AND THE WINNER IS…THE 2023 MIMSIE AWARDS!
January is upon us, which means that, once again, it is time to look back at all the books I read in the previous year (in this case, 2023) and hand out (imaginary) awards to the best of them.
Let me warn you up front, that my list won’t include any of the completely obscure and/or long-out-of-print novels that I generally take so much pleasure in discovering and then writing about. Previous Mimsie Award lists have included such forgotten masterpieces as Richard McGill’s Omamori, Kay McGrath’s The Seeds of Singing, James Leigh’s Downstairs at Ramsay’s, and James Robert Baker’s Boy Wonder. Last year, my work as a freelance writer dictated most of the reading I did. As a result, most of what I read was written by famous writers whose careers I was re-evaluating for Quillette, this blog, or some other online venue. I read a great number of really thrilling novels in 2023, but none of them was terribly obscure. In 2024, I am going to try to make an effort to find some really unsung writers to praise in future installments of this blog. With luck, the 2024 Mimsie Awards essay will introduce you to some writers and books you’ve never heard of before. But, for now, let’s talk about 2023.
For most of my life, I was not much of a re-reader. No matter how much I enjoyed a book, I would almost never re-read it. I have always been haunted by the belief that there are great books out there that lie unsung and unappreciated in dusty old used bookstores, library shelves, or suburban basements across the land. What’s more, I was also aware that hundreds – possibly thousands – of books regarded as classics by far wiser people than me beckoned as well, not just from musty old book shelves but from every educated person’s library, every well-stocked public library, and every reputable seller of new books across the land. With so many great, and potentially great books out there still unread by me, I could only very rarely muster the energy to go back and re-read some favorite book from my earlier days. But all of that has changed now that I am an old man (I turned 65 last August).
For the last half decade or so, I have been churning out essay after essay about the popular fiction of the second half of the twentieth century – essentially the pop fiction that baby boomers like myself grew up with. We boomers may not have read all of those Daphne DuMauriers and Mary Stewarts and Herman Wouks and Alistair MacLeans and Leon Urises and Ernest K. Ganns and Grace Metalliouses and Morris Wests and Sloan Wilsons that we saw cluttering the book shelves of our grandparents’ houses or our best friends’ mothers’ reading rooms or the public libraries of the 1960s and 1970s but, if we were at all interested in reading, we saw them and took note. And some of us, like me, eventually began to actually read and, if we were lucky, enjoy all of those pop fictions that proliferated in America in the years after World War II, when mass produced cheap paperbacks made pop fiction as much a part of the American landscape as McDonald’s hamburgers, Elvis Presley records, and Volkswagen Bugs. My mother was a devourer of pop fiction, and I learned from her example. For decades, I gobbled up the pop fiction of my own era, the books from writers like Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Mary Higgins Clark, and many other authors, most of them far less famous than those three. And for most of my life, I assumed that the pop fiction of the 1960s and 1970s had passed the test of time, had embedded itself in the culture permanently, and would be entertaining readers even one hundred years after their authors had passed away.
Alas, in the early years of the twentieth century, I began to notice than many of the best pop-fiction writers of 1960s and 1970s were no longer well known to anyone under sixty. And so, over the last five or more years, I have been writing and (when possible) publishing essays about the books of writers like John Ball (best known for In The Heat of the Night), Avery Corman (Kramer vs. Kramer), Elmer Kelton (The Time It Never Rained), Frederick Kohner (Gidget), W.C. Heinz (M*A*S*H), Pat Frank (Alas, Babylon), Joseph Hansen (the Dave Brandstetter mysteries), Ken Grimwood (Replay), and many others. Of course, in order to write about these writers and their books, I had to go back and re-read dozens upon dozens of novels that I last visited in the 1970s or 1980s. At first I resisted this. I thought I ought to be able to write a decent celebration of the life and work of John Ball simply by skimming my way through In The Heat of the Night and then searching the internet for information about his career, personal life, etc. To my credit, I quickly realized that this method would produce nothing but short and superficial pieces of fanboy gushery. And I had I no desire to produce such dreck. Thus, since about 2018, much of my reading time has been devoted to re-reading books and authors that I hadn’t visited in several decades. And the experience has been probably the most fascinating of my entire life as a book lover. I discovered that some writers whose works I enjoyed during my teenage years in the 1970s were actually pretty awful (I’m looking at you Richard Bach and Rod McKuen). But, just as often, I learned that many of my favorite writers had much more depth than even I had given them credit for. In the 1980s, when I was writing a lot of pulp crime stories and trying to sell them to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine or Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, I read all of John Ball’s novels about Pasadena, CA, police detective Virgil Tibbs. But only when I undertook the writing of a long and detailed appreciation of Ball did I finally delve into his many non-Tibbs novels, and these proved to be some of his best. I am a huge fan of West-meets-East novels such as James Clavell’s Shogun or Pat Barr’s Jade. But not until I began preparing an essay about John Ball did I realize that he had written several excellent entries in that particular genre, including 1975’s The Winds of Mitamura, and Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms, published in 1968 and, nowadays, one of my absolute favorites. The same thing happened as I went back and read more deeply in the oeuvres of people like Joseph Hansen, Elmer Kelton, Pat Frank, and so many others. I mention all of this because, in 2023, I re-read more books than I have in any previous year. And all that re-reading was, by and large, highly enjoyable and often very enlightening. Thus, this year’s Mimsie Awards essay is going to be filled with books that I read decades ago and only recently re-acquainted myself with (usually for the purpose of writing an essay about some underappreciated author).
