56. The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side by Agatha Christie

I'm struggling to get my daughter to read books.  She is a fast reader and does well in school but just doesn't have the strong desire to read.  For some reason she is fixated on It (the Stephen King book) which I won't let her read because of the super creepy ending.  I also won't let her watch the recent two-part movie because it is absolute dogshit and would ruin all that is good about the book.  I gave her Salem's Lot which I later realized is one of King's most boring books.  She read that but it did not ignite a Stephen King fire in here.  I got her Firestarter which hasn't started.  I know for some reason Agatha Christie is trendy among younger readers so I got her a couple of what I thought were classics.  She started this one and just couldn't keep going.  I took it and read it and can see why.

What is quite good about The Mirror Crack'd is the portrayal of the older English village and the development of the modern estates next door to it.  What's not so good is the mystery itself.  I can see how a 13-year old would not find this all very engaging, especially one who has no real exposure to the subtleties of British social culture.  I was a bit disappointed myself in this one.  The set up is good.  A fading and neurotic British movie actress has moved in with her wealthy producer husband to the old aristocratic mansion of St. Mary Mead.  At a reception in her new home, one of her guests is poisoned and it becomes clear that the poison was meant for the actress.  The more exciting storyline honestly is if Miss Marple can get out from under the thumb of her well-meaning but way too keen and strict caregiver (Miss Marple is quite old at this point).  The mystery itself heads off into a couple of dead ends and the resolution, while clever, is not that satisfying.

Anybody know what are the really good Christie's that will get a 13-year old hooked?  Or any other books.  She is deadset against fantasy and especially all these fantasy series that are popular these days.

55. The Mark of the Warrior by Paul Scott

This behaviour of mine is really not going to reduce the on-deck shelf.  It's reached its horizontal limit, to the edge of the chest of drawers, at which point my rule is not to buy anymore books and only read those on deck.  And yet here I am finding this nice-looking British paperback from my key time period about soldiers in the colonial theatre at the Chainon thrift store.  I would not have bought it if I hadn't also found the Lifegames adult Choose Your Own Adventure book.  Somehow, that enabled me to buy this one as well.  And then I read it right away too!

Mark of the Warrior is the story of Major Craig, an older soldier in the Burmese theatre who is now heading up a training unit in India.  We learn early on that he was leading a retreat when one of the men drowned crossing a river.  This becomes a big deal for him (though we learn it already was) when the dead soldier's brother, A.W. Ramsay, is one of the trainee recruits.  The big philosophical theme is that most men are not made for war, but there are a small minority whose being is basically perfectly suited for the sacrifices of men fighting men. They are natural hunters and put their instinct to survive and kill ahead of their other emotions.  Major Craig is not one of these men.  Cadet Ramsay is.

 

The location, the training exercises and the characters are all richly drawn.  I just really have an issue with the theme itself, especially when it is blasted in the reader's face.  You know how it is going to end up and it is just all so '70s war hero revisionism.  The conflict is that Craig puts Ransom in the lead of one of the two teams in the final, competitive training exercise.  Ransom's team is the local guerrilla army and they are supposed to sneak attack the other team. Ransom gets way to into it, forcing his men to suffer through extra-long marches with minimal rations to simulate potential reality.  Craig encourages this for various thematic reasons that don't really compel (guilt over his brother's death? to release the real soldier in him?  who knows).  

 

I guess I'm being extra critical as it is a well-written book.  I don't know how as an author you could get a richer story out of the setup without having some heavy psychological conflict.  Personally, I would have been happier just to read the setup and playing out of the simulation without all the thematic angst.  But that kind of thing didn't and doesn't sell thanks to the hegemony of the dogma of "conflict" in the  literary world.

 

54. Life games #1 - Woman Up the Corporate Ladder by Angela Harper

This was a crazy thrift store find, a Choose Your Own Adventure for the 1980s career woman.  I wonder how well it did at the time.  I can see how somebody would have come up with this idea as CYOA's were extremely successful in the 80s.  However, the demographic seems like a major leap.  For some reason, the concept of the reader taking an active part in the narrative (which is also the base concept of role-playing games and ultimately video games) seems for some reason to really only resonate with nerdy types, which back in the 80s was predominantly male (and young, though less predominantly).  Happily, this is slowly improving, but I still don't see a market for "normal" grown-ups to read books like these.  I'd be curious how well they did.

This book was a fun read, more fun than I expected.  I thought at first that I might just flip through it or read a few of the storylines.  I ended up reading every single possible outcome.  It's very digestible and a real page turner because every decision leads to a different path and you want to learn what happens.  It actually gets somewhat outrageous, though never totally insane.  You can end up in Brazil, have affairs with your boss (or reject his advances), decide to take a bribe, go after opponents and so on.  There are a lot of ethical decisions, yet not a consistent ethical message.  Sometimes doing the right thing, doesn't end up so well and sometimes making a bad decision can work out for you.  It felt a bit random.  There were some quite bleak and sad endings as well.  

I feel like a man wrote this, but I am not super confident about that.  I'd love to hear a backstory on these and I'll keep my eye out for them.

53. Dungeon Crawl Classics core rulebook by Joseph Goodman

I had to get the Erol Otus cover

If you want to find a reason for my lack of reading in the last couple of months, it is to this tome that you can point the finger.  I did actually read it cover to cover, which I don't believe I have ever done for a tabletop role-playing game before.  However, "reading" an RPG book, usually then triggers a myriad of other activities, such as hunting down multiple other source materials (such as adventures and supplementary rulebooks, older versions), going online to ask questions (an entire internet history is here in the TTRPG sector from usenet to fora to blogs to G+ and today to Discord), creating your own content and finally actually playing!

All these things have happened.  Now that I have had a chance to actually play and GM, my mania has subsided to a more consistent, sustainable level and I have picked up linear non-fiction books again.  So I will limit this post to a broad review of the DCC core rulebook and leave the TTRPG nerdiness to other places of expression.

Goodman Games started out designing adventures for D&D 3rd edition and kept doing that right into 5th.  As D&D evolved, I guess he realized that the system was not fitting the kinds of adventures they were making, which tended towards the kind of fantasy found in sci-fi and fantasy fiction from the mid-twentieth century, which in turn was the material that strongly influenced the original versions of D&D.  It is extremely hard to pinpoint any one playstyle, but very broadly speaking, D&D back in the 80s had less powerful player-characters and was focused more on dungeon exploration and what we call "emergent story" where narrative would come out of whatever weird shit happened in a dungeon.  The term "murder hoboes" captures it well.  In today's D&D, the adventures and campaigns are structured around long-term narratives involving character development and the PCs are insanely powerful ("Fantasy Avengers").  Death is really no longer an option.

