48. Survival Margin by Charles Eric Maine

I believe this was given to me by a friend who knows I like PA. I thought it was American at first, but quickly realized this is a British author. It's actually not PA, but rather A or whatever the term is called for the sub-genre where the world is actually falling apart.  In this case it is a virus, particularly well-constructed with a bunch of science that sounded more or less legitimate for 1968.  Basically, the virus called AB causes a person to get a fever and then die with in a day or two after which their skin melts off.  This concept seemed disgusting and interesting at the beginning, but then gets totally abandoned and has no impact on any of the issues of dealing with the bodies or people dying at home, etc. I point this out now, because Survival Margin while overall being a a fun look at a world ripped in half by disease, also omits or is sloppy and inconsistent about a lot of fun details. 

The virus has a counterpart called BA that mirrors it but only gives you a slight fever for a day and then you become immune.  But a BA person is also a carrier of AB.  About half the people get AB and die and the other half live, so the premise is that basically half the world is going to die.  The powers that be in England decided to create a bunch of armed and sealed underground bunkers (another sloppy lack of detail because they never really explain how this airborne and waterborne virus wouldn't also get into the bunkers if not already there) to protect their top leaders.  This causes civil unrest that eventually becomes a full-on class divided civil war.  The big picture is fun.

The anchoring narrative is between two main characters: the charming and successful soulless journalist/TV producer Clive Brant and his principled disease scientist wife Pauline.  Right at the beginning, as they reunite after a long absence (she was in Japan fighting the early stages of the disease), he announces that he wants a divorce because he is now seeing the much younger daughter of an American media mogul who is giving him a plum job to run his new new studio.  I saw coming that their narrative was going to be some kind of morale on marriage and relationships throughout the book and it kind of bummed me out.  Felt like the author was working out his own boring relationship issues and getting in the way of the disease apocalypse we came for.  

The disease itself was interestingly close in many ways to Covid.  It's totally ramped up in speed and impact (basically going to kill half the humans on the planet in a few years), so the scale is different. It starts in Asia (though the scientists surmise because of a mutation of cells from nuclear testing, not jumping from animals). Many of the quarantine measures are similar and the working classes suffering and having to keep working while the privileged get to shelter were also thematically reminiscent.  Things here, though, go much further, with most of Souther England taken over by a semi-organized revolution of working class men led by a charismatic MP.  The second half has lots of violence and military combat and was quite action-packed and Clive and Pauline are of course re-united this time with him as an interrogator for the rebels and she as a captured establishment POW scientist.  He has opportunity to redeem his previously selfish character and does so in a way that was sort of tiresome and predictable.  This made for a lot of start and stop reading as I would get into the action and then get annoyed.

Another flaw is that there is a lot of telling rather than showing.  In the early stages of the spread of the disease, Maine just narrates how it is spreading in Asia with rumours of mass graves.  It made me remember the opening scenes of The Stand with the truck barrelling into the gas station and dude coming out vomiting blood.  Just so much more alive and visceral while giving you basically the same info.  Still, the telling is pretty cool and I have to credit Maine with some interesting speculation about what would happen with a disease that kills half the population.

I'm critical and would not encourage everyone to seek this book out, but it's overall not a bad read and I think worthy of inclusion in any disaster/disease subgenre reader to seek out.

 

47. The Big Bite by Charles Williams

Helpful hint for the hopelessly distracted. If you ever take a train trip, don't bring a laptop.  You will get a lot more reading done.

When I first started this, I became concerned that I had already read it.  The protagonist is a professional football player who got into a car accident that smashed his leg.  When he healed, he was mostly fine, but had lost the explosiveness that made him the player that he was.  A previous Charles Williams I had read, A Touch of Death, also starred an ex-football player who gets caught up in criminal shenanigans with a femme fatale.  However, after some checking, I confirmed that this was indeed a different novel.

