When I moved to the States it took me a while to get used to everything being non-metric, as well as dates being reversed. Today – in America – it’s Pi day, since it’s March 14, or 3/14. On May the 4th is Star Wars day. Meanwhile, the rest of the world probably looks upon these date celebrations with bemused eyes, as they write dates with day and then the month. For them, today is 14/3, which is nowhere near pi.
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Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin is best known for his gritty Inspector John Rebus novels, set in Edinburgh. The actions in Rankin’s novels take place in real time, such that Rebus eventually retired from the force, with 2007’s Exit Music. Since then Rebus has appeared in four other novels in a civilian capacity, while still helping solve crimes. After Rebus’ retirement, Ranking started another series, featuring Malcolm Fox, an inspector with the Scottish equivalent of Internal Affairs, called Complaints and Conduct. The first novel in the series is The Complaints, published in 2009.
Fox is both different from Rebus and similar. A former alcoholic, Fox is now a teetotaler, unlike the hard-drinking Rebus. They’ve both been married and divorced, but Fox’s marriage didn’t last long enough to produce children. He seems to fail with the opposite sex, unlike Rebus who has regular relationships, though most tend not to last. Working in the Complaints division, Fox initially comes across as a bit of a moralistic person, with a stiff, almost Calvinist personality. Yet when the chips are down and he’s forced into a corner, Fox is not above bending rules, lying, and pushing relentlessly against anyone he encounters, either criminals or superiors in the police force.
The novel opens with Fox having brought a case against a supposed crooked cop. Apparently there are few of these in Edinburgh, as the Complaints division is staffed with only three officers, one quite new. With no current cases, Fox is loaned to a vice division, one specializing in handling crimes against minors. He’s brought into their current case since another cop, Jamie Breck, is suspected of illegal online activity. Problems and conflicts arise when Fox’s sister’s boyfriend is found brutally murdered only days after he broke the arm of his girlfriend, and the investigating officer is none other than the suspect Fox has been tasked with investigating.
The Complaints is a novel dealing with good people doing stupid things, especially Fox. There are times Fox should know better, but instead of sitting back and letting others do their job, he thinks only he can find the answer. This results in his suspension from the force, along with Breck. This step falls into the typical cop theme, and once suspended Fox doesn’t just kick back his heels and relax, but manages to work himself back into the investigation, becomes a suspect, and eventually find redemption. Partnering with Breck, he drags Breck into a series of stupid actions and decisions, although in the end some balance is restored.
Having read all the Rebus novels, even the more recent ones where Fox and Rebus intersect, this was the first stand-along Malcolm Fox novel I read. I found that I enjoyed the lack of Rebus in this book. Although Fox made some stupid decisions, he’s not a stupid person. He didn’t change much over the course of the novel, and he shares the dogged persistence so prevalent in the Rebus novels. Still, Rankin manages to create a compelling character quite different from his regular protagonist. I wonder why he focused on Fox, rather than on continuing the series with Siobhan Clarke, Rebus’ partner and successor in the force, as the main character. Fox only achieved one other stand-alone novel, after which Rankin brought Fox and Rebus together for subsequent appearances.
If you’re a Smiths fan with access to Amazon UK there’s a new graphic novel about the Smiths, covering the time they were famous, due out in March. Apparently this tale required 450 pages. One wonders how many pages it will take to cover their short, brilliant years before Johnny Marr was kicked out of his own band and the group imploded shortly thereafter.
I’m a huge fan of Tim Powers, but not mad enough to spend $300 for this limited edition of the collection short stories of Tim Powers, from Subterranean Press. Limited to only 124 copies, it’s already sold out, anyway. Maybe some day it will filter down to a less limited edition, as it contains at least one new story.
The big news today is that Amazon announced it’s bought the rights to Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks’s Culture novel. I’m still surprised (no, not really) that Banks never won a Hugo Award for any of his Culture novels, as they are pure SF through and through. The novel will be turned into a series, and likely if successful will spawn adaptations of other novels. Alas, Feersum Endjinn isn’t a Culture novel, but still one of my favorite Banks books, as well as the non-M mainstream novel, Whit.
