A Good Dodge

Here’s a nifty actioner from 1948 — Plunder of the Sun by David Dodge, a sweat-soaked tale of gold-hunting in Peru. The publisher, Hard Case Crime, is in the business of both reprinting old pulps and scrounging up new ones. The blurb on one of their books — whether an oldie or hot off the presses I do not know — tells the story: “She was young, beautiful… and dead!”

This one by Mr. Dodge (“Bestselling Author of To Catch a Thief”) isn’t quite so horrid as that. Its young and beautiful women yet breath. But Plunder of the Sun – rival looters vie for a cache of Incan gold near Lake Titicaca — is grim enough for the most discerning junk fiction devotee. Al Colby, the hardboiled narrator, pauses at one point to sum up the story thus far thus:

Dead men, live men, thieves, liars, murderers, cheats, their lives tied to three hundred pounds of metal and polished stones.

Other than that he has no complaints even after being knocked unconcious, strangled unconcious and shot unconcious. He’s a trooper. And did I mention he’s hardboiled? He is. Clever enough to get to the Incan swag first, but not clever enough to… but I don’t want to give away plot jinks. You may find yourself languishing in an airport — or, better, crossing the Indian Ocean in a tramp steamer — and turn to this treasure hunt to beguile the hours. It will do the job, guaranteed.

And if you’ve had it up to here with psychological complexity you may enjoy Al Colby’s stripped down dealings with his fellow hard-boiled humans: Women he ogles, men he punches. Viz:

She had small slender hands, the wrists no bigger than a child’s. The rest of her was grown-up enough for anybody.

and

He… put his arms around her from behind… and she did everything she could, short of biting his ear, to make him realize he was holding something real nice.

and

She was done up like a Christmas tree… The only thing missing was a man on a leash.

and

I stood up and hit him about an inch below the breastbone. It didn’t knock him out, but it paralyzed him. He went down like a plank…

and

I jammed him back against a lifeboat, my left hand on his chest, and whacked him three times…

and

When he stood up to smack me, I hooked a right at his chin, as hard as I could throw it. He went headfirst over the back of his chair and hit the wall.

and, even with one arm in a cast, Mr Colby gives the guys what for:

I still had a good punch left in my right hand. I let him have it. He fell over into the bathtub and cracked his head against the wall… I said, “I can lick you with one hand, guagua. I’d just as soon do it now as any other time. Get up.”

I’d lend you my copy, but it’s all in tatters and scribbled upon. Happily Hard Case Crime foresaw this situation and had printed multiple copies:

Plunder of the Sun
by David Dodge
(Hard Crime Case, Mass Market Paperback, 222pp.)

The Fun Squash

A trip to the Calabasas Gelson’s — one of a local chain of semi-fancy-schmancy food stores — to purchase a pound of shrimp destined for tempura provided the occasion of merriment. Amongst the gourds stacked stadium-seating style in the produce section we found that which has been missing from our lives until this afternoon: The Fun Squash.

Mexicans have long known the happy secret of spaghetti squash, or as they call it, calabaza de los tallarines. Indeed, they have been extracting fun from the “fun squash’ since long before Hernán Cortés first set foot (pie) on their unguarded shores. Lately, in response to the insatiable demand for amusing vegetables in the United Strates, Mexico has begun to roll great herds of spaghetti squash up the avenues (arriba de las avenidas), across the border (a través de la frontera), and right into the heart (corazón) of their namesake city, Calabasas.

To answer the question you ache to ask, while we have not yet followed the instructions on the label for maximizing our squash experience — the cutting, the baking, the gentle teasing out of the tendrils with a fork — we have confidence that the promise of the label and nickname will be fulfilled if only because we have already gotten more fun from this purchase than we ever would have expected from an ordinary food item.

Dog On Duty

While marching around the neighborhood as part of an effort to reduce my carbon (and every other element) footprint, I noted this sign attached to the barrier protecting one of our more timorous neighbors.

On duty, my Aunt Fanny! That dog is drunk! You can see it plainly in his hooded eyes and in his foolish grin! 

Good thing the man cowering inside the compound put his entire trust in neither that easily scalable iron gate nor in the shamefully wasted guard dog. A sign announced a third tier of security, this one more convincing — Armed Response! — otherwise I would certainly have helped myself to one of his lawn ornaments. The concrete goose, I think.

Charade

A CIA gal and an MI5 guy, Claire and Ray, meet cute, fall in love, conspire to rip off their subsequent industrial espionage employers for 35 million bucks.

