Category: Books

Wow, who knew? I found my initial Alistair MacLean books back in the old Community Library, a volunteer and donation operation that operated out of a strip mall in High Ridge until it got its own tax levy and became the Northwest Jefferson County Library or whatever. It was more homey and plucky before it became a government-funded bureaucracy, something shared between those of us who enjoyed books before it became a burden to the taxpayers who didn’t. In the intervening years, my appreciation for Alistair MacLean has waned somewhat, too.

MacLean’s books about World War II and the early cold war period are enjoyable because they’re slightly exotic in tone and style as they are intricate in plot. MacLean, of course, was British, so his heroes are often British with their stiff upper lips mimicked in his slightly stuffy and distant prose. But more contemporary works (The Golden Gate and Floodgate come to mind) don’t work for me because they’re contemporary–in those decades I can somewhat remember.

This book deals with an American bomber carrying nukes that crashes into the Mediterranean. A British frigate investigates and finds a Greek shipping maganate who might have caused the sabotuage of the bomber so he could recover the nukes. The British naval officers on the frigate must outwit the mastermind and handle the armed and dangerous nuclear weapons at the same time.

250 pages, roughly, so it’s a quick read. Paragraph-based dialog makes it easy to skim, and the action does move along quickly, but the characters are pretty superficial and the book lacks the twists that characterize the best of MacLean’s plot-driven work.

But I bought it for a quarter, so it’s worth my time and money at that.

This book, written only a couple of books before Fiddlers, focuses on a lesser character from the 87th Precinct novels: Fat Ollie Weeks. This is appropriate, that is a lesser character, as he works in the 88th Precinct, but he’s been known to participate in the boys’ criminal investigations from time to time, ah, yes. When a councilman is shot before a campaign event, Ollie is the first man up, but he involves Carella and Co. because the vic lived in the 87th. During the course of his initial crime scene inspection, Weeks discovers that his car has been broken into, and someone has made off with the case containing the book he’s very proud to have written.

The book lightly interweaves three plots: the investigation into the councilman’s death, Weeks’s investigation into the theft of his book, and the crook who stole his book’s interpretation of the book, entitled Report to the Commissioner. McBain even includes the text of the 36 page “book” written by Weeks, poorly, throughout the book. Remarkable that he (McBain) could write something bad enough to represent the amateur detective/First Grade’s work. I mean, I remember when I wrote that poorly, but I’m not sure I could do it now one cue (although perhaps I do it perpetually, which is why I lean away from fiction these days, thank you very much.

Also, as the book focuses on a bigoted character used mostly as comic relief throughout the other books, it gives McBain a chance to do some extra characterization to make Weeks’s character sympathetic.

I liked it. I bought it for a buck at a book fair. It’s worth more than that, but I’m cheap.

This book precedes the last book I read (Broken Prey), so I put them in the wrong order when I lined them up on my bookshelf. As I’ve mentioned before, the events in Lucas Davenport’s life are background material, and the plots of the books are the important things within the novels.

This one differs from the rest, which differ from each other pleasingly. Davenport looks into the murder of a Russian sailor who formerly worked for the KGB. Was it a Russian mafia thing? A spy thing? Or could it be a hidden sleeper cell within the northern reaches of Minnesota?

Two things detracted from the book:

• A Russian security operative, Nadya, who is sent to oversee the investigation. No problem. Overreliance upon her saying, “What is this (insert American idiom)?” That can be a problem when overused. As a matter of fact, it was a problem.
• 2 typographical errors: an extra space before a comma and the misspelling of Del’s name as Dell. Come on, guys, you gotta try harder.

Also, I’ve nticed that Sandford’s novels have common pacing: 250-275 pages of chasing herrings and investigating followed by 50-75 pages of manic chase the real criminal action. As such, the climaxes often are forced and kinda rush past you. This book is no exception.

This book represents one of Ed McBain’s last books, and it was published posthumously; the About the Author bit on the back flap is in the past tense, which startles me. Cotton Hawes gives his age as 34 in this book, too, which bothered me a little, too. For most of my life, he’s been older than I am, and suddenly I’m older than many of the detectives in the 87th Precinct. That’s the meta about this book. Also, let it be known that Ed McBain did not support the war in Iraq. I don’t have a vivid impression of whether his contemporaneous books from the Vietnam era were as down on it, or even his Korean War-era books were as down on it, but it’s noticeable in these last books (see also Hark!). Now, onto the story.

Someone is shooting seemingly-unrelated late middle-aged people very quickly, and the 87th Precinct has to find the perp before he can do another vic. Meanwhile, Kling’s broken up with the black doctor following Hark!, Cotton Hawes finds himself falling for an older woman, and Carella’s daughter (now 14 after 30 years) is hanging out with a bad seed. That’s all it takes to craft a good, readable book. Like Perry Mason, McBain’s books age well, so this will be a fine read decades from now.

