20. Wild Talent by Wilson Tucker

Wild Talent has possibly been on my hunting list for about the longest of any book.  I've found so many other Wilson Tuckers in used book stores around the continent, but not this one until I stumbled upon it at Moe's in Berkeley.  Very satisfying!  I was all excited and told the jaded guy at the counter who could not care less.  The reason I was looking for this book is because of the tabletop RPG Wild Talents.  I'm not a big fan of the ESP genre per se, but it was an interesting use of the One-Roll Engine which was an innovative RPG system I was quite into back in the day.  Somewhere in the book, if I remember correctly, the authors mention that Tucker's Wild Talent was a big inspiration and that set me off looking for the book.  They may have also claimed that it was the first or very early example of the ESP powers sub-genre in fiction.  Not sure about that.

 The story takes place in the early '50s.  The protagonist is Paul Breen and he is living in a gilded cage, spending his last few moments with a woman he loves before somebody is coming to kill him.  Just as he is about to be shot, he turns the gun around.  We don't know what happens, because the book then flashes back to Paul's early life.  We learn of him as a precocious and independent 13 year old boy who saves up enough money to take a trip to Chicago and the World's Fair and from there we start to see inklings of his ability to read other humans.  As the book progresses, we follow him in the army, where his power is discovered.  He is then made part of a super secret government operation, run by a guy he dislikes named Slater.  He is used to scan other operatives who are sent out around the world to spy, not knowing that he is reading their minds from afar.  As the operation progresses, anybody close to Paul is slowly removed.  He plots his revenge and escape.

Wild Talent is cleanly written and a page-turner.  I finished it easily and wanted to find out what happens.  But it's not a super exciting book; it's actually kind of down and melancholy. The theme is that because of his powers, Paul is not human, he is superior and that superiority makes him an enemy to humans.  There isn't a lot of action, mainly Paul interacting with the people in his limited world.  There are some cool details and his powers are thought through in an interesting way.  I would like a sequel with more telepathic ass-kicking.

 

19. The Cuckoo Line Affair by Andrew Garve

I found three Andrew Garve's at Moe's after they were recommended by an aligned soul on the internet.  The cover designs would have been enough for me to at least take one.  The Cuckoo Line Affair really threw me and I think part of my pleasure was the mixed expectations as by the time I got to the end, it evolved from real curious excitement to more of a standard semi-cozy investigative mystery.  

After reading Boomerang, I assumed that Garve's work was in the 20th century British men's adventure sub-genre, à la the great Desmond Bagley (and his wife Joan Margaret Brown).  The Cuckoo Line Affair begins with a static description of an eccentric old man Andrew Latimer, briefly a member of parliament who lives in a cottage out in the country, putters around in his garden, plays with the local neighbour child, has a bunch of civic responsibilities and makes a small amount of money writing political gossip columns for various newspapers.  He has two sons who are making their way in the world and an old maid daughter who lives with him and takes care of him.  We are well into the second chapter, describing one of his rare trips by train to London and I am trying to figure out how any of this, as pleasant as it was to read about, was going to evolve into a challenging conflict with elements and/or man in some interesting foreign location.  

Well at the end of the second chapter things do get weird!  He is alone in a carriage with a young woman on the old and rickety Cuckoo Line. She gets some coal in her eye and asks him to help her get it out.  The next thing he knows, they are kissing!  So we do get a real plot, but it isn't an adventure story as much as an investigation.  Latimer is accused of assaulting the woman and finds himself in real trouble.  His two sons, one who is a lawyer and the other a crime fiction writer, have to figure out how to defend him and also figure out what actually happened.  There is a lot of neat stuff around these muddy inlets in Essex (I think?!) and puzzling out the complexities of the crime kept me engaged and interested.  The ending, however, had an early climax and then somewhat of an anti-climax, where everything depended on getting a certain piece of evidence and convincing the prosecuting attorney of something.  It was all very pleasant and I wish I had a nice english cottage with a garden and marshy lands to poke around in.  I also was happy for the Latimer family and appreciated that Hugh, the investigating son, brought his fiancée Cynthia into it and she was actually responsible for several of the crucial clues.  

18. American Falls the collected short stories by Barry Gifford

I'm a big fan of Barry Gifford's life work, especially for his resurrection of the pulp/noir genres with Black Lizard Press and very specifically his book The Devil Thumbs a Ride.  Other than watching Wild at Heart (which I did not love for various reasons), I have never consumed any of his fiction.  I found this one at the interesting Vancouver used bookstore The Paper Hound and I suspect I bought it from the really nice and inviting way the books were laid out.  It is not my usual custom to pick up literary fiction short story anthologies!  I feared I would never finish it, but once I started, I found the stories quite readable and got through it pretty quickly and quite enjoyed it.

Interestingly, there is really only one story here, the final novella, that I would have recognized as coming from Barry Gifford.  I had expected lots of American neo-noir and interesting lowlifes, but actually many of the stories were more "high culture", including ones imagining a trip to North Africa by some famous artists (whose names I have forgotten).  Apologies for lack of a more thorough review, but I am writing this weeks after having read it and have already put the book into free library circulation.  None of the stories blew my mind and some were too slight, but I did enjoy reading it and learning that Gifford's fiction covers a wide range of styles and subjects.