Sounds okay in the usual way, but I’ll tell you the nice thing about Duplicity: believe it or not, it delivers. Funny, engaging, with some “hurry! hurry!” suspense scenes (à la Rear Window), topped off with a Battling Bickersons romance powered by Julia Roberts as Claire and Clive Owens as Ray. Great line from Guy to Claire: “I think about you even when I’m with you.” Claire beams — which, as performed by Julia Roberts, is a lot of beaming.

Combine the sparring spy couple with the ultra-complicated heist of trade secrets and you wind up with a light-thriller along the lines of Charade or Undercover Blues, or what Mr. & Mrs. Smith tried to be but wasn’t. You ask, “Does it include lots of lovely vacation locations?” Well, what do you think? We get Rome, Miami, Bahamas, Zurich, New York, and Cleveland tossed in for laffs –  lots of vicarious travelling for these cash-strapped times.

All very nice, but what really makes Duplicity is what it doesn’t have:

• Not one gunfight.
• Nope, not even a gun.
• No car chase.
• No car crash.
• No barely spandex-clad women with glowing eyes.
• Not one guy wearing plastic abs and a mask with pointy ears.
• No rock music.
• No explosions.
• If there was CGI, it didn’t announce itself.

In other words: a movie for grown-ups. Imagine that.

Dog Treat

You know going in that Spencer Quinn’s mystery novel, Dog On It aims to please. There’s the punning title; there’s the title’s goofy typeface; there’s the cover illo featuring (you soon learn when you check out the blurb) the story’s protagonist and narrator, the dog Chet.

So does it please? Oh, absolutely! Or, to be fair, if you are the sort of dull, crabby, ice-hearted Squidward Scrooge who wouldn’t think a mystery told by a dog is funny, you’ve had plenty of warning that Dog On It is not a treatise on Kierkegaard. If by some chance you had distractedly picked up the volume, you’ve already dropped it and fled.

As for the rest of us. Well, your pleasure in Dog On It depends on whether you sign on for the trip. You’ll know in a page or two whether you want to play this writer’s game; An Arizonian private eye has a pet police dog who is also, more or less, his partner and who — though unable to speak to humans except by barks, growls and tail wags — speaks to the reader, telling the story of how Bernie, the P.I., gets to the bottom of a missing person case. Me, I signed on and enjoyed the ride. It was as fun as reading a kid’s “chapter book” when you were a kid. You just keep turning the pages.

The mystery is okay,  the suspense pretty suspenseful (and relieved a lot by the knowledge that “Spencer Quinn is working on his next Chet and Bernie mystery.” i.e. Dog and human survive the alarming circumstances Quinn puts them in.), but what kept this simple soul zipping along was the author’s resolutely maintaining the canine perspective.

Here are some passages I highlighted.

Watching Bernie dine with (Chet fervently hopes) his new girlfriend, Suzie:

“They clinked glasses. I loved that, clinking glasses, the sight and the sound, but mostly how no glass got broken. How did they do it? My adventures with glass never turned out that way.”

Here are some more:

“She wrung her hands. Hands are the weirdest things about humans, and the best: you can find out just about everything you need to know by watching them.”

“The woman looked confused; the confused human face is almost as ugly as the angry one.”

“The Hound of the Baskervilles was on the screen. I’d seen it more times than I could count—which was two in my case: me and Bernie, for example—but the way that hound’s howl kept scaring the pants off all those people never got old. If I could only howl like that…Hey! maybe I could.”

Here are the two Doggisms that sum up the Chet’s perspective:

“The truth was that humans didn’t turn out to be the best judges of other humans. We, meaning me and my kind, were much better.”

…and…

“Things have a way of turning out for the best: That’s my core belief.”

And they do. Very little violence — even the baddest baddies only receive flesh wounds, and a bite or two. The scatology you can expect in a tale told by a dog is no more than necessary to establish Chet’s point of view.

Good dog!

Dog on It
A Chet and Bernie Mystery
by Spencer Quinn
(Atria Books, Hardcover, 305pp.)

Magical Mystery Bookstore

We had no great expectations as we journeyed in search of The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles. Past experience with specialized bookstores had taught us to look for no more than a hole in the wall with thin inventory and a staff anesthetized with boredom. But this Westwood Village shop dedicated to crime novels surprised us like a Jeffrey Deaver plot twist.

The Mystery Bookstore is spacious enough for that all-important browsing activity: wandering around stupidly. But it is also full of little secret nooks and crannies for that other equally important browsing activity: stupidly flipping pages. The inventory, wonderful to dictu, is actually more comprehensive than a ::shudder:: big-box bookstore because the proprietors wisely mix new and used books together, counting on their customers’ intimate knowledge of the order of the alphabet to sort things out. As for the staff, far from benumbed they rival Holmes himself in acuity, and in kindness they surpass Mother Teresa.

