Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This is the third book in the previously mentioned Copp series, and it focuses on the seamy side of Hollywood. Copp is hired by a studio head to take some quick pictures of people entering and leaving a business. Immediately after he turns over the film, Copp sees the aftermath of a car bomb in a limosuine–the one the studio head drove. Suddenly, Copp is wanted in connection with the explosion and with a string of deaths of the people depicted in the photographs. Before long, he’s embroiled in a twisting journey through the sleazy underbelly of Hollywood including faked deaths, hidden deaths, marriages of convenience, sexy starlets, and enforcers from the syndicate back east who are bankrolling studios.

The book is a little longer than the first in the series, and it has a lot of characters to keep track of. Unfortunately, Copp works in the dark a lot here and things just seem to happen to him, but it’s a good enough book nevertheless. I’m still keeping my eye out for others in the series.

In my forthcoming novel, I use the word fuck in a couple of different forms on the first page (and seventeen times throughout the novel according to my aunt and godmother–or maybe that was my first one). This book uses the word tits on the first page. That’s definitely more directly evocative. I think I’ve learned an important writing lesson in it.

As you might now (especially if you at least scan the headlines for the book reports if you don’t outright read them), Don Pendleton started the Executioner series and wrote 38 books in it throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. This book is a departure from it, the beginning of a new series focusing on an ex-cop private eye named Joe Copp. Since he’s free from the constraints, such as they were, of the Harlequin publishing empire and is into the big time, he can talk in more gritty terms. So the book has a different flavor, more akin to the more modern styles of novels. It’s quite a jump, really, like going directly from old John D. MacDonald to Robert Crais, for example. I’d imagine Ed McBain made a similar transition, but it wouldn’t have been as jarring and would have been more graduated.

The book uses the first person narrator as opposed to the third person of the Executioner series, and it works better for the occasional philosophical asides that appear here as well as in the Executioner books. The book is thicker, too, but for the most part the first person narration carries it along.

The plot? Oh, I don’t know, something to do with a dead stripper and a politician who likes strippers and a party palace in Hawaii and connections with the Hawaiian underworld. Pretty standard stuff, but done better than the standard pulp crime fiction novelist.

I was pleased to note that this is part of a series, and I was even more pleased to discover I had bought more than one of these books (at the St. Charles Book Fair? That might be it). I think the series came out in hardcover first. I like it and have grown to like Don Pendleton so much that I’ll snap up his work when I find them, and I will seek out these titles in hardcover just because I want them for my collection. How’s that for an endorsement?

I read Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story, lord, has it been five years ago already? No wonder I’m feeling old. I was going to go on a bit about how you can hear Paul Harvey’s voice as you read these things if you’re of a certain age and tie it to how people about 40 years old also have a certain affinity for CBS News’ Christopher Glenn’s voice, too, since he used to do the news breaks on Saturday mornings and CBS hourly news on the radio, but jeez, I think I need an old man’s nap before I do.

Although I didn’t like the pacing of the Rest of the Story segments translated to the page, these shorter pieces fit okay. For those of you who don’t know, the For What It’s Worth bits were just shorter segments of Harvey’s News and Comment instead of stand-alone pieces in their own right. The length varies, but the choppier radio broadcast style works better.

The vignettes are amusing. Now that we have Snopes, we know many of them are urban legends recounted, some knowing jokes with the artificial spontenaity of an America’s Funniest Home Videos nut shot (am I old enough that I have to explain that to kids, too?), and some things that might have happened. Just enjoy the stories and don’t build a worldview about them.

Paul Harvey was audio blogs, really. Some linking, little thinking, some wry notes, and some urban legendry. Enjoy them as such, for what it’s worth.

Just when I get to breezing along these paperback pulp novels, thinking they’re all the same, I run into one that’s not.

Maybe I’ve been running in a particular series (The Executioner), so I get complacent and think that they all read like that, fast and engaging, and then I run into something like this.

Oh, not to sell it short: this book is ripped from contemporary headlines. A Texas oilman wants to kill an Arab leader for his own personal gain! If that doesn’t strike you as the summation of the left’s view of the 21st century, I don’t know what would, aside from that the post-2009 21st century includes RACISM! as the motivating factor for Texas oilmen and their sympathists opposing…. Well, anything.

Except this book takes place ca. 1974, when a CIA agent seeks out a South African son of an SS officer who’s out to kill Muammar al-Gaddafi. Wait a minute, a CIA agent protecting Gaddafi? This just in: I made a dartboard with Gaddafi’s face on it as an art project in middle school. I am now middle-aged. I would say, “WTF?” but that’s how the kids talk these days. Did I say “kids”? I meant “people who think they’re young, but are marketing to kids.”

Sorry, as a middle-aged man, I’m prone to the wandering thoughts that come with age. Where was I?

Oh, yes, this book I read in 2010.

Well, it’s a book that takes its inspiration from the international suspense pulps of the era. Ian Fleming inspired many, which is why the main character has relations with Israeli intelligence and Maltese natives in that way.

However, the book’s pacing really pulls it out of the ranks of pulp or paperback fiction; solid paragraphs and extraneousity slow the book down a great deal. The story is a bit meh. The set pieces are not so much predictable as slow to develop, and the main character’s main job seems to be running to authorities in various locations and asking for their help, which is not what one usually wants in a two-fisted pulp novel.

Apparently, this is part of a series and is the first in the series without the Secret Mission: prefix. So I’ll avoid those with it and try to avoid others in the series without it.

And I’m back to Don Pendleton by now, thank you very much.

This is my second book of self-published Ozarks humor this year (the first was Branson Humor as you well recall). I liked this book better.

That’s not to say that this book is a laff riot. It collects some musings of a doctor as he goes through the business of being a doctor (ca. 1982). There are some amusing bits, but nothing that made me laugh out loud or anything. As a matter of fact, it continues my absolute descent in recent reading from Cosby to Bombeck to this.

The book has some things in common with the latter as they come from the same time period. But because it’s a small press book published in the area where I live, although there are no particular pieces dedicated to the Ozarks, I look upon it with affection. It strikes me as a collection of stories a relative might tell you, expecting laughter but mostly getting smiles as much for the relative as for the stories themselves.