The View From The Cheap Seats

The Amazing Mr Gaiman

If there’s any reader out there who has not read Neil Gaiman’s wonderful fantasy stories, graphic novels and children’s fiction, they have missed something!

Gaiman started his writing career as a journalist (“backed awkwardly away from journalism because I wanted the freedom to make things up” as he so eloquently puts it), then moved to fiction, but this collection of his non-fiction, intriguingly titled The View From The Cheap Seats, is not just a great read, but like an introduction to the world of sci-fi and fantasy writing, because a lot of the pieces here are warm and humorous tributes to the masters of the genre—like HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Ray Bradbury, Samuel R Delany—writers who have inspired him and some who went on to become his friends.

There is of course, a lot more in this splendid collection; every bookworm will relate to his memories of libraries, and every nerd will hang on to his impressions of comics, graphic novels, the world of film and TV, and music—nuggets from his amazing and prolific career.

The book is wise, funny, amazingly gracious (writers seldom pay such tributes to other writers). A lot of pieces in this collection are forewords to books, keynote addresses at events, or homages to writers who passed away.

Besides being a very readable and inspiring book, The View from The Cheap Seats, but an invaluable cultural history of sorts. The fact that his journalistic writing can be as powerful as his fiction is proved by the piece he wrote about a refugee camp in Jordan. If such a variety of fine writing, does not induce writer’s envy, what will?  Read, keep, dip into the book from time to time and refuse to lend it.

The View from The Cheap Seats

By Neil Gaiman

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 544

Six Four

Mystery of The Missing Girls

Six Four is Japanese author Hideo Yokoyama’s first book to be translated into English (by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies), and went on to become a bestseller.  The book is a dense and serious police procedural that plays out more in the protagonist’s mind, as he juggles multiple problems.

Yoshinobu Mikami and his wife are in anguish over their missing daughter; they have to repeatedly go over the trauma of looking at corpses of young women to check it’s their Ayumi. Mikami was pulled out of criminal investigation and put into media relations, a post where he is uncomfortable and dreams of getting back to being a real cop.

The case that runs through the book is an old kidnap-murder of a seven-year-old girl, Shoko Amamaya.  Her father had paid the ransom, still the child was found dead. The unsolved case that fascinated the country,  is a blot on the police department, and a large contingent of detectives continues to work on trying to trace the killer, in the case codenamed Six Four.

As press director, Mikami has to deal with a rowdy bunch of reporters, and his first battle with them involves withholding the name of a female driver in an accident case. The reporters demand the names of the woman and the victim, which Mikami cannot reveal due to instructions given by his superiors. It creates an ugly scene between the cops and the press, and they threaten to boycott the visit by the police commissioner from Tokyo. He is visiting on the anniversary of Shoko’s death and hopes to pay his respects at the Amamaya residence. The press boycott would mean major embarrassment for Mikami’s department.

Meanwhile, the still-grieving father politely turns down the commissioner’s visit too, which puts the harried Mikami into more trouble. In trying to find out why Amamaya turned against the cops, Mikami stumbles upon a “Koda Memo” that hints at a blunder in the Shoko case, followed by a cover-up endorsed by higher-ups in the police force.

As Mikami gradually uncovers the conspiracy, the book moves at a languid pace, taking in the minutiae of how the cops work, as well as the internal politics and rivalry between departments. Yokoyama lays bare corruption in the force along with that deep sense of honour entrenched in the Japanese psyche.  The prose is simple with no embellishment; there are too many characters and strands of the story, that somehow get connected, like an immense jigsaw puzzle.

Apart from the hunt for Shoko, and later, the race against time to catch a killer, there is very little action in Six Four. It would take a lot of patience to get through Mikami’s complex investigation, but it always remains gripping and the twist at the end is a zinger.

Yokoyama used to be an investigative reporter with a Tokyo newspaper before turning to fiction, so in this novel he gets the machinations going on between the ‘Press Club’ and the police just right. It’s a thick, sprawling, richly detailed novel, the success of which will undoubtedly result in more of his books being translated. 

Six Four

By Hideo Yokoyama

Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies 

Publisher: Quercus

Pages: 600

X

The Twenty-fourth Alphabet

In 1982, Sue Grafton started her Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series, with A is for Alibi. She has gone through almost every alphabet in the English language, with W is for Wasted coming out in 2013. The latest in the series is X, just X, no ‘is for’ attached. As the bestselling author said in an interview she is entitled to break her own rules.

