novels

Spies in Literature

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From the trailer for 1959’s film version of Our Man in Havana.

I should have posted this “Spies in Literature” piece last Sunday the 7th in honor of Agent 007 James Bond, but I hadn’t yet finished the novel that inspired what you’re about to read.

That interesting 1958 book is Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, and while its protagonist James Wormold is not a typical spy (he’s a vacuum-cleaner salesperson who reluctantly accepts recruitment as an agent), he nonetheless ends up in espionage.

Wormold is a satirical creation — the reports he submits to headquarters are pure fiction — but many other spies in literature are quite serious characters even if some humor might occasionally enter the mix. These secret agents can make for compelling reading as they get into adventures, risk their lives, save lives, end lives, do undercover work for good or evil patrons, inhabit a milieu of geopolitical machinations, etc.

I initially mentioned James Bond, and have seen a couple of movies starring him, but must admit I’ve never read any of the Ian Fleming novels that inspired the long-running 007 film franchise.

But I have enjoyed a handful of other books with spy characters. One author quite famous for that genre is John le Carré, whose The Russia House (1989) is the only novel of his I’ve read. It unfolds near the end of the Cold War — just before the breakup of the Soviet Union — and is pretty absorbing.

The Cold War of course has inspired many a spy novel, which could include Viet Tranh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer if the Vietnam War is considered partly a manifestation of that era’s United States/Soviet Union tensions. His seriocomic 2015 novel — set in 1975 and subsequent years — is told by an unnamed North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army who remains embedded in a South Vietnamese immigrant community in the U.S. Its sequel, The Committed, was published in 2021.

Obviously, not all espionage novels have a Cold War connection. For instance, James Fenimore Cooper’s 1821-released The Spy (hmm…I wonder what its title character is 🙂 ) takes place during the American Revolutionary War of several decades earlier.

And in the Harry Potter series, Severus Snape is a spy of sorts — and the most complex and morally ambivalent character in those seven J.K. Rowling novels.

I’ve barely touched the surface here, as I haven’t read that many books with secret-agent characters. Any thoughts on spies in literature? Your favorite characters and novels in this realm?

Misty the cat says: “I see thorns but not birds, so ‘The Thorn Birds’ novel doesn’t exist.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about another LONG Township Council meeting and more — is here.

The Books of Sleuth

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It’s been a while since I wrote a post focusing on crime novels, so let’s get fictionally felonious again! Today, I’m going to discuss some of my favorite detectives/investigators in literature.

Their exploits can be compelling and satisfying for various reasons, including the wish-fulfillment aspect of seeing criminals get their comeuppance — though not always, and even those caught or killed can wreak a lot of havoc before their illegal work is done. Then there’s the appeal of intricate plots, trying to guess the culprits, seeing how fictional sleuths solve cases, enjoying the interesting and at-times weird personality traits of the detectives and criminals, etc.

Fictional sleuths — some professional, some amateur — are on my mind after having read four of Tarquin Hall’s India-set mysteries the past few weeks. They star private investigator Vish Puri — a brilliant, incorruptible, overeating, occasionally comedic, unfortunately a bit sexist character who solves various quirky cases. Just how quirky is telegraphed by the titles of some of Hall’s books, including The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing (2010) and The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken (2012).

Yes, sleuths are often in multiple novels — including J.K. Rowling’s superb crime series starring Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. Those two characters are brave, brainy, charismatic investigators who carry some serious physical or psychological baggage and, while work partners, are secretly in love with each other. It’s saying something that I find that 2013-launched series — written under the pen name Robert Galbraith — almost as compelling as Rowling’s earlier Harry Potter books.

Also excellent are Walter Mosley’s novels starring another expert investigator: Easy Rawlins, an African-American World War II veteran who lives in Los Angeles. The series began with the 1990-published Devil in a Blue Dress, and now has 16 installments set from the 1940s to 1960s.

Absorbing, too, are Louise Penny’s atmospheric Canada-set novels featuring inspector Armand Gamache.

And there are Val McDermid’s great books starring cold case detective Karen Pirie that I won’t get into today because I’ve recently written about them in other contexts.

