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.
