recent read; SGT JANUS RETURNS by Jim Beard

SGT JANUS RETURNS by Jim Beard

I will try to avoid spoilers, but the big one can't be avoided. If you're reading SGT JANUS RETURNS, then you know Jim Beard killed off Roman Janus in the previous volume. (Or, more precisely, made him disappear with near certainty of death.)

Though Beard shifts to a single, Watson-esque, narrator for this book, if you're expecting a straight "Hurrah! He's back!" (a la THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES) in the opening pages, Beard wisely creates further mystery instead.

An amnesiac woman appears in a small village and solves a ghost problem. Thereafter, she whisks young Joshua Hargreaves into a life of adventurous "spirit breaking." As time passes, "Lady Janus" adopts more of Janus's habits and manners. Who is she? Is she possessed by Janus? Is she Janus reincarnated? Will we ever truly learn the nature and details of Roman Janus's disappearance?

These stories are much more tightly linked than the stories in the first volume. Beard builds a great sense of mystery and suspense as the stories stack on top of each other, creating further complications, rushing toward a thrilling conclusion.

With SGT JANUS RETURNS, Jim Beard has created the best kind of sequel. The book is its own story, with a familiar feel, but not falling to routine or re-treading the first volume.

Highly recommended for fans of pulp mystery and occult detectives. Just be sure to read SGT JANUS, SPIRIT-BREAKER first!

recent read; SGT JANUS, SPIRIT-BREAKER by Jim Beard

SGT JANUS, SPIRIT-BREAKER by Jim Beard

Yup! Another entry from Derrick Ferguson's 75 New Pulp Book To Get You Started list. (which, you should keep handy.)

If you enjoy occult detectives, like Carnacki, Sgt. Janus needs to be added to your reading list.

Janus is a mysterious character. His use of rank title and manner of dress suggest a military background. Some people are convinced he is a charlatan. He tangles with ghosts and other occult manifestations.

Beard has a clever twist on the presentation. Rather than sticking with a single chronicler (e.g.; Doctor Watson,) Janus requests that his clients provide written reports of the incidents. This allows different points-of-view and adds variety to the tales.

Further variety is provided by Beard's plots. Some cases are undertaken in the field. Others take place in Janus's sprawling house in the country, where clients come to him.

The stories have wonderful atmosphere. Each story works alone, though there is a definite arc threaded through the collection. Clearly, this is a set of stories written to be presented together.

I'll be rushing to read the sequel, SGT JANUS RETURNS!

recent reads

No full reviews here. Just thought I'd highlight books I've read lately that I really enjoyed (that I have not yet mentioned on the blog.)

Damballa by Charles R. Saunders

Saunders's take on The Shadow & 1930s pulp heroes. Plus, he gets to bring his boxing reporter chops to the page, too. (Good voices narration on the audiobook.)

Nobody Lives Forever by John Gardner

First non-Fleming James Bond I've read. Bond has a price placed on his head. He must get to the mastermind before various spies and criminals assassinate him first. (Audiobook was great.)

Gates of the Dead by James A. Moore

The finishing novel of The Tides of War trilogy. This grimdark story, though certainly epic in fantasy scope, has plenty of horror and sword-&-sorcery chops. Brogan McTyre is one of the most (Robert E.) Howardian characters I've read in a long time. Brogan will stand to the last, swinging steel at the gods themselves.
 (Also of note; James A. Moore is battling cancer. The prognosis is good. But medical costs will be steep, even with insurance. This month (Aug 2019) Angry Robot will pass through all the money from sales of their catalog of Jim's books [Seven Forges series, Tides of War trilogy] directly to Jim. So--good time to buy the books if you were thinking about it.)

Grim Death and Bill the Electrocuted Criminal by Mike Mignola & Tom Sniegoski

Another take on The Shadow, this time from the weird minds of Mignola & Sniegoski. Grim Death is a vigilante, a servant of Death, carrying out capital punishment where justice has failed. But now one of the ghosts who haunts him needs him to prove a man's innocence. This story is pure pulp with humorous and macabre touches only this team of creatives could deliver.

 (The Best of the) Bolos: Their Finest Hour edited by Hank Davis, created by Keith Laumer

Sentient battle tanks. 'nough said!

recent read/listen; Bass Reeves, Frontier Marshal, Volume 1

Bass Reeves, Frontier Marshal, Volume 1

I'm on a kick to read a lot more new pulp. I'm using Derrick Ferguson's list, 75 New Pulp Books To Get You Started, as a starting point.

