The second of Edward S. Aarons' early-fifties "Love Trilogy" was really good three quarters of the way, then it flTerrible People Weaving Tangled Webs
The second of Edward S. Aarons' early-fifties "Love Trilogy" was really good three quarters of the way, then it floundered on the Jersey dunes and never regained its momentum. It limped its way inexorably to a pretty predictable ending (there were a couple twists) and closed on a hopeful note.
The protagonist is Matthew Emmons, a World War II veteran flyer of air raids over Germany and now seven years later a wealthy and stylish attorney for cutthroat character assassin and public relations man Charley Troy. Emmons does the legwork, digging up dirt on celebrities such as Sheldon Palmer, host of a late-night television show (in the dawn of television). Troy has an ex-pug named Morrie Appleman serving as his butler, bodyguard, and chauffeur. There's also Cora, the secretary, who Charley pimps out to reporters in return for highlighting the boldface names of his client list. It's a sad cast of characters.
Charley is determined to destroy Sheldon Palmer, the man who stole his wife Isabel, a torpedo hit to Charley's colossal ego more than to his hardened heart. Matt Emmons also has reasons to destroy Palmer, as does Matt's sometimes-squeeze Lydia, an actress sleeping her way to stardom. With so much hate coming his way, does Palmer stand a chance?
A new depth is plumbed even for Charley Troy, however, when he dispatches Matt to Massachusetts to bring Palmer's estranged 19-year-old daughter Natalie in for an interview to uncover more dirt on the beloved television personality. Matt feels uneasy about it but being a good footsoldier and accustomed to the benefits of his high life stoops to do the bidding of lowlife Charley.
Natalie Palmer is the pivotal player of the book. Aarons makes her character believable, a teenager but by no means a kooky kid. She's had a hard life and earned wisdom early. And thus it isn't long before she and Matt grow quite close on that long ride from New England to Gotham in the snow.
With the pivotal character on the stage, the pivotal scene unfolds--a murder with three witnesses. Bad decisions--like the Trouble with Harry plot to ditch the body--lead to more bad decisions against better judgement. It's a slippery slope. And soon everyone present becomes a liability to the increasingly unhinged and paranoid Charley Troy.
It took bullets zipping into the sand of an isolated Jersey beach to stir Matt from his stupor. After setting up Matt and Natalie by sending them away for a "honeymoon" near Atlantic City, Charley hires a hitman to rub them out. Matt Emmons is no Sam Durrell, but he does think fast on his feet and manages to get them out of a dire situation. That scene was very cinematic, and to Aarons' credit, he describes it so vividly it played like a movie in my mind.
But that whole long and languorous "honeymoon" scene with the star-crossed lovers building castles in the air just broke the book's momentum. Everything after that three-day beach weekend just struck me as playing out the script and getting us to the finish we knew was coming.
Worse, I felt Aarons was intentionally prolonging scenes, adding unnecessary dialogue and dragging out scenes, throwing up roadblocks that only got in the way of the book finishing. Did Fawcett dictate a length he could reach only by padding out the book? Was he getting paid by the word? The panhandler on the street, the cabbie concerned about his health... just wasting time.
Even that last scene with Lydia in the tub then trying to seduce Matt with her peekaboo towel drop. It just went on and on. And I get that it also served as an exposition dump about Crystal's sad fate and underscored the fact Charley was now completely off the hinges. Lydia's own lid wasn't screwed down tight as she attacks Matt in a blind rage and--like Crystal earlier--rakes her nails on his face. What was it with that cat-like mauling tactic? I can't recall reading of it being employed in other novels, let alone twice in one book.
Contenders for the book's strongest woman was either Isabel Palmer or Cora, and I'm leaning towards Cora, the mousy secretary nobody suspects who suddenly turns in a take this job and shove it offscreen moment and pushes Charley into catatonic madness and despair. Who suspected Cora wielded such power--knowledge is power, after all--and she patiently waited until exactly the right moment to exercise it for maximum effectiveness.
Maurie was the book's tragic figure, and he characteristically helped wrap up the book neatly, leaving no untidy loose ends. And the Comics Code-approved conclusion will appeal to crime-doesn't pay Dragnet fans. I count myself among those law-abiding ranks and was pleased, and optimistically held out hope Matt and Natalie would soon be reunited and on their way to leaving this ugly episode in the rear-view mirror. (In fact, when Matt mentioned leaving New York with Natalie and opening a practice in a small town, I thought of the underappreciated legal drama Petrocelli and its memorable opening of a couple escaping the city.)
An enjoyable and engaging read, even if chapters 15 through 19 lacked the tautness of the preceding fourteen and suffered from so much wheel-spinning. I recently read Aarons' Don't Cry, Beloved, also dating to 1952, which was a much better book. Up next will be 1953's Come Back, My Love, the third Aarons novel with "Love" in its title, which appears to be the only similarity they share. Aarons is best remembered for the Sam Durrell Assignment series, but he was a skilled suspense writer even when there wasn't a spy in sight. ...more
A compelling Cold War espionage yarn published three years before Aarons introduced his trademark superspy Sam DBoris and Natasha Heat Up the Cold War
A compelling Cold War espionage yarn published three years before Aarons introduced his trademark superspy Sam Durrell in Assignment to Disaster.
The setting is Base 4 in remote New Mexico. It's a top-secret facility where research and development are underway in earnest to create and perfect weapons of mass destruction. The human toll of such work is shown in the decadent and dissipated lives of the base scientists and security. Drinking and wife swapping appear to be standard operating procedure. The only entertainment is in Jackson, a nearby former mining boomtown that is transforming itself from a ghost town into a bustling little desert burg with bars, gambling, dens of iniquity, and tourist traps, most of the latter run by local Hopi Indians.
Our protagonist--can't really call him a "hero"--is Security Chief Phil Royce. He's a surly drunk embittered by his wife's running off with a bandleader back east. He came West to forget but hasn't gone far enough to elude the memories that haunt him. He's engaged in a torrid affair with an exotic woman named Sarah Hummer, young and frisky wife of the tired old scientist Dr. George Hummer. She was an easy target for the affections of a lusty prowler like Phil... or was it the other way around?
