MarkHodderAuthor

I just read Fox 3: SIEGE (aka SAVAGE SIEGE) by Adam Hardy (1973). More nautical, Napoleonic action featuring the mean, cunning, and vicious George Abercrombie Fox . . . and this one was FANTASTIC! The author was, in fact, the phenomenally prolific Kenneth Bulmer, one of the grand masters of 1970s "churn it out" trash. It feels amazing, therefore, to discover how nuanced and interesting a character he gave us in Fox. Far from a dashing hero, here we have an ugly little man full of ambition and resentment; an insecure, grim, dark, and lonely man, who suffers from anxiety and, when under stress, loses his eyesight. Yet, you can't help but root for him! This novel finds him at the famous siege of Acre, and we're thrown with him into a marvellously visceral battle written in a way that engages all your senses. It feels like you're there, and it's thrilling and horrifying and simply brilliant. This slim little, forgotten, "throwaway" paperback is an absolute gem! Loved it!

I have just read for the #MyNovelLife challenge: ICE STATION by Matthew Reilly (1998, when I was 36). Matthew Reilly is an Australian author born in 1974. He takes as his cue the type of men's action novel that was popular at the time of his birth but injects a much more pulpy vibe. This is my second foray into his work, the first being AREA 7 (2001), which is book two in this series, featuring his hero, Shane Schofield (ICE STATION is the first). The action starts on page one and doesn't let up for a minute. It is utterly implausible, frequently laugh out loud silly, riddled with errors, and so defies logic that I can only compare it to the old Looney Tunes "Road Runner" cartoons. There is very little else except action . . . just one thing after another, like a zero budget Steven Segal movie, all spectacle and absolutely no substance. In this one, Schofield and his team are called to an isolated station in Antarctica, located above a large cave system in which an alien vessel has been discovered. The French military arrive, and want the ship so badly they go to war with Schofield & co. The battle takes up the first third of the book. Then, the British arrive and prove equally aggressive. It turns out that America, Schofield's own nation, is also trying to kill him. Basically, our hero faces impossible odds, but of course shoots better than everyone else and has a mountainous amount of good luck on his side. It's fun, certainly, but for me, it's simply too eye-rollingly dumb, and I don't think I'll be reading this author again.

I just finished for my #RetroReads project (revisiting novels I owned and/or read during my youth): HOSPITAL STATION by James White (1962). I'm currently working my way through all of James White's work. An underrated Irish SF writer, active mainly in the 1960s and 70s, he is in danger of being forgotten, which would be a terrible shame, as he's very entertaining. HOSPITAL STATION, from the year of my birth, is the first of his Sector General series, for which he is best known. It is comprised of five interlinked short stories, all set on a huge hospital space station, which serves intergalactic travellers. The joy of this series is in the weird and wonderful aliens that arrive at the station for treatment. White's imagination soars as he describes lumbering behemoths, delicate insectoids, shape changers, and even a telepathic creature that resembles a dried date. In addition to this, he comes up with fascinatingly bizarre ailments for his main protagonist—Doctor Conway—to investigate and cure. It occasionally feels almost Sherlock Holmes-like. A lot of fun. I'm intrigued to see how White develops the idea over the course of the fourteen-book series. It feels like he created an entire sub-genre. Extra-terrestrial medical SF!

I just finished for my #RetroReads project (revisiting novels I owned and/or read during my youth): THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL by Baroness Orczy (1905). This is the first of a 10-book series (plus four associated volumes) that I absolutely adored in my boyhood (alongside Russell Thorndike's somewhat similar DOCTOR SYN series). THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL established many of the superhero conventions: a daring adventurer who hides his identity behind a meek and ineffectual alter ego, a team of sidekicks, and a calling card left after each mission. Set during the Reign of Terror in France, the story features the foppish Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy Englishman who secretly operates as the titular hero, employing his mastery of the sword and talent for disguise to rescue aristocrats from the guillotine. The novel is written in an engagingly frivolous style, the mannered dialogue replete with exclamations such as “La!” and “Zooks!” and “Odd’s fish!” and for the most part has Sir Percy's wife as the main protagonist, following her as she is tricked into baiting a trap for the Pimpernel, then races to warn him while coming to realise that the famed hero is, in fact, her own husband. There is an unfortunate Jewish stereotype in the novel, which you have to expect when you read material written prior to the 1960s, but despite that unpleasantness, this is an excellent old-style adventure yarn and I thoroughly enjoyed paying it another visit.

