The Book of the Lion by Thomas Perry

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road on July 14, 2015

This is another entry in Mysterious Press’ Bibliomystery series of short stories that relate to books, bookstores, libraries, or manuscripts. Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffrey Deaver, and a number of other popular crime writers have contributed to the series.

A professor who is a leading expert on Chaucer gets a call from a mysterious stranger who claims to possess the only existing manuscript of Chaucer’s Book of the Lion. The manuscript is thought to have been lost, or possibly it never existed. Is its sudden appearance a hoax? A prank? A fraud?

Rather than offering to sell the manuscript, as a con artist might, the mysterious man has another scheme in mind. Of course, the scheme involves money. With the help of a wealthy friend who has a literary bent, the professor strives to learn the truth about the manuscript.

Thomas Perry peppers the story with snippets of history from the Middle Ages. The characters and tidbits about Chaucer’s works and medieval history make the background more interesting than the plot, which is fun but leads to an unsurprising ending. Still, the fast-moving story is a worthy entry in the series.

RECOMMENDED

A Clue to the Exit by Edward St. Aubyn

First published in Great Britain in 2000; published by Picador on September 1, 2015

Charlie Fairburn has six months to live. He’s a writer and he’d like to write about his impending death, but death is depressing so his agent (who wants him to continue writing screenplays) tells him to write something upbeat. Instead, Charlie sells his house, moves into a hotel, and begins work on a novel called On the Train, snatches of which appear as A Clue to the Exit moves forward.

As every starving artist intuits and as Charlie soon learns, luxury inhibits ambition, so Charlie embarks on a course that will relieve him of the burden of wealth and inspire creativity. His quest takes him to a casino, where parties and a beautiful gambler interfere with his ability to solve “the riddle of consciousness” via the literary exploration of death.

At some point, the beautiful gambler asks him why he’s writing what he’s writing -- what the point of it is -- and it’s a question I was asking, as well. She wants Charlie to meet his death by writing a celebration of life. Instead, he’s writing a story in which pretentious characters discuss the philosophical implications of quantum physics. While the questions they ask are worth pondering -- from Charlie’s dying perspective, the question is how to live consciously -- I agree with the gambler that the story is dry and lifeless. But that’s probably the point. As Charlie provides a pedantic explanation of the novel’s goals and the techniques he is using to achieve them, it becomes all the more clear that Charlie really doesn’t know what he wants to say.

It takes a shocking amount of time for a guy with six months to live who loves but is estranged from his daughter to figure out what is important in his brief remaining life. He gains some other worthwhile insights (people should not hurt others to make themselves happy) but they are less than profound. He also arrives at the conclusion that “consciousness and experience are synonymous.” I take his meaning (I feel the sun warming my face, therefore I am) but the words really aren’t synonymous.

I think Charlie's ultimate realization is that life is a collection of experiences which, again, is hardly a momentous epiphany. His last great insight is “the thing that is closest to us is the most mysterious” which made me wonder when Charlie was going to get around to dying. Someone who is devoting the end of his life to deep thoughts might want to come up with something more meaningful. Or better yet, opt for hedonism, since he’s still young enough to enjoy it.

Near the end of the novel, Charlie goes on something like a vision quest that struck me as laughable. Maybe it was intended as humor. My greatest reservation about this novel is that, while some scenes are amusing, I can’t tell whether it is meant to be taken seriously. If so, I can’t. If not, too many scenes are pointless to justify reading it as a comedy. There is an abundance of good writing here, but it never adds up to much.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Injustice by Lee Goodman

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on September 15, 2015

I started out disliking Injustice because I could not warm up to Nick Davis, the protagonist. By the end of the story I still disliked Nick Davis, but I thought the novel was okay. Its biggest flaw, other than an unlikable protagonist, is that it relies on a chain of improbable coincidences. I don’t mind a coincidence or two -- in real life, they happen all the time -- but too many coincidences are difficult to bear.

Nick Davis is a federal prosecutor who displays all the humorless self-righteousness, pettiness, and narrow-mindedness that characterizes the worst of the breed. He is overly impressed with himself and with his “mission of excising moral disease from the population of free citizens,” a phrase that had me choking with laughter. Isn’t hubris a moral disease? He also seems incapable of recognizing his own hypocrisy, given the number of times he vows to commit perjury to protect his family. At least he has the virtue of realizing that he’s irritating, particularly to Tina, his wife.

