Item! Murder at the ABA

Okay, I have a lot of catching up to do here, so I’ve got I guess some mini updates that I’m just going to write and separate by topic. Oh, also, I’m posting a thing that I wrote a couple of days ago but hadn’t got the chance to put up yet, so feel free to look back at that if you’re so inclined. This month is a tricky one, you may miss things.

Uh, the book is downstairs, but I don’t want to go get it. I’ll need my USB anyway, but forget it, it’s gone forever for now. Forever!

So the book is “Murder at the ABA” and it’s by Isaac Asimov- handsome name, I know. Someone looked over my desk at the spine of the book and went “whu-? Did this guy write a boo- oh, Asimov, that famous guy.”

I’m glad I read this AFTER “Bimbos of the Death Sun” because there’s a lot of crossover while this is the superior book. Written about a decade before Bimbos of the Death Sun.

…

Progress!

So they both take place at conventions, Bimbos at a science fiction convention, ABA at the American Booksellers of America convention (THAT’S what ABA means! I just got it!... no, that was a lie, it’s quite clear what ABA stands for throughout the book, it’s not a secret). Both stories are murder mysteries, both murderees are unlikable characters, both amateur sleuths are writers themselves, both murders take place around the hundred pages mark so that I’m left sitting there going “hey book, I thought this was a murder mystery, aren’t you forgetting something? The only mystery so far is when there’s going to be a murder!”

Both stories, interestingly enough, quasi feature Harlan Ellison, but in opposite roles. I’m given to understand that Harlan Ellison, brilliant writer though he may be, is famously short and short tempered. The murdered party in ‘Bimbos of the Death Sun’ is the star writer of the science fiction convention, a short guy, prima donna, that insists on obscure British candy at all hours (okay, that happened once- and it wasn’t all that obscure a candy for us Canadians- they were Smarties!). I’m given to understand that the writer has denied that this character is based off of Harlan Ellison, but that plenty of readers have suggested otherwise. It sounds like it’s in the writer’s best interest to deny, deny, deny.

Murder at the ABA is in fact DEDICATED to Harlan Ellison, and the amateur sleuth protagonist is a short and short tempered character by the name of Darius Just. So, I figure he’s a Harlan Ellison expy. Interesting, yes?

Ah, a note on “Darius”. For the first chunk of the novel I was reading it in my head as “Dairy-us”, a not unconventional reading of the name, until a section takes the time to specifically inform me that I was reading it wrong, that it was in fact “Dare-I-us”. The book tries to teach us this by saying it rhymes with some other words (the book is downstairs remember, so I can’t drop the books method) - but I still didn’t get it until the last example they used, the first two were still a little ambiguous to me. My “Dare-I-us” has got to be the superior explanation, quick and easy. Anyway.

I think it’s kind of silly to not go into this at the beginning of the book- we should know the characters name! - it makes me think that Asimov just sort of plotted the book, rolled up his sleeves, and then wrote whatever came to mind until a book was done, without bothering to re-arrange after the fact something the would be maybe better served at the start. Then again, it’s a decent method if it gets novels written. He’s gotta make his cheddar. By which I mean money.

On the other hand, it could be a great ploy to get into the readers head, KNOWING that they’d spent all this time calling the protagonist by the wrong name, then calling the reader out on it, then correcting him, then watching the reader squirm and readjust to a new name, slowing down the reading until you get into the new swing of things. If this was some kind of pacing tactic, then it’s an absolutely brilliant move. I doubt that’s what happened, but who knows?

(Funny that for most people I’ll just assume lazy writing, but if this book was written by, say, GRANT MORRISON (!) I’d probably give the benefit of the doubt and assume the brilliance.)

The book feels padded to the extreme. I seriously don’t need to know about how you feel about the fried chicken dinners, or your suspicions about everyone looking down on you, Mr. Narrator-Is-A-Short-Guy Darius Just. I admire the effort at capturing everything that happens in the four day time frame of the mystery, it’s a technique I had long favoured for its verisimilitude to life, but I’ve fallen out with it with the clear realization that it undercuts the drama/storytelling to a huge degree.

I just remembered that there are some cool bits or something that I left a note to myself that I wanted to get them recorded here, but I forget what they are. So now I definitely do have to go downstairs and pick up the book and my notes. Be right back.

Whoah, dude! You’re still here? That’s patience. That’s dedication! I thought for sure you’d get tired of waiting for me since I decided to get that bowl of cereal. Well, great, let’s finish up this entry.

Okay, so my notes allude to two pages near the beginning of the novel, right next to each other actually. Page 26 has the narrator say:

“…it’s not what you know, it’s whom you get drunk with.’
‘If I sound bitter, it’s because I don’t drink. I have no moral objections understand, but it is by my keen, incisive brain- or whatever adjectives you prefer- that I make my living; and I have never quite seen that banging it with a hammer called alcohol (or dope) can improve its functioning.”

I find the idea of someone not drinking fascinating, just because it’s so universal… he said, even though he doesn’t drink at all himself.

Also interesting is that we’re told through the course of the novel that Isaac Asimov, who is a character that shows up in this Isaac Asimov novel, also doesn’t drink. So does that mean there are three pseudo characters here that don’t drink; Darius Just, Isaac Asimov the character and Asimov the writer of the book, or just the one Isaac Asimov highlighting his own views on the subject?

I don’t think we’re getting quite a reliable bit of self description here when Just says he has “no moral objection” to drinking. After he does discover the body and is quite shaken up about it, he goes and sits at a bar, wishing he could drink to dull the experience. Well, if he has no moral objection to it, why doesn’t he?

The next thing I wanted myself to copy down is from the next page over, lucky 27, a sort of exultation of writers:

“But an editor can be fired, I eventually learned. And when he is fired, he is no longer an editor, merely an item in the statistics of the unemployed.’
‘Not so a writer. He cannot be fired. He might be rejected, he might fail, he might starve, he might be forced to keep body and soul together by taking some menial (i.e., non-writing) employment, he might be ignored by the critics and denounced by the public- but he was a writer, a failed writer, an unsuccessful writer, a starving writer, a writer. No editor could change that fact.”

I really enjoyed that passage, obviously.

The best part of the book, a device that doesn’t get used nearly enough here, were the footnotes. Not just any footnotes! The idea as told to us in the novel is that Asimov the character has been tasked with writing a story called Murder at the ABA, and Darius Just actually FINDS a murder at the ABA, so the former agrees to help the latter write the book, the very book we hold in our hands! Awesome! (it’s sort of a let down when at the end Asimov has a page asserting that Just is a fictional character and all the murderous events were his own creation, though he DID attend an American Booksellers Association convention, with certain other true particulars)

So every now and again we get a foot note, either Darius or Asimov suggesting some conceit from the other, with a rebuttal underneath. It was a ton of fun, and again, I wish there were more of these diversions in the book. I’ll find an example so you get what I’m talking about.

Ah, here’s a fine example:

* I think Asimov dedicated this book to Harlan Ellison because of all the checks he signed with that name. – Darius Just

Quite the contrary; out of sincere admiration. – Isaac Asimov

Pretty cool, eh?

Oh, but that said, I’m sure there are better books for you to read. Go check out a Sherlock Holmes if you want a mystery. Oh, but not Hound of the Baskervilles- Holmes was barely in that one, that was such a cheat. Oh, or go see the new Holmes movie, that’s going to be awesome. Yes, okay, I understand the critics aren’t crazy about it. Whatever, it’s Robert Downey Jr. man.