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#FridayReads, May 10–“The Drop,” Michael Connelly; “A Man W/out Breath,” Philip Kerr; “Black Count,” Tom Reiss

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Friday Reads May 10

I’m so lucky to have so many terrific books to read this weekend and over the coming days. And, after these three, I’ve got a Henning Mankell novel I’ve never read, Before the Frost, a thriller that features not only his longtime series character, Kurt Wallander, but also his grown daughter Linda, who over several earlier books had voiced her ambition to become a police detective, like her father. In fact, the novel is officially dubbed “A Kurt and Linda Wallander Novel,” just as all the earlier ones were “Kurt Wallander” books. Interestingly, in Michael Connelly’s The Drop, featuring his series character Harry Bosch, the detective’s teenage daughter, Maddy, has told her father that she wants to become a police officer.

As I have written in earlier posts about Mankell’s books, I love his books, and all these detective authors for the loyalty over many books that they show to their characters. The cases become more engrossing and their characters more believable and more sympathetic the deeper you read in to each series. This is certainly also true for Philip Kerr’s whose A Man Without Breath I started this afternoon. This is the ninth book portraying Bernie Gunther, the German police inspector trying to somehow stay alive during WWII, while retaining his dignity and moral center, while the Nazis all around him engage in mayhem and corrupt self-dealing. I’ve also posted often about the Gunther books.

As for Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, I met Tom Reiss and heard him read from his book at the National Book Critics Circle annual awards ceremony in March, and was enchanted by what I heard of his biography of Alexandre Dumas’ father. More recently, his book won the Pulitzer Prize. I read Chapter One last night, in which Reiss explains how he came to discover the elder Dumas, a remarkable figure who had been all but lost to history. I’m really eager to get back to his book, and so glad I have this nonfiction to balance all my novel reading.

Please note, if you want to read any of the books I’ve written about in this post, I’ve embedded links in each title. If you click on them, it will lead you to pages at Powell’s Books where you can order them. As I explain in a note near the upper right corner of this site, they then return a portion of your purchase price to me to help maintain this site.

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#FridayReads, Sept 12–George C. Chesbro’s “City of Whispering Stone,” w/Mongo the Magnificent

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City of Whispering Stone frontContinuing my theme from last week, today’s #FridayReads is another mystery featuring Mongo the Magnificent, former circus dwarf turned criminology professor and private eye, in City of Whispering Stone, published in 1978, which I read that year, then ordered and sold in my bookstore, Undercover Books in Cleveland, Ohio. The plot of this novel—Book II in a series that would ultimately have fifteen titles—would have been very topical and timely at the time, as it concerns Iranian students in NYC, an Iranian circus strongman who is a member of the troupe that Mongo once performed in as a headliner, and the political fate of the Shah. In real life, this would have been during the Carter administration and amid the tumultuous revolution that ended with Ayatollah Khomeni and the mullahs in control of the country,when American hostages were held captive for 444 days in Tehran. The mullahs have hold power ever since. Chesbro must’ve had a keen line in to the Iranian expat community in the US, because of the depiction of the dissident students reads like a contemporary dispatch from the New York Times. In the novel, the performer/strongman has mysteriously vanished and Phil Statler, impresario of the Statler Brothers Circus, Mongo’s former boss, hires the detective to locate him. The writing is great—noirish and tough, and very good at revealing the mindset of Mongo, an ultimate outsider who’s never fit in anywhere in his whole life. Back in my bookstore days, I never read beyond the earliest books in the series, so in the weeks to come, I’ll go back in the sequence and re-read Shadow of a Broken Man (1977, Book I), then move on to An Affair of Sorcerers (1979, Book III); and The Beasts of Valhallah (1985, Book IV), and perhaps others.