He quits football and is a bit lost and down on his luck.  The accident was not his fault; a drunk driver sideswiped him and knocked him off the road. That driver had died in the accident and the insurance paid Halan 10k, but it wouldn’t cover his potential future salary loss as a pro player.  Things change when he gets a call from an insurance investigator named Purvis.  Something was fishy about the accident and he wants to pick Halan’s brains.  Purvis is a neat side character, an old skinny weak looking guy with sharp eyes who it turns out knows some kind of martial art (as Halan learns when he tries to brace him).  He also no longer works for the insurance company and is working a blackmail deal on the wife of the dead driver and wants to bring Halan in on it.  I’ll stop here with the narrative in case you read it.  You can well imagine that shit gets complicated.

Halan is smart and ruthless, almost without any feeling at all.  It’s weird to read a book and sympathize with the character and slowly realize that he is the asshole jock who is only looking out for himself.  You figure this out gradually, through the words of the widow, Julia Cannon, who is one of the better femme fatales I have encountered in a while.  She too is quite ruthless, but also philosophical, almost tragic in her outlook.

A lot goes on in this book, but there is also a lot more dialogue and life philosophy than you usually get with Williams.  It’s very dark and very fun.

 

46. To the Far Blue Mountains by Louis L'Amour

This is book 2 of the much-lauded Sacketts saga (here is the first one, Sackett's Land).  It was Paperback Warrior who first turned me on to it and so far my reading has been lukewarm with some highlights.  This book, the second chronologically in the family's story, but actually published fairly late.  This continues the story of the original patriarch, Barnabas Sackett, as he flees his life in England for Raleigh's Land in the New World.  It takes place at the end of the 16th century.

A big part of Barnabas's background and character is that he grew up in the Fens, a marshy region in eastern England which at least according to this book, was home to independent-minded people who did things like cut peat and smuggled.  It's a cool region, where the locals know the labrynthine waterways intimately and anyone else enters at their peril.

In Sackett's Land, Barnabas goes to the New World.  Here he returns and has to deal with a bunch of local drama culminating in the Queen believing he has found the long lost royal jewels of King James (he actually only found some roman coins that is what gave him the boost he needed to start his life of adventuring).  So there is a price on his head and the first third of the book is him sneaking around England, trying to get back to his ship with his bride-to-be Abigail and his compatriots in order to return to the New World, settle himself and make his way to the mountains.

He escapes and we get some fun ship trading and combat on the way to the Virginia coast.  The second half of the book, he and a new gang of adventurers, including a tough Welsh woman named Lila who is his lady's maiden and equally good with domestic skills as with sword and fists, make their way up river trying to find a place to settle.

The portrayal of the new world is odd.  L'Amour's rhetoric (through Barnabas' voice) is respectful of the Indigineous people and he recognizes that his arrival foretells a lot of change, much of which will be negative.  The individual Native characters are shown to be intelligent and human.  However, he also portrays them as in constant warfare and even a culture of weird militaristic excess.  This is all contextualized by Barnabas' idea that all men seek to expand and take over other regions, so the behaviour of the white colonists is basically the same as one group of Indigenous people taking over another one. So throughout the second half of the book, even though they are peacefully situated in the territory of the friendly Catawba, they are constantly coming under attack by other tribes.  Eventually this becomes like a rite of passage for these other tribes, to try and kill Barnabas.  He is seen as almost superhuman and a way to test their young warriors.  It feels like L'Amour was quite well-researched on the various tribes (in a similar way that he knew about the Fens and the many other historical details with which he stuffs the book), but wanted to also maintain the colonialist mythology of the west that the land had to be wrested from the warlike natives.

That being said, the portrayal of colonialism here is not as bad as I expected and I think deep down (at least from this book) that L'Amour was an appreciator of the diversity of the people of the world.  He has a passage almost a page long describing Barnabas' children's education, emphasizing how they learn from the natives, the Persian doctor, the Welsh woman, their mother, etc. so they have a rich mix of religions and folklore.  

