The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (2015)

“Edited by” David A. Goodman

I will lead with the most important point: This is indeed the first-person narrative of the life  of the original series James T. Kirk, not the alternate-timeline doppelganger that is featured in the newer movies.

That having been established, this is an enjoyable book. It’s not great, but quite interesting. It’s not really a fleshed-out faux “autobiography.” It might better be termed “memoirs.” It’s constructed as a series of short vignettes, most of them several pages long but organized into about a dozen chapters (unnamed) spanning the 23^rd-c. lifetime of James Tiberius Kirk, most famous as the captain of the Starship Enterprise. There is a great deal of overlap with episodes of the original Star Trek television series and the subsequent motion pictures, but a great deal of “new” material on Kirk’s youth and linking the events chronicled in the TV/movie canon. What I found most interesting was the insight that is given into the mind of the heroic captain, who comes off in his own mind as a decidedly unheroic figure, filled with self-doubt and remorse for many of the actions that were celebrated in those stories, many of them necessary in the situations in which he found himself, but which he so often wishes could have been different and recognizes were driven – especially in the later episodes and even afterward – by an incredible hubris that had sometimes devastating effects on those around him. On the other hand, we do get a sense of the sterling character that inspired the great love and loyalty evidenced by his crew and friends. All-in-all, we get a very different view of Kirk that makes him a more realistic character than I think I’ve ever experienced him to be.

Looking for the King: An Inklings Novel (2010)

By David C. Downing

I found this novel, also published by Ignatius Press, via Amazon's suggestions based on the fact that I'd read Toward the Gleam [LINK]. This is not Toward the Gleam. Although I found the description enticing – American graduate students in England in 1940, interacting with the Inklings, on a quest for an Arthurian relic – and was immediately hooked by the first chapter or so in the Kindle preview so that I immediately purchased it, I ended up being disappointed by it. There are elements of this novel I really liked. It opens at one of my favorite places in the world, the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey in southwestern England, the reputed resting place of King Arthur, and much of the story takes place at other significant medieval sites that I'm familiar with or are on my list of places I would like to get familiar with (two trips are not nearly enough!) As the narrative progressed it takes an unexpected turn in that the object of the quest becomes ultimately less King Arthur than one of my subjects of historical interest, King Athelstan (r. 924-939), probably the most important of the late Anglo-Saxon kings of England, a true “Christian King and Hero” [LINK] who may well have come into possession of one of the most powerful relics of the Crucifixion.  Frankly, for all his importance, Athelstan is largely forgotten in the memory of later ages, overshadowed by his grandfather Alfred the Great, and it is cool beyond words to find his legend at the heart of a modern novel.  Looking for the King is suffused with the early medieval England that I love, and seems well researched as evidenced by a good set of historical notes and a bibliography at the end. (The mistaken identification of the foes defeated by Otto of Saxony at the Battle of the Lechfeld in 955 as “Mongols” rather than Magyars I'm willing to dismiss as a literary slip of the tongue.)

Toward the Gleam (2011)

A Novel by T. M. Doran

I have a fondness for novels featuring historical characters experiencing fantastic but fictional adventures. By this I mean not “historical novels” retelling historical events in the form of a novel, where the author strives to adhere as closely as possible to events as they actually happened while necessarily supplying dialogue, minor incidents, and even peripheral characters as necessary to create a dramatic narrative out of the facts as we know them (examples abound, but springing first to mind are Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series), or even fundamentally fictional stories featuring a fictional character set firmly within a historical context and events, interacting with historical persons (e.g., Max Allan Collins' Nathan Heller Mysteries [LINK]). No, I mean something more akin to Paul Malmont's novels, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril and The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown [LINK], the former placing the 1930s writers of hero pulps in their own hair-raisingly pulpish adventures complete with reanimated corpses and the Yellow Peril, the latter similarly focusing on the 1940s pioneers of science fiction in a fantastic war-time plot to recover a Death Ray defense against the Axis. In fact, as I write this I realize that those latter two novels exemplify what I really find compelling, imagining the writers of fantastic fiction plunged into the midst of their own fantastic adventures.

