15. The Croquet Player by H.G. Wells

I received this beautiful first edition hardcover as a birthday gift (from two good friends whose distilled and parsimoniously public creativity can be viewed here) at least two birthdays ago and I finally got around to reading it. It's one of Wells' later works, written in 1937 and is both an excellent tale of horror in the Lovecraft mould and a disturbing, though none too subtle, foreshadowing of the horrors of the Second World War that were soon to be upon Europe.

It's short, barely a novella.  The book begins with the narrator introducing himself, in the chapter entitled Introduces Himself.  The character is the cliché of the useless British upper class remittance man. He is a bachelor and expert croquet player who lives with his wealthy aunt and is realistically aware of his own shortcomings.  It is actually quite a funny portrayal.  The story begins with our narrator sitting on the terraces at Les Noupets, "nibbling a brioche and consuming a harmless vermouth and seltzer."  He notices a man at the table next to him furiously flipping through book after book.  They being to converse and it is the story of the other man that is the main narrative of the book.  He is a middle-class doctor, who due to some stress decided to open a practice out in the country.  He moves to Cainsmarsh, an isolated rural area near a large marsh.  He discovers the locals to be suffering under some general anxiety and fear, feelings which soon start to invade his own consciousness.  Violent crimes occur in Cainsmarsh at a much higher rate than would be expected.  People are excessively cruel to their animals.  The doctor becomes more and more unhinged, but decides to try to investigate, as is the duty of a rational man.

I'm not going to give away spoilers.  There are themes here we find in some of Wells earlier work about man and his relationship to the beast of the wild.  The Croquet Player, though, is more explicitly horror in its stylings, actually quite creepy.  I always love Wells' english and reading this book reminds me that I need to read him more.  He does a great job of describing the region of Cainsmarsh and the phenomenon that is happening there.  I'll give a slight spoiler and say that the thematic undertone, that man's beastly side is returning and threatens to rip civilization apart, is done with too heavy a hand in the end, though perhaps given how close Britain was to the dawn of war, subtlety was not really an appropriate approach at that time.

You should read this book for yourself.  It's in the public domain and you can find it here.

I'll give you a piece of Wells' great prose to whet your appetite:

He was soon launched upon the wildest diatribe. He was transfigured by an anger that shook his feeble frame. He had fixed upon the local archæologists and naturalists as the chief objective for his tirade, but mixed up with that in the oddest and most illogical way was his detestation of the high-church practices that had been introduced by the new man at Marsh Havering. Just when this Evil was being released and rising like an exhalation from the earth, when the one supreme need of the time was religion straight and stern—'STRAIGHT AND STERN,' he repeated and shook his fingers in my face—this man must come with his vestments and images and music and mummery!

14. The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner

John Brunner has long been on my list of sci-fi authors to read.  I found a nice hardcover book club edition with this cover on it at one of my two (!) local english used bookstores.  I suspect that this was perhaps not the perfect choice of a Brunner novel to read.  It has some cool ideas and the beginning in particular was enjoyably disorienting, but it gets bogged down in philosophical conjectures without having built up a convincing enough world to make them interesting.  It takes place in the not too distant future in a semi-dystopian North American society where everyone has a unique ID and people's identities are based on the data about them.  Sounds topical, doesn't it?  It is and isn't because Brunner's prediction of the size and nature of external data was way off (a massive worm program that dominates the network is a million bits long for instance.  One can't fault him for this, as it was written in the early '70s and there are some concepts that he totally nailed (the worm for instance). 

The main character is a genius who escaped from an elite university and now switches from life to life by changing his identity number.  He lives in a state of fear, constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities that he fears are searching for him.  This part of the book is quite cool.  It is interspersed with future scenes of him being interrogated, which lets the reader know that he does indeed get caught.  The narrative gets going when he takes the role of a corporate analyst and meets the free-spirited daughter of one of his colleagues.  She guesses that he is not who he says he is and this is the catalyst that sets the two of them on the run.

It sounds pretty straightforward, but there are too many socio-philosophical digressions.  Much of their discussion is based on concepts put forth in the book which aren't well-grounded enough in the actual story, so you kind of don't really care.  You can read the political subtext in it as well, but it's Brunner extrapolating what a post-Nixonian world would look like 50 years from when he wrote it.  It all gets a bit obscure.  Then in the last third of the book, the scope suddenly becomes quite massive, with the hero basically taking down the entire system. It just didn't hold together well for me.

So an interesting book with some neat concepts, but not a great story.  Anyone have a better Brunner book to recommend?

13: Case File: FBI by The Gordons

Not my copy (need a new scanner), but the same version, great cover.

Once again, I must pat myself on the back for my instinct in finding previously unknown books that I end up really liking.  I don't know how long this run will last and how painful it will be when it ends, but I am on a damned impressive streak, if I do say so myself!

I found Case File: FBI in a bunch of post-move trash in an alley last summer.  I was a bit skeptical, but the cover was just too cool (when I see an image like that it makes me question whether I truly made the right choices in my own life; I think I would have thrived kicking down doors in a suit).  The book itself turns out to be as cool, a tough, taut, well-written procedural that captures the day-to-day of the life of a Chicago FBI office as well as delivering a gripping, interlocking crime narrative.

Check out this prose:

To Rip it was like a thousand other nights.  Yet always the feeling of the first time possessed him, not of foreboding, nor apprehension, but the strange sensation of wondering what was behind the door they soon would walk through.  It was never the same twice, and yet it was always the same.  People talked, words came spilling out, and by those words, rather than by the tommy guns or the .38s, killers were captured. Words chased men, harried them, cornered them, broke their spirits, sent them to the chair.

That is good stuff!

There are three storylines going on here and it takes a while to get all the people organized in your head.  They eventually come together to form a mostly coherent whole, but they begin as separate cases. The book starts with two officers going to investiage an anonymous tip and one of them getting shot and killed.  The other officer, the protagonist John Riply (or Rip) then has to go through his dead partner's active files to figure out which case the tip was connected to. The first case, and the emotional through-line of the book, is about a young widow who starts receiving extortion letters.  They want the $10,000 she inherited from her husband's death in exchange for her daughter's safety.  Nasty stuff and convincingly portrayed.  The authors spend a lot of time on the woman's personal life and it is an interesting portrayal of the pressures on a single woman in that period.  The second case is a fugitive on the run and the third is a car theft ring.

