Cool mystery series from dramatic classics

Bloomsday was a few days ago, the day people celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses and Leopold Bloom, the hero of that book. In Dublin, Ireland, they have a huge festival every year, with tourist events, pub crawls and theatrical re-enactments of whole chapters of the book. The book is about a single day in the life of Bloom, and the book is titled Ulysses because the events of the day match up against the decades long travails of Odysseus (or Ulysses in Latin), the hero of the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey.

I’ve never read it, but I have multiple friends who have—they love the book, call it a modern masterpiece and try to get me to join them on Bloomsday for a 36-hour nonstop joint reading of the thousand-plus page tome.

Lots of contemporary writers have taken to revisiting classic tales. One current popular theme is myths, Greek (the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series by Rick Riordan is incredibly popular) and Norse (both Joanne Harris’s Runemarks and Nancy Farmer's Sea of Trolls come to mind) being probably the most common. Novels or even series that retell fairy tales are also big. So it should come as no surprise that somebody would take on Shakespeare.

Beginning with Something Rotten, and continuing in the soon to be released Something Wicked, Alan Gratz turns classic Shakespearean tragedies into hardboiled detective novels.

The Hollywood movie pitch meeting would sum Something Rotten up like this: “This is Hamlet as written by Raymond Chandler starring hot young actors like a teen Ryan Phillippe or Shia LaBeuf.”

And, crass and cynical as that sentence reads, there’s some truth to it. Hell, I’ve handed the book to lots of folks telling them something similar (minus the “hot young actors” part). It works—people’s eyes light up. They get the idea, and the idea of it excites them enough to read it. But something about that summary bugs me, and it’s because it does feel like a pitch. Like it sums up the book, or worse.

You know when people try to remake a classic in the hopes of tricking teens into liking it? They try to make it hip and the whole thing comes out stupid? Which happens because they don’t have enough faith in the classic or in their audience, and it falls flat because it’s cynical and tiresome and insulting. And that’s why I don’t like talking about Something Rotten in terms of a simple equation or formula, because it’s not formulaic.

Yes, Something Rotten has the plot and characters of Hamlet as its skeleton. Horatio Wilkes is best friends with Hamilton Prince, of Denmark, Tennessee, a rich kid whose uncle Claude possibly killed Hamilton’s paper magnate father and married his potentially complicit mother. And was Hamilton’s ex-girlfriend Olivia involved? And is Hamilton going off the deep end or is he faking the whole thing in hopes of tricking people into revealing more than they know?

The book is narrated by Horatio, in a voice both hardened and hopeful, punchy and philosophical, matching the hard-boiled lyricism of Raymond Chandler’s most enduring creation, the private detective Phillip Marlowe. So now you hold pieces of this puzzle, elements that make up the novel, and you think you’ve got a handle on it. But it’s more than all this.

These characters live on their own, they lift out of the references and knowing nods to history and literature and become their own creatures—which is where Something Rotten gets exciting. Because then the play Hamlet recedes but never quite falls away, becoming instead a looming fate with which the novel shadow boxes to a standstill, with which the characters dance and weave in and out of until you aren’t sure if they’ll be able to escape the bloody, bloody ending of the play. And you hope they will because they’ve earned it, they live and breathe on their own.

And isn’t that part of what makes James Joyce’s Ulysses great? Leopold Bloom’s small triumphs of daily life become epic triumphs as they echo the travails of Odysseus’s journey home. So too does the mystery of who killed Rex Prince take on more meaning and urgency, because Horatio is trying to beat two clocks: both the burning deadline of his present moment—can he solve this murder before his best friend, or the ex-girlfriend, or even he himself ends up dead?—and the ticking time-bomb that lies in the deep structure of the novel, that history of which Horatio isn’t even aware, but which we, as readers, are.

With Something Rotten, Alan Gratz has stretched the novel beyond the snappy idea of “What if Raymond Chandler wrote a YA novel based on Hamlet?” His writing has a life of its own, not merely a mirror of hardboiled phrases and patterns, but full of energy, describing a world, and, in hero Horatio Wilkes, a character with enough verve and life you are excited to follow him into as many novels as Gratz wants to write in this series.

As a bonus, check out this interview with the author at Powells.com.

