Review: The Coyotes of Carthage by Steven Wright

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The cover blurb puts this book in the world of political thrillers. I think this is misleading because this book doesn't have the elements that we associate with thrillers such as being a fast-paced, edge-of-the-seat story building to a climax. I wouldn't even call it the close cousin of the thriller, a suspense novel. I would call it a study of a character in an existential crises set in the high-pressure, high-risk world of the political consultant.

Toussaint Andre Ross (Dre) is a senior associate for the political consulting firm of Martin, Fitzpatrick & DeVille. A serious miscalculation during a campaign makes continued employment questionable. But founding partner Fiona Fitzpatrick, Dre's mentor and the person who pulled him, a black man, out of the juvenile justice system, throws hime a lifeline. She wants Dre to run a dark money campaign in rural Carthage County, South Carolina. The campaign is to pass a ballot initiative that would allow an international precious metals conglomerate to rape a pristine area ofAppalachian rain forest to extract gold. The budget is small and the job beneath his talents but Dre knows he has no choice but to make the most of the opportunity.

Dre arrives to find out that it worse than he imagined. He only has one assistant, Brendan Fitzpatrick, grandson to Fiona. Being a black man in white bread South Carolina, Dre has to keep a low profile.

If you weren't cynical about politics before, this book will do it for you. The author takes the reader through the process of running a campaign that is not in the best interests of the people who live in Carthage County: collecting and analyzing data, finding a straw man to be the public face, twisting the narrative to make the appear to be something it isn't not worrying about the human cost of the campaign. Wright has the background that makes me believe that what he describes is pretty accurate, particularly after the recent elections.

Parallel to the campaign is Dre's existential crises about his own identity, his downward spiral as he alienates everyone around him, questions about himself, his future.

The only aspect of the book that bothered me is that there isn't an organized opposition which doesn't seem likely given the environment activism prevalent today. I don't think it is so small that it would slip notice. But I could be wrong. In any case, The Coyotes of Carthage is a fine story on all levels and well worth reading. 

Here are a few choice quotes:

The personal information to which the campaign will have access is virtually limitless.

[About Martin, Fitzpatrick & DeVille]  The firm ultimately sought employees with a flexible moral code, political mercenaries happy to manipulate entire communities to earn a buck

"Aren't elections about getting people to like you?" "That's a common misconception. Elections are about getting voters to hate others."

"...You're asking them to support an initiative that's against their own interest." 

Self-interest. Desperate people are terrible at assessing their own self-interest

In his experience, Americans enjoy nothing more than denying their neighbors happiness.

 Voters have neither the time nor the expertise to weigh the costs and benefits of a complicated policy proposal. Instead, voters cast their ballot based upon instinct, based on their gut.

Keywords: politics, fictional political campaigns, political consultants, environmental issues

 

Review: The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

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The title of this book is what got me to pick it up though fantasy is only a small percentage of my reading. The Left-Handed Book Sellers of London has three elements that appeal to me: another world unseen, unknown, and magical to everyday people that is rooted in ancient folklore; a mysterious organization charged with interacting with this unknown world and, when necessary, policing it; and a quest.

The Booksellers fall into one of three groups: left-handed, right-handed, and even-handed. The left-handed are the militia unit of the Booksellers while the right-handed are the planners, strategists, the poets. The even-handed are comfortable in both roles.

Into this world comes Susan Arkshaw, just turned eighteen, who is about the start art school but arrives early to see if she can find clues to her mysterious, never known father's identity. Almost immediately, Susan is caught up in the magical world when she encounters Merlin, one of the left-handed Booksellers, who saves her life. Very soon she realizes that there is more to her past than she could possibly have imagined. Something I immediately appreciated about the story is that when Susan is confronted with the magical realm and the Booksellers, the reader isn't subjected to a lengthly "denial, this is impossible, this can't be happening" impediment to the story moving along. Like Scully's skepticism in the X-Files which always annoyed me.

The story quickly slips into thriller mode with chases, flight, peril, magical encounters, betrayal, and narrow escapes mixed in with humor and some very nice world-building. Seriously, the way Nix fleshes out his world without falling into the Mr. Exposition (aka Basil Exposition) trope is a reading pleasure.

Sorry if this review is a a little shy on detail but for me a lot of the fun reading was the way the author adds layers to the story. The plot flows along with no bumps and no longer than it needs to be; the action is fast-paced without losing control.

I found this a fun read and would like more stories with the same characters.

Keywords: fantasy, magic, alternate London, unseen worlds

Kill Me in Tokyo (Burns Bannion #1) by Earl Norman

About this book:

This is the first book in the eight book Burns Bannion series written between 1958 and 1967.

Kill Me in Tokyo was originally published in 1958 by Berkley Publishing Corp.

