NOVEMBER 2012

Well I read 12 books this month which got me back on track with my year-end revised target of 119.
110 completed, 9 to aim at in December. (119 will mean my 3 year total since 2010 will be 300!)

Anonymous - 9  - Hard Bite (2012) (4)

Martin Amis - House Of Meetings (2006) (1)

Charlie Owen - Two Tribes (2009) (3)

Danny Gillan - A Selection Of Meats And Cheeses (2011) (3)

Roger Smith - Mixed Blood (2009) (5)

Joe R Lansdale - Bullets And Fire (2013) (3)

Richard Rayner - Murder Book (1997) (2)

Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot (1984) (3)

E L James - Fifty Shades Freed (2012) (1)

Jim Nisbet - Lethal Injection (1987) (5)

Mark Sullivan - Corned Beef Sandwich (2007) (3)

Miranda Forbes ed. - Ultimate Spanking (2010) (2)

The month started with a big bang and Anonymous-9's Hard Bite.
It went quickly downhill with Martin Amis, and meandered along until Roger Smith jumped me with Mixed Blood - a fast,violent, ride through Cape Town.

Dipped afterward with Lansdale, Rayner and Barnes, until positively plummetting off the cliff with Fifty Shades Grim.

Jim Nisbet cranked things back with Lethal Injection, before my pulse dropped back down to normal with a Manc-crime caper novel and a bit of soft titillation.

2 neck and neck contenders for book of the month, first prize on the basis of it being an unbelievably good first novel - Roger Smith and Mixed Blood,

Silver medal - Jim Nisbet,
Bronze medal - Anonymous-9

MIRANDA FORBES ed. - ULTIMATE SPANKING (2010)

Blurb.....

There's nothing like a good spanking - customers have proved that this is a bestselling theme! Editor Miranda Forbes has selected 20 more bottom-tingling stories to make your buttocks blush in this fourth volume of naughty treats! Spanking has never been so popular. Find out why ... Xcite Books offer the very best erotic writing. Clear branding and consistently good reviews in magazines such as Forum, Desire Scarlet have helped build Xcite into a bestselling brand.

Ok then, awkward, how to explain why I read this, when it’s so far out of my usual ball-park.

Well, I was browsing in a bookshop in my hometown, Leighton Buzzard, and I needed one more item to make up a price-saving bundle…….and I didn’t want a 600 page Nelson DeMille blockbuster, or a 20 year-old Jeffrey Archer pre-prison beach-read, or a Peter Hamilton science-fiction tome the size of a house brick……….so I chose this soft-porn volume of 20 erotic tales. Excuses out of the way, then!

Well, I read them on and off over a period of a couple of months, all reasonably written and all concerning the same subject matter – spanking or corporal punishment. No real need to go into any greater detail.

I’m well aware that no-one particularly has any interest in my personal predilections, and I’m not too interested in divulging them either, but suffice to say I’m not about to rush out and acquire any accessories in the leather whip department after reading this.

Should there be a subsequent volume published, I won’t be stampeding people in my haste to acquire it.

2 stars from 5.

As stated I bought this copy

MARK SULLIVAN - CORNED BEEF SANDWICH (2007)

Blurb.....

Winner of the Crocus North West Novel Competition in 2001, Corned Beef Sandwich is a side-splitting, fast moving crime caper set in one of the seedier districts of South Manchester. Somewhere between Ealing Studios and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, it follows the exploits of a Bookie's assistant who accidently takes home a gun man's swag bag. Housemates, surf god Axel, nuclear PR whiz Sheena and big plans Theo - are none too happy with the chaos that ensues.

I tracked this down after seeing a recommendation for it on a now long-forgotten crime fiction blog. Whilst it was enjoyable, it didn’t rock my world in the same way it did for the blogger.

I had previously attempted to read this but put it aside, but on returning to it managed to go from start to finish in a day; which whilst it’s not the length of War and Peace.at 230 pages long, does tell me two things. One it’s a decent book with pace, that was interesting enough to keep me turning the pages. Two, I happen to be quite adept at picking up the right book at the wrong time, as my "started never finished" list on the blog shows.

