I found it in Alan Furst. About a year ago, I discovered his work and bought several novels. He has several mysterious and appealing novels. I even recently picked up on in audio CD.

For my first foray, I read The Polish Correspondent. The titular character is Alexander de Milja, an aristocrat who becomes an excellent spy as he traverses Europe in the wake of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. First, he oversees the smuggling of Polish gold reserves aboard a nondescript passenger train, which de Milja himself selected. The journey culminates in a shoot out with bandits and a mad dash to Romania. But, tellingly, the heroes are as much the Polish commoners aboard the train as they are de Milja. This appears to be a Furst theme.

De Milja later settles in Paris — often the centerpiece of Furst’s tales, I gather — to conduct espionage for the Poles and the English. The likable officer quickly becomes exceptional as a spy and handler. So good, in fact, he out survives his own operatives, like the memorable teenage radio operator whose demise from chomping down on a cyanide capsule matches the bomb with which she kills her SS nemesis. The scene is a wonderful, understated bit of black humor that Furst excels at.

De Milja also has love affairs — alluring, middle-aged European women who keep Alexander at a distance emotionally so that the inevitable partings ache, but only a little.

Finally, the Polish officer is assigned to the Eastern front, a veritable hell on earth. It’s a mission he enters knowing he won’t survive. But, then, de Milja learns to master life as a partisan, too. He completes his futile mission in rescuing a Pole, who later dies. Finally, it’s time for a desperate and cold escape with a Jewish woman whom he saves. Here, de Milja shows again his likable qualities as he sacrifices much to save her (and himself).

De Milja’s a wonderful protagonist — likable, smart, properly cynical when he must be. He’s a very Euro-styled James Bond in a much harsher milieu. But the minor characters surrounding him are just as likable and richly written.

If the novel suffers at all, it’s from its episodic structure. It works nearly as a collection of novellas rather than a novel structure. The train escape, taken alone, is a fine short work. The drama of the final book builds to a climactic prison escape, but then flattens out as de Milja and the Jewish woman flee. As such, the novel survives as a reflection on the troubling nature of war and espionage. While there are exciting scenes, the book is not a thriller. Furst takes his time in parts. In others, he’s wry and sometimes implies the dirty work of war and spying, making the reader understand the remains of violence in a confectioners shop, for one example. 

Furst’s writing is rich and detailed, but not overwrought. He captures rich, European details — early war Paris comes alive in his prose. He has a legion of delightful and tragic minor characters, themselves also rich and quintessentially European. All is contained within a novel with a subtler structure than the usual spy thriller. The end result is superb, but will not deliver a quick fix or adrenaline rush.

The Polish Officer: A

The narrator is one of the Midnight’s Children, a child born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the day of India’s independence. These thousand babes grow to earn supernatural powers. The narrator can read thoughts, which accounts for much of his storytelling, and he assembles the thousand children into a kind of telepathic congress. He’s not alone — his “twin” has supernatural knees. Yes, knees, between which he can crush and kill.

The twin is actually a family friend, but there’s a critical twist. An English nursemaid switches the two boys at birth, and the narrator himself is born a bastard of a renegade Englishman and his servant Indian mother. But, because of the switch, he’s raised instead in a wealthy family of unusual characters. Meanwhile, the other boy grows in the poor family and becomes a violent killer then war hero, all hinted at a distance through the narrator’s tales.

That narrator is an untrustworthy fellow. He is — or claims to be — the catalyst of so many of the affairs and deaths and dramas surrounding him. The narrator often refuses to admit his responsibility, or to downplay his involvement. The effects are often tragic.

What his story crafts amid the web of magical realism and shady retelling is a strange and sometimes beautiful menagerie of tales that stab at the heart of India in the modern world. It’s not a subject I know much about, but Rushdie brings alive India of the 1950s and 1960s in personal detail, from the toothpaste brands to the wars in Kashmir. Mumbai in particular percolates with color and colorful characters.

