Erik Davis

I recently read Californian writer Erik Davis's latest book and really liked it. (There's a review lined up for my new blog.) Then I found the man's web site, with 15 years' worth of feature journalism available on-line. Great stuff, highly recommended! Davis writes a lot about mysticism, drugs, religion and the intersection of these themes. I take an outsider's anthropological interest in such issues, and although Davis has more of a stoner's and zen student's perspective, he writes so well that I gladly follow him. Check him out!

[More blog entries about books; böcker.]

Book Review: Hunter, Gay Mystery Novels

Fred Hunter

• Ransom For Our Sins (1996; the 3rd Jeremy Ransom/Emily Charters mystery)
• Government Gay (1998; the 1st Alex Jennings mystery)
• National Nancies (2001; the 4th Alex Jennings mystery)

Reviewed by Jim Benton

There is nothing new about gay or lesbian detective story writers. They've been around since the very beginning of American mystery stories. To mention a few names, Patricia Cornwell, Cornell Wollrich/William Irish, and Stanton Forbes are all both worth knowing and gay. In fact, "S.S. VanDine" (Willard Huntington Wright) who was arguably the first important American detective story writer since Poe, and the first to establish the American Mystery Story as a respectable genre, was also, reportedly, a 'classic' intellectual/aesthete queen type. Certainly his detective, Philo Vance, was (despite a mention of a passing and not really believable hetero romance in a couple of the later books).

But the 'gay detective story' written, usually, by gay men with a main character who is openly and unashamedly gay (whether he is an amateur investigator, a policeman, or a professional investigator) is much newer. (The lesbian detective story deserves to be discussed separately. Most of the gay detective books have been published by mainstream publishers and because of this have had a certain professionalism to them. Lesbian counterparts have, in the past, more frequently been published by specialty publishers, sometimes semi-self published. Hopefully I will discuss this topic in a future $.99 post.)

The field began with Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter books. There has been some criticism of them as being a little too earnest and humorless, but the idea of a someone being a semi-tough Private Eye (technically an insurance investigator) and a gay man with a settled life was a major breakthrough. The early books had gay-related themes, but the later ones were more varied. They had their flaws, but the twelve books in the Brandstetter series (and Hansen's few non-series works) are still worth looking for.

Hansen's work broke the ice, and mainstream publishers found a substantial market for gay mystery stories. While some writers started out in specialty houses for the gay market, most of the major writers in the sub-field were quickly picked up by the mass market. (In an interesting cross-over, St. Martin's produced a line of "Stonewall Inn Mysteries" in large-sized paperback that included originals and reprints of some of the better writers in the field.)

There are over a dozen main series available, ranging the genre from police procedurals to at least one 'hard-boiled private eye' (Richard Stevenson's Donald Strachey, who has appeared in seven novels -- unfortunately, of the three I've read, only the second, On the Other Hand, Death is worth looking for.) Most of the series tend to feature amateur detectives, ranging from the campy hairdresser of Grant Michaels' Stan Kraychick novels to the serious and well-drawn Chicano lawyer of Michael Nava's Henry Rios books.

Interestingly enough, the books' settings are scattered throughout America, but, except for the Provincetown-located Valentine and Lovelace books by Nathan Aldyne (enjoyable but very lightweight) none of them are located in what most people would think of as gay settings. Rios opens his career in San Francisco but moves to Los Angeles, and the others are set in places such as Albany (the Stevenson books), Minneapolis (R.D. Zimmerman's Todd Mills books), Boston (the Kraychick books, I believe -- two of them are on my to read pile) and no less than four series in Chicago, two each by Mark Richard Zubro (my own favorites of those I have read -- I have yet to read Nava) and the two by Fred Hunter that -- at last -- I am getting around to reviewing: the Jeffrey Ransom series of police procedurals and the wildly funny Alex Jennings mystery/espionage series.