There is some tough stuff in this book and I am reminded once again that things from back in the day could be pretty darned hard, even if we think of it as a more innocent time.  It also glosses over the political element of the FBI, with only a passing mention at the beginning of communist infiltrators.  This book was written at the beginning of the Red scare and what the FBI were doing in real life was far from the heroic, selfless public duty that is so appealingly portrayed here.

A bit of internet research tells me that The Gordons were a husband and wife writing team, Gordon and Mildred Gordon, who wrote novels and screenplays.  Case File: FBI became a movie called Down Three Dark Streets which I shall have to look out for.

12. Accident by Design by E. C. R. Lorac

Holy crap, I read a book!

Found this one at a used record store near my house that I have walked by a thousand times but never gone into.  It's the kind of place that I haunted in my high school and college years but have long since grown bored with. However, something drew me in on that day and it turned out that they had a big, messy pile of old pulp books in the back corner.  They were in terrible condition and overpriced ($5 each), but I spent some time going through them (and organizing them) and picked out this one.  Despite having two other books half-read (since March!), I jumped into it and found it engaging enough that I made it to the end.

In fact, Accident by Design was honestly a really well done classic British mystery.  I was quite surprised, expecting something subpar and generic.  It was well-written, with interesting characters and some great descriptions of the British countryside and the work done on a tenant farm.  The story is about a family estate in the early '50s.  The patriarch lies in bed near death, but still quite aware.  His eldest son is a feckless alchoholic with a middle-class (bad), Australian (worse) wife who hates pretty much everyone his father employed and has threatened to make a clean sweep when he takes over.  When they both die in a car accident, too many people benefit and this alerts the local constabulary (who are very well depicted in the best British tradition of the no-nonsense, practical, reasonable police force).  When their surviving son dies a few days later, by seemingly eating some poisonous berries, the game is truly afoot.  It's a solid, enjoyable read that spoke particularly to me because of the British countryside angle.  There are some great walks and agricultural discussions.  The police as well are just awesome in the way their supervisor listens to their hunches and lets them follow their instincts, within reason.  Very satisfying.

I learned later that E. C. R. Lorac is the pseudonym for Edith Caroline Rivett whose works are very well-respected (she is considered a prime representative of the golden age of British mysteries) and whose books are even collectible!  (Though I doubt this paperback is worth anything, given its state.)  I will definitely be keeping an eye open for her in the future.  And let's hope this kickstarts my reading for 2013, because I gots some catching up to do!

11. The 10th Victim by Robert Sheckley

I did a bit of research and learned that this book is an adaptation by Robert Sheckley of the Italian movie that was in turn an adaptation of Sheckley's short story from Galaxy magazine called The Seventh Victim.  I'm curious to find the original and read it just to see how much it changed and if the movie (which was highly stylized, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress) influenced him at all.

It's a great setting: the near future where war has been eliminated in favour of an ongoing, global game of voluntary human hunt.  The rules are simple.  You offer yourself up and then you have a total of 10 kills to succeed, 5 as the Hunter and 5 as the Victim. It's totally legal as long as you don't injure any non-participants.  It is all televised and a major part of the culture.  If you do make it to 10 kills, you become a high-status person in your community.  The book begins with a few example kills and then focuses on two people, both heading to their tenth kill.  Catherine Meredith is a New York executive with a big media organization behind her.  Marcello Polletti is a feckless middle-aged Italian man who doesn't seem to care about the hunt at all.

When I was an adolescent, I got into Killer big-time.  It was a game where you played assassins trying to take out your friends with dart guns, squirt guns, bombs that were notes etc.  It was a brief phenomenon in the '80s, I guess on college campuses.  We lived in a small town and were only like 12 or 13 but we had some pretty good games, including one that took place in the woods behind my house (with my uptight neighbour freaking out about us making noise and screaming into the woods that there was a cougar sighting earlier that day).  This book was a huge influence on the original game.  This is why it has been on my list for so long.

However, the tone of the book is actually quite light, almost sardonic, which was far from the way I as an intense, nerdy 12-year old boy thought about how assassination should go down.  I'm quite glad I didn't read it back then, as I wouldn't have gotten it and probably been kind of annoyed and disappointed.  Today, I find it a fun read, doing some nice satire of the media and our culture of violence.  The Marcello character is quite funny.  It's just all a bit light and kind of goes nowhere in the end.  But I guess that is not too surprising given that it really was just a short story.  There are two sequels.  I am at least curious to know how Sheckley followed this story up.

10. Death of a Citizen by Donald Hamilton

Damn skippy I own this.

I bought this paperback at the inestimable Kayo Books in San Francisco.  I have mixed feelings about Donald Hamilton and picked this one up because of a combination of the date, the price and the cool cover.  It turns out (and I thank the inestimable Nick Jones of Existential Ennui for making me aware of this) that this was the first Matt Helm book.  So that was quite exciting. Happily, the book itself is great and lives up to its reputation as a hard-boiled spy classic.

It's an awesome title and the book explores the theme well.  The protagonist is successful fiction writer (Westerns) Matt Helm, living a very normal, pleasant life in Santa Fe with his lovely family.  He is almost a decade out of his war career, where he was part of a ruthless top secret Allied spy/commando force.  To everyone around him now, he had a fairly boring war, though he did get badly injured.  The book opens in medias res (and really well done in media res as well) at a party where he sees a beautiful young woman who was his colleague and lover back in WWII.  Her presence quickly brings back memories and then more than memories as he gets tangled up in whatever the hell she is up to here.  It's a great ride and the ending is particularly intense and tough and satisfying.  I'm kind of glad this isn't the first Matt Helm book I've read and that I was aware that the whole series is not able to maintain the hardness of this one.  Otherwise I might have been in for a great letdown. Coming to Death of a Citizen at this phase in my reading was most rewarding.  Get your hands on this, citizen.

9. Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller

He looks like the principal from Ferris Bueller's day off.

I knew the Scientology was a cult, but I had never really been clear on how it got from L. Ron Hubbard being a science fiction writer to the place it is today.  I can not even remember how I stumbled onto Bare-Faced Messiah. It was simply a link that I followed on my ipad and because it held my interest, I ended up reading the entire thing online.  I guess that it can be considered my first e-book read, though it was actually a straight-up HTML site with white text on black.  The U.S.'s retarded copyright laws allowed the psychos at the Church of Scientology to block its publication there, but thanks to the internet, it is available online.  You can find it here:

http://www.xenu.net/archive/books/bfm/bfmconte.htm

In case you have any doubt about its validity as a biography of L. Ron Hubbard, know that the book was published to favourable reviews in the rest of the world and that it is generally considered to be the definitive work on the man.  Miller is a respected journalist who did other biographies.  He went through incredible harassment and persecution during and after the work on this book. When you read the story of what the church did to try and defame him and prevent the book from coming out, you really have to wonder how they are allowed to exist at all. They are a total cult operating outside the law of the countries they are in.  Germany was right to shut them down.  The U.S. policy towards Scientology is just insane.  Not only are they not prosecuting them for their crimes, but they actually grant them religious tax status, so they pay no taxes.  The IRS was basically blackmailed into this position to avoid further legal and extra-legal harassment from Scientology.  It's astounding.

But I'll let others fight the fight against these losers.  Let's get to the book at hand, which really is a fascinating study of an individual and a look into a time and place when a cult like this could be able to gain such a  powerful foothold.  The first half of the book is a thoroughly documented tracing of L. Ron Hubbard's early years, constantly comparing the reality to the fiction he and the church created around him. He was basically an imaginative, unfocused young man from the Pacific Northwest who got to do a bit of travelling because of his dad's job with the army.  He was also an extraordinary egomaniac who began embellishing his own life story at a very early age.  So a berth on a merchant marine to Guam with his mother to go visit his dad turns into a rollicking adventure where he performs all these outsized deeds.  His interest in gliding and participation in some gliding clubs becomes him being a record-breaking pilot and general daredevil.  His short-lived role as a pilot of a submarine in WWII where he did a few practice runs and was demoted for taking action against something only he saw on the radar becomes a heroic destruction of the only known instance of Japanese u-boats in US water and him being moved to a top-secret intelligence department.

To his credit, he was able to embellish his life story because he himself was a wildly imaginative and highly prolific writer (though nowhere near as prolific as he and the church claim today).  He was a successful contributor to the science fiction magazines of the golden age and a part of that general scene on and off in New York.

The middle part of the book, about him as a young adult, you can see that what was a penchance for exaggeration starts to take a more serious turn.  He demonstrates all the symptoms of a manic-depressive personality, though fortunately for him, he seems to have spent more of his time in a manic state.  His pulpish yarns do not make him enough money and also don't seem to bring him the kind of respect he demands.  So he starts working on longer, more serious works.  This is where the craziness starts.  Fortunately for Hubbard, his kind of craziness, plus his manic drive to succeed combined to make a system of living that seemed to resonate with people at this time.  I'm really cutting things short, but basically he started these teaching centers, first with Dianetics and then with the more "refined" Scientology.  It exploded and he ended up making tons of money and gathering tons of followers.  As Scientology grew, so did his paranoia and megalomania.  By the end, Hubbard was floating around the ocean on a restored cruise ship, surrounded by an elite team of prepubescent blonde girls who communicated his every command in his exact tone of voice and temper while carrying out complex plots of revenge on defectors.  This is some Kim Jong-Il level shit here.  Scientology has been in the media today a lot.  Anything you might think sounds a little crazy to be true is actually true and it started with L. Ron. The Sea Org, which originated with his cruise ship crew and those psychotic little girls is still the source of the inner elite and extreme weirdness (though now it is land-based) and it is where the current leader, David Miscavige, came from.  These people are completely fucking bonkers and everyone who follows them is bonkers themselves or else a victim who was sucked in against their will.  It's a fucking scary cult with billions of dollars.

And this is where the book disappoints. It's a great factual read of Hubbard's life and how Scientology came to be.  But it does not attempt to understand how it possibly could have succeeded so well.We all know that most people are stupid and gullible and want to be led, but it's rare that some new form of organized religion is able to spring into being in the modern era from the mind of one charismatic, manic loony and turn into a worldwide phenomenon so powerful that it can blackmail the IRS and that its leader can make his wife simply disappear without any authorities asking any questions.  I have my own ideas why it worked so well, but I would like to have had more analysis and data to really think it through.  There is none of that in Bare-Faced Messiah.

Nonetheless, a thoroughly enjoyable, fascinating sometimes infuriating read about one of the twentieth century's great cult leaders.  I recommend it.

8. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin

Another near-masterpiece of science fiction and political speculation, here LeGuin examines two opposing ideals that we know all too well here on earth: the egalitarian collective society versus the hierarchical individualistic society.  I know, it sounds kind of boring, but in LeGuin's expert hands we get a compelling, moving story about the only man who had the opportunity to live in both worlds.  The setting is the planet Urras, similar geographically to earth and its habitable but resource-limited moon, Anarres.  Centuries past, a group of rebels broke off from the society of Urras and instead of causing a civil war, were allowed to go to Urras, where they created a functioning anarchic society.  Both societies mutually decide to break off all contact, except for one rocket ship that goes back and forth with basic trade goods and minimal communications.

Shevek, a physicist on Anarres, has succeeded in getting his theories put on that rocket ship and they are so groundbreaking that they garner him an invitation to Urras.  The beginning of the book is him getting on that rocket and leaving everything he knows behind.  The narrative then breaks off into two threads.  One traces his experiences on this vastly different world (the material wealth alone is mind-blowing, but Urras also has mammals and rich geographical diversity) as he begins to conflict with its political realities; the other thread goes back in time to his own upbringing and the conflicts he faces on hishome planet against its own hidden political rigidity.

