Crime Novels: Thrillers from the 1960s Part 1
Readers begin to ask the question — what happens when your job is crime? What happens when people decide to make money ‘the easy way’?
Rusalka
Rusalka is a tortoiseshell cat, with beautifully brindled fur and a silly Groucho-Marx moustache. She’s bossy, chatty, and very, very lovey.
She was adopted at ten weeks old in September 2020 and is the youngest cat in our household. People warned us about ‘tortitude’ when we adopted her — and she does have attitude, but not nearly as much as we expected.
Rusalka hates to be picked up. Except when she wants onto your lap, then you have to pick her up. Any other time, and she will stick her legs and claws out and flail like you’re murdering her. She goes where she wants to go, and she might be a little bit spoiled.
But you are guaranteed to be Rusalka’s friend. This cat has always been friends with everyone. She is friends with the vet. After her shots, she will rub against the vet’s leg to remind them that they are still friends. She is friends with the service technicians who fix our furnace. And the plumber. And anyone who visits. And her sisters most of all. Rusalka even gets along with the famously anti-friends Jabberwocky.
She is very serious when she plays, whether that’s chasing a string or screaming before running after a felt bee thrown down the hallway. Her favourite toy is the bee on the string, but we don’t play that very often. When she catches the bee on the string, she bites down and growls and gets very, very serious about keeping what she has caught.
She’s the biggest, cuddliest Mama’s girl, and Hargrave rarely gets to lie down and read without Rusalka insisting on being put on her lap.
Anna Hastings
It actually is a mean-spirited and sexist statement about women in traditionally male roles, positing that when women are working, they are inherently not fulfilling their assigned role in society and apparently everything crumbles around them.
Eve’s Hollywood
A collection of shorter pieces, and longer prose, all of the writing is connected by Babitz’s love for Southern California’s most famous city and its environs.
Free Love & Reminiscences of a Student’s Life
This week I’m going to review two McNally selections from earlier this year, both of which are delightful non-fiction reads that I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen off the shelf.
Ex-Wife
Patricia is not broken by her divorce; instead, she uses it as opportunity to live life on her terms and to determine what it is she wants out of herself and out of a partner. She is a complex character that has a lot to say and also displays a range of emotions that are sometimes contradictory in a very human way.
The Sorrow of War & Novel Without a Name
Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War and Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name are both novels about the Vietnam War from the perspective of young men who served in the North Vietnamese Army. They are powerful testaments from a viewpoint that we do no often get in the west — that being the Americans as the invading, colonialist army in Vietnam.
An Ordinary Youth
A Week Fills Up Fast For the last couple of years, I’ve been keeping a bullet journal just to help us plan out our schedule, make sure we don’t take on too many clients at once, and keep track of various appointments. It’s helped a lot. I no longer feel like the days fly by […]
The Feast
There is nearly literally something for everyone, but at the same time the narrative doesn’t feel busy or chaotic. Instead, Kennedy encapsulates the complexity of mid-century modern life from a vast number of perspectives.
In Transit
Unlike most short story collections, In Transit is a work that I would recommend considering as a whole. Though the stories were published separately and years apart, they share a very similar theme. All of them are about being lost in time, lost in space, and lost somewhere far from home.
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone was not well-received when it was published and was compared unfavourably to Baldwin’s earlier work. Now there is a push to go back to it and appreciate it for the excellent book it is.