Category: Books

Okay, it’s a gimmick book; the first half is written by Evan Hunter in a more literary, explore the character style, and the second half is a police procedural in the Ed McBain style. That’s the most notable thing about this book’s universe; the second most notable thing is that the book is set in New York in late July, 1999 (the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., places the dates exactly), so the book makes no reference to the events of two years later (and books set since make reference surely). Thirdly, the book is told in the present tense, a bit of a departure. There, the gimmicks and unusual things are noted duly early.

Of course, I don’t have to explain the first gimmick to you, gentle reader, because you know that Evan Hunter and Ed McBain are the same fellow. Regardless of the authors’ photograph on the back that depicts the two fellows standing side by side.

The first half of the book depicts a rather randy architect in New York who’s scheduled to return to a drab, sexless life with his long-term wife in Los Angeles in the morning. On his last night in New York, the, hem, gentleman tries to call an architecture student with whom he’s dallied and has had phone sex, tries to pick up a woman (an attempted recovering rape victim) in the hotel bar, tries to call a phone sex line, and then tries to achieve satisfaction at a “massage parlor” to ill results. Brothers and sisters, although certain people (my mother-in-law particularly, whom I impressed upon first meeting by reciting Eliot and not McBain) have called this author “smutty,” but I’ve disagreed–but after reading the Evan Hunter part of the book, I felt like I needed a shower. The only other Evan Hunter book I’ve read is Last Summer, which had me feeling for the protagonist until such time as I said, “Ew.”

But then the second half of the book starts with detectives in NYC investigating the homicide of a hooker, and I hoped it wouldn’t be the sad sack from the first half of the book. The second half follows a trio of detectives from Homicide, Vice, and the Special Victims unit looking into the murder. The main character is a woman on the Special Victims unit (the Rape squad), and the section follows her one day crusade to find this perp while she handles her divorce and relates to her co-workers. McBain takes a leap in using a female point-of-view, but he does well as far as I can tell (after all, I’m a male).

An interesting exercise; of course, we all bought it because it’s McBain. And not a bad departure from his norm (like Another Part of the City). McBain is like John D. MacDonald on my pantheon of writers; regardless of what they wrote, I will read it, for I expect it to be good.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

Robert B. Parker phones in another Sunny Randall novel. I can’t say it any better, especially after this:

Quirk, Belson, my father, and I all looked slowly around the still-sealed-off park. Nobody said anything. Nothing presented itself. After a long moment, Quirk squatted on his haunches and studied the gun.

“Smith and Wesson,” he said, “revolver…” He bent over to look at the barrel opening. “Thirty-eight.”

He leaned forward onto his hands and straightened his legs and did a kind of pushup so he could smell the gun.

“Been fired recently.”

He eased out of the pushup and got his feet under him and resumed his squat.

“But not in this flower patch,” he said, “unless he bothered to clean up the brass.“

“I’d look over there,” Belson said, and nodded at the swan boat dock.

Quirk continued to sit on his haunches, looking at the flower bed.

“Stay with this, Frank,” Quirk said. “I’ll get some crime-scene techs over here, but I want you to be the only one touches the gun, okay?”

Belson nodded.

“You bag it, label it, take it to the lab, stay with it, wait for it.”

“Okay, Marty,” Belson said.

“Nobody but you and the lab guy touches it.”

“Okay, Marty.”

“I’ll get some divers to look in the water for the shell casing,” Quirk said.

Friends, that’s a very basic misrepresentation of the difference between a revolver and a semi-automatic pistol. I would expect by now Dr. Parker know the difference. That this very basic mistake makes it into print doesn’t bode well.

“It’s good,” my beautiful wife said after she read the book first because I was mired in Anna Karenina. “It’s focus is on the crime and not Sunny Randall’s life.”

Oh, but no. We have the extraneous chapters on Sunny meeting with Dr. Silverman, her therapist; chapters on Sunny reconciling with her ex-husband; chapters on Sunny interacting with her dysfunctional adult family and recognizing the dynamic about how it revolves around her father; and chapters on a sideplot about what a mess her friend Julie is.

Oh, and the crime. A serial killer returns after 20 years. Sunny knows immediately who it is and then has to prove it. The case turns on a discovery that, when thought about after the end of the book, is quite poorly handled as a means of moving the plot along, and we get the same sort of ending as in Shrink Rap: Sunny puts herself in danger with one of the father figures in the background ready to save her, but she saves herself in a redemption of you-go-girl violence.

Sadly, I’m reading the Sunny Randall series (and probably the Jessie Stone series) out of habit now. I look slightly more forward to the Spenser books and the Westerns, but.

