Category: Books

This book, like the other book I’ve read most recently from Agatha Christie (By The Pricking Of My Thumbs) comes from Agatha Christie’s later works (remember, gentle reader, she started in 1920; this book is from 52 years later and is the penultimate book she wrote). Maybe I’m crazy, but I like the earlier works better, back before the main characters got old.

This book features Hercule Poirot and Mrs. Oliver trying to suss out the story behind a murder/suicide fifteen years earlier. A rarely-seen goddaughter of Mrs. Oliver is set to marry, but the groom’s mother worries about the goddaughter’s parents’ deaths. The protagonists puzzle it out based on reminisces and rumors from people only tangentally involved with the story. As a matter of fact, a main part of the story turns on the goddaughter not knowing her own family or forgetting things that happened at age 14.

So it’s not a very satisfying book in Mrs. Christie’s canon, but reading the book, I’m reminded that she had her own book club as late as the 1980s; one could join the club and get a different Agatha Christie book every month for several years if one was inclined. Wow. I remember Stephen King had one, too, and he’s the only author of our generation that I can recall having such. These days, nobody reads enough to rope them into something like that. And I notice the BOMC offers to send out two books automatically each month unless you send back the card. Just so they can soak the negligent double until they cancel, I guess.

Well, it’s a Parker Western. I picked it up because Appaloosa‘s movie version opened this weekend.

The moral bankruptness of the Parker universe progresses. In it, Cole, the marshal from Appaloosa, has left Appaloosa after his lover runs off with another man. Off-page, Cole hunts down the man and kills him simply for taking up with Cole’s interest. Then, when he joins Hitch in Resolution, the town of the title, Cole takes up with a married woman. Does he deserve to die for it? Apparently not, for some reason that might include he’s a gunman or the woman’s husband has beaten her (but she still loves him and returns to him at the end after the empowerment-through-adultery trope that Parker repeats lately).

Forget it. I’m not even wasting money on Book Club Editions of the new Parker books. I’ll pick them up at book fairs. Maybe.

Oh, for the plot of the book: Everett Hitch signs on as a lookout man at a saloon, and eventually Cole shows up and they navigate through a dispute amongst the homesteaders and their employer. The book meanders through a large number (70+) chapters-as-scenes with semi-unrelated fuguish subplots. Finally, when the word count is reached, Cole faces down the bad guys in a quick shootout. The bad man and his plot to build subdivisions (!) in the old West are thwarted.

Seriously. The man is running homesteaders off to build subdivisions.

On the plus side, unlike Ed McBain, Bush’s name isn’t invoked in his historical or contemporary works, not that I’ll know anymore until the election is way over. I’ve also avoided Parker’s new line of Young Adult novels, but part of me has a morbid curiosity to see how he injects adultery-as-affirmation thing into them.

And I now pose this question for debate, although none of you will debate it with me because you’re all wiser than I am and have avoided the collected works of Parker, but here it is: Which was more detrimental to Parker’s writing: whatever adultery occurred in the middle 1980s to make it the single biggest recurring theme in all of his subsequent work, or Parker’s work for the Spenser for Hire television show that subsequently turned all of his novels into chapters scenes with simple stage management but mostly dialog along with the reliance on recurring guest stars and formulaic endings?

My beautiful wife read this book before I did, relying on a library copy to keep her up to date with the comings and goings of Cole and Pike. Me, I bought the book to complete my enrollment with the Book of the Month Club. She expressed some disappointment with it which, ultimately, I think was unwarranted.

In it, Cole and Pike go back to an earlier case of Cole’s: a fellow that Cole cleared of a murder charge dies from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound with a photo album of dead people in it. The photographs are taken moments after the deaths of the individuals, and the book includes the murder victim from the previous case. Cole is sure that the dead man didn’t kill the woman from his case, so he looks into the man’s death and finds a special police task force that might be protecting a political figure.

The book uses a couple of things common to Robert B. Parker’s writing: the tough narrator and the tougher sidekick and the return to previous stories. However, Crais’s writing still includes prose between the dialog, so Crais executes better than Parker anytime after, say, 1990.

The ending features a twist and a simple resolution that one could see a mile away, post-twist that is. Crais also incorporates some foreshadowing that’s obvious as foreshadowing, but the meaning of the foreshadowing only becomes clear with the twist.

A good book overall and one that keeps me interested in the series, which makes it one of two contemporary series I appreciate (Sandford’s Lucas Davenport being the other).

This book brings back the memories. Memories of text-based games I started, but couldn’t actually get through. Or far into, for that matter. We bought a number of titles from Infocom for the Commodore 64 (Zork, Zork II, Zork III, Deadline, and Suspended), but I only completed Deadline because I got the hint book and it showed me the important pivot point required to get to the solution.

This book precedes the games and attempts to recreate the odd flavor of Zork. It doesn’t do so well. One can approach the book as a rather lightweight, lighthearted fantasy book and enjoy it a bit, though. Plus, it gives backstory for the Zork world, so if you’re an aficionado, you probably ought to read it.

