Author: Brian J. Noggle

I mentioned when I read Viets’ collections of columns from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Urban Affairs and Viets Guide to Sex, Travel, and Anything Else That Will Sell This Book in 2009 and 2010 respectively) that I would delve into her fiction. Well, I read both books after we moved from Old Trees to Nogglestead, and I had not seen any of Viets’ fiction until the Lutherans for Life garage sale in 2017. I don’t tend to hang about in the mystery sections of book stores or book sales much these days, so it would have to be a garage sale for me to find them.

Also, I clearly did not jump right into the book six years ago. But it seemed a thing to read between chapters/sections of Our Oriental Heritage.

This book is the 13th entry (of 15) in Viets’ Dead-End Job Mysteries. Which means that the series has a lot of business in it already, and that takes up a good portion of the book.

The main mystery revolves around the purebred kitten of a socialite who shares custody of said cat with her husband. The kitten is kidnapped, or Catnapped! as the title would have it. The main character, Helen Hawthorne, and her husband are private investigators engaged to find the kitten. They find the ex-husband murdered, and the socialite is arrested. Meanwhile, the ex-husband of the owner of their apartment building shows up after thirty years of shacking up with another woman–he wants to reconcile, but she most assuredly does not. When he winds up dead, she, too, is arrested for the murder.

So we have two or three crimes that the duo investigates. It took me a while to get into it–as you know, gentle reader, despite this being the second cozy I’ve read this year (Murder, She Wrote: The Maine Mutiny being the first for the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge), they’re not my bag.

The particular schtick of this series is that Helen Hawthorne had been on the run from an ex-husband in St. Louis, so she takes low skill jobs for cash. According to legend (and by legend, I mean Wikipedia), Viets actually did these jobs before writing about them. By the 13th book in the series, the reason for the schtick–the ex-husband–was a problem solved in an earlier book, so Hawthorne has to go undercover as an assistant cat groomer to get close to a subject and to show us how grooming and cat show exhibiting goes on.

The other bit of series business that takes up a lot of real estate in the book is the group of people who live at the apartment building. They get together every night to watch the sun go down, and they interact a bunch. It does lead up to the third mystery, who poisoned the ex-husband, but it also fills a lot of pages with socializing and chitchat.

Most people don’t start series toward the end (or just the latest, perhaps), but it does detract a bit from the stand-aloneness of each novel. I know I’ve mentioned it before, and it’s a line that authors have to walk between serving their long-time readers who want these elements of the book and those just looking for a mystery. This book goes a bit far in the series business.

At any rate, I liked it well enough that I’ll pick up more Viets books when I run across them, and maybe I’ll even read them six years later.

I got this book at ABC Books in June at the author’s book signing.

When I bought the book, the author described the short stories as O. Henry mixed with The Twilight Zone. As you might recollect, gentle reader, I read The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia in 2018 and have since accumulated a number of DVDs with episodes on them (and I’ve watched a few). I’ve always found its speculative fiction inspirational in giving me ideas for my own writing, so I looked forward to this book. I bought the author’s first two books of short fiction, and she said she had enough ideas mapped out for another eight or nine books in a similar vein.

The book collects 42 stories in roughly 420 pages, so about ten pages per, more or less. Genres include fantasy, horror, and science fiction along with some that are more speculative than genre-specific. They’re pretty well-written and well-executed for the most part, with interesting characters built with good prose. But….

The O. Henry part rears its head in that most of the stories are structured with that well-crafted beginning of the story that ends on the twist ending in the last sentence, paragraph, or couple of paragraphs. Characters and their situations are built up and then DUN DUN DUN! The demons are loosed upon the world. Or DUN DUN DUN! They were the aliens visiting Earth. Or DUN DUN DUN! The aliens sucked their brains out through their noses!

So it’s a book best taken in sips and not one to read all the way through all at once, as that will highlight how the stories have very similar structures and DUN DUN DUNs. As I said, well-written but formulaic in its own way, and many of the stories could use a little more denouement and maybe not have all of the sympathetic heroes and heroines getting killed by shapeshifting alien serial killers. Once in a while, it would be nice if the plucky small town girl would maybe at least survive.

I got this book two years ago at ABC Books, and it stayed on the side table for browsing during football games in 2021 and 2022, but I didn’t make it through them, mostly because I kind of gave up on browsing through books during the football games. I’m in a bit of a spot, gentle reader, as I have read fewer than 40 books so far this year, and I’ve always counted on the football browsing to make up some ground in my annual quest for 100 books read at the end of the year kind of like how churches expect to make up an outsized portion of their budgets during Christmas week. Since I gave up the habit of browsing during football games, and we’ve given up any television provider that carries football games, I won’t be doing much browsing at all in the autumn and winter.

At any rate, onto Earth Games. Well, now, this might be Grandmother Poetry: The Next Generation. Blurbs on the back come from grandchildren, and one of them indicates Grandma Ruth is 80. My Internet research (a quick search) found an obituary that aligns with that, so Ruth Loring might well have been a grandmother when these poems came out.

