Dean Young, Shock by Shock

Dean Young, Shock by Shock
Copper Canyon Press, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-155659-431-1

Dean Young’s most recent book of poetry, Shock by Shock, was written in the aftermath of heart failure and a heart transplant (in 2011).  Not surprisingly, many of the poems involve mortality, death, and survival.  I’ve been reading his work for 15 years or so, and this is about as good as it gets.  His language is sharp and his images are vivid, and if you don’t have tears in your eyes a lot of the time, there’s something wrong with you.  A line from the final poem in the book, “Believe in Magic”:

“I believe reality is approximately 65 percent if.”

And, “Exit Strategies”:

“Second to last day of November
2014, a year I can almost admit
to surviving.  In an airport
in North Carolina, Laurie looks up
from her phone and says, Sad news.
No one is allowed to live forever
so that part isn’t a surprise.
The whole flight back I try to block out
the kid screaming behind me
even though he is me.
The stewardess tries her toy-plane
trick followed by the beverage cart.
I wish I was an ancient Chinese poet
so drunk even the moon seems sober.
I wish my mind was a flower.
Carry me oh carry me home.”

Also on the back cover, from a   poem titled “To the Critics”:

“…Have you ever tried
to stand up on a bicycle?
Have you ever tried to stand up
on a bicycle made of glass
juggling lemon trees while
a huge rectangle of darkness
approacheth on wheelchair wheels?
Sure you have.”

What I really want to do is type the whole book out for you, but that would be wrong.

Timothy Hallinan, King Maybe

Timothy Hallinan, King Maybe: A Junior Bender Mystery
Soho Crime, 2016
ISBN 978-1-61695-432-1

Junior Bender is in a large mansion-ish home in LA, preparing to steal a very rare stamp…when the homeowner, who happens to  be a contract killer, returns and very nearly traps him.  This kicks off a story that involves Junior's relationship with his wife and daughter, his daughter's problems with her boy friend, Junior's issues with his current flame, his problems with his fence, a nasty Hollywood mogul, an exceptional artist, and more. 

While the narrative occasionally drags, the story is well-conceived and everything holds together (and, no it's not all connected).  The climactic scene, in which Junior manages to turn the tables on a number of his adversaries and manages to see justice partially done--he makes that justice complete later on--is extraordinary. 

Junior is an engaging character, and Ronnie, the current flame, matches him in likeability and in inventiveness in a crisis.  I hope we see her again (indeed, she might deserve her own book).  The title of the book is brilliant, and gets explained.  Hallinan makes the LA setting and the milieu of the studios characters in their own right.  (For a book   presumably written in 2014/2015, there's a great Trump reference.  Also a great Hitchcock quote:  "When someone asked [Hitchcock] how he kept his calm when he was confronted with production crises, difficult actors, uncooperative weather, and the light-blocking, soul-sucking bulk of producers, he said, "I try to live my life as though it happened three years ago.' "  Words to live by.)   A hit with me.

Two great new CDs: Paur Simon, Stranger to Stranger, and Shawn Colvin & Steve Earle, Colvin/Earle

Paul Simon, Stranger to Stranger (2016)
Concord Records
CRE-39803-2

This is not your typical Paul Simon album, not your typical “pop” album.  It doesn’t rely all that much on traditional song forms (verse-refrain, maybe with a “break”), but is more like modernist poetry set to music.  There are exceptions, of course.  “Wristband,” the second track, is a pop-song-sounding thing.  The narrator is a singer/guitar player who manages to get himself locked out behind the venue in which he and his band are performing, and, when he gets to the front, the doorman confronts him with

Wristband, my man
You got to have a wristband
If you don’t have a wristband, my man
You don’t get through the door…

But just when you think it’s a fairly simply little ditty, it suddenly becomes very political:

The riots started slowly
With the homeless and the lowly
Then they spread into the heartland
Towns that never get a wristband…

And you know that the end will not be a pretty fade out.

There are two songs, not back-to-back, that will stick in my mind—“Street Angel” and “In a Parade.”  In “Street Angel,” we meet a homeless man, on the streets,

I make my verse for the universe
I write my rhythms for the universities
And I give it away for the hoot of it…

But

They took him away in an ambulance
Made a way with the ambulance
He waved goodbye from the ambulance…

He returns, more or less, in “In a Parade:”  But it’s a parade in the ER and one that does not seem to be likely to have a happy ending:

Diagnosis: Schizophrenic
Prognosis: Guarded
Medication: Seroquel
Occupation:  Street Angel

The opening track, “Werewolf,” really belongs with these two. 

The werewolf is coming.