It has been republished in 2020 by Fiction Hunter Press in epub format and is available at Google Play and B&N Nook. Later books in this series are now available for Kindle as are other Fiction Hunter Press titles. 

If you are a Kindle user and want to add this book, Fiction Hunter Press kindly makes their books DRM free which means you can easily convert them to the Kindle compatible format, mobi. I use Calibre for my conversions. Note: if you've never uploaded a mobi book to Kindle, it appears in Docs not Books.

If you're on Facebook, you can follow Fiction Hunter Press here. They are providing a great service so give them a shout-out.

Now on to the book:

My relationship with Burns Bannion spans 50 years. In the early 70s I was a SP4 clerk in an aviation unit (fixed wing reconnaissance) in Phu Bai Vietnam. Outside the mail room was a box where the USO or Red Cross or someone would drop off paperback books. Oddly, this is how I first read Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. Along with the occasional volumes of literature were some Burns Bannion books. My fellow soldiers and I loved these books and scoured every little Army exchange for one we hadn't read.

The things you remember don't always make sense, like old ad jingles, and for me Burns Bannion would occasionally surface. When the internet became a thing I searched but available copies came at extravagant prices. And then Fiction Hunter Press came along! I discovered them through Paperback Warrior. They now have four Burns Bannion series (8) out and three more in the works.

So what do I think, revisiting Burnsie after all these years? Are the books as enjoyable as the first time I encountered as a young soldier? Absolutely! To be honest, though, my enjoyment is probably colored by by nostalgia.  They are still a lot of fun to read and I'll be buying every one that Fiction Hunters Press publishes.

I do need to add a little warning here  These books are a product of the time. They are unapologetically men's pulp adventure stories  and written for that readership. Bannion is a stereotypical, oversexed, American GI just out of the US Army in post-occupation Japan with a penchant for young Japanese women.

As Kill Me in Tokyo opens, Bannion, 30 years old, has just been discharged from the US Army in Japan. He finagled this by claiming he wanted to stay in Japan on a student visa to attend university on the G.I. Bill. Actually, Burns' goal is to pursue young Japanese women and to study karate. 

Hoping to score with a stripper he's had his eye on, Bannion is at a bar when a very drunk, squat, red-faced American approaches him. The American, one Charles Echardt, is convinced Bannion is a detective named Bill because he looks like a detective and has a name that only a detective would have. Echardt wants to hire him to find a Japanese woman named Mitsuko with whom he's fallen love. With a wad of yen waving in front of him and being in need of the funds to get by, Bannion agrees and arranges to meet Echardt at his hotel the next day. And he and the stripper, Jade, do indeed hook up.

When Bannion arrives the next day to meet Echardt, he's dead, leaving a cryptic message for Bannion saying "You must find M. She knows who they are—" and a packet of more money. Burns decides to let someone else report the body and slips out of the hotel.

Bannion is determined to find the woman though his client is dead. He doesn't have much to go on: her name is Mitsuko which is of little help since Mitsuko is a common name —Bannion has 3 pages of Mitsukos in his litle black book and the night before Echardt attended a geisha party hosted by someone named Ito. Bannion soon finds out that this isn't a simple missing person case but something much larger, something that has him in mortal danger and his karate skills will be tested for him to survive.

The tone of this book is a playful take on the private detective genre and not to be taken seriously. When Echardt asks him his rates, Bannion quotes $25 dollars a day plus expenses which is what he remembers his favorite private detective (probably Philip Marlowe) charging. The next day he buys a trench coat because all good private detectives need a trench coat. Bannion also checks other private detective tropes: the PI code of ethics — you take a client's money, you solve the case even if the client is dead; wry/sarcastic, dry sense of humor; drinks —a lot; smokes; gets beaten up—a lot.

Besides needing to make money and avoid the notice of Japanese immigration, Bannion's two main passions are women and karate. In this first book he come across pervy with his lingering gazes on "lush" young bodies but these women are able to hold their own and Bannion gets pushed away, slapped, and told "no" quite a bit. He does succeed in his womanizing but these women are no pushovers.

Bannion's love of karate plays a large part in the books. The history of and training in karate plays a large role and Bannion takes it very seriously. Guns are not allowed and Banion needs his hands for self defense. The author repeats the myth that people skilled in martial arts are supposed to register his hands as deadly weapons but this was only true several years after the war when martial arts were banned. I suspect that there is considerable exaggeration in the portrayal of karate but the fight scenes are described very well with Bannion describing the karate moves he and his opponent are using. Chop-socky but still well done. 