It’s a challenging book, dense in its sometimes feverish prose and thick with layers of filtered tales. The book trails off into oblivion as modern India — and it’s pickled curries — grow beyond the reach of the narrator’s arms. He falls apart, literally, and the reader realizes there’s one thing he didn’t lie about: “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”

Midnight’s Children: A-

The first kind of writer’s block is the dreaded blank slate. It’s that intimidating phase of creation where the entire universe of possibility is open before you, and you can’t write one shred of it because you don’t know where to even begin, perhaps even what to write at all.

I don’t often lack for ideas. But, even with some broad-storke notions of what to write, I still have to zero in on something concrete, something compelling.

The second kind of writer’s block is getting stuck in the middle of a story. You’ve got characters in some situation, and you may even have a general idea where you want them to be later in the story. But, as a writer you hit that wall and you’re not sure how to move them into the next step in the story. This kind of block has its own challenges and frustrations as a writer. But, at least  you know you’ve gotten somewhere.

Right now, I’m working on a short story and I’ve hit that second writer’s block. It’s a turning point in the story. I even know where I want the characters to be. But, I can’t yet get them there.

Some writers have great advice about overcoming these problems. Some even publish about the topic. My advice is recognize a couple important things as a writer.

First, it doesn’t much matter if you’re a literary genius or a best seller. Even if you are, you aren’t going to write or sell nothing. Accept living in your own skin. Accept your own ideas as intrinsically worthy to the most important person in your life — you.

Second, don’t try too hard to look outside yourself for solutions. Take a break. Go live. Read and watch other media. Read. Do what you do to rejuvenate. Those things will get your brain working again. Don’t worry if you feel like you’re “stealing ideas” by reading other material. If you’re really into writing, your brain can’t help itself. It will think up ideas in your own way. That is creation.

Third, if you have the option, let someone read what you’ve written so far. Some people don’t like to do this. I’m mixed on it myself. But often, another reader will see exactly the corner you’ve painted yourself into. And, often, they’ll say something obvious that you can’t see, like “Why in the world would this guy say that?” Answer that question, and the dam’s likely to break. You may have to ask questions, and that’s ok. The notion that we are alone in writing our work, and that others don’t contribute to the creation is pretty foolish.

Now, if I can just get myself out of that corner I’ve painted myself into…

In an echo of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales, Chabon casts two very different sword-swinging wise-crackers. Both are Jews from disparate backgrounds. Amram is a hulking African who wields a Varangian axe and a command of languages far and wide (he’s served the emperor of Byzantium). His counterpart is Zelikman, a lanky Frank physician with a gloomly disposition. Both are wildly clever and ably skilled. Chabon makes both endearing, but Zelikman usually steals the scenes with his obnoxious hat and anti-hero antics.

Chabon writes one hell of an adventure tale. Each chapter is a fun twist and a healthy dose of cliff-hanging. The tale is almost effortless in its tidyness, yet somehow manages not to be predictable. After swindling some townsfolk, the pair get caught up escorting a prince who is not everything he appears to be, and yet is more. By the end of the  tale, they’ve jaunted about the foothills of the Caucasus, allied themselves with elephants against Rus invaders, fought — and then recruited — Muslim knights, and ushered in a coup.

The banter is fun, the action exciting, and Chabon sneaks beneath it all some commentary on Jewishness (and Islam) quite relevant to today. His prose in the book is baroque and obscure, deliberately so. It’s a nod, I think, to the idiosyncracies of many admirable pulp adventure writers. It’s at once a joke and tribute, and it also manages to keep the text’s voice lively and smart. It works.

Wonderfully, the book includes a brief afterword cum apologia by Chabon explaining his forays into the lands of adventure writing. He more famously treads in, as he calls it, late-century naturalism a la Wonder Boys. He also explains his only slightly tongue-in-cheek working title for the book, “Jews with Swords.” The afterword is well worth a read for anyone on either side of that absurd divide between serious fiction and everything else.

