World War II Remembered

World War II Remembered by the Residents of Kendal at Hanover © 2012, University Press of New England, 2012 trade paperback, non-fiction, autobiography

We saw a brief piece on this on the NBC Nightly News a couple of months ago and were both very interested. It is the reminiscences of elderly residents of the Kendal at Hanover Mass. elders living facility, many of whom were participants in the conflict, or were affected by it stateside. These 55 pieces relate the experience of each at during a few weeks or years during the war.

The book provides interesting insights into the lives of these people who lived through it, including Navy fliers, Army infantry and armor platoon members, intelligence officers, Red Cross volunteers, and many more. There are also memories by women who worked on the home front and even one by a Japanese man who was interned at Manzanar Camp. Most of the pieces are only a few pages.

JFK Birthday

Today is John F. Kennedy’s birthday. Wish he was still alive.

Happy Memorial Day!

Enjoy, everyone, and don’t forget the meaning of the day.

New Arrivals, May 21-27, 2012

As promised, a few things arrived this week. I’m cutting way down, but not completely out. As usual, I can blame Friday Forgotten Books and other blogs for every one of these.

Fatal Flourishes by S.S. Rafferty [Avon 1979 mass market paperback, used] – historical mystery short story collection – this was posted on May 4th, 2012 on John F.’s Pretty Sinister Books, and sounded really interesting. Here is the posting. I found an inexpensive used copy.

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George – [Puffin Modern Classics paperback, new] – children’s, YA nature fiction – highly regarded children’s book now regarded as a classic. I’d never read it. Saw this on some blog or other, can’t find which.

Tough as Nails – The Complete Cases of Donahue, from the pages of Black Mask by Frederick Nebel [Altus Press 2012 trade paper, new] – 15 short stories originally published in Black Mask pulp magazine, plus an introduction, publication history and bibliography of Nebel’s work.

Xenozoic by Mark Schultz [Flesk Publications 2011 oversized trade paper, new] – blame this one on Carl V. of Stainless Steel Droppings. – Graphic novel comprised of collected stories from Xenozoic Tales comic by Schultz. Fabulous art work and story writing. I already had the three book boxed set of most of these stories published by Kitchen Sink Press back in 1990. There are three or four stories in this that aren’t in that, and three or four there that aren’t in this volume. Between them, they are all collected to the time of this publication. These get my highest recommendation!

John Cheever: 100 years

It was George Kelly who reminded me with THIS post on his blog today. I’m joining the chorus (of 2) with my own cover and comment.

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever, preface by John Cheever, Alfred A. Knopf – A Borzoi Book, first published October 1978

This is a collection of Cheever’s stories, 61 of them, all of which had previously appeared, most of them in The New Yorker Magazine, some in Playboy, Esquire or The Saturday Evening Post. I’ve read this book about one and a half times, once all the way through over the period of a couple months, again dipping back to re-read my favorites or stories I didn’t recall at all or someone, somewhere had mentioned that I wanted to re-experience.

I don’t recall a single bad one among all these, and certainly Cheever is worth reading in short or long form.

Friday Forgotten Book: The Mysterious Affair at Styles

this is the 86th book in my series of forgotten books

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie © 1916, Bantam Books 1961 mass market paperback, mystery – first Hercule Poirot

It had been a very long time since I read this one, the first appearance of Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Certainly not forgotten, but then who has read it any time at all recently?

This one is set in England during World War I at Styles Court, an Essex country manor Upon her husband’s death, the wealthy widow, Emily Cavendish, who had recently remarried a much younger man, Alfred Inglethorp, inherited a life estate in Styles as well as the outright inheritance of the larger part of her late husband’s income.

Emily’s two stepsons, John and Lawrence Cavendish, as well as John’s wife Mary and several other people, also live at Styles. John Cavendish is the vested remainderman of Styles; that is, the property will pass to him automatically upon his stepmother’s death per his late father’s will, while the income left to Mrs Inglethorp would be distributed per Mrs. Inglethorp’s own will.

Late one night, the residents of Styles wake to find Emily Inglethorp dying of what proves to be strychnine poisoning. Lieutenant Hastings, a houseguest, enlists the help of his friend Hercule Poirot, who just happens to be staying in the nearby village, Styles St. Mary. Poirot pieces together events surrounding the murder.

