Category: Book Report

It’s been a while since I read a Matt Helm book (four and a half years, apparently). This book has two bits in it: Matt Helm goes to a Central American country to knock off the leader of an insurgency tied to Cuba and the Soviet Union. When he does, he sees that the insurgents have somehow gotten their hands on a road-mobile medium range nuclear missile which Helm doesn’t have the ability to disable or destroy as part of his mission. He also rescues another agent who is a basket case after torture and rape.

When he returns, he finds that the upper levels of the bureaucracy are disappointed in the results of the mission, as the missile might have fallen into the hands of a government nominally American-friendly. He drives cross country to a southwestern recuperative facility with the basket case. After a day at the facility, she’s less of a basket case and wants out–so he takes her onto his next mission, seeking out a Nazi war criminal plotting some sort of insurrective event from Mexico. He finds a pair of operatives from another country working to look for the fellow themselves, and he crosses and double-crosses them as they cross and double-cross him in the pursuit.

You know, this book was eighteen years after the war. Nazis as bad guys were believable. The book seems less dated, strangely, because Nazis have been the go-to bad guy in popular culture for seventy years. Can you imagine a movie from the 1970s where the bad guys were the Spanish monarchy? I think not.

Still, the book is a very good change of pace from the Executioner novels. Looking back, I see I bought this almost two years ago in Bolivar. Huh. I’ve read a number of books from that book fair already. Mostly the paperbacks.

This blog is getting to be close to ten years old now. And mostly it serves my nostalgia for books I’ve read and where I bought them.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a collection of short stories, b-sides really, rushed out probably on the success of Stranger in a Strange Land. It includes the title story and a couple others.

Impressions:

• “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”: An interesting premise: a man doesn’t know what he does during the day, so he hires a husband-and-wife team of private investigate him. On their first day, the husband is hypnotized into thinking he has uncovered the mystery, but only the fact that his wife saw him speaking with their target, Jonathan Hoag, keeps them from being snowed. Ultimately, that makes no sense, since we’re not clear who hypnotized him. The story turns to the bizarre and, ultimately proved disappointing.
   
• “The Man Who Travelled in Elephants”: An interesting story about an older gentleman who mourns his wife who accompanied him across the country as a travelling salesman and then, for their amusement, across the country to fairs and shows as they told themselves they were elephant salespeople. After her death, he continues traveling by bus to different fairs, but it’s not the same without her. This nice little story has the obvious twist that might not have been so obvious when it was written.
   
• “–All You Zombies–“: As I was reading this, I commented to my wife that at least he was not traveling back in time to schlep his mother, unlike Time Enough For Love. Well, here he does one better, I think: Going back in time to knock himself (as a woman) up with the child who will become him. For reasons unknown and unexplained.
   
• “They”: A piece of paranoid ficton with the obvious twist. A man is locked up, sure that everyone is conspiring against him and the whole world is an illusion for some purpose.
   
• “Our Fair City” A newspaperman and a parking lot attendant make use of–or get help from–a sentient whirlwind to unmask corruption in the city. A nice bit of whimsy.
   
• “And He Built a Crooked House”: The only thing I’d read before in some other anthology. An architect builds a tesseract-looking house that, after an earthquake, folds into itself just as the architect is about to show it to the new homeowners.

A collection of his b-sides, really, but Heinlein (PBUH) really was a juvie rocket-jockey writer whose works achieved resonance because of the aspirational themes and understanding of human nature within them, and when he became popular and wrote adult themed Novels, they succeeded in spite of Heinlein sometimes. I like Heinlein, but with the good, you’ve got to take some not good. This book is half and half.

Books mentioned in this review:

It’s been eight months since I’ve read an Executioner novel; at this rate, it will take me almost forever to read the forty or so that my beautiful wife gave me for my birthday two years ago.

This book finds Mack Bolan in Cleveland trying to figure out why local business men are teaming up with–or getting used by–the mafia. Let’s see, there are gun fights, an RV that moves unobtrusively through the city and past the bad guys’ HQ, and a damsel to rescue.

