John Plotz describes what’s in a database called What Middletown Read, “the borrowing records of the Muncie Public Library between 1891 and 1902.”
The Original Sam McCain Mysteries, by Ed Gorman
I like to think I gave Ed Gorman a fair shake. He’s honest enough to admit his political leanings (liberal), but he makes a genuine effort to humanize his characters, even those awful Republicans. I have to give him credit for that. He tries. But I didn’t like this second book (actually two books; it’s a double volume) of his that I’ve read, and I don’t think I’ll read any more. The Original Sam McCain Mysteries
First of all the main character. As the title suggests, he’s a guy named Sam McCain. Gorman gives what seems to be his inspiration for the character in a passage where McCain meditates on his favorite mystery writer, the pre-Travis McGee John D. MacDonald:
There are no heroes in John D. novels, and that’s probably why I like them. Every once in a while his man will behave heroically, but that still doesn’t make him a hero. He has a lot of faults and he always realizes, at some point in every book, that he’s flawed and less than he wants to be.
If Gorman’s goal was to create a character who isn’t heroic, he’s succeeded. Sam McCain is a short young man, a poor lawyer in a small Iowa town in the mid-1950s, forced by penury to do jobs for the local judge, an elitist woman who delights in humiliating him in small ways. He talks a lot about his love for the town beauty, who is herself in love with a rich guy. Meanwhile another girl, apparently just as pretty and with more personal substance, loves Sam and he doesn’t reciprocate. In this he’s clearly an idiot.
He’s also a punching bag. People beat him up a lot in these stories, and he just endures it. When he finally overcomes the murderers, he ought to be grateful to the God he claims not to believe in, because without a deus ex machina or two he’d be long dead. I think he won one fight in the second book. Continue reading The Original Sam McCain Mysteries, by Ed Gorman
Back to the workbench
Gave blood at work today. It went pretty easily for me, as it generally does. I told the technician that bleeding well is one of my gifts.
But one of the students, across the aisle in the Bloodmobile, apparently had a harder time. From what I could gather, they failed to get a good puncture, tried more than once, and eventually gave up rather than turn his inner arm into hamburger. I heard his technician tell mine, after the student had left, that it was the second one he’d messed up that day.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
Last night, I went back to my fiction writing. I’ve been busy getting my taxes ready recently, plus the desultory promotion I’ve been doing for Troll Valley. But I have the feeling Troll Valley‘s surge (such as it was) has passed. Haven’t seen reviews from several of the bloggers who got free copies, but I have to assume they’re doing what I do when I get a freebie that disappoints me—exercising merciful silence.
So I’ve taken up revising the next manuscript I’ll send to Ori for e-publication. This one’s called Hailstone Mountain. It’s another Erling Skjalgsson book, but this time in the H. Rider Haggard vein, with a lost world and horrible eldritch mysteries. I think it’ll be a fun story, though it has tragic elements. Continue reading Back to the workbench
Look Around You. What Do You See?
Tom Davis was in a cafe in Moldova and saw things he didn’t want to see. “One of the girls you will meet was trafficked from this restaurant.”
Blood Moon, by Ed Gorman
I feel a little guilty about not liking Ed Gorman better as a writer. It’s very obvious that he’s a liberal, but he works so darn hard to be fair to people he disagrees with—like Republicans and evangelical Christians—that I feel I ought to reciprocate in some way. But Blood Moon
This is the first book for a series character, Robert Payne, a former FBI profiler who now works as an investigative consultant from his home in Iowa. He’s approached by a woman who tells him she believes there’s a serial rapist and killer hunting little girls. Her own daughter, she says, was killed by this man, but the police and her family don’t believe the cases are connected. Payne agrees to look into it, and soon discovers that each of the murdered girls had visited the small town of New Hope, Iowa before her death. Payne goes to New Hope and begins making inquiries. He also meets the very attractive local (female) sheriff. Continue reading Blood Moon, by Ed Gorman
Font Expression
The Frankenfont Project, mixing up the letters of Mary Shelley’s text.
Shall We Rally for Free Speech?