I’ll not go further into the plot and characters, that’s for the reader to discover, or recall for all who have read this one. As I said, I had read it but didn’t remember much about it at all, including the twists and ending, so it was all new turf for me. As enjoyable as ever – I enjoy just about all of the Poirot and Marple novels – it was nice to revisit this pair.

I’ll note here that next week Friday Forgotten Books has a single-author day for Margaret Millar, and a month following that the single author day will be Agatha Christie. So I guess you could say this oe was a warm up for me.

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Patti Abbott back and the rest of the Friday Forgotten Book posts
can be found at her blog Pattinaise

No New Arrivals

Another week with a nice clean slate. I’m sort of doing an up-and-down these last few weeks; this one nothing new. I do have a couple of things on the way, though, so check back next week.

Meanwhile, we’ve been walking, gardening, I’ve been doing some reading. I’m about half way through The Bookman, which I previewed in New Arrivals in my April 30 post. So far I’m enjoying it. Review in a week or less.

We’re enjoying the nice weather. Hope you all have been having a great late Spring, early Summer wherever you are!

Friday Forgotten Book: A Killing in Comics

this is the 85th book in my series of forgotten books

A Killing in Comics by Max Alan Collins © 2007, Berkeley Prime Crime 2001 trade paperback, mystery, 1^st in Jack Starr “comics mysteries” series

I like the writing of Max Alan Collins, and – having seen him on panels at mystery cons and having met him twice, very briefly, the first time at the Milwaukee Bouchercon, the other after a panel at another con – I like him as well. I’ve read some of each of his other series and they are good. I hadn’t read any of this series and thought it was high time I did.

This one is set in 1948 and the milieu is the New York comic strip and comic book industry. As is true with Collins’ Heller series, there are historical persons portrayed here, but this time Collins has changed their names just enough that while someone with a knowledge of the players there and then will know who they are, they are not real persons in the strictest sense.

It’s Americana publisher Donny Harrison’s 50^th birthday and he’s having a party. It’s in his mistresses suite at the Waldorf, and he’s invited his wife. He’s also invited Harry Spiegel and Moe Schulman, the writer and artist of Wonder Guy, Americana’s huge hit superhero comic. The party doesn’t go well for Donny, he winds up dead, stabbed in front of 30 or more witnesses, none of whom saw the murderer.

Maggie Starr is the head of  a newspaper syndicate, the one responsible for distribution of the Wonder Guy comic strip. Her stepson Jack Starr is at the party. They decide it’s in their best interests to get to the bottom of the murder, and fast. Sure, the NYPD is working on it, but they have a lot of other cases, and Jack – who is a licensed P.I. in New York – believes he knows the industry and people better so he can solve it faster. So he starts interviewing people. Not surprisingly, just about everyone has a motive, and most had opportunity too.

This is a light, fast moving mystery which for me is as much fun for the comics background as the crime solving. I had this one narrowed down to three, then two suspects by the last quarter of the book, and I saw the solution about the same time as Jack Starr did. Collins has wrapped this one up with the classic ending: pull all the suspects together and reveal the murderer. Pretty fun. I’ll read the next in the series.

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Patti Abbott is on a kind of holiday, so all of this weeks Forgotten Book posts
can be found at Todd Mason’s blog, Sweet Freedom

progress on our summer bed

Every now and then I post an update on our garden, and I figured it was time. This is the first year we’ve really been able to do anything, and we’re enjoying it immensely. We’ve had some nice warm weather, and the bed we planned for summer perennials and annuals is coming along nicely. There is lots of room for growth, of course,  but there’s color and some height and there will be sweet peas on trellis-sticks that are still bare (right side). The snapdragons will get much bigger and there is a little room for the Stock that I’m growing from seed in a flat in another area. So here’s a before-during and current look at one small portion of our garden.

when we moved in it was pretty sad

the construction is almost finished

the way it looks today

Rodrigo y Gabriela and C.U.B.A – Area 52

Here in Portland, it’s Summer! It was been in the 80s all weekend and was 88 yesterday, (a new record high, hottest May 14 ever), glorious heat and sun, and believe me, we’ve been enjoying it. So I decided it was time to crank up the summer music and when I think hot Summer weather and music, I think of steaming Latin Jazz.