I was a little disappointed with how long it took the police to figure out what was going on, but I guess McBain had a minimum length to meet.

This is a three act play retelling an Arthurian legend (particularly the Lancelot and Guinevere thing). Published in 1927, this piece is now 80 years old, but it reads older than that. Set in the 10th century in England, the characters all speak Middle Englishesque, which is not historically accurate (Middle English started in the next century, and it certainly wasn’t spoken in 1927 on the east coast of America). As it’s not a direct retelling of the legend of Lancelot, the suspense kept me moving even through the stilted prose.

I read most of my Millay in early college, and my structured poetry of the time reflects her influence. Casting love poetry and whatnot into Middle English turns of phrase and relying upon iconic imagery of the period. I later moved a bit beyond it, but I still appreciate it enough that I enjoy Millay more than McKuen.

This book contains not only the titular Perry Mason novel, but two other novellas featuring the sleuth. Theses stories are almost sixty years old, but Perry Mason stories are almost timeless. As a matter of fact, I used them as an example in the the March/April issue of The Writer’s Journal:

Are you writing a story with a short shelf life, or an allegory on human nature for all time? Regardless of what you intend to write, the details you include might inadvertently determine whether you’re an Erle Stanley Gardner; whose Perry Mason novels remain accessible and relevant decades after he wrote them, or a Justin Thyme, whose works connect with this year’s audience but will seem as dated as a Baltimore Orioles world championship in ten years….

How timeless are they? One of the suspects is an inventor:

“What does he invent?”
“Oh, lots of little gadgets. He’s made money out of some them.”
“What sorts of gadgets?”
“Well, right now he’s working on something in connection with infra-red rays. Before that, he worked out a device that opens and closes doors and does things like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“It works with invisible light, what I think they call black light. A beam runs across the room and as soon as some object corsses that beam it closes a circuit and does things–oh, for instance, like making electrical contacts so that the minute you walk into the house the elextric stove clicks on and starts cooking, the radio turns on, and lights come on, and … I don’t know, Mr. Mason, I think it’s just a gadget. So many of his things are scientifically fine, but impractical when you want to work on them.”

That’s not so far-fetched now, is it? We still don’t have those things commonly in homes, but they’re available and feasible. The language itself is more archaic than the plots or the characters, with all the talk of infra-red rays, black light, and lots of Gosh!

The stories are more whodunit than the most whodunit of the Lucas Davenport novels (recently reviewed here and here), but sometimes the plots have to be a bit contrived to get there. Within the brevity of these stories, it’s good.

A quick rundown of plots:

• “The Case of the Cautious Coquette”: A simple hit and run tort case turns dangerous when two people “come clean” as the hit and run driver, and a woman named as a witness has her first husband inconveniently die of a gunshot wound in her garage.
• “The Crimson Kiss”: A friend from Della’s hometown is going to be married, but is implicated in a murder of another Lothario.
• “The Crimson Swallow”: A wealthy client comes to Mason to hire him to protect his new wife from whatever made her flee. A jewelry theft muddies the waters, as does the death of a potential blackmailer.

One thing these novels seem to indicate is divorce is bad for you. Ex-husbands die a lot.

As some of you know, I consider myself something of a Sweepstakes Bodhisattva. I’ve seen this book in different places since its inception, and when I saw it again on the table at one of last week’s book fairs, I knew I had to have it, if only to compare my knowledge to its.

This book was written in 1980 by the head of one of the independent judging organizations. He doesn’t hide it, but he does want to offer some insight into the fundamental honesty of the process as well as offering tips on how that sweepstakes contestants can take advantage of that process to have a slightly better shot at winning.

The book takes on sweepstakes, contests, lotteries, and bingo, with about half the book (it seemed) going to lotteries and bingo. There aren’t many ways to shade winning the latter, so there’s a bunch of history to pad the book out from pamphlet size.

Essentially, the tips are enter often and follow the rules. But if you’re interested in contests and sweepstakes, it’s worth a quick glance. It weighs in at 128 paperback pages, and I read the book in about an hour or so.

My wife bought this book for Christmas last year (that is, Christmas 2005) because I’d liked Odd Thomas. As with the preceding book, the narrative voice of Thomas is exceedingly conversational, but this book at this time struck me as too much so. Odd Thomas, who sees silent dead people, gets a visit from the recently dead father of a friend. Someone has killed the father and has taken the son. Although early signs point to the first husband of the boy’s mother (and his birth father), it looks as though the boy is actually bait for the one person who can find him… Odd Thomas.

