Krycek

As a reviewer, my goals were very simple: to thoughtfully reflect my views on a book and my reading experience. When Goodreads customer service opened a thread in the feedback group titled Announcements: Important Note Regarding Reviews (https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...), I was seriously disturbed.

I've bought into the idea that the personal is political, and I incorporate it, when appropriate, into my reading and thus my reviews. Some authors are content to release their books into the world and let them develop a life of their own. Others leverage their social power into political power, using their artistic voice to make comments in the political arena. For the most part, I've only followed or heard from authors I've loved, so it was natural to me to focus on the positives. But as I grew more widely read and the barriers between authors and readers have melted down on Goodreads, I've come to realize there are authors I want to avoid as well, some because of their public persona, some because of boorish behavior in groups. I never set out to castigate most of them in public (there were a few, I admit), but I reserve that right to discuss it in my notes on reads or books.

I was in the mood recently for something sort of Jack Bauer-ish/Jason Bourne-esque (or is it "Jack Bauer-esque/Jason Bourne-ish?"), some kind of military/espionage/thriller deal, along that vein. I was vaguely aware of Brad Thor and his Scot Harvath series, but never had a real interest to check it out, mainly because I generally think that Brad Thor is full of shit. Nevertheless, Hidden Order, latest in the series, was at eye-level at my local library, so I picked it up on a whim. And who knows? Maybe the guy can write a good thriller. Well, maybe he can, but Hidden Order ain't it. 

Bear in mind, to me there are two kinds of 1-star books. Some are so bad and so goofy, but are still sort of fun. The other kind of 1-star book is the kind that's just plain dumb. This one's the latter. I just had to add that clarification to be fair to other 1-star books that I enjoy in a B-movie sort of way. Hidden Order is the answer for those who have ever had the burning question, "What do middle-aged extreme conservative males daydream about when they're not attending Tea Party rallies?"

From the dust jacket copy:

The most secretive organization in America operates without any accountability to the American people. Hiding in the shadows, pretending to be a part of the United States government, its power is beyond measure.

That organization is none other than the Federal Reserve Bank! When the five candidates being considered to head the Fed are kidnapped, Scott Harvath, a former Navy SEAL and Secret Service guy now working for a shadowy private organization, gets the assignment to investigate these kidnappings before they each are murdered by a madman.

Scot Harvath, despite his credentials, has to be one of the least effective and square "action heroes" I've ever seen. Most of the novel he spends looking up stuff in books or on the internet and questions hookers in Boston while the killer is always one step ahead of him. At one point the smokin' hot female Boston detective named Cordero (who, of course, has the hots for Harvath) and Harvath have a telling exchange:

"What can I do?" asked Harvath.
"Do you have any forensics experience?"
He shook his head. "Not much."
"Then I have the perfect job for you," she replied. "Go out to the car and bring those two Rubbermaid bins in."
"Then what?"
"Then you're really going to prove your worth to this investigation."
"How?" he asked.
"You're going to find us coffee somewhere in this neighborhood."

When we want you to shoot someone, Harvath, we'll wake you up.

And Harvath is such a square that he is amazed when he hears the "F-word" peppering an interviewee's statement. "Not even in the military had Harvath heard someone's speech so peppered with it." I call bullshit. As a seventeen year-old private E-nothing I distinctly remember the drill sergeant using some variation of the F-bomb literally every other word. And he was just instructing us how to make our bunks. I remember being amazed at the versatility of the word. I find it hard to believe that this veteran Navy SEAL is so impressed by a little cursing. Isn't that what sailors do?

Speaking of Harvath's naivety, this segues well into the second major fail of Hidden Order. After learning that his client is the Federal Reserve Bank, Harvath goes to some veteran CIA dude, Bill Wise, to get educated on the subject and Wise is all like, "Dude, the Fed, they wanna turn your children into Miley Cyrus twerking zombies and then eat them while they take all your cash to spend on drugs and whores while America collapses!," and Harvath is shaking his head and like all, "No way, dude, that totally blows. Why don't the American people do something about it?" and Wise is like, "Dude, they don't even know!"

Of course, I'm paraphrasing. But the point is, a major portion of the setup is Thor clobbering you over the head with his own political views. I'm not one to rag on a book just because I disagree with its politics, but I don't like being clobbered over the head with an author's personal agenda, especially in such an artless and clumsy manner. For what it's worth, the Federal Reserve bank is the least of my worries. But it could have been an interesting premise maybe. Dan Brown does a much better job of this tin-foil-hat conspiracy stuff, and if you know my opinion of Brown that's saying something. Take a note, Thor.

Thirdly, Hidden Order is just so ridiculously ethnocentric that it could be a spoof-- but it isn't! In the only parallel story thread that's vaguely interesting, CIA officer Lydia Myers is on the run from persons unknown (this eventually ties in with the main thread). When she first catches on that enemy agents are out to get her, she considers the enemy's tactics:

She ran through her mind the long list of people around the world she had pissed off badly enough to want to come get her. The fact that the attack had been carried out by two young Caucasians worried the hell out of her, as it could very well be an Islamic operation. As box-of-rocks stupid as so many Muslim foot soldiers were, the men in the organizational structures of the more aggressive terror organizations tended to be rather intelligent. If one of those groups had the wherewithal to track her down like this, they'd never be dumb enough to send a Muslim man, or even a Muslim woman to lure her out of her apartment. The minute she saw either on her doorstep, her antennae would be up. The tipsy blonde with the fender-bender story was the perfect ploy.

This, of course, begs the question: what does a Muslim look like?
Then ask yourself, what does a Christian look like? Or a Jew? Or a Buddhist? What does an atheist look like? A vegetarian? A conservative? A liberal? A college professor? A librarian? A writer or artist? What does a father, mother, sister or brother look like? You get my point (I hope).

In conclusion, Hidden Order was stupid, pedantic and ignorant. My feeling that Brad Thor is generally full of shit ("shadowed a black ops team in Afghanistan." Please. Get real.) did not factor at all into this review. The book just plain sucked. There are twelve other Scot Harvath books, but life's too short for me to give them a chance.

