42. The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A neighbour around the block was having a garage sale and he had a pretty nice collection of paperbacks for sale, lots of Pan and other beauties from the peak period.  Unfortunately, they were mostly fairly mainstream authors (lots of Raymond Chandler).  He had a really nice set of Sherlock Holmes, which I also don't need, but would have been a great starter set for a younger reader/collector.  I did pick up two of Doyle's later supernatural adventure books, including this one.  It is a beautiful, illustrated cover and I appreciate the bleed and that the title and author text are part of the illustration.

The basic story is an inspired but manic scientist takes a young American (but civilized to English ways) on a secretive research trip where he introduces him to a deep diving vessel to explore the bottom of the ocean.  The vessel is separated from the ship and they fall to the bottom, seemingly cut off forever and running out of oxygen.  Adventure ensues.  I present it that way but Doyle does the opposite, framing the story first as an omniscient unnamed writer (presumably Doyle himself) collecting all the textual evidence surrounding the loss of the Stratford (the steamer the expedition departed in that was carrying the diving bell).  So we get the transcript from a captain's journal, a letter from the young American before they disappeared and then a final letter that popped up in a transparent ball in the middle of the ocean, also from the young American that goes into great detail about their adventures that followed, leading up to them finally escaping (in a giant version of the transparent bubble that brought the letter up).

It is only then, that we get back to the main narrative, their adventures at the bottom of the ocean.  They meet the people of Atlantis and Doyle describes a really cool backstory of how they got there.  We get lots of neat underwater mini-missions and scrapes as the trio learns about the Atlantean society.  Things get really wild in the end, when the three surface humans explore the ruined city and a dark temple where they awaken the evil that brought Atlantis to ruin initially.

It's a fun read.  Doyle does get into his metaphysical stuff here, but it is all in aid of the story and the excitement of the adventure.  One can easily see the contradictory benevolent colonialism in the tale.  Though the Atlanteans have some seriously advanced technology (they can tranmogrify the base elements into things like coffee!), they just don't have the same gumption as our western heroes.  There is also some getting with the hot native ladies wish fufillment going on here.  All in a fun, quick read that actually delivers a fairly satisfying somewhat epic narrative that ties the origins in with the conclusion.

They hook up a wireless receiver and listen to the BBC with the Atlanteans. 
Love this patriotic aside

41. Benny Muscles in by Peter Rabe

This was a pretty nice find, a Gold Medal original paperback of Peter Rabe's second book.  It's funny how Rabe was almost totally forgotten (by most), then re-illuminated by Donald Westlake (who cited him as a major influence on Parker) to the point that his books became very hard to find and quite high-priced.  Now the flurry seems to have died down and you tend to find his books from time to time.  Also makes you realize he was fairly prolific.

Benny Muscles In is, at least according to the excitable back blurb, Rabe's second book.  I really appreciate the title because it is exactly what the book is about.  Benny is a small-time thug with big ambitions.  He is short and desperately motivated to take over and manage real operations.  At the beginning, he is given an assignment to manage a neighbourhood and do the collections from all the syndicated crimes going on there.  Without being told, he doubles the take.  When his boss, the unflappable Pendleton, demotes him to chauffeur.  I was sort of expecting the more common underdog gangster story here and Benny would make his way to the top because of his ruthlessness.

That is not Rabe's way.  Benny is flawed and the situations all around him do not help him at all.  He ends up siding with Al Alverrato, Pendleton's once colleague and now rival.  A lot of shit goes down, most of it involving kidnapping Pendleton's daughter.  It's quite violent and there are some quite crazy situations that you can feel trace a throughline to the Fargo/Tarantino/90s hot noir wacky setup style of crime movie.  The main narrative, though, is Benny's relationship with Pat, whom he keeps calm with heroine, turning her into a real addict all the while falling in love with her. It's a gross, abusive, twisted relationship on both sides.  I felt the ending was a bit of a cop-out, but the tangled mess leading up to it was an enjoyable exercise in crime and broken characters.  Good fun.

