Waking Up Dead by Nigel Williams

Published in the UK as R.I.P. in 2015; published by St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books on August 23, 2016

Waking Up Dead is a murder mystery told from the perspective of one of the victims. That’s been done before, but the “dead victim solves his own murder” plot has probably never produced as many laughs as Nigel Williams conjures in this novel. This murder mystery, told as a tongue-in-cheek ghost story, is surprisingly funny.

George Pearmain, a retired banker, has little interest in getting out of bed, even when his shrieking wife proclaims the death of his mother. George rarely has an interest in getting out of bed -- his post-retirement life isn’t thrilling -- but on this occasion, he seems physically incapable of moving. The novel’s title explains George’s problem, although, while perhaps not in peak condition at his age, George doesn’t feel dead. He thinks, therefore he is, but what is he? Dead, as it turns out.

Still, death is a refreshing relief from responsibility, a state George embraces with equanimity. Death gives George the freedom to say whatever he likes, even if he cannot be heard. On the other hand, George can also hear what people are saying about him, most of which is less than flattering.

Why George might be dead is no mystery to him (65, drank too much, exercised too little). A greater mystery is the suggestion that his mother might have been murdered on the day she turned 99. She is found in the kitchen with a fractured skull next to a broken window. But the suggestion that George might have been murdered leads to a comical coroner’s inquest, where George learns how many of his family members might have welcomed his death.

George’s demise comes during a family gathering to celebrate his mother’s birthday, giving Williams ample opportunity to develop odd and entertaining characters, including George’s sons and siblings and grandchildren. A New Age believer in the healing power of herbs, an interviewer who hosts a popular radio program, a wife who dedicated herself to arguing with George, an incompetent doctor, a nosy caregiver, and a detective inspector who emulates Sherlock are among the many characters who enliven the novel.

Most of the characters are eccentric, some are batty, and a few of them might indeed be murderous. Those who seem relatively normal are shallow or self-absorbed. Perhaps the funniest character is George’s dead dog, the only character who can see dead George. But as the story turns into a murder-fest, the reader is challenged to decide which character(s) did away with George and/or his mother and/or later victims. As the police attempt to answer those questions, George provides commentary that is rich with sarcasm, satire, irony, and every other literary device that can be counted on to provoke laughter.

Waking Up Dead brought to mind a blend of Kingsley Amis and Monty Python. The novel has its share of slapstick (a triple funeral provoked several laugh-out-loud moments) but most of the humor has the restrained quality for which the British are justly famous. A consistent stream of throw-away phrases like “her brief and unsuccessful attempt at childhood” assures frequent chuckles. Williams pokes fun at racism, nationalism, smartphones, officious police detectives, squabbling families, ambition, greed, lust, envy, and other deadly sins while delivering a fun, offbeat mystery. The ending is both sweet and sad, a nice counterpoint to the humor that precedes it.

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Millennium by Ben Bova

First published in 1976; published digitally by Endeavour Press/Venture Press on June 19, 2016

The prolific Ben Bova wrote four novels featuring Chet Kinsman (and eventually combined two of them into a fifth novel). Millennium (1976) is the second of those, although the first, published in 1967, has little in common with the next three. The title has been released in digital format by Endeavour in the UK.

In Millennium, Kinsman is stationed on the moon, where Russians and Americans occupy separate but neighboring bases that are known collectively as Selene. Kinsman, in fact, is the military commander of the American base. His superiors think he is too cozy with the Russians and therefore unreliable, so they send Frank Colt to keep an eye on him.

Novels have to be read in the context of their time (it isn’t fair to judge a 1976 novel by 2016 standards) but even with that in mind, I didn’t buy the character of Frank Colt. He represents a stereotypical view of the Militant Black Man, exemplified by his inexplicable hostility to characters he calls “whitey.” Colt flip-flops in his allegiances throughout the novel, rather too easily and conveniently to make him a convincing character.