Some other contemporary authors have created characters who are not detectives per se but do plenty of incisive sleuthing to solve crimes. Among them are bounty hunter Stephanie Plum in Janet Evanovich’s mysteries, attorney Mickey Haller in Michael Connelly’s books, and the roaming Jack Reacher in the novels by Lee Child (with recent titles co-written by Andrew Child).

Then of course there are past authors who created detectives — many quite iconic. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (in novels and short stories), Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin (in short stories), Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple (of course!), Wilkie Collins’ Sgt. Richard Cuff (of The Moonstone), Umberto Eco’s William of Baskerville (in The Name of the Rose), Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone (of alphabet mysteries fame), Dorothy L. Sayers’ Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane duo, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh, etc.

And, in books penned by multiple authors over the years…Nancy Drew!

Comments about this post? Fictional sleuths you’ve liked?

Misty the cat says: “The leaves turned after I installed steering wheels on them.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the start of school and more — is here.

Fictional People Are Getting Deported, Too

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The Trump regime’s cruel deportation program has extended to fictional characters. And this program is widespread: affecting characters from the United States or other countries, characters who live in the present or lived in the past, etc. Because novels can make readers smarter and more empathetic, most of today’s Republicans feel many characters have to be removed from the pages where they live — including pages in some of my favorite literature.

I first heard about character deportations when The Grapes of Wrath‘s Tom Joad, who develops a stronger class consciousness as John Steinbeck’s book goes on, was yanked from the novel by Trump’s masked ICE agent goons. Determined to find Tom, the rest of the Joad family traveled east instead of west and ended up picking crops in New York City’s Times Square. Needless to say, not much was growing through the pavement.

ICE agents also plucked Jane Eyre from Charlotte Bronte’s novel because she’s a determined young woman too independent-minded for Trump’s taste, and doesn’t have big blonde hair like many Fox News hosts do. So, U.S. Secretary of Education/wrestling biz wacko Linda McMahon substituted for Jane as little Adele’s teacher, and Rochester instead fell in love with a Disney princess.

Of course, characters of color are most at risk of the Trump regime’s deportations, and Bigger Thomas of Richard Wright’s Native Son was no exception. Plus his attorney is a communist! With Bigger no longer around as a client, that lawyer represented Jane Eyre as she tried to return to her novel, but Jane instead got sent to Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” two centuries before that repugnant concentration-camp-like jail was built.

Clara del Valle Trueba was also deported — from The House of the Spirits. After being kicked out of Isabel Allende’s novel, the clairvoyant Clara took her knowledge of Trump’s guilt in the sickening Epstein pedophile scandal and started a blog about that. Because Clara had been in a magic-realism book, the blog levitated out of her computer screen — which puzzled WordPress customer support.

In Daniel Deronda, Daniel D. and Mirah Lapidoth and Ezra Mordecai Cohen are idealistic proto-Zionists rather than the U.S.-armed genocidal Zionists in Israel’s current leadership who are mass-murdering Palestinian civilians, so the three were deported when entering a government office to register as George Eliot characters. That left Gwendolen Harleth wandering around Eliot’s 19th-century novel, searching for a Burger King in which to have lunch.

Atticus Finch? Taken from To Kill a Mockingbird for being an attorney with integrity. This came after some Trump regime hesitation to deport Finch because author Harper Lee had the same last name as Confederate traitor Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general greatly admired by right-wingers for fighting to defend the appalling institution of slavery. But Atticus did ultimately get booted from To Kill a Mockingbird before joining Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch novel starring a painting of a bird sharing his last name.

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, every character except the ultra-evil Lord Voldemort was deported to make the series more palatable for Republican fascists. One of the characters, Nearly Headless Nick, went on to successfully lose 10 pounds by becoming Completely Headless Nick.

But no character was spared from deportation in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things because Trump erroneously thought the title of that novel referred to his fingers and his…

Misty the cat says: “Where’s my teen human? Oh, she went away to college last weekend.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the spending to date of money authorized by my town’s massive 2022 school bond referendum — is here.

Reimagination Actualization

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Four years ago, I blogged about fiction that uses previous fiction as a jumping-off point — and perhaps reimagines well-known characters. This post is sort of a sequel to that post, taking a somewhat different angle and including several novels I’ve read since 2021.