Friend and frequent participant here at Bullhorn Jeff Meyerson had sent me a link to the live feed for Jazzfest in New Orleans and I watched a good bit of it, including most of a great set by Rodrigo y Gabriela, a Cuban guitar-jazz group that blew me away with their guitar playing and musicality. I bought (downloaded) this album and a couple others soon after and have been playing them a lot the last couple of days. Really great stuff. So get out the Sangria, cold white wine, frosty beer or your favorite summertime beverage and have a listen.

 Rodrigo y Gabriela

Click the link for one of their best on U-Tube (sorry about the commercial but you can skip it after 5 seconds.) You can preview this and their other albums on either A-zon or iTunes.

New Arrivals, May 7-13, 2012

Tom Roberts at Black Dog Books has done it again, and I couldn’t resist. So a package from Black Dog arrived a few days ago with three new things. Also arriving were a pre-order that was placed last Fall and something I came across and couldn’t resist. First the covers, then the descriptions, as usual.

The Best of Adventure Volume 2 1913-1914 edited by Doug Ellis [Black Dog Books 2011 trade paper, new] – pulp short story / novelette collection – this is the second collection from Adventure, which many think was one of the best, if not the best, pulp magazine during the heyday of the form. Fine author list.

The Best of Kage Baker by Kage Baker, illustrated by J.K. Potter [Subterranean Press 2012 hardcover, new] – science fiction / fantasy short story collection – Twenty stories, half of them previously uncollected, by a very good writer. I enjoy her novels of The Company and really liked her last novel Bird of the River. I’d hoped for more, but her untimely death prevented that.

Empire of the Devil and other tales of adventure by Frederick Nebel [Black Dog Books 2012 trade paper, new] – eight story / novelettes of adventure by one of the best in the pulp writing business. Black Dog continues to put together this excellent collections! A must read!

Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny by Garrison Keillor [Penguin 2012 trade paper, new] – humorous / parody hard boiled P.I. novel, using the character from sketches on The Prairie Home Companion. The picture above shows the blurb, which says it all.

King Corrigan’s Treasure by H.D. Couzens [Black Dog Books 2010 trade paper, new] – pulp story collection – the collected adventures of Billy Englehart – these seven stories appeared in a variety of pulps between 1911 and 1918. Should be fun.

first time in a long time

My Wife did something this morning she hasn’t done in many, many years, since she lived in Denver. She did a 5K walk. She can’t run due to her knees, but she walks at about 15-16 minute/mile at 5K length, which isn’t bad. Here is a photo of her by the route map just after the event:

Since we got to Portland she has been lamenting not walking enough, though she goes to a fitness club, 24 Hour Fitness, 3 or 4 days a week for treadmill, cardio, strength, etc. When we saw a small piece in our local Lake Oswego paper for the 36th Lake Run, I suggested she try it, and though she hesitated, she decided to give it a try. She was 3rd for her age group and had what she said was an okay starting-to-get-back-into-it time. I’m really proud of her!

New Arrivals – Nada

I was away from the tech Sunday 12:01:01 until Noon Monday in observance of No Tech Sunday. We turned off and left off the computers, cell phones, etc. The only tech, if it can be called that, we used were the land line phone and the television set.

No new arrivals last week, which pleases me. I’m really doing good with the limiting book buying, and that was the goal. I did get something from the library, but can’t even remember what it was. Read it n a couple of days and took it back.

Beautiful day here in Portland, warmest of the year, with temps expected to hit 80 for the first time. Yes, we are out in the sun, reading, gardening and just bagging rays. It’ll be a little cooler tomorrow, but this was our first real taste of Summer. Grilled steaks last night I guess that should be “grilled a steak”, we split a smallish one, split a baked potato (no butter or sour cream), small green salad with diet dressing. No dessert. That may sound kinda sad, but hey, since January I’ve lost 26 lb. and am determined to stick with it!

FFB: Shoot the Works

this is the 84th book in my series of forgotten books

Shoot the Works by Brett Halliday © 1957, Dell #7844, 1965 mass market paperback (second edition), mystery – Mike Shayne #28

Mike Shayne’s secretary Lucy calls Mike and asks him to hurry to the home of her good friend’s mother, who has just returned early from a trip. When Shayne gets there, he finds Jim Marshall lying on the bedroom floor, shot dead through the forehead. On the bed, there is a suitcase, partially packed with clothes and in Marshall’s coat pocket two one way tickets to South America. It seems pretty obvious that Marshall was getting ready to run off with someone, and since his wife wasn’t expected home for another day or more, and since the plane tickets were for the next morning, it wasn’t going to be his wife he left with.

Against his better judgment, Shayne agrees to take the tickets away with him, and then to pretend he got the call to come to the apartment after the police had been called. It was a mistake he would regret throughout the case.

He doesn’t believe Mrs. Marshall shot her husband, but he has no idea who might have done it. The police don’t share this opinion, and though they let Mrs. Marshall leave that night to stay with her daughter, they have an officer stationed outside to watch her. As soon as there is any further evidence, or a hole in her story, she will be arrested.

Shayne knows it’s time for some legwork, starting with tracing the suspects movements, then to talking with the husbands business partners. It’s at the business he finds there is a briefcase with a cool million dollars missing. That’s plenty of motive for anyone who could know or discover it’s whereabouts.

I like these books. They are clever, fast, fun, and usually have just enough twists that I am fooled at least once in my guesses about who did it. This is a good one.

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links to all of this weeks Forgotten Book posts can be found
on Patti Abbott’s blog, Pattinase

New Arrivals, April 23-29, 2012

Once in a while, you just have to have a book – in this case a series – and I caved in on these. I’d wanted them for a while, but a review of the second on in the series finally convinced me to buy them. I’m not much of a fan of steam punk, but these look too good to pass up. Since this is New Arrivals and not a review, I’m not going to put in plot summaries, but I did add the blurbs, by popular demand.

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar [Angry Robot Books 2010 mass market paper, new] – steampunk mystery-fantasy – The blurb:

“When his beloved is killed in a terrorist atrocity committed by the sinister Bookman, young poet Orphan becomes enmeshed in a web of secrets and lies. His quest to uncover the truth takes him from the hidden catacombs of a London on the brink of revolution, through pirate-infested seas, to the mysterious island that may hold the secret to the origin, not only of the shadowy Bookman, but of Orphan himself…“

Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar [Angry Robot Books 2011 mass market paper, new] – steampunk mystery-fantasy – The blurb:

“The mysterious and glamorous Milady De Winter is one of their most valuable agents. A despicable murder inside a locked and bolted room on the Rue Morgue in Paris is just the start. This whirlwind adventure will take Milady to the highest and lowest parts of that great city, and beyond – and cause her to question the very nature of reality itself.“

The Great Game by Lavie Tidhar [Angry Robot Books 2012 mass market paper, new] – steampunk mystery-fantasy – here’s the blurb on this one:

“When Mycroft Holmes is Murdered in London, it is up to retired shadow executive Smith to track down his killer – and stumble on the greatest conspiracy of his life.
Strange forces are stirring into life around the globe, and in the shadow game of spies nothing is certain. Fresh from liberating a strange alien object in Abyssinia – which might just be the mythical Ark of the Covenant – young Lucy Westerna, Holmes’ protégé, must follow her own path to the truth while, on the other side of the world, a young Harry Houdini must face his greatest feat of escape – death itself.
As their paths converge the body count mounts up, the entire world is under threat, and in a foreboding castle in the mountains of Transylvania a mysterious old man weaves a spider’s web of secrets and lies.
Airship battles, Frankenstein monsters, alien tripods and death-defying acts: The Great Game is a cranked-up steampunk thriller in which nothing is certain – not even death.“

As I said above, these just look too good to pass up. I hope they read as good as they promise.

NFL Draft

Yes, I spend a lot of time watching it. Yes, I always hope that the teams I like to watch, the ones I like to root for if they are televised, the Seahawks (the closest thing we have here to a local time), the 49ers (a team I’ve loved for a long time) and the Cardinals (a team I just have a soft spot for).

Each of those teams has had a good – but not great – draft this year. I think the Seahawks made a reach with their first pick because the kid has a lot of off-field problems, though he has a lot of talent. We’ll see how that works out.

It’s interesting hearing what the various gurus have to say about the players, keeping in mind they like to say good stuff when they can, feed the hope, and hope is really what the draft is all about. I watched the whole media circus the first night, then it calms down on the second day, today for the last rounds it’s pretty much just analysis, which is what I wish the entire three day broadcast did. Still it’s on in the background as I continue to do other things, and I can always catch up on the whole thing with both the NFL channel and ESPN on-line.

So do you watch, and if so, how’d your team do?

Shovel Through Fence

Kind of hard to know what to say about this…

New Arrivals, April 16-22, 2012

Still a few things trickling in.

The Happy Valley by Max Brand [A.L. Burt, Dodd, Mead & Co, 1931 hardcover, used] -western – picked this up from Laurie Powers of Laurie’s Wild West blog. She had an eBay auction for some of the books she no longer has room for, and this one looked interesting. It’s in surprisingly good shape for a book over 80 years old, dust jacket and all. I’ve only read one other book by Brand.

Murder in the Maze by J.J. Connington  [Coachwhip Publications 2012 trade paper, new] – classic mystery – originally published in 1927. I saw a review of this in Crime and Detective Stories (CADS) # 62, published by Geoff Bradley in the U.K. The article, written by Curtis Evans, is on the crime critic works of T.S. Eliot. The article quotes Eliot: “with Murder in the Maze, Connington has made a place for himself in the front row of detective story writers.” That was good enough for me, and amazingly, it’s in print.

note: CADS is published irregularly, every few months, and is a wealth of information about mystery books. While there is no website for CADS, Bradley can be contacted for individual issues or a subscription – you pay one issue at a time – at Geoffcads@aol.com.

The Spider pulp double # 23 by “Grant Stockbridge” [Girasol Collectibles 2012 oversized trade paperback, new] – pulp fiction – collects The Spider and the Scarlet Surgeon and The Spider and the Death Piper. I thought I’d dropped this subscription, but this came Wednesday, so apparently I have a couple of issues left. These are fun, but a little at a time is enough for me. I’m starting to think I like Doc Savage and maybe even The Shadow as much.

Happy Earth Day!

Be kind to the planet, each other, and get outside.

FFB: The Deep Range

this is the 83rd in my series of forgotten books

The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke © 1957, Signet 1964 mass market paperback (second printing), – science fiction – cover painting by Paul Lehr

According to the note inside, I read this one in September 1964. I didn’t put a grade down for it, as I sometimes did, but that means nothing. Honestly I didn’t remember a darn thing about the book, though it’s easy to tell from the cover art by Paul Lehr that it takes place in the sea.

Walter Franklin was a senior crewmember on the space vessel Antares when he had to go outside to repair an antenna knocked askew by a small asteroid. His suit rocket got stuck wide open and he sailed off into cold, empty space out of control and expecting to die by oxygen starvation after several hours in the cold reaches of space.

He was rescued, four hours later, but it was the last time he would ever go into space. The trauma was deep and seemingly permanent. So the psychological staff treated him as best they could and he was returned to Earth to start a new life, leaving his wife and two sons on Mars. All this is briefly told in flashbacks throughout the first half of the book.

Franklin was put through a special course to become a Warden in the Bureau of Whales. The sea was being harvested for it’s food and mineral wealth, and – along with plankton farms – whales play a big part, for milk, oil, meat. Wardens keep watch over the herds and keep away predators. It’s an underwater, exciting job, and the sea provides a kind of security the very opposite of space.

The book follows the career of Franklin from raw rookie through Second Warden, First Warden, Chief, then on into the bureaucracy and finally to head of the Bureau. There are some exciting adventures, some dangerous encounters with sea life and the equipment that can be deadly if not properly handled, there are under-sea rescues, a light love story, challenges and rewards.

Yes, this is science fiction, nothing like what is depicted here existed in 1957 and still doesn’t, but the equipment Clarke describes is a lot closer to becoming real– and some already has – certainly much of the undersea submersible equipment is in use today. Clarke as usual had a good eye for future technology.

A very different science fiction book, almost more of an adventure tale. I found myself thinking a few times as I read it that it would make a pleasing audio book. There was one done in 1980, on cassette, a special library edition, which may be out there somewhere. Though how many people still have cassette players? If you’re looking for something different in science fiction, light but interesting, this may be one worth trying. I enjoyed it.

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links to all of this weeks Forgotten Book posts can be found
on Patti Abbott’s blog, Pattinase