Author: Brian J. Noggle

I am not sure where I picked this book up; it is not included in a Good Book Hunting post, so I might have gotten it before I started them, or I might have gotten it at a garage sale where the small number of books I bought did not warrant a photo and comment. At any rate, I will not try to calculate how long has passed since I first read this book, but it was probably longer than The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I went through my real Gregory McDonald phase in middle school and high school where I borrowed the books from the Community Library. Although I reckon I could have read it at college. Or even later; it’s entirely possible I will find the book already in the read books section of the library when I try again to organize it.

So this is the third of the Inspector Flynn books. Flynn is a Boston homicide detective, but he gets called away a lot on special cases (presumably, the preceding two books and maybe Confess, Fletch where he also appears). He is awakened in the middle of the night by a police commissioner who instructs him to drive to a remote location and tell no one. And to come alone. So of course Flynn brings his sidekick Cocky, a medically retired policeman, and they discover that the commissioner is the guest of a secretive Rod and Gun Club where wealthy and powerful men come together to re-enact boarding school traditions and to be weird. One of their members has been shot and killed, and they have moved the body to a local motel that poses as the front for their two-thousand-acre retreat. They’ve brought Flynn in to discreetly investigate, but stymie him when other members start dying.

The cover says that it’s a novel with murder, and I think the main theme of the book is poking at the power brokers of the world or caricatures thereof. Amongst the club members who are suspects (and sometimes victims), we have a judge who wears a dress and makeup when at the lodge; a Senator who drinks heavily all day and all night; a nudist who wears nothing; and cold players determining the fate of companies owned by other members. Given the setting (an isolated hunting lodge) and its language/style, it must have seemed like quite a throwback to Agatha Christie and other protocozies with an American Poirot minus the facial hair investigating.

So it winds up within its 198 pages with perhaps not so much as a true whodunit–or maybe I just did not see the clues which in retrospect pointed to the killer because I’m not really into that genre these days and am out of practice for not so much clues in the story but clues in the writing.

At any rate, it was okay. I wonder how much my tastes have changed and evolved from when I was in the 1980s and limited to what the Community Library had in abundance. I am pretty sure I read a number of Dell Shannon/Elizabeth Linnington books back then and, well, read more than one (I read one, Blood Count, earlier this year and was pretty disappointed). I have to wonder what I would think of Fletch books now (I read three in the omnibus Fletch Forever, in 2011). I haven’t read a pile of McDonald since these book reports began which probably testifies to the memories my cells have about what I think about McDonald these days. Coupled with the fact that you don’t see many of his books in the wild any more–at least not where I browse fiction, which is the smaller library book sales predominated by recent thrillers and Westerns. But the peak of McDonald’s sales were in the 1980s, and those who bought him originally have emptied their houses long ago.

It almost seem like fait accompli that I would read this book after listening to the audiocourse The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin during a long car ride in early October. But I spotted the Classics Club edition and not the Harvard Classics edition that I bought in in 2020 when I assigned it to my boys to read during their long, long vacation from in-person classes. I’m not sure either of them actually read it, but the oldest has been looking for Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations which I also got in cheap editions for the boys about that time as well. Wait, that’s digressing.

So: Whereas the audiocourse was a long, full biography on Benjamin Franklin, Franklin wrote his actual autobiography in chunks. Part of it he wrote when he was young and was trying to capture what it was to be on his way up; the second part was written decades later when he was an accomplished businessman and influencer in Pennsylvania; and the last part of it was assembled from some notes after Franklin’s death. So this book is not the Director’s Cut. Or maybe it is. But it’s more than an autobiography as it gave some others time to do a bit of hagiography was well.

Still, it’s an amazing story: Franklin, born into a very large family, eventually becomes apprenticed to his brother a printer, but he breaks his apprenticeship and goes on the run from Boston to Philadelphia where he becomes a printer, eventually a writer and owner of a printshop, and he moves and shakes with the important men in the colony (but not necessarily the decendents of Penn who really owned the place). He makes the most of the opportunities he gets and speaks up on the virtue of industriousness (but, as we know from the audiocourse, although he described the virtues he espoused, he never completed The Art of Virtue). The autobiography, as I have mentioned, focuses mostly on his early life and mostly the business life as that is the example he was hoping to set. When get to page 246 of 300, we’re at 1756. His role in the events leading up to the American Revolution, the Revolution, his ambassadorship after, and his brief retirement get almost a page for each year depicted. Of course, this last was the bit the least assembled and polished by Franklin, and it’s at a high level summary. But, still, what a life.

