30. Killing them Softly by George V. Higgins (original title Cogan's Trade)

I am really not happy with the trade paperback I found at a local thrift store. It has Brad Pitt looking way to contemporary on a boring cover and now that I have finished the book, a totally sucky alternate title.  Was this done just for the movie, because it reeks of Hollywood idiocy.  The contents, fortunately, are pretty fucking tight.  Higgins writes mostly in dialogue.  Things happen, but you usually learn about them from one guy telling another guy in roundabout, Southie, semi-organized criminal argot.  The basic plot here is that three ex-cons rip off an illegal card game in some suburban hotel and Cogan is sent in to punish them.  When I was about a third of the way through, I told my wife that it didn't have much of a plot, that the real meat of the book is in the milieu and the characters and the dialogue.  Those things are incredibly strong, but the plot itself actually becomes subtly kind of intricate.  You realize that in this little world, everybody is sort of connected one way or another and a guy who was listening to another guy talk about two guys planning a hit on a fourth guy was actually one of the guys in on the original job that incited the need for the hit.  

Cogan himself is only in about half the novel.  Everyone is treated equally by the narrator and we get slices of all their various lives.  Their common theme is their struggle to make money and keep their wives happy and stay out of jail and not get killed, which for most of them seems to be too much of a struggle.  There were some passages that felt a bit long and I had to take a break as a guy goes on for two pages about his wife not liking it when he goes to prison.  On the flip side, there were amazing little crime vignettes.  One that stood out was two dog thieves, taking a carload of doped up dogs to sell in Florida who get caught in a southern deluge just as the dogs start waking up, shitting and farting in the car whose windows they can't open.  And by the end, the storyline really picks up pace and it becomes hard to put it down.  The ending is brutal and hard, quite sad but very satisfying.  Great stuff.

here is the lame one I found
Compare that to these below:

29. The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

My nephew and I made an epic trip last xmas to the Salvation Army in downtown Oakland to find boots and books, only to be dissapointed in both.  I did, however, find two 80s first edition hardcover Mary Stewarts, which I took as consolation prizes.  The first one was okay but I now consider this one to be a real find.  First, Mary Stewart is an excellent writer and I had forgotten how good she is at creating a sense of place as well as moments of satisfying character and badassery in her Arthurian saga.  Second, as I have embarked on the Farseer series by Robin Hobb, I am reminded of some of the tenets of epic fantasy, several of which Stewart does very well in this series.

That being said, I did not totally love this book.  It builds up wonderfully but ends on a frustrating note of uncharacteristic misunderstanding between the two main protragonists. The main character is Mordred, Arthur's bastard son with his half-sister and witch Morgause (Morgane Lefay as she is more commonly known).  Mordred is raised as the only son of a hard-scrabble fishercouple in the Orkney islands.  It's a long and twisted story that takes place in the previous book that lands him here. When Morgause's later husband, King Lot (like a few months later) learns that his wife was impregnated by Arthur and the baby abandoned, he has all the baby's in that village put to death, but Mordred escapes.  He is a good boy and his adopted mother loves him and fears the day when the queen may come and take him away.  Blood will tell and one day he accidently stumbles across young prince Gawain, his half-brother and rescues him, which brings his attention to Morgause the queen.  Thus begins his introduction to his destiny.

In some ways, up until the ending, this may have been my favourite book of the series.  Merlin, who narrates the first three, is really cool but can be somewhat of a bummer.  Here, we mainly have the perspective of Mordred and it is a very enjoyable coming of age plus political intrigue story.  There are some really cool interludes where he demonstrates his character and toughness. His mother as the antagonist is creepy and nasty, with one near-incest scene definitely taking her evil over the top.  I was thoroughly into it and turned the pages quickly.  It's all leading up to Mordred's destiny, which Merlin has foreseen, that he would be the downfall of King Arthur.  You don't want that to happen because they two develop such a good relationship and Mordred had the makings of a fine successor.  I could accept the bad ending except that the mechanics of it felt forced and really went against all that had been built up.  There is excessive miscommunication that creates distrust between the two men, which just didn't feel solid enough to destroy what was such a strong relationship.  So the ending left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.  Still, it wasn't enough to wipe away the enjoyable taste of all that led up to it, especially a really nice section where he makes his away alone through old England, camping out and feeding himself and just enjoying the autumn wilderness.  Very cool stuff.  I am also happy to know that though there is a fifth book in the saga, it is a standalone adventure taking place near the end of the third book.  So I don't feel any pressure to have to seek it out and read it soon, though it shall be on my list.

28. The Brass Cupcake by John D. MacDonald

I'm in a bit of a minor quandary with myself this month.  I have an on-deck shelf that is mostly filled with authors whom I like and whose books I was quite excited to find (John D. MacDonald's non Travis McGee's, Charlotte Armstrong, James Hadley Chase, William Haggard).  However, since I have read books by each of them already this year, I want to save and savour these waiting books over time. This desire conflicts directly with my obsessive need to clear out my on-deck shelf.  I had made a temporary solution by deciding this year to read a single series or author of a big fantasy or science fiction book in order and live with the on-deck shelf not going down much.  That author was to be Robin Hobb and my plan was nicely confirmed by how much I enjoyed the first book in the Farseer trilogy, Assassin's Apprentice.  Unfortunately, it all came undone with my order of the second and third books in the trilogy which won't arrive here until May, assuming all goes well!  So now I am stuck back facing my on deck shelf. I have decided to take this opportunity to narrow down what I have in the next few weeks. There are a few books by authors other than the ones mentioned above, but I thought I would go with this John D. MacDonald as it is his first book and I suspected would be quite different from the books where he had really found his voice.

It is a great setup.  Cliff is an agent of an insurance company, an ex-cop whose rigorous honesty got him kicked off the force in Florence City, a nice little resort town in Florida.  A wealthy old New England socialite gets bumped off in her winter hotel suite, her jewels stolen.  Because Cliff has some underworld connections and has done dropoffs before, he gets the job to try and reach out to the thieves and do a payoff from the insurance company to get the jewels back.  This has often worked with past thefts. The company still takes a loss, but nowhere near what they would have to pay to replace the jewels to the insured.  In this case, however, because of the murder and the damage it does to the reputation as a safe town where the rich can spend their winter months, the cops are all over it and they already hate Cliff.  They won't let him do the payoff because they want to catch the murderers too badly.  To make things worse, Cliff starts to fall for the socialite's niece, who may be involved.

