Michael Connelly is a massive jazz fan.
John Connolly is Irish, I believe, which doesn’t disqualify him from being a jazz fan, although Jimmy Rabbitte in The Commitments was totally contemptuous of it.
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The fictional Charlie Parker was named after his grandfather or something and certainly wasn’t called that because of the musician. He was nicknamed “Bird” by some of his former NYPD colleagues but never embraced nor encouraged that sobriquet.
Michael Connelly’s character Harry Bosch is a jazz aficionado.
edit: I just had a squiz at John Connolly’s Wiki page and he apparently writes about the supernatural quite often, which is not my bag at all. I shall proceed with caution.
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About the time The Narrows came out…early oughties, I think…a Bosch book that concluded storylines from The Poet and Blood Work…Connelly’s crew put out a DVD of Connelly’s LA with locations etc from his books and narrated by William Peterson of the original CSI. Unfortunately it wasn’t distributed here and free in the US. I’d had a bit of correspondence with MC’s sister in law who was his website manager and had a moan to her. Next thing, a DVD (Region 0) turned up in the mail.
The DVD was called Dark Sacred Night (which I think he used later as a novel title) and every part of the soundtrack was classic jazz.
Pretty sure there was supernatural stuff in the JC book I read which was one of the things that turned me off.
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I’ve read them all. The first one is still the best imo with The Travelling Man. I didn’t read them in order though and I think reading about the first novel in other novels certainly increased my anticipation. The supernatural element is right up my alley though but it is a little more nuanced for want of a better term. There are a lot of religious cults that Charlie Parker confronts in these novels.
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Just googled it and the set list is impressive if somewhat old school. The great Gary Giddins did the liner notes too.
PS Nothing wrong with the “Old School”, I went there myself.
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Half-way through Garry Linnell’s book about Yablett (2003). Good access to a broad spectrum of people who knew Garry. A warts and all account, getting more than a few eyebrow raises. I’m enjoying revelations about bit players like Peter Jess, Rod Astbury and John Devine. Worth finding if you like your footy history.
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I’ve just finished Liane Moriarty’s latest, Apples Never Fall, that I got for Christmas. I requested it, although I suspected it might not be very good, because the last one, Nine Perfect Strangers, was rubbish.
For most of the time I was reading it I found myself thinking, this is actually very good. The basic story is about a woman, mother of four well and truly adult children, who suddenly goes missing, leaving only a nonsensical text message in explanation, and the text may be a fake. Over the course of the rest of the book we find out all about her and her husband and all of their children in typical Liane Moriarty fashion: lots and lots of little vignettes, each one of which advances the plot one tiny step and at the same time poses an additional question. She’s technically very good.
I was a little disappointed in the end. As is always the case with her books, the ending is happy, but it’s all rather facile and contrived this time. It was as if she got to a point and decided, OK, time to wrap this up, and did so. Still, it was good enough for me to read in two days, and if you’re after a diverting read that won’t tax you too severely, you could do worse.
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Got through about 6 Kindle books and 2 Audible books, before heading back to the analogue version and reading the sequel to Mara Timon’s City of Spies…Resistance. De Mornay has been sent back into Normandy just before DDay, posing as an Alsatian woman (they alternative between being French and German, depending on woh won the latest war). Very readable.
And now onto another in the ilk of Dervla McTiernan and Adrian McKinty - Irish-born writers now living in Australia - Ruth McIver with I Shot The Devil. Erin Sloane is writing for a true crime publishing house and is asked to write about a crime 20-odd years before, in which she was tangentially involved, whereby 5 teens entered Long Island woods and 3 came out - one murdered by his friends and the apparent leader shot by police. It was blamed on Satanism. Pity this was based in New York, rather than here. She has lived in WA and New York City before settling in Melbourne.
Damned good crime writer, Adrian McKinty. I’m just about to start on Rain Dogs, which is one from his Seán Duffy series, published in 2015.
Been reading an early Tom Clancy and found it a bit so-so. Then the main character becomes Mr Clark and everything falls into place. Amazing how authors could, can, pre plan so far ahead.
Oops. Found out its book #7 . Mr Clark might have already made an appearance!!
Reading Black Snake by Leo Kennedy. An account of Ned Kelly and his gang told by the great grandson of one of the three policemen killed at Stringybark Ck. Suffice to say the author does not hold with the romanticised accounts of the Kelly gang’s misdeeds. An interesting perspective told from the side of the police and their families.
