David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas. Random, 2004.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past. (Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” 1.1-3)

In my beginning is my end…
In my end is my beginning. (Eliot, “East Coker,” 1.1, 5.38)

Cloud Atlas is another one of those books I have wanted to read. I can honestly say that I have never read anything quite like it. It is genre-bending, clever, and entertaining. Parts may not be especially easy to read, but it is worth sticking it out.

The title comes from the name of a musical composition by one of the characters in the novel, the Cloud Atlas Sextet. Unlike, say Infinite Jest, however, the composition does not play a very big part in the overall tale. Still the title does suggest the transience of things. Clouds are always changing their shapes and locations; it would be futile indeed to try to map them out in a book the way Rand McNally maps out countries and continents in an atlas.

The story’s organization is interesting and significant. The book is made up of six separate and vaguely related stories. Each story or novella is from a different time period and presents a different style. They are presented in chronological order and then conclude in reverse order.

The first story which begins and ends the book is “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing.” This reads like Robinson Crusoe in style and like Melville’s nonfiction in content. It mentions Typee. It begins on Chatham Island, a small island off the coast of New Zealand where Ewing’s ship has landed. He observed the conquest and basic eradication of the indigenous people on the island by the Maori, the first settlers of New Zealand proper: in other words, colonizing by those who would themselves be colonized. Plus ça change…

Ewing sets sail and spends some time on one of the smaller Society Islands (Tahiti is the largest in that archipelago). The episode which ends the book has him observe things there and then move on to their final destination, Hawaii. The story is set around 1859-1860. It is very typical of the kind of writing and travelogue from that time period.

The second and penultimate story is entitled “Letters from Zedelghem.” This is set in the 1920s and is epistolary in nature. It is a series of letters written by a young Englishman Frobisher from Belgium to his friend in England, Sixsmith. Frobisher is a musician and composer who has been hired by the elderly composer Vyvyan Ayrs as an amanuensis and helper. Ayrs is English but now lives in Belgium.

The plot of this section has echoes of novels from the time period. When I began reading it, I thought of a comment by a literary critic in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: “Brideshead Regurgitated.” Think of English writers from this period like Maugham or Woolf. Frobisher gets taken advantage of, but he also exploits others as he makes his way through the highbrow music world and the Ayrs family’s drama. While in Belgium, he works on his Cloud Atlas Sextet.

Ayrs owns an extensive library which includes the manuscript of Adam Ewing’s journal. Frobisher reads it with fascination, but is frustrated because it only contains the first half of the voyage, ending where the first part of Cloud Atlas ends. It is no spoiler to say that later he locates the second half and is able to finish reading the travelogue—which is, of course, the last part or “chapter” of Cloud Atlas.

The next section carries the ironic title “Half-Lives.” It is a mystery-thriller set in the California of 1975-1976. Ford is president and Carter is campaigning. Our main character is a young investigative reporter Luisa Rey. She is looking into the corruption and potential safety issues involving the building of nuclear power plant on the California coast.

The elderly and respected nuclear scientist Sixsmith (yes, Frobisher’s buddy fifty years later) fears the planned construction will not be safe enough. He suddenly “commits suicide,” but Rey and others suspect murder. Rey herself gets on somebody’s hit list. Thugs seem to be everywhere. We also learn that Rey likes chamber music and is a fan of Frobisher’s Cloud Atlas Sextet.

The dangers Rey experiences and the attempt to expose the corruption and murders connected with the power plant make up the plot. The title could be considered ironic because, of course, the term half-lives refers to radioactive elements but like the other stories, it is told in halves, after the first part of the Zedelghem letters and before the second part.

“The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” follows. This is contemporary, that is, early twenty-first century. Cavendish makes a living as a London vanity publisher who suddenly has a bestseller, something unexpected in his line of work. Without going into too much detail, he finds himself swamped with book proposals and manuscripts of writers who are not looking for a self-published approach. Before he can sort things out, he is committed to a home for the elderly near Hull.

One manuscript he has received is the story of Luisa Rey. Again, he has just read the first half when he is committed. The second half of his story is how he manages to escape. This story has lots of irony and does typify the style and plot of a number of contemporary stories.

The last two stories are set in the future. The first of the two, “An Orison of Somni-451” describes a post-apocalyptic world which is a cross between 1984 and Brave New World. Much of the world is uninhabitable because of a nuclear holocaust. The Juche government of North Korea rules much of the Orient. The government is called the Unanimity—in other words, everyone is to believe and think the same way.

