The Book Report

Quick catch-up on some of the books I've been reading lately.

JDM's second novel, and it shows, especially in the dialogue, which has a hackneyed, pulled-from-the-movies feel to it. There are set pieces in it, however, that are pretty tense, including an unforgettable showdown at a shack on the outskirts of New Orleans that involves a vicious dog, a hired killer, and an unconscious victim. Other than that, not so good, and as far as I know, the only JDM thriller in which the bad guys are international spies. Didn't work.

Not her best gothic family drama, but a very good read about a mother who will go to any lengths to make sure her daughter has no contact with the outside world. A little slow-going at times, but the ending, especially the last two chapters, are surprising and excellent.

Now this is JDM in his wheelhouse, describing the political and sexual shenanigans that take place during a weekend business conference in an unnamed city. Incredibly grim, this is like the saddest Mad Men episode you'll ever see.

Robert Bloch's Psycho was a big hit before the movie eclipsed it. Hitchcock did not change a lot. The book practically reads as a scene for scene treatment of the movie, except for details here and there. A very creepy book, obviously, and even knowing exactly how it would turn out, I enjoyed it a lot.

You Live Once (1956)

JDM's 16th novel, and a bit of a dud. In particular, the writing seems rushed, and not up to his usual high standards. The typical MacDonald hero, a business executive, discovers the murdered body of the girl he's been dating in his closet. He covers up the crime, then has to out-run the police to try and find out who did it and framed him. The love interest is particularly weak in this book.

In this period of time, JDM was cranking out novels at the rate of probably three or four a year so it's not surprise that not all of them work. Can't win 'em all.

Judge Me Not (1951)

An early thriller from JDM, and a good one. It's his version of the dirty town thriller, as the flawed and manly lead (natch), works against the extremely corrupt factions of a small northern city. It's super pulpy, loaded with violence (pretty extreme), greed, and sex. There's a hooker with a heart of gold, and instead of being a terrible cliche, she's actually a decent character.

One More Sunday (1984)

An excellent late novel from JDM. It was new subject material for him, as he portrays the machinations of a mega-church. There's a murder as well, but it takes a backseat to the financial and sexual shenanigans of the church's hierarchy. My big problem with this novel is that there are just too many characters, and that the book loses a little bit of steam by not focusing more on one central character. But the writing is amazing.

The Book Report

A little bit of snowstorm reading ...

I pulled this Travis McGee novel from my MacDonald shelf in my office just because I wanted to quickly read something I've read before. Lo and behold, it's a good possibility I'd never read this one. If I did read it, I was probably fifteen years old, but it didn't ring enough bells. It was a good one, with McGee avenging a friend's death, but through an economic con game instead of his typical means. The wounded bird of the novel, Puss Killian, turns out to be more of a girlfriend figure for McGee, and her fate is particularly heartbreaking but not in the way you'd think.

Less a murder mystery and more of a comforting novel about a widower returning to his home in Yorkshire, buying an old house, and trying to solve the decades-old mystery it contains. Slow-moving but in a good way.

This well-plotted novella plays on Rear Window and The Daughter of Time, as Lippman's detective Tess Monaghan solves a crime while on pregnancy bedrest. Funny and clever, and then quite touching.

The Price of Murder

Published by Dell in 1957, this thriller is MacDonald working at the top of his game in sordid, quick entertainment. Like a lot of his best books, this is multiperspective, as MacDonald explores the history, motives, and actions of a group that circle around a couple of grisly murders, and a heist gone wrong. There is no true protagonist, although there are good people. There's no love story (actually an oddity for MacDonald) but the pages fly by.

I just heard that Random House is re-releasing all of MacDonald's books, either in bound editions or e-books. This is amazing news. I had just resigned myself to the fact that MacDonald was disappearing from the public consciousness like cigarette smoking from bars. I hope he picks up a few new fans. He deserves them.

Ten Best Books I Read in 2012

10.

A stay-up-all-night thriller that turns very, very tragic.

9.

A forgotten thriller that should be re-issued it's so timely. This is essentially what would happen if the tea party decided to really use all those guns.

8.

Far sicker and crueler than the film version. I'm just staring to read all of Cain and he is pretty masterful.

7.

Really called The Hunter, and one of the best anti-heroes in all of literature.

6.

A novel about a sane man spiraling into alcoholism and adultery. As scary as any thriller.

