As a result, Garner’s voice—wry, witty, warm, and self-deprecating—comes through clearly in these pages. The Garner Files is generally chronological, beginning with the now 83-year-old actor’s difficult childhood in Oklahoma. He was the youngest of three boys, his mother died from a “botched abortion” when Garner was only 4, and his father parceled his sons out to relatives of uneven merits. From there, Garner remembers being “the first Oklahoman drafted for the Korean War.” He remembers the serendipity behind his becoming a Hollywood performer (“The only reason I’m an actor is that a lady pulled out of a parking space in front of a producer’s office”). He remembers meeting and falling in love with his wife-to-be during an Adlai Stevenson for President rally in 1956. He talks here about other film stars he’s admired (especially Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman), his occasional battles to win fair deals from entertainment studios, the health problems he’s endured as a result of on-screen stunts and years of racing cars, his love/hate relationship with golf, the constant pain from arthritis he’s endured since the 1960s, his attendance at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (Garner was seated in the third row at the Lincoln Memorial, when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech), and—last but certainly not least—his careful choice of screen roles over the decades (“A reporter asked once if I would ever do a nude scene. I told him I don’t do horror films”).

Garner also admits to being unlike the easygoing, lighthearted, self-confident, and sometimes self-interested characters he’s played on screens large and small. He says he has a bad temper and a tendency toward pessimism, and insists that he’s “really an old curmudgeon.” But then, some of his characters have been that way too, and viewers have delighted in their company all the same. ~ Jeff Pierce

Her husband assumes it is the common Depression era story of riches to rags but Katey knows the true nature of Tinker Grey’s story. It is intertwined with her story and that of her roommate Eve. It is a story of “chance encounters which in the moment had seemed so haphazard and effervescent but which with time took on some substance of fate”.

She is taken back to the snowy New Year’s Eve when she first met Tinker. She and Eve are off to their favorite jazz club to see if they can make their combined $3 stretch through a night of martinis or even better, charm someone into buying their drinks for them. Theodore Grey, Tinker to his friends, succumbs to their charms and ends up finding a bottle of champagne as well as buying their favorite gin drinks. They become friends while devising resolutions for each other for the coming year. Before the first week of 1938 is over their lives are changed forever.

One of my particular joys in reading is to learn something new whether literary, or of another time or place. To experience a place I will never get to or a time that one of my relatives might have lived in. Also, I read in order to learn how to live. Granted, now in my 60’s I do have a few ideas on that subject, but I love it when the author through the voice of one character or another articulates something I feel but can’t express well. Or even better, he gives me a clue to understanding a literary classic. For instance this exchange between Katey and one of her new friends about The Cherry Orchard:

-What do you think of the play?       -So far, I like it.       -You don’t find it dated? What with all that fuss over the end of agrarian aristocracy? I should think it very old-fashioned to sympathize with the plight of the Ranevskayas.    -Oh, I think you’re wrong. I think we all have some parcel of the past which is falling into disrepair or being sold off piece by piece. It’s just that for most of us, it isn’t an orchard; it’s the way we’ve thought about something, or someone.

And then three pages later in a telling detail concerning her editor Mason Tate:

Occasionally, he would even pluck a letter from the pile and retreat with it to his office. There, with the door securely closed, in the quiet of the afternoon, he could revisit the faded sentiments of faded friends, undisturbed by all but the occasional thud of an ax in the distance.

I love that. Now I want to read Chekov because I’ve got a clue how this play and others can relate to my life.

Then there is this passage “written” by Katey: “It’s a bit of a cliché to refer to someone as a chameleon: a person who can change his colors from environment to environment. In fact, not one in a million can do that. But there are tens of thousands of butterflies: men and women like Eve with two dramatically different colorings – one which serves to attract and the other which serves to camouflage – and which can be switched at the instant with a flit of the wings.” Another “aha” moment for me when I think that Towles has really nailed the changes in people we know between their public and private selves.

