Books: Elementary, My Dear Groucho By Ron Goulart (1999)

"When a body is found in Holmes's 221B Baker Street lodgings on the set at Mammoth Studios during the shooting of The Valley of Fear, Groucho Marx and his sidekick Frank Denby begin investigating. The victim is the German emigre director of the movie who was found in the great detective's favorite armchair, shot in the chest. There is another murder (though it looks like an accident) but it takes more than murder to stifle Groucho's quips or to quiet the laughter this surprising reincarnation inspires."

While Elementary, My Dear Groucho continues Ron Goulart’s alternate universe where Groucho Marx is not only a movie star (though waning), but an armature detective and is a good third book in the series, the plot was lacking something –it was fairly easy to know whodunit. There is some zaniness, though this volume tempers that a bit from the previous two. And Goulart does add a bit of realism to the story, with Frank, Jane, and Groucho also dealing with some homegrown Nazis, and their anti-Semitism, but this aspect is only slightly touched upon. Still, Goulart did do his research and the whole underbelly of Nazi’s in Hollywood in 1938 (just after the release of Room Service, a Marx Brothers film that underperformed) is fairly interesting. Also, Goulart continues his love affair with the time period, mixing real-life actors, locations, and movie-making seamlessly with his fictional characters.

Much like the two previous entries, Elementary, My Dear Groucho, is a breezy read, with delightful smart-ass cracking people. There are also moments of pathos, but it’s still a delightful, if not laugh out loud, mystery.

Books: The Liquidator By John Gardner (1964)

"In Paris in 1944 Tank Corps Sergeant Boysie Oakes kills two Germans attempting to assassinate an Intelligence Corps officer named Mostyn. Twenty years later Mostyn's memories have transformed Oakes (who is in reality cowardly and hedonistic) into a fearless master assassin though nothing could be further from the truth. Mostyn recruits Oakes into the Secret Service where after a training course he is given an enviable lifestyle. Oakes' function is to "liquidate" security risks for the State. Oakes hires a mild mannered professional assassin to do his dirty work for him. Going for a "dirty weekend" leads to Boysie being captured by enemy agents who involve him in an assassination plot."

Long before John Gardner was picked to by the Ian Fleming Estate to pen James Bond novels, The Liquidator was his debut novel and is a sort-of-parody of the spy genre that exploded in the early 1960s thanks to James Bond. It’s a fairly light read and -good or bad- a nostalgic trip back to the sixties era, but the novel takes way too long to get going. The early part was filled with the sexualisation of women and name dropping of expensive brands, with people living the high life, but once the thriller part gets going it was mildly exciting. As noted, the book is a reminder of era when a lot of things where black and white, where everyone smoked, where you could travel on an airplane with a gun in your pocket. It’s an effective parody, but it's no Get Smart!

 

Books: Paradox Bound By Peter Clines (2017)

"Eli Teague lives in Sanders, Maine, the town that time forgot. A chance encounter with a Model A Ford and its driver when he was a kid sets Eli on a collision course with all of America's history. That is, if the faceless men don't get him first. Eli’s willing to admit it: he’s a little obsessed with the mysterious woman he met years ago. Okay, maybe a lot obsessed. But come on, how often do you meet someone who’s driving a hundred-year-old car, clad in Revolutionary-War era clothes, wielding an oddly modified flintlock rifle—someone who pauses just long enough to reveal strange things about you and your world before disappearing in a cloud of gunfire and a squeal of tires? So when the traveler finally reappears in his life, Eli is determined that this time he’s not going to let her go without getting some answers. But his determination soon leads him into a strange, dangerous world and a chase not just across the country but through a hundred years of history—with nothing less than America’s past, present, and future at stake."

I did enjoy Peter Clines Paradox Bound (and I’ve always loved time travel stories) but it does comes off like a pitch for a multi-season SyFy TV show that will be cancelled before it can complete its arc. Much like The Fold, Clines borrows lots themes from other popular culture books, TV, and movie...and, of course, previous time travel stories –or history travel here. Beyond the obvious references to Back to the Future franchise (especially the third film, and mainly due to John Henry's train, the Steel Bucephalus, there are other references along the way) the book also seems also to allude classic Doctor Who with the books MacGuffin, the American Dream. Eli is told the American Dream is a physical thing, forged by the Egyptian god Ptah at the behest of the Founding Fathers, and stolen at some point in history (early 1963 apparently). It is much like the Key To Time arc that the Doctor went on during TOS 16^th season anyone who can get their hands on the American Dream has unlimited power to mold the future. So if thousands of people believe in the same thing, the Dream will do what it can to make it happen. This is also why it went missing. Since thousands of people were looking for it, it had to go missing in order for it to become true, thus creating a predestinational time loop, since no one would be looking for something that wasn't missing.

Through this history travel, Harry and Eli are perused by The Faceless Men, who are chasing the Searchers (who are everyday people from different timelines who are also search for this object. Here the book adds shades of River Song from modern Doctor Who, as these Searchers don’t tend to meet each other linearly). With utterly featureless faces, they wear masks and use hypnotic badges (or as I called them, perception filters) to make sure no one notices that the person they're talking to has no face. Originally tasked with protecting the Dream, after failing to keep it safe, they has doubled-down on their secondary job - keeping history intact from accidental  incursions created by the Searchers. There is a Biff like bully that has been terrorizing Eli since childhood and who is recruited (not by choice, though) into the Faceless Men.

As with all time travel tales, you need to have the hero (or heroine) make some leaps in logic and a lot of those leaps comes that toward the end. Some of the conclusions Eli reaches are a bit farfetched, especially considering he’s only been doing the time hopping business for a very short time and people like Harry (and others) have been doing it for years.

It’s a fun book and would probably make a good weekly TV series for those who only mildly enjoy science fiction. It’s no Quantum Leap, but it will hold your attention.

Books: From the Dust Returned By Ray Bradbury (2001)

"Enter the strange world of the Elliott family...it will change you forever in the attic where the rain touched the roof softly on spring days and where you could feel the mantle of snow outside, a few inches away, on December nights, a thousand-time great Grandmere existed. She did not live, nor was she eternally dead, she...existed. She is the grandmother of the Elliott family, which includes mind-readers, vampires and many others...maybe. In a strange old house, they gradually come together, mixing their arcane skills and life-styles, falling in and out of love and changing the world around them forever. You have never seen their like before."

From the Dust Returned is not really a novel, and even as short stories, does not really become anything to fully understand. There are lots of weird creatures with strange powers that are en route to a family homecoming at the Elliot house in Illinois. While there, we are told a few stories about some of them which seem to be almost entirely unlinked to each other but for the repeated appearance of a few of the characters. Some research brought up that the book originated as short stories written over a long period of time (1945 to around 2000) which Bradbury then brought together in 2001, writing linking portions to try to give it some kind of coherent structure. It really does not work, and I found myself struggling through it. Ray Bradbury’s lyrical prose is fantastic, but I began to ponder if this book was just simply designed to fulfill a contract (and he would only publish two more novels in the early ‘aughts before his death in 2012). I mean, in some sense, this book has a lot of typical dark fantasy that Bradbury always liked, with its themes of growing up and stop believing in magic, the supernatural, and the wonders of endless summers that come crashing when The October People arrive. But it’s mish-mash of weirdness, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and mummy’s fails to be a great book.