Many or most of the people are clones, bred in flasks for different types of work, not unlike the alphas through epsilons of Brave New World. One of the clones is Somni-451, in other words, the 451st iteration of a “person” named Somni. A little like Winston Smith, Somni-451 behaves as an independent thinker rather than a “unanimous” type. However, she is able to overcome her clone-servant status. As she learns about the society around her, we get a pessimistic view of a post-apocalyptic Dystopia. This section tells me why the book as a whole is sometimes considered science fiction.

Her story is told with some distinctive words and spellings, perhaps echoing A Clockwork Orange. All movies are called disneys, for example. One disney she has enjoyed is about Timothy Cavendish. Again, there is not much to explicitly connect the disparate tales, but there is a small connection.

The last story is the one in the middle. “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Everythin’ After” is the only one written in one part since it is the last chronologically. It is set some time after the story of Somni-451 because Somni is referred to a number of times as some kind of goddess or wise “Abbess.” Instead of a diary, novel, or film, it seems Somni’s story had been told by word of mouth, or as scholars would say, via oral tradition. One of the Somnis (whether it was #451 is unclear) apparently came—or escaped—to live on the Big Island of Hawaii where the story is set.

The story may be most challenging to read because it is told in a modified Hawaiian Pidgin. Hawaii is not part of the Asian dystopia, but people from Asia do some trading with Hawaii. Much of the story focuses on Meronym, an Asian and probable clone descendant who comes to live for a year on the Big Island to learn the customs and to promote trade.

Hawaii has become like a pre-civilized tribal island. Our narrator belongs to a tribe in the north of the island. They get attacked and some are killed by the tribe or gang from Kona on the west of the island. While there are traditions and some trade, the overall effect is one of lawlessness, perhaps reminiscent of something by Cormac McCarthy. Still, our narrator and his friends and family try to survive and make a living. If too much conformity brings order and repression with it as in the Juche Unanimty of the future Asia, anarchy and tribalism can be just as oppressive though in a different way.

After the story of Sloosha’s Crossing, Cloud Atlas unwinds in the opposite direction from which it came together. We read then about what happens to Somni-451 and the discoveries she makes about the Asian Brave New World. We learn what happens Cavendish, then what Luisa Rey does. Finally, we get a resolution of sorts to Frobisher and his music. Among other things, Frobisher discovers the second part of Ewing’s diary which completes Mitchell’s novel.

Many novels these days will have different narrators for different chapters. While that technique goes back at least to Castle Rackrent and Wuthering Heights, the approach has become popular in recent years. Mitchell takes that and turns it into something else: Part travelogue, part family drama, part technothriller, part man against the world, then a science-fiction dystopia, and finally an anarchic tale told in a patois.

After reading about a third of the book, I was not sure what was going on in the work as a whole. At the end, I found it satisfying. Cloud Atlas is clever and fascinating, yet somehow it manages to hang together. There are slight threads connecting the stories, but overall it is an examination of human nature from a variety of perspectives and conflicts. Sonmi-451 learns that even no conflict is a conflict. The first and last “chapters” deliberately mention Melville. When I finished Cloud Atlas, I could not help but think of the final words of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener:

Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!

Or as Shakespeare wrote and Huxley echoed:

O brave new world,
That has such people in it! (Tmp. 5.1.69-70)

David Rosenfelt. Dog Day Afternoon. Minotaur, 2024.

Dog Day Afternoon by David Rosenfelt (not Patrick Mann) is the most recent of the Andy Carpenter legal mysteries. Fans of these books understand they will be getting an original, clever, and exciting tale. As is typical, the title and cover are a bit misleading, though a dog is very peripherally involved.

Carpenter is a semi-retired lawyer who supports and helps out at a dog shelter. So does his friend and sometime co-worker Marcus. Marcus has a friend who is in big trouble. Someone has entered a very well-known personal injury law firm and shot six people to death. Although the shooter was masked, one of the survivors recognizes him as Nick, a young “gopher” at the firm who had not come to work that day.

Nick has a very unusual story. He says that on that day he was mysteriously rendered unconscious outside his apartment, and when he came to, he was chained inside some kind of warehouse. He was there for a few days and then released on a highway median. He had a bag over his head in the car so he could not see where he had come from or where he was going. Whenever his two captors appeared to him, they were wearing masks.