I do relish reading detective fiction and many different mystery series. As readers here may recall, I’ve written before about the novels of Michael Connelly (who created series character LAPD Detective Harry—short for Hieronymous—Bosch); Henning Mankell (Swedish police lieutenant Kurt Wallander); the late Tony Hillerman (Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee), whose series was revived in 2013 by his daughter, novelist Anne Hillerman, introducing new series character, Bernadette Manuelito; Philip Kerr (Munich police inspector Bernie Gunther); John D. MacDonald (salvage expert Travis McGee); and J. Michael Orenduff (author of the POT THIEF mystery series, with protagonist Hubert Schuze, dealer in Native American ceramics). Last year, I wrote an appreciation of one of Mankell’s Wallander books that can just as well apply to all of these series, edited for inclusion in this post:

Henning Mankell’s thriller 2004 thriller Before the Frost, features Detective Kurt Wallander and his grown daughter Linda, who like he had earlier in life, elects to become a police officer. With surprising synchronicity, in Michael Connelly’s Detective Harry Bosch novel The Drop, (my May 10th, 2013 #FridayReads), his young adult daughter informs him that she is going to choose police work for her career. I don’t believe these two writers, one in Sweden, the other in Los Angeles, read each other’s work or have directly influenced each other. Instead, I believe that these authors—who have each written ten or more books featuring their detective protagonist—become extremely invested in their characters and loyal to them, so that in their protean creativity, they endow the two characters—both late middle-aged single fathers—with full lives and late-in-life-joy from growing closer to their children. This highlights one of the things I love most about these books, Mankell’s and Connelly’s, as well as mysteries by other authors I enjoy, featuring characters Travis McGee, Bernie Gunther, and Joe Gunther (no relation to the former), by John D. MacDonald, Philip Kerr, and Archer Mayor, respectively: The author is so devoted to their creation that they give them full lives, and I as a faithful reader, become devoted to them, too.

City of Whispering Stone back

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#FridayReads, Sept 5–George C. Chesbro’s “In the House of Enemies,” w/Mongo the Magnificent

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Mongo cover#FridayReads—In the House of Secret Enemies by George C. Chesbro, ten short stories featuring one of the all-time greatest detective series characters, Mongo the Magnificent, aka Robert Frederickson, Ph.D.—former headlining acrobat performer for the Statler Bros Circus; black belt in karate; criminology professor at a New York City university; and dwarf. I found this mass-market paperback, a 1990 Mysterious Press edition, when I browsed and shopped at Myopic Books on Milwaukee Ave in Chicago last month, a great second-hand store with a really extensive inventory. The collection also includes a revealing intro by Chesbro, “The Birth of a Series Character,” explaining how he came to dream up the character of Mongo, and how he persevered despite little encouragement from editors, at least at the beginning. After the intro, Chesbro offers notes before each tale explaining the role that the story played in his ongoing development of the character. These stories were all written before he dared put Mongo in a full-length novel—hell, before he even knew if he could write a Mongo novel, and whether the emerging character could bear the weight of a full-length book, leave alone find it accepted by a publisher—so each of these stories was a key experiment in character creation and development. The collection is full of great writing and shop-talk. I read the first few Mongo novels when I operated my bookstore, Undercover Books, but haven’t read one in many years. I love mystery series publishing, with so many great and memorable characters, such as Michael Connelly’s LAPD detective Harry Bosch, Archer Mayor’s Vermont police detective Joe Gunther, Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache, and Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander. Now, I gotta find more of Chesbro’s Mongo titles, which combine two of my favorite enthusiasms—the circus and detective fiction! For more info on Mongo and Chesbro—who died, sadly, in 2008, but was around long enough to republish many of the fifteen Mongo titles in POD editions under his own Apache Beach imprint—I suggest you visit the author’s Wikipedia page and this site, Dangerous Dwarf.

Mongo back cover

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A Basket Full of Holiday #FridayReads

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PT #FridayReads photoDelighted to have so much free time this week for this terrific collection of great recreational and work-related reading. Here’s a quick rundown on each book with the tweets I put out about them tonight.
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My fave books by suspense writer Michael Connelly are his Harry Bosch novels, but the ones involving defense attorney Mickey Haller are enjoyable too.


Dave Bidini, longtime member of The Rheostatics, is a triple threat–stellar musician, compelling writer, and all-around good guy. I love oral histories like this one: the memorable voices of many musicians are soldered together in to an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking narrative of stalwarts traveling and playing music across one of the largest countries on the planet.


