THE KEYS OF HELL by Jack Higgins

This is the fourth part of an essay about the six novels Jack Higgins wrote featuring Paul Chavasse titled "Paul Chavasse: An Introduction to the Cold War Spy Story".  The novels were written throughout the 1960s, and owe much to both the James Bond and Matt Helm novels.  The novels were published as by Martin Fallon, and before you read this post, you should read the first two segments of the essay here and here and here to put this post in context.

The Keys of Hell was published in the U. K. by Abelard-Schumann in 1965, while it made its U. S. debut as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback (1-3673-6) in the 1970s.  It appeared in the United States after The Eagle Has Landed made Patterson a bestseller, with an attractive cover painting by Gordon Johnson.  It was reissued, in similar fashion to Year of the Tiger, by Berkley as a paperback in 2001.  The Berkley edition included two additional chapters; one at the opening and one at the end.  This time Chavasse is in 1995 Manhattan, and is presented with a case study of his exploits in 1965 Albania.  The inclusion of the introductory chapter is more successful in Keys, and it includes a humorous piece of dialogue, which explains both Patterson’s writing style and Paul Chavasse perfectly—

“‘This man is what?  Half English, half French.  He speaks more languages than you’ve had hot dinners.  University degrees coming out of his ears.  In spite of all that, a killer by nature.’” 

Keys was my introduction to Paul Chavasse and I have a soft spot for it.  It opens in Milan, Italy—Chavasse has freshly returned from an assignment in Albania, where he was reconnoitering the anticommunist underground, which is more or less defunct, since the sigurmi has swept it up.  After he briefs The Chief he is given an assignment to take care of a double agent, and then he is ordered to take a three week holiday.  A few days into his vacation Chavasse is lured, without sanction from The Bureau, back to Albania to recover the Black Madonna, a religious icon a Catholic group attempted to smuggle out of the country, and the communist Albanian government wants destroyed. 

Chavasse garners the help of an Italian smuggler named Guilio Orsini to make a quick run into the marshy delta of the Buene River in Northern Albania, where a small launch reportedly carrying the Madonna was sunk by the Albanian Navy.  They plan a quick in and out trip, but when they arrive the Albanian’s are waiting.  Chavasse is quickly alone—his party all captured—on the sparsely populated Albanian coast.  It doesn’t take him long to find a few friendly natives, and a way into the ancient castle his friends are being held.  It also doesn’t take long for him to end up in one of the cells, and it takes Chavasse’s patented mixture of violence and wit to find his way out again.

Keys is one of the shorter Paul Chavasse novels—it runs well shy of 50,000 words—but it is one of the more illuminating regarding the character of Paul Chavasse.  He is portrayed as something close to an antihero.  He has always been a man of extreme violence, but his violence has seemingly been manifested in his struggle against tyranny.  However, in a single line of dialogue, Chavasse turns his motives from a soldier of democracy to something very close to a thug—

“‘If I’d been born in Germany twenty years earlier, I’d probably have ended up in the Gestapo.’”

This development of Chavasse as something short of a heroic character is a significant development in both Paul Chavasse as a character and Harry Patterson as a writer.  Patterson has always had a tendency to create protagonists that fall far short of their perceived station in life—an educated gentleman who chooses violence over a refined life—but they are rarely simple thugs who enjoy violence for violence.  This separation of Chavasse as a run of the mill protagonist is a mile post in Patterson’s development as a writer.  This treatment of Paul Chavasse as a violent semi-thug is a marked difference from the Paul Chavasse portrayed in The Testament of Caspar Schultz. 

The revised edition of Keys is the first novel to introduce Chavasse as “Sir Paul Chavasse.”  It introduces his birth date, Paris, 1928, his education:  Sorbonne, Cambridge, and Harvard.  He is identified as a Third Secretary of The Bureau, and Smirnoff is his favorite vodka.    

