007 Reloaded: The Spy Who Loved Me

Vivienne Michel is your typical French-Canadian-girl-who-was-orphaned-and-therefore-sent-to-England-to-become-a-lady-but-ended-up-losing-her-virginity-and-worked-in-a-newspaper-office-where-she-had-another-love-affair-before-that-ended-in-an-abortion-and-so-she-returned-to-Canada-and-decided-to-go-on-a-road-trip-via-her-Vespa-which-she-bought-in-England-all-the-way-to-Florida. There, I just saved you from reading Part I of this book. By 'this book', I mean Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me, and it’s supposed to be a James Bond adventure. So where is Bond? Who is Vivienne? And who are the nasty characters who are holding her hostage at the Dreamy Pines Motor Court, a motel in the Adirondacks?

The Spy Who Loved Me is a bit of an interruption in the “Blofeld trilogy” of novels where Bond chases after Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his organisation SPECTRE. Blofeld never appears in this novel, but reference is made to SPECTRE and that is why Bond eventually comes onstage. He stumbles across the Dreamy Pines Motor Court by accident, and finds there Vivienne Michel being held hostage by two nasty-looking gunmen. A fight ensues, St. Patrick drives the metaphorical snakes out of the motel, and claims his prize.

Dead Men Tell No Tales

I’ve recently been hired at the university library as a general shelver, and as a result, I now spend 13 hours a week at the library. I haunt the place to death anyhow, but the difference is I now get paid for it. To my delight, I discovered that the job wasn’t particularly formal—more casual—and I learned that if I felt so inclined, I could listen to audiobooks during my shift. I didn’t need to be prompted twice, and as a result, I listened to Rex Stout’s Where There’s a Will, finishing it in practically one day.

Noel Hawthorne was a very, very rich man, and when he died in a hunting accident, his family was consoled in the knowledge that they could comfort themselves with Noel’s money. What a shock, then, when they discover that Noel’s sisters (April, May, and June) get nothing but fruit— a peach, an apple, and a pear! Noel then left his wife a mere half million, and after some other legacies, the rest of the estate, about seven million or so, is left to his mistress, Naomi Karn.

My friend Daedalus

Paul Halter’s Le Crime de Dédale (The Crime of Daedalus) has an idea at its core that has haunted and fascinated me since I first heard of it. Throw everything you know about Greek mythology into the dust bin: Paul Halter tackles the impossible crime with Ancient Greece as a backdrop and mythological characters taking roles in his story. Le Crime de Dédale is a fascinating book with two storylines: one takes place in Ancient Greece, and the other takes place in 1937.

The book opens in 1937 with Professor Lewis Newcomb making an incredible discovery on the island of Crete. Unfortunately, Paul Halter, that perpetual prankster, withholds the discovery from his readers for several chapters. In the meanwhile, you witness a strange series of events: Newcomb’s team of archaeologists opened a tomb a few days before the Incredible Discovery. This tomb came complete with its very own ancient curse, and right on schedule, one of the team members falls to his doom, winding up impaled on a bull’s horn carved out of stone.

Dead for a ducat

Like so many detectives before me, I found myself searching for a man's lost daughter. My case began last year. The girl I sought was a Californian, 17 years old. She lived in Santa Barbara. One winter night, she was driving home drunk from a party and struck and killed an 11-year-old boy. If I were the Continental Op, Dashiell Hammett's detective, the girl would be the wealthy daughter of a Manchu provincial leader now living in exile up in San Francisco. If I were Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the girl would be the reckless daughter of an oil tycoon (…) Finally, if I were Lew Archer, Ross Macdonald's gentle but edgy investigator (…), the girl would be the daughter of a Santa Teresa pharmacist who had discovered that her father was not her father, but a man being blackmailed for 17 years by the president of a shipping company because her real father is the president's brother, the captain of an oil tanker who knocked up the girl's mother when he discovered her as a young stowaway aboard his ship hiding from her boyfriend, the pharmacist, who was then a young bank robber on the lam from a foiled job where he shot and killed a teller who was the mother of the captain's wife, who in turn was mother of the little boy the girl ran down (her half-brother).

—David Bowman, The Case of the Brokenhearted Father

Raymond Chandler is known for creating mean streets on which his detective, Phillip Marlowe, would walk. Ross Macdonald, however, took the hardboiled genre in a new direction by creating Lew Archer, a private detective who was sensitive. The Zebra-Striped Hearse was published in 1962, three years after 1959’s The Galton Case, which kicked off this series of hardboiled reviews. Perhaps it’s appropriate to come full circle and end this series by returning to the beginning… if that makes sense. If it doesn’t…. hey, it’s a Ross Macdonald novel.

We like to get the trial over with quickly, because it's the sentence that's really the fun!

It’s rare for me to be thoroughly disgusted by a novel. There have been plenty of unpleasant reading experiences, such as Anthony Wynne’s The Toll House Murder or Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. I have been alarmed a handful of times, such as with a disturbing central character in Peter Lovesey’s Mad Hatter’s Holiday. But until now, only George Baxt’s The Affair at Royalties had thoroughly disgusted me— I can now add Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury to the list.

Spillane was once the most vilified writer in America. His hero, Mike Hammer, is as politically incorrect as they come. He refuses to forgive the Japanese for the war, he plays games with his secretary, he sleeps with every woman he comes into contact with on the job, and he threatens or beats up half the suspects he interrogates. And that’s just the first few chapters.

