The Ann Patchett excerpt that made me buy her books

Excerpts often influence whether I pick up books by authors I have never read before. That, along with a post on Twitter (now X), is how I discovered the award-winning American author Ann Patchett, who writes both fiction and nonfiction.

I was drawn to her writing when I read about her latest book Tom Lake, which is described as a “Beautiful and moving novel about family, love and growing up” or in the words of The Guardian, “A truth that feels like life rather than literature.”

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

Those are the kind of books I have always enjoyed reading, and hope to write someday, now more so since my wife and I launched a website Pocketful of Happiness which stemmed from our desire to be as happy as possible and spread a little joy among our readers. Books like these have a feel-good quality about them. 

Ann Patchett's writing has been variously described as warm, poetic, illuminating, rich, poignant, funny, powerful, compelling and stirring. This was evident from the many excerpts I read including this affecting passage from This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2013):

“People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappoint them, or if they do, the owners manage to forget about it quickly. I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me.”

It prompted me to buy the book along with These Precious Days: Essays (2021). Both are personal  and literary collections of essays and memoir.

I look forward to reading one of these books as soon as I finish Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Links.

Why I left a book fair empty-handed

About a month ago, I visited a Books by Weight exhibition in South Mumbai hosted by Butterfly Books and, in a rare display of self-restraint, left empty-handed. 

It wasn't because there were no good books to buy. I simply didn't feel the urge. Perhaps two years of working from home, followed by a hybrid routine, had something to do with it. Apart from evening walks, the occasional social visit and grocery runs in the neighbourhood, I had barely ventured out until that day.

I was also conscious that there was little point in adding to a collection of books that already contained many unread books. Only a few months earlier, my wife and I had given away more than a hundred paperbacks. I had no desire to replace them with another stack that might sit unread for months, if not years.

As I grow older, though not necessarily wiser, I find myself increasingly drawn to the idea of owning fewer things and making better use of what I already have. That applies to books as much as anything else: read them, enjoy them and then pass them on. 

One evening, my wife asked me, "What are you finally going to do with all your books? It's time to move on." 

She had a point. It's not as though I own a treasure trove of rare and valuable editions, aside from a few out-of-print western paperbacks and some books with particularly memorable covers. What she really meant, I think, was that I needed to outgrow the habit of buying books simply because I loved the idea of owning them. There was a time for that, and perhaps that time had passed.  

We still have many books, I more than she. I'm also holding on to my comic books, some of which I've owned for decades. What will become of them when I retire, I don't know. Paper, after all, has a shelf life.

These days, I do most of my reading on a Kindle and a tablet. Both are convenient, reader-friendly and, above all, kind to limited shelf space. Physical books possess a charm that ebooks can never quite replicate, but practicality has led me to draw a line between the two. My reading is now roughly 70 per cent digital and 30 per cent print.

I still buy the occasional paperback from secondhand bookshops and book exhibitions, but only after asking myself if it's really worth having the book and wouldn't an ebook serve my purpose just as well. 

The answer to those questions is increasingly shaping my book-buying habits. Having fewer books doesn't mean reading less.

The last books I bought before lockdown

If there was one thing I missed during the lockdown and the long months of working from home, it was regular visits to secondhand bookshops, pavement booksellers and book exhibitions. 

During that period, I bought only two books from Amazon India—a used but rare Corgi edition of Sudden and a new Fantastic Four: The Coming of Galactus comic-book digest, both featured here. 

Finding Sudden felt like winning the lottery. I was surprised and delighted to come across the paperback—with its striking cover art—on Amazon India for just Rs.295. My favourite western isn't the sort of book one easily stumbles upon at second-hand book sales in Mumbai.

Most of the books in this post, however, were purchased in the weeks and months before the pandemic changed our routines. I've included their covers, original publication years and brief synopses below. 

