A Taste For Death – P. D. James, 1986 ★½

Too Many Notes

Reading this brought to mind a line in that great Mozart movie Amadeus, when Wolfgang asks the Habsburg court why their emperor doesn’t like his latest piece. One courtier answers: “Too many notes.”

It’s a comic scene, and on the face of it ridiculous, particularly directed at Mozart. But I kind of knew what that hapless lackey meant. There can be too much of a good thing, at least as I see it, a surplus of invention, particularly when it comes to writing mysteries.

Thus came my wonderment and annoyance about this novel. P. D. James’ ability to create involving, multi-dimensional characters and settings ultimately gets in the way of what a mystery should be about.

Final Cut – Steven Bach, 1985 ★★★½

Living and Dying with the Ayatollah

If it is true that what one loves in life are the things that fade, at least fading is a process that doesn’t happen overnight.

But it literally did just that for the golden age of maverick film directors, barreling through Manhattan on the night of Wednesday, November 19, 1980, bearing a title very appropriate for the many career deaths it would reap, Heaven’s Gate.

Steven Bach, who greenlit this overpriced art film for United Artists, was out of work by 1981. In his memoir about the experience, he explains how good life was, how fast it went, and the razor-thin line between genius and crazy he discovered in Heaven’s Gate director Michael Cimino, known on-set as the Ayatollah and in the corridors of UA by less friendly terms.

When Eight Bells Toll – Alistair MacLean, 1966 ★★½

Requiem for an Airport Thriller

If Alistair MacLean isn’t the godfather of that once-popular genre known as “airport fiction,” then he is at least a capo in high esteem.

For decades, people – mostly male business travelers – picked up MacLean novels with a newspaper and a pack of cigarettes in preparation for a long flight or train ride. These books featured garish covers where lean, muscular men fired machine guns in front of impressive explosions. For a pre-teen like me, they offered a glance at the world where I liked to imagine adults really lived.

As a thriller writer, MacLean was not subtle. But he was effective.

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote, 1966 ★★★★½

Tru Grit

Famous for mainstreaming two genres, true crime and New Journalism, In Cold Blood is perhaps even more remarkable for how it turned a squalid, non-mysterious quadruple murder into a rare book-driven sensation that remains as powerful over fifty years on.

Truman Capote called his best-known work a “non-fiction novel,” which sets off all sorts of warning bells but sums up its approach: an immersive mix of multiple points-of-view, shifting narratives, even verb tenses.

The more I read it, the more gutted I feel for the victims and the rest of humanity. Then I want to read it all over again.

Twice-Told Tales – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837 & 1842 ★★★

The Iron Tissue of Allegory

Allegory in stories is unpopular for many reasons.

They are moralistic. They present cardboard characters and a restricted point-of-view. Critical aspects of fiction-writing like tone and voice are lost when it all boils down to imparting a lesson.

So in noting that Twice-Told Tales presents Nathaniel Hawthorne as master of allegory, I realize this is like praising with faint damns.

Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? – Jimmy Breslin, 1963 ★½

Who’s On First? Who Cares!

Here’s a thought: A book has to be about something. Find an interesting topic and really delve into it, examine it from different angles, give it a beginning and an ending and build a thesis around it.

Legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin found a way around that and wrote what is hailed by many as one of the best baseball books ever. I don’t even think it’s the best book about the 1962 New York Mets.

Richard II – William Shakespeare, c. 1595 ★★★★

Bad King Makes Bad Choices

Kicking off the second and more famous of William Shakespeare’s “Henriad” history plays, The Tragedy Of Richard II makes the most sense when read after the three plays which chronologically follow it: Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V.

That’s because while this play is concerned with the same basic question, how to be a good king, it does by presenting a type of worst-case scenario the kings of the later plays take pains to avoid.

That is after the first of these Henrys caused the problem leading to that scenario. Or did he? Welcome to the conundrum that is Richard II.