Writers We Love but stopped reading: Alistair MacLean

A Long time ago, I devoured Alistair Maclean books. I was chilled to the bone reading the Arctic adventures of HMS Ulyssees back in the middle of a very hot summer in what must have been the very late 1970s, thrilled by The Guns of Navarone, horrified by Puppet On a Chain, and various impressed or baffled by a dozen other titles. But even as a teenager, there were doubts. I didn't now if Where Eagles Dare was meant to be taken seriously, suspected Force 10 From Navarone was tongue in cheek, and was baffled by Bear Island. So much so that when I read it again recently, it was bafflement all over again. I could see why he completely fell out of favour the instant he stopped publishing. The heavy ironic style of the World War Two veterans had long since become old hat and younger folks didn't care for it much, and as one of the (then) younger folks, I could see why I stopped reading him as well. The protagonist, Doctor Marlowe, has a somewhat grating, waffling line in first person narration which got very tedious to the extent that I had to force myself through to the end I was something close to a speed-reader when I read it last time, which explains my bafflement on that occasion. On this time round, I was wondering why his editors hadn't asked him to make it a bit snappier. But it sold about eight millio copies in 1971 apparently. Must have been nothing to do at the airport and on the beaches that year. I sneaked a look at the start of Where Eagles Dare in the meantime, and there was a similar arch style to that, a little less annoying for being in third person, but still enough to make me beat a hasty retreat for the time being. Having had one book of my youth ruined on re-reading, I was in no rush to spoil one that I had actually enjoyed first time around. But I might be brave soon...

Writers We Love But Stopped Reading: Recovering Jack Higgins Fan

As I mentioned in my Sad Wind From The Sea post, I am a long time and recovering Jack Higgins fan. At one time he climbed to the top of the list of my favourites to where I judged him as being better (presumably, in those days that meant more entertaining) than Alistair MacLean (probably true most of the time). Aside: have I done a post on Alistair Maclean? If not I should have to do a couple, at least one on HMS Ulysses (nothing to do with James Joyce) and at least one for his work in general. At that time, in my early twenties, the fact that he seemed to have brought out been quite prolific and I had fun tracking down old out of print Harry Patterson books and James Graham books in the public library (this was in the early 1980s when you still could find twenty year old books in libraries, something they don't seem so keen on now) But every love affair has its rocky moments, and over time, the publishers went back and mined the Harry Patterson/Hugh Marlow(e)/Martin Fallon/James Graham pen-names for books to become Jack Higgins titles. Actually I found the James Graham books on my own before they got rebadged, and felt quite clever for tracking them down while it was still an open secret. But I digress. As one encounters the different titles spread across many years, a pattern emerges. At times it is straight-forward re-publishing of old titles, at others re-working of titles (some older books became Sean Dillon titles when previously they had been Paul Chavasse stories etc) which was maybe not quite entirely self-plagiarism, and then there were the repeated themes and characters and names -- Hugh Marlowe was a pen-name, and Hugh Marlow was a hero, Steiner is a German surname that comes up again and again, Jago as a surname recurs, boats sink and planes crash in marshes or just off the coast in nearly all parts of the world and have to be salvaged by disgraced ex-military men who have been cashiered for embezzlement or for massacring surrendered Enemy Combatants. The head eventually spins, and the hero or one of his side-kicks usually has a mocking grin and a quip for the disappointing way life turns out, and/or has a haunted look and a death wish. Eventually you get to the point where you wish you just would go back and re-read some of the better ones and forget the others. I learned that much faster with the Jack Reacher books (oh must put them on the list). And a certain troubling inclination as time went on to borrow tropes from the Irish author Maurice Walsh, who did a very good line in Irish Richard Hannays but has been mostly forgotten except for the Quiet Man (another writer who deserves a blog post) One must always be wary of what writers say about themselves as they make things up. At one stage in the past twenty years, Jack Higgins revealed that he had develope a condition called Essential Tremor Syndrome, which caused shaking of the hands and as he wrote by long hand, he was unable to write for some time. This was allegedly cured by falling and hitting his head. Now, it did bring up the observation by George Orwell (which was correct, as it turned out,) that the style of Frank Richards - author of the Billy Bunter school stories - was so mannered that it could easily be taken over by ghost writers. The same could be said of jack Higgins, when I read A Season In Hell, I was still a fast and superficial reader, and at the time I merely thought "He seems to be going in a new direction". Subsequently I have started to wonder was it actually a less than entirely successful substitution of a ghost writer, because of the subsequent books, apart from the ill-advised Memoirs Of A Dancehall Romeo, a non-thriller, were nearly all Sean Dillon books and absurd thrill-by-Lego outings. I should say all as I have not had the patience to read more than four or five of the Dillons, but after the first couple of novels, reliably there is a Russian or Al-Quaida conspiracy intersperssed with Dillon playing piano in a music bar and somebody else singing along to great aclaim, bad people being shot in the ear or knee cap, etc etc. So the best ones still in order of being read, East of Desolation and The Eagle Has Landed. As to others, I defer to Ben Boulden over at the excellent Grave Tapping blog, although he is much more forgiving of the later as well as the paint-by-numbers of some of the very early novels. The Testament of Caspar Schulz springs to mind, although on re-reeading it lately it held up better than a Dillon book I abandoned after ten pages!

