ISBook Club: Hunt at the Well of Eternity

So, as Chris Sims recounts here, he and I have decided to start a cross-blog book club with the first installment of the Hunt for Adventure series, Hunt at the Well of Eternity, written by James Reasoner.

Much like Chris, I was excited to hear about this series about a treasure-hunting hero named Gabriel Hunt when series creator Charles Ardai announced it. Ardai is the creator of the Hard Case Crime series, which I've been enjoying tremendously for the last few years. Unfortunately, the first book in the series doesn't live up to those expectations, but I'm going to stick with this series in hopes that it does live up to its potential.

I agree with Chris on most points. I also wish that the book used first-person narration, especially since "Gabriel Hunt" is listed as the author, and I also found the contemporary setting off-putting. And, in the end, Gabriel Hunt is too much of a generic adventure hero to care much about. But, as Chris also points out, the book moves along at a fast clip, with one action set-piece following quickly after another--in the first 40 pages, we get a fight at a museum benefit, a car chase across the Queensboro bridge, and an airboat chase through the Florida Everglades, all with considerable gunfire.

The book could also benefit from a more self-aware, ironic approach. Hints of that occur in the suggestion that Gabriel learned to use a bullwhip from a friend of his parents who may have been Indiana Jones. In fact, my hopes for ironic self-awareness came in the first page, when we're introduced to Gabriel's brother:

His brother Michael leaned closer to him. Without altering the beaming smile on his face, Michael said from the corner of his mouth, "Stop fidgeting."

I would think, if you named a character "Michael Hunt," you would absolutely have to know what you were doing. And if so, then the reader should expect much of the novel to be written with the tongue planted firmly in the cheek. However, that is really not the case here, and Reasoner writes the rest of the novel with such a bland earnestness that it seems as if he were willfully avoiding ironic self-awareness. Take, for example, the turgid prose used in the introduction of the novel's damsel-in-distress, Mariella Montez:

A mass of midnight-black curls framed a compelling, high-cheekboned face dominated by dark, intense eyes. Those curls tumbled over honey-skinned shoulders left bare by the strapless evening gown of dark green silk that clung to the generous curves of her body. She possessed a timeless, natural beauty that was more attractive to Gabriel than anything the multitude of stick-thin, face-lifted society women attending this reception could ever muster.

This may as well have said "generically attractive Latina," as there is very little here to give us much of a picture of the character, though that's par for the course with most characters in this novel. Reasoner may be intentionally resisting the kind of postmodern irony that accompanies many nostalgic genre revivals, but the bland style used here does not serve as a worthwhile replacement.

Reasoner, best known for his Westerns and Civil War novels, as well as the Mike Shayne mysteries that he wrote as "Brett Halliday," would seem perfectly suited to this kind of adventure tale. And the author does bring his historical expertise to a plot involving the quest for the fate of a Civil War general who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. But apart from strong pacing and action scenes that make the story mildly diverting and inoffensive, there isn't much to recommend here.

Later installments in the series do offer some promise, though. If the preview in the back of Well of Eternity is a sign, then the next novel, Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear by series creator Charles Ardai, should be a lot more fun. Ardai's contributions to the Hard Case Crime series, notably Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence (writing as "Richard Aleas"), are both fantastic crime novels, and he clearly has a love for these pulp genres. Also, Christa Faust and David J. Schow are both lined up for the series, and they wrote my two favorite Hard Case Crime novels: Money Shot and Gun Work (respectively). Both of these novels are fun and fast-paced, with strong characterization and some pretty wild twists. So, while I was disappointed in Hunt at the Well of Eternity, I hold out hope that this was merely a mild abberation, and that the series will live up to its potential.

Book Review: Ms. Tree in Deadly Beloved

One of the things I look forward to during the long holiday breaks that college teachers get is the opportunity to read stuff that either isn't on my syllabus or isn't being considered for a future class. Lately, I've been especially enjoying stuff that comes from the Hard Case Crime imprint, as was the case with the Mickey Spillane novel I recently reviewed. I've been impressed with the quality of the novels I've read from this publisher (though I was disappointed with Stephen King's contribution, The Colorado Kid), and I appreciate the way they have embraced the pulp fiction format and aesthetic: cheap, fast-paced thrillers (featuring lurid covers) that can be read in one or two sittings.

