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As chief of the Mysteries of the East site, I've exposed myself to far, far more books with Asian themes than I'd ever believed possible. My preference, as readers can surely tell, is to read said books on my Kindle, but reality has given them to me in physical form often enough.
I've now read two Japanese books published by Kodansha. What a physical experience that is! By page count, a Kodansha book is heavier than a typical American book. As soon as you open it, you are greeted by a sense of high quality. The binding, the paper—everything is in another world from what you're used to.
Leafing through one reminds me of when I visited a friend in Seattle some years ago. He works for Microsoft, and at least at that time was in charge of German versions of Microsoft user manuals (remember when we had those?). He had four or five on the floor (where we were looking at his computer). I picked up a couple, and leafed through them. "These are user manuals," I related my discovery. "Why are they hard-bound?" "That's the way Germans do things," he explained.
Despite his origins (Germany), I think he had lived in the US long enough to see the absurdity of this approach. A user manual is obsolete the day it is printed. The product has been evolving while the book was in press, and it will continue doing so—to the extent of being entirely replaced within three years—as time marches on.
There are no user manuals anymore, as everything has moved to digital media (both for reasons of cost and also to ease the constant updating necessary to keep the materials accurate), and this would seem to underline a principle: have the medium match the message.
How many times will a typical mystery be read? In fact, I am proud of my hard-back collection of the works of John LeCarre. There was a time when—every two years or so—I would start with the first one and read on through the most recent. Where did I ever get that kind of time, by the way? But the moment LeCarre started publishing with the ebook option, I took it. My hard-back collection instantly became worthless. It was never going to be complete again. Not only that, but it's been years since I've read anything by him other than the latest book (now published on about a two-year schedule).
Also, I've lived in an apartment or away from my former house for almost fifteen years now, and the question of how many books to keep is a very serious one, not only for space but for inevitable moves. I think of books in a completely different way from how I felt during most of my life.
I am not likely to read a second time most of the books I read these days. But incredibly, it is now far more likely that I can if I want to, for storing the Kindle items I've bought over the past couple years costs me no space at all. Nor any weight.
I will take a certain kind of pleasure as I read the next Kodansha book, but I won't be thinking: Ah, if only all books could be printed like this. Yes, a Kodansha book will last forever, relatively speaking. But the likelihood that any library will have to discard a book becomes greater as the years roll on and new books come into existence.
Keeping in lock-step with time...
--Michael Broschat, February 2010
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| Someone has created a book search engine that looks into more than 30 sources of books in electronic format. I had found this some weeks ago, but only tested it once and have since forgotten about it.
But today I got a note from Chase Lane informing me that more than one book in our catalog here actually has an ebook existence but is not noted as such in the book list. So, I ran a couple tests through AddALL and, sure enough, there are lots of ebooks that I don't note in the book list here at Mysteries of the East.
I'm stunned but delighted. Most of the previously unknown ebooks are not from Amazon (and therefore for its Kindle). That makes them more difficult to find but now we have AddALL to help!
In fact, I'm now not so sure that I will continue to note when a book is in ebook format. Having more than just Amazon to check, the task becomes, perhaps, too formidible to continue. We'll see.
Whether I do some work or not, you can run AddALL on your own:
--Michael Broschat
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| I follow the e-publishing business to some degree, through a couple blogs. Of course, it sounds pretty big from this perspective. And these blogs make me understand that the ebook phenomenon is not limited to Amazon's Kindle (my own ebook reader).
In fact, recently I've heard much about Barnes & Noble's new ebook reader (Nook), and when I saw that Martin Limon's latest Sueno & Bascom thriller has been released (today!), I not only ordered my Kindle version (instantly available, of course), but browsed over to the publisher's site to see in what other forms of ebook this novel is being published. There was Barnes & Noble listed as the only other "single" outlet for the book, and there was a group representing independent bookstores, too.
I checked both B&N and also the Indie marketing group for ebook versions of the Limon novel, but none exists.
This rather surprises me. I had begun to believe that if one ebook version was available, others would be, too. After all, it's simply a format change to the same file.
I don't know what this means. Is the Limon novel somehow exclusive to Amazon? Possible, but I'd be surprised. Is there no clear DRM format in which to publish it (DRM is necessary for a publisher to protect its product from being copied and passed around)? I will keep an eye out for that possibility.
In the meantime, there's another "crackling read" in store for me in the company of these wonderful Army soldiers who seem to single-handedly run the US presence in Korea in the 1970s. Couldn't be in better hands...
