Lewis made few concessions to the fact that his audience was growing older (although the dark "Last Battle" requires, perhaps, a more sophisticated reader than the earlier books) but the escape from a forced marriage which sets the story in motion is a little stronger than the readers of "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" might have expected.
Not altogether essential to the history of Narnia, but it does serve to foreground the followers of the great god Tash, the religion that brings about the conflict in the final book in the series.
Historical comic adventure set in the Second Workd War.
The stunning conclusion to the "Mortal Engines" series - and one of the boldest conclusions to a "children's" series that I can remember. Moving.
Dark, dark detective stories: only comics can present this type of story. An array of ghastly characters face off against a deeply righteous, morally driven, psychitically violent detective workinmg in a precinct in the closest thing to the circles of Hell this side of Dante.
As every other year since 1966, I pick it up meaning to just glance at the first few pages, and end up reading the whole thing.
Funny how what seemed once so strong seems now so tame - and clumsily written.
Fame hasn't spoilt our boy. Dex is as Delightfully Devious as ever.
How Brit cop fiction was written in the sixties and seventies - linear, no frills, no excessiveness.
Biggest serial killer of all fictiondom? 200 vivictims - some going!
How to write short stories. read this book. learn.
Dortmunder and his associates get signed up to star in a "reality" show. Even toward the end of his life, Westlake still wrote the with energy and invention of a man a third of his age.
!940's Hollywood, the HUAC is working its dirty work, and a disgraced ex-oater hero and his "Red Indian" sidekick get drawn into it machinations as he uncovers the secrets behind the death of a scriptwriter accused of Un-American Activities. Nevert a dull paragraph, not a single page that doesn't make you want to hurry on to the next.
One of "The Wire" writer George Pelecanos's earlier efforts, this doesn't quite demonstrate the stripped down dialogue that he developed later in his career. It does, however, have pace, and a narrative thrust that makes you want to consume the whole, slim, book in one sitting. Like a latter-day pulp writer (think Horace McCoy, James M Cain or, most especially, Jim Thompson) Pelecanos's hero's fate is entirely out of his habds once he makes a single choice (an this case, giving away his last cigarette to a man who gives him a lift). The hero is a drifter, amoral, emotionally disconnected, trapped by the circumstances of his earlier life. He hitch-hikes his way into the middle of a criminal endeavour where almost everyone's intentions are quite what they seem, and discovers his own moral centre and sense of purpose in a climax that is both bloody and Thompson-esquely bleak. What a wonderful movie this could make.
A lone assassin, a killing spree - and the only thing he will say is "Get Jack Reacher for me".
Girl's brother disappears, years later one of her pupils disappears. Is she the only connection?
sadly, this James Bond spoof is neither as thrilling as it needs to be, nor as funny as it thinks it is.
I'm on a Lee Child jag at the moment. Comes of finding a small stack of his books in a charity book shop in Canterbury for £2.50 a go.
This wasn't one of them, but is, in fact, his most recent paperback release.
Terrorist cells, unlikely escapes, and all the clever Child plotting that you could hope for. As ever, heads roll and women succumb.
I read this on holiday, and I'll read it again before the year is out; like a great movie that you have to watch twice to get all the clues, the you are forced to read the Reacher novels at such a pace that it is inevitable that you miss something first time and, believe, me, you never want to go back a page in a Reacher novel while the whole thing is still rolling out in front of you.
Rather like my penchant for male thriller writers whose surnames begin with "C" I also have a thing for the Gardner/Gardiner duopoly - Lisa and Meg. And, of course, I only began reading one having confused her with the other.
Lisa is NOT the one championed by Stephen King, the one who can't get a deal in her native Americ for her Evan Delaney novels (read 'em, I implore you). No, that one is Meg. This one is Lisa without-an-I-Gardner, and spins off from earlier novels of hers. Helps if you have read them, doesn't hurt if you haven't. This is taut and efficient, a page-turner and satisfying in itself. It won't live forever in the memory, but deals with disappeared wife, suspect husband, nearby sex offender trying to live a straight life. Nothing is as it seems, and Ms Gardner manages to conceal the twists yet make them wholly inevitable when they are finally bought to light.
You know just where you are with Carl Hiassen. A cast of likeable eccentrics. A sunny setting. A hero with high standards and an improbable mission statement. A reptile.
