Treasure of the Rubbermaids 18: The Great Train Robbery
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containerTreasure of the Rubbermaids 18: The Great Train Robbery
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
(Note: For the purposes of this review, any references to the movie are about the 1974 version with Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw. I like to pretend the remake with John Travolta and Denzel Washington doesn’t exist.)
In the early 1970s, four armed men hijack a New York subway car with sixteen passengers and demand a ransom of one million dollars be paid in an hour or they’ll start shooting hostages at the rate of one a minute. Various city, police and transit officials scramble to meet the deadline while dealing with their internal politics.
There are a couple of things setting this apart from the typical crime thriller. The third person narration shifts from the individual hijackers, the passengers, the cops, the politicians, and assorted other people. The different viewpoint makes the scope bigger than just a subway car held hostage underground.
Another departure from the genre is that no one in the book acts heroic in a traditional sense. The Walter Matthau character in the movie is a composite of a couple of people from the print version, but there’s no one individual that negotiates with the hijackers and then takes to the streets to track them down. A police officer hiding in the tunnel does something incredibly stupid for no reason that gets a hostage killed. There’s a subway official who is more worried about the upcoming rush hour than the people on the train. The mayor just wants to stay in bed and nurse his head cold.
Even the hostages seem more concerned with things other than the threat of imminent death. An undercover policeman can live with being branded a coward if he doesn’t act, but he’s more worried about his relationship with his hippie girlfriend. A prostitute thinks that if she stands up her next appointment that she’ll lose one of her most profitable regular johns. There’s a nicely done element of denial that there’s little panic or real feelings of fear among the passengers despite having every reason to think they could be dead in an hour.
In a weird way, the most well adjusted guy may be the leader of the hijackers, Ryder. A former mercenary who ran out of profitable wars, Ryder has a unique outlook that he has boiled down to his personal motto: You live or you die. And Ryder doesn’t think it matters much way either way. His implacable calm and refusal to budge on his demand of one million dollars in one hour makes him the only character that seems capable of getting what he wants in a city full of angry and irrational people that react to everything like overgrown children.
This has the grit and grime of other ‘70s New York crime stories like The French Connection, Serpico or the early Matt Scudder novels by Lawrence Block, and it also delivers a kind of day-in-the-life component that gives you an idea of how a big city of the era would react to a crisis.
Random trivia note: The hijackers in the book are identified by name, but in the movie they use code names like Mr. Blue and Mr. Green. IMDB tells me that Tarantino was inspired by this idea for his characters in Reservoir Dogs....more
Treasure of the Rubbermaids 14: Yippee kai yay, Mr. Falcon!
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid contaTreasure of the Rubbermaids 14: Yippee kai yay, Mr. Falcon!
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
Gather around you whippersnappers and listen closely as Grandpa Kemper tells you another fascinating tale from his days of yore.
Many, many moons ago back in the late 1980s I once went to the movies with some friends and they showed a trailer for a film called Die Hard, and we were all very confused. It looked pretty cool, but why was the guy from Moonlighting fighting terrorists? Was it supposed to be serious or funny? It looked like a hard core action movie but Willis was cracking jokes, too. Was Arnold Schwarzenegger too busy for this one?
As hard as it is to believe now, back when he still had hair and long before he had helped that kid who saw dead people or chased 12 monkeys through time, Bruce Willis was seen by the viewing public as the kind of guy who would play the lead in romantic comedies and definitely not the dude who you’d see firing machine guns at villains. But some bright Hollywood type cast Willis in Die Hard after all the other action heroes of the day turned it down and the rest is history.
The film was based on this book originally titled Nothing Lasts Forever. Joe Leland* (not John McClane) is a middle aged ex-cop who now works as a security consultant with an emphasis on anti-terrorism tactics who goes to visit his daughter Steffie in L.A. After arriving at Steffie’s office in the middle of a Christmas Eve party Joe goes off to wash up and make a phone call when the building is invaded by 12 terrorists who take Steffie and her co-workers hostage. Joe manages to hide, but he’s trapped in the high rise and has to start fighting the bad guys to save his daughter and survive.
*(This book is actually a sequel to another Roderick Thorp novel called The Detective which was also turned into a film starring Frank Sinatra in 1968. The Interwebs tells me that due to contractual issues Sinatra had to be offered the role in Die Hard even though he was over 70 at the time. I don’t know if that’s true, but the idea of Sinatra saying “Yippee kai yay, motherfucker!” makes me smile.)
While there are some significant changes between the book and the film version like the age difference between Joe Leland and John McClane, there’s a surprising amount of material written here that got used in the movie. Running barefoot through broken glass, using a fire hose for an improvised bungee jump off the roof, dropping explosives down an elevator shaft on an office chair, and making a dangerous climb through an air shaft are all things are all things that seem like a Hollywood screenwriter putting an action hero through an obstacle course, but they’re all here in the book.
One thing the movie adapted very well is showing the toll that the fight takes on the hero. Joe Leland is seriously injured, exhausted, and absolutely filthy by the end of this. The film picked up on that and did a great job of making McClane a completely worn out mess by the time the credits rolled. I think one of the things that makes Die Hard such a great action movie is that they followed the book’s example of making the hero someone who can be hurt and who does get tired and runs out of bullets eventually instead of just having him stroll out of the fight at the end with just a little dirt on his face and a tiny cut on his forehead.
The book was published in 1979 so it does seem somewhat dated, and there’s a lot more political stuff as well as some hand wringing over this escalating terrorism issue. (So glad they got that worked out.) The ending is much darker and grimmer than the movie version, but it’s still very recognizable.
