I bought this on the recommendation of one of my correspondents; I’m glad
I did.

A Pince of Snuff is a gritty police procedural set in England; it
features a pair of directives, Detective-Superintendant Andrew Dalziel,
and his subordinate Detective-Inspector Peter Pascoe. It reminds me of
Peter Lovesey’s
Peter Diamond series, in an inverted sort of
way. Diamond is fat, gruff, and given to plain speaking; so is Dalziel.
Diamond is an old school detective; so is Dalziel. Diamond has a younger
subordinate who’s gotten special training in new ways of doing things; so
had Dalziel. Diamond frequently has to put his subordinate in his place;
so does Dalziel. Diamond finally puts all of the pieces together; so does
Dalziel.

The difference is, Peter Lovesey’s books are written from Diamond’s point
of view; Hill is writing (in this book, anyway) from the subordinate’s
point of view. There’s an interesting complementarity here. The other
main difference is that Lovesey gets more into the heads of the other
characters than Hill does; and Hill is correspondingly more gritty, as is
hinted at by the title–A Pinch of Snuff as in “snuff films”.

I’ve been told that no genuine snuff film has yet been found by the
authorities, though they loom large in urban legendry thanks to books
like this one. If you’re fortunate enough not to have encountered the
term, I think that I won’t enlighten you; a Google search will likely
tell you more than you want to know.

That said, the details in Hill’s book aren’t nearly as disturbing
as those in Lawrence
Block’s Matthew Scudder novel (I forget the name) that involved
snuff films. Or, for that matter, as disturbing as An Exchange of
Hostages, which I reviewed last month.

I tend to prefer mysteries more toward the “cozy” end of the spectrum,
and I’ll admit that I enjoy Peter Diamond more than Dalziel and Pascoe.
Nevertheless, this is a good police procedural and I enjoyed it. I’m
looking forward to reading more of Hill’s work.

I’m not a big fan of Dickens; I usually find him tedious and long-winded.
But it would take a far more curmudgeonly fellow than I am to dislike Mr.
Pickwick and his travelling companions, to say nothing of the inimitable
Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick’s unsinkable servant.

This was my second time through The Pickwick Papers; I doubt
it will be my last. The first time I read it, it was as a Project
Gutenberg e-text on my PDA. I picked up a paperback copy while I was in
Vancouver last month. I needed a book to read while I ate dinner, and
the only bookstore I could find was a remainder shop. Fortunately it had
a number of remaindered classics, Pickwick among them.

This is a very long book to read straight through, and I don’t recommend
that you do that; but being largely episodic in nature it’s a wonderful
book to pick up every so often, between other books, and that’s how I
read it.

Bring a little bit of patience, and don’t take too much at once, and I
think you’ll enjoy it considerably.

My last few Heinlein reviews have all contained caveats, not least that
the reviewed books have all been dated in various ways. This one I can
unequivocally recommend–not least because it’s what I call a “small”
story.

I class plots as “big stories” and “small stories”.
The Lord of the Rings is the canonical big story–the fate of
the entire world is at stake. I like epics as well as anyone else, but
they are problematic. When you’re writing a big story, the tale you’re
telling is by definition the most important thing going on in your world.
At best, that spoils your world as a setting for smaller stories; at
worst, it trivializes your story if the tale you’re telling isn’t good
enough to carry the weight. And then, of course, you get plot
inflation–somehow your big story has to be grander and more explosive
and have a more memorable ending than the next guy’s.

The big story is a natural temptation, of course–having invented an
entire world, one naturally wants to use all of it. And so I find
that in the F&SF genre, small stories, stories about events that are
important to those involved but which do not shake the world as a whole,
are not only more interesting, but also better written than the big
stories. The author of a small story has learned some restraint.

Such is the case here. Humanity is colonizing the galaxy, spreading from
planet to planet by means of teleportation gates. Pioneering on newly
discovered planets is extremely hazardous–no one knows all of the
dangers until much later. And so, in order to qualify as a colonist, one
must have completed a detailed course in survival. The course culminates
in a survival test: each individual is dropped onto a wild planet, they
know not where, and must somehow survive until retrieved some days later.
It’s not easy–if you survive, you pass the test. If you fail, you’re
dead.

This book is the story of one particular survival test, a test that goes
grossly awry. The only book I can compare it with is
Lord of the Flies–except to say that Heinlein is much more
optimistic about the human capability to adapt and survive and maintain
civility than William Golding. As a descendant of pioneers
myself, I think Heinlein’s more likely to be correct.

