4. The Iron Gates by Margaret Millar

[Review written October 7, 2014, but actually read at the date of this post.]

I found this paperback at the Brattle bookstore in Boston.  Unfortunately, I dog-eared the cover accidently.  Still, a nice find.  This is one of Millar's earlier works and you can see in it strongly (perhaps too strongly) her gothic side and her detective side.  It's a convoluted mystery that peels away the layers of a twisted family as well.  Lucille Morrow is the second wife to a successful town doctor who lives at home with his two grown children and his possessive old maid sister.  His first wife died under mysterious circumstances many years before.  The book begins with a series of random incidents that result in Lucille running away and disappearing.  As the family reacts, we learn more about each of them and how messed up each of them is (quite).  In the second half of the book, we delve deep into Lucille's crushed psyche.  This is where Millar really excels.  In this case, though, I found it all a bit too long and convoluted and by the time the truth came out, I was a bit tired of the whole affair.  Also, there is not a pleasant character in the book, except for Inspector Sands of the Toronto police, but he is really just a mechanism to move the plot forward and to let the reader see what is going on.

I am probably being overly critical in this short, late review.  Millar is still really one of the best writers of this kind of criminal insanity.  It's just note one of my favourite of hers.

3. Lizard Music by D. Manus Pinkwater

[Actually written on October 2, 2014, but publish date is set to when I read the book earlier in the year.]

Lizard Music is a favourite from my childhood.  I'd been keeping an eye out for it for a while.  All I remembered is the eery opening chapters, about a kid living in suburban New Jersey left alone at home who discovers a weird show of lizard musicians late at night on after hours television.  There is something haunting and evocative about it and probably plays into the culture-hunting that was so much a part of my own adolescence.  I was also just a fan of Daniel Pinkwater's books in general.  But Lizard Music always stood out for me as being slightly darker and more mysterious.

Now that I have read it again to the end, I realize that it is just as goofy and fun as his other works and wildly surreal. It turns into a fantastic adventure, almost pulp-like but with a wacky post-hippie '70s mentality.  The story is about Victor, a 10-year old kid left alone by his parents with his teenage sister.  He is very independent and treats her with a sympathetic disdain.  She is so caught up in her teenage world that she doesn't even realize he is out of the house on his own adventures.  His stumbling across the strange lizard variety show leads him to the city where he runs into various weirdos like The Chicken Man and Claudia.  It's really hard to do justice to the style of Pinkwater's writing and milieu by describing the story so I will leave it at that.  You should get it into the hands of any pre-adolescent kid who might identify as quirky.  Pinkwater makes it awesome to not be normal.

2. Slayground by Richard Stark

During this re-read of the Parker series, I have mentioned several times now in reviewing various titles that said title may be vying for the spot of best Parker book.  Well we can just put that to rest right now.    At this point, Slayground is the hands-down winner.  Now there is a tiny possibility that Butcher's Moon could knock if off at the last second, but it is very doubtful.  Slayground is not the first Parker book I ever read.  I'm pretty sure that was The Green Eagle Score, which was on the shelves of a book distribution company I worked at in the early 90's.  Later, though, when I had moved to New York, I found a hard copy of Slayground (the  book club edition of the 1971 Random House at the top of the page here), read it, loved it and passed it on to a friend which started us on a Parker-hunting craze.  So I credit it with turning me from an appreciator of Stark's work to the fanatic I am today.

[SPOILER ALERT!  YOU REALLY SHOULD JUST GET SLAYGROUND AND READ IT.  Why deny yourself pleasure?  If you haven't read it, reading my blathering below is like reading a restaurant review of a delicious meal that is right around the corner of your hosue and affordable.  Why not just get the real thing?]

Upon rereading it in 2014, the exquisite craft of Slayground has only been reinforced in my mind.  The opening chapter is a master class in in medias res (and let's not forget another genius Westlake metaphor, the armoured car wheels turning "like a dog chasing rabbits in its sleep") .  I had remembered that, but I had completely forgotten how brilliantly and efficiently the entire novel is set up in the final paragraph of that opening chapter.  Parker standing there in the cold, just about to run into a closed amusement park (his only choice with sirens coming, his escape car totalled) glimpses behind him to see in the parking lot across the way two crooked cops getting a payoff from two local outfit men (another genius metaphor, the black mafia Lincoln "as deeply polished and gleaming as a new shoe").  Right there, that is everything you need to know.  It's a brilliant premise and takes the book from escaped heister with cash avoiding cops to escaped heister with cash trapped in a closed amusement park in the dead of winter while the entire organized crime racket of the area comes in to hunt him down and get the money.  It's a quantum step up in coolness.