There have been at least nine books featuring Jeffrey Ransom and his 'adopted grandmother', Emily Charters. They are police procedurals, but much more in the English mode, with the policeman and his assistant (in this case Gerald White) more or less on their own in solving the case. Emily Charters, who, from description, is more of a presence in the other books, is limited to minor appearances and suggestions in this book because she is recovering from bypass surgery.

Ransom For Our Sins has whetted my appetite for the other books in the series, but, in all honestly, I have to call it a 'good bad book'. Hunter's strengths here are in the writing, descriptions, and particularly the characters. All of them come alive, and it is particularly gratifying to see characters that could easily be flat clichés -- the leader and other members of a religious 'community' ("we prefer to call it that, not a church") -- become fully three-dimensional. Ransom himself is an engaging eccentric. Surprisingly, while there are repeated statements and reactions that show he is almost certainly gay, and open to and accepted as such by his partner, it is never explicitly stated. Certainly he's never shown with sexual reactions or desires, and he seems to spend most evenings at his hobby of reading Dickens in the bathtub. (He had accompanied this with cigars, but he is attempting to give them up as the book begins.)

I want to spend more time with Jeffrey Ransom, but I hope that Hunter has learned to avoid the flaws that seriously affect this book. One is that because his plot requires a slow build and investigation, one which would have been ruined by the presence of the media, he simply writes any public notice of the crimes out of the book, a serious blow to the 'suspension of disbelief.' It is conceivable that some murders would get overlooked -- though most of them do get some notice in the news in most cities -- but when the first body is shown to have been 'crucified' -- in fact, not hung on a cross, but with the hands and feet pierced with nails -- and when another body is discovered in the same condition, it is simply inconceivable that the press would not have made it a major story. This is one flaw, and the second is that when the murderer is, in fact, revealed, no satisfactory reason is given for the crucifixions. Again, a 'good bad book' but if you find it, one worth picking up.

The Alex Jennings books -- there have been at least five so far -- are as different from the Ransoms as two series can be from the same writer, and these can be recommended with no qualms except for the titles. These are 'gay' books in both meanings of the term. The lead character and narrator is openly gay, and they are simply a lot of joyous fun. They come closer to espionage fiction involving a mystery than straight detective stories, and the first book's title is a homage to the movie Government Girl, -- no I don't know it, but the other movie that is echoed, North by Northwest, everyone knows.

Alex Jennings is a graphic designer who lives with his husband, Peter Livesay ("He calls me that, too.") in Alex's very British, very rich, mother's Chicago townhouse. ("Peter and I are so happily married we even disgust ourselves." It's true, and one of the nicer touches. Again, Hunter's characterizations are excellent, with both Alex and mother Jean being two of the more delightful people I've come across in the pages of mysteries.)

Government Gay starts with Alex wandering into a gay bar simply to kill time while his mother attends a meeting, having a brief conversation with a character he meets there, giving him a cigarette, going into the mens' room, and immediately being set upon by two hulking characters (the 'clay people' as Alex calls them) asking him 'where is it, we saw him talking to you'. Alex tries to explain he doesn't know what they are talking about, and gets whacked rather substantially until the goons are interrupted. And off we go...

The rest is a wild, funny, somewhat deadly series of adventures and misadventures involving the CIA, the 'clay people', various false identities and mysterious meetings, a couple of corpses, all told in a light, campy style. (A couple of critics have complained about this, but I find it a gay twist on the sort of lightness that was so common in American "Silver Age" authors from George Bagby through Stuart Palmer to Phoebe Atwood Taylor. Too many present-day mysteries are totally humorless, or else nearer to classic screwball comedies. This is simply light and funny and much appreciated.) The plot is good, solid, and somewhat surprising, and the ending is worthy of the Hitchcockian model, with Alex clinging to a scaffold on the top of the Sears Tower.

