bloodygranuaile

In my effort to clear out some of my old Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale purchases, I followed up my reading of Dead Wake with another nonfiction book in sort-of the same time period. This one was Dean Jobb’s Empire of Deception: From Chicago to Nova Scotia - The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation.

The master swindler in question was one Leo Koretz, an affable German Jewish immigrant who had come over from Bohemia with his family as a child. His parents had worked their way into the respectable-enough stratum of Chicago’s vibrant Jewish community and were able to send Leo to high school at a time when only about 1% of the city’s youth graduated high school. Young Leo then got a job in a law firm and took night classes until he was able to become a lawyer himself. While there were plenty of job opportunities for lawyers in litigious and corrupt early-20th-century Chicago, it wasn’t quite the path to lavish riches that Leo had envisioned, so he started with the shenanigans–first siphoning money from the dead clients whose wills he was executing; then selling fake mortgages on real properties; and eventually his master swindle–selling stock in an entirely fake natural resource extraction syndicate in the Bayano Valley, Panama.

This book is split into three “acts.” Act I is the bulk of Koretz’ life, from his childhood up through the years of increasingly daring and complicated fraud. The scale and coldheartedness of Koretz’ Bayano Syndicate swindle was pretty stunning–this was a dividends-from-capital swindle, meaning you need a constant stream of new investors in order to keep the old investors in the dark about the fact that they aren’t actually invested in anything, so the scam tends to have a short lifespan. Koretz kept it going for over a decade, faking exclusivity and selling shares to his closest friends and his own family members.

Eventually, of course, even he can’t keep it going anymore. When it gets too big, he sends a bunch of investors down to Panama to check out the nonexistent company–and uses their absence to cash out all his bank accounts, send some apologetic cash gifts to his nearest and dearest, and go on the lam. Act II is his life under an assumed name as a jolly millionaire and man of letters in New York (briefly, just long enough to establish an identity) and then Nova Scotia, where he buys an old hunting lodge and turns it into a swanky woodland resort-hotel. He spends about a year scandalizing the good backwoods Nova Scotians with his big-city ways and lavish parties, until he is eventually found out via some discreet questioning between his tailor and a bunch of bank officials, and then the law comes to bring him back to Chicago.

Act III, unsurprisingly, is his trial and imprisonment in Chicago, and all the other fallout/aftermath with his friends and family. There is an odd little twist at the end, which provides an interesting end to the story, although I’m not sure I agree with the author that it constitutes “cheating justice” (I might not be the world’s most committed prison abolitionist but there’s times when I realize my assumptions are not always quite the same as other people’s assumptions about these things).

This might not have been the most riveting piece of nonfiction I’ve read lately but that’s because I’ve read a lot of nonfiction about fairly sensational events these past few months–wars and spies and gangs and whatnot–so I feel like the bar is fairly high. This is pretty comparable to a lot of those though; it’s certainly not a dud if you’re in the mood for the sort of thing it’s about. It gives a pretty good look into the politics and corruption and general scamminess of Prohibition-era Chicago and its very colorful cast of characters. I also learned a tiny little bit about Panama during this era, although it’s no substitute for reading a book actually about Panama. Overall this was a solidly entertaining episode in historical true crime, and it apparently inspired an episode of Leverage, so I’m glad I finally got around to reading it.

Last weekend was Readercon! I spent a good chunk of it sitting on the Marriott patio plugging away at the last installment of my Gentlemen Bastards reread, The Republic of Thieves.

This book came out ten years ago, which means it’s been a whole ten years since I read it, which means for like 90% of it I felt like I was reading it for the first time. I remembered it had two storylines, one “present-time” one about an election in Karthain and one flashback one about the teen Bastards joining a theater company. I completely misremembered the ending, except that it was Very Bad for our lead boyos.

Some things have changed in the past ten years that definitely affected my perception of the election-running plot. One is that I got involved in political organizing, rather than just being a very news-houndy hobbyist and telling myself that meant I was Informed, so I had a lot more understanding of what they were doing and sympathy for how much it sucks, even though I don’t do electoral organizing. Another is that I had just recently watched the San Lorenzo episode of Leverage, which was a fun compare-and-contrast (and also made me feel like Locke and Jean were barely rigging this election at all! They were just… running it dirtily!) (this is a bad standard, isn’t it).

Anyway, I don’t have a lot of deep analysis here, not even about the politics of Karthain (I have one joke about Joe Manchin I will refrain from actually making, though). Mostly this book just continues to be a load of fun. It’s got murder and scams and fuckery and a pair of star-crossed lovers who can’t have a normal conversation to save their lives. It has Jean, basically the only character who doesn’t exist to be maximally infuriating to everybody at all times. This is part of the fun.

I have absolutely no idea how Scott Lynch is going to get our boys out of all the trouble they’re in. That’s part of the fun, too.

My girlfriend and I are playing Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (or, more specifically, we’re playing the Alexandrian remix of WDH for Pathfinder 2e with bits of Blades In the Dark thrown in, or something; I’m not the GM), and in preparation for such, I had to learn about spellcasting in Pathfinder and my girlfriend had to read Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series. I realized it’d been ages since I read it and should probably also get a refresher, if only for shenanigans ideas I might be able to steal, so my spare time in the past few weeks has been largely split between heisting dragons and rereading The Lies of Locke Lamora.

The Lies of Locke Lamora is 700 pages long, a fact which escaped me when I read it for the first time in ebook but which was much harder to ignore in hard copy, and it doesn’t have a dull moment in all 700. It’s one of those violent, nasty, sweary, boozy books that honestly feels a little more tired these days than it did 10 years ago given the post-Game of Thrones hangover many of us fantasy fans are still suffering, but as far as “sweary books that make sure you can smell the beer farts off the page” go, nothing else in it is tired. This is a fast-paced series of increasingly multilayered capers, cons, and conspiracies that isn’t afraid to put its extremely-domain-specific-competence-porn antihero through a series of undignified wringers, from being kicked in the balls to being nearly drowned in a barrel of horse piss. (At one point he is decked in the face “courtesy of Locke Lamora” while disguised as somebody else.)

Locke is a really fun protagonist; he’s not really a bad guy although obviously he’s not a good one either–an orphaned child with a nearly preternatural gift for thieving raised among criminals in a city where what counts as law-abiding isn’t much better, it’s easy to take Locke’s side as he lies his face off to everybody except his little found family gang in the Elderglass basement of the Temple of Perelandro. This little gang, called the Gentlemen Bastards, exists basically to violate the Secret Peace, a nasty little pact between the nobility and organized crime in which the city’s criminals are allowed to crime as much as they want only on the working and middle classes, and essentially avoid prosecution as long as they leave alone the nobility and the police force–you know, the group with all the fucking money in the first place, and the gang of thugs that’s supposed to be keeping the law. The Gentlemen Bastards take great pride in stealing off the people they’re not supposed to steal from, not out of any altruistic Robin Hood-esque reasons but just because the nobility is where the wealth is, and it’s the greater challenge than sneaking into the second stories of small shopkeepers’ houses. Anyway, the ruling class is a gang and the cops are also a gang.

Locke and his best buddy Jean cause heaps of trouble and get in even more, crossing paths with a variety of upsettingly powerful people who do wind up really exposing the degree to which, despite their excellent con artist skills, the Gentleman Bastards really are just little guys. Can they con their way out of having every powerful faction in Camorr deeply enraged at them? Even if so, at what cost? The answers make exciting reading but admittedly do also make me worried for the fate of my own little rogue thief because I’m not nearly as smart as Scott Lynch and I’ve got to make decisions more or less in real-time, which is hard. (I saw Scott Lynch do a panel about that once and boy is he correct.)

Have I mentioned I love heist fantasy? If not, please know that I love heist fantasy, and this is very good heist fantasy.

For 2021 I decided to do another yearlong read, the way I did with A People’s History of the United States in 2019, but because we were going into Plague Year #2 I decided that instead of reading any kind of edifying leftist theory or history I was instead going to dedicate myself to the legendary bloated Gothic monstrosity that has been sitting on my shelf for so many years: James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney, the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood. My copy clocks in at about 800 pages, but they are not 800 normal novel pages; they are 800 telephone-book-sized pages full of 8-point font.

I decided to read this in 12 76-page chunks over the course of the year not just because it is monstrously long, but also because I knew going into it that it was monstrously bad. Varney is a masterpiece of mid-19th-century penny dreadful serial fiction, meaning that by most conventional measures of good literature, it is not a masterpiece at all. It was published one chapter at a time on a weekly basis for nearly two years, so even reading stretched out over the course of one still means I am experiencing it in a much more contracted time frame than its original readers, and frankly even reading 70 pages at a time felt kind of like binge-watching one of those old-fashioned episodic sitcoms that wasn’t really meant to be watched sequentially. These things went to print with no editing, no consistency checks, and nearly no planning; the title character has at least four distinct vampire origin stories that all take place in different time periods and operate according to different and mutually exclusive mythologies. The style is stilted and overwritten and contains many scenes full of the kind of hemming and hawing that I recognize in first drafts as “starting to write the scene before you’ve figured out what the people in it need to be doing” writing, like “three pages of people getting settled into their chairs going ‘yes, sit down, I’ve got to talk to you about a thing, can I get you some tea’ before talking about the thing” scenes that usually get cut somewhere around draft two, for works where you have a draft two. Plotlines are picked up and abandoned with the carelessness of the Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer subplot in The Room. Actually there are quite a lot of things in the book that have me wanting to draw comparisons to The Room, if that gives you an idea of how hilariously bad this book is.

