OCTAVUS ROY COHEN – Midnight.   Dodd Mead & Co., hardcover, 1922. British edition: Eveleigh Nash, hc, 1922.

   On a sleety December night taxi-driver Spike Walters picks up a fare at Union Station. The well-dressed, veiled woman instructs Walters to drive to a poorer part of town but when he arrives at the address given, she has vanished from his cab, leaving her suitcase — and a man’s body.

   Of the missing woman Spike asks himself, as will the reader, “Where was she? How had she managed to leave the taxicab? When had the man, who now lay sprawled in the cab, entered it?”

   Chief of Police Eric Leverage and amateur criminologist David Carroll cooperate in solving the crime. The departed is identified as club man Roland Warren, a cad rumoured to have been involved with a number of socially prominent married women although there has been no open scandal, and just as well being as he is engaged.

   It transpires every article in the suitcase belonged to him and this, along with certain other evidence, convinces the authorities and the public that Warren was planning to elope — but not with his fiancee.

   Given the dead man’s reputation of not being too fussy about whose wife he romances, a number of upper crust persons naturally come under suspicion, and then there’s Warren’s just discharged valet, not to mention the bereaved fiancee.

My verdict: Midnight features a fairly complex plot unreeled at a slower pace than in many works. Older novels of detection often display social mores that seem strange to modern eyes, for example not mentioning a woman’s name at the club, or the terrible consequences of cheating at cards, or in some other way being touched by the rancid breath of scandal.

   David Carroll must navigate these treacherous waters to solve the mystery of the who and how and why of the crime.

Etext: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/1/0/4/11043/11043.txt

ROBERT CRAIS – The Watchman. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, February 2007. Paperback reprint: Pocket Star, January 2008.

   Elvis Cole’s sidekick, Joe Pike, takes on the job of keeping a young L.A. socialite, Larkin Conner Barkley, from being killed after she is involved in a late night collision that lands her in the middle of an undercover federal investigation.

   Somebody in a very small group is leaking information about her various hiding places, and with that group including her father and FBI agents, Joe is very much on his own as he tries to keep one step ahead of the unknown assailants.

   This is a gripping page-turner, although Joe loses some of his mysterious charisma as he reveals some of his past and connects with the rebellious Larkin.

IAN RANKIN – The Naming of the Dead. Little Brown, hardcover, April 2007; reprint paperback: September 2008.

   Inspector Rebus is, perhaps, a year or so away from retirement, and he’s assigned to a very nonessential station, where he’ll be out of harm’s way, “harm” being his tendency to involve himself in cases in ways that rile his superiors and don’t make him the most popular DI among his colleagues.

   When a delegate to an international conference falls to his death, Rebus is assigned to what appears to be a suicide. However, he suspects it’s more than that, and while he’s trying to follow up on this case, he’s drawn into the investigation of murders of several sex offenders.

   This is a dense, well-coordinated procedural that was less satisfying for me than earlier novels in the series, but rewards some patient reading and willingness to follow the author through the maze of interlocking characters and plot threads.

ANNE PERRY – Dark Assassin. Ballantine Books, hardcover, March 2006; reprint paperback: February 2007.

   Another in the long series of William Monk novels, which I abandoned after he found solace in marriage and put to rest some of the ghosts that haunted him in his attempts to recover the memory of his past.

   Monk is now working for the river patrol and he and his men witness a argument that ends with the young couple falling to their deaths from a bridge. The investigation of what initially appears to be a suicide and a futile attempt by the young man to save his fiancee widens to include a threat to Metropolitan London from underground excavations for the subway system.

   A dour series that I find I still enjoy, peopled with characters from all levels of society and presenting a convincing portrait of Victorian London.

RICHARD STARK – Butcher’s Moon.

Random House, hardcover, 1974. Paperback reprint: Avon, 1985. UK edition: Coronet, pb, 1977.

   To date [1986] there have been sixteen novels about hard-bitten professional thief Parker, and Butcher’s Moon is the sixteenth. Nearly twice as long as any single previous entry in the series, it represents a culmination of themes and a summation of events, but leaves the eager reader afraid that Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) may have nothing left to say about his enigmatic antihero. Since at this writing it has been ten years since the publication of Butcher’s Moon, that conclusion seems warranted.