The real problem of this book is the pacing and structure.  It jumps from years of narrative to a sudden fight scene. There is no real throughline, nor antagonist, nor conflict to hold it all together.  It's just Barnabas wanting to go to the mountains and a lot of stuff happening to him.  In the last quarter, he is suddenly old and has like 4 sons and one daughter and his wife takes two of the kids back to England forever (she's not mad, just thinks the girl needs to be educated back home and the son is smart).  We get an almost throwaway defeat of an earlier sort-of nemesis and then a final attack by the Natives which kills him followed by a coda of how they respected him.  

I wasn't going to continue with the series, so I was happy to read this guy's ranking who puts this one way down at the bottom.  I speculate that maybe L'Amour was much more interested in the history than in putting together a good story.  I'll keep my eye out for the third and pick it up if I find it cheaply. 

 

45. The General by Alan Silittoe

I picked this one up at the same garage sale where I got the Maracot Deep.  I'm not a huge fan of the British Angry Young Men, but they can write and I thought this might be interesting.  I suspected it would be one of those parable books where ideas of humanity and politics are explored in a semi-surrealistic setting, but hoped there might be enough of a real story to keep me interested.

The book begins with an orchestra being sent via train to the front lines of an unnamed 20th century war to both bring morale to the troops and to demonstrate to the enemy how superior their own culture is.  They tried to object but were overruled by the government and the conductor, who is the de facto leader and one of the two main protagonists, thinks to himself that in war everybody is a soldier who has to obey orders.  The beginning is pretty wild as the train runs through a crazier and crazier battle, while the orchestra cowers in the back, unable to act or even decide if they are supposed to be this far forward in the front.

An enemy soldier on a horse rides down the train and they are taken prisoner.  It is here we meet the general, a loyal soldier, strict disciplinarian and an elite tactician. He knows she should shoot the orchestra immediately, as they serve no purpose other than a drain on resources.  However, he hesitates, not sure why until he realizes that he does want to hear them play.

So the rest of the book is his internal struggle on whether to go against his loyalty and training and the orders of high command (confirmed via signal) or give in to his desire to hear the music and perhaps something else.  This is interspersed with the orchestra themselves contemplating their future.  

It's an interesting read, going beyond the simple "war is stupidity" and looks at our motivations as political beings.  This kind of thing isn't really my bag, but it's short and Sillitoe's descriptions of the landscape of war are grim and effective.  The metaphor of the train with the orchestra riding right into the battle and not even bothering to go to the engine or pull the emergency cord is all too parallel to the American populace right now.

44. Barking Dogs by Terence M. Green

My friend both discovered the existence of this book and then found it himself.  He gave it or lent it to me (need to clarify that).  I was very psyched at every step.  I mean who doesn't want to read about a rogue cop in future crime spree Toronto?  Unfortunately, the book itself is decidedly mediocre, so much so that I am not sure if it will make it to my bookshelf, despite its interest as a physical and cultural artifact.    

The protagonist is Mitch Helwig (🤔), a cop who has recently lost his partner.  He's on  the edge, takes 10k, the bulk of he and his wife's nest egg, and buys a Barking Dog, an infallible portable lie-detector.  He then stumbles on one of these new laser pistols on a perp he took down (cops still only carrying .38s because budget cuts), returns to the same shop and buys a super awesome bullet proof vest that is super light and blocks even lasers for a time.  He's basically armouring up and then goes over the edge and starts lasering perps.

This is a weird book.  It has several indicators of 80s crime hysteria, including the streets running wild with rapists, dope peddlers, you name it and nobody doing anything to stop it because the bigwigs are all in on it. His wife has an inner  monologue asking pre-internet stupid internet rhetorical questions like why don't we have capital punishment when everybody wants it and why not build work camps in the North and shoot any escapees?  These parts feel like half-hearted cookie cutter Dirty Harry or Death Wish  (the movies), but they stop there.  We don't even get the entertainment of the over the top right-wing crime hysteria.  

