2014 Classic #7

Siddhartha – Herman Hesse, 0141181230

This novel will take you on a philosophical and spiritual journey through various tests that are designed to aid the search for the meaning of existence. Siddhartha, the protagonist, is raised in the privileged  Brahmin caste, but his discontent drives him to become a samana, or recluse, in the woods. 

With thinking, fasting and waiting, he trains himself to overcome the worldly desires for inner peace and happiness and be one with the spiritual world and identify the nucleus of all things. After being a hermit, Siddhartha meets with the Buddha, who warns him not to be so clever.  This encounter, however, does not help him to answer the big questions and spurs him to be a seeker without a guru.

Experiencing a crisis, he returns to the world of work and pleasure. He witnesses and observes rich and knowing worldings who know they got a real good bead on things.  He learns to make love with Kamala,  a high -class prostitute. Siddhartha learns as much as possible about making money, gambling, and drinking.

Coming to despise himself, he leaves the world again and takes up with a simply ferryman who encourages him to listen to and learn from the river, a.k.a. nature. He learns to wait, to be willing to listen , be patient , serve and always think of the dynamic changes of life. As composer John Cage said, “No why. Just be.”

Generally speaking, the novel is interesting in terms of storyline, philosophy and pretty language. The drawback, for me, is the Siddhartha ends up alone, responsible only for himself. This is not the way most of us readers live, who figure it's their duty to take care of other people . We have obligations to spouses, kids, employers, and friends. We can’t seek wisdom and peace by a river, alone.

Vintage Mystery #22

I read this book for the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge 2014. The challenge is to read 6 or more Vintage Mysteries. All novels must have been originally written before 1960 and be from the mystery category.

I read this for D-4:  Read one Mystery with a Professional Detective 

Murder Charge – Wade Miller, 1950

In this noir thriller, the Syndicate sends its rep Harry Blue to sunny San Diego to organize the local vice barons. Taking exception to outsiders bringing competition and Eastern ways, the barons greet Harry with an attempted assassination with shotgun blasts. With the shot up gangster in hospital, the city cops persuade PI Max Thursday to impersonate the gangster and collect information on the merchants to vice in order to break up their rings of iniquity. In his travels, Max deals with a diplomatic spiritualist faker, a one-armed WWII veteran gone bad, a Basque thug, and two female troublemakers. Max experiences both distress and violence.

I know, like time travel stories, impersonation stories border on the lame in terms of plausibility. Plus, the prose in this novel, though always lucid, feels grey and flat. Making up for these downsides, the action and incidents provide surprises and interest. The rapid pace and tense tone will appeal to fans of genre.

Wade Miller was the brand name for the writing team Robert Wade and Bill Miller. They teamed up to write about 30 hard-boiled and adventures stories. They are best known for A Touch of Evil (a great noir movie by Orson Welles) and the wonderfully titled Kitten with a Whip (later made into a movie with Ann Margaret and John Forsythe),

Mount TBR #6

I read this book for the Mount TBR reading challenge 2014.

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla - Erle Stanley Gardner, 1952

At an auction, Perry Mason coughs up five bucks ($8.79 in 2014 dollars) in order to buy the diaries of Helen Cadmus, a young woman girl who, the authorities have concluded, either was washed overboard or committed suicide on a yacht excursion. Whatever famed lawyer Perry Mason does, mind, is noticed by the celeb-obsessed citizens and hustlers of L.A. Soon after, in a vivid scene with a believable interview, an obvious crook Nathan Fallon visits Mason. Fallon claims that he is a distant relative of Cadmus and wants her diaries to protect the poor dear girl’s reputation. He offers Mason big bucks for the diaries on the behalf of Helen’s employer, millionaire Benjamin Addicks.  His curiosity quickened, Mason refuses the offer.

Mason has his private investigator, Paul Drake, look into the background of the allegedly eccentric Addicks. In a curious wrinkle, Addicks seems like a mad scientist. Who but a mad scientist would conduct brain research that involves the use of apes, chimps, and gorillas as test subjects?

Perry Mason and his loyal secretary Della Street end up paying a visit to Addicks’ creepy and heavily-guarded mansion. In a scene right out of the pulps (when Gardner cut his writer’s teeth), Mason has a spine-tingling confrontation with a gorilla. He also finds Addicks, stabbed to death. Mason ends up defending Josephine Kempton, the former housekeeper of Addicks. She is a typical exasperating Mason client in that she figures that withholding damning information from her defense attorney is not really and truly lying.

Three elements distinguish this Mason story from the books Gardner wrote in the Fifties. 

First, the pulpy action, settings, and antsy ambiance were hinted at above. Second, in the climax in two characters attempt to murder Perry Mason, which is unusual since Gardner usually kept violence off stage. Third, Gardner seldom went beyond the usual motivations of love, hate, lust, and greed. Though Gardner typically keeps characterization at minimum, Benjamin Addicks is a tangled mad scientist. He reportedly conducts psychological experiments with gorillas because he has committed a murder many years before and wants to understand the roots of this despicable act, to make peace with himself.

2014 Classic #6

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - Charles Mackay, 1841

This classic of early social science is a pioneering survey of crowd psychology. Mackay examines three historic swindles: The Mississippi Scheme, The South-Sea Bubble, and Tulipomania. Motivated by avarice among scoundrels and cads and nourished by gullibility, ignorance and desperation among the marks, these flim-flam schemes went  very wrong. For any reader interested in bubbles, crashes, pyramid scheme, scam investments. Mackay was a journalist so he writes – clearly and jauntily -  for the popular mind, ironically enough, since I’m sure he would ruefully agree with K’s observation in Men in Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

Vintage Mystery #34

I read this book for the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge 2014. The challenge is to read 6 or more Vintage Mysteries. All novels must have been originally written before 1960 and be from the mystery category.

I read this for D-6: Outside Your Comfort Zone

The Sailcloth Shroud - Charles Williams

Charles Williams (1909 - 1975) is known for writing taut suspense stories, a few such as Dead Calm and Aground with a nautical theme. On the water is out of my comfort zone. Though I grew up in a Great Lakes state, I’m no sailor. So, I read passages like, “There’s a formula for calculating the absolute maximum speed of a displacement hull, regardless of the type or amount of power applied. It’s a function of the trochoidal wave system set up by the boat and is 1.34 times the square root of the waterline length.” And I think, “Okay, I’ll trust you on that.”

But like Patrick O’Brian in the Aubrey-Maturin stories, Williams makes the techno-babble go down easy with his concise, readable style and imaginative story-telling. From Texas, he can make his tall tales stay on the plausible side of incredible. In this one, a sailboat captain hires two strangers in Panama to help him pilot a 40-foot ketch back to the US where he can sell it. One of the men dies of a heart attack and must be buried at sea. And just a few days after they land in Texas, the other hire is beaten to death.

Suddenly the captain is subject to unwelcome attention by the cops and FBI and to brutal questioning by hardened criminals. Three flashbacks provide narrative interest. Williams fires off jokes just when the gettin’ can’t get much worse for our hero. He has an excellent touch with down-home metaphors and similes. Like this when our hero manages to run away after “enhanced interrogation techniques”: “My torso felt as if had been emptied and then stuffed with broken glass or eggshells. Every breath was agony, and I ran awkwardly, with a feeling that I had been cut in two and the upper half of my body was merely riding, none too well balanced, on the lower.”

Fine as cream gravy, now that’s talkin’ Texan. I can’t say this one reaches the outstanding standard set by the hard as nails A Touch of Death, because it lacks a femme fatale on the devilish level of Madelon. Also, the vision of the Spanish moss settings of the Deep South are suggestive but not quite as evocative in this outing. But anybody who likes a rockin’ crime novel or stories of average guys suddenly thrust into hellish circumstances will enjoy this one.

2014 Classic #5

Accounting for Murder – Emma Lathan

Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart, attorney-banker and economic analyst respectively, had to write under the pen name of Emma Lathen, lest their Wall Street superiors and colleagues take umbrage. Heaven knows they’d be put out, wondering if they were the models for delicate male egos and whiny babies that posture as formidable captains of industry. For instance, in this one, a composed secretary has learned to bring her boss, the president of a computer company, what he, an ex-quarterback for Harvard to boot, craves most in times of stress: a glass of milk.

In this 1964 mystery, an accountant is found strangled with his own adding machine cord. He was an outsider that was hired by a pack of disgruntled stockholders so there are plenty of suspects inside the company. Series hero John Putnam Thatcher, senior VP for Sloan Guaranty Trust, an investment banking concern, is dragged into the investigation because his bank is heavily and foolishly invested in the data processing company. As in comic mysteries generally, Thatcher, though canny and quick-thinking, finds himself haplessly caught in zany situations. I can’t assert that the humor is of the LOL - knee-slapping variety, but readers who savor James Thurber’s quiet satirical bomb-throwing will enjoy dry and wry Emma Lathan. In fact, in 1965 this novel was a runner-up for the Golden Dagger Award given by the Crime Writers Association, taking second to the still-readable The Far Side of the Dollar by John Macdonald.

Between 1962 and 1997 (when Latsis passed away), the duo wrote as many as 24 novels featuring Thatcher’s adventures. They are marked by highly literate writing, genial satire of Wall Street and the business world of Madmen, and concise descriptions of how business used to deal with government contracts, logistics, R&D, and production in those bygone days when our financial titans actually focused on investing in making things instead of crashing the housing market.

War Challenge #7

I read this for the 2014 War Challenge with a Twist at the reading challenge blog War Through the Generations

The Last Parallel: A Marine War Journal – Martin Russ, 0880642378

I hadn’t read a Marine Corps combat narrative for long time. I picked The Last Parallel, expecting gory tales of bloodshed and destruction, with the primary literary influence being Mickey Spillane. Hey, it was March in Western New York, the punishment phase of winter, so I needed a pick me up, something to take me out of myself.

In fact, The Last Parallel is smart and often funny diary-based account of his training in Camp Pendleton, transport to Korea, and his time in the static war from December 1952 to September 1953. Film director Stanley Kubrick was so impressed with this story that he took out an option to make it into a movie.

Sailors and Marines are forbidden to keep diaries, so it’s a minor miracle that books like this one and Fahey’s immortal Pacific War Diary even exist. When asked what he was writing, Russ would say, “Letters.” I assumed later he edited the entries for publication but the writing is understandably uneven. Some parts are humorous and exciting, while others go on and on.

There’s much to interest readers who are into things military: gear, weapons, landscape, patrols and skirmishes. Many of the fighting scenes will carry the reader away such as in Cross of Iron and With the Old Breed. He describes an ambush:

A tremendous volume of fire, coming from our right front, at a distance varying from twenty to fifty yards. These were the first muzzle blasts I noticed. … Fire of equal intensity came from our left but at a greater distance. The ambush had been deployed in an inverted V formation and the fire from its apex was obviously the most deadly.

For those not so into dispositions tactiques, there are excellent passages too. This on Chinese propaganda efforts.

… “Ike is one of the leaders who could bring peace in Korea, but like the rest of the big-money boys, he is not interested in peace.”

A woman sang a song, a very sentimental piece but quite moving “The Last Rose of Summer.” I looked back at the other three men and could see the outline of their brush-covered helmets. They were listening too, not aware of each other and maybe for a moment unaware of the surroundings. When the song ended, a woman said, “Did you enjoy my song, Marine? If so fire your rifle twice and I will sing another.” A wag on the MLR fired an extremely long burst from a machine gun. It echoed for several seconds. A few miles to the east, in the Army sector, five or six parachute flares hovered above the mountains. Artillery rumbled in the distance, a kind of muffled thunder. The woman sang another song. It was unfamiliar, a semi-art song. This was followed by a haunting, 1920-type number played by an American dance band of that period. I listened hard for the sound of Bix Beiderbecke or at least Henry Busse. It may have been Whiteman.

I had an imaginary picture of the Chinese nearby, listening to the record, thinking how well it must typify the atmosphere of money-mad capitalist, warmonger infested modern America. Poor bastards realty do need a new propaganda system.

Sure, we wonder what a “semi-art song” might possibly be but quibbles don’t spoil the comic relief guys enjoyed in a grim situation.

Theodore Roosevelt – called by Henry James “a dangerous and ominous jingo” -- once maintained that only under wartime conditions is the character of man ever fundamentally tested. Suffice to say, this book is an example of how often the war experience may radically alter a soldier’s entire approach to life. Russ narrates his growth from misfit-goof-college smarty-pants to novice to seasoned professional.

In his last month in Korea, he was promoted to sergeant, as he had been doing a sergeant’s duties for months as an acting squad leader. Post Marines, he wrote several popular histories of the Marines in combat, the best known of which was Breakout : The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950.