Beyond the D&D RPG system, it is the famous "Appendix N" that influences DCC the most. This was a section in the back of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide that listed the fiction that influenced D&D. It is an exceptional list of some genre classics and some relatively obscure.  

DCC builds on the spirit of orginal D&D but has its own slightly more complex ruleset that involves lots of great random tables.  The book is just under 500 pages but probably only 100 pages is actual rules.  The bulk of the book are the spells. Each spell has a table of results which vary wildly and are a blast to read. I laughed out loud several times.  

Engaging with an RPG is an ongoing, dynamic and multi-media experience.  You read it, you talk about it with others, you play it and ultimately, you run it as a GM (gamemaster or what they call "judge" in the DCC world, to emphasize the notion that you are there to interpret the outcomes based on the rules, not guide them).  There is no ultimate understanding of an RPG.  It's a dialectic.  I played in a few online one-shots and then ran a few sessions with my friends.  It went fairly well, but we didn't get in deep enough to really take advantage of the crazy magic.  Another friend is now the GM, which is great as I only have to play, but if he wants to take a break, I'd be happy to get back behind the screen.

Magic is powerful but not without consequences
in Dungeon Crawl Classics

52. The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain by Eric Andrew-Gee

I am a regular patient at the Montreal Neurological hospital.  I didn't even really consciously know about its existence before I was diagnosed by them (very fortunately too) with a rare neurological disorder that falls under the category of Multifocal Neural Neuropathy (MNN).  I'm one in a hundred-thousand!  In my case, I am very, very fortunate.  First that it was caught quite early (I started noticing weakness in my right hand, a reduced shooting range with my jump shot and at its worst the inability to turn the ignition key in a car).  Second, that I am in Canada and where we have universal (sort of thanks to the neo-liberal fucks and incompetents in government constantly trying to destroy it) health care. And third that I live so close to the Neuro, because as it turns out, this is an amazing medical institution with an incredible history and an ongoing commitment to both research and care of their patients.  

I now go in once a month or so for IVig treatments where I get pumped full of expensive blood byproducts to get my antibodies to behave correctly and stop erroneously attacking my mylene (the sheathing that insulates your nerves).  Some of the damage is permanent (which manifests itself as a weakness in my pinky and ring finger on my dominant hand; many cases are much worse affecting both hands and feet and impacting walking and handling) but it appears that the disease has been stopped altogether.  It's super chill, I get a comfy chair and good wi-fi and just work and sometimes take a nap.  The nurses are elite and the other staff super efficient.  Everybody is really nice.  Not to mention Dr. Massive who identified the problem (after several misdiagnoses from other doctors).

So I have experienced firsthand the excellent of the Neuro from the great care and expertise that I have received and am receiving first hand.  But it is this book that taught me the history behind it.  I was looking forward to reading this book, but a bit skeptical as these kinds of less-than-academic histories tend to lack depth and bend the history towards narrative. I think there is a teeny bit of the latter here, but the historical context was very efficiently done.  What makes the book really effective, though, is that it is truly moving.  For this reader, it had the effect it intended, which was to elevate the unsung partner of one of Canada's most famous doctors.

The hook is the famous Heritage Minute which most Canadians of a certain age featuring Dr. Penfield, the rock-star neurosurgeon who advanced the field massively in the 20th century.  Penfield is the known name but he began his career and worked closely with another doctor, William Cone.  Cone was the one who excelled at surgery and had the best bedside manner.  He obsessed over hygiene and technique as well as ensuring patients were emotionally taken care of.  Penfield was no slouch in these areas, but his real passion was in the research and writing, which Cone did not like.  Penfield was the charismatic one and Cone hitched himself to his star, seemingly driven by his love for is friend more than anything else.   

These kinds of journalistic histories are not usually my jam, so I was surprised by how well put together The Mind Mappers was.  It's a very readable, informative and ultimately quite touching telling of an important history of Canada, Montreal and science.  

51. The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

[written Nov 19, 2025 because I put off writing this for weeks as explained below.] 

Wow, I really hit a block with the 50 books blog for the first time in years!  The obvious cause is a recent head-first plunge into the world of tabletop role-playing games, but I wonder if there is a deeper fatigue at play that has allowed/enabled me to avoid writing book reviews for almost two months.

Very briefly, I played RPGs back in the 80s when D&D first exploded and then stopped with adolescence and other social pursuits.  I got pulled back in in the late '90s and then got deep into it (online fights and everything) in the early aughts and then dropped out again with the birth of my own child.  

During the pandemic, my friend groups and I were having regular zoom calls and decided to start a 5e game online.  We have been playing sporadically but consistently since then.  Something happened a few months ago where I got sucked way back in and am now demonstrating all the classic behaviours of the true addict (online talking about it way too much, buying all kinds of beautiful books, playing in a second group locally and in one shots online; it's bad!).

So to slowly drag this back to actual reading, I've been spending most of my reading time, reading game books, which you don't usually read linearly (they have rules, settings, etc. it would be kind of like reading an encyclopedia straight through).  I did actually read one from beginning to end and I will count that in this blog, but overall my reading has fallen way off.

Before the sickness truly set in, I did read this second Tarzan.  Somebody somewhere recommended this one and The Jungle Tales of Tarzan as particularly good and I found both of them in Vancouver.  I did enjoy The Return of Tarzan overall, but had mixed feelings.  First of all, with Burroughs, one has to account for the racism and eugenics.  It's less present here just because the first half of the book takes place in Europe so less opportunity for him to describe the various disadvantages of the non-whites.  But it goes hard in the second half.  It's bad and I condemn it but I'm still going to read the books.

To me as a reader, the literary problem with Burroughs is that he has a lot of potential with the Tarzan concept and he just kind of barfs it all over the page.  His miraculous education and rise to the role of gentlemen (due to his racial superiority of course which is intrinsically tied to class in Burrough's world) makes Tarzan a great vehicle for the contrast between the stiff laws of civilization and the powerful release of the savage.  You need to build this up gradually, though, and use it sparingly at the right moments.  Instead, Tarzan is just kicking the shit out of groups of people multiple times right away, while, super annoyingly, never actually killing the one serious bad guy.  It's just so bald that Burroughs is keeping the Russian spy alive to maintain a central narrative, but he does it by violating the the rules of Tarzan's own character.  It's bad.

On top of that, there are all these convoluted plot lines which ensure that Tarzan and Jane won't get together.  They literally pass each other on separate ships in the night.  I've avoided the plot this whole time.  Basically, the first half is in Europe and involves said Russian spy doing bad shit to a rich guy.  Then they all go to Africa and get shipwrecked and Tarzan comes to rescue them.

