Review: Archie Goes Home by Robert Goldsborough

I read this novel as I have read all of Robert Goldsborough’s Nero Wolfe novels. What’s interesting about Goldsborough is that his Wolfe books can be grouped into two distinct categories. First there are the seven earlier novels, which he wrote between 1986 and 1994. In those he picked up where Rex Stout left off. Stout always kept his characters contemporary. They never aged but in ways large and small, time pased in the novels. Goldsborough continued this, picking up a few years after Stout’s final novel and marching on.

Then he stopped, though I don’t know why. Maybe it was his day job as a journalist that got in the way, but after retiring in 2004, he began writing another mystery series beginning with Three Strikes You’re Dead and continuing for four more books. And then in 2012, he returned to Nero Wolfe.

There was a difference, though. These books were set firmly in the past. In fact Goldsborough makes a book of locating them very precisely in the past. And I can’t blame him since the 50s and 60s when he’s set most of his books are the era where a lot of us love the books. And really the era where I think of the novels as being set. I know of course that Fer-de-Lance, the first of the series, was published in 1934. The duo worked for the government during the war and then in the late forties took on Arnold Zeck in a trilogy of novels, but after that, the series settled into a rhythm.

Goldsborough wants to play with our positive memories of and associations with the era and the books. But in that first book for his return, he took a different tact. Telling the story of how Archie Goodwin met Nero Wolfe. And that really explicits ties the characters to a time and setting.

I thought about this fact reading the new book, which I should note is fine. I read it in the course of a single lazy Saturday and enjoyed myself. I certainly don’t regret spending the time reading it. But I have to ask why.

Like Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, this is a story that no one was clamoring for. (I shouldn’t say that. Maybe someone was. I have no idea what fans want). But my point is that it’s a story that’s not especially necessary. The mystery isn’t very good. It smacks of fan service. The filling in of characters’ backgrounds, telling stories no one was demanding be told, answering questions no one was asking. In this case, we follow Archie back to his hometown in Ohio and spend time with his mother and aunt and the small town he grew up in as he solves a case of what seems like a suicide.

It’s a trend right now, unfortunately. Moreso now that we’re being overrun with remakes and retreads and re-imaginings. This is the answer to what so many writers do, to over explain the characters and their backgrounds. Somehow these characters existed before and we’re known and understood, but now we have to explain them in more detail, dig into their past even more, and not even in especially interesting ways.

I’m not about the spoil anything, and as I wrote above, the mystery isn’t very good, but I can’t help but think that this says that Goldsborough’s time with the characters is coming to a close. Because he doesn’t have much to say. There’s very little the we learn about Archie, his hometown, his mother or anyone else the warrants a book length manuscript. For any new book, but especially for one that is explicitly playing with the formula, trying something different (and as is explained in the afterward, Stout had a few different answers for Archie’s background in different books) there has to be a reason. It can’t just be. Why are we breaking the formula? And the book never answers that question. It doesn’t have much to say about the characters. Archie stops by different places in town and notes that some are the same and others have changed an that’s really about it. It’s a small town, but he doesn’t interact with many people he knew.

Honestly, the more I think about the book, the more disappointed I am by it. My initial reaction being the result of being catered to than of actually being presented with work that I could sit with. The book was fine for an afternoon where I didn’t want to think, but nothing more. If it were a novella or short story as opposed to a novel, I would have been much kinder in my assessment. Because it doesn’t have enough story to be a novel and is padded out.

I’m not a fan in general of series that continue after the original writer’s death. I don’t think the world needs more Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy or Robert B. Parker novels. (Honestly, I think the world had too many written by them when alive…). There are pleasant surprises, of course. I’ve enjoyed a few Holmes novels over the years. Anthony Hororwitz’s Bond novels are good (though Hororwitz can write far better). Joe Gores wrote Hammett and Spade & Archer. Sophie Hannah writes a great Agatha Christie pastiche in her Poirot novels. And Ace Atkins is continuing the Spenser series, but he’s made changes to the series and doesn’t want them to feel like the wet novels Parker wrote at the end of his life.

I can’t lie, if I were asked if I wanted to write a Nero Wolfe novel, I would almost certainly say yes, if only to see if I could pull it off and to play with those characters in that world. But I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason.

