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.]