Books: Who Stole Sassi Manoon By Donald E. Westlake (1969)

“Who Stole Sassi Manoon? That was the question rocking Montego Bay Film Festival. You might ask Kelly Bram Nicholas IV, a twenty-five year old mad scientist and inventor of the sea-going computer STARNAP. Or Jigger Jackson, the girl who wants to be a movie star so badly she’d sell somebody else’s body. Or Major ffor-Linton and Miss Adelaide Rushby, who may or may not be English eccentrics. Or You might as Sassi herself –but she may not be able to tell you.” 

Apparently, this started out as a screenplay –which sort of explains some things. But when things fell through, Westlake adapted the screenplay into a novel and it doesn’t work, if only because Westlake is a novelist not who is not really deft at turning his own screenplay into a novel. Yes, he adapted Jim Thompson’s The Grifters into a brilliant, Oscar nominated screenplay and wrote a few others, but with Who Stole Sassi Manoon, this one may have not been a great screenplay to begin with, and so in prose, you see a lot of its weaknesses.

So certainly not the best Westlake caper, yet it has your typical Westlake set-up with some amateur, clueless, bumbling guys who want to kidnap and ransom off a movie star, and who generally think they have an air tight plan. Until things go wrong. The STARNAP machine –while never explained on how it works, why it works, -is interesting device, but I’m not sure Westlake thought this through (same with the island in the middle of the ocean they end up towards the end –not sure how and why it’s there and how it gets fresh water for the multiple bathrooms). Kelly, Robbie, and Frank are not violent (they could be early designs on Dortmunder and his crew which was a few years off when this book was released), and they can be funny and the set-up, while a bit long-ish, is actually good, but it’s betrayed by a convoluted ending.

Still, there are well-written passages in the book, with Westlake taking another swipe at the movie industry –despite needing their money. And there some ideas that will get revisited –and done better- in later books, but all told, a caper novel you could pass on from this prolific writer.

Books: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo By Taylor Jenkins-Reid (2017)

“Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career. Summoned to Evelyn's luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the '80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn's story near its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique's own in tragic and irreversible ways.”

Much of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a wild trip through Hollywood between the 1950s and well into the 1990s. While Hugo is obviously not a real person (and this somewhat an alternate universe of Hollywood), clearly author Taylor Jenkins-Reid based her movie star hero on other well-known historical movie stars such as Garbo, Tallulah Bankhead, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rita Hayworth. I also found a lot of similarities to Doris Day and her long-time relationship with Rock Hudson.

It’s not perfect and not particularly deep (though it does have a wonderful representation of bi characters that I’ve ever read), but the author did create a compelling book that made me want to turn the pages, to learn about her husband’s and other lovers. I found a lot of the “tabloid” articles particularly unbelievable –though the ones focusing on the 1950s and early 60s may be closer to accurate. The latter ones seemed more National Enquire than People –another words, the language and style changed and yet in this universe, it remains the same.

The twist that comes in the last 40 pages or so reminds of bad soap opera stunts, but I can overlook it because the book is pretty fun. And its themes of what some people do to reach the top in Hollywood, the risks, the loves won and lost, and dark secrets of what remains hidden to be a star are still relevant today.  

A worthy, fun beach read, that may have you staying longer at the beach than you wanted.

Books: Declare By Tim Powers (2001)

As a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Andrew Hale finds himself caught up in a secret, even more ruthless war. Two decades later, in 1963, he will be forced to confront again the nightmare that has haunted his adult life: a lethal unfinished operation code-named Declare. From the corridors of Whitehall to the Arabian desert, from postwar Berlin to the streets of Cold War Moscow, Hale's desperate quest draws him into international politics and gritty espionage tradecraft—and inexorably drives Hale, the fiery and beautiful Communist agent Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, and Kim Philby, mysterious traitor to the British cause, to a deadly confrontation on the high glaciers of Mount Ararat, in the very shadow of the fabulous and perilous Ark.

 I do have a problem with Powers style from time to time because he does use real life facts and places within his story and fits a supernatural one around it. This works a lot of the time, but here the book is caught in three speeds, slow, super slow, and then lightning fast. Regrettably, the book is overburden with so much minute detail of spying during WWII that I grew bored with it. In some ways, like John le Carré, that Powers insists on emulating, the history of spy’s and the final months of a world war are drawn with such detail, I felt I was reading a non-fiction book about spies. His cadence also seems old style, as he seemly is trying to emulate the way writers of the 1940s and early 1960s wrote. It gets distracting as well.

Huge portions of the text are given over to scenes of Andrew Hale involved in trying to keep his cover story clear, dealing with questionable people, with uncertain allegiances -which would look great on film or TV series, but it drags terribly in prose. It's slow, sometimes torturous and far too dense for its own good. A great deal of action happens, but the whole thing feels top-heavy: most of the good stuff is at the end, so you have to wade through a lot of extraneous material to get there. The underlying idea is fantastic, but by the time Powers got to the payoff, I had stopped caring.

As Tim Power says, ‘In a way, I arrived at the plot for this book by the same method that astronomers use in looking for a new planet—they look for “perturbations,” wobbles, in the orbits of planets they’re aware of, and they calculate mass and position of an unseen planet whose gravitational field could have caused the observed perturbations—and then they turn their telescopes on that part of the sky and search for a gleam. I looked at all the seemingly irrelevant “wobbles” in the lives of these people—Kim Philby, his father, T.E. Lawrence, Guy Burgess—and I made it an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any days of the calendar—and then I tried to figure out what momentous but unrecorded fact could explain them all.’