The Mugger by Ed McBain
This is a crime novel that was written in the 1950s. The Mugger is very much of that era. It wasn’t bad, but it was—at least to someone born in the 70s and raised in the 80s—pretty ridiculous. The primary story is that of a squad of detectives trying to find a man who has been mugging and beating up women walking alone on the city streets. It’s standard stuff, just a straight procedural. The interesting thing is that the novel’s title and primary plot actually don’t really concern the protagonist, Bert Kling.
Kling is a young patrolman in the unnamed city. He’s the stereotypical All-American boy. That is, I don’t relate at all to him and I find him pretty creepy and disgusting. He reminds me a lot of the officer Tony on Showtime’s Shameless. He’s a guy who feels owed and entitled because he’s nice. My only true issue with the book is Kling. He’s a bad guy, yet McBain treats him as a hero. He lays lascivious eyes upon 17-year old Jeannie Paige and he badgers Jeannie’s friend into going out with him while he’s trying to investigate the girl’s murder. There was one disturbing scene near the novel’s end during which he threw a tantrum on a first date that only occurred because he’s a policeman and he wouldn’t accept the woman’s “No.” Kling’s fit was the result of the woman not quite being over her previous boyfriend, who’d been killed in war. Kling yelled at her, made her cry in the restaurant, and threatened to leave. Then she apologized to him and they lived happily ever after.
As The Mugger opens, Kling is on medical leave after being shot, and he’s itching to get back into action. Just before he’s medically cleared to walk his beat again, an old high school classmate seeks Kling’s assistance in keeping his teenage sister-in-law in line (the friend’s wife, the girl’s sister, is worried about her). The girl, of course, ends up dead. Finding her killer is the novel’s the actual mystery. If you’ve read enough crime fiction, you know who the killer is before the murder actually happens. This is the price you pay for reading something written so long ago. The mystery is gone, and it all comes down to execution. McBain’s not a good enough writer to make the story great when you already know what’s going to happen, but he’s good enough to keep it interesting.
It’s OK. It moves quickly.
D+
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Game Six
Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime by Mark Frost
This started off great. I love the way the author decided to craft the story of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series: he told it as if you were listening to a baseball game on the radio. He perfectly wove stories of the players and managers involved in the game around each pitch, each swing, each decision. This was a great baseball book…
Then he got to the ninth inning. As I read about innings nine through eleven, I felt as if Mark Frost had grown impatient and wanted to rush his way to Carlton Fisk’s famous homerun. Frost found his rhythm again for the twelfth inning, but my love affair with the book was over by then. He had fallen to cliché. For instance: “Yaz, at thirty-six, wasn’t the same hitter he’d been in his absolute prime, but he still had more sheer guts and gritty work ethic than any man who’d ever played the game.” Every nonfiction work driven by nostalgia will have a fair number of clichéd descriptions, but the end of this book was overrun by them.
And that doesn’t even take into account the afterword. My goodness. The afterword takes up more than 17% of the book’s text. I just finished reading it, and I wonder if the author just couldn’t let anything he researched be left out of the book. He wrote a since-1975 biography of just about every player and executive involved in that game. There were even 500 or so words on Jim Rice, who didn’t play in that World Series. The afterword also included several long diatribes about free agency, the finances of Major League Baseball, and the game’s lost innocence. There was even a passage suggesting that the beginnings of the steroid era are to blame for Dave Concepcion’s omission from the Hall of Fame. What? It was excessive and unnecessary. And it was annoyingly preachy. The afterword ruined the book.
Game Six was one of my favorite baseball books before the ninth inning. It was good before the afterword. Now, it’s just alright. A shame, really.
C
This started off great. I love the way the author decided to craft the story of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series: he told it as if you were listening to a baseball game on the radio. He perfectly wove stories of the players and managers involved in the game around each pitch, each swing, each decision. This was a great baseball book…
Then he got to the ninth inning. As I read about innings nine through eleven, I felt as if Mark Frost had grown impatient and wanted to rush his way to Carlton Fisk’s famous homerun. Frost found his rhythm again for the twelfth inning, but my love affair with the book was over by then. He had fallen to cliché. For instance: “Yaz, at thirty-six, wasn’t the same hitter he’d been in his absolute prime, but he still had more sheer guts and gritty work ethic than any man who’d ever played the game.” Every nonfiction work driven by nostalgia will have a fair number of clichéd descriptions, but the end of this book was overrun by them.
And that doesn’t even take into account the afterword. My goodness. The afterword takes up more than 17% of the book’s text. I just finished reading it, and I wonder if the author just couldn’t let anything he researched be left out of the book. He wrote a since-1975 biography of just about every player and executive involved in that game. There were even 500 or so words on Jim Rice, who didn’t play in that World Series. The afterword also included several long diatribes about free agency, the finances of Major League Baseball, and the game’s lost innocence. There was even a passage suggesting that the beginnings of the steroid era are to blame for Dave Concepcion’s omission from the Hall of Fame. What? It was excessive and unnecessary. And it was annoyingly preachy. The afterword ruined the book.