Gentlemen of the Road: A-

Captain Molly McScowl and Her Birthday Adventure
By Matt Snyder 

Not too far away, across the seas there was a fearsome scourge of a pirate named Molly McScowl. She sailed the pirate ship Terrible under the black flag of the skull and bones. She captained a crew of thirty-three pirate boys. She struck fear into the hearts of good ship captains across the southern seas. And most importantly of all, Molly McScowl was in the third grade.

“It is a very hard thing to be a pirate captain when you are in the third grade,” Molly told her vicious crew of of thirty-three pirate boys, “I have spelling tests every Friday. How can we bury our treasure when I have spelling tests on Friday?”

“YAR!” replied her boys, which is what they said most of the time.

“And it is an especially hard thing to be a pirate captain when it is my birthday and there is no one but you sorry, good-for-nothing boys to celebrate with. Tomorrow is my birthday. Who will bring me presents and birthday cake?”

Now, Molly had a pet parrot named Goodnight who could say ninety-nine words. Fortunately, one of his words was birthday and another word was cake.

“Birthday cake!” whistled Goodnight the parrot. “Birthday cake! Yahoo!” Yahoo was also one of the ninety-nine parrot words.

“YAR!” replied her thirty-three boys. Several of the boys had eye-patches, but none of them had lost any eyes. Molly pretended not to notice when they flipped up their eye patches to look across the sea.

“Very well then,” said Molly McScowl, “since I am a pirate captain, and since I have a spelling test tomorrow, today we will sail out and find me a birthday cake.”

And so, with Goodnight the parrot perched on top of her big, black hat, Molly pointed over the horizon in hopes that out there in the wide sea was a birthday cake with her name on it. Or, at least a birthday cake with someone’s name on it that she could steal like a proper pirate and eat all herself, with maybe some frosting for her thirty-three pirate boys. When she pointed, the thirty-three boys ran all about the ship pulling ropes and heaving levers and wheels and shouting things that pirates shout. The ship Terrible creaked and moaned – but not too much – and glided toward the horizon.

Once out to sea, Molly McScowl pulled from within her polka dotted pirate coat a spyglass. She stretched out the spyglass and put it up to her eye, looking for a ship to pirate, or maybe a port to plunder. In the eyepiece, very far away, she spied what she thought was a spout of steam.

She yelled to her thirty-three boys, “Hard to the left, boys! There’s a spout of steam, and no doubt a ship to pirate!”

“YAR!” cried the boys, and they scurried about the ship pulling more ropes and turning the wheel.

“Plunder.” said Goodnight, which was one of the parrot’s ninety-nine words. “Yahoo!” he whistled.

But when the pirate ship Terrible turned hard left and sailed to the spout of steam, there was no ship there at all. Molly looked all around. “That’s funny. There’s nothing here,” she said.

Just then, a blast of sea spray shot up from water. Molly and her thirty-three boys ran to the side of the ship where they realized it wasn’t steam at all. It was the spray from the biggest whale any pirate captain has ever seen.

“Run out the cannons!” shouted Molly. “Hard to the right!” She was ready to do what good pirates do in a rush of cannons and smoke and every boy for himself.

But, before she could tell her boys to fire their cannons the whale said a friendly, “Hullo.”

Molly opened her mouth, but she couldn’t talk. The whale said hello! Even the thirty-three boys were surprised. Those who had eye-patches lifted them up to see the whale grin.

“Um, hello,” said Molly. “I’m Molly McScowl, scourge of the seas!”

“Hello Captain McScowl. You have a lovely ship. What do you call it?”

“This is the pirate ship Terrible! We sail the seas in it looking for plunder.”

“YAR!” said the thirty-three boys.

“Oh my,” said the whale. “The pirate ship Terrible? You mean the one that sank the galleons carrying all that peanut butter to the Antilles?”

“The very same,” Molly said proudly with her hands on her hips.

“And the same ship that stole all the chocolate milk from Tortuga?”

“That was us,” she said, swelling with pride.

“And the same ship that prevented all those candy canes from rounding the Cape of Horn before Christmas?

“YAR!” said the thirty-three boys, which made Molly McScowl smile.

