One Good Deed - David Baldacci

Aloysius Archer is a combat veteran of World War II and also an ex-con who was sent to prison for a crime he was tricked into. When he’s released on parole in 1949, he winds up in Poca City, a small city in an unidentified Western state that’s probably Colorado, based on geographic clues in David Baldacci’s novel ONE GOOD DEED. Although Archer is supposed to stay out of trouble, he soon finds himself working for a rich local businessman, hired to collect a debt from the guy’s mortal enemy. Not only that, but Archer gets involved with the rich man’s beautiful mistress, who just happens to be the daughter of the man who owes the debt. Add a beautiful female parole officer with a deadly background of her own into the mix, and then a murder where it looks like Archer has been set up to be the fall guy, and you have the makings of a tough, terse Gold Medal-type novel, which is exactly what I think perennial bestseller Baldacci was trying to write in ONE GOOD DEED.

This trend continues with more murders, convoluted criminal schemes, the spectre of past crimes haunting the present, and some excellent action scenes. The problem is that Harry Whittington or Day Keene or Charles Williams would have spun this same yarn in 160 or 144 or even 128 pages, and David Baldacci takes 464 pages to tell his story.

I suspect there are two reasons for this: Baldacci’s publishers would have balked if he’d turned in a 40,000-50,000 word manuscript, and Baldacci, who has been writing fat contemporary thrillers for more than two decades (and very successfully, I might add) just doesn’t know how to write shorter books. This one could have been trimmed considerably by just not describing in detail every item of clothing and every piece of furniture, sometimes more than once.

But other than the length, which I really shouldn’t be complaining about because I knew it was that long when I started it—and it’s really not fair to judge books written today by the standards of books written 70 or more years ago (and vice versa)—how was it? Well, I read the whole thing and didn’t consider stopping (skimming did enter my mind a time or two, but I didn’t do it), so I’d have to say I liked it fairly well. Yes, it’s too long. Yes, there are some anachronisms. No, Baldacci doesn’t even come close to playing fair with the reader where the solution to the mystery is concerned. But the plot is interesting, the characters are good, and Archer is a great protagonist, smart and tough enough to untangle everything but far from a superman like Jack Reacher. I really liked the guy. Everything wraps up in a long, effective courtroom scene a little reminiscent of a Perry Mason novel.

There are two more novels, so far, about Aloysius Archer. Did I enjoy ONE GOOD DEED enough to read them, too? The jury is still out on that (no pun intended), but honestly, I’m leaning toward giving the second one a try. If I do, I’m sure you’ll read about it here.

ONE GOOD DEED Kindle Hardcover Paperback

Happy Fourth of July

This is a bit of a somber cover by Robert Fuqua, but modern life has gotten a bit somber, hasn't it? On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in carrying on, since we can't really do anything else. I do hope it's an enjoyable day for those of you celebrating in the United States. My own low-key plans include getting some writing done and maybe watching a few fireworks from our front porch tonight, if the mosquitoes aren't too bad. By the way, "Frank Patton", the author of that cover story, was a house-name. Authorship of this one has been attributed to AMAZING STORIES editor Raymond A. Palmer.

20 Years of Rough Edges

On Saturday, July 3, 2004, I published my first post on this blog. Here's how I started it:

Following the example of my friends Bill Crider and Ed Gorman, I've decided to start a blog. I may not post every day, and what gets posted here may be pretty haphazard sometimes, but I intend to talk mostly about what I'm reading and sometimes writing, as well as the events in my life I don't deem too boring. (Whether the readers find it too boring is, of course, up to them.) Don't expect anything about politics or religion.

We've lost Bill and Ed since then, of course, Ed in 2016 and Bill in 2018, and I still catch myself thinking now and then that I'm going to tell them about something I read or ask them about some book or author. I've never known two finer men than those two, and their inspiring me to start this blog is only one of the very, very many things for which I'm thankful to them.

Over the years, Rough Edges has become primarily a book review blog, although my own writing sneaks in now and then, as well as some real-life stuff. But still no politics or religion.

