25. When the World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle

I love this cover!  It's a full-bleed illustration by Paul Monteagle, very architectural, which depicts a significant scene from the short story.  Pan does it again. I bought this from a neighbour who had a garage sale, he actually had quite an excellent collection of beautiful old paperbacks but entirely of fairly popular authors so nothing super obscure.  However this one and another Doyle caught my eye.

This is a collection of seven semi-random short stories of Doyle's with a loose theme of mystery and suspense.  They tend to fall into two categories, either a truly supernatural setup or a baffling puzzle that ends up having a real-world explanation.  The latter were disappointingly simplistic for Doyle, either impossible for the reader to deduce with the clues given or just kind of obvious so you were left a bit deflated.  The supernatural ones were just fun.  The story that gave the book its title is about Professor Challenger from The Lost World (I am guessing that is what the editors were thinking would be a draw) attempting to prove that the world is a living organism by piercing it's biological shell deep in the earth.  There is little narrative built around the concept, but Professor Challenger's extreme arrogance is always fun to read.

 There is also a straight-up sports story, about a young man who can't afford to go to university and looks to be stuck in a horrible, exploitative assistant chemist role when he is discovered and recruited to participate in a boxing match.  It was straightforward and genuinely stirring.  Doyle can write action.  His language is always a pleasure to read and he often frames these stories as somebody revealing an ancient dilemma with newly-revealed sources or as some kind of correspondence.  Oh right, there is a final story about a young journalist covering a colonial desert war with two grizzled newspapermen and about how he beats them at their own game that was also enjoyable.

This is full-on colonialism with some explicit racist language and attitudes, so beware.  Not Doyle's best work but still enjoyable and idea-generating.

 

24. The Riddle of Samson by Andrew Garve

I was initially under the impression that Andrew Garve's main metier was manly action and crime but I see now that he also has quite a few books that I would categorize as cozy thrillers.  These are mystery adventures where the protagonist's reputation is at stake rather than their lives or freedom, though in 1950s bourgeois Britain this is a big deal.  The Cuckoo Line Affair falls in solidly in this category.

Here the protagonist, John Lavery, is an archeaologist who has come to the Scilly isles to search for the remains of ancient monasteries.  All is set for a fun summer of camping and digging, when he meets an extremely attractive woman who is unfortunately married to a well-known but fading journalist.  This guy (named appropriately "Ronnie") is an egotistical and jealous blowhard and through a complex set of affairs ends up thinking our hero and his woman had an affair. He confronts them on a bluff and falls over the edge.  It appears to be a horrible accident, but the woman tells a little lie to the police, claiming her husband was rock climbing and fell and then promptly takes off and disappears.  

At first it is just a very unpleasant encounter, but Lavery also realizes that he has quite fallen in love with this woman.  Unfortunately, the body of the journalist never shows up but the cops do and suddenly Lavery is under suspicion for murder.  He starts digging around and listening to his digging partner who points out a bunch of things that make it seem like he might have been a sucker to the couple pulling an insurance scam.  I've spoiled it a bit because this all comes out about a third of the way in, but it is essentially the tension of the plot:  what happened to the body and was the woman an innocent victim as well or a conniving scammer?

I called it a cozy thriller because you never really feel like Lavery is truly threatened.  Mostly it's the tone where he is sort of vexed and has trouble sleeping but really seems more worried about the woman being true than his own situation.  He and his friend discuss that he might go to jail and he mentions how he could lose his job at the university, but the stakes ultimately don't feel high.  We get a semi-climactic search of an underwater cave tunnel that leads up to a perfunctory but satisfactory ending.  There is also a smuggling red herring that extends the book, came basically out of nowhere and has no real impact on the main narrative.  The best part of the book is the initial investigation and speculation.  Garve describes the physical setting competently and evocatively, aided by a nice map.  I guess these are real islands.  It was a pleasant read and I definitely got a nice sense of immersion in the world, but ultimately a bit light.

 

23. The Witches of Karres by John H. Schmitz

After reading Ken Hite's strong recommendations of Schmitz's work, I went on a bit of a buying spree, including finding this nice paperback copy (for $10!).  I knew I was being risky with this book by not reading it exclusively at home, but ironically it was in the home where its greatest threat lay!  My cat, wanting something that he could not communicate to me, knocked it off the table and it fell in such a way that the cover ripped clean off.  Quite devastating.  I continued to read it but without the cover, the interior pages started to curl (and me carrying it in my fanny pack didn't help either, though I was sure grateful to have it with me when I had the 30 minute wait at the doctor's office).  So this explanation is my way of being transparent with the used book collector community and the remaining population of endangered paperback books of how I have ruined once again another beautiful old paperback.  My apologies!

The Witches of Karres is from that period of post-WWII science fiction that was kind of loose and freewheeling.  It is light in tone and the characters who go through quite a lot and whose entire universe is at risk never seem all that perturbed.  The main character is entrepreneur/pilot Pausert from a fairly conservative society where he is engaged to a senator's daughter.  After a few failed business deals, he ends up being pressured to buy three slave sisters, which gets him into big trouble back at home.  Adrift now and on the run from his home planet authorities, he learns that the sisters are from the planet Karres, famous for the witchly powers of its people.  Among their other skills, they can also assemble and control a new kind of space drive which can transport them much farther and faster than any current conventional travel.  

It starts out as a kind of bildungsroman where Pausert and the witches set to do some trade transport deals across a dangerous stretch of space, make some profit and upgrade the ship, but on their first run they are already beset by industrial espionage as well as a greater threat of these worm creatures that show up like the weather and make people insane.  Things get more complicated as they realize that part of their cargo is a comatose witch (in some kind of protective trance) and a weird rubber-wrapped cube that when opened suddenly draws the attention of these space worms.

