Well, it didn't take me long to come back to Lee Child. A disappointment here, a case of reader's block there (it's like writer's block, except you keep finding yourself getting stuck on page 25 of a book that you really want to enjoy), 
and you find a familiar voice calling out to you from the loibrary shelves. This is a fairly recent Jack reacher thriller, and it sees him summoned by an old army comrade to aid in the investigation into the murder of another of his Army days Special Investigation unit. Pretty soon half the old gang is back in town, looking for information and, if necessary, revenge - but who, exactly, is on their tails, and why? The plot line develops convincingly and bloodily - Reacher's own hit rate approaches double figures, and his targets expire in a satisfying variety of ways, and his cameraderie with his ex-colleagues gives an insight to Reacher's state of mind - both for the reader and, it seems, for Reacher himself. It will be interesting to see how he moves on from the experience in future novels, but in the meantime I am going to enjoy myself filling in with the intervening stories.
I wanted to like this book. I liked the basic premise - a crashed airliner whose passengers have maintained a nineteen-fifties, public school society are invaded by the sole survivor of an "I'm Not A Celebrity, Get me Out Of Here" TV endurance/reality show. 
The Wilt-like character at the centre of the plot is an archetypal English lower middle class loser, a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, divorced, skint, emotionally stunted, blah, blah, and very much blah. There doesn't seem much about his life that he likes, and there doesn't seem much about anything at all that the author likes. His satire bites at reality TV, TV producers, English men, chavs, modern society, 1950's society, feminism, ex-wives, the public school system... he really doesn't have a good word to say for anyone. Which is a shame, because he can plot, he can write, he can do dialogue, but he can't invest the book with any warmth, any heart, any positivity. And to write a book which will be enjoyed and appreciated by anyone not terminally addicted to schadenfreude, then, like the song says, "You gotta have heart".
Ed McBain is, by far, the best represented author on my bookshelves, both under this pen name, and as Evan Hunter. There's a reason for that. He wrote the best damn police procedurals ever. Hill Street Blues? A straight, but uncredited, nick from the 87th Precint - in fact, in one of the novels the characters complain about someone spying on them and putting them on TV without their knowledge.
He wrote over 50 novels set in the halls of the 87th Precint squadroom. Some have been made into films - Kurosawa's "High and Low" is based on an early 87th precint novel, and you don't get much better than that. There have been short lives TV shows, even a comic book, but nothing can compare to the original. McBain is witty, funny, sharp, and moving. His characters are flawed, changeable, reedemable, three-dimensional. His plots are complex, thrilling, amusing, puzzling. And he dies about five years ago. I still have the final book he wrote unopened - I can't bring myself to say a final goodbye to the characters. So, in the meantime, every now and again, I pick up one of the old ones and re-read (and re-read and re-read).
"The Mugger" is the second in the series, dating back to 1956 and, in the edition I have, wrapped in the glorious "revolver and gallows" jacket of the Mystery Book Guild.
54 years: you would think it would date badly, wouldn't you? OK there are references to WWII and Korea, and the teenagers are (almost) straight out of West Side Story, but humanity never changes, and its capacity for lust, greed are constant, and expressed now pretty mugh exactly as they were back then. A mugger stalks the streets of a thinly disguised New York, a beautiful teenage girl get murdered, a patrolman uses his spare time to solve a crime and fall in love. will you guess whodunnit? You know, I can't remember if I did the first time I read it, and I know the answer now, but when I read it I still look forward with gleeful anticipation the the moment when the penny drops. And I look forward to the pleasure of re-reading all the rest of the series and maybe, one day a long way away, I will open the final book and bid a rueful farewell to Steve Carella, Meyer meyer, and the rest of the detectives of the 87th
With some writers, you can see the author's hand all over the page. With some writers, every now and again, you get a glimpse of the author desperatley trying to be a writer and breaking the character's cover. And with some writers, you get the Fictive Dream cast so successfully that never for a moment do you realise that you are just reading a book and not actually inside some character's head. You find a writer like that, you come back time-and-time again to their work.
So how come it's taken me so long to stumble across Jack Irish, the hero of Peter Temple's Aussie crime-thriller "Dead Point"? 