Sad Wind from the sea -- The first "Jack Higgins" book published

I have been spending too much time again over at Ben Boulden's excellent Grave Tappings blog site. (Do come back here after) And I read again his review of Sad Wind From The Sea which was the first Harry Patterson (later to be known, and almost exclusively by his most successful pen-name, as Jack Higgins) As a recovering Jack Higgins addict, I was wary and never have been too fond of his very early books. Also I wasn't sure if I had read "Sad Wind" before and forgotten it or if not, did I really want to be such a completist. I finally tracked down an old British library copy and am glad I have now read it. It was surprisingly mature. There were some rough edges, but the early seventies Jack Higgins/James Graham style seems to be mostly in place already. I know he revisited some of his books later, but if this was untouched then it was a remarkable preview of his potential and the possibilities of being an even better and more interesting writer. In some ways, while "The Eagle Has Landed" was his big breakthough to actual best seller status, I don't know if his writing every really recovered. He started recycling prevoius material at an ever more repetitive rate and his treatment of serious topics became less measured. More on that another time.

AUTHORS WE LIKE: DENNIS DRAYTON RE-READS GAVIN LYALL

DECEMBER 17, 2017 originally published on daleniidigital.com I have been re-reading Gavin Lyall’s books over the last couple of months. The pace has picked up in the last few weeks when I noticed that many of them were being re-published as e-books. Partly due to illness, I had the ‘opportunity’ to pick up the pace even further, and so in the last month I have read “The Most Dangerous Game”, “The Secret Servant” and “Uncle Target”. A couple of years ago I bought a second-hand copy of “Blame The Dead” (my favourite Gavin Lyall book) and a new paperback of “Midnight Plus One” (previously my next favourite). I would have read these books originally in the early to mid-nineteen eighties when I was a college student. He was one of my favourite authors, coming somewhere between Jack Higgins and Alistair MacLean in my all time Top Three Thriller writers. Leslie Charteris and Captain W.E. Johns would have filled out the Top Five, but that is two more posts for another day. In those days they seemed tough and intelligent thrillers with a sarcastic or even ironic sense of humour and a good pace. Most likely I have a very different perspective now, as time and culture and I have all rolled on since the early eighties, when the later books were almost contemporary and the earlier ones still seemed recent. The early books now read like historical novels. Also, the flaws in the novels seem to stick out more than the virtues for me now, probably due to reading them at a more leisurely pace and perhaps a higher standard in contemporary thriller writing. I intend to go through the books individually and try to start with why I thought they were great stories and point out the flaws in the second parts. I will dispose of “Uncle Target” first, as I said above I read them while I was at university and had learned to read very quickly and much fiction I read at the time made very little impression on me. At the half-way point of “Uncle Target” I realised parts of the story seemed very familiar and that I must have read it before but had almost entirely forgotten the story and had wiped the fact and act of reading it from my mind. Perhaps although it is very well executed, it just doesn’t have the spark of the other books. I haven’t re-read “The Conduct of Major Maxim” or “The Crocus List,” as I didn’t like them much at the time, although they would even then have seem better executed than “The Secret Servant” Reading his other books, the humour or tone hasn’t aged that well. “The Most Dangerous Game” he gets away with it because it is so much in character for the narrator, but, with “Midnight Plus One” I was thinking “how 1950’s” which I didn’t even notice back in the day. Perhaps my own sense of humour has evolved in meantime. The sense of humour of Cord in “Blame The Dead” also seemed to match the tone of the character and book perfectly so that still stands high in my regard. Another striking observation even from the first time I read them was his re-use of recurring motifs (hard to call them self-plagiarisms the way Jack Higgins does it) — rock-jawed men have brass bullet casings crunch under their heels, people are shot with high velocity light calibre bullets and survive, and they notice old cars with divided windscreens in different books. this still strikes me more as attention to detail and unconscious self-repetition as opposed to being a flaw. Overall, I have enjoyed the re-read, and perhaps learned a little bit about writing in the process.

