11. Kick Start by Douglas Rutherford

cover design by Phillip Castle

I'm quite pleased with this discovery.  I took it from a free box solely on the Fontana reputation and period.  Turns out the Rutherford was a fairly prolific men's adventure writer, but I guess we could say lesser-known.  His particular angle was that most of his works featured cars and motorcycles.  This isn't really my thing, but the bulk of this book was quite good so that I will definitely keep my eye out for his books in the future.

It started off in a slightly low-brow way that set off my alarm bells.  The main character, Valentine Kroll (cool name) starts off bluntly stating how we wanted to pull off a specific crime.  There was a lack of subtlety as well as the dropping of several brand names (he refers to his watch as his "Breitling wrist chronometer" on page 1) that made me glad it was quite a thin book as I thought I would be in for a surdose of that particular brand of stupid British 70s masculinity and faux prestige (cough Ian Fleming cough).  Fortunately, once the action starts, much of that drops away and we get a pretty entertaining adventure that though truncated, approaches a Desmond Bagley level of situation with a post-earthquake dam about to explode.

Kroll's particular skill is his motorcycle riding and maintenance and ostensibly for money but more likely for the thrills, he devises a plan to check in for a flight to Rome from Heathrow, than race back to London to rob a fading movie star of her famous diamond and then back to the flight.  It's a cool idea and though I am not a motorcycle guy, I got quite into all the details of the driving and the mechanics.  It won't be too much of a spoiler to say he gets away with it as far as Rome where the real plot begins.  He gets nabbed by Interpol who need his specific skill to sneak into a valley in Tunis where there has just been a terrible earthquake and find an Israeli spy and steal the deadly bacteria he was trying to sell there.  The extra cool twist is that there is a giant dam that has been damaged by the earthquake and risks collapsing at any moment.  You can anticipate, I am sure, where the motorcycle comes into play.  It doesn't disappoint.

This still is a 1970s man's action book, so there are a few unpleasantly sexist tropes (like the movie star disappointed that he was only there to steal the jewel and not rape her).  The location and the treatment of the Tunisians was relatively informed and respectful.  Rutherford fought in North Africa (and was in Monte Casino!) in World War II and his descriptions are vivid and convincing.  The plot gets a teeny bit goofy near the end (let's join the British tour bus party to avoid our pursuers!) but in a fun way.  I dug it!

 

10. The Narratives of Fugitivs Slaves in Canada recorded and compiled by Benjamin Drew

I found this in one of the free boxes here and had it put to one side.  I realized at the beginning of Black History Month that I did not have a single book by a Black author on my on-deck shelf, except this one.  I was a bit worried it was going to be too dry but it makes obvious sense to read now so I started it.  

It did start out to be very hard to get through as the introductory essay by Drew is written in that verbose, indirect manner of the 19th century.  I do enjoy long and complex sentences, but they have to be well-written and actually clearly deliver their meaning.  Unfortunately here, the language is cumbersome and indirect.  It's not entirely Drew's fault as he is writing in response to the insane pro-slavery arguments that were the dominant rhetoric in America at the time.  At the time, pro-slavery propaganda was pushing the lies that slaves were happy and needed the structure and guidance of their masters.  This book was written to counter those arguments.  Even though it was hard to read, the opening essay also drives home how the forces of oppression have used propaganda and sophistic logic to defend their clearly immoral positions.  These techniques have flared up to an extreme today, amplified by social media, leading to a bunch of con artists and racists taking over the US government.  I suspect a smarter and more informed historian could trace a direct line between the slave-holding south of the 19th century to today's MAGA.

From a purely reading perspective,  once we get past the introductory essay, this book gets extremely readable, though very very painful at times.  It is divided up into sections by region or town, each one starting with a brief overview with some statistics on the number of people per race, the state of land clearing and schools.  Then we get a series of narratives by various individuals.  Given that many of them could not read or write, I am assuming they were told verbally to Drew who then transcribed them.  They tend to have a consistency of language and structure that also suggests he asked specific questions in a specific order in order to put forth a consistent argument.  So they usually talk about their own story that led them to Canada, followed by their current situation, like how much land they own and how much of they have cleared, what animals they have, etc. and concluding with their opinion on slavery.  They also often mention that the money gathered to help slave refugees never seems to get to them and that even if they did, they wouldn't want it and don't need it, as there is ready work for them in Canada and they are able to gather their own community support for new arrivals.  

Anyhow, I am myself being quite dry here in describing the structure.  The narratives themselves are incredibly powerful and enraging.  Each one could make a novel of their own. It seems obvious to us today that slavery is a profound evil, but reading about the actual details of the brutality and tortures that were done to the actual people is still shocking.  The list of atrocities that go on in these stories is long and varied from the most basic concept of one human owning another (and all the ancillary crimes that stem from that such as hiring out a skilled slave and the owner taking all the salary), splitting off children from their parents, wives from husbands to just straight up torture, rape and murder.  One thing I didn't realize is that one of the most common triggers to finally drive a slave to run away is that they often would be raised to a "good" master who treated them well and promised to give them freedom but as soon as that person died or hit economic issues, they would be sold off to a potentially much worse owner.  

 The escapes themselves are harrowing. Though written in very dry language ("I lived in the forest for 3 months"), the toughness and will of these people is astounding. They had to survive both intense physical challenges, like not having shoes or food for weeks long treks as well as never being able to trust anybody else on their road.  The Fugitive Slave Law basically made it legal for people to just grab any Black person, escaped slave or not, and kidnap them back to the South for a reward or just to be sold into slavery.  And even other Black people could not always be trusted, as they were under their own pressures.  On the other hand, there are great tales of bravery and selflessness both by Blacks and abolitionist whites, like when all the waiters surrounded one of the escapees when he was working at a restaurant and got accosted by slave hunters.

