Month: February 2021

Brian J, you say, surely you’re not going to count an Executioner novel as your book set in another country? Well, gentle reader, time will tell: I have a little over a week to finish as many books in the Winter 2021 Reading Challenge categories as I can, and I have five slots left. So I might not have the chance to read something with more heft and depth for the In A Different Country slot.

And, truth be told, this book takes place in several different countries: The Executioner goes to Brazil to establish a relationship with counter-insurrgency agents as they raid a paramilitary group’s hideout to rescue a woman being held for ransom–willingly, as it turns out. Then he stops by Miami for a briefing, and then he’s off to Jamaica with a cross-national defense team to take on the paramilitary group’s beachhead there, and then he goes back to Brazil to take on the paramilitary group with the counter-insurgency agents, and then decapitate–or deliver the coup-de-grace–by eliminating the businessman behind the scenes. And, finis!.

The stop in Miami makes me wonder if I can truly, in good conscience, say this book took place in a foreign country. But ethics fall by the wayside when it comes to filling out my Winter 2021 Reading Challenge form.

As Executioner novels go, it has a lot of development in the first half to two-thirds of the book, which lead me to think maybe it was the beginning of another trilogy in the series, but no–about two thirds of the way through the book, it jumps into action set pieces and finishes quickly. Also, Bolan is a bit of a bystander through much of it compared to other adventures where he works solo. But it’s not a bad entry in the series.

I am down to 13 volumes in The Executioner series, not counting the Super Bolan books and related series. My goodness, what will I do without Executioner novels as the default for times when I need a book to read? It’s taken me ten years to read the 47 books my beautiful wife bought me for my birthday in 2011 and the others I have picked up since then. They’ve been a constant on my bookshelves almost since we moved to Nogglestead. So I will, someday, miss them.

But I probably won’t re-read them, unlike the Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald books that I come across again.

As you might know, gentle reader, the Winter 2021 Reading Challenge has a category Re-read a Childhood Favorite. At first, I thought I would skip this category–one only needs to fill out five to get the free coffee cup–but when I was dusting and re-arranging the shelves last Sunday, I came across this volume. Which I have owned since childhood, gentle reader; this book was one of the books that my recently departed aunt gave to us because her step-children had outgrown them. That was when we were young and in the housing projects; we got a little bookshelf and a couple dozen volumes of young adult literature, which in those days meant a Hardy Boys book (this one), a couple volumes from other mystery series (Nancy Drew, The Power Boys), a couple of boy-and-his-dog books, and a couple of a young-person-and-his/her-horse books. As you might guess, I read most of the mystery books, but the books about pets? C’mon, man, I was living in the projects. Murder and crime, I could imagine. Pets? No way.

So this might trump (sorry, is that word verbotten yet? No? But it will be, and here I used it before it was officially double-plus-ungood) Me and My Little Brain as the longest time between re-reads. I re-read that book in 2018, but I am not sure in what order I read these books in my youth to establish which I might have re-read after thirty-eight years and which I might have read after only thirty-seven-and-a-half years.

In this volume, Frank and Joe and their chums Biff and Chet (who were The Missing Chums in an earlier entry in the series–forty-three years in real-time) go out west to the Rockies to investigate credit card forgers, and they come up with some illegal sapphire miners to boot. So, yeah, that’s it. They travel, have some adventures and whatnot, and solve the mystery of Vampire Trail, which is a path that leads up the mountain to the villians’ redoubt.

You know, for someone who feels as though he was steeped in the Hardy Boys’ mythos, I can only say for certain that I read three of the books. This one, and The Missing Chums and The Twisted Claw, but surely I read more of them when I was young, ainna?

I’ve tried to get others into the series–when he was young, I bought my half-brother the first two books in the series for his birthday or for Christmas and told him that I’d get him a new one every time he finished one. He never hit me up for another, so I don’t know if he ever read them. I’ve also picked up other copies from the series and set them out for my boys to read, but I don’t think they got into them. I asked the youngest, and he said in not so many words that they were too formulaic. How sophisticated the youth have become through the years. Although I think it’s more that they didn’t have enough cartoons in them.