Meanwhile, his face was all over the news. By the time they release him, a major manhunt has begun. Marcus and Andy convince him that he has to turn himself in. He insists he is innocent, but he was identified. Not only that, but a pistol was found near his apartment that matched the ballistics of the fatal bullets, and the pistol has his fingerprints.

To the district attorney, it looks like an open and shut case. Andy only takes the case because of Marcus’s insistence. Once again, Andy has to put together a team to defend Nick and see if (1) Nick is telling the truth and (2), if so, what really happened.

Included in the team are his wife who is a policewoman, a friend who is a computer expert, and Marcus. Marcus is a veteran who, shall we say, is very good at hand-to-hand combat.

The story really grabbed me this time, and I found it hard to put down. The crime was very cleverly planned, so the team that solves the mystery had to be even more clever.

In it we discover some people whom the law firm helped out, but who seemed to have been paid less than what they were told they would get—yet they did not complain about being short-changed. Though the story is set in New Jersey, the land of The Sopranos, there appears to be a connection with a criminal organization out of Chicago.

It seems as though there may have been two people at the firm who were specifically targeted by the killer, one of the partners who specialized in malpractice cases, and an insurance executive who happened to be meeting with that partner. No one seems to know what they were planning to discuss, but the partner had sent out an email that he did not want anyone to leave work early that day because he would have an important announcement.

Slowly, maybe too slowly, what actually happened that day becomes clearer. In the meantime there are a couple of more murders of people who may have had connections to the crime. Andy and his friends may be in danger themselves. The mystery becomes a thriller, and an exciting one at that. Very clever, a bit complicated, but also something we can imagine. Since most of the tale is told in the first person, we know that Andy is still alive as he is telling the story, but there are some close calls…

William Faulkner. The Portable Faulkner. 1946; Edited by Malcolm Cowley, Viking, 1963.

The Portable Faulkner belongs to the well-known series of “Portable” anthologies by Viking Press. Readers may recognize the editor Malcolm Cowley as a well-known critic in his own right. Anyone who is studying Faulkner seriously should read his introduction and various commentaries in this book.

There are a total of eighteen selections in this book. All relate in some way to Yoknapatawpha County or the Mississippi Delta which is the setting of most of Faulkner’s tales. They are arranged historically—not by when the stories were written but by when the stories take place.

The first story, “A Justice,” then, is set in 1820 and describes in some detail the early settlement of Faulkner’s county by the Compson family. In it we meet the Native Americans who lived there before the European settlers and African slaves came. One of the important recurring characters is Sam Fathers.

The last story, “Delta Autumn” is set around 1940. The main character is Isaac “Ike” McCaslin, who in 1940 is about eighty years old. We first read about him when he is around ten in The Bear, a short novel that also appears in this collection.

The Bear has been published in three different versions. The one in this collection is the longest and the one Faulkner preferred. It does have an effective stream of consciousness narrative, but its density may make the reader miss some of the main ideas. The shorter version is more focused and ends with Ike’s father talking to him about the Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” That powerful ending gets a buried in the longer version—though Faulkner uses italics to try to set it off—but the longer version is still worth reading.

The other novel-length story (some might say novella) is Old Man. It is a somewhat wild story set in the 1927 Mississippi River flood. Historically, much of the Mississippi Delta (about a quarter of the state) was flooded. In our story we have a convict from the notorious Parchman Farm penal colony who, when the prison farm is flooded, escapes in a skiff. One of the wardens instructs him to rescue a woman and a man in another place. Much of the story is about the adventures the convict and the woman, who turns out to be pregnant. The ending may be making a statement about life in an institution, whether a prison or some other place.

Although there are many interesting characters in these stories, the main character is really the American South. We have strong-willed characters, rugged farmers making something out of nothing, people conscious of manners and propriety, those prejudiced against Indians and blacks, swindlers, carpetbaggers, former Confederate soldiers, slaves and ex-slaves, Native Americans, those who fit in, and those who do not. But they all reflect the character of those from the South.

F. Scott Fitzgerald called irony the Holy Ghost of the twentieth century. If that is the case, then Faulkner is one of the most inspired writers. Occasionally, the irony is funny. There is a certain amount of humor in stories like “Spotted Horses” and “Death Drag.” With “Spotted Horses” we are reminded that before there were used car salesmen, there were horse traders. “Death Drag” is an almost silly story set in the 1920s when a small airplane lands in the county.

