Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book is a little pulp bit from the era of the early Don Pendleton “The Executioner” series. It’s not published by Gold Eagle or Pinnacle, though: it’s some off-brand called Modern Promotions/Unibook.

And it’s a pleasant surprise.

The main character of the book is a former NYPD detective now serving as a deputy in a small town in Maine after leaving New York in disgrace for having taken some money from some non-Mafia bookmakers. When the chief of police is in a coma and the main character acts as chief, a known mobster moves into town. The incapacitated chief of police, a good man by all accounts, looks to have taken some money. The chief’s wife, a sexpot, has designs on everyone in town, including the main character. As Maine becomes an open territory for mob homesteading, with the New York outfit hoping to beat the Montreal outfit to the new rackets, can one tarnished hero keep the mob out of his town at least?

A short pulp read, pretty dark and noir, but it moves well and keeps you rooting for the main character even as he admits some mistakes, pays for them in his own ways, and tries to do somewhat right.

Recommended.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the second book published by Xerox that I know I’ve read. It’s not the first photocopied book I’ve read; that would be Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, which I pirated from the Marquette Memorial Library back before the Internet made it available for $10. What was I talking about before admitting I’m a book pirate? Oh, yes.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Xerox had a publishing arm that pumped out at least books for young adults. I read The Day The World Went Away some years ago when I bought the book during my Ebaying days. Spoiler alert: It was the hippies.

This book, Moontoons Jokes & Riddles, is a collection of jokes about landing on the moon and aliens and whatnot. This must have been rushed out pretty quickly after the moon landing to capitalize on it. Sadly, the schoolchildren who were of the age to read this book when it was fresh–me included–might have thought space exploration would continue apace. How wrong they would have been.

The book includes a number of cartoons and gags that kids find funny. I only laughed at one thing, but I forget what it was. A couple of things predicted the modern sensibilities better than the then-future of space travel: there’s a cartoon where moon creatures complain about air pollution from the lander’s retrorockets, and there’s a cartoon where a moon dweller tells astronauts he hopes they don’t treat them like the American Indian. These were jokes in 1970, but a way of life for some people in 2012.

I’ll have to try some of these jokes on my children. I suspect they, as the target audience, will enjoy them more than I do, even if they don’t tend to include the words “bananahead” or “diaper.” At least, not until my children retell them.

Books mentioned in this review:

I read this book early in my college career, when I was cutting classes to hang out and read in the Marquette University Memorial Library. I read Existentialism and Human Emotions (which I reread in 2006), and I was looking for some other Existentialism to sink my teeth into. So I did a library catalog search (on a computer, even then, not on little cards), and I found the Camus. I checked out The Stranger and the book right next to it, The Outsider. When I finished The Stranger and cracked open the other, it was quite deja vu, although it did not make me physically nauseated. The Outsider was a British translation of The Stranger.

So, where was I? Oh, yes. Rereading this bit about Meursault not doing much, killing an Arab, and then getting tried for it.

Well, it’s a bleak little piece, and I don’t find Meursault a particularly unsympathetic character, the pivotal point comes when he, after his suspicious “friend” is in a fight with the Arab, returns to the place where the Arab lingers and, dazzled by the sun and his headache, shoots the man.

He’s like a Forrest Gumpian feather floating along on life, and then an Arab is shot, and he starts thinking deeply, well, Existentialism-deep on things? Bleh. I could have followed along some other path with the man who just lives in the moment without thinking or reacting coming to some other realization, but to have it hinge on a single, unforeshadowed violent act just doesn’t work for me.

I don’t remember what exactly I thought of this book twenty years ago, but as I age, it’s becoming clear to me that French Existentialism is a philosophy for college students and Frenchmen. It relies too much on subjective interpretation of reality to speak to someone older than 24. Or at least me.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’m pretty sure I’ve read this book before, but not since I’ve been blogging. I haven’t watched the film too recently, either, so although I was basically familiar with elements of the film and the plot, the exact order of them and many of the details I’d forgotten, so it was more akin to reading anew a book by an author I’ve read a lot of.

This book, written during the Eisenhower administration, finds Bond coming out of convalescence from the things that happened to him in From Russia, With Love. M is not sure that Bond is the agent he once was (sort of like in the film Die Another Day). So M sends Bond to Jamaica to look into the disappearance of the station agent there and his secretary. While the powers-that-be think he’s run off with the woman, Bond looks a little more closely and discovers it’s more related to the secretive island sanctuary of a mysterious Chinese figure, Doctor No. Then hijinks happen and Bond gets quite mauled but wins the day and the girl.

The girl who has the big broken nose, unlike Ursula Andress.

The book departs from my memory of the film, of course, but they’re both independent media, so they’re both enjoyable in their own way. Now that I’ve read the book again, I have the urge to watch the film. Kind of like watching the film The Living Daylights prompted me to pick this book up.

More Bond novel reviews:

• Thunderball (2006)
• Thunderball (2011)
• From Russia, With Love
• The Man with the Golden Gun
• Goldfinger

Books mentioned in this review:

I did not care for this book.

It’s a short but of small, blog-sized pieces about different historical topics. Some are round-ups of topics, like the history of toilet paper and codpieces. Some are more focused, such as the chapter on who would win in an arm-wrestling contest between Atilla the Hun and Ghengis Khan or which of Henry VIII’s wives was most bedable.

It’s a bit snarky, and I’ve determined that if you’re not in on the snark, you’re not going to enjoy it. The author looks down on a lot of his subject matter (“Where the Conquistadors Stupid Or What?” and “Could Christopher Columbus Navigate His Way out of a Paper Bag?” and so on).

I guess the title should have given the game away, but do I listen? No.

Skip this one and read a real history book instead.

Books mentioned in this review:

Given the recent Tom Hanks was near someone in blackface scandal, it seemed the very time to read this little one-act skit that I picked up somewhere.

It’s a short, 25 minute skit from 1901 for a minstrel show, wherein I guess a white guy would put on black face and make humor from the mannerisms of colored folk. This piece features five characters: An older father who is hard of hearing; an eldest daughter who has caught a man to marry, a wealthy man; a middle daughter who is a romantic and sees the match through that prism; the youngest daughter, who has a sharp tongue; and the “wealthy” man who has just come into an inheritance of $44.75 and some shoes and who is being henpecked into the marriage by the eldest daughter.

The piece is written heavily in Negro dialect, or at least that which the author would call Negro dialect. It’s harder to read even than some of Kipling’s argot, which might be why I found a bookmark halfway through its fifteen pages. It’s not very funny, either, but I’m a hundred years past the target audience. I can see some of the gags, though, the more clever ones that don’t rely on the basic comedy elements of the father mishearing the courtier or the continual repeating of the fortune that the young man has inherited.

Meh. It comes from a whole series, which proves that before radio, television, the movies, and the Internet, people would watch anything.