Yes, we all sometimes yearn to end up in exalted circles of society, but this story is deeper than just a modern fairy tale.  There are so many levels on which to enjoy it . Perhaps I shall read it again right away. It is that good.

After concocting a wonderful series of historical crime novels around the covertly ingenious Victorian copper, Sergeant Cribb (Waxwork), British author Lovesey turned his talents to a succession of standalone mysteries, including The False Inspector Dew (a 1982 work inspired by the notorious real-life case of convicted murderer Hawley Crippen) and Keystone (1983), which took place in the rough-and-tumble world of silent-film stuntmen.

It wasn’t until 1991 that the author presented a protagonist to rival Cribb. That year brought the release of The Last Detective, which took place in Bath, a former Roman spa resort west of London. Leading that modern-day story’s cast was Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, a petulant, overweight, middle-aged, and technology averse cop who believes in wearing out shoe leather and wearing down suspects to solve a case, and is contemptuous (to say the least) of the community outreach and management-training techniques that have become such a large part of contemporary policing. From that start, Lovesey has grown a series combining fair-play puzzle themes with eccentric players, situations that demonstrate the clash between Britain’s past and present, and much humor mined from Diamond’s frustration in dealing with subordinates who are less old-fashioned in their ways of crime-solving.

The 11th Diamond outing is Stagestruck. And while it’s not as unpredictable or profusely plotted as the last book, Skeleton Hill (2009), it would be a fine place for somebody unfamiliar with this series to begin reading. The case here centers around Bath’s venerable, 200-year-old Theatre Royal, where aging pop singer Clarion Calhoun is hoping to make a triumphant stage debut. On opening night, however, she suddenly starts clawing at her face and screaming, then collapses. The theater is chary of any resulting scandal, and Calhoun herself refuses interviews. But after it’s discovered that something caustic in her makeup caused Calhoun’s agony, Diamond is sent to determine whether a crime has been committed. Suspicion is quickly cast upon dresser Denise Pearsall, who applied the makeup. And after Pearsall takes a deadly fall backstage, it’s assumed she committed suicide out of guilt. Yet Diamond is far from convinced-and readers should be, too.

Lovesey has shown himself to be a master of mystery-making and misdirection, with the prizes to prove it. Stagestruck earns him more kudos for effectively deploying an ensemble cast, particularly journalist-turned-detective Ingeborg Smith. He’s less successful, though, in developing a subplot here about Diamond’s fear of theaters. Yes, it offers an unusual confrontation with a child molester, but it doesn’t do as much as some previous twists (the death of his supremely tolerant spouse in 2002′s Diamond Dust, for instance) to illuminate new depths in the short-fused detective’s character. ~ Jeff Pierce

Marina Singh researches new statin drugs for Vogel, a pharmaceutical company based in Minnesota. State of Wonder opens with a letter announcing the death of her colleague and office partner from a mysterious fever contracted in the Brazilian jungle. Anders Eckman had been sent by Vogel’s CEO to track down Dr. Annick Swenson who has been working on a potentially valuable new fertility drug for the company. Dr. Swenson has been stonewalling Vogel on the progress of her field research. She is out of reach in the Amazon jungle. Mr. Fox, Vogel’s CEO and Marina’s secret lover, urgently desires to know the progress of Dr. Swenson’s research and he assigns Marina to find out. Karen Eckman, Ander’s wife, doesn’t believe that Anders is dead and begs Marina to find out what happened to her husband and bring him home.

And so Marina is on her way to Manaus, a city on the Amazon tributary Rio Negro. She is apprehensive about her ability to find Anders and suffers from recurring nightmares, the side effect of an anti-malarial drug she must take. Arriving in Manaus, she is unprepared for the stifling heat and the difficulty in finding anyone who knows Dr. Swenson’s location. Eventually, she sets off into the deep jungle for the outpost research station. As she gets further into the heart of the dark, steamy jungle her life becomes more and more disoriented. Each step of her journey strips her of her American accoutrements. Her baggage, including her cell phone, is lost on the flight to Brazil and as she sets off downriver the items she acquired in Manaus disappear.

