Crimes and Misdemeanors: New and Original Stories of Love and Death

Authors: multiple (see below)
Edited by: Elaine Koster and Joseph Pittman
Year: 1998
Genre: Short Stories

Let me just say, this book was not entirely what I expected.  I thought, from the title, that most of these stories would have to do with either love or death, or love and death.  How silly of me.  It turns out, when reading the introduction, that this book is actually a compilation celebrating the 40th year of Signet Books. 

I picked it up at a library sale, mostly because I like reading short stories.  The contributing authors include Stephen King, Sharyn McCrumb, Eileen Goudge, Erica Jong, and other "big names" I've either read and liked, or have heard of and not quite gotten around to reading. So how could I lose?

Overall, the stories were passable.  A few truly stood out.  I was thinking I'd consign this book to the "for sale" heap, but then I read a few stories I really liked, so I will have to ponder the disposition a bit.  

For want of a better way to do this, I'll just review each on its own merits.  None is so outstanding that it deserves its own post. 

• Stormy Weather - Lisa Alther
  Jesse is sunning herself naked by the pool when her ex-husband and his current wife come by to drop off a gift for her 50th birthday party that night.  An OK story, but not particularly engrossing. 
• Headaches and Bad Dreams - Lawrence Block
  A psychic locates the body of a missing boy.  The resulting accolades change her life; she gets recognition and her business booms.  A nice twist at the end. 
• Baby-sitting Ingrid - Larry Collins
  A G-man falls for the woman he's protecting.  She is murdered, and he tried to find justice for her (he knows who killed her but can't pin the guy on charges).  Nothing special.
• Wrong Time, Wrong Place - Jeffery Deaver
  A cop pulls over a couple of thugs in a stolen car, thinking they're the ones responsible for the bank heist earlier that day.  Nice suspense and a good twist to the story.
• Untitled - E.L. Doctorow
  Set in a train on the way to a concentration camp.  I am so totally going to read one of his books, now, as I loved his language.  I think this is the first E.L. Doctorow story that I read: it will not be my last.
• Mother's Day - Joy Fielding
  A mother is waiting for her teenage daughter at an orthodontia office.  Good description of characters; nice slice-of-life plot.  I'd probably pick up a book by her, although I'm not sure I'd go looking for one.
• Paranoia - Stephen Fry
  The OCD wife of a senator-elect has been having bad dreams and consulting psychics.  She is sent to a mental hospital because her paranoia has led to a death.  A great story, with a nice twist at the end (and it shows what an omniscient narrator can do for you, too).  I'd read more by him, that's for sure.
• The Price of Tea in China - Eileen Goudge
  Siblings gather to celebrate their parents' 50th anniversary, knowing that their father has been conducting an affair and their mother would never believe it.  A good, tight story.  Nothing overly dramatic.  I'd also read her again.
• Six Shades of Black - Joan Hess
  A stay-at-home mother takes action.  A great revenge story.  A short great revenge story.  I so want to read more of her writing.
• The Naked Giant - Wendy Hornsby
  A woman planning to celebrate her anniversary discovers her husband cheating on her, and gets a last laugh of sorts.  Very well done. 
• Songs in the Key of I - Erica Jong
  Poems and an essay.  The essay discusses the solitude needed for both readers and writers of poetry, and how suspicious we are of solitude in our modern lives.  My favorite poem was "Waiting for Angels."  Good imagery in all of her poetry. 
• L.T.'s Theory of Pets - Stephen King
  A man shares the story of how his friend L.T's wife left him.  Another demonstration of why Stephen King is so popular - he is a damned good writer and knows how to use telling details.  Also, he manages to convey quite a lot about his characters in the way they speak. 
• Djinn and Tonic - Tabitha King
  A man and a woman find a strange bottle while walking on the beach.  Some good lines: "There was no arguing that men...had a terrible trouble distinguishing a number of things from a vagina."
• Where or When - Ed McBain
  A man is either reliving something terrible he's done - or having premonitions of what he's about to do.  That doesn't matter, really.  I enjoyed this story.  I'm not sure I'd go searching for Ed McBain, but I certainly wouldn't shy away from him, as I have in the past.
• An Autumn Migration - Sharyn McCrumb
  Her father-in-law's ghost inspires a depressed woman.  I loved this story.  It's been a while since I've read McCrumb, but this caused me to remember why I liked her so much.  Will have to make up for lost time.
• Color Blind - Joyce Carol Oates.
  This story had me cringing.  A white woman befriends (or so she thinks) her downstairs neighbor, a black man, only to find months later that she's had his name wrong all this time.  You know, I have yet to read an Oates story that I like.
• A Place for Nathan - Nancy Taylor Rosenberg
  A young woman contemplating abortion meets a man who believes in the transmutation of souls.  A pretty meh story, overall.  Nothing particularly special about it (once you figure out the woman is pregnant - which is dropped out of nowhere - you know how the story is going to end, and pretty much the way the ending will be reached). 
• The Unsung Song of Mary Gallagher - Linda Lay Shuler
  A wallflower comes into her own after being fired from the job she's had for 20 years.  Enjoyable.  I'd probably read Shuler again

Overall, as I've said, most of these stories were unexceptional.  I was surprised at how many dealt with a wronged woman getting revenge.  Some were very clever.  I enjoyed the McBain a lot, which I didn't expect to (I always think of him writing police procedurals, and I just have never been into procedurals).  I really enjoyed the humor and the blackness of Joan Hess's story.  It's one of my favorites out of the whole book, the other being the Sharyn McCrumb story.  Interestingly (or not) both are from rather small places: I think McCrumb lives in Appalachia and Hess in Arkansas.