Gigantic hobo detective Jack Reacher once again wanders into more trouble than any happy-go-lucky wanderer would reasonably expect. This time, after encountering a ghost from his past, a man named Quinn who should be dead, Reacher gets involved in an undercover DEA operation to take the man and his smuggling operation down. Reacher poses as a gun-for-hire in order to infiltrate Quinn's operation. The DEA wants him to go in and recover an agent who went missing and is presumably held captive. Reacher is going in for personal reasons. Quinn was supposed to be dead and Reacher is going to make sure he stays that way. 

Child's Reacher series is fairly reliable. After reading a couple, you pretty much know what you're going to get, and you keep reading more because what you want is what Child delivers. That is, action, thrills, a little sex, despicable villains and a big-ass juggernaut of justice willing to crack skulls and shoot people until all the bad guys are dead. Persuader is no different, and that's a good thing. Replace any of the items above with Reacher learning to crochet or taking a yoga class and…no I would not want to read that. The Reacher novels are, as Zwolf says over in The Mighty Blow Hole, the literary equivalent of a BDAM, or "Big Dumb Action Movie. I have to agree (and, by the way, he also thinks that Dolph Lundgren would be an awesome film Reacher). Persuader is a BDAM, that's for BDAM sure, and it's a heck of a lot of fun. 

You do have to be able to overlook a certain amount of goofiness, however. This goofiness is stuff that's pretty consistent with Child's other Reacher books. For example, dialogues often have that rapid-fire back-and-forth Dragnet quality that is sometimes unintentionally hilarious. Child doesn't write convincingly about army life, cop life or guns. During his investigations, Reacher often seems to just stumble through it pulling some of the most far-fetched subterfuges, like flipping a car over to simulate a car wreck, which is not in itself far fetched, but he still had to keep the car looking somewhat okay, so he put coats on the pavement to keep the roof from scratching! And he almost couldn't get the car flipped back over… and his investigative methods often include such subtle "techniques" as breaking a guy's neck and shooting a guy in the head. I often wonder if Reacher really thinks thing through first.

So if you're looking for a clever, delicately nuanced thriller with a plot as tangled a spider's web, Persuader ain't it. Persuader is about as subtle as a six-feet-five, two-hundred-and-fifty pound ex-military policeman can be. It does, however, offer a good amount of effective suspense thrown in with the action, and Child is quite good at pacing his novels.

Ultimately, the most satisfying aspect of Persuader (and the Reacher novels overall) is the fact that Child has a talent for creating some of the most evil, repulsive, despicably vile bad guys, all who receive suitably brutal comeuppances courtesy of Jack Reacher. It may be a bit of wish-fulfillment on my part but I like seeing bullies put in their place, and so does Reacher:

I don't really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.

Persuader's an effective thriller and a long as you don't take the minor gaffes too seriously it's a lot of fun. 3.5 stars, rounded to 4.

When a couple of high-profile murders occur, Commander Cal Rivers pushes his officers of the 14th Precinct to find this killer. Things get hot, though, as a new breed of criminal threatens to wage war on the streets of Detroit. Calling themselves "New Jacks," these youthful gangsters push drugs, pimp girls, extort and murder. It's up to the brave men and women of the 14th to stop them!

Run, Jack, Run was the second in the 1980s cop series Detroit P.D.. There doesn't seem to be much on the internet about this series, although I do know that "Tom Logan" was a joint pseudonym for co-authors Robert Marshall and Victoria Thomas (source: Michigan in the Novel, 1816-1996: An Annotated Bibliography, Robert Beasecker, ed.) and it looks like there were at least four in this series. I got this from my local used book store and thought the cover was pretty cool. It got me in the mood to watch old TJ Hooker and Hunter reruns.

The actual book inside didn't really live up to my expectations, though. While it was a serviceable read without being great, the plot seemed to sort of ramble along with various officers of the 14th Precinct doing their own things until it improbably coalesced into a rather unsatisfying conclusion. I think the main reason that I didn't feel much of a connection with the story was because there were so many cops to keep track of and the narrative alternated between them. Cal Rivers, commander of the 14th, an African-American veteran officer with voice "reminiscent of James Earl Jones," was pretty central to the whole deal and was a good character, but I would have preferred if the story just stuck to his perspective rather than spreading it throughout the precinct. Although the overall story wasn't remarkable, it was still an okay read and fairly fun.

Most of the other officers were drawn pretty well, even if they were a bit clichéd (but that's not always a criticism, especially for this kind of book) and their stories were interesting. There was also some interesting social commentary regarding the AIDS issue when a gang member carrying the AIDS virus gets arrested and a brutal cop named Raccianello freaks out about it, thinking that he's going to get infected after he beats the guy up while in custody. So there's a little bit of education there about how AIDS works and all that, but I realize that's not why most people read action stories. Still, though, I thought it was interesting that they did that, this being a 1988 novel. 

Most of all, though, I thought the portrayal of the "new jacks" was pretty amusing. It was like a portrayal of inner city youth gangs through the perspective of an average white-collar suburban male. Not offensive, really, just kinda goofy, like the stuff you'd see on a TV cop show, with gang bangers wearing "Bill Blass jogging suits" and saying stuff like "Yo! Be the man! We're in charge!" Coincidentally (or not), 1988 was also the year that the film Colors came out, so I guess there was sort of an emerging general mainstream awareness of gang violence and urban culture. There was also a Spuds McKenzie reference (and if you don't know who Spuds McKenzie is, please keep that to yourself-- you'll make me feel old!).

All in all, Run, Jack, Run was not a great read, but fairly fun and I'd be interested to read the rest of the series should I happen upon them.

After his fiancé is found dead of a drug overdose, NYC narcotics cop Martin Wulff decides that the system is ineffective for dealing with organized drug crime. He decides to go it alone and attack the drug cartels on his own, unfettered by the constraints of the impotent justice system. Martin Wulff is…the Lone Wolf! (dun dun dunnnnhhhh…)

This is the premise of Mike Barry's early '70s series The Lone Wolf and is not so different from other "men's adventure" type novels of the time, but this is not your average action schlock novel. It's pretty dark stuff and Wulff, the "hero," is more of a broken-beyond-repair nutcase than typical action hero. Whereas the Mack Bolans of the world are "can-do, never-say-die" type of guys, it's fair to say that Martin Wulff is suicidal and often describes himself as "already dead." The pages simply ooze with misanthropy and paranoia through long,  stream-of-conscious paragraphs (some nearly two pages long!). Thankfully, when the action arrives it's brisk and exciting, but Wulff's dysfunction is never far from the surface. As such, the overall impression is of a pretty surreal read for an action novel.

