Category: Books

I must have read this book, as I assume that I’ve read all the Travis McGee series, but it hasn’t been recently, so I picked it up as a palate cleanser after the last Robert B. Parker effort. Within this book, McGee reunites with a former acquaintance he had known when she was a teenager. Now she’s a well-to-do heiress to a comfortable living from her treasure-hunter father, and she’s sailing around the world with her new husband. She thinks her husband is trying to kill her, so McGee flies out to Hawaii. He decides she’s just unnerved and not in love with her husband and that, hey, she’s all grown up now and they’re perfect together. So she’s going to sell the boat the newlyweds have been sailing on and live with McGee.

So McGee returns to Florida, but other events lead him to wonder. An intermediary tries to get an expedition going based on the lost research of the treasure-hunting father, which leads to the realization that maybe the husband is trying to kill her. Or make her think she’s going mad.

Also, it leads to a lot of soul-searching, reminiscing, and good old fashioned screw-them-in-power ruminating from McGee. The book is talkier than action-laden. I don’t remember if that’s the general McGee schtick, but it’s not badly done.

I recommend McGee and MacDonald, or vice versa, of course. I am re-reading the book, after all.

I know, you’re thinking to yourself, “Are there only 30 pages of dialog between a major character in the Parkerverse speaking with his/her therapist in this book, or are there 40? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement, I lost track myself. So the question is, does it matter, punk? Well, does it?”

It’s ostensibly a Jesse Stone book, but there’s a Sunny Randall thread going through it that includes a separate, unrelated case, so you get two bits of the Parkerverse in it. Additionally, Sunny is still seeing Dr. Silverman, so it has a touch of all three series. Maybe more, since I haven’t bothered with the Young Adult novels.

Okay, strip out the bad parts of Parkerania, and you’ve got a decent story. Jesse Stone investigates the deaths of a small gangster disciple (not theG.D.s, Packer fans). He discovers(?) two gangsters living side-by-side in Paradise in twin houses, and get this, they’re married to twin sisters. When one of the gangsters is killed, Stone has to find out who amongst the gangster world is doing this. Strangely enough, it’s….

Well, it’s a quick night’s read and it’s not a bad book once you strip the Parkerverse from it. Good news, though, Parkerversians: In this book, a male figure realizes he drove his wife to infidelity!. Jeez, Louise, I swear, I suffered through an English degree and attempting to do some biographical scat studies to explain books that have been studied for centuries. But Parker’s books really haven’t had much difference thematically since the middle to late 1980s. Make of that what you will.

Recommend it? Eh, it won’t do you major psychological damage, but it’s not as good as Parker’s books ca 1980 nor anything a whole host of authors, such as John D. MacDonald, wrote.

I first read this book in high school. Back then, the television program had only been off the air for about 10 years, and cable had not advanced to the point where the program aired anywhere. As with the Star Trek books, this book and other novelizations were the only reusable relic you had unless you could score some grainy videocassettes taped from the television and recopied. But this book held me out in those years between watching the program on TV as a boy with my father and the whole family together in our apartment in Berryland. There were so few things that we all did together. And watching Battlestar Galactica was one of them. A decade after reading the book, the series aired on SciFi, and I taped my own copies to review the series. A couple years later, they were available on DVD. And then SciFi remade it with modern hectoring lessons baked right in.

So this book is not only a book, but it’s an artifact with pointers to many discrete memories in my youth.

At any rate, it’s not a bad casting of the first three episodes of the television program, although when they flesh out the details, they make some stuff up that seems in odds with the actual edited television episodes. The biggest issue I have is that they made the Cylons into a lizardoid race in armor; however, I seem to recall Apollo telling Boxey in one episode that the Cylons were just the machine remnants of the actual Cylon race, which always gave the premise an extra twist for me. But I guess that was not Larson’s original intent and it carries through here.

