Extremely guilty pleasure, this one - but I just couldn't resist when I saw it on sale at our local "Ollie's Bargain Outlet." Didn't realize I was thaExtremely guilty pleasure, this one - but I just couldn't resist when I saw it on sale at our local "Ollie's Bargain Outlet." Didn't realize I was that serious a Rush fan until I thumbed through it and realized yup, I have every CD from "Signal" (when Geddy finally stopped screeching and started singing) to "Feedback." So my mornings lately have been a cup of coffee and going through this chapter by chapter, while listening to the corresponding album on YouTube. Still working through the first nine, all of which make my ears bleed thanks to Lee's truly painful vocals - but there are some interesting early Lifeson licks in there, and I'm hearing some Peart solos I hadn't before, which is always a treasure....more
Read this back around when it first came out, so I must have been, what...13 or so? Back in my James Bond, Man from U.N.C.L.E. phase - what a weird kiRead this back around when it first came out, so I must have been, what...13 or so? Back in my James Bond, Man from U.N.C.L.E. phase - what a weird kid I must have been. And what a weird kid I apparently still am...
This was the first "scholarly" look at James Bond, written while Fleming was still alive and scribbling, so doesn't cover the later books like You Only Live Twice, Man With the Golden Gun, and Octopussy, (the last two of which were published posthumously). It's also interesting to consider the stories in their written - rather than filmed - order, since the movie series is WAY out of line with how the books were published. Same for the characters and plots - these are the original book versions, with less action and more cartoonish bad guys than in the films, (I know, hard to believe). That said, Snelling does include a few comments on first two movies (which again, were the 6th and 5th books in the series), basically comments on casting (loved Bond and Moneypenny, but thought M was way too young and should have been played by C. Aubrey Smith - Google it for a quick laugh).
The book's divided into five sections- His Predecessors, His Image, His Women, His Adversaries and His Future - although His Women alone takes up nearly half the book. His Predecessors is interesting in that it reminds us just how OLD James Bond is, and what a ground-breaking character he initially was, (kind of like how people forget what a revolutionary movie the first "Star Wars" was when it came out). Bond is quaintly compared to "the Terrible Trio" of popular fiction between the two World Wars - Bulldog Drummond, Jonah Mansel and Richard Hannay, only one of who I've even ever heard of.
Anyway - fun to revisit, and interesting to learn that what were originally considered among the best books - Moonraker, for example - were turned into the worst movies. Which forces me to repeat something that my friends are probably sick of hearing - instead of trying to come up with new Bond stories like "Skyfall" and "SPECTRE," who doesn't Hollywood (or England or whatever) just remake some of the original movies - especially the terrible Roger Moore ones? There are good stories there, and other movies get remade all the time. I mean seriously, who wouldn't want to see a decent, non-campy version of Diamonds are Forever or Man With the Golden Gun?...more
As with No Way Out, the last "Secret Agent" book I read, this one starts out interesting - Cold War Albania vs. Cold War Macau - but then the author rAs with No Way Out, the last "Secret Agent" book I read, this one starts out interesting - Cold War Albania vs. Cold War Macau - but then the author really does nothing to set the location other than throw in a few street names gleaned from a map of Tirana. In fact, after the initial scene, the story doesn't actually get to Albania until 2/3s of the way through. The plot hinges on the often-used but never realistic device of the good spy bearing an uncanny resemblance to the dead bad guy, (the only overused plot trick worse than this is Mission Impossible's use of masks).
Obviously, you can't expect these TV tie-in books to be of the same quality as, say, Alistair MacLean's The Secret Ways, (similar time/setting). But they could have made a little more of an effort. Oh well.
This was the last of the old John Drake Secret Agent novels, (only four of them). Unfortunately, I've still got a good 30 Man/Girl From U.N.C.L.E., Avengers, I Spy, Mission Impossible and others to get through someday. They're fun to read in a nostalgic, back-to-the-60s, back-to-my-early-teen-years way, but I really need to spend more time reading much better, much more recent stuff......more
(TV SHOW SPOILERS): We have only recently come to "Luther" the TV show, but have been binging on all four seasons and have become big fans of both the(TV SHOW SPOILERS): We have only recently come to "Luther" the TV show, but have been binging on all four seasons and have become big fans of both the John Luther character and Idris Elba.
This book is a direct prequel to Season One, focusing on the case of Henry Madsen and so the last scene of the book is the first scene of Episode One - kind of a cool concept. And the overall book reads like "legit" Luther - the style, the characters all ring pretty much true (although Luther's wife Zoe, who is complex and sympathetic in the show is IMHO just a total and self-centered bitch here). Also, knowing what happens further on in Season One, there is a special poignancy in Luther's close friendship with Ian Reed - especially when towards the end of the book, there's just one short scene that foreshadows the "diamond scam" that leads to Ian's corruption and downfall, and implies that the whole thing only got started as a spinoff of a favor Ian was doing for John. Truly sad, really - made me want to yell "don't do it, Ian!" at the audiobook - but it was a clever bit of plotting and formed another bridge between the book and the series.