This time round he eschews his usual environmental issues and focuses on a sidelined investigative reporter who decides to dig into the death of a faded rock star and what his Courtney Love-esque widow had to do with it. You either find Hiassen samey, or you relish the familiarity. Put me in camp two, skipper.
George P. breaks the rules - all this "Show, don't tell" nonsense is just that as far as he is concerned. If it saves time to tell you, that's what he does. he's like that. Direct. To the point. That's how he got to write for "The Wire".
Two ex-cons find a bag full of money. But they are trying to go straight, so they put it back. Someone else takes it. The owner wants it back. Will it all end badly?
No doubt.
Read it.
OK, no more than once a year. I promise. Really. Once upon a time I could read two or three Yates's, one after the other. I felt more than a tad icky at the end of it, but I could do it, like eating six Mr Kipling Mince Pies in a single sitting. It's fun, but it ain't good for you. All that flowery prose and high romance and inter-war tacet racism. But still - the heroes are real heroes, the villains are real villains, and the fairyland chateaux set high in the Pyrenees are ... well, perhaps a bit too idealised for reality.
"Shoal Water" is one of Yates's side-shoot thrillers featuring a guest appearance by Jonah Mansel, but without the stiff-upper-chin of Richard Chandos to take the blame for everything that goes wrong. Usual palaver - ex-Uni type, bored with working in the City, buys a sports tourer and heads off to Europe for a few months holidays, meets a gorgeous gal in trouble, falls instantly in love, biffs a few baddies, condemns a few more to death...
Yates is one of the great Clubland Hero writers, and a lot of his novels would make great action movies (I have only ever seen one, and that was a pretty crummy BBC TV version), if they were just a tiny bit more plausible, and even slightly updateable. And that's it - no more for me this year... only, it must be a couple of years since I last read "She Fell Among Thieves", musn't it?
Entertaining Comics did more to change the face of comic books than any other company - more by the restrictions that were bought in
in reaction to their"New trend" in explicit violence and highly sexualised women than in the comics themselves. That is not to say that their effects were merely transient - the Comics Code Authority no longer dictates the rules in the comic world, and the major shift that EC achieved, to bring adults into the comic reading arena, is more evident now than ever before. The Vault of Horror Volume 1 reprints, on great stock paper with stunning clarity and beautiful new colouring, the first half dozen issues of that comic featuring work by Al Feldstein, Graham Ingles and Johnny Craig in styles which were in advance of som many of their contemporaries but soon to fall out of fashion, to be replaced by the anatomical exagerations of Kirby, Ditko, et al. The stories are predicatable, if only because they set the template, and some of the art can be a little crude, but so many gems in this volume suggest that these library quality collections are worth having in their own right and not only as investement pieces (the now out-of-print "Tales from the Crypt" first volume sells for three times its cost price in the second hand market). subsequent
Over the past decade, Everyman has been publishing new, uniform editions of Wodehouse's work. 
Inexpensive, nicely printed, and with delightful dustjackets, they look great on any bookshelf and even better open, in the hand and being read. You either love Wodehouse or... or you just don't have a sense of humour, I suppose. Thank You, Jeeves is the one with Chuffy, Glossop, the American heiress who is an ex-fiancee of Bertie, the yacht, the Bolshevik manservant Brinkley, the bootpolish on the face, Sergeant Voules, and Bertie's attempts to play the banjolele. And if that isn't an ingredient list to promise a classic confection, I don't know what is.
So many of my favourite authors are dying. The latest is Robert B Parker, whose hard-hitting, poetry quoting private eye Spenser has been treading the Philip Marlowe path 
for the last forty years. You can argue that no-forename Spenser's relationship with his psychologist gf Susan is a tad icky (face it, they must both be in their seventies by now) and that Spenser's open-armed acceptance of all races and sexual persuasions (he flirts outrageously with gay gangsters) is perhaps a little too idealised liberal and comes at the expense of actual plot advancement in the later works, but there is no denying that he writes page turners. A master of the snappy comeback and the short chapter (less than 300 words in some instances in this novel) you never put a Parker down though boredom.
This one is a latter day Magnificent Seven - Spenser recruits a crew to clean out a nest of crims, bikers, and general nogoodniks who are driving down property values in the rich people's playground of Potshot, Arizona. The novel is, perhaps, twenty percent Spenser/Susan smooching, seventy percent recruitment, and tenpercent showdown, and it has plot holes that you could hide the British Government overdraft in and still have room for manouevre, but you still read to the end and get a sense of satisfaction. Parker will be missed.