Now that would be enough right there.  But no!  Westlake develops that basic premise in a few more chapters of Parker ascertaining that he truly is trapped, that the legit cops were scent on a wild goose chase and he then begins to prepare for the eventual hunt.  This only takes up the first 40 pages of the book and then we are brought into part two, the viewpoint shift that is a hallmark of the Parker books.  This time, we get to meet the two crooked cops, one more experienced and corrupt and definitely wanting to get his hands on Parker's stolen cash, the other already nervous about being on the take and feeling like hunting a man down and killing him, criminal or not, may be crossing his moral line.  We also get to see the syndicate men, one a rising star in the local mob and the other his strong arm man.  When you read this section, you realize the depth that Westlake is going to bring to the book.  We could be satisfied with the game of cat and mouse with Parker the mouse, but we are going to also really learn about the characters who make up the cat, thus making Parker's kicking of their ass that much richer and complex.  Furthermore, we also get a glimpse into how the local outfit is structured and who are the people that make it up.

This is all 40 pages in and it got me so excited that my poor wife had to suffer my effusive exposition of the points made above while she was trying to get something done (I still haven't entirely lost the adolescent boy in me whose over-enthusiastic and point-by-point retelling of movies I had seen inspired a rule banning me from talking about movies with the rest of my family).  The rest of the book fully delivers on its promise.  It actually goes even farther, though I was ignorant of this at the time, in setting the stage for the orchestral climax of the Parker series, Butcher's Moon.  I wonder if Westlake knew he was setting it up at the time?

And how is this not a good movie already?  Oh yes, Hollywood is retarded.  Anyhow, if anybody has any brains and muscle out there, Slayground is basically already perfectly storyboarded.

So right now, the top three Parkers are: 1) Slayground, 2) The Jugger and 3) Deadly Edge.

1. Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope

Almost but not quite my edition

I chose this my third Trollope novel as part of the long book strategy to break me out of not reading at all.  So far it seems to have worked, as I steadily made my way through Phineas Redux and even got quite caught up in it at several points.  A big advantage to reading Trollope is that all his work is in the public domain, so if you forget your hardcopy, you can always download it at Gutenburg and read it on your phone or tablet.  No need to bother with synching products that tie you in to one provider either, because Trollope wrote in short, well-labelled chapters.  You just remember the name of the chapter you were on and it is then quite easy to find where you last left off.

I chose Phineas Redux simply because I found it somewhere (I think the free store on Lasqueti Island actually) and it was a beat-up paperback that I didn't need to worry about preserving.  It turns out that this is actually the 4th book in the Palliser series and that last Trollope I read (way back in the summer of 2011), The Eustace Diamonds, was the 3rd!  So now by all the laws of mightly Biblius, I must read the entire series, or at least books 5 and 6.

Phineas Redux is the story of Phineas Finn, the eponymous Irishman from the second book in the series (and who plays only the most incidental role in the Eustace Diamonds).  He was once and up-and-comping Liberal MP, who made a political sacrifice and returned to Ireland to marry and work an administrative job.  But his wife died in childbirth and in Phineas Redux he comes back to take another stab at the parliamentary life.  There are several storylines going through this, including a romantic one. The biggest theme is his struggle with the value of being a politician.  At first, he easily reverses his positions depending on what the party asks of him or if it is necessary to win an election.  As things become complicated, and he doesn't receive the expected support from the leaders of the party, he begins to doubt his career choice.

At first, I found it less focused and more like a soap opera than his other two books that I had read.  I also found some of the characters most unlikeable.  Phineas himself becomes kind of a wet sock for a while as well.  But by the end, I was convinced that their actions and behaviour reflected a realistic portrayal of political ennui and disenchantment.  I think, though, that on the whole I am leaning more towards the Barsetshire series, rather than the Palliser, because the location is so much richer in the former.

