Thursday, September 18, 2025

Cape Fear stalks our end-of-summer reading list

Mystery Club #5 

Back in 1991, I went to see Cape Fear in the theater.  De Niro’s terrifying performance still lingers in my mind, all these years later.  But it wasn’t until last year that I finally read the book that the film and its 1962 predecessor were based on.     

All you need is a cocktail umbrella!

John D. MacDonald, best known and loved for his Travis McGee novels, wrote Cape Fear in 1957.  It was originally published as The Executioners

The basic premise is a familiar one.  A lawyer, Sam Bowden, is stalked by Max Cady, a man he helped to put away in prison years before.  At that time Sam had been young, but now he has a family – a wife, three kids, two of them growing up too fast, and a sweet family dog.

You could practically write it yourself, couldn’t you?

Here’s where MacDonald’s genius comes in.  In little glimpses, we get to know the family.  Likewise, the ongoing deeds and general behavior of the villain.  Yes, the family is appealing and wholesome but human.  Yes, the villain proves himself to be the worst of the worst, over and over again -- far beyond retribution.

But the story goes beyond that.  The nuances of justice, of right and wrong, of how far one can allow oneself to go in the name of defending one’s bit of peace and happiness without destroying everything you’ve built and are proud of – and how much fear and oppression a human soul can take before it breaks.  Not to mention how our survival instinct expands to protect those we care about.

This all sounds very pompous as I write it, but the way MacDonald handles it, and turns it over in these pages for us to examine, is anything but heavy-handed.  It is, instead, very human.

Throughout it all, Cady puts the reader on edge as much as he does Sam Bowden’s family.  And Cady amuses himself by tormenting others.  For the most part he sticks to attacking citizens who won’t go to the police.  

One woman, perhaps a little too “friendly,” winds up with “a face like a blue basketball” after Cady’s ministrations with a smashed chair.  And even to her Cady mentions his adopted nemesis, Sam Bowden – “The Lieutenant” – twice.  “And both times it gave me the cold creepers, right up and down my back," she tells Sam. “One time he said you were an old Army buddy and to show you how much he liked you he was going to kill you six times.”

Cady, like many twisted minds we encounter in daily life, doesn’t make sense by the normal standards of society.

It takes some finagling to arrange for Cady to be put away, even temporarily.  Perhaps a small sidestep outside the law.  But even that doesn’t last.  And this time when Cady gets out of custody, he’s not pulling any punches.  He’s not wasting any time.

The clock is ticking.  Summer is high.  And there’s nowhere for the Bowdens to run, after all, but home.

This is a fast, partly delightful and partly very intense summer read.  Perfect for tucking in your pocket to take with you to the beach, or a solo picnic!

My favorite vintage version!

 

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Green Men and Occasional Pseudonyms

Mystery Club #4

I enjoy the spooky and melodramatic cover art that graces vintage paperback gothic mysteries, but I rarely pick them up to read myself -- probably because they tend to be heavy on the πŸ’•romanceπŸ’• and helpless female protagonists. 

However, a couple of years ago I found a 1987 US printing of The Castle of the Demon by Patrick Ruell (one of UK mystery author Reginald Hill’s pseudonyms), and couldn’t resist.

I had fun with its mashup of tropes – a little bit of vintage gothic, a little bit of mystery, a generous dollop of local folklore, a dash of potential romances (plural!), all set against a seaside cliff breeze, and by the end … well you might read it yourself, so I don’t want to spoil anything.  Things get a little crazy towards the end!

What really grabbed me about the book initially besides its title (!!) and the diabolical cover (!!!!) was the writeup on the back:   

“For Emily Follet, alone in the remote village of Skinburness, fear could take many forms.  It could be the college, formerly the castle of a renowned sorcerer, where no one seems to know what goes on.  It could be the mysterious black rider on his black horse.  Or the two recent unexplained drownings.  Or the green men.  Above all, the green men.”  And off I went to follow the train of green things, as I always do.  

Please note that Skinburness is a real place, and its name is honest-to-gosh thought to mean "the headland of the Demon haunted castle."  I’m glad it inspired Hill to pen this tale!  

Our narrator, Emily Follet, is a woman finding her own way for the first time perhaps ever.  She is determined to be independent.  She makes new friends during her vacation break, playing dominoes with the old village dudes at the local tavern, spending time alone with her lanky lolloping dog Cal on the beach, and at night she reads from a book on local folklore that she’s found on the bookshelves in her cottage.  