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

The New Collected Short Stories by Jeffrey Archer

"This brand new edition brings together three of Jeffrey Archer's classic collections of short stories—To Cut a Long Story Short, Cat O' Nine Tales and And Thereby Hangs a Tale—showcasing the master storyteller's skill like never before. Every reader will have their own favourites: the choices run from love at first sight across the train tracks to the cleverest of confidence tricks, from the quirks of the legal profession, and those who are able to manipulate both sides of the Bar, to the creative financial talents of a member of Her Majesty's diplomatic service—but for a good cause. In `Caste-Off', Jamwal and Nisha fall in love while waiting for a traffic light to turn green in Delhi, and in `Don't Drink The Water', a company chairman tries to poison his wife while on a trip to St Petersburg, with unexpected consequences... The stories held in these pages are irresistible: ingeniously plotted, with richly drawn characters and deliciously unexpected conclusions. Some will make you laugh. Others will bring you to tears. And, as always, every one of them will keep you spellbound."

The Twisted Thing by Mickey Spillane

"This was some household.

"The kid was a genius, the father a scientist of international repute. Money was problem. Not shortage of money but the opposite: too much. The sort of money that brings the envious and the scheming clustering like flies round a pile of ripe offal: nieces, nephews, cousins - a family of mean minds and gross appetites.

"The hired help had its peculiarities too: the chauffeur, an ex-con; the governess, formerly a featured act in strip clubs from New York and Miami; a secretary with a well developed taste in other women.

"Quite a household. And not one to welcome the arrival of Mike Hammer—not when the kid had been kidnapped and everyone else was a suspect."

Snobs by Julian Fellowes

"The English, of all classes as it happens, are addicted to exclusivity. Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them."

"The best comedies of manners are often deceptively simple, seamlessly blending social critique with character and story. In his superbly observed first novel, Julian Fellowes, creator of the Masterpiece sensation Downton Abbey and winner of an Academy Award for his original screenplay of Gosford Park, brings us an insider's look at a contemporary England that is still not as classless as is popularly supposed.

"Edith Lavery, an English blonde with large eyes and nice manners, is the daughter of a moderately successful accountant and his social-climbing wife. While visiting his parents' stately home as a paying guest, Edith meets Charles, the Earl Broughton, and heir to the Marquess of Uckfield, who runs the family estates in East Sussex and Norfolk. To the gossip columns he is one of the most eligible young aristocrats around.

"When he proposes. Edith accepts. But is she really in love with Charles? Or with his title, his position, and all that goes with it?"

Sudden: Law O' The Lariat by Oliver Strange

"The word had filtered out that Sudden was dead—and there was no one around to contradict it. Men who had cringed before, swaggered now; others boasted of their encounters with Sudden, the coward.

"Only one man stayed quiet: a tall, saturnine fellow wearing two guns tied low. When he heard the rumours, he gave a thin smile; and when someone asked him who he was, he said shortly: James Green. James Green — alias Sudden!"

Maigret and the Headless Corpse by Georges Simenon

"Two brothers find a grisly package clinging to the propeller of their barge in the Canal de Saint Martins, and by the time Maigret arrives most of a mysterious corpse has been assembled, except for the head. The search shifts from finding the missing piece to finding a motive, as the Inspector's keen mind assembles clues from the dismembered torse which lead to a trio of suspects. A flash of intuition linking the principal suspect's sordid life to the whereabouts of her victim on his last day alive closes the case but opens Maigret's mind to the reason for the crime."

I have yet to read Julian Fellowes and Georges Simenon.

Short Story: The Case of the Wandering Redhead by Leigh Brackett

I’d never read Leigh Brackett until now, and I’m glad I finally did. I discovered her short story, The Case of the Wandering Redhead, in the February 1951 issue of New Detective Magazine and thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is the introduction to the story.

“Here is the most ruthless man you’ve ever met—a filler whom death could not soften nor bullets stop—yet whose relentless fists battered to their last futile gesture that softest thing a man ever finds—the heart of a woman in love. It is with a definite sense of accomplishment that we welcome Miss Brackett to these pages—which many of you will find unforgettable!”

The “ruthless man” is Marty James, a territorial gangster who lives by his guns and fists and serves as the story’s narrator. He is hopelessly in love with Sheila Burke, a stunning redhead he is determined to marry, even though she detests the very idea. Sheila rejects him outright—just as decisively as he would gun down an adversary. And she has every reason to want nothing to do with him.

“Can I get it through your head? I hate you, Marty. I hate everything you stand for. All I want out of life is decency and peace and maybe a little happiness. You can’t give me any of them.”

