Books That Grab Me: John D. MacDonald's Darker Than Amber

I wish someone had clued me into John D. MacDonald a long time ago. I just finished reading Darker Than Amber and am still blown away.

A quick plot outline for those who haven’t read the story. Travis McGee is on his boat with his friend Meyer when a woman is thrown off a bridge into the water below, a concrete block wired to her feet. She survives, thanks to McGee, but not for long. She’s a woman in a very dangerous line of business. McGee, a man who retrieves money and valuables for people who’ve lost them (like a private eye who has no office or official permission to do what he does), digs into the sordid story out of guilt.

If that doesn’t sell you on the book, you may not want to finish this review. Of course now that I’ve read this book I can see the genesis of characters like Jack Reacher and every tough in a modern spy thriller. Characters that mix wit with physicality to survive and prevail.

Here’s the first thing I loved. Every time I thought I’d guessed where the plot would lead, I was wrong.

The tale spent its words in the right places, too. It felt like a long, luxurious read even though there weren’t many more than two hundred pages. Even the (small amounts of) filler in this book were excellent.

McGee spends time hashing over what he sees. He has an imagination and an ability to live through words. He has some sparkling conversations with characters critical to the story and some who are there just to drop a single hint. For example, he gets pretty far afield from his mystery when he elicits from a black maid, “I don't want to integrate. I just don't want to feel segregated.”

The characters are working for the plot, but they also feel like they could be real people. I won’t spoil the particular evil conquered in this book other than to say you should dig in and enjoy it yourself. Invest a few hours and see if Travis McGee is your hint of reluctant hero.

The plotting is great. The attention to language and description is better than most of what I’ve read in the category literary fiction. For example, he's talking about seasonality in the hotel business as "a June problem that usually mends itself in July." At another point, after an altercation, he comments about "my macaroni legs." Not wobbly, not any other adjective. Macaroni legs, that’s the product of a clever man being clever.

It turns out there’s even a film version of this novel and only this novel of the Travis McGee series. I will have to make some effort to find a copy. After I start at the beginning of this series. I just picked one off the library shelf that had an interesting title. Now I know. I hope you do, too.

Never A Wasted Crisis is Available (Espionage, Suspense)

Never A Wasted Crisis (Book 1 of the Green Scale cycle) is now available.

Summary: Win Hewes services private jets flying into Washington, D.C., until an unscheduled arrival brings him luggage stuffed with executed intelligence officers. 

A normal person would call the police, but Hewes has to protect his own CIA cover. 

His unofficial investigation throws him into the crossfire between his fellow agents' private agendas and the CIA's crumbling partnership with a Mexican intelligence agency that's far too cozy with the wealthiest drug cartel around.

Paperback available at Amazon and CreateSpace.

eBook available at Amazon U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, Canada, and Brazil. Also available at Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.

More vendors coming. I hope you enjoy it!

'Green Scale' is Coming

Book 1 of my new series 'Green Scale' will shortly make its debut.

Spies. Our kind of spies. The bad guy's spies. Trying to determine the answer to one question: what will bright, motivated criminals do with a hundred billion dollars. No one's going to like the answer.

A draft of the cover art for your viewing pleasure:

Books That Grab Me: C.S. Forester's Lieutenant Hornblower

Let’s talk about how shallow I can be, shall we? For years, more than a decade, probably closer to two, I put off people who recommended the Hornblower novels to me...because the title character’s name sounded stupid. I never admitted that was the reason, but I just didn’t see how a title character with that name could make much of a good novel. People would rave about the writing, about the action sequences, about the characters and the tricky situations they get themselves into. But the stupid name made me hesitate and never start.

Let me tell you that I was wrong.

I should have read the entire Hornblower series a long time ago. I’m glad I’ve finally dipped in and begun to enjoy them. (The book jacket of more than one of the Hornblower novels included this blurb from Ernest Hemingway: “I recommend Forester to everyone literate I know.” Not sure if that helps or hurts my case given the way Hemingway’s stock has plunged in the last few decades. I remain a fan of The Old Man and the Sea.)

Based on my (as yet incomplete) reading of the series, I recommend starting with Lieutenant Hornblower. It was not the first book Forester wrote nor the first of the stories chronologically. But it is the strongest of the books set early in Hornblower’s career.

