Well, that’s more like it, Bubba! Apparently it helps when you add a bunch of pulp fiction to your reading list.

The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything by John D. MacDonald

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve been aware of John D. MacDonald for ages, but I can’t remember ever reading any of his stuff, not even The Executioners, which was filmed twice as Cape Fear. I may have tried one of his Travis McGee novels decades ago, but I couldn’t swear to it. Anyway, I found out awhile back that he’d written a few science fiction novels during his long career, one of which is this 1962 novel. I came across a copy of it and thought, why not?

The premise: Kirby Winter is a mild-mannered maladroit ninny whose uncle, the mysteriously wealthy Omar Krepps, has just died. Winter inherits nothing but a pocket watch and a letter to be opened in a year’s time. Kirby’s life changes dramatically when (1) everyone from Krepps’ business partners and the IRS to international grifter Charla Maria Markopoulo O’Rourke thinks Kirby is sitting on a fortune in embezzled funds, as well as the secret to Krepps’ inexplicable wealth, (2) he has an accidental sexual tryst with exotic dancer Bonny Lee Beaumont, and (3) he discovers that the pocket watch can freeze time for everyone except the person holding it.

I should note that the time-freezing aspect is more fantasy plot device than anything remotely scientific – which is fine, and probably as well, since Kirby doesn’t discover the watch’s ability until halfway through the book. MacDonald has fun with the kinds of things you could do with that ability, even if some of them are cringey by modern standards. In fact, there’s a lot of cringe to go around – the book has not aged well in terms of how Kirby relates to women, especially as the plot revolves on his evolution from sexually hung-up zero to assertive hero with the help of Bonny Lee’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl character (though, to be fair, it’s relatively progressive by 1962 sex-comedy standards). That said, the dialogue is a bit clunky at times, and I didn’t find Kirby and Bonny Lee’s love affair all that convincing. Overall, it’s okay for what it is and fun at times, but it didn’t convince me to give JDM another go.

Cape Fear is great, though. (Both of them.)


The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep by Lawrence Block

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was 40 years ago that I first started reading Lawrence Block, and his Evan Tanner series – which started in 1966 when lots of authors were diving into lucrative James Bond territory – was my entry point. I was immediately hooked, and the influence of Block and the Tanner novels on my own writing style cannot possibly be overstated. I loved the idea of a spy novel featuring a guy who is incapable of sleep due to a war injury, whose hobby is joining hundreds of international organisations with hopeless causes (like, say, returning the Stuart line to the throne of England), and ends up working for a secret agency so secret that he doesn’t know who they are and they don’t know he’s not actually one of their agents. Anyway, I recently decided to reread all eight books in the series to see how it holds up after all these years. And so here we are with the book that started it all.

As a permanent insomniac, Tanner spends his extra waking hours studying, learning languages, joining lost causes, and writing theses for college students. After being hired to write a thesis on the Turkish massacres in Armenia in the early 20th century, Tanner – who is a member of the League To Restore Cilician Armenia – just happens to meet Armenian belly dancer Kitty Bazerian, who grandmother tells him a tale of how, in 1922, all the gold in Smyrna (573lb) was stashed under the porch of her family’s house in Balikesir in case the Turks invaded, which they eventually did. Tanner figures there’s a good chance the gold is still there, and decides to go to Balikesir to find out and – if it is – steal it. To give you an idea of how that goes, the book opens with him in a Turkish jail cell, having been promptly arrested at immigration.

It gets somewhat freewheeling from there, as Tanner is forced to make it up as he goes, becoming an international fugitive in the process, and leveraging his contacts with various organisations (not all of whom can be trusted) to get from one point to the next. This being a Bond-adjacent genre book, he also manages to get laid several times (hey, it was the 60s – which, incidentally, is something to keep in mind for several passages in this book). Throughout it all, what makes it work is Block’s breezy writing style, sharp dialogue, steady pacing, dry humour and generally keeping it as realistic and believable as you can keep a story involving a lost-cause enthusiast who can’t sleep trying to steal a fortune in Armenian gold. Reading it again, I can see how this made me a Block fan for life, and as international men of mystery go, I’ll still take Tanner over Bond any day.


The Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Leiber

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I recently came across a trove of old SF novels, novellas and short stories at The Gutenberg Project, all scanned from Golden Age SF pulp magazines that are out of print and at least believed to be public domain at the time TGP scanned them. One of them is this, a post-apocalyptic novel by Fritz Leiber, who is most famous for his Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser series. I’ve never read those or anything else by Leiber, and who doesn’t like a good old-fashioned post-apocalyptic pulp novel? So I gave it a try.