Desert Stalker, fourth in the series, begins with Martin Wulff (who is inexplicably named "Burt Wulff" on the back cover copy) in a stolen car heading for the house of his former partner David Williams, who carries a huge chip on his shoulder for being a black cop in a white man's world. Williams is a very angry man but is determined to work within the system and advance in his career, despite the racial inequality. Nevertheless, his anger is palpable. He is perfectly happy to give Wulff a tip so he can commence with extra-legal shenanigans and even though they were partners, they have a pretty strange relationship now. Williams doesn't even seem to like Wulff, but Wulff can get things done that Williams cannot working within the legal system.

Anyway, Williams tells Wulff about a NYC police lieutenant named Stone who absconded with a suitcase full of dope from the evidence room and is heading to Las Vegas to meet with a mobster who runs a casino. Wulff, who's  also an explosives expert, courtesy of the US Army and Vietnam, gets it in his head to bring a suitcase of his own, but filled with explosives instead of dope, which he plans to use to blow up the casino.

The rest of the novel we watch as Wulff heads to Vegas, tortures a mob boss, blows up a casino (packed with innocents, mind you) and carjacks a getaway car, all the while catching glimpses of Wulff's fevered descent into insanity. At one point, thinking that he might not get away from the casino in time to escape the bomb blast, Wulff gets the strong urge to talk to someone and places a phone call to a "hippie girl" named Tamara, whom he had met and slept with in a previous volume. He calls her parents' house (because she lives with her parents!) at around three in the morning and tells her that he "just wanted to talk to her." At this point you can really get a sense of Wulff's crushing loneliness and fatalistic look at life.

Beyond the genre-typical plot, Desert Stalker isn't like anything I've read so far in men's adventure. It's a weird, surreal, misanthropic, paranoid narrative and, to be honest, isn't a barrel of laughs simply because Wulff's viewpoint is so dark. It is, however, a pretty good read and I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. It shares the same demerits that others in the genre usually have (bad editing, etc.), but it wasn't too bad. Besides, Mike Barry (a pseudonym for prolific author Barry Malzberg) wrote ten of these novels in eight months! He expresses in an interesting interview with Ed Gorman that he knew exactly what he was doing in gradually making Wulff become more unhinged as the series progressed. I think that's something I'd like to see.

Desert Stalker, as well as the rest of the series (I believe there are fourteen in all), are now available in ebook format, if you are into that kind of thing. Me, I'm going to first take my chances scouring the used book stores. Either way, this is a series I definitely want to read more of. Hopefully I'll comes across them in order, since it seems to be rather continuity heavy.

When a wannabe tough guy tries to muscle in on Vincent Majestyk's melon farm, Majestyk lets him know in no uncertain terms that he's not welcome. Majestyk, a US Army war veteran, now has only one goal in mind: get his crop in and save his farm. He's not about to let some two-bit hustler dictate terms. This lands Majestyk in jail, though, where he faces assault charges and gets caught up in an escape attempt by a fellow jailbird, the notorious hit man Frank Renda. Offered a chance to run off with Renda, Majestyk just wants to get clear of the whole mess and return to his melon farm. However, Majestyk finds this isn't so easy after you've double-crossed a professional killer and now he's got more than the melons on his farm to worry about. But teamed up with Nancy Chavez, a tough and sassy lady hired on as a picker, Majestyk is about to teach Renda that this is one melon farmer you don't mess with.

Like many others, I was saddened by the recent passing of Elmore Leonard and initially felt the urge to read a bunch of his stuff that I haven't read yet (and there are a bunch), but I guess there is plenty of time for that. Since there won't be any more from EL I'm going to take my time to savor them.

So instead I decided to revisit a personal favorite, Mr. Majestyk. Even though it's sort of a minor EL title, this little novel packs a lot of punch in a small package. Part crime novel and part modern western, Mr. Majestyk doesn't have a lot of the snappy dialogue that EL is famous for, but the dialogue as well as the prose are distinctly Elmore Leonard and carry that same tough, casual feel. There is a lot of action in Mr. Majestyk. I read somewhere that EL wrote this as an original screenplay and wrote the novelization later. That may be because Mr. Majestyk certainly has a cinematic feel to it (strangely enough I don't believe I have ever, at the time of this review, seen the film starring Charles Bronson. I'm going to have to correct that deficiency posthaste). 

Despite this fact, Majestyk, while seemingly a pretty archetypal hero character, actually has a lot of depth and this is stuff you sort of have to put together yourself since neither EL nor Majestyk seem to have a lot of patience for navel-gazing.  Majestyk really is a great character. He's a working-class bad ass without even trying or realizing it. The other characters are drawn perfectly as well and I am always left in some amazement that EL can make characters come alive without letting a lot of pesky words get in the way.

I love Mr. Majestyk and I thank Elmore Leonard for writing it. Again, I'm sad about his passing, but I have a lot yet to read of his stuff. As long as there are Elmore Leonard stories to read and re-read, heck, that's about the best kind of immortality to have, if you ask me.

R.I.P., Elmore Leonard, 1925-2013

I was fascinated with codes and ciphers when I was a kid. I even had a "junior spy code kit" with a bunch of cool stuff and I could send little notes to friends with secret messages like "Mr. Nutzenjammer is a dork" and "Cindy eats her boogers" and we would all congratulate ourselves with our cleverness. That's all pretty juvenile, but the ciphers included in my little spy kit were the basics in modern encryption systems and you can read all about it in Simon Singh's The Code Book, an excellent primer for understanding encryption methods and a fascinating account of its development through history.

Amazingly, Singh has the ability to make this rather complex topic understandable as well as entertaining. I am by no means mathematically inclined, but Singh explains the processes involved in each cipher he describes through baby steps and multiple analogies. If one doesn't work for you then the next will until you get it. This book actually makes you feel like you're learning something. 