A couple of months ago, I read (and reviewed) No Dawn For Men: A Novel of Ian Fleming, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Nazi Germany [LINK]. My assessment of it was somewhat mixed, both because of a rather pedestrian writing style that did not successfully emulate that of either author and because it did not succeed in imparting a necessary suspension of disbelief that these could indeed be “the real story” behind the authors and the creation of the the literary monuments for which they are known. Neither of those criticisms apply to this book, however, which was recommended to me by our parish priest, with whom I share a love for all things Tolkien, around the same time I had heard of and already ordered No Dawn For Men. The intriguing prospect of a mash-up of Tolkien and Fleming in a spy adventure on the eve of World War II had me read that book first, inadvertently saving the better for later. If No Dawn For Men is a simple pot-boiler thriller, Toward the Gleam rises to the level of literature – while remaining an edge-of-your seat thriller. Which is no mean accomplishment given how much discourse and dialogue is contained in these pages, working in a great deal of the changing philosophy and world-view of the early twentieth century. That latter feature, as well as the characters and literary connections posited, make it obvious why Ignatius Press, a relatively small Catholic publishing house specializing in orthodox theology and philosophy as well as fiction picked up this book [LINK]. (As with many other of its books, Ignatius' page for this book [LINK] site hosts a reading guide [LINK] as well as a great embedded Youtube “book trailer” [LINK].)

Before I get to a more spoiler-filled discussion of some particular elements of this book that struck me as noteworthy, here's a general overview of the plot: A young English scholar, recuperating from injuries suffered on the front-lines of the World War I, discovers a mysterious box containing an ancient manuscript bound in red, written in an unknown language. His linguistics training allows him to laboriously decipher over a decade and a half or so the lost tales of a long-departed age – but his obsessive quest to understand the historical context whence came the book brings him to the attention of a great enemy who demands the knowledge contained within the book for himself, toward the end of world domination. Much of this tale is a tense cat-and-mouse game in which we experience along with the scholar the dread of an approaching doom that seems almost a force of nature, tempered with the support of a close fellowship of academic colleagues as well as a loving family and clear-headed, eminently practical and down-to-earth wife, climaxing in a one-on-one confrontation within the hallowed halls of Oxford University itself.

The rest of this review contains spoilers which, while not giving away the overall story itself beyond the brief summary above, may well ruin a lot of the reading experience; if you've not yet read the book for yourself, I would suggest you do so before going any further....

No Dawn For Men: A Novel of Ian Fleming, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Nazi Germany (2013)

By James LePore and Carlos Davis

This book has a fascinating premise – two important writers of the 20^th century meeting in October 1938 Germany under cover of a putative consultation between J. R. R. Tolkien and a prospective German publisher for his recent novel, The Hobbit, journalist Ian Fleming being there to document a meeting Tolkien would also make with an eminent medieval scholar. Of course, with the Shadow of Nazism about to descend across Europe, nothing is as it seems; Tolkien's meeting with his fellow academic has been arranged by British Intelligence – with Fleming as his MI-6 “minder” – to discover what historical secret the professor has uncovered to so embolden the Nazis. In the end, Fleming and Tolkien – with the help of a group of allies collected over the course of their adventure – thwart the unleashing of diabolical forces that would have otherwise assured Germany's quick victory in the imminent global conflagration. Moreover, having witnessed True Evil, Tolkien is wrenched from a state of depressed writer's block to a new determination to direct the clamored-for sequel to The Hobbit toward a similarly epic confrontation between Good and Evil.

Treecat Wars (A Star Kingdom Novel, 2013)

By David Weber and Jane Lindskold

This is the third in the series ancillary and remotely prequel to David Weber's ever-expanding Honor Harrington series of interstellar war and politics. It is a more direct sequel to the second young-adult “Star Kingdom Novel,” Fire Season [link], than was the latter to the first volume, A Beautiful Friendship [link]. This will be a short post since I don't have a whole lot to say about this book that wouldn't be repeating what I said about the other two. I love virtually anything set in Weber's Honorverse, and this story continues the tale of Honor Harrington's several-centuries' great-grandmother Stephanie as she continues to grow through her 'teen years, dealing with consequences of her discovery of the treecats of her new homeworld Sphinx as well as the various issues facing any normal teen-aged girl.

The major themes introduced in the first two books continue to be worked out in this volume: 1) the continuing conflict between humans of the Manticoran Star Kingdom as well as the wider galaxy as to whether to regard the treecats simply as incredibly clever animals or as sentient beings with “human” rights – and if the latter, what should be the relationship and interaction between humans and their “more primitive” neighbors?; and 2) new conflict between treecat clans stressed to the point of crisis by the ecological catastrophe of the recent “fire season,” with autumn advancing and Sphinx's long, hard winter approaching swiftly. But this time, except for at the very beginning and the very end, the story is told in parallel narratives as Stephanie and her friend Karl are dispatched by the Sphinx Forestry Service to receive three months forestry training at the University on Manticore, a rare opportunity for interns who are not full forestry agents – but which means that Stephanie is separated by the gulf between neighboring worlds from her new boyfriend Anders … who remains on Sphinx with the group of xenoanthropologists headed by his father but finds circumstances compelling him to spend a great deal of time in the company of Stephanie's best friend Jessica with predictable (even were it not broadcast on the inside front cover text) results. Once again, it's a well-written and engaging tale that weaves another thread into the growing tapestry of Weber's fictional universe.

