I think you have to be pretty well-versed in the convention of the romcom (in either its literary or cinematic forms) to appreciate just how delightfully weird Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation really is. In this relatively short novel, she subverts as many genre tropes as she luxuriates in, with a plot that careens wildly between a small-town farce, a family drama, and a murder mystery. That and a couple of pretty involved sex scenes.

The story begins with two Dusty Springfield-loving sisters, Sophie and Amy Dempsey, who drive into a sleepy little town called Temptation and promptly involve themselves in a car accident. This is only the first of the disruptions that they cause, however, because the short film that they had originally planned on shooting somehow devolves into gauzy, soft-core porn. As the responsible one in the family, Sophie has to do her best to protect their little production, which means dealing with Temptation's handsome mayor, Phin Tucker. Sparks fly between them, because it must.

Crusie's humor is a great mix of profane and endearing, especially when she gets into the petty bickering and gossiping of the townsfolk. One of the most enjoyable scenes is the town hall meeting where the assembly debate on whether the town's bright pink water tower looks too much like a penis. Several people from Sophie's past also make an appearance and further cause drama in the neighborhood, including another Dempsey. He also happens to be an art thief.

The novel's structure diverges from the traditional in that the two protagonists come together--uh, so to speak--relatively early on in the story. The final conflict then sidesteps the whole "do they love each other or not" rigamarole that bogs down a lot of romance novels. It's pretty refreshing for that reason. It is also refreshingly less cynical about gender issues than the current spate of romantic comedies we've been having in the movies ever since the oppressive reign of Gerard Butler the Romantic Ideal began.

While the strength of this story lies in the zany plot twists and outsized side characters, they can also disorient the reader. I had expected a comforting read when I picked it up, not what pretty much amounts to a Coen Brothers take on the romcom. Welcome to Temptation is not the kind of novel that I would read to turn my brain off--there are too many jokes for that. All in all it is a bracing exercise in how much the romance genre can stretch itself while still remaining true to its structure, and a great product of an authorial mind with a lot of witty one-liners to tell.

I also recommend watching Jennifer Crusie talk about her writing process as well as her delightful podcast Popcorn Dialogues, which began as a dissection of romantic comedy movies through the decades.

(Review originally posted on my blog.)

I've always been fascinated by crime at the beginning of the 20th Century. It was a nebulous time when all the trappings of what we now consider standard police work barely existed. Cities were industrializing at a rapid pace even as local governments struggled to keep up. Jack the Ripper's reign of terror over London, for example, only occurred around ten years before the new century began, and investigators then had to pretty much spontaneously invent psychological profiling, crime scene investigation, forensic handwriting analysis, and other fields of criminology. (Warnings for graphic photos and descriptions of dead bodies in those links.)

Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York is a brisk tour of this rough historical period. It also serves as a chronicle of a peculiar arms race between killers looking for the most ingenious methods of offing someone and the forensic investigators determined to catch them. Representing the forces of law and order are two scientists, the medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler of the New York Police Department. Blum expertly paints the frustrating morass of bureaucracy, corruption, and ignorance that technicians like them had to endure in order to establish a more scientific and reliable protocol for catching poisoners.

To bolster the book's science-meets-history theme, each chapter's epigraph depicts a notorious lethal compound, such as arsenic, chloroform, and even carbon monoxide. These poisons figure prominently in criminal cases that the new NYPD forensics department was supposed to tackle, and each successive (tedious, frustrating) victory served to bolster the team's credibility.

I developed the same kind of geeky enthusiasm for this milieu in its fictional form with Caleb Carr's The Alienist, which is basically Criminal Minds set in the Gilded Age. In both cases, what drew me in was the idea that these process nerds were struggling to build a rational system by which to pursue criminal investigations, something that old law enforcement types around them just didn't trust.

Another narrative thread that Blum explores is the US government's increasingly desperate attempts to enforce Prohibition on a population that was more than willing to drink industrial-grade alcohol to experience a boozy haze. The authorities do everything from raiding speakeasies, patrolling harbors, even adding blindness-inducing methanol(!) to contraband booze in order to dissuade the masses from drinking them. It works as well as can be expected, which is to say, not at all.

Since I started trying out popular science books, I've noticed that Blum's decision to present a more or less objective authorial voice is somewhat of an anomaly. Popular non-fiction journalists such as Jon Ronson and Mary Roach adopt very personal viewpoints that give as much importance to their feelings as to the subjects they are covering. I actually prefer Blum's authorial voice, although I realize that it presents some issues in regards to authenticity, verifiability, etc. I like that this book reads like a long, sustained magazine article with as few digressions from the main story as possible.

This book is hopping with atmosphere and sly humor, not to mention a pretty good warning on the dangers of doing away with a wealthy relative, no matter how tempting Agatha Christie makes it sound.

You can read the first chapter on NPR.org, if you're interested.

How does one convey "charming save for the egregiously self-congratulatory racism" in a star rating system?

Don't you judge me.