FFBL The Dancing Aztec’s by Donald Westlake

 The Dancing Aztec’s by Donald Westlake

I wrote previously about Westlakes Dancing Aztec’s here… but on this eve of the release of what by all accounts is his last unpublished work I think it’s worth revisiting. Set in late 70s NYC, the Dancing Aztec tells the tale of the theft and re-theft of a statue called…. Yep the Dancing Aztec. It’s a disco era farce where people get caught up in the story of the statue and who has it.

I read the Dancing Aztec because one of my high school English teachers recommend it when I posted about Westlake on facebook a couple of years back. She was an important teacher to me, because she could seemed understand me better than the other teachers. I recall running into her own day at Borders books (the original one on State Street in Ann Arbor) in the mystery section when I was still in high school. I seem to recall she had a short conversation about Robert Parker’s Senser books.  I hope that she’s going to get a chance to read this last Westlake and enjoy it… and sometime soon I hope to make my way back to the Dancing Aztec.

James Reasoner also covered it for a FFB HERE

FFB: The Man with the Iron On Badge by Lee Goldberg

The Man with the Iron on Badge was one of those titles that called to me from the shelves at the library. There was something about the title that called out to me and I was very happy to have taken the lead and checked it out.

 Harvey Mapes has a job working security at the gate of one of those concentration camps that rich people hide them selves away in. He spends his time reading classic PI novels and living the marginal life of a low wageworker. He get’s drawn into a real mystery when he’s asked to keep an eye on the wife of one of the 1% who’s gated community he guards… and things go from there. It’s a fun romp and I for one am wondering what happened to Harvey Mapes

Paul Brazill covered The Man with the Iron On Badge Here, and you can check out writer Lee Goldberg’s comments on the book Here.

FFB: The Mouse in the Mountain by Norbert Davis

The Mouse in the Mountain by Norbert Davis is a book that I read after reading about  Sally in the Alley by Davis (which I still haven’t gotten around to reading) and finding that I could get The Mouse in the Mountain via inter library loan. Davis had a strange touch that was part comic and part noir. Mouse is about  a missing treasure.

Evan Lewis covered it on  APRIL 2, 2010 you can find his review HERE

FFB rewind: Zeppelins West By Joe R. Landsale

 I recall reading Zeppelins west while sititng in the tempory home fo the Minneapolis library around 2003. I was working downtown and my brother would drop me off early in the day on his way to work, and I would hang out read, write, wander the sky way and drink coffee before heading off to work. Zeppelins West was one of those mash ups with characters from all kinds of fiction hanging out as a part of a Bill Cody steampunk show. I have to admit that the book was better in theory and concept than execution, but I swear you’ll never read anything else like it. 

read the original FFB post HERE

FFB rewind: THE LIST OF 7 by Mark Frost

THE LIST OF 7 by Mark Frost reviewed by Barna William Donovan caught my attention and lodged in my brain after Patti posted the review. I haven’t checked it out yet, but it’s on the list. I have to admit I am a sucker for books that reference other pop culture and draw them into a mix of history. I think it was the description of the book as a “genre mash-up mixing paranormal and occult horror with conspiracy thriller elements, all wrapped up in a historical mystery starring Arthur Conan Doyle” that hooked me.  It’s one of those books that I swear I am going to make time for this year.

http://pattinase.blogspot.com/2011/01/fridays-forgotten-books-january-7-2011.html

FFB rewind: Shoot by Douglas Fairbairn

 Shoot is a fast, short meditation on the lives of warriors after the battles are over. It looks at middle age men who have won their wars and become successful in the domestic world. A simple plot wherein a group of hunters are shot at by another group of hunters, their opposite numbers from down the road, and what happens afterward.

I checked out the book after reading a FFB post on it by Mike Dennis, and enjoyed it and hop that others will check it out.

http://mikedennisnoir.com/review-shoot/1042/

http://restlesskind.blogspot.com/2010/06/books-april-may-2010.html

FFB rewind: Murder Among Children by Tucker Coe (Donald Westlake)

1/6

In the past I did a couple of FFB entries that were inspired by others entries. I read some of the recommended books and gave them my own review. I only managed to write two of those, but I want to make sure that in 2012 I spend more time writing fiction and less blogging… to that end I plan to high light the FFBs post that others have written. I am going to try and keep them short and sweet and to the point…. And our first second look is…..

Murder Among Children by Tucker Coe (Donald Westlake) covered by Ed Gorman

I had already read the first of the Westlake Tucker Coe books when Ed covered the second one, Murder Among Children, which prompted me to check out the book for myself. I liked it a lot and especially think that there is a cultural element to the book that has only deepened as time has passed. As a member of the silent generation Westlake explores the generational conflict between the silents and the boomers.

