F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 13
September 3, 2018
One Fearful Yellow Eye by John D. MacDonald
I’m sorry, ONE FEARFUL YELLOW EYE, I think a lot of this is me rather than you. Yes, I know I raced through you quite quickly and you might have got the impression than I was entranced by you, but really, I was just trying to get to the end.
The more I consider it, I may just have issues with the whole sub-genre of Florida crime fiction. I can remember once trying to read to Elmore Leonard’s RUM PUNCH and getting nowhere, the work of Carl Hiaasen has always left me cold, and I can’t say I’m blown away by the granddaddy of this genre, John D. MacDonald himself. Yes, I obviously liked it enough that this is the second Travis McGee novel I’ve read, but I’m far from convinced that there’ll be a third for me.
There’s something languid to the prose of these Florida books which doesn’t charm me. Instead, it irritates me. I find the tension diffuses and rather than being gripped, each book just drifts along.
And that’s before I got to various passages in this one about homosexuality and race which left a really bad taste in my mouth. That’s before I took a step back and pondered its problems with women (of course Travis McGee is a man manly enough he can cure a woman’s frigidity). The argument always wheeled out when readers come across difficult things like this is that times change and attitudes change. But there’s some stuff here that would surely have raised eyebrows in 1966.
Okay, ONE FEARFUL YELLOW EYE, you’re far from blameless in this break up. It just has to be said.
Stripped back to basics, the plot is fine and I like the mechanics of it all (even if the ending does turn out to be a big old deus ex machina) but there are real problems with this novel that go beyond the fact that the style of this entire genre just doesn’t work for me.
Should you be interested, I have my own series of crime novels. You can read the first of these – DIANA CHRISTMAS – right here!
August 29, 2018
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
There’s poetry at the end of the world.
There’s proper high culture at the end of the world.
There’s both.
STATION ELEVEN is a beautifully written poem of the post-apocalypse. Its subject matter is grim, there’s no hiding this, but this is a book determined to still focus on the finer things in life. This is a novel which is trying to foster hope. At the centre is a travelling band of actors and musicians who tour the untamed landscape paying their way with plays by Shakespeare and classical symphonies. As in these dangerous and ruined times, just surviving is not enough. There has to be more.
Now we’ve all read or seen end of the world stories. We know how they work. There are feral gangs; there are marauders and rapists; there are new and dangerous religious cults. This novel understands that. The characters of this novel understand that (they’ve read those books and seen those films too). So what the (elegantly, gorgeously named) Emily St. John Mandel does is give us some of what we expect, but also so much more.
Right before the world as we know it was ended by a devastating and malignant disease, a famous actor on the slide died suddenly of a heart attack. An inconsequential fact, one might have thought, given all that was to follow. But a number of people on this new world have cause to remember his man, to hang onto those memories: the girl who played his daughter in his last stage role; his best friend; the man who tried to save his life; even his son. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, hang onto their recollections of him – while the two youngest literally hang onto the obscure sci-fi comic book written by his ex-wife, the fantastical STATION ELEVEN.
This isn’t just a post-apocalyptic drama then, this is a meditation on loss, on how our actions affect other people, of how even a chance encounter can live in the heart of someone for decades after, of how people live on after their death. It’s a book about what we’ve lost, but also what we retain – what we remember. It’s about how Shakespeare touches the next generations, but how in our own ways, we all do. Without a doubt it’s a sad novel, but it’s also a hopeful one. There is survival, but there is more than survival – and the best of people endures even in the most trying times.
Fancy reading some of my own short fiction (some sci-fi elements are included), then you can read a collection for free here!
August 27, 2018
The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
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Reading this (virtually) back to back with the excellent STATION ELEVEN, it struck me that in an end of the world scenario, religion really isn’t your friend. The religious types encountered across both books are likely to either stone you or forcibly marry you. Okay, those are the very extremes, but even the milder examples would be insane zealots in any other type of fiction. Now I’m an atheist to my bones, but even I think this a little strange. Surely there’s hope in religion. The word ‘faith’ after all is an extremely positive one. Isn’t there anybody – after the power fails and the lights go out – who is just content spending their time singing a few cheery hymns? Of course science fiction does have a habit of defaulting to ‘Science = Good; Religion = Bad’ (even in this book, where science actually causes the cataclysm). But just to be on the safe side, if you do happen to find yourself still alive after the apocalypse, I’d be wary of any religious type, if I was you – particularly if they have a well-thumbed copy of The Old Testament.
Whilst I enjoyed a great deal of this, the very first post-apocalyptic novel – the vast spaces of the destroyed American landscape are beautifully captured, alongside dangerous levels of paranoia and distrust – there was one thing which held me back from truly loving it: the characters. At the centre we have two snot-nosed, full of themselves boys on the cusp of adulthood, whose rebellion seems almost willfully petulant. ‘The Long Tomorrow’ was published in 1955, they can only be (the newly dubbed) ‘teenagers’. These aren’t sympathetic examples of youth. Frankly they’d be difficult people to spend time with in a good world, let alone a nuked-out wasteland. As much then as I greatly admired this book, I did wish the narrative would wander a little further afield and find some more pleasant protagonists.
In summary: if Brackett is really suggesting that at the end of the world all we’ll be left with is unyielding religion and teenage boys, I think I’d rather run towards the bombs.
Fancy reading some of my own short fiction (some sci-fi elements are included), then you can read a collection for free here!
August 22, 2018
Confined Spaces – Available Now!
I’m away for a couple of weeks, stocking up my book reviews, so whilst I’m gone I’d just thought I’d post various reminders of the various fiction I’ve put out over the last year. If you haven’t picked them already, then what are you waiting for?