The base is being buttoned up at midnight for a two-day test of Operation Hellfire, a devastating new weapon. But our testosterone-driven security officer slips out for an assignation with his paramour and that is where the novel really takes off with a plot presaging by six years Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and capturing the zeitgeist of McCarthy's Red Scare. This compelling story made the notion of a Red under every bed appear plausible. Those Commies kept turning up in the darndest of places, and that heightened degree of paranoia, coupled with Phil's amnesia, kept the book moving at a gallop.
I say "gallop" because in this high-tech military-industrial complex it sometimes pays to go low-tech. Eluding the Reds, ranch hand Chico wisely suggests he and Phil use horses instead of a car because they will be quieter and can go where cars can't. I appreciated that counter-intuitive thinking. Chico is an unheralded character in the story, and many a daring escape can be credited to a Chico ex machina!
I kept thinking of this novel as a "desert noir" as I read because of the sordid characters, the primarily nighttime settings, the stoic response to murder and mayhem, fallen women, and the requisite bandleader. There's a lot of drinking and smoking going on, and then more drinking. And more smoking. I liked that Chico rolled his own from a pouch of Bull Durham.
Scientists from Base 4 have been disappearing. First Koch and now Strummer. Have they defected? Well, kinda, and with a little help from those fiends the Russkies!
The reveals of the two primary Red spies were not especially surprising, although another reveal caught me flat footed. I was reminded of later spy novels, movies, and television shows about how well-trained Russian agents can credibly pass themselves off as Americans. The 1960 film Man on a String and the Mission: Impossible episode "The Town" sprang to mind on several occasions.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and consider it "unputdownable," meaning I read it regularly at night before bed but found myself taking it off the nightstand during the day to sneak a chapter. It often came to mind during the day, and I would eagerly anticipate picking it up again. It was a quick read in that Aarons knew how to keep a story lean and mean and to keep it moving briskly along.
Aarons also knows how to keep the suspense taut. I had to resist glancing ahead during the traffic stop scene where Phil and Sarah are in a line of cars inexorably approaching a military roadblock. And again in Joe Gregory's nightclub as the MPs are going room to room rousting all suspects. If not for audacious Agnes--one of my favorite characters--Phil would not have slipped the net.
Why does everyone want Phil Royce? Well, unbeknownst even to himself, he stole Strummer's device with the inhibiting factor that can put the brakes on Operation Hellfire and replaced it with a useless lookalike. In other words, Operation Hellfire is almost certainly to get out of control and live up to its diabolical name, with no way to stop it. Royce "remembered his dream of a cloud of destruction, spreading far and wide over the land. He shook with horror. There would be thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands, perhaps: a national disaster. It would be his fault, his responsibility. He was the dupe who had made this man's scheme possible. Death and destruction of the innocent, in a fiery cloud beyond control that would shock and paralyze the nation. He shuddered again" (pp. 138-39).
A chapter later Aarons' crisp writing captures Phil's determination to fight on and to race against the clock ticking down to doomsday: "Death walked through the land, and he alone knew it was coming. By this time tomorrow it might be over for all of them, and the memory made him brush aside his thoughts of Lanny Hogan and personal matters. He looked at Ellen and thought she had never been more beautiful. He didn't want her to die. He felt a deep wave of bitter grief at the thought of how the innocent might suffer, and that emotion gave way to the pounding anger that had brought him along this far (pp. 154-55).
Aarons does a fine job balancing Royce's determination to save the world, to save his relationship with Ellen, and to save his own skin, which is in the crosshairs of both the Red spies and the United States military!
The book suffers few weaknesses. One would be overplaying Chico as Phil's guardian angel always on the spot in a pinch, and a bigger one was the credulity-stretching reveal that local Hopi woman Rose Arrow was Phil's ex-wife Ellen's roommate at Wellesley. C'mon, Ed, that was a coincidence even Dickens would have disbelieved, but I rolled with it. Somehow Aarons had to get Ellen to appear in the middle of nowhere with her bandleader husband Lanny Hogan in tow.
There is romance and reconciliation, but not enough to justify the novel's Harlequinesque title, Don't Cry, Beloved. I have to believe that was the publisher's demented decision, and I fear many adventure, suspense and spy fans spun the drugstore spinner rack right past this book based on that turgid title. Yeah, my Fawcett Gold Medal copy pictures a man gagged and tied to a chair with a woman standing triumphantly behind him (a scene not found in the book, by the way), so maybe that cover art and the blurb promising "a masterful story of atomic espionage" overcame initial resistance and sold a few copies. Me, I would have pictured Phil and Agnes facing the MPs and titled it Man on the Run to complement Aarons' 1954 novel Girl on the Run.
I'm committed to reading what I've dubbed Aarons' "Love Trilogy" comprised of this book, Escape to Love, and Come Back, My Love, all penned in the early fifties before he embarked on the Assignment series in 1955. Did he write a fourth book with "love" in the title? If so, I'll read it. I'll read anything Aarons wrote.
PS for Assignment Series Fans: Was there any telegraphing of Sam Durrell in these pages? Not that I detected. Phil Royce was a former OSS agent, but that never came into play here outside a passing reference early on. Here Phil is not the spy, only the dupe misused and abused by spies. Colonel Moretti can, however, be credibly considered a forerunner to corrupt authority figures like Swayney.
PPS for Marvel Comics Fans: Unconfirmed intel suggests Base 4 was a decade later placed under the command of General Thunderbolt Ross and rechristened Hulkbuster Base....more
A tremendous disappointment coming on the heels of the many times better The Temple of Gold. This slight work in every senGod and Man at Camp Runamuck
A tremendous disappointment coming on the heels of the many times better The Temple of Gold. This slight work in every sense is really a novella or more likely a puffed-out short story, one of the many Goldman has stated he wrote that were rejected.
Peter Bell's recounting of his ill-fated but mercifully short stint as a summer camp counselor reads like a New Yorker short story of that era. Wealthy, overly introspective and self-conscious protagonist, pop psychobabble, ham-fisted symbolism and religious imagery, and the common touch (with a bone tossed to New Yorkers) in the joltin' Joe DiMaggio autographed baseball.
