36. River of Gods by Ian McDonald

I'm really surprised that this book and Ian McDonald himself only came upon my radar recently (that was thank's to Pechorin's Journal).  I'm not a huge sci-fi fan, but I keep my ears open and I really should have heard about this book. It's probably the best new science fiction novel I've read since the Cryptonomicon.  An engrossing, at times thrilling, thoroughly satisfying near future epic that mixes the good and bad of technological development with social and political issues that resonate very much with the present.  River of Gods takes place in India in the year 2047, the 100th year of its independence.  Except India is now divided up into several smaller nations after a civil war that is never fully detailed.  Bharati is one of those new nations and it has become a haven for certain higher-level artificial intelligences after they were outlawed by the U.S. government.  There is a wide cast of characters and the book is structured through them, with each chapter until the end being devoted to each character.  As their stories converge, the greater narrative starts to reveal itself, which I won't reveal but just say that this work is definitely a descendant of Neuromancer.

It's very well written, the kind of science fiction book where you feel a bit worried at the beginning that you are not going to be able to figure out what is going on.  It's not just the passing references to new technology that is taken for granted by the characters, but also the use of a lot of Indian cultural references and language.  However, you become quickly immersed in the world as the characters and whatever the hell they are up to become interesting.  And what a great cast of characters.  Standouts were Nandha the detective whose job it is to hunt down and "excommunicate" rogue AI's with his gun that uses avatars of various Hindu gods and goddesses to do its work and Taj the "nute" a person who has augmented their body so that they no longer have a gender.  The world, too, is just awesome. What I enjoyed about it was that it had a nice mix of optimistic and pessimistic about the future. Climate change is real (one of the serious problems for the nation is the lateness of the monsoon), but there are also many believable options of renewable energy.  So you get lots of neat little instances of day-to-day technology that are the kind of little candies nerds like me love to read about.  But it's all mixed up in a very rich, busy, diverse economy and society where there are still tons of poor people who follow their age-old traditions.  It makes for a very neat mix. 

Ultimately, I can't say that this is a work of art.  It is so well-crafted and slick that it almost felt like it lacked a teeny bit of soul.  I think that is a mean thing to say and probably inaccurate, because I don't think it was created in any way from a cynical motivation.  It just all went down so smoothly for me, like a top-notch summer blockbuster with actual intelligence behind it. I kind of knew how it was all going to go down and nothing in the end blew my mind or touched my own soul (the way Neuromancer did, for instance, though I was 15 when I first read it).  However, I still frickin' loved every page of it and could barely stop reading it at night.  Check it out.

35. The Green Eagle Score by Richard Stark

I just realized about a month ago that I have delayed for quite a while my ongoing re-read of the Parker books.  The reason is that I have been systematically going through my on-deck shelf from left to right and they are ordered by size, smallest on the left and biggest on the right.  I have a preponderance of traditional paperbacks and the new Parkers are in that larger "trade" paperback format.  I normally try to read a new Parker once every 3 or 4 months, as my wife has created a tradition of getting me 3 or 4 new ones from the U of C reprint library for my birthday every year.  So basically, I have a bit of catching up to do and it starts with the masterpiece that is the Green Eagle Score.

How many masterpieces are there in the Parker series?!  Christ, I'd forgotten how great The Green Eagle Score is.  It has vaulted into my top 5, possibly top 3 of the series.  I'm going to need to sit down and think about how it ranks, but there is no doubt that this is one of the good ones.  The heist is just great, the characters rich, the antagonist deliciously hateful, the Alma also hateful and maddening and the little insights into Parker's character are crucial as well.

The setup here is that Parker gets an invitation to participate in an audacious job in upstate New York to hit an air force base and rip off their payroll.  The touch comes from Marty Fusco, an old colleague who got sent up.  When he gets out, he finds his ex-wife shacking up with a young dude called Stan Devers.  It is Devers who points out the job to Fusco.  Parker is skeptical at first (as usual), but with some scouting starts to warm to the job.


SPOILERS AHEAD.  IF YOU ARE AT ALL INTERESTED (AND HAVE ANY BRAINS OR TASTE AT ALL) YOU SHOULD JUST STOP READING HERE AND GO OUT AND READ THE BOOK.  RIGHT AWAY.  ACTUALLY, YOU SHOULD GO OUT AND START READING ALL THE PARKER BOOKS FROM THE BEGINNING UNTIL YOU GET TO THIS ONE AND THEN READ IT AS ALL RIGHT-THINKING PEOPLE SHOULD (AND WILL WHEN I BECOME EMPEROR).



Almost every book in the Parker books has two elements, that I refer to as the Mal and the Alma.  The Mal is the antagonist, the person or group that you as the reader just really hate and can't wait for Parker to fuck up.  Often, it is the Outfit.  It can be a wide range of other characters as well (such as the sheriff in The Jugger).  They are an interesting character to look at, because they give insight into who Parker is and some of the themes that Westlake addresses in the series.  The Alma is the lame character whose emotional weakness spells disaster for the heist.  You always hate them for being so lame, but you also understand that they are weak losers who can't help themselves, unlike the Mals who deliberately choose to cause trouble.

In the Green Eagle Score, the Mal comes from a suprising source.  It's the psychiatrist who is treating Fusco's ex (and Devers' current), Ellen (who is herself quite clearly the Alma here).  She is a messed up individual, with all kinds of fears and insecurities and to help herself, she is in analysis.  It is there that she begins to talk about the planning of the heist, as much of it takes place in her home (and is a source for a lot of her anxieties, reasonably so as her last husband went up because of such an undertaking).  What makes this book so delicious is the slow way that Westlake reveals to the reader that the psychiatrist may be interested in the heist itself.  I really wish I was reading this for the first time or had my mind wiped, so it would come as a surprise to me at what point I would realize that the psychiatrist was fishing around.

His role is a fascinating one.  Often, I feel that in the Parker books, Westlake is taking a shot at certain segments of society.  He hates middle-men, people who control and make decisions without doing any real work.  In many ways, Parker is a true working class hero.  Here, the psychiatrist plays a similar role in that he isn't doing any real work.  He waits and listens and plans to take advantage of other people's labour.  Is that the ultimate sin in Parker's world?  And I wonder how much of a shot is Westlake taking at the practice of psychiatry in general?

There are also a couple of other really cool moments.  I love the introduction of Kengle, one of the heisters who is going to be brought on to help with the job. Westlake spends the better part of a chapter describing the struggles this guy is going through since he got out of jail, trying to sell encyclopedias door-to-door, living in a fleabag hotel.  Then he gets a phone call.

The voice said, "Jake?"
Kengle recognized it, and a heavy weight seemed to lift off his back.

So great!  In some ways, this moment encapsulates why we read these books in the first place.  Westlake takes us into Parker's world and takes the heavy weight of mundanity and the straight world off our back for a moment where rulebreakers are the ones in the right.

Finally, Ellen speaking to the psychiatrist becomes a vehicle through which Westlake can explore the Parker character.  When probed about her fear of him by the psychiatrist, she says:

He's cold and ruthless and he doesn't care about anybody, but that's because he cares about things. Not even the money, I don't think. It's the plan that really matters to him. I think the thing that counts is doing it and having it come out right.

 Again, I think this plays into the notion of Parker as a working class hero.  What is important to him is the job, how well it is done and that it is completed correctly.  He is always fighting against individuals and groups who are either incompetent for a variety of reasons or want to take advantage of his hard work.  The target here, the Air Force, is portrayed as being basically pretty useless, just a lot of bureaucrats with nothing to do but keep each other busy uselessly now that there is no actual war on.  It's ironic that Parker is a criminal, all of whose hard work is done outside the law, but he seems to be someone with a profoundly protestant working principle. 