Someone in Davis’ extended family is murdered and one of his subordinates, who also happens to have been living with that family member, becomes a suspect. Davis sticks his nose into the investigation, which I could believe, then he rides around with FBI agents and waves his Glock around, which seems like a conflict of interest for a prosecutor since he might turn himself into a witness against the bad guys he’s being paid to prosecute. In fact, Davis is always charging around, leading the cops in the field, which is something a prosecutor just doesn’t do. That’s one of the reasons this novel didn’t ring true. There are a bunch of smaller reasons, like calling the security in a federal trial “guards” when a federal prosecutor would call them “marshals” and concluding that a prisoner who won’t talk to cops about an ex-cellmate must feel intimidated by the cellmate when most prisoners refuse on principle to cooperate with the police unless they’re being rewarded for it.

Meanwhile, as Davis and the reader try to figure out whether Davis’ subordinate is innocent or guilty, Davis is half-heartedly investigating a federal crime that involves a corporate conspiracy to bribe politicians. It is a rule in modern crime fiction that if a protagonist is working on two separate and apparently unrelated cases, the cases will eventually connect. The question is how they will connect and whether the connection will make sense, or whether it will seem strained as the writer juggles too many coincidences to keep the plot moving. The latter is the case here.

On a more positive note, courtroom scenes are lively and the novel moves at a good pace. Lee Goodman’s prose is stronger than most thriller writers manage. My interest in the story grew as the novel progressed and continued until the last chapters, when a final coincidence -- one that seemed just too contrived -- left me rolling my eyes. Still, while the contrivance has been used before in thrillers, it is given a creative twist in Injustice. On the other hand, the very last scene is too far over-the-top. Despite my reservations, I recommend the novel for its engaging plot.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

In the Distance, and Ahead in Time by George Zebrowski

First published in 2002; published digitally by Open Road Media on May 19, 2015

The need for balance is a theme that dominates this collection. The stories set in the near future emphasize the need to balance progress against its environmental consequences. Stories set in a more distant time emphasize the need to balance imagination and reality.

The stories tend to be cautionary but they generally avoid becoming preachy. To some extent, they use familiar themes of science fiction to address questions of philosophy. Some of the stories feature recurring characters. Others are set in different points of the same unfolding future that provided the setting for the novel Macrolife. An introduction explains where the stories fit into George Zebrowski’s development as a writer.

The collection was first published in 2002. It contains stories written between 1970 and 1996.

Five bleak stories are set in the near future:

“The Water Sculptor” - Two friends, orbiting the Earth in space stations, contemplate the nature of art and the future of mankind.

“Parks of Rest and Sculpture” - A man who is about to make a life among the stars mourns an ecologically devastated Earth that is on the verge of being abandoned by its population.

“Assassins in Air” - In the battle between man and machine (specifically, pollution-generating cars), it isn’t clear who will win.

“The Soft Terrible Music” - In a post-plague world, a man goes to great lengths to conceal a crime, but concealing his feelings of guilt is a more difficult task.

“The Sea of Evening” - When Artificial Intelligence is finally developed, will alien civilizations finally think that mankind merits contact?

Three stories are set in a more distant time:

“Heathen God” - An imprisoned alien explains the creation of humanity and gives a priest a new mission in life. This is probably Zebrowski’s signature short story, having been anthologized as a Nebula-nominee.

“Wayside World” - On a distant Earth colony that has lost the old knowledge, a man wanders from library to library until he is given new knowledge by people who have come to rebuild the colony -- but is the data in their computers the kind of knowledge that will restore a civilization?

“In the Distance, and Ahead in Time” - Colonists are given the chance to leave a world before they have a catastrophic impact upon the development of its native species. The story illustrates two differing philosophies: humans have no right to interfere with the natural development of life on other planets vs. humans have the right to compete with other life forms for supremacy.