5. 

Another cold and clever marriage thriller.

4. 

It poses as a spy novel but it's ultimately about writing, love, and autobiography. I, for one, loved the big twist.

3.

"When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King," Leslie Fiedler. This one will make a very good TV show (I believe it's in the works).

2.

One of the saddest books I've ever read. The chronicle of a mediocre life.

1.

I'm picking Mother's Milk, but this is really just a stand-in for the first four Patrick Melrose novels. I read them in one big gulp, alternately horrified and amused. St. Aubyn has got to be the best novelist in England right now.

The Book Report

Quick recap of what I've been reading:

Le Carre's first published novel. It's a Smiley book, but it's more of a murder mystery than a classic spy novel. I liked it quite a bit, especially the first half. It slogs a little in the second but it's buoyed along by the excellent characterization of Smiley.

One of the nice things about JDM is that some of his books end happily and some do not. It keeps you on your toes as a reader. This is a spoiler (but no one reads MacDonald any more besides me), but this one does not end happily, and this book kind of gutted me. JDM made me really love a character and then dispatched that particular character in a brutal manner. Clearly, I'm harboring a little bit of a grudge here, but this was still a great read.

This Donald Hamilton novel is the first in the series of Matt Helm books. Thought I'd give it a try. The first few chapters are great but I pretty much lost interest as I went along. It was hard to feel any sympathy and/or interest for the main character, a brutal ex-assassin brought back into the game.

I pulled this one off the bookshelf, pretty convinced I'd already read it, but I hadn't. This has got to be the last McGee I haven't read. It was good, an incredibly brutal story in which McGee stumbles into the murderous end of a heist-gone-wrong.

Clemmie (1958)

Another of John D. MacDonald's infidelity novels, and like the other two, Cancel All Our Vows and The Deceivers, this one is excellent. 

The book's milieu is classic Updike/Cheever country. A happily married suburban businessman is left alone for the summer, his English wife bringing their children back to the home country to meet relatives. He meets a young Bohemian girl who lives in a loft in the city (and off of a trust fund). There's lots of drinking and lots of sex and things turn sour a la Fatal Attraction. It's a long book but doesn't feel it. JDM manages to turn this crime-free tale into a tale of high suspense. It's dated, of course, in its free-wheeling attitudes toward extra-marital activity, and it's almost comical the number of times the main character gets behind the wheel completely sloshed, but, ultimately, it's a heartfelt well-written novel without gimmickry.

A Modesty Kick

I've been on a little bit of a Modesty Blaise kick lately. She's the character who began her fictitious life in a comic strip written by Peter O'Donnell. I don't read the strips but I am reading the novels, also penned by Peter O'Donnell. They are actually pretty hard to find; they're available on Ebay, of course, but they are not always cheap, and I'm a little picky about the cover art. The 1980s re-issues are particularly horrendous.

I, Lucifer is the third Modesty Blaise novel. The bad guys are ludicrous, especially the title character, a paranoid schizophrenic with a pre-cognitive ability, but the writing is excellent and the action scenes are particularly great.

Cobra Trap is actually the last published Modesty Blaise book, a collection of five long-ish stories from different points in Modesty's career. I should have really waited to read this one last, especially the final story, the one called Cobra Trap, which details the (Spoiler Alert!) deaths of Modesty Blaise and her long-time platonic companion Willie Garvin. I've heard that a lot of fans refuse to read this particular story but I've read it, and it's actually pretty touching, or as touching as the deaths of over-the-top pulp fiction characters can be. The rest of the stories, especially "Old Alex," are top-notch as well.

This was definitely taking my mini Modesty-obsession too far but I watched the 2003 direct-to-video film My Name is Modesty. This film was made for the sole reason of keeping the film rights to Modesty Blaise with the Weinstein Brothers. Apparently they did it as a favor to Quentin Tarantino who has always had an interest in making a Modesty film. Anyway, this low-budget flick is far better than it has any right to be. Not worth seeing really but it comes across as a decent TV pilot.

And lastly, although this has very little to do with Modesty Blaise, I just read John D. MacDonald's On the Run, one of his standalone thrillers. Like most of the Fawcett Gold Medal books this cover has absolutely nothing to do with the book. In fact, this cover, by Robert McGinnis, is a painting of Modesty Blaise that was never used for one of the Modesty books (to my knowledge).