Cheers! – and Thanks for reading!

Caliphate (2008)

By Tom Kratman

I'll put up a warning for those who perhaps would prefer to read no further. This post will probably be accounted, as has been the book, as “Islamophobic.” So be it. As, I believe, may be inferred from my long-ago post commemorating the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 [link], I have some pretty strong views regarding how pathetically weak has been our reaction as a civilization to what became obvious that day is a ongoing war between two largely incompatible cultures. It is a conflict that we have little hope of surviving without recognizing the reality of the situation. After the initial shock of that day wore off, and our subsequent national rallying petered out into partisan bickering, our chances have diminished, and continue to do so at an alarming rate. I wish it were not so.

Nobilissima: A Novel of Imperial Rome (2012)

By Carrie Bedford

This has been my (mainly) bedtime reading for the past several weeks. A little about my reading pattern: Typically, I have several things going at once, besides some kind of professional reading and spending too much time browsing the Internet for current news, commentary, and random whim-driven “research” – some main “real” book that I lug around during the evening and end up reading in bed before turning out the light (currently I have just started what will probably take me through the next several months, Shelby Foote's monumental three-volume history of The Civil War: A Narrative); something in the nature of a graphic novel that I will dip into every couple of days (currently the second volume of Fantagraphics' wonderfully restored representation of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant Sunday comic strips, two years per volume, the second comprising 1939-1940, reproduced from the artist-author's own colored proofs); an issue or two of the box of comics I received near the beginning of the month from my mail-order comics source, therefore the comics that actually hit the stores during the previous month (e.g., currently I'm working my way through the comics that went on sale on Wednesday, 24 July; i.e., I'm always well behind comics fandom at large in my reading – and blogging), usually when I first head for bed; and, once I turn out the light, something on one of my iPhone e-reader apps. It's also handy to have during odd times of the day when I have a few unexpected moments to read. That's what Nobilissima was, read via the Kindle app. I think it appeared as one of the daily bargains offered via the BookBub mailing list, to which I subscribe. I don't remember if it was free, or a couple of bucks – the BookBub bargains are never more than that. Whatever, the short description provided in that email intrigued me enough to download it.

The Basis for Dynamite's Masks – The Spider vs. the Empire State, Available as Inexpensive eBooks

Just a short plug to let interested parties know that the pulp basis for Dynamite's current Masks comic book miniseries, Norvell Page's wonderful 1938 trilogy of tales from The Spider magazine, collectively known variously as “The Black Police Trilogy” or The Spider vs. the Empire State, under which title they have been available for a couple of years now in a nice trade paperback edition from Age of Aces, containing a fine historical introduction by Thomas Krabacher (reviewed here, parts one, two, and three respectively), have recently been made available in inexpensive eBook formats by the wonderful folks at RadioArchives.

Part of an aggressive initiative by RadioArchives, mainly known for making available remastered, high-quality CD sets of classic radio shows of all genres, to expand their market into the realm of classic pulp literature, The Spider is just one of several series that are appearing in rapid succession as part of “Will Murray's Pulp Classics” eBook library – see here. All this in addition to marketing pulp reprints and replicas from a number of different publishers.

One great feature of the RA eBooks is that they include the entire contents of the original magazine, including the typical backup short-stories, columns, and letters pages. About the only thing they do not reproduce are the original interior line art illustrations. Well, or the advertisements.  But for one cheap price each (currently – but as long as I've known about them – slashed by a buck from $3.99 to $2.99 apiece), you buy the right to download the eBooks in multiple DRM-free formats, suitable for just about any eReader including Kindle and Nook as well as plain old pdf.

So if you want to read the original tale of the criminal “Justice Party's” fascist state in 1938 New York and the Spider's valiant war against it, for currently less than $10 in total, follow these links: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

Cheers!, and Thanks for reading.

Bye Bye, Baby (The Memoirs of Nathan Heller, #14, 2011)

By Max Allan Collins

I discovered these novels about a decade ago, when I went through an earlier phase of reading “hard crime,” noir, “neopulp” (although I'd not encountered the term), mystery-type fiction. They may even be what drew me into that genre for the next couple of years, I'm not sure at this remove. I was familiar with the name of Max Allan Collins from his stint writing the Batman comic back during the '80s, as well as the fairly recent notoriety of the graphic-novel-become- Academy Award-nominated-film Road to Perdition, and luckily happened to stumble upon the first of his Nathan Heller books newly republished, with the subsequent two in the opening “trilogy” following hot on its heels – True Detective, True Crime, and The Million-Dollar Wound. Those three novels could almost be considered one long story in that they tell a sequential narrative establishing the fundamentals of Nate Heller's “homeworld” of 1930s-1940s Chicago, interweaving his story with a multitude of historical personalities and events.  I've sometimes seen them referred to as “The Frank Nitti Trilogy” in that Heller's relationship with Al Capone's … associate … provides something of an overall unifying arc. I ate them up, and 'round about the summer of 2003 (I think) I felt I grew to know Chicago (which I've never visited except for passing through the train station at the tender age of five or so, as well as flying into O'Hare on my way to a conference in Michigan about a decade and a half ago) like the back of my hand. The themes, style, and setting probably helped set me up for the Dresden Files a few years later, which are told in a similar first-person crime-noir style, largely in the same setting albeit in the present.