What was Goldman trying to say in this story? I think it was beware of hero worship, whether the "just a great guy" gridiron star or that "tall, perfectly formed" object of desire "with gently curling auburn hair, with skin as clear as autumn snow" (p. 20). Peter romanticized Chad and Tillie to where the idols he erected just had to fall, and great were the fall of them.
On that note, the novel is rich with biblical allusions, from the father named Jacob to the son named Peter who becomes an unwitting disciple of the would-be Messiah and who like his namesake initially rejects him only to return repentantly. Tillie, the whore with a heart of gold, whom Peter pushes across the waters like God did Noah and the ark, brought to mind the woman taken in adultery whom Jesus absolved with the admonition to go and sin no more. Even Peter's cabin number--6--brings to mind the biblical symbolism of human frailty, weakness and sin. One can read too far into all that Goldman wove into the narrative. I began wondering if Peter's surname, Bell, was a reference to Donne's line, "for whom the whom the bell tolls," and then feared I was becoming one of those pedantic lit profs who imbued every name and image with profound meaning.
Only Goldman's second novel and already a recurring theme/trope is emerging. The protagonist presuming to teach and transform the prostitute into something better just as Trevitt attempted with Terry in The Temple of Gold. Here Peter actually names Pygmalion, which apt pupil Tillie begins to jot down as "Pig...."
The book's greatest flaw is the story seems to wander aimlessly--maybe an allusion to the Exodus? Seriously, it reads as if Goldman had no clear idea where he wanted to take the story, made it up as he went, and never looked back. The epilogue of what happened later to the characters was an unwelcome predecessor to all those eighties' movie end-credit sequences that reveal the nerd got the girl and the jock got fat. That closing chapter actually diminished further my already low opinion of the book.
But while my opinion of this book was low, I still hold out great hope for its author. I have already laid in a winter's supply of his novels and am looking forward to enjoying the more substantive Soldier in the Rain and the doorstopper Boys and Girls Together.
A compelling story, much better than the overrated The Catcher in the Rye to which it is often unfavorably comparedDobie Gillis Through a Glass Darkly
A compelling story, much better than the overrated The Catcher in the Rye to which it is often unfavorably compared. This novel, which I read years ago and pulled off the shelf and reread this week, really upended my romanticized notions of the 1950s. Growing up watching reruns of Father Knows Best, The Life of Riley, and Leave It to Beaver left me believing that the '50s were squeaky clean and so much more appeaing than the sordid '70s. Intellectually I knew that was wrong, but in my heart I harbored this halcyon days fantasy. Until this book, that is.
On the subject of sitcoms, as I read memories were stirred up of my favorite sitcom of the era, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. The illustration on my battered old Bantam paperback, featuring a flat-topped blond youth wearing a short-sleeve button down shirt, reminded me of Dwayne Hickman in that beloved old series. The literary and introspective Raymond Euripides Trevitt was the dark side Dobie. The more I read, the more I began seeing other parallels: the ugly poet Zock as Maynard G. Krebs, Harriet as Zelda Gilroy, and Annabelle and Terry as twin sirens and star-crossed objects of desire like femme fatale Thalia Meninger. Add in the long-suffering father and doting mother, and one could almost suspect Max Shulman of creating a franchise out of sanitized versions of Goldman's characters. Even the sitcom like Goldman's book dedicated the better part of a season to the protagonist's adventures in the Army, arguably drawing upon Trevitt's ill-fated stint in chapter 5 (of course Dobie's hitch was more Buck Privates than Full Metal Jacket!).
The book, like many novels, is better the second time through. Reading is rereading, right? Knowing where Trevitt would end up made sense of the many missteps he took to get there. I read wincingly, knowing this would end badly, as it invariably did. But I kept reading. It was like watching a car crash--oops, spoiler alert!--in slow motion and not being able to alter the inexorable events or to turn away from them, even when you desperately wanted to.
The book is episodic, with one chapter transitioning smoothly even if not seamlessly into the next. William Goldman revealed in interviews that his original draft was accepted by Knopf on the condition he double its length, which he dutifully did. As I read through it this second time I tried to discern what was added to pad and puff the book to the requested length. Where were the "false noses" on the narrative? My guesses were the Army chapter, the ill-conceived marriage to Terry (coupled with Raymond's mother's meandering romance and marriage to Adrian), and Trevitt's hasty return to college that amounted to nothing. These plotlines from the latter third of the book didn't seem as thought-through or tightly woven into the overarching story.
Same goes for Trevitt's playing Pygmalion with Terry when she asks him to educate her. There are some throwaway lines about her reading through the literary canon, but nothing ever really comes of it. My personal theory is that Goldman, an admitted theater-buff, drew inspiration from (i.e. swiped) the plot of the 1956 play Bells Are Ringing when writing about Trevitt and Terry. (Corroborating evidence--or more charitably, Goldman's winking to the cognoscenti--is that Terry's job was answering phones for the Red Cross.)
And speaking of influences, Dickensian coincidences abound. From Trevitt visiting Harvard and just happening to see his father's obituary in the New York Times to his later chancing upon his old friend Felix Brown, who high hats his old school chum and thus taps a rich and roiling vein of race-hatred in Trevitt. Neither of these scenes rang true, however, since a Eurpides scholar at a small-town Illinois college would be unlikely to rate an obituary in the Times (with a photograph yet!), and earlier in the novel Trevitt demonstrated admirable brotherhood-of-man colorblindness towards Fee. Okay, the obituary was a crutch to get Trevitt away from Harvard and heading back home, but I couldn't understand why Goldman included the ugly scene with Fee unless simply to show Trevitt was unwittingly burning every bridge at home to ensure that only scorched earth remained so boomeranging "home" as he had done several times would never again be an option.
