Category: Books

As if to rinse my head out of the The McBain Brief, I quickly read Lullaby, the fortieth (!) novel in the 87th Precinct series. Written almost forty years later than some of the short stories in The McBain Brief, Hunter McBain’s proficiency has definitely increased.

As usual, the novel follows the squad of the 87th Precinct in The City. Again, McBain introduces several plotlines into the story, which he might or might not connect later. Carella and Meyer catch a squeal for a double murder–a baby and her babysitter–on New Year’s Eve, or rather, New Year’s Day. Kling prevents a bunch of gangbangers with baseball bats from killing a guy, and the guy’s none-to-happy to have been saved.

I love the 87th Precinct series and McBain’s depictions of The City. Harsh, brutal, and strangely romantic. Of course, I have a City that I love, and I see our love story in McBain’s characterization. This story takes place in a particularly harsh portion of winter, where leaden skies threaten and deliver snow (I miss you, baby).

McBain’s writing style is not only poetic in theme, but in style, too. You have to look for it, which you do if you have an English degree, but check out the line breaking for effect:

Angela Quist was an actress.
Who lived in a loft.
But Angela Quist was in reality a waitress who took an acting course once a week on her day off, and her loft was a twenty-by-twenty
space sectioned off with plasterboard partitions from a dozen similar small spaces on the floor.

Or this:

And suddenly there she was. Standing there. Standing in the door to the room, a knife in her hand.
He had to go for the knife.

Anyone who’s had a poetry class knows repetition and its impact. But most poems don’t have knives, at least not ones printed in anthologies. At poetry slams, the poems have knives and the poets have knives and everyone applauds politely. But I digress.

Much like McBain does, digressions and streams of consciousness that flow around sandbars but back into the general plot. To great effect.

So it’s the fortieth book (and since it’s been fourteen years since publication, many more have come since then). Is it a good place to jump in? Well, if you’ve not dabbled in the 87th Precinct before, perhaps your first should be something earlier (the first three appeared in 1956). McBain’s dilated the time a bit, so the same main characters haven’t aged that much; elapsed time has been maybe a decade. But some of the returning characters are evolving somewhat, so you’ll not know about Bert Kling, who started out a patrolman, and his lifes and loves, or about other characters reminisced. Still, you have to start somewhere, so if you can pick this up in hardback for a buck at a garage sale, do so.

To begin with, I want to admit that I love Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. McBain’s mastered the novel form and can inject his lyrical descriptions of the City, he can explore characters at length (both in one novel and in the series), and can add secondary characters with a few deft brush strokes. He’s the master of the quick read, and contrary to what English Teachers everywhere might think, it’s not that smutty.

However, the short story collection The McBain Brief is not an Ed McBain book. As “Ed McBain” says in the introduction, most of these stories were published under Evan Hunter or his other pseudonyms originally. This means, of course, that the stories will lack the Ed McBain voice, although many of the characteristics are there: The recreated documents, the cops with Italian names, the city (although in the stories, it’s really New York, not New York rotated 90 degrees).

But the flavor of the stories isn’t McBain. Some of them date from the 1950s, when Evan Hunter was first starting his Ed McBain line of books, so the writing and plotting are rudimentary. I wrote stories like some of these back in high school, when I was reading Ed McBain and trying to imitate the police procedural, or at least the police detective, style (and may the Roger Williams/John Regen stories remain buried until my heirs want to exhume them to squeeze an extra book, The Early Noggle, out of my desiccated corpse).

This book’s got:

• “Chalk”, the study of a sudden murder perpetrated by a madman, told in a psychotic flashback. These days, this goes straight to video.
• “Eye Witness”, a short piece that’s obvious from the minute it starts.
• “A Very Merry Christmas”, a brutal, senseless piece about a brutal, senseless murder. Perhaps it’s the point, but the tedium’s not the message, marshal.
• “The Confession”, another obvious bit that mirrors something I wrote twice in high school. I wrote “Vigilante” in English for fun and in Spanish because I needed something to kill (hem) four pages for composition.

However, nestled among the lesser filler material, the book’s got a couple radio-worthy hits:

• “First Offense”, the first story, is a passable study of what they used to call “JD” and what we now would call a super-predator. Nowadays, too, the body count’s higher in the newspapers.
• “Hot Cars”, which struck me as slightly O. Henry-esque, but not quite. A light-hearted little raw deal story for a con man. Maybe not O. Henry. Maybe I am thinking E. Leonard. One of those dudes whose last name is a first name.
• “Hot”, an absolutely Hemingwayesque depiction of life aboard a Navy vessel in Cuba (Gitmo, donchaknow) under a brutal, and quite killable, commanding officer.

So if you’re a McBain or Evan Hunter fan, you might want to pick it up to see how his early writing developed. It’s not a long-term committment; I read it in a couple of hours.