Small-time lawyer, Aussie Rules obsessive, in-control potential alcoholic, betting man and man of principles, Jack Irish is a satisfyingly complex character, whose voice is totally realised in this novel. Temple can write, boy can he write. e ytakes a razor blade to the prose and cuts away every unnecessary word: dialogue is sparse and realistic, character vignettes tell you everything you need to know... dammit, let me give you an example.
"A couple walked by, young, handsome in black clothing, arguing, heads flicking, spurts of words. He stopped, she stopped, he raised a hand, inquiring. She knocked it away in contempt, walked. The man waited for a few seconds and came back towards us, jaw moving, small chewing movements."
That's what I call economy. A fully drawn picture in under fifty words. Enviable, immersing, unputdownable.
It's not easy, following the verbal shorthand in the conversations - but then again, eavesdropping on real people is never a route to instant clarity. I shall return to paul temple in future. I think this is the start of a rewarding relationship.
Prequels, authorised sequels, char(acter)-jacking, call 'em what you will, it is hard to think of the practise of taking other writers' creations and giving us "new" adventures as anything other than a semi-legitimized fan-fiction.
("Hold on a second", says the voice of the subconscious,"what about, say, Superman? Where would old Supes be today if only Siegel and Schuster were allowed to write him?". I give my subconscious a playful slap and tell it to mind its own business).
So it was with some nervousness that I approached "The prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon". I love the original - the pace, the characterisation, the language, the writing. I didn't think that this would measure up, and it doesn't - but only by a barrel of a very snub-nosed automatic.
Gores draws heavily on the imagery in the Bogart movie (which in turn was very closely adapted from the novel) to tell us the story of Sam Spade's first few years as an independent investigation agency. The plot is long, connects the dots nicely, and watches Spade stumble across a gold smuggling racket that will touch on his career for the next few years.
We get the skinny on his relationship with Iva Archer, semi-legitimising the philandering which makes him such an ambiguous figure at the opening of Falcon. And yes, Iva is there, along with Miles Archer, just as unpleasant as we thought he might be, Effie Perrine (fresh out of college but already a dab-hand at rolling a cigarette), and the two flatfoots, Dundy and Polhaus.
Although it is all very satisfying, and there is a kind of pleasure in seeing Spade move towards the moment when Effie Perine tells him that Miss Wonderley is waiting to see him, I am still left with one doubt; if Dashiell Hammett had wanted us to see Sam and the rest before the events of teh Maltese Flacon - well, wouldn't he have written it himself?
Elmore Leonard is, perhaps, the best dialogue writer in American crime fiction. Couple this with the fact that he writes believable, engaging characters and intriguing plots and you have an author who bears reading and re-reading.
"Comfort to the Enemy" is a linked series of two short stories and a novella, watching lawman Carlos "Carl" Webster over a span over twenty or so years of his life. Beware the cover - this makes you expect some kind of "White Heat", "Little Caeser", Chicago gangster affair, but the contents are a long way from that. Encounters with wannabe Dillinger sidekicks, cattle rustlers, hard-working men who turn to bank robbery out of despair, a German PoW who escapes and then returns to camp almost at will. There's no detection, as such, very little in the way of knock-down, shoot 'em up gunplay, but a portrait of a man growing older and wiser in his job. Recommended.
The first book of the New Year, an Andrew Vacchs novel (is Vacchs my "turn of the year" author? Cetainly 2009 kicked of with a slew of his work).
Vacchs may have finished with his series character last year, but this novel gives the impression of having been plotted as a Burke vehicle. There is the wise, troubled "leader" and the family of misfits, this time a gathering of homeless who learn valuable life lessons, as does the reluctant head of the family. Ho is a retired sensei with a raft of memories of people he has let down, intent on defeating his own demons. If you have never read a Vacchs before, this one is not going to convert you. Plots peter out, people utter gnomically, nothing much really happens. If you have read Vacchs before, it will remind you of one of the more melancholy Burke novels, but without the graphic details. It's not a thriller, not a "caper", just "a novel". An interesting departure, but not an entirely satisfying one.