At any rate, it ticks off a box–or fills a line–on the summer reading challenge form. And, as my wont, as far as one can develop a wont in but a month and a week, it would fulfill two categories: Re-read a Childhood Favorite and Crime. So I have not filled out the form completely (yet), but I have filled it with things that cross categories.

In keeping with my Winter Reading Challenge schtick, I have selected a book that would fit into two categories: One Word Title and Crime. Since we’ve already got Larry McMurtry’s one-word titled memoir about books Books in the one-word title slot, this will have to be my crime book for the challenge.

I first got into Ed McBain novels in the middle 1980s, about twenty-five years into the series, and I read a bunch of them from the library and from my aunt’s collection, out of order, but the eariler books, it seems, were more episodic and less serial in nature–but that might be only my memory of it, since Steve Carella first marries Teddy sometime back there, and his kids get born somewhere along the way. And patrolman Kling becomes a detective. So, nah, I’m mistaken. Strike this whole paragraph from the record, your honor.

But by the time the 1990s were rolling along, I was reading the books pretty soon after they came out, so I was following the series business in real time. But by now, I’m a bit lost. Who is dead by this book? Who has joined the team? Is Fat Ollie a force yet? I was thinking maybe there would be some small market for an 87th concordance to help put one back into the proper context when picking up a book in the middle of the series. Not that I would do that, gentle reader; that’s a lot of work, and I have many other things to read before I return to this series (although I did just spot a copy of Vespers on my bookshelves and, from a distance, thought it might be a duplicate of this book, so I might read that after David Copperfield).

In this book, the 87th has to find the killer of a kept woman. The man who was keeping her, an attorney, is also killed, and was the writer and recipient of any number of naughty letters reproduced in titilating detail in the book. In another part of the city, Carella’s father is killed during a hold-up, and the detectives from that precinct work on that case. The third main strand is that Eileen Burke, fresh from trauma that I’ll probably read about in Vespers, starts training with the hostage negotiator team. The first thread does not tie into the other two, but when they close in on the people who killed the elder Carella, they take a hostage, which ties those bits up.

So, definitely a good book. McBain was one of the masters, although by mid-career here, the books have expanded a bit to befit higher prices, I guess. And we have the cop-and-therapist trope. Maybe that just seems so outsized because it was such a thing in the Parker books. I dunno.

But I liked the book, and I’ve picked up McBain books here and there, so I’ll have to re-read them a bit as time goes by. Unlike John D. MacDonald, I think I have read all the McBains, although that’s probably only the ones that are easy to come by. Regardless, enough time has elapsed that I won’t remember the plots too clearly and can enjoy them with a little newness again.

I did flag a couple bits.

Asimovian Self-Insertion

Actually, it was a greenboard. Made of some kind of plastic material that definitely wasn’t slate. Eileen wondered if the move she’d seen on late-night television last week would have made it as Greenboard Jungle.

Lombino/Hunter/McBain wrote the book The Blackboard Jungle, but not the screenplay.

I’ll Have What He’s Having

“Yes, sir, that’s it, Pellegrino, like the mineral water.”

In 1991, I would not have known what that meant. In 2021, I was drinking Pellegrino’s whilst reading it.

The War

Tommy had moved back to the house that used to be his parents’ while he was away in the army. Nowadays, you did not have to say which war or police action or invasion a man had been in. If you were an American of any given age, you had been in at least one war.

Which was true at the time. When this book was published, it would have been Vietnam or Panama or Grenada; earlier books would have been World War II (the series began in the 1950s) or Korea. However, with the end of the draft in the 1970s, later generational military endeavors, from Desert Storm to the second Iraqi War and Afghanistan, were not widely shared amongst the young people. But you can still talk about veterans who have been overseas under fire.

Misquoting Yogi

And, as Yogi Berra once remarked, “When you come to a crossroads, take it.”

