When Autumn Reads Start to Call

Wait a minute, it’s fall already? I’ve barely had time to enjoy summer, with its bikini’ed beauties, concerts in the park, long walks at waterside, and opportunities to read outside. And you’re telling me to put all that behind me, to accept the falling leaves and resumption of the school year, and to get ready for shorter days ahead? I call foul!

Who do I complain to about this too-brief period of relaxation? I’m a taxpayer! I want a longer summer, damn it. I need more time, for one thing, to finish off all the books I set aside for reading during the warm months, before diving into my autumn stack. Isn’t anyone listening to me? I demand a recount! It can’t have been three months already since the sun actually started to shine in Seattle. Maybe two. Two and a half on the outside. Definitely not three.

I haven’t even had time to replace my pasty-white, never-leaves-his-office complexion with a summertime glow. And now you’re telling me that summer really is in “its last throes,” as Dick Cheney would put it? Is that why Starbucks is suddenly offering Halloween-appropriate pumpkin-spice lattés? Hurrumph. I feel ripped off. Big time. But OK, if I must accept that autumn is in the wind, at least I can do so knowing that it’s bringing a number of potentially memorable crime-fiction titles my way. I’ll just have to relish them indoors, out of the pernicious Seattle rain. With latté in hand.

Herewith, the 10 books I most look forward to reading this season:

• Exit Music, by Ian Rankin (Orion UK). Following more than ample press build-up, Scotland’s best recognized crime novelist finally pink-slips his series sleuth, Edinburgh Detective Inspector John Rebus, in the latter’s 17th book-length appearance. This novel’s plot focuses on the last 10 days before Rebus, who’s turning 60, is compelled to retire. And he’s got a lot to accomplish before handing in his warrant card--notably, an investigation into the murder of a dissident poet, ostensibly killed without premeditation during a mugging. Or is that death somehow related to the presence in town of Russian businessmen hoping to strengthen ties with Scotland? The typically insubordinate Rebus, pressured by local politicians and his own bosses to wrap up the case quickly, instead turns up the heat, sure that something nefarious is behind the push. In the meantime, an assault on this DI’s old enemy, gangster “Big Ger” Cafferty, makes Rebus a suspect and leaves his younger sidekick, Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke, in the unenviable position of protecting Rebus from himself. This book should hit stores in Britain this week. No word yet on an American publication date.

• The Kingdom of Bones, by Stephen Gallagher (Shaye Areheart Books USA). Melding Victorian sensationalism with the twists of a modern thriller, Bones introduces former boxing champ Tom Sayers (founded on a real historical figure), who now makes money by re-enacting his sporting triumphs on the music-hall stage. Might he also, though, be a serial killer? That’s what Detective Inspector Sebastian Becker surmises, based on the fact that Sayers’ travels coincide with a trail of gruesome murders of young paupers. After escaping Becker’s grip, Sayers embarks on a dramatic but rather harrowing adventure that leads him from England’s mid-19th-century playhouses to the ribald sporting establishments of Philadelphia and the crumbling plantations of Louisiana, ever hopeful of discovering the real killer’s identity and winning his beloved’s heart in the process. Due out later this month.

• Name to a Face, by Robert Goddard (Bantam Press UK). I first encountered the work of Edgar Award-nominated suspense writer Goddard only a few years back, on a trip through England during which I picked up Caught in the Light (1998), a tale that offers the winning combination of passion, betrayal, historical intrigue, and reincarnation--not necessarily in that order. I’ve spent the time since trying to catch up with his old novels, and keep up with his new ones. This month introduces Goddard’s 19th book, Name to a Face, which, according to his publisher, ties together seemingly disparate events occurring over a three-century period: “the loss of H.M.S. Association with all hands in 1707; an admiralty clerk’s secret mission thirty years after; and a fatal accident during a dive to the wreck in 1996.” Throw in, for the protagonist here, a “conspiracy of circumstances that is about to unravel his life” and a “woman he recognizes but cannot identify,” and you have the makings of a Goddard puzzle. Another late September release.