In general, I’m not a huge fan of fiction that’s heavily inspired by a famous work; I’d rather writers be more original than that. Still, there have been some excellent novels that offer insights into the previous work and might be great in their own right.

My latest encounter with this reimagining phenomenon was Queen Macbeth, Val McDermid’s 2024 novella that takes a fascinating approach to characters in Shakespeare’s iconic Macbeth play. The book is excellent, giving Lady Macbeth a more positive (and more historically accurate) persona as a compelling plot unfolds in two different timelines.

McDermid’s book reminded me a bit of Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novella The Penelopiad (mentioned in my 2021 post) that gives Penelope a bigger and more feminist role than she had in Homer’s ancient Odyssey poem.

There’s also Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s 2022 tour de force that gives Charles Dickens’ 1850 classic David Copperfield a modern spin in America’s Appalachian region during the opioid epidemic.

Kristin Hannah’s gripping 2021 novel The Four Winds was obviously inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), but it’s still plenty original and differs in featuring a female protagonist. (The title character in Demon Copperhead is male.)

Zadie Smith has described the structure/focus of her novel On Beauty (2005) as an homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910).

In her also-published-in-2005 novel March, Geraldine Brooks takes the father from Louisa May Alcott’s 1868-released Little Women and gives him his own story.

I haven’t read it yet, but Percival Everett’s acclaimed James (2024) reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim.

In my 2021 post, I mentioned the 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Jean Rhys gives three-dimensionality to the “madwoman in the attic” of Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre; Rhys’ creation is in effect a prequel to Bronte’s 1847 book. I also discussed the novel (by Gregory Maguire) and the play Wicked, which sympathetically portray the Wicked Witch from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel (1900) and The Wizard of Oz movie (1939).

Mentioned as well in that post were Isabel Allende’s 2005 novel Zorro, Jasper Fforde’s 2001 novel The Eyre Affair, and Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 Jane Austen parody Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — the last of which I haven’t felt the “Persuasion” to read.

Comments about, and examples of, this theme?

Misty the cat says: “My right turn has nothing to do with politics.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a badly maintained lower-income apartment building, a change in venue for a senior center, and more — is here.

Going Places

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Elizabeth von Arnim

Can going to a different place change a person for the better? It certainly helps in some cases — as seen in various novels. Characters might get out of rut, meet new people, interact differently with people they already know, see new sights, learn new things, self-reflect, find the new place suits their personality more, etc.

I just read Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April (1922), which focuses on four unhappy British women who rent a castle on the Italian Riviera for a month. The gorgeous setting becomes a big factor in improving things for each of the four. The Enchanted April is…enchanting — an upbeat novel, but with some welcome puncturing of sentimentality.

Another British character travels to Hawaii in David Lodge’s 1991 novel Paradise News, where love is found along with better weather. 🙂

Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 novel Rubyfruit Jungle stars Molly Bolt — who, as a lesbian, finds life somewhat fraught in Florida. She eventually ends up in New York City, where things are of course not perfect but there’s more of an LGBTQ+ community.

The orphaned title character of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre spends many of the 1847 novel’s early pages at Lowood School, a harsh place with little heat and inadequate food until some reforms are instituted. But the big change for Jane is subsequently getting a governess job at the Thornfield Hall manor, where life becomes quite dramatic. Good things happen, but not all good…

Yes, it can obviously be a mixed experience going to a different place. In Kristin Hannah’s 2024 novel The Women, for instance, the rather naive American protagonist signs up to be a Vietnam War nurse. Much of the experience is horrific for her and of course her badly wounded patients, yet she grows so much as a person that going to Vietnam has some positives.

In John Grisham’s 2014 novel Gray Mountain, New York City lawyer Samantha Kofer is a very urban person who nonetheless finds a lot of satisfaction amid fraught moments after taking a legal-aid job in Virginia’s Appalachian region.

A life-changing positive travel experience can also involve leaving Earth, as pioneering female astronaut Elma York does in Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars and its sequel The Fated Sky, both from 2018.

Obvioiusly, characters can get to another place and see their lives go downhill, but that scenario is not part of this blog post.

I’ve just touched the surface here. Other novels that fit today’s theme? Comments about this theme?