The Spider #6: The Citadel of Hell (March 1934)

Screen shot of the ePub format
viewed through iBooks
on an iPhone 4S

By Norvell Page writing as Grant Stockbridge. Originally published in The Spider Magazine, March 1934. Republished by RadioArchives (2012) in the ebook series, “Will Murray's Pulp Classics.”

As I've probably mentioned, I returned early last year (2011) after many years to a genre that I read fairly heavily in during my youth, which corresponded with the waning years of its earlier revival during the 1960s and 1970s, that of the 1930s and '40s pulp heroes. One series that I had only heard of, never read all those years ago, was The Spider: Master of Men! The current pulp heroes' revival is being greatly facilitated by the easy availability of ebook editions, some authorized, some unauthorized. Distinguishing between “authorized” and “unauthorized” can be rather dicey, I gather, because a great deal of pulp fiction has lapsed into the public domain. Such seems to be the case for the first five or so of this series, because I found them readily available in multiple locations around the Internet. I burned through them pretty quickly, pretty much in order – not that it matters that much for The Spider because there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of carry-through of plot elements. As far as I can tell, with only a few minor characters or story elements coming or going into the series as exceptions, an early Spider tale is much like a later one. So when I found the next readily available source for the series to be in the randomly published Pulp Doubles series from Girasol, I started picking those up and reading them in a rather haphazard fashion, and by no means continuously as I'd read the first through the fifth stories.

Then, earlier this year RadioArchives announced the appearance of its ebook editions, complete with series introductions by one of the pre-eminent historians of the pulp genre, Will Murray. I purchased and read a couple, but still at first they were in random sequence. And I have a fair amount of other things I'm also reading, as you know. At some point, however, RA went back to the beginning of the series and started publishing them in order, and filling in the gaps around the ones they'd already released. Finally, in late August or early September, I believe, they announced the “Total Pulp Experience” upgrade to their “Will Murray's Pulp Classics” line, whereby not just the lead novel from each magazine would be included, but also the short stories that usually appeared as back-of-the-book features, along with original editorials and letter columns. All that are missing are the ads and the original interior illustrations. And the process of getting the books onto an ereader device has been streamlined so they are direct downloads from the RA website rather than the previous, rather cumbersome, zip-files containing the ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats together. They are also available directly through the Kindle book store, the iBook store, and the Barnes & Noble book store, in their respective formats.

RadioArchives has been steadily churning “Will Murray's Pulp Classics” out for the past several months, so that at this point virtually all of the legendary Captain Future series by Edmund Hamilton are available, as well as the first couple dozen Operator #5 pulps, a smattering of offerings from other series, all in addition to a couple dozen Spider issues. This link [ here ] should take you to the current titles. All at a very affordable price – about $4 apiece – considering what you would pay for any of these original pulp magazines if you could even find them in readable condition – or the hard copy reprints or facsimiles that are still being published, which range from about $15 all the way up to $35 or $40 apiece. Those are also available through RA, by the way [ see here ]. But for my money, the ebooks are the way I'll be going in the future as I slowly work my way through these great old stories.

Which is a very long introduction to my review of RadioArchives' “Will Murray's Pulp Classics” ebook edition of The Spider Magazine for March 1934, containing the sixth recorded adventure of “The Master of Men” (I still don't know exactly where that subtitle comes from, but was on the covers from the beginning), entitled The Citadel of Hell, written by Norvell Page under the series' pen-name Grant Stockbridge, along with two short stories – “Killer's Knout” by Anson Hatch and “The Standing Corpse” by G. T. Fleming-Roberts. All things being equal, despite the relative lack of any sequential continuity to the series, I would rather read the stories in their original publication order, so the earliest in sequence that I had not read last year seemed like a good place to take the series back up again.

Each issue is fronted with an essay by Will Murray, “Meet the Spider!,” offering a brief introduction to the character, his place in the history of pulp heroes, and his significance in a wider context, including as part of Stan Lee's inspiration for the Amazing Spider-Man. This essay is a series introduction, not an issue introduction, being the same from issue to issue, but does make for a good entry for someone picking up any of the stories at random for their first exposure to the character.

