2013: The year that wasn’t

2013 has not been a good year for reading. I read fewer than fifty books, fifty comic books, fifty short stories, and fifty vintage magazines and anthologies. I’ve done better in the past, in my pre-blogging days (who didn’t?). I liked most of the books I read.

I also ‘rediscovered’ chess towards the end of the year. Time spent on playing the game cost me a few books.

The best sitcom of the year

On the other hand, I watched more than fifty movies and sitcoms, including reruns of nearly all the seasons of Friends, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Everybody Loves Raymond, and David Suchet’s Poirot, though I reviewed fewer than that many. I’d do well to pay heed to Groucho Marx's saying, “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

Instead of mentioning all the books, comic books, and short stories I read and the films I saw during the year, which doesn’t amount to much, I’ll list the ones I thought were good. They have been reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

BOOKS

The best book cover

Western
Three Young Ranchmen by Captain Ralph Bonehill (1901)

The Girl from Sunset Ranch by Amy Bell Marlowe (1914)

Buchanan’s Siege by Jonas Ward (1973)

Hard Texas Winter by Preston Lewis (1981)

Blade: The Navaho Trail by Matt Chisholm (1981)

Vultures in the Sun by Brian Garfield (1987)



Classics
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)

Detective Mystery
The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie (1924)

The Snake by Mickey Spillane (1964)

In the Heat of the Night by John Ball (1965)

All the Lonely People by Martin Edwards (1991)

Suspense-Thriller-Espionage
The Trojan Horse by Hammond Innes (1940)

Hell Is Too Crowded by Jack Higgins (1962)

A Stranger in the Family by Robert Barnard (2010)

The Athena Project by Brad Thor (2011)

General
A Dog of Flanders by Marie Louise de la Ramée (1872)

The Hessian by Howard Fast (1972)

Tales From Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry (1987)

The Big Fix by Vikas Singh (2013)

SHORT STORIES

The best short story cover

The Man Without a Country by Edward Everett Hale (1863)

The Shining Pyramid by Arthur Machen (1895)

The Mysterious Card and The Mysterious Card Unveiled by Cleveland Moffett (1896)

The Man Upstairs and Other Stories by P.G. Wodehouse (1914)

The Killers by Ernest Hemingway (1927)

The Draw by Jerome Bixby (1954)

The Name Is Archer by Ross Macdonald (1955)

The Book Case by Nelson DeMille (2011)


COMIC BOOKS

The best comic book cover

Action Comics #1 (1938)

American Comics Group: Skeleton Hand — Secrets of the Supernatural (1952)

Scream: Skywald Horror-Mood Magazine (1973)

Marvel: Batman vs. The Incredible Hulk (1981)

DC: Batman & Spider-Man (1997)

Additionally, I also read non-fiction, notably The Penguin Book of Comics by George Perry and Alan Aldrige (1967) and In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect by Ronald Kessler (2010) as well as a few books on philosophy.


FILMS

The best film poster

Ants in the Plants (1940)
Posse from Hell (1961)
In The Heat of the Night (1967)
The Devil's Brigade (1968)
Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)
Just Between Friends (1986)
The Next Three Days (2010)
Salt (2010)
The Descendants (2011)
The Dilemma (2011)
Captain Phillips (2013)
Thor (2013)

The only plan I have for next year is to read more, especially the classics and other literary fiction, and watch fewer movies and sitcoms unless they’re vintage, superhero, animated or musical.

A Stranger in the Family by Robert Barnard (2010)

A caveat: yesterday, I reviewed half a film. Today, I review half a book. Fortunately, I've’ read enough to review the British crime writer’s penultimate novel for the Robert Barnard special at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase this Friday.

‘Kidnapping’s pretty rare these days. Where did this one take place?’
‘In Sicily.’
‘Sicily? That explains it. Dicey sort of place in my experience. And what’s the information you have that you want to report?’
‘I am the child that was kidnapped…’ 

Two years ago, an Indian-born Australian businessman was reunited with his biological family in Khandwa, a city in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, after 25 years. He was separated from his family at a railway station when he was five years old. Later, he was adopted by a family in Australia. As he grew up he never forgot who he was or where he came from. This is a true story and it was reported widely in the media, especially since Google Maps and Facebook helped the young man find his real family.