Something Rotten
by Alan Gratz
Published by Dial Books

Thoughts from prison on Cry the Beloved Country

From The Nation, Joseph Cooper on teaching Alan Paton's classic to prisoners:

After reading Cry, the Beloved Country, a particularly thoughtful and articulate 41-year-old inmate wrote, "I can't begin to express the quiet storm that stirs inside me every time I find myself comparing a father-son story with my own."

This inmate went on to write:

"It's an almost indescribable emptiness of being disconnected. More often than not, the father-son relationship is one I can't relate to, for the father-son relationships in so many books and movies somehow resolve themselves favorably. And that resolution is something I can't relate to--it's the opposite of what continues for me, it's the opposite of my contact, my lack of contact.

In Cry, the Beloved Country, we read of Absalom's plea, his consistent plea, that though he did commit the terrible crime, he did not intend to commit the crime. Those words echoed my plea eighteen years ago.

But that is where the comparison stops: Thankfully, I did not receive Absalom's sentence. Sadly, I did not receive the compassion he did from his father.

Though brief, the interaction between Absalom and his father is actually fascinating despite the prison setting, despite the dire circumstances--maybe all the more fascinating because of the setting and the circumstances. Their reunion stirred feelings and thoughts--sadness and regret. I didn't really want to be reminded of my particular snapshot of a father-son encounter. But at the same time there was something between Absalom and his father that I've longed for just an ounce of. It was the love and the concern Stephen Kumalo still had and showed for his son, Absalom, even though the father had been so disappointed and hurt by Absalom's conduct in Johannesburg. For me, those scenes are as profound as the Pacific Ocean. Stephen Kumalo was there for his son, and that is what matters most, despite--especially since--Absalom had fallen so far from living the life his father had hoped, expected."

Christopher Golden on summer

Little Willow has been running a series of interviews with Christopher Golden, this bit of a recent one has really stayed with me:

When you think of the summers you spent as a kid, what comes to mind?

Freedom, of course. We spent a ton of time at friends' houses, or walking in the woods, building tree forts. It was the late 1970s, and though horrible things happened to children then, people didn't know about it the way we do now, and didn't talk about it when they did. Child abduction and that sort of thing seems far more common now, but maybe that's an illusion, I don't know. All I do know is that we were NEVER home. We rode our bikes, had adventures in the woods, found gullies that seemed otherworldly to us, stole bags full of corn from a local cornfield and cooked it up at home. And we walked. Boy, did we walk. The movie theatre was six miles away, and by 7th or 8th grade, we would walk there and back if we couldn't get a ride. We walked to McDonald's, or to get pizza, or wherever we felt like going. We roamed. Honestly, it was glorious.

Kon-Tiki and the heroic nerd

"Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.

If, for example, you put to sea on a wooden raft with a parrot and five companions, it is inevitable that sooner or later you will wake up one morning out at sea, perhaps a little better rested than ordinary, and begin to think about it."

Years ago, I found a yellowed copy of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft among the crammed, cramped shelves of a strip-mall used bookstore. Giving it a second glance--mostly just wondering who would name their kid Thor--I read those first lines and found myself drawn into a very odd situation.


Kon-Tiki tells a true story. In 1947, Heyerdahl, a Norwegian ethnographer, was studying Polynesian culture. Noticing similarities between the crops, sculpture techniques, and myths of Polynesia and South America, he got the idea that, around 500 A.D., refugees fleeing a war in Peru populated Polynesia.

But no matter how much evidence Heyerdahl gathered to build up his theory, his colleagues insisted it would have been impossible. 4,300 miles of rough ocean separate Peru from Polynesia, and at the time, the sailors wouldn’t have had ships, just balsa wood rafts held together by hemp rope.

Finally, Heyerdahl was left with two choices: either give up on his theory or build a stone-age raft himself and prove it could be done.

The Kon-Tiki expedition was a balls-out adventure, no question, but it's the men who took it on that really fascinated me. None of Heyerdahl’s crew had experience sailing or ship-building. They were scientists and wanderers, linguists and radio operators, all risking their lives for a theory. Specifically, a theory based on the global distribution of yams.