The other major thread is a somewhat thoughtful and well-written yet ultimately banal exploration of Helwig's wife Elaine contemplating and then having an affair, as Helwig spends his nights patrolling Toronto.  It feels like this part of the book is the actual real story the author wanted to right.  I almost feel like Terence wrote all the cop vigilante stuff and handed it to his wife to do the romance, but that she is actually the superior writer.

Helwig is supposedly driven by vengeance for his partner's death.  There is no detecting, he just strikes out randomly and as he closes in on a big-time mob boss running a huge industrial district bringing in guns, drugs and kidnapping little girls for snuff films and then harvesting their organs (yes, this is in the book).  Interspersed with Helwig in the present and his wife's storylines, we also get flashbacks of Mitch with his partner Mario whom he seems to love more than his wife.  There is a lot of badly written jocular back and forth between the partners (some painful puns and dumb safely racist humour), culminating like it is some big climax with Mario (with a new baby boy, of course) getting shot at the donut shop (also yes in the book).

The climax is Helwig taking out the warehouse and then the boss, but he never discovers who actually killed his partner.  He comes home and realizes that value of his family and his wife realizes she made a mistake and they I guess live happily ever after.

Very odd tone, as if a Canadian was hired to write an Executioner novel and also thought he might have a shot at the Governor General's Award.  On the plus side, the gear was cool and the descriptions of the laser wounds were gruesome and effective.

43. Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White

I have the good fortune of being at the side of a lovely lake as I write this and as I read the second half of Some Must Watch.  A very enjoyable book made infinitely more enjoyable by being able to read it in such a lovely spot.  A red-tailed hawk chased some prey (I only caught a white blue) through the trees and then landed for just about a second on a stair post near me before taking off.  I caught a very good look at him and he looked miffed at missing his prey.

I can't remember where I found this book and I have never heard of Ethel Lina White before it.  There certainly were quite a few best-selling women mystery authors in the 20th century who were household names (or close) and have now all but disappeared.  I would love to read an essay on the phenomenon of second-tier woman mystery writers from the thirties and fourties.  Did they know each other?  Was it a bit of a scene?

Some Must Watch centers on young Helen, the orphaned and poor servant woman, who  came from some class before her parents died and a mixed education after.  She has spirit and imagination and a new posting at a Victorian home quite far from town.  She starts this job right after another young woman (the fifth) is murdered in the area, this one's body being found not 5 miles from where she is working.

It's a pretty classic gothic horror/parlour mystery, with a broken up family, the Warrens led by a nasty matriarch confined to her bed, her stepson The Professor and his sister (and son whose hot wife has some very hot pants).  There is a student (the one the wife is hot after) and Mr. and Mrs. Oates (handyman and cook) and finally Nurse Baker, the bitter nurse who looks like a man just sent from the agency.

There is a stormy night and gale keeps everyone inside as well as orders from the cute visiting Dr. with the doors and windows locked.  Slowly, people keep dropping out one by one and Helen realizes or imagines that a noose is tightening around her and the killer approaching.

White structures the novel so not only do you not know who the murderer is, but you also doubt there even is one (at least in that house) until almost the last page.  It was driving me nuts!  At one point, I had so few pages left and so many questions that I had a mild panic that this was only the first book and there was a sequel'!  Not to worry, all is revealed masterfully (prompting me to go back and re-read several sections at the beginning).  I wouldn't call Some Must Watch a masterpiece, but it is definitely among the better crafted and entertaining mysteries of this genre.

I didn't cotton onto it consciously (hello male privilege!), this great blog post (with spoilers so only read after you've read the book) made me appreciate how most of the primary characters are women and the longest dialogues are between women.  White describes a very feminine world, where all the dangers are those that impact the female characters (serial killer, unrequited love, lazy men, dangerous men).  Quite an interesting book in that light, which may also point to its success and then quiet erasure from literary appreciation.

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