Blackbeard's Revenge

…And unmoor’d souls may drift on stranger tides

Than those men know of, and be overthrown

By winds that would not even stir a hair…

—William Ashbless

John Chandagnac is off to the New World aboard the Vociferous Carmichael. He has only one thing in mind: he wants to find his uncle, Sebastian Chandagnac. But this will not be a happy family reunion. It turns out that Sebastian Chandagnac is a ruthless criminal. He claimed that his poor brother, the rightful heir to a fortune, was dead, and made off with the cash. That brother, John’s father, was a puppeteer, and ended up dying a pauper, from starvation and the cold. John is furious and wants to get to his uncle, reclaim the fortune that rightfully belonged to his father, and get even.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans. John’s plans for revenge are suddenly halted when his ship is attacked by a gang of pirates, led by the infamous Philip Davies. And they weren’t working on their own: a few of the Carmichael’s passengers were in league with the pirates, helping them to take over the ship. One of these is Benjamin Hurwood, an eccentric one-armed professor with a beautiful daughter named Beth. When Davies murders the Carmichael’s former captain, Chandagnac, in a fit of fury, attacks the pirate and wounds him. As a result, Davies allows the other passengers to go free, but John Chandagnac is given a different choice:

“Join us, wholly adopt our goals as your own, or be killed right now where you stand.”

More Western Thought

Weave a circle round him thrice

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Kubla Khan

Last year, when I reviewed Shane by Jack Schaefer, I admitted that I did not know much about Westerns and that I intended to rectify the mistake. Well... it's taken me a while to get around to it. I have so many books lying unread on my shelves... But because of my blog, I tend to emphasize crime and detective fiction. As a result, I have plenty of books in other genres lying unread and which I will probably never read if I follow my current reading patterns. So I've decided to rebel. For the next little bit -- maybe one week, maybe two, maybe a month... who knows? It depends how much I enjoy myself... - I've decided to take a small hiatus from mysteries and to focus on other genres. (There might be one or two mystery reviews, but these would be out of my backlog.) And to kick this break off, today I’d like to talk about another Western that was recommended to me by Bill Pronzini: The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout.

The scene of the crime has temporarily been taken over by other genres. All those who object may use the provided space-time continuum to proceed to the next crime fiction review.

Western fans might recognize the title as the title of John Wayne’s final movie, and for good reason: that movie was adapted from the book by the author’s own son, Miles Hood Swarthout. The film co-starred such legendary actors as Lauren Bacall and Jimmy Stewart, and it included other high-profile names: Ron Howard, Scatman Crothers, Richard Boone, Harry Morgan, and John Carradine all come to mind. I consider the movie to be one of the finest Westerns ever made, a poignant valentine to the Western and the type of iconic hero John Wayne might have played. (Indeed, the movie began with a unique sequence, in which a series of clips from Wayne’s glory days in film were used to show his character’s glory days.)

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Dracula is one of those immortal stories that pretty much any intelligent person knows, even if they haven’t read the story themselves. It’s right up there with Hamlet, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and A Christmas Carol. I had read Dracula before, but for reasons I will clarify in a moment, I wanted to revisit the classic novel.

So, here’s a really brief overview of the story for anyone who doesn’t know it: Dracula is an evil vampire who leaves his native land of Transylvania to come to England. He wreaks havoc there, draining the blood of a young woman without being suspected… that is, until someone calls in Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, who realises that Dracula is behind it all.

Western Thought

I like Westerns.

I don’t know anything about the genre, but I like it. Something about it really appeals to me. I consider John Wayne to be the ultimate model of manliness. If one of his movies is on TV, I’ll watch it. I count The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Magnificent Seven among my favourite films. I’ve read at least one book by Zane Grey, Karl May, and Louis L’Amour. You have now exhausted all my knowledge about Western history.

But that’s hardly an excuse, is it? I’ve taken many professionals to task for their ignorance about detective fiction history, but I’m not much different when it comes to Westerns. When they come up in conversation, I’m forced to admit that I like them before staring at my feet and shuffling around awkwardly for the rest of the conversation. I simply know nothing about ‘em. And so I’ve decided to rectify that mistake. Every once in a while I will read and review a Western purely for the pleasure of reading and reviewing one. I won’t expect a mystery and won’t review it with the same criteria I use for mysteries. (All those opposed may use the provided space-time continuum to skip ahead to my next review.) And so without further ado, I give you Shane by Jack Schaefer.

I remember...

Donald E. Westlake’s Memory was published posthumously by Hard Case Crime. It was written by the author way back in his early days of writing, but it was never published. I first heard of this book when reading an article on Donald E. Westlake by Lawrence Block, collected in Mystery & Suspense Writers, Volume 2. Block described the novel and praised it in glowing terms. According to the article, 30 years later, Westlake decided not to publish the novel because he considered it too much a creature of its time.