Of course, Larson didn’t mean for it to be an anti-technology, anti-American parable, either, as the reboot came to be. Which is one of the reasons I’m an originalist. The other, of course, is the memories bound into the series.

This is a sixty-year-old book holds up pretty well. Frankly, if you remember the days before the Internet and before cell phones, you’ll only find one jarring dated note in the book: an evening postal delivery? Come on!

Mike Shayne, the red-haired and rangy Miami detective, is called to the hotel room of an investigative syndicate reporter who fears for her life. When he gets there, she’s murdered–and has half of a torn $500 bill in her hand. Since she’d already sent the other half as a retainer, Mike Shayne takes it upon himself to find out who killed her. Was it her ex-husband? The crime boss whose gambling halls she was shuttering? Or someone else.

If you’re like me, you know it’s someone else and you know who way early. But the final plot twist didn’t twist exactly like I expected. And it’s good late pulp crime fiction. This is a Red Badge Mystery, which means there’s another set out there I could accidentally start to collect.

(Previous Mike Shayne reports: Murder Spins the Wheel and The Careless Corpse.)

This book was written in 1978, back when one could try to write a general political humor book without vitriol toward either side. So it’s amusing in spots, imagining Washington buzzwords as actual animals illustrated by Jeff McNelly of “Shoe” fame.

More than its actual humor content, though, the book provides a sort of insight as a time capsule into 1970s political thought. At the base, not much has changed except that perhaps the underlying tenets of liberal thought have been seriously challenged, leading to the aforementioned vitriol.

The more the differences change, though, the more they remain the same.

This book is 25 books later into the series than Double Crossfire, and they really must have been churning them out by this time. Much has happened in the Executioner’s world. He’s no longer doing terrorists in Turkey, now he’s freelancing or something and he’s in Southeast Asia, rescuing POWs. It was what all the pulp guys were doing in that era.

Sadly, the quality has declined greatly, and the character has changed. Now, instead of just killing bad guys, he’s also beating a Russian KGB official’s wife together with a chair leg as part of a trap. Not because she was going to squeal, but because she had to die. So it’s lost some of the essence of the character. The plot is movieish and a quick bunch of set pieces.

You want to know what caliber of book this is? At the end, Mack Bolan saves the POWs, who are repatriated through a bureaucratic process. Bolan goes to meet his Khmer guide, Eng, an attractive woman who leads a band of resistance fighters.

She looked up into his eyes. “Will you return to Bangkok with me?” she asked.
Then Bolan read the look. It was longing, plain and simple. He realized now that she liked him more than just a friend.

Oh, have mercy.

I got another later in the Executioner line here to read. I’ll probably hit it sometime next year. And, sadly, I’ll probably pick up more. On the one hand, with a series like this written by the shop writers, the quality is bound to be uneven to say the least. On the plus side, they can’t all be as bad as this, can they?

Stay tuned in 2011 for answers.

Robert Heinlein is like Ayn Rand with ray guns.

Okay, I said that to cheese off Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand fans, but I think there’s probably some overlap. Heinlein works some political views into his books with paragraph-long statements of philosophy. A lot of authors do this–you can review the list of contemporary crime fiction authors who have cheesed me off with their flippant anti-conservative remarks–but the difference with Heinlein is that you get some building of an argument in those paragraphs, a defense and explanation of the viewpoint instead of just a glib insult. I like it better. Also, it tracks with my viewpoint.

This book collects 800 pages of short stories written over decades that make up the Future History timeline (most of the material; Wikipedia says there are others, and I think Time Enough For Love fits into the story arc). The Future History covers several hundred years, from Earth’s movement to the Road City model (where moving sidewalks built to superhighway size dictate commerce and growth) to the drive to put man on the Moon, the resulting interplanetary colonization and imperialism, the revolts, the rise of a theocracy in America, the revolution against the theocracy, and then the treatment of a subrace of long-lived humans when they are discovered.

