Author: Brian J. Noggle

This represented the rarest pleasure: An Ed McBain book that I hadn’t read before. I’ve read most of the 1980s/1990s/2000s Ed McBain books more than once. So even if I don’t recognize the title, a moment will come when I’m reading the book that I’ll click into recognition. And I’ll keep reading the book because I like Ed McBain.

This book, again, travels to the 87th Precinct, where a new black mayor has been elected. Of course, this would be the beginning of the Dinkins era in New York. You remember that, don’t you? No? Well, Giuliani sort of cleaned the town up and made the city safe enough that it could worry about banning smoking and trans fats. So when I read these books, I tie them to New York history of the time.

The book centers on a woman who has two murder attempts on her life. She goes to the police, and they track down the attempted murderer–her husband’s ex driver. In the meantime, the husband has hired an out-of-town private detective to protect her. But when the attempted murderer is murdered, the plot thickens. It looks like the husband might have hired the driver to kill his wife, but if he did, why did he hire an out-of-town private detective to protect her? We all see where it’s going, and I stayed on to watch it unfold under the masterful direction of Mr. McBain. I almost got the twist at the end, too.

Meanwhile, Kling has broken up with someone, so we know where the book fits in the sequence from that, and Steve Carella’s father’s murderer is brought to trial, so we know where it fits in the sequence from that. So even though I hadn’t read this particular volume, I still felt in touch with the master narrative.

Frankly, it’s encouraging to find a McBain book I didn’t read before; it means that not everything on my to-read shelves of known quality is a rerun.

In July (2006), I read In Someone’s Shadow to my son. Since then, we’ve been working on the innumerable inscrutable complete works of Emily Dickinson. So, to give him a break after a hundred or so, I read him this collection. Most of it, anyway.

Compared to Dickinson, McKuen is a breeze to read. I’ve done my share of coffee shop open mikes, so I’m familiar with the flavor of easy, first person emotional free verse. I understand the line breaks and can read them aloud with the self-conscious and self-important air of the turtle-necked hipster. That doesn’t make the poetry any better. As a matter of fact, it detracts.

Overall, although many of Dickinson’s pieces are riven with weird capitals, unfathomable line breaks, and often run to the simplistic, they’re built on imagery often whereas McKuen’s, like other poems by free versers of the era and all juvenile journaler poets moving into the English programs of today, rely upon the biographical poet narrator saying I did this or I did that or I loved you or I served in Korea. Sure, it’s cathartic for the poet narrator and it can speak to a subset of people who share your experiences directly, but the words don’t evoke the emotion through imagery. They report it in the idiom of the day.

Ultimately, it explains why so many Rod McKuen books are available at book fairs, I suppose.

(Oh, my, and I bought so many volumes at the Carondolet Y Book Fair this year. It’s going to be a long year of poetry-reading, gentle reader.)

No doubt, I picked this book up because I thought it was a compendium of true cases (back in the old days, I hoped to write for DamnInteresting.com and expected I would need constant pointers to interesting cases). But, no, this book is a collection of short fiction collected from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and was edited by the Director of Marketing for those two brands. Trying to extend the brand, you see, into some hardcover publishing dollars since Ellery Queen aren’t churning out the books like they used to.

The anthology collects its stories from a number of decades, so some seem dated (not that I disprove), but others are remarkably contemporary. As you might have noticed, gentle reader, I’ve returned to a fondness for short fiction because it lends itself to easy truncation of a night’s reading when I need to go to bed. Forgive me that I don’t enumerate the stories here, but I’m lazy. Overall, the book was entertaining and short and worth the buck I paid for it. There you go.

I bought this book for a buck at some book fair this year. I don’t think I’ve read any Mike Royko since high school. Many people of Internet age won’t know who Royko is, as they’re steeped in Internet stars like James Lileks, Mark Steyn, Andrew Sullivan, and whatnot. The era of the mega columnist, with a string of syndication papers and inane commentary, left behind those like Royko, who seemed more of a Metro columnist than a humorist or a commentariat.

I mean, who does this any more? Here in St. Louis, there’s Bill McClellan and the black guy. I don’t know if either of them has written a book, but I tell you something, in 20 years, I won’t have ever gotten a copy and I won’t read it with pleasure.

Sure, Royko is what some would call a bleeding heart. But it’s a very communitarian liberalism. He came from humble origins and kept the blue collar edge in his writing. I can sympathize with blue collar origins in a rust belt city. So although he obviously doesn’t like Ronald Reagan, he doesn’t alienate readers who perhaps don’t.

This was Royko’s last collection published in his lifetime. Man, if I had known that would have read this with a sad, sepia overtone.

Recommend it? Yes. Read more Royko. He’s amusing, short, and often right even when he’s left.

Heather gave me this book for Christmas along with a number of earlier Hiaasen novels because she knew that I enjoyed (see also Strip Tease, Skinny Dip, and Basket Case).

This book, however, suffers from the same slow start that stifled Strip Tease. Unfortunately, it has a slow middle and a slow end, too. Whereas the normal whacky Hiaasen characters come out of the Florida backwoods to amuse, ultimately, interact. We have a half Seminole on the run from his own demons and the ghost of an unfortunate tourist whose body he sunk in the swamp; a philandering ne’er-do-well telemarketing salesman and the mistress who’s above him; an activist and off-kilter single mother seeking revenge against the telemarketer for interrupting her dinner; a lecherous man lusting for the single mother; the ex-husband of the single mother; a private detective trailing the telemarketer; and so on.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t have a real central plot; instead, we’re following along a set of subplots that will intersect on a small Florida key. When we finally got the whole crew onto the key, I thought it would be a quick resolution, but I still had 100 pages left, and I was disappointed.

The book isn’t Hiaasen’s best, and it’s definitely the weakest of the four books I’ve read so far. Heather was disappointed at my disappointment, but I tried to reassure her that one book had to be the worst. I hope this one was.