It's a great ride, nicely paced with lots of action.  It's much more wild than you usually get with JDM (at one point, he chases down thugs in a car). The social theorizing is peppered in only sparsely, which makes it more enjoyable.  It's a light touch as opposed to the sometimes heavy moralizing that can wear you down a bit with JDM.  The sexual politics are as weird as ever, abhorrent at one point near the end where a woman gets slapped to have some sense put in her about marrying the dude who slapped her.  Again, though, they are mostly in the action and the subtext rather than JDM telling us directly his bizarre theories on women and gender, so they don't bog the book down.  There are two actual sex scenes as well, one which is quite effective in a steaming hot Florida apartment in a sudden thunderstorm and one which is so bad and weirdly written that I had to take a picture of it.  You can see the text below, whose climax is "twin convexities of alive plum-tautness" to describe the woman's buttocks.

Despite my weariness with JDM, which I think is overly emphasized in my review here, the guy really can create a rich and gripping situation and setting.  The town is so well portrayed, the various locations, the shitty corrupt cops (whose brutality is as nasty as ever), the syndicate run high-end club, not just physically but in how it all works.  He also weaves a realistic and interesting portrayal of how jewel thieves and the payoffs work. I don't know where he got all this stuff from, but it is convincing and absorbing. The title is a nice touch.  A cupcake, according the Cliff, is the term for little special things you get in jail in some prisons in the south, like cigarettes or a pint bottle of something, things that can also be taken away.  The brass cupcake is how he comes to see his badge, which he had thought sparkled with gold when it was first pinned on him.

Schwing!

27. The Secret People by John Wyndham (written originally under the pseudonym John Beynon)

This is a lovely physical object.  The cover immediately caught my affection, especially the typeface of the title. I love these Coronets.  Unfortunately, it has absolutely nothing to do with the book. It's a stretch to even say The Secret People is science fiction. The story is about a man, Mark,  who has made his fortune by building up his family's shoe company.  He takes a little break to fly around the world in his personal jet (this is the sci-fi part).  He meets lovely Margaret at a resort hotel in Egypt and offers to fly her over the New Sea, a massive project to artificially flood part of the Sahara desert and make it viable for agriculture again.  On their way back, the plane engine blows out and they crash into the lake.  They manage to get to a small island, but when trying to escape are sucked down into the water by a giant whirlpool.

It turns out that underneath the desert is a vast network of underground caves, people by white-skinned pygmies who survive on giant mushroom colonies.  There are also hundreds of other human castaways who have gotten themselves trapped her over the years (and centuries as some people have been born there). The pygmies keep them prisoners in a lowered section where they farm their own mushrooms.  Though the pygmies are small, they far outnumber the castaways.  Because Mark and Margaret had found a scraggly old cat on the island and had brought it with them, when they are confronted by the pygmies, Margaret is not thrown in the prison section, but kept up with the pygmies as the handmaiden to the cat, whom they consider a god.

It goes quite quickly, though with a few overly theoretical dialogues speculating on the pygmies and man and all that.  There is a small team that has been trying to escape and when they are betrayed, it becomes a race to fight off the pygmies while defending the escape tunnel.  This part is really pretty excellent, as the only real material in the caves are stone and giant mushrooms.  The escapers build ramparts and creative weapons out of them while the pygmies become more creative in trying to break through their barrier.  There is a series of attacks and defenses in a giant cave that is a lot of fun.  The ending is quite exciting and made for an enjoyable adventure romp in a strange situation.  It is all tinted with "benign" and thoughtful colonial thinking.  Wyndham is trying to be conscious but the subtext and the way certain characters act and are treated because of their race is a bummer.  The whole idea of flooding the Sahara and the destruction it would do to the people who actually live there is addressed, though in an offhand manner that also reflects the offhand manner in which the pygmies civilization comes to an end. 

Nothing close to this exists in the book,
but nice image!

26. Assassins's Apprentice by Robin Hobb (part 1 of the Farseer Trilogy)

I've been holding off on this popular fantasy trilogy for a few months now.  For the longest time, I avoided trilogies and series as a rule.  Then when I really got my reading pace back up a few years ago, I relaxed that rule.  I spaced out books in trilogies and ultimately found myself losing track of what happened and not feeling so satisfied.  My plan now is to read them all together or at least much closer together.  I read an article which extolled the greatness of her world-building and so picked this first one up.  She has many trilogies and I believe most of them take place in the same world, though perhaps at different times.  Various commenters suggested the Farseer trilogy, (Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin and Assassin's Quest) was the place to start.  I was not disappointed, though I have some hesitations.

I am not sure if a label exists for this subgenre, though I have encountered it a few times in sci-fi and fantasy.  A young person enters a high-ranking political situation as an outsider and has to navigate unknown enemies while growing into his or her own character and skills.  The best example of this and one of my favourites, is the Goblin Emperor by Katharine Addison.  The first half of Assassin's Apprentice reminded me a lot of that book, though it definitely goes off on its own path as the story goes on.  A young boy is dropped off at a military castle by his grandfather.  He turns out to be the bastard son of the land's prince and the family could not afford to keep him.  He is rejected by his father and left to be taken care of by the stable master.  Here he learns animal husbandry, seemingly ignored by his family until one day the king taps him to be trained as a royal assassin.  He recognizes that a bastard is a potential asset that could be exploited by their enemies or used by the royal family.  It's a really cool set up and was a pleasure for me to follow the development of this naive boy in his training.

The world-building is as cool as advertised.  It is standard fantasy stuff (though mostly humanoid) but varied and original in its details.  The kingdom of the Six Duchies is on a peninsula and there is tension between the agriculture regions inland and the duchies on the coast.  The external threat, red pirate ships that have some power or method of turning the people they kidnap into soulless maniacs, is severely weakening the kingdom.  Most of the story is on the internal politics, though so much is left unclear until the end that it is more detective story than courtly intrigue.  I really enjoyed this book, but I found the good characters to be oddly unaware of the threat around them and the bad characters to be so obviously bad that I felt kind of frustrated.  I am hoping that part of it is that the hero is only 14 years old so really naive.  Like there was clearly a conspiracy going on and the various participants are all super antagonistic to him, several for no reason. He himself is befuddled at why the stable boy gives him such a hateful glare.  That could have been handled more subtly as it was clear way too early for me what was going on and yet the good guys walked right into it.  Despite that, the climax was quite satisfying and I am definitely ready to jump into the next book, which is supposed to be arriving here in a few days.