Even some of the more serious stories contain strangely humorous images. In “A Justice” we are to imagine a grounded steamboat towed on land over a dozen miles so an early settler could have a bigger house on his “plantation.”

One especially striking tale is the fairly well-known “A Rose for Emily.” It is the most gothic story in the collection and could be compared to other tales by Southerners Poe or O’Connor.

My favorite story in the collection is probably my favorite Faulkner story of the ones I have read. It ends his collection Go Down Moses and it ends this collection as being the most recent chronologically as noted above. “Delta Autumn” ties the Faulkner mythos and major themes together. The boy in The Bear, Ike McCaslin is now an old man. He has to travel much farther to find wilderness for his traditional November hunt. Others come with him including younger men representing the current generation of Edmonds and Legates. There are observations about the wilderness, speculations about the purposes of God, and powerful reflections on race relations. It is a gem. It helps to know the background of the McCaslin and Edmonds families, and the black descendants of the Beauchamps and Tomie’s Terrell, but if this were the only story Faulkner wrote, he would be remembered for it.

The introduction and chapter headings by Malcolm Cowley are well worth reading. Cowley knew most of the Lost Generation writers and personally worked with Faulkner putting this collection together. He shows a lot of understanding and some very acute observations. He notes, for example, that the title Light in August has nothing to do with illumination. A pregnant woman was said to be “light” after she delivered her baby. In other words, it refers to Lena Grove and her due date.

I would like to end the review with what Cowley wrote about “Delta Autumn” in this book:

Old Ike McCaslin…is the most admirable of Faulkner’s characters in his life as a whole and in his relations to the Negroes. Through Sam Fathers, his master in woodlore, he had also become the spiritual heir of the Chickasaws; and therefore it is right that he should give the final judgment on the Yoknapatawpha story from the beginning. “No wonder,” he thinks on his last trip into the wilderness, “the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.” (652)

As another famous Southerner, Pogo, so profoundly put it, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Helen MacDonald. Vesper Flights. Grove Press, 2020.

I had read good things about the writing of Helen MacDonald. I was happy to receive a copy of Vesper Flights as a serendipitous gift. I can see why her writing has received such positive accolades.

Vesper Flights is a collection of essays. Most of them are about nature in some way. One somewhat humorous essay describes how the author as an idealistic recent college graduate got a job with a falcon captive breeding program. It was hard work and everyone who worked there drove one another crazy, but she lasted four years and learned a lot about hawks—and ostriches and cattle. The experience also reintroduced her to the real world after her time in the ivory tower.

A theme in many of the essays is how people relate to nature, especially to animals. She clearly has a love for birds, but she also emphasizes that if we attempt to anthropomorphize them or try to explain their behavior in human terms, we miss things. For example, traditionally, displays of male birds were seen as a means to attract females. Yet in many cases we have realized that they have more to do with setting up territories than mating.

A few different essays remind us that animals sense things differently. Migrating birds, for example, can sense the earth’s magnetic field to help guide them. They also seem to have an almost instinctive memory of constellations and certain landmarks. We understand how bats use echolocation, but it would be impossible for humans to blindfold themselves and then squeak or holler and expect to learn what objects surround us. These essays often get us to reconsider our perceptions.

MacDonald’s control of language and use of metaphor and simile is exquisite. She is a true prose stylist. For example, as she observes a fledgling swift hesitantly taking a flight for the first time, she writes that it reminds her of an insect emerging from a pupa. There is a struggle, there is flight, and in both cases they have been transformed.

The title essay “Vesper Flights” may be the best in the collection. Here she also describes the flights of swifts at night. It seems that near dusk and dawn they fly low but as the night advances, they go higher and higher into the atmosphere to chase the insects at the higher levels. And then they come down around midnight and rise up again until daybreak approaches. Even here discussing birds, she makes connections with her own childhood fascination with the different levels or “spheres” in the earth’s atmosphere.

One of the most moving essays has nothing to do with nature. It is the story of a young man in Iran who converted to Christianity. He literally was escaping from the back door of his home while the security forces were at the front door. “Through many dangers, toils, and snares” he eventually made it to England. Even the relative safety of that land he has to be alert for gangs connected to Shi’ite Islamists.