The book was a quick enough read and pretty engaging; however, some of the narrative voice seems like fluff, and I have to wonder whether this and its 2006 counterpart Brother Odd are merely one story stretched over two books; the ending of the book sure seems like a setup. That’s poor form.

After reading Winter Prey, I flashed forward 12 years in Lucas Davenport’s future. He’s married to the woman he met in Winter Prey, and their children and she are in London, leaving Davenport a psuedobachelor. Instead of watching movies all night, he has to deal with a serial killer who appears to mock the MOs of three serial killers institionalized in a single Minnesota hospital. Early indicators point to a recently-released inmate, but that wouldn’t have made a 300 page novel, would it?

I figured out whodunit pretty early, but I rode along with Davenport and his team as they went down one blind alley after another. But it’s the journey, not the destination, for the most part. I’ve got a couple more prey books on the shelves, and I should get through them and get my complete list together since Prey books are plentiful at book fairs.

All it took as one mention in a Kim du Toit post to help me determine what to read next. Heather, knowing I’ve spoken fondly of John Sandford before (here, here, here, here, and here), gave me a number of Sandford’s books for Christmas, so I cracked into another one. Simply because I saw the author’s name in a blog post. Sometimes, I pick books for the slightest of reasons.

This one dials the clock back to 1993, early in the series, before Lucas Davenport was where he is today both in his personal and professional life (in Mortal Prey, for example, he’s getting married to the woman he meets in this novel; in between, they went steady, broke up, and then came together again). However, Sandford’s books are written so the current plot is central and the ongoing story of Lucas Davenport and crew are secondary, much like Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series. You can read them in any order and enjoy them independently.

Unlike the 87th Precinct, though, Davenport is an investigator with a team, so some of the action is executive in nature. Somehow, that works.

In this book, Davenport is at his cabin in Wisconsin when the local sheriff needs help with a brutal triple murder. It’s northern Wisconsin in winter, with heavy snowfall choking the roads a snowmobile and snow shoes in every garage. Man, it made me homesick. Before it’s done, there are a number of brutal killings of innocents but Davenport gets his person.

A good page turner, and I’ve already segued a decade and a half almost into Davenport’s future with my current reading, which you’ll read about in a couple days.

Also, like Mortal Prey, which took place in St. Louis, this book features talk and visits to Milwaukee, my home town, so I got to play spot-the-inaccuracies. Just one obvious gaffe.

This 1959 booklet (third printing in 1961) discusses Hemingway’s work from a time when he was very contemporary and explores how Hemingway’s prototypical hero evolved from the 1920s to the 1950s as Hemingway’s life progressed. Weighing in at 40 pages total, it’s a nice short refresher on Papa and almost makes me want to read The Sun Also Rises again. But that’s already on my read shelves, and I have hundreds of unread books to read first.

As many of you know, I am something of a Larry Niven fan (other reports: N Space, Rainbow Mars). I read Ringworld in high school, and I was awed. I like the stories that start out with a sense of wonder (see also Alan Dean Foster’s The Dig).

But this book is ultimately not that satisfying. Perhaps it’s been too long since I’ve read The Ringworld Throne, but that’s only fair, since it came out 16 years after the first sequel (The Ringworld Engineers, 1980). But this book isn’t the best of the lot. The first parts of the story are paced okay as more exploration and learning goes on, but the pacing of the end is too rapid and jump cut to really hold my interest. It’s a collage, nay, a kaleidoscope of scenes that end in a rapid denouement whose meaning is clear only when Louis Wu explains it and the magic of hastily conceived and underexplained science fix everything.

I can see why. The first part, Niven’s introduction, explains how classes and scientists have been working the Ringworld over for almost 40 years and have prompted him to write the sequels to explain the inaccuracies plausibly. But that drive to explain everything is what eventually diminishes the impact of the original and why he rushes through this book and takes care of the Ringworld in such a fashion as he’ll never have to write about it in Known Space again.

The book didn’t end as badly as the Rama series did, though, so it’s not dead to me.

Written in 1995, this book takes a recent current event as a starting point and reimagines it humorously, much like Lucky You. In this case, it’s a devastating hurricane (unnamed) that ravages southern Florida and brings together a motley bunch of characters around a crime or two.

The subplots: A woman on her honeymoon begins to doubt the wisdom of her marriage when her husband decides to drive from Disney World to the Miami area so he can take video of the damage and heartbreak; a crazy ex-governor gone native kidnaps him; a pair of unlikely conspirators decide to pose as a homeowning couple to participate in an insurance scam; the son of a woman killed in the storm seeks revenge upon those who sold her a shoddy mobile home; and a crooked former home inspector makes sacrifices to a voodoo god and tries to get some of his grift on.

