Dave's Fiction Warehouse

If there were ever a book I'd buy just because of the title, Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription is surely one of them. Fortunately, I don't have to; my wife also appreciates the sentiment it implies and gave me the book for Christmas. A collection of the most outrageous letters received at The National Review since 1968, paired with the trenchant responses of editor William F. Buckley Jr., this may be a book only newspaper people can really appreciate. Who among us has not fielded a damning letter or phone call and choked out some simpering semblance of civility when sterner measures were in order? Buckley skewered the great and small with equal aplomb, and with such subtle elegance that those of us who today would be wordsmiths can only shake our heads. Was there really a time when the phrases "Get a life" or "Get over it" or "Fuck you" were not considered adequate ripostes? Evidently so. Think what you will of Buckley's politics; the ma...

Perhaps because I've worked at newspapers most of my adult life, I always roll my eyes at the obligatory pope story on Christmas Day. There's rarely anything else going on, so news that the pope has once again come out solidly in favor of peace, love and understanding often as not ends up on Page One. It's like running a story that nights can be chilly at the South Pole. It's not news. It would be news if he advocated the use of tactical nuclear weapons to clean up certain of the world's trouble spots, or pointed out that brutal dictators do cut down on street crime, or wondered aloud why the oppressed of Darfur don't just move to Switzerland. But all this boilerplate about ending poverty, injustice and war ... yeah, OK. We'll get right on that, your Holiness. If the pope really wanted to make news -- and make a difference -- he'd set up a Dunk-the-Prelate booth in St. Peter's Square, three softballs for a dollar. See a bishop take a bath. Proceeds ...

We're thinking about getting a dog. Her name is Faith (pictured at left). Taking on a new pet is always a gamble, but I figure that even if she is a terrible dog, and craps on the carpet, barks all night, kills the cats and chews up my cowboy boots, I can at least write a bestselling book about it to defray some of the expense. Hey, everybody else does. Look at John Grogan. A few short years ago he was toiling in obscurity as a third-tier columnist for my old newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. Now he has become the Thomas Kinkade of dog writers. The man is everywhere: Marley and Me ; Bad Dogs Have More Fun ; Marley: A Dog Like No Other ; Bad Dog, Marley ; The Marley Code ; Marley and the Deathly Hallows ; That Darn Marley! ; and, due out next spring, The Marley Secret: Spinning Dog Feces Into Gold. Strolling through Border's the other day, I noticed that Grogan's success has not been lost on other authors. Anna Quindlen has weighed in with Good Dog. Stay . Dean Koontz h...

I've had a hard time figuring out what to say about No Country For Old Men , the movie based on Cormac McCarthy's bleak novel of the same name. My first reaction on coming out of the theater Friday night: I liked it a lot -- right up until the abrupt ending. One guy in the theater actually cried out, "What the hell?" From what I could see, It was a reaction widely shared. Having read the book, I wasn't expecting Home Alone . But the novel's nihilism was leavened somewhat by some reflective passages toward the end that left you with the feeling that the story had been told; that if morality is meaningless, at least it helps you sleep at night. The movie tries to do the same thing with a single short soliloquy and a cut to black, and I don't think it works. Still, anybody who appreciates the craft of movie-making should see it, because there's so much to admire. Start with the casting: It's hard now to see how anyone but Javier Bardem could play the ...

My staff here at the warehouse has departed early for the Thanksgiving weekend, disregarding my explicit instructions to make sure the Big Box O' Blog Ideas was full before leaving. Also, someone appears to have raided the petty cash drawer. It's so hard to get reliable help these days. Anyway, once again I'm going to have to pull something out of my ... well, let's just say I'll have to make something up. Since I've read no books, seen no movies and watched no television in the past couple of days, this is harder than it looks. Hmmm. Perhaps something with a Thanksgiving theme? So when's the last time you read a mystery where Thanksgiving, the holiday, was a prominent element in the story? I can name a dozen Christmas-themed crime novels just off the top of my head, and probably as many set around Halloween. Several for the Fourth of July, even one or two for Valentine's Day. But Thanksgiving doesn't seem a great inspiration for mystery writers. It...

Here's the kind of report guaranteed to make a curmudgeon's head explode: The National Endowment for the Arts has discovered that on average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading. Seven minutes? That much? I'm trying to think of the last time I saw someone 15 to 24 reading a book or a newspaper. Maybe they only do it one minute at a time, at different times of the day, so it's hard to catch them at it. The predictable reaction, of course, is to lament the decline of literacy and prophesy doom for America. But really, does it matter? If so few young people are reading these days, maybe it's because it doesn't matter. People have to eat to survive, and endlessly fiddle with their iPods, but they don't have to read. So why should they bother? Presumably, there will always be a small subset of humanity capable of reading something to them, should the need arise. I here...

