Category: Books

This is the third novel in the first of the Detective Book Club collections I’ve been working on recently, and it’s the one that has the most American flavor to it, although its setting is an island off the Massachusetts coast that does not have electricity, so everyone’s still lighting oil lamps.

A New York detective, released from the hospital, is sent to a bucolic island for a rest. As he arrives at the boarding house where he will stay, the residents discover a dead man swinging from the rafters in the attic. It looks to be a suicide, but the big city detective proves it a murder. Other residents begin having suspicious accidents, and the detective must lead the sheriff in investigating them. Also, he kinda sorta tries to woo another visitor, a big city resident who comes to the island to paint. He does so clumsily, with the wooing scenes reading a bit like high school, not like what grown people do. Of course, since this book was written in the 50s, the main characters are in their 20s.

As I indicated, the pacing is better and the sensibilities are more modern American, but the book does seem to linger in spots, particularly in the denouement.

If the other two books in the volume had been this good, relatively, I’d almost be eager to jump into another one of the volumes. Many of them feature Perry Mason or Inspector Maigret novels. However, I’ll probably look at something else for a while. And a bit of a note on the binding of these: I don’t know if my body chemistry has changed recently or what, but just holding the book to read it stained the cover a bit, which is unlike other Walter J. Black books I have read. Perhaps it was just a strange circumstance of this volume, but most of the ones I bought, I bought at the same book fair presumably had the same previous owner, so I might need to invest in some reading gloves to keep these relatively pristine.

In this book, Mack Bolan goes to New Orleans to blow the mafia up there during Mardi Gras and finds that his two cohorts from San Diego Seige have been hired by a member of the mob to wire another member of the mafia and were kidnapped when they suspected the job might not be what it was sold as. As such, Bolan has to not only foment the syndicate crossfire among factions of a fraying southern territory, handle out-of-town shooters from St. Louis looking to carve the bayou fiefdom up for themselves, and help the girl, but he has to find his comrades, too.

He does, of course. This book introduces the GMC Warwagon that will become part of the series from here on out. You know, if I’d read this book before Arizona Ambush, I would have found the latter less incredible.

Let’s just say it’s a better read than an Elizabeth Daly doily, but I should probably start again reading more substantive fiction. If all you eat are potato chips, you’ll not find them a treat at every meal.

This book is one of the last in a series by Elizabeth Daly, whom Wikipedia claims Agatha Christie called her favorite American author or something. Like Dark Bahama, this book appears in a Detective Book Club edition I purchased when I bought a couple dozen of the Walter J. Black hardbacks at some book sale’s box day.

Also like Dark Bahama, this book is a little hard for my modern reader sensibilities to get into. Although this book is set in Manhattan in the 1950s (or just post World War II), it shares more sensibilities with English cottage kinds of mysteries. Ms. Daly was in her late 60s when she wrote this, so she’s more of Clarence Day’s Manhattan than Mickey Spillaine’s New York.

The story focuses on a young wife who escapes from the creepy, closed-in life she gets when she marries a wounded war hero who inherited an income and a townhome from an uncle. She ends up with Gamadge, who is a series character that detects based on knowledge of antiquarian books. Apparently, the woman’s husband found her holding two thin books and locked her in a room, compelling her to flee without even her gloves (yeah, it’s that kind of mystery). Gamadge noses around and discovers a murder and a cover-up, all hinging on the fact that the wife saw (but did not read) a book on the Tichborne case. Uh, spoiler alert.

I’d kinda figured that was where it was going, and I strangely enough knew already about the Tichborne case; I even have it up on my white board as something I should write about. Maybe this book report will be enough to get it erased.

So the first 40 pages were hard to get into, but once it got past that and you figured out who the characters were to care about, it got better. At 104 pages, it’s a fat novella more than a book. But it’s sold more copies than I have, so who am I to criticize?

I don’t mean to make you feel old, but Seinfeld has been off the air for 13 years now. I didn’t watch a lot of television in the 1990s, so I missed a lot of the viewing events of my generation, such as E.R. and Seinfeld. Given that it was a thirty minute sitcom, I must have seen a full episode of it sometime, although I cannot remember when or what it would have been. I don’t think I saw a complete episode of E.R., either.

This book, written by a fan newsletter (back in the day when newsletters were mostly mailed) editor, discusses the development of the sitcom, the post Larry David years, the cast, the memorable locations, and so on. It heaps approval on the show, of course, and made me interested in maybe seeing some of the show.