So there’s a crime involved, but it doesn’t really carry the story. Hiaasen jump cuts the subplots and the characters interact, but the inevitable climax on a key comes too early, the denouement runs a bit long, and the book lacks some of the rush that his others bring.

So it’s somewhere between Lucky You and Nature Girl (which I didn’t like so much). Still, it’s a readable and enjoyable book, just not one of Hiaasen’s best.

I bought this book at St. Michael’s book fair earlier this year; between Great Tales of Mystery & Suspense, my reading pace for the year is shot.

This book runs 574 pages and comes from the pages of Reader’s Digest magazine from the first half of the last century. It collects murder mysteries, a couple of ghost stories, and a long piece on the Alger Hiss espionage (starring Congressman Richard Nixon as the hero, which explains why former Vice-President Nixon offered a blurb on the back).

Some of the stories overlap with The World’s Most Infamous Crimes and Criminals, but they’re told with a punchier (partially digested) style. Also, overall, this book was not as depressing as The World’s Most Infamous Crimes and Criminals as it didn’t have matter-of-fact accounts of genocide.

Worth the buck, except for the part where it made me spend a week or so reading it. Looks like I’ll be reporting on coloring books for the next couple of weeks so I can get my average up.

I didn’t care so much for Nature Girl, but this book hearkens back to Hiaasen’s strengths. A winning lottery drawing has two ticket holders: a black woman from a small town in Florida and one of a pair of self-styled white supremecist militia wannabees (who belong to the NRA). The black woman wants to buy a stretch of undeveloped land to save it from developers because her turtles are from there. A mob attorney from Chicago wants the land as part of a way of laundering money in a money-losing development. The militia men (who belong to the NRA) want the black woman’s lottery ticket because they don’t want to share the lottery winnings. So they take it, and the woman and a newspaper reported try to find them and retrieve the ticket. Throw in a dopey convenience store clerk who wants to be in the band–no, the militia, a Hooters waitress that one of the militia men (who happen to belong to the NRA) has his good eye on, an ATF agent smitten, unrequitedly, with the lottery winner who is not in a militia (or the NRA), and a newspaper feature writer who started out with a fluff piece about the lottery winner and a price on his head by a judge whom he cuckolded, and we’ve got a Hiassen novel. It ends, mostly, on a key with some gun play and violence, in which the heroes (who do not belong to the NRA) use firearms and a well-placed stingray to defeat the enemies.

So it’s a pretty good book. Hiaasen, post Murrah, gets in his digs at militias and then stripes the whole NRA as kooks, but several of his characters are responsible gun owners. Some people might take issue with that distinction. Also, he relies a lot on the “newcomers are spoiling Florida” motif that has been popular with Florida writers since the invention of air conditioning. But the book is enjoyable and entertaining, so it’s easier to not take the minor polemics as earnest.

So this book is one of Hiaasen’s better novels. I can say that having come off of reading one that was not.

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

Sorry to be summoning forth the memory of old Alka Seltzer commercials, but zowie, this is a 601 page book. It’s an Anna Karenina-sized collection of mystery short stories.

It’s a large collection of short stories, to be sure, but it’s a very good collection of short stories, so don’t get me wrong. It took me a couple of weeks to read it, but that’s because even the best book of short stories might be hard to put down, but sometimes they can be hard to pick up again, particularly when they’re 600 page books of short stories and you’re a fellow who likes to read a couple of books a week.

This collection, though, is definitely of higher quality than some of the collections of short stories I’ve picked up in the recent past (even better than The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction Fourteenth Series). This book runs a gamut, from serious literary writers like Pearl S. Buck and Bernard Malamud to science fiction luminaries like Robert Silverberg (see my review for Three Survived) to my mystery standards (John D. MacDonald, Ed McBain, Ross MacDonald, Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillaine, and Ellery Queen).

The styles vary, but the quality is definitely high, and it’s worth the buck I paid for it at St. Michael’s book fair this winter. Heck, for the dollar, I got a lot of nights’ reading from it, which is both good (efficient spending for prolonged reading) and bad (prolonged reading means less clearance of the to-read shelf and too little blog fodder).

The link below lists it as low as $.34 currently (plus shipping). Worth all of those pennies and more.

And when you’ve read it, explain the Bernard Malamud story (“My Son The Murderer”) to me, because I didn’t get it. Since it was the last story in the book and the only thing standing between me and logging the book as my 15th trophy of the year, I didn’t mind. But I didn’t get it, either. Blending multiple 1st person points of view across multiple paragraphs? The intro said there was a crime in it, but I didn’t see it.