Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Well, I could not have read this for the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge in the Made Into A Movie/TV Show category because this book is the novelization of the film. I bought it in May 2009, not long after my sainted mother died and not long before I packed up the smaller Old Trees library for shipment to Nogglestead. Looking at the list of other movie paperbacks I bought at the St. Charles Book Fair along with this one (Outland, The Taking of Pelham 123, Meatballs), this is the last of them I needed to read. Heck, I even read Star Trek Memories (but not Star Trek Movie Memories). Man, I do so like going through those old Good Book Hunting posts to see what I have already read, what I have yet to read, and what I know I can easily find in the stacks should I be inspired to read it next.

At any rate, this is a better movie novelization which doesn’t just put the screenplay into paragraph form but adds some depth to the characters interior life, although I am not sure how much of it would be considered canon. For example, does the movie indicate that Indy’s past with Marion took place when she was 15? I dunno. Also, I don’t know if the book’s pacing matches the films. Does half of the film take place before they get to Egypt? Or is the pacing just off because the action sequences that take up the latter half of the movie are condensed while the introduced interior thoughts are longer? Regardless, the book does seem as though it starts thicker and then speeds up toward the end, with less of that interior stuff. Which happens in a lot of formula men’s adventure fiction as well as these better film novelizations.

But you know what? It makes me want to watch the film again, and I have a set of the first three Indiana Jones movies on videocassette, and this is just the excuse to do so.

I bought this book at Rublecon in 2022. The author had a table full of old magazines and ephemer as well as one copy of his book. As I had visited Pierce City several times for sporting events (and have seen its tank many times), I bought the book.

The subtitle of the book is “Through Post Cards, Photographs, Papers, & People”. The author was a collector of post cards, so he explains how post cards were easy mechanisms for short, inexpensive communications before telephones. Which also explains why a small town like Pierce City produced such a great number of post cards.

So the author collected numerous postcards from around the turn of the 20th century, and he researched the buildings, people, events, and so on depicted in them. The book, then, includes reproductions of the post cards and builds an anecdotal bit of history. Amazing things: The number of passenger trains that stopped in Pierce City was incredible. 20 passenger trains each day. And the town had a population of 2,500. When the trains stopped, the town declined a bit, but it’s still a nice place to visit. The postcards also mention whether they were sent (most were) and where they went. One wonders how the author accumulated postcards mailed to Illinois or St. Louis. The story behind the book is probably as fascinating as the book itself.

As I read this, I thought this might be the sort of thing that Lileks would like. I also thought maybe I would start accumulating post cards. Fortunately, though, I will likely move on before I come to a place where I can indulge this new interest.

Still, an interesting book which will give me lots of tidbits for my beautiful wife should we find our way out there again.

To be honest, I was a bit down on this book when I first started reading it. The first chapter is about Jim the Wonder Dog, and I just read a whole book about him in December. Chapter 4 is pretty much a retelling of the Yocum Silver Dollar from Traces of Silver (and lest we forget, I read Woody P. Snow’s fictional account Blood Silver which would have fit into my Blood book theme this year). Chapter 9 is about the Springfield Three–I read a fictionalized account about it, Gone in the Night, a couple years back, and we just “celebrated” the thirtieth anniversary of the disappearence of the three women in 1992, so I’ve seen a lot of press coverage of it in recent years. And Chapter 13 is about the Spook Light down around Joplin which had not one, but two, books published about it in recent years (which means I might have one or two of them around here). So a lot of it was pretty familiar to me.

And, to be honest, perhaps I was a little envious. After all, I at one point fifteen years ago thought maybe I could mine the esoteric books I read for essay material and write articles bringing unknown things to the forefront (which resulted in one such publication, “Hey, Buddy, Want To Buy a Tower?” in History magazine in March 2008). But these stories, or at least the ones I mentioned above, are fairly common knowledge around these parts. Or maybe just to someone who takes eleven local newspapers plus Rural Missouri and Ozarks Farm and Neighbor plus who picks up a lot of local history books, even those not written by Larry Wood (who has multiple books like this Wicked Springfield, Missouri in print and in bookstores).