Before he can rescue them, though, we get the main plot of the second half which is Tarzan going back to the tribal village in his old stomping grounds and defending them against Arab slave raiders.  Here the book gets really fun.  It's almost Conan the Barbarian territory; real pulp stuff.  He discovers an ancient city filled with gold and these weird pygmy descendants from space who were once purebred but got all corrupted with time or some shit.  The hilarious part is their queen is still super hot and genetically pure and she saves Tarzan from being sacrificed because she is hot for him.  It's quite wacky and super entertaining and with a bit of tweaking could be a cool origin story for the Kingdom of Wakanda.

 

 

50. A Chill Rain in January by L.R. Wright

50 books achieved. I guess it's a good sign that I don't make a big deal out of my 50th book anymore.  Like a succesful athlete, not too high, not too low.  Just keep grinding.  Still, satisfying.

I picked this one up at the family home which may not be so much longer as we were there to move our mother to assisted living. I "discovered" L.R. Wright on my own only a few years ago, but now realize that my parents must have been reading her books at the time they came out as we have a few of her paperbacks floating around in the study.

A Chill Rain in January is the fourth or fifth book in the series, and I think it may have been a bit more fulfilling had I been reading them in order.  There are two major plotlines in the mystery that collide.  The first and the main character is Zoe Strachan, a beautiful sociopath who lives on her own outside of Sechelt with a perfectly controlled life until her spendthrift older brother comes to blackmail her for money.  He has her "scribblers", notebooks where she reveals her true inhuman self and evidently admits to some actual crimes.  At the same time, Ramona Orlitzki, an old woman loved by the community escapes from the hospital where she has recently been committed because of her oncoming dementia.

It's a nice premise and the characters are well-conceived.  Unfortunately, I found the actual storyline frustrating.  The suspense is extended multiple times due to incompetence among multiple characters, incompetence that is never called out and so it is left unresolved.  The officer hunting for Ramona doesn't look in her closet when he goes to her old home.  This is never really mentioned as an error.  The coroner finds strange injuries on the murder victim and Sergeant Elberg, who is the main character of the entire series, totally brushes them off. Worse, when he finally cottons on that there is something suspicious going on, the coroner then seems to try to contradict that.  It's inconsistent and frustrating. And it keeps going right up to the climactic conclusion where the mailman is given the crucial evidence and just dumps it off at the police station instead of taking it right to the top.  Finally, when they do figure it out, they wait until the next day which allows for a major out for everybody (being vague here for spoiler alerts).  All this incompetence leads to two unnecessary deaths and should lead to a major scandal and one would hope an investigation into the RCMP in Sechelt (of course, all the Mounties would be exonerated since we all know how that goes in Canada but there should have at least been some official murmurings).

The physical locations, the weather and the trees and water were all well-written and did remind me of my own childhood and that is why I read these.  What was missing, though, from this one, is the human culture of coastal B.C.  This could have taken place almost anywhere.  I'm hoping this was an exception from the rule for this series. 

 

49. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

My sister forced me to read this.  She is a bit like a male nerd in that way but only sporadically and she does have good taste (she got me to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas years back) so I acquiesced.  I had read A House for Mr. Biswas in the pre-50 Books days and loved it, so felt it wasn't going to be a challenge to read this one, despite it being a bit high-falutin compared to my usual reading choices.  It's actually a fairly "intellectual" book.  Though very well-written, it's much slower to get through than Mr. Biswas.  There is a lot of inner reflection, both personal and political and ideas that take some parsing and re-reading.  So it took me a while.  On top of it, I am fully back into the Tabletop RPG community (Discord seems to have become the replacement for the old forums) and had a major life task (moving our mother into assisted living) both of which contributed to inconsistent reading.  I finally banged out the last third in a night of jetlag insomnia.

It's the story of Salim, an Indian African (African Indian?) who was born and raised in the coast of Africa but is given a small goods store up the river.  Here he half-heartedly tries to start a new life away from his family compound and culture amidst the political and social turmoil of post-independence central Africa.  Everybody knows the book takes place in the Congo and the Big Man is Mobuto but they are never specifically mentioned by name in the book.

I won't go into any depth because there is a lot to write and discuss that has been done already by smarter and more diligent people.  I would like to focus on one element relevant to today's collapse into authoritarianism, which is the protagonist's strange passivity and listlessness in the face of the changes around him and his community.  We know that really bad shit is coming down and he sort of does as well.  So it's a bit dissonant as a reader to see Salim basically just putting one foot in front of the other.  What finally knocks him out of his malaise is a woman, who gives him an image of another world (basically cool Europe) but even this doesn't really create much initiative in him.  What Naipaul succeeds in here is demonstrating how difficult it is for people who come up in such an old and solid reality to conceive of alternatives to that reality (positive or negative) let alone acting on such alternatives, even when it may be a question of survival.

Salim's family has been in Africa for generations and though not of Africa, they are as thoroughly fundamental to the social fabric as the indigenous Africans (and less-indigenous Arabs).  When the institutions around them begin to collapse with the end of colonialism, they can only shrink into themselves.  There is also an element of privilege, where their role as "foreigners" with greater wealth and status as well as some contacts outside of Africa delays the impact of the real horrors to them compared to the Africans (who also have also suffered the horrors of colonialism and are thus in a sense already living after the apocalypse).  

But the horrors are coming, just like they are coming to us right now.  And I see the same sort of stunned stolidness in my American friends.  But what are they to do?  You still have your job that you have to go to, taxes you have to pay and the real bad shit is happening to people you don't know just down the road.  So they cling to the fading promise of already broken institutions like "mid-term elections" and "courts" when they should probably be trying to emigrate to Europe and start a new life before the shit really hits the fan.  That is the major part of the success of the criminals taking over America right now: while they destroy all the elements that made America such a great political experiment, they maintain the ones that allow for day-to-day living and comfort, supported by the shitbags in business and tech.  A Bend in the River really gets into the head of that mentality.

I also have to add that there is a scene of misogyny and gender relations in the book that is so bad and craven and deeply dishonest that it almost risks in undermining the entire enterprise. He beats the woman with which he is having an affair quite brutally and then does some other really sick things.  This portrayed in a book is not in and of itself a sin, as these things happen.  But it feels dishonest here, a forced and artificial narrative device to demonstrate some turning point in the protagonist's thinking which completely renders the woman character a device only and also tries to justify Naipaul's own behaviour (he beat up his girlfriend in real life).  We get this nasty shit in many of the mid-century men's books I read and I abhor it there, but it is usually more "I slapped her and she finally got horny" nonsense.  When literary people do it, they often take it to the next level of grossness.  It's a bad look and undermined much of Naipaul's reputation later and deservedly so.