Nevertheless, some of the concepts are mind boggling. Imagine for a moment this number: 10^130. It's a huge number but can be factored by a computer in about 15 seconds. Now imagine the number 10^308, which is ten million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion times bigger than the number 10^130. It would take more than a thousand years for a hundred million personal computers working together to crack a cipher using a value such as this in its key, yet this is the scale of numbers that most modern banking encryptions use. As one might guess, these encryptions are pretty much unbreakable.

Things truly get weird when Singh describes the concept of quantum cryptography, which I won't try to describe but will just say that I re-read that section a couple of times. Although quantum cryptography was just in a conceptual stage at the time of The Code Book's publication, who knows? It might be in usage now. The Code Book was first published in 2000 and a lot has changed since then (probably more than we realize, considering the secretive nature of the topic). At any rate, Singh makes a good point that cryptography, while historically of vital importance in political intrigues, is now of vital importance to most of our daily lives since the internet, for better or worse, has basically connected the world. Because of internet banking and commerce, information security is of prime importance.

Singh also, however, does a good job of telling the stories of code makers and code breakers. Particularly interesting and moving is the story of the brilliant cryptanalyst Alan Turning who committed suicide after the war when attempts to "cure" his homosexuality drove him into a deep depression. However, Turing was one of those unsung heroes working in secrecy, without whom the Allies may very well have lost World War II. Singh's ability to weave these stories into the complex mechanics of cryptography make for an engrossing narrative and one that has excited my intellectual imagination like few others have.

So ditch the "junior spy kit." That's kid stuff. Read The Code Book and you will know how to send inter-office gossip with complete security.

When US orbital surveillance satellites get knocked out one by one, the United States has only one choice: reinstate the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane! Able to fly at over three times the speed of sound and at the upper limits of the stratosphere, the Blackbird was a marvel of aviation. The question is who will fly it? The only one with the skills and the guts to fly this supersonic wonder is Lieutenant Colonel Dan Cox, a former flyer, now retired and hanging out in Bali where he's gone native. A couple of CIA guys are sent to retrieve him and Cox grudgingly accepts this one final mission. He heads back to the US for refresher training and a mission briefing and learns, to his chagrin, that his co-pilot is a woman-- a pretty blonde named Lieutenant Amanda Gilroy. Together, they must fly into the unknown and brave an explosive confrontation with the fate of the nation and the world resting at their fingertips!

I got this at my local used book store hoping that the author was the same David Alexander that wrote the super-nutzoid '80s men's adventure series Phoenix and Z-Comm (under the house name Kyle Maning). It took some time to figure out (since there are several authors named "David Alexander"-- the Goodreads' author entry is not accurate), but this indeed turned out to be the case (and this is his website, by the way). Unfortunately, instead of ultraviolet action schlock, this appears to have been an attempt at a "normal" thriller and is kind of bland.

The set-up is classic action movie: disillusioned hero reluctantly returns for one final mission, teaming up with an apparently incompatible partner against impossible odds. Although this is a bit of a cliché, I have no problems with that at all. Sometimes these kind of tropes lend a sort of comfort that I like. The problem was mainly that these tropes were never really carried out beyond their introductions. Cox was supposed to be a mean S.O.B., a proverbial "loose cannon who doesn't play by the rules," but he really wasn't such a cowboy. He was just a little gruff at times. Cox initially didn't like the idea of flying with a woman, but it turned out to never be an issue. I was expecting arguments and disagreements before an eventual garnering of mutual respect (just like in the movies!) but that wan't the case. They seemed to get along fine. Basically, the tropes in Bandit were empty promises and that was disappointing. 

Alexander's writing in Bandit overall was fairly decent, but the narrative POV-hopped a lot and fell back on a lot of third-person omniscient POV. Also, there is a parallel story going on following the exploits of a Russian commando unit as they also investigate, which, while related to the main plot, was distracting. These things, along with the lack of characterization, made the book seem more like an outline or a treatment than a fully-realized novel.

I will say, however, that a lot of the details about the SR-71 were pretty interesting (like the fact that they crammed the tanks so full of fuel for flight that it was literally seeping out through the seams, and things like that). It was clear that a lot of research went into Bandit. I'd almost think that Alexander was a pilot himself (I don't know if he was), the details being so specific. On the other hand, sometimes the details worked against the story, especially when it came to equipment specifications. I guess it's a "guy thing" that we love that kind of stuff, but it was a little too much. I really don't care that a minor character is using a PRC-319 burst transmitter unit to communicate with his superiors, or that Cox has an AN/APG-67 threat display in his cockpit, or that the Russian commando unit was armed with Spectre submachine guns and Ultimax 100 light machine guns and that Cox was issued a Fabrique Nationale P-90 in 5.7mm designed for penetration of blahblahblahblah--so what? I suspect all that stuff was to appease the gun and tech nerds, and there is an audience for that, but I find it tedious.

Overall, Bandit is a quick and diverting read, but fairly bland. Alexander's writing is good enough to keep my interest, but is a far cry from what I expected, knowing about some of his other stuff like Phoenix. Written in 1994, toward the end of the action-schlock-men's adventure-era, I suspect Alexander was trying to cater to a kinder, gentler audience, but ended up with something sterile and banal. Still, I'm glad I found and read Bandit. It wasn't awful, but it also isn't a title that I can recommend.

This is to-read. I don't know why it was listed as "read" and rated 1 star. Errant iPad finger fumbling? Too much of the happy juice? Hacked account? Who knows. I haven't read it yet.

Step right up, step right up, ladies, gents and children of all ages...

So another example of Americana becomes a casualty of time's remorseless advance. Like drive-in theaters and video arcades, carnivals are going the way of the dodo bird. Oh, I'm sure they still exist, but chances are they are nothing like how I remember them. I imagine they have been sterilized of their vaguely seedy appeal. No more creepy dudes with porn-actor mustaches running the games. No more Blondie blasting over the loudspeakers at the bumper cars. No teens with feathered haircuts necking behind the tents. No more lingering scents of weed wafting across the way  (not that I knew what weed smelled like when I was nine). Joyland is Stephen King's tribute to the carnivals of yesteryear and if you're looking for a setting for murder you really can't beat a carnival.