They were a type of character I’d never encountered before: the heroic nerd, men so driven by the urge to know, to see and understand, they make bold, mad leaps into uncharted territory.

The creed of the heroic nerd is, No experiment is so insanely dangerous that it can’t be made slightly more insanely dangerous with a side experiment. Over the course of their 101-day journey, storms howl and the sun beats down, two men are almost lost at sea, and they must fend off a whale shark that nearly capsizes their raft. And when all that gets boring, they decide to try catching sharks with their bare hands.

"When the shark turned quietly to go under again, its tail flickered up above the surface and was easy to grasp. The skin was just like sandpaper, and inside the upper point of the tail there was an indention which might have been made solely to allow a good grip. Then we had to give a jerk and get as much as possible of the tail pulled in over the logs. For a second or two the shark realized nothing, but then began to wiggle and struggle in a spiritless manner with the fore part of its body, for without the help of its tail a shark cannot get up any speed."


This man has doctorates in zoology, ethnography, and total badassery.
For the purposes of this article, I ran the numbers through multiple computer simulations. It turns out that the only thing more macho than catching a shark with your bare hands would be storming a Nazi machine gun nest using you own lit farts as a flamethrower.

Heyerdahl doesn’t waste time bragging, though. He’s a scientist, and through the book, he writes with the steady observational eye of a scientist, a genial, almost disturbing calm better suited for detailing the mating habits of the golden-rumped elephant shrew. Even when describing the lonely beauty of the ocean, Heyerdahl keeps verbiage to a minimum, letting the scene speak for itself.

"The sea curved away under us as blue upon blue as the sky above, and where they met all the blue flowed together and became one. It almost seemed as if we were suspended in space. All our world was empty and blue; there was no fixed point in it but the tropical sun, golden and warm, which burned our necks."


The author’s copy of Kon-Tiki, scrawny chicken leg.
A couple years ago, while re-reading Kon-Tiki, I decided to get a tattoo of the Tiki image painted on the raft’s sail. I wanted to think that I had a bit of heroic nerd inside me, that wild urge to see and know. I’ve never been to Polynesia or caught a shark with my hands, but I’ve made expeditions to the west Texas deserts, the Louvre, and elsewhere. I’ve worked on an ambulance and in a mental hospital, glimpsed sights as awesome as the blue upon blue sea, and once spent a long night in Heathrow Airport with four stitches in the back of my head.

And every time, sooner or later, the words come. Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation...

Working retail can be really really awful

I have a post up at Chasing Ray highlighting some interesting fall books from Counterpoint & Soft Skull Press. One in particular struck me as very appealing The Customer is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles. Here's an excerpt from Colson Whitehead's contribution, "Eat, Memory: I Scream":

Mine is the story of a man who hates ice cream and of the world that made him.

I was once like you, always quick with a “Two scoops, please” and a “Whipped cream, damn it, whipped cream!” I loved a Breyers vanilla-chocolate-strawberry rectangle straight from the freezer. Never mind if it was a bit long in the tooth, nestled in there next to a half-empty bag of carrots-and-peas medley — scrape off the icy fur and it was good to go. Orange sherbet? Cool. In Baskin-Robbins, I used pure will power to persuade the red digital lights of the Now Serving machine to announce my number, which was a sweat-smudged blob on the pink paper strip in my quivering hand. You can keep your Kiwi Mocha Bombasta: the nuclear green sludge of mint chocolate chip was as exotic as it got, and that’s how I liked things.

Then I went to work in an ice cream store.

readergirlz welcomes GLW

readergirlz diva Justina Chen Headley cordially invites GuysLitWire over to their forum. She says, in part:

We at readergirlz are so thrilled that you’re online, helping guys find great books!

As you know, we girlz are complicated. Okay, make that waaay complicated. On this thread are books that we wish guys would read to understand what's going on with us.

She then asks the readergirlz to list YA novels they wish all guys would read to understand girls. She starts off with Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson and Just Listen by Sarah Dessen, and others have added more titles by the likes of Maureen Johnson, Louise Rennison, and Stephenie Meyer.

Please join us and make it a two-way street - Tell us what YA novels you wish girls would read to understand guys, and vice-versa! Also tell us what YA novels "get" BOTH sides of the story.