48. Survival Margin by Charles Eric Maine

I believe this was given to me by a friend who knows I like PA. I thought it was American at first, but quickly realized this is a British author. It's actually not PA, but rather A or whatever the term is called for the sub-genre where the world is actually falling apart.  In this case it is a virus, particularly well-constructed with a bunch of science that sounded more or less legitimate for 1968.  Basically, the virus called AB causes a person to get a fever and then die with in a day or two after which their skin melts off.  This concept seemed disgusting and interesting at the beginning, but then gets totally abandoned and has no impact on any of the issues of dealing with the bodies or people dying at home, etc. I point this out now, because Survival Margin while overall being a a fun look at a world ripped in half by disease, also omits or is sloppy and inconsistent about a lot of fun details. 

The virus has a counterpart called BA that mirrors it but only gives you a slight fever for a day and then you become immune.  But a BA person is also a carrier of AB.  About half the people get AB and die and the other half live, so the premise is that basically half the world is going to die.  The powers that be in England decided to create a bunch of armed and sealed underground bunkers (another sloppy lack of detail because they never really explain how this airborne and waterborne virus wouldn't also get into the bunkers if not already there) to protect their top leaders.  This causes civil unrest that eventually becomes a full-on class divided civil war.  The big picture is fun.

The anchoring narrative is between two main characters: the charming and successful soulless journalist/TV producer Clive Brant and his principled disease scientist wife Pauline.  Right at the beginning, as they reunite after a long absence (she was in Japan fighting the early stages of the disease), he announces that he wants a divorce because he is now seeing the much younger daughter of an American media mogul who is giving him a plum job to run his new new studio.  I saw coming that their narrative was going to be some kind of morale on marriage and relationships throughout the book and it kind of bummed me out.  Felt like the author was working out his own boring relationship issues and getting in the way of the disease apocalypse we came for.  

The disease itself was interestingly close in many ways to Covid.  It's totally ramped up in speed and impact (basically going to kill half the humans on the planet in a few years), so the scale is different. It starts in Asia (though the scientists surmise because of a mutation of cells from nuclear testing, not jumping from animals). Many of the quarantine measures are similar and the working classes suffering and having to keep working while the privileged get to shelter were also thematically reminiscent.  Things here, though, go much further, with most of Souther England taken over by a semi-organized revolution of working class men led by a charismatic MP.  The second half has lots of violence and military combat and was quite action-packed and Clive and Pauline are of course re-united this time with him as an interrogator for the rebels and she as a captured establishment POW scientist.  He has opportunity to redeem his previously selfish character and does so in a way that was sort of tiresome and predictable.  This made for a lot of start and stop reading as I would get into the action and then get annoyed.

Another flaw is that there is a lot of telling rather than showing.  In the early stages of the spread of the disease, Maine just narrates how it is spreading in Asia with rumours of mass graves.  It made me remember the opening scenes of The Stand with the truck barrelling into the gas station and dude coming out vomiting blood.  Just so much more alive and visceral while giving you basically the same info.  Still, the telling is pretty cool and I have to credit Maine with some interesting speculation about what would happen with a disease that kills half the population.

I'm critical and would not encourage everyone to seek this book out, but it's overall not a bad read and I think worthy of inclusion in any disaster/disease subgenre reader to seek out.

 

47. The Big Bite by Charles Williams

Helpful hint for the hopelessly distracted. If you ever take a train trip, don't bring a laptop.  You will get a lot more reading done.

When I first started this, I became concerned that I had already read it.  The protagonist is a professional football player who got into a car accident that smashed his leg.  When he healed, he was mostly fine, but had lost the explosiveness that made him the player that he was.  A previous Charles Williams I had read, A Touch of Death, also starred an ex-football player who gets caught up in criminal shenanigans with a femme fatale.  However, after some checking, I confirmed that this was indeed a different novel.

He quits football and is a bit lost and down on his luck.  The accident was not his fault; a drunk driver sideswiped him and knocked him off the road. That driver had died in the accident and the insurance paid Halan 10k, but it wouldn’t cover his potential future salary loss as a pro player.  Things change when he gets a call from an insurance investigator named Purvis.  Something was fishy about the accident and he wants to pick Halan’s brains.  Purvis is a neat side character, an old skinny weak looking guy with sharp eyes who it turns out knows some kind of martial art (as Halan learns when he tries to brace him).  He also no longer works for the insurance company and is working a blackmail deal on the wife of the dead driver and wants to bring Halan in on it.  I’ll stop here with the narrative in case you read it.  You can well imagine that shit gets complicated.

Halan is smart and ruthless, almost without any feeling at all.  It’s weird to read a book and sympathize with the character and slowly realize that he is the asshole jock who is only looking out for himself.  You figure this out gradually, through the words of the widow, Julia Cannon, who is one of the better femme fatales I have encountered in a while.  She too is quite ruthless, but also philosophical, almost tragic in her outlook.

A lot goes on in this book, but there is also a lot more dialogue and life philosophy than you usually get with Williams.  It’s very dark and very fun.

 

46. To the Far Blue Mountains by Louis L'Amour

This is book 2 of the much-lauded Sacketts saga (here is the first one, Sackett's Land).  It was Paperback Warrior who first turned me on to it and so far my reading has been lukewarm with some highlights.  This book, the second chronologically in the family's story, but actually published fairly late.  This continues the story of the original patriarch, Barnabas Sackett, as he flees his life in England for Raleigh's Land in the New World.  It takes place at the end of the 16th century.

A big part of Barnabas's background and character is that he grew up in the Fens, a marshy region in eastern England which at least according to this book, was home to independent-minded people who did things like cut peat and smuggled.  It's a cool region, where the locals know the labrynthine waterways intimately and anyone else enters at their peril.

In Sackett's Land, Barnabas goes to the New World.  Here he returns and has to deal with a bunch of local drama culminating in the Queen believing he has found the long lost royal jewels of King James (he actually only found some roman coins that is what gave him the boost he needed to start his life of adventuring).  So there is a price on his head and the first third of the book is him sneaking around England, trying to get back to his ship with his bride-to-be Abigail and his compatriots in order to return to the New World, settle himself and make his way to the mountains.

He escapes and we get some fun ship trading and combat on the way to the Virginia coast.  The second half of the book, he and a new gang of adventurers, including a tough Welsh woman named Lila who is his lady's maiden and equally good with domestic skills as with sword and fists, make their way up river trying to find a place to settle.