So, when I was on my recent trip to Wisconsin, I picked up a couple of the new volumes for the long drive. In addition to Spillane's Dead Street, I also grabbed Max Allen Collins's Deadly Beloved, the first novel featuring Ms. Tree, the comic book private detective that Collins created along with artist Terry Beatty in the early 80s.

I had scant experience reading the Ms. Tree comic--I picked up a few issues of the quarterly series that DC put out in the early 90s--but that inexperience did not hinder me from enjoying this novel. Collins "reboots" the character's origin in Deadly Beloved, updating the character for a more contemporary world.

Ms. Tree is Michael Tree, a former Chicago police officer turned private detective, who is the widow of a former Chicago police detective turned PI also named Michael Tree (and I thought it was confusing living in a house with two Doctors K). Her husband is murdered on their wedding night, and Ms. Tree then inherits his fledgling detective agency. The novel takes place a year after her husband's murder, when Ms. Tree discovers that the killer may have been set up by a mysterious mob enforcer known as "The Event Planner." The Event Planner is a kind of mythical figure who some police believe sets up various hits by manipulating other people into committing murder so he never pulls the trigger. Ms. Tree's police friend, Lt. Rafe Valer, is ridiculed by his colleagues for his theory about the Event Planner, but evidence soon mounts during the investigation of a schizophrenic wife's murder of her cheating husband to make the theory a likely reality.

Collins chooses an interesting narrative approach to this novel: the story is framed by a therapy session in which Ms. Tree tells the events of the investigation to her psychiatrist, Dr. Cassel. A similar conceit is often used on crime shows like Law and Order or CSI, but it works here as well, though the reader is meant to imagine that this is a particularly long therapy session.

As Collins acknowledges in his afterword, some of the character names in this novel are symbolically a bit too on-the-nose. Ms. Tree actually calls attention to her name, demanding that people call her "Ms." instead of "Mrs." and pointing out that she sees the name as a selling point for her detective agency. Other characters have names that also highlight their personality or morality: Rafe Valer, the Muerta crime family, and the groan-worthy Chic Steele, to name a few. This type of symbolic naming is certainly a holdover from the story's comic book origins. Also, Collins, in addition to being a prolific mystery writer, also wrote several comic series, including the Dick Tracy comic strip, a year or so of Batman stories in the 80s, and Wild Dog, a character he also created with his Ms. Tree collaborator, Terry Beatty.

Ms. Tree also has to deal with considerable animosity directed at her gender, as she has built her success in what is largely a man's world. In his afterword, Collins addresses the fact that there are more fictional female PIs now then there were in the early 80s, and a lot of the gender bias Ms. Tree receives does seem a bit dated. Collins does give his female protagonist enough amusingly witty retorts to the sexism that she faces, and her tough, often crude language is effective at putting her adversaries off-balance, though one shouldn't expect this novel to break new ground on gender equality.

This is not to say that the novel is overly simplistic. Collins also infuses the novel with enough noir overtones to give the plot some moral complexity. This is especially true in the intriguing concept of the Event Planner, who is able to manipulate relatively normal people into committing murder through an intimate awareness of what buttons to push. However, the novel does lose some credibility in the end by not playing fair with the audience regarding this particular mystery: we don't get much information on his or her identity, nor do we get a viable candidate for the role, until the very end of the novel. Still, the road leading up to that conclusion is entertaining and engaging enough to minimize the problems there.

Collins's afterword points to potential future developments for the Ms. Tree character, including a possible TV series. While I hope that works out, I also hope that Collins continues to produce more Ms. Tree novels for the Hard Case Crime imprint. The main character is particularly fun, with a versatility that can translate into different media.

