60. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

beautiful paperback from
my wife's adolescence

I convinced my daughter that this could be our night-time reading book and I'm so glad I did.  I was a giant Tolkien nerd back in the day.  I read Lord of the Rings three times by the time I was 13. The back cover of one of the paperback books of the trilogy with the picture of Tolkien tore off and I taped it inside my school binder with the words "My Hero" under it.  I realized, though, that The Hobbit had been kind of neglected in my memory.  Partly because I watched the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings which kind of underwhelmed me (and the constant swelling music annoyed the shit out of me) and thus skipped the Hobbit remake.  I also worry about what I am terming "Youth Narrative Overload" which is the phenomenon of children today being spoonfed endless fantasy narratives.  We had Lord of the Rings, the Sword of Shannara and a few others here and there.  The nerds growing up and taking over media has been good in a lot of ways, but also churned out a kajillion movies and series, driven mainly by the Harry Potter craze.  When my daughter was younger, we let her watch one episode on Netflix every morning and by the time she was like 8, she had seen so many series with a scrappy adventuring party going on a quest to fight some existential evil that I worried any sense of wonder and imagination had been burned out of her brain.  So I was very pleased that we could go back to the ur-text that started it all.

My own memory was that The Hobbit was good but a bit slight.  Wow, was I wrong.  First of all, it is not just good, it is still outstanding, arguably a masterpiece that holds up today in the crowded field of fantasy adventure.  And it is actually quite epic.  I had completely forgotten the ending.  For me, though, what makes fantasy work is not the epic, not the giant battles and crazy powers, but the subtle moments that evoke in the reader a feeling of being in another world, that adventure is just around the corner in your own even.  This is what Tolkien does so well in The Hobbit.  He creates a very likable, sedate character in Bilbo Baggins with just the slightest hints that a few generations back on one side of his family, there may have been some more feisty characters. And then we get these dwarves who disrupt his life and it isn't until about a quarter of the way through the book that you realize how serious the adventure actually is.  And though there is the main storyline of the dwarves trying to get their treasure back from Smaug and the even broader backstory of good people being pushed out by evil, the real story is Bilbo himself and how he ends up as Gandalf predicted being the major player and honestly somewhat of a badass.

I did find the ending where all of a sudden the narrative widens to include human politics and a massive regional power struggle to feel a bit arbitrary (especially with how Smaug is dispatched) and thus render the overall narrative less pure somehow.  As a world-building nerd, I loved it at the time and get now how it fits into the later Lord of the Rings narrative, just pointing out that it mars somewhat the unities that are so well constructed in the first three-quarters of the book.

This is a classic and I implore any of you with kids reading Harry Potter to try and get them to go back and read this one.  It moves surprisingly fast given that it was written in 1937.  But this is where it all began, I am sure there are many antecedents but it is The Hobbit where we get so many core fantasy tropes today: adventuring party, humanoid races, levelling up, magic items, dragons as the main boss, etc.  and they are all so well done here.  Unfortunately, there is one other major flaw that is sadly also a core fantasy trope (though finally being somewhat rectified these days).  There are absolutely no female characters at all.  This is probably the biggest knock on The Hobbit and on the world of fantasy fiction in general that it was so white male. It's something to talk about, but still not a reason to not read this absolute banger.

59. The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman

Whoo boy, faithful readers will notice the significant gap between this blog post and the last one, over a month! It's not that I gave up reading, but I got over-ambitious with a non-fiction book.  It's called The Life and Death of Ancient Cities and came highly recommended but hoo boy is it slow going! I finally had to put it on pause about halfway and get into some fun reading.  On top of that, I moved over to Bluesky with all the others after the election and it's quite fun and pleasant.  I hope it survives and its model can be a future path for social media.  Unfortunately, the goodness of it is not good for my internet addiction.  Twitter was such a shit hole that I barely went there, which was great for my reading. Now I am once again getting excellent feeds on the situations in Syria, South Korea and Georgia as well as reconnecting with great book and movie nerds (and even some sports people) so it is hard to pull away.

Nevertheless, I was able to finish the final book in Pullman's misnamed Sally Lockhart series.  It might be more accurate to call it his Victorian Penny Dreadful series or something.  This last book is a spinoff which focuses on two other characters in Sally's orbit (she at this point is more of an elder statesman of adventurous, boundary-breaking characters):  Jim Taylor who started as a courier in the law firm where Sally first went and is now a globe-trotting adventurer and writer (who never actually writes) and young Adelaid who was the cockney slave to the evil nemesis of the first book.

The Tin Princess feels very much like Pullman trying to do Sabatini or other books of English people having adventures abroad and getting mixed up in European politics.  Here, Adelaide ends up marrying a prince of the tiny central European country Razkavia who discovers her in a brothel (funny how I read this after watching Anora, which has a similar plot basis though very different storyline).  He barely survives a terrorist attack in London and then learns that his brother is killed and he is next in line for the throne, so Adelaide must accompany him back to Razkavia.  She meets a young well-educated Razkavian girl (who fled because her father had been imprisoned and killed) who becomes her ally and Jim goes along as well. Razkavia produces tin which is much needed by both Austria and Germany and it is thus caught between the machinations of these two superpowers.

It's all quite preposterous but also quite fun.   Jim shows his mettle several times.  The country of Razkavia is well thought out and portrayed.  It's fun to see poor, downtrodden Adelaide reveal that she actually has the native intelligence and mettle of a sovereign.  It all could be more tightly constructed and there is a bit too much going on for it to be concluded satisfactorily.  As usual with Pullman, he does a great job constructing super loathsome antagonists but never really gives the reader the satisfaction of them getting their just deserts in a deservingly brutal way.  In this case, it is nasty and manipulative chamberlain of the royal house, Godel.

So I've finished the 4 books and enjoyed them, but they weren't quite the thrills I had hoped for.  I think the whole thing would have been better had it remained centered around Sally Lockhart and the photography studio/detective agency.  We could still have had all the same adventures but with more unity and ongoing character development.  I understand that at the time, Pullman probably wrote where the muse sent him and that is fine, just left this reader with some dangling threads.  I think the excellent trade dress by Scholastic did a good job of selling them to me and may have set my expectations a bit high.

58. The Tiger in the Well (Sally Lockhart #3) by Philip Pullman

Now this is more like it!  I was quite frustrated by the structure and plot elements of the second book, The Shadow in the North, and that led me to some trepidation while reading this one.  The story starts a few years later.  Sally is established in her business and home and she has given birth to a daughter, Harriet, who is now a toddler.  All the men in her life are gone.  Jim and Garland Webster have left on an adventure of their own in South America.  The conflict starts immediately, although subtly, as Sally receives a legal summons.  At first, she treats it lightly as it is so absurd.  She is being sued by a man for abandonment who claims to be her husband.  He also wants Harriet.