2013 Year End Wrap-up

[This is actually being written on February 12, 2014, I just wanted to get it into the correct order.]

Ugh, rough year.  My worst year since I started the 50 books challenge.  I do have a good excuse, which is that I got onto the procreation train in late 2012 and a lot of my time and energy has been dedicated towards raising a rocking little girl.  Honestly, though, I can't fairly attribute being a father to my dropoff in productivity, at least not directly.  The time when I should have been reading was spent dicking around on the internet.  Now it could be that the sleep deprivation and the energy consumption meant that I was just not capable of doing anything more than +1'ing Google+ posts and scrolling through my Twitter feed.  Still, you look at the Sun King, who also jumped on the daughter bandwagon (possible to say that I made the waters safe for him? ;) ) and his productivity has barely dropped off.  I even had a nice burst in August where I had a fighting chance of approaching 50, but I just bailed in the fall and winter.

I'm too lazy to figure out my numbers, but they have certainly taken a major dip.  In terms of what I actually read, nothing really stands out.  I basically added on to threads that I had established in years past.  Deadly Edge stood out as a front runner for top 3 Parker books.  Daniel Dafoe's Journal of a Plague Year was interesting, entertaining and educational, as was Bare-Faced Messiah about L. Ron Hubbard and the sick origins of the Dianetics cult.

2014, well we shall see.  As I write this, I do feel that I have gotten the taste for the printed word back.  But my daughter's advanced pre-post-apocalyptic preparedness training regime will continue to be a priority and my job looks to also be quite rich and busy this year.  I'm too cowardly and weak-livered to actually make any kind of commitment, but in the back of my head I shall try to choose reading over noodling on the internet.  My appreciation to all of you who may read this.

26. Bold Rider by Luke Short

Not the copy I read.

I really should have some system for noting where I found books, because some have stayed so long in my on-deck shelf that I have entirely forgotten their origins.  Such is the case with Bold Rider.  I don't read tons of westerns, but I like to dip my toe in the water every now and then as it is usually satisfying.  The cover and date of this one appealed to me.  It looked like the kind of paperback western that would be quickly and easily purchased by the common man looking for a good read back in the 70s, but it was actually written in 1938 and so has some potential for pedigree and solid writing syntax.

It's funny, though, because if I hadn't known, I never would have guessed that it had been written that long ago.  The story has a slightly cartoonish feel to it, where the main character is a roguish good guy who is in constant conflict with the local army garrison.  There is a highly unrealistic over-the-top train stunt that would not be out of place in today's blockbuster movies.  Finally, the ending is also a bit too easy and happy.  All that was juxtaposed against what was otherwise quite brutal and realistic western stuff.  The bad guy was nasty and people get killed and it's real.  So it was kind of an inconsistent read and unsatisfying because of that, but not uninteresting.

The story involved the hero pretending to be someone else to transport a gold shipment from a mine so that he could steal it, while he knew that the other transporter was also a criminal who had posed as well. This is all wrapped up in the protagonist's history and how he was falsely accused of a crime by the cattle baron for whom the gold was being transported.

25. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

Shantaram!

I wanted to write a longer review, but I just need to get something down here so that I can move forward.

I have been struggling with my reading and am thus casting about for different approaches that will keep my nose in a book and not an attention-shattering tablet.  I thought one long book that I could slowly work my way through might work and two friends recommended Shantaram.  It looked glossy and digestible enough that it would also be easy consuming, like a big blockbuster action movie.  What I didn't realize is that Shantaram is not only a dreaded "trade paperback", it's also a chick book!  My good friend Lantzvillager, with whom I share many literary tastes, took great pleasure in ridiculing me for reading Shantaram.  And thus I found myself torn between friends, questioning my own identity!

