Rain Dogs, Tales of the Three Hemispheres, A Pelican at Blandings

Rain Dogs, by Sean Doolittle, is a nice story about a man's redemption wrapped around a fairly average story about drug trafficking. The beginning of the novel didn't exactly bode well -- Tom Coleman is an alcoholic newspaperman from Chicago who inherits his grandfather's canoe rental place in the small town he grew up in. He's written well, but the whole alcoholic detective thing is a bit played out by now, I thought.

But over the course of the novel, Tom begins to confront his demons and starts detoxing. Since this is a stand-alone novel, we're left with some sense of hope that Tom has started his recovery process, which is a nice change from series novels where the alcoholic just can't kick the habit. The actual crime part of the story is pretty much by the numbers -- there's a drug-trafficking ring near the canoe rental place, Tom gets involved, yada yada yada. But fortunately it only takes up a small part of the novel -- I think I was a third of the way through before that stuff even begins to be important.

I've written a lot about Dunsany recently, and I just finished off another of his collections of short stories, Tales of Three Hemispheres. When I wrote about The Sword of Welleran, I was a bit worried that I was getting tired of Dunsany. Fortunately, Three Hemispheres is a more interesting collection. Sword had some stories that really went nowhere, really more musings than stories, but Hemispheres has nothing like that. In addition, it's got more range -- there's one funny story about a strange overcoat with possibly magical properties, there's a ghost story, and so on. Lastly, it doesn't have the tics that Sword has -- the narrator isn't inserted willy-nilly into every story, and where he is inserted (in the last three stories), he has a good story reason to be there.

A Pelican at Blandings is Wodehouse almost at the top of his form. He was getting on in years when he wrote it (I think he was 88), but the wit is as sharp as ever. The plot gets away from him once in a while (one character seems to exist only to push another down the stairs at a crucial moment, and the coincidences aren't as well organized as in his earlier books), but it's still a great entry in the Blandings books.