Given my current position, hammering on the theme of personal industry was inspirational. My favorite aunt once said I had hustle because I had a full time job, a sideline of selling estate sale finds on Ebay, and thoughts of running a vending machine route or video game route. I somehow lost a bit of that ambition, probably after having a blog that did not turn profitable, publishing books which have not earned enough to cover the cost of the first book’s professional cover, trying to write a couple of software applications but getting stumped at certain points and doubting anyone would use them anyway, putting together a collection of fine fashion which has not sold a single t-shirt except to myself, and other bits of “hustle” that did not actually pay out. I have some ideas for other sidelines, but I’m not sure that they would pay out more than they cost, and certainly would unlikely pay me much in net revenue. But Franklin’s example leads me to thing maybe I should.

I read this book once before, probably in my college years–I think it was required for a class, but I’m not sure which one it would have been. I really need my transcripts to jog my memory of what exactly I took in that collection of English classes which was almost too many credits in one discipline to allow me to graduate. No, really.

At any rate, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. The text is very approachable, although the sentences are longer than you would get in a Don Pendleton paperback or a Jeff Kinney book designed to get kids to read. But I’ve found that it’s easier to read than English prose from the same period. And a pleasure to read as well. I’ll have to read this again, probably when I find the copy which I bought in 2020 or one of the cheap copies I bought for my boys.

And I’m going to just stop trying to guess what the longest time between re-reads is when I re-read a book. I mean, this book is, what, thirty years give or take? A while, indeed.

Ah, gentle reader, this certainly might be the most I’ve paid for a reading book so far. I mean, maybe I spent a similar amount on Homage to Catalonia when I bought it last year or The Gallic and Civil Wars when I bought it in 2014. But since I didn’t write down the exact price I paid for the books (and I’m too lazy to dig out the receipts because of course I still have them), I will just say that this is the most expensive set of books I’ve ever bought for reading since I backed the publication on Kickstarter for $125 (back in the days when I had a job and spent money on things like this and CDs by bands I’d only seen in a single YouTube video). To date, this is the only Kickstarter project I’ve backed. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

So, you say, “What is it?” Well, it is a long (623 pages including index) semi-scholarly look at the history of text-based games. It has a bit of a roll-up chapter leading to 1971, and then it has a chapter that gives a summary of the history of each decade (1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s). It then selects a single game from each year in each decade and gives a well-researched and written essay on that game not unlike you’d find on a Substack like The Lake of Lerna or The Librarian of Calaeno when they delve into popular culture or something you might have found on DamnInteresting.com back in the day (it looks like that site is still around, albeit more into podcasting these days–as you might remember, gentle reader, I tried out for that site in 2006). The essays touch upon the history of companies working in the space (Infocom, natch, but a couple of others), the technologies behind them (not only in discussing at a high level the parsers and whatnot but also including some sample code or data file extracts), and some of the people behind the games.

So, heck, yeah, it was quite a nostalgia kick. For a while. Because I played a number of the games listed in the first two or three decades if you include things ported to the Commodore 64 (I had a Commodore 128, gentle reader, but I downloaded a lot of things from BBSes for the Commodore 64).

I mean, I played Eliza. I played Super Star Trek. I played many Infocom titles–I still have Zork, Zork II, Suspended, and Deadline not in the original packaging but later folder packages. I played TradeWars 2001 on several WWIV BBSes (and I actually have downloaded the source code for TradeWars 2002 and have it somewhere around here). The latest of the games listed by name (but not covered in depth) that I played would have been Gemstone Warrior 3 around 1997–I remember introducing it to a friend from the print shop at the time, and he got into it, but his dialup access was long distance, so it amongst other things led to his declaring bankruptcy sometime shortly thereafter. After that, I didn’t really play games but the Civilization series past that (and up to now, as you know).