   Parker and his sometime partner, actor Alan Grofield, return to Tyler, the scene of a botched armored-car robbery of several years previous, the take of which was abandoned out of necessity. At the time Parker had said, “I know where it is. Someday I’ll go back and get it.”

   That day is now, and Parker sets out to retrieve the money from Lonzini, the mobster Parker figures found the money. When Lonzini fails to cooperate, Parker and Grofield begin pulling jobs — hitting a gambling casino, drug dealer, numbers operation, etc. Much like the Continental Op in Hammett’s Red Harvest, Parker’s activities trigger power plays within the local mob, while the level of violence escalates.

   When Grofield is captured, Parker assembles a string of thieves (characters from previous Stark novels) to pull a simultaneous series of capers he has carefully worked out. From the grand haul these jobs will realize, Parker plans to take no share — he merely asks his fellow thieves to repay him for his work by helping him afterward: “I want Grofield back, and I want my money. And I want those people dead.”

   The twelve men are to hit the mob “safe house” where Grofield is being held, and kill all his captors. Stark builds climax upon climax as the various capers play out and as bullets fly and bodies pile up.

   Butcher’s Moon brings Parker full circle: Taking on the mob in order to retrieve “his” money (never mind that it was stolen from somebody else to begin with) was where Parker began in the trilogy of The Hunter (1962), The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), and The Outfit (1963).

   Significantly, Butcher’s Moon reveals Parker a changed man. While neither he nor Stark would likely admit it, Parker has “mellowed” — he gathers his friends together to rescue a friend. And as one of those friends, father figure Handy McKay, tells him, “That’s not like you … going to all this trouble for somebody else ”

   Handy also questions Parker’s seeking revenge: “I’ve never seen you do anything but play the hand you were dealt.”

   Parker’s association with Grofield and his attachment to his live-in love, Claire (begun in The Rare Coin Score, 1967), have ever so subtly humanized him. This seems to make him, and Stark, uneasy. And that may explain the long silence from Stark since Butcher’s Moon.

    If Butcher’s Moon is indeed the final Parker, crime fiction’s greatest antihero certainly goes out with a bang, with all the cast brought back on stage for one last supercaper. And while he may indeed be turning into a human being, Parker is no less capable of his usual coldblooded violence.

   Nor is Stark shy about depicting such shocking scenes as the one in which Parker is delivered a severed finger that once belonged to Grofield (not only a continuing character in this series but the hero of four of his own Stark novels). When the mob bearer of these bloody tidings says “I’m only the messenger,” Parker shoots and kills him, saying, “Now you’re the message.”

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

LOAN SHARK. Encore Productions/Lippert, 1952. George Raft, Dorothy Hart, Paul Stewart, John Hoyt, Helen Westcott, Margia Dean, Larry Dobkin. Director: Seymour Friedman.

   Loan shark racketeering must have been big business in 1952 to have warranted the production of an entire movie devoted to it and warning the American citizenry of its evil perniciousness.

   Filmed on location in part in a tire plant, the film occasionally has the feel of a documentary feature, and then in others (but not enough) as a film noir.

   Such as the opening scene, with a frightened, hunched up blue collar type of guy trying to make a getaway from the gang of hoodlums he’s in too deep with. With the rain coming down at night, the sidewalks glistening in the street lights, fear exuding from every inch of the man’s being – this is it, the real thing, you think.

   And once in while the promise of this prelude is kept, but not often enough to warrant a recommendation from me. Other reviewers have been more positive, but George Raft’s monotone approach to acting has never appealed to me, and at 57 he’s far too old to be romancing Dolores Hart, who was just over half his age at the time.

   Raft plays Joe Gargen, recently released from prison. When his sister’s husband is killed by the lone shark syndicate, Gargen is convinced to work undercover not only to obtain proof that they did, but to nab the guy at the top as well.

   Dolores Hart, whose first appearance on this movie is bound to make the jaws of the male half of the audience drop in awe. One barely remembers what a cleverly cantilevered bra can do for a woman’s figure, but in the 1950s, geniuses walked on this planet.