It’s a pretty decent action thriller for it’s time, but the film is an action classic and is one of those that has become so much bigger than it’s source material that the book has become an afterthought. It’s a fun read, but you’ve seen a bigger and more exciting version in the Bruce Willis movie....more
I didn’t realize this for a long time but my first exposure to Parker was in the movie loosely based on this book starring Peter Coyote that ran on caI didn’t realize this for a long time but my first exposure to Parker was in the movie loosely based on this book starring Peter Coyote that ran on cable a lot in my teen years. I only vaguely remembered it, mainly for it’s use of George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone in the early scenes of the movie. (Thank you for writing that song, George. If it weren’t for you, there would have been countless film and television scenes where we would have had no clue that the character was ’bad’ without your helpful lyrics on the soundtrack.)
Fortunately, the movie bears so little resemblance to the book that I didn’t even realize the two were connected when I started reading the Parker novels or I may have discounted them because the movie is kind of a crappy horror story with a deadly hitman killing off some thieves. Hell, they don’t even call him Parker in the movie, he’s known as Stone. I don’t know why they bothered buying the book rights because the two share so few similarities that Stark (a/k/a Westlake) couldn’t have won a lawsuit over it.
It’s really a missed opportunity because in the right hands, this could have been Die Hard if they would have filmed the actual story. After a car crash during the getaway of a heist, Parker flees with the loot and tries to hide in an amusement park closed for the winter. Some gangsters and dirty cops see him go in and decide to kill him and take the money, but they make a critical mistake when they allow Parker enough time to get ready for them.
It’s been said that nothing is certain but death and taxes. Easy Rawlins has dealt with plenty of death as a black World War II veteran who also has bIt’s been said that nothing is certain but death and taxes. Easy Rawlins has dealt with plenty of death as a black World War II veteran who also has been mixed up with very bad people in post-war Los Angeles. But this time he’ll have to deal with taxes, too. Which is worse? Ask Al Capone.
Set in the early ‘50s, it’s been a few years since Easy’s introduction in Devil in a Blue Dress, and he has set himself up nicely by taking advantage of an illicit windfall to buy some apartment buildings as well as acting as an unlicensed private detective for the black community. Easy got a little too cute for his own good when he set up his real estate purchases and now he has a zealous IRS agent after him. His only way out is take a deal offered by the FBI to befriend and report on a suspected communist agitator working with a church in Easy’s neighborhood.
Easy soon has even bigger problems than being sent to prison for tax evasion with the appearance of an old flame looking to rekindle a relationship. The problem is that the woman is the wife of Easy’s old friend, the murderous Mouse. Getting on Mouse’s bad side is a sure way to get dead, but Easy can’t stay away from the woman he considers the love of his life.
Just as he did in the previous book, Mosley has recreated a rich and vivid world of the black community in post-war L.A. and then populated it with a variety of characters for Easy to interact with. The theme in this one is betrayal with Easy having to spy on a man he comes to like and respect as well as his guilt about his feelings for Mouse’s wife.
The one sour note in this one is Easy’s man-ho tendencies. Despite carrying on with a woman he claims to have deep feelings for, Easy casually beds several other women over the course of the book and never once shows the slightest bit of guilt or remorse over any of them. Maybe Mosley was trying to illustrate the different standards that applied with regards to men and women in days of yore, but it makes Easy appear like kind of a heartless bastard. ...more
Treasure of the Rubbermaids 13: Are You Ready For Some Football Under the Friday Night Lights On Any Given Sunday?
The on-going discoveries of pricelesTreasure of the Rubbermaids 13: Are You Ready For Some Football Under the Friday Night Lights On Any Given Sunday?
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
This book had crossed my mind several times over the past year before and during the NFL lockout while I heard many fans moan and wail about how it was greedy players ruining the game. I always disagreed with that, and Peter Gent’s novel has been a big influence on my thinking about it for years. You’ve got about 1600 guys on earth capable of playing at that level who generate tens of billion of dollars for a handful of owners, so it only seemed fair that they get a decent slice of that pie. While you’ll sometimes hear grumblings about ‘billionaires versus millionaires’, some people seem to think the players should go out and wreck their bodies for minimum wage and simple love of the game. Anyone who has romantic notions along those lines should read this book immediately.
Gent died recently and that gave me the nudge to dig this out of the Rubbermaids and reread it. He played for the Dallas Cowboys for several years in the late ‘60s, and this fictionalized account of a player named Phil Elliot was obviously modeled on his time there. Elliot is a talented receiver, but he’s injury prone. After just a few years in the league, he already needs huge doses of painkillers and hours in the therapy room just to get on the practice field.
Even more than his injuries, Elliot’s resistance to blindly follow the team’s mandates has gotten him in the doghouse with his coach and general manager. As a quasi-hippie with a love of marijuana and a habit of making smart ass comments, many of his fellow teammates don’t like him much either. Playing for the princely sum of $16,000 a year and routinely screwed over by the corporate side of the team, Elliot realizes he’s not a person to management, he’s a piece of equipment that’s rapidly in need of replacement. If he wasn’t a good drinking buddy and favorite receiver of the team’s star quarterback, he’d already have been cut or traded. Elliot copes with the pain and stress by indulging in heavy drinking, drug abuse and casual sex all while marveling at the hypocrisy and self-deception practiced by the team’s coaches and management. Phil‘s humor and compassion make a stark counter point to the serious violent world he works in.
Despite the injuries, the team’s bullshit and the insanely violent nature of many of his teammates, Elliot still loves playing and lives for those pure moments of athletic achievement where he can make a tough catch and fears the day when he won’t be able to compete any more.