The Spider in The Citadel of Hell, by “Grant Stockbridge”

Fire bombers target New York City's food supply, leading to famine and starvation. To what end beyond creating chaos and a monopoly that they control I'm not sure, but you don't necessarily read the adventures of the Spider for rational, well-thought-out villainous plans. You read them for the driving, outrageous, over-the-top narrative that renders such trivial details of little concern, only occurring to the reader afterward. It makes for a typically frenetic tale that is quite hard to put down, but even harder to abstract.

Here is a very poor attempt. The Food Destroyers' foul plot progresses far along as they proceed virtually unopposed when the Spider is wounded and almost killed in a confrontation with law enforcement, managing only with nail-biting difficulty to reach safe haven with his scientific guru Dr Brownlee where he spends weeks convalescing. That's something I've noticed in several of the stories I've read, that the narrative seems to encompass well more than the month that separated the publication of the pulp magazine issues. I suspect that if you built a comprehensive time line based on the internal evidence of the passage of time as given in the stories themselves you would end up with the Spider's career spanning quite a bit more than the ten or so years that the magazine was in publication, from 1933 to 1943. But thinking too hard about that is as unprofitable as considering how many scores, hundreds, or even thousands of New Yorkers met their dooms in typical issues, as well as the wholesale destruction of large parts of the city including well-known landmarks, that frequently occurred. In the end, all would apparently be well and – more importantly – reset to the status quo ante for the next adventure to wreak similar havoc.

In any case, Police Commissioner Stanley Kirkpatrick comes closer than ever, here just half a dozen episodes into the hundred-plus adventures, to proving that his good friend Richard Wentworth is indeed the Spider whom he is sworn to bring to justice. “Kirk” nevertheless (as always) recognizes the nobility and good that the outlaw accomplishes, and – not for the first nor the last time – essentially lets him go in the end. In this story, however, the Spider is hounded by a new (I believe) antagonist among New York's law enforcement officials, District Attorney Glastonbury, who keeps Dick's fiancée and accomplice Nita Van Sloan off-stage for most of this story, in jail and accused of being the Spider's henchwoman. There is more of a sense than I've ever gotten from earlier or later stories that Dick is a hunted fugitive, which culminates in a preliminary hearing where he outwits the DA and would seem to make a bitter enemy of him. Is Glastonbury a recurring character? – I don't remember him from earlier adventures, but it's been a year and a half or more since I read them, nor do I recall him from the scattering of later stories that I've read.

An unusual twist in the usually formulaic stories is that a girl who comes into and out of the narrative, who believes that the Spider murdered her boy friend at the beginning of the issue, does not as I expected eventually realize the hero's innocence, become his ally, and end up reunited with her miraculously still-living beau. No, the boy friend is well and truly dead, and she is herself ultimately killed in the final confrontation with the evil mastermind in the story's climax, which sees the girl and the mastermind – who really killed her lover, of course – plunging to their deaths together as a fiery comet from the dirigible mast of the Empire State Building. It's quite a memorable scene.

According to the short summary of the tale given at The Spider Returns website, one notable aspect of this story is that this is the first time that the Spider, a master of disguise among his many other talents, uses the identity of the old violinist Tito Caliepi to pass unrestricted here, there, and yonder while the Spider and his true identity of Dick Wentworth remain in hiding.

“Killer's Knout” by Anson Hatch

Whether the protagonists of this and the other short story are one-time characters or part of back-up series of short stories that appeared in multiple issues, I don't know at this time. All I know is that they are all new to me. Frankly, there's not a whole lot to recommend – or distinguish – either story. They seem to be typical albeit very short examples of the same brand of bloody pulp heroic adventure as marked the magazine's lead feature.

Basically, in “Killer's Knout,” the hero, criminologist Oliver Hazard, and his police ally Inspector Brunt, have been working to thwart an evil figure known only as “Number One,” who has been mercilessly working his way through wholesale torture and bloodshed to control of the city. They are presented with a new clue – a ruined victim of Number One's torture who is delivered to Brunt, along with the message that Hazard and Brunt “shall be as he is.” When Brunt is shortly thereafter kidnapped, Hazard desperately searches for him, finding him just in time even as the police inspector is being hideously tortured – by a “friend” of Hazard's whom the criminologist had long suspected of being the true identity of “Number One.” Part of his reasoning demonstrates a virulent example of overt 1930s racism: “I suspect Number One [to be] of Asiatic origins for several reasons. His insatiable thirst for personal power, for one thing. And then, his methods of revenge are carried out with refinements of cruelty of which an Occidental would hardly dream.” The “friend” is indeed a mysterious “Mongoloid” Russian, Basil Marakoff – as Hazard proclaims, “There are other Oriental nations than the Chinese.” And the knout is a Russian implement of torture, a form of whip that could inflict a degree of flogging that could result in death, that Marakoff had been so brazen as to boast of to Hazard. Of course, Hazard manages to defeat Marakoff and save Brunt.

“The Standing Corpse” by G. T. Fleming-Roberts

On the verge of committing suicide by casting himself from a bridge, newly flat broke millionnaire wastrel Nick Bower is interrupted in his intention when he finds a corpse standing against the railing – a corpse from which the brain has been removed. Through a series of circumstances thereafter, Bower ends up confronting and thwarting the Brain Thief – a stereotypical mad scientist who believes the murders he is perpetrating are for the greater good of mankind. He means to avert the human race going collectively insane by studying the brains of healthy people – that he must harvest for himself: “While other scientists seek to fathom the mystery of insanity by examining the brains of ordinary cadavers, they forget that men who insist on becoming cadavers are not men after which to pattern a race. Only by studying the brains of the normal people can we hope to breed a normal race! That is why I, the greatest brain specialist in the world, shall continue my 'mad scheme' of obtaining perfect specimens of the human brain!” You can't beat logic like that! In any case, Bower prevents him from continuing his "mad scheme," and one senses that in so doing the destitute millionaire finds the will to live despite the loss of his riches.

“The Web – A Department”

The issue closed with what seems to have been a place-holder for a letter column, announcing that more and more letters are coming in praising the series and its hero, but even moreso seems to have had as its purpose flogging a new product being offered by Popular Publications, a SPIDER ring “of non-tarnishable white metal, with an inlaid spider of red enamel against a black enamel field,” purchase of which gains membership in the SPIDER LEAGUE FOR CRIME PREVENTION, an organization “devoted solely and exclusively to law-enforcement and the suppression of crime.” Available by returning the enrollment page printed in the original magazine along with a paltry 25 cents. Wow! I bet they cost more now! If you can find them!

Cheers! – and Thanks for reading!

Wayne of Gotham (2012)

By Tracy Hickman

This is a very difficult prose novel to write about. I don't know if ultimately I will decide I liked it or loathed it. I have very mixed feelings about it. I had been looking forward to it ever since I'd seen it announced, and rather than avail myself of the cheaper SFBC edition as I usually do these kinds of things, or even wait until a cheaper paperback edition appeared, I ended up paying virtually full cover price – a whopping $26.99 (I find hardcover prose book prices even harder to swallow, oddly enough, than graphic novel prices in which you objectively get far less story. But I also recognize that there are significantly different economic realities underlying the two genres) less a membership discount at Books-a-Million. But then I found it a very hard book to get through. In fact, I put it aside a couple of times for rather lengthy periods and ended up being almost six weeks from start to finish. And then have let it sit for some time before deciding I have to write something and get it off my back. So here it is – most likely even more than typically rambling.

The overall plot is a parallel story of Bruce Wayne in the present discovering horrible things about his own, his parents', and Gotham City's past with Thomas Wayne in the past participating in a rather dubious secret program of medical experimentation, “Project Elysium,” with the aim of reforming criminals into model citizens via behavioral engineering by means of viral-borne DNA modification that goes grotesquely wrong and ultimately results in his own and his wife's deaths and the creation of the Batman. Of course, those long-buried events are now having repercussions in the present leading Batman to confront the reality of a father who was far less than the paragon he always believed him to be. And along the way Martha Wayne doesn't come off much better. I'm conflicted in how to feel about this. To a real degree it cheapens the ideal for which Batman has always fought, but the reality is that he only saw his parents through the eyes of a child who witnessed the center of his life ripped away from him in a moment of violence and to believe that his memories of perfection were but an idealization is reasonable. But for almost three hundred pages this book rubs the reader's nose in it, from a very off-putting opening with a repulsive depiction of the abuse that young Thomas suffered at the hands of his own father to the revelation that in a real sense Thomas Wayne contracted his own murder!

And it's carried off very inconsistently. On the “cool” side, Hickman very effectively depicts Batman's technology, his ever-evolving equipment and constant upgrades, and at first glance seems to use a lot of canon in this tale of an aging Batman who is now feeling the effects of a lifetime of crime-fighting. At first glance it seems very much a post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint continuity, perhaps set in the future. The “present” is not specified, although 9/11 is more than a decade in the past (p. 31). Seemingly hard dates are established for the past sequences, but there is considerable inconsistency – Thomas Wayne is said to have been born on 26 November 1935 (p. 293), but in the second paragraph of the prologue, set on 21 September 1953, reference is made to “his fifteen years of life” (p. 1); the murders of Thomas and Martha Wayne are dated at 15 August 1971 (pp. 292-293) and 26 June 1974 (pp. 43-44). (Along the same lines of sloppy editing, I noticed several instances of bad word usage, although I only jotted a reference to one – p. 214, “site” for “sight.”) Regardless, Bruce's own birth is placed in 1963, which would necessarily put him in the range of fiftyish years of age at the unspecified “present” date.

There is considerable use of the rich Batman mythology with regard to the Rogues Gallery – a wide range of villains appear or are referred to in the course of this story – but there is nary a mention of any of Batman's many allies and proteges, under either their “civilian” or heroic identities. The closest is Bruce's spur-of-the-moment use of the name “Gerald Grayson” when he needs a quick alias. He is truly alone here. The geography of Gotham City is, as far as I can tell, pretty consistent with the map established around the time of No Man's Land – although I don't think that cataclysmic story was ever referenced – with frequent mention of the various streets, avenues, parks, and so forth named after the many creators of the Batman mythos over the past seventy years such as has been common, I think, in the past decade's comic stories (e.g., Moldoff Avenue, Robinson Park, Wayne Manor is in Burnley just across the river to the north of the island on which is built Gotham City, and so forth). So what you have here is a mixture of what seems very familiar but distorted so that it's almost unrecognizable as if seen through in a funhouse mirror, especially the relationship between Bruce and Alfred as a result of the latter's vigorous efforts to maintain a cover-up that was begun by his father to keep knowledge of Thomas Wayne's actions secret from the world and most importantly from his son. And we are asked to believe that it was so effective that Batman knew nothing of a period of intense chaos in Gotham City that resulted from those same actions – a reign of terror on the underworld carried out by a group of mutant super-humans called “The Apocalypse” – the misbegotten progeny of Project Elysium.

Sitting down and trying to write something about this book has not helped me to come to my own consensus, either, and I'm ready to give up on it. The reviewers on Amazon.com seem to be as a whole conflicted as well. Probably the best review I've found of it is by one Eric Garneau at The Mind Hut and I might as well refer you there and be done with it. It's not a book I can recommend.

Thanks for reading.

The Bronze Battlefield (2005)

By Mark and Karen Eidemiller (Bronze Saga #5)

This is another gripping, high-octane action thriller in the “Christian Adventures of Doc Savage,” available as a free download here. This time, briefly, a villain from a previous adventure comes back with a vengeance, carrying out a hostile takeover of Pat Savage's island base, which she has transformed into a haven for the world's abandoned and orphaned children.  "Clark's" latter-day band of brothers (and sisters) springs into action to save the day.  The real hero of the piece is, however, not the man of bronze himself, but our erstwhile narrator.  We have, once again, real character progression among our heroes, including a bit of a moral lapse due to diminished judgment. The book ends with a promise of a major life change for Clark Savage, Jr.  

I have described my reactions to this unique "Christian-pulp mash-up" in general in previous posts (most recently here). Let me just add that an element of realism is present in this volume that actually had me worried because it could have gone unrealistically a totally different direction. If, in the end, the primary villain of this piece had been shown to undergo a radical conversion, I would have doubtless protested. Certainly God's grace can work in the most unexpected ways, and sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction, but as a fictional character this guy was built up so thoroughly bad that I don't think there was any way to realistically portray him as being redeemed in the end, and the Eidemillers did not even try to pull that. He died without ever recognizing or accepting God's saving grace. His cohort (who ultimately kills him just before herself dying of wounds he inflicted) is played a bit more ambiguously, however, although we are meant to be left with the impression that she does see the light in the last fading instants of her life.  

One interesting development:  Our main (though not exclusive) narrator (and the varying viewpoint is, I think, sometimes a bit of a distraction and not generally considered a good narrative technique, but hey, I'm not a lit-critter so what do I know) along the way gains a new and amazingly "pulpish" ability that I did not see coming in this hitherto pretty down-to-earth series.  Applying "down-to-earth" to Doc Savage may seem odd at first glance, but by it I mean that there's so far not been anything too far outside the realms of real-world plausibility in the adventures, as there generally were not in the 1930s-40s originals (reading them properly, as products of their times).  I guess I should have known the envelope would be pushed in this latter-day series, considering I know that a subsequent adventure will incorporate in some fashion - I'm not certain exactly how as yet - the adventures of a certain man of steel....  This time, its handled pretty well, I think - this reader just accepted and went with it.

Cheers!

Girasol Pulp Doubles #2(b), The Spider: Claws of the Golden Dragon (2007)

Original pulp magazine cover

By Grant Stockbridge (Norvell Page), originally published in The Spider #64 (January 1939)

This is the latest in publication of any of the Spider stories that I have read, but frankly not much seems to have been different after five years and fifty issues. Still filled with violence, outlandish threats, and nail-biting danger for Dick Wentworth, Nita van Sloan, and company. Don't mess with a winning formula!

From the frontispiece of the story: “It was a scarlet scorpion that reached Richard Wentworth, warning him that the Far East had crept for from its Chinatown lair to raid New York! Victims were dying with a blood orchid in their hearts, and the Dragon screamed! With the police helpless, and Manhattan paralyzed, only Wentworth, in the Spider's somber guise, could hope to battle this Prince of Darkness who was looting a metropolis to found his evil Empire!” To which I would add some really effective descriptions of opium addicted denizens of New York running wild, including a description of a little boy beating his playmate to death. This is not for the faint of heart! But the Spider always saves the day, although he remains on the run, hunted by the authorities and feared by the people whom he protects.

Cheers!

Perry Rhodan #12, The Rebels of Tuglan (1972)

By Clark Darlton.

See my full write-up on my other blog, linked at right.

The Abduction of Amy Roberts (2003) (The Bronze Saga #4)

By Mark and Karen Eidemiller

After the somewhat more sedate offering with #3, The Bronze Avengers, the action ratchets back up to 11. Set in the days after 9-11, The Abduction of Amy Roberts finds the adoptive, but no less electronically gifted, daughter of Long Tom Roberts kidnapped by an African terrorist to construct the final intricate mechanism to implement a plot which will, to paraphrase Doc (called “Clark” in this series), “make 9-11 look like a cakewalk.” Clark and his new band of brothers launch a rescue mission that takes them to “The Land of Long Juju” (one of the original Doc Savage pulp novels that I don't believe I've actually read) in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Along the way they find an ally in one Hugo Danner (Philip Wylie's The Gladiator), who has survived as tough and strong as ever (think the original 1938 Superman) and who has also become a Christian. It's a rousing tale of high-tech neopulp adventure, with the Eidemillers' own unique take. I've already mentioned in a previous entry the one drawback to this series of “Christian Adventures of Doc Savage”; no need to belabor it here, other than to assure the reader that it doesn't detract from the overall story one bit.

But since this is the first of the Bronze Saga stories that I've given a full entry to, and it's taking up midstream so to speak, I do want to give at least a blurb about the previous stories to bring us up to speed. The first of the novels was:

Bronze Refined as Silver – establishes the basic premise of this series, telling how the 1930s-40s adventurer and crime-fighter Doc Savage woke from fifty years of suspended animation into a world that was not his own. He was found and “saved” by a street preacher named Perry Liston. They set out to find those members of his previous band of adventurers who are still living – Monk, Long Tom, Johnny, and Renny – as well as their various descendants, putting together (as I put it above) a latter-day band of brothers. They also encounter Doc's beautiful cousin Pat Savage – who has unfortunately “turned to the dark side.” Conflict with Pat, who blames Doc for everything bad that happened to her after he disappeared, helps set up the second story:

More Precious Than Gold – takes us back to the Valley of the Vanished in Hidalgo, where we even meet again, albeit all to briefly, Princess (now Queen) Monja. (Notice how I'm trying not to give away too many spoilers? These stories are well worth reading for yourself.)

Bronze Avengers – I referred to it above as more “sedate.” Well, that's if you can call a major earthquake and its aftermath “sedate”! In the course of this story Doc's new circle of supporters grows larger, and he even discovers that his legacy from the 1930s and 1940s, seemingly sullied by the discovery of what he had been doing at the “Crime College” in upstate New York shortly after he disappeared (his brain surgeries on criminals to transform them into productive and peaceful members of society was considered a gross violation of their civil and human rights), has nonetheless survived in an unexpected way.

Which brings us to The Abduction of Amy Roberts.

Throughout this series the spiritual life and transformation of the characters is a major theme – redemption. It's generally very well written. Sometimes the lack of professional editing does let the occasional grammatic or stylistic faux pas slip through, and I'm not sure a “real” publisher would allow the Eidemillers to so self-indulgently write themselves into the stories as much as they do. But these - as well as the sometimes overbearing evangelical tone - are ultimately minor things.  And the fact is that I find myself more in tune with the Eidemillers' world-view that they are trying to get across than not.  I understand where they're coming from.  And so I highly recommend these e-books as a rather offbeat but engaging series of Christian fiction. I'm finding myself tearing right through them. I started the first on Good Friday and have read through about one a week since then.

By the way, I have to say a couple of words about the covers that I have pictured above. The images are taken from the Eidemillers' website, which has a gallery of pictures to go with the Bronze Saga. They are photoshopped in the style of the old 1960s series of Bantam reprints of Doc Savage pulps which established for all time thereafter the iconic image of Doc Savage as illustrated by James Bama. Pretty clever work - although I didn't picture Kananga as Idi Amin!

Cheers!