26. Death Wish by Brian Garfield

The finding and reading of the original Death Wish novel was another interesting and rewarding experience in the used book world.  I had always had a slight distaste for the movie, having been raised in a liberal household in the 70s and 80s.  It represented a racist, right-wing attitude that we were supposed to frown upon.  This attitude was reinforced one afternoon in grade 9 when me and a couple buddies went to the local video store and they were playing one of the Death Wish sequels on the television.  It was the initial attack and rape scene and I still remember standing there watching it while chewing a Wunderbar and feeling profoundly disgusted and horrified while tasting this nougaty sugary chocolate go all nasty in my mouth.  Did not eat a Wunderbar since then.

However, now that I'm older and harder (and a fan and student of publications like Cinema Sewer), I have recently been curious about actually watching the Death Wish series (or at least the first one) and since I have discovered Brian Garfield and learned that he was a poker buddy of Donald Westlake, I definitely wanted to read the novel.

The book is very different than the movie, I suspect, in tone and theme.  This is not a revenge fantasy.  Death Wish the novel is an exploration of the mind of an urban liberal when it is pushed to a breaking point due to a crisis that conflicts with everything it believed in.  There is no gratuitous satisfaction or cathartic revenge in the protagonist's killings.  The attack on his wife and daughter takes place offscreen (and is in some ways that much more disturbing and horrific for all the question marks surrounding it).  Most of the book is concerned with his state of mind and the thought process that leads him to his vigilante actions.  The climax of the book may be Paul Benjamin reading an interview with a psychiatrist in New York magazine about the vigilante killings, where the psychiatrist quite accurately conjectures who the vigilante is and what may be driving him.

I learned that Garfield wrote a sequel called Death Sentence, which was his response to the movie and the reaction it got.  Ironically, that got made into a movie recently starring Kevin Bacon that was supposed to be quite bad. Don't know about its position on vigilantism, but I guess I may have to check it out as well.  Pulp serenade has a good post about Death Wish and Garfield's reasons for writing it.

What I found most compelling about Death Wish was the way New York City is portrayed.  I have friends who grew up there back in those dark days and they did say it was rough, but this book makes it seem almost like a dark apocalyptic future where enclaves (or ghettoes as Paul Benjamin bitterly compares them to at one point) of upper middle class people huddle together, surrounded by dark streets full of junkies and killers.  It's depressing, especially coming after the random and senseless attack on Paul's family.  It sort of gets to you as a reader.

It's a historically important book and a good read.  Check it out.

25. The Takeover by Richard Wormser

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but I have somehow managed to hit the 50 books halfway mark before a third of the year is over.  It's odd because I had such a slow start.  I guess it's a testament to just keeping plugging away.  I was quite concerned about the double row of books on my on-deck shelf at the beginning of the year, but now I have made a decent dent in it, while remaing so far quite disciplined about not buying any new books.  If I can hold off for the next three months in California and keep up this reading pace, I should be in good shape for the rest of the year.

Memory is shakey, but I believe The Takeover is also from the now legendary Maritimes trip.  You'll notice how similar the typeface and layout is to The War of the Dons and the more blatant "from the publishers of the Godfather" both mark this as being a Fawecett book published in the wave of the Godfather craze. I guess I should read the book that started it all one of these days.

Howeever, though this is a book about corruption, the mafia only play a tangential role.  The story here is about Jerry, the city marshall and the small group of men with whom he works who basically control a city and by extension the midwestern state it is in.  They have converted the boilerroom of the city hall into an informal but highly select meeting room where they decide who will win which election, who will get which contract and how much they will skim off of it.  These guys are corrupt, but from the protagonist's viewpoint (which is not uncynical), they do a pretty good job of running the town.  They allow some crimes like gambling (including a big policy racket) and prostitution to exist, under their control, but have succeeded in keeping drugs and the mafia out and the streets safe.

Jerry's unofficial job is as the guy who actually goes out and gets a lot of things that need to be done done.  He greases palms, hands out fat in the right places and gets favours in return.  He is the right hand man and favourite of the unstated boss Hank Masters.

The problem arises when their attorney general in the state capitol dies suddenly of a heart attack.  His over-eager and reform-minded assistant will by law take over the position temporarily and has a real chance of getting it for the next four years, which would cause all kinds of trouble for the gang in the boiler room.  It's Jerry's job to try and undermine the guy (who also turns out to want a piece of the pie, but too big of one and in a way that would be disruptive to the status quo).  In dealing with this problem, Jerry starts to realize that he has slowly morphed into the main man.

It's interesting, because when I first read the masterpiece that is Butcher's Moon, I loved how Westlake dissected the corrupt political structure of a small city.  Now I see that this was a strong theme in genre books of the late '60s and early '70s.  You see it in a lot of John D. Macdonald of course, but usually as a background.  It is front and center in books like "The Fools in Town Are on our Side" and "All I Can Get".  The Takeover is another fine example of that and goes into even a bit deeper depth of how the city politics can have some level of control over the entire state (though warily so as they take great pains to never disturb or alert the federal authorities).  It's fascinating stuff and I wonder what great reforms went on that we don't have the same situation today?

The story itself is good, but puts the emphasis on Jerry's character development and moral decisions.  The outcome is cynical and quite dark, though a bit obvious and not unexpected, so that it ended up with a bit of a loss of the momentum it had been building up.  But it felt real and interesting and very cynical all the way through.  This is one of those books where political positiions are utterly meaningless, right and left just playing pieces that need to be manipulated so everybody can get paid.  I don't know if it represents the truth, but this vision can sometimes be a respite for the reader.  It absolves one of getting engaged with everything that is wrong with the world because there is nothing to be done about it, but play the game, try to survive and come out on top.

24. World War Z by Max Brooks

My wife just finished reading this and she stayed up late to finish it, so I thought it would be good for a cross-continent plane flight.  She confirmed and it turned out to be correct as I read the entire book going from Montreal to San Francisco.

The book was a huge hit when it came out and rightly so.  It tells the zombie apocalypse from a global perspective, with a collection of first person accounts of many various players who were involved in the initial stages of infection, through the outbreak, the worldwide collapse, the recovery and then the efforts to clean up the planet in the aftermath.  Because of this structure, with each narrative being a little self-contained story (though also slowly weaving together the bigger story), it is quickly digestible.  This is especially true for fans of the apocalypse, like myself.  There is just a ton of freaky, cool zombie stuff in here.  If that's your bag, you should read this (you probably already have).
But I'll go even further, because I think beyond the visceral thrills and scares and horrors of a zombie invasion, World War Z also speaks to a very specific mindset.  There are some strong socio-political themes in this book and clear criticisms.  Blame is laid squarely at the pharmaceutical industry, the media and our comfortable society.  More broadly, this book attacks conservatism of ideas.  The bad guys here are the people who either refused or were not capable of recognizing what was going on or who even when they did failed to adjust their mode of thinking and acting to deal with it.  The result was much more death and destruction than was necessary.

This book is for people who fear the softness of our society, who worry about a service-based economy where nobody has any real skills any more, for people who recognize (and scoff at) the contradiction of fear-based advertising.  Our response to the anxiety that is shoved down our throats by the media and marketing turns out to be the one that leaves us the most vulnerable when the dead start walking the earth.  We're fat, complacent and selfish.  Every other generation but ours has faced real challenge and instead of taking our freedom and wealth and making a better society, we just stuff our faces and brain with sugar.

Some kind of apocalypse is the simplistic response (or perhaps the only one, given our wiring) and World War Z unleashes it in a most satisfying way.

