Author: Brian J. Noggle

This book is another Joe Pike book (like L.A. Reqiuem, I think). As you know, gentle reader, I have read and reported upon all of Robert Crais’s work on this blog. I started out liking him with his early stuff, but later got a little bored with the “World’s Greatest Detective” schtick of Elvis Cole. Crais must have, too, since he’s veered off series, mostly, with some of his other books, but many of them set in LA return to Cole and Pike.

This book centers on a bodyguard gig that Joe Pike, the Hawk to Cole’s Spenser, gets. He brings Elvis Cole into it, of course, but most of the book is from Pike’s point of view, with flashbacks interspersed and other characters getting their chapters to show their emotional evolution.

Pike has to guard a Paris Hilton knock off who’s in danger of getting knocked off after accidentally hitting a Mercedes on an after-club drive. The Mercedes contained two local real estate developers and a gopher for a South American cartel. The girl goes into protection, but someone inside is tipping off the bad guys, so a consultant goes way outside and gets Pike. Pike determines the best way to prevent anyone from harming the girl is to kill those persons first.

As a matter of course, lies are told to the protagonists and are investigated. The layers of the onion are peeled back, resulting in a climax that explains why I keep getting Google hits for robert crais republican.

A decent book, but Crais relies on a certain familiarity with Cole and Pike and might just play too much with shifting point of view.

I must have bought this paperback more than a decade ago, probably during college or immediately thereafter. It’s been hanging around, and I’ve even tried to start it once or twice before, but I stalled out before passing through the narrative frame (introduction of Marlow relating the story while on a boat in the Thames). This time, though, it was the time to read it, and I made it through both the novelette (“Heart of Darkness”), the short story (“The Secret Sharer”), and the introduction/critical materials (and in that order).

“Heart of Darkness” is only 120 pages, but it’s dense Victorian English. As some of you know, the movie Apocalypse Now was based on this work, and the three or four nights I spent reading it seem shorter than watching the movie. The plot varies in that Marlow is going to meet Kurtz, and Martin Sheen is going to kill Marlon Brando. So one almost wants to comment on the differences in the plot and how, thematically, the producers of the two works were talking differently and speculate as to why. But I have a real job, almost, so I won’t waste too much time on it. I did get some of the thematic points of man versus himself at the same time as man versus nature and man versus primitive man. More than half the story spends its time getting up river, and the appearance, retrieval, and death of Kurtz happen very quickly, so if I find a hardback copy of Conrad’s work, I would welcome an excuse to read it again.

“The Secret Sharer” is shorter and more straight forward, although the first pages set the scene and don’t jump right into the action. However, I kind of got the point here, too.

Then I read the critical essays and the introduction to learn a little more about Conrad and such. Wow, I hearkened back to my university days with the critical essays, which were people saying in nonfiction what the author meant in his fiction. The essays confirmed some of my takes on the stories, but my goodness. Somewhere in the world, people make a living explaining largely underread literature to each other and to their students. I am glad I didn’t stick in the academy.

As you know, I bought Tarnsman of Gor and this book so that I would have read the first pentagor of the John Norman fantasy series before I lit into the last half of the first 10. Here, I read #2, the Gor book for 1967 (although my copy is a later reprint with cover by Boris Vallejo).

In this, Tarl Cabot returns to Gor after seven years on Earth to find his home city of Ko-ro-ba destroyed and its citizens scattered–including his father and his love Talena. He also finds himself in unheralded armor, meaning he’s an outlaw. He ends up going to Tharna, a city where women rule, and leading an uprising.

The book is the weakest of the first five, clearly a setup for the longer story lines that took place after the first one succeeded. Still, it’s short and it’s still a neat piece of fantasy. I articulated to my wife that good fantasy is very different from suspense/crime/mystery fiction in that when you want to find out what’s coming next, you really don’t have any idea. These books are like that; they contain enough detail into the world that you know Norman isn’t making it up as he goes, but as you go, you’re learning something about the setting and the laws that govern it. You really can have a sense of wonder you don’t get from other kinds of fiction.

So I’m ready for the sixth book in the series one of these days.

Well, that’s what I get for having too many books on my shelves. I read the sequel to this book in February, completely unaware that I could have read them in order were I more organized.

