I'd like to recommend a series I discovered several years ago, after I bought my first Kindle. I don't generally enjoy reading mystery/crime books where a policeman or law enforcement officer(s) is/are the protagonist, but I've become quite a fan or this series.

The series debuted in 1986 with Too Late to Die:




It's the continuing story of Dan Rhodes, the Sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, and his small band of assistants working out of a small town in rural Texas. There's Hack (the dispatcher), and Lawton (the jailer), who resemble Abbott and Costello in more than appearance. They delight in taking their own sweet time in giving information to the sheriff and get mad at each other when one of them slips up and lets a bit of actual info into the discussion. Additionally, there is Deputy Ruth Grady who is arguably the most normal of the lot. The reluctant coroner is a local veterinarian pressed into service.

Rhodes is a conscientious, mostly laid-back type who is a widower when the series starts, but marries Ivy after a few books. It's  good match. He likes to drink Dr Pepper from bottles and watch old movies.

I started reading the series when only the last one or two of the 20 books was Kindlized. In the last year most of the back list has been converted to ebook format at quite reasonable prices ($3.99 or so).

If you want gritty, this isn't the series for you. Not much violence, no serial killers, no street gangs, no drug wars, no sex or vulgarities, only a few low-key car chases. This is a series I can see myself re-reading at some point a number of years down the road. I like the dialogue between the characters.

Crider has written about 50 or so books in several genres including westerns and horror (and several books for younger readers). He has several other series done over the years. I've read and enjoyed the Truman Smith series (5 books) about a free-lance investigator in Galveston Texas, but haven't yet tried the Professor Sally Good ones (3 books).


Mike

I just finished reading my 100th book of the year yesterday. I'm sure it's a personal record. The only reason I even know how many books I've read is that for the last two years I've entered the date completed in a Calibre column (primarily to keep track of where I am in series reading), and it just takes two mouse clicks to sort them by that number. I saw the stats two books ago, and kept track.

The lucky book?



I've been re-watching the TV series Lost over the last month, and I've been reading the entries in this series after each episode to find out all the interesting things I missed. And to get a better handle on the series ending. 

Next up: Martha Grime's The Black Cat.


Mike

I just got a notification that one of the science fiction books on my iReaderIQ list was slated for release in several weeks: The Carpet Makers, by Andreas Eschbach. I pre-ordered it instantly.



I read this book when the English translation first appeared in 2005, and was impressed. Here's the publisher's blurb:

Since the time of pre-history, carpetmakers tie intricate knots to form carpets for the court of the Emperor. These carpets are made from the hairs of wives and daughters; they are so detailed and fragile that each carpetmaker finishes only one single carpet in his entire lifetime.

This art descends from father to son, since the beginning of time itself.

But one day the empire of the God Emperor vanishes, and strangers begin to arrive from the stars to follow the trace of the hair carpets. What these strangers discover is beyond all belief, more than anything they could have ever imagined...

Brought to the attention of Tor Books by Orson Scott Card, this edition of The Carpet Makers contains a special introduction by Orson Scott Card.

At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

Yeah, OK, it's a publisher's blurb. But this book was unlike anything I had ever read before. It's more of a series of interlinked stories told over a period of years than it is a novel. It reminds me of the movie The Cloud Atlas in some respects (except this story is linear).

If this sounds at all interesting, avoid learning much more about the book and just go for it. The denouement is surprising. Pre-knowledge would be like someone telling you the ending of M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense and then saying you that you simply must see it.  

The author takes his time developing the story; it's not an action-packed work. It's a reflection on how power corrupts. And on a galactic scale, the corruption can have immense effects. It was a thought-provoking book for me. People have said it's a good book to recommend to those that say they don't like science fiction. It may be. Or I may be a loonie.  

It will be interesting to see if I think as highly of it upon a second read.

Mike

I finished reading this early mystery a little while ago, and thought I'd post a message about it. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume was self-published* in 1886. After achieving some success with it (selling 100,00 copies in Australia), he sold the American and English publishing rights for £50 (about $5,500US today). Not a trivial sum in 1886, but after it was taken over by a publisher it went on to sell over 500,000 copies world-wide (enviable even today). It was allegedly the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet.

