Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason novels, used the pseudonym of A.A. Fair to write the Bertha Cool/Donald Lam series (a small set of 20+ books). This is somewhere early in the series, written in 1941 and re-released in the 1960s to capitalize on Gardner’s grown popularity.

The book has all the earmarks of 40s pulp: a hard-boiled detective working on a convoluted plot involving a wealthy young man whose fiancee runs off before their marriage. The father, who disapproved of the marriage, might have had a hand in it, and he hires Cool and Lam to find out why the woman disappeared. The paterfamilias plants evidence he wants the detectives to find, but they go beyond the simple decoy to find the woman, much to the father’s chagrin.

Not before a murder occurs, though, so the detective (Lam) needs to figure out who did it and square it to the best of his belief in justice.

The book’s cock-eyed enough to make it interesting. The main character, Lam, isn’t a good fighter, and every scrap he gets into, he loses. He also doesn’t figure out everything just right, but he makes things as right as he can given his limitations.

This looks to be a cool series that I’ll pursue in the future.

I don’t know why I did this to myself. It’s a book based on a Saturday Night Live skit that I didn’t find particularly amusing. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hold onto SNL skits beyond normal bounds of sanity–after all, I saw Night at the Roxbury on its opening weekend and Ladies Man as soon as I could, but the Pat thing? Nah, I have dodged that particular movie with aplomb.

As you know, gentle reader, the Pat thing is a skit by Julia Sweeney, an SNL alum I remember fondly up until the point that I deconfuse her with Jan Hooks, who I thought was hot. The gag in the skit, the movie (I presume), and the book is that you don’t know if Pat is a male or a female. So innumerable hours of skit time, movie time, and fictional decades in the book are spent by people trying to pin Pat down metaphorically or literally to find out.

I guess everyone needs a hobby.

So the book’s schtick is that it’s a scrapbook of Pat’s life, written in such a way to avoid all pronouns. Um, that’s it.

Well, it didn’t take too long to peruse, anyway, and I probably only spent a quarter on it.

Why do I do this? So I can serve as a warning to you, gentle reader, and I hope you’ll learn the lesson and not bother with this book.

Apparently, an ad at the back indicates that a similar book exists for Wayne’s World. Oh, my.

I have been a fan of the Book of Lists series since my middle school days, when I bought the first Book of Lists as a paperback at a flea market just up the hill from the trailer park in which I lived. I’ve even read The People’s Almanac, for crying out loud.

From a name that includes The People’s Almanac, you can guess that the authors lean a little left of center. Now that they’re flogging more recent history, it becomes more apparent. For example, the following list:

Presidents of the latter half of the 20th Century who were The Devil:

1. Ronald Reagan
2. Richard Nixon
3. George Bush
4. Ronald Reagan
5. Ronald Reagan

Well, perhaps that list didn’t appear in the book, but it could have. The authors rely a lot more on Exclusive for Book of Lists as their source material, which means that now that people have heard of it, the authors could send out a questionnaire instead of doing research. Not that all of the lists are like that; just a lot more than in previous editions, as I recollect.

For those of you not familiar with the concept, essentially the authors come up with chapter titles and then coalesece lists around them. Or vice versa, they come up with a bunch of trivia lists and make chapters to reflect it. Regardless, it’s just a pile of trivia on a bunch of topics.

The book best serves as a sort of brainstorm for further research, as it’s probably foolish to cite this book as a comprehensive or even correct source. Which could serve, ultimately, as the beginnings of many, many essays or articles if I don’t just throw the book on my read shelves and forget about it.

This is not the paperback rendering of the Dirty Harry movie (this is). This is the first in the Objectivist-themed 70s paperback pulp series The Enforcer (I read the third book in the series, Kill City, in July).

It’s more of what that one was about:

I mean, imagine Atlas Shrugged if, instead of a cipher for Ayn Rand’s fantasies of the perfect man, John Galt was an author who died somehow and was now living in a series of cloned bodies that deteriorate in 90 days while he works for the John Anryn Institute using his wits, his special power over his own life force (ki), and judo to take on all the Tooheys of the world (sorry, wrong book). But it’s pulp fiction with a definite Objectivist theme.

In between bursts of violent action, we have Penthouse letters sex scenes, the most graphic I’ve seen depicted in any paperbacks I assume were sold at drug stores. I mean, in some pulp, you get the “they’re going to have sex” paragraph, “they’re having sex” paragraph, and then the “it was good” paragraph. In this book, you get the he did that and she did this to his that and it was good thing. It starts graphic to the N-degree and then goes into the metaphorical several paragraphs later. Conforming with Ayn Rand’s theory of sex, I reckon.