I admire Goldman for featuring a thoroughly unlikeable protagonist and somehow making him sympathetic--at times. I felt like a yoyo as I went from cheering on Trevitt to wishing he got all he deserved and more. I was very invested in this young man. It's an admirable feat for a first-time novelist, and illustrates why Goldman went on to become a many-times novelist (and a screenwriter, to boot). I plan on taking up and reading a few more of his early works: Your Turn to Curtsy, My Turn to Bow, his highly acclaimed "long novel," Boys and Girls Together, and The Thing of It Is. But The Temple of Gold is the fountainhead from which flowed all that followed. Great book. Indeed....more
What goes up must come down / Spinnin' wheel, got to go 'round
From the uttermost of the series' third book to the guttermost with this dismal closing What goes up must come down / Spinnin' wheel, got to go 'round
From the uttermost of the series' third book to the guttermost with this dismal closing chapter of the Cities in Flight saga. I feared it would be a let down, but I never suspected it would be so bad. The narrative bounced between impenetrable faux-physics to turgid romance to puppy love and parental handwringing. It was dreadful first page to last. Oh, and then the universe ends.
Okay, there was an attempt to shoehorn in some action and suspense with Jorn the Apostle's Warriors of God "jehad" against the powers that be. There was potential here, with rustic revolutionaries armed with portable "spindillies" that could tear a person apart or send aloft a portion of a city block, reducing structures to rubble. They even take Hazleton hostage. But the Amazing Amalfi makes a Zoom call to Jorn himself and everything is settled in short order. It was so slapdash and poorly developed an episode that Blish himself admits in his 1964 afterword that a magazine editor who expressed interest in serializing the novel wanted to cut the entire Jorn sequence. The editor was right. The Jorn chapters are like a false nose on the narrative.
Blish's strength is writing plot-driven stories. Here he tried to develop characters, and the results were at best unconvincing. Dee's awkward expressions of love for Amalfi were embarrassingly bad. New characters Web and Estelle were annoying in their Lake Wobegon above-averageness, from bringing youthful insights to the problems that baffled their elders to their serene expressions and soft voices. I never got a firm grasp on them as three-dimensional characters. And Dee's fretting over them was very much 1950's sitcom mom.
Other characters were just as blurry and vague: Jake, Schloss, Carrell, Gifford Bonner--who were these people? They just mouthed endless exposition none of which was especially interesting. Then the planet He shows up again with Miramon still at the helm. Never an especially interesting character, Miramon enjoys a larger role as the book unfolds. And his very model of a modern planetary emperor character was so unlike the unsophisticated village elder we met earlier he may as well have been a wholly different character.
There's a new philosophy in vogue that is capturing people's attention: Stochasticism: "the most recent of many attempts to construct a complete philosophy, from esthetics to ethics" (p. 29). This was certainly drawing upon Ayn Rand's philosophy Objectivism, which was also a complete philosophy that was detailed in her novel Atlas Shrugged, which was published in 1957, a year prior to this novel by Blish. Hazleton is swept up in this new philosophy, and this promised to be an interesting subplot with some satire and thoughtful critique, but... Like Blish's jab at the Jehovah's Witnesses with The Believers in They Shall Have Stars, the Stochasticism subplot is never developed. Just another throwaway plot device.
This book brings to a close the Cities in Flight saga and Blish brings the whole universe down with it. As the back cover of my old Avon edition screams: APOCALYPSE! Time must have a stop, and that will be three short years away. A blurb inside my paperback says this book is "a kind of cosmic On the Beach," but aside from characters facing an inevitable end there is little resemblance. Shute's novel (and the very good movie made from it) was character studies, and while Blish attempted that at various times, it just didn't work. Character study was not his strength.
Blish's interest in religion shone through in his choice to end this universe in AD 4004, since the traditional date of Creation is 4004 BC. And the closing line did result in a Spock-like raised eyebrow (fascinating). But that intriguing moment aside, reading this novel proved a chore and I was glad to close the book. I was so elated after the first three, and utterly deflated after this one. The Cities in Flight Chronology in the back did stir up good memories of the events of earlier volumes. The year I read the saga, 2021, was an eventful one: "Escape of the 'Colonials' from the Jovian system. Trial and death of Wagoner. Death of Corsi, under questioning" (p. 156).
Speaking of Spock, I have also been reading Blish's Star Trek novelizations, and while I haven't yet come across any snuck-in references to his own fictional universe, Blish's style and penchant for dated slang are evident throughout them. Another reviewer here suggested Blish was tapped to write those novelizations based on Earthman, Come Home, which was very Trek-like in Amalfi seeking out of strange new worlds and civilizations.
Ground Control to author Blish: So long and thanks for all the fish, And now it's time to say good night, Let that spindizzy city take flight!...more
This third of four Cities in Flight novels must surely be the pinnacle. It was the longest but read the quickeNew York, New York, it's a helluva town!
This third of four Cities in Flight novels must surely be the pinnacle. It was the longest but read the quickest--I couldn't put it down. Mayor Amalfi, met briefly in the second novel, takes center stage to play a pivotal role in New York City's future history.
Reading this book on the heels of A Life for the Stars, which closed with Chris being named city manager, I anticipated reading of his new adventures with Mayor Amalfi's. But alas, Blish for whatever reason discarded the character of Chris in a throwaway line: "deFord had been shot by the City Fathers around the year 3300 for engineering an egregious violation of the city's contract with a planet called Epoch" (p. 18). Huh? That didn't read like the Chris we knew and cheered on. And how could the City Fathers shoot anyone when they are only computer banks? That implies they ordered Chris shot and somehow Amalfi was complicit. So that set things off on a bad foot.
This novel is set 600 years after the execution of deFord. Current city manager Mark Hazleton could just as easily been deFord, and I wished Blish had simply recast Hazleton as deFord to tighten the continuity between the books. But I grew to like Hazleton and the old man-young protege relationship they shared. It reminded me of the rapport Karl Malden and Mike Douglas enjoyed on The Streets of San Francisco.
The complicating factor of Dee and the resulting love triangle was never fully developed, and that was for the better. Blish didn't seem to know what to do with Dee, besides using her to ask naive questions readers would likely ask that allowed Amalfi to offer exposition. And then there's her gratuitous and bizarre "nude scene" in the abandoned subway station that served no purpose than to "sex up" the narrative for a couple pages.
