Saturday, September 18, 2010
Nobody's Angel by Jack Clark
I heard about this book on an NPR Fresh Air podcast with Terry Gross. She interviewed the author, Jack Clark, who I assume is not the former baseball player. Rather, he’s a writer who turned to driving a cab for some cash and for some story ideas. Originally, he self-published this first novel in 1996 and sold it to his fares. Later, it got picked up by a real publisher. Chicago is his venue, and I don’t remember reading a book about Chicago since reading a couple by Sara Paretsky (and I have another one by her in my list of books to read) and Eric Larson (“The Devil in the White City” – very good book). Clark writes about the life of a cabby and he includes a number of characters that actually begged to be further developed. Clark’s warning – don’t go near the projects, especially Cabrini-Green. During this same time, someone is knocking off random cab drivers, and then Polack Lenny, the dean of cabbies, is killed. The Polack was the most careful of drivers in terms of his fares, so no one can understand how he could have been a victim. I thought the take on cab drivers was good enough, but Clark did put in this murder mystery to help the story. His main character is Eddie Miles, nice name for a cab driver, and Eddie eventually encounters the serial killer. Clearly, this is an autobiographical piece, and it was a fun and quick read, about right for a flight from JFK to Logan.
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Dear Men:
ReplyDeleteFrom the author of critically acclaimed The Paris Enigma, and one of Argentina’s hottest young writers, comes VOLTAIRE’S CALLIGRAPHER, a dark and elegant novel set in 18th Century France, where a mechanical genius seeks life for his creations. Please take a look at the description below, and let me know if you’d like me to send you an Advance Reader Copy.
“While the prose is richly reminiscent of Umberto Eco, the headlong pace of this dark fantasy—combining elements of mystery, historical fiction, horror and the splinter genre clockpunk—will let readers swallow the entrancing story in a single gulp.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“ … with De Santis, reading a crime novel turns into pure pleasure on the highest intellectual level.”
—Tobias Gohlis, Die Zeit
In VOLTAIRE’S CALLIGRAPHER, De Santis combines beloved tropes of the gothic novel – gloomy castles, invisible ink, dubious lines of ancestry, conspirators in frocks – with the Enlightenment’s favorite subject matter: the automaton. Dalessius (the calligrapher of the title) falls in love with the marble-like daughter of an automaton maker. With the latter’s help, and the irascible counsel of the great Voltaire, he upsets the biggest forgery of them all, revealing that the powerful bishop, who writes drastic decrees from within his fortified tower, is not at all what he seems. With remarkable economy, De Santis conjures up a vivid panorama of Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, as the Dark Ages wage war against modernism, in a novel that is both erudite and cheeky, in turns sinister and hilarious.
PABLO DE SANTIS studied literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and subsequently worked as a journalist and comic-strip creator, becoming editor-in-chief of one of Argentina’s leading comic magazines. Most recently, De Santis won the inaugural Premio Planeta-Casa de America de Narrativa prize for best Latin American novel for The Paris Enigma. His works have been published in more than twenty countries. He lives in Buenos Aires.
U.S. Praise for The Paris Enigma
“[A] beguiling historical whodunit…” —The New York Times Book Review
“… a complex whodunit that provokes thought as well as entertainment, on subjects from waterproof shoeshine cream to ancient Greek physics. It fires multiple, intense bursts of crime stories at the reader, some only a page or so long. And it climaxes with serial murders that tie into the building of the Eiffel Tower and the Paris World’s Fair of 1889.”
—Associated Press
“Luminous...a tightly spun thriller...Mr. De Santis effortlessly incorporates important historical events (the building of the tower and the World’s Fair) into his narrative, as well as capturing the turn-of-the-century uneasiness over the emergence of the machine age.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Michael Strong
Regal Literary
michael@regal-literary.com
212 684 7900