But the fourth book in the series, National Nancies, is, despite the title, by far the best of the books reviewed here. A true mystery, though with a minor bit of CIA involvement -- one result of the first book is that Alex is frequently requested to lend his services to that agency -- and a solid political novel, made even more pointed by some of the events of the last election. Alex, though usually non-political, has been dragged into volunteering for a liberal, gay-friendly Senatorial candidate involved in an easy primary before a difficult general election against a bigoted, homophobic Republican. The campaign has been receiving vitriolic phone calls and almost daily bomb threats.

Only one morning, at 5:00, the threats turn real as a bomb destroys the campaign headquarters, in the process killing the universally disliked and somewhat fanatical lesbian office manager. Was it a fanatic, a 'mole' in the office, or was the bomb meant to do what it did and kill the victim? Off the spouses and mom go, sleuthing and 'playing spy' again, though with the slight distraction of a new romance that mother Jean is apparently getting involved in -- and Alex's reaction to this is a priceless extra to a magnificent book.

The plot is solid, the scenes are excellent, the solution is a good one: all in all, a book that is enjoyable by anyone, regardless of orientation (and if I haven't mentioned my own, I am a predominantly straight bisexual). And there are moments of pure brilliance, from an opening scene where the candidate shows the proper response to rumors that he is gay (if only I had read this a week before instead of two days after the election, I might have e-mailed the passage to a number of campaigns) to an ending two scenes -- after the solution -- that are both totally unexpected and absolutely perfectly done.

Definitely, if you happen upon National Nancies, grab a copy -- even if you have to put it in a brown paper wrapper.

Book Review: Simak, Visitors

The Visitors
Clifford D. Simak 1980
Original magazine appearance in Analog 1979 in somewhat different form.
Availability: not currently in print, but Amazon has a number of pbs and hbs for sale as low as $.01 -- of course, shipping and handling adds another $3. Alibris has no copy under $2.95 plus s&h.

Reviewed by Jim Benton

Clifford D. Simak wrote science fiction for over fifty years, from 1931 up until his death in 1988, turning out about 30 novels and many short stories. Despite his two Hugos and one International Fantasy Award, I consider most of his work rather minor -- City, a novelization of several short stories, might be an exception, but it has been many years since I have read it. (I have to say that the readers who have voted in Locus polls would differ with me, since Simak finished in the top 30 for best SF author of all time in several of their polls.)

Whatever, certainly The Visitors is one of Simak's weakest works, perhaps his worst and most disappointing. "Disappointing" mostly because it has one major strength. The "visitors" of the title are that rarity, a new idea in aliens, and one worthy of Stanley G. Weinbaum for true alienness. They are building-sized black boxes, most likely creatures rather than ships, that suddenly appear first in orbit around Earth, and then start floating down to land in the rural parts of the US and Canada. They don't speak or communicate with people, but they do respond to them.

A beautiful idea. Unfortunately it is like a giant chocolate shell you are served at a dinner party that you eagerly start to cut, expecting that it is hiding some rich desert; only when you cut into it, you find there is nothing beneath it but air. Yes, the visitors are interesting, especially as they begin to eat trees, and excrete cellulose -- which is contradictory since they are later said to need cellulose for their survival. The people in the book aren't interesting though, neither the minor love interest of the "tree-loving" Jerry and his reporter girlfriend, Kathy, nor the President of the United States and various other politicians. None of them have a third dimension that makes them more than stock characters -- and they're dull stock characters too because there is no conflict, no drama in the entire book.

As hard as it is to imagine, the arrival of the visitors and their exclusively landing in the US causes no "International Incident", no political dispute. The entire world seems to basically be yawning as they wait to see what happens. Well, it is different, if not believable in the slightest, not now, at the time of writing, or any time in the last century.

The point of the book seems to be the way the visitors repay earth for the trees they consume -- oh, I said there was no conflict, but there is a Senator who occasionally wakes up long enough to protest a little, but never with anything more than a speech in a gathering of political figures. There's the obligatory general to say "but they might be dangerous", but he also is turned on, by Simak, for a speech or two, and then put back into the toybox where they all seem to reside.

