It's a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod Murder

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of It's a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod Murder (Signet, 2005).


I'm a very poor reader of cozy mysteries. I keep letting the plot get in the way.

The cover design sold this book to me. It's the first in a short series of three lighter-than-air murder mysteries written by Rosemary Harris under the pen name Martin. They feature a young super-secretary, Bebe Bennett, formerly of Richmond, Virginia and now at work in the wild, swinging world of New York City in 1965. The Beatles have blown the lid off pop culture, and record companies are falling over themselves to find the next music stars, but nobody anticipated that the next one to cross the pond, Philip Royal and the Beefeaters, would be caught in a heavy police investigation after Bebe and her roommate - a stewardess, naturally - find Philip dead in his hotel room.

But that's all right, because there isn't a heavy police investigation. Seriously, police show up, tell the stewardess that they suspect her of the murder, and then kindly exit the narrative entirely, leaving the ladies to clear their names. This involves the girls repeatedly chatting up the other band members, manager, British journalists and the like, all of whom are completely and totally happy to remain in the hotel indefinitely and assist these two with their inquiries.

Put another way, the plot conspires to have the girls in disguise as French maids in the hotel about three days after the murder, where they somehow gain access to the crime scene and find additional clues that the police somehow missed. Now, I'm understanding of the reality that forensics weren't quite what they are today in the 1960s, but when the story goes about puncturing any suspicion of disbelief in as cavalier a manner as this, you're just going to have to try and accept things and enjoy the scenery. Or, you know, read something that acts like it was the product of some consideration about how this premise might actually have played out. Not recommended.

LSH Reread, part eleven

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 24-29, Annual # 2, 1986)

Major developments:

*Suspicion over Sensor Girl's identity, and how the Empress had approached her, sets just about everybody on the team into arguments against each other.
*Quislet, probably out to cause trouble in the first place, finds Dream Girl out dancing with somebody who isn't her longtime boyfriend Thom.
*The Emerald Empress and the Persuader recruit criminals named Flare and Caress to join their new Fatal Five. Writer Paul Levitz plays up the possibility that Sensor Girl is the fifth member, but it surprisingly turns out to be Mentalla, a character whose membership bid was declined and who briefly joined the Legion Academy before vanishing.
*Sensor Girl turns out to be Projectra. Well, I was surprised as heck anyway. She concluded that her home planet of Orando's disasters were not due to the tradition vs. technology gap, but her own poor decisions, and... comic book hocus-pocus explanations, augmented powers, returned to our dimension, redemption, that sorta thing.
*Mentalla betrays the Fatal Five. The Empress kills her, and the heroes win out.
*The rulers of the Sorceror's World awaken Mordru, depower him, and give him the mind of a child so that he may have a second chance.
*Speaking of "mind of a child," Darkseid... for some reason... relents and un-curses Garth and Imra, and returns Validus to his correct point in time and form, as their baby, Graym's twin. This has got to be the least satisfying curse ever.
*Star Boy's home planet of Xanthu asks him to return home and help look for Atmos, the only other superhero from their planet, who has vanished. Science Police Chief Zendak adds that quite a few heroes and police officers, system-wide, are missing. Atmos can't be found; the Xanthu tribune asks Star Boy to stay. He abruptly resigns from the LSH and doesn't even bother telling Dream Girl. Their relationship has been falling apart for years anyway, but the speed at which she propositions Element Lad is still surprising.
*A new gangster called Starfinger shows up with a surprisingly large criminal extortion business, and, also, the silliest costume in space.


Paul Levitz, more than once in the 1980s, admitted in the letters column that he was not the best at creating villains, but even with that caveat, the unbelievably ridiculous Starfinger is a mess. He'll improve later on, but his first appearance - as a "Kingpin of Space" - is idiotic. It's impossible to believe anybody who so quickly kills his reliable operatives over imagined slights could ever build up such a large criminal empire. His outlandish and bizarre appearance doesn't help. Greg LaRocque has been improving massively on art chores during this period, and he's found quite a knack for drawing Dream Girl as sinfully curvy, but his design skills are still a little behind the curve. We only catch glimpses of the missing hero Atmos in issue # 28; when we meet him properly in the next batch, it'll look as though the artist forgot to draw parts of him.

Much more entertaining is the resolution to the Sensor Girl story. Levitz has obviously been having a ball leaving one obscure clue after another for several months as to her identity. The smackdown with the new Fatal Five is really entertaining, with our five heroes - Sensor Girl, Dream Girl, Colossal Boy, Tellus, and Polar Boy - really looking like they're not getting out of this one alive. Mentalla's betrayal seems like something straight out of an earlier, shallower, time, but her double-agent turn goes over really well. When she's killed, it's a real surprise.