Anyway, the plot: a farm boy banished from his village goes to Bophree to seek his fortune, only to find a tyrant newly in power. He’s impressed into the navy, survives a shipwreck, and returns with a sidekick and a sorceror to Bophree to find all the other magicians are missing. They’ve got to find the conjurors and overthrow the dictator.

The book starts out okay, with some nice backstory, but about halfway through its event-driven plot starts to run things, and then things happen, deus machinate, and coincidences occur to solve the problems. Then it ends.

Eh. It ain’t Tolkien, but it won’t take you a month to read.

I bought this book a couple years ago at the Kirkwood Book Fair because it was a book upon which a movie was based. Funny, I remember seeing the advertisements in 1984 for the film, but I’ve never seen the film. I’ll have to finagle a copy somewhere now so I can compare the two.

Because this book is pretty good. It’s a 70s Mob In New York sort of book. All of the characters, no matter how minor, are evil or are crass and ultimately are not good people, but within the Mob milieu, you start residing in an alternate universe where the most sympathetic bad guy is the protagonist you identify with. Mob/grifter books share this with vampire books, oddly enough. In this particular instance, Charlie is a smalltime grifter who, as his position as restaurant manager, cheats by skimming from the top of the vending machine receipts, guzzling free drinks all night, and sometimes keeping entrees off of the bill for a small gratuity. He needs a small score to get out from under hock and to pay for his divorce from a mobster’s daughter. His cousin Paulie comes up with a simple score, and they go for it. An off-duty cop dies, and then Paulie lets on it was a mobster’s money they stole.

The plot moves along well. There are enough interesting people working together or at cross purposes, and the author cuts between them effectively. However, the ending was a little letdown. Still, I liked the book.

This is the book you wished your grandmother had written.

Part memoir, part musing, Clarissa Start talks about her youth and living on the South Side of St. Louis, and sometimes Florida, as her parents eked out an existence in the 1920s. Those years and her attendance at University of Missouri during the depression were made adventurous by a father with a predilection for the ponies. Then, Clarissa deals with her husband’s getting called up for World War II after they buy their first house (just down the road a piece from here; I went looking for it since there was a picture in the book). She details a bit about her job search and finally her placement with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The book then muses on aging a bit; her first husband dies, she moves out to the country (she lived in High Ridge while I was in House Springs, so we were almost neighbors). It has a wise, even tone to it.

Even retrospectively, Start doesn’t apply contemporary standards to history. She mentions internment in WW2 and explains it seemed like a good idea at the time. So that was noteable.

I liked the book enough that I bought another copy to send to my mother-in-law, another UMC graduate. On purpose. So, you know, I liked it.

You know, the book struck me as slightly familiar, and a trip to my library database software confirmed it: I’ve read this book recently. Well, sort of recently. Between 2000 and 2004: that is, between moving into my house in Casinoport and starting the book report things here on the blog. Oddly, I didn’t remember too much about the plot, but certain setups, scenes, and turns of phrase resonated.

SMERSH, a Soviet organization tasked with killing spies, decides to kill Bond. They set up an elaborate trap for him, using an attractive young Soviet for bait, and put into motion the plan to not only kill Bond but to also embarrass British intelligence.

The Bond books are straightforward, without the winking and smirking that characterizes the movies. At the same time, they’re very pro-Western and anti-bad guys, so red-blooded American readers can enjoy them and hearken back to a time where the West, at least in fiction, hung together.

This is a Mike Shayne mystery without the Castro boosterism. Written in the middle 1960s, it’s a throwback to the old style of hardboiled mystery combined with the contemporary laxity in moral values. In it, an underworld associate of Shayne’s gets set up. A fixed football game, a horserace gone bad, and a set-up stick-up lead the associate to New York, where he’s ultimately set up for a narcotics bust. Shayne has to delve into the complex set of grifters and whatnot to find justice.

It’s a good bit of paperback hardboiled mystery. I’ve read a number of the Shayne series in the past decades, and I’ll pick up others I’ll find. That’s a pretty rousing endorsement from me, except I suppose that I pick up pretty much anything if it’s under a buck at a book fair.

Isaac Asimov not only wrote science fiction, not only wrote science fact, but also wrote mysteries. This particular bit is one such, and it’s one that includes Isaac Asimov as a character. The first person POV focuses on Darius Just, a literary author whose protege is murdered at the American Booksellers Association conference in New York. Just finds the body and determines that, although staged to look like an accident, his tempermental and sexually deviant, uh, protege (I already called him that, but other nouns are not forthcoming) was murdered. Just has, uh, only four days to find the murder. And if he does, he’ll let Isaac Asimov write the book.

Asimov has fun with the book and with using himself, going so far as to have footnote back-and-forth with Darius Just. Along the way, it’s a whodunit sort of mystery where you could figure it out, sort of, if you looked in the right places. Me, I don’t puzzle the book out that way, so it’s not ordinarily my cup of tea. But I enjoyed it.