Free for Nook and Kindle

Tyrus Books is offering the classic Robert Ward novel Red Baker free for both Nook and Kindle.  Today, July 14, 2012, is the final day.  It includes an introduction by Daniel Woodrell, and it received a starred review from Booklist.  The description at B&N reads:  

“When Red Baker, a Larmel steel worker in Baltimore, Maryland, gets laid off from his job he goes crazy: boozing, attempted philandering, running away from his future. Filled with unforgettable characters from Red’s angry but loyal wife, Wanda; his basketball-star son, Ace; his lifelong friend Dog, a casualty of the layoff; and Crystal, the go-go dancer at Lily’s bar who embodies Red’s fantasies of escape. Red Baker is a classic American novel about a man with no identity who tries to replace the one he’s lost.

“Set in the world of the hard-working men of the steel mills, this acclaimed work tells the story of an unemployed steelworker who drinks, nearly loses his wife, and decides to come back fighting.”

The Nook edition is here and the Kindle edition is here.

YEAR OF THE TIGER by Jack Higgins

Signet Edition

This is the third part of an essay about the six novels Jack Higgins wrote featuring Paul Chavasse titled "Paul Chavasse: An Introduction to the Cold War Spy Story".  The novels were written throughout the 1960s, and owe much to both the James Bond and Matt Helm novels.  The novels were published as by Martin Fallon, and before you read this post, you should read the first two segments of the essay here and here to put this post in context.

Year of the Tiger made its debut in 1963.  It was published by Abelard-Schumann in the U. K., but to my knowledge it is the only novel featuring Paul Chavasse, which was never published in the United States in its original form.  It was released in 1996 by Berkley as a paperback in an updated version—Patterson added chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, which featured Chavasse as The Bureau Chief in 1995 London and presented the story as a reminisce. 

While I haven’t seen the original edition, the style of the writing and the plotline indicate it unlikely other significant changes were made.  It has a far flung plot that features a new type of energy for space travel, a rescue mission to Tibet, Chinese communists and an alluring Tibetan woman. 

Chavasse, after his participation in the safe passage of the Dalai Lama from Tibet in 1959, is assigned to infiltrate Tibet and escort a British missionary named Dr Karl Hoffner safely out of the country.  Dr Hoffner has developed a mathematical theory, which would allow for “space to be twisted…until it becomes an energy field.”  While the Chinese are unaware of Hoffner’s recent success with his decades old theory, the British Government is alerted by one of Hoffner’s oldest friends, and it wants him, and his theory, back in the West. 

Berkley Edition

Harper Edition

The story moves quickly from London to Tibet; Chavasse is smuggled across the Indian border and assumes the identity of a Soviet journalist writing a story about Hoffner.  The game turns sour, however, and Chavasse finds himself in the local Chinese garrison’s stockade—a predicament he is often in throughout the series.  It takes Chavasse’s usual mixture of wit and muscle, and a little help from friendly locals, to get out of the jam.  Then he is forced to collect Hoffner, with the game blown, and smuggle him across the high mountains of Tibet, with a platoon of Chinese Army regulars on his trail, to freedom.

Year of the Tiger is probably the weakest of the Paul Chavasse novels, but it still has the same presence and entertainment value as the others in the series.  Not to mention it has all the hallmarks of early Jack Higgins—it is quick, spirited, heavy with a stark and meaningful atmosphere, and really, really fun.

THE TESTAMENT OF CASPAR SCHULTZ by Jack Higgins

Fawcett Gold Medal

This is the second part of an essay about the six novels Jack Higgins wrote featuring Paul Chavasse titled "Paul Chavasse: An Introduction to the Cold War Spy Story".  The novels were written throughout the 1960s, and owe much to both the James Bond and Matt Helm novels.  The novels were published as by Martin Fallon, and before you read this post, you should read the first segment of the essay here to put this post in context.