Many — too many — prettily jacketed novels called to us, especially a spanking new copy of Dog On It by Spencer Quinn — autographed, too! –  but we were mindful of our pocketbook. We payed honor to frugality by purchasing only, at least for the moment, a contemporary reprint of a 1949 pulp actioner  — Plunder of the Sun by David Dodge, brought to us by hard-boiled publisher Hard Case Crime — and an old, old copy of Seven Keys to Baldpate by Earl Derr Biggers with an elegant Christmas inscription from 1914! We hope Aunt May enjoyed receiving her gift from Metta as much as we enjoyed taking possession of it nearly a century later.

But the Dog calls us to return…

The Mystery Book Store
1036 Broxton Ave # C
Los Angeles, CA 90024
(310) 209-0415

Dog on It
A Chet and Bernie Mystery
by Spencer Quinn
(Atria Books, Hardcover, 305pp.)

Plunder of the Sun
by David Dodge
(Hard Crime Case, Mass Market Paperback, 222pp.)

You can read my review of Seven Keys to Baldpate by scrolling a few posts north, or, if you prefer, by clicking on the words WHAT SORT OF NAME IS “DERR”?

Paradise Lost

See the happy floating people!

Where are they going that they smile so?

Come, let us follow them…

The color! The celestial light! The dancing, singing children!

What is this wonderous land?

Oh! Oh! It is Paradise!

I feel as though I could reach out and touch the face of…

But wait! What is this? A portal?

An exit?

It cannot be… It must not be…

Why are we being cast out into the outer brightness where there is a weeping and gnashing of teeth?

How do you turn this boat around?

Slow down! Stop! No, no, NO…

He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

G.K.’s Week

When I was a kid I read the mystery story “The Blue Cross” featuring that amiable detective of sorts, Father Brown, and it made me a lifelong fan of G.K. Chesterton.

Besides being a funny mystery — You can read the story yourself HERE, or you can Netflix the Alec Guiness movie more or less based on it — “Blue Cross” serves up such G.K. good mots as:

“The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.”

That said, another Chesterton classic The Man Who Was Thursday flummoxed me when I was twenty-five and flummoxes me still. A new edition of the beloved classic oddity from good ol’ Penguin Books grabbed me with its snazzy cover and prompted me to revisit this novel, or narrative, or story, or allegory, or whatever it is.

Thursday has just enough plot to hold the duels, speeches, carriage chases, fights, paradoxes, witticisms and arguments together: Gabriel Symes, a young, idealistic Edwardian poet (or is he late Victorian?), blusters his way into becoming one of the seven secret leaders of an outlawed anarchist organization dedicated to the destruction of everything he exults about in his poetry.

The committee of seven — each of whom is given a pseudonym based on the days of the week — is named the Central Anarchists Council. Symes is dubbed “Thursday.” Before long he uncovers the Council’s bizarre secret which is the gist, kernel, nub, thrust and point of the whole goings-on, or would be if I understood what that secret was.

Oh, I get that Thursday was a Chestertonian riposte to the late Victorian (or is it Edwardian?) cult of nihilism (now in full bloom in our benighted culture). But why the six anarchists (plus their nonsensical leader “Sunday”), who are actually fervent defenders of law, wind up enthroned at a masked ball costumed as the seven days of creation from Genesis… well, I didn’t get that and still don’t.

The fellow who pushed the book on me so many years ago asserted that the anti-anarchist/anarchist-ringleader named “Sunday” should be taken at face value when he announces, “I am the Sabbath. I am the Peace of God.” But I don’t know about that. He didn’t seem so peaceful to me when he literally goes “bouncing like a great ball of india-rubber” down a London street and leads the anarchists/detectives in a reckless horse chase while pelting them with wads of paper bearing Dadaisms such as “The truth about your trouser-stretchers is known. — A FRIEND.” The book-pusher was dead wrong, as Chesterton himself made clear (sorta) when he drew attention, years later, to the sub-title of the novel: “A Nightmare.“

All of which doesn’t make the weirdness of Thursday — shelved, by the way, for no reason I can understand, in the “Children’s Books” section of the bookstore where I bought it — any less weird. Still, it’s an exhilarating read if only for the liberal scatterings of quotable Chestertonisms like:

“Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained.”

The Man Who Was Thursday
A Nightmare
by G. K. Chesterton
(Penguin Books, Paperback, 209 paradoxical pp.)

