Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Well, now I’ve done gone and finished the series. Since I just took Painted Ladies back to the library, I picked up the last book in the Spenser series. Well, the last Parker wrote. Whether his estate keeps it going or not, this is the end of the series for me.

This book borrows a bit from Early Autumn, as Spenser takes on an apprentice to teach him how to be a man. It also borrows some from Stardust, High Profile, and the other show business plots in that it deals with a movie star (not a television star, not a radio talker, so completely different!), a large movie star, who might have killed a girl during some sexual games (fortunately, most modern audiences won’t know Parker is recycling Fatty Arbuckle). Complications ensue when Spenser not only gets fired for insubordination, but continues to discover that the mob owns this particular movie star as a money laundering device.

It’s recycled, and longtime fans and history buffs will know where it comes from, but it’s still not among the worst of the books involved. Again, Parker doesn’t summon the posse to help him, relying on his new apprentice, a native American. It’s not like Gerry Broz or the zombie version of April Kyle appear. The chapters follow the recently common chapter of action followed by chapter of talking to Susan trope, but at least though she’s a therapist, she’s his girl. So it’s probably worth a read.

Also, given that it’s written in the OE and not the DYB (Dark Years of Bush), there are no gratuitous jibes at Republicans or Bush in this book. It gives me heart that there’s a block of time in which modern detective fiction is written that does not slap at half the country to prove the detective or narrator is a sophisticated thinker.

You know, maybe I will try one of the new guy’s Spenser books. I might like them better than some of Parker’s postings. But I need to get out of the habit of getting books from the library. I have enough books to read now. And as for my Parker collection, as some of you know, I have one of the best Parker collections in Missouri if not the country. I’ve gotten out of the habit of buying the books whether new or used, but I’ll probably fill out the collection from used book fairs and stores as time goes on and through Ebay (for the hardback of Mortal Stakes, the only one from the early ones I lack in hardback). I used to have images of my collection on Geocities, but that’s gone now, obviously. If you’re interested (or, more to the point, if you don’t explicitly stop me), I’ll get those up sometime.

This Rex Stout / Nero Wolfe mystery starts out with a quick twist: Archie is hired by a businessman to follow him to a certain address, but the businessman does not show as scheduled. Instead, police are surrounding the address, as the businessman has been found dead in a construction site across the street. However, the corpse in the hole is not the man who talked to Goodwin. There are more twists in this book in the first thirty pages than you see in many books over the course of 300.

The book cannot sustain the twisting over the long haul, though; we discover that the real businessman, who is the dead businessman, had a love nest at the address where a variety of women came to call. One of them might have had a hand in the murder, and Wolfe and Goodwin investigate. It’s stretched a bit to novel length and relies a little bit on deus ex machina of Wolfe cogitating and using detectives other than the first person narrating Goodwin to set up the big finish, but it’s not a bad novel.

It is a little strange, though, that this book came out in 1960, nine years after The Book of the Crime, but Manhattan feels vastly different between them. In this book, it’s relatively modern, and but barring the lack of smart phones and computers, might be modern day. As a reader, I’m fortunate enough to remember those times, so I can relate to fiction written before 1998.

And as a side note, this novel appears in a three-book-omnibus edition of Wolfe stories. Because I’ve just about given up on hitting 100 books this year.

(See also this previous Rex Stout review, The Father Hunt.)

I had a certain sadness reading this book, the first Spenser novel published after Robert B. Parker’s death. The copyright notice even attributes the copyright to the Estate of Robert B. Parker. Even though I’ve been a bit rough on him in book reports for the better part of a decade now, his early works still meant a lot to me.

An art expert and college professor engages Spenser to guard him while he conducts a ransom-for-old-painting swap. A precise bomb kills the art expert after the swap, while Spenser is still on the job, so Spenser tries to track down the art thieves. In the course of events, he finds himself as the target while investigating an elite ring of mercenaries and art thieves who might be seeking to right art confiscations from World War II.

This book eschews some of the pitfalls of the later books. When he’s the target, Spenser has the chance to summon the rainbow posse of multicultural tough guys from around the country, but he does not. The book mixes in a large number of allusions to classical literature, but it still hits the regular Spenser catch phrases (“Tough, but oh so gentle” and “Pretty to think so” and whatnot). Additionally, the plot is a little forced, particularly the resolution, which takes a ring of the aforementioned international mercenaries out for Spenser and turns in a resolution based on a bad mommy and daddy domestic situation. A couple of the plot elements and set pieces within the book might also have been lifted pretty much wholely from the early works.

