18. Sex Peddler by Arthur Adlon (pseudonym for Keith Ayling)

I really feel like part of the paperback hipster zeitgeist having found and read Sex Peddler.  The cover design was cheap and anonymous enough that I thought it might be an actually pornographic read and hesitated to pick it up.  Not that I have anything against pornographic text, but just thought I wouldn't want to necessarily waste my precious reading time and overburdened on deck shelf on something that doesn't have a real storyline.  Well, no, this book, while having a lot of sex and a straightforward and relatively positive perspective on sex work, is still very much a crime narrative, albeit a soft one.

Ray is a high-class pimp in Manhattan. He fell into it by accident and though very good at his job and happy with the returns, he is internally morally conflicted.  He considers himself superior to the vice racket and is aggressively resistant to calls from Nick the big time pimp in town to join up.  Because he comes from class, at least failed upper-middle class, his endgame is to go legit. He is also dating Millie, a good girl from Flushing.  It all gets very complicated when he takes on a job for Nick to set up a super-hot fallen arisocrat Cuban girl so she can make a bunch of money and bring it back home to her family.

I don't know how real or based on experience it actually is, but the portrayal of this level of prostitution at this time is very interesting and convincing. He goes into detail about how residential hotels that house young women trying to make it in Broadway, keep tabs on them and their debts and then sell their names and habits to pimps who come and convince them to meet a nice man in their room one time.  It's all very genteel and fun and the pimp covers their rent.  It escalates from there, though nowhere is there any explicit coercion or violence in this story.  

The whole story is kind of soft, from the perspective of a fan of hard-boiled fiction. A woman is murdered and planted in Ray's room and it is almost an afterthought that opens the book and then gets brushed off in a few pages.  The real story is his internal conflict with all the women he is with.  Which one will he choose? Which one will he end up with?  How will this expose the true rot in his character?

The ending is quite weird, where he marries the cuban woman utterly against his will, even though they have the best sex scene in the book.  In some innate way, he is horrified by her, because she is a whore. The book ends turning the tables by making her comfortable with what she does and he being the ultimate whore, the pimp.  An odd little morality tale.

17. Tros (the first book of Tros of Samothrace) by Talbot Mundy

I think Ken Hite recommended this series, but it was so long ago, I can't remember.  It has been on my on-deck shelf for a couple of years at least.  It's a beautiful Tandem paperback from 1971 but the small typeface intimidated me.  I was also a bit wary of jumping into another old British saga after reading a few different takes on the Arthur myth a few years ago.  This quarantine period, however, I felt the need for more escapist fiction and took the plunge.

Tros takes place in I guess the height of Roman power, before the birth of Christ and when they were first threatening Britain's shores.  The story begins with Tros in conference with a British chieftan and his wife.  We learn quickly that Tros is Greek, a powerful fighter and expert sailor, whose father has been captured by the Romans.  In exchange for his father's life, he is sent as a scout to Britain to report back to Caesar good spots for an invasian.  He hates Caesar and the Romans. The story is about him working with and sometimes despite the Britons to doublecross Caesar and rescue his father.  Much of the narrative involves Tros meeting and getting to know the Britons, most good but reckless, a few truly good and honourable and one or two not so good.  I don't know if Mundy is actually British.  It feels like this book likes to poke a bit of good-natured fun at British culture, portraying them as quite rowdy and unable to follow directions or kowtow to authority.  So they are constantly screwing up Tros' clever plans, but once whipped into shape, show a hearty fighting spirit.

I see now I was mistaken in my fear about the density of the text. Tros is written in straightforward style and the narrative advances briskly.  It reminded me a lot of Robert E. Howard, though the individual heroics is more of a sub-text and the language less demonstrative.  It is still very much centered on the individual hero and his will and skills which help him guide lesser men and allies to unexpected success.  The philosophical counterpoint to Tros the hero are the druids and "mysteries" as exemplified by almost Gandhi like quotations at the beginning of each chapter and Tros' father, who is now a spiritual leader after a youth of battling and takes a more pacifist approach to resisting the Romans.  There is also some Asterix here, with the setting and the Romans as bad guys.  I would not be suprised if both Howard and Goscinny and Uderzo had read these books.

16. The Killing Machine by Jack Vance

I found this in a box of really nice old sci-fi paperbacks in english at the thrift store on Gilford.  Most of them really weren't my bag, but I took this one because I remembered enjoying the first and I felt I couldn't leave such a nice little find without something.  It is a pretty classic yellow-spined Daw.  I will probably have to keep it in my shelf.

I won't go into my feelings about Jack Vance's style again.  It is in full force here.  This is the second book of the Demon Princes series. They are tied together by protagonist Kirth Gersen, whose life mission is to murder the five demon princes who slaughtered his village when he was a boy.  This time he is after Kokor Hekkus, who is another one of these megalomaniac universe-spanning super villains. Vance portrays him as somehow a unique criminal character, but there is something about his use of multiple adjectives and weird systematic approaches to his criminality that makes him seem a lot like the badguy from the last book.

There is a lot of spacefaring and he goes to some cool planets. The Interchange is also a really fun concept.  Kidnapping has become so rife and successful, that someone has created a neutral place for the transfers, where the victims are kept in comfort until the payoff (or their ransom is reduced and slowly sold off to the highest bidder).  The killing machine refers to this centipede robot fort thing that looks like these giant killer centipedes on one of the planets.  It is neat in concept but only one step in a multi-faceted narrative, so not sure why it was the title.

I enjoyed the read, there were some neat parts, but again I feel so distanced from the characters that it all felt a bit cold.

15. Burnt Sienna by David Morrell

I believe this is the third David Morell book I have read.  The other two, First Blood and Testament are dark, almost dominated by their darkness.  Burnt Sienna is pretty rough at points but it has a much more traditional men's action story arc.  There is nothing particular original here, it almost feels like a pastiche of a men's action paperback from the late 20th century, though much more meticulously crafted than those tended to be.  It does it really well, though, with a driving, muscular story and an almost mythical clash of artistic ass-kicker against psychotic megalomaniac.

Chase Malone is an ex-military helicopter pilot turned successful artist hermit, living in Mexico. A creepy guy tracks him down and offers him a tremendous sum to paint some rich guy's wife.  He refuses, as his main ideal seems to be freedom. The guy turns out to be a completely bonkers, almost cartoonishly evil black market weapons baron who won't take no for an answer. He destroys Malone's life.  Just before going for a futile revenge, Malone is contacted by his old war buddy (whose life he saved) who now works for the agency.  He convinces Malone to spy while getting his revenge.  

Ballassar the weapons lord is a great badguy.  Portrayed as completely domineering, both psychologically and physically (in his 60s, barrel-chested, he manhandles a .50 caliber machine gun), he sets Malone to paint his super beautiful wife.  His backstory is really nasty.  I won't go into the plot anymore beyond saying it keeps moving forward and takes an interesting route to its wild climax.  It's all a bit melodramatic, but everything is served out with so much vehemence and energy, that you enjoy it as part of the ride.  Nothing complex here, just a good solid action read.

14. Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger

I am pretty sure I bought this from the dollar bin outside of S.W. Welch.  I have read a few more travel books than I ever would have suspected.  I am not a fan by nature, but am interested in the ones that happen in times and places of the fiction I enjoy.  I think also that this was a nice Penguin paperback also motivated me to pick it up.