You might want to pick it up out of curiosity for what passed for gritty cop fiction fifty years ago. Criminey, I even read a bunch of Elizabeth Linington for amusement, so Evan knows I am a sucker for them. A story about a mother who killed her baby? Buddy, in the twenty-first century, evil mothers do them five at once. A kid shoots his sibling? Yeah, so? Someone’s into pornos? Man, I get worse than what McBain characterizes in “Still Life” in my Hotmail account every day, and that’s just from my blog fans (Tom Jones gets underwear thrown at him, I get pix of the hot sexy married virgin sorority girls of the world who like to cheat). The crimes depicted in this collection are becoming more quaint every year.

I read James P. Hogan’s Inherit the Stars in high school or early college, and I was easily smitten with his version of speculative science fiction mysteries. So when I hit Downtown Books in Milwaukee last week, I looked for an author with whom I was familiar, and I found James P. Hogan and The Multiplex Man. I started reading it that night, and I have finished it a little more than a week later. The elapsed time counter reflects the nature of the new job and all that rather than the nature of the book.

The Multiplex Man starts out on a good paranoid fiction note: A middle school (well, they call it “junior high” in Minnesota where the novel takes place) teacher Dick Jarrow has a normal day, with a normal visit to his experimental psychotherapist. He, Dick Jarrow, wakes up in a different body in the Atlanta Hyatt some months later and he’s got to figure out what happened. And why the authorities claimed he died.

The world in which this story is set reflects a dystopian future of the United States. It, and its allies, have been yoked by environmentalist concerns into rationing and authoritarianism. On the other hand, the newly-liberated East is known as the “Wild East” because its liberal, laissez-faire policies are not centrally planned. It’s a spooky projection that reflects what conservatives and isolationists fear most, and it’s odd because James P. Hogan published this in 1992. He wrote it before Kyoto and before Kofi.

I loved this book, and would recommend it if you’ve got a couple nights open in your schedule, or if you’ve got a book club with whom you want to discuss materialism and the nature of the human soul as reviewed through the prism of science fiction. Or, even if you don’t have a book club and just want to engage me in a discussion of the same over a couple of yummy Guinness Draughts.

While researching for my last book review, a non-fiction book, I discovered some Amazon retailers were selling (I mean, trying to sell) the fiction book I was reading in tandem with the nonfiction book I reviewed for outlandish sums of money. This fact piqued my interest in the fiction book; also, I discovered it was the beginning of a series. So I paid more attention to it and chewed my way through the first couple of chapters.

Of course, the research reminded me of the subtitle and genre, so I could grasp it’s a mystery in space. A Galactic detective, the series character Claudine St. Cyr, is guarding a planetary monarch from assassins, when suddenly the ship’s in danger of going nova and then the captain and subsequent acting captains start dropping of hearts that are inverted en media chest.

Once I got through those first few chapters, I started recognizing that rabbits were going to come out of hats, caps, sweaters, suit jackets, and many other items of apparel, and a whole pantheon of deus ex maquinas were at work here. Understanding this, I could more easily read the book. It wasn’t as though I missed some information, it’s that it just wasn’t there before it was relevant. Subtle things, like psychokinesis would make a good a murder weapon.

But it’s a quick read, and a junk read, and an interesting time capsule of the female protagonist written by a male author in 1969. Claudine St. Cyr is beautiful, intelligent, dutiful, and somehow every named male character in this book wants to marry her, and most of the major characters propose marriage to her in the 170 pages. But she remains chaste, although tempted to kiss on several occasions. A sixties male character in this situation, say an interstellar Mike Hammer, would have Kirked every carbon-based female (or nongendered) life form, would have shot one or more of them later, and would have set the ship to supernova himself to make a point.

So what’s my point? I will read anything, I think.

Book review number 2, friends, and this one’s another nonfiction title since the only junk fiction I have currently is Deathstar Voyage, a late 1960s piece of science fiction that has nothing to do with Star Wars. So, while hiding from the unattractive storyline in that piece of sci-fi, I read Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang by Tom Dalzell.

Personally, I like a bit of linguistics and loving Norma Loquendi every once in a while. So I delved into this piece, which I picked up in June at Powell’s in Chicago (which explains why the link above goes to Powell’s and not Amazon). Its chapters reflect decades from the 1920s to the 1990s, with some decades (1950s, 1960s) split to reflect different subcultures within those decades, and others (1970s-1980s) lumped into a single chapter. Each chapter begins with a short essay thing that captures the spirit of the times/subculture. After that, you’re treated to a list of words, like a glossary, and a couple of sidebars that collect synonyms for common concepts like “good,” “girlfriend/boyfriend,” “greeting,” and the like. At the end of each chapter, the author provides little article things that evaluate certain archetypal words from the period and trace their lineage. Good structure.