The way the book ends is just perfect.  Perhaps this little quote captures perfectly Parker and his world (and is a good lesson for us all):

Devers said, "Thanks. This isn't the way I had it planned, but what the hell."

"That's right," Parker said.

34. The Crime on Cote des Neiges by David Montrose

  This is the second in the Ricochet line of books put out by Vehicule Press reprinting some classic old crime paperbacks from Montreal from the 1950s.  This edition has a forward by Brian Busby, Canadian publishing history expert (and sometime commenter here).  I can't say again how much I appreciate the work of Vehicule press in putting together this collection.  These books are cool in and of themselves, but they also represent a thin slice of Canadian culture that would have otherwise disappeared.

This second book is just as convoluted a mystery as the first (I say "second", but I'm not actually sure of the order; it's the second one I've read), however it starts out in a much more straitforward manner.  This time, instead of an omniscient opening, everything is seen through the eyes of private detective Russel Teed.  It's pretty classic private eye stuff.  He is invited up to the house of a wealthy woman and given the case of finding out if her daughter's now disappeared husband had a secret first wife.  This leads him to one then two than many more murders and a complex case involving the heroin racket, past sins and gang subterfuge.  I felt very similar about this book as I did Murder over Dorval.  It was enjoyable, but a bit too convoluted.  After about the third twist, I did appreciate the cleverness that Montrose must have summoned to make it all work but I didn't really care all that much.  Sometimes the writing was really great and other times forced. It is a time capsule of Montreal when it was a great, roaring city, but it really only feels like a time capsule of Westmount. It's amazing how much of this city was able to be ignored by the english-speaking minority at the time.  Even the rare uses of actual french are highly questionable (though he does write a great french-canadian accent).  It made me think of a book from a few years later, The Stringer, which is in many ways quite similar (the underbelly of Montreal, everyone is drinking all the time), but took into account all of Montreal, even if it was seen from the eyes of an anglo.  I guess this is just another example of the two solitudes.

One minor nitpick about this reprint is that the colours on the cover are off.  As you can see compared to the original, the black is so dark that the chair has almost disappeared (this isn't just an artifact of the web, it looks like that in real life) and the softness of the blue and yellow in the original become a harsh yellow in the reprint and it looks a bit cartoonish.  But a minor nitpick for what is a very commendable effort that you should all invest in.

33. The Happy Return by C.S. Forester

I found this beautiful paperback at S. Welch's and finally got through to it on my long (but shortening) on-deck shelf.  It turns out this is the first of the Horatio Hornblower books (and the fourth chronologically).  It's neat, because it isn't obvious that this is the first book in the series.  A lot of references are made to Hornblower's younger days and one might think (as I indeed did while reading it) that those references were to actual events in previous books (which they may well be).  So far, I've read Commodore Hornblower and Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies.  This one is possibly my favourite.  I found the story straightforward as well as the historical context around it, so I could just enjoy it for what it was without trying to figure out what the hell was going on.  It delivers on all the great characterization, locations, intrigue and sea battles that makes this series so well-loved.

In it, Hornblower is sent with a frigate on a secret mission to Central America where he is to aid a local baron and landowner in his efforts to foment revolution against the Spanish government.  When he gets there, he finds that this baron has turned into an insane and cruel cult leader, who calls himself "El Supremo".  Hornblower, trapped between the reality of the situation at hand and the political exigencies of his masters far away, is faced with moral and strategic quandaries that would best even the most capable of leaders.  On top of all this, he has to take on a passenger, the lovely and well-connected Lady Barbara Wellesley.  Forester serves up a delicious stew of everything the fan of adventure on the high seas could ask for plus a big dollop of romance.  This is great stuff and further cementing my appreciation of this series.

32. Serenade by James M. Cain

This book has been sitting on my shelf for almost two decades.  A guy lent it to me at the first job I had out of college.  He stressed repeatedly how he wanted it back and then proceeded to question me daily on if I had read it yet or not.  Of course, I ended up not reading it and not returning it to him. I feel kind of bad about it, which is why it has stayed with me all these years.  I finally got to it on my on-deck shelf and wasn't entirely sure that it truly was the copy I had borrowed back in the day.  But sure enough I found my old business card in it (possibly the first of my career).  So if you are out there, Paul (I think that was the name), I've still got your copy of Serenade and will gladly mail it to you.

And now on to the book.  Cain was very successful as a writer in Hollywood (he did The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity) and this was one of his later books.  It's the first of his I have ever read.  It's the story of a down and out singer, John Howard Shore, in Mexico who meets a beautiful native prostitute in a bar and steals her away on a whim from the toreador she was with.  They decide to open up a brothel together, but on their way to Acapulco they get stuck in a church together during a long rainstorm and end up getting it on.   Somehow, this repairs his voice (we learn as the narrative goes on that he was at the top of the game until his voice stopped working due to some unspoken traumatic event in Paris and he fell and kept falling until he ended up broke in Mexico) and he changes his plans and decides to return to America, with the girl and get his career going.

In order to discuss this book, I have to give away some of the stuff that happens.  In fact, I already have as the narration is continuous and steady so that you don't really know what the main premise of the book is going to be until you are well into it.  So be warned, spoilers here.

He is truly talented and his renewed voice, after some struggling, indeed takes him back to the top.  He gets a regular radio show with a good sponsor, a couple of movie deals and then finally onto Carnegie Hall.  Back in New York, he meets that guy who was his bandleader and inspiration before he cracked up.  It seems like it should be a good reunion, but Shore is super edgy about the whole thing.  The guy, Winston, is super wealthy and obsessed with music and quickly insinuates himself back into Shore's life and career.  For reasons that don't get revealed right away, Shore hides Winston's existence from his Mexican wife.  When they do meet, she totally freaks out and then it all comes out in the wash.  Perhaps it was more obvious for audiences of 1937 when this was written, but I never would have guessed that the whole thing was because Shore had gay feelings for Winston.  Somehow, the gayness made his voice stop working.  He had to get it on with the hot indian mexican earth mama to get it back.  This revelation is well into the book, but there is still a climax  to be played out (which spoiler alert is portrayed on the super '80s photographic colour-tinted re-enactment cover of the edition I have). 

Serenade is quite odd.  I can't tell if Serenade is an advanced cultural critique of homophobia or simply a reflection of the simplistic cultural homophobia of the time. I believe that it was banned in many places when it did come out.  I can't say I loved the book.  There is a lot of talk about music in it that I found pretty boring, because I don't like writing about music in general and I am pretty ignorant about both classical music and what was popular music at that time.  At times, it went a bit too far (like when Juana produces her breast for him to suck on as if it was restoring his heterosexuality) but overall it's an interesting read with some pretty ripe, rich stuff going on.  My guess is that I will prefer his more straight-up noir thrillers.

31. Bang for a Buck by Catherine Roman

Here is an odd little find, picked up for a buck itself (possibly less) at S.W. Welch's annual sidewalk sale.  It was the canlit, in particular the seamy underbelly of 80s and 90s Canada that intrigued me and Bang for a Buck didn't disappoint. It's the autobiography of a pretty wild woman who led a pretty wild life.  Her story is amazing, as are the situations and people she encounters along the way.  It's bizarrely written, though.  The entire book is so full of one-time idioms, unique turns of phrases and random references that it almost becomes like a stream of consciousness poem.  At times, it's even hard to understand specifically what she is talking about.  That's the thing, most of the book is narrative and the story just keeps charging ahead, so despite the excessive language, I had no trouble turning the pages.  By the end, I found myself somewhat caught up in her style, sympathetic to her and quite possibly understanding a bit of her inner psyche, which is I guess one of the end goals of poetry.  However, at times it was just too much, like she didn't have the confidence to simply tell the story.

