Booked (and Printed): October 2024

 

Ah, my old friend October skated by with hardly saying hello; or so it felt because the entire month passed in a week. A windstorm stripped the trees of their coloring leaves and the nighttime lows plummeted from the 50s to near freezing. Brrr… But my reading—as it always does this time of year—improved over last month with five books, four novels and a story anthology, and three shorts. My first of the month is Gavin Lyall’s splendid aviation thriller, Shooting Script (1966). Lyall’s work is defined by his imaginative plotting, literate style, and Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue. And Shooting Script, which is Lyall’s fourth published novel, is amongst his best. Keith Carr—a Korean War RAF fighter pilot—operates a struggling one plane Caribbean air cargo service. After Carr is gray-listed by the U.S. Government for false rumors he is flying supplies to revolutionaries in the fictional Republic Libra, he is forced to take a gig flying a camera plane for an American movie crew filming in Jamaica. But as one would suspect there is more going on than meets the eye. There are echoes of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a bigger-than-life actor with a resemblance to John Wayne, right-wing politics and all, and a creative use for a rusting old B-25 bomber. Shooting Script is about as good as a mid-century thriller gets. Chuck Dixon’s vigilante tale, Levon’s Trade (2012), came next. I’d heard good things about Levon’s Trade and its eleven sequels. It is well-written and entertaining, but there’s not much original here. It’s the same book that has been written over and over since Don Pendleton introduced The Executioner in 1969, but if you like this stuff, you can do a lot worse than Levon’s Trade. Eight Very Bad Nights, edited by Tod Goldberg (2024), is a solidly entertaining anthology featuring eleven new crime and thriller stories set during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. In a phrase, it’s good fun—check my detailed review here. There was a time when I read horror; a lot of horror. And one of my favorite writers from that long ago era is Jack Ketchum. His most popular work tends to be gross-out, ultra-violent slasher stuff; e.g. Off Season (1980), Offspring (1991). But categorizing Ketchum’s writing, even at its most depraved, with the norm in the slasher and splatter-punk subgenres is like comparing a BMW with a Yugo. Ketchum wrote with vigor and style. His tales unfailingly revealed something about humanity; even if that revelation is uncomfortable. So for Halloween this season I reread Ketchum’s 1984 novel, Hide and Seek. I originally read it twenty years ago and I had forgotten almost everything except the climactic sequence and its Maine setting. It’s a demented haunted house tale about five kids playing a game of hide and seek in an abandoned house. It’s damn good, too, but only if you like horror and don’t mind a bit of graphic violence. Penance (1996) is David Housewright’s first novel. You’ve likely noticed—if you read the blog regularly—I’m a fan of Housewright’s Rushmore McKenzie mysteries. But Penance features a former St. Paul, Minnesota cop turned P.I. named Holland Taylor. It’s obviously a first novel. The voice isn’t as strong as Housewright’s subsequent books and the plot is overly complicated. But it’s fun watching Taylor spin around a murder investigation that takes him all the way to the State House. And Penance really is good (just not as good as Housewright has become in the decades since).

The number of short stories I read in October dropped from the previous month, but two of the three were novellas. The first is Ed Gorman’s post-apocalyptic, “Survival” (1995). A novella that was originally published in Gorman’s collection, Cages, “Survival” is a rare so-so tale from Ed. The idea is cool: Fascist religious terrorists demolish humanity with nuclear weapons and the survivors band together in hospitals where they are treated, without medicine, for the after-effects of the blasts. The plotting is a bit confusing, but the premise and characters are interesting enough to make it worthwhile. “Dracula Wine,” by David Housewright (2021)—the 22nd installment of the multi-author A Grifter’s Song series—is a satisfying caper about a con-woman taking a businessman to the cleaners. It’s good fun with a smooth twist. Jeremiah Healy’s “Battered Spouse” (1990) is my favorite of Healy’s John Francis Cuddy shorts. Cuddy is called in when a jogger is killed by a hit-and-run driver to drum up something the police may have missed, which he does, of course—read my detailed review here. Fin— Now on to next month…