But strange things start happening at an accelerating pace, and it becomes difficult to know who to trust and who to avoid, who to keep at arm’s length and who to have dinner with, if only for politeness’s sake.  New disappearances occur, the windswept dunes hide secret excavations… and maybe a corpse or two?  And in the depths of the night, alone in her cottage, she hears strange voices on the phone line, and sees something unbelievable peering through the window into her bedroom at 3:00 in the morning. 

Of course, she can’t tell the polite Constable Parfrey the whole story about the face at the window.  He would think she was barmy.  “He seemed doubtful enough about its existence, as it was.  He probably suspected some kind of hysterical nightmare.  He would have hardly been reassured if she had told him the face was green.”  Events continue to ramp up, with mysterious nurses, midnight assaults, strange “archaeologists”, and then it goes completely off the rails in a fun little darkride.  

So if you like a diversion on the spooky side, with a decently-written female narrator, a gothic seaside setting, just the barest dusting of romance, and a dog named Cal instead of Scooby-Doo, you’ve got yourself a book recommendation here!  I hope someone brings it back into print soon. 


 

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

TONIGHT! Event: JAWS documentary at SPACE Gallery!

 

WHAT: Film screening of The Farmer & the Shark

WHEN:  TONIGHT!!!

Weds Sept 10 @7:00pm (doors open 6:30)

90 min runtime, followed by Q&A

WHERE:  SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St, Portland ME

TICKETS:  

https://space538.org/event/the-farmer-and-the-shark/

It's the 50th anniversary of Jaws this year!!!  
 
Join us TONIGHT at SPACE for the Maine premiere of "The Farmer & the Shark" - a documentary about the making of Jaws through the lens of Craig Kingsbury, the Martha's Vineyard farmer and fisherman who inspired the film character of the one and only QUINT!!! 
 
Director John Campopiano joins us for a Q&A after the film, as we celebrate the tail end of summer in a very New England way. 
πŸ¦ˆπŸ‘¨‍πŸŒΎπŸ’•

Friday, September 5, 2025

Poet vs. Jabberwock - FIGHT!

Mystery Club #3

Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock (1950) 
vs. Michael Connelly’s The Poet (1996)

Reading Michael Connelly’s The Poet resurrected my experience of reading Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock, even though they are very different books.  So of course I had to dig out my old copy of it, and re-read it – even before I finished with The Poet.

I’ll start with The Poet because I really want to talk about Jabberwock – I like both books, but Jabberwock remains a favorite.  You’ll see.

Michael Connelly’s The Poet:

Last year, after years of hearing about him from others, I decided it was finally time for me to try a Michael Connelly novel.  I started reading The Poet, and was feeling pretty lukewarm about it – but as soon as the literary element made itself known in the storyline, I was hooked. 

The Poet is one of three novels Connelly has written featuring the main character Jack McEvoy, an investigative reporter.  In discussing McEvoy, Connelly has mentioned that his character is somewhat autobiographical, but “what is autobiographical is his view of the business” – when Connelly is writing the character, he writes what he himself would do in each given situation, drawing from his own experience as a crime beat reporter throughout the 1980s.  (see interview with Paul Davis here: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/michael-connelly-on-fair-warning-and-his-crime-rep/)

The Poet definitely feels personal, so I was pleased to find that verification in his own words.  I say personal, but really it feels like it’s unpretentious, more specifically.  McEvoy’s inner dialogue is raw and straightforward.  It gives you the impression that you are hearing his thoughts as fast as he is – there’s no filter, no buffer to slow them down and sift them out.  This also means there are moments in the story where McEvoy is just as in-the-dark as you, the reader (perhaps even more so).

McEvoy’s twin brother, a police officer, died shortly before the story starts -- a purported suicide.  But something about the case bothers McEvoy, and when he latches onto some strange clues while digging into other similar cases, ostensibly in the process of researching police suicides as a whole, he knows he’s laid hold of a case much bigger, and more dangerous, than anything he could have imagined.  At the end of Chapter Two, he lays treacherous groundwork for the story to come, telling us, “I thought I knew something about death then.  I thought I knew about evil.  But I didn’t know anything.”

Two sentences form the lynchpin of this story, written inside the fogged windshield of the brother’s car: “Out of time.  Out of space.”  A cryptic legacy of which no one knows what to make.

And from those two short sentences spin the rest of this tale, feathering pinions of tiny case details, cop by cop, that stand out on reinspection, that have bothered the investigating officers, sometimes for years after their fellow officers’ deaths.