The scale of the book goes from spaceship level pirate-dodging to saving the entire universe from an existential threat.  The epic part comes at the end and feels a bit rushed, given its scope.  The ride along the way, though, is quite a lot of fun and ends up with the potential for more adventure.  Other authors have written sequels, which I would pick up if desperate.  My only major complaint is that at the beginning Pausert gets jilted by his fiancee and some toady rival and while he escapes, he (and we the readers) never really gets the satisfaction of him coming home and rubbing his success in their provincial faces.

22. Poison People by William Haggard

Sometimes the collector part of my brain dominates the reading part and it can lead to poor book-buying decisions.  I've quite enjoyed William Haggard's work but not so much that I want to have his complete works or anything.  It's just that the slim Penguin editions of his books are so beautiful.  I don't why that led me to buy this one, which is a later reprint of one of his later works.  It wasn't great, felt like Haggard at the end of his career sort of mailing it in and spending more energy on his old man yells at cloud (or more like looks at them with disdain) than the plot or characters.

Colonel Charles Russel is retired now yet still lives a disciplined life feeling quietly superior to the world around him when a body falls out of an upper-story window and lands right next to him.  It turns out to be a redeemed ex-safecracker who had worked for Russel twice in the past.  He takes charge of the scene and thus gets further implicated in the machinations of an old aristocrat looking for revenge.  His son OD'ed and he is going after the Indian businessman who oversees the drug smuggling and dealing into England.

Russel at first doesn't want to be involved, but than at the safecracker's funeral he meets his widow and she is hot, down for action and in on the heroin revenge plan.  Turns out the toff is her father (the guy who OD'ed was her half-brother).  This is where things start to go off the rails fast.  He spends two pages on what is the right kind of restaurant to take her out to, it's all very snobby and forced.  His editorializing is seething with contempt for people who do it wrong.

But this old man griping becomes really ugly when it comes to the depiction of India and Indians.  They are either scheming and corrupt or effective because of their colonial upbringing and sychophantically grateful for it.  It's straight-up racism.  Man, I see that Haggard has 8 more novels after this, so he was still going full steam when this came out.  I have like 4 other books of his on deck (they are so thin!).  Maybe I should check the dates and just read the earlier ones.  Those are still quite conservative, but the politics are more aligned with the time period and are thus subtler.

The storyline is simplistic for Haggard and you kind of know where it is going about halfway through.  There are some slightly interesting characters (the villain's wife, the Inspect who drinks himself to death), but they aren't enough to distract from the rote resolution, which I read as a duty.

 

21. Grave Mistake by Ngaio Marsh

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

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

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

 

20. The River People by Philip Wayre

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

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

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

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

 

19. The Second Wave - Book 2 of the Woodstock Saga by Michael Tod

I wish I'd read this right after the first one, but these books are quite hard to find (still looking for the third one).  Reading suffered once again as well due to endwinter travel and visits as well as my tabletop gaming addiction flaring up again.  So I read this in fits and starts and often in small snippets which did not make for an engrossing reading experience and the story suffered.  It is partly that the writing and narrative are somewhat at a simpler level, so that while I appreciated it, it didn't suck me in.  This is a book for pastoral animal adventure lovers of all ages, but I would say probably most appreciated by younger readers.

I really love the concept, Tod takes the region where he grew up and makes it a world for the squirrels.  There are 3 maps,which is awesome and they are all pretty close to the geography of the real world (I checked on Google Maps).  The battle between the reds and the invasive American greys in the first book is over with the reds winning.  Despite me saying it is somewhat simple, the actual hook to create the conflict in the second book is quite clever.  The last of the red squirrels who grew up on a stone quarry peninsula with no trees are forced to leave and head inland to find a home and mate.  They are a family of three and the father, Crag, is a religious fanatic.  The hardscrabble life on a quarry developed a puritan way of life with no affection or comfort and he imposes this on his poor wife and child.  Even more extreme, his whole deal is that squirrels must collect and hoard pieces of metal to show their respect to the sun and make sure they go to their instead of a squirrel hell equivalent.  So he makes his family spend all day dragging bits of metal around.  He sucks.

He meets the happier, mellower red squirrels who live in comfortable trees and immediately sees them as heretics.  Meanwhile, the defeated greys who remain decide a new tactic.  Since they can't stop the power of the Woodstock (some kind of human item that the reds figured out to use that burns off squirrels whiskers and worse), they decide to join them, though their intentions still seem nefarious.  The leader of the greys sends a team to integrate and learn from the reds in the hopes of figuring out how to beat them.  The mellow reds are still too suspicious and send them out to a neutral place in the woods where unfortunately the greys meet the puritan squirrel who quickly converts them with his high charisma and terrifying words.  An interesting wrinkle is that the greys have a female squirrel Ivy who chafes at the sexism of their society.  At first, she sees an example of the more egalitarian reds and is intrigued, but meeting Crag she realizes that she can exploit his religion for her own power gains.  The greys and Crag have the same goal for different reasons, wipe out the reds.

There is another parallel storyline taking place on Brownsea Island.  I can't remember what happened in the first book so the connection to the mainland squirrels was not clear and made it seem like two independent storylines.  A pine-marten swims ashore and becomes a genocidal, existential menace to the reds on the island and they send off a squirrel back to the mainland to find her old allies and the Woodstock.

It's a gentle, fun read with some cool ideas (Crags end involves lightning and all the metal he's convinced the others to store) and a highly didactic meeting with helpful dolphins (whose environmental message I am for 100% but some might find it a bit clunky).  I am still looking for the third, but I would suggest that these books benefit from being read consistently and in order.

 

18. The Auctioneer by Joan Samson

excellent cover design

This is a resurrected horror classic that was making the rounds on booknerd social media a few years ago. It was featured in Paperbacks from Hell and then Valancourt released a new version as part of their Paperbacks from Hell series.  I am proud to say that I found an original paperback in quite good condition.  Horror and rural horror especially are not really my jam, but the premise sounded intriguing and it is considered a classic, so I added it to my list.  