I’ve long considered’s British band Slowdive’s 1993 album Souvlaki one of the best sounds of the 1990s, with Dagger, 40 Days, Allison, Machine Gun, and When the Sun Hits five memorable tracks with a unique sound. Yet the British music press can be brutal, raising up bands one moment only to tear them down the next. The arrival of Britpop and grunge in the mid-90s doomed Slowdive, while the press fawned over bands like Blur, Oasis and Nirvana.
In 2017 Oasis is long gone, while the Gallagher brothers attempt daily to top each other in their silly feud. Nirvana is long gone, for more tragic reasons. Grunge and Britpop are relics of the past, while Slowdive is back and stronger than ever with a new studio album, 22 years after their last one, Pygmalion, released in 1995. Between Souvlaki and Pygmalion, Slowdive took an ambient turn, and while Blue Skied An’ Clear is almost a holy experience, the rest don’t measure up (at least in my opinion) to the balanced strength of Souvlaki.
After the hatred from the British music press and fading sales lost Slowdive their record contract with Creation Records, some of the members reformed as Mojave Three. However, while pleasant-sounding, it felt like their music lost of the its soul, a soul formed through a synergy among the five core members of the band. I was surprised to hear around 2014 that these five individuals started to play a few live gigs, and then excited to hear they were back in the studio to record another record. What would it sound like? Would it be along the muted ambient tones of Pygmalion, or classic pedal-driven Souvlaki, or something different altogether?
Released in May of 2017, their self-titled album, Slowdive, contains only eight songs:
- Slomo
- Star Roving
- Don’t Know Why
- Sugar for the Pill
- Everyone Knows
- No Longer Making Time
- Go Get It
- Falling Ashes
The first song I heard was Star Roving, released prior to the album. Far peppier than anything on Pygmalion, it seemed to call back to earlier days, with all five members of the band involved.
For a long time I thought No Longer Making Time was the best song on the album, but the more I listened the more I have decided that Slomo ranks as one of the best songs in many years, from any band. The bass hook, followed by Neil Halstead’s terrific guitar, the mix of vocals, and the overall feel of the song is undeniable. Sugar for the Pill might be second, then No Longer Making Time and Star Roving. For Pygmalion fans the last two songs harken back to that album.
Here is their Pitchfork session:
And their recent live performance on KEXP:
Finally, I’m beyond thrilled that I have tickets to see them live in April in Austin, along with a second generation fan. Sugar for the Pill is one of my 11-year-old son’s favorite songs. And he plays guitar.
There are some novels that seem anchored in a specific place or time, or sometimes both. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they exist like flies in amber—stuck in place. Then there are books that span ages. Eric Ambler’s outstanding novel, published in the US as A Coffin for Dimitrios and in the UK under the more sinister title, The Mask of Dimitrios, is set in the 1920s, and 1930s in Europe, but feels as current as today.
From Constantinople to Smyrna, from Sofia to Geneva, and finally Paris, Ambler weaves a tight tale of detection by a deceive writer tracing the path of a wily criminal. There is no motive other than curiosity here, yet Latimer, the protagonist, places himself in difficult and often dangerous situations, a strange affair for someone used to sitting behind a desk writing stories, not living them.
The criminal whose paths he traces built a life upon exploration, from fellow criminals to prostitutes to drug users and dealers. He worked himself up form the very bottom toward a place of potential respectability, something that seems true to life as well as multiple works of fiction, where the past of people in power often contains many skeletons.
Although written at the cusp of WWII, this novel could just as well have taken place during almost any decade in the past two hundred years, with wars, smuggling of people and drugs, and criminals quick to murder and betray. The prose is superb, the plot never wavers, and the ending both tragic and amusing.
Since my last foray into the world of Wooster and Jeeves I’ve found a few more stacks of Wodehouse books, increasing my library by nearly a dozen books. While not ideally suited to binge reading, I’ve read a couple more Wooster books, and a pair featuring the tales by a certain Mr. Mulliner, as related to a rapt audience in a local pub. (The fact that my compute attempts to auto-correct the name to Milliner is a sad testament to computer illiteracy.)
