{"id":5446,"date":"2010-02-19T07:05:54","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T13:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=5446"},"modified":"2010-02-19T07:05:54","modified_gmt":"2010-02-19T13:05:54","slug":"book-report-adam-12-the-runaway-by-chris-stratton-1972","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/19\/book-report-adam-12-the-runaway-by-chris-stratton-1972\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Adam-12: The Runaway<\/i> by Chris Stratton (1972)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I bought this book for my sainted mother because I think she liked books tied into television shows she liked.  Maybe I just made that up.  But I got her a pair of Adam-12 books for a buck or something.  Little did I realize that these listed on the Internet at $50.00 each.  A lot of times, you can find old paperbacks, particularly series, listed on the Internet at bonzo bucks that you can find at book fairs cheap.  I&#8217;d recommend you buy them if you like them; otherwise, you will buy them and list them on the Internet for bonzo bucks and have them listed there for a long, long time.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, this book is a hundred and fifty pages of lightweight crime drama.  There&#8217;s a central case, the Runaway thing in the title, and a series of other incidents that occur to the patrolmen in the course of their rounds.  I haven&#8217;t seen the show in 20+ years, so I can only assume that the book follows the pattern of the episodes.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a good light quick read, not Ed McBain or John D. MacDonald by any means, but the writing is more pleasant and higher quality than bad pulp.<\/p>\n<p>A couple salient facts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It takes until page 47 for the word &#8220;groovy&#8221; to appear earnestly and unironically.<\/li>\n<li>The climax of the book focuses on a dark mass, <em>with upside down crosses!<\/em> and dogs dressed as ghosts to keep those meddling kids away.  I was going to mock that harder than I am because I realized that, 2 years later, Robert B. Parker&#8217;s <em>The Godwulf Manuscript<\/em> also featured a rescue of a runaway in a dark mass.  And if Parker did it before 1990, I cannot mock it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The cops are upstanding and good.  Adam-12 was a Jack Webb program, after all.<\/p>\n<p><center><b>Books mentioned in this review:<\/b><\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?lt1=_blank&#038;bc1=FFFFFF&#038;IS2=1&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;t=stlbrianj-20&#038;o=1&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;m=amazon&#038;f=ifr&#038;asins=B000KE3L8Y\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I bought this book for my sainted mother because I think she liked books tied into television shows she liked. Maybe I just made that up. But I got her a pair of Adam-12 books for a buck or something. Little did I realize that these listed on the Internet at $50.00 each. A lot [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5446"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5449,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5446\/revisions\/5449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}