This is one of those books that I can say is a legitimately good book but at the same time I really did not enjoy it.  I've read a few other reviews and my concerns are shared, so it's not just that I don't love horror.  It's a frustrating, helpless read that is still kind of realistic so you keep turning the pages to find out what happens (and what is happening).  It takes place in rural New Hampshire in the early 70s (Vietnam war and hippies are mentioned).  The story centers around a small, poor family living on a subsistence farm:  John the dad, Mim the younger and once beautiful wife, their sweet child Hildie and John's mom, Ma.  The land has been in John's family for multiple generations.

One day, the sheriff shows up, talking about this new guy in town who bought a nice house and is organizing an auction with the funds to pay for a bigger police budget.  He's looking for donations of old stuff to sell, so they give him some broken down furniture.  He comes back next week asking for more.  Gradually, but pretty blatantly, it evolves into a gentle extortion, where they "give" more and more of their possessions for the auction.  There is no blatant coercion at first, but the family feels compelled to keep giving and at some point, they do start hearing about accidents in town to people who refused.  But the pressure is much more psychological.  The auctioneer, Perly Dunsmore, is always smiling and positive and talks about small-town values while he slowly takes everything from the families of the town, selling them off to urban sophisticates looking for antiques and more.

It's very disturbing as you read it.  You really feel for the family who are truly trapped, though there is an argument that the John character is also a critique of loud, empty masculinity. He refuses to resist for fear that something will happen to the women around him.  It just goes on and on and keeps getting worse and worse, which makes for a not pleasant read, at least for me.  It is well interested and themes are compelling and painfully relevant.  This process of the American people blindly giving up their power to a manipulative shuckster is exactly what we are living through right now.  It's tough to read it in allegory at the same time.

 

17. South by Java Head by Alistair Maclean

Word on  the streets is that you want to read Alistair Maclean books from the first half of his career, not the second, though I am not quite sure what the dividing year is.  I should not have picked this book up but I couldn't resist an older Fontana with that gorgeous yellow.  I justified by noting it took place in Singapore after the Japanese had just invaded (an inherently interesting setting ripe for adventure) and was written in 1958.

It only begins in Singapore.  At first, there are a lot of threads, which give a good and harrowing picture of Singapore, emptied out and awaiting the arrival of the victorious Japanese in 1941.  It's a bit confusing at first, including a bit with an elite spy who reveals he has the stolen plans of the Japanese invasion of Australia and they must get to London, which seems to be the main story.  There are also a group of lost nurses, an abandoned English toddler and the British crew of a tanker full of oil who need to try and get out.  The groups eventually, through a pretty damned exciting rescue at sea, end up together on the tanker.  That is the main part of the story, this group trying to get away from the Japanese and into friendlier waters.  

The first two-thirds of the book is a lot of fun.  A ton of crazy action happens.  Maclean does sea stuff so well.  The Japanese are comically portrayed.  All their leaders speak excellent, flowery Bond-badguy English and are ruthlessly cruel but not super bright.  Even the German spy reveals himself to be morally repulsed by the Japanese penchance for evil.  The ending is also action-packed but starts to tip over into unrealistic, where the threats are so extreme (to the love interest and the little boy) that you know Maclean won't actually carry them out because the hero will have to win.  So a bit goofy at the end, but the ride there was quite entertaining.

16. A Gift upon the Shore by M.K. Wren

This is what I would call C-PA, Chick Post-Apocalyptic.  It's a refreshing approach after the last two PA books I read, tainted with loser nerd fake manliness.  I'd been looking for it for a while (its recommendation lost to the mists of time) and found it in excellent possibly unread condition, but with too many price tags, at Dark Carnival.  The apocalypse is a general end of times collapse (economic and social collapse, pandemic followed by nuclear exchange).  It takes place mostly on the Oregon coast where two women manage to survive.  It has an excellent and detailed look at that survival but the real conflict is between rationality and religious fundamentalism.

The book initially takes place about 40 years after the nuclear war.  A very small "family" of people live on a small farm on the Oregon coast, trying to maintain and reproduce.  Mary Hope is the matriarch and we don't know much about her at first except that she is the last one who lived through the actual collapse.  Her one goal is to educate the children, but this is starting to be threatened by this nasty Christian extremist bitch Miriam, who is trying to oppose stricter and stricter religion on the rest of them, including stopping them from learning the blasphemy of an actual education.  Mary is trying to teach the oldest boy, Stephen, and the one she deems to have the most potential to be a future teacher himself, while Miriam is trying more and more aggressively to stop it.

This outer plot is a framing device to tell us Mary's story (as she tells Stephen), how she first came to the farm and met her own mentor, Rachel.  This part of the story is really well done.  It begins with her on a bus from Portland to the Oregon coast where she has decided to take over the house left to her by her aunt.  Shit goes south right away as a gang of Rovers attack their bus.  The perspective is from Mary and her emphasis on the human relations (thus, C-PA) so we don't get any kind of overview of everything that goes down, but the parts we learn are dark and realistic. Eventually, after barely surving a nuclear winter (which was only one year; seemed short) we end up with just Rachel and Mary, doing their best to survive. More importantly, Rachel wants to keep a legacy of human intellect.  She has a collection of books that they work on encasing in wax, wrapping in tinfoil and then putting into a vault.  Their lives are changed when a starving young man shows up on their beach.  He is a basically decent guy but came from an inland religious commune of extreme Christians who took set up before things went really bad.  He's been sent to find other people, especially women who could reproduce.  

He is in their world so they are able to confront his dogmatic mind in a relatively gentle way.  The real trouble is to come when Mary goes back with him to his community. The leader is a doctor who is basically a cult leader.  He is not inherently abusive, as long as everybody toes his extreme line, which includes things like not leaving the compound nor questioning the bible (the only book they are allowed to read).