40. Agent of Vega by James H. Schmitz

Once again, Kenneth Hite was responsible for me learning about a new author.  I may have reacted a bit too eagerly to his positive mini-reviews in several Ken and Robin Consume Media posts and hunted down and bought three of his books before reading even one.  I really stalled out on this one (three weeks since my last finished book!).  I struggled to focus on the first two stories because of their removed objective third-person perspective and subtle writing style.  I also have jumped back in head first to the tabletop RPG pool thanks to an excellent OSR actual play podcast which led me circuitously to actually buy Dungeon Crawl Classics and lose my soul in that beautiful madness for a few weeks.

But now I have a week at a cottage and am committed to getting back on the reading train.  I almost put this book aside (it's four longish short stories) but glad I stuck with it as the last two stories really took it home. I also started to get his idiom and structure which made them easier to read.  The content of these stories is as advertised, really imaginative, intelligent large-scale space epics with super high-tech and competent female protagonists (most astonishing for sci-fi stories writting in the late 40s and early 50s).  They are short stories centered around the advanced earth civilization of the Vegan Confederacy, who are kind of like technocratic Jedi whose job is to police the universe and protect civilizations from threats ranging the minor like space pirates to major like a recurrent interdimensional invasion.  They also plant themselves in secret on developing planets to guide them into their network.  You only get hints of how it all works and suggestions of the various opponents (military, political and economic) of the Confederacy.  At least in these 4 stories, it always involves a cool badass space spy with awesome toys and some independence to achieve their manager's goals.

CityTV (one of the 7 channels I get via antenna) for some reason shows Twilight Zone episodes late at night a couple nights a week.  I was so psyched to discover this (such a contrast to today's hyper-packaged media) but disappointed to find that I don't actually love the Twilight Zone.  I only saw a few episodes as a kid and was way into them at the time, but sadly they don't hold up for me.  They feel a lot more like thoughtful, dialogue-driven stage plays exploring social themes of the late 50s rather than mind-blowing excursions into fantastic weirdness.  This is no critique of the show, as it holds up in the writing and acting and ideas.  It's just that with the budgets and production technology of the time, you have to do a lot of telling and not much showing. There is a lot of talking in these shows!

I realized as I was struggling to get through the first two stories in this collection (Agent of Vega, The Illusionists) that their writing style reminded me of the Twilight Zone.  Even though it is written fiction, so production values are not an issue, it still feels like Schmitz's vision wasn't capable (or wasn't inclined) of showing at this time.  A lot of the "action" in these stories is one person telling another (often a manager talking to an agent or to fellow managers within the Vegan bureaucracy) what happened. And the few times there actually is real action, it is elided, with Schmitz just describing the results.  It made it hard for me to connect with the characters and narrative.  On top of that, stylistically for sci fi of this period, his sentences are somewhat complex and indirect.  He also jumps from perspective to perspective with subtle openings to the next character and the formatting in the book didn't always make this obvious.  It also makes it hard to figure out what the main plot is until you are way into the story, juggling a bunch of characters and locaitons.  So I spent a lot of time going back and re-reading sentences and paragraphs as my mind drifted off.  I ended up putting the book down for a couple weeks, reading the amazing tables of spell results in DCC's crazy magic system before going to bed at night.

Fortunately, the third story, The Truth about Cushgar, though equally indirect and all over the place, had a clear revenge plot that I cottoned onto quickly and was able to ingest more consistently.  I think at this point, I also started to get the world Schmitz is creating and better interpret his style.  The last one The Second Night of Summer about the friendship of a young boy in a rural village with an old caravanning gypsy-type woman as these floating light balls appear out of nowhere was really human and satisfying, just a great little story with cool characters that ends with promise of much more adventure.  One of the neat things about Schmitz' universe is that it is done in disconnected short stories and novellas, but characters appear briefly in other stories, so you get a subtle sense of the greater world-building.  His world is about competence and optimism in the face of chaos and evil and I hope to be able to approach is more directly and satisfyingly in the other books I have on deck.  

39. The Tower by Richard Martin Stern

I have a vague memory of somebody on Bluesky recommending this book.  I went through a 70s disaster movie phase in my 30s so thought this might be worth checking out.  It also falls into my sub-sub-niche of post-WWII business man drama novels.  Even though the main story is supposed to be the burning building, much of the plot (and more of the pages) is actually about the men who built the tower, all their internal and external conflicts and the investigation unravelling of the person responsible for the fire.

