Category: Books

Rex Stout falls, in the Brian J. Noggle Pantheon of Crime Fiction, into the second tier of demigods. The Nero Wolfe books more closely resemble the Watson/Holmes school than hardboiled PIs, but they feature pretty punchy writing and the first person narrative style popularized by the pulps. I’ve read a number, and I like them well enough, but they’re not Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler books.

In this book, a woman comes to Archie Goodwin, Wolfe’s assistant, and wants the duo to find out who her father is. She was raised by a frugal and detached mother, and when the mother dies, she leaves her daughter a quarter of a million dollars “from her father.”

Wolfe and Goodwin find the trail leads through a wealthy, unliked family and might well solve the hit-and-run death of the mother.

It’s okay reading, but not MacDonald.

When it comes down to it, of all the authors in the classical hardboiled canon, I will have read and reread Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer novels the most. This comes because of an intersection of the availability of MacDonald’s work, mostly in Book Club Format, at book fairs coupled with my desire to reread the books (and only reading the books on my to-read shelves, natch). You cannot find many Chandler books out there, for example, so I don’t tend to pick them up on impulse and put them on my to-read shelves. As you know, I got lucky last year and re-read The Long Goodbye.

As you might know if you’ve paid attention lo these six plus years, I grew up reading the hardboiled fiction, and when I revisit it, I am struck anew again about how I prefer them to the modern crime genre like Sandford or (shudder) Pearson. The writing is punchier, and although the plots are convoluted, you get the sense throughout that the private eye is making progress throughout the book. It seems a lot of modern stuff involves some thrashing around, trying to provoke the bad guy, and then a sudden revelation at the climax.

In this book, Archer is hired to investigate the man who stole a rich young man’s fiance. The thief, purportedly a French nobleman in exile from the De Gaulle regime, isn’t who he says he is. The resulting unraveling touches on mobsters, infidelity, and murder in the enclave of an upper class California town.

Definitely recommended. I’ll probably read this again someday when I find it for a buck again.

Wow, if I’d known this first edition paperback was so valuable, perhaps I would not have cracked the spine. Internet prices for it range between $30 and $200. Who am I kidding? This is a John D. MacDonald book. My first of the year, I might add.

A small town cop picks his brother-in-law up at prison, where he’s served a five year sentence for manslaughter. The brother-in-law, like the wife, comes from the hill country, so he’s tough, but he’s also mean unlike the wife of the cop. It puts the cop in a bind, because the wife hopes the brother will reform and the cop knows he won’t and that he’s planning something. Something that starts with a prisonbreak.

As always, it’s a quick, engaging read from MacDonald. The characters are complex and the moral and philosophical questions require the characters to wrestle with their lives and their identities. I thought the end was a bit abrupt, though, and simplistic, but it does give the novel a compelling title.

Set in the near future, this book describes an internal collapse of the United States scenario where hyperinflation triggers looting, rioting, and general lawlessness throughout the country. A group of survivalists meet up at the Idaho farm of the group’s leader to weather the storm and ultimately help revive the United States.

I know this book gets a lot of cachet amongst the gunbloggers and Heinleinists out there, but as a novel, it’s a little weak. Okay, it reads like someone explaining his Twilight: 2000. We get the history of the preceding years of the group, their training, a rundown of their individual skills (scores), the preparation to the home in complete detail, and then the party assembles. Various members show up and debrief with their exciting stories of escape, presented not as narrative nor as flashbacks but as people debriefing. Then other members with unique and desirable skills show up. Then a couple of things happen where they defend the compound. Then they get some missions outside the compound, and the characters equip–in lavish detail–and go on the mission. Then the missions become disjointed, and we get an end that probably is intended as homage to Atlas Shrugged.

I bought the extended version of the book, so I might have paid extra for more exposition, particularly the preparatory work at the beginning that would disengage a casual reader. The book is chock full of good survival ideas, but the narrative lacks in pretty fundamental areas. It’s readable, though, so I guess that’s a testament to Rawles’s writing ability.

Now, Dave Barry is a humorist. He oozes absurdity so much he has to wear special clothing to keep from leaving a mess on furniture. Scott Adams can’t touch Dave Barry in the sustained funny department.

