Octavio's Journey is a novella about an illiterate giant of a man named (you guessed it) Octavio. I've been told that it's also an allegorical history of Venezuela, but I don't know enough about the history of that country to comment on that point. So I just enjoyed it as the story of one man's development, adventures, and eventual end, although he really doesn't end. There's a healthy dose of magic realism throughout the story.
Octavio is illiterate and so ashamed of it that he cuts his hand to cover his inability to write. He's quite strong and does odd jobs to make a bit of money. Eventually he meets a woman who teaches him to read and write a bit. Then he falls in with a group of thieves who work out of an abandoned church. He doesn't work with them. He just takes care of things in the building until he's pressed into service to rob the very woman who's taught him. At this point he leaves town and begins his adventures.
Beautifully written (kudos to the translator) and engrossing, Octavio's Journey can be enjoyed on the simple level of a good and magical story or (if you know enough history) as allegory. If you're looking for something very different, this could be it.
Forgotten Hits: February 11th: After receiving an enormous amount of flack for using studio musicians on their records, The Monkees announce that they will play their own instruments on their next LP. (Have you seen "The Wrecking Crew"??? This same group of crackerjack musicians played on EVERYBODY'S records back then. Why The Monkees were singled out is completely unfair. After they'd finish a Monkees session, they'd go back up The Mamas and the Papas and then, later that same night, The Beach Boys in the studio … along with hundreds of others.)
Jean Paradise, The Savage City, Ace, 1956
Washington and Longfellow Slept Here: The untold story of a house that accommodated soldiers, statesmen, and poets By Nicholas A. Basbanes
How can you know a book's reputation for 40 years and still not have read it? Just an oversight, I guess, but I'm glad I finally got around to Brother's Keepers. If there's one word for this one, I think the word might be delightful. It's a warm, funny, and highly entertaining book. It's not a crime novel, although there are certainly crimes involved. It's just a fine comic novel that proves once again what a versatile writer Donald E. Westlake was.
There's this monastery, see, that was established in New York City in 1777, and now it's sitting right in the middle of some prime real estate that's ripe for redevelopment. And, sure enough, no one can find the monastery's long-forgotten lease agreement, so there's no way for the monks to prove ownership or to prove that they have a right to stay where they are. Which, of course, is what they want to do. Complications and high jinks ensue.
The books is narrated by Brother Benedict, who loves the monastery and who goes through quite a crisis of conscience. Westlake does a masterful job with this and with the entire story, which is guaranteed to make you smile. Highly recommended.
Locus Online News : Bryant was an accomplished SF writer, mostly of short stories. He began publishing SF work with “They Come Only in Dreams” and “Sending the Very Best”, both in January 1970. For the next two decades he was a frequent contributor to magazines and anthologies, and though his fictional output slowed in the ’90s, he was still active as a critic. He was a familiar figure at conventions, especially in Colorado fandom. He was a frequent guest at the World Horror Convention, and chaired the 2000 convention in Denver.
Albert L. Quandt, Journey into Ecstasy, Venus Books, 1951
Fire Star Press: Writing Time: Angela Crider Neary
Please leave a comment if you have time.
Barbara Gelb, Author, Playwright and Journalist, Dies at 91 - author and journalist who, with her husband, Arthur Gelb, produced the first full-scale biography of the playwright Eugene O’Neill, then followed it decades later with two volumes that reconsidered his life, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 91.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
What we have here is a case of blurb writing gone hilariously wrong. I don't even know what "crunching suspense" is, but I do know that this book resembles Walking Tall about as much as I resemble Charles Atlas (you whippersnappers can google that one). And in fact the story has very little to do with the Mob other than the fact that the protagonist, Sean Costello, was a New Jersey cop who played it strictly by the book and therefore lost his badge and his job because he wouldn't play ball with the Mob. Now he's a police chief in a small town in Florida, and that's what the book is about.
Costello's a busy guy. He's dealing with an unidentified floater, a murder, a runaway who won't give any information, a supposedly harmless psycho who's first trying to kill himself and then stalking a young Cuban girl who's been taken in by the town's wealthiest woman, who's fallen for Costello. There's also a jewel robbery, the possibility that the Syndicate is trying to start a drug trade in town, and all the ordinary things that cops have to deal with.
Cameron orchestrates all these plot threads masterfully, tying them up one after the other in satisfactory ways. He wrote several standalone cop novels for Berkley in the middle 1970s, including this one and Barca, Dekker, and Tancredi. All of them are quick reading and worth your time.