Sib, the bookie’s assistant is comically portrayed as a lonely, sad-sack social-misfit, stuck in a dead-end job with her parents lamenting the lack of direction in her life and only her fishes for comfort. Opportunity strikes when she ends up with the shop’s takings after an inept armed robber bungles the heist. Mayhem ensues affecting Sib and her housemates, including her sex-driven brother when the hapless criminal attempts to recover his ill-gotten gains.

Right book, right time, with a reasonable resolution. I have tried to discover if the author Mark Sullivan, not to be confused with Mark T. Sullivan, has anything else in print, but I haven’t been able to find anything.

3 from 5 – a reasonably entertaining crime-caper.

I bought this new probably 6 or 7 years ago.

JIM NISBET - LETHAL INJECTION (1987)

Blurb.....

The gritty noir cult classic is now back in print - and the first of nine Nisbet books from Overlook!

Jim Nisbet's cult classic Lethal Injection, one of the first Black Lizard Books originals, has been out of print in the United States for an unforgivably long time. Overlook is remedying that with this paperback - the first of nine reissues that will make up a Nisbet revolution.

It's about as noir as you can get. In a bleak Texas prison Royce, an alcoholic doctor administers Bobby Mencken's last 'high,' convinced that the convicted killer was innocent. When Royce's marriage crumbles he takes off for Dallas to search for the real killer.

Of Nisbet, Germany's Die Welt wrote, 'Neither Norman Mailer nor Truman Capote has in their writing been able to produce such an intensity as Nisbet has achieved.' With sharp humor and a poet's ear for language, Nisbet's world may be bleak, but it is frighteningly real. Overlook is proud to bring him to a new generation of readers.

My first taste of this author and someone who I will be returning to in the future. (I don’t have a choice I have a stack of his books in the attic!)

Lethal Injection is short, sharp, dark and funny; following Franklin Royce, an alcoholic prison doctor’s journey to discover the real killer behind the crime that his most recent patient was convicted of. Mencken; who Royce believes to be innocent, won’t be requiring further treatment once Royce has done his $600 of dirty work.

Royce with marital and financial woes usually seeks respite in the bottom of a whiskey bottle, but shoots for some level of redemption by trying to uncover the truth, without abandoning his whiskey.  Catching up with Mencken’s former partners in crime; Eddie, a low-life sociopath, and a junkie ex-girlfriend with a penchant for dirty sex  before, during and after getting high. Royce with his Gladstone bag full of morphine and his constant bottle descends into a haze of crime, sex, drugs and squalor while trying to avenge Mencken.

Nisbet won’t appeal to all readers but if you enjoy a roll in the gutter and want a view on the seamier side of inner-city America, Nisbet’s the man.

Hopefully this book and Overlook’s plans to reprint some of his previous work will bring to the attention of a wider audience.

5 from 5 – highly recommended!

I bought this new a couple of years ago.

E L JAMES - FIFTY SHADES FREED (2012)

Blurb………

When unworldly student Ana Steele first encountered the driven, damaged young entrepreneur Christian Grey, it sparked a sensual affair that changed both their lives irrevocably. Shocked, intrigued, and ultimately repelled by Christian's singular sexual tastes, Ana demanded a deeper commitment; determined to keep her, Christian agreed. Now, together, they have more-love, passion, intimacy, wealth, and a world of infinite possibilities. But Ana always knew that loving her Fifty Shades would not be easy and being together poses challenges neither of them ever anticipated. Ana must somehow learn to share Christian's opulent lifestyle without sacrificing her own integrity, identity, or independence; Christian must somehow overcome his compulsion to control and lay to rest the horrors that blighted his past and haunt his present. Just when it seems that together their love can conquer any obstacle, tragedy, malice and fate combine to make Ana's worst nightmares come true. Alone and desperate, she must face down the poisoned legacy of Christian's past. Seductive, shocking, sad, and funny, Fifty Shades Freed is the compelling final volume in the trilogy.

Well I can’t say that I am sorry to have seen the back of these three books. The first was bearable, the second slightly less so and this one was just total torture from start to finish………….oh Christian, oh Ana, Oh Christian, Oh Ana, blah, blah, blah for nearly 600 pages.

The sex scenes were dull……..oh Christian, oh Ana, oh Christian, oh Ana, with a couple of ooohhs and aaahhhs thrown in.