The stories themselves are forty to sixty years old, so the space race and human development haven’t proceeded in the fashion depicted, but given that we haven’t gotten far into space yet, much of it could still come truish. For example, Heinlein doesn’t see moon travel as a government program (as it was), but a private endeavor (as it will be). So you have to overlook places where the author projects his expectations into the future that is actually our past and present (and future) that don’t follow along the lines of actual development. If you can get past that, you have a lot of exciting and engaging classic science fiction available to you.

Mostly short stories, but some long novellas and short novels in the mix kept me coming back. I was feeling pretty cocky after Thanksgiving when I’d read 95 books or so, so I thought I’d try to run through this in my drive to 100 books. This took me a month to read, but I’m still in good shape. And Heinlein is good fun. The stories are not hyper-obsessed with science like you get in more modern science fiction along the lines of The Forge of God or the works of Larry Niven, so the focus on story keeps one reading.

I’ve got more Heinlein on my to-read shelves, and that’s a good place to be.

It must be Year of the Early 1980s Good Morning, America Contributor here at MfBJN. In November, I reported on a book by Erma Bombeck, and now I’ve run through this collection by Mary Ellen Pinkham.

Like the Bombeck book, this book belonged to my mother, although I cannot imagine she used it much as cleaning and cooking were not her bailiwicks. This book is a bit of a time capsule to that middle-of-the-century period where housewives looked for tips and tricks to keep their homes clean and their tables laden within a budget. Personally, I wonder how much the world has changed compared to how much my status has changed when I look at these books. On the one hand, I have moved upward from the housing projects to a nice rural retreat in the 30 years since this book was published. On the other hand, technology and the culture have changed to some degree changed. The first chapter, for example, deals an awful lot with gravy and how to thicken, thin, extend, and otherwise deal with its defects. How many people under the age of 50 cook with gravy in the 21st century? Honestly, I don’t know.

At any rate, it’s a collection of grouped hints, as the title indicates. I don’t think I’ll take too many things away from it as the price of cleaning products has fallen to the point that it’s less expensive to buy a cleaner off the shelf for a dedicated task than it is to buy the precursors listed in the book. Maybe I’m just to bourgeois to think so.

I did see a couple of hints (toothpicks in screw holes to tighten the screws and toothpaste in nail holes to cover them before you paint) that my mother passed onto me. I don’t think she got them from the book; I’d wager they were such common knowledge that even my mother knew them. I still use the toothpicks thing, although I can afford filler now for holes before I have my painter come in and paint things in the shade my interior decorator designs for my feng shui. So maybe hints remain relevant for some people beneath me. I do see Heloise still runs in the local rag, after all, but my daily stock reports are not.

I loved this book. It’s a collection of stories about growing up just southeast of Springfield, Missouri, in the 1930s. The author moves with his family to a small homestead called Bethany Homestead with his family of 7. His father’s a Lutheran minister and a frequent missionary to Africa who really wants to return, but he serves as pastor to a number of churches in the United States. This leaves the wife and her children (10 by the time the book ends) on the little farm, which has some crops and a large orchard not to mention some cattle to tend to. The second oldest boy, John takes an active role in the household.

It’s a strange other country, the past. While some of the landmarks are familiar, the culture is different. For example, the author took a year off between finishing school and deciding whether to pursue further education. Not between high school and college, not between his undergrad years and going onto medical school. Between 8th grade and high school. During this year, his father is preaching in Nebraska and his brother is in high school already, so the 13 year old boy is effectively the man of the house, working outside the home for some extra income and taking care of chores and helping his mother tend the 8 siblings at home. 13! He also recounts travelling to the upper peninsula of Michigan to visit his father (who’s preaching afar again) and, instead of riding in a single Packard laden with his 9 siblings and mother, stays over an extra couple of days in Michigan and hitchhikes home.

