43. The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

For some reason, I thought this book was a big deal in the Paperbacks from Hell world, but it turns out to get only a passing mention (and a photo of the cover).  I guess it's infamy in the film world is more likely where I heard about it.  The movie adaptation by Ridley Scott was a famous production disaster and bomb, though of course, now somewhat more appreciated for its efforts.  I've seen it and it really is a mess and it's too bad too because the book if done well would make a great movie.

This book has a minor history for me as well.  It was quite hard to find a copy and I finally came across one at The Monkey's Paw in Toronto.  I was pleased because The Monkey's Paw is a unique little used book store that sells more "antiquarian" books and the genre books are extremely curated.  Unfortunately, I was with my sister, a chaos agent and after I had gotten about a quarter of the way through, I somehow lost the book on a trip to an estate sale with her.  I never lose books! It was quite vexing and took me a while to get through it psychologically and several years before I found another copy.  I made sure I was not travelling and kept this one only at home and am quite satisfied that I finished it.

The setup is excellent. A troop of wermacht have been sent to occupy a stone fortress in the remote mountains of Romania.  It is built into such a steep environment, across a gorge from a small village, that it only gets a few hours of sunlight a day.  Even more odd, it is in pristine condition and utterly abandoned.  Captain Klaus Woermann, an old soldier whose loyalty is to the army and Germany and not to the Nazis, is growing sick of the war and questioning their leadership. When he arrives, the caretakers warn him that nobody is allowed in the keep.  Things go bad fast as each night, one of his men is brutally murdered by something that seems to walk through walls.  After much agonizing, he sends a request to Germany to be allowed to leave, but instead they send an SS Major Kaempffer, an old colleague (and adversary because Woermann saw that he was a coward) from the previous war.  Kaempffer is on his way to Romania to set up a big new location for a concentration camp, a significant step up in his career but he first has to deal with this issue in the keep to demonstrate to his superiors that he is competent.

So we have an old German soldier with some honour squaring off against a cowardly and sadistic SS officer in an ancient redoubt with some supernatural power that is killing them all.  It is very satisfying to watch the Nazis go from sneering, sadistic arrogance to shit in your pants fear (and getting their throats ripped out).  As an aside, this book was written in 1981 when I was an adolescent and while there was much anti-Semitism back then, it was an era where WWII and the evil of the Nazis was still very present in Canadian culture.  I think part of this is why so many older people were (and are) still sympathetic to Israel and buying into their propaganda that their behaviour towards the Palestinians is somehow justified.

The Nazis learn of a scholar in Bucharest who may be able to decipher the writing scrawled in Nazi blood on the wall and the history of the keep in general.  He is super sick with some degenerative nerve disease and so his beautiful and resourceful daughter also has to come along. They start to figure out what is going on and try and use this against the Nazis.  The father also wants his daughter to flee out of Romania because he knows what is coming, but she refuses out of love and loyalty to him. Finally, we get brief snippets of a guy who was working as a fisherman in Greece when he suddenly has to leave, digs up a long package and a money belt full of various gold pieces and starts making his way across war-torn Europe to Romania.  All these exciting elements come together in an epic clash that will decide the future of mankind!

I quite enjoyed The Keep, especially the first 3/4.  It's always tough to end these sorts of supernatural books, because we now have so many narratives in all media of some great evil that has to be put down.  The Nazis and the context of being in Romania in 1941 make it quite interesting.  There are enough details and history to make it all fit well.  The ending was well done but didn't totally rejoice me as it possibly could have.  Overall, it's a well-constructed 1980s page-turning horror adventure.

 

42. Tyler's Row by 'Miss Read'

There must already be an existing genre for this kind of book, quite well-known among a certain generation.  It's a cozy cozy.  Or just a cozy.  I mean look at the cover!  I read after that it is the middle of a 20+ series of books about an English village called Fairacre and all the people and goings-on that happen in and around it in the second half of the 20th century.  I suspect that other than that they are in post-war England, the actual decades do not matter that much, as the interactions that go on among the townsfolks and visitors are mostly timeless.

Tyler's Row is specifically about a small property with four little cottages on it. The owner is getting old and decides to sell it.  After some back and forth, it is purchased by a middle-aged couple whose grown children have left home.  The story is basically about them inspecting the property, their decision behind buying it, fixing it up and dealing with their two difficult tenants.  Interspersed with their story, in the third person, is the first person narrative of Miss Read herself, the local primary school principal, who also hears the village scuttlebutt about goings-on a Tyler's Row.

It's like a plate of digestive cookies at tea, very easy to eat and satisfying.  The worst tension is a possible cat poisoning, but the cat survives and you are quite sure it will (and animal death was not such a big deal in rural England in those times as it is today).  Otherwise, the pleasures in this book are the pleasant exchanges of the various people and the revelations of their character.  There are some barbs in the dialogue and not everyone is so pleasant themselves, but underlying it all is an appreciation of the British character.  You can see why she was much loved and earned the Order of Britain.

It's funny because my sister just told me after reading a lot of British books that maybe deep down, the reality is that the British are just awful people.  This was further reinforced by listening to this great radio show where Henry Rollins and Ian Mackaye recount their first tour of England with Black Flag and what an utter shitshow it was. They were not paid, not fed, only sheltered by the kindness of punk strangers and spit upon by the crowd.  I get the resentment of Americans at that time, but just the general cheapness and squalor did bring home to me that despite all these idyllic fictons, England has a very brutal, nasty side that we should not forget. 

You will forget it reading any of Miss Read's books and if that interests you, I recommend that you do. Very enjoyable. 

 

41. The Ship of Ishtar by A. Merritt

One of my reading side quests is finding and reading some of the more obscure of the famous (in gaming circles) Appendix N of the original Dungeon Master's Guide.  Gary Gygax listed all the authors that inspired D&D and it has since been shared as a reference, critiqued and added to by the tabletop RPG community.  Goodman Games in particular has made a big deal about it and helped to revive awareness of it.  The did their own expanded Appendix N and often highlight specific authors in their blog, including this one specifically about Merritt by influential gaming blogger James Maliszewski So in the last year, I found two A. Merritt books in paperback.  I knew nothing about him and was pleased to see that he was writing in the 20s and 30s so really back in the origin of pulp fiction.