 

The first, and one of the better to feature Paul Chavasse, was originally titled The Testament of Caspar Schultz.  It was published in the U. K. as a hardcover with a limited print run by Abelard-Schuman in 1962, and made its U. S. debut—in a strikingly brilliant silver cover—as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback (13963-8).  It features a straight forward plot.  A high ranking Nazi named Caspar Schultz has written his memoirs.  It is reputed to be an expose of German and British power brokers sympathetic to the fascist regime, including the man who was to act as the Reich’s Quisling after the successful German invasion of England.  

Schultz’s aide is shopping the manuscript to publishers, and makes the mistake of enquiring a German publisher with fascist sympathies.  The Nazi underground is quickly on his trail, with the goal of destroying both Schultz and the manuscript.  The Bureau is brought into the chase when a British publisher is approached to publish the manuscript and Chavasse is enlisted to meet Schultz’s aide and arrange to acquire the manuscript.

Harper Collins

It is a seemingly simple job, but Chavasse is ambushed on the train he is to meet the aide, and he spends the rest of the story trying to catch up with events.  On the way he meets two Israeli spies tracking Schultz as a war criminal, a bevy of heavies from the underground Nazi movement, an unexpected romance—the only he is to enjoy over the entire series—a friendly German Secret Service agent, and a surprising betrayal. 

Testament is the most personal of the Chavasse novels.  It shows Chavasse as something approaching a cynical romantic.  While in Germany he meets an Israeli agent, Anna Hartmann, and he is immediately smitten.  The two make plans to leave the game, but as nothing happens as it should, Paul Chavasse ends the novel in the same place it opened—alone.        

Berkley

Testament was republished as The Bormann Testament in 2006.  The only noticeable change is the Nazi leader morphs from Caspar Schultz to Martin Bormann, which is explained in a brief Foreword as the original title, but due to perceived legal implications it was changed from the real life Martin Bormann to the fictional Caspar Schultz.  The assertion that Schultz was originally intended to be Bormann is supported by an early passage that describes Bormann’s failed attempt to escape Berlin in a tank.  Bormann was never conclusively found after the war; however, it is widely believed he committed suicide outside a railway station on May 2, 1945.

Free for Nook and Kindle

Prologue Books is offering a free eBook version of Gil Brewer's The Brat.  It is free through today.

"She looked at the rotting, sun-blasted shack, the one room where they all lived, slept, made love, died. Looked at the dusty lawn where no grass grew. At the steaming swamp, at her tobacco-spitting mother. Saw the sly, lustful eyes of her father’s friends. Then she looked at her own lush beauty.
Get me out of here, she prayed. Oh, please get me out of here! I’ll pay any price."

The Nook version is here and the Kindle is here.

Two Free eBooks For Nook and Kindle

This post is a little late, but Prologue Books, which is a subsidiary of F+W Media is offering two free eBooks for Nook and Kindle.  The titles:  The Screwball King Murder by Kin Platt, and The Evil Friendship by Vin Packer.  They are both available until July 1, 2012.

If you are unfamiliar with Prologue it is a real treat.  It has issued dozens (probably hundreds) of genre classics--crime, western, science fiction and fantasy--in eBook format.  A few of its authors are Robert Colby, Vin Packer, Talmage Powell, Wade Miller, Peter Rabe, Jack Webb, Louis Trimble, and Mike Barry (Barry Malzberg).  The books range between $3 and $4, and bring a fistful of entertainment.  You can check out Prologue's catalog at it website--here.   

The Screwball King by Kin Platt.  Platt is an author I'm unfamiliar with, but it appears to be a pretty good sports mystery.  It was originally published in 1978 by Random House and features private investigator Max Roper.  If it's good, Prologue has an impressive list of Platt's work available.

The Evil Friendship by Vin Packer.  Packer is a known quantity.  Her work is among the best produced in the mystery / crime genre in the 1950s and 60s.  Friendship was originally published in 1958 by Gold Medal, and you really can't go wrong with a freebie. 

