Month: March 2026

This is actually only the second of the Diagnosis Murder paperbacks that I bought in Berryville, Arkansas, five years ago (The Silent Partner was the first in 2022). Which is kind of odd, really, and I like the books by Lee Goldberg which I have read in this and the series tied in to the television series Monk. So I spend some time gutting out long books that I think I should read or that I’ve started reading and have started putting off finishing, suddenly I read a couple of books that I rather enjoy in the evenings. Which is why the stack of books beside the chair tends toward the thicker books, and I’m just reading everything else while I’m still working on them…..

At any rate, this book has almost two stories in it. A murdered woman dressed as a mermaid washes up on the beach outside Dr. Sloan’s house, and it might be related to his first case in 1962. So the book flashes back to that case when Sloan was just a resident at the hospital, when his son the police office was a baby, and his wife was still alive. Sloan uncovers a series of murders of young nursing students who were moonlighting as babysitters–and maybe prostitutes. This flashback comprises much of the story, and when it is resolved, it doesn’t help Sloan with the contemporary (20 year ago now, though, old man) murder, which turns into murders, of course, until he finally gets the picture–and almost becomes the contemporary murderer’s next victim–and the resolution parallels the one in the past.

At any rate, the pacing moves the reader along, the writing has enough depth to be interesting, and the characterization has enough flourish to not overwhelm, but to give you a sense of who the players even if you haven’t seen the show (as I mentioned previously, I only caught bits of it when visiting my sainted mother). There are touches of humor–it was a Dick Van Dyke show, after all–and some in jokes that are there for real fans (at one point, Dr. Sloan thinks about what it would have been like to go into show business in 1962 and expected he would only merit a half hour sitcom–which Dick Van Dyke did have with The Dick Van Dyke Show).

So I enjoyed it, and maybe I will have enjoyed it enough to pick up others I have, which are stacked on the broken bookshelf (unfixed in 12 years, so don’t expect it to be replaced or fixed soon). So I know where they are. However: You can’t have yer pudding if you don’t eat yer meat. How can you have yer pudding if you don’t eat your meat? I think I would read books much faster if I didn’t feel the need to live up to my English and Philosophy degree and did not innundate myself with audio courses exciting me about the source materials.

I actually ordered this book because I’ve been noodling on writing something something about how the Agile manifesto destroyed software, and I was aware of this book, so I wanted to see if the author touched on it.

Oh, but no.

Here are the biggest reasons, according to Doctorow, about why everything has gone to pot:

• The breakdown of government regulation
• The weakness of labor unions
• Elon Musk
• Donald Trump

Doctorow’s focus is fairly narrow–he’s got a mad-on for the big tech platforms, formerly known as FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google). No, wait; Netflix doesn’t piss him off, so maybe it’s MAAAX if you use their current names and throw in X. When he talks about consolidation, he does mention poultry producers, and he mentions healthcare consolidation, but, man, does he focus on big tech mostly. He’s a former bigwig with the Electronics Frontier Foundation, so that’s his experience, I guess.

And his solutions are:

• More government regulation. Not the bad kind, like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, but the good kind, like the stuff the EU uses to extract money from American companies. And regulation to ensure safe spaces, nonharrassment, censorship, etc. And not by Congress, oh, no! Sometimes the Republicans control it. The rule should come from the executive agencies which will remain in place even when the political tide shifts.
• Tech workers should throw their wooden shoes into their companies’ processes when they, the employees, don’t like them. Or whatever the political cause they have, probably, since we’ve seen that happen in the past, but it’s not cited in the book (nor here, because I’m not a paid public intellectual, man).
• Unions. Which will bring prices down and quality up through wishful thinking.

Yeah, basically, that’s it. Break up the monopolies, I guess. He mentions Mastadon, which was briefly talked about as an alternative to Twitter after the devil Elon Musk took it over. The book was perhaps written to early to mention Bluesky instead. But it doesn’t seem that Musk ruined Twitter except renaming it “X.” I guess we should be thankful he did not create an unpronounceable glyph.

You can tell he’s real, man, because he swears in the text (and the book title!). And he wears his politics on his sleeve–calling people who voted for Trump cultists, etc., which really means the book is targetted to his side of the political aisle (his biggest fans!), so it’s not convincing. And because he’s describing a real problem, but has all the wrong answers to it (well, mostly the wrong answers), I wished that I had ordered the book in paperback so I could beat the hell out of it.

