Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Under the Bridge

The Underbelly by Gary Phillips

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Because the hardboiled genre has become so mainstream, many forget it has its roots in anti-establishmentarianism. Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest is on some level a mea culpa for his time as a strike-busting Pinkerton agent. Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe frequently made an enemy of the local police, whom he never trusted. His last short story functioned as a screed against the American healthcare system. Gary Phillips’ The Underbelly may be seen as a unique take on the genre: a homeless PI maneuvering through the impoverished of LA trying to unravel the conspiracy […]

Get Out

The Expendable Man by Dorothy Hughes

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I need a valium after reading this. I’ve written in this space before and in other places about my concern when white authors write from the perspective of non-white characters. Obviously, people writing trans-racially is not uncommon, nor is it necessarily a bad thing. Many great works of literature would be lost without folks doing this. And yet, considering the strong power dynamics of white supremacy in the United States (and frankly, the globe), a more natural distance separates colonizer from the colonized, no matter […]

Touchdown

The Seventh by Richard Stark

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Every aspiring writer, whether or not they like crime fiction, should read “Richard Stark” (Donald Westlake)’s Parker series. Not because the books are good, though they are. But because Westlake, like other great writers, has crisp, lean prose that lends itself to the telling of a story. Not a word is wasted. And no matter what kind of story you write, if you write it like this, you’ll never halt narrative momentum. The story itself is fun enough but tough to recall with 250+ words. Parker novels aren’t really […]

Lyndsay Faye is the best.

The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by Lyndsay Faye

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I’ve read quite a bit of Sherlock Holmes pastiche, though by no means even close to all of it, and so far, I think Lyndsay Faye’s version of Holmes and Watson is my favorite. This collection, which was gifted to me by Bunnybean for Book Exchange in CBR9, is made up of fifteen stories published over a period of ten years, many of them in The Strand, the very same magazine that published Conan Doyle’s original stories. All of the stories mimic Conan Doyle’s style, […]

most innovative use of a pizza oven 2019

The Lucky One by Caroline Overington

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 Theoretically I really enjoy mysteries and thrillers. In practice, so many of the ones I start reading end up prominently featuring rape that I tend to avoid the genre. My mother assured me this one featured neither so I decided to give it a shot. The Lucky One is set on an old estate in California wine country. It’s recently been sold off to developers, despite the objections of the local community. They think the developers will rip out all the historical features of the […]

Not just a mystery, but an educational mystery

The Ghost Wore Gray by Bruce Coville

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We have a tradition at our annual work party of a book exchange.  You get a book that has something to do with history (I work at a historic site) and you gift-wrap it.  Everyone who brings a book gets a number, and then the first person unwraps a book. The next person can either unwrap a book or steal the book the first person unwrapped, and so on.  Most people try not to spend much, if anything on the book. So I went to […]



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