25. Ramona by Helen Jackson (H.H.)

I believe this may be the oldest book I have ever read, meaning physically oldest.  This book appears to have been printed in 1884.  It is in quite good shape and I hope I kept it in almost as good shape as when I got it.  Because of the Coronavirus pandemic, I am not going out so wasn't worried about carrying it with me.  I still tore ever so slightly one page.  The quality of the paper and binding on these olders books was quite good.  It was given to us as a gift from old family friends and I had no idea what it was about.  It turns out to be a forgotten classic, a huge hit back in the day that it came out and one that reinforced the idea of California in the eyes of a westward expanding nation. It also created a lot of consciousness about Mexicans and to some degree the suffering of the indigenous peoples of California.  Jackson had written a non-fiction report three years earlier titled "A Century of Dishonor" about how the Americans had totally fucked the natives.  She wrote Ramona to fictionalize much of what she had put in the report to try and spread the word.  On her deathbed, she wrote a letter to the president, pleading with him to redress the ongoing repression of the indigenous population.  Some argue that her book was influential in pushing the Dawes act.  

The story takes place in a Mexican ranch in central coastal California.  It is run by a strong, inflexible woman, La Senora Morena.  Though her son, Felipe, is the ostensible boss, she has the great skill of subtle manipulation, controlling everything without saying anything directly and somehow making her son think he is making all the decisions.  She has also taken in her dead sister's daughter, Ramona, whom everybody on the farm loves, except La Senora herself.  Ramona falls in love with the head of the Indian sheep shearers and La Senora forbids it for all kinds of crazy reasons, but basically racism and a weird, misplaced jealousy of Ramona.  I am not doing justice how well and thoroughly written the characters are, turning this simple into a rich and believable dynamic.  The character of Senora Morena is really an all-timer, nearly tragic at the Lady Macbeth level.  It's the kind of story where you would be screaming why can't you just not be fucking lame everything would be fine, except that their characters are so well-built that the lameness (the rigidity of the mother, the weakness of the son, the jealousy of the friend) makes perfect sense.

It also really pulls no punches when it comes to portraying what happens to the natives.  I portrays the Mexican and Catholic relation wit the natives a bit too positively, despite some narrative saying they weren't all as nice as the main ones in the narrative.  The Americans are shown to be the monsters they are, using manufacturing laws to drive the natives from their homes, steal their cattle and horses and basically destroy their lives.  It is interesting to read this narrative after There, There.  It is no surprise that there is so much trauma among the American Indians.  What is a surprise is that they even survived at all.  It's fucking horrific.  Some of this is hard reading.

What is not so hard to read are the beautiful descriptions of California at this time.  It really is an incredible part of the world and back in the 19th century as Americans were only starting to destroy it, you get a sense of how bounteous and beautiful it was.  While you start to get the sense that things are not going to go well early in the book, the fleeing couple stay in a few really cool locations, ultimately ending up in a hidden valley high in the mountains. This location had me feeling quite a sense of longing seeing as I will probably be here in my nice little urban neighbourhood for many months.

Great book.  I am really glad it was given to me.  

(Note, why the fuck can I not wrap text around the image in Blogger anymore?)

24. The Chocolate Cobweb by Charlotte Armstrong

Still tough going with the reading as my twitter addiction flares unabated and we go into our second week of Coronavirus lockdown, everybody's attention on the ticking time bomb that is the U.S. right now and wondering how bad the explosion will be.  I did power through the last third of this book, so it caught my distracted attention that much.  It's a nice little thriller with a great antagonist, though somewhat lessened for me as it had two very similar themes as the first Charlotte Armstrong book I read.

Amanda is a young, attractive art student who learns that as a newborn, she was temporarily given to the wrong parents.  Morover, the wrong father is a well-known artist, Tobias Garrison who lives not far from her in L.A. and is exhibiting.  She boldly introduces herself, gets invited to their house where she meets his handsome, distant son, Thone (with whom she was mistaken in the first hours of her life) and his mousy wife, Ione. Ione, it turns out, is not Thone's mother, but a first and third wife.  Ione's mother, Belle, was Tobias second wife and the subject of his most famous painting.  She died in a horrible accident one night, accidently trapped in the garage with the car running where she was poisoned by the carbon monoxide.

We learn quite early by Armstrong switching to Ione's viewpoint that Ione is a complete psychopath, who is obsessed with removing all traces of Belle from her and Tobias' life, including Belle's son Thone.  She is actively plotting to poison hin with some hot chocolate when Amanda shows up, spoiling it and seeing Ione knock over the thermos of poisoned chocolate deliberately.  It is somewhat contrived, as she helps to mop it up and then swaps the handkerchief so she can take the stained one to her boyfriend the chemist.

Anyways, I gave a lot of the plot away, because it all sets up in the opening chapters (which I appreciated).  The rest of the story is Amanda trying to convince Thone that he is being poisoned, while avoiding Ione's plotting, as she herself may now become a target (Ione suspecting that she may actually be Belle's daughter).  It has a nice gothic situation, in a very modern southern California hillside home.  I enjoyed particularly Ione's the super sweet, controlling utterly mad wife.  Unfortunately, some elements reminded me strongly of Catch As Catch Can, particularly the heroine being trapped in an enclosed space with almost too tight of a time limit before death only to be saved at the very last minute.  The love tension between her and Thone was also similar where there was an almost too aggressive conflict between them where they are so opposed you know they have to fall in love.  Armstrong is good, but I need to give her a break for a while and be in a quieter place to properly appreciate her work.

Oh cool, I just discovered that Claude Chabrol directed Merci pour le Chocolat in 2000, based on this book with Isabelle Hupert as the Ione character.  Definitely not the right body type, but she could play this role extremely well.  Might be worth checking out.

23. The arena by William Haggard

I have been having a hard time reading consistently in these first days of the Covid-19 pandemic.  My twitter addiction, which I had really gotten under control to the point of seriously considering deleting my account on principle due to their ongoing "free speech" tolerance of racists, trolls and fake accounts, has flared up like the virus itself.  It is my main news feed and probably also fulfilling a social need that is not getting its fix on the basketball court or the office or even day-to-day interactions with neighbours and merchants.  I am really struggling to get to that place where I can't stop turning the pages and won't put the book down.

I picked The arena because Haggard writes so well and his characters are all about pragmatic efficiency that I thought it would keep me engaged while helping to model emotional distance in this time of crisis.  It was mostly succesful, given the situation.  It still took me almost a week to read a book I would have read in three days in 2019.

The story centers around the merchant bankers in London in the early 60s as they were evolving from family-owned, aristocratic entities to more and more mercenary affairs driven primarily by profit.  I am not sure about the title, nor why it is in lowercase on the cover (could that just be part of the design?).  The protagonist is William Hillyard, a director and shareholder in the Bonavias bank, a fourth generation company that is threatened with a takeover bid.  That this is happening is because the firm cannot keep up, but behind it there is also espionage.  One of their holdings is a small radar development firm who, unbeknownst to them, is working on some technology that could be very beneficial to the British government.  This is where Haggard's "detective" Charles Russel, head of the Executive branch and his competent assistant Mortimer step in.

