It had a promising start with the outbreak of a disease known as Dragonscale which first manifests as dark marksWell, that was a spoonful of nonsense.
It had a promising start with the outbreak of a disease known as Dragonscale which first manifests as dark marks on the skin. Getting a free tribal tattoo might not sound that bad, but the real problem is that eventually infected people burst into flames and burn to death. The damage caused by walking blowtorches and the fear of being infected have society teetering on the brink of collapse.
Harper is a young nurse who discovers that she has contracted Dragonscale and she’s pregnant. If that isn’t bad enough her jerk-face husband Jakob goes coocoo for Coco-Puffs and thinks they should just kill themselves. During a desperate moment Harper finds help in the form of a mysterious guy dressed as a fireman who leads her to a hidden community of infected people who have found a way to survive the disease. Unfortunately, discord within that group proves as dangerous as the vigilante Cremation Squads that have started murdering the infected.
It’s a strong premise, but unfortunately there’s a number of factors that drag it down. First and foremost is that it’s way too long. Hill can’t seem to commit to one main story, and he keeps adding on to it like a late-night TV commercial promising, “But that’s not all!” This causes a lot of drift with a long swath of the book not even touching on what’s going on in the outside world and forgetting what should be major characters for long periods of time. It’s also like one of those action movies that never seems to know when to end that goes on 20 minutes past the point where it should have wrapped things up.
I also wasn’t a fan of Harper, and since this whole story is built on the idea of a plucky heroine trying to survive a civilization ending plague then I needed to have at least have some respect for her. Unfortunately, she comes across as twit who never seems to wise up until something terrible happens. Which it does. Repeatedly. I lost count of the number of times where she is shocked by the bad intentions of someone and says things like, “You can’t!” It’s the apocalype, lady. They can, and they will. Her infatuation with Mary Poppins, and Hill’s constant use of it and its songs are also way overdone.
In fact, there’s just too much goddamn music in this book overall with constant quoting of lyrics and talking about various musicians. It's a crutch Hill leans on far too often. Plus, it’s all Jurassic Rock with a smattering of ‘80s pop in there with even an old VJ from MTV having a role to play. It’s 2016, Joe Hill. I don’t need your main character, who is supposedly in her early twenties, lecturing me on what the preference for the Rolling Stones or the Beatles says about a person.
Another piece that flies off this jalopy of a book once it gets up to speed is the nature of the disease itself. There’s a lot of effort spent to convince us that there is a rational scientific reason that people would turn into Zippos, and I can suspend disbelief enough to go with that concept. But when more and more is added to the point where we’re into ideas like people being able to generate and control fire without their clothes burning and even more weirdness then you don’t need Neal deGrasse Tyson to call bullshit on it. Just as he couldn’t seem to commit to one story or another Hill can’t seem to decide if he wanted a more grounded concept with some science behind it or if he wanted to jump full-on into the supernatural pool.
Hill also opted to run home to Daddy in this because the entire book is absolutely rotten with Easter eggs of Stephen King’s work. A few references can be fun, but when Hill essentially ‘borrows’ a character from The Stand including a cute little name trick to underline it then it’s crossed the line. (Harold Cross? For a character who is essentially Harold Lauder? That's weak.*) After a while it started to seem desperate, as if Hill knew things weren’t going well and hoped he might use fan familiarity of his father's books to invoke some of his magic. Hill also seems to have inherited his father’s trait of having a bunch of characters claim that they’re are critically short of time only to have them waste most of it with idle chit-chat and banter that is supposed to be funny and make you like the characters. It’s not, and it doesn’t.
So at this point Hill is 2 for 4 with me, and after this I’m going to need a really good reason to pick up his next one.
* And I didn't think about this until I read Edward Lorn's review where he pointed out that there's also a deaf character named Nick. Come on, Joe Hill. You're better than that....more
Lucas Davenport relentlessly tracks down a murderous gang of hippies?!? It’s not even my birthday!
Davenport’s adopted daughter Letty befriends a youngLucas Davenport relentlessly tracks down a murderous gang of hippies?!? It’s not even my birthday!
Davenport’s adopted daughter Letty befriends a young woman, Skye, who is part of a subculture called Travelers who wander around the country living like hobos. After her friend is murdered Skye contacts Letty for help and tells her that the people responsible are a pack of jackals led by a guy named Pilate. Skye is convinced that Pilate’s gang roams around in an RV torturing and killing people.