As I have said before and will probably say again, these books are the equivalent of television episodes of a long-running program. If you like them, you come back. Some are better than others, but they’re all quick reads relatively.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got this book from the library based on the reading I did on Brandman’s first Jesse Stone novel Killing The Blues. The books are incredibly similar.

First, we have the multiple subplots, including a young woman in jeopardy. This one is a rich girl acting out because…Uh. I forget. Because it’s good TV. So throughout the book, Stone busts her a couple of times, gets her into court, and gets her community service duty at the police station. It’s interludes to pad the book.

The main plot is about a movie being filmed in Paradise. It gets a little crazy, but not as crazy as the soon-to-be-ex-husband of the star, who wants revenge and has just enough money for meth and a cross-country trip to kill the only woman he ever seduced-while-bumped-up-and-then-married.

So Stone brings Crow back to Paradise to protect the starlet and, when that fails, to help run the bad guy to ground.

So it’s very much like the first book in the whole protect-a-school-girl, killer-from-California-comes-to-town thing going on. We’ve got another love interest who pops in and then departs. It’s still an okay bit of reading, but since it tracks so close to the first of Brandman’s efforts, I’ve got to wonder whether he’ll bring fresh ideas into the next book or just continue to go with what he knows and risk book sales on account of it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got this book from the library based on Atkins’ strong turn in the Spenser novel Lullaby. This book was not bad enough for me to swear off Atkins’ other books, but it’s not a very good book. Or, at least, it’s not a book enjoyed very much.

The book is a fictionalized account of the murder of an early twentieth century Tampa underworld figure named Charlie Wall in 1955. Atkins, a former newspaperman, was nominated for a Pulitzer based on some articles he did on the case, so he had a pile of research to novelize. And he did.

The book has two main characters, sort of: The first person narrator, a former newspaperman, tells the story as it happens but also from a double-effect narrator position in the present. Then, there’s a police detective, a relatively straight man on a corrupt police force, investigating the crime. But the narrative points of view don’t stop there. No, we also get segments of chapters from two other gangsters, Rivera and Trafficante, a Cuban woman on the run for stealing a ledger from Rivera, and an appearance by Fidel Castro, young revolutionary. You know, I recognize that the modern style is to hop points of view–I’ve done it myself–but this book jumps a number of times per character, and we end up with so many different points of view and characters that it’s hard to keep them straight. Especially since some of the lesser characters are not that well developed.

Okay, we’ve got that knock against it.

Secondly, the book is full of ugly flourishes included only for the grotesquerie. We have a little girl kicking the corpse of a man her father just gunned down until her father restrains her. We have the sodomy of a major character as a young boy because…. Because it was in Atkins’ notes, I guess. Some grungy adultery just for scenery. Bleakness and bleakness for no reason other than to emphasize the gritty noir.

Finally, we’ve got a plot about the murder of Charlie Wall and the maybe related search for his ledger which has–I dunno, the goods on his rivals, his secret accounts or something. It’s a side McGuffin, though, since the actual murderers aren’t after it, really, well, some maybe are. There’s no real justice for them, not in a satisfying end, and I’m pretty sure the first person narrator funds the Cuban revolution by giving the ledger to Castro at the end.

All in all, it’s punching above its weight as a crime novel, perhaps swinging for Great Novel, and it misses both.

I’ll try another Atkins book by and by, but I was disappointed with this one.

Books mentioned in this review:

It’s been a while since I’ve read a Bob Greene book (five years, I guess, since I read All Summer Long, his novel, and He Was A Midwestern Boy On His Own, a collection of his columns). Wow. Five years. I remember reading them in my reading lair in Old Trees. When I had a fulltime job for The Man and a toddler and a baby on the way (or soon to it).

One can’t help but look backward when reading this book; whereas Greene’s normal fare wallows in a certain sentimentality, this volume looks at growing older and tries to weigh a balance between the things you gain when you’re turning 50 and the things you’ve lost. Well, the things Bob Greene gained and lost. And though he tries to balance it, he’s not a fan of growing older.

One cannot read the book without remembering the sordid story of his downfall. With that tone over it, you can see, yeah, he was a man who missed his youth and spent a lot of time missing it.