I’m going to give this year’s first Mimsie Award to Homeless Bird, written by Gloria Whelan and published in the year 2000. In 2022 I awarded a Mimsie to Whelan’s novel Listening for Lions, published in 2005. I didn’t just give the book an award, I named it the fourth best book I read in 2022, which is high praise, considering that I read some great books that year. So inspired was I by Listening for Lions, that, early in 2023, I did some research and discovered that Whelan would be celebrating her 100th birthday on November 23, 2023. Perfect, I thought. I’ll use the occasion of her 100th birthday (she is still alive, by the way) as a pretext for writing an in-depth essay about her and her work. That was going to be one of my major reading/writing projects for 2023. So I got hold of Homeless Bird and began what I thought would be MY YEAR OF READING GLORIA WHELAN. I also went online to ABE.com (the American Book Exchange) and found various letters written by Whelan for sale, as well as numerous signed books, a greeting card she had sent to a friend, and so forth. Surprisingly, most of this stuff was very inexpensive, so I bought some of it. Alas, I quickly discovered that I had bitten off more than I could chew with Gloria Whelan. Ms. Whalen has written something like 65 books since beginning her career in 1978 at the age of 55 or so. Almost all of her books are for young readers and, thus, relatively short, but I knew that I couldn’t possibly read enough of her oeuvre over the next ten months or so to do justice to her career as a writer. And so, MY YEAR OF READING GLORIA WHELAN began and ended with Homeless Bird. Fortunately, it is an excellent book and, whether you are sixteen or sixty-five, you ought to find it compelling, moving, and informative. Of course, it is a novel about a brown-skinned young woman from India, and it was written by a white American senior citizen, so there may be those among the thought police who will denigrate the work as an act of cultural appropriation. To hell with them. Do yourself a favor and seek out Homeless Bird. It won a National Book Award in 2000, and justifiably so. It deserves the widest audience possible. And as for my piece celebrating Whelan’s work on the occasion of her 100th birthday? Well, perhaps I’ll have it ready for her 105th.
Speaking of 100-year-old writers, I wrote an essay a few years ago about authors who are primarily remembered for just a single book. One of the authors I mentioned was Louise Meriwether, who is best known as the author of the classic 1970 YA novel Daddy Was a Number Runner. Like Gloria Whelan, she celebrated her 100th birthday last year. She was born on May 8, 1923. Alas, she died on October 10, 2023. She wasn’t nearly as prolific as Gloria Whelan, but you don’t have to write a lot of books in order to assure yourself literary immortality; you just have to write a single novel as great as Daddy Was a Number Runner. Good luck, with that.
At the beginning of every year, I do research into the books and authors that will be celebrating a birthday/anniversary sometime in the next twelve months. If it were up to me, I would just write essays about books I love and not worry about whether or not they were celebrating some sort of milestone. Alas, it’s difficult to get an editor to publish an essay about an old book unless you can tie it to some milestone or to some contemporary event that makes it suddenly relevant again. At the beginning of 2023, I learned that William Goldman’s classic children’s novel The Princess Bride would be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in September of 2023. I also learned that Elmer Kelton’s novel The Time It Never Rained, one of the greatest Westerns of all time, was first published in November of 1973. I am a fan of both authors, so I decided to write essays about the 50th anniversaries of both The Princess Bride and The Time It Never Rained. Both essays were published last year in Quillette. By re-reading The Time It Never Rained, I discovered that it is an even better book than I recalled it being, and much better than more famous Western fare such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (or his Border Trilogy, for that matter). By re-reading The Princess Bride I discovered that it is way weirder (and not in a good way) than I remembered it being. Almost all the best parts of the novel appear in Rob Reiner’s 1987 film, which was scripted by Goldman. But, man, some of the stuff left out of the movie is mind-blowingly bad. The problems begin with Goldman’s introduction, which contains plenty of material that is inappropriate for the children and young adults who are, presumably, the book’s primary audience. Elsewhere, the book contains enough horrific torture scenes to satisfy fans of the Saw series of torture-porn flicks. I wrote about this for Quillette, and if you are interested in this aspect of Goldman’s book, seek out that essay on line. I was a big fan of Goldman’s fiction as a twentysomething pop-fiction reader. I devoured books like The Marathon Man, Magic, Tinsel, Control, Heat, and the rest over the course of the late 1970s and the 1980s. In recent years, I have gone back and re-read much of it (or at least tried to). I still believe that Goldman was one of the popular cinema’s all-time best screenwriters. But I no longer think much of him as a novelist. I will not be awarding him a Mimsie for The Princess Bride. However, during my research into Goldman, I discovered the existence of a Goldman book I had never heard of before, a children’s book called Wigger, which was published one year after The Princess Bride. I included some info about Wigger in my Quillette piece but, alas, my editor cut it from the published version. One of the things that intrigued me about Wigger is that it has been allowed to fall out of print simply because of its title, which has been deemed offensive (more about that in a moment). This struck me as crazy, because The Princess Bride remains in print and, as far as I can tell, in no imminent danger of being attacked by the cancel-culture crowd despite the fact that it contains a lot of stuff that has gotten other books a public reckoning: fat-shaming, racist terms, a demeaning attitude towards women and minorities, etc. Here’s some of what I wrote about The Princess Bride and Wigger that was cut from the Quillette piece:
Stranger still is the fact that The Princess Bride contains plenty of other content that a contemporary reader of the woke variety would surely fine objectionable, including racist terms such as “spick” (in reference to Inigo Montoya) and “Pollack.” None of this – Goldman’s inappropriate references to Sandy Sterling, his sexist attitude towards his wife, the fat-shaming of his son, the homophobia, his reference to Asians as “yellow,” his dismissive treatment of his “swarthy” young servant girl, Buttercup’s contemplation of suicide, the use of the word “shit,” and so forth – seems to have brought the book even close to cancelation in these overly sensitive times. Making the situation even more ironic is the fact that, in 1974, one year after the publication of The Princess Bride, HB&J released another Goldman book for children, this one called Wigger. The story is about a poor orphan girl named Susanna and the ratty pink security blanket called Wigger that serves as her only companion and confidante. It contains almost nothing that even the most woke individual could complain about. The Child Study Association of America voted it one of the best children’s books of 1974. Alas, according to Wikipedia, “Wigger has since fallen out of print and is considered rare to book collectors; this was in part due to the book’s title (in American slang, a ‘wigger’ is a white person who appropriates and emulates African-American behavior; the word, which came from the term ‘white nigger,’ is considered extremely offensive).” I doubt that one American in a hundred can tell you what the term “wigger” means. But such is the topsy-turvy world we live in that The Princess Bride, which is filled with material that even I find somewhat questionable, remains a perennial favorite among parents and children, while Wigger, a much better children’s story, has been out of print for decades simply because its title inadvertently employs an extremely obscure racial slur (and one that is only used to disparage white people!). In Goldman’s book, no explanation is given as to why Susanna calls her blanket Wigger. Thus, there is no reason why the book (and the blanket) couldn’t simply be renamed and a new edition published for contemporary readers who lack the $120 necessary to purchase what is currently the cheapest used copy of Wigger available online. At any rate, I am awarding a Mimsie to Wigger, which is a beautifully crafted children’s book that is now nearly forgotten. If you want to learn more about it, check out this appreciation of it in the New Yorker:
I am also awarding a Mimsie to Elmer Kelton for The Time It Never Rained.
