Bloody Spur; Astrid Lindgren: the Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking

Third in the Caleb York series, the wonderful Western collaboration between the late, great Mickey Spillane and the keeper of his flame, Max Allan Collins (side note: happy 100th anniversary of Mickey Spillane's birthday the other day!). The railroad wants to build a spur of the line between Trinidad and Las Vegas (New Mexico, not Nevada) and most of the townspeople are thrilled at the idea of the railroad coming through their town, bringing new business and prosperity. Founder of the Bar-O ranch, blind George Cullen, is against the spur, since he thinks it will bring more crime and trouble and competition. His daughter, Willa, is all for it but doesn't know how to convince her father to change his mind. York is for it, but he's got more important things on his mind: a bad hombre named Preacherman is in town to compete in the poker tournament at the Victory, and York has a feeling he's been hired to kill someone. It was good and lots of fun, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I've never actually read any of Astrid Lindgren's books. My sister and I used to love watching the old Pippi Longstocking movies on TV when we were kids. I saw this new biography about Lindgren, and checked it out. It wasn't bad. It's funny to think she only wrote three Pippi Longstocking books, she wrote so many others, and yet Pippi is what she is known for. She lived a pretty unconventional life: she got pregnant at 18 by her much older, married boss and traveled to Denmark to give birth in secret, since Swedish hospitals required both parents' names on the birth certificate. She left their son, Lars, with a foster mother for a few years until she was able to go back and get him and bring him home with her. She married her next boss, who was a bit older, and had a daughter, Karin, with him. It wasn't a marriage for love but for mutual benefit: as a single mother she needed to be able to give her son a stable home, and she and her husband got along well. When he died, quite young, actually, she never considered remarrying, instead enjoying living on her own, surrounded by children and grandchildren. She passionately loved children, and had some rather radical notions about how to raise them.