Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I bought these books last weekened at Rublecon where Cody Walker was the only author or comic book artist (actually, he’s both) present. And as I was done with The Emerald Elephant Gambit shortly thereafter, I delved into these books in fairly short order.

I dived into Hang Me If I Stay Shoot Me If I Run first. It’s a short (122 pages) book which includes the title novella along with a handful of short stories set in the fictional town of Pinhook, Missouri, which just happens to be up the road (Highway 13) a piece like Bolivar, Missouri. Where the author is from. In the novella, a kid from the area returns with a dead dog in his trunk and holes up in a local motel. He has just burglarized a home in the Rivercut neighborhood (just east of Nogglestead). He meets up with the housekeeper/night manager of the motel, a woman of her own ill repute, and they decide to rob a local church run by a preacher with a predilection for philandering and then the local fair run by a man whose money and influence comes from dodgy sources, including the manufacture of meth. When the final reckoning comes, though, the young man is willing to sacrifice himself for revenge. Other stories in the book deal with a gay couple trying to live their lives in secret in Pinhook; an older woman finds that strangers unburden themselves to her; a young woman deals with the attentions of young men and a skeevy uncle as she hopes for college acceptance which will take her away; an older man has had a health episode and is supposed to be resting, but he wants to go to the coffee shop to trade knives; and a young couple seeking to get married finds some resistance from the church.

I mean, I can see a little bit of Winesburg, Ohio in it, albeit with a bit more modern sensibility and them to it. It’s not poorly written, but it does lack a little depth to it that I’ve kind of alluded to before. Kind of like college level classwork or stuff you might find in a writing group. Of course, back in the day–the early part of the 20th century–they filled whole magazines with these kinds of stories.

Loot the Bodies is a collection of poetry. Interestingly, most of the poems are pretty short–maybe the longest clock in at under 30 lines–but the book is printed on very large paper and not in 4×6 size, which means there’s a lot of white space in the 88 pages of poems. The book also includes a couple of short stories at the end; again, slice-of-life material. The poems are okay. Better than Rupi Kaur instapoetry and better than the grandmother poetry I often read. Again, the sort of thing that you might have spotted in mid-century general interest magazines in the 20th century.

Which is odd because the author looked too young to have spent too much time in the last century.

At any rate, I have, what, six more of the author’s books from Rublecon? I’m not feeling compelled to read them all at once, but they’ll be pleasant enough when I get around to them.

Since I just read the second volume in the Agent of T.E.R.R.A. series (The Golden Goddess Gambit), I figured it would be the best time for me to polish off the other volume in the series that I have. As the series total is four books, so I have now read half of the series, and I don’t own the others. Given that the series only lasted four books that came out in rapid succession (both books I read came out in 1967; the first came out in 1966 and the last in 1969 according to Fantastic Fiction), I probably won’t run across the remaining volumes in the wild, and I’m not inclined to order them.

So, in this book, a researcher embedded in Mohenjo-dara before the barbarian invasions is tasked with collecting information about the civilization for the home office. A couple of days before she is to leave because the barbarians are going to conquer and raze the village, a UFO appears in the sky, claiming to be Indra and offering to protect the village if the villagers will give up their gold and valuables as a sacrifice. The researcher calls for help, and Hannibal and Webley come to the past and uncover a plot from their enemies in the Empire to accumulate gold from the era. Hannibal has to put things back in order, including convincing Divodasa, the ruler of the barbarians, to settle down in the area as he did in the prime timeline.

So it’s an entertaining little yarn. It’s as though the author went through the first volumes of The Story of Civilization and poked his stories into the gaps in history. Well, not the Durants’ work; the book contains a for further reading section which does not include Our Oriental Heritage. But it could. Much of the book is adhering to the special rules of time travel, one of which is that a person cannot be present in the same time twice, which leads to some planning for jumping backwards and forwards for an hour or so.

Somewhere between rocket jockey juvies and men’s adventure fiction, but a quick fun read just the same.