I just buddy-read with @criminolly: GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell (1936). This historical romance, one of the most popular and famous American novels of all time, is the most horribly racist novel I have ever read. It's is a plantation novel that celebrates a revisionist version of the antebellum Southern United States. The history here paints a false picture in which slaves are happy, docile, and well treated. Their portrayal is risible, and on more than one occasion they are compared to apes. The author at no point decries slavery. Then there's the principal protagonists, Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler. They are horrible, horrible people. I'll admit, for much of the novel they are fascinating, and it was thoroughly engrossing to follow Scarlett as she navigated her way through the devastating civil war (the war section of the novel is by far the best part) but by the three-quarter mark, their meanness became tiresome and the novel descended into melodramatic soap opera. It's well written, there is breathtaking brutality, and plenty of moments that had me thinking I was, perhaps, reading a great novel . . . but by the end it was clear, GONE WITH THE WIND is simply a big book of bigotry. It has the stench of Trump's MAGA about it. I can't think of any other novel I've hated so much. After finishing it, I threw it in the trash.

I just read for #JuneOnTheRange: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (The Man With No Name 3) by Joe Millard (1967). The third, last, and best of the movie novelisations. The writing quality of these books has improved with every volume (mind you, the movies got better, too), but the real test will come with the subsequent instalments, as after this, the series continues with five original stories. It’s no surprise to find that Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach leap off these pages. Impossible not to see them in your mind’s eye. And to be honest, there isn’t much point in reading the novelisations when the movies are readily available . . . unless, like me, you do so in preparation for wherever the Man With No Name goes next.

I just read (finally!) for #JuneOnTheRange: LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry (1985). Every bit of acclaim received by this epic, heartfelt, and compelling western is thoroughly deserved. It is an absolute masterpiece. Sweeping in scope, it follows a large cast of characters, many of whom you will come to love by the end of the book, though you won’t always like them. They are an ornery crowd! They don’t act wisely. They don’t communicate well. They don’t understand what they are getting themselves into. Many of the cowboys are exactly that—boys—and it’s fascinating and frequently painful to witness how the harsh, pitiless environment gets into them and hardens them into men. There is a great deal of pain and a lot of deaths. The novel is more about loss and how it’s dealt with than than it is about gain, and it gets under your skin . . . a book that you don’t just read, but which you feel. At almost a thousand pages, that’s a lot of feeling, but the pages fly by, and even though I’ve finished turning them, I’m pretty certain the story and characters will stay with me for a long time.

I just read THE EXPANSION PROJECT by Ben Pester (2025). This is one of those amazing but purposefully baffling novels, perhaps a modern equivalent of the kind of weirdness that Barry Malzberg wrote during the 70s. It tells the story (or does it?) of Tom Crowley, who takes his daughter to a “bring your daughter to work day” at Capmeadow, a huge business complex, where he is employed as a content creator. Then she disappears . . . except, was she even there in the first place? No one can confirm having seen her. She doesn’t appear on any CCTV records. And Tom is a VERY unreliable narrator. But guess what . . . so is everyone else. And while various characters (are they all actually people?) give their accounts, Capmeadow rapidly expands. Offices, hotels, shops, and leisure centres spring into being. Employees are present but feel themselves to be at one and the same time elsewhere. Reality bends and shifts, memories prove unreliable. They might not be memories at all. For any reader who has ever worked in a large corporation, the “HR speak” will feel horrifically familiar. All the dehumanising aspects are present, such as being addressed almost as if you are human while it being patently obvious that you are actually regarded as nothing but a replaceable resource. The author pushes it into surrealistic extremes. The book is dizzying and disorientating, and at its end, I wasn’t certain what I had just read . . . but I was damned glad to have read it! I recommend this one, but if you require a linear plot, it’s probably not for you.