Most of the Japanese characters speak a broken English or Engrish. I wish I knew how accurate this was in post-occupation Japan but the author was an ex-pat living in Japan so I assume there might be some foundation even if exaggerated. I wasn't able to find anything about this in internet searches. One thing I did find is that there is a reason why "o" is added to the end of some English words by Japanese. A Japanese native speaker might add an "o' to the end of a word ending in a consonant. See this Quora article. Also, when Bannion refers to a department store as a "departo" he isn't making fun of Japanese speech. Actually it is more of a linguistic rendering of the Japanese word. It is more commonly written as "depato".

All-in-all the Burns Bannion books are easy fun reads. The sex is of the fade-to-black variety whereas the karate fights are described is very bloody bone-breaking detail. If you want a good men's adventure story that doesn't take itself too seriously, the Burns Bannion books are what you need.

Here are a couple of links to other discussions of thee books:

Paperbackwarrior — Kill Me in Tokyo. These are the folks that let me know that Burnsie was back

Pretty Sinister Books — Kill Me in Tokyo is more critical than me and provides good description of the book.

Vintage Paperback & Book Covers writes a little about the author.

Keywords: private detectives, Japan, hardboiled detectives, action adventure, thrillers

Adjusting to the Death of Pet Cat

 We lost Noah three days ago. I recorded my feelings in this Memoriam blog post earlier. The humans in

Molly (L) and Augie (R)

the house are subdued with tears leaking out when something reminds us of Noah or, like right now for me, when composing a blog post.

But we aren't the only ones in the house, two other cats live with us. Molly and Augie. We adopted Noah and Molly at the same time and Augie came later as a kitten. His full name is Augustus Quigley Lewis, Esq. Their lives have changed drastically. They had been indoor-outdoor cats and Augie was a roamer, like Noah while Molly stuck close to home. At right is a rare photo of Molly and Augie together. 

free roaming Augie

With our sense that our neighborhood was safe shattered, Molly and Augie haven't been allowed out since Noah died. The dread that they could suffer a similar fate is too much to bear so we are working out how to turn them into indoor cats after years of free roaming. To give you an idea of what his means for Augie, here's one of the readouts from the tracker we attached to his collar. The cat icon in the middle of the purple is the house where the tracker base unit was located. The purple mass is actually individual overlapping tracks as Augie prowled around. The white dots are where he rested for a while. You can see he was pretty active so the problem now is how to keep him from going crazy with being limited to the house.

The Catio

Marilyn came up with a good idea that we implemented today. Part of the deck has been turned into a screened in porch that includes a window into the dining room. I secured the door to the screened porch then opened the window. Molly figured it out pretty quickly but Augie had to be convinced. Now they both bop in and out of the house through the window. We have designated the room The Catio. We'll see how this works out, particularly in spring when we might want to sit outside. Some negotiation will be required unless Marilyn and I decide to go through the window ourselves. One benefit of making them house cats will be the elimination of headless bunnies and shrews.

Now we are on to making the indoors more attractive. A Google search for "how to change outdoor cats to indoor cats" pulls up some interesting hits. At least one site recommends a catio so we're on our way there. I think a cat door window insert will be needed when it starts getting colder. We've already started a hard search for automated cat toys to supplement the hand-held laser pointer, aluminum foil balls,  twist ties (Augie's fascination), scratching posts, and the catnip sardines we already have.

If anyone has made it this far and has experience making an indoor/outdoor cat an indoor one, please comment below.

Here are some photos of Augie and Molly for those who like to see other peoples' cats. I just learned that Molly's coloration makes her a harlequin while Augie is a ginger tabby.

Mollie and Augie eying each other. Augie wasn't having it, us trying to introduce him to the others slowly. We gave up after two days. He came bouncing out of "his" room with a "high, I'm here" attitude.

Does the dryer represent a cave or somewhere safe? Augie quickly figurde it out.

Molly can't resist an open dryer door

Augie really wanted to be up high with Molly

Molly is such a pretty girl. Here she is outside on a bench in front yard.

All of Molly on the bench. I like the contrast with the yellow black-eyed Susans

Our cats haven't been serious climbers but Augie would go up if there was something taunting him,

Molly liked to climb trees and fences but stopped after a while. Probably thought it was for kittens and not some mature like her.

Augie was still a kitten her and really wanted to get to know her new sister. Molly is largely indifferent.

We were renovating the bathroom and Molly discovered the hole where the new toilet was going. I managed to grab this shot as she disappeared down the hole and into the crawl space. I had to go into the crawl space to get her.

Keywords: harlequin cats, ginger cats, changing a cat to indoors only, cat photos, improvised catio, adjustment after death of pet, cat behavior

Memoriam

 He's dead. Just two little words but they slam an icy fist into the pit your stomach and your world changes.

The doorbell rings and an older lady is standing there holding a collar in her hand. I recognize it and smile. Where did he lose it this time? But the lady isn't smiling, she's distraught, in tears. Then she utters those awful words — He's dead.