The Ship of Theseus thought experiment questions whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains the same object. I think about this when it comes to series. Because there is a point where what is cool and cutting edge becomes static and dull and cliched. Even though sometimes they predated the cliche or were the cause of the cliche. Still, that’s just how culture works. That’s how time moves on. And after so many years and decades, as a series changes hands, it is even the same series? Are they the same characters? Can they be?

I would argue that Goldsborough changed the series when he returned to writing them in 2012. And some will question how much that was necessary and how true he remained to the characters. But even without those major changes, they wouldn’t be the same. They couldn’t be. Should we simply let the characters and series die with the creators? Because it feels depressing to leave it to capitalism, which is the state of things now. How many impressive works and careers falter due to low sales and how many mediocre series continued by other people limp along?

So many unnecessary books. So many pointless films. The movie Solo was good, it just didn’t serve much purpose except expanding the franchise and serving IP.

I loved Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books. The banter between Wolfe and Archie. Or Archie and other characters. That voice of Archie’s which made it so much fun. The character of Wolfe, who remains such a colorful puzzle. There’s such joy to the novels and the setting. Wolfe is an aesthete and the books are full of pleasure. (though the readers’ pleasure is different from Wolfe’s to be fair). Goldsborough writing stories with the characters, but he fails to capture what made them such a joy. But I suppose it was a mistake to think that anyone could.

And it’s unfair to place all of my annoyances about the glut of these stories onto a slender novel like Archie Goes Home. But to be fair, the novel can’t even justify its own premise, or length. I’d like to think that Goldsborough could write another good novel, a good summation of his work and his feeling towards Wolfe and these novels, but he doesn’t seem to have anything to say.

The Novels of Joan Hadley

The late Joan Hess wrote more than three dozen books before her death in 2017, most of which were her Claire Malloy mysteries or Maggody mysteries. The two were very different series but both were centered around women, novels that were defined by voice, and were funny.

Early in her writing career Hess also wrote two books of another series. Writing as Joan Hadley she wrote two novels featuring Theo Bloomer, a retired florist who earlier in his life had done something rather hush hush for the government that remained classified. But the truth is that it didn’t much matter.

The Night-Blooming Cereus and The Deadly Acklee were published in 1986 and 1988. In the three years between 1986 and 1988, Hess published nine books by my count. Which I don’t think is a record, but it’s very impressive.

Neither of the Theo Bloomer books are that impressive. They’re not bad books by any stretch, but in her two successful series, Hess’ work was defined by their very distinctive voices, by the humor, by the characters and relationships. The Bloomer books are very eh, in every regard. The main character and none of the characters really pop or are especially exciting. In each of the books, the retired florist is dragged oversees for one reason by his sister because of something involving his niece and namesake Theodora.

There is also what I consider a third Joan Hadley novel, Mummy Dearest, the 17th novel of Joan Hess’ Claire Malloy series. In the book Malloy has just married and she along with her daughter Caron and her friend Inez are in Egypt on a honeymoon which is doubling as cover for her husband working on a terrorism and smuggling case. The events and the backstory were inspired by a trip that Hess took with her friend, the late writer Barbara Mertz (aka Elizabeth Peters).

As a nod to her friend, there is a small role in the novel of Lady Emerson Peabody who does little, but lives off the money from the published journals of her ancestor.

One of the other supporting characters in the book is loud mouthed obnoxious American named Sitterman, who works for the CIA and is just as loud and obnoxious as he was in both Bloomer books two decades earlier.

I wouldn’t categorize the book as one of the better Claire Malloy novels, but I do think it manages to point to why the Theo Bloomer novels never quite took off. The concept is okay. That he was a florist but he also spent some time during and after the war doing something for the government. He’s a waspy old money type and his namesake and niece is entertaining, but a lot of the amusement comes from laughing at her.

By the second book, a lot of the amusement comes form laughing at the people around her, but she still never managed to grow much as a character in the course of the two books. Caron and Inez were entertaining supporting characters, in that sometimes they were simply comic relief, sometimes they gave Claire a headache, sometimes they were off causing trouble on their own (does anyone remember the biology class frogs?), while other times Claire would delegate work to them to assist on the case.

Also Claire’s voice, which has always been the draw and the highlight of those novels shines through. Hess has always been something of an oddity among mystery writers because she is so voice driven. The concepts of her books – Malloy runs a bookshop – is the entire idea behind many cozy mystery series, but they never have the heart or the humor that Hess manages to inject in the character. (Perhaps because some of those writers spent so much time on the concept – mystery-loving bookstore owner dating a police detective – that they forgot to think about the type of people who might populate such a story, much less give them a personality and a voice).

