I recently got the urge to read an Agatha Christie novel, an impulse that comes over me from time to time. When I was a kid, I read a lot of Christie novels, the first one being THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY, which I checked out of the school library when I was in the sixth grade. This was back during the days before the balkanization of mystery fandom, when you could read Agatha Christie one day and Mickey Spillane the next and never think anything about it.
Anyway, the book I picked up was THE BIG FOUR, a novel I’d seen mentioned every now and then on the Golden Age of Detection Yahoo group. I knew it was something of an oddity for Christie, not really a straight murder mystery like most of her other books but rather an attempt to write an Edgar Wallace-style thriller. (I say that having never read an Edgar Wallace book myself, you understand, but I seem to remember that from the GAD group.) The plot finds Christie’s most famous detective, Hercule Poirot, facing off against a group of international criminal masterminds, the Big Four of the title. They’re led by Li Chang Yen (a brilliant, sinister Chinaman . . . wonder where Christie got that idea . . . what do you think, Sir Denis Nayland Smith?), and their ranks include an American, a French woman, and the assassin of the group, the mysterious Number Four, a master of disguise who might be anybody. Accompanied by narrator and faithful companion Captain Hastings, Poirot foils half a dozen or so plots by the Big Four in this episodic novel (something else it has in common with the early Fu Manchu books) before finally having a big showdown with them.
I really have to wonder if Ian Fleming ever read this novel, because some of the bizarre assassination methods, as well as the villains’ death ray and their secret stronghold inside a mountain, really reminded me of the James Bond books. Well, probably the movies more than the books, now that I think about it. But for a book originally published in 1927, there’s a lot of stuff that showed up later during the secret agent boom in the Sixties.
Despite the fact that there are elements here I like, I’m not sure the book ever really works. Christie just doesn’t seem suited for global-scale action-adventure. The writing seems rushed in places, but at the same time, there’s never really much sense of urgency. And even though stuff Blows Up Real Good, there’s no real sense of that, either. Still, I enjoyed THE BIG FOUR overall. Several of the individual cases that make up the larger story arc are interesting and well-plotted. Poirot is, well, Poirot, even when he’s taking on antagonists more suited for James Bond. Captain Hastings is as dense as ever, and whether you find that endearing or annoying is up to the individual reader. This seems to be regarded as one of Christie’s worst books, and I can understand why. So if you haven’t read her work before, this isn’t the place to start. But it’s still a pleasant enough way to spend some time if your expectations aren’t too high.
SUPERMAN: PAST AND FUTURE is a collection with a sure-fire premise: time travel stories featuring Superman, who has probably done more time-traveling than any other character in the DC Universe. It delivers, too, with stories that originally appeared in various Superman titles from 1947 to 1983. The two earliest yarns were written by Jerry Siegel, one of the character’s co-creators, and other writers incude Edmond Hamilton, who had a long, prolific career in comics as well as his work as an SF author, and the oddly punctuated Elliot S! Maggin, who was one of my favorite Superman scripters (although to me his later work never lived up to his debut, a Green Arrow story called “What Can One Man Do?”). The art on many of the stories is by Curt Swan, the quintessential Superman artist, although there’s one story with art by Wayne Boring, the dominant Superman artist during the Fifties.
I like the Superman stories from the Golden Age and the Silver Age, but I’m less fond of the ones from the pre-Silver Age Fifties, even though they’re some of the first comics I ever read. Wayne Boring’s art never appealed to me, and the stories, while they have a charming silliness to them, still come across as too silly for my taste. Luckily, there’s only one story from that era in this collection – although some might feel that the Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen stories from the Sixties are pretty silly, too. But I enjoyed them anyway, and the three stories written by Maggin are all fine yarns. I wouldn’t put SUPERMAN: PAST AND FUTURE in the top rank of Superman collections, but it’s solidly entertaining and well worth reading.
A. Merritt was one of the big names in fantasy fiction from the Twenties and Thirties, when his novels and stories were first published in the pulps, through the Seventies, when his books were still readily available in paperback reprints, mostly from Avon. However, while I’ve been aware of his work for years, I’ve actually read very little of it. I recall reading his novel THE SHIP OF ISHTAR many years ago, and I think I liked it, although at this late date I’m not sure anymore. A few years ago I read the original pulp version of the novelette “The Moon Pool” (Merritt had a habit of revising his stuff as it went through later editions) and liked it as well.
