25. The Dead Don't Care by Jonathan Latimer

First of all, I want to give a shout out to The Paperback Warrior.  I am a particular fan of their podcast which has been consistently professional, informative and kind of fun.  If you are a fan of 20th century crime paperbacks, their site and podcast should be one of your go-to references.  They did a best of 2020 and co-host Tom* chose Solomon's Vineyard by Jonathan Latimer as his favourite book that he had read that year.  I am still looking for it, but did find The Dead Don't Care by the same author at Dark Carnival. 

First of all, I really enjoyed Latimer's writing.  He has a nice sparse yet entertaining style, reminding me of Dashiell Hammett with a spritz of John D. Macdonald (though that maybe because this one took place in Florida). His descriptions of Florida and the beach were incredibly evocative, made me long for the hot sand.  He also has a lot of great drinking moments, both in the dialogue and the described actions.  They drink a lot, especially Crane, the main detective, who is a self-aware alcoholic.  There are also some great snippets of dry detective humour.  So a real pleasure to read.

There are two detectives here, Crane and O'Rourke, part of a larger company who has been hired by the trustee of a rich scion, Penn Essex, to protect the heir who has been receiving threatening letters.  They go to his waterfront mansion south of Miami and there live the high-life with Essex, his sister and their motley collection of guests.  Crane seems to have had a higher class upbringing than O'Rourke, though both seem to have the clothes for the situation.  The location, the characters and the various conflicts and things that go down are all very enjoyable.  I was really looking forward to how it all played out.

Unfortunately, the plot and to some degree the resolution, was a bit disappointing.  Tom's description of Solomon's Vineyard made it sound really hard-boiled.  This book definitely had some edge and you got a great sense of the darker side of life, both rich and poor.  The plot, however, was a more traditional whodunit, almost a "cozy" in the sense that you were driven to try and solve the mystery of who is sending the threatening letters (and then who is the kidnapper who snatched the sister).  I kind of figured it out early but it seemed too obvious.  The reveal was even done as a classic parlour presentation.  None of it was terrible, it just felt a bit like two genres colliding and the wrong genre for the style winning out.  Solomon's Vineyard will remain on my list as will Latimer as the writing style was so good.

One weird thing is that the back cover blurb of this No Exit Press edition gets the name of one of the characters wrong and is just erroneous as only one of them is the sidekick.  Quite sloppy!

The other detective is O'Rourke

24. Day of the Drones by A.M. Lightner

I can't remember what prompted me to take this book from the little outdoor book box where I found it.  I think it was the combo of Post-Apocalyptic and racial issues as a subject matter.  I was wary as well, though, since science fiction about race written in 1969 can be questionable. The cover also worried me that it was going to be psychedelic and lack coherence.

My apprehensions were quite erroneous. This was actually a very enjoyable, straightforward PA adventure with a cool setting and some simple but not wrong-headed thoughts about race.  It takes place in some distant future, several centuries after "The Disaster" when most of humanity (and most mammals) was wiped out.  The surviving humans live inland somewhere in Africa.  They are a civilized society, technologically primitive, but with some memory of the past.  They attribute the destruction of the world to white people (and to uncontrolled use of technology).  The protagonist is a bright young woman named Amhara who is sent to school with the potential to rise high in the society. Her childhood friend N'Gobi is as smart as her, but light-skinned.  Actually so light that it was only by the pleading of his mother and the other villagers that he wasn't killed as a baby.

With the support of sympathetic professors who value N'Gobi and Amhara's skill more than they respect the taboo of N'Gobi's whiteness, they form a team that is going to explore outside of their lands for the first time.  This trip is triggered by N'Gobi's discovery of a new kind of bird with a strange, knotted rope around it's leg that could only be done by somebody intelligent.  They have a solar helicopter that had been hidden away (this is a bit of a stretch, but in line with the rest of the book which doesn't fret about nerdy details so we can get on with the exploration).  The journey, which is cool in and of itself, finally discovers the birds on a small island off the English coast. There they do finally discover other people, a tribe of white people who have patterned their society around the giant bees that feed them.

It's a neat, tight little story. There is conflict but it is all done in a non-stressful way which I appreciated.  The racial politics may be a bit naive (there is one person on the expedition who is disgusted by N'Gobi but she learns to appreciate him as a human) which seems appropriate as the author is I am pretty sure white and definitely lived well (went to Vassar and ended up in NYC).  I much prefer a straightforward racism is bad and can be overcome if we work together message than some convoluted "exploration" that you tended to get in sci-fi and crime books that did deal with race from this period.  I also really dug the portrayal of the bee society.  It was a cool idea to think of primitive humans with no mammals who would become dependent on the insects around them.

Lightner was quite prolific in fiction and non-fiction and did some other YA and PA books.  Worth checking her out more.  Nice little find!

23. Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier

He gets his name on the cover, so I guess I also have to give a shoutout to story selector and introduction writer, Patrick McGrath, who I guess put together this New York Review of Books collection.  Daphne du Maurier is one of those authors with whose name I have been quite familiar while also basically being ignorant of what she actually did. This book was handed on to me by a friend who was doing a shelf purge.  I felt a bit burdened, but now am glad I read it as it is a nice introduction to du Maurier.  She is an excellent writer.  Although I am not a huge fan of short stories, her clear prose and subtle ability to change styles and perspectives is well demonstrated in all these stories.

The two well-known stories, because of the movies based on them are the titular "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds".  I didn't love the movie of Don't Look Now.  I don't know why, it just kind of bugged me. The death of the daughter was so horrific and sad that the rest of the movie couldn't surpass that feeling and the couple just seemed mostly annoying.  The story is tighter and the husband comes off much more as being an ignorant ass (and thus getting his ironic, "Appointment in Samarrah" type ending).  The Birds was simply exquisite.  A dark, tight story of survival in rural England, it feels very influenced by WWII and the blitz.  The movie takes the basic premise but completely relocates it.  Here we have much more of a straightforward and grim tale of apocalyptic survival.  Just excellent.

The other stories are all equally well-written and intriguing, but ultimately suffer for me from the lack of depth inherent in the short story. There is a really cool one where a woman comes out of an eye operation and everybody has a different animal head (The Blue Lenses).  Kiss me Again, Stranger is a nice woman as serial killer twist with a great but doomed young romance encounter.  

I will have to read one of her novels at some point.

22. The Ants by Peter Tremayne

This was quite a nice find for a paperback collector and in beautiful condition.  It almost looked like it had never been read.  I am also a big fan of the killer ants concept (who isn't).  My all-time favourite old time radio show (and also a classic) is the William Conrad Escape episode "Leiningen Versus the Ants".  The ants as devouring adversary are a great antagonist in and of themselves, but they also engender creative solutions to fight them.  It's fun to think about.

Unfortunately, though The Ants is a competent even enjoyable book, the creative solutions are lacking. I strongly suspect that Tremayne either read the original short story that Leiningen Versus the Ants was based on or heard the radio play.  The setup (South American plantation) and several of the techniques (particularly the fire ditch) to fight the ants seem to be cribbed right from the story.

There are two protagonists here, Jane the anthropologist who returns to the Mato Grosso province to find her father and the tribe they lived with all completely disappeared and Hugo the bush pilot working for the largest plantation owner in the region.  His plane crashes and Jane rescues him.  Together, the two of them with the one native boy survivor make their way back to the plantation, where Xavier the owner, Lopez his foreman and Consuela his selfish and sexy wife are in their own little domestic conflict.  This group must first solve the mystery of the destruction and then when they learn it, fight the ants as well as their own internal conflicts.

As I said, if it were wholly original, I would say it's a pretty fun ride.  The ants are awesome in scale and the destruction they cause is quite fun and well-described, as is the stress when they start to threaten.  Tremayne does a good job of describing the tactile sensations of a lot of large ants, especially when they get squished.  It gets to you a bit.

There are, as usual, some minor missteps with the gender roles.  Jane lived for several years already in a remote village in Brazil, speaks Portuguese and Xingan and is an excellent and fast shot.  Yet as soon as there is danger, she faints.  Hugo is constantly sending her to the safe places.  It's this weird dance of yes she is a cool girl who can do stuff but oh she is also a woman so better not actually just make her the protagonist lest she stress the sensitive ego of the male reader.

21. The Dam Busters by Paul Brickhill

When I found this book in the bookbox in Little Italy, the back cover was missing and the front cover was almost ripped off.  Normally, that is too damaged for me to take, but this was a beautiful 1954 Pan edition with a really nice illustrated cover.  I'm glad I read it but I don't know if I will keep it.  Ethical and archival considerations come into play.I believe it is something of a classic, at least was quite popular when it was released not long after the war ended.  It's the straight-ahead story of the pilots and leaders of the 617 Squadron, a specialized super-heavy and accurate bomber team.  It has the best portrayal of British humble pluck and some pretty exciting bombing runs.  It is told in a documentary style, but the action scenes are none the less thrilling.  I have to admit that I didn't quite understand how the targetting was done by the lead planes, as there was some jargon and terms that were perhaps more widely used right after the war.  It is always crazy to me the men who flew in WWII.  They would fly a plane 10 hours just to get to a bombing run!  Think how hard that would be.

The cast of characters get a bit confusing but the ones that are highlighted are quite compelling.   He pays particular attention to Wing Commander Cheshire, a true eccentric of the British income-less landed gentry.  Brickhill seems to have known and talked with many of the people in the story and he fills it out with many little anecdotes and asides about their characters. 

There is one disturbing element in this book.  It smacks you in the face a few chapters in.  The squad leader's dog is named the n-word!  Just seeing it once is really shocking, bringing the entire good guy narrative into perspective.  You suddenly see that these personable lads are also the elites of a destructive, rapacious empire whose racism is so deep that they would name their dog the perjorative term for a peoplel they had subjugated.  There is a whole little sub-plot with the dog and the name comes up several times.  And spoiler alert, the dog is hit by a car and is killed just before the first big flight.  Reading that chapter created a real conflicting mix of emotions in me.  Imagine being a nerd of colour and reading this book and stumbling onto that word.  

