Brief reviews, June 30

Jane Dickinson, Mark Graham & Jennifer Miller, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, June 30, 2006

MYSTERY

The Highly Effective Detective

By Richard Yancey (Minotaur, $23.95).

Grade: B+

If sharp, good-looking investigators get on your nerves, how about a sleuth so clueless he's a lovable goof?

In Richard Yancey's mystery debut, a feckless private eye wannabe (he doesn't have his license and doesn't think he can pass the test) has a weight problem and low self-esteem. But sweet-natured Teddy Ruzak's trying his best to be a mensch, and his observations on life and love can be both funny and wise. Worrying that in his failed attempt at becoming a police officer he was cited as weak in "moral character," he puts his best effort into being a good guy.

Teddy sets up shop in his hometown of Knoxville after an inheritance frees him from his job as a security guard. His secretary, a former waitress hired on the spot at the coffee shop where he used to hang out, may be the brains of the operation, but personal problems keep her away from the office a lot, which Teddy tries to overlook.

His first client seems a good fit for his experience and abilities: A retired gentleman who saw a speeding SUV run over some baby geese crossing the street hires Teddy to bring the driver to justice. Things get complicated when a woman who disappeared from the area at the same time as the fowl-icide turns out to be a kidnapping and murder victim. Her beautiful stepdaughter isn't immune to Teddy's awkward charm.

Although the bad guys are transparent (bad skin and cool haircuts are dead giveaways), amusement rather than suspense is the purpose of the book. But the sedate pace of the story sometimes slows to a crawl.

Yancey's first book, Confessions of a Tax Collector, a memoir about his years working for the IRS, received decent reviews for the humanity it found in its portrayal of backstabbing IRS agents. In The Highly Effective Detective, the author gives us a different slice of humanity and its foibles that will please readers averse to violence and big-city hijinks.

Jane Dickinson

UNREAL WORLDS

Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke

By Philip Jose Farmer (Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, $19.95).

Grade: A

Like me, many fans of science fiction and fantasy cut their teeth on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Most of us envisioned Mars through the eyes of John Carter and imagined swinging through the trees in the African rain forest like John Clayton, better known as Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.

In 1972, Popular Library published Philip Jose Farmer's Tarzan Alive, a biography of this fictional character written as if he were a real person. Later, Esquire magazine published Farmer's "Tarzan Lives: An Exclusive Interview with the Eighth Duke of Greystoke," and his "Extracts from the Memoirs of 'Lord Greystoke' " was published in a collection of his works.

Now for the first time, these three amazing narratives are published together, along with a new foreword by Win Scott Eckert, an introduction by Mike Resnick, five lengthy addenda and a selected bibliography of more than 200 resources.

Farmer starts off by claiming that Burroughs knew Lord Greystoke and wrote his life story as fiction to protect his privacy. Farmer has painstakingly chronicled the plots of the 24 Tarzan books written by Burroughs and analyzed what he considers to be "true" and what he claims Burroughs added to make the stories more exciting and to convince readers that Tarzan did not actually exist.

Using a plethora of sources, Farmer not only makes the case for the existence of the King of Beasts, but for several other fictional heroes as well. All of these exceptional characters, he claims, can be traced to common ancestries. They include: Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Bulldog Drummond and Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett (from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice).

This easily readable scholarly tome filled me with nostalgia for the first time I visited Africa with Tarzan many years ago and reminded me that, in the books, at least, Tarzan still lives.

Mark Graham

YOUNG ADULT

Victory

By Susan Cooper (Margaret K. McElderry Books, $16.95, ages 9-12).

Grade: A

Newbery Medalist Susan Cooper delivers another thoroughly satisfying novel that will transport readers back through time as completely as it does its heroine.

Cooper, awarded Newberys for books in her fantasy sequence, The Dark is Rising, weaves together the lives of an English girl in present-day Connecticut and a young sailor during the Napoleonic Wars 200 years earlier.

Shifting between these two vastly different lives could easily make readers feel tugged about. In one chapter, readers are immersed in the genteel, though lonely life of 11-year-old Molly Jennings; the next, they have slipped into the treacherous life of Sam Robbins aboard a hundred-gun warship. Fortunately, Cooper is adept at making the shift just as readers begin to wonder what the other character is going through.

The two lives first come together one stormy day as Molly and her family run into a used book store in Mystic Seaport to escape a downpour; Molly is drawn to a battered old book about Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, the infamous hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, the pivotal naval battle of the 19th century.

Molly finds the history book a peculiar comfort, as she struggles to adapt to her new life in her stepfather's home in a country that feels lonely in its lack of familiarity. She also is trying to make sense of the tragic plane crash that killed her father off the coast of Spain seven years ago.

Robbins, a poor English farm boy, has just been given a chance at a better life - his uncle has taken him away to teach him the rope-spinning trade - when he is kidnapped by the Royal Navy and forced to serve on the HMS Victory, Nelson's legendary ship.

By chance, Molly discovers a secret envelope in her book that contains a piece of Victory's flag and an inscription that creates a yearning to know more. The haunts of the past become surreal memories as she is pulled back in time to eventually find comfort in the present.

Cooper's harrowing tale is great on its own, but it also does a wonderful job at pulling in history. Readers, some of whom may never have heard of the Battle of Trafalgar, will feel as though they've been there and may even be spurred to read more about this grippingly harsh and heroic period.

Jennifer Miller