The coolest man who ever lived

From Vanity Fair: "Actor, juvenile delinquet, Marine, lumberjack, auto racer, producer - all the incarnations of Hollywood's King of Cool are captured in Henri Suzeau's new book Unforgettable Steve McQueen, a collection of quotes, anecdotes and archival images."

The book is silly expensive ($60) but still - you could do a lot worse this summer than watch Bullitt, or The Great Escape, or any single episode of Wanted: Dead or Alive.

Oh - and from Formula 1 champ Kimi Raikkonen: “Steve McQueen gave a new meaning to coolness.”

National Geographic is censored

From the Wall Street Journal:

Readers of the 5,000 copies of the English-language edition distributed in China have reported that pages 44 and 45, which show a map of China, were stuck together. These pages didn’t make the often-censored slip-up of treating Taiwan as a separate country, but the concern might have been labeling several borders disputed with Pakistan and India. Another map, on pages 126 and 127, showing the distribution of China’s ethnic minorities, was also glued, perhaps because of recent sensitivities over the country’s Tibetan population.

Pages 100 and 101, which feature controversial artwork, as well as pages 128 and 129, on dissent, were also censored, presumably for more obvious reasons.

Beth Foster, the magazine’s director of communications, says, “It appears that someone connected with local magazine distribution in Asia glued together a few pages of the May English-language issues of National Geographic magazine that were shipped into China. We have not gotten to the bottom of the specifics of this isolated activity, but we have had no communication from or with the Chinese government about this matter.”

Higher Learning #1

Welcome to our very first Higher Learning interview. In Higher Learning, College Guys talk about what they're reading, what they read in high school, and what books are important to them now. Today I sat down and talked to Matt (aka Tiny) at Saints Rest Coffee in Grinnell, Iowa, about books and reading.

Matt graduated from Grinnell College in May 2007 and is headed off to Law School this fall. He was a Political Science major at Grinnell and plans on studying Intellectual Property or Corporate Law in Law School. Matt played football in high school and in college, and lived in Ohio until seventh grade when he moved to Wyoming. Thanks for talking to Guys Lit Wire, Matt!

Kelly Herold: What are you reading at this very moment, Matt?

Matt: I'm reading 1421: The Year China Discovered America, by Gavin Menzies. It's historical Non Fiction by a former submarine commander in the British Royal Navy. He uses his knowledge of physical evidence from the oceans to prove the Chinese discovered the world.

Kelly: Is 1421 typical of the books you like to read?

Matt: Yeah, I tend to read historical Non Fiction. I especially like reading American history through the Civil War. I'm also reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, right now. It's about how Lincoln transformed his political opponents into allies after he was elected. Also, I just read Joseph J. Ellis's Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation which reexamines America's historical myths.

Kelly: Okay, let's go back to Middle School. What were you reading in, say, sixth or seventh grade?


Matt: I was in honors English in Ohio and we got to choose our books as a group. I remember reading The Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) which was cool. I was reading a lot of Science Fiction at the time. Going into the seventh grade I read The Time Machine and 1984 over the summer.

Kelly: What was the first life-changing book you read? A book that made you think 'Wow' for the first time when reading?

Matt: Probably The Time Machine. It was the first "real" novel I ever read and it made me want to read good stuff, real books, not like the books we read in elementary school.

Kelly: What about High School? What did you read for school and what did you think about required reading?

Matt: I went to a small high school, so they stuck to the basics: lots of Shakespeare, Brave New World, the Inferno, Kenneth Clarke's Civilization (English was part of a Humanities course). As with all required reading, some of it was good, some of it wasn't.

Kelly: Did you do much reading for fun when you were in high school?

Matt: Between football in the Fall and Speech and Debate in the Spring, I didn't have much time for fun reading. I did have to read a lot of articles for Speech and Debate, so that's what I read outside of school.

Kelly: What do you read for fun now when you're not reading historical Non Fiction. You don't take those to the beach, do you?

Matt: Um, yeah. But I've also been reading Terry Goodkind's fantasy books forever. Those are my fun reading.

Kelly: Okay, last question: Young Adult literature--ever heard of it? What is Young Adult literature?

Matt: For some reason it makes me think of Romance novels. Well, I know there are some sports-like books, like Bleachers (John Grisham), but I've never really read Young Adult books.