Bloomer, while he was entertaining enough, was never a particularly compelling character. He was never quite comic enough or dramatic enough. It’s one thing to have a mild mannered character who gets dragged into trouble but is able to handle himself as well as anyone, but bringing that idea of a character to life is something much more complex. Joan Hess was able to do a lot of things, and do them well, but that just wasn’t one of them.

Book Review: Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle

Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle

Peter S. Beagle is a writer whose name has become synonymous with modern fantasy. His second novel, The Last Unicorn, has become a classic and has been turned into an animated film, a play and a comic. Over the years he’s written for film and TV, short stories and novels. Of course it’s easy to forget that he wasn’t always thought of in those terms. His first novel was A Fine and Private Place, which todays is considered a modern classic of fantasy, but it was an unusual book that stood out for many reasons both then and now. His second book was I See By My Outfit, a nonfiction account of traveling cross country by scooter. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he overlapped with people like Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry.

Maybe I should admit up front that while I like The Last Unicorn, it’s never been my favorite book of Beagle’s. I don’t say this to be petty, but I was reminded of this fact reading the first chapter of Summerlong. The Last Unicorn is this lovely fable, but the truth is that Beagle’s great talent lies in the fact that he writes fantasy stories that are not fairy tales.

Books like Summerlong, for example.

The book is about Abe and Joanna and her daughter Lily. These are not fable-like characters, they are precisely rendered, quirky and unique individuals with rich full lives, walking contradictions, and struggles. The way that Beagle writes them for chapter after chapter without fantasy intruding – and then for many more chapters with the fantastic at the edges of the action – demonstrate that if he wanted to, he could write a completely realistic novel. He could write a series of realistic novels with complex characters with messy lives and immerse us in the drama of their ordinary but colorful lives. To find and depict the quotidian in new ways, to capture colorful people falling in and out of love, having adventure, struggling to maintain the status quo and abandon what they’ve built. He could probably gain a lot more readers and make a lot more money if he did that.

He’s not interested in writing that book, though.

For Peter S. Beagle, those details, those lives, can also be the foundation of a work of fantasy.

There is so much that I like about the book and these characters that critiquing elements feels almost rude. My biggest complaint is that I could see the twist coming and knew what would happen. Of course when I say that, I’m being disingenuous. I knew who the fantastic figures were and what that meant. I could guess how certain things would play out. I have read a lot of fantasy, a lot of mythology, and so I knew who the characters were before it was explained, and I know that encountering the divine does not leave people unscathed.

When it comes to what would happen to the human beings, to Abe and Joanna and Lily, who we’ve come to know, the truth is that I did not see what would happen. It was surprising but not shocking. Beagle has them acting in character of course. He’s too good a writer to simply throw things at us or have them respond in ways that don’t fit. But there is also the simple fact that the fantastic, the magical, has entered their lives and it changes them. As in classical myth, that doesn’t mean that one’s life improves necessarily, but they cannot simply go back to the way things were before. There is no normal anymore after such an encounter. These vast unchanging figures of myth continue as they have since time immemorial, unchanged, but every time they intersect with the human world and with human beings, they leave wreckage in their wake.

That’s another good example of why his fairy tale stories have left me cold. As I say it’s personal preference, but when Beagle is able to so precisely dissect human relationships as he’s shown he can here, why would I be satisfied with a fairy tale. This is why so much fantasy leaves me cold. Somehow the world they depict is fantastic but it also means so little to characters who are thinly written. The stakes are too low for me to care and be fully invested.

The truth is that the fantasy stories that are impactful, depicted events that changed and reshaped the characters in them. Everything from the legend of King Arthur to Beowulf to Lord of the Rings features characters who change, who die, who are transformed and never the same again. They feature human flaws and human drama, and too often genre fiction is willing to put aside drama and humanity for spectacle. Perhaps that’s modern, or maybe that’s simply American, I don’t know.

But this is why I have read all of Peter Beagle’s work, even if I don’t always manage the month they are released. Because even when I don’t love them, I am affected by them. They are moving and thoughtful stories about people. Beagle’s great skill is how time and again he has found ways for magic and the fantastic to interact with ordinary lives – and find a way to make those things feel both natural, or at least have the effects within the realm of possibility for those outside the direct circle of them, and yet seismic to those who are caught up in it. After all, that is how all the ancient stories and myths worked.

