Do No Harm

 

I've never read one of Collins' Nate Heller books (at least I don't think I have). I borrowed this one because it was about the Sam Sheppard case and sounded interesting. I didn't realize Heller's stories usually involved real life people, so now I'll have to read some of the others. I really enjoyed this one, I like Collins' writing style.

Heller is in Cleveland the day Marilyn Sheppard is murdered, and goes to the scene with his friend, Eliot Ness, to check it out. Fast forward a few years later to Sam's murder trial, and Heller investigates, trying to get to the truth of it. No luck, Sam is convicted and sent to prison. About ten years later, F. Lee Bailey takes his case and gets him a new trial and once again, Heller tries to get to the bottom of it. It was really interesting, I don't know enough about Sam Sheppard to say if Collins came to the "right" conclusion or not, but it was a fun journey. 

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

 

I know I read this book at some point in my life, I went through an Agatha Christie phase in my late teens/early twenties and read everything I could get my hands on that she wrote. But I didn't remember it, and I saw it on a list somewhere as one of the greatest twist endings in all of mystery fiction. Since nothing else is grabbing me right now (I've started and discarded about 10 books in the last three weeks) I figured I could reread it. It was really good, and the ending was terrific (don't want to spoil anything). 

Roger Ackroyd is murdered, and Belgian detective Hercule Poirot comes out of retirement to help the police solve the case. Lots of red herrings, lots of clues, and lots of people lying helped make it a true mystery until the very end. 

Outlander

 

I blame Starz for rerunning the show. I got sucked into it a few weeks ago, and the next thing I know, I'm rereading the first book. Which I just reread less than a year ago. Oh well. At least it's good! It also seemed a lot less boring than the second time I read it. 

Here's last year's review:

http://bekkisbookblog.blogspot.com/2019/11/chaos-outlander.html

And the first time I read it, back in 2012:

http://bekkisbookblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/explosive-eighteen-crank-sybil-exposed.html

Christmas Cupcake Murder

 

I think this is the last time I'm going to waste my time reading one of these Hannah Swenson books. The last few have just been so terrible. Even though they're a quick read (especially if you skip the pages of recipes), I still feel like they're a total waste of time. It's a shame, the first dozen or so were pretty good.

This one supposedly takes place in the beginning, before Hannah solved her first mystery, yet Mike and Norman are both good friends, which didn't happen right away in the beginning of the books. The timeline was just all over the place. If you cut out all the bits about Hannah thinking about what to bake, baking it, describing how she baked it to 16 different people, then had all 16 different people try whatever she had baked and describe how much they liked it, the book would have been about 20 pages long. There was one ridiculous scene where her cat, Moishe, woke her up in the middle of the night by knocking over things in the pantry, then she had to describe exactly what happened to Mike and Norman over breakfast the next day. I'm like...uh...I just *read* what happened, you don't need to rehash it two pages later. I haven't gotten that senile just yet. 

The mystery was a man named Joe who had amnesia and Hannah helped him remember who he was. It was silly.

Oh, TEAM NORMAN!! Seriously, Norman deserves so much better than to be trapped in these dull books with this dull girl who doesn't realize how wonderful he is. We need to rescue Norman. 

Ripped from the Headlines

 

I've read a bunch of Harold Schechter's true crime books and always enjoyed them (I first learned about H.H. Holmes from his book "Depraved", years before I read Larson's "Devil in the White City"). "Ripped from the Headlines" was pretty good. He talked about movies, some famous, some not so much, that had been made based on real life criminals. I was reading the last one, about the movie "The Young Savages", and I'm thinking "Goddamn, this sounds like an Evan Hunter book. I know I've read something *really* similar". Turns out Hunter did write a book about it, "A Matter of Conviction". I'm always amazed when I can remember things like that, since I read so many books, I always wonder if they "stick". Sometimes they do!

The only minor beef I had was with "The Orient Express". He tried to make the case that Agatha Christie based it on the Lindbergh kidnapping. Now, maybe that inspired her, but the book bears zero resemblance to the crime (I've read everything about the Lindbergh kidnapping I can get my hands on, and I'm excited about a couple of new books coming out). Other than that, it was a very interesting book. 

Pylon

 

You're probably not going to believe this, but I have never read this book.

I know, I know. About twenty years ago, when I first got really into William Faulkner and was tearing through all of his books, I realized that because he was dead, there would be no more. So once I finished reading them all, that was it. I decided to "save" a few, and this was one of them. 

"Pylon" is about a group of barnstormers. Roger Schumann, his mechanic Jiggs, his parachuter Jack Holmes, and his wife Laverne and their son Jack (maybe--Jack might also be Holmes' son, no one knows for sure) are in New Valois (a thinly disguised New Orleans) for an airshow. An unnamed reporter gets caught up in their drama, much to his detriment. Roger crash lands his plane on the next to the last day, but he's determined to fly in the big race the last day to win the $2,000 prize. Unfortunately, the plane falls apart in the air and Roger is killed. 

I can't imagine this was an easy book for Faulkner to write. He flew airplanes himself, but his youngest brother Dean was really into flying, and ended up being killed in a plane crash. Faulkner felt so guilty for introducing his brother to the dangerous sport that he assumed responsibility for Dean's young pregnant wife and pretty much raised their daughter, a girl named Dean after her father. It wasn't the best book I've read by him, but it had some good moments. It was just very dark and didn't have much of the black humor that most of his other books have. 

