Category: Book Report

This is a Perry Mason novel. It clocks in at like 140 pages. I understand Gardner dictated two of these a month or something. As such, you should expect it’s a formulaic read, albeit one that’s pleasing.

This one details a plot where an heiress’s double approaches Mason to make sure she’s not getting chosen to be a patsy in something. She’s got an odd story to tell, and when a man appears dead in her apartment during her apparent kidnapping, Mason has to determine if his client is in on it.

On a side note, the 1960s technology that doesn’t appear so dated for this novel: the speaker phone. When Della hooks it up, it reads just like the speaker phone in the conference room where I used to work. 45 years later, it doesn’t read like they’re playing eight track tapes.

And an odd note about the edition I have: it’s a Walter J. Black edition, but mine has a dustjacket. This is the first of the Walter J. Black editions I have of anything that has a dustjacket. Did someone slip a dustjacket for the same title over this one, or what?

Funny how the periods overlap; this book, written within a year of The End of the Night, is definitely a throwback to earlier detective fiction and the MacDonald book foreruns the more modern mystery (as does all of MacDonald’s work). Sure, this book is one in a series with a two-fisted action hero whose name graced a mystery magazine (Michael Shayne), but MacDonald covered that series thing with Travis McGee, and the latter more closely resembles the work of the other MacDonald (Ross) than the hardboiled school (Chandler, Hammett, et cetera).

This book details with the theft of an emerald necklace from a rich man with a boozing, thrill seeking wife; after time, he gets a letter blackmailing him about his fraudulently placing an insurance claim on a replica necklace. Shayne comes in to wreck many plans, including some to arm counterrevolutionaries in Cuba.

The last bit is the most amusing of all: written right after the revolution, the two-fisted American PI is pro-Castro and some tough speechifying defends the revolution and says that Castro’s not necessarily a communist. Of course, a year later, this book would be proven wrong. However, the political framework doesn’t take away from the two-fisted action, so it was forgiveable. And amusing.

I don’t know if I’ve read a Michael Shayne novel since high school; it seems to me I might have, and I really ought to get more. The problem with these books is that the early 1960s cheap paperbacks are deteriorating for the most part in the wild; this one had several pages loose from the spine, including one that the previous owner had put back in backwards (so I read the even page before I read the odd page–it made more sense when I flipped them to the proper position). It would be nice if someone were to bring out reprints or collections, but I suppose Shayne is too old school for that. So I’ll continue to be very careful, only opening the book 25 degrees, and keeping cats off the lap while reading.

When I picked up this book, I figured it was going to be a go-go-go suspense thriller like something Heller or Ludlum would write. An uncommonly good cat burglar with a past in shadowy government service knocks over a luxury penthouse and is surprised by the occupant returning. And more surprised when the occupant is hit by shadowy government types. The cat burglar finds the goods that the bad guys wanted, but they’re onto him, and he’s on the run trying to figure out what they want and whatnot.

But he opens the contents of the safe, and it’s the Majic-12 papers. Maybe some readers won’t know what they are, but brothers and sisters, I got the papers off of the BBSes before the Internet existed and read them. Back in my youth, I was more speculative, and the thought of aliens coming to get you in the middle of the night was kinda spooky (this is before I became more realistic and focused on the government coming to get you in the middle of the night, which is not so much spooky as frightening since it’s a possibility). So when I found that, I knew this was an X-Files sort of thriller, not a realistic thriller. It’s speculative fiction or fantasy, not suspense. So I was disappointed and knocked right into reinvoking my disbelief.

I hung with it, though, and made it through the cat burglary of Area 51, the rescue of the aliens (Joe and Max Gray–Hah! I snorted when I read their cover names!), the flashback of dubious merit except that it would please Majic-12 believers, the dubious deal to set everything right, and then the discovery that the deal won’t hold and the sequel is on.

It wasn’t a bad book, but that didn’t make it a good book. Maybe I would have been more tolerant if the book had been packaged as what it is instead of a straightforward suspense book.

This is probably the darkest John D. MacDonald book I’ve ever read.