Hoping to recover from a failing romance, college student Devin Jones takes a summer job at a North Carolina amusement park called Joyland. While Joyland offers its share of amusement, it also offers its share of mystery and danger as Devin stumbles upon an unsolved murder and finds himself far closer to the solution than he would like to be. When it comes to death there is no height requirement for this ride!

Published by Hard Case Crime, Joyland is less "hard case" than "Hardy Boys," and less "Hardy Boys" than a coming-of-age-type novel. It reminded me a lot of Joe Lansdale's A Fine Dark Line in feel, although somewhat less successful in execution. Joyland suffers a bit from an identity crisis: it doesn't seem to know exactly what kind of a novel it wants to be. It succeeds at being an okay mystery/thriller and an okay story about a young man's awakening into life's more heartbreaking moments, but, being divided in this way, it excels at neither of these things. I read somewhere that Stephen King doesn't outline-- he just writes and works it out as he goes along. It's apparent in many of his novels and it is apparent here. There's even a bit of the supernatural thrown in for good measure. All in all, Joyland is a bit too scattered to really be considered top-tier. Does that mean it's a failure? Hell no.

King's greatest weakness (his tendency to ramble and write himself into corners) is, ironically, one of his greatest strengths. The man is a natural-born bullshitter, a master raconteur and you can't help but be entertained and moved by his writing. All the criticism I wrote above, that all came to me after I was done with the book and was thinking back on it. While reading, little of that occurred to me and I enjoyed Joyland all the way.

If you're expecting a straight-up crime or mystery novel, then you may be somewhat thrown off, but I doubt you'll be disappointed. I think it is said best in one of the blurbs on the inside cover from The New York Times: "Stephen King is so widely acknowledged as America's master of paranormal terrors that you can forget his real genius is for the everyday." 

So take a seat, Pete, and draw a bead on this read! Mystery, magic and mayhem await!

Marty Fusco just got out of the clink and here he is cooking up another heist. Well, birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and Fusco's thinking this deal is pretty sweet. His neurotic ex-wife has gotten cozy with a young airman named Devers who works in the finance office of the USAF base where he's posted. Fusco and Devers think they can lift the entire base's payroll for the month, at least four hundred thousand dollars. But they need a guy that can work out all the angles and run things. This is where Parker comes in. He's getting tired of working on his tan and chilling with his girl Claire in Puerto Rico and is again feeling the itch to work, so he packs a bag and joins Fusco and Devers in upstate New York. The thing is, Fusco's aforementioned neurotic ex-wife, Ellen, is about to turn this cool caper into a hot mess.

The Green Eagle Score is yet another example of "Stark's"/Westlake's mastery of his craft. Coming in at a lean, mean 173 pages, Westlake doesn't fool around. It's almost as if Westlake's laconic criminal Parker was the one who wrote this. Like the other Parker novels (the ones I have read), The Green Eagle Score follows a four-act format and is ideal study material for budding novelists learning how to structure and pace a novel. Hell, it's ideal study material for any novelist on how to structure and pace a novel. I'd say a lot of modern-day "bestsellers" could learn a thing or two.

Though it would seem otherwise, Parker as a character never gets boring. He doesn't smile, doesn't joke, has no real hobbies or interests…he's basically a larcenous golem. The only time I recall seeing any sort of strong emotion from Parker was way back in the first novel, The Hunter, and that was white-hot rage. But don't think for a second that Westlake is skimping with two-dimensional characterization. No, Westlake's characterization of Parker is subtle. In the hands of lesser authors Parker would seem to be a cardboard cutout, a genre cliché. In Westlake's hands, Parker's a force of nature (I love how he "checks" a guy to see if he's alive or dead. Spoiler: he's dead). But, as in other Parker novels, the lively supporting cast contributes a lot to feel of the book and makes for a fun contrast to Parker's stoicism.

What else can I say? The Green Eagle Score is another great Parker novel. If you haven't read a Parker yet, you're in for a treat. If you have, you know what you're getting and won't be disappointed.



(For Westlake fans and people more knowledgeable about him than I am, I have a question. I noticed several British spellings ("defence," "licence," "neighborhood"), but as I understand it, Westlake was American. Was this just a stylistic choice? Did he use it exclusively for his pseudonym "Richard Stark?" Just something I was wondering about.)

Ex-P.O.W. Mark Stone has one purpose in life: to rescue America's abandoned heroes, the soldiers listed as M.I.A. A former Green Beret, Stone will not rest until the debt owed these patriots has been paid…in blood.

This is the premise of the 1980s action series M.I.A Hunter, succinctly stated in the back cover copy. In Cambodian Hellhole, the second in the series, Stone, returning from a failed P.O.W. recovery mission, is accosted by CIA agents in Bangkok and although their mission is to arrest him for bringing light to M.I.A. American prisoners, something that officially does not exist, this time they need Stone for another reason.  It seems that one American service member held captive in a Cambodian prison camp actually managed to escape and will talk to no one but Stone.

Armed with the knowledge that there are other Americans still held captive at that camp, one of them being Stone's old army buddy Jess Lynch, Stone promptly commences with the ass-kicking and evades the CIA spooks. Together with his cohorts Hog Wiley, the veteran Texan, and Terrance Loughlin, a former SAS commando, Stone hooks up with a group of Hmong allies and embarks on a mission into a Cambodian Hellhole!

The publication of this series was timely, no doubt due to the popularity of Vietnam War-related movies and TV so prevalent in the '80s. Stuff like Chuck Norris' Missing in Action and Stallone's First Blood, Part 2 were popular, but Vietnam War-related material was also all over the TV, in shows like Magnum PI and Simon and Simon. I tend to look at this phenomena sociologically, as America, years after clumsily exiting the conflict, attempts to come to terms with the tragedy using popular fiction as discursive media.

While Cambodian Hellhole is not intended to be the kind of book to inspire serious academic thought, it's a pretty good read. Compared to many other books in the "men's action" genre, it's written quite well and thankfully free of blatant jingoistic posturing. Stone comes across as a man who could care less about recovering any sense of nationalistic pride than bringing some honor and peace back to his fellow service members.