While the main story in the comic is exciting and incredibly fun, especially Brainiac 5's latest turn as team detective, thinking on a higher plane than everyone else, the annual is a complete disaster. The only good thing about it is that Keith Giffen returns to provide artwork for the opening and closing segments. This gives it some artistic continuity with "The Great Darkness Saga" and the earlier "The Curse."

Sadly, Darkseid's big, evil curse turns out to be a completely damp and dull disappointment. Only a year after we learned that Validus was the twisted and weird monster formed, by his black Apokolips science-magic, from Garth and Imra's missing child, the big baddie... sort of changes his mind, kills his servant Ol-Vir instead, and returns Validus to humanoid childhood. I guess it explains why Validus was weird and uncontrollable - he was only ever about eight months old - but the baffling way Darkseid returns him to normality is crushingly dumb. Even Imra is confused and unhappy about it. A big BAH to that. Now let's see what Universo has been doing.

Bringing Up Bébé

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Bringing Up Bébé (Penguin, 2012).


I have the habit of reading the one-star reviews at Amazon for any book that I'd like to mention here. Usually, you can set your watch by them. A book by Al Franken will be given one-star reviews by Rush Limbaugh fans who don't like Franken's politics, and a book by Limbaugh will be given one-star reviews by Franken followers who don't like Limbaugh's politics. And so the merry dance goes on. This tendency doesn't actually tell me anything whatever about the book; I just enjoy having my suspicions about people's motives confirmed.

Bringing Up Bébé is the American edition of a book by Pamela Druckerman that was released as French Children Don't Throw Food in Europe. A journalist who has lived for many years in Paris with a British-born husband, Druckerman is raising three children and, as parents of a twenty month-old, my wife and I are happy to read well-written stories about parenting, particularly from new perspectives.

It's Druckerman's position that, in France, parents are not in the service of their children, and kids know this. Because, in my real-world job, I regularly observe kids who are completely in charge, and I notice the "don't touch anything" admonitions peter out and fizzle after mere minutes since the kids are going to do whatever they wish, I wondered how it is possible that parents in France set these expectations and enforce them. The result, according to Druckerman, is a culture where kids are just plain better behaved.

Certainly, a radically different approach to child care is part of it. There, parents compete for daycare spots as soon as they learn they're pregnant, whereas here, parents like me who desire the socialization and group learning in daycare - we call it school - seem to be outnumbered by people - usually ones without kids - who've decided that the practice is unsafe or downright dangerous. But it's more than that. There's a mindset that parents are in charge, and need to communicate that to their children from a very early age. Getting into that mindset, enforcing it, and not spending every minute on the playground "narrating" a child's exploration of it (guilty) as though "playing" (from an entirely different position) is what might work.

So I have been completely sold on the book, am rereading it, and trying to rework some of our home life, naps, meals, and solo time for the baby. I wondered what the one-star reviews on Amazon might say. I envisioned patriotic screeds against day care, but what I found instead were baseless attacks on the author for her sometimes outre sex life and previous books, as though anybody who writes about parenting is obliged to maintain a lifestyle compatible with every other parent on the planet, especially the 2point5 kids ones who do everything for the kid, with murky results that usually end in excuses and outright calamity. This is the sort of complaint that, as with the Franken-Limbaugh reviewer wars, leads me to think that people just don't read. Defining yourself exclusively as a parent and shutting down anything you were before or ever will be again, that's kind of the problem. They don't, after all, have helicopter parents in France. And their schoolkids are doing fine. Recommended.

Savage: The Guv'nor

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Savage: The Guv'nor (volume two, Rebellion, 2012).


Before we get started: not one word of the following review of Savage, a mean action thriller written by Pat Mills, is a complaint. Well, apart from noting the difficulty in comprehending the climax of Book Four when it was first serialized, anyway. The second volume of Savage is completely and utterly terrific. Compared to the awesomeness of the first volume, there's no drop in quality at all, but it is indisputably a very, very different set of stories than what we'd seen before. I hope that it's possible to note how things changed, and speculate on how things might have continued, without damning even a single page of what came next with faint praise. While a large part of me still wonders what a robot- and teleportation-free Savage might have been like, I am completely and totally thrilled with what we got instead.

This is an interesting case where I found elements of the original serialization in 2000 AD bewildering and weird, but everything clicked when I read it in collected form. Each Savage story, typically sixty pages and labeled a "book," first appears across ten or so weeks in 2000 AD, usually once a year. The first three Savage books, illustrated by Charlie Adlard, were collected in the volume Taking Liberties. Patrick Goddard became the artist with Book Four, which is when the series started feeling quite different.