However, unlike the Grandmother poetry that I read from earlier eras, these poems do not often deal with home, family, and Jesus nor do they end with rhymes. Instead, they read more like the instapoetry of Rupi Kaur and Pierre Alex Jeanty in having short lines, stream of consciousness, and abstractions rather than images.

Here’s a taste:

Zapped

Round and round and round I go
my life an endless zero
forever o-ing money.
Oh oh oh!
Then owe owe owe.
Oh…
     woe.
Credit card junkie
and all for naught.

More wordplay than poetry, and like I criticize (most) instapoetry, it has a few good moments scattered throughout but it’s mostly for the amusement of the poet herself.

This book came out a couple of years after The Jeopardy! Book and refers to it as a lightweight cash-grab that only glosses on the show and presents quizzes without actually delving into the backstage workings of the show. Which, come to think of it, is kind of what I said in my review of that book in 2009 (for historical perspective, five years before I auditioned for the program, and seven months before I moved to Nogglestead from Old Trees–so a long time ago).

This book, on the other hand, is written not by ghost writers, but by one of the actual writers (who had just left the show). It includes insights into how one goes about making up the questions for each program as well as how the shows are filmed and some of the personalities involved–Alex Trebek was the producer on the first season, but he was replaced with someone that Merv Griffin had worked with previously. The book also gives short biographies of all the parties involved, from Trebek and Griffin to the various writers, producers, researchers, and receptionists.

The book also tells the history of Kings World who distributed the show and Merv Griffin Productions and how all of that works out, and how Jeopardy! was a surprise holding the #2 game show slot behind Merv Griffin/King World’s Wheel of Fortune.

Which kind of led me to the question: Has the New York Post been ragging on these game shows over the past, what, year to get a better distribution agreement or price? I mean, readers have been subjected to seemingly daily stories mining Twitter for hot takes on anything that anyone said negative about the shows.

For example:

• ‘Jeopardy!’ fans cheer Ken Jennings replacing Mayim Bialik: ‘Don’t let her back’
• ‘Jeopardy!’ fans complain show is ‘unwatchable’ after recent flubs
• ‘Jeopardy!’ contestant slams show for not paying for travel, hotel room
• ‘Jeopardy!’ champion James Holzhauer reveals show’s problem that’s been causing fans to rage
• Final ‘Jeopardy!’ clue blasted as not ‘appropriate’: ‘Hate this’
• ‘Jeopardy!’ fans outraged by ‘horrendous’ movie category: ‘Awful’
• ‘Jeopardy!’ producer asks fans to forget ‘horrible’ episode: ‘Something we never like to see’
• Ken Jennings reveals the ‘cringey’ part of ‘Jeopardy!’ he ‘never liked’
• ‘Jeopardy!’ fans call out Mayim Bialik for inconsistent hosting rules

Those are headlines from the last month. And prior to Pat Sajak announcing his retirement, the paper also ran numerous articles about bad puzzles, Sajak’s inappropriate behavior, and so on, to rag on Wheel of Fortune. Like I said, I wonder what’s up with that and suspect it’s a money thing between the Murdochs and Sony, who now owns the shows.

At any rate, definitely a better read than the other book, and probably more insightful into the show than a contestant’s book would be. The Afterword wanders away from the core topic matter and into a bit of a polemic about the role of television, even Jeopardy! on public discourse. It doesn’t really add to the book, but I guess the author thought it was important.

Also, note the timestamp on the book (1995), and note this bit of prescience:

The new game’s experience of its young existence was to be presented to George [the producer] for his comments and approval. If a particular clue bothered him he ordered it replaced. For some reason he hated references to hamsters or gerbils; he seemed to consider these creatures obscene and so that was out. Other no-nos included references to Donald Trump, the quiz show scandals of the 50s, and mentions of Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Jeopardy! declared Donald Trump persona non grata before it was cool. Or maybe it was always cool to a certain set.

I picked up this book from the free books cart at church. I know, gentle reader, it’s not that I lack for something to read. But our church has a free books cart with cullings from the church library and other books that people drop off. Well, other people, not me, as I rarely separate books from the Nogglestead library, and when I do, they are generally not religous or church-friendly titles. Every Sunday, or almost every Sunday, I make my way past this cart and look it over. Most of the time, I don’t pick up anything as Nogglestead is topped up on Bibles and I don’t tend to read devotionals. But I picked up this book because it is the biography of the guy who serves as the main mascot for the Kansas City Chiefs and includes the story of an accident at Arrowhead Stadium that almost killed him.

The book is biographical and starts with his youth, his attendance of Lutheran church and school, and his relationship with his family. He ends up at Mizzou, not too far from his family in St. Charles, Missouri (a little farther than I had to drive once or twice a week to visit my beautiful girlfriend who attended grad school at Mizzou when I was working as a printer in O’Fallon). Although he played high school sports (at Francis Howell North, which was originally M. Gene Henderson Junior High which I briefly attended in the middle 1980s, right before the change to the high school–given that he’s four years older than I am, he must have started elsewhere as the class of 1990 would have been the first to start and finish at FHN), he wasn’t good enough for college–but he tried out to be Truman the Tiger, the Mizzou mascot, and got the gig. And proved very successful at it–he took first or second at national mascot competitions several years running. After college, a university contact got him an interview to be Fredbird, the St. Louis Cardinals’ mascot, and then an interview to be the new Kansas City Chiefs mascot, K.C. Wolf.