I. ASIMOV: A MEMOIR

Bantam Paperback Edition

Shortly after Isaac Asimov’s death in 1992 his memoir I. Asimov was released by Doubleday.  It is a series of essays Asimov wrote, seemingly, from the narrative and the date of its publication, on his death bed.  The book meanders—it starts at childhood, but jumps forward to his early writing career, and then back.  It is a patchwork of related postcards rather than a chronological narrative of his life, and it works very well.  

The essays run about four or five pages—sometimes longer, sometimes shorter—and cover a specific event, person, or idea.  He discusses his early life in detail; specifically, working in his parent’s Brooklyn candy store as a boy surrounded by the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, which he wasn’t allowed to read until he convinced his father the science fiction magazines were about science. 

The bulk of the book is devoted to his literary life, which, in his own estimation was his life.  In several sections of the book he wrote he would rather write than anything else.  He did not enjoy travel, and while he did enjoy the company of others, he did not tend to seek it out, and, especially in his early years, he had difficulty getting along and making friends. 

He touches on his major works—The Foundation series—specifically the original trilogy—“Nightfall,” “The Ugly Little Boy” and many others.  He freely admits he enjoyed writing nonfiction more than fiction, and in fact, he considered himself a much more accomplished writer of nonfiction.  A sentiment I tend to agree with; however I enjoyed the original Foundation trilogy immensely when I read it as a teenager.

The most interesting essays in I. Asimov are the short pieces he wrote about his experiences with other science fiction writers.  He had lifelong relationships with many writers, some of whom were part of the science fiction fan club The Futurians.  The Futurians, as Asimov describes it, was an off shoot of the Queens Science Fiction club.  The split occurred because the Queens club wanted science fiction to keep itself above politics, and specifically not speak out against fascism, which was spreading across Europe at the time, and The Futurians wanted fascism denounced.   The Futurians included Frederick Pohl, who has written extensively about the club on his blog at (http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/), Cyril M. Kornbluth, and Donald A. Wollheim. 

He also writes admiringly of John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction (ASF), who gave Asimov his first real hope of publishing his science fiction stories and also, later, gave him the idea for his short story “Nightfall”.  The seed for the story came from a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay titled “Nature”.  

Asimov seemingly knew everyone writing science fiction in the 1940s through the 80s.  A few of the more interesting comments Asimov makes about his contemporaries follows.

H. L. Gold.  Gold was the editor of Galaxy; a top tier science fiction magazine where Asimov placed several stories.  Gold was an ill-tempered editor, who changed story narratives and titles, and replied with meanness when the authors objected.  Galaxy serialized Asimov’s novel The Stars, Like Dust and changed the title to Tyrann; “Worst of all was his [Gold had a] pernicious habit of writing insulting rejection letters.”              

Robert Heinlein.  Heinlein is considered the father of modern science fiction, and Asimov worked with him during World War II, as a civilian employee of the Naval Air Experimental Station (NAES) in Philadelphia.  Asimov wrote that he and Heinlein had an uneven friendship.  He quipped about Heinlein: 

“…although a flaming liberal during the war, Heinlein became a rock-ribbed far-right conservative immediately afterward.  This happened at just the time he changed wives from liberal woman, Leslyn, to a rock-ribbed far right conservative woman, Virginia.”

Clifford D. Simak.  In 1938 when Asimov was still a teenager he wrote a letter to ASF regarding Simak’s story “Rule 18”; he didn’t like the story much.  Simak wrote a polite letter to Asimov inquiring what he didn’t like about the story.  In response to Simak’s letter Asimov wrote:

“…I promptly reread [it]…and I found, to my intense embarrassment, that it was a very good story and that I liked it.”  

I. Asimov doesn’t have the depth and detail of an autobiography.  It has the feel of a congenial conversation, but it seemingly reveals his character, and he makes a point to highlight his flaws.  It is an appealing book written by one of science fiction’s most well known writers, and it is more entertaining and enlightening than I would have imagined. 