23. Help I am being held prisoner by Donald E. Westlake

I can't even remember where I found this little gem from 1974.  It's the story of a lifelong, compulsive practical joker who ends up going a bit too far and gets sent to a prison in upstate New York.  There, he accidentally falls in with a crew of hard types who oversee the gym.  They are extremely suspicious and closed to him until he discovers that they have a set-up that allows them to sneak out of the prison, where they go out on day trips disguised as civilians.  It's a clever idea and Westlake plays it out with his light but effective touch.  Things get complicated for the protagonist on many levels when the gang reveals to him that they are planning to rob a bank.  They have the perfect alibi, right?

Westlake is able to create a criminal world that is at once fairly realistic and yet never seems really truly scary.  The stakes are high and there are real threats hinted at, but somehow the whole book has a friendly, relaxed feel (though that feel does not stop you from wanting to turn the pages).  It also has an absolute classic bank robbery moment that only adds to Westlake's oeuvre on this subject.

Great stuff.  Find it and read it.

22. The Ultimate Rush by Joe Quinn

This ended up being an okay story, but the telling was so layered with endless consumer culture signifiers and jargon that I almost didn't make it to the end.  I guess the characters in this book represent some apex of pre-Occupy San Francisco alterno-hipsters.  I wasn't in the Bay Area in the late 90s and if the heroes of this book resemble in any way youth culture there at the time, I'm glad I wasn't.  Most of the first quarter of the book is the edgy coolness of the protagonist's (Chet Griffin) lifestyle being displayed for the reader.  He's a rollerblade messenger! He's living on the financial edge!  His roommate is a hacker with cerebral palsy!  His best friend is a hot asian boarder who dresses up like a schoolgirl but with devil ears!  He has a huge snake!  He has all these special complex tatoos!  It never seems to stop.

The story, such as it is, starts when Chet gets a special job making these super-tight deliveries to odd places, some clearly connected with a criminal operation.  He digs deeper and then accidently opens a package and all hell breaks loose.  He goes on the run and with the help of his friends has to figure out what the operation is and bust it in order to save themselves.  There is a ton of action and the author doesn't worry about adhering too close to reality, which while sometimes giving a reader pause, ends up being the fun choice.  A lot of cool stuff goes down, but again it's all so burdened with explaining why and how its cool (as well as all the cool things around what's going on), that it rarely gives much of a thrill, until the very end.

As I read this, I realized that my impatience may be due to my complete lack of interest in this period.  The 90s were pretty fucking lame.  Grunge, X-games, shitty internet, movies hadn't gotten cool again yet. Bleh.  I also recognize that a lot of the 70s crime books I read have a lot of lifestyle markers, but they tend to know their place in the book and be kept limited so that the action and ass-kicking can take center stage.  Not the case here, sadly.

21. The Sharpshooter #7: Head Crusher by Bruno Rossi

The order of books on my on-deck shelf seems to have arranged itself such that I have spent a lot of the month of March wallowing around in the filth and scum of 1970s New York.  Again, this is a book I picked up on my fruitful trip to the Maritimes.  Who could resist such a cover, especially with the lurid green background?

The Sharpshooter series is the story of Johnny Rock, previously John Rocetti, who parents were murdered by the mafia and who is now on a life mission to wipe them all out.   In Head Crusher, he makes his way to Times Square where he finds a mafia-run brothel and through a bit of dumb luck (there is an attack on the boss of the brothel and Johnny shoots everyone he sees, accidently saving the boss's life) worms his way into a lieutenant position of a local high-ranking member of the family.  It turns out an internecine mafia war is brewing, as the capo from Queens wants territory from the uber-boss of Manhattan.  Johnny Rock, through his cold-blooded killing skill ends up playing a big role in helping the big boss win.  He doesn't care as long as he is killing mafia goons.  But when the war is over, he returns to his main goal and starts taking down the mafioso who have adopted him.

This book is not realistic at all.  However, unlike the last Butcher book I read, it's not preposterous.  The world portrayed seems pretty real, especially all the seedy stuff in Times Square and the mafia's hangouts and homes.  What's unrealistic is how quickly they accept him into the fold and how many of them he kills.  Nevertheless, the book is written with enough grit and intensity that you don't really care.  I actually really started to get into it by the second half.  It feels like a book written quickly by a competent writer, without a lot of regard to the overall structure.  There is one scene that was particularly good, when Johnny gets invited to dinner with the big boss and has a conversation with his educated, dissatisfied granddaughter.  She instantly recognizes him as someone not like the other men that hang around her family and they have a kind of connection.  Then at dinner, Johnny hardens, reminding himself of his mission and that his own murdered sister was very much like the granddaughter and he slaughters the entire family!  His only reprieve towards the granddaughter is that he can't bring himself to shoot her a second time, so she dies with only a single bullet through the chest.  Cold.

There are 15 books in the Sharpshooter series and they are fairly well-respected by fans of these numbered series of men's action and adventure.  I know they were cranked out by several authors with minimal oversight or editing, so I am not too picky about continuity and typos.  But what I don't understand is how in this book #7, Johnny can identify both the guy who carried out the hit on his family and the big boss who ordered it and off them in this volume.  Did he not get to them in the previous six books?  Or does each book have a new mafia leader who is responsible for his family's murder, making the whole thing into a kind of surreal, fantastic cycle of imaginary revenge?

Here is a good overview of the entire series, with some good background material.

20. Loan Shark by J.W. O'Dell

Phew!  Well this turned out to be an excellent antidote to that terrible Butcher novel I read before.  Right from the beginning, I could tell we were in a different level of quality with Loan Shark.  The writing is taut and the setting's grime, squalor and desperation of 1970s Times Square feels very real.

The story starts in medias res as deadbeat gambler and alcoholic Joey Casey loses all his bets in his last big play.  He is in deep to a shylock and not just any shylock, but one of the meanest and least compromising, Macaluso.  Worse, he drunkenly talked shit about Macaluso and even mocked his retarded daughter.  So Macaluso's two top goons, old pros Fine and Demera, are after him and it's quite possible that this time they'll take his life.

The other important character is Frank Cassidy, Joey's older, smarter and more responsible brother.  He is in his own bad place, but it is more psychological. He's a cop who never tried for promotion because that would have revealed how he lied about his identity to hide the existence of his brother with a record.  Furthermore, his wife had died.  Totally estranged from Joey, he spends his days working in a dull daze and his nights being depressed.

The whole book takes place in about a day and a half, with Casey on the run, swinging between despair, fear, anger, hopelessness, a lot of it related to whatever stage of drinking he is in.  Finally, he turns to his last option, his brother.  And that's what Loan Shark is about, the relationship between these two brothers and the choice Frank decides to make.

It's a quick, absorbing and intense read.  All the characters are richly portrayed with an efficiency of text and a realness that makes it effective.  The portrayal of Joey's alcoholism is extremely believable.  You hate the guy for his selfishness, his lying, his manipulation, but you also can't help but sympathize with his inevitable downward spiral.  Excellent book.  I can't find very much else about this author.  Anybody out there know anything about J.W. O'Dell?

19. Butcher #8 Fire Bomb by Stuart Jason

Wow, was this book ever terrible.  Just inept all the way through.  I'm certainly not a book snob (more like a snobby anti-snob, really).  I love gratuitous violence, cheap thrills and exploitation as much as the next red-blooded male.  I've never been a big fan of these numbered series of men's adventure novels, but I respect them for the role they played and the pleasure they gave to a lot of readers.  I've read a few myself already and they've generally been okay.  I've actually grown to appreciate them much more thanks to the recent discovery of Joe Kenney's excellent Glorious Trash blog where he reviews in some depth these kinds of books and compares them to each other.  Often, his blog posts are more fun than the books themselves, though he treats them with respect when they deserve it, which they often do.

I couldn't find a review of any of the Butcher novels in his blog, though he makes a passing reference to them, so he must have read them.  I'm just curious if he would consider this one any good.  It's just so badly done, walking this middle line of mediocrity where it is stupidly brutal but not brutal enough, preposterously unbelievable, but not over-the-top enough to make it fun, stupidly sexist without any real good sex and just terribly, terribly written.  It's almost as if it was written by a hard-working 15-year old boy with some promise who had only ever read numbered men's adventure novels.

Even the action is lame.  The Butcher always whips out his Walther P-38 (which can both blow a hole in a man's back the size of a teacup and hit a sniper high up in a building 100 yards away; nice gun!) which goes koosh!  koosh! every time.  There is no resistance to anything he does, not a single challenge.  So the whole book is just us following him around on this stupid quest by his organization White Hat to find some guy who is responsible for smuggling super high quality heroin into the states.  The big reveal is supposed to be how they do it, which is to mix it into a paste and make dolls out of it.  Then to fool customs, they stamp "Made in Hong Kong" on the back, so they won't realize it just got shipped from Iraq!

It's pointless for me to go on and on with the pathetic plot.  What makes this book really suck is the basic behaviour of the protagonist.  He kills everybody left and right, always figures everything out, but when then he is constantly getting totally surprised by the most obvious thing or having some weird over-reaction, like his hands trembling.  It's just so bad.  Even the cover is lame.  While not offensive, this is definitely the worst book I've read in quite some time and possibly the worst since I've been doing the fifty books thing.  I wish I had the wit and patience to actually make this review enjoyable for the reader, but I'm just too lazy.  So my apologies for the rant, but boy, that was a tough book to get through.  I'm glad it's over!

18. The Spiked Heel by Richard Marsten

I love corporate espionage and wish there were more good books in this sub-genre.  The 50s had a bunch and I stumbled upon this one in the Maritimes (man, that trip is still producing!).  I have to say that I am slightly pleased with my book choosing these last couple of years.  When I stumble upon an old paperback which interests me but whose author I am not familiar with, I really fret over whether or not I should pick it up.  So far in 2012, every single one of those books have turned out to be at least readable and often quite good.  The Spiked Heel was another succesful find by me.  After I read it, I did a bit of research and it turned out that Richard Marsten is the penname of Evan Hunter, who has the penname Ed McBain!  Dude was prolific.

The Spiked Heel takes place in a high-fashion shoe company in the mid-50s, mainly in their manufacturing headquarters in New Jersey (their sales office is in the Chrylser building in Manhattan).  A multi-generational family-owned company that was starting to get soft sells itself out to a much larger, mass-market shoe company from the south.  McQuade, a hatchet man, big, blond, too handsome and too charming, is brought in.  The protagonist, Griff, has worked at the company for 11 years and knows it from top to bottom.  At first he doesn't realize that McQuade is there to shake things up, but as the book moves along he not only finally cottons on to that, he learns that McQuade is a force of evil.

And that's what makes this book so crazy.  Ostensibly, it is about this new guy coming in and forcing changes onto this established company. The book goes into great detail about the structure of the company, how the factory is run, how shoes are made.  Some reviewers at the time found it a bit dull, but I found it fascinating.  This was the peak of American manufacturing, with the skilled manual labourers of the old world working in the industrial context, producing 2,500 beautifully made shoes a day.  And wow, they sure don't make shoes like this any more.  All the cost-saving measurements that McQuade forces onto the company are only precursors to the way all shoes are produced today.  You read about how shoes were made 50 years ago and you realize that even the fanciest bespoke shoes of today are actually pretty low quality.

But the real energy here is the hyper-Freudian McQuade and how he forces himself and his irresistable quest for power onto everyone around him.  It's kind of awesome.  Not only can the sensible typist not resist lifting her skirt and shaking her rump for McQuade, but she is aware of it and tries to prevent herself from doing it, but his animal sexuality is overpowering for her.  His first aggressive move is to break up a fight on the factory floor with a giant firehose, spraying his manhood all over the combatants until they cry.

There is also an interesting regional sub-text that I suspect presages the more stark blue-state, red-state division we see today.  McQuade is from the south as is the company he works for.  He is such an extreme character that he almost doesn't seem human.  He doesn't drink, he doesn't smoke, he doesn't laugh.  When his impoverished background is revealed and the ferocious drive it inspired, he reminds one of Max Cady from Cape Fear. The only other southern character shows up at the end of the novel and though a force for reason, seems almost like an extraterrestrial.  There is a real undercurrent that the South is the other and to be feared.  The voices in the book are from the second-generation immigrants, the Italians, the Jews, the Irish that made New York such a vibrant place in the 20th century.

There is a lot going on in this book and it doesn't all mesh well, like a smorgasbord of themes.  The notion of "decency" is crucial to the protagonist's final understanding of how evil McQuade is.  McQuade's technique is to do something brutal and then follow it up quite suddenly with disarming charm.  He does this once by sticking his hand out for a shake after Griff stops him from taking the way-too-drunk typist home.  When they grip, he then brutally crushes Griff's hand.  He does it a second time at the end of the book and Griff agonizes whether he should shake his hand.  He does again, to his regret again and realizes that it is common decency that compels us to respond when a man sticks out his hand for a shake.  McQuade's not respecting that demonstrates his fundamental lack of humanity.  I really enjoyed that idea.

However, there is a side story about a woman whom McQuade takes out and rapes and while it is portrayed from her perspective with a thorough and interesting look into her background, it still comes off as very nasty and punishing for her.  It's very in line with the sexual mores of the time (she was loose in her younger years, but was trying to change).  But I'm reminded of the nasty mysogyny in the other Ed McBain book I read.

In any case, thoroughly entertaining, with lots of rich material to analyze.  Mad Men has nothing on this stuff.

17. The Lotus Caves by John Christopher

The John Christopher Young Adult review of 2012 rolls on!  I had thought that the Tripods trilogy was my introduction to Christopher as a grade 6er, but as soon as I saw this cover for the Lotus Caves, I realized that this was in fact the first of his books that I read.  I even have a vague memory of Glen Dumont of all people telling me that it was really good.  It definitely made the rounds among our sixth grade class.

After rereading it, I feel that it has jumped ahead of the other of his YA books that I've recently read (excluding the Tripod trilogy).  It's tighter, with a strong focus.  The relationship between the boys is a bit more subtle as well.  Christopher has a tendency to pit the protagonist against a superior boy and having the protagonist always being resentful, which starts to get tiresome.  Here there is some of that, but it is much more complex and evolves nicely. 

It takes place in the year 2068 on a moon colony.  Because of the high-cost of resources and transport, life is very limited here.  Everybody lives under a single bubble and there really isn't that much to do.  The protagonist Marty suffers because his best friend gets sent back down to earth.  This is generally a one-way trip.  He soon makes friends with another boy, who is a bit of a loner and more daring.  After getting into trouble for one prank, they are barred from the local community center.  Boredom and their own restless spirits find them taking the lunar vehicles outside of the dome.  These things have regulators that only let them go a safe distance, but one day they find one with the key to unlock the regulator carelessly left in the vehicle.  So they decide to take the vehicle far out and do some exploring.

Their goal is the abandoned first station, where the first settlers stayed.  There they find a clue that leads them on to a fantastic discovery, a cave under the surface of the moon filled with fantastic plant life.  The only problem is that it really doesn't want them to leave. It's a study in willpower, freedom versus comfort and responsibility, with some really cool concepts along the way. 

I wonder if The Lotus Caves got edited by the same woman who helped him with the Tripod trilogy.  It's very well constructed, probably the perfect length for a twelve-year old.  The first half is about Marty's challenges of adolescent life on the moon.  The second is all about the lotus cave and the boys trying (or not trying as the seductive nature of the plant takes over their spirit) to escape.  Both sections are compelling and keep you wanting to read more, especially the second half.  The visuals are also really stimulating, with the cave taking form in my mind as I read it.  Good stuff.  You can see why it was so popular.  I wonder if it is still on the curriculum today.  It should be.

