excerpt
The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T
By Steve Coll, 1986
"I'll tell you one thing. This case is going to be a severed limbs case. We're going to have severed limbs, AT&T limbs, on the table dripping blood. That's the way this case is going to be settled. We're not going to settle this thing with injunctive relief."
"You can't expect me to go back to my board of directors and tell them something like that," Levy answered.
"That's exactly what I want you to do," said Anderson. "I want you to go back and tell them that the next time they send somebody down here to talk about settling, I want to see severed limbs on the table. In fact, if you want to come in the door, you've got to throw a couple of severed limbs in ahead of you, or you don't even get in the door."
A Murder of Quality
By John le Carre, 1962
This is John boy's second slash at the whole writing game, and it's as frayed around the edges as can be imagined, which makes for double trouble as the book was a bitch for the guy to write. (Collapsing marraige, a stressful day job with the Secret Service, take your pick, le Carre was crawling from crisis to crisis.) An attempt to stretch the George Smiley character into the role of Angela Lansbury, the basic plot of Murder comes down like this: the wife of a teacher at a high class (British High Class, so think Really Snobby) boarding school ends up dead, and Smiley heads to the land of the Dead Poets Society to track the killer through the magic of having tea with the various suspects before unleashing a "theory" that he seems to have concocted from the desperation of wanting to leave town as quickly as possible. This book shot to be a mystery and a satire of the upper classes, but it succeeds at neither, which is why le Carre never tried to write a book like this again. Still, if you're desperate to find out what Smiley was doing in the five minutes between being sloppy awesome (in Call for the Dead) and watching other people be really fucking awesome (in Spy Who Came In From the Cold), this is the place where you would do that.
excerpt
The Sour Lemon Score
By Richard Stark/Donald Westlake, 1969
"I have a personal thing I've got to get settled with him."
Pearson gave a sour grin. "You too? Georgy does get around." He was facing the house, with Parker facing the opposite way, and now Pearson looked at the house and said, "I don't know."
"You don't know what?"
"That's why Grace called, huh? To get Uhl's address for you."
"Yes."
"So now you're coming to me direct," Pearson said, and then he said, "Uh," and a small black thing appeared in the middle of his forehead, making him look cross-eyed. His head started to go back, the black thing went deep, burrowing, turning red at the edges, and the sound of the shot finally caught up with it, a flat, echoless clap in the middle of the sunshine.
Parker dove off the chair.
Conversations With And About Beckett
By Mel Gussow, 1996
It's more on the "About Beckett" side than it is "with", and all the "with" stem from a series of (mostly annual) coffee dates where note-taking was frowned upon. Gussow's passion for the subject of Beckett is palpable, so even though the book has a ghoulish quality to it, (as it's never totally up front about how supportive Beckett felt towards the project, or if he really even knew abou it at all) it's still a treasure trove of information about the man. Which, honestly, it would have been simply by being longer than twenty pages. But if the question is whether anybody but a Beckett fan will get anything out of the book, the answer is pretty blatant: no, not at all. There's no real strong argument here for why his writing mattered, why it's influential, nothing like that. It's just a mildly academic version of a gossip-y love letter, from the point of view of someone who spent a healthy portion of his life trying to tell the world why they should care more about someone he believed in completely. Gussow may not have sacrificed a lot, but he did sacrifice something. In these pages, you could easily muster up an understanding as to why.
excerpt
Tokyo Year Zero
By David Peace,
Death is everywhere. Death is everywhere…
I take the scissors from her dresser. I see black lice. I take the cover off her mirror. I see brown lice. I begin to cut. I see yellow lice. I cut the longer hairs on my head. I see grey lice. I cut the longer hairs on my body. I see white lice. then I take the razor from her dresser. I see black lice. I open up the blade. I see brown lice. I dip the blade in the bowl of water by her bed. I see yellow lice. I have no soap but still I shave. I see gray lice. I shave off my hair. I see white lice. The hair on my head. I see black lice. The hair on my body. I see brown lice. Hair by hair. I see yellow lice. Every last strand. I see grey lice. In my scalp. I see white lice. In my groin. I see black lice. The skin beneath is red. I see brown lice. The skin beneath is raw-
I see yellow lice, I see grey lice, I see white lice…
The razor in my head, the blade dull now-
Death is everywhere. Death is everywhere…
Black lice. Black lice. Black lice-
Death follows us as we follow death…
Yuki is awake. Her eyes open-
But we’re already dead…
From Doon With Death
By Ruth Rendell, 1964
Reading a series of mystery books from the very beginning is a popular thing to do, especially since it's still the standard for mystery authors to rapidly pump out titles, but it isn't always going to be that rewarding. Following up on the meager le Carre results above, here's example two, Ruth Rendell's first Inspector Wexler story, Doon With Death. It's so much the standard that it seems produced via public domain, culminating with one of those "put everybody in the same room, explain everything" conclusions that feels like stale comfort food. Whether she's a good writer or not--probably, although I don't have actual experience to point towards--is a question this book can't even approach answering, although the afterword is pretty blunt about Doon's interest factor being of a purely archival variety, useful only as the opening burp of a writer's body of work. Oh yeah, the cover. It looks like that because the cops spend a lot of pages trying to find the various owners of an expensive brand of lipstick. If it's any consolation, the book takes about 13 seconds to read.
-Tucker Stone, 2010
Now that's more like it. The Quality of Murder sounds like an absolute blast and I shall be purchasing it forthwith.
Posted by: AComment | 2010.05.16 at 06:34
Yeah, I enjoyed that Beckett book quite a bit when I read it a couple of years ago, but I don't think anyone who didn't already love Beckett's work would get much from it.
Posted by: Chad Nevett | 2010.05.16 at 10:54