Blish is at his best writing plot-driven space adventure, and this book boasted a bounty of action-packed and suspenseful scenes, culminating in the final chapters with the introduction of Karst and the showdown with the notorious IMT (of "Remember Thor V" infamy). I defy any reader to get to those closing couple chapters and set the book down. Blish cranked the suspense to overload and I could almost hear the Mission: Impossible music playing while our latter-day Phelps and Barney engineered the awe-inspiring climax.
The novel is necessarily episodic because it is four short stories stitched together. But to Blish's credit, he edited them so well the seams between stories never showed. Well, barely showed. Hazleton's disappearance in the final sequence indicates he wasn't a part of the original "Earthman, Come Home" story. I'd like to read the originals and compare them to the novelized forms.
Blish's vivid writing left many images lingering in my mind, from the jungle of cities circling that red dwarf to my favorite: The legendary Vegan Orbital Fort reduced to being a bug splattered on the windshield of the spindizzy-powered planet Hern VI, which was like a bowling ball hurtling through the pins. And of course that final scene that upended the age-old adage that what goes up must come down.
Onward to the closing volume. I initially thought I would read one and pick up the next volume a month or two later, but Blish has me riveted. I suspect Earthman, Come Home was the pinnacle and that this final volume will be epilogue at best and anticlimactic at worst, but there's only one way to find out: Spin!...more
One down and three to go in James Blish's celebrated Cities in Flight series. It was great fun reading about the yeThe Future Ain't What It Used to Be
One down and three to go in James Blish's celebrated Cities in Flight series. It was great fun reading about the years 2018 through 2020 as forecast in the 1950s. Of course the envisioned future failed to come about exactly as Blish pictured it, but what progress we lack today in interplanetary travel we made up for in other ways: Instances of mailing paper letters and burning the carbons made me grateful for the computer age, e-mail, and the internet. But references to the decline of the West, the ongoing Cold War with the Soviets, and a thinly veiled Joseph McCarthy character still have troubling parallels today.
This short novel packed a lot in: Government corruption and the accompanying personal feuds and power grabs, religious revivalism reflective of today's "woke" churches (Blish's Believers rewrite the Bible regularly), scientific progress and the pesky ethical questions that present hurdles to questionable outcomes, and government workers investing (and losing) their lives in Sisyphean projects--the Bridge on Jupiter--that are simply stepping stones and smokescreens for other projects the workers are never made privy to. There's even a little romance too.
I will admit I skimmed the "hard science" portions complete with mathematical formulae, but I never lost the thread of the story. To Blish's credit he balances well a character-driven narrative with the theoretical science and convinced me his future world was a reasonable and attainable one. It also testified to the fact that while scientific advancements can be made that stagger the imagination, the people populating the world will still suffer the same foibles, fears, and frailties that have plagued humanity since the beginning.
The Believers' catchphrase is [book:Millions Now Living Will Never Die!|, which was a celebrated 1920 book by Jehovah's Witnesses leader Judge Rutherford. The Witnesses were and are still known for holding annual meetings in stadiums, and were rewriting the Bible when creating their New World Translation, so Blish was assuredly drawing upon that organization, but for what purpose? I found their appearances intriguing, but they never figured into the actual plot as more than window dressing. Maybe this was laying the groundwork for later developments in later books?
A prescient passage for the Covid plandemic era of 2020-2021: "In fifty years of unrelenting pressure, they succeeded in converting the West into a system so like the Soviets' as to make direct military action unnecessary; we Sovietized ourselves and our moves are now exactly predictable (p. 147)."
Substitute for the Soviets Big Tech, Big Government, Big Pharma et al. that has cowed a populace with fear and tracks our every online move and purchase and uses logarithms to suggest the next one. Substitute the czars of the cancel culture and their online doxing and intimidating footsoldiers for MacHinery and his "gumshoes" that target and tear down decent people. Carbon papers aside, perhaps Blish did after all rightly envision this period of history in his entertaining and thought-provoking novel.
The Guns of Navarone was an action-packed WWII adventure yarn that kept me turning pages. Good memorable characters in Mallory and Andrea, and to a slThe Guns of Navarone was an action-packed WWII adventure yarn that kept me turning pages. Good memorable characters in Mallory and Andrea, and to a slightly lesser degree Miller, Louki and Panayis. The story spans sea and land, steep cliffs to dark caverns in which lie the massive German guns of the title. Like other MacLean novels, all the action takes place in a tight time frame of about 48 or 72 hours, with rarely a dull moment.
About the halfway point I thought I would enjoy seeing the 1961 blockbuster film adaptation starring Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn. BUT... I learned to my dismay and disappointment that the movie moguls tossed MacLean's novel and rewrote the story to include a couple love interest leading ladies and dropped/added other characters.
MacLean obviously didn't mind since he wrote Force 10 from Navarone as a sequel to the film adaptation (which book's plot was also jettisoned when Hollywood adapted it into a movie). As for me, I enjoyed the novel enough to let it stand in my memory just as MacLean wrote it, so am skipping the movie. ...more
As Sluggish as a Pre-War Citroen Tractor at 40 Below
Night Without End had a lot of promise with a compelling scenario, exotic setting, and an appealinAs Sluggish as a Pre-War Citroen Tractor at 40 Below
Night Without End had a lot of promise with a compelling scenario, exotic setting, and an appealing narrator. The first quarter or so of the book is page-turning and exciting. But once they set out on the tractor for the coast the book sputters and lurches along to an unsatisfying finish.
Another Fawcett author of the era, Edward S. Aarons of the Assignment saga, kept his adventure stories at a taut 150-170 pages. Maclean's novel swelled to 224 pages of small type and would have greatly benefitted from trimming 40 or so pages of blubber. And there was a lot of that, so much so that I admit to skimming a few paragraphs describing yet again the tractor's inching across the icecap, how the winds blew, or the bleak and merciless terrain. The book was padded and stretched, Maclean goosing the flailing story with a senseless killing or someone slipping down a crevasse.