You don’t have to be a football fan to enjoy this book. The broader theme of an individual being crushed by a system that can’t stand individuality is universal. Phil could have been a coal miner or a cop or a teacher or a cube farmer, and his plight would still be just as familiar to anyone who has held a job where the people in charge piss down your back and then insist that you say it’s raining. But for those interested in the football aspect of it, you’ll get the impression that nothing much has changed since it’s publication almost 40 years ago.
Oh, and the movie version with Nick Nolte is pretty faithful to the book although the novel ends on a much darker note than the film....more
Block had written about Matt trying to get sober in the mid-‘80s with 8 Million Ways to Die, and then hAnd so begins the second phase of Matt Scudder.
Block had written about Matt trying to get sober in the mid-‘80s with 8 Million Ways to Die, and then he had done a flashback novel when Matt was still boozing during the ‘70s in When the Sacred Ginmill Closes so there’s been a pretty substantial gap in Matt’s timeline when this story starts up in 1989. (Thanks to winning an ARC of the upcoming A Drop of the Hard Stuff, I can report that Scudder fans will get some more info about what Matt was up to.)
Matt is over three years sober and has become a regular fixture at AA meetings. He still works as an unlicensed private detective and has been trying to track down a missing girl. With no leads in that case and without a steady girlfriend or the circle of bar buddies he used to hang with, Matt is a little bored and lonely. A former small time crook named Eddie approaches Matt after an AA meeting and asks if he would hear his fifth step, a confession of the things that he feels badly about it. Matt agrees, but then doesn’t hear from Eddie. When he goes looking for him, Matt finds Eddie dead under odd circumstances. Was it an accident or murder?
Matt meets a couple of new friends in this one. The first is a woman that he starts dating and likes very much, but he’s quietly conflicted about her drinking. The second is a man who will become a very important figure in the Scudder series: Mick Ballou. (Oddly, he’s called Mickey in this first one. I always remember him as being referred to as Mick.)
Ballou is a bigger than life Irish gangster who likes to wear his father’s old butcher apron to an early mass in the meat district of New York, and it’s probably best that you not ask him about any fresh stains you see on it. Mick also may or may not have once carried an enemy’s head around in a bowling bag while he was bar hopping. Oddly, the hard drinking criminal and the alcoholic ex-cop feel a kinship, and this one hints at the long friendship that eventually develops between the two.
Matt’s life without drinking and the introduction of Ballou mark this as a change to the series, but it’s still the same incredibly well-written account of a low-key but complicated detective....more
Treasure of the Rubbermaids 9: Birth of a Sidekick
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers preTreasure of the Rubbermaids 9: Birth of a Sidekick
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
In 1988 DC offered Batman fans a chance to determine the fate of the second Robin, Jason Todd, by voting via a 1-900 number. The readers turned their thumbs down, and Robin met a gruesome end at the hands of the Joker. However, poor Jason’s body was barely cold when DC decided that they needed a new Robin.
There was still a story problem with this because it was during the phase when they were trying to make Batman as dark, gritty, and realistic as possible. If the writing is good and you can stretch your imagination a bit you can suspend disbelief enough to buy into the notion that an obsessed billionaire would start wearing a costume and beating on criminals due to the trauma of seeing his parents murdered. But how do you explain the kid in the green short-shorts?
So this story needed to bring in the new Robin, Tim Drake, and it had to deal with that lingering question about why Batman needs a Robin. It does a decent enough of job of introducing the kid, and they gave some reasons about why a grim vigilante would need or want a sidekick. But it’s not ever going to be considered one of the best or deepest comics ever written.
Per the story, since Jason’s death Batman has become reckless and driven himself to exhaustion. With no one’s safety to consider but his own, Bruce’s obsession with punishing criminals has gotten the better of him, and he’s been thinking with his fists as he contends with the return of Two Face. Young Tim had figured out who Batman and the first Robin really were years ago thanks to a coincidence, and he has come forward to urge Batman and the original Robin (Dick Grayson) to partner up again. It’s pretty obvious where the story was going to from there.
It’s not a completely plausible reason for child endangerment, and Bruce does note that he sometimes feels like he created a monster with the whole Batman & Robin idea. DC was smart enough to address some of the issues that kept fans from embracing Jason as Robin. They gave Tim a better backstory than just the old my-parents-were-murdered-by-criminals thing. They’d also eventually update the Robin outfit, doing away with the shorts and giving the kid better weapons.
While not a big fan of the idea of Robin, I always liked the Tim Drake character in Batman’s world. He was smart and resourceful without ever being a smug little prick. He followed Batman’s orders and guidelines so that he never seemed like a pain in the ass, but he wasn’t a brown noser either. He’d eventually become a character that many in the Bat-family consider the best detective of them all, and it sometimes seems like he may eventually eclipse his mentor.
Tim isn’t Robin these days. That job is being filled by Bruce's bastard son, but Tim is still around in another hero persona. While this story isn’t great, it’s probably a must-read for hard core fans to get the introduction of one of the more important characters in the Batman mythos....more
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previouslTreasure of the Rubbermaids 6: Made in China
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
I bitch about having to mow my lawn, but when I’m done, I usually sit on my deck and have a few ice cold beers. Then I take a hot shower and get in my car to go to the grocery store where I buy a cart full of food without giving it a second thought.
Chinese farmer Wang Lung (I wanted to type Wang Chung there. Damn you ‘80s!) spends all day doing back breaking labor in his own fields and there’s still barely enough food to keep from starving. His big reward is a cup of hot water in the morning with maybe a few tea leaves in it on special occasions, and he sponges himself off with hot water every couple of months whether he needs it or not.