During the later portion of the French Revolution when Great Britain is fighting two major sea powers, France and her ally Spain, young Lieutenant Hornblower is put on a ship with a captain who sees every smile from one officer to another as plotting against himself. In those days, a captain could make the accusation of mutiny and that was about all it took to kill a career or, at the extreme, hang the officer in question. This paranoia and the increasing brutality of this less-than-sane captain is the start of a tantalizing mystery at the heart of what is a wonderful naval action novel.

Because this captain will take a great fall into his ship’s hold after he’s mustered his Marines with orders to arrest ‘traitors.’ He’s rendered unable to hold command any longer. Starting then, it falls to the ship’s five lieutenants to manage the ship in his absence. The tale is told from the view of the third lieutenant, Bush, who reappears in several subsequent novels, and tracks the enigma of the fifth lieutenant, the youngest by date of commission, Horatio Hornblower. Not so incidentally, Hornblower was one of two people who could have helped the captain to his very convenient fall, the other a young man put aboard the boat at a young age in order to learn the arts needed for sailing but suspected by the captain and legally tortured.

Bush, the central character of this book, is very curious about Hornblower, the youngest but not shy about offering advice to his elders. Advice the shell-shocked lieutenants usually take. The ship heads off to handle the captain’s secrets orders, namely to disrupt a nest of Spanish privateers (pirates who have papers giving them official backing by a government to prey on the country’s enemies).

On board ship, every time the older lieutenants make a hash of something, Hornblower responds with a quiet suggestion. In the end, their near defeat at the hands of the privateers turns into a daring nighttime raid, along with captured prizes. Too easy? Not so. Keep reading.

Every time you think the action is settled, something comes along to create a new crisis. That’s why the entire series is so good. The good officer in chapter five winds up dying ignobly by the end of the book. The rich rewards Hornblower earns melt away before he can claim them. A nice day for sailing turns into a hurricane...the variations are infinite. It’s a world profoundly affected by fortune, good, bad, and worse. Forester keeps spinning Fortuna’s wheel...and we should thank him for it.

It’s not an easy life for Hornblower...he’ll survive of course. This book was written a decade or more after the first Hornblower novels, so the reader knows that Horatio will continue his climb from lieutenant to commander to captain, but we don’t know how. He’s going to be captured by the French during wartime. He’s going to come down with every deadly disease that Forester could research. He’s going to have the supreme joy of marriage and children...only to watch the worst happen to most of them. Hornblower will face success and battery on every front, personal and professional.

Forester is one of those writers who makes the journey really worth the time. He rewards his characters and tortures them back just as hard. Isn’t that one of the reasons to read thrilling books, even dangerous books, where no one knows what the author might just do to a favored character or plot line?

I find that all of the books in this series that I’ve managed to locate have something good in them. (I’m especially partial to Lord Hornblower and Commodore Hornblower for their ways of tackling the vast wars across Europe launched by Napoleon after the end of the French Revolution.)

That said, a few of the books are, in my reading, inferior to the others. I won’t prejudice you. Try them all. Find the ones you like. (I find that even a great writer is lucky to ‘miss’ about fifty percent of the time with the books he or she writes. There are plenty of writers I know, very good ones, who have one book in ten that I admire. Still, the one good book is more than enough to overlook the failed experiments.)

I still think the name Hornblower is stupid. (I’m surprised it’s not spawned an entire sub-genre of nautical-themed porn films.) But the books are worth your attention. Don’t wait a decade or two to pick one up and enjoy.

Q&A: White Wolf Hunger

What’s your story about?

It’s about political assassination, when politics devolves from disagreements and yelling to violence and conspiracies and bullets.

Conspiracies? Not wolves? It's called White Wolf Hunger.

No. The white wolf is a term the main character, Dian Nye, uses to describe a horrific blizzard that pins a bunch of people in the Montana Capitol on inauguration day. Can’t have an assassination thriller without a blizzard, can we? At least if it’s winter in Montana.

So, do I need to know a lot about Montana?

Nope. Come as you are. The book is one day in the life of a woman who’s trying everything she knows to survive a very bad situation with too few resources. Isn’t that the universal story? Seeing someone try to prevail over terrible odds?

I really don’t need to understand politics?

Of politics, you just need to know what the characters involved really want. That’s it. Politics is fancy bunting to hide that 'person X' wants Y to happen so he convinces a lot of people they want it, too, even though it’s only good for 'person X.'

You do need to be interested in the darker side of human nature: manipulation, unclear motivations, opaque conversations, and lots of people scrambling over each other trying to get at things they really, really want. I write about greedy people and desperate people. Or, more often, greedy, desperate people.