Game Six was one of my favorite baseball books before the ninth inning. It was good before the afterword. Now, it’s just alright. A shame, really.
C
Thursday, February 9, 2012
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré
So much potential, such failure to deliver. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is generally considered one of the greatest spy novels of all time. I understand why. It just doesn’t work for me. To be honest, I would have enjoyed this book a lot more had it been the first of le Carré’s novels that I’d read. It wasn’t; I’d read two before this one. As a result, I have already discovered that he does not like women. That knowledge made the plot very predictable. This could have—and should have—been a 5-star novel. It wasn’t.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is the story of an intricate British Intelligence plot to take down a powerful East German enemy. The setup is perfect. le Carré takes the reader deep into Alec Leamas’ pain. He ran agents in Berlin; all of them are dead. He’s old for a field operative. There is virtually nothing left for him. But there is this new mission, a secret mission. And it involved Leamas simultaneously reconstructing and destroying his entire life. And all the while, le Carré subtly bared Leamas’ soul to the reader. This was more than a spy novel; this was a book about purpose, loss, and self-evaluation. Everything was there.
One thing that was clear to me just a few pages into the novel was that le Carré had finally found his way as a writer. Through his first two novels, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, he was still searching for his voice. It all came together for him in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. His characters are not clichéd characters. His plot is not simple. His scenery is not generic. His relationships are real and not forced.
Unfortunately, the entire plot was driven by women being stupid. From the opening scene to the final pages of the book, everything that happens occurred only because a woman was stupid. As an isolated book, I could deal with it. In each of le Carré’s books that I’ve read, however, he’s gone out of his way to portray women negatively. It’s a pattern of his, and it really took away from the story.
Another thing that bothered me (not nearly as much as the women did) was the author’s infatuation with George Smiley, the protagonist of the first two novels. Smiley is just a minor character this time, but he randomly appeared in several scenes. Each time, le Carré noted his presence with endearing references that were out of place. It was just a way for the author to express his love for his favorite character, but it doesn’t fit. It’s a minor nitpick.
This is not: the end included about 15 unnecessary pages of exposition (le Carré loves unnecessary exposition). I’m sure the final scene was considered edgy when the novel was first published in 1963, but the preceding 15 pages ruined the impact for me.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is not bad. It’s not great either, although it really could have been. John le Carré is too prejudiced a man to tell the story the way it needed to be told. But it is entertaining and compelling. Still very, very good. It just leaves you longing for a taste of what it could have been.
C+
So much potential, such failure to deliver. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is generally considered one of the greatest spy novels of all time. I understand why. It just doesn’t work for me. To be honest, I would have enjoyed this book a lot more had it been the first of le Carré’s novels that I’d read. It wasn’t; I’d read two before this one. As a result, I have already discovered that he does not like women. That knowledge made the plot very predictable. This could have—and should have—been a 5-star novel. It wasn’t.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is the story of an intricate British Intelligence plot to take down a powerful East German enemy. The setup is perfect. le Carré takes the reader deep into Alec Leamas’ pain. He ran agents in Berlin; all of them are dead. He’s old for a field operative. There is virtually nothing left for him. But there is this new mission, a secret mission. And it involved Leamas simultaneously reconstructing and destroying his entire life. And all the while, le Carré subtly bared Leamas’ soul to the reader. This was more than a spy novel; this was a book about purpose, loss, and self-evaluation. Everything was there.
One thing that was clear to me just a few pages into the novel was that le Carré had finally found his way as a writer. Through his first two novels, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, he was still searching for his voice. It all came together for him in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. His characters are not clichéd characters. His plot is not simple. His scenery is not generic. His relationships are real and not forced.
Unfortunately, the entire plot was driven by women being stupid. From the opening scene to the final pages of the book, everything that happens occurred only because a woman was stupid. As an isolated book, I could deal with it. In each of le Carré’s books that I’ve read, however, he’s gone out of his way to portray women negatively. It’s a pattern of his, and it really took away from the story.
Another thing that bothered me (not nearly as much as the women did) was the author’s infatuation with George Smiley, the protagonist of the first two novels. Smiley is just a minor character this time, but he randomly appeared in several scenes. Each time, le Carré noted his presence with endearing references that were out of place. It was just a way for the author to express his love for his favorite character, but it doesn’t fit. It’s a minor nitpick.
This is not: the end included about 15 unnecessary pages of exposition (le Carré loves unnecessary exposition). I’m sure the final scene was considered edgy when the novel was first published in 1963, but the preceding 15 pages ruined the impact for me.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is not bad. It’s not great either, although it really could have been. John le Carré is too prejudiced a man to tell the story the way it needed to be told. But it is entertaining and compelling. Still very, very good. It just leaves you longing for a taste of what it could have been.
C+
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