I confess that there might be a few duds. One essay, for example, is a kind of speculation on extraterrestrial life in the universe, but there are only two or three of those. Overall, this is a feast for anyone interested in nature or who wants to read good writing. I can easily imagine a few of these ending up in anthologies of rhetoric or literary nonfiction. I cannot help but think of the lines from Joni Mitchell’s “Clouds”:

Something’s lost and something’s gained by living every day.

Sometimes even loss brings growth and understanding.

Donna Andrews. Between a Flock and a Hard Place. Minotaur, 2024.

We have reviewed a few Donna Andrews books on this blog. Between a Flock and a Hard Place is her latest. As with her other books, the plot involves serious crimes but with a touch of humor.

In this novel, narrator Meg Langslow is back home in Caerphilly, Virginia. A television crew is coming to town because the Smetkamp family has just won a network’s home remodeling competition. They are going to have their 1930s Sears house gutted and remodeled. Most people in town are excited for them, but there has been some opposition. Meg gets involved because she is a special assistant to the mayor.

Her ornithologist grandfather also gets involved because as the renovation team arrives in town, a flock of about 90 feral turkeys set up camp on the property that is to be repaired. Turkeys are aggressive and create quite a disturbance. These are not wild turkeys but domestic turkeys that have gone wild. They have no fear of people. They also tend to stay in one place, so people begin to immediately suspect that someone planted them there overnight.

Things get a lot more complicated. It turns out that the crew from Marvelous Mansions home makeover show knows little of construction. They remove a couple of load bearing walls, so the town has to declare the house unsafe for habitation. Meg offers the Smetkamps a guest bedroom at her house until the work is done. Mr. Smetkamp takes her up on the offer, but not Mrs. Smetkamp.

Across the street from the renovation lives Meg’s friend Gloria who rents out a couple of rooms to people. She rents out her attic space to a hard-core computer geek named Chris. She seldom sees Chris go in and out; he seems to stay in the attic most of the time. She has given up trying to carry on a conversation with him, and his first month there her electric bill rose $800 from all the computer equipment running. He did take care of that, but it does show us what a big operation he has in her attic. Although he seldom goes out, people have seen him watching the turkey antics from his upstairs window through binoculars.

At first the mystery is simply to find out who was behind the turkey transplant and how they did it. There also is the legal problem with the television crew and the building codes. And the mayor still has to deal with Charles Jasper, who used to live in the house and is now leading the opposition against the remodeling.

Those who read Lark! The Herald Angels Sing learned about the corrupt government in neighboring Clay County. There seems to a suspicious connection with Clay County here as well. And then Mr. Blomqvist, the leader of construction team suddenly leaves town—no one knows where he went, and none of the television or construction workers have been paid.

About halfway through Mrs. Smetkamp is murdered. It is clearly a murder since no one would stick a carpenter’s rasp through her neck accidentally or by suicide. The plot truly thickens.

As is true with many such cozy mysteries, no one likes Mrs. Smetkamp, including, it seems, Mr. Smetkamp.

The mysteries do take some time and persistence and luck to unravel. There are indeed several mysteries: the origin of the turkeys, where Blomqvist went, what Chris the computer guy is up to, and, of course, who killed Mrs. Smetkamp. The people involved are not necessarily related to each other or conspiring in any way, but they all come to a satisfying conclusion—though the plot goes in different directions, just as things usually do real life.

Spencer Quinn. A Farewell to Arfs. Forge, 2024.

Was it possible that anyone could throw out leftover bacon? How could bacon be left over? Yet that is what it smelled like. (122)

Yes, that is the typical canine perspective we have gotten used to and enjoyed from Spencer Quinn’s Chet and Bernie mysteries. A Farewell to Arfs continues that entertaining style.

Bernie Little of the Little Detective Agency investigates a case that he may not really have a client for. In A Farewell to Arfs, his elderly neighbor, Mr. Parsons, gets a desperate phone call from his only son asking for two thousand dollars, just for the weekend. Parsons does this only to find out that someone has cleaned out his bank account of all its money, just under fifty thousand dollars. Bernie accompanies Parsons to the bank and offers to help him. One problem is that his son Billy has disappeared.