Smurphy T. Murphy loaned me a copy of Dave Barry’s history book in our shared Honors Western Civ class, and I read through it, not but not fast enough to avoid leaving a food stain when I returned it. That was 1989. This book came out in 1992, only three years later, and it’s taken me this long to read it.

It’s funny, but it’s also tragic in a way, because we know how Dave’s marriage to Beth will end, so the jokes about her divorcing him might have been funny then, but now they’re very sad.

A historical artifact and a funny book. Worth reading.

This book collects a number of blog posts from Scott Adams’ blog on Dilbert.com or something. As such, it ultimately proves that Scott Adams is not really what he fancies himself, a humorist, but is a cartoonist with some good cartoon ideas.

Well, maybe he’s a humorist, but this particular book takes on more thoughtful themes such as evolution, free will vs. determinism, and whatnot, and Adams condescends and mocks those who disagree with him, since the evolved determinism he takes on faith are the positions of smart people. He uses a self-defense against the accusations of thoughtlessness by admitting he is thoughtless.

Sadly, the book diminishes Adams in my estimation. He has real insight into business foibles that he illustrates in the comics, but ultimately, this collection puts his thinking into the worst of condescending geek culture. I have worked with people like Adams. I haven’t been friends with them.

This volume collects two crime fiction novels by Benjamin, a dog trainer by trade. As such, they feature a well-trained pit bull named Dashiell and both novels involve other dogs and one involves the world of dog trainers.

I know a lot of women mystery writers turn out paperbacks in the mold of a woman detective with a twist of some sort, and I hadn’t really gotten into any before this volume. Normally, I hit on the normal hardboiled stuff or the eggs benedict they serve instead these days. But the books are light enough and breezy enough to enjoy.

Plus, you can tell a woman wrote these books, unlike other books written by men (Robert B. Parker) featuring women protagonists. I think the epistemological differences are subtly apparent in not only the language but also the focus.

So to make a long book short, I enjoyed it and would not only mind reading more by this author but in the genre.

This is the Virgil Flowers book, although the difference between Flowers and Lucas Davenport is in their dress, their vehicles, their off-duty neat things, and that Flowers hasn’t married the love of his life and can pursue women. Like Davenport, Flowers is an ass man and spends a lot of the book commenting on women’s asses. Of course, I guess when you’re dealing with genre material, you really don’t get a broad variety of protagonists. And the book really doesn’t suffer from the similarities in the characters, unlike in, say, Robert B. Parker’s works.

The book takes place outside the twin cities, in small town Minnesota where a series of murders erupts with, dare I say it, ritualistic deaths? In a Sandford novel? Get out! No, really. Flowers works over the town, discovers many motives to kill a rich man who lived a lavish and swinging lifestyle in the early 1970s and earned the hatred of the townspeople in a business scam, and finally discovers the killer with a crack in the case that left me unsatisfied.

An average book, I suppose. At least Sandford didn’t feel the need to trash Bush here.

This is a later volume from Nash, and it shows. His preoccupation with his children has passed onto his preoccupation with his grandchildren. His poetry is more gloomy amid the humor as he recognizes he’s aging and won’t be the young man again. Hence, it really doesn’t exhibit the playful nature of his earlier works which really is the strength of his poetry. As a Nash aficionado, I’m glad I read it, but it’s not a good starting point in his work.

This book collects the first two books in the trilogy, natch. A featured selection in the Science Fiction Book Club, too, I learned from the ephemera that came with the book–namely, the flyer for the month where the book was featured.

I like Harry Harrison. I read his Planet of No Return in middle school, and I’ve dabbled with the Stainless Steel Rat series (see also The Stainless Steel Rat for President). I’ve even discovered that I read another alt history book of his recentlyish (Stars and Stripes Triumphant, July 2006). I characterized this as an alt history book as well when I bought it, but it’s more fantasy than straight ahead alt history.

The books center on Shef, a thrall raised by the local karl (minor royalty figure) who kept Shef’s mother. As a bastard, he’s mistreated of course, but he learns some smithing. When a band of Vikings invade to avenge their father, Shef becomes part of their army to rescue his captured stepsister. Then he rises in the ranks and becomes a lord in his own right, guided by a mysterious god-figure who thwarts even Othin.

