Shrapnel Wounds by Tom Crowley

I first made the acquaintance of Tom Crowley as a mystery writer, not a memoirist. He was attending the 2014 Bouchercon in Long Beach and we started up a conversation on that first evening, which ultimately led to my reading the first of his Matt Chance mystery novels, Viper's Tail, which I reviewed here at Not New For Long a while ago. One of the things that I found interesting about that book was how Matt's former life as a soldier came through and affected his choices in the present.

So it was with great interest that I read Crowley's account of his own experience as a 'grunt' in Vietnam. In his forward, Crowley writes about the niche he is trying to fill with this account. He says that there are autobiographies by authentic war heroes,  and there are books by war correspondents, often excellent, but not really reflecting the day to day life of the soldier on the ground. Crowley wanted to speak for the many combat veterans who for the most part haven't really spoken out about their experiences. As Crowley himself found, it is no easy thing to do to revisit traumatic memories long enough to write about them.

Crowley came into the war before our national disillusionment about it had set in, so despite being pressured into service by the looming specter of the draft, he was able to enlist on his own terms. As someone who came of age in the years of protest, it was interesting to me to read of how army life was experienced before the corrosion of trust had set in. Crowley shows  himself to be molded in a particular American grain by resolving early on to do his best, to make the most of it, and even the grueling boot camp days and officer's training he seems to have taken more as a challenge and actually enjoyed. And once given a platoon on the ground in Vietnam, he takes his responsibilities seriously.

Although Crowley claims to be no hero, he does prove himself to be a leader of men, and is conscientious and resourceful in the way he treats the soldiers under him. One short maxim which was passed on to him by a more seasoned soldier as he was about to take up his command was one that I have actually tried to integrate into my own life a little more since reading this book, though admittedly in situations where the stakes aren't anywhere as high. "If you think it, do it." The idea here was that even if you and your troops are bone tired from marching down some trail all day, trying to stay alert for ambushes, if you think to set up a perimeter that can be guarded, you should do even if every bone in your body just wants to rest.

Countering this American resoluteness and ingenuity, though, is a growing sense of how the war is really being played and by whom, and the career military takes some heavy criticism as the book progresses. Decisions are made by higher ups for political reasons that have nothing to do with the troops on the ground but only the generals' long term career aims. Although, Crowley is restrained in his expression of this, it does come through all the same.

I am not normally a student of the history of the Vietnam war, knowing just famous names and battles, the tunnels of Cuchi and other things that are part of our vague cultural associations with the place. So one thing that surprised me was to learn that for the most part, the Vietnam was fought by soldiers who were only there on a one year tour of duty (long enough, obviously, if you were one of the soldiers.) But this set up a dynamic where the North Vietnamese were steadily watching and learning about their opponents, while the Americans were inevitably always learning everything all over again. Although perhaps this doesn't mean the American mission was doomed from the start, it's certainly one scenario that can't help crossing one's mind.

This is a fast, absorbing read even if you aren't a vet or someone passionate about reading war history. It succeeds in interesting us in the life of one foot soldier who perhaps isn't as ordinary as he claims to have been, but nevertheless experienced what many, many young men did in that war and helps us to understand it better. 

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

I was intrigued with the premise of this book after reading about it recently on Rob Kitchin's blog, The View from the Blue House. Rob writes admirably concise, fair and nonspoilerish reviews of crime fiction and you should check out his blog if you need some recs, as he covers a wide swath of territory.

"Slow horses" is what the book's  elite spy world calls fellow spies who have been put out to pasture but refuse to quite die. Usually their banishment is due to some screw-up that can't be swept under the carpet. The case of River Cartwright, who leads us into this world, is given as an opening example. Then we're introduced to Slough House, the refuge for these ne'er-do-wells, and the punning source of the failed spies' nickname. Let's  just say the place has no resemblance to MI-5 headquarters and that's putting it mildly.

I like Herron's description of the particular hell that these people, once members of the best and the brightest, find themselves in. Their actual jobs are no more boring than a lot of people's work is, but it's the haunting sense of what could have been but for one slip, one lapse, one indiscretion that makes this a purgatory for them. As in Dante's description of hell, there is no camaraderie, as everyone is both too preoccupied with themselves and too aware of their neighbors' failures to reach out to each other. However, a kidnapping is about to change all that.

The subsequent story is nice and twisty, and although some of the twists can be foreseen once you get the way Herron's plotting works, I still found a few clever surprises. And the author is successful in keeping a large cast of characters distinguishable from each other and giving them all their own story arc and the story unfolds nicely.

As I may have mentioned a time or two before, I do love me a good London novel, and as Slow Horses takes place almost entirely within its environs, it fit the bill for me on that level too.

Slow Horses is the first of a series and I happen to have a galley of the second, Dead Lions, which I'd picked up just because of the Soho imprint.

Lucky me. 

