Issue 11
February 1,
2002
Photography
Winter Photos
Victoria Harbour Dock
St. Patrick's Church,
Perkinsfield, Ontario
Photography
Weblinks
Poem
"Lartigue Photo:
45. Solange, Neuilly, 1929"
Writing
A Short Character
Sketch
Reading
Reading - Patrick
O'Brian and W.E.B. Griffin
Reading - Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place
Golden
Retriever Saga
2X Golden: "Winter
and Such"
Reading
Highly recommended: The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith
My take on this book: I was drawn to purchase this book by the word appearing in the title and its cover design and after reading the excerpts on the cover and looking at the first page. I expected a standard thriller. It is a truly great read. I didn't realize that the detective was a lesbian, not that that is any hurdle but what impressed me besides the characters and the plot was the way Griffith described two different landscapes and how they affected the main character. It brought the whole story a much richer and more personal feel than any standard thriller and also did not slow down the story at all. That's rare, I think. The Blue Place is a very, very well written story. - William J. Gibson
The Critics on The Blue Place
"The Blue Place doesn't follow any obvious course; it's as if La Femme Nikita stepped into a '50s lesbian weepie to mess around with the rules.... It may be the first-ever nugget of post-gay pulp, with a hero as sexy and iconic as television's Xena." Voice Literary Supplement, 9/15/98
"Griffith switches genres and breathes life into an appealing heroine in this smoothly plotted pulse-slammer... Compelling... Readers will want to see more of Aud Torvingen." Publishers Weekly, 6/1/98
"Well-crafted, evocatively written and swift paced, The Blue Place is for devotees of classic, hard-edged detective tales.... But this isn't simply a thriller [but] an excursion into the more disturbing sides of psyches: What happens when we explore "the blue place" of the title--the epicenter of our violent selves--and how we keep ourselves from being drawn into the seductive power of our most base responses. How do we keep from killing? [....] Ultimately The Blue Place is, as all good thrillers and all the best literary fiction are, a novel of quests and identity. Griffith's prose is intensely visual, and her sense of place--whether on the steaming streets of Atlanta after an April thunderstorm or on the icy glaciers off the fjords and fjells of Norway--is beautifully wrought. This book...is as many-layered as the glacial morraine of the Nordic countryside, and its images and ideas will sear the reader's consciousness, much like the brutal heat of downtown Atlanta at midday." Victoria Brownworth, Lambda Book Report, July 1998
"Inside, [Aud Torvingen] is as icy as Norway...except when, in mortal combat, she must kill. Successful art broker Julia seeks Aud's protection during a high-risk operation involving international drug cartels and money laundering, and Aud, excited by the danger and by Julia, agrees to provide it. What unfolds is a doubly suspenseful tale in which arson destroys evidence in a deadly game of double-dealing, blackmail, fraud, and murder, and the erotic chemistry between the two women builds and boils. Griffith risks...with a heroine who is a cold-blooded killing machine... But superfit, superbright Aud is certainly one watchable sleuth and may win Griffith quite a following of less squeamish readers." Whitney Scott, Booklist, 6/1/98
"The sexiest action figure since James Bond, [Aud]'s 6 blond feet of sinew, muscle, and bone. She's also an ex-cop, a martial arts instructor, a master carpenter, and a private dick for hire. She's beautiful, she's independently wealthy, she's in perfect shape: she's downright deadly. And sorry guys: she's into girls..... Keep a lookout for the next installment." Sumi Hahn, Seattle Weekly, 6/14/98
"It's hard to overpraise the taut plotting and broad intelligence of this thriller. Beyond some smart narrative moves, what makes The Blue Place stand out is its precision. You constantly feel like you're getting the inside dope on new worlds, including those of martial arts, woodworking, Norwegian foods and dress styles, ice hiking and burglar alarms. Griffith has already won herself Lambda and Nebula awards...and she seems destined to add to her laurels." Washington Post Book World, 7/19/98