It’s a fantasy book because it does feature Norse gods as real people, includes a lot of visions and stuff. The two books clock in at 800 pages, so I felt my bottom in the chair, so to speak, although the books were good enough reading as I went along. Although the battle scenes are more Patick O’Brian than Bernard Cornwell in that they’re rather anti-climactic and a bit of an afterthought, with much of the book coming in the in-between things going on. A bit of a knock, but I guess I did end the reading experience with the end of the middle part of the trilogy. If I stopped watching the first Star Wars trilogy after A Empire Strikes Back, I’d been left a little hanging.

Of course, if that’s the metaphor that holds, I’d better not read the third in this series, or I’ll find that the Ewoks keep the Norse gods from winning at Ragnarok.

If you take the classic British totalitarian works like 1984 and A Brave New World with the Existentialist preoccupation with unsavory protagonists, you have A Clockwork Orange. In a future England whose government and language appear heavily influenced by the Soviets, a young malcreant and his mates (droogs in the cant) spend their evenings committing crimes and ultra-violence for fun and for money. When Alex, the self-styled leader and your humble narrator is caught, he serves time in an overcrowded prison until he is offered an opportunity for early release through a program that brainwashes criminals into avoiding violent acts. When he’s returned to the street, he is at the mercy of those he victimized and his former droogs until some of the opposition party want to use him for their purposes of bringing down the totalitarian government.

One would hope that not too many readers identify closely with the narrator, a thief, thug, rapist, and murderer; however, Burgess uses the language of the narrator to lure the reader in. When you first start, the nadsat lingo one out of the book, but after a while, the reader understands the argot and this understanding has to act as the only bridge, one hopes, between the reader and the sociopathic I speaking.

It’s a short book–180 pages, like they used to write paperback fiction–and a decent enough read that really does carry the flavor of 1960s science fiction, perhaps even British science fiction. Its intersection of Orwell and Sartre, though, have given it its classic status.

I bought this book some years ago from the Quality Paperback Club, undoubtedly as one of the four or six books for a dollar deal. I was looking to branch out, and the write up of this book piqued my interest.

It’s about a woman, obviously someone with an English degree, who gives up her current life to return home to a small island off of Maine where the main industries are lobster fishing and working for the summertime residents. The life she gave up was not some sort of Assistant Professor (non-tenure track) position, but that of deep sea fishing boat captain. As a matter of fact, a character based on her appeared in A Perfect Storm played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Looking at the cover photographs, that casting choice might have been flattering.

So I started to read it, and her writing style is choppier than the sea in a Nor’easter. The book has no real narrative flow other than being her thoughts and asides over the course of a bad lobster season. She muses on the life on the island, some of the local characters, and the basics of lobster fishing. Then her mother gets cancer. Then the book ends.

Even though I started out thinking about how choppy the writing was, somewhere into the book I really overlooked it. I really enjoyed visiting a lifestyle so different from mine in a remote location. Also, I decided that the author looks less like Martin Short and more like she could be one of my relatives on the Noggle side, so she became like family. I also bought another of her books at a book fair this weekend, a later book which depicted an older Linda Greenlaw with all her limbs, which indicated that the book didn’t have a “I got caught in a lobster trap, lost an arm, but triumphed!” resolution.

I picked this book up immediately after reading The Tommyknockers, also set in Maine. Like A Salty Piece of Land, the cover of this book depicts the author by the sea. Sometimes I find similarities and threads among the books I read where they aren’t, really, but I mention them anyway.

I was in the mood for a Florida story after my recent fiction meanderings, and I had this recent acquisition on the outside of my double-stacked to-read shelves. Also, I remembered that Jimmy Buffett novels were supposed to be pretty good. After all, the Author’s Note points out that he is one of six authors to make it to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List in both fiction and nonfiction. So I gave it a go.

Sadly, I was disappointed.