Michael Broschat, November 2009
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Looks like Chris Moore put this together, and he and Colin Cotteril contribute often. |
| I see that I haven't been very active reading Asian mysteries this past month. It isn't that I don't have any to read. Teresa Franks pointed out that I haven't included S.J. Rozan yet, so I downloaded a Kindle version of her latest Chinatown mystery. But haven't gotten to it.
I did go through each author's site and did my best to update any news of upcoming publications, etc. That was somewhat revealing. There are not a lot of announced upcoming publications for our authors, taken as a whole.
I get a lot of information about the publishing industry from reading Richard Curtis' fine blog: E-Reads, and most of the news indicates big changes going on in, at least, American publishing. Curtis, himself, has picked up the e-versions of Colin Cotterill's first two Dr Siri novels, which is great news. I suppose they're waiting to see how that goes before committing to any of the others.
Oh, I did see Lisa See read at Politics & Prose, a large bookstore in Washington DC, and she was asked by the several fans of her mystery stories whether she'll write any more of those. I interpreted her answer to be something like "I'm not planning anything in particular but am not averse to those characters reappearing." Right now, she's having a good time (and big success) in the world of "legitimate" fiction, so we'll have to excuse her.
And there are several authors that I have yet to track down and enter into our repository. Authors whose names I found in various issues of Janet Rudolph's fine Mystery Readers Journal. Most of them are probably no longer active but we want to include them, anyway.
—Michael Broschat, June 2009
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| I wonder whether Sherlock Holmes was the first serialized mystery character. As I understand it, AC Doyle wrote the Holmes stories for the relatively new phenomenon called 'magazines', which really got going in England and the United States during the 19th century. Dickens, of course, published most of his novels in serialized form earlier than Doyle's Holmes stories. But Dickens characters did not re-appear in subsequent novels, while the Holmes stories tended to be complete short stories in each issue (a couple novels were serialized).
What serialization seems to do is to create an expectation in the reader. There are wonderful stories of the consequences of serializing novels, stories where crowds met the ships coming in from England to see what had happened in the latest chapter of a Dickens novel, for example. Quite naturally, that expectation can extend beyond a single story. If a detective solves a problem in one story, why couldn't he appear in another story to solve another problem?
I have no hesitancy in claiming that the public likes a 'series' of mystery stories, where said series contains the same character (or set of characters). In what might be the golden age of mysteries, Agatha Christie had two series I can think of—Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and I fondly remember the Campion series written by Margery Allingham. Later, John Le Carre's George Smiley emerged from Le Carre's earliest novels to become the focus of his cold war novels. It was very hard for such readers as myself to adjust, when Le Carre stopped writing George Smiley novels. He explains on video accompanying various DVDs that when Alec Guinness played Smiley so successfully, Le Carre could no longer envision the man he had known as Smiley, and so the character was lost to him as an author.
The point here is that the character(s) of a series can take on a life that is bigger than the novels in which he appears. He comes to live in the minds and expectations of the series readership. We know his character, we know his faults, and we know his strengths. No reader of the Smiley series could fail to be hurt by the infidelities of Smiley's infamous wife, Ann.
But as much as we readers love our series characters, there is evidence that authors do not necessarily share that love. This is easy enough to understand. When you give life to a character, you are responsible for the integrity of that life. You cannot have a character born in Reading only to note three books later that she was born in Westchester. You might have forgotten, but your readers haven't, and they will punish you by abandoning you.
I am a fan of Thomas Perry's Jane Whitefield series. He wrote five Whitefield novels (about a young woman of American Indian heritage who helped desperate people disappear), and then went back to writing thrillers involving new characters in each book. In his blog, he noted the constant demand from his readership for another Jane story, and nine years later finally produced Runner. He has not, so far as I am aware, written about what bothered him so much that he did not continue the series after its undoubted success. But what we as readers see as the next chapter in a character's life, the author can see as repetition. Perry does state that he wanted to grow as a writer, whatever that means, and I'll interpret that to mean he didn't want to repeat what he was doing with the Whitefield stories.
So, a series is a burden to the author and an anticipated pleasure for its fans. I hope there are many cases where an author made his peace with his character, and allowed them both to live happily ever after.
-- Michael Broschat, May 2009
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| Actually, Francie Lin was not born in Greenfield, Mass., but lives there now. She is a Harvard grad and Fulbright scholar. |
| Bob Nylander discovered that a Chinese-American woman born in his home town has written a "Chinese mystery." I won't add Francie Lin to our site yet, as I'm not sure of the nature of her book, but have bought it for my Kindle and have it on my list to read after the John Barth novel currently open.