The two Mulliner books that I’ve read so far are both collections of short stories, each a tale of some hapless nephew, or cousin, or other relative of Mr. Mulliner’s. Nearly each story tells of a young(-ish) lad falling in love, his travails and eventual triumph. The stories are islands in time, so ideally suited for PBS costume dramas set in England between the wars, although likely some were written after WWII. They tell of a time when young men were gentlemen, often of leisure, with butlers and other people to take care of vital needs. Back then people belonged to various clubs, Great Britain still had traditions, and public school chums were chums for life. Some of the characters that appear in the Wooster and Jeeves books appear in these stories, so they exist in the same fictional universe.
Some of those things are obvious inventions, but I found it jarring to read a throw-away line about a tuck-shop, since that’s the term we used for such a place back when I went to school in Lusaka, Zambia, in the 1970s and 1980s. Some British traditions and nomenclature spans decades. This fact sounds trivial, but the reach of the British Empire stretched far across the world in untold ways. Does the tuck-shop still exist in places today?
While not every Mulliner story amuses on the same scale, and they tend to follow for the most part a certain formula, the ones that are good are dashed good, in Wodehousian terms. They’re maybe not Jeeves and Wooster good, but the best ones rise almost to that level.
Twenty or so years ago I bought my first Fritz Leiber book. It might have been The Swords of Lankhmar or one of the other books in the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series. Back in the late 1980s, early 1990s you could still find the old Ace paperbacks in good condition in used book stores. If you were lucky.
At any rate, I bought The Knight and Knave of Swords in hardcover in 1988 or 1989, since this was the first publication date, and picked up The Leiber Chronicles, the massive collection published by Dark Harvest, in the same year or shortly thereafter. I bought as many of Leiber’s fantasy books as I could find, especially the books set in and around Lankhmar with those two rogues. Yet one book eluded me – Swords Against Wizardry. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, or I rejected the beat-up copies I found whenever there was a Leiber book in the paperback section of the (mostly) local used book stores I visited over the years.
This weekend I found a decent copy of the missing book, merely by chance, twenty or so years after my first introduction to Leiber’s works. For the princely sum of $3, marked down from $5, with an extra 20% that weekend, I’ve now added this book to my collection, garish cover and all.
I find it somewhat amusing since Centipede Press has begun the process to reprint in nice, expensive editions the entire eight books in the series, and likely I will end up buying them over the next few years. At least I have a reading copy.
Victor Milán died on February 13. I learned the news one day later, and found it nearly impossible to believe. I’d known Vic for nearly two decades, mostly via email, though we met a few times in person in the mid-1990s when I attended some SF conventions. He wrote an article once for Prometheus back when I used to edit the newsletter, and we discussed books and other subjects when we corresponded. We were both huge fans of Lack Vance, a topic that came up several times. He was alway writing, and publishing great books, all entertaining stories across many genres. I’ve read only a fraction of his books, mainly ones that were published under his own name, not his many pseudonyms. Looking at my stack of his books I’m surprised to find that I own only ten, even though in all he wrote close to 100 novels.
A few years ago he became quite ill, but recovered and kept writing. He recently finished an acclaimed trilogy about dinosaurs and humans, and wrote short stories for George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards anthology. Having mostly left the major social media platform out there a few months ago, I had no idea that he became ill once again in mid-December 2017, or that he was in the hospital. The news that he died struck me particularly hard.
The first book of his that I read was Cybernetic Samurai, back in 1987. I still have the UK paperback edition. The pages have yellowed slightly, the print seems small by today’s standards. When I moved to the US from Norway in 1988 I found a hardback copy of the US edition, which he later inscribed to me, “Thanks for your friendship and support,” at one of those conventions. I bought the sequel, Cybernetic Shogun, as soon as it was published. Every time I saw a Victor Milán new book I bought a copy, from Runespear; CLD; even his Star Trek novel, From the Depths; Red Sands; and a couple of the Wild Cards anthologies. I treasure the New Mexico writers anthology, A Very Large Array, published in 1987 and containing many of the luminaries of SF, such as Jack Williamson, George R. R. Martin, Roger Zalazny, Fred Saberhagen, and, of course, Victor Milán.
A giant in the field of libertarian SF is gone. More importantly, I have lost a friend, and I’m still processing this loss.