   Alas, this was the last movie she ever made. She appeared in a few television shows over the next two years, and that was it. The end of her show business career, a loss to movie viewers I’m still mourning today. (She went on to work for the Red Cross and the United Nations.)

   She’s Ann Nelson in this movie, the downstairs neighbor to Gargen’s sister, and one simply cannot fathom her interest in him. Vice versa, yes. Just out of prison, he forcibly takes a kiss the same evening he meets her. She angrily pushes him away, but are they still friends the next day? Yes,and no matter how long I think about it, I still don’t get it.

   But as for the bad guys, now we’re talking. Paul Stewart, John Hoyt and Larry Dobkin are perfectly cast, oozing evil from their very pores. They’re names you should remember if you watch many crime films like this from the 50s and 60s.

   Margia Dean didn’t have a movie career that anyone remembers, but as Ivy, a good-looking waitress in a joint across from the tire factory, she can take a pass with the best of them, with plenty of repartee to go with it. It wasn’t a big part, but she made the most of it.

FRANCES COWEN – The Shadow of Polperro.

Ace, paperback; 1st US publication, 1973. First UK publication: Robert Hale, hardcover, 1969.

   Here’s a prime example of an authentic gothic romance novel. When this particular example of the genre recently surfaced in a box of books I was rummaging through, I just couldn’t resist.

   It has all of the right ingredients, starting, of course, with the cover: A close-up of a young wide-eyed girl standing behind a iron gate next to a tall piece of statuary; in the gloomy background, a hulk of a mansion or castle, with the full moon partially hidden behind the bare branches of a convenient tree.

   The castle is Polperro, located on the southern coast of Cornwall. Supposedly it dates back to the days of King Arthur, Camelot and the traitor Mordred. It was built by the latter as a fortress. In near decay now, and known by the nearby townsfolk to be haunted, it is the single item in Esther Roden’s inheritance from her father.

   Not knowing how to dispose of it, she deems herself lucky to find a film director who wishes to rent it as a location site for his latest effort, a remaking of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.

   Lots of hints follow of dire things to come, a few unexplainable accidents occur, and there’s an abundance of spooky atmosphere, but except for one dead body found strictly offstage … nothing really happens.

   There are some close calls, but just when you think the story is at last leading you somewhere, it doesn’t, and then it boldfacedly ignores even the possibility that it was leading you somewhere.

   You’ll also think I’m crazy, but the book is as compulsively readable as a bag full of popcorn. It’s not the detective work, which is as flimsy and as transparent as a wisp of mist, the killers’ identities obvious within pages.

   The author’s strong points are her characters, surprisingly enough, both major and minor. You may not notice it while she’s doing it, but she sketches and fills them in with ease, making what’s difficult for some writers seem almost effortless instead.

PostScript:   One character who befriends the heroine in this tale is an older lady named Agnes Macintosh, whose psychic powers warn Esther of the castle’s malevolence. She doesn’t have a big role, but later on it’s revealed that she also has connections with Scotland Yard. Interesting, but not worth mentioning until I discovered that she also appears in Frances Cowen’s Village of Fear, another gothic published by Ace. Al Hubin doesn’t list her as a series character in Crime Fiction III, so I just passed the Big News on to him

[UPDATE] 01-09-09.   I suspect that Agnes Macintosh may appear in some other of Frances Cowen’s books, but these are the only two identified so far.

   Cowen is the author of 30 novels in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, all perhaps in much the same vein as The Shadow of Polperro. Four other novels by her are marginally included in CFIV. These were written as by Eleanor Hyde and are historical novels taking place in the 1500s with some criminous elements. She also seems to have written many books for children, mostly for girls.

   All of her books for adults came out first in the UK in hardcover. Seven were published in US by Ace as paperback originals. Some of the other titles are The Curse of the Clodaghs (1973), The Gentle Obsession (1968), The Haunting of Helen Farley (1976), and The Hounds of Carvello (1970).

RICHARD STARK – The Hunter.