I was receptive to the Ship of Ishtar right from the beginning.  First of all, this cover is awesome.  Second, it starts not in medias res per SE (can you say that?), but pretty much right into the situation.  Kenton, presumably a well-to-do New Yorker is in his study standing before an excquisite miniature ship that just appeared from behind the dissolving mists of a slab of masonry another scientist explorer friend had sent him.  As he stares at the ship, noticing tiny figures on the deck, he finds himself sucked into the ship and the world it is in.  He becomes entangled in the war between Ishar, Goddess of Light and Nergal, God of Darkness who are battling it out on this ship through the complex machinations of the Gods as a result of two of their highest priest and priestess falling in love.  The spiritual construction and plot leading up to the ship situation is complicated, but basically the ship is black on one side and white on the other, with representatives of each God on each side and they cannot cross (it's like a curse against the two lovers).  Kenton arrives and can cross back and forth and thus upsets the balance and becomes the vehicle (and hero) to break the curse.

The spiritual stuff was way to detailed for me.  Merritt is like a gamemaster who desperately wants to create a complex pantheon and religious history where his players just want to cast fireballs.  I think audiences of the 20s and 30s went in for this exotic mysticism.  Fortunately, the characters and action in between the religious stuff are pretty frickin' awesome.  I get why this is in Appendix N.  Kenton meets basically an adventuring party:  Zubar the urban Persian warrior who will accept anything but boredom, Gigi the with the powerful upper body, Dwarven legs and a backstory of regret due to baldness and Siggurd the Viking always ready for Valhalla.  The bad guy is Klaneth, the evil priest and the love interest is Sharane, priestess of Ishtar.  The ship sails across this fantasy world, visiting cool little islands, cities of evil priests and in the finale a vast labrynth of coloured stones thrusting out of the sea.  The action is excellent and super gory!  There are two lovingly detailed decapitations, much smashing and bashing with blunt weapons and a really nasty eye-gouging.  I was quite surprised by the level of gore.

Now this is some 1920s stuff, so while it is not straight up racism and nowhere near bad as Burroughs, it definitely has the language of that period of racial distinctions.  It's actually not that bad given the time period, leaning more towards patronization and exoticism.  The treatment of the women is worse, though again, not negative and aggressive.  Sharane and her priestesses do get armoured up and fight at the end, but one gets tired of her constantly telling Kenton that he is her lord.  Ultimately, it's a white male fantasy so one's enjoyment of the book probably depends on how much of that sort of thing one can tolerate.  I will say that it is a really lively and creative one, with all kinds of cool situations and imagery, marred a bit by too-long passages of religion that kind of lost me.  I'm looking forward to the second book of his I have on deck.

This actually happens

Zubran, the Persian

40. The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Caudwell

This is the third in the Hilary Tamar series of lightly comic mysteries, where the manners of the young lawyers at Lincoln's Inn are as much a part of the fun as the mystery itself.  I've read the first one, own the 3rd and 4th but held off on continuing until I find the second.  A stalwart reader informed me that I don't have to read them in order, thus lifting the shackles of continuity and allowing me to take this one on my August vacation for some fun light reading.

These books stand out for two reasons (at least the two that I have read).  First is that they feature esoteric British legal knowledge.  You actually learn about English tax law (I think, as much of it I couldn't fully understand) and it's a bit off-putting for non-lawyer at first, but soon becomes integrated into the narrative in a way that is kind of fun.  She also has excerpts from I believe fictional travel guide for Lincoln's Inn lawyers (or barristers or whatever) specifically where she lays out the highlights of each of the various Channel Islands that are visited (and heavily featured in the plot).

The second is that much of the action is told in an indirect or epistolary manner (as was the case in the first book).  The main action is by a young lawyer who accidentally gets caught up in a pursuit/protection of a client and narrates his adventures via telexes sent back to London.  Tamar also has conversations with people where they narrate what happens to them.  Little of the actual action happens at the point where you are reading.  It's odd but doesn't distract or distance from the narrative somehow.

The story here involves a group of trustees who have moved a bunch of money in a trust out of England for tax reasons and are now trying to figure out how to free up the money for the intent of the original trust.  The wrinkle is that, from what I could understand, because of some missing paperwork, the money would go to the natural heirs rather than the intended benficients of the trust or something.  It sounds boring and taxey which it is but the trustees themselves are a colourful group of people and they keep getting murdered.  Much of the book takes place on one Channel Island after another, which is interesting, as we learn more about the trustees' pasts and try and link it together.  As usual, I was a bit lost on the mystery but enjoyed the ride.

39. Hidden Histories of the Jazz Age New York: From the Suppressed to the Strange by Jonathan Ezra Goldman

I must express my bias outright, as Jonathan Goldman, Joyce Expert, scholar, musician and all around cool guy, is a friend of mine.  This is his third book but the first two, though, compelling were way too academic for me to read.  I was worried about this one, but since I was going to visit him in NYC, I was motivated to get reading.  I did not need to worry about this one being too academic as, while still built on a good academic foundation (a basic thesis, thorough research), it is eminently readable.  

I don't know if this kind of book has a name already.  It was unique in structure to me.  Basically, he goes through all the various non-dominant (re: white, male, Protestant) peoples who have been neglected in history and finds all their little histories.  There is a lot of small bits of info and it can kind of wash over this reader in its totality, but at the same time it weaves a rich tapestry of all the diverse communities and cultures in New York and all the things they were doing culturally and politically.  You really get a great feeling of what a rich, vibrant city New York was and how so much of those strains of fighting for the community over the big corporation are built into its history.  

There are also many crazy little anecdotes and tidbits that pop up that add to the interest.  I can't imagine (but will ask) on the amount and type of research that went into this book.  There is a lot of straight up popular culture that would have been gleaned from the newspapers at the time, but there is also much deeper knowledge of specific movements.  He spends a lot of time on Marcus Garvey, for instance, which would have required a deeper range of primary and secondary material.

I know one specific audience who would benefit from reading this book:  Call of Cthulu RPG fans.  The classic version of the game takes place a little later, in the 30s, but this book is close enough in time and so full of great detail that it would be an ideal aid to the GM.  You could just use it to broaden your knowledge of New York culture history.  Beyond, there are so many individuals, factions, neighbourhoods that can be used for encounters and plot hooks just as is and even more so with a little occult shenanigans added to their behaviours.

38. Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe

Some of you may already recognize the title.  It is the 1979 book upon which Die Hard is based.  I've read several good recommendations for it and have been looking for it for a while. I found this uninspiring trade paperback in San Jose, CA while waiting for a tour of The Winchester Mystery House (very touristy but worth it) and since a better version seems very hard to find, I picked it up.

It's very hard to read and discuss this book without thinking about the movie.  The film deserves its reputation as an all-time great.  I've seen it many times and hope to take my child to see it when she is old enough to appreciate it (it's playing at the Cinématheque Québecoise on August 15, but we will be away).  Furthermore, it's hard to write about the book without giving away spoilers as part of the fun for reading it is to see how it differs from the movie.  I'll do a separate spoiler section at the end.  Read at your peril.

The premise here is a great one.  Joe Leland is on his way from New York to visit his now successful upcoming executive daughter in LA for xmas.  He is an ex-cop, ex-private detective and now a very high-level security consultant on terrorism.  He sees her only briefly at her office xmas party where they are celebrating the closing of a big business deal before the place is taken over by terrorists.  Leland who was in the bathroom is able to sneak off and spends the rest of the book wrecking the terrorists' plans while trying to save his daughter and grandchildren.  This is all seen through Leland's eyes and brain and as the action is going on, he is reminiscing through all the ups and downs (mostly downs) of his own life: his descent into alcoholism, his divorce and how it messed up his daughter, his fears about the brutality of a military response and on the positive side, the stewardess that he really vibed with on the plane (and whose number he has).

The biggest difference between Nothing Last Forever and Die Hard is that the book is much more firmly set in the 1970s worldview.  It's really about the conservative reaction to the extremist counterculture that came out of the 60s.  The big twist in the movie is that the terrorists are pretending to be supporting some vague leftist cause but are really just there to steal the money, which is an extremely 80s motif (and came to be the main idea in most of the Die Hard sequels and basically the motivation for almost all big bad guy movies since).  Leland is killing educated, upper middle-class euro-revolutionaries and kind of ambivalent about it.  The actions in the book lean right, but his thoughts are pretty balanced.  He just wants to survive and in the end, the corporation comes off as guilty if not worse than the terrorists. It's an interesting read from that perspective (though again hard to parse with the movie so dominant in mind).  I really need to read The Detective, the prequel to this one (which was also made into a movie with Frank Sinatra).

Themes and politics aside, it's a really fun read. The action is tight and you feel the pain and filth of Leland as he gets more and more messed up.  Some of the more elaborate physical situations, like him tying the firehose around himself and jumping off the roof get a bit unclear in my mind but this is probably due to my own laziness.  You can see why it got made into a movie.  It is kinetic as hell and almost all of it takes place in its own limited space.  The side characters are good too, though the movie does a great job of making them even more fun.  It also has a grim humour in it, though overall the tone is much darker than the movie.  I would have really liked this book even if Die Hard had never been made (though thank The Gods that it was).

 

 

 

SPOILER STUFF

 

 

 

 

The biggest difference between the movie and the book is that it is his daughter that he is going to visit (his divorced wife died in a car accident).  At first this seems like a smaller detail and we won't get the reconciliation from the movie, but as we get to the end, it becomes thematically a much bigger deal.  The daughter always had a wild side and in the book she is dating her boss, Ellis, the arrogant cokehead.  We learn that the big business deal was super shady, ostensibly to build a bridge in Chile, but it turns out also to sell arms to the repressive Pinochet regime (this is the reason the terrorists are going after the money, to give back to the Chilean people or something).  And Leland is critical of his daughter's involvement in this as he realizes what is going on.  She in effect becomes the sinner as much as the terrorists and suffers the same fate.  Yes, it's quite a brutal ending, though in its own dark way ending with a weird kind of family resolution with a suggestion that Leland will get with the nice stewardess and they will adopt the grandchildren.  His family state is restored.

37. Richer than all his Tribe by Nicholas Monsarrat

This is the sequel to The Tribe that lost its Head and was the original purchase that started it all.  The photo cover here is not very well executed, as the sexy white lady on the drum looks more like an abstract shape peanut or the top of an ice cream sundae and the whole thing looks like a jack-o-lantern.  Still, the two books together make an attractive diptych.

Richer than all his Tribe jumps ahead from the brutal transition to independence that concluded the first book.  Now the fictional island country of Pharamaul is independent, though still part of the Commonwealth with the Queen at its head.  David Bracken is the head of the civil service and has two elementary school age children.  He is on good terms with the ex-chief now Prime Minister, Dinamaula and working with his new Pharamaulian counterpart.  Things have settled down from the upheaval, though getting ready to upheave very soon), though there is still discontent from the Whites who have businesses, servants, etc.  

This book is done in a series of vignettes (though each one is much longer and more narrative than just a vignette) with some time skips between each one, so a lot happens.  On the political side, the Africans want to move faster to independence than Bracken wishes.  They jump to become a Republic (and the Prime Minister becoming President) and then to a really scary tyranny, culminating in genocide.  Though there is a lot of thinking I don't agree with in the book, this progression felt terrifyingly realistic.  On the characters side, we continue to follow David Bracken and his family and that becomes the most solid link to the first book, but most of the side characters leave quite quickly when things turn against them.  We get a new white, English character, Paul Jordan who is the aide to the president, both treated with contempt but also kept around because Dinamaula depends on him.  He is young and single and we get the romantic angle with him meeting a young Chinese-American woman on his trip to the United Nations (there is some cringeworthy orientalism in the description of their sexy time together, but mostly she is well created and a real person).

The bias of the benevolent colonialism is still the prevalent theme here, with a massive lack of self-awareness endemic to that mindset, yet I found it much less offensive.  Monsarrat spends a lot of time exposing and critiquing the excesses, corruption and ultimately brutality of the Africans being in charge and draws it up like it's because "they aren't ready for civilization" rather than understanding where the culture of authority and violent repression may have come from in the first place.  Despite that, he equivocates in the end, when Bracken is met with a shrug of the shoulders from his own government and finally a fairly thoughtful soliloquy by his retired boss, who lays out how the African will never forget the atrocities laid on them by colonialism.  I wouldn't say it is redemption but this book delivers a more nuanced portrayal of the challenges of moving from colonial rule to independence than the first book does in depicting the initial transition.  And it is pretty scathingly critical of almost every character, except the British mid-level civil servants, Jordan and Bracken, who are the innocent, right-minded functionaries trying their best as the structures around them collapse and their leaders betray them.