Wilfred Thesiger is one of those British dudes who just have to explore and in his case especially the desert.  The beginning of the book, he writes about how he felt drawn to the emptiness and the simplicity as well as the companionship that is created by difficult journeys.  Another ongoing theme is his sadness of how oil exploration and civilization will inevitably destroy the life and culture of the Bedu who live in the desert.

I don't pay close attention to geography of travel books, but I do like to have a rough idea of where people are. The maps in this book were badly printed, too dark to see the paths, so it made it hard to follow along the actual journey. The descriptions of the dunes and the limestone flats and all the varied sand and stone environments were vivid and did make me want to see them.  The hardships of their journey and the stresses were equally vivid and equally discouraged me.  I can see that despite the thirst and hunger and discomfort, there is a kind of freeing fatalism in this kind of trek.  The people of the desert, whose lives are tough, are portrayed as being very accepting of their fates when it turns bad and very appreciative of small things, such as a bit of rain that will not produce any green until the next year when they may not even be there.

Sadly, the pages started falling out of the book as I read it.

13. Kingdom of Gods: Book 3 of the Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

I really had a hard time getting through the final book of this trilogy.  Part of it was me, I was preparing to travel back to Canada and quite distracted about covid and getting through the border and leaving my elderly parents.  I wanted to finish the trilogy so I wouldn't have to carry the monster tome (all 3 books were in a single volume) back with me.  I had also hoped that some deep fantasy would help me escape from my mental gyrations.  It definitely did not work in this case. so I really just churned through it rather than truly enjoying it.

Trying to be objective about the content, I think that though the storylines in all 3 books connect, there is not really an overarching narrative that unites them.  They are just one saga after another about how the gods relationships evolve and then impact the human world.  The world-building was really cool here and seemed to have a lot more potential as now we have Godlings and Demons alive in the world of humans.  Unfortunately, the book is all about Sieh, who was annoying and whiny in the first two.  Now we get an entire book via first person of this perpetually dissatisfied character who basically also loses his agency as he becomes mortal. A lot of really crazy stuff happens, but we barely experience it as most of the story is about his relationship with his dad and mom and uncle and potential lover.  It just didn't do it for me.  

I have the first book of the Broken Earth trilogy and was kind of hoping I could just give it away as it is thick and taking up a precious two inches on my overloaded on-deck shelf.  Unfortunately or fortunately, I discovered that the internet strongly recommends reading it if you didn't like the Inheritance trilogy, many people who couldn't even finish the Inheritance Trilogy loved the Broken Earth.  So on the shelf it stays!

12. Fourth Down, Death by Michael T. Hinkmeyer

Berkeley, CA is lousy with free book boxes.  There are three within a block or two of my parents house and you can't go for a walk of any distance without encountering one.  Fortunately for me now, most of the content is of the literary fiction variety, though I did find a couple of older somewhat interesting paperbacks that I might have picked up in times of a lighter on-deck shelf.  It is still fun to check them out and adds a little fun to an already pleasant walk (though it has lost its funkiness and gone depressingly upscale, Berkeley still has the most beautiful residential neighbourhoods in probably the world).  

I finally gave in against my better judgement (and goal to read the books I brought with me on this trip) and picked up this first edition hardback.  It seemed like one of those enjoyable, readable mysteries of the 80s that always have the subtitle "An [name of slightly interesting regional detective with an ongoing mild personal drama] mystery".  In this case, the detective is Sheriff Emil Whippletree of St. Cloud, Minnesota.  He is a very likable sheriff, easygoing and flexible with his men, the kind of hero you want to doggedly keeping plugging away at a murder while more powerful, nefarious forces try to stymie his investigation.

The investigation here begins first with the wife of a professor at the local private university (Christian, big football team) having a vision just outside the stadium which holds up traffic to the big game.  Emil then discovers in the forest nearby the body of a coed, neck and wrists broken, possibly violated.  She was part of a special seminar group that had studied late on Friday and all the students are suspects.  This leads us to a fairly complex (but not too hard to follow) tangle of threads including a conservative department head trying to ouster a young liberal professor, the charismatic president of the university running interference on the investigation while his vice-president seems to be jockeying for his own run at the presidency, the head of campus security threatening to run for sheriff at the next election, Emil's own niece being in the class of the murder victim, the growing crowd of worshippers coming to see the visions and on and on.  There is a lot going on in this mystery and it keeps the pages turning.  It is all kind of masculine, not in a big macho way but just that the women all are in secondary roles.  Emil's wife in particular seems very endearing but really only adds colour (though pleasant colour).  This was also written in the time before police departments became standing armies.  It is a nice escapist fantasy to think of a under-budgeted Sheriff who knows everybody in town and makes decent-minded judgement calls.  Not a person of colour in sight, and though it is Minnesota, I do feel it had some ethnic diversity in the mid 80's.

I found the solution to be not quite as complex and intertwined as the tangle of narrative threads had suggested.  It was also wrapped up with a plot flourish that seemed a bit contrived.  That's all okay, though.  This is a solid, enjoyable regional mystery.  I would check out another Emil Whippletree book if it crossed my path.

Oh very funny, I read a bio of the author and it turns out he has also written historical romances under the nom de plume of Vanessa Royall.  I thought that the name rang a bell and then I realized that Emil's wife is reading a book by her in this book!  Well played, Mr. Hinkmeyer.  :)

And not so funny, found that Mr. Hinkmeyer passed away the year before last (just missed the pandemic).  Sounds like he ended up having a good life for himself, living in the Hamptons year round on his writing money. 

11. The Broken Kingdoms: Book 2 of the Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

I felt I needed to dive back into some kind of fantasy after the roughness of No Beast So Fierce.  Because I had brought a big pile with me that I intended to leave here and the other remaining books were also noir or non-fiction, I forced myself to go back to The Inheritance Trilogy, despite my earlier concerns.  I'm glad I did because, though this book still got pretty godly, I found it very absorbing and entertaining.  This book takes place after the revenge of the Gods and Godlings against Bright Itempas which thus overthrows the order and power of the Amaneri and thus making the world much more interesting.

The protagonist here, Oree Shoth, is a blind artist who sells her work to pilgrims at the gate which has the best view of the giant tree that grew to take over the city of Sky when Itempas was felled.  She also has some kind of latent magical ability that allows her to see magic and to paint some kind of magic.  The story begins when she finds a body in the trash near her house, a body which turns out not to be dead.  It's some kind of mute being who seems mortal but is constantly dying and then resurrecting the next day.  In this new world, Godlings live among the humans in Sky (though not outside of the city) and while worshipped and with magical powers are also entwined in their lives and affairs.  One is murdered in an alley and Oree is the one to find it, which brings her to the attention of the Bright Order, who are kind of the local asshole stormtrooopers.  She then gets caught up in an adventure involving figuring out her strange companion and dealing with a new force capable of murdering Godlings.

This one has more action at the human and Godling level compared to the first one which is much more cosmic.  The depth of the history of the gods really shows here. It builds on the mythology of the first in an interesting way that makes you think about themes of power and religion.  Jenisin's notion of good and evil, bright vs. dark is nuanced and satisfyingly non-binary.  A god who is evil in the first book is revealed to have much more complexity to its backstory which changes your perspective on everything else.  I'm glad I pushed through my hesitation after the first one and will complete the trilogy.