So maybe I shouldn’t complain about walking around behind a power mower for an hour or two a week during the summer?
The book begins on Wang Lung’s wedding day. His bride, O-Lan, is a slave in the great house of his town, and they’ve never met. He splurges by taking a bath, buying her a couple of peaches, and getting a little pork and meat for their wedding feast which O-Lan prepares. For a honeymoon, they go work in the fields together. This whole section made me laugh thinking about the women on those reality wedding shows like Bridezillas.
Wang Lung and O-Lan make a good couple. They’re both hard working and she soon bears him sons which is kind of important to the Chinese. (And she returns to the fields right after giving birth with no assistance. O-Lan is a dream client for an HMO.) Together their family will go through bad times including droughts and famine, but O-Lan’s steady nature and Wang Lung’s farming skills eventually bring them prosperity.
The one thing that sets Wang Lung apart from other farmers is his constant desire to acquire new land. Part of this is pride, but Wang Lung realizes that owning good farm land is the key to providing the necessary cushion to keep from starving during bad years. Plus, he genuinely loves working his crops and bringing them to harvest. His fierce love of the land is the one constant in his life, but he obviously never went through a real estate crash. (Diversify, Wang Lung! Diversify!)
This book works on a lot of levels. As a depiction of a culture that little was known about when it was published, it’s fantastic. I liked how Buck never comments or judges on things that are kind of horrifying like selling girls for slaves or binding their feet, but treats them as just the way things are to all the characters. She just let the facts speak for themselves. It’s also works as a family drama with trials and tribulations worthy of a soap opera. You could also read it as a plain old rags-to-riches success story.
Despite being set in a time and place so alien to me, the characters still seem very real and relatable despite the cultural differences. Wang Lung doesn’t seem that different from any modern American farmer I’ve known. I think it must be universal that farmers everywhere like to gather and shoot the shit whether it’s at a Chinese tea house or a diner in Kansas.
And when a successful Wang Lung experiences a mid-life crisis and falls for a younger woman, you realize that it’s no different from any modern guy divorcing the wife who stood by him for years. It’s just that the sports car hasn’t been invented yet so Wang Lung can’t go buy one.
This is one of those classics that has an easily readable style and a compelling story that still seems fresh even though it was published over 70 years ago....more
When you’ve hit a point where you’ve read hundreds of books and age starts to degrade your memory, you sometimes doubt your previous assessments. I’d When you’ve hit a point where you’ve read hundreds of books and age starts to degrade your memory, you sometimes doubt your previous assessments. I’d read most of the Scudder novels anywhere from 10 to 15 years ago, and while I thought they were very good, I’d started to wonder if they were actually as good as I remembered. Having reread the first four, I’m very happy to find that these are actually even better than I originally thought.
Matt gets hired by a man whose daughter, Barbara, was supposedly killed by a serial killer with an icepick nine years earlier. The killer was recently caught but while he’s confessing to the other murders, he denies killing Barbara. The cops aren’t interested in screwing up the gift of getting multiple homicides cleared off the books so they won’t bother looking into it, but one of the detectives has steered the father to Matt, who briefly worked the murder when he was still a cop. Matt doubts he can turn anything up, but agrees to look into it.
As with the other Matt Scudder books, the mystery and resolution are intriguing enough, but what really sets these books apart is the character arc of Scudder himself. Block cleverly never gave us much direct introspection from Matt despite being written in the first person. At first glance, it seems like many things don’t seem to effect him at all, but over the course of the series, particularly these early books, you realize that Matt is a guy consumed with guilt and self hatred.
Matt's a very decent guy, but he freely admits to taking money as a cop and a large part of his unlicensed PI business comes from paying kickbacks to the police. He left the cops after accidentally shooting and killing a young girl while breaking up a robbery and subsequently walked out on his wife and kids to start living in a cheap hotel room. This book is yet another stage in Matt’s relationship to the booze where he gets dangerously drunk without realizing it, and it’s the first time that he even starts to consider the idea that he may be an alcoholic, even if he quickly denies it.
This is another short but powerful book that again shows that Block can deliver more story and create more heartbreaking characters in 180 pages than most writers can in a lifetime. ...more
In the third book* of this excellent series by Lawrence Block, ex-cop Matt Scudder continues to work as an unlicensed private detective in Manhattan aIn the third book* of this excellent series by Lawrence Block, ex-cop Matt Scudder continues to work as an unlicensed private detective in Manhattan and spend most of his free time abusing his liver in various bars.
A cop named Jerry Broadfield has volunteered to give testimony regarding NYPD corruption, but his credibility is in doubt when a high priced call girl accuses him of extorting her. Matt doesn’t like Broadfield much and doubts his sincerity in claiming that he came forward because he was fed up with the broken system, but Matt still agrees to find the call girl and try to get her to admit to lying about the extortion.
When the girl turns up dead in Broadfield’s apartment, the cops are only too happy to pin the crime on him. Matt makes his police pals unhappy with his insistence that he thinks Broadfield has been set up.
Having read this series before and knowing the path that Matt’s life will take, it’s interesting to go back to the beginning and see where he was at during this period. Matt is starting to realize that his boozing is slipping out of control, but he isn’t ready to try and give it up. Matt also struggles a lot with this case emotionally because he isn’t a crusading idealist who wants to change the system, but the idea that cops may have been involved in the murder of the call girl upsets him quite a bit.