Books we like: Dennis Drayton on “East of Desolation” by Jack Higgins

crosspost from daleniidigital web site East of Desloation In 1968 Hodder and Stoughton published a book called East of Desolation by a “first time” author by the name of Jack Higgins. The first line begins: “I brought the plane in low over the sea and brought her up to three thousand feet…” and only a few lines later, “When I turned he was there as he always was… the head disembodied … eyes fixed, staring into eternity as he lolled back in the co-pilot’s seat.” And if you are a certain kind of reader, you are thinking “WTH” and are lost, not just for that book but doomed to a 1980s equivalent of watching a whole series over the weekend. Yes I was proud to be a Jack Higgins fan-boy back in the day. And this is the book that maybe started it – even as a youngster I didn’t expect that after “The Eagle Has Landed” there would be any books by the same author that would grip me in my seat. But wow the obsession. I eventually, pre-internet even tracked down many of his psuedonyms so that I could keep reading more and more Higgins. But that’s another post… I re-read East Of Desolation recently and it stood up very well. Of course in reality although it was Jack Higgins’ first book under his ‘own’ name, he was really Harry Patterson who had already written and published about 30 books under his own and various othere psuedonyms before he wrote East of Desolation, but this might have been the book that made his publishers think yes, this chap is finally going to pay back for our investment in him. The narrator of East of Desolation is Joe Martin, a jobbing charter pilot in 1960s Greenland who has this very odd recurring nightmare mentioned above and who turns out to be somebody with a dark past. He is bitter and twisted and is an averted alcoholic with unresolved anger issues, as we would say now (violent drunk as we would have said back in the day.) For a short novel there is a bewildering cast of characters. There is a Hemingway-esque aging American actor who is also not quite what he seems, an Israeli woman who is English, a dashing womaniser, a widowed lady who Martin is convinced is a liar and not a widow, a dodgy German insurance man and his tough guy toff muscle, a Danish policeman and a crew of dangerous trawler-men. The characters are well drawn, and unlike in more modern books, not particularly likeable. They all have a distinct voice of their own and don’t all speak exactly the same way as happens in later Higgins books. It is a short book and everything is done economically, descriptions are brief but get the job done. You get a sense of Greenland, and even the rather strange anachronism of the Portuguese sailing trawlers is authentic — they still sailed until the 1970s – although it feels like a tip of the hat to Captains Courageous, but that might be my noticing Jack Higgins’s penchant for sticking in black and white movie cliches in his books. As with other pre-1970’s books, some of the attitudes are very dated and no longer generally acceptable, so your mileage may vary, but I have to say overall I enjoyed the book as much the second time around as the first and appreciated it better for the skills I now recognise.

