An Inconvenient Truth

Harry Vaughan just got a sad piece of news – his uncle has died. But then he finds out that his uncle has left him a massive inheritance! Excitedly, he runs outside… and from there, his memory becomes fuzzy. He doesn’t really remember anything that happened. He was discovered about twenty minutes later by students en route to class. He must have slipped on the icy pavement and knocked himself very solidly on the head. Nobody saw the accident, though…

It all makes sense, of course. That’s why he has that gap in his memory. But something makes Harry very uneasy. Only time will be able to tell whether he’ll ever be able to remember what happened. But in the meantime, he decides to resign from his job and to go back to his roots in Clearwater, a quiet little village just outside of Washington. But no sooner does he arrive, strange things begin to happen. There’s a prowler on the loose, terrorizing the village, and someone seems very displeased that Harry has come back to town…

Retrial

My Lord, members of the jury, the great Internet public, we are gathered here today to re-examine the case against one Gilbert Adair, author of The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, a crime against humanity posing as postmodern literature. When he was placed on trial on the first day of November in the year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, the evidence was overwhelmingly against him. But in the meantime, influential bloggers such as Sergio from Tipping My Fedora pressed the case in Adair’s favour and demanded that it be re-examined. And so we bring the late Gilbert Adair back to trial to examine A Closed Book, a 1999 novel that Sergio regards highly enough to put on his “Top 100 Books” list.

…Okay, I’ve established a connection to my previous Gilbert Adair review, so I think I’ll stop the fake trial here. My original review was a very angry rant written as though I were putting Gilbert Adair on trial for crimes against humanity. He died about a month after I published the review, and I have not changed a word of that review: it stands as an example of just how furious a bad book can make me. However, it seems like putting him on trial all over again would probably be in bad taste… especially since A Closed Book is actually pretty good.

Psycho II

Warning: This book deals with events that began in the 1959 novel Psycho. So if you are unfamiliar with the story, either the novel or the film, please turn away because I will be dealing in spoiler territory.

Much to my misfortune, I have sat through all the Psycho movies. This includes not only the ghastly Gus Van Sant-directed remake, but also the three sequels to the original 1960 film. As you can guess, I’m not a fan of most of these (though I surprisingly enjoyed Psycho IV). They were derivative pieces of schlock that tried to cash in on what the original Psycho was. However, Robert Bloch also wrote two sequels to Psycho. Until now, I’ve never subjected myself to any of them. But I finally decided to take the plunge and try my hand with Psycho II.

In my defense, I was seduced by the plot idea. Psycho II deals with Norman Bates years after the events of Psycho left him psychologically traumatized. He has been institutionalized since, and has slowly but steadily been recovering. Only one day, he snaps and escapes the institution disguised as a nun. His psychologist, Dr. Clairborne, is worried that Norman will go on another killing spree. But his fears are unfounded: Norman’s charred remains are soon discovered in the car he used to escape. It seems that Norman Bates is truly dead… but if that’s the case, who was it who murdered Sam Loomis and his wife Lila, the two people responsible for Norman’s incarceration in the first place?

Psycho

The iconic cover with "cracked" lettering

Life isn’t easy when you’re running a motel in the middle of nowhere. And Norman Bates is doing just that with his life, stuck running the Bates Motel and taking care of his elderly mother, a monster in frilly clothing whose hobbies include psychological torture and preventing her son from having a life away from her. She will go to extreme measures to do this… even commit murder…

… which is precisely what Mother does when Mary Crane comes to the motel, fresh from stealing $40,000 from her employer. Mary is en route to see her fiancé, hoping that the money will help pay off his personal debts and get married sooner. But she decides to drop in at the Bates Motel, where Norman develops a boyish crush on her, even though the years of psychological abuse have left him afraid to so much as touch a woman. Mother doesn’t like this, and so when Mary goes to take a shower, Mother storms into the bathroom:

Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.

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.

It Feels So Good to Be Bad!

Anyone who reads my blog regularly has, by now, noticed two things about me. First off, I’m positively insane. Second, whenever I get introduced to a new author and am very impressed with the book in question, I tend to go on a reading binge. I did this earlier in 2012 with Donald E. Westlake, devouring Dortmunder and Parker novels as though they were potato chips until I realized that I would soon run out of my supplies if I kept at it. But I just can’t learn my lesson, and I’m at serious risk of doing it again with the work of Charlotte Armstrong. The symptoms are all there, and I just got finished reading Armstrong’s novel Mischief.