I very much recognize the themes set up in this book. I grew up on the west coast in the '80s when these extremists were a thing.  The Satanic Panic originated in Victoria, B.C. and we had an attempt to shut down an after school D&D program that turned into a local controversy.  Evil Christians are often the antagonists in Stephen King books.  They are just the worst.  Sadly, they are in an ascendancy of power currently in the United States and threatening here in Canada.  This book was triggering for me, I kind of wanted to blame the book but other than a couple points where Mary tries to argue logically with the Doctor (which felt like a bit of unnecessary didacticism by the author; we know now logic does not work with these assholes), it's just because it's a disturbingly realistic portrayal of how ignorance can continue to take root even when society is starting over again.

The end of the book surprised me as it climaxed with a pretty tense and exciting suspense/action roll-out that I hadn't expected and wrapped up quite nicely.  I wouldn't go so far as to call A Gift upon the Shore a PA classic, but it is definitely an important work in the canon of the sub-genre.  I'm glad I read it.

15. The Body on the Bench by Dorothy B. Hughes

Also known as The Davidian Report, this original paperback has held up quite well.  The book opens well, with a vague protagonist, Steve Wintress, whose flight to LA is delayed by fog.  He is clearly suspicious and careful, you can't tell if he is paranoid or if this is just the Cold War early '50s.  He is on a mission to meet a man who will give him info about another man, Davidian, who has a report.  The delay and subsequent introduction to a too friendly Federal man (named Haig Armour), a shy young girl and a keen soldier named Reuben (a rube, get it).  When he does finally get to the airport,  he finds his friend and the man who was supposed to meet him, dead outside at a picnic bench.  Now he has to find the missing man with the report himself.

I was mildly annoyed reading this book.  It takes place in the universe of I was a Communist for the FBI, a universe I can never be sure really ever existed or was mostly made up by McCarthy and keen fiction writers.  The Commies are everywhere, but especially running used bookstores and sidewalk popcorn machines.  And once you join them, the party is ruthless and there is no escape.  It's a nice set up for a hard-boiled protagonist, as there is no escape, but I'm not entirely convinced.  The other annoying thing is that Hughes doesn't let the reader know what the protagonist is doing and who he actually is until well into the story.  I guess we are just to assume that the Commies want something and the FBI wants to stop them and that is sufficient for the 1952 reader.

The locations and the writing is quite strong.  The characters are also substantive so it's a mostly enjoyable read. I just couldn't get deeply connected to the actual quest, and less so to the human connections around it.  Steve is slowly revealed to be the grizzled hero that one could like, but it's too little too late.  This is later in Hughes' career and she is much more in command of her material than her earlier works, but it still feels like she is searching for something that she can't quite find.

14. Get Carter by Ted Lewis

Another classic find that I've been reluctant to read is now behind me.  I had been saving this one first because it took me so long to hunt down and because it is in quite delicate shape.  My new rule of simply reading my on-deck shelf from right to left has helped break through the hesitation of indecision and it has been rewarding.

I'm not sure how well this book was received when it came out, but I see why they wanted to make a movie of it.  It's hard, probably impossible, to read this book without thinking of the movie.  Certainly, Jack Carter in the book is 100% Michael Caine in my mind.  I think this is both a testament to the character himself, who almost seems to have been written with Caine in mind and to Caine's performance, which while very Caine-esque still captures the nuance of the Carter character:  both a step above his adversaries because he is just such a ruthless badass but also having the advantage of being hometown boy and London-trained.  So unlike some other books, having the character's image in mind already because of the movie was not a bad thing.  The movie, though, did trigger some distracting comparisons when it came to the plot.  

The first half is pretty much the same, with Jack coming back to his hometown of Newcastle (though I don't think the town is ever actually named) to find out why his brother, normally a very careful and temperate man, would have gotten blindingly and obviously drunk and driven off a cliff.  It's a great set-up, because Carter, while not in a management position is clearly extremely good at his gangster job and important to his London bosses, who he suspects may be involved as they discourage his trip home.  He is a professional and plays it very carefully arriving in town, while also knowing the town very well.  There are many classic crime themes at play here:  the criminal returning to his roots and seeing how pathetic it all was, the slick urban mob versus the regional gangsters and of course the lone wolf badass who is a total bastard but you can't help rooting for him.  It all takes place in a rich portrayal of the commingling of English class dynamics and the grittiness of 70s British Crime.  Oh man, the depiction of the pornography is just so pathetic and deeply disturbing.

I really loved the first 3/4 of the book, but found it ended somewhat anti-climactically.  It felt a bit forced (not unlike Parker's originally intended ending in The Hunter, before Westlake's editor made one of the greatest edits of all time) and not in line with the tone of the rest of the book.  I actually think the movie ending makes more sense.  Still a fantastic book.

 

13. Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

Due to my lack of planning, I was not prepared for Black History Month, so it has been a fail for me on the reading front.  I've made note of a few books by Black authors I will read in the future, but right now I am staying committed to reducing the on-deck shelf.  Instead, February has somehow become Canadian Literature Month, as I end the month with my third Canadian classic or near-classic.  It was my mother who first told me about Jalna. She just sort of mentioned it out of the blue several years ago as a series of books that everyone was reading.  I've been looking for them for several years and finally found this first one in Vancouver.  

This is what you call a novel.  It's about an eccentric family in the Niagara Valley in 1926 and their various domestic dramas.  The oldest, Grandmother, settled here with her Colonel husband from India via London.  The name Jalna is the name of the fort where they met and married.  She is now left with two brothers, 5 grandsons and a granddaughter, each one a unique character.  They all live together in this aged, stuffed manor and running the farmlands around them.  They are a kind of local, Canadian gentry.

It's a thick book, like the decor in their house, but it moves fast.  Each character is so richly portrayed and interesting in their own right that you want to learn about each of them.  It's written in a florid, descriptive style that is still somehow quite breezy. There are many storylines that all intertwine but probably the major catalyst is the poet son coming back from New York with a young, educated bride.  Her background is much more protestant and calm, and she is both overwhelmed and fascinated by this loud, aggressive family who fight and kiss in equal measure.