The book started out with a tolerable, although Kenny Chesney song, sort of story. A cowboy on the run from a rich, vindictive ranch owner in Wyoming hides out in the Caribbean with his horse, ultimately settling into a fisherman’s guide job in the Yucatan. No, wait, let me back up: There’s a frame story, said cowboy at the behest of a very wealthy 102-year-old sailor woman, lands on a Cayo with a lighthouse and is tasked with restoring it. Meanwhile, the woman is on the hunt for an authentic replacement for the Fresnel lens that powered the lighthouse. Then we go into the flashback about the cowboy on the run, who meets his folk-singer hero, who lands the job as a fishing guide and runs into an ex-lover upon which he left on sudden terms, who goes to Belize to buy a jeep and has epic sex with a college girl who happens to be the rancher’s stepdaughter and who happens to turn him over to the bounty hunters looking for him, and who smokes a lot of spliffs on the way.

Then we get back to the real time, exposition and a panthenon of deus ex maquina occur as the folksinger hero, on a trip around the world in a restored amphibious plane, finds a Fresnel lens for him and as the rancher dies after a S&M video of her surfaces. The hero meets the grand-niece or something of the rich sailor woman (spoiler alert: rich sailor woman dies), inherits a mansion, and the book ends.

The book starts out in a rambly story telling fashion, then we start getting odder sidebar stories and letters from the folk singing hero telling about his travels, and then the main conflicts are resolved offstage, and the news from England that the rich rancher woman is dead and so on. The book is semi-enjoyable, but ultimately disappoints that the enjoyment that melts into semi-enjoyment goes nowhere.

Also, it gave me the freaking munchies.

All right, I’m not going to make a habit of reviewing the various and sundry literary magazines that I pick up for the poetry. But this particular magazine struck me on many levels:

Here’s what I found noteworthy:

• The book was laid out before desktop publishing, so it required cutting and pasting. No, the real thing, from which the computer metaphor arose. I did some of that myself in the olden days.
• The magazine was based in the same suburb in which I live now. Meanwhile, in 1981, I lived in a housing project in Milwaukee.
• The mailing address of the magazine is a post office box in the zip code of this very suburb. 13 years after this magazine appeared, I used the same post office for my literary magazine. I did not live in St. Louis proper at the time, but wanted a St. Louis mail address for submissions. I had to drive 45 minutes from Jefferson County to check the box. Which was rarely full.
• Yes, the Image magazine does include a poem by Lyn Lifshin. You know the six degrees of Kevin Bacon? Well, if you’re any kind of poet at all, you’re one degree of Lyn Lifshin. That is, you’ve appeared in at least one magazine with her. Heather has. I have not.

Those are the crazy things that I thought about when I looked through the magazine. The artwork is what would later become known as ‘zine-ish, with a lot of simple hand-drawn bits. The poems are of lightweight literary quality. But I got a kick out of the magazine for the other things which it reminded me of and the wonder of wondering who these guys were that put this out right at the beginning of the Reagan era.

Yesterday’s foreshadowing about the introduction to the novella in Transgressions mentioning this book wasn’t a hint as to the resolution of that story; instead, it foreshadowed that I read this book after that one. Because one decent 780 page book deserves another. Well, truly, this book is only 560 pages, but it took me a while to read it.

In it, the town members of Haven, Maine, start acting funny when a writer begins to uncover an alien vessel buried in their midst.

Well, it’s a kinda short King book, but he still puts in cannon fodder characters that he introduces just to kill off. Also, he spends a lot of time making allusions to other books (The Dead Zone and It in particular) and even alludes to himself (a writer up near Bangor who writes gross books, unlike the writer in this book, who writes Westerns).

In true King fashion, bizarre things occur as people encounter fantasy novel situations and don’t realize they’re in a fantasy novel. However, like many, the writing of the book is very good but the end leaves me a little disappointed. Maybe I misconstrued some of the foreshadowing, but it seems to me that early parts indicated survival of characters who didn’t survive. Perhaps I misread it. But with thousands of volumes left for me to read, I don’t have the need to go back and re-read it to see if I was right.

Now you can understand why I read those Dilbert books I reported on earlier in the week. After 1300 pages in two books that took me weeks to read, I needed to boost my numbers and I’m a little behind on the annual book reading numbers.