You've probably heard of Amazon's Kindle. It's like a book, only it costs $399 -- just like every other electronic gadget now on the market. Notice how everything costs $399? When I was a boy, everything cost $1.98. Except for DC comics, which, at the beginning of my Superman period, would fetch anywhere from 10 to 12 cents. I mocked the concept of an e-reader back in September , but now that Amazon has rolled out the Kindle, I've prepared a guide to help decide if there should be one under your Family Tree this Holiday Season. 1. Do you like to read more than one book at once? If so, you'll want the Kindle, because it will store 200 of them. And they won't be just any books, but selected titles from publishers that have inked a deal with Amazon, so freshness is guaranteed. Imagine that: carrying around a big bag full of books in a package about the size of a Stephen King novel, though hopefully not as heavy. Click a few buttons, accidentally shut it off and ...

I haven't yet read P.D. James' 1992 novel The Children of Men , and after seeing the movie a second time, I'm not sure I want to. This is a departure for me, but the movie's such a cinematic tour de force I can't see how the book would not pale in comparison. It may be one of the rare cases ( Blade Runner is another) where the screen adaptation outperforms the source material by a large margin. I saw Children of Men on the big screen just after Christmas last year. At the time, I was blown away by three long single-shot sequences that appeared almost impossibly complex to choreograph. I've since discovered that a bit of editing was involved in each, but those scenes delivered such a visceral punch that I was determined to see them again. So thanks to my friends at Netflix, I watched the movie a second time last night, this time on the small screen. Bottom line: This is still the best film of 2006, and I'm still incredulous that it earned no Oscars (it wa...

I'm taking a short break from reading crime fiction. One reason for this is that I haven't seen my brother Mike in awhile, and I always rely on him to load me up with boxes of paperbacks, which he consumes like popcorn. Then I'm still working on the novel, a project that proceeds at a glacial pace despite the impetus of getting a new computer to write it on. Finally, I think it's a good idea for any writer to stray outside the genre once in awhile. Which is why I recently bought Ken Follett's World Without End . Many years ago (about 17, I guess) I picked up his Pillars of the Earth expecting to be bored silly and found that I couldn't put it down. Set in 12th-century England during the construction of the fictional Knightsbridge cathedral, it's one of those sweeping old-school historical novels that spans decades. World Without End is the sequel. This will sound churlish, but I should mention that I discovered it quite on my own, without Oprah Winfrey...

HBO has the best show on TV with The Wire , so it's probably fair to point out that it also has the worst: the bleak and tedious Tell Me You Love Me . Because of the buzz about the explicit sex scenes, I caught portions of this overly-earnest angstfest during its first season. But I had never forced myself to sit through a full episode -- a precaution I unwisely cast aside for the season finale. It's an hour of my life I will never get back. The show is not only as bad as my initial impression -- it's far worse. How do I hate this show? Let me count the ways: The casting: All white couples, all pretty much the same age, all with the same acting coach. Two of these women and two of the men are indistinguishable from each other. The men all remind you of Darren on Bewitched , except they never smile. The women, I think, must be sisters. One is tortured by the lack of sex and one is tortured by not being able to have a baby. All three are tortured by general dissatisfaction, ...

I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine ...

Recently, at the invitation of my oldest daughter, I created a profile on Facebook. It's not much of a profile: the same stupid picture I use here, a brief mention of my interests, the sort of music I listen to, favorite books and movies and so forth. So far, I have gathered together an elite cadre of three friends. That includes the daughter. ( Not sure who that doofus is in the picture; wonder if he'd like to be my friend ). Friends are the currency of Facebook; like dollars, you can never have too many. The first thing you must do, after listing a few zany personal details, is start inviting everybody you can think of to be your friend. Everybody, no exceptions. I haven't gotten around to that yet, but when I do, I expect to have so many friends that Facebook will have to add another server just to accommodate them all. Good friends. Then, when my page displays all the avatars, it will slow the Internet to a crawl. Until then, I'm making do with just the three. We...

