1921 in Gilda Carr’s Manhattan involves a thirteen mile fence that runs down Broadway. East of the fence, things continue basically as they were. West of the fence is an overgrown wasteland that is at odds with and disallows modern technology. Thousands of people have disappeared in the Westside, and now the people who remain are thieves, bootleggers, murderers, artists, writers, drunks and the people who are too poor to leave. Gilda lives on the Westside.
In W.M. Akers’ Westside, Gilda is a detective, who solves ‘tiny mysteries’ as she calls them. What starts out as a usual tiny mystery for the wealthy Mrs. Copeland tracking down a white leather glove becomes the mystery of why Mr. Copeland is on the wrong side of town, murdered on a Westside pier. Which she wants no part of. That’s way too big for her. Her father, murdered years ago, was a cop, then a private eye, who solved big crimes. And who was eventually killed for what he stumbled upon. Gilda is not a solver of big crimes, she is a solver of small mysteries. The tiny questions that nag us to death and keep us up at night, not murders.
Still, she finds herself tracking down the details of Mr. Copeland’s death in the swampy Westside world of corruption, bootlegging, smuggling. Now Gilda finds herself on the verge of solving his murder and saving the city, even if she doesn’t want to be the person who does any of that.
I liked Westside. It had a very Neil Gaiman Neverwhere feel setting wise, and I very much enjoyed the whiskey, jazz, and the wild west feel of a wild New York City. Gilda herself is a compelling protagonist who distracts herself from her grief with the small mysteries she solves to make a living. The mystery is interesting but the pace was a little off in some places. I have already read the second Westside novel and have the third to dig into as well. I’m looking forward to it.
Westside: A Gilda Carr Tiny Mystery
2020: Victoria Abbott
I read a series of books by author Victoria Abbott in 2020 that I really liked – The Book Collector Mysteries. They were:
The Christie Curse
The Sayers Swindle
The Wolfe Widow
The Marsh Madness
The Hammett Hex
The series revolves around Jordan Kelly, who is back in her hometown, living with her not-quite-on-the-straight-and-narrow uncles after a treacherous ex-boyfriend put her crippling debt by running up massive credit card bills. She finds a job with local recluse Vera Van Alst (the most hated person in town), who likes her collection of rare books, and not much else, but the position includes room and board, and Jordan gets to work for Vera. Her job entails researching and tracking down rare books for her employer, and her first assignment (in The Christie Curse) is the rumored play that Christie wrote while she “disappeared” briefly in 1926 (reappearing eleven days later at a health spa under an assumed name).
The task seems simple, if challenging, until Jordan discovers her predecessor in the position died while looking for the play. That complicates things a bit.
I enjoyed this series a lot. A lot, a lot. I really like what Otto Penzler calls ‘bibliomysteries.’ (BRB, buying books). I googled the author to see when the next book was coming out, and discovered a couple of things.
1 – Victoria Abbott is the pen name for a mother-daughter writing duo. 2 – their website hasn’t been updated in years (and 3 years later still has not been updated). There’s no indication when another book will be out, or IF another book will be out. The mother is half of the duo seems to be the main writer and has started multiple series…and then seems to drop them. She hasn’t published anything since 2016, by the looks of it. If it weren’t for the fact the official Facebook page was updated, I would have guessed she was dead. (Really. Most of her pages don’t look to have been updated in years.)
The fact that there doesn’t seem to be a lot going on with the series isn’t encouraging. Again, I found those books in 2020 and there hadn’t been a mention of a new one in four years, and now it’s three years later and it’s seven years without any indication from an official source regarding a new book.
But I enjoyed the series a lot. I love the mysteries, Jordan is a decent protagonist and I really like Vera. I know a couple of Veras in my own life. She’s grumpy but pretty great. She lives in a big, old Victorian house (which I would love to live in) and which Jordan recognizes is *definitely* one of the perks of her job. I definitely do not live in a big, old Victorian house, but it sounds like a dream, especially the big clawfoot soaking tub in Jordan’s bathroom!
I’m going to keep any eye out for more of this series, but I don’t have high hopes. Fingers crossed, though!
Black Coffee
Agatha Christie’s Black Coffee was her first play and launched her another part of her writing career as a playwright. The premise of the story is that a scientist discovers a secret formula he was working on for explosives has been stolen. He calls in Hercule Poirot, but as Poirot, his friend and sidekick Captain Hastings, and Inspector Japp arrive, the scientist is murdered.