Needless to say, things accelerate quickly.  McEvoy finds himself first working against, then with, then against, then with a special FBI unit, and the creep of a killer piles horror upon horror as he hears the baying of the hounds getting closer.  The elegant sentences stolen from an age-old poet to grace each incident cannot conceal the sordid dealings which lie at the root of this spreading evil.  The only solution is a brutal cauterization of the elusive source.  I won’t spoil the story for you, in case you have yet to read it yourself.

Fredric Brown’s The Night of the Jabberwock:

Several years ago, while I was attending ReaderCon in Burlington, MA, my friend and fellow bookdealer Bob Eldridge gave me a copy of Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock.  I had never read Brown before, although I was familiar with him by reputation from his wild and absurd scifi work such as Martians, Go Home (1955).  Brown was also an early originator of flash fiction (the two opening sentences of “Knock” 1948, which form a complete story themselves, and “Answer” 1954).  But I hadn’t realized he also wrote mysteries.  That evening, sitting in my hotel room, I began reading Night of the Jabberwock, and didn’t get to sleep until very late that night.

Where The Poet embeds a few choice lines in each of its cases, waiting to be found by McEvoy’s stubborn tenacity, Night of the Jabberwock opens each chapter with an epigraph drawn from Lewis Carroll’s poem "Jabberwocky."  And like Connelly, Brown uses his experience as a newspaper proof-reader and reporter to build the backbone of this winding story.

The passage beginning with “’Twas brillig and the slithy toves,…” sets us out on our adventure, not quite knowing what we are up against, and feeling as ill-prepared as the forewarned son of Carroll’s rhymes.

Our guide and narrator is hardly better-off than we are.  Doc Stoeger, regularly haphazard newspaperman, publisher of the weekly Carmel City Clarion, and Lewis Carroll afficionado, wakes from a dream of the Jabberwock coming for him on the dark streets of his small town, only to find he’s fallen asleep at work waiting for the next-to-final proof of his latest issue, due to come out on Friday morning.  A few small tweaks to the type for the edition accomplished, he heads for Smiley’s across the street, looking forward to a drink to end the long day.

Smiley tells him, “Glad you got here early, Doc.  It's damn dull this evening.” 

Doc commiserates with him.  “It’s dull every evening in Carmel City, and most of the time I like it.  But Lord, if only something would happen just once on a Thursday evening, I’d love it.  Just once in my long career, I’d like to have one hot story to break to a panting public.”

Clearly, we readers know things are about to change.  Instead of the usual Thursday night drill, Doc is about to find himself in the middle of what seems like a dozen different nightmare collusions, none of which he could have anticipated in a million years.  This Thursday, he’s going to wish the evening’s brouhaha started and ended with having to figure out what to put in the paper now that the Tuesday rummage sale has been canceled at the last minute.

The evening starts off normally enough.  Rummage sale kerfuffles (you thought I was kidding?), some booze, a chess game, rampant Carroll-quoting challenges, etc.  A weaving walk home through the dark.  A dite[1] more booze.  Then Doc learns of the existence of the Roman Candle Department at the local fireworks factory (introducing him to a new lifegoal).  Still, all fairly normal Thursday night events.

Next one Yehudi Smith arrives on Doc’s doorstep, a peculiar chap hailing from a Lewis Carroll-loving club, with a strange invitation for Doc to attend a secret meeting.  More booze!  More Carroll quoting!  But these veer into some wonderful deepdives, introducing the lighter Carroll reader to such passages as:

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,

And each damp thing that creeps and crawls

Went wobble-wobble on the walls.

-- from “The Palace of Humbug”


Smith also brandishes a clipping from a nearby newspaper at Doc, titled “Man Slain by Unknown Beast,” and broaches the topic of risks associated with joining ranks with the Carroll-loving club.  Attack by a real Jabberwock?!

And thus the night begins to turn its tail and reveal a sinister side.

Before dawn breaks, Doc will have lived a lifetime’s worth of insane and terrifying events, all by pure happenstance.  All echoing back and forth from Carroll’s rhymes.  All insensible, as most human things are.

It’s not in the book, but surely at some point Doc quoted Alice in Wonderland to himself: “Dear, dear!  How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?”

In closing:

Both Brown and Connelly are aces at writing a tale that lures you in quietly, then gets its hooks in you with all sorts of intriguing details, and then thrashes you mercilessly (but with great interest in your entertainment as a reader).  Almost a half-century apart, but both highly skilled, and both well worth a read.

Early dustjacket art for Jabberwock!
 [1] A “dite” is a Maine measurement, somewhere between a smidge and a bit.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dite