Author: Brian J. Noggle

I paid this book at Borders on the day it came out, but that will come as no surprise to those of you who know me or who have read this blog for the last couple of years. I have been a strident Parker partisan for about twenty years now (see also "Meeting Robert B. Parker").

This is the fifth Jesse Stone novel, and I don’t mind telling you, I like this series least. Jesse Stone comes across as less hard-boiled and more simpering….although he’s hard enough with the bad guys and bantery enough with his police force, his issues with his ex-wife and whatnot really take too much of the book. Any of the book is too much. Unfortunately, as the snippets of him with his therapist unfold in a linear arc beginning with the first book and only advance the character when taken over the course of the series and advance the character independently of the action within the book, which means they’re ultimately superfluous.

Jesse Stone, within this book, has to deal with sleazy sex and murder among the yachting class. He and his force plod along, encountering old standards Captain Healy and Rita Fiore and making a new acquaintance with a no-nonsense cop in Florida who’s now eligible for repeat encounters in any or all of Parker’s series or perhaps a series of her own (since the whole Helen Hunt/Sunny Randall thing seems to have gone by the wayside).

Still, I enjoyed the book and read it almost in a single sitting. Parker’s dialog-laden prose is not very dense, and he hits a lot of familiar tropes, so long time readers can almost skim.

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.