I'm still not sure about the final disposition of this book.  What might happen is that I'll keep it until I get around to reading some of the authors so I know whom to look up.
 
The stories in this anthology were strong enough that I think an aspiring writer could learn from reading them, and that a reader would enjoy most of them.   
 

The White Bone

Author: Barbara Gowdy
POV: Third person limited (Mud, Date Bed, Tall Time)
Genre: Fiction (maybe literature?)  

I've had this book for a few years, and have always meant to read it.  Last night I finally got around to it.  I didn't feel like watching TV, or like writing, or really much of anything.  It's been a long month, and my mental and creative reserves are depleted.  So I thought about reading, and couldn't decide if I wanted to read an old comfort book (Sunshine and A Fistful of Sky being my first two options) or start a new book.  When I went to actually look at the books, though, I didn't feel like re-reading old favorites, so I decided to read something new.

I'm only explaining that I was in a weird mood when I decided to finally read this book to potentially help explain when I can't decide how I actually feel about this book.  The characters are African elephants; the main character's name is Mud (a baby-name).  Mud belongs to the She-S tribe.  The region they, and other tribes, inhabit is experiencing severe drought.  Additionally, the elephants are being demolished by poachers.  The elephants have heard of a white bone that will point the way to a Safe Place - free of both drought and humans.

Gar, was this a depressing book.  Most everyone dies.  Maybe I'm just a girl for happy endings, and that's why I can't make up my mind.  Because, here's the thing: it's not just as 'cute' book about humanized elephants. These stand on their own, with their own culture.  The elephants have their own rituals and ways and explanations. Gowdy has created a neat mythology for the elephants, and some have clairvoyant gifts (one is each tribe is a visionary, one a mind-talker).  One bull elephant, Tall Time, is obsessed with, for want of a better word, old-wife's tales.  He thinks he's collected them all.  There is, actually, a lot to like in this book.   

I was compelled enough by the book that I read it in one day.  However, that being said, I never did get all that emotionally attached to the characters, and I can't imagine reading this again.  The narrative is shared by three elephants: Mud, Date Bed, and Tall Time.  Mud was orphaned and rescued by Date Bed's tribe, the She-S's.  Tall Time is the bull that collects links (their word for the tales).  He's been in love with Mud since he met her when she was a baby.  Elephants don't fall in love, though, so this is a strange aberration (one that is never resolved nor explained).

This book starts off with a tragedy (the slaughter of most of the She-S's) and never gets better.  Things never look up for the characters.  They basically wander around a drought-stricken landscape searching for the white bone and the lost members of their tribe.  Most die.  The final pages have the few remaining She-S's heading off to what they think is the Safe Place.  Everyone else we've been introduced to has died.

So, depressing.  But I'm not even sure that's my main quibble with the book.  I found the names confusing (every female elephant's name, once they've been mated with, changes to She-something; the something will start with the letter of the tribe them belong to).  Mud's name has just been changed to She-Spurns.  Other members of the She-S tribe include She-Soothes, She-Screams, She-Sees, She-Scares, She-Snorts, etc.  I lost track of who was who. 

Gowdy also invented a language.  For instance, flow-sticks are snakes.  But she doesn't use this consistently.  They will be called both flow-sticks and snakes, often in the same narrative.  Choose one and stick with it.  I think one of my hesitations to start this book was the fact that I'd have to pick up a new vocabulary.  Not really necessary.  There's the nice dictionary at the front, but she also footnotes throughout. 

And it comes down to narrative, too.  She used a third-person limited narration, and it threw me to have animals and that described by their human names (like Grant's gazelles).  I don't think she ever called zebras ribs (the elephant name for them), although I could have missed that.  Trust the reader.  The reader can figure it out from context.

All that being said, I did feel the writing was solid and pleasurable, and I would probably read another of her books.  I would just hope it was not quite as depressing.

Disposition: Sale/Donation (it's likely someone will appreciate this book far more than I - and as I said, I can't imagine wanting to reread it).
Recommendations: There's not many people I can imagine wanting to read this book, mostly because it is so depressing.  Maybe someone else seeking to write non-human characters (again, I thought that was very well done).  More of a craft read than a pleasure read.

As a side note/random observation, this book was published in 1998.  It's one of the first fiction books with footnotes in it that I can think of - I believe Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell came out a few years later.