There is a lot packed into this thin book, much of it involves Hillyard and his struggle to resist the takeover (he is the only one who is against it), which puts his own life at risk.  Class plays a huge role.  The antagonist, Scott Sabin (whose character comes in strong only late and thus, at least to me, lacked enough depth to feel satisfied with the denouement) is not of the class that I guess family bankers are or were in England and he is driven by a deep resentment.  We are supposed to loathe him, either because he is not of the correct class or because in his insane desire to move up a class, he has lost all sense of ethics and character.  You get the feeling that this book was written for the landed class, but were there enough of them in 1961 to make up a readership? 

As I alluded, the ending was a bit unsatisfying.  The rest is really good, very subtle, very strategic and political. Haggard has a way of making two men in a room speculating about other men's actions seems really cool.  There is also an attempted murder on a train in a tunnel in Italy, thwarted by one of Mortimer's "top men" that is an excellent example of subtle action and skill not requiring much firepower or physical excess.  Haggard is really good, though you have to keep an eye on the class perspective.

22. The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams

Compare this to some of the covers below

I was led to understand that this was a real classic WWII POW escape book.  It's weird to me that it took me so long to find it and when I did (at Dark Carnival, of course) it was in a new large format reprint of not great quality.  The printing looked smudged and the cover was not of great quality.  Still, I appreciate Skyhorse Publishing for having reprinted it.  Seems a shame that a book like this would not still be on the shelves in most bookstores.

[Ah, just realized I had already read another book by Eric Williams, Dragoman and it led me to look for The Wooden Horse.]

It is written as fiction in third person, but is basically true.  The author and two others did actually escape from a POW camp by building a tunnel underneath a camp-made vaulting horse.  In the introduction, which I read after I completed the book, he explains how when he first published it right after the war, much of the info fell under the official secrets act, so he had to embellish it and change lots of details.  He since rewrote it several times until this 1978 edition which he says is mostly fact.

It is a really tense book.  The first half is all about them digging the tunnel.  I am kind of claustrophobic.  I don't know if I were in their situation, maybe I would be desperate enough to squeeze into a 100-metre tunnel of sand that was barely wider than my own body, with oxygen constantly running out, the walls and ceiling crumbling, sand everywhere.  I actually had to keep putting it down because it was stressing me out too much to read.

Later, when their tunnel succeeds and they are on the run in Germany, it is also extremely tense, but in a different way.  Posing as French foreign workers, neither of them speak German.  They have forged papers, limited maps and outdated railroad schedules.  They don't know how to act.  And they can trust nobody.  It's nerve-wracking.  Also, really interesting to see war-time Germany from the inside through the eyes of outsiders.

It's a great book and I am glad I read it on the day that schools were announced to be closed for two weeks and people are making runs on toilet paper in the supermarket to combat Covid-19.  The privations of the POW camp (which you read in his intro were actually much worse for their guards thanks to the Red Cross packages the prisoners received) put into perspective the anxiety about not being able to wipe your ass with 2-ply quilted Charmin.

21. Hunting the Fairies by Compton Mackenzie

Deciding to take this book home falls under the "it's an old Penguin so it is just too physically beautiful to leave on the shelf, no matter the subject" category.  I quickly scanned the first few lines of the back author blurb and it left me no more the wiser about the subject of this book.  The cover illustration was equally unelucidating, though I know now that it depicts an actual scene in the book and a good one.  It turns out that either it's pure confirmation bias (I chose it, ergo I must like it) or Penguin just generally did a good job with these paperbacks.  Either way, I quite enjoyed this book.

It's a comedy of manners of a sort about a Scottlish Laird, Hugh Cameron of Killwhillie, I guess sometime right after the war.  He is of the old landowning class, though Scottish, not English so a weird subset of British aristocracy that I had never encountered before.  He has an old house on a large piece of land somewhere in Scotland.  All the place names and geography were completely lost on me, but it does sound quite beautiful and rugged.  His dilemma is that an old friend who lives now in the States, having married an American, will not be coming this summer but did take the liberty of asking if Cameron could host an acquaintance of hers, her daughter and her maid.  The woman, Florence Urquhart-Unwin, Yu-Yu to her friends, is the president of the Ossian Society and is coming to Scotland to research and absorb the culture to bring back for the society.  Cameron is quite put out and anxious about this guest, but invites her to come.  Much of the book is then her touring around Scotland, being way more into Scottish stuff than Cameron and many of the Scots.  She also has a rival who comes from the U.S. as well, with her eye on taking away the presidency of the Ossian Society from Yu-Yu.  Much of the humour is them trying to best the other with having more authentic Scottish experiences.

I found it quite funny, even laugh out loud at times.  It is the gentle humour of an older time and an upper class, with lots of dialogue ending in "what?"  The plot thickens as Cameron falls in love with Yu-Yu's 19-year old daughter (he's 50).  It all wraps up nicely and even touchingly, taking on a somewhat more realistic and human tone than the light satire of the middle of the book.  Turns out, Mackenzie has published over 70 books and was very well known on the BBC back in the day.  I would keep an eye out for his other books.  This was fun.

20. There There by Tommy Orange

I picked up this book last year on a recommendation from my sister and my mother and decided to read it now since we are having a lot of increased awareness about the reality for First Nations people in Canada with the blockades on the railroad tracks.  The wet'suwet'en people of British Columbia are blocking a pipeline that was rammed through their land in the usual completely fucked-up way the government and multi-national resource companies work.  Many other First Nations communities then blockaded railroad tracks in solidarity and it has put the federal government in a real dilemma.  If you can't tell, I am 100% in support of the First Nations.  Even if you want to be totally selfish, they are doing us a favour by putting the brakes on all this insance fossil fuels extraction that is destroying our planet.  This issue also brings to the forefront the incredible selfishness and racism in Canadian culture and it really pisses us off to be forced to see it for what it is.  Suddenly we can't be all smug and complacent because it turns out we are just as bad as our friends to the south.

Anyhow, I'll save that rant for when I resurrect Brique du Neige.  I hate to say it but I was somewhat disappointed in There There.  Once again, it is quite a good book but the hype is just insane.  I was getting ready to read a masterpiece based on the pullquotes from every major newspaper review and many famous writers.  I should know better, but nonetheless when people write "pure soaring beauty" and "a miraculous achievement" you can't help but get your hopes up.  I am very glad that the book is a huge success.  Tommy Orange seems like a really cool guy and I hope it opens the doors for more indigenous authors to get their stuff out there.  I'll take a thousand There Theres over one American Dirt and most of the mainstream "literary fiction" out there.  I just wish we could be objective and realistic about the actual text.

The story is about a lot of different American people of indigenous descent (he calls them "Indians" and they call themselves that, but I don't know how that works in the U.S. but us settlers don't use that term in Canada anymore and I suspect shouldn't down there either).  Most of them are in Oakland, but a few are making their way there.  The focus of the plot is that they are all coming to a big powwow that is going to be held in the Oakland Coliseum.  There are quite a few characters, so many that it has a cast of characters at the beginning.  I didn't actually need it until the very end when I got some of the heisting characters mixed up because each character is very distinct, very real.  The introductions and backstories of all these characters do get close to the hype.  They are all so brutal and sad, yet rich and interesting that it makes for that rare combination of compelling reading while being "educational" (for lack of a better word on my part).  Just one cool element is that some of the characters participated in the American Indian Movement takeover of Alcatraz Island, an incident mostly forgotten today but a big milestone in their struggle.  It was cool to read a fictional account (probably based on some reality) of what it was like to be a kid there.  These are all just really great stories about what it is like to be an indigenous person in America today and it is fucked up.  It was also cool that there is a lot of Oakland in this book, both its rougher past and the even more painful gentrification it is going through today.  Tommy Orange is clearly pissed at that.

Where the book did not totally succeed for me is around the powwow.  Everything is leading up to the powwow, including some young toughs who are going to heist it.  It became quite predictable that we were going to end in a violent tragedy with many of the main characters dying.  There lives were so difficult and challenging already, that I don't know if such an ending had much impact on me.  And it felt simplistic and it all ended too quickly. I would rather have read another hundred pages on the robbery going bad, but maybe on person getting killed and the rest of them continuing with the fallout and how it impacted their lives. 

It's funny me saying that, as I am the first to admit I am a slave to the narrative and want a good satisfying conclusion.  Here, I felt that Tommy Orange did such a good job building a rich reality, I would have rather it kept going, even if it never really ended with any kind of narrative conclusion.  Weirdly, it felt a lot like the ending of Game of Thrones to me.

Again, a good book and while I hate to use this term, I think it fairly applies here, an important book.  I hope it removes some ignorance in the world.

19. Complicity by Iain Banks

I'm not sure what to make of this book.  I bought it at Chainon for $3 as I was looking for something readable after having slogged through a few duds in February.  Although I haven't loved all of his Iain Banks novels (Whit being the one standout), he is an excellent writer and the brief few lines of the inside cover blurb I read made me think the premise was compelling (and I am glad I only read the first few lines, because I went back and read the whole thing after I had finished the book and it basically gives away almost 80% of the story for fuck's sake).

It takes place in the early 90s.  The main character is a Scottish journalist in Edinburgh, political lefty, does a lot of drugs, plays a lot of videogames and is having an ongoing affair with a married woman while being friends with both her and her husband.  He is a good journalist, though, and works hard.  His main storyline is basically living his life, though getting these anonymous calls that seem to be providing hints to a big conspiracy.  While this story is going on, we get these nasty vignettes in the second person voice, where horrible "justice" is meted out to mostly white collar criminals: a judge who gives a rapist a lenient sentence is tied up and sodomized with a giant vibrator, an industrialist who allowed a factory accident to kill thousands is blown up in his home, etc. "You" do them all tactically, using cat burglary techniques, voice disguise and costumes.  They are pretty rough.  That's the thing about Banks, his sex and violence can be quite graphic. 

I won't go into any more about the storyline, though you can see the various ways these two storylines might start to converge.  It is well-written and the structure is excellently crafted.  Thematically, I couldn't quite get my head around it.  It is a thriller, with a mystery and action, but much of the emphasis is on the main character's backstory and his relationship with his childhood friends.  There is also a really strong theme of the justice of vigilante action against these kind of elites for their crimes.  So I enjoyed the story, but I just am not sure that any of those questions were really answered or explored in that much of an interesting way.  I guess also for the time the character was sort of novel in that he is doing speed and living a pretty dissolute life but this is presented as normal and okay.  I think it may have had more of an impact if you read it when the book came out (1993).  I felt that Banks was trying to make a point.

18. Flight from a Firing Wall by Baynard Kendrick

I should have read the introduction.  Actually, it is probably for the better that I didn't.  I had two major problems with this book, one that I noticed right from the beginning but got used to and the other that I started to pick up on as I read and that got worse and worse until the end and basically made me decide I did not enjoy it.

It is the story of a Cuban expat doctor, Antonio Carillo in Miami in 1960, with his heart and his wife still back in Cuba.  He is part of an anti-Castro/Communism Cuban society that is also funded by the CIA and other agencies, though portrayed very neutrally as just an old guy with a pipe who is playing cloak and dagger (this neutrality should have set my alarm bells off).  Carillo gets a call from a beautiful Cuban woman who wants him to meet a boat to treat a sick passenger, whom Carillo guesses immediately is a Cuban refugee.  What he doesn't guess and is floored by is when he goes to the boat and discovers that the refugee is his father-in-law, high-ranking member of the secret police who betrayed Castillo and his daughter when they tried to flee.  Castillo escaped with two bullet holes but left his wife behind, not knowing if she was alive or dead.

The first problem that I encountered was the dialogue. Castillo's mother was American and he went to a prep school in Connecticut, so it was reasonable that he would be perfectly bilingual and speak colloquial english. The english he used just sounded totally wrong, a mix of John D. MacDonald-esque early 60s clever speak and cliched hard-boiled private eye wisecracks.  There was a lot of verbiage in general that made reading it slow-going and then so many metaphors and wise cracks that you felt disconnected.  Worse, though, two Cuban expats speaking a mix of Spanish and English spoke like a bunch of camp counsellors in upstate New York.  It just didn't sound realistic.  I've met and hunt out with several perfectly bilingual Cuban-Americans and they do not talk like that.

So back to the story.  In a somewhat convoluted way, Castillo decides to sneak back into Cuba, to both bring medicine to a sick leader of the underground resistance to Castro's regime and to find and rescue his wife, or at least die with her.  It is a nice setup and the details of the trip via boat to Cuba and sneaking back into such a controlled environment undercover and through the underground network was somewhat fun.  Now the second problem becomes apparent. This book was not written for the adventure or the pleasure of the fiction.  It was written to portray communist Cuba as a total nightmare place of atrocity and fear.  It is telling in the introduction, that all his research was done with government agencies and Cuban refugee groups.  Worse, he states that the descriptions of Cuba itself "are from the author's pleasant memories of many trips there dating back to 1954."

Weird that he only went there pre-revolution and somehow seems to that Cuba is a place of terror and privation.  I definitely do not think Cuba was some paradise and Kendrick himself is critical of Batista regime in the early part of the book, but this just feels like a propaganda job.  It is laid on so thick that by the end, I was totally disconnected and just wanted it to end.  Not an enjoyable ride, unfortunately.