Book Review: Mickey Spillane's Dead Street

When I was a teenager, I wasn't very rebellious in comparison to my contemporaries, but the one way I did express rebellion was through my selection of reading material (which is to say, again, that I wasn't very rebellious). With comics, 14-year-old Dr. K found that mature fare like Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! and Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland's Camelot 3000 could easily fly under the parental radar when mixed with Batman and The Legion of Super-Heroes. And with books, I tended to read novels that had been banned or were otherwise controversial (at least for a 14 year old), and such interests often led me toward adventure and pulp fiction. At 14 or 15, I had read every James Bond novel, and by 15 I had moved from those to the works of Mickey Spillane.

I had moved to Mickey Spillane for several reasons. First, the Mike Hammer TV series, starring Stacy Keach, was getting started, and I saw a certain appeal in that sort of private detective. At the same time, Spillane's own Miller Lite commercials had made the author a household name. This, in particular, made me even more interested in Spillane, as his appearances on television brought out an interesting bit of our family history: my grandfather had gone to high school with Mickey Spillane, and they both grew up in the same neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey. My father even remembered seeing Mickey on occasion, when the writer came back to Elizabeth to visit old friends.

During my sophomore year of high school, my English teacher required us to read for 15 minutes at the beginning of class and to keep a reading log that he would check over regularly. We were free, the teacher said, to read whatever we wanted. This, then, inspired one miniscule act of rebellion, where I decided that all I would read was Mickey Spillane novels.

Now, while it was pretty easy to hide more adult-oriented comics from my parents and other authorities, as they could easily be mixed with more innocuous comics, hiding Mickey Spillane books was much more difficult. The primary problem was the covers: all of Spillane's novels published in the 70s (and the ones I could most easily find in used bookstores for around 50 cents) had naked women on the covers, whose nudity was only partially obscured by the book's title or by a banner proclaiming the number of Spillane novels currently in print.

The cover for The Erection Set was particularly controversial because it featured Spillane's second wife, Sherri Malinou, as the model. This was also one of the books I chose for quiet reading time, and, to my English teacher's credit, he just laughed it off and said, "Well, I did tell you you could read anything you wanted to read."

(Now that I look back on that time from the perspective of being an English teacher, I would totally be happy if I had a student who was attempting to challenge authority through reading, so I understand why my mini-rebellion met with such an anticlimactic reaction.)

My memories of The Erection Set, like my memories of most Spillane novels, are sketchy at best. I remember that the novel's hero, Dog Kelly, returns to his neighborhood after decades away. There, he is met by a young woman who, as a child, was saved by Dog and has "saved herself" for the possibility of her hero's return. The novel teases out some sexual tension between the two, as Dog (or is it the woman?) refuses to consummate the relationship until his job (which I think involves eliminating some local gangsters) is done. I distinctly remember one scene in which Dog brings the woman to orgasm with a hairbrush--an act that truly challenged my 15-year-old imagination. And, if I remember right, Spillane brings the two plot elements together in the final chapter, with Dog killing the bad guys, who happen to invade his home, while he is having sex.

And that, I think, summarizes Mickey Spillane in a nutshell. My sensibilities and gender politics have since advanced well beyond that point in my life (and even at 15, I found the characterization of the woman in the novel, waiting decades for the off-chance that one man would return to her small town, as preposterous), and Spillane's work now appeals to me more for its ridiculousness and excesses, though I haven't read much of his writing since those teenage years.

I bring up my memories of The Erection Set here because I was reminded of that book frequently while reading the recent, posthumously published Spillane novel, Dead Street.
When the mystery publisher Hard Case Crime announced that they would be publishing Spillane's final novel, completed (or "prepared for publication," as the cover states) by mystery writer and Spillane pal Max Allen Collins, I was interested out of a combination of nostalgia and curiosity.

Though Spillane's terse, economical prose and quick pacing are in evidence here, the novel lacks the visceral impact of his earlier work, with surprisingly little sex or violence. The plot, which involves the mob, nuclear material, and the Saudis, is both preposterous and threadbare. Jack Stang, a recently retired New York police officer known affectionately on the force as "The Shooter" for his frequent use of deadly force, discovers that his long lost love, Bettie, is actually alive--though blind and amnesiac--and living a safe and protected life inside a Florida retirement community for cops and firemen (the heavily armed, cop retirement community is a clever idea that deserves life beyond this novel). Twenty years earlier, fortyish Jack had been dating 20-year-old Bettie, until Bettie was abducted by the mob because of some secret she knew, but before the secret could be revealed, the van containing her and her abductors was run into the river during a botched police chase. Everyone was presumed dead.

