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The Lime Twig is a surreal, avant-garde novel melded with pulp crime fiction. (Many a review describes it as something like Dick Francis meets David Lynch.) The basic story—a race horse heist gone horribly wrong—is told in nightmarish, impressionistic sequences. The cover of the book, featuring a grainy, blurry mess of images that only come into focus when you really concentrate, is a pretty apt translation of my experience of the book.
I can't remember how exactly I first came across John Hawkes—in some chain of online links—but only a couple weeks later I found a copy of The Lime Twig in a used bookstore and excitedly picked it up, thinking it a nice coincidence. As I was paying for the books, the store owner stopped at The Lime Twig and got a funny smile on her face as she explained that John Hawkes had been her college writing teacher (which explains why the book was prominently displayed on the wall). I'm not really sure of the point of that story but it's what I remember most about the book when I see it.
Georges Simenon might be one my most read authors, maybe because he wrote so many books--around 200--and because they're so incredibly readable (and short). I picked this one up on a shelf at work not long after reading an article about him in BookForum, so it was a nicely timed find. One of 75 novels starring the fictional police detective Inspector Maigret, this one was written in 1949, about midway into Simenon's writing career. In an increasingly complex investigation, Maigret attempts to prove that a murder has been committed, even though no body has been discovered.Revisiting this one makes me want to crack open another Maigret novel. I've got at least a few more unread ones on the shelf.
This is, as far as I can remember, my first foray into spy novels, and it's a pretty good one--Graham Greene said it was "the best spy story I have ever read." Alec Leamas, a British agent in early Cold War Berlin, is called back to London by Control after his last double agent is killed. Instead of being dismissed, he is given a rather dangerous assignment: play the part of a disgraced agent, a defector, as part of a plot to bring down Mundt, an assassin for the Abteilung, the East German Secret Service.
The novel is of course suspenseful and entertaining, but it also seemed somewhat more literary than I had expected. It's well written and carefully plotted, and Leamas is more of an anti-hero, hard drinking and disillusioned, than some kind of slick action hero. Good stuff all around.
One of Simenon's romans durs (the current NYRB edition has been retitled to Three Bedrooms in Manhattan for some reason), in which two lonely and desperate people meet late one night at an all-hours diner in New York. Together they move from one bar to another, and then from bedroom to bedroom around the city (a hotel, hers, and then his). You can almost visualize the thick haze of smoke, whiskey, and desperation present throughout the book. The writing is hard, unsentimental, and spare--romantic and yet not. The noirish elements might almost be a bit much--it definitely doesn't live up to The Widow, which is still my favorite. 
Simenon's many praises.
This novella by Graham Greene was written with the sole purpose of being adapted into a screenplay. In the book's preface, Greene states that "a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script." Which is an interesting observation, though I'm sure that there have been plenty of incredible films made since then without being written out in novel form first. Regardless, The Third Man is a classic film, full of suspense and intrigue and atmosphere, so I suppose Greene's methods worked for him. As a novel it is not Greene's strongest (it wasn't really intended to be a novel in the first place), but worth reading if you like the film (I'd start with that first though).
I'd never read anything by Walter Mosley before, but I've lately been more and more interested in hardboiled crime fiction, and had been curious about this new series about an aging, hard-drinking, ex-boxer New York P.I. named Leonid McGill. McGill has spent most of his career working for criminals, involved in countless shady deals, wrongly setting up innocent people, taking bribes from hitmen, and so on. Now he wants to change "from crooked to slightly bent." Flawed characters are always more interesting than "good people," so the bad guy as the hero angle works pretty nicely. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece but I enjoyed the book and look forward to the second in the series, Known to Evil.
I recently spotted this pair of French editions of two Inspector Maigret novels by Georges Simenon, and even though I don't know the language I loved the cover art, not to mention the coordinating aspect, so much that I couldn't help buying them. The iconic silhouette of the pipe, the man on the back, the rings of smoke. Maybe I'll teach myself French so I can read them. (Probably not.)