The fact is most obits are mixed reviews
Life is a lottery
A lot of people lose…

There are love songs as well—“Stranger to Stranger,” “Proof of Love”—both of which are at best ambiguous about the outcome.  But the song that speaks most clearly to me is the closing track (well, before the “bonus” tracks), “Insomniac’s Lullaby.”

Oh Lord, don’t keep me up all night
Side-by-side with the moon
Alone in the bed
The season ahead
In a winter that lasts until June…

All of the songs are supported by extraordinary rhythm tracks and a huge ensemble of supporting musicians.  At age 70-whatever, Paul Simon has lost nothing, and gained much.

Shawn Colvin and Steve Earle, Colvin/Earle (2016)
Fantasy Records
FAN-39674-02

You might think this is a fairly standard alt-country outing, but it is really a piece of work.  Six original songs (co-written) and four covers (two of which are excellent).  To deal with the covers first, their version of “Ruby Tuesday” is not much like the Stones’ hit, and the song is not, in my opinion, all that good as a song.  Jagger’s singing carried the original, but it’s not much here.  Their cover of John Loudermilk’s (1960) “Tobacco Road” is nicely done, but, once again, the song (about a poor boy in a dying town who vows to get out, get rich, return, and re-make the town) doesn’t really resonate.  On the other hand, their cover of Sylvia Fricker’s “You Were on My Mind” (1964) really makes you forget the hit version (by We Five).  They make the underlying angst clear and almost a physical thing.  Finally, Emmylou Harris’s 1999 piese, “Raise the Dead” is reason enough to buy the CD.  A sample, the second verse:

Sam Cooke met the woman at the well
She told him that his some was something he could never sell
And I think he knew that a change was gonna come
Still he lived to fast and he died too young
Well dyin’ I have survived but
I’ll never get out of your love alive.

The six originals consist of five very country love songs, in which there is almost always as much pain as happiness, and one more song (which will get more attention).  For me, the best of the five love songs is “You’re Still Gone.”  The chorus changes from verse to verse, but appropriately.  And the verses have some real high points, like:

Every time the rain comes in
Every time I hear the wind
I can hear your voice again…

The high point of the album, though, is “Tell Moses,” which you must hear (I can’t find a working link to it, but the whole CD is worth buying in any event).  The song ends

So tell Mary, tell John
Say the hourglass is empty
And the judgment day has come
Say Joshua’s blown his trumpet
And the walls are comin’ down
Tell sister brother too
Tell them where they’re gonna meet us
And what we’re gonna do
Tell Stephen tell Shawn
There’s a message in the music
Everybody sing along…

The singing is not the real strength of the CD, although it’s strong enough.  The strength is in the writing and the playing (especially Earle’s mandolin, but the backing band is extraordinary). 

Both these CDs are keepers, friends.

Michael Pearce, A Dead Man in Malta

Michael Pearce, A Dead Man in Malta
Soho/Constable, 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1569478783

Sandor Seymour of the Special Branch is sent to investigate the deaths of three men in a naval hospital on Malta.  All three (two British sailors and one German balloonists) were admitted with relatively minor injuries, and all three died of "respiratory failure."  A letter from an Englishwoman travelling in Malta raised questions about the deaths, and Seymour's job required (a) that he clear up any mystery surrounding the deaths and (b) prevent any conflict between the British government of the island, the local police force, and the Navy. 

His fiancé Chantale manages to join him there (volunteering as a member of a British women's nursing auxiliary--headed by the woman who wrote the letter that triggered the investigation). 

My two favorite characters were Sophia, a Maltese girl, and Kevin, son of the meddling Englishwoman.  They both have school papers to write and wind up helping each other, and, in the process, doing some growing up.  (I could see a book in which they are the main characters.) 

Seymour investigates in his usual manner--talk to everyone, alarm no one, slowly put all the pieces together.  I thought the last part was a bit perfunctory, but this is a solid entry in a very good series.

Michael Pearce, The Face in the Cemetery: A Mamur Zapt Mystery

Michael Pearce, The Face in the Cemetery: A Mamur Zapt Mystery
Poisoned Pen Press, 2001
ISBN 798-1-59058-296-1
Also available as an ebook

It's August, 1919, and Gareth Owen is in Cairo, serving as the head (the Egyptian title is Mamur Zapt) of the Secret (political) police.  The war  has begun, which raises a lot of issues--IfTurkey enters the war of the side of Germany, for example, what will Egypt do?  Should Englishmen in Egypt remain in their posts, or volunteer for war service? 

Owen's job is complicated by the order t0 intern German nationals; this is made doubly complicated because one of them, Herr Fricker, who worked for an Egyptian ministrey, is the author of a plan to arm the village watchmen (ghaffirs--there are 50,000 villages) with modern military rifles, with a first consignment of 850.  Is this a German plot? 