If you want to know more about that great novel, see my recent Quillette piece:
https://quillette.com/2023/11/23/the-greatest-american-western-novel-of-all/
I have always been fond of epistolary novels and, for some reason, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey’s A Woman of Independent Means has long been one of my favorite books in this genre. I admire it so much that I read it for the third time this year despite the fact that I had no intention of writing an essay about either the book or its author. I just wanted to check in on my old friend Bess Alcott Steed Garner. Bess is born in the late 19th century and lives up until the 1960s. Her long life is filled with both triumph and tragedy. The first time I read the book I found myself wholly enamored of Bess and enthusiastically recommended her story to every booklover I knew. I was surprised, therefore, when several people actually read the book and then told me how much they loathed Bess. Sure, I had found her to be occasionally pushy and insensitive but I believed that her better qualities outweighed her minor flaws. Nonetheless, I re-read the book a few years later to see if perhaps I had misjudged her character. It wouldn’t be unusual for me to do so. The “heroines” of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds are both widely regarded as villains by most conventional readers of those books, but I persist in admiring both of them. They were born into a difficult era for women and they did what they had to in order to thrive. Much of their behavior was inexcusable, but I nonetheless never lost my fondness for them. Upon re-reading A Woman of Independent Means I found myself somewhat in agreement with those friends of mine (including my own wife!) who had found Bess to be a somewhat awful person, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to dislike her. She was just so alive on the page, and she loved to write. Those are qualities that help me to overlook an awful lot of bad behavior. When I read the book for a third time this year, I found Bess to be worse then ever – controlling, two-faced, conniving, and at times downright heartless. It seems clear that she drove her first husband to an early grave by talking him out of the profession he longed to practice (university professor) and into something more profitable (finance). I can see why many readers find her loathsome. But I still like her and I think Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey deserves credit for having created one of the most fascinating female characters in all of American fiction. A lot of people complain these days about unlikeable protagonists in books. It is fashionable among literary snobs to insist that we shouldn’t need to like a protagonist in order to enjoy his story. And I agree with that sentiment! Thus, I persist in liking Bess, although I don’t think I would have wanted her as a mother or a mother-in-law (I’d have loved to have been one of her pen pals, however). Bess was born into an era when women were not even allowed to vote. Women held very little power in America as the 20th century dawned, and so I think Bess can be forgiven (at least partially) for clawing her way to social prominence and wealth by any means necessary. Whether she sounds like a character you would like or loathe, I recommend that you read the book. It remains one of my favorites and I am awarding it a Mimsie.
I have long been a fan of author William Kotzwinkle. His best-known novel is probably the novelization of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster E.T. The Extraterrestrial. I meant to use the fortieth anniversary of the book and the film as an excuse to write an essay about Kotzwinkle’s entire career. Alas, 2022 passed before I could get around to it. Fortunately, the 85-year-old author recently began a new series of novels about a crime-fighting monk named Tommy Martini, a big, bad-ass loner who, much like Jack Reacher, travels the country fighting bad guys and getting into a great deal of violent trouble. These two books gave me the excuse I needed to write a retrospective of Kotzwinkle’s career which was published in Quillette early last year:
https://quillette.com/2023/03/01/monks-and-murder/
In order to write that essay, I had to re-read a lot of my old favorite Kotzwinkle books. Rather than decide which of them deserve a Mimsie and which do not, I have decided to simply give William Kotzwinkle a Mimsie Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Field of Fiction-Writing. In fact, I plan to hand out several more of those awards before this essay reaches its conclusion.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that Frederick Forsyth is one of my favorite writers. A few years ago I wrote an essay for Quillette about some of the books he published during the first two decades of his career, when he regularly appeared on year-end lists of the bestselling novels in America. Towards the end of his career (he’s still alive but has retired from writing novels) he continued to produce books but he no longer was able to compete with the likes of Stephen King and John Grisham for a spot on American bestseller lists. This year I decided to read and review all of those late-career novels of Forsyth’s and write about them for this blog. His last five novels are Avenger (published in 2003), The Afghan (2006), The Cobra (2010), The Kill List (2013), and The Fox (2018). I couldn’t get through The Afghan, but I found something to enjoy in all of the others. Most of them are well worth the time of anyone who enjoys a good international thriller. And Avenger is, in my estimation, nearly the equal of his best books, novels such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, and so forth. If you want to know more about it, see my essay called Frederick Forsyth’s Final Fictions. In order to write about Forsyth in depth, I went back and read some of his earlier masterpieces in 2023, including Odessa, Protocol, and The Negotiator. Rather than award separate Mimsies to each of these I have decided to simply give Forsyth a special Mimsie Award for Lifetime Achievement. He richly deserves it.