One neat thing about this edition.  You will notice the "A Special Inner Sanctum Mystery" at the bottom of the front cover.  It turns out that Simon & Schuster originated the Inner Sanctum concept as an imprint for their favourite books.  At first it included several genres, but then they sponsored the Inner Sanctum radio show and focused it on suspense and mystery books.  Part of the deal of their sponsorship was that one of their books had to be promoted at the end of the show.

17. Slam the Big Door by John D. MacDonald

I have a later 50 cent copy. The blurb reads
"From the best-selling author of THE DROWNER,
THE PRICE OF MURDER and the
celebrated TRAVIS MCGEE series"

Another one in the Ed Gorman list of best non-Travis McGee JDM's, Slam the Big Door walks a line between being a crime novel and a drama at first and then veers entirely into the latter.  I was disappointed, hoping for more of the former but it nevertheless ended up being quite satisfying, with both the highs and lows of John D. MacDonald.

Mike Rodenska, reporter on leave, comes to his old army buddy Troy's place in an exclusive beach community in western Florida. His wife died recently of cancer and Troy and his new wife invited him down to just relax and heal.  We get all the great world-building and social critique that makes JDM so enjoyable. Here we have an enclave of long-time outsiders who now consider themselves local. They have their club and their cocktail parties and their gossip.  It takes a while, but we start to get hints that Troy and Mary's marriage is not doing that well and that Troy may be over his head in a big business deal.  There is a great setup here, when a group of local businessmen, including a super wealthy good ol' boy, meet and plan how to break up Troy's project and take it over for good.

At this point, I got quite excited, as I was expecting a story about a battle between Mike Rodenska, journalist with character from the North coming in to defend his friend, and these local semi-corrupt developers.  There was even some nice little investigating by Rodenska.  Then, all too quickly, he meets up with the good ol' boy, impresses him with his character and basically rescues the deal for his friend.  I was like, that was it?  Where is this book going to go?  Well it turned out to be much more a psychological study of the breakdown of his friend, who had cracked up once before.  There are some of the crazy period sexual politics, including the classic sexually irresistible temptation character (as seen in the great Clemmie), here personified by horsey-looking Jerranna.  When Troy gets with her, he either has to kill her or become a total alchoholic sex fiend and of course always chooses the latter, while she doesn't seem to care one way or the other as she is just in it for "the kicks".

So despite his friend coming down and saving his ass, it all goes to shit for Troy or rather he drives himself to shit, ultimately "Slamming the big door" on his own life. I guess ultimately this was about the damage the war did to him, but weirdly JDM seems to blame the women around him just as much.*  The trigger in the end that he uses to ultimately destroy his life is his flirtatious and amoral daughter-in-law.

Despite it not going the route I had hoped for, I did end up kind of enjoying it.  Yes, it meandered when it got into the weird relationship conversations and JDM moralizes a but much even for him about the youth of today with no morals, but it also had some great passages and awesome portrayals of sordid little places, like the depressing rental cabins.


*Below is the passage when Rodenska seeks out Jerranna after she shows up in Florida and Troy starts going back to here.  He finds her in a bar next to the seedy rental cabins.

She gulped the beer with automatic greed, her long thin throat working.  The years had coarsened her.  He had detected a certain sensitivity, a capacity for imagination, in the girl in New York.  But the years and the roads, the bars and the cars and the beds and the bottles --they all have flinty edges, and they are the cruel upholstery in the dark tunnel down which the soul rolls and tumbles until no more abrasion is possible, until the ultimate hardness is achieved.  So here she sat, having achieved the bland defensive heartiness of a ten-dollar whore. 

But there was more than that.  She had retained that unique sexual magnetism which had no basis in either face or figure.  It was a dark current generated in some unthinkably primitive source, a constant pressure which tugged the male mind into grubby yet shamefully enticing imaginings.  In the back alley of the mind of every man there is a small, black, greasy pool of evil, an unawakened capacity for foulness, a place of guilt.  She could walk through your house, past all your prides and glowing purposes, ignoring your display of awards for small victories, and take you out the back door and down the alley to the brink of the blackness you have learned to ignore, and point at it and smirk with an ancient wisdom and say, "See what we found?" 

If all men are alcoholics, she is the bottle.  If all men are compulsive gamblers, she is the gaming table.  If all men are suicides, she is the knife, the rope, the bullet.  In fair exchange for your soul, she offers self-disgust and avoidable repetition.

I mean it's half-nonsense, ultimately misogynist christian morality, but so much fun to read!

16. The Suicide Murders by Howard Engel

My wife found this nice hardcover first edition from 1980 at Chainon.  I doubt it is worth much but it is in really good condition.  I have a faint memory of having read a Benny Cooperman mystery before.  My mom may have passed it down to me.  Anyways, it looked like one of those page-turning 80s mysteries and as a bonus it took place in Canada.

Benny Cooperman is a sort of sad sack Jewish private detective who is barely making two ends meet on the odd divorce case, except that he seems to stumble upon big interesting cases at least once a book.  He grew up in and now works in Grantham, Ontario, which I think is a real place along the Toronto-Windsor corridor.  In this first book, he is hired by an attractive upperclass woman who thinks her husband is having an affair.  Cooperman quickly learns that his lying and absences are actually visits to a therapist.  He believes the case closed and is about to deliver the news to his client, when he learns that the husband, a wealthy developer, has just blown his brains out.  The cops treat it as an open and shut suicide but Cooperman, who had followed the man to a sporting goods store where he had bought a new 10-speed bicycle is skeptical.  He keeps digging around and uncovers a lot of dirt in this medium-sized Ontario town: city hall shenanigans, blackmail, old boys with sordid pasts.  As he digs, there are more deaths.

It never explodes and the mystery is never intriguing enough that I was dying to find out what happened, but the investigating is steady and interesting.  The locations are well described and believable and he manages to make what is possibly the most neutral, boring place on earth, Ontario, actually sound like it could have a real mystery in it, no mean feat.  He has a funny relationship with his parents as well.  This was very much an 80s mystery, with lots of light wisecracking (a bit too much in the beginning but it found a nice rhythm by the end) and the detective himself being a big character in the proceedings.  Enjoyable!

Addendum: Here is a nice obituary of Howard Engel, who died in July of 2019.  Had a stroke in 2001 where he lost the ability to read but could still write!  Man, that would be brutal.  Seems like a good guy.

15. Odd Man Out by F. L. Green

I can't remember where I found this but it was cheap or free and has been sitting on the far right of my on-deck shelf for quite a while now, because of its small size.  I was expecting a terse, noir thriller, possibly dated.  Instead I got a florid, wordy asymptotical meditation on life, death and Belfast during the post-war Troubles.  (Asymptotical is my term for books that never seem to end, the pages on the right get thinner and thinner but the ending seems infinitely far away.)

