Whipped Cream Difficulties

In order by “Squeee!” factor:

1. Dennis Lehane has a new book coming in November.
2. The new book is a Kenzie and Gennaro novel. Lehane hasn’t written one of those since 1999.
3. The new book is a sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone.

(Hattip to The Rap Sheet.)

The good folks over at The Rap Sheet are running a contest asking folks to name their four favorite private eye novels. It seems like a fun idea, so I’m sending in my entry. But while I was working on that, it occurred to me that I could get a blog post out of it as well; especially if I didn’t limit it to just four.

So here’s a list, in no particular order, of my ten favorite private eye novels, with some comments. The ones I included in my list for The Rap Sheet are marked with a (*). If nothing else, I hope this stimulates some discussion.

• California Fire and Life, Don Winslow. (*)
• Free Fall, Robert Crais. What I love most about this book is that the heart of the plot is a love story about two people who wind up walking through the fire. They don’t come out without scars, but Crais leaves you with the feeling they came out stronger for the experience.
• Gone, Baby, Gone, Dennis Lehane.
• Promised Land, Robert B. Parker. Here’s what I’ve said about this novel previously.
• When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, Lawrence Block. (*) A sad, beautiful, elegiac private eye novel. I’m glad the series didn’t end with this one, but if it had, it couldn’t have ended any better.
• Pale Gray for Guilt, John D. MacDonald. (*) More than just a stand-in for all of the Travis McGee novels, this is my favorite because:
  • It is a very personal novel; McGee is out for revenge on the person who killed his friend, and to protect his friend’s widow.
  • The Christmas setting. I like to pick this up and re-read it every Christmas, so I can get in the mood for the season.
  • It is a novel about dealing with loss.
  • It features Meyer, who I like almost as much as McGee. More to the point, it features Meyer in a key role, and makes good use of his specific talents.
• Farewell, My Lovely, Dashiell Hammett Of course I know this was a Raymond Chandler novel; that was a copy and paste error. I know this is kind of a conventional choice, but there’s just something about Moose Malloy, and especially the last line of the novel, that gets to me.
• The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett. (*) Another kind of conventional choice. There are people who would say that I picked this because of my romantic attachment to Bogart and the movie. There may be some truth to that. But the book existed before the movie did, and I picked this one (rather than Red Harvest) because, I think, this is the Hammett book most concerned with honor; what it means, and how to live with honor in a world without honor.
• The Red Box, Rex Stout. Some other folks have cited books as stand-ins for entire series. This is my stand-in for all the Wolfe books. I have fond memories of some of the other books (Too Many Cooks and The Black Mountain in particular), but those are atypical books. The Red Box is the most typical of the Wolfe books; all the routine is there, but it comes late enough in the series that it feels more polished than the early books.
• The Far Side of the Dollar, Ross Macdonald. I’m not as well read in the Archer books as I would like to be, but I felt like he belonged on the list. Of the Archer books I’ve read, this is the one that made the strongest impression on me.

Honorable mention: I considered putting The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, by Ross Thomas, on this list. In the end, though, I decided that as much as I like that novel, it isn’t what I’d consider a private eye novel. I’m not sure what to call it, but I don’t think it fits that category.

The subject line is a hattip to Lawrence, who complained last time I quoted Mr. Costello’s song that I didn’t use that line.

Patrick over at the excellent Popehat blog has picked up on Tyler Cowan’s “Ten Book” meme, and posted his own list of ten books.

This seems like an interesting idea for a post, and I have much respect for Patrick (as well as the other Popehatters), so…why not? Ten books which, from the original Marginal Revolution post, “have influenced your view of the world”.

• Restoring the American Dream, by Robert J. Ringer. Other people came to libertarianism through Ayn Rand, or Milton Friedman: I came to libertarianism through Ringer’s book, then read Rand and Nozick and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and all the other classics.
• Neuromancer, by William Gibson. This is the book that restored my faith in science fiction, which I felt had become stagnant in the early 1980’s. It also made me want to be a Gibsonian protagonist, but that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard Feynman (with Ralph Leighton). At one point in my life, I wanted to be a physicist. For various reasons, this didn’t work out, but Feynman’s approach to looking at the world was still a major influence on me. (The link above is a bit of a cheat, as it goes to the more recent omnibus that contains Surely You’re Joking, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and some extra material. If you happen to know a smart high school or junior high student, you could do a lot worse than to buy two copies of this book; one for you, and one for them.)
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy. I hope someday to build something as cool as these people built, and this is one of the best books ever written on the true hacker mindset.
• Complete Novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett. Cheating again, but the complete Hammett novels were a Christmas present one year. Hammett’s work, especially Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, got me back into reading mysteries, and are a major influence on my own writing.
• The Survival of Freedom, edited by Jerry Pournelle. I read this not long after Restoring the American Dream. Pournelle got laughed at a lot in the mid and late 80’s for his militaristic SF anthologies, like There Will Be War, but The Survival of Freedom is a shockingly strong anthology. It contains classic stories by William Tenn, Larry Niven, and Harlan Ellison (“‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” was the first Ellison story I consciously read.), essays on libertarianian and anarcho- libertarianian philosophy by people like David Friedman, and even some great poetry. (This was also the first place I ever ran into Robinson Jeffers: “The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean” is still one of my favorite poems.)
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, by Oliver Sacks. At the time I read this, I was very interested in artificial intelligence, and had this idea that we could understand and develop machine cognition by understanding how the human mind worked, and especially how it failed. That didn’t exactly pan out, but the work of Oliver Sacks started me on an amateur interest in neurology that continues to this day.
• The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. Donald Norman is a personal hero of mine (as is Dr. Sacks). This is the book that got me started thinking seriously about human interface design. Oddly enough, Norman’s work (especially the essay “Coffee Cups in the Cockpit“) was also one of the things that started me thinking about leadership.
• The How and Why Wonder Book of Guns. As a little kid, I loved the How and Why Wonder Books, and this was probably my favorite of the lot. I owe my fondness for firearms at least partially to this (and partially to growing up around guns).
• The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. When I was a little kid, I also hated fiction. I remember my elementary school teachers laughing at my comment that “Fiction is gross.” But much of the fiction targeted to people of my age at that time was “gross”, for values of “gross” that include “boring and condescending” (I didn’t know the word “condescending” at the time): it wasn’t until after I became an adult that fiction for kids and young adults began the great movement in the direction of dealing with the real world. The Day of the Jackal was the first fiction book I remember reading that had that feeling of “making it seem real like”. (I was also unfamiliar with the word “verisimilitude”.) Forsyth and Arthur “Airport” Hailey were pretty much my entire fiction diet for longer than I care to remember.

Honorable mentions: Edward Tufte, especially The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which taught me that (in the immortal words of the great Lester Freamon) “all the pieces matter”. Wambaugh’s The Onion Field, which I’ve mentioned in passing before, and will probably come back to later. I’ve deliberately avoided mentioning the Bible and other religious texts, as I feel this violates the spirit (if not the letter) of Cowan’s meme. And Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984.

Edited to add: And, dammit, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. How could I forget that?