In the book, the building is called "The World Tower" and it is downtown a block or so from the World Trade Center but towers over them by 40 stories.  This is one of those books, not unlike the movie, with almost a dozen significant characters and a few more recurring side characters.  On the day of the official ceremonial opening of The Tower, we follow the architect, the secondary architect, his wife, the owner, his daughter and son-in-law, the crazed loner who sneaks into the building with a bomb, the two cops standing guard (explicitly and repeatedly Black and Irish, who constantly mention race but are friends), the governor of the state, the mayor, an old-school senator and a young rabble-rousing senator.  Later, we also get two different people from the fire department and the coast guard each as well as a young woman who seems to have no real role in life other than to be invited to the opening ceremony and fall in love with the governor who is twice her age.

The book is a real hodge-podge of 70s themes.  Everybody is depressed and cynical, especially about politics.  There is a huge gulf between the older politicians who fought in wars and the younger generation who just wants to tear everything down or something.  Likewise, anybody who is educated and part of the east coast establishment is suspect while hard-working folk from the Midwest who love the open land and a stream full of trout are the heroes.  Of course, the city itself and people jamming themselves together in big, dying cities is portrayed as some terrible aberration.

If you can't already tell, there is a ton of white male moralistic blathering pretending to be deep philosophy.  It's too bad there is so much of it.  I am always down for a little bit of demonstration of true character and hard, experienced men in books teaching us how to man properly.  But here there is just way too much of it. The portrayal of the governor in particular is just ridiculous.  He ends up meeting and falling in love with a young woman at the party while trapped on the top floor and they have the most painful conversations, with him dropping all this 60s establishment man-talk and she just oohs and ahhs about what an important and real man he is.  It's not quite as weird as John D. MacDonald at his worst, but there is way more of it proportionally and it is very hard to actually parse any meaning out of it beyond strong man with power is sexually attractive and sensible woman should follow.

It's too bad, because interspersed between all this 70s older white male pandering bullshit is actually a really good disaster adventure.  The portrayal of the details of the fire is excellent and terrifying.  The action scenes are really good.  I was genuinely thrilled at the set piece finale.  It's just that all this good stuff takes up about maybe 30% of the book at most.  I was reading it and at times groaning out loud and really questioning why I was taking up my summer with this book and then at other times quite psyched.  It was a real up and down and read.

I think one of the big issues, beyond the author needing to think he was John Updike, is the plot.  Ostensibly, the main story is that this big, complex new building catches fire on the day of its opening celebration, trapping a hundred or so dignataries on its top, 150th floor.  All of its elaborate safety features fail in a complex combination of bad luck and human error.  This is a great premise.  Unfortunately, nobody does anything smart until its too late.  The emergency exit doors are blocked, the elevators stop working.  There is nothing they can do but wait.  So we spend the entire book with the people trapped on the top floor who can't do anything but talk.  The only adventure we get until the end is the various firemen who try to make the stairs to the top floor.  

The real plot for most of the book is a set of change work orders signed by the second-in-command architect (he is the main protagonist, the simple but brilliant midwestern guy who is married to the perfect yet morally empty patrician east coast woman who went to all the right schools, etc.) that cut costs on a bunch of safety features.  These show up in the first few pages and we spend the first half of the book following the investigation to find out who was responsible for them (turns out to be the boss's son-in-law who is an Ivy League scumbag) and then the second half chasing him down to prevent him from destroying the evidence.  It's actually not bad as we get to see some of the inside operations and meet a range of interesting tri-state area characters.  It's just that with the investigation storyline and the repetitive, mid-reactionary philosophizing we barely get any time with the fire and people escaping it.  Just feels like a lost opportunity and one in which if I remember correctly, the movie actually uses much more by splitting people up and having them try and escape in various ways (though the movie is fairly low down in my 70s disaster hierarchy as well).

This problem really hits its climax at the final escape section, where people are getting taken over via cable to the World Trade Center one at a time.  They have all the women go first and draw lots.  As the fire approaches, panic starts to set in among the remaining men (understandable, I guess).  What gets really ridiculous is when the I guess left-leaning congressman who has already been portrayed as you and idealistic goes full-on wimpy protestor by whipping up the people trapped in the tower to what just sort of freak out over the situation and blame the governor? They want answers!  They want blame!  Well damnit, the governor will have to show them how a real man acts.  And of course the young congressman who never worked a real day in his life backs down to the aggressive alpha-male who worked his way up by his bootstraps.  It's just so badly done on so many levels.