The plot (ish) that takes up most of the book, like 70% of it or so, is the Bannerworth saga, which the 1970’s TV show Dark Shadows was largely based off of (if you’ve never seen Dark Shadows… well, it’s not actually very good either!). The Bannerworths are a very typical mid-19th century protagonist sort of family, being genteelly impoverished, a thoroughly boring middle-class family that can barely stay ahead of the debts of a scapegrace ancestor and has been reduced to letting all their servants go and even thinking about letting out their ancestral home and renting a smaller one (this is the second lowest level of Reduced Circumstances a character in 19th-century fiction can be reduced to; the level immediately below it is “freezing to death in the street”). The Bannerworth family, having lost its patriarch some years ago, now consists of a well-meaning mother (basically the only nice mother figure in the story; I suspect Rymer of mommy issues), two impeccably chivalrous young adult brothers, and an impeccably sweet and beautiful young adult/late teenage daughter named Flora. In their immediate circle are also some friends of the family, including Flora’s also impeccably chivalrous and very boring fiance, Charles Holland, and, for comic relief, the fiance’s uncle, who is a decorated Admiral in the British Navy, and Admiral Bell’s first mate and now personal valet, Jack Pringle. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle seem to exist solely to allow Rymer to mash up bits and pieces of nautical swashbuckler into his otherwise mainly land-locked vampire tale.

No, that is not true. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle also serve the valuable function of breaking up Varney’s marriage plot schemes at the last minute, not once, but at least three times, each time with less leadup, until at the last one of these Admiral Bell just happens to be in the Church audience on the day of the wedding ceremony to recognize Varney and cause general consternation for absolutely no previously given reason at all. Honestly, even the second-to-last marriage plot had him visiting a family friend of the bridge a few pages in advance.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Varney, our fascinating villain and sometimes almost antihero, wants, over the course of the book, basically three things: the blood of young and beautiful maidens, money, and to be relieved of his cursed existence. Much of the book involves Varney pursuing plots to obtain one or, more often, both of the first two, via scheming to marry various wealthy young heiresses, or sometimes middle-class young heiresses. While the book opens with him attacking Flora Bannerworth and then embarking on a long and complicated strategy to obtain possession of Bannerworth Hall, he is eventually forced on to pursue the same tricks in a variety of inns and towns and cities around England. Later in the book he jaunts off to Italy to do just about the same thing, because you can’t really have an English Gothic novel in the 19th century without some exotic ties to Italy, or at least some racism against Italians. Eventually he returns back to England to be very melancholy and get into more scrapes involving eating lovely young maidens, escaping from mobs, incentivizing various persons to spend time in abandoned abbeys and cemeteries where they can catch terrible frights and witness things man was not meant to witness, all that lovely Gothic stuff. It all gets a bit repetitive, especially in the middle, although by the end we start getting some higher-stakes stuff, like more graphic on-page murders, and in one of the final plotlines Varney even creates a new vampire from one of the dully angelic teenage girls he attacks.

I think it is notable that while Varney is quite happy to murder people all up and down the countryside (in multiple countries) he only ever feeds by sneaking into ladies’ bedchambers and biting them while they are asleep, which certainly would be a very specific type of terrifying to Victorian readers. In several of these cases Varney is then called upon to guard the very same lady’s bedchamber for the following night, which usually goes awry quite spectacularly.

The edition of this book that I have is the “critical edition” which means it has a lot of footnotes and also some appendices. Some of the footnotes are quite interesting but others contain a lot of editorializing, including several footnotes to the tune of just “this writing is terrible.” Most of these callouts are fair but I must object strenuously to footnote 11, which is attached to the line “I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture.” I think this line is amazing and I plan to use it every time I don’t know what’s going on for the rest of my life (which is sure to be frequently, as I often don’t know what’s going on). The appendices are great, including a whole bunch of pearl-clutching editorials about the pernicious effects of penny dreadfuls on young minds, plus one wearily condescending defense of them by G.K. Chesterton, which essentially boils down to reminding everyone that there have always been stories that weren’t very good, we used to just ignore them instead of pretending they were supposed to be something they weren’t. There are also a couple other penny dreadfuls/penny bloods and excerpts therefrom, in case you hadn’t yet had your fill of murder and mayhem. But by far my favorite feature of the “critical edition” is the section breaks composed of three poorly sketched skulls. They are extremely cute and whimsical.

I really cannot in fairness recommend this book to other people unless you are really interested in terrible Gothic novels and, specifically, in the things that make terrible lowbrow fiction terrible. For good measure you’d probably have to be interested in both Gothic literature and in crappy horror movies, the kinds that I’m not even sure how to find anymore now that there aren’t video rental stores to find weird stupid shit in the back shelves of. However, if this sounds like you, and you are sure you have the time to put in to fight your way through this enormous, overwritten tome, it is certainly worth the slog, if only for Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle’s ridiculous exploits.

I downloaded the first four ebooks in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series last year when they were being given away by the publisher as a promotion for the fifth book. I had intended to read them last year as they fit my “no male romantic leads” stricture for 2020, as the viewpoint character is aroace. This is partly because they’re an android--specifically, a mass-produced security android owned by a company known only as “the company”--but given how many AI stories use “falling in love” as an indicator of emerging humanity on the part of the AIs, it was nice to be pre-assured that this was not going to happen.

Though it took longer than I had intended, I finally got around to reading the first book, All Systems Red, and got to meet Murderbot. And I gotta say, I like him; I find him very relatable. He is sarcastic and pretty awkward when it comes to dealing with humans, task-oriented but not necessarily invested in his job the way the company intends him to be, has a low tolerance for corporate bullshit and would rather watch melodramatic TV all day, and does security work. Honestly he reminds me of a lot of people I’ve met doing community safety work, sometimes.

Subversive people’s hero anarcho-android Murderbot has a tragic past, which is obviously related to why he calls himself Murderbot, but instead of wallowing, he has taken safety matters into his own hands and disabled his governor’s module, which is the bit of programming that makes him obey the company. Having thus made himself ungovernable, he mostly just does his job with the minimum of effort and engages in time theft to watch TV, which, despite media depictions, is in fact standard operating procedure for anti-state leftists of all theoretical stripes.

Anyway, the book is novella-length, so that plot is short and action-packed: Murderbot is on a contract with a surveying team on a planet; the surveying team is being sabotaged or otherwise mysteriously under attack; there is some intrigue and mystery and Cunning Plans and running around shooting at each other, and Murderbot becomes actually somewhat emotionally invested in the humans he’s protecting, because they’re all basically low-key and nice and competent at their jobs. It’s a short, fun read, and I’m glad there are a bunch more of them.

A few years ago at Christmas, my mom and my brother and I went to see a stage adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith at the A.R.T. While I remember some things about the play very clearly and others not at all--including most of the plot, and, sometimes, the title, leading me to occasionally wonder, when it was brought up, if it wasn’t a stage adaptation of Amberlough that I’d seen, since I haven’t read that either--I remember enough of the general Dickensian vibes that it has stuck in my head as being somehow a Christmas story, like A Christmas Carol, even though it is not actually a Christmas story at all. But as I think it is one and it’s December and also somebody recently reminded me that it was a novel before it was a play, I figured now was a good time to read it.

The book is about 600 pages long, which further affirms my belief that this is the sort of book to read in the winter, when you should be spending many consecutive hours curled up on the couch with a hot toddy (especially this year, when parties are out of the question). It takes place half in the slums of London, in a family-like clique of criminals based out of a house in which a woman named Mrs. Sucksby farms babies, and the other half in a run-down, destitute manor house out in the English countryside, inhabited only by a crabby old scholar of questionable childrearing abilities, his lovely and deeply bored teenage niece, and a handful of servants. In other words, it is absolute catnip for people like me, whomst love overblown 19th century British novels, especially of the “sensation novel” variety. I don’t know what books Waters cites as her particular inspirations for writing this, but for this specific reader, I felt like Fingersmith would be what you got if you put all my favorite reads from college in a jar and shook it up to make a new story, the way The BFG did with dreams. The book starts off discussing Oliver Twist and there’s certainly a similar color to the inhabitants of Lant Street; the big plot twist around Maud’s education made me immediately think of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and the mistaken identities, mysterious parentages, and locking ladies up in madhouses brings me back to Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and a whole bunch of other books I haven’t quite gotten around to reading but were discussed in the lit crit articles about female criminals and madwomen in late Victorian literature that I read junior year and only half-remember. But anyway, the Victorians were very obsessed with ladies doing crimes, and I am also very obsessed with ladies doing crimes, and if you want to learn more about the Victorian obsession with ladies doing crimes I highly recommend The Invention of Murder.