Another one of my favorite living thriller writers is Stephen Hunter. His 1994 masterpiece, Dirty White Boys, is one of the greatest American crime novels of all time, right up there with Thomas Harris’s The Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. I haven’t been thrilled with all of the Stephen Hunter thrillers I have read. I seem to either love his novels or else find myself unable even to finish them. I hope to do a longer essay about Hunter and his works at some point later in the year. In any case, the last novel I finished in 2023 was Stephen Hunter’s Hot Springs, and I am happy to report that I was absolutely thrilled by it. It is a brilliant crime novel set largely in Hot Springs, Arkansas, shortly after WWII, at a time when east coast mobsters were trying to get a foothold in the American South. The novel features frequent Hunter protagonist Earl Swagger (father of Bob Swagger who is featured in many of Hunter’s novels set later in the 20th century). Earl Swagger is a highly decorated former Marine who was wounded several times while serving in the Pacific theater of WWII. Now he is home and has joined a quasi-governmental task force that is hoping to run the mob out of Hot Springs. Anyone who has ever read a novel by Stephen Hunter knows that weaponry, in general, and guns, in particular, are a fetish with both him and his characters. Part of the fun of reading a Stephen Hunter novel is being immersed in his descriptions of all sorts of powerful and terrifying weapons. This book does that as well as any other. Much of the shooting is done by BARs (Browning Automatic Rifles), but lots of other weapons show up as well. Like a Tom Cruise Mission Impossible film, the book is filled with wildly violent, and crazily fast-paced set pieces. If you prefer the sedate crime novels of Agatha Christie, you definitely don’t want to wander into a Stephen Hunter novel. His characters can fire off more bullets on a single page than were fired in Christie’s entire oeuvre. But if gunfire and death were all Hot Springs had to offer, it wouldn’t be much of a novel. The book delves into not only Earl Swagger’s background but also into the life and psyche of Earl’s father, a wretched human being and lawman named Charles Swagger. The novel includes a couple of real-life people as characters, most notably Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Hunter acknowledges in an afterword that, though inspired by actual events, his novel is largely fiction. And that is a good thing, because it allows him to turn real-life events into a series of gob-smacking action sequences. In paperback, the book runs to 550 pages, but they flew by like bullets from a Browning automatic. Give that man a Mimsie!
Thomas Perry is one of the few great crime writers of the last fifty years whom I can claim to have been a fan of since the very beginning of his career. His first novel, The Butcher’s Boy, was published in 1982 (when I 24) and won an Edgar Award for Best First Mystery novel. Naturally, I was too broke to purchase a hardback copy back in 1982, but when the book was released in paperback, I, inspired by all the good reviews I had seen of it, rushed out and bought a copy of it. Then I brought it home and read it in probably three or four sittings. I loved it. I also loved his next book, 1983’s Metzger’s Dog. For several years, I continued to read each new book of his as it came out in paperback, but none of them thrilled me as much as those first two. And, by the mid-1990s, I had drifted away from Perry and his books. It wasn’t until I found myself thrilled by the recent Hulu TV series The Old Man, based on a 2017 Thomas Perry novel of the same name, that I finally got back in touch with his work. Rather than try to pick up where I left off, I decided to go back to the beginning and reread The Butcher’s Boy. I knew that this could be a mistake. Often when we return to a favorite book of decades ago we find that it has lost its magic. But that certainly wasn’t the case with The Butcher’s Boy. In the forty years since I had first read the novel, I had completely forgotten everything about it. So re-reading it was like reading it for the first time. It is a great cat-and-mouse tale, about a mob hit man who is being pursued by a team of bureaucrats from the U.S. Justice Department. Most of the Justice Department employees in the book are used to solving crimes while sitting at their desks and reviewing banking statements and tracking credit-card use. That’s certainly true of Elizabeth Waring, the young Justice Department investigator who is one of the book’s two protagonist’s. The other protagonist is the titular Butcher’s Boy, a mob hit man whose name is never revealed – he uses lots of names but no one knows his birth name. Elizabeth is a young, attractive and very likeable woman who is trying to make the world a safer place while dealing with a lot workplace harassment from her male superiors. The Butcher’s Boy is a career killer looking to make a final score and then collect all the money he has stashed away over the years in various safe-deposit vaults across the U.S. and retire in some tropical paradise. This would seem to be a clear-cut case of good-guy-versus-bad-guy. But Perry is too crafty to give us anything that simple. We certainly do root for Elizabeth as she tries to solve a series of mob hits going back for many years. But the Butcher’s Boy himself is not an entirely unlikeable character. Like TV’s Dexter Morgan, he was pretty much raised to be a killer. It’s the only life he really knows. And, also like Dexter, most of the people he kills are bad guys who deserve it. I found myself half-hoping that he could manage to survive long enough to enjoy a comfortable retirement. The problem is that the mobsters who have paid the Butcher’s Boy to do a lot of contract killings realize that he wants to retire. They know that the Justice Department may be closing in on him and they worry that he may become an informer for the government in order to spare himself a long prison term. So now the hunter is being hunted not only by the Justice Department, which wants to arrest him, but also by the mob itself, which wants to kill him. Elizabeth Waring is a relative newcomer to the Justice Department and has no experience in the field prior to being assigned to the task force trying to capture the Butcher’s Boy. The Butcher’s Boy is an experienced hand at killing, hiding out, and passing himself off as someone he is not. He is also a genius at not attracting attention. When he wants to, he can make himself virtually invisible. Alas, a couple of close calls with people trying to kill him have left him with a temporary limp and some facial cuts that are sure to attract attention. He needs to lie low, but he also needs to travel the country incognito and collect all of the money he has stashed away in bank vaults over the years. This is a great thriller and time hasn’t diminished it one bit. If anything, it’s more entertaining nowadays because it reads like a historical novel as well as a thriller. The computer technology that Elizabeth must rely on (such as dot-matrix printouts) is so outdated it may as well be from the Victorian era. I am awarding Perry a Mimsie Award for The Butcher’s Boy and hoping to read (or re-read) much more of his work in the coming months and years. He’s written quite a lot.