Misty the cat says: “Whoever writes ‘Stop’ signs is even more widely published than Stephen King.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — containing a comedic overreaction to a one-hour-earlier closing time at my town’s municipal pools — is here.

Summer in the City? No, Summer with a Kitty

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My feline self sprawled next to Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, which I will not discuss today because I haven’t finished reading it yet. The first letters of that novel’s title spell “tea,” which I don’t drink. Thank you for your attention to these two matters. (Photo by Dave.)

Misty the suburban cat here with my every-two-month blog post. My previous guest piece was in June, this one is in August, and the next one will be in October. Except that U2’s October album was released in 1981, so I’m not sure how my next blog post will be in…October. There IS a song on that album called “Stranger in a Strange Land,” which is about me at the vet for my yearly check-up.

Anyway, my adult humans Dave and Laurel saw the Superman movie this month, and enjoyed its thrills, acting, and empathy. But I, Misty, was not allowed in the theater because of being a cat. I was actually kind of relieved, because sitting through 25 minutes of ads and previews would have had me yowling loud enough to be heard on Mars — which billionaire bozo Elon Musk, aka the Tesla dude, wants to not only colonize but have The Martian Chronicles author Ray Bradbury write a 2025 sequel called The SpaceX Chronicles. Given that Bradbury died in 2012, he…missed the pleasure of seeing the catastrophic flop of Musk’s stupid Cybertruck.

The Superman film reminds me and other kitties of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the 2000 novel partly based on the real-life Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster duo who created the Superman character for comic books in 1938 — the year the iPhone minus-69 was released.

More generally, the 2025 movie starring the “Man of Steel” also reminds my meowing self of fictional characters possessing abilities beyond the capacity of most mortals. One is the Lee Child-created Jack Reacher — who’s not a superhero but displays unusual strength, incredible fighting abilities, great intellect, and other attributes in the 29-book series that began in 1997. Exactly a century after Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which stars a vampire who acts out in all kinds of ways after Frankenstein defeats him in pickleball. A tip of the hat to Mary Shelley.

Another character who combines exceptional brains with exceptional physical abilities is the prehistoric protagonist Ayla of Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels. Ayla’s many accomplishments included inventing things and being the only person able to ride Baby the lion (a feline like me!), although she never played pickleball with her horse Whinney.

Some fictional people even rise in the air or fly — in magic-realism novels and other books. Among them are Remedios in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Margarita in Mikhael Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and the title character of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan — which was first a play, then a novel, then an animated movie, then a live TV film, and finally a jar of peanut butter which also flew when Dave tossed it out the window to compare its hang time with a jar of Skippy peanut butter. Denying me the opportunity to swat both brands off the counter with my cat paws.

There are also characters who might not be extraordinarily adept in a brute physical way but are really, really smart. Hermione Granger of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Sherlock Holmes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction, Hercule Poirot of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, etc. Lisbeth sadly did not have a cat tattoo, but I forgive her because she’s Swedish and thus might toss some Swedish meatballs my way.

Dave will reply to comments so that I have time to eat the aforementioned meatballs. Rest assured that I maintain a balanced diet — one meatball in each side of my mouth.

I, Misty the cat, say: “After years of study, I’m finally qualified to inspect Belgian blocks.”

My and Dave’s comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

Dave is also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, Dave writes the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my school district’s huge, recently discovered deficit — is here.

Weekly Post, Monthly Theme

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August has arrived, and thoughts not only turn to the approaching start of the school year but also to…Light in August.

Yes, some novels have months in their titles, and William Faulkner’s 1932 book is no exception. It also happens to be my favorite Faulkner work as the author unspools a “Southern Gothic” story about a man (Joe Christmas) who passes as white but thinks he has some African-American ancestry, a pregnant woman (Lena Grove) searching for the would-be father, and others.

Now let’s work back to previous months. Nadine Gordimer wrote July’s People, a novel set in a near-future version of South Africa where apartheid had ended. This was before apartheid actually ended, at least officially, about a decade after Gordimer’s 1981 book was published.

There’s also Three Junes by Julia Glass, whose 2002 novel has an intriguing tri-format set in 1989, 1995, and 1999.