Proving that I just plain don't pay attention like I should, I missed the fact that the first three books take place over a comparatively short period: just about four months. The time was 2004, five years after Britain had been invaded by the eastern European Volgan Empire. After about a year fighting a brutal guerrilla war in the company of some of the entrenched resistance, Bill Savage, a former truck driver, escaped to Canada while escorting an heir to the throne to safety. There, he worked behind the scenes, providing intelligence and directing resistance operations before returning in '04 to turn things upside down. It's all amazing, and Book Two's climax and coda rank among the most startling, unpredictable, and thrill-packed things that Mills has ever written.

Book Three ended with the Volgans in retreat and beginning their withdrawals. What Mills did next was actually pretty confusing, but also amazingly clever. When that first collected volume ended with the British beginning to take back their nation, that appeared to be the end of the story. Book Four - which is where this second collected volume starts - sees the Volgans in charge again. It's set in 2007, after the Volgans reoccupied Britain, ostensibly because their withdrawal had left a massive economic and defense vacuum. And Book Five is set two years later, by which time the Americans are finally ready to enter the conflict, because they've found a way to do so without risking public morale over the loss of life: they've designed robots called ABC Warriors to do the fighting that soldiers once did.

I love this to pieces. It's long been 2000 AD lore that the long-running series The ABC Warriors was borne of the very same conflict with the Volgans that began in the comic's very first issue, when Volgan paratroopers dropped down onto central London in the far-flung future of 1999. A flashback episode that saw print in 1987 explained the development of the war droids, and Book Five of this story ends with the first deployment of the Mark Ones on the beaches of England, coming ashore triumphantly like the Allies at Normandy.

Of course, readers also know that the Mark Ones will be a failure and that the escalating robot war will span decades and devastate Europe. There's still a lot to do behind the scenes, and a lot of intelligence work that requires snap decisions and out-thinking the enemy. Savage, under the cover of a taciturn bar owner named William Carter, is quietly manipulating events from his "manor" while popping out to lead commando raids, even after American E-bombs have knocked out the last several decades of technology - an attempt to deaden the Volgan troops' ability to effectively communicate that also inconveniences the civilian population of London.

Honestly, I might not like the Goddard-drawn Savage quite as much as I like the Adlard-drawn stories, but good heaven, I like it a lot. It's a thrilling series, full of memorable characters and episodes, and great moments. There's a terrific part in Book Five when Savage, having made it to Allied command in Ireland with critical information, is reluctant to share it in front of a civilian: a still-human Howard Quartz. It's not just the tremendous fun of dotting decades-old points of continuity; it's a deeply satisfying and slow-burning scene in its own right. The eighth book of Savage is running in 2000 AD even as we speak; the whole thing is absolutely recommended.

Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life (PublicAffairs, 2009).


I really, really enjoyed what little of Molly Ivins' writing and hellraising that I got to experience when she was still living. She wrote in a wonderful, larger-than-life style, taking no prisoners and suffering no fools. She was a fantastic person, a tough, progressive champion who skewered the pretentious and the status quo. Heaven knows we would have been better off to have her with us during that "too big to fail" malarkey about big business.

Molly Ivins deserved a better biography than this. It's entertaining, to a degree, and I learned a lot about what she did and where she worked, but I didn't learn much of anything about her. Presumably for rights issues or an assumption that readers already have her books on the shelf, very little of her writing made it into this story. It's a violation of "Show, don't tell." The authors tell us that she was a witty and wonderful raconteur, but there's not nearly enough of her prowess on display.

It's a deadly dry story that tells you that hers was a life full of fun, but effectively refers the reader to other sources to experience it. I had hoped for considerably more, and retired it glumly, without much of a reason to recommend anybody read it when most of Ivins' own work is still in print.

LSH Reread, part ten

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 17-23, 1985-1986)

Major developments:

*One of RJ Brande's business rivals, the jealous Leland McAuley, attempts to have Brande killed. The Legion foils the attempt, but Brande not only doesn't press charges, he laughs it off and tells the team he's going off on one of his oddball voyages of discovery again.
*The Crisis on Infinite Earths that's happening in the 20th Century starts screwing with the Legion's memories and history. A huge team apparently travels back in time to fight the Anti-Monitor, and the long-forgotten supporting character Kid Psycho is killed, but nobody can remember this after sending his remains to rest at Shamballa.
*Trying to figure out what the heck happened in the 20th Century, Brainiac 5 and the scientists at the Time Institute unwittingly release the old villain Infinite Man from his strange prison between times and universes.
*The Controller who had been growing a Sun-Eater back in #7-8 abducts the Legionnaires who had destroyed it to finish the task for which he had been growing it: destroy an artificial war-world called Tyrraz.
*Invisible Kid has his dangerous and unpredictable "teleportation" side effect power nullified.
*Brainiac 5 convinces himself that Sensor Girl is, somehow, his old flame Supergirl. The Emerald Empress, who arranges a prison break to headhunt some new blood for the Fatal Five, offers Sensor Girl a place in her team. In a calmly emphatic "no," Sensor Girl somehow shuts down the Emerald Eye of Ekron, which nobody's seen happen before.
*Gigi confirms that she's heard that Sun Boy and Salu are an item. Salu is still very hot-tempered when it comes to Durlans, prompting Cham to ask her to be a little more sensitive.
*Shady confides to Tinya that the serum that protects Mon-El from lead poisoning is becoming much less effective, requiring more frequent dosing. Mon-El nearly dies two issues later before Brainy finds a permanent immunity.
*In Really-Long-Game subplot news, the team's old enemy Universo is masquerading as Earth's vice president Vid-Gupta.
*Greg Larocque becomes the regular penciler. He's pretty good, but he's no Steve Lightle.