Kinsey Millhone is one of the most loveable characters in detective fiction, a single (with occasional, very brief romantic entanglements), independent, courageous, witty and totally kickass female, who through A to X has solved crimes and fought felons up and down her stomping ground of Santa Teresa, California. She lives in a studio apartment, owned by the octogenarian Henry Pitts, who is also an expert chef, and her best buddy. His fun family of long-living Pitts is like Kinsey’s surrogate clan, and their watering hole of choice is Rosie’s bar and restaurant owned by a ferocious Hungarian woman, who often feeds them foul-sounding delicacies from her homeland, with Kinsey’s preferred drink of chilled chardonnay.

The series has remained in the 1980s, so no cell phones, computers just about making an appearance, phones are rotary, and notes typed on manual typewriters or handwritten on index cards. The most advanced gizmo of the age is the copier.  Even if this makes the books seem old-fashioned, it also lends them an unhurried charm.

In W, the down-at-heel detective Pete Wolinsky had been killed. In this book, his wife Ruthie, mysteriously threatened with a tax raid, requests Kinsey to check a box of his papers for any useful financial documents. What she find among other things, is a coded papers with six women’s names on it—all connected to a serial offender Ned Lowe-- and a package meant to have been delivered to his daughter April, fifteen years ago. While she is puzzling over this mystery, she has a problem of her own.

She was invited to a swanky mansion by a stylish, rich woman called Hallie Bettancourt, who wants her to track down her son, she gave up for adoption. The son, Christian Satterfield, happens to be a safe cracker and bank robber, just out of prison. Hallie pays Kinsey with marked currency notes that brings the cops down on her trail. Worse, when she goes back to check, the mansion shows no sign of habitation and her client cannot be traced. This gets Kinsey’s hackles up—how dare anybody cheat her?

As her work proceeds, in the backdrop is a severe water shortage turning to drought in California, that gets Henry into water-saving schemes, even if it means digging up his garden. Meanwhile, the new neighbours, an old couple Edna and Joseph, take full advantage of Henry’s kindness and pull their own little cons on him, much to Kinsey’s annoyance.

There are X’s sprinkled all over—a bank of X. Phillips, a wealthy transport baron Ari Xanakis and his divorced wife Teddy, the cause of a lot of Kinsey’s problems, a Father Xavier, and so on.

The culprit on whose trail Kinsey sets out, is just a small part of the book, but has left his vicious mark on several women. Even the usually equanimous Kinsey spooked out when she finds that he has trespassed into her office and left it off kilter. 

Although there is murder, burglary, cheating and corruption in Sue Grafton books, the times are still relatively peaceful and most people inherently decent. The world is protected from terrorism, computer hacking and religious fundamentalism. Fans wonder what will happen to Kinsey Millhone when Grafton completes the ‘Z’ book. There are still a quite a few months to go, but the suspense is killing.

X

By Sue Grafton

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 416

Love You Dead

Slithery, Slippery, Snaky

In Love You Dead,  the twelfth book of the Roy Grace series, popular crime writer Peter James, creates a heroine/vamp for whom you can’t help having a grudging admiration, even though she is a ruthless killer.

As a child, Jodie Danforth was the ugly duckling of her family, constantly being compared to her pretty sister, Cassie.  The sister dies in a mysterious fall off a cliff. And with this sly murder, Jodie embarks on a life in the pursuit of wealth.  Plastic surgery takes care of her looks, and her already devious brain does the rest. 

When the book begins, she cleverly kills her elderly husband on a ski slope, making it look like an accident. Her modus operandi is to look for rich lonely old men on the net, ensnare them with her beauty and then kill them.  At her secluded home, she has a hidden room full of deadly reptiles and insects; these creatures that would frighten the bravest, are her hobby.

Detective Inspector Roy Grace, is at a relatively peaceful stage of his life with loving wife Cleo and infant son, Noah, when his nemesis, a serial killer, Ed Crisp escapes from prison. To add to his woes, his ex-wife Sandy, who had walked out on him years ago, surfaces in a hospital in Berlin, in battered condition.

Meanwhile as Jodie kills husband number three with snake venom and plans the next hit, a British assassin called Tooth, working for a brutal Russian gang is on her trail, because she stole money and a memory drive from a gangster. The drive contains secrets that cannot fall into the wrong hands, and Jodie does not know that her life is in danger.

When a petty burglar and car thief dies with symptoms that look like snake poison, Roy Grace is called in to investigate and the various strands of the story start coming together. Grace makes a plan to trap Jodie, which involves the kind of subterfuge that would beat even her Machiavellian plots.

The subplots are not too interesting, and tie up rather too neatly, but the book is readable because of the smart and fearless Jodie; this femme fatale makes Roy Grace look like a rather tepid hero, as he plods away at his investigation and copes with the emotional turbulence in his life.  

Love You Dead

By Peter James

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 560