Ackshully, he said when you come to a fork in the road, take it. Perhaps McBain is misquoting on purpose?

What We Could Show McBain In The Future

The kid had been black.

That meant that one of the city’s foremost agitators, a media hound who liked nothing better than to see his own beautiful face on television, had rounded up all the usual yellers and screamers and had picketed both the project and the local precinct, shouting police brutality and racism and no justice, no peace, and all the usual slogans designed to create more friction than already existed in a festering city on the edge of open warfare.

Yes, he means Sharpton. But what would Sal Lombino think about Sharpton and 2020?

Shoot Him In The Leg

“And you’re wrong when you say she had to put him away. She didn’t have to. Her perception–and, again, the reality as well–was that this man was going to cut her if she didn’t stop him, she was going to get cut again if she didn’t stop this man. But she didn’t have to kill him in order to stop him. The man was armed with only a knife, and she had her service revolver, a .44 caliber Smith & Wesson–plus a .25 caliber Astra Firecat in her handbag. She certainly did not have to kill him. She could have shot him in the shoulder or the leg, wherever, anything of the sort would have effectively stopped him. The point is she wanted to kill him.”

The therapist is talking to Kling about Burke’s recent justified shooting, and McBain is demonstrating a bit of ignorance about guns and self-defense informed by popular culture which says that’s a good idea.

Help Is On The Way

That was the trouble when a city started sliding south. You couldn’t bother about the little things anymore. When people were ggetting killed, you couldn’t go chasing kids spraying graffiti on walls. You couldn’t ticket a truck driver for blowing his horn. You couldn’t bust people who were jumping subway turnstiles. When you had murder and rape and armed robbery to worry about, the rest was merely civilization.

You might think that in the Dinkins era. But a couple years after this book appeared, Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York, and the police started enforcing a Broken Windows policy that says you do arrest and punish for those petty crimes, and the effects trickle up. It certainly seemed to work, and current large city administrations are looking to prove the opposite is true as well. Well, mainly, they’re just looking to limit prosecution for petty and small larcenous crimes, and the resulting crime spike is completely unforeseen.

Again, The Future Has A Surprise For You

The people form the nearby project all came out to watch the Late Night Show. This was either Die Hard or Die Harder on a summer’s night at the very top of August. Except this wasn’t a high rise in L.A. or an airport in D.C.

The third entry in the series, Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) takes place in New York City. As you know, gentle reader, The City of the 87th Precinct is a stand-in for New York City.

Cancellation Notice

The Preacher was in the streets already, doing what he did best, doing in fact the only thing he knew how to do, which was to agitate people into a frenzy. Pacing behind the barricades, long hair slicked back, gold chains gleaming in the reflected light of the spots, bullhorn in hand, he kept telling the crowd that whenever a white girl yelled rape, then the nearest African-American males were always accused of it…
“But take a pure innocent young virgin like Tawana Brawley, who gets reped by a screaming mob of white men who then scrawl the word nigger…”

I sure read a lot of books with that word in it. I must be a racist. No telling what Ed McBain would think of this modern world where characters like The Preacher are running the asylum. McBain passed away in 2005; he barely had any time to work in anti-Bush sentiments into his novels much comment on or embrace the rising ethos. When you read the books from the later part of the 20th century, you get a sense of cynicism and detachment. I’m sort of glad we didn’t get to see how earnest he might have become.

Don’t Now Much About Guns And Stuff (II)

She saw a big, muscular man with a close-shaved skull, wearking a white T-shirt, that was all she could see of him in the window frame. AK-47 in his right hand. Just the sight of that gun always sent a shiver up her spine. The illegal, Chinese-made assault rifle–a replica of the gun used by the Viet Cong–was a semiautomatic, which meant it required a separate pull of the trigger for each shot. But it could fire up to seventy-five shots without reloading, and its curved clip gave it the lethal look of a weapon of war, no matter how many claims the National Rifle Association made for its legitimate use as a hunting rifle.