Storywise, this book is about one young lass raised in the baby farm named Sue Trinder, who is quite a clever, well-trained criminal mind in some ways but an endearing level of dumbass in some others. Sue is recruited to a scheme to go to the country and serve as a lady’s maid to a young woman who stands to inherit fifteen thousand pounds, but only when she gets married, and to help maneuver this young lady into marrying the baby farm’s resident handsome con man, Gentleman. Gentleman then plans to have the young lady committed to a madhouse, and pay Sue three thousand of the fifteen thousand pounds for her help. City girl Sue then goes out to the grim, dilapidated Briar House, and has to acclimate to what she finds to be all the weird shit that goes on there, but which is in fact only a fraction of the weird shit that goes on there. Sue doesn’t know just how weird the goings-on in the house really are because most of them concern the old man’s book collection and the secretarial work he is making his niece do for him, and Sue is illiterate.

The niece, Maud, is a bit neurotic, but probably not any more neurotic than anyone would be living the way she’s being made to live, with absolutely no normal people around to model normal behavior for her. Maud seems like a simple enough weirdo to Sue at first, but she turns out to be much more complex than Sue knows, and also much more interested in doing crimes. The parts of the book told from Maud’s point of view are, shall we say, extremely different than the exact same goings-on told from Sue’s point of view.

Complicating the intricate network of crossings and double-crossings that develop when doing crimes of the “marrying people under false pretenses to steal their money” genre, Maud and Sue also develop a romance. Though being gay and doing crimes are generally considered a well-matched pair of activities, in this case, the crimes in question put a lot of strain on their relationship. There is actually only one sex scene in the book, but it is told twice, and, as previously mentioned, it is extremely different from Maud’s perspective than from Sue’s, in ways that I cannot even begin to discuss without massive spoilers, because this is the sort of book where the plot turns completely on its head multiple times before things get resolved.

Despite being very long and, in many places, aping the sort of overdone writing style of popular Victorian novels, which a lot of people find slow, I found this book to be a very fast read (it probably helps that I’ve read enough popular Victorian novels to be used to that type of emotional overwriting); I got through the first 300 pages in one sitting, and most of the rest in a second sitting the following weekend (it was a busy week in between).

Occasionally people will talk about a book and it won't catch my interest too much because they are leaving out a key piece of information, and then when I get that key piece of information, the thing shoots up a million spots on my To Be Read list.

Such a book was Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth. A bunch of friends had discussed it, fairly positively, as being about lesbian necromancers in space, which is certainly a hook. But it took a promotional email from Tor with a link to an article titled Gideon's Guide to Getting Galactic Swole: An Epic Tale of Skele-Flex Trashbaggery for me to realize that the book is ALSO about a big obnoxious jock lady with big obnoxious biceps and an internal monologue in a register that can only be described as Extremely Online. Given that the internet doesn't exist in the necromantic space empire Gideon lives in, it's quite a feat for her to be as Extremely Online as she is.

Gideon Nav is a big dumb redheaded meathead of an orphan who lives in the Ninth House of a creepy and extremely Goth necromantic space empire. The Ninth House is the creepiest and Gothiest of all the houses, of which there are, predictably, nine. The Ninth House is basically a weird religious colony that occupies a big crack in a planet that is definitely not based on Pluto. Gideon hates living in the Ninth House's Isengardian fortress of Drearburh, and everyone in the Ninth House hates her right back, although possibly not in that order. The only other person Gideon's age in Drearburh is the Reverend Daughter of the House, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who is Gideon's opposite in every way--tiny, dark-haired, a gifted necromancer, basically not a dumbass at all, deliberately and cunningly cruel, and completely lacking in anything resembling muscle. She is, however, also a lesbian, although not nearly as easily distracted as Gideon is. Of course, they hate each other's guts.

However, due to a series of events in varying levels of deliberateness, Gideon winds up being the only person even remotely suitable to serve as Harrowhark's cavalier when she is summoned off-planet to compete to become a Lyctor, which is basically a sort of immortal knight-saint to the Undying Emperor. Necromancers absolutely must be paired with cavaliers, because they always have been, and necros and cavs ascend to Lyctorhood in pairs as well. So either they will both become immortal or neither of them will. Then most of the book takes place on the planet of the First House, which isn't really a proper House--the First House is technically the Emperor (I think?) but he's not allowed on the First House's planet, which basically exists as a big, ancient, crumbling, but much-warmer-than-Drearburh temple complex. The challengers--i.e., the necro and cav pairs from the Second through Eighth houses--basically have to hang out there with three priests and a bunch of reanimated skeleton servants until they figure out how to become Lyctors. From there, stuff starts going wrong.

One of the things I realized about a third of the way through the book that made everything ten times more hilarious was the realization that if this were a normal adventure book about a competition between different feudal houses, it would definitely have had a different House as its viewpoint. One of the ones that dressed sort of normal, at least. Probably the Fourth House, whose challengers were both teens, if it were a YA book. But the Ninth House would be the mysterious fan favorites--the weirdest, most distant House, with a lot of mystery surrounding them, both of its representatives aloof and inscrutable, wearing black robes and skull makeup and skulking in and out of scenes without talking to anyone. Harrowhark forbids Gideon from talking to anyone, so everyone else thinks she's taken a vow of silence because she's a creepy shadow cultist penitent, and are therefore spared from Gideon's walking-pile-of-memes thought processes until much later in the book, where they are (unsurprisingly, but hilariously) floored to hear how she actually talks. Just the contrast between the Ninth House's aesthetic and Gideon and Harrow's actual personalities makes me want to see this book adapted for TV; it would be the absolute funniest shit ever.

Even not filmed, it's still pretty funny shit. I made the mistake of reading it on the T a lot this weekend because I had to take the T a lot, and I was having the hardest time not absolutely losing it in public every time some absolutely idiotic meme got snuck in in a way that somehow made perfect sense, or whenever Gideon dramatically put on her sunglasses over her skull face paint or busted up the tone of some courtly dialogue by calling somebody an assmunch.

Another thing I liked about this book is that there is not very much romance! None of the romance that there is is robust or explicit enough to constitute a romantic plotline. There is a lot of Gideon being easily distracted and telling very bad suggestive jokes, and there is some unresolved but very tense tension in and among Gideon and Harrow's incredibly fucked-up lifelong loathing of each other, but nobody actually wastes any time on fluffy stuff because they are all very busy fighting epic bone constructs and getting completely covered in gore repeatedly and in the grossest ways Tamsyn Muir can think of (which are pretty gross; I am quite impressed).

So, in short: Goth stuff, ultraviolence, jokes, skellingtons, upsettingly large biceps, and no wholesome fluffy shit. This one definitely falls under the "It's like it was written just for me!" category.

For the BSpec book club we decided to read Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows, in part because people have been telling me to read Six of Crows for forever and I haven't gotten around to it. This wasn't even one of those things where people told me I had to read it and I was like "No you can't make me"; people kept saying things that made me genuinely want to read it and then I just hadn't gotten around to it. At least one person made me want to read it by telling me why they didn't like it--something like "It's pretty much just a standard heist story, but in a grimdark YA fantasy world" and I was like HEY, THAT SOUNDS LIKE EXACTLY MY KIND OF BOOK.

Six of Crows is part of Leigh Bardugo's world that has Grisha in it but the Six of Crows trilogy is not the Grisha trilogy; that is a different trilogy that I have not read yet. I'm not sure what it's about, only that it has very pretty covers. I do know what a Grisha is now, though! Unsurprisingly, it is this particular fantasy universe's kind of person with magic powers. There are a couple different classes of Grisha with different kinds of powers, and in some countries they are treated as normal or revered, and in at least one other country they are considered abominations of nature and targeted for genocide. Yeah, this is not a light and fluffy sort of heist story, this is a very intense sort of industrial-revolution-y urban fantasy that's unrelentingly violent and doesn't skimp on the, ah, quality of life issues that plagued either the respectable urban merchantry or the slums and criminal demimonde of rising capitalist trade centers. The main setting in this book, Ketterdam, is a sort of Netherlands-flavored port city characterized by absolute ruthlessness at every turn.

The heist here involves a crew of young gangsters from Ketterdam, led by Kaz Brekker, 17-year-old criminal prodigy and utterly broken human, traveling into the heart of Grisha-genociding, Nordic-flavored Fjerdan to "liberate" a scientist who has invented a terrifying drug that turns Grisha's powers up to unimaginable levels before quickly consuming them with addiction and killing them. Kaz and his gang of young misfits, known as the Dregs, were hired for this job by a local merchant of unimpeachable respectability, who, like most highly respected powerful gentlemen in fiction and entirely too many highly respected powerful gentlemen in real life, turns out to be a callous scumbag, but I get ahead of myself. Anyway, Mr. Respectable Merchant Man hires them to bring the scientist to the city council for the princely sum of 30 million kruge, which I'm guessing has got to be at least twice that in dollars.

This being a heist book, I can't really talk about the plot at all without running up against massive spoilers, but suffice it to say it is a prison break type of heist, which is pretty cool. The entity they are prison breaking is literally circular and in layers, for maximum satisfying obstacle-course-ness. Things are carefully planned and then do not go quite as planned, just as one would hope. Overall it's a very satisfying set of clever heroics with high stakes, just as one would want.

The real draw here is that this is a very, very character-driven story! There are a lot of heist books where I don't give a fuck about the thieves' tragic backstory that drove them to a life of crime etc., I just want Debbie Ocean to steal the jewels, nobody cares about your shitty ex-boyfriend. This is very different. All the characters on the main heist crew have intense backstories of highly unique trauma and very distinct personalities, either naturally occuring or shaped by the horrendous bullshit life has flung at them, and most of them are good people under there somewhere, although they all have very different and complex relationships to their good selves. There are multiple viewpoint characters--five of the six people on the heist crew--and I can't even pick a favorite.

I think it'll be a fun discussion on Sunday.

Despite how much it hurt me to not go to the latest Harvard Book Store warehouse sale, I was disciplined and did not go to the latest Harvard Book Store warehouse sale, partly because I am moving and have so many books to pack up and possibly get rid of, but also partly because I have an absolute shitton of books acquired at previous warehouse sales that I have not yet read. Most of them are history books but I do have a book of T.S. Eliot's cat poems (it is the one illustrated by Edward Gorey, because I am extremely on-brand).

One of these books, which I picked up like three years ago, is Cait Murphy's Scoundrels in Law: The Trials of Howe & Hummel, Lawyers to the Gangsters, Cops, Starlets, and Rakes Who Made the Gilded Age. I had never heard of Howe & Hummel before I spotted this book in the warehouse, but the lengthy subtitle indicated strongly that this was likely to be something extremely Up My Alley.

Turns out: It was! Howe and Hummel were exactly the sort of wacky, corrupt mob-lawyer type weirdos that make reading about the Gilded Age so fun. They defended on cases that were ahead of their time on issues like free speech and obscenity; they also covered for a lot of absolute garbage fire humans doing garbage fire things. They knew everybody. They had all kinds of organized and disorganized crime ties. They ripped off their clients shamefully, except for the rich ones, whom they ripped off shamelessly, because the Gilded Age rich sucked and I don't feel bad for them.

One of the best parts of the book was the coverage of the anarchist trials. Howe & Hummel defended numerous anarchists, generally quite skillfully on political freedom grounds, drawing upon the jury's self-images as patriotic Americans who should defend their fellow Americans' right to have odd and possibly misguided political ideas. They got no help from their clients on this, who apparently could not be arsed to keep a lid on their insurrectionary leanings even for the duration of one cross-questioning while on trial for inciting riots that they didn't even incite. Hummel & Howe ended up defending self- and explosives-obsessed gasbag Johann Most, father of the "propaganda of the deed" (i.e., blowing stuff up and calling it theory) when he got hauled in on incitement to violence charges for like the one speech he gave in his life that actually wasn't about how great blowing stuff up is. (There are many anarchist theorists that I have respect for even though I am not personally an anarchist; Johann Most is emphatically not one of them.)

The other best parts of the book are obviously the chapter on theater scandals, complete with burly cops attempting to "demonstrate" belly-dancing in court, and the chapter on gangs, including the most legendarily successful fence I'd never heard of, Marm Mandelbaum. I need an overproduced Netflix or Showtime show about Marm Mandelbaum's life and career, yesterday.

The worst part of the book was the bit where Murphy talks about the Pinkertons in relation to their doing private-eyeing in some bank robberies and never mentioning their strikebreaking activities even once. How do you even do that? Even though this case was about something completely different, how do you introduce the Pinkertons and be like "The Pinkertons, who were famously honest" instead of like "The Pinkertons, who were famous for strikebreaking." I know the author is a Wall Street Journal reporter, but Jesus. Like I'm sure some of them had some detective skill since they did ID and catch the Dunlap gang but they're really most famous in history for being nasty thugs and cracking strikers' heads. It was weird and jarring to read.

Anyway, apart from that, as far as I could tell all the other weird and jarring things were in fact because history is full of goddamn weirdos, like the "animal welfare" zealots whose concern for animal welfare consisted solely of chloroforming cats.

The book also does a pretty good job of sketching out the disparities, contradictions, and miseries of Gilded Age New York. Some of this historical background was at least vaguely familiar to me--no one who likes gang shit as much as I do could grow up an hour outside of New York and not know at least the outlines of the Five Points neighborhood--but I also learned about the Tombs, an incarnation of which still stands today, and Blackwell's Island, now Roosevelt Island, which was basically the precursor to Rikers. (There's a new book about Blackwell's called Damnation Island, if that gives you any idea of how miserable a place it was.)

I finished this book a week ago and it's been the longest week in the world, so I don't have the most coherent thoughts (as is becoming increasingly common for these reviews) on what this book does and does not accomplish and what it illustrates about our legal system and how it compares and contrasts to modern law (contrast: going to law school was apparently quite optional). I could probably come up with some thoughts if anyone wants to give this lovely book a good home and then we can talk about it and I'd be incentivized to try and not look stupid, but otherwise I'm going to go with "It entertained me with true stories about how wacky people were back in the day," which is honestly all I'm looking for in most of the history I read these days.

For the politics book club this month we decided to read Michelle Alexander's bestselling expose of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. It had been referenced, usually favorably but sometimes with a few critiques, in other book we'd read, such as Angela Davis' Freedom Is a Constant Struggle and James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own. Alexander also appears in Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th, which Gillian and I watched sometime last year.

As a result I thought I was reasonably well informed already going into the book. This is the work that basically kicked off the current criminal justice reform conversation, which makes it quite successful at one of its stated goals, although it turns out that the current criminal justice reform conversation is goddamn infuriating to anyone who's read pretty much anything about the criminal justice system, because like most political conversations, there's a lot of people saying the same wrong things over and over again.

One thing that was really striking to me when I was reading this book was just how comprehensively bad the system is, especially once all the drug war policies got passed--the worst possible policies and the worst possible norms prevail at every single step of the process, by every single actor in the system. It's just blunt force racism all the way down. Every single step at which "due process" or something was once theoretically a thing has been formally eviscerated because drugs!!! on top of a long history of not being applied to black people in the first place. It really, really should put to bed any real doubts about the practicality of prison abolition even for law 'n' order-y type folks who haven't read anything about prison abolition. Do you care about stuff like rule of law and due process and holding people accountable for anti-social behavior? Then the U.S. prison and policing systems should be anathema to you. Do you like the Bill of Rights and various other U.S. Constitutional Amendments? Then reading this book will make you want to throw all the courts into the sea and replace them with literally anything else, maybe someone reading bird guts. Whatever non-racist things you want getting done that you think we need the police or prison system for: We don't, and if you want the thing done, we should get rid of the current system that's lying to you about having a purpose other than racial control.

There are a couple places where it becomes pretty clear that this book was written a few years ago. It was written before the rise of Black Lives Matter, so I think the level of public awareness of police brutality and capriciousness has inched up a tiny bit, which is good. Somewhat more depressingly, the myth of colorblindness, racist as it is, has taken a bit of a shredding in the past year or two, and the idea that people are racist but don't want to say too explicitly racist things paired a bit funny with the fact that I was trying to cram finishing this book around counterprotesting a literal neo-Nazi rally where people stood on the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse and yelled about how they wanted to do ethnic cleansing. (Granted, there were only like 30 of them, but still -- five years ago they weren't having rallies at the Statehouse.) On a minor but jarring note, the book references Bill Cosby a few times, but only as a proponent of respectability politics.

But overall, things have really not changed since this book was written. The noises are starting to be a bit different, which I suppose is the first step, but the system remains, with only the most minor of reforms starting to be implemented--frequently at the expense of doubling down somewhere else in order to look balanced and fair, a thing that wasn't necessary when the War on Drugs was being launched but is Obviously Just How Politics Is now. Black Lives Matter has been immediately countered with Blue Lives Matter, like there's some sort of deficit of power and coddling being given to a class that's literally legally allowed to steal people's lunch money like heavily armed, completely immunized from consequences schoolyard bullies. The entire Massachusetts Congressional delegation just voted for a Blue Lives Matter bill in the House. In the last days of the Obama Administration, the DOJ decided to stop contracting with private prisons; Attorney General Evil Keebler Elf reversed the policy before it could be implemented. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently made a big song and dance of reforming a felon disenfranchisement law that will probably end up restoring voting rights to like, ten people. Everything is still trash. Donate to your local bail fund.

Covering gambling news on the day-to-day, I sometimes feel like the industry doesn't change nearly fast enough. It's been almost seven years since Black Friday, and only three U.S. states — Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware — offer regulated online poker. (Soon to be four, thanks to Pennsylvania, but not soon enough.) Some states, like California, seem to bang their head against the same wall every year and get nowhere. And of course, we're all biting our nails waiting to see what the Supreme Court decides about PASPA, and when they'll get around to deciding if legalized sports betting could actually become reality in the U.S.

But, despite all of the above, it's actually quite a rapidly changing industry. It's worth it, every now and again, to look back at how we got where we are and appreciate just how much batty stuff has happened over the course of gambling's establishment as a legitimate entertainment industry.

Enter David Clary's Gangsters to Governors: The New Bosses of Gambling in America, which was published in October from Rutgers University Press. Clocking in at about 250 pages (plus a lot of notes), this new history of American gambling focuses first on how gaming fell under the control of crime syndicates, and then on how the state drove those elements out, turning control of the industry over to "clean" private corporations, Indian nations and the states themselves. Clary also provides a nuanced, even-handed analysis of the pros and cons of states' use of gaming revenues to balance their budgets.

