Book Review Club: Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles by Edward A. Grainger

(This is the July 2011 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click on the icon at the end of this review.)

Present at the creation. Those are the words that came to mind when I downloaded and read Edward A. Grainger's Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles. This writing business is a funny thing. No matter when you start--either reading or writing or both--there are, at that moment, old masters, seasoned veterans, and fresh-faced rookies. It's natural to form a professional bond with those who find themselves at about the same place you are when you start, each with a similar goal: write stories that others want to read.

David Cranmer, the man behind the pen name Edward A. Grainer, is one of the first writers with whom I made a connection back in 2008. In preparation for this review, I went back and read through some of our earlier back-and-forths. It's a fun little time capsule. Over the years, he and I realized that we like similar stories, and we traded reviews and recommendations back and forth. When David saw an opening for an online pulp e-zine, he created Beat to a Pulp as a showcase. I'm proud to say that my first published story found a home within those illustrious pixilated covers.

Somewhere along the line, as writers are wont to do, David asked if I'd be game for reading one of his short stories. It featured a U. S. Marshall in the old west named Cash Laramie. I said sure and he passed along one, then another, and another. I enjoyed each adventure of Cash and his partner, Gideon Miles, and, frankly looked forward to additional requests from David.

But I read those tales piecemeal, in rough drafts, with endings that weren't entirely sussed out. The beauty of this first anthology of the adventures of these two marshals is progression not only of the characters but of the writer.

Cash isn't completely John Wayne, all good and honorable, but he isn't William Holden from the Wild Bunch either. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, merely human. He wears a badge and that badge dictates many of his actions. His job, with his partner, is to bring in the outlaws. Now, the means by which he accomplishes this feat is left largely to his discretion. I've just finished reading the new James Bond novel, Carte Blanche, and there's a good deal of that outlook spicing these tales. Cash and Miles recognize the validity of law, but also the vicissitudes of the real world. "Under the Sun" is a good example of the partners dealing with life as they find it rather than life as it should be. One of the greatest pleasures in reading a new Cash Laramie story is, after being presented with the crime or the mystery, wondering just how Laramie and Miles will react.

For fans of the traditional western, Cranmer has you covered. "The Wind Scorpion," the opening yarn, opens with Cash in a world of hurt. After being nursed back to health by a lonely woman, he sets off to find his quarry. Lead flies in all the stories, and the body count rises. That's the spirit of the spaghetti westerns that Cranmer writes, in the introduction, were a large inspiration for the character of Cash.

It is Cash's humanness that often shines through and takes a story to the next level. He gets hurt. I like that in a character, for it is the hurting that often dictates a man's actions. When Cash hurts on the inside that he can be most dangerous. "Melanie" tells the story of a young girl who sells flowers in town. After Cash rescues her from being trampled, he discovers evidence of abuse. Infuriated, he seeks justice for the young lass. I will not spoil the ending here, but I'll say that this story's ending is, probably, my favorite here in this collection. Then there is another type of justice, as shown in "The Outlaw Marshal." It is a testament to Cash the character and Cranmer the writer that most readers will find themselves liking and identifying with both of these stories.

Now, some of you reading this review might demur on this collection with the statement "I don't do westerns." On the whole, I don't either, but I'm branching out and reading more. Despite my father and grandfather devouring westerns and having just about all the Louis L'amours printed and despite me inheriting my grandfather's numerous boxes of non-L'amour westerns, I'll go on record and say that the number of westerns I have read up to now can still be counted on one hand. But here's the secret: good stories are just that--good stories. Yeah, they may take place in the 1880s. But that doesn't change the fundamental nature of the tales nor the fundamental nature of the characteristics of a good protagonist.

If you like westerns already, this anthology is a no-brainer. But if you've never given westerns a try, I urge these adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles to be a nice sampler. Who knows? You might start liking westerns so much that you might even go out and buy yourself a pair of boots. If you do, I know a good place here in Houston that'll give you a good deal.

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Forgotten Music: Peacemaker by Clarence Clemons

Most should know I’m a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. As a sax player, Mr. Clemons had a tone I envied. When Bruce’s music called for an old-school sax solo (a la “Born to Run”), the Big Man delivered in spades. But, to me, Clemons really shined with the slower pieces. Just as David Gilmour can “say” more with a single extended, held note than other guitarists can with fanatical fretwork, Clemons’s sound was luxurious and full. I’ll even namedrop Miles Davis because Clemons knew the value of silence in his music. For you Springsteen fans out there, I’m talking “Jungleland,” “Secret Garden,” “Back in Your Arms Again,” among others.