I've already read a few titles from the list. I'd been building up my Audible credits again, so I grabbed some titles from the list. The nice thing about the pulp titles is that most of them are on the shorter side (8hrs or under,) so I can knock them off faster.

Bass Reeves was a real person. A black man, a former escaped slave who worked the Indian Territories (Oklahoma & Arkansas) as a U.S. deputy marshal. He had an amazing career.

The stories in this volume are fiction, not history. The palate of the Old West and Reeves's exploits serve as a cauldron to mix facts of the man's life with Western tropes to produce enjoyable tales.

Here's the t.o.c with log lines;

"Ride from Three Devils" by Gary Phillips
While chasing the notorious outlaw, Alamosa Bill, Bass Reeves stumbles into a plot to rob a government silver shipment on a west-bound train.

"Whiskey Road" by Mel Odom
Bass must infiltrate a gang of vicious horse thieves to find a kidnapped child.

"No Master But Duty" by Andrew Salmon
Reeves and his posseman collar a wanted man only to have the citizens of the small frontier town he is hiding in refuse to give him up.

"A Town Named Affliction" by Derrick Ferguson
When an old lawman turns outlaw, Bass Reeves and his possemen must hunt down the Chance brothers and bring them to justice.

There is also an introduction from Ron Fortier with suggested histories of Bass Reeves for further historical reading, and each author has an afterword with their story.

I'm not a Western expert. I've read a few. I've seen a fair number of western movies though I still feel like I've only scratched the surface. That said, I thought these stories were solid and entertaining. They were well narrated, too.

Worth your time.

I'll be getting to Volumes 2 & 3 sooner rather than later.

recent reads (listens) ; back to basics

I've been rather lazy about book reviews lately. Part of that is I've been reading older stuff by authors who have passed on - so they don't necessarily need the Amazon/goodreads review bumps.

I've surpassed my goodreads reading goal (65 books) for 2017. Yes, that includes some graphic novels but not nearly as many as last year. Audiobooks have helped - I listen to them on my daily commute.

Two recent listens;

THUNDERBALL by Ian Fleming, read by (actor) Jason Isaacs.

This was absolutely stellar. If you're a Bond fan, you should try this when you have time. I am going to press on with these and finish off the original Fleming books. This particular run of audios features British celebrity readers. Looking forward to more though I'm a little disappointed Isaacs didn't perform any of the others.

THE VALLEY OF FEAR by Arthur Conan Doyle, read by Derek Jacobi.

A fun reading. Jacobi works solidly with accents, including Americans. I'm only getting to the original Sherlock Holmes tales now - largely thanks to the influence of Charles R. Rutledge (also responsible for my interest in Burroughs's original Tarzan tales, too.) My only complaint is that this story - like A STUDY IN SCARLET - features a second half prequel story set in America without Holmes at all. However, I didn't feel quite as cheated as with A STUDY IN SCARLET, because here the midpoint reveal doesn't come out of the blue.

Aside from audios, Rutledge is also responsible for kindling my interest in Solar Pons.

Pons was August Derleth's Holmes pastiche who went on to a life of his own, with Basil Copper continuing the stories in the 1970s. Recently, Copper's tales came back into print in paperback from PS Publishing in the UK.

Also, a Kickstarter campaign launched brand new stories written by David Marcum with the permission of the Derleth estate. Marcum is a Holmes/Pons aficionado. (The campaign was successful. If you missed out, the book can be ordered from Amazon.)

Because the original Derleth tales are now the ones out-of-print, I hope this campaign carries on to reprint the original Derleth stories in the near future.

Not sure how long I'll be deep diving on thrillers, mystery and crime but I might be here a while.

recent read: A Discourse in Steel

A DISCOURSE IN STEEL by Paul S. Kemp

It took me too long to return to Egil and Nix. Kemp has created a great sword-&-sorcery duo. And yes, even I who prefer novella length as tops for sword-&-sorcery, still consider this novel as sword-&-sorcery. Don't let the length fool you. While it has touches of "high fantasy" and some Dungeons & Dragons magical items and dungeon crawls, Egil & Nix comes right out of the Nifft the Lean and Fafhrd & Gray Mouser tradition.

A psychic friend of the duo learns a little too much about the city's thieves guild. The guild tries assassination and Egil & Nix know they won't let up. So the duo goes for the throat of the guild.