Letty gets Lucas involved, and his initial skepticism fades as they find evidence that indicates that Pilate and his people have left a trail of bodies in their wake. Davenport starts tracking them across the upper Midwest through small towns and the weirdness of Juggalo gatherings. (You can do a Google image search if you want to an idea of what that looks like, but don‘t say I didn't warn you.) Things get messy as usually happens when Lucas starts trying to run down killers, and he also has to deal with a nagging middle manager who wants to know why he’s wasting the taxpayer money trying to stop murderers who aren't killing anyone in their state?
OK, so I guess they’re not technically hippies although there is a certain Charles Manson family type vibe going on here. I still like to think of them as murderous hippies although even Manson would probably hesitate to sign up with this crew considering how crazily blood thirsty they are.
While most Prey novels generally feature Lucas trying to figure out who the bad guy is for at least part of the book, this plays out a little differently in that Lucas almost immediately knows who he’s looking for and what they've done. The challenge here is in trying to find a group of people living off the grid as they roam around. Things soon escalate and the majority of the story is a straight up manhunt that allows Sandford to play to his strength of building the sense of momentum and tension that make his books such page turners.
The one slightly off-key note in this is Letty. Sandford has made her an increasing part of the story in some of the recent novels, and she does make for a great smart-ass foil for Lucas. However, it seems like she’s being set up to star in her own series at some point soon, and sometimes the ways she’s inserted into the plot feel forced. She makes for a fun sidekick generally, but it’s always more fun to read about Batman than Robin. So it was a bit of relief when she fades into the background when the story really gets rolling, and Lucas becomes the center of the book’s attention.
There’s also a sense of Lucas getting fed up with his position in a government agency. While he’s always had a natural feel for helping out his bosses with the media, Lucas has never had much patience with office politics or bureaucratic rules, and he’s seriously frustrated at the current American institutional mentality of being more concerned with the budget than in actually doing the job. Throw in him dealing with turning 50, and Lucas is one grumpy individual at the start of this one. All of this gives the book the feeling that it’s about to boil over, and that Davenport will have to consider making some changes in his life. (view spoiler)[And he does. There have been rumors in Sandford-land that there may be shake-ups in the Prey universe for a while now, and it finally happens with Davenport quitting the BCA but promising Letty that he’ll find some thing interesting to do. (hide spoiler)]
But whenever Lucas is in a funk, he can always count on the adrenaline rush of hunting bad guys to cheer him up, and he’s certainly one cheerful bastard by the end of this one.
You gotta think that way back in 1970 that DC decided to put Green Arrow into the Green Lantern comics simply because they both shared the word greenYou gotta think that way back in 1970 that DC decided to put Green Arrow into the Green Lantern comics simply because they both shared the word green in their names.
They certainly didn’t have much in common other than their favorite color. Green Lantern/Hal Jordan was essentially an intergalactic cop with a ring that gave him enormous power while Green Arrow/Oliver Queen was just a guy with a talent for archery. However, writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams turned that thin odd couple concept into a ground breaking comic by working in some of the social issues of the day and having the two heroes struggle with how to deal with them.
The idea starts with the straight-laced Hal viewing things through the prism of a guy charged with enforcing law and order that absolutely believes in following the rules. Oliver used to be wealthy but lost all his money, and there’s nobody more liberal than a rich guy who went bust. A dispute with a slum lord makes Hal realize that what’s legal may not be what’s right, and that he’s completely out of touch with what is going on in the world. Oliver challenges him to widen his perspective, and the two partner up and have a series of adventures that often find them arguing with each other as often as they fought bad guys.
Issues like racism, drugs, overpopulation, urban decay and protecting the environment came into play, and that was pretty racy stuff for superhero comic books back then. There’s a particularly good segment where Oliver is badly injured by a mugger and has several people ignore him as he lays bleeding on the street and struggles to get help. That entire bit plays out like a microcosm of America in the ‘70s, and stands in stark contrast to the clean cut citizens usually depicted in comic books. There’s also the milestone story of Green Arrow learning that his sidekick Speedy has become a drug addict.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of things that make a modern reading of this a little painful. It’s got the high handed preachiness of a hippie, and since Oliver is the one representing that viewpoint, he frequently comes across as a self-righteous pain in the ass. That makes a certain amount of sense since this was still technically Green Lantern’s book so that Hal is portrayed as the relatable one struggling to figure out the right thing to do while dealing with this guy yammering in his ear all the time, but it still makes you wish that Oliver would shut the hell up once in a while.