The cast biographies talk about how the individuals playing the roles, scrappy good-hearted souls all of them, are dealing with their success and being on top of the world. Strangely, from here in the future, we can see that after the show ends, Jason Alexander voices a cartoon, Julie Louis-Dreyfus cannot carry a realtime sitcom, Michael Richards gets Corrected for a response to hecklers, and Jerry Seinfeld marries that little girl. The wheel of fortune, she turns in a decade and change.

If nothing else, the book would be an interesting time capsule into the 1990s, although the program did begin in 1989, so it ran contemporaneously with my youthful golden age between high school, college, and almost up to my engagement.

Ah, the 1990s. It seems like American history follows a certain cyclical pattern, doesn’t it? An epic struggle followed by a party. The 1920s followed the War to End All Wars, the 1950s and early 1960s followed the Depression and World War II, the 1990s followed the Cold War…. It’s a facile generalization, sure, but what do you expect in a derivative book report based on a television program about nothing? Regardless, I suppose I should be optimistic about the future after we get through the current troubles, but I know past performance is not indicative of future performance. Nothin’ but the David in me.

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.

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.

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!

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.

This is my second Dave Barry tome this year (I read Dave Barry Turns 40 in March). Somehow, Dave Barry or someone convinced Random House to send Dave Barry and his family to Japan for three weeks to get a book about it. Really. It must have been something to be a humorist in that golden age. My employer here at the blog won’t even pay for my trips to the coffeepot.

The book comes at the height of Dave Barry’s popularity and the height of Japan’s economic power. A couple year later, Japan hits the economic skids and falls from the front rank of American citizens’ bugbears. To put it clearly: Instead of American sitcoms dealing with the zany antics of a fish-out-of-water American in a Japanese auto company (Gung Ho, and yes, I know it was a movie first, but it was later a sitcom), we get American sitcoms dealing with the zany antics of a fish-out-of-water American in an Indian call center (Outsourced, which was also based on a movie). No word on if someone is going to send Dave Barry to India for three weeks.

My point in the preceding, aside from having the sudden urge to compare Gung Ho to Outsourced, is that the book is a period artifact since it fits into the period genre of trying to understand the Japanese who were economic geniuses. It has Dave Barry’s amusing spin on it and has a travelogue thing going on, but it’s mostly Dave Barry being Dave Barry.

An amusing read.

I bought this book not because I’m a big fan of self-help motivational books, but because I knew how the main conceits story ended, right about the book was publshed. Larry Walters attached some helium-filled weather balloons to a lawn chair because he wanted to fly. Armed with a pellet gun to shoot the balloons to control his altitude, some sand bags for ballast, and a six pack. He shot up to 18,000 feet and into the flight paths for LAX. After he finally came down and got tangled in some power wires, he told a reporter he did it because “You can’t just sit there.” A great conceit for a self-help motivational book.

In 1993, Larry Walters killed himself. A little less rousing premise.

So I opened the book to chuckle at the woe-begotten central conceit, and indeed some of the other examples in the book are dated and the end result of the stories ends up not being optimal for the participants. Aren’t I a sophisticated cosmpolitan pooh-pooher?

Jess Gibson was a businessman before his calling to serve the Lord, and it shows. The book is definitely a business kind of motivational book with some scriptures overlaid. I can’t say that it’s roused me out of this chair to do something–I’m busy writing book reports that upwards of a dozen people will read–but if you’re the kind of person influenced by this, maybe it will help you. Actually, I wonder about people who read a lot of these kinds of books. People who read self-help motivational books tend to read a lot of them, don’t they? Do they build up a tolerance, or do they just need a steady diet of motivation? Hey, if it works for them, I won’t knock it.

On a side note, although the author looks a little, uh, seasoned in the jacket photo, he’s still around. I just saw him on PBS promoting funding for public television. Good for him.

When (if) you think of Clarence Day, you think of Life With Father. And with good reason. Not only was that middle-1930s reminiscience of growing up in the 1880s Manhattan a good bit of nostalgia that really caught on, including a Broadway play of the material, but it’s really about the only good thing Day wrote.

This volume includes: Life with Father, which collects a number of memoir essays that Day published throughout the Manhattan publishing world of the 1920s and 1930s; Life with Mother, a collection that tried to recapture the success of the earlier work, but was published by his widow and contains scraps and fragments and does not work because Mother was not the character that Father was; This Simian World, his first published book that muses upon civilization as a collection of apes, complete with wondering what civilization would be like if ruled by catmen or elephantmen; and a collection of drawings with short bits of doggerel below them.