***

I posted a book review over at the day job.

The last book of the year that we read for the political book club was James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. I'd learned of this book when Mom and I attended a talk at the Boston Book Festival with Forman and Chris Hayes, moderated by Kim McLarin (the third author who was supposed to be there, Carol Anderson of White Rage, was sadly unable to make it).

The talk--titled Racism in America: It's a Crime--was excellent and I wish I had taken notes, but a lot of it involved dissecting what gets talked about as "crime" politically and the ways in which it does and does not relate to actual crime, as in the reality of people doing illegal and/or harmful things. Forman spoke a bit about how, during the crime waves of the '70s and '90s, black communities asked for funding for a variety of solutions to these problems, which included more prisons and police, but also for drug treatment, community investment/development, better schools, etc., and higher (white-dominated) levels of government were happy to comply with the police stuff but not so much the rest of it.

This, then, was the sort of political context that shaped the subjects examined in Locking Up Our Own, which examines the role of black communities, especially the black political elite (mayors, judges, attorneys, etc.) in unwittingly helping build the mass incarceration machine that blights America today.

Forman's aim in this book is not to cast blame, but to understand the political contexts that made supporting increased punitive measures seem like a good idea at the time, and to examine why these policies didn't turn out the way people hoped they would. The first part of the book, "Origins," covers up through the 1970s, and examines three major topics: the War on Drugs, gun control, and the integration of the police force. A few common threads pop up through these three topics: One is the degree of lawlessness that black communities had previously been abandoned to, with white police officers ignoring crimes committed in black communities. Another common thread is the class divisions within black society, especially in light of the rise of what was basically the country's first black petit bourgoisie -- prior to the 1960s or so, there simply had not been a black elite, so the expectations put on that newly formed class were unprecedented and fragile. A third (but perhaps related to class) element is the variety of political traditions within the black community, something that I think gets erased from a lot of mainstream American political discourse as it disappears under triumphant numbers showing that 90-odd percent of black voters vote for Democrats. But there are black conservative traditions and black radical traditions and black liberal traditions, and questions of respectability politics and what racial solidarity really means permeate the newspaper articles, courtroom speeches, and other primary sources that Forman cites.

The second part of the book, "Consequences," takes us from the '80s up through the present day, with the most infuriating chapter being largely about Eric Holder and pretext stops. It's infuriating because by the time pretext stops became a thing, most of the other, smaller punitive measures had already been passed, so it seems like it should have been a lot easier to spot how this was going to go wrong. By the time we cover pretext stops, we've also established mandatory minimum sentencing, warrior policing, draconian drug laws, and all that stuff that lead pretext stops to be so devastating to so many people.

In addition to being very well researched, I was impressed at how effectively this book was organized. Forman starts off each chapter by discussing a case from his time as a public defender in Washington, DC, featuring a client trapped in the criminal justice system via whatever set of regulations will be covered in the rest of the chapter. This provides an emotionally engaging illustration of how each aspect of mass incarceration traps real people in grinding cycles of poverty, cutting them off from opportunities for education and employment.

The book ends with some discussion of the current state of the criminal justice reform movement, including what it's doing right and what it's doing wrong. His final conclusion is that the problem was built bit by bit and might have to be solved bit by excruciatingly small bit, and that activists should be prepared to be in for a long slog. While prison abolitionists will likely ultimately end up looking elsewhere for their ultimate vision of how to eliminate the carceral state, Forman's policy prescriptions all seem like vital and solid short-term reforms, and I think the book provides vital background on how good people can wind up supporting bad policies.

Our two-hour discussion of this book last weekend ended up focusing a lot on questions of what lessons people should take from it and apply to other forms of thinking about activism and policy. The chapter on police integration raises a lot of tough questions for proponents of increasing the diversity of hostile institutions as a method of reforming them; other chapters raise other tricky questions of policy-crafting and unintended consequences that none of us were smart enough to solve (that's what think tanks are supposed to be for, right?) but from which activists could probably learn what kinds of questions to ask when deciding whether to throw their support behind a proposal or not.

Anyway, for something as short and blessedly readable as this book (seriously, some policy history kinds of books are dry as hell), there is all kinds of stuff packed into it that you might not know about, especially if you are a sheltered white person who wasn't even alive for most of this, like myself.

Current Mood: exhausted

God, I hadn't realized how much I missed Spider Jerusalem.

I first read Transmetropolitan in college, almost ten years ago now, during a blessed period of time where Donald Trump was just some buffoon on reality TV and was totally off the radar screen of people who don't watch reality TV, which just so happened to include me and literally everybody else I knew. That might have been the only plus of that time period, honestly—any hopey-changey goodfeels brought on by the impending end of the historically awful Bush administration were offset by it being precisely the time when the economy imploded. (More specifically, I think I read Transmet during the fall semester at the end of 2007, after the subprime loans had started crashing but before TARP was passed.)

Following the surprise election of the nuke-happy, gropey old toddler to the highest office in the land—helped along by Kremlin trollbots, a corrupt FBI (itself helped by the execrable Jason Chaffetz), thirty years of hysterical anti-Hillary Big Lie propaganda from the GOP because she dared support universal health insurance before it was cool, a comfortably useless Democratic establishment without a competent marketer in sight, and a useless clickbait-driven media ecosystem that on the whole displays editorial judgement so poor it would get kicked off the middle school yearbook staff—it seemed like time to revisit everyone's favorite foul-mouthed, drug-addled gonzo journalist and see how prescient the series really was.

The result, so far, is that it's depressingly prescient. There are a handful of things in it that come off as now being weirdly old-fashioned—cash tollbooths with humans working in them, which are rapidly on their way out in the real world, or the fact that Jerusalem can live off of only writing one column a week, even if he is a celebrity—but overall, we do really seem to be just further along the trajectories Ellis identified in 1998 when it was first published: Increased corruption, sham democracy, advertisements and screens everywhere, cities overcrowded to the point where they can't ever stop being filthy no matter how fancy and overdeveloped they get; high-tech luxuries existing alongside widespread poverty; an exhausted, frenzied populace overstimulated into gullibility and complacency; and, of course, power-hungry scam artists taking advantage of all the generalized confusion and disorder at every turn. It's actually quite shocking to realize it was written almost twenty years ago—if it had been published last week, I'm pretty sure the only thing that would need to change would be the tollbooth worker.

In the middle of it all is social justice rogue Spider Jerusalem, returned to the city after hiding in the mountains for five years because his creditors finally found him, a heavily tattooed agent of chaos in colorfully mismatched camera-spectacles (the machine that made them is also on drugs). Spider bullies his way back into a writing gig with his old editor, a weekly column called I Hate It Here, where he dedicates himself afflicting the comfortable but doesn't really have the time or sensitivity to comfort the afflicted. He does, however, tell their stories, raging on behalf of the dispossessed in time-honored angry lefty fashion, calling out the dirty secrets of the powerful and generally using his boundless capacity for assholery to troll for good.

Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street covers Spider's return from the mountain and his break back into the spotlight as he covers a riot and uncovers the deliberate setup behind the violence. It bears an unsettling resemblance to some of the accounts of outbreaks of police violence at protests we've been hearing about over the past few years—peaceful protests where some small event (or unproven reports of one) are used as a pretext for attack by an overmilitarized police force, although these haven't ended in actual mass slaughter in the U.S. (so far, at least). The group targeted in this riot is a bunch of people spliced with alien DNA, known as transients, who are basically kind of a cult led by a Charles Manson-esque figure called Fred Christ. Christ leads the group to "secede," declaring the destitute handful of city blocks they've been sidelined into to be its own country, building half-assed barricades around the transient's ghetto and cutting off the utilities that their altered bodies don't need in order to drive out any remaining full humans. They're portrayed as a bunch of gullible but harmless weirdos (except for Fred Christ, who is a creeper), so of course the state brings down the hammer on them for this hopelessly ineffectual act of treason.

With a busy, expressive drawing style and lots of creative swearing, this high-octane nightmare-fueled story nonetheless displays a greatly hopeful reminder of what journalism could and should be. Today's Beltway media would do well to take note: With the incoming administration, all journalists are going to have to become muckraking investigative pains in the ass, or they can go find another profession. Put on your stompy boots and remember: You don't have to put up with this shabby crap! You're a journalist!

Current Mood: not putting up with this shabby crap

So it turns out that just because I don't work at a Big Six publishing company, it doesn't mean I can't steal any good books from work.

When my old editor-in-chief left, he found an ARC while cleaning out his desk that someone had given us as a review copy back when it was first published. The book was Hit Me!: Fighting the Las Vegas Mob by the Numbers by Danielle Gomes and Jay Benincasa. The ARC is dated May 2013, making this review three years late, so I don't know if I'm supposed to still send the publisher two copies like they asked for. What's the usual practice for this sort of thing? Anyway, publishers, if you wanna send review copies of gambling-related books to Casino City, we'll be more timely in the future, because I'm here now.