So here I am, a man of 40, reading this downbeat book and feeling a bit maudlin about it. Bob Greene writes about lifelong friends, people he knew in kindergarten. Me, I think back to kindergarten, and I can’t remember any of the other white kids in there, but there must have been some. As to lifelong friends, the friends I have don’t reach back to high school. Come to think of it, in England, you can sue for libel over charges like “This person is Brian’s friend.” Or start a fight. I’m not sure which.

Another thing struck me about this book as I read it: Bob Greene was married when he was writing the book, but the book nor what I remember of his columns ever mention his wife. He’s got little domestic scenes peppered through the book, but they’re always of him sitting down with a television dinner, a beer, and a basketball game or something. You’d be forgiven for thinking he was a bachelor. I don’t know what that’s about, but it didn’t exactly elevate the level of the book.

So of the Greene books I’ve read, it’s not my favorite. It took me a couple of seasons to read it, partly because the topical-by-chapter musings were meandering and disconnected, which meant when I hit a point where I’d had enough, I could put it down without really losing my place. So if you’re going for the Greene, go for one of his collections of columns and not this sort of thing. I’m not very encouraged by his Wikipedia page‘s description of his recent books, which sound more like this than his columns.

Oh, well.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the second of three I received for Christmas from my beautiful wife, and it actually precedes The Sentry, but the events within the books are not so developmentally tied that you can really tell. Crais is keeping the novels episodic enough that you can pick them up in pretty much any order. Series business doesn’t make them a jumble if you read them out of order, and that’s might be something that keeps the casual reader who picks the series up more interested in reading earlier books instead of just following the series from the point of entry forward. Or maybe I’m just making that up. One could probably get a government grant for some scientific study on it, but where would one find study participants?

At any rate, this book deals with Joe Pike and his sidekick Elvis Cole (series readers will see what I did there) investigating the death of one of Pike’s former mercenaries at the hands of a home invasion crew run by a Serbian mob. As he investigates with an eye on vengeance, he’s driven to help an ATF officer on the trail of some missing AK-47s. Real ones, with automatic fire and everything. So he investigates, happy to find his friend is not involved in arms dealing but that his death was a by-product of the Serbians running the home invasion crew wanting something from the Serbian nanny.

It’s a mess of a plot, and the protagonists slowly unravel it. The book’s got a little wheeling-and-dealing with the mobs and a little humanization of Pike, but not too much to tip the book out of a very sweet balance.

As I said in the report on the earlier (later) novel, I enjoy these books at a bit of a deeper level than other recent crime fiction I’ve read. It’s a shame Crais isn’t more prolific, but when you’re prolific (like Robert B. Parker was), you get all the flaws of thin novels, so I’ll just take what Crais dishes out slowly. Well, eventually, when I realize several years have passed and I ask and get them for Christmas.

Books mentioned in this review:

I was never a Cub scout. Oh, I attended an organizational or informational meeting for it, once, in about the second grade. My mother, my brother, and Boogie and his mom went down to a church on Teutonia to hear more about it, and we were very excited about it, but it required some sort of financial outlay, and we couldn’t swing that back in the government cheese days.

Fortunately for me, this book can help me overcome that disadvantage, at least as far as tying knots goes.

I mean, I know two knots, basically: a slip knot and a double reversed slip knot that I think my father taught me as a square knot. So when it comes to tying things down in my truck, for example, I’ve had to rely on them. With success, fortunately, so far.

But this short book contains a menu of 24 knots and includes cardstock pages through which you can lace some string to practice the knots in a helpful, step-by-step manner. It’s not quite as good as having someone there to help guide you, but it’s better than a mere set of photos alone. Which will become important when it comes time for me to pass on generational knowledge to my children, knowledge whose knowing I’ll have to get from books instead of getting them from actual, you know, preceding generations of my forefathers.

Sorry, I was talking about a book here before I somehow wandered into a self-involved bit about growing up in a broken home.