Quote from Goodreads:

"In the dead of night, on a dark, lonely street in Melbourne, a cabby discovers that his drunken passenger has been murdered--suffocated with a chloroform saturated handkerchief. The murderer, his motive, even the identity of the victim are unknown." 3.5 stars.

Here's a link to the free Kindle version which I read (it has typos):



and link to the free version on Mobileread (likely to have no typos):

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74116

The Mobileread version is a .prc format, which will read just fine on your Kindle, but will have to be side-loaded.

I enjoyed this novel. I'd give it 3 of 5 stars. It's typical of the time, you won't find any deep, psychological observations of the characters, or any explicit sex or violence. If you like fast-paced stories, then novels of this era aren't for you. It's a satisfying mystery, with several layers to peel away.

There have been several movies of this work, as well as stage and radio plays. As recently as 2012, an Australian TV movie was made, available on DVD from Amazon (I may buy this next month).

Fergus Hume went on to write over 100 novels and short stories, and died in 1932.


Mike

* Showing that becoming a successful author by initially self-publishing is not a new phenomenon.

I just saw that two dozen or so of Stuart Palmer's mysteries have made it to the Kindle courtesy of Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press.

Palmer was one of the more popular mystery authors in the thirties and forties, and a number of his books were made into successful movies, including ones with his best-known creation, spinster school-teacher Hildegarde Withers.

First one here:



He wrote the scripts for the first three Bulldog Drummond movies (Paramount), and some entries in The Lone Wolf series (Columbia) and also some of RKO's The Falcon series."

An accomplished writer, his characters are memorable for their witty repartee (think Thin Man series).

If you like gritty realism, these books aren't for you. If you like solid writing and well-constructed stories with no explicit sex or violence, no profanity or vulgarities, and interesting characters, then you might give them a try. They are quite reasonably priced, IMHO.

Thus ends my attempt to bring quality, culture, and good taste into the modern wasteland that is contemporary crime/mystery fiction.*


Mike

* Yes, I really do believe that most** contemporary crime/mystery fiction is repetitive, unimaginative, derivative drek. Seriously. But you don't have to believe it. I won't be offended.

** Notice I said most.

A while ago I saw that Neil Gaiman's American Gods* was slated to be an HBO feature or series.

The morning I found a live blog from Len Edgerly of a discussion with Gaiman at BookExpo America. One entry stopped me in my tracks:

Q. How is The American Gods TV show coming?
A. It’s like a very slow game of tennis. (with HBO). I started it with things not in the book. They keep going, “Can you make it more like the book?” Right now, I finished a script and we’re waiting for their notes.

What could HBO be thinking of? Making it more like the book? They obviously have a newby in charge of the project.


Mike


* Possibly the only Gaiman work I started but never managed to finish, despite repeated attempts.

I just saw an article on Slashdot that says Amazon has just bought Liquavista, who has developed a new type of display. Details on the display here:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/portable-devices/lighter-brighter-displays

Amazon announcement guoted here (you have to scroll down the page to the updated section):

http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/05/13/confirmed-amazon-bought-liquavista-color-kindle-to-follow/


Mike

I saw this today.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/04/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-year-later?utm_source=newsletter

Tor books dropped DRM on all their books one year ago. The interesting part of the article was the statement:

"As it is, we’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles, despite them being DRM-free for nearly a year."

Good for them.

Mike

I just got a notification that You're Stepping On My Cloak and Dagger by Roger Hall will be published in a Kindle version on 11 May.



It's been out-of-print for decades, except for a minor print run by US Navy small press run in the early 2000s. I'm the proud possessor of a first edition hard-cover, but I pre-ordered this ebook without a second thought. I've given away more paperback copies than I can count to friends over the years.

It's the story of one man's experiences in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. As one reviewer put it: " If Dave Barry had been eligible for enlistment in 1942 this is the the kind of book he might have written. Roger Hall's account of his time in the O.S.S. is full of dry wit, bawdy humor, accute assessments of the Army's intelligence operations during World War II, and his own vivid personality".