Somewhere in the last few months, I came across a discussion of the use of supernatural elements in crime fiction. I can't recall any novel that uses them so overtly, and so well, as The Coroner's Lunch , by Colin Cotterill. In this story of an aging Lao doctor pressed into running the country's only morgue following the Communist takeover of 1975, the supernatural consists not just of the odd hunch and prescient dream, but is an integral part of the story itself. Dr. Siri Paiboun has little equipment and even less training in forensic science, so the aid he receives from the spirit world is fortuitous. Think how it might help the CSI: Miami crew if the ghosts of crime victims were available to offer tips during the autopsy. Fortunately, Cotterill has created a memorable and amusing character in whom such paranormal phenomena do not seem too convenient, and do not obviate the need for conventional sleuthing. When a dog begins behaving oddly, for example, or the mark of a ...

I can't be bothered to properly review the movies I see. It takes too much time and too much thought, and if I go on for more than three or four paragraphs, it becomes painfully evident that I'm no Pauline Kael. Then again, I always need something to blog about. So here are a few thoughts on American Gangster , which I saw last night in the company of the brunette, a bottle of wine and a platter of hors d'oeuvres, ensconced in a luxurious balcony loveseat at the 13th Street Warren Theatre here in Wichita. Let me tell you, even crappy movies are good under those optimal conditions. Fortunately, American Gangster is not a crappy movie. (I hereby grant Universal permission to use the preceding sentence in promotional materials.) Denzel Washington plays real-life heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, who created his drug empire the American way: by eliminating the middle man. Lucas personally met growers in Thailand and arranged to have 100 percent pure heroin shipped back to the state...

It's taken about four months , but thanks to my good friends at Netflix I'm finally through the first three seasons of The Wire . A pair of clueless cats roused me about four this morning, and since I couldn't get back to sleep I watched the last two episodes on my laptop. I'm now willing to concede that my son and mother-in-law are right: This show really is better than The Sopranos , that other HBO series I've wasted too many hours on. While not perfect, I've come to admire the writing and plotting above all else. David Chase knew how to craft memorable characters and conflicts; The Wire 's David Simon and company know how tell stories, and -- more importantly -- how to conclude them. Each season of The Wire unfolds like a 12-part novel, with a genuine beginning, middle and end. Story arcs never really seemed to matter with The Sopranos -- a point that became maddeningly clear in the finale, when Chase simply jerked out the plug and mocked those who exp...

It's no sign of my blogging prowess that roughly eight out of 10 of my posts concern J.K. Rowling, but here goes another one. The creator of gay icon Dumbledore has finished her first work since closing out the Potter series: The Tales of Beedle the Bard . It's about the failure of the U.S. intelligence apparatus in the run-up to the Iraq War. No, really it's a collection of fairy stories, and the title comes from a book mentioned in Deathly Hallows as a gift from Dumbledore to Hermione. Yes, somebody could have fun with the book description, but it won't be me. In case you're thinking of being first in line at Barnes & Noble, you'll be waiting a long time. Only seven copies of Beedle the Bard will be in print. It's ironic that the pinnacle of success puts Rowling on the same level as me, when it comes to readership. Seven turns out to be the same number of people who read my latest short story. Maybe we can do lunch sometime.

Since it's now Halloween and the western sky has gone amber here in middle America, the window is rapidly closing for horror-themed posts. I'd better get with it. Soon trick-or-treaters will be making their endless demands and I'll be too busy shoveling candy at them to do much else. Let us turn now from scary movies to scary books. I wonder: Is it easier to terrify someone with sound and light, or with the printed word? I hold with those who favor print -- properly done, a book can tap into the darkest reaches of individual imagination in a way no movie can. With the imagination thoroughly engaged, the reader becomes a participant in the tale, rather than an observer. Unfortunately, books are just as prone to cliche as movies are, and it takes a true master to banish disbelief and conjure terror with no more tools than the 26 letters of the alphabet and a few punctuation marks. It's an art, not a craft, and those who can do it are rightly revered. When I consider the ...

When's the last time you saw a truly frightening movie? For that matter, how many truly frightening movies can you name in, say, five minutes? Besides The Exorcist , I mean. I can think of maybe four offhand, seven or eight if I have another hour to think about it. So I'm always a bit skeptical during the Halloween season, when movie pundits start picking the scariest movies of all time, such as this top 25 list from Time's Richard Corliss. Demonstrating that 25 films may be about 15 too many, the list includes such fright-fests as Bambi ; the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead ; and the 50-second Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat , which, when shown in 1896, had certain members of the audience thinking the train on the screen might run them over. Now, these may have been all groundbreaking films in their own way, but scary they were not. It's facile to say that they don't make scary movies any more, but it's almost true. Since the mid-1960s, horror has not been tha...