As she looks into it, and deals with super weak and sexist legal representatives, the case becomes deadly serious and she truly risks losing her child, as well as all her assets and her business.  We quickly meet a truly nasty antagonist, the bland and professional seeming Mr. Parrish.  Meanwhile, we also follow the story of Jews fleeing the pogroms in Europe and arriving in London, where they are often exploited by criminals and attacked by racists or a combo of both.

These two storylines combine in a rich historical adventure that all center around Sally.  I was able to guess quite quickly who was behind it all and it was a bit frustrating that it took Sally so long.  That felt a bit manipulative on Pullman's part, though he explains himself away by basing it on her psychology (she knew all along but didn't want to face it; why?).  My distrust held back some of my enjoyment as Sally really goes through the wringer.  He pulls it out in the end, but the promise of a competent, extraordinary woman that the first book is set up is not fulfilled here in a lot of ways.  She spends much of the book being victimized and never gets to use her skills (no cool financial gamesmanship, she never shoots anybody).  This what we call deprotagonization in the tabletop RPG business.  For instance, in one scene when she is down to her last shillings and she pawns the watch that her father gave her and gets a super low price for it.  I get that Pullman wants her to be as desperate as possible, but this woman is super skilled at money and her dad taught her to be tough and street smart.  This could have been a good opportunity for her to show some mettle and skill and instead she meekly accepts the price.

The other characters and the situation is wild enough that once we start to see some hope, the book gets really fun.  Sally doesn't use her skills, but she is brave and resourceful and quite tough.  We get to see a lot of the lives and locations of the poor Jewish community and this is quite interesting and entertaining.  The finale is quite wild, a real page-turner, so much that I partially blame it for my insomnia and me writing this at almost 2 in the morning.  Too stimulating!

So some minor hiccups but overall this was an excellent adventure and I am glad I am working my way through this series.

57. The Shadow in the North (Sally Lockhart #2) by Philip Pullman

I've committed to reading all 4 of the Sally Lockhart series in order (and also kind of wanted to, though the energy is wearing off a bit; I am almost finished the third as I write this review) and thus jumped right into this the second one.  I was immediately a bit disappointed, as this book jumps ahead 6 years from the ending of the first book.  Sally is now on her own, running a financial management business with mainly women clients.  She still is connected to and manages the photography business, but no longer lives with them and only visits once a month to do their books. It's an odd choice, as so many of the elements that made the first book so fun are just tossed out the window.  They were starting a detective firm, they were an eclectic gang of great characters all living under one bohemian roof.  Sally was finally starting to come into her own. It would have been great to see her continue to develop her strengths and for the gang to do some adventures together.  

Once the adventure gets going, I got caught back up in it.  It's quite fun, involving a cowardly magician who is on the run and a nefarious Dutch industrialist who is doing sneaky things with companies (whose ruin impacted one of Sally's clients which is how she started to sniff around).  Unfortunately, I found the ending very frustrating on two points.  One, which is spoiler free, is that it feels brief and truncated compared to all the investigating and plotlines that came before.  You kind of figure it out quickly and the bad guy gets dispatched all too quickly.  Pullman was trying, I believe, to make a modern retelling of the Victorian penny dreadful.  He does a great job of setting up the environment and the story and then elevating it with modern sensibility.  However, he spends most of his energy on bad stuff happening to the characters (which is fine), but doesn't give the reader the satisfying payoff of the ending.

I remember when I was teaching and the His Dark Materials was all the rage among the middle school kids.  The last book actually came out in 2000 and the kids had been waiting for it.  I personally read it and quite enjoyed it, though I do remember feeling it ended with a bit of a whimper rather than a bang.  But the kids hated it!  They were so mad about the ending that it ruined the series for many of them.  I kind of get where they are coming from now.  I was reading it more as a critique of Christianity and I enjoyed that, but they were focused on the relationship between the two main characters and he did totally pull the rug out in that one.  I kind of think he is trying to be too clever and he showed signs of it here.

SPOILER ALERT

 

 

 

What's worse in this book is that he sets up this awesome gigantic dog that is Sally's companion.  He is clearly super dangerous and super loyal, but we never get him doing anything but sniffing and growling at potential enemies until one final scene, where it isn't even Sally being attacked, and he gets killed!  Totally fucked.  This is the animal equivalent of the Bechtel Scale and it is just lame.  I was really pissed about the dog, but he does the same thing with Frederick, who was one of the great characters in the first book, a significant player in this one, the other half of their potential detective agency, an ally in fighting to young Jim and finally a potential love interest for Sally.  He just kills him off and it felt cheap and manipulated.  I don't really know what was the point in making this choice.  It makes me lose confidence in Pullman as a storyteller.  He feels that his own clever "breaking of the rules" is more important than the reader's pleasure.  No bueno.

56. The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman

If you are going to do a trade
paperback, do it like this!

I read this book already and at the time enjoyed it enough that I wanted to read all of them.  I happened to find all but the first one at Rennaisance thrift shop here in these nicely designed trade paperbacks (see I am not totally close-minded) and then totally lucked out and found the first one that same day at another thrift store that was more clothes but had a few books. I felt that if I was going to do the series, I probably should just re-read the first one, which is what I did.  I also had my daughter in mind who is finally adding actual books to her voracious and rapid graphic-novel consumption pace, but the covers didn't grab her and now that I am reading them I suspect they may be a bit old for her still.  I do remember when I was a teacher, Pullman's Golden Compass series went through the sixth and seventh graders like wildfire but maybe those being more fantastic also makes them more appealing.  I will spring those on to her soon for sure.

The Sally Lockhart series was written before the Golden Compass and though his prose is as strong as ever, some of the structure lacks the craft and polish to make this a masterpiece. Nevertheless, this is a real page-turner and the plot and setting of Victorian England are super fun.  It feels like Pullman just wanted to make a Sherlock Holmes/penny dreadful type adventure but do so with a female protagonist to make it really interesting.  Sally Lockhart is a great character.  Raised unconventionally by her sailor and soldier father who disappeared in a ship wreck in the far east, she is not well-versed in the important skills of manners and social etiquette, but is an expert markswoman and accountant.  The Ruby in the Smoke is basically her origin story as she races against unknown malevolent forces that are conspring against her for reasons she doesn't know.