And what a story.  This woman lived through a lot.  She started out in rural Ontario, starting out with a semi-functional nuclear family but eventually getting bumped from relative to relative, many of whom were already a part of the criminal element.  She just starts to get in to worse and worse situations, at least from society's perspective, finally ending up as a prostitute in a rural, mobile brothel up north.  While she gets beaten, sexually assaulted, kidnapped and constantly harassed, much of her life seems more like an adventure to her (and her real life) than some descent into badness.  There are some truly horrific situations, including getting kidnapped by this psycho french-canadian in the employ of the RCMP, where she is locked in his north Montreal house and forced to play shut-in wife and victim to his weird sex games.  Very scary.

It's hard to know what drives her.  I think a psychologist would recognize symptoms of mental dysfunction in her, both from abuse as a child possibly just innate.  The book ends without any real resolution, except perhaps that she has moved into a new stage of her life (though that is only hinted at).  She's only in her early-20s by the end and one must imagine that she got her life together enough to be able to write a book and get it published.  I'd be curious if today she is living a more stable life.

30. The Doomsters by Ross MacDonald

True to my promise to read more Ross MacDonald, I picked up this early Lew Archer novel (the cover is painfully, stupidly '70s but the book was actually originally published in 1958.  In this one, Archer is woken up by a strapping, well-spoken young man who has snuck into his garage way too early in the morning.  He turns out to be an escapee from the loony bin, with a story to tell about an evil doctor who had him put away.  Archer feels some pity for him but tries to convince him to go back to the institution.  On the driver there, Archer learns that he is from a fairly wealthy family from the agricultural town of Purissima, that his father was a senator and that his brother and wife are conniving to take his share.  It's hard to know how much of it is true, as the kid is pretty wound up and does indeed seem a bit crazy.  At the last moment, just before the gates of the institution, he jumps Archer, knocking him out and stealing his car.

Archer gets involved, driven by sympathy for the young man and some belief that he wasn't entirely wrong in is suspicions.  The reader is introduced to another broken, twisted, hateful California family and the corrupt town that grew up around them.  It's a dark, sordid journey that also goes deep into Lew Archer's own psyche (the reason the young man came to him was because he had escaped with a heroin addict who used to be a protege of Archer's).  MacDonald sometimes tries a bit too hard with the psychologizing and the moralizing, but it's all in aid of a good story and a nasty expose of nasty people.  The bodies really pile up in this one, too!  Good stuff.

29. Special Deliverance by Alexander Fullerton

Normally, I do not pick up action books that seem to be to military in their nature.  I do enjoy reading about war and the exploits of men and women in war.  But there is a point where a book can become to war-nerdy, with an emphasis on equipment and procedure and very little intrigue or human interaction.  So I was a bit reluctant to purchase this book. But the cool cover and its taking place during the Falklands Islands War—a little piece of history that I could do to learn more about—turned the table.

I'm glad I did, because while this book did have a lot of war stuff, especially sections on the boat where there was just way too much jargon, it was, as they say, a cracking read.  The main character is Andy McEwan, a civilian who gets dragged along on a commando mission in the Falklands to secretly disable a stockpile of missiles that are proving to be quite deadly to the British ships.  McEwan is brought along because the missile base is not far from his family land, where he himself grew up.  He's the perfect insider to help the elite SBS (Special Boat Service, bad ass commandos who deal specially with water and water craft), even though he is estranged from his older brother who runs the farm and who, as we learn later, is a high-ranking officer with the Argentine army.  Even worse, he is married to the woman Andy still has a hankering for.  

So there is lots of human interest stuff along side the military action.  Though the periods on the ship were a bit dull for me, the commando sections were really cool.  These guys are all about getting in and getting out without anybody knowing, even though they could kick everyone's ass if they had to.  They are experts in building hides, camouflaged hidey-holes where they spy on their target.  This book has one of the more exciting scenes of guys sneaking into a compound that I have read in a while. It's the kind of incomplete sentence action writing that doesn't always work for me, but worked splendidly here.  Just super cool with them scaling a barb wire fence in a specific order, one guy covering the barbs so the others can climb over him faster. 

The other thing I enjoyed about this book was that it gave me a new perspective on the Falklands War.  That went down when I was in grade 7 and our teacher had us all bring in clippings about it as a way to teach us how to pay attention to current affairs.  I remember the attitudes at the time being generally strongly anti-British.  They were portrayed as sabre-rattling aggressors in a useless war, not unlike the U.S.'s later invastion of Grenada.  Now Fullerton's book is not jingoistic, but it is certainly pro-British.  However, I did not know at the time that the Argentine government was a military junta, with a history of atrocities, who was using the war as a way to distract their rebelling society from an ongoing economic crisis.  In fact, their loss of the war led to the junta collapsing and Argentina setting up a democratic structure that is in existence today.  Thatcher and her cronies were certainly no good guys and their ushering in of the neo-con shitfest we are struggling through today (the long-term effort to move money from the public to the private realm) was majorly bad.  But despite that, it can perhaps be historically seen that the Falklands War was a good strategic move for the world.  

It looks like Fullerton has written quite a lot.  I will look a bit more into his oeuvre for sure.

28. Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harry Wheeler

Fail-Safe was a big bestseller during the cold war and one of those books, I believe that everyone was talking about at the time.  The theme is one film buffs will know well from classics like war Games and Dr. Strangelove: out automated weapon systems accidently trigger an attack that will lead us into nuclear oblivion.  Fail-Safe is deadly serious, though, and thoroughly researched.  It all takes place at the very top, with the president, all the top military brass and a few other stragglers as the large cast of characters.

Fail-Safe is the concept where if no action is taken, a thing will return to its safe state.  In this case, there is a fail-safe point where nuclear bombers will automatically turn around unless they get a specific command to go ahead and continue the attack.  In this case, due to a combination of factors (including an equipment malfunction, but not just that) one bomber group scrambling to what was a false alarm, does receive the go-ahead order and continues on its path to Moscow, with enough nuclear power to destroy the city entirely.

The rest of the book is everybody trying to stop it and the president (who is Kennedy, though his name is never mentioned, seen through the eyes of his expert translator) trying to convince Kruschev that the attack is erroneous.  If you think it through, and the book does, you can see the issues at stake.  How do you convince your enemy not to retaliate when you are just about to destroy their most important city?  The problem with the retaliation is that it will touch off a nuclear exchange that would basically destroy the world.

It's a gripping book, with great characters and a pretty intense outcome.  The portrayal of Kennedy was neat, making him seem like the coolest guy, a super badass with a profound humanitarian viewpoint on the world.  This probably represented a political bias of the authors, but whether it is accurate or not, it doesn't get in the way of the delivery of the problems of nuclear stalemate that depends on systems more complex than man.  It's funny, though, based on the foreward, it seems that these authors were convinced an accident will happen.  It never did and I wonder why that is.  How did we hold out long enough so that the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own ideology? Was it just luck?  Did our systems get better?  It would be interesting to know more.