 “Well then, I don’t think we can be friends. You see, I was planning on eating all that peanut butter. And, I love chocolate milk even more than regular milk. And, I don’t much care for candy canes, but that was just mean!”

With that, the giant whale blasted Molly and her thirty-three boys with a spout of water from his head, and dove deep down in the water. Before any of them could react – for they were thoroughly drenched with stinky, fish smelling water – the whale came up from the deep with his jaws open wide and swallowed up the pirate ship Terrible in one gigantic gulp.

Everything went dark. Never had Molly and her thirty-three pirate boys seen such pitch blackness.

“Goodnight!” squawked Goodnight the parrot. This was, of course, how Goodnight the parrot got his name. Whenever things went dark, he squawked out “Goodnight.” Right then, Molly wished he didn’t do that all the time.

 “What’ll we do?” said one of the thirty-three pirate boys. “I’m scared!” The thirty-three boys began hollering and screaming. They ran around in the darkness, bumping into each other and yelling. They were terrified of the dark, especially when the dark is inside the rather stinky, fish smelling tummy of the biggest whale any pirate captain has ever seen.

Molly McScowl didn’t want to admit it, but she was also a little afraid. She wasn’t sure how they could ever get out of the belly of this whale, and she was very worried that she might miss her spelling test the next day. Worse, she knew there was very little chance she would have any birthday cake at all.

If being a pirate captain taught her anything, it was that captaining a ship of thirty-three screaming pirate boys was impossible. It was a very hard to thing to get them to listen when they behaved as pirates should. But, when they were screaming and scared, it was hopeless. She knew she must get them to listen if any of them wanted to see daylight or birthday cake again.

First, she yelled “QUIET!” But, the boys didn’t hear her.

Then she yelled “I’m going to make you all walk the plank!” A few of the boys heard that, and they quieted down some. But most ran around hollering and screaming.

Finally, Molly McScowl, scourge of the seas, hollered as loud as she could “BOYS ARE CHICKEN!”

All at once, the boys all shouted back “WE ARE NOT!”

Molly smiled. Her trick worked. The thirty-three pirate boys forgot all about being afraid of the dark.

“Well, then, if you aren’t chicken, then I suppose you know how to steer this ship with your eyes closed,” she said.

The thirty-three pirate boys scurried off with their eyes shut. They pulled ropes and heaved levers and wheels and shouted things that pirates shout. Even though it was dark, Molly pulled from her polka-dotted pirate coat her trusty spyglass, hoping that she might see something in the whale’s tummy to sail toward. She stretched out the spyglass and put it up to her eye and spun all around. Just when she was sure there was nothing to see but dark, she spun back again and saw a tiny fleck of light. It looked like a tiny star far away, somewhere across the tummy of the whale.

“Hard to the left, boys!” she ordered. “I see a tiny bit of light.”

The boys scrunched shut their eyes. They pulled more ropes. They spun the wheel hard left. The pirate ship Terrible creaked and groaned – but not too much – and glided toward the light. As they got closer, the light grew bigger and brighter until Molly and her thirty-three pirate boys could see many lights flickering in the dark. Then with a hard thud, the pirate ship Terrible came to a crashing halt.

“Land ho!” said Goodnight the parrot, still perched on Molly’s hat.

Molly tucked away her spyglass and leaped overboard onto an island of junk. It was a pile of wrecked ships, old tires, some boots without laces, seaweed, empty jars of peanut butter and cartons of chocolate milk, and a million smelly old fish bones. Way up on top of the heap of junk there were a hundred flickering lights. And, now that she was ashore, Molly could see an old man standing next to the lights. Molly climbed up the heap, and her thirty-three pirate boys followed.

“Ahoy there,” creaked the old man’s voice. He wore a big black hat, and white tufts of hair poked out from underneath it. He was very old indeed.

“Ahoy,” Molly said. Then she saw that the lights were a hundred candles on top of a strange looking cake. “Who are you?”

