I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN: MAY 2011 EDITION

[defrog]

If there were no such thing as amateur book reviews, we’d have to invent them. Lucky you.

JUST FINISHED

Murder Is My Business by Brett Halliday
A Mike Shayne mystery! I’ve never read Halliday before, though I’m familiar with P.I. Mike Shayne, mainly via the racy cover art that caught my notice as an impressionable teenager with a jones for half-dressed damsels and second-hand bookstores. This is the 11th Shayne novel (reprinted by Hard Case Crime), in which Shayne looks into the case of a missing soldier in El Paso, TX, who turns up dead after being run over by a local mining baron and mayoral candidate who also just happens to be a former client of Shayne’s. That kind of happenstance seems to fuel the entire story, but Halliday delivers some nifty plot twists to keep you guessing. Still, as private eyes go, Shayne might be a durable character (who could argue with 70+ novels, a dozen films and a radio drama?), but he didn’t really make much of an impression on me, possibly due to Halliday’s dry writing style. It’s a decent read, but I don’t know that it’s decent enough to get me to read another Shayne novel.

JUST STARTED

Little Green Men by Christopher Buckley
I’ve been meaning to read Buckley for awhile now – his lineage and political opinions notwithstanding (though actually, like his dad, Buckley is one of the few conservatives I generally respect), and this story of a stuffy but successful Washington D.C. talk show host who gets abducted by aliens seems like a great place to start. A couple of chapters in, he’s already making me smile knowingly.

RECENT TITLES

The Song is You by Megan Abbott
Abbott knocked me out with Queenpin, and she knocked me out again with this Hollywood-noir story that takes a real-life unsolved mystery – the disappearance of starlet Jean Spangler, the “Daughter Of Black Dahlia – and writes her own ending via a studio publicity man who was one of the last people to see Spangler alive, covered up the presence of the two big stars she left the club with, and is forced to find out what happened next to avoid being blackmailed. It’s pure Hollywood Babylon crime, and Abbott tells it with style. 

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore
Set in the same general environment as Moore’s vampire novels (Blooksucking Fiends and You Suck: A Love Story), this is about a widower and thrift-shop owner who becomes Death – or rather, a Merchant Of Death, whose job it is to see that the souls of the deceased make it to their next owner, failing which, the Forces Of Darkness (in the form of Celtic death gods) will rise. Not just another Guy Who Becomes The New Grim Reaper yarn, the book is full of Moore’s goofy humor but is grounded in just enough reality to make the characters believable. The “twist” is way too easy to spot, and Moore’s concept of Death might throw some people, but overall I still enjoyed it. 

Raiders Of The Lost Car Park by Robert Rankin
The second book in Rankin’s Cornelius Murphy series – Murphy being a 17-year-old boy and the Stuff Of Epics. With the previous book having revealed the existence of Hidden Zones in which a secret king controls mankind, Murphy decides to reveal them to the world (and help himself to the riches contained therein) and rescue his biological father, who plans to kidnap the Queen. Jokes ensue. And there’s a rock festival featuring the world’s greatest band, Gandhi’s Hairdryer. Silly fun as usual, but storywise a little weak compared to other Rankin books. 

The Time Machine by HG Wells
Well, you know, it’s one of those classics I’ve never read it, and as I’m developing a story that includes a subterranean race, I thought I should read this for research purposes. By now you probably know the basic idea (guy invents time machine and goes 800,000 years in the future, gets stranded, and discovers humanity has separated into surface-dwelling child-like Utopians and underground savages). And it’s pretty good, if a little stiff. But it’s also so full of invention (for the 1890s, I mean) that it’s not hard to see why Wells gets so much credit for creating one of the most influential science-fiction stories ever. Props.

I want to believe,

This is dF