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.