To his credit, Maclean researched this story thoroughly, but to this reader's dismay, he shoehorned all that research directly into the narrative with long expository paragraphs that did not enhance the reader's enjoyment or propel the plot forward. It did provide an unintentionally funny moment, however, when Captain Hillcrest--the very model of a modern major general--radios Mason:
"'I guess you're a good way from the tractor. At 70 below you won't want to stay there too long. Suggest I do all the talking. I'll keep it brief.'" Hillcrest then launches into a half-page litany of every aircraft and ship that has joined the search, providing Mason the make, model, and national origin of each one, burying Mason under an avalanche of detail (133-34). So much for keeping it brief. Maclean didn't write that detailed list of military air and seacraft for Mason's benefit, but to impress the reader. I just felt bad Mason had to sit outside in 70-below temps while Maclean was utterly failing to impress me.
I couldn't ever accept, even for the plot's sake, that no aircraft were searching for the airplane crash survivors. Hillcrest mentioned a couple tried and failed, but with the precious missile mechanism at stake I would have thought the search would be relentless. I know from the John Wayne movie Island in the Sky that finding a few survivors in vast snow-covered wilderness is no mean feat, but in this case knowing the base camp and probable path and destination of the tractor would have narrowed the scope and made discovery likely.
Now, this will sound heartless, but I didn't give a damn about Mahler or Marie LeGarde, the two albatrosses the ragtag tractor crew haul across ice-capped hill and dale. Mahler's hovering between life and death for over a hundred pages was just boring. I felt no connection to the character. The stereotypical life story he spun, straight out of a Singer short story, was even dismissed as a lie by Mason. LeGarde gave no indication of being the star of musical stage. I expected a bombastic character, one who would be played by Shelley Winters if they ever made a movie of the book.
Besides trusty Eskimo sidekick Jackstraw (who I envisioned as Clint Walker circa Kodiak), there were no standout, sharply defined characters. None of the survivors, even Margaret Ross, whom Maclean dotes on and casts as the damsel in distress near the end, were ever more than two-dimensional. The big reveal of the bad guys was anticlimactic, though I admit to enjoying the fitting finish of the most evil one of them, as if creation itself conspired to snuff out such a foul pollutant.
Night Without End became the Book Without End, one that would have been much improved by a trimming the fat and bringing it down to a lean 150 pages....more
The seventh Sam Durell novel, Assignment: Madeleine, marks the first stumble in the series. Aarons' mistake was introducing a major soA Soapy Spy Saga
The seventh Sam Durell novel, Assignment: Madeleine, marks the first stumble in the series. Aarons' mistake was introducing a major soap operatic subplot into an adventure yarn. This subplot slowed the pacing and was an annoying distraction, like having a fly buzz around your face as you attempt to read. In the end, it tanked the book for me, making this my least favorite of what was a consistently excellent and exciting series.
In the primary plot, Sam Durell is assigned by the CIA and the French Deuxieme Bureau travel to Algieria to bring back for interrogation and trial a traitorous agent--Charley L'Heureux--who murdered a fellow agent--Orrin Boston. Charley also made off with a quarter million dollars American in cash. Durell was a friend of Boston's and isn't confident he can keep from killing his friend's murderer. Further complicating matters, Durell is paired with known double agent Madeleine Sardelle, Charley's girlfriend and suspected co-conspirator. Madeleine makes it clear she's a reluctant colleague whose allegiance lies with Charley.
Underlying the intrigue is the reality of France's tenuous grip on its North African colony and of the competing rebel factions in the desert regions surrounding the cosmopolitan city of Algiers. Charley, it seems, was playing both sides against the middle, working with competing rebel forces, which ultimately put him afoul of them, especially the ragtag rebels led by Hadgi el-Abri, who happens to be another old friend of Durell's. Charley is already in a French military prison in the desert town of Marbruk; the difficulty will be getting Charley out and taken to Paris alive when so many want him dead. And Charley himself is quite resourceful--a trained agent gone rogue, a hulking brute of a man, and one for whom life is cheap.
There's sufficient plot here for a thrilling yarn, but then Aaron's introduces the soap opera subplot. In a Marbruk hotel are Chet and Jane Larkin, a young oil executive and his beautiful wife. Entire chapters are dedicated to their marital strife, often told from Jane's point of view. I would forget this was a spy story as I waded through the turgid Peyton Place-style melodrama, which encroached upon and even crowded out the main story at times. Worse, neither Chet nor Jane were sympathetic characters, so warming up to them proved impossible. This novel predates The Man from U.N.C.L.E. by six years, but I was reminded of that otherwide excellent series' irksome habit of introducing an "innocent" into the action, perhaps as a proxy for the reader, as someone to look on in awe or dismay at the derring-do and evil deeds of the espionage business. The Larkins are the "innocents" here and they dutifully react, get in the way, and prove themselves annoying at virtually every mention.
Further hurting the book is its lacking the Washington D.C. cast of characters. Dickinson McFee is mentioned a couple times, but missing entirely is Sidonie Osbourn and the fellow agents who provided Durell a larger context and some fun banter. Durell's longstanding love Deirdre Padgett does appear briefly, tying this novel into its predecessor by having her in Paris covering the fashion scene. Some have said the Assignment books can be read in any order, but I challenge that and can say after reading the first seven in publication order that there are distinct threads of continuity knitting the books together (though admittedly not so tightly a reader couldn't pick one up at random and enjoy it).
That raises the question: Was this an enjoyable novel? No. All the characters besides Durell are at best unlikeable and at worst loathsome. And almost 100 of the novel's 160 pages is dedicated to one long and wearisome slog across the desert with Durell, Charley, Madeleine, and the Larkins. They bicker and complain, they ruminate about their lives and they conspire and perspire. Aarons' descriptions of the sweaty and swooning stragglers are vivid. Durell and Charley reminded me of William Conrad and Anthony Quinn in the 1957 Western The Ride Back, in which a lawman must escort his wily prisoner to justice across a great expanse of inhospitable terrain. Had Aarons trimmed his cast down to just Durell and Charley, and titled it Assignment: Algeria, it would have made a much better book.