But the book is probably targeted for people outside Missouri or newcomers.

After I got over it and settled into the book (story retellings with few citations), I guess I leaned into it and enjoyed it more. After all, the Civil War cave it talks about is not Smallin Civil War cave just north of Ozark but a cave in Neosho whose entrance was closed, and now people are hunting for it. And I am not sure I’d read about Ella Ewing, a giantess who toured as a curiosity but was unfailingly proper, or Tom Bass, a black horse trainer, before. So I did get some new things out of the book as well as retellings of some of the aforementioned familiar with some asides and digressions into related topic matter.

Not a long book, and not a long read. So worth your while if you’re into Missouri, especially southwest Missouri, history.

The author bio says that he’s a local columnist, but he’s not syndicated. I don’t see him across multiple papers and magazines like I’ve seen Jim Hamilton and Larry Dablemont. Maybe he has moved on and has more recently penned books about other states.

Geez, Louise, it’s been a while since I’ve read an Elizabeth Linington book (Dell Shannon being one of her pen names). I mean, I read a number of them in high school, either because the Community Library in High Ridge stocked them or because I borrowed some from my grandma (who owned some which I inherited in a roundabout fashion–and now that I think of it, my grandma died about the same time as “Elizabeth Linington”, and I never saw the two of them in the same place at the same time….) I know I have The First Linington Quartet around here somewhere, which I inherited from my grandma through my sainted mother. I must have read it right before I began blogging and doing book reports, because I kind of poop on her work in early book reports on this blog (The McBain Brief by Ed McBain, reviewed in August 2003; The Lost Coast by Roger Simon, reviewed in November 2004; Blood on the Arch by Robert J. Randisi, reviewed in December 2004). Clearly, it has taken me twenty years to remember how I didn’t like them (and note that in 2003, I was a little more than 20 years from my heavy reading in the…. well, a couple years earlier). But, oh, dear: Apparently when I bought this book in 2008, I bought several “Dell Shannon” books. Which might well remain in the Nogglestead stacks until 2044, or the sale of my estate.

I guess this book jumped out at me since I’ve already read two books for the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge with Blood in the title (Blood Relatives by Ed McBain–a far superior police procedural–and Blood Debts by Shayne Silver).

This is one of the Luis Mendoza books (The First Linington Quintet being the Ivor Maddox series–Linington had numerous series from 1960 to this volume, one of the last before she passed). Luis Mendoza is part of Robbery and Investigation (Homicide) in the LA police department, and the book features Mendoza as a character amidst the detective squad, most of whom are but names–perhaps in the, what, 35 or so previous books they had personalities, but in this book, they’re a rotating series of names mostly, with no back story elaboration. Why does Mendoza, a cop, drive a Ferrari? Perhaps that was covered somewhere sixty or seventy years ago–the series began in 1960–, but it’s not in this book, and I don’t remember anything about it from whatever I might have read forty years ago from the series.

So, at any rate, the detective squad starts to look into a murder where a woman from out-of-town has extended her stay, but is murdered and someone has tried to cover it up as a car accident. Meanwhile, other cases are introduced: The rape of a young girl walking home from a friend’s house; a mugger who steals his victims’ shoes; an elderly man dies in his apartment amid an apparent struggle; and a couple of other smaller cases whose detecting progress, or not, is woven throughout the book.

So it’s a police procedural, but maybe too much. The cipher-like detectives of the squad–mostly just names, but some with a little mention of their families, and one is a woman–hang out, do puzzles, read books, and sometimes go out to investigate. Fortunately, their Los Angeles police district circa the mid 1980s doesn’t see a lot of crime. When they investigate, they interview some people but spend a lot of time theorizing in paragraphs- or page-long ruminations. But when it comes time for the cases to be cracked, it’s usually a random tip that provides the information that the detectives need–not their hard work. And some of the cases remain unresolved at the end of the book. Because it’s just another day’s–or week’s work–for the police.

