Felony Gift Ideas, Part 2

The previous edition of the Felonious Gift Ideas featured book for readers who love the English language, miss Agatha Christie, and enjoy art. This month Maggie handpicks the perfect book for the history lover, world traveler, music aficionado, and dear old Dad…

For Uncle James, who has a passion for history

A terrific choice would be A Gathering of Saints, by Christopher Hyde, set in London during the Blitz, and based, astonishingly, on actual events. Astonishing, because the book concerns a serial killer who appears to have advance knowledge of where Hitler’s Luftwaffe is going to be dropping its bombs.

This is not a novel for the faint-hearted: Hyde does meticulous research, and his descriptions – of the murders, of London in near-constant flames, of the bombs’ devastations – can be graphic.

But for the right reader, said one Canadian review, “life outside this captivating book simply ceases.”

Perhaps an even better choice? Claire Taschdjian’s fascinating The Peking Man is Missing, based on one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th century.

The Peking Man is Missing is set primarily in 1940s Beijing, where the author was working at the medical school that housed the priceless fossils.

When this novel was originally published, some 30 years ago, Publishers Weekly claimed that it deserved “serious consideration for an Edgar” award.

To the text of that novel we have added eight pages of archival photographs, an annotated bibliography, and a specially commissioned essay, by a noted anthropologist, about the various (often wacko) theories concerning the fossils’ disappearance.

For Cousin Mamie, who’s got those travellin’ shoes

If Mamie’s an Asia-buff, Peking Man would be a great option here as well.

But if she’s got an itch for Italia, send her on a jaunt via Timothy Holme’s wonderful “Inspector Peroni” series, which opens with The Neapolitan Streak – set in Verona, and featuring bean soup, aging Fascist generals, and the city’s most famous doomed lovers.

If she’s got an itch for the exotic, she’ll love to wander the shadowed alleys of Istanbul, courtesy of Barbara Nadel’s haunting Belshazzar’s Daughter. And if, like so many people, she’s a fan of Henning Mankell and all that gorgeously atomospheric Scandinavian gloom, she will adore Karin Alvtegen, dubbed Sweden’s “Queen of Crime.”

Missing, which the Glasgow Herald said was “reminiscent of Ruth Rendell at her very best,” will be out in paperback just in time to be a last-minute stocking-stuffer, as will Betrayal (“simply brilliant,” said the Toronto Globe & Mail).

For Cousin Sally, who lives for classical music

The perfect option here is Paul Adam’s The Rainaldi Quartet, though in truth, I find it tough to imagine anyone who wouldn’t love this book, which opens in Italy and features an delightful old luthier (a maker and restorer of violins) in an unlikely partnership with the local chief of police.

The two of them travel from dusty workshops to glittering opera houses, from crumbling Venetian palazzos to English auction halls, all in search of information about the Messiah’s Sister – a legendary (and perhaps imaginary), violin.

Has Sally been especially good this year? She deserves a second book, and we’d recommend Robert Barnard’s delicious Death and the Chaste Apprentice, which is set at an English arts festival, and pokes exquisitely malicious fun at everyone from pompous conductors to pampered soloists.

For Pop, who’s a fool for spooks and spies

Tell your dad to make room on the bench; we’re huge fans of good espionage. Pop will definitely want to borrow Uncle James’ copy of A Gathering of Saints, but we have some great picks just for him as well.

Top of the list: The Romeo Flag, by the astonishingly talented Carolyn Hougan.

We don’t know any espionage fan who doesn’t love this book, which opens in pre-war Shanghai and then moves to revolution-era Russia, CIA headquarters circa 1982, and a fishing cabin in Maine.

It’s got history, suspense, car-chases, romance, tough-guy action, back-room conniving, a mysterious long-lost trunk…in short, something for just about everyone. Plus which, the writing’s a dream.

This single book was the catalyst for Felony & Mayhem: I couldn’t stand the fact that it had gone out of print.

Is Pop skeptical of women writers? Tell him to get over it, but because you love him anyway, introduce him to Robert Cullen’s stunning “Colin Burke” trilogy, which opens with Soviet Sources.

Cullen was Newsweek’s Moscow Bureau Chief for 15 years (he began writing the series after being arrested by the KGB), so he really knows what he’s talking about. But just as important, he’s a graceful, insightful writer with a keen eye for a good story.

Don’t take our word for it: The L.A. Times called the trilogy “better than Gorky Park.” (PS: If your dad has a taste for British spy yarns, think about giving him either Paper Chase or Disorderly Elements, both by the remarkably smart, funny, cynical and entirely unknown Bob Cook, for his birthday. He’ll thank you.)