Kelly: Thanks, Matt, for taking the time to meet with me.

See you all next month for more Higher Learning.

Do teenage boys need books with weak female characters?

Author Ted Bell has a new YA adventure story out now, Nick of Time. He was on Glenn Beck's show talking about books for teenage boys and Beck makes a point of saying that all books out there for teen boys today are emasculating. He is particularly impressed with Bell's book because the boy gets to be the hero (he goes up against pirates, Nazis, etc.) and - here's the kicker - at one point the hero's little sister is in trouble and she tells the bad guys to just wait, her brother is going to come and get her and they will be sorry. (I've embedded the interview behind the cut.)

In Beck's words, it is wonderful that the girl gets saved by the boy and specifically, that she doesn't save him or herself.

That's what he says - how great for boys that the girl does not do any saving.

There are a couple of things that bother me about this discussion (between two adult men without a teenager in sight by the way). First it is that for a boy to feel heroic he must rescue a girl - and the girl also needs to be rescued. I'm sure the sociologists would have a field day over all this but I can't believe that anyone in the 21st century would believe that such antiquated notions of what it means to be a hero have any place in a worthwhile discussion. Save the world - yes! Save the animals, save the environment, save whatever needs saving in your books. But the girl MUST be saved by the boy for the boy to feel powerful? How do these gentlemen think it makes the girl feel to have to wait to be saved? Have they ever thought about that at all?

Here's the problem that Misters Bell and Beck don't give a moment's thought to - sometimes the boy doesn't show up and the girl is all alone. As I wrote last year, remember Dua Khalil, the victim of a so-called "honor killing". This is part of what Joss Whedon had to say about her death:

Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.

Sometimes the girl is not going to be rescued, sometimes there just aren't any heroes around, and that's why it is so important that we all - male and female - know how to rescue ourselves. That's why no one should have to wait, ever.

Beyond this issuing of rescuing though, I am completely stunned by Beck's assertion that all current books for teenage boys are inferior to those in the past and - I can't believe I'm writing this - emasculating. I am second to none in my hope that more adventurous books for teens will be published (and more mysteries!) but I have read a lot of adventure type books that I am quite confident include strong and heroic boy characters. Just off the top of my head:

Darkside by Tom Becker - werewolves, vamps etc. (sequel due out shortly)
Operation Red Jericho & Operation Typhoon Shore by Joshua Mowll - pirates, mad inventors, etc.
Corbenic by Catherine Fisher - a fight to save the Fisher King
London Calling by Edward Bloor - time travel back to WWII in London
The New Policeman by Kate Thompson - travel to Faerie to save time itself
The Seiki & Judge Ooka series by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler - a series of murder mysteries set in early 18th century Japan where the hero goes up against all sorts of greedy devious bad guys

And then there are all the wonderful realistic dramas in which boys do some heroic things not in the grand adventure model, but very significant in many other ways:

King of the Pygmies by Jonathon Scott Fuqua
No Castles Here by A.C.E. Bauer
The Blue Helmet by William Bell
Into the Ravine by Richard Scrimger
At the Firefly Gate by Linda Newberry
Knights of the Hill Country by Tim Tharp

I have not read the Percy Jackson series although it seems like it would fit in here as a big adventure and I'm still reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and Sunrise in Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers, but in both those cases young men seem to be making heroic decisions. It could be that these two books do not fit into Glenn Beck's moral framework however, as they challenge issues of freedom and patriotism in ways that are beyond the classic vision of unquestioning loyalty to "king and country".

But then again, part of the point of the 21st century is just what it means to be a patriot and beyond that, what it means to be a hero.

Does the boy have to rescue the girl and follow the traditional path to be a true hero in fiction? You tell me - please. I want to know what you think.

EDITED ON JUNE 22nd TO ADD: I want to make clear that this larger discussion is about the interview itself and not the contents of Bell's book. In his book it is a little girl who is saved and he is making a big brother/little sister plot point. It could all be fine for this book but that is not what the two men were discussing in this video. Watch it, and you will see that it is generalizations they were making about being a boy, what it takes to be a man, and why weak female characters are a good thing for boys. Their points, not mine.