But:

One, as text games faded from the forefront, it seems to have become more of a community, with its proponents, academics, and development of games to satisfy the community more than the public. Many of the selections in this book are explicated more because they’re interesting to someone steeped in the culture of text games. Kind of like how art criticism and art itself in many cases has turned inward, pleasing artists and critics more than the public at large. It doesn’t make the essays about the games less interesting per se but it does make one wonder. Often, I read two or three chapters/years of essays in this vein and then got a chapter about an interesting game that was interesting to read about in itself.

Second, well, the book does have its political moments. I mean, it does talk a lot and choose several queer games (his word as he is academically minded), and it does celebrate/elevate trans and nonbinary representation. It made me muse about the nature of outsider community–in my day (sonny), playing on computers and reading comic books and science fiction and fantasy were an outsider community, whereas today, that is mainstream pop culture–so do people who consider themselves outsiders gravitate toward the current self-reinforcing outsider communities that trans and nonbinary life (and, somehow, certain political viewpoints which are almost 50% of the electorate apparently)? That’s outside the scope of this book and this blog. But back to the actual political elements: It gets all the way to 1985’s chapter on Infocom’s A Mind Forever Voyaging before slagging on Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump (president when the book was written, and soon to be president again). And not just slagging, but vituperating. And we get more sucker punch vituperation in the chapter on AI Dungeon because Trump is a lying liar who lies!!!!! (my words, but the spirit is there). For the most part, the book is even-tempered in its disposition, but the little political slaps are there, unfortunately. Also, GamerGate gets a couple of relitigations from the defense of the gamewriter who slept with game reviewers (or something), although that’s not the crux of the matter as it’s presented: it’s mouthbreathers who buy games versus the community (of text game writers and perhaps only those who think correctly).

One does wonder, though, if the author was just too darn young to realize how much Hitler George W. Bush was, too. Is it just me, or does he get overlooked in the pantheon of the worst presidents EVAR!!!!? Millenials filling the Internet are too young to remember, I guess.

Overall, though, those two bits only slightly diminished my enjoyment of the book, although I have to admit that I really got more out of the earlier years where I had first hand experience of the games. Heck, I can even see in my mind’s eye the advertisements for some of them. I could probably re-read the ads and the reviews in my stash of mid-to-late 1980s Commodore magazines (Run and Power Play which would become Commodore Magazine and Ahoy! and maybe Compute’s Gazette). I flagged a sidebar note about Little Computer People–I still have a copy with Bradley, my Little Computer Person, on it. I flagged his mention of a book called Pilgrim in the Microworld by David Sudnow, a book about a guy who got obsessed with the Atari game Breakout!. Man, I picked that up used or remaindered around 1990 and read it. When the book was less than 10 years old (I was there, Gandalf). But it seemed twee to me at the time because technology had changed so much in that decade.

As I got in on a mid or upper tier of the Kickstarter, I got a shorter companion volume entitled 50 Years of Text Games: Further Explorations which has another couple of games called out and brief essays on some text-adjacent game genres. It’s only 57 pages including a timeline of text adventure games at the end, but it’s a nice contiuation of the book. And I counted it as a whole book in my annual total (82 so far, and I’m feeling good–I might make it all the way if I start ripping through some poetry collections).

At any rate, a nice nostalgia trip despite clear signs that the author would vigorously and probably unkindly disagree with my political views.

And it really makes me want to unbox one of my Commodore 64s and run through some of these games that I was not patient enough to appreciate when I was fourteen. Only to discover that I am probably still not patient enough for Suspended.

I bought this book in Davenport, Iowa, last month, and the author signed it for me. He was the only author at a cybersecurity convention, and his table took the whole end of the single cul-de-sac of the vendor area. He has a lot of books available, including three in this series, and several other multi-volume series to choose from and a couple of one-offs. That many quells my temptation to buy one of each, so I bought the first two in a couple of series and a one-off Western. I was tempted to buy a children’s book, briefly, but I remembered then with a start that my children are too old for children’s books. As they’re old enough to carry phones to high school and college now (what?), they’re too old for books as all their handheld entertainment comes from what tech companies feed them.