One of the pleasures of the Scudder novels is Matt’s detecting method of roaming around New York talking to people in his low key manner. Matt can easily chat with cops, call girls, writers, gay night club owners or landlords of Hell’s Kitchen apartment buildings, and Block gives a great sense of New York through Matt’s wanderings and conversations. Another bonus in this one was written in the mid-’70’s, shortly after many scandals involving the NYPD had come out so it makes a nice gritty backdrop for a mystery.
* - I originally called this the second book of the Scudder series and re-read them in that order because there's some confusion due to the fact that they weren't published in the order Block wrote them in. I've edited to change it match the publication order....more
Treasure of the Rubbermaids 4: The Sound of the Men Working on the Chain Gang
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack oTreasure of the Rubbermaids 4: The Sound of the Men Working on the Chain Gang
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
Even though it’s been over twenty years I remember why I bought this book. Back in the pre-Internet days if you didn’t live in a large city books didn’t get a lot of media attention. So when the nearest mid-sized city paper had an article about an author, and his book was described as new gory crime/horror series featuring an outlandish villain that had been endorsed by the likes of Stephen King and Harlan Ellison, it got my attention. If I remember correctly, the author was from Missouri, and it was getting treated as a local-boy-makes-good story so somebody was smart enough to stock his book at the local Waldens so I got a copy fairly easily.
Unfortunately, Rex Miller was ahead of his time. He created a character so gruesome and despicable that he would have fit in better in the torture porn that passes for horror these days. I don’t think the series ever really broke big the way it seemed like it would. I know I never read any of his other books because even my late teen self had better taste than that.
There’s a cop named Jack Eichord who is part of some kind of national task force that’s not well explained who is supposed to be a serial killer expert, and he’s come to Chicago to help find a lunatic who is cutting the hearts out of people. He meets the beautiful widow of one of the victims who was killed a few years before, and they instantly fall deeply in love. So he hangs around her and her kid. That’s about it. For being a cop, he seemingly does very little police work.
That’s because the main part of this book is about a 6’7” 450 lb. psychopath. (I think the author read Daredevil comics and based this guy on the Kingpin.) The psycho was called Chaingang when he was a one man killing machine in Vietnam because he likes to use a hunk of chain to crush the skulls of his targets when he’s feeling frisky. Not only is Chaingang completely shithouse rat crazy, he’s also brilliant. Because all serial killers in fiction are brilliant. Oh, and he also has a low level of precognition that warns him of danger.
If Miller would have stopped there he might have been on to something. The idea of an oversized deranged murderer roaming around could have been a new twist on the serial killer, but he had to keep adding things to Chaingang to the point of where a suspension of disbelief is impossible.
We’re supposed to think that a jumbo sized guy who can’t go fifteen minutes without raping and killing someone as he lugs around a giant duffel bag full of weapons and gear somehow manages to bounce around without getting noticed by the cops for years. Even with his psychic warning system that seems kind of unlikely.
And not only is Chaingang brilliant we’re told that he’s a master con man who can talk a beautiful woman into a vehicle by pretending to be a movie producer. Seriously, what woman would look at a 450 lb. stranger in a piece of shit car filled with fast foot wrappers and jump in with him?
We’re also supposed to believe that Chaingang is a master thief. Because who would notice a giant covered in blood and food stains walking around stealing shit?
So while Chaingang could have made an interesting and unique villain Miller pushed the concept way past the point of absurdity. Even for a schlock horror/crime novel there’s almost no logic to the plot. At one point, the Chicago police want to pin Chaingang’s murders on a copycat killer, and even though Eichord knows that the evidence won’t pass the simplest forensic tests he agrees to be their mouthpiece for the media to sell the story for no good reason even though he thinks the idea is stupid. Plus, the love story between Eichord and the widow is unbelievable and completely pointless except to add sex scenes to the story.
Overall, there was a halfway decent potential villain lurking in this book, but Miller spent too much time adding new unbelievable twists to his creation to come up with any plot for him or another interesting character in the whole book...more
Treasure of the Rubbermaids 3: You Tell Them I'm Coming! - And Hell's Coming With Me!
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in aTreasure of the Rubbermaids 3: You Tell Them I'm Coming! - And Hell's Coming With Me!
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
It was good time to find this one while digging through the Rubbermaid stack. I’d been in the mood to read some westerns after seeing the new version of True Grit and rereading the novel, but I’d gotten a shock when checking out the Josey Wales books when I learned that the author was a former Ku Klux Klan member and all around lying asshat. Finding this in the Rubbermaid pile seemed like it could get me back on track, as long as it doesn’t turn out that Elmore Leonard was actually in the Hitler Youth.
This features a great opening line: The gentleman from Harper’s Weekly, who didn’t know mesquite beans from goat shit, looked up from his reference collection of back issues, and said, “I got it!”
Bren Early was a calvary officer and Dana Moon was a scout in Arizona in the late 1880s. They once crossed into Mexico hunting a renegade Indian who had kidnapped Kate McKean. They find the girl and capture the Indian, but a bounty hunter named Sundeen tried to force them to give up their prisoner. Early and Moon stand up to Sundeen and fight off him and his men, killing several of them.
The two men get reputations as gunfighters because of this incident, but their fame does them little good and brings a lot of grief. Years later, the two find themselves on opposite sides of a land war when a mining company that Bren works for tries to drive of the Indians and Mexicans living in the mountains of Arizona where Moon is working as an Indian agent and married to Kate.
Newspaper reporters from all over the country swarm the area hoping to witness an epic showdown between Bren and Moon, but the two men don’t seem in any hurry to fight each other. Plus, Sundeen shows up as an enforcer for the mining company and has revenge on his mind.