Just who is capable of being redeemed, or redeeming themselves? James Lee Burke sets the question, and answers it in this one. Dave Robicheaux and Cletus Purcell take themselves off on vacation away from it all and pretty soon find that "it all" won't stay away from them. 
Sadistic murders, a wealthy family with buried agendas, an escaped prisoner, a former Al Graihib interrogator-cum-torturer and, of course, reformed alcoholic Roicheaux and his conflicted sidekick, both capable of, and prone to, uncontrollable excesses of violence and self-indulgence.
This one puts in all the usual twists and turns, and throws in a couple of surprises too; if there is one thing JLB is capable of (and, believe me, he is capable of lot's more than just one thing) it is that he is able to show us characters who are fully three-dimensional - capable of good and bad, driven by their pasts but still able to change.
One of the great modern American writers, and sadly overlooked because his books are "just" crime fiction. There's no "just" about it. Crime fiction is a vehicle for the truth in his hands.
Donald Westlake may be gone, but as long as there are books like this around, unpublished in Britain for more than fifteen years after its original appearance in the States, there is still something to look forward to.
Westlake had two succesful careers as a writer, in parallel - one as Richard Stark, writer of the "Parker" series of novels (remember "Point Blank", the Lee Marvin anti-hero vehicle from the Sixties - and forget the Mel Gibson remake. That was a "Parker") and one under the Westlake name. Both wrote from the viewpoint of the criminal, and you always found yourself rooting for the bad guy. Stark's Parker was a deep, silent, vicious killer, but Westlake's strength is the "caper" novel - a gang set up a heist and the reader is privileged to sit on the planning and the execution. More entertainingly, Dortmunder (Westlake's lead character), although a masterful planner and executer, is plain unlucky. Invariably, whatever he steals has to be restolen, recovered, and then stolen all over again.
In this one, he is paid to steal a sacred relic (a saint's thighbone) that is being used as a bargaining chip in the attempt of a newly formed eastern European country to gain a seat in the UN. Simple, huh? If only.
The continuing cast of supporting characters delight, Westlake's dialogue is snappy and funny, and the bits of business work - what could seem contrived comes across as perfectly natural. And the inconsequential conversations in the bar he attends make Pulp Fiction's "cheeseburger" discourse, and Reservoir Dogs's "Like A Virgin" debate seem both important and dull. Ever wondered why the Indy Five Hundred is called the Indy Five Hundred? Or why cable TVs need cables and radios don't? The regulars in the OJ Bar & Grill 'll set you straight in no time.
Never try and cover up. It's bound to come out in the end. That's the lesson that Nathan Redmond learns in the course of this efficient, tenseley written thriller by Neil Cross. 
A drug fuelled kinky encounter at a Z-list celebrity party ends very nastily, but a hasty cover-up seems to have done the trick and Nathan is able to lead a ... no - not a normal life, but an approximation of one. Until the day when his partner-in-crime turns up on the doorstep and tells him that the buried body is about to come to light.
Cross structures his story cleverly, sinking his hook deep early on and keeping the tension on throughout. Despite the dubious morality of his protagonist, Cross still manages to make the reader care about the outcome, and feel sympathy for the man trying to deal with the consequences of his earlier, more immature, actions.
Strange Suspense : The Steve Ditko Archives volume 1 - Blake Bell (ed)
0 comments Posted by Mike at 07:30Steve Ditko is probably one of the greatest (and one of the most divisive) comic book artists of the Silver Age. From his Atlas pre-superhero horror and mystery stories, though the classic work on Doctor Stange, Hulk, and Spiderman, taking in his Charlton superhero work, and oddities like "Hawk and Dove" for DC, and onto his Ayn Rand inspired (and proselytizing) indepent work, there are fans who love him for what he achieved in his early days, and loath him for the way he refused to play the fanboy game and become the passive idol they desired.