The story details, sort of, a cross-country crime spree by four drugged-out kids in the late 1950s. The action focuses really on their last murder (of 4, I think) in a small town and the events that lead up to their capture as well as bits from the trial. MacDonald does not go into a straight narrative, instead starting out with a letter from one of their executioners to a former employee at the prison where the bad guys died. MacDonald then weaves in an out of the in-over-his-head defense attorney’s blustery memos during the trial, the death row diary of the college-kid-gone-bad in the quarter, some “live” actions of the final victim, her fiance, and law enforcement on the trail of the criminals. It’s a bit jumbled, but you get a decent picture.

In most of MacDonald’s book, we get a protagonist of sorts, in some cases a shopworn hero and in others a pretty ruthless, efficient sort of character, but in this book, the protagonist ultimately is circumstances and dogged law enforcement that leads to their arrest. You get a couple scenes with the functionaries in law enforcement, not one guy doggedly stepping forward. Just the professional grouping and how they come together to catch crooks hell-bent on being caught.

MacDonald spends a lot of time on the college-kid-gone-wrong, a kid from a good home who one day decides he’s done with common life, so he walks out in the last semester of college and gets into a tawdry adventure and then falls into the group of drug-addled ne’er-do-wells. He has some conscience, sort of, and serves as a reminder that but for the grace of God go we.

The final scene of the book occurs after the fiance of the last victim, an architect, sells the property where he was going to build their dream house along with the plans he’d drawn up for them. As he drives away, he suddenly swerves to hit a dog but misses and then feels bad for the attempt and relief that he missed. This is the message of the book: one small swerve, maybe even only on whim, can lead one to great evil.

MacDonald’s characterization talents are up to snuff, but overall the book isn’t among his best because of the choppy pacing and lack of a protagonist. Also, did I mention its bleak outlook?

This book will cost you 1d6 SAN. You have Sherlock Holmes and related characters, the poster children for reason, thrust into the world of Lovecraft, where irrationality and things beyond reason rule. You really cannot reconcile the two; the things that go bump in the cosmos win, and it’s ultimately not comforting.

As a collection of short stories written by different authors using the same characters, the different treatments are jarring. In one, Holmes and Watson are action heroes, for crying out loud, having a shootout in the London sewers with a bad guy carrying an unmounted Gatling gun. That would have been kinda heavy, don’t you think?

Still, the book is worth a couple of bucks for the concept and the better stories, but ultimately, it’s not good Holmes and it’s not good Lovecraft.

A bad John Sandford book is better than any Ridley Pearson book I’ve read. Of course, I’ve only read one Pearson book, and this isn’t a bad book, just not Sandford’s best. However, I got to deploy hyperbole, and that’s what matters to a Web log.

This book delves into Goth subculture, something mocked on Saturday Night Live when Will Ferrell was still on it, for crying out loud. When I founded a magazine in 1994, my art editor was a Goth. So he’s not exactly delving into a cutting edge subculture here. Now, death amongst the Disco Revivalist Cults, that would be cutting edge. So an old white dude delving into a subculture of whom I’ve known members sort of made me wonder if he knew what he was talking about in writing it. Then, of course, I thought maybe he knew more than I did since I only knew goths a long time ago.

Ah, well. I figured some of it out early, clued in by the fact that the person above suspicion and the suspect both had really good asses. Yes, that’s how they were described. This book struck me as more tawdry of Sandford’s work, wherein he enters Parkerian territory of the main character being irresistable to all attractive members of the opposite sex, he imagines it, and then he goes home to his significant other (wife in this case). But the discussion of sex and the bawdy talk sort of sticks out in this one.

So there looks like there’s going to be a plot twist, but ultimately it takes the Chandlerian plot turn into interconnected crimes of the rich and the insane, and the one saving twist I was expecting wasn’t there. Finally, we get to the end, where someone who could have gotten clear decides to kill Davenport, leading to the ultimate climax that also makes a major unrelated subplot relevant in that it explains how Davenport survives.

So it’s not the best of Sandford, but it’s good enough. It moves along and works in ways that Pearson does not, and sometimes an attempted writer (me) ought to see the good and the not good in stark relief like this.

And this book, since I got it from the book club, is fresh and it only cost me $.20 plus $30 shipping and handling, so it was a steal so long as I don’t do the math.

Ugh. Ultimately, I sort of dreaded reading a Pearson book because he lives part time in the next suburb over, so he’s the author I’m most likely to run into at the local coffeeshop or used bookstore and the one who could most easily show up on my front doorstep to taunt me that he’s a published and successful author and my blog isn’t even as well read as his book reviews.