Bonus, check out this topical promotion at the end of the book (click to make big enough to read):

A fine example of the propaganda front during the Cold War

27. Spectrum I edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest

This was the first in the Spectrum series that Kingsley Amis edited.  Though it was published in 1961, most of the stories come from the late 40s and early 50s.  It was a mixed bag.  I really love Amis' spirited defense of (and attack for) science fiction.  There were even more ignorant "literary critics" back then in relation to genre fiction than there are today and Amis must be credited as one of the first people to really go directly at them, especially in the UK.  I don't know who Robert Conquest is, but I should probably give him credit as well, as he co-wrote the intro with Amis and was the co-editor (and it is implied that they had some differences of opinion).  [edit to add that I did a bit of internet research and learned that Conquest was a well-respected Russian historian and poet and wrote two sci-fi novels as well, but—big surprise—the sci fi novels are barely mentioned and though his friendship with Amis is, there is nowhere I can find in any of his biographies the info that he edited several of these Spectrums, even in the Wikipedia!  Astounding.]

The problem is that it could be argued that a lot of these stories fell into some of the very criticisms levied against science fiction (Amis admits this as much).  They are often about the exploration of a concept rather than a good story.  There are a couple of really good reads though.  The best story (in terms of actual narrative) is John Berryman's Special Flightabout a freight ship making a standard, but in this case a rushed and unplanned emergency trip to the moon.  It's really quite a tense story, but focuses so much on the technical aspects.  It was written in '39, which is kind of amazing, and was probably really exciting to engineers who understood air flight and loved to speculate about how that would operate in space.  There is also a hilarious Robert Sheckley story about an offworlder who comes to earth to find love.  Another great concept was from Frederik Pohl's the Midas Touch about a future society where consumption and poverty were reversed and the lower down on the social and economic scale you were, the more you had to consume, with ration books and everything.  Very prescient, given the obese state of our lower classes today.

So all in all a mixed bag with some gems here and there.  But overall, this book gives you a feeling of the positive and imaginative spirit of those early sci-fi writers.  These people are enjoying themselves and so are their readers.

26. Death Wish by Brian Garfield

The finding and reading of the original Death Wish novel was another interesting and rewarding experience in the used book world.  I had always had a slight distaste for the movie, having been raised in a liberal household in the 70s and 80s.  It represented a racist, right-wing attitude that we were supposed to frown upon.  This attitude was reinforced one afternoon in grade 9 when me and a couple buddies went to the local video store and they were playing one of the Death Wish sequels on the television.  It was the initial attack and rape scene and I still remember standing there watching it while chewing a Wunderbar and feeling profoundly disgusted and horrified while tasting this nougaty sugary chocolate go all nasty in my mouth.  Did not eat a Wunderbar since then.

However, now that I'm older and harder (and a fan and student of publications like Cinema Sewer), I have recently been curious about actually watching the Death Wish series (or at least the first one) and since I have discovered Brian Garfield and learned that he was a poker buddy of Donald Westlake, I definitely wanted to read the novel.

The book is very different than the movie, I suspect, in tone and theme.  This is not a revenge fantasy.  Death Wish the novel is an exploration of the mind of an urban liberal when it is pushed to a breaking point due to a crisis that conflicts with everything it believed in.  There is no gratuitous satisfaction or cathartic revenge in the protagonist's killings.  The attack on his wife and daughter takes place offscreen (and is in some ways that much more disturbing and horrific for all the question marks surrounding it).  Most of the book is concerned with his state of mind and the thought process that leads him to his vigilante actions.  The climax of the book may be Paul Benjamin reading an interview with a psychiatrist in New York magazine about the vigilante killings, where the psychiatrist quite accurately conjectures who the vigilante is and what may be driving him.

I learned that Garfield wrote a sequel called Death Sentence, which was his response to the movie and the reaction it got.  Ironically, that got made into a movie recently starring Kevin Bacon that was supposed to be quite bad. Don't know about its position on vigilantism, but I guess I may have to check it out as well.  Pulp serenade has a good post about Death Wish and Garfield's reasons for writing it.

What I found most compelling about Death Wish was the way New York City is portrayed.  I have friends who grew up there back in those dark days and they did say it was rough, but this book makes it seem almost like a dark apocalyptic future where enclaves (or ghettoes as Paul Benjamin bitterly compares them to at one point) of upper middle class people huddle together, surrounded by dark streets full of junkies and killers.  It's depressing, especially coming after the random and senseless attack on Paul's family.  It sort of gets to you as a reader.

It's a historically important book and a good read.  Check it out.

25. The Takeover by Richard Wormser

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but I have somehow managed to hit the 50 books halfway mark before a third of the year is over.  It's odd because I had such a slow start.  I guess it's a testament to just keeping plugging away.  I was quite concerned about the double row of books on my on-deck shelf at the beginning of the year, but now I have made a decent dent in it, while remaing so far quite disciplined about not buying any new books.  If I can hold off for the next three months in California and keep up this reading pace, I should be in good shape for the rest of the year.

Memory is shakey, but I believe The Takeover is also from the now legendary Maritimes trip.  You'll notice how similar the typeface and layout is to The War of the Dons and the more blatant "from the publishers of the Godfather" both mark this as being a Fawecett book published in the wave of the Godfather craze. I guess I should read the book that started it all one of these days.

Howeever, though this is a book about corruption, the mafia only play a tangential role.  The story here is about Jerry, the city marshall and the small group of men with whom he works who basically control a city and by extension the midwestern state it is in.  They have converted the boilerroom of the city hall into an informal but highly select meeting room where they decide who will win which election, who will get which contract and how much they will skim off of it.  These guys are corrupt, but from the protagonist's viewpoint (which is not uncynical), they do a pretty good job of running the town.  They allow some crimes like gambling (including a big policy racket) and prostitution to exist, under their control, but have succeeded in keeping drugs and the mafia out and the streets safe.

Jerry's unofficial job is as the guy who actually goes out and gets a lot of things that need to be done done.  He greases palms, hands out fat in the right places and gets favours in return.  He is the right hand man and favourite of the unstated boss Hank Masters.

The problem arises when their attorney general in the state capitol dies suddenly of a heart attack.  His over-eager and reform-minded assistant will by law take over the position temporarily and has a real chance of getting it for the next four years, which would cause all kinds of trouble for the gang in the boiler room.  It's Jerry's job to try and undermine the guy (who also turns out to want a piece of the pie, but too big of one and in a way that would be disruptive to the status quo).  In dealing with this problem, Jerry starts to realize that he has slowly morphed into the main man.

It's interesting, because when I first read the masterpiece that is Butcher's Moon, I loved how Westlake dissected the corrupt political structure of a small city.  Now I see that this was a strong theme in genre books of the late '60s and early '70s.  You see it in a lot of John D. Macdonald of course, but usually as a background.  It is front and center in books like "The Fools in Town Are on our Side" and "All I Can Get".  The Takeover is another fine example of that and goes into even a bit deeper depth of how the city politics can have some level of control over the entire state (though warily so as they take great pains to never disturb or alert the federal authorities).  It's fascinating stuff and I wonder what great reforms went on that we don't have the same situation today?

The story itself is good, but puts the emphasis on Jerry's character development and moral decisions.  The outcome is cynical and quite dark, though a bit obvious and not unexpected, so that it ended up with a bit of a loss of the momentum it had been building up.  But it felt real and interesting and very cynical all the way through.  This is one of those books where political positiions are utterly meaningless, right and left just playing pieces that need to be manipulated so everybody can get paid.  I don't know if it represents the truth, but this vision can sometimes be a respite for the reader.  It absolves one of getting engaged with everything that is wrong with the world because there is nothing to be done about it, but play the game, try to survive and come out on top.

24. World War Z by Max Brooks

My wife just finished reading this and she stayed up late to finish it, so I thought it would be good for a cross-continent plane flight.  She confirmed and it turned out to be correct as I read the entire book going from Montreal to San Francisco.