His 1995 album, Peacemaker, is a slow, peaceful, meditative offering. At its base, Clemons is merely soloing over soft percussion, mostly non-western in origin. This is night music, the kind free from worry and other noises, the kind that can mingle in the shadows of your house or apartment and breathe life into the mysterious places in your soul. In the spirit of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, this album is Clemons’s thank you to God for bestowing upon him the talent to play sax. I listened to it in a Barnes and Noble sixteen years ago and immediately bought it. Now, it is one of my Top 10 desert island CDs. That is, if I can only choose 10 albums to listen to the rest of my life, this makes the cut. Last weekend, when I learned of Clemons’s death, I put Peacemaker on and drifted to another place.

Here is a cut from Peacemaker: Into the Blue Forest

And here is Springsteen's eulogy for the Big Man.

Forgotten Music: June 2011

Welcome to the June 2011 edition of the Forgotten Music Project. As always, if I missed someone (or if someone joins in for the first time), I'll add you to the summary.

Enjoy.

Bill Crider
Eric (Iren)
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
Charlie Ricci
Richard Robinson
Perplexio
Paul D. Brazill

Louis L'amour's Place on the Bookshelf

I went to four estate sales yesterday. The historian part of me drooled (and sweated a lot) at the treasure trove of magazines in one garage: Life, Saturday Evening Post, Time, among others. I picked up the issue of Life from 1971 with the cover story about the opening of Disney World (two words back then). I also found the first issue of Time after JFK's assassination. Cover: President Johnson.

While those were good finds, I was struck by something else. In two of these homes, the man of the house literally had shelves of nothing but Louis L'amour westerns. Mostly they were paperbacks, a mix of the Bantam titles (with the black spines) and the more recent white ones (with the westerny font on the spines). One house had what we now refer to as a man cave but was, probably, just the library. With all the stuff of a certain age, the L'amour westerns did not seem out of place. In fact, they seemed almost a requirement. I say that because, when I was growing up, my dad and his dad both had their collections of L'amour westerns on their respective bookshelves.

Which led me to this question: is there an author's work nowadays that is required reading for a man? In forty years, at estate sales in 2051, will some future buyer look at the bookshelves of men who lived in these early 21st Century decades and think: "Ah, right, it was altogether fitting and proper for a man to have read those books."

Collateral Damage - A New Anthology Inspired by Father's Day

Fresh off the Kindle presses is Collateral Damage, the second anthology written by the eight authors of Do Some Damage. I'm one of the eight, in case you don't know. We've spun a few tales inspired by the only holiday in June that doesn't involve a flag, Father's Day.

Here's the blurb from Amazon:
This collection boasts stories from Joelle Charbonneau (SKATING AROUND THE LAW, SKATING OVER THE LINE, the Paige Marshall mysteries), John McFetridge (LET IT RIDE, DIRTY SWEET), Dave White (WHEN ONE MAN DIES, WITNESS TO DEATH), Russel D. McLean (THE LOST SISTER, THE GOOD SON), Sandra Ruttan (THE FRAILTY OF FLESH, SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES), Scott D. Parker (TREASON AT HANFORD: A Harry Truman Mystery, BEAT TO A PULP: ROUND ONE), Jay Stringer (OLD GOLD, SCORCHED EARTH), and Steve Weddle (NEEDLE Magazine).

As I was with Terminal Damage, our first collection, I am immensely proud of my collaboration with the other seven writers in this group.

Taking a cue from Steve Weddle, I'm including the first part of my story, "Anne Chambers and the Case of the Father's Day Murder."

In far southwest Houston stands a memorial to the Vietnam War. In the middle of a Vietnamese-American shopping center parking lot, a roped-off area contains a small plateau of nine, white steps. The peak of this plateau has a granite, oval block, about four feet high, with a bronze relief showing a scene from the war. Atop the oval, two bronze soldiers share a constant vigil. The taller man is an American, clad in late-60s fatigues, army belt with canteen, rifle at a high angle, ready to bear down on an enemy. Next to the American is a South Vietnamese soldier. He is a head shorter than the G. I. He, too, clutches a rifle, staring ahead with the American.

It was on the American’s rifle the body had been impaled.

