Dark Side of the Morgue by Raymond Benson (prog-rock mystery)

Oddly enough, I got this book because I'm excited about an upcoming book. Raymond Benson is one of six authors tapped to write for the newest venture from Hard Case Crime founder Charles Ardai: pulp adventure novels in the old style featuring a new character, Gabriel Hunt.

I've been highly anticipating this series since it was first announced because the other five authors (Ardai himself, David J. Schow, Christa Faust, James Reasoner, and Nicholas Kaufmann) have proven themselves to be quite skilled at fast-paced narratives. Benson is the only one I'd not read before, so when I saw that his second Spike Berenger novel, Dark Side of the Morgue was available, I leapt.

Part of the attraction came from the concept of a rock and roll P.I. Spike Berenger used to be in a progressive rock band called The Fixers, but they didn't last long (though they still have some devoted fans). Now Berenger and his partner Rudy Bishop run Rockin' Security, a service for the music industry. Berenger also has his private investigator's license because it sometimes helps with business. Suzanne Prescott, a former Goth devotee now into Transcendental Meditation (T.M.) and martial arts, is his investigation partner.

A blonde wearing sunglasses and a big, floppy hat has been killing members of Chicago's prog-rock scene (known locally as "Chicagoprog"), and Zach Garriott (guitarist and vocalist for the seminal bands North Side and Red Skyez, but gone solo since 1980) wants Berenger's help finding the suspect — he's on the list. The trouble is, the main suspect is Sylvia Favero, and she's been dead since 1970.

Berenger, a little bored with his current caseload involving Iggy Pop's dogs and Debbie Harry's landlord, decides to take the case, partly because he's friends and former colleagues with many of the participants. Here, Benson's knowledge of the prog-rock industry serves him well (he wrote The Pocket Guide to Jethro Tull and is himself a composer and songwriter). After a long exposition introducing character relationships and band histories, Benson's feel for the high points brings authenticity to the story and never feels just like some guy trying to write a rock novel. (A Chicagoprog "family tree" at the front of the book is great for reference, and the table of contents is actually a "track listing" of song titles.)

Dark Side of the Morgue is funny, disturbing, and filled with deep knowledge of the music industry and abnormal psychology, all combined to make a really terrific read that I wanted to pick up whenever I had a free moment. It is assembled from P.I./thriller tropes we've seen many times before, but Benson has put them together in a way that feels fresh and original, and results in the reader responding to them as if they were brand new (a skill no doubt useful in his upcoming Gabriel Hunt novel, Hunt through Napoleon's Web).

Also speaking well of his skill at adventure, Benson is the author of six recent original novels featuring Ian Fleming's James Bond — only the fourth author chosen to do so — in addition to the first two Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell novels (written under the pseudonym "David Michaels") and other thrillers like Sweetie's Diamonds and the first Berenger "hit," A Hard Day's Death.

My only real complaint is that protagonist Spike Berenger is the least interesting person in the book. But Berenger's transparency allows the supporting characters to truly shine (for example, in how Prescott's T.M. skills actually figure into the plot instead of being just an interesting character quirk). Dark Side of the Morgue is an intelligent mystery with a twist as layer after layer of the story is slowly revealed to the reader's joyous satisfaction.

Benson obviously spent a great deal of time developing his musicians' relationships and histories, and the hard work pays off in an engrossing read that is as much for rock fans as it is for fans of conventional P.I. novels. Honestly, Dark Side of the Morgue is so good that if it's not nominated for both the Edgar and the Shamus awards, somebody's just not paying attention.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

This review is a little different than most of those I've written because I haven't actually read the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary all the way through, and yet this is not a negative tirade on how ridiculously awful the first few pages were (see Code of the Mountain Man, X-Rated Bloodsuckers, and When One Man Dies for examples of those). In fact, I couldn't be happier with it. I hope I never finish it — that there will always be something new to discover about our fabulous (though often painfully flawed) English language.

Though I wouldn't turn down a full Oxford English Dictionary if someone gave it to me and I had the free shelf space for all twenty volumes (both of which are equally unlikely), I actually believe the two-volume shorter version is more useful. The editors have pared the contents of the behemoth down to just those words in regular use any time after 1700 a.d.

Added to this are the entire contents of the works of pre-1700 authors William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Edmund Spenser, as well as the full text of the King James Version of the Bible. This is basically every word the average person is likely to come across, provided you don't often indulge in pre-18th century reading material (with Geoffrey Chaucer and Beowulf being notable omissions).