I admire CUNY Graduate Center Professor William Helmreich’s civic enterprise–he walked on nearly street in the five boroughs, meeting and speaking with hundreds of New Yorkers to weave together a fascinating portrait of the 21st century city enriched by new immigrant groups.


I’m hopeful that Chicago writer Haas’s suspense novels will merit rediscovery and publication. I was delighted to be asked to look at them by Shirley Haas and old Chicago friend Kevin Riordan.

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#FridayReads, May 24–“Before the Frost,” a Kurt & Linda Wallander novel

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Henning Mankell photo#FridayReads Henning Mankell’s thriller 2004 thriller Before the Frost, featuring Detective Kurt Wallander and his grown daughter Linda, who like he did earlier in life, chooses to become a police officer. With surprising synchronicity, in Michael Connelly’s 2011 Detective Harry Bosch novel The Drop, (my May 10th #FridayReads), his teenage daughter informs him that she is going to choose police work for her career. I don’t believe these two writers, one in Sweden, the other in Los Angeles, read each other’s work or have directly influenced each other. Instead, I believe that with these authors–who have each written ten or more books featuring their detective protagonist–become extremely invested in their characters and loyal to them, so that in their protean creativity, they endow the two characters–late middle-aged single fathers in each series–with full lives and late-in-life-joy from growing closer to their own child. This highlights one of the things I love most about these books, Mankell’s and Connelly’s, as well as those by other authors I enjoy–featuring characters Travis McGee, Bernie Gunther, and Joe Gunther (no relation to the former), by John D. MacDonald, Philip Kerr, and Archer Mayor, respectively: The author is so devoted to their creation that they give them full lives, and I as a faithful reader, feel obliged to be solicitous of and devoted to them myself.Mankell photo

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“Hearts on Fire: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music, 2000-2005,” the Latest Addition to My CANRock Library

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Really excited to have my hands on a copy of HEARTS ON FIRE: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music, 2000-2005 by Michael Barclay, the latest book in an ongoing series of in-depth histories of independent Canadian rock and folk music. It examines the rise of a couple dozen Canadian bands who broke lots of new artistic and sonic ground—and while sharing few commonalities apart from the fact they largely or partly hailed from Canada—put the Canadian music scene on the global map in a new way in the first decade of this millennium.

The bands and solo artists in the new book represent wide swathes of indie music from Canada: anthemic, quasi-orchestral rock, with Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Stars, Metric, Owen Pallett, and  The New Pornographers; country rock roots-folk sounds with The Sadies and Blue Rodeo, and singer-songwriters Sarah Harmer, Kathleen Edwards, Hawksley Workman, Feist, and Joel Plaskett; headbangers are not overlooked with Constantines, Danko Jones, Black Mountain, and Fucked Up. And The Hidden Cameras, God Speed You Black Emperor, Hot Hot Heat, Peaches, Sam Roberts Band, Royal City, Wolf Parade, The Dears, Tegan and Sara, and AlexisonFire, also appear. A lot of artists whose music I knew already, and a number of others I’m glad to discover.

It’s the latest installment in what amounts to a publishing rarity—a nonfiction trilogy*, though I’m pretty sure the three authors involved, Barclay, Ian A.D. Jack, and Jason Schneider, didn’t envision it as such when they published HAVE NOT BEEN THE SAME: The CANROCK Renaissance 1985-1995 (HNBTS) in 2001; it was very well received by fans and musicians alike, which led to an expanded version in 2011. That’s when I first became aware of the book.

A prefatory note in the second edition explained they’d begun working on the first version in the late 1990s, so collectively this enterprise has been going on now for parts of four decades. They’ve had the same publisher throughout, ECW Press. As an editor and literary agent myself I want add, to ECW’s credit, they have consistently put out well-designed and edited books, very readable volumes that do justice to the authors’ vision for their books.