But Marty has no intention of leaving Sheila alone. In fact, he is trying to force her into marriage when his sidekick summons him away on urgent business, only to betray him to a rival gangster eager to seize his territory. Marty fights and shoots his way out of captivity before returning to Sheila, carrying a cracked rib and two bullet wounds in his thigh.
 
"Six flights, with thin snow beginning to fall, thinking of Sheila’s voice saying, There’s blood on you, Marty. You’re not in my world.

"I thought, All right. That’s the way it is, Sheila. That’s the way we’ll play it. I was colder than the snow, and numb."

The Case of the Wandering Redhead is a cracker of a story. Its two central characters, Marty and Sheila, are vividly drawn. Marty may be a ruthless gangster, but he is also, in his own words, "human enough to go crazy over a girl."

"I looked at her. She was beautiful. She was like something the wind might cut out of a snowbank, with the red fire of her hair on top. Her eyes met mine, and there was an awful coldness in them, like I’d killed the spark inside her."

The story is a fine example of hard-boiled crime fiction from the Golden Age, though I still have plenty to explore and read in the genre.

Book Review: Stone: M.I.A. Hunter by Stephen Mertz

Stone: M.I.A. Hunter by American thriller writer Stephen Mertz is the first novel in the adrenaline-soaked Mark Stone: MIA Hunter series, which spans seventeen books. The series was created and plotted by Mertz, who collaborated with Joe R. Lansdale, Michael Newton and Bill Crider on the novels. Mertz and Newton also wrote several instalments of Mack Bolan: The Executioner, the long-running action series created by Don Pendleton.

My Kindle edition of Stone M.I.A. Hunter is a reprint of the first M.I.A. Hunter novel, retitled Leave No Man Behind and published in September 2017. 

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.) 

As the series title suggests, the M.I.A. Hunter is Mark Stone, a tough-as-they-come former Green Beret whose mission in the years following the Vietnam War is to locate American POWs forgotten by the government and officially listed as MIA or KIA, and bring them home. He knows he cannot rescue them all, but he is determined to save as many as he can.

Stone conducts his MIA-hunting missions in the jungles of Vietnam and Laos, and in other trouble spots around the world, accompanied by two trusted and battle-hardened companions: the six-foot-four Texan Hog Wiley and former British commando Terrance Loughlin. They rarely question Stone or his decisions, even when they lead them straight into hell and force them to fight their way out. Their loyalty to one another is absolute. 

Although Stone works for the CIA in an unofficial capacity, he often operates independently through Stone Investigative Consultants, a Los Angeles-based private investigation agency that provides a convenient cover for his missions.

M.I.A. Hunter begins in the Laotian jungle. Stone and his men, aided by anti-communist Laotian guerrillas, rescue a US Navy pilot and several other POWs who have been held by the Viet Cong since the end of the war. After fighting their way through more than a hundred miles of hostile territory, they finally reach their pickup point. But the waiting helicopter brings an unwelcome surprise: CIA operative Alan Coleman, a man with an agenda of his own. Coleman despises Stone and promptly places him and his companions under arrest for violating US law—or, as Stone sees it, for making the intelligence community look bad.

Back in L.A., Stone overcomes his legal hurdle with the help of Carol Jenner, a close friend who works for the Defence Department in Washington, and a sharp lawyer. Out on bail, he helps the widow of a Vietnam comrade rescue her teenage son from a Mexican drug cartel and set him on the right path. Just when he’s hoping for some MIA action, a badly wounded stranger turns up in his garage with shocking news before dying: Rosalyn James, an army nurse and the love of his life—believed killed in a Vietnam medevac—is still alive. For nearly fourteen years, she has been held captive on the Laos–China border by a brutal, torture-loving drug lord known only as the General.

Stone goes back with Wiley and Loughlin, in what could well be the most important MIA rescue mission of his life.

Stone: M.I.A. Hunter delivers nonstop, edge-of-the-seat action. Mark Stone and his team use weapons and hand-to-hand combat with lethal efficiency. It’s classic vigilante fiction where the heroes are near-invincible. They are men of honour, integrity and sacrifice. For many readers, including myself, it works because it satisfies a simple sense of justice—someone has to uphold it, even if only in fiction.

Stephen Mertz does not disappoint in telling the story of the MIA hunter and the forgotten war heroes he brings home. I will be reading more books in the series.