Friday's Forgotten Book: Gardner F. Fox: Barbary Slave

We did a week-long trip to Chania and Gerani in Crete, and I took, as usual with our trips, my Kindle along. I didn't get to read much (who can do that with a three-year old kid on a same trip?), but I managed to get through one novel. I think that's pretty good given the circumstances. And hey, I also wanted to the beach!

The book in question was Barbary Slave that I'd loaded free on my Kindle. It was written by Gardner F. Fox who's best known as one of the more prolific writers for DC Comics and the creator of the DC Multiverse, alongside with several DC characters. I'm not really into superheroes, but Fox interests me as a contributor to pulp magazines (westerns, sports, science fiction) and as a paperback writer. His reputation hasn't been very good, seems like he could be a sloppy writer with cardboard characters. I thought, though, I might be entertained for a short while reading Barbary Slave. I'd started earlier a new thriller with an interesting premise, but given up after some pages, since there was just too much disposition and not enough action. I'd also started one of Gardner Fox's science fiction novels, but that seemed only ridiculous.

But Barbary Slave proved to be pretty entertaining. Sure, it was racist and chauvinistic as all hell, but I still enjoyed the heck out of it. The action starts from page one and almost never slows down. Barbary Slave is a fast-moving swashbuckler set in the early 19th century Tunis, during First Barbary War (war I knew almost nothing about until now), and the hero is an American navy lieutenant called Fletcher. In the beginning of the book he's already been a slave for several months and been digging food from ditches. He manages to rise from the gutter only to find himself a guardian of a harem. The queen lusts for Fletcher and tries to conquer him with all her might. The book has all the plot twists of several Game of Thrones episodes, with all the violence depicted in an old-fashioned, at times almost ecliptic style, and without the rapes. I actually thought this could've been a Conan novel, set in a fantastic setting, instead of a historically accurate (or at least one pretending to be) setting. Many of the chapters end in a cliffhanger, which kept me turning the pages, though Fox's writing style is florid. This is strictly purple prose, but it's almost never too purple. I also know next to nothing about ships or fencing, but Fox seems to have known was he was writing about.

The racism, though... almost all the Arabs and Moslems in the book are either stupid or cruel and sadistic - or both. The only heroic Arab is an armless man who's been tortured wildly by rulers. There's also no way Fletcher could fall in love with the harem's queen or another Arab woman, there has to be a white American woman who he can fall in love with safely. But given the book's age, this all is somewhat understandable.

The book was originally published as by Kevin Matthews by Popular Library in 1955, but it's been reprinted as Gardner F. Fox for quite a few times now. I noticed the e-book was free through illustrator Kurt Brugel's newsletter (for a limited time, it's not free anymore); he's bringing all of Fox's novels out as e-books. There were some formatting errors throughout the book, but not too many. Here's another review if you don't believe me.

More Forgotten Books at Patricia Abbott's blog here.

Anthony Neil Smith: All the Young Warriors

I had a one-week holiday in the first week of September. I though I was going to read some crime novels that were sitting on my Kindle. Well, yeah, I did, but it took longer than a week. I read Barry Malzberg's first Lone Wolf novel, Night Raider, written as by Mike Barry (forgot to blog about it) and then I read W. Glenn Duncan Rafferty's Rules (about which I blogged here). I also started Lawrence Block's old sleaze title, Sex Without Strings, but it didn't seem interesting enough (no crime plot that I could see!). And then I started Anthony Neil Smith's All the Young Warriors, really not knowing what to expect. I finished it only tonight.

Okay, it's only 304 pages in a Down & Out Books paperback, but it felt longer - and I don't mean this in a negative way. I could've sworn it was more like 400 pages. The scope is almost epic, close to what you have in more literary novels. Two Somali guys kill a pregnant female cop in Minneapolis while they are already headed towards Somalia, their fatherland, and the lover of the woman, a cop himself, decides to go after them with the help of the other guy's father, who happens to have a gangsta past. And this is only a skimpy outline. The book's more like Conrad's Heart of Darkness taken into the 2000's (well, with the exception that Conrad's novel is a lot shorter). The grim outcome in the end couldn't be darker, even if it's happy for some of the characters.

The subject of the book could easily be racist in the hands of someone else, but Smith, while he certainly pulls no punches, is not your typical stereotype-weaving thriller hack. The Somali characters come out alive, and while some of them are evil and do evil stuff, I didn't see the book calling them evil only because they are Somalis. The discussion about cultural appropriation is hot at the moment, but I didn't see that in here - of course I'm not a Somali myself, so what do I know? But Smith's novel seems free of that appropriation.

All the Young Warriors takes its time to get going, but the reader is awarded in the end.

W. Glenn Duncan: Rafferty's Rules

Lately I've been reading stuff that's been loaded on my Kindle, something I haven't been doing for ages. One of the books I've now read was Rafferty's Rules by W. Glenn Duncan. I think it was author Paul Bishop who said good things about the Rafferty series over at the Men's Adventure Paperback Series Facebook group some weeks ago, so I decided to give it a try.

Rafferty is a private eye working in Texas. Rafferty's as hardboiled as they come, yet he smokes a pipe - for some reason or another, this bugged me a bit. He dates an attractive woman, Hilda Gardener, who's also an antique dealer, and he also has a sidekick called Cowboy. There's something a bit too Spenserish in the set-up, and Robert B. Parker is one of those private eye writers who briefly turned me off the genre 20-plus years ago. I still can't stand him (or his books, to be precise).