The portrayal of the new world is odd.  L'Amour's rhetoric (through Barnabas' voice) is respectful of the Indigineous people and he recognizes that his arrival foretells a lot of change, much of which will be negative.  The individual Native characters are shown to be intelligent and human.  However, he also portrays them as in constant warfare and even a culture of weird militaristic excess.  This is all contextualized by Barnabas' idea that all men seek to expand and take over other regions, so the behaviour of the white colonists is basically the same as one group of Indigenous people taking over another one. So throughout the second half of the book, even though they are peacefully situated in the territory of the friendly Catawba, they are constantly coming under attack by other tribes.  Eventually this becomes like a rite of passage for these other tribes, to try and kill Barnabas.  He is seen as almost superhuman and a way to test their young warriors.  It feels like L'Amour was quite well-researched on the various tribes (in a similar way that he knew about the Fens and the many other historical details with which he stuffs the book), but wanted to also maintain the colonialist mythology of the west that the land had to be wrested from the warlike natives.

That being said, the portrayal of colonialism here is not as bad as I expected and I think deep down (at least from this book) that L'Amour was an appreciator of the diversity of the people of the world.  He has a passage almost a page long describing Barnabas' children's education, emphasizing how they learn from the natives, the Persian doctor, the Welsh woman, their mother, etc. so they have a rich mix of religions and folklore.  

The real problem of this book is the pacing and structure.  It jumps from years of narrative to a sudden fight scene. There is no real throughline, nor antagonist, nor conflict to hold it all together.  It's just Barnabas wanting to go to the mountains and a lot of stuff happening to him.  In the last quarter, he is suddenly old and has like 4 sons and one daughter and his wife takes two of the kids back to England forever (she's not mad, just thinks the girl needs to be educated back home and the son is smart).  We get an almost throwaway defeat of an earlier sort-of nemesis and then a final attack by the Natives which kills him followed by a coda of how they respected him.  

I wasn't going to continue with the series, so I was happy to read this guy's ranking who puts this one way down at the bottom.  I speculate that maybe L'Amour was much more interested in the history than in putting together a good story.  I'll keep my eye out for the third and pick it up if I find it cheaply. 

 

45. The General by Alan Silittoe

I picked this one up at the same garage sale where I got the Maracot Deep.  I'm not a huge fan of the British Angry Young Men, but they can write and I thought this might be interesting.  I suspected it would be one of those parable books where ideas of humanity and politics are explored in a semi-surrealistic setting, but hoped there might be enough of a real story to keep me interested.

The book begins with an orchestra being sent via train to the front lines of an unnamed 20th century war to both bring morale to the troops and to demonstrate to the enemy how superior their own culture is.  They tried to object but were overruled by the government and the conductor, who is the de facto leader and one of the two main protagonists, thinks to himself that in war everybody is a soldier who has to obey orders.  The beginning is pretty wild as the train runs through a crazier and crazier battle, while the orchestra cowers in the back, unable to act or even decide if they are supposed to be this far forward in the front.

An enemy soldier on a horse rides down the train and they are taken prisoner.  It is here we meet the general, a loyal soldier, strict disciplinarian and an elite tactician. He knows she should shoot the orchestra immediately, as they serve no purpose other than a drain on resources.  However, he hesitates, not sure why until he realizes that he does want to hear them play.

So the rest of the book is his internal struggle on whether to go against his loyalty and training and the orders of high command (confirmed via signal) or give in to his desire to hear the music and perhaps something else.  This is interspersed with the orchestra themselves contemplating their future.  

It's an interesting read, going beyond the simple "war is stupidity" and looks at our motivations as political beings.  This kind of thing isn't really my bag, but it's short and Sillitoe's descriptions of the landscape of war are grim and effective.  The metaphor of the train with the orchestra riding right into the battle and not even bothering to go to the engine or pull the emergency cord is all too parallel to the American populace right now.

44. Barking Dogs by Terence M. Green

My friend both discovered the existence of this book and then found it himself.  He gave it or lent it to me (need to clarify that).  I was very psyched at every step.  I mean who doesn't want to read about a rogue cop in future crime spree Toronto?  Unfortunately, the book itself is decidedly mediocre, so much so that I am not sure if it will make it to my bookshelf, despite its interest as a physical and cultural artifact.    

The protagonist is Mitch Helwig (🤔), a cop who has recently lost his partner.  He's on  the edge, takes 10k, the bulk of he and his wife's nest egg, and buys a Barking Dog, an infallible portable lie-detector.  He then stumbles on one of these new laser pistols on a perp he took down (cops still only carrying .38s because budget cuts), returns to the same shop and buys a super awesome bullet proof vest that is super light and blocks even lasers for a time.  He's basically armouring up and then goes over the edge and starts lasering perps.

This is a weird book.  It has several indicators of 80s crime hysteria, including the streets running wild with rapists, dope peddlers, you name it and nobody doing anything to stop it because the bigwigs are all in on it. His wife has an inner  monologue asking pre-internet stupid internet rhetorical questions like why don't we have capital punishment when everybody wants it and why not build work camps in the North and shoot any escapees?  These parts feel like half-hearted cookie cutter Dirty Harry or Death Wish  (the movies), but they stop there.  We don't even get the entertainment of the over the top right-wing crime hysteria.  

The other major thread is a somewhat thoughtful and well-written yet ultimately banal exploration of Helwig's wife Elaine contemplating and then having an affair, as Helwig spends his nights patrolling Toronto.  It feels like this part of the book is the actual real story the author wanted to right.  I almost feel like Terence wrote all the cop vigilante stuff and handed it to his wife to do the romance, but that she is actually the superior writer.

Helwig is supposedly driven by vengeance for his partner's death.  There is no detecting, he just strikes out randomly and as he closes in on a big-time mob boss running a huge industrial district bringing in guns, drugs and kidnapping little girls for snuff films and then harvesting their organs (yes, this is in the book).  Interspersed with Helwig in the present and his wife's storylines, we also get flashbacks of Mitch with his partner Mario whom he seems to love more than his wife.  There is a lot of badly written jocular back and forth between the partners (some painful puns and dumb safely racist humour), culminating like it is some big climax with Mario (with a new baby boy, of course) getting shot at the donut shop (also yes in the book).

The climax is Helwig taking out the warehouse and then the boss, but he never discovers who actually killed his partner.  He comes home and realizes that value of his family and his wife realizes she made a mistake and they I guess live happily ever after.

Very odd tone, as if a Canadian was hired to write an Executioner novel and also thought he might have a shot at the Governor General's Award.  On the plus side, the gear was cool and the descriptions of the laser wounds were gruesome and effective.

43. Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White

I have the good fortune of being at the side of a lovely lake as I write this and as I read the second half of Some Must Watch.  A very enjoyable book made infinitely more enjoyable by being able to read it in such a lovely spot.  A red-tailed hawk chased some prey (I only caught a white blue) through the trees and then landed for just about a second on a stair post near me before taking off.  I caught a very good look at him and he looked miffed at missing his prey.