Because, brother, this book sucked.

It sort of serves me right, I suppose, that I swore off classics because they take so long and then I start a 470 page mass market paperback that I have to endure over the course of two weeks or so. You know what? Maybe I’ll go back to the classics. Sometimes, they’re good enough that I enjoy them even if they’re slow reading.

This piece is the third, I guess, in a police detective series featuring a detective and a police psychologist. Perhaps its presence in the series explains a bit how the characters are sort of thin–I suppose they get that way in even the middle of McBain’s books or John Sandford’s books. But the descriptions are paragraph-long (or more) adjective dumps, and we get bunches of them even for minor characters. Then, they’re moved through a series of convoluted, contrived, and melodramatic chapter scenes where individual characters, mostly the female police detective, face artificial peril. Then we get to a semi-climax whose very setup relies on poor police procedure that imperils innocent children based on a prosecutor’s (wait, second prosecutor: first was eliminated in a contrived subplot) desire for better charges.

It was so bad that the night before I finished, I went into my wife’s office after reading it and banged my head into her wall just so I could sum up why I stuck with the book: the punchline “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

Maybe this is an outlier on the bottom end of Pearson’s books. I think I’ve got at least one more in English here somewhere to read (in addition to the one I have in a Scandinavian language that I cannot read), so perhaps eventually I’ll give him another shot. I won’t buy any more, though. I have enough else to read.

Special memo to Mr. Pearson when he Googles himself: Hey, no offense, and congratulations on making a living doing what I’d rather. I cannot even get agents to review the complete manuscript of my last novel.

I last read this book, I think, about 14 years ago when I got the New American Library complete novels of Chandler set. I’ve seen the movie since, although it took me two years to get through it after hanging up on the extended dance remix argument about impotence between the Wades. The film version took certain, erm, liberties with the story, I could tell based on basic WWRCD instinct. Now that I’ve refreshed my reading, I’m ready to go back to try the film again to set in concrete the reasons why it’s inferior.

A later novel in the Philip Marlowe pantheon, this book deals with Marlowe striking up a friendship with a veteran. When the veteran flees after his wife is murdered, Marlowe helps him out and is drawn into the circle of his friend’s neighbors and their moneyed misdeeds. It’s a typical Chandler sort of plot, for what that’s worth: a little convoluted, perhaps, but at least all the corpses are accounted for this time around.

But the texture of the language. There’s something to it, of course, something that differentiates it from the other pulp writers and other purveyors of paperback sensibilities. MacDonald and McBain dabble in it, but Chandler mastered it. Parker touched it before writing for the talkies ruined him.

Reminds me why I wanted to write this sort of thing.

It took me three weeks to read this book, which means that it’s probably weaned me off of classical literature for the near future, at least until I can get back to reading a couple of hours each night.

That said, this is certainly my current favorite Hardy book, but all I’ve read is Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was young (at the university) and Under a Greenwood Tree last year. Therefore, it’s currently one of three.

The book details the affairs of the daughter of a rector in West England, Elfride by name. When a young architect comes to draw up plans for the work on the rectory, she falls for him and he for her; he idealizes her and looks up to her after a fashion. They almost elope, as her father discovers that he is of low birth and refuses to approve the match. The young man goes to India to make his fortune. Meanwhile, his educated mentor meets the woman and she falls for him, too. He, on the other hand, does not look up to her, but celebrates her purity and the fact that he’s first in her heart. When her past attachment is uncovered, the scholar breaks off their engagement.

It’s a simple enough structure, but by presenting the two types of man and how she relates to them, the book delves into male-female relationships well. I thought the ending was a bit of a cop-out, though, but the book is still a heck of a read. The language slows one a bit, but not too much off of the pace you get with current dialogue-laden scripts-with-paragraphs.

The book I read was the Penguin classics edition, though, and it came with a horrid, long introductory essay that I was smart enough not to read before I read the book. I mean, it’s a discussion about the themes within the book and has no place ahead of the material it talks about. Also, the introduction did reassure me that I made the right decision in not pursuing a job in academia. It actually has the sentence, “The drama of the plot of A Pair of Blue Eyes is patriarchal,” and although it does not use the word phallic, it does use bourgeous. Oh, for Pete’s sake. It’s a good story with interesting dwellings on the human condition, and the academics sap that power from the narrative through their readings for their own chestnut points. I squirm when I realize these people have moved out of English programs and into government.