16. The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas

The more Ross Thomas books I read, the more I realize that the first book of his that I read, the Porkchoppers, is an anomaly.  It's fairly serious and straightforward and while there is a large cast of characters, it really focuses on one man.  My sense is that Thomas' usual style is a blend of tough crime and espionage with an undercurrent of dark humour, all pushed forward by a rich ensemble cast of characters who are either unique in their own right or the result of various crazy historical situations.

The Eighth Dwarf is the story of the early days of post-WWII espionage, as a group of people converge on Berlin searching for a rogue assassin who is taking out hidden ex-Nazis.  The main protagonist is Minor Jackson, an ex-OSS hotshot turned slacker turned (quite passively) spy/independent operator.  He is a bit of an empty construct, though, as it is Nicola Polescu, the charming, clever, sophisticated and untrustworthy dwarf who brings him into the game who is the real mover and shaker in the book.

Nick and Minor are hired by a German Jew in Mexico, the father of the rogue assassin, to find him and bring him back.  The Russians, the Brits and the US also want the assassin, all for their own reasons, and they all send their various representatives to war torn Germany to participate in the party.

It's a fun, lively read.  Ross Thomas writes books that are fun to read, as there is always something going on or an interesting character doing something cool.  The portrayal of 1946 Berlin is great as well, not too in-depth but full of black market basement restaurants, ruined hideouts, gangs of polish DPs (displaced persons), prostitutes wearing nothing but fur coats and more, all put together make for a really intriguing, adventuresome milieu.

I found the 1988 Mysterious Press edition, which has a nifty, though more symbolic than representational, cover.  Interestingly, there are quotes about Thomas from both John D. MacDonald and Eric AmblerIt stands out and I'll keep it, but I would probably be as ruthless as "the wicked dwarf" if it would help me to get my hands on this British version as discovered (and researched) by Louis XIV of the great Existential Ennui book blog.

15. The Incline by William Mayne

There is a whole world of British fiction for younger readers.  I only know a small sampling of it (The Box of Delights, Swallows and Amazons, Enid Blighton) but would like to know more.  There is a used bookstore in Winnipeg (Nerman's Books) that has an amazing selection of it (entire collections of authors) in their basement.  If I lived there, I would probably make more of a study of it.  The first bookstore we went to on our Maritimes trip was in Victoria in PEI and was called Kit Marlowe & Co.  The proprietor was a friendly, informative British woman and she had a small and selective stock with a lot of interesting british stuff.  She recommended William Mayne as having been a popular young adult author with a working class perspective.  The Incline is the book of his that I picked up there.

It's about a young man, Mason, who finishes school and starts a job working as a clerk in the bank in his village.  His father is the foreman of the local granite quarry, which is the economic heart of the little village.  The main storyline in the book is about the quarry losing money and then shutting down, but it is all seen through young Mason's viewpoint.  It's odd, because he is really young, seemingly just starting puberty, but he's finished schooling and starting out in the bank working alongside an older fellow.  I guess this is the period when the concept of "teenager" had yet to come into being.  It makes it difficult to understand his behaviour and thinking as he is at once much more adult than a person of his age today and at the same time, much less experienced.

The owner of the quarry came from the same roots as Mason's father, but has done well for himself and now owns the big house on the hill.  He also has a daughter that is about Mason's edge.  They used to play together, but now he has developed a crush on her.  She is weirdly infantalized, having been groomed for a higher class and sheltered from the realities that her peers in the village face.  She's nice, though, but wants to keep their relationship at the same level it was when they were toddlers together, while Mason is looking for something more serious (though even he is quite innocent about how it all works, believing only that he "loves" her).

It's an odd book, staying mainly in the cerebral.  While things actually happen, quite serious things, they never seem to disturb the dreamlike wondering that is Mason's worldview.  This book doesn't have any of the weight or bitterness I expected.  There is no resentment of the wealthy or crushing despair for the poor.  It just is what it is and doesn't seem all that unpleasant.  An interesting read, which probably requires some analysis and explanation by experts to help the 21st century North American reader to understand.

14. War of the Dons by Peter Rabe

This was probably the find of last summer's trip to the Maritimes.  I still remember running my finger down the horizontally stacked (and badly organized) paperbacks in the mystery section of this rambleshack used bookstore run by an ex-ship's engineer in Lunenburg, N.S. (check the back of the Canadian dime) and seeing the Godfather-esque typeface and the name Peter Rabe.  I got all excited, but immediately tried to act cool when I saw the price was $2.  I actually was nervous when the proprietor was going through my stack of books to calculate the total price that he would say, "hey wait a minute, let me just check this on ebay..." Fortunately it didn't happen.

War of the Dons is the story of the three Guarda brothers, who are top-ranked lieutenants in mafia don Messina's southern California organized crime empire. Marco, the leader, sees Messina as weakening and wants to get him out of the way and take over.  The three brothers pretty much run everything anyways.  Then things get really complicated.  I don't mean a big mess, but just really complicated.  This book takes the idea of the outfit as a complex business organization and really runs with it. The conflict between the traditional family roots and the modern business structure of organized crime is a big theme here, anticipating the cynicism with which Stark portrays the mob (basically as the IRS with guns and equally hated).

Most of the book follows the Guardas, their sattelites and the big bosses at the top as the Guardas succesfully kill Messina but then have to try and hold on to the power in the vacuum they have created.  For the first half, I found it a cool and engaging narrative, exposing a fascinating world with lots of juicy details of personalities, locations and ways the mob works.  But I wasn't blown away, kind of feeling that maybe Rabe had mailed this one in a bit to cash in on some editor's request to cash in on the godfather craze.  But things take off in the second half and you get a taste of what makes Rabe such an interesting writer.

The book focuses here on the three brothers and their relationships, probing deeper than what we had previously seen on Marco in particular.  Pepe, the oldest, is the crazy, sexual strongarm.  Nuncio is the weaker business guy.  (I'm pretty sure there is some correlation here with the id, ego and superego but I'm too lazy to figure it out.)  Marco is the fascinating one.  He spends most of the book under incredible tension, trying to hold his increasingly-complex plans together.  He is cold and seems motivated by ambition but also a desire just to make the thing work.  But when it does all go to shit, he suddenly relaxes, desiring only to wreak havoc on his opponents just for the sake of the havoc.  He goes back and forth between this freedom from pressure to uber-tenseness several times in the book and it is this duality in his character that's the most compelling (and what the plot ultimately seems to be driving at).

It's not a perfect book.  The pacing is inconsistent, especially at the end.  I would have loved another 50 pages on what was wrapped up in one.  But I think students of Parker would do well to read this book.  I don't even know if this was one of Rabe's works that influenced Westlake, but there is a similar and maybe more complex relationship to power and authority here as there is in the Parker saga.  Good, intense stuff.

13. Gangway! by Donald E. Westlake and Brian Garfield

This was a nice $2 find from, if my faltering memory is holding up, the Maritimes.  However, I am really not a big fan of the aesthetic of this edition.  Because the book takes place in the late 19th century, but was published in the early '70s, they had to give it that heinous slightly abstract '70s old-timey aesthetic.  Shudder.  I grew up with that (I remember my friends had a wallpaper of it in their bathroom), couldn't stand it then and can't stand it today.  But still, it's a nice paperback of a pretty fun read and a less well known Donald Westlake.

Gangway! can be pretty easily encapsulated as a historical heist comedy novel or for those of you familiar with Westlake, Dortmunder in 1870's San Francisco.  It also reminded me a lot of Westlake's comedy capers like High Adventure.  If any of that is up your alley, then Gangway! is probably worth putting on your list.

The protagonist, Gabe Beauchamp, is a con from Hell's Kitchen, forced to go to San Francisco by his local ward boss.  A lot of the book is about Gabe hating and adjusting to what he considers living in the boonies, though the authors go a long way towards making it more of a mockery of the New Yorker who has never left Manhattan.  Gabe has a nose and a skill for crime and is immediately attracted to the Federal mint and the wagonloads of gold bars that are shipped into it from the mines around SF (this is the late gold rush period).  So he assembles a string of wacky characters, including a streetsmart San Franciscan women who takes a shine to his exotic east coast ways.

He comes up with an elaborate, dubious plan that very much invokes the title of the book and involves a lot of other interesting characters and wacky situations.  I found some of the humour a bit forced, just not quite as tight and polished as the Dortmunder novels, but it never gets in the way and overall supports a light, pleasant tone that makes for quick and enjoyable reading.  The heist itself is quite fun and would have made for a great movie.

There is a great interview with Brian Garfield (author of Death Wish among many other things) and he talks about his days in the 60s and 70s playing in a regular poker game with Westlake as well as how they collaborated on Gangway!

Don Westlake had a blinding-fast mind. He always seemed to have on the tip of his tongue the sort of wonderful witty rejoinders that occur to most of us a day or two too late. In 1970 we got the idea that it would be amusing to try combining our strengths in a Western comedy novel. We wrote Gangway!, and it turned out to be quite funny, I think. Henry sold it and it did fairly well. But our ambitions to sell it as a basis for a movie didn’t work out. And we’d done it in a silly way—each of us would write a draft, then turn it over to the other, who’d rewrite the whole thing and give it back. It was about four times as much work as either of us would have put in individually on a book. So we didn’t try that again. But it was fun, and we got to know each other’s working styles.

12. All I Can Get by William Ard

This was another exciting old paperback find at an outdoor book fair in the Laurentians last summer.  I really should have bought more.  There was some great stuff there. 

While this turned out to be an enjoyable read, the cover does not reflect the interior of the book at all well.  Yes, that scene takes place and yes there is a girl who plays for fun and yes I guess the protagonist, Lou Largo P.I. does play for keeps.  But this book is not some intense, torrid, hard-boiled tale of sexual conflict.  The tone is the biggest thing not well-represented by the cover.  It's actually kind of light and humorous, closer to Boston Blackie than Philip Marlow.  And the story is actually about a wealthy newspaper tycoon who invests in a morning paper in a small city across the bay from Tampa in an attempt to take over the market and the resistance he and his allies face from the mob (well mobs, as both the mafia and the Cubans are fighting over the turf). 

There is another story wrapping around the newspaper narrative.  At the beginning of the book, the newspaper tycoon hires Lou Largo to investigate a beautiful, young woman with whom he just fell in love and has proposed to marry after meeting her hours earlier (this is where the light tone starts off).  Of course, Lou, after discovering that she is a total party girl, gets with her.  Though it is "a Lou Largo novel", Lou leaves the story for the next half of the book, where we follow the tycoon as he goes to Tampa to sell the newspaper and take his star editor back with him to NYC.  He is also planning on marrying his fiancé as well, but gets caught up in the mob war and changes his mind on selling the paper.  The story then moves into main gear and we get lots of good (actually fairly hard-boiled) gang war stuff, beatings, stand-offs, gunfights, corrupt cops and so on. 

It really reminded me a lot of "The Fools in Town Are on our Side", though a bit neater in its wrap-up and a bit lighter in its overall tone.  It was kind of a fun book, but just not as heavy as what I was expecting.  Now I shall go and see if Lou Largo actually had a series.

11. All These Condemned by John D. MacDonald

My copy of this is the same depicted here, except with a 35¢ price tage and in even worse condition.  It's almost on its last legs, with the pages separating from the spine, though not yet falling out.

It's an early John D. MacDonald and though it hinges around a murder mystery, it is much more a study of the soullless, broken bourgeoisie of the mid-fifties and probably thus fell into the literary genre rather than the mystery.  The copy on the back and inside front cover suggests that it was marketed that way.

The story is about 8 people who go to a weekend at the beautiful country lodge of the rich and manipulative cosmetics executive, Wilma Ferris, who in some way owns them all.  She drowns during some skinny-dipping on Saturday night and the ostensible hook of the book is for the reader to find out whodunnit.  It's structured in a neat way, with each chapter being the viewpoint of one of the 8 people, either from a "before" or "after" the murder.  We get to see how each of them think, how they think of the others and what their relationship was with the victim.

It's good, engaging stuff.  All of them are in some ways broken or on the verge of being broken.  In many cases, they are in this state because of Wilma Ferris.  MacDonald, though, doesn't seem to really blame Ferris.  From his perspective, they are all examples of the modern condition, people so far removed from the honest basics of hard work and treating people right, that they have no moral compass in the first place and it is easy for a cruel sociopath like Wilma Ferris to push them in the wrong direction.

I have only watched a few episdes of Mad Men, but upon finishing this book, I kind of felt the whole series is kind of superfluous.  They were trying to critique the flaws of that era in multiple episodes, when John D. MacDonald did it in a single book, with a lot more punch.  The other thought I had upon finishing this book was that although I look upon a lot of the naive excesses of the '60s with a great deal of superior scorn and contempt, when you jump into the era that went before, you kind of feel that the over-reaction of the 60s made a lot of sense.

10. The Words of my Roaring by Robert Kroetsch

I cannot even remember why I picked this book up.  I think it was early on in our Maritimes trip and at one of the first used book stores in PEI, so I was a little overeager (like women or fish, you need to let them come to you).  I was interested in it because it was Canadian and looked like a fun read.

It's a story of a man, Johnnie J. Backstrom, running in the Prairies during the Depression and a drought, running for office. His main opponent is an old doctor, who is also his mentor and father figure.  Backstrom himself is quite reckless and irresponsible, constantly drinking, spending money he doesn't have and neglecting his pregnant wife.  The whole story is told from his perspective and I guess we are supposed to sympathize with him.  His big move is to spontaneously predict that it will rain the day of the election and then he spends the rest of the book wrestling with the attention and potential success this gives him, while getting drunk and sleeping with the doctor's hot daughter back from an eastern college.

It's an enjoyable read, but doesn't really resolve itself in the end.  It seemed a bit of a celebration of masculine excess, without excusing it, but just lacked a concrete narrative for me to really like it personally.

One thing to note is the sticker with the author's name on the lower-right-hand corner.  Wow did somebody fuck up the printing of this book!  How pissed would you be to have been that author?  I can only imagine the conversations that went on behind the scenes when this book hit the shelves.

9. The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart

This is the sequel to The Crystal Cave and while I had been initially reluctant to continue on with the series, I found this nice coronet version that compliments my copy of the first one.  It arose next in line on my on-deck shelf and I dove in.

To my good fortune, I would add.  I loved this book. The first was very enjoyable (my reluctance to not continue is due to the vast number of books I still have yet to read and thus not ready to commit to multi-series books unless I really have to), but this one surpasses it in my opinion. It's about Merlin's quest to protect and raise young Arthur so that he shall be ready to become king when the time comes.  What I loved about this book is that Merlin just kicks so much ass, but he does it almost entirely without using force or violence.  His tools are wisdom, strategy, diplomacy, guile, discourse, negotiation, charisma and his reputation, all slightly enhanced by his magic.  I found it absorbing throughout with several tense, gripping moments.  Arthur's importance is that he is foreseen to properly unite Britain, and though subtle, there is also an inspiring undertone of British patriotism throughout the book that is also quite moving.

One element that troubled me was the portrayal of Morgause, who in Stewart's telling, is the evil sorcerous who may be Arthur's eventual undoing.  I'm sure feminists have dealt with the character in the myths.  Here she is given no mercy, shown to be utterly corrupt almost from the get-go.  All the elements from his lineage that mix to make greatness in Arthur, mix into his sister to make evil.  Given that Mary Stewart is a woman, most of whose novels I believe have a female protagonist, I wonder if it is okay to question her portrayal of Morgause as a missed opportunity.  If you care about those kinds of things.  As a potential antagonist (her role is revealed late into the book), she is pretty scary.