Well, he got the semiautomatic part right, and that it should be illegal because it looks scary; however, the 75-round magazine is a drum, not a curved banana magazine. C’mon, man, do you even read Executioner novels (or, as the younger generations do, play first person shooters)?

Still, even though sometimes McBain’s politics seeps into the books–like that passage above, it’s not odious and permeating and he offers enough sentiments that an evil-thinker can agree with to make up for it.

So, yeah, McBain is up there with John D. MacDonald as masters of the craft that didn’t get to the phoning it in phase of a career or to injecting politics into the books so overtly as to alienate readers who didn’t vote for Dukakis. The books have depth, and just a bit of series business seeping in.

You will know how serious I am in the endorsement by how soon you see a report for Vespers. Well, I mean another one.

This book is a trifecta in the Winter 2021 Reading Challenge. I could count it in any of three different categories: Memoir/Biography, Book About Books, or One-Word Title. As I have already entries for the first two (Sid Meier’s MEMOIR!, Book Lust). So One-Word Title it is, which means I don’t have to read Linda Greenlaw’s Seaworthy out-of-order. But, Brian J., you read The Hungry Ocean and The Lobster Chronicles out of order, you might point out, but that’s different. Back when I got The Lobster Chronicles from the book club, I did not have her later work–and now I have All Fishermen Are Liars around here somewhere–so I have the luxury of reading them in order. If I ever do, that is.

Wait a minute, whose book memoir is this–mine or Larry McMurty’s? Both, gentle reader, both.

You might know Larry McMurtry as the author of any number of books, such as Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, or Lonesome Dove–I say that because those books were adopted to films sometimes by McMurtry himself. Or you might know him as the guy whose shirts got pinched by Robert Clark Young.

In this book, McMurtry collects a number of musings and recollections about receiving books as a young man, buying books, and then becoming a book scout and a book seller in the 1950s. He ran a book store, first in Georgetown and then in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, until 2012 (after this book was written), so he offers insights into the secondhand and antiquarian book business through the mid-to-end of the twentieth century when it was a going thing. He also talks about the changes to the industry with the advent of the Internet, and how he was a throwback–which lasted only a little longer than after this book was published.

The chapters are short–the book has 109 in 258 pages–as the topical reminisces sometimes only last a couple of paragraphs. The book has no structure or flow, either, as the memories go backwards and forwards in time, with anecdotes of his youth following stories set later in his bookbuying (he prefers the experience of buying to selling). They drop a lot of names in the business but without a lot of character for most of them–just names, what store they were with, and maybe what they did once–but he somewhere says that’s intentional, as many of them have passed on and he doesn’t want to tell stories about people who cannot defend themselves. And the book ends not with a real conclusion, but a list of booksellers with whom he’s done business, including whether they’re out of business or not. He only lists two in St. Louis, Anthony Garnett and Lost Generation, neither of whom I’d heard of–and I was in the St. Louis area at the time. But McMurtry dealt in antiquarian books, not the cheap stuff I tend to buy.

So this book did not dissuade me from wanting to buy books and to read books and maybe even buy and sell books. As you might know, gentle reader, around the turn of the century, I spent my Saturday mornings at estate sales and garage sales looking for books and old games to sell on eBay–so I remember the thrill of that hunt and the triumph of a good find. I also marvel at how much McMurtry seems to read–he talks about re-reading certain books every couple of years, but I can’t make headway against my library without re-reading.

So I did flag a couple things for comment here.

A New Personal Goal

I now own Mr. Taylor’s mansion and have filled it with about twenty-eight thousand books, which took a while.

I don’t know where I am–I have about 2500 books in my book database, but that’s books I’ve read and reference sets. I have no idea how many books I have on the to-read shelves–probably that many or a little more–so I have a ways to go. Although I will probably get a boost from collecting volumes in a set–say Reader’s Digest World’s Best Reading editions–whose individual entries I have already read. I know, the sets I collect are very middle-class tastes. But they’re currently affordable, and they’re something, and I’m accumulating them more than collecting.