There’s also some groan worthy elements like a story involving Native Americans in which even the efforts to portray them as sympathetic comes across as racist. (The cover featured Green Arrow wearing a feathered headdress and talking about his ‘redskin brothers’.) A comic about an idealistic environmentalist becomes a parallel to the crucifixion of Jesus that is way over the top. The conversation where Oliver confesses his growing admiration for the ‘rock-n-roll music’ makes him seem like that creepy middle age guy trying to pretend he’s still in his 20s.
Still, you have to keep the time it was created in mind and realize how different this comic was. It’s run with O’Neil and Adams didn’t last long, but the fact it’s still discussed and read today shows how important it was for the medium. ...more
Reading this book gave me a serious urge to watch The Big Lebowski again.
Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello is a private investigator in LA in 1969, and he’s also Reading this book gave me a serious urge to watch The Big Lebowski again.
Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello is a private investigator in LA in 1969, and he’s also a damn dirty hippie who smokes dope constantly. Doc gets a visit from his old girlfriend Shasta who has been seeing married and wealthy Mickey Wolfman. Wolfman’s wife and her boyfriend want Shasta to help them with a scam to get Mickey committed to an asylum, but Shasta feels guilty and wants Doc to help Mickey out.
Doc no sooner gets started than he gets blamed for a murder by his arch enemy LAPD Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen who has nothing but contempt for hippies. Mickey and Shasta have vanished, and while Doc tries to wrap his foggy brains around these developments, he’s also approached by another woman who claims that her boyfriend, a saxophone player in a surf band that supposedly died of an overdose, is still alive.
The Crying of Lot 49 is the only other Pynchon I’ve read, and this one has the same kind of hazy vast conspiracy lurking in the background . And like that one, I was left kind of liking the book in a general sort of way while thinking that Pynchon is just fucking with me on some level. There’s a lot going on in here in terms of information and secrets with a friend of Doc’s feeding him info he’s getting from the first primitive form of the Internet.
The spacey and affable Doc makes for a unique main character to guide us through a noirish but laid back landscape, but it was Bigfoot Bjornsen with his constant stream of anti-hippie comments that I found the most enjoyable. ‘Cause much like Bigfoot and Eric Cartman, I am also a hippie hater.
I get why Pynchon is worshipped as such a post-modern master, but there’s just something about his style that isn’t engaging me at the gut level. ...more
Hey, George Lucas! Now THIS is how you do a prequel!
Don Winslow’s Savages instantly became one of my favorite crime novels, and I was a little worriedHey, George Lucas! Now THIS is how you do a prequel!
Don Winslow’s Savages instantly became one of my favorite crime novels, and I was a little worried about him doing another one that takes place before it. Frankly, it seemed like a rush job done to capitalize on the movie version of Savages which comes out tomorrow.
I should have had more faith in Winslow. He has expanded the backgrounds of the characters from Savages and uses their stories to give us an idea of the rise of the drug trade in southern California from the ‘60s through the turn of the century. It turns out that that drug dealers Ben and Chon (A mutated version of John.) and their shared girlfriend O (Short for Ophelia.) had a lot to contend with as they built up their pot growing empire that they were running at the beginning of Savages.
Like that book, Winslow has played with the style and format as well as taking that casual SoCal tone of voice he does so well to extreme lengths including incorporating segments that are written like a screenplay and sometimes using sentence fragments arranged on the page for maximum impact. Instead of a crime novel, this could almost be considered an epic free form poem. With shotguns.
This is that rarest of prequels, one that actually adds depth and story to the original without diluting it. There seems to be some parts of the history that don’t sync well with what we were told before, but the continuity glitches weren’t enough to seriously detract from my enjoyment.
Oh, and there’s a lot of mocking of both hippies and Republicans which made me laugh out loud repeatedly. ...more
While Parker is off robbing the proceeds of a rock concert his girlfriend Claire has found them a quiet home near a lake. Parker may be a profesional While Parker is off robbing the proceeds of a rock concert his girlfriend Claire has found them a quiet home near a lake. Parker may be a profesional thief and a stone cold killer when necessary, but even he has to bow to this simple truth: If the woman in your life decides that the time has come to buy a house then you might as well pick up your pen and get ready to sign the mortgage paperwork.