Great stuff and now I'll definitely read the third one when a nice Coronet version crosses my path.

8. Fireball by John Christopher

I'm less enthusiastic about John Christopher's young adult stuff.  It's not that it's not good (the opposite in fact, it ranks among the classics), but it lacks the underlying anxiety that I enjoy so much about his earlier, adult fiction.  The YA books are also quicker reads, with simpler, condensed narratives.  They are not totally fulfilling for me as a reader.  As a collector, though, I have decided with the conclusion of Fireball that I will definitely be keeping an eye out for his YA fiction to add to my bookshelf.  When I finished Fireball, I thought it was a one-off (like Wild Jack) but it turns out to be a part of a trilogy as well, though one, I suspect, that wasn`t originally planned, as the three books are so far apart and the stories so different.

The basic premise is two cousins, one American the other British are spending the summer in the english countryside when they see a fireball floating in the air.  They go to it and the next thing they know (after some discovery) they are in an alternate earth where the Roman Empire never declined.  They become involved in a Christian revolution and when that turns sour, they head with some new allies to the New World.  I kind of got into it, especially the exploration of the world.  The coda is their voyage to the new world and that is the part that really intrigued me (thus my interest in picking up the sequel, New Found Land).  There was also some stuff at the beginning that suggested that their world was not in a great state ("the television news had been on, showing yet another scene of mob violence somewhere").  I'm curious to see if they get back to their world and any of those hints are played out.

Christopher's adolescent protagonists are often kind of whiny pills.  The American cousin, Brad, is superior to the British kid, Simon, in the ways that matter to teenage boys.  He is also more idealistic and moral.  At times, though you are in the thoughts of Simon, one finds him a bit of a pill.  There isn't a whole lot of arc for him either, at least in the first book.  He just kind of ends up following Brad's lead, after initial resistance, because Brad is usually right.  British inferiority complex on the part of Christopher or a sucesful technique to appeal to the minds of his readers?  It's hard to say, but it is noticeable.  I'm also interested in seeing if this dynamic develops in the later books.

7. Flight into Danger by Arthur Haley and John Castle

This is another book I picked up in the Maritimes.  I've learned since finishing it that it is the novelization of the teleplay of a very succesful 1956 TV movie on CBC that launched Arthur Haley's career.  I don't know if this is the first, but it certainly strikes me as the classic tale of the amateur or retired pilot forced to land a passenger airplane.  Here, a severe case of food poisoning in the salmon that is served for dinner jeopardizes the health of many passengers as well is incapacitating both pilots.  Luckily, there is a doctor on the plane and even more luckily, George Benson, a truck salesman who flew fighter planes in WWII.  This is a very straightforward, tight and exciting little thriller.  There is no bigger plot or unexpected twists, no real drama among the passengers or the ground control.  Just a man who hasn't flown for 13 years and only flew single-engine fighters when he did being coached from the ground by an expert pilot while passengers are slowly dying and the odds of him actually landing the bird are extremely low.  I found it quite thrilling and tore through the second half.  The lesson here is that you don't need a lot of bells and whistles if the story is exciting and you can tell it in an effective way.  Good stuff.

(Note, while I found several images online of the same cover, they were from Pan books.  This Totem imprint was published by Collins and sold, I believe, only in Canada.  Here is the little blurb from them on the inside back cover (backispiece?):

6. The Fiend by Margaret Millar

Ah yes, the great Margaret Millar.  I felt like a bit of a fiend simply reading this book in public.  How freaky is that cover!  I'm a huge Patricia Highsmith fan, but I'm believing more and more that Millar belongs in her class and is maybe even superior in some respects.  Millar is less clinical.  She seems to have some affection for her characters, though she is absolutely unsparing in the way she exposes their weaknesses and flaws.  It gives a bit of warmth to her books that make them perhaps a richer read.  Boy is she unsparing, especially towards women (another similarity to Highsmith).  A smarter person than me with more time should dedicate at least a long article, if not a book on comparing the two authors and their works.

The Fiend is ostensibly the story of a mentally damaged individual, Charlie Gowen, who lives with his older brother.  There was an incident with a child that happened in his past, sent him to a ward and made him the town pariah.  Today, though, at least on the surface, he is more or less coping and the few people he does interact with consider him more or less "fixed", if they are even aware of his history.  His brother, though, has basically sacrificed his life to take care of him and he is highly attuned to any potential weirdness or strayings.  And Charlie is straying.  He has noticed a particular little girl, Jessie a little daredevil, and is started to become obsessed with her safety.  He wants to "protect" her.  Millar draws out his pathology very gradually (as well as the details of his original crime), so you never really know how far he will go or the exact nature of what it is he will ultimately do.  It's nerve-wracking!  The question of whether he can exist in society is on the table and you do feel some sympathy for him.

Charlie's story is actually the center of a much richer plot, involving the little girl's parents and the two other families that are close to her: the childless couple of whom the wife is obsessed with Jessie and the bitter, misandrynist divorcée who is the mother to Jessie's best friend.  It is in the portrayal of these people where we start to see the real human ugliness.  It would be simplistic to pit the seemingly normal people against Charlie, but that isn't what Millar does here.  Everybody gets their brain opened equally and revealed to the reader.  Charlie's is just much more inconsistent and difficult to figure out.  But they are all pretty messed up in one way or another.

I suspect that a professional psychologist would probably find some of the analysis of Charlie's mind possibly a bit dated or erroneous.  There were some parts that seemed a bit facile (though a lot of those came from the perspective of a character, so it's hard to say if Millar was reflecting her own take or what she thought the character would think).  There was also a small side development between the divorcee and her lawyer that seemed forced and unnecessary.  But otherwise this is a pretty excellent book that keeps you hooked right to the end.

5. The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun by Sebastien Japrisot

Finally starting to get my reading pace back again.  Still not quite where I was last year, but I am feeling that joy of really getting into a book.  I apologize for my lameness in not getting back to those of you who have so kindly commented (and often quite wittily) in a timely manner.  I hope that my growing reading energy will also translate to more responsible blogging behaviours.

I'm quite happy with my good luck in my recent cheap and free book finds.  Quite often when you take a flyer on an author or book you've never heard of, you can suffer.  I am not able to not complete a fictional book once I've started it and because of that have suffered through some painful reading in the past (The Folly by David Anne is a recent example).  That's the fear that is nestled in your head when you are staring at a cool-looking cover.  Sometimes I'll buy the book but then keep on putting off reading it, so that it is always staring at me from my on-deck shelf, making me feel guilty and questioning whether I have the intestinal fortitude to be a true book nerd.

 The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun is an example of a complete guess.  I found it at the S.W. Welch sidewalk sale for 50 cents.  It looked very intriguing and had a cool cover.  I'd never heard of Japrisot and was mildly concerned that it was a translation. 

It turned out to be a very good read.  It felt a bit like The Red Right Hand as if it had been written by Simenon.  It's the story of a neurotic young Parisian woman who gets asked to drive her boss and his wife to the airport in their fancy Thunderbird.  Instead of returning it to their house as she is supposed to, she decides on a whim to take it on a holiday drive.  Her head is full of her own neurotic and insecure thoughts.  She is a weird girl, seemingly attractive but isolated and in the habit of lying to her work colleagues about her life (and particularly her vacation plans).  As she travels through the outskirts of Paris and the small towns along the vacation route, things start to get weird.  Someone attacks her in a gas station bathroom and when she comes to, her hand is injured and she isn't sure for how long she had been out.  Even weirder, people start acting like they had already come across her.  The reader as well as the heroine are really not sure what the hell is going on.  Is she insane?  Is she the victim of some bizarre, improbable plot?  It's a compelling journey across the social and physical landscape of late-60s France, with lots of amoral people at every stop.  As the mystery gets weirder and more convoluted, we also learn more about the girl. 