So it’s not too bad, but not without its flaws. Knowing that Parker won’t pen any more of them, good or bad, still saddens me, and I’m not sure how I feel about the series continuing without him.

It’s strange; I’ve borrowed a number of the later parts to this series from the library, and this is an ex-library volume that I own, so I kinda felt like I had to be extra careful with it when I read it. Even though, as an ex-library copy, it’s obvious that other people have not been as scrupulous as I. I passed this book a number of times on my shelves, each time a little surprised that I owned one of Sandford’s books that I had yet to read. Finally, the time was right, and I happened to spot it sometime other than I was 300 pages into a 600 page science fiction or high fantasy epic.

It’s an early volume from the series; number four, I think. Davenport has not yet become the political fixer cop he does later, although he does get a glimpse of that lifestyle as he travels to New York to try to hunt a serial killer whom he’d already captured in Minneapolis but who escaped custody. The killer is strung out on drugs and–wait for it–does gruesome things. Seriously. Although he just dumps the bodies and does not pose them ritually, which differentiates him from some of Sandford’s other villains.

As Davenport purportedly is supposed to draw press attention from the actual cops hunting the serial killer, he’s also commissioned as an outsider by a secret intelligence project to find a group of vigilante cops who might be vigilanteing. So there’s another thread here with lots of intrigue.

It’s an okay book, but Sandford does a very, very naughty thing: he withholds a very pertinent bit of information so he can spring it on us as a surprise. The bad guy is crossdressing to get his victims. So we get him all out and about and whatnot, and this pertinent bit is not revealed until an interview with a jailhouse neighbor transvestite reveals that the villain learned how to do it right from him. Then, suddenly, we get passages of the villain dolling himself up and mentions that he’s walking in heels, and so on. I mean, he’s hiding out as live-in help for an elderly woman by wearing drag at all hours, and this is not mentioned until two-thirds of the way through the book. Oh, for Pete’s sake.

I missed a book in the series, as the last Executioner book I read was #20, New Orleans Knockout. However, when one misses a book in the series, it’s not like missing an episode in the serial. Although I might miss a couple references to prior characters, it doesn’t completely hang upon what happened then.

This book sends Mack Bolan to Hawaii, where he encounters some recurring characters and they get together to bust up not just a mob plot, but a plot from a Red Chinese general, possibly rogue, who is using a secret volcano lair for ill. Strangely, though, the hit on the lair doesn’t play out like a secret agent novel would; instead, it’s a pretty straightforward assault, and a bit anti-climactic as a climax for the novel. So it’s not one of the better ones in the series, or I wasn’t in a proper appreciative mood.

That said, the novel is noteworthy for the number of times it refers to a karate wraparound or a terrycloth karate wraparound. Kung fu movies were emerging in the culture, but I guess the word gi had not made it across the pacific just yet.

Given that the local school district has removed this book from its school library and curriculum and seeing as I’ve defended the school board’s right to do so and have taken issue with use of the word “ban” to describe the school board’s actions (see this and here). Since I already owned the book, it seemed a topical time to read it. And…. meh.

It’s a novel about a writer writing about his experiences in Dresden during the firebombing in World War II. That’s the frame story: a writer has produced this book and has dealt with his compatriot who was also there. Then, there’s the text of the novel, where a survivor of Dresden has come unstuck in time and goes back and forth between the past and the present and who was kidnapped by aliens and kept in a zoo for a number of years on their planet, where he copulated with a porn actress. This novel-inside-the-novel was a successful optometrist until he started expressing his belief in the extraterrestrials, who can see things in the fourth dimension and to whom all moments are equally present or some such, through newspaper letters to the editor and appearances on late-night radio. So maybe he’s going crazy instead of it being a science fiction book. Also, the writer of the novel inserts himself into the novel by pointing himself out when the narrator of the novel-inside-the-novel meets him.

So I can see why this was popular on campuses: it’s a messed up novel that has the play-within-the-play thing going on, an anti-war message at the time of an unpopular war, and enough oblique things open to interpretation to make smooth sledding for students or tenure-track scholars who need to publish. That’s not to say it’s unentertaining and a lightweight read. It is. But I’m unsold on its presence on any list of serious literature. No doubt I did not enjoy it as its previous owner, Mr. J. Tobacco.