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.