Various novels include May and April in their titles, but I haven’t read any of them. 🙂

March? We have Geraldine Brooks’ March, but — rather than referring to the third month of the year — the title of the 2005 novel is the last name of the father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as Brooks focuses on that dad’s harrowing Civil War experiences. There’s also Middlemarch, but that’s the name of a fictional English town in George Eliot’s 1871-72 classic.

I haven’t read any novels with February, January, December, or November in the title, but they do exist — including Gustave Flaubert’s…November (1842).

Going further back in the realm of months, we have Tom Clancy’s 1984 Cold War thriller The Hunt for Red October.

Have I read any novels with September in the title? Nope. But the Earth, Wind & Fire song “September” was pretty good.

Watch for a Misty the cat guest blog post next week! He was adopted in December (of 2017).

Any novels you’d like to mention with a month manifestation?

Misty the cat says: “There are twin beds, queen beds, king beds, and hall-floor beds.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which has a quirky percentage theme — is here.

Ten Years After: a Video Interlude

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A 1987 photo I took of ‘Peanuts’ cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000) on the right, ‘Terry and the Pirates’/’Steve Canyon’ cartoonist Milton Caniff (1907-1988) on the left, and Snoopy.

Today, I’m doing something different in this usually literature-focused blog of mine. 🙂 I was surprised and pleased to see on the Bluesky social-media platform three days ago that my Canadian writer friend Dan St.Yves had re-posted a filmed interview he did with me almost exactly ten years ago, so I decided to re-post it again here instead of going with a more typical lit post.

In that summer of 2015 conversation, we talked about various syndicated cartoonists and columnists I had met and covered while working for Editor & Publisher magazine from 1983 to 2008 — before I started blogging on literature. Among the creators discussed: Charles M. Schulz (“Peanuts”), Jim Davis (“Garfield”), Lynn Johnston (“For Better or for Worse”), Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), Stan Lee (“Spider-Man”), humor columnist Dave Barry, and twin-sister advice columnists Abigail Van Buren (“Dear Abby”) and Ann Landers.

When Dan and I had our conversation, we were in Indianapolis attending the 2015 conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists — for which I was a board member from 2009 to 2023.

Again, this is not a typical book post for me, although all the cartoonists and columnists mentioned above have seen MANY sales of paperback (and in some cases hardcover) collections featuring their work, and some have written some non-collection books as well. (For instance, Dave Barry has authored and co-authored a number of novels.) Also, the 2012 Comic (and Column) Confessional memoir I wrote about my time at Editor & Publisher comes up during the interview. I could add that Alexandre Dumas wrote an 1845 sequel to his famous 1844 novel The Three Musketeers titled Twenty Years After — twice the length of time since this post’s 2015 video of ten years ago. So, if one read half of Twenty Years After…

Anyway, below is a link to the video, which lasts a bit over 20 minutes. Whether you watch it or not (no obligation!), I’ll be back with a more normal literature post next week. Actually, Misty the cat is soon due for another guest blog effort here to discuss books from his feline perspective, but he’s not sure yet if that will be on August 3 or sometime later in the month. In the meantime, Misty is reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Treats and hoping for a happy ending.

Misty the cat asks: “Why is there smoke in July when the new Pope was chosen in May?”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and the aforementioned 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the cancellation of “The Late Show,” whose host Stephen Colbert is a resident of my town — is here.

Self-Therapy By Book

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Thomas Mann (Picture Alliance/Ullstein Bild)

Sometimes, novels are semi-autobiographical confessionals and/or expressions of authors’ repressed thoughts and/or a way for them to “work out issues” and/or a way of reckoning with their past and/or an exercise in wish-fulfillment, etc. Sort of self-therapy by book.

I thought about this when recently reading Thomas Mann’s novellas Tonio Kroger (1903) and especially Death in Venice (1912), and seeing that there was a whole lot of male longing for other males by the protagonists. Sure enough, a little online exploring showed that Mann — the father of six with wife Katia — was sexually attracted to men, though there’s no conclusive evidence he acted on that during a more homophobic time. But he sure made his feelings known in some of his writing, as when middle-aged Death in Venice protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach (a famous author…hmm) becomes obsessed with a teen boy he finds very good-looking.