Hit Me! follows the story of Dennis Gomes, a young accountant with an unshakable sense of justice who is tasked with heading up and reforming the Nevada Gaming Control Board's Audit Division in 1970's Las Vegas. Most of the casinos in Vegas at this time were owned by Mafia groups--usually multiple outfits, as joint ventures--who massively underreported revenues and used the skimmed funds to finance all sorts of other mob operations back in their home territories. A pretty huge proportion of Nevada's political and law enforcement apparatus was also involved, either actively in the mobs' pockets or just unwilling to cross them. This lack of institutional support--plus the occasional active betrayal from inside the house--makes Gomes's job very, very difficult at times.

While the word "audit" may conjure up for some readers a rather unsexy image of some desk workers poring over spreadsheets, rest assured that this is a full-on gangster story, with all the clandestine meetings, undercover surveillance and raiding rooms full of money at gunpoint that that implies. The cast of characters is also pretty loud, on the cop side as well as the mobster side. Fans of the movie Casino will be able to spot some familiar material in the second half of the book as Gomes starts going after the Stardust's Frank Rosenthal and Tony "the Ant" Spilotro. (The first half of the book I'm not sure about 'cause I didn't see Casino until this Friday, because I am the worst gangster movie fan ever.)

The biggest strength of this book is that it is very, very detailed--not in a lengthy way, but entire conversations are reconstructed verbatim, accompanied by vivid sights and sounds and smells until you feel you might as well be reading a trashy noir novel. Some of this is because the Audit Division kept extraordinarily detailed notes, and some is apparently because Gomes had an excellent memory, but I'm sure a bunch of it is just because some of this shit is so crazy you could never forget it. Gomes makes a relatable enough viewpoint character most of the time; mostly he comes off as very committed to driving the mob out of Vegas and very frustrated when he can't, which is pretty hard to take issue with. You get a glimpse of a little more of a weird dude right at the beginning and right at the end, but for the bulk of the book he's all Secret Agent Man all the time.

I don't know if this is something they may have included in the final printing, but my biggest complaint about this ARC was its lack of photographs. I want some pictures! Mugshots, crime scenes, awful '70s fashion, pics of the tacky old casinos that were there before the tacky current ones. I mean, this should be obvious. The ARC doesn't even identify whose photos are being used on the cover.

Overall, though, this is a high-adrenaline true crime tale, and I especially recommend reading it while drinking wine in the bathtub.

I read Lyndsay Faye's The Fatal Flame in about a day, which is pretty much the exact same thing I did with both of the first two books in this series, The Gods of Gotham and Seven for a Secret.

The title of this one is a bit more literal than the first two--the book is about fire. Much of the series has already been about fire: Timothy Wilde's parents died in one; his larger-than-life older brother Valentine is a firefighter; and, of course, he got half his face burned off at the beginning of Book 1. As a predictable consequence, Timothy Wilde is terrified of fire.

So it's only fitting that the final mystery in the series would be an arson case.

At least one thread in the plot seems deceptively simple: When sleazy robber baron industrialist and hella corrupt Democratic Party alderman Robert Symmes reports the arson to Timothy and Valentine, he also hands them a convincing suspect pretty immediately: a women's labor rights activist whom he had fired after an unsuccessful strike. He also seems to have proof in the form of creepy threatening letters that Sally Woods, the activist in question (who lives in a greenhouse with a printing press and wears pants and is generally awesome) had sent him.

Obviously, it's not going to be that simple.

For starters, when Robert Symmes asks Valentine to investigate the arson, he pisses Valentine off so badly that Valentine decides to run against him for Alderman, which upsets nearly everybody because of a long-ass list of Tammany Hall-related Reasons. Like, Timothy isn't even the person who is the most pissed off about this--that would be Gentle Jim, Valentine's boyfriend. The circumstances under which Symmes pissed Valentine off are also ones that intersect with both Timothy's detective work and a lot of long-running personal and family issues for Valentine, who honestly seems to be in competition with Tim for which one of them can be the most messed up. (Or more likely, it is Tim that is in competition with Valentine.)

The resulting plotlines draw Tim--and us--deeper into the world of corrupt Tammany politics, and into the horrifically exploitative world of women's industrial labor in the mid-nineteenth century, including the prejudices endured by the white in-house factory girls, the abuses heaped upon the out-of-house freelance seamstresses (mostly immigrants), and the even more horrific abuses employed to divert immigrant/refugee women into the sex trade (this story takes place at the height of the Hunger, so: lots of very destitute Irish washing up in New York). There are good cops and bad cops and good corrupt politicians and bad corrupt politicians, and while I usually found it pretty easy to slate characters into Awesome Characters and Characters I Want To Punch Up The Bracket, in the actual situations on the ground Timothy doesn't always know who's a "good guy" and who's a "bad guy" (except Alderman Symmes, where the only question is just HOW reprehensible is he really) (answer: TOTALLY REPREHENSIBLE), and winds up in all sorts of awkward situations like "working with his nemesis Silkie Marsh" and, as previously mentioned, "trying to solve a crime on behalf of Alderman Symmes."

Some readers have apparently complained that there is not enough Valentine, probably because they want the book to be all Valentine all the time, which is understandable enough. Valentine Wilde is both the hero this version of New York City needs and that it deserves. Timothy is not very good at heroing, which is what makes him such an excellent actual protagonist. But Valentine is totally big on heroing, doing ALL THE DRUGS and banging ALL THE LADIES (AND SOME OF THE DUDES TOO) (MOSTLY JIM) and speechifying ALL THE RABBLE-ROUSING SPEECHES and dressing ridiculously and running into fires and slamming rapists' heads through walls and basically being a Big Damn Hero and also entertainingly batshit. His and Timothy's relationship continues to be a thing of beauty to read, meaning they fight even worse than me and my brother Timothy ever did--which is sayin' something, but I don't think Tim and I have ever devolved into a giant screaming match about how much we hate each other in front of extremely important political personages, at least not as adults. This Tim and Valentine will have giant I-hate-you screaming matches at any time in front of any person, about literally anything, from Valentine's sex life to why Timothy is short. All these topics eventually end up illuminating something about their extremely complicated relationship, because fiction is supposed to have less pointlessness in it than real life.

Anyway, if the book were all Valentine all the time, we also wouldn't get as much of everyone else--not Bird Daly, on her way to becoming a teenager; Elena Boehm, whose accent gets more pronounced every book for some reason I still haven't figured out; Dunla Duffy, an immigrant seamstress whose half-simple Gaelic poeticism makes getting information out of her a whole new mystery plotline in itself; Mercy Underhill, back in New York and with something unidentifiably wrong going on; Tim's squad of Irish roundsmen buddies, including the one who falls in love with a police-hating immigrant woman because she nearly shot him; Gentle Jim Playfair, with whom Tim begins building a real friendship independent of Valentine; pants-wearing activist Sally Woods; the fictionalized version of George Washington Matsell, first head of the NYPD; or spectacles-wearing wannabe-dandy newsboy Ninepin and his crew (but mostly Ninepin)--even the bad guys, like Grand Bitch Silkie Marsh and Alderman Robert "That Guy" Symmes, are worth every minute of their time on the page. Usually in a book this big there's something that I figure could have been edited down, even if I don't personally mind, but with Faye's stuff I need every single interaction between every single character that takes place. All I need is for someone to have an asshole cat and I might have actually died of awesome casting.

Despite all the screaming and arson and oppressed laborers (and an ACTUAL TARRING AND FEATHERING OMG), much of this book is still funny. Partly this is due to Timothy's entertaining internal narration -- he is very clever when he is not being dense as a brick--and a big chunk of it is due to his wacky pseudodetective sidekick, Mr. Jakob Piest, a Dutch policeman with a talent for "finding things." But the funniest part of the book is Timothy voting for the first time in his life, which doesn't sound all that exciting until you get up close and personal with just how absurdistly corrupt the Tammany Hall voting machine was at that time. And how terribly loud the "dandy" fashions of the era were. Apparently, an orange cravat and getting completely shitfaced were mandatory for voting in this time period.

As always, the flash patter remains one of my singularly favorite aspects of the book, but I really have to take a step back and admire how seamlessly this thieves' cant fits into the rest of the worldbuilding, with different characters' use of and reactions to it informing their already rich characterization. This New York is pretty hardcore awful, but it's not a one-dimensional pseudo-deep grimdark -- it's as rich and thrilling and satisfyingly devourable as a Guinness chocolate cake.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: Lexington, MA
Current Music: Irish music in my head

I didn’t get much of anything done today, because I spent basically the whole day on the couch with a cup of coffee and Lyndsay Faye’s Seven for a Secret, the sequel to her awesome historical mystery The Gods of Gotham.

Set in New York City in the 1840s, both books follow bartender-turned-reluctant-police-officer Timothy Wilde, younger brother of the larger-than-life Democratic machine member Valentine Wilde, as he deals with the psychological fallout of having half his face burned off in a fire and solves extremely sordid crimes. These crimes are not particularly “set against a backdrop” of mid-nineteenth-century New York as they are thoroughly woven within it. Where the first book’s plotlines grew out of the lurid, sordid contemporary social problems of child prostitution, body-stealing, and anti-Irish sentiment, the plots of Seven for a Secret grow directly out of the odious practice of Southern “fugitive slave catchers” kidnapping free blacks and selling them down South. (There was a certain Oscar-winning movie made about this two years ago, and excerpts from Solomon Northup’s memoir make up a good portion of the epigraphs in this book.) Chimney-sweeping, which was a thoroughly horrific industry, also makes several appearances. And we get to see a lot more of the corrupt Tammany Hall machine, as Timothy’s investigations into the murder of one Lucy Adams—the secret colored wife of a prominent Democratic politician—bring him closer and closer into Party politics.

