Dave's Fiction Warehouse

I was an early and unlikely fan of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. Normally I go in for hard-nosed crime fiction where at least five people die horribly before the denouement. In Smith's books, a very kind and overweight woman goes around solving mysteries of a less-menacing nature. People do occasionally die in these books, but never at the hands of depraved serial killers. If you like curling up with a writer like Thomas Harris , A.M. Smith takes some getting used to. He has a finely tuned ear for West African English, which makes every character sound both simple and profound. Even the antagonists can be charming. This charm comes across very well in the HBO series of the same name, which we watched last night. The series is perfectly cast and perfectly written -- which is to say it matches the expectations of longtime readers like myself. As in the books, the pacing is pleasantly sedate, driven more by character than plot. If you have H...

Guess it's a storm after all. The power went off at 3:30 a.m., and didn't come back on until around 10 a.m. In the meantime, our good friends were good enough to have us over for a nice hot breakfast. Thanks, D & D! Now everything is covered in ice and certain branches are hanging dangerously low, and wet snow is coming down hard. But the furnace is on and I'm going to take a nice hot shower while I can -- day like this, you can't take continuous power for granted. As the picture at left suggests, we won't be barbecuing for dinner tonight. Good Lord willing, we'll be tasting wine and eating pizza instead. Speaking of which, here's a poem I wrote at the request of tonight's hosts, in praise of tonight's featured grape: I think that I shall never know A wine so useful as merlot, A modest grape that won't offend When crowds of people must attend. Though other wines may have more fame, The alcohol is much the same; It's not too heady, nor too...

The big news here is that a major blizzard is on the way and it's going to hit this city but good. Forget Fargo and its 112-year flood ; we've got a half-inch of snow on the ground and now it looks like some sleet. This could be rough. I expect to see CNN vans on every block of this city by the close of business today. It doesn't look too bad in the picture, but just you wait. People here love bracing for a winter storm, particularly at this time of year when tornadoes are more likely than a foot of snow. I love it too, monitoring the situation from the relative safety of command central. I left the house just once today, to pick up some stew fixings at the grocery store. Evidently I was the last one to think about stocking up: there wasn't much left in the meat aisle and all they had for milk was some 2 percent that was very close to the sell-by date. Would have picked up some guns and ammo too, except you can't find that stuff around here either, what with Obama i...

Here's a grab bag of items on a day when nothing in particular rises to the fore. Such days seem entirely too frequent. * Just finished reading Hit and Run , Lawrence Block's latest in his series about the hit man J. P. Keller. These days I rarely finish a book on the same day I acquire it; when I do, I have to give props to the author. Block is no literary genius, but he's a master at crime fiction. He keeps you believing the story and turning the pages. That's what good fiction is all about, and it's a lot harder than he makes it look. Particularly if the protagonist is a hired killer who collects stamps, and not all of the people he kills have it coming. If you haven't checked out his Keller series, do so. Just don't expect a warm and fuzzy feeling to result. This is not the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency . * I mentioned on this blog a few weeks ago that I'm a fan of American Idol . I'm pretty close to demanding a retraction. I skipped last nigh...

I'll tell you what: I'm getting tired of all these sob stories about newspapers shutting down. Not that I have anything against newspapers, which until recently afforded me a life of unimaginable luxury. But I cringe at the poignant and somewhat accusatory tone of stories bemoaning the demise of yet another big-city rag. You'll all be sorry when we're gone, they say; you won't have the Daily Bugle to kick around any more. And beware: If you don't have a newspaper, you don't have a democracy. Who'll afflict the comfortable without the Bugle's crack investigative team sniffing out corruption? Then again, the investigative thing and the corruption thing kind of fell by the wayside over the last decade or so. Surveys revealed that what readers really wanted were anecdotal trend stories, whimsical lifestyle pieces and 20-minute recipes. So newspapers went that route, realizing too late that the readers who answered the survey were already getting all that...