Noah is lying in the street, dead, hit by a car, still warm when I get to him. It must have been very quick with no suffering, perhaps an adrenaline spike of fear at the approaching car.  I carry him home wrapped in a towel, his blood seeping out onto my hand. I rinse my hands then go to tell Marilyn. And our shared, stunned, unbelieving grief begins.

He is in the foyer under a clean towel. We aren't ready to let him go. One of his feet pokes out from under the towel. Augie, the youngest, tapes at the foot, perhaps thinking that Noah is just hiding and wants someone to find him. Finally it's time and we take him to our vet who will handle his cremation. His ashes will join the urns of three of the cats who came before him. He is the only one to die violently.

Two days later and I relieve that morning many times a day. Seeing his body lying in the street as I round the corner is seared into my memory. I also think back to the night before when I went into the bedroom and gave him a hug as he lay on his favorite spot on the bed and got a lick in return. Then the next morning when I greeted him on his favorite place to spend the night, the orange chair in my work room. When I go into the living room he follows, going out on the deck as usual. Then he comes back in for breakfast, pausing at the same place by the couch where he usually pauses to be petted. He goes back outside; he will lose his life in about an hour and a half.

Perhaps these memories will fade but for now they are still raw wounds on my soul. And these memories are mixed in with guilt, the feeling that we let him down by letting him be in the place he died.

It's impossible not to look for Noah in all the places we would normally see him —the foot of the bed, the orange chair, the dry food bowl he so loved in the kitchen, his white paws glowing in the porch light when he returned home. And the distinctive thud of him jumping up to a bathroom sink for a drink. I don't think I ever saw him drinking from the pet water fountain in the kitchen. If you got up to go to the bathroom you could be certain that Noah would be waiting on the sink for you to turn on the tap. He would give a little meow to make sure you knew he was there. It was something you had to resign yourself to, waiting until he finished his drink. It must have been a comfort ritual for him because if he was in the house and anyone went to either of the bathrooms, Noah would be there for a drink. After being petted of course.

Noah must have had a traumatic kittenhood. He was easily spooked and would run to his safe place under the bed if he perceived the slightest danger. When we met Noah at the SPCA, he was pretty outgoing, playing with Molly, the cat we adopted at the same time. He was beautiful with big eyes. He had been adopted twice before but returned. We vowed that we would be his forever home no matter what. When we brought him home, we didn't see him for a week. He spent days hiding under furniture or under the bed. Our pet sitter of many years never saw Noah out and about during visits and would place his food under the bed. Eventually he became more trusting but never became the lap cat previous adopters expected.

We named him after Noah John Rondeau, a hermit who lived in the Adirondack mountains of New York State.

Noah and Marilyn had a special bond. It was a major event when Noah got up on the couch in Marilyn's study and just barely touch her. And there were times when Noah had an insatiable need for contact. Usually this was in the middle of the night when he would pummel Marilyn such that she took to wearing an extra layer to keep from being punctured. Never me, only Marilyn.

Someone is likely to say that if we had made Noah an indoor cat, he wouldn't have died. That's true but

We put a tracker on Noah

it wasn't Noah's nature. He had to have time outside or he would have gone crazy. Literally. We were probably complacent in the belief that the neighborhood was safe. He wandered all over  but for some reason was fixated on one street and a storm drain that he would disappear into. About twenty feet from where he died. A neighbor's dog had to investigate the storm drain whenever he was walked along that street.

Once we thought we had lost him. He ran out into a snow storm, thick snow blanketing the ground. Without his collar. When he didn't return that night or the next, we feared that he was frozen under a bush somewhere. When the weather cleared, I took flyers to houses in the area Noah liked to hang out but no one I talked to had seen him. Days passed and we were convinced he was gone. One evening I walked past the door to the deck and thought I saw motion. Opening the door, in strolled Noah, none the worse for wear. He didn't act like he was starving so we speculated that found shelter with a neighbor who saw the flyer and realized had had a home and let him out. But we'll never now. Just one of the mysteries surrounding Noah.

Noah was a gentle introvert who didn't reveal much about himself. He needed his freedom but knew where home was. That's where he was heading.

RIP Noah. You are missed.

To those of you who got this far, I am going to confess something now. I am grieving more over the death of Noah than I did with the death of my parents and my only sibling. I don't know how normal this is but I don't feel abnormal. Noah was an integral part of our daily life and losing him has had a more visceral impact than other deaths I have experienced.

I have a follow up post on this topic — Adjusting to the death of a pet cat.

More photos of Noah

Kitten Noah

Noah Basking in Sun

Noah Deep in contemplation

Before he ran off into the snow

Noah helping me work

Noah chilling in living room— Unusual

Wary Noah

Dinner?

When we thought we lost Noah

Keywords: cats, death of pet, pet bereavement, pet loss, cat behavior, cat stories