What cost the book stars was the really gruesome violence. The show is violent enough, but BBC handles it well by keeping the actual horrors pretty much off-screen. But here, the violence is front and center, and there were a couple of places where I found it really uncomfortable. I also found the whole story very Thomas Harris, with the main baddie being a mashup of both Buffalo Bill and the Tooth Fairy. The horrific home invasions immediately reminded me of Red Dragon - one of my favorites in this genre - while there was a real "it puts the lotion in the basket!" vibe to the kidnapping in the book's second half. The influence wasn't a real negative - everything copies something else - but The Calling did then suffer a bit by comparison.
The audiobook narration was in general very good - there was quite a range of British and Scottish accents to master and keep consistent - but no one sounds like Idris Elba, so at best his lines sounded like a bad impression, and at worst it made him sound more working class than the TV character.
Conclusion: if you're a fan of the show and not too squeamish, this is a good read. But as a stand-alone mystery, there are better books out there - especially the first two (and ONLY the first two) books in the Hannibal Lecter series....more
Watched Guy Ritchie's "Man From U.N.C.L.E." this weekend, and surprisingly, it was not terrible, (although the more I hear about his weird bondage/canWatched Guy Ritchie's "Man From U.N.C.L.E." this weekend, and surprisingly, it was not terrible, (although the more I hear about his weird bondage/cannibalism/sex addition issues, the harder it is to watch Armie Hammer in anything these days). Which made me want to read another one of these crappers again, because...well, just because.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have a whole bookshelf of "Man from U.N.C.L.E.," "I Spy," "Mission: Impossible" and other TV tie-in paperbacks/magazines from the mid-60s, that my parents, God bless 'em, stored in their garage for half a century. Most of these cost 50¢, and it tells you a lot about the quality of these magazines - published by pulp legend Leo Marguiles - that I could get a two year subscription (24 issues) for just $8.
And that quality, of course, was - oh, just awful, laughable crap. But they DO take me back to my late preteen years, and so they remain fun in their own terrible way.
That said, I don't plan to read many of them, and so carefully chose this one because it looked to be the only story that actually takes place in Hong Kong and China, and even has a vaguely (at least by U.N.C.L.E. standards) plausible "plot:" Russian missiles en route to Vietnam get hijacked by the bad guys to start a war between Russian and China. But from there on…yeah, pretty much what you'd expect, (although I did find this unique in that it's the only U.N.C.L.E. book I can recall that actually mentions the CIA, as in both U.N.C.L.E. and CIA existed in the same world - don't think the TV show ever went there).
And so that's my review, since these books don't deserve more than a couple of sentences at most. ALTHOUGH...it did bring a few other thoughts to mind.
First of all, both "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and the James Bond stories in general are just undeniably stupid. Solo, Kuryakin and Bond are all truly TERRIBLE spies; their one practical skill being escaping, since they are invariable captured numerous times in almost every story. And rather than deal with any real-world espionage issues between world powers (like "legitimate" spy fiction, whether on paper or film), both U.N.C.L.E. and Bond focus on preposterous evil organizations/madmen bent on either world destruction or domination - nothing every approaching the slow pace of legitimate intelligence gathering and assessing. So yeah…dumb.
Perhaps one notch up from these were Patrick McGoohan's "Secret Agent," "I Spy," and "Mission: Impossible," although not by much. Which brings me to my next point: unlike science fiction updates/reboots like "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Gallactica" which actually improved on the originals, most of those 60's spy shows did not update well at all. The Eddie Murphy/Owen Wilson "I Spy" sucked; the Fiennes/Thurman "Avengers" sucked; the Will Smith "Wild, Wild West" sucked and - okay, no surprise here - even the "Mod Squad" movie sucked. The sole exception has been Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible" movies, with perhaps now Ritchie's "U.N.C.L.E." in a distant second…amd I'm frankly not quite sure why that is. If Timothy Dalton could save James Bond from the Roger Moore death spiral, and then Daniel Craig could totally reboot the character after Pierce Brosnan's invisible ice car, I don't know why none of these popular shows could be remade as semi-serious modern thrillers, more in the mold of Jason Bourne than the tongue-in-cheek hack jobs most of them went for. Any thoughts out there?
Anyway…this thing, "The Genghis Khan Affair" - fun but terrible, and I'm probably U.N.C.L.E.'d out for another couple of years, or at least until they make an "U.N.C.L.E." sequel; which I understand Henry Cavill is interested in, although word is that Illya will either be killed off of recast. Maybe a "Man" and "Girl" hybrid, with Solo teaming up with April Dancer?
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