I exaggerate for humour, but the truth is that throughout this book I kept going back and forth on whether it should be praised or condemned.  The narrative is great, right up my alley: heroin-addict armed robber escapes from brutal Australian prison and flees to India where with his street smarts and the craziness of the Mumbai crime world begins a life of adventure.  The problem is that all of this is of course in service to his own journey of personal discovery.  So that at the end of each chapter of entertaining craziness, there would have to be several paragraphs of reflection and bad metaphors ("and with each bullet wound, the river of pain that is life reminded me of my own pain and blah blah).  Worse, the whole thing is such an insane white man fantasy.  As a white man, I'm all for white man fantasies of going into one of the craziest most other cities in the world, learning all their languages, getting down with the super poor people in the slums and hanging with the baddest ass gangster bosses in the fancy clubs, but please don't try and frame it in all this self-actualization and awareness bullshit to try and make it more than it is.  [And one part just goes way beyond the pale.  When he is making his way up with the big Mumbai mafia bosses, he is given the responsibility for the currency exchange side of the business.  In an aside, he mentions how he has introduced computers into their business to improve their efficiency.  Please.  Australian ex-con is going to show the Indians how to use computers.  Yeah, right.]

The problem with the above criticism is that while this is not based on a true story at all (according to the other), he really did flee an Australian prison and lived in Mumbai and still lives there today.  So the guy probably is kind of a badass.  Usually when someone is full of shit, you find out about it on the internet pretty quickly, but it does seem like Gregory David Roberts has led a pretty extraordinary and courageous life.  His white man fantasy was no fantasy.

As you can see, I kept going back and forth, though I also kept turning the pages.  The last section, where he goes to Afghanistan, drags on a bit long, but overall it did deliver the kind of reading experience I had hoped for.  And got me at least halfway to my goal in 2013!

24. Death of a Thin-skinned Animal by Patrick Alexander

[I'm actually writing this review on Jan 4th, 2014.  I finished the book sometime in the fall of 2013 and then only read 2 other books for the rest of the year.  All to be explained in my year-end wrap-up.]

I picked this book up at a closing-down sale at a used bookstore on Broadway in the Kitsilano district in Vancouver late this summer.  It's a 1976 espionage thriller about a spy who was sent on a mission to assassinate an African dictator, who got doublecrossed and sent to jail.  In the ensuing years, Britain decides that it must make friends with this dictator.  The spy then escapes and decides to carry out his mission.  The story takes place in London from the point of view of the people working in the agency (and in particular the handler who sent the spy on the original assassination mission) while the dictator is visiting and they learn that the spy is making his way back to England to complete his mission.  It's a great premise, with a nice structure of the current cat and mouse game and a slow unravelling of the captured spy's backstory.  Right up until the end, Alexander succeeds in making this premise live up to its potential.  The anxiety of the spymasters, the politicians and the police involved is very satisfying to the reader, as you know they were all involved in some way or another with the betrayal.  The portrayal of all the various players is also rich, especially the educated, amoral and decadent dictator.  Where it bogs down is in the love story, which, as is so often the case in British stories from this period, is overly pessimistic and faux-modern (in the sense that everyone acts like they are so modern but still follow strict gender and class roles).  British upper class men were such unter-mensch losers in this period (same annoying patheticness that dogs Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy).  So of course we have to have a forcedly ironic downbeat ending of an otherwise cool story.  Despite my harping on it, this was a good read and I would definitely pick up something else by him.

23. A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

That weird mask was because the nose was
stuffed with strong-smelling spices to ward off
the disease and the stench of dead bodies.

I have a general rule, which is to try and read as little as possible about a book before I actually start reading it.  I especially avoid all the business printed on the book itself that is not the actual story, like the blurb on the back, critic's quotes, the author's bio and forwards.  I am always tempted, as I am easily distracted.  So this practice is a form of self-discipline to get me through the book.  All that other stuff is a little bit like desert.  The big reason, though, is spoilers.  I know editors have to sell books, but it is just selfish and irresponsible the way they give away all the cool stuff on the back cover.

With a classic like A Journal of the Plague Year, the temptation to read the foreword (by J.H. Plumb, Cambride) and even to go to the internet was strong.  I wanted to find out the history behind the narrative as it is just so fascinating and crazy what happened.  However, spoilers were just not a concern for me in this case.  Well when I did finish it and read the Foreword, I was totally blown away to find out there was a HUGE spoiler (explained at the end of the post) and one that would have completely changed my perception of this work had I known ahead of time.  It was a great pleasure to be surprised in this way and this experiences reinforces my dedication to my rule.

