Category: Books

This is the second Perry Mason book I’ve re-read this year; the first was The Case of the Cautious Coquette in April. This volume is published by Walter J. Black, the same fellow that does the Classics Club and Dickens editions I’ve been collecting; now that I look at it, they use the same binding. No doubt these were inexpensive books sold as part of a Perry Mason book club, and the fact that I see so many of these titles in the wild indicates they were probably early volumes in the series.

In this book, celebrating its 56th anniversary this year, Mason consults with a nurse who wants to prevent the murder of her charge by a husband after her (the charge’s) property. Mason can’t do much for her, but gets roped into defending the nurse when she’s accused of theft. Then the charge actually dies, and Mason must defend the accused–the dead woman’s sister who also consulted with Mason with an incomplete hand-written will.

A quick read and a good mystery. There’s a reason Mason was popular in fiction and on television for fifty years.

I picked up this book because I liked its cover and its book jacket flap blurbs. Of course, now that I look more closely, the cover is kinda weird:

I mean, there’s a tire with a shiny hubcap on the pavement, and there’s the hot chick (ca 1982) witness to a hit and run reflected in it. However, if the perspective of the reflection is to be believed, she’s either a legless panhandler on a little cart or coming out of a manhole in the street. Or the car and the obligatory hard-boiled hat are somehow on a platform three to four feet above the pavement level where the woman is standing.

Okay, so the hard-boiled detective, series character Tanner in this case, is supposed to find a model who witnessed a hit-and-run where the hitter was a local crime boss and the hitee was really a hit. That’s what the flap says. Inside, the Tanner character and his Greenleaf author try to throwback to Chandler and Macdonald (Ross)–the detective even mentions reading those authors at one point. The language is seriously over-the-top riven with metaphors, sometimes two to a sentence or five in a paragraph. It made for some slower reading.

Then, after a bit, the language didn’t jar me, so I thought perhaps this Tanner fellow was hard in the line of the greats. The book, set in El Gordo, California (literally, The Fat Man) uses the California landscape prevalent in the classics, and the book plays in the elements of the idle rich, gangsters, and mixed-up youth.

However, ultimately, it’s not up to the level of the names it tries to invoke. The plot gets just one not too twisted and the resolution is a little too tidy.

I won’t dodge others in this series, but I’m not ordering them all right now. It’s below Robert Crais and Robert B. Parker but not completely unworthwhile.

I’ve read this book before, so I knew how it was going to end. I read it again anyway. That’s what I like about McBain. That I like McBain. Or something.

This book is one of the Deaf Man books, which you know what that means if you know McBain. The 87th Precinct series are pretty straight ahead police procedurals, but a number of the books center on the heist designs of the arch criminal of the series, The Deaf Man. These books deal less with the investigation of a realistic crime than the heistalistic stylings and clues and eventual accidental collapse of the schemes. In this book, he begins sending clues to the 87th Precinct that usually indicates the heist he’s going to pull. If he’s playing fair. Oh, yeah, there’s a dead body found in Grover Park, too.

The Deaf Man subseries aren’t the best introduction to the series if you haven’t read them before, but if you’re familiar with the series, they’re a understandable diversion. McBain must have had fun with them.

So I’ve read it more than once, and I’ll probably read it again someday. The next time I find another copy on my to-read shelves. Which could be as early as December.

I got this book in the Reader’s Digest purty edition instead of the Walter J. Black Classics Club/Classic Editions (as is Oliver Twist and some of the other Dickens I have). Hence, instead of $1 or $4.95 I would have paid for it, I paid $30 or so (plus shipping and handling). There was a phase I was going through when I thought it would be neat to have matching editions of books in my collection, before I came to my senses and started amassing matching editions that only cost $1.00.

At first, I thought I would like this book much better than Oliver Twist for two reasons: first, the book uses a double-effect first person narrator. Now, to those of you not up on those terms, it means that the voice telling the story is an I (I did, I said). The double-effect means that the voice is telling a story from the past, so the events of the past convey not only what happened and what the narrator thought of them as they happened, but the greater wisdom of interpretation from a later time. This allows some offhand foreshadowing as well as a certain wryness.

Secondly, with a first person narrator, I figured that flaw I found in Oliver Twist, that things happened to Oliver, a passive participant in his own story, wouldn’t happen. Well, therein I was incorrect. For although things happened to Oliver, in Great Expectations, Pip spends a lot of time doing nothing.

For a quick synopsis: A young orphan, raised by his sister and her blacksmith husband, finds an escaped convict in the graveyard where his parents are buried (the child’s, not the convict’s). Forced to help the convict, the orphan brings him a file and some victuals. The convict is captured the next day, but the child never lets on he helped the convict. After time passes, the child (Pip) grows a bit and is selected to visit a reclusive wealthy woman who has stopped her clocks at the time she was jilted by a con man some years ago. Pip meets her ward as well, a young woman who is attractive but cold. Apparently, the woman is raising the child to be a man-eater to exact revenge on the gender. Suddenly, the woman’s attorney–and a criminal defender of some reknown–comes forward to tell Pip he has “great expectations”–that is, someone has given him an allowance for education and he might come into some property when he turns 21. Pip turns from an earnest, lower class fellow into a shiftless upper class snob, continues to pursue the beautiful but cold Estella, and waits to learn the name and nature of his benefactor.