If you open the book and lay it face down it looks like Maigret is smoking his pipe. Pretty awesome.
This is the follow-up to French's In the Woods, and features one of the same characters, Detective Cassie Maddox. The body of a woman is found in an old stone cottage outside of Dublin, and the dead woman and Cassie are identical. Even more bizarre, the name on her college I.D. is the same as one of the fake names that Cassie went by as an undercover cop several years back. The police report the victim to be injured but alive, allowing Cassie to go undercover once again, to step into the life of her doppelganger, into the lives of her four housemates, in an attempt to uncover the truth. The book was totally engrossing. I can't remember the last time I was so rapt up in a book that I didn't want to put it down, and more importantly, that I didn't want it to end.
The Hotel Majestic is the first novel by Georges Simenon that I read. I'd been interested in him after reading an article Luc Sante had written about him in Bookforum, and not too long afterward I spotted this book on one of the take shelves* around the building at work and picked it up. While I've since found that I prefer the romans dur (his darker noir fiction) that NYRB has just reissued, the Inspector Maigret novels are nearly just as strong, and rather addicting.
Simenon, pictured on the inside front cover of the book (the inside back cover features his signature), wrote hundreds of books, including 75 Maigret novels (and dozens more stories). Simenon himself was critical of some of his work, knowing when he was just churning it out to pay the bills. But I have yet to come across one of those.
*I've gone over this before, but there are bookshelves throughout the building where I work full of free books. It's gotten to the point where I have to remind myself when I go into an actual bookstore that I can't simply just take things off the shelves and leave.
Between vacation (hello, Baltimore!) and work, I just haven't had time to scan books lately. But after a brief hiatus I hope to be back to regular posting (for awhile, at least).
I mostly bought this book for the great cover, and the fact that Francois Truffaut made it into a movie.
But it's actually a pretty decent read--not your typical cheap pulp novel. I got a little annoyed with how the character's thoughts were written in the second person, but otherwise I'd say I enjoyed it. I haven't seen the movie in awhile so I couldn't tell you if it diverged much from the plot of the book. And yet I found myself picturing the characters in black and white, seeing shots of a movie in my head.
I have lately been gobbling up many of Georges Simenon's crime novels. Most notably the creator of the character Inspector Maigret, he also wrote many romans dur (i.e. "serious novels"), which I suppose this one falls under, though it was probably my least favorite that I've read thus far.
Simenon was a ridiculously prolific writer who published nearly 200 novels. (Even Nora Roberts has only 165--although she's not dead yet and will probably catch up to him. But Simenon still wins just because.)
I love the subtly creepy typography on this cover. When the paperback came out, Penguin distributed a copy to each of its employees because they were that excited about it. I'm glad that they did because I might not have picked it up otherwise. I don't read that many mysteries (though I do enjoy a good one now and again), but this one is particularly compelling, though I will say that the ending is a bit of a disappointment.The paperback of The Likeness, a follow-up to this book, just came out, and I am hoping it is just as gripping and entertaining--and more importantly, that the ending is more satisfying!
The Lime Twig is a surreal, avant-garde novel melded with pulp crime fiction. (Many a review describes it as something like Dick Francis meets David Lynch.) The basic story—a race horse heist gone horribly wrong—is told in nightmarish, impressionistic sequences. The cover of the book, featuring a grainy, blurry mess of images that only come into focus when you really concentrate, is a pretty apt translation of my experience of the book.
I can't remember how exactly I first came across John Hawkes—in some chain of online links—but only a couple weeks later I found a copy of The Lime Twig in a used bookstore and excitedly picked it up, thinking it a nice coincidence. As I was paying for the books, the store owner stopped at The Lime Twig and got a funny smile on her face as she explained that John Hawkes had been her college writing teacher (which explains why the book was prominently displayed on the wall). I'm not really sure of the point of that story but it's what I remember most about the book when I see it.
