The Red Reef by James Reasoner, 2008

In The Red Reef, a 23-page sea adventure, Captain Thomas Larkin is racked by guilt even though he committed no crime. The master of ‘The Red Reef’ is distraught with grief ever since a gale sank his ship. The shipwreck costs lives and sends Larkin, one of the survivors, into gloom. Although he can still command a ship, if he wants to, he decides to sail as an ordinary seaman, “sweating out his guilt in the blistering sun on deck” and trying to forget his past. 

But his past catches up with him. One day, as Larkin is drowning his sorrow in liquor at a port-side tavern, Giselle Beauchene, a young and sensual woman, walks up to him and asks him to take her to the spot where the ship sank. She wants to pay tribute to her father, Charles Beauchene, who was a passenger on ‘The Red Reef.’ 

Although the deep-sea journey will not bring her old man back from the dead, Larkin reluctantly agrees to take Giselle because it will in some way enable him to overcome his guilt. Giselle hires a schooner called the ‘Gallister’ captained by a dubious-looking Scotsman named MacGreevey and the trio and crew waste no time in setting sail for the Navabutu Straits.

However, once the ‘Gallister’ reaches the graveyard at sea, Giselle reveals her true colours and her hidden motive. The morning after a night of lovemaking with Larkin, she turns on the tormented captain with a gun and tells him what she has in mind. The journey of redemption soon turns into a nightmare for Thomas Larkin.

Seasoned author James Reasoner tells a classic pulp story without much fuss. There is little description of people and places. The characters of Larkin and Giselle are well drawn. It’s short and gritty, and it has some good action and an unexpected twist in the end. I liked The Red Reef as much as I liked Reasoner’s The Man on the Moon which I reviewed on October 6. Both stories are crisp and very entertaining to read.

The Red Reef was originally published in Hardluck Stories, June 2008, but you can pick up the Kindle edition at Amazon.

A Walk With Death, 2013

This Tuesday, a short but interesting docu-drama for Overlooked Films, Audio & Video at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

© USPS

A Walk With Death is a short Civil War film made by one Logan Fulton. It is 8.56 minutes long and quite poignant. The film shows Union and Confederate soldiers at war, to the death, in what looks like a forest area. The combat first takes place with rifles, fired with deadly aim on both sides, and then with bayonets and bare hands. There is death everywhere as soldiers, in blue and grey, keep falling to the ground.

What makes the scene so affecting is the poetic narrative and haunting music in the background. The film is set to The Blue and the Gray, the famous poem by Francis Miles Finch (1827-1907), an American judge, poet, and academic associated with the early years of Cornell University. I had not heard of Finch or his poem before.

Francis Miles Finch

© Wikimedia Commons

Finch wrote the poem in memory of all those who died in the American Civil War. Its message is clear—although soldiers fight on opposing sides in a war, they are equal in death; be it victory or defeat, death spares no one, neither blue nor grey. Logan Fulton uses Finch’s poem with telling effect.

I will end by reproducing a few lines from The Blue and the Gray, courtesy National Regiment, where you can watch this short film and read the rest of the poem. The last stanza is the recurring theme of A Walk With Death.

By the flow of the inland river,
Whence the fleets of iron have fled,
Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver,
Asleep are the ranks of the dead:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgement-day;
Under the one, the Blue,
Under the other, the Gray

These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgement-day;
Under the laurel, the Blue,
Under the willow, the Gray

From the silence of sorrowful hours,
The desolate mourners go,
Lovingly laden with flowers
Alike for the friend and the foe;
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgement-day;
Under the roses, the Blue,
Under the lilies, the Gray

Five new paperbacks

On November 3, I wrote about my visit to a secondhand bookshop (Musings on a Moody Monday) tucked away in the recesses of a glass-fronted mall not very far from my residence. I forgot to mention either the name of the bookshop or the five new paperbacks I picked up. My friend, Col Keane, who reviews novels and interviews novelists at his blog Criminal Library, wanted to know which books I’d bought. Good point, seeing as we like to know the books we buy and add to our tottering pile. 