This book could only have been written by an American, but it should have been written by a Brit.

38. There's a Hippie on the Highway by James Hadley Chase

JHC delivers once again!  He was so prolific and quite easy to find at used bookstores, that I tend to not buy them when I see them.  I still I believe have two more of his on my on-deck shelf.  So demand is very low, but I could not resist this book with its title and incredible cover photo. I am pleased to report that both the title and the image happen in the book.

The title, though, is more of a framing device.  Harry Mitchell is a Vietnam vet hitching his way down Florida looking for summer work and some "sea and sun".  He gets picked up by a trucker who warns him about the hippies on the road, stoned youth who will ruthlessly set upon anybody who stops. I guess Chase wanted to do something set in Florida (perhaps keying into John D. MacDonald's popularity?) but this feels more like Mad Max.  Mitchell stops at an Italian roadside restaurant run by a really nice old Italian guy and his plump daughter and there confronts a gang of these hippies who chase another traveller inside.  Mitchell busts them up and their pursuer, Randy, tells Mitchell he is heading to a restaurant/ beach resort where he could get him a job as a lifeguard.

See already, I'm trying to write a summary of the plot, but JHC always has so much going on right from the get-go that it's hard to know which details to exclude.  Even before they get to the restaurant, they get picked up by a woman towing a "caravan" (another word that we don't say in North America; JHC is always good for a few of these) who then leaves them with a dead body (this is where the cover image comes from; his wig comes off when they bury him).  I'm already giving away spoilers.  I'll stop there and just say it gets even more interesting at the restaurant.

Among the cast of characters is an over-ambitious cop, the weirdly aggressive and ex-peterman (safe cracker) owner of the restaurant, his over-sexed daughter, the murdered man and his two associates both rough-edged women.  As always with JHC there is a lot of story.  The intricacies of the crime and its fallout are well thought out and coherent.  The characters are colourful and just slightly unreal, but not in a way that lessens the entertainment.

There are two layers of racism in the book.  On one level, the Black characters are portrayed stereotypically (although more for the 50s than the late 60s) and this is racist enough (like more than once, Joe the always friendly bartender goggles his eyes).  There is a second, worse level where the racism feels off and I think it's again because Chase has no actual experience with actual American Black people.  So you sense not only did he copy an ugly stereotype, he also sort of amped it up and made a point to emphasize it.

I am guessing this was perhaps also to reinforce the overall reactionary politics of the intro and outro (where the evil hippies return brutally).  Chase thought that certain Americans would want to read about the hippie scourge and the triumph of a hardworking vet and a little background racism fits right in.

So not without flaws, this book is nevertheless overall entertaining and well put together.

37. The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on the World's Most Powerful Mafia by Alex Perry

I can't remember where I became interested in this book.  It has been on my short non-fiction hunting list for years until I found it for $8 at Encore Books and Records. It is the journalistic account of three women who testified in the 2000's against the 'Ndrangheta Mafia who dominated Calabria (the toe of Italy) and controlled significant portions of international crime in drug smuggling, prostitution, extortion etc.  It is an astounding story worthy of a book like this.  The Ndrangheta at least according to this book, have such a vast criminal empire that it impacts major world financial markets.  The women who testified against them were incredibly courageous (two were brutally murdered) and whose actions triggered a significant culture change in Italy that then dealt a weakening blow to the Mafia.

The thing with these journalistic books, though, is that ultimately I just want the facts.  Because it's not an academic history, the writer has to make it into a "story."  For myself, these two demands make an end result that is not entirely satisfactory either for the facts or the story.  Perry's thesis is that women were ignored by the Mafia and the prosecutors going after them because of traditional Italian machismo and by finally paying attention to them, they were able to break the crime families.  These powerful and brutal families, rooted in the gangster history of poverty-stricken southern Italy, were not able to get past their misogynist culture and this is what undid them.  He does a good job arguing this thesis.  It's the narrative that I found a bit forced, as he hopes between the three women's stories (which were all connected but not that closely).  I was impatient to just find out what happened.  This isn't really a critique of the book, just that as I was reading it, I remember why these kinds of popular non-fiction books are not really my jam.

