Book Sale 2018, Part 3: My Husband's Books

It is not enough that I bring home way too many books from the book sale, but my husband and son also buy books that I want to read.

These are a selection of the books my husband found at the book sale.

Two years ago my husband found American Lit Relit by Richard Armour, this year he got English Lit Relit and It All Started with Eve. I have never read anything by this author, but I really like the illustrations.


Below are excerpts from a post at TOR.COM by Jo Walton. Read the whole post for examples of other books like this, and more about the book.

In 1939, L. Sprague de Camp came up with one of the wonderful ideas of science fiction, the man taken out of his time to a time of lower technology who works to change history and technology. ...

De Camp’s Martin Padway is a historian of the sixth century, the period he winds up in. There’s barely a handwave of explanation as to how Padway makes his way across time. As soon as Padway’s there, he puts his head down and starts to concentrate on what makes these books such fun—improvising technology from what he knows and can find around him.

Above are reissues of four vintage mysteries.

The first, Called Back, is from the vaults of HarperCollins and involves a blind man who stumbles across a murder, but is released by the assassins. Later he regains his sight, and he ends up searching for the solution to the murder. Originally published in 1883.

The Last Best Friend (1967) is from the British Library Classic Thrillers series. Murder Underground (1934) and A Scream in Soho (1940) are reissues from the British Library Crime Classics series. All three are set in London. And all have lovely covers.

A nice hardback edition of The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing, featuring Ray Milland and Maureen O'Sullivan on the cover. O'Sullivan was the wife of the film's director, John Farrow.

My husband is a fan of Ben McIntyre's nonfiction books. As the subtitle says, this one is about "The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War." I am looking forward to reading it myself someday.

The Big Clock: Kenneth Fearing

George Stroud is an editor at Crimeways, one of many magazines that are published by Janoth Enterprises, run by Earl Janoth and his right-hand man, Steve Hagen. George Stroud is clearly unhappy with his job; he describes the corporation he works for and the machinations that go on daily as a big clock, sometimes running fast, sometimes running slow, but always seeming meaningless. He gets involved with Janoth's girlfriend, and when she is murdered, he is pulled into a  manhunt for the culprit.

That sounds like a pretty straightforward story, but there is nothing simple and easy about this book. To start with, there are seven first person narrators. The story is mainly told from George's point of view, but the switching around of narrators can get confusing. Each chapter title includes the narrator's name, but if you skip chapter titles, like I sometimes do, it can take a while to figure out who is talking. Not that I am complaining. I enjoy stories told from the point of view of several characters.

George is married and he doesn't want to lose his wife and daughter. George's wife is named Georgette and their daughter is named Georgia. And to complicate things further, Georgia calls both of her parents George. That sometimes makes reading dialogue difficult, and I am sure there was some symbolism to it that I missed.

All of this sounds like I did not like the book and that is far from the truth. The characters are not fully fleshed out but the book is paced nicely. Any one who has been in the working world and felt like they have lost control of their own life and time or anyone who has dealt with meaningless bureaucracies can empathize with this story. This was a complex, dark novel and the symbolism of the clock worked well.

A personal plus for me was the setting in the publishing world. This story is about a big business and how its workers are subjugated. I worked in a smaller, family run business. But still, publishing is publishing; we did produce serial publications and we were in competition with other publishers.

A quote...

One runs like a mouse up the old, slow pendulum of the big clock, time, scurries around and across its huge hands, strays inside through the intricate wheels and balances and springs of the inner mechanism, searching among the cobwebbed mazes of this machine with all its false exits and dangerous blind alleys and steep runways, natural traps and artificial baits, hunting for the true opening and the real prize. 

Then the clock strikes one and it is time to go, to run down the pendulum, to become again a prisoner making once more the same escape.  

For of course the clock that measures out the seasons, all gain and loss, the air Georgia breathes, Georgette's strength, the figures shivering on the dials of my own inner instrument board, this gigantic watch that fixes order and establishes the pattern for chaos itself, it has never changed, it will never change, or be changed.

The book was adapted into a film also titled The Big Clock, directed by John Farrow, and starring Ray Milland as George, Maureen O'Sullivan as his wife, and Charles Laughton as Janoth. We watched the film in early 2014, and it was over two years before I read the book. I had plenty of time to forget the intricacies of the story, although I remembered the basic plot and the clock imagery. When we watched the film again after I read the book, I was surprised by the differences between the two.

The film contains less sexuality than the book. I assume this is because of the mores of that time. George does not have an affair with Janoth's girlfriend in the movie, he just spends an ill-fated night on the town with her because he is exasperated at his boss and he is drinking too much. The only real flaws he has in the movie is heavy drinking and poor judgement. George is not a very likable character, in the movie or the book, but it is more obvious in the movie.

Thus the novel is much darker, more serious, and realistic; the movie is more fun and less confusing. The movie conveys the symbolism of the clock very well but doesn't really give us a hint why George feels like he is on a treadmill. Even though it is obvious (fairly early) that he has a demanding and unscrupulous boss, his job seems pretty good to me. I liked the book better but the film is great too.

There is a more recent film adaptation, No Way Out, with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman. That film is a very loose adaptation. I have not seen it, but it has been recommended, and I do want to try it.

See thoughts on both the book and the film at Tipping My Fedora, and posts on the film at Riding the High Country and at LILEKS.COM.

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Publisher:    New York Review Books, 2006 (orig. pub. 1946)
Length:        175 pages
Format:        Trade paperback
Setting:        US
Genre:         Mystery

Source:        I purchased my copy.

Reading in April 2016

In April I read seven books; six of them were crime fiction. The seventh book was True Grit by Charles Portis, a novel of the American West set in the years following the Civil War, the early 1870s.

The six books of crime fiction I read were:

• The Defection of A. J. Lewinter by Robert Littell
• Call for the Dead by John le Carre
• Trouble on the Thames by Victor Bridges
• Sweet Silver Blues by Glen Cook
• The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
• Moonraker by Ian Fleming

Of the six crime fiction books, four can be categorized as spy fiction. Two of the spy stories (Trouble on the Thames and Moonraker) were more adventurous and not so bleak as the other two (The Defection of A. J. Lewinter and Call for the Dead). April was a great reading month, with a lot of variety, even with the preponderance of spy fiction.

Sweet Silver Blues by Glen Cook  is a cross-genre book, combining fantasy and a detective novel. It is the first novel in a series of fourteen books, written between 1987 and 2013, so I would say the series has been fairly successful. Glen Cook has written many books of science fiction and fantasy, but he is most well known for his Black Company fantasy series.

True Grit by Charles Portis, published in 1968,  was one of my favorite reads of the month. This type of book is not one I would normally read. In early April, when we decided to get a copy of the 2010 film adaptation, I decided I wanted to read the book first. (I had never seen the adaptation starring John Wayne and Kim Darby.) So I quickly acquired a copy of the book and read it almost as soon as it arrived.

If you are not familiar with the story, this is from the summary on the back of my edition:

True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory.

My favorite crime fiction read of the month was The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing, published in 1946. I had seen the movie starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton within the last few months, and after reading the book we watched it again. Both book and movie are good but there are significant differences. The book has an unusual narrative structure; each chapter is told from the first person point of view, but there are several narrators. Most of the story is told from the point of view of the main character, George Stroud, but several other characters narrate at least one chapter.

The Crime Fiction Pick of the Month meme is hosted at Mysteries in Paradise. Bloggers link to summary posts for the month, and identify a favorite crime fiction read for the month.