Robert Plunket is a living American author so obscure that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia listing. In 1983 he published a novel called My Search for Warren Harding, which generated glowing reviews but few sales. My wife managed to hear about it somehow and, when it came out in paperback the following year, bought a copy and read it. She sang its praises so loudly that I couldn’t resist giving it a try. It instantly became a classic novel as far as the Mimses were concerned, and Julie and I talked about it for years. Sadly, almost no one else did and the novel fell quickly out of print. Plunket wrote one other novel, 1992’s Love Junkie, which generated almost no buzz. After that, nothing. Well, Robert Plunket went on living and writing but he published no novels and the two he had managed to publish seemed to be destined for complete obscurity. But, fortunately, in 2023 Plunket’s brilliant first novel was rediscovered and brought back into print by the independent press New Directions. This event was covered by big, splashy stories in some of the country’s most prominent publications:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/books/robert-plunket-my-search-for-warren-harding.html
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/04/26/who-was-robert-plunket/
It seemed as though 2023 was going to be the year that Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding finally became widely recognized as the masterpiece that it is. I dug out our old paperback copy and re-read it with trepidation. But the trepidation proved unnecessary. The book was as witty and cleverly plotted as I remembered it being. And it was actually much meaner than I remembered it being (and I intend that as a compliment). It reads as though Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion and John Kennedy Toole had all collaborated on a rewrite of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers (which actually served as Plunket’s inspiration). I felt certain that by the end of the year I would read that the book had sold tens of thousands of copies and was destined to become a prestige TV miniseries sometime in the next year or so. But it seems to be Robert Plunket’s fate to go largely unappreciated through life. Yes, his brilliant book is back in print. But it doesn’t seem to have become nearly as popular as I had hoped it would. At Amazon.com right now it ranks number 1,695 in humorous fiction, 10,989 in literary fiction, and 186,009 in all books. I don’t know if this will cheer Robert Plunket up or not, but I am hereby giving him a Mimsie Award. The honor is long overdue.
Catherine Marshall’s novel Christy was the fifth bestselling novel in the U.S. for the year 1967, and the ninth bestselling novel of 1968. By 1975, it had become the 51st bestselling novel of the 20th century in America. By that time, it had managed to sell 3,797,732 copies, according to Eighty Years of Bestsellers: 1895-1975, by Alice Payne Hackett and James Henry Burke. Curiously, it was just one notch below Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, which had sold 3,866,488. A paperback copy of Christy resided on my mother’s bookshelves for as far back as I can remember. It was always there. My mother must have loved it. She was a huge fan of popular fiction, and over the years I read her dog-eared copies of The Godfather and Rosemary’s Baby and The Thorn Birds and many another bestseller of the era. But I always intentionally steered clear of Christy because it looked like it was a religious book. My entire formal education came in Catholic schools. During that time I had a lot of religion crammed down my throat. I never felt the need to voluntarily consume anything religious back in those days. So I gave Christy a wide berth. But, when my mother died a few years ago in her late eighties, I began to think a lot about the books she read when I was young. Whenever I was in a bookstore and saw a used copy of one of the old Mary Stewart gothic thrillers she loved or any other book that reminded me of her, I would buy it. And so, a few years ago, I reluctantly bought copies of not only Christy, but also of Julie, Catherine Marshall’s only other novel (published in 1984, one year after the author’s death). I read and reviewed Julie a few years ago. I wasn’t as put off by Julie because I knew it was about a young woman who longed to be a writer – the kind of story I can relate to. Julie had its share of religion, but it wasn’t at all preachy and the Christians in Julie were just as likely to be wicked as well-behaved. I enjoyed Julie so much that I was eager to read more by Marshall. Alas, I was faced with the fact that, though she had written plenty of nonfiction, Marshall had published only one other novel. And so, finally, I decided to give Christy a try. It turns out that I was a fool for avoiding the book for so many decades. Although the protagonist of Christy is definitely a Christian, she is no more preachy about it than Julie was. In fact, Christy is a story about the life of a young woman (based on Marshall’s mother) who travels to an impoverished area of Appalachia and devotes herself to teaching the children of the families who live there. The story is well-known. It has been adapted for television and you can find summaries of it at Wikipedia, Amazon, Goodreads.com, and elsewhere. I’ll just point out that it is not a book that renders a sanitized version of its milieu and those who populate it. It is a very raw book, with a lot of violence and death in it, and Marshall views it all unflinchingly. Again, as in Julie, almost all of the characters are at least nominally Christians, so the book isn’t about how much better Christians are than all other people. You don’t have to care much about religion at all to enjoy this story. Although the word “enjoy” seems kind of inappropriate, considering just how miserable many of the characters’ lives are. Christy doesn’t manage to magically improve the lives of everyone she meets. She fails as often as she succeeds, perhaps even more so. The book has a romance, but it isn’t the main part of the story. This is one of the most powerful depictions of rural poverty in America during the early 20th century that you are ever likely to encounter outside of a history book. At times it was a very difficult read, but I did, in fact, enjoy it immensely. I’m glad that my mother finally led me to this book, even though I didn’t get around to reading it until after she was dead. Christy gets a much-earned Mimsie Award.
