Some more Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer detective novels

I had seen and lost some secondhand Ross Macdonald novels some months back due to procrastination (ooh …) and also due to some vague sort of discontent regarding pricing … then I felt I was overacting (mmm …).  This was on one of the used books portals on amazon which has a good collection of some hard to get books, both fiction and non-fiction.  I had found and purchased short-story collections of Hammett and Chandler, and some titles of the special set Martin Beck series, the Joe Gores novels … all from here.  I always do this, I do this shillyshallying at the beginning, though I desperately want to buy them books, and then I put them in the shopping cart, I want for a couple of days, nothing happens, I keep visiting the cart … and then what do I see … two of the books in my shopping cart are ‘no longer available with the seller’ … then I say shadaa and slap my (right) palm against my forehead … why didn’t I buy the books that day itself … and all that. 

So, when I found five Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald a couple of weeks back, I hesitated for a while … of course, I wanted all of them … I waited for a couple of days, and then I said whadhdha hell … and here they are …

Sleeping Beauty and The Zebra Striped Hearse are old editions … Sleeping Beauty was written in 1973 and this is a 1975 edition … The Zebra Striped Hearse was written in 1962 and this is a 1978 edition … very old ya, almost reaching antique proportions … and they are contemporaneous with the author, who lived till 1983 … I hoped against hope that one of these would be author signed … he he he …

These are editions published in 1988 and 1996 … not too recent … but the covers, which are not exciting as the earlier two, and also monotonous, make them look as if they are more recent editions …

Off to Mediaeval England with Brother Cadfael, the Benedictine Detective …

As soon as I started reading A Morbid Taste for Bones, a novel I found at Abids during my previous visit, I knew this would happen … it happened more sooner that even I anticipated … A Morbid Taste for Bones, I discovered, to my great joy and pleasure, is the first in the series of Brother Cadfael mystery novels by Ellis Peters (the pseudonym of Edith Mary Pargeter) … set in 12^th century England, these novels are historical murder mysteries, proudly calling themselves ‘Mediaeval whodunits’ … another name I came across for this genre is ‘mystoricals’ and Ellis Peters is said to have revived interest among readers and writers in the ‘historical mystery’ novel …

The ‘detective,’ if one may call him so, in these Mediaeval whodunits is Brother Cadfael … a man of many talents and skills which he acquired when he was a soldier and sailor before deciding to don the robes in his forties by entering the Benedictine Abbey at Shrewsbury … he is also a talented herbalist, apart from being a skilled observer of human nature … and so, Brother Cadfael is consulted as a doctor, detective, becomes a diplomat, spokesperson, and so on …

A Morbid Taste for Bones sets the stage for a display of Brother Cadfael’s many talents … the reader sees him as a diplomat soothing ruffled feathers, a detective who uses his observational skills and medical knowledge to solve a murder, his knowledge of weapons also comes into use … all in all it was a very satisfying read and I enjoyed it … and I wanted more … mmm … not surprising …

I did what I always did when caught in this kind of situation … I went to my online secondhand book sources and wanted to see what was available … I thought there’d only be a few of these medieval whodunits … ha ha ha … tough luck and a big test of my self-control … I located the mother lode, sort of … except for a couple of them, I found the rest of the series of 20 novels … and priced well …  but this time, I exercised self-control big time and wanted to go step-by-step … and bought only three novels … numbers two, three, and four in the series … and look at the covers … 

A bountiful haul at Abids on 19th November …

As if to compensate for letting me return home with an empty bag on the previous Sunday, Abids bestowed a bounty of 8 books on me on Sunday the 19^th … ah well, but I am running ahead of my story …

Vinod had posted a couple of weeks earlier that he found a novel named Chinnery’s Hotel by Jaysinh Birjepatil at Abids (a heartbreaking-lost and serendipitous-found story … read here) and that it was listed by Khushwant Singh as one of the major Indian novels in the last sixty years that left a deep impression on him … and that the author had written two more novels … there was a vague memory of having read about the book when it was released … and also having seen it at Bookpoint here … I checked my online used book sources and was happy to find Chinnery’s Hotel at Abids prices!!  I also found two copies of the author’s other novel The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights … I bought both copies, one copy which I wanted to give Vinod …  

So, off I went to Abids on the 12^th … I called up Vinod to check his whereabouts at Abids and he told me that he is not at Abids and might not be able to make it … aww maan … that was a downer … I couldn’t give the novel to Vinod and I wandered around listlessly trying to see if I could find some books that could lift my spirits … I also had to locate some mathematics workbooks for Mamoon … I found two workbooks, but no novels, no nothing … and I trudged home … really, it was very boring at Abids without Vinod and our chai and chat session and later joint bibliovenating © (ha ha … just like that … I invented/created the word ‘bibliovenator,’ you see … yeah, really … god promise!) with us pointing out books to each other … ah, well … there’s always next Sunday …

But I was not sure because my Appa and Amma were arriving on the next Sunday morning and if I had to visit Abids, it really had to be a flying visit … I checked with Vinod if he would be going to Abids … yes, he said … I checked with Anand if he would be free to take me to Abids and back … he said yes … I told him I’d confirm in the morning … I also alerted Shruti … because this was unprecedented – me going to Abids on two consecutive Sundays!!  All things tied up and I finally decided at 8 in the morning that I’d be going to Abids after all … but I had only an hour’s window for meeting, chatting and bibliovenating …

So, off I went to Abids on the 19^th too … I met Vinod … Umashankar was there too … I gave him The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights … I was happy to see the gleam in his eyes … chalo, main job done … then we had chai and chota samosas … and we chatted for a while … and then we set out … I concentrated only on the ‘20 Rupees’ piles at three places and picked up these 8 books …

In A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters, I found the first novel in a series of ‘medieval whodunit’ novels featuring Brother Cadfael … I started reading this one … very very slowly … and I must say I am happily sucked into this medieval English world of brothers and priors and abbeys and herbariums …  

Another Gulmohar Tree by Aamer Hussein, a Pakistani writer living in London … Aamer Hussein is rather known for his short stories, and this book is a novella that tells a tale of east-west romance …  

I found two books by Elmore Leonard, one of my favourite crime fiction writers … Elmore Leonard wrote a good number of westerns too and Gunsights is one such tale and I haven’t read any westerns by Elmore Leonard, and so this was a good one … and after reading Ron Scheer’s article How to Write like Elmore Leonard: Gunsights (1979), Gunsights appears juicier … 

I have a copy of Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval already, but I picked it up along with Robert B. Parker’s Sudden Mischief, another doubles, for my colleagues … members of the small and informal book reading club for which I lend books from my collection … 

  

I found another Doctorow novel, The Waterworks, to add to my Doctorow collection all exclusively found at Abids … 

When I picked up Tarka the Otter, I thought I was buying a children’s book for Mamoon, and then the usual curiosity bug bit me and I realized that this book has quite some history behind it … Tarka the Otter, written in 1927, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1928, and has never been out of print!  It was not written for children per se, but became popular with young adults and the book was praised by Thomas Hardy and T E Lawrence and has influenced literary figures like Ted Hughes, Roger Deakin, and Rachel Carson and nature writers Kenneth Allsop  and Denys Watkins-Pitchford described it as "the greatest animal story ever written.” 

It was at Abids that I first ran into a David Quantick book, and then found another and I liked what I read … and then I found another one on the 19^th, The Dangerous Book for Middle-Aged Men … 

I was super happy after the haul and more so, afterwards discovering that some of these are real gems ... thank you Abids!!!