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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 21, 1982)
JN DRINT Bad Deeds KTRT NEWELL Pmnacie. SJ SO Detective noveLs are like sculpture Or doowop records from the Fif ties Or architecture Form follows function around and around in a fineh patterned dance What we respond to is choreograpihv. the skill with which the form is fulfilled, the route bv which the conclusion is reached When the sculptor or the vocal arranger, or the detective novelist brings it off with a sense of novel tv or surprise, then we've got beautv Bad Deeds is a beaut of a detective novel It's got everything genre fan ciers crack the covers for: a private eve protagonist with a hard-boiled hide and a touchable heart, a secretary who calls him Boss,' a full complement of Irish cops, close scrapes and a sense of danger that accelerates like Al Haig s pulse on entering the Vi ar Room Arme Kahane springs into action when a tockey friend is the victim of a brutal assault ‘Before long. Kahane is off and running—finding out more than he wants to know about doped fillies. LA racetrack politics and a bent fatcat with designs on the circuit's foremost female jockey He also dodges toromygun-toung Filipinos, reads Dick Tracy comics. bowLs. drives out to the beach at mid night to clear his head (like Chandler s Marlowe). and falls into near love with an airhead dame who's "good in bed ." Kahane is believable (within the well-posted boundaries of the form) His pals and predators are well drawn and fall into their assigned roles with gusto Best of all. they waltz and bop around a pkx that keeps us turning pages fast 'i ell before halfway into Bad Deeds 300-odd pages, we find ourselves trvmg to beat Kahane to the mystery's solution: who clubbed Wayne Teagueworthy"' Who stands to lose the most if the goon is unmasked, and why did somebody pump lead into the quiet motel room where Amie was shacked up with the gal jocko Speed and action are Bad Deeds chief virtues That and in appropriately economic prose (Vagrant witness Horace Ipps is described as wearing a filthy Salvation Army suit that was bagg\ enough for two of him" lpps temporan address Bushes. Victory Park racetrack Forwarding address Bushes. Hialeah. Florida") Newells accomplishment is that he applies fresh twists and a sense of newness to a genre that, itself, has been worked over like a rummy, backstreet stiff Good gib. Gene Sculatti Sixty Stories DONALD BaRTHELME C.P Putnam s Sons t/5 95 Scxn Slones combines works from the author s seven previous collet lions with nine uncollected pieces and a section from a novel. The Dead Father It is a chartering fat gnome of a book, an enchanted little beast with a startling satchel of sorcerer s charms, including: Chaos: I produced chaos she regarded the chaos chaos ls handsome and attractive she said and more dura ble than regret I said and more nourishing diaii regret she said Dtam pewter snake tea had #6 shern serviette, fenestration, crown, blue Repetition butter butter butter butter butter butter Philosophy The death of God leh the angels in a strange position Allusion Judge de Bontons arrises earning flowers The 100 proposition story 84 Should 1 go hack for the Band Aids'5 Tile epistolary tale Dear L>r Hod der, 1 realize that it is probably wrong to write a letter to one s girlfriend s shrink but And much much more, not the least of which is literan theorv Some people Miss R said run to conceits or wisdom bui 1 hold to the hard brown, nutlike word Effects cm the reader are (11 wonder 1 2) admiration (3) frequent sporttane ous, and unfeigned chuckles (4J fre quent trips to the tal Webster s <S) recognition o( common American speech patterns (6) is he pulling my leg? (7) recognition of American follies and dreams (8) recognition of our (mankinds) common awareness of mortaiiti (9) gratitude, etc Surprise to quote a character m one of the stories out of the original, sexual context, keeps the old tissues tense There is a kind of clean, surgeonlike workmanship in sn if ping apart the cluttered tapes of literan loopage in the storage bins of our brains Reading this book ls like having a tumor! ike regret taken out ^jrna Death Notes ki m KENDiu Pantheon fit inks S') 95 Death b\ misadventure is the vrr diet when Sir Manuel Camargue is found frozen beneath an icy pond on his Sussex estate The frigid lata! as of a world famous flautist may hair been nothing more than accident Bui no acodent can explain to kings mark ham (duel Inspector Reginald Wexford the mysterious visit made earlier to Camargue by a woman claiming both to be and not to be his estranged daughter, or Camargue's announced intention to disinherit Natalie Camar gue Amo — an intention he did not live to fulfill Was Camargue's death accidental’ Is the woman who calls herself Natake Amo his rightful heir’ These are the obvious