Rafferty's Rules however turned out to be a piece of nice entertainment, no matter how much Spenser there is in the book. Rafferty is hired to take care of some bikers who kidnapped and raped a young woman who later turned out crazy. Rafferty says he won't kill the molesters, but goes after them nevertheless. The case turns out to be more than that, as is usual the case with hardboiled private eye novels. The story moves along nicely and there are good action scenes throughout. The Texas settings reminded me of Joe R. Lansdale's Hap and Leonard novels, but they are better. There's too much cute stuff here, such as Rafferty eating nice lunches with Hilda. There are several more books in the series that was originally published in 1987-1990, but I still won't go out of my way to find them.

Here's Kevin Burton Smith at the Thrilling Detective on Rafferty books.

Some e-books I read during the trip: Allan Guthrie, Peter Brandvold, Paul Levine, Gerard Brennan, J. David Osborne

That's a long subject line, isn't it?

We were on a smallish trip earlier this week: we went to Denmark, where we've never been. We visited Legoland, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (highly, highly recommendable) and the vintage Tivoli entertainment park in the centre of Copenhagen. It was a fun trip, for most part, but I'm not going to write about it. Instead, in the spirit of this blog, I'll say something about the books I read during the trip. I had nothing with me but my Kindle. I download only free e-books, since I don't have a credit card with which I could buy e-books, so I'm dependent on what comes free. Even with this approach, I've managed to accumulate a pretty good selection of new noir and hardboiled writing, with some westerns and horror thrown in. Mentioned should also be some classic noir stuff that's coming from publishers like Prologue Books.

Okay, to the books. Peter Brandvold's better known as a western writer, but I've never read any of his books in that genre, but they seem quite good. I read his short novel Paradox Falls that I think is mislabelled as horror. It's more like a suspense thriller, with a possible serial killer hunting some hikers in the Colorado mountains. The book reads pretty fast, but the ending is a bit abrupt. There was also some interesting stuff on being a writer that seemed a bit autobiographic, as the main character, a sympathetic young man yearning for his early love affair, makes his living writing sex westerns. Paradox Falls could've been published as a cheap paperback in the early eighties, and I mean this as a good thing.

Allan Guthrie's Kill Clock was even a shorter book, a novella-length tale of Guthrie's occurring character, Pearce. Guthrie tells his brutal tale with short sentences, but also manages to make Pearce a sympathetic character in all his bruteness and tendency to sudden bursts of violence. Kill Clock also has a good plot for a novella. Recommended quite highly.

Paul Levine's Last Chance Lassiter is the first Jake Lassiter story I've ever read, as I'm not very keen on courtroom thrillers. But this one was so funny and entertaining I'd be willing to try more of Levine's work. Very fluent writing, very smooth plotting, some quite funny wisecracking.

J. David Osborne runs Broken River Books that's a very interesting crime and horror fiction outfit specializing in edgy and bizarre neo-noir. Osborne's own short story collection Our Blood In Its Own Circuit is full with, well, edgy and bizarre stuff that's not easily labelled. I read the first three stories on our flight back, and two of them were very strong: the titular story is about Mexican cops who bathe in the blood of chickens, and the western story "Amends Due, West of Glorieta" is full of shocking violence and characters straight out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Check out this free Broken River Books sampler!

I also started Gerard Brennan's novella The Point, a brutally realistic story about two brothers whose life goes to hell when they move to a small town on the seaside and the other one starts dealing stolen cars. The plot could be more original, but Brennan's clipped style makes it interesting. I'm only halfway in the middle, so there might be some surprises coming.

Charlie Williams: Graven Image

Wanted to read something short and catchy and reverted to my Kindle that I've used all too rarely for these past months. Charlie Williams's novella Graven Image had landed free on my Kindle just some time ago and I decided to read it.

And it's very good stuff, smooth but edgy, funny but smart, violent, brutish and noirish. It's the story of a fallen man who tries to make it good, but never succeeds. You want him to, even though he's not a good man, but you know from the start it doesn't end well for him.

I just kind of lost in the end. I really have no idea what went down. Maybe someone could explain it to me? I'm sure the fault is all mine, not Charlie Williams's.

Finnish fantasy free for Kindle

Jeff VanderMeer supports Finnish new weird writing giving away free e-book copies of famous Finnish fantasy writer Leena Krohn's short novel Tainaron. Check it out, it's a great book, full of wisdom, beauty and marvel. epub format also available.

Negative reviews on e-books?

I've been reading some stuff on my Kindle, mainly stuff I've picked free from Amazon, new gritty and noirish crime fiction from both side of Atlantic. I've liked a lot some of the stuff I've acquired, for instance Juaréz Dance by Sam Hawken and Tony Black's bleak novella The Storm Without (of which I didn't do a blog post). I also liked Lawrence Block's short story "Keller on the Spot" quite a bit.

But I've recently dropped two novels by new noir writers I was reading on Kindle. The other one was sloppily written and edited, and the other one had ridiculous characters and the police work depicted in the book wasn't believable. I was going to post a review of the books, but then I got to thinking I wouldn't be doing much of a service to the writers and their publishers (the other one of the two writers has just a book out from a small publisher working actively in the neo-noir business). Then I got to thinking that as a critic that's just what I should be doing: pointing out what these writers and their publishers are not doing very well and keeping readers out of the bad or mediocre stuff, but then I got to thinking again and then I decided not to post.

What do you think? I'm really an outsider in these circles, since I'm essentially a foreigner to all American, British and Scottish writers mining this area, but then again, someone might benefit from my point of view.