My Twelve@Random novel for June (each month I read a book selected from my Calibre catalogue by a random number generator) was A RAFT OF SWORDS by Duncan Kyle (1973). Kyle was a British thriller writer of the Alistair MacLean era, and seems all but forgotten, which is a shame, as his books are very good. I’m currently working my way through them all, so this random pick was a happy coincidence. It’s the sixth I’ve read of the author’s fifteen novels. A cold war story, it concerns an underwater nuclear missile launch platform situated off the coast of Vancouver, abandoned by the Soviets some years ago after becoming obsolete. With an international peace conference due in the Canadian city, the KGB has discovered that the platform is not only still functional but also armed with six missiles. A mission is launched to secretly dismantle and remove the weapon. The plot follows the Soviets as they hijack a midget submarine (rare, cutting edge tech when the novel was written) and abduct a British man who can operate it. Meanwhile, British and American intelligence agencies gradually become aware that something strange is going on, and endeavour to find out what. The way that multiple characters piece together the clues is gripping, and the entire book entertaining. My only issue is that the stakes don’t seem very high. After all, the Soviets are removing the missiles, not installing them, and if discovery threatens the conference, then how can the reader cheer for the intelligence agencies? Nevertheless, a good read.

I just finished for my #RetroReads project (revisiting novels I owned and/or read during my youth): THE QUIET PLACE by Richard Maynard (1987). I had completely forgotten this one until @Criminolly mentioned it during his Library of Forgotten Books project, at which point I recalled really enjoying it near 40 years ago. I immediately located and purchased a copy. It tells of seven astronauts who, due to space/time physics, return to Earth thousands of years after their departure. They find that civilisation has collapsed, and the human race is much reduced and regressed to the stone-age. Yet, there are no signs of a holocaust or even of war. The story of how they struggle to survive while investigating the mystery is gripping, and the losses they suffer really strike at the heart. The narrator occasionally hints at greater tragedies to come, and this keeps the tension simmering throughout. Where the novel really excels, though, is in its atmosphere. The haunting descriptions of decaying, empty, and overgrown cities are fantastic. I cannot think of any other post-apocalyptic novel that comes close to matching the overwhelming silence and dilapidation, aside from EARTH ABIDES by George R. Stewart (1949). The difference is that where the latter is set in the USA, THE QUIET PLACE has France and southern England as its arena, and includes visits to the decayed remains of cities and towns in which I have actually lived. The story’s end is poignant, tremendously sad, and it’s easy to see why it made such an impression on me all those years ago. I’m surprised I ever forgot this lost classic. Fantastic to have rediscovered it!

I just read LONE WOLF #3: BOSTON AVENGER by Mike Barry (Barry M. Malzberg) (1973). What Malzberg does in these Lone Wolf books, which in my opinion raises them far above the Executioner series, is to give believable back stories to the victims of his vigilante. He makes them human. Sure, they are big in the illegal drugs trade, but they come across as businessmen. They have families. They feel the pressure of the job. Some have redeeming qualities. As a reader, you never root for them, but you can at least understand them, and when they know Burt Wulff is coming for them, you might even feel a dash of sympathy. By contrast, Wulff himself just gets crazier and crazier. By the fifth chapter of this, the third of the fourteen novels, it’s irrefutably evident that he’s insane. And it’s wonderful. With Mack Bolan, you always know what he’s going to do next, because it’s basically the same thing every time, but Burt Wulff is too deranged to be predictable. You see that early on in this one when he lobs a grenade into a crowd of funeral-goers. I mean, wow! It’s interesting that he plainly knows he’s losing control and must struggle to conquer not just his opponents, but more crucially, himself. As ever, Malzberg’s frenzied writing imbues proceedings with brilliantly dark, nihilistic energy. It’s turned up to full in this action-packed volume, and I love it! This is a great series!

I have just read for the #MyNovelLife challenge: AREA 51 by Robert Doherty (1997, when I was 35). Years ago, I read and really enjoyed W. A. Harbinson’s five-book PROJEKT SAUCER series, and have ever since eyed-up Doherty’s AREA 51 series as one that might scratch the same itch. It does . . . to some extent. An alien artefact recovered from the Great Pyramid? Check! A journalist investigating strange goings-on at Area 51? Check! Conspiracies and ancient civilisations? Check! Warring alien races? Check! The secret of lost Atlantis? Check! Yes, it’s all packed in and it’s all very silly, dragging in a lot of the pseudo-science that I always associate with the 1970s (the era of Erich von Daniken, Lobsang Rampa, etc) but which is probably even more pervasive today. The problem is that it feels a bit forced. The whys and wherefores of the plot are so hokey that I frequently found myself rolling my eyes. It’s fun, but it’s not memorable fun . . . and I'm left with no urgent need to continue with the series.