 

From a functional perspective, the book really does an almost excellent job of portraying the challenges of moving from colonialism to independence.  The solution according to Bracken is to go slowly, but Monsarrat does a good job of showing how that would almost never happen in this context.  He portrays the interference of the Russians as a strong factor (with a ridiculous coda at the end, suggesting the Pharamaul will become a launching point for nuclear bombs and that Lord Protector Dinamaul could take over all of Africa and then possibly the world), as well as the "Afro-Asian" block of newly liberated ex-colonialist countries, who unite at the UN.  Here is where his blinders are at their worst, portraying a situation that is disturbingly similar to the right-wing racists today who argue that white people are somehow victims of racism and crushed under the woke ideology.  He makes it seem like this Afro-Asian block has basically dominated the UN while white liberals desperately kowtow to them.  He almost completely ignores the massive power of the large corporations who were doing everything they could, with the assistance of western governments to destabilize the new independent governments and continue to steal their resources.   I keep getting back to critiquing Monsarrat's colonialist viewpoint, but my main takeaway was that the actual portrayal of what happened and (mostly) why it happened is quite convincing and richly portrayed.  Colonel Mboku, the police officer initially recruited by the English who rises to become the terrifying fist of Dinamaula seems very realistic.

 

Finally, while the conclusion is far more horrific and destructive than the violence that led to independence at the end of the first book, Monsarrat avoids the sexual violence to the female characters in this one (though the threat is hovering around).  It all just felt much more real and less manipulative here and made for a very impactful book.   

36. Seven Men of Gascony by R.F. Delderfield

Delderfield is just so darned readable.  I've had Seven Men of Gascony on my shelf for quite a while.  The cover does little for me.  I'm just not a fan of the Napoleonic era, though not sure why.  The aesthetics?  The horribly confusing mess that is European politics at the time?  So I was putting it off, but it made at the near bottom of my vacation grind pile and I'm glad it did.

It's Delderfield retelling the Napoleonic campaigns from the perspective of the front row soldiers, specifically the Voltigeurs who were marksman responsible for holding the frontmost point in the place of battle.  The book is framed by an old veteran living alone in a small town in 1840 when Napoleon dies.  When he hears the news, he reaches for an old pile of sketches, which launch us back to 1809 when a young artistically-talented Gabriel, after his adoptive mother dies, volunteers for the French army.  He meets his fellow soldiers (the six other men), and more abruptly their dog, Fouché, when he tries to steal some of their food.  The sergeant is Jean, a grizzled vet and totally loyal to Bonaparte.  The 5 others are Nicholas the cynical ex-teacher, Louis the horse whisperer, Dominique the simple fiddler, Claude the young and handsome and Manny the Jewish ex-circus performer.  Following along is the camp cantinière, Carla and her daughter Nicholette, the latter whom figures significantly in the overarching storyline.

Seven Men of Gascony reminded me somewhat of the Black Company books.  The language is richer and more complete but otherwise in form it is basically a series of vignettes within each significant campaign.  As I say above, it is very readable.  I only got a bit confused when Delderfield gets into the historical and military specifics, but since the bulk is from the soldiers' perspective, that was very rare.  Other than entertainment, one of the important functions of historical fiction is to impart the history via those who were living it and I definitely learned some broad strokes of this period in Europe.  

It loses its steam somewhat as it approaches the end. This is not so much because of the writing but because it takes place in the retreat from Moscow and this just rough and depressing, no matter how much Delderfield's schoolboy enthusiasm for historical war makes it seem somehow bearable.  It's just rough though Nicholette's narrative (also very rough) keeps you turning the pages.  The climax is the battle of Waterloo and I think this would have been more effective if you had already studied it as the military significance (other than the final blow of Napoleon's empire), kind of went over my head.

Ultimately, the book is about friendship and camarderie in the world of war and it is a very effective and  enjoyable one.

35. the antagonists by William Haggard

Now this is Haggard in fine form.  Charles Russell of the Executive Branch spends the entirety of this book doing his job.  There are no dalliances with younger women and no dates in acceptably unpretentious Italian restaurants.  It's a classic Haggard situation.  An elite radar scientist, Alexander Gorjan, from an eastern European, Communist country (but still a sovereign nation) collapses while on a talk in England (in quite a funny, British scene where he lashes out at a British anti-nuclear aristocratic lefty).  The ambassador of said country comes to Russell and reveals that his country is under significant pressure from the Russians.  There is a risk of a major political upheaval, which the Russians would exploit, between the old guard, who are communist but also nationalists, and the new younger politicians who are much more religious in their communism and beholden to the big commie master.  The old guard want Gorjan held in England indefinitely to protect him during this turmoil.

This leads to a complicated game where the Russians are trying to kill Gorjan and now the Americans want his knowledge. The Americans in this case are coming from the diplomatic side, not the intel side, and Russell loathes this as diplomats, like civil servants will always screw things up and are just generally ideologically loathsome to Russell. 

At first, I was a bit nonplussed to the setup, but things get quite complicated.  The wild card is the traitor to the unnamed small country, working for the Russians as he is forced to flee when his initial plan to assassinate Gorjan in the hospital fails.  There are quite a few really good, short action scenes and some excellent London locations, including a cool raid on a block of flats with a bunch of small manufacturing shops on the inside.  I don't know if this is a trope with Haggard yet, but there is a West Indian nurse again and her race is constantly referenced.  Gorjan is a good scientist and communist but also likes his wine and women and somehow he and this nurse start a regular thing which is kind of cringey but also kind of fun.  He also really goes hard after a fellow traveller journalist who is a woman and promiscuous.  I'd say at the very bottom of Haggard/Russell's list of contempt are educated leftists.  He loves to skewer them and he does it to men and women, it just feels nastier here and a bit of a "straw woman", though in the end her punishment is not cruel at all and quite funny as well.  [spoiler alert:  she is forced to marry the American whom she helped to get at Gorjan.]

34. Nails by R. Lance Hill

This was a pretty neat find, a previously unknown to me 1970s Canadian crime paperback.  They really hype it up on the cover and I have since learned that R. Lance Hill was a fairly successful writer in Hollywood, hitting his peak with the original Road House.  Nails is an interesting contrast to the Long Masquerade that I had just read.  The former is a man's action adventure book disguised as a chick romance.  Nails is kind of a romance/relationship tale disguised as man's crime.  The excellent opening of a drug ripoff involving snowmobiles next to a frozen lake in Creston, B.C. and the ending chapters frame the middle which is mostly about the protagonist running a club, deciding who he is and what to do with his life and most significantly being in a relationship with two different women.  

After the drug rip-off, where protagonist Joe Black, also cold-bloodedly shot and killed the other courier, the main narrative starts off back in time.  There is a major factual error I noted right away here, first, that he says normally it takes 4-5 hours to get from Creston to Vancouver, which is completely untrue, more like 10 hours and would have been even slower back then before they built the new highway.  I can only guess that Hill was writing this from memory in Hollywood.  But I'll let it pass.  The feel is Canadian and he clearly knows Vancouver of that time.  We only get snippets of Joe's past, including that he had travelled around when growing up and had been drifting post-college as well before returning to Vancouver.  Of his character, though, we learn that he has an extreme sense of pride as well as a cold rationality and zero hesitation to fight.  He gets a job with a wealthy high school friend to manage a new club he has just opened.  The bulk of the rest of the book is him managing the club, the challenges of difficult patrons, his friends trying to get him to commit to staying while the entire time he is itching to just get on the road and drift.

He meets a beautiful stewardess and she immediately falls in love with him.  He later meets a beautiful wealthy Shaugnessy debutant and she also seems quite smitten with him.  As the book goes on, his drive to make quick money and get out fights constantly with the pressure around him to settle into this good life.  There is another thread where he comes more and more into confrontation with the psycho son of a local crime family.  Though Italian, they are not true organized crime, but run a bunch of extortion and drug dealing locally.  These threads all come crashing together.

There was a lot of relationship narrative in the middle, interspersed with some cringey (though not too bad) race relations.  One of his friends is a Black cop.  There are also several really nasty mysgonistic scenes thrown in.  I was sort of losing patience with the book but then when the crime stuff picks up, the book gets really good again.  Hill has an excellent writing style for that world, as well as realistic seeming characters and details.  He needed a sitdown with Richard Stark to excise some of the 70s self-involved character development and human relations and we would have had a 70s pulp masterpiece.  Still, not bad.  It's funny, his Wikipedia is all about his screenwriting career.  He doesn't even have a bibliography but he's written a few books.  I'll keep my eye out.

Way more details here than
in Hill's Wikipedia bio

33. The Long Masquerade by Madeline Brent

A few years ago, Rennaissance, a chain of thrift stores that I think supports some charity, opened up a books-only store on St-Denis.  It has a very small english section and like so many thrift stores, they prioritize trade paperbacks and big names, but every now and then you can find an actual decent book there, so I do very much appreciate its existence.  I was shopping for the latest Hunger Games book for my daughter and popped in and found The Long Masquerade.  The cover is clearly targetting a female audience, but I had my suspicions (the Fontana imprint was a big clue) and the little I read of the back blurb suggested there may be as much adventure as romance in this one.

It turns out that Madeline Brent is the pseudonym for Peter O'Donnel, best known for the Modesty Blaise comic strip (and later books) series.  I discovered this after having finished the book but suspected I was reading a male author.  This really isn't a gothic romance though it starts out very much in that vein, as 18 year-old Catherine Delaney is set to marry the much older and wealthier Oliver Foy. She isn't ready for this major life change, but already has a courageous and stoic character.  Her biggest worry is that she won't be able to continue swimming with her dead nannie's husband, Daniel Choong, but Foy seems really nice at first and says he has always admired her from afar and won't try and change her too much.

The plot thickens before her marriage when she stumbles upon the mysterious adventurer Chad Lockhart, who it turns out is the sworn enemy of Daniel Choong from some mysterious past sin. The plot continues to thicken in this book to the point where I don't know where to leave off and avoid spoilers.  I think you can all guess that of course her husband turns out to be a total monster, as she brutally learns on her honeymoon.  Can she save her self from her abusive husband?  Will she learn why her beloved Daniel has a man pursuing him?  A lot goes on in his book and it is all somewhat unbelievable, but still very fun.  I enjoyed that Brent does keep suspense going, but never artifically draws it out, so when something needs to be told to avoid misintepreration, the characters just tell it.  The ending is full-on action and violence, with a nice dashing of romance, all of which I enjoyed.  

I won't seek any of his other romantic adventures out, as they are a bit too cozy (you kind of know it will all work out and every one is just so nice an accepting), but I won't complain if I am stuck with one in the future.

32. A Hero for Leanda by Andrew Garve

This was a short, somewhat slight, yet still entertaining, classic British mid-century sailing adventure.  It starts right into the situation,  where our hero, Mike Conway, discovers that his sailboat, and all his worldly possesions, has come unmoored and crashed, a complete write-off.  He's now almost penniless and stranded in Accra, Ghana.  We learn quickly that he has spent his last years sailing around the world, a vagabon with no ties.  His desperate situation does not last long, however, as he meets a sophisticated Greek gentleman who makes him an incredible offer.  He is representing a wealthy businessman, Metaxas, who is originally from the island country of (fictional, I'm guessing analog for Cyprus?) Spyros, currently under the thumb of the British and resisting.  The rebel leader of Spyros has been arrested by the British and is being held on a remote colonial island far off the eastern coast of Africa.  Conway is the perfect man to sail quietly in and free him.

The wrinkle of the title is that the boat that Metaxes finds for Conway needs a second hand to make such a long crossing.  This person turns out to be Leanda, a beautiful competent young woman, who herself is a native of Spyros.  You can see the setup!  This is all done quite efficiently in the first section and then we are off on a sea voyage.  I would say this is almost a cozy sailing adventure, with much of the book mostly pleasant sailing. Things get complex when they pick up the prisoner.  I think the thing with Garve is that he kind of pulls his punches with his priority being a nice, romantic resolution.  This was a fun read with a somewhat soft, but enjoyable ending.

31. The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson

I wish I could remember who recommended this book to me, because I owe them a debt of significant gratitude.  It has easily taken the top spot of books I've read this year and has a place on the all-time favourites as well.  I do remember that I bought this new at Dark Carnival.  The NYRB reprint is quite well done, with excellent maps (though spoilery as they show the paths of the journeys as well, so beware) and a brief, inoffensive, non-spoilery intro by Michael Chabon.  

I'm surprised that this book is not better know and loved among the nerd community.  It's an incredible adventure epic with many D&D tropes, such as exploration, treasure, strange lands and even a bit of light, folk magic here and there.  For the first book, you could basically call the protagonists a band of murder hoboes.  I try in my later years to not be that recommending guy ("you gotta read this!"), but I am making an exception in the case of this book and will be foisting it on others as much as possible, especially gamers.

The book is about Orm the Red, a Danish viking in the late tenth century AD.  It was originally two books, each made up of two books.  The first is his initial voyage as a young man to plunder the lands to the west and then further fall into several wild adventures in western Europe.  The second is about his involvement in wars and politics within the viking lands.  The third is much more domestic and tells various tales of Orm's homestead and the region he is in.  The final book is the shortest and is his last adventure to find some hidden gold in Eastern Europe.  The first book is far and away my favourite,  with so much adventure and ass-kicking, told in such an entertaining way, that I could barely put it down.  It becomes quite domestic in the third book and this goes on for many pages. It's not boring at all and I always enjoy stories of people developing their homestead ("domain play" as we say in the TTRPG community), it's just that it's hard to beat the thrills of the first book.  Nevertheless, there is still combat a-plenty in the years back in the Danish hinterlands as Orm builds up his community, has to fight off bandits, assassins and berserkers and deal with the other groups around him.

A big through line in the book is Christianity and its adoption in the viking lands.  Another reason I enjoyed the first book the most is that it is decidedly anti-christian in a very funny way.  The vikings are not nice to christians, let's just say.  Slowly and insidiously, they are converted for one reason or another.  I do have to agree that trying to get vikings to move from constantly killing each other and their neighbours to a more peaceful "turn the other cheek" policy is a good thing.  And the Christianity here never fares well when it tries to impose its sexual mores on the vikings so it doesn't become too much of a bummer.  Feels distinctly Scandinavian. The main priest character is a fun part of the proceedings as well, usually in a foul temper because of the godless north people.  

Others have written more thoroughly and better on the virtues of The Long Ships, but my recommendation is that you just get it and read it.

30. Trigger and Friends by James H. Schmitz (edited by Eric Flint)

Most of Schmitz' work were short stories, novellas and a few serialized novels were published in sci-fi magazines at the time.  That is a level of pursuit and collecting that is beyond me, and finding any of his original paperbacks is quite tough.  Other than The Witches of Karras, it is only these Baen collections that I have been able to find.  They are also fairly rare in used form these days as well (and quite likely new).  If you are a Schmitz fan, I would recommend seeking them out as they are, from what I can tell, when all of them are together a complete collection of his works.  The problem for me who is not a Schmitz completist, is I would rather a nice sampling of his best stuff and preferably in novels only.  I feel this Baen series kind of demands you to read it all.  Furthermore it isn't just one series, but a set of books for each universe that Baen wrote about.  This one, Trigger and Friends, is the fourth in the Hub universe.  I did appreciate that once I had finished it, the editor had done a good job of collecting several short stories and a full-length novel that united all the same characters in a mostly singlar arc involving the discovery of the mysterious bio-tech left over by an ancient civilization.

The characters are Trigger herself, a beautiful and smart Precol agent, her boss Commisioner Holati Tate and sometimes agent, sometimes rogue Quiller.  The first stories detail Holati and Tate in mini-adventures on the planet Macon where they first discover these weird shelled slug beings of various sizes that seem to have been left on autopilot and display a range of powers and energy.  There is one story about Quillan defending a giant resort station from various factions who want to destroy it that would have been more fun if there hadn't been so many characters and confusing scheming (it also had a cool alien life force).  These characters all come together in the main novel in which they try to figure out what the alien artifacts are doing while they fight off all the other galactic factions trying to steal them.  We are also introduced here to the Psychology Service, which is a much-disliked but crucial sort of galactic behaviour police force that oversees telepathic powers to ensure individuals don't get too powerful and destroy everything (a real possibility in Schmitz's construction).  

I have mixed feelings about these books.  Schmitz's alien concepts and technologies are really unique and cool.  He finds that balance between unknowable and yet still interesting and somewhat graspable that eludes most galactic sci-fi.  Most aliens are either humanoid variants à la Star Trek or utternly uknowable (like some of Cherryh's species).  Schmitz are kind of both which is impressive.  He also likes action and there is a lot of cool space stuff that isn't too fussy.  On the other hand, he also really likes organizational theorizing of the post-WWII corporate style and on top of that corporate espionage but in a very vague, suppositional way.  

What this means in practice is a lot of the good guys trying to figure out what the bad guys might be doing, while the reader isn't given a lot of actual info to work with.  This can go on for many pages even the entire story and then be resolved at the end by a quick exposition that is not satisfying but appears super clever, I guess.  For example, in the main novel, Trigger who is hired to work at a university, keeps wanting to escape to see her boyfriend, to the point where her own team has to kidnap her.  Even when they explain that the job at the university was just a front because they think she is somehow connected to the new alien tech and they now bring her on to help with the main mission, she still keeps trying to escape.  It's just sort of baffling as you don't really know her character that well and it doesn't make sense.  This creates hundres of pages of her on a fancy cruise ship and other side adventures that feel like distractions and are confirmed as such when we finally get to the main plot and not until the very end learn that she was being mind-controlled, which then led to some big expository explanation at the very end about the alien tech that fell kind of flat and deflated the cool attack on the alien-infested base.

I do have one other thick multi-storied Baen book of Schmitz's work, but it is in some entire other universe and I'm not sure if I will make it through.  For a certain kind of sci-fi reader, who enjoys thought puzzles along with their galactic action and intrigue, I would recommend him. His prose style is strong and the worlds are rich.  It's just the overal execution makes it hard reading for me.

29. On the Beach by Nevil Shute

Well it is snarky to say but also true that this is far and away the most boring post-apocalyptic novel I have ever read.  That being said, it is also quite good and moving.  I joke a bit about it being boring, because it did hold my attention.  It’s just that I came up in the 80s and my PA worlds range from The Road Warrior to Gamma World.  On the Beach is about as calm and sober as you can get. The story is set in Melbourne and follows the lives of a few characters as they prepare for the end.  A global nuclear war, triggered by Albania (who somehow bombed Israel), which then set off Russia and China followed by the US, has covered the northern hemisphere in deadly radioactivity, which is then moving south.  Everybody knows it, nobody can avoid it and it is just a question of when the end will actually come.

The main characters are a young couple with a new baby.  He is an officer in the Australian navy and gets assigned as a liaison to a US sub (the last of two).  He meets the sub commander a nice, calm dude named Dwight, who meets and develops a platonic affair with a young Australian girl.  Dwight’s wife and children are all still in Connecticut presumably dead but he has no way of knowing.  Finally, there is a young scientist who is fixing up a beautiful old ferrari and using what fuel he can find to drive fast. The men go on a sub journey to the north, but they can’t leave the boat because the radiation is so high.  The young couple prep their garden and watch their daughter grow.  

This is a very civilized and mundane end to the world.  There is no real reason to freak out because there is nothing anybody can do.  I found it a bit unrealistic, informed I believe by Shute’s own strongly colonialist and old-school British conservative worldview.  Things do deteriorate but mostly out of neglect and people deciding to spend their final days doing what they love rather than because they go wild.  Everybody is very respectful and helpful to one another.  This is a very stiff upper lip indeed!

The first third was a bit slow-going.  The pace never picks up but the characters are very well-written and mostly quite likable.  You get absorbed in it and that is what makes the simple and expected ending so sad.  I have been aware of this book for a long time, but always avoided it for fear that it would be a bit too slow and realistic.  Well it was but I am glad I finally got to it.  It is sobering and sits with you.

28. Smith and Jones by Nicholas Monsarrat

I'm a fan of Monsarrat so would have bought this book no matter what, I mean look at that amazing cover.  It has extra special meaning for me as well, though, because of the title.  I'm a huge fun of Wall of Voodoo and they have a song called Spy World which has the line "He goes by Jones in Istanbul and Smith in Beirut."  I would be surprised if Stan Ridgway knew of this book, but you never know. It's quite a coincidence.

Smith and Jones is one of Monsarrat's "Signs of the Time" mini-novels.  It's the second one I've found and I'm not really sure what unites them other than that they are short.  The story here is told from the perspective of a diplomatic security officer.  He is recounting the saga of Smith and Jones that brought down his career "for the record."  The introduction is interesting as it makes it very clear that his role is one of a police officer and he distinguishes himself from the other diplomatic staff.  There is a coldness here that I can't tell if Monsarrat is critiquing or not.  Monsarrat himself was on the diplomatic side and it seems that a lot of this book comes out of his actual experience.

Smith and Jones are both sad characters.  The former is fat, suave and unhappily married to a wealthy woman and their public quarrels put his career and his country's reputation in harm.  Jones is petite and flamboyant, who drinks excessively and behaves much worse, ranging from saying undiplomatic things to killing a person in his host country while driving drunk.  For both men, the narrator has to make a judgement call on whether or not to have them fired or give them a second chance.  He gives them a second chance and then, out of his control, both men are posted as a sort of punishment to the same wintery enemy country.  It's not named, but I presumed it to be Russia or some other cold war, actually cold analog country.  

By being in the same posting, both men's bad tendencies resonate with each other, they move in together and start really partying (Smith's wife left him at this point).  It is also very clear, though in the typical "soft" homophobia of the time, that Jones is definitely gay and Smith probably.  The portrayal of both men is quite realistic and therefore I found their stories sad.  The narrator, on the other hand, is quite mean and utterly unsympathetic.  Aside from their sexuality, they are both quite selfish and pathetic, but one has to wonder if that is also not a function of growing up in a society where they are repressed from being themselves.  Monsarrat is speaking in the voice of the security officer and his positions is really clear, almost ruthless.  It's unclear to me how much of his contempt for these men is a lens on the security perspective or Monsarrat's own.

The culmination of these men living together is that they eventually defect.  This is a huge blow to the reputation of the country and the narrator's boss blames it all on him. He is sent out to the host country ostensibly to monitor the situation, try and find a resolution and minimize the damage.  It is also a sort of punishment.  At first, Smith and Jones are paraded around in triumph, invited to all sorts of cultural events, given the star treatment.  Of course, over time their roles are diminished and they start to have to face the reality of what they have done.  It's pretty bleak and their behaviour falls once again to the dissolute, excessive drinking and bad public behaviour so that their new country accelerates their move out of the spotlight.

It's a fun, sad and interesting little read.  Monsarrat is an excellent writer, both technically and the depth and realism he gives to his characters.  It all feels very real.  There is also a wild element that I will not reveal but will say that all Canadians of my generation would get a real kick out of reading this book.

27. The Hardliners by William Haggard

I continue to bore you with the minutiae of my reading habits. As loyal readers well know, I am trying to read only from my on-deck shelf and not buy any new books.  One of the things that is making it difficult is that I have several books on that shelf from authors that I generally like whose other books I have already read recently.  This is particularly acute with William Haggard. His thin Penguins are just so beautiful, I can't resist buying them!  So despite having recently read and not enjoyed one of his later books, I still have 4 others on deck so thought I should continue on.

The Hardliners is a later Haggard, but fortunately Colonel Charles Russel has only just retired and Haggard seems to still keep his creepy old-man fantasies on a tighter leash.  The temptation is there, though, as once again Russel is drawn into action at the request of a younger woman, a columnist and the daughter of a pompous ambassador.  More importantly, she was one of Russel's informants when he was back at the Executive and he respects her work.  Her father is preparing to publish his memoirs and is weirdly over-excited about the chance of their success.  She suspects that he is going to reveal some secrets from his posting an Eastern Bloc country that could put himself and both England and this country at risk.  The country is not named but it's pretty clear that it is a Czechoslovakian analog.  It was recently invaded by Russia (also barely mentioned by name) and now stable, but if the ambassador's secret is made public, it will allow Russia to fully clamp down on the country.  So this country's spies have an interest in suppressing the memoirs, while Russia and its agents want them to come to light.

Fortunately, the emphasis here is on the intrigue and the action (of which there is more than usually for a Haggard book).  We get only one restaurant scene and Haggard's mid-century culinary advice is kept to a minimum.  Likewise, even though it's clear Russel is crushing on the journalist (so many lines to describe how admirable she is and what a good wife she would make), he never crosses the line, just drives expertly and gives good advice.  You can see the edges of Haggard's fraying post-war conservatism, but it's not annoying.