Timothy Wilde continues to be a great first-person narrator—emotionally volatile, smart in some ways but amusingly dense in others (and therefore sometimes a bit unreliable), well-read with a poetic streak and fluent in “flash patter,” and good at meeting really interesting people. He’s got a bit of a savior complex that is mostly used to explore how complicated and awful the social issues plaguing New York are—there aren’t any easy answers here, despite Tim’s boundless bleeding-heartedness and the mostly-ineffectual savior complex it gives him. While I’m probably not the right person to give a definitive opinion on all the issues raised with a book with a white protagonist written by a white author that is mostly straight-up about saving black people from slavery, I do think it well avoided most of the common white-saviorey pitfalls, in that Tim certainly doesn’t sweep in and save the day—he screws up a lot, he’s the main player in only one issue of a fairly expansive web of interlocking Things Going On (his job is to find out who killed Lucy Adams), he works closely with a number of well-characterized people of color who often know more than he does, have more resources than he does, and generally have better things to do sit around and be grateful to Tim for his help. Even in the scene where Tim is literally dragged in to be a white savior—namely in Julius Carpenter’s identity trial, where only white people can give testimony—there’s minimal grateful carping, and it’s heavily subordinated to discussing actual issues of plot and observing the ways in which racist laws and restrictions eat away at the people who have to constantly live under them.

Faye also continues to give both an unflinching look at the absolute misery the Irish famine immigrants suffered through, both on their way to New York and the prejudice they faced when they got there—something that tends to get soft-pedaled in a lot of American History courses—and an equally unflinching look at what utter bigoted, nasty thugs some of the Irish could be when it benefitted them, including an interesting portrayal of the NYPD’s first thoroughly crooked cop, an Irishman in league with the slave-catchers. Unfortunately, the degree to which the Irish in the U.S. “earned” respectability through corruption and attacking other immigrant and minority groups is something that’s also frequently ignored in our popular understanding of history.

On a more fun note, we get to see a lot of fun old faces again, and often learn more about them. Bird Daly makes some reappearances, as does the deplorable brothel madam Silkie Marsh. Gentle Jim plays a bigger part, and we get to see a bit farther past Mrs. Boehm’s respectable German landlady face. Julius Carpenter, unsurprisingly, becomes a very major character and brings with him a host of interesting connections involved in the Vigilance Committee and the Underground Railroad. Also, there continues to be lots and lots of Valentine Wilde, who continues to absolutely steal the show on every page that he’s on and several that he isn’t, because he’s just that over-the-top about everything.

Two minor things did bug me: There is a lot of people “snapping” their heads around when something catches their attention, which is the sort of authorial tic that you don’t notice until you notice it and then it bothered me every single time and made my neck hurt. Also, for some reason all the Irish are either redheads or “black Irish,” which is a specific type of coloring, and like… many, many Irish people are neither of these. Many, many Irish people are “fair” (blonde) or sort of lighter brunette, but I don’t know if we’ve met any “fair” Irish in the whole series thus far. It’s a little weird? Especially since the rest of the series is ridiculously researched right down to the ground.
But those are nitpicks. Overall, I just want the next book to be out ASAP!

Those who know me know I read some pretty morbid stuff, both fiction and nonfiction. This is why one of my friends saw fit to lend me her copy of Jessica Snyder Sachs' Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death.

I fear my reputation may be more hardcore than I actually am, though, for I definitely had to stop eating at several points during this book, and I love to eat when I read.

This book presents a short but, as far as I can tell, fairly comprehensive overview of the measures by which scientists, medical examiners, and other people in the death business have tried to determine time of death. It begins with short histories of the three "clocks" that medical examiners use in the immediate postmortem period--rigor mortis, livor mortis, and algor mortis--and all the ways in which they can be unreliable. The book then moves into the mid- and later twentieth century and the development of forensic entomology--the study of all the bugs that feed on corpses, and their life cycles and migration patterns and such, in order to determine time of death by assessing what bugs are on a corpse and what stage of their life cycle they are in. This part of the book is FANTASTICALLY gross, full of descriptions of roiling masses of maggots and buzzing swarms of blow flies. The entomologists interviewed for the piece all seem like really smart, interesting characters, but the descriptions of some of the research they did--especially that conducted at "the Body Farm"--and the cases they helped solve are really kind of stomach-churning. I usually like to put in one or two interesting tidbits I learned when I'm reviewing nonfiction books, but in this case I feel that maybe I shouldn't.

I think the maggots also got to me a bit more than other gross stuff gets to me because they always made me remember that time I came home from being gone for the weekend and one of my idiot roommates in Somerville had thrown meat in the garbage and left it there for a few days, so then when I went to throw something away, the kitchen garbage was a giant roiling mass of maggots. THAT WAS A GREAT SURPRISE. Kiddos, if you throw any kind of organic waste into your kitchen garbage, empty it frequently, even if it isn't full.

After all the bug stuff the book moves on into forensics and plant studies, in which ecologists try to identify the time of death of a corpse by the state of the plants immediately surrounding (especially "crushed under" or "growing over") it. This part of the book had the most fun, non-stomach-turning, Sherlock Homes-y bits in it, as usually the local flora of an area was already being studied as part of general ecological field work, and the forensic application was mostly about matching up the clues to determine, for example, what year a rope was tied around a tree branch.

After this section we get back into the realm of gross with a lot of stuff about bacterial studies and "drip zones," which is fancy science talk for "where a dead body's juices sink into the ground." This is apparently still a baby science, or at least it was when this book was published, but it's racked up a couple of interesting cases.

Overall this is an A+ book for anyone who likes gruesome murdery things to test how much they can handle.

The elevator pitch for Elizabeth Bear’s new novel Karen Memory is colorful enough that you can pretty much be certain that if you like the elevator pitch, you will like the book, and if you don’t, you won’t. The elevator pitch is: Heroic prostitutes versus disaster capitalists in the steampunk Old West.

I was pretty much sold at that point, and I am happy report that Karen Memory is just what you’d want from a pitch like that, with added awesomeness besides. This includes a fictional appearance by real-life historical badass U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves and his giant mustache.

I’ll be frank: I have enjoyed a fair number of stories that are absolute trashy messes, because they are trashy mess hodgepodges of stuff I like, and I probably would have still liked Karen Memory well enough if it were that. All the same, that is not the case here: This is a really solid story. It’s got strong and unashamed dime-novel elements, but it all ties together into a coherent, well-paced, thrilling narrative that is chock-full of awesome things and they all make total sense.

It’s a first-person narrative that does well the main thing a first-person narrative has to do well, which is: the voice is fabulous. Karen’s been taught “proper” grammar as part of her genteel parlor-girling duties, but the narration is in her regular nineteenth-century Old West working-class reads-a-lot-of-dime-store-novels voice, and it’s great—it’s fun and colorful and folksy and smart, and Karen’s a great one for sly observations and over-the-top similes and you can generally tell she’s got her roots in a good old playful Irish storytelling tradition. She says “could of” and “knowed” and she’s not one whit the less smart for it. She’s also totally adorable in her developing feelings for Priya, an Indian girl who’s managed to escape the cribhouses of the story’s villain, abusive pimp Peter Bantle.

Priya’s also great—a budding mad scientist with phenomenal language-learning skills who wears pants and is even more awkward about feelings than Karen. In fact, the cast of characters surrounding Karen is almost exclusively made of thoroughly awesome people, except the people who are such utter terrible people that you viscerally want to punch them in the face with their own fists, which does still make them great character. The cast at Madame Damnable’s consists of a diverse crowd of women (and one dude—the house bouncer, a gay Black man named Crispin), including the inestimable Miss Francina, a transwoman who nobody is an asshole to about it (except Peter Bantle, of course), the human embodiment of solidarity and friendship, and all-around stellar character. The other girls come in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and accents, and they each have their own characters, though we rarely learn their backstories. The rest of Rapid City seems to be populated with men ranging from the villainous to the sort of ineffectually decent enough, at least until Marshal Bass Reeves and his posseman, a Comanche dude named Tomoatooah, arrive. They kick ass, quietly and with great dignity and sometimes dynamite. The dynamite is less quiet, obviously.

On to the steampunky bits! The steampunky bits are a bit less goofy than much of the steampunk I’ve read so far, although I admit to only reading ridiculous steampunk. There are no flying whales. There is, however, a lot of really bizarre city infrastructure and some weirdo robot full-body sewing machines that sound more like Iron Man suits than anything else. Much of the plot hinges on a creepy technological advance that’s so far still secret but not implausible based on what tech they’ve already got, and a bit more plot hinges on a particularly souped-up submarine with tentacles, because what’s a steampunk story without at least one octopus-thing? At any rate, I’m wicked jealous of Karen’s sewing machine.