DULL, DULL, REPETITIVE, BORING, COMPLETE AND UTTER MINCE FROM BEGINNING TO END, WITH SOME GRIM BITS IN THE MIDDLE.

Each copy should be sold with bottle of bleach that you can pour in your eyes just to make it stop!

I’m sure some people enjoyed it, but not me. Fortunately my wife agrees so we won't have to suffer like this again next year.

1 from 5 - on the basis that you can't give a book a ZERO (Am I too generous?)

JULIAN BARNES - FLAUBERT'S PARROT (1984)

Blurb......... Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the great French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert. As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer's work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey himself.

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Always a sucker for a smart cover, and add in the fact that it had been enjoyed and praised by no less than the likes of John Irving and Graham Greene, with a price tag of a whopping 30p in whatever charity shop I was browsing about 10 years ago and it was pretty much a given that I would be reading this sometime in the distant future.

After a previous start, stall, stop attempt to read this some years ago, I reopened it with a new found determination to read it start to finish and hopefully at the same time enjoy it.

Well in places it was okay, amusing and informative. In other places it was dull and tedious and though it is classed as a novel, it has a strange structure to it. One of the plus points was it was relatively short!

I’ve found some detail out about Gustave Flaubert that I previously didn’t know; a French author of the 19^th Century, who’s first published work – Madame Bovary - brought him and his publisher up on immorality charges, of which he was acquitted. Flaubert is regarded by some as one of the greatest novelists of Western Literature. He never married, he took on average about five years or so on each book, plus he at some time borrowed a stuffed parrot.

I haven’t been inspired to go and seek out anything from Flaubert to form my own opinion on his value as a great exponent of Western prose. Similarly neither have I been encouraged to seek out much else that Barnes has penned, apart from his recent book - A Sense Of An Ending - which I’ll get to sometime, though it might be another 10 years or so.

On reflection, it was probably a bit better than a 2 from 5, but not quite a 3, but in the process of rounding up 3 from 5 it is.   

As indicated earlier, I bought this copy second-hand.

RICHARD RAYNER - MURDER BOOK (1997)

Blurb...... About as noir as it can be…excellent’ Frances Fyfield, Daily Telegraph

The city is Los Angeles, the birthplace of the American dream, a city that has come to symbolize both heaven and hell. Billy McGrath is an enigma, half American, half English, who once dreamed of pursuing a career as an academic philosopher, but for the last fifteen years he’s been a homicide detective – one of LA’s best. He knows the rules, and understands a justice system that punishes the underprivileged and lets the rich go free. He’s an unhappy man, divorced from the wife he still adores and separated from a daughter for whom he’d willingly die. If he hasn’t yet thought of suicide, he soon will.
McGrath is called to a crime scene – a woman dead on a kitchen floor in one of the city’s seamiest neighbourhoods, an apparently routine assignment until he discovers that the murdered woman’s son is LA’s biggest crack dealer, an idol of the ghetto who offers him a one-million-dollar bounty for the name of the killer. Making the wrong choice for what might be the right reasons, McGrath initiates both his own fall from grace and, as he strives to redeem himself, a series of wild and furious actions that hurtle him through the many identities of corrupt Los Angeles.
In McGrath, Rayner has created a sympathetic everyman who becomes both victim and victor. Set against a bleak cityscape, Murder Book is a dark, violent and sexy thriller that is impossible to put down.

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I bought this when it was first published back in the late 90’s having been drawn by the LA Times remark on the cover of my copy.....”Neo-neo-Noir”........hell, not just Noir but Neo-neo-Noir!

I tried reading this some years ago, but as often happens to me the book you pick up at the time doesn’t suit your mood, so quickly gets returned to the shelf, whilst something more suitable steps up in place.

Well this time around I was maybe 40 pages in and thinking.........hmmm, not too bad, and then it died on me. I must have spent a week persevering through the next 100-150 pages at which point the pace picked up again and maintained until the end.

Okay-ish, in a sort of I don’t care too much what happens manner.

Beginning  - good, long, long, middle -total grimness, last section - alright.

Conclusions:

Neo-neo-noir is some horrible 90’s inferior version of noir and if I ever pick up another title recommended by Francis Fyfield it will be because I’ve suffered amnesia probably after being hit round the head by a box full of remaindered copies of Rayner’s other books, if this one is anything to go by.

2 from 5