A book recommendation, recognition of a literary icon, and the search or an absorbing read

 

Some time ago I wrote about outrageous cozy mysteries—those that require the reader to suspend disbelief because nothing so far-fetched, improbable, outrageous could happen in real life. If these stories were onstage, they might be called slapstick. I cited Lois Winston’s Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun, first in her Anastasia Pollock Crafting Mysteries. Amateur sleuth Anastasia learns her husband, supposedly on a business trip, dropped dead at the tables in Las Vegas, having lost every penny they had and with a mobster after him for gambling debts. Anastasia inherits the threatening mobster, her mother-in-law who is a card-carrying, outspoken Communist, and a parrot that quotes Shakespeare. An editor at a crafting magazine, she finds a body in her office chair, firmly attached by glue from a hot glue gun. See what I mean by outrageous? (Of course I included my own Saving Irene in the list.)

This week I read the latest of Anastasia’s adventures, A Crafty Collage of Crime, published today. Twelfth in the series, the book takes her on a honeymoon to Tennessee’s wine country where she and her superhero (really, he can almost stop bullets) husband stay at a winery owned by three whacky sisters who are true-crime addicts. When the sisters’ husbands start turning up dead, the local sheriff welcomes Anastasia’s help—seems everyone knows about her because of a true-crime podcast featuring her. Anastasia is the only one who doesn’t know about the podcast. What follows is a hilarious mix of tourists, wineries, an ex-con, crooked real estate deals, a corrupt politician, kidnappings, and cryptocurrency. It’s a wild and improbable pace and lots of fun. The action is sprinkled with Winston’s talent for the comedic. For instance, she refers to her first husband as “the Dead Louse of a Spouse.”

If some days it seems the world is too much with you, I suggest you read A Crafty Collage of Crime. You’ll probably want to go back and read the rest of the series. Anastasia is irresistible. 

In other book news, no one who follows the news, particularly in Texas, can have missed that Cormac McCarthy died this week. Texas Monthly solicited statements of praise from ten authors, everyone from Stephen King to Annie Proulx (author of Brokeback Mountain). He was a Texas icon whose literary reputation stands with our greats—Larry McMurtry, John Graves, even J. Frank Dobie. If Dobie established southwestern literature as a genre, McCarthy took it in a new and dark direction. McCarthy’s prose is amazing, his landscape passages breath-taking, and I know his reputation will endure. Someone who knows Texas literarature well once speculated on what Texas authors will still be read a hundred years from now—he didn’t mention McCarthy, but I’d add his name to the slim list.

All that said, I never read one of his books through. McCarthy saw a darkness in humanity that was too much for me. Violence, corruption, and always the shadow of mortality hung over his works. Perhaps the violence of his vision accounted for his reclusive lifestyle. I am glad to recognize his importance in the canon of Texas literature (and earlier that of Appalachia) and I regret his death, but I cannot call myself a fan.

Obviously, from the recommendation above, I like lighter reading. Yet this week, I’ve had a hard time settling down with a new book this past week. Perhaps I’m picky. One stretched the limits of satire too far for me, another was too slow for even a cozy mystery, still another threatened to delve into Nazi brutality and, like McCarthy’s dark vision, I can’t go there. And then there was one that quoted Gertrude Stein (an apron is an apron is an apron) and waxed eloquent on the sensuality of cutting into a pumpkin. No thanks. I’m prowling my Kindle for all those books I haven’t yet read.

What are you reading?