Blech. Not only is the book particularly existential in its meaninglessness–the “heroes” of the book just kind of ride along with the story–but it goes out of its way to be existential as two separate sets of characters in different scenes go on to embrace and evangelize their atheism over the course of a dozen pages about two-thirds of the way through the book. Out of nowhere. Additionally, the book is crazy anachronistic. They mention a gang fight with stabbings like it was the Sharks and the Jets and not the gangs and violence we who came of age in the 1980s would recognize from the era.

But, as I mentioned, this book comes at the tail of Linington’s career, and this particular series began in 1960, almost a half century before. Ed McBain kept his 87th Precinct books pretty fresh from the 1950s through the early part of the 21st century, but this book reads like the author had frozen her understanding of police procedure in amber. I mean, I guess I cannot knock it–She banged out enough books to make a good midlist living at it. But they’re not that good, and they don’t have the staying power of the McBain work. Not that one can talk about the staying power of any 20th century books or maybe books in general in the 21st century.

And, apparently, I have two more “Dell Shannon” books in the to-read stacks, ready to strike at any time. Maybe if the Winter Reading Challenge next year has a category A Book That Probably Sucks. Well, it likely will, but with a mind-broadening woke title instead of the more direct Probably Sucks.

I am ready to read something else (and I already have!)

I was mistaken in October 2022 (That long ago? Already?) when I’d said I’d finish Star Trek 13 sometime and turn my attention to the Star Trek: The Animated Series books by Alan Dean Foster. This volume is the final one in the original set, and Blish died while working on it (his widow, J.A. Lawrence, finished it). I also thought that Star Trek 11 was the last in the set that I had on my to-read shelves as I’d grouped them as I went along before reading them, but I found this paperback when scouring the stacks for books for the Winter Reading Challenge, and I figured it would be a good, quick book to start off my post-Winter Reading Challenge reading.

The book has five stories based on episodes, and they felt rather familiar, but perhaps I remember them from reading Star Trek Memories two years ago–I think it had some summaries of the plots of the shows.

Stories/episodes include:

• “Patterns of Force”, the one where the Enterprise crew visits a planet where a peaceable Federation researcher has somehow become a Fuhrer figure to a militant society looking to eliminate people from the next planet over.
   
• “The Gamesters of Triskelion”, the one where an Enterprise’s away team is snatched during transport to a distant planet where they’ll be trained to act as gladiators that the Gamesters can wager on.
   
• “And the Children Shall Lead”, the one where the Enterprise comes to a research outpost to find that the adults are dead and the children are unconcerned; when the crew brings the children aboard, they start to take over at the behest of an alien force.
   
• “The Carbomite Maneuver”, the one where the Enterprise goes to the edges of known space and encounters a stronger alien presence that wants to defend itself by destroying the Enterprise until Kirk explains about the Carbomite.
   
• “Shore Leave”, the one where an overworked Enterprise crew finds a planet that seems to bring the crew’s memories and thoughts to life–for good and for bad.

Blish (and his wife) got better as he (they) went along with these books, where they could not only write from relatively fresh scripts but from the actual aired episodes, so they match (and perhaps make) our memories. You know, when I initially read these books in the 1980s, I probably had not seen many of the episodes. I mean, Star Trek was fairly common on the weekends in syndication, so I took it for granted. So many of the episodes that I’ve later seen–and infrequently at that, now that I think about it–I would have seen after reading these books.

So fifty years after he passed away, I have to salute James Blish for his work. He was not a midlister who filled a void for science fiction fans–television science fiction fans, perhaps–but, as I’ve said, until Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out (and, honestly, until The Wrath of Khan or maybe Star Trek: The Next Generation came out), this is what we had to make do with in those pioneer days before streaming, before cable. I suspect Laura Ingalls Wilder read these books on the prairies. Well, not quite, but…. Yeah, kids these days would not enjoy these books as much as I have decades and a half-century later.