Newborns and small children routinely disappear in India, as they do in many parts of the world. While some are genuinely separated from their families, like the five-year old boy above, others are kidnapped from bus stops and railway stations and homes and hospitals. While boys are abducted by those desperate for male offsprings, girls are often kidnapped and forced into the flesh trade. There is no official count of India’s missing children.

The separation or abduction of children is a recurrent plot theme in Indian films, particularly Hindi films made by Bollywood, which almost always have a happy ending.

It was for these reasons that A Stranger in the Family by Robert Barnard struck a chord with me. His main character, Kit Philipsons, is born Peter Novello in Leeds, England, kidnapped in Sicily when he is three, adopted and raised in Glasgow, Scotland, and returns to his biological family in Leeds at the age of twenty. 

The 250-odd page novel recounts the story of Kit and his quiet but desperate quest to find out who abducted him, while on a holiday in Sicily with his family, and why. The more Kit digs into his past, the murkier it gets, as he sees a sinister link between the Sicilian mafia, his kind and doting adoptive parents and their Jewish background in Nazi Germany, and his biological father, a lawyer by profession, who brands him as an impostor and an illegitimate.

To make matters worse, Kit’s sudden reappearance in Leeds results in a rift instead of a reunion with his biological family. While his birth mother, Isla, who has long separated from her husband, welcomes Kit with open arms, his siblings, two brothers and sister, are not quite happy as they would now have to divide the inheritance in four parts. Kit wants no share of the family wealth as his adoptive parents, Jürgen and Genevieve, have left him with plenty.

All Kit wants is the truth behind his kidnapping and in search of it he casts a wide net starting with the local police station in Leeds where he has frequent interviews with Sergeant Hargreaves who is sympathetic to his case. Kit meets people directly and indirectly connected with both his biological and adoptive family in the hope that he'll learn what exactly happened twenty years ago.

A Stranger in the Family is not strictly “a novel of suspense” as claimed but it has some elements of suspense. The story, as the title suggests, is self-explanatory. There is no serious character development. Instead, the author brings out the characteristics of the various players through speech and mannerism. There is a certain aloofness about Kit Philipsons and his interactions with people, most notably his birth family. His character doesn't touch a chord as much as his plight does. Robert Barnard's writing is simple but in no way is it ordinary. In fact, his style is one of the better aspects of the book.

A Stranger in the Family falls somewhere between literary fiction and a popular novel. The book is available for Kindle, at Amazon. Recommended.

Django Unchained (2012)

Quentin Tarantino was three years old when Django was released in 1966. The film seems to have made an impression on him. For, 46 years later, he made Django Unchained and recreated the coffin-dragging gunslinger from scratch. Except for raw courage, skill with a gun, and few lines, Jamie Foxx’s Django has little in common with Franco Nero’s Django, or the other spin-offs one of which had Terence Hill in the role. Tarantino paid his tribute to the original version by casting Nero in his film.

I missed Django Unchained when it came in the theatres last year. Then, last night, I watched a portion of the film on cable. It has all the hallmarks of a Tarantino film: bloody vendetta, insensate violence, intense dialogue, oodles of machismo, and shock treatment. I’m basing my opinion on the films I have seen, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill 1 & 2, and Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino makes fewer movies but he makes them well. He can turn reason on its head and still be convincing. 

A few observations on Quentin Tarantino's racially charged film.

I thought casting Jamie Foxx as Django was a shrewd and a brilliant move. If you grew up watching Nero as Django, as I did, it’s a bit of a culture shock to see Foxx in the role which Denzel Washington apparently refused to do. Foxx, however, steps into Nero’s shoes without effort.