In the meantime, you can see various items on the web about Ms Lin and her book. For example,
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| From the point of view of my profession (computer industry), the fact that my web site(s) is self-hosted (I run the servers from my home) is perfect. From the point of view of visitors, this is not always a good thing.
For the most part, Mysteries of the East has been down for a couple months, and I've just solved the last problem before bringing it back on line. Of course, in the business I'm in, it wasn't so much the last problem as it was the most recent problem.
If this site ever becomes "popular," whatever that might mean, I would probably be obligated to move it to a commercial web hosting service. I don't want to do that until I have to, because I like the immediacy of dealing with things right here in my hands.
Unless, of course, I don't know how.
Anyway, we're back in business, and I have a couple reviews and even a site ready to post. I hope you've been good while I've been away!
--Michael Broschat, April 2009
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In writing my reviews of a Peter May novel and a Eliot Pattison novel, I found myself thinking about 'formula'.
Perhaps, the most obvious formula—although it's one I'm not familiar with—is the gothic romance novel (I don't even know what the words mean). Evidently, these books are all quite similar, at least in plot. I wonder whether the formula used for many "popular" Chinese films is similar. Boy meets girl, one family is "lower" than the other, parents of one/both kids object, boy and girl struggle to be together, some event happens that shows the worth of the lower person, and the film ends with both families united in marriage and smiling for the camera.
Two mystery formulas that I've considered are the love interest formula and the oppression formula.
The love interest story could (and does) take place anywhere, and it could be about almost anything. The thread running through the plot is a boy/girl matchup. If it happens anew in a given book, then there will often be some sort of tension (as in the Chinese movies) that threatens the relationship, but then all will be worked out, one hopes through the solving of the mystery. A variation on this would have the couple working together to solve the mystery, but where one (or both) get into deep trouble. It all works out in the end.
A good example of the latter is the Dashiell Hammett Thin Man story, which became several hugely successful films. People love the relationship between Nick and Nora, and it hardly matters what happens the rest of the time.
The boy meets girl formula happens so often it would be easier to find novels that don't use it. Perhaps the archetype was set in the Charlie Chan and Mr Moto series from before WWII. There, boy meets girl, there's lots of trouble (threatening one or both), and then it all works out in the end. Incidentally, the Chan and Moto stories had an additional formula (almost certainly established by the earlier Chan series) where Charlie and Mr Moto are not the central characters. The books are really adventure love stories, and the Asian detectives are used to spice up the plot. I suppose we could say that they're gothic romance novels but with acceptable macho components provided by the detectives.
The oppression theme would seem to involve a story that takes place within an oppressive environment, usually a totalitarian government. Almost anything by John Le Carre fits this, and such stories as The Third Man are perfect examples. As I look over the novels represented so far in our Mysteries of the East collection, I see an additional twist on this theme—the chief character is working within this system. A lot of pre-WWII stories had the British or American hero go into some dangerous situation, play around for a while, and then escape unharmed.
But look how many stories in our current collection have the chief character as a part of the totalitarian structure. The heroes of Diane Wei Liang, Lisa See, and Qiu Xiaoling are working for (or, at least, within) the Chinese government. They are good people, but they are governed by standards of behavior that belong to modern Chinese society (on the mainland). James Church's character, Inspector O, is a detective within the North Korean government, and Colin Cotterill's Dr Siri is a rather low-ranking functionary in the Laotian government in its Communist days (if they are gone now). Eliot Pattison's Inspector Shan is even a prisoner of the Chinese government, and is imprisoned in Tibet!
Even the Thai detectives work within a society that is munificently corrupt, and behaving in a way we readers might consider to be morally upright can be a very dangerous thing to do within the Thai society represented in these novels.
Non-formula books are probably more likely found in the Japanese collection, at least among post-WWII novels.
Does writing to a formula harm a book? It seems to be what we want, in a way. A series requires that everything turn out well at the end, because the characters have to start a new story soon after this one has finished. I'm not feeling that a formula book cannot be great literature, but then I don't know what great literature is. It does seem to be a component of "the series" books, and I suspect that we like series books a great deal more than the authors do. I'm a great fan of the Jane Whitefield novels of Thomas J Perry, and he went nearly ten years before he continued the Jane series. He admits in his blog that the demand for Jane never ceased, but I have not seen where he addresses the reasons he stopped writing about her. Our series writers here, too, often seem to adopt other outlets, writing books outside the series.
But we are loyal to the heroes we love, and we want to see them smiling for our camera at the breathless end of another exciting tale...
- Michael Broschat, Feb 2009
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