Victims would run through the streets, naked and crazed
with pain and the madness of the disease.

So on to the book itself.  It is a first-person recollection of the year 1665 when the Black Plague swept through London, killing tens of thousands and (as you can well imagine) throwing the city into an upheaval.  We've all heard about it to some degree or another, most limited (like me) to Monty Python and a few scraps of memory from high school history classes.  It was pretty hard core!  It's hard to imagine the way London was back then, even before there was a plague.  There were open sewers and people just threw their garbage out into the street.  When the plague hit, thousands of people were dying per week.  The whole "bring out yer dead!" thing really happened.  The book, though, stresses that despite some mistakes, the city managers actually handled the situation relatively well, creating policies that ensured that ensured that there were no dead bodies left on the street.  They also managed to ensure that enough trade remained open so that the poor who remained in the city didn't starve.  One of the controversial policies was the act forcing families to be shut up in their homes if one of their members or staff showed signs of the sickness.  Guards were hired to stand outside their door to ensure that nobody left and nobody came in (which also helped create employment).  Defoe narrates some great stories of families trying to sneak out, or attack the guard.  Several were murdered.

Structurally, the book is lacking.  There isn't really an order and it goes all over the place in time and subject.  Defoe often gets started on something and then says that he'll say more about that later.  This happens a few too many times so that the reader loses track.  And dude, chapters!  The whole thing is one long flow and it makes it hard to put it down and pick it up again.  (Oh yeah, right, they hadn't been invented yet.)  The writing style is rich and arch, made me laugh out loud at times

However, in general, prudent, cautious people did enter into some measures for airing and sweetening their houses, and burned perfumes, incense, benjamin, rozin, and sulphur in their rooms close shut up, and then let the air carry it all out with a blast of gunpowder; others caused large fires to be made all day and all night for several days and nights; by the same token that two or three were pleased to set their houses on fire, and so effectually sweetened them by burning them down to the ground...

 Dry British humour in its earliest days.

Suckah!

A really enjoyable read that gave me a strong interest in the Black Death, which led to lots of fascinating internet reading.

ADDENDUM: new (and avid) reader and commenter Kelly Robinson (check out her great blog Book Dirt) reminded me in her comment below about how Apocalyptic this novel is.  It reminded me strongly of the British authors from the 60s and 70s and especially John Christopher's Death of Grass. A big part of the book is about the exodus out of London, with the issues of the advantage of wealth and class and having to decide when (or whether) to leave.  He also recounts a tale of a small group of workers who banded together to travel in the country and how they were refused to enter by certain towns.  I wonder if this is something that is part of British culture that has been passed down with the various disasters that have befallen London in history.

[SPOILER!]




Daniel Defoe was 5 years old when this London plague happened!  He wrote the book as a work of fiction based on several non-fictional tracts and his own childhood memories and tales.  The entire time I was reading it, I thought it was his own recollection.  Looks like he was a darned good writer!

22. Dale of the Mounted Sub Hunt by Joe Holliday

Here is a nice little piece of post-war Canadian propaganda.  As a physical artifact, it was just so beautiful that I had to pick it up, despite it's beat-up condition.  How great is that illustration on the front!  It's almost Hergé-esque in its geometry and soft-focus, with a filter of 50s modern abstraction.  What is going on on the cover here actually happens in the book as well.  Unfortunately, the book itself is quite boring, in keeping with its Canadianness.  The adventure part of it is simply a frame for the author to repeat paragraphs of information that seem quoted verbatim from Fisheries Canada pamphlets.  It is divided into two parts, the first taking place in Atlantic Canada and the second in my old stomping grounds, Nanaimo! 

In both cases, Dale goes undercover.  In the first, he joins up with a fishing crew.  This section was actually not so boring, as it described the fish-trapping techniques used in the Bay of Fundy.  Wide nets would be installed in the ground at low tide and then when the tide came up and went out again, the men would unload the traps with all the fish stuck in them.  The mystery starts here when a body is discovered in one of the traps.  Actually, looking back, this was a pretty cool start.  From there, though, it all gets kind of boring, at least narrative-wise.  The problem is the writing style, so that even when we get away from factual info and statistics about the Atlantic Fisheries, it is all still dull and stilted. 