But before all the times of adulation and excoriation, there were the days when Ditko was a learner, plying his trade for the small, low-paying comic book publishers in the days before the Comics Code stifled the medium for a generation. This volume prints all of Ditko's pre-code work, most of it for Charlton, in a beatiful hardback volume on heavy stock paper. It looks as if the artwork has been reprinted from stats of the comic pages, with their register slippages and mistakes. I suspect that that is the only form that the comic pages are now available in, the originals having long gone to feed furnaces or line trash cans. And these are, it must be emphasised, the works of an artist learning his trade. Many of the trademarks are already present - the floating heads, the closing in camera shot, the distorted faces. There is, too, a clumsiness, as if the pages were being drawn at high speed (and given the kind of page rates these guys were payed, they drew fast or starved). So, don't go into this book expecting the fine delineation of Ditko on Doctor Strange, or the sharp scripting of Stan Lee in his Tales of Suspense majesty. Enjoy, instead, the development of a talent, the first stretchings of the artistic muscle - it is only by seeing where he came from that you can tell just how far he managed to travel.
Well, it didn't take me long to come back to Lee Child. A disappointment here, a case of reader's block there (it's like writer's block, except you keep finding yourself getting stuck on page 25 of a book that you really want to enjoy), 
and you find a familiar voice calling out to you from the loibrary shelves. This is a fairly recent Jack reacher thriller, and it sees him summoned by an old army comrade to aid in the investigation into the murder of another of his Army days Special Investigation unit. Pretty soon half the old gang is back in town, looking for information and, if necessary, revenge - but who, exactly, is on their tails, and why? The plot line develops convincingly and bloodily - Reacher's own hit rate approaches double figures, and his targets expire in a satisfying variety of ways, and his cameraderie with his ex-colleagues gives an insight to Reacher's state of mind - both for the reader and, it seems, for Reacher himself. It will be interesting to see how he moves on from the experience in future novels, but in the meantime I am going to enjoy myself filling in with the intervening stories.
I wanted to like this book. I liked the basic premise - a crashed airliner whose passengers have maintained a nineteen-fifties, public school society are invaded by the sole survivor of an "I'm Not A Celebrity, Get me Out Of Here" TV endurance/reality show. 
The Wilt-like character at the centre of the plot is an archetypal English lower middle class loser, a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, divorced, skint, emotionally stunted, blah, blah, and very much blah. There doesn't seem much about his life that he likes, and there doesn't seem much about anything at all that the author likes. His satire bites at reality TV, TV producers, English men, chavs, modern society, 1950's society, feminism, ex-wives, the public school system... he really doesn't have a good word to say for anyone. Which is a shame, because he can plot, he can write, he can do dialogue, but he can't invest the book with any warmth, any heart, any positivity. And to write a book which will be enjoyed and appreciated by anyone not terminally addicted to schadenfreude, then, like the song says, "You gotta have heart".
Ed McBain is, by far, the best represented author on my bookshelves, both under this pen name, and as Evan Hunter. There's a reason for that. He wrote the best damn police procedurals ever. Hill Street Blues? A straight, but uncredited, nick from the 87th Precint - in fact, in one of the novels the characters complain about someone spying on them and putting them on TV without their knowledge.
He wrote over 50 novels set in the halls of the 87th Precint squadroom. Some have been made into films - Kurosawa's "High and Low" is based on an early 87th precint novel, and you don't get much better than that. There have been short lives TV shows, even a comic book, but nothing can compare to the original. McBain is witty, funny, sharp, and moving. His characters are flawed, changeable, reedemable, three-dimensional. His plots are complex, thrilling, amusing, puzzling. And he dies about five years ago. I still have the final book he wrote unopened - I can't bring myself to say a final goodbye to the characters. So, in the meantime, every now and again, I pick up one of the old ones and re-read (and re-read and re-read).
"The Mugger" is the second in the series, dating back to 1956 and, in the edition I have, wrapped in the glorious "revolver and gallows" jacket of the Mystery Book Guild.
54 years: you would think it would date badly, wouldn't you? OK there are references to WWII and Korea, and the teenagers are (almost) straight out of West Side Story, but humanity never changes, and its capacity for lust, greed are constant, and expressed now pretty mugh exactly as they were back then. A mugger stalks the streets of a thinly disguised New York, a beautiful teenage girl get murdered, a patrolman uses his spare time to solve a crime and fall in love. will you guess whodunnit? You know, I can't remember if I did the first time I read it, and I know the answer now, but when I read it I still look forward with gleeful anticipation the the moment when the penny drops. And I look forward to the pleasure of re-reading all the rest of the series and maybe, one day a long way away, I will open the final book and bid a rueful farewell to Steve Carella, Meyer meyer, and the rest of the detectives of the 87th
With some writers, you can see the author's hand all over the page. With some writers, every now and again, you get a glimpse of the author desperatley trying to be a writer and breaking the character's cover. And with some writers, you get the Fictive Dream cast so successfully that never for a moment do you realise that you are just reading a book and not actually inside some character's head. You find a writer like that, you come back time-and-time again to their work.