I hesitate to say it, but I side with Limbaugh in the recent selective outrage. Perhaps the word “slut” is currently anathema, but haven’t several other female public figures been called the same or equivalent names without the outrage? With a hard-R-rated movie like Project X opening last week, are we really this disgusted at some hard words on a ugly topic?
The whole point of this is that a Georgetown law student and feminist activist claimed to need $3,000 of contraception to get her through school, and public taxes should provide it. Meg McDonnell describes the story as I remember it before the outcry:
Claiming that contraception coverage was financially crippling to students, like herself, Fluke ended her testimony by saying: “We refuse to pick between a quality education and our health and we resent that, in the 21st Century, anyone thinks it’s acceptable to ask us to make that choice simply because we are women.”
Fluke claimed the costs of contraception were steep, saying that roughly 40 percent of Georgetown women struggle with $3,000 contraception bills over the course of a three-year law school term. But many quickly debunked her claim, notably The Weekly Standard, who found that Target in DC sells generic birth control pills for $9/month to those who do not have insurance.
That sounds like typical, ridiculous political rhetoric that gets politicians and newspapers moving again, and I’m having a hard time believing it should not be ridiculed. No one wants to deny women contraception; some of us are fighting the idea that every healthy provision can be paid for with federal taxes by the good will of congress.
True Detective, by Max Allan Collins
[Detective] Miller stood planted there like one of the lions in front of the Art Institute, only meaner-looking. Also, the lions were bronzed and he was tarnished copper.
I discovered, after I had bought True Detective
All the Heller books are good. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s impossible to keep a series from becoming formulaic after a while. With the Heller books, you have a series where the same private eye somehow manages to be on the scene for almost every important murder in America between 1930 and 1970. Each one is plausible individually, but they stretch credibility in the aggregate.
But this first novel deserves a place all its own. Collins’s own contemplation of the hard-boiled genre led him to want to write a book that stretched the limits and broke the rules, not with malice but for a reason. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was an honorable man, trying to keep clean in a dirty world. Collins’s detective, Nate Heller, is a soiled man, trying to find a way to preserve some degree of integrity. He’s a tragic character, and True Detective is a genuine tragedy, with a plot that functions like the mechanism of a guillotine. Continue reading True Detective, by Max Allan Collins
New from Gene Edward Veith
Our friend Dr. Gene Edward Veith has a new book out, Family Vocation: God’s Calling in Marriage, Parenting, and Childhood.
I probably won’t be reviewing it myself, this subject being outside my sphere of expertise, but if you’re a normal person, you’re likely to find the book useful. Dr. Veith is a wise and godly man.
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (Anthology)
I just got in under the wire, acquiring Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe from Amazon. I went to link to it for this review, and discovered the Kindle version was not available. I puzzled over this, since the book is right here on my Kindle device now, and I knew I got it from Amazon. Turns out it’s one of those Overdrive books that got removed the other day. So you’ll have to either buy a paper copy, or go to Overdrive for the e-book.
What Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is, is an anthology, first published in the 1980s and expanded in 1999, of original Philip Marlowe stories written by current mystery writers. The contributors contributed their own Marlowe stories, and then added brief appreciations, telling how Chandler’s work had influenced their own.
The results are uneven, but entertaining. The authors all attempt to emulate Chandler’s style. Some do it better than others. The most interesting thing to notice, for me, was the personal indulgences several of them couldn’t seem to resist. Female writers (but not all of them) couldn’t help correcting Chandler’s portrayal of women, introducing the kind of female characters they wish Chandler had written about. A couple writers couldn’t resist injecting politics, something Chandler generally eschewed. “The Empty Sleeve,” by W. R. Philbrick, is interesting for having Philip Marlowe meet his own creator, Raymond Chandler, at a poker game. But he also injects, entirely gratuitously, a certain politician he doesn’t like in a sleazy role for which there’s no historical warrant I’m aware of. Roger L. Simon, still a liberal when the book was compiled, contributes a slashing indictment of the Hollywood Black List, “In the Jungle of Cities.” Continue reading Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (Anthology)