Dave's Fiction Warehouse

I was an early and unlikely fan of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. Normally I go in for hard-nosed crime fiction where at least five people die horribly before the denouement. In Smith's books, a very kind and overweight woman goes around solving mysteries of a less-menacing nature. People do occasionally die in these books, but never at the hands of depraved serial killers. If you like curling up with a writer like Thomas Harris , A.M. Smith takes some getting used to. He has a finely tuned ear for West African English, which makes every character sound both simple and profound. Even the antagonists can be charming. This charm comes across very well in the HBO series of the same name, which we watched last night. The series is perfectly cast and perfectly written -- which is to say it matches the expectations of longtime readers like myself. As in the books, the pacing is pleasantly sedate, driven more by character than plot. If you have H...

Guess it's a storm after all. The power went off at 3:30 a.m., and didn't come back on until around 10 a.m. In the meantime, our good friends were good enough to have us over for a nice hot breakfast. Thanks, D & D! Now everything is covered in ice and certain branches are hanging dangerously low, and wet snow is coming down hard. But the furnace is on and I'm going to take a nice hot shower while I can -- day like this, you can't take continuous power for granted. As the picture at left suggests, we won't be barbecuing for dinner tonight. Good Lord willing, we'll be tasting wine and eating pizza instead. Speaking of which, here's a poem I wrote at the request of tonight's hosts, in praise of tonight's featured grape: I think that I shall never know A wine so useful as merlot, A modest grape that won't offend When crowds of people must attend. Though other wines may have more fame, The alcohol is much the same; It's not too heady, nor too...

The big news here is that a major blizzard is on the way and it's going to hit this city but good. Forget Fargo and its 112-year flood ; we've got a half-inch of snow on the ground and now it looks like some sleet. This could be rough. I expect to see CNN vans on every block of this city by the close of business today. It doesn't look too bad in the picture, but just you wait. People here love bracing for a winter storm, particularly at this time of year when tornadoes are more likely than a foot of snow. I love it too, monitoring the situation from the relative safety of command central. I left the house just once today, to pick up some stew fixings at the grocery store. Evidently I was the last one to think about stocking up: there wasn't much left in the meat aisle and all they had for milk was some 2 percent that was very close to the sell-by date. Would have picked up some guns and ammo too, except you can't find that stuff around here either, what with Obama i...

Here's a grab bag of items on a day when nothing in particular rises to the fore. Such days seem entirely too frequent. * Just finished reading Hit and Run , Lawrence Block's latest in his series about the hit man J. P. Keller. These days I rarely finish a book on the same day I acquire it; when I do, I have to give props to the author. Block is no literary genius, but he's a master at crime fiction. He keeps you believing the story and turning the pages. That's what good fiction is all about, and it's a lot harder than he makes it look. Particularly if the protagonist is a hired killer who collects stamps, and not all of the people he kills have it coming. If you haven't checked out his Keller series, do so. Just don't expect a warm and fuzzy feeling to result. This is not the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency . * I mentioned on this blog a few weeks ago that I'm a fan of American Idol . I'm pretty close to demanding a retraction. I skipped last nigh...

I'll tell you what: I'm getting tired of all these sob stories about newspapers shutting down. Not that I have anything against newspapers, which until recently afforded me a life of unimaginable luxury. But I cringe at the poignant and somewhat accusatory tone of stories bemoaning the demise of yet another big-city rag. You'll all be sorry when we're gone, they say; you won't have the Daily Bugle to kick around any more. And beware: If you don't have a newspaper, you don't have a democracy. Who'll afflict the comfortable without the Bugle's crack investigative team sniffing out corruption? Then again, the investigative thing and the corruption thing kind of fell by the wayside over the last decade or so. Surveys revealed that what readers really wanted were anecdotal trend stories, whimsical lifestyle pieces and 20-minute recipes. So newspapers went that route, realizing too late that the readers who answered the survey were already getting all that...