Pocket Books, paperback original, 1962. British title: Point Blank. Coronet, ppbk, 1967. Reprint editions include: Gold Medal, pb, ca.1967; and Berkley, pb, 1973, both as Point Blank; Avon, pb, 1984; Univ. of Chicago Press, trade pb, 2008. Film: MGM, 1967, as Point Blank (scw: Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, Rafe Newhouse; dir: John Boorman). Film: Paramount, 1999, as Payback (scw: Brian Helgeland, Terry Hayes; dir: Helgeland).

   Although one of the most influential series of the Sixties and Seventies, the Parker novels have never really been a huge popular success in the United States. They have shuttled from one publisher to another, while gaining critical acclaim and cult status, selling handsomely in foreign editions, and generating six motion pictures — the income from which no doubt justified the effort put into the books by an author who is finally coming to be viewed as one of the major figures of the twentieth-century mystery.

   The impact Parker has had on the tough crime novel can be gauged by a sub-genre Stark has virtually invented: the so-called crook book. Prior to Stark, only Robin Hood thieves like Raffles or the Saint had taken center stage in series fiction; and W. R. Burnett — in whose path Stark most clearly treads — did not write series fiction about his amoral antiheroes.

   Parker’s recorded adventures begin in The Hunter (sometimes republished as Point Blank, the title of the stylish 1967 John Boorman-directed movie version with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson).

   Betrayed and left for dead on a heist by his wife, Lynn, and his friend Mal Resnick, Parker returns with a single-minded mission: to get the $45,000 due him. He first contacts his remorseful wife (who describes herself as a “Judas ewe”) and, without really intending to, intimidates her into suicide. When he finally corners Resnick, now employed by the mob, he finds Resnick has turned the money over to his “Outfit” bosses.

   With a sense of logic unique to him, Parker forces Mal to tell him the names and whereabouts of the various mob bosses, then strangles him and sets about getting his money back from the mob. What begins as a personal vendetta — which Parker cloaks in the practical consideration of getting his money back (it is characteristic of him to bury his emotions, his humanity turns into a darkly humorous tale of one man battling an organization.

   Parker is a self-sufficient, single-minded loner out of an earlier, wilder America; the soft, big-business boys don’t stand a chance against him.

   Richard Stark’s prose is as straightforward and matter-of-fact effective as Parker himself. His narrative structure, here and in the other Parker novels, is not so straightforward: Working in the third person, it is Stark’s method to follow the initial Parker-point-of-view section of the book with a section that shifts to Parker’s antagonist’s point of view (or, in later novels, the points of view of various characters, including antagonists), and then, finally, shift back to Parker’s viewpoint.

   Events are often seen more than once, from varying perspectives, moving back and forth in time, creating a sense of inevitability where Parker’s Frankenstein-monster forward momentum is concerned.

   The Parker series is one of the most evenly written in crime fiction; the sixteen novels are consistently well done and readable. If forced, one might point out Plunder Squad (1972) as a somewhat perfunctory Parker, and Deadly Edge (1971) as a particularly fine example.

   Offbeat entries include The Jugger (1965), in which Parker plays detective: and Slayground (1971), a set piece in which Parker hides from and does battle with mob interlopers in an amusement park.

   Parker has inspired two spin-offs: Grofield by Stark, and Dortmunder by Westlake. Actor Alan Grofield, whose first appearance was in the Parker novel The Score (1964), has appeared in four novels of his own: The Damsel (1967), The Dame (1969), The Blackbird (1969), and Lemons Never Lie (1971).

   The first three resemble slightly straighter versions of Westlake’s famed comic crime novels and, in their foreign locales, prefigure his massive Kahawa (1982). Grofield seems a slightly different character in his solo novels, struggling to perform the role of protagonist and not sidekick; but the two personas converge in the Parker-like Lemons Never Lie.

    Butcher’s Moon is a sequel to both the Parker entry, Slayground, and the Grofield entry, The Blackbird, which share nearly the same first chapters (detailing a botched armored-car job). The Dortmunder books are deadpan comedy versions of Parker capers: The first, The Hot Rock (1970), is a specific reworking of The Black Ice Score, and Grofield has a leading role.