What this book did really help me with was understanding better the political geography of Italy and the Mafia.  I had heard of Calabria but didn't really get the deal with it.  I'm no expert but this book had excellent maps and Perry does a good job of giving an overview sense of the geography and culture of the region.  He glosses over it with a couple of sentences, but I also can understand how poor brigand families in remote mountain areas who met with revolutionaries could have evolved into a more sophisticated level of crime.  What is missing is how they could all just become so brutal and murderous, even (especially) to their own families.  Are they just this backward?  I would be interested in a more nuanced treatment of the culture of the region.  Still, humans.  We can be as shitty as possible.

The other thing that I still don't understand is how these local thugs who dominate a region can also be controlling major finance and law firms with international scope.  I guess this is the plot of the The Firm and it must be happening, but I'd like a clearer explanation with examples of where an archaic, country family can also be able to make decisions for billion-dollar firms.  How does that work?

36. System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries #7) by Martha Wells

Murderbot Diaries complete!  What a lot of fun.  As advertised, all the way to the end.  I was half-joking about my previous complaints that Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse were put together in the same book when Network Effect takes place between them, but it really is quite egregious.  System Collapse is more than just a follow-up to Network Effect. It's basically the second half of the story.  System Collapse is entirely dependent on Major plotlines and characters are all established in Network Effect.  It would be quite confusing and spoilery to read it first.  The publishers should at least have put a disclaimer between the two books.  

Network Effect is about rescuing ART's crew and figuring out the mystery of the Lost Colony.  Now that we know what is going on.  And there is a lot going on with factions of colonists, two layers of semi-failed terraforming/colonization, the evil corporation coming and trying to turn the colonists into indentured servants while the good people of ART's university crew (actually more of an advocacy group that secretly rescues and supports lost colonies) and Murderbot's Preservation friends try to save them.

The final act gets a bit confusing and drawn out and was somewhat of an anti-climax.  There were so many moving parts and while it was emotionally satisfying and there was some decent action, I was hoping for something on a grander scale.  An epic battle between secunits riding those crazy alien-contaminated ag-bots for instance would have worked.  I'm nitpicking and as this is an episodic type series, going against my own values.  Still very entertaining.  I'm excited to learn that there is a new novella at work for 2026 and two short stories online that I will read next.

Some thoughts on the Murderbot TV series

I've watched the first 6 episodes and it's not quite doing it for me.  It looks great and most of the actors are excellent (and look correct as well).  I have two issues.  First, while Skarsgard is fine, I hate to be super work but I really have to question the casting.  One of the genius touches of the books is that Wells never identifies Murderbot's gender nor really their appearance.  I realized at some point in that I was vaguely imposing my own masculine default image in my mind, but Murderbot could be any skin colour, gender or body type even.  Like why not a thick, short butch lesbian look?  Skarsgard is about as generic white male as you can get.  It just anchors the show back to the 20th century.  He is an executive producer so maybe a lot of the money came from his work, so I can accept him wanting to star if so, just not an ideal choice.

I can live with the boring safe choice but what really irks me is the obviousness of the writing.  The books are far from subtle but Wells always delivers her various themes with a light touch.  Murderbot is always sardonically commenting on the naivete of humans outside the Corporation Rim, but they are all quite competent (again, for humans) and don't ever flip out unecessarily and screw shit up.  In the TV series, Dr. Mensah has to keep having panic attacks and they even wrote in an entirely new character who would betray them just so Murderbot could blow her head off in front of them all so we could get an entirely new level of freak-out and mistrust by the wimpy liberals.  Yes, they are humanists and soft-hearted, but they are all experienced researchers who come from a refugee colony and have seen some  shit.  I can just see some producer going "we need to punch this up!"  It's just so stupid and obvious and manipulative rather than good characters reacting with complexity to interesting situations (which is what the book delivers so well on).

This concept that progressives are soft and don't understand reality is a long-used propaganda narrative by the right and given that the entire thesis of the Murderbot Diaries is against corporatism and the need for authoritarian control (in the symbol of Murderbot's rejected governor module), it is depressing to see Hollywood once again internalizing it making it a fundamental aspect of the show.  That's your coastal elites for you, always bending the knee to money and the power behind it.