Before Claire can even get Parker to organize the garage or mow the lawn for the first time he gets a disturbing phone call. One of the guys from the robbery crew he just worked with is desperately trying to get in touch with him. Sensing trouble Parker leaves his new domestic bliss to find that someone is torturing and killing the guys he just worked with, and they're working their way towards him.
Any fears I had that Claire was making Parker soft are dispelled here. While Claire is one of the few people who can stand up to Parker without getting pistol whipped, and Parker is still as merciless and unemotional as he needs to be when going against some murderous punks. Richard Nixon probably would have appreciated Parker’s method of dealing with damn dirty hippies.
This volume also features an introduction from Hard Case Crime founder Charles Ardai, and he makes the interesting point that Stark (a/k/a Westlake) managed to take the same basic premise of Parker planning and committing a robbery and spin it off in a variety of different ways. This one is great twist on that central idea, and it’s another top notch Parker novel....more
In the late 1970s, Koo Davis is an aging and iconic comedian best known for his constant USO tours to entertain American troops overseas. Koo is kidnaIn the late 1970s, Koo Davis is an aging and iconic comedian best known for his constant USO tours to entertain American troops overseas. Koo is kidnapped by a group of militants left over from the ‘60s who threaten to kill him unless the US government releases ten ‘political prisoners’.
Leave it to a bunch of goddamn hippies to think that kidnapping Bob Hope is a good plan.
A FBI agent who has been exiled from DC for a minor role in Watergate sees getting Koo back as the key to reviving his career. Meanwhile, Koo learns that his captors are a real bag of mixed nuts including a woman who walks around naked to show off the scars she got from a bomb making mishap and a hostile young man who seems to have a grudge against the comedian.
Worst of all is a guy who lectures Koo about all the injustices of the US. If you ever have a choice between being kidnapped by religious extremists who will cut your head off or getting snatched by a ‘60s style hippie determined to show you the light about the unfair nature of the distribution of global resources, pick the guys who have a sword. You’ll suffer less.
According to the introduction Westlake finished this book about the time that the movie The King of Comedy came out, and he decided his plot of kidnapping a famous comedian was too similar so he didn’t publish it. He gave a copy to Max Allan Collins who came forward with it after Westlake’s death.
I enjoyed the first half quite a bit, and Westlake seemed to almost being using this book to say some things about the end of the ‘60s. He came up with several interesting characters and had the plot cooking along nicely, but it just seemed to fragment in the second half of the book. There’s a lot of stuff just kind of dropped as the plot rushes to it’s conclusion. For example, the FBI agent is constantly thinking about trying to use the case to get back to DC in the early part of the book, but it’s never mentioned in the second part.
Westlake fans will probably find it worth reading, but it seems like it could have used another rewrite to get the whole thing to seem more cohesive....more
How else can you explain a country that embraced a right wing philosophy after a devastating terrorist attack that lCall us America the Schizophrenic.
How else can you explain a country that embraced a right wing philosophy after a devastating terrorist attack that led to blindly following a moron for eight years, yet finally overwhelmingly rejected those politics by voting in the liberal opposition only to seemingly overnight turn into a nation of screaming maniacs who consider spending a dime on anything but guns and prisons a waste of tax payer money?
The cold comfort I got from reading Nixonland was that America’s maddening division between left and right and the lack of a consistent philosophy isn’t anything new. Apparently we’ve always been this stupid.
After JFK was killed, Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats won landslide victories in 1964. The country’s economy was booming, and the elections seemed to signify a new unification of the public behind liberal policies. Many pundits thought conservative politics and the Republican party were as dead as Abraham Lincoln. LBJ seized the moment and began pushing legislation on civil rights for blacks and his plan to end poverty and create a ‘Great Society’.
Four years later, LBJ declined to run again knowing that he may not even be able to win his own party’s nomination, and the country was tearing itself apart along right wing/left wing battle lines. And Richard Nixon got voted in as a president leaving everyone to scratch their heads and wonder what the hell just happened.
What this book does brilliantly is examine how that split occurred and how Nixon, and other right wingers like Ronald Reagan, both took advantage of and did everything they could to widen that gulf. The standard history class will tell you that it was Vietnam, and it was certainly one of the major factors. However, it wasn’t just about the war. Working class whites were generally OK with Johnson pushing the South to end segregation, but when policies like open housing and forced bussing impacted them directly, they got angry with northern cities like Chicago showing a kind of racism that caused Martin Luther King Jr. to say it was worse than Mississippi. Black communities, angry after years of racism and repression and frustrated with slow progress, erupted in riots and militant groups began to form. The war caused a split within the Democratic party and led to the rise of the counter culture.