Cambodian Hellhole was written by Mike Newton (under the "Jack Buchanan" house name) and does a fairly good job. Although it wasn't any remarkable literary triumph, it did succeed in delivering some good jungle atmosphere as well brisk plotting and violent action. It was everything you'd expect an '80s action movie to be and I wasn't expecting or hoping for any more or less. I kept imagining Mark Stone as Tom Berenger.

All in all, I found Cambodian Hellhole to be a quick, enjoyable read. I'll be looking forward to locating the third in the series, Hanoi Deathgrip. There's a preview for it at the end and it seems pretty crazy, featuring a badguy pit-fighter with an actual deathgrip--he crushes peoples' heads like melons! For added value, Hanoi Deathgrip was written by one of my all-time-favorite authors Joe Lansdale as "Jack Buchanan." Is that cool or what?

What's new, pussycat? A lot for Selina Kyle. Having faked her death, as well as that of her alter-ego, the Catwoman, Selina finds herself in a bind when a heist goes sour. Out of money and out of contacts, she returns to Gotham City to begin her old life in a new way.

Catwoman: Volume 1, Trail of the Catwoman is a collection of several story arcs, covering Darwyn Cooke's graphic novel Selina's Big Score, back stories from Detective Comics and Catwoman issues 1-9, authored by Ed Brubaker. This is collection is cohesive and meaty, just the way I like them, and well worth the $29.99 (although I read the library's copy. I may just buy one for myself sometime).

Selina's Big Score begins the new Catwoman saga, as she returns to Gotham, gets word of a big score and puts together a team for the heist. It has the feel of a Parker novel, and it's probably no coincidence that Selina teams up with a guy named "Stark" with whom she has a history, a neat little homage to Parker. Darwyn Cooke's writing is great and his art has a nice retro feel, with broad brushstrokes, simple colors and crisp chiaroscuros. It also has a bit of a rough edge, which I welcome in today's world of overly-polished, computer-assisted comic art.

"Trail of the Catwoman," also by Darwyn Cooke, is a related story arc, that features Slam Bradley, the hard-boiled private investigator, who is hired by the mayor of Gotham to investigate the death of Catwoman/Selina Kyle. In doing so, Slam is exposed to the dark underbelly of Gotham corruption. Slam's a real cool character and tougher than leather. I like this guy a lot.

The stories from the Catwoman comic are "Anodyne" and "Disguises," both written by the excellent Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Darwyn Cooke and others. The stories do a good job of showing how dark and seedy Gotham City really is, as well as Selina's perspective of it. For example, Batman makes an brief appearance, but he sort of comes off as a bit of a self-righteous prick, which I guess sort of makes sense from Selina's street-wise, grayscale perspective.

Catwoman: Volume 1, Trail of the Catwoman is a great book. I'm looking forward to reading the second volume. (By the way, saying "What's new, pussycat?" to Selina Kyle probably isn't a great way to make friends with her. I'm sure that Tom Jones gets a pass, though. That guy's pretty smooth).

In preparation for the aftermath of World War III, wealthy filmmaker Kurt Carpenter established a survivalist retreat in the wilds of northwestern Minnesota. He called this retreat "the Home" and his followers "the Family" and left the Family instructions on how to rebuild society after the war. Now, one hundred years after the end of the war, the Family is forced to explore the wastelands outside of their sanctuary to find the cure for an epidemic of "premature senility" that has been plaguing members of the family.

That's the premise for David Robbins' '80s post-apocalyptic Endworld series. In the third of the series, Twin Cities Run, a group of "Warriors" (a sort of social class) from the family attempt to venture to (yup) Twin Cities, Minnesota, so search for medical supplies. Our group of heroes include Hickcock, a guy who carries twin six-guns and has a fondness for the Old West; Joshua, the group's Empath, which is sort of like a priest, I guess; Geronimo, a superb Native American hunter and tracker; and their leader, Blade, a big "hunky" (yes, the word "hunky" is used, if I recall) dude with rippling muscles who (you guessed it) carries around a bunch of knives. Joining them is an African-American woman named Bertha, a refugee from Twin Cities they picked up in the last volume. They all pile into the SEAL, their armored vehicle, and head to Twin Cities, but when they arrive they find themselves in the middle of a territory war between the four local gangs: the Porns, the Horns, the Wacks and the Nomads. Turns out "Minnesota nice" was one of the things that didn't survive WWIII. You betcha.

I gather that this series has its fans and the edition I read was a 2010 Leisure Books reprint (with a really sucky cover, I might add), but I have to say the whole thing was pretty dumb. The writing is pretty simplistic, along the lines of a Filmation cartoon (think He-Man and Bravestarr). The characters' names sort of fit in with that cartoony feel, being so obviously descriptive of their most apparent attributes (Blade/knives, Hickcock/"Old West" dude, Geronimo/"Indian" dude, Joshua/spiritual dude). Another guy, an Asian (or "partly Chinese") named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (!) makes an appearance and, yup, he carries a katana. 

I've noticed that when reading I do often tend to examine the racial/ethnic matters within a story, but usually it is because these matters are very noticeable despite the fact that they may not be intentional. Robbins appears to be making a show of having a racially diverse cast of characters, but the diversity is limited to racial stereotypes. Another weird thing is that when Bertha, the African-American woman who joined up with them, is taken to the Home the Family is shocked because they've never seen a black person before. It is explained that Kurt Carpenter, the founder, tried to pull a Noah and include someone of every race when he founded the Home. Apparently, he couldn't find any black people? 

Also problematic is that Hickcock and Bertha sort of have the hots for one another, which is not problematic itself but their terms of endearment for one another are rather unusual. He calls her "Black Beauty." She calls him "White Meat" and sometimes "honky!" I personally never found "honky" to be as offensive as other racial slurs, but it still seems a little weird. Some of the dialogue is unintentionally hilarious ("'Don't I get a hug?' Bertha baited him. 'I missed you, honky!'" I would seriously hate to see this conversation if the roles were flipped). I'm not saying the book is racially offensive or anything, but Robbins writes like he's never met a real non-white person in his life, so he relies on stereotypes. It's just dumb.