I guess it has been nine years since I read a John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novel (three, actually, in A Tan and Sandy Silence and Two Other Great Mysteries which also includes The Long Lavender Look and Bright Orange for the Shroud) and five years since I’ve read McDonald at all (On the Run in in 2019). As I might have mentioned then, I’m pacing them out.

In this book, a wealthy businessman asks McGee and Meyer to go to Mexico to find out the circumstances in which his daughter was living before she died in an auto accident, perhaps while drunk or high. She had fallen into a bad crowd and had travelled to Mexico with them, and McGee and Meyer find layers of intrigue as they try to find her associates. The father of the other girl in the group has also come to Mexico to find his daughter and is also trying to find himself and get tuned into the youth culture. A wealthy woman emerged from seclusion, although the two girls were staying with her, to identify the body and has gone back into seclusion somewhere around the world. And the group itself descended into drug-fueled madness and free sex, culminating in a plan to use the dead girl’s savings to smuggle heroin into the United States. McGee and Meyer unpeel the layered plots over time with a lot of speculation taking pages along with the normal existential musings you get in MacDonald.

The plot and goings on might have been edgy and shocking in 1969, but you could set a similar story in a high school and play it out on a network television show (not even a cable or streaming show, although presumably if you did you’d get more skin and depicted violence). It has a few anachronisms, like presenting Mexico as a fairly safe destination for travelers and easy border crossings without a passport, but it’s still relatively timely to someone who lived in an era before cell phones and personal tracking devices became a thing. Access to these devices and their pings would have made a much simpler story indeed.

As you know, gentle reader, if you’ve been around long enough and remember previous MacDonald reviews, I like the man’s writing. He writes pulp with a depth of theme and depth of writing that was beginning to fall out of practice in the 1960s. I mean, Robert E. Howard’s work had depth to the writing (but not as much overt philosophizing thematics). Don Pendleton had a little philosophy, but his writing was not as thick and rich. Now, of course, you get length that has replaced depth. I wonder why the writing changed. The nature of the business? The difference between education in the eras? Something, for sure.

So I will continue to dabble in reading the MacDonald, although I have to think I have read most of the popular work, and it would take some doing on my part to figure out definitively what books I have read since I have started tracking my reading and books that I own (I have no way to be sure what I would have borrowed from the library when I was younger) and to seek out the ones I have not. And I have a bunch of projects ahead of me in the queue. So that’s a thing for another day. Meanwhile, I will probably continue to pick the books up when I see them and re-read them as I come across them in the stacks here at Nogglestead.

I picked up this little 1960s-era paperback almost 10 years ago at Pumpkin Daze. It’s the second of a brief series of four books featuring Hannibal Fortune and his alien symbiote protoplasmic partner as they try to protect the natural timeline from changes made by their enemies in a war where time itself is the battlefield.

In this volume, Fortune and Webley, his partner, go back to a continent that will be lost in the sea in the future to find out who Kronos is and why he was worshipped as a god there. They discover that Kronos has planted the seeds of a goddess-worshipping cult but whose queen/goddess figure might not want to share power when Kronos returns. Fortune and Webley foment a rebellion and look to restore the queen’s sister, the rightful heir to the throne.

It’s a short book–158 pages–and moves along pretty well. But I was amused to find myself, again, in prehistoric times on a continent/island that could be Atlantis. It fits in with the history books I’ve read recently (Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi) as well as fiction (the Bucky and the Lukefahr ladies books Walking the Labyrinth and Songs of Three not to mention Robert E. Howard’s work such as The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard). I’m not even seeking out books that feature ancient Cypriot/Minoan/Celtic/Pictish books at this point, but I keep finding them anyway. Funny how that works.

As it happens, I picked up the third book in the series at the same time, and I’ll probably delve into it soon as well. Heaven knows with all the thick hardbacks in the Nogglestead to-read stacks that I will constantly pick up the small mass market paperbacks instead.

Facebook must be reading my blog as it seems to know that I’ve read a pile of Howard this year (Tigers of the Sea, Conan the Invincible, and The Hour of the Dragon). So it’s been showing me a hella lotta Dungeons and Dragons suggested/sponsored posts. And, in June, an ad for this book, which I proceeded to order from Amazon.