Bettie, however, survived and was rescued by a wealthy veterinarian (this, I think, requires some suspension of disbelief), who set her up in this retirement community as a means to protect her from the mob, who was still after her secret. Once the veterinarian dies, his son reveals to Jack that Bettie survived, though without her memory, and the father had set up a sizeable bank account for the detective along with a home next door to Bettie. He had hoped that Jack would both protect her and help jog her lost memory.

It is the Jack/Bettie relationship that reminded me the most of The Erection Set. Both novels involve May/December relationships, and both involve characters whose lives seem to be put on hold for decades while waiting for someone. Jack describes Bettie as unchanged over twenty years, and she has made absolutely no progress on recovering her memory during that time. Jack, also, never emotionally recovered from the loss of Bettie. This is an interesting, though somewhat unrealistic, conception of loss and paralyzing nostalgia that Spillane presents in these characters.

Meanwhile, Jack's old neighborhood back in Manhattan--the "Dead Street" of the title--is in the process of being leveled for some kind of civic improvement, and all of the residents have been moved out. Jack, therefore, has lost his home, so there is little to dissuade him from taking the veterinarian's offer.

In the process of helping Bettie bring her memory back, Jack discovers that his old neighborhood still holds one secret: 20 years ago, a group of mobsters stole some nuclear material from a military convoy, and it was hidden somewhere on Dead Street. Whoever stole it was now offering it for sale to the Saudis for use in a nuclear bomb that would destroy NYC.

And it is here that the novel is its most preposterous. In the most successful film adaptation of a Spillane novel, Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955), the filmmakers added a plot involving the recovery of nuclear material, which was contained in a lead box that glowed and burned as characters opened it to see what was inside. Though the film's depiction of such material was naive, the overall plot was effective: detective Mike Hammer discovers that, as a small-time PI used to handling infidelity cases, he is in way over his head when he realizes the international impact of his case. It's curious, then, that Spillane would take a plot element added to an adaptation of his own book and use it here. Stang seems little affected by the potential consequences of his case, and, despite being a retired police officer, he is still allowed to continue investigating it even when government authorities are made aware of the situation.

Spillane never hid his conservative politics in his writing, and that makes some of his stuff written during the Cold War seem quaint today, though his racial politics are still disturbingly problematic. Here, Spillane's politics appear evident especially when dealing with the Saudis who are interested in the nuclear material. For example, when Stang learns that his old neighborhood has been bought by a "Saudi investment group," who plans on replacing the tenements with luxury apartments, he responds, "They took down two buildings, didn't they? Ought to put up a few." That Spillane would have his hero, one who is frequently commended for his strong detective skills and keen mind, make such a gross generalization is problematic on many levels, both within the story and without, in the novel's place in post-9/11 American culture.

That being said, Max Allen Collins's work in completing the novel for publication is remarkable. In an afterword, Collins notes that Spillane had finished the first eight chapters, and the last three were written by Collins, following Spillane's notes. However, if I hadn't read the afterword, I wouldn't know where one writer ends and the other begins, as Collins does a masterful job of duplicating Spillane's style. And the climactic fight is as violent and bloody as one would expect from Spillane. To Collins's credit, the novel doesn't end with Bettie suddenly getting both her sight and memory back--a plot development that Spillane probably would have included. However, the wrap up of the nuclear plot takes place "off-screen," which may be an indication that Collins was aware of the plot's credibility problems.

The afterword also states that Spillane was working on four novels to varying degrees of completion at the end of his life: in addition to Dead Street, there are two Mike Hammer mysteries and an adventure novel called The Last Stand, which was completed. Despite my disappointment in Dead Street, I do hope that these final novels see the light of day and that Max Allen Collins will complete the unfinished work with the same care and skill that he brought to this novel. In addition, it would be nice if Hard Case Crime were to publish these last novels as well: the trade dress and lurid, painted covers seem especially suited for Spillane's work, and I've been very impressed with what I've seen from this publisher so far.