8. Danger at Bravo Key by Ronald Johnston

Pegasus and Pendragon used book stores in the Bay Area are great.  However, their buying strategy which probably is what works best for them, does not really consider me part of their purchasing demo.  They have a decent-sized and well-organized mystery section, but it's almost all trade paperbacks in such good condition that one has tiny doubts that one is in the used section.  Very rare to find any good old paperbacks other than major classics like Agatha Christie.  I did find this one and it had many elements that appealed to me:  cool active cover, the Caribbean, post-WWII and thin. It was $8 (another sign that they don't cater to me) but I am always happy to support any used book store when I can.  Turns out to have been a good choice, my instincts once again proving true.

Joe Lennard is a successful journalist taking an absolutely sick vacation on a little uninhabited Island off the Bahamas.  His big break came in interviewing Castro while he was still in the hills, so he knows a bit about the region and recent Cuban history.  He has hired a local guide, Moses to take him fishing and hunting and they are camping out on this island when at the beginning of the book.  When a hurricane hits, they hide up in some mountain caves.  During the storm, they happen to see a flare and help bring in a foundering ship.  It's supposedly a fishing trip, except they have a store of weapons in the hold. It becomes clear (and admitted soon after) that the 6 men and 1 woman are anti-Castro rebels who are going to try and make some kind of attack on Cuba.  The woman is a journalist who hopes to get a big scoop.

The Cubans are, if not benevolent, at least not outwardly hostile at first.  They are led by their intense captain, Juan Camenides, whose whipping scars and "b" brand Lennard recognizes as the same that were on a young man he met with Castros rebels in the hills. He begins to wonder about Camenidas' allegiance and real plan.  Things get messy fast, as one of the men takes a hating for Lennard and takes it out on a friendly pelican he and Moses had been feeding.  I was enjoying this book decently for the first third. It was a cool setting but some of the politics were a bit wishy-washy and the treatment of the Moses character at first somewhat problematic (he is referred to often as "The Negro").  However, once the action started, it got really good.  There is a great hand to knife fight where Lennard, who was a special forces marine in the Pacific Theatre and saw a lot of action, loses control and goes into commando mode.  

The final act got a bit drawn out, but all the action that led up to it was quite intense and fun and creative.  The characters are mostly all well drawn out.  There is no real bad guy but people put in conflict due to the situation, which makes everything that much more intense and poignant.  Even the Moses character gets his own cool narrative and backstory that made him a full-fledged human.  I dug this.

I really struggled to find any info on Ronald Johnston.  He did have a successful writing career and has some other intriguing titles out there.  Today, his greatest claim to fame seems to be that he is author Paul Johnston's father.  Paul also seems to be an interesting writer, so I've added both to my hunting list.

Inflation!

7. Rogue Justice by Geoffrey Household

I was surprised to discover that Rogue Justice was written in 1982.  I have read Rogue Male back before the 50 books era (even made a fun xmas card out of it) and enjoyed it but also found it a bit odd and off-putting.  I went back and read my reviews of the three books of his I have read and found I had the same impression.  Rogue Justice was much less odd and rather than an extended hunt, most of the book was a chase with the protagonist on the run.  It made for a really enjoyable read. It gets a bit convoluted at the end but most of the book is a just a great escape story.

Rogue Justice is framed by an intro and epilogue by a colleague of the hero and briefly summarizes his attempt to assassinate Hitler and the ensuing retaliation assassination attempt by the Nazis (the story of Rogue Male).  After this, the hero (he has so many names and aliases that one forgots who he even is) returns using the Nicaraguan passport of his would-be assassin and tries again to take Hitler down.  He ends up in jail, which is luckily bombed, killing his captors and starting the adventure in this book.

The rest of the book is him making his way all over Europe in an attempt to escape the occupied territory and to join the British forces to take the fight to the Nazis in a more conventional manner.  His love was tortured and murdered by the Nazis and he lives for revenge only.  He won't even get with the hot Greek resistance agent because he can only think of his dead wife.  The route he takes is so cool and each stop is a little segment of adventure.  Household is really in command of his material.  He seems to know the geography, culture and military situation of each country and even region of a country they go through.  The journey goes from Northern Germany, through Poland, across mountains to Romania, then on to Istanbul via the Black Sea then western Greece, then Italy and finally back to Jerusalem.  There is a lot of British self-satisfaction and veneration of the Jewish people.  Household always has to elicit one Yuck or Yikes! per book (I had said it in two different reviews) and his extreme colonialist portrayal of Israel is the them that does so here.  Yikes!

On the plus side of the ledger, he kills 18 Nazis in all kinds of ways, often after witnessing their barbarism, so particularly satisfying.  I'm surprised that he was writing this will so late in the game.  I'm going to look for more of his later work. 

 

6. The Three Roads by Ross MacDonald

At this point, I consider most of Ross Macdonald's books to have some amount of their work done by Margaret Millar.  The Three Roads, his fourth book and I believe last that was to be published under the Kenneth Millar name, feels strongly that she had a heavy involvement.  It's all pure speculation based on style and themes and their work can be considered together a single ouevre given how symbiotic they were. 

The story here is about a young man on indefinite recuperation leave from the navy after losing his memory.  The book starts in a sanitarium in Southern California where Lieutenant Bret Taylor is under the care of his potential fiancé, slightly older screenwriter and divorcee Paula West.  His situation is very complex.  He and Paula fell in love but just before he went back to sea, he started a big fight and then stormed off, got super drunk and married some chick he met in a bar.  When he came back to see her 2 years later after his ship was blown up, he finds her murdered in the bedroom of the bungalow he had bought for her.  At which point he blacked out and lost his memory. 

Paula West, has fallen in love with him and wants to help him so he can move on and they can get married.  Taylor has other ideas and takes off on his own to investigate the murder of his wife.  At first, there is a lot of heavy Freudian psychology but once Taylor starts the investigation we get into the excellent sleuthing of Macdonald.  I always love the investigating in his books, just great characters in interesting locations and rich, nuanced dialogue to dig out the clues.  