The name of the bookshop is Bookmark whose tagline—Mark yourself with knowledge—doesn't make sense, and these are the five crime novels I added to my collection. The covers are the exact replicas of my paperbacks.

Eighty Million Eyes (1966) by Ed McBain: In No.21 of the 87th Precinct Mystery series, Stan Gifford, America's most beloved comedian, dies on camera in front of eighty million eyes. Enter the persistent detectives of the 87th Precinct.

Darker Than Amber (1966) by John D. MacDonald: In No.7 of the Travis McGee novel, the salvage consultant, who lives on a houseboat, and his friend Meyer get involved with the death of Evangeline. The woman with “darker than amber eyes” lured men onto her boat, robbed them, and threw them overboard when she was done with them.

My Fawcett edition of the novel, as pictured alongside, was printed in 1966, the year it was published, but it’s not a first edition. The back cover has a small colour portrait of Travis McGee and a black-and-white picture of JDM with a brief profile.

The Case of the Sliding Pool (1981) by E.V. Cunningham: I have read many novels by the prolific Howard Fast but none under his E.V. Cunningham pseudonym. In No.5 of the Masao Masuto mystery series, the Nisei detective with the Beverly Hills police department investigates a thirty-year old crime after a swimming pool weakens and gives way, sending tons of concrete crashing into the canyon below, and unearths a corpse. A Nisei is a person born in the United States of parents who emigrated from Japan.

Mack Bolan: The New War Book by Don Pendleton: In No.63 of the Executioner series, credited to Wiley Slade, Aaron Hill, and Judy A. Newton, one-man action hero Mack Bolan takes on the evil Hydra who is “out to rape the world and eat it whole.” This illustrated novel is short but it has plenty of add-ons like Bolan’s combat catalogue, a gallery of characters from Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan, Able Team, Phoenix Force, and Stony Man series, and the various terrorist organisations in all four series, among other features. 

Split Image (2010) by Robert B. Parker: In No.9 of the Jesse Stone series, the last and final instalment, Chief Stone investigates the murder of a man found crammed into the trunk of an abandoned car. The corpse turns out to be Petrov Ognowski, a tough guy for a local mob boss. Stone gets involved in the high-ranking crime even as he grapples with his personal life, his failed marriage and his battle with the bottle.

I didn’t realise I had bought five series novels till I was halfway through writing this post. Since I have never read E.V. Cunningham and Robert B. Parker before, I’ll probably start with either of their novels. Mack Bolan is an old favourite and although his stories are stereotype, I never tire of reading about his vigilante war. Originally created by Don Pendleton, the series has been kept alive by other writers. The hardcore noir of Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald requires no introduction. 

I miss the days when I borrowed just one book from the library, read it over a couple of days, and went back and borrowed another. There was a simple pleasure and a quiet satisfaction in reading like that.


Source of JDM cover: www.johndmacdonaldcovers.files.wordpress.com

Hemingway in Space by Kingsley Amis, 1960

Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

© Creative Commons

The absence of humour in science fiction, apart from his liking for the genre, appears to have prompted Kingsley Amis to write Hemingway in Space in the December 21, 1960, edition of Punch. The story was published in the satirical magazine as part of a series of parodies.

This is the impression one gets after reading American-Canadian sf writer Judith Merril’s introduction to Hemingway in Space which she included in her anthology 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F a year later.

“One of Mr. Amis's sharpest criticisms of science fantasy in general was the lack of good humorous writing in the field. From the examples he cited, and those he did not, I suspect we do not always laugh at the same jokes. Not always; at least one exception (and probably several more) appeared in the series of parodies published in Punch last year,” Merril noted in her 1961 Dell anthology.

I'm relatively new to sf and especially humour in sf. I didn’t see it either in the title, Hemingway in Space, however amusing it sounds, or in the story which reads like any other sf tale.