So, ultimately, while Oliver Twist had a lot of things just happen to Oliver, Great Expectations has a first person narrator who does little but kill time. Overall, the book was too long building with a lot of paragraphs spent on the things Pip did while passing the time, but the nut of the story could have been told in 200 pages. This is the nature of Victorian literature, I guess, filled with passages and “comic” moments that really aren’t that funny to a modern audience.

Worth your time if you’re into literature, but there are better things to read.

This old book is more akin to a pamphlet as it weighs in at 20 typed-and-photocopied pages, but since the library counted it as a book, I will, too. Like Webster Park: 1892-1992, it provides insight into the history of the region in which I live, but it’s not much. The book provides a little text describing how to look for information about your home from the city of St. Louis (if your home was built before the city threw out the county lo, those many years ago) or St. Louis County. Additionally, it provides a couple of maps showing some of the early subdivisions of the land, so I now know who owned the land my house was on from the time the Spanish crown deeded it to a fellow named Sarpy to the time it was parcelled into 40 acre lots. It’s not far, really, for me to draw up a line of owners all the way to me if I were so inclined. Perhaps someday I might.

The book precedes the Internet, though, in that it includes a couple of forms that you can photocopy and fill out to take with you to the government. Of course, from what I know of the government, it still precedes the Internet, so perhaps those will come in handy.

Worth the hour I spent browsing it just for the maps.

Wow, this book is 16 years old now and its subject matter is as relevant as it was then. The plot, as you know, deals with a set of terrorists who get their hands on a lost nuclear weapon and smuggle it into the United States. That’s the first half. And if you didn’t know the rest of it, stop reading now.

Then they blow it up at the Superbowl in Denver, and the United States president thinks it’s the Russians, so the thing escalates into the brink of a nuclear war. Meanwhile, Jack Ryan struggles with the bureaucracy in the CIA and at the top levels of the government. Those struggles, and the inside baseball that goes with it, comprise much of the weight of this book.

The book compares with some of the classical literature I’ve read this year (The Three Musketeers particularly and somewhat with Anna Karenina) in that its cut scenes deal with a war and with a large cast working within and without of the government using intrigue and whatnot. However, this book is frightening in its possibility. Brother, after September 11, 2001, I had trouble watching the movie True Lies because it dealt with nuclear weapons smuggled into the US, and it’s not entertainment if it plays to my deepest fears.

But the book moves along well, and Clancy is a master at torquing up the tension, although the ultimate climax really goes on too long with the heated exchanges between the US and Russian presidents. Also, the book refers quite a bit to A Clear and Present Danger, which I have yet to read, so many of these allusions were lost on me. But a good thriller if you’re into that, and if you want to have nightmares about it.

I italicised Denver above, because the movie version set the Superbowl and the detonation in Baltimore, which holds with my thesis that terrorists could take liberty with pretty much anything between the Rockies and the Appalachians and nobody would care; obviously, Hollywood thought Denver was bucolic and backward enough that audiences wouldn’t feel the tension and the shocking sense of loss that Baltimore, on the east coast, inspires. Also, apparently, the movie changed the terrorists to Nazis or something. Although there’s an element of freelance non-Middle Easterners in the plot, make no mistake, it’s Palestinians who blow up the Superbowl. But I’ve only seen Patriot Games and The Hunt for Red October as movies and I’m not in a hurry to rectify that “oversight.”

I do have more Clancy on my shelves, comprising many shelf inches, so I’ll get to them sooner or later, and I don’t dread the prospect.

Like the other MacLean books I’ve read this year (Puppet on a Chain and Santorini), this book represents more “modern” MacLean (that is, up to date when he wrote them; in this case, the late 1970s). Unfortunately, like the other modern books, this one is a little thin relative to the action in, say, The Guns of Navarrone or Where Eagles Dare.

This book details two MacLeanesque heroes who help out a rogue oil billionaire whose revolutionary oil platform, parked in the Gulf of Mexico, is under threat from a bad man employed by the traditional oil cartel. Weapons are fired. However, there really aren’t any plot twists to keep it going. It reads like a television or movie script.

Still, a bad MacLean book is average suspense, so it’s not as though it’s a bad book; it’s just not the best in the MacLean oeuvre.

I bought this book this weekend for a quarter, a super bargain since it’s a two-fer: It’s the first printing of the Signet movie tie-in edition (with the book review from the New Yorker cut out and tucked in as a bookmark), and I bought the next two books in the series last weekend, so I needed to get this book, too. I guess there’s a fourth in the series, but I might hold off buying that that until I see how the first three go. After all, he did ruin the Rama series.

The book, written in conjunction sort of with the screenplay for the Kubrick film, fills in a lot of the gaps of just what the heck was going on. It adds plenty of detail to the monkeys scene and to the ending to make sense of what only served as stunning images in the movie.