In Mischief, Mr. and Mrs. Peter O. Jones are on their way to an important social function, where Mr. Jones is due to deliver a speech. They have to leave their daughter Bunny behind, and they planned to leave her at the hotel with Mr. Jones’ sister. But at the last moment, she cancels on them, and they’re forced to scramble around to find a replacement. Fortunately, an elevator operator named Eddie Munro hears of their plight and volunteers the services of his niece, Nell Munro. The Joneses are only too happy to accept Eddie’s offer, but something feels odd the instant Nell steps into room 807…

What Dreams May Come

The Dream Walker is about a young woman named Olivia Hudson, a teacher at a fashionable girls’ school, aged 34. She is narrating her story into a tape recorder as a break from looking at a Portugal-shaped crack in her ceiling. And the tale she tells is a fantastic one: it is the story of a plot to bring down a well-regarded man. But how do you do that? According to Armstrong, you need a crazy plan, one so insane that even when it is exposed it is hard to believe that someone would go to all that trouble to fool people. Such a plot apparently took place.

The target of this plot was John Paul Marcus, a highly respected man whose advice led to Raymond Pankerman’s illegal activities being discovered. Now, Pankerman desires revenge, and right on cue he met Kent Shaw, who devised a brilliant and completely mad plan to bring about Marcus’ downfall. Four people were in on the plot, and Ollie tells us all about it. For although the truth is now known, the damage to Marcus’ reputation has been done, and this is Ollie’s attempt to undo it. But it’s hard work: “Respect is a kind of Humpty Dumpty. All the King’s horses can’t put it all the way up, again.”

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.

Snapshot

Helen Clarvoe is terrified. A girl named Evelyn Merrick has been harassing her and making veiled threats, all while carefully treading a legal line that ensures her victim can’t call the police and have something done about it. But soon, Evelyn decides to expand on her work instead of limiting her victim to Helen Clarvoe. She begins to terrorize everyone connected with Helen, starting with telephone calls and escalating into more and more vicious behaviour…

And so Helen turns to her lawyer, Paul Blackshear, who makes it his mission to track down Evelyn. But things aren’t quite as simple as that might sound. Half of the people who know Evelyn describe her as an insane girl who will destroy herself one of these days. The other half is shocked at the first half, and describe Evelyn as a saint who would do anything for a friend and whose kindness knows no limits. What is the secret behind the enigmatic Evelyn Merrick?

One Hell of a Time

It is wintertime, and the bus struggles to stay on the road in the Québec countryside. The driver finally decides to stop the bus and walks out to fix the snow chains… never to return to the bus. The passengers become anxious and after half an hour decide to look for the driver. They follow footprints to an eerie house, where they are first greeted by gunfire and afterwards, have the door opened for them by Miss Rudd, a woman who is quite cheerfully insane.

Miss Rudd lives in the house with her nurse, Floraine, who is not at all happy to have the bus passengers in the house. She denies seeing the bus driver and claims that nobody has come to the house. She seems quite anxious to get everyone out of the house… but she promptly changes her mind when they all offer to pay for the night’s stay.

Dead fiancées, spirit hands, and Russians! (Oh my!)

Back when I reviewed Paul Gallico’s Too Many Ghosts, I wrote that “From what I can discern, Too Many Ghosts is his only entry into the mystery genre, and it’s a pretty damn good one at that.” As it turns out, this was a lie on my part, and so, I went to confess my literary sins to Father Brown. He advised me that as penance, I should read and review the sequel, The Hand of Mary Constable. So here I am today …

First off, this book is entirely different from its predecessor. Too Many Ghosts was a mix of a supernatural mystery and a comedy, with only a few creepy scenes and a marvellous impossible problem. The Hand of Mary Constable seems to reverse this statement: it has a marvellous atmosphere, but its impossible problem ultimately is not given such an interesting solution.

So the murderer must be somewhere in this house... unless he had very long arms!

You know, usually when I write these reviews, I try to start things on a clever note by starting with some sort of broad statement, and then whittling it down until I get to the book I wish to review itself. I find that I can’t really do this for today’s review. The author in question, Rufus King, is one I had never heard of until I stumbled over a little row of his books on the 10^th floor of the library. I cannot comment on how good or bad an author King was, or what I like or dislike about him— at least not until I get to the main review. Well, enough stalling; today I will be looking at Rufus King’s Somewhere in This House.

This is truly a bizarre book. The events all take place in the same secluded house in the countryside over the course of one night. A maid, Alice Tribeau, has been shot, but luckily she isn’t dead. Lieutenant Valcour is near the scene, and so, along with the man he’s staying with, Dr. Harlan, he goes off to the house to investigate while Harlan treats the young lady.