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.

 

23. The Witches of Karres by John H. Schmitz

After reading Ken Hite's strong recommendations of Schmitz's work, I went on a bit of a buying spree, including finding this nice paperback copy (for $10!).  I knew I was being risky with this book by not reading it exclusively at home, but ironically it was in the home where its greatest threat lay!  My cat, wanting something that he could not communicate to me, knocked it off the table and it fell in such a way that the cover ripped clean off.  Quite devastating.  I continued to read it but without the cover, the interior pages started to curl (and me carrying it in my fanny pack didn't help either, though I was sure grateful to have it with me when I had the 30 minute wait at the doctor's office).  So this explanation is my way of being transparent with the used book collector community and the remaining population of endangered paperback books of how I have ruined once again another beautiful old paperback.  My apologies!

The Witches of Karres is from that period of post-WWII science fiction that was kind of loose and freewheeling.  It is light in tone and the characters who go through quite a lot and whose entire universe is at risk never seem all that perturbed.  The main character is entrepreneur/pilot Pausert from a fairly conservative society where he is engaged to a senator's daughter.  After a few failed business deals, he ends up being pressured to buy three slave sisters, which gets him into big trouble back at home.  Adrift now and on the run from his home planet authorities, he learns that the sisters are from the planet Karres, famous for the witchly powers of its people.  Among their other skills, they can also assemble and control a new kind of space drive which can transport them much farther and faster than any current conventional travel.  

It starts out as a kind of bildungsroman where Pausert and the witches set to do some trade transport deals across a dangerous stretch of space, make some profit and upgrade the ship, but on their first run they are already beset by industrial espionage as well as a greater threat of these worm creatures that show up like the weather and make people insane.  Things get more complicated as they realize that part of their cargo is a comatose witch (in some kind of protective trance) and a weird rubber-wrapped cube that when opened suddenly draws the attention of these space worms.

The scale of the book goes from spaceship level pirate-dodging to saving the entire universe from an existential threat.  The epic part comes at the end and feels a bit rushed, given its scope.  The ride along the way, though, is quite a lot of fun and ends up with the potential for more adventure.  Other authors have written sequels, which I would pick up if desperate.  My only major complaint is that at the beginning Pausert gets jilted by his fiancee and some toady rival and while he escapes, he (and we the readers) never really gets the satisfaction of him coming home and rubbing his success in their provincial faces.

22. Poison People by William Haggard

Sometimes the collector part of my brain dominates the reading part and it can lead to poor book-buying decisions.  I've quite enjoyed William Haggard's work but not so much that I want to have his complete works or anything.  It's just that the slim Penguin editions of his books are so beautiful.  I don't why that led me to buy this one, which is a later reprint of one of his later works.  It wasn't great, felt like Haggard at the end of his career sort of mailing it in and spending more energy on his old man yells at cloud (or more like looks at them with disdain) than the plot or characters.

Colonel Charles Russel is retired now yet still lives a disciplined life feeling quietly superior to the world around him when a body falls out of an upper-story window and lands right next to him.  It turns out to be a redeemed ex-safecracker who had worked for Russel twice in the past.  He takes charge of the scene and thus gets further implicated in the machinations of an old aristocrat looking for revenge.  His son OD'ed and he is going after the Indian businessman who oversees the drug smuggling and dealing into England.

Russel at first doesn't want to be involved, but than at the safecracker's funeral he meets his widow and she is hot, down for action and in on the heroin revenge plan.  Turns out the toff is her father (the guy who OD'ed was her half-brother).  This is where things start to go off the rails fast.  He spends two pages on what is the right kind of restaurant to take her out to, it's all very snobby and forced.  His editorializing is seething with contempt for people who do it wrong.

But this old man griping becomes really ugly when it comes to the depiction of India and Indians.  They are either scheming and corrupt or effective because of their colonial upbringing and sychophantically grateful for it.  It's straight-up racism.  Man, I see that Haggard has 8 more novels after this, so he was still going full steam when this came out.  I have like 4 other books of his on deck (they are so thin!).  Maybe I should check the dates and just read the earlier ones.  Those are still quite conservative, but the politics are more aligned with the time period and are thus subtler.

The storyline is simplistic for Haggard and you kind of know where it is going about halfway through.  There are some slightly interesting characters (the villain's wife, the Inspect who drinks himself to death), but they aren't enough to distract from the rote resolution, which I read as a duty.