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August 20, 2018
Death at the Seaside – Available now!
I’m away for a couple of weeks, stocking up my book reviews, so whilst I’m gone I’d just thought I’d post various reminders of the various fiction I’ve put out over the last year. If you haven’t picked them already, then what are you waiting for?
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August 15, 2018
Eden St. Michel – Available Now!
I’m away for a couple of weeks, stocking up my book reviews, so whilst I’m gone I’d just thought I’d post various reminders of the various fiction I’ve put out over the last year. If you haven’t picked them already, then what are you waiting for?
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What Eden St. Michel means for me
August 13, 2018
Diana Christmas Available Now!
I’m away for a couple of weeks, stocking up my book reviews, so whilst I’m gone I’d just thought I’d post various reminders of the various fiction I’ve put out over the last year. If you haven’t picked them already, then what are you waiting for?
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Why I had to write Diana Christmas
Why Diana Christmas changes everything for me
August 8, 2018
The Pictures by Guy Bolton
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THE PICTURES is a book practically designed just for me. The old school Hollywood setting, the murder mystery, the compromised tough guys spouting tough guy dialogue at each other – this novel couldn’t be aiming any more for my sweet spot if it rolled me over and tickled my tummy after every chapter. And you know what? In effect, it practically did.
In late 1930s Los Angeles, even though he has just suffered a great personal tragedy, it seems like business as usual for MGM’s pet police detective, Jonathan Craine. He’s long lost his passion for police work and is clearing up cases in the easiest (and slackest) way possible, and if they concern the studio he makes sure that it’s done quietly and with little fuss. But then a series of crimes rock him from his stupor, and he realises that – no matter how much it hurts his standing – he’s going to have to find the real culprits.
If you’ve read a lot of this kind of fiction, the influences are not hard to spot. There’s L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, both novel and film; THE THIN MAN suaver end of Dashiell Hammett; and most definitely Stuart Kaminsky’s Toby Peters – although this a far less glib version. Bolton takes all of this illustrious history and makes it very much his own, to create a novel that ticks all the boxes, but for tough guy fiction is really quite affecting.
This is obviously the type of fiction I love and somewhat the type of fiction I write (although I’d never be brave enough to try an LA setting.) I just love the grit and glamour combined that comes from a film star murder story. Absolutely it’s five stars from me, but then I’m a deeply biased audience.
If you’d like to check out my own film star fiction, you can pick it up very reasonably here and here.
August 6, 2018
Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie
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The main problem with the Hercule Poirot novel, CAT AMONG THE PIGEONS – and I know this is not a criticism that Dame Agatha Christie would have welcomed at all – is that there just isn’t enough Hercule Poirot in it. It’s probably more than three quarters of the way through before the great Belgian detective shows up, but once he does it’s like the elixir of life has been injected intravenously into the page. He’s such a wonderful character that he immediately invigorates the whole book. And a story which was frankly becoming a slog, becomes suddenly a beautiful breeze.
Okay, when it comes to solving the case, Christie gives the reader no chance at all. The logical leaps Poirot has to make are frankly beyond any reader, and some of the information he has to unravel the mystery is stuff we simply don’t possess. As such, it’s a bit of a cheat, but by that point I was frankly so happy to see him that I forgave him the trickery.
The tale hinges on a murder in a girl’s school, and the first chapter is one of the most bizarrely opaque chapters I’ve ever read in popular fiction. Not really the kind of thing one expects from Dame Agatha at all. Half a dozen and more lady teachers are introduced, most with little more than a sentence of description, and they charge around while the reader tries to keep them all straight in their heads. It’s like Christie, to keep herself amused in the umpteenth Poirot story, has started using alienation techniques. As if what we have here is Agatha Christie in her Samuel Beckett phase.
However, more jarring than that was encountering the phrase “sex craved teenager” in a Poirot novel. Really? It’s like when P.G. Wodehouse had his Uncle Fred characters “dance the rock and roll”. It absolutely feels like a moment that shouldn’t be there. Hercule Poirot great detective of country house mysteries of the 1930s should no more be near a sex craved teenager, than he should buy a pint for P.J. Proby.
It’s an interesting book then, an odd book too – but one that definitely needs more old school Poirot.
As well as reviewing books here, I also write thrillers. If you’d like to sample my fiction, the opening chapters of my novel, DIANA CHRISTMAS, are here!
August 4, 2018
Diana Christmas – Free Today!
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Exciting news!
This weekend is that the first of the ‘Screen Siren Noir’ series, DIANA CHRISTMAS is free this weekend. It’s a book I’m really proud of and would highly recommend (although I would say that, wouldn’t I?) If you like classic hard-boiled crime fiction, then this will genuinely be a book for you!
It’s also a book that I wrote as a standalone which has since become a series. And just to give you an update of where I am with that series right now: EDEN ST. MICHEL, the follow up is now published and available to buy on Amazon; ALICE RACKHAM, the third in the series, has been edited and is nearly ready for proofing and it will be published in October. In every spare moment I get, I am now typing up the fourth book in the series (having written it in longhand first, as I do with them all); while I am also writing detailed plotting notes for the fifth in the series. All being well, both will be out next year.
So, I’m busy, busy, busy – with the added wrinkle that I’m going away on holiday next week and am trying to get a huge amount of stuff done before I go.
If you’re heading away yourself and want some holiday reading (or if you’re not going away and just feel like a good book) then please do check out DIANA CHRISTMAS. I think you’ll enjoy it.
