In the early 1970s, I worked at a publisher’s representative’s
office in San Francisco, and made one of the best friends I’ve ever
had. Lillian, the office manager, sat across from me, and she and I
talked books and politics and life for the whole time I worked
there. We’ve been talking ever since, and we still correspond.
Lillian taught me that I could read for fun.
That sounds odd, I know, but till then, I had read books the way
I read them in high school and college: Dostoyevsky, Proust,
Balzac, Tolstoy. Heavy, serious literature. Lillian vouched for me
with the Mechanics Institute Library, where I became a member, and
she introduced me to Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, and Raymond
Chandler.
While I lived in San Francisco, and while I was a member of that
great library, I read every one of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries
(more than 70) and every book P.G. Wodehouse had ever published
(near 90).
I’m still reading that way.
EARLY THIS YEAR, I realized that I was going to have to find some
new authors. I took my key from jacket art. About 20 years ago,
Carl Hiassen’s publishers started putting out his kicky comic
novels with bright tropical pastel cover designs. Since then,
publishers with authors who may appeal to the Hiassen audience have
adopted the same jacket designs.
First off, I discovered the Randy Wayne White Doc Ford novels.
Doc Ford, the White hero, is a marine biologist living in a hip
little Florida harbor community. Ford, with a deep dark
intelligence background, gets into all kinds of super violent
scrapes entirely at odds with his professorial demeanor.
Six or seven books there.
Then, browsing nearby library shelves, I found William Tappley,
who may be unknown to readers outside New England. Tappley has no
paperback deal, so his books haven’t circulated very widely. He
writes about Boston lawyer Brady Coyne, who solves mysteries in a
more or less conventional fashion.
Tappley appears to have stopped writing in the early nineties.
Our library has nine or ten of his books. I’ve read them all.
About the same time, I started reading mega-bestseller John
Grisham. Interesting developments in Grisham. His first big seller,
The Firm, is absolutely horrible, a contrived commercial
concoction obviously aimed at the lowest common denominator of
bestseller reader. Then came another awful brick of a bestseller,
The Pelican Brief, and thereafter (as I imagine) Grisham
said, “Enough. Now I’m going to write the books I want to
write.”
And he did, and those books are very good. I can especially
recommend The Last Juror. Grisham has written around two
dozen books, and I’ve read nearly all of them.
MANY YEARS BACK, I HAD PICKED UP a novel by James Lee Burke, and
for some reason, it put me off. I continued to see his name, but
had ignored the books. In this current reading stint, I decided to
give him another try, and loved his work. Most of Burke’s books
feature his Louisiana sheriff investigator Dave Robicheaux. The
plots can get Byzantine, but Burke’s phenomenal style and
characters carry the books forward. I’ve now read all the
Robicheaux books, plus the Billy Bob books, set in Montana.
Call that 30 more books.
And that’s the way it goes. I’ve left out a lot of authors here:
Robert Crais, Jonathan Kellerman, Stephen White. My latest
discoveries are Lee Child (six books) and T. Jefferson Parker
(eight or ten). With Parker, I’ve discovered, you have to check the
publication date. Before about 1996, his books could get confusing
and confused. By the evidence of the characters and plots, I
presume that Mr. Parker got sober in the mid-nineties, and
thereafter his life and his prose cleared up.
So I figure that, this year, I’ve read a hundred or more books
so far. I’ve had some disappointments. James Lee Burke’s daughter
Alifair has written some mysteries, too, but she’s nowhere near as
good as her old man. Sometimes publishers push writers for “one
more of those,” and the new book falls flat. Example: Bangkok
Tattoo, by John Burdett, a flaccid follow-on to his fantastic
Bangkok 8 and Bangkok Haunts.
Of course I’ve had time. Unfortunately, I’ve had time. And you
can read flat on your back.