questions in Death Notes, less obvious are the questions Wexford must ask himself as to what constitutes an identity Is it something fixed and permanent like a passport, or a fluidity within us that alters not only because of how and where we live but from generation to generation’ In Death Notes Wexford must read between the lines His suspicions take him to Califor nia, following the Pacific Highway for possible dues left in Los Angeles sub urbs or Carmel motels where Amo may have lived- On that trad Wexford seeks as well an understanding of him self as an aging detective in a modem world Questions of identity sun Ruth Ren dell Author of 20 mysteries and two collections of short stories, the British ex-journalist writes two very different kinds of novels The Wexford series of police procedurals moves at the pace of Kingsmarkham itself, a middle-sized village feeling the intrusions of city life These are sharp portrayals of or dinary people who find themselves ex traordinarily linked by violent death. Rendell's non-series novels (such as A Demon m My View, which received the 1975 British Crime Writers Associa tion Gold Dagger Award) explore the forces that lead individuals to commit outrageous acts Her criminals are themselves victims of the necessary transition in English society from its past structured social classes to a chaos of class less ness Death Notes can be read at any point in the Wexford series with equal plea sure and respect for Rendell’s mastery of the genre Those reading the eleventh Wexford adventure need not return to the first for full appreciation of detective or author, and will find themselves satisfying the hunger mys teryphiles share for deeply-rooted characters and suspenseful plotting. R. Sue Smith America Now: The Anthropology of a Changing Culture MARVIN HARRIS Simon & Schuster, tl2.95 To many Americans, it would seem the American dream has finally turned into a nightmare of cosmic proportions. One need only read the morning’s headlines for confirmation of America's sad realities — seen in an evergrowing miasma of bloody vio lence, decaying morals, sexual confu sion and economic uncertainty. But while many Americans simply throw down their newspapers in despair or stop reading them entirely, Marvin Harris attempts to sort out the whole mess via anthropological methods that, while not exactly scientific or original, do make for mildly amusing cocktail party conversation. After spending a lifetime studying cannibals and kings, Harris, an an thropologist at the University of Florida, has turned his eye to analyzing America's problems in a pedestrian book entitled America Now: The An thropology of a Changing Culture. Here he examines the seemingly unre lated phenomena of American culture (including the rise of homosexuality, cults, crime, shoddy goods, women's liberation and inflation) and theorizes that they are all causally linked. Acknowledging that we are a nation of manipulators and manipulated, Harris traces the root of our cultural troubles to the drastic changes that have oc curred in America’s economy and so cial structure since World War II. The twin terrors of American big business and American government are blamed, the former for uniting into all power ful oligopolies, the latter for being an inefficient bureaucracy that excells at proliferating more inefficiency. To gether, says Harris, they’ve worked to destroy the very foundations of the American dream. But writing about cause and effect relationships is a tricky matter; while Harris takes on some interesting issues — like why there's high unemployment among blacks, deteriorating nuclear families, women who work and vocal homosexuals — he fails to completely convince us of the connections be tween these phenomena. The most in teresting chapter is that on homosexu ality, in which Harris discusses the practice in primitive and vanished cul tures. Many of the questions Harris raises simpl/ cannot be answered because American society has no yardstick by which to measure itself, being a unique nation of diverse ethnic and cultural entities without a common thread. In addition, and quite obvi ously, the new technologies of our time are going to affect America in ways we cannot yet predict since we have nothing to which they can be compared. One thing Harris’ book makes quite clear—in an age of decay ing morals, traditions and economy, America has very little to comfort it ... and much to fear. L. R. Htga NEVER MISS A PERFORMANCE. Whether you’re in the middle of the city or in the middle of nowhere, youll never lose the beat Our legendary Super-tuners^ give you the best possible reception in the worst possible conditions. And our soon to be legendary anti-tape eating features make certain that everything that’s on the tape is reproduced, instead of regurgitated. 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