Bad News by Donald E. Westlake

I'd been fairly neutral about the last three Dortmunder books.  I didn't dislike them.  But they were just okay.  I felt like they were just a bit too long which led to too many "side quests" and not a succinct caper.  Oddly, this one worked a fair bit better for me even though it's still pretty long and has some side quests as well.  But what it did better was to use Dortmunder himself to his strengths.  The opening chapter shows him using his wits to get out of a very perilous situation.  And while there isn't a true caper (it's more of a scam) here and Dortmunder definitely didn't plan it, it's his planning skills that make it pay off, to the extent that it does.  So what we get is closer to pristine Dortmunder, the intelligent thief who is the planner but who mostly fails because of profoundly bad luck.  There's also pretty good use of his extended supporting cast.  So, while it's not the best of the series, it's a big step up from the last three entries to precede it.  

Currently reading Leah Garret's X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos Who Helped Defeat The Nazis.



X Troop was part of Number 10 (Inter-Allied Commando) which was made up of soldiers from other Allied armies, most of whom were refugees from Occupied Countries. X Troop was a special subdivision, made up entirely of German-speaking Jews, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), Hungary and Poland, who had fled Nazi oppression. They didn't escape discrimination when they left, as after the war broke out, many were interred as Enemy Aliens, Non-Combatant and placed in camps, many of which were not much better than a concentration camp (which is really what an internment camp is). Some were shipped off to Canada, to horrible conditions, and others to Australia, for even worse. Eventually, some were allowed to join the Pioneer Corps, providing labor for building projects and the like, to free up more men for frontline fighting. Finally, many were recruited into the SOE and then X Troop. They had to use cover identities to protect their families in the occupied nations and hide the fact that they were Jewish, to keep the Germans in ignorance. They all adopted British surnames and identities and were told to get rid of anything tied to their past.

I am up to their experiences in the invasion of Sicily, but the tales of escaping the Nazis, life in Germany and Austria, as the Nazis came to power, are extraordinary. The injustice of their treatment in the internment camps is infuriating and you can see the forces that dove these men to excel. They were used in intelligence gathering, immediately interrogating prisoners and interpreting captured documents, to aid them in their larger missions. They were also used in deNazification programs and in conducting investigations into war crimes.

One of the men, Manfred Gann (aka Fred Gray), was a German, whose father had served in the Imperial German Army, in WW1 and lost a leg. He was head of an organization that cared for war wounded, widows and orphans, before being dismissed by the Nazis, after coming to power, because he was Jewish. They lived in a town near the Netherlands border, where his father was a successful merchant and even his bar mitvah showed that young Manfred wasn't afraid to stand up to the Nazis, as his speech spoke of how the Nazis had wrongly stereotyped Jews, which was a dangerous prospect, with non-Jewish servants in the household. However, his father was respected enough that no one seemed to report it. His father got him to Holland and then to England, where he lived with a Jewish family and continued his studies. However, he was interred, then allowed to join the Pioneer Corps and then X Troop. During the latter stages of the war, he received word that his parents, who had been captured by the Gestapo, while hiding in Holland, had been transferred from Bergen-Belson to Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia and were alive. he got permission from his CO and orders directing all Allied soldiers to aid him as best they could, loaded up a jeep with weapons and supplies and a driver and tore across Europe, crossing lines into unsecured areas and those in the Soviet zones. He made it to Theresienstadt alive and succeeded in finding them and getting them home, once they were fit enough to travel. his mere presence at the camp elated the prisoners, as it showed that others had survived and helped destroy the Nazis. He went on to become an engineer and work in international projects.

Just amazing stories of some very brave and dedicated men, at a time when it really counted.

There were a number of factors, including a pretty extensive business being run by two kids who are barely in their 20s.  But a LOT of it can be placed at the feet of Marvel and, to a lesser extent, Diamond.  Marvel started flooding the direct market with reprint books which caused retailers to cut back on the number of independent books that they were ordering (Marvel Zombies gonna zombie) and at about the same time Diamond decided that they weren't going to distribute one or two of Pacific's more risque books.  This was before Diamond was a monopoly, but they were the biggest east-coast distributor to comic shops.  Add in a few creator's coming in with late books and the overstretched finances of the Schanes Brothers snapped.  

Superheroes
Michel Parry, ed., 1978

A collection of twelve stories, plus that (in)famous essay by Larry Niven (“Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex”), that each in some way deal with super-powered beings. Half of the stories were first published in this book. The first three are from the pulp magazines of the early 1940s – one, “Stuporman” by Robert Bloch (1943), is, as the title suggests, satirical, while another, “The Evil Super-man” by George Clark is a straight up horror story. More on the third one below.
The rest of the stories of more recent vintage written by, among others, SF writers like Norman Spinrad, Donald Glut and George Alec Effinger (the last two also had comics-writing credits), are mostly either straight-up humorous in nature or sort of deconstructions of the superhero genre. Probably the best written is “Alternative Ending” by Frank Adey, which starts off like the Superman origin story we’re all familiar with, but then once the alien baby gets taken in by a kindly middle-aged couple living on a farm in Kansas, the story takes a really unexpected turn (not to give anything away, but it’s a pretty effective horror story).
The third pulp magazine story from the 1940s, “The Golden Amazon Returns” by John Russell Fearn (then writing under the pseudonym Thornton Ayre), led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. It’s the third story that features the titular hero, the Golden Amazon, an Earth woman named Violet Ray, who was raised from infancy by the natives of Venus when the spaceship carrying her family crashed on the planet and she was the sole survivor. The nature of the solar radiation on Venus gave her super strength and invulnerability and gave her skin a golden/amber hue. She grew up to become an planet hopping heroine who fought organized crime gangs and pirates. I was so fascinated by the character that I had to track down the other early stories, all of which were published in the magazine Fantastic Adventures (easy to find online now).

(the original pulp magazine illustration for the story included in this book).
Otherwise, in about 1945 or so, Fearn revamped the character, altering her origin (her powers were the result of scientific experimentation) and setting (20th century rather than mid-21st) and changed her hair color from raven-black to blonde; I’m not as interested in that version, even though Fearn then went on to write almost 30 novels about her.

Children of the Void
William Dexter





This one definitely falls into the 'the cover is the best part' category of classic sci fi. Written (according to the copyright in 1955) about the far future time 1980, where literal little green men (called the Nagani) are helping the remnants of humanity chase after a runaway planet, where they find the dying bits of the race on the cover.

This is a sequel.. the Earth gets destroyed by some sort of vegetable aliens in the first one, and only those that were taken captive survive (its not clear how many.. maybe just a small group, or maybe like a town worth), but they seem to have been defeated.

The first 1/2 of the book is a Burroughs still universal travelogue book, where it talks about the different planets and the races that live on them. We visit some of them chasing the runaway planet, but then things get really weird... including a weird quest that doesn't make alot of sense and some time traveling future men.

The end is fun though, and that cover is great, so it was worth the read.

Yeah, looks like my lack of interest in the revamped character is warranted. The earlier stories from Fantastic Adventures - four in all - are not literary masterpieces, but they are really interesting given the time when they were written, and often quite amusing. What I mainly like about them is that in them the Golden Amazon is very much the alpha hero, and even has a handsome but non-superpowered male sidekick (he eventually becomes her husband) who she often has to rescue like a damsel in distress. The banter between them, with the Amazon frequently telling him to grow a spine when dealing with ruthless criminals, is pretty amusing as well.