The plot is not all the well thought out and thus doesn't resolve very well.  There is not much of a mystery and after a feint of distrust we get a anti-moralistic ending that is quite dark and noir.  It's not super effective and a bit muddy how we are supposed to take the ending.  The route getting there is mostly enjoyable, though a bit heavy on the psychoanalyzing.

The Three Roads feels like Macdonald is still trying to find his voice and his ideas.  The psycho-babble comes on way too thick, at one point almost feels like he is writing an essay.  It is sprinkled with Chandler-esque critiques of modern LA society, but they come on way too strong.  And there is no morals centre here so you kind of end up not caring.  On the positive side, the writing is well-paced and engaging.  The people are believable and unique as are the locations.  You really get a feel for LA at the end of the war.  This Macdonald guy may have some chops.

5. Come to Dust by Emma Lathen

This is where my sickness comes in.  I found this battered paperback in a free library box in Berkeley.  I took it purely on the Anthony Boucher pullquote.  I am literally piling books horizontally on top of my full on-deck shelf.  It's bad.

 I've never heard of Emma Latham.  This was an interesting read, an east coast establishment mystery where the main detector (I guess) is the president of a major bank.  His ally is the Chairman of the Board of the same bank.  The world is the elite establishment of NYC and New England in the late 60s pretty much Mad Men time.  It centers around a secondary and fictional Ivy League college and in particular its alumni fundraising organization.  One of its members, a particularly steady and thorough man, disappears on the way home to his perfect suburban house in Rye, along with a $50,000 bond certificate that was a donation from a wealthy widow of an alum.

A lot of the first half of the book follows the reputational damage to both the college and the fundraising organization and as we expect things get more and more complicated as it starts to become clear that this guy did not just run off with a young hussy or some other more expected scandal.  The two bankers, including the Chairman's competent and socially skilled wife at times, move among the various players, visiting the shattered wife at Rye, and having nice lunches at various clubs and restaurants.  There is a significant act during the big alumni weekend at the college itself and it is here where finally an actual murder takes place. 

It's a pleasant read, although a bit over written.  Latham uses adverbial phrases excessively and they weigh down the prose and could be confusing at times.  There were also a lot of white people with white people's names that I struggled to differentiate at times.  I did enjoy the inner perspective on the comfortable WASP bankers whose main concerns were not getting roped into dull conversations and the mystery itself was well constructed.  There is a very effective slight of hand or at least presentation of ideas that really worked to hide what was a seemingly obvious erroneous assumption throughout the book.  Also, the careful conservatism of the banking world, while stifling culturally, boy does seem welcome in today's financial cesspool.

Oh wow, I see now that this is a real series of 24 books, with John Putnam Thatcher (the banker) as detective, written by two professional women (who sounded quite successful even outside of the writing world).  I feel quite ignorant never having heard of these.  I may read another one if it crosses my path.

Now that's a well-travelled paperback!

 

4. Can't we Talk about Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast

I grew up in a New Yorker household.  Honestly, it always kind of annoyed me because my parents would not read them efficiently and there were always big stacks of half-read issues around the house.  This got worse as they got older.  As a kid, though, I did enjoy reading the cartoons and as I got older there were a few articles that I enjoyed.  I was generally not into the fiction at all, which the few times I read it, rarely actually had a good story, but was more about some theme or story or some modern American literary nonsense.  Roz Chast is a mainstay and I loved the way her characters looked, that frazzled hysteria, but I never totally found them all that funny. 

My father died a few years ago and my mother while quite physically healthy for her age (she was always really active and engaged in life a lesson to us all) started to have ongoing memory issues.  She herself asked to be moved to assisted living, so that last 6 months of me and my sister's life has been dealing with all that stuff, a situation common to many people at this stage in our life.  For some reason, we are called "the sandwich generation" but I think it's been going on forever in various forms in various societies.  Anyhow, my sister gave me this book for xmas and I guess it is a minor classic.

It's about Roz Chast's own parents, who lived in the same apartment for Brooklyn for most of their adult lives and all of hers.  It's an incredible portrayal of two unique people and the odd family they created.  You really get the vibe in both the art and the writing.  It's quite hilarious as well, though ultimately sad.  She portrays her parents so well.  I was laughing out loud at several moments in the way she portrayed her father's idiosyncracies.  The storyline is their aging and how it forces them finally to leave their apartment.  It's often so sad how life ends this way.  People who have found an established home and routine that makes them happy are ultimately forced to leave it behind as they are no longer capable of managing it.  This more than anything has made me see that life can be very arbitrary.

She doesn't make a huge point of it, it's implicit in her narrative, but the other major thing this book shows is how stupid America is with dying.  It has basically turned into a giant racket to steal people's money at the end of their lives.  Fucking stupid Christian obsession with "life" means that many people end their years in discomfort and worse for themselves and econonomic stress and worse for their families.  As late-stage capitalism grows more and more voracious, this just gets worse and worse.  Assisted living is now a major investment category, most of them owned by big private capital firms.  The places are designed to exploit the staff to the hilt, assisted by weak labour laws (drafted by politicians in lobbyists pockets).  Same with the medical system which is designed by exploiting and twisting the Hippocratic oath to keep people physically alive as long as possible even if their quality of life has diminished so far it isn't really even life.

I have two friends whose elderly parents have chosen to end their own lives.  The American had to travel to Europe and the other was here in Canada where we now finally have humane MAID laws that make it possible.  In both cases, while sad as anyone's death is, it was very much the right choice and better for everyone involved.

This is me editorializing above, because Chast's book stays away from any kind of soapboxing.  She just tells the story of their end and her experience of managing it.  It's not a total disaster or anything and in the end they did lead very long lives.  She spends more time on her own challenging relationship with them and especially her mother, who was quite tough and strict.  Chast was the weird quirky girl at school who probably didn't have the right clothes.  She could not wait to leave home and clearly has done extremely well.  But you can see the weird, tough home life that creates the kids who don't fit in.  

