Category: Books

This is another of MacDonald’s hardboiled detective things. In it, Lew Archer has to help a family find their son, who has had some mental problems. Of course, it opens into a can of worms wherein the boy might have killed his real father when he, the boy, was eight; people who change names but not skeletons in their closets; illicit love affairs during the war (World War II, remember) whose sins are avenged in the present, 25 years later; and so on, and so on.

You know, while reading this book, I was stricken with insight into why you don’t tend to see a lot of these sorts of plots in the twenty-first century: people move around a lot, particularly the people in larger communities and places where writers live. You don’t tend to get several generations of different families sharing the same space. Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe I don’t read enough contemporary fiction to know what I’m talking about. But a lot of newer books have different sorts of crimes and not so much sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons vibes.

At any rate, a good book. Worth reading and/or rereading.

A better title for this book would have been I Am Legend And Other Stories, as the book contains the 170 page novel that served as the source for the Will Smith movie as well as The Omega Man. However, I thought the whole book was the title story, which meant I expected the title story to extend the whole 300 some pages. When it ended at page 170, I was a little disappointed since I thought the book would carry on for another 130 pages of plot twists. Still, a decent book and worthy of making two films, although I bet neither of them end the way the book itself ends.

In addition to the title story, we get some other tales of varying length. An interesting note: one of the other stories, “Prey”, also made it to the big screen in the film Trilogy of Terror. Of course, true fans of Matheson already knew this, but when I make connections like this between unrelated bits of knowledge in my head, I feel clever.

A good book, and I guess Matheson is well known for his work. It’s punchy prose from horror pulp, and its terseness is quite different from Stephen King, which means it’s a quicker read and just as rewarding. I’ll have to monitor book fairs for more of Matheson’s work, which is the second-best compliment I can give to a writer.

Well, the book had no icepickings, but it had a bunch of murder and mayhem. This is the 56th book in this paperback series following a Killmaster for the secret agency AXE. Nick goes with a revolutionary to Haiti; she wants to invade, he wants to extract a physicist who is building the Haitian bomb. Carter recognizes their guide as a KGB agent with his own agenda. The plot utlimately gets explained as an afterthought. A Haitian nuke? Ah, who cares, BANG BANG naked woman BANG BANG knifing explosion naked woman. That’s why one reads pulp.

As an addendum, I said this when I read another Nick Carter novel:

Fortunately, no trained goats tempted Nick, or it would have been a much different story.

All I have to say about that is this book features a trained goat.

This is the first book in a series based on the television series Happy Days. As such, you can expect that there will not be a number of icepickings.

Instead, the book gives me a weird timewarp sense. I grew up in Milwaukee when the television series was actually on television, so it (and Laverne and Shirley provided a bit of pride for the city (which now sports a Fonzie statue in a prominent place, if I am not mistaken). So I am reading a book about a television series from my youth which depicted my hometown in a bygone era. Needless to say, that’s some weird nostalgia.

The book is a thin, teenish high school thing about Richie meeting a new girl and getting his first job over the summer. Things progress until he’s actually engaged to her, and then they break it off and agree to be friends.

The book gives no sense of Milwaukeeness; instead, the Cunninghams live in some nameless and smallish-seeming town. Chuck, the older brother who disappears from the television series, appears, but the book focuses on Richie and Mr. and Mrs. C. with brief appearances of Potsie and Ralph Malph. You will recognize some of the names, but not really the tenor of the series, in this book. Of course, I might not remember the series well.

It’s definitely a book for people who, 35 years later, are interested in the niche into which the book falls. Otherwise, you’re better suited reading something else.

You know, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote innumerable Perry Mason novels and far fewer in this series featuring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. A shame, really, because these are a touch more enjoyable than the lawyer novels. They feature a small private detective who is irresistable to the ladies and who is quite easily roughed up. A bit tongue in cheek, I think, but not burying the needle in Campy.

In this book, a businessman hires the team to find a leak in his organization. They do, easily, but Lam thinks something more is at work. He finds a tangled web of love affairs, double-crosses, and women who like to take their clothes off. Lam manages to dodge a murder rap and, of course, solve the crime to the chagrin of his boss and the local police.

I’d be happy to find more of these in the wild. Someday, I might have to actually order them by name if I cannot.

I’m always up for a James Hogan novel. I first read Inherit the Stars in middle school and have encountered other novels in the 20 years since (see also Paths to Otherware and The Multiplex Man).