Houston Police Detective Anne Chambers gazed up at the male victim. Limp, with clothes tattered, the body’s fluids had gathered around one side of the dais. They had run down and stained the white steps. His clothes, where they weren’t ripped, looked haphazard: one tail of his shirt was untucked, the suit jacket had a slash along the side, and the man wore loafers without socks. His hands were cuffed behind his back.

Resting against the base of the step was a crane, the kind city electricians use to repair traffic lights. The cage was a mere two feet from the victim. Anne circled the scene, piecing together what happened. The killer had cut through the chains surrounding the memorial, run the crane as close as possible, loaded his victim onto the pedestal, and thrown the victim onto the bronze rifle.

She turned and scanned the growing throng of onlookers. Men and women, hands over mouths or pointing at the victim, cell phones to ears or held out in front, snapping photos. Behind the crowd, the first news van was parked. She checked her watch: 3:34 a.m. Time to retrieve the body. Giving a thumbs up sign to the two medical examiners in the crane’s cage, Anne said “Any idea how he got up there, Gary?”

“We’ve already asked for the security feed,” Patrolman Gary Ward said. “Figured you’d want it.” He chinned the body. “You seen the front of him?”

Anne nodded. “They look like medals of some kind. They ours?”

Ward shook his head. “Don’t recognize them.” He pointed to the blood-stained steps. “One of ‘em fell off.”

In the center of the blood, a small military medal rested on the edge of a step while the silk ribbon and pin dangled over the side. Anne squinted her eyes. The medal didn’t look familiar.

Ward nodded to a man who stood facing the body. “How you think he’s taking it?”

Anne turned to look at her partner, Detective Harry Tran. “Probably not well.” She pursed her lips and watched as the body was lowered to the pavement. The two medical workers placed the body on a waiting gurney.

Walking up next to Harry, Anne said, “You doing okay?”

Harry’s lips were a thin, hard line. When he spoke, his voice was husky. “His name is Dat Nguyen. He is one of the giants in our community.”

Anne gave him a sidelong stare. “Listen, Harry, if you don’t want…”

He turned and strode to the gurney. Her mouth still open, Anne cocked her head, then followed him.

A coroner was examining the body. The suit jacket covered what looked like a pajama top. The slash on the arm had dried blood, darker than the blood on the chest. The mouth was half curled in a snarl of agony.

“Nothing unusual here,” the coroner said, “death by exsanguination caused by the impalement on the bronze rifle.” He turned the body on its side and examined the handcuffs. “The bruising and contusions along the wrists indicate he put up quite a struggle.”

“Time of death?” Anne asked. Harry stood, stone-faced, looking at the dead man.

“Pretty recent, I’d say,” the coroner said. “An hour or two.”

They all shielded their eyes as a vehicle entered the parking lot. It stopped nearby and a man emerged. He started running towards the crime scene. Two officers halted him. After a brief conversation, Ward walked over to Anne and Harry.

“That’s the guy who can get us a look at the security cameras.” He eyed Harry then Anne. She shrugged and head motioned for him to take care of the security footage. Ward nodded once and walked with the newcomer to one of the locked storefronts along the strip center.

With a grunt, Harry started walking towards their car. “Let’s go.”

Anne hurried to catch up. “Where?”

“Mr. Nguyen’s house.”

Book Review Club: Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann

(This is the June 2011 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For a complete list of participants, click on the icon at the end of this review.)

Buck Rogers had one. Flash Gordon had one. Batman has had one throughout the years, especially in the always-entertaining Brave and the Bold cartoon. Tony Stark certainly has one. Heck, even James Bond had one back in 1964. Know what I’m talking about? Jet packs. For as much as we’re living in the future of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, we still don’t have jet packs or flying cars. But in the world of Ghosts of Manhattan, at least one person possesses jet-powered flight in an alternate 1926. That would be the heroic vigilante, The Ghost.

In George Mann’s novel, America is in a Cold War with Great Britain since the end of the First World War. Coal-powered cars, with their black effluvia, clog the atmosphere above Manhattan, where the air is filled with dirigibles and biplanes capable of launching upright because of rockets on their wings. In this environment, the police have their hands full not only with run-of-the-mill crime but also with a criminal boss nicknamed The Roman. Like any good villain, he leaves a calling card: two Roman coins on the eye sockets of corpses.