And of course the Oxford editors are perhaps best known for their historical perspective, an aspect that is also contained in the shorter version of their dictionary. Most words have chronological listings and a complete etymology with origins where they're known and literary examples, something often missing in American dictionaries but utterly vital to language enthusiasts (like those of us who take the time to write rave reviews of dictionaries).

If you're in the market for a dictionary and just aren't satisfied with yet another variation on the Webster's/American Heritage clan (and you're willing to spend the extra money), the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is an investment in your future. (Mine was a gift from my wife — that's definitely one way to know you've married the right woman.)

Terminal City (miniseries) created and written by Angus Fraser (starring Maria del Mar, Gil Bellows, Katie Boland)

Terminal City (2005 miniseries). Episodes directed variously by Rachel Talalay (episodes 1, 2, 7, and 8), Lynne Stopkewich (episodes 3 and 4), Kari Skogland (episodes 5 and 6), and Stephen Surjik (episodes 9 and 10).

Katie Sampson has a lump in her breast. This is going to change her life in more than the expected way. On leaving the hospital following a biopsy, Katie is interviewed by the waning medical reality show Post Op!, and her winning personality and openness reinvigorate viewers. Quickly, the producers retool the show to focus on her as both host and subject, and the newly titled No Show is a huge success.

Much like the fictional No Show, the success of Terminal City lies in Katie Sampson — or, rather, in the actress who plays her, Maria del Mar. Del Mar wins over viewers with her own engaging charm, and she carries this Canadian miniseries (that saw its American premiere on the Sundance Channel) on her shoulders.

Or on her chest, as the case may be. For in many ways, it is not just Katie but also Katie's breasts that are the focus of Terminal City. Creator Angus Fraser (who wrote all ten episodes) and the four directors never let us forget what's at stake, and Del Mar's own toplessness is showcased in different ways. I can't tell if this is meant to be titillating, but that it will undoubtedly be to many viewers is used by the filmmakers to perhaps make us think again, to treat Katie's breasts as just another body part.

However, this is television, a visual medium, and one wonders if lung, bone, or any other cancer would have been as appealing to Fraser as one whose subject can so easily cause such a combination of reactions in the viewer. Also, a good deal of dark humor is present, leading many to compare the miniseries to another dealing with death, Six Feet Under.

In a series of interviews with the cast and crew — the only extra on this three-DVD set — Fraser expounds on his inspiration for the Terminal City (his mother's own cancer scare), and he very specifically wants to make us think. Perhaps the intent is partially to keep us uncomfortable in much the same way that Katie's husband Ari (Gil Bellows) seems to spend the majority of his screen time.

In any case, it is a good thing that Katie's story is so compelling because the supporting plotlines involving the other Sampson family members are simply not equal to it, and often seem like filler. The attempt of daughter Sarah (Katie Boland) to seduce her teacher (Nakul Kupur) is completely predictable, though the young Boland has a certain screen presence. The affair older son Nicky (Adam Butcher) has with a married European woman (Stellina Rusich) seems merely an excuse to feature a different pair of breasts now and then.

The problem Ari's father Saul (Paul Soles) has dealing with his past comes across as an attempt to shock and yet appear additionally "thought-provoking" in addressing Holocaust themes. And younger son Eli (Nico McEown) and his crisis of faith are merely annoying. Someone from Katie's past (inspired by seeing her on TV) also suddenly decides to appear, bringing up memories and at least one genuine surprise (though it's obvious long before it's actually "revealed").

In all, it's just really hard to believe that every member of the Sampson family would be going through these major life events all at the same time. They have hardly any time left to support their dying matriarch. And if this weren't enough, the crew of No Show have their own problems to deal with, especially producer Jane Richards (Jane McLean).

The ten 40-minute episodes are certainly watchable (especially if you don't mind fast-forwarding through the slower parts), and the finale is original and moving, if a little hard for a jaded realist to accept at moments. (It's also only effective once you've seen everything leading up to it, but it's still the best of the set and quite a way to go out.) There are several jabs at the reality-TV phenomenon (an easy target, but still), but the primary reason to watch Terminal City is to discover a potential new star in the fine acting of Maria del Mar, and to watch her grasp this opportunity by the hair and steer it where she wants it to go. The actress gets to embody the full range of emotion, and she never once rings a false note. I definitely hope this leads to further substantial roles for her in the future.