I can't remember where I found this book and I have never heard of Ethel Lina White before it.  There certainly were quite a few best-selling women mystery authors in the 20th century who were household names (or close) and have now all but disappeared.  I would love to read an essay on the phenomenon of second-tier woman mystery writers from the thirties and fourties.  Did they know each other?  Was it a bit of a scene?

Some Must Watch centers on young Helen, the orphaned and poor servant woman, who  came from some class before her parents died and a mixed education after.  She has spirit and imagination and a new posting at a Victorian home quite far from town.  She starts this job right after another young woman (the fifth) is murdered in the area, this one's body being found not 5 miles from where she is working.

It's a pretty classic gothic horror/parlour mystery, with a broken up family, the Warrens led by a nasty matriarch confined to her bed, her stepson The Professor and his sister (and son whose hot wife has some very hot pants).  There is a student (the one the wife is hot after) and Mr. and Mrs. Oates (handyman and cook) and finally Nurse Baker, the bitter nurse who looks like a man just sent from the agency.

There is a stormy night and gale keeps everyone inside as well as orders from the cute visiting Dr. with the doors and windows locked.  Slowly, people keep dropping out one by one and Helen realizes or imagines that a noose is tightening around her and the killer approaching.

White structures the novel so not only do you not know who the murderer is, but you also doubt there even is one (at least in that house) until almost the last page.  It was driving me nuts!  At one point, I had so few pages left and so many questions that I had a mild panic that this was only the first book and there was a sequel'!  Not to worry, all is revealed masterfully (prompting me to go back and re-read several sections at the beginning).  I wouldn't call Some Must Watch a masterpiece, but it is definitely among the better crafted and entertaining mysteries of this genre.

I didn't cotton onto it consciously (hello male privilege!), this great blog post (with spoilers so only read after you've read the book) made me appreciate how most of the primary characters are women and the longest dialogues are between women.  White describes a very feminine world, where all the dangers are those that impact the female characters (serial killer, unrequited love, lazy men, dangerous men).  Quite an interesting book in that light, which may also point to its success and then quiet erasure from literary appreciation.

42. The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A neighbour around the block was having a garage sale and he had a pretty nice collection of paperbacks for sale, lots of Pan and other beauties from the peak period.  Unfortunately, they were mostly fairly mainstream authors (lots of Raymond Chandler).  He had a really nice set of Sherlock Holmes, which I also don't need, but would have been a great starter set for a younger reader/collector.  I did pick up two of Doyle's later supernatural adventure books, including this one.  It is a beautiful, illustrated cover and I appreciate the bleed and that the title and author text are part of the illustration.

The basic story is an inspired but manic scientist takes a young American (but civilized to English ways) on a secretive research trip where he introduces him to a deep diving vessel to explore the bottom of the ocean.  The vessel is separated from the ship and they fall to the bottom, seemingly cut off forever and running out of oxygen.  Adventure ensues.  I present it that way but Doyle does the opposite, framing the story first as an omniscient unnamed writer (presumably Doyle himself) collecting all the textual evidence surrounding the loss of the Stratford (the steamer the expedition departed in that was carrying the diving bell).  So we get the transcript from a captain's journal, a letter from the young American before they disappeared and then a final letter that popped up in a transparent ball in the middle of the ocean, also from the young American that goes into great detail about their adventures that followed, leading up to them finally escaping (in a giant version of the transparent bubble that brought the letter up).

It is only then, that we get back to the main narrative, their adventures at the bottom of the ocean.  They meet the people of Atlantis and Doyle describes a really cool backstory of how they got there.  We get lots of neat underwater mini-missions and scrapes as the trio learns about the Atlantean society.  Things get really wild in the end, when the three surface humans explore the ruined city and a dark temple where they awaken the evil that brought Atlantis to ruin initially.

It's a fun read.  Doyle does get into his metaphysical stuff here, but it is all in aid of the story and the excitement of the adventure.  One can easily see the contradictory benevolent colonialism in the tale.  Though the Atlanteans have some seriously advanced technology (they can tranmogrify the base elements into things like coffee!), they just don't have the same gumption as our western heroes.  There is also some getting with the hot native ladies wish fufillment going on here.  All in a fun, quick read that actually delivers a fairly satisfying somewhat epic narrative that ties the origins in with the conclusion.

They hook up a wireless receiver and listen to the BBC with the Atlanteans. 
Love this patriotic aside

41. Benny Muscles in by Peter Rabe

This was a pretty nice find, a Gold Medal original paperback of Peter Rabe's second book.  It's funny how Rabe was almost totally forgotten (by most), then re-illuminated by Donald Westlake (who cited him as a major influence on Parker) to the point that his books became very hard to find and quite high-priced.  Now the flurry seems to have died down and you tend to find his books from time to time.  Also makes you realize he was fairly prolific.

Benny Muscles In is, at least according to the excitable back blurb, Rabe's second book.  I really appreciate the title because it is exactly what the book is about.  Benny is a small-time thug with big ambitions.  He is short and desperately motivated to take over and manage real operations.  At the beginning, he is given an assignment to manage a neighbourhood and do the collections from all the syndicated crimes going on there.  Without being told, he doubles the take.  When his boss, the unflappable Pendleton, demotes him to chauffeur.  I was sort of expecting the more common underdog gangster story here and Benny would make his way to the top because of his ruthlessness.

That is not Rabe's way.  Benny is flawed and the situations all around him do not help him at all.  He ends up siding with Al Alverrato, Pendleton's once colleague and now rival.  A lot of shit goes down, most of it involving kidnapping Pendleton's daughter.  It's quite violent and there are some quite crazy situations that you can feel trace a throughline to the Fargo/Tarantino/90s hot noir wacky setup style of crime movie.  The main narrative, though, is Benny's relationship with Pat, whom he keeps calm with heroine, turning her into a real addict all the while falling in love with her. It's a gross, abusive, twisted relationship on both sides.  I felt the ending was a bit of a cop-out, but the tangled mess leading up to it was an enjoyable exercise in crime and broken characters.  Good fun.

40. Agent of Vega by James H. Schmitz

Once again, Kenneth Hite was responsible for me learning about a new author.  I may have reacted a bit too eagerly to his positive mini-reviews in several Ken and Robin Consume Media posts and hunted down and bought three of his books before reading even one.  I really stalled out on this one (three weeks since my last finished book!).  I struggled to focus on the first two stories because of their removed objective third-person perspective and subtle writing style.  I also have jumped back in head first to the tabletop RPG pool thanks to an excellent OSR actual play podcast which led me circuitously to actually buy Dungeon Crawl Classics and lose my soul in that beautiful madness for a few weeks.

