Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

I still haven't brought myself to read the final McBain 87th Precinct book, "Fiddlers", published shortly before his death.  I don't want it ever to be over, this relationship with his cast of assorted cops.  So instead I find myself dipping into the back catalogue from time to time, re-reading and enjoying as much as ever.

"Lullaby" is from a less than happy period in the existence of the 87th Precinct.  I don't know if it mirrored some feeling of the author's that the world, or New York at least, wasn't what it had been.  There is little of the levity that brightens the earlier books - Meyer Meyer, so fond of funny stories, is at his most antipathetic.  I don't think I have ever before read him swear at and about a suspect.  There is little interaction between Steve Carella (the nominal "lead man" of the 87th Precinct) and his wife, while his children are present only by mention of their existence.  I wouldn't say that McBain was out of love with his characters, but I can't help that his characters were out of love with their lives.  And it would take a good few years before the general tone of the series lightened up, when McBain decided that the redemption of New Yorkers could be exemplified by that of Ollie Weeks, the hitherto unloved (and unloveable) unreconstructed bigot.


Enough of the  overall arc - what about this one book itself - how does it hang together after twenty years?  Well, it is great to read again stories where the solution doesn't lie in Internet searches, DNA tests and mobile phone records, but in relentless, plodding, fruitless footwork and interviewing.  McBain weaves together three separate storylines - the murder of a baby and baby-sitter, and double- and triple-crossing drug deal, and a soap-opera thread about a policewoman's fears of remaining in the job.  Separately, each thread is slight, but together make for a well-paced read, with each storyline being cut into and away from in order to achieve dramatic tension.    As a one-off read, it probably wouldn't make any new converts - too much depends on a familiarity with the cast, but a satisfying chapter in the 87th Precinct's story for any McBain fan.

Unputdownability : Lots of convenient chapter breaks make this a "cut-and-come-again" salad.

"HERE WE REMAIN"

They go out walking after midnight...

After the life-changing events in Volume 8, this one is a quieter affair, a time for Rick and his son to establish a new relationship.  Rick's crisis of confidence is not helped by his precarious hold on reality, but he still has the support and companionship of series stalwarts to help him as they meet freshh survivors and embark on a new mission - a trip to Washington in the company of someone who just might hold the key to resolving the whole zombie situation.

It would be easy to regard this as an extended breath-catcher between story arcs, but this is no bad thing.  We need time, as does Rick, to recover from the frenetic events of the previous two volumes, and to appreciate their effects on the travellers.


Unputdownability : A welcome, slower pace than of recent.

I said I was going on a John Christopher jag,
and with two down, I don't think that it was a bad decision at all. 

TDoG is a great British post-apocalypse novel.  Imagine "Day of the Triffids" but without a happy ending.  The speed with which Christopher's characters devolve from middle-class civility into a neo-feudalism is both astonishing and completely believable.  The premise is simple, and all to realistic - a virus attacks and destroys all forms of grass, including the members of the genus that provide our daily bread.  A middle class engineer sets out with his family to escape London and the coming civil disturbance, and join his brother on a farm in the North of England where they believe they will be safe.  He takes with him a small assortment of people - his friend and bridge opponent (funny how bridge is seen as a symbol of civilisation in the face of calamitous upheaval;  see Robert A. Heinlein's "Farnham's Freehold" for another example), a semi-abaonded schoolboy, and an ageing gun-dealer and his loose-moraled wife.

One hundred and ninety four pages, and a few days later (Christopher is wonderfully economical with his prose and his timelines) everything in their lives has changed.  Don't go into this novel expecting "classic science fiction" - it is, instead, a novel which shows how ordinary people respond to extraordinary circumstances and you find yourself asking "Would I do the same things if I were in their position?"

Unputdownability :  You have to pause for breath regularly.

Classic crime, memorably portrayed.

 Stark is the pen-name crime writer Donald Westlake used for his darkest creation, the anti-hero Parker.  You might remember Parker from Lee Marvin's portrayal in the '60s classic Point Blank, based on The Hunter (or, perhaps, from Mel Gibson's 1990s Payback - if so, bad luck).

Darwyn Cooke has adapted the first Parker story into graphic novel format in  a lovely, loose, cartoony duo-chrome pen-and-wash style reminiscent of early 60's advertising.  But the world being sold here is no consumer dream, rather a tale of a falling out between thieves, betrayal, and implacable revenge.  Cooke maintains a  feeling of tension by regularly changing the rhythm of the story-telling - wordless action sequences alternating with crisp, noir-style dialogue, lengthy internal monologues, and single establishing shots.

To be sure, he has top-notch material to work with, but the skill he shows in creating the early sixties ambience, in keeping the reader turning the pag, and in conveying the emotional existences of the cast proves him a master of the sequntial-art story form.  I'm off to search out the next volume.

Unputdownability: I know what's going to happen, but I want to see it now!

Heaven knows - anything goes
A place where nothing is certain,  and rules change almost at random, the World House is set inside a giant house contained inside a small antique box, whence its inhabitants have been drawn from random places and times when at moments of physical peril.