I read Life with Father in 1999 or 2000, right after I got married. I was not yet 30, so I identified a lot with the narrator of the pieces, Day and his double-effect narrator self-appointed omniscience. Although I would not have applied those adjectives and adverbs then. He was the young guy, and Father was the old man stuck in his ways. Upon re-read, I identify more with Father, bellowing for his dinner or his way after working all day at the stock brokerage. The character of Father is seen through the eyes of a child, retold by that child as an adult. As such, Father is a bit of a cipher and a bit of a caricature. But he’s providing a damn good life for his wife, a lightweight deb of the postbellum world, and his four boys. Underneath the buffoonery of his wanting his own way and throwing what look like temper tantrums to get them, he’s a good man and the son knows he cannot emulate the father.

Aside from the father/son relationship, this book is great for the view of New York City in the 1880s. Gas lights. The installation of telephone replacing the bell you ring for a message boy. The horses and carts riding underneath the El to the farmland north of Central Park. Fascinating. I started reading this soon after I read The Virginian; in that book, the Virginian tells a tall tale that involves the New York restaurant Delmonicos sometime in the recent past. In Life with Father, Father takes the son to Delmonicos, probably right about the time the story from the western was set. Interesting confluence of my reading.

Life with Father, frankly, is the best of Clarence Day. The other things really aren’t worth much.

Interesting side note: This is a 1948 edition of the collection (I can’t imagine there were many more); the previous owner used a photocopy or reproduction of an industry article from 1948. The bookmark was in the early part of Life with Father, so the previous owner did not make it far into the book at all.

This book finds Mack Bolan, the Executioner, winging into Texas to take on the Mafia there. In this particular book, Mack rescues a hostage, buys an old fighter jet to hit important men with mob connections in three cities in rapid succession, and destroys what might be an attempt to create a new petro-state out of the former Republic of Texas. The books are very similar in the series, but each has its own plot and twists, so they definitely keep fresh. Also, they’re books on can tear through to make quota.

This year, I decided to bone up on my geek bona fides and read some geek lore that I’d previously skipped. Although my beautiful wife read the trilogy ten years ago when the films came out (I said TEN YEARS AGO, granpa!), I didn’t. I also missed out in my youth in the middle eighties to read these in the formative years where they’d have had the most impact and I’d be a slavish fanboy. As it is, I am not.

You know the plot, surely, so I won’t bore you with going into it. Instead, I’d like to point out the book that The Fellowship of the Ring (yes, I know, Tolkien himself called it the Company more than the Fellowship, blah blah blah. I did catch that) most reminded me of was Kim by Rudyard Kipling. They both feature very lush descriptions of exotic locations populated with strange (to us) people, and both feature someone who is elevated to play a big role in The Great Game/The War of the Ring. Both feature Roads which cut through the wilderness. I don’t know if any serious scholar has seen it and written a dissertation on it, but you could definitely put a deep comparison through the works.

That said, Lord of the Rings might be a touch too lush for optimum enjoyment. Its very populous cast of characters makes it hard to relate to a single person within it as the reader’s proxy. The best you can do is Sam Gamgee. Even Frodo is a cipher, really. And you need that proxy when running through dozens of pages of elaborate history/description/meeting of the minds to get to the next brief bit of action–although by the beginning of The Two Towers, we get to more action, but by splitting the Fellowship into two or three parts and giving us complete books without Sam, it can still be a slog to read.

Also, note I did not read the appendices which account for something like 200 pages of the final book. Seriously, more of the lush background and description with none of the action and, ultimately, none of the relevance to the story at hand? Maybe, as I say, this would have been more relevant had I grown up a decade earlier or read these books in my younger, more time to kill days.

That being said, I do have the rest of the Tolkien canon, and I will get to it eventually, but not right away. This stuff is rich and deep and dense–more so than Kipling himself–and I need to tear through some books to make sure I make quota this year.

So it’s worth reading if you fancy yourself a geek, and it is a 20th century classic that will probably be studied and relevant in the future when so much is not. But steel yourself. This is not a comic book nor a 20th century American thriller.

I read this book before I read The Well-Stocked Bookcase, and I liked the genre enough so that I decided to read the latter, too, in addition to checking another book of the type from the library (returned unread, as the completion of this book and then the aforementioned The Well-Stocked Bookcase sort of put me off of them for a while).

This book stems from a newspaper column for the Baltimore Sun, where he read and wrote book reviews on classic literature. The early part of the book deals with actual dyed-in-the-wool classics, and as I read his book reviews on them, it really made me want to go on to read the books themselves. Then, the chapters wander into more contemporary nonfiction and into lesser books by noted authors, and suddenly it veered into that “my stamp on classics” territory.

Still, a good read, and you’ve probably recognize the titles of most. I won’t enumerate them here to clutter up your skimming. Suffice to say, I have most of the classics he mentioned and don’t remember any of the non-classics he talks about.