One of my major reading/writing projects of 2023 was for a retrospective of the work of Joseph Wambaugh that I published in Quillette:
https://quillette.com/2023/04/23/the-man-who-invented-the-cop-novel/
I first came across Wambaugh’s work in 1976 when I read a paperback copy of The Choirboys, his most recent bestseller at that time. As it did plenty of other readers, it shocked me silly. Up till then I don’t think I had read anything that had managed to be so profane and funny and gripping and smart all at the same time. I was absolutely floored by the horrific antics of Wambaugh’s cops. Being eighteen at the time, I probably found those antics more funny than horrific, but they were definitely both. I immediately sought out cheap paperback copies of his three previous books, The New Centurions, The Blue Knight, and The Onion Field. Those books also bedazzled me but none of them struck me as being quite the equal of The Choirboys. After that I continued to grab each new Wambaugh book the minute it appeared in paperback. But I found each of these post-Choirboys novels slightly disappointing. And by the end of the 1980s, Wambaugh had gone from my second favorite novelist (after Michael Crichton) to someone whose books I rarely bothered with anymore. But then, late in his career, he returned to what he does best: writing with an insider’s knowledge about the officers of the LAPD at both their most admirable and their worst, as well as every other stage in between. Although he is still alive, he is no longer writing fiction. His so-called Hollywood Station series of novels comprises five books, published between 2006 and 2012, and they were pretty much the equal of his first four books, all of which were masterpieces. In order to write my essay for Quillette I had to re-read a ton of Wambaugh books, and it turned out to be the greatest literary treat of the year. What surprised me was how much my tastes had changed. Although I still enjoyed The Choirboys, it was now The Blue Knight that impressed me the most of those first four books. This makes plenty of sense because, although Wambaugh was only thirty-five when The Blue Knight was published in 1972, it is an old man’s novel. It tells of the last three days in the career of an LAPD officer who is 72 hours away from retirement – if he can go that long without getting killed or fired. Bumper Morgan, the title character, is only about fifty, but he has put in 20 years with the LAPD and is planning to leave the force and take a cushy job as chief of security for a Bay Area tech firm. Fifty seemed old to me in 1972. Now it seems barely middle-aged. But Bumper doesn’t wear those fifty years very well. A man of his time, he is fat, drinks too much, and smokes. Even if he manages to retire from LAPD in one piece, it seems unlikely that he’ll live much beyond sixty or sixty-five. Physically, he’s probably the equivalent of your average 70-year-old contemporary working-class American male. In other words, he’s in his final act. And because of that, I felt a great deal of kinship with him. Bumper is a man of his time, and possesses a lot of the unpleasant traits – homophobia, racism, sexism, etc. – that you’d expect of a roughneck L.A. cop of his generation. Wambaugh doesn’t whitewash Morgan’s negative traits, but he nonetheless makes him a sympathetic character. You can learn a bit more about The Blue Knight if you seek out my Quillette essay online.
While I was re-reading much of Wambaugh’s work, I also read for the first time some of the Wambaugh books I had skipped earlier. Three of these were nonfiction books: Echoes In the Darkness (1987), The Blooding (1989), and Fire Lover (2000). Echoes in the Darkness is set in Pennsylvania near where Wambaugh was raised and dealt primarily with American police work. It should have been a home run for Wambaugh but I thought it was awful. The writing was so clichéd and repetitive I found myself wondering if he’d been battling a substance abuse problem when he wrote it. The book is also problematic because Wambaugh appears to have gotten a lot of facts wrong and to have paid cops to provide him inside information that he shouldn’t have had access to. The man who Wambaugh identifies as the villain of the piece did indeed go to jail for the crime in question, but he was later released when it was proven that the police and the prosecutors engaged in widespread misconduct, including accepting money from Wambaugh. The book is a black mark on an otherwise excellent career as a nonfiction writer. Fortunately, The Blooding (which is set in England and would seem to be way out of Wambaugh’s comfort zone) was gripping and brilliantly written. So too was Fire Lover (which is more about firemen than cops, so also a stretch for Wambaugh), which may be the single most gripping story Wambaugh has ever told. And then, of course, he capped off his career with five novels that can easily bear comparison with his first four. As with William Kotzwinkle and Frederick Forsyth, I am awarding Wambaugh a Mimsie Award for Lifetime Achievement. I read a lot of his work in 2023 and I’d have a hard time denying individual Mimsies to any of them except for the aforementioned failure Echoes in the Darkness. In the past, I always recommended that newcomers start with The Choirboys. Nowadays, I’d advise newcomers to his work to start with his Hollywood Station novels. But if you are an old fart like me and find yourself moved by stories of old guys just trying to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world, you might want to start with The Blue Knight.
Perhaps paradoxically, I am going to write fairly short appraisals of the two books I enjoyed most last year. The simple explanation for this is that I enjoyed both books so much that I almost immediately gave them away to other booklovers whom I thought might enjoy them. Without a physical copy of either book at hand, it will be difficult for me to write about them in great detail. Another, perhaps more honest explanation is that I am lazy and eager to wrap up this year-end report. A third explanation is that both books are reasonably popular and glowing descriptions of them can easily be found online at Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, and elsewhere.