In the second half, Dale takes on the disguise of a young applicant for the Fisheries department in their research center at the West Coast Biological Center in Departure Bay.  Here, we have lots of optimistic enthusiasm about all the science being applied to the fishing industry and how it is going to make it even easier for Canada to deplete the oceans.

What is fascinating, and depressing, about this book, is how there is not a single mention of conservation.  Everything that the government is doing in the Atlantic and the Pacific side, is made to increase yield.  There is an oblique mention of ensuring the future existence of fish populations when they mention poaching and efforts to reduce it.  This book was written just a few decades before the total collapse of the entire Atlantic Fisheries and you can see the profound ignorance and greed that was the dominant culture of the government and the industry at the time.  Not that it's changed much today, sadly.

I scanned the back cover as well, which has examples of the entire line.  It's a shame that these weren't better written, because they are quite beautifully designed and would make a great collection of Canadiana for a bookshelf.

21. The Moonraker Mutiny by Antony Trew

These 1970's manly action books put out by Fontana were really where I began with my adult reading.  I don't remember specifically who introduced me to Desmond Bagley, it must have been my dad, but he was my favourite in my high school and college years.  Once I finish re-reading the Parker series, I may go back and read his books again.  I also discovered Duncan Kyle through Fontana as well.  They are manly adventure books, but generally written with some intelligence and that British WWII mentality that doesn't have to get in your face about being badass.  So when I see one, I will always give it a scan, which is what happened at the sadly closing down Blackberry books in Kitsilano where I found The Moonraker Mutiny.  I mean how can I resist this cover?  At the very least, I know it will give my wife something to snicker about.

The Moonraker Mutiny turned out to be quite an enjoyable read, with a more complex storyline than I had expected from the blurb.  It's about a merchant freighter with a once competent but now broken and badly alchoholic captain and its sketchy crew who are making a run from Australia to Cape Town when they get caught in a hurricane.  Things go bad in many ways, leaving the ship engineless and badly damaged.  The crew, led by the treacherous and disrespectful Italian first mate, decides to abandon ship, leaving the captain, his neice, his steward and one young mechanic.  We follow the stories of both groups, as well as the sleazy owner back in London and another smaller merchant ship coming from Antarctica whose fate becomes entwined in a really interesting way with Moonraker's.

And that is what pushed this book from pretty good to really damned enjoyable to me.  The first half was decent, with a nice range of characters (though a few stereotypes such as the aforementioned first mate), but I thought the story was going to be either about the mutiny or the ship in the storm.  It turns out that was merely a jumping off point and a lot of other cool things happened.  I didn't realize that even up in the modern days the law of salvage at sea is still valid and there are boats that just trawl the sea looking for abandoned ships and who will get aggressive with one another for salvage rights.  It makes for some pretty cool sea action, especially when you are dealing with a crippled tanker that still has the barely coherent captain aboard.

Sigh, one more author to add to the list.

20. Star King by Jack Vance

I have read a few other Jack Vance novels and enjoyed them but they never grabbed me the way they have some others.  I respect his massive contribution to the world (both in fictional writing and in the tabletop roleplaying game hobby as his ideas about magic were fundamental to the way it was designed in Dungeons & Dragons).  Many people have said that I should check out the Demon Prince series and so I could not resist picking up this paperback (which is also a beautiful Daw paperback and was in such good condition, appearing almost unread, that I was loathe to even open it).

Well it turns out they were right!  There is still something distancing to me about Vance's approach and prose, but Star King was super cool and super engrossing.  I think it helped that it was the first of his books that has a very straightforward plot, so that while it meanders, especially at the beginning, and while there are all kinds of asides that are not relevant to the story (though do build a rich sense of the universe), the book always presses forward and you want to find out what happens.  It also has a strong moral core, which is something I've found lacking in his other books.  It's not that I need a moral core in a piece of fiction, but in Vance's case, it helps to bridge somewhat the distancing effect of his prose style.  Finally, there are some really good and detailed fight scenes, which I always appreciate. These were so detailed and well mapped-out that they could have been choreographed for a movie.