"...the novel goes down like honey, full of the quirky detail that makes a good mystery great... If pretty girls and danger don't grab you, the plot will. A house full of forgeries and cocaine explodes, setting off a slow burn of corruption and murder, with plenty of sex, fast cars, and a pit stop in Norway." OUT, July 1998
"Call [Aud Torvingen] the love child of Smilla and Nikita....After stumbling upon a fire (and bystander) of suspicious origin, her steely 6-foot body--with the help of her equally sharp mind--kicks, sleuths and seduces its way through an international web of drugs and death." New York Daily News, 7/3/98
"Resembling John Woo's movies, The Blue Place swims inside violence as in a lushly colored dream; it makes a polar opposite to Martin Amis's gaunt Night Train, which also stars a big-boned, quick-fisted woman cop. Amis's anti-heroine is clearly a man in disguise, weary of the cruel noirish milieu the author can't quite admit to creating. Griffith, meanwhile, writes Aud as convincingly female, because she would claim for women the entire spectrum of human behavior, including brutality and its sometime converse, rage." City Pages, 7/22/98
"Griffith hits her stride, her prose sizzles. The rich descriptive nature of her writing emerges in full strength, and it really rocks." Southern Voice, 8/98
"Griffith clearly challenges us to understand a radically atypical--or perhaps just typically ignored--aspect of the female psyche: the fine line between brutality and passion. She produces passages that provoke and startle...finely rendered observations. The novel soars. Aud's 'blue place'--where women glow with the elated, bluish tinge of power rather than the black and blue marks of victimhood--is a peculiar and unsettling place indeed." The Women's Review of Books, 7/98
The Blue Place jacket copy
A police lieutenant with the elite Red Dogs until she retired at twenty-nine, Aud Torvingen is rangy six-footer with eyes the color of cement and a tendency to hurt people who get in her way. Born in Norway into a failing marriage between a Scandinavian diplomat and American businessman, she now makes Atlanta her home, luxuriating in the lush heat and brashness of the New South. She glides easily between the world of silken elegance and that of sleaze, tattoos and sudden savagery, equally at home in both; functional, deadly and temporarily quiescent, like a folded razor.
On a humid April evening between storms, out walking just to stay sharp, she turns a corner and collides with a running woman. Catching the scent of clean, rain-soaked hair, Aud nods and silently tells the stranger Today, you are lucky, and moves on--and behind her a house explodes, destroying its sole occupant, a renowned art historian, in an inferno of hot reds and yellows. When Aud turns back, the woman is gone.
But Julia Lyons-Bennet will return seeking Aud's help, protection from a deadly international game of forgery, drugs, money and murder. Aud knows there is danger here, pulling her back once again to that cool blue place where everything slows down and takes on a crystal clarity; that place where violence is bliss. The danger excites Julia as well--sexy, refined, frightened Julia. "Danger is not a game," Aud tells her, "not when the stakes are your life."
And luck has a habit of running out.
From acclaimed, award-winning author Nicola Griffith comes a stylishly erotic and suspenseful new thriller that combines the chilly atmospheric dread of Smilla's Sense of Snow with the relentless white-hot excitement of La Femme Nikita..
The Blue Place back cover excerpt
I ran down the stairs. Julia stood in the hall, bathed in the yellow entry light because the door was wide open. Her head was back and her eyes huge. I stopped four feet away.
"I hit him. He came down the stairs and I hit him." She looked at her hand again, fascinated. "I hit him, and he ran away."
The realization of what she had done, the exhilaration of her own strength rushed into her, like champagne rushing to fill lead crystal. She shimmered with it, she fizzed. I wanted to lift her in both hands, drink her down, drain her, feel the foam inside me, curling around heart, lungs, stomach.
I stepped closer. She lifted her chin. Closer still.
"Wolf eyes," she whispered, and I could feel her breath on my throat, "so pale and hungry."