My mother did not exaggerate.  Jalna was a huge success and lead to 15 other books, selling over 11 million copies in multiple languages.  It's odd that it isn't better known. It is subtly proudly Canadian.

 

12. Morgan's Castle by Jan Hilliard

Well looks like I've hit the big time.  Those who follow me closely will have spotted Brian Busby's generous offer to send me the latest Ricochet Books release in the comments section of my review of The Three Roads.  Busby has his own excellent blog and is also the editor at Ricochet Books is an imprint of local publisher Véhicule Press and they do great work, finding and re-releasing in lovely paperback (proper paperback size too, none of this trade paperbacks nonsense) a range of Canadian genre novels, mostly excellent crime and pulp fiction from the mid-20th century.  Go check out their catalogue, it's amazing.  Well he very kindly followed up on his offer and sent me an efficient little package containing this lovely paperback reprint of a lost Canadian semi-classic.  It was surprisingly thinner than I had expected and I jumped right in.

I find it difficult to characterize this novel.  As a rule, I don't read introductions or afterwords (and even try to avoid blurbs) of a book until I have finished the book itself.  The idea is to avoid assumptions and just approach it as directly as possible.  I realize that even with those rules, I had several unexamined assumptions in my head and they were wrestling with the text itself in my brain as I read it.  This is particularly the case with the "gothic" novel.  The famous cover conceit of women with great hair fleeing a castle/manor/cabin with one light on has overshadowed the actual genre itself, one that was already problematic to define.  Morgan's Castle is certainly gothic adjacent in its setup, but the tone and unfolding of events are very different, almost like a dark comic social satire of gentile Canadians behaving badly.

The story takes place in rural Ontario in the early 60s and involves a teenage girl, Laura Dean and her widower, artist father. They live in survivable genteel poverty with better off family members not too far away.  Her aunt Amy as well as her adult brothers are all concerned about her future in about the most selfish way possible:  they want to ensure that she is quickly married off so none of them have to deal with the responsibility of supporting her.  They seem awful right from the get-go.  At first I thought it would be a kind of father and daughter against the world set-up, but her father is portrayed just as negatively.  He is a completely self-obsessed, indulgent and shameless dilettante who only seems to care about his daughter's future in how it will impact him (negatively if she leaves him alone but positively if she can marry into money from which he could benefit).  I'm seething against all these people just a few chapters in!  Laura herself is somewhat of a cypher, a sweet and pleasant girl but still very young and inexperienced.  Though the book is mostly from her perspective, the reader never really gets any sense of her character.

Her aunt Amy is very close friends with Charlotte Morgan, who is the matriarch by marriage of Hilltop House, a mansion overlooking the winery that brought her dead husband their wealth.  Charlotte's lone son Robert's wife was recently made a widower himself (by either an accidental or suicidal ingestion of arsenic sprinkled on berries) and she has designs on making Laura his new bride.  So she invites Laura to spend the summer with her at Hilltop House (or Morgan's Castle as the townsfolk call it).  We get this great set-up where the dad also comes, though very much unwelcome, and refuses to leave ostensibly to watch over his daughter but really because he gets luxurious room and board.

This is where my expectations became confounded.  There is no suspense in Morgan's Castle.  Right away, you hate Charlotte and Amy for their conspiring to manipulate this maiden's future.  Laura is sort of isolated the way you might expect in a gothic thriller but she really isn't as there are so many people around all the time.  It also becomes pretty obvious that the various deaths around Hilltop House could only be the responsibility of one person and the omniscient text all but confirms this.  There is some tension with timing at the end but ultimately this more like a social drama with a psychopath in the middle of it all.

Busby's introduction, which is mostly about the author's life and work than a dissection of the book itself, describes at is having the richest vein of black humour of all her books.  I think perhaps I should have read the introduction first (there are no spoilers, which I appreciate, as this is so often not the case), as I might have picked up on that. I wonder if this book is inspired by a savage critique of uncaring families, perhaps of one that Hilliard (actually Hilda Kay Grant) herself had experienced?  Every single character, except the young and a few side characters (whose best trait may be cluelessness or deliberate obtuseness to avoid social discomfort) are utterly self-serving.  The meagre reputation of small-town Ontario is the ultimate priority.  This rings true to my own upbringing in small town Vancouver Island.

I'm not sure I loved this book.  It was enjoyable and very well-written.  The pastoral Niagara Valley is richly portrayed and the people feel very real (and really awful).  As I said, I was a bit muddled with expectations as I was reading it but I think ultimately the heroine is too vacuous a character for me to have cared for her and the denouement does nothing to fill this out.  There was no satisfying punishment for the bad done, which is not a critique of the book (perhaps some might find this a superior conclusion), but also not to my simple tastes.  You should buy this book to judge for yourself at is nonetheless an important work in Canadian literature.

11. Jackrabbit Parole by Stephen Reid

This is another one of my white whales. I had been looking for this book for years!  I finally found it in a used bookstore in the touristy section of Stephen's Point in Richmond, B.C. (really quite lovely out there if you ever get a chance to go).  I really don't understand why this book is so hard to find. According to the afterword, it was actually quite a bestseller when it came out.  Stephen Reid was certainly very well known at the time.  My family had just left Vancouver Island when he first got arrested and I later heard quite a lot about him, but didn't actually return to Canada until after his much-publicized second arrest.  In any case, his story was long on my radar and I'd been scouring used bookstores across Canada for years.

After I finished Jackrabbit Parole, I went back to the internet to square off the reality of his life versus this narrative.  It's interesting, the wikipedia article feels too short and appears to have some inaccuracies, likewise for his wife, Susan Musgrave.  She is probably an even bigger literary figure in Canada (though both their lives are so entwined it's sort of hard to compare).  It was really sad reading.  He geniunely seems like a decent guy and his ending was quite tragic.  For those of you who don't know, he was part of a celebrated gang of bank heisters called "The Stopwatch Gang" because he wore one around his neck and got in and out within minutes.  He finally got arrested in the 80s and started writing in prison.  The manuscript for Jackrabbit Parole came across Susan Musgrave's desk, who fell in love with both the book and the author.  