Several years later, in 1918, Willa Cather wrote perhaps her best novel: My Antonia. In it, male protagonist Jim Burden holds Antonia in such high regard that he might well be a stand-in for Cather, who was probably gay. Meaning she could have narrator Jim (i.e. Willa) express some feelings the author might have found more difficult to express if that character were a woman.

While sexual orientation isn’t a subtext (as far as I know) in Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic 1826 novel The Last Man, the author did base the male protagonist Lionel Verney on herself despite the different gender and modeled two other characters — Adrian and Lord Raymond — on her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their late friend Lord Byron, respectively. So, Mary was kind of remembering and analyzing her relationships/interactions with the two famous poets.

Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853) also has a semi-autobiographical element: characters Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel are partly based on Charlotte and the real-life Constantin Heger, who Charlotte fell in love with (?) while enrolled in the Belgian boarding school run by Heger and his wife Zoe. And the downbeat tone of some of Villette was shaped to a degree by the 1848 and 1849 deaths-before-their-time of Charlotte’s younger novelist sisters Emily and Anne.

The Brontes’ contemporary Charles Dickens used a number of his novels to indirectly work through the childhood trauma that would help shape his social conscience. The future author’s father was sent to a debtors’ prison, and 12-year-old Charles had to leave school to work in a miserable factory to help support his family. Echoes of that can be found in the impoverished young characters Dickens created in David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist (1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and other works.

Amid the compulsive plot of his 1940 novel Native Son, Richard Wright wrestled with such matters as racism (which he experienced plenty of as a Black person) and his complicated feelings about the Communist Party USA (which he joined but later broke from).

Some authors who served in the military and were perhaps wounded in action indirectly worked through that trauma in war novels they would later write. Erich Maria Remarque — in books such as 1929’s All Quiet on the Western Front — is one prominent example of that.

Also, authors’ unrequited “crushes” in real life can provide rather intense fodder for novels, as was the case with Mann in his aforementioned Death in Venice and with Goethe in his The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

Thoughts about and examples of this topic?

Misty the cat says: “Halley’s Comet won’t be back until 2061, so you may not see it in this video.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — a time-warped look at a long-closed movie theater that might open again — is here.

They’re Serious about Series and Standalone Novels

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Some authors are good at two or more things: novels and short stories, fiction and nonfiction, literary fiction and mass-audience fiction, etc. For this post, I’ll add to that by focusing on authors who are good at series as well as standalone novels. It certainly requires some different writing muscles to wrap up things in one book vs. extending things across multiple books.

This topic occurred to me last week as I read Val McDermid’s A Place of Execution, a superb standalone novel with a concluding twist that will knock your socks off. My previous experience with McDermid was with her series fiction, including the books starring “cold case” detective Karen Pirie.

I followed A Place of Execution with Martin Cruz Smith’s Independence Square — his 10th in the series starring Russian investigator Arkady Renko that began with Gorky Park. (Independence Square was okay; not as good as the earlier Renko books.) Smith has also written standalone novels such as Rose.

Sometimes, authors toggle throughout their careers between standalone books and series — as has been the case with Smith and McDermid as well as authors such as Walter Mosley with his Easy Rawlins books and much more. Other times, authors start with standalone novels before hitting on a hit series and focusing on that — as did Sue Grafton, who wrote two standalones before launching her popular Alphabet Mysteries (25 in all; she reached the letter “Y” before she died).

J.K. Rowling has also written many more series novels than standalone ones: seven Harry Potter books, then The Casual Vacancy one-off, then seven Cormoran Strike/Robin Ellacott crime novels (so far).

L.M. Montgomery followed her classic Anne of Green Gables with seven sequels over the years, during which time she also penned the Emily trilogy and standalones such as The Blue Castle.

Stephen King is known mostly for standalone novels, with a sprinkling of sequels and trilogies, but has also written many books in The Dark Tower series.

Some long-ago authors also toggled. For instance, James Fenimore Cooper wrote the five “Leatherstocking” novels (including The Last of the Mohicans) as well as various standalone books. Alexandre Dumas did both as well — many standalones (most famously The Count of Monte Cristo) as well as The Three Musketeers and its five sequels (sometimes published as fewer sequels when certain books were combined into one edition).

Your thoughts about and examples of this topic?

Misty the cat says: “My fitness tracker better record backward steps.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a lot of school news during a non-school time — is here.