There is an attempt to compare Earth to the Native Americans, losing their civilization by accepting the white man's gifts, and at one point there is a hint of a really scary potential gift, but Simak doesn't do much with either idea, or much of anything else. If he'd stripped the book of ninety percent of its words, and written a short story using the one idea I mentioned, it might have been a major work. If his mention of it on page 220 and then suggesting it again on the last page had been surrounded by anything believable, it might have rescued the book. But by the time you get it, you've stopped thinking, out of self-preservation. Stopped thinking, or caring.

[More blog entries about books, review, sf, sciencefiction, cliffordsimak; böcker, recension, sf, sciencefiction, cliffordsimak.]

Jim Benton, Haunter of the $.99 Shelf

Jim has a plan for all those cheap paperbacks...

Because I am cheap, broke, and have a high reading speed -- and all three have been true most of my life -- I very rarely buy new books. I much prefer building my library, particularly the fiction part of it, by frequenting thrift stores, second-hand book stores (or used book tables at general book stores) and, since I've been living in Brooklyn, taking advantage of a public library that has permanent book sales in every one of its 40+ branches.

Yes, I lose the chance to walk into a bookstore with a particular book in mind, finding it, and buying it -- provided it is both in print and in stock. But there are a number of compensations.

I like the "grab bag" situation, the never knowing what you will find when you check a particular place. I can check a particular spot four times running and walk out empty-handed, and the next time I may find so many books that I can't carry them all, or afford them even at those prices.

I like the opportunity to take a gamble on an unknown author or book, much easier when what you are risking is $.25-$1.00 rather than $5-$25.

I like the fact that if I have, say, $7.00 to spend, rather than getting just one paperback, I can come home with anywhere from 7 to 70 pbs or hardcovers -- yes, there are places to get books for as little as $.10 for paperbacks and $.25 for hardcovers.

Since I've been doing a fair share of book buying recently, I thought it might be fun to start reviewing the books as I read them. You won't find the latest bestsellers here, but you might find the occasional book or author to look for -- or to avoid. (I'll be doing them as I read them, except that sometimes a book will send me onto my shelves for others by the same author.)

I'll try to check availability for each of them, at least through Amazon and Alibris. So here goes...

[More blog entries about books; böcker.]

Fifty Years Out Toward Lyra

The Swedish language has produced very few really good works of science fiction. (Give us a break, Swedish has less than nine million native speakers). One of these few really good works was published 50 years ago, and the occasion was celebrated with a symposium today at the Academy of Letters. It might have been the Swedish Academy, because the book's author was a member and they awarded him the Nobel for it. I'm talking about Harry Martinson's science fiction verse epic Aniara.

The Aniara is an interplanetary spaceship full of colonists bound for Mars, escaping from an Earth ruined by pollution and nuclear fallout. On its way from Earth the spaceship evades an asteroid, gets thrown off course, sustains heavy damage to its steering, and ends up randomly on a course for Lyra. The constellation's stars are so far away that when the Aniara finally arrives there its passengers will have been dead for aeons. In 103 cantos of varying length and lyrical form, Martinson tells stories of the people on board as they progress through the years on their pointless journey into interstellar space.

We came from Earth, from Dorisland,
the jewel in our solar system,
the only orb where life obtained
a land of milk and honey.
Describe the landscapes we found there,
the days their dawn could breed.
Describe the creature fine and fair
who sewed the shrouds for his own seed
till God and Satan hand in hand
through a deranged and poisoned land
took flight uphill and down
from man: a king with ashen crown.

Aniara, canto 79, by Harry Martinson.
Translated by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg 1999.