So when your average Joe Six-Pack and Susy Homemaker (who were a generation that had grown up during the Great Depression and World War II and just wanted a little peace and quiet) turned on their TV’s and saw the country seemingly ripping itself apart while their kids turned into dirty hippies, they got pissed.
That well of white rage and resentment is what Nixon tapped into and encouraged. Republicans like to point to Reagan as their patron saint, but the modern right wing resembles Nixon’s black soul much more than Reagan. Resentful, paranoid, and insecure, Nixon’s personality became the blueprint for Republican politics that’s still used today.
Nixon always felt snubbed by the east coast ‘intellectuals and elitists’, and he used that to tar the high ranking Democrats as limousine liberals who were completely out of touch with ‘real Americans’. Nixon also played up his hatred of the press to convince people that the media had a left wing agenda and was run by more liberals. (He was so successful in this that many people refused to believe the stories about the My Lai massacre even after the army convicted Lieutenant Calley.) Nixon hired his own media people (including a young Roger Ailes, the current president of Fox News) to carefully control and craft an image of reliable steadiness. All the while, he also engaged in back room political deals like promising former Democrat and all-around evil fuck Strom Thurmond that he’d have the government drag it’s feet on enforcing the end of school segregation in exchange for Southern support.
But Nixon’s most diabolical play was in doing everything he could to keep the Democratic party in disarray. Nixon used back channels to sabotage LBJ’s Paris peace talks to North Vietnam to keep the war going before the election while promising that he had a secret plan to end the war. Once in office, he regularly drew down ground troop levels and talked peace in public while escalating the bombing and still seeking a ‘knock out blow’ that would force North Vietnam to come to favorable terms.
Nixon was more than willing to reap the political benefits of the war. It was an on-going propaganda campaign for him where he could go on TV and seem reasonable while shaking his head at all those crazy hippies tearing up college campuses. He made sure that his public events always allowed a few protesters in so that cameras could show the crowd and security turning on them, and his secret ‘rat fuckers’ launched constant sabotage operations against Democratic campaigns to make them look chaotic and confused.
The Democrats helped by shooting themselves in the feet repeatedly. While the counter culture fought the old machine bosses for control of the party, they were so busy trying to include special interest groups that they effectively lost the white working class and union voters who had been their backbone for years. That started a shift that the Republicans continue to exploit to this day.
All in all, this was a fascinating book that deeply explores the issues that led to the splitting of America into factions that has made it nearly impossible for politicians to just provide reasonable public policies. It also does a lot to debunk some of the favorite myths of the Baby Boomers about how they claim to have changed the country. If you buy into the book’s well made argument, the counter culture played right into Nixon’s hands and gave him the White House and led to the rise of the current right wing nuts. Thanks for that, you ole damn dirty hippies....more
Hitman books are usually entertaining, and I liked the first Quarry book that HCC did. Even though this was recently written, it's a stone cold throwbHitman books are usually entertaining, and I liked the first Quarry book that HCC did. Even though this was recently written, it's a stone cold throwback to another era. This is the kind of crime novel that people used to buy in drug store book racks for less than a dollar. And it is seriously fun.
Collins takes us back to the dark days of 1970 to tell the story of Quarry's first assignment. Along with references to Vietnam veterans, hippies, classic rock, and beautiful coeds it also has a mafia don, a seedy private eye mixed up in a nasty divorce case, rival gangs, sex, and a bit of the old ultra-violence, and of course, Quarry stuck in the middle of the whole mess just trying to kill the college professor he was paid to hit.
Collins has apparently going to fill in more of Quarry's history with these new HCC novels and that's good news for us. ...more
Eleven books into my rereading of the Travis McGee series and as usual there’s a Good and Bad side to it.
Good = Travis McGee continues to be an intereEleven books into my rereading of the Travis McGee series and as usual there’s a Good and Bad side to it.
Good = Travis McGee continues to be an interesting character who has rejected the responsibilities associated with a modern American life circa 1969 by working as a kind of hybrid detective/con man who gets involved in shady dealings to make a buck. On the surface McGee is just a lazy boat bum on a series of extended vacations, and he’s willing to occasionally risk his life to finance this lifestyle. However, on another level McGee is deeply offended by injustice and the destruction of the individual by society.