A Good Man in Africa at Escape Into Life

My review of Willam Boyd's first novel, winner of the Whitbread Prize and the Somerset Maugham award, is up at Escape Into Life. Check it out!

Call Me Ishmael

I'm a little behind on the reviewing end of things here, but that doesn't mean I don't have news. I just got an email from Poets and Writers magazine this afternoon about an innovative and book related idea. It's called Call Me Ishmael. Apparently, if you happen to be in one of a few select but soon to be expanded places, you will see an old-fashioned rotary phone and  that phone might start ringing. When you pick up the receiver, someone will tell you about a book they read that's had a major impact on their life. From what I understand of it, the idea is a little bit like Storycorps, where "ordinary people" tell some key story from their lives. Only this one is all about books.

If you don't see any old style phones  near you, fear not. You can also just go to the Call Me Ishmael website and watch an old-fashioned typewriter type out someone's message as they speak it. New features apparently weekly. At the bottom of that page, you will find the steps that you too can use to tell a story about a book you loved.

                                                                    Fuguestock

Hav and Euphoria at EIL

I'm a little behind on my reviews here, but I do have a couple of links to some reviews I've written for Escape Into Life recently, which I've either been too busy or too lazy to post about here. The first is for Hav, Jan Morris's book about a city that may be a fictional place, but is really an amalgam of all the places she ever visited in her long and celebrated career as a travel writer. It reminds me a bit of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in being a sort of wisdom book, a distillation and a summing up.

The second is Euphoria, Lily King's novel based on the lives of Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and Reo Fortune. It veers rather significantly away from the actual lives of the famed anthropologists, a fact which in retrospect I may have gotten a little hung up on. There's some great writing and wonderful observations in this book, so don't let my quibbles stop you from taking a look.

More reviews to come soon. Meanwhile, happy holiday reading, everyone. 

Kristine Ong Muslim at Escape Into Life

We've started what I think is a new thing over at Escape Into Life, which is that occasionally we are going to publish some short, short fiction. It's a little bit like the poetry feature there, as it incorporates art along with the printed work, a combination that I find very winning.  The featured author is Kristine Ong Muslim, who has numerous short stories and poems to her credit, among other things. Please check out her work and you can look forward to a review from me on her forthcoming short story collection Age of Blight sometime around the time of its release in January.

A Little More Free by John McFetridge

It's a funny thing about Canada. Although it's probably different for those in regions abutting our northern neighbor, in general Americans don't really know much about it. Or at least they don't if I'm a representative example, which I think in many ways I am. Although we share much more of a common cultural history than we do with Mexico, we don't really study Canada much in school, or at least didn't the last time I checked. And, over my long career at the bookstore, where part of the time I looked after the history section, I really don't remember many books specifically on Canada coming through at all. As our main buyer was actually a Canadian, I'm pretty sure that this wasn't a lack of interest on her part, but had more to do with the American publishing industry believing that books on Canada wouldn't really sell to the general public. In some ways, I think we tend to feel we already know about Canada, and so don't have to bother learning more.

But Canada has just as interesting a history as the U.S. does, and in many ways they are linked. That's why it's been so interesting to read about the period of history that I came of age in through Canadian eyes. Specifically through the eyes of one Constable Eddie Dougherty, who makes his second appearance in this book. I reviewed Black Rock over at Escape Into Life a while ago, but you don't necessarily have to read it first. There are references in this book to some of its incidents, but I don't think they are particularly of a spoilerish quality.

As was the case in Black Rock, the story starts off with a historical event, a tragic nightclub fire in Montreal that killed 37 people. Eddie Dougherty, having done a stint with the Morality Squad which didn't work out, is back to driving a squad car, and so answers a call that takes him right to the scene of the carnage.

The year is 1972, and as McFetridge tells us in an afterword, this horrific fire was eclipsed by an event that consumed Canadian consciousness--a  hockey match between the Canadians and the Soviets, which Canada initially saw as an easy win. Montreal also knew that it would be hosting the Olympics in 1976, so the hostage situation at the Munich Olympics that unfolds in the background of the novel is not simply a tragedy watched from afar. And on top of all this, there's a murder right on Dougherty's turf.

This death takes Dougherty into another area of Canada's history, that of Americans fleeing the draft. As Dougherty tries to decide what he thinks about war resistance, he becomes involved with a woman in the movement, and they sidle up warily to each other. The very fact that they find themselves fraternizing is a symptom of a larger phenomenon--whatever cohesiveness the counterculture had is now fracturing and people are going their own way again. "Self-actualization" is a key term.

I'm struck as I was reading Black Rock with the similarities to Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy series, in which a young policeman also remains in a police force where he's something of an anomaly. Eddie Dougherty isn't as cynical as Duffy is, yet. But finding that he doesn't progress up the ranks as he thinks he should and not understanding why, he may headed on a similar journey. I look forward to the next book in the series to find out.