In the jungle, Marina is forced to confront every kind of flying and stinging and biting insect. Extremely poisonous snakes lurk on jungle paths hidden in leaves and ready to strike with their deadly venom if stepped on. Monstrous snakes hide under vegetation in the river. She must learn to be ever vigilant.

Patchett piles on subtle details about the jungle, “In the two hours since she had last taken this trail the jungle had installed an entirely different set of birds screeching out an entirely different hue and cry.  The mid-morning shift of insects replaced their early-morning brethren and clicked and vibrated a new and distinct set of messages. Marina kept her mind on the snakes that wrapped around trees and tangled themselves into vines and she placed her feet down carefully.”

Just as ominous are the details of Dr. Swenson’s fertility drug research. She is a charismatic woman with the power to get her way. Marina is forced to confront her accepted ideas of compassion and healing. Dr. Swenson is linked to a sad accident that happened to Marina during her residency year and propelled her into research.

Throughout the novel, Patchett provides the reader with lovely gems of writing and wisdom. “There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.” The section about Marina’s life in Manaus felt slow and boring until it occurred to me that it mirrored Marina’s feelings of being becalmed in a strange place, worn down by heat and confusion.

Ann Patchett fans eagerly await her books and State of Wonder delivers another subtle wonder. This is an affecting tale of the uses of power – by large companies and by researchers driven by their own hubris to make shocking decisions. Marina is a modern day woman who is drawn into a world alien to her yet her quiet, human struggle to complete her mission is a story of one woman’s true initiation into mature womanhood. ~Reviewed by Gretchen Echols

One afternoon Mary Granville Pendarves Delany, age 72, glanced at her painted papers and noticed that one of the colored pieces matched the dropped petal of a geranium. She proceeded to cut out colored paper pieces and paste them to a black background creating her first image: Scarlet Geranium and Lobelia cardinalis. She had invented a precursor to what we now call collage. Over the next 10 years she worked to complete her goal of 1000 original, botanically correct illustrations. She managed an amazing 985 of her Flora Delanica before failing eyesight curtailed her artistic production.

Mary Delaney (1700 – 1788), was the English daughter of a minor branch of a powerful Georgian family. She was married off at the age of 16 to a 61 year old obese, drunken squire in the hopes of improving the family fortune. She cried for two weeks at the prospect of this marriage. At 25 she was a widow with no fortune and only a modest financial portion to make her way in society. During those years, while working to secure a place at court that would guarantee financial stability, she fiercely preserved her independence. She was a friend of Handel and an occasional dinner companion of Jonathan Swift. She was pursued by the wealthy Lord Baltimore, and all the while she was painting, stitching and designing dresses and accessories for her interiors and those of her friends.

During much of her adult life she was the close friend of the wealthy Duchess of Portland who was an avid collector of art and objects from the natural world. In middle age she married Dean Delany and went to live with him in Ireland where the two of them engaged in their joint passion for creating beautiful gardens and closely observing the natural world around the estate.

The Paper Garden, besides being a biography of a fascinating woman, is also a meditation on closely observing the natural world and then distilling those observations into another medium – of abandoning perfection and risking failure in order to create something new.  Molly Peacock combines her own memories with a musing on how a life lived almost 300 years ago can inspire a maker of today. “Even if you’ve managed major accomplishments throughout your life and don’t really need a model for making a mark, you do need one for enriching an ongoing existence.”

Mary Delany was a great letter writer, especially to her beloved sister who kept all her letters. They were passed down to her daughter along with the Flora Delanica after Mrs. Delany’s death. Eventually in the late 1800′s they were donated to the British Museum where the collection has inspired many viewers over the years.