Blogging is no piece of cake, what with the need to motivate the research staff, root out cliches and watch the profanity, but after all is said and done at the end of the day, it's as simple as pie compared to yard work. Which has again reared its ugly head. I started the morning wandering around with a landscape guy, who didn't take long to figure out I'm a lot dumber than I look, at least where it comes to planting things and keeping them alive until his pickup is out of sight. He made some notes and promised to come back with a plan even a chimp could follow, but I'm not optimistic. Look, it's like Zarathustra said: I am become death, destroyer of gardens. Also trees and ornamental bushes. I have good intentions, but my skill set swings between criminal neglect and lethal pruning, with nothing in between. The guy we bought the house from loved roses. He had a nice bed of them and they were a beauty to behold that first year. Now they're all brown canes and w...

If there's a bright spot in the economic meltdown, it's all these stories about the formerly rich who are now living with their parents and trolling for job offers on Craigslist. Here's the lates t , a CNN piece about an out-of-work banker bemoaning the loss of his fancy cars, expensive suits and extravagant vacations. I was really enjoying the story at first. There's nothing better than seeing venal swine get what they have coming to them. Then I got to the part about how much the guy made during his "high-flying" days in the banking industry: $70,000 a year. Can that be right? How fancy could those cars have been, how extravagant the vacations? Was he driving to a reservation casino in a 3-year-old Hyundai? I'm going to guess CNN dropped a zero there at the end. If not, I feel kind of guilty about my initial chortling. However, I was still happy to read that real estate has tanked in the Hamptons. New York Times Magazine has a story about it , leading w...

Here at the Warehouse, I watch out-of-date Netflix movies so you don't have to. Here are a couple of oddball gems I've found in the past couple of weeks: Brick , released in 2005, is a strange blend of two genres: classic film noir and teenage angst. Imagine if Pretty in Pink (1986) had been written by Mickey Spillane. Brooding loner Brendan Frye finds his girlfriend dead, and spends the rest of the movie finding out how she got that way. The clipped, hardboiled dialogue is straight out of Double Indemnity -- no kids talk like this, and you're never quite sure if Brick is taking itself seriously or is nothing more than a sly sendup. Either way, it kind of works and kind of doesn't. In one scene, our protagonist is meeting with a dangerous drug dealer when the dealer's mom wanders in to serve the boys orange juice and cookies. See, it's her house, and her son runs his drug ring out of the veneer-paneled basement. In another scene, Brendan cuts a deal with the ...

What I'm reading: Liberty , by Garrison Keillor. Basically it's another extended "News from Lake Wobegon," and that's not a bad thing. Community pillar Clint Bunsen, 60 years old and unhappily married, is sorely tempted by the young and beautiful Angelica Pflame. Nobody does small-town intrigue and midlife angst better than G.K., and every character here is someone you know. Consider this wonderful description of Clint's old man: "He like to pretend to pull his thumb off and then hold out his little finger and when you pulled, he let out a fart. He loved the Sunday comics, Jiggs and Maggie, Little Iodine, Gasoline Alley, and he smoked a pipe like the dads in the comic strips and he had a mustache too. Daddy was a deacon of the Lutheran church but he was no more Lutheran than Roman Navarro was. He used Jergens hand lotion and Swank cologne. He came home from church on Sunday and sang "It Ain't Necessarily So" to irritate Mom and fixed himself...

It's tax time here at the Warehouse, so we've been busy pulling together records for the accountant. Basically, it looks like gross income will again be zero for the year, resulting in a net income of, let's see ... also zero. We do have another year of depreciation on the coffee maker and the Herman Miller Aeron chair we bought in more prosperous times, but we suppose the lack of income renders that moot. Readership remains at about 30 hits a day, although closer analysis reveals 20 of those hits to be ourselves, checking to see if there are any comments. Comments, which we've been accepting in lieu of cash, have declined slightly from minimal to statistically insignificant. But that's probably because we're no longer juicing the numbers by replying to our own posts. So it is the opinion of the board that the Warehouse is weathering the economic meltdown pretty well. Our Twitter initiative has not performed to expectations, producing even fewer comments than t...