Into this justice vacuum swoops The Ghost. Black-clad, with a duster-length trench coat, fedora, and enhance red goggles, The Ghost, in the opening chapter, foils a bank heist using deadly force and flechette guns (tiny steel darts). If you’ve seen Batman Begins, specifically the scene where Batman first does his thing, you’ll love this opening chapter. I did. It grabbed me, and I happily went with it.

What’s fun about this adventure with a masked hero is the steps Mann deploys to keep the reader guessing The Ghost’s alter-ego. I’ll admit it didn’t take a huge leap of logic to surmise the truth, but he still made it interesting. Gabriel Cross is a bored millionaire, known for his parties and his ladies. One lady in particular is Celeste Parker, a singer at a night club and a necessary component in The Roman’s plans. Felix Donovan is a detective in charge of the investigation into the murder of a famous senator. It doesn’t take too long for Donovan to meet the famous vigilante. From there, they team up to battle strange things and, with any luck, survive.

The book is fast-paced, a true modern pulp novel in the spirit of The Shadow and Batman. The history of this alternate America is delivered piecemeal and mostly in shorter paragraphs and bits of dialogue, a helpful way to show the broader world without stopping the action for pages and pages of tedious world-building. The Ghost is a believable hero. He relies on his wits and his gadgets–he’s got jet packs on his legs, allowing him to fly!–more so than martial arts and fighting ability. He also adjusts his strategies along the way as he encounters adversaries who cannot be defeated using his conventional weapons. In fact, these particular adversaries almost overcome The Ghost in their first encounter.

The book isn’t without some flaws. I thought the lead-up to the big finale seemed to come out of nowhere. Unlike, say, Gabriel Hunt at the Well of Eternity or Dan Brown’s more famous novels, there aren’t a lot of clues that build upon one another, stumping the reader and the heroes along the way. It was almost as if Mann just needed a few action set pieces in order to build a larger story. True, the set pieces were good, and the down time wasn’t boring. I just felt a lot of drive to get to the end, even though I was not given a lot of clues as to what the end was going to be.

One of the things I liked about this novel is that Mann doesn’t feel the need to explain everything. Bi-planes have rocket packs for vertical lift-off. Okay. But there’s no mention of Robert Goddard or the history of the invention of the rockets. They just are. I’ve been told that this 1926-era world is the extension of Mann’s earlier, Victorian-era novels featuring Maurice Newbury and Veronica Hobbes. I’ve not read those books, so, perhaps there’s a longer explanation there.

Speaking of unexplained things in Ghosts of Manhattan, halfway through the book, I kept waiting for something science-fictional to occur. This novel is released by Pyr Books, a prominent publisher of science fiction and fantasy novels. I’ve seen the gorgeous covers (this cover art should stop people in their tracks) and read some of Pyr’s books, so I know what I’ve come to expect from them. Frankly, Ghosts of Manhattan is the exception. You take away the rockets, the coal-powered cars, and other paraphernalia decorating the scenery (including the big finish), and you end up with a book Lester Dent might have actually written in 1933 for Doc Savage. I don’t consider Doc to be science fiction. What’s so science-fictional about this book? Moreover, what’s so science-fictional about this type of alternate history?

When it comes to alt-history, I see two categories. There are stories like Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, which has time travel. Obviously, that’s SF. But what about Turtledove’s other Civil War book, How Few Remain and its sequels, which take a “what if” question and answer it from a non-SF point of view? Same could be said for Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which was nominated for an Edgar (mystery) and a Hugo (SF), winning the latter. There’s no SF trope in Chabon’s novel, just alt-history.

I posed this question to Pyr editor Lou Anders, and he gave me some food for thought. Citing a Norman Spinrad article from Asimov’s magazine, Anders wrote the following:

Basically, alt history has historically been maligned by at least a subset of SF culture as pretend “What if” stories that, as you point out with the Chabon, don’t have any other SFNal tropes/elements in them. But these days, when you have every physicist using the word “multiverse” and the most likely explanation for all the quantum weirdness is that we are in only one of a number of possible realities, while at the same time have people like Charles Stross debunking the idea that we will *ever* achieve human-crewed ships engaged in interplanetary travel, suddenly all the space opera starts to look like make believe wish fulfillment and the alt history like that which actually has some bearing in science.

But these are quibbles, hair-splitting when what is really important is whether or not the book in question is entertaining, moves you, and has something to say besides.