I don’t know.

Download a sample and see if it’s your cup of tea. It’s a heck of a ride. Of course, I’m biased. I wrote this story and plan to write eight more books about these characters.

It’s on Amazon now and will be available in more stores in the coming months.

Books That Grab Me: George Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle

I would probably have never found this book except I’ve started watching re-runs of Tony Bourdain’s No Reservations. His Boston episode was framed as a kind of homage to this book (and the film it inspired). Since I have a great love for both crime fiction and Boston, I had to read it.

Now that I have, I can report it was time well spent. With a caveat or two. The book takes a bit of effort to get into. It’s mostly dialogue with a few unnamed characters roaming around, characters who reappear in subsequent chapters with names attached. It’s going to require some brainwork to make some sense of the story.

Is it worth the effort? Yes. Much of the dialogue is so cleverly phrased it will make you smile. Plus, it’s about criminals in and around Boston. Criminals who sell, buy, and resell guns. Criminals who use guns to rob banks. Criminals who use guns to kill snitches. It’s also about overwhelmed police or FBI agents making deals with criminals and reneging on deals with criminals and exposing their deals with criminals to other criminals. It’s a world where women are treated as an afterthought, but the women don’t particularly like it and it begins to cost the criminals.

It’s about a world where everyone needs to be paranoid all the time because there’s just no one to trust. (Like if Orwell had set out to write 1984 but put it in Boston and substituted the mob for his Big Brother apparatus.)

The title character, Eddie Coyle, has federal charges hanging over his head in New Hampshire at the start of the story. He’s looking to make a deal, a man on the make. (Which leads him to getting batted around by an FBI agent in exchange for help with the prosecutor that never quite appears.) Eddie’s a ‘reformed criminal’ who supplies guns to men who’re trying to knock off banks without killing anyone (until they do start killing people). He’s buying guns from a young man who’s selling guns hand over fist to anyone who wants them. A young man who has a big mouth about his business and where he’s doing it. A young man who clues in Eddie Coyle about his biggest and most dangerous transaction.

You see where this is going? Desperate man plus a dangled bait plus the mafia plus an entire culture of suspicion....

Of course it’s all going to end badly. Eddie Coyle will take the blame for giving up the gun dealer (which he did) and for giving up the bank robbery team (which a woman did to spite her boyfriend, one of the bank robbers). The blame for both messes sticks to poor Eddie. I’ll leave you to discover his exact fate, one of the many perverse pleasures in the book.

There are other pleasures, too, not least puzzling out who the various characters are as you read just the words they say. For a while I thought that a man who turned out to be a hired killer was some kind of policeman by the way he spoke. Of course he is a kind of policeman, a parallel police that punished criminals for their infractions.

The other, greater pleasure is the language used to tell this compelling tale. Even the book jacket bragged about “the authentic, elaborately oblique language born of the paradox that rules the underworld: the high value on betrayal – it is the coin of their realm – in a world where betrayal is punishable by maiming or death.”

When a book jacket sounds that appealing – back when they used to really try to write stunners – you know the stuff in between the covers will be a wonder.

Read it. Linger over the conversations. This is a little kind of tragedy, not a king facing the impossible, but a little guy getting squished between the rock and the hard place. You go into it knowing that Coyle will not end well. The value, like with seeing a play or movie for the twentieth time, is the beautiful journey.

(Now I need to find a copy of the film.)

[Promotion Ended] Free eBook (June 16 - 17 - 18)

[Update: Thank you to the hundreds of you who took a copy of Indiscriminate. I hope you will consider leaving a review if you enjoyed what I wrote.]

For three days, June 16 - 18, Indiscriminate: A Thriller will be a free ebook on Amazon. It's the story of a family outing that goes horribly wrong when a town's long buried secrets intrude violently into the present.

Here are the country-by-country links: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy.

(The paperback edition is available, but not on sale, or free, at this time.)

I’m making my ebook free so that more people will take a chance on a thriller they might not have heard about before. 

Please take a free copy and help me to climb the "free book" rankings. (The idea is that gaining some notice when the book is free will help the book find readers once it goes back to regular price. That's the way the best-seller lists work on Amazon for now, it seems.)

If you enjoy reading Indiscriminate, I’d appreciate your taking a moment to rate my book on Amazon. Your help is much appreciated!