So: I picked this book up first because it has a mystery element to it. A mining company re-opens a mine three years after an accident claimed the lives of all the miners in a particular sector. Because it’s a profitable mine, they reopen it with some questions in place and with maybe a ghost in the old sector. The book starts with a new miner, Justin, coming to the planet with his friend Keontae. Justin vomits on re-entry, embarrassing himself in front of an attractive woman and the mine’s bully and his buddies.

Meanwhile, strange things are afoot at the Circle K. A hacker is lured into the mine and disappears. When Justin is out of his quarters at night, a mysterious green light leads him into the mines and the mysterious Sector 6 which is still closed. And the cold, half-cyborg (can one be half-cyborg? One is either a cyborg or not, I guess) a FULL cyborg scientist who was the only survivor three years ago brings Justin into a conspiracy. And Justin cannot keep from running afoul of security for the mining corporation and the bullies at the mine.

So the book has a lot of interesting plot getting set up, and then….

Well, I won’t be ordering the next two in the series.

The writing is a bit…. sterile, I guess. It’s not bad writing. It’s not full of grammar errors or misspellings or anything, but it lacks depth and soul.

I had been reading a book about text games for a while when I started this book, so I perhaps too easily compared the first part of the book to a text adventure, with the way it mapped out the mining complex and described entrances and exits and things that might be useful (the last is probably more in how I was reading the book after weeks of reading about text adventures). The main character, Justin, is a bit of a cipher–we don’t know from where he’s coming and going, and the plot carries him along as he mostly follows the mysterious light or follows the actions or guidance of others (NPCs) in the book. About half way through the book, though, it turns from slow text adventure mapping and buildup to watching someone else’s Twitch stream of a Doom knock-off. We have a party led by space marines but which includes the main character (now with a cybernetic arm), a few of the named miners with a couple sentences’ of characterization, the CEO of the corporation who was compelled to come in person to the mine, a couple members of corporate security, and the CEO’s body guard go marching through ranks of bloodthirsty mutated corporate minions and murderous androids. A couple, and that is more than one twists of family melodrama, too, amidst all the gore and finis via a deus ex machina whose twist I’d spotted early on. And beyond the finis a bit of a…. well, not cliffhanger, but a tip to the mystery and the twist that might come in the next book.

The author signed it “Read this with the lights on!” along with Joshua 1: 5-9 (in which God tells Joshua to be courageous). To be honest, it was not that suspenseful. Oh, and the last line is:

And Justin never saw her again.

Easy, son. You’re not Raymond Chandler. None of us is.

So: I mean, it’s okay. But too much influenced by video games and related cinema. The third person narration doesn’t give us a lot of depth to any of the characters.

The book is seven years old; I’m not sure where it came in this writer’s cannon-like canon (best I can tell from his bio is that he started around 2009 and by 2019 had about ten books, so it’s not that early). Still, he’s clearly comfortable in writing and his output, so who am I to criticize? Given that he looks to work the con circuit in the Midwest, I might run into him again sometime. And perhaps I’ll pick up the next book in the series.

Like Bad Monkey, I got this book down in Clever in June, and I read them back to back, which is just as well as they feature the same characters. Well, a couple of them.

In this one, the agent of a cable television star who stars in a knock off of Duck Dynasty is in the keys to perform at a comedy club. But he’s an accordian player from Milwaukee (well, Whitefish Bay) only playing a redneck on television, and when his agent is accidentally kidnapped when a woman rear-ends his car whilst shaving her bikini area (we discover where the title comes from very early), the television star causes a near riot with, erm, jokes about gays and disfavored colloquialisms for black people in a club featuring many black gay men. So he, the television star, goes into hiding, and the agent is eventually helped out by the Razor Girl, but a big fan of the television star who wants to be more bigoted than his redneck hero kills a swarthy fellow on the tourist tram and ends up kidnapping his hero to become his friend. Meanwhile, there are some subplots about mobsters and recycled sand scams. Andrew Yancy’s girlfriend the coroner-turned-ER doctor flies to Europe to leave him behind. Yancy investigates the situation while trying to keep an attorney who is addicted to the hazardous aphrodisiac deodorant that he’s running television ads for class action lawsuits from building on the lot next to his house.