But.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book as part of the “Everything you can fit into the bag is $1” sale at Christ the King church earlier this year. Since I only found five things I wanted, size of the bag be condemned, I paid $.20 for it. It’s signed by the author and inscribed, and it came with a flyer from a Lake Superior nursery (the plant kind) as a bookmark, so it’s quite a deal, especially since I liked the book.

The book collects a number of Jim Marshall’s columns from the Lake Superior Journal in the 1990s. The columns touch on the history of the lake and area quite a bit with a number of stories about friends and running his boat, the Skipper Sam II, on that inland sea. The book offered me a number of ideas for essays and whatnot about the region and a strong urge to visit. I mean, I’m from Wisconsin and all, but I’m from southern Wisconsin.

The book also reminded me that we don’t have white birch trees in Missouri. Might not have red squirrels, either. I swear, there are red squirrels in the northern part of Wisconsin and the Upper Penninsula of Michigan. Those previously forgotten and almost fantastic memories of my youth.

So pick it up if you’re interested in the region or if you just want to do a little exploring from your chair. I liked the book so much, I’m considering subscribing to Lake Superior Magazine, although Jim Marshall died last year, so I won’t enjoy more of his stories. It looks like there are another six or seven years of the column online, though.

What an excellent ambassador for the region. This book, too.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, in my book report for From the Corner of His Eye, I said:

I could have almost read Anna Karenina by the time I was done with this book.

As you might know, gentle reader, I have a special term that I use when reading long books to refer to that instant where you realize that you could have read a whole other book by now. That is the Anna Karenina moment. I coined the term after the first time I tried to read Anna Karenina, back in the late middle 1990s (1996? 1997?). I was working in a print shop at the time, operating a Didde-Glaser 175 two color offset web printing press. Every day, I had a 30 minute lunch break, and I brought in a book to read over those lunch breaks. I once brought in Anna Karenina and made it to about page 287 (still bookmarked, a decade later). There, I had my first Anna Karenina moment, and I put the book aside for shorter books.

Well, after making that crack about the Koontz book, I decided to pick up the Tolstoy again to see how it compared. Well, it was certainly longer than the Koontz, and it took me three weeks of almost nightly reading to complete it. But it was still time better spent than From the Corner of His Eye. Where Koontz drops in a chapter for nothing more than melodramatic foreshadowing, Tolstoy adds a theme. So it’s better than the Koontz book, not that anyone had any doubt.

And in case you’re wondering, pages 287-600 are a string of Anna Karenina moments, but I have more patience and discipline now.

For those of you who haven’t read it or its attendant summary documents, the story revolves around several threads in the Russian aristocracy circa 1870. Mr. Oblonsky has a dalliance with the help, and his wife Dolly is put off by it and wonders what she’ll do. Anna Karenina, Mr. Oblonsky’s sister, talks to her. Meanwhile, Mr. Oblonsky’s friend Levin, a country gentleman, has come to ask Dolly’s sister Kitty to marry him. She, though, is flirting with Vronsky, who’s a flirt and has no intent to marry her. But when he meets Anna Karenina, he’s smitten and leads her into an adulterous relationship that will last hundreds of pages.

The book follows two main story arcs: the illicit love of Anna and Vronsky and Levin’s search for happiness and faith. The subthemes, of course, deal with the relationships of the aristocrats to each other and to the peasants and their children. There’s something for everyone, someone to whom everyone can relate, and plenty of heft in case you need the hardback for self-defense.

An interesting bit about the translation: It was translated by an English person who often threw in British coinage to make the denominations more relevant to the English reader. So when you’re talking whole bills, you hear about roubles, but when it switches to kopecks, suddenly you’re talking about shillings or farthings. Which is really weird to an American reader. Or even an English reader some years from now when they’re using Euros or Rials in Britain.

It’s a book that provokes some thought because it’s classical literature, and it makes me want to write a paper on it. Does Levin really become a Christian? How would I match these heroes up to The Fountainhead characters? That sort of thing.

But, although I own War and Peace, I’m not diving right into it. I have a pile of books to read, and knocking down to a 17 per year pace won’t clear my to-read shelves.

Books mentioned in this review:

Perhaps this was a funnier play in 1976 in London. Maybe it was written specifically to get Luan Peters into lingerie onstage. But it’s about dalliances of Members of Parliament that are threatening to diminish the public’s respect for them and a select committee designed to deal with it. Except all the members of the committee have dallied with the clerk who’s supposed to take notes for them.

There’s an interlude that’s called a second play (New-Found-Land) designed to shout out to a London theatre luminary at the time.

Overall, to British and sort of dated. Which is why I wouldn’t expect to see it as is onstage any time soon. But no doubt someone in America would be able to adapt the theme and ride Stoppard’s name for a production of it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I cannot believe I read the whole thing.