It gets even more enjoyable when by chance she falls in with an eccentric photographer and his actress sister.  They take her into their sprawling house out of pity but soon realize that her organizational and business skills can rescue their floundering photography business.  They also become allies with her and enlist young and scrappy Jim Taylor, another great character!

There is lots of great action and a truly moving denouement as she learns the truth about what happened to her father.  Very enjoyable and I am now going to read the next one.

 

 

55. Sunset and Jericho by Sam Wiebe

I'd heard of this author before and was interested as I am always curious about B.C. detective fiction.  I found this one at a neat little used book store, The Paper Hound, near Gastown when I was out in Vancouver this summer.  Classic little Vancouver downtown eastside anecdote:  when I was walking towards the store, I noticed they had a small bookshelf outside with cheaper books on it as many used bookstores do. I always check those out, but this time there was a woman leaning and peering into them with a particularly folded and intense posture.  I thought, damn she is more into used books than even me!  But no, when I got closer I saw that actually she was a junky nodding off and just happened to use that shelf to lean on.  Ah, Vancouver!  The poor bookstore owner must have a hell of a time.  

A word about The Paper Hound. This is one of those used bookstores where everything is carefully curated and it is more about a wide range of eclectic finds than exhaustive sections of every genre that you usually find.  It's not entirely my jam as they tend to only feature quirky or out there old paperback fiction.  Nevertheless, you can often find gems at these kinds of stores and I always celebrate the people who keep old books alive.  I also found a book of short stories by Barry Gifford.  So continued success to the Paper Hound.  Go visit if you are in Vancouver.

Sunset and Jericho, I learned after I started reading it, is the fourth installment in the Wakeland detective series, about Vancouver private investigator Dave Wakeland.  This was a solid and enjoyable detective story about a gang of anti-capitalist radicals who kidnap and murder the mayor's son.  The plot is deeply integrated into current Vancouver political issues, especially the problematic dynamic of real estate values and the growing gap between the rich and the poor that has destroyed what little homegrown culture Vancouver used to have.  I say "what little" in a slightly demeaning way but I don't belittle it because back in the day there was a really cool punk rock, artists, weirdo scene in Vancouver that was the one thing holding it back from the dominant culture of bourgeois gentility (which had some pleasant aspects though ultimately suffocating and depressing).  Sunset and Jericho gets a little fantastic with some crazy violence and action which I felt extended the ending unnecessarily.  It also portrayed the radicals in a way that you hated them but never really gave the full satisfaction of them getting their asses kicked.  Finally, there was a brutal and what I felt was forced surprise twist at the very ending that kind of undermined the rest of the story for me.  Maybe if I had read the first 3 it would have fit in better, but it just didn't work.

All the criticisms out of the way, the rest of the book up until the ending was a real page-turner with great characters and locations (many of which are familiar to me) and a nice, convoluted backstory to the mystery that was quite satisfying to unfold as you read.  I particularly like the abandoned therapy retreat in the British Properties.  I'm going to keep my eyes open for the first 3 books.

54. The Long and Loud Silence by Wilson Tucker

I've been looking for the Wilson Tucker book Wild Talent for decades now.  It inspired a tabletop RPG (Wild Talents) whose design I quite appreciated and is also considered I believe to be the first or one of the earliest ESP battle type stories.  I have read a few other of his books and never loved them (not terrible just from that period of sci-fi which tends to be too speculative and not enough story for my taste). However, this one I decided to take because it is post-apocalyptic (a sub-genre which used to be my favourite but now I am just more of a completist) and because it's a beautiful Coronet with that sick cover.

I'm glad I did get it because this was an interesting read.  It is marred by the nerdy white male sexual politics of the early 1950s.  Once you filter that out, it is a dark and low-key "realistic" PA tale that is quite cool.  The narrator is almost Parker-like in his absence of emotions.  Corporal Russel Gary, career military man, wakes up after a major drunk on his birthday to find that some enemy had somehow sent bombs that killed most of the people, either through a nuclear blast (the kind that leaves buildings standings) or with disease.  His first encounter is with a teenage girl who is desperately robbing jewelry stores.  This is already where the books sexism really sucks.  I get it that she is a young, teenage girl but it shows she has street smarts.  Why would she only be stealing jewelry?  It's stupid.  We get away from her fairly soon (of course though totally naive and unable to make the most basic survival decisions, she is sexually experienced and "surprises" him at night).  We get a lot of cool exploring where he learns that America is divided between east and west along the Mississippi. The east is contaminated and considered full of spies and traitors.  The Mississippi is guarded all along its banks and all the bridges except a few blown up.

The portrayal of the behaviour of the survivors on the eastern side is weird and not well thought out.  Feels like in Tucker's world there are barely any people and he doesn't explicitly say most of them were killed.  It also seems like they quickly and too easily degenerate into looting mobs and starvation instead of pulling together.  Despite these issues, the interactions with the world is quite cool.  He spends a winter on a Florida beach with another man and woman but leaves when they fall in love.  He becomes a sort of bodyguard for a naive farmer family.  It's cool and readable. As the narrative progresses, he slowly descends further and further into animal survival, in the end living in a cave.  It doesn't really end, except a sort of "romantic" wrap-up to the storyline with the naive teenager.  So while flawed, it was an engaging and unsettling story of a ruined and divided mid-20th century America.

53. The Suspect by L.R. Wright

I discovered this author and series because after decades, her work has finally successfully made it to the TV screen in the form of the new Canadian series Murder in a Small Town.  I backtracked to realize the books were written in the 80s and take place in and around Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast in B.C., which we visited last summer.  I found this, the first one, at The Book Exchange used English language bookstore in Amsterdam.  There were several others, but I wanted to see if I like it first.  Also, I suspect these should not be hard to find when I am next in B.C.

It starts out with a bit of a twist in that you the reader knows who committed the murder right from the beginning.  One old man, visiting another old man, bashes him suddenly over the head with an old shell casing.  The murderer recognizes his guilt and is about to turn himself in when realizes  why bother, as he will get caught eventually, he might as well live free for as long as he can. It's subtler and more nuanced than that, but you get the picture.  It's more of a "whydunnit" (I stole that from a Goodreads review), as well as an interesting cat and mouse game between he and the detective.

The detective is Karl Alberg, promoted from Kamloops where he had to leave his family behind as his wife had a successful business and his daughters doing well in school there (RCMP policy is to move their mounties around so they can never get embedded in the community which makes them assholes but also maybe less prone to corruption).  He answers an ad and meets the single librarian, Cassandra who moved from Vancouver to Sechelt to be near her older mother.  Cassandra has also become friends over time with George, the murderer.