The premise: after a nuclear war, the American continent is mostly a wasteland with pockets of civilization nearer the USA’s former borders. In the middle is the Deathlands, where humans have more or less been reduced to two basic instincts – fuck or kill (or possibly both). The narrator, Ray, encounters Alice – a tough woman with a hook for one hand. They go for the first option, after which they spot a hover plane that lands nearby. They kill the pilot, go aboard, are joined by an old man who happened to witness everything, and try to hijack the plane to get out of the Deathlands, upon which the old man, Pops, tells them he has started a movement to reject murder, and that they’re welcome to join.

Leiber has a stellar rep in pulp SFF circles, but this did not work for me at all. Apart from the trope of Ray spending pages and pages explaining what a bad-ass he has to be to be to survive in the Deathlands and justifying his murderous instincts, he also spends pages and pages laying out a lot of exposition for the overall setting. I gather that the story is partly meant to be a rumination on whether humanity can still be redeemed when fear and murder are the only characteristics it has left, but I didn’t find the transformation of Ray and Alice to be all that convincing – not after reading all those pages of Ray wallowing in his own hard-ass Deathlands philosophy.


Saint Francis by Nikos Kazantzakis (1-Jun-1963) Paperback by Nikos Kazantzakis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I read Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ (while I was in Greece, no less – I picked up a second-hand copy of the book while I was there). I’d seen the Scorsese film and loved it, so I wanted to see what the book was like. I enjoyed it immensely, but never got around to read Kazantzakis again – until I came across a copy of this (in Tennessee, not Greece). While I knew very little about Saint Francis of Assisi, I was interested to see what Kazantzakis did with him, and what I’d make of it, as my spiritual outlook is far different now than it was 28 years ago. Admittedly it took a couple of tries, but eventually I found myself sucked into it.

As you might guess, this is a fictionalised bio of Francis, as narrated by Brother Leo, a seeker of God who accompanies Francis from his spiritual epiphany to his death. Kazantzakis weaves together fact and legend to create a portrait of Francis as a passionate fanatic preaching the “new madness” of God’s perfect love, which the people he encounters react to either by throwing things at him or joining him. Francis’ quest to imitate Christ as close as possible drives him to pursue Perfect Poverty (and all the suffering that goes with it) whilst also developing an affinity with God’s creation itself.

As I say, I don’t know enough about Francis to judge how much of Kazantzakis’ version is accurate and how much (if any) is blasphemy. And I can’t say how much I learned about the real Francis from this. But I can say it’s a bonkers novel that succeeds in exploring what it truly means to devote your life to imitating Jesus’ example at the expense of everything else in a world that either rejects you or seeks to exploit you. What made it work for me is that Francis is balanced by Brother Leo, who represents the true believers who don’t have nearly the willpower to be a Saint Francis, and gives a voice to those who believe that we don’t have to be a saint to be any closer to God than Francis is said to be.


Queen of the Martian Catacombs: Planet Stories, Summer '49 by Leigh Brackett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Continuing my exploration of the works of Leigh Brackett, this is her first novella to feature Eric John Stark, her most famous series character who is equal parts Tarzan, Mowgli and John Carter – born on Earth, orphaned on Mercury, raised by a local indigenous tribe, now a mercenary on Mars. Awhile back I read the first two books of her Stark reboot in the 1970s (The Ginger Star and The Hounds of Skaith), and while the results were mixed, the character was interesting enough for me to want to see what Brackett did with him in the 1940s.

Stark’s debut sees him on the lam from the Earth Police Control for running guns on Mars. Simon Ashton – the man who rescued him from Mercury and, as it happens, an EPC officer – gives him a choice: do 20 years for gun-running, or help stop a civil war. Stark has already been hired by a man named Delgaun for what he thinks is a private war, but is in fact part of a plot by the barbarian leader Kynon – who claims to offer immortality by way of ancient cult magic – to start a rebellion against the ruling govt. Ashton wants Stark to join Delgaun’s army in order to stop Kynon and his queen, the luscious redhead Berild, who may have plans of her own.

And so. It’s classic “planetary romance” swords-and-sorcery stuff, and here it works for two main reasons: (1) Brackett really was good at writing this sort of thing, and IMO wrote it as good as (or arguably better than) Edgar Rice Burroughs did, and (2) Stark is a strangely compelling character – an anti-hero that embodies an uneasy mixture of savagery and civility with a soft spot for the oppressed. The story is alright as these kinds of stories go, although – typical of the genre – the love-interest angle is even less convincing than the idea that there is indigenous life on Mars, Venus and Mercury. Anyway, I liked it well enough.

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