The second problem is that we know that Billy has not been the most respectful son. He has spent time in prison; however, from all accounts he has cleaned up his life. He now helps run a kind of twelve-step program for ex-convicts. Everyone who knows him now says that the old Billy has truly changed.

So what really happened? Mr. Parsons insists that it was his son talking to him on the phone, and also that it could not have been him that took his money. Still, his dog Iggy was barking just about the whole time he was on the phone.

As Chet and Bernie begin investigating, things get complicated quickly. They end up interviewing people from all kinds of backgrounds, including clients of Billy, Billy’s girlfriend, some brilliant computer geeks, professional gamblers, and contacts in the police department.

Bernie continues to have some girlfriend problems himself. He has actually proposed to longtime girlfriend and policewoman Weatherly. Almost as soon as he accepts, the relationship goes south. A certain thug has been harassing her. When Bernie visits the man and tells him to lay off, the harasser files a complaint. The gung-ho new district attorney tends toward the “defund the police” side in her politics and threatens to recall Bernie’s detective license.

As always Chet observes a few things that Bernie does not, but since he cannot communicate with words, Bernie has to make his own discovery later.

We note that this story has echoes of a Quinn standalone novel Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge in which a retired woman is scammed by criminal phone call. Indeed, A Farewell to Arfs even mentions in passing an article about a woman who tracked down the scammers to Romania and went there looking for them. In this case, the outcome is quite different. I compared that novel to something by Alexander McCall Smith. No one would confuse this story with something by him. It is a lot less mellow.

P.S. In my last review of a Chet and Bernie book, I complained that I guessed the “perp” from Hollywood stereotyping. Thankfully, this story did not do that.

Arthur Conan Doyle. His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes. 1917; Project Gutenberg, 2024.

I confess that I thought I had read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories. After all, I had read and reviewed a collection that claimed to be the complete works. It turns out that the collection had a few stories missing. The recently reviewed O Jerusalem mentioned “The Devil’s Foot,” a story I could not remember at all. It turns out that the collection I reviewed omitted all but one story in this collection, which was the last collection of “new” Holmes stories that Doyle published.

The single story that was in the collection perhaps explains why the compiler missed the other stories. “His Last Bow” was also the name of the last story in this book. Apparently, the editor of the “complete” stories thought that that story was the only story in the collection. Anyway, now, I believe, my own reading of the Doyle Holmes stories is complete.

From his personal correspondence, Doyle indicated that he was not happy with many of the Holmes stories he wrote after Holmes returned from being presumed dead. Most of these stories are interesting and even clever, but for the most part they are not as entrancing as many of the earlier stores. Still, they would likely be published even today in a magazine that specialized in detective stories.

“The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge” has echoes of “The Red-Headed League” and may be the most interesting of these tales. A Mr. Eccles tells how a country neighbor named Garcia who recently moved to Wisteria Lodge has befriended him and turned up murdered the day after he spent the evening with him. There is a mysterious letter that makes it sound like Garcia was on his way to rendezvous with a woman, yet the only woman with any connection to the tale is a housemaid considerably older than Garcia.

“The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” tells how Holmes managed to root out a spy from the Continent. This case is somewhat interesting because Sherlock gets hired by his brother Mycroft Holmes who, as readers may know, has some kind of high-level unspecified government job. This tale progresses well via a combination of dialogue and classified advertisements.

This story is also alluded to in O Jerusalem, though not mentioned by name. Set in 1895 it is supposedly about secret naval engineering plans for a submarines. In O Jerusalem, Holmes says that the British never acted on the submarine plans, and the Germans had underwater superiority throughout the World War in spite of the vessel the British had designed—they never put it into production.

We could call “The Devil’s Foot” a medical mystery. Holmes and Watson are vacationing in Cornwall when two brothers and a sister, all single adults, expire mysteriously while playing cards one evening. They are found sitting at the table with their card hands still ready to be played. This story involves some subterfuge on Holmes’ part. (For what it is worth, this story was mentioned in O Jerusalem—for a plot-related reason—and I could not find the story in that “complete” Holmes collection I owned. That led me to discover this book I am now reviewing.)

“The Adventure of the Red Circle” also has echoes of the “Red-Headed League” as well as The Valley of Fear. A Mrs. Warren engages Holmes because she has a mysterious lodger. He has rented a room in her lodging house, but he never seems to come out of his room. She takes his meals to his room on a tray and leaves the tray by the door. Someone is murdered in her neighborhood, and she thinks there is a connection.

