16. A Gift upon the Shore by M.K. Wren

This is what I would call C-PA, Chick Post-Apocalyptic.  It's a refreshing approach after the last two PA books I read, tainted with loser nerd fake manliness.  I'd been looking for it for a while (its recommendation lost to the mists of time) and found it in excellent possibly unread condition, but with too many price tags, at Dark Carnival.  The apocalypse is a general end of times collapse (economic and social collapse, pandemic followed by nuclear exchange).  It takes place mostly on the Oregon coast where two women manage to survive.  It has an excellent and detailed look at that survival but the real conflict is between rationality and religious fundamentalism.

The book initially takes place about 40 years after the nuclear war.  A very small "family" of people live on a small farm on the Oregon coast, trying to maintain and reproduce.  Mary Hope is the matriarch and we don't know much about her at first except that she is the last one who lived through the actual collapse.  Her one goal is to educate the children, but this is starting to be threatened by this nasty Christian extremist bitch Miriam, who is trying to oppose stricter and stricter religion on the rest of them, including stopping them from learning the blasphemy of an actual education.  Mary is trying to teach the oldest boy, Stephen, and the one she deems to have the most potential to be a future teacher himself, while Miriam is trying more and more aggressively to stop it.

This outer plot is a framing device to tell us Mary's story (as she tells Stephen), how she first came to the farm and met her own mentor, Rachel.  This part of the story is really well done.  It begins with her on a bus from Portland to the Oregon coast where she has decided to take over the house left to her by her aunt.  Shit goes south right away as a gang of Rovers attack their bus.  The perspective is from Mary and her emphasis on the human relations (thus, C-PA) so we don't get any kind of overview of everything that goes down, but the parts we learn are dark and realistic. Eventually, after barely surving a nuclear winter (which was only one year; seemed short) we end up with just Rachel and Mary, doing their best to survive. More importantly, Rachel wants to keep a legacy of human intellect.  She has a collection of books that they work on encasing in wax, wrapping in tinfoil and then putting into a vault.  Their lives are changed when a starving young man shows up on their beach.  He is a basically decent guy but came from an inland religious commune of extreme Christians who took set up before things went really bad.  He's been sent to find other people, especially women who could reproduce.  

He is in their world so they are able to confront his dogmatic mind in a relatively gentle way.  The real trouble is to come when Mary goes back with him to his community. The leader is a doctor who is basically a cult leader.  He is not inherently abusive, as long as everybody toes his extreme line, which includes things like not leaving the compound nor questioning the bible (the only book they are allowed to read).

I very much recognize the themes set up in this book. I grew up on the west coast in the '80s when these extremists were a thing.  The Satanic Panic originated in Victoria, B.C. and we had an attempt to shut down an after school D&D program that turned into a local controversy.  Evil Christians are often the antagonists in Stephen King books.  They are just the worst.  Sadly, they are in an ascendancy of power currently in the United States and threatening here in Canada.  This book was triggering for me, I kind of wanted to blame the book but other than a couple points where Mary tries to argue logically with the Doctor (which felt like a bit of unnecessary didacticism by the author; we know now logic does not work with these assholes), it's just because it's a disturbingly realistic portrayal of how ignorance can continue to take root even when society is starting over again.

The end of the book surprised me as it climaxed with a pretty tense and exciting suspense/action roll-out that I hadn't expected and wrapped up quite nicely.  I wouldn't go so far as to call A Gift upon the Shore a PA classic, but it is definitely an important work in the canon of the sub-genre.  I'm glad I read it.

15. The Body on the Bench by Dorothy B. Hughes

Also known as The Davidian Report, this original paperback has held up quite well.  The book opens well, with a vague protagonist, Steve Wintress, whose flight to LA is delayed by fog.  He is clearly suspicious and careful, you can't tell if he is paranoid or if this is just the Cold War early '50s.  He is on a mission to meet a man who will give him info about another man, Davidian, who has a report.  The delay and subsequent introduction to a too friendly Federal man (named Haig Armour), a shy young girl and a keen soldier named Reuben (a rube, get it).  When he does finally get to the airport,  he finds his friend and the man who was supposed to meet him, dead outside at a picnic bench.  Now he has to find the missing man with the report himself.

I was mildly annoyed reading this book.  It takes place in the universe of I was a Communist for the FBI, a universe I can never be sure really ever existed or was mostly made up by McCarthy and keen fiction writers.  The Commies are everywhere, but especially running used bookstores and sidewalk popcorn machines.  And once you join them, the party is ruthless and there is no escape.  It's a nice set up for a hard-boiled protagonist, as there is no escape, but I'm not entirely convinced.  The other annoying thing is that Hughes doesn't let the reader know what the protagonist is doing and who he actually is until well into the story.  I guess we are just to assume that the Commies want something and the FBI wants to stop them and that is sufficient for the 1952 reader.

The locations and the writing is quite strong.  The characters are also substantive so it's a mostly enjoyable read. I just couldn't get deeply connected to the actual quest, and less so to the human connections around it.  Steve is slowly revealed to be the grizzled hero that one could like, but it's too little too late.  This is later in Hughes' career and she is much more in command of her material than her earlier works, but it still feels like she is searching for something that she can't quite find.