Ed’s review here and my follow up here

http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com/2010/06/forgotten-books-murder-among-children.html

http://restlesskind.blogspot.com/2010/08/ffb-echo-murder-among-children-by.html

FFB Thieves World

I am pretty sure that I first heard of Thieves's World from my cousin Dan, which is strange in that Editor Robert Asprin was my brother's Cub Scout troop leader. Anyway, Thieves's World was a series of 12 anthologies set in a shared world, written by a cadre of Sci Fi and Fantasy authors.


Set in the city of Sanctuary the stories are range in topics from the stories of city administrators to that of Shadowspawn the thief. The Shadowspawn stories were my favorites, and I did end up reading the spin off novel Shadowspawn by Andrew J Offutt. I think I read almost all 12 of the volumes and even stayed on after the original set of authors left the series. 


Later on there was a Role Playing Game and a Graphic Novel incarnation of the series, along with a series of spin off books and an relaunch of the series in the early 2000s. I have fond memories of the books and their covers and have been tempted to revisit series in the last couple of years but have yet to pick up and crack one open.  I have to wonder what a Crime Anthology called Thieves City might look like from todays new Noir and Crime Writers.

FFB License Renewed by John Gardner

This was the first Bond book that I read. I only recall that we were on a family trip out east when I was reading it, but nothing about the book or the plot. It was a big deal that these new Bond books were coming out in the 80s and I read most of them long before I cracked any of the Fleming books. Looking back I am really not sure that there needed to be new Bond books in the 80s, and I am not sure that they need new ones now... at least not ones set in the current landscape. I might be on board with some retro adventures set in the 50s, 60s, and maybe even into the 70s.


I'm going to open this one up to the readers, thoughts, comments, anything that you recall about the Gardner Bond?

FFB: ILL Wind By

    The two pillars of the post apocalypse fiction world are Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and Earth Abides by George R Stewart and every other book in the genre owes some debt to one or the other. Alas, Babylon deals with the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, and Earth Abides deals with the aftermath of a plague which wipes out a chunk of humanity.

Illwinds falls mostly into the Earth Abides camp, telling the story of what happens when microbes intended to eat oil spills end up eating all petroleum based products on the planets. Airplanes fall from the sky, the combustion engine is useless and the infrastructure of the world just seems to fall apart.

I don’t recall much from the book aside from the plot other than I enjoyed it, as I enjoyed most of the books in the genre that I read at the time. There were a few that I read and didn’t really get or like. With some of these books that I recall liking and some that I recall fondly I wonder if they would hold up for me. I was a different kind of reader then, I was living a life that had different expectations and a different perspective on life. I have to admit that I have some fear of opening one of these books and finding that I have changed too much, or worse yet finding that I haven’t.

Anyway, Ill Winds was once worth reading for me, and if you are looking for something to follow up The Stand or Swan Song, it might just fit the bill.

FFB Wishsong of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Elves, Swords, a quest, magic, it’s all pretty standard Fantasy stuff, and that’s why I have largely forgotten The Wishsong of Shannara aside from the fact that once upon a time I read it and liked it. The Shannara series started out in the late 70s and the third book arrived almost a decade later, just in time for me to find it at the end of elementary school and the start of Jr High.

            I am going to pause here from talking about the book and talk about my relationship with reading. I started kindergarten when I was 4 years old in the fall of 1977, and turned 5 about three weeks later, I had to be the youngest kid in my class until I became the oldest. When I was in the second grade my reading did not improve over the course of the year and my parents had me held back and repeat the second grade. I can recall clearly being annoyed and bored with the reading books we were given, Honeycomb and Cloverleaf. I also recall being attracted to the older schoolbooks from the 40s and 50s that some teachers kept in their rooms, and I recall visits to the school library and not finding many books that really related to my world there.

            When I was in the 4^th grade I had one of those old school teachers who wasn’t going to fall in line with all the new fangled education theory and among other things she insisted that we read. She also read to us, Where the Red Fern Grows and Call it Courage were both read aloud in class… along with a couple of 50s text books, one called If I Were Going that ignited my imagination about seeing Norway, and that we do book reports. To this day I look back on the structure of her reports, synopsis, tell what you liked, tell what you didn’t like and tell the class if you recommend the book as THEE structure for any kind of review. I think that it is safe to credit her more than another teacher for getting me to read, and by the time I was in the sixth grade I was reading at an eight-grade level.