So how come it's taken me so long to stumble across Jack Irish, the hero of Peter Temple's Aussie crime-thriller "Dead Point"? 
Small-time lawyer, Aussie Rules obsessive, in-control potential alcoholic, betting man and man of principles, Jack Irish is a satisfyingly complex character, whose voice is totally realised in this novel. Temple can write, boy can he write. e ytakes a razor blade to the prose and cuts away every unnecessary word: dialogue is sparse and realistic, character vignettes tell you everything you need to know... dammit, let me give you an example.
"A couple walked by, young, handsome in black clothing, arguing, heads flicking, spurts of words. He stopped, she stopped, he raised a hand, inquiring. She knocked it away in contempt, walked. The man waited for a few seconds and came back towards us, jaw moving, small chewing movements."
That's what I call economy. A fully drawn picture in under fifty words. Enviable, immersing, unputdownable.
It's not easy, following the verbal shorthand in the conversations - but then again, eavesdropping on real people is never a route to instant clarity. I shall return to paul temple in future. I think this is the start of a rewarding relationship.
Prequels, authorised sequels, char(acter)-jacking, call 'em what you will, it is hard to think of the practise of taking other writers' creations and giving us "new" adventures as anything other than a semi-legitimized fan-fiction.
("Hold on a second", says the voice of the subconscious,"what about, say, Superman? Where would old Supes be today if only Siegel and Schuster were allowed to write him?". I give my subconscious a playful slap and tell it to mind its own business).
So it was with some nervousness that I approached "The prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon". I love the original - the pace, the characterisation, the language, the writing. I didn't think that this would measure up, and it doesn't - but only by a barrel of a very snub-nosed automatic.
Gores draws heavily on the imagery in the Bogart movie (which in turn was very closely adapted from the novel) to tell us the story of Sam Spade's first few years as an independent investigation agency. The plot is long, connects the dots nicely, and watches Spade stumble across a gold smuggling racket that will touch on his career for the next few years.
We get the skinny on his relationship with Iva Archer, semi-legitimising the philandering which makes him such an ambiguous figure at the opening of Falcon. And yes, Iva is there, along with Miles Archer, just as unpleasant as we thought he might be, Effie Perrine (fresh out of college but already a dab-hand at rolling a cigarette), and the two flatfoots, Dundy and Polhaus.
Although it is all very satisfying, and there is a kind of pleasure in seeing Spade move towards the moment when Effie Perine tells him that Miss Wonderley is waiting to see him, I am still left with one doubt; if Dashiell Hammett had wanted us to see Sam and the rest before the events of teh Maltese Flacon - well, wouldn't he have written it himself?
Elmore Leonard is, perhaps, the best dialogue writer in American crime fiction. Couple this with the fact that he writes believable, engaging characters and intriguing plots and you have an author who bears reading and re-reading.
"Comfort to the Enemy" is a linked series of two short stories and a novella, watching lawman Carlos "Carl" Webster over a span over twenty or so years of his life. Beware the cover - this makes you expect some kind of "White Heat", "Little Caeser", Chicago gangster affair, but the contents are a long way from that. Encounters with wannabe Dillinger sidekicks, cattle rustlers, hard-working men who turn to bank robbery out of despair, a German PoW who escapes and then returns to camp almost at will. There's no detection, as such, very little in the way of knock-down, shoot 'em up gunplay, but a portrait of a man growing older and wiser in his job. Recommended.
The first book of the New Year, an Andrew Vacchs novel (is Vacchs my "turn of the year" author? Cetainly 2009 kicked of with a slew of his work).
Vacchs may have finished with his series character last year, but this novel gives the impression of having been plotted as a Burke vehicle. There is the wise, troubled "leader" and the family of misfits, this time a gathering of homeless who learn valuable life lessons, as does the reluctant head of the family. Ho is a retired sensei with a raft of memories of people he has let down, intent on defeating his own demons. If you have never read a Vacchs before, this one is not going to convert you. Plots peter out, people utter gnomically, nothing much really happens. If you have read Vacchs before, it will remind you of one of the more melancholy Burke novels, but without the graphic details. It's not a thriller, not a "caper", just "a novel". An interesting departure, but not an entirely satisfying one.