Both stories are equally engaging, though it is the present one on Urras (the wealthy planet) that really grabs the reader's attention at first. It reminds somewhat of The Man Who Fell to Earth, though Shevek is not here to plead for anything other than increased communication between the two worlds.  He enters this wealthy place a hero, but soon learns that he is in the proverbial gilded cage.  The government of the host nation (and the wealthiest one on the planet) wants his knowledge as it may be the key to instant inter-galactic communication, thus giving them a huge advantage with the other worlds they have just started to meet.  Shevek tries his best to navigate the choppy waters of this highly social world and badly fails in the book's turning point.

Here the origin story starts to get more interesting.  We are feeling critical of Urras, but we soon see that Anarres has problems of its own.  Shevek's mentor, who controls access to the rocket ship, is jealous and close-minded.  When it becomes known that Shevek may be actually going to Urras, political adversaries mount an aggressive attack against him and his clique.

The ending of the book is not explosive, though it threatens to be.  Rather, LeGuin zooms out and we suddenly see these two worlds from a new perspective and it is quite enlightening, both for the way we think about what we read and for the way we think about our own world.

It's quite easy to see how these two worlds can be seen as communist Russia and the capitalist west.  The parrallel doesn't quite work, because LeGuin is examining these political ideals more abstractly.  Divorced from the realities of our earth, she can push both philosophies to different outcomes - but especially the collectivist one, which works much better here.  It is cool to see how a collectivist, anarchist society could actually work, what the pros and cons would be, especially given significant material constraints.  While I was reading it, I was thinking to myself that I would be pretty unhappy to not have beautiful oceans and mountains and to only eat sweet food once or twice a year.  But as you read on, she does a pretty convincing job of making the positive human elements of this society, the true freedom to pursue what you want while being deeply connected to the greater community, very appealling. 

7. Deadly Edge by Richard Stark

Now we're talking.  The University of Chicago Press edition of Deadly Edge has a great introduction to Deadly Edge, by Charles Ardai, where he points out how the Parker series softens slightly with the four books ending in "Score" and then kicks into a darker, more intense gear with Deadly Edge and the three that follow it (Slayground, Plunder Squad and Butcher's Moon).  He also points out that for many Parker fans one of those 4 is their favourite.  That was definitely the case with me, with Slayground being my favourite (and the first one I read).  With this third go-around, though, I am holding out on naming a favourite until I am finished. Currently, The Jugger is in first place.

But boy does Deadly Edge make a run for the title!  First of all, it starts out with my favourite heist, the robbery of the ticket offices of a stadium during a rock concert.  The idea is just cool in and of itself, but it is also so well realized. Only Westlake could so effectively put together the constant throbbing of the 60's psychedelic rock, the decaying industrial architecture and the tense execution of this heist.  He portrays the side characters so well (the pessimistic heister and the angry security guard) which adds to the tension and the richness of the situation.  Finally, the entire thing is founded on the value of skilled physical labour, with the opening being entirely focused on the logistical details of cutting into and through a stadium roof.  Just so good.  This is Westlake the master craftsman writing about other master craftsmen, both parties at the very top of their games.

And this is only the beginning. Westlake is not satisfied with this perfectly constructed music box.  He needs to jam his pen right into the middle of the mechanism.  In doing so, he also demonstrates that he is more than just a master crafstmen.  He is also a profoundly observant social critic and her he turns his eye to the idealism of the 60s and its sordid demise.  Deadly Edge is Donald Westlake's Altamont.  It takes the form of the two "hippie" characters, one a sexless psychopath wearing fringed leather and talking about "taking it easy", the other an lsd-blasted man-child as prone to glee as to savagery.  They have discovered Parker's heist and are tracking down the participants one by one, torturing each and taking their money.  Their insanity and ruthlessness trumps the skills of the more experienced criminals (there is an interesting generation gap here as well).  Until they get to Parker of course.

There is a lot of other good stuff to mention as well in Deadly Edge  We get to see Claire on her own again and this time she is not quite as helpless.  She shows her inner toughness and smarts in parrying with the intruders long enough for Parker to get back. There is also a horror element here, reminiscent of the grindhouse movies of the same period (Last House on the Left in particular comes to mind).  Finally, despite the utter depravity of the hippie thugs and the reader's desire for Parker to completely fuck them up, Westlake still portrays their relationship with some humanity.  Their ending does not deliver easy satisfaction for the reader.  Westlake was too realistic for that.

Another Parker tour de force.  I'm into the home stretch here.  Next up, the first Parker I ever read and possibly my favourite:  Slayground.  Going to be hard to wait.

Administrative Interlude: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Comments

I just discovered this morning a slew of fantastic comments that I had never approved!  For some reason, Google decided that blogger did not actually want to alert me when I had a new comment (a policy change on which I was not consulted), so they have been piling up there since July of 2012.  My apologies to everyone if you felt snubbed!  Man, there are some good comments there as well.  I will respond to each one on the post in question and pray that you will somehow get alerted.  In any case, my thanks and appreciation to all of you who have been reading and especially to those who have given me some feedback.  You know how it works in this blogger game.

Also, I know I've been a bit lax so far in 2013, but my reading is ongoing.  I actually have a bit of a back-up of posts to write but will start to hack away at them.  Appropriately, one of the comments was "More blogging, less reading!".  From my mother, natch!

Keep turning those pages, people!

Oh and since I have you, let me throw out a recommendation for End of Watch, a 2012 southside LA cop movie.  It's not a masterpiece and the plot when it finally happens kind of gets in the way, but the procedural moments of which there are plenty are really fantastic, a nice mix of crazy situations and rich engaging characters, especially the two cops.  It's kind of like Cops that old television show scripted by Pelecanos on a cocaine binge.

