Book Beginning: Martin Amis' Money

As my cab pulled off FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and sloped in fast right across our bows. We banked, and hit a deep well or grapple-ridge in the road: to the sound of a rifle-shot the cab roof ducked down and smacked me on the core of my head.

...is the beginning of Martin Amis' Money.

I think the poop on this is, it's supposed to be his best and it's supposed to be funny. Anyway, it's been on my TBR pile for...la la la, I can't hear you, TBR pile, what did you say? I read his father's Lucky Jim years ago and was disappointed; I like my humor a little more genial than Lucky Jim. But that's not very fair to Amis fils. And now Martin Amis is coming to Toronto to give a talk at the downtown public library and I got tickets (they're free) and I haven't read a single one of his books. No doubt he'll mostly talk about his latest, but I have this one, and I decided that would be my homework.

The cover above is way cooler than that of my Penguin paperback.

Anybody have any thoughts about Martin Amis? Is this the one to read? Would that opening keep you going?

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a bookish meme hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader. To play, quote the beginning of the book you're currently reading, give the author and title, and any thoughts if you like.

Ross MacDonald's The Blue Hammer

The Blue Hammer was Ross Macdonald's final novel. It came out in 1976. Lew Archer, P.I. and the usual protagonist of Macdonald's novels, is hired to recover a painting stolen from copper magnate Jack Biemeyer and his wife. But there's more to it than that. On page eleven, Archer is already telling Mrs. Biemeyer, "This case looks a bit more complex to me than it does to you."

Naturally Archer was right. This ends up the longest of the Archer novels at 280 pages in my edition.

Macdonald was well-established by this point in his career and the book got mostly glowing reviews, except for one in the New York Times. And I like it, too. But in his book of interviews with Macdonald It's All One Case, Paul Nelson says, "I do think it's correct that anyone who read all of the Archer books would anticipate things in The Blue Hammer," and that's true, too. Nor does Macdonald deny it. A crime in the past is connected to crimes in the present; there are troubled children, and possibly more troubled parents; there are secrets in the family. In this one the family secrets are particularly complex, with two interlocking families. The main figure is Richard Chantry, a famous painter, who disappeared 25 years before, and whose illegitimate half-brother had been killed seven years before that. That's the crime in the past. In the present, two dealers in paintings are killed, one drowned, the other beaten. The theft of the painting was partly contrived by the Biemeyer's drug-addled daughter. That's the troubled child. And there are family secrets, revealed by the end of the novel.

Anyway, quite enjoyable, if not his best.

Paul Nelson asks him in It's All One Case: "One more book at least would you say is fairly certain?"

"Yes, I should round it off," Macdonald replied. Alas it wasn't to be.

Vintage Mystery Challenge. Silver Age. How. At least two deaths by different means.

Book Beginning: Lynn Crosbie's Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

"Hey pig!" was one of the many greetings thrown from cars, with bags of warm garbage, each day as I walked home, my chin tucked into my neck.
     At home, a cuff to the face for the bowl left in the sink.
     In my room, I saw under my dead boyfriend's poster, and love flooded through my barren heart, as always.

...is the beginning of Lynn Crosbie's Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

Crosbie's novel came out in 2015 with House of Anansi Press, a small-ish Canadian publisher. Evelyn, the unhappy high school girl whose voice we hear above, is moving from self-harm to drugs, and has just scored some heroin at the start of the novel. She's being raised by her drunk single mother, who's a former hanger-on in the Seattle grunge scene. The dead boyfriend of the poster is Kurt Cobain, with whom Evelyn has no relationship in this world. But maybe in the next.

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a bookish meme hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader. To play, quote the beginning of the book you're currently reading, give the author and title, and any thoughts if you like.