He got out eventually and they lived together on the Island, had kids and he started a solid career as a writer and teacher.  Then in 1999 to everyone's shock, he got busted in a shootout following a botched heist in Victoria.  The generally accepted explanation is that his addictions caught up with him again, but I wonder if there also isn't something about the bank robbing life that is hard to let go.  He ended up doing another 15 years in prison, which must have been just brutal at his age.  He eventually got day parole and died a few years later.  What was really heartbreaking is that their daughter who was 10 when he went up, ended up herself an addict and died in her early thirties from a fentanyl overdose.  You really feel for Susan Musgrave, who stuck by both of them to the end.  Must have been so exhausting and stressful.

The book itself is really good.  It was worth the wait.  At first, I found it overwritten, with way too many metaphors and descriptions of quotidian things.  It is a first book, for sure, but as you get involved in the narrative, the style starts to flow into you and the end result is a rich picture of a certain time and place.  The attention to things like using a car radio or making coffee actually would be probably quite interesting and valuable to a younger reader of today to whom all those things would be indicators of a very different time.  

He depicts a criminal milieu that was very specific to Canada in the 80s and still lingers with us today.  The first part takes place in the States, but it still feels very Canadian.  Bobby Andersen (the protagonist and avatar for Reid) is as classic a Canadian expat as is the Canadian doctor who moves to Santa Barbara except he is robbing banks.  I was a safe little middle class kid on Vancouver Island, but the world of real bad guys was always lurking for some reason (one of my classmates older brother was tied up in a bed in a cabin and burnt to death, rumoured to have been done by the Hells Angels).  I don't know what the hell it is, but there are some hard dudes in the hinterlands of this country, despite the relatively good economy and half-decent welfare system.  Jackrabbit Parole gives you a bunch of them, especially the Quebecers and a privileged peek into their world.   

The heists are excellent, really detailed and absolutely capture that 80s aesthetic.  There is a great moment near the end at the final robbery when he is exhausted and stressed after months of being on the run and just before they are heading out for the hit, everything suddenly clicks into place for him.  You realize that he is wired to do this and it is what gets him to his zone, despite everything else that may not be working in his life. It helped me to understand why Reid would have gone back to robbing banks after decades as a successful poetry professor. 

10. Epidemic! by Frank G. Slaughter

I had to pick this one up as it is about a disease catastrophe. I had some slight reservations that I couldn't put my finger on. They were revealed as I read the book. I was hoping and the trade dress and slim paperback somewhat suggested that I would be getting an apocalyptic disease story.  I mean it's about the Black Plague hitting New York in the beginning of that city's roughest period, coinciding with major garbage strikes, the residential arson campaigns by landlords against the poor, crime wave, etc.  Well I know now that Frank Slaughter was a true best-seller middle-brow writer, the kind who walks that thin and often somewhat boring line between entertainment and literature.  It's oddly serious and though a lot of shit goes down, it all feels distant and never really loses control.  It was also much longer than it physically looked.  Took me a while to read.

The beginning is promising. A ship comes in to the NY harbour with a sketchy captain and a drunken first mate.  They took on cheap labour and flea-infested rats in Cameroon, which was having a revolution so there was no news on the outbreak of the plague there.  Slaughter goes into some detail on how the disease actually works, which was cool.  The captain is already sick but his priority is to get to his hot to trot waitress, Gladys.  The rats, of course, are just super psyched to get off the boat to the piles of rotting garbage.  I always love the narrative of the vector spread in disease books.  It's an opportunity for the author to really have some fun with little vignettes, neat characters and locations.  I haven't read it since I was young, but currently the opening of Stephen King's The Stand is a truly memorable example.  Here it is kind of fun, we get Gladys and the captain, whose tryst goes terribly awry (he dies on her couch and she throws him out her window!), a homeless alcoholic who was sleeping near the docks with whom the rats cuddled and a few other threads from there.

Unfortunately, the fun stops here as we transition to the main narrative, which centers around a hospital in Manhattan next to a promising new housing development.  The main character is a world-class immunologist who is on temporary leave from the U.N.  He is absolutely the perfect person to be in charge of fighting the epidemic.  He is in a love triangle with his close friend, surgeon Bob, and the nurse Eve.  There is also a conflict with the irascible tycoon who is paying for the housing development and a police inspector trying to hunt out the Commie (though this word is never used) infiltrator arming the youth gangs who are vandalizing the project.

As you can see, there is a lot going on.  Unfortunately, the bulk of the narrative is either very detailed surgical procedures (Slaughter was a doctor and this was his area of expertise, so they seem accurate) or board rooms of men discussing their plans to fight the epidemic.  I think for some people, this kind of book is quite engaging.  It's a thought experiment.  What would you do if you were in charge of NYC in 1961 and the black plague arrived?  Two comparisons came to mind when I was reading this book.  It's like one of those 60s action movies with the cool poster but when you watch it it's mainly men sitting in unpleasant rooms talking or a tabletop RPG session where the players spend the entire time planning what they are going to do.  I speak only for myself, but I need to get to the action.

From a sociopolitical perspective, this book is an odd mix.  It has currents of conservative thought with its portrayal of commie-driven otherwise mindless bad people.  And yet also strongly argues for public medicine and communal, socially-cohesive policy when it comes to things like vaccines and quarantines.  I don't think Slaughter was particularly political and did not think too deeply about politics, but it is an interesting snapshot of a very different worldview about disease management than we see today.  Oh yes, I also have to give Frank points for his portrayal of Eve, the nurse.  She is actually quite tough and the big tension between her and the immunologist is that he keeps trying to protect her and cut her out of dangerous situations and she is just like fuck that and actually ends up saving the day with straight-up physical action against the commie.  Spoiler alert but this is the reason she chooses to go with the more down-to-earth surgeon, because he will not keep her in a glass cage.