   Later, in Jimmy the Kid (1974), Dortmunder’s gang read and follow as a blueprint a nonexistent Parker novel entitled Child Heist; this nicely counterpoints the differences between the cute absurd world of Westlake/Dortmunder and the grim absurd one of Stark/Parker.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

NORTHWEST TRAIL. Action Pictures/Lippert, 1945. Bob Steele, Joan Woodbury, John Litel, John Hamilton, Raymond Hatton, Madge Bellamy, George Meeker. Cinecolor. Based on a story James Oliver Curwood. Director: Derwin Abrahams.

   As a word of caution first, several online websites that discuss this movie suggest that the connection to James Olive Curwood was totally imaginary. The DVD was also sold to me in a box set of western films, but since the setting is contemporary Canada (circa 1945), with both automobiles and airplanes not only visible but part of the plot, I’m going to call it an action adventure movie instead.

   Bob Steele, of course, was indeed a long-time B-western movie star, but in Northwest Trail he plays a Royal Canadian Mountain Policeman instead. It was toward the end of Steele’s career as far as leading roles was concerned, but the career continued on to 1973 in secondary roles. He’s probably most famous for his role as Trooper Duffy in TV’s F-Troop, but not to me, as the series, a comedy taking place in the Old West, never appealed to me.

   Playing opposite him in Northwest Trail is Joan Woodbury as Kate Owens, the daughter of a man to whom she’s bringing $20,000 in cash to help him meet his payroll far up in the Canadian wilderness. Their first encounter does not go well, which means of course they will eventually find themselves falling in love with each other.

   But I’m getting ahead of myself. The movie begins with mounted officer Matt O’Brien (Bob Steele) coming across the young lady as she’s sleeping in the middle of nowhere in a car with a carburetor that’s being balky at the high altitude. The young lady is greatly amused. The officer is stolid and inwardly grimacing as he tries to help her:

    “Say, tell me, is this ‘always gets his man’ stuff true, or just a lot of movie hokum?” she asks. “That happens to be the motto of the service,” he replies stiffly. “Oh, how noble. Well, where’s your man, or didn’t you get him yet?” Zing, zing, zing. See for yourself. It’s a scene that’s well worth the price of admission.

   My apologies for the smallness of Joan Woodward’s photo (and it’s not even from this movie) and the blurry image of the scene to the right. (Bob Steele’s being ordered back to his RCMP base by John Litel after he’s successfully reunited the lady with her father, played by Neil Hamilton of Superman fame.)

   I haven’t the skills to improve this second image. Maybe it can’t be done.

   But getting back to the story, it’s full of action, beginning with a robbery after O’Brien is assigned the task of escorting the young lady on the final stage of her journey, on horseback, since cars are no longer up to the task.

   Not all of the action makes a lot of sense, but there is plenty of shooting, chasing, and sneaking up on, plus an abundance of other suspicious activity.

   I referred earlier to Tim McCoy’s rather stiff way of riding in the saddle. You could hardly ask for more animation in a rider than Bob Steele, elbows flying, his horse fairly leaping along.

   Remarkably enough, Joan Woodbury is also an excellent rider, and overall, with sparks continually flying, she brings far more life to the story than the rather dour Mr. Steele does.

   What her character sees in him is another matter altogether, especially when all is said and done. That includes an ending I didn’t believe even as I was watching it – the solution being built out of the sheerest of gossamer fabric – and the clinch that occurs afterward seems as unlikely as the proverbial snowball.

ARTHUR MORRISON – Chronicles of Martin Hewitt.

D. Appleton & Co., US, hardcover, 1896; Ward Lock & Co., UK, hardcover, 1895 (shown).

   Arthur Morrison’s Martiin Hewitt was for the decade 1895-1905 probably the foremost rival of Sherlock Holmes. Not much of one, though, for he completely lacked the distinguishing personality of the Master and his creator the skill to make his deductions seem other than lucky guesses.

    Some of his adventures, however have plots as delightfully flamboyant as Holmes’. Notable of the six short stories — each the length of a Nero Wolfe novella — included in Chronicles are “The Case of Laker, Absconded,” in which the crooks carefully arrange their robbery of a bank messenger to make it seem that he has defaulted; and “The Case of the Missing Hand,” in which a gypsy almost frames, unintentionally, two brothers for killing their suicide step-father by stealing the corpse’s hand to make a Hand of Glory — a thief’s talisman.

   The telling of these tales is, however, almost as pedestrian as Hewitt’s personality.