This tale is probably the most mysterious of the ones in this collection. Its only weakness is that the conclusion is a long narrative explaining the mystery. If there had been an effective way to illustrate the same through the action rather than a multi-page explanation, the story could have been a lot stronger.

“The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax” takes Watson through Europe trying to track down Lady Carfax who seems to have disappeared (in case you could not tell from the title). This is interesting because Holmes dispatches Watson to collect clues on his own by tracking down her last known addresses. Holmes disappears from much of this story, too. Watson is even more than usually self-effacing in this story. Still, together the two men do solve the mystery.

In “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” Holmes uses disguises effectively as he does in a couple of the other whodunits in this collection. Some stories depend not only on disguise but on Holmes’ acting ability. This is one of those. We admire Sherlock even if the plot is somewhat predictable.

“His Last Bow” was and is meant to be the last of the Holmes stories. Here we learn that Holmes indeed has retired to the countryside. He is in the process of having his Practical Handbook of Bee Culture published. He seems content but finds himself caught up in a German spy ring. Yes, this begins with “the most terrible August in the history of the world,” i.e. August 1914 when World War I begins. This is likely the most complicated of the plots in this collection. Readers will still find it intriguing, though Holmes seems a little too pat in this one.

All of these stories have an interesting feature. They all involve one way or another and international cast—whether it is foreign criminals, foreign spies, or foreign settings. I believe the earliest of these stories came out in 1909, and some clearly were written with the Great War in mind. We know that Doyle was interested in international affairs: The Crime of the Congo, his critique of the Belgian administration of the Congo, also came out in 1909. Holmes fans should not miss this, including those of us who thought we had read them all.

Laurie R. King. O Jerusalem. Bantam, 2000.

I went to the public universal library card catalog known as Amazon.com to see how many books were titled O Jerusalem. I found ten on the first three pages of my search. The title comes from the Bible:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you,
If I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy! (Psalm 137:5-6)

The O Jerusalem by Collins and LaPierre was one of the most exciting books I ever read. I was visiting a friend who owned a copy. I started reading it before going to bed. I ended up spending most of the night to finish it in one sitting.

King’s O Jerusalem is very different, but still an intriguing story. King has made a cottage industry by writing sequels to the Sherlock Holmes stories. The narrator of the tales taking Watson’s place is Mary Russell, a precocious teenager. In O Jerusalem she has just turned nineteen. Holmes recognizes her talent and is training her to become a detective like him, so he takes her along on certain cases that bring him out of retirement.

In this case, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft enlists his help for some government work in Palestine. The year is 1919, after the end of World War I, the defeat of the Turks, and the beginning of the British Mandate there. According to the novel, Holmes had spent some time in Palestine in the 1880s and learned Arabic. Russell is Jewish and speaks Hebrew, at least at the bat mitzvah level. Holmes and Russell, then embark to the Holy Land where their adventures begin.

Much of the tale is a kind of argosy through Israel. They visit numerous locations from Beersheva to Jericho and from Jaffa to Haifa. Much of the time they are accompanied by two Arabs who work for the British, Ali and Mahmoud. They encounter a few murders, and at some point each one of the four rescues at least one of the other members of the group.

However, the biggest mystery seems to be what Holmes and Russell are doing there. They discover some interesting facts and interesting people, but no one really knows what the actual purpose of their mission to Palestine is. About halfway through the novel Holmes and Russell meet General Allenby—a person whom Russell greatly admires. Finally they get a sense of what they are looking for.

It seems that there is a Turkish-rooted underground that wants to destabilize the British occupation and League of Nations mandate. Holmes deduces from what he observes that the plans of this underground include something big—think September 11 big.

Holmes begins to get close as he visits an ancient Orthodox monastery. He identifies one of the key operators in the underground group as someone thought to be dead. It is also pretty clear that someone in the British administration or army is informing the underground of what the British are doing. At one point they kidnap Holmes, and they clearly knew where his car was headed.

Some of the various parts come together, and the tale that begins with rambles around the Holy Land ends with a true tension. The opposition works in the underground not merely figuratively but literally. Holmes and Russell have a claustrophobic adventure among the various tunnels under the city of Jerusalem.

