I have been taken by some recent high and lowbrow crime drama—actually it’s all great writing and just that subjects that inhabit various rings of Dante’s hell.
Lush Life is novel number eight from Richard Price and it was my first encounter with his pen. I used to cover cops for a living and Price obviously spent a good deal of time hanging with them, because he gets both the mindset and the gallows humor just right.
He is also a master of capturing his surroundings: he wraps the Lower East Side around you in all of jumbled glory, and puts you inside the head of some very interesting and troubled characters on all sides of the law.
On the non-fiction side, I tore threw The Good Rat by Jimmy Breslin and loved every second of it. Breslin’s just the brass tacks facts approach is refreshing...especially after eight years of hyper-focus on evildoers, as if they were some special breed. Breslin knows what makes dumb crooks tick. He has seen greed, and killing in untold variations, and he knows the interesting underside of New York. You would be foolish not to tag along for this wickedly well-written primer.
Finally, fans of Rumpole will be glad to see the creator of the Old Bailey hack somehow keeps finding his way back to the typewriter—one assumes he would not waste much time on new fangled contrivances such as the computer. The title Rumpole Misbehaves is itself a joke to anyone who has read even one of the 20 or so Rumpole titles, as Horace Rumpole is rarely doing anything if not misbehaving. He still drinks the house brand at Pomroy’s Wine Bar, and his troubles with She Who Must Be Obeyed as always are in fierce competition with those who want to bring him down in court and at work. John Mortimer seldom has Horace misbehave just to keep in practice; usually his small social transgressions are aimed at getting us all to pay attention to stupid developments in the law and the world at large. In this case it is to agitate around Anti-Social behavior Orders, known as the ASBO in the UK. 
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