But now I have a week at a cottage and am committed to getting back on the reading train.  I almost put this book aside (it's four longish short stories) but glad I stuck with it as the last two stories really took it home. I also started to get his idiom and structure which made them easier to read.  The content of these stories is as advertised, really imaginative, intelligent large-scale space epics with super high-tech and competent female protagonists (most astonishing for sci-fi stories writting in the late 40s and early 50s).  They are short stories centered around the advanced earth civilization of the Vegan Confederacy, who are kind of like technocratic Jedi whose job is to police the universe and protect civilizations from threats ranging the minor like space pirates to major like a recurrent interdimensional invasion.  They also plant themselves in secret on developing planets to guide them into their network.  You only get hints of how it all works and suggestions of the various opponents (military, political and economic) of the Confederacy.  At least in these 4 stories, it always involves a cool badass space spy with awesome toys and some independence to achieve their manager's goals.

CityTV (one of the 7 channels I get via antenna) for some reason shows Twilight Zone episodes late at night a couple nights a week.  I was so psyched to discover this (such a contrast to today's hyper-packaged media) but disappointed to find that I don't actually love the Twilight Zone.  I only saw a few episodes as a kid and was way into them at the time, but sadly they don't hold up for me.  They feel a lot more like thoughtful, dialogue-driven stage plays exploring social themes of the late 50s rather than mind-blowing excursions into fantastic weirdness.  This is no critique of the show, as it holds up in the writing and acting and ideas.  It's just that with the budgets and production technology of the time, you have to do a lot of telling and not much showing. There is a lot of talking in these shows!

I realized as I was struggling to get through the first two stories in this collection (Agent of Vega, The Illusionists) that their writing style reminded me of the Twilight Zone.  Even though it is written fiction, so production values are not an issue, it still feels like Schmitz's vision wasn't capable (or wasn't inclined) of showing at this time.  A lot of the "action" in these stories is one person telling another (often a manager talking to an agent or to fellow managers within the Vegan bureaucracy) what happened. And the few times there actually is real action, it is elided, with Schmitz just describing the results.  It made it hard for me to connect with the characters and narrative.  On top of that, stylistically for sci fi of this period, his sentences are somewhat complex and indirect.  He also jumps from perspective to perspective with subtle openings to the next character and the formatting in the book didn't always make this obvious.  It also makes it hard to figure out what the main plot is until you are way into the story, juggling a bunch of characters and locaitons.  So I spent a lot of time going back and re-reading sentences and paragraphs as my mind drifted off.  I ended up putting the book down for a couple weeks, reading the amazing tables of spell results in DCC's crazy magic system before going to bed at night.

Fortunately, the third story, The Truth about Cushgar, though equally indirect and all over the place, had a clear revenge plot that I cottoned onto quickly and was able to ingest more consistently.  I think at this point, I also started to get the world Schmitz is creating and better interpret his style.  The last one The Second Night of Summer about the friendship of a young boy in a rural village with an old caravanning gypsy-type woman as these floating light balls appear out of nowhere was really human and satisfying, just a great little story with cool characters that ends with promise of much more adventure.  One of the neat things about Schmitz' universe is that it is done in disconnected short stories and novellas, but characters appear briefly in other stories, so you get a subtle sense of the greater world-building.  His world is about competence and optimism in the face of chaos and evil and I hope to be able to approach is more directly and satisfyingly in the other books I have on deck.  

39. The Tower by Richard Martin Stern

I have a vague memory of somebody on Bluesky recommending this book.  I went through a 70s disaster movie phase in my 30s so thought this might be worth checking out.  It also falls into my sub-sub-niche of post-WWII business man drama novels.  Even though the main story is supposed to be the burning building, much of the plot (and more of the pages) is actually about the men who built the tower, all their internal and external conflicts and the investigation unravelling of the person responsible for the fire.

In the book, the building is called "The World Tower" and it is downtown a block or so from the World Trade Center but towers over them by 40 stories.  This is one of those books, not unlike the movie, with almost a dozen significant characters and a few more recurring side characters.  On the day of the official ceremonial opening of The Tower, we follow the architect, the secondary architect, his wife, the owner, his daughter and son-in-law, the crazed loner who sneaks into the building with a bomb, the two cops standing guard (explicitly and repeatedly Black and Irish, who constantly mention race but are friends), the governor of the state, the mayor, an old-school senator and a young rabble-rousing senator.  Later, we also get two different people from the fire department and the coast guard each as well as a young woman who seems to have no real role in life other than to be invited to the opening ceremony and fall in love with the governor who is twice her age.

The book is a real hodge-podge of 70s themes.  Everybody is depressed and cynical, especially about politics.  There is a huge gulf between the older politicians who fought in wars and the younger generation who just wants to tear everything down or something.  Likewise, anybody who is educated and part of the east coast establishment is suspect while hard-working folk from the Midwest who love the open land and a stream full of trout are the heroes.  Of course, the city itself and people jamming themselves together in big, dying cities is portrayed as some terrible aberration.

If you can't already tell, there is a ton of white male moralistic blathering pretending to be deep philosophy.  It's too bad there is so much of it.  I am always down for a little bit of demonstration of true character and hard, experienced men in books teaching us how to man properly.  But here there is just way too much of it. The portrayal of the governor in particular is just ridiculous.  He ends up meeting and falling in love with a young woman at the party while trapped on the top floor and they have the most painful conversations, with him dropping all this 60s establishment man-talk and she just oohs and ahhs about what an important and real man he is.  It's not quite as weird as John D. MacDonald at his worst, but there is way more of it proportionally and it is very hard to actually parse any meaning out of it beyond strong man with power is sexually attractive and sensible woman should follow.

It's too bad, because interspersed between all this 70s older white male pandering bullshit is actually a really good disaster adventure.  The portrayal of the details of the fire is excellent and terrifying.  The action scenes are really good.  I was genuinely thrilled at the set piece finale.  It's just that all this good stuff takes up about maybe 30% of the book at most.  I was reading it and at times groaning out loud and really questioning why I was taking up my summer with this book and then at other times quite psyched.  It was a real up and down and read.

I think one of the big issues, beyond the author needing to think he was John Updike, is the plot.  Ostensibly, the main story is that this big, complex new building catches fire on the day of its opening celebration, trapping a hundred or so dignataries on its top, 150th floor.  All of its elaborate safety features fail in a complex combination of bad luck and human error.  This is a great premise.  Unfortunately, nobody does anything smart until its too late.  The emergency exit doors are blocked, the elevators stop working.  There is nothing they can do but wait.  So we spend the entire book with the people trapped on the top floor who can't do anything but talk.  The only adventure we get until the end is the various firemen who try to make the stairs to the top floor.  

