The Hungry Detective

I have only re-read one book before, THE GREAT GATSBY. Which is strange because I have also listened to the audio book on a cross-country drive with Mrs. Hungry Detective when we moved to California. Anyway, I am just about half way through on my re-read THE DEVIL IN THE BLUE DRESS.  It should not have come as a great surprise to me just how assured the prose is. The spartan directness of Walter Mosely's writing is so, so good. There is very little fat in those first 128 pages. Even, Mr. Mosely's asides about Eazy's life, and sidetracks about the other characters are brief and pointed. What I didn't recall was the depth and darkness of the racism that Mr. Mosley details. I remember the racist cops, but otherwise I remember the other white characters being more benignly dismissive of Easy, treating him more as second class citizens. Of course that is its own kind of racism, but as a 17-18 year old at the time I did not see it for what that was. Those opening chapters are...

10 years ago I ranked all of the books written by Dennis Lehane. It was a fun post. Some people hate lists and ranking. Those people are cowards and nobody likes them. My ranking for Mr. Lehane then was as follows. 8. PRAYERS FOR RAIN, 7. SACRED, 6. SHUTTER ISLAND, 5. A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR, 4. THE GIVEN DAY, 3. MYSTIC RIVER, 2. DARKNESS TAKE MY HAND, 1. GONE BABY GONE. Since then he has written depressingly few books for this reader's taste... MOONLIGHT MILE (2010). LIVE BY NIGHT (2012). THE DROP (2015). WORLD GONE BY (2015). SINCE WE FELL (2017). I am updating the ranking to include these 5 books. I should note that I did not re-read these books for this list. 13. MOONLIGHT MILE (2010) After a decade in hibernation Kenzie-Gennaro were back. I was too excited for this book. I believe I was in the room when Mr. Lehane first announced that he had written or was writing a new K+G book. Reading it was crushingly disappointing. No verve, no brio. Every page reeked of his disinterest in...

30 years ago I wandered into a Walden Books. It was in the Janesville Mall, in (not surprisingly) Janesville Wisconsin. I bought two books or rather my Dad bought me two books. It is a strange occurrence because my parents didn't buy books. My Dad was and still, is an occasional reader. Historical novels about Colonial America and Native Americans... "I read a couple pages and I fall asleep..." My mom read a lot in fact, but she got them from the library until e-readers came around.  As a child, I liked books as long as they were about baseball and World Records. My sister and I would get what amounted to YA fiction from the library. Encyclopedia Brown was huge even if I thought he was an insufferable dick. Memorably my sister and I read THE ADVENTURES OF THE BLACK HAND GANG. We liked the book because at the end of each chapter there was a picture where you had to spot the 'anomaly'. It was fun. Later in life, as I met and married my wife I discovered that I ...