This book clocks in at almost 600 pages, overwritten the whole time as though Dean Koontz single handedly has to support a struggling simile factory in southern Georgia. He layers his similes like an onion; even when you peel away all the layers of the metaphor, it’s still an onion. To Stephen King’s Shakespeare, Dean Koontz is not even Ben Jonson; he’s that other guy they don’t even offer survey courses for.

Let’s see here, there’s a plot: a guy murders his wife for no reason (no, it’s because he’s a psychopath trying to broaden himself by killing the woman he loves); he becomes obsessed with the name Bartholemew. Also, he raped this one underage girl, who has a baby girl. A woman who’s pregnant has an auto accident on the way to the hospital that kills her husband; his last request is that she name the boy Bartholemew. The underage girl dies giving birth, so an aunt raises the girl. The children are prodigies who can also go other places. The boy goes blind. A cop chasing the psychopath gets left for dead by said psychopath instigates psychological warfare against the psycho. And the psycho kills people.

Meanwhile, Koontz dedicates many pages to similes, many paragraphs to minor characters with only roles as extras, and we navigate through several plot lines ultimately related but whose relationships are not too compelling. Then, after 500 pages, we get a three page sudden climax, and then we can roll over and go to sleep for the 40 page denouement that is supposed to tell the rest of the story about the kids and their powers. But come on. I could have almost read Anna Karenina by the time I was done with this book.

I liked Odd Thomas well enough, tolerated Mr. Murder passingly, and just read Forever Odd. However, this book really has me dreading reading any of the other Koontz volumes on my shelves, and that’s not a good kind of dread for a horror/thriller writer. It spills over to the unread John Saul books who are painted by being too close to the Koontz books.

Don’t bother with this book. Let me be a lesson to you.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

 

Of course, this work was originally entitled De Commodis litterarum atque incommodis before Renée Neu Watkins translated it for us. I picked this book up over a year ago at the Carondolet YMCA Book Fair for fifty cents. Even though it’s only 54 pages, it has taken me this long to power through it.

Apparently (the introduction tells us), Alberti wrote this tract early in his Renaissance career as a scholar because his wealthy family was begging for him to produce something to justify his existence as a freeloading scholar. This is his defense of freeloading: in it, he outlines that someone dedicated to books should seek only the higher knowledge and truth within and should not expect to get chicks, money, power, or reknown. Let’s face it, a real scholar hits the books for 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, in ill-heated Renaissance apartments wearing rags–because all of the scholars meager moneys go into books.

The book reads as though it was written by any stereotypical scribe from a fantasy novel, but it was written by a young man romanticizing the hair shirt he’d chosen for his wardrobe and trying to lower his family’s expectations. The prose is flowery and meandering, even where the text continues to say that the author is glossing over many things and is getting back to the point.

Still, the rhetoric comes from a different time, where arguments are advanced by reason without the intrusion of actual data points (although Alberti offers anecdotes, often at hearsay distance, to illustrate) or invective (which is the contemporary practice).

The book did not give me any advice on how to wean myself from book abuse, and it was my 50th book completed this year. I obviously need help.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is another Joe Pike book (like L.A. Reqiuem, I think). As you know, gentle reader, I have read and reported upon all of Robert Crais’s work on this blog. I started out liking him with his early stuff, but later got a little bored with the “World’s Greatest Detective” schtick of Elvis Cole. Crais must have, too, since he’s veered off series, mostly, with some of his other books, but many of them set in LA return to Cole and Pike.

This book centers on a bodyguard gig that Joe Pike, the Hawk to Cole’s Spenser, gets. He brings Elvis Cole into it, of course, but most of the book is from Pike’s point of view, with flashbacks interspersed and other characters getting their chapters to show their emotional evolution.

Pike has to guard a Paris Hilton knock off who’s in danger of getting knocked off after accidentally hitting a Mercedes on an after-club drive. The Mercedes contained two local real estate developers and a gopher for a South American cartel. The girl goes into protection, but someone inside is tipping off the bad guys, so a consultant goes way outside and gets Pike. Pike determines the best way to prevent anyone from harming the girl is to kill those persons first.

As a matter of course, lies are told to the protagonists and are investigated. The layers of the onion are peeled back, resulting in a climax that explains why I keep getting Google hits for robert crais republican.

A decent book, but Crais relies on a certain familiarity with Cole and Pike and might just play too much with shifting point of view.