This is just a great read, but especially for any of you dealing with your own parents situation.

3. Forgive me, Killer by Harry Whittington

This was the other Black Lizard book I found at Green Apple Books.  The forward in this one is by Harry Whittington himself.  It's an overview of his career, which frankly sounds just exhausting.  The guy wrote non-stop.  It seemed he never found true financial success, but did achieve much-deserved (and gratifying for this reader) critical success finally by the French late in life.  I did not realize how many books he had written.  It's strange how hard his books are to find these days, considering how many titles he published under his own name.  Maybe because his prime was relatively long ago and he truly did get forgotten in between?  A real adventurer could also look for the many books he wrote under pseudonyms. 

[Vague spoilers ahead]

Forgive me, Killer is a reversal of the themes I have previously encountered in Whittington's books.  Instead of a protagonist where shit gets worse and worse as he is destroyed by his own mistakes and the women around him, this one is a redemption story.  Lieutenant Mike Ballard is a corrupt cop, utterly cynical, but tough and competent.  He's under pressure from the DA and public opinion, but doesn't seem to realize or just doesn't care how serious it is all getting.  At the beginning, he goes to a prison to visit a guy on death row, even though the case is pretty cut and dry.  It's the guy's wife that convinced him to do it and though a poor, frazzled housewife, Mike is drawn powerfully to the steel under her shabby core and even more powerfully by the unawakened sexual potential in her.  She is clearly hot and ready to get hotter but doesn't even know it.  It's a great premise.  

Ballard starts to poke around the case and quickly starts to see some very corrupt holes in it.  His lust pushes him to go past his own safety limits and he adds the gangster boss that pays him to the list of people that want him gone.  It's a quick, fun read with a very satisfying (and dare I say it, happyish) ending.

 

2. Black Friday by David Goodis

While in the Bay Area, I had a tremendous day visiting San Francisco, first going to the guided tour of The Internet Archive, which was really amazing and inspiring.  It's basically the library of the internet, constantly under attack by rights-hoarding corporations for trying to do what the internet was supposed to do in the first place:  be a repository of human knowledge.  Both the work they do and the physical space itself (it used to be a Christian Scientist church) are well worth learning about so I strongly recommend their tours (every Friday at 1:00 PM) if you are ever in San Francisco.

Their office is in the Richmond District, at the border between Inner and Outer Richmond neighbourhoods.  San Francisco has so many cool neighbourhoods with amazing residential architecture, great little stores and absolutely incredible neighbourhood bars.  I found Green Apple Books here and picked up a couple of slim crime fiction, including two Black Lizard books (also from the Bay Area).

I have somehow never read David Goodis.  Right from the beginning, I felt a sense of ease and relief, as the prose style was clean and direct and the situation immediate.  A young man is on the run in the freezing cold city.  He stumbles upon a dying man who gives him several thousand dollars in cash, which then leads him (or rather them to him) to the gang who killed him.  This could almost be a play as most of the drama takes place in the house where they are holed up.  The protagonist has murdered his brother and while a practical, experienced man for his age, he is not a career criminal.  He has to pretend to be, to stay in the shrewd gang boss's good graces.

The wrinkle for him is the short, fat and hyper-sexualized girlfriend of the boss.  She wants our hero and he doesn't want her, but she cottons on that he is not a professional and blackmails him to get with her.  I read later in the thorough introduction (by Geoffrey O'Brien; one of the elements that made the Black Lizard re-releases so good were the excellent intro essays) that Goodis had a self-loathing thing for fat women.  His forced attempt to please her is very well-written; she's actually quite hot on text.

The plot is not super compelling. It's more of a psychological character study of doom, which is usually not my thing.  But it is done so efficiently and compellingly that I quite enjoyed this one.  Goodis himself sounds like a dark figure and the quality of his books varied wildly.  This one was pretty intense. 

1. The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr

I think I may be done with the locked room mystery.  I delved into it after reading several articles sharing the top examples of the sub-genre (and introduced me to some of the rich history of Japanese detective fiction) and read several.  I'm told that this one is the absolute pinnacle, though it sure took me a long time to find (I finally cornered it in a very well-organized used book store in an Abbotsford mini-mall (The Bookman, long may it live).  I believe it had a cameo in the latest Knives Out movie.

I'm a lazy reader.  I want the narrative to take me for a ride while I sit back and enjoy myself.  Locked room mysteries are designed to make the reader engage and try and figure it out for themselves.  I actually have made an effort (and had some partial successes, including with this book), but I need the rest of the ride to be entertaining.   Most of the locked room mysteries I've read really put all the work into the clever murder and it becomes a slog for me to read.  This one was particularly guilty of that.  I just didn't connect with the context.  It was supposed to be London but there was minimal atmosphere or character.  There were multiple investigating characters, though I guess one detective.  I figured out one of the major puzzles, but in order to actually put it all together, I would have had to write down a timetable.  

Ah just read that Carr was American, who did live in England.  That explains the lack of atmosphere.  It's an ersatz British mystery.  It was the holidays and we had lots of lovely family activities, and I had quite a lot of work around moving my mother into assisted living, but a book this thin should not take me 2 weeks to read.  I thought it was me, but I cranked through two great pulp crime books right after this one (I'm behind on my reviews), so I think that is it for me with the locked room mystery sub-genre.

[Apologies, kind of a negative way to start the year. I was in a bit of a reading rut and after this one have gone on to pick books that are fun to read, so picking up a bit of steam for 2026.] 

 

56. The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side by Agatha Christie

I'm struggling to get my daughter to read books.  She is a fast reader and does well in school but just doesn't have the strong desire to read.  For some reason she is fixated on It (the Stephen King book) which I won't let her read because of the super creepy ending.  I also won't let her watch the recent two-part movie because it is absolute dogshit and would ruin all that is good about the book.  I gave her Salem's Lot which I later realized is one of King's most boring books.  She read that but it did not ignite a Stephen King fire in here.  I got her Firestarter which hasn't started.  I know for some reason Agatha Christie is trendy among younger readers so I got her a couple of what I thought were classics.  She started this one and just couldn't keep going.  I took it and read it and can see why.

