If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr

Bernie Gunther is back in a story that starts in Germany in 1934 and ends twenty years later in Havana.  The book begins with Bernie working as a house detective at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.  With the Nazi consolidation of power the Berlin police force is no place for s Social Democrat like Gunther.  As he contemplates becoming a private investigator he gets drawn in to mysteries by hotel patrons, including a wealthy female Jewish-American writer trying to get the U.S. to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics, an American mobster with ties to companies building the venues for the 1936 Olympics, and a Bavarian quarry owner who ends up dead in his bed in the hotel.  Bernie has to navigate the dangerous waters of Nazi politics and the growing anti-Semitism of the party.  He just barely manages to do so, not completely unscathed, and with a loan that allows him to start his P.I. office.  

Twenty years later Gunther is living in Havana, having migrated there from Uruguay (where he fled when he was forced to leave Argentina).  He's angling for a job promoting cigars in the new German Federal Republic when he meets the American writer, staying in Ernest Hemingway's home in Havana and the mobster, now running a Havana hotel/casino.  Because he's Bernie he ends up embroiled in another mystery at the behest of Meyer Lansky.  And again, the real danger may well come from the Cuban government of Batista, much as Gunther had to deal with the Nazi's and then the Peron regime.  

Again Kerr deftly weaves historical fact and historical figures in to his narrative.  He fleshes out Bernie's earlier history and then gives us a much older and much more tired Gunther who doesn't want to solve mysteries...he just wants to find a way to get back to Germany and be a German.  I would love to see the research Kerr did (if there's any) indicating mob ties for Avery Brundage, President of the U.S. Olympic Committee.  That he was an anti-Semitic dirtbag is pretty well established, but I haven't seen any evidence of mob ties (not that I've really looked).  Another very good outing for Bernie Gunther.  

Mike Mignola's Hellboy: The Companion
by Stephen Weiner, Jason Hall & Victoria Blake with additional material by Mignola

a very good resource for someone new to the Hellboy Mythos, it gives a good range of encyclopedic entries and timelines up through 2006, it also includes a couple of interesting essays and an annotated reading list by Mignola himself. If you are already steeped in the Mignolaverse, it's not as helpful, but as a quick reference or refresher, it does well. After having read the full run of Baltimore, I was contemplating a reread of the Hellboy and BPRD, but I had never read the companion before, so I decided to give it a quick read to see if it scratched the Hellboy itch I had before diving in to that read. I am still planning on doing a Hellboy reread (this time including the novels I have) but I will hold off a bit after reading the companion, so I can get to some other stuff on the to read pile.

-M

I read one of Westlake's later Dortmunder novels, Why Me? that was pretty good as well. A pretty good mix of caper and humor. Otherwise, though, I have mixed feelings about Westlake's forays into more humorous fare - Two Much in particular is a book I almost threw against the wall after I finished reading it.

The Parkers books are another of those things I really need to get back to.. I greatly enjoyed the ones I read, but then I got stymied finding the next one in the library system and ended up kinda leaving it off... some time (or maybe I'll find them as a book sale some time)

Ross Poldark
by Winston Graham

This book jumped out at me at the library... I remember attempting to watch the PBS show and being quite bored with it, as was my wife, despite Aidan Turner. Reading the back cover, it seemed like it might have a bit more history and a bit less drama than a supposed.

I was pleasantly surprised at how good the writing is, especially for such an old book... it flowed along really well and had none of the anachronisms that sometimes jump out at you in these sort of books. The characters are quite well developed and it's very easy to quickly know who's who in the large cast because of it.

Sadly, while the details of life in the English countryside in the late 18th century (and perhaps of Cornwall in particular) abound, there was far less history in the book than I was hoping... it's a completely local story, that has only a few bare mentions of the greater world. While that fit the story quite well, it wasn't really what I was hoping for.

I can see why the series is very well regarded, and would highly recommend it if family dynasty series are your cup of tea... I may give the next one a shot to see if it gets a little less local.

Dune by Frank Herbert.




I picked up a copy of Dune a couple of years back, but didn't get much further than about 40 pages into it before deciding to abandon it. But with the new Denis Villeneuve-directed movie coming out in a month or two, I thought I really should give the book another go and this time I finished it. I can totally see why I gave up on it last time though: the first 140 pages are really, really slow, but then it suddenly gets really gripping.

To be honest, this "slow-slow-fast-slow" pacing was a recurring problem for me. Parts of the story are really exciting and make you eager to find out what's going to happen, but these moments are broken up by rather verbose sections in which very little of any real consequence seems to happen and, what's more, these dull parts are sometimes drawn out over two or three chapters. I think the whole book could've been about half as long as it is and you wouldn't lose much of the actual plot.

The central story of the overthrow of House Atreides by House Harkonnen in an attempt to gain control of the planet Arrakis (the only source of the valuable spice melange) and Paul Atreides' subsequent befriending and harnessing of the wilderness-dwelling Fremen as a means of retaliation is a good one. Also, the grotesque Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is a great and extremely memorable villain.