This may be a western instead of a crime novel, but it’s still Elmore Leonard so you get a large cast of offbeat characters and a plot that zigzags in unexpected directions. I also got a laugh that one of Bren and Moon’s friends is an ex-slave cavalry soldier named Bo Catlett because Leonard used the name Bo Catlett again in Get Shorty. Maybe he's supposed to be a descendent.
Leonard pulls his usual tricks of having the story come out in a series of encounters between characters and incorporates some flashbacks that tell us the story of how Bren and Moon got into their current positions.
A fun western with good characters, plenty of action and a lot of humor, this is Elmore Leonard proving yet again that he can tell a story like nobody else....more
This book was written in the mid-‘70s and in some ways, it seems like its set on a different planet, not just a different era. This was that odd time This book was written in the mid-‘70s and in some ways, it seems like its set on a different planet, not just a different era. This was that odd time when all of America decided that being a drunken redneck was the thing to aspire to. (See the movies Smokey & The Bandit and Every Which Way But Lose for further examples of this phenomenon.) And Milo Milodragovitch fits that mold nicely.
He’s a boozer from a family of boozers and after his rich father’s death, his mother put his vast estate into a trust that Milo can’t touch until his early fifties because she thought he’d drink himself to death. So Milo hangs around the small Montana city he grew up in and spends most of his time in bars and is on a first name basis with every wino in town.
He used to be a deputy sheriff who quit when he got tired of scraping accident victims off the road. Milo had recently been working as a small-time private detective specializing in messy divorce cases while he impatiently waits for the trust. Unfortunately, the state decides to loosen up the rules about granting divorces so Milo’s services are no longer in demand.
When a beautiful but naïve woman named Helen tries to hire him to look for her missing brother, Milo knows that he doesn’t have the skills or the soberness to be a real detective, but he eventually does start asking about the guy. Despite spending most of his time drinking, Milo eventually stirs up a hornet’s nest involving a local drug ring that leads to several violent encounters.
James Crumley is a crime writer that never reached a mass audience during his life but he’s got a pretty loyal cult following, including me. His books have been described as a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson, and I’d agree with that. Crumley created his own style of redneck noir that also reminds me a bit of Joe Lansdale at times. He should be included in any conversation of the best of the hard boiled crime writers.
The Wrong Case is his first novel, and while it’s pretty entertaining and sets the tone nicely, it’s not the best work he did. The relationship between Milo and Helen is just too bizarre to be believed, even for the ‘70s. And while Crumley’s characters would always like to pull a cork, Milo’s constant drinking in this one makes it hard to believe that he’d be able to do anything but check himself into rehab.
It’s an entertaining and better than average crime novel, but it’s not my favorite Crumley book. ...more
If Preacher was a TV series, then the preview for the events here would have dramatic music and the voiceover would ominously say something like, “ThiIf Preacher was a TV series, then the preview for the events here would have dramatic music and the voiceover would ominously say something like, “This is where everything changes.”
The voodoo encounter with the giant snake in New Orleans *shudder* gave Jesse some info from the Genesis entity that bonded to him, but he needs more if he’s going to track down God. The trio heads to Monument Valley in Utah so Jesse can score some peyote to go on a desert vision quest to see if he can get more clues as to the Good Lord‘s whereabouts.
Unfortunately, Herr Starr has figured out where Jesse is going and has used the Grail’s political influence to have the U.S. Army waiting for him, and the Saint of Killers is on the way to get Jesse to fulfill the bargain they struck in Proud Americans. Jesse is also unaware of tensions between Tulip and Cassidy that are threatening to boil over. When they all meet in John Wayne country, the ensuing battle escalates into full-scale modern war, and no one gets away unscarred.
This is the pivotal story that drives Preacher towards its ultimate conclusion, and as you’d expect, Ennis amps up the action and delivers the most disturbing plot twist yet.
This volume also includes the origin story of Herr Starr, and even though the revelations make it clear that he’s always been a world-class asshole, you also understand why he turned out that way and what’s driving him to lead the Grail to global domination via religion. Surprisingly, he’s not out for power for himself, he’s trying to bring order to chaos. Starr could relate to Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible when he said, “The world’s a mess, and I just need to rule it.” ...more
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previoTreasure of the Rubbermaids 7: The Forever War
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
I picture Dr. Richard Hornberger sometimes turning on the television and catching the movie or TV version of MASH and shaking his head in wonderment at how the short novel he wrote based on his experiences as a surgeon in Korea became an icon of American pop culture. The real Korean War lasted three years, but the TV show ran for eleven seasons over twenty years later. I gotta think that had to be mildly disconcerting to the good doctor.
While the Robert Altman movie and the Alan Alda TV version ultimately were considered anti-establishment and anti-war statements, that's really not what’s going on in the book. Hornberger (writing as Richard Hooker) wrote a brief forward where he noted the hard and emotionally draining work in bad conditions led some to blow off steam by acting batshit insane.
At the 4077th MASH in 1951, Colonel Henry Blake requests two new surgeons and gets Hawkeye Pierce and Duke Forrest. Hawkeye and Duke have decided that if they work their asses off when they’re needed that they’ll be able to do what they want in their off hours, and they’ll be too valuable for anyone for anyone to punish. They’re right. Soon they’re joined by another surgeon, Trapper John, and the three alternate trying to save the lives of wounded soldiers with heavy drinking and outrageous stunts including trying to raise money by selling autographed pictures of Jesus and giving their camp dentist a bizarre form of shock therapy to snap him out of a suicidal depression.
There are really no overt political or anti-war statements in the book, and there’s nothing like the liberal attitude that would later be incorporated into the show. The antics of the doctors aren’t meant to be seen as ideological. They just have very demanding jobs, and their only means of relieving stress and boredom comes from heavy drinking and fucking with people that irritate them.