The novel’s paranoid view of Russia and a heated-up Cold War is more forgivable, given the political climate of the time, but readers in the current century should be aware that the story will seem dated. As you would expect, the technology is wrong (the USA and Russia have a moon base by 1999 but they are still using the kind of computer terminals that are now found in museums). The political reality at the end of the 20th century was also far removed from the future that Bova envisioned. But this is a work of fiction, and not making an accurate prediction of the future is not a reason to criticize the book (in retrospect, after all, a reader can make the inaccurate predictions unimportant by viewing this as an alternate history). Still, the sense of reading a dated novel is stronger here than it is when reading some other older works of sf.

On Earth, nasty Russians are shooting down America’s ABM “Star Wars” satellites faster that replacements can be launched and faster than America is shooting down Russia’s ABM satellites. The puzzled president -- Bova makes him a bit soft-headed, easily manipulated by his hawkish military advisers -- doesn’t understand that America is in an undeclared war. The military wants to take steps that would probably lead to actual war while assuring the president that war isn’t an inevitable outcome of blowing a manned Russian command center out of the sky. Yeah, right. Kinsman knows better.

Kinsman decides to lead a revolution that will turn Selene into an independent nation, but Heinlein already did that in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, so Bova had to tell a similar story in a different way. He does that with reasonable success. While Heinlein premised his revolution on his trademark libertarian perspective, Bova’s revolution is based both on utopianism (one world, make war no more) and practicality (if nations of the Earth destroy each other, who will be left to ship food to the moon?). Both are interesting, but Millennium still feels like a shadow of Heinlein’s novel. It is nevertheless a good story. It’s not Bova’s best, but it is better than his most recent work.

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The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock

Published by Doubleday on July 12, 2016

Readers who are familiar with Donald Ray Pollock expect his characters to be defined by a combination of hardship, violence, and ignorance, softened by occasional moments of compassion and wisdom. In The Heavenly Table, Pollock focuses on impoverished characters in the World War I era who are struggling with life’s unfairness as they search for self-worth or redemption or something that will give purpose to their lives.

Pearl Jewett has three sons: Cob, Cane, and Chimney, all named in fits of drunkenness. He loses his farm in a futile effort to keep his wife alive and confronts a crisis of faith as he struggles to feed his children. He tells them that good fortune awaits -- they will all dine at the heavenly table when they go to meet their maker. Their more immediate fortune is uncertain as they try to make their way in the world, guided by a pulp western that chronicles the adventures of an outlaw named Bloody Bill.

Other characters play out their own dramas as the Jewetts emulate Bloody Bill. Vincent Bovard, in despair after his fiancé leaves him, decides to join the Army and die on the Western Front. Serving as a lieutenant in Ohio who is still far from the front, he struggles with his sexual identity.

Ellsworth Fiddler, a farmer, has been swindled out of his life’s savings. Jasper Cone inspects outhouses in a town where indoor plumbing is considered a Socialist threat. Sugar Milford is a black man who can’t get ahead in a white world -- although his idea of progress is to find a new woman who will support him.

Pollock stretches his literary legs in The Heavenly Table without departing from this strength -- the ability to make readers understand, and relate to, the troubles of people who are disadvantaged by a lack of education, opportunity, and positive parental role models. Many of the characters are desperate -- for money, for friendship, for a woman’s touch, for a peaceful existence. There is greater depth in Pollock’s characters than in his past work, no small feat for a writer whose characters have always been strong.

Pollock uses chance and geography to tie the story threads together. Although The Heavenly Table story is not entirely bleak, Pollock doesn’t contrive the kind of happy endings that appeal to lovers of cozy mysteries, On the other hand, readers who like gritty stories about desperate characters will find much to admire in The Heavenly Table. Pollock's prose, his plot, and his characters are all exceptional.