I found it interesting that the galaxy Herbert created is very matriarchal in structure – not that the men are marginalised, mind you, but women certainly occupy an equal and, at times, much more significant place in society than the men. This is particularly true of the Bene Gesserit – a religious and political sisterhood who have superhuman mental powers.

Herbert also drops in some rather thought-provoking philosophical concepts. For example, at one point when Paul Atraidies is on a melange-induced trip, extending his awareness throughout time and space, he realises that by being aware of the Fremen prophecy that centres around him he is actually affecting said prophecy in such a way that it will come true. This raises the question of whether the prophecy is a genuine matter of fate or destiny, or whether there's an element of self-fulfilment to it. This strikes me as a concept that is kinda reminiscent of the observer effect in quantum psychics, in which simply observing an experiment changes its outcome. It's fairly heady philosophical stuff.

I've heard Dune compared to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, particularly in terms of fantasy world building, but I really don't think it's a patch on Tolkien in that respect. Herbert's world building seems to mostly consist of every now and then replacing familiar words with suitably futuristic sounding alternatives. This seems to me to be a shallow, entirely superficial form of world building which is a million miles away from the more thorough and laborious background work that Tolkien poured into his books.

Incidentally, it's pretty easy to see the influence Dune had on Star Wars. Of course, there's the obvious similarity of the desert planet location, but there are also moisture farmers and "sandcrawlers" on both Arrakis and Tatooine, while the Sarlacc – with it's circular, many-toothed mouth – certainly bears a resemblance to the giant sand worms of Dune. Furthermore, the mystical Bene Gesserit are somewhat like the Jedi, especially in their use of "The Voice", which allows them to control others just by the tone of their speech; that's very much like the Jedi mind trick.

I'm glad I've read Dune. Apart from being a landmark sci-fi novel, it's actually a pretty enjoyable story, even if it does drag a bit at times. I liked the ending; it felt satisfying and tied things up enough that the reader doesn't feel any obligation to read any of the numerous sequel volumes – which is good because I have absolutely no desire to do that. I was slightly disappointed that the long-waited-for Fremen Jihad is mostly handled "off page", in between chapters, because I think showing us more of this Guerrilla war would've actually made for a more action-packed crescendo to the book. Overall though, I found this to be a (mostly) entertaining sci-fi novel, with some fascinating concepts and ideas, but it is flawed by being made up of brief moments of gripping, rapid plot development interspersed with moments of dull, verbose narrative.

Quick heads up...

I know a lot of people don't like e-books (I love them) but there's a Humble Bundle of Hard Case Crime that is (mostly) their original books with a few of the HCC comics as well.  

I went ahead and got it because it was less than 10% of the price of buying the books and I'd only read two or three of them already. 

The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison.




I read this book back when I was about 14 or so, and I remember enjoying the hell out of it back then. So, it's pleasing to find that almost 35 years later I still really enjoyed this first instalment of the adventures of that debonair criminal of the spaceways, "Slippery" Jim deGriz.

The story is set in the far future, at a time when genetic manipulation has eliminated crime from the galaxy's human population, leaving society rather sterile and...well, boring. DeGriz is an adventurous spirit who has shaken off society's shackles and dedicated his life to becoming a master criminal. Unfortunately, he gets caught by the mysterious Special Corps – an elite crime-fighting organization – who recruit him to investigate the illegal manufacturing and theft of a heavily armed space battlecruiser. From there, the story follows Jim as he chases the murderous femme fatale Angelina, who (in true pulp fiction style) he begins to fall in love with, across the galaxy in order to apprehend her and turn her in.

Author Harry Harrison's writing is packed with lots of action and plenty of humour – this really is some top-draw, high-octane pulp sci-fi! That said, I'm not sure Harrison is quite as funny as I thought he was back when I was a teenager – although the intervening 30+ years have undoubtedly dated his witticisms a bit – but he's still funny enough to have given me a few chuckles as I read. The plot is kinda thin, in all honesty, but what makes this book such a joy to read is deGriz's personality: he's just an immensely likeable rogue. Interestingly, he's also a criminal with a conscience: he is appalled, for example, that his quarry would stoop to killing innocents in her flight from the law.

However, something I found interesting and which really jumped out at me is just how poor Harrison's predictions of future technology are. His starships still rely on magnetic tapes for navigation, for example, and some of his robots even run on coal! Clearly the author didn't see the coming of the microchip and miniaturised circuitry or, in the case of his robots, the obsolescence of steam power. Arthur C. Clarke he ain't!

Nevertheless, I really enjoyed re-visiting The Stainless Steel Rat. It's a fast read (only 158 pages) and is pure action-packed space opera: the perfect palette-cleanser after reading the rather verbose and stodgy Dune, in fact. In short, this book is a blast.