Jack M. Bickham's Black Bat Mystery Titles

Bobbs-Merrill Edition

In the early- to mid-1970s Bobbs-Merrill, as part of its Black Bat Mystery line, published four early suspense novels written by Jack M. Bickham.  The four titles were published as by “John Miles”, a pseudonym Mr Bickham used primarily for his early crime and suspense novels, and later for his whodunits.  The publication of the Black Bat Mystery titles was a landmark in his career.  It represented the change of Bickham’s writing focus from westerns to mystery and suspense.

The John Miles nom de plume was first used by Bickham on his nifty little 1961 crime novel Dally with a Deadly Doll (Ace, D-489).  Over the next decade he used the Miles brand sparingly, choosing instead to write westerns under his own name and as by “Jeff Clinton”.  The titles published with the Clinton moniker featured a brawling red-headed series character named Wildcat O’Shea.  He later published a handful of non series westerns under the pseudonym, and a single science fiction novel titled Kane’s Odyssey (1976).

Detective Book Club Edition

In 1973 the Miles brand was dusted off and used for a slim hardcover titled The Night Hunters.  It was the first, and best, of four Bickham titles to be published by Bobbs-Merrill over the next two years.  The Black Bat titles fit squarely in the suspense mold—not necessarily traditional mystery, but with a crime aspect, which tended towards amateur criminals.  Two are heist novels—The Silver Bullet Gang (1974) and Operation Nightfall (1975)—and another, an entertaining, but standard extortionist tale titled The Blackmailer (1974).

While all four titles are entertaining, The Night Hunters is a masterpiece.  It is a rural suspense story built around a young woman named Ruth Baxter.  Ms Baxter stops in the small town of Noble, Oklahoma to research family genealogy for her uncle, but the place is less than friendly.  A local cop threatens her off, and the townspeople act strangely hostile towards her.  The plot is built perfectly to maintain the slow build of tension, and the mystery is strong.  It has the teeth to have been a bestseller in 1973 when it was released, but for whatever reason it didn’t get the push from the publisher it needed.

Berkley-Medallion

It’s a shame the titles are all out-of-print, and to my knowledge have been for decades, because each has held up well over the passing years—The Night Hunters is the strongest and The Blackmailer is the weakest.  Jack Bickham’s Black Bat Mystery titles would make a terrific addition to a small publisher’s catalog of classic e-books and maybe even POD.          

Jack M. Bickham’s Black Bat Mystery novels:

The Night Hunters (1973)
The Blackmailer (1974)
The Silver Bullet Gang (1974)
Operation Nightfall (1975) - Read the Gravetapping review.  

Jack M. Bickham’s “John Miles” novels:

Dally with a Deadly Doll (1961)
Trouble Trails (1963)
Female Animal (1970)
A Permanent Retirement (1992)
Murder in Retirement (1994)
A Most Deadly Retirement (1995)
Tenoclock Scholar (1996)

Pete "Black Jack" Ketchum, R.I.P.

Pete, April 27, 2004 - March 20, 2012

Pete was a strange cat.  He enjoyed car rides, the park, and he tolerated change at the worst, and seemed to enjoy it at the best.  He was named for an outlaw, but he was everything but an outlaw.  He was a clown, curmudgeon, scientist—he tested gravity at every chance, and never failed to be mildly disappointed with the results—but mostly he was a companion and friend. 

We adopted Pete as a kitten from the Humane Society and it took him less than thirty minutes to make our home his—he was on my lap before the sun set, and that night he slept next to me on my pillow.  It took him even less time to steal our hearts.  He was rambunctious and so damn playful he never failed to make us smile. 

Our kitchen had linoleum flooring, and Pete would run to the end of the hall that led to the kitchen, get his steam up, and hit the linoleum under full power, extend his claws and slide across like it was ice.  He did that so many times I worried the flooring would flake into nothing.