Get yourself a good Barnes and Noble edition or a Walter J. Black printing from somewhere and ignore the pretentious pontifications about it and enjoy the story. As Hardy would have wanted it.

You know, once might have been enough.

Fresh from reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales, I jumped right into this book by another American author to see if my thesis that I could read American vernacular with more pleasure than the British was true. Apparently, it’s not unflinchingly true, as Hawthorne’s stories are more allegorical, high-faluting, and educational rather than enjoyable.

I read it slowly. At the beginning, I thought the style was overwhelming. Then, I amused myself in snickering at double entendres that would have made Hawthorne blush if he’d known how they’d sound to 21st century ears, such as the first paragraph of “The Maypole of Merry Mount“:

BRIGHT WERE the days at Merry Mount, when the Maypole was the banner staff of that gay colony! They who reared it, should their banner be triumphant, were to pour sunshine over New England’s rugged hills, and scatter flower seeds throughout the soil. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire. Midsummer eve had come, bringing deep verdure to the forest, and roses in her lap, of a more vivid hue than the tender buds of Spring. But May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all the year round at Merry Mount, sporting with the Summer months, and revelling with Autumn, and basking in the glow of Winter’s fireside. Through a world of toil and care she flitted with a dreamlike smile, and came hither to find a home among the lightsome hearts of Merry Mount.

However, I eventually got acclimated to the book and got more into the tales, but they’re not really the sorts of things one reads for pleasure unless one gets pleasure out of saying, “I read Twice-Told Tales by Hawthorne for fun.”

So I guess I got some secondary pleasure out of it.

Less fun than the aforementioned Irving though, and only a bit more enjoyable than the Stallone but at greater investment.

This is a Fawcett reprint of the original book, so you’ll have to forgive the back cover’s references to patterns of violence and evil lurking beneath the surface. Instead of a crime novel, this book depicts a decadent family in a milltown in New York that has a week wherein their lives break out of the rut into which they’d fallen. It’s a character study of each and the events that change them.

The patriarch, 50 something Ben, runs the mill he and the others inherited, but his progenitors allowed it to run down, so he’s barely holding it together. A major financier comes along to buy the mill, and Ben has to determine what’s best for the family.

Ben’s son Brock has been expelled from school after falling in with a bad woman and stealing from another student to support her. He has to deal with his father’s sanction, but he meets another girl who draws his attention.

Ben’s daughter Ellen is dating an older boy and hangs with some older kids, college students now, but she thinks that they’ve changed or she has.

Ben’s half-brother Quinn, a vice president at the mill, is intimidated by his robust and energetic wife. He doesn’t work for his salary and keeps a woman on the side.

Ben’s half-sister Alice married a construction man and deals with frigidity.

The construction man used to build good homes, but now speculates with his construction, cutting corners and using cheap materials.

The youngest brother of the family marries a strong woman in Mexico City, where both work for the State Department, and they return.

Over the course of the week, Alice has a sexual awakening of sorts, which causes the construction man to reevaluate his life and goals and stop doing shoddy work. Ellen’s boyfriend stumbles through a rape attempt, and she grows up. Ben tells off Quinn, who must be the evil guy as he engages in the pattern of violence–beating his girlfriend to death (he thinks) and then killing himself. Brock regains his father’s trust as he helps the patriarch with the crises. And Ben decides not to sell, even though it might drive him to an early coronary, because he likes keeping the mill–and the family–together ultimately.

A decent character piece, a bit awash in characters though, more like MacDonald’s business books than his crime fiction. But a good read nevertheless.

After almost winning an Academy Award for writing (Rocky, which ties Stallone with the number of almost Oscars as Roger L. Simon and puts him only one ahead of me), Stallone unleashed this book in bookstores before turning it into a film starring Stallone. Unlike Rocky, which dealt with boxing, this book deals with wrestling. And it’s set in the 40s, not the present day (then), so it’s completely different.

It’s wooden, it’s written pretty specifically in scenes for a movie, and it uses concrete poetry style arrangements of words to make points. But ultimately it didn’t suck as bad as some novels movies are based on or some novelizations of movies.

Plus, I get to say I read Stallone’s novel. It’s mixed in with Austen, Dickens, and Hardy this year, but jeez, any kid in college reads those. I alone read Stallone.

