Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This is a shorter 87th Precinct novel from the 1970s, before hardback bloat demanded every book be 300 pages. A blind man is murdered, and then his blind wife is murdered and the apartment tossed. Is someone murdering blind people, or were they targeted specifically? That’s the question for Carella and the gang.

Funny, the book deals with veterans back from the War (Vietnam) and shenanigans in the military, but in 1977, McBain didn’t feel the need to foam about LBJ, Nixon, or Carter. Was George W. Bush just that evil that McBain couldn’t refrain in later books? It’s fortunate he did, otherwise he would not have sold so well nor built a legacy which makes his later political rhapsody tolerable.

I might count this as a historical novel. Well, a pulp novel from history. The cover says Tarzan is perhaps the most famous character this extraordinary writer ever created, but I know Burroughs mostly for John Carter, the Warlord of Mars. Tarzan has gotten quite the screen time, though, hasn’t he? I remember the television program that KPLR ran on Saturday mornings before its movie triple feature. Remember when independent stations ran those?

At any rate, this book follows the plight of Tarzan’s parents, the Lord and Lady Greystoke, marooned on the African coast, the raising of Tarzan, his growth and eventual ascendance among the apes, and the arrival of other maroonees at the same spot. There, Tarzan saves Jane, and the hearty French (!) rescue Jane and her family. Tarzan then, in the final bit of the book, goes to civilization and ultimately Wisconsin (!) to save Jane again, but ultimately lets her wed his cousin who has assumed the title Lord Greystoke.

The end bit runs very quickly (quicker since it’s missing 6 pages of the climax). Taking Tarzan out of the jungle ultimately doesn’t work, but I bet others in the series will return him to the wild. I bought a number of them at a recent book fair and left some of them unpacked, so I imagine I’ll read it in the next month.

All the cool kids, and by that I mean Kim du Toit (PBUH), love the Flashman novels. So when I lit upon one for a couple bits at a book fair, I bit. You know if you’ve been reading here any length of time (and don’t skip the book reports) that I’ve been reading historical novels, particularly the Sharpe series, so I have to draw a quick contrast between the two. Unfortunately, this book and probably series might fall short.

In this book, a ne’er-do-well aristocratic prodigal son gets thrown out of school (apparently, the books take off of a bully and boor from another British series of schoolboy books), gets his colors, and ends up getting sent to India and Afghanistan as an officer. He gets reknown and reputation for surviving massacres simply because he runs away, lies, and does disreputable things. I kept hoping for some sort of redemptive moment, but at the ending of the book, he finds his wife has been cheating on him while he was away and accepts it because her family has become his family’s meal ticket.

I guess the books were written at different times, which might explain the differences. Fraser’s book came at a time when it was radical to puncture the sense of pride Britain had in its empire; Sharpe’s books, where Sharpe starts out sort of a Flashman sort but with comraderie, kinship, and some patriotism, actually prop up the traditional notions instead of knock them down. Hence, I enjoy the Sharpe books better for the thematic treatment.

I didn’t enjoy this book, ultimately, and I’m not going looking for another in the series. To say I won’t read one, though, might be going a bit far. Perhaps I’m optimistic enough to hope for some redemption somewhere.

I read this book right after the Gates thing and right after a conversation on race that pretty much ended with my black friend saying, “You’re not black, so you can’t understand and you’re wrong.” Maybe this book was penance. Or maybe it’s because it was the first Mosley book I saw at a book fair after I read Transgressions. Pick whichever you want to fit into your narrative of Brian.

This book is later in the Easy Rawlins canon, and it fits into the mold of good hard-boiled detective fiction. Rawlins helps a friend by finding what his wife’s child, the titular Brawly Brown, is into. He peels away the layers and finds that the young man is indeed in over his head in something bad and he has to go to extraordinary means to extract him (in a fashion).

That said, the retro feel of it, the strange lingo, and a certain alienation of the reader from the argot of the story keeps with what one encounters reading the oldies today. However, Mosley pulls the white reader out a little with continued that’s what it’s like to be black asides. The situations Rawlins encounters aren’t that much different from the things encountered by the regular private eye, but the first person narrator dwells upon his blackness an awful lot. I don’t dwell on my race that much, so that’s very alien to me. I’m not sure if it’s authentic or not, either, but if it is, that’s a real tragedy.

Still, I liked the book enough to not shirk other Mosley books in the future.

I read the first book in this series (Sharpe’s Tiger) earlier this year, and nobody saw fit to fill in the gaps in the series for my birthday, so here I am reading the second book.

In this book, Sargeant Sharpe is the sole survivor of a massacre by a treasonous English major. Colonel McCandless takes Sharpe to try to capture the traitor and bring him to justice as English forces march to fight the armies of Northern India. A good collection of details and episodes based on real history.

One thing between reading this book and Space Vulture is how much more detailed modern books are. The old ones provided some sketches and a fast moving plot, but the books these days really lay on the detail. I don’t know, it can take the book out of your imagination a bit and shoehorn it into the author’s. Not that this book is that bad, per se, but I think it’s a general evolution of the common style. I blame Faulkner.

One of the more interesting things about this story is the authors. Childhood friends in the 1950s in Illinois, they went onto different things. One wrote the story that became Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. The other became an archbishop. They got together and wrote a book that would hearken back to the sci-fi space operas they loved as kids. It’s such a neat story, it appears on the back instead of anything of the plot. Probably because it’s the sort of thing that hearkens back to fifties space operas.

The book follows the takedown of the Space Vulture, a criminal genius whose exploits are legendary. Opposing him are the reknowned bounty hunter Victor Corsaire; Gil Terry, a small grifter who was briefly in the custody of Corsaire; Cali, the widowed administrator of a planet raided by Terry and later, more successfully, by the Space Vulture; and Eliot and Regin, Cali’s two plucky young sons who are left behind. In a series of reversals and cliffhangers, the foes gyrate about each other and finally meet for the climactic battle on a slaver planet.

The book walks the line between earnest and campy, staying pretty earnest. The style mimics serials a bit, complete with an ending that indicates another adventure will be available next week. And, with an archbishop co-author, we get prayers and peace in the face of death that you don’t normally see in science fiction, but these are really just flourishes and asides, so religious belief is not core to the story.

Overall, a pleasant reading experience.