The book starts out in medias res, though the text was already heavy and spilling over with excessive clauses, adjectives and adverbs.  Four men pull up outside of a laundry mill, ready to execute a well-planned heist of its payroll.  This was somewhat promising, but right away we go into the getaway driver's head.  Okay, fine, it is a stressful job.  But the thoughts in his head are beyond stress.  He is on the verge of completely freaking out: "...his mind would fracture and admit impulsive, hysterical factors which were already advancing from indefinable sources in his spirit"  And this is on page 3!  I thought that maybe the getaway driver was particularily nervous, but then we get to the ring leader, Johnny, we learn that he is along time member and leader of The Organization and this heist is to get funding for their political work (terrorism for some, liberation for others).  He is freaking out even more!  It's like he is on acid.  Seriously, everything is described like a bizarre dream and he completely loses touch with reality.  It's really weird because this guy is an experienced pro.  His state is attributed to him having been holed up in an apartment for months, but soon I realized that everyone is like this in the book.  One person saying something to another person launches some metaphorical, metaphysical reaction in that other person's brain.  It's really weird.  I don't know if this is just the way Irish people write thrillers because they are so tragic and poetic or something.  The whole book could have been about a third as long as it actually was.

Just to give you an example of how practically every description in the book spins off into excess, here is one sentence from a paragraph (of which there are many) describing the activity of patrons in a bar near the waterfront:

At corners, they broke into shrill chatter; and parting, they sped off to dart into deserted entrances or to pour wildly into the gutters or the dank foundations of walls oozing with slime and guarding a hollow silence into which the incessant breathing roar of the city dropped occasionally as the wind veered.

So because Johnny is tripping balls, the heist goes sour and he kills a cashier in a struggle.  The driver of the getaway car freaks out and drives too fast, spilling wounded Johnny off the running board. The first half of the book is then the story of the three other heisters making it back to their hideout, the recriminations, the getaway and tightening police cordon.  The second half of the book is Johnny, who is basically almost dead but somehow stumbling from place to place, person to person.  In this part, Johnny is really a vehicle for all these other characters to reveal themselves.  The neutral Protestant women who try and heal him until their husbands come home, the underworld barman freaking out because of Johnny's presence in his bar, the painter who wants to create a masterpiece by capturing the look in Johnny's dying eyes. Johnny is basically dragged around from Belfast locale to Belfast locale meeting a bunch of characters.  Call it Weekend at Belfast's.  It's not uninteresting but everything is so heavy and wrought.  It really was a slog to get through to the end, which was more or less predictable.  I really don't see how they could have made an entertaining movie out of this.

Speaking of movies, I did have a moment of amazing synchronicity.  My wife and I were watching the trailer for this documentary about New York bookstores called The Booksellers.  Though it looked annoyingly precious and utterly NY-centric (so typically navel-gazing New York, a city with probably the worst used bookstore scene in North America makes a documentary celebrating it), there was one very brief scene of the kind of used book table that excites me and others of my ilk.  I paused it to take a closer look.  Zoom in and you will see Odd Man Out, one of the more legible titles!  How crazy is that.  I was about a third of the way through the book at the time.

14. Gateway by Frederick Pohl

I found this in the ever-fruitful free shelf on St-Viateur.  It was in the nice old-school paperback that I like and my father is a huge fan of the Space Merchants.  I have so many books on my on-deck shelf that I am more picky now about what I take home, but this one made the cut.  Later on Twitter, a person whose taste I respect had a picture of it and when I mentioned that I had just found it, she said it was one of her favourites and she had read it three times.

So I had sort of high hopes, and I had just finished Appleby's Other Story, which I enjoyed but also found it left me a bit wanting.  Unfortunately, Gateway left me even more wanting.  I guess this is post-new age (was written in 1977), but it still feels like it comes out of that American masculine semi-nerdy, inner and out exploring period.  I just found it really boring.  The book has two storylines, both following Rob Broadhead.  In the first thread, he is later in life a very wealthy playboy in some future earth where Manhattan is under a dome and seeing a computer therapist named Sigfrid.  The second thread is his younger self, when he wins the lottery that frees him from a life of food-mining to take his chances in Gateway.  The stories come together as we slowly learn what his great trauma was that he is resisting facing in therapy and as it actually happens on Gateway.

The Gateway concept is cool.  An asteroid is discovered not too far out in the solar system that was once inhabited by some technologically superior race that humans call the Heechee.  They have left almost nothing except hundreds of pre-programmed spaceships that go far out to various spots in space and then come back again. The trick is that the tech is so advanced, nobody knows where they will go nor for how long until they actually launch them.  You could go, find yourself in the middle of nowhere and come back.  You could go and keep going far past the duration of your life support systems and die.  You could go and have a horrible accident.  In most cases, the ships return with the crew dead or alive.  In the best situations, you come to planet where you find a usable Heechee artifact.  If this happens and you return alive, the Gateway Corporation will pay you a big rewards.  So it is the ultimate high-risk high-reward gamble.

As I say, it is a really cool concept.  For me, the way it was put in to use was just utterly unentertaining.  I am really not into therapy sessions in fiction in general.  Here it was especially trying as the protagonist is fighting the computer therapist the whole time.  It just seemed stupid.  I don't know, maybe in the '70s this kind of childish resistance with you finally breaking down and realizing some deep thing about yourself was the norm.  Even worse, one of the big things he realized was that he had been sexually aroused by a man and had hooked up with one during one of the trips from Gateway.  It was just like, dude, really, this is what you go to therapy for?

And then on Gateway itself, the whole plot was about his fear to actually commit to going on a trip and his relationship with one woman.  It went on and one with Broadhead saving his money and avoiding for as long as he could actually going out on a trip.  I get it that it would be scary as hell, but his whole raison d'etre was to get out of his hardscrabble existence.  And it just was not fun or interesting to read about him being scared.  So we finally get a cool trip only at the very end of the book.  It just took way too long to get there and when we did, the payoff, while sort of neat conceptually, did not justify all the build-up.

Also, the guy freaks out at one point and beats the woman up, knocking a tooth out.  But then later, they realize they are really in love and the big tragedy is because they are separated at the end because of the big trauma that went down on their trip together.  That was just a rotten little cherry on the top that made me thoroughly dislike this book. Going to read up on what they hype was.

13. Appleby's Other Story by Michael Innes

Michael Innes has been lurking around the periphery of my book reading for all my life, but I have never read him (nor have I read Hammond Innes, either for that matter).  I found this one on the free shelf up on St-Viateur (it's really been quite productive, that shelf).