The book was a huge hit when it came out and rightly so.  It tells the zombie apocalypse from a global perspective, with a collection of first person accounts of many various players who were involved in the initial stages of infection, through the outbreak, the worldwide collapse, the recovery and then the efforts to clean up the planet in the aftermath.  Because of this structure, with each narrative being a little self-contained story (though also slowly weaving together the bigger story), it is quickly digestible.  This is especially true for fans of the apocalypse, like myself.  There is just a ton of freaky, cool zombie stuff in here.  If that's your bag, you should read this (you probably already have).
But I'll go even further, because I think beyond the visceral thrills and scares and horrors of a zombie invasion, World War Z also speaks to a very specific mindset.  There are some strong socio-political themes in this book and clear criticisms.  Blame is laid squarely at the pharmaceutical industry, the media and our comfortable society.  More broadly, this book attacks conservatism of ideas.  The bad guys here are the people who either refused or were not capable of recognizing what was going on or who even when they did failed to adjust their mode of thinking and acting to deal with it.  The result was much more death and destruction than was necessary.

This book is for people who fear the softness of our society, who worry about a service-based economy where nobody has any real skills any more, for people who recognize (and scoff at) the contradiction of fear-based advertising.  Our response to the anxiety that is shoved down our throats by the media and marketing turns out to be the one that leaves us the most vulnerable when the dead start walking the earth.  We're fat, complacent and selfish.  Every other generation but ours has faced real challenge and instead of taking our freedom and wealth and making a better society, we just stuff our faces and brain with sugar.

Some kind of apocalypse is the simplistic response (or perhaps the only one, given our wiring) and World War Z unleashes it in a most satisfying way.

23. Help I am being held prisoner by Donald E. Westlake

I can't even remember where I found this little gem from 1974.  It's the story of a lifelong, compulsive practical joker who ends up going a bit too far and gets sent to a prison in upstate New York.  There, he accidentally falls in with a crew of hard types who oversee the gym.  They are extremely suspicious and closed to him until he discovers that they have a set-up that allows them to sneak out of the prison, where they go out on day trips disguised as civilians.  It's a clever idea and Westlake plays it out with his light but effective touch.  Things get complicated for the protagonist on many levels when the gang reveals to him that they are planning to rob a bank.  They have the perfect alibi, right?

Westlake is able to create a criminal world that is at once fairly realistic and yet never seems really truly scary.  The stakes are high and there are real threats hinted at, but somehow the whole book has a friendly, relaxed feel (though that feel does not stop you from wanting to turn the pages).  It also has an absolute classic bank robbery moment that only adds to Westlake's oeuvre on this subject.

Great stuff.  Find it and read it.

22. The Ultimate Rush by Joe Quinn

This ended up being an okay story, but the telling was so layered with endless consumer culture signifiers and jargon that I almost didn't make it to the end.  I guess the characters in this book represent some apex of pre-Occupy San Francisco alterno-hipsters.  I wasn't in the Bay Area in the late 90s and if the heroes of this book resemble in any way youth culture there at the time, I'm glad I wasn't.  Most of the first quarter of the book is the edgy coolness of the protagonist's (Chet Griffin) lifestyle being displayed for the reader.  He's a rollerblade messenger! He's living on the financial edge!  His roommate is a hacker with cerebral palsy!  His best friend is a hot asian boarder who dresses up like a schoolgirl but with devil ears!  He has a huge snake!  He has all these special complex tatoos!  It never seems to stop.

The story, such as it is, starts when Chet gets a special job making these super-tight deliveries to odd places, some clearly connected with a criminal operation.  He digs deeper and then accidently opens a package and all hell breaks loose.  He goes on the run and with the help of his friends has to figure out what the operation is and bust it in order to save themselves.  There is a ton of action and the author doesn't worry about adhering too close to reality, which while sometimes giving a reader pause, ends up being the fun choice.  A lot of cool stuff goes down, but again it's all so burdened with explaining why and how its cool (as well as all the cool things around what's going on), that it rarely gives much of a thrill, until the very end.

As I read this, I realized that my impatience may be due to my complete lack of interest in this period.  The 90s were pretty fucking lame.  Grunge, X-games, shitty internet, movies hadn't gotten cool again yet. Bleh.  I also recognize that a lot of the 70s crime books I read have a lot of lifestyle markers, but they tend to know their place in the book and be kept limited so that the action and ass-kicking can take center stage.  Not the case here, sadly.

21. The Sharpshooter #7: Head Crusher by Bruno Rossi

The order of books on my on-deck shelf seems to have arranged itself such that I have spent a lot of the month of March wallowing around in the filth and scum of 1970s New York.  Again, this is a book I picked up on my fruitful trip to the Maritimes.  Who could resist such a cover, especially with the lurid green background?

The Sharpshooter series is the story of Johnny Rock, previously John Rocetti, who parents were murdered by the mafia and who is now on a life mission to wipe them all out.   In Head Crusher, he makes his way to Times Square where he finds a mafia-run brothel and through a bit of dumb luck (there is an attack on the boss of the brothel and Johnny shoots everyone he sees, accidently saving the boss's life) worms his way into a lieutenant position of a local high-ranking member of the family.  It turns out an internecine mafia war is brewing, as the capo from Queens wants territory from the uber-boss of Manhattan.  Johnny Rock, through his cold-blooded killing skill ends up playing a big role in helping the big boss win.  He doesn't care as long as he is killing mafia goons.  But when the war is over, he returns to his main goal and starts taking down the mafioso who have adopted him.

This book is not realistic at all.  However, unlike the last Butcher book I read, it's not preposterous.  The world portrayed seems pretty real, especially all the seedy stuff in Times Square and the mafia's hangouts and homes.  What's unrealistic is how quickly they accept him into the fold and how many of them he kills.  Nevertheless, the book is written with enough grit and intensity that you don't really care.  I actually really started to get into it by the second half.  It feels like a book written quickly by a competent writer, without a lot of regard to the overall structure.  There is one scene that was particularly good, when Johnny gets invited to dinner with the big boss and has a conversation with his educated, dissatisfied granddaughter.  She instantly recognizes him as someone not like the other men that hang around her family and they have a kind of connection.  Then at dinner, Johnny hardens, reminding himself of his mission and that his own murdered sister was very much like the granddaughter and he slaughters the entire family!  His only reprieve towards the granddaughter is that he can't bring himself to shoot her a second time, so she dies with only a single bullet through the chest.  Cold.

There are 15 books in the Sharpshooter series and they are fairly well-respected by fans of these numbered series of men's action and adventure.  I know they were cranked out by several authors with minimal oversight or editing, so I am not too picky about continuity and typos.  But what I don't understand is how in this book #7, Johnny can identify both the guy who carried out the hit on his family and the big boss who ordered it and off them in this volume.  Did he not get to them in the previous six books?  Or does each book have a new mafia leader who is responsible for his family's murder, making the whole thing into a kind of surreal, fantastic cycle of imaginary revenge?

Here is a good overview of the entire series, with some good background material.

20. Loan Shark by J.W. O'Dell

Phew!  Well this turned out to be an excellent antidote to that terrible Butcher novel I read before.  Right from the beginning, I could tell we were in a different level of quality with Loan Shark.  The writing is taut and the setting's grime, squalor and desperation of 1970s Times Square feels very real.

The story starts in medias res as deadbeat gambler and alcoholic Joey Casey loses all his bets in his last big play.  He is in deep to a shylock and not just any shylock, but one of the meanest and least compromising, Macaluso.  Worse, he drunkenly talked shit about Macaluso and even mocked his retarded daughter.  So Macaluso's two top goons, old pros Fine and Demera, are after him and it's quite possible that this time they'll take his life.