Here at the Tilda Swinton Fan Club, we would be happy to see her in a Burger King commercial. But when she co-stars in a solid thriller like Michael Clayton -- well, let's just say we're orgasmic. No, scratch that. Delighted, that's the word. Well, quite pleased. Swinton's turn as the amoral, paranoid corporate lawyer -- who defeats her Arrid Extra Dry in the first 10 minutes of the film -- is sheer genius. She's definitely on the short list for best supporting actress; you read it here first. Swinton has this way of making her eyes opaque, like a shark, while the rest of her exudes acute desperation -- the kind you get when you're in over your head and need to make sure no living person ever finds out the things you'll do to stay afloat. George Clooney, in the title role, isn't bad either. He plays a "fixer," a corporate lawyer who no longer practices law, but cleans up the sort of messes that can crop up for any major U.S. agrochemical cor...

I always hate it when readers dream up qualities for fictional characters that are never alluded to in the books in which they appear. That is precisely why fan fiction is so unfailingly awful. But I really hate it when authors indulge in the same juvenile exercise. After all, if it were a trait germane to the character, why wasn't it in the book? And so we come to J.K. Rowling's startling announcement the other day that wise old Dumbledore, the bearded headmaster of Hogwart's, is gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Being gay, I mean. But isn't saying so a little like Mark Twain deciding in his dotage that Huck Finn and Jim were lovers? Or Charles Dickens revealing years later that Scrooge was suffering from Alzheimer's? Characters are precisely the sum of the words on the printed page. No one, not even the author, should come back later and revise them in an offhand remark. At the very least, it is a violation of the basic tenet of fiction writing...

I have temporarily gone off reading to mess around with a new camera I bought, a Canon G9. It comes with a time-lapse feature, enabling it to take a frame automatically every second, or every two seconds. As you can see, this feature will revolutionize the world as we know it; it enabled me to mow my front lawn in 1/60th the normal time. All I can say is, thank God for YouTube. Wunderbar! No? Well, soon I'll get back to the big stack o' books, which includes Fred Vargas' Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (did she really need the world "clean" in that sentence?) and Ken Follett's World Without End , a sort-of sequel to his excellent Pillars of the Earth , published way back in 1990. Also, The Coroner's Lunch , by Colin Cotterill, which has gotten pretty decent reviews.

Eventually, I will move on from this fascination with things French. But for now, I can't seem to stop. At the moment, I'm reading the excellent novel Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. This is a remarkable book for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it is a historical novel written while the history was still in progress: the Nazi occupation of France starting in 1940. As the New York Times notes, it is likely the first work of fiction to be written about World War II. It is also among the best. Better reviewers than I have praised this book, and I won't attempt to pile on more superlatives. But the fact that Némirovsky wrote this without the luxury of historical hindsight makes it even more remarkable. The knowledge that she died at Auschwitz not long after makes it poignant beyond words. Maybe it's a trivial note, but having just been to Paris I was struck by Némirovsky's humane, incisive observations of how things unfold when civilizati...

While waiting for a new shipment of books to arrive, and while struggling with the dread of paying the fine that awaits at my local library, I had a look at the New York Times list of " The 10 Best Books of 2006 ." Yes, I'm aware that 2006 has been over for about 10 months now. Sue me. It's not like I'm getting a lot of blog ideas via e-mail. So in a sense, it's your fault. Also, I've got a day job too. At least I think I do; I'll have to phone them. Anyway, without clicking on the link, can you name even one of the best books of 2006, as decreed by the Times? Two? Five? How about who won the 2006 Super Bowl? I didn't think so. (It was the Pittsburgh Steelers.) Fame is so fleeting. On the books question, I named one, and it's no coincidence that it's the only book on the list that I've read: Mayflower , by Nathaniel Philbrick. I mean, it's no Learning to Sing , Clay Aiken's autobiography, but it ain't bad. It ain't fict...

Shoe leather: That's the way you solve cases. And so, 10 years later, 11 jurors spent the afternoon milling around in a Paris traffic tunnel where the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, intersected abruptly with a nondescript concrete pillar. No word on what they found, beyond some psychic vibe about who really iced the People's Princess. Maybe cigarette butts of a brand favored by Prince Phillip. Or the Queen's cell phone number scrawled inside a soggy Buckingham Palace matchbook. Diana, as you know, was murdered at the behest of the in-laws because of ... well, this where it gets really mysterious. Because this was a murder without credible motive, means or opportunity. A conspiracy that seemingly makes no sense. It's crazy, some would say. Yeah, I say: crazy like a fox. Crazy like Mr. Ed. It was a gutsy move, staging the hit in full view of the paparazzi. I'm still not sure how they pulled it off, making it look precisely like a Diana's drunken driver hit the ...