Bad - Travis McGee can also be a narcissistic bore and all around Know-It-All-Pain-In-The-Ass. He’s also even more of a man-whore than James Bond, and a bigger sexist than all the male characters of Mad Men combined.
I almost dropped this rereading of the series after I had baited friend Amanda into reading one just for my own amusement because I figured the results would be spectacular, but I outsmarted myself there because she did such a thorough job of blasting 'Sea Cock' McGee in her review of Darker Than Amber that I actually had a hard time picking up another one. But then Audible released new audio versions of the entire series, and I couldn’t resist diving back in.
A wealthy widower was badly injured in a car accident and while recovering is informed that his daughter Bix had died in Mexico. The man had drifted away from her and wants someone to go retrace her steps and find out about her last days. McGee and Meyer fly to Mexico where they learn that Bix had been part of the damn dirty hippie subculture flourishing there as well as being involved with a very wealthy and private woman. McGee begins to suspect that there was more to Bix’s death than just a simple car accident.
As usual if you can get past the depiction of the female characters and how they’re treated, there’s a pretty enjoyable late ‘60s mystery story here. The women this time include an oversexed British expatriate who tries her best to wear McGee out (Guess how that goes.), and a secretary on vacation who falls for McGee‘s manly charms. Hell, there’s an actual scene with a friend of McGee’s slapping his secretary’s ass while she runs out of his office giggling. There are also some homosexual characters in this one and while it’s not as bad as it could be, MacDonald wouldn’t have been winning any GLAAD Awards.
Despite the flaws, I stick around for the Good elements as well as MacDonald’s writing. There’s a particularly nice chapter here where McGee is recounting all the bad luck that the wealthy Bowie experienced and reflecting on how easy it for even a well-constructed life to fall apart that’s a classic example of what redeems the dated parts of these books.
Also, the newly recorded audio versions of this are great. Narrator Robert Petkoff does a superior job of delivering McGee’s extended monologues as well as creating unique voices for all the different characters. McGee fans who enjoy audio books won’t be disappointed....more
Only Elmore Leonard could make damn dirty hippies somewhat entertaining.
Chris Mankowski is a Detroit cop in the late ‘80s who transfers from the bomb Only Elmore Leonard could make damn dirty hippies somewhat entertaining.
Chris Mankowski is a Detroit cop in the late ‘80s who transfers from the bomb squad to sex crimes. His first case is a feisty young actress named Ginger (a/k/a Greta) who was sexually assaulted by alcoholic millionaire Woody Ricks. Chris takes a highly personal interest in Ginger’s case and starts checking out Woody and his brother just as two old associates from their college radical days embark on a scheme to shake down some money. Robin and Skip plan to use bombs to blow open Woody’s wallet while his chauffer Donnell, an ex-Black Panther, is also trying to scam the drunken Woody out of all he can.
Like most of his books, this involves a lot of shady characters with their own agendas saying great dialogue to each other as we get enough of their inner monologues to make all of them feel real. Leonard also famously wrote by the seat of his pants, making it all up as he went with no real plan, and usually that gives his books some fabulous twists and turns. However, sometimes this can give the book odd shifts, and that’s what happens here.
The first half focuses heavily on Robin and Skip’s past as former ‘60’s radicals who got sent to prison for their militant behavior and now are past all that peace, love, and dope bullshit. They want to get paid, and Leonard does a great job of characterization to quickly let you know that Robin and Skip’s old hippie days had a lot more to do with raising hell and getting laid than any high minded principles about protesting the Vietnam war or a corrupt capitalist system.
However, in the second half, this shifts a bit and become more about Chris. Leonard did a lot with characters seeing themselves in terms of pop culture, and there’s a great section where Chris, frustrated at all the murky motives and his relationship with Greta, sees Lethal Weapon and begins trying to act a bit like Mel Gibson with some hilarious results. There’s also a good deal from Donnel’s point of view as caretaker to a drunk that he’s trying to figure out a way to legally rob blind while holding off Robin and Skip. Then there’s a dilemma for Ginger who debates taking a settlement from Woody rather than trying to press legal charges.
All of this is pretty good, but it’s just a bit too much. It’s good enough, but just doesn’t feel as tight or as satisfying as some of his other plots. There’s also a bit of ickiness around how Chris is instantly attracted to Ginger even as she’s come into report her rape, and it seems more than a little odd that she’d be returning his affections pretty quickly.