The real plot for most of the book is a set of change work orders signed by the second-in-command architect (he is the main protagonist, the simple but brilliant midwestern guy who is married to the perfect yet morally empty patrician east coast woman who went to all the right schools, etc.) that cut costs on a bunch of safety features.  These show up in the first few pages and we spend the first half of the book following the investigation to find out who was responsible for them (turns out to be the boss's son-in-law who is an Ivy League scumbag) and then the second half chasing him down to prevent him from destroying the evidence.  It's actually not bad as we get to see some of the inside operations and meet a range of interesting tri-state area characters.  It's just that with the investigation storyline and the repetitive, mid-reactionary philosophizing we barely get any time with the fire and people escaping it.  Just feels like a lost opportunity and one in which if I remember correctly, the movie actually uses much more by splitting people up and having them try and escape in various ways (though the movie is fairly low down in my 70s disaster hierarchy as well).

This problem really hits its climax at the final escape section, where people are getting taken over via cable to the World Trade Center one at a time.  They have all the women go first and draw lots.  As the fire approaches, panic starts to set in among the remaining men (understandable, I guess).  What gets really ridiculous is when the I guess left-leaning congressman who has already been portrayed as you and idealistic goes full-on wimpy protestor by whipping up the people trapped in the tower to what just sort of freak out over the situation and blame the governor? They want answers!  They want blame!  Well damnit, the governor will have to show them how a real man acts.  And of course the young congressman who never worked a real day in his life backs down to the aggressive alpha-male who worked his way up by his bootstraps.  It's just so badly done on so many levels.

This book could only have been written by an American, but it should have been written by a Brit.

38. There's a Hippie on the Highway by James Hadley Chase

JHC delivers once again!  He was so prolific and quite easy to find at used bookstores, that I tend to not buy them when I see them.  I still I believe have two more of his on my on-deck shelf.  So demand is very low, but I could not resist this book with its title and incredible cover photo. I am pleased to report that both the title and the image happen in the book.

The title, though, is more of a framing device.  Harry Mitchell is a Vietnam vet hitching his way down Florida looking for summer work and some "sea and sun".  He gets picked up by a trucker who warns him about the hippies on the road, stoned youth who will ruthlessly set upon anybody who stops. I guess Chase wanted to do something set in Florida (perhaps keying into John D. MacDonald's popularity?) but this feels more like Mad Max.  Mitchell stops at an Italian roadside restaurant run by a really nice old Italian guy and his plump daughter and there confronts a gang of these hippies who chase another traveller inside.  Mitchell busts them up and their pursuer, Randy, tells Mitchell he is heading to a restaurant/ beach resort where he could get him a job as a lifeguard.

See already, I'm trying to write a summary of the plot, but JHC always has so much going on right from the get-go that it's hard to know which details to exclude.  Even before they get to the restaurant, they get picked up by a woman towing a "caravan" (another word that we don't say in North America; JHC is always good for a few of these) who then leaves them with a dead body (this is where the cover image comes from; his wig comes off when they bury him).  I'm already giving away spoilers.  I'll stop there and just say it gets even more interesting at the restaurant.

Among the cast of characters is an over-ambitious cop, the weirdly aggressive and ex-peterman (safe cracker) owner of the restaurant, his over-sexed daughter, the murdered man and his two associates both rough-edged women.  As always with JHC there is a lot of story.  The intricacies of the crime and its fallout are well thought out and coherent.  The characters are colourful and just slightly unreal, but not in a way that lessens the entertainment.

There are two layers of racism in the book.  On one level, the Black characters are portrayed stereotypically (although more for the 50s than the late 60s) and this is racist enough (like more than once, Joe the always friendly bartender goggles his eyes).  There is a second, worse level where the racism feels off and I think it's again because Chase has no actual experience with actual American Black people.  So you sense not only did he copy an ugly stereotype, he also sort of amped it up and made a point to emphasize it.

I am guessing this was perhaps also to reinforce the overall reactionary politics of the intro and outro (where the evil hippies return brutally).  Chase thought that certain Americans would want to read about the hippie scourge and the triumph of a hardworking vet and a little background racism fits right in.

So not without flaws, this book is nevertheless overall entertaining and well put together.

37. The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on the World's Most Powerful Mafia by Alex Perry

I can't remember where I became interested in this book.  It has been on my short non-fiction hunting list for years until I found it for $8 at Encore Books and Records. It is the journalistic account of three women who testified in the 2000's against the 'Ndrangheta Mafia who dominated Calabria (the toe of Italy) and controlled significant portions of international crime in drug smuggling, prostitution, extortion etc.  It is an astounding story worthy of a book like this.  The Ndrangheta at least according to this book, have such a vast criminal empire that it impacts major world financial markets.  The women who testified against them were incredibly courageous (two were brutally murdered) and whose actions triggered a significant culture change in Italy that then dealt a weakening blow to the Mafia.

The thing with these journalistic books, though, is that ultimately I just want the facts.  Because it's not an academic history, the writer has to make it into a "story."  For myself, these two demands make an end result that is not entirely satisfactory either for the facts or the story.  Perry's thesis is that women were ignored by the Mafia and the prosecutors going after them because of traditional Italian machismo and by finally paying attention to them, they were able to break the crime families.  These powerful and brutal families, rooted in the gangster history of poverty-stricken southern Italy, were not able to get past their misogynist culture and this is what undid them.  He does a good job arguing this thesis.  It's the narrative that I found a bit forced, as he hopes between the three women's stories (which were all connected but not that closely).  I was impatient to just find out what happened.  This isn't really a critique of the book, just that as I was reading it, I remember why these kinds of popular non-fiction books are not really my jam.

What this book did really help me with was understanding better the political geography of Italy and the Mafia.  I had heard of Calabria but didn't really get the deal with it.  I'm no expert but this book had excellent maps and Perry does a good job of giving an overview sense of the geography and culture of the region.  He glosses over it with a couple of sentences, but I also can understand how poor brigand families in remote mountain areas who met with revolutionaries could have evolved into a more sophisticated level of crime.  What is missing is how they could all just become so brutal and murderous, even (especially) to their own families.  Are they just this backward?  I would be interested in a more nuanced treatment of the culture of the region.  Still, humans.  We can be as shitty as possible.

The other thing that I still don't understand is how these local thugs who dominate a region can also be controlling major finance and law firms with international scope.  I guess this is the plot of the The Firm and it must be happening, but I'd like a clearer explanation with examples of where an archaic, country family can also be able to make decisions for billion-dollar firms.  How does that work?