Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I remember reading another book in this series, and I was surprised that I bought two. I’d have been more surprised if I had bought the second after I read Missouri Bandits, Bushwhackers, Outlaws, Crooks, Devils, Ghosts, & Desperadoes earlier this year. But I bought them both at the same time.

It’s more of the same: a couple things native to Missouri, many more things that were not native to Missouri but were instead made relevant by appending phrases like “folks in Missouri” to them, wingdings in words, and all that business.

Maybe I’m in a slightly more charitable mood in October than I was in January, since I will say these books might not be a complete waste of about an hour of a baseball game’s in between pitches time. I did find at least worth investigating for a written piece. But I won’t cite this book as a source, as you cannot take anything in it as truth.

You remember when I bought this book four years ago? Me, either, but I remember I bought of books about the little British automobile at the time. I thought it might be a good little picture book to flip through while watching sports.

Well, I was sort of wrong.

This is not a mere picture book with lots of loving plates depicting the automobile. This is a very detailed history of the automobile and its evolution over the decades of its history written by a high-level employee of Triumph. The book pretty much enumerates the stock parts on every Triumph built based upon serial number. It will tell you that the Triumphs up to his serial number had this engine, and then to this number they had that suspension, and all the way up from the original TRs to the TR7. To be frank, I’m not a gearhead, so most of the information just rolled over me.

I say the author was a high-level employee because he has a low view of the labor that built the automobile. No, strike that: he had a low view of the organized labor that stopped the production of his beloved TRs at various plants at various points. He calls them suicidal and bloody minded at one point. Also, he has no truck with the United States government and its safety and emissions controls that start shackling the automobile’s performance in the 1960s. This guy is a Tea Partier, between the Tea Parties and drinking tea.

So what did I take away from this book? Well, I have a favorite TR body (the TR6, which was built in the 1960s and looks a little like the American pony cars of the era), and I have some insight into the importance of rally cars and those races to automobile dealers and manufacturers in Britain in the early 20th century. Also, I have a pile of research, so sometime, somewhere, a character in a book might drive a TR.

So it’s a worthwhile read if you’re into British cars or if you’re just out-of-control in your reading habits.

This book is the second of the two in the Three Aces omnibus edition I’m reading (remember, gentle reader, I have begun to break out the individual novels within omnibus editions for individual review, but when I’m done, this will still only count as a single volume for my annual book count).

At any rate, the plot: A businessman from the midwest comes to New York, seeking his son whom he drove off after the businessman thought the son had embezzled some money. Now that the real culprit has been identified, years later, the father wants to reconcile. Well, the mother wants to see the boy again. However, the police cannot find the son, so either he’s long gone or he’s changed his name. Wolfe guesses that the son will still retain his initials, so he has Goodwin place an ad in the paper that says, “P.H., we know you didn’t do it.” Strangely, that is the name of a recently convicted murderer who couldn’t be the guy, could he?

Of course he is. He’s taking the fall for killing his twue wuv’s husband, mostly because he thinks she’s done it. She thinks he’s done it. Since someone has begun to follow Goodwin, Wolfe suspects that the real culprit might still be out there. So he cogitates and Goodwin and the other bit players start running down leads. Other deaths during the investigation confirm Wolfe’s suspicion, so the book progresses until Wolfe unmasks the real killer in a sitdown in his (Wolfe’s) office.

It’s a good book for the genre. Those olden days mysteries, especially the good ones like this one, keep it moving, don’t get too detailed, and come in under 200 pages. Remember those days? Modern authors don’t, but I guess if you’re going to drop $30 on a hardback, the authors want to give you 140,000 words to make it worth your money. I think ebooks will change that for the better, make reading less of a daunting undertaking. Or so I hope.

Yes, I do realize that I’m a book behind on Steyn’s works. I run a little late on political books, since I can only take a couple of them annually. I read enough blogs to get my fix of this sort of material daily, and when you’re reading it daily, the book form seems to be a bit tiresome.

I actually picked this book as the first selection in a shared reading experience a friend of mine in Minnesota suggested. Sort of like a book club, but just the two of us, and over the phone. We were talking about demographics one day, and I remembered I own this book, so I recommended it. He borrowed a copy from the library, and when I called him again, he fumed a bit about it and said he couldn’t read it because… well, because Steyn is that way. Also, my Canadian friend in Minnesota is quite probably not that way, which is to say obnoxiously conservative.

