Thankfully, Foul Play Press, which I believe has been bought out by
Norton, keeps Atwood Taylor’s books in print. Someone out there besides
me must read them because they are consistently on the bookshelves in
the Large Chain Bookstores I browse on occasion. I keep a list in my
wallet of which ones I own so I can snap up those that aren’t on the list
when I find them.

The Perennial Boarder has Asey Mayo returning to Cape Cod for
a weekend
off from helping Bill Porter refit his car plant to making tanks or
planes. Just as he walks in the door, still in his city clothes, his
cousin Jennie insists he help her deliver clams to a local hotel because
her husband, Syl, has twisted his ankle and can’t drive the truck. After
some breakdowns with the truck and problems with military convoys taking
up the road, they get the clams to the hotel just under the time deadline
only to find it deserted with a dead body in the telephone nook. And the
dead body is dressed in the clothes of one of the guests who has been
coming to the hotel during the summers for years and years. And there is
a tomato pincushion in the middle of the floor. Asey decides to
investigate.

These books aren’t for everyone. They are definitely period pieces with
convoluted plots that don’t follow the normal formula for setting up
murder mysteries. Asey really has no gimmick to distinguish him from
other detectives except that everyone on the Cape trusts him to solve
mysteries, including the local cops. There is no luscious descriptive
writing to fill in the set and the dialog tends to be terse. And I love
them. They are an absolute hoot to read because you never know what is
going to happen next or how Asey is going to get himself out of the fix
he’s found himself in. The stories are straight from the era of radio
drama when the good guys were good and the bad guys were bad. No
psychotic killers with a horrible childhood to lend sympathy. Just plain
old murders for plain old reasons like, well, money.

This is Ulrich’s first book, published in 1980. Unlike her other two,
The Age of Homespun and A Midwife’s Tale,
she broadens her scope to
encompass most of what is known about women’s lives during the late 17th
and early 18th century. It is an examination of the reality of women’s
lives and how it compared to the Puritan ideals of wife, mother and
woman. Ulrich’s use of primary materials and the stories of real women is
fascinating and, as with the other two books she has written, her writing
is crisp and clean. The early half of the book dealing with the role of
woman as Bathsheba was particularly good. I should clarify that the
Puritans saw Bathsheba as the mother of Solomon whom he idealized in
Proverbs 31:10-31, rather than David’s tempting bather on the housetop.
I enjoyed the book a great deal and if you are a reader of colonial
history, I would certainly look it up. It has perspectives not normally
found in the more traditional history of the times.

This is a much later book than A Morbid Taste for Bones
(see previous review) and it’s interesting to see how the character has
developed and changed in the meantime.

The most notable thing is the change in Brother Cadfael’s standing.
He begins as a minor, if important, member of the Abbey community; he has
to work the angles to make things come out the way he wants them to. By
the time of this book, though, he’s the acknowledged expert on certain
things, and well trusted.

Another notable thing is that the cast of continuing characters has
solidified; every successful amature sleuth needs a friend among the
constabulary, and Cadfael’s is Hugh Beringar, the local Sheriff. Hugh
didn’t appear in A Morbid Taste for Bones; here, his
friendship with Cadfael is a matter of long-standing. Ambitious Prior
Robert and his friend the obsequious Brother Jerome are still around, but
the dreamy, unworldly abbot of the first book has been replaced by the
no-nonsense Radagulf, and Prior Robert is clearly on Radagulf’s leash.

But the real question is whether the quality has slipped, and I can
fairly say that it hasn’t. I’ll be looking for the other books in the
series.

Deb
English
mentioned Ellis Peters a few days
ago, and it got me thinking. I read one Brother Cadfael mystery quite a
few years ago; I don’t recall disliking it, and yet I’d never bothered to
read any more about the Welsh monk. The series is perenially in print,
and I decided it was time to investigate. Suiting deed to thought, I picked up
a couple of Cadfael titles; this one (the earliest) and one written many
years later.

For those who are unfamiliar with Brother Cadfael, he’s a Benedictine
monk; he resides at the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul in Shrewsbury,
England. Born in Wales, he had an adventurous youth before settling down
as a monk. He was a crusader on the First Crusade, and was with Godfrey
of Bouillon when Antioch was taken. After the Crusade, he became a sea
captain, and roved over all the Mediterranean world. Finally desiring a
little rest he joined the Benedictines and settled down to grow herbs.

The present book concerns the efforts of the ambitious Prior Robert to
acquire a saint’s relics for the Abbey. Relics (that is, bones) were a
big deal then; one gathers that there was something of an (I apologize in
advance) arms race among the various cathedrals, abbeys, and monasteries
to see who could get the best relics. Prior Robert has set his sights on
the bones of St. Winifred, a little-know Welsh saint. As a native
speaker of Welsh, Cadfael goes along on the trip to get them.

There’s so much here that Peters gets right. Cadfael and the other
monks, and the people they meet, are all believers, as they would have
been. Some are more susceptible to superstition than others (many believe
that a corpse will bleed if the murderer touches it); others are quite
willing to invent signs, wonders, and visions to advance their cause.
But in Cadfael, Peters makes it clear that she understands the
distinction between the reality of God and the mockery we all-too-often
make of Him in our scheming. It’s a fine line to walk, treating the
Christian faith with respect while recognizing the frailty of individual
Christians, but Peters makes it look easy.

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.