• Damnation Falls, by Edward Wright (Orion UK). Why is it that Los Angeles wordsmith Wright has become so popular in Britain (where he won the Crime Writers’ Association’s 2001 Debut Dagger for Clea’s Moon, and the 2006 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award for Red Sky Lament), but remains relatively unheralded in the land of his birth? (I say “relatively,” because he did of course capture a Shamus Award and a California Booksellers’ Award for While I Disappear.) Surely, fault can’t lie in the fact that he published his initial three John Ray Horn mysteries in the UK first. Or can it? If so, British publisher Orion’s release of Damnation Falls, Wright’s first standalone novel, can’t be depended on to improve his American standing. Even though Wright’s story here grows out of his own experiences and Southern roots. It builds primarily around a former big-city journalist, Randall Wilkes, who returns to the Tennessee hill town where he grew up and agrees to ghost-write the autobiography of ex-Governor Sonny McMahan. Seems like an easy enough gig--at least until McMahan’s “addled” old mother is found “hideously hanged” from a bridge. Another homicide and the discovery of a woman’s long-concealed corpse propel Wilkes to investigate. The case will open up old wounds--his own and others’. Damnation Falls should be for sale in Britain toward the end of this month. Americans will have to wait until 2008 for their own edition.

• The Lords’ Day, by Michael Dobbs (Headline Review UK). Although Dobbs once served as the deputy chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party, his political thrillers have been blessedly bereft of Tory spin. It was he who wrote 1989’s House of Cards, the novel subsequently adapted into an outstanding BBC-TV series of the same name, starring Ian Richardson. Among Dobbs’ later novels have been The Buddha of Brewer Street, Whispers of Betrayal, and last year’s First Lady. For 2007, he’s cooked up a delicious little worst-case scenario of a yarn that finds the Queen, the prime minister and members of his cabinet, the judges and the bishops, together with the sons of both the PM and the American president all assembled in the House of Lords for the State Opening of Parliament--and every one of them about to be taken hostage. “The greatest siege of all time,” trumpets Dobbs’ publisher, but the meat of this book will be to see how desperation to save one’s own life trumps traditional political and family ties. The Lords’ Day may offer the ultimate UK reality-show predicament. Out in mid-October.

• Blonde Faith, by Walter Mosley (Little, Brown USA). Boosted to widespread renown in the 1990s as one of President Bill Clinton’s favorite authors, Mosley has claimed a fecund fictional territory in post-World War II Los Angeles, where his reluctant sleuth, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, struggles with racial animosities and endeavors to keep those he loves free from harm. That latter task presents the most difficult challenges in this 10th installment of the Rawlins series. Not only is Easy losing the love of his life, Bonnie Shay, to another man, but his most casually homicidal crony, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, is missing and wanted for killing the father of 12. Meanwhile, an ex-marine compadre has dumped his daughter on Easy’s doorstep--a sure sign that her father is already dead, or soon will be. Raymond Chandler created the bones of L.A. detective fiction; Mosley gives it flesh and blood, and surprising hope. An October release.

• The Ghost, by Robert Harris (Simon & Schuster USA). After five books firmly rooted in history (including last year’s Imperium), Harris follows Dobbs’ lead in composing a contemporary political thriller. Charismatic Adam Lang, we’re told, “was Britain’s longest serving--and most controversial--prime minister of the last half century, whose career ended in tatters after he sided with America in an unpopular war on terror.” (Shades of Tony Blair, perchance?) Now, after stepping down “in disgrace,” Lang has retreated to a wintry Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to complete his “potentially explosive”--and perhaps self-servingly redemptive--memoir. Trouble is, Lang’s ghostwriter has just been found dead in the surf, and he is forced to recruit new help. Which is how this novel’s jaded, money-hungry writer hero enters the story. He figures to sweep in, clean up and complete Lang’s autobiography, and then move on to the next handsome-payday project. But there are plenty of questions surrounding his predecessor’s demise, and still more about Lang. As he probes his subject’s past, Harris’ protagonist finds that the ex-prime minister’s past is full of dangerous secrets capable of manipulating politics, and provoking more deaths in the future. Due for publication on both sides of the Atlantic in October.