It's a very absorbing and page-turning read, the kind of comfort mystery that readers can't put down and whose characters you grow attached to.  This is a great book to take on the plane and I actually forced myself not to read it at the airport because I knew I would get done too quickly.  I appreciated the locale and descriptions of the geography, though I found that aside from the old hippy fish seller, the characters were not all that quirky and you don't get the sense of some of the benevolent oddness that defined small B.C. coastal towns back in the day.  Maybe they get richer as the series goes on.

I won't seek these out but will grab them when I find them.  I do have one rant about the TV series.  How is it that in the year of our Lord 2024 fucking Canadian television productions still follow this dogma:

"A lot of U.S. media thought it was actually set in Canada, not in the U.S. They didn't actually grasp that this wasn't Canada," Roberts said. "We wanted to make it just a little more generic ... so that it would have the best opportunity internationally to succeed."

Are you kidding me!?  Have you learned absolutely nothing from the success of all those nordic and british crime series?  Or how about Trailer Park Boys or Schitt's Creek?  American viewers do not want watered down generic versions of mysteries they already see every night.  They want to see the unique cultures and perspectives of different places.  The very strength of the L.R. Wright series is that they take place in a uniquely beautiful and culturally interesting place in the world!  Thousands of American tourists now visit the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island every year.  It's just everything I hate about the media decision-makers in this country, the insecure, grovelling to the States, lowest-common-denominator thinking.  This is why the French-Canadians say we anglos have no culture.  We kill it ourselves out of fear and safety.  Just outrageous. Fire everybody.

52. Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie

I saw the Ealing movie adaptation of Whiskey Galore at an Ealing film festival in my younger days and quite enjoyed it.  I stumbled upon this trade paperback version of the book and thought I might enjoy it as well.  It served me as comfort and distraction during a trans-atlantic flight and then several subsequent nights of brutal jetlag from which I am still suffering as I write this.

It's a story of two small Scottish islands during the final years of WWII (1943 to be precise).  They are under rationing of many things, but it is the slowly dwindling and then finally exhausted resource of the island's whisky that is wreaking havoc among the psyche and relations of the people of the islands.  There are many subplots in this book and many characters.  The main one is the middle-aged English Sergeant who is engaged to marry the young Scottish lass, but whose father, famous already for prevaricating about everything, won't give his blessing nor agree on the wedding date.  The bad guy in the book, if there is one, is the local rep for English war security, who is the classic managerial popinjay spoilsport that nobody takes seriously.  He is always writing letters to his superiors, complaining about the laxity of the Islanders. We also have a nice school director who is also betrothed but completely beaten down by his puritan, domineering mother and too scared to tell her he is going to get married.

All these problems and the general mood and well-being of the region could be solved by whiskey and the solution arrives when a freight ship gets hung up on some rocks and turns out to be carrying 40,000 bottles of the best quality whiskey, to be sent to the US as part of I guess some lend-lease agreement.  The names, the descriptions of the bottles and the labels of all the different types of regional whiskeys was one of my favourite parts of the book.  I don't know if they were made up, but they were fun to read about and imagine.

It's a pleasant read, more of an exposure to the pleasant culture and people of these small islands, with an entertaining dig at English bureaucracy and superiority.  I was a bit confused at first, as I couldn't distinguish with any memory the various Scottish names (especially as several of them share last names), but once I got into it, it flowed nicely.

I left this book in a free book shelf in Amsterdam. I  hope it finds an appreciative next reader.

51. Ruler of the Night by David Morrell

I've wanted to read Morrell's more recent historical thrillers for a while now, but can never find them in a used bookstore.  I'm not sure what that means about his publishing success.  His books are published as big populist hard backs, though probably not in the numbers of huge name authors.  You would think some of them would show up used and in thrift shops, but so far they have eluded me.  I was in a different neighourhood and happened upon their library.  Never great pickings for English books in Montreal, so I will some times borrow books a bit recklessly, just because I want to leave with something.  I was psyched to stumble on a David Morrell book, and hastily took it out, without doing a bit of research.  Turns out Rule of the Night is actually the third book in his Thomas de Quincy and daughter Emily as historical fiction detectives.  It's not actually a trilogy, so each book stands on their own, but I nevertheless felt I was catching up and didn't have the connection with the characters that a proper narrative would have developed rather than expository reminders.

I think this added to some of the ungainliness I felt in the book, but much of it was inherent in the writing.  I was disappointed, I have to say.  The set up is really cool, with the early days of the railway and how the public, already hesitant but also fully caught up in the changes trains are bringing, are hesitant, especially after a brutal murder in a first-class carriage.  The ending as well, where we finally learn the truth of the complex mystery, is quite rich and clever.  de Quincy and his daughter are great detectives, with their mutual support and his opium addiction and her burgeoning medical skills.  It's a cool team.

It's the execution of the plot that I felt weakened its actual cleverness.  It goes all over the place, with several intriguing investigative threads and then suddenly about halfway through introduces a major character from de Quincy's childhood as a street urchin (and based on his real-life narrative).  On top of that, we suddenly get a really hateful major antagonist who does his horrible deed and is punished for it very soon thereafter.  It felt like that was supposed to be the climax.  I guess it was done to set up for the twist, but it ends up leaving the reader somewhat deflated and turning pages just to find out the mystery.

Even worse, for me, was the language.  Morrell is a very skilled writer, but it is the rare American writer who can grasp the subtleties of British dialogue.  Here, it's even worse because it feels like he simplifies it even more for the mass audience.  The dialogue between the police detectives, Ryan and Becker (allies of de Quincy and his daughter) and the evil peer is particularly unrealistic, both in the way it sounds and in the class relations that dialogue is supposed to be supporting.  Just felt super simplistic, like the Netflix version.

In the end, the backstory was quite intricate and clever, integrating a historical railway murder and de Quincy's life in a complex and cool mystery that made it overall a decent book to read and I may say for those of you who aren't sensitive to the nuances of British culture and dialogue in detective fiction might enjoy the series.  This may have been my one test of Morrell's Victorian fiction unless I hear that his others are far superior.  One good thing, for sure, is that it did convince me to read Thomas de Quincy!

50. Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams

Watership Down turned out to be such a hit that, despite my hesitation, my daughter demanded we get this out of the library and read it.  It took us a while as there were a lot of missed reading nights during the vacation and summer nights.  I was hesitant because I worried it wouldn't capture the magic of Watership Down and leave us feeling disappointed (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator being the biggest culprit of this).  I'm happy to say that Tales is a satisfying and engaging sequel that doesn't try to replicate the epic, original story, but builds on it and lets the reader be in the world of the rabbits a little longer.

The first part of the book are more tales of El-ahrairah.  I wasn't so into this mythology in Watership Down, but here El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle's adventures are more down to earth.  There is magic but it's not so powerful and abstract as the tales from the first book were.  Here they go on cool, scary quests and encounter (and often have to outwit) all kinds of fascinating creatures.

The third section is several short stories that continue the Watership Down story, as the warren evolves, changing its political structure to have co-chiefs one of whom is a doe, welcome new rabbits and expand to new outposts.  Leadership comes up a lot thematically, as Hazel, Bigwig and Fiver are now getting older and there are more and more rabbits who didn't live through the migration and the fight with Efrafa.  It ends with life in progress for the rabbits, there are issues and man is always threatening.  We are left as readers feeling very much that Watership Down is alive.

49. Negroland by Margot Jefferson

I found this in the new free book box in my neighbourhood (actually had an interesting collection of 80s and 90s paperbacks not to my taste but will keep an eye out).  I've long been curious about the Black upper class communities and their history.  I have to also admit that the slick cover design also went some way to me deciding to grab this.

At it's core, this is indeed Jefferson's biography.  We start with several interesting examples of the early histories of wealthy and educated Black families, following their ancestors who came out of slavery.  History, philosophy and social theory mix with her personal narrative to tell us about her and racism.  The racism stuff is really interesting; she demonstrates its complex and damaging impact in so many contexts.  You really get a sense of how all-encompassing race was for an African-American girl growing up in upper middle class Chicago to educated, well-to-do parents.  

The parts about herself were less compelling for me.  I get that its a biography and I do think she was successful in using herself as a vehicle to portray racism.  There is also a lot of adolescent anxiety and adult self-absorption that just doesn't interest me.  I mean we even get a whole section where she talks about which character in Little Women she would want to be and why.  So it dragged a bit for me and kind of fizzled out at the end, though not enough to negate the interesting parts of the first two-thirds.  I think readers who enjoy more poetic and intellectual style of writing might enjoy this book much more than me.  Not my jam, though was worth the time.

48. Beware of the Trains by Edmund Crispin

This post is really an admission of guilt to a crime against books.  I found this Edmund Crispin paperback before I had read any of his books and decided that he wasn't for me.  I kept it in my errands backpack as an emergency read if I ever get stuck somewhere and don't have my main book with me.  Short story collections are good for that. I have become quite consistent in my chore habits and tend to not have much waiting time and when I know I have a wait (like anything health-related), I will make sure to bring whatever book I'm reading.  So Beware of the Trains ended up in my backpack inside pocket for several years, getting more and more beat up as it shared the pocket with plastic bags for shopping and cutlery for lunches.  Taking off a chunk of the cover one day, I finally decided to clean it up and realized I had basically destroyed the book.  I've now taken to scrubbing my hands incessantly to get the little bits of pulp fibre that have dug their way into my skin.

Crispin is a great writer.  I enjoy the way he can paint an English scene and he often has interesting characters.  It's just that his books are primarily built around an intricate mystery that is supposedly solvable by the reader.  Not this reader!  These short stories are the same, which is kind of incredible, that he can come up with so many little mysteries.  These are like Encyclopedia Brown for grown-ups.  So if that is your jam, I would strongly recommend Crispin.

Now what to do with the body? 

47. The Lady in the Morgue by Jonathan Latimer

Latimer is in the "buy everything by him" category in my hunting list. It started with just looking for Solomon's Graveyard and not finding it to now just having his name (and still looking for the elusive Solomon's Graveyard).  His books are really fun!  It took me a bit to understand some of his stylistics as well as the cultural context and now that I do, I enjoy them so much more.

At their base, they are solid mysteries with a level of pre-WWII manly action.  They are also very much escapist entertainment where you get to follow detective William Crane (often with several quirky, competent allies along) as he gets to both party (with the fun lower classes and the fancy upper classes), do cool detecting and kick a little ass along the way.  Latimer lifts these pleasures to a higher level with his writing style, his complex plotting and most of all many interesting characters and locations/situations.  On top of this, like a maraschino cherry, is the drinking.  It's weird and fetishistic!  This was written in 1939 just a few years after prohibition ended and I guess alcohol was a big cultural deal for certain readers.  It's not just that they are almost constantly drinking incredible amounts of alcohol, but he also is very specific about which drinks and how much.  And the characters are always talking and joking about it.  It still feels a bit added; you could remove all the booze mentions and it would not impact the plot at all. 

The story here starts out in the morgue where two journalists and William Crane are waiting around to see if anybody will identify the dead body of a beautiful young woman.  This is all messed up when somebody sneaks into the cadaver room, kills the attendant and steals the body.  Crane was hired initially by a wealthy New York family who believe the body might have been that of their missing daughter.  Two rival gangsters believe it is the body of the moll they fought over.  Things get even more complicated and we get a raid at a taxi-dance hall, reefer addicted jazz musicians trying to get to the next level, multiple graveyard and morgue raids and fights and several parties.  There is a lot going on in this book!  Near the last third, it actually dragged out just a teeny bit too long for me, but it's still a lot of fun and the final climax in morgue is fantastic, involving hiding under the sheets on those rolling metal beds and then a fight in the dark.  

These books should be reprinted today, though they are full of that deep, assumed racism of the early 20th century which might be a deal breaker.  Characters use the n-word in every day conversation the way we might say Black or African-American today.  Even if you edited that out, these are probably a bit too niche to earn a proper reprint.  At least I hope somebody does a retrospective on Latimer's work.

As an aside, the marijuana scene is really wild.  It's a religious ritual where the musicians sit in a circle and chant certain sayings to certain gods, trying to get to the next level.  It requires multiple joints apparently as I guess the weed was much lighter back then.  It can't be a coincidence that in the scene where they are getting ready to go to the back room of the bar where the reefer party is going on, the bartender rings them up and the change is exactly 4.20 can it?!

 

This book is quite lovely. Printed in 1944, the paper quality is quite good and it has beautiful bright red cardstock pages inside the front and back covers.  Below is the promotion for their books for soldiers program which was responsible for both lots of reading from vets coming back from WWII as well as popularity for the various crime and action genres.  In the following pages are lists of various books you can order with quotes from real soldiers appreciating the program. It's very cool.