The Boomer generation is obsessed with aging “well” as they begin to wrestle with the thorny decisions associated with Medicare, downsizing living quarters and creaky, achy knees and joints. How does one do it? This biography, meditation, and art appreciation book gives some insight into that conversation. One can take heart from Mary Delaney who wrote to her sister that “an ingenious mind is never too old to learn.” We see the importance of friendships to encourage and support our endeavors and how close observation of nature in all its forms helps to keep one alive. She offers us a model of sheer tenacity, hanging on and not disintegrating despite the odds. Molly Peacock has created a wonderful book to inspire us all in our creative endeavors and our daily lives as she encourages us to engage in the world around us.

Gretchen Echols

May 2011

On a subsequent visit to the village Margaret goes off on her own to explore the grounds of the old house. She comes upon a fat old man painting a picture of the yellow house but without any windows. Exploring further she peers at a dried up kitchen garden and walks down the path of a cutting garden full of dried up flowers and burst seed pods. She looks in a long spindly box on wheels and sees a strange wizened old woman “thin as sticks with a little brown head like wood, the head of a wooden little monkey” guarded by a severe woman in navy blue knitting “under some exhausted sunflowers”.

Gardam’s cast of characters includes Kenneth Marsh, Elinor’s older husband, a bank manager and weekend preacher for a fundamentalist sect called The Saints. “She had accepted her husband’s faith after a fervourless girlhood from a mixture of reasons badly thought out.” Binkie and Charles are old friends of Elinor’s who have recently returned to the area and have connections to the yellow house that Margaret doesn’t comprehend. Rosalie Frayling is the invalid old woman who owns the yellow house and has left it to an organization that cares for the institutionalized insane – in a spiteful gesture towards Binkie and Charles, her children.

Jane Gardam has a gift for telling detail – little gems delivered in an economy of description: “…brittle plate-headed sunflowers looking like hanged men in the heat.” As the novel unfolds, Gardam moves effortlessly between the present and the past of her character’s lives. Their diverse perspectives alternate between Margaret’s uncorrupted innocent eyes to the more loaded vision of the adults around her.

This book, a finalist for the Booker prize in 1978, has been reissued in a classy new edition by Europa. Once again we are in the skilled hands of a master artist as Gardam helps us see everyday situations in a new way. She delivers emotionally charged information in the same understated manner that readers loved in Old Filth. One of Gardam’s observations has changed my view of babies forever: “She lifted the baby up on her shoulder… She massaged its back, which was like the back of a duck, oven-ready.” Once again she says so much in a mere 195 pages. What an accomplishment. ~ Gretchen Echols – November 2010

Three years after editor-bookseller Otto Penzler delivered his last behemoth anthology of classic crime fiction, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, he’s back with the almost equal-size–and excellent–Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, which draws its contents from the rich publishing files of Black Mask magazine.

Launched in 1920 by journalist H.L. Mencken and critic George Jean Nathan, the pulpish Black Mask was soon sold to its publishers, and came under the editorial control of the legendary Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw. For the next decade, Shaw bought and printed tough, sometimes brutal yarns of criminality and corruption by writers who would together develop modern-day American crime fiction, people on the order of Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald and Cornell Woolrich. All of those wordsmiths are represented in The Black Lizard Big Books of Black Mask Stories, together with marginally less familiar talents such as Fredric Brown, Talmadge Powell, William Campbell Gault, Frank Gruber, George Harmon Coxe, Carroll John Daly, Brett Halliday, Richard Denning, Norbert Davis and … well, this list could go on and on. Penzler has compiled more than 50 notable yarns inside these paperback covers. Among the reprints are Hammett’s original, serialized version of The Maltese Falcon, with “more than two thousand textual differences” from its 1930 novel version; and “Rough Diamonds,” a series of six connected stories by Ramon Decolta (aka Raoul Whitfield) starring Filipino sleuth Jo Gar. In addition, we find here “Luck,” a previously unpublished draft of Lester Dent’s first outing for Florida investigator Oscar Sail.