He loved to play fetch—not with a ball, but with a wadded piece of tin foil.  When Pete wanted to play, he would drop the ball in a lap—any lap would do—and look at the lap’s owner expectantly with his big green eyes.  If the human didn’t throw, Pete would nudge the ball with his nose, look back with an insolent tilt of his head and unleash an impatient grunt.  As a kitten Pete wanted to play fetch all day, every day, and he liked it best when the tin foil ball was thrown across the kitchen floor, which allowed him to combine his favorite two pursuits—skidding across the linoleum on his claws and snagging a two-hopper with his teeth.  And damn if he didn't do it nearly every time.

As Pete matured into adulthood he lost some of his zest for fetch, but he found other ways to amuse himself.  We lived in a duplex in a rural Utah college town, and across the street three young men shared a house.  Pete would sit on the window ledge for hours watching the neighbors—they were the type of guys who “stored” four wheelers in the beds of their pickups, drank beer in the front yard on lawn chairs, chatted up the plump blonde next door, and took about a week to mow their lawn, one stripe at a time, followed by a can of Coors, followed by another stripe of lawn.  And Pete saw it all from his perch.

Pete also enjoyed the occasional trip to the park for bird watching, but his favorite activity, better than eating, playing, testing gravity with a shove of the nearest item not bolted to the counter, was sitting and preening on a lap.  He could, and did, do it for hours at a time.  His personal hygiene was beyond reproach.  The balance and coordination it took to keep himself anchored to the lap with at least one of his hind legs sticking straight in the air and his long body folded into unreasonable angles was a wonder to witness.  It was better and more impressive than competitive gymnastics and twice as fun because it was interactive—you could create obstacles for him, such as spread your legs a little farther apart, give him a gentle push with a finger at the right moment, distract him with a hand, and watch him recover with seemingly effortless coordination and athleticism. And of course give you that impatient grunt.

But Pete’s best quality was his pure, unalterable acceptance of my family.  He never failed to meet us at the front door; although he generally tried to pass it off as coincidence.  He never failed to make me laugh, and if I wanted to play he did to, or nap, or just sit.  He didn’t seem to care so long as he could be part of what we were doing.   Pete was a wonderful little friend, and his journey with us ended far too soon.  One day he was the old Pete, prowling around the house looking for trouble and the next he was a shadow of himself.  He lost three pounds in as many weeks, and when we finally realized something was wrong it was too late.

He stopped eating; slowly at first because it took us a few days to realize his food bowl wasn’t emptying as quickly as usual.  Then he stopped drinking.  We took him to the vet sometime before he completely gave up nourishment, but the blood tests came back normal.  We scheduled an ultrasound a few days later, and the news was bad; he had cancer—three tumors and god knows how many nodes in his abdomen—with a terminal prognosis.  It was about my hardest day, and the decision was awful, but we decided it was best to end his pain and he died laying across my lap at approximately 5:20 PM Tuesday March 20, 2012; the first day of spring and five weeks from his eighth birthday. 

Pete was a terrific little guy, and while his life wasn’t big, it brightened our lives, and I hope he enjoyed living with us as much as we enjoyed living with him.

The Leo Guild Novels

It has been twenty-three years since a slim novel published by M. Evans and Company introduced a half-broken former lawman turned bounty hunter named Leo Guild. He appeared in four titles. The first, Guild, appeared in 1987 and the last, Dark Trail, was published in 1990. Guild was Ed Gorman’s first published western, and it is different than much of what the genre has to offer, but it can still be planted, somewhat askew and off-balance, into the definition of a traditional western. There is a hero, a damsel, and villain. 

Click HERE for the rest...

A Moving Tide...

This is the last post here at Gravetapping, but it is certainly not the last post I will make because there is a new blog where I will share my shameless rambles. A blog titled Dark City Underground. A blog that will feature the same eclectic content as Gravetapping.

Click HERE to go there now.