46. One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens

I stumbled upon a Monica Dickens book a couple of years ago and brought it out to the family seat to read during the xmas holidays.  My mother and sister immediately glommed on to it, one of them took it to read, then passed it on to the other and it never made its way back to me.  Typical.  They loved it so much that they started looking for her other books and this was one they got that I stole back.

It's a biographical telling of the year and a half that Dickens, born into a genteel family and bored with life, decided to get a job as a domestic in the role of the cook.  She recounts in a light and entertaining way each of the houses where she worked (from bourgeois apartments in London to country family estates).  She is admittedly not great at her job but does really try hard and improves.  It's not laugh out loud funny, but it is, as they say, thoroughly delightful and I would add, quite readable.  She has an excellent way of describing the worst kind of people in a way that is damning and yet excusing at the same time.  A large part of her enjoyment in the experience, which she shares with us, is the eavesdropping of the people for which she works.  Some of them are just awful, whereas others, particularly the last family, are quite loveable.

There isn't really anything deep here beyond perhaps a very nice anthropological exploration of the evolving relations between the classes in the context of domestic service in England at the beginning of the 20th century (it was written in 1939).  Underneath, though, you really do see how hard this work is.  You have to have a significant skill set (cooking is huge but also cleaning those old houses required all kinds of knowledge and techniques) but more importantly be really efficient and organized.  It's one thing to make a meal for your own family (a decent enough amount of work), but with these jobs, everything has to be presented correctly and with the exact right stuff.  It's kind of like running a private restaurant, not to mention that you have to be up before everyone else to get the stove running to make the hot water to prep breakfast.

I really enjoyed this book and will now have another name to look for in the gasp literary section of used book stores!

45. Green River High by Duncan Kyle

I went through my past reviews of Duncan Kyle and at least twice, probably 3 times, I referred to him as a poor man's Desmond Bagley.  I need some new material!  Well I always meant that in terms of perception and now after having finished Green River High, I am discarding it altogether.  Duncan Kyle is good.  He's real good.  I was almost weeping with joy at the setup in the first few pages.  George Hawke Tunnacliffe is at a turning point in his life, where he is about to be promoted to head clerk at the bank where he works and is extremely reluctant to take that step, fearing being stuck in the mediocre stability of such a life.  On his way to work on the day that he will have to decide whether to accept the promotion or not. he is delayed by an old man on the bus getting sick and because of that interrupts a bank robbery at his own bank.

Of course, Tunnacliffe has a background in the army and by foiling the robbery, he becomes a minor celebrity.  This scene in the hospital, where he is talking to his female doctor is the stuff that I absolutely love about good British men's fiction. 

Of course being a hero doesn't help this guy!   And I just love the "you're rather dangerous" with the subtle implication that the doctor is attracted to him, yet still professional herself.  This is what America so often struggles with, the understated nature of the true badass (Asia gets this as well).  Of course, the military background with the rugged but loved superior officer.  It's just all so awesome.

Because of his public exposure, two old contacts of his WWII pilot father reach out to him, each with intriguing, inter-connected opportunities stemming from his father's disappearance in SE Asia at the end of the war.  From then, the story is pretty classic well-researched exploration and struggles in the jungles of Borneo (with a side tour of action in the Essex hills).  There is one great wrinkle in the character of Mrs. Franklin, prim and proper churchgoer who was also a nurse in those same jungles and is a total badass in her own way.  She's a great character that really elevates the story.  Straight-up banger.

On a consumerist note, I really love these Fontana wrap-around covers.  I'd love to have a complete set in good order.  Here is a great site with each of them laid out flat.  Props!

44. The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji

This is another classic in the Japanese honkaku school, I believe actually shin honkaku, or new orthodox/traditional where the authors recreate the "fair play" mysteries of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, etc. that the reader has all the clues to figure out the mysteries themselves.  This one is hardcore into the classics as the main characters are a group of university students who are also members of the mystery book club and give each other pseudonyms of different classic authors (Carr, Ellery, Van Dine, Orczy, Agatha, etc.).  There are several tropes here that are quite common in much of the Japanese media we get translated in North America: the group of young people isolated on an island, the sad loneliness of the loser kid but the overall style and atmosphere is more straightforward and realistic.

The plot is that 7 members of the mystery club are going to spend a week on a small island that is infamous because the owner who was an eccentric architect built a mansion which then was the site of at least four people being murdered and the building burned down.  One of the students uncle, a real estate agent, ended up buying the island and let the kids stay in the remaining ten-sided building.  For them it is kind of an adventure, but little do they know somebody is planning an elaborate revenge against them.

There are two narrative lines in the book, one with the students on the island first just exploring and being themselves but then dealing with each of them being murdered one by one.  The other narrative is another student who had quit the club who received a threatening letter.  He starts investigating and we learn about the history of the architect and start to piece together what happened before on the island.

At first, it felt a bit wooden.  The characters used their nicknames and it took me a while to get a sense of who they actually were.  Characterization is not strong throughout the book as the emphasis is on the puzzle, but it does get more human as the trauma of the murders starts to impact them (and eliminate them so there are fewer to try and remember).  The mystery is layered and elaborate and I really got into it by the second half.  It's a page turner for sure.  I'm hopeless at figuring these things out, I finally started to cotton just when the author wanted me to.  It's a lot of fun and I can't understand why all of his books are not translated into English.

43. Path to Savagery by Robert Edmond Alter

Paperback Warrior turned me on to this book and after much hunting I found it (I believe at Pulp Fiction books in Vancouver but can't remember for sure beyond the happy feeling of seeing the book on the shelf).  I'm surprised it isn't better known among post-apocalypse readers because it really hits all the fun notes of the genre.  I would have loved this as a Road Warrior inspired adolescent.

The timeline is a little inconsistent, as different character's memories of the destroyed civilization seem a bit too fresh compared to the level of destruction and deterioration of society.  Falk is a Loner, picking his way through ruined America on his own, simply trying to survive.  He will glom onto Flockers to get some water and trade, as they are the small semi-civilized groups in contrast to the Neanderthals, who have regressed to nomadic raiding and destruction.  Falk's big advantage, other than his own experience and skill, is that he has a tommy gun.  We get several neat little episodes involving both groups until Falk discovers a ruined coastal city where the downtown is half under water.  Figuring he can maybe discover a treasure trove by making it out to the big department store, he discovers a small community that has already taken it over.  

