Remembering an Icon

  Crime fiction author, editor and critic H.R.F. Keating has died at the age of 84. There are many notices and tributes already up on the Web, including the Rap Sheet, Mike Ripley for The Guardian, Mystery Fanfare, Shots Magazine and The Telegraph. I had featured his novel Is Skin Deep, Is Fatal just a month ago for Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books. Keating is also known for his listing of personal favorites in Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books (through 1986), a fine list indeed of books you should seek out (an update in 2000 was created jointly with Mike Ripley).

Although Keating didn't include his own novels on that list, while you're adding his suggestions to your TRB pile, add some of the titles in Keating's series featuring Indian policeman Inspector Ganesh Ghote. If you want to start at the beginning of the Ghote saga, look for The Perfect Murder, which won the CWA Gold Dagger and was made into a film in 1988.

What About the Afterlife?

 

What do the above have in common? They're all 1,000 years old or older (in the case of the Cuneiform stone, close to 4,000 years old). As the publishing world breathlessly awaits the latest eDevelopment, I find myself wondering about the future of today's books. I embrace digital technology every day, enjoy eBooks and believe they have a variety of uses and loads of potential for readers and writers.

However. Ask my audio engineer hubster how easily it is to get music or audio off an old 8-track tape or cassette. How many times has he tried to rescue something from a reel-to-reel tape, only to have it disintigrate? How many records has he painstakingly restored with a laser turntable, to find some parts just can't be decoded? DAT tape? Hardly anyone has DAT players anymore. CDs certainly aren't permanent.

Even in today's eBook realm, not every book can be read on every device due to the differences in software, hardware and formatting (.azf? .opf? tr2? chm? PDF?). Will our ancestors a thousand years from now have the technology to scan these binary bits when our current technology seems as ancient as a stone and chisel?

What do you think? How permanent are today's books—digital or print (those not published on acid-free or high-quality paper)?

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

  British novelist Jasper Fforde has written several novels in his Nursery Crime, Last Dragonslayer and Shades of Grey series, but he may be best known for the series featuring Thursday Next. First introduced in The Eyre Affair in 2001, ace literary detective Thursday divides her time between Realworld (a Britain that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ours) and Bookworld where literary characters have their own existence.

Meek, mousy written-Thursday lives at the quiet end of Speculative Fiction in Bookworld, trying to keep her small four-book series respectful to her illustrious namesake and away from being remaindered. Every time someone picks up a Thursday Next novel in Realworld, written-Thursday has to be ready to jump into action and act out the parts, aided by her supporting cast that includes her pet dodo and Mrs. Malaprop.

In the sixth installment of the series (released this month), titled One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, written-Thursday Next gets called into action by the Jurisfiction department to investigate when a novel suffers an in-read breakup and deposits a narrative debris-field halfway across Bookworld. Upon closer investigation, written-Thursday realizes the real Thursday has disappeared and it's up to her literary counterpart to figure out what has happened.

When written-Thursday realizes someone has ground off the ISBN number from the wreakage, she finds herself playing the usual action-adventure heroine roles intended for her real counterpart, dodging the mysterious Men in Plaid who want her dead and navigating the Bookworld's elite as they try to deal with a border dispute between Racy Novel and Women's Fiction genres. Only trips to Realworld and up Bookworld's Mighty Metaphoric River will help written-Thursday save the day.

Fforde's genre-bending novel dips its pen into an inkwell-maelstrom of satire, romance, fantasy,  suspense, steampunk, science fiction and of course, detective fiction, a sort of publishing-world version of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Or, as the author himself said in an interview, Benny Hill meets Heart of Darkness. Fforde's creativity and imagination appear effortless and boundless—which is probably close to the truth, seeing as how the author says he sits down to write these books without much of a plan and finishes them in about 100 days or do. Maybe that's because his "years in the film industry makes me think visually and I construct the scenes in my head before putting them on paper."

The premise sounds confusing and the satire is so densely packed, you may find yourself stopping and re-reading passages over and over again to make sure you get all the references, but don't let that discourage you from an entertaining literary roller-coaster reading experience. And when you're done, head on over to the Thursday Next web site for all sorts of clever special features and extras.