The story here is about Kirth Gersen who finds himself on a remote tavern far out in the Beyond, the part of the universe that is not governed by law.  He meets a "locater" who has discovered a paradisiacal garden planet, but who has discovered that his employer is Malagate the Woe, an infamous intergalactic slaver.  The locater does not want to reveal the location of his discovery because he has been enchanted by its innocent beauty and doesn't want to see it destroyed.  Well this poor dude, quickly gets killed by three very nasty characters (and a rich, flamboyant group of badguys they are indeed) who show up at the bar, including Malagate himself, though he is not actually seen.  When they leave, they accidently take Kirth's ship instead of the murdered locator's, which allows Kirth to mess with them.  Well, it turns out that Kirth has specifically been on the hunt for Malagate, that he has actually been trained his entire life to hunt down and kill the Demon Princes (of which Malagate is one) who destroyed his village when he was just a child.

So that is really my kind of plot.  As I said, it does meander and at times gets a bit bogged down, particularly in a long section of logic/deduction in trying to figure out which of three characters back in the civilized part of the universe is actually Malagate.  But there is enough coolness along the way, in the story moving forward; the rich and wacky locations and characters and finally in Gersen himself, who is a real badass.  I also like that Vance is really not a nerd.  He doesn't waste time fretting over whether or not you can fly through space in a timely manner.  He just goes to where the coolness needs to go and yet does it in such a way that it feels more or less realistic within the logic of the setting.  I also enjoyed the way he portrays the style of this universe, as people can modify their bodies to any degree and change their skin colour, so that every character has a different palate going on.  I will definitely be hunting down the rest of this series.

19. Nice Fillies Finish Last by Brett Halliday

Really you couldn't ask for a better combo of cover and title to incite snickers and contempt from the modern literary set.  I'm pretty sure this might be the first Mike Shayne book I've read.  I didn't have a high regard for the series before I read this.  I was pleasantly surprised to find the book more intelligent and complex than I would have suspected.  In particular, the author had a very deft way of portraying his characters as one way in the beginning and then revealing their true corruption as the story went on. I found myself actually believing their initial stories and found myself taken by them later on in the book.  The detective work is quite good as well.  The framing of the story and Shayne himself are fairly standard stuff, with him being super cool and having all the neatest gadgets, but the meat of the story, I would say, was a step above what I expected and leads me to keep an eye out for other Mike Shayne books.

Here, Shayne's gambling buddy and reporter gets a hot tip on the carriage races from a usually reliable stable hand.  It's a complex affair involving betting on three races in the day.  The reporter convinces Shayne to come out with him at two in the morning to meet the stable hand and back him on the tip.  The guy doesn't show up and the two guys write it off as a bum tip.  Until the stable hand shows up dead, of alchohol poisoning.  This leads us into a complex mix surrounding a wealthy stable owner, his wife and a satyr-like jockey (and several other characters).  There is some dark stuff here, especially at the end, as the true nastiness of what already was kind of a nasty relationship is revealed.  There is some good action too.  My only problem is that I don't know anything about gambling on the horses and the complexities surrounding the betting and the scams behind it were lost to me.  Nevertheless, this filly rode well and I look forward to future installments.

18. The Explorer by W. Somerset Maugham

For some reason, I have a hard time getting W. Somerset Maugham into my head.  I get him (or is it her?) mixed up with Evelyn Waugh and Armistaud Maupin.  I really need to make the effort to do a bit of researcha and figure out who each one is.  I guess it is just because there names all sound similar, but it's also that Maugham seems so well known, but doesn't seem to have a specifically famous book, style, genre or period attached to him. This problem is so acute for me that I actually wrote this paragraph initally about Evelyn Waugh!

The Explorer is the story of Lucy Allerton, a young heiress to a large estate whose disollute father has run to the ground.  She is strong and selfless, loves her father unquestionably, even when she learns of all his faults.  She pins the hopes of her family's ressurection on her brother.  When the father is arrested for fraud, thus ruining the family's reputation as well, the brother is forced to join the expedition of an intrepid African explorer.  This explorer and the heroine up to this point had fallen in love, but she refused his hand in marriage because she could not love him until her family's name was restored.  Complications ensue on the voyage and the the explorer is left with a heavy burden and difficult moral choice.