The Paperback Warrior review goes deeper into the plot if you want to learn more.  Ultimately, it's just a fun action-packed read, with some hints at a greater storyline (rumours of some place called Genesis in the north where they are trying to create a new civilization).  However, the thematic through line is actually Falk trying to find the right woman, one he sees and feels in his dreams and then actually encounters.  The outcome is quite interesting.  I sort of dug it and felt that it pushed the sexual politics of the book slightly beyond the late 60s mores that were in the rest of the book.

42. The History of England by Lord Macaulay (abridged and annotated edition by Hugh Trevor-Roper)

I found this book in a free box in the community center where I sometimes play basketball.  It seemed a bit daunting, but interesting.  Now I wish I actually had the full edition and I may one day track it down and read it.  The full edition is roughly four times the size as this one.  Trevor-Roper does his usual solid job of putting the history into context and then picking out all the sections dealing with the Glorious Revolution that kicked James III off the throne, put William III on and established the foundation of England's strong parliament that would lead to its dominance in the world.  I had probably learned much of this in high school, but completely forgotten all of it but a few fleeting references.  This book was really informative.  Furthermore, it was also quite enjoyable.  Macaulay really could write and he has that great British characteristic of not holding back at all in his critiques and doing so in a readable way.  Trevor-Roper reveals all his biases and even where he is straight up erroneous and these make him ripping apart various Tory historical figures all the more fun.

Some great quotes:

It must be remembered that, though concord is in itself better than discord, discord may indicate a better state of things than is indicated by concord. Calamity and peril often force men to combine. Prosperity and security often encourage them to separate.

In revolutions, men live fast: the experience of years is crowded into hours: old habits of thought and action are violently broken; novelties, which at first sight inspire dread and disgust, become in a few days familiar, endurable, attractive.

Indeed, during the century which followed the Revolution, the inclination of an English Protestant to trample on the Irishry was generally proportioned to the zeal which he professed for political liberty in the abstract.  If he uttered any expression of compassion for the majority oppressed by the minority, he might be safely set down as a bigoted Tory and High Churcham

Also, a note on the length of time it took me to read this (astute readers will notice that it has been a month since my last post).  Part of it is that the book is long and there is a real slog in the middle where he goes into the mire of religious arguments of the non-jurors and their counterparts (another example of the absolute stupidity of religion where Catholic leaders in England had to twist themselves in knots to figure out how accepting or not accepting William as sovereign could fit into their interpretation of the bible).  But really, I could have finished it much faster but this July has been warm weather, Fantasia film festival and just hanging out in Montreal.

41. The Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

The Economist had a podcast series called The Prince that went deep into the background of China's Xi Jinping.  It was excellent and led me to their follow-up series on China called Drum Tower, which is also quite good though a bit meandering and judgemental at times.  I was tempted to subscribe but am already overwhelmed with podcast and print content.  They recommended this book as a really good and interesting snapshot into modern China.  I found it at half-price books.

This kind of fiction is just not for me.  Let me start off by saying that it is well-crafted and a couple of the stories were quite good.  It comes from what I call The New Yorker school of short fiction, which is stories where not much happens and end on an ambivalent note that is supposed to give you some kind of feeling which makes upper middle class people feel that they are clever.  I have not read enough of these kinds of stories to know if they all have to be mildly depressing but I think that is also generally expected, as happiness and things working out isn't considered deep by anxious grad students.  The stories in the Land of Big Numbers were all mildly depressing.  What was really damning, though, is that I didn't feel that I really got that much of a better understanding of modern China.  This felt very much like the western judgement of all the flaws of modern China: quaint villages with traditions destroyed for crass wealth and modernity, the controlling but bumbling state apparatus and so on.

China has issues for sure, but I am sure there is a lot of good stuff about life there and I would have much preferred at least one or two stories of what is the good life in China today.  This all felt like a western visitor who was steeped in daily life but didn't actually grow up in China and is approaching it (and the writing) with an a priori critique.  There are many moments of local life that are interesting and did give an excellent sense of the day-to-day.  Two stories, one about a new fruit that has almost magical properties and the other about people stuck in a subway platform, were really good.  But the rest kind of bummed me out.  The worst one was about a young Chinese-American nurse travelling around the Grand Canyon with her douchebag outdoorsy American long-term boyfriend.  Oh boo hoo your boyfriend may be cheating on you and doesn't listen but you'll probably marry him anyways. 

I should have known but I have a vague memory that it was suggested this book was vaguely science fiction or some stories set in the near future and that sucked me in.  Also, the slick trade dress seduced me.  It was a quick read, the prose being tight and flowing and I finished it while stuck in traffic trying to get on the Lions Gate Bridge, so I appreciate it for that, but otherwise just not my jam at all.

40. The Young in One Another's Arms by Jane Rule

I found this in the free box on Esplanade and just had to take it.  So many factors contributed to this decision:  classic 70s painted cover, Canadian lit and finally it takes place in Vancouver where we were heading for "vacation".  I was wary, believe me, I mean just look at the title.  I was hoping that the location and period trappings would maintain my interest if the narrative got too cloying.  Fortunately, it is not an overly sentimental read, though spent too much time in the main character's head constantly fretting.  Unfortunately, I suspect the author was American and though living in Canada, didn't really seem to either want to or was not able to give it any real Canadian or B.C. or Vancouver flavour.  I wonder if this was a deliberate choice to try and make the setting approachable to potential American readers, like so many films shot in Canada but pretending to be the U.S.

The story is about Ruth Wheeler a middle-aged woman who owns a large house that she manages as a boarding house.  Her daughter died in a car crash a few years earlier at the age of 22 and her husband is away most of the time working on road projects up north.  She is effectively a den mother for a disparate group of what I guess is supposed to be a representative range of the youth of the late 70s, including a draft dodger and a young military runaway.  The neighbourhood they live in has been slated for development, all the houses to be demolished.  Hers was purchased and the dilemma is what to do next.  She plans to move into a condo with her older mother-in-law (also a tenant) and Warren, the shoe salesman with some kind of mental disability that she knows she can't leave him on his own.  Much of the book is the dramas of the various members.  There is a love triangle, then a quadrangle.  The deserter gets arrested.  The husband comes back from time to time and is a chauvinist jerk, though mainly in rhetoric as he doesn't actually block Ruth from doing what she wants.  It's all semi-interesting, though I never felt a strong emotional connection to any of it, beyond admiration for Ruth and her mellow approach to her charges.  Later, a Black character arrives, an educated gay guy whose shtick is to parrot stepinfetchit language and parody the racism around him.  This portrayal is very 70s, though he ends up being a cool and interesting character, about as well fleshed out as the rest of them.  What I did enjoy about the book is that none of the drama was exaggerated or hyped up to create fake tension in the reader.  It just happens and that made most of it feels quite realistic and natural.  There was one false where she recounts a childhood memory where a neighbour smashes all her watermelons because she wanted to taste them before they were ready which just seemed utterly false.

