Jon Wilson (1)

Words that come to mind when thinking back on this book? Charming, entertaining, delightful, and romantic. Jon has done a wonderful job with the material here, and his writing style is so clear and warm, you can’t help but settle into the story. I only intended to give the first chapter a read last night, and I found I was halfway through before my eyes challenged my brain to a duel at twenty paces . . . and won.

What struck me most about the story is how beautifully the feeling of family is developed – something you don’t necessarily expect from an old west tale or a gay romance. Tom and Jack make a wonderful couple, so much so that your heart really does beat a bit faster every time they enter the room together. As for little Abby, she’s a lively (and lovely) character herself, cut and charming, but not smarmy in that TV sitcom way.

The pacing here is slow and languid, entirely fitting with the sleepy western town setting. There’s an underlying sense of mystery surrounding Jack, the late Fiona, and Tom, but it serves to move the story along, as opposed to overwhelming it. This is also a wryly humorous story, the kind that makes you smile and chuckle – but often a page or so later, as the literary punchline is so casually dropped. It’s not a comedy, but instead has just enough of that subtle humour woven into the narrative to balance the more serious emotional aspects.

Ever so slowly, Jack’s lies are revealed, one by one, the threads working their way out of his carefully crafted tale. If this were Hollywood, I’m sure the temptation would be overpowering to shift this into the realm of slapstick, but I’m just as sure they’d omit the entire forbidden love angle that pulls the story together. Jack is a cheat and a liar, but for all the right reasons. Instead of wanting to see him get his comeuppance, we just want to see him come through the unravelling of his world healthy and happy once again.

One quirk of the novel is that it relies a little too much on the element of surprise, saving crucial details for the end of a conversation or section of the narrative. On the one hand, it’s understandable – this is Jack’s own story that he’s telling us, so he doesn’t need to explain to himself who people are – but it can be confusing at times. It’s a small matter, but one I suspect might put some readers off.

Overall, this was quite an enjoyable read, and one that I would have no qualms about recommending.… (altro)

Declan Colette is a private investigator in post-World War Two LA. When a young woman is killed on her way to an appointment with him, he comes under suspicion. To extricate himself, he must solve the mystery of her death, while entangling himself with a powerful family, obstructive police, resentful rivals and local gangsters. And a redhead. But the redhead is male.

This is the setup for Cheap as Beasts. It’s classic noir in the Chandler vein and yet it isn’t. It faces the eternal challenge for the genre novel – give us what we know, what we want, but give us something surprising, moving, new. And for me this book really does.

Everything about it is subtle. The prose is clever and laconic. The characters are all fluent in subtext. Colette has the obligatory world-weary take on the world. People may think they can take him in, but he’ll work out what’s going on. When he quotes Shakespeare he doesn’t stop to explain it. You’ll get it. Or you can look it up. (I had to look it up.)

It’s clear that, whatever Colette is telling you, there’s a lot more he’s keeping back. Colette’s ironic detachment comes, you sense, from a feeling that he’s living in a world he no longer believes in.

The book takes on themes that are controversial or ambiguous or sublimated in Chandler. When Colette sees a black lawn jockey, an image taken from Chandler’s The High Window (okay, I had to look that up too), he thinks of the humiliation of the black servant who has to polish it. It’s the same world, but from a different perspective.

Ideas of masculinity are questioned. Men judge each other, not only on their words or their strength, but on their war record. Colette’s sexuality is acknowledged, with varying degrees of acceptance – as long as he can pass those other tests.

World War Two and its aftermath are at the heart of this story. The man Colette loved was killed in the war. Clubs and bars are renamed to conceal their Japanese ownership. The case Colette is investigating turns in on itself, testing family alliances against wartime bonds. War and loss subtly suffuse everything.

Chandler himself wrote about how he struggled against the constraints of genre. This book, in turn, takes on Chandler and creates something new.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley.