The plot revolves around the appearance of the monoliths, strange stones that man has found which have an age of 3 million years. When one is found near a moon base, it blasts a radio signal to Saturn (Jupiter in the movie). A ship is sent to it, and Hal the computer kills everyone on board. Even that is explained better in the book. And it’s all tied together.

I’ve seen the movie once and I saw 2010 a couple of times when it was on Showtime and I was stuck in rural Missouri in the 1980s, so I’ll be a little familiar with the continuing storyline.

Although I don’t know how much I’ll appreciate Clarke and his reputation after I am done. I mean, Childhood’s End was okay, this book was okay, Rendezvous with Rama was great until Clarke ruined it in the 1980s with its sequels. But that this fellow is held up with Asimov, Heinlein, and Niven as one of the greats in the field. Meh.

This year, I’ve read pulp novels from the Killmaster, the Enforcer, and Matt Helm series, so why not try one from the granddaddy, Don Pendleton’s The Executioner? It has the most books published about a single character, some 200 or 300 of them. So I found one at a book fair, cheap, and checked it out.

The other two series offered more depth. Sugar’s “The Enforcer” has weird sci-fi elements and Objectivist speeches; the Killmaster gets the chicks; and Matt Helm channels Dean Martin, whether intentionally or not. The Executioner just runs around and kills Mafia.

In this book, he goes to Philadelphia to take out a branch of the Family. He blows up a compound that used to be a bordello and then works his way into the home of the don. He kills a “specialist” that’s come to take care of the problem and then sets elements of the mob against each other while having a hand in, I dunno, 60 deaths? 70?

On a side note, The Executioner (one of the main inspirations for Marvel Comic’s The Punisher, by the way) was a Vietnam veteran. Many characters from the pulp of the era and television of the next decade involved Vietnam veteran characters who were not suicidal nutbars or whatnot; instead, they were tough, efficient crime fighters of one sort or another. Where are the veterans as honorable crimefighters these days in popular culture?

This book reads like a television script (and the book says they’re a major motion picture series coming!) with about that much depth of character (I know, it’s pulp, but this guy isn’t much more than a name holding various guns). I guess that’s what you get with a series written by dozens, but this is only #15, when Don Pendleton himself was writing them.

Of all the series I’ve sampled this year, this is the least likely for a return visit; that’s not to say that it’s bad pulp, but it’s the worst of the pulp I’ve read this year.

This book rounds out the Brighton Beach trilogy, and although it’s been decades since I read Brighton Beach Memoirs, I read Biloxi Blues just this May. Ergo, I am sort of up on the characters and storyline. Bottom line? This play was probably the weakest of the bunch and only made its way onto stage and onto the television screen because Neil Simon was all that. As a stand alone drama, it’s a little lacking. You have to be invested in the characters already from the previous works to really care, and the piece doesn’t offer an overarching goal/conflict that needs to be resolved; instead, you’ve got a subplot in the chance Stan and Eugene have to make it as comedy writers, a subplot about the grandmother offstage moving to Florida, and a subplot about the breakdown of the Jerome parents’ marriage. Even lumped together, it doesn’t stick.

On a side note, I find that the actor who played Eugene Jerome in the movie Brighton Beach Memoirs, Jonathan Silverman, reprised the role for the Broadway debut of the play; however, in the made-for-television treatment (as opposed to the other two plays’ movie treatment), Silverman plays Stan Jerome, the older brother. He’s lost the part of Eugene to Corey Parker, who played Epstein in the film Biloxi Blues; as you know, Matthew Broderick played Eugene Jerome in both the Broadway and film versions of Biloxi Blues. Both Silverman and Broderick played Eugene Jerome on Broadway in Brighton Beach Memoirs; so when you’re watching the movies in order, you get some cast switching in odd ways. Kind of like when Lee Van Cleef was two different characters in For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

So it’s good to read the play if you need to close out the trilogy, but if it’s your only insight into the Jerome mythos, you might want to pass.

I saw this play staged in 1993 or 1994 in Milwaukee at the Milwaukee Rep or one of the subsidiary theatre groups that shares the space down on Wells; at the time, I thought it was the best drama I’d ever seen on stage. I still do, but unfortunately I’m not going to the theatre as much as I did when I was a poor college student making $6.60 an hour and paying tuition. I don’t know how that happened. So my experience hasn’t gotten much broader since the middle 1990s.

This book tells the story of a successful artist, Jonathan Waxman, who visits the home of his collegiate flame in England on the eve before the opening of his first European show. There, he finds a painting from his student period that captures something of his innocence before he became famous and rich and a self-made producer of commodity art. Or maybe it’s his meeting Patty again, a woman whom he dumped unceremoniously because she was not Jewish and who’s now married to an English archeologist whom she does not love.

The play is told in a series of scenes told non-chronologically and in as varied of places as the English house where Patty and her husband live; Jonathan’s boyhood home; the college where they went to school; and the opening itself. When the Milwaukee Rep staged it, I didn’t get the correct sense of the scenes between Jonathan and his German interviewer were at the opening, so I lost a bit from it.

But I got a bit out of reading it that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t seen it first; perhaps that’s the way to do these plays, unlike movies. Watch them live first and read the book after to see what you’ve missed.

At any rate, I liked the play and I liked the book.