Well, if anybody was wondering where fandom got the idea that Salu and Ayla would end up the team's first lesbian couple, it's in this run of comics. There are more shared glances and heavy discussions about friendship than in a whole season of Rizzoli & Isles. Nothing's confirmed and nothing's formally stated - in fact, Salu's being seen in public with Sun Boy a whole lot, putting the team's resident playboy in the quite unexpected position of being her beard, I suppose - but the subtext is impossible to ignore.

And this is one of the reasons that fans love this era of comics, because the characterization is so very good. Salu is not the same "Shrinking Violet" that she was before she was abducted by the Imskian terrorists. She's cynical, she's mean, and she's really quick to jump in fists first. Of course, the standards of the day didn't allow Paul Levitz to be very overt with much of anything, but there's just enough here, particularly in her question, “I changed my whole life, Ayla. What about you?”, to launch a hundred fanfics.

Interestingly, I have never actually read an interview with Levitz where he was asked about his intentions here, but it's evident that some subsequent writers chose to follow in his footprints, regardless of whether he intended this to be text or subtext. I think that some of the later continuities and reboots kept them as a couple and some didn't, but gay fandom has claimed them regardless of what later writers and editors might have had in mind with "NEW" Violet/Atom Girl or "NEW" Ayla. When Levitz returned to LSH in 2010 and rebuilt something close to this original continuity, he resumed their relationship, and might have even finally made them an official-in-canon couple, although I don't recall whether he made it a centerpoint of any of his stories. (I dropped the book when "The New 52" launched, so I'm not sure what happened after that.)

In previous editions of this Reread, I'd explained that I dropped the book when it split in two and started Volume Three. Issue 21 was the first time I'd looked at the Legion for a very long time; I found this as a back issue in April 1987, a year after it was published, at a convention called, I think, PhoenixCon. That was a remarkable weekend; I went to the con with $40 and came home with more than $100 since sixteen year-old me spent the evenings mixing drinks and tending bar at the consuite. I remain amazed that I got away with the stuff that I did at that age. Anyway, I spent all of one dollar in the dealer's room. I had given up on LSH for the X-Men, and gave up on the X-Men for 2000 AD, and I've stuck with it ever since. I could only find three issues of those crummy Files Magazines about Doctor Who by John Peel - remember those awful things? - in a four-for-a-dollar bin, and picked up this one lone issue of LSH to make up the dollar. I read it, I liked it, but I didn't come back to it. Not for a long time.

The Murder Room

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Murder Room (Faber & Faber, 2003).


Rereading P.D. James with fresh eyes, I was surprised to notice that there's another trope at work among some of her later novels. Death in Holy Orders, The Murder Room and The Lighthouse each feature a series of short chapters building up to the inescapable death where, one after another, motives upon motives are stacked up. I think that this is an old Agatha Christie trope, but somehow I missed it the last time that I read James.

Where James succeeds is with her slowly ratcheting up the inevitability and hatred - this time out, even the suspect with the least likely reason to kill is every bit as resolved to do something about the problem, which might mean killing - so that when it finally happens, absolutely everything breaks down. All of those motives, and all of that anger, lead to desperation and terrible decisions. It's really fun watching Dalgliesh calmly instigate such squirming.

Unfortunately, The Murder Room features one of the most unbelievable and ridiculous coincidences I've ever seen in detective fiction. I really enjoyed the great red herring about the nature of the murders - they appear to be "copycat" or, at least, themed recreations of famous killings from the 1930s as celebrated in the "murder room" of an eccentric museum devoted to the period - and Dalgliesh's team is soon hunting for a witness who has evoked one such crime with passing words to the woman who finds the first victim's body. His haste in leaving the scene has an altogether more prosaic, albeit tawdry, explanation, but it's how the man is identified that beggars belief.

Fortunately, not every twist is that mundane. The business of the third victim is handled extremely well, and I really enjoyed the sinking feeling of realizing exactly what happened that delayed the emergency services. When James is on fire, she's untouchable. Sadly, she's not completely on fire throughout this novel, but enough that it doesn't always matter. Recommended with reservations.