6. All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman

All My Sins Remembered shares similar themes to the only other Joe Haldeman book I've read (and his most well known), The Forever War:  war and time and how they effect the individual.  In this book, the protagonist is a Prime Operator, an elite agent for a universal peacekeeping force.  He is sent from civilization to civilization disguised as a local with plastiflesh and a personality overlay (which only allows his true personality to come through in moments of crisis).  The book is made up of several separate episodes, interspersed with debriefings, without much of a thread beyond the main character to tie it all together.  Two of the chapters were actually stand-alone short stories in Galaxy magazine. I don't know if he always intended them to be part of a larger narrative or if he went back and stitched them together to get a book.  It holds together fairly well, but more because the concept is cool and the episodes are each quite interesting on their own.  The protagonist's fate feels a bit forced precisely because his internal arc only really moves forward in the debriefing sessions and not in the episodes.  The things that affect him happen in missions that he only refers to and not ones you read about.  The parallel to the Vietnam war and its effect on US soldiers is strong here and I suspect that's what Haldeman was going for.  He doesn't quite get there, but it is still an enjoyable read.

5. The Magician's Wife by James M. Cain

I'm starting to question James M. Cain's reputation.  This is the second book of his that I have read and while I enjoyed the reading, I found it to be seriously flawed.  I did read some other reviews that considered this part of his lesser, later work so I will withhold such a general judgement for now.  But I am wary.  The reason is that the same flaw that bothered me about Masquerade is the one that makes The Magician's Wife so preposterous: a rigidity and blindness in his approach to sexuality that seems extremely dated.  Cain seems hampered by a morality that he himself can't seem to see.  So instead of talking around sex like many of his contemporaries did, he hides from it all the while that it is the main mechanism that is driving his storyline forward.  It makes for a disconnect for the reader.  You are constantly questioning why the main character is behaving the way he is.

The plot here is quite compelling.  Clay Lockwood is a super succesful meat salesman.  Now I love any book that takes the time to explain the details of a real job and the mechanisms behind this and Cain really does this here.  We learn about Clay's role in the early days of food industrialization, selling pre-packaged meat products to high-end restaurants.  It's fascinating to read about how he has to explain to experienced chefs that they only need to throw the foil packet in boiling water for one minute before the meat is ready.  This is considered the new haute cuisine!  So I was quite psyched when the book started.  In touring one of his major clients, he meets a super-hot hostess, Sally Alexis, who demonstrates impressive efficiency in the way she runs the restaurant.  Circumstances bring them together again and they are clearly attracted to each other.  Unfortunately, she is married.  To a magician!  Not only that, but the magician comes from a wealthy family and they have a young son together.  Clay and Sally fall in love.  She is unhappy with the magician.  He is a jerk.  But she refuses to leave him because in doing so she will cut off her son's chance at inheriting his father's money (currently also blocked by her crabby mother-in-law).  As the book progresses, she reveals herself to be more and more of a psycho, possibly murdering the mother-in-law and then pushing Clay more and more to help her murder her husband.

It's a classic set-up.  The problem is that none of it really rings true.  Clay seems like a rational, focused dude and Sally shows herself to be completely psycho early on. She spazzes out and breaks all kinds of fancy art in his sweet penthouse apartment.  Why would he bother with her?  There is nothing in his character that explains why he would stick with this woman. He is a super eligible bachelor with a fine future.  Furthermore, even if her son would lose his inheritance, Clay is very well off and on his way to becoming even more succesful (he gets promoted in the course of the book and is being groomed to run the whole company).  He could easily support Sally and her son with a wealthy lifestyle.  The only thing that holds it all together is that they had sexual intercourse and that now he is somehow destined to be stuck with her.  Except that Cain never tells us this and never dives into it in any interesting way.  It's just assumed that it's the 50s, if you bone some chick you are going to go all crazy and make a bunch of stupid decisions that will ruin your life because you have to whatever she wants.  It's so weird.  So while I'm reading it, I'm quite enjoying all the situations and the characters but I'm not believing any of it and Clay just comes off like the giantest chump ever (and there are a lot of them).

So ultimately a failure, but not a painful one for the reader.  Also, the paperback edition I found is quite lovely.

4. The Black Ice Score by Richard Stark

The Black Ice Score is my least favourite of the Parker novels (though this may change with my second reading of the second run).  I believe I am not alone in this.  It's actually a pretty cool story, but the tone is just off.  I feel like Westlake was, for once, a bit mixed in his head about which identity was writing this one. It has hints of Dortmunder in it (the New York location, the cast of different gangs, the slight goofiness).  More strongly, it feels like it came about when Westlake was really getting into Africa as a theme (which would later come out more fully realized in Kahawa and to some extent Humans).  He seems more interested in the nation of Dhaba than in Parker.  We see Parker through their eyes, rather than his own.

But what really knocks this one down a peg for me is all the grinning.  One character in particular, who actually is somewhat of a hardcase (though in a civilized, educated exterior) is constantly grinning.  It just doesn't fit a Parker book in general and in some moments seems utterly out of place.  I hate to say it, but it also has a disturbing stereotypical edge to it, the grinning African with his big white teeth.  Finally the white South Africans are the lameos here and should really get their shit handed to them Parker style.  They get off way too easy for pulling a gun on Parker in his hotel room, kidnapping his woman and generally acting smugly superior.  I note that this is the second book in a row where Parker seems a bit restrained.  Was Westlake working through some issues of his own?  These were written in 1969 and 1970, as the tide started to turn on the hippie movement and America began to truly question itself.  Perhaps Westlake too was demonstrating some thematic doubt with the purity that is Parker.  Or perhaps he is just storing the ass-kicking up in order that he will have plenty to unleash in the wave that comes in the following books.

Not to say that there isn't a lot good in The Black Ice Score.  The character of Hoskins as the international criminal sleazeball is well-realized and his role in the job going sour is pretty classic. The job itself is quite cool, with an intricate setting and plan.  And we get to see a bit more about Claire, who, while remaining a bit of a cypher also demonstrates an inner strength that helps the reader start to understand why Parker might stick around.  The characters' names are, as usual with Westlake, absolutely superlative, somehow both very realistic and yet not mundane.