What is quite good about The Mirror Crack'd is the portrayal of the older English village and the development of the modern estates next door to it.  What's not so good is the mystery itself.  I can see how a 13-year old would not find this all very engaging, especially one who has no real exposure to the subtleties of British social culture.  I was a bit disappointed myself in this one.  The set up is good.  A fading and neurotic British movie actress has moved in with her wealthy producer husband to the old aristocratic mansion of St. Mary Mead.  At a reception in her new home, one of her guests is poisoned and it becomes clear that the poison was meant for the actress.  The more exciting storyline honestly is if Miss Marple can get out from under the thumb of her well-meaning but way too keen and strict caregiver (Miss Marple is quite old at this point).  The mystery itself heads off into a couple of dead ends and the resolution, while clever, is not that satisfying.

Anybody know what are the really good Christie's that will get a 13-year old hooked?  Or any other books.  She is deadset against fantasy and especially all these fantasy series that are popular these days.

55. The Mark of the Warrior by Paul Scott

This behaviour of mine is really not going to reduce the on-deck shelf.  It's reached its horizontal limit, to the edge of the chest of drawers, at which point my rule is not to buy anymore books and only read those on deck.  And yet here I am finding this nice-looking British paperback from my key time period about soldiers in the colonial theatre at the Chainon thrift store.  I would not have bought it if I hadn't also found the Lifegames adult Choose Your Own Adventure book.  Somehow, that enabled me to buy this one as well.  And then I read it right away too!

Mark of the Warrior is the story of Major Craig, an older soldier in the Burmese theatre who is now heading up a training unit in India.  We learn early on that he was leading a retreat when one of the men drowned crossing a river.  This becomes a big deal for him (though we learn it already was) when the dead soldier's brother, A.W. Ramsay, is one of the trainee recruits.  The big philosophical theme is that most men are not made for war, but there are a small minority whose being is basically perfectly suited for the sacrifices of men fighting men. They are natural hunters and put their instinct to survive and kill ahead of their other emotions.  Major Craig is not one of these men.  Cadet Ramsay is.

 

The location, the training exercises and the characters are all richly drawn.  I just really have an issue with the theme itself, especially when it is blasted in the reader's face.  You know how it is going to end up and it is just all so '70s war hero revisionism.  The conflict is that Craig puts Ransom in the lead of one of the two teams in the final, competitive training exercise.  Ransom's team is the local guerrilla army and they are supposed to sneak attack the other team. Ransom gets way to into it, forcing his men to suffer through extra-long marches with minimal rations to simulate potential reality.  Craig encourages this for various thematic reasons that don't really compel (guilt over his brother's death? to release the real soldier in him?  who knows).  

 

I guess I'm being extra critical as it is a well-written book.  I don't know how as an author you could get a richer story out of the setup without having some heavy psychological conflict.  Personally, I would have been happier just to read the setup and playing out of the simulation without all the thematic angst.  But that kind of thing didn't and doesn't sell thanks to the hegemony of the dogma of "conflict" in the  literary world.

 

54. Life games #1 - Woman Up the Corporate Ladder by Angela Harper

This was a crazy thrift store find, a Choose Your Own Adventure for the 1980s career woman.  I wonder how well it did at the time.  I can see how somebody would have come up with this idea as CYOA's were extremely successful in the 80s.  However, the demographic seems like a major leap.  For some reason, the concept of the reader taking an active part in the narrative (which is also the base concept of role-playing games and ultimately video games) seems for some reason to really only resonate with nerdy types, which back in the 80s was predominantly male (and young, though less predominantly).  Happily, this is slowly improving, but I still don't see a market for "normal" grown-ups to read books like these.  I'd be curious how well they did.

This book was a fun read, more fun than I expected.  I thought at first that I might just flip through it or read a few of the storylines.  I ended up reading every single possible outcome.  It's very digestible and a real page turner because every decision leads to a different path and you want to learn what happens.  It actually gets somewhat outrageous, though never totally insane.  You can end up in Brazil, have affairs with your boss (or reject his advances), decide to take a bribe, go after opponents and so on.  There are a lot of ethical decisions, yet not a consistent ethical message.  Sometimes doing the right thing, doesn't end up so well and sometimes making a bad decision can work out for you.  It felt a bit random.  There were some quite bleak and sad endings as well.  

I feel like a man wrote this, but I am not super confident about that.  I'd love to hear a backstory on these and I'll keep my eye out for them.

53. Dungeon Crawl Classics core rulebook by Joseph Goodman

I had to get the Erol Otus cover

If you want to find a reason for my lack of reading in the last couple of months, it is to this tome that you can point the finger.  I did actually read it cover to cover, which I don't believe I have ever done for a tabletop role-playing game before.  However, "reading" an RPG book, usually then triggers a myriad of other activities, such as hunting down multiple other source materials (such as adventures and supplementary rulebooks, older versions), going online to ask questions (an entire internet history is here in the TTRPG sector from usenet to fora to blogs to G+ and today to Discord), creating your own content and finally actually playing!

All these things have happened.  Now that I have had a chance to actually play and GM, my mania has subsided to a more consistent, sustainable level and I have picked up linear non-fiction books again.  So I will limit this post to a broad review of the DCC core rulebook and leave the TTRPG nerdiness to other places of expression.

Goodman Games started out designing adventures for D&D 3rd edition and kept doing that right into 5th.  As D&D evolved, I guess he realized that the system was not fitting the kinds of adventures they were making, which tended towards the kind of fantasy found in sci-fi and fantasy fiction from the mid-twentieth century, which in turn was the material that strongly influenced the original versions of D&D.  It is extremely hard to pinpoint any one playstyle, but very broadly speaking, D&D back in the 80s had less powerful player-characters and was focused more on dungeon exploration and what we call "emergent story" where narrative would come out of whatever weird shit happened in a dungeon.  The term "murder hoboes" captures it well.  In today's D&D, the adventures and campaigns are structured around long-term narratives involving character development and the PCs are insanely powerful ("Fantasy Avengers").  Death is really no longer an option.

