I am currently ensconced in a nice room at the Crown Plaza Hotel
Georgia in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. It’s not very large,
but it’s got a window (that opens!) overlooking the downtown street
scene, and if I sit in the one reasonably comfortable chair and put my
feet up on the bed I can look out on the street as I type. There’s an
upscale mall next door (translation–no book stores) and an art museum
across the street with a Georgia O’Keefe/Diego Rivera/Frida Kahlo exhibit
that ran from July 15th until precisely eleven minutes ago. I guess I
won’t be seeing it. I did manage to find a bookstore on the other side
of the mall, but it was one of those remainder stores. I got a copy of
The Pickwick Papers to read during dinner.

The voyage here from Los Angeles was less unpleasant than I expected.
Except that I had to take my laptop out of its case and put it in a large
plastic bin with my wallet, keys, and so forth, the security check-in
wasn’t much different than I’d encountered pre-9/11. Of course, I was at
a small airport at 8 AM on a Sunday morning. It wasn’t conspicuously
crowded. The flight to Seattle was uncrowded, as was the hop from
Seattle to Vancouver. The Airporter bus brought me straight to this
hotel, and now here I am with nothing much to do until registration opens
for my conference tomorrow morning at 8 AM.

Update: Score one for terminal stodginess. It has started to
rain; if I were more adventurous I’d be out in it. And I’m a Southern
California kid–I didn’t bring an umbrella.

It was undoubtedly a dimwitted thing to do, but I began posting to
this web log just half a week before leaving on a week-long business
trip. I might post some more today, and I might not; if not, see you on
the 21st!

A couple of months ago I read van de Wetering’s Amsterdam Cops mystery
The Streetbird, and found it to be very strange indeed. My
correspondent assured me that most of the books in the series were not
quite that peculiar, so I ventured to try him again.

Hard Rain follows after The Streetbird, possibly
immediately after, and involves a crisis in the Amsterdam police
department. The old Chief Constable (equivalent to our Chief of Police)
has retired, and his successor is incompetent at best, and probably
crooked with it. His appointments and personnel transfers have been in
keeping with this.

When the bad cops come in, the good cops have to be disposed of,
naturally; in this case that means our heroes Grijpstra, de Gier,
Cardozo, and their boss the commissaris (that’s his rank; we never learn
his full name, though his wife calls him Jan). So the commissaris is
being investigated for corruption, murder cases are being closed
improperly, cops are being paid off, and behind much of it is a crook who
was once the commissaris’ boyhood friend.

Hard Rain still has much of the ethereal, philosophical, whimsical
atmosphere of The Streetbird; if you’re looking for gritty,
hardboiled police procedurals, this isn’t the place. Although, that
might be a misleading statement–I don’t want to leave the impression
that van de Wetering’s Amsterdam is a suburb of Disneyland, either. The
city is rife with drugs, prostitutes, and murder–but the writing is
somehow detached from it all.

I read the book with interest, but I’m not at all sure whether or not I
liked it.

Howdy, and welcome to my new web log, “A View from the Foothills”.
I’ll be posting news and information about this site, book reviews that
will later appear in Ex Libris
Reviews, and reflections on any topic that I care to write about.
If you’re a regular reader of Ex
Libris Reviews, you’ll probably want to keep reading it, as
only part of its contents will appear in this space.