Worth checking out.  I'd read another of this guy's books for sure.

4. The Tango Briefing by Adam Hall

I had what I believe was the first Quiller book on my shelf for years and I finally gave it away.  I couldn't remember why I never got into it. I found this one in a pile of recycling and refuse at the corner of the school near my house.  It was being thrown out with a bunch of other books from the library.  I started reading it and I think I know now why I never got started with the other one.  If The Tango Briefing is any indication of the Quiller series, it is some pretty hardcore nerd-espionage.  Nothing can be simply done without Hall explaining in insider espionage language the background, the ramifications, the various potential outcomes, several other instances of the same maneuver having been done (generally unsuccessfully) and how it will impact the behaviour of the "opposition".  It's kind of like reading about a football game where each play is prefaced with a litany of statistics and comparisons.  It's cool if you are into that sort of thing, but can be a bit trying for the reader that just wants some football action.  In case you think I'm exaggerating, the act of flicking a lit match into a car's gas tank takes over two and a half pages of explanation!

Furthermore, he writes in an almost poetic style at times, using incomplete sentences and jumping around in time without being really explicit about it.  So if you aren't paying close attention, it can be easy to get lost and not even be clear where the protagonist is geographically at any given point.  This reader was not paying close attention in the first third of the book or so.  However, once I did finally get an understanding of his style and once I got caught up in the story, I did pay closer attention and actually got quite into.

My critique above are not really criticisms, because Hall is a skilled writer and the story that goes down was really cool.  It's simply a question of personal preference.  You see some popular modern writers try to write like this (Jeffrey Deaver comes to mind and Lee Child as well).  Once you read a Quiller book, their efforts seem sort of cartoony and overblown.  The Tango Briefing was intense.  The story centers around a mysterious marking in the middle of the Algerian desert, some kind of aircraft, discovered by British surveillance.  Quiller is sent out to establish a base and make his way to the aircraft without being discovered.  Unfortunately, when he gets to Algiers, he finds that two previous agents ("executives" as they are called) have already been compromised: one killed and the other a broken, nervous wreck after having been followed by a sniper for several days.  Just the process of setting up a way to get to the aircraft in the desert takes up about half the book, with Quiller negotiating every step to lose "tags" (people following him) and avoid alerting listening posts and other sensitive alerts that make up the world espionage network. The "opposition" is so faceless that it might as well be a computer network.

When he does get to the desert, he has to find the wreck, discover what is so special about it and get out.  The whole section in the desert is really intense and believable.  It gave me a strong feeling of how frightening it would be to be exposed in the middle of the sahara where even if you had enough water, you couldn't drink it fast enough to prevent the evaporation from your body.

I'm not sure if I will rush after any more Quiller books.  They are a little too detailed and complex for my simplistic mind.  I would, however, strongly recommend them to anyone who considers themselves a hardcore espionage fiction enthusiast.

3. The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

The Friends of Eddie Coyle definitely lives up to its reputation as a classic.  It's the story of a lower-echelon mafia guy juggling a mix of gun-running and informing while trying to navigate his way between the law and his colleagues in crime.  It's told almost entirely in dialogue, though the crisp, intense bank robberies are narrated.  It's the kind of book you should really try to read without a lot of breaks.  Due to the dialogue and the lack of clear identification of some of the speakers at the beginning part of the book, the reader can get a bit lost (or at least this distracted reader).  But once you start to grasp the overall form of the narrative, the story flows forward and you can't stop turning the pages.  This is a dark, realistic and gripping read.  Strongly recommended.  I am looking forward to checking out the movie now.

2. The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

Note to self:  continue to read non-Sherlock Conan Doyle books.  The Lost World was really awesome.  I found it at a bookstore with the Lantzvillager, who recommended that I get it.  It was a good recommendation as I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  The adventure to the lost world plateau in the heart of South America was great, but I loved the public spectacle of scientific controversy in Edwardian London that bookened it even more.  Good stuff.

1. The Diamond Smugglers by Ian Fleming

I don't know what's up with me this year, but I just can not get motivated to write my blog posts.  Perhaps I pushed myself too hard last year, perhaps it's bigger issues.  It's bizarre and I can't figure out what is going on (which is also bizarre).  I do not want to lose track, though, so I will continue to log the books I've read and put up their covers.

I found the Diamond Smugglers in the Maritimes.  It was in terrible condition, but had such a cool cover that I picked it up.  It assembles a series of articles Ian Fleming wrote for a Sunday paper where he interviews a top agent working against international diamond smuggling.  There were some neat anecdotes and a fascinating picture of the diamond industry and black market in the world after WWII.  There were some very disturbing and damning assumptions made about who had the native rights to the diamonds that reflect an ongoing colonial mindset.  Neat book.

61. Without Drums or Trumpets by Alec Le Vernoy

Another succesful random book find closes out my 2011 year of reading.  Without Drums or Trumpets was one of the books I found in a dusty box in a top shelf of a work closet.  I had actually not taken it the first time through because the cover and title combination was so uninspiring (I thought it was a treatise on peace).  I had a second opportunity to go through the box and gave this one a closer look, thus realizing that it was actually a cool-sounding WWII narrative about a french guy who got into all kinds of adventures.

At the start of the war, Le Vernoy was a young outdoorsman, who loved the mountains.  There is a brief prologue of him with some friends on a trek and then we launch into the invasion of France and Le Vernoy's crazy story.  He fights briefly with the French army before the capitulation.  Instead of surrendering, he continues fighting and fleeing, making his way to North Africa.  There he tries desperately to join the British with a couple of insane kayaking and sailing episodes to Gibraltar.  He finally succeeds but instead of getting sent to fight, he is placed by British intelligence back in North Africa where he does a bunch of spying and then sabotage missions with the local french community in occupied North Africa.  I throw that off in a sentence, but this section alone is full of incredible episodes of tension and violence.

He eventually gets captured and spends time in a Tunisian prison.  When Nazi rule in North Africa starts to collapse, he is shipped to Germany with a bunch of other important prisoners where he ends up in a concentration camp.  The narrative here turns from the adventurous to the truly dark.  No matter how many different perspectives and narratives I encounter about those concentration camps, I am still surprised once again by the incredible horror of what went down there.  I guess the mind just sort of blocks it out.  In Le Vernoy's case, he was one of the POWs in the camp so it gave a different perspective than from the Jews who were for the most part sent specifically to be murdered.  All the other prisoners were basically being worked to death, so it wasn't much better, but it is just interesting to read about the experience from someone who actually saw families still carrying their suitcases being driven to the gas chambers, not realizing what was going to happen until the last minute.  He also writes an extremely effective passage where he describes the horrific philosophy of production behind the way the camp was being run.

Aside from being incredibly resourceful, he can also speak German and was a medical student, skills which get him into slightly less deprived positions in various prisons and which also allow him to find means of escape, which he does.  Most of his war, in fact, is him on the run, which leads to a lot of frustration for him, as his main goal is simply to get out and fight. He also has a lot of criticism for the majority of his own people, the french who collaborated or just remained passive.  The times when he goes from door to door, desperate for a bit of help, and is categorically refused by his own people are maddening and an important reminder for us all.

As a book, the translation from the french is a bit rough (but makes it feel that much more authentic) and as a personal narrative it lacks a consistent structure.  Those are minor concerns, though, as the guy's story is just so crazy and entertaining (and informative) that you can't stop turning the pages.

