MarkHodderAuthor

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!

My Twelve@Random novel for May (each month I read a book selected from my Calibre catalogue by a random number generator) was THE SWARM by Andy Marino (2024). The story follows several characters—a divorced couple, both private detectives, investigating the case of a missing teenage girl; a policewoman and her partner, hunting a serial killer; a millionaire tech bro; and a teacher of forensic entomology. All are caught up in a terrifying phenomenon, the emergence of billions upon billions of aggressive cicadas. The descriptions of this overwhelming, swarming mass are incredibly effective, and the way society comes to a grinding halt, totally convincing. But these aren’t ordinary insects—like Ridley Scott’s ALIEN, the females are driven to implant their eggs in host animals (humans), which then hatch and burst out in the form of cat-sized, super intelligent cicadas. The horrors grow steadily, various plot strands gradually come together, and by the final chapters, the story becomes wonderfully post-apocalyptic. It’s a satisfying read, and one that I recommend, but it isn’t perfect. While the characters are great and the imagery amazing, at 500 pages, I felt it was too long for its own good. There are Stephen King-style indulgences (in fact, parts of this novel made me think of THE STAND): unnecessary plot elements, including a major one that clogs rather than forwards the story; digressions; and too much dwelling on character-related matters that didn’t need any further emphasis. Slimmed down, this could be brilliant. As it is, it’s very good.

I just read ORACLE OF THE THOUSAND HANDS by Barry M. Malzberg (1968). This early Malzberg novel is the “sexual biography” of D’Arcy, as recounted to the inmate of an insane asylum. D’Arcy is the “ultimate heterosexual,” but as in all Malzberg novels, sex is an awkward and joyless experience, and D’Arcy is much more comfortable with dirty magazines and his right hand than he is with actual women. As he gives an account of his many conquests, he grows increasingly irritated with his biographer, as does the staff at the institution. Gradually, over the course of the short novel, it becomes clear that much more is going on than meets the eye … but what, exactly? With its two unreliable narrators, shifting perspectives, and a big reveal implied but never enacted, this is written in Malzberg’s uniquely frenzied style, which makes it entertaining, confusing, challenging, and thoroughly worthwhile.

I just read THE COBRA EVENT by Richard Preston (1998) This was the author’s first novel. It followed his non-fiction book, THE HOT ZONE (1994), and uses that book’s exploration of biological weapons as the basis for a horrific but thankfully fictional account of a germ warfare-style terrorist attack on New York. The story follows Dr. Alice Austen, a New York medical pathologist, as she investigates fatalities caused by an unknown biological agent, which causes its victims eat their own flesh. The tension builds gradually but relentlessly, leading to some seriously graphic and disgusting scenes. Autopsies are described in visceral detail. The smells. The sounds. The state of decaying corpses. If you are at all squeamish, you’ll not make it through those pages. Then there are the deaths, which include a man slicing through his own scalp then ripping off his face. Not for the faint hearted! If you can stand it, the book is entertaining and terrifying, but it isn’t perfect. It suffers from a common fault in debut novels (especially those by authors of non-fiction) in that it is terribly over-written, with descriptions that feel excessive and frequently unnecessary, and absolutely massive info-dumps that slow the pace almost to a stop. The middle section of the novel, in particular, was a frustrating slog. With aggressive editing, this could have been an incredible short and sharp novel. Instead, it’s a good but virus-ridden bloat.

I just read FLASHPOINT FOR TREASON by Desmond Reid (Brian McArdle, with revisions by George Paul Mann) THE SEXTON BLAKE LIBRARY issue 379, 1957. This is a perfect example of the post-1956 Sexton Blakes. A straightforward plot, high stakes, and loads of action. It features the penultimate appearance of Doctor Huxton Rymer, one of the “master crooks,” who made his debut in 1913 and featured in 75 Blake stories plus a number of solo adventures. Here, he’s partnered up with a gangster to steal secrets from the Woomera Rocket Range in Australia. Infiltrating the base in the guise of a maintenance man, he kills a scientist, photographs the documents, then waits for an aeroplane to make a pre-arranged “emergency landing,” which will be his means of escape. Of course, Sexton Blake interferes and it all goes terribly wrong. Thrills aplenty, and a very fast “in-one-sitting” read. In fact, this story is so short that there’s an extra one thrown in: THE MILLION POUND STAKES, which has Blake investigating a double murder among the horse racing set.

