Author: Brian J. Noggle

I bought this book about a year and a half ago at Downtown Books in Milwaukee for $3.95. I don’t know why I was looking for an almost scholarly survey of private eye fiction, but I bought it.

As I mentioned, this book surveys the evolution of the private eye character within American fiction from its origin in the pulps through the middle 1980s (when the book was published). It identifies certain eras (early pulps, post WWII detectives, sixties touchy-feely detectives, and modern detectives) and then identifies certain seminal authors and their most famous or influential creations. The book includes Raymond Chandler, Robert B. Parker, Ross MacDonald, Brett Halliday, Mickey Spillane, and Richard S. Prather among the obvious. I’ve read books from each of these and probably work from among the others in the list. Oddly enough, these sorts of summary books not only inspire me to read more of these authors, but also to write more so I can hopefully get included in some of these volumes in the future. If I’m lucky.

(As for inside baseball, Roger L. Simon is only mentioned in this book when the author notes that a character is not as Jewish as Moses Wine. Simon and Wine do, however, make up a large portion of Sons of Sam Spade: The Private-Eye Novel in the 70s, which I read in college when I should have been attending Biology 001.)

I got this book as a Christmas gift, and as I was looking for a quick read in my recent spate of nonfiction, so I picked it out of my hundreds of volumes that I have yet to read. It was a quick read.

I won’t go into too much depth with the book, as it doesn’t go much into depth itself. Of course, it’s preaching to the seminary here with its indictment of entire classifications of people whose individual goals counter the cohesion of our country for no real purpose except to aggrandize the individuals. It’s not a creative indemnification of the collective, but rather the buzzards shrieking that distracts a weakened nation.

Although he became a conservative pin-up author for Bias and Arrogance, Goldberg doesn’t just identify liberals, nor does he fall into pinning the tail on liberals because they’re liberals. He identifies destructive ideas and people who champion them, and I agreed with many of his selections.

So it’s a good book for a couple bucks, and it’s a great book for nothing. Just keep in mind you’re getting a list book and not a deep analysis of ideas, politics, or society.

On my second attempt, I made it through this book by blogger Roger L. Simon. Of course, the book was written in 1979, before blogs. As some of you long-time readers know, I bought a number of the Moses Wine iBooks reissues in November 2004 and I read the two books (The Big Fix and The Lost Coast) in the first week I owned them. Then I tried Peking Duck. And it took me over a year to try it again.

The book centers on a trip Moses Wine takes to China. A liberal by philosophy, Wine has some sympathy and reverence for the Chinese Communists and their noble ideals. As he’s belonged to a Chinese friendship society to please his aunt, he’s invited on her tour of China. While in China, a crime occurs, and he’s the one who has to solve the mystery and set the things aright, to make the world safe for Chinese communism.

One of my complaints with this book is the same as with The Big Fix: We get a complete enumeration of names and professions for the people on the trip with Moses Wine, but for the most part, they remain names and professions, and I couldn’t keep many of them straight. Which wasn’t too important, as they’re just scenery. The book goes at length to describe the trip to China, the Chinese cities, and the Chinese line on communism in the late 1970s. As a matter of fact, it reads more like a fictional, sympathetically political travelogue. On page 120 or so, the crime finally occurs, and I knew who did it immediately.

So the book didn’t really hold me in any suspense, nor did I really enjoy it all that much. However, I did make it through it this time. Roger L. Simon was nominated for an Academy Award for a screen play, and I think his strength must lie in that medium.

Like the Lupica book, I bought this book at Barnes and Noble (Ladue) off of its clearance table for $1.00. I mean, if I don’t burn those points off of the card, the card management company will gladly do so for a certain number of cents every ten days until such time as they have to garnish my wages for the overage. So it’s desperation, coupled with the twin desires of acquiring trivia knowledge and preparing for a historical perspective when the Torino Olympics start, I dove into the book.

It’s a series of top ten lists which include different athletes and incidents within the past Olympics, sliced and diced by topic. Unfortunately, that’s led to some repetition in the records. Also. as I read, I found that the trivia infusion only re-inforced the information I’d experienced. That Zola Budd was responsible for Decker’s loss in some track event in 1984….Man, the number of times I retyped the decade digit indicates how powerful that bit of trivia is, so I better not indicate that I know how South African Zola Budd got to compete anyway, or else I’ll be in jeopardy the next time the North Side Mind Flayers step into a St. Louis Trivia night.

The book’s major flaw is that it repeats anecdotes in different sections as the author tried to leverage limited material into more pages. For example, we read about the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding incident in two chapters. One anecdote focuses on Kerrigan and one on Harding. This retreading of material gives one the idea that the author was indeed stretching to make his limited sources pay off. Hey, as a writer, I can’t knock it, but as a reader, I can sure mock it.