Meanwhile, a body is found in an ancient Egyptian temple site, wrapped in grave cloths, and poisoned (arsenic).  She is the (German) wife of an Egyptian who works in the sugar refining factory.

 All of this has consequences for Owen's relationship with Zeinab (whose father was once and may be again a minister in the Egyptian government). 

Yes, it's complex.  Owen has to somehow get the murder investigation into the hands of his friend Mohammed (lawyer in the prosecutor's office), find 200 missing rifles, determine whether the rifle plan was a German plot.  Oh, and help solve the murder.  The setting is, as usual in the series, brilliantly realized, and the political complexities are nicely handled.  (Some of these are purely British issues, including establishing a coordinating committee of which one member is a strange, supercilious little man named Lawrence). 

Pearce handles all the complexities of the plot well, and, if the resolution leaves some things hanging, well, that's almost inevitable.  A very good book in a very good series (which now has 19 entries, including the recent The Women of the Souk.

Walter Satterthwait, New York Nocturne: The Return of Miss Lizzie

Walter Satterthwait, New York Nocturne: The Return of Miss Lizzie
The Mysterious Press/Open Road Books, 2016
ISNBN 978-1504-02812-7

Miss Amanda Burton, who we met some years ago in Miss Lizzie (1989), has come to New York for the summer, to stay with her uncle, her father’s brother, John Burton (a stockbroker), while her father and step-mother travel around the world.  It is the summer of 1924. Several thousand speakeasies and night clubs are flourishing, and John Burton seemingly knows everyone, everywhere.  During her first week in New York, she wanders the city during the days and is escorted to various more and less savory establishments in the evenings, including a trip to the Cotton Club.  Throughout the book, Satterthwait evokes remarkably well the city in the mid-1920s, not simply recounting things, but making it live for us.

But the first week ends.  And it ends with Burton’s rather savage murder in his apartment at the Dakota.  Amanda is the only other person in the apartment at the time, and there are no indications of an intruder.  The New York police (who are not depicted as zealous pursuers of the guilty), seize on Amanda as, if not a likely suspect, someone on whom they can fasten guilt.  She is rescued by Morrie Lipkind, an attorney, and taken to the person who hired him, Miss Lizabeth Borden, in her suite at the Algonquin.  Miss Lizzie decides that it is imperative to conduct an investigation of the murder, to forestall any further actions by the police.  With Lipkind’s assistance, the assistance of Robert (Lipkind’s chauffer, etc.), PI Carl Leibowitz, and Cutter (who is something of a mystery), they begin.

They move in the real New York, against a backdrop of the people who inhabited it, including Arnold Rothstein and Dorothy Parker.  As the investigation, proceeds……well, as this conversation between Miss Lizzie and Amanda suggests.  Miss Lizzie speaks:

“It might, however, be wisest to withhold judgment until you know the complete truth.”

“But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?  We can’t ever know the complete  truth.”

“Yes,” she said, and smiled.  “That is indeed the whole point.”

 This is am immaculately constructed and written book, with what has actually transpired being revealed slowly.  The climactic scenes (there are two) would both make great theater and do make great reading. 

Whether Miss Lizzie returns for a third installment, I suspect, and sincerely hope, that we have not read the last of Amanda Burton.  If you have not yet read New York Nocturne, go to your local bookstore, or get on your computer, and buy it now.  You will not be disappointed.

John G. Brandon, A Scream in Soho

John G. Brandon, A Scream in Soho
British Library Crime Classics
ISBN 978-0-7123-5745-6
Also available as an ebook

Detective Inspector Patrick Aloysius McCarthy is handed the job of solving an apparent murder--with a disappearing body--which occurred in Soho Square.  McCarthy and a young constable both hear a scream--after midnight, and in the blackout conditions of wartime London.  McCarthy, born and raised and still living in Soho, knows the byways, the good, and the bad of the quarter, knowledge that he puts to good use.  However, he is ialmost immediately called away to investigate the theft of war plans (at the Foreign Office's HQ in Whitehall) from a locked safe in a locked room, with only about  30  minutes for the theft to have been accomplished.  (Now, how an unauthorized stranger managed to get into the building and remain unobserved even for that long is unexplained.) 

Coincidences abound (Surprise!  The murder and the theft are linked!), and McCarthy seems impervious to pain (and possible concussion), and a satisfactory time is had by all (and a satisfactory conclusion reached).  Not by any means a great--or even much above average--book, but not a chore to read either.  I'm not recommending that you seek it out, however.