Somewhere in there I picked up the Shannara books the first two were already out, the second one The Elf Stones was the first book that I literally stayed up all night reading. It was the 4^th of July in the mid 80s…. when the Wishsong came out I was ready for it. The plot was about evil coming back into the world, and the Omsford clan once again is called upon to put a stop to it. Quests are started, Allies gathered and danger faced in route, but it all works out pretty well in the end… until the next series of course.  I don’t recall any of those books either, even though I did end up reading the next 5 or 6 entries in the series. .. It’s true that I have forgotten the book and it’s plot and most of the characters and what I really liked about it…. But in this case maybe what is important is that I remember that it was important to me once upon a time.

FFB: THE Spy by Clive Cussler & Justin Scott

Back when I got out of college in the bad old days of 1996, my first job was a minimum wage security gig.  I worked Midnight to Noon on Saturday and Sunday the guy who worked the opposite 12 hour shifts spent a lot of his time reading and Clive Cussler was one of the authors he was a fan of and I started making my way though the Cussler books. I had read Raise the Titanic in college, but hadn’t picked up any of the other Cussler books.  After a couple of years my tastes changed and I stopped picking up the Cussler books and the increasing number of books that he was writing with others. 

I checked out The Spy on Audio book on a whim, and didn’t get around to listening to it until I was on an long drive to the other side of the state. I found The Spy to be a fun, fast adventure story set in the early 1900s. PI Isaac Bell is hired to find the killer of a weapon designer for the Navy. His investigation takes him all over the country and into the obit of a few soon to be famous people and events. There is a secret weapon in the Dreadnaught race and industrial espionage ensues. It’s a solid story and it passed the hours of my driving and downtime during my vacation last spring. I don’t know that I am interested in sitting down and reading any more Cussler books, but I have already queued up the other adventures of Isaac Bell in Audio Book form.

Isaac Bell tales

1.     The Chase (2007)

2.     The Wrecker (2009)

3.     The Spy (2010)

4.     The Race (2011)

5.     The Thief (2012)

Friday Forgotten.... Liner Notes? Nuggets Box Set

I think I have a bead on the kind of people that follow the FFBs, and one thing that I think many of you will find something to like in is the Nuggets set of 60s Garage Rock tunes and the accompanying liner notes.  While the music on the set is some of the greatest Rock and Roll tunes ever recorded by bands like; The Electric Prunes, The Castaways, The Sonics, The Amboy Dukes and The Standells to name just a few, it’s the liner notes that I really want to focus on today. For those not in the know, Garage Rock in it’s 60s form was really about young bands inspired by 50s Rock, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Dylan, playing teen clubs, writing fast furious and sometimes primal pop songs.

 Running just under 100 pages the booklet included with the box set a work of art by itself.  It is to the point where the last two entries in the Nuggets series of sets by Rhino Records have been in book form with the attached. The liner notes in the first set include lots of photos and reproductions of the cover art from the singles that the tunes are drawn from. Nuggets started as and LP collecting many of the one hit wonder singles of the late 60s; it was released in 1972, and included in the booklet is the original essay written by compiler and music critic Lenny Kaye. A couple of other essays are included in the book, but the real story is the track-by-track reviews of the songs.  The box covers 118 songs across 4 CDs, and each of them is given a history, context and information on labels, where the band was from, and chart date. On it’s own it is a history and puzzle that is worth checking out… and of course the music is first rate.

The Nuggets box set was enough of a hit that of course Rhino had to follow it up with others.  Nuggets II focused on non-US bands, Children of Nuggets focused on the neo-garage movement of the 80s, and the last two Love is the Song We Sing (about the San Francisco scene) and Where the Action Is? (about the LA scene) have been region specific. In many ways the last two have been a bit of a let down, and I haven’t bothered to pick them up… however if a Seattle, Scandinavian or Detroit set appears you can bet that I will be in line to pick up a copy.

Rather than the standard call for thoughts, comments and the like, I think this time I am going to call for your Juke Box picks from the bands and songs on this set….

While I love so many of these songs, the one that today calls out to me is … Cold Outside by The Choir

FFB: 'Til Death by Ed McBain

Bordering on cozy territory ‘Til Death, one of the three 1959 entries in the 87th Precinct series, ‘Til Death is a solid read, but feels like an entry which is drifting away from the police procedural genre pioneered in books like; Cop Hater, The Mugger and The Pusher. This is not to say that I didn’t like McBain’s tale of Det. Steve Carella looking into a threat to his sisters fiancé on their wedding day.