I passed up a couple of copies of this at the St. Charles Book Fair because I knew I had a copy of it at home. The copy I have is an ex-library copy, so because I wasn’t that attentive, I passed up a chance to upgrade. One of these days, I should really add my to-read shelves to my database and run a comprehensive report before I go so I know what to look for and what to buy. But that’s more organized than I pretend to be.

This book is a 1974 87th precinct book, which means you’ll not find it as easily in the wild (St. Charles Book Fair notwithstanding) as you’ll find the 80s-00s books, so I’m glad I got it regardless of the edition. One finds that McBain’s quality remained pretty steady throughout his career.

This book deals with an arson fire that destroys a shipment of toys, putting a company’s owner in a bind. Investigating leads the 87th Squad to find some dubious investment schemes and a series of related murders that indicate something more than toy selling was going on.

It’s a good book, and it’s dated a bit. I mean, pushers want bread, dig? But still a worthy read.

You know, Garfield gets all the attention these days, but back in the old days, Heathcliff was the cat. Of course, his cartoon was a single panel, not a strip, so his humor had to get to the point, and it did. Instead of lazy, Heathcliff was a helion. Instead of liking lasagna, he eats the remnants from trash cans. In other words, he’s a scrapper where Garfield is a dilettante. No wonder I liked Heathcliff more when I was younger. Also, the daily we got had Heathcliff, but not Garfield, which could explain it. Heathcliff even had a cartoon before Garfield did.

This book collects a number of strips, mostly around the motif of Heathcliff’s love for Sonja. Given that, though, the book really identifies how Geo Gately used a limited number of ideas for a lot of cartoons. Another cat looks at Sonja, and Heathcliff does something to him; Heathcliff steals the fish; Sonja’s woman owner asks the man why he doesn’t do for her what Heathcliff does for Sonja; and so on. I hope that over the run of the series, the cartoonist spread these repeated bits out a little more than you can within a book limited by this theme.

Ultimately, I guess this might explain why Garfield would ultimately eclipse Heathcliff.

And although there’s no Heathcliff without Heathcliff blog (unlike Garfield, there is the Heathcliff Explained blog which echoes sentiments expressed above with some profanity and daily cartoons.

Can’t anyone else in the 21st century just enjoy the cartoons, or just look at them?

I picked this book up a couple years ago at Hooked on Books in Springfield for 33 cents. It’s taken me until this month to get to it simply because the title was so, well, bland.

The book centers on Ned Allen, a regional sales director for a computer magazine who finds out he’s in a jam. Seems a major client has decided to pull a promised insert at the time the magazine is being acquired by a German publishing company. The Germans are going to replace the magazine’s publisher with the regional sales director, effectively putting him in the position of climbing over his mentor to the big time. However, things go awry very quickly when Ned twists an arm to save his job, but effectively loses it and finds he’s made enemies that will keep him from working in his field and maybe even New York again.

The book sort of struck me as a fun mash-up between And Then We Came To The End and Lloyd, What Happened? for their high-flying corporate business ways and Vienna Days for its compelling central character who, through weakness, tends to make poor decisions and is perplexed a bit by the consequences.

However, about 2/3 of the way into the book, one screw too many turned, I thought, and then suddenly the book departed into a crime-suspense novel with a murder, blackmail, and a resolution out of a Spenser novel, where Ned Allen talks down the big bad level boss and makes a free-wheeling deal to extricate himself and others from danger while giving a bad man his comeuppance. The character’s name could even have been Tony Marcus, for crying out loud, or that guy in LA.

The book, then, really seems like two different books stitched together a bit unsuccessfully. A pity, really. I still rather enjoyed it, but my praise is not unqualified.

I’ll probably keep my eyes out for another Douglas Kennedy book, though. What the heck, I’ve given David Morrell (of First Blood infamy) another shot.

This is a collection of fantastic stories for children, which explains why not many brown people were oppressed in the book, although the book does include the word nigger in it. I’m sure one could go in depth to find language structure and plot points to identify how Kipling wanted to use this book to indoctrinate the young in old England to believe in their cultural superiority and need to overrun the heathens. I think many have.

However, it’s probably best just to enjoy these stories for what they are and for the language within them.

Please note that this children’s book represents the 49th book I’ve read this year. I don’t count the board books, but things over 100 pages, especially Rudyard Kipling, count in my annual reckoning.