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold (unabridged audio book read by Joan Allen)

When Helen Knightly killed her mother Clair, the first thing she felt was relief — the horror didn't come till later. But in the next 24 hours, she will make her ex-husband an accomplice after the fact, have sex with her best friend's son ("'Fuck me,' I said, and hoped that no one's God was watching"), and realize she may just have killed the only person stranger (crazier?) than herself.

Author Alice Sebold has made a career of chronicling the aftermaths of violent acts; first with Lucky, her memoir of her own rape. Next came her debut novel, The Lovely Bones, the story of the rape and murder of a young girl told by the girl after her death.

The Lovely Bones was a sleeper phenomenon — the kind of book (like The DaVinci Code) that becomes popular because people actually read and liked it and recommended it to others, not because some ephemeral influential force says they should — and is the reason Sebold's name is well known today.

With a combination of dark crime tropes and a stream of consciousness narrative style, Sebold's sophomore novel The Almost Moon is a literary noir that is true enough to each to appeal to both audiences. Fans of Gillian Flynn's recent Sharp Objects should especially flock to it, as the pair have thematic similarities though their approaches are distinct. However, it's entirely possible that fans of Sebold's earlier work will be turned off by Helen's completely unlikeable nature.


The narrative of The Almost Moon is filled with Helen's reactive behavior combined with the character's insights into dysfunctional families ("When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes or bone density?") as she flashes back to her memories of her childhood and after.

Sebold skips back and forth between past and present with an abandon that expresses confidence in the intelligence of the reader (and it is hard to keep up sometimes). She is nonjudgmental about Helen's mostly shocking actions and winds a thread of dark humor throughout, offering some laugh-out-loud moments among the horrific elements.

Academy Award® nominee Joan Allen has a cool, detached delivery that matches the character beautifully. Many times I even forgot The Almost Moon was being read by someone other than Helen herself, which I think is the best compliment I can give. A good audiobook reader is like a good editor — if they're doing their job properly, both should be invisible.

The strength of Sebold's literary voice suggests that she is not finished stretching herself. I only hope that she also expands the boundaries of the readers that picked up The Almost Moon expecting something more like The Lovely Bones and stayed for the great writing.

Friday's Forgotten Book: A Man Called Brazos by T.V. Olsen

For more of Friday's Forgotten Books, visit Pattinase.

"Brazos — that is a strange name. Isn't that a river?"
"Yes, ma'am, in Texas. My father settled by it, and I was named after it."

In Twentieth Century Western Writers, author Joe R. Lansdale says of T. V. Olsen, "He should be better known outside the immediate Western field, and ... I can not help but feel that with the right press, Olsen could command the position currently enjoyed by the late Louis L'Amour as America's most popular and foremost author of traditional Western novels."

The author of 40 novels under his own name and pseudonyms such as Joshua Stark and Christopher Storm, Theodore Victor "T.V." Olsen won a Spur Award for The Golden Chance, and two of his novels were made into films: The Stalking Moon with Gregory Peck and Soldier Blue with Candice Bergen. Olsen has lately become known for his often-sympathetic treatment of the American Indian in his fiction (see Bob Herzberg's recent Savages and Saints), though he considered his Jefferson Davis novel There Was a Season to be his most important work.

This week's "forgotten book," A Man Called Brazos, was originally published by Fawcett under their famous Gold Medal banner. It showcases Olsen's skill at the traditional Western tale. Based on my experience with it (and Lansdale's high praise), I'll definitely be looking for more of Olsen's work in the future.

Brazos Kane's parents were killed when he was ten by a raid of Choctaw Indians, and he was sent to live with his uncle, whom he left one night after a few too many beatings. Afterward, Brazos lived like an urchin in a trail town for a year until he picked the wrong drunk to roll — Pop Melaven. Pop offered Brazos a choice: work for him, or get his ass beaten right there. ("He'd rubbed his brass-studded belt, and Brazos was two seconds making up his mind.")

Brazos pulled his own weight and then some (as Pop liked his whiskey) in their partnership and was never treated as less than an equal for ten years. Then, after selling their largest herd of horses yet, Pop took the $12,000 into town and was promptly robbed and murdered. ("It was easy to anticipate a brutal and bitter end for the man, and yet when it came it had dropped the bottom out of Brazos' life.")

From that point on, Brazos's only goal in life was to find the man who'd killed his friend and mentor. Following up on a vague description of the culprit, Brazos zooms in on John Lambeth as his prime suspect. He hires himself out with Lambeth's crew on the Nugget ranch during the middle of a range war with the neighboring Montalvos.