On the Canadian side, this is a tantalizing insight into the very early days of Black Canadians.  I was totally ignorant of the many Black communities in what is today the far western side of the Windsor corridor near the border.  Sadly, their populations were reduced by usurious land practices and the end of slavery. Today, though, there are still several famous Black Canadians who came out of that region and some interesting museums and historical locations (I plan to visit the Josiah Henson Museum of African-Canadian History one day).  I am curious if there are still Black people living in that area.  I am very ignorant of the Windsor-Toronto corridor even though it is a crucial economic region for Canada!

9. Death of a Doll by Hilda Lawrence

I do remember where I found this book!  I bought it in Amsterdam, back at the one remaining true english-language used bookstore which while a great little bookstore, has yet to reveal to me any real treasures in the three times I've gone there.  Despite its depressingly banal and unremarkable cover (how fall Pan had falled in cover design by the early 2000s!), it really was it being a "classic" and part of some Pan series that had other good authors that pushed me over the edge in buying it.  I had never heard of Hilda Lawrence before.

Death of a Doll was written in 1947 and is of the American class aspirational cozy mystery sub-genre, where the protagonists and detectives are of "the quality" and a part of the pleasure of the book is sharing both their leisurely, tasteful lifestyle and their benevolent superiority over the victims and supporting cast.  There may be a more official name for this sub-genre.  I've mainly discovered it via Old Time Radio (in particular through the really thorough and well-curated Great Detectives of Old Time Radio podcast, which I highly recommend) with shows like Mr. Chameleon and Mr. and Mrs. North, though to today's readers, Nick and Nora Charles would be the most well-known example.

The detectives are quite quirky here and they don't really appear until about a third of the way in.  Mark East is the private detective, but he is joined by two old, meddling, bickering and comedic spinsters, Bessie and Beulah.  The narrative begins with a young woman, Ruth Miller, who works at a department store and has just found an advantageous lodging at a single women's hostel called Hope House.  Everything seems great until upon walking in, she sees something or someone and becomes deathly afraid. The narrative is from her perspective but the other doesn't tell us any details, beyond her trying to avoid being seen which is almost impossible with the shared bedrooms and common dining area.  We also get perspectives from various characters in Hope House, including the director and her assistant who are in an interesting implicitly lesbian relationship.  Aside from Ruth's fear, they do a lot of controlling of the girls in the house and when she indeed turns up dead, ostensibly having committed suicide by jumping from her window, they ramp up the control.

The detective team is brought in because a good friend of Mark East's (presumably from some ivy league and shared class background), shopped regularly at Blackman's the department store where Ruth worked and had taken quite a liking to her, thinking of maybe hiring her as a nanny.  She doesn't buy the suicide story and the rest of the book follows Mark and the B's investigation and the internal tensions and dramas of the girls in the house as the murder's aftermath impacts their world.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on, not so much with the actual victim and murder, but who the detectives were. I read afterwards in Minette Walters' introduction that this is the third book with these characters and that Lawrence really doesn't give any backstory. You learn about their relationships by their dialogue and actions but no background is ever explicitly given.  Walters also argue that Lawrence was attempting to mix cozy and hard-boiled genres, but I'm not so convinced about that.  Nonetheless, the detective team is certainly a unique one with very different styles, each contributing effectively to the investigation.  The murder takes place during a party in the house, where all the girls dress up in the same burlap dresses and masks (to look like dolls, thus the title), which is effectively unsettling with imagery that keeps coming back.  It would make a great movie.  By the second half, I was definitely flipping pages and stayed up at my bedtime to get to the end.  I wouldn't call it a masterpiece but it is a fascinating and creepy mystery in its exploration of the world of urban single women after the war and an enjoyable dark look into the souls of broken people.  I will keep my out for her three other books.

8. An Ace up my Sleeve by James Hadley Chase

This is the last of the super 70s Corgi James Hadley Chase's that I bought in a bunch almost entirely for the incredible front covers (love that typeface!).  I have to say, the more of his books I read, the higher he rises in my estimation.  I think he may get doubly denigrated, first because his books were considered exploitative and puerile by the snooty intellectuals of the time and are considered (I suspect) somewhat second-rate by pulp and hard-boiled aficionados of today.  I'm here to tell you that the text itself is more than solid. I'm even starting to believe that he has some real themes and ideas going on under the solid craftsmanship, though that will require more reading on my part.

The first quarter of An Ace up my Sleeve is absolutely excellent.  Straightforward, adult and gripping with a great twist.  The second half of the book meanders a bit, with some clever cat and mouse, back and forth between antagonists, though it is never dull and you definitely want to find out what happens.  Helga Rolfe is a beautiful middle-aged woman, married to a super old businessman. She is lonely and horny as hell (this is portrayed as her one big flaw) and picks up a studly American while traveling alone to Switzerland to meet her husband at their sick cliffside mansion.  He is a big strong naif, AWOL from the army and got rolled by a woman who picked him up at the bar.  He's weirdly competent, though, and seems to constantly avoid getting into a situation where they could hook up.  Then things get interesting.

I'm going to stop here but just say the ending is really interesting on a sociological level, though surprisingly soft given JHC's brutality in past books.  I learned afterwards that there are two other novels continuing Helga Rolfe's adventures.  I will be looking for them and let's hope she gets laid!