I wondered if this sort of collection of stories would fly were I or a peer try to write it about our youths in the 1970s and 1980s, whether they would be interesting enough to draw any attention from seekers of esoterica 50 years from now. You know what? They just might. Some of my stories sound outlandish among my cohort now, only 30 years beyond their occurence. Perhaps in another 30 years they will be exotic enjoyments for readers. If anyone reads in 2040.

At any rate, I liked the book so much I’ll keep my eyes out for the others written by Hult and his immediate family. Also, last night, I returned to the used book store where I bought this book and bought six other memoirs in the same vein from different authors from the Ozarks.

Well, I threatened to read coffeetable books to make my 100 this year, didn’t I? Of course, I’ve been interspersing them all year so I could have something to flip through during football games, but as we get down to the end of the year, I really expose my dependence on these sorts of books to count. Of course, I also do things like count multiple novel volumes (like this) as one book, so I’d like to confuse you into believing it all works out.

At any rate, this book is a collection of photographs of antique arms from matchlocks to wheellocks to flint locks (and with some percussion guns thrown in at the end). It describes in some text the difference between them and shows examples of them, but it really doesn’t seem to have good diagramming to really make it clear the difference. Either that, or I skipped that particular corner of the page to watch a replay. It’s an interesting glance book to the relatively uninitiated (like me), and it might have some more meaning to someone who is an educated aficionado and know what you’re looking at, you might enjoy a little retrospective trip through the history of firearms that this book offers.

Apparently, this book came along with one of the films when it was released on DVD. As such, it’s marked NOT FOR RESALE. Note that I am personally not in violation of the law here, I hope, since I merely bought this little book at some book fair or garage sale. Hopefully, I can avoid the affection of the TSA, the BATFE, and the other secretly abbreviated agencies with that disclaimer.

What is the book? It’s a little Marvel Universe lite that focuses on the Fantastic Four. It talks about the members, their enemies, the different eras in the comic books, and the different plot arcs the comics have followed. Unfortunately, since it was bundled with a DVD, it did so in a very small book with freaking tiny print and a lot of italics on a lot of colored backgrounds. That made it very hard to read in places. By “in places,” I mean “on pages.”

That said, when I squinted enough, I got a good flavor of the remembered history eras of the 1960s and early 1970s, the remembered present era of the 1970s and 1980s, and that weird future era of the 1990s and the 2000s. Of course, all references therein are to my contemporaneous reading of comic books. The wild story arcs were much more tolerable and comprehensible when you were reading them issue-by-issue. Of course, in the time I was reading comic books, a lot of the stories stretched two issues. Then they started the longer story arcs over a number of different titles, so you had to buy three or four magazines a month to keep up, and if you missed one, you were lost. And the stories got daft. For example, the Spider-Man Mark of Kane series really turned me off to the Spider-Man titles. I haven’t really read comics since.

But this book makes me think about dipping back in. I have a half long box of comic books I bought in 2007 and a small stack of comics my brother gave me at some time or another. As well as several boxes that my mom didn’t throw out.

Given that I haven’t read any of the other books I bought on September 22, 2007, maybe I will stick to real books for a while yet.

This is the third book in the previously mentioned Copp series, and it focuses on the seamy side of Hollywood. Copp is hired by a studio head to take some quick pictures of people entering and leaving a business. Immediately after he turns over the film, Copp sees the aftermath of a car bomb in a limosuine–the one the studio head drove. Suddenly, Copp is wanted in connection with the explosion and with a string of deaths of the people depicted in the photographs. Before long, he’s embroiled in a twisting journey through the sleazy underbelly of Hollywood including faked deaths, hidden deaths, marriages of convenience, sexy starlets, and enforcers from the syndicate back east who are bankrolling studios.

The book is a little longer than the first in the series, and it has a lot of characters to keep track of. Unfortunately, Copp works in the dark a lot here and things just seem to happen to him, but it’s a good enough book nevertheless. I’m still keeping my eye out for others in the series.