    Setting two sets of plot in motion, the protection of the groom and the investigation of the prime suspect, McBain gives a quick, driving novel with just enough of the 87th Precinct style to keep me reading. What I am left wondering is if at the point the book was written if McBain had yet to realize the opportunity he had in front of him. I don’t know that he realized three years into the series that he had the chance to show the evolution of police and their culture over the decades.  I do realize that he book is still early in the series and that marketplace pressures might have played a role in the softening of the series.

    I plan to keep on reading the series, and up next is King’s Ransom, a notable entry in the 87th Precinct series as it is the bases for Kurosawa’s High and Low (which received a Bluray release from Criterion recently).

Thoughts, Comments, Feedback?

FFB: Killer on the Road by James Ellroy

           Ellroy is hardly forgotten, and might be the best and most important crime writer of the last 30 years, but his take the on the serial killer novel, Killer on the Road, seems to have largely fallen to the wayside…. Which is too bad, because not only is it one of the few times that Ellroy was willing to play the game and try and five the publishing world what it wanted, but it was also one of the first that really contained autobiographic elements.

            Killer on the Road was my first Ellroy book, I discovered it on the shelves of Curious Books in East Lansing Michigan when I was a student, and it would have been either 1994 or 1995. I have the exact date that I finished my first reading some where at hand…. Ok, looking it up.. I see that I finished reading it on 26 April 1995.

That same year I read; Ripper by Michael Slade (Finished 13 Feb), Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block (Finished 4 April), Tricks by Ed McBain (Finished 14 April) and followed Killer on the Road with a after the bomb book not worth noting and then Miami Blues by Charles Willieford (Finished 7 May). My next Ellroy was Because the Night which I finished on 12 June.

            The plot follows a wayward youth who is left on his own after the death/abandonment by his parents (stop me if this starts to sound familiar…) and after getting started with small time prowling and petty larceny, ends up following his impulses to killing and heading out on the road… hence the title. There is also a cop who the main character get’s caught up with, mind warping exposure to comics and more than a bit of potential homo erotic undercurrents…. In other words what we have come to expect from Ellroy.

 Honestly I haven’t reread this one, and am a little afraid to crack it open again after all these years. That same copy is shelved in my Ellroy collection. While I tend to point people towards the master pieces, The Big Nowhere and LA Confidential as a starting point in the Ellroy collection, Killer on the Road is of interest in show casing a young writer still trying to find his place in the publishing world and giving what even by then was a tired genre his own spin.

Other Ellroy books read in 1995 not noted above?

Hollywood Nocturnes

White Jazz

(I didn’t get to The Big Nowhere and LA Confidential until early in 1996)

A selection of Crime Books I am not embarrassed to have finished reading in 1995?

Hells only Half Full by Rob Kantner

Wilderness by Robert B Parker

Let Us Prey by Bill Branon

The Michigan Murders by Edward Keys

Bandits by Elmore Leonard

B.O.L.O. by Dave Pedneam

Farwell, My Lovely by Chandler

Trace: Too Old a Cat by Warren Murphy

FFB: KILLER’S WEDGE (1959) by Ed McBain

The Killer's Wedge is McBain riffing on the locked room mystery in several ways.... and commenting on them in a way that we would call Meta these days. The two plot lines involve a dead man in a locked room who looks to have killed himself and a group of 87th Precinct Bulls trapped in a squad room while a woman waits to kill Det. Steve Carella with a .38 Special and a jar of Soup (nitro). The action takes place over the course of 1 day, mostly the afternoon, and it tense and driving.  


Carella wrestles with the suicide squeal, the rest of the squad wrestle with how to escape the trap they have been placed in.  It's a fast, punchy read that shows what a limited story in a small setting can be and still keep the larger story of the 87th Precinct moving along. McBain knew how to keep the pages turning and his readers waiting for the next installment. As with earlier installments in the series the book a product of the market of the time, 160 pages of sparse proses telling two simple stories and at the same time fleshing out the world of the 87th Precinct... well worth checking out, and I hear tell that Amazon is going to start reprinting the series in the near future for anyone that wants to check it out.


another look at the book can be found HERE. Patti Abbott advises that this weeks links are going to be collected by  Brian Lindenmuth at SPINETINGLER 