Aside from the bitching common to all soldiers they don’t spend time raging against the military or the war. They work, they drink, they bullshit, come up with bizarre schemes to amuse themselves and that’s about it. Aside from one brief phase where the guys fall into funks after a particularly hellish couple of weeks following a major battle none of it seems to get to them too much. There’s also a moving chapter where their former Korean houseboy is drafted and brought back to them as a patient, but while the guys get very serious about saving him that more somber attitude doesn’t last long.
One of the more interesting points of the book is the descriptions of the surgery that the doctors perform. The quick and concise accounts of the fast paced and often brutal operations should seem out of place in a book that is primarily going for laughs, but it helps to establish the idea that after spending hours up to their elbows in blood-n-guts without a break that Hawkeye and his friends would need a laugh by any means necessary.
This probably seemed a lot more shocking and outrageous back in 1968 when it was published then it does today, but it’s still amusing. While an offbeat and funny book, I can’t imagine that anyone who read it back then could imagine what it’d become on film and TV. There are a couple of bad sequels to this, and a whole string of bad MASH books ghost written by someone else after the show became popular. None of them have the goofy charm of this one.
Reading this is kind of like going into the local VFW and sitting down next to an old guy with a couple of drinks in him and listening to his funny stories about his days in the service....more
Treasure of the Rubbermaids 10: Good Cop - Bad Cop
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers preTreasure of the Rubbermaids 10: Good Cop - Bad Cop
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
Junior Frenger has just gotten out of prison in California, and he promptly heads to Miami with a pocket full of stolen cash and credit cards. No sooner does he arrive at the airport than a Hare Krishna annoys him so Junior breaks his finger before leaving to embark on a one-man crime wave. Freakishly, the Krishna dies from the shock of the broken digit, and homicide detective Hoke Mosley gets the case.
Junior goes on to meet part-time call girl Susan, and then unlikely coincidence brings Hoke into contact with both of them. Hoke doesn’t realize that Junior is the guy who inadvertently killed the Krishna, but he picks up on Junior being an ex-con and starts nosing around him and Susan. This annoys Junior who goes on the offensive and ends up in a position to impersonate a police officer while complicating Hoke’s life.
This is a slick and original crime thriller with off-beat characters. Junior is described as a ‘blithe psychopath‘, and he lives up to that billing. Since he’s sure that he’ll end up in jail eventually no matter what he does, Junior is only interested in instant gratification and fast cash with no real concern about long term consequences. Susan is so grateful to have someone to take care of her that she quickly begins complying with Junior’s instructions.
Hoke isn’t your typical hero cop, either. Just over 40 with a failed marriage and a mouthful of false teeth as well as a taste for bourbon, Hoke‘s personal life is a mess. With every spare dime going towards alimony and child support, he has to live in a shabby hotel and can’t even keep up with his bar tab. Hoke’s also losing most of his friends on the police force as an increasingly dangerous Miami of the late ‘80s is causing most of them to flee to safer jobs.
Anyone looking for an fast paced crime novel with a dark sense of humor would enjoy this book. The movie version from 1990 with Alec Baldwin and Fred Ward is a good adaptation of this also....more
The notion that comics are just for kids has been pretty well discredited these days, but if someone ever tried that line on me, I’d probably use Ed The notion that comics are just for kids has been pretty well discredited these days, but if someone ever tried that line on me, I’d probably use Ed Brubaker’s Criminal series for my rebuttal. Not because of the language, violence and nudity it contains, but because they really are top notch hard boiled stories. This is crime fiction enhanced by art, not a funny book with guys drawn with trench coats and guns to make it look like crime fiction.
Each volume has its own self-contained story. In this one, Tracy Lawless got busted right after becoming an adult and took a deal to join the army instead of going to prison. However, he always feels guilty for leaving his younger brother Ricky behind with their abusive lowlife criminal father. When Tracy gets word that Ricky was murdered, he returns home under a false identity to hook up with his brother’s crew of thieves to find out who killed him and get his revenge.
Brubaker is one of the most consistently solid writers in comics, and the artwork by Sean Phillips creates a brooding atmosphere of a seedy underworld. The obvious comparison would be to Frank Miller’s Sin City series, but this is a much more grounded and realistic series than that one. The story goes off in several unexpected directions and Tracy is a great anti-hero character.
Good fun for fans of old school crime fiction....more
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previouslTreasure of the Rubbermaids 11: Generation X
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
Now that there are umpteen million versions of X-Men out there in comics, cartoons, movies and just as many spin-offs, it’s kind of hard to remember that there was a time when there was just one comic featuring the mutants being published by Marvel. Even more amazing is that from the mid ’70s into the early ’90s, The Uncanny X-Men was written by one guy, Chris Claremont. That’s a run that will probably never be matched again, and he turned a small-time Marvel title into one of the most popular comics of its time.
He also wrote classic storylines like the Dark Phoenix saga and Days of Future Past that helped change comics from kid’s stuff to the kind of stories that would keep generations of nerds in their parents’ basements while they zealously guarded their Mylar wrapped treasures and bitched about movie casting on the Internet.
One of the things that Claremont did well was to play up the outcast nature of the mutants, and then tie that into stories of bigotry and persecution. This graphic novel from 1982 is a great example of that, and it’s an extremely adult storyline that came out several years before Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns got released and credited with making comics ‘mature’.
A religious leader named Stryker has launched a national campaign against mutants. While he wages a political and propaganda war to strip them of their rights, Stryker has secret paramilitary teams targeting and killing mutants. Stryker also has a plan that involves kidnapping Professor Xavier. However, his brutal tactics have brought about a temporary truce between Magneto and the X-Men as they work together to save the Professor and stop Stryker.