I strongly recommend this book to everyone who likes badass ladies, steampunk, stories about lesbians that aren’t tragic death coming-out novels, historical figures you haven’t learned of in school, seeing abusive assholes get what they deserve, the Old West, big diverse ensemble casts, luxuriant mustaches, characters exhibiting genre-savviness (the genre in question being dime novels), and fun.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: the land of ice and snow
Current Music: none

Well, I feel like I have a lot of things to say about Half-Resurrection Blues, but chances are good I’ll forget to say some of them, or possibly I will not say them as fully as they are in my head. Sometimes you get a book where there’s just a lot going on. (Sometimes this is because it’s 1500 pages, but sometimes it’s not.)

Starting with the basics: Half-Resurrection Blues is the first novel in the Bone Street Rumba “spectral noir” or “ghost noir” urban fantasy series by Daniel José Older, who I’ve seen on a bunch of panels at Readercon and Arisia, where he was always a kickass panelist. He has opinions on italicizing Spanish that I always think about whenever we have clients who are like “We’re trying to target a Hispanic market, also, italicize any term in Spanish.” He also answers all my bullshit tweets which is (a) good author marketing branding practice stuff and (b) a sign that his fanbase isn’t big enough, so go buy his book. He was also nice enough to sign my copy at Arisia so nyah nyah.

We’ll get to the ugly little fucker on the exercise bike in a bit.

So “ghost noir” turns out to be exactly what it says on the tin: It’s noir, all lyric description of gritty city streets (in this case, Brooklyn) and characters smoking a lot and doing shots because they’re in such a manly bad mood and thinking about sex and having tragic buried backstories and stuff. It’s also got ghosts. Our gruff damaged protagonist is a “half-resurrected” (meaning he died but has mysteriously come mostway back to life, no one knows how) special agent for the Council of the Dead. His name is Carlos Delacruz and he figures he’s Puerto Rican and he doesn’t know anything of his former life. Mostly he skulks around keeping shit-stirring ghosts in line and drinking rum with some of his ghost agent bros and making fun of hipsters in his inner monologue and reading, which sounds like a pretty good life for a noir protagonist. But then the plot shows up in the form of another half-resurrected guy—the first one Carlos has ever seen—who wants to bring a bunch of college bros into the Underworld, and Carlos has to kill him, and then everything gets complicated. Not least because Carlos immediately develops a ginormous crush on a photograph of the now-dead half-resurrected guy’s sister, except that he’s just killed her brother, so you can imagine how well that’s going to go.

The other immediate problem is the sudden infestation of a bunch of soul-tearingly irritating (literally) ugly little demon things called ngks, which apparently look like tiny grinning toads riding tiny stationary bikes. Somehow they are connected to whatever terrible plan involved the college bros, and Carlos and his ghost cop buddies have to set about trying to figure out and dismantle an increasingly labyrinthine situation set up by some ancient weirdo called Sarco that manages to involve (and by involve I mean screw over) pretty much everyone we’re introduced to in the entire book, as is right and proper noir/hardboiled plotting. I don’t want to talk more about the plot because spoilers.

Possibly my favorite thing about this book is the voice. It’s a first-person POV, as is also only right and proper, and man, does Carlos have certain aspects of sounding like Noir-y Protagonist Man down pat. He swears a lot and he bounces back and forth between the lyrical descriptive thing and the blunt, matter-of-fact hardboiled thing accompanied by cynical inner monologue about everybody. But while Carlos’ voice and characterization is unapologetically working within a certain tradition, he doesn’t sound like a Philip Marlowe ripoff. He’s more modern and more Puerto Rican, obviously, and the Brooklyn he moves in is a modern Brooklyn, full of communities of color getting slowly edged out by annoying white hipsters and rich people, which is precisely what’s happening in Brooklyn, from all reports. I’m wildly unqualified to have any opinions on the authenticity of the use of Spanish in this book because obviously the author is actually Hispanic and I am an Irish-American living in a mostly white section of Boston, but from some recent reports of People Having Opinions About Spanish In Fiction, I am going to say that it’s really not that difficult to read, guys, even if you don’t speak Spanish. I did not even have to use the Google machine once. Stylistically I think it lends a sense of place and a sense of specificity— you don’t feel like you’re in Anycity USA, in the I Guess People Live Here Quarter where people speak Ninth Grade Textbook English—but whether it’s accurate is up to people who have been to Brooklyn more than twice. The language overall is very playful and colloquial and makes you want to read it all out loud just for the fun of it.

Additionally, but no less importantly than any of the stuff to do with race, class, or identity, is that this book is funny. Dry cynical wisecracking is a time-honored part of noir, obviously, but the humor in this book runs much goofier than that sometimes, because why not. Carlos’ super surly noir man persona not infrequently gives way to a sort of flaily haplessness when either shit gets truly bizarre (see: demons on tiny bikes) or when he’s attempting to put together sentences about Sasha, our maybe-femme-fatale love-interest lady. There are also a handful of memorable puns, the aforementioned ridiculous ngk bikes (which are never really explained), and a ghost that shows up and says “Schmloooo” a lot during a very important and suspenseful following-people scene, apparently just to ruin the atmosphere. It could easily have not worked, but it does.

My biggest criticism of the book: It is pretty dudely. There are a handful of pretty cool but still pretty minor female characters, a secondary character who is a female house ghost, and Sasha. And I like Sasha, and I actually like most of the other female characters and think they all should totally get more page time in the sequel. Apparently the Council of the Dead and all its ghost cops have a serious gender imbalance in their line of work, though. Overall, though, considering the long history of surly-white-dude-ness and general misogyny in the noir genre, Half-Resurrection Blues makes an excellent refuge for people who love gritty noiry mystery shit but are over the surly-white-dude-ness and general misogyny.

Highly recommended for: Anyone who’s ever read a Raymond Chandler novel and been like “This would be perfect with a little less raging racism and sexism, and maybe some ghosts.” Fans of Castle who are always disappointed at the end of the Nerd Episodes when the vampires/zombies/ghosts/Victorian time travelers turn out not to be real. People who like urban fantasy but are bored of the same old Laurell K. Hamilton knockoff shit. Anyone who really appreciates good use of style and language in genre fiction.

Current Mood: snowed in
Current Location: winter storm juno
Current Music: "Mo Ghile Mear," Mary Black

In a most timely boon from the library gods, Dark Triumph, the second book in Robin LaFevers’ His Fair Assassin trilogy, became available just in time for a weekend bookended by four-hour bus rides between Boston and New York, where me and some of my lovely friendesses were going to check out some awesome Gothy New York things, like the “Death Becomes Her” Victorian mourning fashion exhibit at the Met, and a trendy foofy cocktail bar called Death & Co.

Dark Triumph is considerably darker than Grave Mercy, and Grave Mercy was already about assassins, betrayal, and threat of sexual violence. To this, Dark Triumph adds heaping helpings of child abuse, incest, infanticide, spousal murder… you know, basically everything.

The protagonist of this book is Sybella, a secondary character in the first book, who arrives at the convent in the middle of a full-fledged psychotic breakdown from the goings-on of her previous life. In this book, she’s been sent to infiltrate the family of the sadistic Count d’Albret, a man who already has six dead wives to his name and has repeatedly threatened—and in one case, attempted—to rape thirteen-year-old Duchess Anne if she doesn’t keep the marriage contract that was made on her behalf when she was very young (one of many such contracts). Sybella’s ability to infiltrate this family and spy for the convent is made easier, from the convent’s perspective, but harder, from Sybella’s, by the fact that Sybella is the daughter of Count d’Albret’s fourth wife. And Sybella’s family makes the Lannisters look like the Brady Bunch. Sybella spends a good deal of the book, particularly at the beginning, being near-suicidal, kept going only by the hope of getting permission to kill her supposed father (as an assassin of this particular convent, Sybella’s actual father is Death).

Things start to look up, for a pretty messed-up definition of looking up, when Sybella springs the injured Beast of Waroch from d’Albret’s jail. Beast is a big ugly berserker dude who is nevertheless super friendly and awesome when he is not in the grip of battle rage, and who is a staunch ally of the Duchess. Additionally, the Beast’s sister was d’Albret’s sixth wife, leading to many feelings and much tragic backstory for everybody. Their romance, though of necessity pretty angsty, especially on Sybella’s part, is pretty sweet, in a dark sort of way, with both of them coming to terms with their own darkness and tragic pasts and all that stuff and supporting each other, and generally being heartwarmingly messed up.

Despite all the deeply disturbing stuff, which is really quite disturbing indeed, Dark Triumph still manages to be fun in a way that a story about medieval teenage assassin nuns cannot help but be fun. It’s action-packed, vivid, twisty, fast-paced, sometimes witty, and full of rich characterization and richer intrigues. I highly recommend the bejesus out of it.

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Entries tagged with crime

A man, a plan, a canal, and no company

The play's the thing

Of false-facing and fucking up

For blood and money

Become ungovernable, watch TV

To over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy

In which I am inspired to start doing bicep curls again

A job for thugs and thieves

Cable address: LENIENT

Just say "hell no, Jim Crow"

Mobsters and CEOs and state legislators, oh my

A prison is constructed brick by brick

Journalism, the election and other shabby crap

Family secrets

In Which It May or May Not Be Valentine's Fault that Timothy Is Short

Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie

Content warning: bugs

Now that I think about it, "Anchorage" really is a dumb name for a port city

Ghosts, gentrification and some end-of-the-world type shit

Beauty and the Beast