I picked up the book because of the title in the hope that there would be some good colonial adventurism.  There was, but most of it was narrated by characters within the book, after the fact.  It was interesting nonetheless, as the explorer is portrayed as a hero, liberating the local tribespeople from the oppression of Arab slavery (I am thinking that he is supposed to be modeled after a real-world figure of the time).  This all seems good, if fantastic, but then his ultimate goal is to turn the territory over to the good hands of the British Empire, for the uitimate betterment of the native people!  Oh well, better than the Belgians at least.

It's an enjoyable read, very well-written, but ultimately a bit simplistic.  It is basically a romance, with the barrier being the aforementioned moral dilemma and a female character who is a bit one-dimensional.  This latter stands out because the rest of the characters are portrayed with nuance and richness.  I suspect a book like this was quite popular at the time, as it reads a bit like its period equivalent of today's best-seller, addressing popular themes in an easily-digestible way without challenging the average reader's thinking.

17. The Mistress by Carter Brown

Carter Brown is one of those crime fiction authors whose existence can be discouraging both for the reader and the writer.  He was actually a British guy living in Australia and he cranked out 332 (!) novels under the Carter Brown pseudonym, not to mention dozens of westerns, sci-fi and romances under other names.  His books were ubiquitous in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s, said to be a favorite of JFK.  What's particularly distressing is not just the sheer quantity (at one point, he was contracted to write two short and one long novel a month), but that he was also subject to painful writer's block!.  It makes the potential writer realize how much writing is just hard, hard work.

The Mistress begins with a sheriff's niece found shot dead on the front steps of the sherrif's house in Pine City, a small town somewhere not too far from Vegas.  The protagonist is the brash lieutenant, Al Wheeler, who always second-guesses his chief's simplistic solution.  In this case, it's the independent bookmaker who had just been ran out of Vegas by the syndicate, had taken up shop in Pine City and in whom the niece had fallen in with.  He is too obvious of a culprit for the lieutenant, who starts digging deeper.  It's a fun ride, with some good detecting and an interesting set up.  I correctly guessed who the murderer was early in, because he was telegraphed as such an asshole, even though not obviously connected to the crime at the beginning.  One of the principle characters is a top-shelf stripper, whose abnormal routine was quite fun (she appears on stage just for a moment in the spotlight completely nude and then comes back dressed and starts the dance).  However, that she quickly hops in bed with Wheeler and basically is in love with him for the entire second half of the book was pushing even my tolerance for unbelievable genre and period sexual mores. 

So it's a decent book and that is what makes Carter Brown so discouraging for the reader.  It's not garbage, it's actually good enough that you wouldn't mind reading more.  But there are just so many and nothing that really stands out about them that gives you anything to grab on to.  Is there a highlight or a particular series I should look into?  It's all so much that one kind of just wants to ignore his entire ouevre.  Though interestingly, I rarely come across old copies of Carter Brown.

16. Broke Down Engine and other troubles with machines by Ron Goulart

Another find from the back alley pile of apartment stuff that just keeps on giving, this is a collection of short stories by Ron Goulart, a prolific writer from the 60s and 70s and onwards about whom I knew nothing until now.  The cover just intrigued me at the time.  The style of these stories makes me think of Omni and Playboy rather than science fiction magazines and rightfully so as several of these stories were published in Playboy.  Theys tend to be of two types, either taking place in some kind of dystopic near-future LA where machiness and man combine to make nightmarish bureaucracies (hospitals that don't let you leave, food agencies that decide who lives and dies) or in far off galaxies and futures.  In both cases, the tone is similar, light, wry and not taking itself too seriously, despite often fairly nasty situations.  At first, I found myself a bit disconnected (which is not unusual for me with short stories), but as I worked my way through, I enjoyed the read more and more.  The themes here, though based on very primitive extrapolations of technology, age well.  Human stupidity tends to get magnified rather than mitigated by more powerful tools.  Cruelty is a truism and not worth making a big moral stink about (though defnitely worth avoiding).  We get so caught up in the moment, especially in today's media environment, that we tend to think that all the issues we are freaking out about now are new.  Reading a book like this reminds me that they are not new at all and that guys like Ron Goulart were pointing them out to the rest of us decades ago.  Good stuff.

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!