Once a decade I get an irresistible urge to revisit the hardboiled crime noir classics I was introduced to in high school but didn't appreciate at the time.

My latest binge included Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock, James Ellroy's LA Confidential, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and two books from Raymond Chandler.


Particularly with Ellroy, Hammett, and Chandler, their anti-hero heros are troubled, rebellious, and cynical - but can't ever escape from that ember of honor and hope smoldering deep inside. The authors paint a dark, bleak picture of the underbelly of society - usually LA. Why LA? Why not LA? Where the lights shine brightest the shadows cast deep and wide.

Their outlook was shocking when they wrote their novels - especially Thompson when he wrote from the killer's perspective - but is standard fare today. (Today, you might need to write with a positive buoyancy to shock people!)

I still read crime novels, but I'm not sure anyone has really bested the patron saints, Hammett and Chandler. That begs the question, who had the greatest character? Was it Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe?

I like both characters - but Marlowe is my favorite and I believe he was at his best in The Long Goodbye - which just edged The Lady in the Lake in my mind.

Marlowe befriends Terry Lennox - wealthy but haunted by his demons from serving in war and by the escapades of his nymphomaniac wife. No good deed goes unpunished and soon both the cops and the gangsters are after Marlowe when he begins to investigate the death of Lennox's wife after being told to back off. Telling Marlowe to back off is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

Rereading Chandler is a graphic reminder that California has always had problems - and a guilty pleasure from an era of tough guys, dames in distress, partnerships between the gangsters and dirty cops, and the discovery that even heros have flaws.


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Mark Gilroy is author of the critically acclaimed novel Cuts Like a Knife. A 30-year veteran of the publishing industry, he has served as publisher and executive vice president at several companies and currently runs a company that services retailers, publishers, ministries, and other organizations in the industry.

How The Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. Anchor Books.

In 406 A.D the Rhine River froze solid - and the barbarians crossed this temporary bridge to strike one of the final blows to a lazy, corrupt, and aging empire. When Alaric, king of the Visigoths, showed up at Rome's gates in 410 A.D., the citizens still didn't know the end was at hand. Unable to defend themselves - it was a lot of effort after all - they negotiated a "sack" to spare the city from bloodshed:

"So they kept their lives, most of them. But sooner or later they or their progeny lost almost everything else: titles, prosperity, way of life, learning: especially learning. A world in chaos is not a world in which books are copied and libraries are maintained. It is not the world where learned men have the leisure to become more learned."

While working through Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for my nightstand reading, I realized I needed a shorter "boost" to keep going, so I decided to reread Thomas Cahill's much heralded work that shows the disappearance of learning, scholarship, and culture from the European Continent from the fall of Rome to rise of Charlemagne. All the great works of western civilization would have been lost were it not for the fact that as the Continent became illiterate, one small "unconquered people" at the edge of the Empire were just learning to read and write - with gusto. As peaceful Rome turned to chaos, chaotic Ireland grew more peaceful - the key word being more. Following the lead of their eclectic and passionately spiritual patron saint, St. Patrick, and his spiritual son, Columcille, they built centers of learning that not only drew visitors from the Continent, but sent a wave of missionaries that restored and returned the Greek, Roman, Christian and even "pagan" classic literature to Europe.

Just a fun note or two on Patrick. He was not actually Irish. He was a Briton - "almost Roman" - that was captured, enslaved and brutally mistreated by the Irish as a young boy. Following a vision from God - like King David he was a shepherd and solitude and deprivation turned his thoughts toward God - he escaped Ireland and received a seminary education. But his heart beat for Ireland. In one of history's unique footnotes, he became the first missionary since the Apostolic Age. Also, he didn't drive snakes out of Ireland, but he did curb the Irish passion for violence - curbing the passions of that day for hard drink and, um, ah, for a liberated sense of sexuality, is another matter. One of the reasons Patricus was so well received by his one-time tormentors was that he may have been the only man to stand up to the Irish of his century and say, "I am not afraid of you, I fear only God." That they liked and respected.

I'm only one in a long line of many to recommend Cahill's short, poetic, sometimes rambling, but always charming narrative that brings history to life.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

First things first. The title has nothing to do with IQ. The first character is the number 1 so the title is a play on George Orwell's 1984. Just in case you were wondering if I selected the title because of a possible correlation in title and my intellect!

If you aren't familiar with Japanese author Murakami, his novels are critically acclaimed - he has been awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and many others - and are a fantastical mix of surrealism and a rich (sometimes dense) detailing of everyday life. He consistently deals with themes of loneliness and alienation and soul, the self and reality (and especially perception/imagination and reality). 1Q84 tackles all that and adds acute questions of the-ends-justify-the-means murder, religion and cults, destiny, sexual abuse, revenge, and parallel realities. Oh, it takes a while to catch on, but first and foremost, it is a love story.

Was it listening to Janacek's Sinfonietta that sent Aomame ("sweet pea") into another world with two moons? Did Tengo see the same two moons when he rewrote Fuka-eri's crude draft of Air Chrysalis? (And by the way, was that a story from the fevered imagination of a 17-year-old girl or was she describing things that actually happened?) Will either of them survive the revenge of a cult group called Sakigake and the brilliant and relentless pursuit of Ushikawa - a man with a large misshapen head that shouldn't be able to follow anyone without being noticed? And what of the "Little People" - who seem to hold special powers in 1Q84 and that seem to be looking for a bridge to 1984 - are they neutral or as malevolent as we suspect? And the big question: did Aomame and Tengo have to enter 1Q84 to find each other after 20 excruciating years of separation from each other and disconnect from the world around them? I don't think it's a spoiler alert to say that they became soul mates at age 10.

Enough. You're with me or not. If I've scared you off completely, don't run away before reading the last sentence of this paragraph. If you've read other reviews I've written what you might have already discovered is I don't actually review books - I recommend books. Sometimes quite different books.  I know Murakami is not for everyone - though 1Q84 sold a million copies in Japan alone - and I'll have to admit, it's not my usual fare. But I recommend this book for its dense, other-worldly beauty - reading it creates that curious sensation of wanting (even needing and willing) it to be done and to never end.

The original Japanese was publishing in 2010-11 and the English translation was introduced in 2011. I read the lovely boxed set (very reasonably priced on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and others) that was given to me as a gift by my son Merrick.