The storyline here is surprisingly sophisticated and dark for it’s time with the book beginning with the vicious murders of a couple of mutant children. Stryker’s efforts to win over the American public with his media campaign and the effect it has seems all to realistic and chilling.
Unfortunately, Claremont’s dialogue hadn’t caught up to the rest of the ahead-of-its-time comic story telling so there’s lots of exposition along with a side order of cheese. Still, this was an above average comic that gave a taste of where the genre would be going in the future. It held up well enough that elements of it would be used twenty years later in the second X-Men movie...more
Floating this one with a new shelf to see how the kinder, gentler Goodreads policy will handle a review that brings up the author's documented historyFloating this one with a new shelf to see how the kinder, gentler Goodreads policy will handle a review that brings up the author's documented history of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan and a liar.
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After seeing the Coen Brothers’ version of True Grit and rereading the book, I had an urge to check out another western. Preferably one with a movie adaptation made that I could watch after reading. The Outlaw Josey Wales came to mind. I loved the movie but haven’t seen it in years. Plus, I’d read the book a long time ago and didn’t remember much about it. Now, I’m really kind of wishing that I would have left well enough alone.
I got this volume that had both the books by Forrest Carter. Gone to Texas is the one that inspired the film version with a Missouri farmer becoming a guerilla fighter during the Civil War after his family is killed by Union forces. After the war, Josey refuses to surrender and tries to fight his way to Texas. The second book, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, is about Josey going into Mexico chasing after a sadistic bunch of rurales who came into Texas where they raped, murdered and kidnapped friends of his. This book also dealt a lot with how the corrupt Mexican landowners and the Catholic Church conspired to keep the peasants in debt and working the land.
As I was reading, something kept bugging me. In the first book, a lot of time is spent on how unfair and cruel the federal government had been to Josey, his Confederate comrades, and some of the Indians he meets. Josey is presented as the Mythical Righteous Redneck Warrior who will ruthlessly shoot you down, but is a straight talking man of his word. Unlike them guvment fellas.
At first, I thought this was just my Kansas nature. I’ve always been slightly irked about how both the real and fictional Missouri guerrillas who later turned to robbery were portrayed as heroes or at least anti-heroes. While there were plenty of atrocities on both side of the border war, it’d be nice if Kansas got a little credit for being the free state while the Missourians were fighting for the slave state.
However, the book had a bad habit of going on and on about how ruthless the government was while Josey and his pals were just simple folks wanting to live peacefully on the land. But slavery is never mentioned once, and there isn’t a single black character in the novel. Carter was supposedly part Cherokee who had written a memoir about his ancestry so I thought he had just decided to highlight the mistreatment of the Indians and leave slavery out of it to make Josey more sympathetic.
But while I was looking up Carter before writing this review, I found out that his real name was actually Asa Carter, and that he’d been a segregationist, a speech writer for George Wallace, and he was heavily involved with the Ku Klux Klan. According to Wikipedia, he had to leave the KKK after shooting two members in a dispute over finances. How bad do you have to be to get thrown out of the Klan?
In the 1970’s, he changed his name, tried to pass himself off as part Indian and wrote a ‘memoir’ called The Education of Little Tree so apparently he was the James Frey of his generation. He died shortly after writing the Josey Wales novels, but his double life was finally revealed in the early ‘90s.
Shit.
There’s nothing like finding out that a movie you really liked was inspired by a racist asshole, and that it was subtle propaganda about ‘the evils of guvment’. He even managed to work in some shots at the Catholics in the sequel. I feel dirty just for having read it.
I never got that vibe from the Eastwood version so I’m assuming it got filtered out of the movie, but that’s really going to be hard not to think about while watching Clint spit tobacco and sending troops on a Missouri boat ride. ...more
You would think that after a while the business of being a private investigator has to get kind of routine and boring for guys like Matt Scudder who hYou would think that after a while the business of being a private investigator has to get kind of routine and boring for guys like Matt Scudder who have had long careers. Sure it seems like searching for murderers would never get dull, but I imagine it’s like any other job and eventually even tracking serial killers would be just like filling out another TPS report. But Matt gets a humdinger of a problem in this one that would make even the most bored and jaded detective straighten his tie and polish his blackjack at the possibility of looking into this case.
Lewis Hildebrand has been a member of an odd secret club for three decades. A group of 31 men meet once a year for a dinner and a reading of the names of members who died since their last gathering. This goes on annually until only one member is left, and then that survivor creates a new group. According to the man who recruited Hildebrand, the club’s roots go back for several generations.
However, Hildebrand is troubled at the high death rate of the membership. About half the members have gone to their reward even though his research with actuarial tables show that only about 5 men should have died out of a group their age and size. With several murders and alleged suicides in the mix, Hildebrand hires Matt to see if someone is targeting the group or if it’s just some kind of statistical anomaly. As Matt looks into the deaths, he finds a lot be suspicious about, but what kind of killer would patiently go after a small group of men for years with no obvious motive?
This is another quality entry in the Scudder series with Matt trying to unravel a unique mystery and dealing with his own issues. Investigating a group of successful men about his own age has made Matt examine his own legacy, and he’s finding it a bit thin. This is also a great one for Scudder fans because we get a lot of interactions with Matt’s supporting players like street hustler TJ, police sketch artist Ray, and an extended all-night bullshit session with his best friend and gangster, Mick Ballou.
We also get another example of Matt displaying his own brand of problem solving when it comes to dealing with the killer....more
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