I got my copy of the sturdily-bound 750-page trade paperback of HNBTS soon after my discovery, in 2009, of the dynamic Internet radio station CBCRadio 3, then a vibrant outpost for independent Canadian rock on the digital airwaves. It offered a passionate tribe of music lovers and fans dozens of hours of music every week. A cadre of talented hosts helmed the live programming with information, patter, contests, a new Track of the Day every weekday, brief interviews with musicians, and each day, a highly interactive blog featuring a Topic-of-the-Day with the hosts reading comments by contributors who minted memorable blog names for themselves. My handle was PSTNYC. According to the wiki on Radio 3, it “had its genesis [within CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster] in a late-1990s proposal to launch a radio network devoted to youth culture, comparable to BBC Radio 1 and Australia’s Triple J.” The station was supported by CBC for more than a decade, but poobahs there seemed to never quite understand the potential of it, even though the hosts—a lively group that included Craig Norris, Lana Gay, Vish Khanna, Amanda Putz, Lisa Christiansen, and Grant Lawrence, and musicians Tariq Hussain (a member of Brasstronaut) Graham Wright (of Tokyo Police Club), Jay Ferguson (from Sloan)—had loyal listeners for whom each host’s daily three-four hour show could be “appointment listening.” Sadly, live hosting was scuttled in 2015, and the station became little more than an algorithmic-driven entity. At its peak, the number of artists who created band profiles on the Radio 3 website and uploaded music to it numbered greater than 30,000. That’s a snapshot of just how active the music scene across Canada was, and is, a country whose population at the time hovered between 30-35 million. I attribute this, at least in part, to the prevalence of music education in Canadian schools. Radio 3 was a potent force for community-building which I still miss, as do the many dozens of friends in Canada and around the world I made in the course of the decade or so I was on the platform. Unfortunately, the website doesn’t even exist anymore as an archive of any sort.

I discovered HNBTS thanks to an album of songs by then-current bands covering songs by artists from the 1985-95 period which appeared in the first version of the book. It was organized, smartly, to promote the 2011 reissue. I heard those new version of older songs played on CBC Radio 3, and bought a digital download of it from Zunior.com, a digital musical seller that’s been a reliable source and supplier to me for many years. It’s operated by Dave Ulrich, a member of Inbreds, a band he played in with Mike O’Neill, included in HNBTS.

Around 2013, I started a companion to this blog called Honourary Canadian: Seeing Canada from Away, and have often written about Canadian indie music for both sites, attending shows by Canadian groups when their tours brought them into NYC. During this period, I also began attending the annual NXNE music festival in Toronto as press, and wrote many posts about the gathering for both of my sites. During the week of NXNE over five consecutive nights, I would hear upwards of four dozen groups at venues all across Toronto—the Horseshoe Tavern, Rivoli, Paddock, Danforth Hall, Dakota Tavern—hanging at the shows with friends from the CBC Radio 3 fan community. We would meet up for a picnic on the Saturday during the festival week, for which musicians would come to play under the trees—and in 2012, even in the trees—when Adrian Glynn and Zach Gray climbed this big beauty with their guitars to play for us.

With three authors to cover the musical waterfront, HNBTS discussed dozens of artists and groups. Here’s a partial list: Stompin’ Tom Connors, Barenaked Ladies, NoMeansNo, the Nils, Rheostatics, Skydiggers, Bruce Cockburn, Hayden, Cowboy Junkies, k.d. lang, Jr. Gone Wild, Sloan, Eric’s Trip, Thrush Hermit, Sarah McLachlan, Blue Rodeo, Tragically Hip, Ron Sexsmith, New Pornographers, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, and the Weakerthans.

The second installment in this troika of titles to be published was WHISPERING PINES: The Northern Roots of American Music…from Hank Snow to The Band, in 2009, by Jason Schneider writing on his own. The narrative in this book actually begins earlier than the other two, in the 1950s with Canadian country music, by looking at the careers of Wilf Carter and Hank Snow. Radio played a key role in spreading their music, especially when American country singer Conway Twitty encouraged them to bring their music to the US. Later chapters cover Ronnie Hawkins (who just died yesterday) & the Hawks, Ian & Sylvia, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Anne Murray, Bruce Cockburn, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Murray McLauchlan, Neil Young, and The Band. Lest you think this all wouldn’t interest you, or would only cover unfamiliar bands, consider that the book’s meaty chapter on Hawkins, the Arkansas rockabilly pioneer,  covers his hiring of the outfit comprised of Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, and Richard Manual. He dubbed them The Hawks, and of course, later they would be known as The Band. This is pure gold for people who like to read about Bob Dylan and The Band. Simply said, the book offers a superb narrative chronicling the influence of Canadian musicians on the growth of country-rock in North America.