Now I’ve read his novel DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE, and I can see why his books were popular for so long. There’s a lot to like here: a modern hero who’s the unknowing reincarnation of an ancient warrior-king; a lost civilization located in an isolated mountain valley in Alaska, which due to volcanic heating is actually tropical; a couple of beautiful women, one good, one evil, who have a habit of running around in few, if any, clothes (I told you the weather was tropical); a couple of evil high priests; a tentacled, otherworldly horror from a different dimension; castles, strongholds, and epic battles. Just my kind of book, in other words.
What sets Merritt apart from most other heroic fantasy authors, especially the ones from the pulp era, is his leisurely, highly descriptive style. It takes a little getting used to, but I found myself being drawn into the prose. Merritt comes up with some really striking images in this novel. The drawback to this is that despite all the conflict going on, there’s really not much action. The few battle scenes are very well-done, though, and the big showdown at the end between the hero and one of the villains is a great, bloody, hand-to-hand fight.
I enjoyed DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE quite a bit. Merritt’s no Robert E. Howard, mind you – Howard would have compressed the plot of this novel into a novella, probably to great effect – but I definitely plan to read more of Merritt’s work. I’ve already picked up a copy of his novel THE METAL MONSTER, and I also have a reprint of the pulp versions of “The Moon Pool” and “Conquest of the Moon Pool”, which were combined into the novel THE MOON POOL. With any luck, I’ll get to them soon. In the meantime, I have an extra copy of DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE, a fourth printing of the 1967 Avon edition. If anyone wants it, the first person to email and ask for it gets it.
Stories about outsiders have always appealed to me. Many of the classic Western and private eye heroes are cut off to a certain extent from society and although they may form connections with other people, in the end they ride away alone or walk off by themselves down some mean, empty street (with wet pavement because it just rained, of course . . . and somebody up in one of the buildings is playing a saxophone . . .). Shane doesn’t come back, and Sam Spade rides down in the elevator by himself.
So it’s not surprising that I’d be interested in reading a book called LONERS. It’s a collection of short stories by Mark SaFranko, an author I hadn’t encountered before, and it’s published by Murder Slim Press, a fairly new British publisher. Some of the stories are original to this volume, while the others were first published in ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE and various literary magazines. Despite coming from a British publisher, the stories are all very American, some set in big cities, others in small towns. While most of them concern desperate, lonely people at the end of their rope, and crimes are committed in several of them, I wouldn’t really call them crime stories. They’re more mainstream, literary stories, despite the presence of cops, hookers, gangsters, and at least one serial killer. I guess they’d qualify as noir, though, because they’re dark and bleak as hell.
My favorites are “At the Hacienda” and “Acts of Revenge” because their narrators are writers. (There’s a strong autobiographical element running through several of the stories.) SaFranko writes very well, with the ability to capture characters in a few brief strokes, and his dialogue rings true. I also like the fact that several of these stories have enough plot packed into them that they could have been novels, something that author Seymour Shubin comments on in his introduction. Shubin’s right about that.
I don’t usually comment much about the production values of a book, but I think LONERS deserves some plaudits along those lines as well. Too many books these days are full of typos, from major publishers and small presses alike, but not this one. The cover is all right, but I really like the interior art by Steve Hussy that leads off each story. Fine work all around.
LONERS won’t be to everyone’s taste. The lack of resolution in a few of the stories might bother some people. It bothered me a little. But overall, this is a very good collection.
Over on his fine blog The Tainted Archive, Gary Dobbs presents a Wild West News Roundup today, including a mention that another Wild West Monday, designed to increase the demand for Westerns in bookstores and libraries, is in the works. There's plenty of other information about Western goings-on in this lengthy post as well. Check it out, and when you're finished there, go and read Gary's story "A Man Called Masters" at BEAT TO A PULP. This is a fine traditional Western yarn with a gritty, hardboiled tone that plays out in some ways you might not expect.
Many of you have already heard about this, but for those of you who haven't, author Travis Erwin's house burned down yesterday. He and his family got out safely, but they lost everything. I haven't heard yet what people can do to help, but when I do, I'll post the info here. My heart goes out to Travis and his family, and once things are organized, I urge all of you to do whatever you can to help.
You can take a look at the cover art for the first six Gabriel Hunt novels at the series' website. Looking at these covers makes me even more eager to read the other books in the series.
I’m a sucker for superhero movies. I can usually find something to enjoy in just about any of them. I even liked the universally-reviled DAREDEVIL. But I hated THE HULK. It’s my least-favorite comic book movie of all time. So I was a little leery about watching the second Hulk movie, THE INCREDIBLE HULK.
