Handler, David The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again

This is what I would call a summer throw-a-way. Handler has written a slew of these books and their unifying feature is a lovable basset hound named Lulu who is always on hand with an important clue to help solve the mystery.  I sense that this is the one that tells you the author is running out of new ideas, so he returns to the time when he got the dog and when he returns to his old hometown that he swore he would never return to.

We get a little dose of soft-porn to keep the cozy mystery folks at bay. It comes along with the improbable plot that our hero Stuart Hoag has just leaped out of 13 years away from home trying to become a writer. Finally, his big book materializes, and money and fame come to him along with the passionate attention of a six-foot-tall blond actress who is more famous than he is.

Why does he go home again? Well, the librarian back in his old hometown was one of the few women who treated him well when he was growing up. She has been murdered at her desk and Mr. Hoag “Hoagie” decides to return for her funeral with his puppy and new squeeze. Soon, he is involved with the task of finding the killer and that means involvement with all the low life created by the Hoag family’s now defunct business that poisoned all the water in the town and shot the cancer rate through the roof.  Handler tries to write with humor, but to give you an idea of the level of it, all I need to do is mention that there is a running joke about the town’s current police chief who was called “Peter the Beater” by Hoagie and his old school pals. Nuff said.  Check this one out only if you are desperate.

I give it a 1.5 out of 5  

Book Review The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl

 

Ruth Reichl, THE PARIS NOVEL

Stella is a lovely young woman with a literary bent and a taste for good food. She has had a lonely and miserable childhood with a mother who doesn’t seem to care about her and an absent father whom her mother doesn’t want to talk about. When her mom passes on, the single bequest to Stella is strange indeed. She leaves her only a plane ticket to Paris and a few traveler's checks. Stella works up enough courage to take the bait and goes off to Paris to find both herself and the father her mother refused to talk about. What ensues is a pleasant, warm-hearted love affair with food, books, and France. Stella ends up as a so-called “tumbleweed” living at the famous literary bookstore Shakespeare and Company. She meets famous authors, French food, and a rich patron.

I don’t want to spoil the dinner or the search, so let’s leave it with this. The Paris Novel is a delicious little book that will delight any lover of gastronomy, literature, and travel. Do I need to remind you that Ms. Reichl is a former editor of Gourmet magazine and was also the restaurant critic for the New York Times.

I give it a 4.5

Play Review AMADEUS at Theatre Cedar Rapids

 

 

On April 17,1980 I was on a sabbatical in London. I got up at 6:30 AM to get to the Waterloo tube station and the National Theatre of Great Britain. I wanted to arrive by 8:00AM to join the queue for day tickets to see  Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus, which had opened to acclaim the year before and was still running with the original cast of Paul Scofield and Simon Callow in the two lead roles of Salieri and Mozart.

Upon arrival there were already 30 ahead of me. By 10:00 AM the line had doubled. I got a ticket and my single seat was dead center in row 3. I could see the hairs in Paul Scofield’s nostrils every time he came downstage. “At the end of the production, Salieri pleads for pity on the mediocre souls of the world. He knelt dead center not ten feet from me. As the music slowly faded out, he directed it with his arms, then with smaller gestures, until his head sank and said “Oh Lord have mercy on we who are not the geniuses of the world.” Blackout.

That account of the first production of Amadeus was adapted from my 1980 journal. I am not going to claim that the Theatre Cedar Rapids production I saw in their small Grandon experimental theatre last Sunday afternoon, was better than the British National Theatre’s lush and award-winning production in the large Olivier Theatre, but their rendition was damn good. The singular advantage was that the tiny space permitted every spectator to focus on the key dramatic conflict. In Amadeus, that is the collision that occurs when a good, but mediocre artist, is faced with the arrival of a genius who would become a giant for the ages.  As another giant once said, “Oh what fools these mortals be.”

Matthew James plays Salieri with fervent excellence in both his aged years and his prime. He moves between the two time periods by the simple addition of a cloak and a hood to cover his wig and silky waistcoat when he is playing the elderly man. Ethan B Glenn’s ebulliently crude and massive Mozart crushes Salieri as if he was driving a steamroller over a creampuff. Age and disease catch up to both men and what remains is the tragedy. God has unexplainably given the talent to the boor and left the journeyman to take his place with the rest of us poor mortals. Kehry Anson Lane also deserves mention for a strong and nuanced portrayal of Joseph II.     

Director Patrick DuLaney moved his actors confidently on the tiny Grandon stage making sure that every audience member had ample full-face views. No one felt ignored. And we could hear the actors clearly in their true voices without amplification.  The scenic design was simple and demonstrated that this was a play about people, not an ode to baroque splendor. The evocative blocked floor was spattered in what appeared to be blood. Scene changes were smoothly performed by the actors by simply moving the few pieces of furniture around into different configurations.   

Although the play was reduced in visual grandeur by being crammed into a 100-seat black box, the superiority of Mozart’s music came through at every turn. This is a show you must make an effort to see. It runs until June 22^nd, but you had better hurry to get tickets. According to the stage manager, the advance was strong.