So I'm left conflicted.  The book is too beat up for my library and I don't think I want it in there anyhow.  Do I repair the front cover and pass it on or should it be removed from circulation because of the use of that word and maybe it is just at the end of its life?

20. The Executioner #24: Canadian Crisis by Don Pendleton

The Executioner books do little for me but I had to pick up #24 for $10 from S.W. Welch because of the Canadian content.  And not just any Canadian content, but Quebec and Montreal.  This one will go in my glass display case next to Iceman #6: Canadian Kill.  

Just as a concept, the Executioner books are hard for me to understand.  Mack Bolan is unstoppable. There is little suspense in his campaigns against various mafia headquarters.  There is also not a wide range of interactions to be had in stories whose main purpose is to deliver scenes of mafia goons being gunned down.  I guess there is creativity in the ways in which they get set up.  The actual gunning down can take place in a range of locations.  But overall there is just not a lot to these books. They are almost poetic.  Mack Bolan goes to a new place, assesses the situation, has some plan (where he can also call upon any government agency and all their resources) and then kills everybody.  We get really bizarre conversations and narrator musings about questions and answers where the answer was already written and the answer it is always death.  You can't even really tell what political world these books are in.  Something about extreme individualism but so muddled up with Bolan's weird life (death) philosophy that it is almost meaningless.  The theme of these books is that The Executioner must be constantly killing mafia people and they must keep being there to be killed.  At least in the two books I've read, the mafia don't even actually do any crimes or harm anybody. 

Canadian Crisis sends Bolan to Montreal where he has learned of a global crime summit where somehow the American mafia will launch a crime invasion of Quebec, taking advantage of the current political instability (this book was written in 1975 a few years after the FLQ crisis, which is mentioned). The crossing to Canada, the drive to Montreal and the stealth approach into Montreal (via Rivière des Prairies) are all geographcally acurrate.  I was hoping we would get more of that in Montreal but unfortunately the rest of the book takes place in a hotel so we never get to see the rest of the city.  It's a cool hotel because it has a network of secret shafts and tunnels, which the Quebecois Francais (the new separatist society following the footsteps of the FLQ) has discovered and retrofitted to use to start their revolution. I guess the plan is to kidnap and kill a lot of rich people in the hotel but before that it serves as a perfect way for Mack Bolan to kill more mafiosa.

Pendleton does a decent job of giving some colour to the mafia who actually get names and roles and there is a well done reveal when the bodyguard finds his boss with his throat slit.  Bolan meets a hot revolutionary quebecoise who is named Betsy Johnson because her father was American.  Her conversations with Bolan are the weirdest. One could believe that Don Pendleton had never actually spoken directly with a woman, certainly not a French-Canadian revolutionary. She has all these questions and he keeps telling her the answer is death but she doesn't get it until she has to.  And then he gets to go off camping with her to fish and have sex until he has to go back to killing mafia again.

19. The Unsuspected by Charlotte Armstrong

I am starting to see a pattern in Charlotte Armstrong's work.  The climax often involves somebody trapped somewhere with limited time before they will be killed, while one or two people desperately try to find them and convince the authorities.  In one, the guy was trapped in the basement of a house about to be demolished.  I also have a better grasp of her tone.  When I first started reading her, the outer and inner dialogue felt stilted and uncertain which made the characters seem unreliable.  Now I think that is more her style and is intended to give an immersive feel to the reader.  So I found myself better able to just sit back and enjoy the narrative.

The setup is Francis has returned from WWII and discovered his childhood love has hanged herself while in the employ of a much-loved retired film-producer.  His sister has already gained employment at the producer's house to follow up on her suspicions.  Francis pretends to be the husband of the recently drowned daughter of the producer to also insinuate himself into the household, but his plot gets thrown for a serious wrinkle when the daughter shows up alive.  It is a psychological game of cat and mouse as Francis and his sister try to find proof that the suicide was murder while the daughter struggles with her own reality.  The producer is a real trip, super charismatic and manipulative with an almost spell-like voice.

I find the interactions a little too hesitant in this book.  Armstrong does a great job of building up tension but there isn't quite enough release for my taste.  The fun is in the hidden conflicts as people try to communicate with a mix of lies and truth.  The ending here, though, was quite exciting which kept me turning the pages.  I'll try not to be too spoilery but leave this to remind myself that it involved garbage men and a trunk.

They made a movie out of it and Claude Rains is the perfect actor to play the producer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. The Killing Machine by Jack Vance

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

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

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

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

15. Burnt Sienna by David Morrell

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

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

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

14. Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Fourth Down, Death by Michael T. Hinkmeyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker

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

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

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

9. The Quiet Gentleman by Georgette Heyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson

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

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

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

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

6. The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

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

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

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

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