So Long, My Sweet

Earlier this year, I attempted to struggle through Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and failed. The book started off well, but at the point at which I gave up, the plot was going nowhere, you could see the ending coming for miles ahead, and it was so overly padded that I simply couldn’t face the prospect of finishing the book. I put it down, wrote a harshly negative and sarcastic series of comments, and concluded that, after all, Raymond Chandler couldn’t write, and his stories were no more realistic than those he blasted in his famous essay The Simple Art of Murder.

So perhaps it’s only fair to give Raymond Chandler another go. My motives were not entirely altruistic; I’ve been preparing to paint my room, putting all my books into boxes and the like (which, by the way, resulted in my desk falling apart yesterday, which will make a lovely start to the school year). So I’ve been listening to an audiobook, and Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely was the only one of his I could find which I hadn’t read yet. I had no intention of returning to the frankly incompetent The Big Sleep, and my thoughts on The Long Goodbye are already well-known.

[insert name-related pun here]

The last time I looked at a Bill Pronzini novel, it was Camouflage, the latest entry in the Nameless Detective series, published in June of this year. It is somewhat fitting then that I return to the series with Blowback, the fourth book in the series, published in 1977. My copy of the book comes complete with a quote that declares the main character is “an immensely likable addition to the roster of private investigators”. It slightly shocked me when I realized that the quote was attributed to my favourite author of all-time, John Dickson Carr. In 1978, the year my edition was printed, Carr could still sell books. My, how times change.

Blowback is a fairly short novel, but it is jam-packed with events. It all starts when the Nameless Detective gets a call from an old friend and fellow WWII veteran, Harry Burroughs. Harry owns and runs a small fishing camp, and invites Nameless to spend some time there, as he would like to ask him a favour. Nameless is waiting for results of a test—he has a lesion on one of his lungs and is waiting to hear whether it is benign or malignant. Waiting it out alone over the weekend doesn’t sound like much fun, so he decides to accept Harry’s invitation.

Murder on Air

It might seem like an odd choice to review a novel by William L. DeAndrea in this series of hardboiled reviews. But in this case, I think the choice is defensible: Killed in the Ratings (DeAndrea’s first novel) is far more hardboiled than later entries in the Matt Cobb series. The book deservedly won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and DeAndrea would follow it up impressively, winning another Edgar the following year for The Hog Murders. (Here’s an interesting bit of trivia—looking at the dust jacket of Killed in the Ratings, it seems that DeAndrea originally planned to call his second book The Serial Murders.)

Are you a detective?

Macdonald constructed his plots rather than improvise them, thereby merging his novelist’s concern for his themes with the reader’s desire for a good (and fairly clued) mystery. The plot was everything with Macdonald. Beginning with The Galton Case (1959) (…) all Macdonald’s novels have the same plot. A murder in the past traumatizes a child and poisons the present, threatening a relationship and causing more murders. The themes of child’s loss of parent and parent’s loss of child (Macdonald experienced both) are rendered poignantly again and again.

—William DeAndrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa

Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald

When I moved, I started to attend Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational School. This is the same high school that Margaret Millar and her husband Kenneth Millar (better known under his pseudonym Ross Macdonald) attended. For what it’s worth, I despised the school, which is full to the brim of bad memories for me. I don’t recall a single enjoyable day I had between those walls, and returning for a single evening to obtain a diploma was one the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I left five minutes after the general reunion got underway.

Perhaps it’s one of the reasons I’ve been interested with the work of Ross Macdonald, a prolific writer of hardboiled mysteries starring private eye Lew Archer. I have no idea how he and his wife enjoyed the high school experience, but I walked through the same corridors as they did for a few years. What really surprises me is how long it’s taken me to read something by Macdonald: I decided to acquaint myself with his work through The Galton Case, which he apparently considered the book in which he broke off from the influence of Raymond Chandler and started writing his own way.

"Name is a fence and within it you are nameless."

I’ve just noticed a pattern between today’s review and my last one, The Devotion of Suspect X. Both books were published just this year, in 2011— and today’s book, Bill Pronzini’s Camouflage, was published just earlier this month! So this really is the newest book I’ve ever reviewed!

I have quickly become highly enthusiastic over the work of Bill Pronzini, particularly his Nameless Detective series. Since reading Hoodwink, I’ve gone on to read several books by Pronzini— I consider him one of the finest talents in the mystery field today.

It surprised me somewhat to see Nameless named in Camouflage— Tamara, his partner, refers to him as “Bill” at one point. (Huh. I think I can guess where Pronzini got that one from.) No last name to report as of yet …

Pig of Many Lives

Although The Case of the Late Pig has points of interest, I’m not entirely convinced it is a great starting point for newcomers to Margery Allingham. It is an enjoyable read, and in many ways a black comedy. It is a remarkably short book, barely over short story length. The edition I have is a 138-page Penguin. So the book practically flies by, and it’s amusing and so on. So what’s wrong with it?

Well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what, if anything, is wrong with the book. But I do know this: it was a confusing introduction to the Allingham universe. Perhaps it is because this is such an uncharacteristic novel for her. From what I can discern, it is the only time a book is narrated by Albert Campion, Allingham’s sleuth. He’s a fun enough type, who feels rather like a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but something about his narration is just… off. Then there are the various supporting characters, and some of their roles still have me confused. I’m not sure if they’re recurring characters, one-offs, or what. Allingham’s stylistic traits, as recounted by her sleuth, just seem odd and ended up confusing me in a few segments.