Read two penguin classics, recently.
A Confederacy of Dunces, and The Plague.
I was behind the eight ball with Dunces right off the bat, because for some reason I had it confused with Primary Colors.
Once I figured out that it was not that, I got a better handle on it.
I have to say that I really didn’t like the first ninety percent of the book, but the way it concludes made me re-evaluate everything that had gone before.
It’s not that anything is revealed at the end, it’s just that all the threads come to a satisfying conclusion which to me was most unexpected.
Until then the book just felt like one thing after another, and I’ve certainly read enough of those sort of books to last me a lifetime.
The main character, as I’m sure many in this thread are aware, is extraordinary.
You can make comparisons, but nothing really fits. I went through John Goodman, Oliver Hardy, Jack Black and even the Simpsons Comic Book guy in my head before I gave up and just let him be himself.
He does kinda remind me of a certain type of internet poster, though.
One other thing, he has a catchphrase, which is set out as, “Oh, my god!”
I found that comma very distracting, and was never sure if I was hearing it in my head the way the author meant it.
The Plague is certainly more relatable after covid, although obviously on a smaller scale (which is to say that the covid epidemic is not nearly as deadly, while The Plague affects one city rather than the world).
Still, every now and then there are observations of behaviour, whether from individuals or the government or the media which make you go, ah, I recognise that.
It’s written in a very dispassionate way. The plot never becomes melodramatic (or dramatic, come to that), but the writing is quite beautiful. I feel like you could open the book and point at a random sentence and it’s pretty likely to be something insightful and human, despite the dryness of the delivery.
Somehow, despite the lack of all the usual tropes and conventions authors use to make this happen, I found the conclusion quite moving.
I’m not sure I’d read either again. If there was one of the two then it would be The Plague, but both very satisfying reads.
The Plague is one of the great books, IMO. Camus is best known for The Outsider, but I think The Plague is much, much better. You’re absolutely right about the absence of melodrama and great displays of emotion; they heighten the intensity of the reactions of the reader much more than florid language and extreme actions by the characters would have done. One of the things I liked very much was the way Camus used the situation created by the plague to show the different ways in which different types of people reacted. And you’re right again; the ending is very, very moving.
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Finished Ruth McIver’s I Shot the Devil.
It’s a fairly heavy read.
Now onto Inheritance of Secrets by Sonya Bates, a Canadian writer who’s lived in Adelaide since 1997.
Juliet Dunne, a novelist based in her grandparents’ holiday house in Victor Harbour, is called to tell her that her grandparents, German post-war immigrants, have been murdered in their home. It appears that the murderer thought they had some wartime secrets.
Anyhow, I’ve discovered the origins of the girl’s name, Gretchen. The grandmother’s name is Margrethe, the equivalent of Margaret. That’s shortened to Grete, and the German diminutive -chen added to the end, sort of like abbreviated in English to Margie or Maggie, even though diminutives of Margaret in the form of Meg, Madge, Peg, Peggy exist.
In Spanish, add -ito or -ita (for girls) to the full name, like Juan becomes Juanito as John becomes Johnny.
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“Riot Baby” by Tochi Onyebuchi is a punchy novella that goes off like a string of firecrackers. The title refers to the Rodney King riots and Onyebuchi constructs a layered tale of imagined futures full of violence and retribution and, to some extent, personal renaissance. A mixture of hyperrealism and sci fi, it’s from TOR publishing which appears intent on resurrecting the novella form, and long may it prosper.
Finished Inheritance of Secrets. Pretty good read but i think we’re pretty much at the end of ex-Nazi war criminals books. This was set 2009 so not too bad, but the war did end 76 years ago.
Pretty well accepted that South Australia has the greatest proportion of German immigrants…see places like Hahndorf and a lot of wine-producing areas. Not sure if Dr Lindemann settled in SA or the Hunter region.
Now onto Vigilante by Sarah Barrie. Lexy is a child-abuse victim grown up, and now is a hacker seeking to expose paedophile Rings. Rachael Langley is a detective inspector who made her name with the arrest of Spider, a rock spider, 18 years ago. It now seems she might have got the wrong ma, so she’s back on the Central Coast of NSW to solve a child murder.
Looking promising.
Do you mean Unforgiven?
Yeah…I do. Sorry! Serves me right for writing this without the book near me.
Old-timers disease
Lol phew, I reserved it a couple of days ago
On Borrow Box and thought I must have reserved the wrong book.