There are some allusions to other Holmes stories. One is mentioned explicitly as they come across a ten year old issue of the Strand magazine. Another time Holmes disguises himself with the pseudonym of William Gillette. I had to laugh since William Gillette was an actor who made a living a hundred years ago playing Sherlock Holmes on stage. (A few chapters later, this allusion is explained for the uninitiated.)

Even though the story takes a while to get off the ground, the many fascinating, historical, and Biblical places they visit give us an idea of what the Holy Land was like, and in many ways, what it is still like.

One quibble with the storytelling: Our first-person narrator occasionally uses words or terms that would not have been in use in 1919. One might be able to excuse some of the wording by saying that Russell, born in 1900, is looking back in the 1980s or 1990s and has picked up modern terms in the meantime. However, when a character speaks of the Armenian genocide, that is a clear anachronism since the term genocide was not coined until World War II.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Translated by Reg Keeland, Vantage, 2009.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was one of those books I felt I had to read. It was very popular and got great reviews. I wanted to see what it was all about.

It is a riveting story. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist has just been found guilty of libel for an article he wrote about a prominent Swedish entrepreneur, one Hans Wennerström. The year is 2002. Just as he was resigning from being publisher of his magazine, the Millennium, he was offered an interesting assignment.

Another prominent businessman, now largely retired, Henrik Vanger will pay him a handsome sum if he works for him for a year. He has two things he would like him to do: (1) Look into the disappearance and apparent murder of his grandniece Harriet Vanger in 1966, and (2) Interview relatives and examine family records to write a history of the Vanger family, five generations of industrial success and wealth.

Henrik lives a day’s trip north of Stockholm on an island off a small coastal town. He has an estate there, and a few relatives live in the adjacent village. Mikael will live in a cottage on the estate. He looks over the files and photos Henrik has collected and begins his own queries.

The day seventeen-year-old Harriet disappeared was a holiday in town. It was also a time when the whole extended family (over fifty people then) got together. The last photos of Harriet were of her watching the holiday parade. To complicate things, there was a traffic accident on the bridge going to Herr Vanger’s island. There were many photos of both the parade and the accident.

Of course, the events happened 46 years before, but Blomkvist is able to track down many of the people in the photos, and he notices a few things other people have missed. So part of the story describes some fascinating sleuthing.

Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, would have been called a Goth in the United States. She indeed has a few tattoos, dresses in black with short hair dyed black, and shows various piercings. She keeps to herself and few people know much about her. She does contract work for a private detective who is always impressed with the thoroughness of her background checks.

That is how Blomkvist finds out about Salander. Henrik Vanger had the detective agency do a background check on Blomkvist before he hired him. When Blomkvist sees the report, he is impressed with how thorough it is. No one, he thinks, even his ex-wife, knows all this. So he hires Lisbeth Salander to help him in his research to find out what happened to Harriet Vanger.

The story of how they learn what happened to Harriet leads to the main plot. We also learn about Lisbeth’s life. Though twenty-four, she is still a ward of the state. Her new legal guardian is, to put it mildly, an unscrupulous lawyer. Lisbeth has learned not to trust anyone in authority. She seems to have her own way of dealing with crimes and injustices. The story is ingenious and clever as well.

Larsson clearly believes in Chekhov’s gun. I was able to correctly guess (at least broadly) what happened to Harriet about a third of the way through the story. A little more than halfway, I was able to deduce that another crime had happened. Neither one of those correct guesses detracted from the story at all. Larsson has the reader in his grip.

The story is not for everyone. There is a lot of sex. Some it is criminal, some is consensual, but one begins to get the idea that Swedes are obsessed with it. There are also a lot of Vangers. I had to refer to the family tree printed near the front of the book several times.

It turns out there are a lot of crimes. Harriet’s disappearance is just the tip of the iceberg. Much of the tale, then, is psychological. We learn something about why Lisbeth is the way she is and, maybe, get some insight into people who tend to Aspergers. We also get into the minds of some pretty crafty and maybe creepy criminals. If The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is your cup of tea, you will drink every drop.

The original Swedish title is very different: Men Who Hate Women. (Blomkvist is not one of them.) At one point Salander makes an interesting observation. She is doing a background check not related to the Vangers and learns that the man she is checking made a girlfriend get an abortion. She mutters, “One more man who hates women” (547). In the United States abortion is often seen as favoring women, but here Salander has it right. The chauvinist pigs want to avoid responsibility. The women are stuck. Some things are universal.