Summerlong is such a precisely drawn, beautifully written book. It was a pleasure to read even after summer has ended and even when the characters behave in wrenching ways. This is a book that doesn’t offer a happy, pat ending. It is a book, though, that was hard to put down. This is no fairy tale; but it is magic.

Review: How To Be Alone by Lane Moore

How To Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don’t

by Lane Moore

I feel as though there’s been a new school of memoir/nonfiction written by comedians which have been coming out over the past decade or more. There are other books by comedians which are comedic in nature, extended riffs, whereas these other books are often about the stories behind the comedy and what they talk about on stage. They’re about discussing the roots of what they do, their journey, and in some ways capture that distinction between what Hannah Gadsby in her special Nanette talked about, between jokes and stories. For me Jen Kirkman is just brilliant at this. I’m a big fan of her comedy, but I think both of her books (I Know What I’m Doing: And Other Lies I Tell Myself, especially) are simply excellent, being both laugh out loud funny but also darker, deeper, more intense, and display a different type and approach of storytelling.

Lane Moore is the latest person to do this with her book How To Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don’t. The collection of essays covers a lot of ground by the comedian-writer-actor-musician behind the band It Was Romance, the comedy show Tinder Live and other projects.

Moore had me at the title. I read a lot of books about being alone and what that means for the simple reason that I’m alone. And I use the word as Moore does which is that it’s not about being single which is a temporary relationship status, but instead something more. It’s something that I sometimes use in jest, but it’s not an accidental or casual word choice.

But I do occasionally use it in jest or in a flippant manner, and in her opening chapters Moore slaps the reader across the face by saying, no, do not be fucking flippant about this. Because she talks about her childhood, which was brutal and lonely on levels that a lot of us have never had to deal with. About a childhood that was harder than a lot of us had to deal with and hurts to read about.

There are two aspects though which make this less brutal for those of us who had relatively happy childhoods. One is simply the ways in which she has such great insight into herself and to the people around her. From the dynamics of teenage and pre-teen friendships, to how we make and nurture friendships to parenting and so much more. Also she mentions how the act of writing this book meant that she reached out to her mother and sister to talk about some of these events and it sounds as though writing the book has brought them closer together than they have perhaps ever been.

Moore also writes extensively about one relationship – and the long and messy aftermath. There’s a lot that’s heartbreaking about this relationship. But what’s stayed with me is how insightful Moore is in dissecting both of their behavior. The way that she’s spent a lot of time thinking about it, how this relationship does stand out in so many ways, and what it meant. What it continues to mean. Because for some people there is this one relationship in our lives that didn’t work out, but it was the one that hit us. The one that really affected us. The one that taught us a lot about ourselves. And it didn’t end in this happily ever after way. It ended in this messy way that’s left marks that take us some time to figure out.

There’s a chapter about her adventures in babysitting – both when she was a kid and then in New York as an adult. There’s a New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs piece that covers some of the same ground but in a comedic way, showing off some of her purely comedic voice and approach.

There’s a chapter talking about TV and which mostly consists of her sharing her love for Jim Halpert from The Office and talks about her tendency to ship characters on TV shows which made me go, okay, fine, great, but then she mentioned Jaye and Eric from Wonderfalls as one of those couples she loves. And this is one of those things that I think is a good lesson with people as well as writers which is that one so often encounters in life and in works of art these elements and digressions and aspects of the work which is less than interesting, which doesn’t enthrall us, which makes us go eh. Chapters like this where it’s easy to skim to get to what we want. But what interest us in this person or in this artist is contained within there.

Plus she cited Wonderfalls. I mean Moore is so clearly my people.

Besides which she talks about the obnoxious disgusting bi-phobic bullshit that we find all over the place from all sorts of people. But not much. One could write a book about about being open to so many people but being rejected in such a nasty way by so many. But that’s another story and another book. To be honest I liked the fact that she didn’t make the book about that, though I’m sure some people will react differently.

The final essay in the book is titled “How To Be Alone” and if the earlier chapters in the book veered between scenes I couldn’t relate to and those to which I related so intensely, this chapter made me almost cry a few times. First of all it involves traveling alone, which I love doing and to the point where I struggle sometimes traveling with other people. Some trips have been the best of my life and some have been depressing, but I love traveling alone and any joyous tribute to the people you meet doing that is perfect in my book.