I just finished for my #RetroReads project (revisiting novels I owned and/or read during my youth): FAREWELL, EARTH’S BLISS by D. G. Compton (1966). The story follows a group of social outcasts and political activists who are deported from Earth to a penal settlement on barren Mars. After a nine-week journey, during which they are quelled by drugged food, they are met by a freezing climate, poverty, harsh rules, and the threat of capital punishment for any perceived breach. D. G. Compton was one of the “Three Cs”—underrated British SF authors whose distinctive work added great flavour to my teenage reading (the other two were Richard Cowper and Michael Coney). Here, he tackles themes of religion, class, racism, and social conformity with considerable depth and insight. His character work is masterful, making it impossible not to root for his little band of misfits as they struggle in the bleakest of environments. This is not epic SF, but a focused, claustrophobic tale of hardship and the human soul. An almost forgotten, thought-provoking classic.

I just read THE ARBITRATION SWINDLE (THE UNION JACK issue 496, 1913). This is the 47th of the 145 Sexton Blake stories to feature one of his greatest foes: the disgraced former Scotland Yard detective George Marsden Plummer. In this one, the master crook teams up with a villainous stockbroker and attempts to manipulate the market. When Plummer betrays his partner and over-reaches, the scheme comes crashing down, and he flees the country with Sexton Blake snapping at his heels. It’s a fairly typical yarn of the period. Plummer was created in 1908 by the most mysterious of the Blake writers, Michael Storm (real name thought to be Ernest Sempill) about whom little is known. It was Storm who introduced the concept of the “super-villain” to the Blake stories, which developed into Blake’s Golden Age during the 1920s. Plummer was the longest lived of them all, not bowing out until 1960. After Storm’s death (around 1910), other writers took over the character. This particular tale was written by Lewis Carlton, in whose hands Plummer is much diminished, not at all the passionate, hedonistic, near-psychopath that Storm created. Also, Carlton’s stories rely far too much on the repeated and increasingly absurd use of disguises. I have nine more of his to read before he passes the character over to J. W. Bobin, who handles Plummer much better, and whose tales are more entertaining.

I just read GIVE THE BOYS A GREAT BIG HAND by Ed McBain (1960). This is the seventh 87th Precinct novel. When a severed hand is left in a bag by a bus stop, the boys of the 87th follow a trail that leads them to the world of nightclubs, strippers and musicians. This was, as I’ve come to expect from this series, a very enjoyable read and I have no criticism of it. However, it doesn’t really forward the series or any of the characters aside from revealing that Carella, his wife, and their twins have moved into a sizeable house and gained a nanny. The case itself is fairly straightforward. I’d rate this as the one against which the others in the series can best be judged as “better than” or “not as good as.”

I just read FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE by Joe Millard (1968). This is the second in the Dollars series, a novelisation of the movie, and it’s an instance where the sequel—the movie and the book—are by leaps and bounds better than their predecessor. The story concerns rival bounty hunters and their prey, and if you’ve seen the movie, it’s impossible to read this without visualising Clint Eastwood’s squint and Lee van Cleef’s cheekbones. The novel doesn’t stray from the screenplay, nor does it add anything to it, but it has a strong and tight plot, great characters, and is well written. I enjoyed this much more than the first. So, THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY next, after which the remaining five novels in the series are all originals. I’m intrigued to see where they take the Man With No Name.

My Twelve@Random novel for April (each month I read a book selected from my Calibre catalogue by a random number generator) is THE HOT ROCK by Donald E. Westlake (1970). This is no.1 in the John Dortmunder series (the pick was no.6, so it defaulted to 1, as I’m new to the series). On his release from prison, Dortmunder is commissioned by a man named Kelp to steal an emerald on behalf of an African General. The jewel is currently on show in an American museum. Kelp and Dortmunder hire Murch, Chefwick, and Greenwood to help with the heist. Each cohort is memorable in his own right—the novel has a truly excellent cast of characters. The caper goes wrong, Greenwood is cornered, and he swallows the gemstone before the police grab him. Thus begins a sequence of escapades, rescues, and double-crosses, all increasingly outlandish and over the top, with the emerald remaining infuriatingly elusive and Dortmund fast closing in on the end of his tether. It adds up to a brilliantly entertaining novel. The humour is marvellous, and the dialogue razor sharp. What an absolute delight! Now, I have yet another series to add to those that I follow, and I look forward to my next visit with this gang of likeable, crooked misfits.