Here's how I ended that first post:

For those of you who don't know, I'm a professional writer and have been since 1976. Yesterday I finished my 165th novel, so I'm sort of between projects at the moment. I have to do some research and come up with a proposal for a historical novel, and then the next thing on the schedule is a house-name Western novel. I have work lined up through the spring of '05, which in the world of freelance fiction writing is considered pretty good job security. Of course, it could all come to a crashing halt after that.

That's enough to start this off. Feel free to comment if the mood strikes you.

The writing didn't come to a crashing halt. I'm currently working on my 425th novel. That means I've written 260 novels (or 61% of my novel output) since starting this blog. I don't think there's any connection, but I like playing with numbers. I have house-name work lined up through the end of 2025 and plan to continue writing some under my own name, too, assuming I stay sane enough to do it. And this blog will continue, too. As I said about the WesternPulps group a few months ago, it's a labor of love and I intend to keep on with it as long as I'm capable of doing so, even if it gets to the point where I'm just posting to myself.

My sincere thanks to all of you who have visited, whether you're new here or have been reading since 2004, and everything in between. Your comments and emails and just knowing that you're out there have meant a great deal to me.

The Other Woman - Charles Burgess

As we all know, many of the soft-core sex novels published in the Fifties and Sixties were actually crime or mystery novels in disguise. That’s certainly true of Charles Burgess’s THE OTHER WOMAN, published originally by Beacon Books in 1960 and about to be reprinted by Black Gat Books.

The narrator/protagonist of this one is Neil Cowan, a real estate agent in a small city on the west coast of Florida. Neil gets involved in a deal to sell a large piece of land to a wealthy developer who’s going to put houses all over it. In the process of arranging this, Neil meets the developer’s wife Emmaline, a blonde who is the most beautiful woman Neil has ever seen. He’s happily married with a nice sexy wife and a small child, but he falls for Emmaline despite that and soon they’re having a torrid affair, which continues until, in true noir novel fashion, Emmaline suggests what a good life they’d have if her husband, who’s considerably older than her, was dead. And who better to hurry him along off this mortal coil than Neil?

From this point on, THE OTHER WOMAN veers off into something a bit less like a Gold Medal novel. Even though he’s obsessed with Emmaline, Neil isn’t just about to commit murder for her. Unfortunately, her husband winds up dead anyway, and Neil is the only potential suspect who doesn’t have a solid alibi. When one of the local police detectives learns of the affair between Neil and Emmaline, he’s convinced that Neil is the killer and goes after him doggedly, looking for proof—proof that the actual murderer is willing to provide to pull the frame tighter around Neil. In order to save himself, he’ll have to uncover the real killer.

I’d never heard of Charles Burgess, but the Florida setting and the excellent writing had me suspecting that Burgess was a previously unknown pseudonym for Day Keene or Harry Whittington or Talmage Powell. The book doesn’t really read like the work of any of those authors, however, and a bit of subsequent investigation turns up the fact that Burgess wrote another hardboiled novel called BACKFIRE, apparently published only in Australia. I don’t think he was Australian, though. He had at least one story in MANHUNT in the late Fifties, and he wrote a number of true crime stories for various detective magazines. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s probably his real name, and he might well have been a reporter since many of them wrote those true crime yarns as a sideline. But that’s purely guesswork on my part.

As for THE OTHER WOMAN, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Although the affair between Neil and Emmaline is what the whole plot hinges on, there’s really not much sex in the book, only a few scenes that don’t go on very long. I’m a little surprised Beacon published it. It’s more of a solid mystery novel with a reasonably clever solution. It reads very much as if Burgess wrote it intending to try to sell it to Gold Medal or Ace, and when it didn’t click at one of those houses, he sexed it up a little and sent it to Beacon. We’ll never know if that’s true, of course, but you can tell from that description what sort of book this is. I liked it, and if you’re a fan of noirish, hardboiled mysteries, I think THE OTHER WOMAN is well worth reading.