      Additional bibliographic data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

ARTHUR MORRISON – Chronicles of Martin Hewitt

      The Case of Laker, Absconded · nv The Windsor Magazine May, 1895
      The Case of the Lost Foreigner · nv The Windsor Magazine Jun, 1895
      The Case of the Missing Hand · ss The Windsor Magazine Apr, 1895
      The Holford Will Case · ss The Windsor Magazine Mar, 1895
      The Ivy Cottage Mystery · nv The Windsor Magazine Jan, 1895 (shown)
      The Nicobar Bullion Case · nv The Windsor Magazine Feb, 1895

ROBERT KENNETH JONES – The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s.

NAL Plume, trade paperback, 1978. Hardcover edition: FAX Collector’s Editions, West Linn OR, 1975. Reprint hardcover/softcover: Wildside Press, 2007.

   In 1940, when I began reading everything I could lay my eyes on, there were countless pulps at my local newsstand. There was even, in the neighborhood in the South Bronx in which I grew up, a store that sold used pulps at three for a dime. Aware of the prices being asked for pulps now, I deeply regret not having invested-or at least kept those I had. Had I but known.

   Robert Kenneth Jones’ The Shudder Pulps is designed for those of us who, for literary and-or monetary reasons, are nostalgic for the pulpa era. It is not designed as a complete history, but rather as an informal survey of the horror-weird menace type of pulp that was so popular in the 1930’s.

   The stories of which Jones writes fell somewhere in between fantasy-science fiction on one hand and detective-mystery fiction on the other. While most of his discussion concerns magazines like Weird Tales, Horror Stories, and Terror Tales, some of the detective pulps like Dime Detective come in for attention as well. In an easy-going, anecdotal style, Jones describes the contents of some of the magazines, the publishing taboos, and gives us an idea of the economics of writing at the time.

   Though many of the pulp writers of the thirties are no longer alive, Jones interviewed several of those available, e.g., Baynard Kendrick and Wyatt Blassingame, and has captured their reminiscences for posterity.

   No book about the pulps would be complete without some discussion of the illustrations, especially the gory, funny, sexy covers. Jones has included more than seventy illustrations, mostly covers. Unfortunately, they are reduced in size and are in black and white, so that some of the original appeal of the covers is missing. Still, in words and pictures Robert Kenneth Jones has done an admirable job of recreating a time for which we rightly feel nostalgic.

DAN BROWN – Deception Point.

Pocket, paperback reprint; 1st printing, December 2002. Hardcover edition: Atria, November 2001.

   There are more than 550 pages in this recent techno-thriller with strong political overtones, and unless I lost track of time, it all takes place in just over or under 24 hours. And in most of the action is Rachel Sexton, who works for NASA and who’s on the outs with her U.S. Senator father, who’s making a strong run for the Presidency, based on an even stronger anti-NASA platform.

   But something’s afoot in the Arctic. NASA has made an earth-shaking discovery of some sort, and so far they’ve been keeping it under wraps. To convince Rachel to commit to his side, her boss whisks her off to the Milne Ice Shelf before making a world-wide television announcement that will completely change the course of the campaign.

   Not all is what it seems, and Dan Brown continually managed to keep me off guard most of the way through. (One thing I did know is that when on page 65, it is revealed that Rachel is petrified of open water, that it’s one hundred percent guaranteed that she will be later challenged in this regard, and probably more than once. And she is.)

   Brown knows his technology, or if he doesn’t, he certainly convinced me that he does. And the scary thing is, you start to wonder, if the government has this much power and this much control of almost everything, what possible say does a common citizen have to alter the way the country is run, to influence the decisions that are made?

   To say that the book is compulsively readable is an understatement. The thrusts and counter-thrusts, by each of the parties involved, both political and physical, never cease, and deciding who exactly is on whose team is like grasping images in smoke.

   The ending can’t possibly survive the accumulated firepower of all that goes before, and it doesn’t, but in terms of a pyrotechnic display, it’s one heck of a show while it lasts.

[UPDATE] 01-07-09.  In case you were wondering, this is still the only book by Dan Brown that I’ve read. The review was written several months before his next book came out (March 2003).