Reading Wilkie Collins was a revelation to me. How could I have taken so many English Lit. classes and not read this guy?

The narrator of We, D-503, is a mathematician and engineer, the primary designer of a rocket called the INTEGRAL. D-503 is a citizen of the totalitarian OneState, in which the Benefactor presides over a society of perfect reason. People are “Numbers.” There is no I anywhere in the society, no concept of an individual. Each Number is simply a component of the larger We.

This is the first I’ve read from Gardner, and it’s a good one. It’s more of a straight-up detective mystery than a noir, and it doesn’t attempt the reach the depth or weight you find in the best crime and noir novels, but it is entertaining.

Bertha Cool is the unapologetically unorthodox head of the B. Cool detective agency. Donald Lam, “the runt,” is her new, wet-behind-the-ears junior detective. He’s got plenty of brains and more than enough street smarts to do his job, but he has a weakness for women in trouble, or perhaps for any woman who will give him the time of day. As Bertha puts it, “You pick some little tart and fall in love with her every time.”

I’ve read many of Greene’s books, and this is the most powerful and intense of the lot. The book follows the travels of a priest on the run from a communist regime that has sworn to abolish religion, and has got rid of every priest in the state, either by execution or by forcing them to marry. The “whiskey priest” is the last in the state. He’s been on the run for years and is wearing down.

A few months ago, my wife brought home a book by Micheal Tolkin called Among the Dead . Tolkin was the author of The Player , which was made into a film directed by Robert Altman, and like The Player, Among the Dead is a dark satirical look at the vanity and egotism of the bit players in the entertainment industry.

This book is dark, in the vein of Jim Thompson and Elliott Chaze. It starts out with a guy who’s troubled and hiding from life. In fact, he’s engineered his whole life to avoid entanglements, responsibilities and feelings.

Two things struck me while reading John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-By. The first was the quality of his writing, which can be witty and insightful, and is never cliché. The second was how, especially in the case of this book, the hard-boiled detective genre can pander to male fantasy in the same way romance panders to women.

I picked this up in a bookstore the other day because I liked the lurid, 1950s pulp style of the cover, and the opening chapter was good. I hadn’t read Ed McBain before, and I was surprised to read a first novel in which the plotting, dialog, and characters are solid throughout.

The main character, Ray Stone, is an addict who finds himself framed for a murder and has to prove his innocence. Some elements of the book are dated, such as the descriptions of fight scenes, which play out exactly as they did in the movies of the forties and fifties–a little slow, with guys in suits kicking each other in the shins and trying to wrestle pistols from each other’s hands. Some of the dated elements of the book, however, actually make it interesting. This book was first copyrighted in 1952, and slang of jazz musicians in this novel didn’t seem to appear in film until a few years later.

I picked this up off the library shelf after reading an article that praised it. I had difficulty with a few things in this book. Bowen’s writing can be uneven. I often lost the thread of a scene, a conversation, or an interaction. Her dialog can sometimes be long-winded. Eddie especially goes on at length. Sometimes there’s a disparity between what she says about her characters and how they actually present themselves through their words and actions. (For example, why does she keep calling Eddie innocent when he knows exactly how he’s manipulating people?)

Impala won first place for genre fiction in the 24th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards . They announced it in the March/April issue of the magazine.