The stories certainly do not have the flavor of Lovecraft’s stories of the mythos (or other writers who followed him). Instead, they only share some thematic elements, specifically that alien races preceded man on the Earth, including Atlantis which sank beneath the waves.

The book includes:

• “The Shadow Kingdom”, a Kull the Conqueror novella wherein Picts help Kull to learn that an ancient shape-shifting snake people have infiltrated his palace.
• “The Skull Face”, a novella wherein an ancient magician has laid plans in the shadows to unite non-white races to overthrow the white men around the world and establish his own global empire. The magician ensnares an opium-eater in London as his thrall, but the man recovers himself to ally with the authorities to try to stop the plot.
• “The Children of the Night”, wherein a modern Englishman is hit in the head and regresses to a previous life where he was a barbarian hunting the Children of the Night, an ancient race of non-humans, and when he returns to the present day, discovers one of his cohort is a desendent of them. This story has elements of the mythos and refers to the Call of Chulhu and other texts shared across the mythos.
• “The Gods of Bal-Sogoth”, a novella similar to the Wulfhere/Cormac Mac Art stories from Tigers of the Sea blended with Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”. Two enemies are cast ashore on a remote island where the savage population has been ruled by a white woman who was their goddess until unseated by the practitioners of the old religion. She hopes to use the two to regain her throne.
• “The Black Stone”, a story wherein a traveler in the back roads of Europe decides to visit a mysterious monolith and has a vision of an ancient race celebrating a black and eldritch ceremony in the distant past.
• “People of the Dark”, wherein a modern man goes to a cave in a plot to kill his rival in a love triangle, but a blow to the head regresses him to a past life wherein he was Conan and entered the caves to capture a woman but has to unite with a rival to fight off a subterranean race. Then the modern man un-, de-, or re-regresses to the present day, he saves his rival and love from the remnant of the ancient race.
• “Worms of the Earth”, a novella wherein Bran Mak Morn summons an ancient race to attack Romans who have crucified on of his citizens.
• “The Thing on the Roof”, wherein an adventurer who has stolen a temple gem asks for help from an antiquarian to discover the meaning of its power in an old book.
• “The Haunter of the Ring”, a story wherein a man’s newlywed bride seems to be trying to kill him, and it’s tied to a cursed ring given to her by a jilted lover.
• “The Challenge from Beyond”, a story written in the round by many authors. C.L. Moore starts off with a conceit about a man finding a strange cube in the wilderness and gazing in it; A. Merritt extends the story; H.P. Lovecraft sets his stamp on it by setting up how it’s a mind transfer probe from a distant and ancient worm-like race to seek habitable planets to plunder and populate; and then Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long turn it into one of their stories by explaining how the human mind transferred to the worm body conquers the worm planet due to the violence only human consciousness brings but rules as a benevolent despot. It’s funny how Lovecraft turns the story one way and Howard and Long turn it into one of their style stories at the end.
• “The Fire of Asshurbanipal”, wherein two adventurers in the Middle East are pursued in the desert but seek refuge in an ancient city feared by the locals, and, in it, they discover a gem in an ancient idol. Before they can steal it, though, their pursuers find them, bind them, steal the gem for themselves, and deal with the deadly consequences.
• “Dig Me No Grave”, wherein a man asks another man to help with a ritual that an old, old man who recently died tasks the man to perform on his death. It turns out to be an eldritch ritual releasing the man’s soul to the evil it had been promised.

So some of the stories have a modern-day setting to them that more closely aligns with stories in the Cthulhu mythos, but others are more straight-forward Howard stories.

I thought the book was a cheapo collection of public domain stuff, but it’s actually more than that: It’s part of the MFA program at Western Colorado University where students put together and publish a book. So it’s not riddled with typos and stuff (I saw one), and I have a couple of design notes I’d add. The page headers have the author’s name on left pages, but on right pages, they have the name of the novella if it’s a novella or the book title if the heading is on a short story. I’d have made it consistent, probably with the book title and story/novella title (the book title has the author name right in it). Also, the last chapter of the novella “Skull-Face” appears in the table of contents as its own short story (and the heading of the right pages does not have the novella title but the book title). Still, I have an eye for that.