I’m a big Donald E. Westlake fan, though admittedly I’m a newcomer. And Memory is a challenge to describe. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever reviewed for this blog. It isn’t a mystery in any proper sense of the word, and yet… Okay, here’s the plot: Paul Cole, an actor, is assaulted by the husband of his current lover, and he lands in the hospital. But on waking up, he finds that his memory is bad—it is like a sieve, full of holes and gaps that he simply cannot fill. Memories are constantly draining from his head, though he remembers who he is, how to dance, and (presumably) how to tie his shoes. I know what you’re thinking: this sounds a lot like Memento! But it isn’t anything like the brilliant Christopher Nolan movie – which I highly recommend. Memory is very much a creature of its own…

The Not-So-Talented Miss Highsmith

Strangers on a Train was Patricia Highsmith’s first published novel, and it was a smash hit. So big, in fact, that a film adaptation was quickly made by the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock. And the first script was written by Raymond Chandler – although venom-filled “creative differences” between Hitch and Raymondo ended up getting Chandler dismissed from the project. The final product is one of Hitchcock’s finest thrillers. But how does the novel compare?

Fans of the film are warned that the book is very, very different from the film. I suspect that many of the differences arose thanks to the Hollywood censors, but if that was the case I can only say “Thank God!” When reviewing Francis Iles’ Before the Fact, which became the film Suspicion, I remarked that Hitchcock could take the silliest stories and turn them into terrific thrillers. My batting average for books-that-become-Hitchcock-films is very low right now: Strangers on a Train is one of those silly stories. And I have no idea why it has such a high reputation.

The Doctor is Out

It wasn’t exactly my intention, but I seem to have accidentally made this week an unofficial “Crippen Week” with my literary choices. I started off the week by reading Peter Lovesey’s excellent The False Inspector Dew, and from there I moved on to Martin Edwards’ Dancing for the Hangman. After the excellent All The Lonely People, I was eager to try another one of the author’s books, and I had already purchased Dancing for the Hangman. So the choice was fairly simple.

The book is a retelling of the story of Dr. H. H. Crippen, a notorious murderer hanged in England in 1910. A fascinating idea, that, and it immediately convinced me to buy the book. But I wasn’t quite sure what I was about to get myself into. Was this going to be a work of non-fiction—a laborious reconstruction of the case with Edwards’ personal theory as to the solution? Or was this going to be a cheerfully fictitious work that invented a wild theory in which Crippen was the victim of a conspiracy? The product descriptions didn’t quite help, so I asked Martin Edwards himself. Here is his reply:

" [It] was conceived as a novel about the character of Crippen that remains true to the established facts, as I understand them, but tries to make psychological sense of them so as to explain the various paradoxes of the case. It's meant to be psychologically plausible, but of course since nobody knows what actually happened, I don't claim this as a definitive interpretation of the case."

Batman Returns

This is the second instalment in my unofficial series on Batman stories. To catch up on why I am doing this, feel free to read the first post in the series, which is also a review of Edward D. Hoch’s The Pirate of Millionaire’s Cove.

***

Although I have yet to read one of his novels, Max Allan Collins is no stranger to me, or to this blog. When I did a series of reviews of hardboiled mysteries, I kicked it off with one of his quotes and agreed with the general sentiment (though I expressed reservation at the generalisation of it). A while ago, he did a slideshow for The Huffington Post where he chose his “game changers” in the mystery genre—not necessarily personal favourites, mind you, but people who really transformed the genre in different ways. And this list was an interesting one! Kudos to Collins for praising Agatha Christie’s characterization and for including Ellery Queen on the list, and also for an excellent defense of Mike Hammer, although it is not a defense that makes me warm up to the character. (Also, the comments are frankly depressing, and if I hear one more person praise an author as “transcending the genre”, it’s to the guillotine for them!)

But I bring up Collins today because as it turns out, he too wrote a Batman adventure that was collected in The Further Adventures of Batman. Entitled The Sound of One Hand Clapping, this is a story that includes Batman’s arch-nemesis, the Clown Prince of Crime—The Joker!

Return of the Crime Scene

Your faithful correspondent in Barcelona

The day after I wrote about Paul Doherty’s The Devil’s Domain, I boarded a flight that would eventually take me to Spain, where as part of a 23-person group, I participated in World Youth Day in Madrid. It was a wonderful experience, and I loved visiting all sorts of lovely places. Barcelona and Porto particularly impressed me as beautiful places with very friendly people. I managed to have all sorts of adventures, including one in which I (with a handful of others) managed to get separated from the rest of the group at around 10 PM in the middle of anti-papal protests. Of course, I wasn’t regarding it as an adventure while I partook in it, but as G. K. Chesterton wrote: “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

Which makes for a wonderfully convenient segue into today’s book review, G. K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn. Like I said last time, I took no mysteries with me, but I took Chesterton’s novel so as not to be bored. I read some of it on long plane rides to Europe and back (for some unfathomable reason, I have never been able to sleep on a moving plane, even if I’m extremely tired), but I ended up having so much fun with my friends that I did not turn a single page of the book while actually in Europe.