Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Earlier this year, I read Battlestar Galactica in hardback, so why not run through the paperback sequel in short order? So I did.

This does continue the season of reading repeats, as I also read this book in high school. This book covers the two-part “Gun on Ice Planet Zero” episode, where Apollo and Starbuck lead a team of convict mountaineers to an ice planet to disable a giant Cylon laser. I mean, what’s not in it for a fourteen-year-old to love? Giant lasers, a mismash of World War II film plots (although a fourteen-year-old in 1986 might not recognize this), and a young child who stows away and gets into danger that I can relate to? Well, all except the last: no matter how much the writers insist young people need that character, we never did.

It’s a good adaptation, which means it adds some depth to the events depicted on the screen and does not generally detract from the charaters and the established mythos (or at least what I imagined was the mythos). So it’s worth a read and maybe, 20 years later, a re-read. And it makes me want to watch the original series again, which I haven’t done in five years or so.

Repeat month here at Nogglestead continues. I first read this book in middle school or high school, so it’s been a while since I’ve read it, but this is a repeat, albeit not a recent, unintentional repeat like Thunderball.

This was the first in his Benjamin Smoke series of books. The Smoke books didn’t go far; he would later go with another series character, Matthew Hope, and that would take off. Yes, I do have some of the Matt Hope books on my to-read shelves, and they will be reruns, too. But McBain was a writer who carried his quality on for more than 50 years, so I’m happy to reread many of them in a span of decades myself.

The schtick here is that Ben Smoke, a retired police lieutenant, does some freelance investigating because he wants to find a case he cannot solve. Most cases, he points out, are easily solved with dilligent police work and fall into the same ruts of criminal activity. Ergo, when he finds strange cases that might be impossible to solve, he gets involved and wants to be unable to solve it. Ultimately, though, he finds he can.

In this case (the first book, but not the first he has worked on; the book alludes to other capers preceding the printing), Smoke helps out a funeral director whose funeral home is broken into and a body stolen. Smoke investigates, even after the corpse is found abandoned in a vacant lot, because he uncovers the fact that many funeral homes in the area have been broken into without a loss of property except the one embalmed body. He works sort of with the police, many of whom remember him from his days on the force, but he gets shut out so they can don’t jeopardize the prosecution. In another funeral home burglary, a technician is killed, so the ante is upped to murder. Smoke beats the police to most of the witnesses and relevant people to question and, of course, solves the case.

It’s a quick read, a decent outing by McBain. I did pick up an additional thing this read that I would not have in my earlier run through it: Smoke hits a crow with his car and brings it into his home to nurse it back to health, which gives Smoke the opportunity to gripe several times about how he hates the Hitchcock film The Birds. Evan Hunter (Ed McBain) wrote that screenplay. It’s a bit of an injoke I would not have gotten in the middle 1980s.

Well, it would appear that I have read this book in paperback form in 2006. I didn’t mean to re-read it, but I did sometime pick up a hardback copy of it, and so I have.

I think the things I said then apply, but I’d like to add that reading it in close proximity to American pulp fiction of only a decade later shows a stark contrast in the British versus the American thriller styles. This book is very slow to develop to action, and the set pieces are interspersed with character building and scenery. I’d expect that’s why they translate better to film than some American thrillers; a lot of the thickness of the book translates into the shots and the varied action bits from the book get included more directly, whereas a slam-bang American thriller has to be cut down to size.

At any rate, to summarize the plot: James Bond becomes a health food fanatic, briefly, and meets an enemy agent at a spa. The enemy agent tries to kill him, but Bond survives and gets some revenge on the fellow. SPECTRE has a plot to steal two nuclear weapons and does. Bond is sent to the Caribbean on what he thinks is a wild goose chase, but he finds the SPECTRE agents responsible and, with the help of Felix Leiter, thwarts the plan.

A good interlude. The film follows the book pretty well, as I mentioned; however, I’m not sure how the beginning section really adds to the book other than to fluff it up, as the enemy agent from the spa is only tangentally associated with the main plot. I think Fleming is a little guilty of padding here.

Well, this is the next Executioner book. In the previous book, Mack Bolan receives word that his kid brother and his love-of-his-life are missing in Massachussetts, so Bolan goes to the East Coast to find them. He starts knocking off low end mob shops and leaves a survivor with a message: someone knows why Mack is back, and unless they want him to go really ballistic, they’d better make him happy. There is some mob dealing and wheeling, and Mack blows a lot of bad guys and their cars and/or homes up.

Note to self: I’m not going to be able to read 45 more of these contiguously; they are light snacks, for all their virtues as soul-searching, morality-affirming pulp fiction. I need something with a little more depth, or at least a little more variety, than a steady diet of these.

Which pretty much rules out an actual subscription to them. I’m not sure I could handle three of these a month, every month.