I guess the program/publishing house has published a couple of other books, but I’m not going to run out and get them–I got this one just because I have been so much on a Conan/Howard kick this year. But binge reading them (if three or four books over six months is “bingeing”–) really highlights the tropes and repeated motifs that make the material seem less fresh. So I’ll likely put them down for a bit now.

I passed over this book which was on the outer rank of books in the hall for a number of years. Even when I’m in the mood for a McBain, which happens from time to time (such as when I am working on the Winter Reading Challenge), I pick up an 87th precinct book. This is a Matthew Hope book, the other series McBain did, about the attorney in Florida. I am sure I read a number of these when I was younger (the series ran from 1977 to this book in 1998), but I’ve only read one since I’ve been reporting on books for this humble blog (Rumpelstiltskin in 2004).

Matthew Hope is an attorney who has a team of investigators working for him; in this book, a woman hires him to find her husband who walked out on her and went up north. Presumably, she wants to divorce him or have him declared dead. So Hope and his team swing into action, and a corpse turns up with the husband’s wallet but is not, apparently, the husband, the start to unravel a complicated plot for a heist that involves a couple of different bisexual love triangles and plans to steal the heisted cup of Socrates from the original heisters.

The story occurs partly in real time and partly in flashbacks amongst the good guys and the bad guys and features a team-up with the detectives of the 87th Precinct as they look into what the husband did when he was up north in The City.

But, ultimately, although the good guys catch on at the end, it relies a little on coincidence to put Hope at the museum as the heist occurs, and a quick climax with bloodshed and finis!

Yeah, ultimately, I don’t like the Matthew Hope books that very much. I am pretty sure I have one or more amongst the to-read shelves here (including, likely, one or more that I have already read), but I will space them out. Maybe every twenty years or so.

As I mentioned when I bought this book on June 20, I fully expected to read it fairly quickly as its premise matches that of the Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies books I’ve read recently (Walking the Labyrinth and Songs of Three)–that is, that a Hittite travelled with Minoans to the Americas a couple millennia B.C.

Also, I actually read an academic book about the copper mining ancient peoples in Michigan back around 2008. I got the book through Inter-Library Loan at the Old Trees library from something I’d read in a History or Renaissance magazine; the volume I got was a numbered book out of a thousand published, and I forget from how far away it came. I pored through my book report archives here and did a quick search of the old Blogspot blog, but I cannot find a book report for it. Which is odd; I thought I did them all, but perhaps I did not do this one because it is not or was not available on Amazon, and there was a time when I thought I could monetize this blog (spoiler alert: no, and it hasn’t served as much of a spring board to book sales, either).

At any rate, that previous book was an academic work by a university professor, but this book is an amateur work, a labor of love, by a guy who’s had numerous jobs including working for the United States Forestry Service in the upper midwest which sparked his interest in this topic. He wonders where all the copper that the natives mined went and why they seemingly stopped mining it and regressed to hunters and gatherers about 1200 BC.

He lays out reasons why he believes the Minoans were able to sail beyond the Mediterranean, up the coast of Europe, to Britain and then Greenland and Iceland and beyond where they established trading posts and helped the natives to mine the copper which they then brought back to the Mediterranean. He refers to something called the Newberry Tablet, a stone tablet found under an uprooted tree (which also happens in Walking the Labyrinth) with cuniform writing as well as similarities between Algonquin written language and Cypro-Minoan script.

The book is not very well written; it repeats itself and is a bit stilted in spots, not like academic speak though. It’s a bit informed by cable television history, but you know what? This guy has done some research, and he has traveled to Europe and the Mediterranean to view artifacts in various museums. He says that the establishment does not take his theory seriously, and I believe that’s true whether his theory is true or not: The academy selects for people who will not rock the boat and will parrot the established narratives to ensure continued funding and employment.

So the book presents an interesting theory, one worth considering, even if it’s just to use the concept for a series of fantasy books that I’ll get back to by and by.