DARK MOUNTAIN by Richard Laymon

Scott and Flash are old Air Force buddies. They served together in Vietnam, and while they have grown apart over the years since the war they are still friends. The two men decide it’s time to renew acquaintances and plan a joint backpacking trip into the backcountry of central California. It is a trip that both families are looking forward too, with the exception of the usual grousing from Scott’s teenage daughter Julie, and Flash’s twin girls. It doesn’t help Julie’s mood that Scott’s new girlfriend, Karen, is along.

The troupe sets off on a weeklong pack trip in good spirits. Their route is set, and the terrain is rugged and more than a little beautiful. The two older children—Julie and Flash’s teenage son Nick—take an instant liking to each other. The families congeal nicely, and Mr Laymon deftly creates their interpersonal discourse and squabbles with his usual light and charming touch. The dialogue and patter have the flair of both likability and believability. 

 

The trip takes a downward turn when one the Flash’s twin girls sprains her ankle and the group has to make an unplanned stop for the day at an ugly treeless lake called Lower Mesquite. The park ranger told them to steer clear of the lake because there are several lakes with much more to offer. The group, however, makes the best of the unplanned stop and settles in for the night. Unfortunately their trip takes another unpleasant turn when Karen is brutally attacked in the short hours of the night.

Dark Mountain is an example of what Richard Laymon did well—its characters are likable, in that foreshadowed horror manner that keeps the audience a touch uneasy about getting too close because they know that the character will likely not make it to the end. The story is tight and controlled. It is dialogue rich, and the action is well placed to build both suspense and unease. 

There are also glimpses of Laymon’s weaknesses, or, more aptly, his excesses. The dialogue is rich and, at times, humorous, but at moments it is overdone and annoying. The characters have a habit of over talking the situation and curbing its potential suspense. There are also brief, much more brief than usual, graphic sex scenes, including a rape scene, that tend to be less pivotal to the story and more ludicrous. Although the graphic sex has a teenage boy wholesomeness to it that only Richard Laymon could accomplish.

Dark Mountain is not in the top echelon of Richard Laymon’s work—The Traveling Vampire Show, In the Dark, Night in the Lonesome October—but it is a solid horror-suspense novel. It opens as the standard wilderness horror story, but Laymon takes it to unexpected places. It twists from the backwoods of California to the streets of Los Angeles. There is witchcraft, murder, violence, and even redemption. It is a novel that will appeal to fans of Richard Laymon, horror, particularly horror films, and even those with a taste for suspense.

Dark Mountain was originally published in the United States under the title Tread Softly as by Richard Kelly. It was published in 1987 and, under its original title, is nearly impossible to find. It was published in the United Kingdom with the title Dark Mountain, and has since been republished in the States, by Leisure, under the same title.

NECESSITY by Brian Garfield

It has been nonstop busy at my house the past few months and yesterday as I was browsing the stacks of a used bookshop I found myself thinking about the terrific books I read in 2009, and there were many. I rediscovered the work of several classic suspense, crime, and western novelists. The best of the bunch was probably the work of Brian Garfield.He hasn't published a new work of fiction since the late-1980s, which is a shame since he really redefined the suspense novel with his novel Death Wish and then kept getting better and better. And then simply stopped writing, or at least publishing, fiction.
 
The following is a review of Brian Garfield's Necessity. It was the first of several Garfield novels I read last year, and when I think about it I can't help but smile. It is a terrific suspense novel with as much flair and style as you will find in the genre. It originally went live July 6, 2009.

It’s been several years since I’ve read a Brian Garfield novel—maybe Death Sentence in '04 or '05. I made amends recently and jumped into his 1984 novel Necessity and wondered how I waited so long.

“It’s the sixth day after the theft. She pulls off the Interstate in Tucson, a city she has never seen before. According to the atlas it is a county seat and the second largest city in Arizona—population half a million people.”