14. Get Carter by Ted Lewis

Another classic find that I've been reluctant to read is now behind me.  I had been saving this one first because it took me so long to hunt down and because it is in quite delicate shape.  My new rule of simply reading my on-deck shelf from right to left has helped break through the hesitation of indecision and it has been rewarding.

I'm not sure how well this book was received when it came out, but I see why they wanted to make a movie of it.  It's hard, probably impossible, to read this book without thinking of the movie.  Certainly, Jack Carter in the book is 100% Michael Caine in my mind.  I think this is both a testament to the character himself, who almost seems to have been written with Caine in mind and to Caine's performance, which while very Caine-esque still captures the nuance of the Carter character:  both a step above his adversaries because he is just such a ruthless badass but also having the advantage of being hometown boy and London-trained.  So unlike some other books, having the character's image in mind already because of the movie was not a bad thing.  The movie, though, did trigger some distracting comparisons when it came to the plot.  

The first half is pretty much the same, with Jack coming back to his hometown of Newcastle (though I don't think the town is ever actually named) to find out why his brother, normally a very careful and temperate man, would have gotten blindingly and obviously drunk and driven off a cliff.  It's a great set-up, because Carter, while not in a management position is clearly extremely good at his gangster job and important to his London bosses, who he suspects may be involved as they discourage his trip home.  He is a professional and plays it very carefully arriving in town, while also knowing the town very well.  There are many classic crime themes at play here:  the criminal returning to his roots and seeing how pathetic it all was, the slick urban mob versus the regional gangsters and of course the lone wolf badass who is a total bastard but you can't help rooting for him.  It all takes place in a rich portrayal of the commingling of English class dynamics and the grittiness of 70s British Crime.  Oh man, the depiction of the pornography is just so pathetic and deeply disturbing.

I really loved the first 3/4 of the book, but found it ended somewhat anti-climactically.  It felt a bit forced (not unlike Parker's originally intended ending in The Hunter, before Westlake's editor made one of the greatest edits of all time) and not in line with the tone of the rest of the book.  I actually think the movie ending makes more sense.  Still a fantastic book.

 

13. Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

Due to my lack of planning, I was not prepared for Black History Month, so it has been a fail for me on the reading front.  I've made note of a few books by Black authors I will read in the future, but right now I am staying committed to reducing the on-deck shelf.  Instead, February has somehow become Canadian Literature Month, as I end the month with my third Canadian classic or near-classic.  It was my mother who first told me about Jalna. She just sort of mentioned it out of the blue several years ago as a series of books that everyone was reading.  I've been looking for them for several years and finally found this first one in Vancouver.  

This is what you call a novel.  It's about an eccentric family in the Niagara Valley in 1926 and their various domestic dramas.  The oldest, Grandmother, settled here with her Colonel husband from India via London.  The name Jalna is the name of the fort where they met and married.  She is now left with two brothers, 5 grandsons and a granddaughter, each one a unique character.  They all live together in this aged, stuffed manor and running the farmlands around them.  They are a kind of local, Canadian gentry.

It's a thick book, like the decor in their house, but it moves fast.  Each character is so richly portrayed and interesting in their own right that you want to learn about each of them.  It's written in a florid, descriptive style that is still somehow quite breezy. There are many storylines that all intertwine but probably the major catalyst is the poet son coming back from New York with a young, educated bride.  Her background is much more protestant and calm, and she is both overwhelmed and fascinated by this loud, aggressive family who fight and kiss in equal measure.

My mother did not exaggerate.  Jalna was a huge success and lead to 15 other books, selling over 11 million copies in multiple languages.  It's odd that it isn't better known. It is subtly proudly Canadian.

 

12. Morgan's Castle by Jan Hilliard

Well looks like I've hit the big time.  Those who follow me closely will have spotted Brian Busby's generous offer to send me the latest Ricochet Books release in the comments section of my review of The Three Roads.  Busby has his own excellent blog and is also the editor at Ricochet Books is an imprint of local publisher Véhicule Press and they do great work, finding and re-releasing in lovely paperback (proper paperback size too, none of this trade paperbacks nonsense) a range of Canadian genre novels, mostly excellent crime and pulp fiction from the mid-20th century.  Go check out their catalogue, it's amazing.  Well he very kindly followed up on his offer and sent me an efficient little package containing this lovely paperback reprint of a lost Canadian semi-classic.  It was surprisingly thinner than I had expected and I jumped right in.

I find it difficult to characterize this novel.  As a rule, I don't read introductions or afterwords (and even try to avoid blurbs) of a book until I have finished the book itself.  The idea is to avoid assumptions and just approach it as directly as possible.  I realize that even with those rules, I had several unexamined assumptions in my head and they were wrestling with the text itself in my brain as I read it.  This is particularly the case with the "gothic" novel.  The famous cover conceit of women with great hair fleeing a castle/manor/cabin with one light on has overshadowed the actual genre itself, one that was already problematic to define.  Morgan's Castle is certainly gothic adjacent in its setup, but the tone and unfolding of events are very different, almost like a dark comic social satire of gentile Canadians behaving badly.

The story takes place in rural Ontario in the early 60s and involves a teenage girl, Laura Dean and her widower, artist father. They live in survivable genteel poverty with better off family members not too far away.  Her aunt Amy as well as her adult brothers are all concerned about her future in about the most selfish way possible:  they want to ensure that she is quickly married off so none of them have to deal with the responsibility of supporting her.  They seem awful right from the get-go.  At first I thought it would be a kind of father and daughter against the world set-up, but her father is portrayed just as negatively.  He is a completely self-obsessed, indulgent and shameless dilettante who only seems to care about his daughter's future in how it will impact him (negatively if she leaves him alone but positively if she can marry into money from which he could benefit).  I'm seething against all these people just a few chapters in!  Laura herself is somewhat of a cypher, a sweet and pleasant girl but still very young and inexperienced.  Though the book is mostly from her perspective, the reader never really gets any sense of her character.

Her aunt Amy is very close friends with Charlotte Morgan, who is the matriarch by marriage of Hilltop House, a mansion overlooking the winery that brought her dead husband their wealth.  Charlotte's lone son Robert's wife was recently made a widower himself (by either an accidental or suicidal ingestion of arsenic sprinkled on berries) and she has designs on making Laura his new bride.  So she invites Laura to spend the summer with her at Hilltop House (or Morgan's Castle as the townsfolk call it).  We get this great set-up where the dad also comes, though very much unwelcome, and refuses to leave ostensibly to watch over his daughter but really because he gets luxurious room and board.

This is where my expectations became confounded.  There is no suspense in Morgan's Castle.  Right away, you hate Charlotte and Amy for their conspiring to manipulate this maiden's future.  Laura is sort of isolated the way you might expect in a gothic thriller but she really isn't as there are so many people around all the time.  It also becomes pretty obvious that the various deaths around Hilltop House could only be the responsibility of one person and the omniscient text all but confirms this.  There is some tension with timing at the end but ultimately this more like a social drama with a psychopath in the middle of it all.

Busby's introduction, which is mostly about the author's life and work than a dissection of the book itself, describes at is having the richest vein of black humour of all her books.  I think perhaps I should have read the introduction first (there are no spoilers, which I appreciate, as this is so often not the case), as I might have picked up on that. I wonder if this book is inspired by a savage critique of uncaring families, perhaps of one that Hilliard (actually Hilda Kay Grant) herself had experienced?  Every single character, except the young and a few side characters (whose best trait may be cluelessness or deliberate obtuseness to avoid social discomfort) are utterly self-serving.  The meagre reputation of small-town Ontario is the ultimate priority.  This rings true to my own upbringing in small town Vancouver Island.

I'm not sure I loved this book.  It was enjoyable and very well-written.  The pastoral Niagara Valley is richly portrayed and the people feel very real (and really awful).  As I said, I was a bit muddled with expectations as I was reading it but I think ultimately the heroine is too vacuous a character for me to have cared for her and the denouement does nothing to fill this out.  There was no satisfying punishment for the bad done, which is not a critique of the book (perhaps some might find this a superior conclusion), but also not to my simple tastes.  You should buy this book to judge for yourself at is nonetheless an important work in Canadian literature.

11. Jackrabbit Parole by Stephen Reid

This is another one of my white whales. I had been looking for this book for years!  I finally found it in a used bookstore in the touristy section of Stephen's Point in Richmond, B.C. (really quite lovely out there if you ever get a chance to go).  I really don't understand why this book is so hard to find. According to the afterword, it was actually quite a bestseller when it came out.  Stephen Reid was certainly very well known at the time.  My family had just left Vancouver Island when he first got arrested and I later heard quite a lot about him, but didn't actually return to Canada until after his much-publicized second arrest.  In any case, his story was long on my radar and I'd been scouring used bookstores across Canada for years.

After I finished Jackrabbit Parole, I went back to the internet to square off the reality of his life versus this narrative.  It's interesting, the wikipedia article feels too short and appears to have some inaccuracies, likewise for his wife, Susan Musgrave.  She is probably an even bigger literary figure in Canada (though both their lives are so entwined it's sort of hard to compare).  It was really sad reading.  He geniunely seems like a decent guy and his ending was quite tragic.  For those of you who don't know, he was part of a celebrated gang of bank heisters called "The Stopwatch Gang" because he wore one around his neck and got in and out within minutes.  He finally got arrested in the 80s and started writing in prison.  The manuscript for Jackrabbit Parole came across Susan Musgrave's desk, who fell in love with both the book and the author.  

He got out eventually and they lived together on the Island, had kids and he started a solid career as a writer and teacher.  Then in 1999 to everyone's shock, he got busted in a shootout following a botched heist in Victoria.  The generally accepted explanation is that his addictions caught up with him again, but I wonder if there also isn't something about the bank robbing life that is hard to let go.  He ended up doing another 15 years in prison, which must have been just brutal at his age.  He eventually got day parole and died a few years later.  What was really heartbreaking is that their daughter who was 10 when he went up, ended up herself an addict and died in her early thirties from a fentanyl overdose.  You really feel for Susan Musgrave, who stuck by both of them to the end.  Must have been so exhausting and stressful.

The book itself is really good.  It was worth the wait.  At first, I found it overwritten, with way too many metaphors and descriptions of quotidian things.  It is a first book, for sure, but as you get involved in the narrative, the style starts to flow into you and the end result is a rich picture of a certain time and place.  The attention to things like using a car radio or making coffee actually would be probably quite interesting and valuable to a younger reader of today to whom all those things would be indicators of a very different time.  

He depicts a criminal milieu that was very specific to Canada in the 80s and still lingers with us today.  The first part takes place in the States, but it still feels very Canadian.  Bobby Andersen (the protagonist and avatar for Reid) is as classic a Canadian expat as is the Canadian doctor who moves to Santa Barbara except he is robbing banks.  I was a safe little middle class kid on Vancouver Island, but the world of real bad guys was always lurking for some reason (one of my classmates older brother was tied up in a bed in a cabin and burnt to death, rumoured to have been done by the Hells Angels).  I don't know what the hell it is, but there are some hard dudes in the hinterlands of this country, despite the relatively good economy and half-decent welfare system.  Jackrabbit Parole gives you a bunch of them, especially the Quebecers and a privileged peek into their world.   

The heists are excellent, really detailed and absolutely capture that 80s aesthetic.  There is a great moment near the end at the final robbery when he is exhausted and stressed after months of being on the run and just before they are heading out for the hit, everything suddenly clicks into place for him.  You realize that he is wired to do this and it is what gets him to his zone, despite everything else that may not be working in his life. It helped me to understand why Reid would have gone back to robbing banks after decades as a successful poetry professor. 

10. Epidemic! by Frank G. Slaughter

I had to pick this one up as it is about a disease catastrophe. I had some slight reservations that I couldn't put my finger on. They were revealed as I read the book. I was hoping and the trade dress and slim paperback somewhat suggested that I would be getting an apocalyptic disease story.  I mean it's about the Black Plague hitting New York in the beginning of that city's roughest period, coinciding with major garbage strikes, the residential arson campaigns by landlords against the poor, crime wave, etc.  Well I know now that Frank Slaughter was a true best-seller middle-brow writer, the kind who walks that thin and often somewhat boring line between entertainment and literature.  It's oddly serious and though a lot of shit goes down, it all feels distant and never really loses control.  It was also much longer than it physically looked.  Took me a while to read.

The beginning is promising. A ship comes in to the NY harbour with a sketchy captain and a drunken first mate.  They took on cheap labour and flea-infested rats in Cameroon, which was having a revolution so there was no news on the outbreak of the plague there.  Slaughter goes into some detail on how the disease actually works, which was cool.  The captain is already sick but his priority is to get to his hot to trot waitress, Gladys.  The rats, of course, are just super psyched to get off the boat to the piles of rotting garbage.  I always love the narrative of the vector spread in disease books.  It's an opportunity for the author to really have some fun with little vignettes, neat characters and locations.  I haven't read it since I was young, but currently the opening of Stephen King's The Stand is a truly memorable example.  Here it is kind of fun, we get Gladys and the captain, whose tryst goes terribly awry (he dies on her couch and she throws him out her window!), a homeless alcoholic who was sleeping near the docks with whom the rats cuddled and a few other threads from there.

Unfortunately, the fun stops here as we transition to the main narrative, which centers around a hospital in Manhattan next to a promising new housing development.  The main character is a world-class immunologist who is on temporary leave from the U.N.  He is absolutely the perfect person to be in charge of fighting the epidemic.  He is in a love triangle with his close friend, surgeon Bob, and the nurse Eve.  There is also a conflict with the irascible tycoon who is paying for the housing development and a police inspector trying to hunt out the Commie (though this word is never used) infiltrator arming the youth gangs who are vandalizing the project.

As you can see, there is a lot going on.  Unfortunately, the bulk of the narrative is either very detailed surgical procedures (Slaughter was a doctor and this was his area of expertise, so they seem accurate) or board rooms of men discussing their plans to fight the epidemic.  I think for some people, this kind of book is quite engaging.  It's a thought experiment.  What would you do if you were in charge of NYC in 1961 and the black plague arrived?  Two comparisons came to mind when I was reading this book.  It's like one of those 60s action movies with the cool poster but when you watch it it's mainly men sitting in unpleasant rooms talking or a tabletop RPG session where the players spend the entire time planning what they are going to do.  I speak only for myself, but I need to get to the action.

From a sociopolitical perspective, this book is an odd mix.  It has currents of conservative thought with its portrayal of commie-driven otherwise mindless bad people.  And yet also strongly argues for public medicine and communal, socially-cohesive policy when it comes to things like vaccines and quarantines.  I don't think Slaughter was particularly political and did not think too deeply about politics, but it is an interesting snapshot of a very different worldview about disease management than we see today.  Oh yes, I also have to give Frank points for his portrayal of Eve, the nurse.  She is actually quite tough and the big tension between her and the immunologist is that he keeps trying to protect her and cut her out of dangerous situations and she is just like fuck that and actually ends up saving the day with straight-up physical action against the commie.  Spoiler alert but this is the reason she chooses to go with the more down-to-earth surgeon, because he will not keep her in a glass cage.

 

9. Callan by James Mitchell

I bought this book at a serendipitous stop at small BMV books on Yonge and Eglington on a cold winter walk with some friends in Toronto.  It was mostly popular type resell books (though some good finds in that category as well as I got my daughter some Stephen Kings), but upstairs they had one vintage section that was actually quite a treasure trove of nice old paperbacks.  I chose Callan purely on it being a Corgi and a young Edward Woodward on the cover.

Turns out the background to this book is somewhat complex.  Initially, Callan was a TV series, written by James Mitchell, with an initial pilot that was the story of this book.  The series was a success, going from black & white to colour.  Mitchell then wrote this book.  It was initially titled Red File for Callan, then A Magnum for Schneider and finally this one, just Callan.  They later made a longer theatrical version of it as well.

If I wasn't drowning in content, I would start watching the Callan series.  People speak very highly of it.  It is missing 10 episodes but there are still like 40 more out there and they are supposed to be an excellent piece of tough spy fiction.

Callan seems to be written as a response to Bond.  This is grimy English kitchen sink espionage.  Callan is an ex-locksmith, ex-commando who became really good at killing people in Burma, got promoted twice and demoted twice and then when demobbed got busted stealing from a grocers because he was bored.  At the beginning of Callan, he is working as an accountant in a messy office with a bizarrely abusive boss.  He has to work there because it is the only place the special office where he used to work carrying out assassinations will allow him to work.  He wears crappy suits and old shoes excessively polished. His apartment is tiny and a mess.  He loves playing wargames with miniatures. 

At first, I thought the book was going in another more Pendleton-y direction because it starts right out with his ability to kill and there is one goofy part where he uses "akimi" or some shit that is supposed to be a killing karate blow.  As you can see from above, it does not go in that direction. Everything is quite squalid and depressing.  His boss has a shitty office in some old building.  His only "friend" is a quavering ex-con pickpocket named Lonely who stinks when he gets scared which is pretty much all the time.

The job here and his chance to get back to the agency is to kill a man named Schneider, who has his own much more succesful import export operation and we later learn is also smuggling weapons to commie insurgents to Indonesia, insurgents who are killing British soldiers.  Callan is supposed to follow orders and not ask any questions, but the core of this book and the reason he is no longer working as an assassin despite his skill is that he has somewhat of a conscience and struggles with guilt over his last kill.  The real antagonist in Callan is his boss.

It moves a little slow in parts and is overall quite dark.  However, the action when it happens is economical and intense.  I grew to like Callan and wanted him to get out of his predicament.  I won't seek these out, but would not say no to another one at a time when my on-deck shelf is not overflowing. 

 

8. Danger at Bravo Key by Ronald Johnston

Pegasus and Pendragon used book stores in the Bay Area are great.  However, their buying strategy which probably is what works best for them, does not really consider me part of their purchasing demo.  They have a decent-sized and well-organized mystery section, but it's almost all trade paperbacks in such good condition that one has tiny doubts that one is in the used section.  Very rare to find any good old paperbacks other than major classics like Agatha Christie.  I did find this one and it had many elements that appealed to me:  cool active cover, the Caribbean, post-WWII and thin. It was $8 (another sign that they don't cater to me) but I am always happy to support any used book store when I can.  Turns out to have been a good choice, my instincts once again proving true.

Joe Lennard is a successful journalist taking an absolutely sick vacation on a little uninhabited Island off the Bahamas.  His big break came in interviewing Castro while he was still in the hills, so he knows a bit about the region and recent Cuban history.  He has hired a local guide, Moses to take him fishing and hunting and they are camping out on this island when at the beginning of the book.  When a hurricane hits, they hide up in some mountain caves.  During the storm, they happen to see a flare and help bring in a foundering ship.  It's supposedly a fishing trip, except they have a store of weapons in the hold. It becomes clear (and admitted soon after) that the 6 men and 1 woman are anti-Castro rebels who are going to try and make some kind of attack on Cuba.  The woman is a journalist who hopes to get a big scoop.

The Cubans are, if not benevolent, at least not outwardly hostile at first.  They are led by their intense captain, Juan Camenides, whose whipping scars and "b" brand Lennard recognizes as the same that were on a young man he met with Castros rebels in the hills. He begins to wonder about Camenidas' allegiance and real plan.  Things get messy fast, as one of the men takes a hating for Lennard and takes it out on a friendly pelican he and Moses had been feeding.  I was enjoying this book decently for the first third. It was a cool setting but some of the politics were a bit wishy-washy and the treatment of the Moses character at first somewhat problematic (he is referred to often as "The Negro").  However, once the action started, it got really good.  There is a great hand to knife fight where Lennard, who was a special forces marine in the Pacific Theatre and saw a lot of action, loses control and goes into commando mode.  

The final act got a bit drawn out, but all the action that led up to it was quite intense and fun and creative.  The characters are mostly all well drawn out.  There is no real bad guy but people put in conflict due to the situation, which makes everything that much more intense and poignant.  Even the Moses character gets his own cool narrative and backstory that made him a full-fledged human.  I dug this.

I really struggled to find any info on Ronald Johnston.  He did have a successful writing career and has some other intriguing titles out there.  Today, his greatest claim to fame seems to be that he is author Paul Johnston's father.  Paul also seems to be an interesting writer, so I've added both to my hunting list.

Inflation!

7. Rogue Justice by Geoffrey Household

I was surprised to discover that Rogue Justice was written in 1982.  I have read Rogue Male back before the 50 books era (even made a fun xmas card out of it) and enjoyed it but also found it a bit odd and off-putting.  I went back and read my reviews of the three books of his I have read and found I had the same impression.  Rogue Justice was much less odd and rather than an extended hunt, most of the book was a chase with the protagonist on the run.  It made for a really enjoyable read. It gets a bit convoluted at the end but most of the book is a just a great escape story.

Rogue Justice is framed by an intro and epilogue by a colleague of the hero and briefly summarizes his attempt to assassinate Hitler and the ensuing retaliation assassination attempt by the Nazis (the story of Rogue Male).  After this, the hero (he has so many names and aliases that one forgots who he even is) returns using the Nicaraguan passport of his would-be assassin and tries again to take Hitler down.  He ends up in jail, which is luckily bombed, killing his captors and starting the adventure in this book.

The rest of the book is him making his way all over Europe in an attempt to escape the occupied territory and to join the British forces to take the fight to the Nazis in a more conventional manner.  His love was tortured and murdered by the Nazis and he lives for revenge only.  He won't even get with the hot Greek resistance agent because he can only think of his dead wife.  The route he takes is so cool and each stop is a little segment of adventure.  Household is really in command of his material.  He seems to know the geography, culture and military situation of each country and even region of a country they go through.  The journey goes from Northern Germany, through Poland, across mountains to Romania, then on to Istanbul via the Black Sea then western Greece, then Italy and finally back to Jerusalem.  There is a lot of British self-satisfaction and veneration of the Jewish people.  Household always has to elicit one Yuck or Yikes! per book (I had said it in two different reviews) and his extreme colonialist portrayal of Israel is the them that does so here.  Yikes!

On the plus side of the ledger, he kills 18 Nazis in all kinds of ways, often after witnessing their barbarism, so particularly satisfying.  I'm surprised that he was writing this will so late in the game.  I'm going to look for more of his later work. 

 

6. The Three Roads by Ross MacDonald

At this point, I consider most of Ross Macdonald's books to have some amount of their work done by Margaret Millar.  The Three Roads, his fourth book and I believe last that was to be published under the Kenneth Millar name, feels strongly that she had a heavy involvement.  It's all pure speculation based on style and themes and their work can be considered together a single ouevre given how symbiotic they were. 

The story here is about a young man on indefinite recuperation leave from the navy after losing his memory.  The book starts in a sanitarium in Southern California where Lieutenant Bret Taylor is under the care of his potential fiancé, slightly older screenwriter and divorcee Paula West.  His situation is very complex.  He and Paula fell in love but just before he went back to sea, he started a big fight and then stormed off, got super drunk and married some chick he met in a bar.  When he came back to see her 2 years later after his ship was blown up, he finds her murdered in the bedroom of the bungalow he had bought for her.  At which point he blacked out and lost his memory. 

Paula West, has fallen in love with him and wants to help him so he can move on and they can get married.  Taylor has other ideas and takes off on his own to investigate the murder of his wife.  At first, there is a lot of heavy Freudian psychology but once Taylor starts the investigation we get into the excellent sleuthing of Macdonald.  I always love the investigating in his books, just great characters in interesting locations and rich, nuanced dialogue to dig out the clues.  

The plot is not all the well thought out and thus doesn't resolve very well.  There is not much of a mystery and after a feint of distrust we get a anti-moralistic ending that is quite dark and noir.  It's not super effective and a bit muddy how we are supposed to take the ending.  The route getting there is mostly enjoyable, though a bit heavy on the psychoanalyzing.

The Three Roads feels like Macdonald is still trying to find his voice and his ideas.  The psycho-babble comes on way too thick, at one point almost feels like he is writing an essay.  It is sprinkled with Chandler-esque critiques of modern LA society, but they come on way too strong.  And there is no morals centre here so you kind of end up not caring.  On the positive side, the writing is well-paced and engaging.  The people are believable and unique as are the locations.  You really get a feel for LA at the end of the war.  This Macdonald guy may have some chops.

5. Come to Dust by Emma Lathen

This is where my sickness comes in.  I found this battered paperback in a free library box in Berkeley.  I took it purely on the Anthony Boucher pullquote.  I am literally piling books horizontally on top of my full on-deck shelf.  It's bad.

 I've never heard of Emma Latham.  This was an interesting read, an east coast establishment mystery where the main detector (I guess) is the president of a major bank.  His ally is the Chairman of the Board of the same bank.  The world is the elite establishment of NYC and New England in the late 60s pretty much Mad Men time.  It centers around a secondary and fictional Ivy League college and in particular its alumni fundraising organization.  One of its members, a particularly steady and thorough man, disappears on the way home to his perfect suburban house in Rye, along with a $50,000 bond certificate that was a donation from a wealthy widow of an alum.

A lot of the first half of the book follows the reputational damage to both the college and the fundraising organization and as we expect things get more and more complicated as it starts to become clear that this guy did not just run off with a young hussy or some other more expected scandal.  The two bankers, including the Chairman's competent and socially skilled wife at times, move among the various players, visiting the shattered wife at Rye, and having nice lunches at various clubs and restaurants.  There is a significant act during the big alumni weekend at the college itself and it is here where finally an actual murder takes place. 

It's a pleasant read, although a bit over written.  Latham uses adverbial phrases excessively and they weigh down the prose and could be confusing at times.  There were also a lot of white people with white people's names that I struggled to differentiate at times.  I did enjoy the inner perspective on the comfortable WASP bankers whose main concerns were not getting roped into dull conversations and the mystery itself was well constructed.  There is a very effective slight of hand or at least presentation of ideas that really worked to hide what was a seemingly obvious erroneous assumption throughout the book.  Also, the careful conservatism of the banking world, while stifling culturally, boy does seem welcome in today's financial cesspool.

Oh wow, I see now that this is a real series of 24 books, with John Putnam Thatcher (the banker) as detective, written by two professional women (who sounded quite successful even outside of the writing world).  I feel quite ignorant never having heard of these.  I may read another one if it crosses my path.

Now that's a well-travelled paperback!

 

4. Can't we Talk about Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast

I grew up in a New Yorker household.  Honestly, it always kind of annoyed me because my parents would not read them efficiently and there were always big stacks of half-read issues around the house.  This got worse as they got older.  As a kid, though, I did enjoy reading the cartoons and as I got older there were a few articles that I enjoyed.  I was generally not into the fiction at all, which the few times I read it, rarely actually had a good story, but was more about some theme or story or some modern American literary nonsense.  Roz Chast is a mainstay and I loved the way her characters looked, that frazzled hysteria, but I never totally found them all that funny. 

My father died a few years ago and my mother while quite physically healthy for her age (she was always really active and engaged in life a lesson to us all) started to have ongoing memory issues.  She herself asked to be moved to assisted living, so that last 6 months of me and my sister's life has been dealing with all that stuff, a situation common to many people at this stage in our life.  For some reason, we are called "the sandwich generation" but I think it's been going on forever in various forms in various societies.  Anyhow, my sister gave me this book for xmas and I guess it is a minor classic.

It's about Roz Chast's own parents, who lived in the same apartment for Brooklyn for most of their adult lives and all of hers.  It's an incredible portrayal of two unique people and the odd family they created.  You really get the vibe in both the art and the writing.  It's quite hilarious as well, though ultimately sad.  She portrays her parents so well.  I was laughing out loud at several moments in the way she portrayed her father's idiosyncracies.  The storyline is their aging and how it forces them finally to leave their apartment.  It's often so sad how life ends this way.  People who have found an established home and routine that makes them happy are ultimately forced to leave it behind as they are no longer capable of managing it.  This more than anything has made me see that life can be very arbitrary.

She doesn't make a huge point of it, it's implicit in her narrative, but the other major thing this book shows is how stupid America is with dying.  It has basically turned into a giant racket to steal people's money at the end of their lives.  Fucking stupid Christian obsession with "life" means that many people end their years in discomfort and worse for themselves and econonomic stress and worse for their families.  As late-stage capitalism grows more and more voracious, this just gets worse and worse.  Assisted living is now a major investment category, most of them owned by big private capital firms.  The places are designed to exploit the staff to the hilt, assisted by weak labour laws (drafted by politicians in lobbyists pockets).  Same with the medical system which is designed by exploiting and twisting the Hippocratic oath to keep people physically alive as long as possible even if their quality of life has diminished so far it isn't really even life.

I have two friends whose elderly parents have chosen to end their own lives.  The American had to travel to Europe and the other was here in Canada where we now finally have humane MAID laws that make it possible.  In both cases, while sad as anyone's death is, it was very much the right choice and better for everyone involved.

This is me editorializing above, because Chast's book stays away from any kind of soapboxing.  She just tells the story of their end and her experience of managing it.  It's not a total disaster or anything and in the end they did lead very long lives.  She spends more time on her own challenging relationship with them and especially her mother, who was quite tough and strict.  Chast was the weird quirky girl at school who probably didn't have the right clothes.  She could not wait to leave home and clearly has done extremely well.  But you can see the weird, tough home life that creates the kids who don't fit in.  

This is just a great read, but especially for any of you dealing with your own parents situation.

3. Forgive me, Killer by Harry Whittington

This was the other Black Lizard book I found at Green Apple Books.  The forward in this one is by Harry Whittington himself.  It's an overview of his career, which frankly sounds just exhausting.  The guy wrote non-stop.  It seemed he never found true financial success, but did achieve much-deserved (and gratifying for this reader) critical success finally by the French late in life.  I did not realize how many books he had written.  It's strange how hard his books are to find these days, considering how many titles he published under his own name.  Maybe because his prime was relatively long ago and he truly did get forgotten in between?  A real adventurer could also look for the many books he wrote under pseudonyms. 

[Vague spoilers ahead]

Forgive me, Killer is a reversal of the themes I have previously encountered in Whittington's books.  Instead of a protagonist where shit gets worse and worse as he is destroyed by his own mistakes and the women around him, this one is a redemption story.  Lieutenant Mike Ballard is a corrupt cop, utterly cynical, but tough and competent.  He's under pressure from the DA and public opinion, but doesn't seem to realize or just doesn't care how serious it is all getting.  At the beginning, he goes to a prison to visit a guy on death row, even though the case is pretty cut and dry.  It's the guy's wife that convinced him to do it and though a poor, frazzled housewife, Mike is drawn powerfully to the steel under her shabby core and even more powerfully by the unawakened sexual potential in her.  She is clearly hot and ready to get hotter but doesn't even know it.  It's a great premise.  

Ballard starts to poke around the case and quickly starts to see some very corrupt holes in it.  His lust pushes him to go past his own safety limits and he adds the gangster boss that pays him to the list of people that want him gone.  It's a quick, fun read with a very satisfying (and dare I say it, happyish) ending.

 

2. Black Friday by David Goodis

While in the Bay Area, I had a tremendous day visiting San Francisco, first going to the guided tour of The Internet Archive, which was really amazing and inspiring.  It's basically the library of the internet, constantly under attack by rights-hoarding corporations for trying to do what the internet was supposed to do in the first place:  be a repository of human knowledge.  Both the work they do and the physical space itself (it used to be a Christian Scientist church) are well worth learning about so I strongly recommend their tours (every Friday at 1:00 PM) if you are ever in San Francisco.

Their office is in the Richmond District, at the border between Inner and Outer Richmond neighbourhoods.  San Francisco has so many cool neighbourhoods with amazing residential architecture, great little stores and absolutely incredible neighbourhood bars.  I found Green Apple Books here and picked up a couple of slim crime fiction, including two Black Lizard books (also from the Bay Area).

I have somehow never read David Goodis.  Right from the beginning, I felt a sense of ease and relief, as the prose style was clean and direct and the situation immediate.  A young man is on the run in the freezing cold city.  He stumbles upon a dying man who gives him several thousand dollars in cash, which then leads him (or rather them to him) to the gang who killed him.  This could almost be a play as most of the drama takes place in the house where they are holed up.  The protagonist has murdered his brother and while a practical, experienced man for his age, he is not a career criminal.  He has to pretend to be, to stay in the shrewd gang boss's good graces.

The wrinkle for him is the short, fat and hyper-sexualized girlfriend of the boss.  She wants our hero and he doesn't want her, but she cottons on that he is not a professional and blackmails him to get with her.  I read later in the thorough introduction (by Geoffrey O'Brien; one of the elements that made the Black Lizard re-releases so good were the excellent intro essays) that Goodis had a self-loathing thing for fat women.  His forced attempt to please her is very well-written; she's actually quite hot on text.

The plot is not super compelling. It's more of a psychological character study of doom, which is usually not my thing.  But it is done so efficiently and compellingly that I quite enjoyed this one.  Goodis himself sounds like a dark figure and the quality of his books varied wildly.  This one was pretty intense. 

1. The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr

I think I may be done with the locked room mystery.  I delved into it after reading several articles sharing the top examples of the sub-genre (and introduced me to some of the rich history of Japanese detective fiction) and read several.  I'm told that this one is the absolute pinnacle, though it sure took me a long time to find (I finally cornered it in a very well-organized used book store in an Abbotsford mini-mall (The Bookman, long may it live).  I believe it had a cameo in the latest Knives Out movie.

I'm a lazy reader.  I want the narrative to take me for a ride while I sit back and enjoy myself.  Locked room mysteries are designed to make the reader engage and try and figure it out for themselves.  I actually have made an effort (and had some partial successes, including with this book), but I need the rest of the ride to be entertaining.   Most of the locked room mysteries I've read really put all the work into the clever murder and it becomes a slog for me to read.  This one was particularly guilty of that.  I just didn't connect with the context.  It was supposed to be London but there was minimal atmosphere or character.  There were multiple investigating characters, though I guess one detective.  I figured out one of the major puzzles, but in order to actually put it all together, I would have had to write down a timetable.  

Ah just read that Carr was American, who did live in England.  That explains the lack of atmosphere.  It's an ersatz British mystery.  It was the holidays and we had lots of lovely family activities, and I had quite a lot of work around moving my mother into assisted living, but a book this thin should not take me 2 weeks to read.  I thought it was me, but I cranked through two great pulp crime books right after this one (I'm behind on my reviews), so I think that is it for me with the locked room mystery sub-genre.

[Apologies, kind of a negative way to start the year. I was in a bit of a reading rut and after this one have gone on to pick books that are fun to read, so picking up a bit of steam for 2026.]