Remind Me

I'm always reading different things and I love to juggle books - subjects and concepts - in order to see what comes up! That means my night table books tend travel from room to room in the house and with me to the offices and wherever I end up during the day.

That's my apology for the chaos of this list!

I'm reading Roddy Doyle's The Dead Republic (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010) to see the end of Henry Smart, the hero in the brilliant A Star Called Henry. Doyle's grasp of character and history make the first book almost perfect and so now I can say goodbye to an old friend. I'm also finishing Gideon's Spies by Gordon Thomas (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007) an interesting history of the Mossad that I don't quite trust as spies are NEVER completely honest to authors or anyone else, or else they wouldn't be spies.

I'm also re-reading The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine (Authors Guild Backinprint, 2000) which is an interesting investigation/history of the US/South Vietnamese assassination program from the 1960's and 70's. Then there's Death By Rope: Volume One: An Anthology of Canadian Executions by Jeffrey Pfeifer and Ken Leyton-Brown (Vanity Press, 2007). That's a death by death account of the executions in Canada from 1867 to 1923, a very interesting and informative book full of details that remind me that crime really hasn't changed all that much. I'm rereading some of Raymond Chandler's classics - The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953) and Playback (1958) (Everyman's Library, 2002) - alternating and comparing them with Chandler's bio. It makes interesting reading!

Then there's The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Picador, 2008), the definitive history of music as culture in the last century. Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer by Newfoundland anthropologist Elliott Leyton (McClelland and Stewart, 1995), the classic treatise on serial killers as anthropological phenomena. The Armada: 400th Anniversary Edition by Garrett Mattingly (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), an excellent day by day history of the Spanish attack on England. Stony: A History of Manitoba Penitentiary (Stony Mountain Institution) by William G. Edwards (Interlake Publishing, 2004), a self-published history of the institution by a former Assistant Warden at the institute. And, finally, I am reading Death in Silver by Kenneth Robeson (aka Lester Dent) (Bantam Books, 1934), this is number 26 in the Doc Savage series of pulp stories by Dent, the most prolific and imaginative sci-fi/pulp writer ever - without Dent and Savage there would be no Batman or James Bond or any of the other heroes of today. The pulp-fiction characters of the 30's will play a role in an upcoming novel but, honestly, they're just fun to read and listen to as radio plays - The Shadow, The Spider, etc. Dent's Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot should still be read by anyone interested in writing fiction!

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Michael Van Rooy writes for documentaries, magazines, newspapers, and the Internet. Michael won the 2006 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book, and the 2009 John Hirsh Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Born in Kamloops, BC, he grew up in Winnipeg where he now lives with his wife and three children. This is the first volume in the Monty Haaviko series. The third installment, A Criminal to Remember, was recently published by Turnstone Press.

An Ordinary Decent Criminal is nominated for the 2010/11 On the Same Page Project read. Click here to cast your vote.