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The Big Sheep by Robert Kroese

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on June 28, 2016

A biotech company hires a phenomenological inquisitor (a fancy title for a private detective) named Erasmus Keane to help it find a missing sheep. Keane works with the novel’s narrator, Blake Fowler, who is Watson to Keane’s Sherlock. In addition to the sheep (science fiction’s traditional farm animal), a beautiful television star named Priya Mistry wants to hire Keane because she thinks someone is trying to kill her. But soon there seem to be multiple Priya Mistrys and they aren’t all on the same page.

The novel takes place post-Collapse. A portion of Los Angeles exists as an underground, off-the-books community known as the Disincorporated Zone. Yes, Compton is part of it. City officials decided that walling it off would be easier than restoring it to order, which is fine with most of the DZ residents, and with Keane, who had something to do with its creation.

The story is built on the separation of a person from a persona. Owning a person is illegal but owning a persona, at least in the future imagined here, is not. The characters debate the morality of that arrangement; readers can decide for themselves. From the standpoint of Keane and Fowler, the larger question is how a person and her persona can be duplicated with any degree of precision. The solution to that problem is convoluted but clever.

Since the story of chasing a sheep around futuristic Los Angeles is told with tongue-in-cheek, its implausibility didn’t bother me. The story is amusing and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Lively prose, fast-paced action, and quirky characters add to the story’s charm. The Big Sheep isn’t a deep book, but it is a fun book.

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The Emerald Lie by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press (Grove/Atlantic) on August 30, 2016

At some point in The Emerald Lie, a character says, “I’m going to write a crime novel channeling David Foster Wallace, blend in the rules of grammar, have a broken-down PI, an enigmatic femme fatale, and oh, for the punters, a lovable scamp, as in the dog, not the PI.” Which pretty well sums up The Emerald Lie.

The Emerald Lie begins not long after Green Hell ends. Jack Taylor has made a lifestyle of devastation. In The Emerald Lie, he is trying to live quietly, taking his new dog for walks, enjoying his whiskey without a chaser of violence.

The father of a young woman who was brutally killed, apparently by someone who films torture porn, wants Jack to help him avenge the death. Jack has had enough of vengeance to know it makes nothing better, but he has a hard time saying no. His troubles continue when Emily, the crazed killer Ken Bruen introduced in Green Hell, returns to his life.

A second plotline involves a serial killer who selects his victims based on their grammatical errors. That’s a killer for whom I can root. The media call him The Grammarian. Making fun of a lethal grammar enforcer is probably Bruen’s way of thumbing his nose at critics who deplore his addiction to sentence fragments and unorthodox paragraph structures. Ridge, a character from past novels whose friendship with Jack often gives way to hatred, is investigating the killings.

Bruen always riddles his work with reference to popular culture. I give him credit for having the courage to say that some of the best American writing in the last couple of decades has come from television writers (Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and even, bless him, Battlestar Galactica), although he also praises some excellent crime novelists. In Green Hell, Bruen said that references to popular culture allow readers to connect to an author’s work. I would connect to Bruen anyway, on the strength of his honest characterizations of troubled people, but I also love the steady flow of song lyrics, movie references, and quotations from gifted genre writers who lack snob appeal.

As for Jack: “Desperation is its own beacon and I seemed to attract the worst and the worthless” pretty much sums up where he is in life. He carries so much guilt it is no surprise that he walks with a limp. Jack spends much of the novel reflecting on his tortured past, so readers who are familiar with the series might have more context in which to appreciate this novel than newcomers. Fortunately, Jack’s biting wit and pointed commentary on the surrounding world provides humor that balances the darkness of his life. Of course, Jack’s understanding of the world helps the reader understand Jack, which makes it possible to sympathize with a guy who has trashed his life and who continues to make sorrowful choices.

The plot in The Emerald Lie might not be as powerful as those Bruen crafted in some other novels in the series, but Bruen is always a joy to read. Clever prose, strong characterizations, and pointed observations more than make up for a meandering story, albeit one that works its way to a surprising finish. This is a book that Jack Taylor fans cannot miss. For others, I would suggest starting at the beginning and reading the novels in sequence, as Jack’s evolution from book to book is what makes this series one of the best in crime fiction.

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