The Town

 

William Faulkner's birthday was a few weeks ago (September 25) and I started rereading book two of the "Snopes" trilogy, "The Town". I got sidetracked by some Richard III stuff, but I got back to it today to finish it. I love the Snopes trilogy. Because I tend to reread "The Sound and the Fury" so much, I tend to forget how funny William Faulkner's books are. Take his description of Eula Varner Snopes, for instance: "So when we first saw Mrs Snopes walking in the Square giving off that terrifying impression that in another second her flesh itself would burn her garments off, leaving not even a veil of ashes between her and the light of day..." Anybody could say she was beautiful, but it's inadequate. Eula was more than that. 

Flem Snopes married a pregnant Eula Varner and gave her bastard child his name. Whether is was a good name or not is debatable, depending on who you ask in Jefferson, Mississippi. The Snopeses are either scheming or hapless, but never harmless. Upon returning from their honeymoon with a six month old that can already walk, Eula takes up with the bank president, Manfred de Spain. Everyone in town knows and waits for Flem to do something, but he doesn't. Flem's playing the long game, and no one does it better. Once Eula's daughter, Linda, gets to be a teenager, Gavin Stevens, the county lawyer, befriends her and tries to better her mind and convince her to go to college somewhere far away. It ends with Eula's suicide and Flem consenting to let Linda go to New York, with some very funny moments in between (the rake and used condom corsage, for one). Faulkner knows how to paint a vivid picture, that's for sure!

Read Me, Los Angeles

 

While I'm not *quite* out of books about King Richard III, I am pretty close, and I do have other books I want to read. So I took a break and read this book, "Read Me, Los Angeles", about the rich and vibrant culture of books and writing in L.A. Everyone always thinks of movies and TV when they talk about Southern California, but we also have our fair share of writers (the amazing James Ellroy immediately pops to mind--although he no longer lives here, he did and most of his books are about this area). L.A. tends to be polarizing: people either love it or hate. Some of my favorite writers hated it: Faulkner called it "the plastic assshole of the world" (ouch) and Truman Capote said it was "redundant to die in Los Angeles". But there are other writers who love it, like Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner. It was a quick, fun read and I learned about some interesting places to potentially visit if I ever want to brave traffic. If it didn't take an hour to go five miles, I would visit more often :)

Royal Blood

 

This, ladies and gentleman, is the book that started it all for me in regards to King Richard III. This was the first one I read, and just finished rereading, twenty years after reading it the first time.

I love historical mysteries and unsolved true crime. As a teenager, I was fascinated by the Lizzie Borden case, the Lindbergh kidnapping, Jack the Ripper, the Black Dahlia, and so many others. I ripped through the true crime section at the library, reading everything I could get my hands on. Somehow I managed to stumble across this book when it was first published. I'm glad I did! Not sure how I managed it--that time period in history wasn't of interest to me yet (it would be a few more years before I would devour everything I could read about the Tudors). Fields looks at the evidence surrounding the disappearance and perhaps murder of Edward IV's young sons, Edward and Richard, who were last seen sometime in 1483 in the Tower, after their uncle Richard became King. No one knows what really happened to them, if they were murdered or spirited away. If they were murdered, who did it? Richard certainly had a motive, but if he did murder them, he made a clumsy botch of it by not displaying the bodies in order to quell potential rebellions and pretenders, something Henry VII had to deal with. Others had a much better (in my opinion) motive, like Henry Tudor himself (stay with me for a minute, I promise I'll make it as simple as I can, because it really is complicated). Richard had the children of his brother Edward and Elizabeth Woodville declared illegitimate after learning his brother was precontracted in marriage to another woman before marrying Elizabeth. He takes the throne. Now, Henry's troops defeat him at Bosworth and Henry takes the crown and marries Princess Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Edward and Elizabeth. But wait! She's illegitimate. So Henry has to reverse that--but if he does, then not only is she no longer illegitimate, her brothers benefit as well. Now Edward, if alive, is truly the rightful King. If Edward is dead, then Prince Richard becomes King Richard IV. So who benefited most from the boys being dead? Richard III, who already held the crown by right after the Council declared the Princes illegitimate, or Henry VII, who had no rightful blood claim to the throne and was married to the illegitimate daughter of Edward IV? It's easy to see that Richard had no cause to kill those boys and most likely didn't. I doubt we'll ever really know what happened, but for folks looking for the facts plainly told, you can't beat this book.  

Dickon

 

You absolutely have to love this super cheesy cover, right? It's hysterical. 

I heard about this book being one of the first fictional books that didn't make Richard III out to be a tyrant. Bowen published it in 1929. It wasn't bad, but it definitely was silly and, to overuse a word, cheesy. It starts when Richard's father, the Duke of York, is killed when Richard was 8 and he and his older brother George were spirited off to the Low Countries while their older brother, Edward, continued to fight the Lancasters for the throne. On the boat ride, Richard is frightened by a man he thinks is the devil, and this man pops up periodically the rest of his life, leading Richard to think the house of York is cursed. She left out major time periods of his life, unfortunately, like his time in Middleham with Warwick. A reader less well versed on RIII would have wondered why exactly he was so hurt by Warwick's later betrayal. She also used really overly formal medieval language. Her historical details weren't quite on track, I caught a few major blunders, but for being almost 100 years old (no internet back then!) she didn't do too badly. 

And on a related note, tomorrow is the anniversary of Good King Richard's birthday. Which might explain my current reading choices :)