As a side note, I’m actually re-reading this book. I first read it in high school, lo those many years ago. I liked it enough to pick it up for a buck, and all I remembered was the gimmick of having Asimov in it.

This book is one of the last of the series, and quite frankly, it’s not of McBain’s best. I mean, you’ve got the 87th Precinct guys looking into a kidnapping, working around the FBI who would use Carella, their liason, as a gopher. Actually, that’s it. One crime from multiple points of view. Still, I figured it out awfully early and hoped for a twist that never came. Also, sometime this century, McBain started knocking president by name (Bush). I’ve mentioned that before, but he brings it out here again as a couple of asides. I could understand a sort of disgust with the Powers That Be in some of his previous books, but now that he’s naming names for especial vituperation, I’m saddened and slightly put off.

Also, he probably works to hard to get the title thing working.

Even with those knocks, the book doesn’t fall to below the Fair or Slightly Good rating. Better than any Pearson or Randisi novel I’ve read.

This book comes from early in McBain’s career, and it’s not even really a McBain book. Instead, it’s McBain finishing a book started by another author. However, unlike Robert B. Parker taking over a Raymond Chandler novel, McBain’s mannerisms and stock characterizations don’t appear. Maybe it’s too early in his career and he didn’t develop the stock. That said, this is a Craig Rice book that Ed McBain worked on.

It’s a little pulpy bit about two New York street photographers (who have had other capers in previous books) who decide to move to Hollywood to get rich and famous. Bingo, the brains of the outfit, almost thinks he has control of the situations and is atop things, but he’s not. Handsome, the athletic and good-looking part of the duo, seems to follow Bingo’s every word, but he has a tendency to go above and beyond his instructions in a beneficial way. Ergo, the characters have a sort of double-effect to them. On one hand, they seem buffoonish, but might only seem buffoonish on the surface.

In a series of events, they’re sold a mansion by a con man whose receipt carries the actual signature of the presumed murdered former owner. Then, the housekeeper and caretaker is actually killed in the house. As the duo run through their cash reserves hiring attorneys and whatnot, while trying to figure out who killed the previous owner, who killed the housekeeper, and whatever happened to April Robin, the starlet who first owned the house.

An amusing little book. I enjoyed it and wouldn’t mind reading the straight-up Craig Rice books in the series.

This is a Perry Mason novel. It clocks in at like 140 pages. I understand Gardner dictated two of these a month or something. As such, you should expect it’s a formulaic read, albeit one that’s pleasing.

This one details a plot where an heiress’s double approaches Mason to make sure she’s not getting chosen to be a patsy in something. She’s got an odd story to tell, and when a man appears dead in her apartment during her apparent kidnapping, Mason has to determine if his client is in on it.

On a side note, the 1960s technology that doesn’t appear so dated for this novel: the speaker phone. When Della hooks it up, it reads just like the speaker phone in the conference room where I used to work. 45 years later, it doesn’t read like they’re playing eight track tapes.

And an odd note about the edition I have: it’s a Walter J. Black edition, but mine has a dustjacket. This is the first of the Walter J. Black editions I have of anything that has a dustjacket. Did someone slip a dustjacket for the same title over this one, or what?

Funny how the periods overlap; this book, written within a year of The End of the Night, is definitely a throwback to earlier detective fiction and the MacDonald book foreruns the more modern mystery (as does all of MacDonald’s work). Sure, this book is one in a series with a two-fisted action hero whose name graced a mystery magazine (Michael Shayne), but MacDonald covered that series thing with Travis McGee, and the latter more closely resembles the work of the other MacDonald (Ross) than the hardboiled school (Chandler, Hammett, et cetera).

This book details with the theft of an emerald necklace from a rich man with a boozing, thrill seeking wife; after time, he gets a letter blackmailing him about his fraudulently placing an insurance claim on a replica necklace. Shayne comes in to wreck many plans, including some to arm counterrevolutionaries in Cuba.

The last bit is the most amusing of all: written right after the revolution, the two-fisted American PI is pro-Castro and some tough speechifying defends the revolution and says that Castro’s not necessarily a communist. Of course, a year later, this book would be proven wrong. However, the political framework doesn’t take away from the two-fisted action, so it was forgiveable. And amusing.

I don’t know if I’ve read a Michael Shayne novel since high school; it seems to me I might have, and I really ought to get more. The problem with these books is that the early 1960s cheap paperbacks are deteriorating for the most part in the wild; this one had several pages loose from the spine, including one that the previous owner had put back in backwards (so I read the even page before I read the odd page–it made more sense when I flipped them to the proper position). It would be nice if someone were to bring out reprints or collections, but I suppose Shayne is too old school for that. So I’ll continue to be very careful, only opening the book 25 degrees, and keeping cats off the lap while reading.