We follow the adventures of a small number of groups of people - nightclub crooner, twenties flapper, Victorian adventurer/explorer, twentyfirst century small-time gambler, Spanish fisherman, and more, through a seemingly uinconnected set of story-strands which eventually intertwine plausibly to reach an effective and affecting climax.

It is all too easy for this kind of novel to leave a sense of dissatisfaction - when everything can change with the turn of a page, it is tempting to feel no real sense of peril or, indeed, satisfaction when the heroes temporarily escape a plight, simply to be thrown into another dangerous situation.  However, Adams manages to keep a tight grip on everything so that the episodic nature recalls (at least to a long memoried reader like me) the lost "Celestial Toymaker" story arc from William Hartnell's incarnation as The Doctor without at any time seeming to have borrowed in any way from it. 

I await, with interest, subsequent books in the series.

Unputdownability : It's the end of a chapter - a good time to put the book down (or maybe read just one more...)

Don't come to this expecting the see all the characters that you know and love from the TV series:  this is a different "Walking Dead" universe (see "Dexter") where just a few of the characters are the same, and some TV chums are no longer with us.

He's keeping an eye on you

Our heroes are ensconsed in their comfortable camp within a deserted prison.  However, their interaction with the Commander and his followers is about to have violent repercussions.  His description of their actions to his own community inflames them and sets them on a path of vengeance which has terrible repercussions.

I'm not going to say any more.  If you have been reading this series, you'll have this one lined up waiting to go.  If you have only watched the TV show, then start with Volume One (it will seem comfortable familiar) and then go on from there into a complex story less about zombies and more about how people cope and interact under extreme duress.

Unputdownability : Yes, I know my dinner's getting cold, but...

Nothing like this happens in the book.

The cover looks... ermm... unpreposessing to say the least.  But I am about to go on a bit of a John Christopher jag, with three more of his novels waiting to be read, so I thought I would start with one of his Young Adult novels.

Christopher is one of the unremembered greats of the British SF scene, although if you are in your Forties, or thereabouts, "The Tripods" maybe a children's TV series that lingers in the recesses of your memory.  He sits slightly uncomfortably alongside John Wyndham in the "post-apocalypse" sub-genre but, unlike Wyndham's optimistic view of humanities chance of surviving and restoring "civilisation", his visions are often much bleaker.

"The Guardians" is a prophetic work, set in a britain where class distinctions are much more sharply drawn than they were at the time of writing (around 1970), with the proletariat confinded to the Urban areas, where they are kept employed in blue collar and manual jobs, and entertained by 3-D TV, tribalised sports, and sporadic rioting. The upper classes live in the fenced-off County, enjoying their wealth and engaging in the pastimes of the archetypal aristocracy (hunting, shooting, fishing and meaningless hobbies).

The story tells of a prole boy who escapes into the country, only to meet up with a public schoolboy intent on bringing down society.

Economically told (less than 200 pages long), simple in style, this reads like it should have been an instant classic; perhaps its open ending proved too uncomfortable for its intended audience.

Unputdownability:  Have I reached the end alread?

45 years later and it all comes back like it was yesterday 
OK, stop sniggering, it has the word "Gay" in the title.   Autre temps, and all that.

This is the third of the "Lone Pine" adventures, a series that started in 1943 and was wound up in about 1978.  Frightfully middle-class, frightfully polite, and yet something that working class children soaked up in their millions in the days when to be aspirational was not seen as some sort of betrayal of your roots.   Nowadays it would be condemned out-of-hand as irrelevant, and racist-by-omission - everybody is very white and very English, although the second-string villain does have a foreign sort of lilt to his voice (a dead giveaway when combined with his greased back hair).

Plucky kids attempt to save a faltering family business by searching for buried treasure (as you do), while enjoying midnight excursions, secret passages, ice-creams, and picnics.  But it still, somehow, works - and it isn't just nostalgia on my part, I have seen my own children pick these books up and become ansorbed by the other-worldliness of Britain in the nineteen forties and fifties.

The whole thing is set in a beautifully captured Rye and its immediate environs, and you can still  walk round the area today and recognise many of the locations.

Unputdownability - ten minutes 'til I have have to do something more pressing.

DEXTER IS BACK...
in the sixth volume of the series.  Now, for anyone who watches the TV series (and it is excellent in its own way) don't expect to be able to pick up the books in random order and make any sense of them.  After Season One (which followed the first Dexter novel faithfully) the two media split in completely separate universes (see "Walking Dead" for another example).   So don't expect to see all the same characters, in the same relationships, or even in the same state of corporeal existence.

In this print universe, Dex is married, a recently-made father and uncle, and still enjoying his nights out with his Dark Passenger.  Until, that is, someone witnesses him at work and, deciding that he is a fit person to rid the world of a monster, sets out on a mission to Do Dex Down, while Dexter himself struggles to find a way to locate his new adversary and put him out of the picture.  At the same time, Dex's old nemesis, the severely abbreviated Sgt Doakes finds a new ally in his campaign to uncover out our hero's secret life.

Lindsay manages to ring the changes with each new Dexter novel.  There is never a feeling of repetition, of re-using the same plots, or of having the character re-voice pet anecdotes, but instead new scenarios are imagined, and characters grow and change, as people (and even monsters) do.   Already looking forward to book seven.

Unputdownability : Not now!  Can't you see I'm reading?