10. No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker

I grabbed this on a rare whim at the now-reprieved SW Welch used bookstore.  I can't remember what possessed me because at that point, my on-deck shelf was way too long (and now it is overflowing).  I brought it and several others that I had been stalling on to my emergency medical trip to my parents, since I figured there would be a lot of reading time.  I didn't have as much reading time as I thought, but did get steady reading in.  

I had just finished the Georgette Heyer and was not feeling ready for gritty crime. My heart sank as I started this one, as it not only was gritty crime, but also darkly realistic and self-conscious.  I was not feeling enthusiastic about a contemplative take of a life of poverty and crime.  The book takes place in LA in the early 70s.  The protagonist, Max Denbo, is a career criminal just released from 8 years in prison for check forgery. He got an extra long sentence because of all his previous crimes and has decided to go straight.  The descriptions of poor and criminal LA was quite well done and that kept me going.  After several humiliating and anxiety-inducing punishments by his blindly righteous parole office, and just becoming more and more aware of how impossible it will be for him to go legit, Denbo does an about face and decides to become a complete criminal.  

The book really takes off here. Denbo starts moving up in his crimes, through a mix of solid planning and excellent criminal instincts, from ripping off a corner store to break-ins and finally a big jewelry store.  He gains a couple of allies and a fun divorcee girlfriend (who, though excited by his criminal status, does not yet know the full depths of his nature).  Because the stuff happening is so well-written and the protagonist isn't just being victimized, the editorial sections where he waxes poetic about society and his criminal nature mix much better than at the somewhat heavy opening part.  The trajectory is not surprising, but is done in a dark and meaningful way that really resonated with me. 

9. The Quiet Gentleman by Georgette Heyer

This is the second Georgette Heyer and while I am glad there are quite a lot of them, I know that I am going to have to parse them out carefully.  She is like a box of delicious chocolates.  Each one is scrumptious but as soon as you finish it, you just want to eat the next one.  By the time you finish the box, you just feel a bit sick and can't separate one chocolate from the other in your memory.  So patience!

The story here is about Earl St. Erth, a succesful soldier returning home from Waterloo to his estate, which has been effectively run by his cousin and populated by his mother-in-law and her son, Martin (his half-brother).  These latter two had been assuming the Earl would be killed and that Martin would become the earl.  Martin has been spoiled by his mother and is already a hothead.  The earl is very good-looking, charming and skilled and also quite chill.  Martin doesn't hate him but gets quite heated up and this gets acute when the earl charms the young girl in town whom Martin (and many other boys) had been circling.  Things get somewhat more serious when several near-accidents and finally an attempt at murder befall the earl.  Is it Martin?  Suspicion and polite tension abounds.  I failed to mention the mousy yet supremely practical Miss Morville, who is the dowager's friend (at least tolerates her) and thus always around to help out in the action. 

This is probably the first full-on hardcore romance novel I have read.  The mystery and very light gothic elements are secondary to the subtle at first, but quite obvious in the second half potential of a match between the debonair and self-assured earl and the equally self-assured but sexless (at least on the surface) daughter of progressive intellectuals.  It's a great match and resolved in an extremely satisfying way to the point that my allergies may have acted up every so slightly and I was forced to blow my nose.

8. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: Book 1 of the Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

I've been meaning to read Jemisin for quite a while now.  I almost bought The Fifth Season but then I found her entire Inheritance trilogy and The Fifth Season somewhere I can't even remember now, but free.  It's a big book!  Fortunately, quite large type and spacing so a quicker read than the size would suggest.

It starts off quickly and interestingly.  The initial situation of a young woman from the outer, barbaric provinces being summoned to the sophisticated, dangerous capital and suddenly put in a position of power reminded me a lot of The Goblin Emperor.  Here, Yeine is the granddaughter of the patriarch of Sky, a fantastical city whose people have enslaved the gods, giving them ultimate power over the entire world.  Yeine's mother was the heir apparent but then for reasons to be discovered, was exiled.  Her grandfather has brought her back because it is the time of the succession and she must battle with her two cousins to become the ruler.  

It is a cool premise and the world is compelling, rich and very well thought out, especially the cosmology and history of the gods.  For me, though, the main thrust of the narrative was not really super engaging.  It is really about Yeine and her relationship with these enslaved gods and their plot to free themselves.  I am more interested in the lower-level diplomacy and strategy among the mortals than epic battles of existence.  I can see why this book received so much praise.  It's very well-written and definitely achieves the goal of fantasy to take you to another world.  There is some pretty wild sex with gods scenes as well. Hot stuff!  So my appreciation of the book is more about my taste than a critique of the book itself.  Now I am in a bit of a dilemma because I am only mildly curious to read the next book yet I have this huge tome I must finish.  If it switches perspective and the narrative takes place at a more grounded level, I might quite enjoy it.  I would like to learn more about the world and Jemisin is skilled enough to make those parts really good.  There just weren't enough of them.  If it is more of the war between the gods stuff, I will not be so interested.  Should I just plunge ahead?

7. A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson

I found this book among the big dump in my alley.  The guy had a lot of classic fantasy and a lot of WWII including a some hovering a bit too close to Nazi interests.  This one I grabbed, though it was beat-up, as I had heard the name and felt there was a Canadian connection.  It is the story of William Stephenson who was the head of the BCS (British Security Coordination, basically underground intel ops and the precursor to the OSS) during WWII and the main liaison between Churchill and Roosevelt in coordinating intelligence operations in the time before the US got fully into the war.  Stephenson himself preferred to stay in the shadows, he had no title and collected no salary and basically didn't say anything about any of his work until this book came out.  Much of it fell under the Official Secrets Act as well.  When this book came out, it was kind of a big deal.  Supposedly, Hugh Trevor-Roper savaged it and said much of it was untrue.  While there were some pieces that did not bear out under scrutiny, most of it has been confirmed since, as more and more of the truth was allowed to be released.

It's not a great book, technically speaking.  I can understand why a historian would be critical. The first half is kind of sloppy, with timelines not being clear nor arguments.  It gets tighter and more entertaining in the second half, where several major BCS operations are detailed including Operation Jubilee where they sent a fake invasion to Dieppe a year before D-Day to trick the Nazis into thinking that would be the main point of attack and to steal radar equipment; a bombing raid on a gestapo office in Denmark to kill and/or free Danish guerillas about to be interrogated; the spy CYNTHIA who seduced many men working for Vichy France to get codes, convincing deluded and pacific Danish physicist Neils Bohr to escape (and then getting him out in the belly of a plane where he almost suffocated because the comms with the pilot got disconnected and he never put on his oxygen mask). Just a ton of really cool spy and military stories that really happened.  It's crazy the risks and danger and just straight up discomfort these brave men and women put themselves in, many who barely got paid and who still aren't recognized today.  Contrast their real heroism—where you would send one person in to enemy territory who had the knowledge with another who didn't just so the second person could shoot the first if they got captured—to these fake-ass MAGA shitbird "patriots" who have deluded themselves into thinking they know what it means to fight for freedom.