Beyond the D&D RPG system, it is the famous "Appendix N" that influences DCC the most. This was a section in the back of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide that listed the fiction that influenced D&D. It is an exceptional list of some genre classics and some relatively obscure.  

DCC builds on the spirit of orginal D&D but has its own slightly more complex ruleset that involves lots of great random tables.  The book is just under 500 pages but probably only 100 pages is actual rules.  The bulk of the book are the spells. Each spell has a table of results which vary wildly and are a blast to read. I laughed out loud several times.  

Engaging with an RPG is an ongoing, dynamic and multi-media experience.  You read it, you talk about it with others, you play it and ultimately, you run it as a GM (gamemaster or what they call "judge" in the DCC world, to emphasize the notion that you are there to interpret the outcomes based on the rules, not guide them).  There is no ultimate understanding of an RPG.  It's a dialectic.  I played in a few online one-shots and then ran a few sessions with my friends.  It went fairly well, but we didn't get in deep enough to really take advantage of the crazy magic.  Another friend is now the GM, which is great as I only have to play, but if he wants to take a break, I'd be happy to get back behind the screen.

Magic is powerful but not without consequences
in Dungeon Crawl Classics

52. The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain by Eric Andrew-Gee

I am a regular patient at the Montreal Neurological hospital.  I didn't even really consciously know about its existence before I was diagnosed by them (very fortunately too) with a rare neurological disorder that falls under the category of Multifocal Neural Neuropathy (MNN).  I'm one in a hundred-thousand!  In my case, I am very, very fortunate.  First that it was caught quite early (I started noticing weakness in my right hand, a reduced shooting range with my jump shot and at its worst the inability to turn the ignition key in a car).  Second, that I am in Canada and where we have universal (sort of thanks to the neo-liberal fucks and incompetents in government constantly trying to destroy it) health care. And third that I live so close to the Neuro, because as it turns out, this is an amazing medical institution with an incredible history and an ongoing commitment to both research and care of their patients.  

I now go in once a month or so for IVig treatments where I get pumped full of expensive blood byproducts to get my antibodies to behave correctly and stop erroneously attacking my mylene (the sheathing that insulates your nerves).  Some of the damage is permanent (which manifests itself as a weakness in my pinky and ring finger on my dominant hand; many cases are much worse affecting both hands and feet and impacting walking and handling) but it appears that the disease has been stopped altogether.  It's super chill, I get a comfy chair and good wi-fi and just work and sometimes take a nap.  The nurses are elite and the other staff super efficient.  Everybody is really nice.  Not to mention Dr. Massive who identified the problem (after several misdiagnoses from other doctors).

So I have experienced firsthand the excellent of the Neuro from the great care and expertise that I have received and am receiving first hand.  But it is this book that taught me the history behind it.  I was looking forward to reading this book, but a bit skeptical as these kinds of less-than-academic histories tend to lack depth and bend the history towards narrative. I think there is a teeny bit of the latter here, but the historical context was very efficiently done.  What makes the book really effective, though, is that it is truly moving.  For this reader, it had the effect it intended, which was to elevate the unsung partner of one of Canada's most famous doctors.

The hook is the famous Heritage Minute which most Canadians of a certain age featuring Dr. Penfield, the rock-star neurosurgeon who advanced the field massively in the 20th century.  Penfield is the known name but he began his career and worked closely with another doctor, William Cone.  Cone was the one who excelled at surgery and had the best bedside manner.  He obsessed over hygiene and technique as well as ensuring patients were emotionally taken care of.  Penfield was no slouch in these areas, but his real passion was in the research and writing, which Cone did not like.  Penfield was the charismatic one and Cone hitched himself to his star, seemingly driven by his love for is friend more than anything else.   

These kinds of journalistic histories are not usually my jam, so I was surprised by how well put together The Mind Mappers was.  It's a very readable, informative and ultimately quite touching telling of an important history of Canada, Montreal and science.  

51. The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

[written Nov 19, 2025 because I put off writing this for weeks as explained below.] 

Wow, I really hit a block with the 50 books blog for the first time in years!  The obvious cause is a recent head-first plunge into the world of tabletop role-playing games, but I wonder if there is a deeper fatigue at play that has allowed/enabled me to avoid writing book reviews for almost two months.

Very briefly, I played RPGs back in the 80s when D&D first exploded and then stopped with adolescence and other social pursuits.  I got pulled back in in the late '90s and then got deep into it (online fights and everything) in the early aughts and then dropped out again with the birth of my own child.  

During the pandemic, my friend groups and I were having regular zoom calls and decided to start a 5e game online.  We have been playing sporadically but consistently since then.  Something happened a few months ago where I got sucked way back in and am now demonstrating all the classic behaviours of the true addict (online talking about it way too much, buying all kinds of beautiful books, playing in a second group locally and in one shots online; it's bad!).

So to slowly drag this back to actual reading, I've been spending most of my reading time, reading game books, which you don't usually read linearly (they have rules, settings, etc. it would be kind of like reading an encyclopedia straight through).  I did actually read one from beginning to end and I will count that in this blog, but overall my reading has fallen way off.

Before the sickness truly set in, I did read this second Tarzan.  Somebody somewhere recommended this one and The Jungle Tales of Tarzan as particularly good and I found both of them in Vancouver.  I did enjoy The Return of Tarzan overall, but had mixed feelings.  First of all, with Burroughs, one has to account for the racism and eugenics.  It's less present here just because the first half of the book takes place in Europe so less opportunity for him to describe the various disadvantages of the non-whites.  But it goes hard in the second half.  It's bad and I condemn it but I'm still going to read the books.