This is the book that introduces the elite assassin Clara Rinker into Lucas Davenport’s life. An attorney hires her through an intermediary to kill the wife of the man she wants. When the intermediary tries to blackmail the high-powered attorney, she calls the assassin back. They develop a friendship based on being sociopaths who happen to be women, and that’s all spoiled when Davenport investigates the growing number of dead bodies.

The book is paced better than some Davenport novels, since it moves quickly throughout instead of a leisurely pace and then a hyperkinetic last hundred pages. However, the story does hinge on some coincidences and leaps of faith that made me go, hmmm. And contrary to what I said in previous book reports, there is a “hum” spelled out in this book, so the introduction of the aside utterances began and evolved gradually, I guess.

Still, a good enough read.

Of all the Neil Simon plays I’ve read (I Ought To Be In Pictures and Biloxi Blues recently), I like this one the best. It details two middle-aged (in 1974, this was 42 and 32) people coming out of their first marriages. The man is a widower still grieving for his wife, the woman a divorcée. Their friends are trying to set them up with people, and a chance meeting in a restaurant puts these two on a collision course of love. When the man dials her accidentally, it starts a whirlwind romance and marriage that aren’t as rosy as they could be, as the man still wants to hold onto his self-pity in losing his wife.

Unlike Biloxi Blues, there’s a unifying and identifiable theme here: the way middle-aged (in 1974) people deal with long-term relationships and the loss of the same. It’s billed as a comic play, but it’s definitely more serious than straight-ahead comedy. Also, I like the set designed by the playwright, which requires no scene changes even though it shows two scenes–the apartments of his and hers–and allows interaction via telephone. Smooth.

Side note: the original production used Judd Hirsch as the man character; I just read a complete episode guide for Judd Hirsch’s comedy television series (Taxi). Isn’t it funny how the mind imposes order on disorder (that is, my reading list and my wandering journey through the same)?

I bought this book for a dollar at a book fair this year because I liked Alex Karras as Mongo, and as Webster’s father, and in all his television and film roles; I wasn’t born when he played football (but man, they all became movie stars from that era, didn’t they? Alex Karras, Bubba Smith, Merlin Olsen). Still, I bought the book because it was written by Alex Karras with Douglas Graham. And I think it was mostly Alex Karras.

What an absurd little book it is. It reads like a polished high school creative writing piece, like something I would have written in the tenth grade. Seriously, it reminds me of something my creative writing class group came up with when we were doing the “stories in the round” schtick, where every row of students working as a group would write a scene into a short story and pass it to the next group for them to write a scene, and we would get a story from another group and write a scene. We created an absurd character and inserted him into all of the stories.

In this book, the character is the happy-go-lucky or lucky-go-happy son if immigrants named Lazlo. He’s eventually going to be on Tuesday Night Football, the also-ran behind ABC’s Monday Night Football. But the first half of the book deals with the youth of the precocious Lazlo, who became an accordion prodigy, lived through a slightly cracked but within the bounds of normalcy family, and ended up as the Jingle King. From an early age, he has always connected to commercials and loved jingles because the people depicted within commercials are all happy, and Lazlo associates that with happiness. He’s never anything bad to say about anybody and looks on the bright side of life.

A network executive catches him in his act in a Holiday Inn and decides to bring him to Chicago to be the third man in the booth with the play by play man, a veiled rendition of Howard Cosell, and an extremely randy color man. Thus, the second half of the book deals with the middle-aged young Lazlo coming to the big city, seeing what happens behind the scenes, learning the meaning of the University of Michigan fight song to Lance Allgood, and thwart the middle level executive and the professionals who think Lazlo will sink the sunken show.

But in the end, when Haywood’s ex-wife incapacitates him with drug-laced cookies, Lazlo has to step in and briefly save the day. And he does, at which point the authors realize they’ve reached novel length and end.

The prose wasn’t bad, the characters were obvious caricatures, and the plots outlandish. The book is billed as a comic novel, and while some of it is very, very mildly amusing, it doesn’t reach the level of Hiaasen or Barry. It was designed and packaged with the football fan who reads in mind, as the cover depicts not Lazlo, but Alex Karras sitting in a cartoon chair in a cartoon living room watching football.

But I had a good time reading it.