In the pre-Civil War days of slavery, coloured people are treated inhumanely. White men buy slaves and whip them into subjugation often pitting blacks against blacks. The brutality of it all is unsettling. For example, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio in a villainous role), a rich and cruel planter who owns many slaves, is sitting on a sofa, smoking a cigar, and watching two men fight to the death. Either one must kill the other, the final blow coming from a hammer carelessly tossed by Candie. The bloody scene was cut, as stipulated by Indian television guidelines, but I knew what was coming next.

Between commercial breaks, we are told that DiCaprio was apprehensive about the strong racial overtone of the film and particularly his character and that Tarantino had to convince him of the need for some of the graphic scenes.

Elsewhere in the film, the mean and nasty Brittle brothers strip a black woman, tie her to a tree, and get ready to whip her when Django strides up to them and shoots two of the men at point blank range. In another scene, he lies prone on a small hill and momentarily grapples with his conscience before killing a man working the field with his son.

All the white men were wanted dead or alive with a bounty on their heads.

The bounty is collected by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) who, ridiculous as it sounds, is a German dentist turned bounty hunter which is obviously a more lucrative occupation. Early in the film he buys Django’s freedom but instead of treating him like a slave, he befriends him and treats him as an equal and makes him his deputy. Together, they kill many wanted men. In return, Dr. Schultz agrees to help Django rescue his wife from slavery under Calvin Candie. This is the key part I missed.

Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained.

I have read about slavery in America in the 18th and 19th centuries, leading up to the Civil War, but I don't know enough to understand it in the context of this film. For instance, while some slaves are treated like slaves, others are treated like normal people who wear fine clothes, move around freely, sit in the living rooms, and talk with their masters. I don't know how close white and black people were in those days but Dr. Schultz and Django share so friendly a relationship as to raise eyebrows. They ride in and out of towns and ranch homes without fear of being shot in the back. The bounty hunter spends lavishly on his friend, buying him a cowboy’s attire, guns, and a horse with a new saddle. Above all, Django shoots white men without fear of reprisals. Dr. Schultz defends himself and Django by brandishing ‘dead or alive’ notices for the men they kill. But did black men actually kill white men in cold blood?

These are some of the issues that left me a trifle confused. Historically, I don't know how close to the truth some of the scenes in the film are, even if some of them are exaggerated.

Django Unchained is an action-packed western shot in the backdrop of an emotive and sensitive issue like slavery and racism. I have been told not to take Tarantino's movies seriously and that the worth of his unconventional films lies in their entertainment value. This is true of Django Unchained which also hits a raw nerve unlike the other five movies I saw.

The songs of Bryan Adams

For a change an audio-video entry for Tuesday’s overlooked films, audio and video at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. Don’t forget to watch the video at the bottom of this post.

There are many songs that have stayed with me since I first listened to them, beginning in mid-1970s. Foremost among these is Una Paloma Blanca (or Paloma Blanca, which means ‘white dove’ in Spanish) by Dutch musician George Baker. The single was released in 1975 by his band the George Baker Selection. It was sung at most parties and school picnics.

In fact, so popular was the song in India that my generation used to record it from a radio on to a cassette player, usually a National Panasonic (see picture). Those were wireless days. The two electronic systems were kept side by side and as soon as the radio jockey announced a popular number, we’d press down hard on the ‘Play’ and ‘Record’ buttons simultaneously and shush everyone in the vicinity, lest external voices lent an unwelcome chorus to the songs. Upon replay, we could occasionally hear the loud honk of a bus or the shrill whistle of a pressure cooker in the background. However, that did not spoil the pleasure of listening to the songs. Pre-recorded cassettes were expensive.

I haven't forgotten the music or the lyrics of Paloma Blanca, which partly went…

Una paloma blanca
I'm just a bird in the sky
Una paloma blanca
Over the mountains I fly
No one can take my freedom away

It’d make a nice soundtrack for a second film remake of Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Paloma Blanca is one of several pop and country songs that I can lip sync well. Some others include Annie’s Song by John Denver, Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You, first sung by George Benson and then by Glenn Medeiros, and Somebody by Bryan Adams.