 

 

The Quantum Spy by David Ignatius

Mr. Ignatius is a distinguished foreign affairs columnist, and it is no surprise that he should take advantage of his international knowledge to pen a thriller. THE QUANTUM SPY is a pretty much run-of-the-mill piece of work. China has a mole deep in our intelligence world, and a young Chinese-American is on the team to track him or her down. This is paired with the race to develop a super-fast quantum computer between the USA and China. There is a lot of technical talk about stuff well beyond bits and bytes and plenty of tradecraft that involves meetings and psychological sparring at secret locations around the globe.  My only sense is that there may be too much computer jargon for one group of readers and too little physical action for another group of readers. That leaves the book firmly ensconced in the less-than-blockbuster middle.

I give it a 2.5 out of 5

 

 

Review A DEATH IN DIAMONDS by S.J. Bennett

 

A Death in Diamonds by S.J Bennett

This is the fourth book featuring Queen Elizabeth II as an amateur detective doing murder investigations in Britain in 1957. Bennett gives us a plot focusing on a brutal fetishistic double murder in a London mews house that has been used as an illicit hideaway for upper-crust patrons of an escort agency.

The queen is trying her best to handle the loss of her empire after WWII and suspects that her efforts to renew the reputation of England in foreign lands are being sabotaged by some members of the old guard.  She brings into her staff and her confidence a bright young woman who had a past with the code breakers during WWII, but that does not keep the royal family from being sucked into a possible involvement with the double murders. Scotland Yard moves at a glacial pace, and the security agencies also seem to be lurking about. Several possible solutions pop up, but all end up as red herrings before the final knot is untied in the last few pages.

Bennett has a clever story, yet tells it so deliberately that I found my interest flagging before the next new development arrives. The “mews” twists are interspersed with too many overlong passages on England’s place in the post-war world, palace infighting, and society backbiting.

I love almost anything set in London, but this one leaves me lukewarm rather than wanting to read any more of the series.

I give it a 3 out of 5  

P.S. Another author, Karen Harper, wrote a series of books with the young Elizabeth I as a detective in the early 2000s. The Elizabethan ambiance was more colorfully depicted.   

 

HAIRSPRAY at TCR

 Hairspray, a classic Broadway musical that won eight Tony awards in 2003, has stomped onto the Theatre Cedar Rapids stage with splashy lighting, loud 1960’s music, splendid choreography, and wild costumes.  The matinee crowd was applauding vigorously all afternoon, but saved their biggest ovations for Michael Olinger’s drag performance as Edna Turnblad. He lived up to everything I remember from seeing Harvey Fierstein in the role in New York years ago.

All the majors except perhaps Calvin Boman as Link Larson seemed on target. Belle Canney was both earnest and buoyant. Brandon Burkhardt was oily and smooth. Larson just seemed a bit understated when thrown into the rest of the high-energy cast. He may not have been feeling up to par.

I was particularly impressed by TCR’s vast lighting and costume resources. They were put to the test and succeeded in charging every moment with color and sparkle. Hats off as well to the choreography.  for sure. These folks can dance and they were put through their paces immaculately by Megan Helmers. I have seen musicals--a lot of musicals-- and her work is right up there with anything I have witnessed in New York. 

It is also a pleasure to see that one can still find people with the courage to mount and perform a show that finds pertinence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion despite a government that has tried to eliminate the words from the English language.  The audience was filled with children and adults who didn’t seem to find a drag performance sinful or the participation and defending of protests against the established order unpatriotic.  

This is a show to see if you can. TCR seems to excel in musicals. I know they have to put patrons in seats, but one can only wish they would bring more of the same talents to bear on other kinds of dramatic works.  

 

Daniel Silva The Order

Mr. Silva is an accomplished author of over 20 espionage thrillers. This one seems long and dense--perhaps because I was reading it in a small print paperback edition. You may also not be ready for quite this much medieval church history and some of the political bias that appears. On the other hand, The Order continues to draw you in. The plot centers on the murder of a pope by an ultra-right-wing faction with a plan to take over the entire Catholic church. Silva claims the book is a fictional elegy on the age-old curse that the Jews killed Jesus and it draws heavily on Pius XII’s treatment of the Jews during World War II. The current anger and desperation over the still raging Gaza War also lurks as an undercurrent. 

The savior of the Catholic faith is, ironically, no other than a Jew. Gabriel Allon, master assassin, head of Israeli Intelligence, art restorer, and tender family man is this time summoned from a vacation holiday in Venice to investigate the possible murder of a pope. The mystery is bound up in a literary enigma. There are multiple ancient copies of biblical texts available and whether there is or was a gospel of Pilate, whether it exists but is a forgery, or whether its potential content might be terrible enough to elicit the murder a pope keeps the narrative boiling right down to the very last pages.

This is not an easy read and general critical opinion is mixed, but Silva is a master writer of location detail and Gabriel Allon is a fascinating and complicated character.   

I give it a 4 out of 5