jdcorley's Reviews (191)

adventurous dark funny fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

The love for pulp adventure fairly crackles, and the concept ("of course the pulp heroes, teens or no, are psychopathic bad guys") is fine, if a little trite, especially in these post Venture Brothers days.  The main problem is there's no place to stand. Our point of view characters are selfish, deranged, sexually precocious to a skin crawling degree, and so we can't celebrate their casual attitude or smirking coolness no matter how bad the Lovecraftian (literally, and literally) opposition is. The pulps were at least fun and there's really no fun to be had here.

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mysterious fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

A delightful ramble, with Marple along from the beginning, and although figuring out the culprit is prety straightforward, Marple's revelations are pretty drab.  After a few deft moves in the first few chapters, she doesn't really impress with any of her little hints.  The supporting cast, especially Lucy, is charming enough to make up for it, but not quite to the snap of a truly top tier Christie.  

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mysterious tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Wolfe and the team are at their best - the only flaw is in the denouement, when a clue is just literally dropped off as a result of an offscreen shenanigan. Why not let Archie commit the shenanigans?!

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emotional medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

How to make a mystery/crime story have racial elements without falling into stereotype - get very, very, very specific. Every single character in this from the racist redneck meth dealers to the innocent young kid present at exactly one interview has a point of view, a history and Pelecanos carefully lays it out with understanding, even if not acceptance. See what you think of Terry Quinn by the end of this book that supposedly introduces him to the private-eye job that will be the source of the next few books. Tell you one thing, Pelecanos absolutely doesn't expect us to just love him and think he's great.   

The one exception to the rule of Pelecanos' relentless, detailed focus on personal viewpoints and history are drug users. In this story a drug addict has no point of view and no interiority at all; they're just a vehicle driving towards an overdose. There's not an ounce of sympathy to the addict anywhere in here, even when rescuing (this is not a euphemism) one is the core objective of the last fourth of the book. 

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adventurous funny medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

This, the last of the Pete Schofield romps, is running out of gas just a little bit - the plot is a rambling, shaggy dog story of mobsters, crooked soldiers, secret weapons and a mysterious tattooed woman - but what has always brought you to the Schofield mysteries is still here.  Namely, Pete's relationship with his shady, lascivious, fun-loving and boldly-drawn wife Jeannie.  The book just crackles whenever she's on the page, and when she's not, we know she's off somewhere causing trouble which will soon orbit back to the wry view of Pete.  It's honestly one of the better relationships in noir, and always fun to revisit them.

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mysterious reflective fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Christie has several times written a novel about a murder that took place years and years before the investigation, with varying degrees of success. This is one of her more successful attempts, perhaps a little on the  formalistic side, but deeply described and felt. Poirot is not much of a presence, and perhaps this is why the attempt is lesser known than some of her other works. It isn't deserved. This one's flawlessly crafted and turned.

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emotional mysterious medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

A rather marvelous Poirot, if you look at it a second time. The setting is contained while still feeling appealing; the characters are relatively modest in number and all emotionally simple to understand, and yet when Poirot hits upon his final move, you still don't quite get it unless you've been paying attention all along. Really excellent.

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adventurous funny mysterious fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Three out of four ain't bad - the first three Poirot stories are each a delight, from thefts to murder. They're short - Poirot sometimes barely has anything to go on at all when he makes his deductions, but each of them addresses a very particularlized view of Englishness, which is Christie's forte.  The last one is a bit of a dud - not much happens and Poirot certainly does little enough.  The quality of the previous ones are among the best of the best, however.

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adventurous funny fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Fans of James Bond (and you can't talk about the Liquidator series without talking about James Bond) will usually emphasize that Ian Fleming doesn't think that Bond is an admirable person.  He expresses a sort of ambivalent conservatism about him - Bond is needed to keep the world safe, but he also is an echo of the trauma and brutality of The War.  You can't really have a good time when you're over Bond's shoulder, even if you're traveling to fancy places and smooching fancy ladies.  

Gardner cures this with a bracing dose of absurdity - our hero doesn't actually kill, even though he's licensed to.  His boss thinks he's a cold-blooded murderer but in the war his heroism was just by accident, and his business partner's wife really did get drunk and crash the car, and his business partner did actually fall out of a window by accident, and all the "license to kill" hits that he has to execute, he just...hires a hitman to do them, because he doesn't have the nerve. He keeps his job because he likes the pay and the travel and the women - which is what we actually would like about the James Bond experience!  In this particular installment we're introduced to our hero, bending the rules to bed a secretary, then due to a mixup, being targeted prematurely by enemy agents.  Those enemy agents then trick him in a way that brings his boss into the field, culminating in a double-cross and the theft of a new air force prototype.  It's neat - it has everything we actually want from a 20th century secret agent experience without the somewhat crawling sensation Fleming suggests that things aren't right.  This is why this series is, as light hearted adventure, much more palatable than Bond. Long live "L".

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dark mysterious medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Freemantle wrote this novel at the peak of POW fever - a frantic passion that gripped America for almost thirty years, convinced that increasingly elderly POWs were being held - for some reason - in the victorious Vietnam. At times this belief was held by 80 percent of the country; the lack of solid evidence, reliable eyewitness statements or even a shadow of a doubt among the incredibly over-documented archives of the Vietnam conflict did nothing to assuage it.  And between the lines of this novel you can see the sickness this belief was a symptom of. Americans couldn't believe, of themselves, that they had spent a solid fifteen years obliterating a poor nation for nothing, torturing, dropping more bombs every week than had been dropped in all of World War II. It had to have been a noble, heroic sacrifice, or else the nation weren't just losers, the nation was a monster that had massacred its way to defeat, a spasm of corruption, the flag a banner of technocapitalistic evil that deserved to be defeated. Heroism and "tough choices" are the sugar that helps America swallow the defeat.  

Freemantle is too much of a keen observer to miss that the war was a war, and that the desperation for heroic feelings about the war distorted America, still distorts America, will distort us until, someday, a moral conviction may be found to let us see ourselves clearly.  And this distortion is at the heart of the book.  A British journalist returns to Vietnam in search of a story about his father's involvement in a heroic, doomed action.  It's no twist to learn that the heroism wasn't what it seemed to be.  You know it from the start - and you get the feeling that he does too.  There's a half twist near the end where it almost seems like his father was a hero after all, and that perks your interest. But in the end Freemantle reiterates that the war was just a war and Americans are just like any other nation at war since nations and wars have been.  And he can't quite bring himself to point, firmly and without flinching, at the gap between what Americans were in Vietnam and what they had to think they were in Vietnam.  The gap is in this book. You can read it. He didn't miss it!  But he can't indict it.

Still, the journalist's story is strong enough. While it makes sense for there to be a tense Special Forces scene in the book, I almost would give it up just to stay in the journalist's head, to navigate things he doesn't know and we don't know.  To not know things he will never know.

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