Al Franken used to be just a pretty funny comedian.
We got to know him as an adjunct cast member on "Saturday Night Live" who combined great wit with good ideas: the Al Franken decade, the reporter who wore a satellite dish on his head, and Stuart Smalley.
Readers who have followed the long path of Elmore Leonard know that when he was starting out in the 1950s, still with his hand in advertising copywriting, he wrote short stories and Westerns.
In "When the Women Come Out to Dance," his 39th publication, he comes back to both, though in the case of Westerns, not exclusively. Strictly, that description applies only to "The Tonto Woman," which tells of a character kidnapped and tattooed by Indians and banished by her husband to an isolated hut when she is returned a dozen years later.
One of the first things the casual reader might know about Walter Mosley is that he is a man of colors. The titles of his Easy Rollins mysteries each contain a color, from "Devil in a Blue Dress" to "A Little Yellow Dog," and one of his four novels outside that series is "Blue Light."
It's been said that firefighters come alive when they're battling a blaze. Earl Emerson's novel, "Vertical Burn," comes alive when he's describing one.
That shouldn't surprise: Emerson's not only a novelist, he's a lieutenant in the Seattle Fire Department. He's at his best when he's depicting the rush of suiting up or how moisture in the grass sizzles when a fireman just out of a blaze puts a helmet down.
Unfortunately, in between the fires that hold up "Vertical Burn," the excitement ebbs, leaving too much time to ponder one unacceptable plot twist after another.
The explorers who spent the 18th and 19th centuries searching for the source of the river Nile battled great obstacles, but they had an advantage: They knew the end justified their search for the beginning.
Explorers of new fiction have no such knowledge, particularly when the author is new as well. So readers of "The True Sources of the Nile," the deep and flowing first novel by Sarah Stone, can be excused if they wonder early on if their effort will be rewarded.
One thing that's always been true about Elmore Leonard is that he takes his world with him. With "Tishomingo Blues," his 37th novel, Leonard's traveling road show pulls into Tunica, Miss.
Ten years ago, that would have seemed an odd setting for Leonard, whose modern novels have never strayed too far from the street. But when you consider that Leonard began No. 36, "Pagan Babies," in Rwanda, maybe it's not that far after all.
To read "The Professional," the fabulous first novel of writer W. C. Heinz, is to visit a world that no longer exists, even to wonder whether it ever did.
What's it like to live at the right hand of greatness and then to have it taken away? One answer might be found in the life of Ray Manzarek, who helped make the whirlwind that was the '60s band the Doors and who continues to ply its wake, better than three decades after Jim Morrison died in a Paris bathtub.
When Andy Caspar, the good guy in Po Bronson's second novel, has maxed out his credit cards but still needs cash to bring his revolutionary computer ideas to market, he finds it in his closet.
For years he's been buying from the L.L. Bean catalog, and he's just remembered that Bean wear comes with a lifetime money-back guarantee. Sweaters, shirts, every pair of pants he owns and, bingo, he's got three months' rent.
It's tough to imagine a cookbook that brings together such dishes as masoor dal, buffalo gourd mash, and scrambled eggs and brains.
But Ric Lynden Hardman has done it in "Sunshine Rider" by making the recipes just one ingredient in his novel, which is also a happily-ever-after saga from the Old West, a satire on modern times, a treatise on vegetarianism, and a coming-of-age yarn.
