Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

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.

Steve 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.