Surviving a Firing Squad, Only to Die in Sedona

Hello from the Dibs! blog, where we preview books that aren’t out yet, but we’ve got the galleys, so by the time the books we cover hit the stores and the mainstream media, their names will ring bells in the back of your mind and you’ll go, Wait — was that the one in which Stephen Baldwin writes about being a born-again Christian and driving a car called “the Lord’s Lounge? ... Or was that the cool Norwegian mystery novel which entails a colostomy bag? ... Or was it the how-to book by that woman who owns over 1,200 My Little Ponies? Trying to beat others to the finish line, because back on the middle-school running-track we were always last, that’s Dibs! But also it’s a site for constantly updated weird book-related news. From the novelist who claims to have been Osama Bin Laden’s sex slave (now she writes for Days of Our Lives) to a murder in Bed-Stuy inspired by a Marvel Comics character to anti-gay violence at the Zimbabwe Book Fair to the asteroid named after J.K. Rowling to a Japanese novelist asserting her right to throw kittens off cliffs — it’s all at Dibs! And now, more and different news and previews are here at Beatrice too.

Whom has the lit world lost this week? Ex-spy Alan Lyle-Smythe, better known by his World War II alias, Alan Caillou — the name under which this Englishman, born in 1914, just barely escaped a North African firing squad after working behind enemy lines and aiding guerrillas in Yugoslavia. After the war, he was a police chief in Ethiopia, a district official in Somalia, the director of a Shakespearean acting troupe in Tanganyika ... then jumped the pond to Hollywood, where he acted in dozens of classic TV shows and movies such as Rat Patrol, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mannix, Bonanza, Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion, Gauguin the Savage, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, and Magnum P.I.. He also wrote scripts for Flipper and screenplays for films including Evel Knievel and Kingdom of the Spiders. Among his many books — mostly written in the ‘70s — are Diamonds Wild, The World Is Six Feet Square, Prophetess and Assault on Kolchak — not to mention the prophetically titled Afghan Assault, South From Khartoum and Swamp War. Sleep well, soldier.

Due out next month from Soho is Chinatown Beat, a mystery set in NYC’s Chinatown and featuring detective Jack Yu, who grew up in that neighborhood among gangs, poolrooms, gambling-halls, bars and bloodshed — authored by Henry Chang, who grew up in that neighborhood among gangs, poolrooms, gambling-halls, bars and bloodshed. A child-raping maniac is on the loose and Triad thugs deal drugs while extorting haggard immigrants. A gorgeous trophy not-quite-wife from Hong Kong yearns for freedom and revenge. It’s tempting to say that this is, in fact, tempting. Promising. But by saying so, are we strolling into some odd snare that the author has laid for us? Because Chang, through Yu, pretty much starts out by accusing Caucasians of being dimwitted racist asswipes. Yu’s colleagues were “ninety-nine percent white.... Chinatown was like a foreign port to them, full of experiences confounding to the Caucasian mind.... They were able to dismiss [Chinatown] as a troublesome nightmare, half-remembered and unfathomable. These Chinese were creatures unlike themselves.” Thinking back, Yu “could remember a boyhood time when there were no Chinese cops ... only gwai lo white devil faces in the blue uniforms howling watseemotta no speakee Englee?” Ohhhhhkay. Now, Dibs! is not Chinese-American, but some of Dibs!’s best friends are, and none of them remember hearing any such howls, anywhere, anytime — except in old Westerns. Is the Caucasian reader supposed to imagine him- or herself somehow exempted from white devilry, at least for the duration of this book, or to fall down sobbing and confessing in condescending pidgin? It’s hard to tell. Chang spins compelling inner monologues and powerful scenes, rich in sensual and visual detail. But when these details start to stack up like a tourist’s shopping cart full of exotica, it’s almost like a taunt. If we get drawn in and enchanted, then what are we if not thrillseeking droolers with cherry-blossom disease? Yet somehow these passages seem devised for exactly such an effect. Within two pages of a single scene, we get dragon figurines, feng shui, mini-pagodas, the I Ching, jade, a rice bowl, drying laundry, Kwan Yin, a red door because “red was the color of luck,” tea, silk, ginseng, the double-happiness sinograph, and a woman who “moved like a cat across the bedroom.” Purrr! Within a few paragraphs, who should crop up but Mulan, the Woman Warrior. You can almost hear the author thinking: You know you love this, gwai lo.