The book is very much a product of the Cold War: marked by concerns about environmental degradation and the nuclear threat. It is also a pessimistic book, a vision of the futility of human endeavour, very far in tone from what for example Robert Heinlein was writing at the time. But Aniara draws from the same background of sf tropes as Heinlein's books, offering an alternative and cautionary take on what is sometimes called Golden Age sf.

As a child, I used to feel a deep stomach-churning horror at the thought of that crippled spaceship falling away into the darkness. Looking at it now, I'm not so sure the alternatives would have been much better. The people on the Aniara fled a dying Earth to live as colonists on inhospitable Mars. Neither their origins nor their intended destination was Paradise, and so their fall into darkness shouldn't really be seen as a fall from grace. They have food and power to last them for years. They continue to produce cultural fads, religions, even scientific discoveries. Sure, they're all fucked. But they were fucked before they even went aboard the Aniara. And that, I guess, is how the gloomy yet brilliant poet, then just into his 50s, saw life. We're fucked. Nobody gets out of here alive.

*

Harry Martinson wasn't a glumster all of his life. For youthful vigor, optimism and prose-lyrical mastery, read his early books about life as a sailor in the merchant navy: Resor utan mål (1932) and Kap Farväl (1933).

[More blog entries about books, reading, sf, sciencefiction, sf, poetry, Sweden; böcker, läsning, sciencefiction, sf, poesi, harrymartinson.]

Swedish Academy

Another one of the academies founded by Swedish royalty in the 18th century is the Swedish Academy, set up by Lovisa Ulrika's son to cultivate the Swedish language. The organisation's mostly known for its role in awarding the Nobel Prize for literature. It's also a household name through its dictionary, the SAOL.

Being an aesthetic relativist, I don't have much respect for the Nobel Prize for literature. All that such an award says is that the receiver has managed to please eighteen people in Stockholm who are very far from average readers. Their selections are actually kind of a continuing joke in Sweden, greeted by the catch phrase "Yes! Finally!" (Äntligen!) every year when some obscure old man's name is revealed. The prestige of the prize is of course not contingent on that of the academy members, but rests entirely on the amount of cash involved. If Alfred Nobel had just donated money enough to buy a fancy fountain pen for every laureate, then nobody would care about the prize.

But Nobel was an aesthetic absolutist: indeed, his will stipulates that the prize be given to the writer of the "most ideal" works of fiction or poetry. Little could he foresee that the artistic ideals he espoused would one day be (indeed, were already at the time in some quarters) seen as sub-culturally contingent and largely arbitrary. So don't expect me to greet the new laureate, when his (of course it's gonna be a him) name is publicised next week, with much enthusiasm.

The Swedish Academy can have only eighteen members, and they're elected for life. This means that when someone becomes too old or ill to participate, or when a member disagrees with the others so badly that they want to leave the association, then no replacement is possible until they die. So I don't think there have been eighteen fully active members at any one time since the 18th century.

Two members died recently (Östen Sjöstrand and Lars Gyllensten), and the names of their replacements were announced today. Kristina Lugn (58) is a widely read and staged poet and playwright, hugely popular among middle-class ladies of a certain age. Jesper Svenbro (62) is apparently a poet and a Classical Greek philologist, though I have managed to read Swedish books and newspapers for almost 30 years without registering his existence. Actually, he looks suspiciously like a Nobel Laureate for literature. Too bad for him he ended up a member of the Academy.

[More blog entries about books, nobelprize, Sweden; böcker, nobelpriset, svenskaakademin.]

Robert Anton Wilson Needs a Hand

Psychedelic and occult writer and prankster Robert Anton Wilson is most well known for books like Cosmic Trigger and the Illuminatus! trilogy. Wilson, born in 1932, is currently in poor health and dire financial straits. There's a fund raising drive going on. I'm certainly dropping a few bucks into the old visionary's paypal account. I heard his talk at the Stockholm Spoken Word Festival in 1999, and he was great.

[More blog entries about books, rawilson, robertantonwilson.]