The book includes these knots:

• The Bowline
• The Clove Hitch
• The Two Half Hitches
• The Tautline Hitch
• The Better Bow
• The Bow Tie
• The Trucker’s Hitch
• The Constrictor Knot
• The Ring Knot
• The Prusik Knot
• The Timber Hitch
• The Killeg Hitch
• The Sheep Shank
• The Rolling Hitch
• The Coil
• The Package Knot
• The Harness Loop
• The Short End Bend
• The Figure 8 Stopper
• The Incredible Magic Loop

As you can guess, it’s not a long book, but so it’s a quick run through. But it’s a solidly constructed piece of work, coil-bound and on cardboard so you can practice. I’ll probably keep the book on my desk so I can practice some of these knots while I watch a process run or such. A little bit of practicing on something every day to get better at it. Something I never learned to do. Probably because I was the product of a broken, government cheese kind of home as a youth. Or more probably because I have quite a touch of the lazy in me and always have.

Books mentioned in this review:

I admit, I fall behind on the Robert Crais reading. I don’t know why I haven’t been seeking out his books at the library like I have John Sandford’s (until recently). But I haven’t. I read Chasing Darkness over four years ago.

But when I fall behind, my beautiful wife is there to provide me with nice hardback copies of the books for Christmas, like this one. And I read it promptly.

It’s a Joe Pike-centered novel, where Joe runs into a crime in progress and intervenes, only to learn that the victim is on the run from a vicious, relentless killer who has been looking for his targets for years. Joe’s heart goes pitter-pat, such as Joe Pike’s heart does, over the “niece” of the victim who really isn’t his niece at all.

So the basic outline of the book is that Pike and Cole try to uncover who these people are and who is after them while also trying to find where they’ve run to next. It’s pretty standard stuff, but I rather enjoyed the book. I got the feeling that I did when I read the old Parker books: I wanted to be like the protagonists. I aspired.

It’s not something I tend to get from the Davenport books or the John D. MacDonald one-offs, or even the Executioner series.

My beautiful wife gave me three of these books, and I’m looking forward to reading them, not just finishing them.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book smells like the 1970s: it’s an inexpensive paper and an inexpensive hard binding designed for school libraries. Or maybe that’s just how they did it in Great Britain in those days. I dunno. It’s got a bit of a musty odor that it shares when you read it.

As the title says, it’s a a book about how to take a couple of sticks, some paper, plastic, and/or other material, and string to make a kite. Like most craft books, it starts out with basic techniques and moves to specific projects of different types of flat kites (box kites are not included). Also, note that the book does not include directions for embedding glass in your kite strings, so no fighting kites, either, children.

But it’s something interesting to consider as a project to work on with one’s children. You could go to the drug store and buy a wing-style plastic kite for two dollars, but if you really want to make an impression in their future memories, you can take a couple dowels (or better yet, tree branches) and do the same thing.

Maybe I’ll do that one of these days.

At any rate, this book is only 28 pages, so it’s not a grand tome on the history of kites through the ages (which is what it would have been if it had to be padded to an adult craft book). It’s just sticks, papers, designs, and some instructions on flying a kite. A simple pleasure, or so I remember.

Books mentioned in this review:

Reading the pulp fiction blogs newly in the sidebar reminded me that I had not read a John D. MacDonald novel in quite some time (not since The Damned in March 2012). So I picked up this book.

The novel focuses on an American ex-pat in Mexico who wants to get a little extra income to supplement his savings, so he talks to another ex-pat, a decadent aging beauty who suggests an artist workshop. They line up a couple of artists to teach, rent a rundown failed hotel for the summer, gather a staff of inexpensive indolents, and lure a varied cast of characters to the workshop. Students include a retired career military man who likes to paint landscapes where battles were fought; a newly married couple on a honeymoon, a recent widow who is beautiful but who seems to have given up on life; a player who’s out to conquer more women in his scientific study of the species; an artist working low-paying jobs; a high school teacher with a hunger for sex; a couple of rich Texan girls; an ad man who suffered a mental breakdown; an architect whose firm is breaking up because his partner’s wife has fallen in love with him, and a couple of older women who paint as a hobby.

That’s pretty much the plot, too. They come together, meet, interact, pair off somewhat, and then they leave.

With a MacDonald book, you kinda wait for the death or crime as a pivotal moment, but there isn’t one in this book. I’m not sure there’s even a pivotal moment, although a party has some dramatic impact on the people and turn their lives a bit.