WRITERS WE LIKE #3: DENNIS DRAYTON ON JACK HIGGINS

cross post from daleniidigital.com Last time I mentioned how the publication of “East of Desolation” marked the ascent of not-so-new author Jack Higgins. I think if I may say so myself, that it was a total fan-boy rave. As I said “Yes I was proud to be a Jack Higgins fan-boy back in the day. I eventually … tracked down many of his psuedonyms so that I could keep reading more and more Higgins…” Truly for quite a few years I couldn’t get enough Jack Higgins. By the eighties, his publishers were coyly admitting that Harry Patterson was Jack Higgins and vice versa, but I went further and discovered that he was also James Graham. By that time his various other earlier pen-names had been tidied up, but the Grahams were still in the library in their original guise. I not only wanted to read Higgins, I wanted to become a writer in the same style. However, as with many a torrid love affair, eventually I suffered from Jack Higgins poisoning. It was a slow enough process, but times and people and tastes changed, and me and Jack diverged. At which point I began to notice more strongly The Dark Side of Jack Higgins (pun intended, he has several books with titles beginning “The Dark Side of …”) I particularly devoured and still think uncritically of the “middle period” Jack Higgins of “The Eagle Has Landed” up to (but not including) “The Eagle has Flown” period. There is the “early” or pre-Higgins, some of which I didn’t care for at all (“Testament of Caspar Schulz”, I’m looking at paint-by-the-numbers you) And the “late-early” Higgins which I would rate it just below the “mid” and above the “late” period books. The James Graham books are pretty strong. Then we have the Dillon-Fegusson series and this is where the divergence occurs. I think from looking at Amazon reviews that there is a dividing line and that Jack Higgins is an acquired taste, partly because he has been so prolific that being a fan of some of his books doesn’t mean being a fan of all – for instance a lot of people seem to be fans of Dillon-Fergusson series and not of the earlier books and in my case I would be the opposite. I enjoyed Thunder Point particularly for it being The Testament of Caspar Schulz done right, but for the most part I find them facile, the few that I read before giving up on them —I never really understood or believed in Dillon’s transformation from renegade Irish Terrorist to committed British Secret Agent. But even with the books I loved, I began to notice his penchant for sticking in some black and white movie cliches and even whole plots seem to be lifted from noir-period movies, which haven’t dated as much as the movies themselves it’s true, but it gets irritating after the first ten go-rounds, Also he has re-used and recycled characters, character names and whole plots with a bewildering frequency that you can pretty much guarantee there will be somebody called Kelso, or Steiner, a small dark man (swiped from the author of The Quiet Man, which is another post), bar fights ended by somebody shooting the ceiling. Nazi paratroopers, Irish terrorists etc etc And in the later books, especially since Dillon became a plot machine, that the distinct voices of the characters has been lost and everybody speaks exactly the same way, like in a Joss Wheedon movie. They have got witter too, like the characters in a Joss Wheedon movie. So, having read maybe fifty of them, I have ‘nt read a new one for maybe fifteen years, but I do dip back into the old ones to recapture the magic from time to time and see if it’s still there. And usually it is.

Book review: The Beam: The Complete First Season Collection (Books 1-6) Sean Platt and Johnny B Truant