The revenge story alone would be enough for some authors, but Olsen fills out the majority of A Man Called Brazos with the bad blood between the two ranches. Olsen also adds the spice of a femme fatale of sorts in the character of Lila Mae Lambeth, John's wife — a Southern belle with vast ambitions and just enough Lady Macbeth in her to make them happen.

All she needs is a cowpoke dimwitted enough to follow along while thinking he's in charge. The cast of characters is a little hard to keep straight at times, but the tension of the war, the suspense of Brazos's quest, and Lila Mae's machinations (while insightfully illustrating the difficulty of getting a man to see the truth about his wife) combine to make A Man Called Brazos a gripping read with a fine, fast-paced finale that more than satisfies the justice requirement.

To Wake the Dead by Richard Laymon (unabridged audio book read by Gene Engene)

First off, there's something bothering me that I have to get out of the way right off the bat. Amara, the main subject of To Wake the Dead, looks nothing at all like the figure on the cover. Laymon's Amara is a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, and she looks just like one, with beef-jerky skin, shriveled breasts (a fact that every character seems to notice), and no eyes in her empty sockets. So if you're looking for a story that features the vital (Asian?) vampiress depicted on the cover illustration, I'm afraid you're going to have to keep looking.

Now that subject has been covered, let's move on....

After the death of horror author Richard Laymon in 2001, his international fan base mourned the loss of a writer who seemed to still be improving his craft. (He won his first Bram Stoker Award posthumously for The Traveling Vampire Show, widely considered his best work.) Then three complete, previously unpublished manuscripts were found among his files. One of these was published each year from 2003 to 2005. They were, in order, To Wake the Dead (UK title: Amara), The Lake (same in the UK), and Into the Fire (UK title: The Glory Bus).

To Wake the Dead is the most ambitious novel by Laymon I've read to date. In the other novels of his I've encountered, the author has tended to focus on a relatively small cast of characters that we get to really know before he kills most of them.

In To Wake the Dead, however, there are several stories running parallel to each other, each with its own cast of characters, giving the novel a similar feel to a Robert Altman film. The focus is on Amara, an Egyptian mummy brought to a Los Angeles museum, but along the way, we meet a vast array of other individuals, each with their own struggles:

Virgina, Ed, and Marco, a trio of caged captives, are held as sex slaves by a mysterious kidnapper who only moves around in the dark. April, a young blind woman, alone in her remote mansion, receives an unexpected, but not unwelcome, visitor. Susan, the woman in charge of the mummy exhibit, has to deal with unexplained murders surrounding her new acquisition. Her cop boyfriend, Tag, has his own problem in the form of Mabel, a hygienically challenged woman who wants Tag to be her lover. Teenaged Grace, along with her boyfriend and sister, makes her way to Hollywood to be a star. And Imad, a local womanizer, proves to be the source of some surprising information.

Laymon somehow manages to make all these varied plotlines skillfully come together at just the right moments. He doesn't make the obvious choices, and manages to breathe some new life into an idea whose time came and went long ago (and that includes the laughable series of recent "mummy" movies). To Wake the Dead has the same flaws of most of Richard Laymon's bibliography, namely an overabundance of breast references, a reliance on implausible plot contrivances based on the characters' stupid decisions, and villains that are really more disgusting than they need to be. But, at the same time, it also has that wonderful Laymon charm that keeps you going in spite of these drawbacks.

Reader Gene Engene (who has a vocal range very similar to his colleague Michael Taylor) has a facility with accents that more than makes up for his limited number of female voices; his males fare considerably better, and it seems the more despicable the character, the more fun he has with stretching his talent. But, other than the characters not sounding the same as they do in your head, there is just one main difference between reading and listening: the speed. Visual reading speed is variable, but with a CD, you can't listen any faster or slower than the pace of Engene's voice, which leaves space for dramatic pauses and the like.

In the case of this book, that means the squeamish will be unable to skim the nastier elements of Laymon's story (and they're not always where or when you think they'll be), and you can't peek ahead to see what's about to happen — which results in at least one oh my god!–level surprise. The only drawback is that it makes To Wake the Dead seem just a bit longer than it would otherwise. Sometimes, when you just want the story to get going so you can find out what's going to happen next, that is frustrating. But more often, Engene's pacing leaves room for an appreciation for Laymon's inimitable way with words.