Leonard did however know how to end the book perfectly. (view spoiler)[By blowing those two goddamn hippies to hell! (hide spoiler)] ...more
Hap Collins and his friend Leonard Pine seem like pure east Texas rednecks in a lot of ways. They have crappy jobs working in rose fields, shoot clay Hap Collins and his friend Leonard Pine seem like pure east Texas rednecks in a lot of ways. They have crappy jobs working in rose fields, shoot clay pigeons with their shotguns, drive worn out piece-of-shit vehicles, raise hunting dogs and listen to country music. But Leonard is black and gay, and Hap is a former damn dirty hippie who got sent to prison for refusing his induction notice during Vietnam as a protest against the war. So they aren’t exactly the Dukes of Hazard.
Years after his prison stay ended his marriage, Hap’s ex-wife Trudy still likes to come around regularly to break his heart all over again. Trudy is another former flower child who still thinks she can change the world while Hap’s time in prison took care of all his idealistic notions. When Trudy shows up again, she’s got a new proposal for Hap.
Trudy and some other old damn dirty hippies have gotten a lead on a lot of cash from a bank robbery that was believed lost. They think it’s in a sunken boat in an remote river area that Hap grew up in. Trudy wants Hap’s help, and Hap insists on cutting Leonard in, too. But both have second thoughts when they meet the old radicals they’ll be working with. Still convinced that they can revive the spirit of the ‘60s, they want the money for their pet causes while Hap and Leonard just want to be able to stop working in the rose fields.
Joe Lansdale is one of the funniest guys I’ve ever read, and he really knows about rural living and the redneck lifestyle. Every time I read one of his books, I feel like I’m sitting on a front porch in my old hometown while listening to some entertaining story teller spin a yarn about the trouble that some idiot good old boys got themselves into. The series is profane, politically incorrect, violent, and hilarious. Lansdale created a couple of my all-time favorite characters in Hap and Leonard. ...more
Spenser takes on a thirty twenty-eight year old case for the fee of six donuts. If he’d have known he’d end up investigating a bunch of goddamn hippieSpenser takes on a thirty twenty-eight year old case for the fee of six donuts. If he’d have known he’d end up investigating a bunch of goddamn hippies I assume he’d have demanded a full dozen.
Paul Giacomin, the closest thing Spenser has to a son, brings a young actress named Daryl to the detective for help. Daryl’s mother was killed in the midst of a bank robbery in 1974 by a group of militant radicals, but no one was ever arrested for the crime. Spenser takes on the case as a favor to Paul, and he soon gets on the bad side of a dangerous gangster with a psychotic hitman on his payroll. Even worse, he’ll have to talk to a bunch of dried up old hippies.
This one starts with the intriguing premise of Spenser digging into a very old case, but it soon falls into the familiar routines of a client in need of a good therapist, Spenser smart mouthing various thugs, Spenser bantering with Hawk, Spenser eating some food, Spenser drinking some booze, Susan being annoying as hell, etc. etc. The only thing that really makes this one noteworthy is that it features a crossover to another RBP series when Spenser meets Jesse Stone.
The only other part that I really liked was the scorn and anger that Spenser eventually dishes out on aging hippies. Take that, ya dirty long hairs!
RBP had long ago hit a point where he wouldn't upset the status quo, and a subplot here makes it clear that he didn’t feel any need to shake up the series. Spenser and Susan had acquired a dog named Pearl a dozen books ago, and she was showing signs of old age in the last one. At the beginning of Back Story, Pearl has gone to dog heaven and Spenser is still grieving her in his own stoic way. However, he soon acquires a new dog the exact same color and breed of the old one, and then he and Susan start calling the new dog Pearl. (Which to me is borderline creepy.)
So even though RBP allowed some real world aging to creep into the series in Pearl’s case, he still kept Spenser and his friends in a kind of timeless limbo after a certain point. Yet he refused to change the basic template to even accommodate the idea of having no dog or making it a new dog with a different name or anything that might feel like some kind of change to Spenser’s world. It’s a small point, but it shows how locked down RBP had the Spenser formula at this point .
As a side note: I listened to the audio version of this with Joe Mantegna narrating. Mantegna played Spenser in three TV movies, and he even though he doesn’t fit my mental picture of Spenser at all, he has a knack for delivering Spenser’s quips and observations.
Next up: Spenser takes on Enron and crashes the US economy in Bad Business. ...more
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