Book notes, pt. 1

Back in June I decided to take some time off from writing in this blog.  I was still working my old job, which demanded a lot of hours, and I was not feeling inspired to keep up with much.  However, as I kept reading, I made some notes about the books.  They aren’t much, some are just impressions, but this includes some books that I would have liked to have explored more fully in posts.  I thought that I would post a collection of these here and maybe this will inspire me to go back and write more about them.

Note: I ended up with more than I thought for some of these so I decided to split them up.  Here are four of them.

Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

John D. MacDonald is one of a handful of pulp detective fiction authors who I have spent a lot of time reading.  Writing in the hard-boiled style, his work is similar to that of Brett Halliday, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, and others.  They all wrote these short novels about tough-guy detectives who work just outside of the law, sometimes cooperating with police.  The characters are all pretty similar, they are all imposing men who are perpetual bachelors.  They are war veterans who we would probably recognize now as suffering from PTSD.  They all present extremely macho/masculine facades but are well-intentioned and can sometimes expose a domestic or feminine streak.  Their attachments with women are either idealized and distanced or short and intense.  

This novel contains a scene that I have come to find pretty common in these novels.  Travis McGee, MacDonald’s central detective character, is helping the younger sister of a friend of his.  The plot doesn’t matter much because it follows a pretty similar arc to many of these novels.  At one point, McGee helps the sister, Nina, prepare a meal and then clean her apartment.  Nina remarks on McGee’s domestic abilities and how it undercuts his tough guy image.  Then, when she throws himself at him he resists her advances, for a time at least.  

This scene recurs in these pulp novels.  The male figure in these novels is hyper-masculinized to the point that he is able to adopt stereotypically feminine attributes as a point of proof of masculinity.  McGee is so big and tough that he can cook and clean and it doesn’t detract from his properly masculine image.  Also, that act of resisting female advances, which McGee does throughout the book from different women, serves to prove his value at the expense of the women in the book.  He gets to maintain his virtue and good intentions while also eventually sleeping with the woman he desires.  

The Stranger beside Me by Ann Rule

This is the true crime book that sets the standard for a lot of modern true crime stories.  Ann Rule knew Ted Bundy before he became famous for his killings and her book follows much of the investigation through his conviction.  The copy I read has several updates with the last one detailing his execution.

Parts of this book were interesting but I thought it was a bit longer than it needed to be.  Because Rule follows the case chronologically, many details are repeated as investigations and trials in various states commence.  

This book also treads a line that I can find a little worrisome in contemporary true crime stories.  It comes very close to lionizing the killer-subject.  Rule has to walk a fine line because of her friendship with Bundy and can seem at times to tip toward being too complimentary.  She is careful to explain that this is part of Bundy’s game and what makes him dangerous: he was able to hide his dark side and be both disarming and charming.  Then again, I may just be projecting my own ambivalence about the subject.  After all, I did just finish reading a 600-page book about a serial killer.  If Rule is fascinated by this subject, so are a lot of other people (myself included), and a bit of ambivalence to temper the interest/enthusiasm may be the right course.

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

Rogue Protocol is the third installment in Martha Wells’ Murderbot saga.  These stories follow a SecUnit that has gained its own autonomy and travels around the galaxy on its own missions, but who ends up helping out humans in need along the way.  Back at the beginning of the plague, tor.com gave away the first 4 novellas in this series to their readers and I scooped them up.  I had already read the first two and just now got to this third one.  

I enjoyed reading it but am a little fuzzy on the details of the book because I read it on my phone during lunch breaks and while standing in line.

Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

The third book in the Dune series left me a little cold.  This novel takes up the lives of Paul Atreides’ family that he has left behind when he went into the desert to, ostensibly, die at the end of Dune Messiah.  The principal family members include: Paul and Chani’s twin children Leto II and Ghanima, who are pre-born, or abominations, depending on the side of mythology you happen to follow; Alia, Paul’s younger sister who is also a pre-born abomination; Duncan Idaho, an Atreides loyal who died in the first book, comes back as a ghola, mentat in the second book, and who is now married to Alia; Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother who has been off-world for a while but returns to Arrakis; Princess Irulan, House Corrino daughter who married Paul at the end of the first book; and Farad’n, the heir apparent of House Corrino who may have designs on the Atreides Imperium.

There is a lot of talk in this book, and a lot of intrigue.  Many of the players are vying for control over the Atreides twins, which would provide control over the Imperium.  There is also some infighting among the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen, and other factions in the Dune world.  A lot of the talk gets further confused by the phenomenon of the “pre-born.”  Alia and the Atreides twins all possess within them the consciousnesses of all of their ancestors.  They have broader views of history and “remember” things that happened before they were born.  Occasionally two characters will dialogue but as different personalities.

One of the more interesting uses of the “pre-born” is to throw personal identity into question.  If Leto II is the conglomeration of all of his ancestors, is there room for his own personality?  Leto II ends up following a path similar to his father, Paul, so he comes to learn his place.  The use of the pre-born trope is also interesting as it plays with destiny and the ability to see the future.