The play was, with the consent of the Christie estate, turned into a novel in 1998 by Charles Osborne (a writer and a classical music composer and critic). This is the version I listened to in 2020 (and the first of several Christie mysteries I read in 2020). I enjoyed this story very much, in spite of the fact that Christie didn’t actually write it in its novel form. It was more or less a locked room mystery and those are some of my favorites, plus, I enjoy Hercule Poirot a lot. I learned another fun poison, and of course read all about it.
When I saw this was the adaptation of a play I wasn’t sure what to expect. I would assume that it would be easier to go from a play to a novel under the premise that adding is easier than subtracting, but I don’t rightly know. That said, Christie always created an atmosphere that I enjoyed and wasn’t sure Osborne would be able to duplicate it, but he did a good job. I enjoyed the story tremendously and I even thought I’d solved it! But I got it wrong, haha.
It wasn’t my favorite Christie mystery but it was very enjoyable and I hope to see the stage play some day.
White Fragility
In 2020, when I listened to a few books about racial justice in the United States in part due to the clear violence shown to black people by police of all stripes, Robin DeAngelo’s White Fragility was the first book I listened to…and I hated it. For a lot of reasons.
You know how Alex Jones spouted far right conspiracy theories and reality denying bullshit (Sandy Hook massacre didn’t happen) for the grift? White Fragility is the same thing for a very specific brand of woke leftist person. This is a grift.
DeAngelo sets out to instruct white racists (because we white people are all guilty of racism by literally existing as white) how to do the work and to self examine the new original sin. But we white people are not allowed to ask questions (because it is not the job of black people to educate us), we are not allowed to deny charges of racism (this is just more evidence of said racism), we are not allowed to show emotion of any kind (because this makes it ‘about us’ and not the black folks we are racist against). White people are now allowed to feel unsafe, only black people are. White people are there to sit and agree as DeAngelo declares us all morally stained with no hope of redemption and no solution to overcoming any implicit bias or bettering the country in which we live.
In addition to being informed that I was hopelessly morally compromised, a lot of DeAngelo’s anti-racist evangelism involves infantilizing black people. Like, a lot. I’m not going to pretend that I had tons of black friends, but I had some. I’m not going to pretend I fully understand the black American experience. I do not. But I’ve met enough black people and had enough black friends to know that they are 1) not some monolith of experience and 2) they do not require me (or any white people) to sit in a corner and silently contemplate my innate and all permeating racism so that they can feel equal or whatever it is DeAngelo is pushing. It’s insulting, frankly, and my friends deserve better.
If you’d like to read an article about White Fragility that very much states my feelings on the issue with the added bonus of being written by a black man, you can do so here. John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and I saved his article because I knew one day I’d be writing this review and his eloquence and experience on these issues far outmatch mine.
The reason I say this book is a grift is because DeAngelo is a white woman who ‘consults’ about social justice and race relations for educational institutions, in the corporate world, wherever she can pedal her snake oil. McWhorter says she’s well intentioned, but I think he’s being generous. I think she’s a con artist. As per DeAngelo, I have no hope of ever improving either myself or the world I live in. I am irredeemable and so is American society, and so what is the point in her engaging with us except to make money on our guilt and a desire to improve the world for our fellow human beings? If she’s not helping to make things better because things can’t be made better, then what is she doing besides selling snake oil for an ailment that can’t be cured?
I’m not an expert on race relations, or social justice, or history or anything, really. But I try to be a good person to everyone, I try to fight any implicit bias I may have when I realize I have it, and I’m pretty damn good at spotting a con artist when I see one. Robin DeAngelo is a con artist and I’m out on her bullshit. Everyone else should be too.
Democracy in America
This one was dense. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was definitely one of the thickest books of 2020. I listened to it based on the recommendation of one of my Twitter acquaintances, who, sadly, has mostly left the platform (not that I blame him). Anyway, de Tocqueville came to the United States to see the relatively new republic in action, and the work he wrote when he returned to France remains one of the most timeless books about the United States. It’s quoted by Colin Woodard (who I love), and while I haven’t noticed it quoted in other place, my Twitter acquaintance claims its frequently cited, and I tend to believe him because he loved books like this.
Anyway, I found this book extremely interesting and insightful, and I’m rather devastated I lost most of my notes on it (I took a lot of them) in a great notebook tragedy of 2020 (my cat spilled a pitcher of water over all my stuff). de Tocqueville’s purpose in writing the book was to examine the ‘revolution’ taking place – not an actual bloody revolution, but the social and economic conditions happening in a republican experiment in which the majority of the population bought in.
