Month: July 2011

I’m breaking with tradition here a little bit: although I read this book as part of a Detective Book Club volume, I’m breaking it out to review individually (but I don’t count it as a book I’ve read this year until I finish the volume, of course–my accounting rules are as esoteric as GAAP).

This book is part of a series, the “Johnny Vallon” series–although that’s rather strange, as “Johnny Vallon” only makes an appearance at the very beginning as he meets a couple of the characters that do most of the sleuthing and sets them into motion. Maybe he’s like Charlie in Charlie’s Angels throughout the series.

At any rate, the alternate title is I’ll Bring Her Back, and it centers on an old flame of Johnny Vallon who asks for help. She’s promised to retrieve from Dark Bahama the ne’er-do-well daughter of a widow. Vallon can’t go himself, so he sends a man named Isles, kind of a ne’er-do-well gumshoe sort. When Isles gets to the island, he finds a dead body and is suspected in the murder, and as he works to clear himself, he finds that the job entails more than he bargained for. Enter Guelvada, a Belgian/English espionage type who takes over the book and gets some papers from under the nose of the other side.

Well. I mean, it starts out a crime/hard-boiled detective thing and then it turns into an espionage thing, and the main character isn’t the main character halfway through the book. Instead, the guy we’d rooted for falls into a sort of gofer role to the hardened espionage agent. Well.

The style, strangely, is English pulp. I can see where it’s trying to have the paperback sensitivities of American fiction, but the style is very poor for it. I figured it out later: it’s the prepositional phrases that blunt the punch.

For example:

Once again, he had a vague sense of annoyance at the sight of the overturned chair.

and:

In twenty minutes he arrived at the apex of the two roads. Immediately in front of him was the broad State highway. Twenty yards to his right, parked in the middle of the side road, was a State Trooper’s car. By the light of the dashboard Guelvada could see two men seated in the car…nearest to him the driver and on the right in the passenger seat a State Trooper with a submachine-gun on his knees.

Zzzzzzz….. Huh? What? Wrap it up?

It is an interesting artifact if nothing else, but I don’t think I’ll hunt down the rest of the series or the related Quayle series.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought a copy of this book at one of the recent friends of some library book sales hoping to blot the karma stain I earned by reading The World’s Best Dirty Jokes way back in 2005.

This book comes from the same era–1981–and contains a number of gags that are dated and really not that funny. Some border on amusing. And, to be honest, I did refactor five of the jokes within into my own tweets and status updates, so the book was worth something. Also, consider that Tal D. Bonham has turned this into an entire series of Treasury of [topic] jokes and that the edition linked below is the second edition of the book published in 1997. Heck’s pecs, the guy has more titles in this series than I’ve sold of my first novel. Someone’s finding these books to be worthwhile.

But I get slightly more laughs from Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post, both of which are starting to recycle their own jokes. But sometimes I’m slightly humorless, and there are only a couple of talking animal jokes in this book (talking animal jokes very often get me).

I guess this explains why I read joke collections only once every six years or so.

Books mentioned in this review:

This entry in the Lucas Davenport series details a robbery at the pharmacy of the hospital where Weather, Davenport’s wife, works. The first chapter describes the robbery, including the people within it and their relationships to the people within their criminal circle and to the inside man in the hospital who provides them with the pharmacy key. Weather sees him, of course, and sees one of the bad guys as she comes to the hospital for a rare spectacle of a surgery separating conjoined twins. So she becomes a target when the bad guys bring in a Psycho Killer, and they turn upon themselves in various ways.

I didn’t care for this book for many reasons. Here are some:

• It’s 400+ pages. I mean, really, it’s almost as long as Dune. Is that really necessary? Maybe, these days, to justify a $25 hardcover price.
• It spends a lot of those pages on Weather’s surgery. They go on and on about pediatric neurosurgery. That pads it and does not add to it.
• By introducing the bad guys early and spending a large portion of the story dealing with their dealings with each other, the book becomes something of a collection of intrigues. Who will double-cross whom? How will it end? I came to these things expecting to read about good guys against bad guys, but so much of this book (and the previous, Wicked Prey) deals with subplots among the bad guys. I think part of this might have started with the books where Clara Rinker was the bad guy. Maybe not. But as time goes on, the books have evolved in a direction I don’t like.

It’s not a bad book, especially after page 125 where Lucas Davenport and the cops begin actually investigating, but as this series progresses, note that I’m checking them out from the library. Nevertheless, I have a link where you can order it below. BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!

Books mentioned in this review:

As part of my ongoing project to up my geek cred, I went ahead and read Dune, too (in addition to Lord of the Rings) this year. I’ve been exposed to the mythology before. The 1984 David Lynch film starring that guy who looks like a grown-up Matthew Broderick was in heavy rotation on Showtime back in the days when I was trapped in a trailer in Murphy, Missouri, for days on end, so I saw it a couple of times back then, but not in the last 20 years. Then, there was the time I bought a first edition of the book (not a first printing, mind, but definitely a hardback published by Chilton) for a buck and sold it on Ebay for $150. Granted, I did not read the book, but I was somewhat steeped in its publication history if nothing else.

When I first picked it up, I wondered if I was still reading the Lord of the Rings. I mean, it’s chock full of intrigue and every once and again it breaks into a verse of poetry or song. Also, it’s broken into books within the book. More subtle similarities that I’d go into if I were really that into it or if I were seeking and advanced degree.

Except this book is American in nature. The language is more accessible, and the writing is not as, erm, textured. Additionally, the main character is less of a cipher and the intrigues play out in real time instead of having a wizard show up every decade or so to tell you that intrigues are going on, and the cipher must do something to play his unknown role in it.

The story, of course, tells of Paul Atreides, son of a Duke whose father is double-crossed and killed by the Emperor and another royal house on the dismal outpost of Dune, the only place in the universe where one gets melange, the spice that extends men’s lives. Paul joins the natives, becomes a native leader, and plots his revenge.

So the book flowed better than the trilogy, and I got through it quicker. My greatest disappointment is that the third book-within-the-book starts really jump cutting. Whereas the first two portions of the story take place in a pretty limited time frame, the last third of it starts skipping whole years and starts telling of battles that happened instead of, you know, having battles happen.

So I enjoyed it enough to get through it. I also bothered to read the appendixes (which did not number in the hundreds of pages), but I skipped the glossary, though, having muddled through the language in the text.

I’ve like to think I’ve upped my geek cred slightly with the read, but I’m not going to hunt out the sequels any time soon. Besides, I’ve spent a lot of time this summer on four paperbacks, and I need to start making some little ding in my several thousand books of backlog here.

Books mentioned in this review: