Month: March 2011

This is a 3-In-One Volume, as the dustjacket indicates, which means I might have screwed myself as far as the absolute metrics are concerned. This is the 21st book I’ve read this year, but if I’d read individual novels and whatnot, I’d be on 24. But such is life. When I read The Green Mile, someday, I’m going to take advantage of just that.

Meanwhile, this is the first book of G. McDonald’s that I have read in seven years (the last, apparently, was Skylar in Yankeeland). I read a lot of McDonald when I was in high school, back when I read a lot. These books were much fresher then, about ten or fifteen years old. Like me. But he was one of the big three Mc/MacDonalds (Ross and John D. being the others). But Gregory was the lesser of the three in output and ultimate popularity.

The books are the first three in the Fletch series. The first was made into the Chevy Chase film, albeit with some elements altered to make it more cinematic. Strangely, I like the film a little better, as it ties some things up better. In it, an investigative reporter for a newspaper goes undercover on a beach to find out the source of its drug traffic. As he does that, millionaire Alan Stanwyk hires Fletch, in his drifter disguise, to kill Stanwyk, who claims to have a fast-moving cancer. Fletch investigates both lines and solves them, but the two plotlines are parallel and only slightly converge at the end in an unsatisfying demideus ex machina. The movie ties it up better.

In Confess, Fletch, Fletch visits Boston from his recent residence in Italy. He’s seeking some paintings stolen from his fiance’s father. The father has disappeared. The father’s third wife follows Fletch to find out where her paintings are. And someone is murdered in the apartment Fletch borrowed for his stay on the night he arrives. Inspector Flynn, another McDonald character, gives Fletch enough lead to investigate the murder as well as the stolen paintings, and Fletch resolves both. These plotlines resolve a little better.

Fletch’s Fortune finds Fletch blackmailed by the CIA to bug the rooms of journalists at a national convention where the primary target, a newspaper magnate, is murdered. Fletch investigates and solves the crime.

It’s an interesting throwback, the investigative reporter. Remember when they were relevant, briefly, in the 1970s and early 1980s? Remarkable.

A good read; I tore through it, relatively. I have at least one more McDonald on my shelves–a Flynn novel–and need to revisit McDonald’s other works as well. If that’s not enough to get you to consider it, nothing is.

This is a particularly timely book, as I am now staring at 40 myself and am getting started on my 2/3 life crisis as we speak. I’ve read Barry for 20 years, ever since that Dave Barry Borrowed Book Staining Incident of 1989. So I know how the next 20 years of Dave Barry’s life are going to turn out. Strangely, I also know how both of Dave Barry’s parents died by the time he was 40, too. That’s all very meta, of course, unrelated to the text, but lately I’m really sticking on when a book was written, where I was at the time, and where I and the author might have gone since. But you’re not here for that. Well, if you’re reading the review and did not get here from a Hong Kong Google search for Dave Barry Turns 40 book report, you might be here for that.

At any rate, this book talks about getting older back in an era when 40 was older. Now that the Boomers have come along, though, they destroyed the concepts of “older” even as Dave Barry makes fun of them here. You’ve got your bits on relationships and marriage, your parents and kids, and your body’s changes.

Dave Barry’s humor is topical, and (I haven’t read his recent work–when did the blogs all stop linking to him?) the pieces talk generically about politicians without (too much) asserting that one side is better than the other. That’s a nice respite. Although given the halcyon era we’re dealing with–B.C.–maybe I’ll discover his work changes in the 21st century. I hope not.

Recommended, of course.

This book is the source of the Charles Bronson movie of the same name (soon to be remade with Shia LeBouef, no doubt). I have it in the movie tie-in mass market paperback and have picked it up a couple times without actually reading any of it until recently.

It’s a Cold War era spy thing with a twist: The Soviets placed hypnotically controlled deep-cover agents across the country with programmed orders to destroy bits of infrastructure. In the decades since their insertion, they’ve become model citizens who don’t even know they’re Soviet agents until a coded message delivered via telephone activates them. A failed coup in the Soviet Union sends a dissident to America with the complete list of these agents and their code phrases–the Telefon book–to seek revenge on the Soviet Union by creating embarrassment or worse. So the Soviets send in a world-wise, cynical secret agent who likes the ladies. When he reaches America, he cuts ties with the local KGB operations to keep himself free of interference and of control. As he hunts the dissident, his superiors start to question whether he can do stop his target or if it would be easier simply to kill all the sleeper agents and their agent-in-place.

A good book, not as tense as a Clancy novel, paced okay prosaically but the action plays out over months where many days the Bronson-agent spends in his hotel watching the news because he has no current leads. Given the nature of the author’s history, he probably had insights into what real intelligence work was like. But, as I said, it paces and reads well.

Sometimes, when I’m at a loss about what to read next, I kick the can down the road a bit by selecting a play. Modern plays are pretty easy reads; semi-modern plays (like Ibsen) are heavier fare, but they buy me a couple days before I have to pick another book; but classics (like Shakespeare or Jonson) can take as long as a short book. So when I was at a loss and didn’t want to simply pick up another paperback, I picked up this Neil Simon play. I’ve read a bunch by him in the past (I Ought To Be In Pictures in 2006; Biloxi Blues, Chapter Two, and Broadway Bound in 2007; Lost in Yonkers in 2008; and Laughter on the 23rd Floor in 2009). So I expected a lightweight comedy.

This book is not a lightweight comedy; it’s more heavy dramatic fare. It centers around a recovering alcoholic returning from rehab to her New York apartment, where her remaining friends are an aging actor who’s starting to know he’s not going to make it and an aging woman holding onto her youth and beauty as much as she can. When the gingerbread lady’s seventeen-year-old daughter returns, she has hopes for making as best of a life that she can sober and, she suspects, somewhat boring. When her friends’ problems all erupt at a birthday party, she backslides and has to deal with the aftermath.

It all takes place in a single set–the woman’s apartment–and deals with a milieu and a set of characters I can only imagine through fiction. It doesn’t end with any resolution, nor with any weddings or corpses. It’s a very 1970s kind of thing, probably taking on a slightly taboo subject seriously and pointing out the ongoing nature of life. Not bad, per se, but not compelling. A quick read, though, as it’s only a play, and it doesn’t dismiss the affection I feel for Neil Simon’s plays, however little I actually relate to them.