Books: The Prisoner of Blackwood Castle By Ron Goulart (1984)

"Harry Challenge is a field operative for the Challenge International Detective Agency, a family business. Receiving his assignments by mail and telegram from his nearly-estranged father, Harry bounces around early 20th century Europe, usually accompanied by stage magician The Great Lorenzo (whose abilities may not all be just sleight-of-hand illusions). Intrepid girl reporter Jennie Barr is often on the same trails as Harry, alternately aiding and competing with him in cracking the cases… and as the mysteries may involve werewolf assassins, clockwork swordsmen and the odd vampire or two, Harry can use all the help he can get."

Over the decades, the prolific Ron Goulart created countless P.I.’s (Jake and Hildy Pace, Ben Jolson to name a few), with Harry being one of the latest ones released in the 1980s. This genre mix-up of hard case detective, noir thrillers, science fiction and steampunk is seemly set in an alternate universe –though Goulart reveals nothing- of Europe, America, the world. A lot of The Prisoner of Blackwood Castle plays out like an episode of the classic TV series Wild Wild West, but a bit more reserved, if possible. There is some of Goulart’s trademark wit, here, but the book seems more serious...still, he's clearly not taking anything serious here. There is a tongue and cheek, wink, wink, nudge, nudge satirical air to it, which I liked. Interestingly, I read it nearly forty years ago, when first released in 1984. Surprisingly, I don’t remember much of the tale. Not sure if I should be worried about that. He wrote a sequel three years later, The Curse of the Obelisk, but then left Harry Challenge behind.

Books: Call Me a Cab By Donald E. Westlake (2022)

 

“Tom Fletcher is driving his dad’s taxi cab in New York.  There he meets Katherine Scott, who is heading to Los Angeles to meet her plastic surgeon fiancée. The only thing is, she’s unsure if she wants to marry him, but cannot find a real reason not to marry him. So half-way to Kennedy Airport, Scott decides the best way to solve this problem is to convince Tom Fletcher to drive her across the continental United States, to Los Angeles.”

What we get here then is great character driven story as Katherine, apparently a brilliant landscape architect, tries to figure out why she’s reluctant to marry Barry. We also get a tale of botany, biology, philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, geography, and topography, along with a bit of class inequality. But like all adventures, it’s the events along the way that are more fun than the destination. Written somewhere around 1977-78, Westlake’s keen observation skill, his ability to create wonderfully three-dimensional characters, makes this a very enjoyable tale. There is some great set pieces and even better conversations (My Dinner with Andre, except set in a taxi) here and all of it, surprisingly, very page turning.

In the afterword of Call Me a Cab, Charles Ardai, an entrepreneur, businessperson, and writer of award winning crime fiction and mysteries and who is the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, a popular line of pulp-style paperback crime novels, who knew Westlake very well, has said that the prolific writer tried to write a caper novel where no crime takes place. Westlake’s first effort was Brother’s Keepers, a tale about a group of monks in New York City fighting to keep their century old monastery from being knocked down. While there is a tiny bit of crime in the book, it’s a solid, funny tale of people with limited resources up against progress. Later –or maybe sooner- Westlake began Call Me a Cab. Ardai says that it’s possible the book began as a caper novel, but maybe this was another attempt to write a book with no crime. In the end, it becomes a love story.

“Don’s first stab at Call Me a Cab,” Ardai notes, “was a 215 pages long in typescript and ended pretty much the way you just read. It also seems clear that somewhere along the line, Westlake decide to make Katherine Scott more the lead than Tom Fletcher. Through several revisions, the book gained some 50 pages (the entire sequence with the Chasens –and the one of funniest and best bits in the book). Ardai notes that while going through to assemble this novel, Westlake tried several different ideas and scenarios. So much like he did on Forever and a Death (he also edited Westlake’s Memory and The Comedy is Finished), Ardai took the material provided by Westlake’s widow, Abby and a longtime agent of Don’s, Stephen Moore, and hopefully crafted a book that Westlake would’ve liked (as always, editing the works of authors long gone is often a complicated job, if only because you never know if this was the way the writer intended to finish it).

Books: The Library of the Dead By T.L. Huchu (2021)

 

"When a child goes missing in Edinburgh's darkest streets, young Ropa investigates. She'll need to call on Zimbabwean magic as well as her Scottish pragmatism to hunt down clues. But as shadows lengthen, will the hunter become the hunted? Ropa dropped out of school to become a ghostalker. Now she speaks to Edinburgh's dead, carrying messages to the living. A girl's gotta earn a living, and it seems harmless enough. Until, that is, the dead whisper that someone's bewitching children--leaving them husks, empty of joy and life. It's on Ropa's patch, so she feels honor-bound to investigate. But what she learns will change her world. She'll dice with death (not part of her life plan...), discovering an occult library and a taste for hidden magic. She'll also experience dark times. For Edinburgh hides a wealth of secrets, and Ropa's gonna hunt them all down.” 

Much of this book is a fun ride, and you cannot help but love Ropa –even if she seems smarter than any 14 year-old should be. It’s set in contemporary times, but clearly a future that has also gone through some changes. This Edinburgh is ruled by a King (with people greeting each other with 'God save the king' and 'Long may he reign') and has a diverse cast of characters who would not be out of place in a Grimm’s fairytales or the universe of Charles Dickens (with magic). The book is dark, but filtered with some cynical humor that makes you want to follow along.

Huchu wisely keeps some of the external world building from overtaking what is essentially a Scooby-Doo adventure –hopefully more of this will be explored in later tales, but there were times I wished he let on a bit more. And it’s also fun to see how the Zimbabwe born, but Edinburgh raised writer mixes his heritage with history of the Scottish city.

Books: Honestly, We Meant Well By Grant Ginder (2020)

 

“Family vacation always comes with baggage. The Wright family is in ruins. Sue Ellen Wright has what she thinks is a close-to-perfect life. A terrific career as a Classics professor, a loving husband, and a son who is just about to safely leave the nest. But then disaster strikes. She learns that her husband is cheating, and that her son has made a complete mess of his life. So, when the opportunity to take her family to a Greek island for a month presents itself, she jumps at the chance. This sunlit Aegean paradise, with its mountains and beaches is, after all, where she first fell in love with both a man and with an ancient culture. Perhaps Sue Ellen’s past will provide the key to her and her family’s salvation.”

More darkly humorous than laugh out loud funny, Honestly, We Meant Well takes a very liberal Berkeley based intellectual family whose lives are slowly unraveling. Wife Sue Ellen has been teaching for three decades and is “worried that undergraduate laziness was becoming more the norm than an anomaly.” Her husband Dean is celebrated author with fans who sort of stalk him and even sleep with him. And their son Will, on the cusp of graduating college and still unsure what he should do with his life –which includes being the son of a celebrated professor of classical studies and bestselling author.

There is a fine line with these characters –they are morbidly trashy in some respect and dumb in others. And Dean plays too much the victim card here, having various affairs with much younger women and who fails to understand his own son’s issues, including the fact he plagiarizes his college thesis. And though Sue Ellen is not that horrible, she is another in a long line of women who for reasons never fully explain, stays with a cheating husband.

The Greek descriptions are great –makes you want to go there; a nice bit of travelogue and history to counterpoint some lesser interesting things that happen in the book. I think it could’ve been a bit more humorous and less turgid (it took me longer than it should to get through it), but I liked it enough to get Grant Ginder’s other book, People We Hate at the Wedding.