As I read this book, it reinforced the simplistic yet somewhat truthful idea that one could argue that every book is a genre book, with specific conventions that appeal to specific demographics of readers.  The Young in One Another's Arms is ostensibly just a novel, but ultimately it feels targeted to a certain type of semi-progressive but ultimately bourgeois female.  Just as I take pleasure in reading about men preparing equipment and calculating the odds of climbing a snowy mountain pass, I suspect women want to read about other women's constant inner monologue on their changing emotional state in reaction to their past and current events.

I read about Jane Rule and she was indeed an expat and a significant voice of lesbian rights and fiction back in the day.  She spent most of her life with her partner on Galiano and sounds like she was quite a nice person.  I have expanded my CanLit knowledge!

39. Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold (#10 in the Vorkosigan Saga)

I read this in the omnibus
"Miles in Love"

I love reading and since the dip from my daughter's birth, I have been steadily turning it into a constant habit.  It's kind of like eating for me now, which is cool.  I have to say, though, that sometimes it can be a bit of an effort, especially when a book is annoying or boring.  Reading these Vorkosigan books is the exact opposite.  They are like delicious ice cream sundaes that aren't too filling and not unhealthy.  I had set a goal to find a long science fiction series and many voices suggested that Bujold's saga be the one.  They were right.  However, now that I am over halfway through and really am getting (and really enjoying) the style and rhythm, I have the dilemma of wanting to plow right through them but also wanting to savour them and not wanting them to be over.

This dilemma is only amplified by Komarr being my favourite so far and it leading to a potential romantic situation whose outcome I am desperate to learn!  Komarr takes place on, you guessed it, Komarr. It's the planet situated right next to the only wormhole that goes to Barrayar and is thus strategically crucial for Vorkosigan's planet (and growing empire).  The Cetagandans did a deal with Komarr to allow them through the wormhole to invade Barrayar.  When Barrayar repulsed that invasion, they then came after Komarr, invading it and securing the planet and the wormhole.  Miles' dad was a principal military leader in that invasion and it ended with a bunch of Komarrian politicians and rebels getting massacred after having given up their arms thus earning him the nickname "The Butcher of Barrayar".

Several decades later, the power relationship has softened somewhat as Barrayar has tried to integrate and assimilate rather than dominate.  The Barrayan emperor Gregor has fallen in love with a Komarran scientist and they are to be wed, when suspiciously destructive accident sends a freighter into the massive solar reflector that is crucial to Komarr's terraforming project.  Miles, newly appointed and youngest of the Imperial Auditors is sent out with an older colleague and engineering expert Lord Vorthrys to investigate.

This premise alone is intriguing and satisfying, but this book becomes doubly delicious when they are sent to stay with Vorthrys' niece, Ekaterina Vorsoisson.  She is a stifled wife and mother married to a career bureaucrat who is just on the border of being truly abusive.  However, you define his behaviour he is one of the most dislikeable characters I have read in a book in a long while.  He has a rare genetic disorder that makes him a "mutie" in the Vor prejudice and deals with it in the most loserish way possible, by hiding it and avoiding getting the treatment because he wants to do it in some faraway place where nobody will know which is way beyond their means.  Even worse, his son also has it and he keeps delaying the treatment for him as well.  He is also just a generally insecure and mean dick and the wife has long suppressed herself to be able to survive with him.

What makes the book so fun is that Miles is immediately smitten with her.  She is his physical type and then keeps revealing more and more layers of a great personality with suppressed potential.  These books are very much romantic adventure fantasies in the Georgette Heyer mode (others have made this comparison) and here the comparison is particularly apt.  There are so many great scenes of Miles using his class, charm and experience to try and get her to like him.  The fantasy is on both sides as we want her to fall in love with Miles and we also want him to user his wealth and power to grant her the life she deserves.  It's good stuff!

There is also some cool space stuff (though at the planetary level) and a fun conclusion with some action.  I stayed up way too late.  Now I want to jump into the second one to see how the relationship progresses but also want to wait.  Dillema!

38. Killer Mine by Mickey Spillane

I'm not a huge Mickey Spillane fan and he is generally considered a lesser rated writer by hardboiled aficionados.  I think he is also slightly tainted for being somewhat extreme in his language that is a precursor to the right-wing Dirty Harry/vigilante mentality that really came to fruition in the Death Wish cinema of the 80s.  A friend of mine gave this to me and I thought I should give him a revisit, since to be fair, I had no memory of actually why I wasn't a fan of his as I hadn't read him since college.

This is actually two novellas put into one book.  The first, Killer Mine, is about a police lieutenant who is sent back to investigate some murders in his old tenement neighbourhood.  He is a good cop and had worked to put that world behind him, but his inside knowledge is seen as an assett by the department.  The plan is that he goes in "undercover" in the sense that everybody knows he is a cop but he is back in the neighbourhood because he has taken up with an old fling (who also was from the neighbourhood and kind of an old fling) who is still living there.   She is a police officer as well.  Big names have been getting killed and it seems to link up to something bigger in the mob.

The story was okay and I guessed the mystery quite early on.  Spillane also has a lot of weird very dated romantic interactions that I guess were supposed to seem modern and edgy at the time.  They aren't quite as psychologically convoluted as John D. MacDonald but have a similar tone and language.  The depiction of the neighbourhood, it's grime and various locations as well as the characters that live there and even some history was quite rich and well done.  A decent enough read.

The second story, Man Alone, also stars a cop, who just got acquitted from killing a mid-level gangster and taking bribes.  We start out with him sneaking out of the courthouse and getting in a cab.  He was framed and now he is pissed.  The plot here was quite convoluted and I got a bit confused, though I also guessed the main mystery (both involved somebody who was supposed to be dead but wasn't actually).  However, I quite enjoyed the protagonist's journey.  There is some good investigating (which I always appreciate) and some nice tough language.  This one was a good read.

So I'll re-assess Spillane somewhat.  He definitely churned them out with a certain cynical style towards selling books and there is a simplistic escapist fantasy element in there that is a bit too blunt for me to take him seriously.  Nevertheless, he sets a good scene and moves things forward.  There is entertainment here.