Felonious Gift Ideas From the Publisher

I am a believer in the notion that book make the best presents in the world. And in one sense, they’re also the easiest, since they’re such a breeze to wrap.

In another sense, book can be tricky to give, especially if the recipient is a passionate reader.

Casual readers can often be made perfectly happy with the latest bestseller, but readers with more finely honed tastes demand a bit more thought.

The bookeller in Christopher Morley’s peerless The Haunted Bookshop offers a list of titles as curatives, prescribed for a variety of ills and hungers – “If your mind needs a tonic of iron and wine and a thorough rough-and-tumbling,” he recommends Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, while The Story of My Heart, by Richard Jefferies, will provide “a whiff of strong air, blue and cleansing.” And “one who loves the English tongue,” he notes, “can have a lot of fun with a Latin dictionary.”

I’m afraid the following suggestions don’t rise to Morley’s level, but I hope they’ll be useful nonetheless.

See you in the stacks! — Maggie T.

Felony Gift Ideas, Part 1

Looking for the perfect gift for a mystery lover? Consider works by Edmund Crispin, David Carkeet, John Norman Harris, Elizabeth Daly, Peter Watson, and Douglas Skeggs, if you’re shopping for…

Aunt Edwina… who loves the English language but already has a Latin dictionary

Edmund Crispin’s spectacularly literary series features a compulsively quipping Oxford don begins with The Case of the Gilded Fly.

Crispin (a pseudonym for composer Bruce Montgomery) wrote Gilded Fly on a bet, while still an undergraduate at Oxford, and though history does not record his winnings, they couldn’t begin to compensate for the pleasures provided by the eccentric, endlessly erudite Professor Gervase Fen.

David Carkeet, the author, was himself a professor of linguistics, and Double Negative is as much a satire of academia as it is an irresistible character-study: The protagonist is a brilliant scholar with the social acumen of a fruit-fly.

Shortlisted for an Edgar award in 1980, Double Negative has frequently been called one of the best mysteries of the 20th century.

Grandma Eloise… who misses Agatha Christie

Genuine clue-laced mysteries can be tough to come by these days, especially for a lady who would prefer not to read about much sex or violence.

Happily, there is The Weird World of Wes Beattie, by John Norman Harris, which is set in the very proper Toronto of the early 1960s, and reads like a splendid combination of P.G. Wodehouse (who adored the book) and, yes, Miss Christie’s finest. It’s irresistible.

And if you really love your grandmother, you might also introduce her to the “Henry Gamadge” series, by Elizabeth Daly, who was in fact Miss Christie’s favorite writer.

Set (and written) in 1940s New York, they evoke an elegant, long-gone world of drawing rooms and gentleman-sleuths, and offer a lovely antidote to the frenzy of the 21st century. We open the series with Murders in Volume 2 and The House Without the Door.

Mom… who paints and haunts museums

A good art-mystery is a wonderful thing, but it’s also a rare thing. In order to work, to satisfy that true art-mystery craving, the book has to have a swell story, interesting characters, and – this is the tricky bit – a basis in genuine scholarship.

The world is full of good art-historians, but very few of them can craft a believable chase-scene. Ours can.

We’d recommend in particular Peter Watson’s marvelous Landscape of Lies.

Watson is a highly acclaimed art historian (and won an Edgar for Double Dealer, his non-fiction exposé of the market in stolen art); he’s got the scholarship down.

But he’s also a knock-out novelist, so that scholarship is put to the service of a nifty plot featuring a 16th-century painting that is in fact a treasure map, pointing the way to a priceless collection of religious artifacts that were hidden when Henry VIII was looting England’s monasteries.

The directions, though, are encoded in the painting’s “clues,” which reference everything from Botticelli to the Old Testament to classical Greek myths – will the good guys decipher them in time to beat the baddies to the stash of medieval gold?

We’ve included a full-color fold-out of the painting, to allow readers to play along at home.

Then there’s Douglas Skeggs’ fascinating Triumph of Bacchus, which I liked so much that I spent four years trying to sign it up.

Skeggs was for some time the director of a London museum, and he remains a well known critic, lecturing widely on British TV and all over the UK and Europe. As with Landscape, the expertise is beyond reproach, though we would love to ask just how Skeggs comes to know so much about the process of forging a Titian.

Stay tuned for a second set of recommendations from the publisher of Felony & Mayhem Books.