3. The Stingaree by Max Brand

This was part of my alley way find.  I don't know much about Max Brand, but I think he was a popular western writer, as the cover of this book has its own MB logo on it.  What was neat about The Stingaree is that it is a Northern Western, taking place somewhere in a small northern town in Canada.  The protagonist is a young orphan boy who is both a local terror and troublemaker, but also an adoptee, loved by the entire town.  He lives a rough and tumble life, learning all the skills of the outdoors from local outdoorsmen and Indians while also leading a gang of youths that control one side of the town and battle the gang from the other side.  One day, while in the forest trying to train a half-wild wolf-dog, he stumbles upon an out-of-towner, an impressive man with a remarkable gun accuracy, who appears to have walked from the south.

The boy becomes his ambassador to the town and the reader soons learns that this man has a reputation and a mission.  He is the infamous but honourable criminal, the Stingaree, who has come north to avenge the murder of his partner by one of the more respectable citizens of the town.  The boy is put in a difficult ethical position and forced to make difficult decisions.  He must choose between his own ideals and the people he respects in the town, while also trying to figure out what those things are.  The theme of adulthood and identity are forefront in the book.  There is lots of narrative, there is also a lot of introspection.  It's an interesting stew with a mix of flavours.

The last third of the book veers into a different rhtyhm, as the Stingaree, the boy and his Indian ally make a journey even farther to the north, pursued by the RCMP.  This is a long slow survival chase and puts to the test the friendship between the boy and the Stingaree.

An enjoyable read.

2. The Sour Lemon Score by Richard Stark

[This review is intended for people who have already read the book.  It's not that there are a lot of explicit spoilers, but I come to some (probably facile) conclusions that are only possibly interesting if you have read the book.  As always, if you haven't read The Sour Lemon Score yet, I can only assume that it is because you are still working your way up to it.  So get cracking!]

I always used to think of The Sour Lemon Score as one of the more archetypical Parker books.  It has the classic structure of heist gone wrong and Parker dealing with the aftermath.  It has no links to any of the cross-book storylines.  Finally, it has The something something Score title.  On this, my third go-through of the series, I am more of the mind that there are no archetypical Parker books.  Each one has its own flavour and style that make it unique.  Upon this re-read, I have learned that while the beginning follows close to what might be considered the Parker formula, it quickly becomes a very different book.  The majority of the storyline is devoted to a double manhunt with a lot of investigation:  Parker trying to find the dude who betrayed the heist while that dude hunts Parker down to eliminate the last betrayee.

Things get complicated, of course and Parker interacts with a wide range of individuals that keep the book interesting.  For me, I find The Sour Lemon Score a bit dissatisfying. It's not that it isn't a good book.  It has the usual rich and fun writing ("Uhl was still as docile as a lobotomized monk"), a couple of neat dips into the straight end of the pool (it's always interesting when Parker enters into the non-criminal world) and a surprisingly deep look into the character of Parker himself and his ethical limits.  It's just that it starts off with such a bang with the heist and then the awesome action of the betrayal (Parker jumping out of the barn window one bullet ahead of his life is just so excellent) that I get all revved up.  I'm so fucking angry with George Uhl and I want Parker to find him and punish him.  The rest of the book holds that tension but adds complexity to it so that it becomes harder and harder to release it.  By the end, when Parker makes the moral choice that he does, you realize that you aren't going to get that simple satisfaction and it's a bit of a letdown.

Thinking about it, I realize that the book could be read as Parker's failure.  He ends up with no cash in a lot of them, but somehow it feels like he tries really hard and is constantly questioning himself as he is doing so.  He ends up with nothing and in a position where he has to make what is perhaps the less efficient moral decision.  It's kind of depressing.  Yet it still adheres to Parker's realism and cold objectivity regarding life and himself.  He knows it as much as the reader does.

1. Casca: The Legionnaire #11 by Barry Sadler

I literally found this book in an alley, along with several other minor little treasures.  The contents of what appeared to be someone's apartment  were strewn about an alley and my eye flashed on a beat-up paperback sticking out of a plastic bag.  I couldn't resist and ended up finding a nice little stash of books from the 60s through the early 80s.  Don't know if somebody had moved out or passed away, but I couldn't let these books go to the dump.

Casca is a fairly well-known and appreciated series among fans of the manly military series books.  It's the story of a legionnaire responsible for putting Jesus on the cross who is then cursed to spend the rest of time until the Rapture being a soldier.  He is effectively immortal and follows history going from war to war.  #11 starts out with him as a Nazi soldier, fleeing the Russian advance at the end of WWII.  He makes his way to the French Foreign Legion and is sent over to Indochina to help stave off the Viet Cong resistance to French colonial rule.

I'm not a big fan of war fiction.  There is often a slightly disturbing pornographic element in it that makes me think of certain kids in high school that I didn't really want to hang around with.  I also find it kind of boring.  Of all the wars, I'd say it is Vietnam that I find the most boring and disturbing when portrayed fictionally.  So I had a bit of a slog at certain points getting through this book.  It wasn't extremely pornie when it came to the guns and violence (less so than the Bruno Rossi books for instance), but at the same time there isn't really a whole lot to care about character-wise.  The coolest part for me was when Casca does actually get killed.  It is about halfway through the book and up until that point there was no explanation of his supernatural status, just a few oblique references to his scarred body and intense, deathly stare.  The description of his resurrection after being shot down in a swamp in Vietnam was compelling and intense.  I got into that part. 

I think if you like this sort of thing, the Casca books deserve their reputation and you should check them out.  It's not my cup of tea, so I am glad I read this one and know how the series works, but that will be it for me.

2012 Year-end wrap up

This wrap-up is actually being written February 6, 2013.  My extreme slow-down in reading that characterized the second half of 2012 continued on into the new year and I have had a hell of a time getting focused and getting reading and writing.

Despite the second half collapse, one has to consider 2012 another 50 books victory for Olman.  I think I sensed troubled waters ahead early in the year and cranked out as much as I could.  I also had the advantage of a 3-month secondment in San Francisco with a long commute and not much of a social or home life (and a mother making me dinner almost every night).  But that all ended when I came back to Montreal in July and decided that I wanted to live life rather than read about it.  On top of that, work got really busy and I sucessfully reproduced (with a not insignificant contribution from my wife on that score).  Thus you have the graph below:

Not something I would want to take to potential investors looking to buy into a 50-book blog for 2013!  Still, 67 books is my 3rd highest total since I started in 2005.  Even more important, since I started, I am now averaging over 50 books a year (52.25 to be precise) which was my real goal.  Now I just have to keep that going.