Bryan Adams performs in Hamburg, Germany in June 2007.
© Wikimedia Commons

Somebody (1984) was the first Bryan Adams song I heard somewhere in the late eighties. At the time I didn’t know it was sung by the famous Canadian singer-musician who has been to India and is immensely popular. I found out only in the nineties. It was pretty much how I listened to music in those days. Just as I saw films without caring to know who directed them. The lyrics “I need somebody/Somebody like you/Everybody needs somebody” sung by Adams in his rich and raspy voice have remained with me since.

It was this bestselling single that prompted me to listen to Adams’ other songs, most notably Heaven (1985), (Everything I Do) I Do It for You (1991), and Please Forgive Me (1993). These four songs ruled on the US Billboard and the UK Singles Chart for a long time.

Everything I Do was, of course, made famous as the official video soundtrack of the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Christian Slater, and Alan Rickman. It was an entertaining film. The Kostner-Freeman catapult scene was funny.

I have not heard every song by Bryan Adams but out of the ones I have, these four songs I like the most. The official video of Please Forgive Me, from the album So Far So Good, is really nice, as much for the slow ballad as for the beautiful German Shepherd moving about in the recording studio. I believe the Alsatian belonged to Adams who is said to be fond of dogs. If you like pets, especially dogs, you'll enjoy the video below.

Hidden treasures in book collections

David Cranmer, who writes short stories, edits and publishes the in-demand webzine, Beat to a Pulp, and blogs at The Education of a Pulp Writer, recently wrote about the discovery of an 118-year old treasure in his possession—William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice published in 1895. It’s definitely the find of the year as far as rare books in the hands of individual readers are concerned.

I don’t remember the last time I discovered a book of great literary value, buried in a trunk in my attic. Of course, I wouldn’t. I don’t have a trunk. My modest collection of books is stacked in cabinets and on shelves at home and in office. I usually give away the books as soon as I read them though I hold on to the ones I know are rare and hard to find, such as Sudden, the series of ten western novels by Oliver Strange, an Englishman who wrote about the wild west without once crossing the Atlantic, and a few original paperbacks under The Executioner series about Mack Bolan, the one-man army created and written by Don Pendleton before ghostwriters took over.

So which are some of the earliest published books in my collection? I made a random survey of the books I’d immediate access to and found nine in all and out of these the one with the highest vintage tag was The Hell Raisers, a Raw-Action western by Lee Floren (Tower Publications, 1947). The cover of the paperback says “They lived by their guns in a land where death was a way of life.” The original title was Saddle Pals. Lee Floren also wrote as Matt Harding.

My hardback copy of The Tudor Edition of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Quatercentenary Edition, belonged to my paternal grandfather and was published in 1965 by The English Language Book Society, also known as The English Library. It has an introduction and glossary by Peter Alexander, a Shakespearean scholar and academic and then Professor Emeritus of English language and Literature, University of Glasgow.

Old Ramon (Pennant Student Edition, 1966), by Jack Schaefer, the author of the famous western novel Shane, is a moving tale of a boy, a man, and a mighty desert. The 110-page paperback has black and white illustrations by Harold West.

The first paperback edition of Through the Wheat by American journalist and novelist Thomas Boyd (1998-1935) is considered one of the finest American novels of World War I. My Award Books Military Library edition, published in 1964, gives the reader a picture of the horror and glory of the Great War.

The oldest book in our Agatha Christie collection is What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, a Cardinal edition published by Pocket Books, Inc. in 1958. The novel was serialised as Eye Witness to Murder. This tattered copy has a facsimile of Christie’s signature and a strip advertising Lloyd C. Douglas’ famous novel The Robe on the back cover.

While I have partly read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, the one book I read from start to finish in less than half a day was Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler (Scholastic Inc., 1961), the complete story of Hitler’s beginnings, his triumphs, and his downfall told in 188 pages. I have no idea why I’m still holding on to this book; perhaps, it’s for the cover.

Two titles originally published in the sixties are Carter Brown’s The Brazen and Had I But Groaned. I liked the opening line of The Brazen—“I was just sitting there in the bar minding my own business, when this guy dropped dead at my feet—and the blurb of Had I But Groaned—“An old Hag, a gorgeous Witch, and one ripe Virgin—about to be sacrificed. What more do you need for a swinging Sabbat?”

I haven’t read all of these books yet, not even Shakespeare’s Complete Works entirely, but I’m going to try and see what other early books I can come up with. Who says you got to read all the books you own?

Do you have any original or early editions of books?

Note: The covers displayed above are the ones that adorn the books I mentioned.

The Book Case by Nelson DeMille

This book does not strictly fall under Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase but just in case you didn’t know about it.

Otis Parker was dead. Killed by a falling bookcase whose shelves were crammed with very heavy reading. Total weight about a thousand pounds, which flattened Mr. Parker’s slight, 160-pound body. A tragic accident. Or so it seemed.

The Book Case by thriller writer Nelson DeMille is a short fiction about the mysterious death of Otis Parker, the owner of the Dead End Bookstore in New York. As the opening lines reveal, Otis, a bearded man in his early sixties, is killed when a loaded bookcase directly behind his desk falls on top of him. Detective John Corey of the First Precinct Detective Squad finds the bookstore owner “sprawled, splayed, and flattened on his collapsed desk,” his body half on the desk and half on the floor, but with his brains still intact.

John Corey, who has his own detective series, is almost convinced that Otis’ death is an accident until he discovers that the chocks or wedges that held the bookcase upright against the wall are missing. He smells murder.

The detective begins to question three people directly linked to Otis Parker—his young and good looking wife Mia, her lover and a not too successful crime writer Jay K. Lawrence, and a very nervous employee called Scott. He leaves out Otis’ part-time clerk Jennifer and his nameless ex-wife who are never in the picture.

Corey uses an old trick in police investigation—lying to the suspects and pitting one against the other—to ferret out the truth from Mia, who hated her husband and his store and dreamed of an inheritance and a new life with her lover; Jay, who gives her the plot idea but develops cold feet and sleeps with his publicist for an alibi; and Scott whose greed for money and lust for Mia gets the better of him.

“Cops, as I said, are allowed to lie. Half the confessions you get are a result of lying to a suspect.”

Final word
The Book Case (2011) is a light and quick read with just the right touch of suspense, and some humour. The writing style is easy and conversational. Detective Corey is a likeable character who thinks on his feet, is not hard on the suspects, and is determined to nail the murder accused, without ado. I liked the plot. Now why didn't I think of writing this story? Too late. I look forward to reading more books in the series.

The Dead End Bookstore is a nice name for a bookstore. It specialises, ironically, in crime fiction that includes both classic crime novels of Chandler, Sayers, Christie, Doyle and others as well as contemporary authors like Brad Meltzer, James Patterson, David Baldacci, Nelson DeMille, and others—who, as Detective Corey observes, “make more money writing about what I do than I make doing what I do.”

© www.nelsondemille.net

The author
Born in New York and living on Long Island, Nelson DeMille’s earliest books were NYPD detective novels. His first major novel was By the Rivers of Babylon (1978). He is a member of The Authors Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, and American Mensa. He has written over thirty series and standalone novels and contributed short stories, book reviews, and articles to magazines and newspapers. I gleaned this from Nelson DeMille's official website.

The Book Case, one of five short fiction works by the author, is available for Kindle at Amazon.

Sexist ads?

This week I received an email containing over a dozen vintage advertisements that must have appeared in newspapers and magazines in America many years ago. A brief introduction said: "Do you remember seeing any of these ads? Can you believe there used to be such ads!" I scrolled through the images and found some of the most sexist ads I'd seen. I'm thinking: were there any protests when these ads were published? Or were they simply laughed off because they weren't meant to be taken seriously? Or am I missing something? In our world, today, ads like these would be unthinkable. There is another lot which I'll post some other time. For now check these out and if you know something, let me know.

For previous Vintage Ads, look under ‘Labels’.