To me as a reader, the literary problem with Burroughs is that he has a lot of potential with the Tarzan concept and he just kind of barfs it all over the page.  His miraculous education and rise to the role of gentlemen (due to his racial superiority of course which is intrinsically tied to class in Burrough's world) makes Tarzan a great vehicle for the contrast between the stiff laws of civilization and the powerful release of the savage.  You need to build this up gradually, though, and use it sparingly at the right moments.  Instead, Tarzan is just kicking the shit out of groups of people multiple times right away, while, super annoyingly, never actually killing the one serious bad guy.  It's just so bald that Burroughs is keeping the Russian spy alive to maintain a central narrative, but he does it by violating the the rules of Tarzan's own character.  It's bad.

On top of that, there are all these convoluted plot lines which ensure that Tarzan and Jane won't get together.  They literally pass each other on separate ships in the night.  I've avoided the plot this whole time.  Basically, the first half is in Europe and involves said Russian spy doing bad shit to a rich guy.  Then they all go to Africa and get shipwrecked and Tarzan comes to rescue them.

Before he can rescue them, though, we get the main plot of the second half which is Tarzan going back to the tribal village in his old stomping grounds and defending them against Arab slave raiders.  Here the book gets really fun.  It's almost Conan the Barbarian territory; real pulp stuff.  He discovers an ancient city filled with gold and these weird pygmy descendants from space who were once purebred but got all corrupted with time or some shit.  The hilarious part is their queen is still super hot and genetically pure and she saves Tarzan from being sacrificed because she is hot for him.  It's quite wacky and super entertaining and with a bit of tweaking could be a cool origin story for the Kingdom of Wakanda.

 

 

50. A Chill Rain in January by L.R. Wright

50 books achieved. I guess it's a good sign that I don't make a big deal out of my 50th book anymore.  Like a succesful athlete, not too high, not too low.  Just keep grinding.  Still, satisfying.

I picked this one up at the family home which may not be so much longer as we were there to move our mother to assisted living. I "discovered" L.R. Wright on my own only a few years ago, but now realize that my parents must have been reading her books at the time they came out as we have a few of her paperbacks floating around in the study.

A Chill Rain in January is the fourth or fifth book in the series, and I think it may have been a bit more fulfilling had I been reading them in order.  There are two major plotlines in the mystery that collide.  The first and the main character is Zoe Strachan, a beautiful sociopath who lives on her own outside of Sechelt with a perfectly controlled life until her spendthrift older brother comes to blackmail her for money.  He has her "scribblers", notebooks where she reveals her true inhuman self and evidently admits to some actual crimes.  At the same time, Ramona Orlitzki, an old woman loved by the community escapes from the hospital where she has recently been committed because of her oncoming dementia.

It's a nice premise and the characters are well-conceived.  Unfortunately, I found the actual storyline frustrating.  The suspense is extended multiple times due to incompetence among multiple characters, incompetence that is never called out and so it is left unresolved.  The officer hunting for Ramona doesn't look in her closet when he goes to her old home.  This is never really mentioned as an error.  The coroner finds strange injuries on the murder victim and Sergeant Elberg, who is the main character of the entire series, totally brushes them off. Worse, when he finally cottons on that there is something suspicious going on, the coroner then seems to try to contradict that.  It's inconsistent and frustrating. And it keeps going right up to the climactic conclusion where the mailman is given the crucial evidence and just dumps it off at the police station instead of taking it right to the top.  Finally, when they do figure it out, they wait until the next day which allows for a major out for everybody (being vague here for spoiler alerts).  All this incompetence leads to two unnecessary deaths and should lead to a major scandal and one would hope an investigation into the RCMP in Sechelt (of course, all the Mounties would be exonerated since we all know how that goes in Canada but there should have at least been some official murmurings).

The physical locations, the weather and the trees and water were all well-written and did remind me of my own childhood and that is why I read these.  What was missing, though, from this one, is the human culture of coastal B.C.  This could have taken place almost anywhere.  I'm hoping this was an exception from the rule for this series. 

 

49. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

My sister forced me to read this.  She is a bit like a male nerd in that way but only sporadically and she does have good taste (she got me to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas years back) so I acquiesced.  I had read A House for Mr. Biswas in the pre-50 Books days and loved it, so felt it wasn't going to be a challenge to read this one, despite it being a bit high-falutin compared to my usual reading choices.  It's actually a fairly "intellectual" book.  Though very well-written, it's much slower to get through than Mr. Biswas.  There is a lot of inner reflection, both personal and political and ideas that take some parsing and re-reading.  So it took me a while.  On top of it, I am fully back into the Tabletop RPG community (Discord seems to have become the replacement for the old forums) and had a major life task (moving our mother into assisted living) both of which contributed to inconsistent reading.  I finally banged out the last third in a night of jetlag insomnia.

It's the story of Salim, an Indian African (African Indian?) who was born and raised in the coast of Africa but is given a small goods store up the river.  Here he half-heartedly tries to start a new life away from his family compound and culture amidst the political and social turmoil of post-independence central Africa.  Everybody knows the book takes place in the Congo and the Big Man is Mobuto but they are never specifically mentioned by name in the book.

I won't go into any depth because there is a lot to write and discuss that has been done already by smarter and more diligent people.  I would like to focus on one element relevant to today's collapse into authoritarianism, which is the protagonist's strange passivity and listlessness in the face of the changes around him and his community.  We know that really bad shit is coming down and he sort of does as well.  So it's a bit dissonant as a reader to see Salim basically just putting one foot in front of the other.  What finally knocks him out of his malaise is a woman, who gives him an image of another world (basically cool Europe) but even this doesn't really create much initiative in him.  What Naipaul succeeds in here is demonstrating how difficult it is for people who come up in such an old and solid reality to conceive of alternatives to that reality (positive or negative) let alone acting on such alternatives, even when it may be a question of survival.