Dismissive

I read these comics with shock, but I didn’t really become interested in comics until I was an adult, investigating the Yellow Peril panic, which in essence had the Mongol Horde riding agin. The various Fu Manchu movies starring Christopher Lee are the modern-day Yellow Perilism; and our current worries about being crushed by China’s economic might is an extension of the syndrome.

Well, that very glibly dismisses policy concerns by calling them racist without using the word itself, ainna?

I wonder if McMurtry feels differently twelve years later? Probably not.

Brian Feels Smart

A dealer in Wichita Falls made a big paperback purchase, and was happy to sell the vintage stuff to me. These numbered several hundred books, and contained at least eighty percent of the titles I sold to Greg [McMurtry collected the first five hundred titles from five early paperback publishers but sold his first collection]. When Booked Up [McMurtry’s store] purchased Barber’s Bookstore, in Fort Worth, I siphoned off a few hundred more, all of which now ring the shelves of what once, long ago, was Mr. Will Taylor’s servants’ quarters, a plain two-story brick house which we nicknamed the Petit Trianon.

I know what that is not because I lived near Trianon Parkway in the St. Louis area, but because I read a book about Versailles and the original Trianon last year.

Almost The Second Book In A Row with De Sade

The book I got at Second Story that day was Marquis de Sade’s Justine, the first edition of which is an easily acquired book. But this wasn’t the first edition. It contained a few erotic engravings, meant to be dirty but not likely to raise much heat today. The book was priced $350–with my dealer’s discount I got it for $280.

I suspect a de Sade book is the one alluded to in The Picture of Dorian Gray but is unnamed in that book. It’s not finding the word brougham in two books in a row–and I have read a book between this and The Picture of Dorian Gray, but I like to find connections between my bibliowanderings.

Reminds Me Of A Bookseller I Knew

Ought dealers to collect? A good many dealers just don’t seem to want to. Leo Weinstein of the Heritage Book Shop (now gone) once showed me his collection of first American editions of famous books. My polite view is that Lou Weinstein’s heart is not really in acquiring books that he can’t sell.

I once said to Sheldon, the proprietor of A Collector’s Book Shop in University City and later Maplewood, he who was notorious for gigging people by pulling books out of the bookshelves by putting their fingers on the top of the spines and pulling them out that way–I said to him, “I can’t imagine what your collection is like.” He responded by saying, well, chided me that his business is buying and selling books; he did not collect them.

And I am serious about his notoriety for gigging people–when I took people to the shop for the first time, I would tell them to watch for it, and surely enough, Sheldon would chide someone for putting their fingers atop the spines while we were there. My goodness, I have not thought about A Collector’s Book Shop in a while, but right now, I am walking through it–going upstairs and then into the other rooms above the shop next to his on the ground floor.

Not Unlike My Experience

Underlying all these adventures was one motive: I never wanted to be without books I wanted to read, and if I could be reading four or five books at the same time, so much the better. With books pouring into the shop almost daily, this was not a hard thing to achieve.

I do pretty well without running a book shop with the biannual library book sales and frequent trips to ABC Books. I could probably lose half my unread books–maybe two-thirds–and I’d still have enough to read for a lifetime. But let’s not take that risk.

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At any rate, I thoroughly enjoyed this book which I have in a fine first edition with mylar over the dustjacket that I ordered from ABC Books during the great stay-at-home of 2020 (how’d that work out?), although I have personalized it with Cheeto dust and pizza grease. Which is just as well–I might be of the last generation, and perhaps a throwback amongst my generation–who loves books this way and who would really enjoy this sort of book and the attitudes contained within.

Which has a silver lining: cheap books in the near future, and plentiful kindling for my succeeding generations.

Amongst that future kindling, I have a copy of The Last Picture Show and maybe the movie book for Hud, the film version of Horseman, Pass By. Perhaps I shall pick them up after the reading challenge ends at the end of this month (and I finish the interrupted David Copperfield).