This last chapter is also where she tries to say, embrace being alone. Enjoy sleeping alone. Travel alone. Be weird. Be yourself. Do whatever you want. Encouraging us to see being alone as an opportunity. And as someone who deals with depression, I know what she means, and I also know what it means to be unable to think in those ways. Moore is saying to go and do what you want and find a new way to be. To take exercise classes and be open with your feelings to people. But also what it means to need physical affection when single and how hard that is for so many of us. She writes about getting a dog and how that changed her. She writes about her career triumphs, which are beyond what she ever would have dreamed. She writes honestly about how that doesn’t mean that dealing with depression and longing and sadness doesn’t go away. But that we know that life is hard and depression will return and that being in a relationship won’t solve any of our problems. The only solution is to simply be ourselves and grab at things and do what we love and what we think will bring joy. It’s a knowledge that comes from hard won sadness and depression and loneliness, but that’s the only answer. It’s not necessarily a comfort, but it is the answer.

“You take all that love you keep giving to selfish idiots and try to throw some of it in the general direction of your own heart and you pray even a little bit of it sticks there.”

I don’t know how it’s possible to read the book without falling in love with Moore a little. Without wanting to give her a hug and go drinking together. (Or at least attend the next Tinder Live show she does...more information of which can be found on her website). But if you can’t, then sitting alone in a room with a drink one night, and after turning that last page feel a little bit better, a little more connected, and a little less alone, that’s not bad, either.

Related:

Hard To Love: Essays and Confessions by Briallen Hopper. I interviewed Hopper about her book for The Rumpus which is about friendship and love and life outside of marriage. I feel like Hopper and Moore would be friends. Maybe, maybe not – I don’t know either of them – but I feel pretty certain that their books would be friends and go drinking together.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing. A book about being single and lonely in a new city and through it interrogating art and artists who have been lonely and solitary and how their lives played out and how some of their work tries to visualize this idea of loneliness in very different ways. I love all of Laing’s work but here she really captures in her own story some of the loneliness of living in a new city and she managed to make something from it in a way that’s really thoughtful and inspiring.

The Winter Sister by Megan Collins. Not a Review.

A few random thoughts about The Winter Sister by Megan Collins (Atria Books, 2019).

I have a great affection for dysfunctional protagonists who are forced to return to their hometowns. Though maybe because I am one.

The fog that Sylvie is in rang very true to me. Also the ways that this fog can lift, be penetrated, in ways that are not directly tied to good things happening. It was a solid portrait of depression.

It’s set in a small Connecticut town, and while the dynamics of a very divided and heavily class and status conscious town rang true, in other ways the town as Sylvie lived and experienced it felt a little too small and not claustrophobic enough. Meaning that she keeps meeting people related to the murder case but in a small town wouldn’t a lot of people know her, know her mother, and wouldn’t she feel those eyes watching and judging her at all times? Or maybe I’m projecting…

There’s a former detective who sits down with Sylvie to talk about the case and the whole scene, while it was important as to the structure of the book, it was also frustrating. The whole “there’s too much red tape and not enough stock put into hunches and gut feelings” nonsense. No surprise that these cops were unable to solve a murder

I’m unsure about Annie. The portrait of the mother as this fragile and deeply damaged person feels a bit too one dimensional for the large and central role she plays in the book. Of course Sylvie is the central character and the book is about her, but the book conveyed too little sense of who the mother was. Maybe some of that is simply POV, but it felt unsatisfying.

In broad strokes, though, I found the mother-daughter dynamic worked. Maybe some of that is because we never really know our parents. Though of course it’s one thing for Sylvie to not understand her mother, it’s another thing for the reader not to.

In some regards, I had a similar response to the identity of the murderer. The book takes place in a small town and there is a limited cast of characters who could have been responsible. The killer wasn’t just going to be a random stranger we had never met before or something like that.

But in some ways that is the problem with writing small town murder cases. Most murders are committed by people they know. Most murders are committed because of a handful of reasons. And so there were only a few possibilities. Well, there was only one really, even if it wasn’t immediately clear.

The optimistically inclined ending works (is that a phrase? I’m using it) because I know what it feels like to come out of that fog of depression and exhaustion. And Collins doesn’t fall into the trap that things will improve, that everything is looking up, or even that the guilty party will ultimately be held accountable. The journey of the book is more emotional than it is about solving the crime. Which I like.

Overall, a good book. A good first book. And I want to see what Collins does next.