One of Stephenson's biggest goals was to get the US onside to support the British.  Roosevelt was from the beginning, but a large part of America and an even larger part of Congress were against going to war.  On top of that, Nazi spies had infiltrated many parts of American society to further encourage that isolationism.  Likewise, Nazi propaganda at low and high levels was used to convince Americans that Britain was doomed to lose, that their was potentially great economic opportunity with a united Nazi Europe.  It is really interesting to read about how Roosevelt had to tread extremely lightly to not excite the isolationist mood of the country and congress.  The BCS was kept totally hidden because it was illegal for a foreign entity to practice espionage on US soil and knowledge of their existence would have been a huge scandal and strong ammo for the isolationist side.  I would love to read a better analysed history of those issues.  It was a strong reminder that the kind of selfishness that grew under Trump has been around in America for a long time.

It was a bit of a slog for the first half, but got quite exciting at the end.  I don't take away a ton from it historically speaking, but it definitely gave me a nice perspective on the origins of today's intelligence culture.

6. The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

This book was given to me in this trade paperback form by a friend who was clearing out his shelves.  I took it because I had heard of the film as well as Fearing's name.  I would have loved the original though normally I do appreciate some of the choices the NYRB puts out.  In this case, though, the introduction was really godawful and made me annoyed at the entire publication.  I don't know who Nicholas Christopher is but I hope he is not chosen to write an intro for this kind of book ever again.  His essay is mostly a recap of the entire storyline overlaid with pretentious and meaningless undergrad-style literary analysis.  So that is not just a waste of space since you are going to read the book anyways, but also full of spoilers.  There are tidbits of helpful biographical detail on Fearing.  However, Christopher seems to be wholly ignorant of the culture of post-war America and of the genre of crime and suspense fiction of the time.  He seems utterly confounded by the coded way sexuality is portrayed in the book and attributes it to the author as a failure rather than the standard of the times. Worse, though, it is just dripping with the kind of insecure, condescending literary snobbishness.  He laments that Fearing's poetry was somehow ruined by his other writing: "it is unfortunate that he never managed to insulate his poetic faculty from the wear and tear of hack journalism, pulp writing and public relations assignments".  Fuck right off. 

Sorry to rant about the introduction.  I read it after reading the book (as I always do) and it set me off.  Just gross and a big failure by the usually solid NYRB editors.  On to the book. It is the story of George Stroud, editor at a succesful and innovative crime magazine whose publishing house is struggling against competition. Stroud is the man in the gray flannel suit except with a bohemian twist (he likes art) and a more varied background (he had many other jobs including running a bar before settling down to the commuter life).  He ends up having an affair with the girlfriend of Earl Janoth, the powerful, charismatic boss of the publishing house and he drops her off at the end of a weekend getaway to see her run into said boss outside her apartment. The boss and she get in an argument, starting with his jealousy but then escalating into counter-accusations of homosexuality where the boss flips out and beats her to death with a heavy decanter.  

The book gets quite interesting here with a very similar setup to Chase's You Find Him, I'll Fix Him.  Janoth thinks he is in the clear except for the guy who dropped off his girlfriend (he didn't recognize him), so he needs to find that guy and silence him.  He chooses Stroud, because he is known for his investigative skills, to hunt this guy down.  Basically, the boss has ordered Stroud to hunt himself.  It becomes a complex cat and mouse game where Stroud leads a team to try and find himself while actually trying to delay the discovery for as long as possible.

It's lively and tight, with viewpoints changing from chapter to chapter, so we also get a fairly critical look at the main character as well, who is kind of a heel.  The ending is quite fun as well and fast, which I also enjoyed.  It is also quite realistic about sex in the city in 1946, which I think the film does not portray at all. It's a bit more poetically written than I usually appreciate and at first it kind of annoyed me.  That was the voice of Stroud.  As I got used to it, though, the prose became more natural. There is a lot of subtle depth here, with hints at corporate intrigue and inter-office politics and some nice asides about working for the system (the big clock).

5. The Cat's Paw by James Heron

I found this among a treasure trove of older paperbacks in one of those free book libraries, this one situated in the Little Italy/Rosemont neighbourhood below the Jean-Talon market.  I found a Ross Thomas and several WWII thrillers as well as a near-complete set of some historical work on Nazism.  It was slightly creepy so I left that.  I wasn't expecting much from this one but just loved it as a beautiful classic British 70s thriller.  I mean look at it!  Also in excellent condition.

I was further pleased to discover upon reading that it has a really cool premise.  It's preposterous but just enough.  The protagonist, Charles Hutchison is back in England after years in Nigeria.  He's down on his luck and nursing a drink in a bar where his last job interview fizzled when he is accosted by a man who looks almost identical to him.  This man, James Fitzpatrick, is equally surprised and they get to talking.  Hutchison pours out his life to the charming and wealthy Fitzpatrick who invites him to his office next week for a proposition.  

After some research (learning that Fitzpatrick is the chairman of a very successful publishing company) and trepidation, Hutchison makes the appointment. There he is met by Fitzpatrick and his efficient and gorgeous secretary. After asking him to strip and poring over his personal details, they make their proposition. Fitzpatrick is sick of his life and wants to leave it for 2 years to write a book on birds. For a significant amount of money and controlling stake in the company, he wants Hutchison to impersonate him for those two years.  As I said, preposterous, but Fitzpatrick and the author have thought it out well enough that you do believe it could work.  I won't go into details beyond some surgery and a fake breakdown, but you buy into it.

Of course, things are not what they seem and much of the fun of this book is first following Hutchison as he tries to fake his way into this new world and then second following him as he unravels what is really going on.  The second part is not as tight as an investigation as I would have like and many of the other characters are not all that clever.  Overall, though, the ride is a lot of fun.  There is also a ton of sex. This guys is getting laid constantly, with a wide variety of women who enjoy a wide variety of sexual practices.  Even with that, the relationship between Hutchison and "his" (actually Fitzpatrick's wife) is kind of fun and romantic.  Fitzpatrick was a workaholic who didn't really love her and didn't want the kids whereas Hutchison really likes children and comes to appreciate the wife.  It makes for an enjoyable side plot.  Quite a nice little find and will go on the shelf for its beauty and its content.

Such a sexy book I had to do a 3/4 angle

4. Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie

Like so many, I read much Agatha Christie in my younger years, I think as early as high school.  It has been a really long time.  I hadn't even thought of her that much, except for the recent remake of Murder on the Orient Express and somewhere learning that quite a lot of young french readers also get into her.  I found this one in the free box on St-Viateur and though xmas is over, I thought it would be nice to check hour out again.  As it turned out, this is another nice entry to get my reading habits back up again. She is certainly most digestible.

The story takes place on a British estate in the holiday season.  Three sons (two of whom were long estranged) of the old, nasty lord as well as his newly-discovered half-Spanish grandaughter and the unexpected son of his old business partner all assemble at what later turns out to be his request.  We quickly learn that he was a big success in diamonds in South Africa, quite a wild young man and today a manipulative bastard who has nothing but contempt for all his sons.  He of course gets murdered inside his own locked study with all the guests downstairs and accounted for (at first).

Poirot, who is a friend of the Commisioner, just happens to be on the scene and he ends up supporting detective Sugden in the investigation.  Everything moves forward at a brisk pace. We meet the characters, learn quickly of their characters with several mysteries about their pasts sprinkled in.  Once the murder starts, we learn more about each of them as they are interviewed.  And then Hercule starts poking and detecting, with a pretty good reveal at the end.  These are classic mysteries with curious clues that scream "CLUE!" at the reader.  I was close to elements of it but definitely did not guess.