The other important character is Frank Cassidy, Joey's older, smarter and more responsible brother.  He is in his own bad place, but it is more psychological. He's a cop who never tried for promotion because that would have revealed how he lied about his identity to hide the existence of his brother with a record.  Furthermore, his wife had died.  Totally estranged from Joey, he spends his days working in a dull daze and his nights being depressed.

The whole book takes place in about a day and a half, with Casey on the run, swinging between despair, fear, anger, hopelessness, a lot of it related to whatever stage of drinking he is in.  Finally, he turns to his last option, his brother.  And that's what Loan Shark is about, the relationship between these two brothers and the choice Frank decides to make.

It's a quick, absorbing and intense read.  All the characters are richly portrayed with an efficiency of text and a realness that makes it effective.  The portrayal of Joey's alcoholism is extremely believable.  You hate the guy for his selfishness, his lying, his manipulation, but you also can't help but sympathize with his inevitable downward spiral.  Excellent book.  I can't find very much else about this author.  Anybody out there know anything about J.W. O'Dell?

19. Butcher #8 Fire Bomb by Stuart Jason

Wow, was this book ever terrible.  Just inept all the way through.  I'm certainly not a book snob (more like a snobby anti-snob, really).  I love gratuitous violence, cheap thrills and exploitation as much as the next red-blooded male.  I've never been a big fan of these numbered series of men's adventure novels, but I respect them for the role they played and the pleasure they gave to a lot of readers.  I've read a few myself already and they've generally been okay.  I've actually grown to appreciate them much more thanks to the recent discovery of Joe Kenney's excellent Glorious Trash blog where he reviews in some depth these kinds of books and compares them to each other.  Often, his blog posts are more fun than the books themselves, though he treats them with respect when they deserve it, which they often do.

I couldn't find a review of any of the Butcher novels in his blog, though he makes a passing reference to them, so he must have read them.  I'm just curious if he would consider this one any good.  It's just so badly done, walking this middle line of mediocrity where it is stupidly brutal but not brutal enough, preposterously unbelievable, but not over-the-top enough to make it fun, stupidly sexist without any real good sex and just terribly, terribly written.  It's almost as if it was written by a hard-working 15-year old boy with some promise who had only ever read numbered men's adventure novels.

Even the action is lame.  The Butcher always whips out his Walther P-38 (which can both blow a hole in a man's back the size of a teacup and hit a sniper high up in a building 100 yards away; nice gun!) which goes koosh!  koosh! every time.  There is no resistance to anything he does, not a single challenge.  So the whole book is just us following him around on this stupid quest by his organization White Hat to find some guy who is responsible for smuggling super high quality heroin into the states.  The big reveal is supposed to be how they do it, which is to mix it into a paste and make dolls out of it.  Then to fool customs, they stamp "Made in Hong Kong" on the back, so they won't realize it just got shipped from Iraq!

It's pointless for me to go on and on with the pathetic plot.  What makes this book really suck is the basic behaviour of the protagonist.  He kills everybody left and right, always figures everything out, but when then he is constantly getting totally surprised by the most obvious thing or having some weird over-reaction, like his hands trembling.  It's just so bad.  Even the cover is lame.  While not offensive, this is definitely the worst book I've read in quite some time and possibly the worst since I've been doing the fifty books thing.  I wish I had the wit and patience to actually make this review enjoyable for the reader, but I'm just too lazy.  So my apologies for the rant, but boy, that was a tough book to get through.  I'm glad it's over!

18. The Spiked Heel by Richard Marsten

I love corporate espionage and wish there were more good books in this sub-genre.  The 50s had a bunch and I stumbled upon this one in the Maritimes (man, that trip is still producing!).  I have to say that I am slightly pleased with my book choosing these last couple of years.  When I stumble upon an old paperback which interests me but whose author I am not familiar with, I really fret over whether or not I should pick it up.  So far in 2012, every single one of those books have turned out to be at least readable and often quite good.  The Spiked Heel was another succesful find by me.  After I read it, I did a bit of research and it turned out that Richard Marsten is the penname of Evan Hunter, who has the penname Ed McBain!  Dude was prolific.

The Spiked Heel takes place in a high-fashion shoe company in the mid-50s, mainly in their manufacturing headquarters in New Jersey (their sales office is in the Chrylser building in Manhattan).  A multi-generational family-owned company that was starting to get soft sells itself out to a much larger, mass-market shoe company from the south.  McQuade, a hatchet man, big, blond, too handsome and too charming, is brought in.  The protagonist, Griff, has worked at the company for 11 years and knows it from top to bottom.  At first he doesn't realize that McQuade is there to shake things up, but as the book moves along he not only finally cottons on to that, he learns that McQuade is a force of evil.

And that's what makes this book so crazy.  Ostensibly, it is about this new guy coming in and forcing changes onto this established company. The book goes into great detail about the structure of the company, how the factory is run, how shoes are made.  Some reviewers at the time found it a bit dull, but I found it fascinating.  This was the peak of American manufacturing, with the skilled manual labourers of the old world working in the industrial context, producing 2,500 beautifully made shoes a day.  And wow, they sure don't make shoes like this any more.  All the cost-saving measurements that McQuade forces onto the company are only precursors to the way all shoes are produced today.  You read about how shoes were made 50 years ago and you realize that even the fanciest bespoke shoes of today are actually pretty low quality.

But the real energy here is the hyper-Freudian McQuade and how he forces himself and his irresistable quest for power onto everyone around him.  It's kind of awesome.  Not only can the sensible typist not resist lifting her skirt and shaking her rump for McQuade, but she is aware of it and tries to prevent herself from doing it, but his animal sexuality is overpowering for her.  His first aggressive move is to break up a fight on the factory floor with a giant firehose, spraying his manhood all over the combatants until they cry.

There is also an interesting regional sub-text that I suspect presages the more stark blue-state, red-state division we see today.  McQuade is from the south as is the company he works for.  He is such an extreme character that he almost doesn't seem human.  He doesn't drink, he doesn't smoke, he doesn't laugh.  When his impoverished background is revealed and the ferocious drive it inspired, he reminds one of Max Cady from Cape Fear. The only other southern character shows up at the end of the novel and though a force for reason, seems almost like an extraterrestrial.  There is a real undercurrent that the South is the other and to be feared.  The voices in the book are from the second-generation immigrants, the Italians, the Jews, the Irish that made New York such a vibrant place in the 20th century.

There is a lot going on in this book and it doesn't all mesh well, like a smorgasbord of themes.  The notion of "decency" is crucial to the protagonist's final understanding of how evil McQuade is.  McQuade's technique is to do something brutal and then follow it up quite suddenly with disarming charm.  He does this once by sticking his hand out for a shake after Griff stops him from taking the way-too-drunk typist home.  When they grip, he then brutally crushes Griff's hand.  He does it a second time at the end of the book and Griff agonizes whether he should shake his hand.  He does again, to his regret again and realizes that it is common decency that compels us to respond when a man sticks out his hand for a shake.  McQuade's not respecting that demonstrates his fundamental lack of humanity.  I really enjoyed that idea.

However, there is a side story about a woman whom McQuade takes out and rapes and while it is portrayed from her perspective with a thorough and interesting look into her background, it still comes off as very nasty and punishing for her.  It's very in line with the sexual mores of the time (she was loose in her younger years, but was trying to change).  But I'm reminded of the nasty mysogyny in the other Ed McBain book I read.

In any case, thoroughly entertaining, with lots of rich material to analyze.  Mad Men has nothing on this stuff.