The calm climax takes place in a cool Russian safe house, owned by an independently wealthy communist-sympathizing artist way out on some marshes.  One of the themes of The Hardliners is the prevalence of left-wing sympathy among the noble elites (who of course, Haggard is always at pains to point out, live in material comfort themselves).  These guys are almost always total stools of the actual scary commie spies and one of them here really gets his comeuppance.

The Hardliners was a solid espionage story, nothing spectacular but kind of fun. 

26. Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Well I cheated and I paid for it.  I am supposed to be strictly reading only books on my on-deck shelf, but I stumbled upon this generically covered 80s paperback and thought that it would be not great, but at least an easy, entertaining read with some crazy action.  I should have been suspicious of this really terrible cover.  I mean the colours are nice, but talk about an utter lack of inspiration, in the name which maybe sort of has something to do with the book but even worse this partial image.  I mean what are we trying to convey here?!  It's amazing how even this limited picture can tell us so much about the sexual mores of the time.

My guess is that Niven and Pournelle were trying to go somewhat mainstream here with a sort of sci-fi techno-thriller along the lines of Robin Cook and Whitley Strieber which were big sellers at the time.  It takes place in the near future where a private company has built a gigantic cubic arcology in the middle of devastated Los Angeles.  I thought it was going to go the distance and involve some giant battle or collapse. Instead, it is more concerned with the social and political ramifications of such a setup, which might have been somewhat interesting if the authors were not such boring consnerdatives.  There are some nuances but not enough to make this go beyond the stupid Death Wish/urban decay themes of Reagan's America. Oh right and with a really nasty anti-60s counterculture cherry on the top (the radical groups against the arcology are basically terrorists rapists with no coherent position).

Not only were the politics simplistic but there is also a bunch of really stupid plot maneuvers that make absolutely no sense.  The plot hinges on an executive who releases toxic gas on what he thought were people trying to blow up the hydrogen lines in the arcology.  It turns out they were rich kids doing a prank (although actually they were a front for the eco-radicals). The executive is arrested and in the LA jail and the other leaders of the arcology decide to break him out of jail.  This involves the most preposterous (but also the only real fun in the book) episode involving a borrowed/stolen tunnel digging machine like the one used to make subway tunnels. It's ridiculous.

Also, they pepper in tons of nerd easter eggs here.  There are references to Cthulu, tabletop RPGs, science fiction conventions, all sort of normalized as if these had moved from a nerdy subculture to the mainstream.  I have to give Niven and Pournelle that they did get that right, but just wish these welcome moments had been in a better book. 

 

25. When the World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle

I love this cover!  It's a full-bleed illustration by Paul Monteagle, very architectural, which depicts a significant scene from the short story.  Pan does it again. I bought this from a neighbour who had a garage sale, he actually had quite an excellent collection of beautiful old paperbacks but entirely of fairly popular authors so nothing super obscure.  However this one and another Doyle caught my eye.

This is a collection of seven semi-random short stories of Doyle's with a loose theme of mystery and suspense.  They tend to fall into two categories, either a truly supernatural setup or a baffling puzzle that ends up having a real-world explanation.  The latter were disappointingly simplistic for Doyle, either impossible for the reader to deduce with the clues given or just kind of obvious so you were left a bit deflated.  The supernatural ones were just fun.  The story that gave the book its title is about Professor Challenger from The Lost World (I am guessing that is what the editors were thinking would be a draw) attempting to prove that the world is a living organism by piercing it's biological shell deep in the earth.  There is little narrative built around the concept, but Professor Challenger's extreme arrogance is always fun to read.

 There is also a straight-up sports story, about a young man who can't afford to go to university and looks to be stuck in a horrible, exploitative assistant chemist role when he is discovered and recruited to participate in a boxing match.  It was straightforward and genuinely stirring.  Doyle can write action.  His language is always a pleasure to read and he often frames these stories as somebody revealing an ancient dilemma with newly-revealed sources or as some kind of correspondence.  Oh right, there is a final story about a young journalist covering a colonial desert war with two grizzled newspapermen and about how he beats them at their own game that was also enjoyable.

This is full-on colonialism with some explicit racist language and attitudes, so beware.  Not Doyle's best work but still enjoyable and idea-generating.

 

24. The Riddle of Samson by Andrew Garve

I was initially under the impression that Andrew Garve's main metier was manly action and crime but I see now that he also has quite a few books that I would categorize as cozy thrillers.  These are mystery adventures where the protagonist's reputation is at stake rather than their lives or freedom, though in 1950s bourgeois Britain this is a big deal.  The Cuckoo Line Affair falls in solidly in this category.

Here the protagonist, John Lavery, is an archeaologist who has come to the Scilly isles to search for the remains of ancient monasteries.  All is set for a fun summer of camping and digging, when he meets an extremely attractive woman who is unfortunately married to a well-known but fading journalist.  This guy (named appropriately "Ronnie") is an egotistical and jealous blowhard and through a complex set of affairs ends up thinking our hero and his woman had an affair. He confronts them on a bluff and falls over the edge.  It appears to be a horrible accident, but the woman tells a little lie to the police, claiming her husband was rock climbing and fell and then promptly takes off and disappears.  

At first it is just a very unpleasant encounter, but Lavery also realizes that he has quite fallen in love with this woman.  Unfortunately, the body of the journalist never shows up but the cops do and suddenly Lavery is under suspicion for murder.  He starts digging around and listening to his digging partner who points out a bunch of things that make it seem like he might have been a sucker to the couple pulling an insurance scam.  I've spoiled it a bit because this all comes out about a third of the way in, but it is essentially the tension of the plot:  what happened to the body and was the woman an innocent victim as well or a conniving scammer?

I called it a cozy thriller because you never really feel like Lavery is truly threatened.  Mostly it's the tone where he is sort of vexed and has trouble sleeping but really seems more worried about the woman being true than his own situation.  He and his friend discuss that he might go to jail and he mentions how he could lose his job at the university, but the stakes ultimately don't feel high.  We get a semi-climactic search of an underwater cave tunnel that leads up to a perfunctory but satisfactory ending.  There is also a smuggling red herring that extends the book, came basically out of nowhere and has no real impact on the main narrative.  The best part of the book is the initial investigation and speculation.  Garve describes the physical setting competently and evocatively, aided by a nice map.  I guess these are real islands.  It was a pleasant read and I definitely got a nice sense of immersion in the world, but ultimately a bit light.