However, it’s obvious that the author slapped together this quick-read, coffee-table-linguistics book. The fact that glossary entries replicate themselves, unself-consciously, from chapter to chapter, as though “gasper” were a new term for a cigarette in the 1940s, when the preceding chapter called it the lingo of the soda jerk.

It was only when I got to the 1980s, my youth, that I realized all was not well. In the chapter that lumps the 1980s along with the 1970s, I spotted several errors:

• “animal” (p 168) attributed to the movie Animal House (1978) when The Muppet Show debuted, and popularized, the term earlier;
• “waldo,” (p 184) defined as “Out of it, as in ‘That new kid in Biology class is totally waldo–clueless to the max.’ Derived from the popular Where’s Waldo picture books of the 1980s….” Pardon me, sir, but Where’s Waldo seems to stem from 1987 whereas I distinctly remember the perjorative term applied to me in 1985 by the punks in middle school. Oh, and Waldo was a character in the video for “Hot for Teacher” from the Van Halen album 1984, which came out strangely enough in 1984;
• “Hasta” explained in a sidebar on p 185 as “from the Spanish ‘hasta luego’ or ‘hasta la vista,’ popularized by the movie The Terminator….” Um, no, “Hasta la vista, baby,” was from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991);
• Misspelling of Eddie Murphy’s name as Eddy Murphy (p 195)

And these represent a sample of the incongruities and typographical mistakes I found in that single chapter.

Suddenly, the author’s research (regurgitation of others’ research+some faulty memories, perhaps) is at odds with known facts and my own memory. Suddenly, I couldn’t trust the author for the era I knew, which means I probably can’t trust him for the eras I don’t. Crap! This book was a waste of time. Sloppy research, fanciful assertions, and typographical errors are intolerable when they directly impact the veracity of the subject matter, which is the usage and spelling of words themselves.

Still, the book might illustrate how words never leave vogue, assuming that some of the words and phrases ascribed to the 1920s were really used then. Based on the fluid, evolutionary nature of slang, I don’t think any one of us would be completely out of touch if we stepped through a time-warp into a previous era, or vice versa.

Since I read a lot and nothing good seems to come of it, I’ve decided to do a bit of brief book reviewing for you, my five Internet readers. I shall incorporate some puppetry for the sixth person who cannot read but logs in for the soothing blue tones.

I have just completed We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism by Clarence E. Walker, a professor at University of California at Davis. It’s a highly academic book, as the 31 pages (out of 164) are end notes, and it’s split into only two chapters: “If Everybody was King, Who Built the Pyramids: Afrocentrism and Black American History” (83 pages) and “‘All God’s Dangers Ain’t a White Man’ or ‘Not All Knowledge Is Power'” (50 pages). Personally, this limitation (only two chapters) rather makes it difficult to read, since the organization of the material in the macrochapters is not readily apparent (by the subdivision).

Instead, we have super-sized chapters ill-suited for consumption by a McDonald’s audience. The first chapter, “If Everybody was King, Who Built the Pyramids: Afrocentrism and Black American History”, is the pure science of the book. Walker examines certain tenets of Afrocentric thought, such as Egypt (Kemet) as the primary source for most intellectual thought in the ancient world (which the white men of Greece and Rome ripped off) and that Egypt was even a “black” culture. Instead, Walker identifies Afrocentrism as a therapeutic movement that bears little relationship to actual history. Walker also explores how black African-Americans (not redundant) in the United States diverged from Africans by the nature of their passage to this hemisphere and their bondage.

I didn’t trace the quotes nor research from his endnotes, so I cannot comment on the thoughts and arguments to which he is responding, but his historical points and interpretation make sense in themselves.

However, when we get to “‘All God’s Dangers Ain’t a White Man’ or ‘Not All Knowledge Is Power'”, Walker fails to signal for the left turn he makes. Just because Afrocentrism is wrong doesn’t mean that affirmative action should be eliminated, I think he means. He begins the second paragraph of the second chapter (page 85, remember):

A rightward drift in American politics is moving the country toward what I call “free market racism,” the state of American race relations during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the ideology of lassez-faire reigned supreme in the realm of economics and race on the national level.

There he lost me. Not in a violent explosion of disbelief, during which I fling the book against the wall and/or stomp on it (this wasn’t Stupid White Men, after all, and it is not a paperback). But by coining a term “free market racism,” Walker provides the good citizens of Oceania academia with a twist of logic.

Racism and affirmative action, the practice this book defends, represent a statist intrusion into thought and practice in one form or another. Free market, on the other hand, represents a rational system of commerce wherein the best value wins. In a free market of ideas, individual performance should prove a better value than racism or affirmative action. Hence, “free market racism” is a paradox, a contradiction, and a big fat hanging straw man that Walker cracks with a full swing.

I was greatly disappointed with the practical application of repudiating Afrocentrism. Quit following a foolish, bankrupt, therapeutic ideology and start supporting affirmative action. Well, the professor does teach at the University of California at Davis. What did I expect?