Musings from Brian J. Noggle

As advertised, this is a book of questions and answers about various things, such as why the sky is blue except at sunset, why the ocean is blue, who Dr. Pepper was, why the mile is 5,280 feet, and whatnot. It runs about 128 pages and is probably geared to a younger audience, so don’t expect that it’s a science textbook. The questions are not so esoteric that Cecil Adams would cover them in The Straight Dope columns nor Slate in The Explainer columns.

But if you’re a bit rusty or if you want to bone up for obvious questions from your children, it’s probably not a bad idea.

This books finds Bolan hitting a joint in Buffalo to rescue a Canadian undercover policeman who is the brother of a dead compatriot of The Executioner. Bolan catches wind of a plot to take the Mafia international with a meeting in Montreal. While there, Bolan impersonates an Black Ace, again, to infiltrate the hotel taken over by the mafiosos and their crews. Once there, he finds a group of terrorist Free Quebeckers who might be planning something for the 1976 Olympics–or maybe just for Mack Bolan.

It’s a quick read with a lot of “snorters” flying through the air. The political takeaways from this: One, Mack Bolan believes that people should have the right and the ability to defend themselves. Two, Mack Bolan doesn’t have much truck for revolutionaries who are just playing at it, much as he thinks the Free Quebeckers in the book and other young student-type revolutionaries are. He points out that in those kinds of civil wars, a lot of innoncent people die needlessly, especially when terrorists attack soft targets instead of engaging the military. Of course, he compares this to his War, which is different, and it is.

The book reminds me a little of the Robert B. Parker Spenser novel The Judas Goat because the climax of that book is set at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. What a big deal that must have been that it makes its appearance so frequently in pulp of the era. Maybe the London 2012 Olympics has the same cachet in modern pulp, and I just haven’t gotten to it yet (and probably won’t for 30 years).

Wow, this is one cynical little book.

I bought this book in April with a bunch of Ross Thomas’s other titles, and I put them in chronological order in case they’re a series. This book is the first of the ones I got.

The book deals with a labor election, where the longtime president is standing for reelection and the secretary-treasurer is challenging him. The president regrets not having gone to LA when he was offered the opportunity for a screen test when he was a young man. Now, he’s a raging alcoholic who’s bored with the job but wants to keep it. His wife is thirty years younger and is hungry for sex that her husband can’t provide when he’s particularly alcohol-consumptive, as in the stress of the election. The man’s handler provides booze for the husband and sex for the wife, thinking she’s going to divorce the labor leader for him. The secretary-treasurer is an ugly man and a bully with the tendency to break into violent childish tantrums. Then there are the campaign workers, the power brokers, and the influencers who machinate in their ways to get their man elected. And the hitman hired for a couple bills to kill the labor president.

As I said, cynical. There’s really not one unflawed character amongst them. You feel a little sympathy for some, but I couldn’t relate to any, really, except perhaps the labor president’s son, a former policeman fired for being too compassionate, who returns to help his father.

The book moves really well as it shifts between characters and scenes. Each has a good deal of background thrown in fairly expositorially, but it’s not so much as to bog the novel down. The author reminds me a bit of John D. MacDonald for some reason, perhaps the pace and topic matter, but without the main character that the audience should sympathize with.

Another thing: the book dates itself mostly not because of the technologies used and whatnot, but it talks about salaries, and they’re low. Wealthy fatcats make $90,000 a year, and a lot of middle class types make under $10,000. Each one jars you a bit.

Then the book ends, kind of abruptly. But it’s a pretty good book and I enjoyed it. Which is a good thing, since I bought three other books by this author up in Bolivar.

It’s been six months since I’ve read a Dilbert book. I don’t know if that’s a record or not; it’s just an excuse to link back to the previous Dilbert book I read.

So if you read that review, you know what I’ll say about it: The humor holds up over the intervening 13 years (since the book was published, not since May). You could still stick these on your cubicle wall. It’s not that hard to read and is a nice respite from longer works or for browsing while you watch a sporting event on television.

Although maybe the deeper meaning in the deeper meaning of Dilbert lies in the fact that these books, of which I own 8 (numbers 6-14 now, so I’ll try to remember if I go looking in book fairs for the rest) is that they’re amusing, they’re relevant, but they’re not really deep and resonant that I remember any of the real ongoing storylines. The characters sketched, yes, but the plots? Not so much. They’re more like the Executioner novels than other sorts of fiction, enjoyed as one consumes them, but only really for the time one is reading. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you, but nothing more, ultimately.

After I read a science fiction paperback recently, I chose from shelves laden with thick important tomes another of the many thin genre paperback novels: this book. I had already read this book, some 20 years ago when I was in high school and when I’d borrowed the paperback from the Community Library in High Ridge (memory and logic serves that I borrowed it from the Community Library and not the high school library because I read a paperback, not a paperback in library binding).

The plot: A Federal Marshal goes to a mining colony on Io where miners are cinematographically killing themselves. Sean Connery, back when he had color to his hair, uncovers a drug ring run by the colony’s administrator, and has to deal with hired killers. An Amazon reviewer calls this High Noon in space, and I immediately tut-tutted it, but there is a countdown-to-the-killers element, but it’s not a direct transfer and there’s more to it than that, but the film certainly nods to the classic.

So it’s a good lightweight science fiction book. Wait, some aficionados would call this a Western in space (see above). But you know what? That’s what science fiction really was before Niven and the engineers took over the genre. Accessible, breezy, and commonly themed stories set in space that people could relate to without pulling out the slide rule.