Ghosts of Manhattan is certainly entertaining, a true summer thrill-ride of a book. I’m looking forward to future installments of this character and his world. Do yourself a favor this summer: see Thor, Captain America, and all the other superhero films, and then head on over to a bookstore and pick up a copy of Mann’s book. In this day and age, you just can’t have enough heroes.

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New Post at Criminal Element: "Gotham Central"

My take on the entire Gotham Central run by DC Comics is now live at Criminal Element.

"Castle's" Season Finale Shocker

Were you as surprised as I was last night with the season finale of "Castle"? I've got my take on it over at Criminal Element.

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2019 Update:

(Now that it has been eight years, I'm posting my review here in case the Criminal Element link disappears.)

Did Andrew Marlowe, the creator of the TV show Castle, misname the show?

Think back three short years ago. Castle appears as a midseason series with only ten episodes written and produced. From the first sequence, we learn most of what makes this show so charming: the juxtaposition of glamour shots of author Richard Castle (actor Nathan Fillion) at a swanky book launch party and crime scene shots of Kate Beckett (Stana Katic). Two worlds destined to intertwine.

Note: If you don't want intertwined SPOILERS, read no further, until you watch the finale for yourself.

For all the witty allure and fun, light banter between the two leads, there is only so much crime-of-the-week storytelling viewers can take before the tales begin to blur. A series succeeds based on its underlying backbone, a far-reaching story arc that can tie multiple episodes together. The X-Files had Mulder’s search for his abducted sister. Adrian Monk constantly searched for the man who murdered his wife. Ditto for CSI: Miami’s Horatio Caine.

Richard Castle is basically a man-child, a kid in a grown up body. While he has emotional baggage, it’s not the stuff that makes good, compelling drama. Since this is a cop show, there has to be a character that can’t move past The One Case that’s stymied everyone else. There always has to be a detective that will shoulder the burden for that one special case and forge ahead, finding clues here and there,and  never giving up. Kate Beckett is that cop. She has that case. It just so happens to involve the murder of her mother.

Early on, in the pilot episode, Castle tries to put Beckett in a nice little box. Using his writerly imagination, he postulates why she became a cop and, then, detective. In one of the best scenes of the entire series to date, the camera lingers on Beckett’s face, her façade of toughness visibly eroding before our eyes. With that one scene, you get additional information that echoes throughout the series: Castle often goes too far, and Beckett hides more than she reveals. He is intrigued by what lays hidden behind her steely cop face, and, over three seasons, more and more of her backstory is uncovered.

Season 3 demonstrates how to move a story forward without reaching the end and resolving the very dramatic tension that propels the show each week. In the episode “Knockdown,” Beckett and Castle are interviewing the former detective who investigated the murder of Beckett’s mother, when a sniper’s bullet kills him on the spot. The subsequent investigation uncovers the presence of a mystery man behind everything, including the hiring of professional hit man Hal Lockwood (Max Martini). As Lockwood goes to prison, Beckett swears to him that she’ll visit the prison every week until he names the man who put out the hit on her mother. The events of this episode not only show how ragged, determined, and blinded Beckett can be when it comes to the subject of her mother, but it also gave us The Kiss. (link and scroll to watch or re-watch in action.)

Granted, it was designed to be a distraction for the bad guys, but Rick and Kate lingered for just a moment, their eyes meeting. For a light-hearted police procedural, the acting is, at times, superb. After three years of will-they or won’t-they suspense, they finally took a step. And, yet, what marks the writing of Castle is how many times Rick and Kate can make a move forward, only to have them take two steps back…and make it believable.  “Knockdown” ends with the plausible event: Beckett’s boyfriend arrives to comfort her. Thus, Castle and Beckett are apart again.

Interestingly, the title of the season finale is “Knockout,” an obvious move to link the two episodes. On one of Beckett’s visits, Lockwood offs a convict (one of the two former detectives who investigated the murder of Mrs. Beckett) before having a confrontation with Kate. She smiles grimly when referring to Lockwood’s mysterious employer: “He can’t hide from me.” Lockwood merely returns her stare: “You can’t hide from him.” During an arraignment hearing, Lockwood escapes with some trained hit men dressed to look like NYPD cops. A manhunt ensues and, during the squad room scenes, Castle postulates that there has to be a third cop involved in the cover-up. Thus, not only do the police search for Lockwood, they also sift through years-old information searching for the identity of the third cop.