I guess compared to all the British mysteries I have since read, she feels somewhat blunt in her portrayals of the British Aristocracy and all its damaged progeny. The Spanish granddaughter was pretty bad in the cliches (she was beautiful and would cut the throat of her enemies).  The cozy element I quite enjoy and she does truly have a savage side, which makes it all work quite well.    

3. You Find Him -I'll Fix Him by James Hadley Chase

James Hadley Chase is a good author to help one get back into reading form.  This one started out solid got quite good, ended up a bit banal with a fun coda that made the mystery worthwhile.  Despite the pat ending, I have to give Chase his credit.  He is able to keep a story moving.  Ed Dawson is a newspaper man heading up the Rome office of an American paper.  He gets a call from the paper's owner asking him to watch over his daughter who is coming to Rome to take architecture classes.  Dawson meets her, finds her plain and basically drops the assignment.  A few weeks later, he runs into her again at a fancy party and this time she is a total babe.  Like any fool in one of these books, he starts to go around with her and then accepts her proposition that they spend a passionate weekend at a remote villa in Sorrento together.  Against his better judgement (basically because he has the total hots for her), he goes.  Of course it goes very badly when he gets there and discovers her body at the foot of a cliff.

This was all kind of straightforward and made even less interesting because the protagonist is not very smart.  He panics and puts himself in a worse situation.  Now I know we wouldn't have a book if he didn't get himself in a jam.  Fortunately, the jam itself gets more interesting for most of the middle of the book, as we learn more about the backstory of the daughter.  It's complex enough to keep you wanting to find out what goes on, though a few of the twists are quite obvious.  The ending, as I mentioned, is almost sappy, quite the opposite of No Orchids for Miss Blandish.  However, there is a further reveal that reinforces the complexity of the backstory.  I apologize for speaking so vague, but I am pretty strict about spoilers.

The work of James Hadley Chase doesn't seem to merit a lot of analysis and maybe he was a bit of a journeyman.  I'll have to read more to know, but so far I have to appreciate his work.

2. Peel's England by J H B Peel

I can not even remember where I found this old hardback. I certainly didn't pay much money for it. I do remember my motivation for taking it. I felt that maybe a bit of non-fiction exploration of pastoral england in the 70s would help reinforce my appreciation of the context of a lot of the fictional books I read.  That goal was only somewhat achieved, not through any particular flaw in this book, but in my own inability to remain focus on facts and descriptions in text. 

I guess Peel was a well-known writer and commentator. He seems to be, at least in this book, one of those mild-mannered conservatives whose common-sense tone belies what we know today in post-Brexit england to be a pretty nasty jingoism.  Or maybe it was mild-mannered and has since evolved into the basic racism we see today.  In any case, the roots are there.  His real enemy, though, is progress and particularily the motor car and I am with him on that.  The entire book is him traipsing through all the regions of England, describing the scenery and a few specific locales like old churches or villages, adding tidbits of history, poetry and a few hints of the above mentioned politics.

Actually, as I think of it, it did give me a good broad sense of the various regions of England.  For instance, I finally get now that the legend of Arthur took place somewhere in the southwest, possibly even Wales.  I also think I know a bit about Cornwall, which is cool.  I knew a Cornish guy once and he had the black hair and an intensity of gaze, as Peel describes them.

Anyhow, that was perhaps not the best book to get my reading habits back up.  Now on to some fun fiction!

1. The Adventures of Ben Gunn by R.F. Delderfield

Past performance does not indicate future results.  Wow, after the last two years of consistent reading, I totally fell off in the end of 2020 and early 2021.  I gave myself a break after achieving my goal last year, played videogames, watched a lot of sports and too much twitter.  Somehow it turned into a pit of pleasant lassitude that is now catching up to me.  I did at least complete an entire videogame (Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden and the expansions).  And the post-Trump insurrection social media world was entertaining enough to bring my addiction flaring back (at least when social media is stressful and depressing you are really motivated to get out of it).  I guess my struggle with laziness will last my entire life and I cannot ever let up my efforts.  Enough wanking, on to the review!

I am now a full fan of R.E. Delderfield and will pick up his books when I find them. This was a real score, a lovely Coronet paperback of his unofficial sequel to Treasure Island.  When I found it, I realized I needed to reread the original, which turned out to be a great pleasure.  The conceit of The Treasures of Ben Gunn is that James Hawkins, now a comfortable middle-aged landowner, became the employer of Ben Gunn, the castaway on Treasure Island.  Once the latter passed on, Hawkins felt he could tell his tale as Ben had told him.  This tale also tells the story of Long John Silver and the origin of the treasure. It's a great idea and most well executed, though one wonders if it is right to actually write down a tale that may have been better left for each reader's own speculation.  This applies not only to the backstory but also the fate of the characters.  I felt sort of sad at the end of this knowing that the rest of James Hawkins life, though a good one, did not lead to much more adventure.

Ben Gunn's story starts out on land, on an estate in England with a new Lord who is a tyrant about following the laws. His rigidity and his asshole, drunken loser son, make the lives of their tenants miserable.  Nick Allardyce, whose skeleton you may or may not recall, pointed to the treasure, was a young squire who runs afoul of the masters of the estate.  He and Ben Gunn, after an altercation where the son is killed, are forced to flee England.  Their paths in the oceans eventually lead them to Captain Flint, Long John Silver and a life of piracy.

The opening section feels very Delderfieldesque and brings the reader some righteousness at the injustice.  The middle part of the book, where we follow the adventures of the pirates, somehow lacked excitement for me. It was very historically accurate, rich in location and situation, but somehow there wasn't enough of a real foil or narrative through line to get me fired up the way Treasure Island did.  Once Ben Gunn gets marooned, we get a mini-Robinson Crusoe, which I always enjoy, as well as his redemption.  This development as it aligned with the Treasure Island narrative (when the pirates return) was quite fun to read.  So it does fill in the backstory nicely but somehow didn't grip me the way a good pirate story should.  I will have to read more Delderfield, but my sense is that his strength is in the long, slow narrative, punctuated with moments of satisfying character and Englishness rather than the flash bang of a true adventure novelist.  Still, very enjoyable and I am happy to have this on my too-full bookshelves.

66. The Two-Headed Serpent by Paul Fricker, Scott Dorward and Matthew Sanderson

There has been a bit of a slowdown in traditional book reading here at Olman's Fifty.  Normally, I tend to crank it up in the xmas holidays, at I am at my parents which is very conducive to reading (not near my own computer, often times everybody is reading).  This year, having been an exceptionally busy one at work and having xmas at our own immediate family this year and me buying two new videogames, I am just generally taking a break from concentrating too hard.  The Two-Headed Serpent is a campaign for the Call of Cthulu tabletop role-playing game.  So definitely reading, but much easier to consume in small bites, as it is divided up into several different sub-adventures.

Once, when I was starting to really get into gaming (I had just discovered the incredibly rich world of RPGs outside of the big brand name game Dungeons & Dragons), I was at the Compleat Strategist in NYC, which was the big and really only tabletop RPG store in the city at the time.  I ran into a guy who was maybe 10 years older than I was who was asking about a few games.  He told me he used to play, but doesn't anymore but still buys RPG books for "non-linear fiction, you know."  I remember thinking that made a lot of sense, but was also a bit sad as you would just not get the same satisfaction of immersion and interaction from just reading these books as opposed to playing or running them.  And yet here I am, twenty odd years later, picking up game books with the almost sole intention of just reading them.  I do have a tiny hope to run something again.  It's just that there is so much material and so little opportunity and in the end I'll probably just make my own thing up as usual.

I'm not a big Call of Cthulu guy.  I am a huge fan of pulp gaming, though.  Together, they make a very nice mix. The pulp element elevates the Call of Cthulu setting out of its depressing (to me) death/insanity spiral base play and allows the players to go in half-cocked and blasting.  And the mythos world gives an endless possibility of conspiracies and bad things all over the world for pulp adventurers to go investigate and fight.  The Two-Headed Serpent sets the players are being hired by Caduceus, a global philanthropic organization that sends doctors and scientists to help crisis situations around the world.  I won't give any more away in case anybody is going to play it, but of course shit is not what it seems.  Lizard people are involved.

 

[warning some tabletop RPG nerdery/inside baseball talk in the paragraph below.]

Overall, it is extremely well put together.  It is a beautfully-produced book.  The adventures are in diverse and fun situations (chases through the crammed streets of Calcutta, disease outbreak in the Belgian Congo, mafia wars in NYC, expedition to Iceland and that's about half of them!).  The back story is well thought out and the badguys and other NPCs are a great mix.  My only hesitation to move this from really good to great is that it is all a bit old school.  Absolutely nothing wrong with the old school and while I vacillate, I am probably actually pretty old school myself at this point.  It's just that the overall timeline is basically a railroad.  I know that is hard to avoid with a long campaign in this vein. I just feel like there are innovative ways to present this material so that it is much more freeform and dynamic, which would allow the players more agency in the way things unfold, while still moving the campaign into all the great material provided here.  The few options are presented here as basically if then statements and they really ultimately only shift the order of things somewhat.  Likewise, there is no real connection set up between the material and the players.  So basically, their motivation is "you were hired by this organization to do some stuff".  If I were to run this, I think I would do some kind of hook-building process where I got the players to come up with two connections their character would have to something in the campaign setting.  I just find when they have those things, they tend to be much more motivated (or you just make the main bad guy kick their ass right at the beginning :) ).

Anyhow, really fun to read and would be great fun to play or run one day.    

 

65. Le chat du rabbin by Joann Sfar

I am always ready to read anything by Sfar but le Chat du Rabin was always low on the list for me.  My wife bought a copy of the first one in english and it was kicking around the house, so that got me started.  I got the next 7 volumes in french from the library here.  It's hard to pinpoint exactly what this bande-desinnée is about, as it can meander in many different directions. It's more of a cast and characters and a milieu thematically centered on Judaism and the philosophy of religion, with each album taking on a different story or concept and even then not always distinctly.

It takes place mostly in Algiers in the beginning of the 20th century (30s I think?).  The main character is the titular rabbi's cat, though he is more of a commentator, shit-stirrer and court jester.  The rabbi and his friends and family are the characters who tend to have stories and conflicts, while the cat observes or pokes and prods.  He's a real shit-stirrer, this cat, and it is even suggested at times that he may be the devil.  I think these characters may actually be Joann Sfar's ancestors, but I have not confirmed this.  It`s enjoyable reading, though arguments about religious theory are really not my jam and I did skim or glaze over those parts somewhat.  The characters, the milieu and the situations are absorbing and a compelling mix of semi-realistic history and geography and Sfar's slightly fantastical embellishments (such as a cat who can talk).

I have to mention Sfar`s art.  I prefer a hard, solid line, the empiricist that I am.  Sfar`s style is not usually to my liking, but boy does he capture real things in his loose way.  In the third or fourth volume, there is an actual photograph of Bahomet, the real life Sfar family cat that he based the character on and it`s uncanny how he captured the cat.  Likewise, the rabbi's daughter Zbaya just seems super hot to me.  It's almost weird.

 

 

64. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I took this book out of the library (which we have been hitting hard now that my daughter is reading; man do I love libraries) because I found an R.L. Delderfield that is a prequel story of the life of Ben Gunn, one of the characters from Treasure Island.  I thought it was just some pirate book by him until I brought it home and read the back.  I had read Treasure Island as a lad and enjoyed it (though Kidnapped stayed with me longer for some reason).  I didn't want to read the Delderfield without really having a memory of Treasure Island.  

I had positive but not elevated expectations of reading Treasure Island as an adult. I thought it would be a fine tale as they say.  It surpassed my expectations.  It's a great book, a tight, exciting adventure that still lives up to its reputation as a classic, beyond its massive cultural influence.  Though it owes much to the popularity of castaway and pirate tales that preceded it, it really is Treasure Island that defined what we think of pirates today. Reading it again, one understands why. It combines innocence and real darkness in a perfect balance that makes it light and enjoyable to read but not trivial. The pacing is masterful, so that you really have a hard time putting it down, yet also let's you take a pause in nice places.  Finally, it is the characters and dialogue that really make it a masterpiece.  Long John Silver and the disturbing father/monster/victim relationship he has with young Jim Hawkins is at the heart of it. Several side characters add richness without getting in the way.  

This is definitely colonial history and its sins are woven into the story and setting.  The obvious racism only shows up at the end since there is really no other characters other than Englishmen.  The jolly class relationships are a tasty illusion that makes the whole thing palatable.  Just pointing these things out, as they should be critiqued, but for the astute reader none of it gets in the way in what is probably one of the best adventure books I have read this year and definitely in the top ten.  I read this to prep for the Delderfield, but I may have to take Kidnapped out of the library now.

63. Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney

I can't remember how we discovered these.  We got one and my daughter was hooked, so I have been taking the rest out from the library over the last few months.  It only take about half-an-hour to read one of them.  I've read them all plus the two Rowley Jefferson side books, so I figure I can count it as a single book (similar principle to a bande-dessinée series).  They are aimed at boys in elementary school.  I am not quite sure what it is about them that so appeals to my 8-year old daughter.  I suspect the format itself is a big part of it. They are books with illustrations with just enough balance of text and images to make them very easy to digest. The pictures themselves are nice, clean solid line drawings that have a lot of humour in them as well.  

Kinney has made a kajillion dollars from these books, so I will leave it to other experts to figure out why they are so popular in any more detail.  I found them to be quite fun and very enjoyable to consume aesthetically speaking (I even stole some of the character images for a presentation for work).  I get a chuckle and sometimes a belly laugh at least once a book and there are a few truly hilarious moments.  Perhaps the standout for me is in book 14 with the epic neighbourhood snowball fight when the weird forest inbred children come and join.  

 The portrayal of the mother is somewhat problematic. She is always both the overly strict punisher in the family and the lone enthusiast who is always forcing them to do "family activities" nobody wants to do. Now, to be fair, I suspect Jeff Kinney grew up around the same time I did and whatever patriarchal structures were in place then and probably responsible, the truth at the time was that a lot of moms really were like this.  However, that has changed significantly and I feel like this series is perpetuating and reinforcing a stereotype that we can all move on from.  The dad is feckless and selfish, but his passivity is never portrayed as being such a negative element in Greg's life. You could also argue that everybody is kind of awful in these stories (except sweet, innocent Rowley), but it still feels like the brunt of the parody is thrust upon the mother character.

62. It by Stephen King

Whew!  Epic!  I have been looking for It for quite a while now, but would only read a used paperback copy.  These are actually quite hard to find, especially after the latest movie came out.  I did finally discover this really beat-up copy (not the ideal cover, but I am not complaining) in the big book dump in my alley last summer.  While I was still looking for it, I made the mistake of watching the first installment of the new movie.  When it came out, I hadn't been that interested in it, but the trailer for the second installment was so good (the one where she is visiting the old lady) that it made me want to give the two films a chance.  That was a huge mistake.  The first movie fucking sucked.  They had all this money and now we live in an era where it is okay (and even desirable) to actually tell the story and instead they ruined it like so many of Stephen King's properties. This one just devolved into tired repetitions of the way clowns could be freaky with only the smallest hints of the true storyline of the kids friendship and the evil that is the town of Derry.

The purity of my reading the book was thus somewhat spoiled by having seen the movie, as it imprinted some imagery, especially that of Pennywise and Beverly.  Fortunately, the rest of it was mostly forgettable.  I had also started reading It right at the end of my big Stephen King phase and then abandoned the book.  I just wasn't interested at the time.  My memory told me that I had only read a few pages before giving up, but I was 100 pages in and still remembering stuff, but couldn't tell if that was from the movie.  Finally at some point, I realized I had definitely not read it and could just enjoy the book.

I consider It to be the last of the early and for me best phase of Stephen King's writing. This could be erroneous, but it felt like after It he started going into more literary territory and doing things like The Dark Tower series.  I was always into his more adventure/sci-fi than his horror books.  Firestarter and The Dead Zone (and of course The Stand) were my favourites.  It is definitely mostly in the horror category but it gets pretty cosmic near the end.  There is a lot going on and it is a long book.  I am too lazy to fully and fairly analyze it.  I will say that I mostly enjoyed it and loved some parts of it enough to remind me why I was so into his books as a teenager. It's a bit long at times, especially in the early part.  There is so much horror in it, that it starts to get a bit not scary.  I am not into horror that much anyways, but I think the gruesome child murders could have been brought out a bit more slowly.  As it is, you are barely a third of the way in and you know there is a killer clown ripping lots of kids apart. The sexual and racial politics are questionable and interesting.  I think we can mostly give King a pass here as he was really trying.  The one black character, Mike the librarian, has some Magical Negro elements, but is also a fully-fledged character (though still getting somewhat second billing in the final action given his importance to the plot).  Beverly is really great as a kid, but somewhat weird as an adult, the abuse victim pattern doesn't feel entirely realistic (though the abusive husband does and is one of the scariest characters in the book).  There is also a super weird part in the end when they are kids that I am just not smart enough to unpack but seems somehow very wrong to me.  

Overall, though, the portrayal of this nasty town takes this book to the next level.  Stephen King knows America and though the evil here is from elsewhere, the manifestation it takes in Derry, Maine is all American and all too relevant today.  The real evil here are the racists, the bullies, the abusers and worse of all, the people who look away when it is all going on.  King describes the history, the geography, so many people, the establishments, the weather, everything to such a degree that I feel like the town should be findable on Google Maps and Wikipedia.  And he just savages it.  One wonders about his own childhood. He seems to know the darkness in small town America all too well.  And this is Yankee Maine!

As I mentioned when complaining about the shit movie, It is fundamentally about childhood friendship and before it gets really weird, this is the second-strongest part in the book. Each character and their confused perspective on their world is well written and when they start to find some salvation in each other, it is really quite moving. The part where fat Ben escapes from the bullies and meets Bill and Richie and then helps them build a dam and is blown away when they ask him to come and hang out with them is especially touching.  

Accomplishment achieved and thoroughly enjoyed! 

Now that is a well worn paperback!

61. Famous Trials 5 edited by James H. Hodge

This is the last of the Famous Trials Penguin paperbacks that I found at the Concordia book fair and bought almost out of pity and because they were just so beautiful.  Now, having finished this one, I find I am surprisingly pleased by their contents as well.  I would pick up any others that I may find in the future.  I can see why they were so popular.  Each one contains an essay, retelling of 4 or 5 famous trials.  They have a fairly consistent structure, beginning with a narrative of what actually happened, the ensuing investigation and then the trial.  They conclude with the author's thoughts on some social, legal or philosophical aspect of the trial.  Basically, they are true crime for the discerning reader (said in a slightly self-mocking snobby voice) and interesting and enjoyable at their base just for the retelling of these various disturbing and sordid human tragedies.  It is the various authors' voices that elevates these essays to sometimes quite enjoyable reading places.

Famous Trials 5 has 5 essays and I will give a brief summary of each, mainly for my own future reference. Overall, this was pretty enjoyable, highlighted by the last essay that had particularly rich writing and some nice critique of British moralism.  A bonus was that there were several Canadian connections in these trials.  Quite a lot of poison and drug use as well.

Thomas Neill Cream
Cream was a ne'er do well doctor who studied at McGill at the end of the 19th century and then went to England. His thing was hooking up with women, trying to get them to take pills that he claimed were to abort any potential pregnancy but would usually kill them. He would then send anonymous blackmail letters to some other well-known person claiming that he had evidence that they had poisoned the person.  It was all incompetent and kind of crazed, driven I guess by money needs, due to his addiction to "morphia" and his own misogyny.  

Neville George Clevely Heath
This charming fellow was recently demobbed and met two different women and horribly sexually tortured them then murdered them.  What was weird about his story is there was nothing in his past to indicate that he might become a sexual sadist. He was, however, a total cad and career criminal, getting kicked out of several armies and involved in many petty crimes.  This was one of the least interesting essays because it went on for pages and pages about how to define if someone is criminally insane (as his defense tried to do) and when to use it to excuse the death penalty.  As an empiricist, I don't really care about these kinds of arguments, though I recognize their value in making life or death decisions.

John Watson Laurie
Two young men meet on holiday in Scotland and go on a hike where one bashes the other with a rock to the head and then takes his stuff.  This was another truly incompetent murder where the killer returned home wearing the victim's clothing, among other sloppy actions.  This was more interesting for the history and geography of the Isle of Arran, which sounds incredibly beautiful.

Dr. George Lamson
A drug-addicted (and thus money desperate) doctor poisons his poor crippled 18-year old brother-in-law to get his inheritance.  This one was really quite sad because the boy, who was confined to a wheelchair because of a spinal defect, was quite loved by his housemates at a boarding school. He already had a tough row to hoe but seemed to keep up good spirits.  His death was agonizing and took hours.  The uncle once in prison and off the dope later realizes it was the addiction that drove him to do it and though not truly remorseful, you do get a feeling that it was just a shitty business all around.  

Rattenbury and Stoner by F. Tennyson Jesse
This essay was the gem of the book, so I add the author's name in case I should run across it again. It was written in a particularly enjoyable style. The author really had fun with it, including a hilarious letter from Benjamin Franklin (see image below) on the advantages of having an affair with an older woman.  The story here is that Mrs. Rattenbury, a woman in her thirties and married to Mr. Rattenbury, a wealthier man in his sixties, starts to have an affair with their 18-year old chauffeur, Stoner.  The latter becomes infatuated and kills old Mr. Rattenbury by hitting him in the head three times with a mallett.  It was portrayed in the media at the time as a classic affair murder and initially Mrs. Rattenbury tried to take the fall for young Stoner. She was aquitted and he did life but she killed herself not long after the trial by stabbing herself in the heart six times (!).  The essay is very sympathetic to her and portrays her as a bit unbalanced, but actually very loving. According to the author, the arrangement itself while the affair was going on was not even that bad of a situation.  Mrs. Rattenbury was very kindly and loving the Mr. Rattenbury, who was more concerned with his business and his nightly bottle of whiskey. He didn't seem to mind the affair. It was just the melodramatic nature of an 18-year old working class boy suddenly thrust into a grown-up love affair that turned it deadly.  Everybody suffered.  Quite sad, but very enjoyably written.