My highlight for 2012 was the discovery of Ursula K. Leguin.  She basically kicks ass at every level a nerdy reader like me could want (great writer, genre, awesome personal politics and just super cool all around) and on top of it there is the bonus that she is a female, which whittles away ever so slightly at my hyper-masculine reading habits.

Not sure what 2013 will bring.  My on-deck shelf is sagging once again.  I am dedicated to cutting into that.  Theme-wise, I have no special goals.  I guess just consistency and another 50 books.  Onward!

67. Chinaman's Chance by Ross Thomas

First of all, I may be the proud owner of the worst cover of Chinaman's Chance (of course, Existential Ennui has the best one).  I couldn't find an image anywhere on the internet, so I will assume for now that among us paperback book hunters, I'm the only one who currently has this trophy.  I get into some geekiness with the cover below that I think those who have read the book may appreciate.

Chinaman's Chance is considered one of Ross Thomas' best.  Once again, we get a slowly unravelling storyline which doesn't reveal itself until at least halfway through the book.  In this case, two sharp dudes, Artie Wu and Quincy Durant, are renting a beach house in Malibu.  Through a seeming accident, they make aquaintances with Piers Randall, an ex-software tycoon with a problem.  He hires them to try and track down his missing sister-in-law, who was having an affair with a murdered senator from Pelican Bay, a seedy seaside town just under LA ("a long and grimy finger that poked itself into the backside of Los Angeles" as Thomas puts it).  Things get even more complicated and interesting from there.  Ultimately, the book is about Pelican Bay and how big organized crime moves into a dying town to take it over, with some help from deeply corrupt political power at the national level.

It's a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner with the usual cast of rich characters.  The town of Pelican Bay is amazingly well-depicted and there are a couple of really great action moments.  The plot is fairly complex, going really big picture with the backstory, but I never got lost (and I'm reading at a very slow pace these days, like a chapter a night, so that's good).  Thomas is like a bartender that makes a delicious mixed drink of espionage and crime and Chinaman's Chance is like a great night at his bar.

[the rest of this review is more aimed at people who have already read the book.  There aren't any major spoilers, but several references I don't bother to explain.]

This is my fourth Ross Thomas book and I think I definitely have an understanding of his style, for better and for worse.  I say for better, because he is a master of many important writing skills: characterization, dialogue, spatial description and world-building (especially of towns and cities, but he also is able to create wonderful little social ecologies i a few pages, like a rundown mixed residential and commercial neighbourhood with all its key players and locations).  I say worse, because he has two tendencies that rub me slightly the wrong way.  They are stylistic choices and I am probably alone in not liking them.  Indeed, it is quite possible that fans of his love them.  The first is that I feel like he creates principal characters that are quirky for quirky's sake and both he and them are a little too proud of it.  Artie Wu is a great case in point. The guy is a con artist and an ass-kicker, an orphan who may or may not be in line for the throne of China.  Okay, fine, that's kind of cool and fun.  But he also has a super-beautiful Scottish wife and two sets of twins!  It's all a bit much and kind of unrealistic given his profession.  The second thing is the sexuality in his books is pretty silly and again to this reader jarringly unrealistic.  The super-rich dude who hires Wu and Durant has a super-beautiful actress/singer wife who is a nymphomaniac of the kind you only found in Penthouse letters.  She also has a super-hot sister.  Both throw themselves at Quincy Durant whose psychological impotence also never happened in the history of science.  Ross Thomas would be the worst gynecologist ever.  I get that these books are escapist fantasies, so it is perhaps pedantic of me to harp on about realism.  But I just find he goes a little too far in some cases with the quirkiness and the fantasy sex objects.

I think that's why I still think the Porkchoppers is so far his masterpiece.  It's a much darker book, so the quirkiness is tamped down.  You get the wide range of characters and their rich backgrounds, but everybody seems quite realistic.  For those of you who have read many more of his books, which ones are closer to the Porkchoppers?  Don't get me wrong, I am going to continue reading his books and look forward to the continunation of the Wu and Durant saga.   But I think I know what to expect now and that will make me more discerning.

Can you name all the characters?

Now onto the cover.  What a doozy!  This cover is so Dallas.  It makes me think it will be one of those mainstream epic novels that "adults" read in the 70s with the embossed covers.  Clearly, it targetted that audience.  I wonder how well it fared.  Though quite tacky (  "Oh why oh why can't I get it up?" Quincy Durant thinks, "even when a super-hot movie star strips and masturbates in front of me.), I do appreciate that a real effort was made to capture much that is actually in the book.  A bunch of the characters are there.  The beach house and Pelican Bay are shown.  The only real innacuracy is that Tony Egg is bald and it looks like instead of making Icky Norris black, they just put him in the shadow (some editor was probably like "we've already got a chinese on the cover, if we put a black guy on the back, people will be turned off.").  It's hard to see with my scan, but on the spine are two patrol cops in helmets, which I think are supposed to be Sheriff Ploughman and Lt. Lake, which is totally wrong (they are detectives and never in uniform in the book).  Finally, the blowing up vehicle does not look like a motor home.  No credit is given for the cover design.

Here, for your pleasure, is the cover annotated with all the characters:

66. Voyage to the North Star by Peter Nichols

Dear readers, please be forewarned that I have decided it to slum it for a book and have delved into the murky gutters of literary fiction.  For those of you genre fiction enthusiasts with a delicate disposition, I would recommend that you stop reading now, as this stuff is pretty lowbrow and generally frowned up by right-thinking critics.  Despite its reputation, there is some very entertaining and well-written literary fiction, though from what I understand, most of it is simplistic pap, churned out to satisfy the baser appetites of an undiscriminating public of upper-middle class wives, New Yorker subscribers, liberal arts graduates and so on.  I've even heard that some of the better known literary fiction authors are actually nom de plume's of succesful crime, science fiction and fantasy authors!

