Month: April 2007

I am currently reading Ed McBain novels in heavy rotation (see also Fat Ollie’s Book and Kiss). I guess that’s only three so far this year, so I’m not making much of a dent in the oeuvre that spans fifty years.

This book from the late 1990s deals with an old woman killed in her apartment in an apparent burglary. The old woman, a formerly world-reknowned pianist, leaves $100,000 cash for her granddaughter, a lounge singer who has taken up with two Italian tough guys. Amidst this main plot, three high school seniors from a well-to-do prep school kill a hooker, her pimp, and a smalltime drug dealer. Fat Ollie Weeks handles this subplot.

Because the cops use the same informant in this book as in Fat Ollie’s Book, one can easily spot recycled material in the description of the informant. But I find the continued consistently good writing in the novels even though they span 50 years almost incredible. With each book, McBain varies the formula somewhat, alters his narrative slightly, but the characters and the crimes remain fresh and interesting. Some writers hit a certain level of success and just phone it in, but McBain never seemed to reach that level.

Which is why I can read these books over and over again.

At one of the book fairs last year, I bought a number of Ross MacDonald books because, although I have read many of them twice, I don’t have many of them on my shelves.

As one might expect if one has read Geherin, MacDonald represents a transitional author in the hard-boiled detective school. He still has his hard knock chops in Lew Archer and the Chandleresque plots, but they have a touch more touchy-feely exploration of intrafamily conflict. This book is no exception as it begins with a disturbed young man kidnapping a wealthy oilman with the help of one of his underling’s innocent daughters and then delves into several decades-old murders amid a family tree that intertwines like a oak and poison sumac. I don’t even know if those two things intertwine frequently, but the book compells one to try his hand at simile.

This book and others that I’m revisiting on occasion remind me of why I wanted to be a writer, or at least what made me think I could get away with it. Somewhere, though, my voice varied from these pieces, but it’s good to come home once in a while.

This book follows Winter Prey, so it’s obvious that I’m getting these books all out of order. Davenport’s in love with Winter, and they’ve moved in together. Meanwhile, an invisible man–that’s what the book flap calls him–is picking up women in art galleries and bookstores and is killing them.

It’s a fairly standard plot, well handled. However, the twist is reminiscent of Broken Prey, and frankly, I am probably reading these Davenport novels too quickly to remain absolutely glowing about each. But I like them and will hit the others on my shelf sometime in the near future.

I bought this book at a book fair because I was binging. Probably the Carondolet YMCA last time. I mean, it’s an ex-library book, a movie tie-in, and I paid a buck for it. But you know what? It wasn’t bad.

The book relies on the narrative set in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Instead of the past trying to change the future through action, which is the core of the movies, this book involves John Connor ca 2039 finding that one of the people on his team was a software developer programming on the Terminator project and that this software developer can communicate with his past self through his dreams. The developer, though, cannot remember anything beyond Judgement Day.

A good quick read, although I’d be interested to see how the series would turn if it didn’t rely so much on the cross-time thing, if it weren’t so important to have something happening in the present day. Apparently this author has another book based on Terminator 3 out, so that might be worth reading if it comes to my attention at one of the various book fairs coming up.

Wow, who knew? I found my initial Alistair MacLean books back in the old Community Library, a volunteer and donation operation that operated out of a strip mall in High Ridge until it got its own tax levy and became the Northwest Jefferson County Library or whatever. It was more homey and plucky before it became a government-funded bureaucracy, something shared between those of us who enjoyed books before it became a burden to the taxpayers who didn’t. In the intervening years, my appreciation for Alistair MacLean has waned somewhat, too.

MacLean’s books about World War II and the early cold war period are enjoyable because they’re slightly exotic in tone and style as they are intricate in plot. MacLean, of course, was British, so his heroes are often British with their stiff upper lips mimicked in his slightly stuffy and distant prose. But more contemporary works (The Golden Gate and Floodgate come to mind) don’t work for me because they’re contemporary–in those decades I can somewhat remember.

This book deals with an American bomber carrying nukes that crashes into the Mediterranean. A British frigate investigates and finds a Greek shipping maganate who might have caused the sabotuage of the bomber so he could recover the nukes. The British naval officers on the frigate must outwit the mastermind and handle the armed and dangerous nuclear weapons at the same time.

250 pages, roughly, so it’s a quick read. Paragraph-based dialog makes it easy to skim, and the action does move along quickly, but the characters are pretty superficial and the book lacks the twists that characterize the best of MacLean’s plot-driven work.

But I bought it for a quarter, so it’s worth my time and money at that.

This book, written only a couple of books before Fiddlers, focuses on a lesser character from the 87th Precinct novels: Fat Ollie Weeks. This is appropriate, that is a lesser character, as he works in the 88th Precinct, but he’s been known to participate in the boys’ criminal investigations from time to time, ah, yes. When a councilman is shot before a campaign event, Ollie is the first man up, but he involves Carella and Co. because the vic lived in the 87th. During the course of his initial crime scene inspection, Weeks discovers that his car has been broken into, and someone has made off with the case containing the book he’s very proud to have written.

The book lightly interweaves three plots: the investigation into the councilman’s death, Weeks’s investigation into the theft of his book, and the crook who stole his book’s interpretation of the book, entitled Report to the Commissioner. McBain even includes the text of the 36 page “book” written by Weeks, poorly, throughout the book. Remarkable that he (McBain) could write something bad enough to represent the amateur detective/First Grade’s work. I mean, I remember when I wrote that poorly, but I’m not sure I could do it now one cue (although perhaps I do it perpetually, which is why I lean away from fiction these days, thank you very much.

Also, as the book focuses on a bigoted character used mostly as comic relief throughout the other books, it gives McBain a chance to do some extra characterization to make Weeks’s character sympathetic.

I liked it. I bought it for a buck at a book fair. It’s worth more than that, but I’m cheap.