A pleasant surprise I'm starting to sound like a liar when I write this, because most of my reviews lately seem to be of sci-fi books, but honestly I am not a regular reader of sci-fi or of Platt and Truant so this might review may be of most interest to other people 'from outside'. I had come across Sean Platt and Johnny B Truant as the hosts of a couple of rather juvenile podcast series, so I started reading with some misgivings. Also I don't really like the idea of television style episodes in books. However, the Beam was a pleasant surprise. The book is well written, and serious in intent. There are occasional jokes and crudity, but it seems to serve the story and isn't gratuitous. The characters are interesting and despite what should be a lot of talking and people thinking, the story rattles along at a good speed for the most part despite being quite long. There are a couple of dull patches and several places where I wished they had a more economical writing style but overall the format seems to work. And yes a guy writing a three page review complaining about people using too many words... The speculative fiction elements are not too intrusive (mostly revolve around nano-technology) and are worked into the story so most of the time you could almost read the book as a straight-forward novel. Or a Novel of Ideas. In about 30 years time, after an ecological disaster and a collapse of civilisation, North America has been cut off from the rest of the world both by circumstance and by closing the borders and building a literal shield. Fast forward another fifty years or so and the North American and a totally immersive internet called The Beam has made life bearable or even fantastic depending on how rich you are in the North American Union. Alongside this you totally commit to your political party for seven years by living off the dole or choosing to live by your wits with no social security at all. This is called the Shift and causes great tension every seven years. I found the idea of the Shift the most ingenious idea in the book, it could be a satire on the real world as it is and at the same time a possible basis for future democracy. Alongside the 2080 story there are flashbacks to earlier eras, including the disaster in the 2030s. It's hard to tell if it's deliberate (as in Brave New World) or not that the rich old people with the beautiful young nano-technology bodies act and think in a spoilt immature manner which makes their attitudes almost indistinguishable from the young characters – wisdom will be even in shorter supply in the future! We see this world from the point of view of various characters: Natasha Ryan, a spoilt beautiful nano-enhanced young singer who should actually be an elderly lady, who is married to Isaac Ryan who is the weak-willed political figure-head for the vaguely socialistic Directorate, the political party in charge of hand-outs and token jobs. His brother Micah is the slightly less token figure-head for Enterprise, the political party in charge of risky jobs where you might get incredibly rich or starve but either way nobody is going to help you. Micah has an agenda and it involves making life harder for Natasha and Isaac. Nicolai Costa a young-old refugee from Italy and wannabe artist who actually works for Isaac Ryan but is sick of being a speech writer and wants to quit. Doc Stahl, a hustler and seller of second-hand and grey market technology. Nicolai is one of his clients. Doc stumbles on the explosive fact that the ultra-rich have access to far more sophisticated technology than eveyone else. This gets him into potentially fatal trouble with the ultra-rich who want this kept secret. Kai Dreyfus a hooker who has both Nicolai and Doc as clients and also has a side-line as an assassin (you can see where this might go...) Dominic Long is an old-style police captain with divided loyalties who has a fractious relationship with a bunch of drop-outs called the Organa who don’t like The Beam and try to live off the grid. Despite this they have an addiction to a high-tech substance called Moondust and Dominic is their supply channel. Leah is a young computer hacker who is a genius on the Beam despite being an Organa Crumb is an insane tramp who lives with the hippies but may have been lobotomised in some way by the ultra-rich to hide a terrible secret. Leo Booker is a wise old hippy Organa who also seems to have a terrible secret. There is enough pay-off and answers to questions to keep you happy and enough unresolved to

Too Much Rain (Maybe it's me and not you, Barry) aka Book Review -- Graveyard of Memories by Barry Eisler

Graveyard of Memories by Barry Eisler two stars Too Much Rain (Maybe it's me and not you, Barry) Picture this, ace assassin John Rain is all geezered out and is in a retirement home for hitmen, where he bores the pants off everyone with his reminiscences of Japan back in the day, and his time and Nam and so on. This novel kind of nails it, probably unintentionally. Perhaps I have just got bored with Barry Eisler and John Rain, “The Detachment” felt like a Rain Too Far, and this one feels like flogging a dead horse. For me it is Barry Eisler's third dud in a row, and your patience for an admired writer has to run out sooner or later when you feel they dont deliver the goods. It is somehow less than more of the same would have been. None of the Rain virtues seem to be here – the sudden switches to immediacy, the intermittent moral awareness, but all the Rain vices are here – the monologues, the rambling searches for whiskey and coffee, the inappropriate sex (with a crippled woman just to spice things up in a politically correct way) the interminable opinions, the excessively brutal killings. Previously this all came together somehow, but for me it just doesn't gel this time round. It feels to me like a John Rain pastiche. There is a framing device of Rain is reminiscing at a distance of 40 years plus (now or even in the future with an old fogey Rain as I suggested in the first sentence), and the distance is just too far this time, he seems to have forgotten Hemingway's Iceberg and wants to show of all his research, and the magic trick of Rain's detachment (no pun) somehow adding to and not detracting from the action scenes is missing this time, there is too much 'you must remember that this was back in the seventies and we didn't have mobile phones' and it all feels too much like “what grandpa did in the war” so much so that I nearly expected Rain to break off and hum us a few of the hits from 1972 and tell us kids that we didn’t know good music. Bear in mind that I'm about Barry Eisler's age and so only about ten years younger than Rain and you get an idea how scary this all is. It didn't really feel like a John Rain Origins book – we got more of that before about his time in Vietnam in flashbacks earlier in the series. Far better to have taken a new direction and had a Delilah novel, a Dox series, even some Jim Hilger prequel books. Not a great introduction to the series, I would say try the second of third books to start with and leave this one until last or even just leave this one.

Book Review -- Huntress Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff

Huntress Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff three stars this is probably a three and a half star book, its a pity you can't give 70%. First, the good. Ms Sokoloff is a screen-writer and this is a very well written and well constructed book with a strong cast of characters. The mysterious blonde woman (the Huntress of the title) is interesting as is the premise of the female serial killer/vigilante. The supporting cast are great too, Epps the charismatic, line-backer sized ex-gangster turned FBI agent feels like he should be the star of the show, not glum 'damaged' agent Roarke. Epps is a straight shooter. Unlike a lot of serial killer books, this one shows a lot of compassion, not unfortunately for the FBI agent truck-killed at the start because he was a bad egg, nor for the trucker-rapist type that the Huntress kills in the ladies' toilets (but he's a red shirt anyway). But for the most part the victims are treated like real people and given respect. The accident-murder which starts the book as its 'inciting incident' becomes somewhat unbelievable as the book goes on, which is a huge flaw as trying to understand what happened and how it happened are a big part of the FBI team's story. The author flirts with suggesting the Huntress might have psychic powers although this might also be explained as great intuition. As a total contrast, I think back to Will Graham in Thomas Harris's Red Dragon who was also an FBI profiler felt great compassion for the Tooth Fairy serial killer, but is enough of a cop to want to kill him without hesitation if it saves future victims. I would prefer Alexandra Sokoloff to have left Roarke with some of this distinction left within him. It is almost as if she feels he has to have some fatal flaw. There is even a good discussion between Roarke and Epps his number two where he is explaining about why he quit being a profiler (same answer as you will have heard if you are within seven degrees of separation of a profile – dealing with psychopaths creeps you out) and it becomes a discussion about The Nature of Evil, which again dangerously skirts close teenage paranormal territory but is satisfying and should have established that Roarke is enough of a good guy and sufficiently self-aware to know on which side of the line he stands no matter what provocations. On the contrary, as the book goes on in this case, Roarke goes from feeling compassion for the Huntress, to identifying with her to, it seems very much, wanting to get into her pants. This just seems wrong, on any number of levels. It seems out of character for Roarke, he's a damaged character and all that, but this is just creepy. When it turns out that the Huntress was the sole survivor of a serial killer rampage and Roarke has the profiling information and everything, and he knows just how distressed and messed up she is … [need to check if this is in the second book] It seems fair enough that the Huntress bewitches the troubled father and in their mutual pain they get it on, but Roarke isnt Travis McGee ready to fix ladies' psychological problems with his magic wand. I'm not sure this is what Ms Sokoloff intended but it comes across as an 'all men are bastards, even the good ones are screwed-up inside their heads' sub-text and I think it's only fair to call her out on this. If a male author is presenting women in a mysogonistic light, he will get called out on it and a woman author presenting an unrelieved parade of messed-up, women-hating men could lighten up a little and let a couple of good guys through beside Epps. She may not even be aware of the fact that her book could come across like this, but there you go. And there is the plausiblity problem – as a burnt-out profiler, Roarke would no doubt have had the training to recognise his own mental breakdown at some level and go and see his designated shrink – I would imagine that no doubt the FBI would have a confidential go-to person for their people who could make a call and get you stood down no questions asked if you thought you were tipping over into weirdo land. Sure he goes to his old mentor Snyder but its all very ambiguous. It is brilliantly done how the Huntress worms her way into the broken family of father and son, not entirely understanding what she is doing herself, and raising the suspense for the reader...sure she likes the little boy but does she mean harm to the father? The Huntress chapters are written in the present tense again a brilliant contrast and showing the intuitive, impulse driven nature of the woman. The descriptions are absorbing and for me not too long and get your really to feel that you are there. There is some great scene setting in Oregon, Portland comes across very well warts and all the shanty village is conveyed nicely. San Luis Obispo/ Piosmo Beach in California stands out as a lot of the action takes place there, with a carnival in which the Huntress hides in plain sight with the family who have adopted her as FBI are looking for her. The appropriately Hitchcockian carnival at Pismo beach, the fancy dress costumes, the mixture of party and the serial killer cat and mouse game is very well done