In his introduction, McBain says he wants to honor a mostly-forgotten form from the pulp era, the novella. Longer than a short story, shorter than a novel, the form doesn’t get much love these days. So he rounds up a number of people to contribute works in this form.

Included:

• “Walking Around Money” by Donald Westlake. The story of series character Dortmunder and a plot to break into a printing plant and print a number of bills of a foreign currency from the presses used to make the currency and reset the serial number equipment.
• “Hostages” by Anne Perry. A crime novel, sort of, depicting the seizure of an Irish Protestant leader by Irish Catholics. That’s all secondary to the main plot: Men are stupid, and docile women really have to save the day.
• “The Corn Maiden: A Love Story” by Joyce Carol Oates. A rather pedestrian, almost high-schoolish effort detailing the abduction of a young special needs kid told in a variety of viewpoints, including that of her abductors. Side note: I was very down on the novella at first, but I realized I had confused Joyce Carol Oates with Erica Jong. Once I realized my mistake, I enjoyed it more. Because I don’t have a lot of respect for Erica Jong.
• “Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large: Walking the Line” by Walter Mosley. This novella doesn’t feature his series character, but instead a rather crazy setup spun from the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin paradigm. I enjoyed it a lot and was disappointed that Mosley hadn’t created a series with the characters.
• “The Resurrection Man” by Sharyn McCrumb, not so much a crime fiction piece as a character study about a slave/former slave charged with a grisly task for a medical school in the South circa the Civil War.
• “Merely Hate” by Ed McBain, a chance for McBain to mention once again that he really hates George Bush. Pathetic.
• “The Things They Left Behind” by Stephen King. After the attacks of September 11, a man who called in sick that day must deal with some remainders and reminders from his coworkers who died in the attacks. The introduction mentions The Tommyknockers by name. Consider that foreshadowing.
• “The Ransome Women” by John Farris. A reclusive artist chooses an art dealer’s assistant to be his next subject, and her police detective fiance thinks there’s something amiss since the former subjects are all reclusive.
• “Forever” by Jeffrey Deaver. A police statistician thinks that an abnormal number of suicides might mean murder. A bit of a fish-out-of-water tale that was very pleasing.
• “Keller’s Adjustment” by Lawrence Block. A murderer-for-hire has a change of heart after the September 11 attacks and has to work it out while on the job. Plenty readable.

On the whole, it was a pretty good book, although I didn’t enjoy a couple of the novellas very much. Sadly, that includes the McBain piece.

It weighs in at nearly 780 pages, so it’s quite an endeavour to read it. But the novellas move along and you can read each in one or two nights, so it might expose you to some writer whom you’d enjoy in longer form.

This is an early book in Scott Adams’s collections, one of those whose cartoons are reprinted in Seven Years of Highly Defective People. So I got some deja vu.

As always, the cartoons are amusing. I’m sure I relate to them because not long after this book was published, I left the world of retail and light industrial to make my livelihood in an office, and I didn’t know how to behave. Fortunately, it’s a lot like Dilbert, so eccentricity was okay.

By the way, if you’re keeping track at home, by the time this book was published, Wally was not yet Wally.

I bought this book last week at a book fair and thought it would make a good break from the thick books that have been bogging me down this year. Indeed, it was not only a break, but a retread of sorts, since this book collects material from earlier Dilbert books and provides a bit of gloss or exegesis to the characters Adams created and what he was thinking of. This includes thoughts about the origins and evolution of Ratbert and Dogbert as well as the character who would become Wally but who was called by many names over the first couple of years.

Considering that this book came out in 1997, that means Dilbert is coming up on its 20th anniversary. It seems like it’s younger than that, but probably only because I think I’m younger than it would make me. Additionally, one has to reflect that Dilbert really caught on because it was partially established when the Internet rolled around and geek/engineering culture ascended. Adams really was in the right place at the right time.

So this book shouldn’t be the first of the collections you get; you can get the same cartoons elsewhere, and Adams’s commentary is interesting if you’re really into Dilbert. Or if you’re an Adams drone who will buy any book he publishes, like me.