But it’s an interesting book, and one filled with MacDonald’s writing. So if you’re a fan, you’ll enjoy it more than if you’re not, but it’s worth a read. Also, you should be a MacDonald fan. Thank you, that is all.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book in the discount bin at the grocery store a couple years back. It’s an art gallery style book sampling modern comics, particularly focusing on independent artists who are doing creative work with the new technologies.

I mean, there are some smaller books in the Marvel line mentioned, but most of it is smaller artists publishing their own work. The focus is not American comic art, either; the book features a lot of British, Brazilian, Japanese, and European artists. The author is himself a British comic book editor, so there you go.

The biggest insight I got out of it really has more to do with my own relationship to the comics, such as it is these days. As I was going along, I read the captions for the art first and only then, sometimes, looked at the images briefly.

So that might explain why I take a little less out of books like Frik’in Hell and why I don’t do comic books as much as I did when I was younger; I’m more into the prose than into the art, and when that art takes precedence over the story, I’m not sold on it. I’m that way with films, too, I guess. Come to think of it, I’m that way with prose books, too.

So it’s an interesting book to page through, and I liked it. But not enough to go buy a stack of comic books.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a coffee-tablesque biography of Mike Royko written shortly after his death in 1997. Strange, I think I read Royko in his lifetime, but if I did, it must have been his syndicated work in actual newspapers, as I did not get a job with Internet access until 1998.

Long time readers know I like Royko (see my book reports on One More Time, Like I Was Sayin’, and Dr. Kookie, You’re Right!). I think I’ve got another collection of his around here somewhere, and I’ve also read his profile of Mayor Daley I, Boss, in the days before the blog.

Interesting side note: According to this book, Royko was encouraged to write Boss by Saul Alinsky.

This book takes an overview of his career from his time in the military through the three Chicago daily newspapers. It has some interviews with people who knew him, particularly his sons by his first wife. It’s a bit hagiographic, but as I’ve mentioned, I don’t mind admiring a figure about whom you’re writing (or reading).

It’s not a deep biography, weighing in at only 114 pages and featuring a lot of photos, but it offers some insight into the man behind the columns that the columns themselves didn’t provide on their own.

I enjoyed it. If you liked Royko, old man, you might, too.

On the other hand, I’m going to have to get away from biographies. Man, they’re all like, It’s going good, it’s going good, he’s dead, the end. At the end of the year, these can hit one right in the depressive cleaving groove.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a Jesse Stone book, but it’s not a Robert B. Parker book. It’s written by one of the guys behind the Jesse Stone television movies, so it comes out of that milieu. It definitely has some television moments in it, but unlike the television excesses that Parker injected in his book after writing for the Spenser: For Hire television show, this book has some description and prose in it that are not dialog. But some moments in it are definitely televisionish in other ways, like when Jesse Stone breaches a room where an armed man might be by hitting the door and rolling into a sitting position with his gun up.

It’s also like Parker filtered through Ed McBain after a fashion: there are multiple, unrelated plot lines running through it. It takes place as Paradise is getting ready to go into the important summer tourism season. A ring of car thieves threatens the town, and then one of the thefts goes awry and leads to a homicide. A criminal from Stone’s past comes east from LA to get revenge. A girl holds her school principal at gunpoint and Jesse Stone helps intercede. The plots don’t all start or end at once; the car theft thing starts the book out, and ultimately gets a mob-assisted resolution midway through the book. The third plot starts out in the middle of the book and resolves over the last half. The main plot, the revenge one (although you might be forgiven thinking the plot that starts the book is the main plot), kinda weaves through a bit and then ends climactically in an episode that makes you go, “What?”

It’s meant to fill the book equivalent of two hours, and it does. It’s not as fast of a read as Parker’s work, but really, they’re two different animals. How different? Jesse Stone gets a cat. Not a shorthaired pointer. Not a bull terrier whom children say reminds them of Spuds McKenzie, a marketing icon from twenty-five years ago.

So it’s a so-so read. Not as good as the Ace Atkins Spenser novel, but Atkins is a novelist by trade. Still, this book is weightier than Parker’s last entries in the series, so it’s got that going on. But a direct comparison and contrastation does us no good.

Books mentioned in this review: