Category: Books

I bought this knob-licker‘s book from the three-for-a-dollar rack outside the Hooked on Books in Springfield. The book’s cover and pages are kinda wavy and the book has a sort of sweet odor to it. I don’t know if some Southwest Missouri State student, steeped in openmindedness and something sweet and smoky, dumped the book before moving from the stifling confines of the Bible Belt for a big city or if someone received the book as a gift and ran it through the dishwasher because it’s dirty. I can only speculate, but I didn’t practice safe reading and read this book without protective latex.

I’ve read Dan Savage in the local tabloid and on Salon in the middle-to-late 1990s. His columns tend to have the message that if it doesn’t hurt anyone (unless they want it), sexual practices are okay. He’s right, of course, but focus on the physical pleasure disservices participants who don’t know or expect anything more thank a hook-up.

Savage writes as a know-it-all, slightly an ass, and it’s hard for me to take any more than a couple of pages or letters in any one sitting. Because it will undoubtedly offend Mr. Savage, I’d like to point out that his voice reminds me a little of Rush Limbaugh. There’s a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek in the voice, as though Savage is playing the part of being more ass than he really is. It’s that quality that makes Rush Limbaugh amusing, but Savage is more, well, savage in his assishness. He calls names, casts aspersions, and belittles those whose sexual aesthetics differ from his rather expansive set. So he’s like Rush Limbaugh, but not as good or humorous. Maybe Dan’s more like Michael Savage, who an Internet rumor I’m starting right here indicates is Dan Savage’s estranged older brother.

So I’d recommend sticking to the columns and not investing any more than thirty-three cents on the book, and I don’t imagine I’ll buy any of Savage’s other books of commentary.

This book features Elvis Cole working for an adopted starlet who’s interested in finding her natural parents in Louisiana. When Cole travels to Louisiana, he discovers that her past is shrouded in mystery, mayhem, and the secrets of a small town.

Enough of the back of the book stuff. Another good Elvis Cole book, but one that again makes me think of the work of Robert B. Parker–the end reminds me a lot of Early Autumn, but with a twist. Of course, these novels make me feel like pre-Spenser:For Hire Spenser novels, when I could wonder what was going to happen before I was caught up in the dialog-driven post-Spenser: For Hire Parker novels, when the dialog just carries you from page 1 to page 300 without allowing the reader to wonder what’s going to happen.

On the other hand, this novel represents the first time Crais deploys the old “first person narrator discloses to other characters, but not to the readers, the plans” trick, which is second in cheap tricks only to the “first person narrator dies at the freaking end” device in absolute author naughtiness. Poor form, Peter, especially when you’re just throwing it in on page 200 to create suspense. Stephen King would thrash you, and rightfully so. That doesn’t count as proper foreshadowing.

Still, I recommend the book, particularly if you can, as I did, get it as a Christmas gift from a beautiful wife who gives up her collection because she knows I won’t read books that are not on my To-Read Shelves unless they’re my books. Otherwise, they’re worth your paperback or second-hand dollar.

I have this book in hardback, but that means instead of bending paperback covers, I got blue ink on my hands from the spine of the de-dustjacketed book. I guess it was worth it.

Elvis Cole receives a visit from a damsel in distress who thinks that her fiance, a cop with an elite undercover group, is in some sort of trouble. The cop visits Cole right after the woman leaves and explains that he’s just cheating on her. Elvis follows up and finds that one of them is lying and one of them is not. It would be a much shorter book if only the woman had been lying.

The book returns to a better hard-boiled standard where the detective is looking for answers and not just solving a problem–even though there’s some of that in this book. Still, I like the style of the plot better than Lullaby Town, and I’m even willing to overlook some questionable plot holes in the beginning–as long as I don’t think about it too much.

Still, it’s better than average detective fiction bordering on the exceptional.

Lullaby Town is the third Elvis Cole book, and Crais takes the series in a new, but common direction. No longer does Elvis Cole have to figure out what’s going on, but rather he knows what’s going on and has to get his client out of it.

When a famous Hollywood director hires Elvis Cole to find his ex-wife and child, Cole has to travel from the warm and friendly confines of California to New England. He soon discovers the wife has made a new, successful life for herself but with accidental and encompassing involvement as a money launderer for a New York crime family. So early in the book, we know the whole thing and the remainder of the book is not so much mystery as it is crime-based problem solving.

Robert B. Parker took this tack, too, with a number of his novels and, in many cases, the lesser novels in his canon. Chandler, nah, Marlowe was always trying to figure out what was going on in the room. Whenever crime novels run in this direction, they tend to make their heroes the most clever person in the room, and that goes against the spirit of the hardboiled school in a way, where the detective perseveres and wins in the end not by outfoxing, necessarily, the bad guys, but through his tenaciousness and relentlessness. Okay, with some intelligence, too.

Heather assures me that not all of the remainders of the series reflect this trend, which I hope is the case. I root for the underdog, and guys who hope to outsmart organized criminals aren’t underdogs. They’re just smart guys who outsmart organized crime. And in series of detective novels, they do it once a year at least.

Confession: When confronted with the name Elvis, most people would think of the Elvis. Me, when I picture Elvis Cole in my head, I have a different Elvis as a starting point.

I read the second Elvis Cole book, my second in 36 hours, so that bespeaks much of how enjoyable these particular novels are proving.

This one finds Elvis Cole looking for a a stolen Japanese manuscript, protecting a wealthy businessman’s family, looking for a kidnapped girl who might be complicit in her disappearance, and battling Japanese organized crime. Elvis Cole battles more crime in a day than some fictional private eyes see all book.

The plot is convoluted, but not confusing; as the first person narrator has to reframe events in his own mind, he takes the readers along, so it’s not confusing or overly elaborate. Heck, I figured it out sixty pages in with a guess as to how I, as a writer, would play it.

I’m eager to continue with the series as it, like John D. MacDonald’s work and some of the sixties paperbacks I’ve taken to in the last six months, entertains me and inspires me to write. As soon as I finish another book, of course.

I got this book, and all of Robert Crais’ novels to date, for Christmas, so I started with this book as it’s the first Elvis Cole novel.

The book features a private investigator in California who follows well the footsteps of Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, better than that Moses Wine guy. Elvis has to investigate the a husband who has disappeared with the couple’s son. The husband, a down on his luck agent, has been cheating on his wife with the sordid lot of starlets and seems to have gotten himself in over his head with drug dealers, organized crime, and femme fatales.

The writing is denser than Robert B. Parker’s work, from whose early this work seems slightly derivative. This book does draw its attention to a common modern writing foible, though; the shortcut use of the brand name as an adjective. You don’t find it in the older stuff that remains fresh to this day; Chandler didn’t tell you who made the high-quality merchandise, he described how the merchandise was high quality. A lot of authors these days just drop the brand name in and let us make the appropriate judgments on how well the character is dressed–or not. Unfortunately, I don’t know a lot of California brand names, so I can’t get the full flavor of the scene. So I’ve learned something to avoid in my writing. Sure, the brand names will draw contemporary readers in, but over time, their use will stale quickly.

Still, The Monkey’s Raincoat is a good read, even if I don’t understand the title or its allusion. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series anyway.

I paid several dollars for a remaindered copy of this book, so you can guess I like Stephen King enough to part with green instead of silver for his books. That’s my disclaimer for bias you’ll find in this book report.

The book chronicles, in a series of flashbacks told as part of a narrative, how a troop of Pennsylvania State Police deal with a portal to some strange world and its occasional tendency to disappear state troopers or disgorge aliens. After the SC (sergeant commander) of the troop recounts the story to the son of a recently-killed trooper, the situation comes to a head in the now as the young man decides –probably under the influence of the alien force — to destroy –or empower–the Buick 8.

The narrative shifts among different speakers both in the present and in the flashbacks, so the narration is somewhat disjointed and not particularly effective. A couple of times in the book, I wanted the action to move a little more quickly, but I made it through. It helped that the book runs only 350 pages, a mere short story for King. Also, he resorts to trickery in the epilogue, poor form, Stephen.

Still, it’s always interesting and inspirational to read a Stephen King book to examine his style and his voices and how he can turn a simple plot into a readable and enjoyable novel.

To honor Raymond Chandler on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, Byron Preiss commissioned a number of contemporary writers to try their hands at writing Philip Marlowe stories. So a number of them did, including Roger L. Simon, Roger Crais, Robert J. Randisi, John Lutz, and other known names as well as a bunch of writers I hadn’t read before.

As with any amalgamation, the treatment remains uneven. Some of the authors appreciated Chandler’s style, and the stories mesh with Chandler’s voice and vision for Marlowe. In many cases, the author might as well have taken one of his own short stories and have changed the names and sometimes the gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and board game affinity to get the check. Still, the book moves quickly, as even the most flamboyantly non-Marlowe stories are just short stories and are decent examples of the mystery fiction.

An interesting omission from this book: Robert B. Parker. After all, he finished Poodle Springs and then wrote the poor sequel to The Big Sleep, Perchance to Dream. By 1988, he’d written a number of Spenser novels and had a television show for which he consulted. That’s a why-didn’t-he-do-it worthy of investigation!

The book’s worth your money if you’re an extreme Raymond Chandler fan, like I am, and it’s worth it if you’re just a mystery fan and can find it cheaply. It’s probably not worth Internet prices for the casual reader, though ($20.00 hardback, $7 paperback) unless you’re Byron Preiss’s mom. Sorry, Byron.

All right, so this book is really a young adult science fiction book and not an adult science fiction book. But, in my defense, I bought it from the local library for a quarter, and the library conmingles its adult and youth fiction on the sale tables. Also, many of the novels of the era were shorter, so the thin spine nor story line didn’t give much hint, and I didn’t spend that much time perusing the text in the library before making the acquisition, which represents all the excuses you’ll need to understand why I owned this young adult book.

I read it because the only way to get an acquisition off of my to-read shelves is to read it.

The book runs about 100 pages and tells the story of three diverse characters who are the only survivors of a spaceship accident: Rand, an engineer; Dombrey, a low level jetmonkey crewman; and Leswick, a Metaphysical Synthesist. Although Rand thinks he’ll lead the group of deadweight survivors, he learns that it takes more than logic to meet the challenges of the jungles and the natives of a hostile world.

Read it as a parable of how people should respect the talents of those who have a different skill set. For example, Rand could represent developers, Leswick the sales and marketing types who have to deal with people for a living, and Dombrey the techinical writers and the testers that everyone thinks are dumb and superfluous, but who know which fruits to eat and which vines are really snakes, and the developers had just best get off of their little primadonna “We run the world” schtick and realize that it takes dumb jetmonkeys and liberal arts majors to make a successful software company.

Or maybe I’m reading the morale of the story wrong.

Well, in Randisi’s defense, he had just moved to St. Louis when he wrote this book and, given his prodigious output, he probably didn’t have a lot of time to research the area or how the police departments interoperate, but….

The book begins with murder on the grounds of the Arch or, as it’s formally known, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. The intrepid St. Louis City police detective Joe Keough investigates the crime on his day off and then shuts the facility down indefinitely. I’m not so clear on the jurisdictional issues here, but I would expect the federal authorities to investigate a murder in a national park, which is what the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial represents. But in Keough’s world, this closure occurs without a squawk by federal employees. Underneath the Arch lies the Museum of Westward Expansion, capitalized in this book as a proper noun as the Arch Museum. So in the first few chapters, I got the sense that Randisi was unfamiliar with his setting.

So I spent much of my reader processing power looking for inaccuracies. They come aplenty. Twice, the main charater refers to St. John’s hospital as The Palace on Ballas, once asserting that everyone in St. Louis calls it that. I’ve never heard it called that before in my twenty years of residency in the St. Louis area (including five in the northwest corner of St. Louis County near St. John’s). The cop refers to the new prison in Clayton, but it’s a jail, not a prison, and a cop would probably know the difference. A city cop, even Detective Joe Keough, would not make an arrest downtown and book the suspect in Clayton as the city and the county are completely separate (the city of St. Louis is not even in St. Louis County because of some short-sighted short-term tax money greed in the late 1800s). Also, someone familiar with the layout of St. Louis, which I would expect from a cop, would not take Highway 44 to Highway 270 to travel from downtown to St. John’s–but a new resident to the city who lived in a southern or southwestern suburb might. Not Joe Keough, who lives right off of Highway 40 in the fashionable Central West End; I wager Randisi lived off of 44 and knew it as the main corridor to the suburbs from downtown because how he traveled. Let’s also overlook the claim that mayor of St. Louis is the most powerful man in the city. That bias probably carries right over from Randisi’s time in New York.

So as much as I hate to, I have to knock a fellow St. Louis author. I have to hope that when I add local flourishes to my novels that they won’t end up like this. Aside from the grimace-inducing local mistakes, the book is a servicable police detective story. It’s not up among the MacDonalds or Chandlers or Parkers, but it’s not low among the Liningtons. I paid almost five dollars for this book in a 80% off bookstore, where I also got my Roger L. Simons (also, one of whom Randisi is not).

I hope and fully expect the others in the series will be more technically accurate, so I haven’t written Randisi completely off, but I have no intentions of seeking him out new or used.

I have always been a big fan of what would become known as counterfactual history; why, to this day, I have a large collection of Marvel What If comic books, wherein Uatu the Watcher examines alternate realities in which pivotal events in the Marvel Universe turned out differently than they did in the actual comic books. This volume, a sequel to a book I haven’t read, does the same with actual historical events, where historians and other people who write about history imagine what would have happened if history had gone another direction than it did.

Essays within the book include musings on what would have happened had Socrates died in battle (written by the blogpular Victor Davis Hanson, whose name isn’t even on the cover), what if Antony had won, what if Pontius Pilate had spared Jesus Christ, what if France had defeated Haiti, what if Lincoln hadn’t issued the Emancipation Proclamation, what if the Chinese had discovered the New World, and a number of what ifs revolving around World Wars I and II.

To sum up, in most of the essays not dealing with Socrates or World Wars I and II, the sum result is that the United States wouldn’t exist as we know it. Either it would be the eastern part of the Chinese empire, or part if a Caribbean/French empire, or anything but the oppressive regime it is. The book was written before September 11, 2001, and before chimphitler got re-elected, so I am sure that some of these writers have other what ifs in mind to cry into their lattes.

To illustrate how some of the speculation slightly skews anti-American, take the example of the essay “The Chinese Discovery of the New World, 15th Century”, wherein Theodore F. Cook, Jr., muses on the possibilities of expansion during the Ming Dynasty. The story centers around eunuch admiral Zheng He, who led several large armadas to Africa, India, and throughout the southwest Pacific, overcoming many youthful difficulties, including:

Selected for his alertness and courage by the general himself and marked a “candidate of exceptional qualities,” after enduring the excruciating agony of castration by knife (which traditionally removed both penis and testicles), the boy was assigned to the retinue of one of the emperor’s sons, the Prince of Yu (Zhu Di’s ititled during his father’s reign), [sic] at the capital of Nanjing.

So the Chinese were painfully emasculating a portion of their population, but on the other hand:

Might not the worst horrors of the Atlantic slave trade been aborted by a halt to Portuguese expansion along the African coast at this early date?

This author happily trades forced castration for stopping the Portuguese slave trade. To many academics, undoubtedly, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

I found many such idealogical digs and inflammatory throwaway lines to note, but once the book got back to warfare, where apparently the serious historians play, it turned more coldly analytical.

Still, it’s a good read and worth your time as each essay explains what happened and how it might have changed, which serves to remind and reinforce one of historical knowledge one might have, or need. Counterfactual history, as the introduction notes, reminds us of the narrative of history instead of the dry dates and campaigns of history. Plus, it makes me feel like Uatu.

This book represents the best book value I’ve gotten all year. The book weighs in at 605 pages. I paid $.33 for it at Hooked on Books. That amounts to 18 pages per penny, friends, and you won’t find dime detective fiction any cheaper.

The book collects a number of short stories from the 1930s and 1940s from the pulp detective fiction. The authors include Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Erle Stanley Gardner, Paul Cain, and Robert Leslie Bellem (as well as Robert Bloch, Fritz Lieber and others). The language? Oh, yeah:

I grabbed her gently, but firmly; pulled her close to me. “No look, Frenchis, I like you, see? Your glims are like stars. Your stems belong behind footlights.”

Poetry.

Unfortunately, as with any book of this size, the authors feel the need to include stories that wander into the fantastic, including two Depression-era Robin Hoodesque superheroes, some Scooby-Dooish pseudo-supernatural thrillers, and a midget detective. Crikey, if I wanted to re-read The Defective Detective, I would have, or I would have gotten its sequel (if I could find it for three-for-a-buck).

Still, the book mixes the stories up, so when you read about a special mad scientist murder method in one story, you can rinse your mind out with some mindless two-fisted, slug-of-scotch action in the next.

I inherited this book from my grandmother and grandfather indirectly. So I didn’t pay anything for it, and the book is worth more than that.

It’s a set of lessons and steps to playing well with others. Unlike other self-help tomes, this one’s particularly literate. Carnegie draws on Benjamin Franklin, William James, William Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and other learned sources to make his points. He wrote this book originally in 1936, and it would testify to how far we’ve fallen as a culture if Dr. Phil only quotes luminaries such as Oprah in his books. After all, Carnegie must have expected his audience would know who William James was.

At the best of times, this book resembles all self-help books in presenting the philosophy of pragmatism, particularly in dealing with other people. Sometimes it reads like an Elements of Style for courtesy, but at its worst it strikes me as a sort of Becoming Peter Keating. After all, Carnegie would have you win friends and influence people by being pretty yang, by putting other people first and by not contradicting others directly.

I’ve seen too much of this behaviour from used car salesmen and marketing professionals to swallow the hook, but it’s convinced me to try to temper my natural surly nature. For example, I try to keep my net Carnegie Karma positive by not saying harshly critical things about people more than I compliment people. However, some days I still net positive through accounting gimmicks, such as telling another driver that his exceptional amorous ability undoubtedly traces to practice with his matriarch, but I’m working on it.

The book sold millions of copies in an earlier, more civil age, so perhaps there is something in it.

I bought this hardback book from Hooked on Books in Springfield (Missouri) for 33 cents (part of 3 for $1). Hey, it was worth it.

I don’t read a lot of horror because it really doesn’t scare me, but I bought this book because I figured it was worth the price. It was. It’s a collection of short stories dealing with ghosts and whatnot around trains. The fiction within the book splits its time between the United States and England, with most of the pieces appropriately enough set in the late part of the ninteenth century or the early twentieth. In between the stories, the editor recounts several real alleged hauntings near rails that might have inspired the stories.

A fairly even collection, with some highs and some lows (Algernon Blackwood, unfortunately). Stories by Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.

Worth a look if you’re into that sort of thing.