17. The Lotus Caves by John Christopher

The John Christopher Young Adult review of 2012 rolls on!  I had thought that the Tripods trilogy was my introduction to Christopher as a grade 6er, but as soon as I saw this cover for the Lotus Caves, I realized that this was in fact the first of his books that I read.  I even have a vague memory of Glen Dumont of all people telling me that it was really good.  It definitely made the rounds among our sixth grade class.

After rereading it, I feel that it has jumped ahead of the other of his YA books that I've recently read (excluding the Tripod trilogy).  It's tighter, with a strong focus.  The relationship between the boys is a bit more subtle as well.  Christopher has a tendency to pit the protagonist against a superior boy and having the protagonist always being resentful, which starts to get tiresome.  Here there is some of that, but it is much more complex and evolves nicely. 

It takes place in the year 2068 on a moon colony.  Because of the high-cost of resources and transport, life is very limited here.  Everybody lives under a single bubble and there really isn't that much to do.  The protagonist Marty suffers because his best friend gets sent back down to earth.  This is generally a one-way trip.  He soon makes friends with another boy, who is a bit of a loner and more daring.  After getting into trouble for one prank, they are barred from the local community center.  Boredom and their own restless spirits find them taking the lunar vehicles outside of the dome.  These things have regulators that only let them go a safe distance, but one day they find one with the key to unlock the regulator carelessly left in the vehicle.  So they decide to take the vehicle far out and do some exploring.

Their goal is the abandoned first station, where the first settlers stayed.  There they find a clue that leads them on to a fantastic discovery, a cave under the surface of the moon filled with fantastic plant life.  The only problem is that it really doesn't want them to leave. It's a study in willpower, freedom versus comfort and responsibility, with some really cool concepts along the way. 

I wonder if The Lotus Caves got edited by the same woman who helped him with the Tripod trilogy.  It's very well constructed, probably the perfect length for a twelve-year old.  The first half is about Marty's challenges of adolescent life on the moon.  The second is all about the lotus cave and the boys trying (or not trying as the seductive nature of the plant takes over their spirit) to escape.  Both sections are compelling and keep you wanting to read more, especially the second half.  The visuals are also really stimulating, with the cave taking form in my mind as I read it.  Good stuff.  You can see why it was so popular.  I wonder if it is still on the curriculum today.  It should be.

16. The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas

The more Ross Thomas books I read, the more I realize that the first book of his that I read, the Porkchoppers, is an anomaly.  It's fairly serious and straightforward and while there is a large cast of characters, it really focuses on one man.  My sense is that Thomas' usual style is a blend of tough crime and espionage with an undercurrent of dark humour, all pushed forward by a rich ensemble cast of characters who are either unique in their own right or the result of various crazy historical situations.

The Eighth Dwarf is the story of the early days of post-WWII espionage, as a group of people converge on Berlin searching for a rogue assassin who is taking out hidden ex-Nazis.  The main protagonist is Minor Jackson, an ex-OSS hotshot turned slacker turned (quite passively) spy/independent operator.  He is a bit of an empty construct, though, as it is Nicola Polescu, the charming, clever, sophisticated and untrustworthy dwarf who brings him into the game who is the real mover and shaker in the book.

Nick and Minor are hired by a German Jew in Mexico, the father of the rogue assassin, to find him and bring him back.  The Russians, the Brits and the US also want the assassin, all for their own reasons, and they all send their various representatives to war torn Germany to participate in the party.

It's a fun, lively read.  Ross Thomas writes books that are fun to read, as there is always something going on or an interesting character doing something cool.  The portrayal of 1946 Berlin is great as well, not too in-depth but full of black market basement restaurants, ruined hideouts, gangs of polish DPs (displaced persons), prostitutes wearing nothing but fur coats and more, all put together make for a really intriguing, adventuresome milieu.

I found the 1988 Mysterious Press edition, which has a nifty, though more symbolic than representational, cover.  Interestingly, there are quotes about Thomas from both John D. MacDonald and Eric AmblerIt stands out and I'll keep it, but I would probably be as ruthless as "the wicked dwarf" if it would help me to get my hands on this British version as discovered (and researched) by Louis XIV of the great Existential Ennui book blog.

15. The Incline by William Mayne

There is a whole world of British fiction for younger readers.  I only know a small sampling of it (The Box of Delights, Swallows and Amazons, Enid Blighton) but would like to know more.  There is a used bookstore in Winnipeg (Nerman's Books) that has an amazing selection of it (entire collections of authors) in their basement.  If I lived there, I would probably make more of a study of it.  The first bookstore we went to on our Maritimes trip was in Victoria in PEI and was called Kit Marlowe & Co.  The proprietor was a friendly, informative British woman and she had a small and selective stock with a lot of interesting british stuff.  She recommended William Mayne as having been a popular young adult author with a working class perspective.  The Incline is the book of his that I picked up there.

It's about a young man, Mason, who finishes school and starts a job working as a clerk in the bank in his village.  His father is the foreman of the local granite quarry, which is the economic heart of the little village.  The main storyline in the book is about the quarry losing money and then shutting down, but it is all seen through young Mason's viewpoint.  It's odd, because he is really young, seemingly just starting puberty, but he's finished schooling and starting out in the bank working alongside an older fellow.  I guess this is the period when the concept of "teenager" had yet to come into being.  It makes it difficult to understand his behaviour and thinking as he is at once much more adult than a person of his age today and at the same time, much less experienced.

The owner of the quarry came from the same roots as Mason's father, but has done well for himself and now owns the big house on the hill.  He also has a daughter that is about Mason's edge.  They used to play together, but now he has developed a crush on her.  She is weirdly infantalized, having been groomed for a higher class and sheltered from the realities that her peers in the village face.  She's nice, though, but wants to keep their relationship at the same level it was when they were toddlers together, while Mason is looking for something more serious (though even he is quite innocent about how it all works, believing only that he "loves" her).

It's an odd book, staying mainly in the cerebral.  While things actually happen, quite serious things, they never seem to disturb the dreamlike wondering that is Mason's worldview.  This book doesn't have any of the weight or bitterness I expected.  There is no resentment of the wealthy or crushing despair for the poor.  It just is what it is and doesn't seem all that unpleasant.  An interesting read, which probably requires some analysis and explanation by experts to help the 21st century North American reader to understand.

14. War of the Dons by Peter Rabe

This was probably the find of last summer's trip to the Maritimes.  I still remember running my finger down the horizontally stacked (and badly organized) paperbacks in the mystery section of this rambleshack used bookstore run by an ex-ship's engineer in Lunenburg, N.S. (check the back of the Canadian dime) and seeing the Godfather-esque typeface and the name Peter Rabe.  I got all excited, but immediately tried to act cool when I saw the price was $2.  I actually was nervous when the proprietor was going through my stack of books to calculate the total price that he would say, "hey wait a minute, let me just check this on ebay..." Fortunately it didn't happen.

War of the Dons is the story of the three Guarda brothers, who are top-ranked lieutenants in mafia don Messina's southern California organized crime empire. Marco, the leader, sees Messina as weakening and wants to get him out of the way and take over.  The three brothers pretty much run everything anyways.  Then things get really complicated.  I don't mean a big mess, but just really complicated.  This book takes the idea of the outfit as a complex business organization and really runs with it. The conflict between the traditional family roots and the modern business structure of organized crime is a big theme here, anticipating the cynicism with which Stark portrays the mob (basically as the IRS with guns and equally hated).