It was published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840 and focused on several main themes, including the impact of a Puritan founding (which was a lot about the separation of church and state and religious freedom, not common in Europe at the time), the Constitution (the Puritans originally developed the concept of popular sovereignty in some early piece of American political thought and the Founding Fathers developed institutions to protect popular sovereignty, but de Tocqueville argued that freedom is protected more by American habits of thought than any real institution) and the situation of women (where women at the time did not have much more freedom than anywhere else but de Tocqueville did predict they would become ‘just as equal as men.’)
I found Democracy in America a valuable and insightful history book and apparently it’s still studied in political science, sociology, and history spheres. Lots of different view points on the political spectrum like to be able to claim it as a document of support, which I suppose means it does a pretty good job of being well written and neutral.
Readers beware: this book is pretty dense. It’s probably going to take you awhile to get through, but it is interesting and still relevant today.
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
Fun fact: Thomas Jefferson used to be my favorite founding father. In my twenties it changed to Washington but that’s another story.
I’ve always been interested in Jefferson, since I was a kid. I think one my first book reports was on him when we had to do a biography. This book came out in 2012, I think but I didn’t get around to it until 2020. It had been on my radar for several years but Jon Meacham’s books are thick and I wasn’t entirely sold on them until I listened to his book about Andrew Jackson. After that I decided to give some of his other books a try.
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power explores Jefferson’s ability to be both philosopher and politician. Philosophers think and politicians maneuver, and Jefferson was one of the rare men who could do both. Meacham presents Jefferson’s world as he saw it, and what shaped him in his formative years as a boy and a young man. He was interested in and passionate about many things, including but not limited to science, architecture, gardens, books, his friends, family and women. Jefferson loved his home, Monticello, and the city of Paris, but he loved his country most of all and he was constantly looking for ways to achieve what he would consider a founding principle: creation, survival, and success of popular government.
This book takes us through his time as a leader – marshalling ideas (and cohorts), learning from mistakes, forming coalitions in a bitterly partisan time and a time of economic upheaval. Meacham presents Jefferson as possibly the most successful leader of the early American republic with possibly the most widely ranging influence – he championed individual liberty but recognized the new nation’s promise lay in progress, he argued for a small executive branch but he bought the Louisiana Territory, plus he wrote the Declaration of Independence and he established the University of Virginia. He had the usual complicated relationship with race, as did many men of his time.
I enjoyed this book greatly. I especially appreciated the look at Jefferson’s formative years, where you could begin to see that traits that would so clearly appear later on. Meacham does a commendable job explaining one of our most enigmatic founders, and the book is well researched.
Fun fact: My favorite quote from this book was “Jefferson found himself in a debate with a seven year old.” I just started laughing when I heard it read. The context was that Jefferson had to convince his daughter, Polly, to come to Paris with him and her sister, Patsy. Polly didn’t want to go.
The Girl Who Lived Twice
The Girl Who Lived Twice is the sixth book in the Millennium saga, originally started by Stieg Larsson and continued by David Lagercrantz. This was the last book by Lagercrantz.
In some ways this book picks up where the last one left off, with Lisbeth Salander looking to find her twin sister, Camilla, who is the head of an international crime syndicate. Mikael Blomkvist is once again in a creative slump because nothing interesting is happening – until a man turns up dead under suspicious circumstances with Blomkvist’s phone number in his pocket.
With Salander’s help, as well as another the help of another journalist named Catrin Lindas, Blomkvist begins to unravel the tangled nest of wires that connects an Everest guide to the Swedish Minister of Defense, and Salander continues to chase her sister, first to Russia and then back to Sweden, ultimately cornering Camilla when Camilla goes after Blomkvist.
I can’t say I didn’t enjoy this book – it was decent enough and I liked it. Salander and Blomkvist are still a dynamic pair and Salander is still fascinating, but the stories themselves are becoming less compelling with time. I loved The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo when I first read it back in 2012(ish). Since then, the stories have gone downhill. I couldn’t say why. There was less violence in this book than the previous couple, but that is not a sticking point for me. I disliked how gory the books had become. Maybe I just don’t like Lagercrantz’s stories as much as Larsson’s. Either way, when I read/listened to this book, I was pretty glad that this was the end of the series. At the time, it was the end of the series.
But the publishing company has contracted another trilogy with Swedish writer Karin Smirnoff. The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons will be released in the English translation on August 29, 2023. I am, of course, going to read/listen to it. Hopefully, Smirnoff will be able to capture some of Larsson’s original magic.
words in scarlet ink 