Musings from Brian J. Noggle

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.