In the three seasons this show has aired, there have been some genuinely great moments. “Knockout” had more than its fair share. Jim Beckett, Kate’s father, talks to Castle to urge him to help Kate back down. Captain Montgomery (Ruben Santiago-Hudson in perhaps his best episode ever) and Castle have a scene together where we learn how the captain and Beckett first met. Naturally, Castle and Beckett have a fight when he asks her to back down. The good thing is that they get to address the elephant in the room: their romantic feelings for each other. And, like every other episode, it’s left unresolved. Why else would we tune in each week? Finally, there is the first of two scenes between Montgomery and Beckett. With exquisite somberness, the captain admonishes Kate not to let this case consume her. “We owe the dead justice,” he says, “but we don’t owe them our lives.” Life is a series of battles where there are no victories. “I will stand with you, detective,” the captain says.

In following leads, Detectives Javier Esposito (Jon Huertas) and Kevin Ryan (Seamus Dever) discover the truth about the third cop right after we viewers have: it’s Captain Montgomery. In what is perhaps the most excruciating scene between Ryan and Esposito to date, Ryan, in shocked disbelief, speaks the words that the captain has to be dirty. Esposito decks him and the two fight. The anguish in their faces and voices is palpable, real even, and brings home the obvious fact that these two characters are as essential in Castle as Rick and Kate. If there was an Emmy Award for Best Co-Star Team, Huertas and Dever should be nominated annually. As they stand in an alley, backlit so that only their dark profiles are seen, they faced the unspeakable truth, and realize they must warn Beckett.

Stana Katic as Detective Kate Beckett in Castle Season 3 Finale
Bad News Keeps Coming for Beckett in Castle’s Season 3 finale
She is already at an airport hanger, brought there by Montgomery’s phone call. She gets a text message from Ryan and confronts the captain with it. In an episode already dripping with heart-wrenching scenes, this one hits it out of the park. As Beckett implores Montgomery to reconsider—even going as far as saying (begging?) “I forgive you!”—he just looks at her with all the paternal grace he can muster, and tells her “This is my spot.” Castle drags/carries a screaming, moaning, inconsolable Beckett away to safety. Montgomery, dirty cop that he is (or was), goes down and takes out all the bad guys with him, including Lockwood.

The funeral scene, complete with eulogy by Beckett is touching, but the moment is ripped away as a sniper’s bullet (again?) hits Kate. Castle, hovering over her, pleads for her to stay with him. In a moment of desperate clarity, he utters the words we all know he feels: “I love you.” She smiles, a tear running down her cheek, and closes her eyes.

Going into the episode, I knew that one of the team was not going to make it. After hearing that Montgomery was going to retire, I pretty much pegged him as the victim. I did not, however, see the turn of events that put him in the middle of the giant conspiracy surrounding the murder of Beckett’s mother. I can’t imagine that Andrew Marlowe, the show’s creator, had the captain as a bad guy from the start. But it works, and it doesn’t come off as some gimmicky, out-of-character thing like what happened to Clarice Starling at the end of Thomas Harris’s novel, Hannibal (when she willingly went off with Hannibal Lector).

In a show with humble beginnings and a funny premise, Castle is marked more by the episodes of intense drama than the humorous, crime-of-the-week variety. In fact, while watching last night’s show, I realized something: the humorous show, Castle, does drama well in the same manner that the serious show, The X-Files, did humor. From a midseason replacement series, Castle has grown and matured fast, both in the writing and the acting. For a program that is more about the characters than the plots, it is the interaction of the cast that gels this show into something greater than the sum of its parts. Yet, for all the charm and wit and charisma of Castle, the brotherly comradeship between Ryan and Esposito, and the dynamic between father and daughter and son and mother, the emotional core of Castle is Kate Beckett. It is her story that underpins the entire series.

And it is her story that might have just ended with this cliffhanger of a finale.

CSI: Miami at Criminal Element

My take on the CSI: Miami season nine finale is now live at Criminal Element.

Two Posts at Criminal Element

My second post for Criminal Element, Incognito by Ed Brubaker, is now live:

This follows the first one from last week about The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke.

Head on over to that excellent resource and give it a read.

Book Review Club: It's Superman by Tom De Haven

(This is the May 2011 entry for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click the icon at the end of this review.)

I've always been a Batman guy. Even as a kid, I gravitated towards the Caped Crusader with his more outlandish villains, his humanness, and his tales that seemed just a bit more real. As a kid, I loved Superman, but I liked him best when he was with other characters. My Superman comic collection fits in probably one-and-a-half comic book boxes (approx 250/box). My Batman collection spans three boxes at least, perhaps four. Even as an adult, I still kept up with Batman while Big Blue just seemed to fade away.