Story-wise, there is some pretty good action and it progresses pretty well (despite one hanging plot thread--maybe he intended to resolve that in a later volume). Overall the action is pretty PG-13 except for one instance that creeped me out in a way that the author probably never intended. [At one point Blade is captured and tied, naked and spread eagle, for the Wacks, a gang of crazies, to taunt. A mother and daughter pair of Wacks come up to him and the Mother Wack points out Blade's penis to Daughter Wack to teach her the difference between men and women. Then the Daughter Wack says she wants to cut off his penis and keep it and the mother says no (they have to save the penis for Clorg, because he likes to eat them). Aside from the obvious yuckiness of this scenario, having a little girl (crazy Wack or not) anywhere near a penis sends me creepy pedophile signals. I did not like this bit at all.] 

The action is okay enough to grant the thing two stars, but what dropped it another star for me was the obvious proselytizing of the story. There is a point in the story where Joshua debates bible scripture with a member of the Horns and convinces him to try to seek a peaceful solution to the gang war in Twin Cities. While it was Joshua quoting all the scripture, I had the feeling it was Robbins preaching at me. Not the sort of thing I'm very receptive to, especially when I just want to read about survival in a post-apocalyptic nightmare. 

On the whole, Endworld #3: Twin Cities Run was dumb, cliché and preachy. On the plus side, it's pretty easy to read and if I had to choose between reading this and staring at the other people waiting in the waiting room at the doctor's office, I might just read this (if no magazines--Time, Good Housekeeping, hell even Ok!-- were available). I don't think I'll continue with this series.

I seldom get an opportunity to go exploring around town to see what's new. In fact, I rarely even have the desire to because traffic these days is a nightmare and just getting worse, so unless I'm running low on booze fresh produce, I sit my misanthropic ass at home on Friday and Saturday nights and enjoy a book. And fresh produce. However, a few weeks ago my dentist told me during a visit that I should get a bite guard. "Do you grind your teeth at night? Are you under a lot of stress? You have some wear on your teeth." No doubt due to the increased traffic.

Happily, on the way home from the dentist I discovered a rare and beautiful thing: a used book store! I thought these creatures were extinct (at least locally)! I walked in, eagerly anticipating the treasure trove of paperback originals that surely must lie inside. The older, mild mannered gentleman (who I learned also owns the place) welcomed me and I said hello back, telling him with some embarrassment that this was my first visit here (because, by the looks of the place, it had been there for at least several years. I must have passed by it countless times without even noticing). He asked if there was anything in particular that I was looking for. I timidly told him that I had been reading a lot of these "men's adventure" books recently, slightly embarrassed at admitting to enjoying this low-brow form of literature. "You mean like The Executioner?"
"Yeah!"
"Sure, lemme show you where they are. They're a lot of fun."
When I finished browsing and went to pay the man for my stack of books he chuckled when he pointed to this one, Death Merchant #10: The Mainline Plot and said, "I remember I read this one about thirty years ago, when I was in the air force."

(Pic above is stolen from Marty McKee's blog, but if you click on it you can give him some web traffic. His blog is pretty cool).
Moral of the story? Support your local booksellers! They are probably pretty cool cats. And that's how I got this book. Joseph Rosenberger's Death Merchant series has been one I have been wanting to read since reading Roseberger's C.O.B.R.A. #3: The Red Dragon Operation, which was pretty damn awful, but awful in a wacky, ridiculous way. From my online research, I knew that Joseph Rosenberger was not a house name or a pseudonym. He actually wrote every freakin' one of the 71 volumes in this series, as well as various other oddball series like the aforementioned C.O.B.R.A. series. 

Known to allies and enemies alike as the "Death Merchant," Richard Camellion is a freelancer who takes only the most difficult, the most hopeless jobs from the CIA. At $100,000 a job, they don't come cheap, but Camellion gets results. In The Mainline Plot the Death Merchant is hired by the CIA to foil a joint Mafia-Corsican Mob-North Korean plot to smuggle a particularly potent form of heroin known as Peacock-4 into the US, thereby turning a whole generation of American youths into junkies! They must be stopped and the Death Merchant is just the one to do it!

And that is the plot. Not "that is basically the plot," but that is the plot in its entirety. It goes like this:
On location, SOUTH KOREA: Fight fight fight fight fight.
Planning scenes here and there.
On location, FRANCE: Fight fight fight fight fight.
Planning scenes,
On location, NEW JERSEY: Fight fight fight fight fight.
Fin.
It doesn't even matter that "Peacock-4" is supposed to be a super-drug. I don't recall the drug ever really showing up in the story except for talk.

Neither subtle nor sophisticated, you'd think the whole thing would be a snore-fest (and parts of it was. I mean, a twenty page chapter describing a shootout does get tiresome) but Rosenberger's particular authorial idiosyncrasies are what make this a disaster to behold. If there is one thing I have learned from reading a couple of Rosenberger novels is that he is, if anything, consistent. 

In The Mainline Plot we have: 
Long, detailed fight scenes filled with excruciating minutiae of how a human body can be destroyed:

Two explosive shells hit Angelo Debelligofaci in the side and exploded like loud firecrackers. Three punched into Santo the Animal. Three more loud bangs and the Animal fell apart--one arm blown off, a foot of ropy gray-white intestine hanging out his belly like a German sausage. Debelligofaci wasn't any better off. He crashed dead to the floor, four bloody rib ends sticking out.

Names and details on the lives of nearly every faceless goon the Death Merchant kills:

Bocca--an ugly slob who resembled a good-looking orangutang--loved big cars, black women, and fancy underwear. He also loved life. He lost all four within the twinkling of half a dozen explosions that blew apart his head and tore off both arms.

Strange metaphors:

The three Mafia gunmen died quicker than it takes a judo expert to mug a midget.

The area behind the partition resembled high noon at wrecksville!

Odd cursing:

Shit fire and honeysuckle!