Here's trusting Aarons that the next installment in the saga, Assignment Carlotta Cortez, will be better. After six stellar stories, a stumble was inevitable and is more than forgivable. ...more
Fun fifties sci-fi, set in the far flung future of 1964. There was a proto-Vonnegut vibe to this book I really enjoyed. There was authorial intrusion Fun fifties sci-fi, set in the far flung future of 1964. There was a proto-Vonnegut vibe to this book I really enjoyed. There was authorial intrusion used to great effect, and a whole cast of kooky characters, from unhappily married shrink Ellicott Snyder to U.N. Secretary General Yato Ishurti to cockney pickpocket Alf Billings. Each plays his part and adds to the fun.
The narrative is loose with many tangents and bunny trails where it seemed Frederic Brown was just writing whatever came to mind. Several times Brown packed paragraphs with synonyms, even once describing the Martians A to Z as everything from abusive to zealous in making themselves obnoxious. Writers pro and amateur will enjoy all the insights Brown gives into the author's craft. Hack writer Luke Devereaux is the novel's protagonist, though he disappears for chapters at a time, and Brown uses his character to illustrate the frustrations and exhilarations of writing.
Luke Deveraux, as Luke Devers, would rather write science-fiction, but can churn out a marketable Western when he has to. In listing Western authors he names Zane Grey, Luke Short, and Ernest Haycox, but not arguably the greatest and best-known Western author of the 20th century, Louis L'Amour. But this novel first appeared in the September 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and I can only guess L'Amour hadn't then risen to the top as he soon would.
The Martians of Brown's novel are impish pranksters and are literally "little green men." As I tread I came to suspect that Stan Lee and/or Jack Kirby drew upon this novel when creating The Impossible Man in The Fantastic Four #11 (Feb. 1963). The Impossible Man of course lacks the Martians' propensity for profanity and Bronx cheers (credited to Brooklyn by Brown).
The book is a fun read with many hilarious set pieces, like the poker game interrupted by Martians who tattle on everyone's hand and even what the next cards dealt will be. Perhaps most memorable was the indecipherable account of the cockney pickpocket that Brown kindly translates.
Even at only 159 pages in my 1956 Bantam paperback edition, the story starts to sag and run out of steam after Luke is institutionalized and reunited with Margie. All the Martian gags had been played and played out, but Brown continued to stretch out the story. The chapter about Hiram Pedro Oberdorffer of Chicago just dragged, as did the protracted scene starring Bugassi, witch doctor of a cannibal tribe in Africa. The joke on McCarthy in that scene fell flat, too. While I still enjoyed the book a lot, it did limp to its finish--or non-finish--which left me rather deflated at the end.
I did not even know there was a film adaptation starring Randy Quaid, but since every reviewer I read here panned it, I will skip the movie. This was my first Frederic Brown book and may be my last, though I would like to seek out his 1944 short story "Arena" that was adapted into the Star Trek episode of that name. ...more
**spoiler alert** Wow! This was a compelling spy thriller I couldn't put down. The action is relentless without being mindless. This sixth novel of th**spoiler alert** Wow! This was a compelling spy thriller I couldn't put down. The action is relentless without being mindless. This sixth novel of the series dates to 1958. The novelty of air conditioning and a reference to a pre-Castro Cuba are the only topical references I could detect, besides the fact the criminal gang are veterans of then-relatively recent WWII. This is also another stateside adventure, which I prefer to the globetrotting settings the series is known for featuring.
Aarons created four memorable characters in that criminal gang: Mark Fleming, Erich and Jessie Corbin, and the sadistic psychopath Slago (with a name like Slago, what can you expect?). They're a complicated group and Aarons dedicated many pages to their development. What initially appeared to be a cohesive group comes apart at the seams as their seamy story progresses. Aarons captures well the interpersonal dynamics and proves true the adage that there is no honor among thieves.
The story open with the gang leaving a trail of blood as they search out a Nazi-formula for knock-out gas that one of the platoon pilfered in the waning days of the war. There's a Kelly's Heroes vibe as the German manager of the plant teams up with a couple disgruntles ex-GIs to retrieve that Nazi formula and use it for mutual benefit. Charles Dickens would have appreciated the coincidence of the man who had the document being (1) a neighbor of Sam's back in Bayou Peche Rouge, and (2) engaged to Sam's first love, Angelina Greene. The connections, even if stretching credulity, do speed up the action. Sam's having served with G-2 during the war and having supervised the document-seizing operation during which the formula was stolen was yet another coincidence (and one that played a smaller part than anticipated).
Sam is in an awkward position this time around, loaned out begrudgingly by his boss McFee to an unnamed super-secret organization whose front is a nondescript uniform supply company. Sam takes orders from Whittington and Kincaid, who rely upon data generated by a computer much like Lew Wickersham of Intertect did in the first season of Mannix. And like Joe Mannix, Sam Durell bristles at technology displacing good old American know-how. But the computer proves right, and the criminal gang is plotting something much bigger than bank heists in one-horse towns.
Angelina Greene would be a bizarre and memorable character even if the only thing she did was walk into a New York City bar with a Bowie knife strapped to her thigh. Sam reminisces about their adolescent fumblings and puppy love, but is rightly appalled at what she has turned into as an adult: mob-connected, money-hungry, and ambitious. Add vengeful after she swears to kill Slago for what he did to her fiancé Pete Labouisse. Disappointingly, this foreshadowing of an I Spit on Your Grave scenario is never realized, even after the reader's desire for revenge is heightened to a fever pitch after a harrowing and horrifying encounter in a hotel room between Angelina and Slago. When Slago finally meets his much-deserved end, it's anticlimactic and Angelina's role is minor.
Aarons disappointed me with that ending, and then surprised me by not having Sam and Angelina rekindle their romance. I was glad they didn't. I hope Sam doesn't succumb in later volumes to the James Bond m.o. of love 'em and leave 'em. In these early stories, minus a weak moment in a cold hayloft a couple books ago, Sam only has eyes for one woman: Deirdre Padgett.
Deirdre is mentioned several times but has no role in this novel. She is in Paris covering fashions. We learn that Deirdre did telephone once while Sam was away from the apartment. Angelina answered and claims to have assured Deirdre of the situation, but Sam got the sinking feeling he'll have some 'splaining to do. I did not in any way miss Deirdre, whose clingy character serves only to unsettle Sam with thoughts of a domesticated life away from the spy biz.
