the culture wars!

CUL-CHA SATURDAY UPDATE: Ian Hamet agrees with me I agree with Ian Hamet 100% on the genre fiction vs. lit-fic issue that kicked off MvB’s essay. I happen to enjoy both, but less so on the lit-fic side since the Blowhards started harshing my mellow on Don DeLillo (whose last book, Cosmopolis, sucked like an 8 lb. Oreck XL). In fact, I’d have to think long and hard to name a lit-fic I enjoyed over the last 12 months. Does Life of Pi count? I dug that for it’s story-telling and the writing of the author, not so much for any great morales or insight into the human condition. I just thought that being marooned on a lifeboat with a full-grown Bengal tiger was an awesomely brilliant jumping-off point. Please overlook my shallow nature.

Newsday.com - Three Infant Bodies Found in Texas Attic

A family renovating a rural home they had lived in for three years found an old trash bag in an attic crawl space containing the mummified bodies of three infants. Authorities said Sunday they were investigating the deaths as homicides.

That’s practically a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Plimpton wasn’t someone I tracked, by any means. All that Paper Lion stuff was pretty dull. But he did write the one story that completely and totally hooked, reeled in, and fileted 99% of the baseball fans in the world in 1985. Show me a fan who didn’t want to see Sidd Finch, and I’ll show you a faker. I was convinced.

See what I mean about going crazy?

Mr. Kramer Wetzel, of Xenon fame, down there in that Austin town, has just gone and published a dang book:

Fishing Guide to the Stars: Fishing for love thru the zodiac…

The fastest way to get the book is order direct from publisher. Yeah, it’s self-published, but after being shot down by a couple of publishers, I decided to go ahead and launch it. Besides, the website’s stats showed, as late as last June, that the romance text was one of the highest traffic areas, behind, of course, the scopes themselves. And this web journal.

Neato. Another step in the self-publishing game. Guy’s got a built-in & primed audience, why not?

Of course, you know what this means, don’t you? Keep your eye’s peeled for “Eatin’ with The Fat Guy: Tips on Drinkin’ and Grillin’ and Smokin’”

Yahoo! News - Krispy Kreme Franchise Owner Eyes Sale

The largest owner of Krispy Kreme doughnut franchises is exploring a possible sale.

Great Circle Family Foods, based in Los Angeles, owns 22 doughnut shops and holds the exclusive rights to the franchise in Southern California.
Great Circle is seeking $80 million and wants preliminary offers by July 18, with a final decision coming in September, according to the newspaper The Daily Deal, which cited unidentified sources.

This would be called “gettin’ while the gettin’ is good.” It’s a damn donut, and there’s not much standing between me (or far more likely, a real baker) doing the same thing as KK. I wonder what GCFF paid for those franchises, but I’m way too lazy to investigate. If it’s more than 1/10th of the asking price, I’d eat my…cruller or something.

I just finished Moneyball, probably the most talked-about baseball book in 20 years. It’s great. If you love baseball, and think you know baseball, you’ll really like this book. I’m still not convinced that Bill James would make the best GM ever in the history of ever, but the case could almost be made.

The New Yorker: The Critics: A Critic At Large

This is just a note to those of you who might have been inspired as a child by the story of Helen Keller.

Yet the story of her life is not the good she did, the panegyrics she inspired, or the disputes (genuine or counterfeit? victim or victimizer?) that stormed around her. The most persuasive story of Helen Keller’s life is what she said it was: “I observe, I feel, I think, I imagine.” She was an artist. She imagined.
“Blindness has no limiting effect upon mental vision,” she argued again and again. “My intellectual horizon is infinitely wide. The universe it encircles is immeasurable.” And, like any writer making imagination’s mysterious claims before the material-minded, she had cause to cry out, “Oh, the supercilious doubters!”

It’s really a beautiful article, with all kinds of detail about Keller’s life that I never knew. The parts about Annie Sullivan are truly inspirational, to me. I’m tempted to buy the book, but I’m afraid it would sit on the shelf while I read more mindless stuff. I’m sure I’ll get it anyway, in the eternal hope that I’ll find (or make) the time to read it and appreciate it.

I can say that, thanks to whomever back in the mists of TFG time (either my mom or Mrs. Mitchell in 1st grade), Helen Keller has always stuck with me as an absolute reminder that all things are possible, and that anything you think is an obstacle is only one because you think it is. It’s an absolute pleasure to be reminded of that right now, today. I’m with Mark Twain* on this one:

Mark Twain compared her to Joan of Arc, and pronounced her “fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare and the rest of the immortals.” Her renown, he said, would endure a thousand years.

Forgot to add — Found it at The Awesome A&L Daily…

*Shocking to find myself in such company…