This book starts in the near future, where aliens have established contact and want to impose a soft totalitarianism on the world, and they find helpful accomplices in Western governments, particularly the United States, where the ruling class wants power and wealth that collaboration will bring. A fixer gets dragged into insurgent plots because his ex-wife has become a revolutionary. The battle for Earth becomes bloodier as the insurgents arm up and begin convincing aliens that the Earth way of creativity and experiential pleasure beats the rational and regimented alien way.

I enjoyed the book, even the italicized expositionary chapters describing the alternate science that powered the aliens. In the middle of the book, though, Hogan splits the characters and then goes into their points of view covering the same time period for some reason. It didn’t really add suspense and just seemed to bog the book down. But when the timelines merged again, the book picked up.

So it’s not his best, but it’s pretty good anyway.

Being as this is a 13-year-old Sandford novel, it’s one of the better ones in the series. If you’re familiar with the series but are reading them out of order, note this is the book whose events precipitate the first breakup between Lucas Davenport and Weather, which is the name of his girl who was going to become his wife and eventually does.

The plot centers on a biker-slash-light-militia guy seeking revenge on Davenport and his (city-wide, not state-wide) team after they kill the man’s sister and wife in a bank robbery. Thus, Davenport dispenses with much of the mystery element with which he sometimes struggles in favor of a more straightforward thriller plot. Since Davenport’s still a city cop in this book, he deals with crime instead of the mix of crime and politics he has to deal with later.

That being said, why is it that the quality of many modern series declines over time? Is it because once the brand is built, the author puts less efforts in those books while he or she tries to increase earning potential by writing additional series or books in the time he or she used to spend on a single title? Don’t get me wrong, as a former wannabe novelist, I’m all in favor of that, but as a reader, sometimes it leaves me cold.

This is an idea of stunning fecundity. As you know, an idea book is any collection of anecdotes or stories from which one can derive ideas for expanded articles or essays. This book collects a large number of facts grouped topically and focusing well enough on history to go into my sweet spot.

I read it over the course of a number of months, a couple anecdotes/facts or a chapter at a time. I’m thinking about putting it onto my desk, though, so any time I’m out of ideas, I can grab it, flip to a random page, and then draw something out to draw out into an essay.

This book is a slender Hallmark version of the book listed below. Child photographer Josef Schneider has taken photos of children with odd expressions on their faces, and they threw in word and thought balloons to ascribe wry thoughts to the children. Mildly amusing.

It’s not a coloring book that I’m counting towards my yearly reading total, but I am counting it.

Well, this was a book in a plain brown wrapper.

The cheap binding mirrors a Walter J. Black sort of binding. A novel title like Devil’s Holiday and an author named Fred Malloy, I was sure someone was going to get icepicked. But you learn something new every day. Like that there was a lurid genre of what they called sleaze or soft-core pornography featuring tawdry, descriptive scenes of seduction as it were. In 2009, you wouldn’t call this pornography. But fifty years ago, apparently, hoo-whee!

The book centers on the afternoon, evening, and night of Christmas Eve. Young couple (almost 30, so Old Married Couple in 1950s books) is kinda on the rocks. When husband came back from the war, he was different and the wife had almost taken a lover in his absence, but did not. The afternoon of Christmas Eve, the husband gets together with a young woman from the office and, after heavy drinking, they spend the afternoon in a hotel. He leaves his wife’s Christmas gift in a cab with her, and he starts fruitlessly seeking her to find it. She returns it to the wife, and the husband’s infidelity is thrown in her face. So she goes out on the town to get even and to give him grounds for a divorce because she loves him and doesn’t want him to be the villain in the divorce. So he goes out to a dive bar, hooks up with a ruffian from Missouri, and they drink, get into a fight, and try to meet women.

The characters at the root have a basic love for each other but cannot communicate it, and they’re swept into a series of poor decisions that are fueled by the constraints of the norms of the time and more alcohol than it would take to kill me and preserve me.

I don’t know what it says about its times that the relatively tepid sensual descriptions in the book were considered sleazy or pornographic. I also don’t know what it says about our times that 1950s sleaze has more conflicted characterizations and internal dilemmas in a simple plot than in much contemporary fiction of a more lofty-goaled but still genre fiction.

I might try this author again if I stumble over another one of his works, but I gather they’re pretty rare.

This is a book aimed at the middle-school or early high-school market, and it describes, briefly and zealously, some of the role-playing games available for the original NES. These include The Legend of Zelda, Shadowgate, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, and whatnot. Each has a couple of pages that includes some information about the storyline, a bit of comment on the game play, and tips that range from knowledgeable and insightful to vague, general, or obvious, possibly depending upon whether the author played the game before writing it up.