Again, a crash of various threads, characters, and zany situations where the mystery is solved in the middle of the book and the rest of it is resolution amongst the whacky characters.

Amusing; not a waste of time, but not high literature, and it has not overtaken in my heart the things I’ve read of his long ago from long ago.

But I know what you’re wondering:

• Trump? Yes, of course, but only a mention that someone has Trumpish lips. This book might have been written before he ran for president or during. Not when he somehow won.
• The baddest word? I thought that Hiaasen had given it up because he uses the N-word early in the book, but the redneck antagonist does, in fact, invoke the whole badness.

He has a later book, but it does not appear to be a Yancy title.

Apparently, Bad Monkey was turned into a television series just this fall and stars Vince Vaughn as Yancy. So it might be worth a watch when it comes out on DVD. Which is likely never, as most streaming does not.

After reading The Downhill Lie, Hiaasen’s nonfiction golf book, I gave myself permission to read this book, a recent acquisition. I have read many, many fine Hiaasen books in the past (see also Skinny Dip, Strip Tease, Nature Girl, Lucky You, Stormy Weather, Basket Case, and even the YA novel Hoot). Still, this is a 21st century book, so I was looking for a sucker punch, but the book came during the holy interregnum of the Obama administration, so none was forthcoming (spoiler alert!).

At any rate, the story focuses on Andrew Yancy, a former police detective in the Florida Keys who has been busted from the force for publicly sodomizing with a cordless handheld vacuim the husband of a woman with whom Yancy was having an affair. His allies on the force help to get him a food inspector gig which he talks reluctantly. A tourist on a fishing charter catches the arm of a swindler about to be taken down for a Medicare scam, and Yancy is given the job of pawning it and the case off on the Miami police. He does not succeed and pursues a murder investigation on his own time. Was it the wife and her mystery man? Meanwhile, Yancy is trying to scare off a real estate speculator who has bought the lot next to his and wants to build a large home which will block Yancy’s view. Also, he is trying to woo the medical examiner in Miami while trying to determine what to do with the woman with whom he is having an affair, whom he learns is a fugitive teacher who seduced a student fifteen years ago. Oh, and someone is building a resort on a Bahaman island, the homestead of a simple fisherman who won the titular bad monkey and who commissions the local woodoo woman to curse the resort builder.

All these threads come together, of course. The book makes the Big Reveal about half way through the book, and then we get another half where the characters deal with the ramifications of the big reveal and a gradual denouement that probably goes on a little too long.

But you’re not reading the book for the plot, per se. Instead, you’re reading the book for the characters and the zany situations and…. Well, I was kinda meh. Yancy’s a bit of a slacker, and he smokes a lot of pot, and one wonders how it is he gets these attractive women to throw themselves at him. And it might have a couple too many situations and characters to be truly compelling. Or maybe I’ve outgrown Hiaasen and Dave Barry (maybe not–my review for The History of the Millennium (So Far) last year doesn’t indicate meh, but perhaps it was the nostalgia for a simpler time–2008–talking).

Two things:

• Does Trump make an appearance? You betcha! This is a pre-presidency book, though, so it’s not hateful. A character says:
  

  “Showin’ off is all. He said he come into serious money, but that could mean he won eighty-five bucks on the Lotto scratch-off. Now all of a sudden he is Donald fucking Trump.”

• The baddest word appears. This came out in the first year of the second Obamanency, which is far later than you find it in other writers. In the dark age of the 20th century, as in this book, it appears to show how backward the person using it is, but that petered out somewhere around 2005 in most books, or at least most books I’ve read after that (which is not that many, I admit). But it was noticeable mostly for the copyright date of the book.

Just things you can comment on and notice about books and how just the asides can date them. Or not.

So the book was all right. It didn’t drive me away from Hiaasen, but it looks as though I’ve read most of his ouevre already anyway.

Oh, and the titular monkey? I’m really not sure why he got the title slot, honestly. Perhaps Hiaasen had bigger plans for him.