Also, we get the speechifying, but in small doses, where the protagonist and his Institute compatriots go on about the power mongers who would rule over men. Nothing comparable to Galt’s Speech, though, so the narrative is not impaired too badly.

What fun!

Author Alexander Jason is dying of inoperable stomach cancer at 38, but the John Anryn Institute has a solution and a means for him to cheat death (the aforementioned cloning). On his first of his indentured service Enforcer missions, he’s sent to a Caribbean island to blow up some oil wells, but the training wheels come off in a big hurry as he is inserted on the wrong beach and is captured right away. He awakens from weeks of torture to endure weeks more of torture before a second Institute mission arrives with a change in plans; instead of the oil wells, their primary focus is a secret lab in the jungle. And Jason has to deal not only with the new mission, but also a traitor in the midst and the breakdown of his clone body.

Probably the most possible fun I can have with this sort of pulp book, but your mileage may vary if you’re not into Objectivism.

I bought this book earlier this year at a garage sale here in Old Trees at the same time as I bought my Triumph TR books and New York At Night. So I got it cheap, which is good, and in an gluttonous frenzy of book buying, which is also good, for this is not a book I would have liked to have spent a pile for and to have bought by itself.

It’s a little gift book, and a slightly amusing one at that. The author takes individual clichés uttered by mothers, places them one up on each page, and writes a couple sentences of exegesis. I would have said humorous exigesis, but it’s mostly wry. I guess if you’re looking for something for your mother for Christmas and cannot think of anything (especially if, unlike my mother, you cannot simply stick to power tools), perhaps you can share some warm memories and smiles with the Hamilton book. It’s a gift book, that’s what it’s for. Not great insight into the origins of the Modern American-English language.

Think of it as Lileks without the photos and without the depth. Speaking of whom, he’s got a new book out, Gastroanomalies: Questionable Culinary Creations from the Golden Age of American Cookery. Buy two copies today, and send one to me care of this station.

I originally heard this book on audio book about a decade ago, when I spent a lot of time in my car. Ergo, I remembered the conceit of the book, but not much about the plot. I guess that happens, the details (that is, the whole plot) falls from your memory faster from audiobooks than from books you read, but that’s because reading is more engaging than listening while you’re doing other things, such as avoiding other people on the roads not content to merely listen.

This book is similar to Candyland in that someone who’s not a native New Yorker gets caught up in the crime-ridden life in New York. Instead of a randy architect, we get a mild-mannered orange grower up from Florida who has some time to kill before his flight leaves for home, so he talks to a woman in a bar. The woman is a con artist who, along with an accomplice, steals the contents of his wallet. A sympathetic ear at the bar listens to his story, and then steals his car. After he talks to the police and gets subway fare to the airport (in the days where you didn’t need ID to fly, apparently), he fights back in a mugging and is confused for the agressor by a cop. He flees, following the would-be mugger to a Chinese gambling den and catching a news upate that indicates that a film director, the sympathetic ear from the bar, was murdered in the car stolen from the protagonist and that the protagonist’s wallet was found on the scene.

So it’s a tour de force, absurd bit, but it drags you along.

It’s a good book, as you might guess would deem a McBain novel. Again, it’s a departure from the police procedural bread and butter, but it’s amusing as long as you take it as sort of a camp. You cannot help it, which attests to the skill of the writer. And although I enjoyed the audiobook, I probably enjoyed the actual book more. Hopefully, I’ll retain the plot a little longer in my memory.

Well, with a title like that, one would expect it to either be a bodice-ripping romance or a horror book. This book is neither.

It deals with a recent British widow who decides after her husband’s sudden death to move to a small cottage in the British countryside. She does so and discovers its environs are mostly owned by a land-grabber who has a number of ruffians about. There’s also a faded writer nearby. She moves in, deals a bit with her two children, and then engages a handyman to do a little work on her cottage.

Well, the handyman is a louse, ultimately, and his lousiness triggers a change in the widow and her son, and the characters move on that event. The book ends in tragedy, though, which saddened me, and the author goes for the Nausea ending:

A memorial, then, to both of them, extinct as they are, foolish, fond, courageous and insignificant.

That is, in spite of the meaninglessness, the writer character decides to tell the idiot’s tale for us. Marvelous.

I’m probably a better person, slightly, for going outside the normal comforts of genre fiction. The book isn’t a bad read, although a trifle slow and slightly alien for a middle-aged American male.