“Why, I’m Billy McCringe, and I’m a pirate captain like yourself, from the looks of your polka dotted coat and black hat. Nice parrot.”

“Thank you,” said Molly. “Well, Captain McCringe, what in the world are you doing here?” Molly asked.

“It’s my birthday, of course! I’m ninety-nine today, and I’ve made this cake for myself. It’s mostly peanut butter, with only a few fish bones inside. As you know, it is a very hard thing to be a pirate captain.”

“Tell me about it,” said Molly as she rolled her eyes.

“And it’s an especially hard thing when you’re ninety-nine and don’t have a birthday cake, nor anyone to share it with, not even a bunch of sorry, good-for-nothing boys. So it’s a good thing you all showed up when you did. Care for a piece?”

“YAR!” cried the boys, and they swarmed all around the old pirate captain and his birthday cake, licking their lips.

“To tell you the truth, we set out looking for just such a cake, if you can believe it. I am a pirate captain. I’m Captain McScowl. And, my ninth birthday is tomorrow. I’d happily take that cake from you. But, I’m much more worried about ever getting out of this whale. I have a spelling test tomorrow! But now I’m going to be here forever.”

“Well, there are worse things,” said Billy McCringe.

“Like what?” asked Molly. But the old captain just shrugged.

“Tell you what, Captain McScowl. My wish came true before I could make it. You make a wish and blow out these candles. A pirate captain like yourself should have no trouble blowing ninety-nine candles, I can tell you.”

Now, Molly was quite sure Captain McCringe was crazy. But she decided to try, because there wasn’t much else she could do. Besides, the thirty-three pirate boys would probably go bonkers again if they didn’t soon have cake. So Molly closed her eyes and thought and thought. She thought of all the things she could wish for, like a big cannon to blast her way out of the whale, or a new ship named Terrible Too to take over the seas, or even the biggest birthday cake any pirate captain has ever seen. And then she thought of something she really wanted. Something that might even get her out of this mess.

I wish I do well on my spelling test tomorrow, she thought to herself. Then she took in three great big breaths and blew out the ninety-nine candles like a lantern in a squall.

Everything went dark.

“Goodnight!” squawked Goodnight the parrot.

The next day, Molly McScowl took her third grade spelling test and did quite well. She missed only one.

The Club Dumas is a mystery thriller with shades of the noir detective. In this case, protagonist Lucas Corso is a book detective. He’s a mercenary hired by rich — and usually corrupt — book collectors to buy, sell, trade and find rare books. I found Corso fascinating. (My wife, who read the book with me, found him deplorable. Ce la guerre!) He’s a weasel of a man, exceptionally clever, and lonely. He occupies his time drinking gin and romanticizing his Napoleonic ancestor. Oh yes, and books — very expensive, very rare books.

The story begins with a book collector’s suspicious suicide. Corso gets hired to verify the dead man’s possession – a rare manuscript written by Alexandre Dumas. It’s a chapter from The Three Musketeers. Subsequently, he’s hired by an obsessive collector of the occult to discover which of three extant editions of The Book of Nine Doors is a forgery.

Thus begins a twin strand of narrative where Corso races to find eccentric book collectors and examine their occult tomes while he’s pursued by a modern-day Milady and Rochefort (Dumas’ famous villains) as a strange conspiracy re-enacts The Three Musketeers with him at the center. The eccentrics wind up dead, and Corso demonstrates his cleverness.

Along the way he finds the girl. The alluring woman gives Corso fictional names and careless excuses. She’s slightly infuriating to read. Corso asks her questions I wanted to know, and she’s just aloof. There are many hints that she’s supernatural – a guardian angel maybe, or even the Devil. Through her shining, green-eyed seduction we learn that Corso once loved and lost. It explains his emptiness and callousness. And, in the end, explains why the green-eyed girl is so fond of him. She is, it turns out, rather diabolical.

Throughout the book, Corso works to unravel the pictorial mystery within The Book of Nine Doors. The book contains nine engravings, and the novel actually shows the images. This teases out one of the most captivating mysteries of the book. I desperately wanted Corso to unravel this occult puzzle. And, he does. But, the result is disappointing.