Most of the book follows the Guardas, their sattelites and the big bosses at the top as the Guardas succesfully kill Messina but then have to try and hold on to the power in the vacuum they have created.  For the first half, I found it a cool and engaging narrative, exposing a fascinating world with lots of juicy details of personalities, locations and ways the mob works.  But I wasn't blown away, kind of feeling that maybe Rabe had mailed this one in a bit to cash in on some editor's request to cash in on the godfather craze.  But things take off in the second half and you get a taste of what makes Rabe such an interesting writer.

The book focuses here on the three brothers and their relationships, probing deeper than what we had previously seen on Marco in particular.  Pepe, the oldest, is the crazy, sexual strongarm.  Nuncio is the weaker business guy.  (I'm pretty sure there is some correlation here with the id, ego and superego but I'm too lazy to figure it out.)  Marco is the fascinating one.  He spends most of the book under incredible tension, trying to hold his increasingly-complex plans together.  He is cold and seems motivated by ambition but also a desire just to make the thing work.  But when it does all go to shit, he suddenly relaxes, desiring only to wreak havoc on his opponents just for the sake of the havoc.  He goes back and forth between this freedom from pressure to uber-tenseness several times in the book and it is this duality in his character that's the most compelling (and what the plot ultimately seems to be driving at).

It's not a perfect book.  The pacing is inconsistent, especially at the end.  I would have loved another 50 pages on what was wrapped up in one.  But I think students of Parker would do well to read this book.  I don't even know if this was one of Rabe's works that influenced Westlake, but there is a similar and maybe more complex relationship to power and authority here as there is in the Parker saga.  Good, intense stuff.

13. Gangway! by Donald E. Westlake and Brian Garfield

This was a nice $2 find from, if my faltering memory is holding up, the Maritimes.  However, I am really not a big fan of the aesthetic of this edition.  Because the book takes place in the late 19th century, but was published in the early '70s, they had to give it that heinous slightly abstract '70s old-timey aesthetic.  Shudder.  I grew up with that (I remember my friends had a wallpaper of it in their bathroom), couldn't stand it then and can't stand it today.  But still, it's a nice paperback of a pretty fun read and a less well known Donald Westlake.

Gangway! can be pretty easily encapsulated as a historical heist comedy novel or for those of you familiar with Westlake, Dortmunder in 1870's San Francisco.  It also reminded me a lot of Westlake's comedy capers like High Adventure.  If any of that is up your alley, then Gangway! is probably worth putting on your list.

The protagonist, Gabe Beauchamp, is a con from Hell's Kitchen, forced to go to San Francisco by his local ward boss.  A lot of the book is about Gabe hating and adjusting to what he considers living in the boonies, though the authors go a long way towards making it more of a mockery of the New Yorker who has never left Manhattan.  Gabe has a nose and a skill for crime and is immediately attracted to the Federal mint and the wagonloads of gold bars that are shipped into it from the mines around SF (this is the late gold rush period).  So he assembles a string of wacky characters, including a streetsmart San Franciscan women who takes a shine to his exotic east coast ways.

He comes up with an elaborate, dubious plan that very much invokes the title of the book and involves a lot of other interesting characters and wacky situations.  I found some of the humour a bit forced, just not quite as tight and polished as the Dortmunder novels, but it never gets in the way and overall supports a light, pleasant tone that makes for quick and enjoyable reading.  The heist itself is quite fun and would have made for a great movie.

There is a great interview with Brian Garfield (author of Death Wish among many other things) and he talks about his days in the 60s and 70s playing in a regular poker game with Westlake as well as how they collaborated on Gangway!

Don Westlake had a blinding-fast mind. He always seemed to have on the tip of his tongue the sort of wonderful witty rejoinders that occur to most of us a day or two too late. In 1970 we got the idea that it would be amusing to try combining our strengths in a Western comedy novel. We wrote Gangway!, and it turned out to be quite funny, I think. Henry sold it and it did fairly well. But our ambitions to sell it as a basis for a movie didn’t work out. And we’d done it in a silly way—each of us would write a draft, then turn it over to the other, who’d rewrite the whole thing and give it back. It was about four times as much work as either of us would have put in individually on a book. So we didn’t try that again. But it was fun, and we got to know each other’s working styles.

12. All I Can Get by William Ard

This was another exciting old paperback find at an outdoor book fair in the Laurentians last summer.  I really should have bought more.  There was some great stuff there. 

While this turned out to be an enjoyable read, the cover does not reflect the interior of the book at all well.  Yes, that scene takes place and yes there is a girl who plays for fun and yes I guess the protagonist, Lou Largo P.I. does play for keeps.  But this book is not some intense, torrid, hard-boiled tale of sexual conflict.  The tone is the biggest thing not well-represented by the cover.  It's actually kind of light and humorous, closer to Boston Blackie than Philip Marlow.  And the story is actually about a wealthy newspaper tycoon who invests in a morning paper in a small city across the bay from Tampa in an attempt to take over the market and the resistance he and his allies face from the mob (well mobs, as both the mafia and the Cubans are fighting over the turf). 

There is another story wrapping around the newspaper narrative.  At the beginning of the book, the newspaper tycoon hires Lou Largo to investigate a beautiful, young woman with whom he just fell in love and has proposed to marry after meeting her hours earlier (this is where the light tone starts off).  Of course, Lou, after discovering that she is a total party girl, gets with her.  Though it is "a Lou Largo novel", Lou leaves the story for the next half of the book, where we follow the tycoon as he goes to Tampa to sell the newspaper and take his star editor back with him to NYC.  He is also planning on marrying his fiancé as well, but gets caught up in the mob war and changes his mind on selling the paper.  The story then moves into main gear and we get lots of good (actually fairly hard-boiled) gang war stuff, beatings, stand-offs, gunfights, corrupt cops and so on. 

It really reminded me a lot of "The Fools in Town Are on our Side", though a bit neater in its wrap-up and a bit lighter in its overall tone.  It was kind of a fun book, but just not as heavy as what I was expecting.  Now I shall go and see if Lou Largo actually had a series.

11. All These Condemned by John D. MacDonald

My copy of this is the same depicted here, except with a 35¢ price tage and in even worse condition.  It's almost on its last legs, with the pages separating from the spine, though not yet falling out.

It's an early John D. MacDonald and though it hinges around a murder mystery, it is much more a study of the soullless, broken bourgeoisie of the mid-fifties and probably thus fell into the literary genre rather than the mystery.  The copy on the back and inside front cover suggests that it was marketed that way.

The story is about 8 people who go to a weekend at the beautiful country lodge of the rich and manipulative cosmetics executive, Wilma Ferris, who in some way owns them all.  She drowns during some skinny-dipping on Saturday night and the ostensible hook of the book is for the reader to find out whodunnit.  It's structured in a neat way, with each chapter being the viewpoint of one of the 8 people, either from a "before" or "after" the murder.  We get to see how each of them think, how they think of the others and what their relationship was with the victim.

It's good, engaging stuff.  All of them are in some ways broken or on the verge of being broken.  In many cases, they are in this state because of Wilma Ferris.  MacDonald, though, doesn't seem to really blame Ferris.  From his perspective, they are all examples of the modern condition, people so far removed from the honest basics of hard work and treating people right, that they have no moral compass in the first place and it is easy for a cruel sociopath like Wilma Ferris to push them in the wrong direction.

I have only watched a few episdes of Mad Men, but upon finishing this book, I kind of felt the whole series is kind of superfluous.  They were trying to critique the flaws of that era in multiple episodes, when John D. MacDonald did it in a single book, with a lot more punch.  The other thought I had upon finishing this book was that although I look upon a lot of the naive excesses of the '60s with a great deal of superior scorn and contempt, when you jump into the era that went before, you kind of feel that the over-reaction of the 60s made a lot of sense.