I was reading the end of this book while flying home.  The in-seat entertainment device was playing 24 channels of broadcast television and I kept getting distracted and flipping through the channels.  It was new year's eve and so we had all these countdowns and summaries of 2011.  Except for the brief actual news events, it was all so much irrelevant horseshit.  It just saddened me that a guy like Alec Le Vernoy, who had all of his fingernails peeled back slowly one by one because he wouldn't inform on his fellow prisoners, is mostly forgotten while our most powerful media voices spend vast resources celebrating nobodies who have done nothing.  Is this what guys like m. Le Vernoy sacrificed for?

60. The White Rajah by Nicholas Monsarrat

First of all, a minor pat on the back for myself as this 60th book brings up my "lifetime" (well since 2005) 50 books average up to 50 books per year.  This was my goal and though I flagged in the second half of this year, I have achieved it.  So that is quite satisfying.  Now I shall try to maintain this average in the years to come.

I picked up the White Rajah early on in my trip to the Maritimes this summer almost entirely on the strength of the author's name.  I had only read The Cruel Sea and really enjoyed it.  The White Rajah sounded like a very different kind of book with an adventurous, possibly swashbuckling premise.  It also had a cool map of some south seas island.  As you can see, those elements were strong as they outweighed the super cheesy cover.

It's the epic story of Richard Marriot, younger brother of an artisocratic family in the 18th century who is left nothing but a globe and a pair of pistols by his wealthy father.  The book opens at the day of the funeral when Richard's stuffy older brother basically throws him out of his newly inherited estate.  After this dramatic chapter, we jump forward 10 years when Marriott is a pirate captain, sailing the exotic oceans.  He stumbles upon the island nation of Makassang and finds himself in an advantageous position, where he can upset the balance of power in a struggle between the ruling Rajah and the resentful buddhist priests.  Marriot is soon inculcated into the royal family and the bulk of the book follows the political struggles and his efforts (and lack thereof) to take control and help move the island from its savage state to a more politically enlightened place, with the help of the Rajah's beautiful daughter.

It was a really enjoyable read that suffered in the end by moving away from the adventure and intrigue towards political moralizing.  It wasn't heavy-handed, but instead of a tense narrative, Marriot's struggles are sort of undermined by a semi-deus ex machina ending (that also all too easily waves away all the narrative potential of the conflict between Richard and his brother, who is instrumental in the deux ex machina ending).  Another problem was the protagonist himself.  He is portrayed as a lusty, headstrong young man whose natural energy and charisma (which are wild and out of control when he is a young lord in England) are honed in his years as a south seas freebooter.  When he gets to Makassang, he becomes seduced by the easy living and grows soft and oblivious to the dangers around him.  It's a great theme, but I felt that it went on for way too long, with the dangers being so obvious and Marriot himself being so lame that I grew frustrated with him.  So instead of personal growth and a kick-ass return to form, we get lots of lots of him being passive while worse and worse shit goes on around him until finally the situation is intolerable, at which point a British gun ship comes out and saves the day.  He is never really given the agency that would pay off all the built-up potential and so the reader is left a bit unsatisfied.

Still, the first half of the book is gripping, the situation and location are exotic and richly developed and portrayed.  It was an enjoyable read and I would keep an eye out for any other Monsarrat books.  He is very skilled at telling a story, enough so that I am not ready to say that some of the choices he made in this book reflect an actual flaw in his skill as an author. 

59. The Folly by David Anne

My copy does not have the yellow graphic on it.

I stumbled upon this book in a big ripped open garbage bag of books in my own back alley.  At first, I thought I had stumbled upon the mythical motherlode.  They were all paperbacks, all in read but decent condition and looked to be from the time period that I am interested in.  But as I started to root around, I saw sadly that whoever had owned these books had the worst taste.  It was all that late 70s, early 80s garbage like Lawrence Sanders.  Ugh.  I did manage to salvage an Ed McBain and this british horror novel which looked promising.

According to the inside cover, it is David Anne's second novel and his first was a best-seller.  The cover I got off the net here also suggests that The Folly was also a best-seller.  I find it a bit hard to believe.  This book is not terrible, but it's pretty bad, awkardly and obviously structured without any real suspense.  It does have a few moments and ideas of horror that are okay, but otherwise it feels like the book equivalent of the TV movie of the week.

It takes place in the countryside and the events surrounding Sir Mark Hatrell's lands and the ancient tower called the Folly.  People in the surrounding countryside are getting savagely attacked and eaten by some creatures.  [spoiler here] It turns out that sir Mark, with a crazed scientist he hired, have turned the Folly into a secret lab and are experimenting with rabbits and myxomatosis.  I guess that was a real virus that killed tons of rabbits in the english countryside.  Their goal is to get rid of rabbits, which eat the crops, once and for all.  To do this, they need to create a rabbit that is immune to the disease (yes, this makes no sense and doesn't in the book).  They end up creating giant carnivorous rabbits.  We get lots of semi-gruesome eatings of various people, an intrepid journalist who is having an affair with sir Mark's wife (and an even more convoluted backstory involving sir Mark's first wife, whom he stole from the journalist then turned into a junkie—I guess to give the journalist some more motivation but it really has little role in the book) and a small cast of other characters, including a police sergeant and a gamekeeper.

When the gamekeeper was first introduced early in the book (he is resistant to Sir Mark's aggressive plans to modernize his farms), I had high hopes that he might be the protagonist.  Unfortunately, he ends up being a secondary character.  Even worse, he makes a stupid blunder that is clearly put in place to create some action.  He and the journalist hide out in a blind with a recently killed lamb to attract the rabbits.  Their plan succeeds and they finally observe the rabbits in action, but when they go out to inspect the shredded carcass, the gamekeeper trips and shoots the journalist in the leg!  This is an obvious device to get the rabbits to come back (they are attracted by the smell of blood) so we get an action scene.  So retarded. What kind of gamekeeper would ever trip in a hole in a site they had carefully prepared and even worse would have their gun unbroken or the safety off so they would shoot a compatriot in the leg.  This scene offended my sensibilities to the point that I almost stopped reading the book.  If you can't write a thriller with everybody being efficient, just don't bother, okay.

58. Deadly Welcome by John D. Macdonald

Courtesy of Vintage Paperbacks

This was one of the paperbacks I found on a weekend trip to the Laurentians this summer.  I've read a lot of John D. Macdonald's, both from his Travis McGee series as well as his stand-alone thrillers.  I love his books, but a writer as prolific as he, with such a strong style, can tend to become a bit repetitive if you read too many too close together.  Also, his books are very easy to find, used and cheap.  For these reasons, I tend to not buy his books any more, preferring to hold them back in case of emergency.  In this case, it was the original paperback and thus probably has some value (except the guy stuck a $3 price tag with masking tape on the cover-Argh!) and it has been quite a while since I last read a John D. Macdonald (according to this blog, not since May 2007!).

The story here is about an agent who is pulled from his Venezuela post to go back to his own small Florida town to try and convince an old scientist to get out of his funk and get back in the game working on the weapons research that he abandoned for a beautiful young woman who was recently murdered.  The agent has a rich and troubled past with this small town and the murdered woman as well, so his espionage assignment also includes his own personal challenges.

Macdonald is excellent at creating corrupt small Florida towns and that was one of the things in the blurb that attracted me to this book.  I wasn't disappointed. The psychotic sheriff was particularly well (and disturbingly) portrayed.  He rules the town with expert and scientifically sexual beatings with his billy club, breaking the spirit of anyone who might be a troublemaker.  He gives the agent a solid working over his first day in town and that becomes motivation for the reader and the agent to get their own back.

Unfortunately, it never really builds up into a rich climax.  Instead of the whole town being corrupted, the sheriff is really the sole bad guy.  There is also not a lot of mystery around the murder of the woman, though it is drawn out for quite a while.  The atmosphere and the characters are quite good, but  I suspect it's the mix of the espionage side with the personal history side that didn't quite gel.  It might have been better had it been one story or the other (which Macdonald later did do).  So all in all not terrible, but not one of his best.