Each of the three books employs a modified oral history approach, with lengthy interviews with musicians, and analysis of social factors, including consideration of what distinguishes Canada from the USA in the cultural realm. For a taste of the writing, see this paragraph from pg 58 of HNBTS of the instrumental trio the aforementioned Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet:

“Formed in 1984, Shadowy Men became one of Canada’s most beloved bands, known for their musicianship, eventful live shows, absurdist wit, and innovative visuals. They are best known around the world for providing music on the Kids in the Hall TV show, including its theme, “Having an Average Weekend.” Featuring Brian Connelly on guitar, Reid Diamond on bass, and Don Pyle on drums, the surf-influenced Shadowy sound was decidedly retro, but considerably more advanced than their peers. The Shadowy Men were extremely talented musicians and boasted underrated compositional skills as well, set to creative and extremely danceable grooves. They also attracted attention via their series of 7″ single between 1985 and 1988, featuring gimmicky packaging such as a game board or a Jiffy Pop container.”

A number of factors have combined to reduce my ardent involvement in Canadian indie music in recent years, beginning with the disappearance of CBC Radio 3, though my appreciation of the music continues unabated, and I still purchase and download music from Zunior.com, especially on their annual Boxing Day sale. During the pandemic I really enjoyed listening to the acoustic Mantle Concerts by my fave Canadian rocker, Matt Mays, still posted on youtube. Other factors in that diminishment included 1) the arrival of the Trump administration, whose border policies made it hard for Canadian musicians to enter the US, especially with their CDs and other merchandise that were always a key money-maker for them; 2) the advent of COVID-19, of course, with venues closed for much of the past three years; 3) and NXNE was downsized for a few years, but I’m happy to see it looks like it will be back at full strength this June, so perhaps I’ll make it up to Toronto for it in 2023. I would love to visit there again, and go back to such venues as The Cameron House, a homey spot where I’ve heard many great shows over the years.

As a closing note, here’s a picture of a shelf of music books in my home library, including a number of titles from my CANRock library. Reading from left to right: Special Deluxe and Waging Heavy Peace by Neil Young; The History of Rock N’ Roll in Canada by Bob Mersereau; Lives of the Poets (with Guitars): Thirteen Outsiders Who Changed Modern Music by Ray Robertson; I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons; The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern by David McPherson; Whispering Pines by Jason Schneider, Have Not Been the Same by Barclay, Jack, and Schneider, and Hearts on Fire by Barclay; Return to Solitude: More Desolation Sound Adventures with the Cougar Lady, Russell the Hermit, and the Spaghetti Bandit, The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie, Adventures in Solitude: What to Wear to a Nude Potluck, and Dirty Windshields: The Best and the Worst of the Smugglers’ Tour Diaries (the latter four are all by former CBC Radio 3 host and friend Grant Lawrence); Kick it Till Breaks, and The Trouser Press Record Guide, 4th (which I helped escort to publication as editor at Collier Macmillan Publishers back in 1989) and 5th editions by Ira Robbins; Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, the Band and the Basement Tapes by Sid Griffin; Out of the Vinyl Deeps by Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz; Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Joe Jones, as told to Albert Murray, edited by Paul Devlin with an Afterword by Phil Schaap; and Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H. Walsh.

*Some weeks after Hearts on Fire was published, and after I wrote this post, Win Butler of Arcade Fire was credibly accused in a number of news outlets including Pitchfork, of a history of behaving predatorily toward women. He claimed all the conduct was consensual, but the preponderance of public revelations weighed against him. When and if a paperback edition of Michael Barclay’s book is published I will be watching for any new prefatory material the author includes by way of reporting on this issue.

**While nonfiction trilogies are scarce, there are many in fiction, such as Canadian novelist Robertson Davies‘ Deptford Trilogy, comprised of Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders.