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.

 

21. Grave Mistake by Ngaio Marsh

Finally, a Ngaio Marsh that is fairly easy to read and follow.  Grave Mistake is pretty much a classic English village cozy whodunnit.  I was a bit fuzzy on the details but was suspicious about halfway through and felt strongly before the last quarter who the murderer was.  This is a sign that it was one of Marsh's more forgiving mysteries. 

The story begins from the point of view of a middle-aged playwrite, Verity, thinking about the various people in her local choir.  She is the most self-aware and I thought she might be the protagonist at first.  The plot involves an attractive and wealthy widow who is somewhat of a character and a hypochondriac, her eligible daughter, their new exaggeratedly Scotch gardener (named Bruce Gardener), the nouveau-riche Mediterranean businessman and his attractive son, the cad doctor from Verity's past and a few other cast of characters.  When the widow is found dead, at first believed by suicide, in her room at the spa/asylum (where the cad doctor is newly in residence), Inspector Alleyn is brought in.  Verity becomes more of a information hub for the book at this point, though we also get a storyline about a potential romance between her and the nouveau-riche guy (which sadly never reaches its fruition).

As usual, I enjoyed Alleyn's expertise and easy, supportive manner with his underlings.  There is a great scene at the end where they have to dig up a grave in heavy downpour.  The writing was very evocative and combined well with the suspense of the outcome (which I had guessed; wasn't that hard at this point).  There was one slightly false note which was that I found it unrealistic that Alleyn and Fox would have believed Gardener's story of it being a total coincidence that he ended up working for the widow of his old captain in WWII.  Still, a fun read.

 

20. The River People by Philip Wayre

I picked this beautiful paperback up in a thrift shop in Halifax on aesthetic reasons alone.  It's a non-fiction book about otters and specifically, the author's work in researching rehabilitating them that led to the creation of The Otter Trust which still exists and appears to be doing good work to protect wetlands and revive endangered species in England.  I am theoretically a radical environmentalist but pretty fixed in my views that we humans are destructive parasites hellbent on consumption until nothing is left and need to reform radically or be wiped out.  So there is not much use or pleasure for me in reading about the environment or endangered species as I already know the drill.  However, I just could not resist this lovely 1971 Fontana with a beautifully illustrated wrap-around cover (by Stephen Adams).  Unfortunately, the colour on the spine is weirdly all green so the effect is somewhat spoiled when you open the book all the way.  Still, a keeper.

I am guessing that Philip Wayre was better known when this book came out.  He produced a documentary about otters that was well-received at the time.  He kept otters and other animals on his property and let children visit.  The first half of the book is about the various otters he rescued in England and brought back to his land to raise and try to breed.  It's actually a pretty fun read.  Otters do not make good housepets.  They are mischievous and destructive and leave a very strong-smelling "spraight" to mark their territory.  They can be tamed, but have strong jaws with really sharp teeth and even the super tamed ones will sometimes bite hard when excited.  The author and his wife were incredibly patient but I guess that was their passion.  

The second half of the book is about their journey to Malaysia to try and study some other species of otters.  This was a pretty classic British post-WWII travelogue with some light dusting of colonialism.  They visit some pretty beautiful-sounding places and spend more time looking at otter tracks and spoor than seeing actual otters, though sadly they do bring a few back home that had been captured by locals.

The final chapter is an explanation of the creation of The Otter Trust, including frustrating story of how he purchased a big plot of land only to have it blocked by the local council who would not approve of making it an otter trust.  Very weird business. I hear England is like that, powerful NIMBYs and laws that let them block everything.  He is very vague about who is behind it and dismisses the idea that it was graft but also laments that it most likely would end up being developed, which I am sure it is today (and thus sounds like it would be some shitbag developers behind blocking any land being put in trust).  It seems like they did succeed in finding some land based on the projects on their website.