Meers has been a faithful Christian throughout his life starting in his youth, but he turns his position as K.C. Wolf into an opportunity to talk to others and to make appearances at schools and in other forums to gently spread the word. He even becomes an ordained minister in the Baptist church and serves as one of the ministers in his church for a time, so he has helped wedding proposals at Arrowhead Stadium and he has performed weddings (and gave away a bride a time or two when her father was unavailable). The book is chock full of Bible versus that inspired Meers at any given moment (and as this book is signed, the signature–K.C. Wolf–has a Bible verse with it). Clearly a Godly man with a story to tell. I was pleased to do further research, and it doesn’t look as though in the nine years since he’s written the book that he’s had any scandal or divorce followed by a quick engagement like some Bible-quoting Facebook friends. Which was reassuring and inspirational in itself.

So, the accident: As part of his act, he does a little bit with a dramatic entrance at football games at Arrowhead. He started out by riding on an ATV, but he’s also appeared via airborne jumps (tried several times, with only a few successes–and the guys landing with parachutes were professionals). Meers had ridden a zip line into the stadium, and in this case he was going to jump off a light with a bungee cord attached to a zip line–I’m not sure how exactly it was supposed to work–but in the rehearsal for the stunt, something went wrong, and he hit the upper deck before the zip line carried him out over the field. The last bit of the book talks about his recovery and return to the field, which he handles through faith, although it was challenging. This book was written and published within the year it happened, so that part is no doubt fresh.

Meers is still the K.C. Wolf, although with less zip lining and crazy stunting now, which is appropriate, since he’s four years older than I am, which would make him almost thirty. Which seems improbable, since he has been the K.C. Wolf for over thirty years. But I am pretty sure time-space itself is warped these days, which makes all of that possible.

So an enjoyable and inspirational book. As intended.

My goodness, it has been a year and a half since I read the first in the Harbison Mystery series (Terror Near Town, which I read in January 2022). It’s been two years since I got the series at a book signing at ABC Books. This probably means that there’s another one or two in the series since real writers are writing books whilst I write intermittent blog book reports.

This book takes place almost twenty years after Terror Near Town. Set in the Great Depression, Chet Harbison, the Spanish-American War veteran from the first book, is 51 years old and has lost a bundle in a St. Louis bank’s failure. He and his family, including his brother and his family, economize and handle different business ventures to keep themselves and their farms afloat. The Jefferson County sheriff gets Chet to agree to be a deputy to earn a little money and to mostly keep him on a short leash and to take credit for Chet’s successes.

Although there is a bit of “mystery”–organized crime is moving in on local bootleggers–the book is not a mystery–it’s a western in the vein of Louis L’Amour (which, of course, I have cottoned to after reading A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour and Bendigo Shafter last year). The crime part of the story is a small part of it, almost an afterthought. But I suppose it’s better to be in the mystery section of the book store than the Western section–although in ABC Books, I’m pretty sure he’s still in the Local Authors section regardless of where the author actually lives.

I flagged a number of things in the book, gentle reader, that were errors and oversights, such as talking about the county alderman from High Ridge (the county has a council, but I’ve never heard of them called aldermen–but, to be honest, most of my time living in Jefferson County when I was too young to pay attention to such things) or a character telling another to bring in half a cord of wood for a stove–half a cord of wood is 8 feet by 4 feet by 2 feet (64 cubic feet) which is a pretty big ask to bring inside at one time or how onerous an eighth of a mile walk is (it’s 660 feet or two football fields which is not that far). But never mind those.

I will mention one thing: One of the events in the book is a raid on the Biltmore Club which straddles the St. Louis/Jefferson County Line. Apparently, the trick was if one county raided the club, they would all run to the other side of the club in the other county. As you have often heard, gentle reader, I lived in a trailer park down Delores Drive, and I often mention going up to the flea market on the hill. The hill was overlooked by a ridge, and atop that ridge was Biltmore. It wasn’t a club in the 1980s, but they did have a little business center up there with a couple offices (and a dump). Now, I believe it’s a real retail development. But the locations in the book came very close to where I lived indeed.

A good enough read that I look forward to the two others I have in the series. Apparently, I picked up the fourth in the series last August, which means I might only be missing one in the series if one came out this year. Note how this note indicates I’m writing these book reports in stream-of-consciousness–I just now searched again for the author on the blog and only now, four paragraphs later, I discovered I had actually bought the fourth book in the series. Of course, time goes all a-wonky again since I’ll be scheduling this post, so now is several days ago. Ay. And it might well be another year and a half before I pick up another in the series, by which I might well be further behind in the series.