NH1: Just-'OK' spaghetti dinner sparked police standoff in Merrimack
Houston Press: The Dead Sometimes Float to the Top in Latest From Texas Author Joe Lansdale
Coco Butternut is a novella, or maybe it's a novelette (I'm confused about those terms) that brings back Hap and Leonard in another of their strange cases. This time, a funeral director's mother's dead dog has been kidnapped, and he wants Hap to deliver the ransom money. Yes, you read that right. The dog is dead. It's been disinterred and spirited away. The mother is dead, too, but never mind that.
Leonard thinks there's something fishy about the case from the beginning, and he's right. The money gets delivered, the coffin has the dog's body in it, but there's more. There's a false bottom in the coffin, and it conceals another body. This leads Hap and Leonard to go to talk to the funeral director at his home, but he's dead, murdered. Things start to get complicated, and you can bet that there's going to be plenty of trouble before it's all over. You can also bet that Hap and Leonard and Chance and Brett will get it all sorted out, but not before there's a lot of weirdness, action, and wisecracking. Lots of fun, and something to tide you over until the next full-length Hap and Leonard novel appears.
“Clive Cussler and the RTS Zavala: Cheers to a Real Life Captain of Adventure” (by William Dylan Powell) | SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN: William Dylan Powell’s first fiction, the comic “Evening Gold,” appeared in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in November 2006, and went on to win that year’s Robert L. Fish Memorial Award. Prior to his fiction debut, he had already begun to publish nonfiction, primarily about Texas history, something he continues to this day. One of his recent book projects fuses his love of history, humor, and mystery; it’s Untimely Demise: A Miscellany of Murder, a “darkly humorous presentation of 365 deadly deeds.”In recent years the author (who is, by day, the head of an advertising agency) has been contributing stories in a series starring unlicensed P.I. Billy Raskolnikov and his monkey Ringo to EQMM. The latest of those stories draws on some fascinating aspects of Texas history, as described in this post; it appears in our March/April issue (in stores 2/21).—Janet Hutchings
Edward D. Radin, Crimes of Passion, Popular Library, 1954
By Heart: John Rechy on the Mystery of William Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily': The veteran author John Rechy discusses the powerful enigma of William Faulkner and the beauty of the unsolved narrative.
James McCague, The Big Ivy, Ace, 1955
“Chin Yong-Yun Stays at Home” by S. J. Rozan | Trace Evidence: Novelist and short-story writer S. J. Rozan is the award-winning author of Ghost Hero and co-author of of Blood of the Lamb. She writes the P.I. Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, and the related series featuring Lydia’s mother. Here she talks about that series, including her story “Chin Yong-Yun Stays at Home” from the January/February 2017 issue of AHMM.
The New York Times: Alec McCowen, the acclaimed British character actor whose gallery of roles on both sides of the Atlantic ranged from St. Mark to the Fool in “King Lear,” and from Rudyard Kipling to James Bond’s ever-inventive outfitter, Q, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 91.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Louis Trimble was an interesting guy. In the academic world he made a name for himself in the field on linguistics. In the literary world, he was a prolific paperback writer, although he started out in hardback with books under his own name and as "Stuart Brock." He wrote paperback crime novels, westerns, and science fiction for Ace and Daw books, and here comes the confession: Although I have a whole pile of these books, I'd never read a one of them until now. Not having done so was a mistake, as I enjoyed The Ragbag Army, and now I'll have to read more by Trimble.
Not that there's anything very new or different about the plot of the book. It's the old "rich guy takes control of town and wants control of all the surrounding ranches" story. Naturally a lone stranger rides into the situation in the Montana Territory and picks a side. You can guess which one. But you might not guess what the stranger's doing there.
The writing is sharp, and there are some interesting characters, including a very strong woman character. The town marshal isn't corrupt, either. He's a by-the-book guy, and his arrangement is that he will enforce the law as written, although he does report to the Bad Guy. And as it happens, he and the Lone Stranger are long-time friends.
The cover copy is interesting. "Who will lead the desperados of the Beartooth range?" Does whoever wrote it not even know what desperados are? The "army" is the group of men being pushed off their land by the Bad Guy. They might be desperate, but they're not desperados.
The book's very short and might have been even better if it had been longer, something I don't often find myself saying. I'm glad I decided to pick up. Trimble is worth another look or two.
NY Daily News: Richard Hatch, who was best known for his role as Captain Apollo in “Battlestar Galactica,” died Tuesday.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
If you're looking for gritty, The Right Wrong Number is as gritty as Number 36 sandpaper. Ed Earl Burch is former cop and now a private-eye. He can't resist the wrong women, and when he gets a call from his former lover whose husband has disappeared, he takes the case, even knowing he shouldn't. As it happens the husband has faked his death because he owes money to some people who will be happy to have him killed to get the money back. And because they think the wife might be involved, they'd be happy to kill her, too. The husband would also like to kill her.