My second favorite novel of 2023 was Noah Gordon’s 2000 masterpiece The Last Jew. It is set primarily in Spain during the Inquisition, right around the time when King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella issued an order calling for the expulsion of all Jews from Spain. Naturally, these monarchs claimed to be acting in God’s name. In fact, it was more of a cash grab. The Jews of Spain could avoid expulsion by converting to Catholicism and, of course, paying an extortionate fee to the crown. Hundreds of thousands of Jews did convert to Catholicism (nominally, at least) so as to hang on to their homes and businesses and families. Those who left were forced to sell their land and belongings to non-Jews at bargain-basement rates, which made the Gentile population of Spain quite happy. In any case, Gordon wisely avoids delving too deeply into the history of Jewish persecution in Spain, or even the specific details of this particular Jewish expulsion (there had been previous ones, as well). His book is an historical thriller that follows the exploits primarily of a single Jewish character, Yonah Toledano. His father is murdered early in the novel. And Yonah’s brother has departed Spain for parts unknown. Yonah, now completely on his own, refuses to formally convert to Catholicism. Nonetheless, he assumes a less Jewish name and makes every effort to give the impression of being a good Catholic as he tries to remain in Spain and live as close to a normal existence as possible without attracting the suspicions of the authorities. Yonah’s father was a gifted silversmith, and Yonah was at first determined to follow in his footsteps. For awhile he takes a job as an apprentice to another, Gentile, silversmith, a man who is sympathetic to Yonah’s plight. Eventually, though, Yonah is forced to flee this trade. He takes a job for a time on a merchant ship that travels back and forth from Spain to northern Africa. Finally, he decides to take up the practice of medicine and, after apprenticing for several years under an older doctor, proves to be quite gifted at it. Anyone familiar with Gordon’s work will not be surprised by this development. Most of his novels are about doctors. His most famous work is The Physician, published in 1986 and a massive bestseller in Europe. For some reason, his work never became as popular in his native U.S. as it was in Europe. You can read more about that in this fascinating New York Times piece:
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/21/books/best-selling-author-but-not-at-home.html
My favorite of Gordon’s novels is Shaman, about an American doctor who becomes a military surgeon during the Civil War. His novels The Rabbi, The Death Committee, and Matters of Choice all deal with medical matters as well. Gordon himself was not a doctor, but for years he edited a medical publication and he was very well-versed in all matters medical. Gordon’s books have brought me so much enjoyment through the years that I considered awarding him a Lifetime Achievement Award. But I have decided to reserve that honor only for writers who are actually still alive (Gordon died in 2021 at the age of 95).
At any rate, Yonah’s efforts to settle down to the quiet life of a small-town doctor are frequently thwarted by the fact that he has two very powerful enemies who want him dead. One is a Spanish nobleman for whom Yonah’s father crafted an elaborate and expensive sword. Payment on the sword was due when Yonah’s father was murdered in a pogrom that broke out after the announcement of the expulsion order. Yonah feels honor-bound to collect the debt owed to his father. But the nobleman who owes the debt would prefer to see Yonah dead than paid what he is owed. The other person who is determined to see Yonah dead is a Jesuit priest who murdered a boy who was delivering a piece of silverwork that Yohan’s father made for a Catholic church. The priest killed the boy and took the silverwork for himself. But he knows that Yonah suspects him of these crimes. This priest is eager to find Yonah and murder him but, because Yonah is now living under an assumed name in a town far from his original home, the Jesuit is having difficult carrying out his plan. The novel is very much a thriller. Yonah finds his life frequently imperiled by possible exposure of the fact that he is still a practicing Jew (though he practices in secret). The anonymous reviewer for Kirkus Reviews panned the book, claiming that it fails as an updated version of the Spanish picaresque. The reviewer notes that, “Rather than a bawdy romp in the picaresque style, this is a throwback to epic potboilers like Anthony Adverse and the other bestsellers of the 1930s: well-intentioned and too well-mannered.” Well, yeah, sure. It certainly isn’t much of a bawdy romp, but I don’t know why the reviewer expected it to be. This was never intended to be a novel in the tradition of Fielding’s Tom Jones. This is a flat-out historical thriller that entertains while it also teaches us something about the plight of Spanish Jews in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. But Gordon wisely emphasizes the thriller aspects of his story, while laying the history on with a light touch. Curiously the novel reminded me a bit of Brian Moore’s masterful 1995 thriller The Statement, although the protagonist of that story is Pierre Brossard, a Frenchman who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII and helped send hundreds of Jews to their deaths. After the war, Brossard was protected by friendly Catholic priests who allowed him to hide from the law in various monasteries for many years. But, as the novel opens, his luck is running out and justice, in the form of a very determined Nazi hunter, seems to be catching up with him. In The Statement, the reader is eager to see Brossard brought to justice. In The Last Jew, naturally, one is eager to see Yonah escape the long arm of the Inquisition. But both books are equally thrilling. It would be difficult to find a better historical thriller than The Last Jew, but I managed to do it.