 

9. Callan by James Mitchell

I bought this book at a serendipitous stop at small BMV books on Yonge and Eglington on a cold winter walk with some friends in Toronto.  It was mostly popular type resell books (though some good finds in that category as well as I got my daughter some Stephen Kings), but upstairs they had one vintage section that was actually quite a treasure trove of nice old paperbacks.  I chose Callan purely on it being a Corgi and a young Edward Woodward on the cover.

Turns out the background to this book is somewhat complex.  Initially, Callan was a TV series, written by James Mitchell, with an initial pilot that was the story of this book.  The series was a success, going from black & white to colour.  Mitchell then wrote this book.  It was initially titled Red File for Callan, then A Magnum for Schneider and finally this one, just Callan.  They later made a longer theatrical version of it as well.

If I wasn't drowning in content, I would start watching the Callan series.  People speak very highly of it.  It is missing 10 episodes but there are still like 40 more out there and they are supposed to be an excellent piece of tough spy fiction.

Callan seems to be written as a response to Bond.  This is grimy English kitchen sink espionage.  Callan is an ex-locksmith, ex-commando who became really good at killing people in Burma, got promoted twice and demoted twice and then when demobbed got busted stealing from a grocers because he was bored.  At the beginning of Callan, he is working as an accountant in a messy office with a bizarrely abusive boss.  He has to work there because it is the only place the special office where he used to work carrying out assassinations will allow him to work.  He wears crappy suits and old shoes excessively polished. His apartment is tiny and a mess.  He loves playing wargames with miniatures. 

At first, I thought the book was going in another more Pendleton-y direction because it starts right out with his ability to kill and there is one goofy part where he uses "akimi" or some shit that is supposed to be a killing karate blow.  As you can see from above, it does not go in that direction. Everything is quite squalid and depressing.  His boss has a shitty office in some old building.  His only "friend" is a quavering ex-con pickpocket named Lonely who stinks when he gets scared which is pretty much all the time.

The job here and his chance to get back to the agency is to kill a man named Schneider, who has his own much more succesful import export operation and we later learn is also smuggling weapons to commie insurgents to Indonesia, insurgents who are killing British soldiers.  Callan is supposed to follow orders and not ask any questions, but the core of this book and the reason he is no longer working as an assassin despite his skill is that he has somewhat of a conscience and struggles with guilt over his last kill.  The real antagonist in Callan is his boss.

It moves a little slow in parts and is overall quite dark.  However, the action when it happens is economical and intense.  I grew to like Callan and wanted him to get out of his predicament.  I won't seek these out, but would not say no to another one at a time when my on-deck shelf is not overflowing. 

 

8. Danger at Bravo Key by Ronald Johnston

Pegasus and Pendragon used book stores in the Bay Area are great.  However, their buying strategy which probably is what works best for them, does not really consider me part of their purchasing demo.  They have a decent-sized and well-organized mystery section, but it's almost all trade paperbacks in such good condition that one has tiny doubts that one is in the used section.  Very rare to find any good old paperbacks other than major classics like Agatha Christie.  I did find this one and it had many elements that appealed to me:  cool active cover, the Caribbean, post-WWII and thin. It was $8 (another sign that they don't cater to me) but I am always happy to support any used book store when I can.  Turns out to have been a good choice, my instincts once again proving true.

Joe Lennard is a successful journalist taking an absolutely sick vacation on a little uninhabited Island off the Bahamas.  His big break came in interviewing Castro while he was still in the hills, so he knows a bit about the region and recent Cuban history.  He has hired a local guide, Moses to take him fishing and hunting and they are camping out on this island when at the beginning of the book.  When a hurricane hits, they hide up in some mountain caves.  During the storm, they happen to see a flare and help bring in a foundering ship.  It's supposedly a fishing trip, except they have a store of weapons in the hold. It becomes clear (and admitted soon after) that the 6 men and 1 woman are anti-Castro rebels who are going to try and make some kind of attack on Cuba.  The woman is a journalist who hopes to get a big scoop.

The Cubans are, if not benevolent, at least not outwardly hostile at first.  They are led by their intense captain, Juan Camenides, whose whipping scars and "b" brand Lennard recognizes as the same that were on a young man he met with Castros rebels in the hills. He begins to wonder about Camenidas' allegiance and real plan.  Things get messy fast, as one of the men takes a hating for Lennard and takes it out on a friendly pelican he and Moses had been feeding.  I was enjoying this book decently for the first third. It was a cool setting but some of the politics were a bit wishy-washy and the treatment of the Moses character at first somewhat problematic (he is referred to often as "The Negro").  However, once the action started, it got really good.  There is a great hand to knife fight where Lennard, who was a special forces marine in the Pacific Theatre and saw a lot of action, loses control and goes into commando mode.  

The final act got a bit drawn out, but all the action that led up to it was quite intense and fun and creative.  The characters are mostly all well drawn out.  There is no real bad guy but people put in conflict due to the situation, which makes everything that much more intense and poignant.  Even the Moses character gets his own cool narrative and backstory that made him a full-fledged human.  I dug this.

I really struggled to find any info on Ronald Johnston.  He did have a successful writing career and has some other intriguing titles out there.  Today, his greatest claim to fame seems to be that he is author Paul Johnston's father.  Paul also seems to be an interesting writer, so I've added both to my hunting list.

Inflation!

7. Rogue Justice by Geoffrey Household

I was surprised to discover that Rogue Justice was written in 1982.  I have read Rogue Male back before the 50 books era (even made a fun xmas card out of it) and enjoyed it but also found it a bit odd and off-putting.  I went back and read my reviews of the three books of his I have read and found I had the same impression.  Rogue Justice was much less odd and rather than an extended hunt, most of the book was a chase with the protagonist on the run.  It made for a really enjoyable read. It gets a bit convoluted at the end but most of the book is a just a great escape story.