And lots of exclamation points…whether they're needed or not! The writing is at level 11 on the Pulp-O-Meter™ (and it only has ten levels). On one occasion, while killing some Corsican mobsters, Camellion says to them, "Au revoir, my halfwits!" Stuff like this make Rosenberger a hoot to read. I haven't even mentioned yet his special CIA designed submachine gun that has a whopping capacity of 3,117 shots, all explosive tipped bullets. One aspect absent from this book, and something that I understand appears with some frequency in later books, are the supernatural, fringe science and conspiracy theory wackiness, like UFOs and such.

Besides all this wackiness, I also find the author Joseph Rosenberger fascinating (and once again I must point out Joe Kenney's blog post wherein we catch a glimpse of Rosenberger's sad, fevered mind). We learn in The Mainline Plot that Richard Camellion's middle name is Joseph. Rosenberger's middle name was Richard. It's not a stretch to assume that the Death Merchant was a Walter Mitty version of the author, sharing many viewpoints. For one, both Camellion and Rosenberger hate religion ("The mobster lied with all the expertise of a priest or minister.") Interestingly, Camellion is critical of the South Korean government at the time for persecuting a Christian group with suspected leftist tendencies. The book (strangely enough) opens with this, and I was rather surprised at Rosenberger's awareness of the South Korean political climate in 1974, as well as his stance.

Unfortunately, another shared attribute is the racism. While Camellion reflects on the fact that he likes the Korean people pretty well, as well as Korean food (who doesn't?), he calls the North Korean agents "slant-eyed slobs." The Mafisosi get called "wops" (or, my favorite, "greasy garlic snappers"). An innocent Puerto Rican truck driver gets called a "spic." It's like Archie Bunker wrote this book. Few things piss me off more than bigotry, but it's difficult to really be offended because the whole deal is so ridiculous. It just sort of leaves me flabbergasted. It doesn't get a pass, but it is what it is. After reading Rosenberger's letter on Joe Kenney's site, I just feel sorry for the old, alcoholic, bigoted crank.

The Mainline Plot isn't good by conventional standards, that's for damn sure, hence the two star rating I give it. But to purveyors of action-trash lit (such as myself) it's gold. I can't wait to encounter more of this insanity.

In the '70s there was an abundance of "war against the Mafia"-type "men's adventure" books. Bruno Rossi's The Sharpshooter was one of them and after reading in various blogs about the over-the-top violence and sleaze in this series I knew I had to check it out! 

I lucked out, scoring a cheap copy online, with this one, No Quarter Given, the eighth in the Sharpshooter series. 

(Clicking on the pic takes you to a great overview of the series by Rayo Casablanca)

No Quarter Given has Johnny Rock, killer of Mafia goons, taking a small vacation from killing Mafia goons. Why does he kill Mafia goons? No backstory is explained in the text--it plunges right into the action, but it has something to do with the Mafia murdering his family…or something like that. The back cover copy reads:

When his parents were slaughtered by the Mafia, something snapped inside Johnny Rock's head. From that moment on he became a relentless killing machine, programmed to seek out and destroy the mob.

You can probably tell that characterization is not a high priority with this series, but it doesn't really matter. He kills Mafia goons, is really good at it and loves his job.

This vacation, however, turns out to be less relaxing than expected when a sixteen-year-old stripper/prostitute named Mimi approaches him asking for help. She's been forced to work as a prostitute by the Mafia. A local Mafia group has infiltrated the US Naval base where Mimi's father works as a civilian commissary manager, but the Mafia has framed him for embezzlement and he now rots away in prison. It doesn't take long for Rock to decide. He busts Mimi out of the stripper joint, killing three goons with aplomb, and they work together to destroy Joe Barbagallo, the Mafia boss who's running the show on the naval base, as well as an officer's club-type bar on the side.

The violence in No Quarter Given was not as extreme as some other volumes seem to be (from what I can tell), but it is still pretty whacked out. To call Rock a "killing machine" is somewhat inaccurate because machines don't enjoy what they do. Johnny Rock does and is perfectly happy to kidnap Mafia thugs, murder them, mutilate their bodies and dump them somewhere as warning signs. 

Charging like an enraged beast, using both his erect thumbs like daggers, Rock gouged the man's eyes, twisting his thumbs, jabbing them until blood poured.

Then he pulled out his Beretta and shot him dead.

"That takes care of that," he said under his breath to Mimi.

 
Mimi, the gal that Johnny Rock is helping is a pretty fun character. She's a real firecracker with lots of lively dialogue. She's also pretty horny, which is somewhat problematic since she tells Rock from the outset that she's only sixteen. Apparently Rock didn't believe her because they get it on quite frequently. Later she tells him again and he says, "Forget it. If I get picked up for anything it'll be for contributing to the delinquency of a minor." I don't think that'd fly these days. At any rate, and despite the fact that Mimi is a target of much of the sleaze in the book (one mobster violates her with the muzzle of his gun), she's got a smart mouth and is a fun character to read.

Speaking of sleaze, there's plenty of it in the Mafia sex clubs, and Joe Barbagallo, the slovenly mob boss who's Rock's next target, is in charge of it all. Like Mimi, Barbagallo is a much more interesting character than Johnny Rock, with dialogue that would make Quentin Tarantino proud:

"Listen, you cocksuckin' motherfuckers, when I fuckin' tell you to break that fucker's ass, I don't mean no tomorrow. You shits listenin' to me?"

 
Bruno Rossi is, of course, a house name, and I haven't a clue who actually wrote this one. Sources have indicated that the editor for this series was a fellow named Peter McCurtin, who also edited another series called (ahem) The Marksman, featuring a guy named Magellan who, for all intents and purposes, is basically the same character as Johny Rock. Funny thing is, there were two or three instances in No Quarter Given where Rock is mistakenly referred to as "Magellan!" Clearly, these stories were pretty much interchangeable. They could crank out stories for either series, saturating the market. I imagine half-drunk, chain-smoking writers pounding away on their Royals at three in the morning churning out these books. Spelling and grammatical errors are littered throughout and, on at least one occasion, a sentence will break off midway, as if there

Yeah, like that.

To call No Quarter Given "good" or "bad" is kind of beside the point. It's a grindhouse  film put in print. Fast-paced with punchy dialogue, sleazy and violent, No Quarter Given is a lot of fun.