The underground complex was a real revelation, and I appreciated Aarons having Durell experience it with a mix of awe and anger. Sam's an insider, a spy who has dedicated his life to preserving the American way of life, so he understandably has mixed feelings about a secret bunker the government can preserve itself in and relocate to in case of a nuclear holocaust. Those scenes stirred up memories of the Cold War classic Fail Safe.
Assignment Angelina is a highly recommended read for fans of heist capers and detective/spy sagas. Aarons effectively evokes the bayou and bowery hotels and transports the reader into a very ugly world peopled by ugly individuals. It was a fast and furious read and I had no regrets. ...more
My first encounter with Lew Archer that left me wanting to seek out further adventures of this private eye who bridges the gap between Philip Marlowe My first encounter with Lew Archer that left me wanting to seek out further adventures of this private eye who bridges the gap between Philip Marlowe and Jim Rockford.
My 1970's-issue Bantam paperback boasts only seven stories, not the nine in the description (missing the last two). The stories hail from 1946 through 1955 and their lengths varied from short 20 pagers to novella-length yarns spanning 40 to 60 pages. Each story was immediately engaging, as magazine stories had to be, and thoroughly entertaining with neither a dull moment nor a dud in the bunch.
The stories I enjoyed most were "Find the Woman," "Guilt-Edged Blonde," and especially "The Bearded Lady," which was my favorite of the lot. It ran from page 63 to 119 and was a fully developed and substantive story concerning art and artists. "Gone Girl" and "The Suicide" were also quite good. I even enjoyed "The Sinister Habit" and "Wild Goose Chase," though they were my least favorite, and likely only because they had the misfortune of coming at the end of the book and paled in comparison to the stories that preceded it.
"Wild Goose Chase" had a definite Perry Mason vibe, with Lew playing Paul Drake, running around during trial recesses to round up facts, even inconvenient ones. But the attorney, Rod Harvey, was no Perry Mason, and I think that's what hurt the story--it was reminiscent of Perry Mason, but Erle Stanley Gardner was already doing these kinds of courtroom dramas and doing them better. It also suffered from being too short. Once you got involved and invested in the characters the story was suddenly over.
I bought this book on a whim in a used book store, drawn to it by the title--The Name is Archer. It just had that hardboiled detective ring to it, and the stories certainly fall under that trench coat and fedora rubric. I'm glad this was my first Archer book as opposed to a full-length novel. The seven stories allowed me to warm up to the character and see him in different situations and settings (as well as see his development over a decade). Now I'm ramped up and ready for a novel, hoping to find and read the first of the series, The Moving Target.
PS: While The Name is Archer was my first encounter with the literary Lew Archer, I did long ago see the character played by Peter Graves in an excellent TV-movie from 1974 titled The Underground Man. ...more
What a letdown! was my reaction. But I'm unfairly bringing the weight of Updike's later work to bear on this fledgling effort. I jumped into The PoorhWhat a letdown! was my reaction. But I'm unfairly bringing the weight of Updike's later work to bear on this fledgling effort. I jumped into The Poorhouse Fair as I neared the end of Updike's The Same Door, which collects short stories written around the same time (late 1950s). This novel had a fresh outta creative writing class feel to it, as if it were written to impress more than to entertain and edify.
Speaking of edification, I most enjoyed the lengthy theological discussion about two-thirds of the way into the book. Hook was my favorite character, and Conner a close second, so it was fascinating to see them square off, bobbing and weaving when addressing the big questions. It was Updike's religious themes that initially drew me to his work many years ago.
Gregg was a thoroughly loathsome character. And he never gets his comeuppance. Gregg's profanity is f.ing censored in the 1964 Fawcett Crest paperback I have. This struck me as odd since Updike drops at least one f-bomb in The Same Door and it was left intact. I wasn't sure if this initializing the offending words was a stylistic choice of Updike's or a mandate by the publisher (akin to what the fuggers did to Mailer's Naked and the Dead).
I admit I did not detect this was a dystopian novel set in the then-near future until close to the end when a reference to a half dollar with President Lowenthal's face on it threw me for a loop. Then I remembered overlooking incidental references to the poorhouses and to how the elderly were being warehoused. The science-fiction elements are so slight I suspect many have read this novel never knowing it was set in the future.
Finishing the book was a chore, and it felt a lot longer than its 120 or so pages. I doubt I will re-read it. Updike's next novel was the iconic Rabbit Run, a book with eminent re-readability. That and his many short stories are much better launching pads for readers eager to uncover the rich rewards of reading Updike. ...more
Like most collections, this is a mixed bag. This unassuming collection of 16 stories is noteworthy for boasting John Updike's first Olinger stories, fLike most collections, this is a mixed bag. This unassuming collection of 16 stories is noteworthy for boasting John Updike's first Olinger stories, first Maples story, and first golf story. The young Updike impresses with some outstanding stories. My favorites were the proto-Rabbit "Ace in the Hole" and "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth." Others I enjoyed were the first Maples story "Snowing in Greenwich Village," the two religious-themed tales "Dentistry and Doubt" and "Sunday Teasing," and the opening story "Friends from Philadelphia."
A few stories left me cold. It was a chore to finish "A Trillion Feet of Gas" and "Who Made the Yellow Roses Yellow." I know a lot of reviewers loved "The Happiest I've Been," but I found it a frustrating read, flipping ahead (how many more pages??). Then I wondered if Updike was intentionally making the reader impatient to create empathy with the narrator, whose eagerness to get started on the road trip was thwarted at every turn. That final story of the book had a great ending that made me forgive the shortcomings that came before it.
I read one story a night, and that restraint aided and abetted my appreciation. Binge-reading Updike short stories can try one's patience; for example, his tendency for meticulously detailed listings of every object on a shelf or in a room. On the other hand, reading them close together one notices the many references to the arts--music, film, literature, and the viusal arts, topics that Updike would expound upon in his erudite nonfiction writing. THE SAME DOOR was an enjoyable book and a fun visit to the early work of a great writer. ...more