The story is set around Mars. Philip Hardacre, the main character, a young man and his annoying wife Martha, and Ghlmu, an old, grizzled two-headed Martian, are hunting for a space monster with their Wyndham-Clarke blasters. The monster is xeeb, a large and ferocious creature prowling that part of the galaxy. After spotting the phosphorescent creature, Philip insists on stepping out into space without his Martian friend. He takes the young man along with him. In the end, however, Ghlmu is killed while saving Philip and the young man.

Other readers might see humour in the story where I didn’t; perhaps, in the dialogue between Martha, “the boring, senseless bitch,” and Philip and Ghlmu, whom she and her husband hired to take on the monster. Philip Hardacre can’t stand her and would gladly get rid of her and xeeb together. In the story Earthmen and Martians seem to be friends and Venus is inhabited. In short, it’s a decent sf story.

The 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F contains more than thirty short stories. Other writers include Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, Howard Fast, Anthony Boucher, Isaac Asimov, Henry Sleser, and Brian W. Aldiss, among others. It also includes an essay ‘How to Think a Science Fiction Story’ by G. Harry Stine, ‘The Year in S-F’ by Judith Merril, and ‘S-F Books — 1960’ by Anthony Boucher.

If you’d like to read just this story, you can click here.

In his biography The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006), writer and academician Zachary Leader has described Amis as “the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century.” Amis has parodied sf on more than one occasion, including in New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960) where he looks at the genre in a lighter vein as well as in Something Strange, a short story that first appeared in Spectator (1960) and later in his first collection of stories My Enemy's Enemy (1962). Clearly, I need to read more sf humour by Kingsley Amis.

120 Banned Books

As the title suggests, 120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature by Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald and Dawn B. Sova (second edition, 2011) is a comprehensive analysis of 120 books that have been "banned, suppressed, or censored for political, religious, sexual, or social reasons across 20 centuries and in many nations" along with a detailed censorship history of each entry followed by a list of further readings.

The 120 books in the four categories of suppressed literature have been banned over 2,000 years and include contemporary fiction like Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

Most of the banned books are well-known titles and are read to this day.

In India, books have been periodically banned, pulled off the shelves, and pulped—at times by the publishers themselves—to suit political and religious interests. There have been protest marches, acts of book burning, and vandalism. 

The more you ban something, the more people are likely to go looking for it. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of literary censorship. Banning a book is the best way to ensure that more people read it. It draws your attention to the "offending" book which otherwise you might have never heard of or never intended to read. The ban is soon forgotten, but not the book.

Fortunately, the internet has proved to be a sensible counterweight to the uninformed debate on banning of books. You can download and read the victimised books even as those who force censorship on the reading public are arguing about the merits of the ban. Modern writers whose books are banned in some quarters or regions of the world have found a way to get back—they make their books available online and often free of cost—proving the old adage that the pen continues to be mightier than the sword.

The Reader, 2008

Todd Mason has all the links to yet another week of Overlooked Films, Audio & Video at his blog Sweet Freedom.

I have got into the habit of watching the last half-hour of a film on cable and then reading all about it on the internet. The Reader is one such movie I saw by accident last week, and I'm glad I did.

This film is set over three different periods after WWII. In the first period, a young Michael Berg has a short but passionate affair with Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), an uneducated German woman old enough to be his mother. Then, some years later, the law student is shocked to see her in court where she is standing trial for Nazi war crimes and is sentenced to life in prison. Finally, the fully grown Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) revives his relationship with the ageing Hanna by sending her audio cassettes of classic literature, especially Homer’s The Odyssey, which he used to read out to her during their affair. Michael records each classic in his own voice and soon Hanna comes to cherish and listen to the cassettes in her grey cell. Then comes the day when Hanna is to be released and the jail warden calls up Michael because he is her only contact and relation in the outside world.

I’ll use two words to describe the parts of The Reader I watched and read about—touching and heartbreaking. Kate Winslet is outstanding as the elderly grey-haired Hanna Schmitz, probably in the role of her lifetime—she won an Oscar for best performance—while Ralph Fiennes is dapper and dignified as Michael Berg, the single father of a teenage girl. He inhabits all her three worlds—their affair, the court trial, and her last days. And while he is confused about his feelings for Hanna through much of the film, he doesn't give up on her.

Stephen Daldry directed The Reader which is based on the novel Der Vorleser (1995) by German lawyer and writer Bernhard Schlink. In 1997, Carol Brown Janeway translated the book into English under the eponymous title.

Slow moving, but recommended.

Musings on a moody Monday

There is a crowded place called Irla some 4 km from my home in northwest Bombay (Mumbai) and on either side of the main street are retail stores selling everything from smartphones to electronic gadgets, dry fruits to household provisions, jewellery to saris, and clothes to footwear. Many of these stores are “custom notified” which means the goods (or contraband, in earlier times) are sold at lower rates, though, I don’t see how that matters now that India has opened up its economy, well almost. They only accept cash.

On the pavements outside these air-conditioned stores are a line of hawkers who sell fruits and vegetables, flowers and garlands, and ready-to-eat snacks the city is gastronomically famous for. Their trade is illegal but years of physical presence on the footpaths has earned them the right to stay put and shove pedestrians on to the road.

Beyond the hawkers and along the kerb are cars, two-wheelers, and autorickshaws double parked and causing traffic jams. Tempers and tantrums are traded freely. But man and machine co-exist even as human and vehicular traffic moves at a crawl.

It was into this cacophony of horns and hoots that my family walked into Sunday evening, to visit a bookshop we hadn't been to for more than two years. The shop is located in the back of a depressing mall. Once inside the bookstore, however, my eyes lit up and my spirits soared as I confronted hundreds and thousands of books spread over a vast area. 

Actually, it wasn't a bookshop; it was more like a dumping ground for paperbacks and hardbacks shipped from the West. Many of the books had stamps of their American distributors. There were all kinds of books, including popular and bestselling fiction by the likes of Grisham, Koontz, Cruz Smith, Deaver, Highsmith, Baldacci, Kellerman (husband and wife), Nesbo, Cornwell, King, Patterson, Rice and so on and so forth. The books were sold at Rs.50 (less than a dollar) and Rs.100 (more than a dollar). They were dusty but brand new.

I shot past this humungous heap of novels and made my way to a section that screamed Rs.20 (less than 50 cents) in bold letters. There I picked up my kind of books—five less-than-200-page paperbacks—one each by Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald, E.V. Cunningham (Howard Fast), Don Pendleton, and Robert B. Parker. I was satisfied with my lot but I was disappointed I didn’t find more.

My daughter bought Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001) by Laura Hillenbrand. The book is loosely based on the real life story of the thoroughbred champion race horse, Seabiscuit. She had seen the 2003 film version of the book starring Tobey Maguire, Jeff Bridges, and Chris Cooper. It was a good choice and I hope to read it in future.

There were lots of books by writers I wasn't familiar with and I hoped that I didn’t leave behind some really good ones that deserved to be read.

Apparently, I did, for on my way out I spotted an espionage novel called Dagger (1984) by William Mason who turned out to be William W. Johnstone, a prolific American author of western, horror, and survivalist novels. You can read about him and his work here and here.

This is what Dagger is about.

The time for project Eagle-Fall has come—and that means that the President of The United States is going to die. The Secret Service is on alert, but not all the President's men can be trusted. Somewhere a traitor is waiting to strike, and when he does, Dagger will be ready. War hero, ladies' man, soldier for hire, Dagger is the one man who knows the meaning of the word survive, the one man who knows the international spy network like the back of his hand. He knows every agent in the world…except the one who is out to assassinate the President!

I could have kicked myself. Hopefully, Dagger will still be there when I revisit the bookshop; hopefully, soon.