This review first appeared on The Next Best Book Blog
http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...… (altro)

There are not many novels set at the beginning of the XX century and dealing with homosexuality, but the few I read gave a chance of happiness to the heroes that at first I wasn’t thinking possible. But indeed, hidden in the layers of history, there are many of these stories, of “roommates” who never married, of old bachelors who shared an house, of men who married but still had a special relationship with their best friend. They are the gay men of the past, sometime emerging from vintage photo-shoot, posing in their best Sunday attire and conveying from those pictures all the love they felt for each other.

But it was not simple for them, it was not easy above all to accept they were different. For how strange it sounds, I think that, for who was living in the “Wild” West, it was easier, women were scarce, and I don’t think many questioned if two men were living together. But our heroes move their story to the big cities of the east, Atlanta and Philadelphia, and with the big city comes the feeling they are different, and comes the guiltiness, the hoping and believing there could be a cure for those strange feelings.

This is not a cowboy meets cowboy and they walk together towards the horizon, they have to earn that right, more than an heterosexual couple. And while Federal Marshal Forest O’Rourke can be more refined than County Sheriff Eugene Grey, he also the one who seems to give up to them, not accepting his feelings, believing they are an illness. Not that Gene is more comfortable, even him has the feeling to be dirty, but in a way he is more resigned, less bent upon denying them.

There is sex between Forest and Gene, but it’s not graphic details and mostly to give the feeling to the reader that their love is complete, in any sense, physical and emotional. It’s also romantic in a way, and the ending, while not easy is, as I said, full of hope for a chance at happiness.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1937692175/?tag=elimyrevandra-20… (altro)

If you expect to read you classical western romance (even with the addition of the gay element), A Hundred Little Lies will surprise you. Western romance are mostly about midday appointment under the sun, or corrupted small town where justice is not at home, or bittered men who are searching for vengeance. But that is not the case here, and even if, like in an old classic western romance, Jack Tulle has a past he would prefer to forget, and being forgotten, that is basically the only common element you will find.

What is probably the most interesting plot device is that it’s really difficult to identify who is the good fellow and who is the villain, probably since actually, no one really fit any of those roles. Now, in a good western romance, you can have the real villain, the bad guy, the one that of course will be dead at the end of the story, or the good villain, mostly a wonderful rogue, the man all the women (and in this case also men) would like in their bed at night, but that they have to avoid by day. That should be the role of Tom Jude, Jack’s former lover and partner in crime; but when Tom enters the scene, instead of being bad and vindictive towards Jack, he is almost regretful, like Jack was his true love, and now that they are back together, nothing will move him from his side (thus nothing strange if we find them rolling on the hay no later than the first night; but don’t worry, this book is not really about sex, and the encounters are almost chaste, at least in the way to write about them). So no, Tom is not the villain, but he is not even the good boy, since he is also unsettling Jack’s comfortable life in Bodey, Colorado, threatening to reveal that in no way Jack can be Abigail’s father, and he well know why.

On the other side there is Jack, the good fellow, isn’t it right? The good daddy of 8 years old Abigail, the quiet drugstore owner, the good citizen that is fighting to not have corruption in his city; of course he is doing it for the good of the town, or maybe he is doing it to avoid people he may know coming too near to him, or maybe he is doing it since he knows he is even too much corruptible? Page after page, the good fellow’s image of Jack is falling down, like a cheap paint covering a scandalous picture. But, as almost always happen, the scandalous picture is more interesting of the boring paint, and if it took Jack a hundred little lies to paint that picture, well then, he did a good job.

If the reader is wondering how two men can be lovers in the XIX century Far West and still being alive, well the answer is simple… almost no one notice; if neither their own friends and colleagues noticed when they were together every day doing their business, probably no one will notice in a small town where people believe they are nothing else than good friends since their childhood. I can easily imagining their possible future together, mistaken for very, very good friends, and if someone is wondering about their bachelorhood, well they can always think they are both mourning the loss of Abigail’s mother, Jack’s wife and maybe Tom’s unrequited love?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982826753/?tag=elimyrevandra-20… (altro)