I found this to be a funny, funny book.

Mike

I don't think anyone has posted this recently, but if you aren't using the KB search function to find books, you're missing out on a valuable feature.

The standard Search feature via the text entry at the top of Amazon's product pages is terrible. It seems to default to a keyword search and gives many results where some author/publisher has just typed in an author's name as a keyword to get hits on their unrelated book. It also give Audible books.

Harvey has given us an easy hook into Amazon's Advanced Search feature so we can limit the books to only an author, either or both public domain or not, subject, when published, language, maximum price, and more.

You can even sort by most recent, reader reviews, price, bestselling, etc.

This feature has saved me a lot of time and trouble. Thanks, Harvey.

Find it at:

https://www.kboards.com/search/

or click on [advanced] near the top of the KB pages where it says "find e-book"


Mike

This was one of the more entertaining and engrossing books I've read in a while. I've pretty much always been a movie buff, particularly of suspense movies of the nineteen-thirties, -forties, and -fifties.

This book covers Hitchcock's life from his birth (of course) in 1899,  his movie career from his early days as a title-card writer and general dogsbody in the silent era through to his last film as director, and then to his death in 1980.

Since I'm almost as interested in the details behind movies as I am in the actual movies, I found the details of how his movies came to be made to be fascinating. He hardly ever got the stars he initially wanted. He was in constant conflict with studios over one thing and another.

Each movie he made is subject to an in-depth description of creation, shooting, and editing here… this book is 20270+ locations, all text and no pictures. The index from the DTB version is included, but there is a note at the beginning that the page numbers aren't valid and the reader should use he Search function of his/her ebook reader. This is the first time I've seen a publisher acknowledge this fact.

I found Hitch's writing process to be a bit surprising. He would hire a writer (or writers) and they would spend months developing a script, then when it was finished he would let that writer go and hire another and redo the job. Sometimes he even hired a third writer to finish it. He always took the last cut but never put his name on the writing credits, despite the fact that most of the work ended up being his (or at least he made major tweaks). He worked with some of the most famous writers of the day, including James Agee, Eric Ambler, Robert Benchley, Robert Bloch, Evan Hunter, Raymond Chandler, and others (all mostly uncredited).

His wife Alma Reville was his constant assistant, and much of his success can be attributed to her influence. He didn't appear to do much without her approval and/or collaboration.

This book also has an entry what seems to be all the TV episodes. It's interesting that his contract with the network gave him the ownership of the episodes after broadcast (if I recall correctly), an unheard-of concession at the time. Or even now.

I'm in the midst of a re-watch of most of his pictures, courtesy of Turner Classic Movies and Netflix. Next up is Blackmail (1929), credited as Britain's first talkie. Hitchcock filmed this movie as both a silent and (secretly) as a talkie version. I plan to re-read each of the sections of the biography after watching the associated movie. I have the silent version recorded*. I have seen it as a talkie.

I tried watching one of the films he made for the British government as a war propaganda effort, but it was in French and I wasn't in the mood for what was essentially a documentary.

I'll likely be re-reading parts of it for years to come.

I watched the movie Hitchcock this week. While not entirely accurate (at least according to this biography), it had the general idea of things. I didn't entirely buy Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock, but liked the film nonetheless. Helen Mirren was fine as Alma, and Scarlett Johansson was OK as Janet Leigh.


Mike

* Later: Contrary to the statement of the fellow who introduced the film, it was the talkie version.

The are several Clarke SF books that were published late last year that seem to be on sale at $2.99 each until 10 March. I picked up several. One I would recommend is Childhood's End, arguably his most famous novel. The City and the Stars is another I picked up, as well as a volume of collected short stories. Clarke wrote excellent short stories. His collection Tales from the White Hart (not enKindled yet) is a gem.

If you're looking for a lot of characterization, his work isn't for you. If you are looking for an imaginative, well-written plot, give it a try.

Mike