So I read it with an eye toward what it would mean to my friend, who is not a conservative. The thrust of Steyn’s argument lies in three facets: 1) Demography is destiny, 2) Sclerotic, secular, non-reproductive societies have their roots in their cradle-to-grave welfare systems, and 3) A certain worldwide demographic wants to destroy the West and make the world submit to its religion, and its birthrate exceeds that of the West. If you’re reading this blog, you’re familiar with it. In Steyn’s thesis, Western Europe and possibly all of Europe will be overrun by Islamic citizens in the near term, which will destroy those countries as they’ve been known, and of all the West, only America will maintain its civilization since it is barely replenishing its citizenry through things done routinely in seventies science fiction in extraplanetary zoos by human captives on display.

Steyn weaves the three main thrusts of his arguments together instead of building them syllogistically to the conclusion, and he puts barbs into the text. Between those two things, it’s really not going to convince my friend and maybe not many who are yet unconvinced. However, I think the target audience of the book is those who are already convinced and want affirmation or restatement of their beliefs, hopefully so they can go forth thoughtfully and convince others.

Five years after the book, I’m not as gloomy as Steyn was (and is now, given the title of his latest book–After America for those of you who might not know). The sweep of history is broad and long, and its predictors are more often wrong than not. However, the book does crystallize, or should, that our Western traditions and heritage are better than all the others that have been tried and do require some conscious defense thereof. If you merely enjoy liberty without recognizing its sources, someone will quickly take it from you.

Is it super? Well, it’s over 4,850 entries spread over 506 pages, mostly on popular culture with heavy emphasis on films, so it’s big.

Is it trivia? Well, some of it is. A lot of it, though, depends upon phone numbers, house numbers, and license plate numbers of sets in films, sometimes the sort of thing you only glimpsed once. These researchers were thurough, and probably only working from videocassettes or laser discs when they compiled the book.

Is it incredible? Here’s the entry for KITT:

Michael Knight’s (David Hasselhoff) special black Pontiac Trans-Am in the TV series “Knight Rider.” KITT, which stands for Knight Institute Two Thousand, is voiced by William Danielson.

Incredible, as in you cannot believe any of it. Quick, what’s wrong with that entry?

Since it’s from 1984, all of the sports records have been broken since then except for Ivory Crockett’s 100-yard-dash record, which this book fails to mention. What it does rely on, though, is a very, very good knowledge of the author’s or the researchers’ favorite films, which explains why so many entries deal with Time Bandits or Somewhere in Time.

At any rate, it’s something that I kinda flipped through as I was winding down for bed or during sporting events over the course of months. I don’t know how much of it I’ll retain for Trivia Nights (the one item I’ve worked hard to retain is the name of the only singer to chart a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.) It also reminded me of how many interesting old movies I’ve not yet seen, and it assured me that Kate Mulgrew had done something else besides "Alien Lover" (which I have seen in its entirety) before Star Trek:Voyager.

Is it worth reading? If you’re a trivia masochist like I am.

Oh, a churchpeoplewhohomeschooldunit.

Well, it’s not as bad as all that, but you do kind of start keeping score about how many bad guys would be likely to vote Republican, don’t you? In this particular novel, the bad guys are a bunch of people in a free-lovin’ (and “free-lovin'” includes children) religious group out in the hinterlands. Some kid, a gay football star held back from college ball by an injury, kills a farmer at a grain elevator, which in turn leads to a deputy who’s in the free-lovin’ church killing him, who leads to someone killing the deputy to silence him. Virgil Flowers comes to southwest Minnesota to investigate and to romance the lady sheriff in town.

As with Sandford novels, the action jumps between the good guys and the bad guys, so you know whodunit and why very early in the book, and the real puzzle is how the cops will prove it and deal with the political fallout. Frankly, it’s a bit of a narrative cop-out, no pun intended, but it does keep the plot moving along (and the writing of the novel, I’m sure). This book hits a bang-bang climax, but that’s not the climax. Instead, like the book Painted Ladies, we end up with a later ‘climax’ where it comes down to a dysfunctional family resolution wherein the protagonist is present, but really is only a witness to something happening, which is also dissatisfying.

So it’s a disappointing book overall, but it’s paced well. So you might not mind the disappointing elements if you don’t think about them too much or if your taste varies from mine.