Soon enough, they'd all be happy to kill Ed Earl, and they do try. There's a Dallas cop who'd also like to see Ed Earl dead or at least maimed because he thinks Ed Earl is responsible for the death of his partner. Ed Earl takes so much punishment in the course of the book that it's amazing that he's still able to stand, but he presses on.
There are some great Texas scenes, including a set piece at the Houston Rodeo, and there's a good bit of Texas travel between Houston and Dallas and out to the Big Bend country.
The Right Wrong Number has a lot of sex and violence in many combinations. It's dark and hard boiled. And I've already mentioned gritty. If that's what you're looking for, this one fills the bill.
Hollywood Reporter: "Professor" Irwin Corey, who forged a long career in show business using a talent for "intellectual doublespeak" — comic stream-of-consciousness riffs that went absolutely nowhere — has died. He was 102.
Hat tip to Toby O'Brien.
Peter Cheney, The London Spy Murders, Avon, 1944
The dead-bird detective: Pepper Trail is the first to admit he has an unusual skill set. Give him a single feather or a small fragment of a claw or a cooked hunk of breast meat, and he'll tell you the species of bird from which it came. As the world's leading criminal forensic ornithologist, Trail is asked day in and day out to perform these exact tasks. Over the past 18 years he has assisted with hundreds of investigations, testified in federal court 15 times, and handled more bird carcasses than anyone should. "All birders have life lists," Trail says. "I have a death list."
There's no trailer available for Cheyenne Roundup, but you can watch the complete movie on YouTube if you're so inclined. When I saw that it was going to be on some movie channel or other, how could I not watch? After all, it stars Johnny Mack Brown, Johnny Mack Brown, and Tex Ritter, with Fuzzy Knight for comedy relief and the Jimmy Wakely Trio for the music. Johnny Mack Brown plays Gils Brandon, leader of an outlaw gang that buys a ghost town named El Dorado just before an old miner discovers gold nearby. The seller is Fuzzy Knight, and his best friend is the old miner.
Gils and his crew decide that they’ll take over the mine and turn the ghost town into a boomtown, which they do. They’re running the show, making the laws, and having their way. Fuzzy and some of the decent folk who have moved to El Dorado send a representative to Steve Rawlins (Tex Ritter) and ask him to come to be their marshal. Gils goes to stop him and Rawlins shoots him. Gils finds his way to an abandoned cabin to die, and who should come riding by but his twin brother, Buck Brandon (Johnny Mack Brown).
Gils has a deathbed change of heart and asks Buck to go to El Dorado and make it a decent place. Buck agrees and teams up with Steve. Complications ensue, of course, along with shootin’, ridin’, fightin’, and singin’, and Buck is eventually found out. Then comes the final big shootout, and guess who wins. Hint: Not the bad guys.
Johnny Mack Brown, was cruelly denied an Oscar mention for his outstanding dual performance.
You might have noticed that although the title of the movie is Cheyenne Roundup, the setting doesn’t appear to be Cheyenne. And it isn’t. You might also have noticed that there was no mention of a roundup. That’s because there isn’t one. There’s not even a shot of any cattle. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m sure the audience for the movie didn’t care one bit or even notice. I’m surprised that I did.
Oliver Keystone, Major Crime, Phantom Books (Australia), 1955
cleveland.com: CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Sonny Geraci, the Cleveland-born pop singer who scored national hits as lead singer of The Outsiders in the 1960s and Climax in the 1970s, has died, according to multiple media reports. He was 69, and had been in ill health since suffering a brain aneurysm in 2012.
Listverse: In 1953, Ian Fleming told a friend that he had been inspired to create James Bond after reading about the life of Sidney Reilly. Known as the “Ace of Spies,” Reilly was one of the greatest British agents of the early 20th century. But he was also a ruthless and dangerous man, loyal to no one but himself, and ready to betray or murder anyone who got in his way.
Zelda Popkin, Murder in the Mist, Dell, 1945
Octavio's Journey is a novella about an illiterate giant of a man named (you guessed it) Octavio. I've been told that it's also an allegorical history of Venezuela, but I don't know enough about the history of that country to comment on that point. So I just enjoyed it as the story of one man's development, adventures, and eventual end, although he really doesn't end. There's a healthy dose of magic realism throughout the story.
![Road to Perdition: The New, Expanded Novel (The Perdition Saga Book 1) by [Collins, Max Allan]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Fj%2B-OuXGL.jpg)