Anyway, it’s good stuff–not earthshaking, but a good solid novel. If you
like Heinlein’s style, go buy it.

This is a deceptively silly book about destiny and the nature of fantasy
fiction. I picked it up on a whim, based on the cover description,
thinking that it was more likely to be really bad, but if good might be a
lot of fun.

It’s the story of a young man named Apropos, the son of a prostitute and
the child of an unknown father. He’s got a mishapen and useless leg
(a birth defect), a flame shaped book mark, and a bad attitude; he’s a
classic anti-hero in the style of Harry Flashman. In fact, the book
reads rather like a mixture of Harry Flashman with
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For a period of time,
Apropos is squire to Sir Umbrage of the Flaming Nether Regions (the name
describes his manor, not his person); at one point he encounters the
dreadful Harpers Bizarre.

Except that sometimes it’s more serious than that.

I began the book skeptically; I grew to enjoy it; by the end, after
numerous twists and surprises, I was really rather pleased. The closing
scene is as good a close as I’ve seen in quite awhile.

There’s a sequel out in hardcover, The Woad to Wuin; I’m
looking forward to it.

Sedley writes mysteries set in 1400’s in England during the War of the
Roses. Her detective is Roger the Chapman, a failed monk who peddles door
to door from his pack–oddments like laces, needles, pins and assorted
pieces of fabric. The conceit is that he is telling each story looking
back on his life from old age, 50 years after the action has taken place.
“Death and the Chapman” is the first in the series and sets up the life
of Roger leaving the monastery to seek his fortune on the road after his
mother dies and frees him from his obligation to fulfill her wishes that
he become a monk. The cloistered life is not for him so he buys a pack of
inventory from a retiring Chapman and sets out. He discovers, eventually,
that the son of a wealthy Alderman has disappeared on a journey to London
and promises to investigate when he reaches London.

The Plymouth Cloak follows shortly afterwards when Roger is asked to
protect a messenger of the Duke of Gloucester on his journey to deliver a
secret letter to France. The Plymouth Cloak refers to the club that Roger
carries as his weapon on the journey. Unfortunately, he and the messenger
are not particularly compatible and his discovery that the guy has
engaged in kidnapping young children and dwarves and selling them to
royalty for court jesters doesn’t endear him either. They are attacked
and Roger must figure out if the attacks are directed at the message they
carry or are retribution for the messenger’s former shady trade.

These were ok mysteries. The action dragged in places and I often wished
she’d hurry up and put something into the plot to make it more
interesting. The period detail was there but could have been done better.
Roger isn’t a compelling detective. He seems to stumble upon the answer
rather than figure it out. I kept comparing these books to Ellis Peter’s
Brother Cadfael mysteries and they seriously fall short of the standard
Peters created. I have one more in the series that I purchased along with
these so perhaps they will improve as they go along. If you like medieval
mysteries, they might be worth picking up at a used bookstore. I doubt I
would pay full price for them, though. There are too many really good
mysteries out there.

I have read other mysteries by Wright and been impressed with her plot
lines and general writing so when I found this one in the used bookstore
I pulled it off the shelf right away. After I got home, I realized they
charged me $6 for it because it’s out of print but, hey, it’s less than
the price of a movie and it took me at least a couple hours to read it.

The story opens on a rainy night with the murder of the young woman by
some shadowy man in a dark clearing in a woods outside of Sechelt,
British Columbia. No names, no motives and no descriptions of the people
involved. Fortunately, Sechelt is blessed to have Staff Sergeant Karl
Alberg, of the CMP, to handle figuring out the who’s and why’s of it. Not
that he fits the profile of a Mountie, mind you. He’s slightly
overweight, doesnÂ’t wear the red uniform, is middle-aged and drives a
beat-up car rather than flinging himself on a horse. His subordinates
aren’t really movie Mountie material either. Plus Alberg has his eye
on the local librarian who, unfortunately, is having an affair with a
movie star taking a sabbatical from the pace of life in California. As
the lone stranger in town, the movie star is the prime suspect.

The whole thing sounds pretty lame but it actually reads quite well.
Summarize the plot to a Stephen King novel (who I think is a dynamite
storyteller), and it sounds just as hokey. Wright uses the weather
beautifully, particularly the rain, to add to the eerieness and suspense
of having a murderer in the town. There’s brush and brambles and dripping
water and fog. She adds some local color characters that ring true and
sets up some other possible victims that you just know are going to get
it next. My only beef is that the ending moved a little too fast. She
could have drawn it out a little more and gave the killer more lines but,
all in all, I really like this book.

I wish I could find more of her books. Sadly, none of the chains carry her.