Saved by the Frog

When I visited L.A.’s Venice Beach years ago it seemed the very soul of SoCal youth culture. Pretty girls in extra-short short-shorts whizzed to and fro on inline skates licking ice cream cones. Skateboarders, cyclists, scooterers and sunbleached guys bearing boogie boards swirled around, lost in a breezy mixture of health, youth, hedonism and earphones jacked into their Sony Walkmen (a precurser to the iPod).

We dropped by yesterday to see how time had treated the place. Did Venice Beach still exude the old exhuberance?

Our initial elation — induced largely by our having just found that rarest of Venice treasures: a free parking place — wore off quickly. Pretty youth, it seems, had aged and relocated. In its place was the largest collection of fat — really fat — young people I’ve seen this side of a Minnesotan Oktoberfest. The bright colors had give way to various shades of black: dark black, faded black, Dorito-crumb covered black, taco-sauce stained black, black with kettle-corn bits. A passé hip-hop style defined the shambling crowd. A low-rent carnival atmosphere defined the wretched tourist-bait shops despoiling the promenade. If the minimum wage laborers of China wonder where all their massive output of skull-insignia trashware goes, they can find the answer here on Venice Beach.

Even Rip Cronk’s famous Venice Beach mural, Venice Reconstituted, has been ravaged, but not only by time; mostly by the spray cans of addled Venetians. Once emblematic of the unbound spirit of the place, it is now disappearing. Twenty years of sun and sea exposure pale the upper portion. Vandals have obscured the bottom. Even the Venice Venus’s inline skates are gone, buried under layers of idiot scribbling.

I’m glad I hadn’t brought my cameras, so I couldn’t yield to the temptation to take pictures of the awful awfulness of the once-merry playground. I’m sure you have awfulness aplenty within commuting distance of wherever you live and hardly need another memento mori. Besides, I’d rather remember how Venice Beach looked in more innocent days.

Deflated, we made our way back through alleyways to our lucky parking place — which immediately filled as we pulled out — and left the animated corpse of the 90s behind us. We would have been bummed if the word were still in use.

Fortunately the day was saved as we hurried home via Topanga Canyon Road. Topanga Canyon is a stasis field of grooviness. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale it. Here the Age of Aquarius has refused to give way to the Age of Capricorn.

We pulled a death-defying U-y and screeched into the dirt lot of the eternal 70s style Froggy’s Fish Market & Restaurant. All distressed wood, dim light, industrial windows, and frog-themed decoration (see the picture at the top of this post). Dress code: beyond casual. A couple of mahi-mahi tacos later and our cheer was repaired.

Squidward Rock

It took some hunting, some back-and-forthing in the car, to find this entrance — over-bowered and recessed — but we did at last. Beyond that bloodied iron door lies a trailhead of the Temescal Ridge Trail. The simpler way to access that trail is from Temescal Gateway Park down on Sunset Boulevard, but arcane signs had lured us here. And so we strapped on our backpacks, wrapped trek pole straps around our wrists and set forth.

The forbidding door creaked ominously on its hinges as we pulled it open. Beyond stretched a narrow path dedicted to the memory of Philip Leacock. He was a film director from England where he had achieved some critical acclaim with movies like The Spanish Gardener (1956). He gave up all that when he got a taste of California. He settled in the Palisades (where this trailhead is found) and spent the rest of his career directing TV shows like Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, and Dynasty. Spent some time hiking, too, I guess, since this really nice half-mile trail is named in his honor.

Honor him we did, and gladly, as we climbed, making merry melody upon his sunny trail — a very nice trail rapidly whisking us above the ritzy manses of Pacific Palisades Highlands for half a mile before glomming onto the Temescal Canyon Ridge trail. Not at all spooky as the eerie trailhead gate had seemed to portend. We paused for breath at the junction.

That is when we felt the FEAR.

A FEAR emanating from the north. A FEAR growing with every step as we wound along the rising ridge. What chthonic evil radiated this pulsing dread?

The answer appeared after a mile or so of climbing:

The rock in our road is none other than infamous SKULL ROCK. Did we dare pass Skull Rock — glaring at us from its empty sockets, if it’s possible to glare from empty sockets — and Skull Rock’s equally menacing companion, Weird-shaped Rock? We certainly did dare. We had the key.

We re-named it.

Inspired by the Philip Leacock leg of our journey, we invoked the beneficent power of television and dubbed the threatening boulder “Squidward Rock.” A glittering of fairy-dust, the tiny chiming of celestial bells, a harp arpeggio and the evil dispersed. We strolled blithely on our way, whistling.