As the owner of a dog who resembles a pit bull, I guess I can live with Wichita's new animal ordinance . The requirements -- microchip, spaying and a limit of two -- shouldn't greatly compromise my active senior lifestyle. Especially since I don't have a pit bull. The dog currently occupying the recliner downstairs does possess some of the characteristics spelled out in the city's ordinance: "deep brisket, well-sprung ribs and slightly-tucked loins"-- but then, so do I. No, our dog is bull boxer mix, or, if you prefer, a Rhodesian Ridgeback. She's not a collie. She's not a chocolate lab. And she's definitely not a pit bull. Just want to put that on the record. Because people always ask. Yesterday in College Hill Park a guy walking his own mutt assumed a defensive stance 20 yards away and shouted, "what kind of dog is that?" The tone didn't convey friendly curiosity, so I shouted back: "Pit bull!" I was just pulling his chain...

You have to love WorldNetDaily. Since its founding in 1997, the site has emerged as the nation's premier source of information about the coming apocalypse and, more recently, secret plans by the Obama administration to steal your money and crush your soul. Where else are you going to get that kind of content? Diane Rehm? Wake up and smell the coffee! Bookmark the site now and refresh it every few minutes from your safe room down in the basement. At least until the power goes out. Which should be any time now. On Sunday, WND posted an "exclusive" warning that global catastrophe is imminent. It came from Pastor David Wilkerson: "An earth-shattering calamity is about to happen. It is going to be so frightening, we are all going to tremble – even the godliest among us." Presumably that would include him. Think about it: If even the godliest are trembling, then it's only a matter of time until the least godly start rampaging through the streets, screaming and ...

During these trouble economic times, what we really need is a good scapegoat. Fortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Madoff are happy to oblige. Just when public outrage over Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme begins to subside, his lovely wife Ruth comes forward to claim that the mere $62 million she was able to salt away during the good times has nothing to do with Bernie. See, he had his business, systematically robbing charities, and she had hers -- systematically counting the money as it arrived at their Manhattan penthouse bundled on wooden shipping pallets. Completely separate! Should she be penalized for Bernie's errors in judgment? That would be un-American, your honor. You can only shake your head. Crime of the century, and the Madoffs remain free, rich and unrepentant. At worst, they're facing a reduction in status from billionaire to millionaire. That's a little too subtle for my taste. But it appears my recommendation of public flogging and lifetime poverty has ...

Moving now to media criticism, I would like to respectfully suggest that NPR move The Diane Rehm Show to some time slot when I'm not listening. Let's say 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. As it stands, I'm forced to curse and make pained facial expressions during the two morning hours she's on KMUW here in Wichita. And that's not always convenient. Look, I know about the spasmodic dysphonia, the vocal condition that makes her sound like somebody's dotty grandmother trying not to slur her words after a second bottle of white zinfandel. That's a tough break and she can't help it. Far be it from me to criticize someone's disability. On the other hand, since there aren't many slots open for radio personalities, you'd think they could find one with the minimum qualification: a voice that does not evoke fingernails on a chalkboard. You'd also think they could find one with a personality. That's my real beef with Diane Rehm: the personality. She has no se...

OK, I've plunged back into crime fiction, but I seem to have started at the shallow end of the pool: Murder in Vegas , a 2005 anthology of short stories edited by Michael Connelly. I found it at the library a few days ago and I was in a hurry. I like short stories, even though it's rare to find a really good one. The yarns here -- set, as you might imagine, in Las Vegas -- are entertaining enough but only one ("The Sunshine Tax") is close to memorable. The rest all seem a bit derivative and predictable and lean heavily on violence to resolve plot complications -- which is the sort of thing I'm perfectly capable of writing myself. I read short stories for fun, but also to gain insights about the craft, and these didn't yield many. They didn't yield many new angles on Vegas, either. We were there in December. While the city remains a glittering petri dish of vice and weakness, it has a pathetic air about it now. You walk the sleazy Strip and don't think ...