I just read 57th Precinct #12: THE HECKLER by Ed McBain (1960). This one is brilliant. The story concerns an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist in the planning, and the boys of the 57th investigating diverse matters, including heckling telephone calls made to various people, that gradually come together to point toward the imminent crime. For the first two thirds of the novel, it’s all pretty light-hearted, and it’s great fun to hang out with the lads again, witnessing them going about their business. However, an event of startling brutality then occurs, one of our favourites being the victim, and the book suddenly gets a lot darker, and the stakes much higher. The finale is truly gripping, dramatic, and very significant in terms of the precinct and the surrounding city. This far into the series, it seems like game changers come along every now and then. This is one of them. It introduces the Deaf Man, a master crook, who will appear in five further novels. Outstanding!

I just read DOCTOR WHO AND THE REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN by Terrance Dicks (1976). This is the last of my visits to the classic Cybermen stories. On TV, their next appearance was in EARTHSHOCK, in 1982, by which time they had a new look which I really didn’t like, and my interest in Doctor Who had anyway waned to the point where I rarely watched it. REVENGE is a fairly straight novelisation, which changes only a few insignificant details, but the plot is pretty good, and the advantage of reading it rather than watching it is that you don’t have to suffer the god-awful, budget-starved sets and SFX. That said, for me, the best Target books are the ones which, in my early teens, allowed me to experience the Doctor Who stories I had never seen (I was born one year after the show made its debut). This one, by contrast, features the fourth Doctor, all of whose episodes I remember very clearly, so it lacks the mystique. I shall take a rest from Doctor Who for now, but at some future point, I may revisit some of the Target versions of those early stories.

I just read HERNE THE HUNTER 4: SHADOW OF THE VULTURE by John J. McLaglen (1977). Fabulous Corgi cover! Having killed all the men responsible for his wife’s death, Herne heads toward San Francisco to get rid of his last enemy, the father of one of them, who has been sending men after him. One the way, Herne loses all his money to a gambler, and finds himself penniless in a dead end town. Here, he is commissioned by the bank manager to evict a family from their small ranch. Herne does the job, demonstrating his heartlessness. He then catches up with the gambler, whom he likes despite his losses, and protects him against a vengeful father and son. Finally, he reaches ’Frisco and completes his mission. This novel is little more than three incidents strung together, each of them showing Herne in a much worse light than the earlier books in the series. There’s a lot of violence, yet, of the various “Piccadilly Westerns”, Herne is considered to be fairly mild. I’m invested in the character, and will continue with this series, but I think it’s time I explored a more extreme example of the genre. Maybe Edge or Breed next!

I just read OSS 117 vol. 11: PIÈGE DANS LA NUIT (Trap In The Night) by Jean Bruce (1951). Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath is sent to Hong Kong to investigate the illegal weapons trade. A dealer, John Worth, is abducted by a Chinese General, as is his sister-in-law, Joyce, who has been mistaken for his wife. From this act, OSS 117 follows a twisty trail that leads to an agent of Chairman Mao. While entertaining, with plenty of deceits and double-crosses (perhaps too many), this novel suffers from a dearth of action, and feels like a minor entry in the long running series. All the female characters are treated abysmally, too, which doesn’t help. If this had been my introduction to OSS 117, I wouldn’t have read any of the others. I’m glad I know that Jean Bruce did much better!

I just finished for my #RetroReads project (revisiting novels I owned and/or read during my youth): CLONE by Richard Cowper (1972). This is an entertaining, funny, and touching novel about Alvin, a not very clever clone, who sets out to find his four “brothers” (fellow clones). The story takes place in 2072, a time when chimpanzees have been bred to human-level intelligence, the world’s population is tightly controlled, and lives are eminently disposable. When the four clones finally meet, they become a great deal more than themselves, and suddenly humanity is faced with a very different future. Written in a brisk, bright and breezy style, CLONE enchanted me back in the day, and has done so all over again. And hurrah for that fantastic Pan cover with art by Ian Pollock. How I wish publishers still cared that much about how their books look!