Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This is the second big collection of MacDonald’s pulp-era short stories. I’ve read the first, I think, sometime in the distant past. I thought I read it in the recent past, but I was thinking of End of the Tiger, which I read in 2015.

Unlike that collection, this one is a collection of pulpy crime stories that appeared in various magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. MacDonald says in his forward that he’s updated them a bit to make them more contemporary (to 1984). However, by now, they’re quite dated, but less so to someone who was sentient in 1984.

The book includes:

• “Deadly Damsel”, a story about a woman who kills husbands, and what happens when she meets a grifter in Florida.
   
• “State Police Report That…”, wherein an escaped convict is tripped up by a surprising twist.
   
• “Death for Sale”, wherein a prisoner of World War II hunts a French traitor to New Orleans.
   
• “A Corpse In His Dreams”, a successful investigative journalist returns to his hometown, haunted by the death of his girlfriend in a car accident he survived.
   
• “I Accuse Myself”, a man recovering from emergency brain surgery remembers the murder.
   
• “A Place to Live”, a city employee takes on the city machine with a story of corruption and finds the odds stacked against him.
   
• “Neighborly Interest”, a trio of kidnappers hide out in a nondescript house and are tripped up by a small detail.
   
• “The Night Is Over”, a grieving man hits bottom and is unwittingly enticed into a scheme by a con man and blackmailer, only to find himself trapped.
   
• “Secret Stain”, a hard man plays both ends of an organized crime group against each other for his own reasons.
   
• “Even Up the Odds”, a drunkard gets into a scrap with the local connected bully.
   
• “Verdict”, a hard man is sent out of town to eliminate a crusading police chief but finds more than he expected.
   
• “The High Gray Walls of Hate”, an ex-con looks to even the score with those who framed him.
   
• “Unmarried Widow”, a woman finds an out-of-work journalist in a bar, and mistakes him for someone named Jerry. The journalist finds that some hard men are after her, and he tries to find out why. The gimmick where a mad woman calls the protagonist by another name, you might remember, was used in the film Quigly Down Under. I did.
   
• “You Remember Jeanie”, a former cop hits bottom after his girl is killed in a bar, and he continues to frequent the bar for vengeance.

Overall, a pleasing book to read, and it’s the first book I’ve read this year (!). I might revisit the MacDonald stuff for fun some day, especially if I get to live to 200 and they stop making paper books so I have to reread what I have.

I closed out my annual reading with this volume. After all, I’ve read books on the various Tao this year (Tao Te Ching, The Tao of Elvis). I’ve read books purportedly by cats (I Could Pee On This) and books about magical cats (The Catswold Portal, No One Noticed The Cat). So this book fit right into my annual reading selections.

The schtick is that the author’s cat wrote 81 poems just like Lao Tzu, and each talks a little about the way. And about being a cat. In the first couple dozen poems, I wondered if the author was really trying to walk a fine line between amusing and actually trying to convey serious elements of Taoism in the book, but it hits one of the poems–I forget which one–where the author basically says that this is a humor book and not to be taken too heavily.

It’s a bit of a stretch to get a full 81 poems out of the conceit, and the results are uneven. Some are thoughtful, some are amusing, and some are sort of pro forma. But I enjoyed it enough for what it is.

Now that 2017 is over, perhaps my cat book binge can be over, and I can start focusing on ferrets or pot-bellied pigs as pets, detectives, and philosophers in 2018.

I bought this book on the last day of the local GAME Expo in October. You’ll have to take my word for it, as I did not post a picture of the things I bought on that trip. I bought it from the author, who traipsed all the way from Boston to sit at a table in Springfield, Missouri, to sell her books. I was her last sale of the day, as she was heading out to catch a plane home as we got to the game / science fiction convention on Sunday afternoon.

At any rate, this is like, what, three in a row of self-published books that are pretty good? (Obsidian Son and The Leftovers being the others.) I’m a little afraid of delving into more self-published stuff for fear of ruining the streak.

This young adult book centers on four teens on a remote outpost. Ro, the daughter of the chief engineer of the station, is good with computers and whatnot; Jem and Barre are the children of the doctors of the station, and Jem is a good engineering student while Barre seemingly wastes his talents on music; and Micah, son of a disgraced Senator, who is trying to perfect a strain of a plant-based drug called Bitterweed to break the current cartel’s hold on the supply. Ro hopes to get to the university, and she hopes to revive a derelict crashed space transport as a project to show she’s competent. But the teens find guns in the hold with forged diplomatic seals on them and uncover a plot by the engineer and the senator to traffic the goods. A plot that requires Ro to awaken the ship’s AI and make the ship space-worthy. When she does, the confused space AI takes off from the asteroid in a panic, leaving the four teens scrambling to survive and return home even as they’re hunted by the government and the people who want their wares.

It’s pretty good. It meanders a bit, especially towards the end, but I might just get impatient with books that clock in at almost 400 pages. Also, the derelict of the title is treated as ancient, but I believe the book says it crashed forty years ago. That seems a little recent for how ancient it’s portrayed. Even today, we have almost 100 year old ships sailing the seas and some of our airplanes are forty and fifty years old. Perhaps the author is trying to convey the youngsters’ perspective here.

So I enjoyed the read, and if I catch the author at another fair, convention, or festival, I might pick up some of the later books in the series (I believe she brought four titles to Springfield, but was sold out of one of them). But I don’t think I’ll hop on the Internet and order them to catch up. That is just not my way.

The title of this book certainly fits into the philsophy kinds of books that I might like to pick up. Its size (short and paperback) meant it would make a good carry book for me. It did. As I was reading it at the dojo, a very well-read teenager there recognized Watts’ name. After I finished it, I saw a Facebook image with a Watts quote on it. So his influence continues, some thirty-five years after his death.

At any rate, this book was originally published in 1951, so it’s steeped in the Existentialist zeitgeist, but it’s not really an Existentialist book. Watt was at one time a clergyman, but he switched over to Buddhism as a relatively early American adopter (and he knew Shunryu Suzuki). So this is a bit of a spoiler alert. I detected some of the Buddhist themes in the work along with some response and comment on other philosophers’ work, but not so much by name.

It’s a popular bit of philsophical musings. That is, it grapples with some of the main themes in life instead of being a comment on a particular school of thought. The gist of it is that life is changing and fluid at all times, and the more you try to crystallize it into something specific, you lose it. That is, defining a word takes something away from the thing being defined. Also, the early traces of the Mindfulness movement are here, he posits that only the present is real and the past and future are not. So we get into the real nub of Buddhist theory of consciousness, which ultimately doesn’t seem to work: The “consciousness” in the “present” is not the same thing as it was in the past nor is it the same thing that will experience the “present” different from this one. If you accept a certain evolution of the person, the being, the soul, you can sort of think this is right, but the Buddhist thought says, no, literally, the consciousness who came to my blog is not the same one that right now is finishing the third paragraph of this book report.

So there are lessons one can take away from the book, which are basically the things you find in Mindfulness listicles all over the Web. Try to improve your mindset and adaptability to changing circumstances; let go of the past; don’t worry about the future; enjoy the present as it is. But unlike a listicle (and contemporary Mindfulness books written by the listicle authors), the book has depth in exploring some ontology and epistemology.

So a good read, and apparently still relevant if contemporary high school kids, albeit precocious ones, talk about the author.