This ability to look into the future using the spice and the effect that it has on people is one of the more interesting aspects of this series.  The Atreides twins are careful to avoid using spice in the beginning of the novel because they fear what it will do to their personalities.  Leto II also begins to fear that knowing the future will doom him along a certain path.  This means that the character is constantly pulled in two directions: toward the past and the influence of the ancestors living inside of his consciousness and toward a future that he wants to carve out on his own, separated from the spice melange.  

In the end, I have to say that I am getting a little bored with this universe.  I think that there are some interesting things going on, but there are also too many things going on.  Like in the preceding books, the reader must keep track of a lot of things that are not really well explained.  Herbert jumps around in his writing and seems to work out details as he goes.  This makes for some confusing reading at times.  

I think I have a copy of God Emperor of Dune somewhere in my office.  If I do, I will read it but otherwise I might be done with the series — though I will probably return to the first book, Dune, and read that again at some point in the future.

Hard Boiled Detectives

The first detective stories I remember reading are Encyclopedia Brown and a series about boy detectives call The Three Investigators.  Anyone who has read Encyclopedia Brown remembers that it all centered around a nerdy boy who annoyed everyone and found objects misplaced by adults.  The stakes were low and the only really interesting thing about them is the opportunity the reader is afforded to solve the problem based on clues in the stories.  I was never able to do this.
The other series, The Three Investigators, was for a slightly older reader and I devoured it.  I don't remember many of the mysteries the three solved or any other plot points, but I do remember the interaction of the boy detectives and the dangers they would sometimes face.  The stakes were higher in these stories as the mysteries often involved the adults in their lives and in the town they lived.  The boys were never injured, but they faced the possibility of it.  I continued reading mysteries and detective fiction, but these were my first forays into the genre.  I ran through a patch of Sherlock Holmes in my twenties, finding the literary character to be far more interesting than the watered down representations I had seen elsewhere.
My interest in detective fiction peaked when I enrolled in a special topics course called "Crime and Punishment" that focused on crime and detective fiction (not on the Dostoyevsky novel).
This class opened a new world to me in detective fiction.  We started with songs and old accounts from the Newgate Calendar, something like the first true-crime accounts.  This is worth looking into if you are unfamiliar with it.  The thing that stuck with me the most was our section on "hard-boiled" detectives.
These novels were rougher around the edges and were much darker.  The detectives did not always win the day by using their brains, but had to use cunning, deception, and muscle to get their way.  The hard-boiled detective was an even more ambiguous character than Holmes.  These detectives were often private eyes, which freed them from the constraints that law enforcement officials would be bound to.  This meant that they were also often outlaws, or at least operated in a "para-" legal, if not "extra-" legal sense.
These novels paralleled literary naturalism in the sense that they tried to depict a gritty, realistic world.  The detectives were hard because they were forced to be by human nature.

This is all a long introduction to provide context for a recent book I read.  Brett Halliday is one of the mystery authors I most like.  His work, along with John D. MacDonald, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Dashiell Hammett, and others tend to feature a single detective.  The pulpy narratives can be fairly formulaic and the writing is sometimes terrible.  In this novel, Murder is My Business, Halliday's detective Mike Shayne picks up a case from a mother concerned that her son has fallen in with a bad element and may have been killed.  The story features a mayoral race in El Paso, TX, war profiteering, Nazi sympathizers, troubled border crossings, negative stereotypes of Mexicans and immigrants in general, and an overly-circuitous plot to smuggle silver across the border into America.

Back cover artwork for Murder is My Business

The story itself is most interesting for Shayne's actions and attitude.  He attempts to remain aloof from the legal battles that surround him, though he has a personal relationship with many of the involved parties and has a favored outcome.  He enters into the case without a clear motivation besides making money, and even that is uncertain because he is not sure who will ultimately pay him.  Eventually, Shayne will extort money form one of the central figures and mayoral candidate, only to double-cross him immediately and turn him over to the police anyway.
Shayne, like many of the hard-boiled detectives, plays criminals against the police for his own benefit.  Also like many hard-boiled detectives, he has a code of ethics that doesn't necessarily align with the law or with those around him, but is rock solid.  This can be a troubling aspect of these novels because this code can sometimes lead a detective to help someone against their own interests, but it can just as easily lead them to hurting or killing someone, or using illegal means to help the police to arrest someone.  These novels have both a distrust of police for their potential ineptitude and corruption, but also because they are unwilling or unable to go "far enough."  In more than one of these novels, the featured detective will violently coerce confessions from the bad guy to "help" the police make the case against them.  The novels tend not to present any moral ambiguity about this because there is rarely doubt that the detective is wrong.  However, in a real world where hunches are generally wrong and where personal prejudices often masquerade as deduction, this scenario looks more grim and definitely more suspect.
Before this gets too long, I will leave off with some more optimistic notes.  While in that special topics course, we read another author who has become another favorite of mine: Sara Paretsky.  Paretsky adopts many hard-boiled detective tropes but bends their politics a bit by introducing a woman detective.  VI Warshawski is as smart and tough as the other detectives and gets into the same sort of trouble that they do.  Her moral compass tends to read a bit more true and she also tends to be more sympathetic as a character.
I have recently purchased Paretsky's newest novel Shell Game, that I am sure will make an appearance in this blog at some point.