The Grouchy Editor

by Glenn Frankel

It’s funny how you can sail through life thinking that you are reasonably well-versed in popular culture, yet be oblivious to certain landmark events (or movies).  I lived for 20 years in North Texas, but had never heard of Cynthia Ann Parker, a legendary frontier girl who was abducted by Comanches near Dallas in 1836, and whose kidnapping became the basis for John Ford’s classic western, The Searchers – a movie I have not seen.

Frankel’s book is an ambitious attempt to link Parker’s story, Ford’s movie, and America’s tortured racial past, but it’s only somewhat successful.  Searchers suffers from the same disease that afflicts so many other historical books:  the author’s obligation to include genealogical minutiae of interest primarily to other historians.  Yes, I’m intrigued by Cynthia Ann’s tragic life – but please don’t bore me with details about her uncles and aunts.

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What, me worry?  Yes, unfortunately.  This coffee-table sampling of 60 years of MAD magazine disappoints on a number of fronts.  Many of the selected articles are incomplete; the type is often impossible to read without a magnifying glass; and, last but not least, there is not enough Don Martin.  There can never be enough Don Martin.

Another problem, probably one that could not be helped, is that much of MAD’s humor is topical – and topical humor tends to lose bite over time.  Marlon Brando jokes from the 1950s don’t quite cut it in 2013. 

It might have been a better idea to do what Dark Horse Comics did with old issues of Creepy and Eerie, and publish a series of books containing entire issues of MAD; if they had done so, I would have been happy to buy editions representing, say, 1964 to 1970.   But I don’t want to be too harsh on “the usual gang of idiots,” because there are a lot of funny bits in this 256-page collection, and nostalgia seekers will surely find some nuggets.

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 by Richard Lloyd Parry

When it comes to “true-crime” material, journalist Parry had a lot to work with for this book:  a mysterious, cold-blooded rapist/killer who used charm and loads of cash to lure victims; an intriguing culture clash between East and West, as the British family of victim Lucie Blackman descends on the Land of the Rising Sun to seek justice for Lucie, who was eventually found – in pieces – buried in a seashore cave; and the lurid setting of much of the book:  the bizarre night world of Roppongi, a Tokyo red-light district where Lucie worked as a “hostess.”

What Parry delivers is a workmanlike recounting of the hunt for Lucie, followed by the trial of middle-aged Joji Obara, who comes off as a combination of Jay Gatsby and Hannibal Lecter,  certainly the strangest “date rapist” in Japanese history.  But Parry is handicapped by never landing an interview with the enigmatic Obara, which turns People into a poignant, but not particularly compelling, story of the luckless Blackmans.

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 by Gillian Flynn

Did smirking Nick Dunne kill his gorgeous, albeit pampered, young wife?  As I read for clues, the plot twists kept coming but I persevered … persevered … persevered – stop.  Alas, about two thirds into the story, Gone Girl lost me.

Flynn’s mindbender is peppered with clever asides about marriage, co-dependence, and the perils of marrying a sociopath, but it’s also decidedly lacking in sympathetic characters; if her people aren’t flat-out crazy, then they’re something conceivably worse: relentlessly cynical.  But we all love a good villain, and the cat-and-mouse shenanigans between the less-than-perfect Dunnes are often delicious (imagine Nick and Nora Charles with homicidal streaks).  The problem here is plot:  There are simply too many “yeah, right” moments.

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by Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer

“In all of my deployments, we routinely saw this phenomenon.  The higher up the food chain the targeted individual was, the bigger a pussy he was.  The leaders were less willing to fight.  It is always the young and impressionable who strap on the explosives and blow themselves up.”  Those words are from “Mark Owen,” co-author of No Easy Day and one of the Navy SEALs responsible for killing Osama bin Laden.

The book is a compelling look at the day-to-day life of an elite SEAL, and I’m sure it’s a great recruitment tool for the military.  However … if only Owen had left it at that.  Owen (a pseudonym), who claims that he and his fellow SEALs don’t much concern themselves with politics, does little to hide his disdain for Barack Obama, and presumably liberals in general – yet has nothing to say about the “young and impressionable” Americans who died in the bogus war begun by Obama’s predecessor.

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by Charles Dickens

They say that people don’t read books anymore, and they say that the few who do, don’t read long books.  Especially long, old books.  So I suppose there isn’t much of an audience these days for novels like David Copperfield, Dickens’s 729-page coming-of-age classic, and that’s a shame, because books might not get any better than this.

Unlike Tolstoy (the endless battle scenes in War and Peace), and Hugo (an interminable description of the Paris sewer system in Les Miserables), Dickens avoids bloat in Copperfield.  It’s not “perfect” – Dickens’s affection for some characters borders on sappiness, and a few of his plot coincidences stretch credulity – but in the two categories that matter most, strong characters and story, I’m not sure that it can be topped.

Wait, I take that back.  There was a little book called Great Expectations ….

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 by Jo Nesbo

Caustic critic Joe Queenan once wrote, “There is no earthly reason a mystery or thriller needs to be more than 175 pages.  After a mystery writer passes the 200-page mark, it’s all ballast.”  I suppose there are exceptions to Queenan’s rule, but not in this case.  The Redbreast, Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbo’s 500-plus-page marathon of serial killings and romance in frigid Oslo, is mildly interesting.  The characters are … mildly interesting.  The sole aspect of this plodding novel to avoid a been-there-done-that sensation is its background theme about Norway’s tortured history during WWII, a topic about which I knew little.

In 2004, Norwegian book clubs declared The Redbreast the “Best Norwegian Crime Novel Ever Written.”  Across the border in Sweden, I’m guessing that Henning Mankell suppressed a chuckle.

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 by Joe Queenan

Humorist Queenan, now in his 60s, says he occasionally visits the suburban Philadelphia library that he patronized in his youth, and where a librarian from that era, one Edith Prout, still toils among the shelves.  One of Queenan’s books is stocked on those shelves.  “Edith herself isn’t all that taken with my work,” Queenan tells us.  “Too cynical, she says.  Too snarky.”

I think Edith might have a point.  Although Queenan’s homage to the book, in which he writes lovingly not just of his collection’s content but also of each title’s importance as a symbol of treasured moments in his life, is often funny, sometimes poignant, and frequently biting,  I think One for the Books is probably best read in bits and pieces, rather than all at once – too much snarkiness can be hazardous to your health.

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                                                          by Cyril Hare                                                                         

A gathering of hoity-toity Brits is cut off from the outside world by a snowstorm, trapped in a decrepit manor house as a clever killer picks them off, one by one. Thank goodness an eccentric little “foreigner” is on hand to save the day.  If that sounds a lot like Agatha Christie, well, that’s because it is.  But if you find this kind of piffle irresistible – and I confess that I do – you can do much worse than An English Murder.

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 by Sarah Caudwell

Caudwell’s characters inhabit an odd-but-arresting literary universe.  Time-warp a clique of Edwardian aristocrats to 1980s London, engage them with casual sex and lots of snarky-yet-sophisticated banter, and you have a good picture of Caudwell’s protagonists, a quartet of young barristers who decipher a murder mystery under the tutelage of “Hilary,” their middle-aged mentor.  In real life, you’d likely want to deliver a swift kick in the pants to these self-satisfied twentysomethings, whose every comment is cloaked in irony, sarcasm, or snobbery.  But in Caudwell’s clever hands, they’re amusing, rather than annoying.

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