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defrogTaking it up a few gears this month, thanks to pulp fiction. Go me!
A Bullet for Cinderella by John D. MacDonaldMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I tried John D MacDonald for the first time last year with The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything, and while it was okay, it didn’t inspire me to seek out more of MacDonald’s stuff. But this 1955 novel fell into my lap by happenstance, and it seemed more like straightforward pulp crime, so I decided to give it a shot.
The premise is pretty classic noir – Tal Howard, shell-shocked from his time as a POW in the Korean War, shows up in the small town of Hillston with a mission: find $60,000 that his compatriot Timmy Warden (who was a fellow POW and died in the prison camp) had embezzled from his brother George and buried somewhere. His only lead is a woman named “Cindy”, who Timmy said would know where the money is. Howard arrives in Hillston to discover that another POW – a ruthless psycho named Fitzmartin – is after the same treasure.
It pretty much follows the private eye formula as Howard tries to find Cindy, and in the process meets a girl, gets sapped, annoys the police and finds dead bodies in incriminating places. It reads better that The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything, and spends some time ruminating on what the POW experience can do to a guy. Even so, Howard isn’t that sympathetic a lead character, which makes the ending a little hard to swallow. Again, it’s okay for what it is, but I’ll probably need more happenstance to try MacDonald again.
The Scoreless Thai by Lawrence BlockMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Continuing my revisit of Lawrence Block’s Evan Tanner series, this is the fourth instalment, which was titled Two For Tanner when I first read it – which was apparently the publisher’s idea, as they didn’t care for Block’s Title. Maybe they wanted something more identifiable with the series, or maybe they didn’t get the joke, as one of Tanner’s companions in the story is Dhang, a young Thai man who is also a virgin and desperate to get laid. Well.
This time, Tanner – who is incapable of sleeping and freelances for a super-secret agency that thinks he’s one of their agents – is off on a mission to rescue his latest girlfriend, Tuppence Ngawa, a Kenyan-American jazz singer whose band plays a gig for the King of Thailand, after which they are reportedly kidnapped by Communist rebels right around the same time the Royal Jewels are stolen. Given the novel starts with Tanner held prisoner by guerillas in a suspended bamboo cage in the middle of the Thai jungle, it’s obvious his mission isn’t going as planned. His only hope turns out to be Dhang, who is a member of the guerillas and will help Tanner escape ... if he can help him find a woman to boink.
And, well, you know. This one has aged even less well than the previous three, particularly the “Dhang needs women” angle, though I guess you can also say it’s a pretty accurate representation of how Americans viewed both sex and Southeast Asia in the late 60s. And Tanner is comparatively more enlightened than most of his contemporaries (to include one of his CIA shadowers in this story). Still, I did find myself wincing a little more than usual. This one is also a bit more grim, as Tanner really gets put through the ringer this time, and also has some critical thoughts on the Vietnam war that was happening at the time, so the tonal shifts can be a bit jarring. For all that, Block (as usual) tells the story well, so as page-turning adventures go, it’s still pretty good.
The Sex Life of The Gods by Michael KnerrMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Found on Project Gutenberg, this is an obscure relic from the days of pulp SF and pulp erotica – or in this case, both. Michael Knerr (a.k.a. M.E. Knerr, both of which may be pen names) wrote some erotic pulp thrillers in the 60s before moving on to non-fiction books in the 70s about stuff like Bigfoot and the Jim Jones Guyana suicides. As far as I can tell, this 1962 novel was his only attempt at SF – and it’s probably as well.
The premise: a man wakes up in the woods next to a plane crash with amnesia. His wallet tells him he’s Nick Danson, and that he’s married to a gorgeous sexpot of a woman named Beth. He seeks her out in hopes of getting his memory back, and finds he’s being tailed. He’s also having weird dreams about being a space soldier in an alien race of gods with a gorgeous sexpot of a girlfriend named Jela. But what if those aren’t dreams – and he’s not really Nick Danson?
What fun!
But of course, this ain’t Philip K. Dick. The actual SF part is poorly fleshed out (to say nothing of the distinction between humans and the alien ‘gods’), but then the target audience probably wasn’t reading this for the SF bits. As one might expect from the title alone, there’s a whole bunch of sex scenes with Nick and Beth, Nick and Jela and even Nick and random sexpot neighbour Janet, and while they’re tame by modern standards, Knerr really wants you to know that Beth, Jela and Janet had fantastic boobs. On the plus side, it’s readable and fast-paced. Best thing I can say about it is that if anyone had bothered to make a film version in the 60s, it would have made a great MST3K episode.
Zone One by Colson WhiteheadMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’ve read and enjoyed two of Colson Whitehead’s novels to date (The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys), and when I found out he’d also done a zombie novel, I was keen to see what he would do with that particular genre, on the reasonable grounds that he would do something different with it. And so he did. The novel starts as the plague appears to be receding. The provisional American govt (now based in Buffalo, NY) has started a rebuilding campaign under its “American Phoenix” programme. To this end, they’ve kicked off an initiative to repopulate Manhattan Island as a testbed for urban repopulation elsewhere.
With the Marines having already killed the bulk of the zombie hordes in Zone One on the southern tip of the island, teams of sweepers are now being sent into the zone to clear buildings of “stragglers” (harmless zombies who generally stay in one place in a catatonic state), plus any flesh-eating monsters the Marines might have missed. The basic story follows three days in the life of a man nicknamed Mark Spitz, a member of Omega unit as they go through the routine of sweeping Zone One. That said, most of that time involves Spitz flashing back to the events that brought him from Last Night to this point, the people he left behind, the people who left him behind, and the various ways everyone is coping with PASD (Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder).
Notably, his flashbacks are not in linear order, and Whitehead doesn’t neatly separate past and present, giving it an almost stream-of-consciousness-type vibe. A lot of readers have complained about this, having apparently expected a straightforward zombie action thriller, whereas Whitehead is more interested in exploring how people cope psychologically and emotionally with the end of life as they know it as they’re thrown into a nightmare survival trip. But then zombie action thrillers are a dime a dozen these days, so credit to Whitehead for doing something different. The jumbled flashback motif is admittedly a little exhausting to navigate (and it's one reason it took me three months to finish it), yet I found that it does give more emotional heft to a rather exciting final act, when Spitz finds out the true nature of their mission. Probably not for everyone, particularly hardcore zombie fans, but I liked it.
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