Salim's family has been in Africa for generations and though not of Africa, they are as thoroughly fundamental to the social fabric as the indigenous Africans (and less-indigenous Arabs).  When the institutions around them begin to collapse with the end of colonialism, they can only shrink into themselves.  There is also an element of privilege, where their role as "foreigners" with greater wealth and status as well as some contacts outside of Africa delays the impact of the real horrors to them compared to the Africans (who also have also suffered the horrors of colonialism and are thus in a sense already living after the apocalypse).  

But the horrors are coming, just like they are coming to us right now.  And I see the same sort of stunned stolidness in my American friends.  But what are they to do?  You still have your job that you have to go to, taxes you have to pay and the real bad shit is happening to people you don't know just down the road.  So they cling to the fading promise of already broken institutions like "mid-term elections" and "courts" when they should probably be trying to emigrate to Europe and start a new life before the shit really hits the fan.  That is the major part of the success of the criminals taking over America right now: while they destroy all the elements that made America such a great political experiment, they maintain the ones that allow for day-to-day living and comfort, supported by the shitbags in business and tech.  A Bend in the River really gets into the head of that mentality.

I also have to add that there is a scene of misogyny and gender relations in the book that is so bad and craven and deeply dishonest that it almost risks in undermining the entire enterprise. He beats the woman with which he is having an affair quite brutally and then does some other really sick things.  This portrayed in a book is not in and of itself a sin, as these things happen.  But it feels dishonest here, a forced and artificial narrative device to demonstrate some turning point in the protagonist's thinking which completely renders the woman character a device only and also tries to justify Naipaul's own behaviour (he beat up his girlfriend in real life).  We get this nasty shit in many of the mid-century men's books I read and I abhor it there, but it is usually more "I slapped her and she finally got horny" nonsense.  When literary people do it, they often take it to the next level of grossness.  It's a bad look and undermined much of Naipaul's reputation later and deservedly so.

48. Survival Margin by Charles Eric Maine

I believe this was given to me by a friend who knows I like PA. I thought it was American at first, but quickly realized this is a British author. It's actually not PA, but rather A or whatever the term is called for the sub-genre where the world is actually falling apart.  In this case it is a virus, particularly well-constructed with a bunch of science that sounded more or less legitimate for 1968.  Basically, the virus called AB causes a person to get a fever and then die with in a day or two after which their skin melts off.  This concept seemed disgusting and interesting at the beginning, but then gets totally abandoned and has no impact on any of the issues of dealing with the bodies or people dying at home, etc. I point this out now, because Survival Margin while overall being a a fun look at a world ripped in half by disease, also omits or is sloppy and inconsistent about a lot of fun details. 

The virus has a counterpart called BA that mirrors it but only gives you a slight fever for a day and then you become immune.  But a BA person is also a carrier of AB.  About half the people get AB and die and the other half live, so the premise is that basically half the world is going to die.  The powers that be in England decided to create a bunch of armed and sealed underground bunkers (another sloppy lack of detail because they never really explain how this airborne and waterborne virus wouldn't also get into the bunkers if not already there) to protect their top leaders.  This causes civil unrest that eventually becomes a full-on class divided civil war.  The big picture is fun.

The anchoring narrative is between two main characters: the charming and successful soulless journalist/TV producer Clive Brant and his principled disease scientist wife Pauline.  Right at the beginning, as they reunite after a long absence (she was in Japan fighting the early stages of the disease), he announces that he wants a divorce because he is now seeing the much younger daughter of an American media mogul who is giving him a plum job to run his new new studio.  I saw coming that their narrative was going to be some kind of morale on marriage and relationships throughout the book and it kind of bummed me out.  Felt like the author was working out his own boring relationship issues and getting in the way of the disease apocalypse we came for.  

The disease itself was interestingly close in many ways to Covid.  It's totally ramped up in speed and impact (basically going to kill half the humans on the planet in a few years), so the scale is different. It starts in Asia (though the scientists surmise because of a mutation of cells from nuclear testing, not jumping from animals). Many of the quarantine measures are similar and the working classes suffering and having to keep working while the privileged get to shelter were also thematically reminiscent.  Things here, though, go much further, with most of Souther England taken over by a semi-organized revolution of working class men led by a charismatic MP.  The second half has lots of violence and military combat and was quite action-packed and Clive and Pauline are of course re-united this time with him as an interrogator for the rebels and she as a captured establishment POW scientist.  He has opportunity to redeem his previously selfish character and does so in a way that was sort of tiresome and predictable.  This made for a lot of start and stop reading as I would get into the action and then get annoyed.

Another flaw is that there is a lot of telling rather than showing.  In the early stages of the spread of the disease, Maine just narrates how it is spreading in Asia with rumours of mass graves.  It made me remember the opening scenes of The Stand with the truck barrelling into the gas station and dude coming out vomiting blood.  Just so much more alive and visceral while giving you basically the same info.  Still, the telling is pretty cool and I have to credit Maine with some interesting speculation about what would happen with a disease that kills half the population.

I'm critical and would not encourage everyone to seek this book out, but it's overall not a bad read and I think worthy of inclusion in any disaster/disease subgenre reader to seek out.

 

47. The Big Bite by Charles Williams

Helpful hint for the hopelessly distracted. If you ever take a train trip, don't bring a laptop.  You will get a lot more reading done.

When I first started this, I became concerned that I had already read it.  The protagonist is a professional football player who got into a car accident that smashed his leg.  When he healed, he was mostly fine, but had lost the explosiveness that made him the player that he was.  A previous Charles Williams I had read, A Touch of Death, also starred an ex-football player who gets caught up in criminal shenanigans with a femme fatale.  However, after some checking, I confirmed that this was indeed a different novel.

He quits football and is a bit lost and down on his luck.  The accident was not his fault; a drunk driver sideswiped him and knocked him off the road. That driver had died in the accident and the insurance paid Halan 10k, but it wouldn’t cover his potential future salary loss as a pro player.  Things change when he gets a call from an insurance investigator named Purvis.  Something was fishy about the accident and he wants to pick Halan’s brains.  Purvis is a neat side character, an old skinny weak looking guy with sharp eyes who it turns out knows some kind of martial art (as Halan learns when he tries to brace him).  He also no longer works for the insurance company and is working a blackmail deal on the wife of the dead driver and wants to bring Halan in on it.  I’ll stop here with the narrative in case you read it.  You can well imagine that shit gets complicated.

