Books: A Talent For War by Jack McDevitt (1988)

“Everyone knows the legend of Christopher Sim. An interstellar hero with a rare talent for war, he changed mankind's history forever when he forged a rag-tag group of misfits into the weapon that broke the alien Ashiyyur. But now, in a forgotten file, Alex Benedict has found a startling piece of information. If it is true, then Christopher Sim was a fraud. If he is to see it through, Alex Benedict will have to follow the dark track of a legend, into the heart of an alien galaxy, where he will confront a truth far stranger than anything he could have imagined.”

The Talent for War is set 9,600 years into our future, where human civilization has spread through a substantial part of the Orion Arm of our galaxy. It’s the first of the Alex Benedict series and plays out like a hard science fiction novel with a mystery at its core. This novel is also concerned with a battle two centuries earlier, which helps fill in the backstory of this universe author Jack McDevitt has created.

It’s a bit prosaic, old style science fiction novel, with its own unique perspective on first contact with aliens. The first-person narrative is a bit distracting, as Alex comes off a bit self-centered, and with a bunch of supporting characters being a bit underwritten. Still, the whole historical research, the archeological mysteries that need to be solved works. It reads like anyone who is doing research into the past, with its dead ends, papers and memoirs (got to say our future ancestors did a hell of a lot of writing, considering our current ages obsession with videoing everything we do).  

I’m guessing that McDevitt’s choice of using Greek Myths as the backbone of tale is designed for readers to invest their time in those old tomes. It does feel a bit like an Odyssey we’re on.

Books: The Chinese Agent By Michael Moorcock (1970)

“Arnold Hodgkiss, a young Chinese American patent attorney whose secret identity is ‘Jewellery Jules’, is a notorious jewel thief who has never been caught, or even suspected. He has come to London to steal the Crown Jewels, is dreamily casing the Tower of London when a strange man approaches him and says ‘The crown is large’. Hodgkiss, nonplussed, replies ‘And very heavy’, unwittingly giving the correct countersign. The man, a spy, thrusts a parcel at Hodgkiss and disappears. Hodgkiss keeps the parcel, hoping to turn it in some way to his advantage. Soon afterward, Jerry Cornell receives a new assignment: he is to discover the whereabouts of plans for ‘Project Glass’, which have been stolen. Although the thief has been caught, the plans are still missing, and are believed to be in the hands of a fiendish Chinese agent named Kung Fu Tzu. Meanwhile, Kung is hopping mad because he never actually got the plans; they were given to Hodgkiss by mistake.” 

Author Michael Moorcock, best known as the author of fantasy fiction and science fiction-based parables, released The Chinese Agent in 1970, though it was a revision of book, called Somewhere in the Night, released during the height of the spy crazy in 1966 under the pseudonym of Bill Barclay.

The sometimes dark comedy of errors gets a bit absurd, as Cornell tracks Kung, who in turn follows Hodgkiss, who then eludes Kung but finds trouble aplenty when he tries to steal a brooch from a stall on Portobello Road. All awhile this is going on, Moorcock gives us a bizarre look at the city’s worst aspect, folks just above, I guess, homeless, and their antics on how they survive. That includes Jerry’s Uncle Edmund, a person “so fantastically dirty that the rubbish pile in his yard has congealed and come to life.” This is enhanced when the two communist operatives try to intimidate him, Edmond sneaks up behind them and pushes them into the quivering pile, escaping while they fight to extricate themselves from its gelatinous embrace. It’s less than flattering, but amusing just the same.

What work the most here are the agents themselves, as each whom have inflated opinion on their opposition. You’ll get a few good chuckles here, but the book is clearly of a certain age. But as parody of spy novels, it works.

Books: The Scared Stiff by Judson Jack Carmichael (2003)

“The high life for Barry and Lola Lee is not without its share of risk as they run one scam after another to finance it and barely stay ahead of their creditors. In a bind, Barry hatches a scheme that will take him to Lola’s South American homeland, Guerrera, where he will stage his accidental death and collect megabucks on his life insurance. The death itself—a spectacular swan dive off a cliff in a rental car, with a restaurant full of witnesses—goes off without a hitch, thanks to the participation of Lola’s brother and other relatives, but in the days afterward, with Barry holding new papers as Lola’s brother and in seclusion until the insurance settlement (and lonely, lusting after the wife of Lola’s black-market cousin), greed turns out not to be the Lees’ trait exclusively. Tipped off by a cousin, the vivacious Luz, that his life is in danger from yet another branch of the family, Barry accepts her offer of sanctuary—even though sexy-looking Luz leaves him with his tongue hanging. When the hideaway is compromised, though, Barry has to assume a third (or is it fourth?) identity and take a room at an exclusive resort catering to foreigners. There, he comes face to face with the insurance examiner sent to investigate his case, who doesn’t recognize him but tells him that the jig is nearly up. With Lola looking at jail time if the examiner succeeds, desperate times call for desperate measures—and Lola’s murder-minded cousins show up.”

Judson Jack Carmichael is none other than Donald E. Westlake, and according to the Westlake Review site, this pseudonym came about in the late 1990s, after he had released The Ax (a hard noir thriller I’ve yet to read, one with no humor and also the return of his other pen name, Richard Stark after a twenty plus year hiatus). His publishers felt this comic insurance scam novel could not come after those two hard core novels. 

It was a little comic insurance fraud novel, closest in spirit to books I’d written in the seventies.  I finished it, and gave it to my editor and my agent, and the gloom could be heard to descend. (It sounds like a grounded blimp losing air.)

Gently I was told that this could not possibly be the book that would follow The Ax, nor could it be the book that followed the return of Richard Stark.  I did see that.

Unfortunately, I did.  I saw what they meant, and I had to agree.  I had a certain responsibility now.  The book I published after The Ax and Stark redux could not just be any book.  I had newer readers now, who would come to that book with a certain level of expectation.  They wouldn’t necessarily need The Ax again, they could certainly understand that I also had my comic moments, but there was a level of emotional truth that really should be present in whatever book was published next.  -from an unpublished article found in his files; now collected in The Getaway Car.

The funny part is how anyone could’ve thought this was not a Westlake novel. Unlike some of his Stark books, of the many other nom de plume’s he has released books under since the late 1950s, it’s very clear this book was written in the tone of his many comic caper novels of the 1970s. The Parker novels published under his Richard Stark name always seemed to carry a different voice than his comic tales released under his name. It was like they were to different men. But any reviewer could tell that the book was written by Westlake (it was released through Carroll & Graf, and they tried to tantalize new readers by saying this was a famous writer going incognito), but the Westlake Review added that they could find no reviews that seemed to indicate anyone caught on that Carmichael was Westlake.

Still, there is nothing really new here, just a rearranging of various material he had been doing for decades. Plus it was another adventure set outside his beloved New York, and I think this why –despite some his publishers’ dismay- this book saw the light of day in 2003. It’s not a bad book by far, but it’s also a reminder of why authors do release books under pen names –because publishers’ like their authors to stay in one lane.