9. Callan by James Mitchell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

8. Danger at Bravo Key by Ronald Johnston

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

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

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

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

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

Inflation!

7. Rogue Justice by Geoffrey Household

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

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

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

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

 

6. The Three Roads by Ross MacDonald

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

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

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

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

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

5. Come to Dust by Emma Lathen

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

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

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

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

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

Now that's a well-travelled paperback!

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Forgive me, Killer by Harry Whittington

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

[Vague spoilers ahead]

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

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