Halan is smart and ruthless, almost without any feeling at all.  It’s weird to read a book and sympathize with the character and slowly realize that he is the asshole jock who is only looking out for himself.  You figure this out gradually, through the words of the widow, Julia Cannon, who is one of the better femme fatales I have encountered in a while.  She too is quite ruthless, but also philosophical, almost tragic in her outlook.

A lot goes on in this book, but there is also a lot more dialogue and life philosophy than you usually get with Williams.  It’s very dark and very fun.

 

46. To the Far Blue Mountains by Louis L'Amour

This is book 2 of the much-lauded Sacketts saga (here is the first one, Sackett's Land).  It was Paperback Warrior who first turned me on to it and so far my reading has been lukewarm with some highlights.  This book, the second chronologically in the family's story, but actually published fairly late.  This continues the story of the original patriarch, Barnabas Sackett, as he flees his life in England for Raleigh's Land in the New World.  It takes place at the end of the 16th century.

A big part of Barnabas's background and character is that he grew up in the Fens, a marshy region in eastern England which at least according to this book, was home to independent-minded people who did things like cut peat and smuggled.  It's a cool region, where the locals know the labrynthine waterways intimately and anyone else enters at their peril.

In Sackett's Land, Barnabas goes to the New World.  Here he returns and has to deal with a bunch of local drama culminating in the Queen believing he has found the long lost royal jewels of King James (he actually only found some roman coins that is what gave him the boost he needed to start his life of adventuring).  So there is a price on his head and the first third of the book is him sneaking around England, trying to get back to his ship with his bride-to-be Abigail and his compatriots in order to return to the New World, settle himself and make his way to the mountains.

He escapes and we get some fun ship trading and combat on the way to the Virginia coast.  The second half of the book, he and a new gang of adventurers, including a tough Welsh woman named Lila who is his lady's maiden and equally good with domestic skills as with sword and fists, make their way up river trying to find a place to settle.

The portrayal of the new world is odd.  L'Amour's rhetoric (through Barnabas' voice) is respectful of the Indigineous people and he recognizes that his arrival foretells a lot of change, much of which will be negative.  The individual Native characters are shown to be intelligent and human.  However, he also portrays them as in constant warfare and even a culture of weird militaristic excess.  This is all contextualized by Barnabas' idea that all men seek to expand and take over other regions, so the behaviour of the white colonists is basically the same as one group of Indigenous people taking over another one. So throughout the second half of the book, even though they are peacefully situated in the territory of the friendly Catawba, they are constantly coming under attack by other tribes.  Eventually this becomes like a rite of passage for these other tribes, to try and kill Barnabas.  He is seen as almost superhuman and a way to test their young warriors.  It feels like L'Amour was quite well-researched on the various tribes (in a similar way that he knew about the Fens and the many other historical details with which he stuffs the book), but wanted to also maintain the colonialist mythology of the west that the land had to be wrested from the warlike natives.

That being said, the portrayal of colonialism here is not as bad as I expected and I think deep down (at least from this book) that L'Amour was an appreciator of the diversity of the people of the world.  He has a passage almost a page long describing Barnabas' children's education, emphasizing how they learn from the natives, the Persian doctor, the Welsh woman, their mother, etc. so they have a rich mix of religions and folklore.  

The real problem of this book is the pacing and structure.  It jumps from years of narrative to a sudden fight scene. There is no real throughline, nor antagonist, nor conflict to hold it all together.  It's just Barnabas wanting to go to the mountains and a lot of stuff happening to him.  In the last quarter, he is suddenly old and has like 4 sons and one daughter and his wife takes two of the kids back to England forever (she's not mad, just thinks the girl needs to be educated back home and the son is smart).  We get an almost throwaway defeat of an earlier sort-of nemesis and then a final attack by the Natives which kills him followed by a coda of how they respected him.  

I wasn't going to continue with the series, so I was happy to read this guy's ranking who puts this one way down at the bottom.  I speculate that maybe L'Amour was much more interested in the history than in putting together a good story.  I'll keep my eye out for the third and pick it up if I find it cheaply. 

 

45. The General by Alan Silittoe

I picked this one up at the same garage sale where I got the Maracot Deep.  I'm not a huge fan of the British Angry Young Men, but they can write and I thought this might be interesting.  I suspected it would be one of those parable books where ideas of humanity and politics are explored in a semi-surrealistic setting, but hoped there might be enough of a real story to keep me interested.

The book begins with an orchestra being sent via train to the front lines of an unnamed 20th century war to both bring morale to the troops and to demonstrate to the enemy how superior their own culture is.  They tried to object but were overruled by the government and the conductor, who is the de facto leader and one of the two main protagonists, thinks to himself that in war everybody is a soldier who has to obey orders.  The beginning is pretty wild as the train runs through a crazier and crazier battle, while the orchestra cowers in the back, unable to act or even decide if they are supposed to be this far forward in the front.

An enemy soldier on a horse rides down the train and they are taken prisoner.  It is here we meet the general, a loyal soldier, strict disciplinarian and an elite tactician. He knows she should shoot the orchestra immediately, as they serve no purpose other than a drain on resources.  However, he hesitates, not sure why until he realizes that he does want to hear them play.

So the rest of the book is his internal struggle on whether to go against his loyalty and training and the orders of high command (confirmed via signal) or give in to his desire to hear the music and perhaps something else.  This is interspersed with the orchestra themselves contemplating their future.  

It's an interesting read, going beyond the simple "war is stupidity" and looks at our motivations as political beings.  This kind of thing isn't really my bag, but it's short and Sillitoe's descriptions of the landscape of war are grim and effective.  The metaphor of the train with the orchestra riding right into the battle and not even bothering to go to the engine or pull the emergency cord is all too parallel to the American populace right now.