I could see right away why his books are so ubiquitous.  He is an entertaining writer for fans of the educated British writing style.  It begins with Appleby, whom I guess is his detective in a long series of mysteries, driving with the local country Chief Constable to a country estate for a social visit.  The first few pages have references to classical poetry, latin quotations and deft observations of class and character, all in a rich vocabulary and indirect sentence structure.  There has to be a better word than indirect here.  This is the kind of book that you would not recommend to a reader for whom english was a second language.  Even for me, I had to reread many of the sentences to understand what he was trying to say.  It's fun, though, and quite clever.  There are a few really solid moments inside the ornate writing that are made even stronger because of the style of the writing.  Here, the detective is in the rather dingy pub where he initially had gotten surly service from the man at the bar.  After a fruitful conversation with one of the witnesses, he returns to the barman:

Appleby resolved to investigate.  He got to his feet and walked over to the bar.  A detached observer might have remarked in him a somewhat ominous gathering of authority as he moved.  The taciturn and discontented publican, who was disdainfully puddling glasses in an invisible sink of what was doubtless dirty water glanced at him with a new wariness as he approached.

I was a bit less pleased with the mystery itself.  The plot is that when they arrive, they find the lord of the manor shot dead in his study and a small house party of potential suspects, including a wayward son, a parasitical nephew, an over-efficient secretary, a dishonest London art dealer, a second wife and her lover, the murdered man's own mistress and finally a butler with a rough edge.  It's a nice setup but too much of the backstory is delayed simply because Appleby takes his time to talk to the witnesses.  It is a nice touch that he is retired and starts out trying to avoid getting involved and his expertise is thoroughly enjoyable.  The twist itself was also a bit convoluted, involving geography in the house that I never could have figured out through the reading (though this could have been my own lack of attention to detail).

Overall, though, I am glad to have read and been made aware of Innes' qualities.  I would like to find an earlier Appleby story when he was still on the force.

12. A Touch of Death by Charles Williams

Charles Williams is quietly but strongly lauded by fans of the pulp genre as being one of the better if not the best of the Gold Key authors.  His books are very hard to find.  Of course, Dark Carnival had this Hard Case reprint as well as at least one (maybe two, I can't remember now) other reprint in a larger format.  I kind of wished I had bought it after having read this one.  I am not ready to say he is the best or anything, but this was a really solid, efficient read with a great ending.

It starts in medias res, the way I like it.  Lee Scarborough, looking to sell his car, accidentally meets a sunbathing beauty at the back of the apartment complex.  Coincidentally, she too is looking to buy a car.  Or is she?  In the first few pages, we learn the Lee is an ex-college football star whose bum knee kept him out of the pros and is now getting down to his last dollar.  He picks up quickly that she is feeling him out for some other reason.  After the fake test drive, she gets down to business.  She has inside info about a missing businessman and what may have happened to the $120,000 with which he disappeared.

What starts out for Lee as a simple break & enter gets messy quick and gets messier and messier right up to the disastrous end.  What I particularly enjoyed about this book was that while the storyline was simple, the actual plot underneath it was somewhat complex and keeps you guessing until the end. And—despite that complexity—it never loses steam.  There is a lot of action and you have a nice rhythm of straight up action and then tension and questioning.  The tension in the last act is almost unbearable, with Scarborough and a fantastic femme fatale character holed up together and hiding in his apartment as the dragnet tightens and each doesn't know where the other stands.  Good stuff.

I think I must have purchased some early publisher's version.  My copy looks exactly the same as the image above, except the tagline reads "It Began As ...AND END AS A NIGHT" which is just weird and wrong.  The inside back cover has what looks like promotional copy and info for a book store to order it, so maybe it is some kind of advanced copy.  Otherwise it all looked pretty legit.  I was just thrown by that bizarre tagline.

Here is a much better and fuller review, if you don't mind spoilers and want to get a better sense of what makes this book so great without actually reading it.

11. The Coup: 1953, The CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations by Ervand Abrahamian

You know things are getting weird here at Olman's Fifty when not only am I reading two non-fiction books in a row, but one of them is actually a serious history book.  One of my best friends did his undergrad thesis on Iranian history and has an excellent shelf of Iranian history books. I've grown more and more interested in the mechanics of British colonialism as it comes up frequently in much of the fiction I read.  I was originally looking for a broad overview of Iranian history in the 19th and 20th centuries (and am still looking for one of Indian history), but when he handed me tome VI of the 7-part Cambridge History of Iran, that was a bit too daunting.  I went with this thinner, more focused book and I am glad I did.

I was completely ignorant of Iranian history leading up to the 1979 revolution.  This book deals specifically with an equally significant upheaval in Iran in the 20th century: the 1953 coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mossadeq who was seen (and still is by many) as the Mahatma Gandhi of Iran.  Mossadeq was working to separate Iranian civil government from the monarchy and more significantly negotiating to wrest control of Iran's oil production from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and to nationalize it.  The US and UK worked with various internal oppositions (worked with being a very loose term here) to organize a coup against Mossadeq and return power to the shah. 

Abrahamian has a very specific thesis, that this coup was not motivated by a fear of communist takeover of Iran by the Soviets, as was the accepted conventional wisdom (and the propaganda line of the US, UK and the oil companies) but rather by the motivation to maintain control of oil production in Iran.  He argues this very convincingly.  A side affect of this argument is also to contradict the media portrayals of Mossadeq as being an crazed ideologue whose inflexibility to any negotiating offers other than nationalizing oil was the real reason for the coup.  From the beginning, Abrahamian argues, the UK and AOIC would never accept total nationalization (meaning loss of control of oil production in Iran).  The U.S. was more flexible at first, but soon changed their mind over fears that Iranian nationalization would then encourage other countries being exploited at the time to follow suit.

At the very end of the book, Abrahamian also lays out how the coup set the stage for the Islamic revolution of 1979. By basically destroying any republican, secular opposition to the shah the only outlet for a very unsatisfied and exploited people (who had once looked to Mossadeq as their saviour) was to their spiritual leaders.

The biggest takeaway for me from this book was how deep and effective was the propaganda in the large media outlets.  Though I have a deep contempt for the New York Times, I always assumed they more or less tried to post some form of objective truth, while always couching it in the editorial safety that would never truly criticize.  At least in the case of the coup, they just printed outright lies, straight from the CIA.  As did the CBC, the Herald-Tribune and pretty much every other mainstream journalistic outlet  Utterly fabricated and racist interpretations of Iran's quest to control its own oil were standard fodder for editorials and articles. The hatred of Iran and its use as a scapegoat by the west has been going on for a long time.  Fake news, indeed.