Pérez-Reverte gives us a lesson in narrative; I’m still not sure I needed it. At times, the characters actually imagine that their absurd situations are so dreadful that perhaps they’re merely fictional characters in a book. Of course, they are. The author’s teasinge. This itself, I don’t mind. He’s not the first to dabble in post-modernism. But, Pérez-Reverte has another, grander trick up his sleeve. To spoil it for readers, his trick is a lesson in how we perceive narrative. Those twin strands of narrative are ruses. They’re not intertwined. Corso – and therefore readers like me – have impressed upon these twin strands interconnectivity.

And what is the result? Corso, for all his cleverness, learns that he’s lost his soul long ago. He’s Faustian. And, in the end, he knows it. He’s smitten with the girl, and she’s pulling the strings behind it all, wrecking selfish interests for her own amusement. Let’s just say the devils in the details.

Like I said, I’m not sure I needed the lesson in constructing narrative. Fortunately, I the lesson entertained the hell out of me. It had all the wonderful trappings of that Umberto Eco style occult mystery (Eco himself actually has a cameo in the story!) in a tidy detective fiction package. It’s a good read with some frayed ends.

The Club Dumas: B-

His memoirs on writing amused me. They might even have inspired. It’s not much of a book to review (Oh hell, ok: B+). But, it is full of great lines. Here are some of the best:

When you’re six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. I’m not editorializingm, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remidn yoruself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

You go on the third level, of course, and begin to write real fiction. Why shouldn’t you? Why should you fear? Carpenters don’t build monsters, after all; they build houses, stores and banks. They build some of wood a plank at a time and some of brick a brick at a time. You will build a paragraph at a time, constructing these of your vocabulary and your knowledge of grammar and basic style. As long as you stay level-on-the-level and shave even every door, you can build whatever you like — whole mansions, if you have the energy.

But you need the room, you need the door, and you need the determination to shut the door. You need a concrete goal, as well.

I also tore through Private Wars, the next novel in the Tara Chace series.

Here, Tara Chace is out of the service with a baby. This is serious business given the thriller ending of the previous book. Meanwhile, Paul Crocker, her chain-smoking, hard ass boss deals with bureaucratic hell. His own boss is out to get him, and Tara’s replacement sends an operation into chaos. These first several chapters make for the most interesting reading in this more uneven book. In particular, Crocker’s at his most compelling here as Crocker plays politics and juggles his own home life some. He tends to be the best character in the series.

The rest of the thriller is set in Uzbekistan, where a dying dictator’s daughter and son squabble over who will assume control of the country. The daughter is a Machiavellian nymphomaniac whose lover is a secret police sadist. Turns out, this guy’s the real villain. So, the story pits Chace against him as she tries to smuggle the brother out of the country and maybe figure out where some rocket launchers are along the way.

The story is about Tara’s comeback to special operations and Paul Crocker’s desperation to avoid a lousy demotion. Again, Rucka is willing to do awful things to his protagonist. The effect is a build-up to Tara’s torture and near rape at the hands of the secret police antagonist. It’s tense, but it’s a no-brainer figure out Rucka won’t go that far. No rape is imminent, and her rescue is minutes away.

This willingness to torture Tara (figuratively and literally) is what makes Rucka’s writing so great. Here, it almost works as well as the previous novel. But, not quite. The plot becomes to uneven, particuarly at the fast-forward moment following Tara’s rescue. Rucka actually interrupts the narrative chapters with a psychological profile about Chace, who has post-traumatic stress disorder (who wouldn’t!) and a bloody obvious need for revenge. While a bit of interesting verisimilitude, the suspense suffers.

Of course, Tara enacts her revenge, and regains her hard edge as Britain’s finest “Minder” (Rucka’s slang for special agent). Best of all, she sneaks in one surprise decision at the close of the story that turns out to be the clearest sign that Tara Chace really is back, motherhood and all.

Private Wars: B-