I don't know what the big deal is about the Louvre. They only have three things worth looking at. I'm kidding, of course. But to the thousands saluting the Winged Victory, Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo with their cell-phone cameras, the rest of the world's best-known museum might as well be an oversized Furniture Mart. To hell with Botticelli or Renoir; they're there to photograph the Big Three and then get their asses on over to the Eiffel Tower to stand at the end of a 90-minute line. As a gawking tourist myself, I'm familiar with the compulsion to see and record every landmark in the guidebook. But at the Louvre, the crowds milling around these particular pieces radiate the impatience and hunger of paparazzi -- how many blurry pictures will constitute proof of the visit? How many bizarre poses? Would that idiot in the cargo shorts please move a little to the left? These great works became famous because they were masterpieces; today they are just three more celebr...

Our trip to France was lovely, marred only by the near-lethal cold I managed to contract on the transatlantic flight back home. Better then than at the start of the trip, right? Today my throat feels as though I've been gargling battery acid, but the golden memories help mitigate the pain. As the saying goes, we'll always have Paris. We did all the things tourists usually do when they visit France, so I won't expound on them. Instead, here are a few impressions from a first-time visitor who doesn't speak the language. No doubt they'll seem hopelessly naive to veteran Francophiles, but it's my blog. On our first night in France, we were treated to dinner by representatives of the mayor's office of the city of Orleans. As it happened, it was the final night of the city's three-year-old river festival, culminating with a fireworks show. We stood with a crowd of about 80,000 and watched the pyrotechnics light up the night and the Loire River. It was a splend...

I'm not sure anyone will notice, but I shan't (as Maxine would say) be blogging for awhile. The brunette and I are off to Paris, where I will attempt to mend relations between our two great countries and consume more French wine than is strictly necessary. Adieu. I'll post a comprehensive discourse on the state of French crime fiction (and French wine) when I return. Or maybe I'll just steal something off Peter's site. Evidently, this Fred Vargas has written a book or two...

Normally I'd wait until finishing a book before commenting on it, but since I'll be reveling in France for the next few days, I'll mention Mistress in the Art of Death , one of those books that looked intriguing at the bookstore, but not quite intriguing enough for me to lay out the price of a hardcover. Once again, my local library branch comes through. I'm about halfway through it now. Briefly, the book is about a female forensics expert investigating a series of gruesome child murders in 12th century England. Yes, that sounds anachronistic -- my limited study of Medieval history somehow omitted all the women doctors of that time who tracked down serial killers with suspiciously up-to-date forensics techniques. At least the protagonist is not beautiful; she's short, plain-looking and rather abrupt. And author Ariana Franklin has given her a plausible, if not entirely believable, back story: the doctor majored in "the art of death" at a medical school i...

Ahem. I'm among those who thought Andrew Meyer had it coming when security officers applied a Taser to his struggling form at the John Kerry town hall event on Monday. My deepest regret is that they didn't hit him a couple more times to drive the point home. The point? It's this: Even in America, even at this late date, there's a remote chance you might pay a certain price for being an asshole. I defy anybody to watch the various videos of the incident and say Meyer was a victim of anything besides his own extreme assholeness. The president of the University of Florida called the incident "regretful." Uh, yeah. The most regretful thing is that this guy Meyer, a prankster by trade, has just secured a bit of YouTube immortality, which has a half-life of at least two weeks. What's a few thousand volts compared to that? The injustice! One other regret: "Don't Tase me, bro." I have a feeling we're going to be hearing that phrase quite a bit ...

Ayn Rand once referred to her novel Atlas Shrugged as a mystery, "about the murder -- and rebirth -- of man's spirit." If so, it's far and away the most plodding and preachy mystery you'll ever read. It's 1,200 pages long and the approximate weight of a Volkswagen. I burned as many calories just lugging this book from the parking lot as I did on the YMCA Stairmaster where I made myself read it over the course of a week. Nevertheless, the book continues to sell well 50 years later. The New York Times revisits the tome in a weekend piece headlined "Ayn Rand's literature of capitalism." It will come as no surprise that the book's biggest fans today are corporate executives, who like the part about naked self interest but overlook the part about inventing things of public value. Let's just say Kenneth Lay was no John Galt. As someone who experienced the Bolshevik revolution firsthand, Rand may be forgiven for her hatred of collectivism. Sh...