Here is how I took my first steps down into this mouldy basement of failed narrative dreams.  As you know, I am a huge follower of the late, great John Christopher and am on a quest to find all of his work, which was written in a wide range of genres (post-apocalyptic, romance, mystery, horror and even cricket!) under at least seven different pseudonym.  At least one of those names was Peter Nichols.  I've recently made a list of those names that I keep in a small card in my wallet along with the other specific titles I am hunting for.  Whenever I am in a bookstore, I can quickly scan through the paperback shelves to see if by chance any of them will show up.  So for, no luck.  I think I would do better in Great Britain.

Last week, I happened to be near the Bibliotheque Nationale.  It's been a while since I've been there, but had the time to pop in.  Saw a fantastic exhibit about this Polish philosopher and peace activist who ended up in Montreal after the war.  The exhibhit was mainly his collection of books, which was amazing.  They also had some cool intelligence documents from his role working for the British Secret Service in WWII.  Anyways, I did a quick check of the english fiction section and went through hunting for al the John Christopher nom de plume's.  I found nothing, but as you have probably guessed by now, I discovered this book by Peter Nichols, which is one of Christopher's pseudonyms.  It's not him, but it looked pretty interesting and I got sucked in by the preface, which was a horrific little short story about a rich American industrialist on safari shocking the British hunters by machine-gunning a bunch of giraffes.  So I checked it out, despite my full on-deck shelf.

Voyage to the North Star takes place at the height of the Depression.  The protagonist is Will Boden, an unemployed sea captain who lost his own ship in a shameful incident.  He encounters Carl Schenk, the afore-mentioned industrialist, who fashions himself a Teddy Roosevelt type.  He is aggressive and reckless and loves machines and killing animals.  He becomes obsessed with making a trip to the arctic to collect as many big animals and birds as he can.  He hires Boden to find him a ship, but ends up going with a totally inappropriate luxury steam ship.  The whole thing spells disaster from the start, but the intrigue is about how it will all go down and how everyone will react.

It's an entertaining read.  The plot moves forward at a good pace, with diversions into many of the characters' backstories, that are all interesting.  You know from the start that Schenk is going to do something stupid to doom them all, but the results that followed were unexpected and kept me turning the pages.  I think what hangs the unfortunate "literary fiction" label around Voyage to the North Star is that, while the story is strong, it has very obvious "themes", such as the folly of the civilized white colonialist in the face of the native other, the effects of class hierarchy on human relations, the honesty of the man who works with his hands in contrast to those who manipluate capital (and other men) and of course a sprinkling of incestuous sexual abuse.  I believe that this book falls under the even lower sub-category of literary fiction (if you can believe it gets any lower, but there is something for every degenerate taste out there) of "post-colonial" fiction.

So don't worry, dear reader, you won't find me anytime soon skulking in downtown coffee shops with a trade paperback or joining suburban women's reading groups.  This was just a brief diversion and I shall climb back up onto honest and rigorous heights of proper reading: the crime, science fiction and fantasy genres.  I can safely report, though, that at least in this case, some literary fiction is actually pretty good.

65. The Hamelin Plague by A. Bertram Chandler

I have only the vaguest memory of where I found this book, but I do recollect thinking I really shouldn't be taking it due to an overfull on-deck shelf moratorium on buying new books at the time.  However, that moratorium can be temporarily put aside in the case of a few exceptions and one of the biggest exceptions is a new, obscure edition to the post-apocalyptic genre.  When the apocalypse is rats destroying civilization than you have no choice.

Tim Barrett, first mate on a merchant marine ship playing the waters around Australia, comes home to a frigid post-miscarriage wife.  This is his burden.  More interestingly, the news on land is the increasingly aggressive behaviour of rats across Australia.  This hits close to home when, in an effectively horrific scene, a neighbour's baby has a portion of its face chewed away in the crib.  This incident, plus the  dead dog in the street and one of his car tires being chewed off were not quite warning enough and Barrett heads back out on another run.  All the men are nervous on this trip, worried about their various situations back home.  The news gets worse and worse and weirder. There are unexplained fires and planes falling out of the sky.  We piece together that this is more than just rats being aggressive, but a seemingly organized attack against all of humanity.  There are sightings of mutant rats, that stand on their hind legs and resemble small, nasty kangaroos.

When they do come back to Sydney, the entire city is burning.  Ignoring the usual protocol, they come back to port and rush off to find their loved ones.  At this point, all of Australia is in total chaos.  Barrett makes it back to the ship with his wife and a few crew members and they push off from the dock just in time.  With limited resources and information, they become a floating outpost in a ruined world, with Barrett as their captain.  Their first run-in is with a small cruise ship, led by a retired admiral.  This brings a bunch of civilians on board, as well as two conflicts in the form of the admiral versus Barrett in a power struggle and the Admiral's hot and motivated young niece who does all the things Barrett's lame, depressed and bitter wife doesn't (like serving him hot tea while his wife spends the whole time sleeping in the cabin).

The Hamelin Plague has real promise, especially in the first two-thirds, but it never quite reaches its potential. There are not enough actual encounters with the rats.  After the brief escape from the burning city, all the action takes place at sea and the rats are doing their damage on the land.  The intra-human conflict also gets resolved quite easily, though there is a pretty good fight with some fishermen turned pirate.  It's the ending that really undermines the book though, coming way too fast and easily, involving a nudist colony and the goofiest, yet thematically appropriate solution to the problem (can you guess?  Hint, look at the title and think of the story it refers to).  Even lamer is the way the sexual conflict for Barrett is resolved, a complete cop-out all around, where his lame wife gets motivated by the sounds of crying children on an island (where the rats were breeding them for food in another nicely horrific touch).  She goes rushing off to save them and Barrett than has to save her and this rekindles their love.  The young floozy, who is hot and single, easily moves on.  So everybody retains their moral wholesomeness.  Weak sauce, A. Bertram!  But hey it kept me turning the pages.