An Easy Recommendation, Again

Had one of our annual meetings at the bookstore, to exchange favorites, make recommendations for the Holiday shopping season, and just generally learn what other people on staff recently read. This is a marvelous tradition at the store where I work, and something we all wish we might do more often. It is a big bookstore, with a large staff, still, and it takes three separate meetings to work our way through everybody. Luckily, the indefatigable L., who manages the complicated task of collecting, making presentable, and stocking our Staff Favorites section, was at all three meetings, making notes. The result is a convenient list, organized by section, of all the recommended titles, with authors and descriptive quotes from named staff. This is our Christmas "cheat sheet," if you will. Can't imagine a better tool for working through the Holidays, or anyone producing a better, cleaner copy from so many voices, than dear L.

This list is something I've actually used, again and again, carrying it around in my apron pocket in years past and pulling it out whenever some unlucky soul happens to ask me for, say, a good book for a six year old nephew, or for something her crystal-gazing daughter-in-law might like. It never fails to amuse me that anyone would ask me for help with such things. Sign of holiday desperation, that. But because of the list, and the astonishing diversity of my coworkers, I can assume an air of graceful omnipotence and waltz nearly anyone to nearly anything, confident that there will be something on the list to answer. If nothing else, I can use the list to waltz the customer to a better partner for the tune. It's a wonderful thing, that annual list.

As to my personal contribution this year, I hadn't thought much about it until the actual meeting loomed up on the schedule. There are better prepared participants every year, let me just say, bless them, but even without much forethought, there are always new books I can confidently gather up from under my desk, often as not at the very last minute, and take to the meeting. Every year, there will always be something just perfect. No exception this year.

Just a few years back, Knopf inaugurated a new series, to compliment their delightful "Pocket Poets:" Everyman's Pocket Classics. The first of these was, appropriate to the Season of it's release, Christmas Stories. A lovely little hardcover volume, at 4 and a half by 7 and a half, with red cloth covers, a bright Garamond typeface on acid-free paper, stitched, and in a pretty dustjacket with a striped spine, this was the first of five little anthologies to date. A superb collection, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell, I've used this wonderful little book for my Christmas readings ever since, and mentioned it, and the series, here before.

This series almost never fails me, as a reader or as a participant in the recommendations meeting. The latest volume, Detective Stories, is edited by Peter Washington, who edited the earlier volume of Ghost Stories, for which I cared not much, but who has also edited many happy volumes of the Pocket Poets, from Russian and Persian poems, to erotic poems and poems of friendship, love, mourning, prayers, and a volume of poems on sleep and dream. What I didn't like in his selection of supernatural stories, and do in his volumes of poetry, and in his new book, was his sometimes puckish preference for interest over and above consistency. Ghost stories require an atmosphere, an agreed suspension of disbelief, that is too easily undone if too much attention is drawn to the medium working the trumpet with her toes, or twitching the ectoplasm by a string. It won't do, reading a ghost story, to notice the author's, or the editor's, eyes rolling. One may giggle, now and again, but it ought to be nervous, not sarcastic. Ghosts are a serious business, even the amusing ones, and one doesn't like to be mocked at the seance, having put one's money already in the till. Too many of Washington's selections of ghost stories just weren't very spooky, and worse, too many of them refused to go along with the fun. Bad form.

But like the best of his Pocket Poets anthologies, Washington's latest book of short fiction doesn't pretend to be representative of the genre, but rather is just a paper chase, with familiar stops along the way, but all the better for the rambunctious and quirky turns it takes. Chandler and Hammett are here, both represented by stories that might define the hard-boiled, even if all other evidence of the form were to be lost. Chesterton's Father Brown is at his delightful best in a short story like "The Blue Cross," as is Conan Doyle's Holmes in "Silver Blaze." But I might never have appreciated Bret Harte's lampoon of Sherlock, "The Stolen Cigar Case," had I not read it right after, or enjoyed Jorge Luis Borges' famous tribute to Poe, "Death and the Compass," had I not read a Simenon story before it. Poe himself closes the little book with "The Purloined Letter," a fitting tribute to his influence,

The revelation to me in this anthology was a story called "A Jury of Her Peers," by one Susan Glaspell. I'd never read it, or anything else by the woman. I'd never heard of her before, I regret to say. How is that possible?! The story is a small masterpiece; the tension perfectly gaged, the setting sparsely and beautifully realized, the characters devastatingly right, and the crime itself, or better say crimes, and their solution, if it can be called that without giving too much away, so satisfying as to send me raving about just this story for days after.

I could have recommended this book for that story alone. Meanwhile, here are Christie, and Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin, and ever dear old Earl Stanley Gardner, among others. Everyman's Pocket Classics, and their latest, Detective Stories, came through for me again. Makes my job easy then, this.