Rogue Justice is framed by an intro and epilogue by a colleague of the hero and briefly summarizes his attempt to assassinate Hitler and the ensuing retaliation assassination attempt by the Nazis (the story of Rogue Male).  After this, the hero (he has so many names and aliases that one forgots who he even is) returns using the Nicaraguan passport of his would-be assassin and tries again to take Hitler down.  He ends up in jail, which is luckily bombed, killing his captors and starting the adventure in this book.

The rest of the book is him making his way all over Europe in an attempt to escape the occupied territory and to join the British forces to take the fight to the Nazis in a more conventional manner.  His love was tortured and murdered by the Nazis and he lives for revenge only.  He won't even get with the hot Greek resistance agent because he can only think of his dead wife.  The route he takes is so cool and each stop is a little segment of adventure.  Household is really in command of his material.  He seems to know the geography, culture and military situation of each country and even region of a country they go through.  The journey goes from Northern Germany, through Poland, across mountains to Romania, then on to Istanbul via the Black Sea then western Greece, then Italy and finally back to Jerusalem.  There is a lot of British self-satisfaction and veneration of the Jewish people.  Household always has to elicit one Yuck or Yikes! per book (I had said it in two different reviews) and his extreme colonialist portrayal of Israel is the them that does so here.  Yikes!

On the plus side of the ledger, he kills 18 Nazis in all kinds of ways, often after witnessing their barbarism, so particularly satisfying.  I'm surprised that he was writing this will so late in the game.  I'm going to look for more of his later work. 

 

6. The Three Roads by Ross MacDonald

At this point, I consider most of Ross Macdonald's books to have some amount of their work done by Margaret Millar.  The Three Roads, his fourth book and I believe last that was to be published under the Kenneth Millar name, feels strongly that she had a heavy involvement.  It's all pure speculation based on style and themes and their work can be considered together a single ouevre given how symbiotic they were. 

The story here is about a young man on indefinite recuperation leave from the navy after losing his memory.  The book starts in a sanitarium in Southern California where Lieutenant Bret Taylor is under the care of his potential fiancé, slightly older screenwriter and divorcee Paula West.  His situation is very complex.  He and Paula fell in love but just before he went back to sea, he started a big fight and then stormed off, got super drunk and married some chick he met in a bar.  When he came back to see her 2 years later after his ship was blown up, he finds her murdered in the bedroom of the bungalow he had bought for her.  At which point he blacked out and lost his memory. 

Paula West, has fallen in love with him and wants to help him so he can move on and they can get married.  Taylor has other ideas and takes off on his own to investigate the murder of his wife.  At first, there is a lot of heavy Freudian psychology but once Taylor starts the investigation we get into the excellent sleuthing of Macdonald.  I always love the investigating in his books, just great characters in interesting locations and rich, nuanced dialogue to dig out the clues.  

The plot is not all the well thought out and thus doesn't resolve very well.  There is not much of a mystery and after a feint of distrust we get a anti-moralistic ending that is quite dark and noir.  It's not super effective and a bit muddy how we are supposed to take the ending.  The route getting there is mostly enjoyable, though a bit heavy on the psychoanalyzing.

The Three Roads feels like Macdonald is still trying to find his voice and his ideas.  The psycho-babble comes on way too thick, at one point almost feels like he is writing an essay.  It is sprinkled with Chandler-esque critiques of modern LA society, but they come on way too strong.  And there is no morals centre here so you kind of end up not caring.  On the positive side, the writing is well-paced and engaging.  The people are believable and unique as are the locations.  You really get a feel for LA at the end of the war.  This Macdonald guy may have some chops.

5. Come to Dust by Emma Lathen

This is where my sickness comes in.  I found this battered paperback in a free library box in Berkeley.  I took it purely on the Anthony Boucher pullquote.  I am literally piling books horizontally on top of my full on-deck shelf.  It's bad.

 I've never heard of Emma Latham.  This was an interesting read, an east coast establishment mystery where the main detector (I guess) is the president of a major bank.  His ally is the Chairman of the Board of the same bank.  The world is the elite establishment of NYC and New England in the late 60s pretty much Mad Men time.  It centers around a secondary and fictional Ivy League college and in particular its alumni fundraising organization.  One of its members, a particularly steady and thorough man, disappears on the way home to his perfect suburban house in Rye, along with a $50,000 bond certificate that was a donation from a wealthy widow of an alum.

A lot of the first half of the book follows the reputational damage to both the college and the fundraising organization and as we expect things get more and more complicated as it starts to become clear that this guy did not just run off with a young hussy or some other more expected scandal.  The two bankers, including the Chairman's competent and socially skilled wife at times, move among the various players, visiting the shattered wife at Rye, and having nice lunches at various clubs and restaurants.  There is a significant act during the big alumni weekend at the college itself and it is here where finally an actual murder takes place. 

It's a pleasant read, although a bit over written.  Latham uses adverbial phrases excessively and they weigh down the prose and could be confusing at times.  There were also a lot of white people with white people's names that I struggled to differentiate at times.  I did enjoy the inner perspective on the comfortable WASP bankers whose main concerns were not getting roped into dull conversations and the mystery itself was well constructed.  There is a very effective slight of hand or at least presentation of ideas that really worked to hide what was a seemingly obvious erroneous assumption throughout the book.  Also, the careful conservatism of the banking world, while stifling culturally, boy does seem welcome in today's financial cesspool.

Oh wow, I see now that this is a real series of 24 books, with John Putnam Thatcher (the banker) as detective, written by two professional women (who sounded quite successful even outside of the writing world).  I feel quite ignorant never having heard of these.  I may read another one if it crosses my path.

Now that's a well-travelled paperback!