I’d call it a walk down memory lane, but that’s cliche and I was not an NES guy. But it did give me the urge to install a new role-playing game. Or maybe install one that I bought in the past when I’ve had this passing urge. Or maybe hook up an NES and run through one of these games. Instead, I’ve started a game of Civilization IV which I’ll probably abandon in a couple of days. Face it, gaming’s not high on my priority list these days.

But I liked the book. A simple read.

I find Cavuto to be the most engaging of the Fox News hosts. He’s pleasant, polite, and assertive, and he always looks as though he believes that his guests are full of crap. In many cases they are.

This book collects, in written form, some short pieces of comment he used on his television programs in the late nineties and the early part of this century. He offers a couple paragraphs on dot-coms, on the Fed, various recessions we’ve passed through in the last decade, the Iraq War, Congress, and so on and so forth. In the Brave New World, they remind us of the time Before, the time of prosperity and opportunity. I can’t imagine a collection from 2008 through 2018 would look like. If it would be allowed to be printed.

That said, it’s only an okay book. The topics are handled with empathy and whatnot, but given that they’re based on thirty second comments at the end of a newscast, you don’t get really deeply into a topic. Since they say a lot of the same things, the book is also a bit repetitive since a collection from a decade or so is going to cover the same thing the same way sometimes. If you’re going to read the book, break it up by reading a chapter a night or such. Maybe that’s how normal readers do things instead of reading for hours at a sitting.

I’m a bit saddened that I don’t get to see his program more often, but I’m busy afternoons and the guy isn’t taking an afternoon bottle these days.

Rex Stout falls, in the Brian J. Noggle Pantheon of Crime Fiction, into the second tier of demigods. The Nero Wolfe books more closely resemble the Watson/Holmes school than hardboiled PIs, but they feature pretty punchy writing and the first person narrative style popularized by the pulps. I’ve read a number, and I like them well enough, but they’re not Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler books.

In this book, a woman comes to Archie Goodwin, Wolfe’s assistant, and wants the duo to find out who her father is. She was raised by a frugal and detached mother, and when the mother dies, she leaves her daughter a quarter of a million dollars “from her father.”

Wolfe and Goodwin find the trail leads through a wealthy, unliked family and might well solve the hit-and-run death of the mother.

It’s okay reading, but not MacDonald.

When it comes down to it, of all the authors in the classical hardboiled canon, I will have read and reread Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer novels the most. This comes because of an intersection of the availability of MacDonald’s work, mostly in Book Club Format, at book fairs coupled with my desire to reread the books (and only reading the books on my to-read shelves, natch). You cannot find many Chandler books out there, for example, so I don’t tend to pick them up on impulse and put them on my to-read shelves. As you know, I got lucky last year and re-read The Long Goodbye.

As you might know if you’ve paid attention lo these six plus years, I grew up reading the hardboiled fiction, and when I revisit it, I am struck anew again about how I prefer them to the modern crime genre like Sandford or (shudder) Pearson. The writing is punchier, and although the plots are convoluted, you get the sense throughout that the private eye is making progress throughout the book. It seems a lot of modern stuff involves some thrashing around, trying to provoke the bad guy, and then a sudden revelation at the climax.

In this book, Archer is hired to investigate the man who stole a rich young man’s fiance. The thief, purportedly a French nobleman in exile from the De Gaulle regime, isn’t who he says he is. The resulting unraveling touches on mobsters, infidelity, and murder in the enclave of an upper class California town.

Definitely recommended. I’ll probably read this again someday when I find it for a buck again.

Wow, if I’d known this first edition paperback was so valuable, perhaps I would not have cracked the spine. Internet prices for it range between $30 and $200. Who am I kidding? This is a John D. MacDonald book. My first of the year, I might add.

A small town cop picks his brother-in-law up at prison, where he’s served a five year sentence for manslaughter. The brother-in-law, like the wife, comes from the hill country, so he’s tough, but he’s also mean unlike the wife of the cop. It puts the cop in a bind, because the wife hopes the brother will reform and the cop knows he won’t and that he’s planning something. Something that starts with a prisonbreak.

As always, it’s a quick, engaging read from MacDonald. The characters are complex and the moral and philosophical questions require the characters to wrestle with their lives and their identities. I thought the end was a bit abrupt, though, and simplistic, but it does give the novel a compelling title.