Friday Forgotten Book: Big Rock Beat by Greg Kihn

Following The Horror Show Kihn pick up the story a decade later. This time around director Landis Woodley and his crew is headed to the beach to film a Beach Party Rock and Roll flick, and of course things go wrong.  Just as Sci Fi/ Horror films were the cheap fast buck film genre of the 50s, for at least a portion of the 60s a beach flick was going to make money... and what would a good beach flick be without a Rock and Roll band. Take a look at Tom Hank's That Thing You Do! (well worth revisiting) for a bit of insight into that scene.... anyway,  It's been so long since I have read the book that I have largely forgotten what all happened. I have fond memories of it and  I liked it enough to read the next installment in the series.
check out Greg Kihn on the web HERE

as always more FFBs can be found via Patti Abbotts blog here

FFB: Balefire by Kenneth W. Goddard

Sometime around High School I was given a copy of Balefire as a gift. It was one the few books that I had encountered at that point that dealt with the issue of terrorism which I had an interest in. Living in a very politically aware university town the threats of all out nuclear war and terrorism were often discussed, debated and lectured about. As a teen I had watched as there had been high profile hijackings and I knew about the Delta Force and the Iranian Hostage crisis. I was interested to read about terrorism, and stories that proposed to deal with terror on US soil were of interest to me.  Blaefire fit that mould perfectly.

From the authors website…

(http://www.kengoddardbooks.com/descriptions.htm)

When a real, honest-to-god professional terrorist named Thanatos shows up along the shoreline of Huntington Beach, California, intent on destroying the scenic beach city as a demonstration against the 1984 Olympic games, the local cops have no idea what's happening, and therefore don't stand much of a chance. Which puts them in a terrible situation when they're forced to chose between defending their city, their families ... and themselves.

I honestly don’t recall much about the book besides having enjoyed it’s mix of police and action enough to seek out more books by Goddard. While the ’84 games area going on 40 years past the threat of domestic terror and the response of Federal, State and Local Law Enforcement to such events have changed greatly in the last decade. We now have a department of Homeland Security (which I am sorry with all due respect is an awful name for the agency) who are tasked with responding to terror around the country.

As I noted I did seek out and read ore of the books by Goddard, who moved on to a pair of books, The Alchemist that dealt with designer drugs and Digger which I recall as a serial killer novel. I stopped picking up his books at some point, most likely because I stopped seeing them around. Looking at his website I see that he moved on to writing about Wild Life Law Enforcement.  In thinking back I think that I would like to revisit Balefire, just to see how the world of Law Enforcement and terror mix circa 1984, and I might even check out one of the Wildlife Law Enforcement themed books…

Goddard can be found on line HERE

Friday Forgotten Book: Such Men are Dangerous by Lawrence Block

Such Men are Dangerous is either a heist novel that takes half it’s page count to get to the heist, or it’s a study in what individuals who have been cut off from society and culture. The book starts off with Paul Kavanagh, who has spent the last decade fighting in south East Asia, discovering that the Agency has determined that he is not the type they can trust to work for them. Dejected he heads south and ends up living in alone and cut off on an island he has developed a list of rules to live by and seems to be settling into his new life…. …. Only someone shows up on his island and manages to recruit him to help steal a load of weapons from the US Government.

     Using a tone and a style that shows the journey of Paul Kavanagh though the book Block explores the crime as the choice of a man who has none of the typical reasons for committing his crime. There is no need for money, for vengeance, he’s not angry; he’s not looking for more…. In fact the only thing he really wants is to be left alone. There is an Existential element of the book, like the Hitman series (of which I have only read the first), that really in many ways is a deconstruction of the crime genre, getting to the core of what drives the professional heister.

Such Men Are Dangerous is the 7^th Lawrence Block book that I have read this year as part of my one Block Book a month for 2011. This one was a very solid entry into his backlist and is worth checking out.

More FFB's can be found here

FFB: The 100 Best Movies that you’ve NEVER seen by Richard Crouse

In these days of the Internet guidebooks for films, books, and music might are often obsolete. Most of the basic info on almost anything you are looking for can be found on line somewhere, along with plenty of opinions about what every you are looking for. … that said the place for the ‘guide’ book these days is in either documenting a scene (see Swedishsensatinsfilms ), films that are off the radar, and then there is the guide for films that have been overlooked and that’s what we have here, a book that gives you 100 films that you may never have heard anything about.

Covering a lot of ground from the early horror of Island of Lost Souls (1933, and slated for a Criterion Collection release this October) to Here Comes Mr. Jordan to The Krays (1990) Crouse covers a lot of ground and provides enough varied material to make this a nice selection of film in general. Two films that I really love and recommend, CQ and The Dish are included along with many that I had never heard of. I have to admit that there are a number of films in the book that I have yet to check out, but in an age of Leonard Maltin’s best film’s you’ve never seen and 101 of the best action films you must see before you die, Crouse seems to have been ahead of the pack. This is also a perfect gift (which is how I got my copy) for the budding film fan in your life.

more forgotten books HERE