Books mentioned in this review:

I must have bought this paperback more than a decade ago, probably during college or immediately thereafter. It’s been hanging around, and I’ve even tried to start it once or twice before, but I stalled out before passing through the narrative frame (introduction of Marlow relating the story while on a boat in the Thames). This time, though, it was the time to read it, and I made it through both the novelette (“Heart of Darkness”), the short story (“The Secret Sharer”), and the introduction/critical materials (and in that order).

“Heart of Darkness” is only 120 pages, but it’s dense Victorian English. As some of you know, the movie Apocalypse Now was based on this work, and the three or four nights I spent reading it seem shorter than watching the movie. The plot varies in that Marlow is going to meet Kurtz, and Martin Sheen is going to kill Marlon Brando. So one almost wants to comment on the differences in the plot and how, thematically, the producers of the two works were talking differently and speculate as to why. But I have a real job, almost, so I won’t waste too much time on it. I did get some of the thematic points of man versus himself at the same time as man versus nature and man versus primitive man. More than half the story spends its time getting up river, and the appearance, retrieval, and death of Kurtz happen very quickly, so if I find a hardback copy of Conrad’s work, I would welcome an excuse to read it again.

“The Secret Sharer” is shorter and more straight forward, although the first pages set the scene and don’t jump right into the action. However, I kind of got the point here, too.

Then I read the critical essays and the introduction to learn a little more about Conrad and such. Wow, I hearkened back to my university days with the critical essays, which were people saying in nonfiction what the author meant in his fiction. The essays confirmed some of my takes on the stories, but my goodness. Somewhere in the world, people make a living explaining largely underread literature to each other and to their students. I am glad I didn’t stick in the academy.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you know, I bought Tarnsman of Gor and this book so that I would have read the first pentagor of the John Norman fantasy series before I lit into the last half of the first 10. Here, I read #2, the Gor book for 1967 (although my copy is a later reprint with cover by Boris Vallejo).

In this, Tarl Cabot returns to Gor after seven years on Earth to find his home city of Ko-ro-ba destroyed and its citizens scattered–including his father and his love Talena. He also finds himself in unheralded armor, meaning he’s an outlaw. He ends up going to Tharna, a city where women rule, and leading an uprising.

The book is the weakest of the first five, clearly a setup for the longer story lines that took place after the first one succeeded. Still, it’s short and it’s still a neat piece of fantasy. I articulated to my wife that good fantasy is very different from suspense/crime/mystery fiction in that when you want to find out what’s coming next, you really don’t have any idea. These books are like that; they contain enough detail into the world that you know Norman isn’t making it up as he goes, but as you go, you’re learning something about the setting and the laws that govern it. You really can have a sense of wonder you don’t get from other kinds of fiction.

So I’m ready for the sixth book in the series one of these days.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, that’s what I get for having too many books on my shelves. I read the sequel to this book in February, completely unaware that I could have read them in order were I more organized.

This is the book that introduces the elite assassin Clara Rinker into Lucas Davenport’s life. An attorney hires her through an intermediary to kill the wife of the man she wants. When the intermediary tries to blackmail the high-powered attorney, she calls the assassin back. They develop a friendship based on being sociopaths who happen to be women, and that’s all spoiled when Davenport investigates the growing number of dead bodies.

The book is paced better than some Davenport novels, since it moves quickly throughout instead of a leisurely pace and then a hyperkinetic last hundred pages. However, the story does hinge on some coincidences and leaps of faith that made me go, hmmm. And contrary to what I said in previous book reports, there is a “hum” spelled out in this book, so the introduction of the aside utterances began and evolved gradually, I guess.

Still, a good enough read.

Books mentioned in this review:

Of all the Neil Simon plays I’ve read (I Ought To Be In Pictures and Biloxi Blues recently), I like this one the best. It details two middle-aged (in 1974, this was 42 and 32) people coming out of their first marriages. The man is a widower still grieving for his wife, the woman a divorcée. Their friends are trying to set them up with people, and a chance meeting in a restaurant puts these two on a collision course of love. When the man dials her accidentally, it starts a whirlwind romance and marriage that aren’t as rosy as they could be, as the man still wants to hold onto his self-pity in losing his wife.

Unlike Biloxi Blues, there’s a unifying and identifiable theme here: the way middle-aged (in 1974) people deal with long-term relationships and the loss of the same. It’s billed as a comic play, but it’s definitely more serious than straight-ahead comedy. Also, I like the set designed by the playwright, which requires no scene changes even though it shows two scenes–the apartments of his and hers–and allows interaction via telephone. Smooth.

Side note: the original production used Judd Hirsch as the man character; I just read a complete episode guide for Judd Hirsch’s comedy television series (Taxi). Isn’t it funny how the mind imposes order on disorder (that is, my reading list and my wandering journey through the same)?

Books mentioned in this review: