23. Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold (#12 in the Vorkosigan saga)

Still in catch-up mode, I went to the queen of fun and fulfilling (and quick to read), the Vorkosigan series.  Diplomatic Immunity thoroughly delivered.  It was as enjoyable and rich as the previous books with the added bonus that all the previous background to Miles and his various associates, and especially the galaxy-building all come into play here.  My old man memory has held up enough or perhaps after 11 books, I have internalized much of it, that I was able to stay entirely on top of the big-picture space strategy plot points that came up.  This was what I was looking for when I started researching a sci-fi series so long ago.  So very satisfying.

Here Miles is now newly-married, settling into his role as Imperial Auditor and seemingly a slight more staid life than before.  He and Ekaterina are returning from their honeymoom to prepare to settle down and welcome the birth of their son and daughter, in uterine containers back on Barrayar.  Of course, everything goes to shit when he gets a call to deal with a conflict between a Barrayar military escort with the local authorities of the remote Graf station, in Quaddiespace.  The Quaddies were genetically developed with four arms instead of two arms and two legs, specifically for construction and living in zero-gravity and due to persecution and exploitation set off centuries before to make their own colony. 

It's a complicated situation involving initially a disappeared, either deserted or kidnapped or murdered, security officer, plus an "overzealous" (or brutal) attack by Barrayan officers when they went to return to the ship a late-returning pilot.  Things get more and more complicated and risky as the situation continues to escalate to a galactic level.  I'm not going to say more than that.  This was another fun one, involving a great look at the Quaddie world and how they live, lots of gross bio-weapons and some cool, exciting last-minute space action.  I can't wait to see where they go next.

22. Closed Circuit by William Haggard

boring as hell for a photo cover
but still looks cool

Back to fiction and wow what a boost to my reading!  This book was thin and I burned through it in two days, thoroughly enjoying myself.  I love all kinds of reading but it sure is nice when you don't have to re-read passages, check the maps over and over again and even go to Wikipedia to try and figure out the historical context.  

It doesn't hurt how beautiful these Penguins are.  I'm not a massive Haggard fan, but I keep all of his that I find because the editions are so lovely and look great on my shelf.  I know it is pure snobbery, but I love the back tagline of this book "the 'adults' Ian Fleming".  It is so true.  These are smart espionage books.  Sometimes perhaps a bit too smart, as Haggard loves oblique conversations (and even sometimes narrative passages) where nothing specific is mentioned and the read has to infer what is actually going on.  I think this is often how intelligent spymasters do actually talk, but there are also elements that refer to subtle class distinctions in England that can be tough for a 21st century North American to parse.

The story here contains Haggard's usual elements: skullduggery involving a fictional foreign nation that somewhat implicates Britain as well.  However, it is off to the side from his usual sandbox, only indirectly involving the Security Executive branch.  The protagonist is Francis Mason, the heir of a multi-generational farming family of English descent from the South American country of Candoro (an analogue of paraguay perhaps).  His grandfather and the patriarch of the estancia (named "Seven" because it was the seventh plot of land granted to colonialists in the 19th century) drove off a local official in a humiliating way (knocking him down with bolas just after he had left the property) and that local has recently become the president of the country.  He is making serious trouble for Seven so Mason heads off to England in the hope of getting some support from the British Foreign Office and sympathetic people in the Candoran embassy.  His first "ally" is Kenneth Gibb, an ambitious and less than ethical middle ranking diplomat who also had an affair with Mason's wife.  Mason is portrayed initially as a bit soft and passive, but as the narrative unfolds, we of course see that he is made of sterner stuff, as he threads the needle of all the various enemies working around him.

It's a fun read, though I found the ending a bit too dependent on chance.  I didn't mind as there is an excellent scene here of the kind of subtle badassery that is why I read these books.  Just so fucking cool.  The whole thing about Mason is that he is descended from good British stock and his grandfather was a famous badass landowner.  So he inherited that toughness and also was raised on the estancia, learning to ride, work cattle, but he also grew up with the peons and learned all their sweet knife-fighting skills, which gets revealed to the reader at the best possible moment.  He is shown as deferring and polite, just trying to minimize trouble and save his Estancia, while all these nastier and seemingly more sophisticated players are maneuvering around him to screw him out of his money.  When things get nasty for real as an assassin is sent to take out one of those players (with whom he had become allied and started to respect) in a London park, suddenly Mason is whipping out a 14" facón that nobody knew he had on him and completely besting the assassin to the point where he discusses whether or not he should kill him and decides not to because the body would cause problems for them.

 

The Kenneth Gibb character is interesting as well as in some ways the book is more about him.  Haggard really has it in for him.  He starts out as seeming that he will be quite a problem for our protagonist but ends up just getting utterly screwed left and right, to the point where though he initiated much of it with bad selfish decisions, you start to feel bad for him.  By the end he goes out in the worst possible way.  One feels that he may have been a type that Haggard dealt with in his own life, so severe is his retribution. 

21. Russell's Despatches from the Crimea edited and introduced by Nicolas Bentley

My on-deck shelf is maxed out and has been in this state or close to it for quite a while now.  I keep promising not to buy or find any more books, or at least only to look for my most prized treasures, yet I keep finding things that I can't not take.  The iron will of my disciplined youth has mellowed into a more supple approach to life.  This is my long-winded way of justifying me picking up this book on the Crimean war I found in a free book box I don't usually have access to (next to the Pirate park down by des Pins).  It's just such a beautiful book, with pull out images and maps.  And I do need to better understand 19th century European political history.  Unfortunately, it took me several weeks to read and put's me in slight catch up mode for my 50 book goal.

William Howard Russel was a very successful military journalist whose honest reporting from the Crimean front and specifically the siege of Sebastopol, though polite and respectful, exposed the incompetence and disconnection of the government at home.  The logistical planning for the war was a total disaster and the British lost thousands of men to cholera and exposure before the fighting even started. I know we all hate the British and colonialism now, but there is an element in their politics that always allowed for critique and you see that in the writing here.  He writes with sympathy of the brutal situation of the men in the field, who had to spend a winter on sodden ground without tents and insufficient food and clothing and in the gentlest way makes your understand the incompetence of Lord Raglan, the general who was given the post out of respect for his seniority rather than competence.  He also goes after the excessive paperwork and bureaucracy that stymied the army and navy actually making decisions and getting things done.

At the same time, he speaks in the voice of a patriot and his writing is so good that he makes the battles seem quite thrilling.  You could see how young men could read his passages in The Times and feel the allure of the false glories of war.  These passages, however, are strongly tempered by his descriptions of the aftermath.  Wow, these battles were just gruesome.  Russell describes the various mutilations (from shot balls, bayonets and other shrapnel) as well as the fields of the dead, dying and wounded.  It's crazy how expendable life was considered back then in the pursuit of strategic goals on the other side of the continent.

Ultimately, this battle was about western Europe using the Ottoman empire as a buffer to prevent Russian expansion (and allow Britain a free and open market in the Ottoman empire).  The specific flashpoint or excuse to trigger a war was ostensibly a conflict over who was allowed to protect the Orthodox Christians in the Palestine.  It is a conflict that we are still fighting today, in both regions.

 

20. Wild Talent by Wilson Tucker

Wild Talent has possibly been on my hunting list for about the longest of any book.  I've found so many other Wilson Tuckers in used book stores around the continent, but not this one until I stumbled upon it at Moe's in Berkeley.  Very satisfying!  I was all excited and told the jaded guy at the counter who could not care less.  The reason I was looking for this book is because of the tabletop RPG Wild Talents.  I'm not a big fan of the ESP genre per se, but it was an interesting use of the One-Roll Engine which was an innovative RPG system I was quite into back in the day.  Somewhere in the book, if I remember correctly, the authors mention that Tucker's Wild Talent was a big inspiration and that set me off looking for the book.  They may have also claimed that it was the first or very early example of the ESP powers sub-genre in fiction.  Not sure about that.

 The story takes place in the early '50s.  The protagonist is Paul Breen and he is living in a gilded cage, spending his last few moments with a woman he loves before somebody is coming to kill him.  Just as he is about to be shot, he turns the gun around.  We don't know what happens, because the book then flashes back to Paul's early life.  We learn of him as a precocious and independent 13 year old boy who saves up enough money to take a trip to Chicago and the World's Fair and from there we start to see inklings of his ability to read other humans.  As the book progresses, we follow him in the army, where his power is discovered.  He is then made part of a super secret government operation, run by a guy he dislikes named Slater.  He is used to scan other operatives who are sent out around the world to spy, not knowing that he is reading their minds from afar.  As the operation progresses, anybody close to Paul is slowly removed.  He plots his revenge and escape.

Wild Talent is cleanly written and a page-turner.  I finished it easily and wanted to find out what happens.  But it's not a super exciting book; it's actually kind of down and melancholy. The theme is that because of his powers, Paul is not human, he is superior and that superiority makes him an enemy to humans.  There isn't a lot of action, mainly Paul interacting with the people in his limited world.  There are some cool details and his powers are thought through in an interesting way.  I would like a sequel with more telepathic ass-kicking.

 

19. The Cuckoo Line Affair by Andrew Garve

I found three Andrew Garve's at Moe's after they were recommended by an aligned soul on the internet.  The cover designs would have been enough for me to at least take one.  The Cuckoo Line Affair really threw me and I think part of my pleasure was the mixed expectations as by the time I got to the end, it evolved from real curious excitement to more of a standard semi-cozy investigative mystery.  

After reading Boomerang, I assumed that Garve's work was in the 20th century British men's adventure sub-genre, à la the great Desmond Bagley (and his wife Joan Margaret Brown).  The Cuckoo Line Affair begins with a static description of an eccentric old man Andrew Latimer, briefly a member of parliament who lives in a cottage out in the country, putters around in his garden, plays with the local neighbour child, has a bunch of civic responsibilities and makes a small amount of money writing political gossip columns for various newspapers.  He has two sons who are making their way in the world and an old maid daughter who lives with him and takes care of him.  We are well into the second chapter, describing one of his rare trips by train to London and I am trying to figure out how any of this, as pleasant as it was to read about, was going to evolve into a challenging conflict with elements and/or man in some interesting foreign location.  

Well at the end of the second chapter things do get weird!  He is alone in a carriage with a young woman on the old and rickety Cuckoo Line. She gets some coal in her eye and asks him to help her get it out.  The next thing he knows, they are kissing!  So we do get a real plot, but it isn't an adventure story as much as an investigation.  Latimer is accused of assaulting the woman and finds himself in real trouble.  His two sons, one who is a lawyer and the other a crime fiction writer, have to figure out how to defend him and also figure out what actually happened.  There is a lot of neat stuff around these muddy inlets in Essex (I think?!) and puzzling out the complexities of the crime kept me engaged and interested.  The ending, however, had an early climax and then somewhat of an anti-climax, where everything depended on getting a certain piece of evidence and convincing the prosecuting attorney of something.  It was all very pleasant and I wish I had a nice english cottage with a garden and marshy lands to poke around in.  I also was happy for the Latimer family and appreciated that Hugh, the investigating son, brought his fiancée Cynthia into it and she was actually responsible for several of the crucial clues.  

18. American Falls the collected short stories by Barry Gifford

I'm a big fan of Barry Gifford's life work, especially for his resurrection of the pulp/noir genres with Black Lizard Press and very specifically his book The Devil Thumbs a Ride.  Other than watching Wild at Heart (which I did not love for various reasons), I have never consumed any of his fiction.  I found this one at the interesting Vancouver used bookstore The Paper Hound and I suspect I bought it from the really nice and inviting way the books were laid out.  It is not my usual custom to pick up literary fiction short story anthologies!  I feared I would never finish it, but once I started, I found the stories quite readable and got through it pretty quickly and quite enjoyed it.

Interestingly, there is really only one story here, the final novella, that I would have recognized as coming from Barry Gifford.  I had expected lots of American neo-noir and interesting lowlifes, but actually many of the stories were more "high culture", including ones imagining a trip to North Africa by some famous artists (whose names I have forgotten).  Apologies for lack of a more thorough review, but I am writing this weeks after having read it and have already put the book into free library circulation.  None of the stories blew my mind and some were too slight, but I did enjoy reading it and learning that Gifford's fiction covers a wide range of styles and subjects.

 

17. Blue Moon by Lee Child

I am not supposed to be picking up any new books and have a general block on Reacher books.  I quite like Reacher but there are so many and so ubiquitous, I want to save them for emergency situations.  I wouldn't quite say I was in a reading emergency; I was just needing something that made me want to read it.  I am also almost done season 3 of the Alan Richter Reacher series and I wanted to remind myself of what the books were like.  Furthermore, Blue Moon is from 2019, so relatively recently and I wanted to see how the quality is of the newer books.  What pushed me over the edge, though, was the blurb on the back about Reacher seeing some old guy on a bus he knew was going to get mugged.  That was enough for me.

I am pleased to say that as of 2019 the quality of Reacher is strong as ever.  Blue Moon did not disappoint.  The entry into the situation was classic Reacher, totally compelling.  He follows the old guy off the bus, foils the mugger, but then quite quickly figures out the man is being extorted.  In trying to help him and his wife out, he gets involved in (well actually creates) a gang war between the Albanians and the Ukrainians, each of whom control one half of a medium-size midwestern city.

What the TV series only hints at is what makes the books so great.  In Reacher's America, the collapse has already come.  America is no longer civilized, the social and economic structures have collapsed.  Civilians are fodder for criminals (organized and unorganized) and the forces of law are weakened or absent.  He's always walking around the fringe areas, the post-industrial wasteland of mini-malls and car dealerships.  There are good people here and there who aren't victims but they aren't strong enough to resist the evil around them.  Until Reacher shows up.

In Blue Moon, other than the two gangs, the major baddies are a techbro and the US health industry (which is portrayed as more efficient and ruthless extorter than even the Ukrainians and Albanians).  I mean talk about relevant.  Reacher and his new allies must get through these gangs first and it is a hoot.  This book had some funny moments, because Child juxtaposes Reacher investigating with the two gangs trying to figure out what is going on and constantly getting it wrong.  It has two shootouts that are almost like a slapstick comedy.  The ending gets quite preposterous and perhaps a bit too easy and long, but it's all so much fun getting there that I accepted it all.  And there are just several great fight scenes.  Lee Child is really good at his job.