The last two are set in the far future:

“Transfigured Mind” - People live long lives, then change and live different lives. They see life as a game and self-consciousness as a painful experience that is best avoided. They choose not to remember the past. An outsider asks whether experiencing a more tangible reality would be more fruitful, but the search for new knowledge does not interest the humans who dwell on Earth.

“Between the Winds” - Set in the same future as “Transfigured Mind,” the remaining inhabitants of an Earth that is coming back to life are living a Matrix-like existence. The story again explores whether it is better to live in virtual reality or actual reality.

“Transfigured Mind” makes a self-conscious effort to be literary. Like “Between the Winds,” it doesn’t hold up as well as the other stories, perhaps because other writers have taken the notion of virtual reality to loftier heights. Still, this is a strong collection by one of the genre’s more philosophical writers.

RECOMMENDED

The Complete Crime Stories by James M. Cain

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road on May 26, 2015

James M. Cain wrote in an era when real men slapped women around because that’s what real men did. Of course, it was also an era in which women slapped men who insulted them and who, motivated by profit or jealousy, murdered men while pretending to be their victims. And an era in which middle-aged men proposed to sixteen-year-old girls after being acquainted with them for five minutes -- to be followed, presumably, by a lifetime of slapping each other. At least that’s the world that Cain portrayed in these stories.

Most of the stories are relatively short but one of my favorites is relatively long. “Career in C-Major” deals with a “roughneck” contractor in the depression era and the woes he experiences after marrying a socialite who blames him for ruining her chance to become an opera singer. With the help of another singer, the husband devises a scheme to put his cold-hearted wife in her place. It’s an unusual love story about a man who falls in love -- with himself (or, at least, with his own voice) and with a woman whose identity comes as a surprise. “Career in C-Major” is the most substantial and most interesting story in the volume, but it doesn’t have a thing to do with crime.

Several other entries in this collection of crime stories are not crime stories, which might disappoint readers who want the book to live up to its title. They are nevertheless excellent stories. “Coal Black” is about a miner and a sixteen-year-old girl who get lost in a mine that the miner believes to be haunted (a superstition compounded by the bad luck of finding a female in a mine). Another story of two people thrown together in a dangerous environment, “The Girl in the Storm,” goes in a completely different direction.

“The Birthday Party” is an amusing story about an insecure, boastful boy who is embarrassed by his attempt to deceive a girl. “Mommy’s a Barfly,” one of the best titles in the history of short stories, is about a soldier, his wife, their little girl, and an eventful evening in a bar. “The Taking of Montfaucon” is a war story about a soldier who might have been awarded a medal if he hadn’t gotten lost.

The most compelling crime story (and my other favorite in the collection) is “The Money and the Woman.” A bank officer wonders if he’s been played for a sucker by a teller’s wife, but as the story unfolded, I kept changing my mind about whether the woman was an innocent victim or a con artist. The ending carries a nice surprise and the entire story builds suspense and intrigue.

Most of the other crime stories are also quite good. Without quite forming the intent to do so, a hobo named Lucky kills a railroad detective, then obsesses about all the ways in which he might get caught. “Dead Man” tells how Lucky deals with his sense of guilt. “Brush Fire” tells of a man who saves another man’s life, and then wishes he hadn’t.

Written in the style of a semi-literate narrator and steeped in the vernacular of its time, “The Baby in the Icebox” is a story of ironic justice involving a man who has no luck taming tigers, including his wife. A semi-literate narrator surfaces again in “Pastorale,” the story of a man who feels the need to confess his crime.

A miscommunication caused by a failure to distinguish one accent from another subjects a man to a hotel scam in “Two O’Clock Blonde.” A prison break and the chance to start a new life lead to an ironic ending in “Joy Ride to Glory.” A “Cigarette Girl” needs help with a gambling issue, and of course the guitar player who helps her immediately decides to marry her.

The collection includes three stories that fall below the standard set by the others. “Pay-Off Girl” is an uninspired story about rescuing a woman in trouble and giving her a better life. “The Robbery” is a nothing story about a man who confronts a neighbor he suspects of burglarizing his apartment. Set in Mexico, “Death on the Beach” is sort of a tragic (but not entirely believable) love story that revolves around a little boy who swims too far from shore. Other than those three, however, this is a strong collection that showcases Cain's mastery of the short story.

RECOMMENDED