Luckily, while not a great film, it’s a considerable improvement on the first one. Edward Norton is well-cast as Bruce Banner (I can’t say the same for William Hurt and Liv Tyler as Thunderbolt Ross and his daughter Betty, though). There’s plenty of action, the computer-generated Hulk looks better in this one than in the first movie, the whole tinkering of the character’s origin from the first movie is pretty much ignored, and thankfully, there’s quite a bit of humor. I also liked the foreshadowing of more Marvel movies to come. I think the Spider-Man movies are the best of the lot, and also the truest to the spirit of the original character, but THE INCREDIBLE HULK is an okay way to spend a couple of hours.
I’ve read several of the Bill Crane novels by Jonathan Latimer, a short but very well-written series from the Thirties about a wise-cracking, hard-drinking private eye. Good stuff. I thoroughly enjoyed them. But over the years, SOLOMON’S VINEYARD has become probably his best-known novel, because of the controversy surrounding it. Written in 1940 and published in England in 1941, it was available in the U.S. only in a censored version retitled THE FIFTH GRAVE (which Latimer himself has said i
s the better title). The original version was finally published in the United States in the Eighties, in at least two different editions, both of which are long out of print. You can find the text on-line and in a POD version from several years ago. Both have a considerable amount of OCR errors, but luckily that sort of thing doesn’t bother me much, as long as I can tell what the text is supposed to say.
Anyway, SOLOMON’S VINEYARD is a private eye novel, too, but instead of Bill Crane, the protagonist/narrator is a PI who calls himself Karl Craven, although he makes it pretty clear that’s not his real name. The reader never learns what that is. He arrives in Paulton, a small, Midwestern city, looking for his partner, who is there on a case involving a young woman who’s gotten mixed up in a bizarre religious cult. Her uncle has paid the two private detectives to get her away from the cult. But when “Craven” gets to Paulton, he finds that his partner has been murdered. He sets out to finish the case, rescue the girl, and find his partner’s killer. Of course, it gets pretty complicated along the way, what with a corrupt police chief, a suspicious lawyer, a couple of beautiful women, a vicious gangster, and a fortune in jewels and cash all being involved in a complex plot.
“Craven” is a pretty hardboiled character, setting his enemies against each other in ways that wreak bloody havoc, sometimes on innocents. A lot of this book seems influenced by Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories and novels, most notably RED HARVEST and THE DAIN CURSE. We never find out the Op’s real name, either, and like the Op, “Craven” describes himself as fat on several occasions. But there are also echoes of Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner in the narrator’s snapper patter and colorful language, and the plot eventually goes far enough over the top to be reminiscent of some of Turner’s wackier capers. Understand, to me this is a very good thing, as I love Bellem’s work, and this blend of Bellem and Hammett works spectacularly well for me. (I have no idea whether Latimer was actually influenced by those two authors, of course. But that’s the way SOLOMON’S VINEYARD reads to me.)
As for the controversy surrounding the book, well, the plot gets a little kinky for 1940. So does the abundance of fairly graphic sex talk, which begins with the book’s opening line. It’s not shocking by today’s standards, but I can see why it would have been back then.
All in all, I’d say that SOLOMON’S VINEYARD is worthy of its reputation. It’s one of the best books I read in 2008, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled private eye novels, it’s well worth your time and effort to seek it out.
The passing of Donald E. Westlake has already been widely noted (and blogged about), and nearly everyone has commented on his versatility as a writer. It's certainly true that he did fine work in a variety of genres. When talking about Westlake's work, people often mention the Parker novels he wrote as Richard Stark and the Dortmunder books and other comedies he wrote under his own name. Probably my favorites of Westlake's work, though, are the novels he wrote as Tucker Coe, about retired, disgraced cop Mitch Tobin, who functions as a reluctant and (if memory serves) unlicensed PI. These are bleak but wonderful books that really had an impact on me when I read them back in the Seventies. I may have to hunt them up and read some of them again. Rest in peace, Mr. Westlake.
I recently got the urge to read an Agatha Christie novel, an impulse that comes over me from time to time. When I was a kid, I read a lot of Christie novels, the first one being THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY, which I checked out of the school library when I was in the sixth grade. This was back during the days before the balkanization of mystery fandom, when you could read Agatha Christie one day and Mickey Spillane the next and never think anything about it.