About the actual book, this is one of JDM's worst efforts, in which the cheesy over-talked romance completely destroys the element of suspense. However, and it's not one of those howevers that means you should actually read the book, but after 120 pages of drivel the book takes a sharp and brutal turn, and the last ten pages or so are pretty excellent. I'd read the sequel at the drop of the hat.

The Crossroads

One of many impressive things about this standalone thriller by JDM is how the entire novel is centered around one simple heist, that is neither twisty nor complicated. But from that one idea MacDonald builds a complex, populated novel with a unique setting.

The unique setting is where the novel gets it's title. The Crossroads is a built-up highway stop somewhere down in the South. It's got gas stations, motels, restaurants, bars, gift shops, and it's all owned by one man, an Eastern European immigrant, and his four grown children.

It's excellent, despite some of MacDonald's typical flaws. His "good" female characters tend to all be alike, as do his "bad" female characters. But it's minor. The best part of the book is the way he delves into his location, creating a richness out of a banal rest-stop. At times, the omniscient narrator floats around and observes the comings and goings of the travelers. There is a brief description early on of a young unmarried female doctor with an incurable disease who is driving down to Florida for a few days on her childhood beach before committing suicide. It's a throwaway scene (she never returns) but in just those few paragraphs MacDonald creates a life.

Contrary Pleasure (1954)

Around this period in the middle-1950s JDM took a few shots at straight fiction instead of thrillers. This one came right after Cancel All Our Vows and traces a few weeks in the life of four grown-children and their spouses in an industrial town in upstate New York. They are all heirs to a failing textile factory, most with marital difficulties.

It's a beautifully written book in which most chapters could stand alone as short stories. There is no real central narrative drive and it hurts the book a little bit, with an abundance of navel-gazing from the multiple characters. Some of it, of course, is a little dated, especially a sequence dealing with a frigid wife. But there's an interesting character, the type of which I've never seen in a JDM book: a teenage boy who might have extreme Asperger's syndrome.

All These Condemned (1954)

An unusual book for JDM because it's essentially a classic whodunit in which a rich perfume magnate invites a group of friends and enemies for a drunken weekend at her lake house. She winds up dead and the story unfolds as each character narrates their own chapter. JDM once said that he didn't like whodunits and it shows in this book, one of the few of his I've read where I didn't really care about any of the characters.

One of the oddities of this book is that the final chapter is narrated not by one of the weekend guests but by a police officer who had been on the scene. It's the shortest chapter and also, by far, the best. In a few short paragraphs MacDonald puts you in the mindset of an average man in a situation beyond him, and then kind of breaks your heart.

The rest of the book: substandard at best.

Ten Favorite Books of the Year

My favorites of the books I read this year, not necessarily books that came out this year (or anywhere near this year) ...

10. Bonecrack (1971)

All of Francis' books are pretty much the same, just either good or bad. This was very good.

9. The Hunger Games (2008)

I could've put the trilogy here, since I read them all, but the first book, much as I liked the follow-ups, was the real barn-burner of the bunch. Let's hope the movie is half as good.

8. One Across, Two Down (1971)

Sometimes we don't need fuzzy characters or moral uplift. Sometimes it's uplifting to read about a degenerate plotting to kill his mother-in-law and his wife. Sometimes.

7. Full Dark, No Stars (2010)

Not King's best collection of novellas, but certainly his grisliest. It's nice to know that the old fella can still make your skin crawl.

6. Mad World (2010)

A rare non-fiction appearance. This is the fascinating true story of Evelyn Waugh and the family that inspired Brideshead Revisited.

5. A Good Man in Africa (1981)

Boyd's very funny first novel, with a protagonist worthy of Kingsley Amis at his best.

4. An Unsuitable Job For a Woman (1972)

I prefer Cordelia Gray to Dalgliesh somehow. My favorite of James' mysteries.

3. The Last One Left (1966)

MacDonald at his height, telling a multi-character tale of corruption and redemption.

11/22/63 (2011)

Simply a great page-turner, with some nice asides thrown in about history, America, and the passage of time.

1. Any Human Heart (2002)

It's hard to imagine a year in which this wouldn't be my favorite book. Maybe the year I read Lucky Jim, of course, or the year I read Brideshead Revisited. An epic and human tale.