For all of us who missed living through the Black Mask era, Penzler’s new anthology provides both a pleasant trip back to crime fiction’s fast-paced and firepower-filled roots and a welcome escape from the disappointing sameness of so many genre works being published nowadays. ~ Jeff Pierce

John Clare dreams of escape, of nights with his “flash” friends in London, drinking and whoring, and of reuniting with his wives Mary and Patty.  Dr. Matthew Allen dreams of becoming rich and having his genius recognized with his machine to manufacture carved furniture detail.  Alfred Tennyson dreams of his lost love, Arthur Hallam, and the poems he will write.  Hannah Allen dreams of love and Alfred Tennyson as a potential husband.  As these and other characters weave their dreams and stories through this thoroughly enjoyable novel,  the narrator takes us into the minds of these people  with seamless transition between internal and external dialogue as the past nips at each with a similar intensity blurring the lines between the mad and the normal.     Highly recommended.  ~ Marla Vandewater

Pearl Buck grew up speaking Chinese before she spoke English. Until The Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when she was 8, she thought she was Chinese. She was raised in a missionary family in various locations along the Yangtze River, haunted by the ghosts of siblings dead before she was born. Her Presbyterian father was totally absorbed in his daunting work to convert Chinese peasants while her mother struggled to keep house in primitive conditions.

Watched over by her beloved Wang Amah, she was in and out of the homes of Chinese families. She was a curious and avid listener, asking endless questions as she soaked up the life stories of the peasants. She was especially interested in the bitter and often harsh lives of women. She knew first hand that boys were more valued than girls. As a child in her rambles through the village, including the cemetery, she often found small body parts of girl babies who had been ravaged by dogs after being abandoned to the elements. She overheard how many young brides were treated as slaves to unyielding mothers-in-law and often sought escape through suicide.

Pearl’s life in China was interrupted by sabbaticals to her parent’s families in West Virginia, deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Life in the United States was foreign to her and left her ill at ease.

She returned to West Virginia as a young woman to attend college where she met John Buck who was avidly interested in the agricultural practices in rural China. They returned to Nanking where they lived until the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931. By that time Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth had been published. The last third of the book relates Buck’s life in America. She continued to write and publish fiction and non-fiction, much dealing with the lives of ordinary Chinese people.

Spurling presents Buck’s life in the context of the lives of Christian missionaries in China at the beginning of the 20^th c. as well as the history of her parents’ lives in rural West Virginia. She also discusses Buck’s writing in its relationship to her life as she worked to make Americans aware of the humanity of the Chinese people, struggling to eke out a living in often harsh circumstances.

I found this story a fascinating look at the development of an unusual writer seamlessly woven together with the history of China in the years leading up to the revolution.   ~Gretchen Echols

Fans of David Mitchell’s books know all too well the anticipated pleasure of revisiting a past character or the reworking of a familiar theme from his previous works. It gives the reader a sense of being part of privileged group-one who is knowledgeable of the Mitchell family of characters.  So it was when I began his latest novel, a history/love story set in a Dutch trading post off the coast of Nagasaki in the late 18th century. What I found to my surprise was the not the usual pyrotechnics of intersecting plots and the leaping forward and back in time. Instead Mitchell has given us a straightforward historically accurate narrative, told in the third person about a group of characters who are so realistically drawn the reader feels transported to that time and place. The place is Deshima, a man-made island that housed the Dutch traders as they were not allowed to mix with their Japanese  counterparts. Jacob de Zoet, a bookkeeper for the Dutch East Indies Trading Company, is assigned the task of uncovering the rampant corruption that was occurring for years. During his stay he befriends the many Japanese/Dutch interpreters, the resident physician (an irreverent and brilliant character) and the hired hands. It is his forbidden attraction to Orito, a Japanese midwife, which leads him to discover a debauched practice at a monastery involving murder and sexual abuse. What impressed me most about this novel is the rich historical detail (it’s evidently well researched) and his aptitude for writing “real-sounding” dialogue with the obvious differences in dialect. Ultimately it’s Mitchell’s storytelling ability that shines in this novel, and is sure to impress his loyal followers and first-time readers alike.  ~Carol Santoro