Classics Club Spin #45

 

What will I next read? Only the owl knows...

It's the 45th Classics Club spin and this will be my 25th spin. You've seen the rules before so straight to the list of books:

1.) Frances Burney/Evelina

2.) Willa Cather/Lucy Gayheart

3.) Willa Cather/Sappho and the Slave Girl

4.) Nella Larsen/Passing

5.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry

6.) Jack London/The Iron Heel

7.) Jack London/Martin Eden

8.) Walter Pater/Imaginary Portraits

9.) Harry Mark Petrakis/A Dream of Kings

10.) Leslie Marmon Silko/Ceremony

11.) Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men

12.) Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding

13.) Andrei Bely/Petersburg

14.) Mikhail Bulgakov/The Heart of a Dog

15.) Joachim Machado de Assis/The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

16.) Benito Perez Galdos/That Bringas Woman

17.) Dee Brown/Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

18.) W. E. B. Du Bois/The Autobiography

19.) R. L. Stevenson/An Inland Voyage

20.) Gotthold Lessing/Nathan the Wise 

 

On Sunday August 16th the number will be revealed. 

 

Which look good to you? Which have you read? 

Helen MacInnes' Prelude to Terror

Colin Grant is an art critic. He's recently moved to New York City to work at the Schofeld Gallery. A woman in the art world he knows approaches him on the behalf of millionaire art collector Victor Basset. Could he buy a painting at an auction in Vienna on Mr. Basset's behalf? The painting is a river scene by Salomon von Ruysdael of 1642. It might go for a $200,000, but Basset is worried he has a rival and if it were known Basset was bidding the price would go up.

There's an additional complication. The owner is a Hungarian national who wants to get out of Hungary (this is the 1970s) with this painting that the government would cheerfully confiscate if they knew about it. So for both those reasons it all needs to be hush-hush.

Of course it's Helen MacInnes so there are more complications than that...

This is the first of three spy novels by MacInnes which feature Robert Renwick. He's in Vienna working on a money-laundering scheme run from Eastern Europe. The money's being used to finance terrorist activity in the West. (The Red Army Faction had been in the news in the 70s.) 

I thought this was one of the better MacInnes books. It is fairly dark for MacInnes, though. This is her first novel after her husband Gilbert Highet died. Grant is a widower still in grief when it starts; if you know MacInnes, you won't be surprised that as an American dragged into a spy story, he will be involved in a romance. It doesn't pan out in this one.

It's possible I read this when it came out--both my parents were MacInnes fans--but if so I didn't remember it.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1978). Painting. Is that a von Ruysdael river scene on the left of the cover?   

Ed McBain's Shotgun

"Oh, how they hoped for an original slaying once in a while, a well-conceived murder instead of these sloppy run-of-the-mill crimes of passion that were constantly being dumped into their laps. Oh, how they longed for a killer who would knock off somebody with a rare untraceable poison, Oh, how they wished they might find a body in a locked windowless room, Oh, how they wanted somebody to scheme and plot for months on end and then commit the perfect homicide, which everyone would think was suicide or something." 

"Meyer and Hawes got all the interesting cases."

Carella and Kling are called in when two bodies, a man and a woman, are found by the milkman making his morning rounds. The milkman liked the Leydens--she gave him a cup of coffee when he collected the bill, she didn't have to do that--and he seemed like a very nice man, only he had to travel a lot, missed his wife. "It scares you, you know?"

The first cops on the scene are happy to call it domestic trouble, murder-suicide, and wrap it up at once. But Carella sees through that. (Kling is busy throwing up--he's still new to the 87th--and murders--in this one.) 

Both the victims have been shot in the face, which must mark particular hatred on the part of the murderer. Some sort of creep? (Beyond the usual fact that murderers are creeps, of course...) Carella and Kling are on the track of somebody who meets girls in bars.

McBain's stories often look like they're some sort of random violence--or some sort of creep--but in the end the solution is much more Sherlock Holmes-ish than that--untraceable poison, locked room--and this is no exception. Shooting somebody in the face might be a mark of particular animosity, as they speculate at first, but it just might also be a trick to make indentification difficult, especially for people who've never been fingerprinted...dental records are of no use...and our first cops are happy to think this was suicide or something...

Cotton and Hawes' case is a woman who's stabbed with a bread knife. Was that more interesting? I wouldn't have thought so, necessarily. But it turns out connected to Carella and Kling's case, and that's definitely another sign of a classic puzzle mystery.

Not the best McBain by any means, but a satisfactory entry.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1970). Two People