I mean, you get similar messaging from Substacks like Your Brain on Money, even down to the policy solutions, but without the political invective that prevents discussion and conversation.

I mean, one could argue, and were I public intellectual who made money from his glib fingertips instead of a backwater blogger who pays for the privilege of writing book reports nobody reads. However, since we’re both here (me and the cat), let’s look at some of the things that have also contributed to us old people saying things were better in the old days:

• Government regulation in every domain has made things worse. Whether it’s mandates for what health insurance has to cover or improved safety/efficiency in cars, lightbulbs, appliances, and seemingly everything you can buy.
• He does mention rent-seeking, and somehow he thinks more regulation will fix things–but large organizations that get the government to regulate industries by requiring credentials or licensing make it harder for people to become cosmeticians, sellers of real estate, and more.
• The aforementioned Agile Manifesto which had its heart in a right place but which lead to minimum viable products as final product and to rationalizing technical and business failures whose consequences are not only felt by the businesses but by the users who might have come to depend upon them.
• Importing large numbers of people and tech workers from non-Western countries whose mores and ideals do not necessarily match Western thoughts of quality or fair play, especially in the tech field, might lead to lesser outcomes.
• Changes in generational mindset, from the effects of having phones from toddlerhood to changes in the “education” system.
• The long-term impact of putting “diversity” on the same level, or higher than, competence in hiring.

Etc., etc.

Unions and government regulations aren’t going to fix it. If it is to be fixed, it will likely take a long time and a cultural shift which I’m not sure is possible any more.

(Oh, and I would be remiss not to self-referentially post other mentions on this blog: I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in 2019 and thought it was okay, and apparently, in 2010, a proto-clanker thought that I write like Doctorow.)

Oh, and another thing: I came up with the he is a Canadian who does not like hockey as a perjorative to apply to Doctorow, but apparently, he has become a British citizen (according to Wikipedia), and I’m pretty sure he mentions getting US citizenship in the book (and later says, “As a Canadian, I….”). So make of that what you will. Still, I’m going to use that to denigrate Canadians with whom I disagree in the future. “You have forgotten the face of your father” is the only thing I remember from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.

And! I’ve been kind of putting of going to the eye doctor because I think this time I really will need glasses for distances, and I’m afraid wearing glasses will make me look like a public intellectual of a certain type. Although, hopefully, a public intellectual who can do finger pushups like Bruce Lee. But not one-finger pushups because I do not have kung fu hands.

As I am deep in some thicker books which I am not really enthusiastic about reading, so I picked up this bit of pulp for enjoyment, kind of like having a bite of the sweet corn whilst eating the liver. I picked this book up in 2012 at Hooked on Books–a year later, I would really pad out my collection of the books in the Executionerverse, which includes the next title in the Able Team series, but who knows how long it will take me to get to it.

Able Team is three of the members of the Stony Farm team that helped Mack Bolan, the Executioner, out on occasion. Note that the Stony Farm series is a separate line in the Executionerverse, and who knows when I will get to them–since I finished the last of the Executioner books I accumulated in 2022, I’ve been slow to really delve into the men’s adventure paperbacks. Maybe I’ve gotten old and switched to Westerns. Anyway.

So Able Team is sent to El Salvador to hunt for a guy who has eluded their grasp in the United States, a big drug dealer or what have you, not part of the government but a powerful man with his own private army nevertheless. It’s a story ripped from today’s headlines, where today is almost forty years ago. The El Salvador civil war was going on. Is it still? Maybe. Central and South America, neh? Although they find help from various rebel groups with their own agenda, they find that the hard site is too hard for their small band, and the bad man has gone to a meet-up in Honduras with other similar fellows from across Central and South America who are looking to bring about a Fourth Reich. It’s a story ripped from today’s pulp fiction forty years ago.

You know, strangely enough, the plot is not necessarily that dated. Not that there’s a great swell of Naziism, but it never really went away in thrillers, did it?

At any rate, it’s an ensemble piece with characters who are almost ciphers, just bundles of characteristics, whose characterization, I guess, takes place over time. The book alludes to events in previous books, and the bad guy gets away again, which means I can guess what Able Team is doing in their next book. Which I’m not sure when I will get to. Unless, of course, I dawdle in the thick books stacked beside my chair for any length of time.