My favorite novel of 2023 was Act of Oblivion, by Robert Harris. This too is a historical thriller. It tells the story of two men, Col. Edward Whalley and his son-in-law Col. William Goffe, who are forced to flee from England in 1660 and hide out in America. Years earlier these two men participated in a plot to overthrow King Charles I and to establish a commonwealth comprising England, Scotland, and Ireland. Charles was executed in 1649 and, after much wrangling, Oliver Cromwell eventually became the Lord Protector of the short-lived commonwealth. He died of natural causes in 1658. The commonwealth fell shortly thereafter and Charles II restored the monarchy to Great Britain and took on the crown of his murdered father. He also ordered that every person who had any connection to the execution of Charles I be tracked down and killed. Many of these men fled to the continent, but were fairly easily tracked down in France or Germany or Spain and dispatched with. Knowing that there was no safety to be found in Europe, Whalley and Goffe head instead for America, where they are hoping to escape the executioner. These men were actual historical characters and Harris’s book follows the actual historical record as closely as possible (or so he tells us; I’m in no position to judge). At any rate, like Yohan Toledano in rural Spain, Whalley and Goffe find themselves constantly on the run, even after they escape to America. New England had a population of only about 30,000 white people at that time, so hiding out in the small towns of northeastern America is nigh impossible. And if they try to hideout in the forests beyond the cities, they risk being killed by Indians. Making matters worse is that Whalley and Goffe are being pursued by an agent of Charles II’s named Richard Nayler, who, like Javert in Les Miserables, is single-minded in his determination to bring his prey to justice. Nayler is a great villain, almost supernatural in his devotion to his duty. Harris fills his pages with more historical background than Gordon did in The Last Jew. But Harris never loses site of the fact that he is writing a thriller, and the way he ratchets up the suspense with each new episode of the story is a thing of beauty. The last few pages of the novel were almost unendurably suspenseful. They could almost stand alone as a great short story. Once I finished the novel I immediately read those concluding pages to my wife Julie, who found them just as gripping as I did. Harris eschews anti-climax in this novel and basically climaxes his story in the final sentence.
Robert Harris has been a favorite of mine since his debut novel, Fatherland, appeared in 1992. His 2013 novel, An Officer and a Spy, about the Dreyfus Affair, is one of the best historical fictions I have ever read. Having been raised a Catholic, I have a fondness for papal thrillers, and Harris’s Conclave (2016) is one of my favorites in that genre. After finishing Act of Oblivion, I was inspired to go back and re-read The Ghost, his 2007 thriller, which became the source of Roman Polanski’s top-notch 2010 film noir The Ghost Writer. I also went back and read both Pompeii (2003) and The Fear Index (2011), two of his novels that I hadn’t gotten around to earlier. Both were enjoyable, but neither came close to equaling the heights of thrillerdom that he has achieved in masterpieces such as Fatherland, An Officer and a Spy, and Act of Oblivion. One of these days, no doubt, I will be awarding Harris the coveted Mimsie for Lifetime Achievement.
Below is a list of every book I read in 2023. Many of them were re-reads done for essays I either wrote or intended to write buy never got around to. They are listed in the order in which they were read (sort of):
Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
If It Bleeds (stories) by Stephen King
Man and Wife by Andrew Klavan (might’ve been a contender had it been more tightly edited)
Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
Dirty Martini by William Kotzwinkle
Avenger by Frederick Forsyth
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
The Fourth Protocol by Forsyth
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre
Class Trip by Emmanuel Carrere
Blue Jay Summer by Elleston Trevor (an effort on my part to find you a forgotten gem; close but not quite good enough)
The Negotiator by Forsyth
Various Rumpole books by John Mortimer (I reread them for a Quillette essay; all of them are very good and I would have given Mortimer a Lifetime Achievement award were he still alive)
John Mortimer: The Secret Life of Rumpole’s Creator by Graham Lord
Gidget by Frederick Kohner (check out my Quillette essay on this one)
The Blue Knight by Joseph Wambaugh
The New Centurions by Joseph Wambaugh
The Choirboys by Wambaugh
Sparring Partners (stories) by John Grisham
Bestsellers (nonfiction) by John Sutherland
Fire Lover by Wambaugh
Hollywood Station by Wambaugh
Gravedigger by Joseph Hansen
A Queer Kind of Love by George Baxt (see my Quillette essay on Baxt and the aforementioned Hansen)
The Blooding by Wambaugh
Nightwork by Joseph Hansen
Hollywood Crows by Wambaugh
Echoes in the Darkness by Wambaugh
Hollywood Moon by Wambaugh
Icon by Forsyth (couldn’t finish it)
California Golden by Melanie Benjamin
Hollywood Hills by Wambaugh
My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunket
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris
The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee by Thomas Fleming
The Ghost Writer by Harris
Fadeout by Joseph Hansen
Puberty Blues by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette
Death Claims by Joseph Hansen
Christy by Catherine Marshall
The Chain by Adrian McKinty
Crawlspace by Herbert Lieberman (another attempt at unearthing a forgotten masterpiece and it came pretty close)
The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton
Elevation by Stephen King
Hangman by Louise Penny
The Odessa File by Forsyth
Exodus by Leon Uris (see my Quillette essay on this one)
The Uris Trinity (nonfiction) by Michael Uris
The Gold Coast by Nelson De Mille (coulda been a contender had it been more tightly edited; just too damn long as is)
The Investigator by John Sanford (very good, nearly an award winner; Sanford deserves comparison to Thomas Perry)
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
State of Terror by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny
Family Honor by Robert B. Parker (recommended)
Pompeii by Harris
The Butcher’s Boy by Thomas Perry
Airframe by Michael Crichton (a re-read, and Crichton’s work doesn’t always improve with age; alas this one didn’t, though it is still fun)
The Cobra by Forsyth
The Fox by Forsyth
A Woman of Independent Means by Elizabeth Hailey Forsythe (it just occurred to me that it must have been all the Frederick Forsyth novels I was reading that put me in mind of this book and author)
Night Stalks the Mansion (nonfiction but not really; more a ripoff of The Amityville Horror) by Constance Westbie and Harold Cameron
The Last Jew by Noah Gordon
The End of October by Lawrence Wright (a contender but ultimately just not thrilling enough)
The Fear Index by Harris
The Kill List by Forsyth
Standing By The Wall (stories) by Mick Herron (very good)
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (a good Crichton-esque techno thriller)
Jaws by Peter Benchley (I re-read it for a forthcoming Quillette essay)
The Snake by John Godey
The Jaws Log (nonfiction) by Carl Gottlieb
Hot Springs by Stephen Hunter