• Hidden Moon, by James Church (St. Martin’s Minotaur USA). A Corpse in the Koryo, last year’s debut novel by the pseudonymous Church (a former Western intelligence officer) won plenty of praise and a spot on January Magazine’s list of the Best Books of 2006. I didn’t catch up with Koryo until more recently, but was sufficiently entranced by that tale set against the backdrop of repressive, dysfunctional, leader-worshiping North Korea to add its sequel to my must-have list for the fall. In these pages, we rejoin the company of Inspector O, a too-patient-by-half homicide detective who is tasked with solving a bank robbery--the first one in Pyongyang. Predictably, nothing goes quite right for O. He must put up with the conflicting ambitions of government ministries and sift suspects from among the gaggle of people (also with their own agendas) whom he meets during his inquiries, while somehow arriving at a solution to the robbery that will keep him in good stead with the dictatorship’s powers that be. Look for Hidden Moon in late October.

• The Silver Swan, by Benjamin Black (Picador UK). I very much enjoyed Christine Falls, last year’s first novel by “Black,” a pseudonym of Man Booker Prize-winning Irish novelist John Banville (The Sea). Although it was slow in places and inconclusive in others, that story about a hard-drinking, lonerish 1950s Dublin pathologist named Quirke, who one night finds his obstetrician brother-in-law altering a young woman’s death record, was both consuming and emotion-laden. It was a surprisingly serious effort at genre-writing by an author more associated with high-brow lit. Black/Banville’s sequel picks up Quirke’s story two years later. The pathologist’s surrogate father has been hospitalized after a stroke, his previously unacknowledged daughter has become withdrawn, and an old college chum, Billy Hunt, suddenly shows up to talk with Quirke about his wife Deirdre’s apparent suicide. Our hero should have learned by now the risks of becoming too curious about things. Yet Quirke’s “old itch to cut into the quick of things, to delve into the dark of what was hidden” leads him to investigate--a decision that will draw him into a world of sexual obsession and drug addiction. The Silver Swan is slated to reach UK bookstores in early November, with an American edition due out sometime next spring.

• Not Quite Dead, by John MacLachlan Gray (St. Martin’s Minotaur USA). Despite his having been in the grave for more than a century and a half, Edgar Allan Poe continues to enjoy an active existence in fiction. Over the last year, he’s turned up in Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow, Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye (one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2006), and Joel Rose’s The Blackest Bird. Now he’s back again, in the latest novel by Canadian John MacLachlan Gray. It was Gray, you’ll recall, who produced The Fiend in Human, an engrossing Victorian-era crime novel that numbered among my favorite books of 2003. Not Quite Dead follows several speculative threads. What if Poe didn’t actually perish, delirious, at a Baltimore hospital in 1849, but instead faked his death because he needed to escape violence at the hands of Irish mobsters? What if he thereafter found refuge in shabby lodgings, only to be saddled with a roommate in the form of Charles Dickens, whose tour of America hasn’t gone as well as he’d planned? Complicating all of this, as I understand it (having not yet read Gray’s new book), are manuscript pages from Dickens’ then-still-forthcoming novel, David Copperfield, which have fallen into the hands of trans-Atlantic stowaway who figures to make a buck from the English author’s U.S. publisher. Another November title.

Of course, 10 books in three months isn’t enough to keep yours truly happy. So don’t be surprised if you spot me also carrying around copies of Michael Pearce’s A Dead Man in Tangier, Sharon Rowse’s The Silk Train Murder, Stephen Hunter’s The 47th Samurai, John Connor’s Falling, Michael Wiley’s The Last Striptease, David Lawrence’s Down into Darkness, Gabriel Cohen’s The Graving Dock, Peter May’s The Critic, Theresa Schwegel’s Person of Interest, and Kevin Wignall’s Who Is Conrad Hirst? under my arm. Not to mention a couple of promising biographies scheduled to roll out soon: The Devil’s Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial That Ushered in the Twentieth Century, by Harold Schechter; and The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, by Judith Freeman. Oh, and we can’t forget about Otto Penzler’s 1,024-page door-stopper, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age--The ’20s, ’30s & ’40s, or Libby Fischer Hellman’s small anthology, Chicago Blues.

With all of these books headed my way, maybe I shouldn’t regret the coming of fall quite so much. But, damn, I will miss those bikinis ...