I draw your attention to the Fifth point

60. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (Robin Buss translation)

Found this hefty tome in one of those neighbourhood free shelves.  I had been wanting to read it since I saw the Jim Cazaviel movie (actually before that, but the movie cemented it from a fancy to a determination) and was happy to find this nice Penguin edition.  It turns out to be the most recent (and possibly most complete) translation in English.  I could probably have read it in french, but only if I were myself imprisoned in the Chateau d'If for 14 years.  As it was, the english edition of 1,243 pages took me almost 3 weeks!  

As the translator states in the introduction, Count of Monte Cristo is one of those books that was so popular that almost everybody knows something about it, without actually knowing it all.  The basic story is so compelling, that its impact is felt without needing the entire text (and reinforced by past incomplete translations and the many TV, movie and theatre adaptations).  I myself had a few misconceptions.  I was trying to figure out why it was so long, when he gets out of the prison within the first 200 pages.  The parts that I was most interested in, the endless training and self-improvement montage, are actually quite curtailed and even absent from the book.  He does educate himself mentally and gets a bit of aristocratic bearing while in prison, but the origins of all the combat skills, poisons, finance and the myriad other abilities that make him almost god-like are never explained beyond that he spent ten years in "the orient".  Much of the book is the more complicated narratives of the social and political lives of the families of the men upon whom he is seeking revenge and the slow, delicious unraveling of the count's revenge plot.

I got a bit confused in the early part of that, with several daughter's and wives who at first are not well distinguished as characters.  As the plot moves forward, though, and things get stickier, I figured it all out.  It's a real page-turner.  You can imagine when it was serialized how people would have awaited anxiously for the next chapter.  A lot of shit goes down and it gets quite dark and nasty.  There is even a cool lesbian cross-dressing escape from the constraints of Parisian aristocratic society.  I have to say, as well, the French really were fucking bonkers.  Their class system and its obsession with shame and duelling and all that really do make the 19th century British seem kind of staid and boring.  I guess the revolution and all the turmoil that followed it contributed to that.  This book definitely made me want to better understand that period of history.  It's just so complicated, Jesus, with so many revolutions and restorations and everything open to interpretation of the time.  No wonder historians still argue about it today.

59. Plunder Squad by Richard Stark

This is a very auspicious moment in the life of my 50 book blog.  With the completion of Plunder Squad, the 59th book of 2020, I have now finally recuperated my losses from the early child-rearing years and restored my overall average to 50 books a year.  I almost lost the trail entirely in 2016 with a record low of only 18 books read (and looking back a 4 year-old averaging 3-5 major meltdowns a week was probably the biggest factor, though there were several others) and may have even blogfaded altogether.  I don't know what pulled me back but I am glad I stuck with it as reading has never been more enjoyable.

I wrestled for about 24 hours with which book should I read for #59 and I realized that I had also been re-reading the Parker series and Plunder Squad was next.  It's actually quite perfect since these are my favourite books and probably anchor most of my online interactions in the reading world.

What an absolute joy!  It has been long enough, and I think I only read Plunder Squad once, that I had forgotten almost everything about it.  The structure is multi-faceted and it lacks a central narrative, so aesthetically, I do not rank it high amongst the best Parkers.  Yet it is so full of Westlake as Starkian goodness and so hard at its core that I can still understand how others may consider it among his best.

Plunder Squad starts, as always, in medias res, with Parker getting shot at from behind while planning a heist in an anonymous house. The shooter is George Uhl, whom Parker left alive at the end of The Sour Lemon Score. The first half of the book is more like a series of short vignettes of Parker trying to put together jobs while also dealing with Uhl.  The second half is a truncated, traditional Parker heist where we get the planning, the perspective of some of the side characters and finally the execution.  The ending is whatever the opposite of in medias res is, with Parker barely escaping a doublecross, fleeing a burning warehouse in Soho.

There are several great moments.  The scene when he is waiting out George Uhl in the California hills after having second-guessed the other guy who led him to Uhl who now knows Parker is probably going to kill him.  Just sad and brutal and yet so efficient.  The final heist here is really cool as well in all its details.  They hijack a truck full of valuable paintings while it is being escorted from one gallery to the other in the midwest.  I love Tommy the hippy heister.  Also this one has Stan Devers, mainly anonymous but still likable.  I'm rambling.  Plunder Squad is fantastic.  And finally, this:

Lou Sternberg met Parker at O'Hare International. He had a disgusted look on his face, but he gave the standard greeting:  "Have a good flight?"

"Yes." Parker meant nothing by the word; it was simply a sound that ended the topic.

Next up, Butcher's Moon, the masterpiece.

58. The Foundling by Georgette Heyer

I found the worst edition

I do follow some good people on Twitter in the book world, so good that it is one of the big reasons I haven't been able to delete my account and walk away.  Fans of the gothic and romance genre were talking up Georgette Heyer and how big a role they played in their own early reading.  Her stuff sounded right up my alley and I was pleased to find a copy for $2 at Chainon with a truly uninspired design, such that I would have no worries of my poor treatment of the book.

I am pleased to say that their recommendations were spot on.  I thoroughly enjoyed The Foundling.  It was delightful.  I found myself delighted from the first few pages and continuously delighted throughout the book.  I would have read it in two days if it wasn't for current events and my struggle with distraction. As it was I basically read it in two sittings but with days of wasting my life on Twitter and reading only a few pages at a time in between.

The story is about a young Duke who grew up quite sickly and though petite of frame is healthy and smart at the age of 24, about to come of age and claim his inheritance.  However, his controlling uncle and the retinue of staff conspire to mollycoddle him.  His own gentle and unaggressive nature only reinforces their maintaining a layer of protection between him and the world.  He yearns to live a bit in the world and his frustration with his uncle and servants reaches a peak when he is basically browbeaten to ask his old friend Harriet's hand in marriage.  They grew up together and he likes and respects her, but never really had a chance to develop any feelings.  When one of his cousins gets in a bit of a scrape with a blackmailer and asks the Duke for money, he decides to escape from his handlers and deal with the problem on his own.

There are so many things that I enjoyed in this story: the mannered interactions of the aristocracy, the talented and trained but never tested character off on his own, descriptions of Regency england at once so civilized and yet always simmering with potential villainy.  Ultimately, though, what really made this book for me was how it pleasant and un-tense it all was.  The bad guys really aren't all that bad, the scandals never really threaten to ruin anybody and the plot twists and miscommunications are fun and move the story forward without driving us mad.  Just a real tonic.  I am so happy to know that she has written some 60 books and everyone has their various favourites.  I think I will just keep an eye out for her and pick them up slowly, as I am sure used copies are easy to find.  They can be read between more stressful works.