Matty LaCasse is a former model and now the wife of a wealthy New York construction magnate. She is the recent mother of a beautiful and healthy baby girl. She is on the run, alone, scared and hell-bent to get her daughter back.

Matty tracks across the American West, a briefcase full of cash with her and a plan; she needs a home away from her pursuers, but to do so she needs to become someone else. An entirely new person that no one from her old life will recognize or even associate with the person she was.

Necessity is an absolute firecracker. It opens with a white hot flash and never lets up—the action is tight and it is expertly used as a tool to ratchet the suspense from vague dread to outright terror. The characters are perfectly molded into dimensional people who are likable, terrifying and, most importantly, believable. The storyline is linear and sharp with enough false leads and psychology—mostly Matty’s—to keep the reader off balance and avidly turning the pages—which is all terrific, but Mr Garfield also flavors the story with technical information about creating new identities and, more importantly, erasing an original identity. He creates a world that is real and absorbing without slowing the story with too much detail and information.

The narrative is smooth and inviting. It is told in a matter-of-fact fashion, and with the seldom-used present tense—“She lets herself in and double-locks the door and slumps into the threadbare easy chair. Strength flows away as if a drainplug has been pulled.”

Necessity is an example of what a thriller should be--quick, hard, intense, and thrilling. It is a story that was published twenty-five years ago, but it still has a freshness and originality that makes it compelling and entertaining reading. In short, it is a novel that should not only be read, but that should be savored.

Tom Selleck on the New Rockford Files

The Internet, at least the few sites I visit regularly, has been abuzz with the remake of the 1970's television series "The Rockford Files." I haven't read a positive spin about the new series remake yet. I was too young to remember "The Rockford Files" when it originally aired. Instead I was introduced as a teenager in the late-1980s in syndication, and then the eight or so television movies made in the 1990s.

Now Tom Selleck, who guest-starred in two episodes, weighs in about the difficultly of recreating the series without James Garner in a brief interview with Zap2It. In a sense it would be tantamount to remaking "Magnum, P.I." without Tom Selleck, a difficult chore at best.

Mr Selleck said, in part:

"They ought to cast Jim Garner," Selleck tells Zap2it. "I'm a little prejudiced because he was really a formative influence on me, even a mentor in so many ways, even though he probably wouldn't admit to it if he was aware of it.

"Dermot Mulroney seems like a fine actor in the work I've seen him do, and this has nothing to do with him -- but when you think of 'Rockford,' you don't remember 'that episode about the bank robbery,' you remember [Garner] making you laugh."

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American Vampire Trailer

Reading

It has been shamefully quiet around here the past few months. The world--my world--has been a little tipsy-turvy, and not necessarily in a bad way. In fact it has been more good than bad, but I have been really busy. And reading is a form of relaxation that I constantly use as a source of calm. Unfortunately my time demands have made it difficult to write reviews recently, so here are a few titles that I have enjoyed over the past month or so without the benefit of a review.

I have been enjoying the work of the late-Robert Ludlum. I hadn't read any of his novels since the mid-1990s, but I picked up his first published novel The Scarlatti Inheritance and really enjoyed it. I also read, and liked, The Holcroft Covenant, although it would have benefited from a sharper pencil during the editing process. Ludlum's work is interesting because he has a very unique style, and while his writing can be verbose he keeps the story moving quickly with plots that are tricky without too man--what the hell!--twists.

I have also read several non-fiction titles, mostly history, both military and American history. A favorite was a little volume titled Inside the Green Berets. It takes a brief glimpse at the formation of Army Special Forces, the key personnel involved, and the major conflicts up through the early-1980s. The writer is Charles M. Simpson, III.

I also tend to listen to about one audiobook per week at work. My favorites have been full cast performances of David Morrell's spy thrillers The Brotherhood of the Rose and The Fraternity of the Stone. I have read both of these novels before, and the audio productions were very well done and captured my attention and imagination.

That's it for now, but I have a few reviews planned, and even an interview. Come back. I promise that I will.