They're not out to save the world - they are out to save their friends .. and their whorehouse.

Along the way we get cosmic horrors of a black alley that appears at random in the city, magical "gewgaws," lost civilizations, a whole lot of action and combat, and even deeper reflections on what makes a person a person, friendship and loyalty.

The banter between Egil and Nix comes to life in the audiobook. It might work well on the page, too, but there were moments when I laughed out loud while listening.

Angry Robot originally published the first two Egil & Nix novels. They were dropped after Angry Robot were bought and went through some restructuring.

Original Angry Robot cover

Fortunately, Del Rey picked them up and republished the first two novels and they have released a third, A CONVERSATION IN BLOOD.

I enjoyed A DISCOURSE IN STEEL a whole lot. I won't wait so long between books this time.

And I want a t-shirt;

In a world of slubbers and fakkers, be an Egil (or a Nix.)

recent read/listen; Doc Savage: Skull Island

Doc Savage: Skull Island by Will Murray

Doc Savage? Skull Island? King Kong?! Sign me up!

The book is roughly split in three sections. The first three chapters involve Doc and his gang employed as cleanup crew after King Kong falls to his death in New York City. After that prelude, we get a prequel tale featuring Doc, his father, and later his grandfather. Set in 1920, this tale contains a lot of the emotional dynamic between father and son. Doc is back from the war and reconnecting with his father. I believe a lot of groundwork and touchstones were included in this prequel story but I am not well-versed in Doc Savage. His "annihilator" machine gun is under development in this story.

The book clocks in at 400+ pages (according to Amazon.) That's a very long length for a Doc Savage story. Murray seems to have approached the tale as two shorter novels linked together - the first half deals with Doc and his father seafaring around the Pacific and Indian Ocean, searching for a lost schooner. They ran afoul of pirates.

I went in biased, of course. The initial seafaring story isn't bad but I was impatient to get to Skull Island.

The story got much better when they finally reached Skull Island. Lots of homages to KING KONG with clever references (spider canyon, dinosaur and ape evolutionary offshoots - which is why nothing on the island correctly matches the paleontological [is that a word?] record.) Lots of battles and derring-do.

I found some of the phrasing awkward and some word choices seemed to misuse the thesaurus. I don't know if that was Murray or if Murray was imitating Lester Dent.

Usually when I listen to an audiobook, I still consider it more of a 'read' than a 'listen.' But, it is worth mentioning details of this audiobook. Although this is put out by Radio Archives, it is a complete unabridged novel, not an audioplay. However, the narration very much sounds like an old radio show. In some cases this is good because the voice-acting is done well and the characters are distinct. On the other hand, it is a bit like listening to an overblown propaganda short from the 1950s or listening to Stan from AMERICAN DAD over emote even the simplest paragraph. It took a while to get used to it. Sometimes reverb is used for crowd and shouting effects.

So - felt a little long in the middle. I imagine in the old days it would have been two separate stories loosely connected. Fun romp in the end. If you're Doc Savage fan and/or a King Kong fan, you'll probably enjoy a lot of the book.

recent read; The Dracula Tape

THE DRACULA TAPE by Fred Saberhagen

I am a traditionalist. I like my good guys good and my bad guys bad. But, in the hands of Fred Saberhagen, the flipping of traditional roles in THE DRACULA TAPE, I was still entertained. You see, Dracula isn't all bad. Yes, he's a vampire and he's no saint. But Bram Stoker's novel was a bit of a smear campaign built on misunderstanding. Van Helsing was a bumbling fool.

Saberhagen did a great job of following the original novel and inverting everything a reader thinks they know. Saberhagen drops wonderful bits of history along the way. Some of the deconstruction of the Dracula myth goes beyond mere misinterpretations. Crucifixes? Vlad fought the Muslim hordes! Why would the cross bother him?

I enjoyed the first half of this novel which is very clever indeed with turning all the elements of DRACULA 180 degrees. I did feel, though, that as the book progressed, and Saberhagen created scenes and conversations completely outside the realm of the original novel, the effort lost steam.

And his conceit on how Dracula survived his staking missed some salient points of Stoker's folklore, in my opinion.

Fun, worth a read. You do need to have read DRACULA to fully appreciate what Saberhagen was doing. Looking forward to more entries in Saberhagen's Dracula series now that the beginning has been established.

p.s. - I listened to the audiobook via Audible, and the narration by Robin Bloodworth is excellent.