So how to explain the sudden desire, about a month ago, to read a Superman tale? The author, to be exact. Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman is just about the best Superman story I've read in a long time. Not hard to do considering I've not read a Supes story in years. Morrison recaptured that whimsical Superman pre-1986, when DC Comics rebooted Kal-el's story from the beginning.

But I've always wondered about Superman's true beginning. Since his debut was in 1938, that makes him a Depression-era hero. For all the years of telling and retelling his origin, writers have always tried to update Clark Kent's story. Where was the tale that put Clark back in the 1930s? Tom De Haven must have had the same question, but he answered it with his novel, It's Superman.

When you get right down to it, some of the best Superman stories are, in fact, Clark Kent stories. A good friend of mine--a member of my little SF book club--commented that, since Superman is so strong and so invulnerable, the only good Superman story is an origin story. He might have something there. Case in point: TV's "Smallville" has stretched Clark's discovery of his alter ego over ten years. Jeph Loeb captured an excellent, modern retelling of Clark's story with "Superman: For All Seasons." But not since the Depression has there been a good, honest story about Clark Kent and Superman in the 1930s.

Superman, as created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, is an American story of the Depression. Tom De Haven captures the look, the feel, the smells, the sounds of the Depression with intimate detail. Not hardly a page goes by without some reference to how we lived in the middle of the 1930s. It served as a wonderful touchstone to the types of lives that Siegel and Shuster lived as they created the first, great superhero. To be honest, this tale is more pulp than SF. Heck, it's almost Steinbeckian in its slowness and non-action.

Not that that's a bad thing. De Haven allows all the characters to breath on their own. The story is the origin of how Clark went from a farm boy in Kansas to a reporter and superhero in New York. And, yes, De Haven sets the story in NYC, not the fictional Metropolis. It's yet another piece that makes the story of this alien more real.

Lois Lane and Lex Luthor play their obligatory roles. Lois is almost the most fully realized character in the book. She is not some modern 2011 woman trapped in the 1930s, complete with winks and nods to us 21st Century readers. She is a modern, 1930s-era woman. She wants to be taken seriously as a reporter--something the male reporters don't do--but, also, upon meeting one character, tries out his last name with her own first name, wondering about marriage and kids.

Lex is fabulous. This isn't the mad scientist of the Silver Age of Superman's history. Lex, now, is more in line with the post-1986 rebooting of the character: a rich, brilliantly intelligent man, an Alderman, and a gangster. He doesn't want to rule the world, he just wants to rule the organized crime groups in NYC. Unlike Clark, Lex knows that his intelligence makes him an outsider among the more "normal" people.

Lex's brains is a nice counterpoint to Clark's brawn, a usual aspect of Superman stories. But, in this retelling, Clark isn't very smart, constantly doubting what he should do. In fact, it is Clark's constant questioning of his powers that, depending on what kind of story you want, will sway you one way or the other. For those of y'all (like another member of my book club) who read the word "Superman" on the cover and wait for Superman to do something super, you'll be disappointed. For those of y'all (like me) who enjoys the human side of Clark's story, this novel will be right up your alley. In the world of 2011, if one discovers one has superpowers, we'd likely try to get a TV deal. For someone like the Clark Kent of the 1930s, he almost doesn't know what to do.

Superman, like Batman, James Bond, and various animated characters, has adapted as the decades have passed. With my reading of It's Superman coming around the 900th issue* of Action Comics--the comic where Superman debuted--and it's modern, super-smart, SF version of Superman, it's fascinating to read a novel that takes Clark/Superman all the way back to his beginning.

*Don't let the news-making storyline of Superman renouncing his American citizenship rankle you too much. It wasn't a part of the main story and, frankly, I'm wondering if this little short story isn't truly canon. Another thing about the actual citizenship story: the end panels show Supes flying away after standing in the plaza of Tehran (I think) for a day. As he flies away, leaving only the protesters and the soldiers, one protester gives one soldier a flower. The one soldier lowers his weapon. It's almost as if the author is saying Iran 2011 equals USA 1970. It's really ironic that everyone's so up in arms over this one, potentially uncanonical story that, in the end, symbolizes American ideals anyway.

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@Barrie Summy